Bad Priorities Destroy People

My site had some problems over the last couple of days. The comment page refused to load, and then the site started redirecting to the “About” page. I used chat to get support from my hosting company, but they were not helpful. They kept asking the same questions over and over, and it wasn’t until after I contacted them that the site started redirecting, making things worse than they already were.

The person I chatted with seemed offended when I pointed obvious things out, and he or she told me they were not responsible for fixing problems like the one I had. I was told they were doing me a favor by even trying. Of course, this is not true. If I set WordPress up wrong, that’s my problem, but I didn’t do that. Something had to go wrong with the data in the server, and that’s on them. Something must have been corrupted, and finding and fixing corrupted data is 100% their job. They have access to server backups, and the whole purpose is to recover data. I can’t do that as far as I know.

Anyway, I was disconnected from the person I chatted with, and I think he or she hung up on me.

So why would there be a server problem?

Most likely, it was one of those inexplicable things that happen to computers. A few electrons go to the wrong places, and errors pop up. Another possibility: a hacker figured out my password and went in and changed a few things to be an annoyance. Third possibility: a company employee with delusions about sex roles and Christianity didn’t like things I was writing.

I think it would be pretty hard for a hacker to get my password, but I know host company employees can mess with files without my password because I can also do it. I doubt they can create a new WordPress account, because that requires a password, and anyway, I would see it.

Whatever the explanation is, the whole thing is trivial, and it was a helpful taste of the future, when Christians will be banned from the web. If this blog vanished for good right now, I would not despair or threaten to sue people or call the FBI. I like blogging, but it’s not my life. I don’t make money from it. It serves no essential purpose. It would bother me if my data were destroyed, but I would be over it in an hour or so.

It’s not like we would be losing the works of Chopin.

I thought I should write about it, because ths blog still gets a surprising amount of traffic. How much of the traffic is human, I can’t say, but last time I looked, it was something like 1500 per day. Someone out there will be interested in what’s happening.

I always wonder what people thought when I vanished from Facebook. I announced it in advance, but I was the kind of person Facebook shadow-banned, so who knows if people saw it? I’ll bet a number of people thought I blocked them and still wonder why. You can’t shadow-ban a blog, so whoever looks at my blog regularly will read what I’m writing now and know I didn’t pull the plug.

Enough of that. There are more important things to write about.

I get a lot of revelation, and there is no way I can convey it all on a blog. If you really want to understand what’s going on in the universe, you have to hear from God directly. It’s too complicated and interwoven for one person to explain to another. I can relay bits and pieces, but the whole picture is multidimensional and can’t be transmitted well using a one-bit connection.

Or is it two bits? Is one wire a one-bit system because only one piece of information can be carried at a time, or is it two bits because it can send both 1’s and 0’s? I don’t know anything about computers. Anyway, writing comes out one character at a time, and nobody can read multiple sentences at once.

Yesterday, I really, really heard from God.

I was in my car, which is something I should write about. I had a huge music collection, and I used to listen to secular music in the car. Then I got to where I only wanted to hear certain Christian artists. Then I got to the point where I only wanted to hear the Bible. Now, I turn the Bible off because it drowns God out. I supposed this is how things are supposed to work as a person gets closer to God.

I’ll tell you some of the things I heard.

First, God is very angry at all the people who have abused me, and there are a lot of them. I don’t think about it a lot, because my life is very pleasant anyway, but he does. My life is better than the lives of all the people I know of who have mistreated me, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t do harm or that my life should not have been better.

People have cheated me out of many opportunities. They have lied about me. They have stolen from me. They have abused me verbally. They stabbed me in the back behind closed doors and kept it quiet, thinking they had gotten over on me for good. They set me back in life. My wife is in the same boat. She’s an orphan, and she literally had a wicked stepmother.

People who are stupid enough to participate in the occult have cursed both of us. I guess I should mention them. It’s worse for Rhodah, who lives in a country where cursing people is more popular than video games.

If you’re a Zambian, as soon as anything good happens to you, at least one of your relatives will put a curse on you. It’s expected, like sending a high school graduate a nice card.

When you curse someone God favors, the curse comes back to you, but when it returns, it’s a lot bigger than it was when you sent it, and you can’t do anything to defend yourself. Witches and various types of pagan nuts don’t believe this, so they curse themselves and their families all day, thinking they’re hurting people God loves. It’s very silly.

Think of Haman. He tried to kill the Jews and destroy his rival Mordecai, but Mordecai got to stand by and watch as Haman and his 10 sons dangled choking on ropes attached to the gallows Haman had built for Mordecai. This is a picture of what happens to people who have joined the supernatural underclass and decide to attach the nobility. The people God favors are the nobility.

To get back to my situation, I got an overpowering conviction that God was going to bless Rhodah and me very, very powerfully not just because he loves us, but to punish the people who have mistreated us. To an abuser, few punishments are worse than watching a victim succeed. It absolutely kills them.

I also learned about the rapture.

The rapture will be a gathering of wedding guests. Oddly, the guests will also be the bride, but that’s how it works. So what happens when you marry a woman? Do you burst through her front door unannounced and yell, “I just bought a tux! Let’s get married!”?

No. She would murder you. You get to know each other. You become engaged. You prepare yourself financially. You get your house ready. The bride, in all likelihood, tries to lose 25 pounds. You prepare for the ceremony. You plan a honeymoon. By the time the wedding rolls around, you and the bride are ready, if you’re doing it right.

When it comes to the wedding of Christ, it’s a little different, because he’s marrying a bunch of people who started out as dirty, crooked peasants. We have to be cleaned up a lot. He’s not going to drop out of the clouds and snatch Christians off prostitutes or out of crack houses. He’ll prepare us. The word says the bride will be without spot, blemish, or wrinkle, and those things appear to be people.

We are always in danger in this corrupting world, and if God leaves us here long enough and doesn’t step in frequently, many or all of us will backslide and go to hell. Human beings have peaks and troughs in their walks with God, like athletes who train for events and then eat cheeseburgers during their down time. God is monitoring our peaks and troughs, and he will time things so we will be on peaks when the rapture comes. I’m only referring to Christians who will make it. Most will be left here to suffer.

Three people have been raptured. We should look at them and ask ourselves why we would be raptured if we’re not like them. Enoch, Elijah, and Jesus walked with God. The Bible literally says Enoch walked with God, and then he was not. Elijah was a loner; he complained to God about it. Jesus was constantly wandering off to be with God, abandoning even the disciples. If you’re not walking with God before the rapture, why would you expect to be taken? It’s not speed dating. He’s going to take people he knows. Are you better than Enoch and Elijah?

There isn’t going to be any worldwide revival. Christians who think there will be don’t understand how the world works. We already had our big revivals. Generally, the world has chosen Satan over Jesus, and there is nothing God can do, because he will not interfere with free will.

I had a dream last night. I was invited to an event thrown by The Last Reformation, a pretty good charismatic ministry. They work miracles, prophesy, and baptize people with the Holy Spirit. They think they’re changing the world, though, and that isn’t true.

I was given a hand-drawn map. I was supposed to drive down a residential street, make a turn, and park by a house where people were meeting. A lot of people were supposed to be there.

When I got there, there was no house. There was a big building containing warehouse condos. They faced inward, opening onto an indoor hallway. It was a winding hallway just wide enough for a car. I got out and pushed my car up the hallway.

I ran into Torben Sondergaard, the imprisoned leader of TLR, and his wife. There were only a couple of other people there. The warehouses were empty.

I woke up, and later on, I dreamed I went to a similar building where my late father owned warehouses. This building doesn’t actually exist. My dad was there, working hard to get the warehouses in shape for new tenants. He was so tired, he was stumbling. He limped. He was sweating. I was afraid he would die if he didn’t quit. He said the people who built the warehouse had covered up a lot of problems. All I saw was a need for some paint, which I could have applied, personally, in a short time.

I marveled at the size of the warehouses and asked what they were going to rent for. He said they would go for around $4000 each. I was happy. I had this idea that 10% would go to me.

I believe the empty warehouses show what has happened to the church.

During the last century, pretty good evangelists filled stadiums and expensive venues. When they came to town, newspapers announced it without being paid, and people showed up to get help. It’s not like that now. A Satanic evangelist like Joel Osteen can fill a stadium, but Torben Sondergaard visits churches that meet in tiny warehouses. Warehouses are pretty much standard for serious charismatic churches now. It’s an insult to God. Catholics can teach demonic doctrine, own perhaps trillions of dollars’ worth of real estate, and build huge, grotesque churches, but a man who casts out demons will probably have to rent, not own, a warehouse surrounded by car repair joints and little businesses that fulfill Amazon and Ebay orders.

My dad represented misguided preachers who have great power. They work hard in the flesh to build churches, but very little comes of it. They are so busy wasting time, they don’t spend much time with God, and that destroys their effectiveness.

God also showed me that the most important thing for me to do was to spend time with him. It’s more important than going to church, being with Rhodah, helping the poor, or any other aspect of Christianity.

Your main job as a Christian is to see to it you hold onto your own salvation and continue to be improved by God. If you fail, nothing you have ever done for anyone else will matter. In order to fulfill your main task, you have to avoid becoming busy with other things.

There are Christians out there who are proud of themselves because they put in long days doing things for churches and people. They work so much they have no time to spend with God, and they think he will be happy about it. They’re wrong. The main thing he wants is you, not your ridiculous works.

He gave us Mary and Martha to show how he feels. Jesus was in their house, and Martha was serving people and cooking and cleaning and so on. Mary abandoned her, let her do all the work, and sat at the feet of Jesus. When Martha accused her to Jesus, he told her Mary was doing a better thing than she was.

It was better for Mary to sit next to Jesus and interact with him, while Martha worked like a slave, than it was for Martha to do the work of two people in order to look after a gathering of believers.

Many times, God has said, “Stay close to me and enjoy my love and my favor,” and I have asked him to help me do it. He’s doing it now. By turning off the car stereo, I’m getting closer, and I’m hearing more from him.

Jesus isn’t going to have an arranged marriage where he meets the bride for the first time and hopes for the best. Read the Song of Solomon. He will be marrying a bride he already knows very well, whose heart is aligned with his.

Revival is not coming. Not in any grand way. A few people here and there will be saved. The Last Reformation will not grow. Not unless they abandon their principles and whore out. Men who heal incurable diseases on Youtube will not get large followings. Things will get worse, because people’s hearts have gotten too hard for God to break.

That relates to another thing God showed me.

A tribulum is a board with nails driven into it. Sort of resembles a cross, now that I think about it, but that’s a digression. Tribulums were used to remove the husks from very hard grain. A man would stand on the tribulum, and an animal would drag him around over grain spread on a rock. Sort of like the rock the sower threw grain on, but that’s another digression.

The nails protruded from the bottom of the board, and as they ran over the grain, they would break the husk. Tribulation was only necessary for very hard grain. Other grain came out of its husk with less persuasion.

The tribulation will be God, using extremely harsh means to harvest a few of the extremely stubborn people who have not yielded to nicer means of persuasion. Some people are easy to bring to God. Others have to feel the flames charring their feet.

People who have already yielded to God will be raptured before the tribulation, because tormenting them would serve no purpose, and because God could not do it if they were on the earth to pray for it to stop.

How do you know it’s time to get the tribulum out? You get it out when only the hard grain is left. When using other means fails to produce results, you resort to tribulation.

God showed me this: we are now in a time where almost all the grain is hard. Even the little warehouses aren’t very full. God has sent us preacher after preacher. He has performed sign after sign, and we have ridiculed and rejected the people who were used to perform the signs. The soft approach has been exhausted, so the tribulation is about to start, for man’s own good.

The tribulation will be the last chance for the people of this age. Anyone who won’t listen when the world is burning up and the trees and the fish are dead will go to hell, and it will be the right place for them, because there is no reaching them.

Yesterday I heard Jeremiah in the car. All the bigwigs and clergymen in Israel hated him. They called for his death because he prophesied against Israel. They didn’t say he lied, which is funny. They said he prophesied. Maybe they knew, or at least suspected, he was right. Maybe they were willing to risk killing a man for repeating a message God had ordered him to give. No wonder God stopped sending the Jews prophets for 400 years. He had to be tired of watching them torment and kill them.

I can relate to Jeremiah. Every preacher and church rejects me sooner or later. They’re with me up to a certain point, and then they turn on me when I set God above them and their imaginative, self-serving doctrine. I could have been very, very helpful to the people at the churches I belonged to, but Christians drove me out. They do it to everyone who speaks the truth.

Christians love to look down on the Jews and talk about how stupid they were for rejecting Jesus, but we do the same thing every day. We torment and exclude everyone who goes a little too far in telling us what Jesus is saying.

If Jesus came back today under a different name, Christians would kill him as soon as possible. They hate being told this, but it’s true.

We would celebrate his death. We would say, “God really showed HIM.” We would post memes showing his dead body, taunting him and anyone who believed him.

Most Christians, including charismatics, hate the doctrine of Jesus.

If you think I’m wrong, read the Revelation and see what people will do to the two witnesses he sends. I’m sure nominal Christians will be among those who throw parties.

If you’re not rejected by the world and the church, which is really just part of the world, you’re doing something wrong. I didn’t say that. Jesus did. Look it up.

One of these days, this blog will be gone for good, because persecution will increase, and whoever takes it down will smirk, thinking I’m washed up. In reality, he will be driving nails through his own hands and feet. And things will keep going better and better for me.

Plus Hard Times for the Venereal Girl

The news makes me hope God pulls the plug on this planet quickly. What we are going through is too much, and it’s going to get worse.

I guess everyone knows about the Grammy awards. They’re like Oscars for musicians. The Grammys have a history of producing disgusting spectacles that insult God. In 2015, aging songstress Madonna sang and danced amid a throng of shirtless homosexuals made up to look like demons. Their costumes included fake horns. They worshiped her. In 2017, Beyonce did a ridiculous number in which she and other women had halos appear around their heads.

Now the Grammy people have outdone themselves. We were just subjected to an act featuring an obese homosexual dressed as Satan, dancing with another homosexual who had himself castrated and claims to be a woman. The one dressed as Satan is Sam Smith, the man who made people gag by singing a Bond movie theme song. Bond title sequences have historically featured songs performed by women, accompanied by lewd dance routines performed by dancers shown in silhouette. The other man in the act is Kim Petras, a German whose parents let a doctor castrate him when he was a minor.

A few years ago, no one disputed the fact that the age of castrati was over. Now it’s back. We used to look back on it in horror and disbelief. Things have really changed. In 2010, people generally agreed that castrating minors was barbaric. In 2023, people who object are considered barbarians.

Ever wonder who the greatest soprano of all time was? It wasn’t Beverly Sills or Kiri Te Kanawa or Leontyne Price. The greatest sopranos were men. As late as the 1800’s, greedy parents were having their sons castrated so they could become singers. Men, even eunuchs, have a stronger vocal apparatus than women. They’re a lot like the men who pretend to be women in order to win athletic contests.

Kim Petras looks like a woman if you don’t stare too close, but he’s a castrato.

It’s interesting how men are replacing women. Trannies are better athletes. Castrated ones have the potential to sing better. They are now taking over women’s role in feminism. It seems like we are constantly hearing from men who feel their mental aberrations and surgical successes entitle them to speak for actual women born with ovaries. The other day, one told the female author J.K. Rowling he was more of a woman than she would ever be, and people, including women, applauded him.

The Grammy performance was done by two men. If there were any women on the stage, and that would be hard to prove these days, they were relegated to supporting roles. Hollywood’s new take on barefoot and pregnant.

Smith and Petras sang a song with an extremely appropriate title: “Unholy.” I read the lyrics, and they are close to gibberish. Basically, it’s about people fornicating. That much I could figure out. It looks like it’s about a married man who has sex with female strippers or maybe other men who just claim to be female.

By “married man,” I mean a man who is actually married, not a man who pretends he’s married to another man.
A man who is married to a woman. Who was born with ovaries. An actual woman.

Here is what lyrics look like when intelligent people with talent write them:

And now the purple dusk of twilight time
Steals across the meadows of my heart
High up in the sky the little stars climb
Always reminding me that we’re apart
You wander down the lane and far away
Leaving me a song that will not die
Love is now the stardust of yesterday
The music of the years gone by
Sometimes I wonder how I spend
The lonely night
Dreaming of a song
The melody haunts my reverie
And I am once again with you

Here’s a little bit of “Unholy”:

Mummy don’t know daddy’s getting hot
At the body shop, doing something unholy
He’s sat back while she’s dropping it, she be popping it
Yeah, she put it down slowly
Oh-ee-oh-ee-oh, he left his kids at
Ho-ee-oh-ee-ome, so he can get that
Mummy don’t know daddy’s getting hot
At the body shop, doing something unholy (woo)

See if you can see the contrast.

People think Christians are crazy for saying Satan is real and that he is taking over the world. Okay; let’s try to imagine what he might do if he were in charge.

How about having two homosexuals (including a transvestite castrato) go on an award ceremony televised globally, dress like Satan and a damned soul, dance on a set designed to look like hell, and sing about a husband who has sex with strippers?

If what we’re seeing now doesn’t look like Satan’s work to you, what will?

It’s funny how women don’t see the threat feminized men pose. Women do more to promote them than anyone, but these men are replacing them. Gays are envious of women. They resent them and want to take their places. They are moving into fields women used to dominate. They are shaming women who disagree with them. They are taking achievements and income away from women.

Don’t be mad, ladies, but men are just plain better at a lot of things. It becomes more noticeable when they decide they’re women and compete with women.

I think the world is finished. Revival is going nowhere. Churches are drying up or endorsing perversion. Clergymen are being fired for refusing to endorse perversion. Imagine that happening in the time of David. What would David have done if the chief priest had expelled someone for not endorsing queer theory? What would Paul have done if the church of Philadelphia had insisted on ordaining homosexuals?

The rapture can’t come soon enough for me. What are God’s children doing here? Not increasing their numbers. That’s obvious. More of us are falling away than receiving salvation. The kingdom is running at a loss. At least it looks that way. I can’t really know.

Today I had what I think is a revelation: while the kingdom of God is about love, and while God only leaves us in the world to reach others, your primary job is to look out for yourself and make sure you don’t go to hell. It does you no good to serve God all your life if you end up in the lake of fire. There will be no reward while you’re burning and screaming. You won’t be comforted by the thought that it was all worth it because you helped other people avoid the flames. Your consciousness is all you have, and if it’s in hell, what happens in heaven is of no importance at all.

I’ll be honest. I would rather see everyone I have ever known go to hell than go myself. Everyone who has ever been born, for that matter. That’s just common sense. I might be willing to die for someone, but I would have to be nuts to choose to burn for eternity.

The longer we stay here, the more of us will quit. Temptation is going to get worse and worse, and many of us will fall. The salvation of a few more souls does not seem worth the loss of so many people who have already been saved.

We have become such pigs. It’s astonishing. We barely notice blasphemy and obscenity that would have caused riots 60 years ago. We approve of these things. We celebrate them. We curse people who warn us about them.

Why hasn’t God destroyed us already?

Well, he has. In Noah’s time. But why has he let the current age continue so long? His patience is astounding.

Even if I were not a Christian, I would not want to live in this world any more. There is no place for sane people. We hide in the corners. We keep quiet. We hope no one will notice us. We hope they won’t come and make trouble for us and our children until we’re dead. It’s a sad way to live. Like a scared cockroach.

Certain types of things recur throughout history. Based on what we know of societies that become depraved, there are certain things we should expect to see. Sexual perverts should come to rule us, and they should start roaming in bands, raping men as well as women, with the government’s consent. Homosexuality should become the majority orientation. We should see more rioting. We should see more mobs looting stores and homes. We should see Holocaust-style persecution of Jews and actual Christians (not nominal Christians who support perversion and idolatry). Cuban-style confiscation of wealth must be on the way, too.

I think tattooing and mutilation will continue increasing. I believe demons use these things to deface the image of God and make people look the way they look.

One interesting casualty of the Grammys: Madonna. People are commenting on her looks. Her face is swollen and grotesque. The end has come. She’s shooting the messengers, claiming ageism and misogyny. That’s crazy. They’re just reacting to a freakish spectacle.

Rhodah and I were talking about her today.

I always think about Madonna and Cher when I think about people who have no hope for the life to come. Things went their way on Earth, while they were living in perishable bodies that had the potential to be attractive for 30 years at the most. Then their looks faded, and they scrambled to hire surgeons. They held onto youth every way they could. Who can blame them? If you’re a rich female sex symbol, no matter how well things are going for you, you are just a few years away from ugliness and rejection, and when you die, your wealth will vanish. In the afterlife, no one will give Cher a table at an expensive restaurant when it’s already full. No one will pay her just to show up somewhere. No one will care about her opinions. She’ll be just like everyone else around her. No one will know her name, because she won’t have one.

People call Madonna the Material Girl because she had a hit song called “Material Girl.” In the song, she confirmed everything I say about her, decades before I said it.

Some boys kiss me
Some boys hug me
I think they’re ok
If they don’t give me proper credit
I just walk away
They can beg and they can plead
But they can’t see the light (that’s right)
‘Cause the boy with the cold hard cash
Is always Mister Right
‘Cause we are living in a material world
And I am a material girl
You know that we are living in a material world
And I am a material girl

Rhodah said people like Madonna have to buy men when they get old. Guess what? It’s in the song.

Boys may come and boys may go
And that’s all right you see
Experience has made me rich
And now they’re after me

Imagine what dating is like for a single woman who looks just like Madonna and has no money or fame. Imagine Cher, working as a TJ Maxx saleslady and trying to find a husband.

Madonna relied on her body, which is a material object. Now she’s angry because the thing she used to manipulate people repels them. If she used it to build a following of people she knew were shallow enough to be manipulated by sexual temptation, why should she be angry if they drop her when she becomes sexually repulsive?

Look, if I baked a cake to get people to come into my house, I wouldn’t expect them to stick around after it got moldy.

Life is fleeting, and our bodies fall apart and die. We should look at our lives here the way kids look at McDonald’s jobs. They don’t provide security for the long term. They are stepping stones to better things.

Madonna is trying to turn McDonald’s into a career.

I wonder how Satan is going to top the Sam Smith act. Whatever he does, it will have to be something very, very special.

If You Can’t Buy it, Mod it

God keeps giving Rhodah and me lots of revelation, and it gets hard to keep up with and document, so I write about beer instead.

I now have two beers fermenting, and I plan to brew another tomorrow or the day after. I am tired of fooling around. I have to put myself in a position where production is much faster than consumption and loss, or else I will always have idle faucets and frustration.

It appears the stout I brewed over a week ago still hasn’t given up. An occasional bubble still pops out of the airlock. Unbelievable. I checked the specific gravity last night, and it looks like it’s around 1.015, only .002 down from a couple of days back. I was thinking it would end up around 1.012. Am I asking too much?

On the one hand, it’s taking forever, but on the other, it’s still active, so I must be doing the right thing, waiting for it to die. It’s no good kegging a beer while there is still sugar in it.

My other beer may be a Belgian IPA. I learned this the other day. Before that, I didn’t know what it was.

I brew whatever I want, whether it fits a known style or not. Most guys choose a particular factory beer or style they want to brew, and they create or borrow a recipe within established guidelines. I think, “I’ll bet it would taste good if I did THIS,” and then I put together ingredients that sound like they would work. It annoys some people. I don’t know why. What business is it of theirs what I put in my beer? I can’t imagine getting upset at other people for creating recipes.

The grain bill I used is a lot like an IPA, only I added a little table sugar for some reason. Sugar increases alcohol without changing flavor much. I used Crystal hops for the finish. For IPA, you pretty much have to use something like Cascade or Centennial or people wonder what’s wrong with you. These are citrusy hops. To me, Crystal tastes very spicy. Somewhere in the realm of cinnamon and allspice.

For IPA, you’re supposed to use an IPA yeast like Wyeast 1056, and you ferment at 68 degrees. I use Belgian ale yeast. The stuff they use in tripels. I ferment at room temperature. Right now, the bucket is in my kitchen, burping away at 75 degrees, threatening to generate all sorts of aromatic chemicals and hangover-inducing heavy alcohols.

The other day, someone on a forum mentioned Belgian IPA, and I realized it sounded a lot like what I was making.

I pitched my yeast last night, and now the beer is burping like crazy. It may be done in 4 days. That’s how long the last batch took.

I don’t want an IPA. I feel like I’m drowning in IPA every time I go to the store. But BELGIAN IPA…that may be different. Because it’s not IPA.

Maybe it’s BPA.

My next beer will be either an amber lager or a very heavy Belgiany beer with some similarities to the one I just described. If Belgiany, it will be different from the quasi-IPA because of the weight and high alcohol content, not to mention several pounds of wheat. Also, I decided to use Sabro hops. This is a new hop which is said to generate creamy, coconutty flavors. Perfect for a sweet, heavy, aromatic ale. I hope. I don’t know.

My sense of smell goes in and out. A few minutes ago, I was able to smell Vick’s Vaporub. Maybe I can enjoy a beer tonight.

I am working on some cowboy mods to my Speidel Braumeister brewing machine. It’s great, but the user interface is garbage. The maker wants $400 for a wifi module so I can join their website, store my recipes there, and download them into the machine. That’s insane. I want a program on my PC or phone. I want to use wifi or Bluetooth like a sane person, for a few dollars. I do not want to join a manufacturer’s cult.

I have to be honest. The Germans are still a little scary. They seem to think customers should fall in line with the herd and do as they’re told. I’m an American. I eat things that travel in herds.

I guess Europeans think we’re nuts. They’re all standing at the government trough, eating that sheep feed and thinking how wonderful it is to be taken care of, have the government do their thinking, and to be just like everyone else, and many of us see it and want to throw up. It looks like a living death. My country isn’t my family. I don’t belong to it. I want to NOT fit in. I don’t want to melt into it. I just live here because God won’t let me move to heaven.

I spent a lot of the day looking at the Braumeister and the Internet.

I learned that the Braumeister only has three electrical connections other than AC in. It has a temperature probe, a heater, and a small pump. Simple. All I need is a bit of hardware that can run these things and connect to a PC. It has to have storage, like an SD card. A small SD card would give my machine millions of times as much storage as the manufacturer did.

I need a microcomputer that will operate two relays that turn the pump and heater on and off. I need it to listen to the temperature probe, because the temperature will guide the use of the heater. I need it to have a timer. I need it to be able to run programs I wrote. I need to be able to run the pump and heater manually.

I looked all over the place. I found what looks like a solution: Craftbeerpi. This is a program that hooks a Raspberry Pi up to a brewing system. You should be able to connect it to any system that has a pump and heater.

My heater, pump, and probe are modular. Among them, they use two types of connections. German and hard to source, of course. Stupid. Anyway, I can disconnect the Braumeister’s controller and rig up new cables coming from a new controller built by me. The Raspberry Pi will talk to a couple of big relays. The relays will turn the pump and heater on and off. The temperature probe will talk to the Raspberry Pi.

Craftbeerpi will let me use a program to store a limitless number of brewing schedules somewhere. On an SD card on the board, I guess. No more, “Drei zchedules iss all you get. If you have nussing to hide, ziss iss all you need.”

The only question is whether it will work. I guess it will.

I have some inquiries out.

I am convinced Germanness is the problem with Speidel, the outfit that made the Braumeister. I think these guys believe they know better than their customers. That’s almost never true. There are companies that have thousands of engineers but billions of customers. No matter which company you’re talking about, somewhere out there, there are a bunch of customers that make its engineers look like monkeys.

If an American company had made it, it would have Bluetooth built in. It would have a PC app and a phone app. The connectors would be mainstream. It would have gigs of storage, not bytes. If it needed wifi, it would include it, or it would use a $9 adaptor. If it needed a firmware update, you would use a $4 USB cable to connect it to your computer.

I think Germans may be overconfident when it comes to building things. There is a myth that says they do it better than anyone, but it’s a lie. Their cars are unreliable and impossible to work on. Their tools are overpriced and not the best. Their beer is very polished, but it tends to be boring and low on flavor and imagination. And anyone can make beer with finesse. It’s not like they figured out nuclear fusion.

They seem to make things in an overthought way, and that creates the illusion of superiority while making things worse for everyone concerned.

Doing things differently without a good reason is incompetence in the tech world. It causes a lot of unnecessary expense and suffering. Ask anyone who ever needed an Apple cable in the middle of the night.

I will digress.

The other day, I asked some Internet beer people if they were their own favorite brewers. Did they like their own beer better than anyone else’s? One guy responded, “I live in Germany.” That was a stupid remark. He was saying German factory beer had to be better than anything he could make, because all German factory beer is perfect. Not true. And what he said would have been closer to true in the US than Germany. We make the best factory beer on Earth now. We have almost 5,000 breweries, competing hard to innovate and make the best beer possible. Germany has about 1500, and they crank out the same things they cranked out in 1800. Germany is a beer backwater. We’re the leaders now.

There are several companies that make small brewing machines for hobbyists, and as far as I know, they all have problems. Some have build issues. Speidel’s products work very well, and the construction is good, but they have serious user interface deficiencies. It’s like marrying a beautiful woman in a titanium chastity belt.

If Toyota had made this brewing machine, I would never have had a problem with it. Everything would have been worked out before I bought it. They would never have let it out the door with a user interface like this.

I hope to hear back about the Raspberry Pi solution tomorrow. If it looks good, I’ll go for it. Can’t be very hard. Two relays, a Raspberry Pi, a screen, a mouse, a keyboard, and some cables and connectors. If it works, I’ll kiss Speidel’s support team good bye, and maybe next time I’ll build my own machine. A lot of people do.

Stout on the Way

I had a busy day today. In addition to taking care of some nagging tasks, I made a pizza and a keg of Irish-style stout, and I worked on problems with my first post-hiatus wheat beer, which I kegged yesterday.

The pizza was nothing remarkable. An 8″ Sicilian with Boar’s Head pepperoni. I can crank those out all day. The beers were more interesting.

I drew my first wheat beer today. Sour with lots of head. The sourness concerned me a little. Wheat is supposed to produce tart beers, but you can overdo it, and I used about 75% wheat in this beer. A lot of so-called wheat beers are down around 30%, and back during the Bush II years, when I drew up my recipe, people thought I was nuts to go to 75%. Nonetheless, this beer is working.

You can’t judge a beer by the first few samples if you are drawing beer off the bottom of the keg. Yeast and hops flakes will make it bitter and sour. I threw out a little bit of beer, and after that, it seemed the balance between crystal malt sweetness on one hand and wheat acidity and hops bitterness on the other was way better.

Beer starts out as a sugar solution, and sugar is heavier than water. Alcohol is less dense, so as yeast does its work turning sugar into alcohol and CO2, beer gets lighter, and the alcohol content increases. This beer went from a specific gravity of 1.053 or so to about 1.0115, and this suggests it should have a light character and around 5.8% alcohol, which is not a lot. It’s very easy to drink, and cold temperatures don’t detract a lot from the experience. This means it’s a lawnmower beer, even though it’s a quality homebrew and not big-beer industry swill.

“Lawnmower beer” is a term homebrewers use to describe beer which goes down easily and isn’t very heavy. It’s a hot day, you’re mowing the lawn, and for some reason, you think it’s a good idea to quench your thirst with an alcoholic beverage while riding a 20-horsepower machine that can cut a person’s feet off. You want a lawnmower beer. It means you’re probably an alcoholic, but nonetheless, the term itself is useful.

Most people who think it’s intelligent to operate dangerous machinery while drinking will favor gross corn-and-rice-based beer substitutes like Bud and Coors, but any beer that goes down well on a hot day is a lawnmower beer, and it is possible for a truly good beer to fit into this category.

I have another lawnmower beer recipe. A long time ago, I tried to convince a Bud addict he should like real beer. I made a light lager that was partly corn-based, and I used a yeast similar to the one Bud uses. It turned out to be great, but I got nowhere with the conversion because my friend was an alcoholic and drug addict who was not interested at all in the quality of what he drank. He just wanted to stay high and drunk so he didn’t have to face himself and admit he treated people badly. I didn’t understand that at the time.

When I think of alcoholics, I think of vodka, not beer. When I was a kid, an older Irish lady lived next door to me, and she was a good example of a vodka alcoholic. My mother saw her turn up tumblers of pure vodka, and she said that as she drank it down, her Adam’s apple moved up and down like a jackhammer. One tumbler like that would make me very drunk and might even stop my heart, but she was used to it.

Addicts like vodka because they have the mistaken belief other people can’t smell it on them, it’s less likely to cause headaches than brown liquors, and there are a lot of cheap vodkas. But there are beer and wine alcoholics, too.

Anyway, what I drew from my keg today was full of yeast and hop sediment for various reasons too boring to go into. It will clear up as the beer at the bottom of the keg is consumed. The yeast and hops gave the beer sharp acidic and basic flavors, and the live yeast may produce astounding CO2 flatulence, but as I go through the lower layers of beer, the hops and yeast will be removed, and the beer will be outstanding.

What I have now could be called a beer lemonade. I used Amarillo hops, and they produce a strong lemony flavor. They belong to a family of hops, and believe it or not, related hops like Centennial and Cascade produce orange and grapefruit flavors. That’s how crazy hops are. I don’t know of any lime-flavored hops, though.

So I have a light, lemony beer that tastes great on its own, but what about adding things to it?

Ordinarily, I think adding things to beer is an indication that someone is misguided. Generally, really good beers don’t need any help. Wheat beers, however, seem to lend themselves to flavorings. Adding fruit syrups to wheat beers is a pretty old practice even in Germany, where people are so uptight about beer they take all the fun out of it.

I am thinking I may try adding grenadine, which is really cherry syrup. I may try to find raspberry and strawberry syrups. People add these things to German wheat beers from really stuffy companies, so I would not be committing heresy.

Today I brewed an Irish-style stout, sort of like Guiness and Murphy’s. It’s one of my old recipes. At the time, I wrote this:

It’s a bit like Guinness or Murphy’s, but it has tons of body and a silky feel to it. The chocolate malt gives it a wonderful chocolate smell and flavor. I used Munich malt and Maris Otter to make it rich, but it’s not TOO rich. The bitterness is high, at 47-something, but it’s still very smooth. I think it might be better if I dropped it slightly.

It’s in the fermenting freezer now. I have high hopes for it, but I don’t know if it will pan out. As you drink better and better beers, you lose your enthusiasm for old favorites because you grow up. I had a pub draught Guinness yesterday, and I found it thin, too dry, and lacking in complexity. I hope I won’t find these same flaws in my own stout, which I created during a time when I thought Guinness was pretty good. I liked Murphy’s better, however, and it had a friendlier taste, with less of an edge. I hope my feelings for Murphy’s pushed the recipe toward the sweeter, more complex end of the stout spectrum.

Incidentally, stout is dark because it’s made with barley that has been roasted until it turns dark brown. Now you know.

Next up is my orange lager. I am not all that excited about lagers because they are boring compared to ales, but this one can hold its own against an ale. It’s about the color of Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, and that means it has a lot of malt flavor. It has crystal malt to prevent it from being abusively dry. It’s smooth and full of interesting aromas and tastes. It’s like a lager that wishes it were an ale. Very, very good.

The big problem with lagers is that they have to be lagered. Lagering is storage at low temperatures. Lagers need it to refine them and dissipate off flavors. I’ll have to leave the keg in cold storage for several weeks.

I’ll just blurt it out: in my mind, lagers are generally inferior to other beers. They are the vodka of beer. If you want something extremely polished and inoffensive, there are a lot of lagers that will make you happy, and there are subtle pleasures in lagers. Those pleasures are real and not to be contemned. Still, if you want to get lost in a beer, it’s easier to do it with ales. That’s my opinion, but there are way more beers now than there were when I formed my ideas about beer, so I may be wrong.

I do appreciate a good lager. I love Spaten and Gosser. But I’ve had a lot of very good lagers that were like BMW’s. Well-behaved. Faultless. Relentlessly similar.

I don’t like dark lagers at all. They taste like light lagers flavored with burned sugar. A good dark ale is another matter. It’s a forest of unexpected flavors and aromas.

In a week or less, I should have stout ready to serve. It would probably be best to wait a couple of weeks after that to serve it, but I don’t plan to do that. I need to get a beer inventory going so I don’t empty kegs prematurely, and besides, the fact that a beer gets better with time doesn’t mean you shouldn’t start on the keg before it hits its prime. You can enjoy it for what it is as soon as it’s ready, and then you can enjoy the way it changes later.

I have this idea that God, or “Tod,” as I call him when I hit the wrong keys, would like me to be able to talk to ordinary people leading ordinary lives. That means not surrounding myself with Jesus buffs who only associate with each other. Beer, strange as it seems, could help me bridge the gap. I think self-righteous teetotaling Christians repel a lot of people. They make them feel dirty and ashamed. Maybe if I can have a couple of beers with people who have tattoos and spit cups on their dashboards, they will understand that Jesus, not I, is the one I want them to admire and love.

Unpersons, Unite!

Wow. Every day brings a reminder that Satan runs modern society.

I used to comment on Yahoo News stories, but I quit because it drew me into childish squabbles and also because Yahoo started censoring comments very dishonestly.

Today I fell to temptation and made a comment. I responded to a story about Adam Schiff, who is pushing for a Constitutional amendment to limit corporate contributions to political campaigns.

Here is what I said:

Weird, since the Democrats are more in debt to corporations than Republicans. Big corporations pour much more money into Democrat campaigns, and Democrats reward them by passing laws that cripple small businesses.

What I said is true, and it’s not inflammatory, obscene, anti-trans, or whatever else Yahoo is not supposed to like. It’s a bland, factual comment. In sincerity, I was surprised to see a Democrat go after corporate donations.

I guess he’s just grandstanding for the unsophisticated. “Look how I stood up to the Man.” Surely he doesn’t want to cut off the hand that feeds his whole party.

Today I got this in my email:

Your comment on Democrats introduce constitutional amendment to reverse Citizens United campaign finance ruling violates the community guidelines and has been rejected

Yahoo apparently does not use periods.

I think this is excellent. It’s wonderful to be reminded that the secular world is completely corrupted. God has shown many Christians that the entire world is going to be just as insane as the Germans and Austrians were 75 years ago. Christians and Jews will be driven out of commerce, education, government, the press, the arts, and everything else Satan runs. Eventually we will see mass, nationwide riots like Kristallnacht, and they will be endorsed by the government. Our wealth will be taken. We will be imprisoned and murdered. It will be the new normal.

The world was much more sane when I was growing up. For that matter, it was much more sane 10 years ago. We have entered an age of demonic psychosis. This psychosis is the real pandemic. Coronavirus, in comparison, is a minor inconvenience. Diseases will come and go, as will famines and disasters. Delusional hatred will continue to increase until the tribulation ends and the raptured return to Earth.

The person who rejected my comment knows it’s exactly the kind of comment Yahoo pretends to want. He or she or ze or whatever didn’t care. “They” just wanted to snuff out the voice of a person who disagreed. It’s a manifestation of a deeper desire to kill us off. Conservatism is identified with Christianity, and leftists want conservatives off the planet.

Oddly, they have no problem with Muslims, of whom many millions endorse wife-beating, honor killings, ripping out the clitorises of young girls, and the execution of homosexuals. In America, Muslims herd with the leftists. They stand among the rainbow flags at their conventions, and then they go home and practice a religion that conflicts with nearly everything leftists believe.

Here’s interesting reading: Google “gay Muslim marriage.”

If I posted the comment again, it might get through, because Yahoo has many censors, and not all of them automatically reject conservative comments. There are a number of comments more forceful of mine on the site.

I supposed I shouldn’t assume that some of Yahoo’s censors try to be fair. There may be another explanation. Some may be careless, I may be on a special list, or they may have quotas. Anyway, conservative comments do go through frequently.

Yahoo instituted its moderation policy because conservative responses to new stories dramatically outnumbered leftist responses. It’s like Youtube, which stopped displaying “dislikes” because so many popped up on videos about Biden. At first, Yahoo banned comments altogether. Then they brought them back with censorship.

It’s fitting that Yahoo’s founders choose the name “Yahoo.” It comes from Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. Gulliver encountered a land of man-like beings who were filthy and stupid. They were hateful, violent, and materialistic. They preferred garbage to food. They were obsessed with pretty stones they dug out of mud. Our modern Yahoos may not be quite the same, but they are nearly as brutish. They are hateful and just as obsessed with earthly things.

I’m submitting the comment again just to see what happens.

Let go of this world. It’s never going to be good to you, no matter how many times it tells you you’re about to break through. Stop taking the bait. Go to the sidelines and do God’s work behind the scenes. We were never intended to be mainstreamed.

Ice Breaks Under Hollywood Favorite

I just found out Alec Baldwin will be charged with involuntary manslaughter in the killing of Halyna Hutchins. This does not surprise me at all. I wrote about it a long time ago here, and I quoted the applicable law. I also discussed fundamental principles of firearms handling which are relevant to negligence, which is an element of involuntary manslaughter.

Every crime has a list of elements. An element is something you have to do in order to be guilty of the crime. Involuntary manslaughter is what they charge you with when your negligence kills someone, so negligence is an element.

Here is how New Mexico’s Supreme Court defines involuntary manslaughter:

All that it is necessary to establish for involuntary manslaughter by the use of a loaded firearm is that a defendant had in his hands a gun which at some time had been loaded and that he handled it, whether drunk, drinking or sober, without due caution and circumspection and that death resulted.

“Without due caution and circumspection.” Negligently.

How is negligence itself defined in a particular case, beyond the general definition? It’s not necessarily defined by laws or court rulings. It may be defined by common sense. It may be defined by rules and practices of everyday activities.

In Baldwin’s case, we have to look at the rules surrounding firearms use. Those rules prove his negligence. Every firearm user is obligated to follow them, even though they are not laws.

When someone hands you a gun, you open the chamber and look inside. You do this even if they just did the same thing in front of you. After that, regardless, you tread it as though it were loaded. You make sure you don’t touch the trigger unless you’re shooting, you don’t point the gun at anything you don’t want to shoot, and you make sure nothing you don’t want to shoot is in the bullet’s potential path.

While rehearsing for his film, Alec Baldwin 1) didn’t check the chamber, 2) put his finger on the trigger (and pulled it), 3) pointed the gun at someone he did not want to shoot, and 4) didn’t make sure nothing important was in the potential path of a round. As a result, he fired unintentionally, he hit a cinematographer, and he also hit the director, who was standing behind her.

The rules about not pointing at anything you don’t want to shoot and making sure nothing important is in the bullet’s potential path aren’t all that distinct. Not pointing at anything you don’t want to shoot, and making sure nothing you don’t want to shoot is downrange, are almost the same thing, but the latter concept is intended to apply to things behind your target. It’s primarily about things like shooting a rifle at an animal and hitting property or a person off in the distance. It also applies to things that are not far behind whatever you shoot at, like the director.

Baldwin didn’t do what every gun user is supposed to know he is supposed to do. That makes him negligent. That makes him guilty. If he didn’t know the rules, he was negligent because he didn’t learn. If he knew the rules, he was negligent because he didn’t obey them.

Ordinarily, it’s foolish to make decisions about a person’s guilt without seeing all the evidence, but sometimes the available evidence stands on its own and can’t be overcome. This is such a case.

I’m not surprised the set armorer and a producer were also charged with crimes. I discussed that here in 2021. It’s very clear that anyone whose actions put a loaded gun in an actor’s hand is guilty of something. I was surprised to see the people who supposedly used the gun for target practice were not charged, but the report says the target practice claim was untrue.

Baldwin’s post-shooting behavior was not good. He was very arrogant. He tried to throw his employees to the wolves, in the bizarre hope professional investigators and prosecutors would take the bait. They did, and then they took him, too. You can’t just tell a prosecutor to go away because someone else did it. They don’t let defendants tell them what to do. It’s amazing that Baldwin’s attorneys let him make crazy remarks and argue with people. Unless they’re incompetent, they must have advised him to shut up.

What he was really saying was this: “Don’t arrest me. Please don’t arrest me. Maybe if I keep arguing, you won’t arrest me.” His posts were aimed at the police and prosecutors. He hoped they would read them and let him go. Law enforcement doesn’t work like that. It doesn’t respond to transparently manipulative Internet tweets.

Now his Twitter account is private. That suggests he hasn’t learned. Saying unwise things to a smaller audience isn’t going to keep other people from seeing them. Anyone can cut and paste, and prosecutors can get private tweets if they want. His “protected” tweets have been republished from time to time. Someone has surely saved all of them.

So what will happen to him?

If there are technical errors in the case, or if he gets a really good jury, he’ll walk. If not, he will be convicted.

His lawyers will do their best to pick a sympathetic jury. Defiant juries turn murderers loose every day. O.J. Simpson murdered two people, was proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, and went home acquitted because a jury of black women wanted it that way. Maybe Baldwin’s lawyers will figure out which potential jurors like Baldwin.

They will hire experts to help them pick jurors. This case will be a windfall for experts of all sorts. Baldwin will not hesitate to get out the checkbook.

As for errors, Bill Cosby is definitely a rapist, but he is home now because of a technicality. If your case is sufficiently tainted, what you actually did is irrelevant.

Baldwin should have kept quiet. He should not have antagonized people in public after the shooting. It will make him look bad if he is sentenced, and it will also make this whole affair much more humiliating than it had to be. His enemies will be dancing on his prostrate body for at least the next two years.

He reminds me of Michael Avenatti, the Trump-hating lawyer who disappeared into the black void of the federal prison system not long ago. He was brash and self-righteous even after convictions started dropping.

He was still tweeting two days after his last sentencing. That is amazing. Federal prison–real federal prison–is like hell. It’s a Jonah fish that swallows you alive. Smart people drop their attitudes when they land in federal prison. It’s a subtle clue your pride is not helping you.

God punishes the proud and self-righteous, sooner or later. When it happens during this life, the punishments generally escalate with time. If you repent, things start to get better.

There are many people who double down with punishment. The harsher the punishment, the worse they get. There is no hope for those people. There is no limit to the suffering God will let them experience. I have no doubt there are people cursing God and saying he wronged them, even as they burn in hell. People are just that crazy. They are just that stubborn and dishonest.

That’s why hell exists. It’s for people who don’t listen.

What kind of sentence will Baldwin get? No idea. I assume it’s impossible for a healthy man to avoid prison time in a manslaughter case in New Mexico, but assumptions aren’t worth much. Right now, lawyers who like appearing on TV are looking for the answer so they will have something to say tonight. They will let us know. All I know is that the maximum is 18 months.

I just checked, and apparently, he is looking at a 5-year minimum because a gun was involved. The DA says so. Does that mean anything? Not in Florida. My last pastor raped a girl over and over and got two years, which was nothing like the mandatory minimum. A close relative was convicted of felony fleeing and evading, which carries a mandatory minimum, and she got probation. Maybe New Mexico is like Florida.

My guess is that he’ll get whatever minimums apply, at the very least, because this is a high-profile case. If my last pastor had been on the news and people had followed the trial, I think the judge would have applied the law correctly in order to avoid a backlash.

I don’t like Alec Baldwin because he’s a nasty person, but I don’t want to see him go to prison. He’s not a career criminal. He’s not going to shoot anyone else; I think we can be sure of that. I have prayed for him. In my mind, a dislike for an obnoxious person doesn’t justify wishing that person will go to prison.

I have done stupid things, myself. I have done things that could have killed people. You have, too. Own a car? The only big difference between Alec Baldwin and me is that the egregious risks I took didn’t produce disasters. I could have been in his shoes.

I have been arrogant. I have been nasty. It makes no sense to hope for mercy for myself and wish prison on someone else who is annoying but not really a major problem for the world.

It’s not like he’s going to go out and commit a slew of involuntary crimes.

I do think he needed to be charged. He needed to be alerted to his issues with pride.

Maybe they’ll offer him a juicy plea. I think I would jump for it if I were him. If he is sentenced at age 67, he could be looking at release at the age of 73, not counting time off for good behavior. The web seems to say he could be out by 70. That’s not great for an old man who has young children. In his situation, I think I’d be happy with anything under a year.

It may be that the only person who is really surprised today is Alec Baldwin. Someone should have sat him down after the shooting and told him this was coming.

They probably did.

I’ll keep praying things go as well as they can for him.

Can’t Wait to Meet the FBI

Today I had one of the stranger experiences of my life.

Back in December, I became convinced God wanted me to brew beer again. Within less than two weeks, I had a beer finished. During the time while I was getting the whole business back on its feet, I looked for sources of things like grain and tools, and I found a really excellent homebrew supply place in Orlando, over an hour away. I bought my first grain batches there. I went in person, and I was impressed by the service and prices.

As part of this process, I needed to look after my gas bottles. I needed CO2 and beer gas for draft beer. I always to go Airgas near me, but they said they could not deal with 5-pound bottles. I checked measurements to see if I could use a 20-pounder in my keezer, and I learned it would cost me a keg, so I gave the idea up. I emailed the supply place to see if they knew anything, and they recommended a gas supplier right around the corner from them.

Over the last week or two, I’ve had what I thought was dermatitis on my hands. My skin was cracking, and when hot water hit my hands, it stung. I thought maybe I had been in contact with some harsh chemical or other. I also wondered if it was just age. Maybe old people’s hands don’t deal well with all the cleaning involved with homebrewing. I thought about going to a dermatologist, but then I thought maybe I should just try lotion.

Before Rhodah and I went to Singapore, I applied for Global Entry, which is a government service that allows citizens returning to the US to bypass a lot of the DHS/Customs torment and waiting. You have to fill out an online application, pay a fee, and then make an appointment to be interviewed in person.

Because this is the government we’re talking about, appointments are scheduled far in advance, and you have to drive a long way to be interviewed unless you live near one of a small number of facilities. I applied in November, and the best I could do was January 6, which I somehow missed.

When I looked for a new appointment on the government’s site, I saw very depressing news. They wanted me to wait months. Then I learned about a private company that scans appointment schedules continuously and tells people when spots open up. The government doesn’t tell anyone when it decides to add appointments, and it does not inform people of cancellations, so a private company does it for $29 per month.

You have to love the government.

When an appointment pops up, you have to jump on it fast, no matter what time it is, because other people are also using the service.

I paid the fee, and I started seeing appointments popping up in my text messages. The closest places were Orlando, Sanford and Tampa.

I saw an appointment I liked. I took it. I saw a better one. I rescheduled. New appointments kept coming up, and I kept running to the PC to reschedule.I found myself in February. Then yesterday, I got a shock. I saw an appointment for today, in Sanford.

I grabbed it. I was thrilled. The wait would be over, and I had to go to Orlando anyway to run beer errands. This saved me a second set of tolls plus gas. Sanford is near Orlando.

As I got ready to leave today, I thought maybe I should plan a stop to get some lotion, but I decided to wait.

I went to the gas place first. They could not have been nicer. They gave me shiny new tanks, took my old ones that needed testing, and sent me on my way. I went to the brew store. Everything went well there, too. Then I drove to the Sanford airport, where they do interviews.

I was not happy about dealing with the government. It belongs to Satan, and I do not see the government as my friend. I don’t want to deal with law enforcement, ever, if I can avoid it. Homeland Security is close to the top of agencies I want nothing to do with. Who knew what questions they would ask? What if Bidenistas ran the place, knew I was a far-right Christian, and wanted to make trouble?

I resented having to go through this, but I really did not want to wait in any more long customs lines.

I went into the airport and sat down. The agent came out, asked who was next, and ushered me in, early. He held the door.

They ask you where you’ve gone in recent months. I was wearing a Singapore shirt and an Ephesus hat. He asked me how Ephesus was. I told him my wife and I had really enjoyed it. I said we were Christians, so it had significance to us. There is no other reason to go to Ephesus, so I thought I needed to explain.

He said he was a Christian, too. He said, “God bless you.”

I was more than a little freaked out.

I started telling him about Ephesus and the pizza-shaped ichthus signs the underground church left there. He told me he had worked in Israel for 6 months. He said, “I worked on a kibbutz.”

Most people would say, “What’s a kibbutz?” I got excited. I asked which one.

He worked at Nir-David, near Beit She’an. I didn’t know Nir-David, but I knew Beit She’an. It was just down the road when I lived on Geva. He also worked on a kibbutz near Jericho where they grew bananas. He said one of the places where he worked grew pummelos. Geva was in the process of replacing grapefruit with pummelos when I worked there!

We got into all sorts of things. We had been to the same temples in Egypt. We had both cruised the Nile, although he did it as a kid on a little rented sailboat, and I did it on a nice cruise ship. We had been the the pyramids. He had seen more of them than I had. He had been to Saqqara. We couldn’t go to Saqqara because Rhodah felt an attack of evil spirits inside the Great Pyramid, and we had to go back to the hotel so she could recover. I told him that.

He had been all over the Sinai Peninisula with a backpack. I told him I had turned down a trip. I said a Finnish girl on the Kibbutz had offered to pay my way so I could protect her from Middle Eastern men. Then we started talking about Israeli men and their abnormally high sex drive, and that got us to the subject of Israeli women and how unexpectedly attractive they were.

He had been to the Banias. He started to explain it to me, but I knew about it already. It’s one of my favorite topics. He knew how the pagans had thrown sacrifices into the spring there and how it was believed to be the site of Caesarea Phillipi, where Jesus called Peter “Satan,” told him to get behind him, and said the gates of hell would not prevail against his church. It is said that, “gates of hell” referred to the area of the Banias, because it was a center of demon worship. The Banias itself looks like a gate of hell. It’s a big hole in the side of the base of Mount Hermon.

Mount Hermon is significant to me because it’s believed to be the place where fallen angels came down and made a pact to have sex with women and then stick together when they had to account for themselves to God.

He said I was the first person he had interviewed who had known about kibbutzes. I think. Maybe he said I was the first one who knew about the Banias. He was amazed.

We talked much too long, and then he had me put my hands on the fingerprint machine, which didn’t see my fingerprints. He said I should try applying some hand sanitizer, but it didn’t help. He excused himself, went out, and got a bottle of lotion, which I put on my hands. The machine then worked.

I shook his hand when we parted, and he said, “God bless you,” again.

I thought I was going to have a creepy, scary government interview, but instead, I met a brother. I must have made 5 appointments while I was looking for a convenient time, and look who I ended up with. I picked his location and a time when he was working, and I had no idea who he was or even that he existed.

I got to my car and made a short video call to Rhodah and told her. She was amazed. I prayed after we hung up. Then I started the car and turned on Waze to find the best way home. I set home as my destination, and my phone said, “Have a blessed drive.”

I’m not kidding. Waze told me to have a blessed drive. I’ve been using it for at least 5 years. It has never said anything like that to me. I was actually scared for a minute.

The interview shocked me so much, I started asking myself if the government had had people look at my blog and investigate my past so they could have a plant pretend to be a Christian with amazingly similar experiences. It was hard for me to believe God had brought us together, so my mind looked for other explanations.

Of course, the government is far too stupid to do a thing like that. The government is only smart in movies and in the minds of socialists and other authoritarians.

As I was writing this, my approval came through, and when I got home, I realized my hands were better. The lotion did the trick, so now I know what to do about the cracks.

I wonder what’s on tap for tomorrow.

It’s all About the Data

The whole brewing enterprise is going very well.

Day before yesterday, I was finally able to get my first ale into a glass, and yesterday, I started drawing beer that was carbonated more correctly and had less suspended yeast in it. Yeast is bitter, and not in a way that improves beer.

I’ll post a photo.

The beer is still cloudy. It may stay that way. This is what I wanted. I can’t explain why, but this is a beer that should be a little chewy. If it turns clear as I take more out of the keg, it will still be great, but this photo shows what I was trying to do.

I bought 4 of those glasses. They’re called Brimley nucleated glasses. “Nucleated” means they stuck a laser or something in each glass and made tiny dents in the bottom. This creates what are known as nucleation points, and it means bubbles form on them and stream up into the beer.

I was not really interested, or even aware of the existence of, nucleation points when I started looking for glasses, but they don’t seem to hurt anything, and I was willing to compromise because it was so hard to find sturdy glasses with a good shape and a low price.

Brimley himself must be a Chinese guy, like Mr. Bauer from Harbor Freight.

Wing Wa Brimley, son of Mei Ling and Wo Fat Brimley.

I am controlling my food and beverage intake these days, but Saturdays…come on. I’m going to have a pizza or a Coke occasionally. Yesterday, I must have had a quart and a half of beer. It’s delightful. The complex aroma and flavor. The fine-textured Kirin-y head. And the satisfaction of finally getting it in my hand. These all drove me to go overboard.

Also, this stuff is just plain good. I have a problem when I create recipes: sometimes the results are so good, it’s very, very hard to stop eating. Beer is made from recipes, so the same problem applies when I get it right.

I will not say I make a great beer or a beer that should win prizes. It’s all subjective. I will say I really, really like the beers I designed. Really. A lot. Seriously.

I always say I don’t drink to get a buzz, but I will not lie. I want to be honest and correct myself. While I’ve been researching new beers and…wow, “researching” sounds so legitimate! Like saying, “I EXPERIMENTED with marijuana before being put in charge of document security in the Clinton White House.” Anyway, during my research, I have had several strong beers, and there is no way to drink twelve ounces of a 10%-alcohol beer without feeling something, especially if you have my Gary-Coleman-like moderation-induced tolerance. I have felt some pleasant sensations, and several times, I drank a little more to extend them.

I have been a little concerned. I don’t ever want to be drunk again, and my feeling has been that it’s a bad idea to see beer as anything other than a delicious drink. I’m not going to worry, though. I’m in the initial-enthusiasm phase of my return to brewing, so naturally, I will drink a little more now than I will in the future.

The Bible says God gave us wine to make man’s heart glad, so I suppose it can’t be true that it’s evil to feel a little sensation from beer. I don’t want to be a self-medicater, but being a Sadducee–a legalist–is worse.

I still want to make a couple of strong beers, but I have realized they’re not for every day. If I drink a bottle of imperial stout in the evening, I feel a little different when I get up the next day. The general rule is that I feel energetic and enthusiastic when I wake up, so I don’t want to face mornings with a vague sensation that reminds me I drank the night before.

I keep thinking about the relationship between Christmas and the rapture. I feel that beer is suitable for celebrations, as we see in Deuteronomy 14, and this is why I’m supposed to make it. I think I’m celebrating the rapture–the second Christmas–in advance. I’m ahead of most people. Last night, I lifted a glass and told God I was celebrating. I kept thanking him for coming for us the first time.

As for my views on how we see Christmas and gifts, I believe God told me this yesterday: Christmas IS the present. That’s really true. I told this to Rhodah, and she quoted John 3:16. God “gave” his son so believers would not perish but have eternal life. Jesus is a gift. The best possible gift. But we have Jesus-free Christmases during which we get excited about puny gifts like jewelry and gift cards.

Giving is essential to a blessed life. If you want to receive, give to others on God’s command. Not preachers in Lamborghinis. Actual human beings with hearts and needs. The things we give are seeds, and we receive harvests. God gives to receive a harvest, and so should we. He gave his son so he could have us. Jesus, who is God, even received a harvest when he gave away fish and bread.

If you don’t have a lot of money to give, you can give prayer, labor, a ride, a free professional service, or something else of value. Rhodah says T.B. Joshua said that if you have nothing else to give, give your ear and your heart. Sometimes people just need to talk.

I may crank out a wheat beer today.

The Shortage Glut

Are things getting crazy again? Looks like they may be.

There was a big increase in global suffering in 2020, as we all know. Coronavirus popped up and made us all miserable. Here in the US, leftists threw terrible, diaper-bursting tantrums, terrorizing the police, beating up people they disagreed with, and destroying property. And of course, there were shortages.

As time passed, we got used to coronavirus, leftists got their president and reduced hostilities, and there was some easing of shortages.

Now covid has erupted in China, defying the ridiculous zero-transmission orders their vile government imposed, and which our own death-fearing leftists still praise. Bird flu has quadrupled the price of eggs. Food packages have shrunk, and prices have gone up. I suppose riots will resume, since that’s the only part of the puzzle that’s missing.

China is really something, and so are our press and medical establishments, which are both dominated by leftists. If you go to Google and look up “coronavirus China,” you will get a government-doctor graph that says there are about 5,000 new cases in China per day. If you Google the news, you will see figures like 76% and 90%, describing the current infection totals in Chinese cities.

Clearly, if 76% of the people in any large Chinese city are currently infected, the entire country has a daily rate which is in the hundreds of thousands or millions. But our handlers still post absurdly low figures.

Why would the medical-government complex allow CCP numbers to be published in their names when even our feeble press is acknowledging statistics that prove those figures aren’t even close to correct?

If there is one sane thing happening in China, it’s this: if a Chinese person who has covid dies in a train wreck, they don’t call it a covid death. Here, death figures have been wildly inflated because hospitals and the government have financial and political interests in jacking them up.

It seemed like the official figures made a little sense early in 2020, but eventually, it became obvious they were being cooked, and there was no way to know what the truth was. Fall down an elevator shaft, and you were counted as a covid death. As long as you had the sniffles, you counted, and no test was required, so colds and the flu were good enough.

We will never know how many people got covid or died from it. It’s like asking about the Atlantic slave trade. Sure, over a hundred million people died during shipment. Whatever you say. Never mind that there were roughly a hundred million people on the entire continent of Africa in 1600, and only a tiny percentage were sold to slavers by their fellow Africans.

Slaves were expensive. Letting them die in huge numbers for no reason would be like loading ships with new Toyotas and letting them roll into the ocean. It never happened. There weren’t that many to begin with, and slavers tried to keep them alive so they could sell them. Slavery was a capitalist industry. Industries that lose money don’t last 400 years.

Talking to leftists about covid is like talking to flat-earthers about satellites.

To get back to the point, things seem to be getting worse again. This comports with the Bible’s warnings. The tribulation will come, and before that, there will be labor pains. Things will get bad, and then they’ll get better. Then the pattern will repeat. It seems we are entering a labor pain.

Today I read about eggs.

We have always had eggs. Chickens are mentioned in the Bible. We have always had influenza. There have been bird flu epidemics in the past. Now, if the establishment is to be believed, we have a unique epidemic which is expected to stay with us until some external force ends it. They are telling us it will not go away on its own like all the other bird flus. So we have had chickens for thousands of years, and during most of that time there was no science to help end epidemics, but somehow we never had a permanent poultry epidemic until this century.

The bird flu is like coronavirus in that it is firmly established in the wild. We can’t vaccinate every pigeon and crow. This is why you paid $7 for jumbo eggs the other day.

Just when I learned how to make creme brulee.

Will it run its course until birds around the world develop resistance, or will it be killing poultry until Jesus returns? Wish I knew.

If there have always been bird flus, why is this one different? Let me guess. Global warming. Or homophobia. Maybe if more male shop teachers were allowed to teach while wearing mammoth artificial breasts with protruding nipples, eggs would be cheaper.

Yesterday, I called a gas company and asked about buying a beer gas tank. Sorry; no could do. Steel shortage. They said that if I brought them my own tank, they could swap it, but they were not selling new ones.

There is no steel shortage. The Ukraine war, and probably other things, put a big dent in steel demand. Steel was a lot more expensive in the recent past. I suppose there must be a tank shortage. Maybe companies are hoarding them, or maybe the Chinese people who make them are bogged down by coronavirus. Anyway, one more thing that’s hard to get.

It’s not a trivial problem. Gas bottles are used for all sorts of things. Anesthesia. Welding. Weird industrial uses that are little known but very important.

Gas is also expensive. There is a CO2 shortage. On the one hand, we are told that CO2 is destroying the world, but on the other hand, there is a shortage of CO2 for things like beer and soda production.

Why is CO2 expensive? Because of coronavirus? Because of backward environmentalist legislation? No, it’s because gas supplies we have relied on in the past have experienced contamination, and it’s taking time to fix it. One CO2 source was contaminated by an extinct volcano. No human being, not even a white one, caused that.

Citrus is disappearing all over the world. Bananas are threatened by a devastating fungus. The king crabs and snow crabs just vanished; look that up. Of course, some are blaming global warming for the crab problem, but scientists who are probably more honest are blaming a complex and cascading combination of factors.

Deer are in trouble. Chronic wasting disease, which is like mad cow disease or kuru for deer and people who eat the wrong deer parts, is killing deer in large parts of the US and Canada, and in the Florida Keys, screwworms are literally eating deer alive. Deer have a high coronavirus rate, although they don’t get very sick. Yet.

I guess I’m wasting my time, telling people about shortages and diseases. We all see these things happening.

Here’s another shortage I find interesting: the gas stove shortage. It’s not here yet. Leftists have decided to try to ban gas stoves and ovens. That is amazing. How can anyone be that stupid? It can only be demons at work.

Gas stoves cause global warming, apparently. So what about grills and other portable cooking tools? Will propane be sold only with permits based on what we plan to do with it?

From personal experience, I can tell you it’s wonderful not to have to need electricity to feed yourself. Living in a hurricane state, I’ve had to grill my food many times. If leftists get their way, gas stoves and ovens will start to vanish as they age, and everyone will depend on the power grid.

This could kill a lot of old people. I’ll give you the example of a relative of mine; a diehard faux leftist hypocrite. She just got rid of her gas fireplace appliance and replaced it with an electric one, and she lives in an area where winter weather sometimes kills the power. She’s feeble and sick, and so is her husband. They’re not rare cases. I would hate to live in rural Minnesota or Montana and lose heat in the winter.

Oddly, ammunition is getting cheap. You can buy .22 rounds for as little as 5 cents each. I can get 9mm for $7.50 per box before tax and shipping. It was more like $30 not long ago.

For a long time, my feeling has been that God would see to it that the guns and ammo kept flowing, because humanity will want those things after the rapture. People will want to kill each other, and God will let it happen, because his children will not be here to intercede. Even when we claimed there were shortages, guns and ammo were selling like crazy. We used the word “shortage,” but it looks like the scarcity was only on retailers’ shelves. We were buying so fast, they could not keep up.

One of the curses of the tribulation is a spirit of murder that takes over the world. It’s going to happen. There is no way to stop it. God has predicted it, so that’s that. It makes sense that people would be armed very well during that time.

No one should consider it strange if a pandemic causes a series of shortages, but we have shortages that are only attributable to accidents and what insurance companies used to call “acts of God.” That should make people think.

A pandemic itself is like that. People don’t cause them. Well, there is the covid lab theory, but it’s not proven, and it’s an outlier. Labs didn’t create the bird flu or the deer diseases I mentioned.

Over the last week, I heard two charismatics predicting a bad year. One is a man who goes around healing people. I don’t know how accurate his prophecies generally are. The other was Mark Hemans, the Australian healer and teacher. He appears to get solid information from God. He compared the time we’ve just experienced to the eye of a hurricane. There is nearly no wind in the eye of a storm, so people tend to go out and celebrate as it passes, thinking they’re in the clear. Then the other side of the storm shows up and drives them indoors.

I was walking into a store two days ago, and I thought about my dependence on stores. I knew that if this one and the other local stores closed, I would be in a bad way. My little farming efforts amounted to nothing last year. Is this the year when we will start driving by stores with taped-off entrances?

It’s going to happen. If it’s not this year, it will still happen soon.

Maybe this year won’t be too bad. I have the feeling this will be a year of celebration for my wife and me. I feel as though we will be comfortable, and we will be full of the awareness Jesus will be here soon. I certainly hope this is true. I don’t look forward to begging for food or fending off hoardes of city dwellers who think I have it. They will be hit worse than anyone. They have no way to look after themselves, and they will be surrounded by desperate people who are in the same boat and who will do anything in order to get food.

In the Bible, Hebrews boiled and ate their own children, and they were no worse than modern Americans. If a person will eat his own child, what will people do to strangers?

If you don’t have a good relationship with God, you will sink when America finally enters the drainpipe. Biden can’t save you. Money can’t save you. Bags of junk silver, weapons, and a generator can’t save you. One of the purposes of the tribulation will be to show people God has always been the only source of provision and safety, so He will make sure they understand. Everything else people trust will be proven useless.

Tithing was More Fun Than we Know

I think I know why God wants me to make beer.

Yesterday, I wrote about the rapture. The birth of Jesus was the first Christmas. The rapture will be the second real Christmas, not just a yearly observation. The second coming, to rule the earth, will be the third Christmas. The Bible says we will know when the rapture is coming. People who don’t read carefully get hung up on a scripture that says only Yahweh knows the day, but the Bible also says it will not take us by surprise, and it’s clear we are expected to know the season, meaning we will have a good general idea of the timing, and this will help us prepare.

Look, Jesus told us there would be signs. That proves we are not to be taken by surprise. It serves no purpose to tell people about signs of an upcoming event if you want them to be ambushed.

So if we will have a pretty good idea that the rapture is nearly here, we will have reason to celebrate, and what did the ancient Jews celebrate with? Alcohol. Yes, they did. Stop with the legalistic teetotaling sophistry. What was the first miracle Jesus did?

I won’t tell you. You should know.

His first miracle took place at a wedding. The rapture will take us to heaven for the wedding of Jesus. It will be a celebration. There will be wine. Jesus said he would drink wine in heaven. The Song of Solomon, which tells about a man gathering his fiancee to him, is about the rapture. It makes sense that we would celebrate here on Earth before we leave.

I believe God told me another reason why he wants me to make beer. He wants to pick a fight.

I can hear people yelling at the screen. “The Prince of Peace doesn’t pick fights!” Sure he does. You should read the Bible some day. God picked a number of fights in the Bible, to glorify Himself. Read Exodus, if you want an obvious example. Let me spell it out. He picked a fight with the false gods of Egypt and their followers. He humiliated those spirits one at a time with plagues showing he ruled their supposed spheres of influence.

It appears God is picking a fight with Christians who worship men and rules.

We are supposed to be under the law of the Holy Spirit, not laws carved in stone. In law, there are two principles you need to know about: supercession and preemption.

Preemption means laws from high authorities outweigh laws from lower authorities. Federal laws sometimes outweigh state laws.

Supercession means new laws replace old ones.

The law of the Holy Spirit supercedes the written law, because it is newer.

The law of the Holy Spirit preempts the traditions of men because the source is God Himself, who has the highest authority. A lot of our religious rules are traditions of men with no authority.

What does “testament” mean? It means the same thing in the Bible and on Earth. It means “will.” What do we say in our wills? We say we revoke all previous wills. While the new covenant doesn’t exactly render the old covenant invalid, where it conflicts with the old covenant, the old covenant is superseded. This is why Messianic Jews can eat pork and drive on Saturday.

As for preemption, Jesus came and let the world know fabricated traditions of men had no validity, and when he gave us the Holy Spirit, he put the one who wrote the law inside us. That person has the right to overrule baseless tradition and tell us things that disagree with the written law.

When mom and dad go out and leave a list of instructions on the refrigerator, that list doesn’t have to be obeyed forever. It stays up until they come home, and then they tell the kids what to do in person. That’s the difference between the written law and the law of the Holy Spirit.

We are supposed to be commanded by the Holy Spirit these days. Very few Christians are. Most of us live by wacky traditions and rigid Old Testament laws. If you took the invalid traditions out of Catholicism, there wouldn’t be much of it left.

Jesus healed on the Sabbath. His disciples violated the Sabbath with his approval. He spoke disrespectfully to priests who were chosen by the Romans, not God. He interfered with a lawful stoning. The Holy Spirit told him what to do, so his authority was higher than the authority of the written law.

These days we have Christians who teach tithing, which is wrong. We have Christians who teach teetotaling. Some Christians teach that we can’t serve in the military, which is crazy. Many Christians think you get to heaven by going to church or volunteering. Many think we are supposed to obey a bunch of rules we do not understand, and God will tally up our scores and see who gets in. These things are not Christianity. They are traditions and legalism.

We can be very stuffy and pretentious. We often argue when we have no idea what we’re talking about. “The pope said THIS!” “Daniel Kolenda said THAT, and he works miracles, so he’s right!” “I rode around in Reinhard Bonnke’s bus for two years, so I’m right!” “God is going to get you for criticizing Benny Hinn because you’re touching his anointed!” “If you have a Christmas tree, you’re worshiping Satan!”

Christianity is actually a supernatural relationship. It’s like being inhabited by demons, except you’re inhabited by the Holy Spirit. Just as demons command and influence people who are depraved and make people similar to themselves, the Holy Spirit will influence and command you and make you similar to Him.

We argue because we are not in touch with the one who makes the rules. The Holy Spirit tells us all the exact–EXACT–same things. He doesn’t pit his children against each other. When God picks a fight, he picks it with other spirits and people who listen to them.

If you speak in tongues a lot, you will be brought into agreement with God over time. If not, you’re going to end up guessing, not to mention fighting with people who are right.

I think God is telling me to make beer for celebration and to provoke and expose the ignorant and proud. The rule-followers. The preacher-worshipers.

In the end, some people will win, and those people will be the ones who heard God in the first place.

I was talking to Rhodah about all this today, and she showed me something about a scripture I had mentioned to her the day before. Deuteronomy 14 says that Hebrews who were too far from the temple to take their tithes there (and tithes were not money) were to convert the tithes to money and then give the money to rich priests who could buy fancy chariots sheathed in gold.

NO! It says they were to convert the tithes into “‘anything you want — cattle, sheep, wine, other intoxicating liquor, or anything you please,’ and then feast before the Lord.”

How about that, tithe-craving preachers? God wants us to eat and drink your yachts and $7,000 basketball shoes.

It also says they were to store food and drink so the Levites could come and eat. Nothing in there about giving them money to buy jets.

A lot of Baptists would explode if they read Deuteronomy 14.

Maybe not the Forty-Gallon Baptists. My dad used to claim they existed. He said they were only allowed to drink 40 gallons per year. I think he probably got that wrong.

So this is where we are. I am brewing, and it’s going very well. Just slides along without any real problems.

Obviously, I don’t encourage anyone to get drunk or even to drink. That’s another subject.

I can tell you this: alcohol is perfectly fine. It’s not like tobacco or LSD or mushrooms, which have no place in a Christian’s life. People and demons are the problem. If you can’t drink safely, the problem is you. Most people can be surrounded with alcohol all their lives and never have any trouble, so it’s clear the individual is what makes the difference.

Some Asians can’t handle alcohol, and some can’t process it well. This is said to be a biological thing that can’t be changed. The rest of us aren’t like that. It’s all down to demons and character problems.

My grandfather, who died from drinking moonshine with methanol in it, was an alcoholic and a mean drunk. Family lore says he beat my grandmother on the steps of the courthouse where he lived. My dad was an alcoholic. When I was young, I did stupid things when I drank, but was I an alcoholic? I’m definitely not an alcoholic now. I barely drink, and when I do, it causes no problems.

They say there is no way to for an alcoholic to be free from alcoholism, so either they’re wrong, or I have never been an alcoholic.

The general rule is that when another person thinks you’re an alcoholic, there is no way to change their mind. It is not possible. They can always come up with an argument. I don’t have a drinking problem, and I never will again because it isn’t in me. When I did have a drinking problem, the problem was immaturity, not bondage.

I hope to be imbibing moderate amounts of the results of my labor and God’s grace very soon. Of course, you will read about it here.

This is a Real News Story

Sadly, it is time to take advantage of America’s fair use doctrine. I’m going to post an amazing photo.

I’m posting it to show how civilization has declined. The person in the photo is in Canada, which is somewhat more decayed than the US, but as everyone knows, there is really just one culture in North America, with variations here and there. Bad things that happen in Canadian culture are things Americans should be aware of, because they generally reflect problems that are developing here as well.

The person in the photo is a man named Kayla Lemieux. He teaches shop at Oakville Trafalgar High School. Oakville is near Buffalo. At work, Mr. Lemieux dresses like a woman and wears a long blond wig. That’s not all. He also wears two huge fake breasts that are approximately a foot and a half long, and as worn, the pair is about two feet wide.

To make matters worse, Lemieux’s fake breasts have large nipples, and he wears clingy tops through which the nipples protrude.

I’ll post a photo with the nipples blurred out. You don’t need to see everything to get the idea, and some of you may be eating. I don’t know how much the blurring will help.

If there is anything good about this story, it’s that some parents complained. And the school system told this sick man to stop wearing false breasts to school.

No, of course it didn’t. But it did say students who took photos of Mr. Lemieux would be suspended. The government has also provided Mr. Lemieux with bodyguards.

Here we see one of the big problems with leftist insanity. They start out with requests that seem reasonable, like, “Let us do what we want in our own homes.” Then a few years later, they’re forcing their disgusting ways on us. and on our children, in every part of public life.

There is a big difference between sexually normal people and perverts. Sexually normal people are not driven entirely by sex. Generally we don’t insist that other people become unwilling participants in our sexual activities. It would be very unusual for a heterosexual female teacher to dress like Mr. Lemieux in public, and for that matter, it would be unusual for one to do it in private.

Sexual normals don’t tell people they’ll commit suicide or cut themselves if they can’t indulge in their sexual activities in public. For example, if you like dressing up like a nurse, and you’re sexually normal, you’re not going to get your attorney to sue your employer to force them to let you wear your nurse outfit to work, based on the idea that forbidding you will cause you immense psychological harm.

I can’t believe I’m trying to explain this. Things that used to be obvious to everyone are suddenly hard for many people to understand.

Mr. Lemieux’s trashy prosthetics are like outrageous emotional support animals. Back when the world made a little sense, you could only take an animal on a plane if you were transporting it and agreed to house it properly, or you had a bona fide trained service animal with documentation. Then the nuts got to work, and suddenly, spoiled, attention-craving people started showing up at gates with things like peacocks and pigs.

Obviously, even if we pretend Mr. Lemieux is a woman and should be allowed to dress like one, gigantic false breasts with enormous visible nipples are not necessary to his female identity. Actual women manage to be female without these accessories.

If men can do this in front of kids, think what the women will be allowed to display. If you’re going to display an enormous false body part, there are things that would be more disruptive than breasts.

Come to think of it, those things are already being displayed to girls in locker rooms all over America, by legally-protected men and boys who claim to be women.

The other day, I was listening to the Bible, and I heard about Asa, king of Judah. He was one of the good kings. Look what he did when he was crowned:

And Asa did that which was right in the eyes of the LORD, as did David his father. And he took away the sodomites out of the land, and removed all the idols that his fathers had made.

In 1990, I would not have understood that, even though I was a Christian. I would not have understood why God’s prophets told Asa to get rid of sodomites. Now I get it. I see what eventually happens when they are mainstreamed. I see why gangs of pagan men and Jewish men roamed the streets openly, trying to rape other men in Gibeah and Sodom. Sexually abnormal people became emboldened because of their large numbers, and then they did what they were afraid to do when they were in the minority.

This is why we now have nude gay parades in major cities, accompanied by public sex. The sex won’t always be consensual in the future.

Sexually abnormal people are turning the world into a homoerotic performance art stage, and it’s very harmful. We are seeing not just the sexualization of minors, but their forced exposure to sexual deviation by authority figures who have the power to get them in trouble.

If you Google “trans teacher,” you will see that while Mr. Lemieux’s wardrobe choices are still pretty far out by the standards of American deviant teachers, he has many, many peers here. And if you can’t afford private school, your kids have to honor and obey them and use their insane pronouns.

Maybe you’re lucky, and you can homeschool. There is a movement to ban it, however. It’s illegal in Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Greece, and Sweden.

I can’t believe the world we live in now. It is astonishing that Lemieux is allowed on a school campus, even as a guest. To give him bodyguards and punish students for exposing him is something that shouldn’t even happen in an absurdist movie.

It makes me think about the rapture. How long will we have to wait? Life here on Earth is going to become very, very hard for Christians, very, very soon, and few of us are ready or even trying to prepare.

My wife and I are trying. God keeps talking to me about my own depravity and the need to clean up and attain humility, and I keep thanking Him. We keep interceding for others in hopes their eyes will be opened.

Of course, we will pray for Lemieux, too. He looks like the stubborn type, and those are the people who go to hell, but you never know.

Sehr Gut

My first post-2006 brew day is behind me, and it went great. Sort of.

I bought myself a used Braumeister 20L V2 brewing system, which does everything for you up to the point where it’s time to chill the wort. It mashes and boils, in other words. That’s a lot of help. You just put your water and grain in the machine, turn it on, pull the mash thing out when it beeps, throw hops in when it beeps, and drain the wort into your fermenter.

In the past, I had to mash in a huge kettle on the counter wrapped in towels. Then I moved everything to a big cooler and sparged with hot water I had prepared separately. Then I lifted the refilled kettle back to the stove and boiled. The kettle and cooler were too big to wash in the sink. I had to stand in the kitchen most of the time, because nothing was automatic.

Instead of typing “Braumeister” over and over again, I’ll just call the machine Helga. It’s much easier to type.

I made a major mistake this time. I read the manual, and it said to use 12 liters of water for mashing. This sounded crazy, because I was making around 20 liters of beer. I figured the Germans had come up with a way to use less water. Some kind of greeny thing.

As I was doing the mash, I heard weird noises from Helga. It sounded like liquid was hitting something very hot.

Helga mashes in the following way. She is a cylindrical kettle with a ring-shaped heater in the bottom. You put a smaller cylinder (mash pipe) inside the big one, with screens on each end and grain inside it. You add water. Helga heats up and starts pumping water up through the grain, so it overflows out of the inner cylinder, down to where the heater is.

It sounded like liquid was hitting the heater. Seemed to me the heater should have been submerged, so I added water until the noise stopped.

I got a bunch of error messages. They said, “Temp Err.” I Googled, and other people had had the same problem. There were no answers.

After a while, there was a burning smell. It wasn’t bad, so I let it go.

Helga has a cute insulating jacket she wears to make her more efficient. When I took it off later, I found a big burned place on the inside.

When I looked back at the manual, I saw that it recommended 12 liters of water for a smaller model. Helga was supposed to get 23. The heater was exposed part of the time, and it heated up one side of Helga so the jacket was scorched.

When all was said and done, I had a specific gravity (reflects sugar concentration) of around 1.040. I should have had 1.056. I turned up the boiling temperature, and eventually I added around 5 ounces of malt extract I had on hand for making yeast cultures. I got up to 1.054, which is good enough.

The lack of water prevented the mash from going as it should have, so I didn’t get as much sugar as I had hoped.

The funny thing is that before adding the wrong amount of water, I checked the manual several times.

Cleaning up was pretty easy. I took the mash pipe and screens out. I put the screens in the dishwasher. I washed the pipe and Helga herself in the kitchen sink. Not too bad.

I made the mistake of using loose hops instead of putting them in mesh bags, so I ended up with a lot of hop mush in the bottom of the kettle. I ran a lot of clean water through the pump to make sure there were no hops in it, and I tipped Helga over and rinsed everything down the drain.

When I was done, I drained Helga into my fermenting bucket, Franz, and put it in the pool, where the water was at 65°. Two hours later, the wort was down to about 71°. It only needed to be below 80° in order for it to be safe for yeast, so I suppose I can take fermenters out after an hour or so from now on.

I have gone back and forth about fermenting temperature.

I chose to begin my return to brewing with this recipe because it ferments at room temperature, but after buying the grain, I bought a little freezer for fermenting. I put a temperature control on it to get it to 68°. Fermenting at 75° can produce strange alcohols that cause headaches and hangovers, if certain people on the web are right, and I thought maybe I should ferment at a more conventional temperature.

Upon reflection, I decided to move the temperature back up but still use the freezer. Higher temperatures produce chemicals that can make beer taste better, and I didn’t want to miss that, nor did I want to violate a sound principle of cooking: never mess with a recipe if you need to learn something from it.

Brewing beer is a type of cooking.

I needed to know how the original recipe would work, and using a lower temperature would prevent that from happening.

I could have fermented on the floor in the house, but that could have caused problems. First, beers sometimes overflow when fermenting. Second, I am doing this fermentation with a loose lid to let gas out. Bugs could get in if I didn’t put Franz in a container. I don’t have a lot of bugs, but I do have a few.

I am using a brand new freezer to keep something at more or less the same temperature that surrounds the freezer. Sounds odd.

Now I’m waiting for my kegging stuff to arrive. I ordered something called a Torpedo Megamouth keg. It’s about 18″ tall and 11″ wide. Shorter than a Cornelius keg, which is what most people use. It will fit in my spare fridge so I don’t have to get a beer fridge yet.

I’ve also ordered a fancier fermenter. I chose something called a Fermzilla All-Rounder. It’s a clear plastic jug with a big mouth. The one I got comes with a valve on the lid, so you can do fermentation under pressure. My understanding is that this allows warmer fermentation, faster fermentation, and some other things I forgot. The All-Rounder is easy to clean, you can see what’s happening inside, and it’s generally better than a bucket.

Should I get a beer fridge? I guess. Not sure what to do. I don’t really want a big fridge with taps sitting out in my Christian house, scaring Christian guests, but if you’re going to make beer, you really need to be able to keep at least three types ready to drink.

I felt tremendous peace after brewing. The process was rocky when I got started, but as time passed, things went more and more smoothly, and I started to feel as though angels were doing things for me. When I got to the point where it was time to clean up, I was surprised to see how little there was to do.

I can’t explain any of that.

I still feel like God wants me to do this. I am not all that excited about drinking beer. I don’t look forward to being lectured by legalists. I’m enjoying myself, but I don’t know what it’s all about.

A-I-AIO!

Yesterday was pretty interesting. I drove to Orlando to get beer ingredients and equipment.

I used to have all sorts of brewing items. A fermenting fridge. A freezer turned into a kegerator. Brew kettle. Lautering tun. Stir plate. Kegs. Gas bottles. Measuring stuff. When I left Miami, I had no help and a parent with dementia, so I must have thrown out or given away $10,000 worth of belongings, and most of the beer things went. Also, my kegerator died one day without warning, so that had to be hauled off.

Over the last couple of days, I rooted around, and I learned that I had a cornucopia of brewing paraphernalia. Here is a comprehensive list:

1. A brew kettle I no longer need.
2. A wort chiller I no longer need.
3. A hydrometer I no longer need.
4. A mercury thermometer I no longer need.
5. A control to maintain a high temperature in a freezer.
6. A $6 handle for lifting carboys.

So all I lacked was the other $90,000 worth of equipment.

Brewing used to be cheap, apart from equipment. I used to spend $20 for 5 gallons of the best beer on Earth. Best to me, I mean. People like different things for some reason. I nearly always ordered ingredients online. I placed orders large enough to get free shipping, so all was well.

This week, I went to Morebeer.com, which has apparently absorbed and digested some of the other companies I used to use. The cost for ingredients for one beer had shot up to close to $50.

I realize Joe Biden is president, and this is the beginning of the apocalypse, but that seemed unreasonable to me.

The problem was made worse by their unwillingness to sell me the amount I needed at a uniform price. If you need 9 pounds of a malt, you can’t order it. You can order 5 + 3 + 1, with the per-pound price going up sharply as increments shrink, or you can order 10 pounds and either throw out or try to store the excess. Holding onto extra grain is not practical. It’s mouse bait, it takes up room, and you have only 6 months to use it. Basically, you have to pay for something you don’t want.

On top of this, Morebeer charges about 10% to crush the grain in preparation for brewing. You can spend $160 on a machine to crush grain–one like the one I threw out–or you can pay as you go.

The nice thing about Morebeer is that they kill shipping on big orders, but by the time you’ve given them a lot more money than you want to, you’ve paid for shipping.

The local place I found 1) charges way less for malt across the board, 2) crushes it free of charge, 3) lets you order malt and hops in tiny increments, 4) bags things separately and labels the bags, and 5) charges about 40% less for yeast.

I probably spent $30 or more in tolls and gas yesterday, but I saved about $30 on ingredients alone, I got exactly what I wanted, I got it fast, and I was able to look around the store and see if I needed anything else. Yes, you can do that at Morebeer.com, but it’s not the same as being there in the flesh. You don’t have to scroll and flip pages.

During the drive, I prayed and listened to the Bible, which is what I always do in the car unless someone distracts me. Guess who I heard about? Naboth.

Talk about good timing.

Ahab wanted Naboth’s vineyard, but Naboth didn’t want to see. Ahab started crying, literally, so his wife Jezebel paid two losers to accuse Naboth of blasphemy. Naboth was stoned by a mob, and Ahab took the vineyard.

Why is this interesting? Because Naboth, a man who made wine, is the good guy in the story.

Please don’t try to con anyone with the idea that “vineyard” was a mistranslation. The Hebrew word clearly means a place where grapes are grown. Naboth wasn’t growing tangerines.

I really feel that God pushed me back into brewing, and I find it confusing, so I have been thinking and praying about it. Very often, when there is something I need to know, related material pops up on my car stereo. Looks like it happened again.

A lot of Christians are intolerant teetotalers. They insist that no Christian should ever drink anything alcoholic. I don’t know where they get this idea.

1. Jesus drank wine. Hello? He also ate meat. In fact, it was a sin for a Jew to be a vegetarian because of the Passover requirement. Jesus drank wine during Passover, which was months after the grape harvest, so fermentation had to have occurred.

2. The Bible says wine is a blessing. Psalm 104 says God gave it to make man’s heart glad. And no, doesn’t mean we’re glad because we’re not thirsty. Come on. Don’t torture the text.

3. Losing a vineyard’s production is a curse in the Bible. See Deuteronomy 28:39.

4. In Deuteronomy 14:26 the Lord commanded the Jews to have a feast and have “wine, other intoxicating liquor, or anything you please.”

Back in Biblical times, Jews were not knocking themselves out in their vineyards because they liked table grapes or raisins. If they were excited about fruit, the Bible would be full of material about things like figs and pomegranates, and it isn’t. Wine and grapes are mentioned much more often. The Jews wanted wine. And God had no problem with it. Misuse of alcohol was what he hated. It has never been much of a problem among Jews.

Some Christians make the ridiculous claim that the wine ancient Jews drank was just unfermented grape juice. The problem with that is that ancient Israel had no refrigeration and plenty of hot weather. Heat plus grape juice and a couple of weeks equals wine. It takes considerable work for a low-technology person to eliminate or reduce grape juice fermentation in a hot climate.

It is very obvious that Christian teetotaling is a post-Biblical creation. At the same time, the Bible condemns drunkenness beyond any doubt.

Some of life’s pleasures are wrong all the time. Others are only wrong when they cause problems. Food and drink fall into the latter category. If alcoholic drinks cause you no problems, there is no reason to avoid them. If they do, you should abstain.

When I was young, I drank to get drunk. Often. It was one of life’s great pleasures for me. The thought of doing that now is repulsive to me. I remember the dizzy feelings and the way I smelled of alcohol. I remember the stupid things I did. I remember hangovers and vomiting. I don’t want any of that, ever. To me, now, alcohol might as well be mineral water, except for the taste.

Since the idea of returning to homebrewing arose, I’ve had several beers (never two in one day), but before that, I was having maybe two drinks per month. By “drink,” I mean a real drink, not a 14-ounce martini or a huge cocktail. I mean a small glass of sherry, a shot of expensive whiskey, or maybe a beer. If I couldn’t have another drink for the rest of my life, it wouldn’t be a huge sacrifice. I keep alcohol on hand primarily for cooking. I use sherry for pork roasts and soup, whiskey for barbecue, beer for barbecue, and wine for lots of things.

Actually, I should come clean. I forgot that I had several beers and one gin and tonic in Singapore last month. I was in a foreign country, and I wanted to see what the beer was like, so there were times when I had one beer with a meal. I had the gin and tonic because tourists in Singapore are supposed to go to the Raffles Hotel Long Bar and have cocktails.

Alcohol doesn’t cause me problems. It used to, but that ended a long time ago. There is no reason for me become a teetotaling legalist fanatic. Avoiding alcohol because it messes up your life is not legalism; it’s common sense. Avoiding it because you think God will put a black mark on a scoreboard in heaven is legalism. Christianity is not a game of points.

Listening to Naboth’s story made me feel a lot better. I don’t want to do anything God hasn’t told me to do, and alcohol has been involved in the destruction of many, many people. For example, my dad and his father were alcoholics. Also, I would prefer not to upset future guests any more than necessary. Sooner or later, I’ll probably have to get some kind of kegerator, and there it will be, in my house, staring people in the face.

You have to fear God’s disapproval, not other people’s.

I suppose many people think there is no reason to drink alcohol except to get drunk. That’s a problem of limited perspective due to lack of knowledge. If you’ve never had alcohol, or you’ve never drunk except to get hammered, maybe you could get the impression that alcohol has no other purpose. It’s not true at all.

It’s a lot like saying there is no reason to own more than one gun, which is like saying drugstores should only carry one medicine or there should only be one size spoon. It reflects unfamiliarity with the subject.

I have never been much of a wine person, but I know a little bit about beer. It’s an exhaustive topic.

Beers start with grain. Most beer is made from barley, but there are zillions of different barleys. Dark ones. Light ones. Barleys that provide sweetness to beer. Cheap, nasty barley for beers like Budweiser. Beers are also made with corn, oats, wheat, and rice. I’m sure you will find other things beer can be made from. Anything with starch should work. They all contribute different flavors and colors.

The next main ingredient is hops. There are many different varieties, and they taste different. There are American hops that taste like oranges, grapefruit, and lemons. There are European hops that taste like cloves. Using the wrong hop in a beer can ruin it. Adding the hops at different times during brewing also makes a big difference in what you end up with. Many recipes use more than one type of hop.

The last important ingredient is yeast. The Wyeast company, one of the two big suppliers, lists over 60 beer yeasts on its site, and there is a reason for that. They work at different temperatures. They produce different flavors. Yeast doesn’t just produce alcohol and gas. It produces chemicals that change the taste of beer.

With all the different ingredients and brewing methods, there are many, many very different types of beer. The range of flavors is staggering. They suit different occasions, seasons, and foods.

Anyone who thinks all beer is the same should try a weissbier next to an imperial stout and an IPA (India Pale Ale).

If you can understand why there are so many different wines in the world, you should be able to understand the reason for making different beers. No one with any brains would say champagne is interchangeable with chianti. You should be able to understand that it’s not about getting drunk. If it were, I wouldn’t ever have one beer by itself. Lovers of good beer are actually pretty sophisticated.

If I start believing God is against the brewing operation, I’ll sell my stuff and take the hit. I am not married to the notion. I can go either way.

My brewing appliance, a Braumeister 20L V2, should get here tomorrow. That means I may be brewing Sunday.

For anyone who is still reading, the Braumeister is a self-contained system, commonly known as a self-contained system or all-in-one. There are a bunch of these things on the market. I don’t think they existed when I quit brewing.

I picked the Braumeister because the others appear to have problems. The Braumeister is German and more expensive than most. Sometimes those things mean something. I have seen new ones prices at $3000, but the great thing about brewing is that guys give it up, so I found a lightly-used one for a small fraction of that.

AIO’s, to use brewer jargon, let you do everything but fermentation in one vessel. When I used to brew, I mashed first. This means I put the grain in a kettle of hot water so the enzymes in it would turn the starch to sugar. Then I moved it to another device, and I rinsed the liquid and sugar out, back into the kettle. This gave me a sweet solution called “wort,” which rhymes with “squirt.” Then I boiled the solution with hops and drained it into a fermenting container. After the first fermentation, I could choose to move it to a big bottle, or carboy, and let it finish.

This is how I remember it, anyway.

With an AIO, you dump the grain and water into the machine and leave it there until you move it to the fermenter. It controls the mashing temperatures and times (there may be several for one batch). When mashing is done, you remove the grain and boil the wort with hops and whatever else you want. The machine has a timer. Then you cool the wort, put it in a fermenter, and add your yeast. This is called “pitching.”

You end up with less stuff to wash, and you don’t have to stand next to the kettle all day. The electronics prevent a lot of fussing with a clock, turkey fryer, and thermometer.

Here is what people say: AIO’s don’t make better beer; they make better brew days.

I plan to make an ale I named “Senseless Cruelty.” Maybe I’ll change that. It’s a high-IBU (bitter) ale like an IPA. I chose it because this is the only beer I ever fermented at room temperature. To ferment cooler, I will need another fridge or a fermenter that will fit in the little one I have. I expect to put the fermenter on the garage floor. Sometimes fermentations go too fast, and things leak, so I want to make my return to brewing with a safe approach.

In order to be ready on Sunday, I need to make a yeast starter today. I have yeast, so I have to boil some yeast extract in a flask and add yeast. Then I’ll let it ferment until I brew. The more yeast you have when you pitch, the less likely a problem is.

It will be interesting to see how this pans out. I look forward to seeing what the purpose is.

Plus Unexpected Beer Content

Here is something I have believed for a long time: if you pray in tongues a lot, instead of hearing God’s truths for the first time from preachers, you will hear them from the Holy Spirit, and if preachers mention them later, it will just be confirmation.

This has been my experience, and there is also evidence for it in the Bible.

Here are some words from Galatians 1:

But I certify you, brethren, that the gospel which was preached of me is not after man.

For I neither received it of man, neither was I taught it, but by the revelation of Jesus Christ.

For ye have heard of my conversation in time past in the Jews’ religion, how that beyond measure I persecuted the church of God, and wasted it:

And profited in the Jews’ religion above many my equals in mine own nation, being more exceedingly zealous of the traditions of my fathers.

But when it pleased God, who separated me from my mother’s womb, and called me by his grace,

To reveal his Son in me, that I might preach him among the heathen; immediately I conferred not with flesh and blood:

Neither went I up to Jerusalem to them which were apostles before me; but I went into Arabia, and returned again unto Damascus.

Then after three years I went up to Jerusalem to see Peter, and abode with him fifteen days.

But other of the apostles saw I none, save James the Lord’s brother.

Now the things which I write unto you, behold, before God, I lie not.

Here is something John said:

But the anointing which ye have received of him abideth in you, and ye need not that any man teach you: but as the same anointing teacheth you of all things, and is truth, and is no lie, and even as it hath taught you, ye shall abide in him.

This idea makes a lot of Christians angry because they have been raised to worship preachers, not the Holy Spirit. When Christians argue, they often say this preacher said this and that preacher said that, instead of referring to the Bible and the things they have received from the Holy Spirit. Because of this, one corrupt preacher can corrupt a lot of people.

Jesus said to avoid the leaven of the Pharisees for this reason. Leavening is something that grows in dough until the whole loaf is infected. “Infection” is the correct word. Brewers use it to describe things that grow in beer, including yeast.

The Jews fell into the same trap as Christians who rely on preachers too much. They are taught to rely on sages to tell them what the Bible means. When they discuss religion, they quote Maimonides and Rashi and so on, and they discourage people from forming conclusions without relying on learned men.

If everyone hears from the Holy Spirit, Satan has to deceive a huge number of people in order to get anywhere. That’s hard for him to do, because he is weak and small. If people listen to a few preachers instead, all he has to do is ruin the preachers. Then the rot gets into everyone else.

This is what has actually happened to the church.

Today I watched a recent Mark Hemans video, and I enjoyed it, because he confirmed things I had been telling people for years. He says that if you want to be Spirit-led, you should be praying all the time about little decisions. You shouldn’t divide your life into a secular part, where you do whatever you think is best, and a religious part, where you try to do what God tells you. You should pray all the time, even about things like ordering at McDonald’s or picking out new socks.

Even if the decisions aren’t that important, the practice is. And nobody wants unsatisfying socks.

A long time ago, God directed my attention to the fact that in the Bible, doing what you think is right is evil. It sounds strange, but it’s true. If you read through the Bible and look at the occasions when people “did that which was right in their own eyes,” you will see that those people were disobeying God. That’s what doing that which is right in your own eyes means.

I would hate to have to sit here and list all the verses that confirm what I’m saying. “There is a way that seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death.” That appears twice in Proverbs. “The way of a fool is right in his own eyes: but he that hearkeneth unto counsel is wise.” “There is a generation that are pure in their own eyes, and yet is not washed from their filthiness.” Moses said: “Ye shall not do after all the things that we do here this day, every man whatsoever is right in his own eyes.”

I could sit here for hours doing this.

We are supposed to do what God says is right, and while the Bible is helpful in determining that, its advice is general, and not every verse applies to every situation. If you doubt that, look at these consecutive verses:

Answer not a fool according to his folly, Lest thou also be like unto him. Answer a fool according to his folly, Lest he be wise in his own conceit.

How can you do both, in every situation? It’s not possible. Someone has to tell you which course is appropriate. You need the Holy Spirit, who wrote the Bible. Talking to the author is even better than reading the book.

It is tiresome, listening to people who say the Bible is perfect and that we don’t need any other guide. The Bible itself contradicts this belief. Consider what the Ethiopian eunuch said to Philip when he was asked if he understood Isaiah: “How can I, except some man should guide me?” Philip, who heard from the Holy Spirit, was able to interpret Isaiah correctly for him, which is something generations of Jewish sages have never been able to do on their own.

To me, the challenge is distinguishing what the Holy Spirit says from what my wishful flesh says. You can sometimes compare what you hear to the Bible, but that’s not always helpful. The Bible doesn’t tell you which socks to buy.

Your flesh, and demons, can pipe up and pretend to be the Holy Spirit. “Go ahead and marry another man; God loves you as you are.” “Marijuana is fine; didn’t I create it?” You have to speak in tongues a lot, remove corrupting things from your life, and cast out your demons.

Lately, I have been getting a powerful urge to brew beer again. I don’t understand it. I miss the astounding beer I used to make, but I barely drink these days. I think I’ve had one drink this month. Also, brewing is work, and it costs money. Part of me is interested in brewing, and the other part thinks about the work, expense, and my low rate of consumption, not to mention the awkwardness of entertaining other Christians with a kegerator in the house.

I prayed about this several times, and I finally decided to go with it. I ordered a modern machine that does a lot of the work of brewing. I plan to order ingredients for a wheat beer. We’ll see what happens.

Christians don’t have to be teetotalers, and Jesus certainly wasn’t one, but it seems strange for God to suggest homebrewing to anyone. A similar pursuit got Noah in trouble.

Hemans also talks about the problem with assuming you can handle things. It doesn’t work. I try to avoid it. I tell people that when you tell God, “I got this,” he folds his arms and stops helping you. It’s pride, and God fights the proud, according to his word.

This is one reason why I fight the self-reliance culture many Christian men have picked up from things like football and military service. God isn’t looking for tough guys who strive in the flesh, working hard to please him. That would be like running a construction company and hiring people who refused to use power tools. It would be asinine. But men’s groups all over America are using football and soldiering as teaching tools. God is not a sports fan, and soldiering is about using carnal tools to fix problems caused by carnal people.

Sports nuts and military people teach pride, and that destroys Christians. Armies are not led by God these days, and God has never been behind competitive sports, so they have to have something to compensate, and pride and toughness are their crutches. They are substitutes for God’s help. Like all such substitutes, they get us into trouble.

You can’t take a breath without God’s assistance. Telling him you can fix your complex problems, which involve other human beings, demons, and who knows what else, is extremely arrogant. You are weak. Nobody can stand up to the world without help.

I’m very glad to get confirmation that some of the things I believe came from God and not my imagination. It gives me hope that life will continue to improve in spite of my own efforts.

Frisky Persecutors Undeterred

I guess anyone who reads what I write about The Last Reformation will think I’m a hard core supporter who thinks Torben Sondergaard has all the answers mankind has been seeking. That isn’t true. I have never belonged to The Last Reformation, and I disagree with them on minor points of doctrine. I have some concerns that it could become a cult over time, and I think they may be making things too systematic. On the whole, though, I support them, and I know they do wonderful work.

All that being said, I am at it again.

Recently, TLR put up two videos about Torben, who is still in jail or prison or something. “Detention,” I think they call it. Makes incarcerating people who haven’t been found guilty of anything sound better. TLR is trying to set the record straight. I’m going to embed the videos here.

My only complaint with the videos is that comments are disabled. That’s a bad move. It makes TLR look like it’s afraid something will be exposed.

It’s fascinating how things unfolded. The videos contain new information. It turns out Danish TV, which belongs to the government, sent two spies to TLR’s facility, and they both told huge lies on camera.

The spies pretended to be Christians, and they asked to be baptized. They even went so far as to give false testimonies later to be used in videos.

As TLR’s second video says, these are people who have no fear of God. No one who believes in a just God would ask to be baptized while lying to the people doing the baptizing, and certainly, no real Christian would lie later in a video testimony.

The name of one of the spies is Sebastian Svensson. This man is accused of doing something so low, it’s hard to believe. The story: in private, he told Torben he had inherited a lot of money, and he said he wanted to give it to Torben. When Torben told him he could donate via the TLR website, he refused. He said he wanted Torben, not the ministry, to have it. Torben never took the money.

In America, this tactic is considered so unfair, law enforcement can’t use it. It’s called entrapment. Black’s Law Dictionary defines it this way: “a law-enforcement officer’s or government agent’s inducement of a person to commit a crime, by means of fraud or undue persuasion, in an attempt to later bring a criminal prosecution against that person.”

More simply, the cops aren’t allowed to go up to a person who has no plans to commit a crime and entice or pressure him until he commits one.

Svensson is a journalist, not a cop, and statutes barring entrapment don’t apply, but the principle underlying the prohibition still applies. Entrapment is a slimy thing to do. In some courts, a private party who entraps someone is considered guilty of the crime of aiding and abetting.

I don’t bring these legal points up to suggest Svensson broke the law. I’m just using them to highlight the vileness of the things TLR says he did.

Is entrapment considered ethical by journalists? If so, then a journalist’s job isn’t just to cover crime but to make it happen. Bribing a preacher with no record of dishonesty is like Woodward and Bernstein telling Nixon he should have people break into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee.

When I was going to Trinity Church in Miami, a member tried to give the church a car, and Pastor Rich Wilkerson jumped right up and snagged it for himself. The church got nothing. Too bad Svennson wasn’t there.

Another journalist, Amalie Borup, filmed a private discussion with Torben and then published parts of it. According to TLR, she took things out of context and tried to make it seem that Torben had told her to stop taking a prescription.

TLR says he never does this, and I believe it. He’s not a moron. Obviously, telling people to abandon medical treatment can lead to legal problems, and aside from that, every Christian who knows anything about healing and deliverance knows that problems may return.

You can watch the second TLR video and see these schemers go under the water, wasting people’s time, and then testify about how it changed them.

Why believe TLR about the prescription story? Well, the journalists are proven liars, for one thing, and I have never seen anyone at TLR get caught in a lie.

The video also tells about random Internet warriers who put out rumors claiming Torben makes a lot of money from TLR and only cares about getting rich.

Is this true?

TLR is transparent, and no one has ever published a story saying he or she looked at the books and found wrongdoing. But apart from that, they don’t behave like greedy preachers.

I have been to several TLR events, I have received lots of their group emails, and of course, I have seen their website and videos. Here are my observations.

1. If they have asked for money, apart from taking quiet, unpressured collections at meetings, I am unaware of it.

2. I have no recollection of ever seeing a TLR person draw a connection between giving TLR money and receiving financial prosperity from God.

3. Torben and his family look like they dress from Kohl’s and Marshall’s.

4. Torben criticizes the prosperity gospel.

TLR also complains about people who call it a cult. The big problem with the proposition that TLR is that so far, no one has produced any evidence.

What are some things cults do? They control people. They isolate them from other people. They don’t permit dissent, so there is no accountability. They may expect people to turn over assets. Cults are often led by individuals who are considered infallible.

Now that I think about it, this describes the Catholic Church, back in the days when they still burned people alive.

It is true that TLR has enforced some annoying rules at some of its live-in retreats. For example, they have required people who live close by to sleep in dormitories and be in bed by a certain hour. These things did not sit well with me. I have enough problems sleeping at home, and I’m not excited about using a community shower or toilet. On the other hand, if you go to a TLR meeting, you will notice the following things:

1. You don’t have to pay a dime. You may be required to give a refundable deposit in order to reserve a spot, but they do this because people who hate them used to take up all the spots in order to kill attendance and leave them holding the bag when paid venues expected payment.

2. You can come and go as you wish. They don’t even notice. If you only want to see the second day of a three-day event, and you want to show up two hours late, that’s fine.

3. No one pushes you to join. They tell you how to do it, and they leave it at that.

4. People in attendance run around healing, praying, and casting demons out without direct supervision. If you want to cast a demon out of someone, you can walk into a TLR meeting from the street, find a person, and go to work. No one will question you. I’ve seen people ministering spontaneously, and I’ve done it, so I know what I’m talking about.

5. Torben is not the only one doing things, as #4 suggests. In fact, the other people there will correct you if you think you have to deal with Torben directly. You may, if you want, but they make it clear he’s not God’s unique emissary. A guy who prayed with me somehow got the idea that I thought Torben had to do it, and he gave me a little lecture. It is true that a lot of misguided people put him on a pedestal, but that’s their own fault. He doesn’t attend every event. Especially now, while he’s in jail.

6. TLR gives things away. They give away water, snacks, DVD’s, and books.

7. They have never told me who to associate with, although the Bible itself makes it clear we need to cut certain types of people off.

If this is a cult, it’s the sorriest cult in human history. They’re doing everything wrong. In comparison, Orthodox Judaism, the Masons, and even the Boy Scouts look like the Branch Davidians.

I have tried to find eyewitness testimony proving TLR is a cult, but I can’t come up with anything. I keep seeing Google results that look promising, but when I click on them, it’s usually some fringe kook claiming TLR is a cult because it disagrees with him about doctrine. Cessationists really love to call TLR a cult. It infuriates them when anyone claims to have received a healing, and talking about tongues is like jabbing them with a pointed stick. Some atheists also hate TLR, but what preacher don’t they hate?

A ridiculous site ironically labeled Rationalwiki says TLR is a cult, but all it publishes is innuendo. “Professionals” have criticized TLR! Professional what? Ballroom dancers? Drywall installers?

A former member says TLR is heretical! What? By whose standards? Jesus was labeled a heretic. Protestants consider Catholics heretics. Again, disagreement over doctrine does not form a basis for labeling TLR a cult.

Irrationalwiki says TLR “abused” a handicapped woman who developed psychosis caused by the abuse. It says she had to receive 24-hour care for years. Who defines “abuse”? Not Rationalwiki. What was the abuse? What were the symptoms of psychosis? Who made the diagnosis? Who says it was caused by TLR? Rationalwiki does, and that’s good enough for you. It provides a link to a Facebook post to prove it. If you don’t have Facebook, too bad.

The psychosis claim comes from an entity called InsideOut. This outfit claims Torben performs “violent” exorcisms. Excuse me; I’ve been there. The only thing resembling violence comes from the people being delivered. They often thrash and yell. There is no violence. The people around them comfort them and help them not to injure themselves.

Try to find information on InsideOut. You’ll find it’s extremely obscure. TLR-bashers call it “a Danish anti-cult corporation.” People love using words like corporation and coalition to describe a nut with a Wix website. The leader of InsideOut is named Camilla Johnson. Try to find her on the web. Good luck, because I got nowhere.

My bet is that InsideOut’s headquarters is her apartment.

A number of the powerful arguments Rationalwiki confidently presents are simply references to people who think Torben is wrong to believe basic Christian tenets. In other words, atheists. To most atheists, I guess every religion is a cult.

Here is a quotation Rationalwiki presents, approvingly, on its page about Jesus:

“Jesus was no perfect man, no meek or wise messiah: in fact his philosophies were and are largely immoral, often violent, as well as shallow and irrational.”

“Rational”…wiki.

You should always look out when a person claims to be rational. It’s funny, but people who claim to prefer logic and science to religion never seem to notice that science has proven that human beings can’t be rational. Look up “Clever Hans.” Look up “double blind.”

Too often, “rational” really means, “motivated by an irrational hatred of religion.”

Persecution is amazing. It doesn’t have to have a single grain of truth in it to motivate people.

I have a relative who is convinced TLR is a cult. Strangest thing. She doesn’t actually know much about it. She thinks its leader is a criminal, and she hasn’t even heard about the immigration thing. She doesn’t know TLR’s name. The other day, I heard she was concerned I was running around with “NRA.” I wish she would read up and find out how mistaken she is.

Maybe some preacher she likes, who sees Torben as a threat, said some bad things about him. Torben is definitely a threat to big, profitable churches.

I have wondered why Torben ended up in jail, given that you would expect God to look after him. I wonder if it has to do with putting his trust in carnal people and the United States government. It’s just my impression. Maybe he would have been jailed no matter what.

His US asylum case has been rejected, and many people think it’s unfair. I have no idea whether that’s true or not. I don’t know the law surrounding asylum. Maybe his case is completely normal, and he doesn’t meet the criteria for asylum. I know it’s a big mistake for laymen, and lawyers who are not familiar with a case, to draw conclusions.

TLR is no cult, so don’t be nervous about visiting their meetings. The rumors about leather straps and electrodes are grossly exaggerated.