Jesus Jesus Jesus

It’s very bad when we think Christmas is about elves and an imaginary nutcase who climbs down chimneys to give gifts to other people’s children. It’s bad when we think it’s about money and gifts. It’s terrible when we call Christmas “season” or “holiday” in order to accommodate a minority’s phobia of the word “Christ.”

It’s also bad when we think Christmas is about getting together with our families and sharing love. Love without Jesus is one of the Antichrist’s favorite themes. He is always trying to push an alternative righteousness, telling us we can be good people without Jesus, and that this is all that matters. These are toxic lies.

Yesterday, I got supernatural revelation about Christmas. The reason to celebrate Christmas is that Jesus chose to come down here, to this filthy world, and give us eternal salvation.

Every Christian knows this, but it’s different when you get a revelation from the Holy Spirit. You don’t just know it. It becomes part of you.

If more of us had a heartfelt revelation, things would look very different in December. People would be overjoyed at Christmas celebrations, thinking about the gift they’ve received. No one would care about those stupid, idolatrous elves or Black Friday or Cyber Monday or Special Extended Cyber Tuesday or any of that. No one would be thinking about new cars with big ribbons around them. No one would hold drunken Christmas parties where people find other people to fornicate with.

There definitely wouldn’t be a big audience for dirty Christmas movies made by Hollywood pagans, perverts, sluts, and addicts.

It is amazing that God Himself came down to this rotten place and let the people who rejected him torture him to death so He could save them.

Yesterday when I prayed, in my mind, I kept hearing, “Thank you for coming for us!” Today, I kept hearing, “You came for us!”

Sometimes people feel let down at Christmas because they’re alone or they didn’t get presents. No one should feel bad today. Wherever you are and whatever your circumstances are, you can have the biggest present of all, right now. You may think Christmas has been a bust, but it’s really an unqualified success. It’s a complete victory. It worked.

I hope this helps people who feeling bad today. Snap out of it. You won. You just have to claim your present.

Plus a Much Better Gift

It’s Christmas Eve, and I am all by myself except for Marvin. But don’t pity me. I spent a lot of the day communicating with close friends and my beautiful wife, and I made Marvin and myself a pretty decadent dinner. Now I’ve decided to come here and save the world. I will tell you how to make creme brulee very easily.

My wife loves creme brulee, so I decided I should learn how to make it. The other day, I made my first batch, using a surprisingly clumsy recipe from The New York Times. Even in its withered state, this major metropolitan newspaper has ample resources to find a good creme brulee recipe, and they didn’t do it. There is no way to justify that.

The recipe required me to use a water bath, and that doesn’t work for various reasons. Mainly, it requires you to use tall dishes. Creme brulee should be served in a shallow dish, and the dessert itself should be one inch deep at the very most.

Today I made Caesar salad with homemade croutons and anchovies, potatoes au gratin (sort of), a standing rib roast, and I felt it would be a crime not to have a dessert, hence the creme brulee.

I roasted the beef at 175° on a lark, and it worked beautifully. When it got over 100° inside, I cranked the oven to 550°, and I took the meat out at an internal temperature of 115°. It was nearly perfect. Pink nearly all the way to the edge. Tender. Not that juicy, though. I dry-aged it, and that removes some water. I think that may be a mistake for a roast. Next time, wet aging.

To age it, I salted it and left it in the fridge for something like 10 days. It was wrapped in plastic for the last three or maybe 4 because I was concerned about dryness.

I did something else that was new. I rinsed the excess salt off the raw meat. This turned out to be a great idea. I applied butter and pressed garlic before roasting.

This was not the greatest piece of beef. I cut a steak off of it a week ago, and it was not as juicy or tender as it should have been. Publix always puts rib roasts on sale at this time of year, and that’s why I bought this one. Unfortunately, just about all the roasts I saw at the store lacked real marbling.

Aging it made it tender and flavorful, but I should have wet-aged it to keep it as juicy as possible.

I used the Caesar recipe from Bon Appetit. It’s the best one I’ve found. You still have to increase the lemon juice, Worcestershire sauce, and anchovies to make it work. The recipe calls for canola oil, but I avoid that stuff. I used cheap olive oil.

I took the NYT creme brulee recipe and more or less halved it. I increased the ratios of egg yolks and sugar to everything else. I doubled the vanilla extract. I skipped the water bath and 325° recommendation and baked at 205°.

The texture was perfect. The flavor was intoxicating. Better than restaurant creme brulee. Could not have been better except for the caramelization. I am not all that skillful with a Bernzomatic torch. I may buy an attachment called a Searzall to improve my work. The caramel tasted fine, but the browning looked uneven.

Here you go.

INGREDIENTS

1 cup cream (I used regular whipping cream)
1 teaspoon vanilla extract or fake vanilla extract
pinch salt
3 egg yolks
3/8 cup sugar

Heat your oven to 205°.

Forget all the stuff about heating this or whisking that. Dump everything into a bowl and mix it with a mixer on a fairly low setting so you don’t beat a lot of air into it. You do not want a foamy creme brulee. Just make it smooth and dissolve the sugar.

This makes 4 small servings or two fairly large ones. Your call. Size your dishes appropriately. Fill them up and put them in the oven.

Here is the uncertain part: I think this takes 90 minutes to cook, but I’m not positive, because I kept fooling with it. When it’s not jiggly any more, it’s done. Don’t wait for a knife to come out clean. I don’t think that will ever happen.

When it comes out, sprinkle sugar on top and roast it with a propane or butane torch. You can use a broiler, but they say the results are not as good.

Chill until…chilled.

That’s it. Very simple.

I spent some time thinking about Jesus today. This is his day. Why aren’t we excited about that?

If he had not come down from heaven and endured life in this miserable place for our sake, we would all be going to hell. Heaven was the first Christmas gift. What greater gift is there than eternal salvation in the presence of God and people you love?

I turned on a long Youtube of old Christmas songs. I did not have to deal with any wokeness. I did not have to hear anyone rap about Santa Claus. I didn’t have an elf on my shelf. I didn’t have to sit at a table with vegan killjoys or angry same-sex couples with multicolored hair and vape pens next to their plates. No one lectured me about Christmas being a patriarchal white supremacist holiday. It felt a little bit like Christmas Eve at my grandfather’s house in the 1970’s.

My uncle used to cook a rib roast and potatoes au gratin for everyone, and that’s why I like to do it now.

I say I made potatoes au gratin “sort of” because real potatoes au gratin isn’t really a great dish. I made something a little more like macaroni and cheese with potatoes instead of macaroni.

Next year, I’ll be doing this with my wife, and I hope to have a bunch of guests, as I often have in the past.

Merry Christmas, everybody. I hope you’re with family or friends you love, but even if you’re not, someone loves you, and you can still have the biggest gift of all.

One More Place to Experience Rejection

I hate social media, but I joined Reddit so I could get some help with Starlink. Since then, I have asked a few things about other topics. It’s not always easy to find a forum where you can get information, and Reddit has a lot of specialized groups.

I found out Reddit has a “karma” system, which is offensive, of course, to people who are not Hindus and do not want to be dragged into the Hindu religion. It’s amazing how Hinduism has somehow escaped being labeled a religion. You can talk about karma and do yoga all day and not be accused of promoting a religion when, of course, you are.

Imagine what would happen if Reddit gave people holy points and damnation points and said comments made Jesus smile.

Reddit karma is a social credit system. If people like something you say, they give you a karma point. If not, they give you a negative karma point. If you get enough positive points, you get the privilege of starting groups. If you get enough bad points, your stuff may be put where it’s harder to find, and Reddit has shadowbanning, although I’m not sure if karma is involved in that.

So basically, it’s a system that allows other people to persecute you anonymously. As a result, you feel pressured to say things that make people happy by reinforcing what you perceive to be the existing majority opinion. It pushes you to keep useful information they won’t like to yourself. It makes healthy dissent wither and fosters the overgrowth of disinformation. So it’s a lot like Twitter. And Facebook.

Reddit has confirmed some of my prejudices.

The sad thing about prejudice is that it is usually reinforced by experience. It works, except when a prejudice is based on irrational feelings. Prejudice is generally based on years of observation. It really is a bad idea to go to black neighborhoods at night. It’s a bad idea to start a big STEM company and insist all the engineers be female. It really is dangerous to drive in China.

One of my prejudices is that lots of Internet cooking people are jerks. Boy, did Reddit confirm this. In a food group, said it was a shame known outlets published bad recipes, which it is, and three guttersnipes voted me down without being man enough to say anything.

I don’t know why food people are so hateful, but they really are. The nastiest Internet troll I ever saw, which is saying a great deal, was a food guy who called himself Sheldon Martin. His email address was penmart10@aol.com. I still remember that address, because the things he said were so foul. You can probably find his old postings online. Search for “penmart10@aol.com” and “prolapse.”

I just found some of his material. Take a look at this really mild example.

I won’t dispute your knowlege of pottery, although I seriously doubt it’s been more than remedial, probably an ugly ash tray you once made during a therapy session in a mental institution, but I know with absolute positive certainty you ain’t any kind of cook, ‘specially not a baker.

Some guy disagreed with him, politely, about pizza stones. A lot of his stuff was extremely filthy.

Another valid prejudice: there is no way to deal with Musk fans without facing a wall of insanity. There are people who will praise Tesla and Starlink no matter what. If Starlink satellites went nuts and started shooting gigawatt lasers down into daycare centers, the Muskhive would lunge at the throats of anyone who complained.

I pointed out some bad things Starlink had done, and I got whacked with Hindu demerits. There went my chances of going to Internet Nirvana and getting high with Steve Jobs.

It reminds me of communism. Communists tell people to rat on their neighbors anonymously. They tell kids to do this to their parents, and some do.

I could not resist trying to game the system. I went to a couple of areas and made some comments I knew people would love, and now I have overwhelming credit in the eyes of Krishna Berners-Lee or whatever.

It’s pretty stupid, and it shows how Satan is using the Internet to brainwash us into conformity. I guess I’ll delete my account and start a new one if I ever need Reddit again.

Lions are Supposed to Have Teeth

I have an audio Bible among the files in my car’s stereo, and I keep it on all the time when I drive. I used to listen to different kinds of music, but over time, I moved to Christian music, and now I just listen to the King James. It bothers me to turn it off. Sometimes my friend Mike has turned it off while riding in my car. I told him to stop doing that. We would be riding along, and suddenly I would notice that the atmosphere in the car was wrong, and I would realize the Bible was gone. I didn’t like it.

I almost never select books or chapters because Ford’s system for doing that is useless. Whatever plays, plays. Yesterday it was 1 Samuel, which contains the stories of Samuel and Saul.

I made a Youtube video yesterday, and in it, I discussed the fact that Christians who are failures are often able to exercise divine gifts and authority. It’s very strange. My last pastor, Albert Santiago, was an unrepentant, active child rapist, but he cast a demon out of me, and sometimes God spoke through him. In the video, I mentioned Saul, who prophesied even after God cursed his kingdom.

It was later that I went on an errand and heard 1 Samuel.

I mention Santiago’s name a lot because men who rape little girls should not have cover. Secrecy let him put a little girl in his bed over and over, and honesty might have protected her and whoever else he has raped. Maybe someone will be spared in the future because I’ve spoken or written his name. He should have been executed.

Saul was actually a great guy when his story started. He was taller and better-looking than other men, but he was humble, and he wanted to please God. The corruption that ruined him came on over time.

Early on, Saul heard a story about an Ammonite named Nahash who planned to commit an atrocity against Israel. According to extrabiblical sources, he had a practice of gouging out the right eyes of the men he defeated, and he had done this to every Jewish man in the area where he did his conquering.

Nahash came against Jews in a place called Jabesh-Gilead. They agreed to submit, but that didn’t satisfy him. He told them he would let them live only if they agreed to let him gouge their eyes out. They asked for a week to think about it, and they contacted Saul.

Here is the interesting part: when Saul heard about it, he became very angry, and the reason he was angry is that the Holy Spirit was upon him. So the Holy Spirit himself made him angry. God, who is love, and who loves forgiveness, made Saul angry. Saul got the Hebrews together and defeated Nahash, and this involved killing a lot of people. For God.

I found this interesting, because anger is one of my big concerns. I always think about the way I felt when Jesus visited me. Love poured through me like microwaves heating up a turkey breast. I have concerns that anger at other people comes from self-righteousness, fear, and lack of empathy, so I always ask God to send his love through me. I question people who seem to be hooked on what they call “righteous anger.” I generally feel that they are using God to justify something that comes from another source.

I had a friend who seemed to be angry all the time. He was very proud of work he claimed to be doing for God. He wanted to be praised for it. He got angry at me because here on my blog, I said God was not interested in our hard work and wanted to do things for us. After I wrote those things, he vanished from my life, and since then, he has had a lot of problems.

It turned out he had filled people with tall tales about his adventures and abilities and grand plans. Most of it was just hot air. He said he was building a strange Christian compound with a hurricane-proof house and a big workshop. He was known for offering people jobs. He suggested I could be his in-house attorney. His projects never panned out, though.

He told me something weird. He held himself out as some sort of nuclear engineer. He said he had designed an atomic bomb in high school, and that a state university had admitted him purely on that basis. I believed it because I had no reason not to. Some people really are nuclear engineers.

Later on, though, he admitted he couldn’t do math. You can’t design or even understand an atom bomb without math, and you definitely can’t participate in an undergrad engineering program. It’s like joining the Bolshoi when you can’t walk. No university anywhere is going to let you study engineering if you haven’t done calculus in high school.

He was never an engineer. I don’t know whether he has a college degree.

Knowing I was a physicist, he once tried to give me the idea he knew more than I did about a hand-waving calculation I had done to determine roughly how many bombs could be made from the uranium ore Saddam Hussein had. He said I was pretty close.

It was an informal Chicago-piano-tuners estimate, and I figured a nuclear engineer would know more than I did. I have not been trained to build nuclear bombs.

In retrospect, I suppose he just made up a number. He lacked the mental tools to do a calculation, but he wanted me to admire him and think he was part of the STEM gang, so he said what he said.

The fact that he told me he couldn’t do math shows that he didn’t really take engineering courses, because even a failed engineer would know that a physicist would know an engineering student has to know a lot of math. He slipped up.

He got in trouble for asking a huge, reputable company to move a ship for him. He held himself out as a successful entrepreneur when his company didn’t really have much in the way of assets or income. The company later sued him and won. They claimed they had lost nearly $800,000 preparing to do the job for him. They got a default judgment because he couldn’t afford an attorney.

Since then, he has had bypass surgery, his projects have failed to go anywhere, and I don’t think anyone would call him conspicuously blessed.

The ship was abandoned and broken up for scrap.

The story of the lawsuit is on the web, so it’s not exactly a secret.

I tried to get him to pray in tongues and basically fuel up with God, but I don’t think he ever did it. He once said, as an admission, that he was living on other people’s prayers, which is not really possible. He was way too busy for his own good.

He used to get very angry at preachers and other Christians, and he defended it. I thought he was wrong to justify his anger all the time. I felt God had used him to caution me about anger. Maybe I went too far in the direction of conciliation, though. Maybe I am fighting to suppress anger that comes from God. I am not sure.

In case anyone is wondering, while I do have the typical human desire to conceal my faults and failures, and while I have not revealed every disappointing thing about me, I am pretty much what I say I am. I do have a law degree and a physics degree. I did spend two and a half years in graduate school in physics, and I quit because I was burned out, not because I could not do the work. Although you could say I couldn’t do the work because I was burned out. You need enthusiasm to get up every day and do 6 or more hours of advanced math problems.

I was enrolled in classes when I quit, and I began trading stocks, which did not work out because it was a dumb idea.

I really did score over 150 on a battery of IQ tests, except for one where I got 142, but I give myself an asterisk for that one, because the lady who was giving the test didn’t tell me it was timed until I was way into it, and we were having a pleasant and engaging conversation while I worked. I got a perfect score on the something-or-other reading test, which impressed the lady.

The tests did not define scores above 150, so I do not have a number. Just “150+.” I have the papers somewhere to prove it. Many people are smarter than I am. I feel like I’m smart enough.

I haven’t done extraordinarily well on math tests. I got a 690 on the math SAT back before they dumbed it down. I have a history of locking up mentally on math tests, though. For some reason, I have aced practice tests and then choked when doing the real thing. I used to get perfect scores on practice quantitative GRE tests, but I got a 730 when I took the exam.

I have said I used to bench press 300 pounds easily, and this is true, but I did it on a machine, which I always point out. I also add that when I tried 220 on a real bar, I succeeded, but it was a lot harder. Machines don’t develop muscles used to balance things, and they let you put a lot more strength into movement. I maxed out most machines I used, but I didn’t impress anyone on the leg machines or the curl machine.

I wrote an article about training as a boxer, and the editor of the magazine I wrote it for didn’t believe me when I wrote that I used to do 25 one-armed pushups per side, with my feet on a chair, while working out, but I really did. I was able to do 30 or more, but I was not willing to keep going. I did 5 in his office, easily, quite some time after I had stopped exercising regularly. I know he and everyone else in the office had been talking about it and questioning my honesty, because when we came out, he announced, “He did 5.”

I think I could do one regular pushup right now if the floor was red hot and the reward was a pizza.

I did hit very, very hard as a boxer. I didn’t make that up when I said so. People who held pads for me were startled. Their eyes opened wide when I punched. I was not a good boxer, though. I did not train long enough because I got an injury, and for all I know, I would never have become any good. I didn’t skip rope well.

I practiced law successfully. I was very good at it. It was not hard for me at all. I quit to take up writing. Three books I wrote were published by a real publisher, even if they were stupid and did not make money. I chose not to return to law because I felt sure God was telling me to knock it off. I started applying to firms and doing interviews, but I quit. I did not fail. I made a choice. I was working when I decided to quit.

I really do live on a farm where I have a lot of tools and things. I built every single thing I have said I built. I really did marry a woman from Africa last year, and we did go to foreign countries to be together. When I say we are financially okay, I am not lying. I am not planning to run off to the Bahamas to get away from a pile of Mastercard debt.

I do make the best pizza and cheesecake on Earth, as far as I know. I am not lying about those things.

I have not accomplished anything in the way of a real career, what I have is mostly inherited, and I am no one to be admired, but anything I tell you I can do, I can do. I don’t make claims I can’t back up in order to impress strangers. I would be afraid of being exposed. I am not overly burdened with a craving for admiration, although I do have some desire, and I have never had much in the way of ambition.

I’m not building a big compound, and I am not going to offer anyone a job.

Now you know some good things about me, and some bad things.

Recently I wrote about an aunt who has extreme problems with insecurity. She is so hungry to be admired, it may amount to a mental illness. She has made wild, dishonest claims about her children which ended up embarrassing them; you would think she was talking about Niels Bohr and Queen Elizabeth the First. I like being admired, but I can’t imagine throwing everything else away for it.

The problem my aunt has is made even sadder by the fact that everyone knows about it. No one who knows her admires her. The things she says to gain admiration have led every one of her relatives who is still involved in her life to look down on her. They express their contempt and laugh behind her back. I guess that’s what usually happens to such people.

If she didn’t lie about her kids, people might be somewhat impressed, or at least not disillusioned, when they get to know them. Instead, people find them disappointing.

Spud Webb looks pretty good unless you’re expecting Wilt Chamberlain.

I don’t really understand narcissism, which is a root of ambition. I think you have to have a lot of ambition in order to understand ambitious people. I’ve read about men who drove themselves like slaves for years, not because they loved what they were doing, but because they wanted admiration and sex. Pete Townshend has said he became a guitarist just to get girls. I can’t grasp that mindset. I won’t even pretend I like a woman for 10 minutes to get sex! That’s too much to ask.

I don’t understand what drives Donald Trump. He was a great president, but he has done a lot of stupid things. He commits adultery with about as much hesitance as I have when I throw aluminum cans in the regular trash. He doesn’t think about his wives or kids when he cheats. He has completely neglected his children’s moral and religious educations in order to make himself rich and sexually busy. And he’s pretty typical of driven men.

I can get excited about making money for about 36 hours. After that, it wears off. I can get excited about promoting myself for about 15 minutes.

I am naturally lazy. I have told plenty of lies in my time. I am not brave. I fry chicken badly.

I think it’s better to surprise people by being better than they expect than to fail and hand them transparent excuses that make them look even worse.

I think about JFK sometimes. Democrats like to say he read 1200 words per minute, but in reality, he and a leftist journalist discussed false figures to put in a story, and JFK picked 1200 to impress them. Look it up. He was that dishonest, not to mention insecure.

He was just a fairly smart guy with a crooked family and a dishonest press establishment that backed him up. He would have been humiliated if someone had given him something to read in a short time and then made him take a test.

The other day I read that Jennifer Lawrence graduated from high school and entered college at 16. People repeat this myth. She never graduated from junior high. JUNIOR. She is out there lecturing high school graduates about how to fix the world, though.

The late Brian Dennehy lied and claimed he was a combat vet. Now it’s on his Wikipedia page forever.

A magazine said Benjamin Netanyahu had an IQ of 180. Turns out it’s not true. They recanted. But the myth is still out there. He’s a very impressive man anyway.

Radio psychology guru Dr. Laura Schlesinger is a doctor of nutrition or something. Qualified to work in a health food store, I guess. No, I’m wrong. Her doctorate is in physiology, says the web. Not psychology or medicine. So why behave like a psychologist and call yourself a doctor? I’m a doctor of law. I can literally call myself a doctor, and no one can contradict me. Should I get a radio show about medicine and bill myself as Dr. Steve?

Someone once told me that Menachem Schneerson, the rabbi some Jews thought would be the Messiah, was off-the-charts brilliant, and that he had stunned people as an engineering student at the Sorbonne. Not true. While he may have excelled at his religious studies, he had an ordinary EE diploma from the Ecole Speciale des Travaux Publiques, which is not part of the Sorbonne and is known for civil engineering, not electrical engineering. He was no Tesla. Maybe I shouldn’t mention Tesla in this context, because Nikola Tesla hated Jews.

Tesla himself, who truly did change the world with the AC motor and radio, both of which would been invented soon with or without him, has been overrated. A biography says he was 6’6″ tall, but he was really 4 inches shorter. People think he invented all sorts of currently-incomprehensible technology which will one day change the world, but that’s not true. We already have everything he invented, and some of his ideas didn’t work. He said he would prove relativity wrong and put Einstein, a Jew, in his place. That claim aged poorly.

Bill Nye calls himself the Science guy, but he’s an engineer with a bachelor’s degree.

I frequently feel annoyed at Massad Ayoob, a fading magazine writer who has a rabid following of uneducated gun nuts. Around half a century ago, he started publishing fairly useful books about self-defense, but he has made himself out to be things he is not.

He has no military background. He is not an engineer or gun designer. He has no scientific training. He has no legal training. He was a part-time cop in a microscopic all-white New Hampshire town with almost no crime, and he has never used a gun anywhere but the range. But he likes to give people the impression he’s Wyatt Earp crossed with Audie Murphy, John Moses Browning, and Gerry Spence.

He has worked as an expert witness, which a plumber or dentist could do, and which in no way qualifies him to talk about the law. He lies about his experiences in this line of work. He has argued publicly with some of the world’s greatest wound experts. He puts up Youtube videos in which he gives people legal advice which could put them in prison or execution chambers. Why not just bill yourself as a pretty good writer and competitive pistol shooter? Isn’t that enough?

Lance Armstrong’s whole life is a lie. I wonder who was really the best cyclist in the world all those years. Probably someone who ended up working in a bike shop.

It’s always irksome to read about overrated people with padded resumes. There have been people like Leonardo da Vinci, Mozart, Sergei Rachmaninoff, and John von Neumann, who have lived up to and beyond their hype, and it’s a shame to put liars on their level.

To get back on track, a guy from Scotland has a Youtube channel nearly no one watches. His name is Gordon. I watch every video he makes. He hears from God. There is no doubt about it.

Today Gordon put up a new video, and he linked it to an older video.

In the new video, he talked about 1 Samuel and the way God made Saul angry. It made an impression on him this week, just as it did me. I was shocked to see him talking about these things exactly when I was thinking about them.

The earlier video was made when coronavirus had churches locked down. In that video, Gordon was somewhat angry with lukewarm Christians in big, complacent churches. He was a little derisive. He laughed. In today’s video, he gave some background information.

The first video was made after he had a vision. He was praying, and he started walking in circles, talking about Jericho and bringing Rahab out and destroying the walls. He then saw a woman on her knees with her hands up, as though chains had just come off. He saw a tower that had fallen around her. He passed out and then found himself on his couch, groggy and unable to get it together.

He made the derisive video while he was still under the effects of the vision, and the words he said in it were prophecy, not his own words.

The big message here is that sometimes God wants you to be angry and critical. These things are not off limits. God can give you commands, words, and feelings that make you uncomfortable because they put you outside a Christian’s normal ranges.

This makes sense, because if there is one thing Satan’s children love, it’s shaming us for being critical and angry. They ignore Christian charity and the inestimable number of things we do for others, and they focus on the small amount of time we spend in anger and correction. They tell us we are not allowed to be angry or give correction. They want to pull our teeth.

It’s ridiculous, how non-Christians are always giving us Christianity lessons. I don’t teach people how to be good at sodomy or smoking weed.

Gordon says church has to be different now because we are at war. That is true. I keep saying the time for cajoling and stroking is over. The ship is sinking fast, so patience has to be redefined.

I believe this is an area where you have to use caution and rely on tongues. If you rely on tongues, you will be guided, and the things you do will be God’s will and not your own, so you will not go off into anger and criticism that come from Satan.

I was amazed that Gordon and I had the same thing on our mind on the same day.

Now I have something new to pray about.

The Only Acceptance That Helps is Acceptance of Rejection

I heard something surprising today in a video by Mark Hemans. He said he rarely goes to church.

Hemans is a healer who goes around prophesying and delivering people. A lot of his videos are shot in churches. So how can he say he doesn’t go to church?

He said his small grandson was with him recently, and they were walking to a hotel where Hemans was going to have a meeting. The grandson said the hotel was where “church” would be that night. The point of the story is to show that “church” is any place where people get together with God.

It looks like Hemans is trying to say he doesn’t go to church buildings for regular services. I don’t, either. But we are still part of the body. I haven’t been inside a church for maybe two years, but I’m not excommunicated, estranged, defrocked, or whatever. I’m as legitimate as any Christian.

The word “church” is a translation of a Greek word that referred generally to any group of people who belonged to God. It doesn’t mean an organization, building, or denomination. If you have 10 people over for prayer, you are literally in church in your own house. It’s not an imitation of church. It’s not an unauthorized church. It’s not a lower grade of church. It’s plain old church; legitimate and fully accredited with God.

Yes, you can have a real church without TV cameras. Hard to believe, I know.

In the same sermon, he talked a lot about getting impediments out of your life. As I listened, I felt like I was hearing myself. God tells everyone exactly the same things, so if you hear from him, and you listen to other people who hear from him, you will get confirmation of things you have already been told. My wife confirms such things to me every day.

He said it was important to get cursed objects out of our houses. Boy, do I agree. I threw out thousands of dollars’ worth of Cuban cigars. I threw out thousands of dollars’ worth of CD’s and vinyl. I threw out my dad’s Masonic garbage. I threw out heirlooms. I burned another religion’s scripture. I tore Rick Warren’s terrible, destructive book in half and threw it out so no one else would be hurt by it.

Unforgiveness and a desire to get reparations are like cursed objects. You have to dump them if you want to move on. It’s important to get used to being better to other people than they are to you.

He criticizes tattoos. Christians get really mad about this. They get gaudy tattoos of crosses, Hebrew words, and scriptures, and they claim God loves it.

God hates tattoos. They come from pagan cultures. American Indians, Africans, and Polynesians worship the devil, and along with other toxic cultures, they brought us tattooing. Post-Christian Europe doesn’t have much of a tattooing tradition. Apparently, once Europeans turned to God, they had more sense than to stain themselves. Tattoos are Satan’s parodies of torah verses written on animal skins.

Look up the history of tattooing. It’s about demon worship. It comes from religion, not the arts. Yoga is religion, not exercise, and tattoos are based in religion, not art. Many martial arts are religions. I had a karate instructor tell me I had to bow and make gestures when I entered his studio. A lot of things that come from exotic cultures are evil.

I’ve seen Hemans tell people the demons that were ruining their lives came in through tattoos.

Honoring God with a tattoo is like honoring him with a bong shaped like a cross.

I have no use for tattooed hipster preachers. First of all, hipsters are appeasers. They want to be cool, which is an undeniable symptom of the spirit of antichrist. If the spirit of antichrist has so much power over you he can make you turn yourself into a circus freak, the Holy Spirit is not dominant in you. He would never agree. Second, they have no knowledge. If you don’t know tattoos are bad, you are definitely wrong about a lot of other things, so I shouldn’t let you teach me.

Seems like tattoo preachers are always proud. They want people to admire them, not God. Why else would a person spend thousands of dollars decorating himself like a pagan prostitute, especially if he has a family to support?

Hemans says some people should get rid of TV and social media. He has a Facebook account, but he’s not using it to share stupid memes, read political indoctrination, or gossip. He quit using it for worldly things. He just informs people about his meetings and so on. He says he got a revelation that he should quit looking at the news, too.

I agree with all these things. In about 2015, I underwent what I call “the little rapture.” I quit Facebook and the other social diseases…I mean ministries…and I felt a whole lot better. I rarely expose myself to secular entertainment or even Christian entertainment, which is often the same thing. I think I need to keep looking for things to get rid of.

People are so ignorant and arrogant; it’s discouraging. You write about separating yourself from Satan’s world, and they call you a legalist. They have no idea what legalism is, but they’re sure that anyone who tells them to stop doing anything is a legalist.

Legalism is about substituting a game with a point system for a relationship with the Holy Spirit, who is God. You rack up points by doing things you think are good, and you avoid demerits by obeying rules that tell you not to do other things. God adds up the points, and if you score high enough, you get into heaven. Legalism is about pride. It’s about presenting God with a bill. “I did this, so you owe me help and salvation.” Job was a legalist until God corrected him.

Telling people not to do stupid things is not legalism. If I tell you not to walk through a minefield, it’s not legalism. Cursed objects, tattoos, and social sites are land mines. They give evil spirits access to you and your family.

My mother told me not to smoke. It was a rule she made. I obeyed it. My sister started smoking practically in the crib, and she got lung cancer. Was my mother being legalistic?

I wish she had made more rules, but she was a neglectful mother. I hate to say it, because I am used to idealizing her. It’s true. On the one hand, she loved me more than she loved herself, and she was extremely generous with me and she took care of me, but on the other, she and my dad didn’t teach me very much, and the neglect wrecked my life.

Hemans also talked about adopting the culture of heaven. I’ve been talking about this a lot this month. You can read things I’ve written about it recently. God really does tell us all the same things. The problem is that we reject speaking in tongues, so he doesn’t get many opportunities to talk to us. The ones who listen learn a lot, and when they try to share it, the others try to kill them.

Sooner or later, I will see some preacher somewhere telling people something else God told me: the rapture is not just a one-time event; it’s a process. God is not going to come down and pull you off the top of a whore. He’s not going to pull naked men out of a bathhouse. He’s not going to lift Christians out of yoga studios or Antifa meetings because at some point in the past they raised their hands for 15 seconds while watching Joel Osteen. He’s going to take people who are already sick of this place, not the ones who love it.

The Bible says God gives people the desires of their hearts. This isn’t just true for Christians. People who desire to be left alone by God will get their wish.

“He who loves his life will lose it.” This verse doesn’t mean you should be suicidal. It means you should love heaven and hate the culture of Earth. How can anyone question this? Jesus says Satan is the god of this world. How can you be conformed to God’s nature and not hate the culture of a world Satan rules? It’s not possible.

If you want to be taken in the rapture, you have to be ready to go. By the time Jesus comes, you should have gotten sick of TV, popular music, the culture of the Internet, drugs, drunkenness, lewdness, vengefulness, ostentation, pride, greed, leftism, feminism, and all the other nasty things worldly people love.

When I felt I needed to turn back to God, I resisted because I was afraid I’d become a fanatic again. In reality, fanaticism is the best thing that happened to me. It saved me and freed me from people and situations that made me miserable. The Bible says to love God with all your heart, mind, and strength. How is that not extreme?

I’m very glad to see someone confirm the things I’ve been told. I wish there was a way to convince more people to tap into the information pipeline. We could be much more helpful to each other.

Trump NFT’s: I Miss Out on the Ground Floor Again

I know virtually nothing about nonfungible tokens, but I wish I had bought a Trump NFT this week. I think they’re hilarious.

If you haven’t heard about these tokens, it’s partly because the big announcement was made on Truth Social, where information goes to die.

For people with even less knowledge than I, if any exist, I will impart the few facts I know. An NFT is a piece of digital currency, so I suppose that means it only exists as a piece of code. A method of authenticating these things has been created, and I won’t tell you what it is because I don’t care enough to find out for myself. My understanding is that if you store your money in NFT’s, you can prevent the IRS from finding out you have it. I’m not sure, though.

I don’t like NFT’s because my feeling is that they can evaporate without notice, leaving you with FN, or fungible nothing.

Stocks can also evaporate, and the dollar can, too, except for dollars made of silver and gold. Most dollars have no physical existence. Only a tiny percentage have been turned into bills and coins. The rest are imaginary, stored as numbers in computers all over the world. I don’t see how that can work, but it’s the truth. The dollar can plummet, but I think it’s less likely to do so than an imaginary coin with a dog’s picture on it.

I don’t know how NFT offerings go. Based on my knowledge of the unfairness of the world, I would guess they go like stock offerings. In a stock offering, a company sells shares to the public, and brokerages see to it that only people who are already rich can buy them. Then the prices skyrocket overnight, and the rest of us get to come in, buy shares, and watch the prices collapse.

A quick scan of the web suggests that nearly all of the people who make money from NFT’s are the ones who create or sell them. That is exactly what I would have predicted. Completely consistent with my view of the world. So probably, there are a few thousand lucky consumers who got rich buying NFT’s before they became trendy, and now the only way to profit is to be in the creation and sales business. And the whole business is propped up by suckers who buy NFT’s that generally don’t work out.

By the time suckers find out about things that make money, the money has usually gotten a lot harder to make.

Sounds like the whole thing eventually becomes a Ponzi scheme.

I’ve probably already said things that aren’t correct, so I guess I’ll stop “explaining.”

This week, Donald Trump (PBUH) issued his own NFT, and it is making leftists boiling mad. Like they weren’t already. I Googled to try to find out what it was and where to get one, but it looks like the leftweb has ganged up to make this information very hard to find. Google “buy Trump NFT,” and believe it or not, you won’t get much useful input at all. If somebody were selling a Hunter Biden NFT or an NFT with Obama’s dog on it, similar Googling would produce useful results immediately, so I’m not sure what’s going on.

If Obama issued an NFT with a grainy picture of his butt on it, Google would be drowning in positive content, the NFT would be all over every news site, and news stories would tell people where to get them. TV shows would be full of segments about them, disguised as entertainment or news but intended to boost sales.

Instead of getting information about the NFT and where to get it, I was inundated with links and excerpts excoriating Trump, ridiculing his NFT, and insisting its release was a failure.

I didn’t see any stories about the tokens being “dangerous” or “violence,” but I’m sure they are out there. I’m sure there are people claiming they’ve sustained terrible emotional damage.

Conversing with the leftist world about Trump is like stabbing a rabid dog with a red-hot fork. You can’t even have a conversation about harmless facts.

Was the release a failure? Doesn’t look that way to me. The web admits the NFT’s sold out instantly, and sources suggest $230 is a typical price for an NFT that sold initially for $99. The cheapest ones I’m seeing run almost $500. Some of the tokens are unusual, and they have sold for $24,000. How is this a failure?

There are 45,000 Trumpcoins (“Trumpcoin”?) out there, and their value is probably in the hundreds of millions of dollars. It will probably increase, because Trump is a fleeting phenomenon, and people like me would love to have these NFT’s just to remember him.

If I bought a ton of manure sculpted into a bust of Joe Biden for $99 and sold it immediately for $230, I would be thrilled. If I bought Apple for $99 and sold it the next day for $230, I would be thrilled. Why would I feel bad about selling a $99 Trump token for $230?

After several minutes of Googling, I learned that there is a website called Opensea, and you can buy various NFT’s there. I took a look at it, and it appears to be a useless site for anyone who isn’t in the game already. The prices are listed in Ethereums. An Ethereum is an NFT, so how do I buy the Trump NFT or an Ethereum if I don’t already have an NFT? I assume there is some way around it, but I haven’t looked yet and probably won’t.

That’s some catch, that catch-22.

CNN says, “Donald Trump’s NFT superhero trading cards timed the market all wrong.” So a 130% profit is what you get in one day if you time the market wrong. Timing the market right must turn you into Jeff Bezos in a week.

The Washington Post says, “Trump NFTs are not art. Unless you consider grifting an art form.” That’s a weird comment. The cards feature a funny painting (digital or whatever) of Trump, defiantly facing the viewer. Some cards feature him in cowboy hats. Others show him in a sort of Iron Man suit. Who claimed this was serious art? I’m sure no one ever did. Even if it happened, who cares? The purpose of the issue isn’t to distribute digital art. It’s to make money.

Is the Dogecoin fine art? Was that the purpose? Is any NFT fine art? I know I’ve missed nearly all the memos, but selling anything digital as fine art makes no sense at all. What good is it for me to create and sell a digital Mona Lisa if you can copy it to your hard drive in a hundred-thousandth of a second and email a million copies around the world? Maybe those copies won’t be authorized, but any idiot will still be able to view them and use them as his Windows home screen.

Even if an NFT featuring art is collectible because it’s unique, the quality of the art is irrelevant. The scarcity is what makes it valuable.

Opensea features photos of available Trumpcoins. Can’t you just download those photos? Okay, they may not be high-resolution, but does that matter when you’re looking at a photo of a picture of Trump dressed like a Marvel character?

Here’s a Trumpcoin that just sold for 15 Ethere…ae? Ums? That’s nearly $18,000. Keith Olbermann must be under sedation today.

Why call it grifting? Grifting is fraud. Why is Trump’s NFT any more fraudulent than all the other NFT’s? They’re all digital Beanie Babies and tulip bulbs. People issue them because they know they can spend nearly nothing creating something collectors will snap up and turn into a valuable asset. The whole thing is based on a desire to make money, but how is it dishonest? Everyone knows how it works.

Rolling Stone, the stoner rag that still contends Hunter Thompson was a real journalist, which is about like claiming Charlie Sheen is a journalist, says, “‘I Can’t Watch This’: Even Die-Hard Trump Allies Think His NFTs Are Cringe.”

“Cringe” is not an adjective. Grow up. Don’t you have editors? As for Trump allies, he surrounded himself with a lot of opportunistic people of fragile loyalty, and they have been subjected to insane pressure to turn on him. Naturally, some of them have flipped. What about all the Trump allies who think the NFT is funny and harmless? Count me in that group, not that I make any effort to promote Trump these days.

This is Trump. He has always been a showman. He has always loved fun. He has always loved controversy. He likes money. What did people expect?

What really angers the leftists? Probably the knowledge that the NFT’s, which they can’t trace, tax, or take away, will be worth tons of money soon. They’ll probably go into the billions at some point, and Trump will get some of that. This retards the left’s berserk efforts to starve him and his children.

Surely Trump bought some of these things. He would have to be nuts not to.

If there is anyone who needs concealable assets and money to pay armed security, it’s the Trump family. American leftists are determined to do them the way their predecessors did Czar Nicholas II and his children.

Leftists lie awake every night, tormented by visions of an improbable 2024 Trump victory. Their 2024 campaign started on the day Biden won. They will not stop reviling this man and everything he is associated with, ever. They’ll probably slow down a little when he fails to get the nomination, but they will never quit. Mental illness doesn’t go away by itself.

Trump isn’t coming back. He will be too old to run, and the GOP will see to it that he isn’t nominated. They’re already working on it. People need to quit worrying about it. Personally, I want to see DeSantis run. He’s like Trump with most of the problems filtered out.

TDS comes from the spirit world. Satan sees Trump as a friend of the church and Israel, not to mention the unborn, so he stirs up the vulnerable people he can control. Reasonable dialogue will not change anything. If leftists were reasonable, they wouldn’t run around claiming disagreeing with them is violence. Lunacy has been mainstreamed.

It’s too late for me to get my own Trumpcoin, so I guess I’ll forget about it. They have no physical existence anyway, so I couldn’t display one on my workshop wall or otherwise enjoy it.

I hope they become insanely valuable. I hope they start selling for seven figures each. I hope Trump kept a thousand of the best ones for himself. Of course, I also hope God reaches him and his enemies and helps bring agreement in Him to whoever is willing to receive it.

More

An hour into my career as a crypto expert of global standing, I have already discovered a major flaw in my grasp of the topic. Evidently, an NFT is not the same thing as cryptocurrency.

It looks like Dogecoin, as an example, is just currency, whereas an NFT is a unique digital object, and you can pay for an NFT with cryptocurrency. So I guess NFT’s are digital Beanie Babies and cryptocurrencies are sort of like stocks that aren’t backed by companies with income and assets. So when you buy a digital coin, you’re buying stock in nothing.

In the case of Trumpcoin, the asset is the digital file representing the funny picture.

On the whole, I would say give me commercial real estate.

“A Trip Through a Sewer in a Glass-Bottomed Boat”

Ordinarily, I don’t watch secular entertainment, but the other day, I felt an urge to watch the movie Le Mans. This is a 1971 film starring Steve McQueen. He plays a race driver participating in the yearly 24-hour race. I could not rent this movie on Youtube, so first, I rented Grand Prix, a 1966 movie featuring James Garner. It’s about drivers going through a series on the famous Formula One circuit. The next day, I found Le Mans on Amazon Prime, so I watched it, too.

Last night, I started to watch The Front Page. This is a movie based on a play written by a couple of leftists. One, Ben Hecht, was a newspaperman before he wrote the play. The movie has been remade several times. I watched the 1931 version which is now in the public domain.

I felt it was okay with God for me to watch this stuff. I removed Amazon Prime from my TV afterward.

James Garner was a folksy, self-deprecating, appealing actor. On the other hand, he was also a fierce leftist who smoked dope all the time. He was also very litigious, and he got into a road rage fight in which a former Army Captain and Green Beret named Aubrey Williams put him in the hospital. Steve McQueen seems to have been less politically involved, but he smoked dope a lot, too, and he treated women very, very badly.

Garner’s fight may not have been his fault, but the stories don’t smell good, and his own accounts vary. The man who beat him up was a veteran with no criminal record, and he provided a pretty credible story. He said he walked up to Garner’s car after they got into a dispute while driving, and Garner grabbed his necklace and jerked it down, banging his head against the roof of Garner’s trademark Firebird and putting him in a bad position.

This is exactly the kind of dirty trick a smart aggressor might pull, and it’s not one I have heard of elsewhere, so I am skeptical of claims Williams made it up. If it were me, and I were inclined to lie, I would just say he opened his door into me, jumped out, and started swinging.

In one of his varying accounts, Garner admitted he pulled the necklace trick, so you have to wonder what to believe. He claimed he did it in self-defense.

Williams had his sister with him, she jumped in, and they put Garner on the ground and broke his tailbone. Later, Williams was convicted of a crime. Of course, juries are known to be gullible, and who would convict Jim Rockford in California?

Maybe Garner told the truth, but it sounds fishy. Williams was also accused of stealing gold chains from Garner, so that diminishes his own credibility.

Williams is black, so that may have factored into his conviction and the acceptance of Garner’s dubious account. Afterward, he kept it classy, believe it or not. He said, “I used to really like him. I didn’t even recognize him during this encounter. I didn’t realize he was involved until I read about it the next day.”

In 1964, Garner, an ardent environmentalist, approached and threatened a 65-year-old politician who was three inches shorter than he was. The disagreement was about a property that was going to be developed. Garner was about 44, and he was 6’3″ tall. The police had to step in and prevent a fight, or more likely, a one-sided beating. Nice people don’t beat up old men.

Today, at least in Florida, doing what Garner did is a felony.

There is something about Garner I just don’t like. I feel like something is not right. I don’t trust his reputation.

McQueen would probably win a poll for coolest actor of all time. He was the highest-paid actor of his day. Female co-stars practically begged him to have sex with them, and he often agreed. He had the ability to do some of the impressive things his characters did on screen. He was so good with a motorcycle, he did stunts for The Great Escape. They could have used stuntmen, but it was too hard to find people as skilled as he was. He actually had to be filmed on two motorcycles, as Army Air Forces pilot Hilts and as a Nazi, chasing himself. He was also a skilled car racer. He was a fairly serious martial artist. When he wore things, other men bought them. Men are still paying huge sums to have old Ford Mustangs fixed up to look like the one he drove in Bullitt. He wore a big ugly Tag Heuer Monaco watch in Grand Prix, and they were still using him in ads long after he died.

McQueen and his teammate came in second at Sebring in 1970, so he was a legitimate pro racer, like Paul Newman. He’s not a duffer like Tom Cruise, who has raced without much success.

McQueen was a heavy smoker and drug user. He killed Ali McGraw’s career by forcing her to quit working at her peak so she could be a housewife. He beat his first wife and also put a gun to her head to make her confess an affair.

Garner was similar in some ways, but he had a real marriage and didn’t achieve the heights McQueen did. He had a brown belt in karate. He could have been a pro golfer had he chosen. When he trained for Grand Prix, his teacher discovered he had extraordinary talent, and he claimed he could have been better than most of the top F1 drivers. Garner went on to race cars in his spare time.

Grand Prix was not a great movie. Pete Aron, Garner’s character, was involved in an incident involving a teammate. The teammate wanted to pass Aron in Monaco, and Aron resisted, which was a faux pas. Eventually, Aron let him pass, but the teammate’s car hit his rear wheel, and both cars were wrecked. The teammate ended up with serious injuries, and he struggled to get back to work before the end of the season. He blamed Aron for his injuries.

The teammate’s wife hated racing because she feared her husband would die. She left him after the accident, and she then began having sex with Aron, making things much worse.

That about sums it up. Various racers had sex with various women. The teammate came back to work. An older racer died in a wreck.

The teammate’s wife asked a great question. She asked Aron why men risked their lives for something unimportant. Aron told her it was very important to them. His explanation was that he was only alive when he was racing. The rest of the time, he was just waiting.

Le Mans had even less depth. Steve McQueen played Michael Delaney, a Porsche driver. He had a rivalry with a Ferrari driver named Stahler. The previous year, Delaney had been involved in an accident in which a woman’s husband died. The woman returned the next year to see Delaney and the others drive.

Delaney wrecked again, ruining his car. He and the widow had some boring conversations and ended up in his trailer. His team’s manager came in and told Delaney he had to drive another team member’s car because he was the only hope of a Porsche victory. Delaney left the trailer, drove hard, and came in second. He and the widow never made it into bed.

So why write about two bad movies?

I got a message: people do stupid things with their lives. We strive for earthly glory. We sacrifice important things, including our bodies themselves, for what amounts to garbage in the long view.

Who won the Formula One championship in 2005? No one cares. How much good did it do other people? Was anyone saved from damnation? Did anyone get a miraculous healing? Were any addicts delivered? Were the poor fed? Did unwanted kids get families?

Some guy who drove a car got a little richer. Some endorsements were sold. Some big, fat companies that sold trivial things got more publicity. Then the next season came along, and the champion was not the champion any more. He had to compete again.

People are like monkeys, and Satan is the monkey trainer. He waves shiny prizes that have no lasting value, and we cut each other’s throats to get them. In the process, we give up our relationships with God, along with Spirit-driven accomplishments that would have stayed with us for eternity. We give up the chance to accumulate new brothers and sisters to take with us to heaven. We give up the chance to end suffering and set people free.

These movies reminded me of my dislike of professional sports. Ignorant people do not know that pro sports and God have been at odds since before Jesus. There are actually Christians who think football teaches people to be closer to God, which is the opposite of correct. Football teaches aggression, violence, pride, cheating, greed, lust, and obsession with fleeting things.

The Greeks conquered Israel, and they instituted nude athletic competitions. Social-climbing Jews joined in, defying Yahweh and the priests, and they even tried to undo their circumcisions. Look up “Hellenism” and find out about it. It was a very big problem. Athletes have been distracting people and teaching children destructive values for millennia, not decades.

The characters in these movies treated themselves like garbage. They made themselves disposable. They served a vain purpose for a few years, helping on one except themselves.

As for The Front Page, it disturbed me because it made me realize I did not hate leftism enough. After I watched, I apologized to God for this. God really hates leftism. Satan was the first leftist, and all leftists are his children.

Let me tell you about Sacco and Vanzetti, whose story was one of the motivations behind The Front Page.

Believe it or not, Italian immigrants were a big problem a hundred years ago. I used to think Italians formed social groups to defend the reputation of their ethnicity because of the mob, but there is more to it than that. Italy sent us a large number of terrorists who, instead of kissing the ground of the country that saved them, and instead of working to be good citizens, murdered a lot of American citizens and tried to destroy the government.

For some reason, anarchism developed a following in Italy. Anarchism is the ultimate leftistm. Anarchists believe there is no such thing as a legitimate government.

I’ll be blunt. You have to be an utter imbecile to be an anarchist.

Am I saying you’re an imbecile because you don’t like the government? No. I don’t like the government, either. I’m saying you’re an imbecile because you think it’s possible for human beings to exist without government.

If you put 10 strangers in a locked compound, a month later, they will form a government. We will always form governments. People want to control each other. They want to protect themselves from other people. They naturally form gangs and generate leaders in order to achieve these goals.

A government is just a gang with a flag.

Anarchists believe they can get rid of the government and then live government-free lives. That is beyond asinine. Kill every government employee in the United States today, and new governments will start to spring up in under 24 hours. And they will make you miss the government you eliminated, because they will be incompetent and much more cruel and amoral than an established government that has been honed over centuries.

It’s not just people. Put chickens or dogs together, and they form hierarchies.

The true choice isn’t between government and no government. It’s between different governments.

Only true idiots can be anarchists. It is incomprehensible that anyone can be that stupid.

Sacco and Vanzetti were part of a faction that killed all sorts of people. They set off a lot of bombs.

They were convicted of murder. Sacco shot someone, and Vanzetti was his partner. They were guilty as hell. Ballistics tests and witnesses prove it.

Still, their convictions and executions are controversial. There were supposedly improprieties in their trials. I don’t know the details. I am willing to stipulate that they may have been tried unfairly. The fact remains: they were worthless, despicable, dangerous human beings, and their kind needed to be sent a message. They deserved execution, and their executions probably did America a lot of good.

You can wrong a murderer by trying him unfairly and executing him. Doing such things is wrong, and we have to fight corruption in the justice system, but unfair trials don’t make murderers innocent. Oswald was lynched by Jack Ruby, but he was still guilty.

Leftists have been whining about Sacco and Vanzetti for decades. They have turned them into martyrs and heroes. Michael Dukakis, the inept former governor of Massachusetts went so far as to proclaim a day in their honor without consulting or according any courtesy to the families of the victims.

The Front Page is about Earl Williams, a leftist who is about to be executed for murdering a policeman. Williams is portrayed as a sweet, impressionable little man. A cuddly, vulnerable murderer you naturally want to hug. Most of the action takes place in a room at the penitentiary set aside for journalists.

The journalists are extremely vile. They’re supposed to be funny, but they’re disgusting. As they call their papers to send in stories, they lie without the slightest hesitation. They make sick jokes about the upcoming hanging. A prostitute who tried to help Williams shows up to criticize them for their callousness, and they ridicule her until she jumps out of a window. A paid shrink shows up to analyze Williams, and Williams shoots him. They joke about that while he’s in the operating room.

The interesting thing is that Ben Hecht knew the subject matter. He was writing about journalists as he had known them. I assume he exaggerated their faults to some extent, but he must have based their personalities on his real life experiences. Watching the movie will make you wish they were the ones being hanged.

They remind me of comedians. Comedians tend to be disgusting people.

I quit watching after a while. The characters were off-putting, and the movie was poorly done compared to the Cary Grant version.

Afterward, I read up on Sacco and Vanzetti, and I thought about Ben Hecht and the way he had portrayed his former colleagues.

It made me hate leftism more than ever. I certainly understand why people would be upset over an unfair trial, regardless of who the defendant was. But lionizing a couple of dangerous, vicious criminals who were also ungrateful and toxic immigrants? How can anyone do that?

I didn’t like the idea of writing a movie that made terrorists look good, and I didn’t like the godless, hellbound journalists. I hated their cynicism and the pleasure they took in the suffering, injuries, and deaths of others.

The word “leftism” comes from the French Revolution, but the concept is far older. It’s just rebellion. Any hierarchy that doesn’t have God at the apex is leftist.

When Satan tempted Eve, it was an act of leftism. Adam and Eve were leftists. They rebelled against their only legitimate authority.

The best government is a face-to-face relationship with God. After that comes submission to prophets and priests who obey God. After that comes submission to kings who honor God. After that comes rule by godly assemblies. After that come various forms of democracy, which is a degenerate and evil institution.

Adam was under the best government. Since then, things have gotten worse and worse. The Jews had prophets and priests, and that wasn’t bad, but they stupidly demanded a king. When the time of kings ended on Earth, the world descended into backward systems which put nations at the mercy of every moron who could pull a handle and cast a vote.

Moses was chosen directly by God. David was anointed by a prophet. Hitler was elected. Something to think about.

It’s astounding, where leftism and hatred of God’s authority has taken us. In places of power, we now have spectacular degenerates whose very nature we could not have conceived in the near past.

Have you seen the amazing specimen Biden appointed to be his deputy assistant secretary for spent fuel and waste disposition in the Office of Nuclear Energy? You have probably been reading about him. His name is Sam Brinton.

Brinton has disclaimed his proper gender, calling himself nonbinary. It is impossible to figure out what he is trying to be. I will post a photo. It’s fair use.

What exactly is this?

As you may know, he has been fired for stealing luggage repeatedly. Gay men like luxury goods. I don’t know if the bags were Vuitton or what, but it makes sense that a person like this would want luxury bags.

Brinton claims to have “survived” brutal conversion therapy, but a person who interviewed him says his story does not check out.

He’s involved with our children. This freakish person. He helped create official policy enabling schools to hide children’s sexual confusion from their parents. Fox says he:

played a key role in developing a model school policy adopted in multiple states that instructs school districts to keep “unaffirming” parents in the dark about a potentially suicidal child’s gender identity or sexual orientation.

Look at him. And if you live in a place where his recommendations have been adopted, he has power over your relationship with your children. YOUR children. Not the states.

We paid him to do this. We voted for the people who gave him the power.

I live in a country where we paid this creature to give government the power to hide and nurture sexual perversion–abomination–in our children. It is inconceivable to me that anyone could be anything but shocked and distressed to know this happened.

It’s going to get much worse. If Jesus tarries, we will see creatures like this in the Oval Office. There is no limit to the oddities and abominations we can come up with and empower with Satan’s help.

Yesterday and today Rhodah and I were talking about the rapture. I told her I felt bad because I ate a lot of ice cream, but I said part of me doesn’t care, because I feel like the world is ending, so what difference does it make what I eat?

Today we tried to think of the things we would eat if we heard the rapture trumpet blow. I said I would rush to the freezer and open the ice cream. Or I’d be lifted to heaven with a slice of pizza in each hand. Of course, we were kidding, and we had some laughs, but the rapture will come, and most of the things people do in the weeks leading up to it won’t matter. They will be preparing, well or counterproductively, for a future that will not come.

If you quit working out right before the rapture, no big deal. You won’t be here long enough to go flabby and feel bad about it. If you spend your retirement money, no big deal. Stop mowing your yard? No big deal.

Stop touching up your roots. The rapture is coming. Don’t plant your crops. The rapture is coming. Don’t show up for jury duty. Speed. Quit your job. Throw out your contraceptives.

I’m not suggesting these things. Just thinking about actions that will stop mattering at some point.

People will be pulled out of jail cells, defendants’ chairs, operating rooms, and even wombs. More abortions will take place on that day than on any other day in the history of the world. God will have to remove the innocent from the wombs of degenerate women.

We also tried to think of things we would buy if we had all the money in the world. I had a hard time coming up with anything. Finally, I blurted it out. “I’ll start flying business class!” Not even first class. The extra money doesn’t seem to buy you much.

I thought of business class because I take a lot of long flights, and I really hate flying coach, but paying $5000 or more for one seat is more than I am willing to consider at the moment. Put a billion in my account, and I’ll spring for it.

I said I would also get Rhodah more rubies, but not really big ones, because ostentation is wrong.

I would make sure my home was in top shape, and I would probably try to move to Tennessee

That’s about it. No Lamborghinis. No gold Rolexes. No more Zegna suits.

To get back to the rapture, I really do not want to be here when the cabinet consists of a bunch of smirking, effeminate bald men with bro staches and tacky prom dresses.

I care less and less to be involved with this world, and I am having a hard time motivating myself to do anything but pray, eat, and work to bring my wife home. I assume this will pass and the rapture will come much later than I hope, because this is how things have worked so far, but my feelings are real.

I can’t wait for the day when it finally happens.

Not the Cure for Jet Lag

It’s gradually sinking in: I have nephews.

It somehow seems unfair that people automatically become my relatives just because I marry someone, but I have discovered that this is the way it works. My wife has a couple of sisters, and both have kids. Her sister became a grandmother at 38, and my wife has been a great aunt since 2020. That makes me a great uncle, which is practically the same thing as a grandfather, so I feel like I should be shopping for a coffin and some Mephisto shoes.

I can’t help feeling that uncle status should involve some kind of participation or consent, but it doesn’t. You marry someone, and BANG, there it is. A label. And an obligation to buy Christmas gifts. I guess.

Rhodah does not have parents any more. It’s terrible that they died young, of course, but I have to admit that it made things easier for me. Rhodah is younger than I am, so it might have been awkward if I had had to butter her parents up. It would feel wrong, currying favor with my father-in-law by taking him to Universal Studios or buying him a skateboard.

Rhodah is helping her sister and brother-in-law move to Lusaka, the capital city I had no idea Zambia had until last year. As a result, they and their 4 sons have had to stay with Rhodah this week.

To imagine what Rhodah is going through, consider some facts. She spent around 12 days in Singapore, 8 time zones away, and then she took a 21-hour trip home on crowded planes. She arrived to a a spotless house and started trying to sleep. A few days later, the Fresh Princes of Lusaka and their parents arrived.

The house is a disaster now. The air conditioner remote is broken. The living room rug, which had just been cleaned, is filthy. Books which had been stored neatly on shelves are lying in random locations. Everything is dirty. And Rhodah has had to share a bed with a nephew who kicks like a mule. Fortunately, that stops. When he gets up at 5 a.m.

I told her this was a great chance to teach them how to clean. Their mother weighs about 35 pounds, so they need to start helping her. I don’t think my suggestion will be implemented.

My mother did not teach my sister or me much of anything about responsibility, so we both became slobs, and my mother did a lot more work than she should have. It’s kind of ironic. She resented her own mother for making her and her sisters clean the house, and she resolved not to teach her daughter to clean. I think I was spared because I was a male. In Kentucky, men didn’t do anything around the house. The women used to stand and serve meals while the men ate, and the women ate later. My mother didn’t want her daughter to be a slave to a husband, but by teaching her to be slovenly, she ended up extending her own servitude.

I was probably around 6 when my mother finally taught me to tie my own shoes. She was mad at me, and she said she couldn’t keep doing it for me. Thing is, she had no reason to be mad at me. I would have done whatever she wanted, but she chose not to teach me, so she got what she deserved.

I now believe kids should be taught to be clean and neat and capable as early as possible. I have no intention of wiping a 5-year-old’s rear end when he can, and should, do it himself. Very young kids can put toys away and throw dirty clothes in hampers. It’s not integral calculus, and it’s pretty obvious that the ability to get things done and look after oneself is a big asset in life.

I think we wait too long to teach kids things. When I was a kid, someone taught me a little bit about multiplication a few years early, and I had no trouble understanding the concept. Then, instead of moving on to greater things, I stagnated until school got around to covering the same material.

I could have been years ahead in math, but no one had the good sense to teach me. I was also taught to read at least three times. My mother taught me when I was very young. Then I went to kindergarten and relearned, using an asinine woke system called ITA which replaced real spelling with moronic leftist letters that had to be unlearned later. Then they taught me real reading again. I remember arguing with the other kids, telling them the real spellings of words were wrong.

I should have been taught real English at age three and then been given a lot of stuff to read.

By waiting to teach me things I was obviously capable of learning, people set me back in life and reinforced my natural laziness, and they also taught me to hate school, which was unbelievably boring.

Now I say beat the little ones until they pick up their toys, and teach them anything their tiny heads can absorb. They will bless you for it later, and if you die while they’re young, they will have strengths that will help them stay afloat.

Some people say kids don’t have enough free time and they need hours and hours to play. Nonsense. What they have is too much after-school status garbage. Your kids should not be doing gymnastics 4 hours a day. They should not be training to be Olympic athletes or practicing the piano until 9 p.m. These things are true. But you don’t bring a kid home from school and just turn him loose with the TV remote and the dirty magazines he knows you hide in your closet. Kids should have to do chores. They should do things for spending money. They shouldn’t just wander around until dinner time, looking for things to set on fire or break.

When I was a kid, my friends and I did healthy things like playing football and various forms of baseball, but we also abused lizards, shot songbirds with BB guns, burned things, took expensive things apart and could not put them back together, made our own fireworks, played with guns, killed fish we could not eat, trespassed, committed acts of vandalism, and wasted our time in other ways. And we were fairly well-behaved by local standards. This is what “unstructured play” really is when parents are lazy and uninvolved.

Spoiling kids is one of the worst forms of neglect.

The concept of the importance of “unstructured play” comes from leftists, so naturally, it’s extremely destructive. When street gangs in New York rape women and beat them to death, it’s unstructured play.

Unstructured play is a symptom of fatherlessness. When you’re a kid and you don’t know what to do with yourself or how to act, it’s because your father has failed you. Fatherless kids go to prison, end up in rehab, die young, and so on. A father is supposed to prevent you from becoming a directionless idiot. Jews have successful children because Jewish fathers are involved. People from my culture are lucky if their kids have jobs at Walmart.

Fatherlessness is an extremely important concept in Christianity, but no one teaches about it correctly.

Anyway, Rhodah will not get any peace until tonight, and she will still have to sleep one night in a dirty house. Then she’ll have to pay to get her rug and car cleaned.

The really funny thing about all this is that Rhodah looks forward to having children. I’m on board, but I believe I have a better understanding of what she is in for than she does.

No point in thinking about it too much. There is nothing that can be done. Raising children will be challenging no matter what. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.

I can tell the nephews are a lot of fun. The dirt and disorder don’t change that. It’s too bad they will always be thousands of miles away.

I feel like God is making me a patriarch, which is something I never expected or wanted to be. I have two sisters-in-law, 5 nephews, a niece, and a great-nephew. I have two godchildren. A friend whose dad has abandoned his family has 5 kids who appear to think I’m their grandfather, and one of them is my goddaughter. She sends me funny little texts out of nowhere and tells her family she wants to visit my house again.

My mother’s father was the patriarch in my family. He had the big house everyone ran to for shelter. He helped all of us when we needed it. Now I’m the one with the big house and the tractors and the gun room and the cattle, and sometimes I can be helpful.

There are 5 male grandchildren, and none of the others have taken this role. Two seem to have no interest in helping anyone else. One is a devoted single father but would never do anything for anyone outside his own family. The remaining one is living a normal and profitable life in the financial industry, with a wife and, I believe, two daughters. No one ever thinks of calling him when there’s a problem. He has nothing to do with the family now.

I have this feeling that a patriarch is a tall bald guy with long hair and a white beard, who always knows what to do. I don’t always know what to do. I have made a lot of bad decisions. I have not made any effort to build a family, develop an estate, or become a leader. But here I am.

It’s good to be important to people. I never saw it coming. It beats spending the rest of my life alone, flying around the world on fishing trips or something.

I think some people may come to my funeral!

“Smitty,” They call Me

Reader LauraW posted some interesting comments about my recent dealings with my elderly aunt.

My grandparents left some property to their descendants, and my 78-year-old aunt is in charge of getting rid of it and distributing the proceeds. She should have been finished with nearly everything in about 2012. She doesn’t provide bank statements or reports, and she says she doesn’t have to, which is something most prosecutors would disagree with.

She has Parkinson’s, and her health is very, very bad. She has trouble speaking and walking. She has been hospitalized at least once. Her husband is 89 and appears to be senile. He is also in bad health, and he is not expected to stay out of assisted living long. He takes care of my aunt, so a crisis is expected soon.

My aunt has two grown children. I can’t imagine her son offering to care for her. It would be very unlike him. I think her daughter and her son-in-law would want to do the right thing, but they have kids to deal with, and their house is not that big. In all likelihood, my aunt will have to choose between 24-hour live-in help or the local nursing home.

While I was in Singapore, my aunt texted me and said I needed to contact her right away about a property she wanted to sell, and I responded, saying I was in the process of flying home and I would try to contact her the next day. When I arrived, I called her. She was very angry with me from the second she answered the phone. She was angry with me for taking a trip, and she demanded to know why I had done it.

She asked me who goes on vacation during November, as though I had done it to offend her, personally. Well, can anyone think of a day in November when people like to travel? And who calls his aunt for permission to leave town? No one thinks, “I want to go to Fiji, so I better call all my elderly relatives who almost never talk to me.”

While we were talking, I spoke very bluntly about her poor performance, but I was not rude. She apparently felt she was being attacked personally. She said a lot of very insulting things about me which were shocking and untrue, and she speculated that I was poor and desperate and had no one in my life except a “sorry dog.” Paradoxically, she also criticized me for bragging that I was “filthy rich,” which I did not do. I didn’t tell her anything about my financial situation.

You can read more details in an earlier post.

LauraW says she was an RN, and she worked with psych patients and old people. She said urinary tract infections sometimes cause old people to go nuts, and she said antibiotics bring them back.

I don’t know anything about my aunt’s urinary health. We are not close these days, and even if we were, I would not be connected with her care in any way. She has her husband and children, and aside from that, she is not inclined to take advice.

I decided to look up Parkinson’s. I knew it caused dementia and other mental problems, but that was about the sum of my knowledge.

Parkinson’s is incurable and fatal. The web says it isn’t fatal, but that’s not really true, because it causes problems that shorten life. When it sets in in late middle age, you can expect to live about 20 more years, depending on the breaks. My aunt is at the upper range of that period now.

When I was a kid, and people got fatal diseases, doctors either told them they were going to die, or they told their families and let the families keep them in the dark. Now, the fashionable thing is to refuse to say conditions are fatal. It doesn’t mean they’re not. It just means the medical establishment has developed a bias against saying so. The official dogma appears to be that Parkinson’s isn’t fatal, but on the other hand, you can find all sorts of sites discussing deaths caused by Parkinson’s, so, yes, it’s fatal, unless something else gets you first. The same could be said of any fatal disease. You can get rabies and die from an unrelated heart attack.

We think of Parkinson’s as something that causes tremors, but it also causes hallucinations, delusions, and dementia.

I found out it can make people paranoid and likely to argue. They may become physically violent.

It is common for people with Parkinson’s to see things that aren’t there, like brightly-colored animals.

My aunt said some weird things to me, causing me to wonder if she was experiencing psychosis. She seemed panicked because I was questioning her actions as my fiduciary. Panicked people often lash out. Proud people with dementia do this when you question their faculties.

She seemed to feel it would help if she criticized my life to make me feel like a loser. Thing is, she doesn’t know much about my life because her side of the family started excluding me a long time ago. She had to guess. She attacked in various areas, including the area of romance and family. She said I had flown to Egypt to try and find a woman who would agree to come home with me and marry me. That was weird.

Did someone tell my aunt I went to Egypt last year? I don’t know. I don’t believe she knows. I know she has no idea I’m married, because she said she had grandchildren and all I had was the dog she imagined. One of her longstanding traits is that she wants people to admire her life and feel bad about their own.

My grandparents had eight grandchildren, and by God’s blessing and no virtue of my own, I turned out to be the smartest. I think this gnaws at my aunt. She used to tell me how brilliant her kids were, even though it wasn’t true. Then it was her son in law, who went on to die in a plane crash, removing him from the arsenal. Now it’s the grandchildren. Evidently, they are all prodigies, although no one else in the family seems to have noticed. She also tells me how incredibly intelligent various local eccentrics are, even though there is no truth at all in that. Smart people get out of Eastern Kentucky.

I think she was guessing about the trip I just completed, which had nothing to do with Egypt. If she had heard anything substantial about last year’s Egypt trip, she would know I was married. I took that trip with my then-fiancee.

I didn’t mention my marriage because I felt it could be helpful to me to hold onto that information, and I didn’t feel any motivation to get into the process of arguing with her about whether I was a loser and she and her family were to be greatly admired. That kind of bickering is not important to me. I didn’t insult her kids or her life, and I certainly had room to do so.

It would be pretty strange to go to Egypt to find a wife. The prime countries for foreign brides are the Philippines and Thailand, as far as I know. I believe Ukraine is also high on the list. Egypt is a Muslim country, so it’s not a great hunting ground. Nothing spoils a wedding night like a honor killing.

Finding a wife in the US is not exactly hard, so it makes no sense to suggest I would fly overseas if I were desperate. If you’re a desperate American male, stay where you are. You just have to make yourself available, have a net worth, and stop saying no. Finding a wife you actually want is another story. Only God can arrange that.

In any case, if I had been desperate for a wife, I would have looked here first. In fact, I did, when I decided to check out online dating. The Americans who popped up…there was just no way. Unthinkable.

My aunt must have come up with Egypt through a coincidental delusion or a guess. My wife and I have been to 4 countries, so the odds of her randomly picking one we had visited were not all that low.

I don’t think American brides will ever be hard for American men to find, and I doubt they will ever be in big demand overseas, because they tend to be spoiled, selfish, conceited, and misandrist. And they’re not especially attractive compared to the competition. Far Eastern brides get the best marks in that area, and Eastern European girls are also very impressive compared to Americans. American women also have a very high obesity rate. Over 40% of American women are obese, and 12% are severely obese.

I can say these incendiary things now, because I’m married and have nothing to be afraid of. Although, to be honest, I would have said them anyway.

I am checking Wikipedia, and it looks like I’m right. It says:

The majority of the women making use of these services in the late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century are from Southeast Asia and from Russia and other countries in the former Soviet Union.

It also backs up what my friend Mike, who does business with Ukrainians, has told me:

52 percent of Russia’s workforce is made up of women, yet according to some sources they often hold low positions of prominence in their home country and work jobs with less respect and lower wages (such as teaching or physician positions); and women earn 43 percent of what men do. Marriage is a substantial part of Russian culture, with 30 years being the age at which a woman is considered an “old maid”. With 4,138,273 more females than males from the ages of 15 to 64, marriage opportunities are slim at home and worsened by the life expectancy difference between men (64.3 years) and women (73.17 years), as well as the fact that a large portion of successful males are emigrating out of Russia.

I realize Ukraine is not Russia, but the foreign-marriage business is big not only in Russia itself, but also in countries like Ukraine which have similar cultures and are part of the same general area.

Foreign men who pursue American girls are generally looking for money or temporary non-Muslim demi-wives to serve as unpaid servants and sex providers.

For all their problems, I don’t think American men are as undesirable as American women. If you think they are, I have three questions.

1. Why is “bridezilla” a word, while “groomzilla” is not?

2. Why do American women crave marriage while most American men fear it?

3. Why are American men lining up to find foreign brides while almost no American women are looking for foreign men?

In at least three places, Proverbs cautions against the horror of an combative wife. I go further. I always say marrying the wrong woman is, literally, worse than cancer. America is a great place to find the wrong wife.

My aunt seems way more argumentative than she used to be, which could be a Parkinson’s symptom. I’m not sure, though, because I used to be one of her favorites, so I may not have seen what others have been seeing all her life. I have been told my sister and my other living aunt were chewed out royally by her. I have heard stories that made her sound pretty awful. Maybe she has always been nasty to other people.

In conversations with me, she always sought approval. I think she wants validation from people who didn’t grow up in Eastern Kentucky. I think she perceives them as more sophisticated, which is true.

My wife and I pray for my relatives. That’s all we can do. When thinking about what’s happening makes me angry, and it does, I use my supernatural tools to end it and get God’s help to love them. I don’t want pettiness to damage my relationship with Him.

Unsaved people who are too close to you will be used to drag you down to hell. This is why we are not to be unequally yoked. Provocation is one way they do it.

I’m very glad my relatives are only connected to a small part of what I have. Such independence is a gift from God, and it is an extraordinarily great gift I did nothing to deserve. I deserve poverty, but God lifted me up. Many, many people are in horrible marriages or are caught up in family turmoil or have cruel employers and jobs they can’t quit. I have been spared in spite of inviting these problems.

My aunt criticized my parents and me, saying we were ashamed of our people and our culture. Don’t ask me to explain it, but she felt this disqualified me from telling her she should advertise real estate on the web like everyone else, including people in Appalachia. She thinks I should be ashamed because I don’t admire my people, or former people. I thought about her remarks a lot yesterday.

If you’re a Christian, it’s very important to reject your earthly culture and to be ashamed of it, especially if you come from a backward place like the one where my aunt lives.

It goes beyond rejecting certain earthly cultures. You have to reject the culture and ways of the earth as a whole. Things that work to make you successful as an unbeliever don’t work for Christians. To make it without God, you are expected to be proud, aggressive, relentlessly self-promoting, greedy, and way too devoted to hard work. To succeed as a Christian, you have to be humble, peaceful, self-abasing, generous, and unwilling to sacrifice your relationship with God in order to make money.

Backward cultures are worse than relatively healthy ones, emphasizing stupid things like fighting, drinking, emotionalism, ethnic pride, racism, fornication, adultery, and contempt for education. All these things are celebrated in Eastern Kentucky.

My wife rejects Zambian culture. People ask me why I don’t go visit her, and I tell them she doesn’t want me to. We have no incentive to get together there. There is nothing in Zambia except wild animals and Victoria Falls. Her parents are dead. The relatives who looked after her when she was young treated her badly, and a number of them are witches who put curses on her.

Rhodah used to want to enter politics so she could fix Zambia. Now she wants to get out and move to America. She’s not stupid. She can look around and see that her country isn’t going anywhere. There are a lot of good Christians there, but they are outnumbered by pagans and Catholics. America is doomed, but it offers a better standard of living and a husband who will be unified with her in her relationship with God. Most importantly, I think, it will get destructive relatives out of her life.

You have to hold onto the family God gives you, but you should also cut the old one loose.

Yesterday we talked about our names. She said she wants to dump both of her names, both first and last. She was a neglected child, and her first name was issued as an afterthought. She was so neglected, her birth date is uncertain because no one cared enough about her to keep good records. She says I should pray for God to tell me what to name her.

I plan to get rid of my dad’s last name. I like the idea of taking my mother’s father’s name, which is a very common one. I want to get rid of my middle name because a middle name is one more thing to write down on forms, and it makes you easier to trace. We can have nice, common names that are very hard for people to use to look us up on the web. Perfect for making a new start. I don’t want people from my past, especially hopeful divorced women, bothering me. My life and my real brothers and sisters are in the future.

I don’t know how my aunt feels about people of other races today, but I know what she said in the past. I have to wonder what will go through her mind if Rhodah and I show up with a mixed-race son who has my grandfather’s first and last names. I think my grandfather’s family name is a bit like an Hermes “H” to her.

Time for yet another digression. A year or two ago, my dad’s email address got a message from a woman who used to work for him. She was an associate in his firm. She wanted to know how he was doing. Mind you, this was a person who probably had not contacted him in 10 years, and she had no idea he was dead.

I emailed her back, letting her know my dad had passed away. So of course, she responded with condolences, asked what happened, and said she hoped I was okay.

No, she didn’t! She didn’t respond at all. And I know her and her husband. We are not strangers.

Googling, I see that she and the man I knew as her husband now live in different states.

Here’s what I think: she took her shot. Best guess. Maybe she emails other elderly single men.

I don’t think she had a heartfelt interest. My dad was rude to his subordinates and said all sorts of offensive things to them. I recall two colorful terms he used to refer to this lady.

I don’t think she’s a malevolent person, but it’s common for older women to need money, and marrying is one of the most common ways to fill the need.

The older a man gets, the more women will see him as a potential musical chair. Something to be aware of.

To get back on track, I am expected to be excited about my people and be loyal to them, but who are my people? Not my grandfather’s descendants. They don’t care about me at all. My people are those who are Spirit-led. Jesus said the same thing. He said, “whoever does the will of My Father in heaven is My brother and sister and mother,” and the word says it is impossible to please God in the flesh, so he was talking about Spirit-led people.

Maybe we should call ourselves Mr. and Mrs. Jim and Mary Smith. Does it matter whether our earthly names have any connection to our ancestors? People who claim to have died and visited heaven sometimes tell us we have new names there, which is probably true. I can’t imagine heaven having three million people named John Jones.

I used to think Eastern Kentucky was my refuge and a sort of paradise on Earth, but now I have no desire to go there again. It’s like Miami to me. I hope I never have to visit again. Drugs, laziness, violence, racism, self-inflicted poverty, childishness…these are the things it offers me. It offers to pull me backward and take away whatever improvements God has made.

Eastern Kentucky is rich, or it used to be before leftists killed the coal industry. It should be like Texas. Instead, Kentuckians sold their mineral rights to less-backward people from places like New York City, and they became laborers for the people who owned the coal. It wasn’t theft, regardless of what apologists say. They did what Esau did. They gave their birthrights away for fleeting short-end benefits.

Fools are supposed to lose their money to responsible people. It’s not an aberration, and it certainly isn’t unjust. Appalachia has poverty because it earned it.

The funny thing about what my aunt said is that it applies to her, too. She is also ashamed of her culture and her people. She’s always trying to make them look better, and she likes to claim accomplished people who came from the area. The problem is that she claims people whose parents got out before they were born. She likes to talk about J.D. Vance and Cameron Crowe.

Until my aunt told me, I had no idea who J.D. Vance was or that he was connected to Breathitt County, Kentucky, where my grandfather sat as judge. I didn’t know who Cameron Crowe was or that he had a parent from Powell County, another county on my grandfather’s circuit. Vance is a senator-elect who wrote a bestseller about toxic mountain culture, and Crowe wrote Jerry Maguire.

The problem with using them to prop up Kentucky is that both these men are from other places. Like many Kentuckians who wanted better lives, Vance’s parents moved to Ohio, and he was born there. Crowe has only one parent from Kentucky, and he was born in Palm Springs.

Obviously, the Vances and the Crowes were unhappy with our culture, and their sons probably would not have succeeded had they stayed in Kentucky. Furthermore, Vance clearly has a low opinion of his parents’ culture, because his book, Hillbilly Elegy, has a slur in the title and depicts a family destroyed by mountain ways.

If you thought Mexico had a great culture, would you write a book about car thieves and gangs in Los Angeles and call it Wetback Memories? The name of Vance’s book killed my interest in reading it. I don’t think anyone should call another person a hillbilly.

J.D. Vance has no accent. How about that? Neither does Crowe. Losing your accent is considered one of the most important steps in masking your Kentucky roots. It’s a tradition among social climbers who leave.

Loyalty to earthly connections is a tool of the antichrist. The spirit of antichrist pulls people backward and makes them feel a groundless loyalty to the cultures of the earth. Satan wants us to put our families and ethnic groups above God. Clinging to degenerate ways out of mindless loyalty is a great way to make sure you are never transformed by the Holy Spirit, and it can also help you on your way to hell.

It’s also a great tool for starting wars. We identify with nations instead of the family of God, so instead of having the unified interests of God, we have the conflicting interests of squabbling countries.

I don’t know what will happen with my biological relatives, except maybe the one I baptized, but I have a great Christian wife and a number of friends who are my true brothers and sisters. My biologicals distanced themselves from me a long time ago, so I don’t feel much of an attachment now.

Kentucky is getting worse and worse. I was there in 2019 for my dad’s burial, and my second cousin told me she had told her kids to leave the area. Appalachia had its big revival about 80 years ago. Since then, in Eastern Kentucky, there has been more deterioration than progress.

I still like the idea of moving to a Christian area in Tennessee. Kentucky and West Virginia are a mess, but it seems like there are places in Tennessee where a Christian could enjoy life.

There is a guy in Scotland who pops up occasionally and makes Youtube videos about things God has shown him. He has nearly no subcribers. He just put up a video in which he discusses the fact that Spirit-led Christians lose their interest in carnal pursuits and the things of the world. To me, it’s obvious that maintaining your unity with stubborn unsaved people is an example of a worldly pursuit.

Use Your Enemies as Diagnostic Tools

I feel I should continue writing about the weird conversation I had with my aunt yesterday. In the past, she tried to get my approval and validation, but yesterday, she let her true thoughts and feelings come out.

She said extremely strange things. She accused me of bothering her about our mutual financial interests because I was poor and irresponsible and needed money right away. Then she suggested I was bragging about being rich. She said she had grandchildren while I had nothing except a “sorry dog.” She theorized that I had run off to Egypt to see if I could get a wife to come home with me. She didn’t explain why she picked Egypt.

The things she said contradicted each other and had no basis in fact. She made things up on the fly; a stream of hopeful delusions. I guess the demons were tossing out bait, hoping I would bite on something. Her tone of voice was venomous. The only other person who speaks to me that way is my estranged sister, and I am the one who estranged her.

I told my wife all about it today. Her attitude is the same as mine. She believes that if demonized people hate you, it means you’re doing something right.

It made me think of Rabshakeh.

During the time of Hezekiah, Jerusalem was besieged by Sennacherib, the king of Assyria. Sennacherib sent Rabshakeh, or, more accurately, the rabshakeh, to discuss terms. “Rabshakeh” is a title, not a name. This is not obvious in the KJV text. The rabshakeh was a messenger.

Hezekiah was a pretty good king, and he had done good things. He destroyed worship sites belonging to other religions, and in the Bible, that always brought Judah and Israel favor. He hoped God would deliver him from the Assyrians. The rabshakeh said this:

Beware lest Hezekiah persuade you, saying, the Lord will deliver us. Hath any of the gods of the nations delivered his land out of the hand of the king of Assyria?

Where are the gods of Hamath and Arphad? where are the gods of Sepharvaim? and have they delivered Samaria out of my hand?

Who are they among all the gods of these lands, that have delivered their land out of my hand, that the Lord should deliver Jerusalem out of my hand?

This was a bad move on the rabshakeh’s part.

Hezekiah also received a letter full of similar nonsense. He took it to the temple and spread it out before the Lord, and he called on the Lord to rise up and punish the Assyrians for insulting Him. Instead of asking God to intervene for Judah’s sake, he asked him to defend his own name.

An angel came in the night and killed 185,000 Assyrian troops, and back in Assyria, Sennacherib’s sons eventually murdered him.

Yesterday, Satan used my aunt as his rabshakeh. The defeated, powerless spirits that work for him used her to express contempt for my beliefs, suggesting she doesn’t think God gives me an enviable life like hers (!), and they also used her to revile me and make nutty accusations.

I have talked to my aunt about God a lot, hoping to help her get some of the blessings I have gotten. She has generally pretended to be more or less in agreement. She wants to be perceived as a serious Christian. She has never told me my doctrine was stupid or wrong. She is a Catholic, however. She converted in her old age. She doesn’t know anything about the Holy Spirit. I have never been able to interest her in correct doctrine or a real meeting with God.

The cult of Catholicism is a problem among women in my family. Even my mother was drawn to it. Catholicism has a strong worldly appeal.

Catholics like to claim they have the only “official” church, and they impugn other churches and say people who are not Catholics go to hell. It gives the impression of offering security, and women crave security.

Catholicism is full of pageantry and performance, and women are drawn to those things. Catholicism also takes responsibility off people, and women like handing their responsibilities off to others. They do it to their husbands all the time. Catholicism says, “Do what you want all week, come in and take communion, and we will work things out with God.”

My aunt would tell you she is a Christian, but the marks aren’t there. There is no ministry in her life. She has a worshipful attitude toward famous people, which no Christian who knows God has. Respecting persons is forbidden to us. She is emotional and biased. She is quick to anger. She loves admiration.

The impression I have is that she thinks my doctrine is ridiculous, even though she has pretended to take me seriously. I think she looks down on people like me.

This may be because her grandmother was a charismatic. Her dad’s mother was a widow, and she got caught up in the charismatic revival in Appalachia during the last century. She used to go to town and hand out tracts. My mother said she would go off by herself to pray, and when she returned, her face glowed. People accused her of going behind her house to pray, returning, and saying she had been to Jerusalem. Probably not true, but it shows how they saw charismatics.

In Kentucky, charismatics are known as “holy rollers.” This term refers to rolling in the floor. Charismatics are known to fall down and lie on the floor when they are under the influence of the Holy Spirit, or when they just want people to think they are.

Holy rollers are seen as ignorant and backward.

My great grandmother was respected for some things, but she was also ridiculed. Maybe my aunt turned to the pope in order to distance herself from the odor of the religion of hillbillies.

It’s strange. On one hand, she promotes the untenable and absurd notion that Eastern Kentucky is full of unsung geniuses, and she is furious at me because she thinks I’m ashamed of the area. On the other, she seeks validation from city people and people who have left, so she must be ashamed, too. I guess she is seeking validation from the Catholic church. “I live here, but I know better than these people.”

Her attitude reminds me of the rabshakeh. She seems to be reproaching God by wronging me and claiming God, as I worship him, is a useless and embarrassing fantasy.

My aunt has Parkinson’s. She has a hard time talking. She has dementia and makes involuntary movements. Her 89-year-old husband, who is somewhat senile, has to take care of her. They both have serious medical problems, and she has been incapacitated and hospitalized at least once. Her relationships with her sister, son, and nephews are a mess. Her relatives have no respect for her. Her son’s life is a wreck that embarrasses her.

I’m in good health. I have no prescriptions. I’m very strong for my age. Yesterday, I got off a plane after 30 or so hours of hard travel without sleep, and I carried and dragged two heavy bags all over the Orlando airport with a bounce in my step, looking for a shuttle. I enjoyed the excercise. I walked fast to dissipate the excess energy.

I should have been on my back on a public bench, trying to sleep before daring to drive home.

My wife is a jewel. I live in a wonderful place. I don’t have to work. I have fantastic friends. There is ministry in my life. I have a daily prayer partner. I get miracle healings. God speaks to me and tells me helpful things that change my life. My wife has prophetic visions, and she has seen Jesus, who has also visited me. We have no major problems. We have some issues with relatives, but nothing like what my aunt goes through every day. Things keep getting better for us.

I am a bad person, and there are many people out there doing Christianity much better, but it’s very obvious that my wife and I are basically on the right course. It is strange that someone who is as miserable as my aunt would dismiss me as a failed eccentric who is out of God’s favor, or that she would see herself as someone who has found the correct path. A good relationship with God shouldn’t lead you to dementia, disability, and constant turmoil.

If the pope is right, why is it people who follow him get such poor results and people like me get such good ones? I’ve never known a single Catholic who reported a healing, but I’ve seen plenty of Christians healed.

As for my aunt, I can understand how a person with a good life might feel entitled to dismiss someone else’s beliefs and provide correction, but why would someone who is unhappy, burdened with terrible problems, and deprived of good relationships feel that way?

It makes me think of those silly emails I used to get, recommending Oprah Winfrey’s dieting secrets. Whenever I think of bad advice from bad sources, I think of those. If Naomi Campbell has some dieting advice, I’ll listen, but I’m not taking any from Oprah.

I was on my last flight yesterday, and I thought I felt someone touch my right knee. I looked, and no one was there. I started to feel warmth going through both knees. I started thanking God. About a decade ago, I had a couple of spontaneous healing episodes in church. I felt pulsating warmth around both knees, and God took away some soreness problems I was having. On the plane yesterday, I thought I might be experiencing the same thing again, so I jumped on the chance and gave thanks profusely to maximize the benefits. Today my knees feel great.

I would like to see my aunt have experiences like that instead of struggling to talk and relying on other people to move her around. But how can she receive anything from God when she can’t take advice?

I got a lot of revelation about humility on the plane. God started lecturing me about looking down on people for certain reasons. He showed me there were areas where I was being a snob. It was very generous of him. God will never stop teaching you valuable things if you listen. When you stop listening, he stops talking, and then you have to rely on your little monkey brain, which is mainly good for getting you in trouble.

If I listen to him about humility, he will teach me about other things, and my life will never stop improving.

I was prophesying today, and I heard myself say not to strive with my relatives and that God would give my wife and me abundance for whatever they took from us. I don’t think the words came from my imagination. I intend to play things that way, so I suppose we will find out.

It doesn’t matter. God keeps taking great care of us.

You should be very happy when demonized people vomit their venom at you. It’s a tremendous honor, and it shows the demons are afraid of you. It shows you’re better off than the people who try to rattle you. I was thinking about it in the kitchen this morning, and for a minute, I actually felt like dancing. I am not a dance-prone person. Much the opposite. I surprised myself.

Jethro Takes His Self a Trip

I’ll tell you what. You haven’t lived until you’ve taken a 30-hour plane trip.

I got home from Singapore this morning, and I haven’t slept in quite a while. My wife and I had a great time there, but the flights were really something.

Singapore is so far away from me, it doesn’t matter which direction the jets take. They could go north, south, east, or west and get there in about the same amount of time, as long as they didn’t run into fuel problems. My flights to Singapore flew east, and so did my flights home.

The web says Singapore is around 10,700 miles away, so it’s pretty much on the opposite side of the globe. The time difference is 13 hours in the fall. Until this trip, I had no idea two time zones could differ by 13 hours.

My first international flight took off from JFK and landed in Doha. It took off pretty late. It should have been empty, right? Well, it turns out Doha is hosting an event you may have heard of: the FIFA World Cup. An event of which I took no notice because I’m not the kind of person who cares about millionaires kicking a ball into a net.

People from Latin America were shoehorned into the plane’s every crevice. The aisle seat I had carefully chosen in hopes of getting an empty row turned out to be a waste of money.

Actually, I didn’t get to sit next to an empty seat on any of my flights. Not even the 15-hour one from Singapore to San Francisco.

I was spoiled when we traveled during the covid statistical hump. I got to lie down across rows of seats. People were terrified of flying, and Rhodah and I reaped the benefits. It looks like those days are gone. We flew on the slowest days of the week, and every plane was still packed.

I know this will sound insensitive, but I miss the slow tourist traffic of the pandemic. We flew on empty planes. We didn’t have to wait in line at restaurants. We had the Great Pyramid to ourselves. Looks like those days are gone, unless the black death makes a comeback.

What can I say about Singapore?

I was afraid it would be unpleasant because I hear bad things about Far Eastern destinations. I thought it would be like Blade Runner crossed with Slumdog Millionaire, sort of. I was afraid the people would be hard and selfish, and I was concerned about the weather. Singapore is nearly on top of the Equator.

Here is how I would describe Singapore now: it’s a little bit like Miami would be if the people were vaporized and replaced with better ones.

Singapore is very orderly. The streets are clean, and there is a great deal of beautiful, meticulous landscaping in public areas. People obey the traffic laws, which seems weird given the large number of ethnic Chinese. Everything is built well. Signs are in English, probably because there are three major ethnic groups, each with its own language. Or languages. Whatever.

The people in Singapore are very polite and helpful. We experienced nearly no rudeness. There is nearly no crime in Singapore.

Singapore is also wealthy. They have stores like Chanel and Bulgari everywhere. They have impressive skyscrapers. The cars are generally clean, dent-free, and relatively new.

There is food everywhere in Singapore. There are so many restaurants, it’s hard to understand how they can all make money.

The hotels are very nice. Ours was just about perfect. Spotless and quiet, with several restaurants and a gym. I think there was also a pool in there somewhere.

I just realized I forgot to tip the maid. Dang.

That’s okay, though, because tipping is not customary in Singapore.

Here’s something weird: the weather in Singapore is better than the weather in Miami. It doesn’t get really hot, and the island is in a breezy location.

Now I will digress and tell the world about a high school history teacher who told me a tremendous number of baldfaced lies. His name was Morgan Kelly. I guess it’s okay to mention his name, because he has surely been dead for at least 20 years.

My prep school taught grades 7 through 12, and when I arrived in grade 9, Mr. Kelly was already a legend among the core group of students who had started two years earlier. He was an amateur sailor. He had a lanyard with a spliced monkey’s fist for a keychain. He wore green coach’s shorts every day. He sounded like Burgess Meredith’s Penguin. He taught history.

Mr. Kelly impressed the younger kids by telling the time by looking at the sun. He claimed he could nail it within a few minutes. He would point at the sun with his extended left hand, look down his arm, pause briefly, and make his estimate. Over and over, he amazed the kids by proving to be right.

By the time they were sophomores, they started to realize his watch was on his left wrist.

Anyway, Mr. Kelly told all sorts of lies.

He claimed he was a tail gunner in World War Two. Ordinarily, I would not doubt a claim like that, but because I know he lied about other things, I don’t know whether he was really a tail gunner or even if he served.

He said that when he arrived at the place where they sorted out bomber crew trainees, the men were told to form a long line ordered by height. I would guess Mr. Kelly was about 5’4″ tall. Everyone at Mr. Kelly’s end had to become tail gunners because only short people could fit in the gunners’ stations.

Is this really how tail gunners were selected? I wonder. Maybe it’s true. Mr. Kelly had thick glasses, which means he wasn’t capable of the job, but maybe his eyes went bad after the war.

How likely is it that my school checked his military record? They might have checked to see if he had an honorable discharge, but I can’t imagine them asking for anything beyond that. I doubt they checked his record at all. They would have asked for his college credentials, but they wouldn’t have needed his military information.

I don’t think he was ever in a bomber, because he would have told us war stories.

He told a huge lie about the Chinese military.

He said he was on a troop plane going over the Himalayas, and there were Chinese soldiers on board.

Okay, right away you can see some issues.

Why would they fly troops over the Himalayas? It would be unbelievably expensive, not to mention dangerous. They would have moved troops with ships and trains.

Why would Chinese troops be on a plane with American bomber crewmen?

Okay, so now we get to the part I am sure is a lie. He said several Chinese were playing a game of chance. I think he said they were throwing down cards. He said they would play a round of their game, look at the results, grab one person who was playing, and throw him out the side door. While the plane was in flight.

We believed it. We were kids.

Of course, the Chinese military did not permit soldiers to murder each other in card games. This should not have to be explained to anyone. You can’t win a war by throwing your troops out of airplanes. Also, even if the game were permitted, how would you find people willing to play? If you did, how would you get enough men onto one plane to play the game? If you have to throw a man out after every hand, and you have 20 men, your game will last around 20 minutes. Not a great way to kill time on a plane.

Even if all the obstacles mentioned above were overcome, why would American servicemen sit and do nothing while people were thrown out of a plane?

So, yes, he was a big liar.

Here comes the lie he told about Singapore.

The British were building a bridge in Singapore. It was 120° Fahrenheit every day. The workers had to work outdoors, obviously, but at night they slept in air-conditioned barracks.

They were only able to cool the barracks to 90°, but it seemed so cold after working in 120° heat, the men had to wear winter coats indoors.

Lie number 1: 120° heat in Singapore. It doesn’t happen. It rarely goes above 92°, and that’s something you can’t say about Miami.

Lie number 2: men who found the 90° temperature in the barracks too cold would solve the problem by wearing winter coats. No. They would adjust the temperature.

I don’t know why Mr. Kelly lied to kids so much. I took Ancient History and Ancient Chinese History with him, and I guess I can discard everything he taught us.

I didn’t sweat much at all in Singapore. It was surprisingly comfortable. Rhodah, however, was shocked by the humidity. Apparently, Zambia doesn’t have any. In the past, she had heard me complain about the humidity in Florida, but she had no idea what I was talking about until we went to Singapore. We went to Egypt, which was hot but dry. We went to Turkey and Ireland, where the weather was cool. In Singapore, she suddenly understood why people buy anti-perspirant.

I just remembered another lie Mr. Kelly told.

Americans needed to land planes somewhere in China. There was no runway. The ground was covered with rocks. Fortunately, China was incredibly full of human beings. Their numbers were astounding.

The mayor of the city where the runway was needed told the people who lived there to go and stand where the runway had to go. Then he told them to pick up one rock each and leave. They did, and the runway instantly appeared.

I don’t know how we fell for that one. Having a lot of people doesn’t really get you past the problem that you can fit hundreds of rocks into the area one person takes up. Pick up one rock, and you still have hundreds more.

Man, that guy lied.

Another Mr. Kelly lie just popped into my head.

Some ancient Chinese pottery manufacturer had a slave, and one day, the slave got trapped in his kiln and burned to death. When the kiln was opened, the pots had a magnificent red color. The manufacturer couldn’t figure out how to reproduce the color, so he decided to throw a slave into the kiln every time he made red pots.

I’m starting to think we were really stupid.

Okay, Google and see if you can find this story, or any story about the ancient Chinese having a really gorgeous and highly prized red pottery glaze. I couldn’t find anything like that on the web. After that, try to find a story that mentions the part about murdering slaves.

Then ask yourself how many pots you would have to sell to pay for one expensive slave. And why use a slave when you could use a dead body or a pig or goat? Dead bodies would have been pretty easy to come by in ancient China or ancient anywhere.

How does a slave get stuck in a pottery kiln? Why wouldn’t he yell for someone to let him out?

I knew someone who served in Iraq, and he had a photo of himself shivering in a sleeping bag in a very hot room. He said the hot room seemed cold to him. Soldiers there wore a lot of hot gear, and the daytime temperatures sometimes broke 120°, so for all I know, the photo wasn’t a gag. But it never happened in Singapore or anywhere else in Southeast Asia.

Soldiers love jokes and pranks.

The food picture in Singapore is interesting. Nice restaurants and well-known restaurants there are unbelievably expensive, like $40 for Five Guys or $400 for two at Ruth’s Chris. On the other hand, there are cheaper places where locals eat, and they are real bargains.

It appears there are three types of restaurants in Singapore. Independent establishments, food court restaurants, and food center restaurants.

By “independent,” I mean restaurants that are separate from other restaurants. Food courts are about like American food courts, except the restaurants are jammed together very tightly, and a typical food court will have a huge number of them.

A food center is a concrete building with a roof and no exterior walls. Inside, there will be long concrete structures broken into stalls. Each stall will be around 8 feet wide, and most food center restaurants occupy one stall.

Between the rows of stalls there will be sturdy plastic tables and seats which are fixed to the floor.

You can get an incredible assortment of foods and beverages at a food center. Malay. Cantonese. Sichuan. Indian. A typical entree will run around 5 Singapore dollars, and that amounts to about 4 US dollars. Some stalls sell excellent food. Some sell food that is merely good. Some sell stuff you will prefer to discard.

If you want to eat well and adventurously in Singapore while saving a ton of money, food centers are the way to go. The trick is to keep ordering things until you find things you like. The initial investment may be $20 or so per person, but it will pay off in the end by helping you avoid unnecessary experimentation.

One tip: don’t go to the stall Anthony Bourdain recommends. His photo is still on the window. Bourdain was not a great cook, as he admitted, and his advice about food is not reliable. He went to the stall in question and ordered something called Hainanese chicken rice. He raved about it as though it had made the earth move for him, and Gordon Ramsay’s face also appears on the window on a sticker.

The stall usually has a long line of people waiting for chicken. There was a line on the day when we stupidly listened to Bourdain and Ramsay.

Hainanese chicken rice is basically a boiled or possibly baked chicken cutlet, skin on, sliced, and dumped across rice made with chicken broth. It is served lukewarm. It is limp. It tastes not quite as good as what you would get if you boiled chicken in Campbell’s chicken noodle soup. I am not exaggerating. It is worthless.

It may be that Chinese people who are raised on it like it. There is a big difference between authentic Chinese food and much of the Chinese food Chinese people make in America.

After we tried the chicken rice, I bought myself a Tiger Crystal beer (very good) from another vendor and told him the food was basically garbage. He agreed. He said all the people in line were tourists who had been fooled. He said the chicken rice was no good. He very kindly led me to another stall, where he recommended laksa, a pho-like dish with rice noodles, shrimp, and some kind of meat. Much better.

We liked the Maxwell Food Centre and the Albert Food Centre. There are others.

If you go to a food center, buy a package of paper towels and a package of antiseptic wipes first. Food stalls don’t provide napkins, and the tables and seats are often in need of cleaning.

I would advise avoiding fancy American chain restaurants. We tried Lawry’s, for example, and it was just plain bad. I think Asians sometimes copy the appearance of American food without capturing anything else.

We had Egg McMuffins in Singapore, because we had to, and they were good but not quite as good as American. They don’t toast the bread enough. We tried Five Guys, and it was better than American because they made the fries correctly. I think the reason is that they hire conscientious Singaporeans instead of American high school slackers who can’t be bothered to follow the formula.

We didn’t go in for sights much. The famous Marina Bay Sands, which is three buildings joined by a pool that runs across them at the top, did not get Rhodah excited enough to pay the $23.50 cost of going up for a look. She was pretty excited about the high-end mall at the bottom, however, much to my chagrin.

We visited the Singapore Botanic Gardens. If you want to see what Asians can do with gardening and landscaping, this is the place for you. All sorts of perfectly-tended plants and trees. They also have some weird wildlife. We walked right up on some kind of monitor rooting for food, and it didn’t mind us being there at all. We also saw some red jungle fowl, which are supposedly pre-domestication chickens. There are otters in the gardens, but they didn’t show.

The gardens has a huge orchid area. Pretty impressive, if orchids are your thing.

We went to the National Museum. It’s very small, and you can get in and out in less than an hour. They had some interesting exhibits, but not a whole lot has happened in Singapore, so there was a limit to what they could do.

We had a very satisfying trip in spite of Singapore’s limitations. It’s an extremely comfortable city to stay in. It will spoil you.

While I was there, I came to a crazy realization: I don’t actually hate cities. I hate AMERICAN cities, because of the people who live in them. Our cities accumulate the worst we have to offer. Singapore isn’t like that. You don’t have to be bullied by entitled homeless people or frightened by potential muggers. People don’t ignore you or abuse you. You can walk around at night and not worry that you’re in a neighborhood where your presence is considered consent to beatings, robbery, racist behavior, or rape.

There is no Antifa in Singapore. There are no self-pitying street murals that condemn the police while ignoring the people who do nearly all the damage.

I could live in Singapore without going crazy. I could even stand not being allowed to carry a pistol.

While the subject of bad behavior is on my mind, I may as well mention a remarkable conversation I had today. My aunt said a bunch of horrible things about me.

My aunt is in charge of some things related to my grandparents’ estates, and I am not very happy with the job she is doing, or, in my view, not doing. Everything should have been sold and distributed many years ago, but a few assets are sitting around doing nothing, and I would like to have my financial connections to my family cut. I’m just tired of being involved in it. I’m not very concerned about the money.

My aunt has Parkinson’s, and dementia is one thing Parkinson’s can cause. I can’t diagnose anyone, but I am wondering if she is getting close to the point where some decisions have to be made regarding her care and that of her husband. Today I had to tell him over and over who I was. I told him his wife had three sisters and I was the son of the eldest. I told him I was his nephew. I told him I was his wife’s nephew.

Anyway, she started the conversation by angrily criticizing me for being unavailable to discuss a deal involving a property. I received a text from her in Singapore, and I responded when I saw it, saying I was in the process of flying home and would try to get back to her the following day. She was very angry at me for taking the trip! This is someone who has never spoken angrily to me until this year, so it was strange to hear the tone of her voice and the openness of the hostility.

I didn’t get that at all. I said I had taken a vacation, and she demanded to know who takes a foreign vacation in winter, as though it was a hostile act no decent person would perform. She was seething. Why? She said, “I hope you had a nice time!” Still angry. I said, “I did!”

I have complained to her this year about her failure to take certain steps to get things sold. I have never been nasty to her, and I have never insulted her. I have been blunt, though, and Southerners don’t always take that well. It’s a serious failing we have. Often, we prefer to be passive-aggressive and treacherous. Smile in your face; stab you in the back later. Being blunt is like violating an unwritten code or something. It’s not done.

She said she needed to apologize for saying nasty things about my religious beliefs. She said she apologized wholeheartedly. I didn’t know what she was talking about. I said so, and that I accepted her apology anyway.

So has she been making fun of my beliefs to the family? I don’t know. When I have talked to her about my beliefs in the past, she has generally given me the impression that she was right there with me. I took her expressions of agreement with a grain of salt, but I didn’t have any reason to think she contemned my faith.

I don’t really care about this stuff. A bunch of family members are long dead, and the rest greatly reduced their involvement with my dad and me over a decade ago, so I haven’t been part of their circle in a very long time.

I wonder if we see things differently. Maybe it would bother her a lot to find out I had criticized her faith to the family, so she assumes I would be upset if she had done the same thing to me. I don’t really think or care about what they say about me, though. I have so many things to think about.

I’m just guessing here. Maybe there is no rational explanation.

Bizarrely, she accused me of taking off to Egypt to see if I could find a wife to come home with me. She, whose son is on wife three, was saying I was a loser with women. I was amazed. Where did that come from? How long had she been holding it in? Why did she pick Egypt? Does she know I went to Egypt? Why would anyone go to Egypt to get a wife? I can’t imagine a worse place, unless it’s the area where my family comes from.

I now know she doesn’t know I’m married. I didn’t correct her. I didn’t think it would help.

I have tried to get her to list properties on the web for sale, and I have mentioned the fact that I manage properties and have sold some. I guess she did not like that, because she blurted out, “My property is worth much more than yours!” I had no idea what she was talking about, so I asked her what she meant. I think she was saying she had a bunch of rental properties that were worth more than what I have.

I don’t have any idea what she has, and she has no idea what I have.

She said everyone else in the family had planned for retirement and I had not. Where she got this idea is a mystery.

Apparently, she thought I was trying to get her to liquidate things because I was desperate for money. I said, “Do you think I’m poor?” She said, “Fine. You’re filthy rich!” So first she wanted to insult me by saying I had nothing, and then, I think, she wanted to make me feel bad for bragging about being rich. Which I didn’t do!

She said she had her treasures, which were her grandchildren, and she said I had no one, except my sorry dog. What?? I didn’t know where to go with that. I said I didn’t have a dog.

I never said anything rude. For example, I didn’t try to come up with a snappy comeback about her pets.

She said the family was going to do whatever it wanted with or without me, so of course, I asked her why she had called me. What is the point of asking for my support when it doesn’t matter? She said I couldn’t do anything about it, which is not true at all.

I told her I would never sue or contact the attorney general or anything along those lines, because I’m a Christian and I don’t intend to live that way. But I’m not going to say things are going well when I think they’re not.

I said she needed to advertise properties on the web, like everyone else does now. She said she was in “the hot spot,” meaning the frantic world of undesirable Eastern Kentucky rural real estate. She wanted me to know she knew more than I did. She then told me I was ashamed of my people and my culture, which seems irrelevant. I think she was telling me I did not understand the mysterious and unique methods of selling property up there.

I AM ashamed of my people and my culture! Every mature person who has come out of Eastern Kentucky is ashamed of the people and the culture. I used to be proud of my roots, but I was deluded. Immaturity, racism, illegitimacy, toothlessness, violence, adultery, drugs, generations of welfare recipients, hatred of learning…yes, of course I’m ashamed of my people. I didn’t say so, however.

I’m ashamed of being like them in counterproductive ways.

I used to love Eastern Kentucky, but the smart people left a long time ago. For years, my aunt has tried to promote the area as unappreciated and full of brains and talent, but that’s not even a little bit true.

Think about Singapore. In 1965, it had to start out as a new nation. It was poor. It was in the middle of nowhere. Now they call it the Switzerland of Asia. Money everywhere. A harbor full of ships. A highly educated populace. Skyscrapers. Safety.

Now think of Eastern Kentucky. It’s loaded with coal. All they had to do was keep their mineral rights, sell the coal, develop other industries, and invest, and it would have become the Kuwait of Appalachia. Instead, they sold their inheritances to outsiders and became their laborers. They never built a decent university. No infrastructure. No industry other than coal. They kept their corrupt politics and courts. They held onto racism. They fell in love with handouts. They planted marijuana patches full of booby traps. Since 1965, Eastern Kentucky has gotten worse.

Yes. Sure. I’m ashamed of it. Why would I not be?

Maybe “ashamed” is the wrong word. I’m critical of it. I am honest about it. I reject a lot of it.

She went on to accuse my parents of being ashamed of it. That’s true. They were. They didn’t try to disguise themselves or cure their accents, but they were realistic. My dad used to quote Kentucky author Harry Caudill, who said that everybody who had any get-up-and-go got up and went.

My dad was the best lawyer I ever knew or knew of. He flew all over the country representing companies like PPG, UPS, and Nabisco before the NLRB and the federal appellate courts. He was the head of litigation in one of Florida’s top firms at the age of 33, three years after joining as an associate.

My mother loved classical music. She read. She loved good restaurants and trips to Europe.

What were they supposed to do in Eastern Kentucky? My dad wrote a brief for my grandfather once, and my grandfather told him it was too good for the judges up there.

Since my beliefs have been mentioned, I’ll talk about some of them.

I am certain everyone has demons. They are around us all the time, influencing, or trying to influence, our hearts and minds. Many of the thoughts, desires, and emotions we think are ours really come from demons, and some, in some people, come from the Holy Spirit.

Demons use people to express themselves and fulfill their desires. They give us habits and leanings. Some try to turn us into the people they would be if they had bodies. They get us to wear things they like. They get us to cut ourselves up and get tattoos.

They manifest in things like overeating, pornography, rage, depression, delusions, to name a few.

I believe that when people become demented, the demons get promotion. Before dementia sets in, people resist them to a certain extent. They also cover their influence up, pretending to be nicer and better than they really are. Once the host loses the ability to steer things, he or she becomes more like the demons.

My grandmother liked to boss people. She covered it up when she was young and able, but she became demented, and one day, she announced, “I want to be the boss!” I believe that was her demons talking. Sometimes my dad, who had vascular dementia, would curse me for no reason and then forget instantly. I think that was demonic, too.

Now my aunt is fading, and she seems like a different person. Maybe she is a different person. Maybe other beings are finally getting to spit poison at me, after veiling their feelings for decades. She used to tell me she admired me. She tried to impress me, probably because I grew up in cities and had more sophistication than the rest of the family. She’s done with that now.

God has told me all kinds of brilliant things, which makes sense, because he is God. He told me this: “Things get better, or things get worse.”

It sounds extremely simple and obvious, but it’s important. Every day, you improve or deteriorate. You never stand still and remain unchanged. Nothing does, except God. Troubled people who don’t know the Holy Spirit deteriorate. Whatever is wrong in their hearts and minds gets worse.

God brings improvement and order. Where God is absent, rot and chaos are unstoppable. God told me this: “Bring order.”

I’ve talked to Rhodah about my family, and she feels the same way I do. Don’t sue. Don’t turn anyone in. Don’t wade into the food fight. The amounts at stake are too small to make a real difference in our lives, and getting into unforgiveness and juvenile squabbling would take all the joy out of life.

Paul said it was better to suffer wrong than to take another Christian to court. I would only call one or two of my relatives Christians, but I think Paul’s advice applies anyway. If anything is taken from me, God will repay it with interest, and He will be pleased that I’m pursuing his presence instead of playing verbal laser tag with people who are in real supernatural trouble.

We have been praying for my family. It doesn’t seem to help them. I don’t know what else we can do. I thought about contacting relatives to raise awareness about my aunt’s condition, but they know already, and nothing is being done.

It seems likely a very abrupt move to assisted living is in her near future, and I am told nothing is being done to prepare. If she’s angry with me for questioning her actions as my fiduciary, you have to wonder how she will handle assisted living staff telling her what socks to wear.

It’s very unfortunate. I used to have a great relationship with her. I don’t see that being restored any time soon. If my grandfather had done a better job planning his estate, maybe the family would still be whole.

At least I can say I never took advantage of any of the others. I’m not the world’s finest person, but I have managed to avoid that.

Approved

It is time for an update on my wife’s immigration status.

At some time during the last 24 hours, the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services issued a document known as an I-130 approval. This means they have signed off on our application for Rhodah to join me in the United States.

So now she just jumps on a plane, and I meet her in Orlando!

Actually, no.

The case now moves to the National Visa Center at the Department of State, and they arrange for Rhodah to be interviewed in Zambia. Assuming she convinces them she’s not a problem immigrant, she will then be issued a visa, and THEN I will meet her at the airport.

Along the way, I will have to show I can support her.

This process takes a while, but nothing like the 384 days it took for our petition to be approved. Really, we need a little time to get things in order, so the additional delay isn’t a big deal. She has to dispose of her car and whatever possessions she isn’t bringing. We have to make travel arrangements. I have to make any necessary changes here at the house.

I don’t know how many more trips we will take before she arrives here. We are all set to visit Singapore, and there is no point in canceling. We intend to visit Israel, and I would like to take her to Europe, if only to spite the bureaucrats who kept us out this year.

My understanding is that a US green card makes it easier to get tourist visas from other countries, but they have been pretty irrational so far, so one wonders how it will pan out in practice.

We’re not going to keep going to second-tier and third-tier destinations. Not unless God sends us.

It will be very strange being together with Rhodah 24 hours a day. We’ll be able to do normal-life things together all the time. We’ll be able to travel, go to restaurants, shop, look after our properties…no cell phones or email accounts required. We’ll get used to going various places together. We’ll get used to certain meals. We’ll visit the dump as a team.

It will be great not to have to do every little thing for myself as well as looking after another person from thousands of miles away.

When the visa process is over, I will post the news.

Garbage Doesn’t Get Better With Time

I keep doing things to improve the house.

Today, I’m looking for ways to get rid of the trash compactor.

I’ll tell you right off; if you use a trash compactor, I have no respect for your trash standards. There are lots of reasons to avoid them, and there is only one reason for having one: laziness.

Garbage compactors attract and feed roaches, ants, mice, and rats. Anything that can squeeze in there will stuff itself on your garbage and then pee and poop all over your kitchen.

Garbage compactors stink. You can’t keep unrefrigerated garbage in your kitchen for days without growing bacteria and fungus.

Garbage compactors turn what should be light, fresh, manageable bags of garbage into heavy bags of rotten garbage.

Garbage compactors encourage dirty, low-class habits.

I used the compactor in this house for a while because the people who built it seemed to know what they were doing. There is no garbage collection, so I drive my garbage to the dump. I thought the previous owners, as longtime farm residents, knew something I did not, so for a time, I tried to do whatever they did.

Eventually, I quit. I could not see any virtues in the compactor. It smelled, the bugs loved it, the bags were heavy, and it didn’t actually save me much work.

At some point, I decided I would no longer tolerate having edible garbage in the house overnight. I started putting all trash that had food in it in the garage in a sealed can before bedtime. I abandoned the garbage compactor, cleaned it as well as I could, and hosed it with pesticide.

Now the kitchen never smells like rotten food, and the bugs and mice are out of luck.

I go to the dump three times a week. Twice if I forget. I buy cheap 30-gallon plastic bags for 10 cents each online, I use them for garbage and lining Marvin’s cage, and I end up spending something like $120 per year. If that sounds like a lot, find out what you spend on expensive bags from the store. A cheap store bag runs 25 cents. Big-name brands cost a lot more. If you’re buying store bags, you’re probably paying more than 2.5 times what I pay.

Last time I bought cheap bags online, I bought a box of 1500. I don’t play. Next time, I’ll try Ebay and see if China has anything cheaper.

Bag makers like Hefty love to talk about how tough their bags are. Know why? They’re trying to appeal to dirty, lazy people. “We know you only take the trash out once a month, so here’s a bag you can jam 50 pounds into. Go ahead and jam your foot in there. Pack it down good. Our bag won’t split. Comes with free cotton to shove up your nose.”

You don’t need tough bags. You need to get your butt to the curb or the dump more often.

What do professionals use, in places where letting trash sit can lead to big fines? They use exactly what I use. You’ve seen them beside highways, waiting to be picked up. You’ve seen them on the backs of utility carts at stadiums and malls. Hefty bags are for people who let garbage rot in their houses.

If your trash is moving out of your house in a timely way, you don’t need a bag that can contain a rabid wolverine. It just has to survive long enough to make it to the can or the dumpster.

I’m naturally lazy myself, so anything that helps me improve is welcome.

When I was looking after my dad, I was lazy with the garbage. Usually, I didn’t do all that bad, but often I made dump visits a week apart, which was disgraceful. There were times when the bed of the pickup was pretty full.

When you have a dementia patient in your house, garbage piles up fast. You need to stay on top of it. I did a poor job. Since then, by God’s grace, I have repented. In the time since I turned over a new leaf, there have been days when I simply forgot to go, and I ended up with little ecosystems developing in the bags, but overall, I love going to the dump, and it’s unusual for me to miss visits.

When I go, I see horrendous scenes that take me back, except many are a lot worse than the scenes I caused. Many people show up with pickups entirely full of bags. I see people walking quickly to the dumpsters, holding dripping bags as far from themselves as they can. I’ve seen utility trailers covered with bags.

When I go to the dump, I look carefully at the people in front of me. Here’s a tip for dump users: never get behind a trailer, a pickup, or a van if you can help it. There is a reason people bring vehicles like that. Clean people generally drive passenger cars and only have a few bags.

Now that I have better habits, I am disturbed by other people’s practices. I pray for them. I look at their beat-up cars, their mountains of maggot-ridden trash, their tasteless, ill-fitting, stained, worn-out clothes, their tattoos, their obesity, and even their bad posture, and I realize they have problems going far beyond poor trash standards. I know demons are involved. They need to know God. I am being improved, and they need the same help I’m getting.

I want to get rid of the trash compactor and fill the space with some kind of storage, but I don’t know if there is any way to do it without ruining the way the kitchen looks. Maybe a handyman could find a matching set of drawers.

I also want to get rid of my terrible sink.

The lady who designed the kitchen was no cook. I can tell, because she did things a good cook would not do. First, the compactor. Second, she bought a 4-burner electric stove with a useless electric grill taking up space in the middle. Third, she put her wall oven at knee height. Fourth, she gave a microwave priority, installing it above the oven. And the oven the house came with had no warming drawer.

The worst thing she did was to install a two-basin sink.

My sink has a gigantic basin on the left, and it has a small basin on the right with a garbage disposal. The big basin is too small to wash cookie sheets. Unforgivable. The small basin is not much good for anything.

I tried to find out why people get two-basin sinks, since it’s clearly a stupid design. It turns out one answer is laziness. People want to be able to hide dirty dishes in one basin.

Okay, so your dishwasher is a foot from the sink, and you want a place to hide dirty dishes instead of, at the very least, putting them in the dishwasher to wait.

You already have a roach feeder full of old garbage, and you want to add a roach buffet to the sink area.

What?

I remember a time when I was too lazy to put dishes in the machine. I would say it ended about 25 years ago. If you can’t find it in yourself to put a dish on a dishwasher rack and push a button, you have a very serious problem. As I did, for half of my life.

I want to put a new sink in, but the old one is in a stone counter, and they cut the stone so you can’t put a rectangular sink in it. You have to find a sink that’s bigger on the left side. Turns out they exist. I guess a lot of people got tired of their ill-conceived two-basin sinks and had them replaced. If you’re in my shoes, you may be able to buy a one-basin offset sink that will fit your hole. “Offset” is the Google term you need.

You may also be able to use an apron sink. These things rest on top of counters, covering up a lot of the stone. If your counter has weird cuts in it, you may be able to put an apron sink on it.

I think I am headed for an apron sink. The likelihood that a one-basin offset sink will fit the cutout I have now is not high, and I don’t believe I can make my cutout fit a new sink without ruining the cutout’s appearance. An apron sink doesn’t need a perfect cutout because the edges of the cutout would be covered. I should be able to open my cutout up with an angle grinder and make an apron sink fit.

My advice is to avoid garbage compactors and two-basin sinks. Sooner or later, you will know you made big mistakes.

I want a new faucet to go with the sink. The existing faucet is very low, which is extremely bad design. You want to be able to get things between the faucet and the sink. Big things, like 3-gallon pots. The faucet I have is in the way all the time, and it dribbles water back onto the stone, where a calcium crust forms.

I plan to get what is known as a pot-filler faucet. It will arch up over the sink, and it will have a built-in sprayer on a hose.

I don’t know how the original owner’s wife managed to do anything in the kitchen. Maybe she didn’t.

I’ve talked to Rhodah about these things, and she says I should wait until she moves here. That never occurred to me. I’m so used to the single mindset. Having someone to help me is a new experience.

Storm Update

God, as always, has been extremely gracious, and the corpse of Hurricane Nicole has done no damage here. The putative center of the former storm is now as close to me as it will get. It’s breezy, and there is a little rain, but even the Weather Channel’s trained actors couldn’t make this look like a real tropical storm. At least not so far.

I am now seeing one outlet predicting stronger winds later today. That is new. I hope it’s just the usual over-reaction. If not, I’ll be moving to the Red Roof Inn.

My prediction, which is worth what I paid for my meteorology diploma: things will get better, not worse. As the storm moves to the west, winds will have to go over most of the lower half of the state to get here, and that should cut their speed. Also, the storm is getting weaker with time.

I guess this theory won’t work if the winds in the bottom half of Nicole are stronger than they are up north. This doesn’t appear to be true, though, because if it were, Sarasota and Orlando would be having high winds now, and they are not.

Winds can’t just materialize magically in the middle of dry land. The storm circulates. Before the winds get here, they have to be somewhere else.

The same site that says we’ll have 33 mph base winds 45 minutes from now says we’re at 15. So an 18 mph increase in 45 minutes? Doubt it.

A friend in the northern part of the county says she lost power, which is surprising, but the properties where she live are maintained pretty badly. Maybe that’s the explanation.

She also managed to get a broken window, which is a bigger surprise. It’s a good idea to protect windows during hurricanes, but even if you don’t, the odds of losing one are low. And this is no hurricane. It was barely a hurricane when it WAS a hurricane.

My power company, which is one of two in this county, reports 489 customers with no electricity, county-wide. Not bad. Duke Energy, the other company, reports around 6 times as many, which is much worse but still nothing compared to Irma.

Maybe Duke Energy doesn’t manage trees well. My company went on a trimming binge last year.

In other news, I am very happy with the batch of Texas trash I made. I’ll post the recipe.

INGREDIENTS

1/4 cup butter, melted
1 teaspoon celery seed
1/2 teaspoon garlic powder
1 teaspoon salt
2 tbsp. brown sugar
1/4 cup Worcestershire sauce
1 tbsp. A1 sauce
1 teaspoon chipotle powder
4 tablespoons Crystal sauce
10 cups cheddar Chex Mix
2 cups Spanish peanuts

You just mix it up, spread it in a pan, and bake it at 250° until it drys out. I stir it every 20 minutes for the first hour, and then I quit.

MSG might make it better. MSG is the reason it’s so hard to eat only one Dorito.

For some reason, idleness sets in during a storm, so you do trivial things to kill time. Yesterday I put a new diode in my Ronco Showtime rotisserie oven. I installed one a year or two ago, but I did a bad job, and it pooped out.

These ovens have 120V AC wires going straight to the heating element, and there is no way to adjust the heat. A clever guy realized he could reduce the heat by cutting off half the AC signal.

AC is positive half the time and negative the rest of the time. A diode will only permit current to flow one way. If you cut off either the positive or negative part of an AC signal, you reduce the power by half.

I stuffed a questionable diode in there, and it was great until it frizzled due to lack of heat sinking. This time, I used the same diode as the guy who came up with the concept. It’s enormous and should require no heat sinking.

I had to cut wires and put in spade connectors, a selector switch, and shrink tubing. I had to find a way to cram the giant diode into the oven. Now it’s done, so I should be able to slow-cook rotisserie meat.

These ovens are wonderful. It’s hard to believe a TV huckster could invent something that really benefits mankind, but Popeil did it. My only big complaint was the lack of adjustability. If you don’t like things browned well, or you want certain things to cook very slowly, you have to wrap them in foil or try other tricks. Now that my oven is modified (again), I can throw a glazed pork roast in it, slow-cook it for a couple of hours, and then turn the heat up to brown the glaze.

The newer ovens are made in China, and there are complaints. Mine is Korean, and there is really nothing wrong with it. I’ve been through every part of it, so I know how it’s built. It’s not the toughest oven ever made, but it’s not junk, either.

Starlink is working fine, except for one thing. We had a one-second power flicker, and the system had to reboot. Starlink can take a very long time to start working after an outage. I put a battery backup on it, so I should be okay now.

The verdict is in: I’ve decided I’m a big Starlink fan. There are little annoyances, but it works, and it’s a great deal better than my old system. Once it becomes more mainstream, there will be more help available for users, so maybe people like me will not have to crawl around in their attics and drill holes in their walls. Tradesmen will be ready to help.

I also like my VPN, but it isn’t perfect. I get a lot of security puzzles now, and sometimes a site will refuse to load because it’s convinced I’m a hacker.

Hmm. We just got a couple of pretty decent gusts. Hello? Am I still here?

Guess I’ll post this using my mobile hotspot. Come on, Starlink. Get it together for daddy.

MORE

It’s 4 hours later. We are supposed to have winds of around 50 mph. It’s not happening. I’d call it 10 mph.

Never trust a weatherman.

Looking Forward to Newsmen Doing Their Marcel Marceau Impressions

Tropical Storm Nicole is turning out to be pretty lame, so I am optimistic about tomorrow.

The center of the eye is west of Freeport, around 70 miles from our coast, and the NHC says the wind speed was 75 mph an hour ago, making it EXACTLY equal to the minimum speed of a hurricane. Suspiciously, some would say. A remarkable coincidence. Maybe they round to the nearest 5 or 0.

Weather Underground, a well-known weather site, is saying some remarkable things right now. It says 1) Nicole is a hurricane situated over Grand Bahama, and 2) a wind gust of 61 mph was recorded there tonight. Like, now.

Okay. Here is how storm speeds are measured. Storms are measured by “maximum sustained winds,” and a maximum wind is “sustained” if it maintains speed for at least one minute. So in order for Nicole to be a hurricane, it has to produce winds higher than 74 mph for at least one minute, right where it is, which means Grand Bahama. If a gust of 61 mph is so significant it made the news, how can Nicole have maximum sustained winds of over 74 mph?

Gusts are faster than maximum sustained winds, so it seems bizarre that a gust of 61 mph made news in a storm which is supposed to have maximum sustained winds of at least 75 mph.

I saw a site claiming there would be “coastal flooding” all the way to North Carolina. Uh…no. Flooding is when water comes in under your front door, way above the high tide line, at the very least. Right now, the worst-hit areas are expecting a maximum storm surge of 6 feet, and it could be as low as 3 feet. If Florida, right in the crosshairs, is going to top out no higher than 6 feet, North Carolina is not going to have “flooding” by any honest definition. In all likelihood, anything resembling flooding will be confined to some barrier islands in Florida. We are not going to see people in Atlanta paddling kayaks in their front yards. Not unless CNN or the Weather Channel shows up and fakes it, as they are known to do.

Here’s a quick video of a Weather Channel reporter getting ready for hurricane season.

Maybe you can see why I don’t trust the dire predictions we always get.

The storm is now moving at 13 mph, which is good news. Better than the 8 mph they quoted earlier. You want a storm to move as fast as possible so it doesn’t sit on you and blow trees down for two days.

At this speed, the eye, if one still exists tomorrow, should pass by me roughly 24 hours from now. By that time, the storm will be broken up pretty badly. My county will probably get nearly no wind damage. My opinion may change if the storm’s track moves significantly. Things could be worse than I now expect. But the future looks good right now.

The NHC says I am well within the tropical-storm-force wind area right now, but it’s not bad at all. I would call it very breezy with no rain. The longer the dry conditions hold out, the stronger the trees will stay.

Weather Underground still thinks my area will get 2″ of rain, which is wet but not disastrous. When I was a kid in Miami, we got 14″ one day. I remember, because my mother went into cardiac arrest at a doctor’s office and failed to pick me up from school, and my sister and I had to walk home in it. Supposedly, the county I’m in right now got 10″ during Irma. There was water standing in my woods.

Palm Beach County is supposedly about to be hit with very, very hard rain. I got that from a TV newsman, however, so it may be a gross and intentional exaggeration. The NHC is number one in terms of reliability, and news people are right up there with mood rings, Miss Cleo, and Democrat pollsters.

Weather Underground predicts winds of 25-35 mph here tomorrow, but they also predict them for…right now. If there is any basis for their predictions, then I am already seeing the best Nicole has to offer.

I gave in to storm paranoia and bought sugary cereal, Pop Tarts, and the makings of Texas trash, one of my favorite party snacks. I rolled Cheddar Chex mix and Spanish peanuts in Worcestershire, A1, butter, Crystal hot sauce, celery seeds, brown sugar, and a couple of other things, and I baked it at 250 until it was dry. Really nice.

I guess I will be overindulging today and tomorrow. Ordinarily, I go out on the patio at lunchtime and fix a big cheeseburger on my dangerously-modified propane grill, but I don’t want to deal with the rain and wind, if it comes. Looks like it will be Frosted Mini-Wheats instead.

Rhodah and I have been interceding regarding the storm, and I hope you will, too. Nicole is not a scary storm, but it has the potential to cause fairly serious problems for some areas, and there are always people who do dumb things that turn mild storms into killers. A guy on the West Coast decided to stay in his beachfront home during Ian even though he knew he couldn’t swim, and now he’s dead. He posted commentary on Facebook, and the last posts were very sad.

Hurricane parties and “riding it out” were popular activities when I was a kid. There is something exhilarating about having drinks with friends on a screened-in patio by Coleman light as a storm whirls around your house.

Years ago, people could be forgiven their bad judgment. We didn’t know as much as we do now. These days, there is no excuse. When the government tells you your storm surge will be “unsurvivable,” and they tell you to write your name and Social Security number on your body so it can be identified when they find it later, you should get in the car.

There is no “riding it out” where I live, because we don’t get hurricanes. We get tropical storm winds at best. Storm surge can’t come near this county. This is not the coast, so unless you live in a mobile home under a big tree, you don’t have to leave home. Coastal people have to be more careful.

I truly hope I still have power tomorrow. Otherwise, look for me to blog from a nearby hotel until it comes back.