Behold my Creation

Yesterday was a big day, tool-wise. I used CAD to design a part, and I managed to make my CNC lathe cut something using the design.

Notice I did not say I got a proper part; just that I got the lathe to use the design I made.

Here is the design; I’m not sure why I used a cell phone instead of a screen grab, but anyway:

That’s a tool handle. I don’t need a tool handle, but I figured it was the sort of thing I might want to make in the future, so I designed one.

Here is the part I actually cut:

As you can see, it’s a wee bit off.

Here is how CNC works, at least in my mind. You draw a part in a CAD program. You open the file in a CAM (computer-aided manufacturing) program, and it tells the computer how to write a Gcode file that goes to your controller. The controller–in my case a board–tells the machine motors what to do.

Essentially, the CAM program turns a picture into a path a tool follows as it cuts.

Last night, I learned that it gets even more annoying. I use Fusion 360, Autodesk’s free CAD/CAM program. In Fusion 360, you have to create something called a “setup” before you make your Gcode, and you also have to come up with a file called a “post processor.” I found this definition online: “The software that converts CL-file CAD/CAM data to specific machine tool commands is called a Post Processor.>

I don’t know what “CL” means, but I’ll let that pass.

The post processor communicates with the machine control program, which is the software that tells the control hardware what to do.

I guess this is not easy to follow. I’ll make a list.

1. CAD file
2. Setup
3. Post processor
4. CAM program ==> Gcode file
5. Control program
6. Controller
7. Motor amplifier
8. Machine motors

I think that’s about right.

Numbers 6 and 7 are pieces of hardware. My controller is a KFlop board, and my amplifier is a KStep board. The amplifier takes control signals from the controller and turns them into current that drives the motors.

LinuxCNC and Mach3 are control programs.

It’s a mess, isn’t it?

Fusion 360, like just about everything else in the CNC world, does not like lathes. At least it doesn’t like hobby lathes put together in garages. As a result, the creators made no effort–none–to make it work with Mach3’s turning software. That means it lacks a Mach3 lathe post processor file. I had to go dig one up. Other people had the same problem, predictably, so they came up with files that seemed to work. “Seemed.”

Installing a new post processor file in Fusion 360 is not fun. The program hides the location of its processor files. The trick is to open an existing file in Fusion 360’s editor, and it will display the path to all of the post processor files. Then you can move your file to that folder manually. Which I did.

There were problems.

First of all, the setup utility in Fusion 360 is not easy to work with. You have to set it for turning, and then you have to describe the uncut stock to it. You have to program a coordinate system into it, so it doesn’t run backward. You have to describe the tool you’re using. All the while, Fusion 360 will try to reset things after you’ve set them yourself. I have to get some help with that.

It uses language I don’t understand. I know about things like clearance and depth of cut, but Fusion 360 gets into “overlap” and “smoothing” and so on. It defines terms for you…sometimes. The way you bring up the definitions is to hover over stuff you don’t understand. If you’re lucky, an explanatory popup appears. But sometimes you’re not lucky.

I did the best I could, and I sent the Gcode to Mach3. I had three major issues.

First, the x-coordinates don’t work. I kept telling the machinery where the tip of the lathe was supposed to start, but it kept deciding the +x side of the work was an inch closer to me than it really was. This meant that if I ran the program on a 3/4″ piece of Delrin, it missed the work entirely.

I wanted to see something happen, even if it was wrong, so I lied to the machine about the x location, and my lying wild guess was about 0.100″ off. As a result, the part is a lot skinnier than it should be. Not a catastrophe. I’m happy it exists at all.

Second, the cuts are way too deep. In Delrin, which is plastic, a mini-lathe can do a 0.100″ cut without crashing. Try that in steel. No way.

Third, the Gcode crashed my controller. I think it died when it hit a G0 command. I looked G0 up, and all I found was “rapid positioning.” Whatever it means, the lathe stopped moving, and the control board locked up and had to be restarted. The part was not finished.

Now I have to know: did the code kill the controller, and if so, is it a controller problem or a Mach3 problem? If it’s a controller problem, then the post processor I found is no good, and I have to find out how to fix it. I already know Mach3 and the controller get along. So basically, I need to go to MIT for three or four years and then come back and solve the problem.

I’m happy, regardless. I designed something. I turned it into a part. That’s progress.

Life is not all peaches and honey, however. I got some news about my sister. She left a homeless shelter at some point this year, and no one knows where she is. Yesterday a letter arrived, at an address she left long ago. Someone showed it to me. I can’t say what it was about, but it was bad news for her financially and in other ways. It will catch up with her eventually.

I used to be concerned because she had been disinherited. I used to pray for her inheritance to be restored. Now I know that was not a good idea, and I understand why God didn’t agree with my prayers.

It made me think, and it helped me understand some general truths about wealth.

I’m not sure people think clearly when they make their wills. They work hard all their lives, and they store up wealth that can be a tremendous help to their descendants. What happens when you leave that kind of gift to a person who has immense debt, or who spends profusely? It’s as if you put it in a pile and set fire to it. It vanishes.

Think about it. What if you have two kids; one has zero debt, and the other owes someone $500,000? Say you leave $250,000 to each kid; what happens? Immediately, half of your wealth is gone. It’s as if you never had it. The creditor takes it, and then the broke kid goes to the other kid and tries to get the rest of it, bit by bit.

If you have more than one child, and you cut off the children who have debt, their creditors can’t do a thing. You never owed them, and neither did the other children. The wealth is insulated from attack. It’s common sense, but people don’t seem to think about it. They leave money to children who are essentially bags with no bottoms. It goes right through them and into the hands of other people.

People sometimes favor their irresponsible children, saying they “need” the money. That’s like saying Charlie Sheen needs more coke. If you want to be Santa Claus, give money to people who have nothing. If you want to conserve wealth and bless your kids, give it to people who look after what they have.

Children who have debts feel they’re more entitled to inherit. That’s just denial.

The conviction that you have to give handouts to people indiscriminately is also denial. It can make their problems worse and add to yours, especially if the people you give money to are abusers you used to pray to be freed from. It’s like inviting a vampire into your house.

It’s a bad idea to grab a tar baby once you’ve gotten loose. You’re asking for whatever misery ensues. Who will you blame? Will you go to God and ask him to free you again?

Some people have to keep repeating mistakes, and often, helping them is so costly, it doesn’t make sense. It’s not even help. It’s even worse when the people you try to help are folks who spend their time insulting you, lying to others about you, and scheming to take things from you. Generosity and compassion are extremely important, but you have to be very careful. You wouldn’t want to lend the bum on the corner money for bolt-cutters to rob your house.

I remember a time when I considered marrying someone who had debt. I didn’t know about the debt; I didn’t ask. Love conquers all! Thinking about money is tasteless and coarse!

That was stupid. Man, I was an idiot. I should have asked. If you marry someone who is debt-free, the cost of the wedding and honeymoon is your only immediate expense. If you marry someone who owes $100,000, you are immediately on the hook for the marriage, the honeymoon, and…$100,000. No one with any sense would spend a hundred grand on a wedding, but people do it every day without knowing it.

Instant cost of marrying debt-free spouse: $5000, if you’re sane. Okay, I didn’t include the ring.

Instant cost of marrying big spender: $105,000.

No.

Also, the debt a wastrel has at the time of marriage is just the beginning. It’s a tiny tumor that hasn’t blossomed yet. It will get much bigger eventually. No irresponsible woman ever decided that marriage was her cue to stop spending.

Marriage isn’t about money, but debt is slavery. It’s hell. Marry a slave; become a slave.

Jesus said those who had a lot would receive more, while those who had little would lose what they had. It’s true. People build or destroy, in every area of their lives.

I’m grateful for the people I can help. The rest just make me shake my head. I certainly hope I can be helped.

Blessings only go to people who can be blessed.

The Bible talks a lot about the fatherless. That’s me. You can have a father and be fatherless. If no one passes wisdom on to you when you’re young, you are fatherless. It’s disgraceful to be my age and to be surprised by wisdom other people accept at the age of ten.

God is a good father. He doesn’t just give you stuff you crave; that’s what pimps do to hookers. He teaches you. He improves you. He changes you so you have productive habits and thoughts. I wish I had known him decades ago, but, of course, fatherless people don’t have the wisdom to understand that they’re fatherless. I wasn’t interested.

I hope I still have enough time left to benefit from the things God shows me. If not, at least I get to relate them to younger people.

All is not Well

I feel like I should stop reading the news. The world is disintegrating around me.

The GOP rejected several excellent candidates and nominated Donald Trump. Hillary Clinton, whose husband was impeached and deprived of his law license, is ten points ahead in the polls. A Muslim immigration lawyer named Khan–a person who takes money in exchange for helping dangerous people remain in our country–has a Presidential candidate on the defensive less than a month after 84 people were killed by an Islamist truck driver.

All over the news I see the pronoun “she” being used to describe men who want to use women’s bathrooms. Journalists are bending the knee to self-deluding people from a violence-prone movement that supports criminals like Michael Brown against the police. News stories feature foul language in their headlines. “Serious” websites are full of picture links to stories about “wardrobe malfunctions.”

Is this reality?

I feel like I woke up in the world of Idiocracy, a film by Mike Judge, the creator of Beavis and Butt-head. In that world, everyone is stupid and vile. It’s as if everyone on earth had been sterilized except for the Occupy Wall Street crowd, and their foul offspring had multiplied to fill the earth.

I don’t know why Mike Judge felt qualified to comment negatively on the debasement of American culture, since he got rich pouring gasoline on the fire.

Here’s a bit of the movie. Expect bad language.

How filthy are we going to get? I don’t think there’s a limit. The human race has produced people who killed others and then saved their dead bodies for posthumous rape. It has produced pedophiles who tortured children to death and recorded their agony to enjoy later while pleasuring themselves. It appears that the bottom is pretty far down.

Any slimy, vicious thing a chimpanzee can do, a human being can surpass. Without the Holy Spirit, we are just frail chimpanzees with higher IQ’s.

I feel bad for the world, because I know what’s happening. God’s patience is coming to an end. We are almost at the point where he will withdraw the mercy that has kept this planet functioning since the fall of Adam. He will look down and decide the return on investment just isn’t there any more. Destruction will come, and we will react not with repentance, but by hating God even more.

I wish there were a bus terminal I could go to, for a ticket to some place else.

The earth is much more like hell than heaven. Hell is literally on earth, under the surface. Heaven is far away. We should be pushing the stink of Satan farther down below the earth’s crust. Instead, we’re doing all we can to bring it to the surface.

Is Kim Kardashian really getting rich, appearing on reality TV and exposing her tiresome body on the Internet? Is that actually happening? Are millions of Americans really sitting down every week to watch this imbecile? I can’t make my mind swallow that.

Are we really putting Satanic displays up on government property? Did I dream that?

I’m imperfect like everyone else. From God’s standpoint, I’m a nasty item. I have done all sorts of immoral things. I have caused a lot of suffering. I don’t want to hold myself out as a morally superior person, but I know that I’m entitled–obligated–to observe and criticize what’s happening around me.

God puts us through things to show us what his job is like. I made the inside of myself filthy, and for decades, I didn’t listen to God. It makes sense that after turning back to him, I would get to experience the sensation of being surrounded by filthy people who don’t listen and can’t be fixed.

This place is a mess. I know God leaves us here so we can reach others, but whenever he decides my job is done, I am ready to go. Keep my stuff; you can have the rattle and the soiled onesies. Just let me out.

It’s a bizarre situation. The more God corrects you and makes you useful and ordered, the more the world hates you. This place makes no sense at all.

Well, that’s wrong. It makes sense, and it’s predictable. But people behave extremely irrationally.

I’m thinking about the people who jumped from the World Trade Center. They hung on as long as they could, and when the flames got close enough, they decided death from a fall was better than death by burning, so they let go.

This world is not worth hanging onto. It will not help you; it has no mercy. If you belong to God, you’re like a splinter it’s trying to expel from an infected wound. It doesn’t want peace. It doesn’t want coexistence. It wants you gone, the way Muslims want Israel gone. The way the Germans and Austrians wanted the Jews gone.

I feel like I’m walking on a vast plain of pure, deep dog excrement, wearing snowshoes. I have to be here a while longer, so I want to avoid sinking any farther than I have to.

What must it be like, to live in a world that works? I can’t imagine it, any more than I can imagine being part of a healthy family.

Judges are stupid and dishonest. Presidents are incompetent. As much as I detest Black Lives Matter, the police are so crazy we had to craft the Bill of Rights to keep them from destroying us. The world is completely insane; our authorities are as unreliable as thin ice. What will it be like when Jesus returns to rule? I wish I could see it.

Imagine having a one-world government with a king who has unlimited power and never makes a mistake. That’s the future, after the purge. I would give anything just to spend a week there and look around.

Turn away from this disaster. Don’t hold on too long. Your side lost; you can’t make it work. God’s people will be driven off the earth temporarily, but after that, we receive the eternal victory which is already assured. Don’t sell your future for a bowl of soup.

Coach is no Place for a Prince

More info is coming in.

Last night I was in prayer, and I kept hearing the word “churl.” In dictionaries, this word’s primary definition equates it with terms like “peasant” and “hick.” That may be the definition they list first, but in reality, most people use it to refer to a lower-class person who is insolent, uncultured, stupid, and arrogant. Think of Kanye West.

In Shakespeare’s works, people who get above themselves are churls. A child who has no respect for a parent, or a servant who talks back to the king…that’s a churl. An ignorant young person who participates in a flash mob and robs a store is a churl.

King Lear should be called Revenge of the Churls. It’s full of low people suddenly thrust into high places. Of course, that means it’s also full of upper-class people thrust into low places of abuse and fear.

Lear starts the ball rolling by giving up his kingdom without thinking clearly or asking for advice. He allows his daughters to determine their shares by participating in a praise contest. Whoever spews the most ridiculous lies about her admiration for him gets the most stuff. As a result, predictably, the slimiest daughters get everything, and the honest daughter is banished.

He puts low people in charge, and they turn his world upside down. They take away his knights. They talk to him as if he’s a little boy who misbehaves. They let their snotty, lower-class servants abuse him. They tear the eyes out of one of his nobles, and they promote the noble’s illegitimate son, who already had a sweet deal that was nothing to complain about.

His friend Kent, obviously a noble, is banished and put under threat of execution.

In the Lear world, up is down and down is up. It’s like a preview of this week’s Democratic convention.

In the supernatural realm, Satan, the fallen angels, and the demons are churls. And as churls will, they have assumed temporary power over their betters. People who serve Satan tend to be churls.

A long time ago, God told me this: “Satan is a loser.” Sounds like a harsh thing to say, but then this is the same God who says he derides Satan and laughs at his defeat. God isn’t a wheedling punching bag full of marshmallows; his patience deceives people. He drowned the human race and burned children alive in Sodom. He built hell and the lake of fire.

Satan really is a loser. He’s like a ghetto punk who can’t get what he wants honestly and ends up pimping and selling drugs. He wants God’s power, along with worship, without his righteousness.

Satan is like a moron who lives in the guest bedroom of his mom’s trailer and makes meth in soda bottles. He’s like a food stamp recipient who wears Air Jordans and plays video games all day. He can’t cut it. He’s a malodorous failure who can only get the things he desires temporarily, through lies and fakery.

The demons, which are the offspring of angels and women, are losers, tool. They’re illegitimate. They have no inheritance and no future. They can’t do anything good; it isn’t in them. Their time is taken up with malice and cruelty directed at human beings. They see us as pampered younger children, which is what we are. It tears them up to see us receive God’s help, when they’re all headed for eternal pain and humiliation. The fact that God took our punishment must drive them out of their minds. I’m sure they talk about how unfair it is.

Churls think they’re victims. That’s why they’re so ready to do evil to better people. It’s why they key nice cars and steal things from people’s yards. If you have something, it was supposed to be theirs, so stealing isn’t wrong; it’s reparations. If your country is nicer than theirs, it’s not because they make their country a miserable place where no one can succeed; it’s because you stole their land.

Of course, if they got what you have, they would destroy it fast. That’s their nature. They don’t build; they destroy. Look what happens to lottery winners who have no class. Look at Rodney King, an instant millionaire who died broke.

There is a famous canard among minority philosophers: “It’s impossible for minorities to be racist, because you can’t be racist if you have no power.” Okay, so if you hate other people because of their color, and you do your best to kill them, but you’re not part of the majority…what are you? If not a racist, then what? A saint?

No, obviously, you’re a racist. Your canard is just a shield that protects the filth in your heart. You just want an excuse to hurt other people.

Christians live in defeat because we think churl spirits can’t live in us. Backward preachers tell us demons don’t exist, or that they’re just bad parts of our own personalities. They tell us demons do exist, but we’re too good to have them; people who have demons always foam at the mouth and roll on the ground. We think there are no churls ruling us, so we leave them in power, and we die of disease and other causes. We live in misery, ruled by supernatural enemies and the vile people they bring against us.

We lack authority because we don’t identify with God in our hearts. We go to church to get forgiveness, or just to feel good, or to find dates. We want to give God just enough of ourselves to make life tolerable. That means we choose the churls over the king, so when we appeal to the king’s authority for help, we usually don’t get much. He’s like a rich aunt we only visit when we want money; why should he help us?

Last night God reminded me: we are not supposed to be part of the universe’s defeated lower class. We are supposed to be nobility. More specifically, we are supposed to be royalty; each one of us should be a prince or princess, very literally. We don’t accept the role, so we don’t get the perks.

It sounds elitist to talk about class as though it were a good thing, but history vindicates me. Who would you rather be stuck in a lifeboat with? Prince Charles and his family, or a mix of Baltimore protesters, Bernie Sanders socialists, white supremacists, and La Raza members?

Aside from that, my real subject is supernatural classes, not earthly classes. I’m not saying only people with money are good. As Paul said, not many people who are wise, mighty, or noble on earth are called.

The word “noble” doesn’t just mean “high born.” It also means full of grace and altruism. A person with a noble heart is better than a person with the heart of a grasping peasant. Whatever your heart is like right now, God is ready to change it and turn it into the heart of a prince. It doesn’t matter whether you rule a country or rake leaves for a living.

If you think you don’t have demons, you are sheltering them and keeping them in control. Jesus said his followers would cast them out, but not many people are doing it, and those that try are usually using one hand to cast them out and the other to hold them in. Without confession and accountability, you’re asking for a prince’s privileges coupled with a stooge’s heart and mind. The filth inside you will hold the spirits that squat in you, the same way poop holds flies.

Jesus is very elitist. He welcomes the poor and people who aren’t bright, but he calls the class of people who reject him “swine.” He calls them “the dead,” “whitewashed tombs,” and “dogs.” When he cast demons out of a man who lived in a cemetery, they ran into pigs. This was a demonstration of his opinion of people who prefer Satan to him. That’s the majority of humanity. The man lived with the dead, and the pigs were like unbelievers.

The spirits that control you are like crackheads who break into your house, beat you in front of your family, and force you to cook and provide for them. They are losers. They spread their filth and darkness in you; that’s why so many people who are heavily controlled by demons keep their homes dark and let filth accumulate until it stinks. Hell is a dark place that stinks. The presence of the wicked makes it that way.

You’re submitted to the Holy Spirit, who wants you to receive a kingdom, or you’re submitted to filthy, stinking churls who want to eat you while you’re still alive and then drag you to their prison to share their punishment. There is no middle alternative.

The universe makes a lot of sense. We think it doesn’t because the people who came before us rejected wisdom and failed to pass it on. We don’t understand the things they understood. You have more control over your suffering than you think.

The more I give myself to God, the better things get. The more I ask for criticism, and the more I agree with it and ask for help, the fewer problems I have with my enemies. This is what God wants. You’re not supposed to live however you want and come to church every week so God can change your diaper. You’re supposed to let him potty-train you.

I have to be what victimhood cultists call “self hating.” I don’t hate myself, of course. But I have to reject the culture I come from. Appalachia is messed up. America as a whole is not quite as backward, but it’s bad enough to be doomed. The counterproductive traits I’ve cultivated in myself, which are not necessarily related to my culture, are messed up. I reject all of it. I want the culture of heaven. I want to be of the race, nation, and family of God.

If you tried to say that at the Democratic Convention, they would burn you alive. Culture is sacred (unless it’s mainstream culture). Speak Spanish on the job! Cover yourself with ghetto tattoos! Be rude and surly. Be a racist. Hate men. Attack white people. Don’t accommodate. Be proud and unwilling to change, because pride is better than gold!

The supernatural realm is perfectly polarized. We think it’s bad here in America, among people, but we’re wishy-washy and moderate compared to spirits. Spirits literally hate God and want to abuse and kill him, or they love him and want to serve him without any thought of backtalk. It’s too bad we can’t see the spirits we side with every day. We would realize how many of our backward cultural ideas are actually demonic and poisonous.

I don’t want to be ruled by supernatural peasants who should be lower than slaves. I want to see them pushed out of my life. I don’t want their filth-loving human servants to be able to lead me around by a hook in my nose. Whatever I have to part with in order to get free is worthless compared to the benefits.

The farther you go into the kingdom, the more you alienate yourself from human beings. Their hatred of you increases; the rejection increases. Be happy about it. People are treacherous, and they carry transmissible problems. Limiting your exposure is a good thing.

I almost never hear from my relatives. Local people who used to call themselves my friends cut me off when I started going to church. Good. If you’re not with the program, you’re not going where I’m going, anyway.

Here’s to class mobility. I plan to take advantage.

Your Body; the Left’s Choice

I knew better, but I clicked on a link to The Washington Post. I have only myself to blame. The headline I clicked said, “As a young evangelical, I believed a bestselling book that warned me to stay ‘pure’ until marriage. I still have a stain on my heart.”

Weird way to write a headline.

You really have to see the core “argument,” in order to believe it:

Purity culture taught me that I ought to be passed down from father to husband, more an inheritance than a human. I was taught that men are my cover and my shield, when for the most part they have been the ones causing damage through molestation, rape, and abuse. I was taught that my holy calling was to open my legs for one and only one and bear him children. Barring that, I was to keep them closed and never express desire or lust or fear or longing. So many women in my life cracked under the untenable pressure, often giving up on God all together. Others were forced into marriages with men who hit them and hid their abuse behind another message of the church borne from purity culture, that God hates divorce.

Are you kidding me?

This isn’t a Christian led by the Holy Spirit. She’s probably not a Christian at all. It reminds me of the famous Internet comment lead-in: “As a lifelong Republican,” which means, “As an extreme leftist who posts comments, pretending to be conservative.”

Maybe there is a church out there somewhere that teaches women they are their fathers’ possessions. I have never heard that doctrine. I’m pretty sure it disappeared during the Renaissance.

The line about women “forced” into marriage is classic victimhood spiel. Who “forces” women into marriage in 2016? I mean, not including Muslims? This isn’t the Middle Ages. Christian parents are some of the most passive people on earth. A typical evangelical would rather walk off a pier than “judge” his daughter or tell her whom to marry. The “judge not” crowd has us penned into a dark corner, like Moonies at an airport. The devil talked us into unilateral disarmament.

Is it possible that there are non-Christian women who slept around a lot and still ended up in abusive marriages? Just maybe. Call me crazy, but I believe that. Or maybe Mike Tyson was a virgin when he got hitched.

Suddenly, purity is human trafficking. Fathers and husbands of pure brides are pimps. Insane. We have entered the age of virgin-shaming.

But it’s not surprising, from a woman who clearly feels hostility toward men (not the typical evangelical attitude). She says, “I was taught that men are my cover and my shield, when for the most part they have been the ones causing damage through molestation, rape, and abuse.” Did Rachel Maddow write this?

It’s a remarkable thing. Suddenly promiscuity is wise, and purity is perilous and foolish. If you can believe things like that, there is probably no lie you can’t swallow.

If you aren’t baptized with the Holy Spirit, you can be persuaded to believe things that go against doctrine and your upbringing. You have weak walls. This is why Jesus told the disciples not to do anything until he gave them power.

I looked at the comments, expecting to gag, but even the Post’s readers were not completely on the side of sleaze. That surprised me.

I keep getting these not-at-all subtle reminders: “America’s goose is cooked. Stop thinking about fixing it.” I have stopped. I will not resume. It’s like the feeling you get when you realize God wants you to stop trying to reform someone who has already decided not to listen. Often it’s okay to let people destroy themselves. God does it every day.

You’re not really letting them destroy themselves; you’re just acknowledging that you can’t help them.

I got some interesting comments about The Aeneid, which is now high on my list of least-favorite books. One commenter pointed out that it’s actually a poem, and that prose translations suck the life out of it. Another person said I should consider a different translation.

These comments make sense. Imagine reading The Rime of the Ancient Mariner in prose form. Not something I would look forward to. It would be a terrible book. You would have to change everything about it to make it digestible.

The translation I quoted in an earlier post keeps rhythm and rhyme in the poem (I am assuming the original rhymed so I don’t have to look up the Latin). It’s considerably more palatable than the version I’m reading. It’s broken up into short lines, which makes it less imposing. My translation is just a wall of letters.

I wanted to use the translations Columbia College used, so that’s what I bought. I’m sure they have a good reason for subjecting students to the version I have. Just like they have a good reason for coed showers.

My new strategy is to use my phone to read the book. The screen is small, so it breaks the prose up into little pieces that cause less pain going down. But maybe a different translation is the way to go. I’m not going to remember this stuff anyway, so it shouldn’t matter much. I just have to convince myself I’m not cheating.

Sooner or later, I have to tackle Don Quixote, which weighs a good pound and a half in paperback. Maybe I should give it a pass. I had to read it for another course at Columbia. There was a strange old guy who was held out to be a great genius, and his Don Quixote course was a Columbia College staple. I failed to perceive any signs of genius–I thought he was boring and barely coherent–but then you don’t have to be Marilyn vos Savant to do well in the Liberal Arts. You just have to memorize well and pretend you agree with your warped leftist teachers.

Maybe he was a different person if you dealt with him one on one, but everyone I knew thought he was an empty suit. Nice guy, I think. Smiled a lot. A LOT. It was a little strange.

He kept calling Don Quixote “the quicksut.” No idea what that was all about.

I may get yammered at for this, but it seems like Spanish-language literature is not on the same level as literature in English, French, German, whatever language the Scandinavians write in, and Russian. There goes my diversity merit badge.

Spain-boosters always cry, “Cervantes!”, when you say this. I don’t think Cervantes was all that good; Rabelais did the same kind of thing with much more skill and erudition. If you skip forward a few centuries, you run into Borges and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I like Borges okay, but I thought Four Hundred Years of Solitude was windy, coarse, and pointless. The world is bad. Babies get eaten by ants. Okay; what are you trying to get at?

It may be that Spanish-speaking authors get an automatic push to the front of the line, like black directors. Okay, I apologize. Spike Lee really is a genius. The only reason his stuff goes straight to DVD is that the general public is too unsophisticated to appreciate Oldboy.

I didn’t know that movie existed until thirty seconds ago. It does exist, right?

If Spanish literature were really good, you would see a wall of translations when you walked into Barnes & Noble in America, just as people surely see walls of translations when they walk into bookstores in Spain. If it’s good, it will be translated. Publishers like money. They like new markets for old merchandise.

Maybe Spanish literature is to French literature as Spanish brandy is to cognac. As everyone knows, the French have accomplished huge things in literature, as well as math and science. I’m sitting here trying, and I can’t think of a theorem, law, or principle named after a Spaniard. France, though…Poisson, Cauchy, Descartes, Pascal, Ampere, d’Alembert, Lagrange…and they invented the bidet. Maybe.

I guess the Spanish had other things on their minds.

Spanish brandy is really bad, by the way. I got fooled into buying it once. It was said to be the equal of French XO, at a fraction of the price. Don’t you believe it. I bought something called Le Panto, and it tasted like it had been made from cooking wine that had been left outdoors in troughs for a month. I did not finish the bottle. I’ve also tried Gran Duque D’Alba, which is like a cheap domestic brandy with sugar in it. I paid forty bucks for a bottle, as a gift. Never again. Now I get Korbel’s top offering, for $19. It’s excellent.

I hope Virgil is behind me soon. When this ordeal is over, I will be able to say I read the whole book, and that will put me in, I would guess, an exclusive group making up perhaps 2% of the people who took Lit. Hum.

The quicksut himself would stand up and applaud.

Now That You’ve Clicked, Take me Seriously

I generally look at Drudge in the morning, and today I was treated to a link to an article about naked dating shows.

This is really something.

A couple of days ago, I watched a movie filmed in the Forties. A man married a woman, and they had a problem that kept them awake. They discussed it…from separate beds.

That’s a little weird, but it shows how things have changed. Now we have single people on TV kids can watch, stark naked, examining each other like buyers at a slave auction.

Based on things I’ve seen in the past, I am going to guess that the people who make the show blur out the parts everyone wants to see, and that–OOPS–occasionally there’s an “accidental” peek viewers can pause and turn into a video capture.

An exposed rear end isn’t considered nudity any more. Go figure. They probably show those a lot.

The message came home to me: I am not ahead of the curve in announcing America’s defeat. I’m behind it. We are done. If the devil had a pop-out timer in us, it would have popped in about 2004.

Maybe I’m still too generous. How about 1990?

The end isn’t near; it’s here. Dawn has broken. I assume the only reason Satan isn’t moving faster is that he wants us to have time to acclimate. That way he can get us to jump through hoops that are still too disgusting for us in our present state.

I don’t know what to do. I haven’t been given instructions yet.

There’s an old movie called On the Beach. It’s not about naked volleyball. It’s about nuclear war. In the movie, the war is over, but the dying isn’t. The northern hemisphere is immersed in a cloud of lethal fallout, and because of the way the wind works in the movie, it takes a very long time to move below the equator. That means the Australians are sentenced to wait and see if they’ll be killed by radiation poisoning.

At first they have food and drink, and they continue with their lives. Everything is fine, except for the knowledge that death is probably on the way.

When they find out the situation is hopeless, they react in different ways. Many people poison themselves. Fred Astaire kills himself in a race car. It’s hard for them to decide how to deal with doom.

American Christians are on the beach. Our future is brighter than that of worldly Australians, because our future lies in another world. But our earthly prospects are bleak.

Wikipedia relates the term “on the beach” to two sources. One is the British military. They use the phrase to refer to vessels that are retired from service. The other source is T.S. Eliot, who wrote:

In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river.

So the Australians in the movie are avoiding talking about death. They are afraid of it. In this respect, their situation differs from that of Christians. We will talk about it a lot, and strong Christians will be more concerned about the destruction of the lost and the end of civilization than about their own deaths.

We’re coming up on our Peter moment. Deny God and get a little space to live, or acknowledge him and move on to something better.

People will be so glad to get rid of us. At least at first. Surely many of them will be upset to learn that they do a fine job of making each other miserable without us. The Germans and Austrians thought Jews screwed up their countries. If they had succeeded in killing them off and holding onto their empire, they would have found that some other group was a problem. People aren’t the issue. Hearts that aren’t influenced by the Holy Spirit are the foundation of strife.

If you’re full of hate, you can always find someone to blame and persecute.

Some people will miss us. Some will join us and invite murder. It will be nice to miss that spectacle.

I have to admit I’m full of morbid curiosity, wondering what 2020 and 2025 will look like. It’s hard to resist staring at a freak show or an accident scene. I suppose that’s a character issue I need help with.

I don’t want to see the Tribulation. Hell’s stink will soak through the earth’s surface and permeate everything. Nothing will go right. People will treat hate the way they should treat love. Cruelty will have no limits. God won’t restrict misery as much as he does now. Humanity will be lucky if it’s only as bad as Sudan and Somalia. I shouldn’t say that. It will be worse.

It’s such a strange thing to watch. People who hate God are going to see the new Satanic ethos as liberation. People who love God see it as what it is: a self-inflicted terminal disease. But then it’s not the first self-inflicted terminal disease.

I wish there was a cruise ship terminal I could drive to before things get completely insane. I could lean on the rail as the ship pulled out and the pierced and modified kooks on land threw rocks and their own excrement. I am ready to go. Curiosity notwithstanding, I have no desire to continue residing here after the decay curve steepens.

What will the signal of the end be? Maybe Naked Interspecies Dating.

I can barely look at the Internet any more. I think I’ll look around for some exhibits that illustrate our decline.

I’m glancing at some clickbait links. Here you go.

From Fox News: “M____’s body-paint look.”

From CNN: nothing. How about that? Liberal CNN is ahead of Fox on a moral issue.

The Daily Mail: “Making waves! D______ shows off her smoking hot body in a thong bikini as she enjoys a spot of paddle boarding with her adorable family in Ibiza.”

Agence France-Press: “Pilots and Flight Attendants Confess Dark Secrets,” with a photo looking up a woman’s skirt.

Time: nothing. Still holding on.

NBC: “Taylor’s Daring Style Leaves Little to the Imagination.”

The New York Post: “his Woman Giving Birth in a Stream Has Been Watched Over 54 Million Times (NSFW),” complete with a nude picture.

I’m surprised to see some sites behaving reasonably well. Bloomberg, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Politico haven’t lost it yet.

I don’t know what new shocks are around the corner. I suppose I should be content with what I’ve already seen. I look forward to whatever instructions I get. I want to keep improving and pull my feet up out of the cesspool as far as possible.

I don’t think any British news site has retained its dignity.

Your Parents are Just Breeding Stock

Yesterday I continued slogging my way through Plato’s Symposium. It’s like being forced to eat a chain-store pizza with a cat poo decorating each slice.

As I probably said in an earlier post, the book is about a bunch of gay Greeks sitting around drinking, talking about love. That’s actually wrong; they talk about “eros,” or “passionate love,” which really means sexual desire. It’s not what you and I think of as love.

They refer to love as a god over and over. That makes more sense if you think about Eros with a capital “E.” He’s the little round guy we think of as Cupid, the son of Venus. His name is a building block of the word “pederasty”; the “eras” comes from him.

I didn’t have a professor to explain this to me. I have a feeling they don’t push this angle at Columbia University, the school where I was supposed to be subjected to this book the first time around. I had to figure it out.

The Greeks loved two things we would call gay pedophilia and gay statutory rape. Plato’s book is a long rationalization which tries unsuccessfully to portray gay sex with younger, less powerful, less informed people as a good thing. If you think I’m exaggerating, read it yourself.

I finally got to the part where Socrates talks. To say it’s underwhelming doesn’t begin to express my reaction.

Here’s how Socrates works. He puts his conversational partner on the defensive, forcing him to answer questions but refusing to supply answers or take responsibility for them. He gets them to start out with idiotic premises, and then he forces them to build absurd arguments based on them.

He keeps pushing them toward the results he wants, pretending to compliment them on their brilliance the whole time. Then he arrives at a conclusion a ten-year-old would instantly know is insane.

I’m not impressed at all. Anyone can badger a less-intelligent or less-assertive person into saying something stupid. Put him on the defensive. Ask questions. Never answer questions. Never let him make a retraction. You will always win. You win for the same reason welshers win at poker; they never risk anything.

When I read Thucydides, I was very impressed with the arguments various orators made. It showed that they knew how to build arguments. It showed that they understood logic and persuasion. They understood structure. If you want to see how a good lawyer works in 2016, you can look at the speeches in Thucydides.

Socrates is not on that level. He is a sophist. By sophist, I don’t mean the Greek defition. I mean a person who builds arguments that are clever but false. Like Supreme Court Justice Brennan, who used an excellent mind to twist logic to suit his socialist bent.

He reminds me of something the character Mr. Dryden said in Lawrence of Arabia: “A man who tells lies, like me, merely hides the truth. But a man who tells half-lies, has forgotten where he’s put it.” People like Socrates and Brennan often don’t realize they’re lying. To abuse the truth is to destroy your ability to perceive it.

The upshot of his beliefs appears to be this: love for a woman is bestial, like a dog’s lust for a bitch in heat. It’s a low thing, to be contemned. The desire to sodomize a young man systematically is refined and godlike, as long as you give him teaching in exchange for allowing you to insert yourself and make him a receptacle for your fluids.

Socrates considered fathering children a lower pastime than teaching young men. Imagine that. It’s disgusting to even think that a person could have things so backward. Your mom and dad are clods, but the funny gym teacher who always had to come into the shower to talk to you…he’s a sophisticate.

I’m not distorting it at all. You can find the same argument in pedophile chat rooms all over the world.

My understanding is that we study Plato in order to understand where other philosophers got their foundation. That’s important to a lot of people. I don’t find secular philosophy useful or interesting. I had to take a course in it. I got an A, and I impressed and annoyed the professor. That’s as far as I care to go. I have never been in a situation where I thanked God for a helpful idea from Kant or Gurdjieff that got me out of a tough spot.

The characters in Plato’s book, who may or may not be accurate depictions of the real people whose names they take, are extremely shallow and carnal. They think like pigs and goats. “Love” means “sex with boys.” You can’t love anything that isn’t beautiful (bad news for parents of kids with birth defects). Everyone is motivated by a desire to be famous and admired. People should strive to make their names “immortal.”

Ridiculous. That’s not how quality people work. Quality people know the difference between lust and love. They are genuinely altruistic. They aren’t motivated by the possibility that society might reward their actions by putting their names on buildings that will be gone in a hundred years.

It’s not surprising that Plato and his pals were shallow. Their “gods” were like monkeys at the height of the mating season. They were rapists, thieves, torturers, liars, drunks, and adulterers. The men of The Symposium repeatedly affirm their admiration for these Olympian baboons. If my “god” was a chimp on Viagra, I guess I’d feel the same way Socrates did.

I’m just reading the book for its historical value, and to be able to say I actually did the reading for Lit. Hum. After that, I plan to leave it on the shelf. I don’t know if I should even have it in the house, because it’s so gross. Most of my books are sources of useful information, and they can be helpful in my person development. The Symposium is more like a slice of a diseased liver, kept by a pathologist as a warning to drunks.

I think I’m on page 517 of the PDF I am reading while I wait for my hardcopy to arrive in the mail. It ends on page 539. Every time I turn a page, I feel like I’m scratching a day off a prison sentence.

It’s strange to see the Greeks talk about excellence of character (arete) all the time. They were slimy, cruel, violent, oppressive people. They wouldn’t know excellence if it came up behind them and beat them with a club.

Augustine is coming up. I was thinking it might be nice to get away from the diseased heathen minds of the Greeks, but I may be even more disturbed by crackpot Catholic doctrine that keeps people in chains. At least I enjoyed King Lear. I read it out of sequence. Good thing I did. It was the lime sherbet that refreshed my palate prior to a serving of garbage.

Thiel Ushers in a New Age of Republican Surrender

I did not watch the Republican convention. Not that interested, and I have a lot of things I prefer doing. But I did read some of Peter Thiel’s remarks. He is a homosexual businessman, and he founded Paypal. He is also the man who killed Gawker and bankrupted Nick Denton. He helped Hulk Hogan sue Gawker into the dirt.

Among other things, he said this: “I don’t pretend to agree with every plank in our party’s platform. But fake culture wars only distract us from our economic decline, and nobody in this race is being honest about it except Donald Trump.”

“Fake”?

Here’s another gem of deceit:

“When I was a kid, the great debate was about how to defeat the Soviet Union. And we won. Now we are told that the great debate is about who gets to use which bathroom. This is a distraction from our real problems. Who cares?”

A lot of people care, and Peter Thiel knows it. Girls and women in locker rooms care. Parents care. Christians care.

This is another example of Republicans trying to own gay and vigorously deny God. And it’s another example of our unfortunate determination to insulate ourselves from God’s protection.

It reminds me of George W. Bush’s naive, self-destructive efforts to convince Democrats he wasn’t divisive. He talked about “crossing the aisle.” He extended his hand across the aisle on many occasions, and he got it bitten off. The Democrats didn’t see him as moderate or inclusive. They saw him as weak, and they treated his overtures the way a boxer treats his opponent’s defense flaws.

RNC leaders don’t have faith in God. They are cynical, secular, realpolitik-oriented materialists. When they have setbacks, they don’t fast and pray. They hold strategy meetings, and they look for secular solutions. A big percentage of Republican voters are believers; people like Priebus and Norquist see us as starry-eyed suckers, to be herded and manipulated. They would love to see us give up God completely so they could make the platform changes they really want to make.

They’re not that interested in policy. They’re interested in getting rich and holding onto power. When you develop the habit of assuming, by default, that people are motivated primarily by the desire to get money and hold onto power, you will find that the world makes a lot more sense. As the Bible says, “The love of money is a root of many evils.”

I went to law school with Reince. I barely knew him, but I knew his crowd well. He was just another ordinary, ambitious guy who ran for silly class offices. No one admired him for his principles. No one I knew looked up to him. When I see him on TV, I don’t see anything new.

If the RNC bigwigs thought they could get more votes by putting support for partial-birth abortion in the platform, they’d do it in five seconds. When it comes to homosexuality, they did a little math, estimated the numbers of votes they might lose or gain, and gave Thiel a call. It’s that simple. Principle was never a consideration.

Christians have some power in the party, but it’s disappearing. Soon the Republicans will lose their status as the unofficial party of Jesus. They’ll be the party of business and law enforcement. They’ll be like the people who say, “I’m fiscally conservative but socially liberal,” which is code for, “immoral and stingy.”

No one cares about God. No one really believes he won’t be mocked. We take him about as seriously as Catholics take the Pope.

It’s a sad spectacle. Thank God watching it develop from the sidelines won’t kill us.

I don’t know how we’re supposed to prepare for the sex-centric, perversion-embracing world of the near future. Does God want us to stay home all the time, to avoid the visual pollution? I can’t figure out how he’ll handle it. Sex with younger and younger people will be accepted. Sex with animals will be accepted. Stranger and stranger practices will be commonplace. It will be very hard to turn on a TV or walk down a city street without being smeared with filth.

One of the wonderful things about using sexual corruption to hurt human beings is that it hurts them from without. You don’t have to take part in it to be a casualty. You just have to see it. Even if you see it against your will, you are fouled by it. The devil made a great choice when he chose to use sex against us. It literally makes the world intolerable for us, unless we live in bomb shelters.

A sexually immoral person has the advantage in a corrupted society. He or she can go anywhere and do anything. You don’t have to worry about catching corruption when you already have it. The rest of us will have to find ways to avoid exposure to corrupted people. Not easy.

When perverts take over a beach, they say, “If you don’t like it, don’t go to the beach” (he beach funded by your taxes). If they take over the sidewalk, they say, “Don’t walk on the sidewalk.” Your territory shrinks and shrinks, until it becomes impractical or illegal for you to exist anywhere.

I wonder if other countries are having this problem. Do the British allow naked people to walk the streets, the way New Yorkers and San Franciscans do? Is it legal for two men to marry in France? Are large numbers of Germans piercing and mutilating their genitals?

The press always tells us we’re behind the sin curve. Whenever they want us to do something stupid, they say Europeans are doing it already, and that they make fun of us for not doing it. And Americans are just like kids who can’t resist peer pressure. If France jumped off the Empire State Building, we would be likely to follow.

You can’t find out what’s going on by relying on the press.

Now that we’ve given up on sexual morality, it’s reasonable to expect us to give up on other moral positions. Maybe abortion will be next. People think different types of sin aren’t connected, but they are. The spirits that drive them work together. The spirits of homosexuality serve as anchor-baby spirits in the Republican party. They’ll help the others get in.

Trump would love that analogy, except…he supports homosexuality. Fine; I’ll vote for him. Sometimes you have to eat from a filthy bowl. Sometimes you have to eat at Pharaoh’s table.

It seems like the more clarity I get, the crazier people around me get. It’s like it’s leaving me and going into them.

Here’s what I want from Trump: temporary protection and a little time to improve and do whatever God wants me to do. With any luck, I will have been struck by lightning by the time he leaves office. I don’t want to be elderly in Sodom.

I have no interest in changing humanity. I will be used to help a few individuals, but I accept the fact that America is going to self-destruct. I’m grateful for that. There are a lot of nuts out there who think they have to fight all the time. Islamist terrorists are great examples. So is the guy in Norway who shot all those kids. I don’t have to fight, because the battle to change America has already been lost. I just want a comfy couch and a fridge full of food, as far as possible from the lunacy.

I used to fight via blogging. That was dumb. Blogging is a carnal tool. There is no strength behind it.

I remember being part of the conservative Blogosphere. We linked to each other frantically. We loved our little victories; we thought they were so important. We exposed Dan Rather. Yay. Now we have other people doing the same things he did.

We were angry all the time. We never had peace. We exchanged angry emails. We posted angry Photoshops. A total waste of time. And anyway, Pajamas Media killed it with greed, elitism, and a very poor understanding of the way the Internet works. I predicted it. I thought predicting it was important. It probably wasn’t. It certainly didn’t make a difference.

I wonder if people I know are still immersed in vitriol and squabbling. I know the gutted, hamstrung conservative Blogosphere is nothing like it was, but I don’t monitor things. I looked at a well-known (formerly well-known) blog the other day, and I could almost smell the anger, cruelty, filth, and atheism rising from my monitor. Before that, the last time I looked at a conservative blog was months earlier. I don’t even know what they’re talking about.

A long time ago, I took a psychology course, and the instructor taught us something interesting. If you put rats in a cage and shock them, they attack each other. The lesson was this: frustration causes anger, and it will make you look for a villain to punish. If you can’t find the guilty, you will go after the innocent, or at least the relatively innocent.

That’s what fighting about politics is: a bunch of rats attacking each other because they can’t see the individuals who are shocking them. We blame people. We ignore the spirits who pull the strings. People are certainly responsible, but they aren’t the prime movers.

It’s weird to see Americans give up so completely and quickly. It’s weird to see us move from one viewpoint to its opposite in a short time, with no admission of hypocrisy. It shows how useless and weak people are without the Holy Spirit. No wonder Peter denied Jesus. If the Romans had pressed him, he would have driven the nails. So would I, without God’s help.

My advice to everyone: lower your expectations of America. Expect it to rot and die. Focus on getting yourself fixed. Choose the only battle you have a chance of winning. It’s worth it.

Better to be on an ark surrounded by bloated, drowned bodies than to be outside being eaten by birds and crabs.

History says Otherwise

I’m thinking about technology today.

I read something interesting this morning. Edward Snowden, the fugitive hacker who lifted the rock off of our government’s slimy, Constitution-killing surveillance programs, accepted a visit from journalists. He told them to put their phones in the refrigerator. Why? Because that way, if Barack Obama turned the phones’ microphones and cameras on, he would see nothing but beer bottles and cold pizza.

It’s funny to me, because I’m one of those rare people who avoid showing their phones and tablets things they don’t want seen. I do not use the phone on the toilet. When I say things I really don’t want it to hear, I put it in a drawer. I don’t think anyone is interested in what I do–today–but it’s good practice. You never know who will develop an interest in the future. There are a lot of actresses out there who wish they had kept their phones in drawers or their drawers on.

Apparently, Snowden knows the government does, in fact, listen to us and watch us via our phones. Confirmation. If only we could turn the tables. I suppose we would spend a lot of time throwing up, though.

I worry about tech privacy in some regards, and in others, I’ve made a conscious decision to give up. Privacy was one reason I got rid of Facebook and Twitter; I thought it was a bad idea for everyone in the universe to know what I had had for lunch every day for the past three years. On the other hand, I accept the fact that the government tracks all of my driving, because I can’t do anything about it. I also blog, knowing that what I write will surely be used against me in the future. I use email and a cell phone, knowing my communications are stored away somewhere, by people I find disgusting.

In the law, we have a concept we call “ex post facto,” which means something or other in Latin. It looks like “from after the fact,” but then I got a D in Latin. It means you can’t punish someone retroactively, for breaking a law you make today. It doesn’t seem to work very well. Bill Clinton taxed people retroactively. But we do rely on it. We sort of assume the legal things we did in the past won’t be used against us in the future.

One glaring problem with the policy against ex post facto punishment is that it depends on laws that can be changed in the future. If you pass a law saying ex post facto punishment is okay, then it doesn’t really matter what the law said a day earlier. You’re on the hook. You can change the law, but the past is carved in stone.

Another problem is that it doesn’t bind private individuals. If the general public decides to persecute you for past deeds of which they approved when you performed them, there isn’t anything you can do.

In the future, people like me will be persecuted and probably prosecuted for legal self-expression. In 2025, it will probably be possible to take all sorts of legal action against me for things I said legally in 2014. It will definitely be possible to take social action; it already is.

That’s life. Maybe “smart” conservatives will take down their blogs and beg for forgiveness. Maybe they’ll make convenience conversions to liberalism and atheism. It worked for Arianna Huffington. Of course, assimilation didn’t work too well for Jews under Hitler, so maybe we can’t do anything now to save ourselves.

Everything is documented now. We swim in evidence.

File all this under, “That’s tough.”

I’m also thinking about programming. I wrote a little about this a few days ago. I got my CNC lathe to work, sort of, and then I found out the program that came with it, which tells the motors what to do, isn’t very good. I’m sure it’s great for mill users, but lathe users are the red-headed stepchildren of CNC, and hobbyists are also red-headed stepchildren. Maybe that makes me a red-headed step-grandchild.

Anyway, the program depends on a lot of files written in the computer language C. The manufacturer admits that you should know C in order to deal with his invention. That’s not a knock on the manufacturer. Surely getting the electronics and software to the point where they are was a Herculean task. I don’t want to abuse anyone for failing to take it further.

I do not know C. I had a small amount of interest in programming in the Nineties, but it withered and died. While I was getting my physics degree, they made me take a Pascal course, and that’s about all I’ve done, apart from hacking php, css, and html files in order to blog. I did that hacking very clumsily, by trial and error. I didn’t know what I was doing.

I don’t know why my advisor told me to take Pascal. It was a MONUMENTAL mistake. I looked Pascal up, and it’s not very useful. For the most part, it’s a teaching language. Here is a quote from Wikipedia:

Initially, Pascal was largely, but not exclusively, intended to teach students structured programming.A generation of students used Pascal as an introductory language in undergraduate courses.

Pascal was used in the development of some Apple products, but, hello, just about everything else in the world is based on C or a related language. Teaching future programmers Pascal is like teaching UN interpreters Esperanto. A complete waste of time. And my experience has proven that. I believe I wrote one or two programs in Pascal back in the deep past, for purposes I no longer recall, but today I am, essentially, a programming cripple. That’s where Pascal got me.

My undergrad advisor at the University of Miami was a great instructor, but he gave me some really bad advice. He told me grad schools didn’t care about the physics GRE, so I shouldn’t waste time studying for it. Yeah…okay. The Pascal suggestion came from him, too.

I love MOOC sites. “MOOC” stands for something I don’t remember, but it basically means online education. I decided to check Udemy, Edx, and Coursera for C courses. I didn’t see anything I liked. There were a lot of C++ and C# offerings, but I read that these languages were not really C or helpful to C users, so I blew that off.

I decided to check Youtube, and I found a couple of good offerings which I will not link to. The best one for barely sentient beginners was run by a user called Thecodingschool or something similar. I started watching and doing exercises, but I soon realized they were crawling. It would take me a year to get anywhere. I looked for a book.

Amazon had a number of offerings. I looked at them and decided the one I wanted was a beginner’s guide by a guy named Kochan. As luck would have it, it’s available at an online lending library, so I am using that. I may buy the book or a Kindle version, though, because the library thing is hard to read.

The thing that surprises me is that I’m doing very well. I am finding C very easy. Pascal was a different experience, even though it’s basically the same thing. When I wrote Pascal programs, my absent-mindedness drove me up the wall. I left characters out or put them in the wrong places, and I would spend ages reading the same code over and over, looking for the booboos. This time I’m making mistakes, but finding and fixing them isn’t nearly as bad. I can’t explain why.

The book has programming exercises in it. I can’t stand them. It’s just too boring; when an activity is too dull, it slides off the brain like a blunt instrument. I had to make it more interesting, so instead of doing the exercises, I do things that are different but related to the exercises.

I can’t resist making the code silly. I think that’s hardwired into me. Here’s a program I wrote yesterday:

#include

main ()
{
//int dancer, prancer; This didn’t work. Apparently you can’t divide two integers and get a float.
float dancer, prancer, vixen;

printf(“Enter a number: “);
scanf(“%f”, &dancer);
printf(“\n”);
printf(“Enter another number, if you can think of one: “);
scanf(“%f”, &prancer);
printf(“\n”);
vixen = dancer / prancer;
printf(“Here is %0.2f divided by %0.2f (to six places after the decimal), and that’s exciting: %0.6f.”, dancer, prancer, vixen);
fflush(stdin);
//If you leave fflush in, the program stays open and waits for you to enter a key before giving you the final
//”enter any key” message. You have to hit 2 keys in order to make the CMD window close.
//The values %d and %i mean “integer.” They are fungible.
getchar();
/*Here is another way of adding comments.*/

}

As you can see, I’m using the programs to do little experiments to answer questions, and I take notes inside the programs, to help me remember. Here, I tried to divide one integer by another and produce a float, which is a number that extends past the decimal point. The computer didn’t like it.

It beats printing “Hello World” over and over. Now that I think about it, my “Hello World” program was actually, “Hello, Fat Jackass.”

Sorry.

You have to do something to keep yourself awake.

My feeling now is that if you have to watch videos in order to learn this, you might as well kill yourself, because it will really hurt.

I’ve learned something new. A lot of our modern machines can be penetrated with programming. C, supposedly, is the king of languages for operating machinery. That includes robots and so on. So if you want to do anything really interesting with motors and whatnot, C is for you. Maybe I’m wrong, but that’s the impression I get from what others say.

I also found out that you can buy little robots and write code for them so they do stuff. I guess this is how we ended up with self-driving cars invading our privacy. There is a language called Pbasic, which I refuse to capitalize, which works with certain popular microcontrollers. You can get yourself an inexpensive robot and Pbasic it all over the place. I don’t know how much C would help a person who needs Pbasic, but it probably can’t hurt.

I plan to look into that if I ever get the lathe functioning correctly. I feel like it would make me feel less intimidated by the machinery around me. Maybe the computerized toaster and portable phones would tense up and start to sweat when I came into the room. That would be nice.

In other news, I completed Thucydides and started in on Plato’s Symposium. My short take on Thucydides: the Athenians were evil, disgusting people. They whined and moaned about excellence and virtue all the time, but they kept slaves in their homes, they destroyed other cities, they slaughtered untold thousands of people just for getting on their nerves, and they were colossal thieves. They were right up there with the Nazis. I have zero respect for them, even though I acknowledge their mental achievements.

The small amount I’ve read recently tells me I probably did not read The Symposium when I was at Columbia University, because I think I would remember the revulsion it engenders.

When I was at Columbia, I thought gay sex was just fine. I was not much of a Christian. I would not have been offended by the Athenian predilection for sodomy. What would have bothered me is the predilection for boys. The Athenians didn’t prey on their equals. They sodomized small boys and teens who were weaker and less informed. Even in my younger days, I would have been bothered by that.

The Symposium starts out with a long discussion of “love,” and by “love,” it means the phony, self-deluding love between an erastes (older sexual predator) and an eromenos (younger victim). If erastes looks familiar, it’s because it’s related to the word “pederast.”

A man (presumably a real person) stands up and says there are two types of love; a high kind and a low or common kind. The heavenly kind is the love a predator shares with a victim who is old enough to have sprouted the beginnings of a beard, and supposedly, it is largely based on a desire to help the younger victim improve himself. The low kind is the love a predator shares with a younger boy, who is simply a sexual device intended to satisfy lust.

This reasoning reminds me of the bilge spewed by molesters in Internet chat rooms. They say we don’t understand their pure, altruistic love. They say it’s good for the kids. They say kids consent, which is surely true sometimes. We still put the molesters away, and in prison, criminals still rape and kill them.

Somehow we’re supposed to accept this from the ancient Greeks, while we imprison people for it today. That’s crazy. It’s the same. Man’s laws change; that which is evil remains evil.

It’s remarkable that we have studied this work in our universities for so long. I can understand how it would have been popular in my youth, because universities were already pretty gross at that time. But I don’t understand how it could have passed inspection in 1900 or earlier.

My skin crawls when I read the book, but I want to get it over with, so I will continue. I think this is the book that mentions the cave and the ideal forms and so on. I will take whatever profitable information it has to offer and try to forget the rest.

Incidentally, people who get their Greek history from the movie 300 may be surprised to learn that the Spartans weren’t the big military power in ancient Greece, and they weren’t the leading sexual predators. The Athenians topped them (poor choice of words) in both regards. In the movie, Leonidas calls the violent, imperialist Athenians “boy-lovers,” but Plato’s book tells us the Spartans had a reputation for “common” love, or sex with very young boys.

I look forward to getting past the Greeks. I ordered Ovid and Vergil, so I will be reading the Romans before long.

Ask Your Sons What’s Going on at School

I read something interesting. Apparently a girl is suing to be allowed to use boys’ restrooms in a school somewhere.

Usually, Christians think of men as the restroom and locker room threat. Transsexualism is the new “medical” marijuana. Stoners go to sleazy doctors (or visit them online) and claim they have headaches, and the doctors go, “AWWWWWW,” and they give them prescriptions so they can smoke weed. Perverts say, “I think I’m a woman,” and next thing you know, they’re displaying their penises to girls in locker rooms, and anyone who questions it is treated like a…well, I was going to say “child molester,” but that doesn’t really fly any more. Anyone who questions it is treated like a hunter.

Men have drawn most of our attention, but girls and women also cause problems.

Imagine this. You’re 16. You’re in gym class. You walk to the locker room, you get ready for your shower, and at the locker next to you, a girl at her lifetime attractiveness peak strips off her clothes. She exposes her genitals, buttocks…the works. And then she goes to the shower with you and soaps up. Everything she has, the boys see. Everything they have, she sees, regardless of how they or their parents feel about it.

This is the new America.

One of the weird things about transsexuals is that they’re allowed to retain heterosexual urges. You can be a teen “trans man” and still want to have sex with boys. That will make for some interesting showers. I think it’s fair to assume there will be at least a few lonely, desperate girls who will say whatever it takes to get into locker rooms.

It’s pointless to say it’s insane. America belongs to Satan now. People don’t hear the Holy Spirit, because we rejected him. We hear lies, and we like them better than cotton candy. We hear every spirit that isn’t holy. Talking to us is like talking to tree stumps. Well, except that tree stumps can’t get you fired, burn your house, take everything you own, put you in prison, or execute you.

To Americans, the obvious truth sounds crazy, but we say Bruce Jenner is a woman without even pausing.

It’s so strange, watching the ship sink after I predicted it. God told me (and many others) what was going to happen, and we talked about it. Still shocking to see it materialize.

There is no place for us here. That’s probably the only thing I’ve written today that Satan’s people would agree with. We are being rejected by America’s immune system. We can keep climbing to smaller and smaller bits of high ground as the waters rise, but we can’t take the country back or make ourselves safe. Sooner or later, people who think the world needs to be relieved of our presence will have the government’s permission to get rid of us, and that will be that.

Maybe there will be a bounty on us. The Nazis put bounties on Jews.

I suppose there already is a bounty. The people who get fired for their beliefs lose their jobs to the devil’s slaves.

The best thing is to turn around and get close to God before things become intolerable. The sooner you get with the program, the sooner the benefits start to flow. The world is against you. America hates you. You need someone on your side. If you don’t align yourself with God, you’re just throwing yourself on Satan’s mercy and waiting to see how long it lasts. It’s like leaving your gun at home and relying on a strategy of talking sense to rapists.

Mercy isn’t Satan’s thing. It’s hateful to him. It’s hateful to his people. They’re not interested in it.

I feel alienated and disgusted when I look at my country today. Not just my country; my world. I have no use for this place, but here I am. I would love to get on the bus to heaven this afternoon. I would love to wake up tomorrow in a world where “he” means “he” and “she” means “she.” I would love knowing no one would abuse or mistreat me. I would love knowing my body was perfect and impervious to deterioration. Of course, we are kept here for a reason. We have to do our tours of duty, to help others escape.

My best guess is that the closer you are to God, the sooner he will remove you from this dungheap. That seems to be the pattern. It seems fairly clear that most Christians will be left here after the Rapture, to face the horror of the Tribulation. Jesus said he would take people who were doing his work. He’s probably not going to take people off of stripper poles.

In the past, it was realistic for an American Christian to look forward to raising a family and leaving a legacy. That’s not true any more. How can you be excited about raising kids in a teeming hive of perversion, anger, and persecution? America is becoming so filthy, it will soon be impossible to involve yourself in public life without being polluted beyond your emotional limit. A trip to the grocery will be like scuba-diving in a sea of excrement. What rational person can think about children and grandchildren now?

If I were an atheist or a “progressive” Christian, reading this blog would make my day. They want us gone. Hearing that they’re going to win should make them very happy. It should satisfy their craving for “vengeance.” Of course, they don’t believe in the judgment that comes after the conquest and genocide. The future always seems bright when you’re in a Satanic movement on the uptick. The Nazis called their twelve years of evil “the Thousand-Year Reich.”

I wonder when liberals will finally out themselves and admit that what they really hate about conservatism is its relationship with God. They hate defense of the unborn. They hate all types of sexual restraint. They hate public decency. They hate churches. They hate Israel. It’s obvious what their underlying motivation is.

They don’t like to come out and admit they hate God, although they did vote against him four times, on TV, at one of their conventions. I will never forget the look on Villaraigosa’s face; the way he looked at his bosses after the crowd voted against God, trying to get instructions.

And then he lied to the cameras.

Liberals are still somewhat afraid to curse God in public. Some are not; Dan Savage is an example. But ten years ago, Barack Obama was afraid to endorse gay marriage. Things change quickly. The minds and hearts of most Americans are like cities without walls. There is nothing to keep insane notions or behavior out.

Stephen Colbert and Jon Steward have real problems with God. People don’t seem to talk about it much. In 2010, they appeared at an outdoor “sanity” rally. Instead of sticking to politics, Stewart went after our belief in prophecy. He said, “We live now in hard times, not end times.” Now, during the week of the RNC convention, Colbert has joked, “Jon and I are very happy living off the grid, making jerky and canning our own urine for the end times.”

“End times,” of course, means the end of the current age, prior to the Rapture and Tribulation. They’re making fun of us for believing God’s prophets. Funny; they doesn’t seem to have anything negative to say about the flood of 2016 Ramadan murders. But that would take courage. Muslims shoot people for speaking. Criticizing Christians takes almost no courage at all.

Stewart flat-out contradicted our beliefs. Colbert ridiculed them. They didn’t have the courage to say Christianity is evil. Why come at us sideways, as Firefly’s Shepherd Book would have put it? Why not show some guts and say, “God isn’t real, and Jesus was not his son”? Because the devil doesn’t come in through the front door. He works his way in gradually. One day you find him sitting on your couch ordering your family around, and you can’t recall how he got there.

In the past, no one would have complained about a person who said girls should not be in boys’ locker rooms. Now, if anyone on the other side reads this, they’ll say I pick on children. Whatever is evil and brutal…that will be me. I will be treated the way people who put girls in boys’ locker rooms should be treated. Down is up, and up is down. We shouldn’t elect Trump. We should elect Bizarro.

Why write this stuff, since it does so little good, and since it may harm me? I’m not sure. At least I serve as a witness. People who might otherwise have claimed innocence will be subject to judgment because they read what I wrote. People who agree with me will feel less alone. Maybe people who live after I’m gone, in a world that is completely corrupted, will see what I wrote and use it to guide them to salvation.

Like Mr. Spock said, “In an insane society, the sane man must appear insane.” My view is healthy and normal. It shouldn’t be alarming. What should alarm you is finding that the world agrees with you.

Gagging of Conservatives Continues on Social Media

Today I see that leftists are celebrating censorship again. This time the victim is Milo Ya…I’m not even going to try to spell it. It’s a gay conservative who works for Breitbart.com.

If I’m ignorant about the dispute that led up to the censorship, it’s not completely my fault. Milo was banned from Twitter, and whatever he said that upset people is now deleted. I Googled around, assuming every far-left Internet nut on the planet had screenshotted his offenses, but I can’t find any of it. Makes you wonder if he actually did anything wrong.

I don’t care about Milo’s work. I don’t know anything about it. I tried to read a movie review he wrote (the new Ghostbusters, and in all honestly, it was not very good. It verged on unreadable. There was no organization, and he didn’t produce many facts. It seemed that the article was a series of nearly unrelated paragraphs, in which he restated his dislike of the movie.

I know a tiny–and I do mean tiny–bit about Milo himself. He is gay, and he is provocative. He does things to upset people. Conservatives are giving him a ton of promotion. My educated guess? They want to say, “We’re gay, too. You don’t own gay.”

It won’t work. In America, conservatism is inextricably bound up with Christianity, and God does not have a rainbow sticker on the gates of heaven. It may be helpful to Christians if larger numbers of gays vote for conservative candidates, but if the conservative movement abandons God completely, we lose much of our incentive for supporting it. I would vote for a Christian-friendly Democrat before I would vote for a God-hating Republican. That choice doesn’t seem to come up, though.

Minority Republicans get a certain amount of promotion, too, and surely part of the reason is to remind minorities that you can be non-white and be accepted among our ranks. That’s somewhat more legitimate than promoting gays. Race doesn’t have to be a mental state; you can be black or purple or orange and be 100% on board with the conservative ethos. Non-whites do not change us. Homosexuality is different. When homosexuals enter the group, automatically, we have to change our positions in order to accommodate them.

Here is what people love to call “the narrative” in post-2000 America: Milo got into a Twitter fight with a Ghostbusters actress named Leslie Jones, and she is black. He bullied and tormented her on Twitter, he posted racist tweets (is “tweet” capitalized now?), and he reposted the racist tweets of others. She complained, and Twitter gave him a lifetime ban.

I can’t find his racist tweets. Someone dug up a 2015 racist tweet from Leslie Jones, but that’s all I’ve seen. I have seen some abusive tweets from people who took his side. Welcome to the web. Michelle Malkin gets worse treatment every day of her life, and has for years. I will never forget the comment from the loon who threatened to mutilate her genitals with his or her teeth.

Maybe Milo is a bad guy. On the other hand, there are some truly vile accounts that never get in trouble. Spike Lee sent black racists after the parents of George Zimmerman, and they had to leave their house. It’s my understanding that it’s okay to root for terrorists on Twitter, too.

A lifetime ban is going to be hard on a guy who is billed as a major website’s “tech” editor. It’s like telling a motivational speaker he’s banned from hotel ballrooms. I have a feeling it won’t stick, but maybe it will.

It’s an interesting story.

When the Founding Fathers wrote the First Amendment, they did not intend to protect porn merchants, in spite of what you may think, given the way it has been used. They had ONE major goal in mind: to enable people to speak about political matters. When you strike at political speech, you strike at the heart of the First Amendment.

The First Amendment was motivated by the behavior of British kings, who had been known to publicly castrate and disembowel people who said things they didn’t like. If you had tried to blog in England in 1776, they would have castrated and disemboweled you in front of a jeering crowd, and before you died, they would have fried your genitals and internal organs in front of you. Simply for saying the king was wrong.

There was no Twitter when the Constitution was written. You could publish a newspaper, or you could write a book or simply stand up in your local bar and mouth off. It was very much like life in the 1980’s. No one depended on the Internet to make his voice effective. There was no danger that half of the population (the left half) would have a tremendous communication advantage over the other half, because of access to a medium provided by corporations. That has changed.

In 2016, merely being allowed to speak to your neighbor or wear a T-shirt does not put you on an equal footing with others. You need Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, blogs, and whatever else is out there. With social media, Milo was able to make a noise comparable to the noise someone like Lena Dunham can make. Without it, he may as well go home and yell into the toilet.

It’s not easy for leftists to violate the First Amemdment, which protects people from government censorship. It’s very easy for them to violate the spirit of the First Amendment and nullify it through private censorship. It’s a beautiful thing. If you like censorship.

For a long time, I’ve been saying that conservatives would eventually be driven off the web. The liberals who run companies like Facebook and Twitter are immune to First Amendment challenges. Blogspot belongs to a liberal-run company; blogs are not safe, either. Milo’s case shows how easy it is to silence us.

Things were different a few years back. Blogs were big. Remember blogs? I don’t mean corporate websites pretending to be blogs. I don’t mean The Huffington Toast or Wonkette. I mean sites like this one. Most blogs were run by individuals who had no corporate affiliation, and many of the top blogs were operated out of studies and bedrooms. That ended some time back. The big blogs are fake. They’re run by companies that pay for promotion. Many of them pay writers. We were allowed to sit at the big boys’ table for a while, and then they came and kicked us out. Predictable. I know, because I predicted it.

Real blogs are not very important now. We have become addicted to “free” social media sites. Does it really make sense to call any site that tracks you and feeds you ads “free”? Anyway, we loved the convenience and the instant audiences. So we gave up our autonomy.

Now we broadcast our opinions at the pleasure of leftists. They can unplug the machine whenever they like, and there is nothing we can do. If we sue, they can say, “We don’t have to obey the First Amendment. We are not the government.”

Can we complain? I don’t mean, “Are we able to complain?” It looks like we are losing that ability. I mean, “Do we have a right to complain?” I don’t think so. We put our own heads in the noose. Did we really think atheist tech nerds were going to give us a fair shake? Besides, people like me warned everyone.

If you can only speak in private, the First Amendment is useless. That’s the future we face. We will be pushed out of liberal-run forums. Then they’ll find a way to come after blogs, which are, after all, hosted by corporations.

Interesting times.

It reminds me of the problems people have when they lose their driver’s licenses. The courts always remind us, “It’s a privilege; not a right.” You don’t have a Constitutional right to drive. But if you can’t drive, you might as well be crippled. In most parts of the country, pedestrian status will make it impossible for you to compete in the job market. You don’t have a right to Tweet, either, and if you depend on Twitter to make money, you better kiss the ring.

What if the conservative movement can be persuaded to divorce Jesus? In that case, everything changes. Conservatives will persecute Christians right beside liberals, and presumably, Christians and Jews will be the only ones who are ostracized. Any way you slice it, Christians will be pushed aside.

What can you do? Nothing. So I don’t get upset about it. I just blog my observations and wait for them to be proven right. I am thrilled to be disconnected from social media, and I have no plans to fight anyone about social media abuses. I don’t care about things that are doomed to fail. It’s a waste of the space in my heart.

Minorities Have Minorities

Last night I was thinking about the police shootings again, and I realized there will be a schism I hadn’t thought about. The split between blacks and everyone else is an obvious result, but there will also be a sort of cold civil war among blacks themselves.

If things get worse and go completely nuts, black people who don’t agree with Only Black Lives Matter will be very concerned about having the smell of chaos attach itself to them. People who have worked hard to become successful, unhyphenated Americans won’t want to be lumped in with folks who make entire cities dangerous for those who don’t look like them. They won’t want to be rejected at work or socially. They won’t want to appear to condone self-destructive victimhood myths.

What will they do? They certainly won’t be able to change their families and neighbors. They will not be accepted. The loneliest black people on earth are the ones who refuse to go along with the program of blaming others. They get called “Tom,” “sellout,” and “house n____r” all day, every day. Stacey Dash actually received death threats simply for endorsing Romney. Those threats didn’t come from white Mormons.

They’ll have to try to join the rest of us. That won’t be easy. Increasingly, racism is developing a grip on non-blacks, including conservatives. You can see it in Internet comments; always a window on the cesspool that is the collective soul. Over and over, when a story involving black people who behave badly pops up, you will see the n-word, plus terms like “apes” and “animals.” Hatred among non-black people is getting worse. When blacks who are rejected by other blacks look for acceptance and help, will we be around to let them in? BLM is helping the enemy close doors to them. It’s making people afraid of them.

I prefer to use the term “non-black” instead of “white,” since it’s more accurate. Blacks don’t just have problems with white people. Get to know some Asians and see. Get to know some Cubans; they have a very serious problem with anti-black feeling.

It reminds me of the problem early Jewish Christians faced. They were hated by the Romans because they were Jews. They were hated by other Jews because they were Christians. Even today, a Jew can be an atheist or a Satanist and still be considered a Jew, but if you accept Jesus, they claim you’re no longer one of them.

Black people who don’t listen to the race hustlers may have an even harder time in the future than they do now.

I used to think people should cling to their cultures. I was proud of my own Appalachian culture, because of, you know, all the Nobel prizes that have gone to West Virginia. I was crazy. We should all be eager to adopt the best parts of various cultures and flush the rest down the toilet. Some cultures are better than others. Not “different.” “Better.” It’s disgraceful to hold onto reeking garbage simply because you have pride on behalf of your segment of society.

The Bible agrees with me. In the Old Testament, people who married Jews and lived in Israel were supposed to become Jews. Solomon disagreed, and he practiced tolerance. He died a failure and a disgrace, ruled by his unclean pagan wives. Paul cautioned Christians not to be unequally yoked. Jesus was 100% intolerant of other religions.

There is no Jew or Gentile in Christ, and there is no black or non-black, either. There is no Black Students Lounge or Whites-Only fountain in heaven. There is only one race there. If we made a better effort to join it down here, we would not have the division we have today.

Your race isn’t people who look like you; it’s people who are led by the Holy Spirit. Your family isn’t people who share genes with you; it’s people who are led by the Holy Spirit. The Spirit-led are the people you’re supposed to side with. We can’t accept that, so we have riots and hate crimes.

We should know this, but we aren’t interested in learning. We go to church so God can make us feel better, so we can continue to sin. It’s like leaving a football game to get the trainer to give you Vicodin, so you can continue playing injured. We don’t want to change or admit we’re wrong.

This is why America is lost.

I have no hope at all for the world or America. Prophecy and common sense say failure is a certainty. On the other hand, I have complete confidence in the victory of the Spirit-led. The greatest power in existence is behind us. You can grab the lifeline and do well, or you can take your chances with the rioters and fools.

I’m not going to identify with a race if I can help it. I’m not going to hold onto the poisonous parts of my heritage. I can’t make anyone else agree, but I hope a lot of other people take the same position. I have to want the Spirit-led to increase and win. After all, they’re my nation.

Fabrics Rip Most Easily Where They’re Already Torn

It’s exciting to have God show you things, but the excitement can make you forget the seriousness of the subjects. Something for me to think about today as the murders of innocent policemen continue.

God showed me that our society was going to decay and fall into chaos. Now the edge of the tapestry has started to tear. I’m glad I was right to believe what I heard, but it’s sobering to think about the destruction and suffering that are descending on us.

We have three new mass murderers to add to our history’s list: Lakeem Keon Scott, Micah Johnson, and Eugene Gavin Long. There are also a few new murderers who only shot one cop, and there are a number of people who were arrested before managing to kill anyone.

We now have enough incidents to constitute the beginning of a fad.

Demonic activity is increasing in America. Crazy behavior is on the upswing. Black Lives Matter and the cop killings are part of it.

God showed me that the devil makes the fastest progress in people who are already defeated. That’s why we’re seeing strange activity from sexual deviants and minorities. These are people who were in spiritual trouble before the ship started sinking, so they are the fastest to drown.

Obviously, I’m not saying every minority member is going to go crazy. But if you know blacks and poor Hispanics, you know a high percentage of them live in defeat. The ones who aren’t rooted in the Holy Spirit are particularly susceptible to demonic influence, just as drug addicts and alcoholics are.

On average, white people are a little better off, but we will fall, too. We deny the Holy Spirit. When we acknowledge him, it’s mainly in churches dedicated to greed. We may take longer to fall apart, but it’s coming.

Minority racism is a real problem in America, and because we are terrified of criticizing minorities, no one does anything to correct it. Minority “thinkers” have even crafted an evil excuse: they say you can’t be a racist if you “have no power.” So if you’re black, you can’t be a racist.

What hogwash. If a black person can’t be a racist, what do you call a black person who hates non-blacks and calls on others to kill them? What’s the name for that? Is it a good thing? If you’re black, and you have a son with this issue, do you pat him on the head and tell him how glad you are?

Liberals always like to play with words.

Last night I went to Eugene Long’s Youtube page, to see what he said about race. I saw appalling comments from black people, defending him and calling him a martyr. It’s not a rare mindset. We like to think it is, but it’s not. Ask a black friend and see.

There are a lot of brainwashed people out there who seriously believe violence is the answer to anti-black racism. They think there will be a war, and that they will win. They seriously believe 12% of the population can defeat the rest. How do you counter that kind of insanity?

Assuming the rest of us are defeated, where will jobs come from in the new America? If you take our businesses, where will you work? Will 12% of the population be able to replace us as executives and business owners? Will 12% of the population be able to provide an all-black police force that keeps us in line?

There is no plan. There is no forethought. Just a sense of being defeated, coupled with violent rage looking for a target.

None of it makes any sense.

The president is not helping. Nothing new there. He should be saying the FBI will go after every cop-killer, and he should be saying the killers are cowards and morons. Instead, he says it would be helpful if the police admitted fault and tried to change.

I believe the violence will escalate, because there is no reason why it shouldn’t. There is a huge pool of potential offenders, raised on angry music and race-baiting. The supply has barely been tapped. If things do escalate, it will be the biggest setback black people have ever experienced in America.

We are in danger of ending up with a country in which no non-black person is safe in any area where there is a large concentration of black people. It won’t matter if many or most black people are against the violence. It only takes a few nuts to render a neighborhood radioactive. What happens then? If you think it’s hard to get businesses to locate in black areas now, wait till Wal-Mart has to start armoring the cabs of its trucks. Non-blacks will quietly pull back, taking money and opportunity with them.

What are human resource people thinking right now? If they were looking for excuses to exclude black people five years ago, what will they be thinking now that murdering cops and whites is becoming a trend? There are laws against racism in hiring, but in the end, they only work if people cooperate. You can turn a lot of applicants away without getting caught. It will happen. Wait and see.

Voluntary social segregation–the kind you can’t forbid with laws–will increase. People will be afraid to get to know each other. Who will suffer most? Not the 88%.

When bad things happen to America, black people are generally among those who get hit hardest, and it’s not because of racism. Human beings cause most of their own problems. AIDs and other social diseases, drugs, crime, illegitimacy, poverty, prison…these things land disproportionately on black people. When the devil attacks, the vulnerable are the first to fall. No one should be surprised to see America’s collapse starting this way.

God showed me that we have to be very serious about being the head and not the tail. Greedy preachers love to preach the line that says God will bless people by making them the head and not the tail, but they don’t understand what it means. They think it means you give Kenneth Copeland or some similar slimeball your money, and then God fights your enemies and makes you win the lottery. That’s not it at all. It means you have to stand up for God and be a leader, and that if you do that, you will be dominant on earth. You may not be dominant in the way you desire, but you will be blessed and protected.

If people you hate have power over you, it doesn’t mean there’s a white Illuminati conspiracy to keep the black master race down. It means you’re the tail and not the head, because you aren’t aligned with God. If this is your problem, you don’t just have an opportunity to correct it; you have an obligation. You are supposed to serve God effectively on earth, and you can’t do that if you’re a follower and not a leader.

I’m not making the conspiracy and master race stuff up. You should hear what murderer Eugene Long said in his Youtube videos. He told ignorant people whites are putting things in black people’s food to prevent them from rising up and assuming power. And they were buying it, with no hesitation.

He said–I am not kidding here–“It hurts our melanin.” As if melanin gave people super powers.

If you’re not black, you may not have heard this kind of crazy talk before, but it’s all over the place. Lunatics like Long don’t just think blacks should be equal; they think blacks are genetically superior, and that they’re supposed to be our masters.

Long belonged to the Nation of Islam, the fringe cult that murdered Malcolm X. They believe white people were created in a laboratory by an evil scientist. They don’t believe we’re human. Look it up.

Anyway, if you’re not submitted to God, you’re submitted to Satan. There is no neutrality. If you’re submitted to Satan, you’re the tail and not the head. People you don’t like will have power over you. You will have suffering you can’t control. That’s the nature of life. Eugene Long was apparently very angry because people he hated had power over him. The answer to that problem is to align yourself with the greatest power there is, and to share in his authority. But to do that, you have to admit fault and examine yourself constantly. You can’t sit around blaming others and claiming the world owes you an empire. Power brings responsibility; it’s a package deal.

Long supported Elijah Muhammad, the man who ordered the murder of Malcolm X. Crazy.

It doesn’t matter what color you are. God wants you. He will help you. He will fight your enemies, including your white enemies. You don’t have to feel like a second-class citizen anywhere.

You can’t fix things by pretending to be a victim and rejecting accountability. No one on this planet is good. No one who has the awareness to ground accountability deserves anything but hell. Denying your faults just prevents God from helping you.

It looks like we are entering an age of interracial guerrilla warfare. As experience has taught us, guerrilla warfare is the hardest kind to defeat. There are no authorities to offer surrender. There is no organization. There are no uniforms. Kill one guerrilla, and another one pops up. If this is really what’s about to start here, it may never stop, and it will devastate American blacks.

Islamists are using guerrilla tactics against us, and we have seen that we can’t stop it. They can’t destroy us, but they can bite and sting us from now until doomsday. It’s a bad situation. It will be worse when a larger segment of the population takes the same position.

Non-blacks aren’t going to reciprocate in any significant way. There will be a few kooks who murder black people in reprisal, but basically, our response will be to stay in our neighborhoods and lock the doors. Even if hate spreads among us, and it probably will, very few of us will be motivated to commit violent acts, simply because we won’t have to. We can protect ourselves by refusing to engage.

Black leaders need to rise up and warn people, but most of them won’t. They can’t stand up and gainsay their own decades-old, moneymaking narrative. If they want to continue to get paid, they’ll have to keep blaming the rest of America. If they do warn others, they’ll probably do it in a backhanded way: “I understand how angry the vile racist oppression in this white-controlled system makes you, but you have to show restraint.”

I envy people who live in the country. If you can’t make people who hate you disappear, at least you can live far enough away so they don’t want to make the drive to persecute you.

I wish I had positive things to say about America. I do not. I have extremely positive things to say about individual human beings. Any individual can get God’s help.

The Devil Won

It’s funny how prayer in tongues changes people.

I have a young friend who is in college. He lives near me. We get together from time to time. Five years ago, he would have been 100% on board with Black Lives Matter and the Obama administration. He swallowed the victimhood lie whole and repeated it. It poisoned his life and prevented him from succeeding.

Yesterday, without prompting, he started telling me how discouraged he was with the world. He said he had hoped to marry and have kids, but because the world was getting so crazy, he didn’t mind if God opened the sky up immediately and put an end to this age. He specifically cited BLM as an example of the craziness that has taken over.

The Holy Spirit did that. This young man has been praying in tongues for several years, and he has been increasing the time he puts in. His whole outlook has changed.

I feel the same way he does. If the world ended today, I would be thrilled to death. America is lost. The losers and nutbars took over. We love sin, pride, and anger, so we love and serve Satan. The loser spirits that serve Satan rule us now. It’s not going to get better. It’s going to get worse. We are too stupid and arrogant to change.

Don’t look at our location. Look at our direction. That’s what matters. Our location is not that bad. Our direction is terrible, and it’s fixed.

People who think they’re Christians have decided to rewrite scripture and make new rules for God. We love fornication. We love anger and pride. We decided God had to change; we decided things that were obviously wrong were right. Of course, God has not changed. If he changed, the universe would be taken over by evil. He is the anchor that makes the universe just.

We decided God was the child and we were the parents, so now Christians lack God’s support, just like kids who quit college and expect their parents to finance their pole-dancing careers. Segments of society that used to be weak and relatively harmless are now very powerful. We run from the people who used to run from us.

In the future, I expect to see a gigantic explosion of sexual perversion. Sexual sin has turned out to be the single biggest yoke Satan uses to control us, and there is no reason why that shouldn’t continue. You stick with what works. Sexual deviants used to make up one or two percent of the population. As demonic influence increases and Satan cements his domination, that number will rise. There is no reason why it can’t be 80% or 90%. We may be biologically wired a certain way, but supernatural influence is stronger than biology.

We will see more cruelty and persecution. We’ve already reached the point where every normal Christian who says abnormal sex is sinful–something obvious– is called a “hater” and threatened with exclusion from the marketplace. In the future, firing us and fining us won’t be enough. We’ll be beaten, imprisoned, and killed.

People think it’s not possible. If it can happen in sophisticated countries like Germany and Poland, it can happen anywhere. People who are not guided and protected by the Holy Spirit are capable of anything.

I feel very good about losing my emotional attachment to this place. I was never part of it to begin with; I wanted to fit in, but I was chasing something I was never going to be allowed to have. On top of that, the thing I was chasing was garbage. Life here lasts around 80 years, and almost all of what we do will be destroyed, because it has no importance to God. We all age. We all fall apart and die. Getting caught up in what happens here is a mistake.

A hundred years from now, people who seem like winners will be dead. George Clooney will be a pile of dust. Bill Gates will be eaten by worms. Nothing here lasts. Even now, Michael Jordan can’t play basketball. Carl Lewis can’t run fast. People may leave legacies that impress others for a few centuries, but what good does that do, when those people are in hell? Buddha is probably in hell. Mohammed is probably in hell. How much comfort can it be to them, if people who are not in hell yet admire them and follow them?

There are some things that last. If you help someone get to know the Holy Spirit, you will have that treasured relationship for eternity, in a place where there is no persecution or worry. In heaven, there is no disgruntled underclass or counterculture. Those beings are on earth and in hell, and in the future, they will be far away, burning forever. They won’t be allowed anywhere near us. They won’t get to talk. They won’t get to sue. They won’t get to argue.

That’s worth working for.

Heaven isn’t a democracy. There are no elections there. Brutish, cruel people won’t get to vote or even voice an opinion. They won’t be there. God will be on the throne, and he will rule. Every decision he makes will be perfect and right. There will be no discord, because we will all agree with him. One of the great benefits of heaven is the presence of God, but don’t forget the other benefit: the absence of Satan and every other evil, useless being.

How nice that will be. No disease, no rot, no wear, no violence. No lies. Wonderful.

It sounds cruel to celebrate the absence of beings that are damned to eternal suffering, but it’s not their suffering we will celebrate. It’s just the absence of the suffering they inflict.

One of the blessings the Bible promises is long life. That’s the only one I’m not excited about. Back when America was a safe place for Christians, long life was something to hope for. Now it’s like having your combat mission requirement extended. No wonder Paul was glad when he was sentenced to death; he lived in a pagan nation, just like the one we are becoming.

It’s frustrating to see Christians talk about changing the world. There are denominations that claim we’re supposed to make the world a nice place. They think being nice is all that matters. You can sin all you want, as long as it’s not mean sin.

That’s not how it works. The world has a terminal condition; we can’t fix it. Niceness is not the goal. The goal is to be led by the Holy Spirit, regardless of what he asks. Misplaced niceness is sin. Saul was cursed for it.

You can’t have love without correction. You can’t have correction without criticism. If you want to destroy someone, the best way to do it is to tell him he’s right about everything, from the day he’s born. Our prisons are full of people who have endless self-esteem. If you care about people, you tell them the truth so they can change. We’re not interested in that. We want to be told that we’re martyrs and victims. We want someone to blame; someone we can torture and abuse with complete justification. Doesn’t matter who it is, as long as we get to be harsh with others and not ourselves.

I wish there were more preachers telling people we’ve lost. If they were honest with us, we would make some effort to look after ourselves. We would try to get as close to God as possible, to maximize his help and protection. As it is, stinking predators and ignoramuses stand in pulpits telling us how unbelievers and the bad old devil cause all our problems. We’re just perfect. The universe is wrong.

They keep us asleep, like Samson on the lap of Delilah. No wonder our enemies keep winning.

I hope Donald Trump wins. I hope God will put him in the White House and use him to give Christians a little time to prepare as well as they can. I don’t know if I’ll even bother praying about the next election. What can I tell God? “Give us four more years, and we’ll be completely different than we have been since the fall of Adam?” Not likely. I don’t want to have to sell that pitch.

God has limited patience. The first time he killed the entire human race, he gave us 120 years to straighten up, and then the axe fell. Sooner or later, he will stop striving with modern man. I am not sure I should pressure him to indulge us more than he already has.

When you start hearing from God, your expectations and hopes will change. It will be a positive thing, but it will not be positive in every way. Might as well expect it. In this age, God is not going to turn everything around and make the world a magical kingdom of happiness and giggles, like Willie Wonka’s factory.

God isn’t going to change the world to suit you. He wants to change you, to suit his will. Your personality is supposed to be like his, and that happens through the growth supplied by the Holy Spirit. It’s all about internal improvement. The external things are just signs that the inside is fixed. And it’s the internal things that bring happiness and success.

It would be nice to live in a country where people loved God’s ways and were less likely to try to destroy me, but those days are over. It could be worse. I could live in Burma or Saudi Arabia. I could be in prison for owning Bibles. In America, that’s still a few years off.

Think about your goals. Are they eternal, or are they completely useless? If not, why do you chase them? You can keep what God puts inside you. You can keep people who make it to heaven with you. The rest will burn.

That’s my cheery Friday message. Whether it brings you pleasure depends on what you do with it.

Buckets of Pure Cocaine Would be Safer

The weight-maintenance-cookie plan was a disaster of Hindenburgian completeness. I have firmly concluded that it is not possible to adjust my calorie intake using cookies made from my own recipe.

I was doing just fine using Oreos. I ate three or four a day, just to take the edge off and restore my mental functions. I figured there was no reason better cookies wouldn’t do the same thing, cheaper and more enjoyably.

The batch of cookies I made from scratch is completely gone. It vanished in two days. I could not stay away from them. They taunted me They jeered at me. And now they are no more.

Lesson learned. Night before last I picked up a new bag of Oreos, and yesterday I put them to use. I went through a grand total of three. Oreos just don’t have the temptation punch my own cookies have.

The oatmeal cookies I made were stupendous, but now I can’t have them. One more recipe I can’t use. Dang it.

I wonder if I could come up with a recipe for mediocre cookies. Probably not. It seems like anything that comes out of a home oven beats anything that comes from a plastic bag.

Oreos have gone nuts. Things got weird thirty or forty years ago when they came out with “Double Stuf” Oreos. Someone at Nabisco realized fat people were only buying the cookies for the filling. Now they have “Mega Stuf.” Next they’ll have “Pure Stuf” or “Gallon Can o’ Stuf.”

They have birthday-cake-flavored Oreos now. Wonder what that’s like. Do they come pre-sprayed with spit, to simulate the blowing out of candles?

American consumers are not hard to please. The buying habits of chubby ladies prove this.

When I was a kid, Nestle started selling raw cookie dough so incredibly lazy people could use it to make cookies. At some point we all accepted reality: fat girls were buying it to eat out of the tube. Now you can buy ice cream and protein bars made to taste like raw cookie dough.

Prefab cookie dough is very popular, but the thing is, it’s not good. I don’t know what Nestle puts in their dough to serve as shortening, but I’m confident it’s not butter. The dough tastes sort of like toothpaste with sugar in it. People love it anyway.

My cookie experience shows how things really are: the supermarket junk we think is good is actually pretty lame. We like it because we’re lazy. The British have a saying: “Hunger is the best sauce.” I would say laziness is second best. When you get off your rear end and make real cookies, or even cookie dough, you understand the depth of the compromises you’ve made in the past.

God has given me more strength to turn food down, but there are some things I still have to stay away from. I can’t keep bags of fun size Snickers in the freezer. I can’t keep miniature Reese’s cups on the coffee table. And I can’t keep homemade cookies anywhere near me.

I feel like he’s helping me get off caffeine again. A long time ago he showed me that caffeine destroys peace. I quit drinking it. But when I had to take over my dad’s business affairs, I jumped off the wagon. The boredom of using Quickbooks and straightening up chaotic files was more than my mortal frame could stand. Now things are more orderly, and I have to give up the crutch. I do not want to spend the rest of my life feeling peppy and cheerful until noon and then crabby and crotchety for the rest of the day. I don’t want to have to take Benadryl to get to sleep.

God changes peoples habits, and it seems like he really hits hard in the beverage department. You find yourself cutting way back on alcohol. Sugary sodas turn into occasional treats. Fruit juices are just sugary soda without the gas, so they’re not the answer. That leaves coffee and tea, right? Wrong. Caffeine.

Today I’m going to get a bag of decaffeinated coffee beans. I can’t drink room temperature bottled water at breakfast every day. I am not ready for that.

I’m still fooling with the CNC mini-lathe. I got it to function with Mach3, the most popular home CNC machine-running program. I haven’t been able to get it to work with KMotionCNC, the nerdier, learning-curve-heavy free program that came with my controller board.

I think the people who made the board don’t care about lathes. They’re not going to come out and say that, but it seems to be true. Their program comes with a little viewing window that shows you an animated movie of your cutting tool at work. It’s set up perfectly for a big milling machine, but if you try to scale it for a lathe, it looks ridiculous. The software doesn’t give you a way to fix that.

The documentation that came with the boards says you need to know the computer language C in order to really understand what the software does. For that reason, I looked around for C courses yesterday. I tried Udemy and Edx. I wasn’t too impressed. C is an old language, and if I understand things correctly, it has morphed into newer languages like C++ and C# (C sharp). The online course offerings for plain old C aren’t that great. I decided to settle for a Youtube course.

The instructor said I had to get a compiler called Dev-C++, which is free. Right away I had problems. He uses version 4-something in the videos, and the current version is 5-something. It looks and works a little differently. So far I’ve been able to figure it out.

A compiler is a program that takes the code you write and turns it into program files. For example, you might write 30 lines of C or Pascal or whatever code, describing a program that lets you enter two numbers and then adds them and prints the result. You feed this into the compiler, and an “exe” file comes out the other end. When you want to experience the thrill of adding two integers, you double-click on “add.exe” or whatever you named it, and the program appears in a little DOS window (assuming it runs in DOS).

The first (only) language I learned was Pascal. I had to learn it in college. I used a compiler made by Borland. It was called Turbo Pascal. Dev-C++ is surely capable of much bigger things than Turbo Pascal, but to the user it looks pretty similar.

I learned a few things that were almost, but not quite, interesting. For example, the nerd term “ported” is a corruption that comes from “portable.” When you move a program from one OS to another, it’s portable, so you are–nails on a blackboard sound–“porting.” I can’t actually remember the other things, so I guess they truly were not interesting.

Here is how much interest I have in programming: zero, or even a large negative number. But if it will help me not have to go to surly, condescending nerds for help with technical stuff, I am all for it.

I’m still trying to figure out what kind of screws I need to make the lathe work well. At first I thought any ball screw would work. Then I found out some ball screws are very crude, so buying such a screw would fail to help or even make things worse. Then I found out there are levels of accuracy, designated “C” this or that, and I learned that most affordable screws were C7, which didn’t seem good enough.

After that, I read that the rigidity of the machine and the skill of the user make more difference than the quality of the screws. Is this true? I don’t know. The truth is a jittery target that skitters away every time I try to draw a bead on it.

A guy who supposedly knows a whole lot claims a plain old Acme screw will do fantastic work if you set it up right, and he says rigidity is more important than worrying about the number that comes after “C.” So maybe I need to buy a C7 screw in a big diameter; 3/4″ or better. I can do that for around a hundred bucks, if I go Taiwanese.

I’ve wondered why Acme screws were not considered useful. If I machine manually, I can get accuracy within a thousandth of an inch, relying on Acme screws and hand dials. Somehow that is not possible with a machine tool. You would think the computer would get better accuracy out of a screw than I can, but it looks like it doesn’t.

The topic is insanely complicated. Good screws aren’t the end of the discussion. For really accurate machining, some people use “screw mapping.” As I understand it, this means examining the screw with precision instruments and recording all its imperfections, so the computer will know to apply the correct compensation at every point on the screw.

Obviously, I am not going to do that. If I can get parts to measure within 0.002″ of spec, I will be the happiest man on earth. I’m not making crucial parts that prevent hydrogen bombs from going off. I don’t have to have perfection.

Now that the machine functions, I have to figure out how to design parts. I have a workable CAD program. I have to decide how to turn the CAD files into Gcode Mach3 can digest. I’m using Fusion360, from Autodesk, for CAD. It’s free. Not sure if it goes past CAD. I should design a part and see where I have to go with it.

Some day when I have room, I’ll get a mill. It will be a real CNC mill. I won’t spend my life on Ebay looking for bearings and screws. I’ll just place an order and wait for the machine. That will be nice. It doesn’t have to be big. Just sort of mid-sized, and it has to be something I can operate without pulling my hair out.

The CNC lathe will be very useful, but if you want CNC, what you really want is a mill. In fact, if you want to machine, period, you want a mill. I do not understand people who claim lathes are better. Most of the time, when you need a part, it will be something a mill can make easily, yet which a lathe can only make with weird, denial-reinforcing attachments.

If you want to make pens all day, sure, get a lathe. You’ll wish you had a mill, though.

Whatever you do with CNC, buy lots of plastic. You do NOT want to practice on metal parts. You will crash, and the crashes will damage your machine and cutting tools. Plastic will give, and it will provide a nice buffer between your mistakes and your checking account. Also, remember you can run programs in an animation window with the motors turned off. If the program looks funny in the animation, you do not want to run it with the motors on.

You can practice with wood instead of plastic, but it makes a mess.

Is this information useful to you? My hopes are not high, but I don’t care, because writing it was a very effective means of procrastination. I got what I wanted.

We are Really, Really Stupid

Working my way back over the Columbia University Lit. Hum. syllabus has helped me make some positive changes in my life. I guess I should not say “back,” since I probably skipped half of the reading when I was a snotty-nosed undergrad (now I’m a snotty-nosed geezer or “overgrad”). Anyway, things are getting better.

Lit. Hum. has reminded me that reading (books, not Google search results and Wikipedia) is a good thing. It has also reminded me that it’s not okay to stuff your mind with cotton candy all the time. You can’t spend ten hours a day watching Naked and Afraid and Spongebob Squarepants and not expect to find the equivalent of termites and dry rot when you examine the walls of the house that is your mind.

I think about this when I set the DVR. Okay, shut up. Yes, it’s TV, but you can’t survive without a little TV. It’s a great thing to have when you’re doing something that doesn’t occupy your brain.

I look for good stuff to watch. I record Modern Marvels, for example. Also historical shows. I found a bunch of Shakespeare plays on Turner Classic Movies, and I recorded them. Unfortunately, you really need to read the plays before watching performances, so I added work to my life.

Last night Marv and I checked out a 1970 production of King Lear, which was on the reading list a thousand years ago in my Lit. Hum. class.

I have a soft spot for this play, because it got me one of the only two compliments I ever received from instructors at Columbia. I wrote a paper on it, and my prof. wrote “Absolutely brillant” on the first page. That felt pretty good. Better than being told to get out a couple of years later. The memory of that remark was helpful to me later in life, when people were working hard to convince me I was stupid and worthless.

Last night as I watched, I was surprised to see how much of it I remembered. I’m surprised when I remember anything. But little bits of it got away from me, and I decided I should look at the text. Naturally, it’s available free on your smartphone. Believe it or not, I found an MIT page that had the whole play. I guess MIT students do have to speak English and read an occasional book that wasn’t written by Paul Dirac or an Indian guy.

When I started reading the text, I saw that the movie omitted about half of the material. Good Lord. Who does that? It’s like the famous story about the Arab theater owner who saved time while showing The Sound of Music by cutting out the songs. Who edits Shakespeare?

I deleted the movie from the DVR. I will find another source. I’m sure the play is on Youtube or something.

Apparently, getting your Shakespeare from movies is about as smart as learning history from movies. No, Thomas Jefferson was not a transgendered black womyn who wore a Che T-shirt. George Washington wasn’t gay. JFK was not assassinated by NRA operatives recruited by Jerry Falwell. Read a book and see.

I was only a few lines into the play when I was stricken by a fresh understanding of how stupid modern Americans are.

Shakespeare lived about 400 years ago, but he knew things we do not know today. He understood human nature. He understood that the universe was ordered, and that we were not at the top of the food chain. He knew that people had to cultivate virtue, or they would be no better than rats.

We don’t know these things today. We’ve been taught that “Question Authority” is a commandment. Most people are too stupid to question authority. That’s why it’s authority. If we all did what we thought was right, 99% of us would spend our entire lives screwing up. Oh, wait. That’s actually happening.

The writers we admire today are idiots compared to Shakespeare. They entertain, but they don’t enlighten. Take Hemingway. He was a fake; a poser. He was absorbed in convincing everyone he was the strongest, manliest man who ever manned. He rubbed his phony manliness in our faces. He talked about eating mussels alive and watching them squirm when he put lemon juice on them. He talked about the “comical” way horses looked when they were gored in the bull ring and their intestines dragged behind them.

No one really thinks that’s comical. You could have the male hormones of a thousand goats and Charlie Sheen and still not find it comical.

Where is the wisdom in that? Nowhere. If you want to be a poser, Hemingway and other posers (like Kerouac) are wonderful guides. They will help you grow up to be a little boy who thrives on denial. You can be the grown equivalent of the little boy who gets up and dances on his desk to get the teacher’s attention.

I remember that kid. His name was John Simmons.

Hemingway tried his he-man routing on boxer Gene Tunney, who got tired of trying to warn Hemingway off and gave him a carefully administered “little liver punch” that took all the color out of him and put an end to his manly act.

Shakespeare extolled things like honesty, humility, altruism, and knowing one’s place. That would never fly today.

Most people don’t understand Shakespeare. For example, they think Romeo and Juliet is a wonderful love story about two crazy kids who told their uptight parents to jam it and enjoyed a tragic but beautiful romance. That’s not true. To Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet were immature, selfish brats who ruined their own lives and wrecked their families.

In King Lear, the King hands his kingdom over to two nasty, insincere daughters who refuse to flatter him, and he disowns the honest daughter who really loves him yet refuses to stroke his ego. Here is what his advisor, Kent, says, after Lear warns him that his own anger is like an arrow about to leave the bow:

Let it fall rather, though the fork invade
The region of my heart: be Kent unmannerly,
When Lear is mad. What wilt thou do, old man?
Think’st thou that duty shall have dread to speak,
When power to flattery bows? To plainness honour’s bound,
When majesty stoops to folly.

Here is what Kent would say today. “Yo. It’s cool. No judging here.”

Kent is saying he would rather be shot with an arrow than fail to correct Lear and by correcting, help him avoid disaster. He says an honorable person must speak plainly when the king is crazy. He says power should not bow to flattery.

He’s giving Lear a lecture on classic morals and good sense. Pericles and Marcus Aurelius probably would have agreed, although they lived in the distant past, when people were supposedly backward. Kanye West would disagree; he wouldn’t even understand the words. And the state gave him a free education.

Lear is a fool (oddly, his fool is not), and he can’t receive the advice. He uses his sword to threaten Kent, who says:

Do:
Kill thy physician, and the fee bestow
Upon thy foul disease. Revoke thy doom;
Or, whilst I can vent clamour from my throat,
I’ll tell thee thou dost evil.

That’s genius. It sums up foolishness in a nutshell. “Kill the physician and pay the disease.” That’s exactly what stupid people do. They kill prophets. They shoot messengers. They hate good parents who correct them.

Look what Lear says when Cordelia explains that she has to be truthful instead of flattering him:

Let it be so; thy truth, then, be thy dower

Here is a fool speaking wisdom he doesn’t understand. He took away her inheritance, and he thinks that preferring the truth to money is imprudent and sure to lead to disaster. He has everything backward; in Shakespeare’s world, the penalty for doing evil isn’t poverty; the price is that you become an evil person. The reward for virtue is virtue, as the proverb says. The truth really is her dowery, but he doesn’t get it.

The play is packed with stuff like this. So are his other works. It’s sad, because modern Americans can’t receive it. We prefer pride, mockery, greed, and every type of sensual indulgence. Our heroes are the imbeciles in Hollywood and on MTV. You could never get a significant percentage of us to accept Shakespeare’s values. We swim gladly in a giant septic tank, swallowing as much as we can and thinking it’s champagne.

Shakespeare isn’t perfect; he’s not a prophet or apostle. He was a big proponent of fornication. If you look at his love poems and replace “will” with its real 1500s meaning, “genitalia,” this becomes clear. But he was way ahead of you and me. Maybe in his better moments he sincerely promoted values he himself could not live up to.

Wisdom is not accumulated through experience. At least, not enough to save us. It’s inherited. The people who lived before us built it up, and we can have it for nothing, if we will accept it. When we insist on proving everything by experience, we burden ourselves with the impossible task of recreating, in one lifetime, what others developed over millennia.

We don’t just eat candy and garbage; we eat infectious excrement, in big, deep gulps. It’s good to realize it’s excrement, but then you have to deal with the pain of being unable to convince other people.

I used to live with the sensation that I was under water, maybe a foot below the surface, always able to see the air above me, but never able to reach it. That’s gone; it left me quietly without announcing its departure. I believe it was caused by my immersion in poisonous worldly ideas.

In the Bible, water is words. Words are many things; they are ideas, urges, statements, denials, promises, and threats. The Sea of Galilee symbolized the world, which is inundated in the words of Satan and the people he controls. The water of this world is foolishness and poison.

When you only have the world to listen to, you’re under the surface of the sea of words. You are the tail, not the head. You are under the power of blind men and inferior loser spirits. When you start to hear from the Holy Spirit, and you spend time praying in tongues, the word of God flows through you.

The Bible says water flows from his throne, and the Holy Spirit’s flow within you is living (running) water. In the Bible, stagnant water is bad; it’s not clean, and it can’t be used for baptism.

I suppose the flow of living water is the reason why I no longer have the sensation of being submerged.

Jesus walked on water, not to impress people, but to show that he was above the backward thoughts of men and devils. He was dominant because he listened to God, not man. Noah was lifted by water that drowned the wicked. It protected Noah but killed his enemies.

Whether the water was death or life depended entirely on a person’s attitude toward it. Noah had the right attitude. His neighbors had the wrong attitude, and it made the water death to them.

Modern entertainment is a swamp of stagnant water. Modern culture is a poison.

It’s no wonder singers and actors do so much harm. Satan was a musician, and he’s also an actor. He plays the role of God every day.

It’s funny that in 2016, two thousand years after the crucifixion, there was no human being available to tell me this stuff. Surely the apostles knew it, but the people who followed them spat on their inheritance and refused to take it. Because they didn’t inherit good things, we couldn’t inherit anything good from them. So we stagger through life blinded, until the Holy Spirit comes to us and gives us what we should have been able to receive from our parents and neighbors.

If you’re too caught up in low-quality secular entertainment, take heart. There are alternatives. All you have to do is change channels and open books.