Better Start Bailing

Here is an update on my son.

Can I call him my new son or baby son now? He’s over a year old, and they say any small child over a year old is a toddler, but I still tell him he’s the baby. The baby man.

He can’t really talk yet. He wears diapers. Baby.

He continues to be extremely advanced with regard to everything but talking. Runs, dances, jumps, walks backward, squats and picks up tiny things between his thumbs and index fingers, climbs…you name it. While he doesn’t really talk, he has conversations with us using gestures, expressions, and noises.

Sometimes when I tell him “no,” he stands and stamps his foot and grunts to show he’s not happy, but he always obeys. Eventually.

Morning before last, it seemed like he said “red” and “close.” One of his toys lit up a red button and said “red,” and he said something that sounded like “red.” He loves opening and closing doors, and the same day, he followed his mother into the bathroom, closed the door, and said what she thought was “close.” He imitates singing.

For a while, he has been doing things you usually expect to see at about two years. I have written about him freaking doctors out. Also, he is very tall, and we are hoping he remains tall because tall men have easier lives, as long as they’re not too tall.

I am not concerned about his speech, because he’s not late, and as long as everything else is going well, there is not much of a relationship between intelligence and the time a baby starts to speak. Personally, I don’t think it interests him much. He whistled when he was a few months old, and then he quit because it didn’t interest him, so it may be that he is the same way about speech.

I’m not going to let myself obsess on his intelligence, because intelligence is not very high on the list of things that make a successful child of God. My own intelligence has not been all that helpful in life, and many people who are close to God have been more successful than I in every way, with less mental horsepower.

He is still very, very cute and charismatic. I have written about how people fawn over him on our weekend Costco and grocery outings, and they are still doing it. There are 4 or 5 Costco ladies who come over and talk to him every time they see him. The place is always full of babies, but the others don’t get this kind of attention.

Now that he interacts with people, grinning and doing his arm-waving “happy salute” when they wave at him, they get even more pleasure out of talking to him.

We take him to baby gatherings at the local library, and the employees read books, sing, use puppets, and let the kids play with toys. He behaves very well, but he is not like the other children. He runs around constantly. The other kids generally stay up front with the herd, but he runs around the entire room.

I thought he would stay close to his mother because he adores her and doesn’t like being separated from her, but he ran off and left her.

He pushes things over. He loves pushing things, so he grabs chairs and pushes them around the room. He approaches adults and just assumes they love him. He tries to grab purses off chairs and tables. He goes to the exit doors and pounds on them. He grabbed an American flag and pulled it over.

We were the only parents there who stood up and said “no” to their child, so we know the problems the other kids are likely to have later. It’s amazing that people have learned nearly nothing new about raising kids since the dawn of time, while they have forgotten so much.

People say babies are curious, so when I tell them about him, they say it’s normal, but they haven’t seen him. He is clearly not like most kids. His abilities and energy stand out. We keep getting him toys and interacting with him, but he is insatiable. He is always finding our things, running off with them, and playing with them.

I take things away from him so often that he now tends to drop whatever he is holding, or hand it to me, whenever I appear.

I bought a new TV with an annoying remote that has a trackball and projects a moving shape onto the screen to select options. Every so often, when I sit down, I’ll see the shape moving around, and I’ll know my son is somewhere in the house playing with the remote.

The other day, he grabbed a toilet brush and tried to clean the toilet. That was upsetting.

He’s not hyperactive. A hyperactive kid can’t behave. He’s just smart.

He’s still very strong. He lifted two 5-pound dumbbells off the floor. When he pummels us with his hands and feet, it actually hurts. He doesn’t do it with hostility. He just loves to wrestle and roughhouse.

He can get into our upper bathroom cabinets now, so we had to get more baby locks. He can use almost every doorknob. Our house has lever knobs, and they make it easy.

I’m going to have to get a pool cover, because in a month or so, he will be able to open the back door. I hate the pool, because a pool is a sucker amenity, but we can’t make it go away, so we will just seal it off.

We’re trying to get music lessons for him. He shows some interest in music, and he needs things to fill his voracious mental appetite. His mom is talking about finding a swimming class, which she also needs.

I’m very grateful. The world is full of suffering children and parents. So many kids have physical and mental problems that crush their parents’ hearts. We are no more deserving than those parents, but God has been very kind to us. I keep praying God will use us to heal kids. I am horrified by the problems I see out there. It makes me feel helpless because I can’t say a prayer wherever I am and heal them. It makes me hate this world more than ever.

I keep asking God to help us receive blessings in fear and humility, and never to show off. We are pardoned criminals who live on an allowance. On God’s charity.

The dangers of showing off have been driven home to me. Our car is starting to be impractical. We’re excited about the possibility of buying a minivan. Not a Mercedes or some other kind of glamor wagon. I have realized God hates ostentation.

Proverbs 17:5: “Whoso mocketh the poor reproacheth his Maker: and he that is glad at calamities shall not be unpunished.”

Galatians 5:26: “Let us not be desirous of vain glory, provoking one another, envying one another.”

Luke 14:8-11:

When thou art bidden of any man to a wedding, sit not down in the highest room; lest a more honourable man than thou be bidden of him;

And he that bade thee and him come and say to thee, Give this man place; and thou begin with shame to take the lowest room.

But when thou art bidden, go and sit down in the lowest room; that when he that bade thee cometh, he may say unto thee, Friend, go up higher: then shalt thou have worship in the presence of them that sit at meat with thee.

For whosoever exalteth himself shall be abased; and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted.

I try to receive in fear and humility regarding our son, and I ask God to help me with this, because I can’t generate perfect humility on my own. Pride will always bounce back, to my disgrace. I want God to keep blessing my son, and I want him to protect the next one.

Whatever blessings my son has received came from God, in spite of my long history of wickedness and in spite of the evil my wife has done.

The main thing I want to write about, however, is love. This house is soaked with it.

When I was a kid, my sister and I were afraid of my dad. We didn’t run in terror every time he came home, but we didn’t want to be around him, either. It’s good for a child to have a healthy fear of his father, but it has to be part of an intense, loving, comfortable relationship. It’s important for a father to take a hard line sometimes, but when my dad was harsh with us, usually, it was not out of concern for us. It was because we had gotten on his nerves. Someone broke a glass. Someone stood in front of the TV.

My family never prayed together, studied the Bible together, talked about God, or went to church together. What a horror. No wonder things went so badly for us.

I didn’t pray with my dad until he was 86, and he died when he was 87.

We pray in the morning with our son. We pray in the evening with him. He’s in the room while we watch Christian videos. I speak blessings over him and his mother. We speak blessing to God when we eat. He sees us on our faces, worshiping.

My wife and I have conversations about our son’s welfare. What to do next. Where we are failing. My parents didn’t do that.

We play with him a lot. I have the priceless luxury of being with him, and so does his mother. She takes him for walks, on his own feet. I sit down and play with his toys.

He loves playing with us. He brings us his giant Walmart ball, and we bounce it around. His new thing is to make me take his Fisher-Price popper toy. He has a little stuffed chair with a dinosaur face on it, and he sits in it and watches me run the toy around the floor. If I stop, he goes to get the toy and hands it to me again.

He has been kissed so much, it’s a wonder he has any skin left. He has been squeezed so much, it’s a wonder he isn’t covered with bruises.

He screams with joy, many times a day.

We are not doing things as well as we should, and I ask God to help us do better, but my son’s upbringing so far has been infinitely better than ours.

Because the family I came from is a failure, and because I am a recovering failure, our new ways and blessings are hard for me to get used to. My mother lavished me with love, but her relationship with my sister was a war from the time she was a toddler. My sister was impossible to get along with. I had many affectionate moments with my dad, but generally, he was very selfish, childish, and unfair. And he also had a hard time warming up to my sister, or, rather, he warmed up to her at first, and then their personalities ruined it.

I have never lived in a house of love before, and it’s a first for my wife, too. My son, on the other hand, has no idea what a dysfunctional family is like. He will never know what it’s like to feel alone because his family hasn’t introduced him to God.

Outside of this house, I have never seen a family that wasn’t dysfunctional, and that includes the Christian ones. Having one of my own is an extraordinary experience.

It’s all because of prayer in tongues. Order and success in a family come only from alignment with the Holy Spirit, and you only get his help if you pray in tongues. Otherwise, you are limited. It’s like going to Disney World and not using the rides.

We try to align ourselves with each other here on Earth, but it’s the wrong approach. We are supposed to be aligned with God. Any two people who are aligned with God are automatically aligned with the Holy Spirit. This is why Yeshua is called the Prince of Peace. Peace is simply order.

We are not particularly good people. We don’t go on mission trips to India and Africa. We don’t run an orphanage. We don’t go into prisons and baptize people. We have faults. We sometimes argue a little. We’re not doing all the things many Christians think bring them God’s blessings, and we sometimes do things that are counterproductive. Nonetheless, things are going extremely well. It’s because we are taking the supernatural approach, making God our head.

The frustrating thing is that people we are desperate to help argue with our testimony.

We know people whose families are terribly screwed up. People who are suffering because of bad choices. People with lingering problems. If I tell them they need to pray in tongues more (axiomatic, since the word says it builds us up), instead of agreeing with me, some of them blaspheme the Holy Spirit instead. They want to convince me that what I know didn’t come from God and that God doesn’t give us the kind of help my wife and I received.

They can’t explain our blessings, however, or the fact that they’re doing so poorly in spite of being right about everything.

When you attribute the work of the Holy Spirit to Satan or deluded men, you blaspheme the Holy Spirit. This is what religious Jews did when they said Yeshua had a demon. He raised the dead and healed the sick, and instead of getting behind him, they said he used the power of Satan.

Cessationism is blasphemy, and so is claiming to be charismatic while scolding other people because they truthfully say they have received supernatural help from God.

It’s a variant of cessationism. It’s such a huge sin, Paul told us to avoid people who did it. He didn’t say to be inclusive and nonjudgmental and that such people were our brothers and sisters.

In his second letter to Timothy, Paul lumped the God-deniers in with the greedy, brats, slanderers,and despisers of good:

For men will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, unloving, unforgiving, slanderers, without self-control, brutal, despisers of good, traitors, headstrong, haughty, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having a form of godliness but denying its power. And from such people turn away!

Here, the language translated “despisers of good” means “those who don’t love good.”

The word translated as “power” is dunamis, which, in the context of the above passage, is the miracle-working power of God, as well as all of his other abilities to help us.

There are many people out there who make up stories about what God has done for them, and there are many people who spread false revelation, but people who pray in tongues a lot, read the word, and seek humility are not like that. God will allow delusion, but he’s not a jerk. He doesn’t make supernatural help impossible, and he doesn’t allow counterfeits to be so good there is no way to find the real thing. If you pray in tongues and seek humility and revelation, he will guide you. If this were not true, there would be no hope for us, because the system would be completely rigged.

Arrogant Christians are in love with their strongholds. They love their pride. They love defending themselves instead of admitting fault. They love pointing to all the things they’ve done “for God.” They’re like Eagle Scouts who think their sashes and badges entitle them to kowtowing and deference. “I used to wax Jimmy Swaggart’s car!” “I was head deacon with a special red vest when you were still going to strip clubs!” They’re so arrogant, they can’t see their arrogance.

Old wineskins.

This is why Yeshua bypassed religious leaders and called fishermen and a tax collector.

When God shows you helpful things, and people who are in real trouble reject your testimony because they’re afraid you’ll stop thinking they are holier than you, it is extremely frustrating.

If you’re doing everything right, why is your life a mess? Isn’t it possible that a person whose life has improved drastically knows more than someone who is miserable and shows no sign of progress?

One of the worst things about Christianity is that it convinces people they are above correction. “We’re smarter than the Jews.” “We’re smarter than the awful people at the church across the street.” “The old guys who came up with our doctrine two thousand years ago were smarter than the old guys who came up with your doctrine 500 years ago.”

We’re exactly like the Jews of Yeshua’s time. Just as wrong, and just as arrogant.

Just as determined to blaspheme the Holy Spirit and glorify men.

What about me, being sure so many things I’ve been shown are right? Well, I got that by obeying the Bible. I got it the same way Paul did. The way he recommended we do it. I prayed in tongues for years. I didn’t get it by worshiping St. Augustine, who worshiped pagans. I didn’t get it by worshiping Kenneth Hagin and memorizing everything he said. I didn’t take courses at my last two churches, which were run by a con artist and a child rapist.

When I fell away for a time and wasn’t praying in tongues, I didn’t get revelation, and I had problems I don’t have now.

I don’t make things up, and I don’t claim I figured anything out. I had a genius IQ all of my life, and I was a fool for most of it. I ruined most of it. I could not figure the answers out. God had to spell things out and spoon-feed me. He still does.

I don’t say I’m right. I don’t say I should be given deference because I “got saved” decades ago or because I have put in thousands of pew hours. I say God is right, and that he has been getting through to me in spite of my immaturity and pride.

Saying these things is not arrogance. It is humility. Attributing your success to yourself and hard work is pride.

There is not one person in the Bible God rewarded for hard work. There are many he rewarded for admitting they were weak and letting him help them. There are many who were destroyed because they were proud. Consider Nebuchadnezzar and the dream of the tree.

In the Bible, hard work is always a curse. It was one of the first curses God pronounced on man, in Genesis. Hard work convinces you that you are the source of your blessings. It makes you your own God.

God preferred Mary to Martha.

Yeshua was more certain of his beliefs than any other man who ever lived. Does that mean he was proud? He had no pride whatsoever.

As the Bible says, humility, not mission trips or fasting or collecting church titles and enormous bejeweled hats, is what brings God close to us and causes him to help us. If you don’t know that, you have missed one of the three or four most important lessons that make Christianity work. You’re barely a Christian.

I always find that life is like being on a wide sea in a small boat, with many other boats around me. I’m doing fine, at last, but almost all the other boats are sinking, and when I try to help the people in them, they push me away and tell me they already have the answers.

If the analogy were really complete, they would be pulling their boats up beside mine, throwing buckets of water into my boat, and telling me they were trying to save me.

So I could be as blessed as they were.

Every day, we pray for God to keep people who won’t listen away from us and to bring us the people who will. It is discouraging and painful to watch people sink while you’re trying to tell them how to float.

Revelation is Better Than Brains

My wife and I went through Daniel 1 and 2 last night, and all sorts of revelation came out.

In Daniel 2, Nebuchadnezzar had a dream he could not remember, and it bothered him, so he asked his crew of sorcerers and charlatans (“wise men”) to tell him what he dreamed and what it meant. They told him he would have to describe the dream in order for them to interpret it, and he got angry. He told them that if they didn’t tell him what was in the dream, he would kill them all and turn their homes in to garbage dumps. Then he started doing that, and his people came after Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego, since they were numbered among the kingdom’s wise men.

Daniel was understandably concerned, and he got the king to give him time to go to God for the information. Of course, he received it, he told Nebuchadnezzar what he wanted to know, and he and his friends were spared. He also received promotion, much like Joseph in Egypt.

In case you have not read about the dream, I will post the text here, from the New King James Version.

You, O king, were watching; and behold, a great image! This great image, whose splendor was excellent, stood before you; and its form was awesome. This image’s head was of fine gold, its chest and arms of silver, its belly and thighs of bronze, its legs of iron, its feet partly of iron and partly of clay.

You watched while a stone was cut out without hands, which struck the image on its feet of iron and clay, and broke them in pieces. Then the iron, the clay, the bronze, the silver, and the gold were crushed together, and became like chaff from the summer threshing floors; the wind carried them away so that no trace of them was found. And the stone that struck the image became a great mountain and filled the whole earth.

This is the dream. Now we will tell the interpretation of it before the king.

You, O king, are a king of kings. For the God of heaven has given you a kingdom, power, strength, and glory; and wherever the children of men dwell, or the beasts of the field and the birds of the heaven, He has given them into your hand, and has made you ruler over them all—you are this head of gold.

But after you shall arise another kingdom inferior to yours; then another, a third kingdom of bronze, which shall rule over all the earth. And the fourth kingdom shall be as strong as iron, inasmuch as iron breaks in pieces and shatters everything; and like iron that crushes, that kingdom will break in pieces and crush all the others. Whereas you saw the feet and toes, partly of potter’s clay and partly of iron, the kingdom shall be divided; yet the strength of the iron shall be in it, just as you saw the iron mixed with ceramic clay. And as the toes of the feet were partly of iron and partly of clay, so the kingdom shall be partly strong and partly fragile. As you saw iron mixed with ceramic clay, they will mingle with the seed of men; but they will not adhere to one another, just as iron does not mix with clay.

And in the days of these kings the God of heaven will set up a kingdom which shall never be destroyed; and the kingdom shall not be left to other people; it shall break in pieces and consume all these kingdoms, and it shall stand forever. Inasmuch as you saw that the stone was cut out of the mountain without hands, and that it broke in pieces the iron, the bronze, the clay, the silver, and the gold—the great God has made known to the king what will come to pass after this. The dream is certain, and its interpretation is sure.

I broke it into paragraphs as well as I could to make it easier to read.

As I read this, I kept seeing ties to other parts of the Bible.

Of course, it’s about Yeshua. He is the stone that was cut out without hands. The dream is about the tribulation and the Messianic age that comes afterward.

The stone is cut out without hands because Yeshua was made by God, not man. From man’s standpoint, he was uneducated. No one says much about that, probably because they’re afraid of insulting God, but it’s true. He was not a scholar, like Paul. He was a handyman from a small, unimportant town far from centers of learning.

Man’s hands did not shape him. He was shaped by God. He was taught by the Holy Spirit, just as every informed Christian (of which there are few) is. People marveled that a person of such knowledge and intelligence could have had no formal schooling. This was literally a guy you would go get when you needed someone to hang a door.

Yeshua was humble. He said he could do nothing without God. He knew he had not made himself. Nebuchadnezzar was different. He looked out at his kingdom and announced that he deserved all the credit, and then God allowed him to go mad for 7 years.

God told the Jews to build altars from stones that were not carved. The purpose of that was to prevent them from using man-made tools to create things they could be proud of and take credit for. Better to have rocks as God created them. It’s the same principle. And when he told David to kill Goliath, David chose 5 stones that had been smoothed by living water, not man, so they would fly true. “Living water” just means “flowing water.” It’s an idiom, and it represents the flow of the Holy Spirit, who wears off our rough edges so our paths are straight.

The progression from gold to iron mixed with clay is a chronological progression from the time of Nebuchadnezzar to the Messianic age. The feet of the statue represent the kingdoms of the time when God will run out of patience, destroy the kingdoms, clean the world, and replace the kingdoms with his own.

The Bible says God’s love is eternal, but it does not say that about his patience. It makes it clear that his patience is limited.

Psalm 2 is also about the Messianic age. It’s all about Yeshua. It actually mentions him as the son of God, saying, “Kiss the Son, lest he be angry, and ye perish from the way, when his wrath is kindled but a little.”

In Psalm 2, God describes the crucifixion, saying the kings of the earth (presumably spirits) conspired to depose God and be free from his restraints. Instead, their efforts resulted in Yeshua receiving his throne:

Yet have I set my king upon my holy hill of Zion.

I will declare the decree: the Lord hath said unto me, Thou art my Son; this day have I begotten thee.

Ask of me, and I shall give thee the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession.

Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron; thou shalt dash them in pieces like a potter’s vessel.

The holy hill of Zion is the holy area of Jerusalem, where God’s earthly throne will be. The son is Yeshua, and he is “begotten” by God, which means God is his father in every sense, not just symbolically. It means God created him by impregnating a woman.

Describing the destruction of the world’s ungodly empires, God says he will give Yeshua the heathen (literally, the goyim) for his inheritance, referring to the fact that non-Jews will accept and worship Yeshua.

As for the part about the rod of iron, that’s about the tribulation. Yeshua will come and shatter the kingdoms, just as he did in Nebuchadnezzar’s dream.

What about the chaff?

Grain has two parts. They both start out with life, but only one part continues to live. The chaff is the part that dies and rots. It’s the part that can’t grow and become new plants. It is important because it exists to support the seed, but after that, it is destroyed. It’s the afterbirth of plants.

People who reject Yeshua are afterbirth. There is a good chance you are afterbirth, so you need to think about it while you can still change. Kiss the son while there is time, because after you die, you are cut off permanently. Don’t listen to Catholic and Jewish myths about helping the dead.

Afterbirth people are useful, like a placenta. They do a lot of helpful labor. They grow crops and build buildings. They create roads and infrastructure. They manufacture. These things help the children of God. But eventually, the unsaved are carried off and destroyed, just as afterbirth is carried out of a delivery room in a plastic bag after the baby is placed in the arms of his mother.

When the tribulation comes, God himself is going to kill the people who work against his kingdom. They will still have the opportunity to repent, but many won’t. He is going to smash the kingdoms of this world, like a dissatisfied potter shattering defective fired pots with a steel bar.

After that, his kingdom will be set up, and it will cover the entire world.

And in the days of these kings the God of heaven will set up a kingdom which shall never be destroyed; and the kingdom shall not be left to other people; it shall break in pieces and consume all these kingdoms, and it shall stand forever.

That isn’t the Roman Empire. It’s not Israel. It’s not the UN or NATO. It hasn’t happened yet. It’s about the future under Yeshua.

We also looked at the last chapter of Ezekiel, which says the Messiah will enter Jerusalem through the Eastern Gate, which the Muslims have blocked with stones, mortar, and a Muslim graveyard.

The Messiah already came through this gate. He rode through on a donkey. When he returns, he’ll use the gate again, and stones cut and put in place by man won’t stop him.

This story made me think about gatekeepers.

The other day, I was treated rudely in a photography forum, and for some reason, I asked AI to look at what was said to me. AI said it was rude and condescending, and it used the word “gatekeeping.”

I hadn’t thought about that.

On the web, a gatekeeper is a pompous, hostile, admiration-craving jerk who pretends to help new people but is really more interested in exalting himself and aborting anyone who threatens to become like him.

Gatekeepers love telling you you’re not as smart as they are. Usually, they are mediocre people trying to convince themselves they’re legends, and they panic and get angry when they are confronted with reality.

They want you to think you will never be as good at what they do as they are. They want you to swallow everything they tell you, even when they are clearly wrong, and when you question this, their defense is their identity: who are you to question Oz the Great and Powerful?

Forums are full of gatekeepers. They love having themselves appointed as moderators. Their irritating behavior ends up decreasing membership and participation, and forums tend to turn into echo chambers where a few exalted, crusty old guys take turns slapping each other on the back and ganging up on new people.

They can also thwart the efforts of people who own forums. They take their places and do things contrary to the owners’ interests. Meanwhile, they’re not the ones who created the forums or pay the bills.

There are gatekeepers in the Bible.

In Biblical times, a city’s main gate was a place where people gathered to do business, including government business. If you wanted to get something done, you went to the gate and dealt with the authorities who sat there.

Absalom knew this, so he went to the gate and intercepted people who wanted help from David. He tried to seem friendlier and more effective, to turn their hearts against David and set the stage for a coup.

Satan is a gatekeeper, and Absalom was a picture of Satan. He thinks very highly of himself, although he is the single biggest failure and loser known to man. He wants to sit in the gate and sweet-talk or threaten us before we get into God’s presence. He wants us to think he is friendlier and more effective. “You want to be a homosexual? Great. I’m down with it. I’m not like that bad old Yahweh. You want to live with your girlfriend? You want to be a Buddhist or a witch? You want to be a rich atheist and tell everyone you’re a self-made man? You want to be a rich, admired churchgoer who doesn’t have to repent or change? I’ll make it happen. Don’t waste your time with the old God.”

Most clergymen are gatekeepers. Some wear ridiculous costumes to make themselves look important. The leftists like to wear colorful sashes to make people think they’re friendly and full of life compared to actual Christians who know and support God. Preachers generally teach garbage about self-help. They discourage manifestations of the Holy Spirit, which are the key to a Christian life. They used to torture and burn a lot of people who corrected them. They have been terrorists, beginning with the ancient Jews and continuing into Catholicism and other violent sects.

A gatekeeper’s first goal is to keep you out of the outer court of the temple, where people who acknowledge God but are not all that close to him are allowed to go. If that fails, he tries to keep you out of the inner court, where people who are closer to God are allowed. If that fails, he does his level best to keep you out of the holy of holies, where the Spirit of God resides.

I’m speaking figuratively. You are the temple, and a gatekeeper wants to prevent you from harboring–literally–the Holy Spirit in your heart and mind.

A gatekeeper is basically a goalie.

Gatekeepers, whether Jewish, nominal Christian, pagan, or atheist, are antichrists. They want to keep you from entering the gate and receiving the real thing. They offer you substitutes; usually their pathetic, pride-bloated, festering selves.

When John wrote of antichrists who lived in his time, he was talking about Christians. He said they “went out from us” but were not “of us.” That can only refer to Christians. Nothing has changed.

As Yeshua was growing up, he went right by the gatekeepers. He went to the Holy Spirit, who is God. That’s who taught him. If he had listened to the priests and scribes, he would have died full of disinformation and gone to hell.

He gave us a way to go around the gatekeepers. He arranged for us to be baptized with the Holy Spirit and speak in tongues. Every one of us is supposed to spend time with God himself every day. Every one of us is supposed to learn ALL the things we need to know, not some, straight from God. Human beings are simply here to introduce us to God and to be helpful to us. They’re not supposed to put on hats the size of toaster ovens, dress in black, and rule over us.

Imagine how you would feel if you went to work one day, and your boss was wearing a black robe and a hat so big he had to bend over to get through the door. You would think he was a lunatic.

Underneath the crazy getups, pompous clergymen are wearing underwear and socks from Target. They’re not mystical beings from another dimension.

When Yeshua was here in the flesh, the gatekeepers hated him, which is obvious, because they murdered him. They didn’t love other people. They weren’t trying to help them. They were too busy dressing up like Liberace and studying day and night to find halachic loopholes so they could justify cheating other people out of their money and land. Much like every prosperity preacher today.

Yeshua was a threat to their business. They were squatters, and they knew he was there to evict them and cut off their income.

We’re supposed to lift people up, as Yeshua lifted Peter from the water so he could walk on it. Instead, the gatekeepers want to stand on us to keep their heads above water. They use us as footstools. What kind of people are treated like footstools in the Bible? Enemies.

Gatekeepers are spiritual abortionists, in a world God created specifically so he could reproduce. That is the fundamental reason we exist, and gatekeepers treat us like bedbugs they are trying to keep down with spray.

Any preacher who hates competition is a gatekeeper. You can tell prosperity preachers are gatekeepers because they welcome other prosperity preachers to speak at their churches as long as they come from far away, but they make a point of keeping preachers from nearby churches out. They also compete with the poor for our donations. Every dollar you give Joyce Meyer is a dollar you can’t give the poor.

If I know these things, it’s because I spent time with the Holy Spirit, praying in tongues, and he told me. I couldn’t figure these things out on my own.

I could go on all day. God has shown me so much. And he has also shown me that almost no one will listen. If Yeshua were here right now speaking on television to the whole world, people wouldn’t listen to him either, and that includes self-proclaimed Christians. He failed to convert his own people, and of course, he did the job as well as anyone could have, so what chance do you and I have?

I hear this stuff, and I repeat it, and for the most part, I get argument. It’s like I’m talking to grown people in diapers, and when I share revelation straight from God, they take their dirty diapers off and wave them at me, inside-out, with great pride, displaying their treasures. They are rude to me. They condescend. They talk to me as though I were a naughty child, and I’m trying to help them. I have nothing to gain from this.

I suppose I should stop now. Someone out there will read this and benefit from it, and the rest never mattered, because they never had a future.

The Water is Rising

I used to watch a pair of biracial conservative Youtubers known as the Hodge Twins. They say they were raised leftist but came around later in life, and I thought that was good. They were also very funny. On the other hand, they were clearly ignorant in spite of understanding the evil of leftism, and they made a lot of crude remarks.

I quit watching them, but a couple of days ago, I heard about them again. Guess what? They hate Jews. I had no clue.

They’re 100% on board with Candace Owens, and they gave Nick Fuentes a softball interview. They have a podcast, and some white weirdo they talked to said “Hitler was based!” One of them agreed. He said he had read one of Hitler’s speeches and concluded that we needed someone to say the same things today.

Hitler was based? A person really sad that in front of the public, with pride? In America? After the well-known events of the last century?

I wonder what the twins would say if they knew how Hitler felt about blacks and biracial people like themselves. Their parents’ marriage would have been called “race defilement.” The twins might have been castrated like many other biracial people. The Nuremberg laws were extended to apply to blacks. Hitler claimed the Jews brought blacks into Germany to bastardize the white race.

The existence of the video is bad, but the worst is yet to be discussed.

I looked at the comments on one of their videos, and they were almost unanimously supportive. A lot of them claimed the Jews had been expelled from 109 countries, and that there had to be a good reason. I had never seen that one before.

I would have been disturbed if 5% of the comments had been antisemitic, but it was more like 98%.

Jews are not upset enough. Even the ones who are very upset are not upset enough. Things are even worse than the most vocal coalmine canaries seem to think. Conservatives are finally starting to live up to the libels leftists have projected onto them for decades. They are becoming Nazis.

The worst development of all is that many or perhaps most of the conservatives who have turned against Jews are claiming it’s their Christian duty.

What?

Christianity is an offshoot of Judaism. In the beginning, all Christians were considered Jews. They truly were Jews, even in places like Asia Minor. Christianity was just a new Jewish sect. Gentiles weren’t a big factor until later. Every single apostle was Jewish.

As for today, we are required to worship a Jew who said, “Salvation is of the Jews.” He told Jews, “You are the light of the world,” confirming what the Jewish prophet Isaiah had said. When he first announced his status as Messiah, he did it by reading from Isaiah in a synagogue.

I’m not saying modern Jews are on the right track or spreading salvation, because those things are not generally true, but the church is inextricably entwined with Judaism, and hating Jews is antithetical to our core beliefs.

Yeshua sits on the throne of David, which is the throne of Israel. The Old Testament says so, and the New Testament agrees. He truly is the King of the Jews, whether or not they agree. But we’re supposed to give Israel to murderous Muslims and kill Jews? How is their king supposed to feel about that?

I don’t want to waste a lot of time debunking patent idiocy. It’s like going to a mental asylum and debating people who think they’re cats. The big point here is that Jews are in big, big trouble, right now, not in 5 years or 10 years or 50 years.

A huge majority of American Jews has empowered their enemies and libeled and opposed their friends for many decades. They have had way too much faith in America’s hospitality. They have concentrated themselves in areas where their enemies concentrate. They have been huge proponents of self-disarmament, otherwise known as gun control. Now they are not ready for what is going to happen.

They still have many friends in conservative areas, but I don’t think we can do much to help Jews. I think they will stubbornly cling to the urban centers they love, just as many European Jews refused to get out before the Holocaust. They love the culture. They want to be able to walk to synagogues on the sabbath. They want to live close to kosher butchers and restaurants. They think of our cities as their homes.

The election of New York Mayor Mamdani, an obvious antisemite, is amazing. About a third of New York’s Jews voted for him. I don’t know what is more surprising: that a third of them voted for him or that it wasn’t the historic 90% Democrats get. Anyway, even a third is a figure way too large to be consistent with sanity.

What were they thinking? American Jews are appeasers. Were they thinking that voting for blatant antisemitism was a good way to curry favor with their enemies? Was it supposed to be yet another self-hating, self-destructive, pointless olive branch?

Historians think 10% of German Jews voted for Hitler. It shouldn’t be a surprise.

You have almost no guns. You are surrounded by people you hate you, and they now appear to be a majority. The government is turning against you. You are far from most of the people who are inclined to help you. How could anyone think this was a desirable outcome?

The prophets tell us terrible things are in store for Jews in Israel. It will be like October 7, all over the country. If it will be that bad inside the Jewish state, I have to wonder what it will be like in gentile nations.

What are Christians supposed to do? How much is possible? Not much, I suppose. My wife and I pray for the Jews and Israel twice a day, but a lot of the good things we pray for can’t happen unless Jews accept their Messiah, and that is not within our control or God’s.

This isn’t like the 1930’s. With the technology human beings now have, you won’t be able to hide Jews behind false walls in your house. You won’t be able to take in their kids and pretend they’re yours. None of that stuff will fly in the age of total surveillance, cashless transactions, drones, and thermal cameras. Every Jew will need the help of God himself. They will need the kind of help Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego got.

Christians are in trouble, too. The rapture and tribulation are real events, and they are coming. Most people who call themselves Christians are only Christians in name, and they will be stuck here during the tribulation, experiencing the worst suffering humanity has ever known. They can’t be helped unless they listen and repent before the rapture.

I suppose nominal Christians are just as bad off as Jews, except their holocaust will come later.

As for the rest of the world, they have always been in trouble, and that will not change. They will think they’re doing good when they go after Christians and Jews, but they will come to regret it.

I can understand how antisemitic conservatives exist, because conservatism is not a religious position. Heathens like Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk are conservative. What is astonishing is that people can be convinced they are Christians and that Yeshua wants them to torment, expel, and kill Jews.

These days, boys believe they’re girls, and many Americans agree. When we started seeing the trans movement gain credibility, we should have realized no insanity was beyond us.

I don’t know why I’m writing this. What’s going to happen is going to happen. The only thing worse than witnessing destruction is witnessing self-destruction.

Ripe Pomegranate Versus Sour Grape

God has started showing me things about favor, which is disparate treatment. For example, if your neighbors have their houses washed away in a flood, but the water goes around you, it’s favor. If there is an economic crisis, and somehow you make money instead of losing, it’s favor.

I prophesy. I saw a Derek Prince video a long time ago, and he made a good argument for at-will prophecy. You can’t say what you want to say, and you can’t tell people’s fortunes or pick winners at the racetrack, but you can open your mouth and let God say whatever he wants, in the language you normally speak. It appears to work, although I have had some glitches. I believe errors come from letting the flesh crowd in.

For a good long time, I’ve heard myself saying, “Be with me and receive favor.”

I believe that for my entire life, I have received favor. My life was a mess when I was young, and I failed at all sorts of things at which I should have excelled, but on the other hand, I was spared calamity over and over. Problems that should have hit me hit other people. It has been a lifelong pattern.

I believe that most of the problems I had were caused by Satanic persecution. The people of this world, including Christians, generally belong to Satan, and if evil spirits think God is likely to do good things with you, they and their puppets will do a lot to suppress you. They will blacklist you, steal from you, take jobs away, prevent you from getting jobs in the first place, drive potential spouses off, cause whatever wealth you have to be destroyed and wasted, cause people to libel and slander you, and, of course, cause you to be driven out of churches.

I had disfavor from Satan and his worldly people, and it destroyed my worldly success, but I had God’s favor to keep me from being wiped out while he waited for me to come around, know him, and receive sufficient favor from him to overcome Satan’s disfavor. Once I got close to him, things got better and better for me, and it has never stopped.

Some misguided Christians like to wear T-shirts with “Favor ain’t fair” printed on them. That’s ridiculous. It’s insulting to God, who is always more than fair. The intention is good, but the slogan comes from a ghetto mentality that says anyone who is not blessed is being treated unfairly. Blessed people don’t earn what they get, so the disfavored think favor, which comes by God’s righteous judgment, isn’t fair to everyone else. People who hate favor think they are better than God.

Favor certainly seems unfair to many people, and I can make a partial list. Feminists, leftists, antisemites, and vocal atheists hate favor. BLM and Antifa people hate favor. It’s impossible to be a real Democrat and not hate favor.

God isn’t the only one who shows favor. Satan does it, too, on a grand scale. Look how rich Oprah Winfrey and Megan Thee Stallion are, to name but two of his proteges.

“Protégé” is a French word meaning “protected.” You can’t be protected in this life unless there is a protector. Someone stronger than you who does the protecting.

What do favor-haters do? They try to steal the fruits of favor, and they like to kill the favored.

If you examine the Bible, you will see lots of favor-haters and favor-stealers. Satan, Eve, Cain, Haman, Dathan, the religious Jews who had Yeshua murdered, Adonijah, Absalom, Jezebel, Joseph’s brothers, Balak, Balaam…read for yourself. The best way to become hated in this world is to become one of God’s favorites.

All sorts of favored people were murdered or tormented. Abel, Job, the prophets who were all killed by religious Jews, and the martyrs of the New Testament come to mind.

Being a favorite is like being the pampered youngest child the older siblings hate. The hatred is irrational and unfair, and it is solely based on a perceived difference between the treatment you get and the treatment your siblings got. You don’t have to harm them or actually receive more than them to be hated. Favor-haters are unjust.

I was the favorite in my family, and I can tell you a story that will illustrate my point. When I was very small, on Christmas, my sister got angry at my parents. She said, “Steve got two presents, and I only got three!” That’s how favor-haters think.

Favor-haters covet. If you have favor, they covet everything you have. At the bottom of their hearts, they want to replace you. They want you to die so they can take what you have. What they really wish is that you had never existed.

Favor-haters portray themselves as victims. They libel the favored. They make up stories about how you got your favor. You got it through racism and sexism, they say. You stole it from other nations. You ran the government and the banking system behind the scenes.

If you’re favored, they come up with excuses to steal from you, convict you of made-up crimes, and even kill you. Socialists have murdered millions of people using libels as excuses. Our modern domestic terrorists in BLM and Antifa will do the same if they ever get power.

In the Christian church, they go after people who are close to God. If they don’t get miracles, prosperity, healing, revelation, safety, and so on, and you do, they will claim you got what you have by earthly means.

I know a Christian who is very bitter, and she was telling me tongues aren’t for everyone. They clearly are; the Bible says so, and every time anyone in the New Testament got saved after the gospels, they spoke in tongues. It’s a universal gift.

She also told me God doesn’t make people wealthy, because it will destroy them. She did allow for some exceptions; those who are so mature, they can handle wealth.

I set her straight, and I am sure I offended her. I didn’t offend her by criticizing her. I offended her by saying good things about the way God treats people.

She is very angry. Whenever she has a conversation, she focuses on other people’s sins and how badly she has been wronged. My understanding is that unforgiveness blocks healing and tongues, so I would like to see her admit that she ruined her own life. If she did, she could be filled with the Spirit and be filled with blessings. This is why I told her the truth instead of sparing her feelings.

I told her God made me wealthy after I quit going to church and giving offerings, as I got closer to him and spent a tremendous amount of time speaking in tongues. She contradicted me. She told me I was well-off because I was “born into it.”

This is a lie Satan tells all the time. “You’re doing well because you’re white.” “You’re doing well because you’re male.” “You were born in a wealthy family.” “You got lucky in the job market.” “You got lucky in investing.”

My dad was born poor. His dad was born poor. My mother’s father was born poor. I couldn’t succeed at anything when I was young, no matter how I tried or how much ability I had. I was sabotaged and stabbed in the back over and over. I had nothing until I was in my thirties, and even then, I didn’t have much.

By the time the lady I was talking to was born, her father was wealthy. He bought her a brand-new car on her wedding day. He let his daughters run up bills at department stores. He paid for their schooling. When he died, with a net worth that was probably close to 15 million dollars, the person I was talking to got a fourth of it. Now it’s mostly gone. What happened to it? If being born into wealth makes one prosperous, where is her prosperity?

God gave her a husband who was a good provider, and she drove him away. Then he made her affluent. She was set up for life, twice.

She is in no position to speak as though God didn’t give her prosperity, and saying I was born with a golden safety net is wrong. I inherited, to be sure, but that was late in life. My sister was in the same position I was in, and now she has almost nothing. What she inherited, she spent. She blew it on things like cars, clothes, furniture, drugs, and Whole Foods cooked prime rib for her dog. Then she pretty much forced my dad to delete her from his will, twice without a break.

The lady I talked to is not filled with the Holy Spirit, so spirits of envy, anger, and bitterness don’t have much opposition. Such spirits drove her to deny what God, in his overwhelming love and kindness, had done for me. These spirits want everyone to think poverty is standard for Christians.

God kept telling me to be with him and receive favor, but I don’t think I fully understood it until very recently, when God started telling me 1) never to reject favor, 2) never to apologize for favor, 3) never to feel guilty about favor, 4) never to question whether favor was right, and 5) always to declare that the favor God gives me is righteous; how can I criticize what God does?

I am taking his advice. Now, I defend favor.

If you think about it, giving people good things they don’t deserve is the foundation of Christianity. None of us deserve to be saved or helped, but God is love, so to protect us, he allowed himself to be tortured to death and took the blame for our sins. That’s all of us. The pope. Your favorite evangelist. All the “saints.” Everyone. God can’t fix us if he doesn’t give bad people good things. The system wouldn’t function.

When I was in my thirties, I rejected favor, and it caused me a lot of misery. My mother was dying from cancer, and my sister, as usual, was abusing her. She didn’t take care of my mother. She was not helpful at all. She was her usual narcissistic self. My mother wrote a diary in which she criticized her, and after she died my sister stole it (along with the painkillers we had to keep in a locked box) and threw it out. She later bragged to me that she had thrown it out, with a delighted, spiteful, sadistic smile on her face.

One day my mother told me to help her, because she was going to disinherit my sister. This was favor. I should have kept my mouth shut.

Instead, I rejected favor, which means I questioned it. I didn’t realize God was behind it. I was making myself out to be more just than God. I talked my mother out of cutting off my sister, so the only bonus I got was in the form of a couple of small investment accounts that went straight to me.

If I had listened, my sister couldn’t have stolen from my grandparents’ estates. Her ability to make me miserable would have been greatly reduced. I would inherited twice as much. But I opened my mouth and ruined it because I didn’t understand what was happening.

God wanted the one-heir solution, and I pushed for, and got, the two-heir solution.

When my dad talked about disinheriting my sister, I kept quiet and didn’t try to influence him, so he cut her out. I can’t even guess at the pain this saved me.

I never tried to mediate between them. I never questioned his decision. I never went to her and tried to get her to try to restore her relationship with him, although I consistently prayed God would make it happen and that she would be put back in the will.

She knew she had been disinherited, and amazingly, although she was a dishonest, greedy, manipulative person who loved inherited wealth, and who stole from estates, she never tried to get herself put back in the will.

Learning to accept favor without questioning it has improved my faith. When I ask for things now, instead of being derailed by feelings of unworthiness, I say, “I receive favor. I will not reject it. I will not apologize for receiving it. You are right to do this for me.” I don’t look at other people’s problems and feel that it is somehow wrong for God to treat me better.

Satan and his children don’t sit around questioning their unfair decisions to abuse me and treat me worse than other people. They never have. His children never question his decisions to fill them with money and power and make them famous and admired. Why should I question God’s decisions to help me? Do I know more than God? Would I rather he didn’t help me?

I don’t question his righteousness when bad things happen to me. Should I think he’s wrong when God does me good? What’s the difference?

When God began telling me to receive his favor, I started trying to obey him. I would tell him I received it. After he told me not to reject it and so on, I augmented my responses, as I have written above. As for “be with me,” I now believe that means I’m to spend time in the Spirit, praying in tongues, entertaining his presence, worshiping him, humbling myself, and so on. If I’m in the Spirit, who is God, I am with God. According to his commandment, the time for proactively receiving his favor is when I’m in the Spirit.

All favor is inheritance. Satan’s children inherit from their father. The Jews and God’s children inherit from God. There are no self-made people, although there are a lot of proud and deluded people who think they did everything on their own. They commit the sin of Nebuchadnezzar, who took credit for his kingdom and then went mad for several years.

Inheritance is right. It is good. You will never make leftists believe that. They pass laws to take inherited wealth away. They murder people who inherit wealth, and they give it to fools who destroy it. They say this is “equity,” meaning inheritance is inequitable. Meanwhile, God calls his children heirs, not employees or earners. He tells us we receive good things we don’t deserve.

We are supposed to give our kids what we have, starting with the knowledge of the Holy Spirit. We are supposed to set them up in life and give them fortunes when we die, as Proverbs says. We are not supposed to throw them out of the boat with nothing so they can pull themselves up by their own bootstraps and reinvent the wheel with every generation. That’s idiotic. It’s as if the wealth of a parent were a big, elaborate sand castle, to be kicked over so the kids can suffer for no reason.

Will unearned wealth destroy immature people? Sure. But so will earned wealth. And if you give your children an inheritance of holiness and revelation, they will probably be blessed by every bit of earthly wealth they receive. Saying wealth destroys people only makes sense when the wealth is not coupled with the knowledge of God, which every Christian is supposed to have. If you say wealth destroys Christians, you’re really saying it exposes people who haven’t been transformed by the Holy Spirit. The wealth doesn’t destroy them. Spirits and their flesh do. Wealth can’t hurt anyone. It is completely good.

Nearly all Americans look down on heirs, but nearly all Americans want to leave their children fortunes. The only thing more amazing than the hypocrisy is that no one ever talks about it. I have never heard a single person other than myself mention it.

If you sneer at heirs and call them things like “nepo-baby,” “trust fund baby,” and “trustafarian,” you shouldn’t give a penny to your kids. You should add up all the things your grandparents and parents did for you, and give away whatever the monetary value is. You won’t.

As for the obligations of heirs, people who are given things are supposed to be humble and grateful and fear God. They should never be proud. They should never make fun of the poor, which I have done, since I have made fun of just about every type of person. To make fun of the poor is to reproach God, as the Bible says. I was very disturbed to find out I had reproached God.

Heirs should be generous. We are objects of generosity. The Bible says God rewards us in this life, not just in heaven, for generosity.

The story of creation, good, and evil is a story of class warfare. There are two classes: the class composed of God and the spirits and people who will always receive his help, and the class of Satan and the spirits and people who have no chance because of their evil decisions. The evil class is the ghetto class of the universe. The protestor class. The social justice warrior class. The left wing of the universe. They can’t be blessed by God, so they devote their lives to trying to harm him and his favorites and working to steal what God gave them.

In our political system, conservatives more or less represent the first class, and leftists more or less represent the second. Politics isn’t religion, and there are plenty of godless, useless conservatives who are mistaken about the class they are in, but the distinction between the classes is valid. It’s not really possible to be a serious leftist and belong to the first class. No one who actually knows God can remain a leftist.

The word says that during the millennium, people who are raptured because of their closeness to God and his righteous nepotism will return to Earth and rule with Yeshua. They will be kings and queens. Proper royal persons rule by inheritance. They are not elected by mobs run by Satan. They are not people who worked their way up from the mailroom. The monarchs will all be heirs. Who has the right to question that?

This revelation is life-changing for me. It will make things go much better in my walk with God. It will annoy many blind Christians, but they are always annoyed with me anyway, so it won’t be a significant change.

Crazy, or Just Plain Mean?

The Rob Reiner story is very disturbing.

As everyone knows, Reiner has a drug addict son named Nick, and a few days ago, the son cut Reiner’s throat as well as his wife’s throat. They died, and a daughter found their bodies after rigor mortis had set in.

I can understand a lot of crimes of violence, which doesn’t mean I approve. I can understand having a sadistic, parasitic spouse killed. I can understand domestic violence. I can see why a person who has had a few beers might flip out during an argument and hit someone over the head with a beer bottle. I understand a person who successfully defends himself with a gun and then keeps shooting after the assailant is incapacitated. People get angry sometimes.

Slitting your mother’s throat? I can’t comprehend that. How can anyone get that angry? Slitting your parents’ throats when you know they would otherwise leave you set for life is also incomprehensible. You would think selfishness would kick in.

Nick Reiner has a defense attorney, and his name is Alan Jackson. Presumably, he is extremely expensive. He handles high-profile cases in Los Angeles, and he appears to have a big staff. Who is paying this man? Reiner appears to be indigent, and you would think his siblings would be reluctant to help. Maybe Jackson is doing it pro bono, which really means pro publicity.

To someone like Jackson, this case is worth 7 figures. That’s a lot of charity. I believe charity is extremely important, but don’t come to my house and ask for 7 figures.

I hope no one thinks I’m criticizing this man for representing a murderer. Murderers are supposed to have representation. I’m just marveling that Reiner could get representation this expensive, as an indigent drug addict whose wealthy family is presumably far past estranged.

As a sibling, do you really want to help your vicious, murdering brother to stay free while you live on millions you inherited and he did not? I wouldn’t. I have a second cousin who was disinherited and then emptied a deer rifle, a shotgun, and a pistol into his brother.

I suppose it would be best to refer to the murderer as Nick in order to avoid the confusion that would arise from typing “Reiner” over and over, as well as the awkwardness of calling him “Nick Reiner” 50 times.

People are saying Nick is mentally ill. Some seem sympathetic. They seem to think his addiction or his mental illness caused the murders. I can pretty much guarantee you Jackson will push this angle, because there is no way he can convince a jury Nick didn’t do the crimes.

As for me, I suspect Nick is just a rotten human being.

Let’s talk addiction. I know a little bit about dealing with addicted relatives, and not the nice kind. Not the kind of addict who says, “Hey, I broke my leg a month ago, and I’m still on Percocet. I better do something.” I mean the kind of addict who has to be forced into rehab and always quits. The kind that abuses and bleeds people until they die and then looks for new victims. The kind of addict that turns 65 with no signs of repentance and every sign of becoming more evil.

People say drugs drive evil behavior. I’m sure that’s true in many cases, but I believe that a person who starts doing evil things, is confronted with it repeatedly, is offered help repeatedly, and consistently demonstrates that he greatly prefers to continue doing evil things…was probably evil to begin with.

The Reiners were leftists, and leftists promote the delusion that people are good. They get upset when you tell them some people are just plain evil. They don’t like it when you say many people simply prefer being evil and cannot be changed. It’s true, though, and the Bible says it’s true.

Rob Reiner said his son was resentful because his parents wanted him to stay in rehab, which is different from detox in that it takes many months. This should tell you a lot abut Nick. It suggests he preferred doing drugs and doing as he pleased to receiving help and living a successful life.

As for mental illness, I don’t know if it’s a valid excuse here. Some nice people with good intentions have delusions that seem to come from nowhere. On the other hand, I believe you can make yourself mentally ill by choosing to be a jerk all your life. I think that if you love lies, you will lie until you can’t tell the truth from lies. I think that if you love rage and sadism, and you indulge in them long enough, you become a rotten, sadistic, angry human being, and while your therapist may claim it’s a mental illness, it’s really a habit you formed deliberately, reinforced by demons you don’t want to get rid of.

I don’t think you can choose to be a bona fide psychotic who sees imaginary people, but I think you can choose to be consumed with hatred and lies. Medical science says we can rewire our brains to some extent, habits are real, and so are demons.

Some people who don’t have the facts yet are reflexively claiming Nick is schizophrenic, which could mean he was so psychotic he didn’t understand what he was doing. Maybe he thought his parents were vampires or something. Could be the case, and it would be grounds for acquittal, but on the other hand, it could be a label a therapist gave him in order to be nice and help his parents avoid concluding they had raised an evil man. Therapists are not very reliable. They get things wrong all the time. They can be biased. They can be dishonest. If they couldn’t be dishonest, lawyers wouldn’t hire them to examine their clients.

Sorry if that last sentence is disturbing.

Lawyers are pretty truthful, believe it or not. Laymen often say otherwise, but it’s true. Lawyers don’t always present all of the truth, because that isn’t their job. They present truth and speculation that may help their clients. To a layman, that may seem like lying, but it isn’t.

On the other hand, they hire experts they know are crooked. There are pro-plaintiff experts and pro-defense experts. Defense lawyers know who they’re hiring when they choose their experts. They know their experts may not be all that truthful. Is that dishonest? I suppose it is to some degree, but I think many lawyers would say they aren’t competent to say for sure whether pro-defense experts are more honest than pro-plaintiff experts.

I can assure you, there are lawyers who hire experts they know are crooked, but anyway, lawyers themselves generally tell the truth, because if they get caught lying, it can get them in serious trouble.

It’s generally not necessary for a lawyer to lie. Parties and witnesses tell so many lies, there are plenty to go around without any help from lawyers.

I don’t think Nick saw vampires. He clearly had a history of scary behavior. His own sister turned him in, and she must know him very well. She found her parents with their throats cut and their bodies going stiff, and she immediately told the police her brother was the best suspect. She knew what he was capable of. Also, he went to a party with his parents the night before they died, and he got into loud arguments with them and another actor. No one has said he was angry because he thought they were aliens who had come to destroy the planet or because he thought God had told him they were going to kill him and harvest his organs.

So what about the Reiners? Were they bad parents? Did they bring this on themselves?

They were definitely bad parents. Any parent who doesn’t raise his children to know Yeshua and the Holy Spirit is a failure. It seems they loved their son a great deal and tried their best to fix him, but love and loyalty aren’t enough to make you a successful parent. You have to co-parent with God.

In all likelihood, this man never had an encounter with the Holy Spirit or Yeshua. There is no way his liberal Jewish parents would have introduced him. They were hostile to God’s ways. They promoted evil and called it good. For example, they were known for their strong support of pushing society to accept sexual perversion, which destroys lives.

Would it have mattered if they had accepted Yeshua, been baptized with the Spirit, prayed in tongues every day, been transformed, and done their best to guide Nick in the same path? Maybe not. Like I always say, God raised Satan. He also raised the rest of the angels, and a third of them are evil.

I’ll say this: the odds of Nick’s salvation would have been a whole lot better.

I don’t say they were failures as parents because their son is what he is, and I don’t say he would definitely have been different had they done better. I say they were failures as parents for the same reason I would say any parent, liberal or conservative, who didn’t introduce his children to God was a failure.

God is real. His love is real. He truly does help people. There is no other solution.

As for me, I was not all that satisfied with my own response to the killings. When I read about the discovery of their bodies, I briefly wondered if it was God’s judgment, and I also hoped they hadn’t been killed by a conservative or nominal-Christian nut. My first response should have been grief combined with empathy. These things followed immediately, but they should have been first.

I never said I was good. Just that I am being improved.

Donald Trump has embarrassed conservatives with his response. In part, he said this:

A very sad thing happened last night in Hollywood. Rob Reiner, a tortured and struggling, but once very talented movie director and comedy star, has passed away, together with his wife, Michele, reportedly due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME, sometimes referred to as TDS.

I think it is objectively true that Rob Reiner was somewhat deranged. His self-reporting on his mental state with regard to Trump is well known, and he said a lot of things that were legitimately indicative of an unbalanced mind. But you can’t relate that to the evil that lived in Nick or the resulting murders. Obviously, Nick did not cut up his parents because his dad had severely irrational beliefs about conservatives.

I have no idea what “reportedly due to” is supposed to mean here. I don’t think anyone–not even Tucker Carlson or Alex Jones–claimed Nick went crazy because of his father’s political delusions.

As a new father with concerns about his family, I now have some ability to comprehend how far off base Trump was. Trump has a big family, so he should have more insight than he does.

There is a religion which could be called Trumpism. A religion which says Trump is infallible and that conservatism will solve all the world’s problems. It’s spreading these days, and it is dangerous. God is conservative, but conservatism can, and does, exist among people who serve Satan. Conservatism is a fruit of submission to God. It is not a good substitute. Without knowledge of the Holy Spirit, you can turn into Candace Owens or Nick Fuentes. Such people are as dangerous as any far-left agitators.

The president needs to wake up and apologize, which is not very likely. Sometimes I think he is getting a bit deranged, himself. During the last half of the year, he has said and done some kooky things.

President Trump is a friend of the church and Israel, but that doesn’t mean he’s with us all the way. He is definitely not our Messiah. He is not even our Josiah.

Today my wife and I prayed for the Reiner family, with special emphasis on Nick. I have no doubt that he is a vile person, but that has never been a barrier to salvation. If you are willing to listen, you can be renewed, no matter what you’ve done or what you have been. I am concerned that people are not likely to pray for him, so we jumped in. Will it pay off? That’s completely up to Nick. It’s possible, if he will listen.

Sorry. I Take That Back

The other day I wrote about a Christian friend who was mad at me. Another friend insists he’s not, but the texts suggest he is.

You can’t just ask a Christian if he’s mad at you, because they will always say no. You have to piece it together from clues.

You know how we are. “I’m going to pray for you” often means “I want to push your face in.”

He has invited me to a dinner function with other Christian men, on his dime. I accepted, but I was a little reluctant because of the timing and because of my many, many bad experiences with groups of self-identified Christians. Maybe I was rude, but I said I had to make something clear: I was never going to join a church again.

He said he knew that. Seemed a little annoyed, but I can’t really be sure.

I was afraid there was going to be an intervention. Let’s fix the backslider boy!

Some Christians evangelize for Yeshua, but most evangelize for churches. If you’re not going to church, you might as well be a crackhead who performs degrading services in exchange for small change. You have FALLEN AWAY, and they must go seek after the lost sheep.

Church Christians like to say we have to have “coverings.” If you don’t have a pastor, you have no covering, whatever that is. Like you’re doing an EVA without a spacesuit.

Coverings never worked for me. When I was a kid, I never saw a preacher who knew God or knew much of anything about him. They were able to dust off ancient notes and repeat sermons, and some were good at passing out communion and holding raffles and running church carnivals to raise money, but that was about it.

When I became an adult, things didn’t get much better. I had charismatic preachers, and they knew a few things about the Holy Spirit. That was helpful. They didn’t know they were supposed to pray in tongues a lot and receive revelation, however, so they mixed a lot of harmful excrement in with their teaching. Tithing, prosperity offerings, hard work, mindless submission to other human beings…the works.

They also discouraged talk of repentance. At my last church, there was a girl who kept coming in with new illegitimate babies, and they put her on the stage because she sang well. They never asked the obvious question: “When are you going to knock this off?”

The church before that was full of thieves, armed robbers, scammers, rappers, and strippers, and they were only too happy to put unrepentant people in ministry and hold them out as examples. I recall seeing one girl sing while her belly was so big it was like she was looking at the audience over the top of it.

Where there is no repentance, there is no salvation. That’s not me being self-righteous. That’s just how it is.

Most people have no idea what self-righteousness is. Giving useful criticism to others is not self-righteousness. We are required to do it. Yeshua did it and still does. The apostles did it. A self-righteous person doesn’t criticize himself. That’s the definition.

If I added up the hours I’ve spent criticizing myself and repenting this year alone, no one would believe me. God keeps waking me up at night.

Preachers think getting people into churches–their churches–is the most important thing in their lives. They also think that talking about repentance will keep butts out of seats, so they use “judge not” as an excuse to avoid it. They tell people God accepts they just as they are, which is not correct at all. They get lots of butts, but they’re the wrong butts. The wrong-butt people then end up running the church.

God eventually told me the church age was ending. Big churches had failed so catastrophically, he was giving up on them. This was necessary for a number of reasons I’m not going to get into now. God still wants us to assemble together, but you can do that in your backyard. Wherever two or more are gathered in his name, there he is among them.

When I tell people the church age is ending, they don’t like it. I think that must be because they are dependent on their churches, not the Holy Spirit. If they don’t go, they don’t feel God’s presence. They stop feeling clean. They feel like they’re not learning or improving.

It’s not supposed to work that way. You should bring God’s presence with you when you go to church. From your house. From your car. Otherwise, you’re showing up empty-handed.

The Holy Spirit should be with you wherever you are. If he’s not, something is wrong, and it’s disastrously wrong.

I hope they don’t try to drag me to churches. It would be nice to visit a church once in a while, but becoming a slave again and giving them over 10% of my income when I should be helping the poor instead…that will not happen unless I somehow become deranged.

I hope they don’t slander the Holy Spirit. If they ask me what’s happening in my walk, I will just tell them. God told me to stop going to church. God told me to stop tithing. God told me to pray in the Spirit a great deal. God told me preachers compete with the poor for money. God told me I had to do charity. God this and God that. I hope they don’t give me that, “Oh, another one,” grin and start talking about all the people who make up things God supposedly told them.

My friend belongs to the Assemblies of God. This outfit has produced a fair number of bad preachers. People like Swaggart and Bakker. It pushes the prosperity kickback scheme very, very hard. Trinity Church, my old church, was also an AG church.

I used to think the Assemblies of God was a charismatic church that promoted the Holy Spirit, but I found out that wasn’t true. They tell people to be baptized with the Spirit, and they get them started speaking in tongues, but then they stop. It’s like recruiting new soldiers and sending them straight from the recruiting station into battle. No weapons. No training. No communication with officers and instructors.

If you pray in tongues a lot, God WILL give you revelation, and you WILL have testimony. The vast majority of AG people don’t do it. They are there for prosperity, marriage, babies, healing, and the social life. And in many cases, money.

I figured most people in my church would be full of the Holy Spirit and that we would help others fill up. No such luck.

I would say AG people, and most people from charismatic churches, are just greedy Baptists who believe in miracles but don’t actually expect them. Not literally Baptists, but functionally similar. Nominal charismatics.

Nominal charismatics don’t have revelation or testimony, and they scoff at those who do. “I didn’t get it, so you’re not getting it, either.” They assume you’re lying or deceived when you talk about what God does for you.

This is how you can become a lifelong Christian who has never left a charismatic denomination and still end up slandering the Holy Spirit, living in defeat, being puffed up with pride like a bullfrog in mating season, and missing out on enormous blessings.

You can be a missionary, nurse the sick in a hospital in India, wash the feet of the homeless, preach with a bullhorn every day, memorize the whole Bible, smuggle Bibles into godless countries, drive the church bus, coach volleyball at Christian youth camp, lead the choir, compose hymns, and still have a lifestyle of slandering the Holy Spirit and thereby persecuting people who are doing better than you are.

Dormant, stunted charismatics who served churches instead of the Holy Spirit persecuted me at my last two churches. I didn’t have much trouble at all with unbelievers or the voodoo people who infest Miami. Preachers and volunteers made me miserable.

I joked to my friend about God telling me to buy my wife stuff, which is a privilege on both ends. He said Kenneth Copeland claimed God told him to buy his wife an $18 million mansion.

Was he slandering the Holy Spirit? I have to wonder. God really does tell me to buy my wife things. God tells Spirit-led Christians to do all kinds of things.

My wife lived in poverty until God joined us. She washed her clothes in a bucket. Much of the time, she had no hot water. She shared a hovel with two other women. She couldn’t afford to have a lost tooth replaced. To get up to the standard of a normal American women, she needs to be given some things other women here already have. Jewelry, shoes, clothing, medical care, and so on. She should be expected to require above-average expenditures until she levels up.

I’m not Kenneth Copeland. Copeland is a notorious fool and egomaniac who has lied for a living for decades. He’s a nasty person, and it is obvious his sick, worship-like covetousness didn’t come from God. Comparing the two of us would be absurd, and the absurdity is extremely obvious. You can’t miss it unless you want to. Surely my friend was not comparing me to him.

My sense is that he was trying to tell me I was claiming to have a relationship with God that I don’t really have. Like Copeland. If the Assemblies of God is what it should be, no AG member should be skeptical when another claims to hear from God. It should be disturbing when they say they don’t hear from him.

I have noticed that when we’re together, he keeps questioning my words, beliefs, and actions and asking me to defend myself as a Christian. I have never done that to him.

Maybe I’m wrong about the Copeland thing. Benefit of the doubt and so on.

My wife and I saw a funny video the other day. Maybe it wasn’t funny. Copeland had been given a Bentley. He was talking about it. He bowed his head and, in a reverent and highly emotional tone, said, “Ohhhhhhhh, thank you, Jesus!” He sounded like a junkie who had just recovered his stash of heroin after dropping it in a storm drain. It almost sounded sexual. He was overwhelmed with emotion. Over a car. A car no one told God to give him.

I dread going to the dinner for the same reason I avoid Christian forums. My concern is that I may be lectured and “corrected” by people who don’t know anything and who may be motivated by pride.

Christian forums are amazing. They’re like correction demolition derbies. Everyone wants to correct, and it’s not because they want to help or because they want others to avoid making the mistakes they’ve made. It’s because they have Smartest Boy in Class Syndrome. And most of what they say is wrong. Sometimes it ends with, “I’m going to pray for you!”, which, to many Christians, is synonymous with the middle finger.

A long time ago, I learned that I can’t help groups. I have managed to help individuals, but never groups. Satan works through groups.

My young friend Travis, who died in 2020 after a ghetto friend who was showing off a new gun shot him in the chest, thought he would save the black race. He was always mentoring kids. He thought he could save the ghetto, and he wanted to live there while he did it.

I told him that in 20 years, the people he knew would be exactly as they were at the time I was speaking to him. I told him that if he wanted to help, he needed to leave the ghetto and come back on weekends to reach a few people.

The same principle applies to Christians, generally. If you soak in their presence all the time, you will be distracted, misinformed, used, and persecuted. You need to spend a lot of time apart from them and avoid turning them into your consuming club. It’s better to be with a few people here and there.

I’m probably overly concerned. PTSD from past dealings with churches. Maybe I’ll have a great time.

My friend means well. I should appreciate it when people try to help.

One of the great things about my wife is that when I get a revelation that isn’t part of the church-worship belief structure, she never tries to correct me. She never accuses me. She never hands me a woke line in order shame me. She pipes up right away with a scripture confirming what I said, and then we have a discussion in which the Holy Spirit expands on it.

I have one person, on the entire planet, who listens with God’s ear and doesn’t fight with me.

This is a wife’s proper function. If your wife is constantly trying to correct you, or she’s always praying for God to correct you, one of you is married to the wrong person.

In any case, I am going to the dinner. Pray for me. And not in that, “I’m going to pray for you,” kind of way.

Spam is not a Dish That is Best Served Cold

Yesterday I wrote about a startling and disappointing spam text I received from Erika Kirk, and I was very critical. Some people have questioned the legitimacy of the text, suggesting I fell for a scam.

I didn’t. I will teach you a few things.

The text is from Turning Point, and it links to their official donation site. The language in the text is repeated on that site word for word.

Here is a link.

Anedot is TPUSA’s official donation processor. Go to TPUSA’s site, click a donation link, and see for yourself.

I didn’t just fall off the turnip truck. I don’t believe everything I see on the web or in texts or emails. I never click on links I can’t verify. I have never bought a timeshare. I don’t fall for organic food. I have never wired money to a Nigerian. I have never paid a gypsy to put “leftover” blacktop on my driveway. I don’t follow the Omaha Steaks people back to their trucks. I haven’t left a tooth under my pillow in around 60 years. I know the difference between “made with real cheese” and “uses only 100% real cheese.” I have never responded to an infomercial. I would never get a reverse mortgage. I have never even considered getting a Herbalife franchise. It doesn’t scare me at all when a guy with an Indian accent calls and claims he’s with the IRS. When I receive envelopes with warnings saying things like, “OFFICIAL COMMUNICATION! OPEN IMMEDIATELY!”, I throw them out without opening them. I have never put my Social Security number in an email or spoken it over the phone. I don’t buy anything endorsed by Oprah Winfrey or Shark Tank. I don’t answer misspelled emails thanking me for huge purchases I never made. I have never paid anyone money because they sent me an email claiming they turned my webcam on and filmed me watching porn. I will never pay anyone to clean my air conditioning ducts. I don’t take methylene blue. I don’t believe a mediocre old socialist in Rome, elected by homosexuals, is even dimly acquainted with Yeshua or can send anyone to hell. I don’t open mail from companies offering to buy my house for half the market price. I don’t buy extended warranties except in rare cases. I don’t tip on tax. I don’t believe racking a pump shotgun will scare a burglar off. I don’t trust AR-15’s. I don’t believe Brigitte Macron is a man. I am positive Barack Obama was born in Hawaii, and I know for a fact Charlie Kirk was not bumped off by Israel.

I have made some real sucker moves in my life. I gave money to Robert Tilton, and I also dated a Brazilian who told me she would never date a Brazilian and gave me solid reasons. But I have checked this spam text out, and it’s the real thing.

As long as I’m in a lecturing mood, I want to comment on something more personal. I had an epiphany this morning.

Once I got past a certain age, older women started paying attention to me. I was never attracted to them. No apology. You don’t apologize for things like that. It’s like apologizing for not liking yogurt. It’s not something that results from a choice.

Who insists women apologize for their preferences? No one. Feminists think Brigitte Macron is practically a deity.

She put an end to the Macron line. Emmanuel Macron will never reproduce unless his wife leaves the picture and he finds himself someone who can still have kids. She deprived him of a great deal.

She’s a bit of a husband-beater, so she and Macron may part ways. If that happens and he goes on to have kids with someone young, feminists will probably cruficy him.

I have also turned down women of childbearing age, not just in recent years, but when I was young. It would be crazy to apologize for that. You don’t marry people you don’t want. It’s wrong, and it leads to misery. I don’t owe marriage to anyone. I am under no obligation as a Christian to save women from their problems, even if they’re nice single women.

Marriage isn’t musical chairs. You don’t leap for the only remaining option just because there is no choice. There is always a choice. It’s called bachelorhood. It worked for Paul. It worked for Boaz until the time was right.

I never felt I should marry someone because I was old myself and should be grateful anyone would have me. That would have been pathetic. A Japanese robot would be an order of magnitude less pathetic. At least I wouldn’t be using another human being. I would be objectifying an object.

I was completely prepared to remain single until I died. That was better than burdening myself with the human equivalent of chopped liver and burdening a woman with a man who only stayed with her out of duty.

More than one older lady tried to turn other people against me. Women will do that. If you reject a woman, she may go to your common friends, and they may conspire and decide you’re a wicked person for not wanting ONE woman out of 4 billion. A cousin of mine broke up with a girl in high school, and other girls in his small town decided no one else should date him.

I’m sure some were willing to jump in and undermine her, though.

It’s gaslighting. The victim is the problem. If the victim agrees to be victimized, everything will be as it should be. Take one for the team. The other team.

Today I was lying in bed, and I looked at my son. His crib is between our bed and a sliding glass door. He was standing in the sunshine, in his romper, eagerly awaiting his day with us. He seemed to glow with innocence and love. My own love poured out toward him, as always.

Suddenly I had a realization: this is what irrational, selfish older women wanted to keep me from having. Maybe they never articulated it to themselves, but this is what they offered me: life without my beautiful son and whatever siblings God might provide later. Life without any hope of a grandchild.

In exchange for that, I would get to pay someone’s bills and maybe the bills of their kids and relations, and I would get to lie next to someone who was as attractive and who brought me as much pleasure as another old man.

No; I won’t say that. Women are difficult; they even find each other difficult. Men are easy to get along with, and we share interests. It would be much better to share a house with another man than a woman I didn’t want. We could shoot together. We could do metalworking. We could smoke ribs and make beer. We would be happy with crummy furniture and doing small engine repairs on the kitchen table.

Two Oscars and no Felix.

No woman ever thought, “I want to make sure he never has kids.” Surely. But every woman who can’t or won’t have babies knows this is the sentence she imposes on potential husbands. A considerate person would have thought about that, and she would have backed off and encouraged me to find someone suitable. I was willing to die a bachelor, but if married, I wanted to have children.

If I had given in to the pressure, which was never even a remote possibility, I wouldn’t be waking up every day bathed in the presence and love of my very own family. I wouldn’t get to hold my baby son and kiss him. I wouldn’t get to pray for him and speak blessings over him.

My phone wouldn’t be jammed with pictures of my wife and son. My boy fresh from delivery. My boy swaddled in the bassinet. Taking his first trip to Home Depot. Being bathed by my wife in the utility sink. Going to his first restaurant. Sitting up by himself. Crawling. Standing up while holding a chair leg. Sitting in a grocery cart outside Costco while my wife beams with joy.

I’m sorry life doesn’t work out for everyone. My own life was a disappointing mess until I was well into middle age, so I know how it feels. Doesn’t mean I’m the catcher in the rye for every woman who is in the same boat. I can’t do it, and it would be wrong to do it. Your problems are not my fault. They’re your fault.

Choosing the wife I did doesn’t make me immature, insecure, a fetishist, selfish, gullible, domineering, or unwilling to face reality. I chose a magnificent helper, and we could not love our baby more. You know all those miserable couples on Facebook who post glowing entries about their wonderful lives together? That’s not us. Our lives really are wonderful, thanks to our patient, forgiving, generous, reliable father.

There are a lot of women out there who don’t think at all about the welfare of their potential husbands. Gimme, gimme, gimme. Save me. Save my kids. Serve a man’s proper purpose. You should love me because I want you, or, worse, because I need you.

Actual love is not selfish.

I used to pray for God to give me someone to pour myself out for. Like most husbands and fathers, I take pleasure in sacrificing for my wife and child. I didn’t say, “Please make her rich. Give her a nice car. Give me a warm body so I don’t feel lonely at night. Make her good at fixing our house and vehicles. Send me someone to solve the problems I caused.”

I’m not a good person, but I genuinely wanted to give of myself. I didn’t pray for God to send me someone who would make sacrifices for me. I wasn’t like a Titanic survivor pleading for God to send me a piece of floating wreckage I could cling to until a ship came along.

A man should sacrifice for his family, but a woman shouldn’t pray for God to send her someone to sacrifice for her. She should pray for someone to whom she can be a good helper. A woman should be a good helper, but a man should pray for God to send him someone to make sacrifices for.

And she should be someone he actually wants.

I apologize for nothing except dating people who could never have been good Christian wives. That was unfair to them. I don’t apologize for rejecting anyone, and I don’t feel even the tiniest trace of resentment toward women who rejected me. They were right. The ones who rejected me when I was young dodged a bullet.

If you’re a female troll, and you think I’m still a bullet, all I can say is, my wife sees me very, very differently.

My son is on the floor at my feet, moving the end table around and grabbing my leg while I type. He coos and grunts with pleasure. He explains what he’s doing with incomprehensible babble. What did I ever do to deserve to be so blessed? Nothing.

This is what some women thought I should give up on and do without, forever, so I could give them everything and get precious little back. If anyone should be ashamed, it’s not me.

Don’t marry the wrong person. It is literally worse than cancer. Get to know the Holy Spirit. Pray in tongues. Beg God to clean you up for marriage, and ask him to send you the right person.

On your own, you have no chance.

I got a spam email today, addressing me by my first name. That always annoys me. It is never proper to address a grown stranger by his first name. It is insulting, because it’s a transparent trick intended to foster a false sense of intimacy. It doesn’t work on me. It offends me, because I hate two things: having my intelligence insulted, and being manipulated.

I’ll post the text.

Charlie loved witnessing excellence.

It’s why he loved sports so much.

He loved watching the best of the best perform at the level of greatness God intended for them.

[Insert your first name here.], that’s why this photo…

One of the very last photos ever taken of Charlie…

Took the breath right out of my chest. Because I know that look…

I fell in love with that look. He’s in athlete mode. Locked in. Dialed. Focused. Just Charlie. In his element.

And now, this image is permanently etched in time, held in my heart, as I admire his greatness.

Forever.

[Insert your first name here.], this is a message I never imagined I’d write.

You knew Charlie’s voice…

But I knew his heart.

That’s the story I want you to know – and the man I want you to remember: turnpt-usa.com/6etCd_ZXd

-Erika Kirk

Reply STOP to end

I am old-fashioned by 2025 standards. By the standards of my grandparents, I am practically a savage, but in 2025, I look like Emily Post. Am I wrong to be old-fashioned? Putting it gently in view of the time frame, I am unfavorably impressed by this text.

Charlie Kirk’s body is in a coffin somewhere, still above ground. It has been 13 days since he died. Now his wife’s company is sending me seemingly-ghostwritten texts in her name, trying to get me to sponsor her career as a political pundit.

If I had a friend who was poor, and he died, and I knew his family needed money to get them through the months following his death, I would be thrilled to help. I wouldn’t be upset if the widow came right out and asked me. I would offer before she could do that. But this is a rich woman with many, many millionaire and billionaire contacts, and I am being asked not for help making ends meet, but for help advancing her media career.

Worse, I could be helping the dangerous antisemite Tucker Carlson, who seems to be jockeying for Kirk’s job. That would feel like sponsoring Josef Goebbels.

There is no way she wrote this. Not by herself, anyway. It has the smell of professional copywriters all over it. I think a company that does fundraising for a lot of outfits wrote this. It reads exactly like the computer-generated letters I used to get many years ago, before I realized prosperity preachers were the among the lowest creatures on Earth.

“[Insert your first name here.]: MY WIFE DEONDRIANNA AND OUR CHILDREN JAYDEN, HAYDEN, PAYDEN, AIDAN, PEYTON, ASHLEY, ASHLYNNE, MICKAYLA, BRAYDEN AND I HAVE BEEN WEEPING OVER YOUR FINANCIAL SITUATION! OUR HEARTS ACHE OVER YOUR LACK! JESUS WOKE US IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT AND TOLD US TO PRAY FOR YOU AND LET YOU KNOW THAT IF YOU WOULD JUST SEND US YOUR BEST POSSIBLE SEED GIFT OVER $250…”

I think TPUSA does wonderful work. It’s well worth supporting if you’re the kind of person who gives money to political causes. I’m not that kind of person, and I haven’t been since Bush I was running, but if you are, I can’t think of a better political cause than this. But this is not the way to go about getting donations. This is fodder for Charlie Kirk’s leftist critics.

Now that I think about it, I may have given Trump $25 in the process of buying a hat and a shirt, but I can’t recall.

I say it was spam because it was. It was an unsolicited and unwelcome fundraising pitch, sent to a random person with no previous communication.

I have never had anything to do with TPUSA. I saw very little of Kirk’s work. He did not inspire or influence me. I didn’t subscribe to his Youtube channel. If Charlie Kirk had spoken next door, I wouldn’t have gone, because his bag was not my bag, and I hate crowds. I’m glad he did it, just as I am glad there are people who become morticians, accountants, and septic tank pumpers, but I don’t want to be part of it.

I never signed up for a mailing list or gave anyone any indication whatsoever that I was interested in TPUSA. I have been blogging for 24 years, and prior to his assassination, I have mentioned Charlie Kirk precisely once.

I didn’t give them my number, so I know they got it without my consent. They bought it, or some other political corporation gave it to them in an underhanded, rude, and thoughtless way.

Back in 2014, a car thief who went to a church I used to attend drowned while fleeing the cops. His name was Alex Nicolas. He knew a lot of wealthy Jewish kids, so Rich Wilkerson, the pastor of the church (Trinity Church in Miami) offered to hold a memorial service.

Some of Alex’s rich friends came by to pay their respects, and Rich Wilkerson saw his plan coming together. He asked for a cash offering. To help Alex’s family.

No, he didn’t. You knew I wasn’t headed that way. He asked for a cash offering to go to his own “charity,” from which he personally drew funds. A charity which did nearly nothing for anyone not named Wilkerson.

It was ghastly.

I can’t help thinking of it now.

The folks at TPUSA need money, so they ask for it. That’s fine, but they should not spam innocent people, and this is not the proper time to send out emails in his widow’s name. I don’t think they should be using this kind of emotional appeal, either. It seems very inappropriate to me. There is a lot more of it on the page the text links to. Maybe it’s sincere, but I just don’t feel it, and anyway, I did not know these people.

They could have said, “People funded TPUSA largely because they knew they were supporting the work of Charlie Kirk. Now that he is gone, we need your help more than ever. Please consider sending a generous donation while we recover from this tremendous loss.” And they could have refrained from spamming.

You know what? I’ll post the link they sent me. Go ahead and donate if you like. I think TPUSA was fueled by Charlie Kirk, and I expect it to dry up and vanish like The Daily Wire without Ben Shapiro, but maybe I’m wrong. Maybe lightning will strike twice in the same place, and they’ll find someone who can do what Charlie Kirk did. Make up your own mind.

I don’t think this disturbing spam necessarily justifies abandoning what is fundamentally a good cause. I’m just put off by the tone-deaf approach. I now have a sour opinion of the character of the people involved.

As you will see, suggested-donation buttons range from $25 to $100,000. Seems bold to me. Maybe, for the first time in 24 years, I should put donation buttons on this blog and suggest amounts ranging from $10,000 to two billion dollars.

Of course, the link they sent has tracking code in it to show where it came from, so I guess they have already tracked me and realized I went to the site. I guess I can expect more spam now that there is blood in the water. I stripped that code out in the link above, not that it matters, since it would have led back to me, not you.

I guess people will be mad at me now. But as many people have said, being offended doesn’t make you right. Kirk himself said that, although it was not his original thought. I used to say it before I had ever heard of him, and you probably said it, too.

I think it’s time to register as an independent.

Who is Really Blocking Blessings?

Knowing certain people is like having shingles. You go years without an eruption, and then you feel that familiar sensation again.

Today I heard a police siren outside my house. I looked out, and I saw a cop car at my gate. The officer was waving. I buzzed him in.

He told me nothing was wrong, meaning I was not in trouble, but he named my sister and asked if I were her brother. I reluctantly said I was, and I asked what she had done. He told me she was in a hospital in Kentucky, and a caregiver was trying to get in touch with me. He did not have details.

Thinking she might be dead or dying, which would be something I would need to know about, I took the caregiver’s number. I figured this person was a nurse.

I knew one thing: I was not about to call that number without praying and without asking someone I knew in Kentucky for information. I also did a little research to make sure I would not obligate myself accidentally.

After my wife and I prayed, I called someone and asked what they knew. Nothing, but they offered to call the caregiver for me. I could not believe it. What a gift from heaven.

I didn’t want the caregiver to have my number, I did not want to be manipulated, and I definitely didn’t want to be put on the phone with my sister after a decade. It would be like erasing “3650” and writing “0” on a sign reading “DAYS SINCE LAST ACCIDENT.”

A long time later, I got a call back.

My sister’s life is not in danger at the moment. The caregiver is actually a social worker who helped her move into a subsidized apartment a few years ago.

She is obese. She has diabetes. She had a fall. It was not her first. I knew that. She fell in her kitchen in about 2010 and broke her arm. She also moved in with our elderly aunt and refused to leave, and the only reason my aunt was able to get rid of her is that she fell in a ditch on the way to Whole Foods and broke her leg. While she was in the hospital, my aunt and her daughter moved my sister’s things to the subsidized apartment.

A CAT scan says she has had 4 strokes. Her memory is not good.

She says God is going to heal her.

She says nutty things. She says neighborhood kids come to her apartment, and she feeds them. This is not true.

She is being evicted because she never cleans. This is how she behaved in the only house she ever owned, which she held in joint tenancy with my father after she conned him into paying for most of it. The filth in her house was so bad, you wouldn’t understand if you hadn’t seen it. She didn’t do any maintenance, either, so the house fell apart, and my dad had to buy her out.

The caseworker sent crews to her apartment several times to clean it for her, and she would not come to the door. On one occasion, someone took her trash out, and it amounted to 26 bags.

No surprise. My mother used to pay for apartments for her, and to prevent eviction, she used to go clean them. She would haul out multiple bags full of filthy garbage and dog feces.

When she is thrown out, she will have to wait three years to get another subsidized apartment. If she gets one, she will be evicted from it, too.

Someone has looked the apartment over, and they say the contents are a total loss. There is filth on everything. It’s full of dirty clothes that are beyond saving. Apparently, she has been buying new clothes instead of doing laundry.

She has to go, because one filthy unit will eventually ruin an entire building. Roaches and other pests will use it as a base and maternity ward.

Her car has been impounded. Somehow, she has a driver’s license, but it is being taken away. She has 4 hit-and-run charges. There are two active criminal cases on the county website where she lives, but the site won’t tell me what they’re about. Maybe the traffic cases. She does not have car insurance.

The caseworker wants someone to make medical decisions for her. I could do that, right? I could, but I won’t. It would put me in a position where she could sue me or report me to the authorities over imagined malfeasance. Also, and more importantly, I couldn’t stand being subjected to her. I am too old. I have suffered enough.

God has worked things out so I have no abusive or toxic people in my life. If I bring the worst one back in voluntarily, is that gratitude? Should he continue to help me? This is one of the greatest gifts he has given me; one of the greatest gifts anyone could have. I don’t want to spit on it.

She will get medical treatment. I checked, so it’s not as if she will do without treatment if no one steps up to make her decisions. I don’t know why they want a family member involved, except that it may save the government money. I don’t know, but I feel sure there are people who make medical decisions for indigent individuals who don’t have family. I don’t think they just toss them into dumpsters.

It occurred to me that the person I spoke to could make the decisions. I would be happy to consult, as long as I could stay here and never speak to my sister. I would even be glad to pay a monthly fee. The person I spoke to is not a tempting lawsuit target.

I am told something has to be done, because my sister will have nowhere to go in a day or two. Well, I can’t help that. Look at the options.

1. Have her move in with me. My wife would leave and take my son, and I would not blame her. My life would be shortened, and I would wish for death every day. Frankly, I would rather see my sister die than take her in and subject myself, my wife, and my wonderful baby son to her.

2. Pay for an apartment. She would be evicted. I would be liable for the repairs, extensive pest control treatment, days of cleaning, lost rent, and junk removal.

3. Buy a house for her. This has been tried.

4. Put her in a facility. She would be evicted. See 2. Even if she did not destroy the place, she would be so obnoxious, they would have to get rid of her in order to maintain order. This isn’t a possibility; it’s a certainty. It has happened already.

5. Homeless shelter. That’s where she’s going to go, if they will take her. They will probably throw her out before long, but at least I won’t have to pay for new drywall and plumbing.

Prison or a mental asylum would be the best thing for her, because they could keep her clean, give her medical care, and feed her, and she wouldn’t be able to defy them. No one else can do it.

The person I spoke to asked if I wanted to do anything to save the car. No. I do not. She can’t drive it anyway, so it has to go. Maybe a relative of ours would agree to sell it for her. I can only think of one who would dare try.

The caseworker likes my sister. She thinks she’s funny. She didn’t have to raise her or be her sibling, however. She was not there to see her torment her mother over and over. She was not there when she was torturing her little brother in the crib. She was not there when she tried to victimize her elderly father or when she abused her frail, elderly aunt and refused to leave her home.

She wasn’t there when she got thrown out of Teen Challenge, of all places. When you hit bottom and find yourself in Teen Challenge, and you abuse the employees and residents until they give you one day to leave, you should know you are very, very special.

I can’t help her. Maybe I can work it out so someone assumes responsibility for her medical decisions, but even that is risky. She will never get better. She will keep doing what she does until she dies. No one can help, but people can become enablers.

The caseworker is a woman. She is probably an emotional person; the field attracts that type. I doubt she has thought the situation through, as I just did. She may marvel to see the family of a helpless person abandon her. She may be under a common Christian delusion, which is that God never gives up on anyone, so we shouldn’t either.

God gives up on people. He gave up on the entire world in Noah’s time. He gave up on Sodom and Gomorrah. He will give up on the world again, precipitating the rapture and tribulation. He gave up on the Amalekites and the residents of various Canaanite cities. Yeshua gave up on cities that would not receive him. He told his disciples to do the same.

There is one person who could help my sister, and it’s not Yeshua. It’s my sister. Yeshua has done everything he could. My sister refuses to help herself by doing simple things like cooperating with her caseworker. She refuses to confess and repent. The horse is at the water trough, but it will not drink.

There is a small possibility that I might involve myself peripherally in getting someone to handle the medical decisions, but I don’t think I will. I think God told me I should not even think about my sister, and I don’t believe he wants me tossing others into her snake pit. Fixing her medical care won’t change much, anyway.

She will lose the car. She will go to a shelter, if they will have her. She will not get another apartment. I suppose she will live in a tent. There are tent camps in her area. The county and city clear them out, but they return.

Until today, I never thought much about the final residences of incorrigible people who don’t qualify for prison or permanent commission to institutions. I see how it works now. We are told encampments exist because of bad old capitalism or because we don’t offer enough care. Not true. People who live in tents are there because they don’t give us options. They won’t work with us, so we can’t help them. And leftists blame society, not the guilty.

Sure, there are some tent residents who can’t be blamed because of mental illness, but on the other hand, you can make yourself mentally ill by being an unrepentant jerk all your life. Not every mental case is a blameless person who suddenly went schizophrenic without warning. There are plenty of crazy homeless people who caused their own mental issues.

My sister appears to be somewhat crazy now, but that was not always the case. She made herself crazy through decades of evil decisions she made in cold blood while in her right mind.

She is as self-righteous as anyone on Earth. She is always right. She is always the victim. Everyone owes her an apology. Other people cause all of her problems. She could be saved if she would admit guilt, repent, and have her many demons cast out. Pride, a love of lying, and hostility are the hedges that confine her with her demons.

So that’s it. I’ll pray with my wife, and we will probably leave it at that.

“Thanks for Nothing” Would be too Kind

Gloria Copeland is dying from dementia. My wife told me.

She is the wife of prosperity preacher Kenneth Copeland. He is 88. He says he prevented his hair from turning gray by telling it not to, and he also says he and God have a deal which will keep him alive until 2056. He says he will die on his birthday at the age of 120.

While he was announcing the deal, he compared himself to an old car that had been restored, and he said certain parts had been repaired.

He also tells a story about being short of breath while getting on one of his expensive airplanes. He said he sat down and prayed, and God told him he was giving him a new heart.

He now has a pacemaker.

I used to love Kenneth Copeland back in the 1980’s. I didn’t know any better. He mixed the truth with very seductive lies, and he was an excellent speaker. I had had supernatural experiences, so I was looking for preachers who were in the same boat, so they could teach me. I was not able to sift out the truthful ones and discard the liars.

Things got worse when I got a supernatural healing by listening to Copeland. When I decided to find a church, I got a flu-like illness that persisted for weeks. I heard him say I should pray for healing and keep saying I was healed, so I did that. I was tenacious. One day, I walked into the kitchen, looked into the freezer, and saw a dark shape fly out of me and into the freezer. Then it turned and flew out of the house through a closed door. I was instantly healed of all symptoms.

It was my misfortune to get a powerful bit of truth mixed into a gruel of lies. The healing was wonderful, but it gave me the false impression that Copeland was a man of God.

It seems ironic that I got healed and the Copelands have not. I don’t think either of them seriously expected anyone who listened to them to receive a miraculous healing.

Copeland has a protege in Africa. His name is David Oyedepo. He apparently claims to have the same deal with God. He says he will die at 120. He is 70 now, so keep an eye on him for the next 50 years.

I used to listen to Gloria Copeland, too. She is also a fine speaker. Unlike her husband, she has always exuded a false aura of class and serenity. On first examination, she seems wise, mature, and gentle. Now that I think about it, I’ve seen Buddhists who come off the same way, and of course, they go to hell.

The self-righteous act is one of the most annoying thing about Buddhists. You’re supposed to be enlightened, so you act enlightened, and if you make a career of it, people pay your bills and treat you like royalty. And every truthful, perceptive person who gives you the emperor’s new clothes treatment is sloughed off as unenlightened and in need of a few more incarnations.

To be a successful Buddhist authority, you just have to smile constantly, trying to look benevolent, and pretend you’re not as upset as everyone else. That’s really true.

Another great thing about the job is that you never have to answer a question or give intelligent input. When someone makes a remark about Buddhism to you, you can grin and close your eyes, say something like, “Who can make the wind orange?”, or just say, “Yeah, mmm,” in a dreamy voice.

There is a mildly famous lady from Texas who does this act beautifully. She has a calm, hypnotic voice. She doesn’t show signs of irritation or anger. She gives ridiculous advice, like “Stop doing.”

People give her roses at her appearances, and they stand in awe and stammer rehearsed speeches about their own enlightenment process, trying to make it look like they’re “in” with the awakened one, just like she is. They work hard to say the right things, fearing she might expose them as unenlightened.

But, you know. Who can make the wind orange?

To get back to the Copelands, Gloria doesn’t know what’s going on any more. She looks fine. Always elegantly dressed and made up, as in the past. She can talk. But she has to be led around, and people have to explain simple things to her.

If she were not the wife of a billionaire or near-billionaire, she would be in a memory care unit. She will get worse and die soon.

Like many or perhaps all prosperity preachers, Kenneth Copeland has not healed anyone.

Yes, I got a healing, but I was on my own. He never prayed for me. I’ve never been in the same building with him.

I saw a recent video of Gloria Copeland with her husband. Her condition was startling, but it didn’t startle me as much as this: her husband was on the verge of tears as he spoke to her. I was shocked to see that Kenneth Copeland loved anyone other than himself and Mammon.

He makes his living making gullible people poor and buying himself airplanes he doesn’t need while they move in with their kids or go on welfare, so it was reasonable to assume he had no heart at all.

He knows perfectly well that he has destroyed countless lives. The lives of people who had less than he did and gave it to him.

It made me think of my sister, who used to send him money. It may seem odd that a narcissistic sociopath would support a ministry, but then the ministry taught selfishness, and sending money was a way to get admiration, which narcissists love.

Ever notice how sweet and full of admiration salespeople are when you’re buying expensive clothes or jewelry? That’s how crooked preachers and their employees treat people who give them a lot of money.

My sister gave preachers money. Then she quit. Kenneth Copeland’s people called her. They said they were worried about her. They didn’t worry when she was sending them money.

She was going broke fast, because she shopped but did not work. She could have used some cash to repair her house. Although it would not have helped her, a real minister would have offered counseling.

Not one ministry offered to give her back a single penny.

She gave to John and Lisa Bevere. I will give them this: Bevere’s mother called and seemed concerned. Somehow I ended up talking to her instead of my sister. I can’t recall whether I prayed with her.

They didn’t send a refund, however. They weren’t around later to help fund her cancer treatment or rehab expenses. My sister was there for the Beveres. They weren’t there for her.

“Minister” means “servant.”

I don’t know what to think of Bevere. I drove him around for a while when he visited Trinity Church in Miami. I still have his cell number. He seemed pretty sincere, and I don’t recall him pushing for offerings. On the other hand, he was a youth pastor under Benny Hinn, and he was involved in Joyce Meyer’s company. I won’t call it a ministry. He pals around with some truly slimy and dangerous preachers.

Doesn’t the Bible say God’s children should give? If that is true, why is it that when we connect with celebrity ministries, we expect them to take a lot, but it doesn’t occur to us that they might give us anything, even if we have given generously to them in the past?

The disciples had to choose deacons because they were so busy helping the poor.

T.B. Joshua’s ministry gave a lot. When my wife and I took our son to his first pediatrician, we picked a Nigerian. Somehow, we ended up mentioning T.B. Joshua to him. He told us that when his father got married, T.B. Joshua gave him and his wife 40 bags of rice.

Where is my sister’s rice, Mr. Copeland?

The charitable efforts of Joshua’s church were extensive and generous, and he lived in a modest house.

Kenneth Copeland is not very likely to live to be 120, and he will probably be a widow by 90, so living to 120 would really be a punishment.

I won’t prophesy, but I will predict. Copeland’s health will take a downturn, and he will realize he’s going to die. Then he’ll tell the world he decided to go ahead and be with his wife, deal notwithstanding. Either that, or he’ll give up public life and abandon his flock, because he never cared about them to begin with.

Yeshua spoke about religious Jews who were like the Copelands:

But woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye shut up the kingdom of heaven against men: for ye neither go in yourselves, neither suffer ye them that are entering to go in.

Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye devour widows’ houses, and for a pretence make long prayer: therefore ye shall receive the greater damnation.

The Bible says a lot of scary things about those who swindle and those who oppress the poor. It says if you give to the rich, you will come to poverty.

Having your wife lose her mind and die is a very harsh punishment, but when you consider the hordes of people the Copelands and their friends have impoverished, it seems very lenient to me. Ananias and Sapphira were struck dead for much less.

In any case, Kenneth Copeland’s plans and his rich old age have been spoiled, and what’s in store for him afterward is much worse.

The world is really filthy. Most people have no interest in Yeshua. When you try to find him, people who claim to represent him do their best to make sure you find Satan instead. If you’re in one of the old churches, that’s about the worst of it. If you’re in a charismatic church, they also do their best to make you poor. It’s amazing that anyone gets to know God.

My Boys Went on Ahead

Today I took a box out of my spare refrigerator, took it to an animal hospital that does cremation, and said goodbye to my little friend Marvin. I did not open the box. I have also thrown out nearly everything that had anything to do with her or my other deceased bird, Maynard. I don’t want that stuff around me. I threw out food. I threw out vet bills. I deleted emails from vets. I didn’t keep their bells or toys. Just photos and videos, as well as a few old feathers.

The hospital says Marvin will be part of a communal cremation, and then the remains will be scattered on a horse farm. I hope that is true. I can’t say it actually matters, because Marvin is not in that body.

I have lost other pets, but losing a parrot is worse. A dog is likely to be with you a dozen years. You expect a dog to die after a short time. Marvin was nearly 29 when he died, and Maynard was 30, and they were fairly young. To say I was used to having them around is an understatement. I expected them to outlive me. I felt as though they would always be there, like the walls or the floor.

My habit is to greet Marvin by exclaiming “MARV!” as I come in the door. I used to greet both birds. Now I walk in the door, and I realize no one is there, and no one will ever be there again. The greeting sticks in my throat. I keep walking.

Last night I got up to use the bathroom. To avoid disturbing the baby, I like to leave the bedroom and walk past the kitchen. I always say something to Marv along the way. Not any more.

We went to a fried chicken joint today. Usually, we ask for containers for scraps for Marvin, which he loved. Not today.

For the first time since early 1991, parrots have absolutely nothing to do with my life. That is so strange. I have old books on parrots. I belong to parrot forums. I’m used to thinking a lot about parrot food, toys, and cage upgrades. Instantly and forever, that ended.

It’s like losing a hand. You feel you can look over and see it whenever you want, but it’s not there, and it will never be there again.

A life without parrots.

I was going to take Marvin’s cage to the dump. I gave away my other cage after Maynard died. I started feeling guilty about throwing out Marvin’s cage, so I put it on Craigslist in the Free Stuff area. I thought there might be some little bird out there whose owner could not afford a decent cage.

I got emails right away. When I asked the senders what kind of birds they had, they had nothing to say. I asked because I didn’t want scammers to take the cage and then try to sell it at thrift shops or on Facebook. Three senders didn’t answer, and one admitted he wanted to flip the cage.

Of course, none of the senders admitted they didn’t have birds up front. The whole business made me feel very bad. I didn’t need to have people try to take advantage of me on this particular day.

Now, for the next two days, I am stuck with a cage I will probably have to take to the dump. I can’t get rid of it until Wednesday. Maybe someone who actually has a bird will get in touch.

As for me, I do not feel good at all.

My faith has been attacked. I stood on the word of God, and then Marvin died. I felt faith when I prayed for her, and it didn’t work. I have been talking to God, asking him to help me know what’s real and what isn’t. My wife and baby son depend on my relationship with God. It has to be sound.

I am more tired of death than ever. I can get new pets and meet new people, but I will still see more deaths, so it’s an imperfect solution.

I would say I want death for myself, to get me out of this world, but that’s not true. I don’t want to die, and I would never, ever harm myself. I just want to leave. I wish Yeshua would come get us. I want to move to a place where things that go well. A place less like Omaha Beach.

Today in one short car trip, I saw sick people and crippled people. I saw poor people who clearly didn’t have it together. I kept thinking about how much suffering there was in the world, how little I could do about it, and how I was going to keep seeing it. I know what I’m in for. I could conceivably live another 30 years, and the world will be as it is now or worse. Will I ever be able to do anything real for people? I keep asking God to use me to heal people. I would love to heal people’s children and even their pets, so they would know this world doesn’t have to win. I sound like Holden Caulfield.

I am blessed, but those around me keep dropping. Being blessed is wonderful, but if you live among people who suffer horrible fates, it’s natural to want to be somewhere else where things are different.

God has said, “A thousand shall fall at thy side and ten thousand at thy right hand, but it shall not come nigh thee; only with thine eyes shalt thou behold and see the reward of the wicked.” Sounds wonderful at first glance, but who wants to see other people destroyed over and over?

If it were not for my wife and son, I would be glad to leave this minute. My family is my only reason for choosing life.

When my dad was alive and I was single, I wanted to see him saved, and I wanted my pets to be taken care of. Other than that, I was happy to leave whenever God called me. Now my dad is dead and in heaven, and my pets are presumably with him. But I am still attached to this miserable planet by my family. I have to watch out for them. I have to prepare them. They are surrounded by enemies, natural and supernatural. They are swimming in a sea of lies. Abandoning them is not something that could ever be on the table.

I hope my friends and relatives do well on Earth, but I would not stay here just for them. Maybe that’s a flaw. I care more about my wife and baby.

I’ve also thought a great deal about what a bad person I’ve been and how I’ve let my loved ones and pets down. I don’t like thinking about it, but correction is like free money. I won’t turn it down. I wish I had done less evil.

I will surely feel better as time passes, but I don’t think the weariness will ever leave me. The future of this world is dim. I don’t expect the constant flow of bad news for humanity to stop or even stop accelerating.

I don’t think I’ll have much reason to mention my birds in the future.

Does God Consider This Charity?

I had an interesting experience this morning. I realized a guy I thought of as big-hearted and kind of a salt-of-the-earth person had treated me very badly. I already knew what he had done, but somehow it didn’t affect my feelings about him until today.

His name was Don. He died 5 years ago. He was my dad’s partner. His wife’s name was Claudine. She died a decade earlier. I did a considerable amount of legal work for Don.

Don was eccentric. When I worked for him, he and my dad had separate offices. He worked out of a high rise condo on Miami Beach. A residential apartment. I used to drive there and use a converted bedroom for an office.

Claudine was his office manager. A former IRS attorney, she did not practice. She spent a lot of her time dealing with projects that arose from the death of their son, who was raped, murdered, and dismembered by an illegal alien. She knew John Walsh. She helped police departments get bloodhounds to track criminals.

Claudine was also eccentric.

Don snagged a beautiful client. It was part of a huge European corporation. I think it was Parmalat, but I don’t recall. It’s now part of UBS. The subsidiary that hired Don invested in several expensive high rise condo units, but construction was never finished.

The man who represented the client in America was named Giancarlo. He was a short, wiry Italian guy. Whenever I asked him how he was doing, he would thrust his fist in the air and say, “Like a LION!”

To hear Don tell it, Giancarlo had essentially handed a Miami Beach shyster a 7-figure check based on a handshake, and his employer wanted the money back.

There were boxes of badly-prepared documents. Duplicates. Irrelevant material. Don told me only a lawyer could fix it, so he told me to sift out the junk, dump it, and present him with the rest.

This took days. I sat in that bedroom for hours going through this stuff.

Don and Claudine were both disorganized. I’ll give you a Don story so you will understand.

Don took a trip for a client back in the Seventies. Being Don, he parked his c. 1970 Toronado in a short-term garage at Miami International. When he came home, he did not use his car to leave the airport. I don’t recall the reason. Maybe it wouldn’t start, or maybe his then-wife picked him up.

He kept procrastinating, and eventually, the bill became enormous. MIA kept pestering him. He decided to abandon the car.

MIA would not let him abandon the car. Eventually, he had to pay them a visit, give them a big check, and take his car.

When I worked with Don, he and my dad were no longer part of the first firm my dad led. Don got fired by that firm.

My dad really liked Don, but he eventually had to go along with the rest of the partners when they fired him. Don didn’t record his hours, so they couldn’t bill clients. Don told them he was so good, his value as a resource somehow made him worth keeping anyway. My dad had to explain that nobody was worth keeping if they didn’t generate income.

Because Claudine was lazy and disorganized, she put off checking my hours. When she and Don finally look at them, I had spent a number of full days on the boxes, unsupervised.

Don got upset. He looked panicked. He said he could never get the client, which had extremely deep pockets (especially compared to mine) to pay so much. His solution was to tell them I had spent much less time on the boxes, and I was underpaid accordingly.

Had I been a partner, there could have been some colorable argument that Don wasn’t on the hook, but though I worked as a partner with my dad, I was an associate as far as Don was concerned, so he owed me for every hour I spent.

As an associate, I was an employee. A subcontractor, really, because I was paid by the hour and had no expectation of severance pay if I was canned. If you hire a subcontractor, you pay him, whether you get paid or not. Let’s say you have an AirBnB. You pay someone to paint it because you think a rapper is going to rent it for 6 months. Then the rapper goes to prison for multiple counts of statutory rape. You still owe the painter.

For some reason, I let it go and didn’t hold it against Don and Claudine, and I kept working with him.

On another occasion, a man who owned delivery trucks asked us to write contracts for his drivers. He was a subcontractor for Fedex. Don told me to get to work, but he failed to get a retainer. When I was finished, the client refused to pay, and I got stiffed for 4 figures. Don, not the client, owed me the money, but I got what I got.

I don’t know why I continued working with Don and Claudine or why things remained cordial among us. I will never be able to explain that. I liked Don. I thought of Don as a very good person. I always looked forward to seeing him.

I got stiffed by other employers, and afterward, I didn’t think of them as good people. Why were they different?

My first boss in the legal world was the late Jack E. Dominik, a brilliant but nutty patent attorney. He had a domineering secretary he feared and obeyed. I worked for him as a law student.

One day, Jack told me and another student he would hire us after we graduated, and we would receive $50 per hour for our work, which was very good at the time. We worked assiduously, and I thought I had a good job waiting for me. Then I got an unexpected call from Jack.

He told me my services would no longer be required, blah, blah, blah, best of luck with my career.

I later learned that his secretary had told him to fire me. I was always courteous with her, but she must have seen me as a threat to her domain, so out I went. I learned this from his paralegal, a brilliant Swiss polyglot who understood Jack’s work better than he did. She is one of the most amazing human beings I have ever known. The secretary was just a blob.

The paralegal got an important job at Motorola. She probably runs the company from her desk. It will probably collapse if she quits.

Anyway, Jack owed me money.

We had a system. Our computers were networked. I kept a file in mine. In the file, I recorded my hours. The office manager, a friend of Jack’s daughter, was to go into my computer every so often, collect my information, pay me, and bill clients. The office manager called herself Jenae. It was not her real name. She just thought it was cool.

Jenae did not collect my information. Instead, she spent tens of thousands of dollars on Beanie Babies. Jack’s dollars. I think this was her retirement plan.

The plan did not pan out. Jenai was finally caught when Jack decided to look at his books, and she went to prison. I don’t know who got custody of the Beanie Babies.

When I asked Jack for my money, which was nothing like the cost of the Beanie Babies, he got very upset. He wrote me an emotional letter saying that writing my check made him “sick.” Jack liked money a lot, so this was true. He said there was no way his clients would pay him. Probably not true. Jack was not all that honest, and I suspect he managed to find a way to add my $2,200 to his own hours, which would have been fair, if not quite kosher.

After Jack sent me the money, he softened up and became more cordial. He told the paralegal he should never have fired me, and he said I would make a fine litigator. Well, thanks, I guess.

I didn’t think highly of Jack after this. I thought he was an untrustworthy jerk.

The other law student, Larry, left, too. I think Jack was just too wacky and erratic for him. He ended up working for a big firm farther up the coast.

While working for Jack, I met another lawyer who stiffed me. I did 30 hours of work for his client, I was owed $1500, and I never saw a dime. The other lawyer kept telling me the client was a standup guy who would pay up eventually, but it never happened. The problem was not the client, however, because I never contracted with the client. My agreement was with the lawyer, and he owed me the money regardless of what the client did.

I’m not naming this guy. His law practice is dead, and he may be, too, but for all I know, he’s sitting in a one-room apartment, Googling himself furiously in hopes of suing someone so he can pay his rent.

I don’t think of this lawyer as the salt of the earth. He’s a deadbeat who took advantage of a young lawyer who trusted him and did good work for his clients. He could have paid me.

Diane, Jack’s secretary, made a huge blunder. I was a good attorney, and Jack was about 77 when Diane had me fired for no reason. He quit about 5 years later, I believe. That’s when he stopped filing reports with the Department of State.

He had a disabling stroke in 2005 or 2006, and he ended up dying in California in 2009. I guess one of his kids put him in a facility. He was estranged from his son. Maybe it was his daughter.

I used to know the details, but I forgot.

Diane’s job ended with the stroke. Had she stayed out of my way, I would have kept the firm going, and I would have kept her on as long as she did her job. She had a cushy position in a very comfortable and spacious law office, there were tons of clients, and she could have ridden it into old age instead of setting fire to her own bed.

She should have done everything she could to help Larry and me succeed, but instead, she sacrificed her future for some petty reason Jack did not have the courage to articulate. She probably ended up with a menial job.

It’s interesting that I could have such low opinions of two lawyers who cheated me while continuing to think highly of Don, who underpaid me by much larger amounts, twice.

I forgive Don, Claudine, Jack, Diane, Jenae, and the guy who stiffed me for $1500. They did what they did, though.

Trash is Diverse

I see people on the web promoting a badly-chosen and destructive phrase: “black fatigue.”

It is attached to stories of ghetto blacks doing ghetto things, like calling for white people to be killed, beating up restaurant employees, and being forcibly removed from airports.

It’s a phrase that has an appeal to anyone who has witnessed, or been a victim of, ghetto behavior by blacks. I have had some issues, myself. I had a black woman come up to me on the street and tell me white people were nasty and that she couldn’t stand us. A black kid tried to take a fishing pole away from me and ride off on his bicycle. A young black man called me “bitch and “honky” at church. A black man moved to my side of a crosswalk to spit at my feet. I’ve been called “white boy” by racist black kids. I understand the weariness.

It’s a stupid phrase, though. What people really have is trash fatigue.

My grandfather was a circuit judge in Eastern Kentucky. A black woman who should have been warned moved to one of the counties where he worked. This is a very trashy county. It’s a place where people go out in public with bed hair. Where illegitimate kids and welfare scammers are all over. A place where people shoot each other over the kinds of arguments children have.

When I was young, I assumed my grandfather was kind of racist, because nearly everyone around him was, but maybe he wasn’t. He mentored this lady and supported her efforts to establish a practice.

Some moron or morons burned down her house.

That’s exactly the kind of thing “black fatigue” victims complain about, but the perpetrators were white.

Do I know they were white? No. I know the black population there amounts to less than half a percent, though, and I have heard people from that county and and nearby counties share their negative views of “niggers” with no shame and every expectation of approval.

Okay; American black culture is a mess, black people commit much more crime per capita than whites, and racism against other groups is accepted in most black areas. These things are true. We see a very disproportionate number of American blacks causing trouble. But the same things are true of other groups, like Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and Salvadorans. They’re also true of white trash.

Trash comes in all colors, because it’s DIVERSE.

When you use the term “black fatigue,” you make it sound like trashiness is exclusive to blacks, and other groups are above it. You push people in the direction of plain old racism. You motivate them to treat all blacks like dangerous, parasitic losers. That is evil.

I can never know for sure, but there are probably at least a million black people in America who are much finer human beings than I am. Not the highest bar to clear, I admit. On the other hand, there was my dad’s wealthy white law partner, who once asked a South African boat handyman, “Can I go to your country and shoot niggers?”

This was a guy who was second in command of a prestigious firm in Coral Gables. After he and his wife forced my dad out, he was the top dog. He represented prominent clients like Florida Power & Light, Anheuser-Busch, NASA contractors, American Express, PPG, and Nabisco. He’s dead now. His wife is still there.

Trashiness, social standing, and financial status are three different things.

I managed to find his death page at Legacy.com, and no one, not even his wife and son, has left a message. There is no obituary. Not a surprise. He was completely selfish and without morals. I never knew anyone who liked or respected him. I certainly didn’t. Not after I was maybe 10 years old.

There is a fluff biography on the firm’s website. It’s pretty cold. I don’t think his wife wrote it. I wrote my parents’ obituaries. When your own family doesn’t write an obituary for you, it’s not a good sign.

He used to run around with a couple of guys named Robinson and Hicks. They drank and fished in the Bahamas. My dad’s partner and Robinson owned a yacht in which my dad held an interest for a time. No fond messages from Robinson or Hicks at the Legacy page. Nothing from their wives. The firm’s page says my dad’s partner was a mentor. None of the “mentored” wrote anything. Nothing from his brother.

Robinson was disagreeable person and not very bright. He was included in the partnership to save my dad’s partner money. Hicks was a little odd. I was told he had notebooks full of nude photos. I never saw them. Miami has a disgusting annual event called the Columbus Day Regatta, during which boaters raft up, cavort naked, and have sex in plain view. My dad claimed Hicks had a telephoto lens he broke out every Columbus Day.

When my dad’s partner wanted to buy something for the boat, my dad asked him how he would get Robinson to agree, and the partner said Robinson would do what he told him. He said Robinson was stupid.

His own dog didn’t like him. He had a German Shepherd named Yancy, and Yancy used to walk around his house with one side against the wall, trying to get as far away from him as he could. I guess he got some beatings.

He got what he wanted by sacrificing better people, so when he died, he had money, but no people. Must have been a bright day for ambitious associates at the firm.

Actually, he may not have had that much money as he should have, so he may not have gotten what he sold himself for.

My dad invested and denied himself, so he had a solid net worth. His partner’s wife was also a partner, so they had two incomes, but they led a more self-indulgent lifestyle. My dad said they blew their money. Ski trips and so on.

In 2015, the partner upgraded his 1978 yacht to a 1999 model which probably cost him $400,000. It’s listed right now for $349,000.

In terms of spending power, $400,000 is close to the value of the 1978 boat back in the 1980’s when the partnership bought it, and the new boat is only 4 feet longer. In 2015, the partner would have been about 69, his son was out of the house, he was qualified for full Medicare and Social Security benefits, and he and his wife were working, so he shouldn’t have been nervous about the future. Given all the cutthroat things he did to enrich himself, he should have been able to drop a million on a boat without flinching. And he did like big status symbols. He was always talking about how nice other people’s bigger boats were.

Either he was watching his money, which was uncharacteristic, or he wasn’t doing well enough to buy something more expensive. Or maybe Robinson was out, and he had to pay for it by himself. Still, if my dad had been in his shoes, almost 70 with a double income and no dependents, $400,000 wouldn’t have been the best he could do in 2015. When you’re 70, the years during which you might have to support yourself without working are not likely to exceed 25.

If you’re 25, spending a given percentage of your net worth is a lot riskier than spending it at 70.

Singlehandedly, my dad paid almost the same amount for a boat, corrected for inflation, in 1988, and it was not a problem.

To return from my digression within a digression, it’s amazing, how the partner vanished without any evidence that he meant anything to anyone.

I think God just gave me some revelation. Psalm 37 says this:

I have seen the wicked in great power, and spreading himself like a green bay tree.

Yet he passed away, and, lo, he was not: yea, I sought him, but he could not be found.

I used to think this meant God would eventually take the wicked out, but maybe that’s not the whole story. Maybe it means everyone is relieved when the wicked die, because they are tired of them and glad they’re gone. Maybe it means people move on without them as quickly as they can, treating them as though they never existed, except in cases where circumstances force them to keep praising them.

My dad’s partner is gone, and I don’t think anyone misses him. He was rude. He was dishonest. He was ruthless. He told my father he would swear lies against my mother in their divorce. I doubt he had a single friend.

I don’t think his wife was crazy about him. Their relationship started when she was an associate at the firm and he was married to someone else. Marrying a partner certainly advanced her career. She became a partner and was able to combine her firm voting power with her husband’s. That’s how they got rid of my dad.

In the Nineties, he took up with a flashy receptionist named Donna, and he and his wife separated. He told my dad he was dissatisfied with his wife because she had stopped working out, if you can imagine such a thing. They got back together, however, and my dad’s understanding was that the reason was that he wanted to maintain his lifestyle.

I never heard of him doing anything for anyone else. I mean not one single thing. I never heard anyone say anything nice about him. They laughed about him, because he was often unintentionally funny, but no one admired him at all.

Anyway, I think “black fatigue” will become a popular phrase, and it will be destructive to an already-polarized nation.

As I always say, I recognize two “races”: the children of God, and everyone else. Those are the only races anyone should care about. Identifying with whites or blacks or Americans or anything other than the children of God is immature and counterproductive.

My white status is temporary, like my American status. There are no races in heaven, and there are no Americans there. Citizenship ends at death. My status as a son of God, if I hold onto it until I die, will last forever.

I hope to be in heaven eventually, and if I make it, I will be with former blacks, Asians, and every other type of person. I want to be with people who are like myself and share all my beliefs and desires, and those things do not correlate with biological race.

Professional Nice Guy

Happy Passover. I don’t call it “Easter” because Easter is a filthy, evil, damned spirit worshiped by pagans. I don’t call this day Resurrection Day unless it doesn’t fall during Passover. My understanding is that today will be Passover until sundown. Correct me if I’m wrong.

Speaking of correction, I saw conflicting dates on different Jewish sites. A Reform site says Passover ended yesterday, but Chabad says it ends today.

“Reform” is a funny word in this context, because it means “to correct.” The Reform movement started because somebody decided to correct God.

“Correct” is a synonym for “righteous,” so “Reform Judaism” means “Judaism made righteous.” The self-imputed righteousness came from Reform Jews, so they must be, literally, self-righteous. Like nearly all Christian denominations. The Catholics have given God all sorts of corrections. They pray to dead popes and baptize babies who have no idea who Yeshua is.

Indulgences are still a problem. The Catholic Church says it has never sold indulgences, but the catechism says you can get one by sending money to support pilgrimages, and the difference is not all that clear to me. This is much like Walmart’s policy, which says I can receive a barbecue grill by sending money. Granted, Walmart isn’t in the pilgrimage business, but money is fungible, so if I give an arm of the Catholic Church money for pilgrimages, it means it loosens up money they can use for other things. Not that they need it, with their gigantic real estate empire.

They say they don’t worship saints. They say they venerate them. And dictionaries define “worship” as “venerate.” That’s interesting.

Reform Jews can eat pork and practice homosexuality, so they are pretty liberal with their corrections. Messianic Jews can also eat pork if they want, but it’s not quite the same thing, since they believe God himself permits it. They can’t be sodomites, though.

Speaking of the self-righteous, I saw an interesting article today. Dwayne Johnson, who calls himself “the Rock” for reasons never made clear, has told the world he is sad because of the sick and dying fans he has communicated with. He never gets tired of positioning himself as the nice musclehead everyone is obligated to love.

Yeshua says the actual rock is the rock of Holy Spirit revelation, as demonstrated by Peter when he said Yeshua was the son of the living God. Professional wrestling and action movies are not mentioned in the Bible as means of salvation.

The identity of the rock is another thing Catholics got wrong. They think Yeshua meant Peter was the rock, meaning he was supposed to be the first pope. Popes are supposed to be infallible in matters of doctrine, however, and Paul corrected Peter’s doctrine publicly. In reality, popes are far from infallible, and the early church didn’t have one.

If Johnson is trying to cheer up sick people out of love for humanity, that’s very good. But overall, it’s not an inspiring story.

First of all, how do celebrity puff pieces get published? How is it that a journalist might find out Johnson was sitting in his house looking at correspondence from sick people? Did the journalist stake out his mansion and use a telephoto lens? Did he hack Johnson’s phone?

No. Johnson put a video of himself on Instagram. He wanted the world to know what he was doing. Yeshua told us not to act like that. The fleeting admiration of human beings is all you get. Okay, you might also make some money. There is no further reward.

So how did this turn into a news story that almost literally glows?

Here’s a fact everyone should be aware of: news outlets are prodded and often paid to publish puff pieces. It’s not just puff pieces. The press gets a great deal of its material and personnel through networking. I’ve written about this sort of thing before.

My sister was a “legal analyst” for Fox and CNN. She appeared on panels as a “former prosecutor.” She liked to brag about this, as though Bill O’Reilly and Dan Abrams had crawled to her home on their knees, seeking her out because of her great reputation.

In reality, she paid a publicist named Terry to call network connections and get her gigs. And she was never vetted. Right now, if you called enough news outlets, you could almost certainly find yourself some gigs as a former prosecutor or even a judge. They won’t check. Tell them you’re an astronaut. See what happens. Say you’re the king of France. It might work.

My sister was not an exemplary prosecutor, and she parted with her employers less than amicably. She ended up suing them.

If you’ve ever gotten the impression that news show panelists were unremarkable and lean on competence, you were onto something. Their main appeal to the networks is their availability. People who are good at their jobs are too busy to do free work on demand.

Back when my sister and I were on good terms, I helped her research for some appearances. I helped in the sense that I actually did the research. She couldn’t speak competently on cases without cramming. And if you listened to her, you were really listening to me.

You don’t get chosen for network panels because you’re successful. You become successful because your network appearances get you business. My sister got all sorts of calls because she was on TV.

Now we have a pretty good idea why Johnson’s Instagram was picked up by the press. He put it out there himself, and he probably had his publicist send some emails. The whole thing was probably the publicist’s idea.

Why criticize someone who cheers up sick people? I think there’s a good reason.

This is an old man on bodybuilding drugs. Don’t question it. When he was a football player at the University of Miami, he had a full-time strength coach, and the man he was then looked like the little sister of the man he is now. Smaller muscles and no definition.

He was smaller when he was a pro wrestler than he is now, and the WWE ran on steroids.

I know a little bit about the strength program at UM, because I was a UM student. I knew a player who looked like a Marvel hero. Muscles bulging all over him. I saw him a few years later, and he was somewhere between Chris Rock and the pre-Ali Will Smith. All the bulk and definition had vanished, along with the tone. You would never have guessed he was even a high school player, let alone college. He didn’t look athletic. The strength coaches at UM surely did an excellent job with Johnson, who was young and full of a young man’s testosterone (if not other things), but he is much bigger now.

Dwayne Johnson is using dangerous drugs to make himself big, and he is also holding himself out as exactly the kind of nice guy kids should look up to. So what are kids going to do when they want to be like the Rock and they find out no amount of clean lifting will get them anywhere close? A lot of them are going to take drugs. Just like their idol.

Very few of them will have riches similar to Johnson’s, so they won’t have capable doctors to oversee their drug regimens. They’ll shoot up in gym locker rooms and hope for the best.

I guarantee you, there are thousands of boys and men who admire Johnson and have taken drugs so they could look like him.

Johnson admits he grew breasts and had them cut out by a surgeon. Why? A condition called gynecomastia, which means “woman breasts.” It’s caused by estrogen, and it happens because people use drugs.

When you use steroids to bulk up, and you shoot up too much, your body may convert the extra testosterone to estrogen. Then you grow breasts. It’s a common problem with drug lifters. They have a crude name for it. I don’t know what they do to fight it now, but they used to take something called tribulus terrestris, thinking it would block estrogen and keep them from growing breasts.

Johnson didn’t have breasts as a college player, so where did they come from?

Other bodybuilding drugs also cause serious problems. Like, for example, death.

It should bother people that an old man who uses drugs to make money and make people think he’s something he is not is promoted as a positive role model.

Anyone whose kids think Johnson is great needs to sit them down and talk to them about drugs, pride, honesty, and the filthiness of professional sports and other types of show business. Yes, sports is show business. That’s why stadiums have all those seats.

Johnson isn’t going to look the way he does his whole life, unless he dies pretty soon. I wonder how he’ll explain the change.

He wouldn’t be the only celebrity to shrink. Arnold Schwarzenegger took enough hormones to power an army of Charlie Sheens, and when he had to quit, I was able to tell people, completely honestly, that my body was better than Arnold Schwarzenegger’s.

Celebrity chef Robert Irvine also appears to be off the juice. On his TV show, he had a huge upper body. Now he’s skinny. He’s so thin, it makes his head look enormous. What happened?

He says he hurt his arm and had to change his routine temporarily. So he shrunk all over? It doesn’t work that way. And his injury was several years ago, so why is he still skinny?

I think his doctor or common sense told him he couldn’t stay on the juice, so he quit.

He says he ruptured his triceps. He probably ruptured a triceps tendon. Steroids build your muscles better than they build connective tissue, so tendon ruptures are common.

He seems to have lost a lot of his swagger. He used to bust up old restaurants with a sledge. I’m not sure he could pick it up now. He used to come across like a nightclub bouncer, ready to get in people’s faces and intimidate. Now he scans more like a high school drama teacher.

He moves differently now. He used to swing his arms around as he talked, as if he wanted everyone to see his arm and torso muscles. Now he holds them close to his sides as though he is holding a gold bar under each arm and doesn’t want it to fall. He seems to want to hide himself.

Muscle drugs are like pride. They pump you up and make you look more impressive than you are.

Johnson said something about not knowing what to say to his sick fans. A Christian filled with the Holy Spirit would know. A Christian could introduce them to Yeshua and put them on a path to supernatural visitations. A Christian might be able to help them get supernatural healing, which is very common. A Christian could help them lose their fear of death.

Celebrities are very poor substitutes for God. They’re like baby bottles full of Kool-Aid.

In other news, my son is changing fast.

When he first popped out, my son was like a potato that cried and pooped. As days passed, he improved. We got some giggles out of him. He started grinning. He cried less. Now he appreciates music.

I have been determined to develop my boy’s potential. Not to make him a genius I can show off but to improve him as a person and prevent major regrets, like the ones I have because my parents taught me so little. I only learned one foreign language. I can’t sight-read while playing an instrument. I was in my thirties when I mastered calculus and became a physicist. My son WILL learn to sight read and play. He WILL be able to write tunes out in proper notation. I may make him learn to sight sing. These skills should be considered basic in a civilized world.

People say you can’t make your kid learn music. Those people are stupid. We make kids learn all sorts of things.

Yesterday, he was crabby about something. One of the hard parts of raising a baby is figuring out what’s wrong with him. Tired? Hungry? Dirty? In pain? Eventually, you have to add “bored” to the list. Last night he was bored. He was grousing and squirming, so I put him on his electronic educational mat so he could bang the toys and kick the music keys. He got engrossed, but that only lasted a while.

It occurred to me that his mat played terrible music, so I decided to find something better. I have a Christian music playlist on Youtube, so I turned it on, picked him up, and made him listen. I bounced him around in time with the beat, and I sang to him.

He lit up like a pinball machine. He smiled with his entire head. He was overjoyed. He couldn’t get enough of it.

We had played music for him before, and my wife had sung to him, but we hadn’t sung to him while listening to good songs, and we hadn’t connected him to the beat. When I put everything together, it worked.

Now I’m going to have to do this with him every day, unless I can make his mother do it sometimes. I’m going to have to find more songs. When he’s far enough along, I will have to do the unthinkable. I’ll have to get him a drum.

My old guitar teacher told me rhythm was the real heart of music. He said the wrong note at the right time was the right note, but the right note at the wrong time was the wrong note. I believe a rhythm instrument is the path to sight reading, because the hardest part of sight reading is reading the rhythm.

I felt very emotional during our session. Some of the songs were very moving, and it was moving to share the experience with him and see his breakthrough. Sometimes I found it hard to sing.

Now I have to ask myself if I should try to play music again, for his sake. If you haven’t made music with other people, you haven’t gotten the full experience. Do I try piano again? Should I break out the guitar and banjo?

One song we listened to was Alison Krauss’s version of “I’ll Fly Away.” Krauss is from the area my parents came from. My aunt knows one of her musicians. “I’ll Fly Away” is an important gospel song in Appalachia. Krauss’s rendition uses bluegrass instruments.

As I listened, I thought about how my bridge to my own people had been burned. I didn’t burn it. They did.

Eastern Kentucky culture is too flawed to take part in. Childishness, racism, drunkenness, drugs, adultery, violence, corruption…I could never go back. But it’s not just my heritage. It’s my son’s heritage. He’s not black. He’s biracial.

My wife gets angry when light-skinned American blacks call themselves black. She says, “I’m black. They’re mixed.” We have to check “black” on forms for my son, and she does not like it. It’s a denial of the most important part of his heritage. He is never going to live in Zambia.

I can’t really connect my son to Appalachia, unless we move to an area where the people have grown up. If he’s not a Kentuckian, what is he? A cultureless person. His only culture will be Christian culture. I suppose that’s for the best, but it’s sad that I can’t introduce my son to the place I used to love.

My mom and dad were real Kentuckians. They were born at home, between hills. They ate the food. They lived the lifestyle. I’m more like Dwight Yoakam, who were raised in another state by parents from Kentucky. I can reach either way.

I don’t know where my son fits in.

There will be no reason for him to see Kentucky. A lot of my family’s surviving members chose money, land, and possessions over me. My sister lives there, but she’s Satan incarnate. All the nice properties in which I owned an interest in are gone.

If I went to Kentucky, I would only tell one cousin and aunt. Other relatives, whom I used to love visiting, come to Florida and don’t tell me. They get most of the family together for holidays, and they haven’t invited me, ever. I have never done them wrong. Not even once. But they have certainly done me wrong.

I never stole anything from my grandparents’ estates. I never tried to charge for doing work on the estates. I never swindled any of my relatives. They’ve done those things to my aunt and me.

Oddly, they made soulless sacrifices, but I’m the one who ended up well off and joyously unemployed. I’m well enough off to never miss the loss of what they took from me. The misery of hiring a lawyer and battling them would be much greater than the pleasure of being repaid. My standard of living would not improve.

What they took isn’t enough to put any of them in my position. Apart from one aunt, the ones who are doing well had to get almost all of it elsewhere. If you’re going to sell yourself, you should at least get a good price.

I would have to become like them in order to scrap with them. That is not a price I am willing to pay, because I understand something they never will.

I knew my mother’s and father’s cousins. I knew my great aunts and uncles. My son can forget all that. My wife’s family is in Zambia, she’s an orphan, most of the relatives I knew are dead, and almost all of the rest will never be close to me again.

When relatives died in the past, it went without saying that I would go to their funerals. Now? It might be awkward.

When my dad died in 2019, the aunt that has turned on me declined to go to his funeral. She had known him for over 60 years. She was in her vacation condo in Naples, and she said she had an appointment to have it measured for blinds.

We were on good terms then. But she needed those blinds.

I flew to her husband’s funeral. I flew to her son-in-law’s funeral. Things used to be very different.

You wouldn’t think listening to one song with a baby would bring all this to mind.

I can’t fix other people. We live lives of joy and love here, all by ourselves, and I have Christian friends who fill the places my relatives used to occupy. That will be more than enough.

Who Was She Writing About?

Yesterday I learned that the wife of my first cousin by marriage had died. I didn’t even know her name. I couldn’t pick her out of a lineup. I’m not even sure this is the wife I met. I saw a photo, and the face doesn’t look familiar.

My dad and I took my cousin and his wife fishing in the Bahamas. I guess this would have been 30 years ago. I remember the wife as a chunky lady with a round face, but the lady in the photo I saw has a prominent chin. I wonder if this was my cousin’s second or third wife.

I would guess I have seen the cousin fewer than 10 times in my life. On very rare occasions, our families got together when I was a kid. My cousin’s stepmother, my dad’s sister, died in 2014, and my dad insisted I accompany him to Tennessee for the funeral. I must have seen the cousin and his wife, but I have no memories to prove it.

To me, this underscores the difference between my mother’s family and my dad’s family. When I say “my family,” I mean my mother’s family, although bad behavior involving my grandparents’ estates has led most of them to distance themselves from me. When I discuss my mother’s family without mentioning my dad’s family, I generally don’t give my dad’s family a thought.

My dad picked up on this unintentionally. Often, he referred to my mother’s father as my father.

My cousin’s wife died last year. Cousin or ex-stepcousin? I don’t know how that works. The notice I saw didn’t mention a cause.

No one called me. No one emailed. I wouldn’t expect them to. I’m not offended. If I had stood in line behind this guy at Walmart this week, I would have had no idea who he was.

My dad’s older sister was a cruel sociopath, and my dad also had sociopathic tendencies. She was abusive to him when he was a kid. She stabbed him in the head with a pencil. He was sitting on the floor making noises and pretending his hand was an airplane, and she stabbed him. She must have been trying to murder him.

The pencil didn’t go through his skull, but as an adult, he liked to show people the deep hole it left.

My aunt was obese and brassy. She was not charming. Her first marriage produced one child. I don’t know if she was at my aunt’s funeral. Can’t recall. I was just counting the minutes until I could leave. It was boring, sitting among strangers, facing an ash container that looked like a styrofoam beer cooler, listening to them talk about their abusive parents as though they were wonderful people.

My uncle had 4 kids of his own, so I guess he needed help. I don’t know why else he would have married my aunt. They didn’t seem to feel anything for each other except annoyance.

My aunt’s child was a daughter. Maybe this is why my aunt hated my uncle’s daughter, who was kind, gentle, and honest. She used to beat her for no reason. She used to give her own child candy and let her eat it in front of her husband’s daughter.

I was Googling my cousin when I found out his wife had died. For some reason, I started thinking about his first name, which is a strange one. I wanted to know if anyone else had that name.

I also came across my uncle’s obituary, written by the kids. He died 11 months ago.

I’ll tell you what. I wish I had known the guy in the obituary. But truthfully, I was not worthy.

Scholar. War hero with a Purple Heart. Educator. Beloved dad. I never met that guy!

He was awful. He didn’t have the spine to protect his kids from his wife. I don’t think he cared. They made the kids work and buy their own clothes. They worked them hard. After the kids were grown, they sat their parents down and told them exactly what they thought of them.

I thought about him again today, because norovirus is spreading in America.

My uncle was a big baby who thought only of himself. He loved to travel, fish, and hunt. He loved to freeload in order to make these things happen. His son was a pilot, so when my uncle and his wife flew, they only had to pay the taxes on their tickets. Freeloading. They didn’t care much for my dad, but he had vacation properties and a yacht, so my uncle arranged to visit from time to time.

They came to visit us over Christmas one year. I wanted no part of it. Back then, I was still close to my mother’s family, so I wanted to be with them, as usual. My dad’s two sisters and their entire tribes packed themselves into his three-bedroom house. The nicer sister and her husband were also freeloaders.

We shared common dishes. Christmas. People started throwing up. Turned out my uncle had norovirus, and he didn’t tell anyone. He knew we would have told him to stay home.

Making matters worse, norovirus is only spread via feces. If you’ve had norovirus, you touched someone else’s poop. My uncle hadn’t been washing his hands after using the toilet.

He was a biologist. A professor. It wasn’t like he had no idea how germs worked.

Every single person who was present threw up and had diarrhea for several days, except for my mother, who was spared. Maybe the viruses couldn’t take the nicotine.

When I found out my uncle was making us all sick, I left and slept somewhere else. Didn’t work. I still ended up using the toilet every 20 minutes.

I’m pretty sure my other aunt’s daughter Judy thinks I’m a jerk because I left abruptly. My mother was angry with me. I loved my mother, but common sense was not her long suit. She was overly emotional.

I didn’t care about ruining our puking family Christmas. I knew my aunts and uncles a little. The others were like strangers. It wasn’t like I had any concerns about future resentment or lost connections. There was no possibility we would go on to have relationships.

I don’t owe anyone an apology for isolating myself from a disease. It seems like women put closeness above staying healthy, however.

That might make a little sense in situations where people care about each other and aren’t together simply because relatives want free Florida vacations.

Avoiding days of diarrhea and vomiting is not rude, and even if it were, I would still have done it. If I were sick, I would expect others to avoid me.

Maybe the problem was that I was smarter and more rational than everyone else there, and I had a better conception of the connection between present behavior and future regurgitation. I really hated norovirus. I was familiar with it.

My dad’s older sister never liked it when I stood up for myself. I think this was because it bothered her to see a young relative she couldn’t abuse and boss. She must have felt like a horse that couldn’t reach an apple through a fence.

All around her, in her own home, she had had kids who ran and fetched when she barked, and they were used to feeling her knuckles on their heads. Here I was, out of range. Acting like I had rights.

I suspect she resented my mother, my sister, and me because we stood in the inheritance path. She thought my dad was much richer than he was, and he let her believe it. Even though he didn’t like her, he enjoyed being seen as a financial guru and being asked for advice.

I never understood why he liked spending his time impressing people he didn’t like much.

My dad’s relatives liked inheriting money and stuff. When my grandmother started to decline, my dad sent money and helped arrange to finance her care. When she died, my aunts backed up to her place and emptied it with no notice to us. My mother was incensed on behalf of my sister and me. She was always appalled by my dad’s people’s selfishness and greed.

Of course, she didn’t live to see what her own daughter and sister did with her parents’ estates.

My dad’s bunch picked some heirlooms for my sister and me. A Baccarat angel and a Lladro horse my dad had given my grandmother. Street value about $75, combined.

They’re both gone now. I threw the angel out because it looked like an idol to me, and I accidentally broke the horse after my sister abandoned it. It wasn’t like these were things we had seen on fondly-remembered visits to my grandmother’s apartment. I don’t miss these things. I didn’t know the angel or horse existed until my dad presented me with them and told me to choose one.

Why did he do that? He paid for them.

The thing on my mind today is the contrast between my uncle and the guy in the obituary. He was lazy. He was selfish. He always seemed gutless to me, so the idea of him fighting bravely and competently in Korea befuddles me. Maybe it’s not completely true. He probably got on the other soldiers’ nerves and let them down.

They didn’t write the obituary.

We love praising combat veterans, like they’re Yeshua himself. They can do no wrong. We don’t look after their families well, and we warehouse the crippled ones in substandard facilities, but we tend to act like anyone who has seen combat is an inspiring figure. A lot of vets use their exalted status to shut other people up. “You weren’t in ‘Nam with me and my buddies, face-down, in the muck!”

It’s not true. Lots of combat veterans–even true heroes–are horrible, trashy people. I knew a Korea vet who thought it was funny to steal other soldiers’ helmets. He said that when he got tired of his heavy helmet, he would dump it. Later, when he needed a helmet, he stole someone else’s. Serving in combat doesn’t automatically make you a role model.

There are too many stories about my uncle to tell.

My grandmother hated him, but because they lived near each other, he and my aunt had to drive her around. She used to sit in the backseat and watch the gas gauge. He would refuse to stop and get gas because he didn’t like being told what to do, so more than once, he ran out of gas with her in the car and ended up walking to gas stations. He kept a gas can in the car for this reason. She used to call him a fool.

On a Bahamas trip, his wife fell on our boat and caught her ring on something. It ripped the skin on her finger wide open. We had to go to the nearest island where there was medical help, in very rough seas.

While we were en route, with the seas pounding and things falling on the deck in the saloon, while my aunt held her bleeding hand in a paper towel, he told her to get up and get him a Coors Light.

Why the glowing obituary?

I wonder if Mormonism is the reason.

I don’t know a lot of Mormons, but my impression of them is that they have an inferiority complex about their non-Christian cult. The feeling I get is that they want people to think they’re the real Christians. They want to convey a false image of success and blessings in order to convince actual Christians we’re wrong.

“Look how much money we make.” “Look at our beautiful families.” “Check out our family photos.” They seem to be aggressive about it.

They say you should never fish with fewer than two Mormons, because if you fish with one, he’ll drink all your liquor.

My uncle’s daughter is a Mormon spiritual advisor of some kind. Women listen to her. She seriously believes American Indians are really Jews. She believes every wacky thing Mormonism teaches. Maybe she wrote the obituary.

I said she was honest, but many people who are otherwise honest lie in obituaries.

My aunt and uncle were miserable, and so were their kids. My aunt and uncle were immature. They were not good people. They were sometimes embarrassing. They hurt their children.

They didn’t actually believe in Mormonism. They were both atheists. They went to hell. Their local shaman or whatever told them not to worry about losing their faith, if they had ever had it. He said they should stick around for the social life.

I wrote a nice obituary about my dad. I did not say he was an alcoholic. I did not say he beat his wife when he was younger. I left a lot of stuff out. On the other hand, I did not craft a deceptive blurb intended to make people think he was an exemplary human being everyone should envy. That would have been wrong. The unnecessary damage he did to his family was immense.

Lying about the dead in order to make people admire them is sinful. Other people need to learn from bad examples.

Why should we make each other feel bad about our lives by pumping up the resumes of dead scoundrels?

I sound like I’m calling my dad a scoundrel now, which was not my intention. Well, he was. But he changed. During the last months of his life, he was wonderful, but the past can’t be erased.

When we laud each other unrealistically, we discourage people. We make them feel as though they are particularly wicked or unsuccessful. We destroy their hope. Everybody is a failure. Everybody is despicable. Pretending otherwise is harmful, not helpful.

My uncle was a jerk. My aunt was a wicked stepmother. If they ever did anything good for anyone else, I am not aware of it. If they ever expressed concern for people with problems, I don’t remember it. They didn’t even take us to dinner when they showed up to freeload.

I should make it clear I didn’t hate my aunt and uncle. There were times in my life when I got along well with them. But they were what they were. The person who wrote the obituary erected a monument to an illusion.