Life Resumes on Friday

Time for a nice hurricane update.

The good news: Milton is much weaker than it was last night.

The bad news: Milton is expected to double in size.

The good news, at least for me: the track is holding steady with the cone centered south of Tampa.

The bad news: people in that area got blasted by storm surge twice this year.

The good news: I bought Pop Tarts.

The bad news: Walmart was out of cherry frosted.

This pretty much sums it up. I don’t know if I need to write anything else.

DeSantis continues to be the greatest governor imaginable. He issued an order forbidding the guy in charge of the state’s disaster response to restrict the sale of guns and ammunition. I don’t think it means anything, however, because DeSantis appointed him, and he never tried to pull anything before.

The police chief of Okeechobee, Florida, is another story. He signed an order banning the sale of guns and ammunition in his town. Think that’s bad? It also banned gun possession in public areas. I am pretty sure no state in the union has tried to do that. I believe his order put Okeechobee, Florida behind Hawaii and Massachusetts.

The order was supposed to cover the period during which Hurricane Helene would pass through.

Hagan now says he enacted the order by mistake, and that he canceled it immediately. That looks like a huge lie. You can see the order all over the web. It’s very simple. It’s short. His signature is at the bottom. Unless he signs things while blindfolded or at a party at P Diddy’s house, he appears to be a tremendous liar.

Maybe he means he mistakenly thought the law made him an emperor because he didn’t read it correctly. That is plausible. There is a law on the books allowing the governor to ban gun and ammunition sales plus possession in public if:

there is reason to believe that there exists a clear and present danger of a riot or other general public disorder, widespread disobedience of the law, and substantial injury to persons or to property, all of which constitute an imminent threat to public peace or order and to the general welfare of the jurisdiction affected or a part or parts thereof.

A police chief is not a governor.

This is not the kind of “mistake” that would excuse him, because it would still mean he wanted to take away people’s civil rights. And the conditions mentioned in the law did not exist when he issued his illegal order.

Maybe he did it because Okeechobee County has a big minority population. Most crimes are committed by minorities.

I think this is a stupid law, because in application, it would do more harm than it would prevent. I must not be alone in thinking this. All of these conditions were met after Hurricane Andrew, and flaky Democrat Governor Lawton Chiles didn’t activate the law.

Another Democrat might.

After Andrew, ghetto types roamed Dade County looting houses and businesses. The National Guard swarmed the ghettos. People put signs in their yards reading, “You loot we shoot.” They sat in their yards with pistols and rifles on display. They probably patrolled neighborhoods. The cops were overwhelmed. People really needed guns, and they didn’t just need them in their yards. They needed them while on the move.

You can say we shouldn’t let people have guns when order has broken down. Well, they already have them. And of course, criminals won’t obey an emergency order. Better to let the citizenry protect itself. This is the philosophy behind the Second Amendment, after all.

Also, during a crisis, a gun shop would still have to do background checks and observe waiting periods. The only people who would be able to get guns quickly in Florida would be permit holders, and we already have guns.

Florida has preemption, which means no one but the legislature can regulate firearms. This is why there are backyard gun ranges near Miami and Palm Beach. The county can’t do anything about it. Old Jewish ladies who moved here from New York can ring the cops’ phones off the wall, and nothing will happen. The cops are bound by preemption.

A police chief can’t appoint himself Supreme Commander and take people’s guns.

It doesn’t matter to me. First of all, I would violate the law egregiously and continuously before endangering my family, second, I have no police chief, and third, my sheriff is more likely to order people to carry guns than to ban them.

Florida may be about to get open carry. Insanely, this is one of only 4 states that ban it. Gun Owners of America and a citizen have sued St. Lucie County Keith Pearson and State Attorney Thomas Bakkedahl in an attempt to get rid of Florida’s anomalous ban. Attorney General Ashley Moody, who hopes to be governor, has refused to help the defendants.

The leftists at Politico are saying she’s a hypocrite because she has complained about officials refusing to enforce laws, but of course, they’re weaseling. Florida does enforce the carry ban, every day. Refusing to defend it in court is another thing entirely, and it’s a completely legitimate move by an attorney general who may disagree with the law.

If there is a state or federal law requiring attorneys general to defend lawsuits seeking to get laws repealed, I am unaware of it.

St. Lucie County has an enormous minority population, and Democrats outnumber sane people there. The State Attorney named in the case is a career prosecutor, so he could be conservative. Sheriff Keith Pearson is a lame duck Republican. He lost a recent primary.

How do I feel about open carry? I’m 100% for it. I don’t plan to do it, and I think concealed carry is usually better, but anything that makes it harder for the government to jail people for obeying the spirit of the Second Amendment is okay by me.

“Florida will be like the wild West! There will be duels in the streets!” Yes, it will be a war zone just like New Hampshire, Vermont, Iowa…don’t make me list them all.

Open carry will help people get over their gun phobias, it will help insure good manners in public places, it will help the cops to know who is and is not armed, and it will get rid of a lot of hassle. “Is my shirt long enough?” “Can people figure out what that bulge is?” None of that nonsense will matter any more. It should also make it permissible to carry rifles in public, and that will be helpful to a lot of people.

It might put an end to late-night brawls at Denny’s and Waffle House, although probably not, because those things still happen in states with open carry.

For a second, I had hope.

I don’t have any idea what will happen in the case. Even if the defendants default, you never know what a judge will do. He might be married to an old Jewish lady who moved here from New York.

Let’s see. It’s a federal case, and the judge’s name is Jose E. Martinez. Uh oh. If he’s Cuban, we could be okay. If he’s Mexican or Puerto Rican, the case is as good as dismissed.

He’s 83 years old. He’s…DOMINICAN. What? I have no idea how they vote.

He was appointed by George W. Bush, a nominal conservative. Maybe there is light at the end of the tunnel.

Looks like he was a JAG officer for a long time. I hope he can handle the truth.

I am going to relax and not worry about the storm. My plan is to rest in God’s presence and let him take care of us.

The News from Home is not Good

A few years back, I watched a Derek Prince video in which he claimed a Spirit-baptized person should have the ability to prophesy at will. The idea seemed to be that it was like speaking in tongues, but you do it in English.

I gave it a try, and it seemed to work. It still seems to work.

Unfortunately, these days, I hear very bad things when I do it. I keep hearing that God will remove my enemies and their seed from the earth. He will destroy them. I hear he is angry over the way they’ve treated me and the rest of his children, and his patience is at an end. I hear these things over and over.

I have asked myself if I was projecting some sort of deep-seated resentment on God. Maybe I was saying things I wished would happen to people who wronged me. But that isn’t the case. I’m not the kind of person who sits and stews about somebody blackballing me from the chess team 50 years ago. I am not happy about the mistreatment I’ve received in life, but I like to think about the present and the future. Truthfully, they are just more interesting. They’re also much more pleasant.

I think being male helps. Women seem to be very bad at letting things go. Many times, during conversations with women, I’ve been startled to hear them bring up their continuing resentment over trivial things that happened decades ago. Things no one else cares about.

Women are more manipulative than men, and unforgiveness is a tool of manipulation. You can keep presenting the same bill over and over, no matter how many times it has been paid. Even if it’s imaginary.

Men use their own tools to get what they want. Women are more likely to use people.

I also hear myself saying something else, but it doesn’t come from God. I keep saying, “I hate this place.” It happens right after I think about some horrible aspect of life. Maybe I’ll see a crippled person at the grocery store, or someone who is falling apart from old age. I’ll think, “I hate this place. Look what happens to people here.” Or I’ll see irredeemable, incorrigible punks online, libeling Christians or Jews or white people or conservatives. Punks who can’t possibly be saved because they love lies and can’t be forced to admit the truth. “I hate this place. Look who is taking over.” I think about the things they’re going to do when they have a free hand. I think about the pointlessness of engaging them.

I’ll think, “I hate this place,” and then I’ll tell God, “You were right about everything.” All the horrors of this world come from our rejection of Yeshua and the Holy Spirit. They come from our hatred of correction. If we had done things right, the world would be a peaceful place full of healthy, prosperous people.

I hate this place even though my life and my wife’s life are wonderful. We pray all the time. We know God. We live among fantastic people. We are healthy. We have a son on the way. We get along. We don’t have to work. It’s not that our lives are hard. It’s just that this place is disgusting and beyond fixing. I always say it’s like we went to Mexico for a vacation and got stuck there.

Today I asked God if he was displeased because I say I hate this world, and instantly, I thought of Lot. Look at 2 Peter:

And delivered just Lot, vexed with the filthy conversation of the wicked:

(For that righteous man dwelling among them, in seeing and hearing, vexed his righteous soul from day to day with their unlawful deeds;)

Lot was wealthy, and he had a family, but he was vexed anyway, because he lived in the San Francisco of the Middle East. Lot did not fit in. People like to live among their own kind.

That’s not totally true. Good people like to live among good people, and so do rotten people. Good people try to get away from rotten people, and rotten people pursue them and stay close to them so they can prey on them.

This explains a lot of the tension we have with immigrants. It explains socialism. What good is a tick without a dog?

I think God is pleased when we hate this place and look forward to growing up and moving on. Jesus said, “He that loveth his life shall lose it; and he that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal.”

Holding onto this life is sick. Fearing death is sick. Who feels that way? Terrible people. Look at Hollywood. A lot of people there would eat live babies in order to get 5 more years. We now have sick billionaires funding life extension research to save themselves. So they can be wrinkly and weak forever, getting coronavirus over and over.

What if they stop aging and then go broke? They don’t think about that. Being Jeff Bezos on a huge yacht is all right. Being centenarian Jeff Bezos working at Five Guys is not. How about being poor, paralyzed Jeff Bezos in a motorized wheelchair because he took a fall on his yacht? How about being weak, old Jeff Bezos with a crooked younger wife who has a power of attorney?

If Bezos is around when the kids with the multicolored hair take over, he will not be rich for long. Has he thought about that?

One of the great things about death is that you get to leave this place. Why would you throw that away? It’s like being 40 and preferring diapers to the toilet.

After praying, I read a Buzzfeed article. It was a collection of things people had written about events that made them realize their families were messed up. It was long, but I couldn’t stop until I read the whole thing

One person wrote about telling her friends a funny story about how her dad hit himself while trying to beat her with a belt. They didn’t get it. Another said it was weird to go to the homes of kids whose parents weren’t hoarders. One wrote about being surprised to find that other people’s parents helped them with school and homework and so on.

It really took me back. It made me realize what bad parents I had.

I hate saying that, because my mother loved me more than she loved herself, and my dad changed completely during his last months on Earth. But it’s true. You can love your child and still be a terrible parent.

Looking back, I wonder what our neighbors thought of the times the cops came to our house and had long conversations with my dad, who was standing in the front doorway in his underwear, drunk. They would try to get him to come out so they could arrest him, but he knew they couldn’t touch him in his house. My sister used to call them when he hit my mother. Eventually, we quit calling.

I also remember the little trips we took with my mother. She would put us in the car and take us to motels in places like St. Petersburg or Key Biscayne. She didn’t tell us why. She took me all the way to Kentucky once.

One day we got home from a trip to the Thunderbird Motel in St. Petersburg, and I ran into the living room to tell my dad all about it. He was sleeping face-down on the couch with no shirt. He opened one eye and stared at me in silence. When my mother came in, he got up and choked her in front of us. Here I was, expecting him to want to hear about our trip.

We lived in several neighborhoods while I was growing up, and while we had plenty of dysfunctional neighbors, none of the other men hit their wives.

I remember going to jail with my mother to pick my dad up. This was in Tampa when I was about 5 years old. I don’t know what he had done. The walls were white. We sat on a wooden bench and waited until they released him.

An elderly black man sat next to us. He started talking to me. He took out a nickel and gave it to me. I guess he felt sorry for me. I tried to give it back, and he said, “That’s your nickel.”

He must have been waiting for someone, too.

I never felt right taking things from people when I was a kid. I always
tried to give them back.

I went to the Coke machine and got myself a drink.

We did almost nothing together as a family. My dad would come home from work, take off his pants, get a drink, and lie on the couch watching TV until he went to bed. I don’t really remember what my mother did. I think she was idle when she wasn’t cooking or cleaning.

On the weekends, my dad went to the golf course.

My mother took some interest in my education. She endured all-night abuse sessions to get my dad to put me in private school so I wouldn’t be a victim of racist violence at our local public schools, and she spoke to a couple of my teachers, but that was it.

My dad never knew my teachers. He did show up for a school play, though. That was strange.

My friends told me their fathers gave them money for good grades. My dad never did anything like that. When I got a bad grade, I heard about it. I never worked to get good grades. I just tried to avoid failing.

I used to give my dad a partial pass on this, because I thought his dad had been trashy. I had heard about his dad getting drunk and beating my grandmother. I figured my dad never got any encouragement when he was young, because his dad was Eastern Kentucky white trash. When my dad was past 80, he told me his dad gave him money for every A he received. There went that excuse.

My dad and his sisters had music lessons. He played high school football. His sisters went to college. I don’t know why my dad didn’t raise his kids. his father died when he was young, but it looks like he taught him some things he didn’t pass on.

I got a degree in physics, and decades later, my dad was still calling me an engineer.

My mother definitely loved me, but she ignored me a lot of the time. She told me to shut up so many times, I started to feel self-concious about joining conversations. She wasn’t a violent person, but I got a fair number of slaps I didn’t see coming, over trivial things.

Here’s something odd: I got slapped when I broke things. If I dropped a plate or a dish, I was likely to be slapped. That never made any sense. My parents could break whatever they wanted, and it was understood that it was no one’s fault. Accidents were unavoidable. At some point in my teens, the standards changed. Somehow, breaking a dish was no longer a slapping offense.

I rarely got spanked. I can remember two spankings. But my dad kicked me in the stomach once, and he used to punch me in the back when he thought I wasn’t walking fast enough.

I would have been a lot better off if I had had defined rules and received a few predictable spankings. It would have given me self-discipline.

My wife’s life was worse. Her parents died when she was young. She was raised by her dad’s family, and they mistreated her. She had relatives who cast spells on her to destroy her. This is a popular pastime in Zambia. Everyone was poor.

Thinking about these things, and how they were caused unnecessarily by other human beings, I started to understand why God would be fed up with our enemies. My own parents, and my wife’s relatives, did us a great deal of damage they didn’t have to do.

I started thinking about how I had inherited my dad’s entire estate. On two separate occasions, he had wills drawn up to cut my sister out, and she did nothing at all to try to get back into his good graces. She got nothing whatsoever, even though she had spent time in shelters.

Recalling my dad’s behavior, and all the abuse my mother and I got from my sister, I realized something: my inheritance was no gift. Unlike most heirs, I was owed every cent. I didn’t work for it, but I was mistreated. What I received was compensation. There was a debt. And the payment was insufficient. It can never make me whole. Any intelligent person would choose a good upbringing over an inheritance.

I have a son on the way, and my biggest concern is for his safety. I am afraid I’ll love him too much. I’m afraid I’ll be overprotective. I’m concerned about all the creatures that will try to destroy him. Spirits, people, and every other type of hostile creation. I’m concerned I won’t do a good job of equipping him.

Now that I have to think about my son’s welfare, I can’t figure out what was going on in my parents’ heads. Where was their dedication? Where was their plan? How could they not feel this way? Isn’t this normal and natural? Even cats teach their young.

I can’t imagine raising a child and not teaching him every day. I can’t imagine not praying with him. How can a parent skip that? Why not just kill your child and get it over with?

How can a parent have no involvement with a child’s education? If you don’t care about your child’s future, you shouldn’t have him. I’m already planning to do homeschooling. I’m not letting the state teach my son it’s wrong to be male or that he should support perversion and hate God. If my son ever has a teacher with rainbow hair and a rainbow flag in the classroom, it will mean I’m dead.

Aside from not introducing me to God, my parents taught me nearly nothing. Did they have something better to do?

I had Jewish friends. Their parents taught them constantly. Take this course. Apply to this college. Save money. Invest. Don’t trust the government. Hide cash.

I was in a carpool with some Jewish kids, and one day while we were on our way to school, the dad who was driving us turned the radio down. He had been listening to the news, and he had heard something he thought was important. He gave us a lecture about the importance of the two-party system. I thought that was crazy. My parents never did anything like that.

Granted, one of his kids grew up to be a real mess, but at least he tried.

I should check. Well, the web says he’s a partner at a law firm in Cleveland. Hope things worked out for him.

The Buzzfeed article brought something home to me in a new and powerful way: not everything is my fault. I try to take responsibility for all the bad things that happen to me so I can have power over them, but the truth is that I have received a great deal of mistreatment in this world. Parents, my sibling, my friends, institutions, teachers, employers, strangers…they have done a lot of rotten things to me. People who should have been helpful were detrimental. Satan worked in them to give me disfavor in order to destroy me, and because I didn’t know God, I was defenseless.

When I got to know God, everything started turning around. I began living a victorious life. I received correction. I was cleaned up. These things are still happening. God keeps improving me. When I prophesy, I hear that he is helping me partly in order to torment my enemies.

Nonetheless, the world is still against me. As Yeshua predicted, it hates my wife and me. Hates us. Wants us to fail. And it also wants us to think it’s fair to us. It wants us to keep trying, playing by its rules, like gambling addicts playing rigged games. That jackpot could come on the next pull of the handle.

I’m right to hate this place and to maintain my distance from the herd. Most of them will be obliterated in the tribulation, and most will burn in hell. God can use me to pull a few aside, but that’s about it. Humanity is not going to change.

What if Kamala Harris gets elected? In that case, Christians can forget about help from their country. Our country will do its best to destroy us. America will be better for us than Indonesia or England, but it will be very hostile.

What if you’re not prepared? What if you don’t pray in tongues and you don’t have God’s full protection? You’ll be in real trouble. Just being a Christian is not enough. A whole lot of Christians just died in floods.

We need to be close to God so he, and not this twisted nation, is our protection and our provider. If you’re with him, you’re in the ark. It doesn’t matter what governments do. He is stronger than governments, and he knows more than they do.

I think God really is about to destroy the enemies of those who are close to him. I don’t think I imagined it.

#3

Incredibly, Florida has a new hurricane cone. Debby landed on August 5, Helene landed on September 27, and Milton is expected to pay a visit on October 9. Next year may be a great time to snap up a west coast home, or what remains of it, cheap.

Debby landed near Steinhatchee, which is nearly nowhere unless you live there. Helene landed near Perry. These areas are around 35 miles apart, so it’s reasonable to say the storms landed in the same place. Close enough for government work.

Right now, Milton’s projected path’s landfall area is centered just south of Tampa, so if the cone turns out to be solid, the storm will land around 150 miles away from the area where Debby and Helene landed.

They do a pretty good job with the cones these days. They blow it when it comes to storm surge and wind.

So I’m doomed, right? No.

You have to think about three things when a storm is coming. Wind, surge, and diameter. Diameter is a big deal. Storms vary tremendously in size. Andrew was a horrible storm, but it was small, so while Dade County was wiped out, Broward County, just north, didn’t really have a crisis. Businesses were open the next day.

Helene was enormous. Milton will be much smaller in comparison. If Milton goes right up the middle of the cone, the center it will land near Venice. That’s maybe 140 miles from me. That’s a long way, considering the size of the storm. The winds here will be from the east when it lands, meaning they will have to come across half of Florida before they get to me. That will weaken them.

In short, at the moment, things look pretty good here. But then this area has never had hurricane winds, storm surge can’t happen here, and flooding is nearly impossible where I am.

On the other hand, people in some coastal areas must be wondering if this is the tribulation. The area where Milton is headed is said to have experienced “up to” 7 feet of storm surge during Helene, so apply the exaggeration factor and call it 5, which is still not good. Based on my observations over many years in Florida, I would guess there are a lot of coastal structures less than 5 feet above the normal high tide line. I lived in a house close to Biscayne Bay, and I would say the yard was around 5 feet above high tide, so the floor was around 7 feet above the line.

It’s hard to get solid information, but it looks like the water inside some buildings where Milton is headed was nearly a foot deep as Helene passed. If your floor was under several inches of water on September 27, you will not be ready for a second storm on October 9.

Storms spin counterclockwise, so storm surge hits to the south of a storm’s center when the storm approaches from the west. If Milton’s cone holds up, the surge should end up in areas with low population densities compared to Tampa and St. Petersburg. That’s a plus, unless you live in those areas.

At least they don’t expect heavy surge up the coast, where Helene’s waters rose at least as high as 6 feet in some buildings.

I don’t even know what happened in North Carolina and Tennessee. I kind of tuned it out. I thought I was getting disinformation and that I would never really get the facts. I know the flooding was catastrophic, and that’s about all. My wife and I have prayed for the people, but I haven’t been reading much about the situation.

Before the storm, TV people were saying there was already flooding up there. The storm was around 700 miles away from North Carolina, and at least one source said the flooding came from another system. There was a big dry gap between the mess over North Carolina and Tennessee and the mess from Helene. It was obvious on maps.

I don’t know how a dryish hurricane 700 miles away can flood anything. It didn’t flood anything here, and I was maybe 150 miles away from the eye. We didn’t get much rain. Under two inches.

Leftists control the news, and they always exaggerate the impact of hurricanes. They always claim every storm was caused by global warming. If the flooding in the hills came from another system, we will never be told.

It’s important to be honest about what causes things like this, because good information helps people understand and prepare for hurricanes. If people in North Carolina and Tennessee get the idea that it’s normal for a huge storm to wash their houses away from 700 miles off, they’re going to make a lot of stupid decisions in the future.

Ordinarily, when a hurricane floods these places, it happens only after the storm dissipates and moves over them. I’ve never seen a storm flood Appalachia from two states away while leaving Florida nearly dry.

Not to make light of other people’s terrible suffering, but our preparation has been light. Today we bought 18 eggs and some Tennessee Pride sausage. In the past, I bought a lot of Pop Tarts, lunchmeat, bread, and unnatural foods in bags, but I can’t get motivated any more, and I don’t want to constipate myself terminally with 10 pounds of white flour and cheap corn meal. If we lose power and water, we’ll go to a hotel with Marvin and eat all our meals at Chick-fil-A for a day or two.

One likes to think we won’t get any more storms before the end of the season, which is three weeks away.

In other news, another homosexual has set himself on fire for Palestine.

Is this a trend? I read somewhere that 5 people have done this. Were they all gay?

The best-known gay self-immolater was Aaron Bushnell, a military contractor. A guy named Matt Nelson burned himself to death later. Not sure if he was gay. Now a man named Samuel Mena has set fire to his left shirt sleeve, saying he was giving Palestine his left arm.

How do I know he’s gay? I don’t, but he screamed, “I’M A JOURNALITHT!”

There must be straight men out there who support Hamas and have heavy, heavy lisps. Maybe. But effeminacy, including lisping, is a pretty strong indicator of homosexuality.

Here’s what gets me: they’re doing to themselves the kind of thing Hamas would do to them if they outed themselves in Gaza and the West Bank.

Hamas pigs raped Jewish men and boys on October 7. They have a history of gang-raping homosexuals. Wonder how that fits in with the gay agenda.

I saw a neat video in which an Israeli asked random Palestinians whether they supported the sexual deviants who claimed to be their allies, and I didn’t see a single one who didn’t say no. I stopped watching after a while, so maybe I missed one or two, but the video made it pretty obvious Hamas supporters–a term synonymous with “Palestinians”–were not at all in favor of warm relations with the deviant community.

Deviants want a world in which Christians and others who embrace ancient faiths that clearly disapprove of sexual perversion do not exist. They literally want us to be gone. But now many of them are trying to hand Israel to heartless Muslim fanatics who throw deviants off tall buildings.

How much weirder will it get? Haredi for Jihad? Lesbians for Female Genital Mutilation? Well, we already have that one, but it’s called bottom surgery. Girls are skinning and castrating themselves all over the US.

That’s it for today. Hope the power holds out until Milton is gone.

Time to OD on Dangerous Veterinary-Grade Livestock Remedy

Is anyone else tired of coronavirus? I certainly am. My wife and I have traveled a lot during the last three years, and on most of our trips, at least one of us has gotten covid.

It’s never really bad. A cold is worse. But it’s a drag.

I am not sure when I got this latest case.

I divide covid symptoms into three categories: perceptible, annoying, and serious.

Perceptible symptoms aren’t trustworthy. You might feel a slight raspiness in your throat, for example. Covid, or dry winter air? Maybe it’s pollen. Impossible to be sure. If it goes away, it may have been something else, or it may have been a very mild case of coronavirus.

Annoying symptoms are things like chills, bone aches, sore throats, headaches, nausea, mild fever, and congestion. When you have annoying symptoms, you know you’re sick, but you don’t care, because you know it’s no big deal.

A serious symptom is anything that results in you having a tube down your throat.

I have had perceptible symptoms many times. Sometimes they were followed by annoying symptoms. Sometimes they went away quickly. That has happened more than once after taking ivermectin.

I’ve had annoying symptoms several times. They were just bothersome enough to make me angry. They sometimes made it harder for me to enjoy life.

I’ve never had serious symptoms. I have never had a case of coronavirus I did not prefer to the flu, norovirus, a cold, food poisoning, dysentery, or a bad day following the ingestion of Myers’s Rum, which should be classified as a poison.

It’s impossible to tell whether my wife or I got sick first this time. She had annoying symptoms before I did, after we arrived in Rome. We got there on the 12th. A day or two earlier, my voice was a little raspy, but I felt good. I was in Switzerland, and the weather was a big change for me. Sometimes it was cool and rainy, and sometimes the air was dry enough to make Carmex a good idea. A healthy person’s throat could be affected by changes in weather.

On the 13th, we took a food tour. We had to walk on cobblestones a lot. The soles of my feet started hurting.

I thought it was the new shoes I had bought in Switzerland; my old ones gave out unexpectedly. But maybe I was having bone aches and noticing them in my feet first.

We’ve been home almost two weeks, and I am still getting little reminders that I had coronavirus. Sometimes I feel like I have a baseball sitting in my stomach. Yesterday, the joints in my hands were sore for no obvious reason. Some days I have more energy than others.

At least the crud in my lungs is gone. I was wheezing and waking myself up.

I would like to move on with life. I still haven’t done anything about the debris that fell in the yard when Helene passed. Sometimes I have felt slightly faint, so I haven’t wanted to toss branches around in the heat.

Because my fingers were sore yesterday, I decided to take more ivermectin, and of course, I feel much better today. The improvement is not subtle at all. My energy is improved. My wife can’t take drugs right now, and she is still not quite as strong as she usually is.

I think I can do some outdoor work today.

I’m wondering if I should increase my ivermectin intake. When people ask me how much I take, I say, “Half an inch.” I use horse paste, and it comes in syringes that measure doses by length. A whole tube will deworm a horse. My math says half an inch will be plenty for a person my size.

A tube contains enough ivermectin to provide 200 ug/kg for a 1250-pound animal. Divide it by 5 to get down close to a human dose, and you get about half an inch. The syringes are actually marked so you can go by an animal’s weight.

I have been pretty cautious. A study says it’s safe to take 400 ug/kg per day for three days. Half an inch of horse paste is roughly 250 ug/kg for a person my size. It’s not necessary to be precise. Your body isn’t going to go haywire over the difference between 200 and 250. Medication doses are almost always approximate. I’ve been taking around 250 ug/kg once a month.

Interesting fact leftists haven’t exactly trumpeted: ivermectin may work against dengue, which we now have in Florida. It’s not like ivermectin specificially targets this or that virus. Its antiviral effects are believed to affect numerous bugs, including the flu and West Nile.

Makes you wonder if there is any reason not to take it when you have a cold, the flu, norovirus, or any other viral disease. Like I always say, it can’t hurt, and you definitely won’t have worms.

It has landed some people in the ER, but they were bad at math, and nearly every one of them got better. You can kill yourself with Tylenol if you’re bad at math, and many people have done it.

Two Extra Strength Tylenols contain 1000 mg of acetaminophen, which is the maximum safe dose. If you take two pills more than 4 times per day, you can kill yourself. No one is running around calling for Tylenol to be taken away from Trump voters.

There is an interesting story leftists are using to prove ivermectin is evil. A guy named Danny Lemoi took it for Lyme Disease, and stories on the web say he died from a side effect of ivermectin.

It all looks like BS to me. He started taking ivermectin in 2012, he died 11 years later, and he had a serious bacterial disease. He also had an enlarged heart, which is what supposedly killed him. Far as I can tell, that is not an ivermectin side effect. For example, it’s not on the Mayo Clinic’s long list of side effects. But it is a symptom of Lyme Disease.

Here’s something interesting about causes of death: when a pathologist cuts a person open, he doesn’t find a sheet of paper with the cause of death listed on it in big black letters. He has to look at the body, do tests, and figure it out. If he finds an obvious immediate cause of death, he may still have to do tests to find out what caused the immediate cause. For example, if blood clots killed the patient, were they caused by the Johnson & Johnson coronavirus vaccine or some other agent?

If Danny Lemoi had obviously been killed by ivermectin, we would know it, because the articles about him would say it and back up their conclusion. And they would also explain why it took 11 years for him to die, during which time his health seemed to improve.

Let’s say ivermectin is the evil poison Harris voters think it is. If that’s true, here is what will happen if you overdose habitually: you will get sick, exhibit known symptoms of ivermectin poisoning, and die, all within a short period of time. What you won’t do is improve for 11 years and then die suddenly from something that kills all sorts of people your age, which is not known to be an ivermectin side effect.

Leftists without medical degrees, who hate ivermectin, are the only “authorities” who have concluded Lemoi died from using ivermectin.

He’s their poster patient, and that’s really sad, because if ivermection was dangerous, they wouldn’t have to cling to a guy who took 11 years to die from an unclear cause. There would be hundreds of thousands of dead people who were indisputably killed, quickly, by ivermectin. They do not exist.

It looks like he abused ivermectin pretty badly, although it’s not clear, because none of his leftist accusers has taken the time to publish the dosage. Even if he took huge doses, it still took forever for him to expire, from an uncertain cause.

MSM outlets called his ivermectin “veterinary grade.” There is no such thing. Pharmaceutical companies don’t make bad drugs on purpose! Isn’t that obvious? They don’t put clean, pure ivermectin in tablets for people and dirty, diluted, counterfeit ivermectin in paste for horses. It’s the same thing, from the same facilities.

Hello? Pet and livestock owners aren’t potted plants. They don’t sit around and do nothing after pharmaceutical companies kill their animals. They sue. They contact the FDA. Manufacturers aren’t run by imbeciles who think it doesn’t matter if their products kill animals.

If companies were deliberately making bad drugs for animals, people would be in prison. It is amazing to me that there are morons who are paid to do journalism and think otherwise. How stupid can a person be?

When you take your cat to the vet, do you tell him to be sure to give him the human stuff and not the deadly, inferior cat medicine?

Many, many people have definitely been killed by coronavirus vaccines. That is indisputable. It is proven. It is documented. The vaccine I took is now restricted because it killed so many people. Finding people who have been killed or even harmed by ivermectin is still very, very hard.

People will read this and say I claim ivermectin cures coronavirus. Never. I have never said that. All I’ve said is that I have gotten good results with it repeatedly, I think it probably works, and I, along with virtually 100% of trained physicians, believe it’s very safe.

In any case, to get back to my point, I am tired of coronavirus, and it’s disturbing to realize most of us will probably continue to get sick at least once a year until we die. Even if it’s not serious, it’s a problem I could have done without. I can’t thank our government enough for taking my taxes and paying the Chinese to create and release this irritating virus (as the Department of Energy says). Thanks for killing so many people with your hubris.

Michael Jackson was an Amateur

The news is getting so weird.

Sean Combs is in jail right now, and he will be there until he is tried for a whole bunch of sex felonies. We all know that. But now a mid-tier celebrity is saying things that make it look like he could be the next to fall.

One of the annoying things about celebrities is that they never stop lying to us. One example: they plant stories about themselves. When you see a celebrity appearing in a torrent of stories, you can usually assume their publicity people are paying to have them placed.

Over the last couple of years, we’ve seen endless Yahoo stories about Liz Hurley posing in bikinis in spite of her advanced age. Yahoo didn’t ask for those stories. It’s not like an editor popped out of his office and yelled, “The public is begging to see an old woman in a bathing suit! Get me pictures!” No; Hurley paid somebody, and the people she paid called around and got the stories placed. Not that it helped her career, because the truth is that people don’t want to see aging women in bikinis.

Halle Berry has been doing the same thing. Over two decades ago, she got an inexplicable, undeserved Oscar for a dirty movie, and after that, her career failed to continue its upward trajectory. The placed stories and pictures seem like desperate attempts to keep her viable as a sex object and female lead while she continues to seek redeeming roles.

I don’t know anything about the country star Carrie Underwood, but for the last few years, Fox has carried endless stories about her. What she eats for breakfast. The secret to her slim, trim thighs. Her secret heartbreaks. What she likes to do with kale. Somebody was paid to place these stories. There is no way anyone at Fox discovered them and thought they were interesting.

Now Ashton Kutcher is suddenly in the news. We are told he is “terrified” Sean Combs will make up stories about him to divert attention from Combs’ own crimes.

Come on. No one believes that.

Kutcher has had a lot of bad PR in the last few years. His buddy Danny Masterson was convicted of two rapes, and Kutcher and his wife Mila Kunis got roasted for choosing to be Masterson’s character witnesses.

I don’t know if Masterson is guilty or not, because as far as I can tell, there was no physical evidence of coercion, a prior trial failed to produce convictions, and the rapes were reported long after they supposedly occurred. But Kutcher and Kunis apologized and said they didn’t question the verdicts.

Kutcher is trying to recover from the Masterson business, and now another friend has been charged with too many sex crimes and related crimes to list. Kutcher is one of the many celebrities accused to going to parties where sex crimes occurred.

I don’t think he’s afraid Combs will make up anything. Whatever Combs is guilty of, he isn’t known for making up stories in order to frame acquaintances and deflect attention from his own misdeeds. And there is no reason to think gossiping about Kutcher will help Combs in any way. What are prosecutors going to say? “Combs facilitated 300 rapes, but Kutcher went to a couple of parties and watched, so I guess we should let Combs go”?

The most likely explanation is that Kutcher did some ugly things at Combs’ parties (which may or may not have been crimes), he fully expects to be exposed, and he wants to poison the well. He wants to get in front of the scandal so when the stories come out, he can say, “See? I told you he would make up stories.”

Actually, he won’t be able to say he told us anything, because he’s having other people, who are nameless, accuse Combs. No accountability for Kutcher. He can say he had nothing to do with planting the story about Combs framing him.

Its seems childish to me, like the pathetic attempts Alec Baldwin made to defend himself and hang his friends after killing Halyna Hutchins. It seems like a strategy that would seem smart to an actor or an agent but silly to an attorney or federal agent.

I doubt Kutcher would personally violate anybody, but what if he watched approvingly while other people committed rape? People have lapses in judgment, especially when under the influence and surrounded by idiots. Kutcher used to use strong drugs.

When people hear the word “rape,” they think of illegals and homeless people dragging women into the bushes. Consensual sex with a drunk person can be rape. There are a lot of ways to rape consenting adults. At a Combs party, it would’t be hard to become an accomplice to rape, before or after the fact, while thinking you’re in the clear.

I think the big story here is that going to sex parties is not smart, even if you don’t care about sin. And it’s also interesting to see how depraved celebrities are. I’m one of those people who believed Scotty Bowers, Hollywood’s famous gay pimp, when he said just about everyone in show business back in his day was a pervert. I think showbiz has always been like this, and in the Middle Ages, people were right to drive actors out of towns.

Think about all the famous actresses who worked for Miramax and haven’t had anything negative to say about Harvey Weinstein. They’re vocal about everything else, from water bottles to global warming. Hmm.

Anyone who thinks actors aren’t low-lifes should read Errol Flynn’s autobiography. Read about Tallulah Bankhead, Mae West, Rock Hudson, and Marlene Dietrich.

MORE

Now a lawyer is accusing Combs of having a 15-year-old boy perform oral sex on him, based on the promise Combs would make him a star.

The attorney says the list of victims includes names “we all know,” so it’s reasonable to expect the list of criminals to contain familiar names, too.

Where is the bottom of the rabbit hole? Maybe it doesn’t have one.

Pick a Side

Last night I slept like a dead person. I woke up at 9:30. I had a long, weird dream.

I was in the little Eastern Kentucky town where my grandparents lived. The official population sign there read 165. Not a big place.

I went to the courthouse, which also functioned as the town hall. There were Muslims all over the place. Not American Muslims. Sullen foreigners in weird clothes. Like Afghans. I didn’t see any obvious pedophiles, though, so maybe they were not Afghans.

I was in a little vehicle, and I drove it into the courthouse. I drove by a line of men. Half of the men were Muslims. They looked like jihadis. They were silent, and they looked angry. The second half of the line was all Israeli soldiers in uniform. They were smiling. Friendly. I glared at the jihadis as I drove by, but when I passed the Israelis, I said, “Shalom!”

The Israelis and jihadis were not fighting. They were waiting for something, right next to each other.

I found myself out behind the courthouse with my dad. We were in a little miniature train with no glass in the windows. It stopped, and a grim-looking lady I took to be Indian walked up and gave me some papers. One looked like it had been written with brushes, in colored ink.

I resented the fact that she was handing me a bizarre document in a foreign language, as though she were somehow entitled. I dumped it on the ground. She had no authority.

As we left the town, I saw blocks of red brick apartment buildings in ruins. No windows, roofs, or inner walls. They looked like they had been empty for a hundred years or more, like Roman ruins.

I didn’t know why they were there. They looked like they had been built for 10,000 people.

My wife thinks it’s an end-time dream. She said the Jews were God’s army.

Makes sense to me. When the end comes, evil spirits will be unleashed on the world in huge numbers, and spirits that serve God will rescue people who are raptured. Maybe the jihadis and Jews in the dream were not fighting because their missions didn’t conflict. God will allow evil spirits to do what they like to people who aren’t raptured, because they rejected his help, but he will send spirits to pull certain people out while the rest are tormented.

The Bible says God seals his servants on their foreheads so they will be set apart. Maybe the obnoxious lady with the documents was trying to get a person who had been sealed to give up and submit. I thought she was a contemptible idiot.

These days I don’t feel like doing anything but eating, sleeping, and praying. I’m forcing myself to look after the house and so on. That’s about it.

My belief about dreams is that the police usually represent demons, while soldiers represent God’s angels. In your homeland, soldiers are almost always your friends, but the police are dangerous. The police fight citizens, not foreign troops, and they are often corrupt and brutal. It is often necessary to remind them of our rights in order to avoid being abused. We have to remind demons, too.

The police generally go after people who have opened doors through wrongdoing, just like demons. Soldiers don’t bother citizens. They are almost always helpful.

I support the police, but I also believe in avoiding and placating them. I believe in treating them like dangerous mental patients who need to be soothed. I’m white, and my family lived in upscale suburbs, but my mother told me a lot of cops were crazy and that I should never give them an excuse to go off. That is true. There are a lot of black people who think the police are slaves to white people, but the police hurt white people more than any other group.

I am grateful for the 90% or so of police who can always be trusted, but I can’t distinguish them from the others until something goes wrong, so I treat all police like potential assailants. I’m also aware that every policeman is insulted, slandered, and threatened throughout his career, so when I interact with them, I want them to know I’m not an entitlement case with a chip on my shoulder.

I don’t worry about soldiers. They’re not interested in me, and they have no authority over me.

I don’t know if my dream means anything, but I’m passing it along just in case.

We are Riff Raff

A reader has once again recommended an interesting resource: Nomad Capitalist. This is a company that helps people with assets and income move abroad. Its motto is “Go where you’re treated best.” They help people move to places like Singapore and Malaysia, where successful individuals are not yet considered enemies of humanity.

I can’t resist fantasizing about Singapore. Today I looked at some Nomad Capitalist videos. I was just playing around, but when my wife saw me watching, she said she would not hesitate to move to Singapore.

Why would anyone move from a peaceful red state to a tiny island between two dangerous Muslim nations? Does it sound crazy?

Here is what she said: in Singapore, you can let your child ride the subway alone.

Wow. Imagine doing that in New York, Philadelphia, or any other American city. Unthinkable.

We’ve been to Singapore a couple of times. On one visit, they held some kind of outdoor celebration that featured a planned walk among illuminated works of art. Even though we were in the middle of a big city, the park where the event was held was very dark apart from the exhibits themselves.

Families were everywhere. No worries.

Consider Central Park, the 880-acre oasis in the middle of New York City, created by Frederick Law Olmsted. Would you visit at night? It would be more convenient to invite the rapists and muggers to your apartment and get it over with.

America has a huge population of mostly-minority repeat offenders, and they do whatever they want. A couple of days ago, I saw a sheriff on Youtube saying a recent arrestee had a rap sheet with 102 felonies on it. In Florida, where we are supposedly tough on crime. When you hit a hundred felonies, execution, or at least life without parole, should be on the table.

I live in the reddest county imaginable, but you never see kids here riding bikes by themselves, as I did when I was young. You can’t let your kids walk to school as I did.

My dad’s partner had a young son who was stolen from a school bus stop a short walk from his house. He was raped repeatedly, shot in the back, cut in three pieces, and buried in concrete. You could practically hit his school from his house with a rock.

If your kids survive the violent perverts here, they still have to suffer with the tenured perverts in our public schools. The people who tell them Yeshua is a myth and that their parents are basically Nazis.

What about internal strife? Well, Singapore has had riots. The last one was small, in 2013, and before that, you have to go back to 1969. And no one is putting on black pajamas and attacking conservative groups for praying in public.

What about medical care? I’m no fan of nationalized medicine, but Singapore’s universal system is something I could live with. They force you to have your own medical savings account, an idea Democrats assure us would lead to the end of the world. In the US, medical problems are probably the biggest threat to people who prefer to die with substantial estates. At my age, with a family to think about, I am open to the notion that protecting our assets is more important than getting the doctor I want, when I want him. If we had Singapore protecting our assets, we would be better able to pay for private care on the rare occasions when it was needed.

My belief is that the better a country’s inhabitants are, the easier it is to have government programs that work. Singaporeans are better than Americans. We have huge, entrenched demographics that do nothing but bleed the taxpayer, commit crime, and vote for Democrats. When we try to help them, they take advantage and ruin everything. An entitlement attitude, not entitlements themselves, is the major reason our programs are disasters.

What about drugs? Singaporeans kill drug dealers. It works for them. There are no ghettos in Singapore, and when you walk the streets, you don’t see poop, tents, or used needles. You can park your car without assuming, as you would in many American cities, that a junkie will steal everything in it. Street crime, which is driven by drug use in the US, is extremely rare in Singapore.

What about housing? It’s small and expensive. Rent is sky-high compared to a few years ago. But is small housing a bad thing, in and of itself?

I hate being close to people, so I like big properties, but then I live in the United States. Americans are not the best neighbors. They steal. They’re loud. They form abusive HOA’s. They let their dogs terrorize neighborhoods. I don’t think living close to Singaporeans would be the same, because Singaporeans love boredom. They like peace and quiet. I may be wrong, but I’ll bet they get along better with their neighbors than we do.

Eventually I’m not going to feel like cutting trees and mowing large areas, so maybe a little house among nice people would be acceptable.

What about the Second Amendment? The need for self-defense is not likely to arise in a place like Singapore, and the people are at peace with their government, so I think guns would be less important. Let me think. How many Americans do I know who have been robbed at gunpoint? Three, off the top of my head. How many shooting victims have I known? Two. How many of my relatives have shot or shot at people? Two.

The more I think about it, the more I realize something: Americans are bad people. We really are. Not all of us, but enough of us to make America different from peaceful countries. We’re not Somalis or Brazilians, but we’re not the Swiss, either.

When we decided to visit Singapore the first time around, I thought I would hate it because I hate cities. I also thought Singapore was likely to have a culture of selfishness and callousness, because most Singaporeans are Chinese, and China is horrible. Instead, I liked it a lot. The people were nice. It was safe. It was very prosperous. The food was pretty good. Everything was orderly. They even had wonderful public landscaping. I think socialism is what made the mainland Chinese what they are.

After my wife and I came home, we both had the strange feeling that somehow, part of us belonged to Singapore. It felt like home, and I can’t explain that. I guess it was just nicer than America and Zambia.

What about religion? Surprisingly, Christianity, including charismatic Christianity, is on a dramatic upswing in Singapore, having risen from about 10% to about 20%. That’s bizarre. Shocking.

Isn’t Singapore boring and distant? I don’t care if it’s boring, because I’m boring, too. My wife and I live in a boring place, and we love it. As for distance, well, there are jets. We could travel from time to time. I don’t know how soon we would get around to visiting the US, given what it is.

I like dreaming about leaving the US for a better place. I don’t think Singapore is in our future, though. You can’t just walk in and ask for residency.

They have something called the Global Investor Programme. The idea is that if you have a lot of money to invest, you can put it into a Singapore enterprise, and they may give you permanent residency. It’s very hard to understand the criteria, though. I think you need to invest S$10 million inside Singapore. Let’s see. Did I leave my S$10 million in my other pants today? Must have.

A couple of years ago, the price was S$2.5 million. Singapore has decided to keep the riff raff out, though.

My understanding is that you can move to Singapore if you have a job there. “Job.” The word makes my skin crawl. Never again, I hope.

Come Root for the Guys who Matter, Insects

I just saw a weird article. If it’s true, a college football coach just emailed his school’s entire student body and told everyone to go to the next game. He said the team needed them. He said studying could wait. That’s unbelievable. Of course, he probably has a number of players who have other people who study for them, so his perspective may be twisted.

I love writing about our national sickness of sports worship. This is a great example. His school, Indiana University at Bloomington, is supposed to be dedicated to learning, and surely there must be over a hundred extracurricular activities to choose from, but a man who gets paid over $4 million per year to coach one sport for one sex is telling kids the university needs them because his sport needs support.

I don’t get this stuff. I went to one game when I was in high school. I went to one game when I was at Columbia University. When I was getting two degrees at the University of Miami, I didn’t attend any games.

Incidentally, Columbia had an amazing won-loss record. They went at least a decade without winning a game after I left. They played at Baker Field, a tiny stadium which was mostly condemned for safety reasons. There were chain-link fences between seats, separating the safe ones from the dangerous ones.

Our band was The World’s Most Dangerous Band. They wore jeans and T-shirts. I don’t think they practiced. The game I saw (partially) took place during the Carter era, and the Hamilton Jordan cocaine scandal was in the news. At halftime, our band formed a giant nose on the field, and various band members ran up the nostril.

The coach who wrote the email is named Curt Cignetti. He says his team is trying to achieve something historic. Call me crazy, but I think winning a stupid game designed to amuse children is not historic. Groundbreaking research would be historic, though. Or how about a campus-wide revival, featuring thousands of conversions and miracles?

He doesn’t mention the other extracurricular groups. They’re not important. Don’t support the chess club or the forensics team, kids.

I really hate stories about athletes and coaches receiving worship and special treatment. These are people who don’t belong on campus to begin with.

When I lived in Miami, I knew a prosecutor. Then, as now, the main prosecutor was a lady named Kathy Fernandez-Rundle. My acquaintance told me a story about her. Is it true? Well, he “alleged” that it was.

He said a UM football player beat a smaller student severely for no reason. Felony case. From the sound of it, he deserved years in prison. My acquaintance was given the case.

He told me Fernandez-Rundle had him come to her office. He said she told him he WOULD get the victim to agree to lesser charges because the team really needed the player. So prison was not an option, nor was expulsion, nor was the nuclear option of…removing him from the football team.

When I was at Columbia, a huge baseball player named Chris Boyle beat a smaller student who wore glasses. It made the school paper, which is how I know. The story said he ambushed him from behind. He was dating a girl named Carolyn, and the story said Boyle was jealous. Boyle was not expelled.

I knew Carolyn well enough to recognize her in a hallway. She was beautiful. She started up a conversation with me one night while a bunch of us were drinking and hanging out. Good thing I didn’t follow up. I later found out Boyle and his pals hated me for some reason or other, so I guess I dodged a bullet. They used to write nasty things about me in a dorm elevator. Weird. I had no idea who was doing it. I barely knew who they were.

No, wait. Chris, in case you read this, Carolyn and I went to hotels a couple of times every month, behind your back.

Not really.

I hope she married someone who didn’t beat smaller people, including her, for that matter, up.

I decided to Google. She married a doctor with what looks like a Jewish last name. She had 4 children and died at 49.

It’s amazing that an Ivy League school with hopeless athletic teams would let a mediocre athlete destined for a cubicle beat another student badly and then let him get away with it. It’s the kind of thing you would expect from Ohio State.

One of my dad’s partners had a relationship with an NFL player named Najeh Davenport when Davenport was in school. I think he hoped to represent Davenport when he turned pro. That did not happen, perhaps because the partner’s law license was suspended over some interesting behavior.

One day Davenport got upset about something, broke into a female student’s dorm at Barry University in North Miami, and defecated in her closet. Should I say “allegedly”? I don’t think so, because he took a plea instead of risking a long prison term.

At the time, he was attached to the Green Bay Packers. They held onto him. After all, football is important.

She told the police she was in bed when it happened. She saw a strange man a few feet away, pooping in her laundry hamper. That must have made her feel safe. In Florida, she could have shot him, legally, without facing consequences.

America is full of athletes’ rape and DV victims who have been ignored, threatened, or paid to be quiet. It’s business as usual.

If Nicole Simpson had been married to a dentist, he would have been jailed several times instead of being turned loose by cops who asked for autographs.

Nicole Simpson was not important. She could not run very fast or catch a ball. Same goes for Ron Goldman.

I’m glad I’m not a student at Indiana University, because I would be tempted to respond to Coach Cignetti’s email, and after that, I would probably have to watch my back. Someone might poop in my closet.

This world is ridiculous.

Back in May, a court decided college athletes were entitled to be paid. The decision has not gone into effect yet, but it will probably happen later this year. It is expected to help male basketball and football players, female basketball players, and pretty much no one else.

People are saying it will destroy college sports. Man, I hope so. Nothing could make me happier. We need a system in which the hopes of 90% of universities are utterly obliterated. We need to see fans so discouraged they quit buying tickets. Athletes who simply are not smart enough to understand college courses need to be removed from campuses. Coaches who abuse people and teach aggression and dishonesty should be sent home. I suppose the new system would help a lot of these people remain in place, but maybe it would rid us of many others.

I guess I’m hoping for too much, though. The system will surely evolve to avoid reform.

What is Left to Accomplish?

Based on weather forecasts, I made plans to do nothing today, and I am sticking to my plans. But I think I made a mistake.

Hurricane Helene’s weak outer winds were supposed to produce sustained speeds of about 40 mph here. Far as I know, it never happened. I would say the situation this county ended up with is 10% worse than the aftermath of Debby, which left a few downed trees here and there. We got nearly no rain during the Helene crisis, so that’s a plus.

I have some cleaning up to do. Yesterday I checked the forecast to see when it would dry up, because nothing is worse than doing heavy yard work on a 90-degree day when the air is full of steam. The forecast pretty much said it was going to rain until next Friday. The probability figure for today is 88%.

Of course, it’s dry and breezy without much sun. The temperature is about 82 degrees, or 8 degrees lower than recent days. This would have been a good day to clean up.

I don’t understand precipitation probability, and it turns out neither do meteorologists.

At some point in the distant past, I looked it up, and I read that a certain chance of rain meant that there was that much likelihood rain would fall somewhere in the area the chance applied to. So if you were in an area with a 25% chance of rain, the chance that it would rain somewhere in that area was 25%. How much rain? Whatever I read didn’t say. I assumed it had to be a significant amount, because if not, the figure was useless.

I just checked again. A British site says a figure of x percent means x percent of sources have concluded it will rain in the area. How much? Doesn’t say. An American site says it means x percent of the area will get measurable rain.

Either meteorologists have no idea what their own metric means, or they are letting uninformed people try to explain it to us.

Experience has taught me this: if a forecast says the chance of rain will be 60% or more, expect a nasty, rainy day, nearly every time. That’s more useful than the weird things I’m seeing on the web. Anything over 20% is reason to avoid outdoor activities as far as I’m concerned.

I am sitting here doing nothing. I still feel some covid fatigue, and I’m not sure I can start the tractor, so I am in no rush.

I’m not sure what to do with my life these days. We are done traveling. I doubt we’ll go anywhere until far into next year, and we will not be able to go any place exciting because of the baby. We still need to fix the house up a little, but that’s about it. What should we be doing with ourselves?

The world has turned into an immense toilet. Americans have proven they really are stupid enough to put Kamala Harris in the Oval Office. Wokeness is getting worse, not better. We are giving birth to generations of soft, useless, cruel, incompetent, spoiled, godless perverts who will make the last decade look like the Messianic Age.

I don’t know what we’re supposed to do here. I am spending more and more time in prayer. We think about things like good food, medical appointments, and managing our practical affairs. That’s about it.

Lately I have noticed I am sometimes bored. That’s a problem I thought I had left behind decades ago. It’s strange to see it creeping up on me again. I find myself thinking, “I remember this!”

I think I had started believing I was immune to it. I took not being bored for granted for maybe 35 years.

I have zero enthusiasm about America’s future. I don’t want to live here. I don’t know how I’ll defend myself when my son asks me why we put him here, to face seventy-plus years of hiding out in a world gone insane. I can tell him God wants people to have children. Best I can do.

While we are here, we will have to devote a lot of energy to sheltering him from godless friends, Satanic entertainment, exposure to perverts, and so on. We will really have to have God’s help, because we can’t generate our own safe Christian bubble.

I don’t have any projects in mind. There is nothing I want to do here. I don’t want to start big things in a world which has no future.

I try not to imagine a future under Kamala Harris. Obama was an arrogant homosexual atheist who was hard on the church, the unborn, and Israel. Biden was dumb and without conscience, and he appointed godless nutcases to rule over us. Harris would make us miss Biden. She is a complete zero as a human being.

She’s a wonderful exhibit to use in order to prove democracy doesn’t work. When Biden gave her affirmative action and made her his running mate, she was extremely unpopular even among Democrats. That didn’t change during her time in office. Now she may get a legitimate majority in a presidential election. The people didn’t get to vote for alternatives. She was simply installed, and Democrats could either vote for her or let Trump win.

Imagine the kind of pigs she will appoint to abuse and control us if she wins. The worst choices imaginable. Disgusting, vile, incompetent, corrupt, and stupid.

It seems like there should be something to do other than praying and waiting for Yeshua, but if there is, I can’t see it.

Maybe I should prepare a rapture-ready will. Will it matter? Will the wills of raptured people be triggered when they leave? Will they be respected? Will whatever I could leave people be helpful to them in a world where demons and fallen angels are running amok?

I assume people will run around killing each other, squatting in each other’s houses, and stealing each other’s money, so I don’t think a will would be helpful.

There must be something useful for us to do right now. I just need to be told what it is.

What if the rapture doesn’t come, and I have to age and die in Satan’s America? Terrible thought. But I know from experience that if I pray in the Spirit enough, things will work out for me. I can’t do all that much for others, so it’s a limited blessing.

I can’t wait for this place to be wiped clean and remodeled. I don’t know what it is to live in a world that works. I’ve seen better times than the present, but I have always been surrounded by death, disease, injury, deformity, murder, accidents, poverty, and every type of emotional pain. I have always lived in a world ruled by Satan’s children.

My patience with suffering is gone. A couple of years ago, it didn’t discourage me as much. Now, every time I see someone with a terrible physical problem, or I hear about a terrorist attack or a natural disaster or some other cause of suffering, I think, “I have HAD it with this. Please get us OUT.” Enough. I have seen enough.

A few people can be helped, but almost everyone will continue to suffer and fail. Most of the people we try to help will turn our help into curses. They won’t turn to God. Not really. They won’t pray in tongues. They won’t repent. They won’t be accountable. Things won’t get any better for them.

The blessed will stay blessed, and the people who hold onto them like Titanic survivors holding onto floating planks will continue to hold on. Nearly everyone who leads a cursed life will continue to be cursed.

People who lead cursed lives generally don’t want to know God. They want money. They think money will fix everything and they won’t have to repent. It’s frustrating, because continued abundance comes from a relationship with God. You tell them how to fix their lives, they pretend to agree, and they don’t change.

When someone listens, it’s like you’ve found a big gold nugget in a manure pile the size of an apartment building.

We don’t have enough money or time to buy better lives for the people who won’t repent. We have to watch nearly everyone sink. Elon Musk couldn’t fix them. Look at his son, the pervert.

I like to prophesy, but I keep hearing about how God is going to destroy people who are against his children. That means the vast majority of human beings. I would love to hear about revival and miracles.

The human race is just too crooked to help. We have always been that way. God is always ready to bless, but almost no one is interested.

Guess I’ll go pray and then think about dinner.

Full Price for Half the Show

I am waiting for my wife to get dressed, so I have a lot of time to kill. I think I’ll write about Rome.

Do not go to Rome.

Before we went to Rome, I tried to get advice on the best Italian city for a week’s stay. I figured the only real choices were Rome and Florence. Art, history, and so on.

People said Rome was the best choice, but they were completely wrong. The correct answer is Florence. I will explain.

Next year, Rome has a jubilee celebration. In preparation, they are cleaning things up. A lot of restoration is going on.

If you look at videos about Rome, you’ll see exciting shots of the altar at St. Peter’s, the Senate building, and various other sights. When you go to Rome, you see something very different: sights that have been fenced in or covered with fabric.

The altar is almost completely covered. The Pieta is a fake. The Senate is fenced off. A lot of things you could walk right up to a couple of years ago are off limits.

Don’t go. In fact, don’t go in 2025, either. It will be a madhouse. Everyone who sees the Pope the way teenage girls see Taylor Swift will be there. Believe it or not, there are a lot of people who take the pope and the Vatican seriously. They think the pope is super-holy and not just a cookie-cutter secular leftist who loves attention, and they think the Vatican is a holy place. They will pack Rome to the rooftops, and you don’t want to be there. It’s obscenely crowded right now, a year before the jubilee, so the jubilee will be a nightmare.

You want to go in 2026. Rome will experience a tourism dip because everyone on Earth went in 2025. It will be cheaper and less expensive, and the restored stuff will be accessible again.

Go in winter or early spring, or wait until late fall. You don’t need warm weather to enjoy Rome, and it draws tourists.

Here’s an interesting observation, from someone who has met God: the Vatican doesn’t feel like a church at all. There is no trace of God’s presence. You’re not going to feel awed by the holiness. You’ll feel like you’re in a crowded museum that makes lots of money.

Incidentally, the Catholics have decided forgiveness isn’t something you can get wherever you are, at any time. I learned this from my tour guide. There is some touristy thing or other in St. Peter’s, and the official belief has always been that if you walk by it or under it or something at a certain time–the jubilee year, I think–you get forgiveness for everything. St. Francis, generously, changed the rule. He decided you don’t have to go to the Vatican. You still have to get the time right, however, and you have to go to a church or something. I forget.

Apparently, the Catholics believe there are a bunch of sins God will not ordinarily forgive. No wonder ex-Catholics make the best and angriest atheists. They are recovering abuse victims.

Paul was a murderer of Christians. Moses was a murderer. David was a murderer who killed a man because he had gotten the man’s wife pregnant, and he led violent, thieving raids on towns. He had a man killed for throwing rocks at him. But a woman who got an abortion at 15 goes to hell unless she can walk through a certain door on a certain day.

It’s asinine. It’s sick. Yeshua will forgive you wherever you are, whenever you ask. He will forgive you for nearly anything. He saved a Roman centurion. Think of the things that man had done.

“Wrong day. Sorry. Come back next year.” Imagine Yeshua saying that. “Hope you’re still alive during the jubilee.”

Yeshua let people torture him to death because he was so driven to save sinners. He talked about his burning desire to reach the lost. But somehow he burns repentant Christians who can’t afford a ticket to Rome?

But this is the organization that decorated churches with naked statues, burned people over minor doctrinal disputes, and tortured Jews to death. It took the church until 1965 to stop holding the entire Jewish people responsible for killing Yeshua.

Everyone who has sinned is responsible for the crucifixion. This is obvious. The pope is responsible. Mary is responsible.

Yeshua visited me twice, and he never mentioned the pope or the catechism. He poured love through me and told me nothing bad could possibly happen to me while he was there. He annihilated worry and fear. He didn’t say, “It’s too bad you’re going to hell forever for rejecting the one true church.”

It’s a pretty safe bet that Yeshua has never met the pope.

I wish we had visited Florence. The art is much better. I don’t think they’re covering it up this year. But now I can say I’ve seen Rome. Whoo hoo.

Tennessee Looks Better and Better

Things are looking good, post-Helene. God took care of us. A tree fell over in my side yard, maybe 80 yards from the house. A smaller tree snapped about halfway up near the workshop, but it didn’t hit the building. We have a lot of leaves down.

There may be some trees down farther from the house. I haven’t checked yet. the lights went out for about 30 seconds, but they came back on. People here got very serious about tree-trimming after Irma, so power outages are not as common as they once were. I checked the power company’s site last night, and I saw a total of 14 outages on their map. That’s impressive.

My wife had a doctor’s appointment set for today, and they called and said they had no power. That was a surprise.

My big complaint is the upcoming weather. We expect a nasty, rainy week, so I’m not planning to do much about the debris right away. The general rule is that the weather gets noticeably better in October. Can’t wait.

The coast is a wreck. Not the entire west coast; just the areas where the surge was bad. It looks like the 20-foot surge that was predicted failed to materialize, to no one’s surprise, but I did see video of small houses floating around. I saw a lot of structures that are just plain ruined. I don’t know where people will go.

Sooner or later, coastal people will have to get serious about building for hurricanes. The people who own concrete houses on stilts don’t have much to be upset about today, but owners and occupants of frame houses situated on the ground have lost everything.

Everyone hates insurance companies, but insurance is a business, and it’s not realistic to expect insurers to offer good rates to people who know their homes will sustain catastrophic damage every 25 years or so.

I don’t know why coastal people got in the habit of building structures that weren’t ready for hurricanes. It’s bizarre. Everyone knows storms will come. Everyone knows how to build for them.

Another interesting phenomenon: rescuers were pulling people out of flooded areas late last night. Why were they still there? Two days ago, everyone knew these places would flood. Shelters were ready.

I saw a video of an airboat that had been removing people from an area where there was a Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. I don’t understand ghetto people. They did the same thing in Louisiana when Katrina hit. Stayed right where they were.

Ghetto people have a culture of helplessness. Can’t work. Can’t get through high school. Can’t take care of their kids. Can’t stay out of prison. Can’t evacuate before storms. Can’t recover after storms.

Helping the poor is hard mainly because they respond so badly to help. They turn every blessing into a problem. They are used to being rewarded for failure, so they put their energy into failing.

My aunt was a principal in Eastern Kentucky. They used to test the kids for ADD. She found out parents were telling their kids to fail on purpose so they could get aid money. I wonder how those kids are doing today. Well, I don’t have to wonder. Everyone who could add two and two left, and now the place is full of drug addicts and professional thieves.

The failure culture is found everywhere people have gotten used to government handouts.

I don’t understand the people who left their cars in flood areas. It’s not that hard to drive a mile inland. Now they’re pedestrians, and if they replace their cars, they’ll have to pay the deductibles.

Coastals need to learn not to move into homes that can’t withstand storms. Even if you’re insured, you have to move out and throw out lots of your belongings. You probably won’t be compensated for everything, because you won’t have an inventory, and you won’t be paid replacement cost. Even if they overpay you, replacing your stuff will not be a simple matter. It will take a very long time, and many things won’t be available. While you’re living somewhere else, there’s a good chance looters will come in. It’s better to start off in a home that won’t flood or disintegrate.

Insurance isn’t God. It can make things better, but it’s no substitute for prevention.

If you look at the web, you’ll see people promoting the notion that hurricane-proof homes require magical new technology, or that they cost too much. Not true. My dad’s house down south was built in 1951, and it took about 170 mph without significant damage. There are concrete stilt houses all over the Keys, and they don’t all belong to tech billionaires. I put hurricane doors and windows in a house for under $20,000, which is not much compared to decades of insurance premiums.

Houses built for hurricanes cost more, but not that much more, and they save a fortune. It’s not unusual for a modest home to cost $700,000 today. Adding $50,000 to make it safe from storms is a reasonable expenditure.

Why don’t schools in coastal states teach kids these things? Too busy telling them Heather has two mommies and that chromosomes don’t matter.

My house is hurricane-proof, by local standards. It wouldn’t work in Cedar Key a hundred yards from the Gulf, but it will take anything a hurricane can dish out in my area. It would take a tornado to take it out. I felt pretty good when I heard a storm was coming, because I knew the odds of a serious problem were extremely low.

If I had just moved in without thinking, I could be in a flood plain right now.

Later on, I’ll look around and see if any other trees need to be cleaned up. I already know I won’t have to file any claims.

Number One on the List of Stuff for the Messiah to Tear Down

Having returned from Europe, I put up a blog post, and reader Juan Paxety posted a comment about the Arch of Titus. As it happens, this landmark is one of the sights I really wanted to see while visiting Rome. It stands in the forum.

The arch of Titus is a “triumphal arch,” and that means it was built to be used in a triumph. A triumph was a huge victory celebration, and during these celebrations, parades would pass through triumphal arches. I don’t know if all arches were used for parades, and for all I know, there were parades that bypassed arches. I’m writing in generalities.

Titus was the vile pagan who sacked Jerusalem in 70 A.D. He destroyed the temple and took all the gold to Rome. According to Juan, the wealth from the temple was used to build the Colosseum.

The arch was built by his brother Domitian, who was known for tormenting and massacring Christians. Domitian is the idiot who deep-fried John for the amusement of the peasants. Sadly for him, John was not harmed, and the miracle is said to have lead to many conversions. That’s the story, anyway. We know John lived to be very old, and he wrote the Revelation while exiled to Patmos.

The claim about the financing of the Colosseum made so much sense to me, I had to look it up. History is full of fake facts that tie things together very nicely, so you have to be careful. Turns out Juan is right.

The story made sense to me for a very important reason: it was consistent with a supernatural theme that has been with us for millennia: the conflict between worship of the one true God and Hellenism, which is the global system of the spirit of Antichrist, better known as Satan.

The word “Hellenism” more or less refers to Greek customs and beliefs, but to me, it means the Satanic political and social apparatus, in totality. After all, the system we live with now is just a continuation of the Greek system, which was inspired by the Egyptians and stolen by the Romans.

Rome never went away. All over the Western world, it’s still with us. Greco-Roman architecture. Representative government. The mile. We even salute the Roman eagle. We use it. The Nazis used it. Lots of other nations use it. The Nazis called themselves the Third Reich, meaning a continuation of the Holy Roman Empire, which was descended, obviously, from the empire that was based in Rome and then Istanbul.

We still live in Rome, which means we still live in Alexander’s empire.

Hellenism was a big problem for the ancient Jews. The Greeks took over Israel, and they had something resembling our country club system. In the US, if you want to succeed, it can be very helpful to join a golf club and play golf, even if you hate it. Deals and connections are made on courses and in locker rooms. In the Greek world, they had the gymnasium instead.

Greek males (only) competed in sports before adoring crowds. They competed naked. After all, they were perverts. The word “gymnasium” literally means something like “place of nudity.”

Ambitious Jews under the Greeks needed to fit in, so they competed, too. They sinned against God, removing their clothing and making fools of themselves in exchange for social credit. In doing so, they exposed their circumcisions, which they came to see as barriers to acceptance. Instead of doing the right thing, many stopped circumcising their sons, and some resorted to primitive medical procedures intended to make them look as though they had not been circumcised.

Circumcision was very important to God. The Jews had a contract with God, and circumcision was the only way to sign it. No circumcision, no contract. An uncircumcised Jew was not really part of the Jewish people. They must have gone to hell, because salvation was part of the covenant.

Jews caught up in Hellenism celebrated nudity, perversion, pride, greed, and pantheism. They celebrated the fleeting and puny strength of the flesh instead of the lasting help of God.

Hellenism is one of the many reasons Catholicism is worthless and corrupt. Instead of teaching people to love the Holy Spirit, the ancient church held onto the Greeks they revered. You can see this in the stupid books people like Augustine wrote. They held onto pagans like Aristotle and Plato. They clung to pagan art. This is why the Sistine Chapel is full of paintings of hairless nude men waving their penises around.

We are so used to nudity in art, we think nothing of seeing it in churches. How do you think Yeshua feels about it? If he came down today and told you to build and decorate a church, do you think he would be happy if you said you wanted to include 40 paintings of men’s penises?

I saw the chapel last week. I thought it was ridiculous. The quality of the art is not the issue. The issue is the ridiculous notion that it’s okay to fill the walls and ceiling of a church with completely gratuitous nudity.

I get it. Michelangelo thought we would all be naked at the judgment. The Bible doesn’t actually say that. The judgment isn’t going to look like a parade in West Hollywood.

The Colosseum was a triumphal monument to Hellenism. It was Satan’s way of saying, “We won.” The temple was gone. Israel was gone. The church was dispersed. The treasure was in Rome. Time to build a huge outdoor theater devoted to cruelty and murder. A place to celebrate the flesh and honor the false gods. Satan made the Jews pay for it.

Jerusalem was God’s capital. Rome was Satan’s. It was that simple.

Jews don’t like Titus much, and they don’t like the arch. Sculpted into it are depictions of happy Romans carrying the treasures of the temple into Rome, including the lampstand that stood in the Holy of Holies. Pope Paul IV made Jewish leaders go to the arch every year to kiss his feet and swear loyalty. No wonder Jews hate Catholicism nearly as much as former Catholics.

The arch may have been designed by the same man who designed the Colosseum.

Today, we live in a country dotted with colosseums. They are patterned after the architecture of the Colosseum in Rome. We neglect God, our families, and our children to pump money to functional illiterates who run fast for a few years and then go bankrupt and spend the rest of their lives wobbling around on shattered knees, coping with CTE.

A proper Christian invests in eternal things. An idiot invests in things that are soon destroyed. We are a culture of idiots, and that includes every “Christian” who tells children Yeshua loves competitive sports.

We treat athletes with reverence, as though they were making sacrifices for us. Like they were little Yeshuas.

They’re selfish. They’re rich. They are often brutal and violent. Many are too dumb to do their own work in college, even in simpleton majors like English and Public Recreation. They do nothing whatsoever for us at work, they take as much as they can, and we pay for their sweaty jerseys and dirty pants and hang them in our houses. If an athlete with an IQ of 90, and 10 illegitimate children he ignores, touches something, we treat it like a holy relic that cures cancer.

It makes perfect sense that Titus, a son of Satan if ever there was one, would loot the temple and use the wealth to build a stadium used to placate and control the masses. Nothing has changed.

A 50th-percentile dog entering middle age, leading a sedentary life, could run circles (literally) around any athlete who ever lived. No marathon runner could hope to win a race with a dog in good condition. A scared cat has a vertical leap of 8 feet, which no athlete will ever approach. What are we so excited about?

The world is disgusting. As bad as we are, we are now being replaced by generations of people who are even worse. They are soft. They are inept. They love cruelty. They can’t understand why anyone thinks the truth is important. They worship themselves. They live for Internet likes. They think the people who built the world they live in are morons.

They will make things worse. They already are. They are openly calling for the murder of the entire nation of Israel, and they can’t see anything wrong with it.

God needs to wrap things up. This place is finished. There is no reaching these people.

Frightened Critics Torch Movie to Protect the Revolution

I am editing photos from our trip to Switzerland and Italy. It’s a real challenge. In the past, my cameras shot JPG files, and after that, I adjusted them to some degree (or not), and that was that. Now I am shooting raw files, and I have to use a program to make them look nice.

My knowledge of digital photography is weak, but if I understand things correctly, a JPG is an edited photo. If your camera shoots JPG’s, it’s editing them before storing them, based on some set of parameters nerds put in there. The photo you end up with doesn’t contain all the data your sensor picked up, because the camera discards it to save space. A JPG is pre-edited to look pretty good, and it usually works.

A raw file is whatever your camera picks up, whether it looks good or not. Your job is to take the file and mess with it until you like it. Because the file is raw, there is a lot more to work with, so you can make much larger adjustments without ruining the shot.

Correct me if I’m wrong.

I’m sitting here being disappointed over and over in the shots I took, because a lot of them look horrid when I open them. But they do clean up well, in many cases.

Editing is slow because I am not used to Photoshop. It’s not like my old copy of Photoshop Elements, which was very easy to use right from the start.

I’ll post a couple of shots. Not life-changing, but good enough to prove we went somewhere.

I’m taking a break right now because I hate Photoshop.

I’m thinking about a movie I saw during the trip. I rarely watch movies because Hollywood is an abcess and I think God does not like fiction, but when you are stuck in a tiny hotel room with covid, and you have three woke-country TV channels in English (they all seem exactly the same), you will be tempted to expand your options.

Somehow I came across a Youtube clip of a film about demonic possession. I don’t like entertainment about the occult, but I found the clip compelling, and my wife wanted to see the movie, so we watched the entire film. Maybe this was hypocritical. Not sure. You have to be careful with bright lines.

The movie is called Nefarious, and it’s about a serial killer who is about to be executed. A psychiatrist is engaged to determine whether he’s sane enough to kill, and the psychiatrist commits suicide. A doctor the psychiatrist mentored replaces him, and the movie consists mostly of his interview with the murderer.

The murderer says he is completely possessed. He rarely speaks as his human self. He says his name is “Nefariamus,” and he tells the second doctor that he, the doctor, will become famous for writing a new book: the dark gospel.

The doctor is an atheist, so you can imagine how impressed he is at first.

The demon tells the doctor all about Satan’s kingdom and the things Satan’s spirit cronies have done to destroy the world. Abortion, every type of immorality Hollywood loves…you name it. He explains why evil spirits hate God and how this hatred is the foundation of their unprovoked cruelty to human beings. It’s really something to hear. It’s pretty accurate.

Most Christian movies are bad or mediocre, but this one features top-notch acting and dialogue. It’s low budget for sure. Almost all of it takes place in one room. But Sean Patrick Flanery, the actor who played the killer, was nothing short of spellbinding. Everyone enjoys a clever, superhuman film villain, and I thought this guy was better than Anthony Hopkins.

The movie has its flaws. Not all of the actors are great, and there were things that could have been improved, but it was very good. Certainly better than much of the garbage that brings people major awards these days. Like I always say, Cher and Marisa Tomei got Oscars.

Those awards seemed remarkable to me, because I did not yet live in a world where a huge man in ladies’ underwear could win a prize for giving a girl brain damage in a volleyball match.

Having seen Nefarious, I wondered why I had never heard of it before.

Of course, the obvious occurred to me. We live in a world where Barack Obama was given a Nobel Peace Prize for winning an election, but Donald Trump, a man known for spreading peace, was ignored after putting the Abraham Accords together. Maybe the critics had killed the movie because it honored God and exposed their industry’s patron spirits.

Well, here is a screenshot for you.

That’s from Rotten Tomatoes, the famous site where critics and actually human beings review films side by side. In case you don’t know, the critics say movies are “fresh” or “rotten,” and actual human beings use a star system. The rating generated by human beings is called the Popcornmeter.

This movie has 21 critic reviews and over a thousand reviews from real movie watchers. Look at the difference. The critics say 33%, which is abysmal, but the audience says 96%, which is about as good as a movie can do.

Wonder why there is such a difference. Hmm.

Let’s quote some critics.

Nefarious has been inaccurately described as a horror movie. It’s a poorly made psychological drama about a death row inmate, with no real scares and too much over-acting. As this dull movie drones on, it becomes preachy propaganda for right-wing beliefs.

I like that one, because that critic really dropped her pants for us. She admits leftists think Christianity is “right-wing.” How long have I been saying leftists hate conservatives because conservatives are associated with Christianity? I doubt she even thought about the way she was exposing herself. There is virtually no political material in the film, but it’s full of religious matter, and that’s what set her off.

As for “preachy propaganda,” wow…should I sit here and try to list all the leftist propaganda films critics have loved? I’d be here for days.

Nefarious advertises itself as a possession thriller but pulls a bait & switch to deliver a Christian and Conservative propaganda piece. Flanery does his best to elevate what is otherwise a 90 minute sermon on abortion, euthanasia, and the death penalty.

If you like your demons on the preachy side, then you may enjoy [this movie]. The rest of us will find [it]…tedious, heavy-handed and indoctrinating.

The film’s heavy-handed and bogus message tells us that Hollywood is immoral because it acts to corrupt its viewer’s minds.

The only thing not covered in this Christo-fascist manifesto of a movie is “guns.”

While there are moments of intensity in Nefarious, there isn’t a moment in the film that feels like cinematic horror unless you’re talking about one of those evangelical haunted houses where demons pop out of the walls to warn of the evils of the world.

Nefarious builds to a howler of a climax that delivers exactly what you’d anticipate from the makers of God’s Not Dead, just in an even more preposterous way. The big scene would be perfect for an Airplane!-style spoof of evangelical-themed films.

Subtlety is not the film’s strong point. Neither is casting.

That’s idiotic. Do critics pan other movies for not being subtle? Not if they push the left’s agenda. And the two central characters in this film did great jobs. It has been years since I’ve seen a performance as good as Flanery’s.

They filmmakers cast Glenn Beck as himself, interviewing the psychiatrist a year after the execution. That was a mistake. For one thing, Beck is not a Christian. For another, he looked like Johnny Depp dressed him. A creepy chin beard and bunch of old-looking and seemingly-unrelated clothes piled on top of each other, as though he found them in a Salvation Army box. And his performance was bad. It was very odd. He leaned toward the psychiatrist and maintained an expression I would ordinarily associate with strong sexual arousal, as though he were talking to an Onlyfans model after a long period of solitary confinement. His lower lip hung loose and swung as though trying to wave at the other actor.

Beck should not have been cast in this or any other movie, but the two leads were excellent.

I don’t know how Beck got in there. Did Mormons back the movie? They are a real problem for ignorant people who think Mormons are Christians. I wonder if Beck invested in the film on the condition they include him.

I have never been a Beck fan. Not for 10 seconds. He’s a kook.

I still remember the nutty video he did, in which he claimed he was nearly killed by a hemorrhoid laser. Try and imagine a scenario in which that is even possible. No, don’t.

By the way, The Passion of the Christ got a whopping 49% from leftist critics at Rotten Tomatoes.

Not subtle enough for them, I guess.

I don’t know if you should see Nefarious or not. Just telling you what I thought about it. But I can confidently say that if you still don’t think Satan controls Hollywood, you need to snap out of it.

The Internet is Really Something

I just got the weirdest comment. It’s pretty long. Some guy or gal responded to my last post about the way my family has deteriorated. I haven’t published the comment yet. Maybe I will. It went to my trash folder automatically because it had a racial slur in it. This person quotes me using the right angle character, so anything you see right after that is me.

Some highlights:

>My sister was sick and sadistic. My mother was always unhappy

And you’re a psychotic liar.

It only gets weirder from there.

>With the exception of my strange Uncle John, who was cruel to me for no reason

= you did something to him, you know perfectly well what it is, and you don’t want to admit it. Whenever anyone says “and then they did this horrible thing FOR NO REASON” there’s always a reason. You, particularly, have made a habit of doing this, and of doing it in cases where the other side can be verified because it is online and visible.

Wow! John really was not a good guy. He divorced his wife and left her in poverty, after destroying what should have been a profitable car dealership. He could not control his addiction to alcohol, and he refused to use the time-tested, fill-in-the-blanks GMAC accounting system. My dad said he sold cars and never did the bookkeeping, so he had no idea what was going in or going out. He would buy cars from GM and sell them at auction for less than he paid, to raise cash.

It was bad. My grandfather pumped money into the business for a while, but he eventually quit. He called his other sons-in-law together and asked what they wanted to do, because it was affecting their children’s inheritance.

She had to go on welfare and live in a trailer while she got a teaching degree. John taught their youngest son to call her dirty names while she was struggling. He taught him to call the trailer a tin can. I don’t know if my cousin ever really recovered from the guilt. He eventually became an extremely devoted son. John also stole things in front of him and joked about it. I saw him go into an Arby’s, wrap both hands around the sauce bottles, and take them, like he was scooping up a big poker pot.

After he left Kentucky, he got a job teaching auto shop at a high school. He used to send my cousin stolen tools stamped “Property Of.”

I saw him hit his other son in the back, very hard, with a large screwdriver because he said something about a haircut his dad was giving him. Neither of us saw it coming. Just BANG! No sign he was mad until he struck. I froze, hoping I wasn’t next, and my cousin started crying from the pain.

That’s how John was. One second, things were fine, and the next second, he would explode for no reason. If my cousin had had any idea what was going to happen, he wouldn’t have said anything, but there is no way to predict what an abuser will do. I don’t think John was good to anyone.

I would guess I was 10 when my aunt divorced him and he exited my life. I suppose a really bad kid that age or younger could do mean things to a strong, tall man in the prime of life if he were really good. Not me. I was scared of him. I hated being in the room with him.

I remember him blocking my grandfather’s driveway with his car, drunk, crying, and pitying himself loudly about something or other related to the divorce. I guess I was about 10. My dad had to go out and get him to leave. Everyone was afraid he would try to come in the house. It was a very disturbing spectacle for a child to watch. When you’re a kid, you expect your elders not to act insane.

He did the strangest things. I recall him taking his sons and me to a drive-in restaurant, and we had burgers and fries. I sat in the back seat. After a while, he asked his sons if they wanted more fries. Then he reached over the seat into my box of food, grabbed all of my fries in his hand, ketchup and all, and dumped them in his son’s boxes. Like I wasn’t there. Didn’t say a word to me.

My mother would have lost her mind if she had seen that. I guess he was nicer to me when she was around, and that would explain why she never set him straight. She later came to believe he hated me because my grandfather loved me so much. He gave his eldest son my grandfather’s middle name, and my mother’s impression was that he wanted his son to be the son my grandfather never had.

I was too young to see and remember all that. I was told John used to practically throw his son at my grandfather, in an obvious and off-putting way.

I remember him unlocking the bathroom door while I was sitting on the toilet. No reason. He opened the door wide, took a good long look, and then closed it. He may have said something nasty about me being in there too long. I can’t recall. But it was a deliberate humiliation. I never heard anything about him being sexually perverted, so I don’t think that’s what it was about.

He was nice to my sister. The theory I heard is that as a girl, she couldn’t be a rival to his son, so she wasn’t a threat. I do remember this, though: she had a piggy bank containing silver dollars, and he broke into it while the adults were playing poker. I don’t recall whether he stole anything or not.

The one time I saw him after I grew up, he was respectful and polite, and I saw no trace of hostility, so maybe he was cowardly around adults. Instead of dealing with the trashy dealership employees who stole car parts and sold them, helping ruin him, he cried about them to my dad. I mean he literally cried and said he couldn’t understand why they were so mean. Perhaps he was one way with kids and another way with people who could fight back.

I wonder what his students went through. When I was at Miami Country Day School, a teacher named Jack Bubrick told me he was going to break my arm if I reached for a pencil to use on a quiz, and he said he didn’t care who my dad was. Out of nowhere. I was in the 7th grade. I wonder if John’s students have stories like that. But as high school students they would have been pretty big, so they might have been intimidating.

John is not online except possibly at Find a Grave.

I wrote about one of my aunts flipping out and excoriating me, and I got this:

>The last time she talked to me, she was furious.

Yeah, this is an interesting account. It’s very clear you’re leaving out about half of it, and particularly any of the context that might have led up to this interaction. People don’t talk that way out of the blue for no reason. It builds. You know it. You are lying about it, because you know you did things that caused her to be angry at you, and you can’t bring yourself to face your own flaws. You would much rather pretend to face imaginary flaws that don’t really bother you because you don’t really have them.

How about that? Hard to say what might have inspired it.

Here’s a really good one:

>He defended 11 people charged with murder and got 10 off completely.

You’re bragging about your father helping murderers escape punishment. You are choosing to brag about this. You think this is a good thing. There is no obligation for any lawyer to take a case. This is particularly clear in child porn cases: the lawyers won’t take them, because they find defending such individuals immoral. Your father was totally free to decide that defending a murderer was immoral. He didn’t. You’re proud of that.

The theory seems to be that if you’re accused of murder, you’re guilty, and you shouldn’t get a trial. Just a plastic bag over the head. And guilty people have no rights.

It would be silly to spend time explaining how wacky that is.

I think this is the most spectacular one:

>Now if I want a blood family, I’ll have to start one, in my old age.

Your kids will be niggers, on a continent where the nigger population is systematically alienating the civilized people as hard and as thoroughly as they can. You have taken what gifts there are in your bloodline and thrown them into a sewer. I would be angry about this if there was any indication you were trying to redeem any of your failings.

Criticism really hurts when 1) it’s true, 2) it’s expressed in a dignified and rational manner, and 3) it comes from someone you respect.

My bloodline is a mess. Mental illness on both sides. Addictions. Wife-beating. Adultery. Lying. Psychopathy. Obesity. Smart people, for sure, but my wife is as smart as they are.

The idea that white Europeans have magical genes is supported poorly, given our barbaric history. White people killed about a third of the Jews for no reason, in the modern age, when they had no excuse. And evidence suggests that Far Eastern Asians and Ashkenazi Jews are at the top of the intelligence heap. Over 40% of incoming MIT students are Asian, in a country where people descended from Europeans still hold a slim majority.

I would like to live in a country of Spirit-led Christians. Race immaterial.

Anyway, I thought I would share this with my readers. Interesting stuff.

Temptation Reveals Character

I was thinking last night about my mother’s family and how sad it is that some of us decided to trade priceless relationships for money.

I really do mean “sad.” People use the word in a snotty way, to lash out at others. “It’s so sad you think eating meat is cool.” “It’s so sad you have white fragility.” I’m using the word in its proper sense. We lost something of tremendous value, and we will never get it back. I miss the relationships we used to have.

When I was a kid, I lived in a miserable home. My dad drank and chased women. He strangled my mother twice in front of me. He beat her for things like failing to match his socks. My mother, my sister and I were afraid of him. I had a repeating nightmare in which he cut them up and they talked to me while they were dying. We looked forward to his business trips because when he was gone, we had more peace.

My sister was sick and sadistic. My mother was always unhappy. My dad and my sister both abused her. I was not much of a son. I was irresponsible, afraid of people, and unsuccessful. She loved me deeply, which is not surprising, but she was also proud of me, which made no sense.

I loved going to visit my mother’s parents. They had a big custom-built home on a hill with three spare bedrooms plus a basement room and a sewing and gun room that could be used for guests. We visited in both summer and winter.

When Christmas, came, the families of all 4 daughters gathered at the house. The families that didn’t live nearby stayed there. It was wonderful. I treasure the memories.

My branch of the family drove up from Florida, where the air was hot and never smelled quite clean. I remember how things changed when we got to Kentucky. The air was crisp and cold and smelled like coal smoke. If we were lucky, we also smelled snow.

The house would be full of homemade cookies and things like stack cake and fried apple pies. Sometimes there would be a crate of oranges in the foyer. By the time we got there, the tree and decorations were always up, and the house smelled like pine needles.

With the exception of my strange Uncle John, who was cruel to me for no reason, and who was never held accountable by my parents, I looked forward to seeing everyone. When I heard the door to the carport open, it made me happy, because I knew another bunch had finally arrived.

We opened presents on Christmas Eve, which was a mistake, and we generally got in a couple of days of playing with things like race car sets.

I liked all of my aunts. At different times of my life, each one was my favorite. I liked two of my uncles.

In the summers, I got to work on my grandfather’s farms, and he would often put me in his car or truck and take me to one. He let me run his tractor. When I was small, he would set me on the right fender, and I would sit on it while he ran it. Sometimes he would stand on the floorboard to my right and coach me while I steered.

I remember him taking me on a long hike on a farm that bordered the Red River Gorge. He showed me an old moonshining camp by a little branch. He dug up some old bottles and gave them to me, and I cleaned them up. Of course, someone took them from his house later, along with a remarkable chunk of solid mica I found in the Chattooga River in North Carolina, below Potholes Falls.

Sometimes we shot, or shot at, rabbits. Sometimes he would take me to a local restaurant, and after he sat down, a big group of people who knew him would pull up chairs and make the place crowded. To me, he seemed like a king. The boss of three counties.

He was actually a corrupt politician, and he made a lot of money suing insurance companies in front of mountain juries, but I didn’t know those things.

Corruption was considered cute up there. Still is, I suppose.

I used to walk up the road to his brother’s house, and we would sit in his carport and trade pocket knives. I still have one I got from him. He was like an extra grandfather.

All that is behind me now. Two aunts are still alive. My mother is dead. All three uncles are dead. My dad and my grandparents are dead. Estate preparation was poor. There has been division. People have taken advantage.

I still get along with one aunt. The other is in charge of the interminable distribution of my grandparents’ wealth. My grandfather died in 1994, my grandmother died in 2003, and my aunt still resists selling land and closing up the estates. Things will probably wrap up very quickly when she dies, unless the family puts her unsuccessful nonagenarian second husband–not a blood relative or heir–in charge.

I trust God to compensate me for anything I lose, I don’t need money, my life is very peaceful, and my mother always told me not to get into a certain kind of fight with a skunk, so I don’t push things.

The last time she talked to me, she was furious. I told her she needed to sell everything, and I said she had never given any of us a monthly or yearly statement. I asked why she bothered me about prospective land deals. I said she was going to do whatever she wanted anyway. She said, “That’s right!”, without a trace of shame or any concern about civil or criminal liability.

She blurted out, “I HAVE MORE THAN YOU.” She wanted me to know she had more real estate than I did, as though that justified mishandling things. She told me I was trying to get money because I was poor. She started bragging about her kids and grandchildren, and she said all I had was “maybe a sorry dog.”

Very weird. At the time, as now, I was married to a wonderful woman, and I had a parrot. I don’t have a dog. I have no idea whether she has more real estate than I do. God bless her if she does. I don’t claim to be rich. All I know is that I have a wonderful home from which my wife and I have made a lot of foreign trips, all of which were paid for without borrowing. I have no debt.

All of my property is in areas where values have gone insane, very much unlike prices in Eastern Kentucky, so I am grateful for the way things have worked out. I don’t know if I could take the stress of working a real job in a world that has given itself over completely to Satan.

She said I had sponged off others all my life. I did sponge pretty badly in my twenties while I was trying to make it as a writer, and it’s true that I lived with my dad after law school, but that was a choice, and I paid my own way. I worked when I was in law school, I had inherited money from my mother, and I paid half of my tuition from stock market trades.

Our relationship improved tremendously when I was in law school, and afterward, although I was working, I thought a lot about joint families and the way families worked in the Bible. I felt God wanted me to stay. I started thinking the nuclear family was overrated and that it was better to be around older generations. As it turned out, that was correct.

It was strange to hear her sputtering at me in anger. Others had told me about her cursing them out, but I had never seen it. I don’t know how much of it is dementia. Age has a way of exposing people, though.

As personal representative of the estates, she hired her son to do legal work my dad and I offered to do for nothing. In my opinion, her son is not a real lawyer. He’s intelligent enough to practice, but he ended up at the second-worst law school in the US. I guess my aunt’s connections could not get him into the University of Kentucky, but I don’t know. I can’t imagine going to a horrible law school far away when you can go to a better one nearby and pay in-state tuition.

I won’t toot my own horn, but my dad was third in his class, and he made a living beating Ivy League lawyers in federal court. He defended 11 people charged with murder and got 10 off completely. I will say that I kept up with him.

The estates’ legal affairs turned out very badly, but my cousin got paid a lot. He did some shocking things, and his representation seemed completely inept to me. I called him on it, and he was rude and nasty to me. But I didn’t feel God wanted me to file a bar complaint or sue.

These are people I used to love seeing. It’s hard to believe it ended up like this. I thought we would have loving relationships as long as we lived.

I have never done them wrong. I never stole a penny or a paper clip from the estates, but I have been told things were taken by others. I always said I would not charge for helping, but others got paid. Now here we are. My aunt is slowly dying, her husband is in similar shape, and I suppose it would be awkward if I attended their funerals. Not that I plan to return to Eastern Kentucky for any reason. If my other aunt is living there when she dies, I’ll go, but that’s about it. I am going to avoid the whole area as well as I can. It’s a trashy, cursed place full of people who never grow up. A white ghetto.

My wife and I just got back from North Carolina and Tennessee. So different. The houses and businesses were well-kept. We didn’t see a single discarded school bus in a yard; this is a popular Eastern Kentucky decoration. We didn’t see old cars and refrigerators that had been dumped in creeks. The people were much nicer than people in Eastern Kentucky. You don’t have to be white trash to be from Appalachia.

I wish I could go back in time and tell my grandparents about the future of their descendants. Maybe we would still have a family. They could have done something to lock everything up so no one could end up controlling and taking advantage of the others Good fences make good neighbors.

I thought our family, dysfunctional though it was, was great. I thought we had such warmth. We seemed privileged. An illusion. I saw a veneer. Now if I want a blood family, I’ll have to start one, in my old age. And of course, my Spirit-filled friends are my family. God has given me excellent friends and godchildren.

Speaking of dysfunction, I had a startling revelation last night. I realized my wife and I were not dysfunctional. It came home to me, how strange it was to be all right. Most people are dysfunctional.

Out of 8 grandchildren, I think two may have families that are reasonably free of dysfunction. The rest are a mess. Can’t say I’m sure about the other two. I don’t hear from them. Maybe that means things are going well. My suspicion is that one or both deliberately limit contact with the rest of us in order to protect their peace, but I don’t know. Maybe they just outgrew the family.

I don’t beat my wife. I don’t drink much. We don’t take drugs. We don’t argue. I have no interest in other women. She doesn’t sit by herself and contemplate her existence, thinking about how disappointing it is and what a letdown her husband is. We love each other’s company. We treat each other well.

We have long prayer sessions every day. No one has to be coerced. We both want it.

She didn’t marry me hoping to turn me into a status symbol and money fountain. I didn’t marry her hoping for a perfect sex object that never aged. We don’t think about other people’s opinions of us. We don’t social-climb. We won’t be buying cars we think will impress people. Right now, I’m investing a ton in my old Dodge Cummins so I can drive it until I die.

We don’t go on Facebook and try to convince people who know better that we are Prince Rainier and Princess Grace, living in a fantasy world of blissful marital dreams come true. That’s a common affliction. We are not trying to impress people to make them feel inferior; especially people we don’t respect.

I don’t have to worry about cleaning the house myself or doing laundry because my wife is a slob. She doesn’t have to call tradesmen because I’m too sorry to have repairs made.

I don’t wonder if my newborn son should have a DNA test. I will never try to convince people he’s the next Mozart or Newton because I feel bad about myself or him. He will never have to tell people I lied about him or that he’s not what I held him out to be.

I don’t know how smart or talented he will be, but I know he will have a dedicated father who teaches him about the Holy Spirit and passes on as much wisdom as possible.

We don’t have any mental disorders. I was depressed pretty much continuously until I was 30, but it’s gone, and I feel better every year. We’re not neurotic. We don’t have delusions.

It’s so strange, knowing we’re not dysfunctional. I’m used to thinking of myself as dysfunctional, because I was, and I think of dysfunction as normal, because it is. It’s hard for me to think of acquaintances who aren’t dysfunctional.

Childishness is a big problem everywhere, but it’s SOP in Eastern Kentucky. People hold grudges and maintain feuds. I’m sure a lot of them go to hell for it. If the members of a family can learn to be accountable adults, they can spare themselves a lot of unnecessary suffering. A long time ago, I realized I had never seen two people who were not jerks divorce. Not once. At least one person was always a problem. The same thing is true in all relationships.

Prayer in tongues repairs hearts and minds. It also keeps husbands and wives aligned with each other. It aligns you with God, and if you’re aligned with him, it’s not possible to be out of alignment with each other. You can have little speed bumps, but you’re not going to throw plates at each other or hire attorneys.

We both come from dysfunctional homes, but God repaired us and continues to repair us. If we stop doing what he has taught us to do, we’ll be as dysfunctional as anyone.

It would be great if everyone in the family were praying in tongues. I don’t see anything like that happening in the future. Old people are hard to save. I have one cousin who, like me, is recovering. By the grace of God.

I wish the family had not turned out this way. It would have been wonderful if we had continued to be close. The worst thing about succeeding is watching people you care about continue to peel off and fail.