New Storm Drives me to Buy Pop-Tarts

Once again, a friend and I are in what we jokingly call THE CONE OF CERTAIN DEATH. Unbelievably, the devil has managed to scrape together a tropical storm after the end of hurricane season, and he has tried really hard to get it to go right over my house. The National Hurricane Center’s prediction cone is looming ominously, like the strong possibility of Kamala Harris becoming president when Biden finally forgets who he is.

This threat, Tropical Storm Nicole, is not too bad. It’s below hurricane status now, and it has very little time to build speed before it hits the coast and starts falling apart. They are predicting 75 mph upon arrival, which sounds like perverse hurricane optimism to me, because that’s the exact number where storms become hurricanes. It sounds like the forecasters took a look at it, figured it would be somewhere in the mid-70’s, and said, “What the heck. Let’s say it’s going to be a hurricane.” The storm is also somewhat dry compared to others. Rain makes hurricanes worse because it soaks the ground and loosens up things like trees and power poles.

The unfortunate thing about Nicole is its size. It’s really wide. On the NHC’s current map, it looks like the tropical-storm-force wind field is 5 times as wide as Florida. That means you can be pretty far from the center of the track and still be in the storm. Is the map correct? Well, if it was, I would be experiencing sustained winds of at least 40 mph, and I’m not, so draw your own conclusions.

Looking out the window, I’ll call it 10 mph with gusts to 25. Best guess. Safe to drive in. Nothing flying around.

Of course, it happened right after I got my Starlink cable installed more or less correctly. I am no longer using a bath towel to cushion it as it runs through an open window. That bath towel is not looking good. It’s amazing how a week of sunlight can bleach a towel. No wonder people get skin cancer.

I would be amazed if my new roof dish mount had problems in this breeze. This will be a good test.

What have I done to prepare? I got gas, and I bought one case of bottled water. I no longer have the big cooler I bought before the last threat. I got it in case the power went out and I needed to use ice. Then I took it back to Walmart. Hope that was not a mistake.

In other news, Rhodah and I are finally going somewhere. Italy lied to us. Germany wasted our time. Ireland let a new employee deny our visa application. The Czechs came up with a ridiculous document demand probably intended to prevent us from applying. Now we’re headed to Singapore, where they never turn anyone down. They wouldn’t care if Harvey Weinstein and Kevin Spacey arrived in the same flight kennel with Steven Seagal.

I really, really do not want to visit the Far East. Ever. I have never been very interested in visiting the Orient, and traveling is such a bad experience now, I dread visiting any place with a flight that takes more than 15 hours. My flight to Singapore will take around 30. The stuff of nightmares. Jonah went 72, however, so perspective is important.

These days flying is physically extremely unpleasant, and it’s also humiliating. They process everyone like Jews at the gate of Auschwitz. The service is terrible. The seats are like clamps. They nag constantly about masks, or at least they did in the past. I don’t know if they’ll do that this time. Anyway, it makes you wonder if the TSA hired the guards from Abu Ghraib.

Singapore is so far away, one of my flights will go east, and the other will return from the west. The airlines do it both ways. It’s nearly half the circumference of the world away. Vietnam is substantially closer.

On the up side, Singapore is supposed to be crime-free, clean, rich, and full of great restaurants. It’s certainly free of chewing gum, because they confiscate it at the airport. Good for them. I can’t imagine what it’s like to reach under a restaurant table and not feel globs of gum left behind by women and girls.

I may not want to visit Singapore, but if I had to live in the Far East, I would beg to be given citizenship.

Back in ’07, famed investor Jimmy Rogers said Singapore was the place to be, and he loaded up his truck and moved there, never, so far, to return. A long time ago, he decided the US of A was washed up, and he predicted a rosy future for Asians. I wonder if he made the right move. I don’t like the idea of living in a non-Christian country, though. I mean more non-Christian than the one I live in now.

I was surprised to learn that Singapore has a lot of American chains. We already have reservations at Lawry’s The Prime Rib and Ruth’s Chris. I also found a promising barbecue joint, and we’re booked.

So I’m a typical American, wanting to stay at the Hilton and eat steak? Yes. Go ahead and shame me, like I care. No apologies.

Actually, that’s not totally true. I have other reasons for choosing these restaurants.

Rhodah loves meat, and she has not yet been able to have steak or barbecue in a top American restaurant, so I picked a few places in Singapore in order to give her a special experience that will prepare her for life in her new home. We do want to eat the local stuff, but come on. It’s all Chinese food. We’ve seen that before. Call it Chinese. Call it Indonesian. Call it Thai. If it ain’t Chinese, it’s all close enough for jazz. Here’s your pile of white rice. Here’s your bowl of meat and vegetables in sauce. Here’s your funny sticks. Dig in. Chinese.

We need to find a good Indian place. Singapore might be the only city in the world that has clean Indian restaurants. Actually, there’s an extremely clean Indian place in Ocala, which is odd, because nearly all the American restaurants here are dirty.

We also plan to go to a Scottish restaurant. McDonald’s.

What about activities? Hey, it’s Singapore. No Eiffel Tower. No Rhine to cruise on. No Big Ben. No Renaissance art or architecture. No museums worth discussing. No alps. No Vatican. No Taj Mahal. No pyramids.

They have a couple of really neat buildings, and I think there’s an aquarium.

Truthfully, it sounds a lot like Vegas.

We will have great food, a nice hotel, safety, and each other. We are extremely blessed. A lot of people in our shoes can’t be with each other at all, and most of those who can get together don’t have trips as nice as ours.

It’s a whole lot better than the other places where Rhodah can go without a visa. Hong Kong arrests sick tourists and imprisons them until they test negative, so it’s almost as oppressive and backward as Australia. The Philippines are apparently extremely squalid, because Filipinos who live there advise tourists not to come. Malaysia is Singapore under oppressive Muslim rule. African countries are African. More or less like Haiti.

We should be going to places God chooses, to do things has planned for us. That would make the nature of the destinations less important. Remarkably, Rhodah has been counseling a new Christian in Singapore, so maybe we’ll meet him, and that will redeem the trip.

I guess I should go to the store and pick up a few items of face-ready food, just in case. You never know what a storm will do.

Hope I am still online tomorrow night.

Blazing Internet Speeds Take me Back to 2005

I guess anyone who still reads my blog is pretty bored with the Starlink stuff by now, but here I am with more.

Today I finalized my dish location efforts.

The dish was originally on a short J-mount that used to hold up a Dish dish, and the mount was on the first-story roof about 8 feet from a second-story wall that runs north to south. The wall cut off a big percentage of the dish’s view of the southern horizon.

When you get your Starlink dish, which Starlink whimsically identifies as Dishy McFlatface, the app tells you all kinds of needlessly alarming things. It rants about the necessity for a clear view of the horizon.

Nobody has a clear view of the horizon. Maybe if you live in the desert or on a ship. Or on top of a mountain or skyscraper. Other than that, no.

I learned about Starlink’s somewhat neurotic horizon obsession when I opened the Starlink box for the first time. Prior to that, I had no idea. I just assumed Elon Musk, or “M,” as I like to call him, had some idea what he was doing. If the dish were hard to use in a normal location, he would have told me before sending it to me, right?

Yeah, okay.

It was because of the horizon obsession that I was reluctant to do a serious installation to begin with. I thought I might have to send the dish back in a week. I couldn’t believe it would work here in the woods.

Starlink needs to see the northern sky, and I have tall trees to my north.

When I did my preliminary installation, I got okay performance compared to my old cellular link, but I thought there was probably room for improvement. After all, in addition to the tree problem, there was a vertical wall at a bearing of around 330° (west of north), so my horizon was far from perfect. It was because of this concern that I started moving the dish around and ultimately got a new mount.

I decided to put the new mount on the edge of the second-story roof. This idea was based on some misconceptions. I thought it would be fairly easy to run a wire through the second story wall into the attic from the dish, and from there to another part of the attic where I could get access to a stretch of hallway wall near my desired router location.

I had this ridiculous idea that the southern edge of the upper roof terminated abruptly above a wall, so it would be easy to install the mount on the edge and run the cable a couple of feet down past the eave and into the attic. In reality, and I have no idea why I didn’t check this first, the upper roof slopes down toward the south, so to put the mount on the highest part, I would have to climb up the slope.

Ordinarily, I am not afraid of roofs, but mine is covered with gritty shingles, and the grit comes off under your shoes when you walk on the roof. I can walk up a slope that doesn’t have grit on it, but when you add loose grit to the equation, it’s a different story. I’m not sure how roofers do it.

I walked part of the way up the slope, and I decided it was time for plan B. I was not going to risk rolling off a roof.

I ended up putting the new mount near the old one, a couple of feet farther from the vertical wall and a couple of feet higher. The new mount is around 20″ longer than the new one, so I would say the dish is maybe 4 feet higher than it was yesterday.

Here’s the really irritating part: I turned on the app to see what it thought, and it declared my dish was free from obstructions. So as far as Starlink is concerned, my location is perfect.

If I can get an A+ in a location which is partially blocked, why make so much fuss about obstructions? For all I know, the old location was fine.

I would have checked the old location using the app, but even though I had used the app before, I was not aware it had an obstruction-check feature. I can’t explain this. Maybe the app looks different the first time you turn it on.

So I failed to scout my own roof properly, and I failed to use the app correctly.

Anyway, now I have a dish location that is beyond reproach.

I thought I would have to cut a new hole in my house, but I found I could shove the Starlink cable through a grommet from the old Dish installation.

I pulled the cable through the grommet into an attic space. Then I drilled a hole from the hallway into the attic. I ran the cable over some trusses to the hole, shoved it out of the hole, put a new RJ45 jack on the end, and hooked the router back up. A while later, after Starlink stopped pouting over my impudent interruption, I had the web again. Starlink likes to shut down for a while after you fiddle with it. Perhaps M’s way of wagging his finger at us.

I still don’t have my shielded jacks from Amazon, so I was not able to install a wall plate. I want to have a grounded dish, and without a shielded jack, that means using a jumper to connect the cable’s grounding wire to the shielded plug from the router. I can’t run a jumper through a wall plate without mangling it.

Now I have a router sitting on the hall floor next to a little pile of drywall dust, with a cable hanging out of an unfinished hole. I will fix everything up in three days when the jack arrives.

Here is the big takeaway for other confused Starlink people: YOU DO NOT HAVE TO HAVE AN UNOBSTRUCTED HORIZON. Pay no attention to the nonsense Starlink tells you. Put your dish in the best location you can find without a lot of effort and expense and let the app tell you what it thinks. If the app likes it, leave it alone. If not, move it to different locations in increasing order of installation expense and difficulty. When you get one that works, leave the dish there.

Another important lesson: DO NOT BOTHER WITH THE STARLINK APP’S LOCATION-SCOUTING FEATURE. I mean the one that tells you to point your camera at the sky and stand there like an idiot. It is unnecessary, hard to use, and worthless. It will just discourage you. Set your dish up, turn it on, and rely on the app to tell you how the dish feels. The feature you want to use is called “Visibility.”

Right now, Ookla says I am getting download and upload speeds of 83 and 6, and Starlink’s app says it’s 42 and 12. I’m sure both of these results are wrong, because past experience says both tests are stupid and unreliable, but I think they work for comparison purposes. My old cell connection ran around 12 and 1 on Ookla, so whatever I am actually getting now from Starlink is a lot better.

Why do I say the tests are stupid and unreliable? Well, I just got 83/6 and 42/12 about a minute apart. How can that happen if the tests work?

Being able to use the web 20% as well as a normal person in, say, Bangladesh or Malawi is a heady experience. It’s weird, seeing so little of the swirly Youtube waiting symbol while I try to watch videos. I can’t imagine what real Internet speed is like, though. You people with 300 Mbps must live in a different world.

My next Starlink project will be a cable running under the yard to the shop. I have the Starlink ethernet connector, which should have been built into the router. Elon. I just need to install another wall jack, find the path the old cable used to get out of the house, run a new cable through it, dig a slit in the yard, bury the new cable in it, run it into the pipe leading into the shop, put in a wall jack, and hook up the PC.

In other Musk news, my wife tells me Kathy Griffin and some other celebrities and demi-celebrities have decided to SPEAK TRUTH TO POWER. They are fighting the system. They are determined not to pay him $8 per month for their identity-verifying blue checks. Some are threatening to leave.

There are problems with this movement. Apart from the obvious triviality of the dispute.

First of all, if you leave Twitter, no one will care, and you won’t have a voice any more, so no one will hear you if you continue to criticize. A lot of celebrities are basically washed up, and Twitter helps people realize they still exist, thereby helping them get jobs. If it weren’t for Twitter, who would know people like Kathy Griffin and Valerie Bertinelli were still alive? Until today, I thought Griffin, a cancer victim, was probably dead.

Griffin and Bertinelli changed their Twitter names to Elon Musk and put up tweets supporting left-wing political candidates. They said they did this to prove the blue check process is flawed. Seems to me they proved Musk was right.

Bertinelli says the blue check makes it harder for criminals to impersonate celebrities. So she’s saying the system she describes as flawed works. What? So how does charging for the check make impersonation easier? Is she saying she can’t scrape up $96 per year? Is she saying criminals will pay but celebrities won’t?

If the system works, how come she was able to call herself Elon Musk without losing her blue check? It was still there when she pulled her prank. Shouldn’t blue-checkers be prevented from changing their handles? After all, the check is supposed to be proof they’re who they say they are.

Maybe I don’t understand her argument. She says the system is flawed, and then she says it works. Somehow, charging makes it less likely to work? Maybe I missed a vital tweet that reconciles these claims.

Okay, I’ll clear things up for everyone. First, a disclaimer: I don’t care what happens to Twitter. Second, blue checks should be screened well, and screening should be continuous so blue-checkers can’t change their handles. Third, everyone with any self-respect should get off Twitter and try to regain some dignity.

Who really cares? It’s all junior high to me. It’s amazing that human beings are willing to hiss and claw at each other like this in public. Over $96 per year.

Maybe they do it because celebrities aren’t busy. They have long periods (sometimes multiple decades) of inactivity. What better to do than caper and prance for attention on a free service that brings them attention from lots of people?

I like what Dave Chappelle said about Twitter, but for the profanity: “Apparently they dragged me on Twitter. I don’t give a ___, because Twitter is not a real place.”

What is the other problem with celebrities SPEAKING TRUTH TO POWER? Well, they ARE power. Liberals are the establishment. Conservatives and Christians are the counterculture. Elon Musk is an insurgent who just happened to get very rich. Musk is the rebel and protestor. Griffin and Bertinelli are establishment stooges. They’re on the side that slaps down the little people. They’re organs of the military-industrial-entertainment complex. Insiders. Swamp creatures. They’re sith lords. Musk is Luke Skywalker.

I had a thought recently. What if Instagram starts increasing its word limit and giving people checks for nothing? Instagram is a leftist organization, very much in favor of ending free political speech, and it already has a big base. I wonder if Instagram could kill Twitter.

I can’t predict the future, but I know what’s happening right now. Liberals all over America are calling each other and meeting, trying to find a way to end the existential threats of free speech and blue check fees. They really think these phenomena are disastrous for the world. Satan has convinced them up is down and down is up.

Projection. That’s what it is. I was talking to my wife about this the other day. Controlling, abusive people who can’t tolerate dissent project. A delusion comes over them, and they think they people they hurt are the real oppressors. They think they’re victims. When you manage to prevent them from abusing them, they think what you’ve done is abuse.

My dad and sister had this problem. It is truly a mental illness. A state of bona fide delusion. Not far from psychosis.

My sister used to accuse me of having her own faults all the time. It was bizarre. I’ll give you the weirdest example. She used to walk around the house in her underwear. It was trashy and very rude. She would do it in our house and even my grandparents’ house. She would spend the entire day that way. It was normal for her.

One day she was abusing me for some imagined offense, and while she was listing my crimes, she said I walked around in my grandparents’ house in my underwear all the time. Never, ever, EVER happened. I would have been mortified if I had accidentally walked through the house like that. It’s something white trash people do. Decent people have the courtesy to wear clothes.

I think this was the moment when I understood how crazy projection is.

It made me realize why my sister hated other people so much. She thought they were like her. And even more unbelievably, she thought she had their good qualities and the moral high ground.

Maybe that’s why she loved and admired herself so much. I wonder.

Projection is slander and accusation, so no wonder Satan’s children do it. He is the devil, and “devil” means “accuser” and “slanderer.” Look up the Greek.

Sometimes they know they’re slandering, but a lot of the time, they really believe the insane things they say about the people they’re abusing. They hate us because they think we’re like them.

It’s an important thing to understand. It’s a big mistake to treat a crazy person as though he were sane. You waste a lot of time. Reasoning with them is like reasoning with a stump.

It’s so weird, seeing the people who run the world acting like they’re the French Resistance. So brave, agreeing with all the people around them. Agreeing with the people who pay them. Agreeing with most people in our government. What kind of rebellion is that? What kind of revolutionary props up the ruling regime?

The Nazis shot resistors without trials. Here, the people who think they’re rebels get to go to the Oscars.

It’s all incredibly interesting to watch.

The Twitter squabble. Not the Oscars. They’re ridiculous. A bunch of insanely wealthy people, patting each other on the back for playing make-believe.

As of Thursday, I should have a real Internet wall jack, and by next week, I hope to have Starlink in the shop. You can keep Twitter, though.

Honey Doing

Starlink Junior, my slow version of Starlink, has worked out so well, I have dumped my old Internet provider.

I suppose I would have had the courage to make the break sooner had Starlink felt like including real instructions and some kind of user support. I didn’t know how to install the dish. I didn’t know how to rout the cable. I didn’t know how to tell if the dish was pointed the right way or located where it should be. Starlink gives you cartoon instructions and a terse app, but you have to figure a lot out by yourself.

Starlink is one of those companies that causes its customers to work harder by trying to shut them out of the technical side of things. It’s a bad approach. Real black boxes that do everything perfectly the second you pop them out of the UPS package are rare. My feeling is that Elon Musk thinks he has done all the thinking for us already, and frankly, he’s not that good. There are a lot of things he and his team have not thought of.

I had a Dish Network dish on my roof, so I put the Starlink dish on it, and I added an 8-foot pole from Ace Hardware. Starlink insisted I needed extremely clear horizons, so I thought I was going to have to get the dish as high as possible. My roof is irregular, and I’m surrounded by trees.

Today I took the pole out of the system and left the Starlink dish in the Dish dish mount, and it seems to work about the same. I don’t know what to make of it, but stabilizing the long pole will take some metalworking and carpentry, and I don’t want to continue working on these things if they’re a waste of time.

I decided to order a new J-mount (this is what you call a thing that holds a dish or antenna) and put it on my topmost roof section. Because of the geometry of my roof, this is actually a very easy place to install a J-mount. I don’t want to use the old J-mount because I would have to move it, and removing it could tear up the roof.

The new mount will go on the roof next to the edge. The cable will go over the edge and through a hole in the wall below the soffit, into the attic, unless I decide to put it through the roof. Going through the roof could be a problem, because I would have to seal the new hole, and it would see a lot of rain. A hole in the wall under the eave would never get wet, so caulk and a coax grommet should fix it easily.

I was not very familiar with the part of my attic where the cable will go, so I took a look. I had put it off because I was afraid of what I would see. Roof rot? A horrible space to work in? Dead roaches and rats? It turned out to be in great shape, well organized, with hardwired lighting and a convenient switch.

When my new mount comes, I’ll have to go up in there, work my way 30 feet to the south, grab the cable, and feed it to the location where the router will go.

My house has ethernet cables, but I have never used them. I have been able to get along without them, and also, I had my wireless router in a place where there was no port. Now that situation is changing. I want to connect my TV’s and computers to the wiring, and I want to revive the long-destroyed Cat5 wire to the workshop. I have a computer there, but I have to use my phone as a hotspot in order to get a connection.

I have to find out where the ethernet cables originally joined. There had to be a router somewhere. Then I can use an adaptor (I will resist “adapter” until people start writing, ‘rapter,’ ‘capter,’ ‘recepter,’ and ‘intercepter.”) to hook my dish up to the house wiring. This will give me the best possible speeds.

I don’t have to have perfection. If I could get 20 Mbps down and 10 real Mbps up every minute of the day, I’d be the happiest person on Earth.

Right now, speed tests say I get 6-120 Mbps down, but when I actually download things, the best I see is about 1.6. I suspect Musk is secretly throttling me because I’m not one of the cool kids in a real Starlink coverage area. If the router can get 100 Mbps, I ought to be able to do a lot better than 1.6 when I download a file. I don’t think the connection is the problem.

Starlink told me it wouldn’t have satellites set up for my area until next year, but apparently, that’s deceptive. They made it sound like they couldn’t give me high speeds without new satellites, but it looks like they can give me lots of speed, and they just don’t want to. Maybe speeding me up will slow the cool kids down.

Starlink isn’t the only thing I’m working on here. I’m getting a ton of stuff done. Jobs that used to intimidate me are falling like dominoes. I started out by fixing my shop, but now order is spreading to the house, as I almost didn’t dare hope it would.

I got my keychain rack made, and it’s a much bigger help than you would think. I cleaned out the freezer where ginger ale exploded. I put my bedroom in order. I started moving things from the dining room workshop to the real workshop. I blasted the house, including all the attics I can get to, with pesticide. For a long time, I couldn’t get the filters out of the range hood, and they were getting nasty, but yesterday, they came right out, and they went in the dishwasher. The laundry room and its closet are nearly in order. I got the burglar alarm upgraded to 4G. I’m getting flu and shingles vaccines tomorrow. Today I mixed salt and garlic into 5 pounds of ground chuck and turned it into patties, so now I have lunch waiting for me for the next 12 days.

I’ve taken a lot of annoying things to the dump. I started converting my storage room fluorescents to LED’s. I got a wireless printer.

I can’t remember all the other things I’ve done, but I can sure tell when I walk around the house.

Disorder bothers me now. I take pleasure in straightening things sitting on tables and counters, even though it doesn’t matter.

A few days ago, I was praying, and I heard, “Order my life,” over and over. I asked for it, of course. I’ve been praying prayers similar to that for years. It looks like the words came from God, because I can’t stop ordering this place.

My mother went through something similar when she was several years younger than I am. She started telling me how great it was to have everything in its place. She organized things for the first time in her life. Then she learned she had cancer, and she died.

The ordering I’m doing makes me wonder if God is preparing what I have for my wife’s arrival or for my departure. In April, I’ll be as old as my mother was when she died.

It’s wonderful to find out that things you think you heard from God really came from Him. It means you can trust what you hear in the future. It also helps you to be unified with Him.

In June, my wife had two visions, and one came true when Queen Elizabeth died. In the other vision, she saw Russia bombing Japan. I wonder if it will happen. A quick Google says Japan just expelled Russia’s ambassador, and relations are at a new low. Russia and Japan are still hashing out World War Two, and Russia has just abandoned peace talks. I don’t know much about Russia’s relationship with Japan, but things sound bad.

I love having order in my life. It’s not completely pleasant, finding yourself compelled to do things you used to put off luxuriously, but overall, it’s exciting. I hope it continues. I always say good habits are like slaves. They get things done for you, and they don’t cost anything.

Speaking of habits, I also heard, “Your habits are important.” I think about that when I’m about to put something off or do it badly. I feel that if I give in and let things slide, I’m spitting on something God gave me; a treasure. How many people get express advice from God? That’s not something to take for granted. Elon Musk and Bill Gates don’t get it. The president of the United States doesn’t get it. Famous musicians and Hollywood stars don’t get it. Nobel prize winners don’t get it. I get something only a tiny percentage of people get, and it’s something you can’t buy. If you could, the price would be astronomical. I have to take it seriously.

I believe whether I can hold onto my gifts and receive more depends a lot on how much my actions show how much I value them.

Tomorrow another big load goes to the dump, and I’m sure I’ll find several other fossilized obligations to move out of my own way.

Because I keep getting bogged down in things Rhodah could do if she were here, what I’m going through reminds me how good God’s plan for marriages is. The man handles certain things, and the woman handles others. I can take care of the shop and grounds, but I keep getting pulled backward by problems in the house. If Rhodah were here, she would deal with those things, and I would get my own work done much better, in much less time. She can’t wait to get here to run the house.

Feminism is filthy. It destroys our potential as couples and families. The benefits we get from women pursuing careers is trivial compared to what we lose by having God’s order in our homes destroyed. Thank God my wife has no interest in feminism. I look forward to the day when I don’t have to concern myself with housewife responsibilities.

You’re not Imagining it; They Hate You

Jesus told us the world would hate us, and the closer you are to him, the more obvious the hate is.

I quit social media, and I live like a hermit, so I don’t have a lot of involvement with strangers, but I still find that unsaved people get mad at me for no reason. They come up with pretexts to justify hostility they can’t really explain. They gaslight, saying I’ve done this or that wrong, but the truth is that there is one standard for me and another for other people. I will always be judged unfairly.

Spirits that hate God work strongly in people who aren’t led by the Holy Spirit, and they turn them against us no matter what we do. The good we do is forgotten or characterized as evil, the wrongs we do are grossly exaggerated and overpunished, and we are accused of many things we haven’t done.

Christians who don’t know this will blame themselves, taking the side of their slanderers. That’s a big mistake. Never let them gaslight you. Look at the things you have actually said and done, compare the treatment you get with the treatment others have gotten, pray for guidance, and appraise things correctly.

Today some character came up with a totally new jab for me. I went to a forum and asked for input from people who owned a certain product. Things were going fine, and then a forum moderator said he wondered why I hadn’t posted a link to the product. I said it was because I was asking for comments from people who actually had it and didn’t need to be told what it was. He came back with accusations, saying it would be helpful for other people, and he said he had noticed this “same attitude” from me in the past.

“Attitude”? The attitude that people who own something don’t need to be told what it is? What?

How can that be an attitude?

Another member quoted his post and described it as “caustic.”

I looked over old things I had posted, wondering if there was even an atom of history he could be relying on, and of course, there was not. And who gets angry at people for not posting links to things? When did that “become a thing,” as millennials love to say? He could have posted a link himself in less time than it took to try to provoke me.

I responded with something like, “So it wasn’t a question,” and I posted the link.

I don’t know if that seems snippy or what, but it’s hard to think of something I could have said to make him happy without being dishonest. I tried to come up with the least offensive response that would, nonetheless, express what any reasonable person would think. Of course, now he looks stupid and passive-aggressive, but I don’t think I was in a position to prevent that. He was well on the way before I responded.

Perhaps you have had this experience, as I have: a person makes a stupid and unfair attack on you, they end up looking really dumb and childish without assistance from you, and then they get even madder at you. It happened to me a hearing when I was being cleared to join the bar. One of the examiners accused me of something or other, and I had no idea what he was talking about, so I asked him to show me, and of course, he could not. The other two examiners must have been bursting, trying not to laugh at him.

I wasn’t trying to make him look like an idiot. I really didn’t know what he was talking about. But he set himself up.

Anyway, people who attack without thinking often end up exposed as fools.

Internet forums have private message features. The moderator who got mad at me could have sent a message letting me know about his weird new rule and asking me to post a link. This is assuming it was too much trouble to post it himself and be done with it. Or he could have posted to the forum, saying, “Can you post a link to that?”

I would have posted the link. That solution is obvious. He was looking for an excuse to flex his Karen muscles, but he wanted me to feel as though I were the problem.

I didn’t get into an argument. The whole thing is trivial in the extreme.

When I was younger and less aware of the permanent hostility carnal people feel toward people like me, I would have blamed myself. Now I understand what I’m looking at. It’s not a reasonable criticism from someone who has identified a blind spot I have. It’s a bite from a supernatural mosquito. A spirit, or spirits, pushed this person to say something aggressive and unfair in order to try to get me into a silly argument and unforgiveness.

I used to take the bait and obliterate people’s arguments with no sensitivity at all, and I insulted people. As time passes, I am better able to resist. Getting into Internet spats is like fighting with children. Nothing to be proud of.

Here is how the universe works: the saved are God’s favorites. We are like pampered younger children who came after older children who turned out to be losers with tremendous senses of entitlement. That’s just how it is. We receive “favor,” and a person who receives favor is a “favorite.”

The older creatures–the spirits who are disinherited and headed for the lake of fire–really hate us, even though we didn’t take what was theirs or wrong them in any way. They are full of envy.

They can’t take our favor away, so they punish the one who gave it to us and who hates them. They want to hurt God for giving them the rejection they deserve. Sniping at us is the best they can do.

It doesn’t matter what you do or say if you’re a favorite. You will be hated. The older ones will keep pushing their pawns to abuse us. They hope they can bring us down to their level. If they can make us angry and unforgiving, they can drag us to the lake of fire with them.

The older spirits are heaven’s leftists. They want to destroy a hierarchy which justly puts them at the bottom. They want to take from those who are blessed and give to the wicked. They want God’s very throne. They’re just like BLM and Antifa, which they created. “You have more than we do, so you must have wronged us. Inequality of outcome equals unfairness.”

My wife had a vision of Satan once. She saw him sitting on a beautiful golden throne. Excrement was falling on him as he sat. It had been happening so long, he was used to it. There was nothing he could do. A big piece of poo would smack him in the face, and he would flick it off as though it were lint. He wanted his golden throne, and it looks like he got it. No wonder the Bible calls him the lord of flies and the lord of feces. He must be sitting somewhere now, fantasizing about the higher throne he thinks belongs to him. Hatching leftist plots that will only make things worse for him.

I guess it makes sense. If he sits on a throne with poop raining down on him, of course he would send his kids to throw poop at us on our thrones of favor.

My grandfather was rich, and he had 8 grandchildren. I was the favorite. I didn’t plot to get that. He just liked me. Night before last, I dreamed of him. He took me into his basement and showed me strange little objects worth millions of dollars each. He said they couldn’t stay there. The danger of theft by my relatives was too great.

While I was with him, I remembered I had never told him how I felt about him until he was unconscious and dying from a heart attack. In the dream, I told him everything. He brushed it off, laughing. He was not offended, but he said his descendants were liars, as though I were trying to butter him up. I was a little hurt, but I was glad I said it. I wish I had said it to him instead of a figure in a dream.

I thank God for favor all the time. I really want to have the right attitude. I can’t bring my grandfather back, but I can try to have a pleasing attitude toward God.

I have learned to accept favor without guilt. Zero apologies. Sorry if the old ones don’t like it. Let them take it up with God. Favor is God’s plan. I didn’t invent it. I agree with God, always. I don’t question his decision to put me in the upper class and them in the lower class. When I suffer, I will agree with God, so I will certainly agree with him when he blesses me.

My sister was spoiled very badly. When I showed up in the world, she was very angry. She hated me even when I was a baby who couldn’t have done anything wrong. My mother caught her torturing me in my crib. She never changed. From my sister, I learned what Satan is like. He used to be the center of attention, or close to it. He felt special. Now the saved have replaced him, he is headed for eternal agony, and he will be forgotten, which is a horrible fate for a huge ego.

My sister made my parents suffer, and in comparison, I was pleasant, so after a while, I became the favored child. That wasn’t my fault. I shouldn’t be penalized for better behavior, and bad behavior has natural and fair consequences.

My parents and everyone else suffered when my sister was around, so when my parents were with me, it felt like rest. How could that not give rise to disparate treatment?

I hope I am somewhat more pleasing to God than Satan and the human beings who hate God, and I am thrilled to receive better treatment than they do when I can get it. If I have better health, more peace, more money, an attractive and pleasant wife, and whatever else God has decided to give me, so be it. If you’re out in the streets trying to burn police buildings, promoting perversion, calling Christians “christofascists,” and blaming white people for inventing evil, you should expect to be poor and miserable. You invested, and you’re getting your return.

James thought separation from the world was so important, he chose it as one of the two things he emphasized when he told people how to please God: “Pure and undefiled religion before God and the Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their trouble, and to keep oneself unspotted from the world.”

We are not part of the world, so we will not be treated fairly by it. People will always get angry at us for no reason. You have to blow it off. Realize you’re dealing with insane people. You won’t get anywhere by compromising and currying favor, and bickering will just draw you into the the mess your accusers swim in every day.

Rising to the Occasion

The workshop is becoming more and more orderly and less dysfunctional every week. Can the rest of my life be far behind? The other day, I was praying, and I heard myself saying, “Order my life,” over and over. Yesterday or the day before, I heard, “Your habits are important.” Little words and phrases that come from God can make big changes in your life.

I bought myself a big ice cream maker with built-in refrigeration, and I also got a deep fryer and a Ronco rotisserie. As a result, my counters look like Fred Sanford’s yard. I started building a kitchen cart to hold these things, but I got distracted, possibly by the unexpected courtship that led to me marrying my wonderful wife. I had built most of the frame of the cart, but it sat and rusted after that.

Rust was never a problem in Miami. I was led to believe that things rusted quickly in warm, humid places, but the opposite is true.

Rust is caused by condensation more than above-average humidity. When you have sudden temperature swings, things that are cold collect water until they warm up. Then they rust. Sudden swings happen all the time in most of America, but the closer you get to the tropics, the rarer they are.

Where I live now, I have to cover bare iron up or spray it with greasy concoctions unless I want rust.

This week, I started working on the cart again, and I had to begin with about an hour of knocking rust off with an angle grinder and a paint-stripping wheel.

As of last night, I had the frame nearly done. I have to weld one more piece of tubing into it, and I also have to add two attachments to set one pair of wheels farther apart than the other two.

When I started working on this thing, I was under the impression it had to be very square. I was planning on welding 4 plate casters on the bottom, and if you have 4 wheels on a rigid object, and they’re not in exactly the same plane, the object will rock or one caster won’t touch the floor. I welded it up carefully, but it’s still off by almost 1/8″. Since starting the project, I have realized the answer isn’t perfect fabrication; it’s casters with stems.

A lot of products have casters or feet on threaded stems. The reason is that you can adjust their height to make up for small errors in the construction of the products.

Yesterday, I made three little pucks of steel, and I drilled and tapped them. I’m going to weld them into the bottom of the cart and use stem casters.

I have also learned that every 4-wheeled object should have one set of wheels that are farther apart than the others. Or closer together, if you look at it that way. A trapezoidal footprint makes it impossible for an object to rock. It can fall over, but it can’t rock back and forth, and rocking can lead to tipping. Also, increasing the length of one axle will make tipping harder even without considering rocking. It puts the center of gravity farther inboard from the wheels.

To increase the width of one set of wheels, I made these things out of 1″ by 3″ tubing:

I will weld them onto one pair of vertical tubes on the cart, and I’ll put the caster nuts I made in them, as far out as possible.

I have also replaced all the lights in my shop. LED’s are improving at a furious pace.

Where I used to have two relatively expensive 4000-lumen fixtures that were built in, I now have 4 3000-lumen jobs from Home Depot, wired to trusses. They cost me $17 each. They don’t have tubes, so they cost less. I can’t replace dead tubes when they go out, but the fixtures cost about the same amount of money as two tubes, so it doesn’t matter. I hardwired them pretty easily.

I had two somewhat dim 4-foot LED lights over three areas in the shop. I went to Harbor Freight and got three 5000-lumen replacements for $17 each. The quality appears to be about the same. China is China.

I bought my self 16 feet of white LED strip lighting, and I put it in my shelf complex.

These things come with an adaptor that plugs into one end. This is a problem if you want to have the adaptor and switch in the middle, along with a stretch that doesn’t give off light. If you run a strip through two cabinets, you don’t want light between the cabinets. I figured there had to be a way to splice them.

Turned out I was right. I put 42″ of wire between two 8-foot sections. Now the switch is where I want it to be, and I don’t have a useless strip of light running across the wall.

You can splice them with a soldering iron and shrink tubing. Look it up if you’re interested. It’s simple. They also make clips to splice LED strips, but people say they are unreliable.

I got the strip lights as a lark. They’re not a permanent solution. LED strips are pretty tacky if you can see them, and I can see mine. They’re best for indirect light, so the strips are concealed. They’ll do for now, though.

I got my smallest leaf blower running. It’s a tiny Husqvarna I’ve had since Miami. It would be worthless for cleaning up a yard, but it’s perfect for a workshop with big doors. At the end of a session, you vacuum up anything that can damage concrete (steel filings=rust stains), you fire the blower up, and you blow everything else out into the yard. My big electric blower would actually be better, but the Husqvarna is light and convenient, and it’s important to run small engines frequently because leftists have ruined the world with ethanol gas that kills carburetors and other parts.

I was thinking of putting up a second building, and I got an estimate. Now I want to make the most of my existing building first. To that end, I am considering building a loft and an elevator.

You would think putting an elevator in a workshop would cost thousands of dollars, but it doesn’t. An OSHA-approved elevator with all the bells and whistles would probably cost as much as a Cadillac, but you don’t need that kind of equipment in a home shop. You just need a platform that goes up and down without killing anyone.

Somebody came up with a way to combine a cheap winch, steel struts from Home Depot, rollers, and plywood to make an elevator that will move a person and maybe 350 pounds of stuff, depending on how fat the person is. I’ll embed a video chosen at random.

I had thought about building a loft, but a loft usually means stairs or a ladder. I am not going to carry things up a ladder, and stairs would take up maybe 30 square feet and make it hard to get around the shop. With an elevator, I can put things like a pressure washer or generator on the platform, get on with them, and ride up in comfort. An elevator would only take up maybe 12 square feet, and it would be against a wall, out of the way.

The added bonus of an elevator is that you can leave it about three feet from the floor and use it as a workbench.

If I had a loft, I could get some big things off the floor. I have a portable table saw, a pressure washer, and a sliding miter saw. I could also put shelves in the loft and use them for things that are rarely used but too good to throw out. Big jugs of machinery oil, for example.

My walls are only 12 feet high, so in order to get a reasonable height under the loft, I would have to make do with around 5 feet between the loft and the ceiling, but that’s a whole lot better than nothing, and I wouldn’t be playing basketball up there.

I would have to add a built-in ladder in case the power went out while I was up there, but that would take up almost no room.

It can be done. It has been done.

The only question is how big to make it. I’m thinking maybe 6 feet by 16. I don’t want to put a whole wall in the shade. If I change my mind, adding more loft space would be simple.

There are a lot of Youtube videos featuring shopmade elevators, and there is a lot of negativity in the comments. “Kids will hurt themselves.” “You’ll get your foot caught between the elevator and the stuff beside it.” “The cable will break, and you’ll fall.” A smart person put up the obvious response, saying shops are already full of dangerous things. A band saw can take a finger off in a hurry. Grinders can kill in an instant. A lathe can roll an arm up like a sock. Somehow these things are okay, but an elevator is too perilous? Not listening.

The fall hazard can be negated pretty easily. They make contraptions that catch things when they start to fall.

It looks like an elevator can be installed for well under a grand, and it’s not a really big job.

I may also build a shed. I can buy a little one for $600, but I would like to have one big enough to put the utility cart and garden tractor in when I’m using the shop. Just to keep the rain off. I think it would be a simple matter of installing 6 four-by-four poles with concrete slugs and running boards between them, with steel roof panels above.

When the loft and elevator are done, I can put in a split AC unit. I have until about mid-April to get that done. The weather should be acceptable until then. I’ll want a drywall ceiling with insulation, as well as an new insulated roll-up door and insulation for the conventional garage door.

That’s about all the shop news. If I go through with the loft plan, of course I’ll post photos.

Truth is a Terms of Service Violation

God keeps showing me how the willfully-triggered belong to Satan. They are slanderers, just like their dad.

Before I go on, I should mention gaslighting, which is a type of slander Satan’s children love.

The term “gaslighting” comes from a movie called Gaslight. In that movie, a man murders a woman for her jewels but leaves them behind. He then marries her heir, a niece, in order to get access to what he wants. He takes measures to get the jewels. As she starts to notice strange things happening, he convinces her she is imagining things, trying to make her think she is going insane. Of course, the things she imagines are actually happening.

A gaslighter may tell a cuckold he is jealous, delusional, and possessive. A gaslighter may tell a battered wife she brings beatings on herself with her bad behavior. Gaslighters love causing problems and blaming them on the victims.

The purpose of gaslighting is to enslave others and make them take the punishment for the evil you do, while seeing to it you are neither blamed nor punished. A good gaslighter gets people to reward him for doing evil.

Before my dad accepted Jesus, he was a big gaslighter. My sister is a horrible gaslighter.

BLM and Antifa are gaslighting organizations. The perpetually-offended are gaslighters. They do evil constantly, and they thrive financially and socially by slandering the innocent.

Our new leftist rulers are racists, sexists, and ageists. They openly hate white people and men. They condemn older, wiser people, claiming they ruined the world. They tell their victims innocent things the victims say and do are proof of their wickedness.

Against convenience abortion? You’re a white supremacist. Got a Bass Pro Shops hat? Racist. You can be convicted of racism now for words and deeds totally unrelated to race. Making an “OK” sign with your hand. Complaining about illegal immigration. Saying a person who claims to be a US citizen should identify himself properly when he votes.

I still can’t figure out how opposing the killing of the unborn makes you a racist, but it doesn’t matter, because leftists can construct whatever insane theories they like, and anyone who points out the insanity can’t have a voice, because to oppose leftists is to be so evil society is obligated to silence you. For the children.

They’re like Hitler’s theorists and “scientists.” And Stalin’s. They can say any nutty thing they want, and the government will back them.

Leftists have decided only white people can be racist, which is a racist claim on its face, but you can’t be taken seriously if you disagree, because you have white privilege, which is the privilege of being muzzled because of your skin color.

Today I learned something chilling, and it helped me to realize how close to the rapture we are. Youtube has banned RT.

RT is a news organization sponsored by the Russian government. Predictably, it pushes Russian viewpoints. Much of what RT used to put on Youtube was informative and entertaining, a lot of it was unrelated to politics, and they did some very good journalism, but RT was not always honest. So it was a lot like CNN, the network of Chris Cuomo.

Now, we don’t have to worry about having our minds corrupted by RT’s Youtube channel. It’s gone. The Google kidz took it away because of the lies RT was telling about Ukraine. Well, actually, we never got to see those lies, because RT vanished before they could be told. But they were really bad. Or would have been, had they been allowed to exist. Mommy Google knows best. We are not intelligent enough to look at RT videos and then other sources and decide what the truth is.

Mommy Google decided Russia was 100% wrong and Ukraine was completely innocent. She looked out for us. She made it unnecessary for us to do the hard work of thinking, which could have led to disagreement with Mommy. Who was right. She always is.

Now Mommy and her friends have decided Russia blew up its own gas pipeline, and we are not supposed to question it. Russia can’t defend itself on Youtube, but that’s okay, because Russia is wrong, as Mommy concluded for us a long time ago. Letting a wrong person make a defense is wrong. If you disagree with my last sentence, you should be deplatformed so you can’t say so.

Russia’s Nord Stream pipeline carries Russian gas to Europe, and it mysteriously ruptured a while back. It was deliberately breached. We know that, because gas pipelines don’t just rupture. What we don’t know is who blew it up.

If you ask Mommy and her friends why Russia would blow the pipeline up when Russia needs money, they don’t have an explanation. Presumably, the idea is to get sympathy for the Ukraine war. To believe that, you have to think Putin is not merely malevolent, but extremely, astonishingly stupid. Supposedly a guy who runs Russia with a bunch of oligarchs is in favor of cutting off oligarch wealth in order to strengthen his support. Okay. Sure.

It’s kind of like the idiotic claim that FDR sacrificed half of the Pacific Fleet in order to get us into a war…in the Pacific. Which we would need a fleet to fight.

Meanwhile, Tucker Carlson is in Mommy’s penalty box because he thinks the theory is silly. He quoted Joe Biden, who threatened to sever the pipeline on record. So let’s see. Putin and his friends and his country need money. Putin’s enemies don’t want them to get it. So Putin cut the pipeline, and we, his enemy, had nothing to do with it. After our president threatened to do it.

Our government says we didn’t do it. Thank goodness. That clears that up. Our government has never lied to us about anything.

Am I supporting Russia? No. I don’t know what happened. But it would sure be nice to see what the Russians say on their own Youtube channel, because as our founding FATHERS (not sperm-providing mothers) believed, the accused should be allowed to make defenses. Maybe Russia has some valid information to provide.

RT should be allowed to publish on Youtube. If they lie, other people should respond with correction. That’s how America is supposed to work. Or was supposed to. Those days are gone. We now live in the age of sanctioned prior restraint.

“Prior restraint” is a legal term for censorship. It is used in discussion of the right to freedom of expression. In discussions of government censorship, it means the government reviews things prior to publication and decides whether they can be released. Prior restraint is very, very, VERY strongly disfavored by our laws.

Now that speech is controlled by a small number of millennial punks, the government has a wonderful, legal tool it can use to perform prior restraint. It gets the tech punks to agree with it, and the tech punks do the restraining.

This is like the police sending a civilian to break into your house to steal evidence of a crime. The punks are not government employees, but they are agents of the government.

A week or two back, we saw emails proving the government is using the punks to do prior restraint. The White House got Facebook (Meta) to take down things it didn’t like. Not plans for nuclear weapons. Not the new names and locations of federal informants. A parody Instagram account making fun of Anthony Fauci. The request and obedient response took place within a few seconds of each other.

We used to understand that prior restraint was very bad. The punks don’t believe this. They are exasperated with sane people and our inconvenient truths. They have had enough. They are tired of reasoning, arguing, and voting. They believe the answer is to strangle us so we can’t speak. We are so bad, merely hearing our words is harmful. Our words are violence.

We have become like China and Cuba, where people have no idea what’s going on in the world. People who disagree with Mommy are banned or shadow-banned, which is just as bad. Ignorant, conceited morons who spew the party line are promoted and paid.

Things aren’t as bad here as they are in China, where Mommy also helps a government censor important speech, but we are in the same boat, because we have unelected entities exercising tremendous power over what we see, hear, and believe. And it will get worse, because it works. The longer the punks do their work, the more Americans will agree with them. America will gratefully hand the work of forming conclusions over to the punks and the government, and we will go blissfully to sleep with visions of Kardashians dancing in our heads.

To get back to gaslighting, yesterday I stirred up trouble on a forum I use. I asked a question, and an obnoxious person gave a nonresponsive answer and, in the process, suggested I was a bad guy for thinking countries like Georgia and Tanzania were “bad” travel destinations. The implication was that I was prejudiced, which I am not. These really are bad travel destinations. Read reviews. And I was standing up for Africans, not slandering residents of poor countries. I was doing the opposite of the thing I was accused of.

Anyway, I try not to fuss with people these days, and I ask God to help me not to be angry with people, but last night, I made an exception. I made a fool of this person. I was also very critical of nations and embassy employees that have a shadow-ban policy of encouraging Africans to apply for tourist visas and then denying them without considering them. I complained about an employee who denied my wife’s application based on the delusion that we were not actually married. We gave these people a marriage certificate, a link to the clerk’s site so she could check it out, proof of the assets I had given my wife, and even an appraisal for her nice, big wedding ring. We gave them copies of visa stamps showing we had gone to other countries.

I said the employee apparently thought I gave money, trips, and jewelry to all my prostitutes. That was a reasonable thing to say, because the employee didn’t think Rhodah was my wife, and she knew I was giving her money, possessions, and trips, and she knew we traveled together, so the only rational explanation, once the actual explanation was discounted, had to be that I was paying for sex.

Of course, the moderators locked the thread, claiming violations of all sorts of Terms of Service.

I felt kind of bad about all this today. I talked to God about it, apologetically. To my surprise, the response was that I had done right.

I have been gaslighted to the point where I feel bad about speaking bluntly in response to false accusations. That’s a dangerous way to feel.

I will continue to offend people for the rest of my time here on Earth, not because I’m a mean guy, but because I feel compelled to be truthful, and people choose to be offended by it. Choosing to be offended gives them power over people. It puts people who are correct on the defensive when they should be conquering. Now that choosing to be triggered is the way of the world, offense will never stop. It will only increase. That’s not my fault or God’s. It’s the fault of the gaslighters and their father Satan.

If you choose to wet your pants every time someone makes an “OK” sign or uses a plastic straw, that’s on you. Go ahead and cry. Suffer. You’re doing it to yourself.

Appeasement won’t help, because the end goal is to get rid of truthful people. You won’t be spared because you agreed to disagree or made concessions. Move the goalposts to make the enemy happy, and he will keep advancing, because he wants everything. He wants an end of you.

Look at Israel. They have been moving their borders inward for decades. Has it helped? Are their enemies happy with them now? Of course not. They keep advancing.

The goal isn’t a two-state solution. It’s a no-Jewish-state solution. A no-Jews-anywhere solution. What happens in Israel should tell you all you need to know about appeasement.

It’s a good lesson. It reminds me of something I already know: I should be at peace with myself, because I can’t fix anything. If I speak the truth, I will be attacked. If I keep quiet but refuse to parrot lies, I will be attacked. That I will be attacked is a certainty, so I should speak the truth and be blameless. The world gives me little incentive to be quiet.

Satan was the first leftist. Like all leftists, he challenged rightful authority that had been set over him. Leftists are his children. They take after their dad. Satan gets what he wants partly through slander, so we will be slandered and slandered and slandered by his children. And the wicked will be praised, because there is always symmetry in the supernatural.

Jesus is the Prince of Peace, but he also said he didn’t come to bring peace but a sword. The world will have peace after the tribulation, when leftists are gone, but Jesus isn’t going to make the world peaceful during this age. Right now, individuals who love Jesus can have peace and protection. The world as a whole can’t.

Jesus is dividing people, as he said he would. His children say and do certain things, and Satan’s children can’t stand it, so they will continue trying to destroy us.

Don’t make your life a popularity contest. You can’t be popular unless you’re lost. Be glad you’re unpopular, because you can’t be right without being unpopular. If you’re popular, try to find out what the problem is and ask God to fix it. Jesus said we would be unpopular and that we should rejoice because of it. He said a friend of the world is an enemy of God. He meant these things.

It looks like our senile president is doing his best to start a nuclear war. I miss Trump and his hopes of kicking other countries out of the nest and making them fight their own battles. I still haven’t seen any compelling reason for getting into the battle between two corrupt nations that have been unfriendly to us.

I wonder what will happen. My wife had a waking vision of Russians bombing Japan, of all places. It came in a package with another vision that has already come true. I wonder if the war will spread soon.

I see Elon Musk is being forced to buy Twitter after all. Big step for free speech? I kind of doubt it. Musk rules with a heavy hand, so I am skeptical of his plans to free Twitter. Of course, if he does free Twitter, it could help Satan because it will push us closer to civil war. Meta could be the Union’s platform, and Twitter could belong to the Confederacy.

I want off this planet. It’s far crazier than I realized 20 years ago. Mainstream America is truly vile now. The trend is very strongly negative, and there is no reason to think it won’t continue and accelerate. The biggest disappointment I face every day is knowing the rapture hasn’t happened.

Like Father, Like Sons

I had some disturbing thoughts I would like to relay.

I always wonder how Americans manage to die in hurricanes. We know they’re coming. We have time to prepare. The experts tell us about storm surge, which ought to drive anyone to evacuate. The government provides buses and shelters. Still, people die.

Sometimes, you can’t blame them. The first Ian death in the US was a man who fell into a canal while checking his generator. Assuming he wasn’t under an evacuation order, and that he had no reason to think his property would be submerged, he was apparently behaving reasonably, and things just didn’t go well.

Most deaths occur because of bad decisions. People choose to leave areas they know will be flooded. They choose to stay in structures they know can’t stand up to strong winds. Why do these things happen?

Back in ’05, Katrina killed a lot of people in New Orleans. They knew the storm was on the way. They knew their areas were below sea level. They knew about storm surge. Buses were waiting to move them out. Shelters were ready. Many people drowned anyway.

Later on, information started to trickle out, partially explaining things. Many people in the submerged areas were living on government handouts, and they were under the impression they would miss their checks if they left.

Does that explain everything, though? Yesterday, I realized two other factors were in play.

First, people in certain types of neighborhoods are afraid of their neighbors. They know what will happen if they leave their homes. The neighbors will flood in and take everything they have. They risk death in order to avoid having their houses emptied by their friends.

Second, and this is more disturbing, there are many people who look forward to looting. If you evacuate, you don’t get to loot.

I don’t have to Google to find out whether these things are true. I know they’re true because I know human nature. Looking for proof would be like looking for proof that people will cut in line at a crowded highway exit. We all know it’s true.

I’m sure there were also many people who died simply because they were incompetent. I mean derelicts and addicts. Many of them are mentally ill, and many are just plain incapable of reasoning. Their emotions and urges rule them all day, every day.

It’s common knowledge that certain people prepare for disasters by setting themselves up to take advantage of others. For example, before hurricanes, they go to stores and buy up generators. Then after the storms hit, they sell them for big profits. They create the shortages, harming people by depriving them of what they need, and then they swim back for a second bite, selling them what they need at inflated prices. Florida has made disaster profiteering illegal because it has been so common.

It’s obvious that if people will do that, they will also look forward to, and prepare for, looting opportunities. They will size up targets and try to be the first ones there.

Remember the filthy parasite in Tennessee who bought up hand sanitizer in several states when covid hit? He had plenty of company. I remember seeing paper towels on Ebay listed for several times their original prices.

It’s discouraging to realize how disgusting your race is. Humanity is revolting. When I think about it, I’m amazed that God hasn’t destroyed us for good.

In related news, I got some revelation this morning.

I came across a Youtube of Representative Andrew Clyde, asking questions at a congressional hearing. He asked two leftist doctors simple questions. He asked one whether it was true that, as Stacy Abrams says, the heartbeat of an unborn baby at 6 weeks is a “manufactured event.” He asked the other whether a biological man could get pregnant and give birth.

Sometimes it’s unfair to demand yes or no answers. Some questions can’t be answered that way, and sometimes a yes or no answer can be misleading even if true. Clyde’s questions don’t fall into these categories. It’s obvious.

The first doctor, a woman, refused to answer, instead wandering off on a tangent about her professional goals in order to squander Clyde’s time and deny him the right to do his job. The other, a very effeminate male hipster, started talking about the delusional people who call themselves trans men. The question was about biological men.

Without God’s assistance, my only reactions would be laughter, contempt, and anger. But sometimes the Holy Spirit shines his emotions into our hearts. That happened to me. I felt tears trying to come to my eyes. I felt what Jesus feels when he sees how insane people have become because they rejected his help.

I realized these people represent America’s future. Christians are dying out. America is aging out of Christianity and blessings and into idolatry, defeat, subjugation, humiliation, disease, poverty and hatred. It’s not going to stop. There will be no big revival. We already had that. It took place during the last century.

The effeminate doctor, a homosexual who kills the unborn for a living, has claimed that laws protecting the unborn are based in white supremacy. How can anyone be that insane? But it’s saner than thinking Chaz Bono is a man, a lie the left swallowed eagerly, so no one should be surprised.

Black babies are the biggest victims of abortion. A black baby in New York City is more likely to be killed by his leftist mother and her leftist doctor than to be born alive. Abortion is a leftist tool intended primarily to get rid of poor blacks. “Unwanted baby” really means “black baby.”

The emotion that ran through me said, “There is nothing more I can do. I can’t save these people.” It was as though a grey curtain were falling between the unsaved world and Jesus.

That brings me to the title of the video: “Get Me Off This Planet…NOW!” It’s like a reference to the rapture, even though it probably was not intended that way. It expresses what I and many other Christians are feeling. We have less patience than God. We want out.

My wife and I intercede every day, and lately, I have been interceding for Jesus himself. If that sounds crazy, you should look at the Bible. I’m not the first. Zechariah interceded for Jesus. In the third chapter, he had a vision, and he saw a freshly-killed Jesus before the throne, wearing a filthy robe stained with our stinking sins. God forgave Jesus and gave an order for a new robe to be brought to him. Zechariah asked Yahweh to put a clean turban on him, and Yahweh agreed.

That was intercession. Talking to God is prayer, and praying for another person’s benefit is intercession. Zechariah prayed for God to do something for Jesus.

Notably, Satan was also before the throne, accusing Jesus, just as most of the priests and scribes did. He really wanted to keep him.

Their spiritual descendants are doing the same thing today, claiming Jesus is in hell, boiling in feces and semen. You can find them on Youtube, proclaiming it. Highly esteemed people, not fringe characters no one listens to.

My wife and I ask God to give Jesus the desires of his heart and end his suffering. We ask him to bring the rapture about quickly so he can be with his bride. We’re allowed to do that.

Speaking of accusers, leftists have truly become the children of the devil. The Greek word translated as “devil” means “accuser.” It describes a person who accuses people falsely in order to destroy relationships. What do leftists do all day now? Accuse falsely. Words are violence and murder, but rioting is speech. Protecting babies is white supremacy. Calling a sports team the Braves is colonialism and racism. Calling a man a man is misgendering, sexist, and probably also, in some way, white supremacy. I should check.

In Biblical terms, a biological child is not necessarily a true child, but a person who takes after another person enthusiastically is. This is why Jesus called the rabbis and priests who hated him children of Satan. They thought they were sons of Abraham because of the biological link, but they were nothing like Abraham, so they were not really his children, regardless of genetics. They were enemies of God, and by extension, enemies of Abraham. People who are not related to Abraham, on the other hand, become part of his family by accepting Yeshua.

Leftists slander us all day, every day. They do exactly what Satan does, so they have chosen to be his children. In the next life, we will go to the place Jesus has prepared for us, and they will go to be with their father in a place that was prepared for him.

If we know we sin, how can we say Satan slanders us when he accuses us? Isn’t he speaking the truth? It’s slander because if we repent and rely on the sacrifice, we are not guilty any more. The price has been paid, so it’s a lie when Satan says we should be punished. He’s trying to impose double jeopardy.

It’s all very interesting.

I See no Math

Here is my final update on Hurricane Ian: absolutely nothing happened here. A couple of buckets blew across the yard. We have had a long spell of continuous light rain, nowhere near the one-foot-plus we were supposed to get. That’s it.

Because hurricanes spin counterclockwise, a storm that passes you on the east will bring you hot, wet air at first and then cool, dry air from the north. That’s happening here now. We are set to have a glorious week of cool, dry weather. Unusually good for early October. Apart from the fresh crop of post-hurricane mosquitoes, things could not be better.

I don’t have regular TV, because I hate it. That means I am not seeing what everyone else in our TV-addicted nation is seeing. I only see little bits of it as they pop up while I look at the web. It wasn’t until last night that I started to see a lot of video about the destruction Ian did in other parts of Florida. I haven’t seen much of anything about Cuba.

Now that the storm is over for me, I am looking at stories about other places. Lee County’s sheriff is claiming hundreds of deaths. Can that really be true? In 2022, it’s not that easy for an American to die in a hurricane. The government knocks itself out providing transportation and shelters, and hurricanes generally aren’t that dangerous to begin with. The winds kill very few people. The big threat is storm surge, which can drown people who don’t evacuate. The people in Lee County knew the water was predicted to rise high enough to kill them, so it’s hard for me to believe hundreds of them chose not to move to high ground.

When you live inland, there is no such thing as storm surge, so the main danger from hurricanes doesn’t exist.

I didn’t expect anyone in the US to experience the kind of catastrophe the sheriff is talking about. I thought there might be a lot of property damage and economic loss, but I didn’t think anyone would drown. We know how to prevent that. Now I’m hearing that while I was having a pretty good time, grilling burgers and eating junk food, other people may have been drowning or waiting on rooftops for rescue boats.

Truthfully, I think it’s a big mistake to live in any hurricane-prone area. From Texas to the Carolinas, coastal people know they will get hit sooner or later. The pleasure of being near the water is not worth the unending flow of tense pre-hurricane vigils or the pain of cleaning up when storms actually hit.

I have been through Betsy, Katrina, Wilma, Rita, and Irma in one way or another, and I have also spent a bunch of weeks watching other storms that didn’t reach me. All in all, I wish I had been in Tennessee or some other nice place where people aren’t afraid of the weather.

The place where I live is about as unsafe as I can stand. We haven’t had hurricane winds since 1885, but we sometimes get tropical storm winds that cause serious inconvenience, and that’s bad enough. I would never accept a higher level of risk again. I would never live close to a coast.

My wife and I were discussing our pleasant fate today, and I had an interesting thought. In the Bible, people who knew they were in danger fasted and prayed. They repented and humbled themselves. They knew this was how to get God’s help. America is full of Christians who think they know the Bible, but virtually no one calls for repentance, prayer, and fasting when we face a threat.

I fasted and prayed because of the storm, and I came out fine. That shouldn’t surprise me. Why hasn’t every Christian done it? Many times I, myself, have failed to do it. How can we make such an obvious mistake?

Look at our teachers. They are at fault. The Catholics teach us to pray to statues, dead people who have no power, and a mere woman, and they tell us God rarely helps anyone. Cessationists tell us we have to work hard and fix our own problems because while Satan is happy to continue doing supernatural works, God has quit. Prosperity preachers teach us we get eternal security by raising our hands once in church, and they tell us God will make us rich for buying them jets. Almost nobody is teaching anything helpful, and most preachers are teaching lies that cripple us.

I don’t feel guilty about sailing through Ian without a care. I am supposed to receive blessings. It’s not something to feel guilty about. We are supposed to strive to receive and share God’s blessings. Why else would we worship Him? What would be the point? Feeling bad about being blessed makes no sense. You’re just getting what you asked for. Other people should ask, too.

Jesus paid for my help with his body and blood and kingdom. It’s terrible that so many other people had devastating outcomes, but I’m not responsible. I want to continue being blessed and protected, even if everyone else on Earth is destroyed. I pray for people and help them, and I want to see them get the best things they can, but sinking with them won’t help anyone.

Now I will get back to making my tractor attachment and making travel plans. I should be done with hurricanes for one year.

Expected Giant; Received Midget

The hurricane news today is generally good. If you live where I do. In Fort Myers, it’s a colossal disaster. It’s hitting the Fort Myers area right now. It will not be great for Tampa or Orlando, either. Assuming the predictions aren’t hype.

The NHC thought the storm would weaken before hitting the coast and come in at Category 2 or so, but the official measurement looks more like Category 4 or 5, so the pessimists are winning that battle. At least it’s not hitting Tampa, a large city, directly.

For me, the good news is that they are predicting maximum sustained winds of 29 mph where I live, and the winds will be from directions that are not favorable to a lot of property damage. If the predictions pan out, I probably won’t even lose my electricity. That would mean I could continue bathing. With hot water. Not pool water.

The storm is nearly as close to Tampa as it will ever get to me, give or take, and the winds in Tampa are not terrible: 44 mph. When the storm makes its closest approach to me, it will be a lot weaker, so the winds SHOULD be lower. But as the storm’s history shows, hurricanes like to change directions.

One source says 44 mph. Another says 9 with 14 mph gusts. How can that be?

It’s hard to tell what’s really happening. Cape Coral is about as close to the eye of Ian as Florida gets, and they are reporting 31 mph winds with gusts to 43. Can that be right? I would have expected something like 140 based on the maps. Cape Coral is well within the NHC’s hurricane-force band, meaning Cape Coral is inside the hurricane, so the sustained winds should be no lower than 75 mph.

I haven’t been able to find the Weather Channel’s usual hysterical, dishonest coverage. I have been trying to find videos of raincoated reporters pretending to have a hard time standing up in light winds, or reporters standing on their knees in 6 inches of water to make it look deeper, but I haven’t seen them yet. Maybe you have to have cable to get that kind of helpful informational edutainment.

It should be possible to get good, solid information instantly using the web, but it’s not.

I just checked the Weather Channel’s site, and they have privately-hosted videos. One features a guy named Mike Seidel, broadcasting live from Fort Myers. Supposedly the eye wall is coming ashore, and the storm has maximum winds of 155 mph. The little meter in the corner of the screen says 31 mph with gusts to 58. What?

When I saw his name, it rang a bell, so I Googled “‘mike seidel’ fake news.” Yes, I remembered him for a reason. He got caught lying during another hurricane, pretending to struggle to stand. I’ll embed a video.

He didn’t lie verbally. He lied with his body. As my friend Mike points out, he leaned the wrong way. He leaned to leeward. That’s not how it works.

Today Seidel, who still, incredibly, has a job, is standing and walking normally. I guess he learned something.

Here’s another classic:

I can’t stand it:

The Anderson Cooper video reminds me of Baghdad Bob. Remember him? “There are no enemy tanks in Baghdad, and our victorious army of Islamic holy warriors [boom] @*$^@(*@^$#!!! ALLAH SAVE ME!!!”

I have been praying for God to keep the storm from harming Christians and their property, and I am still okay with it leveling Walt Disney World.

Things are looking very good for me and most of the state, but now I have a giant stockpile of junk food to deal with, and I may no longer have an excuse to eat it. This morning I ate a big bowl of Sugar Smacks (now called Honey Smacks, which is no better) with milk and cream, and then I followed it up with Cape Cod potato chips and onion dip. And three Pepperidge Farm cookies. Lunch will be more like actual food. I’m planning to have a delicious half-pound cheeseburger.

I am seriously wondering if local charities take pretzels and chips.

Ordinarily, I would have had a normal breakfast, but you know how it is when you’ve been fasting.

There is really nothing to do here except wait for NHC updates and think about food. And, of course, pray.

The storm still poses a hazard for me. It will probably cause a mosquito explosion. The water it leaves behind may be here for a couple of weeks.

Time to make sure all my portable power banks are charged, just in case. I need to have cell power so I can talk to my wife.

More: 2:23 P.M.

Things still look pretty good here. The projected path of the storm has moved slightly to the north, but it’s still favorable for my county.

Here is the weird thing: the Internet says the wind speed here, right now, is 26 mph. When I look outside, I see a pleasant breeze. The trees are moving a little. Doesn’t look like 26 mph to me. I would guess it’s between 10 and 15.

Hope it continues this way. The forecast says we are looking at another 7 mph, tops.

Sitrep: 6:15 P.M.

I always tell people you can often predict hurricane behavior better than the pros if you look at the rawest data you can get. This has turned out to be true with Ian. Of course, prayer is the main reason every good thing has happened.

At around 3:25, I found a radar loop and checked it out. It showed that the eye of the storm was moving more to the east than the official reports were saying. I thought that was good news, because it was likely to move the whole cone of future misery eastward later.

Lo and behold, the cone has obliged me. The 5 p.m. cone indicated that the storm was projected to veer eastward from the previous cone. This increases the length of time it will have before it makes its closest approach to the compound, and it also makes that approach farther off. Time will weaken the storm, and distance is obviously helpful, as people in Wyoming and Australia could tell you right now.

The storm has moved so far eastward, it’s actually slightly to the east of me. The center is about 120 miles south of me, which is close by hurricane standards, the maximum sustained winds are at around 130 mph, and virtually nothing is happening here. The center is forecast to get within maybe 60 miles of me, but that will be after the storm passes over a lot of real estate very slowly, so it should be much weaker. NOAA says it will be at about 65 mph at that time, so people 60 miles away shouldn’t get much wind.

Tampa is way closer than I will ever be (twice as close as I am now), and it’s getting the best Ian has to offer. Its current wind figure is 32 mph. I talked to a potential tenant today, and he said his relatives in Tampa were saying not a lot was happening. Tampa was supposed to get a good beating.

Of course, if a storm can move east, it can move west, too, but the experts and models say that won’t happen. They have a consensus, and as we all know, when it comes to science, a consensus is always right.

What a burden off my mind.

The wife and I will keep praying for others. I hope you will, too. No prayers for Disney World, though. It ought to be obliterated. I don’t want to see homes or businesses that don’t promote evil harmed, but if Ian wiped Disney World and Universal out without harming anyone around them, I would be content.

Ten O’Clock Update: Ian Now Weak Category 2

Hurricane Ian continues to puzzle me. The Weather Channel says the wind here is moving at 38 mph, but when I go outside, I don’t see it. The trees are bouncing around a little, but it’s not unpleasant.

Tampa is in a much worse location, but the Weather Channel says its winds will top out shortly at a mere 52 mph. After that, Tampa is expected to wind down. For Tampa, Ian is at its peak right now.

I am still trying to understand what’s happening. I had to dig to find information on Irma, which made a mess here. I relearned a few things.

Irma was Category 3 when it landed in Florida. It came ashore on Marco Island. This is nearly the same place where Ian landed today. Marco supposedly had 155 mph winds when it landed, and Irma’s winds were clocked at 120, so much lower.

Irma was huge, though. People are calling Ian big storm, but Irma was about twice as wide, so being 100 miles from the center of Irma, at a given maximum sustained wind speed, would be like being 50 miles from the center of Ian. In other words, Ian has to be twice as close to give you the same wind speed. That means Ian is much less dangerous to me than a storm like Irma.

Irma moved about 1.5 times as fast as Ian, however, so it spent less time wherever it went. A fast-moving storm does less damage in any one area. So Ian’s strong winds will hit less of Florida, but they will spend more time in every location than they would were Ian traveling at Irma’s speed. On the other hand, the smaller diameter of Ian reduces the destructive impact of its lower speed. It’s not a simple picture. The destructive power of storms depends on a number of variables.

Irma traveled a long way before it dropped to tropical storm speed. When it knocked my trees over, it was close to where it crossed the threshold. And the center was close to me. Probably 30 miles away.

Ian is now dropping 5-10 mph of wind speed per hour, and it will be maybe 10 hours before it gets close to its nearest approach to the compound. I don’t know if it will keep dropping speed as fast as it is now, but it will probably be a tropical storm in 10 hours. Weather Underground thinks it will be Category 1 in less than 4.

Category 1 runs from 75 to 95 mph, and Ian is now at 100, so it should cross the line quickly.

So, weak storm. Twice as far away as Irma. Half as wide as Irma, so it will be as though it were 4 times as far away.

Irma also rained like crazy, and Ian may not match it. Rain helps trees fall over because it loosens the roots. They are predicting 4″-6″, but my feeling, based on observation, is that it will be less.

Irma didn’t do all that much damage here. The house was untouched. So was the workshop. I lost trees in the woods, but no one cares about those. I wasted a lot of time cutting them, but I should have let them rot on their own.

I believe I had two trees that landed on fences between me and the neighbors, and only one tree was large. I had one large tree land on my own fence between my house and pasture. I had another big tree land on a fence between my parcels. I would not want to go through Irma again, and Irma caused me a lot of work, but it was no Andrew.

I think very little will happen here. A much worse storm than Ian wasn’t all that bad.

Hope I don’t seem self-obsessed because I am not writing much about the problems in Southwest Florida and Cuba. I am well aware that many other people are suffering very badly. I can’t do anything to help them except pray, and I have done that, so I am studying the storm for my own benefit.

Ian Moves Eastward

The 5:00 news concerning Hurricane Ian is good.

As I noted in my last post, there are two things you have to watch as a hurricane approaches: the predicted path and the way the predicted path is moving as it is updated. Since yesterday, the path has been trending eastward, moving it farther from me and closer to Disney World. Today at 5:00 p.m., the new path was considerably farther east than the 2:00 path.

For yours truly, this is good news for several reasons. It suggests the path will keep moving eastward and increase the minimum distance between me and the eye. It means the eye is already expected to be farther from me, at closest approach, than it was last night. It means Ian will be weaker when it gets near because it will have to cross a lot of land. It also means I won’t get south winds. I’ll get east winds followed by north winds followed by west winds, and the north winds will probably be strongest.

My problem trees are to the north of my buildings. I don’t want south winds. North winds might actually knock over some trees I’d like to lose, saving me the cost of a tree service.

Of course, outlets other than the National Hurricane Center are still supplying bad information. According to the NHC’s predictions, the maximum sustained winds here should be around 50 mph. That’s not good, but it’s way better than earlier predictions. Another site, however, is claiming 67 mph with gusts of 100 mph, about 5 miles away.

So who am I supposed to believe? The NHC, which has always been the best source of information, or a private site which predicts winds much, much higher?

I don’t trust any private source. The NHC is better. Even the NHC is inclined to pessimism, but I think that comes from a natural fear of accepting good news. I don’t think they deceive people deliberately like the news organizations.

I think the forecast for this county will get significantly better. I base that on experience and faith.

My nearest neighbor hasn’t been here long. He has a land-clearing business. He has at least one huge wheel loader at his house. Yesterday I let him know the power pole on his land was the main source of past outages due to wind. Trees used to fall and put it out of commission. Today I heard a big machine moving around over there. I think my neighbor did a little work. That was nice.

My friend Mike is still staying here while he starts a business. Today we sat down and prayed about the storm. It was right after that that I got the nice 2 p.m. report.

We started talking about various things, and I mentioned the revelations Rhodah and I had had over the last day. We both have the impression that God is giving up on the world and that evangelism is a low priority compared to preserving the people he already has. Mike was amazed, because he had the same thought yesterday. He was in Palm Beach County, and he thought about what he saw around him. It made him feel like humanity was lost.

I would love to see the rapture happen right away (provided Rhodah and I make it). I am sick of the antics of Satan’s children. Today I saw that a man had been suspended from Twitter for informing people that men can’t have babies. I want to live in a world where it’s okay to tell the truth and everyone tells the truth.

Isn’t it obvious that a man can’t have a baby? Of course it is. But human beings are herd creatures, and when we are pressured to believe and repeat lies long enough, we give in and follow the flock. The only way to avoid falling for lies is to hear from the Holy Spirit all day, and only a tiny percentage of people hear him, because preachers have been teaching idiotic things like cessationism, legalism, and the Mammon gospel instead of helping people to know God.

People can believe any moronic notion if they think it will help them fit into the herd, and they will perform acts of extreme cruelty to those who refuse to go along.

I hope to see even better news at 8 p.m. when the next update is issued.

Let Disney Drink my Mickey

The practice of trying to figure hurricanes out is not simple. Lots of factors have to be considered. How strong are the winds expected to be? Where is the storm supposed to go? How fast is it moving? How wide is it? Are the people giving you information complete liars, or are they relatively impartial?

Today I saw some liar saying Ian was expected to land in Florida as a Category 4 storm. Not true at all, so why scare people?

Back when Andrew hit, a homosexual meteorologist named Bryan Norcross became a big celebrity in South Florida. His TV channel was able to keep broadcasting after the storm, and the others were off the air, so people came to rely on him. Women fell in love with him and mailed him marriage proposals and their dirty underwear. They didn’t know he was a homosexual because he hid it. He became Florida’s hurricane guru, and for some years, he rode the wave.

I think he is the biggest reason the press lies about storms. They have the baseless, irrational feeling that if he could do it, they can do it, even though the circumstances are different. They all seem to be shouting, “PICK ME!”, and it will never work, because there is competition. There will never be another big hurricane guru.

I’m just guessing.

Why are so many weathermen homosexuals? It’s strange.

Anyway, my primary answer to the Hurricane Ian problem is to fast and pray. Everything else is less important.

We get a lot of information from the National Hurricance Center. The difficult thing is deciding what it means.

We are used to seeing predictive cones that try to show how a storm’s direction will change. Thing is, there is another level of predictions. The storm’s direction changes, and so do the cones. They themselves trend, which goes to show how unreliable they are. If my prediction concerning what will happen on Friday changes between Monday and Tuesday, it’s not a very solid prediction, and a clever person could decide to try to predict how the predictions will change. Second-order predictions.

The NHC is now saying the cones themselves are trending eastward. Ian’s cone was centered over the area of Tarpon Springs, north of Tampa. Now the cone and models suggest it will land south of Tampa and head for Disney World.

This would be a very big break for my county. It might mean winds that are 25 mph lower, and that would probably be the difference between lots of downed trees and a few downed trees.

If the cones keep moving southward, our farm might escape damage entirely.

I have prayed for God to keep the storm off of his people and their property, and I also asked him to prevent the ungodly from having worse problems than is necessary. Today, I changed that a little. I thought about Cuba and Disney World.

Cuba just legalized homosexual marriage by a wide margin, which is just one more indication that Cuban culture is depraved. The storm hit Cuba the next day. It occurred to me that Disney promotes the daylights out of homosexuality and the occult. They now have a show about a demon-worshiping girl who is supposedly the Antichrist, and people are saying how nice it is that paganism is getting positive coverage.

It’s so absurd, it’s hard to comment effectively.

Anyway, I wondered if Cuba’s error was connected to the weather. With that in mind, I told God that if the storm had to go somewhere, he might consider Disney World. Just drown it. No one will be there because it will be closed. It’s fine with me if he shows the world what he thinks of Disney. When storms hit places like my county, it just provides fuel for trolls who say God hates Christians or conservatives or that he doesn’t exist.

My wife and I had similar revelations yesterday and today.

Yesterday, I started wondering whether God is still primarily interested in adding new souls to his family. Maybe he is more interested in holding onto the ones he has so as many as possible will make it in the rapture and avoid the tribulation and hell. The world is an extremely filthy place now, and the constant temptation, which is increasing fast, is very dangerous because under its influence, Christians are losing their salvation. I asked him about it.

As I was praying, I started thinking about my sister.

My sister treated my mother terribly. My mother used to pay her rent so she wouldn’t be on the street, and in order to avoid trouble with my grandparents, who owned the apartment, my mother used to go there on occasion and clean it, carrying out bag after bag of filthy garbage and dog manure. When my sister was in law school, my mother was thrilled she might amount to something, so she supported her financially. My sister showed her gratitude by parking in a handicapped space over and over at a cost of $250 per ticket, and my mother paid the fines. I could go on and on.

When my mother was dying, my sister continued treating her badly and neglected her. My mother wrote a journal for the first time in her life, and in the journal, according to what I have been told, she wrote about how she loved me and how badly my sister had treated her. After my mother died, my sister told me she had stolen the journal and thrown it out so I would never see it. She said it with a big grin on her face, glowing with the pleasure of sadism. She told me because she thought it would hurt me, and the thought of my suffering and the evil she had done made her light up with pleasure.

Not long before my mother died, she told me she was going to disinherit my sister. I talked her out of it, but she insisted on giving me her brokerage account, and she said it was a drop in the bucket compared to what she had spent on my sister.

After she died, my sister, as an heir, was heavily involved in my mother’s estate and my grandparents’ estates, and she made all of us extremely miserable. She offended many people to the point where they refused to do business with us. It was a very bad experience.

If I had not talked my mother out of disinheriting her, these things would not have happened. A lot of people would have been spared a lot of pain. I made a big mistake.

Years later, when my dad started talking about disinheriting her, I kept my mouth shut, not because I wanted the money but because I didn’t want to be chained to my sister again. That decision led to one of the biggest blessings of my life. I don’t have to have any contact with my sister. And because I’m married, she can never inherit from me, so there is no point in her trying to involve herself in my business.

I am the reason my sister was disinherited. I could have saved her, but I minded my own business and respected my father’s decision.

A few years ago, God gave me a phrase: “The whole world is like my sister.” I took it to mean the whole world was like a person who loved evil and could not be helped because of it.

Yesterday, I thought about these things, and I realized God had prepared me for the future. He showed me what my sister was like and that even though I was a Christian, I was supposed to quit chasing her and trying to help her. In doing that, he showed me what the world was becoming: a place so rotten there was no point in chasing people and trying to start revivals.

Sometimes I have felt bad because I have reached so few people for God. Yesterday, I thought about that. I really tried to reach people. I joined churches and ministries. Fools were promoted over me, my efforts to help were swatted down, and the pastors came to consider me their enemy. I tried to help the people they were looting, and the victims themselves persecuted me, saying I was touching God’s anointed and so forth. I was rejected soundly, over and over.

I was very enthusiastic, but Christians wanted nothing to do with me. I would guess I have reached maybe 20 people.

Maybe I’m not the problem.

During the last century, there was a huge revival. Millions of people all over the world were baptized with the Holy Spirit. Things like that don’t happen any more. Not like they did then. And the preachers who still draw big crowds are generally money-worshiping pigs. They want us to think they’ve brought millions into the kingdom of heaven, but in reality, they’ve helped keep them out. They teach people they can be saved permanently by raising their hands once in church, and that they can go home and continue living sinful lives.

Now I suspect God is preparing a small percentage of Christians for the rapture instead of focusing on evangelism. Maybe the next wave of evangelism will be the tribulation itself, in which people will be suffering so terribly, and God and Satan will be so open about their existence, that a few more grains of barley will find their way into the harvest.

The tribulation is all about evangelism. Most people don’t know that. “Tribulation” is a process that separates stubborn grain from its husk. You drive nails into a board called a tribulum, you stand on the board with the nails protruding toward the ground, and you have an animal pull you around so the nails ride over the grain and break the husks. In the Bible, harvest represents saving souls. The tribulation will be God’s last attempt to win souls before the Messianic Age.

I don’t think I should continue feeling bad about reaching so few people. I said what I believed. I didn’t hold anything back. I made myself available. I provided financial support and my own labor. I submitted to the leadership of ghetto people and crooked, half-bright pastors. I prayed a great deal, alone and with others. I was there. The fish just didn’t want the bait.

I am in good company. Jesus himself is only known to have reached 120 people even though he drew large crowds. The Jews of his time generally died unsaved.

I hope I’m right about these things and that the rapture comes soon, because I am fatigued with this place. I don’t want to raise children in a world where perversion and pride and hate are pervasive and they, as Christians, will be treated like demons.

New Storm Threatens to Ruin my Fall

Tropical storm preparations continue here at the compound.

Hurricane Ian’s path has wobbled this way and that over the last couple of days. It was headed for Tampa. Then it was headed for the east side of the panhandle, where there is not much to destroy. Then it turned farther east. Now it’s headed for Tampa again. If it hits Tampa and continues on the present path, the eye will come pretty close to me.

The good thing about this, from my limited perspective, is that the winds that hit here will have to go across a tremendous amount of land first. Land kills storm winds.

Hurricanes circulate counterclockwise, so when one passes near you, you know the directions the wind will take as it goes by. If it passes on the west, as Ian is expected to, the first winds will be from the east, and they will be weakened because they will have to cross Florida twice; first from the Gulf to the east and then from the east to me. After that, there would be southern winds, also weakened, because they will have to come up the middle of the state. Finally, there would be west winds. They would have less resistance, because they would only have to cross from the west coast.

I think the big questions are 1) how wide is the storm, and 2) how strong will it be, generally, when it makes its closest approach to me.

In 2017, Irma spent a lot of time over land before it came near me, but it was very strong when it came ashore, at over 140 mph. It had a hurricane-force wind swath about as wide as Florida until it was about 100 miles south of me, and the tropical-storm-force field was over 5 times the width of the state even after it passed me.

Ian (which Fox is calling a “monster”) looks like it will be much smaller. When Irma was at the stage where Ian is now, it was much, much wider. If Ian stays smaller, the tropical-storm-force band will be narrower and will also have speeds that drop off faster with distance from the eye.

Right now, Tampa’s forecast calls for 80 mph sustained winds, tops, making Ian a Category 1 storm when it hits the coast. That isn’t consistent with other claims I’ve seen. Some news sources say it will be a Category 4. It’s hard to know who is telling the truth because journalists and meteorologists lie about hurricanes so much.

The National Hurricane Center is fairly neutral, so I’m checking their site. They say Ian will DECREASE in intensity after it hits Cuba, so it appears the Cat 4 story is just another media lie. Here’s what they say:

The NHC intensity forecast calls for Ian to become a major hurricane before it reaches western Cuba early Tuesday. It is then forecast to reach its peak intensity over the southeastern Gulf of Mexico in 36 h. After that, southwesterly shear in association with a deep-layer trough over the eastern U.S. is forecast to significantly increase over the hurricane on Wednesday and Thursday, which will likely disrupt the vertical structure and import drier air into its circulation.

They think it will hit land with winds of about 85 mph, and the center of the probability cone is right around Tarpon Springs, about 15 miles north of Tampa.

If this is more or less what happens, things shouldn’t be too bad here. It sounds much better than what the professional liars are saying. I don’t want a Category 4 storm landing 100 miles away.

Anyway, I have propane, a big cooler, water, and as of this afternoon, a generator that sort of works. I should be able to have hot food and refrigeration for two or three days.

I have not finished my tractor fork project. I don’t know if I will get it done by the time the storm comes. I ordered myself a set of clamp-on forks just in case. I need them anyway because they will turn my tractor in to a fairly decent forklift. Brush forks can sometimes be used for forklift duty, but sometimes they won’t fit whatever you’re trying to lift.

Hope I don’t end up bathing in the pool again. Prayers for me and the other people in the cone would be appreciated.

Fabrication and Revelation

It’s hard to believe how far I’ve come. I remember joking about getting a Bridgeport mill. I thought it was a good example of a tool no normal man would have in his shop. Now I have a mill, three lathes, an arbor press, a plasma cutter, a hydraulic press, and three welding machines. I have two belt grinders and about 5 angle grinders, and I’m building my own tractor fork attachment from old parts and steel tubing.

Today was an intimidating day. I had to take two 56″ pieces of 2″ square tubing with 1/4″ walls and turn them into a frame to hold tractor forks. Then I had to weld them to plates I modified to attach them to my tractor.

I don’t know what a foot of 1/4″-wall tubing weighs, but my guess is around 4 pounds. Okay, the web says 5.41 pounds. It’s a little unpleasant moving a 56″ piece around on a welding table. When you weld it to another piece plus 4 pieces of 2″ by 3″ tubing with 3/16″ walls amounting to about 56″, it gets heavy. Then when you attach the whole business to two 3/8″ plates with areas of over a square foot, you can forget about manipulating it safely without machinery.

I had to rip the scale and rust off all the tubing, weld it into a frame without too much distortion, and then add the plates. It was quite a job.

When I got the frame put together, I had to figure out how to hold it in place against the mounting plates while I tacked it on. The answer, as it so often is: a Harbor Freight hydraulic cart. I put the plates on the tractor, put the frame on the cart, lifted it up to the plates, shimmed it so it was in the right place, and clamped everything together. Then I added some very big tacks and moved the tractor into the shop so I could finish welding.

I think things went well. Two of the tacks popped, but I clamped the frame back down as if nothing had happened, and I finished my beads.

Tomorrow I can add more weld to make this thing indestructible. Then I have to get started, cutting up the old fork tines and adapting them to this frame.

How will I hold everything in place while I weld? Beats me. If you had asked me yesterday how I would have done what I did today, I would have had no idea. Ideas will come. God will inspire me.

I used to see ads for welding tables that held half a ton or more. I wondered what kind of nut would need a table like that. Now I am that nut. A bigger table would have been a big help today.

I have been looking at tables online. I am positive I want to stick with fixturing tables. Solid tables require you to weld things to them in order to make them work, and that would drive me crazy. All of my work would have funny places where I had ground off tacks.

Fixturing is great. A fixturing table has dozens or hundreds of holes in it, and you use them to hold clamps that hold your work in place while you weld. This ensures that the work will not warp.

HAHAHAHAHAHA. No it doesn’t. You may think it will when you buy your table, but it won’t. Only two things prevent warping: skill and huge steel. The thicker steel is, the harder it is to warp it. If your steel isn’t all that thick, you have to develop the skill to lay welds down in a way that minimizes distortion.

Fixturing is still helpful, though. You really need to have your work held in place while you work.

If my table were stronger, I could put the fork attachment on it and weld the tines on. The manufacturer, Klutch, claims it will hold 600 pounds, but I am suspicious, and I don’t want to learn they were fudging by having the attachment fall on me after it passes 200 pounds. I put casters on the table, and they will supposedly hold 1600 pounds among the 4 of them. All I can say about that is this: China. That’s the home country of the company that made the 1600-pound claim. Maybe it’s true, and maybe it ain’t.

A company called Langmuir has come up with a table it calls Arcflat. It’s actually a system of cast iron boxes with fixturing holes. You can use one box as a table, or you can buy several boxes and clamp them together. They are supposed to be very precise and very tough, and the whole setup for three feet by four feet would run about $2000, tax included.

That’s a lot. On the other hand, what would a dubious-quality set of pallet forks cost me? Well over a grand. A grapple would run over three grand. And I think grapples are stupid. I’ve seen them in videos, and I have never seen one do anything my forks can’t do. I’ve seen my forks do many things a grapple can’t do.

Pallet forks are the only quick-attach forks available online, they are vastly inferior to the forks I already have when it comes to moving trees and brush, and they cost a fortune. By adapting my old forks, which I would never be able to sell for a decent price, I can get a dynamite setup for under $300. That means my little table, which cost $200 with tax, has paid for itself and then some. It also helped me fix my subsoiler, so there’s maybe another $150 saved. It helped me make a bunch of mobile tool bases, so I probably saved a couple of thousand there.

I would have been smart to buy a big table to begin with. But I didn’t think I had room, I was cheap, and I didn’t think I’d build big projects.

Tomorrow will be the point of no return. I will start chopping my old forks up for repurposing. I’m sure it will work out, because when it comes to fabrication, there is always a way to fix things.

I had a wonderful dream last night. Or maybe night before last. I was in my dad’s house, and my parents were there. My dad was suffering from dementia, as he did in life. He was standing at the kitchen sink, puttering around with things. Sometimes people with dementia look for things to do in order to give themselves purpose.

He picked up some kind of utensil which he thought was supposed to be covered. It was not. He said, “Somebody didn’t cover this. That’s okay. Still friends.”

He was forgiving someone. Covering for them. It was wonderful to hear. The tone of his voice was so sweet. Like it didn’t even occur to him to be angry. “Still friends.” No big deal. Everyone makes mistakes.

It made me think about a problem I’ve had since he died. I have tended to remember him as he was when he was young. He was extremely hard on people, and he was not the kind of person who would forgive quickly. Even after you apologized and made things right, he would keep hammering. In his last months, he changed completely. He was gentle. He loved prayer. Whenever I showed up to see him, he said, “Here comes my beautiful son.” He was like the Dad I saw in my dream.

Since his death, I have tried to remember him as he was when he died, but old habits have crept in and caused me to remember the old Dad who died months before the new one. The dream has helped me to remember the new Dad and forget the old Dad, just as God has.

It made me think about love and what a privilege it is to be a gentle and benevolent person. Love is the reason the universe was created. It’s not an incidental benefit. I have to remember to take pleasure in being like my dad was in my dream. The modern world taught me to be cynical and hard. I changed myself in order to feel safe. That was a mistake.

We are in a lot of danger now. An apocalyptic spirit of murder has been released, and we are nastier to each other than ever. This is especially true of the Internet. It’s a snake pit. Social media sites, in particular, are disgusting and perilous.

The dream was life-changing. From now on, when I feel angry about something someone has done, I’ll just say, “Still friends,” and let it go.

Hope I can get my forks working before the storm. It looks like we’ll miss the real wind, but some trees could still come down, so I want to be ready before the power goes out and I have to use the generator to weld things.

Tractor Forks Gradually Materializing

Looks like my tractor brush fork attachment may be usable by the time Hurricane Ian either gets here or misses us.

When I converted my tractor bucket to quick attachment, I bought a heavy mounting plate and cut the ends off for the bucket. I welded them to the bucket, and this left me with a big piece that could also be turned into a mount with some modification. I decided to use it to hold brush forks on. I have been cutting and welding, and now I have two plates which should be suitable for attachment to a heavy frame which will hold 4 brush fork tines.

I had to make these plates wider, and I also had to add metal to the bottoms. Before I did this, it would have been hard to attach a frame in a way that put it at least as low as the bottom edges of the plates.

Brush forks need to slide freely on the ground, especially if you want to use them as forklifts occasionally. You can’t have something protruding down behind them. In order to have the tines flat on the ground and have ample steel to weld the tines to, I needed to have the frame on the ground, too.

It’s a complicated problem, and my explanation probably doesn’t make it very clear. If I hadn’t added the additional steel, the mount plates would have extended 2.5″ down below the rear ends of the tines. The tines would not have slid easily on the ground, and the bottoms of the mount plates would have banged into things a lot.

It took me a couple of hours yesterday to cut out the steel pieces to add to the plates. I had to use the mill as well as a big angle grinder with a cutoff wheel. Today it took me another 90 minutes or so to weld everything together and grind off the lumps. It was not easy to weld these things and make them pretty because of their shapes, so I settled for ugly strong welds followed by a lot of grinding.

Tomorrow’s work should go by fast. I have two 56″ pieces of 2″ by 2″ tubing with 1/4″ walls, and I have 4 shorter pieces of 2″ by 3″ tubing with 3/16″ walls. I will turn all this into a sort of ladder structure which will be my attachment’s frame. The long pieces will run horizontally, and the short pieces will be welded between them at intervals of around 15″. I should be able to accomplish this in an hour or so. Then I have to weld the frame to the mounting plates.

I figure I should be done in three hours or less.

After all this the real fun starts. I have to cut the rear portions off my old forks so they can be welded to the frame. I have to weld them in place. This will give me 4 pieces of tubular steel around a foot long. I will have to cut these so they can be used as struts to keep the tines from bending when horizontal loads are applied to the tips. I figure one strut per tine will do it.

I think I may be able to get this work done in a day. Then it will take me another day to weld it all together. This will put me in position to use the forks if trees come down this week. If they don’t come down, I’ll have time to paint everything.

Once this project is done, I’ll have a quick-attach tractor and quick-attach forks. I’ll be this area’s king of cheap quick-attach tractor guys.

By using bits of the old mounting plate, I saved around $140. The whole project will cost me $198 for steel, plus whatever paint and consumables cost. And maybe 4 bolts. This estimate is based on the assumption that this will work. If I ruin my old forks and can’t make good new ones, I’ll be spending a lot correcting the problem.

I hope this thing will be as strong as I need it to be. I believe it will be. People tend to overbuild weldments and underestimate what they can take, and this generalization applies to me. If I’m only a little worried, it probably means the attachment will be considerably stronger than it has to be.

I am amazed how nice the shop is now. I get things done fast. I know where most things are. I don’t have to search much. Thank you, God, for making this dream come true.

Hate-Based Handouts for the Undeserving Always Solve a Nation’s Problems

I saw some character talking about slavery reparations, so I thought I should write this, not that it will do any good whatsoever.

Reasons why slavery reparations are stupid and unjust:

1. Single biggest reason: reparations have already been paid many times over through affirmative action and government assistance. Nearly every time I have applied for a job or admission to a school, I have been put at the back of the line behind minorities. Many people like me have been rejected because of affirmative action, costing them hundreds of thousands of dollars over the courses of their lives. My black friends in law school were quietly whisked away to a secret tutoring center in Arkansas where they were given summer courses to give them an advantage over everyone else before freshman year started, and the rest of us paid for it without being informed. They also had organizations working to give them scholarships even when they didn’t ask. My experiences are typical. The benefits already extended through affirmative action are far greater than the benefits that would be provided through further lump-sum reparations.

2. Wealthy blacks who have already outdone the rest of us financially would receive reparations paid for partly by poor and middle-class whites. Jay-Z can get two new tires for his latest Lamborghini.

3. Blacks whose ancestors were never slaves, including blacks who came here decades or centuries after slavery ended, would receive reparations. My wife is moving here from Zambia. Why should she get reparations from Americans?

4. Blacks whose black ancestors owned slaves in the United States (there were many) would receive reparations. Slavery would be rewarded.

5. Blacks whose black ancestors sold slaves in Africa (this is how nearly all slaves got here) would receive reparations.

6. Whites whose ancestors never owned slaves, and whites whose ancestors were abolitionists, would have to pay reparations.

7. Non-blacks who are not white and who came here long after slavery ended would have to pay reparations. Welcome to America, Koreans.

8. The descendants of whites who were enslaved through indenture would not receive reparations, but they would have to pay them.

9. Every black person who was alive when slavery existed in America is now dead, so the injured can’t be made whole.

10. Every white person who was alive when slavery existed in America is now dead, so the guilty can’t be made to repay. Fining an innocent person for what another person did is evil.

11. Virtually all non-blacks who are affluent now are affluent through assets accumulated long after slavery ended, so almost no living non-blacks have assets that came from slavery. Everything I inherited came from people who had nothing when they were young. What the non-black affluent have generally has no connection to slaveholding ancestors.

12. If we pay blacks, we will have to pay American Indians whose economic losses were hundreds of thousands of times greater.

13. If we pay blacks, we will have to pay Mexicans because we took a lot of the West from them. Try and put a price on Texas.

Hope this is helpful.

The theft scheme known as slavery reparations comes from a spirit of envy, not a desire to do justice. As the apocalypse unfolds, people will be filled with murderous hatred. The Revelation says so. Various canards will be used to justify the evils one group does to another. The reparations canard is no better than the “Jews sold us out at Versailles” canard.

It is important for us to forgive each other and realize our problems come from bad relationships with God, not from the bad intentions and acts of other people. If you are right with God, he will give you favor and deliver you over and over. If you live a life of sin and rebellion, you can generally expect to remain at the bottom of the food chain, regardless of your race.

Holding people responsible for what their ancestors are accused of is sick and evil. It will lead to bloodshed here in America.