I Hear Them Giggling at Me

I have a sad setback to report. My weight-maintenance cookies are not working out.

I had found that keeping Oreos on hand was helpful for weight control, because I could grab one or two whenever I felt like my blood sugar was getting low, and it made it easy to avoid eating bigger things. It also saved me the time and expense of running to the drugstore for a Snickers bar. It saved me the time it would have taken to fix another meal.

I decided I should make my own cookies, since they’re better and cheaper than Oreos.

I made a batch using my oatmeal raisin recipe. I usually use golden raisins, but my local store has apparently stopped stocking them, so I used the dark kind.

When the cookies came out of the oven, I ate a few, and, as I should have predicted, they were so good, it was hard to stop. I ate too much.

Later in the day, I grabbed one after it had cooled off. I learned something really surprising: dark raisins don’t taste that great when they’re hot, but they make for a fantastic cookie at room temperature. This goes against everything I know about cookies. Generally, the hotter they are, the better they taste.

I was actually disturbed by how good the cookie tasted. I can’t remember ever eating a cookie that good. And I don’t even like oatmeal cookies that much. Chocolate chip is my favorite.

The conclusion is obvious: I have to go back to Oreos. My cookies are just too good to stay away from.

It sounds crazy, but I do not understand why I get such good results in the kitchen. I am my own favorite cook; no one else comes close. I cook stuff, I try it, and I make groaning noises and have to lean on the counter to keep from falling.

I don’t have any interest in this gift. I don’t use it. I cook very ordinary food, I almost never make anything special, and I quit cooking for friends (much to their chagrin). These days I only cook a couple of times a week. I make a big pot of soup and a meat dish, and I eat it all week long. As far as I know, my pizza and cheesecake are the best in the universe, and I haven’t made either one in maybe a year. My steaks are out of this world, but when rib roast prices took a huge dip recently, I didn’t bother aging roasts and cutting them into steaks. I did buy some steaks, but I didn’t knock myself out aging them and cooking them properly.

I’ve told God that if he wants to take this gift away and help me do well at something else, I would be fine with it.

One nice thing about not cooking for friends is that it helps you find out why people associate with you. If you stop feeding them and they stick around, you know they’re not just there for free food. If you’re lonely, buy a pickup truck and learn to cook. You’ll never be alone again. Just make sure you keep the food flowing and you never refuse to help someone move.

Another thing I don’t understand: I don’t make everything well. I have never made chicken wings I would serve to a guest. I finally gave up trying to improve, and I settled for wings that were just okay. It’s like some recipes just come to me, and other dishes are hopeless causes.

What am I supposed to do with this cookie recipe? Nothing, I guess. I’d like to keep using it, because Oreos are expensive and mediocre, but I don’t know if I can handle this level of temptation.

I guess I’ll find out, because I still have a lot of cookies left.

By the way, someone asked for the recipe in a comment, and I posted it. I have some corrections. Use dark raisins, and use at least a cup, not half a cup. And don’t eat the cookies until they cool down. You might want to double the salt.

This week’s huge meat dish is meatloaf. I had never made it before. I found the “Award-Winning Quaker Oats Recipe” at Epicurious, and I tried it. Maybe I did something wrong, but it’s not very good. The “sauce” is ketchup with a ton of brown sugar, Worcestershire sauce, and vinegar in it. The loaf is dry, even though I used cheap, juicy hamburger. It needs more salt, too. Like everything.

I know I can improve it. I could add beef broth to the oats before mixing them in. I could mix onion soup mix into the meat instead of using minced onions. I could fix that strange sauce. I could add pork.

Mmm. Pork.

I could be really bad and mix butter into the meat. That would be sick.

I thought I could trust Epicurious, but I was wrong. I shouldn’t be surprised. The recipe got a top rating, but most people can’t tell good food from dog chow.

I still have like three pounds of that meatloaf left. Hope I make a good dent in it today.

Mine and Yours

I have something to do in 45 minutes, so I can’t really sit down and dig into my new responsibilities. So here I am.

I have been reading Thucydides. I thought I was going to start sooner, but I looked at the Columbia University Lit. Hum. syllabus and discovered I was supposed to read Euripides (The Bacchae) first.

I think I should have taken the midterm last week. I would have been ready for it, which is more than I can say about my last time through this stuff.

I don’t believe in stealing copyrighted stuff, so I always look for cheap paper copies of whatever I read, even if I read it first on Scrib’d or whatever. I read The Odyssey on Scrib’d, and I also ordered a real copy. It’s still in the plastic.

I ordered a copy of Euripides V from Amazon, and then I read an earlier version at the Open Library, which is a site that “lends” ebooks. It has some connection to the Internet Archive, but the Archive has its own borrowing site. You figure it out. I am too lazy to look. I have accounts at both sites. I hope they’re taking care of authors’ rights, but anyway, I do use them. I took a look at a couple of drink recipes from Trader Vic’s without buying paper copies of the book. I hope that’s morally acceptable.

“Bacchae” rhymes with “wacky,” and maybe that’s fitting. It means “bacchants.” “Bacchant” (also “bacchante”) is pronounced “buh-Can’t.” It means a lady who worships Bacchus, the Bieber-like Greek God of drunkenness and–I don’t know–being effeminate maybe.

Here is the idea. Bacchus comes down to–wow, I’ve forgotten already–is it Thebes? Yes. The Thebes in Greece. He claims he’s Zeus’s son. His family says he’s a random illegitimate sissy. His cousin, Pentheus, is given the throne of Thebes, and Bacchus is rejected, although he does go on to a successful run, playing millionaire Thurston Howell on Sixties TV.

People who worship Bacchus go crazy. They get really drunk and run around the woods, dancing and fornicating. Women are the main participants, and during their craziness, they provide sex for any man who asks. This is not considered sleazy or sinful; it’s considered pious. Go figure.

It’s a remarkable thing to read, because it’s like a perverse reflection of being led by the Holy Spirit.

When you’re led by the Holy Spirit, you’re out of sync with the rest of the world. Like the bacchants, you seem irrational to other people, but you’re under the influence of a spirit who knows what he’s doing. You will do things that seem ill-advised from people who don’t hear from him.

The bacchants were also out of step with other people. Unlike Spirit-led Christians, they lost their free will and good sense. They did strange things. The mother of Pentheus got together with a group of bacchants and tore him to pieces, removing his head and so on. She didn’t know he was her son. She wanted to find Pentheus and tell him how she had helped kill the unbeliever.

Bacchus was the son of the highest Greek God, by a mortal woman. Jesus was the son of the real high God, by a mortal woman. Bacchus was rejected. Jesus was rejected. Bacchus sent a spirit to control people who followed him, and they did strange things. Jesus sent a spirit to help people rise above Satan and the world, and under that spirit’s influence, we do things other people don’t understand.

Bacchus gave humanity wine, and the Greeks thought that was a great gift, because it got people drunk. Jesus gave people his blood, which was represented by wine. When the Holy Spirit fell on the Apostles, people thought they were drunk.

I have to wonder how much of this is coincidence. In the time of Euripides, Satan didn’t know about the crucifixion or the baptism with the Holy Spirit, but it seems like evil spirits pick up on things from time to time, getting little incomplete glimpses of the things God is up to.

Thucydides is interesting. His book is about the Peloponnesian Wars. The Peloponnese is the lower part of Greece, where Sparta is located. It’s actually a peninsula. Athens is on the mainland. The mainier mainland. Athens and Spart went at it, with other Greek city-states joining the fray.

The Athenians were led by a remarkable man named Pericles. He reminds me of Winston Churchill and George W. Bush. He was a solid wartime leader whose people turned on him once the consequences of their decision to follow him into battle became clear. People always want the omelette, and then they want the eggs back.

Pericles was a speaker, and he made some famous speeches before the Athenians. In the first, he urged them to go to war. He said something you would expect to come out of the mouth of an American Founding Father: “Make up your minds that happiness depends on being free, and freedom depends on being courageous.”

Well, I got called away before the 45 minutes were up. But I’m back now. I’m making diet cookies.

To get back to Pericles, he showed me something interesting about Sparta: the Spartans were crazy to put their kids through 18 years or whatever of cruel boot camp.

If you’ve seen 300, you know that the Spartans sent their male children off to suffer miserably until they were old enough to join the army. This was after killing off all the ones that looked imperfect; the Spartans were extremely pro-choice. They left weak-looking babies to die in the wilderness.

In the movie, the Spartans are incredibly macho and tough. They’re like the SAS of Greeks. No one can fight as well as they can. Three hundred of them hold the huge Persian army off for days.

In real life, the flabby, hard-drinking Athenian queens kicked the snot out of them. They defeated the Spartans, proving you don’t really need to throw your life away to be an effective soldier.

American conservatives got really sweaty and pumped after 300 came out. We put “Molon labe” all over our blogs (even though King Leonidas of Sparta didn’t say that in the movie). Maybe we should have been excited about the wedding planners, figure skaters, and airline stewards of Athens.

Want to hear something interesting about Pericles? He had the Athenians hide behind a wall during the war. He also wanted to fix it so you had to have two Athenian parents in order to be a citizen of Athens. Do you realize what this means? He wasn’t the Greek George Bush. He was the Greek Donald Trump.

Pericles, it seems, was brilliant, even though his plans didn’t always work. Thucydides was no moron, either. He understood how smart Pericles was, and he paid him this compliment: he said he led the people instead of being led by them. That’s true wisdom. Most of our politicans are followers, not leaders. Obama is the biggest sheep in the universe. Somehow a man who lived 2500 years ago knew how important it was for a leader to lead, and we don’t know it now. How can that be? How can you not know something you knew in 475 B.C.?

Leadership is a huge part of Christianity. You’re supposed to be the head, not the tail. The head doesn’t follow the tail. When your buddies are getting tattoos, using drugs, and doing yoga, you shouldn’t go along just so they’ll love you. You should set an example and do what’s right.

You’re wondering what diet cookies are.

In 2009, after a fast, I suddenly found that God had given me control over what I ate. I didn’t feel compelled to stuff myself. I lost weight. That blessing didn’t go away, but I damaged it. One night I decided to order all-you-can-eat ribs with a friend of mine, and since then, things haven’t been quite as good as they were in 2009. I guess I followed instead of leading.

Recently, God brought the self-control back. That’s great, but it comes with little challenges. One is that I tend to eat too little at breakfast. I can tell when I need more food, because I start to feel crabby, and I don’t concentrate well. Like Betty White in the Snickers commercial.

I bought a bag of Oreos the other day, and I found them very useful. When I needed food, I grabbed a couple of Oreos, and they fixed the problem. Without small, handy, calorie-filled items around, I would be likely to eat something that’s too big.

I ran out of Oreos, and I was going to get more, but then I remembered my own cookies. I make fantastic oatmeal raisin cookies. It’s not a big brag. All homemade cookies are phenomenal compared to bag cookies, as long as you don’t use vegetable oil or shortening.

Today I made a pile of oatmeal cookies, and I’ll keep them around so I don’t keel over at 3 p.m. every day. The big problem is that they may be too good. If they’re too good, it will be very hard to control my consumption, even with the help I have.

They really are good. I know they’re good, because I love them, and ordinarily I don’t like oatmeal cookies.

I guess I’m going to have to get back to work on accounting. Either that, or I’ll have no choice but to get into the differences between rolled and ground ball screws.

I Will Beat This Thing if it Kills Me

I have been trying to rehabilitate my wayward CNC lathe. I built it in 2014, and for some reason, I quit working on it. I don’t recall the final straw, but I know that I was frustrated with the motor setup, and I was disturbed to learn that the screws that move the carriage (one of which cost a ton of money) were not adequate for good machining.

I started working on it last week, and I learned a few things.

First off, the screws aren’t that bad. The screw on the x axis (toward and away from the operator) is accurate to within a thousandth or so, which is about as good as I will ever need it to be. The other screw (z, or left and right) can be made accurate to within a couple of thousandths, which will do for 98% of hobby projects. I would be better of with ball screws, which have no significant backlash, but I don’t need them at this stage. Better to put my effort into making the motors and programs work.

Second thing: ball screws are getting cheaper and easier to find. I should be able to replace the z screw for under a hundred bucks, and the x screw, if it needs to be replaced at all, will be less.

Third thing: you don’t need a compound rest on a CNC lathe. A compound rest, for those of you who haven’t stopped reading already, is a second slide on top of the main carriage slide. The main slide, or cross slide, moves the tool toward you and away from you. The compound sits on it, and it can be swiveled, so it can move the tool in all sorts of directions in the horizontal plane.

A compound is very useful in manual machining, but with CNC, it’s a problem, unless it’s connected to a computer. The computer needs to control all movement and know where everything is, and that doesn’t happen with a compound that isn’t wired up. You have to leave it in one position all the time, so the computer knows where it is. That means it takes up space for no reason, and because compound rests are inherently wobbly, it adds error.

I took mine off and replaced it with a nice aluminum block. I was really happy with the block. It’s probably the first thing I’ve ever machined successfully, in one try, with no errors.

Now if I can just get the lathe to work.

The little flat part that projects in front of the tool post is probably not necessary, but I left it there in case I found a need to mount additional stuff. You never know.

Fourth thing: if you use a KFlop controller, like mine, you will not be able to do threading without two spindle inputs. Mach3, the program just about everyone uses, will let you observe your spindle’s movements with a single sensor that, obviously, sends a signal once every rotation. The KFlop isn’t having that, so I have to rig up a two-sensor thing.

The mini-lathe came with variable speed and a tachometer, so it has a spindle sensor already. There is a disk around the spindle at one end, and there is a hole in the disk. The disk runs through a caliper-looking thing which contains an optical sensor. Every time the hole goes through, the sensor sends a signal to the tachometer, and the lathe tells me how fast it’s going.

The CNC plans I bought say to buy a new sensor and install it on the spindle. The sensor is inductive. That must mean it has a coil in it. Anyway, you mount a small flat piece of metal on the spindle, and every time it passes the new sensor, it makes current run through the sensor, telling the controller what the spindle is doing. When I realized the lathe already had a sensor, I decided to try to hack into it and connect it to the KFlop. That’s when I found out it won’t work. Now I have to put a second disk on the spindle with two cheap optical sensors at 90 degrees to each other.

I still can’t get the software to work right. That’s largely because I made a lathe and not a mill. You have to be stupid to make a lathe, because no one does it. Because there are so few hobby CNC lathes, there are very few people who can help you with problems. Also, the people who make the KFlop do not provide computer code for two-axis machines, so you may have to learn to alter C programs to work in two dimensions.

Aggravating.

Nonetheless, things are moving right along.

I have one problem which is strictly physical, i.e., not in software. I crashed the lathe a long time ago, and now it tends to sputter. I changed the brushes on the motor, and it didn’t help. The old brushes were fine. I am now wondering if I damaged the contacts on the switch that changes the lathe from forward to reverse motion. Anyway, it’s one more thing to fix.

I bought a long piece of Delrin rod from Zoro Tools. I figured it would be more forgiving than aluminum when the lathe crashed. We’ll see. And Delrin is very useful stuff.

In other news, I am learning a lot about dementia. This week I realized that dementia is like dissection. It shows you what’s under people’s skin. It tells you what’s inside them.

My dad keeps having problems with his prescriptions, which I dole out for him, putting everything in a pill organizer. His doctor is supposed to keep them flowing to him by mail, by keeping his refills up to date. The supplier is supposed to send new pills automatically. Over and over, they screw up. I call the supplier, and they say the doctor didn’t update the prescription. I call the doctor, and they tell me to talk to the supplier. No one ever says the obvious thing, which is, “We are incompetent. Sorry. We’ll fix it.”

He ran out of one of his medications, and there was turmoil for about half an hour.

He can’t keep the names of the companies that supply his drugs straight. He can’t remember who sends the prescriptions. He became very angry and agitated, and he kept asking me the same things over and over. I was very calm about it; this is a problem that literally takes 30 seconds to fix. You make a note to call the doctor and the prescription people, and you go on with life. He kept telling me he couldn’t have this chaos in his life, and he was clearly upset that I wasn’t upset.

I had a sudden realization: he enjoys being angry and upset. It brings him pleasure. He doesn’t like to see it end. In the instant I saw that, a lot of things from my childhood started to make sense.

Most people don’t like being upset. When they get upset, they look for solutions to put an end to it. My dad never did that. When he got angry, he looked for ways to prolong it and spread it to other people. He used to get mad at people he couldn’t rattle. He thought there was something wrong with them. He had an employee he criticized for being unflappable; he found the man extremely frustrating, just because he didn’t burst into tears or share in the hysteria. I didn’t understand that. Now I do.

My house was always full of stress and yelling. When we would ask him to calm down, he always said, “Don’t tell me to calm down!” Now I see why he did that. He was enjoying himself.

You couldn’t tell him you were sorry and have an end to the problem. Even if you fixed the problem on the spot, he kept going. He didn’t stop until he got tired, and that could take hours. Sometimes he would run down and stop, and then it would start up again later. Sometimes he resumed days afterward.

I can’t believe I never saw this before.

It shows how harmful bad habits are to older people. When you’re 50 and you still have it together, you can change. When you become demented, forget it. People can’t help you with good advice, because you can’t receive it. All they can do is try to limit your suffering. And theirs. By spending less time with you.

Whatever you’re hiding from your kids today will eventually be so obvious it might as well be on a billboard.

Awareness of the problems my parents and grandparents have or had is not useless. It can’t help them, but it can help me. These things are caused or exacerbated by spirits, and those spirits leave the dead and prey on their descendants. As is so often the case, I am presented with a situation in which I can be blessed through others, yet I can’t bless them in return.

My dad’s potential to change and enjoy life is limited, and my sister is a lost cause. I don’t even know if she’s alive. The strange thing is that I’m not agitated about it. Many Christians have the idea that you’re never supposed to stop weeping and worrying over people; that’s a huge lie. We are supposed to be blessed, and you can’t be blessed if your life consists of perpetual handwringing over people who choose, habitually and over a course of decades, to harm themselves.

The Holy Spirit killed Ananias and Sapphira; people forget that. Peter spoke curses to them, and they died on the spot. He didn’t weep. He didn’t beg them to change. I’m sure he wasn’t happy about what happened to them, but the Holy Spirit tells us which battles to fight and which to drop, and he apparently chose not to have Peter wear himself out on Ananias and Sapphira.

We don’t know what people did for them in the time leading up to their deaths. They may have fasted and prayed for them every day for months.

I pray for my dad every day. I do what I can in the supernatural, and I make his life easy. That’s plenty of effort; I’m doing what I’m supposed to. Results can’t be guaranteed; I am not responsible for them. I am content.

I have more peace now that I understand what’s going on. That’s good. It’s bad when other people can’t be blessed, but I’ll take my blessings just the same.

Evil Rules America

Last night some imbeciles shot up Dallas, killing a number of policemen. One of the murderers told police he wanted to kill white people. Lost individuals are on social media, applauding the racist losers who committed the crimes.

None of it is surprising. For most of a century, liberals have been teaching minorities, women, and gays that every cruel, vicious thing they do to the rest of us is justified. Our president takes that attitude, and during his reign, race relations have reached a new low. White people, men, Christians, and heterosexuals are constantly corrected and insulted, so we have tried to clean up our acts. The people who proudly call themselves victims have been coddled and pampered, and they have been taught to blame others for their problems, so they have deteriorated morally.

I see people on the news asking what we can do to fix it. It’s sad, because they’re living in a fantasy world. We can’t fix it. We won’t. It will get worse.

We abandoned God years ago. American serves Satan, and we do so with increasing openness. God doesn’t take care of us the way he used to, because we are his enemies. Order and hate will continue to decrease until the end of this age.

Our ghettos are full of people who can’t receive truth. They can’t be helped any more. They will believe any lie you tell them, but the truth infuriates them. A black friend told me she was against Republicans because we took prayer out of school. Another black friend told me a mutual acquaintance was against Republicans because we fought for gay marriage. The blindness is a marvel. If you can live in America, surrounded by 24-hour news outlets, carrying a smartphone in your pocket, and still believe Republicans fought for gay marriage, then you are immune to learning.

Black people abandoned God, so they became blinded. White people abandoned God, so we lost our protection and help. Every segment of society is cursed in various ways, and irrational hate and violence are two of the results.

The infantile individuals who shot up Dallas are not intelligent enough to understand what they’ve done. They dealt a devastating blow to black people in America.

The only way to do well in this world is to submit to God, learn, and improve. You have to take accountability. The second you start blaming others for your problems, you lose. Instead of growing stronger, you grow weaker. The Dallas murderers will inspire other black people to mistreat the police and people of other races, and the net result will be more poverty, more isolation, and more black-on-black violence.

Black people make up something like 12% of the population, and they don’t have much of the wealth. They don’t have many guns. They don’t have much property. They are not powerful people. Now they are being encouraged to fight against the strong, wealthy, government-backed, heavily armed, job-providing 88%. That’s not going to work. You can’t fight a civil war with 12% of the population.

As things get worse, black people will suffer. They will riot and destroy their own areas. They will destroy their businesses and careers. They will drive other people, and their money, out. They will be hit with business-killing curfews. Many will be crippled by felony charges that make them unemployable. People will be less willing to befriend them and help them assimilate.

A few non-blacks will suffer, but let’s face it; my neighborhood will be just fine, and so will nearly all non-black neighborhoods. We have weapons. The police are behind us. The National Guard is behind us, even under Obama. Deranged rioters and murder gangs don’t get on the bus and go to other neighborhoods. They walk outside, right where they live, and raise hell. They won’t be a problem here.

I have a black friend I pray with every week. He used to be on board with the victimhood movement. He thought George Zimmerman was a murderer. That’s over now. He is very frustrated with Black Lives Matter. He says he feels like he can’t talk to his black friends, because he disagrees with their mindset and they are incapable of listening. It must be a very unpleasant position to be in. He has seen the light, and he has knowledge that can help people he cares about, but if he tries to speak up, he’ll get nothing but abuse and accusations.

I’m not stupid. I know there are many, many black people in America who are celebrating today. The press will pretend it’s not happening, but social media is a fluoroscope that reveals all. Self-destructive attitudes are on full display right now. It won’t be acknowledged, accountability will be rejected, and things will get worse.

Talking heads will be on the air all week, trying to find a way to blame white people. When you blame people, you imply that they have power. White people are out of line with God, and to that extent, we are responsible for what’s happening, but come on. This mess is primarily the result of the actions of black people.

I can relate to my friend’s problem. I feel the same way about human beings, generally. We are full of blindness and unjustified anger, and we love it. When God tells me something good, it’s very hard to share it successfully with anyone. More and more, I am an outcast.

How could I succeed now if I tried to integrate with secular society? I’m very outspoken about homosexuality; that, alone, would suffice to get me blackballed in business. I call Bruce Jenner a man. I call Islam a cult. A person like me is unwelcome everywhere. I’m even unwelcome among tongue-talking Christians, because I tell them their leaders are lying vultures.

The world hates truth, and if you speak the truth, it hates you. The fact that you want to help just makes it worse. The world is evil, and help makes it angry. Satan is the god of this world, and if you try to graft yourself into it, he will see to it that you are rejected like a transplanted limb.

Jesus said the world would hate his disciples. He was not joking. There was a time when America was relatively safe for Christians; this country was unusual, in that God had a lot of power here. That day is gone, gone, gone. And it’s not coming back.

People are going to look for secular solutions to the BLM problem, and that will not please God. It will make things worse. He let us have this predicament as a lesson, to help us turn back to him. Instead, we will throw it back in his face and continue to offend him.

In all likelihood, we are about to see a terrible time for black Americans. It’s very sad. They pinned their hopes on a president and an ideology that make things worse.

If I lived near the edge of a black area, I would be looking for a realtor right now. Anger will increase, and I am a natural target.

I feel bad for black conservatives, but then when has that not been true? I feel bad for any black person who is against the violence. The bad behavior of the hateful makes the rest of us wary. The government can’t profile, but the rest of us will, even if we try not to, and many innocent people will be ostracized out of fear.

It’s disturbing to see how right I have been about the direction the world is taking. My information definitely came from God. I used to joke about wanting a walled compound in central Florida, but it’s actually a very good idea. Miami is full of Cubans who didn’t like blacks much to begin with, and it’s full of black people who are getting angrier by the minute. People who live in the country live with less tension.

The good news is that help is available. You can’t fix your “community.” You can’t even fix your relatives. But you can fix yourself. You can get power, peace, and correction from God. You can get his protection and help. It has gotten to the point where a real Christian is like a bubble boy; that’s sad, but the bubble is still a great gift. You can get close to God, submit, develop a prayer life, and find insulation from the crazies and killers. If you haven’t done it yet, you need to turn the PC off and start today.

I wish I had something nice to say about the world, but it would be a lie. Accept the situation as it is and receive the best help available. Denial will only make things worse.

More

I feel like adding a few things to what I wrote.

People will read this and call me a racist or say that I don’t care about police abuse of black people. It’s always easier to make a false accusation than to use your brain.

The cops have all sorts of problems. Everyone over the age of two knows that the job attracts a lot of sadistic, corrupt control freaks. I haven’t dealt with the police all that much, and even in my limited experience, I would say 20% of them were snotty and possibly dangerous. I had a black cop wake me up by banging on a car window with a nickel-plated .357 close to my head; that wasn’t just rude; it was a felony. And I know racism is a serious problem in police departments.

Some of the people the BLM crowd is upset about were murdered. Tamir Rice was murdered. So was the guy who was shot while running from the police on foot in South Carolina. I believe the Eric Garner case was manslaughter. It happens. It happens more often to white people, but in any case, it happens, and black people are probably more likely to be victims.

I think it’s swell to keep an eye on the cops, and I think any cop who interferes with a person shooting video of a police interaction should be put in prison for several years.

That doesn’t mean the BLM people aren’t crazy or counterproductive.

We are not going to be able to do much about the police, because policemen have always been dangerous. That has been true in every country, since the dawn of history. Cops are one of the main reason the Bill of Rights was written. The job attracts crazies and crooks. No matter how much we screen and observe, there will be more Tamir Rices. We should make reasonable efforts to change that, but realistically, we are not going to see results much better than what we have now. It’s actually surprising to me that we have as few problems as we do.

Changing yourself is another matter. You can do that. You can stop selling drugs. You can stop carrying illegal weapons. You can stop stealing, raping, and killing. You can refuse to join a gang. It’s not that hard. The difference BLM would make by teaching people to shape up dwarfs the difference they will make by blaming the police and white people.

Look at the people the cops have been killing. Almost all of them delivered themselves into the hands of the cops. Almost all were in the hands of the police because they had just committed crimes. Even the man who was shot in the back had committed a crime. If you really want to save lives, isolate yourself from the threat by behaving responsibly.

Also, BLM critics are 100% correct when they say BLM is hypocritical because it ignores the threat blacks pose to each other.

If you’re a black person conceived in the city of New York, you will probably be murdered…by your mother. You are more likely to be killed by your mother than born alive. If BLM really cares about black lives, why not attack the white-funded, white-dominated abortion industry, which deliberatedly targets black babies? The whole purpose of the abortion industry is to reduce the numbers of live black births.

I know people will say this is trite, but it’s trite because it’s true: it would also make sense to fight black crime. Right now in Liberty City, a few miles from here, a black man who is angry at another black man can shoot him in his front yard in front of witnesses and not worry about a conviction. People do not cooperate with the cops. People who talk are in danger of being killed, not just by the people they inform on, but by all sorts of people in their area who have no direct interest in the crimes in question.

If you’re a black man, you’re about as likely to be shot by a cop as you are to die in a bathtub accident. It’s not that common. But you stand a pretty good chance of being killed by your mom or another black civilian.

So to sum up, BLM is avoiding approaches that can help, and they are working very hard on an approach that will produce extremely limited positive results. In the process, they’re burning neighborhoods, looting stores, shooting cops, and teaching destructive values that lead people to self-destruct.

The things I’m saying are useful and helpful. I’m sorry they don’t taste like Froot Loops, but medicine usually doesn’t.

Accounting is my Passion

I said I eagerly awaited the day when I could honestly say I liked Quickbooks; it looks like that day is here.

I have had to take over most of my dad’s responsibilities, and I’m aware that the percentage will approach 100 asymptotically in the near future. Every weekday I put time in, entering old checks and payments in Quickbooks. I deal with people who fix his car and work on his house. I watch to see if he’s doing anything wrong, so I can step in.

Using accounting software is not exciting, but along with the other new responsibilities, it’s paying dividends. When I’m only responsible for myself, I don’t have a lot of motivation to do things well. Now that I’m responsible for another person, I cut my own excuses short and get things done, and the mindset extends to my own affairs.

I’m developing the habit of scheduling things and setting daily goals. This is more helpful than you would think. As I’ve said before, if you sit down to work on something and you have no specific goal, you don’t know when you’re finished. When you quit, it’s because you’re tired, not because you accomplished something. You think about the rest of the task for the remainder of the day instead of putting it out of your mind.

When you set goals, you know when it’s time to get up, and you can be at peace while you do other things.

This all comes from my prayer life, which goes better and better with time. I have started making a point of asking God to help me give 100% of myself and my wealth to him. That’s very important. We are generally taught to give him just enough of ourselves to make our lives run well, as if we’re tipping a waiter or paying the IRS. Prosperity preachers teach us to pay God to help us and then go away. The old covenant taught us to give him 10%. That stuff doesn’t work now. You have to trust him completely, and when you ask him to help you do that, you find that part of you is very reluctant.

It’s not natural to trust God completely. That makes sense, because we are selfish, we are used to doing what we want, and we are used to being cheated by just about everyone we deal with. I don’t trust people; do you? I don’t even trust the people I trust. There are people I’d trust with my house keys, but there is nobody I’d put on my bank accounts. I wouldn’t trust anyone to tell doctors whether they could start passing out my organs. My trust has limits.

It’s hard to think of a single person who hasn’t let me down, and I have let others down. A lot of people have gone beyond being untrustworthy; they have worked to destroy me, for no good reason. They have stolen from me. They have slandered me behind my back. I’ve been lied about to judges.

God is the only person who is completely trustworthy. It’s no wonder I come to him with the habit of limiting what I give to people. I’ve never known any human being I could rely on, because such people do not exist.

So anyway, asking for help with complete trust and submission has been helpful. And it makes sense that it would help. Why should God help people who aren’t his employees? You don’t see Burger King giving uniforms to the kids who work at McDonald’s.

Peace and success keep increasing in my life. It’s absolutely great.

This morning I thought about the churches I used to go to. I was so glad I quit going. I felt relieved, knowing that disgusting weight was not on my back.

I know there are people at those churches who think I’m lost. They assume things are going badly for me now that I’ve “touched God’s anointed” and criticized “the prophets.” They are waiting to hear a bad report, and to see me crawl back to church full of regret. Fat chance!

I know they mean well (some of them), but they couldn’t be more wrong.

The Wilkerson family, at Trinity Church, is a horror to deal with. The place is a cult. They treat people like slaves. They put the dumbest, trashiest, most worthless teachers imaginable in front of people (most of whom are poor), and these people and the staff preachers persuade the crowd to go into debt to give the Wilkersons ridiculous offerings. The Wilkersons run people down to their friends. They interfere with relationships. They scheme behind people’s backs. Attending that church was like sharecropping. No, it was like being in a Nazi death camp. You work until you’re used up, and then someone replaces you.

Rich Wilkerson, Sr., asked for an offering at a funeral! No lie.

The last church I attended wasn’t great, either. The pastors had crazy, inflated opinions of themselves. They thought they were always right. The head pastor actually scolded the volunteers because they didn’t honor him correctly on his birthday! We were supposed to honor his adolescent son, who is nothing but an angry brat. He posted a photo of Jesus on Instagram, clutching a gigantic marijuana leaf. Under it, he announced that he was an atheist. He was nasty to older people. He was uneducated, by choice. But we were supposed to honor him!

They broke up relationships. They were incapable of listening. They were childish. They made a confused man their “house prophet.” They expected people to listen to the crazy things he said, and to rely on them when they steered their lives. The church never grew when I was there, and it’s still in a little rented room. Every time God started to move, pride stopped him in his tracks.

I don’t have to fool with that mess any more. I’m free. I talk to God personally all the time. I don’t need to talk to his crazy, manipulative personal assistants.

I have much more control over my mind, heart, and flesh than I used to. I have more success. The thistle hedges God put around me when I was in rebellion are coming down. I keep getting correction and supernatural improvement. It’s wonderful. If I had listened to the slave drivers and tiny pharaohs, I would still be walking in circles treading out their grain.

It’s great. I love it. You can have it, too.

I’m also glad I’m off Facebook, Twitter, and the other social media sites. I don’t have to turn on the PC and groan, knowing I’m about to see backward garbage posted by friends who claim to love God. I don’t have to see half-naked pictures, Only Black Lives Matter propaganda, prosperity gospel filth, or posts about how hard Christianity is and how we have to save ourselves through effort.

I miss people, but I would rather have what I have and be without them than have what they have and be with them.

In my prayers, I keep telling God I’m going to keep going forward and doing well even if every other person on earth dies in defeat and goes to hell.

That sounds bad, I suppose, but it doesn’t mean I don’t care about other people. It means I will not let my desire to please them or be accepted drive me to accept the chump change they’re living for. The devil pays them off in trinkets, so they’re happy to remain as they are. Not me (not any more). I want to keep growing. I don’t want to peak in this life.

I hope everyone I know grows and improves, but if they don’t, I will keep walking, and I will never look back. Never. It’s unthinkable.

Sometimes I sit and focus and try to feel the way I felt six months or a year ago. I remember the tension and worry. I remember the sensation of defeat. Things were pretty good back then; they were way better than they were in 2007, when I first decided to go back to church. But today I feel ten times as good. As pleasant as things were in 2015, I could never allow myself to sink back to that level.

I realize the kingdom of heaven isn’t about feeling good. God is not my life coach or massage therapist, with a purpose of making things swell for me. But when you align yourself with God, you can’t help being blessed. It can’t be avoided.

The things I’ve been talking about on this blog work. They are correct. It’s not my imagination. It’s revelation. It never stops working. It never stops getting better. I make little errors here and there, but fundamentally, it’s right. I don’t regret buying into a single part of it.

After all this, I almost look forward to attacking Quickbooks today. And if God can turn Quickbooks into a blessing, what can’t he bless?

I am my Own Old Flame

Yesterday, through an odd twist of events, I ended up reading a letter I wrote to my mother when I was in college. When I was SUPPOSED to be in college. My family was a disaster, and I was hanging outside the fabric of society like a bit of loose yarn on a sweater.

The letter really opened my eyes.

Many writers want to throw up when they read things they’ve written in the past. Not me. I’m almost always pleasantly surprised. Even when I read things I said, which I no longer agree with, I generally feel good about the quality of the writing and thought. The old letter was an exception to the rule. It reminded me of something I had forgotten. It reminded me of what I used to be.

One of the greatest things God has shown me is that correction is the best thing there is, apart from salvation.

When you say something negative about a person, it falls into one of two categories: condemnation or correction, i.e. constructive criticism.

Condemnation is for people who will not improve. It’s what the King James Bible calls “judgment.” If you criticize someone, knowing it won’t help him, it’s condemnation. It may be necessary to do this from time to time, usually inwardly, in order to avoid continued involvement with people who can’t be blessed. You shouldn’t do it without a good purpose. You shouldn’t do it for the pleasure of hurting people or getting revenge.

Correction is for people who can change. To correct is to open a door to freedom and victory.

I think about these things every day, and I work to get correction in my daily prayers. One consequence of this is that I am now fairly ruthless with myself. I try to find ways to take responsibility for problems other people and spirits helped cause, as though I were the only one who did wrong. To take responsibility for a thing is to take power over it.

I like to say that all the problems you have after you turn 18 are your own fault. I say this because I used to blame other people, and it made things worse. I gave my parents much of the blame for the way my life turned out, and by refusing to take responsibility, I dug myself deeper into the hole.

Obviously, then, I am extremely reluctant to blame other people now. But when I looked at that letter, I remembered how my upbringing crippled me. Looking back on it, I understood that whatever I am now, it’s a wonder I’m not in an institution, or dead. My sister ended up in a homeless shelter. That could have been me.

I was raised in an atmosphere of abuse. In my case, the abuse was generally verbal, coupled with neglect. I was insulted and barked at all the time. I was made to understand that I was wrong about everything, and that if I spoke or asked questions, I was likely to be driven off with my heart pounding, looking–literally–for a place to hide until the storm passed. When others were abused, I would sit behind my bedroom door in the middle of the night, waiting for the sounds of abuse to stop.

When I was a teenager, I had no confidence whatsoever. I barely had any involvement with girls; I ruined my opportunities with my lack of certainty. It was hard for me to stand up for myself. When someone mistreated me, I suddenly felt the same way I had felt at home during outbreaks of abuse. Instead of trying to set things straight, I wanted to say or do whatever it took to make it stop. I had been conditioned to feel that any effort to defend myself would make things much worse. I had been taught that I could not do anything to help myself.

I had no goals, except to escape. I used to go for long drives and wish I had somewhere to go, so I would not have to come back. I only worked hard enough to avoid getting F’s. I never thought in terms of accomplishment. I thought in terms of avoiding suffering, and even temporary relief was worth pursuing, regardless of the cost.

I knew things were screwed up. I tried to fix it. I looked for secular heroes. I ran to all sorts of unlikely messiahs. One was Fritz Perls, the founder of gestalt therapy. I thought he was brilliant, but he was really just a dirty old man who hated his parents. His answer to life’s problems was to discard his parents and feed his giant ego and goatlike lust, without thinking about other the way he hurt other people.

I read books by people who believed self-esteem was the path to nirvana. It was very appealing. I had no self-esteem at all, unless negative self-esteem counts. I internalized the abuse I had received from others. When they weren’t around, internally, I insulted myself throughout the day, repeating the things they would have said. Believing in myself and praising myself gave me relief from that; it took away the pain, the way morphine takes away the pain of a broken bone. It was the wrong way to go. I didn’t know that.

I applied to a grand total of three colleges. Columbia accepted me. Yale sent my application back because it was late. Dartmouth waitlisted me. I went to Columbia. As a college student, I was totally ineffective. No one had taught me how to organize my life and get things done. All I wanted was to get drunk and make trouble. Animal House was my source of guidance. I tried to relive it.

I couldn’t deal with the challenges of college life. My freshman advisor quit during the first semester, and my English class moved to a new building. I didn’t do what was necessary to get a new advisor, and I missed class for six weeks because I didn’t want to deal with the administration. I hated talking to people in authority. They intimidated me, and I knew that if they asked me questions, I would have to tell them things that would get me in more trouble. Also, to be honest, the administration at Columbia was fairly useless. They didn’t do much to help people in trouble.

I fell under a lot of bad influences. Bad influences were pretty much the only kind Columbia had to offer. I thought I was going to be a writer, so I wrote a lot, and I took classes in writing and literature. Columbia was still wilting under the demonic spell of fools like Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs, like a high school girl in the back seat of a car with a third-string college quarterback. The atmosphere was godless, debauched, and pessimistic. I drank it in.

I read Henry Miller. I thought he was wonderful. He was a wicked old crank and probably a sociopath, but he seemed to be getting over on the system.

More and more, self-esteem and self-determination seemed to be the answers. I made a conscious, proactive, overt effort to become proud, to the point where I gave myself a nickname that started with “Arrogant.” I wanted to be so self-assured, no one could shake me. I was building my own little internal Tower of Babel.

I saw these things yesterday in the letter I wrote. I saw the effects they had on me. I was dramatic and emotional, like one of the English Romantic poets. I kept praising my own talent. I was trying to make myself believe I could do something. My parents had no faith in me at all. They didn’t think I could accomplish anything. My answer was to go way overboard, trying to supply what I couldn’t get from them.

I was nearly insane. My handwriting looked like the scrawl of a potential serial killer. I was clinging to anything that would keep me from sliding into complete despair. It made me almost deranged. Almost delusional. I needed help, and I couldn’t find it anywhere. My desire for help and my suffering didn’t matter. No one gave me what I needed, and when I tried to give it to myself, I became more warped.

I had forgotten about this. It’s hard to relate to. My mind is completely different now. I have more peace. I’m not afraid of people. I don’t go to bed at night and hold onto myself and shift in bed, wondering what will become of me. God has worked a tremendous amount of healing and restoration in me, so it’s a shock to remember how I used to feel.

Now I’m thinking about this, trying to draw the right conclusions. I have to take responsibility for what I am; I can’t pin it on others. At the same time, I look back and realize I didn’t stand a chance. I couldn’t turn myself into a good student or a competent person. I was the only person I had to rely on, and I was running on fumes. I had almost nothing to give myself.

You can’t breastfeed yourself; you run into the same principles that govern thermodynamics. You have to have input from outside.

I’m still responsible for what happened. I chose not to pray when I was young. I looked in the wrong direction. There is no getting around that. I didn’t want to serve God. Maybe I would have wanted to serve him, had I not been immersed in slander about him. Those who slandered him to me are accountable, but I am still responsible. I knew he was God.

Looking at that letter makes me think about the way I view people who don’t believe in God. They are as lost and wrong as I was. Their blindness and deafness are extremely profound. What hope is there for any of them unless God does them a giant favor, steps in, and gives them supernatural faith and remorse? None, I suppose.

My misery was a blessing. Had I been successful, I would have thought everything was fine, and I would still be on rails, sliding toward damnation. A lot of famous, greatly admired people have awakened suddenly in hell, wondering where their limos and personal assistants went.

I have to be aware of the wrong others have done to me, and I have to acknowledge it. The truth is important, regardless of its nature. You’re not supposed to forget the bad things people have done or pretend they didn’t happen. You’re not supposed to lie about them to make them look better. At the same time, I can’t hold onto anger or blame others for my problems. If I do that, they defeat me twice.

If you want your kids to do well, there are two important things you have to do. You have to teach them to know the Holy Spirit, and you have to support them emotionally. These things are more important than food, education, clothing, and shelter, because meeting internal needs results in the meeting of external needs. There are many kids on this planet whose material needs are met, who would be better off if their parents died. That sounds terrible, but it’s unquestionably true. Many parents wreck their children, to the extent that almost any adopted parents would be better.

I still take responsibility for what I did with my lfe, but I don’t feel as bad about it as I did last week. I see now that I’m very blessed to be doing as well as I am. My sister didn’t get what I got, and my mother died young after a miserable life. My dad doesn’t know God. I’m doing better than all of them.

Don’t fool with prosperity preachers, positive-thinking preachers, or the old-line clergymen who teach you garbage about pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps. You need the charity of God, provided through the Holy Spirit. You need handouts, not paychecks or bribes. Improvement of the self is job one, after receiving salvation. If you know that, you will avoid a lot of blind alleys. You will eventually come out on top.

Progress Isn’t Always Pretty

A friend of mine is taking serious steps to get aligned with God, and he has all sorts of problems. People let him down constantly. Things go wrong for him. He got in trouble with the law, in a moment of completely inexplicable irresponsibility. He has all sorts of financial issues because of his credit history, and because his legal problems–combined with Miami’s Spanish-first policy–make it hard for him to get employers interested.

If you think bilingualism is a great idea, wait until you try to get a job in Miami. It’s no wonder Cubans think it’s heaven. They get first dibs on every job because of their remarkable and unique refusal to learn the language of the country that saved them. Strange way to thank us.

He still makes a lot of mistakes, but I keep working with him, because I know he’s not joking about fixing his life. Also, I know I’m going through the same thing, even if my experience is not nearly as difficult as his.

The other day while I was in prayer, I got a picture in my mind. I don’t mean a magical vision; just something that occurred to me. I thought of a dirty, blind canal full of dead fish, floating turtle grass, and junk.

When you aren’t led by the Holy Spirit, you’re off course. You’re like a boat that has turned up a blind canal. A canal that goes nowhere will fill up with crap over time, and at the end of it, there is nothing but a concrete wall.

If you cruise up a blind canal, you will have to go by all sorts of obstacles. The debris in the canal will be in your way the whole time. When you wise up and turn around, things don’t improve right away. In order to get out, you’ll have to go through the same mess you passed on the way in.

My friend and I–you are probably in the same situation–putted our way up our blind canals for a long time. Then we reluctantly, grudgingly turned around, and we expected everything to be fine. Of course, that isn’t what happened. The junk was still there, and now we are cruising through it.

Today I thought of this, in connection with the work I’m doing, putting my dad’s financial transactions in Quickbooks. I don’t mean to whine (this time), but it’s the opposite of fun. I had to study accounting briefly, which is just about the most boring thing a human being can do, and then I had to learn how to use the program. I also had to get special materials to make it work with rental properties. Now I sit for hours every day, entering checks and bills.

It’s a drag, but it was predictable. For years, I tried to get my dad to keep track of things week by week instead of all at once, during a yearly two-month period of hell. He would not listen. By the time I got ahold of things, over a year’s worth of transactions had to be dealt with.

The work I’m doing is not fun, but the main reason it’s not fun is because my dad sowed for it over a period of decades. If he had been doing what he should, I would be entering current transactions, which would be relatively quick. Because he didn’t, I’ve been entering things going back to December of 2014. The work of entering transactions has been multiplied by about 18.

In a couple of weeks, I won’t hate Quickbooks any more. I’ll love it. I’ll tell people how wonderful it is. I’ll be living in the world of a responsible person doing maintenance, not that of a goofball doing tons of remedial work.

I brought it all on myself. I’m not saying other people didn’t screw up. I’m saying I let a lot of things pile up over the years, and now I’m paying for it. I don’t know if I could have made my dad use accounting software, but I am confident that one way or another, God would have arranged things so this experience would have been much better.

The Quickbooks thing is but one example of old, creaky problems I’m having to fix now.

God aligns things. He straightens our paths. The promises of the Bible are true, but they’re only true for people who truly give themselves to him, and when you change your ways, things don’t necessarily change instantaneously.

God doesn’t just do repairs; he also puts thorns in our paths to show us we’re screwing up. Or he merely lets others put thorns in our paths.

When I was living in Israel, I saw a very strange thing: impenetrable walls of thistles. You would really have to see these things for yourself in order to believe it. They looked like something out of a movie. The plants they grew on were very tall; they must have been seven or eight feet in height. They grew right against each other, so you couldn’t walk between them. They were covered with razor-sharp thorns. There is no way a human being could get through them. I couldn’t even see through them.

I think about that sometimes. Israel was arranged by God to illustrate Biblical principles. I think those creepy thistles were there to show the Jews what life was like without his help.

In some ways, we expect too little from God, and in other ways we expect too much. We don’t think he’ll fix our lives, so we stick with our own stupid plans. Once we turn around, we expect him to make everything wonderful overnight.

The things at which you fail are signposts, telling you you’re going the wrong way. It’s that simple. If you want to get past them, you have to stop leading yourself. When you accept God’s leadership, you will start to defeat your obstacles, but you shouldn’t be surprised if they don’t clear up all at once.

I eagerly await the day when I can honestly say I like Quickbooks. I may throw a party. Unfortunately, I don’t think it will be deductible.

Get Your Holy Ghost Water Wings

Motivational speakers make a living retelling lies. One famous lie is, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.” I love that one. No, that’s not insanity. That’s persistence. Insanity is thinking you’re a chicken or running down the street naked, rubbing your own excrement into your hair. Thinking the CIA put listening devices in your fillings is insanity. Doing the same thing over and over is pretty much normal; we all accept the fact that doing things right often produces bad results, so we don’t give up.

Isn’t telling the same lies to different crowds (who don’t improve) insane, according to the motivational-speaker definition?

Another big lie is the frog story. You put a frog in a pan of cold water, and you turn on the heat. The water heats so slowly, the frog doesn’t realize it. Eventually it boils to death. Yeah, okay. Try that and see what happens. Even a frog knows when it’s being scalded.

Nonetheless, the frog lie illustrates a valid point: human beings don’t notice slow change. Somebody has to slap us to get us to see it.

Case in point: Internet filth.

There was a time when you couldn’t say “condom” in front of your grandmother at the dinner table. That all changed with the venereal disease explosion in the 1980’s. Driven by gay promiscuity, AIDS seemed to threaten to kill all of us, and suddenly, we were shamed for being unwilling to talk about condoms at every conceivable opportunity.

That was gross, but the Internet made things a lot worse. Today, unfortunate phrases like “nip slip” and “upskirt” appear not just on porn sites, but on the evening news, and while I wouldn’t swear to it, the President has probably used the word “d*****bag” at least once in the State of the Union Address.

The water is hot. The frogs haven’t noticed.

I’m surfing the web in order to procrastinate. I guess I’ve put in half an hour. So far, without going to a porn site, I have seen two naked people and one woman wearing a bikini that reveals a big percentage of her pubic region. One of the naked people was a woman straddling a man. I’m not even trying, and this stuff is coming at me.

I wish we could go back to 1975 and transport people into 2016 for brief visits, so we could show them TV and the Internet and see what they thought. They would probably go back and start smoking and overeating, hoping to die before they got here. We are surrounded by lust and perversion, along with every kind of uncleanness. Gay marriage. Transsexuals in the military. The idiotic pro-public-nudity movement. We live in a time when people who say homosexuality is wrong are treated like child molesters.

If the change had occured in a day, we would be shocked beyond words, but it took 40 years, so most of us don’t even know it happened.

The big problem with this is that it wrecks our relationships with the Holy Spirit, who is our only source of help. There is a limit to how intimately he will associate with a filthy person who doesn’t listen. The devil knows that, and he’s terrified of God, so he spreads filth everywhere.

When I was in high school, I read a funny book called Superfolks. It was about a Superman-like hero who had gone soft. He was from the planet Cronk, and he was allergic to matter from his planet, appropriately called “Cronkite.” His arch enemy neutralized him by putting Cronkite in everything. Over time, the hero turned into a mushy couch potato who posed no threat at all.

Satan must have read that book.

Most people don’t think about the assault we’re experiencing. They think it’s fine, because they have no idea who the Holy Spirit is, what he can do for them, and how much they need him. They don’t think about minimizing the filth in their lives, because they don’t know it repels God. They welcome filth. If the average male sees something dirty pop up on his TV or monitor, he’s happy about it, and he stares intently. The people who produce this junk promote it with no sense of shame at all. They’re very proud of it. And I’m talking about people like network TV executives, not Larry Flynt.

Once you start trying to clean up, you realize how bad the problem is. Even if you don’t deliberately seek out sexual stimulation, it pounces on you from unexpected directions. You can’t go to the beach. You can’t turn the TV on. You can’t walk through a mall. Thanks to the breastfeeding fanatics, you can’t even sit in a restaurant.

You don’t realize how broken something is until you try to fix it.

Liberals and other God-haters keep saying we should be more concerned about violence and cruelty than sexual sin, but that’s stupid. The sexual urge is very, very strong, especially in men. It is extremely persistent. The urge to be violent or cruel is not like that. It’s not universal, it’s weak, and in most people, it only flares up briefly, on isolated occasions. Most of us try to resist it, because we think it’s bad. It offers the enemy less power over us than sex.

Look at it this way: how many people do you know whose lives were screwed up through sex, and how many do you know who ruined their lives with violence or cruelty? The list of violent people will be way, way shorter. Sex is simply not as dangerous, on an individual level, as violence. The devil knows that, and it’s why he works harder to promote sexual sin.

Many, many famous people have been destroyed by sexual sin, whether their own or that of others. Let’s see. Marvin Gorman. Jimmy Swaggart. Charlie Sheen. Bill Clinton. Denny Hastert. Anthony Weiner. Larry Craig. David Vitter. General Petraeus. Ted Haggard. Jim Bakker. Eliot Spitzer. Rock Hudson. Liberace. Prince. Michael Jackson. Anthony Perkins. Freddie Mercury. Amanda Blake (yes, Miss Kitty), Rudolf Nureyev, Brad Davis, Peter Allen, Paganini, Karen Blixen, Al Capone, Oscar Wilde, Ryan White, Arthur Ashe, Kimberly Bergalis…how many names do you want?

There are billions of people with sexual addictions. There aren’t many people who are addicted to violence. If the condition exists at all, it’s sufficiently rare to be considered a mental illness. We think intense lust is normal. And guess what? Many famous prolific murderers, if not all, are actually sex offenders. They murder in the pursuit of sexual pleasure. Think I’m making that up? Have you heard of Ted Bundy? Jeffrey Dahmer? John Wayne Gacy? Gary Heidnik? Wayne Williams? Richard Speck?

Serial killers keep souvenirs from their crimes so they can look at them later while they pleasure themselves. It’s like pornography to them. One investigator got a murderer to talk by putting one of his souvenirs where he could see it. He became sexually aroused by the memory of raping and murdering a little boy, and he dropped his guard. The son of my dad’s former law partner was raped, murdered, and dismembered by a sex-driven killer.

God-haters tell us sexual sins are victimless. Tell that to the children of a divorced couple. Tell it to hemophiliacs who have AIDS. Tell it to people who were born with syphilis. Tell it to a first wife. Good luck with that.

I know I’m not going to change anything by writing this. That’s not my motivation. I’m just commenting on something I find remarkable. I feel like I’m looking out the rear window of the Enola Gay, remarking on the explosion.

God gave me a sudden supernatural increase in my own self-control. I could never have managed that on my own. I used to think sexual sin was just fine, or that I had an expense account in heaven, so I could do what I wanted as long as I asked for forgiveness. I worked sexual iniquity deeply into my being, over decades. I could not have gotten rid of it on my own. The Holy Spirit lifted me to a better level, without my help. All I did was ask and wait. Without his help, I would still be walking in the same circle. If he stops helping, I’ll go right back.

Most other people aren’t going to receive his help, because they aren’t even asking. They think nothing is wrong; people will actually pay for phony pills to increase their sex drive. They will never have good relationships with the Holy Spirit, so they will be weak and defeated until they die. They will think defeat is victory.

Remember the book and movie, Hannibal? Dr. Lecter decided he didn’t like a pedophile, because as a murderer, torturer, and cannibal, he was morally superior. He gave the pedophile drugs, which the pedophile liked, and then he told the pedophile to cut his own face off and feed it to his dogs. The whole time, the pedophile was enjoying himself. Lecter was supposed to be helping the court analyze the man, but here Lecter was, being the best pal ever, helping him fool the silly old judge. Then the pedophile woke up with no face and a broken neck. Oops.

That’s what life without correction is like. The devil convinces us to destroy ourselves, and the whole time, we think we’re winning and that our fangs are dripping tiger blood.

It’s great to beat your enemy when he fights back, but it’s a thousand times sweeter to get him to destroy himself while you watch. Satan loves deceit, because it turns us into our own murderers. And it certainly saves work.

I wish I had something useful to say, but I don’t think that’s the case, so I’ll just settle for interesting.

Or “I’m Awl Ears”

A while back, I wrote about habits and the way they run our lives. I am getting new revelation on the subject, and it’s coming through an unfortunate source.

When I was young, I figured I was safe from dementia. My great-grandfather lived to be 100, with full control of his mind. My grandfather was a little forgetful, but he was able to practice law at 85. He had sisters who grazed or passed the century mark without losing it. I assumed genetics were on my side.

In 2014, my father’s older sister died. She was obese. She was demented. In her case, doctors believed strokes caused the problem, but she was an angry, irritable, bossy person, and she was probably never less than a hundred pounds overweight, so her habits probably caused her downfall. Also, she was a Mormon, so she didn’t have any useful knowledge to help her beat her problems.

When she died, it became obvious that my genes were not as good as I had thought.

Now my dad is having problems, and I have to look after him. I am learning things.

He decided to make a five-figure investment in his real estate. It looked like a good idea to me, but I didn’t push it. I had looked into it, but I was not planning to follow up. He made the decision.

I made the arrangements, and then I told my dad we had to meet with the salesman to firm things up and provide a deposit. Before the salesman arrived, my dad started asking why we wanted to do it. He had forgotten, and I had to go back over the story.

Here’s the interesting thing: he forgot the decision to buy, because that was a factual matter. He remembered that he didn’t like to spend money, because that was a habit. Dementia destroys your ability to recall facts, but habits aren’t facts, so they persist.

I have a young friend who gives hospice care to old people, most of whom are demented. I talk to her and get her advice, and she confirms my observations. She says dementia never changes people’s habits. You can forget a fact, but you can’t forget a character trait.

What does that mean, on a practical level?

The other day, I wrote a blog post, and I said good habits were like slaves that work for nothing. They do what you want done, 24 hours a day, with little input from you. Last night, God showed me the other edge of the sword: bad habits are slave drivers. They goad you all day, every day, even when you resist.

This is obvious when you see it stated concisely, but I didn’t think of it that way before. I didn’t think of the terms “slave” and “slave driver” in close juxtaposition.

For a long time, I’ve been telling people they need to clean up their personalities while they’re young, because when they get old and lose their minds, all the bad things will persist, and they will be socially isolated because people will not be able to stand them. It’s not great advice, because people who are irritating and unpleasant are not the kind of people who take advice. But it’s true. It would be good advice, if the people who needed it were able to act on it.

If you’re arrogant, and you think you’re always right, you will still be that way when you’re wearing diapers and being fed with a spoon. Same thing goes for lust, greed, and whatever other habitual flaws you have.

My mother’s mother became demented at the very end of her life. She had always liked telling people what to do. One day she made the following announcement: “I want to be the boss.” Just like that. It’s funny, but it’s also instructive. When you get old and demented, it’s like your clothes fall off, and all the stuff you used to hide pops out.

Here I am in middle age, with slave drivers I chose to empower. At first I didn’t know the Holy Spirit. After that, I knew him, but I chose to do my own thing. The other spirits…lust, greed, pride, dishonesty, anger, whatever…those, I listened to. The Holy Spirit’s liberating influence was stifled, and the filthy, stupid influence of the others was magnified. It was like an eclipse, where the moon, which is lifeless, comes between you and the sun.

The Old Testament provided for slavery. If you wanted another person to take care of you, you stood by the door of the house, and that person took an awl and shoved it through your ear, into the doorpost. After that, you had to serve him. For slaves who were Hebrews, the length of the service was limited, but I don’t want to get into that.

Doorways symbolize the gates of perception. They symbolize our senses, which are doorways to our hearts and minds. When we let foreign spirits in, we let them penetrate our ears at the doorways to our inner parts. The symbolism is obvious.

Once a spirit gets in, it builds a stronghold of habit, and it’s hard to evict, because your own flesh and mind work to keep it in place.

If I can’t get God’s help and receive deliverance, and I later lose my mind, all the gross parts of my personality will be in control and on display, and I will be totally powerless.

Supposedly, the body of George Custer was mutilated with an awl. A person claiming to be a witness said a squaw shoved an awl deep into both of his ears, into his brain, because he was a man who would not listen. Interesting.

We don’t understand how bad our situation is, or how filthy and how close to hell this world is. We don’t see anything wrong, so we think defeat is victory, and we don’t try to do anything about it. Sooner or later, anyone who doesn’t get free will see the spirits he served while he lived. My feeling is that it’s better to boot them out while I’m still breathing.

Pray in the Spirit to get revelation and faith. Never make an excuse to God. Never try to defend yourself. Always ask what you’re doing wrong, and how you can fix it. If you keep doing these things, the clouds will start to part. If not, try to enjoy being the tail and not the head.

I am Too Busy Doing Nothing to Deal With You

Saturday, Saturday, Saturday. I’m middle-aged, and it’s still my favorite day of the week. On Saturdays, I REFUSE to do anything productive. The rest of the week, I merely FAIL.

It’s not the same.

Yesterday I blogged so I could put off working on bills and taxes. Today I’m blogging so I can put off reading Aeschylus. You have to be a sick, sad individual to procrastinate with regard to recreation. You can’t stoop much lower than that.

I have been trying to get my dad’s finances up to date. I have come to accept the fact that it’s not going to happen overnight. I could work at it for twelve hours a day and lose my mind. Instead I put in three or four hours and remain partially sane. If he has to pay a couple of late fees, he will live.

When your affairs get screwed up, you can’t turn them around instantly. It’s like turning an oil tanker. After you turn the wheel, you keep going in the same direction for a while. Some things will actually get worse while you’re improving the big picture. It’s better to accept it than to ruin your sleep and digestion.

The process of untangling the mess is improving me, personally.

Because I merely occurred instead of being raised responsibly, I have bad habits a well-reared six-year-old would not have, and I lack good habits. For one thing, I never know when to start things or when I’m done. I come from a family of disorganized people. They just do things when they have to. Very little planning. And the dumbest one probably has an IQ of 120. There is no excuse.

It came as a big shock to me that it was possible to break tasks into chunks and quit before I was finished. This is the kind of thing Jewish and Asian parents teach their kids in the womb, so they go on to blow the curves on tests and own really nice houses. My ancestors–at least the immediate ones–didn’t pass this information on, probably because they didn’t know it.

I wonder if one of the purposes of the Sabbath was to teach the Jews time management. Imagine what it was like to live before the Sabbath, in a world where every day was exactly like the one before. There were no weekends. There were no days off, unless you died. It must have been hard to organize time.

Once Saturday is cordoned off for God, you must inevitably start thinking in terms of a weekly cycle. You have to prepare for the Sabbath, which takes time. Some parts of the preparation will surely take more than one day. Tasks will have to be broken up. Meanwhile, your Dagon-worshiping neighbors will be wandering aimlessly in an unstructured existence, on a time line that stretches out before them like the unreachable horizon.

First thing you know, you have a desk calendar and a to-do list, and you own all the real estate for a mile in every direction. And your neighbors are sharecropping and waiting for a chance to behead you.

My guess, anyway.

Good habits are like slaves that work 24 hours a day, without being prompted. A good habit is like a passive investment. It works even when you’re resting.

I really need some of those.

I was diagnosed with ADD a long time ago, and they put me on powerful drugs that made me considerably crazier than I had been when I was untreated. ADD is real; no question about it. But I always felt that a good upbringing would have canceled most of the ill effects.

Oh, well. You have to think about what you have left and what you can still gather, not what you have wasted.

A lot of what the Holy Spirit does for people falls into the realm of habit. Spirits drive habits. Any Christian who has been a heroin addict could tell you that. God will take bad habits out, and he will put good habits in. Only if you give yourself to him. Otherwise, you limit his help.

I have finally figured out that you need to prioritize tasks. Then you need to create a list. After that, you need to go down the list and deal with tasks in order. And you need to break each task up into bits, so you don’t work on one thing for ten days straight while letting everything else slide.

You have to have finish lines. You can’t have a goal like, “Get condo fee mess straightened out.” You have to come up with something that has a definite end, like, “Call condo association and leave a message, threatening to sue.” When you do this, you know what you’re supposed to do, and you know when you’re finished for the day.

When I was a kid (and when I was in college the first time around), I did my long-term projects the nights before they were due. My parents knew I was in the living room at 5 a.m., time and time again, cobbling things together and getting B’s or worse, but somehow they didn’t see it as a huge problem they should fix. They were able to criticize, but they did not provide solutions, and neither did I.

Even as late as law school, I didn’t know how to structure time. I told my girlfriend, “You can work all semester and get a B+, or you can work hard for three days and get a B.” That was actually true, but it wasn’t a brilliant strategy. I graduated cum laude, and the people with good habits got summa. They’re generally unhappy people, but they handled responsibility well.

When I became a lawyer, all that changed, at least with respect to work. When you work on a case, the court sets deadlines, and your first big job is to pore over the rules and write a schedule for yourself. Once that’s done, you’re on rails. I almost never had a problem. I was the person who kept other people on track. Somehow this didn’t bleed over into my personal life. I don’t know why. Maybe it was because my personal life didn’t include a bar association and a judge, waiting to take my license and put me in jail.

The more I help my dad organize, the more organized I become. I like it.

My dad had a partner who could not organize anything. He was very, very smart. He was a wonderful resource when you needed help on a case. But he didn’t record his hours. He didn’t answer the phone or return calls. He was hard to locate. When the partners complained, he said his value as a resource justified his pay. Then they reminded him that if he didn’t record his hours, the clients could not be billed.

He was always a nervous wreck. He had high blood pressure. He always had some kind of unnecessary crisis going on. Once, he left his car in the airport’s short-term lot, and the cost of redeeming it got so high, he decided to abandon it. And they wouldn’t take it.

The managing partner, who was ambitious in a not-nice way, got rid of him eventually. No one could mount a convincing defense.

When you’re a kid, they don’t tell you this: peace comes from order. If your life is disorderly, you will never have peace. When I was a kid, they taught us that peace came from being a rebel, doing drugs, and following your heart, which is about as smart as following a goose. That stuff is the road to ulcers and strokes, not to mention poverty.

When you start to get organized, things clear up as though by magic. You find yourself noticing that old, familiar problems aren’t there any more. Maybe excess fat disappears. Maybe your digestion improves. Suddenly, you can walk across your living room without tripping. You’re not afraid when the phone rings, because you know your bills are paid. You decide to drive to the store, and you actually know where the keys are.

I am definitely procrastinating right now, but because my life is more organized than it used to be, I don’t have to work as much, so procrastination is less damaging. Strange, how that works.

I guess now I need to work on organizing my free time. That sounds perverse, but it’s not. Even elective activities require a steady, consistent approach. You can’t even get good at playing Frisbee if you don’t practice. Here’s something weird: the time you determine to spend NOT doing anything is almost as sacred as the time you spend doing. It has to be nearly as important.

I wish I could go back in time to when I was a kid and track myself down and kick myself in the butt every day. “Hi. It’s me. Did you brush your teeth this morning? No?” KICK. “Have you prayed in tongues? No?” KICK. “Do you have a list of things to do? No?” KICK. The British say the boy is the father of the man. I kind of wish the man could be the father of the boy.

I can’t fix the years that are behind me, but some people who read this blog are younger than I am, so I know someone out there will, or at least can, benefit from my experience. The rest get to repeat it, as Santayana more or less said. Come over and join me on the Group W bench.

I better get Aeschylus out and put in 30 minutes. After Aeschylus, Thucydides will be like a day at the spa.

The Maze of the Minotaur was Child’s Play Compared to Aeschylus

I feel like climbing a big mountain and shouting from the top. I am so happy about my homemade shower spray. My bathroom practically cleans itself. Now if I could just do something about the 9,000 hairs my body ejects onto the floor each day. Where do they come from? How is it that I still have hair left?

I literally see hairs on the floor as I’m putting the vacuum cleaner away.

It must be pretty obvious that I’m blogging in order to procrastinate, although I really am happy about the shower. The tub and shower take up 80% of bathroom cleaning time. The toilet takes five minutes, and four of those minutes are just waiting for the chemicals to work. The floor takes three minutes. The sink is quick. If you can defeat the tub and shower, the rest is cake.

It’s good that I published the above information for all the world. Blogs are so important.

In other news, The Oresteia is killing me.

I believe the book (the parts Aeschylus wrote) ends at somewhere around the 170-page mark. I am at about 120, I think. I can get through 20 pages per day without spontaneously dying. According to the Columbia College Lit. Hum. syllabus, college students get two days to read the whole mess.

It makes me wonder: was I right to refuse to do my assigned reading when I was in college? Is it reasonable to expect a human being to do this much work for one course (especially a course about something that isn’t important)?

I have done what writers are supposed to do. I have started my essay by starting conflict and provoking thought, so I can go on to resolve things. All good writers are basically trolls.

Actually, it is fair to make people read this in two days. First of all, no college student reads it the way I’m reading it. I read one page, and then I turn to Professor Logan’s incredibly badly written, turgid, pedantic commentary. Then I go back to Aeschylus. I look stuff up on the web. I check pronunciations, which I forget by the next day. I don’t have a lecturer to explain things to me, so I refer to poor old Logan. This adds time, but I’m also avoiding spending time in class.

Of course, I also avoided spending time in class when I was in college, by choosing not to go, so I leave it to you to add things up and decide what’s right.

If I were still in college, I would read the book in two sittings (assuming I read it at all), and then I would get drunk. I would not look anything up. I would only learn what the instructor wanted me to repeat on the exam. Things would go much faster.

Logan’s commentary is really disconcerting. It reinforces all my negative feelings about liberal arts courses and intellectuals.

The man apparently knows Aeschylus-era Greek really well. Points for that. And he knows a lot about Greek literature. That’s where my admiration ends.

His writing is so stuffy and pretentious, I have a hard time understanding it, even though it’s in English. And I’m not stupid. I got a perfect score on the verbal portion of the GRE, which is probably more than Professor Logan can say.

Here’s something most people don’t understand about intellectuals: they are not particularly smart. The word “intellectual” doesn’t really mean “intelligent person,” although we have twisted it to mean that. It really means “member of a relatively small group of highly insecure academics and artists who read the same books and use the same jargon.” It describes accomplishment, interest, and affiliation, not aptitude.

Dick Cavett is an intellectual. Albert Einstein probably was not. You can have an IQ of 110 and be a perfectly sound intellectual. Universities are full of tenured people who are not smart.

Professor Logan is definitely an intellectual, because he winds his convoluted words tighter than the wire on a motor armature, and to understand one of his sentences, you have to unwind it slowly. That’s not good writing. It’s clever, but it’s not good. The purpose of explanatory prose is to make things easier to understand, not harder.

When you go to college, they beat you over the head with simplicity and concision. “Keep it brief. Use small words.” But they can’t seem to take that advice, themselves.

The commentary itself demonstrates one of my many quibbles with intellectuals. They think way too highly of what they do. It’s full of comments that are completely unnecessary. Logan skips over things that are utterly incomprehensible to a modern reader, and then he puts in fluff, like, “It is the hour also means ‘it is the crucial (or opportune) moment.’”

Okay, great. Thanks. I would never have figured that out.

If he took out the junk that adds nothing, shortened and straightened the knotted-up language, and made a better effort to explain things that actually need explaining, his book would be a whole lot better.

It does have one great virtue, however. It’s free. Or at least it’s included in my Scrib’d subscription.

As for the plays themselves…not good. I understand their historical importance, but you would have to be insane to read them for pleasure or attend a performance.

One of the things I don’t like about the plays is their thick coating of excessive emotion. To describe them accurately, we would need to coin new words for the territory beyond “melodramatic” and “maudlin.” The prose isn’t purple; it’s ultraviolet. I guess it’s not prose, since the plays are musicals. Anyway, you get the point. It’s like something a 21st-century stalker would write. Way over the top.

Here’s another problem: there is no action. Agamemnon comes home. He takes a bath. Clytaemnestra and Aegisthus stab him to death. Orestes comes home (apparently years later, with no indication that there was a gap), and he yaps for a while and then kills Aegisthus and Clytaemnestra. No car chases. No sub-plots. No Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. No Touchstone. Just whining and stabbing.

Couple these issues with the fact that all the female roles are played by men, and you have a recipe for a bad evening.

I did learn a few things; had I not, I would feel pretty bummed about what I am putting myself through.

Christians have a concept called “generational curses.” The idea is that demons and fallen angels keep track of families, and they find ways to stick to us and cause us to repeat negative behaviors. This is what the trilogy is all about. Agamemnon’s ancestors committed disgusting murders. Agamemnon sacrifices his own daughter just so he can get a good wind to go on a completely unnecessary raid. Clytaemnestra and Aegisthus kill Agamemnon and mutilate his body. Orestes kills Clytaemnestra (his mother) and Aegisthus, fully expecting supernatural consequences to fall on him and his seed.

Throughout the plays, the characters refer to spirits that drive violent revenge. Words translated “curse” or “fate” can actually refer to these spirits. At one point, the word “daimon” (our English “demon”) is translated “fate.”

The New Testament was written in Greek. The Greek word used for “demon” was “daimonion,” which is a form of “daimon.”

It’s all very interesting, because I know that evil spirits control people who aren’t led by the Holy Spirit. A Christian who is submitted to the Holy Spirit is “Spirit-led”; he is influenced greatly, but he isn’t a slave. A person who isn’t submitted to the Holy Spirit is enslaved by spirits that destroy his free will. He can’t change much, even if he wants to.

When I was in school, they taught me that “tragedy” doesn’t mean “misfortune” or “sad story.” They taught me that it described a tale of self-destruction. A tragic character knows, or should know, that his own behavior is ruining him, but he persists. He can’t stop. The story of the House of Atreus (The Oresteia) is a tragedy, and the characters know their plight is spirit-driven.

Life still works this way. We don’t like to admit it. Nonbelievers scoff at the idea that spirits exist, and Christians think they’re too good to be infested. But if you don’t get clear of the beings that control you, you will never really serve God or walk in victory.

In the law, there is a concept called “adverse possession.” The brief version is this: if someone who hates you camps out on your property for seven years, they own it. You have a responsibility to oust them. If you don’t do it, the next time you show up, they can have you arrested for trespassing.

That’s what life is like for most of us. We are inhabited by spirits, and we don’t throw them out. We love them and serve them. We love the things they give us: lust, greed, violence, pride…whatever. We decide our demonic drives are good, so we let the demons stay. Then we lose the ability to get rid of them, and they can do whatever they want inside of us. This includes things like disease and mental illness. We want the things we think are good, but we don’t realize there is a price.

The ancient Greeks were ignorant. They didn’t know God. They worshiped demons and fallen angels. But they knew spirits were real. They had a basic understanding of how spirits shape lives. The fact that they would equate “fate” and “demon” says it all. If you have demons, they determine your fate.

Pretty wild.

I can just imagine what would have happened had I raised my hand in Lit. Hum. class and brought this up. The same academic who loved teaching about Manichaeans and Zorastrians probably would have turned purple and exploded. I may be wrong; maybe he would have found the beliefs of modern charismatic Christians interesting, from an academic standpoint. But I very much doubt it.

The characters in Greek literature are shallow, violent jerks of limited intelligence. Academics don’t seem to have problems with that, just as most don’t seem to have a problem with murderous, cruel Islam. They do get upset with Jesus, though. When they’re not claiming he was a gay vegetarian socialist who loved gun control.

I think Thucydides is next on the list, and after Aeschylus, I can’t wait. Anything is better than what I’m dealing with now.

You can’t understand Aeschylus. You can’t really understand the Greek, even if you become fluent. You can’t understand pre-technological people. You can’t understand the people who lived during the same decades as Aeschylus, because one century is not like another, even in the ancient world. You can’t understand topical references. You can’t reconstruct the music.

It must be frustrating to be a classics scholar and realize you will never get any closer to your subject than you were the day you got your Bachelor of Arts. It must be a bummer to be in a field that is impervious to progress.

Reading Logan’s book is like reading the Talmud. The Jews who wrote the Talmud didn’t know God personally, so they guessed a lot, and they contradicted each other. The scholars who study Aeschylus can never have a deep understanding of his work, so they do what the Jewish scholars did. In the end, there is no substitute for intimate firsthand knowledge.

Interesting.

At least I’ll be able to say I read this stuff. That counts for something.

Humans Bury Them; Satan Cremates Them

First, some housekeeping. Or at least some trivia to warm up.

Do you have a Windows 10 computer? Do you have an SSD (solid state hard drive)? Is your system still taking a long time to boot up? If so, kill Cortana. You may have killed this wretched, intrusive, domineering fishwife before, but she has a tendency to come back to life, like a tumor driven into remission.

You will want a program called Unlocker. Go get it. Install it. Then navigate to Cortana’s filthy hidden burrow, position her carefully, and give her a curb stomp. I’ll paste directions I found elsewhere:

Navigate to the following folder: “C:/Windows/SystemApps/Microsoft.Windows.Cortana_cw5n1h2txyewy”
Right click “SearchUI.exe” and select “Unlocker”
Under the action menu, select “Rename”
Give it a new name such as “Disabled.SearchUI.exe”
Click OK.

Recently, I’ve been tormenting myself with the Oresteia of Aeschylus. I recommend renaming Cortana “Clytaemnestra.exe.”

Cortana will come back one day, and when she does, just stomp her again.

I guess I’m out of touch, but I do not want a computerized nanny. I don’t want to be able to talk to my PC, because that means it listens to me. I don’t want to be able to communicate with hand signals, because that means it watches me. I don’t want it to hear my questions and give me totally inappropriate and useless answers. I have Google and ten fingers (the table saw has been treating me well).

I don’t want my computer to take forty minutes to boot so it can bring me the latest sports scores every time I turn it on. I hate professional sports. I don’t want to see headlines. I don’t want to see great new stuff that just popped up on Amazon or Ebay. LEAVE ME THE HELL ALONE AND SERVE ME. That’s what I want.

I think the nerds who run the world are involved in a race nobody wanted them to run in the first place. They’re trying to recreate Tony Stark’s Jarvis on everyone’s desk or in the pocket of their fashionable but not stylish Banana Republic hipster shirts.

I guess if you were accepted by Cal Tech at the age of five and you’ve never had a date, you may think having a computer take care of you is cool. Just like having our wonderful government take care of you is cool, because hey, no government has ever gone overboard and done things like genocide or thought control.

The fact that you can do a thing doesn’t mean you should; just because you can write a presumptuous, paternalistic program doesn’t mean you should. I’m a big boy; I can pull up my own pants and wipe my own nose. I don’t need a computer to do absolutely everything for me.

I have a bloatware Siri copy on my Android phone. I never use it. I need to root the phone and get rid of it, along with Google- (did I mistype that?) and Google Hangouts.

I rejected Google+, so now I can’t get comment feedback on Youtube. Probably for the best, considering my tendency to get on people’s nerves.

Some of our modern electronic minder programs are useful, for certain people. I got my dad an Android phone because I needed to be able to find him at any time, using his GPS signal. That’s nice. The phone has a program that will help emergency responders if something happens to him. Wonderful. But as far as I know, I’m not suffering from dementia yet, so I would like to dodder along unassisted until the shapes on the wallpaper start talking to me.

Naturally, my dad’s phone only works with Android Device Manager about a third of the time, and every time he puts it in the holster, the flashlight comes on and kills the battery. But I give the nerds credit for trying. I’m sure it will be 100% successful at gathering information that could potentially be used against him.

I still can’t believe Google tracks our movements by default. If you haven’t checked out your giant Google GPS map yet, you really need to. I looked at mine. It showed trips I had made years before. I’m sure Obama would never use that to put me in prison or anything.

What else was I going to write about? Oh, yeah.

Yesterday I continued working my way through a book called Death Dealer. The author (or at least the person who wrote most of it) is Rudolf Hoess (not Rudolf Hess), a man who served as Kommandant of Auschwitz. He describes himself as the greatest mass murderer in history.

I find reading about the Holocaust instructive, because God uses it to show me Satan’s patterns of behavior. Hoess’s book has shown me a lot. For one thing, it has shown me the great similarities between Nazi genocide and the child-sacrifice (better known as “abortion”) movement.

I’ve always compared abortion to peeing in the pool. If you stand on the side of the pool and pee into it from above, people are outraged. If you jump in, you can pee all you want, and no one cares, even if they know it’s happening.

Everyone who uses a public pool knows it’s full of pee. People jump in at noon and get out at two, and they never go to the toilet. People don’t mind, because we are used to shutting down disturbing thoughts about things we can’t, or don’t want, to change.

Abortion works the same way. If unwanted babies had to be torn apart publicly, we would be lynching abortionists, the way we used to. No question about it. Satan got around this issue by arranging for executions inside the uterus, inside medical exam rooms, where the carnage goes unseen. We rip babies’ bellies open and twist their limbs off without even the courtesy of an anaesthetic, and we tell the mothers they’re losing “clumps of cells.” They decide to believe it, and instead of going home with immediate, crushing guilt, they go home with hidden guilt that grows inside them and reemerges later.

The Germans and Austrians (and many other anti-Semites around the world) treated genocide the way we treat abortion.

The Nazis committed a lot of murders publicly, but they eventually adopted a practice of hiding the killing. They started out with rifles, but they later opted for cyanide gas. Why?

In his book, Hoess reveals that violent, open killings were very hard on the SS!

Hoess says that when SS members were required to line people up and shoot them, they became depressed. They hated the Jews, but they were not completely blind. They had to get large groups of strangers to dig pits, strip naked, and stand beside the pits while they were shot and shoved inside. Among these groups, there were many children, women, and old people. For some reason, murdering the weak bothers people more than murdering the strong. Anyway, SS men became drunks, and a number committed suicide.

Zyklon B, a cyanide preparation originally created to kill bugs and rats, changed all that.

When the gas chambers were built, the whole process became relatively free of stress. The Jews were ushered into the stripping rooms and told they were going to be showered and then relocated. Other Jews, the Sonderkommandos, were forced to do most of the work of herding them, lying to them, carrying off their possessions, and burning the bodies.

It was very much like abortion.

Today, if you want to kill your unborn baby, you drive to the abattoir in the privacy of your own car. You go into a privately owned building (or a public hospital with security), where employees work to suppress your guilt and fear, just as the Sonderkommandos lied to the Jews. You and your family never see the baby you kill. Some of the employees see, because they have to count the parts and make sure every finger and toe has been removed from you, but you don’t have to deal with it.

You’re just like Adolf Eichmann, who issued extermination orders and then sat in his office and let people like Hoess carry the water.

Here’s a remarkable parallel: Hitler burned dead Jews, in a Satanic effort to violate Jewish law and remove not just the Jews, but all evidence of their existence, from the earth. We burn aborted babies.

After the war, we found out that almost no Germans or Austrians knew about the slaughter. Neither did the Poles who collaborated. Almost no one knew! But that’s not surprising, because there were no former Nazis. After the way\r, we learned that everyone who had been in Germany and Austria had hated Hitler and his ideas. I wonder where the Nazis went. Maybe they’re still there, hiding in basements.

Obviously, people knew, and most Germans and Austrians adored Hitler and supported him with all their hearts. They were thrilled to see the Jews go, and they helped Hitler get rid of them. They smelled the burning flesh and rotting meat. They saw the ashes. They saw the full train cars going one way and the empty cars coming back. They heard from witnesses who worked in the camps. But they didn’t have to see the killing, and they got all the stuff the dead Jews left behind, so they were okay with it.

Hoess’s book is remarkable. From the tone, you would think he was describing his stint as a Wal-Mart manager. Eichmann and his other superiors didn’t understand his problems. His underlings didn’t obey orders. Bad things happened, and he couldn’t stop them. He couldn’t get enough food or water. There weren’t enough guards. The pastries in the conference room were never fresh. It’s all very cold and matter-of-fact, and he’s talking about a place where babies were fried alive in the hot fat of burning Jews.

Kermit Gosnell could not be any less empathetic.

Hoess never repented of anti-Semitism. In his book, he complains about anti-Semitic propaganda that pandered to the lowest instincts of the Germans…because it undermined “scientific” anti-Semitism. He continued to call the Jews Germany’s greatest enemies. He firmly believed that if even a stump of the tree were left, it would grow back and annihilate the Germans and Austrians.

He remained faithful to National Socialism. He thought it was the answer to his people’s problems.

He sounded a lot like people who defend abortion. They talk about the unborn as though they were landmines that need to be dug up; as though they were plague-carrying lice. You don’t get emotional about landmines. You say, “There are lots of old landmines in this region of the map, and here is the most efficient way to get rid of them.”

Abortion-lovers say, “They will grow up to be unwanted (i.e. black). They will grow up to be criminals (i.e. black). They will grow up to be poor (i.e. black) and have to go on welfare. They will be unhappy. They will cost us a lot of money. The most efficient way to prevent them from causing problems is to ‘terminate’ them before they fully arrive.”

Abortion is all about getting rid of black people. Don’t fool yourself.

If you want to get people to participate in something horrible, first you hide the horror from them. You make it look clean and peaceful. Later, you convince them that it’s holy. You make them think anyone who opposes it is filthy and evil.

If the Nazis had won, we would now be arresting and killing anyone who tried to keep a Jew alive. Such people would be enemies of the state. They would be reviled. Similarly, we now treat abortion opponents, who are simply objecting to the murder of babies, the way baby-murderers used to be treated.

Evil is good, and good is evil. That’s how the depraved think; this kind of thinking defines depravity. It’s the reason God destroyed the world, and it’s the reason he’s going to destroy it again. Depravity is worse than mere sin, because it makes you incapable of being corrected. It’s the reason hell exists. Our loving God, who is always right, throws depraved people into it every day, because he can’t fix them, and they are a danger to the rest of us.

American Christians are strange. Many think abortion is wonderful. Many of those same people read about the ancient Jews sacrificing their children to Moloch, and they feel superior. We’ve murdered dozens of millions of babies in the name of convenience. The ancient Jews never began to approach that kind of body count. Who will be judged more harshly?

At least the Jews had the courage and honesty to deliver their babies and kill them openly.

The story of God versus Satan is the story of a race war. No one seems to understand it. Genocide is an integral part of it. God’s people are one race, and Satan’s people are the other.

Christians will be wiped out eventually, and very few Jews will be left on earth. The devil will win the earth, and then God will come and take it back. It’s like the Nazi notion of liebensraum (“room to live”), which was used to justify conquest and genocide. One big difference is that in the war between Christians and the lost, the victors will be the ones who die. Strange.

Christians who believe in organizing and taking over are crazy. It will never work. God’s kingdom is not of this world. He will not help you. Your enemies will have his permission to defeat you. If you want to own guns for self-defense, great, but you will never be able to conquer America for God with them. You will just give the lost ammunition for propaganda.

It’s good to know what you have permission to do and what is forbidden. It helps you avoid wasting time and working toward defeat.

Try to get in touch with the Holy Spirit and get his guidance. Without it, you will just have to learn from hard knocks, and some of those knocks are very, very hard.

If You’re not Climbing, You’re Descending

God keeps helping me by showing me how messed up I am.

Hooray. Hooray.

No, seriously; it’s wonderful. You can’t look at God’s correction as a source of discouragement. He wouldn’t bother to criticize if he didn’t provide a way out. The way out is the thing to focus on. When God criticizes you, he is helping you fix a problem.

I suppose this is not always true. I know God sometimes rules against people and puts his seal on the decisions, so there is nothing they can do. But if you’re a believer, and you’re striving to align yourself with God, that probably doesn’t apply to you.

This morning I realized the connection between receiving correction well and giving in the right spirit. Here is something Paul said about giving material wealth:

But this I say: He who sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and he who sows bountifully will also reap bountifully. So let each one give as he purposes in his heart, not grudgingly or of necessity; for God loves a cheerful giver.

From the context, it’s obvious that he’s talking about donations of earthly wealth, but the same principle applies to correction. When God criticizes you, he is asking you to give more of yourself. The usual response, if you’re me, is to feel bummed out and think, “Now I have to give something ELSE up.” In order to apply the correction you receive, you have to give something up to God; you have to cede more territory. If you feel resentful or discouraged, you’re a grudging giver.

The really sad thing is that you give God more of yourself, you’re not giving at all; you’re just returning something God already owns. And you’re not doing it for him. We can’t do anything for God. Everything we think we do for him is actually an imposition. He didn’t cause our problems. He doesn’t have to be here helping us. It’s all for us.

Sometimes when I pray, I ask God if the thing I’m asking for is available on the shelf of the homeless shelter. By that I mean to acknowledge that I’m receiving charity, not a paycheck I’ve earned.

Your attitude toward God matters. How do you like doing things for young people, when they whine and act entitled? Not a whole lot. It’s not rewarding for you, and it tends to reinforce their destructive mindset. Surely God has as much sense as you do.

So I am trying to be less of a jerk when God criticizes me. I’ve been begging for criticism for a long time, so it makes no sense to be discouraged when I get it. It’s the single best thing God gives us, apart from salvation. It is a path to power, peace, and authority.

If you’re having problems, and you can’t find peace, ask God what you’re doing wrong. I guarantee you this: whatever your external circumstances are, you can’t live in despair or gloom if you’re doing things right.

I wish I knew of a church that teaches this stuff and also adds teaching about prayer in tongues and the power of the Holy Spirit. Spirit-filled churches accept the baptism with the Spirit and prayer in tongues, but they teach us to be greedy hypocrites who do as we please and never grow up. Churches that deny the Holy Spirit teach us to grow and be corrected, but they teach us to do it all by ourselves, which is pride.

At my last church, it was just about impossible to get people to pray for God to correct anyone. They thought God never punished people. They thought all of our problems were caused by the devil and lack of faith. Their idea of sound prayer was to beg God to drive the devil out while they maintained a tight grip on the devil’s tail, to keep him from leaving. As a result, they saw very few healings, and there were deaths that were probably unnecessary.

It’s funny, but I got a number of healings there. Kidney stones, gallstones, and knee problems. It was frustrating to see other people who could not get help.

That church is still messed up. It’s still in a tiny rented room in a dirty, neglected building, and they still have a high turnover rate, because people don’t like the way things are done and the way they’re treated. The pastor’s brother and uncle left!

Things are not going great at Trinity Church, which I attended until 2012. Richie Wilkerson, the pastor’s son, presided over the marriage of Kanye West and Kim Kardashian and thought it was a good thing. I don’t even know what to say about that. Rule of thumb: if you’re a pastor, don’t tie yourself to benefactors who are currently displaying their genitals online and have no plans to stop.

Then he got a reality show. Not doing well. He opened a new church, which rents a school auditorium for $1200 a month. No building. I am also told he had difficulty selling tickets to his yearly conference this time. If true, this is a new problem. It did well in the past. It may be that kids associated the conference with Trinity, not him.

The new church was recently sued for using copyrighted artwork in its advertising. Copyright suits can be incredibly costly; even the attorneys’ fees are astronomical. I assume the Wilkersons are shielded personally by the corporate veil, but the lawsuit is still very bad news.

It’s actually a little weird. Kim Kardashian strains the wiring of the Internet every time she posts on Instagram, and her show, which is surely boring, evil, and stupid, has made her very, very rich. Richie Wilkerson is doing more or less the same things, and his church can’t afford a warehouse to renovate and preach in. But then Satan is very familiar with the old expression: keep your friends close and your enemies closer. You can’t align with his people and expect to be treated well.

Anyway, where are people supposed to go to church these days? Church doorways are like choke points where Satan’s troops pick people off as they enter. If the pastors can’t get blessed, what hope do you have if you listen to them?

Keep asking God to criticize and correct you. He will listen. If you can’t find a man to lead you, the Holy Spirit is always available. That’s the best news I have.

And stay away from crazy preachers. It’s better to be covered in leeches.

They do Exist

I’m in my dad’s office, waiting for the coffee to take effect before starting on some bookkeeping chores, so I will write.

I am very excited about the way my homemade shower spray worked out. I’m still using it, and the shower is cleaner than it was back when I scrubbed it once a week.

Back when I was SUPPOSED to scrub it once a week.

Every other day, before I get out of the shower, I spray the parts of it that are hardest to get at from outside, and then I get out and spray the rest of it. Takes one minute. I spray the glass and the metal, not just the tile. If you look at the directions from storebought spray, you will see they recommend scrubbing once in a while, in addition to spraying. I guess they can say whatever they want, to prevent angry people from calling up and complaining that their showers aren’t clean, but in my case, no scrubbing is needed. It would be a total waste of time. My spray even wears away the accumulated calcium scale on the plumbing.

The single biggest non-water ingredient in the spray is no-scrub shower cleaner. Home Depot sells Zep brand cleaner in gallon jugs, cheap. They probably also sell their own Chinese brand, but I’m not sure I trust it. Once ever ten days or so I refill my spray bottle with Zep, water, Dawn, and dishwasher rinse agent, and I’m ready to go.

The Zep costs around 40 cents per dose, and the dishwashing rinse runs about 12 cents, give or take. The dishwashing liquid costs three cents. So I’m paying less than $20 per year for a clean shower. And it also works on the sink. The prepared spray Home Depot sells (one brand) would run $200 per year. You would have to be out of your mind.

When your shower and tub are off your back, cleaning a bathroom is a joke.

Sooner or later I will get real and add the Dawn and the rinse stuff to the big jug of shower cleaner, and then mixing the spray will be a lot faster than it is now. It will just be a matter of adding water.

Are you as thrilled about this as I am? I hope so. You are. I can tell. Try to contain yourselves.

I’m sorry to admit that I’m drinking coffee. It’s a problem. The good Lord showed me that coffee destroys peace, and it’s true. If you drink coffee off and on, and you react the way I do, you will find that you have more peace on the days you go without it. But I am dealing with my dad’s business affairs these days, and I find that a little jolt of caffeine helps me get moving.

I used to drink huge quantities of coffee when I was in law school and then practicing. Law school was a little dull, so I needed something to keep me alert. Actual legal work is much less dull than law school, but I still felt like I needed a boost once in a while. Now I find that very small amounts of coffee work very well. It’s like my normal state is just below the state where I need to be in order to do boring things, and a tiny amount of caffeine pushes me over the hump.

As for my new responsibilities, it’s very strange, dealing with someone who is slipping. It’s not a predictable or consistent thing. They stay strong in some areas while failing in others, and they have days that are better than others. My dad can still do math and crossword puzzles, but sometimes he will have a real problem with something that shouldn’t be challenging at all. Usually it’s memory related.

At some point a few months back, he reached a state where he couldn’t do a good job looking after bills and financial matters, and he simply stopped without saying anything. He didn’t stop completely, but a number of things got backed up, so here I am fixing them. He wasn’t aware there was a problem, or he just didn’t admit it. It wasn’t until this month that he told me I needed to take everything over.

I used to look at his office and say, “Can we throw this out? Can we clean this? Can we do this differently?” Now I just do it. Like the old joke says, it’s easier to get forgiveness than permission.

The difference in his work area is beyond belief. I threw out so much paper, the garbage men refused to take some of the bags. I added longer cords to electrical devices that were in the wrong places, so they could be moved. I replaced his primary hard drive with a solid state job so I could search and boot the PC quickly. I got a good desk lamp. I must have removed him from fifty email lists.

I’ve dusted things. I’ve disinfected things. I’ve removed mysterious work-related films from things.

I have never been good at organization, because I have spoiled myself, and because it wasn’t my nature. I have never organized my own affairs well, except for keeping track of legal deadlines. I’m surprised to see myself doing a good job organizing someone else’s mess. It will help me with my own problems. Realistically, it’s helping me with my problems now, since my dad has nothing that won’t be mine eventually.

It’s easier to fix other people’s problems than your own, because you’re more objective. But when you fix other people’s problems, the problem-solving skills you develop may start to apply to your own life. I say “may,” because it hinges on whether or not you’re in denial. Some people can help others yet are unable to help themselves.

Actually, that’s pretty common.

Life is getting more peaceful and orderly as I get closer to God. It’s funny; the supernatural world has a binary quality to it. There is no “okay.” There are only “horrible” and “sublime.” God provided hell and heaven. He didn’t provide a middle ground. This life is no different. It can go very, very well, with God’s help, or it can go very, very badly (even if you don’t realize it) without him.

When I work in my dad’s office, I play Julie True in the background. She sings about the Holy Spirit. Peace fills the place. I could never have done that while he was strong enough to control things. It was always an area of atheism, disorder, and contention when he was in charge. We should honor God throughout our homes and throw out the stuff the devil likes. It makes things work.

I put Julie True on his hard drive. Don’t tell him.

As always, I hope my experiences are helpful to you. In my studies of Greek literature, I keep coming across a curse worth noting: only a fool has to learn from experience. The Bible agrees, saying, “Judgments are prepared for scorners, and stripes for the back of fools.” I can’t undo the beatings I’ve received, but I can help you avoid receiving them.

To be Gay, Divine

First, I feel like I should say something about comments.

Sometimes I close comments on stuff I’ve written. Once in a while, I’m sure I’ve learned something from God, and on top of that, it’s the kind of thing I know will draw contention and fussing. On those occasions, I don’t want the message to be diluted by squabbling. If you want to get a clearer picture of what I’m trying to avoid, imagine the gospels with black letters, red letters for Jesus, and blue letters for hecklers. Most of the print would be blue, the gospels would be a thousand pages long, and no one would benefit from them.

It would be like reading the comments at PJ Media.

You may think you’re THE person I’m trying to discourage, but you are wrong. Depending on the topic, there are various people and types of people I don’t want to get into it with.

I like the new policy, so I’m going to stick with it. I hope that doesn’t offend people. All that much. You can’t comment at all when you watch TV or read a book or newspaper, so it shouldn’t be that hard to bear. You ought to be used to it.

By the way, the kingdom of heaven is not about opinion and discussion. Our opinions are completely worthless. They don’t count. Jesus didn’t form a consensus and then preach it. He told people how things were, and they were free to accept it or reject it. If I put up a post saying Chevy is better than Ford, your opinion means something, but if God shows me something and I repeat it, not so much.

I try to draw distinctions between things I know and things I merely think are probably true. I’m probably doing a poor job of that.

Second, the main thing I wanted to write about: it looks like I may actually be homophobic now, instead of merely being accused of it by annoying people who demonize their enemies.

I’ve always thought the word “homophobic” was silly, because outside of prison, the YMCA, and certain scouting organizations, very few people are afraid of homosexuals. There are lots of people who hate homosexuals. There are lots of people who disagree with homosexuals. Actual fear is not that big a factor. I don’t know anyone who is scared of them. What are they going to do? Gang up and say mean things about your hair? Refuse to plan your wedding? They are not fearsome people.

That’s changing, though, because these days, they are working proactively to impoverish others. They drive people out of jobs and honorary positions. They get courts to fine them into extinction. They get people’s businesses closed over cakes they don’t really want.

Sooner or later, anyone who thinks homosexuality is a bad thing and says so will be removed from all major social media platforms. You won’t be able to promote your business on Facebook or Youtube, and you won’t be able to post a photograph of every single meal you eat, which is not really that important, but still.

It’s a fascinating thing. Homophobia didn’t really exist in the past. The word was just a disingenuous rhetorical device based on victim-mentality fantasy. Now it’s starting to be a real thing, but it’s not the kind of homophobia gays had in mind when they coined the word. It’s fear of having your livelihood and savings taken away.

Maybe I’m not actually homophobic, because I don’t think I’m in a very vulnerable position. But I am concerned about other people who will receive the blows. I must be homophobic by proxy.

I started thinking about this because I looked at the news and learned that the Orlando murderer, Omar Mateen, was gay. I’m not sure I can recall the dots I had to connect to get from Mateen to the new homophobia, but it happened somehow.

His ex-wife says he was gay. Regulars at the bar he shot up say he visited a number of times. He used a gay “dating” (fornication) app. The man was gay.

Interesting tidbit: the ex-wife says the FBI told her not to reveal this.

What possible reason could the FBI have for doing a thing like that? It should concern us.

One of the weird things about the gay PR machine is that they exclude all truly unpleasant people from the fraternity, regardless of the facts. They say gay priests are “ephebophiles,” even when all their victims are male. They say men who rape other men aren’t gay.

Heterosexuals don’t have similar defenses. A priest who has sex with girls is just a bad old heterosexual. Same thing goes for a man who rapes women or little girls. Only gays pick and choose the people they deign to include among their officially sanctioned ranks.

There is a weird collusion going on, protecting homosexuals from criticism, and it sort of looks like the FBI may be in on it. I wonder.

What difference does it make if the worst mass killer in American history is gay? It doesn’t really reflect on other gays. I don’t sit around fretting over the fact that Hitler and Osama bin Laden were straight. Besides, it’s not like we didn’t know gays were capable of violence. Wayne Williams is gay. Andrew Cunanan and John Wayne Gacy were gay. Jeffrey Dahmer was gay. I understand why gays want to project a good image, but irrational, transparent denial of readily apparent facts is not a good approach.

Journalists are not happy about the news. I guarantee you that. They will work to play down the gay angle. They will somehow turn heterosexuality, Christianity, conservatism, and probably even global warming into the problem. They may even go so far as to play up Mateen’s Islamist extremism. Wouldn’t that be something? Obama and the press love to muffle that sort of thing, but now they have to choose: gays or Muslims? Who goes under the bus?

Here’s a crazy idea: how about telling the truth and not worrying so much about the fallout? Life will go on.

Pretend I didn’t say that. It’s insane to even suggest it.

I think they’ll side with gays and go for the Muslim angle. Angry Muslims can’t hurt a career all that much. Actually, they’ll work the ridiculous gun control angle harder than anything.

I checked CNN’s site a minute ago, just to see if they’re as crazy as I thought. And they are. Knock me over with a feather. In the headlines, there is no mention whatsoever of Mateen’s homosexuality. Zero. Never happened. Fox, on the other hand, is touting it, in a somewhat oblique way: “MULTIPLE MOTIVES? Orlando massacre gunman said to have been regular at gay club where he killed 49.”

It amazes me that people criticize Fox. If you don’t look at Fox, you get about half of the news. They get a little weird sometimes, like when they decided to call suicide bombers “homicide bombers,” but they don’t leave you completely in the dark.

The Daily Mail is also all over it. So is The New York Post.

Spin doctors will probably take this approach: Omar Mateen’s religion did not help him to adjust to his orientation, because God isn’t real, so Mateen became filled with self-hatred and confusion and lashed out at the people who tempted him. So God, though nonexistent, will be the real murderer. As usual.

Actually, I agree with part of that. People are full of compulsions they can’t shake, and religion is very weak in the area of setting people free. If Christians had any real power, we would be able to help people change, but as it is, we do a very feeble job. We can’t even help people stop biting their nails; why should we expect them to come to us for deliverance from much stronger compulsions?

No wonder young people go with their existing inclinations instead of trying to alter them. They have no hope. But God isn’t the problem; we are. We turned away from him, we gave up power, authority, and knowledge, so now we’re the tail and not the head.

If I had had gay urges before I knew God, I probably would have gone with them, too. I had no moral objections about homosexuality when I was young.

We live on one of the lowest levels of existence, very far from God’s world. The only frames below us are hell and the lake of fire. Above us, there are a number of levels of heaven. We expect God to live here and fix everything. We think of the world as his, and we criticize him because life here isn’t perfect. But the god of this world isn’t Yahweh; it’s Satan. Things are going extremely well, considering who we put in charge.

Fascinating stuff.

Christians need to build themselves up in prayer and seek correction, power, and authority. We don’t do those things, because we don’t really want to serve God or be transformed. We want him to come down here and pamper us while we serve the devil. We don’t help people change, so they become our adversaries. It’s not rocket science.

The world has failed irretrievably, and human beings, including Jews and Christians, are the reason. When the end comes, we will have to take part of the responsibility for the behavior of the lost. Unfortunately, we can’t help them bear the punishment. Nobody deserves help, but some of us will get it anyway, and the rest won’t.