Take That However You Want

I finished Ovid yesterday. The last thing I read was the letter from…now I’ve forgotten…Medea to Jason. No, it was Sappho to Phaon, whoever that is. I had to check. You can see how much it impacted me.

It’s essentially a remake of the other letters, which are remakes of each other. Sappho said a couple of things that were relatively clever, but they weren’t clever enough to raise her above the level of the other jilted stalkers.

My main reaction to finishing Ovid: relief. Of course. Now I get to read Augustine. I don’t like calling him “St. Augustine” because he’s not a saint. By that I mean he’s not better than other human beings. He’s not someone people should pray to. Great guy, maybe. Not a saint. The saints were created to replace the Greek pantheon. God had nothing to do with it.

If you had told me a year ago that I was going to have to read Augustine, I would have looked for a way out of it, as I did, successfully, back at Columbia University. After my ordeal with the Greeks and Romans, Augustine sounds like a trip to Disney World. Bring him on. I can’t wait.

The Sappho letter lends credence to the idea that Sappho was a truck-driving, Anne Murray-listening, overall-wearing ladies’ lady. She complains that Mr. Phaon has ruined her for women. After her Phaon fornication binge, women just don’t do it for her. Does this mean she was really a lesbian? I don’t think so. Ovid lived a long time after Sappho, so he probably didn’t know much more about her than we do. Once you get a reputation, justified or not, it tends to stick. Maybe Sappho had already been lumped in with the field hockey players and non-shavers of legs before he was born.

Maybe there is a document out there which proves Sappho liked women. I will never know, because I am done with the classics. I wouldn’t read another classic author even if his book was a collection of winning lottery numbers in Roman numeral form. But the document must not exist, because people who actually like the classics do not agree on her orientation.

I don’t know why I’m discussing this. Maybe it’s because it’s the only thing about Sappho that is even remotely interesting.

It’s hard to think of anything exciting enough to follow up speculation about whether Sappho was a flannel-wearer, but I will try: today my belt grinder is going to arrive. If Fedex gets it right. I ordered it a week ago, and the shipper decided to fix it so it required a signature, so I’m stuck at home.

I think I made a good buy. I’m spending maybe $200 more than the cost of building my own grinder, but I will save a pile of work and time, and it looks like the grinder I chose–the Oregon Blade Maker–is a tremendous deal and a good product.

I say that before trying it.

If Sappho were alive, I bet she’d have a belt grinder.

Is it okay to make jokes like that? I don’t actually care, but I guess these days it’s likely to bring out the pierced and tattooed villagers with thrift store torches and Ikea pitchforks.

The coming increase in the persecution of Christians is a frequent topic here, but there are some aspects I haven’t thought about yet. Here’s one that just occurred to me: we will probably be beaten and imprisoned by hipsters. That’s terrible. It’s embarrassing. I’m not sticking up for the Nazis, of course, but I feel like it’s less of a blow to your self-respect when the man who shoots you in the head is wearing a smart military uniform with shiny death’s head pins. We’re going to be murdered by “men” who look like Snuggles the Fabric Softener Bear with glasses. It will be like getting punched out by Truman Capote.

Suddenly the Romans don’t look too bad. Having your brains clubbed out by a 6’8″ barbarian centurion…that’s a man’s death. Centurions didn’t have to say, “Hold my latte,” before they killed people. We’re going to be slaughtered by the snowflake patrol.

I never thought musing about persecution would look like this. You have to wonder what people will make of it when I’m gone.

I would not be the first Christian to have a sense of humor about it. They say that when Lawrence was roasted on a grill (by the church), he looked up and said, “I’m well done. Turn me over!”

If I have to take sides, I think I’ll side with John, not Lawrence. Lawrence was grilled, and grilling is about health, not flavor. John was deep-fried. It didn’t take, but it was certainly a superior method of preparation. Now that we know KFC’s secret recipe, I can request to be breaded.

I look forward to trying the grinder, but it won’t solve my scale problem. I will still have to find a way to clean mill scale off of steel, without ruining the shape of the metal. A surface grinder would be great to have. Another possibility: buy steel a little oversize and put screw holes at the ends. Screw it to a big piece of metal, put the metal in the mill vise, and mill the scale off. The large piece of metal and the screws would hold it flat, better than a vise could.

While I wait for the grinder, I’m working on my next food project. I keep making large batches of food so I can reheat during the week instead of cooking from scratch over and over. Yesterday I gave up and bought collards, hocks, neck bones, corn meal, tomatoes, and Vidalias. I’m going to make collard greens and hoe cakes. I just hope I don’t overeat. This food will be off-the-charts good.

I look forward to making the hoe cakes, because I have a Griswold griddle I’ve never used. I Ebayed it and used electrolysis to get the crud off. It looked brand new when I was done. Then I seasoned it with bacon fat. It should be wonderful to use. A griddle is great for things like pancakes and crepes, because it provides easy access for a spatula.

I don’t think I’d want to be griddled. I keep hoping I’ll be hit by a meteor. I can’t come up with anything that beats that plan. Makes a mess, but that’s not my problem.

Maybe I’ll post a photo if I get the grinder running. Or maybe I’ll just lie on my back eating hoe cakes.

Ovid Knew When to Shut it

I am going to knock Ovid off today. I’m very grateful to have a short reading assignment to kill the taste of The Aeneid and help me heal from the boredom.

I’m done with Dido’s letter to Aeneas, and I just started someone else’s letter to someone else. It doesn’t matter who wrote whom; they’re fungible. One letter is almost exactly like another. Same voice. Same whiny, neurotic, meandering style. Does Tiger Beat still exist? They probably get letters like this all the time, scarred by clove-cigarette burns, with instructions to forward them to Justin Timberlake.

“My parents don’t understand our secret love. I know you were moved by the triquetra and unicorn I drew in the dust on the side of your tour bus. I totally understand why you had your security people restrain me while you drove away. They’re not worthy to witness what we’re becoming.”

Medea. That’s who it is. Medea wrote Jason. I don’t know anything about these two, except that Jason was in one of my favorite Saturday afternoon movies when I was a kid: Jason and the Argonauts. Jason roamed around in a boat, fighting cool Ray Harryhausen monsters. I loved that stuff. We didn’t have fancy CGI back then; some crazy old coot had to build statues and move them a degree or a millimeter at a time for the cameras. I thought it was wonderful.

To be clear, it’s Medea, not Madea. If you don’t know who Madea is, good for you. It’s a Tyler Perry character. If you don’t know who Tyler Perry is, see previous.

Tyler Perry created very bad TV shows, and somehow he became extremely successful. Now he creates very bad movies. I can’t understand his popularity. He uses BET-grade actors, and the scripts are like something I would have written in the sixth grade.

Back when I was at Trinity Church, they showed a Tyler Perry movie, which I’m sure they did not pay for. It featured a big family of miserable black people having a holiday meal and discussing infidelity and VD (each other’s). The message of the film: we should all admire good-looking guys who date extremely overweight women.

My feeling on the subject is this: people like what they like. If you prefer women under 300 pounds, it doesn’t mean you’re a bad person. If you like them big, it doesn’t make you a good person. Maybe you’re just an Arab.

Yes, they talked about VD and adultery in church, and not in a constructive way. The decision to show the movie was typical of the Wilkerson attitude. The obvious blew right by them. Any normal preacher would have thought, “Maybe this isn’t a great thing to show kids at 9 a.m.”

Trinity was maybe 80% black, and the Wilkersons knew the movie would please the crowd. The crowd’s happiness was always job one, and it still is. Feed the beast. If you don’t feed it, you can’t milk it.

Madea is Tyler Perry in a big flowered dress. I don’t know too much about “her,” but I believe she’s an angry and somewhat carnal church lady, sort of like Lamont Sanford’s Aunt Esther. As a Christian, I’m not a big fan of drag. The Wilkersons love drag. Their son and another pastor did a video in drag.

Madea does not figure heavily in Greek mythology. I guess that’s my point.

I still don’t understand why people admire Ovid. The letters he wrote are like something Bradley Manning might write to Justin Bieber. Stalkerish. “I hope you die. Well, no I don’t. Because I want you to live long enough to suffer for abandoning me. I’m not mad at you. Please come and kill me. If you have a minute.”

Our notions of romance have changed since the 19th century. Before that, it was perfectly okay to be a stalker. We admired stalkers. You could probably get away with that lifestyle up through 1920 or so. Now, we don’t think it’s romantic to mail someone your ear or jump on a bonfire because someone left you. We think it’s sick and crazy.

It’s a little unfair. We encourage young people to read stalker literature, and then we get mad when they grow up and hack the online accounts of people who dumped them, or when they cut themselves. We don’t expect them to take the things we teach them seriously. We expect them to have the good sense to be hypocrites, like the rest of us.

I don’t recall the Greeks getting excited about stalking. Maybe it started with the Romans. The impression I have is that in the Greek stuff, people who couldn’t let go were considered pathetic.

That would make sense. The Greeks admired moderation. Even in their rape, murder, pillage, arson, and theft.

A friend told me I was the least codependent person he knew, because I was so fast to cut people off and so serious about not taking them back. It was a nice compliment, but I clung to counterproductive people in the past, and that’s how I learned that it was better to cut out the dead wood and move on. I had to make a fool of myself many times before God helped me see what I was doing wrong. However I got here, you don’t have to worry about me stalking anyone now. I wish people the best, and I hope I manage to help a few get to know God, but I think my epitaph will be “Buh-BYE.”

I seem to be immune to loneliness these days. Years ago, it was a real problem for me. When I was living in Texas, undergoing the torture of toxic ADD drugs and consistent failure at my chosen profession, I had almost no one, and I was like one of those zoo animals that develop tics and repetitive movements because of isolation. Now I’m kind of glad I don’t deal with people too much. I guess some people go the St. John route, and others go Kaczynski.

When you’re around people too much, they pressure you to be what you don’t want to be. That’s fine if you’re three. You need the guidance. It’s not so good when you’ve gotten a glimpse of God and you’re surrounded by people who think carnality is the bomb.

After today, I am done with Greeks and Romans. I move on to Augustine’s Confessions, which could be a pretty good read. Surely it will not be full of two-paragraph similes, the way Homer and Virgil were.

The next assignment is actually a combination of Luke and John, but I’ve read those three million times, so I don’t plan to go back over them.

I will continue to regale you with tales of my scholarly exploits. I’m sure someone will want to publish my sophisticated insights. I think I’ll hold my breath until I get an offer.

In any case, I’ll get a little closure and redemption. And I will know where Phrygia is.

Blameless Virgil Gnaws the Dust

I have earth-shattering news. I finished The Aeneid.

People who are keeping up know the story. I felt bad about reading almost none of the books on the Lit. Hum. list back when I was “studying” at Columbia, so I downloaded a syllabus and went to work. I slogged through Homer, Herodotus, Thucydides, and some other crap I am too lazy to list. Then I grounded my hull on Virgil. He’s a terrible writer, and I accidentally bought a translation by an even worse writer; by the time I realized it, I was about 60% of the way through the book. I bought the right translation and started over.

It’s a punishment fit for a mythological character. It’s almost Sisyphean. I refused to read this horrible book when I was supposed to, so I was condemned to read it later; not just once, but 1.6 times. I got the Santayana treatment, to the tune of 60%.

Man, this book stinks. It was agony. With junk like this to deal with, no wonder the ancients took so long to achieve literacy. It must have been extremely unappealing.

Checking the syllabus, I see that my next Herculean labor is Ovid’s Heroides. To show how little I learned at Columbia, I will reveal that I have no idea what the book is about. Maybe it wasn’t on the syllabus in 1902 when I took the course, or maybe it just wasn’t on the list of things I expected to be on the exam. In any case, I know nothing about it, and I kind of wish it could stay that way.

Wikipedia, I summon thee!

The Wiki-Oracle informs me that Ovid was a guy who gave up law to become a poet. Not sure that’s a step upward. He wrote in something called “elegiac meter.”

Here’s a quotation: “An elegiac couplet consists of one line of poetry in dactylic hexameter followed by a line in dactylic pentameter.”

Now I have to look up dactylic whatever.

My God, this is boring.

“The foot is the basic metrical unit that forms part of a line of verse in most Western traditions of poetry.”

“A dactyl (Greek: ????????, dáktylos, ‘finger’) is a foot in poetic meter. In quantitative verse, often used in Greek or Latin, a dactyl is a long syllable followed by two short syllables, as determined by syllable weight.”

If a dactyl is three syllables, how can you have dactylic PENTAmeter? “Penta” means “five.”

Oh, okay. I see it now. Dactylic pentameter is apparently fifteen syllables.

How can anybody care about this stuff?

No, I’m wrong about the fifteen syllables. There is apparently a thirty-page book somewhere explaining the rules of dactylic pentameter, and there are lots of variations.

I guess I’m a low-foreheaded potato eater, but I have never understood how meter alone could turn something into verse. When someone reads “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” I totally understand why it’s called poetry, but just screwing with rhythm in unimportant ways only creepy, mildewed academics can perceive is a different matter.

I think haikus are stupid. Is it okay to say that? They’re stupid. Compared to a haiku, a limerick is exciting new technology.

Ordered Sonic fries
She brings me cheese tots instead
Tears in my lime slush

While I was reading The Aeneid, I looked for some evidence that it wasn’t plain old prose, and I gave up. I’m sure it’s in there, but it doesn’t exactly jump out at you or have any detectible positive effect on the reader. You don’t sit there thinking, “Wow! This meter is really clever!” It’s more like, “BOREDOM! BOREDOM! WHEN WILL IT END???? OW, MY HEAD! WHY DID HE WRITE THIS???”

Rhythm is very important to writers. Sometimes a writer’s understanding of rhythm is obvious. One of the neat things about David Mamet is that he has good rhythm. His dialogue bounces along in a very appealing, balanced way. But that doesn’t mean arbitrarily choosing a completely ineffective, rigid rhythmic scheme makes you a great writer. If anything, it makes you self-deluded. A person who gets off on weird rhythmic regimes is missing the point of literature. It’s like thinking your food is good because all the ingredients are autumn colors.

If you want to make clever patterns other strange people notice, my suggestion is to take up needlepoint or maybe drums.

I can already see that Ovid’s rhythmic genius is going to be lost on me. I will just take that as given.

Once Ovid is in the can, I’m out of the Greek mythology ghetto. I can’t wait. The only person I’ve developed any liking for is Herodotus, and that’s only because he isn’t serious. The rest deserve all the bad things that happen to them. The characters and actual human beings in these books are like members of street gangs: they estimate the value of their existence based on the completely unnecessary, narcissistic suffering they inflict on themselves and others. Your son got his head chopped off in battle? Boo hoo! Maybe you should have stayed home instead of sailing off to hit other people with swords.

I didn’t do a calculation, but I’m pretty sure Aeneas lost more men than he took with him. I think he had fourteen ships at the start. What does a Greek ship hold? Say 150 men, tops? By the end of the book, Italy was buried in the rotting corpses of Trojans. One guy–Turnus–killed thousands of Trojans and Tuscans (I think it was Tuscans). Virgil had to be fudging his numbers. My guess is that he wrote the first part of the book, establishing the number of Trojans, and then he got carried away with slaughter in the second half of the book. Then he was too lazy to go back and correct the math. Even Virgil got tired of The Aeneid.

Just a theory.

I should write my own Greek epic and call it The Idiocy. It would be about a bunch of Greeks who got drunk and decided it would be great fun to go burn and pillage someone else’s city, only to find out that war is really unpleasant and lots of people you like die.

Oh, wait. That epic has already been written. Three times.

How could the ancients admire these morons? What kind of infantile morals did they have, to get worked up about which racist rapist murdering crybaby attention-whore thief won which battle?

It goes to show what the world was like before Judaism and Christianity. People had the values of monkeys.

I guess I’ve vented enough about Homer and Virgil. I’m not sure, though. I may have to resume later. I may not be completely purged; I may just be tired.

I’m looking ahead. I only have to read 134 pages of The Inferno. I’m tempted to get down on my knees and thank God, but the little intelligent part of me is screaming, “Who teaches a course and tells you to read a third of a book? What good is that?” For the rest of my life, I’ll have to tell people I read little bits of Dante’s Inferno and then stuck it on a shelf, so I don’t really know what’s in it.

Maybe this course is stupid. I hadn’t really considered that. I considered it back in the Devonian Era, when I was actually in college, but looking back, I thought that was just immaturity. Maybe I was right!

They put Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon on the list. I’m not reading that. It’s just a sop to black people and women. Besides, I already read it. They could have put something really good in that spot, like 1984 or Animal Farm. They didn’t have to struggle to find a black female author and jam her in there in spite of the dubious quality of her work.

Song of Solomon wasn’t in print when I took Lit. Hum., so I give myself a pass. Maybe I’ll give myself Lit. Hum. credit for reading Catch-22, which is a work of real genius.

They stuck Virginia Woolf in there, too. I may blow that off. I haven’t read Lord of the Flies yet. Maybe it will fill the hole. I don’t know anything about Virginia Woolf, but the Burton/Taylor movie was quite depressing.

Apparently, Goethe and Nietzsche have been part of the curriculum in the past. I have no memory of reading either, so I may jam one of them in the Woolf opening. How to choose, though? Wait! I know how! Which one is shorter? Hmm…they’re both around 150 pages. But Goethe’s Faust is a story, not a dreadful philosophy book. I’m a Christian; I already have a philosophy. I don’t need a new one which is necessarily wrong, inferior, and pernicious.

Okay, Faust. That kills Virginia Woolf.

Here’s something interesting! My old Lit. Hum. prof, James R. Russell, moved to Harvard and tried to start a Lit. Hum. knockoff. He has a syllabus, and it’s online. This would be closure, a la mode. I’m trying to relive the course he taught, so what better way to replace Toni Morrison than to make a selection from his list?

Well, this is sad. I looked at the syllabus, and there is nothing from the 20th century in it. I’m apparently on the second semester, and he never did a second semester.

There goes that plan.

I learned some other interesting stuff while Googling Lit. Hum. today. Remember how I said I cheated on a couple of tests at Columbia in order to avoid being expelled? I hate cheating and cheaters, so it really bothered me. Well, it turns out Columbia’s Lit. Hum. system has had other cheating issues. The Columbia wiki site lists THREE, in 1987, 2007, and 2013. In all cases, instructors leaked test questions early. That’s how I cheated, and I believe it also happened in Columbia’s Contemporary Civilization course. I remember a bunch of guys sitting in a room, looking over the exam and frantically flipping through books for answers. I may have cheated in that class, too.

Someone I knew took a test early; his professor was a lady named Lavinia, which happens to be the name of the lady who married Aeneas. The instructor let him keep the test paper, and naturally, it got passed on.

Lots and lots of people cheated on the core courses at Columbia, and instructors helped. Sorry to burst the world’s bubble. It’s Quiz Show all over again, only nobody reads this blog or cares.

I don’t recall ever cheating on anything else in school. I was a mess, and I really did not want to be sent home for failing tests. The pressure was too much. Embarrassing.

I’m going to read Lord of the Flies. That will just have to do. It’s 20th-century. It’s post-war. It’s not a consolation prize for a mediocre writer who belongs to an underrepresented group. It’s not about a bunch of bitter, thwarted cirrhotic Algonquin Round Table rejects getting plastered and making emasculating remarks about each other.

Sold.

I looked over a bunch of other potential works. I’m surprised to see that I’ve read most of them. For a person who more or less gave up on literature at 25, I got a lot done.

Today is a great day. Virgil is behind me. Now to get back to them tasty potatoes and maybe some NASCAR.

More

I felt like I should say a few more things, about cheating at Columbia University, and about Ovid.

When I attended, there were three core courses (that I now recall). One was Contemporary Civilization, and it more or less covered the history of Western thought. The second was Literature Humanities; it covered the history of Western literature. The third was Art Humanities; it covered looking at slides of different types of marble columns. Ionian! Doric! That other kind!

I have a dim memory of attending one or two Art. Hum. classes before making my grand disappearance, but that may be something I dreamed. I seem to remember kouroses.

The big problem with these courses was that every student had to take them, and the exams were standardized. As a result, each course had numerous instructors and sections, and if an idealistic hippie instructor decided grading was a male-exalting, eurocentric concept that tended to inhibit homosexuality and socialist urges, then that instructor could hand the exam out early to take pressure off of his or her students. Those students could, and did, pass them out to students in other sections. This is why cheating was…not unheard of. In fact, the system made it hard to get a fair shake playing it straight.

That covers that.

As for Ovid, when I read his name, I always think “Egg.”

Also, I just started reading his works, and I am happy, happy, happy to report that they are short. Really short. Other than that, I wonder why they were written.

The first one is Penelope’s letter to Odysseus. He is about to come home, kick ass, and take names. Telemachus has already made his voyage to Pylos, and Penelope is really tired of feeding suitors.

I’m sure there is something brilliant about this “poem.” I do not see it. It doesn’t rhyme. It’s not clever. It doesn’t tell us anything new or even a little bit interesting about Odysseus. On top of that, it’s another example of the sick, sad obsession the ancients had with Troy.

If there is something brilliant hidden in it, someone will have to explain it to me. For less than $30,000 a semester.

I looked it up, and Homer was born at some time within a century or so of 1000 B.C. The accepted date for the sacking of Troy is 1270 B.C. Virgil was born in 70 B.C., and Ovid was born in 43 B.C. How long do these people need to get over Troy?

Creativity isn’t that hard. You just say to yourself, “I’m going to come up with something new,” and then you wait. Eventually, an idea will come. It’s not necessary to drag the carcass of Odysseus out over and over for a millennium.

The ancients had the sequel disease; the one that gave us 55 Fast and Furiouses when one was way more than enough. In a thousand years, they could not come up with anything better than Iliad III: the Final Reckoning. Maybe we shouldn’t look down on Hollywood [note: yes we should]. Entire generations of Greeks and Romans were no smarter.

Good news: Heroides short. Bad news: still stuck in 1270 B.C.

If Dante so much as hints at the existence of Troy, I will fly to Italy and desecrate his grave.

Food Fit for a Merry Prankster

Last night I finished off the meatloaf and potatoes au gratin I made last week. I still can’t get over the experience.

When you think of great food, meatloaf does not come to mind immediately. When I was a kid, meatloaf was something I ate because it kept me alive. It was okay, but no sane person begged his mother to make it. That has been the way I’ve seen meatloaf all my life. Cheap, easy to make, and good enough to eat without struggling. It’s probably the most pedestrian food on earth that doesn’t come out of a can with an easy-open top.

The meatloaf I made last week, combined with the potatoes, made an astonishing meal. On top of that, it got better while it sat in the fridge. The seasonings mingled. The pepper in the potatoes worked its way through the potato…meat. By the time I finished it off, it had reached a sensual crescendo.

I could not stop eating this stuff. There are some things I just can’t have in the house, and this combination appears to be one of them. I can’t have fun size Snickers bars or miniature Reese’s cups around. I can’t have Fat Boy ice cream sandwiches around. Now I have to add meatloaf and potatoes to the list.

I ate the last of it, and then for at least two hours, I found myself reliving it and exclaiming aloud that it was fantastic.

Yes. I had meatloaf flashbacks. I have PMSD: Post-Meatloaf Stress Disorder.

I felt like I had ingested drugs. I was borderline euphoric. From food.

There is no restaurant on earth that does that for me, but it happens with my own food all the time. I can’t understand it. Last night I sat on the couch, marveling at the strange gift God had given me.

I would be completely happy being an okay cook. I have no family to feed. Even though I make good food, I’m not that picky about what I eat. As far as I can tell, I don’t really need to be able to produce exceptional food. But it happens time and again.

I made meatloaf and potatoes so well, I can’t make it any more. If I make it again, I’ll eat 5,000 calories a day until it’s gone. I don’t have a church to cook for any more. I quit cooking for my friends because I have no wife to help me shop, cook, or clean up. What am I supposed to do with the recipe?

Even worse, I know I can make it a lot better. I’m going to resist trying.

By the way, one of the keys to making the meatloaf work is baking it at 400 for at least half an hour at the end. This creates a thin black crust around it, on the sides and bottom. The flavor this crust provides puts the icing on the cake, so to speak.

It’s too bad I can’t come here and say, “Wow, God made me an incredible composer/musician/singer/mathematical genius/inventor/whatever.” There are things I wish I could do extremely well, and cooking is not one of them. Mozart got perfect pitch, flawless timing, endless musical creativity, and peerless dexterity. I got potatoes au gratin and strawberry cheesecake.

Which I don’t have the metabolism to tolerate.

There must be a reason for it. It’s not so I can open a restaurant. Forget that. I watch restaurant shows all the time, and I am now sure I would rather be struck by lightning every day than supervise the kind of people who cook on lines and wait tables. It’s not so I can sell things I cook. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life waiting for people to sue me because they pretended to choke on things I made. I definitely don’t want to run a commercial kitchen where the government will force me to sit through seminars about my legal obligation to encourage my gay employees to get “married.”

I feel like one of the lame superheroes. You know. Like Storm, the X-Woman. Her big gift: making it rain on bad guys. Whoopee. Impressive. “Oooh, I’m scared. Whatever you do, don’t jack up the humidity and make my hair frizz.”

The superhero who makes great cheesecake and ribs will never save the world or get the girl. You can bank on that. He’ll be back at Justice League headquarters, hosing out filthy smokers and inhaling unhealthy quantities of hickory smoke. “Wonder Woman and I are flying back to her island on her invisible jet for a three-week honeymoon with no cell phones. Can you fix us some to-go plates before we abandon you to clean up the kitchen alone?”

You can always pick Food Boy out in group photos, because he wears his cape in the front.

It’s a nice gift to have, but if you know why I received it, you are way ahead of me.

Speaking of food, I guess everyone knows the KFC recipe is now public domain. Colonel Sanders has a nephew, and the nephew found the recipe, written in the Colonel’s handwriting. KFC swears it’s a fake, but sadly for them, people who try it say it’s the real thing. The only missing item is Accent, i.e. monosodium glutamate.

I’m happy about the news, because KFC quit making the real thing a long time ago. They used to fry chicken in beef fat, but the joy-killers got to them and made them switch to something inferior. Probably canola oil, which is like sunflower seed oil that has had a small fish fried in it. Beef fat is loaded with cow flavor, and it’s satisfying. Now that we have the recipe, we can make real KFC at home, with proper fat.

Some people are saying the leaked recipe has too much paprika in it. Paprika is pretty mild. You can probably vary the amount a great deal without hurting anything. If the real KFC recipe has less paprika than the leaked one, it may simply mean that KFC decided to save money by cutting down on a low-impact ingredient.

Here is the recipe:

KFC CHICKEN INGREDIENTS

2/3 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. thyme
1/2 tsp. basil
1/3 tsp. oregano
1 tsp. celery salt
1 tsp. black pepper
1 tsp. mustard
4 tsp. paprika
2 tsp. garlic powder
1 tsp. ginger
3 tsp. white pepper
2 cups flour
MSG
BEEF FAT!!!!

I haven’t tried it. I don’t fry chicken all that well, and I’ve been busy with other stuff. If you try it, I hope you’ll report back. They say you have to fry right at 350 degrees, and you should be aware that KFC uses pressure fryers, so you probably won’t want to go all-out and use the same type of equipment. I can’t figure pressure fryers out anyway. How do you know the chicken is done if you can’t see it?

If I made that stuff, I think I’d replace some of the paprika with chipotle powder. Maybe I’d have to cut back on the white pepper, though.

I don’t feel bad about passing the recipe around, because it was never patented to begin with. It’s a trade secret, not the subject of a patent. Infringing a patent is a statutory tort and a crummy thing to do. Using a trade secret you received legally is fair play!

Now that I think about it, the KFC spice profile would be great on fish. You could use it in a fish and chips recipe. That would rock.

I made pot roast today. First time ever. It’s merely very good, so I think I’m safe.

I’m going to go have some now. If I start to freak, talk me down.

More

Predictably, the pot roast was really good. It would go great with hoe cakes or cornbread.

Might as well post the recipe.

INGREDIENTS

3 lb. chuck roast
3 large (large) red potatoes
2 large yellow onions
1 pound grape tomatoes
1 packet beef flavor onion soup mix
1 lb. carrots (peeled baby carrots are fine)
10 oz. Carlo Rossi Paisano or similar red wine
1 qt. water
olive oil
salt
pepper
1 teaspoon starch

Salt and pepper the meat. Use lots of salt. Fry it in a little oil to brown the outsides. You may have to use high heat with a piece of meat this big.

Pour the wine into a big casserole dish or something similar; it will have to hold the meat and all the vegetables. Add the starch and a teaspoon of salt to the wine. Make sure the starch is stirred in. Put the meat in the wine and sprinkle the soup mix on it.

You could probably double the starch and get a better result than I did.

Bake the meat at 300 degrees for three hours. Slice the onions. Cut the potatoes in big chunks. Add the vegetables to the meat along with the water. Salt the vegetables heavily and then season them with pepper. Cover and bake for another 90 minutes.

You may want to turn the broiler on at the end, uncover the food, and brown it on top.

Check the sauce to make sure it has enough salt in it. If not, add salt and swirl it around to dissolve it. Test again and get it right.

You might want to use 1 1/2 packets of soup mix. It’s very good with one packet, but it might be nice to make it more intense.

Also a possibility: 1 bay leaf in the sauce.

We are Sifted Every Day

Today I was thinking about the Patton Oswalt clip I probably should not have linked to (“I’m wearing boots of escaping!”), and I thought about his work in movies and on TV. I decided to check Youtube to see what else he had done.

I found a video in which he compares God to an imaginary sphincter that hovers over his head and threatens to devour him if he isn’t good.

The injustice of that comparison is hard to stomach. He is talking about someone who allowed himself to be tortured to death by cretins in order to save bad people from humiliation, disease, and damnation. But Oswalt’s vile, truth-hating mindset isn’t rare. America is filling up with people who literally hate Christianity, and many of them hate God himself.

The audience in the video was disturbing. They squealed with delight as Oswalt piled cruel remarks on God and Christians. They were thrilled to see someone “telling it like it is.” I could sense the release of pent-up anger; someone was telling them it was all right to hate us, and they were enjoying the opportunity to let it out en masse, in a nurturing, approving environment.

A safe space. Safe for some.

As a Christian in America, I grew up feeling that my country was my safe space. I didn’t think I was surrounded by potential persecutors. I knew such people existed, but I certainly didn’t feel outnumbered. I thought of them as harmless nuts who could not get traction. How that has changed. Today you can literally be fired from a job for refusing to say a man is really a woman.

I decided to Google “I hate Christianity” to see what came up. I found people blaming the world’s hatred of Christians on Christians. We’re intolerant. We’re self-righteous. We’re mean. Yes, and Hitler burned Jews because they were pushy and dishonest and ran the German banking system. It wasn’t because Germans and Austrians were vicious racists who wanted scapegoats; that notion was unthinkable, so Germans and Austrians replaced it with their own version of blood guilt.

If you really want to murder someone, you can always come up with a rationale, and no matter how insane it is, you can make yourself believe it.

It doesn’t matter at all what we do, just like it doesn’t matter how much land Jews give to Muslims. We are not hated because of what we do. We are hated because we exist. For that reason, we should stop trying to appease the world. It offends God, and it gives the world power over us.

People who hate God belong to Satan, and they dance to his tune. Satan doesn’t want a truce. He doesn’t want Christians and Jews to be nice, pay for abortions, and leave gays alone. He wants us removed from the planet, along with our remains. When he went after the Jews sixty years ago, he wasn’t content with sending them away and taking what they had “stolen” from Gentiles; he insisted on turning their bones into untraceable dust. Satan wants a world in which no one remembers we were here. That’s why he convinced many Jews to say, “May his name be blotted out forever,” when they referred to Jesus. He didn’t just want Jesus deleted; he wanted the hard drive incinerated so Jesus couldn’t be recovered.

Until fairly recently, I didn’t realize how bad hatred for Christians was. I definitely didn’t realize how much scientists hate us. That makes no sense at all; apart from a few people who want to teach kids creationism, which is a very minor issue, we don’t interfere with science any more. Centuries have passed since a pope threatened to burn Galileo. Atheists have interfered with science relatively recently; the Soviets imprisoned people for accepting scientific conclusions that seemed to conflict with socialist notions. Why didn’t scientists rise up and attack them? Answer: because Satan likes socialism. It would have been pointless for him to send one group of his flying monkeys to attack another.

Earlier this year, I thought it would be fun to replace some of my threadbare T-shirts with shirts related to science and technology, so I looked to see what was available. I was startled to see that sites selling pro-science shirts were full of selections attacking Christianity. The most disturbing shirt I saw featured a cartoon Satan with the caption, “Keep studying science, kiddies.” What on earth was that all about? Are scientists so overwhelmingly against God that a shirt like that has a significant market?

Recently a strange group of people at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) staged a performance in which robed figures appeared to sacrifice a woman to Shiva, a sick demon deity which is part of Hinduism. CERN bigwigs claim it was a joke. No one really knows what happened. No one denies it took place. Imagine how the world would have reacted had we seen movies of Robert Oppenheimer pretending to sacrifice women to false gods at Los Alamos. He would have been placed in a mental institution.

This is not the America I grew up in. It is not the world I grew up in. God is withdrawing, day by day, and Christians can’t accept the fact that they lost the war. We still issue misguided prayers for the salvation of America. We say God is warning us so we can turn back to him. We need to turn back to him, for whatever help is still available, but we’re not being warned. It’s too late to warn us. We got beaten.

Jesus said the world would hate us. We don’t believe it. We think turning away from the world is judgmental and wrong. We think we can never give up on people, even though God does it every day. The world really does hate us. When we were doing well in the US, our enemies tended to keep quiet, so we didn’t know how numerous they were. Now they’re on top, so the closet doors are springing open. The tide was already up to our waists before we knew it was coming in.

All I want is to live in a relatively peaceful place until I am done with this body, which, I hope, will not take very long. I want to mind my own business as much as I can and do whatever God calls me to do, although I don’t know if those goals are compatible. Regardless of how far I retreat, eventually, the tide will reach me, but it can’t hurt to get away from Miami, which is a node of evil, aggression, pride, demon worship, and hate. It’s not Detroit, but it’s pretty bad.

The other day I was thinking about an unstable person I used to be entangled with, and I asked God if this person was going to hell. The answer seemed very clear to me: yes, and there was nothing I could do to change it. It was depressing and sobering. Justice is real; it may be delayed, but it will come. It is indescribably harsh. Whatever this person may have done to me, I do not wish hell on them. But they have chosen their path.

There is no point in making contact or praying for this person. It’s done, and besides, I already tried those things over a prolonged period. The world is full of such people. God knew they would exist, so he created a place in the earth where they could be stored after death, in preparation for the day when they would be removed to the lake of fire. They hate God now; they blame him for everything. They will still hate him and blame him while they burn. There is nothing that can be done. They have to be locked away so they won’t ruin heaven for the rest of us, the way they ruined the earth.

Walk down a city street, and all around you, you will see people who might as well not exist. They are temporary. It seems like a waste of time to acknowledge them. Anything you say to them will be taken to hell. Where you’re going, it will seem as though they had never been created. They will not be remembered. We will not visit them. The world is like an ovary, and people who aren’t saved are like unfertilized eggs that wash out and disappear. Each of us thinks he’s a big deal, saved or not; we can’t conceive of a universe in which we are not important. But to God, we are more like gametes than fully formed beings. We are disposed of, in large numbers, daily.

People love to say we’re all God’s children, but that’s a lie. The Bible doesn’t say that. We are all God’s creations, but not all of us are his children.

It will be interesting to watch the mess unfold over the coming years. I’m glad I won’t be caught up in it.

I Really Needed One More Tool

I did it. I bought a 2×72 belt grinder.

I’ve been wanting one of these things forever, but they’re not cheap, and building one for yourself is a pain and costs nearly as much as buying one. I figured I could live without it. Then I started making knives, and I realized using a small 1×42 grinder was going to make me miserable in the long run.

Actually, it makes me miserable even in the short run.

Truthfully, I am not quite as gung ho about knife-making as I was a week or two ago, but I kept getting the nagging feeling that I needed to do this. I felt like God wanted me to do it for some reason or other, so I gave in. Now that it’s on the way, I hope I use it.

A lot of Christians are involved with knives and guns, not to mention all types of machining and woodworking. Strange. I guess the zombie predictions are coming true; the heathens are busy playing video games, protesting, and fornicating, so they’re not as likely as we are to have shops full of much-needed tools and weapons when everything goes sour. They will probably be visiting us in groups eventually.

A 2×72 grinder is a remarkable thing. If you work metal, there will be many, many times when you’ll need to remove metal from parts in a hurry, and depending on the job, you may need an angle grinder, a mill, a lathe, a band saw, a drill press, a plasma cutter or cutting torch, or a big belt grinder. They’re not interchangeable.

Now that I think about it, I didn’t mention shears. In the metalworking world, “shear” doesn’t just mean scissors. It can mean a heavy machine you operate by jumping on a treadle, to make long cuts in big pieces of sheet metal.

I’ll post a video of someone showing off a belt grinder. If you’re a man, and you have struggled with wimpy tools, you will instantly want one of these things. Spend two days trying to cut a part down with files and a bench grinder, and you may be willing to trade a leg for a belt grinder.

Here’s something really nice about belt grinders: they’re not limited to steel and iron. You’re probably thinking, “Neither is my bench grinder. I grind aluminum on it all the time.” Well, here is bad news: you’re risking a big accident. Non-ferrous metals can accumulate on a bench grinder wheel and melt into it. Then the next time the wheel gets hot, they can expand and make the wheel explode. When that happens, the best possible outcome is that the wheel will be destroyed and you’ll have to take time off to replace it. The worst outcome is that bits of it can penetrate your face. That has actually happened to people.

Another wonderful thing about belt grinders: you can change grits very quickly. It takes about ten seconds. You can go from 24 grit to a cork belt with polishing compound without removing screws or turning nuts. That’s very nice.

There are a lot of grinders available. I decided to try an Oregon Blade Maker. Some guy, presumably in Oregon, started making grinder bodies from heavy steel plate. He welds them together and puts wheels on them. People who use them like them a lot, and the design seems a lot smarter than the stuff the competition puts out. Also, they’re pretty. They come with nice powder-coating.

Best part: not expensive. When you put “well made” and “not expensive” together, you have my attention.

You can drop three grand on a factory grinder. I don’t see where the money goes. It’s not a complicated machine. You make a box with a cavity that holds an arm that holds the contact wheel or platen, and you stick a few wheels on it, plus a tensioned arm that allows you to put slack in the belt in order to remove it. Simple. It’s not a vertical machining center.

People talk about how grinders have to have mass and so forth. I suppose they must know something, but it seems to me they must be exaggerating. You don’t put an engine block on a grinder rest. The grinder doesn’t have to resist tons of force. It’s not like a mill, which has to weigh over a ton in order to get anything done. I started to make a belt grinder from plywood once, and I’m sure it would have worked fine. I am confident that a welded box made from heavy plate will work just fine, and it should be easier to move around than a giant industrial machine.

Let me see if I can find a Youtube of a wooden belt grinder, just to be a troll. I’ll bet I can.

I found one. This guy went a little nuts; he even made wooden wheels. But the grinder works.

He probably died horribly later. Like the old joke about the guy who backed into a sander says, “a horrible end, but a beautiful finish.”

I was all worked up about making a stand for the grinder. Then I realized I already had one. I have a Northern Tool foam cart I use to hold my bench grinder and 1×42 grinder. I am thinking I’ll remove the bench grinder and put it on a Harbor Freight stand. Then I can put both belt grinders on the cart. That will be convenient.

I learned a few things about belts. Most people like 3M and Norton belts. Basic belts come in aluminum oxide and zirconia. Belts made with zirconia cost a little more, but they supposedly last twice as long, so I assume they’re worth it. I rooted around looking for belts I could buy with credit card points, and I found Red Label Abrasives. You can get them at Sears.com. I have never used one, but I saw a lot of glowing reviews, so I took a chance.

Aluminum oxide is harder than zirconium dioxide (zirconia), but zirconia is tougher. Don’t ask me to explain it, but it supposedly makes a better belt.

While we’re on the subject of economics *rationalization cough cough*, big grinding belts are cheaper than little ones. A 2 x 72 belt contains 144 square inches of grit. A 1 x 42 has 42 square inches. That means a 2 x 72 belt gives you 3.43 times as much grit, for a lot less than 3.43 times the money. Big belts and big motors save time and money, apart from the initial expense.

I wish I could use the plasma cutter for knife work, but I’m a little worried about having problems with the steel, as a result of having nearby metal vaporized at 6 million degrees. It might work, though. I suppose what you do before heat-treating steel isn’t that important.

That would be hilarious. Draw a couple of lines on the metal…ZZZZZHHHHTT…ZZZZHHHHTTTT…clang…done.

I will keep the world informed of my progress, if any. I hope this gives you reason to carry on.

PULL!

I am still plugging away at The Aeneid. It’s like having a disease that goes into remission and comes back, over and over. It’s the herpes of literature.

I am around 60% of the way through it. I started the Mandelbaum translation over at the beginning because the Mackail translation I bought by mistake was so bad.

The boredom is crushing. Yesterday Virgil pulled one of the classics-author moves I hate the worst: he listed everyone who was going into a battle.

Do we really need this information? Do we really need to know that Warrior Queen Frisbee marched to war accompanied by columns of short-haired women who secretly dreamed of being police officers? Do we really need to know that King Phlebitis of Hydrangea wore the lionskin his grandfather Uvulus stole from the lair of Buttafuocus the Thracian Balrog? No, we do not. Not all details are essential, and that goes double when you’re making it all up.

Virgil is an astoundingly bad writer, and I don’t give him a pass. Sure, he lived a long time ago, but he didn’t invent writing. He had read works by other people. He had heard people tell stories orally. He knew what boredom and clumsy pacing were. He had Homer to learn from. He could have avoided Homer’s mistakes, but he decided to repeat them.

A week or so ago, I was inclined to forgive Virgil and look for the good in his work, but now I just want to smack him.

How do classics scholars stand their lives? I guess it’s not that bad once you’ve read everything in the catalog. It’s not like new classics are popping up every month.

I can understand why people became classics scholars decades ago. They were afraid of Vietnam and Korea. They had to stay in school in order to keep their draft deferments, and not everyone is smart enough or talented enough to get into something like engineering or music. If the alternative to reading Virgil were running around the jungle dodging bouncing Bettys and punji sticks, I guess Virgil would look pretty good. But how can people force themselves to study this stuff when the alternative is…a normal life doing something relatively interesting?

At the moment, Aeneas is about to go to war with the Italians. His ridiculous, childish gods are behind it. Zeus wants to help him, but Zeus doesn’t wear the pants on Olympus. His wife Juno is doing her best to get Aeneas killed. She has stirred the Italians up against him, hoping they’ll take him for a ride and fit him with a cement toga. She wants him whacked.

What is the point in worshiping these idiots if they’re just going to make you more miserable? It’s a complete ripoff. You can’t make them happy. If one of them likes you, the others hate you. They need family therapy, but they’re working their issues out on the Greeks instead.

Let’s give the real God his due; if he’s on your side, everyone in heaven is on your side. He doesn’t have a crazy wife who runs around behind his back, messing with the people he loves. Come to think of it, that sounds a lot like Satan. The devil is basically the Glenn Close character from Fatal Attraction, played by Liberace.

Shakespeare said hell had no fury like a woman scorned. He was wrong. That’s exactly the kind of fury it has. If Satan were a human woman, he’d be vandalizing our cars and calling us at work a hundred times a day. His apartment would be full of group photos with God’s face torn out of them.

No one is crazier or more tenacious than a jilted woman. They never show mercy, and they have no shame. It doesn’t bother them that their campaigns of vengeance make them socially radioactive and ridiculous.

I’m surprised a woman didn’t invent the suicide vest.

Aeneas doesn’t need Jupiter to help him conquer Rome. He needs Jupiter to slap his wife down. She’s a walking reality series. She should be tied to a rock with Prometheus, wearing an orange jumpsuit.

Okay. I feel a little better now.

I have Ovid on deck, and my copy of The Inferno is also ready when I need it. I don’t know what these books are like, but if they’re more entertaining than the phone book, they’ll be a big move up from Virgil.

No wonder I didn’t finish this stuff when I was in college. I forgive myself. I wonder if the serious students actually read this junk. Barack Obama and George Stephanopoulos were major grubs at Columbia; they were both in my class. I wonder if they read these books.

Maybe Obama read the books, and that’s the reason no one remembers him. He was in either the library or a padded room.

I think I may become the only person in history to complete the reading. I’ll bet the professors only read the Cliff’s Notes. Who would know the difference?

It’s too bad I didn’t realize the liberal arts weren’t for me. I thought high verbal test scores and some writing talent meant I had to take literature and writing courses. That was stupid.

I guess I did realize it, because I became a biology major the year before the deans and I agreed it was best I take a year off. But my family was driving me insane, and I had no study ethic to begin with, so that effort crashed and burned. Oh, well. It would have been nice to get into something I actually liked.

This experience is like the two years I spent learning salsa. I felt like a social failure because I hated to dance, so I took lessons, went to clubs, and even wrote extensive instructions. When it was over, I still didn’t care for dancing. I’m glad I’ll never have to do it again. I’m spending months reading the classics, and when I’m done, I will have conclusive proof that the classics are not my cup of nectar.

Maybe the brush I paint with is too broad; I don’t hate all old books. I like Voltaire, Rabelais, Shakespeare, Racine, Francois Villon, Marot, Moliere…it’s mainly the Greeks and Romans that make me want to carve an escape hatch into my skin from the inside.

I don’t like Dickens much. Windy. As I understand it, at least some of his works were published piecemeal in newspapers, so he had ample motivation to prolong them. Also, his work is depressing.

When I get done with Virgil, I may throw a party. Now that I think about it, it may take me so long that when I finish, Carnaval will be underway in Brazil. I could just hop on a plane. I wonder where I can get a giant papier-mache head around here.

Do not read Virgil. Okay, that was over the top. Read it once and then put it in your attic. It’s not entertaining. It’s not illuminating. You will not enjoy it. Get it done and move on.

I’m going to go take some Advil now.

Narrative Hits a Major Speed Bump

Today I’m thinking about the Nate Parker/Jean Celestin rape scandal.

There is a new movie called Birth of a Nation. The title is taken from an old D.W. Griffith movie which portrayed the Klan as a noble organization. I haven’t seen the original movie; I would guess that almost no one alive has. I don’t really know what’s in it. The movie is extremely long, and it’s not exactly popular. In the minds of the public, renting this movie would be like checking Mein Kampf out of the library.

The new movie is about the Nat Turner rebellion, about which I know little. A slave named Nat Turner decided that God had told him to rise up against white people, so he led a revolt in which slaves killed white people indiscriminately. Turner himself killed a woman by slugging her with a fence post. I’m all for slaves running away, using violence and theft if necessary, but going from farm to farm murdering women and children for pleasure isn’t emancipation; it’s just sadism.

The new movie was written by two young black men, Nate Parker and Jean Celestin. They are former Penn State wrestlers. In 1999, they had sex with a woman who was so drunk she was unconscious at least part of the time. They invited others to participate. Both were indicted for rape, and Celestin was convicted and spent six months in jail. Celestin appealed, and he was granted a new trial based on ineffective assistance of counsel. The victim refused to testify again, and the prosecutor dropped the case. Celestin has since claimed that he was “fully exonerated,” which is not an accurate way to describe what happened.

The victim was an honor student who went to college a year early. After the rape, she dropped out. She became a drug addict. She killed herself.

The bizarre thing about this is that Parker used an extremely self-righteous, insulting image to promote his movie. It’s a photo of his face in a noose made from the American flag. The message it appears to send, which may or may not be the intended victim, is that young black men are victims in America. Coming from a highly successful film director who got a free ride to college and then avoided conviction for gang-raping a white woman, that’s a little hard to stomach.

When I say “rape,” I am not saying he was convicted or that he can legally be referred to as a person who committed the crime of rape. I am saying that what he and Celestin did was rape under the common-sense dictionary definition. He had sex with someone who couldn’t consent because she was extremely drunk. Without real consent, in my mind, sex is rape, whether or not it satisfies the legal definition.

The perpetrators don’t deny that they penetrated the victim over and over–simultaneously–or that she was very drunk.

A lot of people are surely getting caught up in the legal niceties right now, and they are surely trying to make a case that what these men did wasn’t rape, but that draws attention away from the plain facts. They shared the body of a young woman who had consumed something like 13 shots of alcohol, and after the fact, they made her miserable by hiring a detective who posted pictures of her photo all over campus.

Can you support a person like that just because he wasn’t convicted, or because his conviction was reversed?

Rape is a strange crime, because it has levels and nuances. If you have sex with your wife twice in one in one night, consensually, and then during the third effort she withdraws her consent and you don’t comply immediately, that’s rape. It’s also rape if a bum grabs you off the sidewalk and violates you beside a dumpster. There are lots of shades in between these examples. Realistically, you can’t equate all rapists. The damage they do varies.

What Parker and Celestin did was unusually sick. The victim was barely conscious, and Parker went ahead anyway. That’s very bad. Then he invited his friends, as if her body were a pizza he wanted to share. That’s horrendous; inviting another man to violate a woman who barely knows him is vile. Then the victim was shamed publicly, as though she had committed a crime. That’s beyond the pale.

It’s disturbing that two men like this could be paid and lauded for making a movie which appears to be the latest in a series of race-baiting, anti-white films. It’s ironic that the poster depicts lynching. Many black men who were lynched in America were murdered because it was believed they had insulted or defiled white women. Now we have a director and screenwriter who fit that description, literally, and they’re using lynching imagery to make money.

It’s almost as if Satan is telling non-black America, “Look. You were right about them.”

Racial tension is out of control in America. I think Satan is poking both sides to stir things up. I think this movie and the scandal are parts of it. It’s polarizing.

Satan is doing a fantastic job on leftists and blacks. Black Lives Matters rioters just tore up Milwaukee over a case in which a black cop shot an armed black man who was clearly threatening him with a gun. They’re proving what most of us have suspected for a while: it’s not about police brutality. A justified shooting is still a good rationale for looting and violence. A large percentage of the “protesters” are just looking for an excuse to do evil to their neighbors.

Non-blacks are likely to use this senseless aggression as an excuse for anti-black racism. Even the least racist among us are likely to make changes in our behavior. This is not a good time to move to an area with a lot of black residents; who could be blamed for trying to locate elsewhere? It’s a scary time to reach out to black people and socialize with them in places where you’re outnumbered.

There are some types of race-motivated behavior you can control with laws. You can ban discrimination in hiring and selling, to some extent. There are also things you can’t control with laws. You can’t force white people to have black friends, or vice-versa. You can’t force people of one race to buy from people of another race. If things keep going the way they are, blacks and whites are going to segregate themselves in whatever ways are still legal. We’ve already seen black students advertising for “POC only” roommates, claiming the stress of living with whites is intolerable.

We should be building bridges. Instead, whites are on the receiving end of constant, open, unjustified criticism and rejection, and I guarantee you, they will retaliate silently. When whites can strike back without accountability, many do so. Look at the increase in racist Internet comments.

This mess is going to hurt black people. It won’t damage the rest of us that much. It won’t make people reluctant to hire us or associate with us. It won’t hurt our businesses. It will make it harder for black people to assimilate and succeed.

I don’t think there’s much hope for people who don’t serve God. For the rest of us, the answer is clear: identify with God’s family, not a race or nationality. If you’re a child of God, other children of God are your relatives and your race. Other people may look like you, but they’re against you.

Americans are flipping out over whether this person has the right to wear dreadlocks or that person has the right to rap. We ought to be concerned about aligning our hearts with God’s. Any two people whose hearts are aligned by God’s heart will live in agreement and peace. Discord is proof that something is wrong. God doesn’t fight with himself. His house is not divided. If we’re at each other’s throats, we’re not really of his house.

I don’t like the race-baiting movies. I don’t like the scary anti-black Internet comments. I don’t like the way we’re being censored by left-wing extremists. I think it will continue and get worse, though. The only hope of rising above it is submission to God.

Excuses are Poison

I got a great revelation today.

For a long time now, God has been teaching me that growth, not money or healing, is what Christianity is all about. God is a father, and he wants what every father wants: children who function correctly. Think about it, if you have kids. Do you sit around worrying that they won’t be rich? No. You worry that they’ll be dysfunctional idiots who end up on jail, dead, or on welfare. You worry that they’ll become bad people who can’t thrive and do good. God has the same concerns.

Correction is literally better than gold. There are a lot of disgusting, stupid, disgraceful people who have wealth. There are very few people who have their heads on straight.

God has shown me that my problems are generally my own fault. Even if someone else sins against me, I opened the door. People who conform to God’s design win their battles. If you’re a loser, God is not backing you up, and there’s a very good reason for that.

It sounds harsh. It is harsh. That doesn’t matter. It’s the truth, and you can’t change it. You have to work with the truth if you expect to succeed. You don’t make the rules of the universe. The sooner you accept responsibility for your problems, the sooner you will beat them.

I created my own enemies. I opened the door. I fed them. I bent the knee to them and thanked them for abusing me. People and spirits that might have had no interest in me at all but for my participation showed up in my life and abused me, and that’s on me. It’s also on them, but that shouldn’t matter to me. At judgment, God is not going to ask me about their sins. Not once.

When kids fight and their parents wade in, often one kid will say, “He started it.” Lazy parents don’t care who started it. They just care about shutting down the noise so they can flop back on the couch and watch Snooki. They say it doesn’t matter who started it. In reality, it matters. If you start a problem, you are primarily responsible. You start most of your own problems.

I knew all that. I also knew that the New Testament was different from the Old Testament in that Jesus criticized people’s attitudes as well as their actions and words. In the Old Testament, you just had to obey. That’s not good enough for Jesus. He criticized men for committing adultery in their hearts.

Is it fair to criticize people for things they merely want to do? Yes. If the Holy Spirit is available to change them, and they haven’t taken him up on it. Under the new covenant, we have access to the Holy Spirit, in a way that wasn’t available before the crucifixion. We are supposed to be baptized with the Holy Spirit, and we are supposed to pray in tongues and subdue our flesh and our minds. So yes, Jesus was not out of line when he criticized our desires.

When you put all this together, you get the revelation God gave me today: we are held accountable for our inclinations.

We are held accountable for our inclinations.

That sounds discouraging, if you have no faith in the Holy Spirit’s ability and willingness to change your heart. If you have that faith, then it’s an open door. It’s one of the greatest messages you’ll ever hear.

Jesus said he came to set the captives free. The Jews thought he was talking about kicking the Romans out. Christians think he only meant he was freeing people from hell. He wasn’t concerned about the Romans, because the rebellion of the Jews put them in place. He was referring to salvation from hell, but that’s not all he was referring to. He was referring to freedom from sinful inclinations and compulsions.

Paul talks about this. He says we are slaves to sin. We give up our free will through rebellion, and we become unable to do right. Powerful inclinations fill us, and we can’t resist them.

The Holy Spirit can undo that. This is what we should focus on, instead of pretending God will give us money for supporting embarrassing, heartless imbecile preachers with helicopters and palaces.

God does not hold people accountable for things over which they have no power. Because he holds us accountable for our inclinations, we know we have power over them through the Holy Spirit. We should be taking it upon ourselves to avail ourselves of his help, but we’re too busy not judging and pretending to love each other more than we really do.

Jesus said no man born of woman was greater than John the Baptist, but he also said he that was least in the kingdom of heaven was greater than John. That’s because Pentecost hadn’t come in John’s time. John had to fight using his own power. The Holy Spirit didn’t live in him around the clock, cleaning and restructuring. We live under a different set of principles. We have power John didn’t have, and because we don’t use it, we live in defeat.

I try to do what is right, but because I see and hear my own thoughts, I know I’m still filthy inside. Some things are fixed. There are other things I have to cope with through willpower, and I fail from time to time. The knowledge that God wants to fix my remaining issues is a huge relief.

Here is what Satan says, through Christians: “You’re so judgmental. You’re going to drive people away. Who are you to say these things?” I hear it all the time. Most Christians in the US love sin and spiritual laziness. They don’t want to change, and they love excuses. They love attacking anyone who gives them good advice. The Jews in the time of Jesus were the same way. It’s why they had him killed. It’s why they murdered the prophets with their own hands.

You can have your excuses or you can have victory and peace.

If you want your life to improve, focus on getting your heart and mind fixed. Otherwise, you’re just making things worse. You’re coating yourself with a bulletproof crust of denial, and you will wear it until you die.

Think about this, and put it to work. Stop sending money to vampires with cable TV shows. Give up your bitterness toward God, and stop blaming him for your suffering. Stop blaming other people. Close the door, and get God to clean your house. Confess everything you can think of.

This is the plan we gave up during the Dark Ages. It’s still on the table. You just have to choose it.

Consider the Balloon

During prayer today I had a very simple revelation, and I was glad to get it, so I’m bringing it here.

I’m always talking about the way America has become the tail and not the head (if you don’t know what that means, open a Bible once in a while). People who used to run from us now have us on the run. Things are upside down. Citizens of other countries come here and push us around and vote in our elections. Sexual deviants get us fired from jobs or have our businesses closed down. Losers and criminals hold “protests” which are really excuses for racist crimes and looting, and we bend the knee and apologize.

We don’t have God’s favor any more.

I think about this principal a lot, in relation to my own life. The closer I get to God, the more problems fall away from me. People who used to drive me crazy are removed from my circle. Problems I couldn’t beat disappear. What’s happening to me is the opposite of what’s happening to my country.

Here is one of the worst forms of defeat: debt. It’s slavery. If you don’t believe it, check the Bible: “The rich ruleth over the poor, and the borrower is servant to the lender.” The word translated “servant” in the KJV means “household slave,” but if you disagree, well, isn’t “servant” bad enough?

When you borrow, you take things you haven’t earned. That means you have to keep working in order to pay for them. A person who has no debt can walk off his job in an instant, singing a Johnny Paycheck tune on the way out. A debtor has to take all sorts of abuse, and he may be pressured to do immoral or distasteful things in order to hold onto his position.

A slave is a person who doesn’t have the leverage to quit or say no. A debtor is no different. They are prisoners without cages.

Americans don’t see it that way. They think, “Wow, I have a new bass boat and a 300-inch TV so I can watch the Kardashians!” They don’t think about slavery.

I considered marrying a debtor. I must have been having a psychotic episode. I never thought to check. I was stupid. I was willing to walk into a bear trap, blindfolded.

If I had married a slave, I would have become a slave. Her debts would have been on my back, instantly.

Slavery is a funny thing; it’s like electricity. If you make contact with another person, it may run from them into you.

I don’t borrow. I would rather have a $15000 car and pay cash than drive a Mercedes that belongs to someone else. I have no interest in leasing, either. Freedom is too important to me. It may be questionable financial practice, but I have no regrets.

This week I saw a website saying Obama had jacked our collective debt up to $19 trillion. That’s debt we all have, whether we agreed to it individually or not. We owe China. We owe other nations. We even owe ourselves; we have a bizarre system in which we allow ourselves to buy our own debt, with imaginary money.

We are a nation of slaves. That’s the revelation God gave me.

Borrowing unnecessarily is a bad thing. It puffs you up and makes you think you’re a bigger deal than you are. Our roads are full of cars driven by people who can’t afford them. A big car with a note on it makes you look blessed, but to get it, you have to put a curse on yourself.

Borrowing is a way of cursing yourself in order to fake a blessing.

The Bible says God brings wealth without remorse. Here is Proverbs 10:22: “The blessing of the Lord makes one rich, And He adds no sorrow with it.” If you’re borrowing in order to look successful, expect sorrow.

Every so often, I see a nice car on the back of a Jerr-Dan truck. It was more common back when the stock market crashed. I’m sure one or two of those cars had mechanical problems, but usually, a nice car on the back of a truck is a repo. Someone couldn’t pay his bills, and the real owner took the car back, in front of the neighbors. That’s what will happen at judgment. A lot of people–especially prosperity preachers–will come before God with pride and thick resumes, and God will put their ill-gotten trinkets on his truck and take them away. Metaphorically.

That’s no way to live.

America is sitting on a pile of wealth it can’t pay for. Sooner or later, there will be a bill. Then we’ll find out how well our new economics really works.

A funny thing about debt is that it makes you feel better…until it makes you feel worse. It makes you weak, but it makes you look and feel strong. We’re already poor. We only lack the appearance of poverty. That encourages us to keep borrowing.

Here is how the universe works: every once in a while, a servant who hates his position and has no patience overthrows his master, takes what he has, and stands on top of him crowing like an idiot. Then order reasserts itself, the master is restored, and the servant is way worse off than he was to begin with. That’s the story of Satan and God. It’s the story of debt. If you don’t serve God, it’s your story, too.

God will not be mocked. He always balances the books. He is patient, but if you don’t work with him, sooner or later, you will pay what you owe, plus a penalty for disobedience.

I have a few loose ends in my life, and I’m fixing them up. Thank God, they amount to nearly nothing. I’m glad I don’t wake up every day realizing I have to go and do something I hate in order to pay for, say, a car I already wrecked. I wish America were as safe as I am.

If you want to be blessed, give yourself completely to God and keep praying in order to become aligned with his will. Giving money to TBN leeches won’t help you; it will make things worse. Your own schemes won’t help. You have to come by what you have in the correct way.

By the way, I have something that will be very helpful to you. I like to play Christian music all day; I even play it in my bedroom when I’m not around. Yesterday I pasted a bunch of MP3’s together to create one 10-hour long file, and I put it on a DVD. If you do this, you can put it in a disk player and keep the music going all day. You could also leave a Christian radio station playing, but a lot of their material is just worthless dance music. I bought five Julie True albums, and that’s what I use. Try it for three days. You’ll understand why I like it.

If you play her music around people who dislike God, it makes them very uncomfortable. It’s something to see.

It will be interesting to see what happens as Americans reap what they’ve sown. It’s already interesting, but it will get more intense.

Hope this is useful to you. Let me know.

This Will not End Well

I can’t seem to learn from my mistakes! Today I looked at The Drudge Report again.

I found a link to a story about Oklahoma Satanists. They are planning to rent out a hall and have a blasphemous ceremony called “the Consumption of Mary.” I looked it up, and the reference I found–probably Wikipedia–said it involves putting a statue of Mary inside a triangle, dancing around it, cracking the head off, and eating a pig heart which has been concealed inside it. Yes, adults do this.

I completely understand atheists. The world is messed up, so they think it’s impossible for a good God to exist. A thinking person could take that position, wrong though it is. But what’s with people who believe in God and choose to hate him? How is that supposed to pay off in the end?

Why do they hate Christians so much? Is it because we run so many charities and fund so many hospitals? Is it because we believe in forgiveness and love? What, exactly, are we doing that gets under their skins?

When you work hard on creating an extremely offensive ceremony like the Consumption of Mary, you clearly have cruelty issues. You’re not looking for a peaceful way to express your views. You’re looking to torment people you dislike. You know there are emotional Christians out there who will lose their minds over your actions, and you delight in making them suffer.

A lady named Mary K. Baxter wrote a fascinating book in which she claimed she had been given a tour of hell. She said there were people there who were extremely disappointed in Satan. Maybe I shouldn’t put it so flippantly. She said there were people there who, during their lives, seriously thought Satan could defeat God, and that Satan would reward them with kingdoms of their own. They arrived in hell and were shocked to learn that Satan doesn’t keep his promises.

Is that the mindset of the unfortunate Satanists in Oklahoma? Is Satan their crooked retirement counselor?

If you believe Satan is real, you probably believe a lot of what the Bible says about him. The Bible says he’s a liar, and it also says God defeats him effortlessly, whenever he wants. How could you put your faith in a loser like that?

I am more disturbed by what’s happening in the hearts of the Satanists than by the ceremony itself. Mary is in paradise, and despite what some Catholic drivers may believe, she is not in a statue. You can’t put a pig heart in her. You can’t trap her in “the Triangle of Solomon.” I’m not worried about Mary, nor am I worried about the harm the ceremony will do to Christians (i.e. none).

Some people get very upset by sacrilegious acts directed toward objects. It doesn’t rattle me that much. If you want to burn Bibles or pee on crosses, I will be offended, but I will go on with my life. I wouldn’t do anything if I saw a demonstrator burning a statue of Christ. Statues and Bibles are things; viewing them as more than that is a gateway to idolatry. Muslims think the Koran IS God, and there are many, many Muslims who would kill anyone who harmed a copy. That’s not me. As long as you pay for them, burn all the Bibles you want. You’re supporting Christian publishers.

The rot in the hearts of Satanists is the real problem. They love evil and lies so much, these things are walls and strongholds to them. A person who doesn’t live in a stronghold of deception can be reached with reason and love. Once the walls go up, only supernatural warfare can bring them down, and most of the time, even that won’t work.

Here’s something else that disturbs me: Satanists use supernatural tools to fight Christians, and we fight back by carrying signs and making Internet comments. Occultists have way more faith than we do. They rely less on carnal tools. They know curses and prayers to fallen spirits work. We think relying on prayer is lazy or unrealistic; we actually criticize Christians who pray instead of “doing something.”

We should be praying and repenting all day. That would fix the problem. I don’t think those “Jesus rules” signs are going to help much.

Over the last day I’ve been thinking about myself and America a lot. I’ve noticed that the more I’ve turned to God, the more problems have fallen away from me. Even silly things, like the strange little flies that used to breed in my shower. I couldn’t get rid of them; nothing worked. They buzzed around me for years, and then one day I realized I hadn’t seen them in a very long time.

Defying God causes problems in life. They won’t be obvious to people who are spiritually blind, but they do pop up. Defying God gives your enemies power. They can go before God and get permission to defeat and abuse you. Defiance will make you sink lower and lower, and you will start to find that people and beings you used to defeat easily walk all over you.

This is what’s happening to America. Satanists aren’t using public buildings to hold ceremonies because we don’t wave signs or because our views on tolerance have “evolved.” They’re doing it because our defiance gave them power. They have God’s permission to do it.

It’s not just Satanists. It’s jihadis, illegal aliens, black racists, gays, enraged feminists, socialists, and every other type of confused, spirit-infested individual.

I love being raised up past my problems. It’s terrific. I want more of it. But it seems like America sinks while I rise. If that has to be true, then I’m fine with it. I can’t carry people with me, and there is no way I’m going to join them in defeat. But I do wish it weren’t happening.

We have a president who was raised by communists, and one of his best friends is a terrorist who admits he’s guilty. A person like that shouldn’t be able to get a job as a TSA agent, let alone as chief executive. We knew what he was, and we chose him over a war hero and a competent governor. People like Obama could not get traction in the past. God slapped them down. God doesn’t do that as much as he used to. The ground underneath us has changed, because we think we are the source of our own blessings.

The people I used to natter and grumble with in the conservative Blogosphere are chasing their tails. For the most part, they’re just making things worse. They think we need this carnal solution or that carnal solution. It won’t help. When God is against you, there is no rock big enough for you to hide under. He is the worst enemy you can possibly have. There is absolutely no way to stop him.

Inside God, there is complete protection and peace. Outside of him, everything is margarine and saccharine. Everything that appears good is poisonous.

I’m getting used to the stories about sacrilege and blasphemy. Obsessing on problems you can’t change is a curse. I just wish people would turn around before it’s too late. I know most of them won’t. It’s a certainty.

Whoever you are, and whatever you’ve done, the door is open to you. The sooner you apply, the better off you will be.

I Miss Newspapers

I really have to quit checking the news as soon as I wake up.

Today I awoke and checked Drudge. I found a link to a story containing another link to a 2015 Milo Yiannopoulous story (I don’t even care if I spelled that right) about the destruction of the Nick Denton online empire. I went through a typical daisy chain of links, from one story to the next. By the time it was over, I felt sick to my stomach.

I’m not one of those people who say they feel sick to their stomachs when they really don’t. I mean I felt physical nausea.

Nick Denton created a site called Fleshbot. It was a porn site. I have certainly looked at porn, but I don’t know much about Fleshbot, except that it was very successful. Porn dealers are like drug dealers; their audiences can’t control themselves, so they keep showing up. It’s not hard to get rich selling something people can’t turn down.

Denton went on to create a bunch of oddly named sites that did well: Gizmodo, Gawker, Jezebel, Jalopnik, and Wonkette (possibly the most famous fake blog in history) are among them.

I’m not positive Fleshbot came first. You can check.

Anyway, the Denton conglomerate was (and is) a very sleazy operation. It exudes slime.

As everyone knows, Hulk Hogan killed the Nick Denton cancer. Hogan was videotaped committing adultery, and Gawker either published or linked to the video. Gay billionaire Peter Thiel, who had been outed by Denton, backed a lawsuit. Hogan won, and Denton was handed a fatal multimillion-dollar judgment, which is being enforced.

I’m going to check this time…I was right…YIANNOPOULOS made a list of people who should also sue Denton. It’s quite impressive.

Denton’s crew published a story about a man named Geithner–not a public figure, according to…Mr. Y….and suggested he hired a gay prostitute. They accused actor James Franco of raping a man. They helped leak a Quentin Tarantino script before the movie was produced. They published a lot of nude celebrity photos obtained from criminals. They published voyeur photos of the genitals of male athletes, without the consent of the athletes. Imagine how their wives and kids must feel.

The Internet tends to make people feel invincible, and it brings out their cruelty and arrogance. Denton’s lackeys developed a pattern of tormenting people online, for amusement as well as money, and as far as I know, the Denton apparatus has never expressed significant regret or a serious inclination to examine itself and make corrections.

The Yiannopoulos story appeared on the Breitbart site (Breitbart, himself, was no paragon of dignity or kindness), and the Breitbart site contains links to disturbing social media posts. It’s also full of poisonous comments from people on both sides of the political spectrum. I kept clicking, and I ended up reading a Slate story which was so mean-spirited I decided it should be my final destination for the morning.

The Slate article’s title: “The Heaving Pukes Who Write Gawker and Wonkette.”

This is public discourse in 2016. Slate is not a Blogspot site written by a tipsy anonymous accountant who likes to knock a few back after a ten-hour workday. It’s not a tabloid site. It’s the 2016 equivalent of a 1985 magazine you might have found in supermarkets.

“Heaving Pukes.”

The amazing conclusion I drew from my few minutes of websurfing was that I had underestimated the vileness of the Internet.

That makes sense, when I think about it. The godless leftist side of the Internet, which makes up maybe 80% of the bandwidth these days, is much more vile than the rest of the web. I have never been inclined to spend time on leftist sites. Even when I was behaving badly myself, I was put off by the astounding obscenity and cruelty of the leftist Internet. That means I didn’t get a representative sample of the Internet’s content. As bad as my experience was, it was filtered.

Many people have spent more time reading godless garbage than I have, and a lot of them don’t mind it. They don’t mind when a lesbian crazy threatens to sexually mutilate a conservative writer with her teeth. It doesn’t bother them when someone threatens to have sex with another person’s dead skull. Cruelty and filth bring them pleasure. They titter and smirk.

That’s what America is good at these days; tittering and smirking. We are losing our manufacturing capacity, but we have the Internet, The Family Guy, South Park, Deadpool, and The Hangover.

Man, this place is sick. And of course, I used to contribute to the sickness. I sowed; now I’m reaping.

People need to step back and think about what they’re making of themselves. This is not going to end well. And even if there were no lawsuits or other worldly repercussions to think about, what about the inward cost? What about the penalty of simply being the kind of person who swims gladly in a world of vomit?

To Shakespeare, the worst price a villain paid was to be a villain. People don’t understand that concept. Do you really want to wake up at the age of 60, hung over, in a bed that smells like cigarette ashes, with no real friends and nothing to show for yourself except herpes and a monument built from congealed bile? That’s the future for Internet denizens who love hate.

Unless you’re mentally ill–maybe even then–you can’t hate other people habitually without coming to hate yourself. Hate is a habit that operates without your conscious consent, and when you don’t give it a target, it will find one for itself. When you’re not ideating about cruelty to others, you will find yourself inwardly contemning and ridiculing the creature you have made of yourself.

You will be right.

America is like a hate slingshot. With the help of the Internet, we have been building up hate energy. We have been embracing, approving, and feeding our cruelty. We have outed ourselves as cruel, the way gays out themselves as gay, and like gays, we’re proud of what we are. We are pulling the slingshot pouch back. One day we’re going to release it without the buffers of keyboards and monitors. We will act directly, with our hands and feet, not just our words. We are being turned into the kind of people who can put other people in gulags and death camps.

Where do you turn when the world rains burning sulfur? Earth didn’t come with an escape pod. There is no natural shelter. When America turns into a killing field, there will be no other America to flee to. This was the last refuge. You better give yourself to God and find his protection while you still can. You’re not going to develop that kind of relationship with him overnight. It’s time to get started. It may be too late to get everything you need.

I feel like turning the Internet off and going to live in a hole, but the hate culture has penetrated TV and daily life, so it wouldn’t protect me completely. Increasingly, the world is an extension of the Internet. What do you see when you turn on the news now? Tweets, Facebook posts, and Internet videos. You might as well plug into the Matrix and stop eating solid food.

America is not going to change for the better, but you are not America. You can take measures that will affect yourself and your family. I plan to keep moving forward. What’s behind me is not worth the trouble of turning around.

You Can Have Zeus

I am taking the day off.

Monday and Tuesday were not pleasant at all. I am still working on getting my dad’s business straight, and I am also taking care of my own loose ends. Today I just want to level off and relax.

I took my problems to God this morning, and as always, he was helpful. He reminded me that voices of worry and stress don’t come from him. They are lies. My father above, who is in control, has told me things are going to be fine, and he keeps living up to his word. There is no point in allowing lies from other sources to rattle me.

When I was younger, I worried about bad things happening to me, and sometimes they happened. Usually I was wrong, but I had some serious failures. Life isn’t like that any more. Things work out. My problem isn’t problems; my problem is doing a poor job of receiving the peace that comes from knowing my problems are fixed.

Writing that, I feel like FDR. He said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” He wasn’t really correct, though, as a lot of World War Two’s victims could tell you if they were alive. He was just trying to make people feel better. What I’m saying is true, because I have someone who backs it up.

I’m going to be fine. I’m not going to be poor. Peace and success will increase. I will get more and more inner healing. My character will improve. God’s help will flow more freely. I will feel better.

God makes it happen, not just because I say he does, but because he says he does, and because I am submitting to him instead of demanding favors while living in rebellion.

It took me many years to build the stronghold of bad habits and wrong thinking. It’s not taking nearly that long to tear it down and build God’s stronghold in its place. Of course, this time, someone stronger is doing most of the work for me.

Once again, I have to say I’m glad I’m not involved in the political demolition derby any more. It was a source of frustration and anger.

I used to love being a self-appointed conservative Internet avenger, linking to other blogs, writing vitriolic essays, and posting silly memes. It’s nice to be out of it. It’s nice to realize that fixing myself is more important and productive than fixing the country. It’s better to focus on the roots than the leaves.

America is dying. I suppose it’s good that there are carnal people out there making themselves miserable, trying to slow down the disease’s progression. Thank God I’m not one of them.

I’ve finally received some control over my participation in Internet squabbles. I haven’t been writing much political stuff here, but I still felt an irresistible urge to comment on news stories. This week I’ve been deleting my comments. That means the deluded and vicious people I argued with will “win.” That’s okay. Should I even have to tell myself that? Sane, healthy people don’t lie awake at night thinking the world will end if they give up a flame battle attached to a story on The Washington Post’s website.

The devil is a square dance caller, and he pairs people up on the Internet so they can dance for him. Like most square dancers, they go in circles. I don’t want to do-si-do with Amanda Marcotte, Andrew Sullivan, or Ann Coulter’s slavish fans. Those people are trapped in a sick fantasy world where nothing improves. It’s a video game, and Satan keeps resetting it.

https://youtu.be/m9SrXRNPRCA

I have accepted the fact that I have to support Donald Trump. After McCain and Romney, Trump is an easy pill to swallow. The alternative is unthinkable. It’s amazing that America has sunk to the point where we are seriously considering making Hillary Clinton the commander-in-chief. Who’s next? Rod Blagojevich? Al Sharpton? Charles Manson?

If I were still involved in political blogging, I’d probably create a T-shirt with Hillary’s photo on it and big text reading “TRUMP FOR PRESIDENT.”

Hillary may lose, but even if she does, sooner or later we are going to be ruled by extremely slimy, disagreeable leftists. We are going to be humiliated the same way the Russians and Cubans were. Trashy individuals who couldn’t hold jobs at McDonald’s will show up at our homes with guns to tell us our property belongs to the people. They will sit in our offices at our former businesses, running them into the ground. People who were complete losers in a fair capitalist system will have titles and goons, and we will bend the knee to them, just as Jews bent the knee to Egyptians, Babylonians, Greeks, Romans, and Nazis.

I’ll be very grateful if Trump buys us a four-year delay; eight years would be an unexpected bonanza.

I don’t think Trump will be as bad as his opponents predict. When the responsibility of the office hits him in the face, he will surely take off his clown shoes and work to make his administration a success.

I never communicate with conservative bloggers. I mean, not one. I never look at their blogs. The last one I looked at was The Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler. I used to love that blog. Last time I looked at it, I found it disturbing. I don’t want to share that kind of impotent fury any more.

In other news, the savage blow I took from The Aeneid still has me “bug-winding,” as people in Kentucky used to say. We don’t hear that expression enough. “Get off my porch, or I’ll knock you bug-winding.” I was something like 40% into Mackail’s horrific translation when I realized I was reading the wrong book. I got the Mandelbaum translation, and it was so much better, I decided it was best to start over. I think I’m on page 70-something out of 400.

Aeneas and Ulysses had to endure long, painful journeys filled with bloodshed and frustration. At times they felt they would never get where they were going. I can totally relate. I believe I’ve been working on this one-week reading assignment for a month. Or maybe it just seems like a month.

I’m still disgusted by the Greeks. I know Virgil was a Roman, but I think he captured the Greeks as well as Homer and the other Greek writers did. The Greeks were gung-ho about things like rape, enslavement, pillage, arson, and murder. They loved invading other people’s countries and destroying them. They were horrible people. But they loved calling each other stupid things like “pious” and “guiltless.”

What kind of religion calls you pious and guiltless while you’re running around murdering everyone you see?

The weird thing about the Greeks in the classics is that they moan and whine about the suffering that comes from war, while they’re in the midst of initiating or prolonging it. They’re just like the Crips and the Bloods. They want pity and admiration for self-inflicted misery.

The Olympics are in session right now; it’s a good time to comment on the Greeks. Like Olympic athletes, the Greeks were obsessed with things that have no real importance; things that do not last. If you criticize the Olympics, people treat you like you kicked a puppy, but the whole thing is a misguided festival full of neurotics and self-worshipers, and at night, it’s an orgy.

I don’t really care who runs a hundred meters the fastest. I can’t believe anyone can make a living doing that. I can’t believe people will make you rich for pole vaulting or lifting a barbell.

How can any woman be proud she spent six hours a day for twelve years, learning how to hop around on a balance beam? Think of the things she could have done with that time. She could have learned four languages. She could have learned to play and compose music. She could have had a social life.

What do you do at age 25, when your world-class gift no longer exists? Hello, public speaking! I guess. “Here’s a motivational story about something unimportant I did not nearly as well as today’s athletes, back before I gained sixty pounds…”

Here’s an interesting thing the Olympics and the games in the Greek classics have in common: they produced a lot of losers and very few winners. People love to say it’s a great honor to represent your country in the Olympics, and that no one really minds losing. That’s not very credible. No one who doesn’t mind losing has the temperament to exchange childhood and a normal hormonal profile for a chance at some plated medals. Top athletes can’t stand to lose. It haunts them.

When a huge number of people engage in an activity and nearly all of them emerge as dejected losers, it seems to me that it’s an indication that it’s not a good investment of time. Imagine what it would be like if you could feel all the heartbreak inside the Olympic athletes as they participate in the cruel closing ceremony.

P.S.: doping. Everyone since about 1965 gets an asterisk.

We took our unfortunate love of sports from the Greeks. I’m glad we’re not quite as vain and shallow in all areas of life.

I don’t care all that much what happens to Aeneas. He’s a miserable, violent, greedy, vain person. Reading about conflicts between the ancient warriors is like watching a boxing match between John Wayne Gacy and Ted Bundy. None of them deserve to win. A good ending to their stories would be to see their slaves revolt and put them in prison.

Ovid is next. The book I ordered is here. I took a look, and it doesn’t look too bad. Virgil is not a hard act to follow, though. After the tale of blameless Aeneas, Naomi Wolf would seem like a vacation.

I still dread Cervantes.

You Become What You Love

Someone directed me to an article about Popes Benedict and Francis. I looked it over. Popes are not really within my areas of interest. I see them as distractions, outside the will of God.

It reminded me of one of the major problems with denominations that exalt human beings: they discourage the rest of us from connecting with God directly.

God never wanted us to have popes and special people called “saints.” That’s not how the kingdom of heaven works. It’s not a system with lots of levels, like the military. In God’s kingdom, there is God, and then down one level, there is you. That’s how it’s supposed to work. The Bible calls us his children, not his grandchildren.

In the Bible, the Greek word translated “saint” just means “person who belongs to God.” It doesn’t mean you can pull rabbits out of a hat or turn water into Pepsi.

I used to go to Trinity Church in Miami, and then I attended a place called New Dawn. Both were screwed up. They exalted preachers above everyone else. They gave people the ideas that preachers were closer to God than they were, and that this was okay. It’s not okay. It’s not even a little bit okay.

Many preachers want to be worshiped. They want to be little gods to their flocks. They have teams of people who screen them from the masses. They keep their distance, except when they pop out to act for the cameras and convince people to send money or give them obedience.

At the churches I went to, “submission to authority” was the excuse. A centurion told Jesus he was a man under authority, so somehow, preachers turned that into a basis for Kommandant status. Preachers turn themselves into emperors. Criticize the emperor, and he tells the flock to ostracize you. He says God will curse you, although the real curse is being under a little man with delusions of grandeur. He stands in front of the people and says, “Touch not my anointed and do my prophets no harm,” with no understanding of the word “anointed.”

The big cheese at Trinity had secret meetings about me when I left. When someone reported my Facebook account and got it canceled, the pastor at New Dawn put up a status that said, “God don’t like ugly.” I am completely serious. These characters questioned other people about me behind my back, as if merely knowing me were treason.

One preacher approached a friend of mine in the church parking lot and started yelling at him about me, waving his fingers in his face. My friend threatened to defend himself with a beating. Someone who was afraid the cops would get involved called me about it and asked if I could help.

When Moses was in charge of the Hebrews, some men prophesied without informing him first. Joshua, fancying himself the hall monitor of the Hebrew people, ran to Moses to tattle. Here’s the story, from Numbers 11:

But two men had remained in the camp: the name of one was Eldad, and the name of the other Medad. And the Spirit rested upon them. Now they were among those listed, but who had not gone out to the tabernacle; yet they prophesied in the camp. And a young man ran and told Moses, and said, “Eldad and Medad are prophesying in the camp.”

So Joshua the son of Nun, Moses’ assistant, one of his choice men, answered and said, “Moses my lord, forbid them!”

Then Moses said to him, “Are you zealous for my sake? Oh, that all the Lord’s people were prophets and that the Lord would put His Spirit upon them!”

Now we know he was prophesying about the baptism with the Holy Spirit, which most Christians will never receive. They don’t ask for it, or they think they already have it.

Look what Moses said. “Is your zeal for me, or for God?” That says it all.

Here is what Paul said about worshiping preachers:

Now I say this, that each of you says, “I am of Paul,” or “I am of Apollos,” or “I am of Cephas,” or “I am of Christ.” Is Christ divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Or were you baptized in the name of Paul?

I thank God that I baptized none of you except Crispus and Gaius, lest anyone should say that I had baptized in my own name.

When a church tells you popes, “saints,” or priests have something you can’t have, they lie to you and keep you defeated. They put you to sleep so you don’t reach your potential. They convince you it’s okay to do as you please all week, as long as you show up on Sunday, like a pair of dirty underwear headed for the washing machine. You don’t have to be good; the priests do that for you.

Every one of us is supposed to be dedicated to God, and every one of us is supposed to have victory in life.

If Popes were truly anointed, they wouldn’t be wrong all the time, and Francis definitely wouldn’t be a leftist. A leftist Christian is like a Nazi Jew. The left has always tried to kill us off and blot out God’s name. The Soviets used to teach kids to pray to Stalin.

As for the “saints,” they’re just replacements for the pantheist “gods.” “You don’t want to pray to Zeus any more? Fine. Now you can pray to St. Francis. Anyone but Jehovah.”

Any time you worship anyone or anything other than the Lord, you are worshiping Satan. That’s why Jesus is so intolerant. Anyone you pray to is an object of worship. The “saints” don’t answer prayers. If you pray to a saint and get an answer, it came from someone else.

Because I’ve been sitting around reading books by Greeks and Romans, I now realize pantheism is a bigger problem than I thought it was. I thought the Greeks and Romans had one set of “gods,” and the Egyptians and other heathens had different ones. That’s not true. The Greek pantheon came from Egypt. The names were different, but the basic pantheon was fundamentally the same. The Egyptians had temples dedicated to Greek spirits. The spirits rebellious Jews worshiped were the same spirits.

I haven’t checked, but I’ll bet the spirits Hindus worship are connected to Greek pantheism.

It appears that it’s wrong to think that there are lots of different pantheist religions. For the most part, it’s one religion with different names.

Rejection of pantheism has always been considered bigoted and extreme. The devil doesn’t mind if you worship Zeus, Krishna, the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Elvis, and Gitche Manitou. You can even worship Jesus right along with them; lots of idolaters claim to revere Jesus. What Satan hates is the exclusion of the defeated fake gods. If you worship the Jewish God alone, you are a troublemaker.

The devil has millions of people worshiping Mary. Pagans conflate her with Venus. She must be appalled.

Anyway, I do not think the pope is a helpful influence. And that was probably three times as true during the years when there were three rival popes. If you can’t know God personally, and you have to rely on a man in Italy to tell you about him, you must be doing something wrong.

I now see the world as a porous, hollow sphere filled with filth. That may not be physically correct, but it’s spiritually right. Hell is beneath us. Our job is to keep it there, and to bring the ways of heaven down to earth. Instead, we pull hell up to the surface. It soaks through, as though the earth were a ball of cloth surrounding a lump of bloody pus. We are pulling it to the surface, like John D. Rockefeller pumping oil. Almost literally, we are raising hell.

We rejected God, so now we are becoming like the inhabitants of hell; we are striving to emulate the losers of the universe. We dress like convicts, who are the biggest losers in society. We love their shaved heads, chin beards, and tattoos. Our speech is so filthy it’s almost nauseating. We are in love with sexual perversion. We love pride and cruelty. We’re supposed to make God our father and come to resemble him, but the way things stand, Satan is our father, and we grow more like him every day.

We lower ourselves toward hell by following spirits. The only way to lift ourselves up is to follow the Spirit of God. We’re not interested. God isn’t cool.

Churches make it worse by teaching us we’re not God’s children. We’re more like his fans, sitting in the back row of the upper deck of a stadium, as far from him as a U2 fan is from Bono. We don’t expect him to go home with us.

Things are going to get worse. Look after yourself. The sooner you change your mind, the more you will accomplish during your remaining time.

Rule Your House

I’m having the strangest morning. I feel wonderful.

I always feel good in the morning, but not like this. When I say I always feel good, I mean I always feel good physically, and I mean I don’t hate getting out of bed the way I did for the first few decades of my life. I don’t mean I always feel good inside. I’ve felt considerable stress lately. I had to fix it with prayer before I got started with the day. Today I felt stressed when I woke up, but now I feel like I just had a massage.

False doctrine is always a problem. Men who don’t know God make things up, usually because they love money, glory, and power. As a result, Orthodox Jews believe in reincarnation, and Catholics think priests shouldn’t marry. Charismatics believe God will give them a hundred dollars for every ten dollars they give Kenneth Copeland. Our religious authorities have made up a lot of poisonous doctrine, and we suffer because of it.

Testimony is better. If a truthful person testifies, we know that what he says happened actually happened. Testimony isn’t perfect, because people are often deceived by evil spirits and miracles performed by the devil; the Mormon church may have gotten its start through the appearance of a lying spirit. A person can give truthful testimony that misleads people. But when testimony is truthful, and it lines up with scripture and the inner witness of the Holy Spirit, it can’t be beat.

You can’t testify about something you didn’t witness. Nearly all of the world’s religious leaders haven’t witnessed anything. They repeat hearsay or deliberate lies. They give us strategies that don’t work. Instead of calling us up to walk on the water, they tie millstones around our necks. When we take their advice and fail, we are likely to give up on God altogether.

Why did I suddenly veer off into the area of false doctrine? Because I believe I feel good today because I gave up a cherished belief of Christians everywhere.

We believe that a human being has three parts: flesh, mind (or soul), and spirit. I accept that. Some churches teach that you can command your flesh or your mind, in the name of Jesus. I accept that, because it works pretty well. Many churches teach that the spirit of a saved person is perfect and doesn’t need any improvement. They teach that it’s supposed to be exalted above the flesh and body, with no need for input from anyone but God. That, I do not accept.

The Bible tells us the spirit of a prophet is subject to the prophet, meaning it has to obey him. On the cross, the mind of Jesus sent his spirit to the Father. In English, the verse says, “I commend my spirit.” In Greek, it means something like, “I place my spirit beside you.” It comes from Psalm 31, and the Hebrew word used there appears to mean something like “commit” or “entrust.” He was sending his spirit to the Father. His mind had that authority.

A person who prays in tongues has the power to turn it on and off at will.

It sure looks like our spirits have to listen to us, but if preachers tell us our spirits are perfect, and that they’re in charge, we are not likely to take authority and get things done.

Today I started commanding my spirit to do this and that, and to stop doing other things. I can’t tell you how much better I feel.

I live in Miami, which is full of rude people, and I spend time on the Internet, which makes Miami look like a Care Bears picnic. I am constantly subjected to provocation. I don’t want anger in my life, and I don’t want to live with the sensation that I am always balled up in a defensive stance. I developed the habit of commanding my flesh and my mind not to be angry. I commanded them in other areas. It works, but the effect is not as powerful as it could be. I think that’s because I wasn’t going far enough upstream, to where the problem really starts.

I used to blame other people for my anger, and it was not a hard thing to rationalize. People are a mess. Under the polite surface, there’s always a food fight going on. People say and do nasty things all the time. Eventually, I learned that I could not blame other people. Anger is a choice, and it becomes a habit. If I blame other people, I cede power over my heart to them. That’s a bad idea. I have a responsibility to be an authority over myself. Why would an intelligent person give control of his heart to someone who is against him?

I know people who love talking about “righteous anger,” as if it’s okay to be enraged all the time. I don’t know if anyone is immune to anger, and I doubt such people exist, because we know God gets angry. All the same, it seems obvious that if anger has to exist, it should be brief, and it should serve a purpose. It should not be in control. If you pet it and feed it and shelter it, it sits inside you and eats you alive while the people you’re mad at enjoy life, oblivious.

This morning I felt unwanted anger and stress, and I commanded my spirit to knock it off. I commanded it to forgive and to submit to the Holy Spirit. I did this along with the other spiritual warfare strategies I use every day.

Commanding your mind and your flesh produces results, but it’s different when you command your spirit. It works better. That shouldn’t be a suprise. Jesus said the spirit was willing but the flesh was weak. I think the spirit is quicker to obey.

When I was living in Israel, my kibbutz gave the volunteers a bus tour. I’ve written about this before. We went to the northern end of the country and visited the Banias, Mt. Hermon, and the nature preserve at Tel Dan. We went by the Sea of Galilee. The Banias, Mt. Hermon, and Tel Dan contain origins of the Jordan River.

Pure snow falls on Mt. Hermon, and it melts and goes into springs that contribute to the Jordan. The Banias is an old heathen shrine (named for Pan) at the base of the mountain. Its Latin name is Caesarea Philippi. There used to be a bubbling spring there, and pagans threw sacrifices into it, polluting the Jordan for the rest of its length.

Mt. Hermon (“Baal Hermon,” or “Lord of the Curse”) is where rebellious angels came down when they descended to earth and polluted mankind’s genes by fornicating with women. “Baal Hermon” is said to be the name of a false deity that was worshiped under the mountain.

The Sea of Galilee (farther down the Jordan) represents the earth, and the fish are people. The waters are the voices of men and spirits. The pollution of the Jordan is the spiritual pollution that bathes mankind.

When you command your spirit, it’s as if you’re going to the Jordan’s source and cutting off the unclean sacrifices.

I know that sounds strange, but God designed Israel to confirm his word.

Human iniquity starts in the spirit. If you don’t address it until it’s in your mind and flesh, you’re just stopping up a leak with chewing gum. What you want is to cut off the flow at the source. If your spirit is with you, then you don’t have to rely on your weaker parts to fix your problems.

The spirit is like a man in a marriage. It should be the head, not the tail. If a husband and father is screwed up, there isn’t much hope for the family. If he’s doing what he should be doing, the family will usually prosper. You have to get your spirit to wake up and move. That’s what I take away from this. You have to give your spirit feedback and call on it to live up to its obligations.

I don’t care if people think I’m crazy; that’s par for the course. The world will be against me no matter what I do or say, so I might as well be truthful.

Right now I can read the news without having to battle anger. I can think about my obligations without anxiety. I can consider the defeated state of the world without feeling despair. I want to hold onto this.

It’s nice to resist your counterproductive emotions, habits, and opinions, but it’s better to be rid of them.

Man-created doctrine tells us resisting temptation is the best thing we can do. Forcing ourselves to obey God, using willpower, makes us righteous. That’s not true. It’s better to have your heart changed so you don’t want to do evil. This is what God is talking about when he says he will write his law on our hearts.

Who would you rather have live in your spare room? A repentant pedophile who fights temptation every day, or a former pedophile who no longer has any interest in children? Which person would you say is “better”?

Before the crucifixion and Pentecost, we didn’t have much ability to change our hearts. We could choose to obey, but we couldn’t rewire ourselves. Now we can hack our character. That’s a much bigger blessing than a set of laws.

The things God is trying to give us are exponentially better than the worldly garbage we pursue every day. They are worth giving up ambition, pride, and pleasing the flesh. Earthly pleasures are like thin scabs on festering wounds. The Holy Spirit cleans the wound out and eliminates it. We are too deceived to realize this.

If you’re struggling with yourself, consider what I’m saying. No one expects you to carry everything by yourself.