Don’t Let This Happen to You

I used to recommend a Christian teacher named Perry Stone. He got all sorts of revelation from God, and he taught about the deep truths of the Bible. He connected things in various books. He explained the meanings of symbols. It was something to see.

He didn’t ask for money, and he made it clear he never intended to. He counted on God to bring donations in. He gave materials to people who couldn’t pay, such as prisoners. He called his ministry Voice of Evangelism instead of putting his name on it.

Over time, he started to become somewhat crazy. He was angry a lot, and sometimes he relayed stories that were not true. He hadn’t checked them. He supplied information that wasn’t reliable.

He started to seem very proud of himself. He seemed to think he was always right. He wouldn’t admit it when he was wrong.

Eventually, he started asking for money. God didn’t give him what he wanted, so he appealed to people to help him build a big campus. He started calling his business Perry Stone Ministries.

I used to support his work, but it seemed to me that he was going astray, so I stopped. It was particularly ominous to see him appearing with Steve Munsey, a crooked megachurch grifter who is known for helping preachers get people to give them money. Rick Wilkerson Sr., the failed pastor of my old church in Miami, idolized Munsey and let him ruin his church. He thought Munsey was a genius because he had a Starbucks in his church.

I used to post comments on Stone’s Youtube videos, warning him to get away from Munsey.

In 2020, women associated with Stone accused him of gross sexual behavior, including things like showing them how sexually aroused he was. One said God had told him his wife Pam would be dead soon and that he needed to be with another woman. He took time off from preaching, but he went back very quickly.

He began attacking the victims and messengers. A lady stood up in church and called him a “nasty perv,” and he threatened to have her arrested and sue her, neither of which were credible options. He said those things because he panicked. His pride had been breached publicly, while he was on camera, in the pulpit, and after years of being surrounded by yes-men, he could not handle it.

He claimed he had a divinely-inspired dream about “ugly fish,” which represented women interfering with his ministry. He said he expected bad things, such as death, to happen to them.

In short, he went off his nut.

Recently, highly disturbing audio emerged. He had a meeting with two men who were close to him. One was a ministry leader, and the other was a cop who handled security for him. They tried to talk sense to him and calm him down. He cursed and said he was going to kill himself. I’ll provide quotations.

I’m going to go commit suicide up in the mountains and end this thing.

Listen to me, before God, I’m going to go take pills in the mountains … because I can’t put up with this. I am a very sincere person but I have almost no friends, man. And I have almost no friends because of s— like this.

I can’t shake a woman’s hand, “Oh, he’s coming on to me!” Pat them on the back, “Oh, he’s coming on to me!”

I will take my life before I let the ministry go down. I swear to God I’ll take my life!

No, no, no, no. This is going to get bigger. If he’s got letters, it means they’re talking. The ministry is ruined. I’m going to shut down and sell the building. I need to. I need to shut OCI down and sell the building and forget everything I’m doing. And if Pam Stone knows this, Pam Stone will leave me. Oh, she’ll find out. She’ll find out. And by accusations I’ll be destroyed, so what do I have to live for?

This is not your ordinary TV preacher scandal response. Stone reacted like a scared little girl, and he was caught up in selfishness, threatening to spite the world by depriving it of his exalted self. We haven’t heard any audio indicating remorse or a rational response. I doubt there is any.

The voice is undeniably Stone’s. You can go hear him on Youtube, and the story appeared in a reputable paper.

I looked at Stone’s Youtube channel last night. Videos are still popping up, many without Stone. Comments have been turned off. This is one of the signs of a ministry’s death. Crooked preachers like Kenneth Copeland, Paula White, and John Gray don’t let people comment on their videos. Cockroaches run from the light, as conservative Twitter users know.

I know what happened to Stone. Lust wasn’t his big problem. Pride was. He became so full of himself, he could not accept any kind of correction, and he craved wealth and admiration. After he became incorrigible, lust was able to get in and control him, and then after he sinned, pride made him lie.

God told me this: “The concealment of a sin is worse than the sin itself.”

I know why pride defeated Stone. He didn’t pray in tongues enough. He told people they should do it, but his own prayer life was scant. He bragged about the long hours he spent studying the Bible and other books. You can’t put in long hours every day and have a prayer life that works. It’s not possible.

He used to praise old mountain people who prayed in tongues “excessively,” and to him, “excessively” meant 20 minutes. That’s not excessive. That’s just a beginning. If you only pray in tongues 20 minutes a day, you aren’t winning at life. You are being deceived and defeated.

Stone thought a 20-minute session was a big deal, so he must have been putting in much less time than that.

One of the signs that you’re not praying in tongues enough is that you become deceived. Stone is clearly deceived. He isn’t being corrected by God, and he appears to be somewhat insane.

He needs to go home, quit preaching, get his prayer life going, and let God fix his life. He needs to repent publicly, for real, not like he did the first time, and apologize to the people he wronged. He needs to have demons cast out of him.

It’s a shame to see him taken down like this. He has become so deranged, he is willing to consider killing himself–going to hell–in order to avoid more embarrassment. His pride is worth more to him than avoiding eternal torture by an enemy who will have special punishments waiting for him.

Because he is crazy now, people will assume he was always crazy. They will be less inclined to look at the sound, valuable work he did years ago. Nice work on the part of Satan. He has retroactively defused bombs that were wrecking parts of his kingdom. Fewer people will benefit from Stone’s earlier teaching, so more people will be more vulnerable to attack. If he gets to torture Stone in hell, it will be the cherry on top of the sundae. What a trophy.

Stone didn’t teach people how to protect themselves, so many of his followers are sticking up for him. They’re not praying in tongues enough. They’re not seeking correction. As the Bible says, a bad tree bears bad fruit.

I was praying about this last night. I told God it was discouraging, because if a man with Stone’s background can fall, what could happen to me?

I have been proud and extremely resistant to correction from other people. I have been hostile to people who were right when they argued with me. I keep trying to improve, but what I say about myself is true.

God has given me grace to pray in tongues. That is what will save me. I am doing what Perry Stone does not do, so I should avoid the snares he fell into.

I hope he doesn’t kill himself. He should have enough money to have a soft retirement, so he should be able to stay home and stay out of trouble. The problem with disgraced preachers, though, is that pride usually drives them back into the limelight. Alberto Lee Santiago, the pedophile who ran my last church, went to prison because he insisted on preaching after he was caught, and I don’t think he is any crazier than Perry Stone.

In other news, the gardening project is going well.

The tomatoes we repotted the other day are all alive. Mike was sure it was good to put tomatoes in a 50/50 mixture of peat and dry cow manure from the pasture, but I insisted on checking the web, and I settled on a mix of peat, potting soil, composted manure, and perlite, along with epsom salt and lime. We repotted 10 plants, and we did 9 my way. Mike insisted on doing one his way. As of today, 9 are doing well, and Mike’s plant is somewhat yellow and is losing…is “branches” the word? He is full of remorse. I think the 9 healthy plants will thrive pretty well and produce tomatoes. They are looking stronger by the day.

I am planning to try Ruth Stout no-till gardening, which could also be called “no-character gardening,” because it requires little work. A lady named Ruth Stout decided to try throwing seeds on the ground and covering them with old hay, with no other preparation, and she found she got better harvests than people who worked hard tilling, enriching, and weeding the soil.

You can see why this appeals to me. First, I am somewhat lazy, second, I want big harvests, and third, my soil is like beach sand. Growing things in the ground would be very hard.

I found out Yukon Gold and LaSoda potatoes grow well here, and I also learned you can grow beans and tomatoes the Ruth Stout way. I have seed potatoes and sweet potato slips coming. I have pole beans on hand. I may get more tomato plants.

I think potatoes and beans are important, because they have calories. You can’t live on cabbage and cucumbers.

Getting a lot of hay seemed like an obstacle. It’s expensive. Then I remembered the round hay bales in my woods. My tenant farmer puts them there for his cattle. I can’t take the edible hay, but the cattle have left a gigantic amount of old poopy hay strewn around, and it’s free. I got myself a manure fork today, and I loaded up the utility cart. It took about 10 minutes, so getting enough for a bed should be fast work. As of today, I own a manure fork, so I’m armed with the correct tool.

Better news yet: you can plant vegetables in oak leaves. I only have a few thousand tons of those. They’re acidic, which is a problem. If only I had a source of something to cut the acidity. Like the gigantic pile of ashes under my burn pile.

I think I’ll put down a layer of hay and then pile leaves over it. The leaves will trap moisture for sure. Or maybe I should put the leaves down first, because they will definitely kill all the grass and weeds under the bed. They have killed enough of my grass to make me confident.

We have not built a structure to protect plants yet. The potatoes won’t need protection, because squirrels are too stupid to dig potatoes. My understanding is that they will eventually discover pole beans. Tomatoes will definitely be attacked. I was thinking of building a greenhouse-like thing, but the more I think, the more I believe I just need a frame covered with chicken wire. It’s not cold enough here for a real greenhouse.

The war on squirrels goes better and better. I have learned that trapping nuisance squirrels is legal here, and I have also discovered conibear traps. These are little snap traps you can bait with marshmallows and peanut butter. You tie them to trees, and squirrels climb up and grab the bait. They’re extremely humane (mainly to me, I admit). They crush a squirrel’s neck instantly. I plan to try them. I got squirrel-thinning permission in writing from the state, so there is no reason to hold back. During the past week, I have executed so many squirrels, I have lost count. There are three in the yard now, waiting for their rides. From hawks.

In past years, I spent a lot of time sitting in the woods in a blind I bought, failing to shoot or even see squirrels. I wish I had known what I know now: the best blind is my house. I shoot most of them from the front door and bedroom.

Being a Southerner is so great.

Tomorrow, I plan to pick a spot for my bed, amass a large amount of leaves using the blower, and put them in place. Then I plan to cover them with poopy hay. Then I have to wait for my seed potatoes and sweet potato slips.

I need to learn this stuff before Biden starves us all. I don’t want to be unable to find carbohydrates because I sat on my rear end and trusted the government. I would be a lot better off had I started two years ago.

I don’t know what Biden-trusting people will do in cities. Eat each other, I guess. What if they start driving to the country to steal food? Good recipe for the wave of killings predicted in the Revelation. When times are good, shooting people who steal crops and livestock seems barbaric. When your chickens and vegetables affect what your family weighs in the spring, or how many members make it through the winter, all that changes.

For the first time in my life, I understand why my great aunt Berthy shot at a man who tried to steal her chickens. I get it. As a Christian, I don’t see myself doing that, but other people would.

I learned I can eat wood ears. They call them “chicken of the woods.” I will never run out of those here. I wonder how many calories there are in a serving. Coons and possums are edible, too. You can even eat a coyote or bobcat if you need to.

The recent improvement in my squirrel tactics could serve me well in the future, if I’m not able to thin them out and they remain in good supply. Two people could fill their meat needs with a weekly tally of 8 squirrels. When things get bad, no one will care much about whether they’re in season, and since they will be nuisance animals when they’re close to my house, killing them would be legal anyway.

If all this sounds crazy to you, ask yourself how crazy a 5-dollar carton of eggs would have sounded last year.

Hopefully the rapture will lift me out of here before I start putting moles in my soup.

That’s Some Privilege, That White Privilege

More apocalypse news: proud celebrity cuckold Will Smith has started a fad. As you probably know, a young man named Isaiah Lee attacked pro-transsexual comedian Dave Chappelle while he was performing. I didn’t expect to blog again so soon, but news that seems important to discuss has popped up twice in three days.

I call Chappelle “pro-transsexual” because he is. A contingent of perpetually enraged leftists have decided he hates transsexuals because he talked about them in his act, but he supports them in their efforts to destroy themselves.

Lee appears to be some kind of mixed-race person with black blood. He has been charged with assault with a deadly weapon, and he supposedly had a replica gun which contained a knife blade. What goes through the mind of a person who designs a silly weapon like that is not clear to me.

I just saw new information. The replica “ejects a knife.” Why not get a real gun that ejects BULLETS? After all, leftists keep telling us buying a gun is quick and easy.

Lee may be a woman. You know how that works these days.

Is Will Smith responsible? He has definitely made it more likely that other immature people will physically attack speakers. On the other hand, you can’t really be responsible for what other people do. Your guilt for encouraging them is not the same as their guilt for acting.

Satan, or as I often call him through clumsy typing, “Stan,” has done a great job, providing leftists with incredibly stupid arguments that allow them to rationalize violence and various crimes. They say it’s violence when other people SPEAK against their beliefs. That means violence in response is justified, even long after the fact. Then they say their own violence is expression, like speech, so it doesn’t justify any type of physical response.

“My violence is protected expression. Your protected expression is violence.”

The dissonance is remarkable, but if you can seriously believe Caitlyn Gender is a woman, what can’t you believe?

Delusion is possibly the primary symptom of demonic influence. We are neck-deep in it now, and the waters are rising faster than ever. Either the end is not far off, or God’s people are in for a very rough ride. Anyone crazy enough to think Chaz Bono is a man is crazy enough to make a coat from the skins of Christians.

Lots of things are happening here at the compound. Mike found a lady who sells tomato plants, including heirlooms, so now we have Better Boy, Cherokee Chocolate, and Mortgage Lifter plants. I’m trying to determine what kind of enclosure to build them. I have never had a greenhouse. A simple structure covered with plasticized fabric is said to be enough to kill a squirrel’s interest, but I am told such a greenhouse will get too hot in the summer and kill the plants. I am thinking about chicken wire, but some people claim squirrels will chew through it.

I feel less and less when I kill a squirrel. I see why the old timers in Kentucky were so hard. They needed crops and livestock in order to keep their families alive, and I am starting to think the same way, given the Biden Catastrophe. I no longer have any patience with vermin.

The squirrel trap I bought is finally working, so that’s interesting. Peanuts pay off. I have a bigger trap baited with a peach and a chicken leg. I want to save a few of my peaches this year. I saw a rabbit eating one. The problem varmints here are squirrels, coons, coyotes, armadillos, and possums. Bobcats can also cause problems. Rabbits aren’t a big deal, because there are so few. I blame the coyotes.

I always take the squirrels, put them in the car with me with lots of air conditioning, buy them a few things at Louis Vuitton, and then check them into nice hotels, safe and sound. Don’t worry about them.

I know I said I had no patience with vermin, but I feel a little sorry for rabbits, because something is killing the daylights out of them, and the rabbits here always look miserable. I guess I’ll shoot next time, though. Rabbits are tasty, and there is no season because everyone hates them.

We plan to grow things in buckets. The lady we got the tomatoes from has a true survival farm on half an acre of sand, so I know I have no excuse for starving. She has tomatoes, squash, onions, garlic, peppers, tomatoes, chickens, potatoes, and probably some other things.

If I can grow food here, maybe moving to Tennessee is a bad idea. Heating a house up there with limited electricity due to Biden would be a lot of work.

The lady who sold us the tomatoes said a lot of locals are moving to Tennessee, North Carolina, and South Carolina.

That’s about it from the compound. Stay prayed up and don’t make any trans jokes unless you’re packing.

Hell Keeps Freezing Over

Yesterday, my friend Mike told me Roe v. Wade had been overturned, and he said the news came from a site with a name like “topnewznowlulz.biz.” Based on the facts that I thought it would be a very long time before Roe would come under attack, and that the site was obscure, I scoffed. But I Googled anyway, and we all know what happened.

What APPEARS to have happened. What MAY happen. I should be careful.

I say, “What APPEARS to have happened,” because I read the opinion, and the tone is a little like that of a Yahoo News article from a leftist agitation site. “Sam Alito SHUTS down far-left Roe Jurists.” Okay, that’s an exaggeration, but you will see what I mean if you read the opinion. As of this writing, I haven’t seen any confirmation that the opinion is real, so I am hedging my bets.

Ordinarily, court opinions are very restrained, but Alito says Roe was “egregiously wrong,” and he really drops the hammer on the justices and other leftists who formed Roe’s murderous, imperialist conclusions.

I say, “What MAY happen,” because the opinion is not published, unless publication by news sites counts. It’s not law until other courts get notice via official notification.

When I saw that the news was probably real, I rejoiced, but I’m sorry to say it wasn’t because I thought the unborn were finally being rescued. It was because I thought the ruling was going to spur conflict and disorder, and I thought this was probably one more indication that the end of the age was very close.

That’s how tired I am of this crazy planet.

A friend of mine had a baby, and when I visited her, she said that during labor, she would have done anything to get him out of her. She wasn’t embarrassed about being seen naked by other people. She didn’t care what she had to do. She wanted him OUT, OUT, OUT. The new ruling (I am too lazy to write “alleged” or whatever over and over) made me think of my friend. When a crisis gets bad enough, your values change, and you just want it over with.

The left loves the word “unsustainable,” and they use it to manipulate us, so naturally, I don’t like it. But I will use it. The world’s current course is unsustainable. We can’t continue in a world in which people and even animals are constantly dodging an infuriating, mutating, capricious disease. We can’t continue in a world where hatred and lawlessness are considered normal. We can’t have lives that are bearable in an atmosphere of forced participation in sexual perversion or where we are expected to submit to technology and completely abandon privacy and free will. Fundamentally, to use a word that is appropriate in more than one way, we can’t continue in a world where God is hated and Satan is openly crowned in his place.

Things have to come to a head, because the strain we live under is unendurable.

Actually, that’s not quite true for people who are close to God and have his blessings and protection. But even such people long to get out of a world where they are completely out of place.

The leak of the opinion is a great example of what’s wrong with the world right now. God tells us Satan’s children are lawless. We see lawlessness everywhere these days. People have turned civil disobedience into an obsession. Many people go so far as to endorse rioting openly. States refuse to obey federal law. Local governments refuse to obey federal law and state law. It’s not just individuals running amok. It’s rulers.

What does the Bible call the Antichrist? “The Man of Lawlessness.”

The person who leaked the opinion is lawless. She (the pronoun I choose) doesn’t care about preserving the order our government is designed to maintain. We have three branches of government. The judicial branch is supposed to make unbiased decisions regarding the actions of all three branches. The judicial branch is supposed to be the final arbiter of existing laws. It is extremely important for the judicial process to be untainted by outside influences. When judges are manipulated, the judiciary becomes a powerless farce, justice is perverted, and people who depend on the judiciary and who rightly feel cheated are likely to be motivated to stop obeying the law.

The leaker is almost certainly a left-wing justice or clerk. There is no conceivable reason why a conservative would do something like this. No conservative would be outraged by the opinion. No conservative would be so highly motivated by dissatisfaction with parts of the opinion that he would abandon his ethics and risk his career by leaking it.

Leftists also have a history of stealing and leaking private and confidential information regarding conservatives. Conservatives are not as prone to these slimy tactics.

What is the purpose of leaking the opinion? Good question.

Is the traitor trying to influence the outcome of the case? Maybe, if she is sufficiently hysterical. Leftists now have greatly increased faith in the public’s ability to coerce judges through protesting and other forms of pressure, and they have lose all scruples about doing so. They don’t care at all about impartiality or justice, and they have a history of pressuring courts. But if the leaker is a justice or clerk, she is also a lawyer, and she has to be pretty smart to be where she is, so she should know the leak has a very slim chance of saving Roe.

What about the midterm elections and the presidential election? Now we have a scenario that makes a little sense. The leaker may be trying to motivate female voters to stop the anti-Biden stampede that is projected to inundate the polls in November. We won’t be voting on a new president, but if Roe is undone, the states will have the power to ban various types of abortions, and leftist women will feel motivated to storm the voting precincts in order to put more leftists in power on the state level.

Of course, by and large, women vote more destructively than men. They are much more leftist than we are. If men didn’t vote, only a small percentage of our elected officials would not be extreme leftists. Many women want the government to be their husband, so they are willing to give up more of their liberty than men.

If the leaker can get more women to the polls, their influence will increase, and effectively, conservatives will be disempowered.

Will the leaker be caught? I think she made a good effort to avoid it. The opinion draft that was published appears to have been scanned, not uploaded directly. I assure you, internal communications at the Supreme Court are purely electronic except for documents obtained externally, and even those documents would be transmitted electronically after being scanned once.

The leaker appears to have given the press a printed copy in order to avoid having the federal marshals trace her through electronic accounts.

Is this a great day for the unborn? I guess. I suppose many children who would otherwise be murdered will be protected by sensible new abortion laws. But many states will persist in supporting infanticide, so the effect will be limited.

Jesus told us the problems of the end time were labor pains. Someone is being born. Who is it? Can it be Jesus? He was already born, so why would he be born a second time?

I suppose you could say that everyone who is raptured is born a second time, because the rapture changes people, but it’s pretty well agreed that “born again” refers to internal transformation by the Holy Spirit.

Is the Antichrist the one who is being born? I tend to think so, but it’s obviously a guess.

The world can’t stay in labor forever. I don’t want to root for the coming of the tribulation, but I am ready for change. If we’re about to descend into global conflict and misery, I say better sooner than later. The sooner we see the rapture and the tribulation, the sooner we will see a world free of Satan, demons, and crazed leftists and pagans who make the world the cursed place it is.

Home Furnishings for the Aesthetically Flexible

Forgive me readers, for I have neglected you. It has been one week since my last blog post.

Things here are going well. Having a friend living in the house with me has been a blessing. It motivates me to do things people have stopped doing during the pandemic, such as showering and getting dressed before noon. I have also resumed looking after practical obligations around the house. I changed my A/C filters, changed the oil in my car, fixed the batteries in my truck and garden tractor, and attended to some other things I had been ignoring.

I have procrastinated because I keep feeling like nothing people do now matters, apart from drawing close to God. I believe the apocalypse is here, so the main thing people need to be concerned about is qualifying for the rapture. Short of dying and going to hell, it is hard to think of any fate worse than missing the rapture. The plagues of the tribulation will be a lot like the plagues of Egypt, but they will cover the entire world, and the only way to escape will be to out yourself as a Christian and be executed.

Most people don’t know what “apocalypse” means. It means “revelation,” which is why the Revelation is so named. It doesn’t mean “disaster” or “doomsday.” It’s probably inaccurate to refer to the hard years at the conclusion of the end time as the apocalypse, even though I do it. The word “revelation” seems to refer to the revelation John received; God revealed what would happen in the future. We have gotten used to calling the end of the age the apocalypse, though, and we use the word more generally to mean any extremely difficult period that would end the world or at least the current age.

Do you know what this means? It means the apocalypse is over! It already happened. About 1900 years ago, on Patmos. What great news!

Maybe I shouldn’t joke. People are going to beg for death.

I have put lots of things off. Maybe it matters, or maybe I’ll be removed from the earth before there are any consequences. In any case, it’s nice to get up and get things done.

I was delivered from a spirit of laziness years ago, but it returned, and I have learned I have to keep casting it out. When it’s gone, I get all sorts of things done. I’m like a slingshot someone has just released. I feel I’m fighting it successfully this week.

I’m getting rid of my awful living room chairs. I have a cheap lift recliner I got for my dad, and I used it when I’m watching Youtube with Marvin. It’s the best chair in the living room. The other two are horribly uncomfortable armchairs with Queen Anne legs. I knew Mike was not happy in them, and he would be here a while, so I said he ought to get a recliner of his own. He could take it with him when he got his own place. We went and picked up a Craigslist beauty, and now I can get rid of the armchairs. I’m not changing anything else until Rhodah gets here, because she will want a say in decorating.

She’s not hard to get along with. I told her we had to choose between comfort and elegance, and she picked comfort instantly. She is actually interested in setting the living room up with twin recliners. Most women hate recliners and would threaten divorce to get rid of them.

Why do women hate so many fantastic things? Recliners, suspenders, overalls, deer mounts…

My mother didn’t like convertibles. Unbelievable. She said we would roll over in a canal and die. Convertibles are among life’s great joys.

Mike thinks he can sell the recliners on Craigslist. I wish him luck, because I tried. I see us hauling them to the Salvation Army with one month.

The armchairs are torture devices, and they’re ancient. My late aunt had them in her house, and when she died, for some unfathomable reason, my mother took them and moved them from Kentucky to Florida. They’re like a curse that follows the family.

The main reason I’m blogging today is to share testimony, not to ramble about chores and chairs.

Yesterday, Rhodah had a vision. She was in bed in the morning, awake, and suddenly, she saw two angels beside her bed, hosing it with fire. The bed was covered with some kind of elegant comforter or something. It was white. She was wearing some sort of beautiful white gown. She said the vision showed her how God was looking after her.

It’s funny that the angels used fire. Rhodah says, “FIRE!”, all the time. It means she’s calling down fire on things. She uses it seriously, for things like coronavirus. If I said I thought I were getting coronavirus, she would say, “FIRE to coronavirus!” She also says it when she doesn’t mean it, though. “FIRE to getting to the airport late!” “FIRE to sitting in the middle seat!”

It’s wonderful to have occasional signs and wonders. When I say that, people with little pinchy faces like to say, “We are not supposed to follow signs and wonders!” Welllll…the Bible says signs and wonders will follow US. See Matthew 16. Put that in your pipe and smoke it a while. If you’re not getting any signs or wonders, something is wrong. Shouldn’t you be looking into it?

Today my friend Leah asked if we needed prayer for anything. She didn’t know about Rhodah’s vision. Rhodah and I visited Ireland last month, and her luggage is still in France. We are getting no help from Air France, Aer Lingus, or South African Airlink, even though they are all responsible. I asked Leah to pray. She said she would ask God to send two angels to protect and return it.

Mike has some health problems, and they make life very unpleasant sometimes. Yesterday, I got him to let Rhodah and me pray for him on WhatsApp. I got him to say he forgave everyone who had sinned against him, and I got him to say he believed he would be healed. We told the disorders to leave him, and we commanded his body to be healed. He felt strange pulsing waves going through his back and arms. Today some of his symptoms are gone. We are going to continue.

In the morning, before we prayed, he told me he had been praying on his own about his blood sugar, and afterward, he had checked it. The value was lower than ever. He was extremely excited.

I have been asking God to make my home a house of prayer, and he is doing it. What a relief.

This is all I have right now. Hope people find it helpful.

Near-Divine Food for a Divine Occasion

My friend Mike arrived yesterday. He is moving to the Ocala area, and he just sold his house in New England. He left on Wednesday, and he arrived on Saturday. It was a horrible trip. Car problems. Bad hotels. No one to share the driving. He should have arrived Friday, but his Mercedes had to make most of the trip in limp mode, and he stopped in North Carolina overnight for an unsuccessful repair.

The night after the failed repair job, he went to a hotel in South Carolina and found it too filthy to stay in. Someone had even left him a little gift in the porcelain receptacle, if you get my drift. He drove to another hotel, and a shabby pickup kept following him as he tried to park. Obviously, it was some white-trash dirtbag hoping to loot his trailer. He called the cops, the trailer left, and a beat-up Pontiac showed up to continue the game.

He checked out and gave up on hotels. He ended up stopping periodically to sleep in his car’s front seat.

Of course, demons were resisting his move to Christian Northern Florida. But they failed to achieve victory. They are, after all, losers and the children of losers. Losing is what they do.

We had to move maybe a thousand pounds of stuff into my house today, and there is still a lot left on his trailer. He had 20 pounds of yellow grits with him, because he didn’t want to throw out everything from his kitchen. They got out and went all over his lawnmower. He had similar problems with sugar and a big bottle of Mexican vanilla extract. And a bottle of liqueur someone gave to his late father.

The good news: we’re working on Passover dinner. Let’s go ahead and call it Passover, even if Christians celebrate on the wrong day. Jesus is our Passover lamb, and he was killed on Passover. No chocolate rabbit ever died for anyone’s sins.

Local stores put rib roasts on sale, and I picked one up Tuesday. I covered it with salt, butter, and garlic, and stuck it in my spare fridge under kitchen towels. I wanted to roast it in my new oven, but Mike got all excited about the Showtime rotisserie, so that’s where it is.

I told him I’d handle the baked potatoes and Caesar salad if he cooked the roast. I cut a baguette in pieces and roasted them. Then I tossed them in olive oil in which I had fried garlic. Very nice. I dried the romaine as well as I could and cut it in suitable pieces. I finally found a very good dressing recipe. You can look it up over at Serious Eats. I used to use an Epicurious recipe, but it was disgusting. I kept forgetting it was bad, and I ended up using it more than once. I also used a Bon Appetit recipe. Forget both of those. It’s Serious Eats Caesar from now on. I had to use more lemon and Worcestershire than the recipe called for, but the dressing is perfect.

Now I just have to fix the potatoes and horseradish sauce. I now rely on Mike’s potato method. He covers his potatoes with oil and salt, nukes them, and toasts them in a toaster oven. They’re better than potatoes cooked in a regular oven from start to finish. Really easy.

Yesterday, we ate leftover pizza, and Mike made garlic knots. I also had some homemade ice cream from my fancy Italian machine. Vanilla with Grape Nuts. Sounds terrible, but it’s delicious.

In an hour or so, we should be eating. The only disappointment is that Rhodah can’t be here with me.

Hope everyone else is having a wonderful Passover or Resurrection Day.

Today’s Greek Lesson

I thought I was done blogging for a while, but a few minutes ago, I realized I had something to pass on.

The other day, I heard the word tetelestai in my head over and over, for no apparent reason, and I had to look it up to be sure what it meant. It turned out to be the Greek word Jesus used (assuming it wasn’t translated in the gospels) at the end of the crucifixion. It means something like, “It is finished,” although it can also be used to indicate the fulfillment of an obligation. You could use it to indicate that you have paid a debt, or to say you have finished a job you were paid to do.

Today while I was praying with my wife, I was thanking God for giving us what I had asked for, and I blurted out, “Tetelestai!”

By this I meant our prayers would be answered, because the answers had been paid for on the cross.

I didn’t see it coming. It just popped out.

Useful word. It seems you can use it to assert your rights when talking to God or evil spirits. It’s almost like a company credit card.

More

Forgot to add this.

The day before I heard “tetelestai” in my head, I dreamed I was cooking in my dad’s kitchen, and he came in, wrapped his arms around me, held me tightly, and said a nonsense word. Suddenly, I had the feeling the world was ending. I thought nuclear weapons were being used somewhere. I looked at a computer monitor on a nearby counter to see if there was any news.

I told my wife about the dream and the word. Afterward, she had a dream. We were together, and she was concerned because of my experiences. I told her God had given me a revelation, and it showed that the things he was telling me about the future were good, not bad.

Then today I had the revelation, fulfilling her prophetic dream.

It’s very nice to have a wife who hears from God.

I Can’t Stand the Heat

I feel like my enthusiasm for blogging is drying up. I think I’m just tired of this world. Seems like every time I turn around, I see an angry man in a dress or some other indication that we live in a world of unsavable people. I keep seeing indications that the system is increasingly rigged to exclude Christians and drive them to renounce their salvation in exchange for the ability to participate in our economy. Or in exchange for Facebook likes, which are extremely important.

In 2022, it is literally impossible to interact with many important companies unless you own a smartphone. Not just a cell phone; a smartphone. Of course, phones can be stolen and hacked, so chips will be next. It will turn out to be possible to hack and even cut out other people’s chips, but never mind. They won’t talk about that until after we have them. Articles are popping up on the web saying we will definitely be chipped; the only question is when.

They’re telling us a digital currency is in the works. I don’t see why that’s a big deal, because our currency is already digital. Yes, you can go to your bank and get cash, even though there is not much need for it, but most American dollars are imaginary. They don’t exist as gold, paper, or coins. Only a small percentage are in cash. The rest are moved around among computers. That’s digital, no matter what you want to call it. DIGITAL digital currency will simply be somewhat worse. They can already freeze, refuse, or confiscate your imaginary money, but you can store up cash as a defense. When we go full-throttle digital, the government will tell us our cash is no longer legal tender, so whatever you have in your mattress will be ready for the landfill.

Today my wife said something about the Euphrates drying up. She said it had been prophesied, and it was starting to happen. I looked it up. The Revelation says an angel will pour out a vial, and the Euphrates will run dry. News stories say both the Tigris and Euphrates are disappearing, and they are predicting the Euphrates will be gone in 20 years unless things change.

It’s really happening. The end, I mean. The apocalypse used to be fodder for kooks, but now it’s actually underway. Signs are everywhere. Satan is tightening the noose around the necks of sane people, and we are about to see a big showdown between the godless and those who refuse to become part of the new totalitarian cyborg world. People will be forced to choose, and those of us who don’t want to join will be characterized as haters of everything good.

I’m blogging right now because a couple of strange things have happened, and I felt I should report them. I blogged earlier in the day because I felt obligated to write about a recent trip. I don’t know when I’ll blog again. Maybe I’ll just write about trivial things. Pizzas and barbecue.

Night before last, I dreamed I was in my dad’s house in Coral Gables. I was at the stove, cooking. My dad came in, put his arms around me, and held me tight so I couldn’t move. He said a nonsense word: “ditewide.” For some reason, I believed this meant the world was ending.

It’s an anagram for “wide tide,” which could refer to the rapture, which will be a global tide that rises and lifts God’s children out of the reach of the godless and Satan. I don’t know. Maybe it doesn’t mean anything at all.

My dad was holding onto me the way a father would hold onto a child while waiting for something like a fatal explosion.

I looked toward a computer monitor on the kitchen counter, hoping to see news. I figured there would be stories coming out if the world were ending. I had the feeling nuclear weapons were being used. I didn’t see any news.

Last night, before I went to bed, I started hearing something in my head, over and over: “tetelestai.” I wasn’t sure what it meant. I thought it came from the Bible, but I couldn’t remember. I had a feeling it meant, “It is finished,” and that it was what Jesus said just before he died.

I looked it up, and sure enough, it’s what he said. It’s a Greek word. I know I have heard it in the past, but if you had put a gun to my head yesterday and commanded me to tell you what Jesus said before he died, I would have come up blank. I would not have been able to recall. If you had spoken the word, told me where it came from, and asked me what it meant, I would have given you the right answer, but it would have been a guess.

According to a source I looked at, tetelestai is something a worker might say to his boss at the end of the day, indicating that his work is done. Or you might say it to indicate a bill has been paid. Both readings make sense in the context of the crucifixion.

Jesus said “tetelestai” because his job on Earth was over. He had completely defeated Satan and all his other enemies. He had provided salvation for all the people the Father had selected for him. Similarly, the job of the church will eventually end. We are living in the age of the church, which started when Jesus rose. Our job is to evangelize and fight Satan. One day, God will declare that our job is done, and he will rapture us because leaving us here no longer serves a constructive purpose.

Is God telling me our job is over? Is he telling me it’s very nearly over? I don’t know, but I know I didn’t start repeating “tetelestai” in my head on my own.

God tends to give people a lot of warning, so even if my experiences came from him, I don’t know when the end will happen. When God says “soon,” he may mean two centuries from now.

Oh, Look. More Sheep

I suppose it’s time to write about our Ireland trip. My bizarre conclusion: I would rather live there than visit as a tourist. The climate is mild. The landscape is beautiful. It’s safe. The people are wonderful. The cost of living is lower than it is here. You could probably grow your own food there. On the other hand, there isn’t much to do in Ireland.

As I have said before, I was not interested in seeing Ireland. I have a relative who thinks she is Irish, and she was very excited about visiting Ireland with her family. Sadly, she has nearly no Irish blood. My genealogy, which includes her genealogy, is available online, and I’ve seen it. There are probably recent immigrants from Somalia who have more Irish blood than we do, so I have no connection to the country. The only reason my wife and I visited Ireland was that the Irish were very nice about allowing her in. We really wanted to go to places like Israel, Switzerland, Greece, and Italy.

My mother had the same faux-Irish delusion. It’s common among Americans. I don’t know why people want to be Irish. Seems like every American wants to be Irish or American Indian.

If we had been going to Israel, I would have known exactly what to do. Stay in Jerusalem. Visit the sights. See Yad Vashem. Visit Jericho, the Dead Sea, Capernaum, Mount Hermon and Caesarea Philippi, see the kibbutz where I stayed…easy. Ireland…different. It’s one of those countries where nothing has ever happened, so it’s hard to think of things to do and see. I planned the trip by guesswork.

We went to Dublin. After that, we stayed in Salthill, which is just outside Galway. Then we stayed in Dingle. Then we spent a night on Inis Mor, the largest of the Aran Islands. Finally, back to Dublin.

Dublin was not great. I would say it’s like Philadelphia. By that I mean it’s a lot like New York, only without the positives. It’s a big city full of American businesses like Burger King and Circle K. It’s packed with immigrants, so it’s barely Irish. We interacted with Nigerians, Spaniards, people from little Eastern European countries that kind of seem Russian, Pakistanis, Thais, and Italians. I would say the Irish made up about half of the folks we dealt with. We heard lots of Spanish, which is disturbing to anyone who has been scarred by years in Miami.

I can only think of a few things to see in Dublin, and we didn’t see any of them. The Guinness brewery, the Irish whiskey museum, the immigration museum, Trinity College Library, and the Book of Kells.

The brewery, which is not actually a brewery, is probably fun. We just didn’t get around to it. I didn’t visit the whiskey museum because Irish whiskey isn’t all that good. Scotch is on another level, and expensive bourbon is also better. I didn’t know the immigration museum existed until it was almost time to fly home. As for the library and the book, it’s hard to get excited about such things. I’ve been in big old libraries. Nice, but not worth buying tickets. My understanding is that you only get to see two pages of the Book of Kells, and neither of us thought that was a bucket list item.

Let me digress back to Guinness. The Internet says Guinness brews all over the world, and the US used to get its draught Guinness from Canada. Then Diageo took over and started selling Irish Guinness in the US again. Bottled and canned Guinness are not always from the same locations as draught. I can’t find out where the Irish brewery is. I would guess they moved it out of the big, expensive city, and they don’t want anyone to know.

What about the food in Ireland?

We had a surprising amount of bad food in Dublin. I thought they would make excellent fish and chips, but they don’t. Long John Silver’s is way, way better. I have had fish and chips in Ireland and at Long John Silver’s, and Ireland can’t compete, so if you want to find out what good fish and chips taste like, head to your local drive-through. Maybe the English do it better, but American fast food fish and chips beat all the Irish fish and chips I tried.

Most places in Ireland use frozen potatoes, and we all know how those taste. We tried a couple of places that breaded their fish. One did a great job. The breading was dry and seasoned perfectly. The other, Beshoff’s, gave me fish that was not quite as good as the fish in a McDonald’s sandwich. We tried battered fish, and it was limp, oily, and not seasoned well. Only two places gave us acceptable chips.

I know it would upset many people to see me say American Guinness tastes just like Irish Guinness and that a lowly American chain makes better fish and chips than famous chip shops in Ireland, but these things are true, and delusion is a bad thing.

Wait till you read my opinion of Irish sweaters. You’ll be furious.

We tried a bakery called Bread 41. It gets rave reviews. It’s one of those places hipsters call “artisanal.” They take reservations for breakfast. They sell big loaves of great-looking bread, as well as breakfast pastries.

The web advises people to book in advance, but we walked right in. I ordered a croissant, pain au chocolat, and hot chocolate. The wife ordered a morning bun (whatever that means), a bun that had been cut in half and filled with pastry cream, and coffee.

The croissant looked fantastic, but it was very dark, and it tasted like burnt egg wash. A croissant should have a buttery, sweet, slightly salty flavor. Croissants are made with milk, butter, sugar, and salt. I didn’t taste what I should have. I didn’t finish the croissant. That’s really something, because I have managed to enjoy croissants from Walmart, Burger King, and a breakfast buffet in Egypt.

The pain au chocolat was like the croissant. The filling was nice, but it was way down in one end, so most of the roll was just a bad croissant.

The morning bun was very nice. The other thing Rhodah ordered would have been excellent, but it had a strange spice in it. Something you would expect to find in a sausage, not a pastry. It may have been sage. I don’t know. It ruined the bun.

The hot chocolate was tepid, and it tasted as though it had been made from water and spoiled milk. I later learned the Irish don’t make hot chocolate well, and they don’t seem to like really hot beverages, so I suppose my experience was normal. I only took a few sips because I was afraid I was drinking angry bacteria. I can’t recall ever failing to finish a hot chocolate before. I will even drink Swiss Miss.

The coffee was also tepid, resulting in a very annoyed wife.

Everything in the bakery looked magnificent, and the food was obviously prepared with great skill. The problem was that it didn’t taste good. These days, people are in love with presentation. Like I always say, you can’t taste presentation. It’s for people who can decorate but can’t cook. Is that code for “gays and women”? Not sure.

Yes, I am. It is.

A chef has to have a palate. He has to know what tastes good. The other nonsense is much less important.

We went to a breakfast place called Keogh’s and paid a lot of money for scones. They were cold and dry. How can Irish people not know how to make or serve scones? I believe cold scones are considered normal, because we saw them elsewhere, but they should not have been dry.

While we were in Dublin, we learned something shocking. Famous chef Marco Pierre White is a total fraud.

White is Gordon Ramsay’s former mentor and employer. He is probably the most respected chef on Earth. He’s all over Youtube, pontificating about food. He has had a ton of Michelin stars.

While we were looking for a restaurant which turned out to be closed, we saw another place with “MARCO PIERRE WHITE” on the awning in big letters. I could not believe it. He had a restaurant in Dublin? We had to try it, just for the experience.

Rhoda had salmon and chips. We shared a scallop appetizer. I had a rib eye steak and an Absolut martini.

It was disgusting, and it cost us about $200.

The chips were frozen, unless White has used his gift to find a way to make fresh ones taste that way. The rib eye was half an inch thick, cooked badly, and covered with some kind of brown gravy that tasted canned. The scallops were dry and tasted like they had been on site for a week.

They could not make me a martini. They tried twice. I kept telling them to add only a couple of drops of Vermouth, but every drink tasted like Vermouth lightly seasoned with warm vodka. Which was warm. Warm!

I later learned that White has a chain of restaurants. I guess they’re all disgusting. Maybe he can’t really cook at all. In any case, he clearly has no integrity. If he did, why would he put his name on a bad restaurant? Obviously, he knows it’s bad, unless he’s not paying any attention. Either way, he’s a phony.

Dublin is much more expensive than the rest of Ireland, for no good reason, so if you get bad food there, you will pay a lot for it.

Strangely, we found the Thai and Italian food in Ireland to be excellent. Also, we had McMuffins in Dublin, and they were very nice. Irish bacon is a lot like what we call Canadian bacon, so if you want a US-style McMuffin, your best option is called a Bacon McMuffin.

Incredibly, the Irish do not serve cream or half and half with coffee. They use milk, which is awful. If you want coffee with cream, you have to buy cream in a store and carry it around. I had a decaf at McDonald’s, and the milk took much of the joy out of it.

My wife has not been what I would call “rich” her whole life, so when we get together, we have to do catch-up shopping. I brought a lot of stuff for her in my luggage, and we also shopped in Dublin. The prices and quality were fine, for the most part. We learned that Henry Street is a good place to look for things. There are also shops on Grafton Street, but the prices are jacked up for tourists.

Now that the subject of shopping has come up, let’s talk about Irish woolens. They are no good.

You may be amazed to see someone write that, because Ireland is famous for Aran Island woolens. Locals used to make heavy oiled sweaters for fishermen who worked out of the islands. Those sweaters were very good. The new ones are not. They are made for tourists, not fishermen.

The original sweaters were white, and they were oiled with lanolin to make them weather-resistant. The new sweaters come in all colors, they are generally knitted by machines, they have no lanolin in them, and they are so lightweight, they stretch and become useless.

There are sweater stores in every city and town in Ireland, selling the same things. The sweaters look fantastic until you hold them up to the light and see how thin they are.

The prices are alluring. You can get a gorgeous sweater for 65 Euros. The problem is that it will be a thin sweater. If you want a real sweater, think more in the range of 200 Euros.

If you look around in Ireland, you will see almost no one wearing Irish wool. They dress exactly like Americans. They wear warmup suits, basketball shorts, and so on. They look awful, just like we do. There is a reason why they pass those sweaters by. They know the quality is inferior.

Sorry if I’m bursting your bubble. Consider this an intervention.

The T-shirts they sell for tourists are also thin and useless. They’re like Kleenex. I couldn’t find a single one fit to give to a friend. The hoodies seem okay, which is hard to explain, given the poor quality of the shirts.

We stayed in an area near Trinity College, near a neighborhood called Temple Bar. Temple Bar, aptly, is named after The Temple Bar. Which is a bar. Tourists flock to Temple Bar to get drunk. It’s sort of like the French Quarter. A Youtube travel guy advises people, very seriously, to keep an eye out in order to dodge flying vomit. If you spend time in Temple Bar, you will see vomit on the ground and buildings from time to time. Apparently, the British use Temple Bar as a destination for pre-wedding parties, and we all know how well the British hold their liquor.

We didn’t see any obviously drunken people, but then we were always indoors pretty early.

I’m not exactly sure what people are supposed to do in Ireland, but I think they’re probably supposed to get drunk in pubs and sing. We saw a lot of signs advertising “good craic.” The word “craic” refers to drunken fun. Far as I can tell, you’re supposed to go to a pub, get a load on, listen to live music, and party with other tourists.

This is apparently a very, very important part of Irish tourist life. We saw references to it everywhere we went.

What if you don’t like partying with drunks? Then you’ll end up like us, in bed watching Judge Judy.

The Irish are obsessed with Judge Judy. Often, we found that her show was on three TV channels, simultaneously. They also seem to like Perry Mason.

Judge Judy is a nasty, rude old woman. It’s strange that the Irish would like her. We found the Irish to be extremely polite and patient. They were a joy to deal with. They reminded me of the people here in Northern Florida.

In the US, there are pretty much two Irish stereotypes. First, there is the coarse, violent, short-tempered, drunken, ill-mannered stereotype. Then there is the cute, witty, Leprechaun-like, Barry Fitzgerald-ish, also drunken stereotype. We didn’t run into people who fit the pigeonholes. I thought the Irish were wonderful people. I told Rhodah the French should be forced to visit Ireland for lessons.

Speaking of prejudices, we were told that the only way to distinguish the seasons in Ireland was by the temperature of the rain. We saw very little of it. We had one day when there were a few light showers. Other than that, we generally had dry, sunny days. I kept praying for God to keep it up so we would have a testimony, and as far as I can tell, he listened.

I think I’ll continue with this tomorrow.

I am back, even though only an hour has passed. I have restored my strength with delicious leftover Sicilian pizza.

Rhodah had a hair disaster in Dublin. She had a weave or something installed in Zambia, and by the time we got to Dublin, it was hurting her scalp. While we were struggling to eat at Bread 41, she saw a black woman, and she asked her where she got her hair done. This is how we ended up visiting the Nigerian lady on Moore Street.

Moore Street is pretty shady. It’s the only place we went where street crime was a serious possibility. Gypsies hang out in the general area, and they steal. Sorry if that hurts your feelings, but it’s true. The Nigerian lady with the hair shop told us the gypsies stole phones. One gypsy slaps your face, and another one grabs your phone while you’re in shock. Don’t blame me for being honest about gypsies. Their reputation is their own fault.

I’m old. I can say anything I want.

Before Rhodah got settled in to get her hair fixed, a young man had to be ejected from the shop. I thought he was Jamaican because he was wearing a lot of green, but later, I learned he was Nigerian. Nigerians like green because it’s in their flag. He was hopped up on some drug or other, and he was angry at people for no apparent reason. He smelled terrible, like he hadn’t showered in a week. The beautician ended up calling the cops on him.

At first, we were told it would take three hours to replace Rhodah’s hair, but in truth, she was there for 10. During that time, she got to talk to the beautician, and I got to wander around Dublin and sit in a hotel room.

It turned out the beautician was a fan of T.B. Joshua, Nigeria’s famous evangelist. He died unexpectedly last year. The beautician had had cancer, and she was healed through Joshua. That was interesting. My wife and I both enjoy his videos, although militant perverts got his main channel removed from Youtube because he cast a demon of homosexuality out of a man on camera.

While I was walking around killing time, I met Andrew. He was standing near a Starbuck’s I intended to visit, handing out pamphlets. Usually, I steer clear of anyone who wants to hand me anything, and sometimes I even say, “I don’t speak English,” in Russian, but I saw something interesting. He was holding a pamphlet about “the cashless society.” I decided to talk to him. I thought it was remarkable, seeing someone in Ireland who was concerned about the apocalypse.

Andrew is in his twenties. He is part of a sect that believes Christians should pool their wealth and live without working. At the time I spoke to him, he was living in a tent. He had coronavirus (something I didn’t learn until I had been standing too close to him for a while), but he said God had given him strength to get up and evangelize that morning.

His group has a website at this link, and he gave me a DVD and a pamphlet. Very interesting stuff.

I don’t think God has called on me to give everything I have to a fund for other Christians, and I’m not sure we should refrain from working, because as far as I know, the Bible doesn’t say those things are required. The New Testament specifically mentions Christians who are well off, and it doesn’t say they have to give everything away. It says we should treat our employers well, which is impossible for those who are not employed. Also, the believers in Acts who pooled their resources didn’t stop working. At least, Acts doesn’t say they did.

Paul worked.

I don’t believe everything Andrew believes, but I know what it is to live without money and rely on God, because I have done it. It works, and there are some very good things about it. I don’t plan to take that route again unless I have to, but I still wanted to find out about Andrew’s group. They are interested in the mark of the beast and the government’s efforts to control us and turn us into a big, filthy, fake family, and they also believe in prayer in tongues.

He said they took donations in order to survive. I told him I wanted to read the pamphlet before committing, so I took it and read it at Starbuck’s. Days later, during our time in Salthill, my wife and I watched the DVD.

Having read the pamphlet, I left Starbucks and found Andrew again. I thought his group was basically okay. I told him things I thought would be helpful. I told him how important it was to pray in tongues for long periods in order to be protected from deception.

The DVD contained two videos. One was about the mark, and the other was about human rights abuses. I felt the second video was about a political concern of limited relevance to Christians, so it didn’t do much for me.

The first video was interesting because in addition to telling people about the mark, it exposed a culture I knew nothing about. I know about preppers, but the video was about people who avoided using money, and that’s different. There is a culture of people who live simply, without jobs. They barter. They eat discarded food. They find all sorts of handouts most of us wouldn’t know anything about.

They have had fairs dedicated to their cause, and the fairs didn’t cost anything to produce. They used donated food, donated venues, and so on.

It doesn’t seem like a great lifestyle. For example, you can get free clothes and free food, but you can’t choose what you get, so you may end up wearing and eating things that aren’t your top choices. On the other hand, these people don’t fear the IRS. They don’t worry about credit. They don’t work soul-killing jobs. They aren’t trapped in a constant fight to impress others. They are free to go wherever they want at a moment’s notice. Provided they can find ways to get there without paying.

Here’s something fascinating about the video. The creators interviewed random street people in America and asked them about chips and the mark of the beast, and they knew more about it than most Christians. They didn’t want to be chipped. They said, correctly, that chips and cashless commerce were about control. So people who sit around smoking weed and asking for spare change know more about our times than most working people do. Sad.

When the mark rolls out, rejecting it will be easier for bums than it will be for the rest of us, because they will be used to living without being part of the system. They won’t have to choose between their membership in an affluent society and a cold turkey entrance into a faith-based way of life. I suppose the first will be last, and the last will be first, as Jesus said.

Andrew and the hair lady were not the only Christians we saw in Dublin. One night while walking to the hotel, we saw an African lady waving a pamphlet. I was afraid she was a Jehovah’s Witness, so I kept walking, but Rhodah stopped. I can’t teach that woman anything. The front of the pamphlet said, “Jesus said: ‘Behold I Come Quickly’ Revelation 22 v 7.”

The lady seemed shy, and I can’t recall her saying anything, but she was out on that corner anyway, handing out pamphlets to warn the world about the impending catastrophe. She was doing her duty. The pamphlet says her church is the Mountain of Soulution [sic] & Redemption Prayer Ministries Worldwide, in Dublin.

We ran into her on O’Connell Street, which is a huge tourist drag full of restaurants and bars. On another night, a group of young people accosted us farther down the same street, in front of a history museum. They handed Rhodah a pamphlet with a cross on it, announcing an April 15 gathering. A revival, I assume.

It surprised me to meet Christians in Ireland. I think of Ireland as a place full of post-Catholic leftists and freethinkers. I have always figured it was about like England, where Jesus is probably less popular than Jack the Ripper. The Irish are spiritual people, though, for better or worse, so I should not be surprised to find Christians in Dublin.

When our time in Dublin was over, I had to rent a car to get us to Salthill. The whole business of driving in Ireland was very interesting, to put it unnecessarily nicely.

I thought I was renting a Ford Focus, which is an okay car, but of course, the rental people gave us something weird instead: a SEAT Arona. SEAT is a Spanish company, and the Arona is a small hatchback.

The Irish love manual transmissions, so if you rent, you will find there are few automatics available. Also, they cost more. I learned to drive on manuals, so I thought manual would be fine. This was a big mistake.

The speed limits on Irish “roads” change very, very frequently, so if you have a stickshift, you will have to use it a great deal. Also, there are a lot of twisty roads with blind curves, so you have to do a lot of downshifting. Because the Irish drive on the wrong side of the road, you will have to shift with the wrong hand. Add it all up, and it spells “automatic.”

On top of all this, shifting gears in the Arona was like buying a lottery ticket. I was never quite sure what gear I would end up in. In an American or Japanese car, the transmission will help you, steering the lever in the right direction. In an Arona, you are about as likely to end up in 1st or 5th as you are to find 3rd.

The guy at the rental counter did me one big favor. He upgraded me to diesel without charging me. I had rejected the upgrade, because they charged 70 Euros. I think he felt I was making a bad choice. The nice thing about having a diesel was that it gave me a wide power band. There were long stretches where I could leave the car in 2nd or 3rd and not shift at all, regardless of how many curves I ran into. The motor wouldn’t stall.

The air conditioning wasn’t functional. The car had a little button labeled “A/C,” and it lit up when I pushed it, but it didn’t actually change the temperature of the air. I’m not sure the car actually had an air conditioning system. Maybe the button was just there to impress passengers and convince people the Spanish were capable of building air conditioners.

The road to Galway and Salthill wasn’t too bad, because a lot of it was four-lane divided highways. Staying on the wrong side of the road was challenging, however. More than once, I found myself looking into the grill of a distant car.

The rental guy told me not to worry about tolls because they would photograph my tag and let me pay on the Internet. It turned out this was totally false. I had to pay in cash every time, and if I wanted change, I had to have small bills. If you give the Irish toll people a 100-Euro note, the machine will consider your change a donation to the treasury.

Once we were out of Dublin, we realized how dumb it had been to spend 4 nights there. The countryside was much, much better. Granted, all of rural Ireland smells like manure, but my own farm has the same issue, and for country people, it’s not a problem. The landscape was green, rolling hills dotted with fat sheep, as far as the eye could see. It reminded me of Kentucky, especially as we got close to Galway. We both loved it.

I was surprised the country was so empty. Ireland has a very small population, because most of the Irish left a long time ago. Most of them are here in America, mixed in among the people who merely pretend to be Irish. I suppose Irish cities hold most of the remaining population. Europe is generally crowded, and Ireland is very small, so it’s strange to see big expanses of open land there. Rhodah said we should move there.

Land is not very expensive. I checked. In fact, everything in Ireland seems cheaper than it is in the US.

Not in Dublin, of course.

In Salthill, we rented a top-floor apartment in a building with an underground garage. We paid about what we paid in Dublin for one room. The apartment was a joy. We had two big bedrooms, a big living room, two outdoor terraces, a big kitchen, a dining room, and two baths. The whole place was sparkling-clean. We had cooking tools. We had laundry machines. It was bliss.

Salthill is a touristy area by the sea. Touristy or not, I loved it. There were good restaurants a few feet away from the apartment, and we didn’t have to deal with Galway traffic. We also found another Nigerian hair lady to repair the repair the Dublin Nigerian lady did. The hair we got in Dublin didn’t suit Rhodah, and when it got wet, it left black stains on things.

Nigerians are everywhere. There is probably one within 100 feet of you right now, waiting to sell you something.

From Salthill, we drove to see the Cliffs of Moher. This is probably Ireland’s biggest tourist site. When you Google day trips from any Irish city, the Cliffs of Moher will pop up over and over. They go from Dublin. They go from Galway. Why? Because there isn’t much else to see.

The cliffs are several hundred feet high, and they rise vertically out of the sea. From the top, you can see Galway and the Aran Islands. You have to walk to see the cliffs unless you have some kind of motorized chair. A lot of Irish sites are like this. They’re not interested in entertaining the disabled. If you can’t walk properly, go do something else.

There are some smaller cliffs to the right of the Cliffs of Moher as you face the sea. I told Rhodah they must be the Cliffs of Less.

There is nothing at all around the Cliffs. They are not near any big towns. You go see them, and you drive home.

The walk was somewhat arduous, especially for Rhodah, who is not about fitness. Whenever we walked on hilly ground, I had to stop repeatedly to let her get her breath. I told her she needed to start walking regularly. At her age, she should be walking off and leaving me, especially when I’m carrying a backpack and she isn’t.

While there is nothing interesting around the cliffs, there are quiet, beautiful towns along the way. We took note, figuring we would stay there if we visited Ireland again.

The roads were horrendous. Some turns were so sharp that on the way out of them, I actually saw my own rear bumper. Irish roads are also very narrow, because Irish landowners were too stingy to give up enough land to build proper roads. In some places, two-lane roads are actually narrower than two cars.

To make the roads worse, the Irish have no idea what a shoulder is. A typical road has a ditch a couple of feet from it, with a hedge or a wall rising straight up from the ditch. You can’t see around curves because of the hedges and walls, and you can’t pull over. If another tourist runs you off the road, into the ditch and whatever else you go.

When you rent a car in Ireland, don’t be a fool. Pay for no-deductible insurance. I did. I ended up off the road three times, and I was able to laugh about it.

The first time, Google took us up a one-lane road, and a big truck approached from the opposite direction. I had to back up a couple of hundred yards in a manual transmission car, shifting with the wrong hand, keeping my feet on the clutch and the brake, while unable to see behind me. I went into the ditch twice.

I thought the car was damaged, but I turned to Rhodah and said, “Who cares?” Not my problem.

The second time, a tourist came from the opposite direction on a very narrow road, and she (I assume it was a she) neither stopped nor moved out of the way. I drove right into the ditch while she crept past, halfway into my tiny lane.

Automatic. No deductible. Diesel. Remember what I tell you.

After Salthill, we went to Dingle, because everyone said we had to. Dingle is a tiny town on the Dingle peninsula on the west coast of Ireland. It has a fishing fleet, but basically, it’s a tourist town.

Well, let’s be serious. Every town in Ireland is a tourist town.

We stayed at Greenmount House, a B&B which, in Internet pictures, looked like a big resort. In reality, it was on a small lot on a hill outside Dingle. For the most part, it was very nice, but they had some kind of weak geothermal heat, and it didn’t work too well. They supplied an oil heater to help.

The innkeepers were very nice, and they put on a big breakfast spread. It almost made me forget that the Irish can’t do breakfast as well as we can.

I guess people will get mad because I criticized Irish breakfasts, because they are legendary. Legends have a way of turning out to be disappointing. The “full Irish breakfast” is Irish bacon, one egg, canned beans, white pudding, black pudding, one or two fried mushrooms, a link sausage, and toast. The bacon is totally inferior to actual bacon. A one-egg breakfast is like a 15-second massage. Beans cause constipation, so they do the opposite of what breakfast food is supposed to do. White pudding is really some kind of bulk sausage, and it’s not too bad. Black pudding is made from blood, so it’s actually a seasoned scab, literally. Irish link sausage is somewhere between a hot dog and a Vienna sausage, and that’s not a good place to be.

I asked for two white puddings instead of a scab. It’s remarkable that Christians don’t know we are not supposed to eat blood. Look it up. It’s not like Paul hid it from us.

One place accidentally left a scab on Rhodah’s plate, and she was so disturbed, she couldn’t eat for a while.

It was during our visit to Dingle that I got the idea of bringing my own cream to breakfast. I let the innkeeper know Americans like cream in their coffee, but I doubt he took the hint.

The best breakfast we had in Ireland came from McDonald’s, far and away. We ate breakfast together about 12 times, so I think we gave Ireland a good test, and McDonald’s is superior, without question. I recommend avoiding Irish breakfasts entirely. If someone put a Denny’s there, it would have to take reservations a month in advance.

Don’t call me provincial. I’ve had wonderful breakfast food in other countries, like Austria and France. Irish breakfast food doesn’t turn me off because it’s foreign. It turns me off because it isn’t very good. And McDonald’s makes a really excellent breakfast, as long as you avoid the pancakes and bagels. McMuffins and breakfast biscuits are very good, and so are the hash browns. If you don’t think so, you’re a snob. The food is not the problem.

While we were there, we kept trying to figure out why we were in Dingle. Finally, the innkeeper told me we were supposed to drive around and see cliffs and beaches. We made a tour of the Slea Head drive, and along the way, Rhodah got to visit her first beach. Prior to the trip, she had never seen the ocean at all, so walking on a beach was a big thrill for her.

Granted, it was cold, and there was no one swimming except for a couple of lunatics trying to make a point, but it was very pretty.

The food in Dingle was generally bad.

We were told we should visit a seafood place called Out of the Blue, by the harbor. It had a “Michelin mention.” I am pretty sure Michelin will mention anything, including the International House of Pancakes, but the people at Out of the Blue seemed proud to have been included. A Michelin STAR is a big deal. I don’t know if a mention means anything.

Truthfully, I don’t trust the Michelin people. No one even knows who they are, so how can anyone judge their discernment? They may be complete idiots.

Rhodah had never had lobster, so we got her one. She didn’t think too much of it. We paid around $60 to find out she didn’t like it. I had a piece of fish fried inside a sort of giant potato latke.

I’m sure the lobster tasted fine, but it was small and hard to get into, and she said it wasn’t worth the work.

The rest of the food was disappointing. The potato shroud was oily and limp, and the fish itself was also oily, not to mention wet and overcooked. The dish wasn’t seasoned much at all.

The bread consisted of a few tiny, cold slices of white bread and strange brown bread, accompanied by cold butter. No good restaurant serves cold butter. It’s like serving warm Champagne. You just don’t do it. Cold butter proves you have no idea what you’re doing. If you serve cold butter, you can’t possibly be trusted to serve anything else worth eating. As for bread, if it can’t be good, there should at least be plenty of it.

I think the B&B people sent us to this restaurant because they were used to snotty tourists who preferred impressive food to food that tastes good. We spent a lot of money and left hungry.

We did find decent ice cream. A volunteer lifeguard runs a little place called Kool Scoops, and it was very good. There was also a nationwide chain called Murphy’s, and not even the locals would recommend it. One of our innkeepers would only say, “Murphy’s is Murphy’s.” Murphy’s has touristy flavors, like Aran Island sweater swirl and sea salt with potatoes. I may be slightly wrong, but you get the idea. Kool Scoops was a real ice cream place, with real flavors like strawberry and chocolate.

We also went to James Long’s pub, where we had a bowling-alley-quality pizza and two cheeseburgers that smelled like sheep. They claimed they would give me a burger cooked medium, but it arrived well done. I actually wondered if it had sheep in it. Maybe they overcooked it to kill the sheep taste. The texture was dry and sort of like wet sawdust.

I didn’t see a single decent burger in Ireland. Avoid. Even if they cook them properly, the ovine smell and odd texture of the beef will ruin them.

We drove to Killarney because people say you should. I didn’t get Killarney. It was a little town pretty much like any town in, say, South Carolina. It had a Tesco (supermarket), some Aran Island wool places, and a bunch of pubs.

We went to the Laurels Pub for lunch. The Murphy’s was perfect, and they did a good job with fish and chips, but their wings (ordered by Rhodah) had a very odd smell to them. She couldn’t finish them.

Pubs are not like American bars. In America, bars are for fornication and drunkenness, period. A pub is basically a restaurant that also has a big bar. The Irish take small children to pubs.

We visited Tesco. You can buy anything there. They even sell clothes. Rhodah insisted on picking some up.

Rhodah took a notion to visit the Aran Islands. I didn’t think this was wise, but I went along with it. In order to make it work, we had to spend the night there. Most people pick an island, take a ferry early in the day, and go back to the mainland before dark.

The only place where we could find a room was Ard Einne, a guest house on Inis Mor, the biggest island. “Ard” means “high,” and “Einne” is a woman’s name.

Ard Einne has a two-night minimum, which is ridiculous, because there is no conceivable reason to spend more than one night on Inis Mor. Rhodah really wanted to see the islands, so we decided to pay for two nights even though we would only stay for one.

We booked a ferry from the town of Doolin. Several companies operate boats there. They go to the Arans and the Cliffs of Moher. It takes around an hour to get from Doolin to Inis Mor. Along the way, you stop at Inis Oirr, a smaller island people may well be visiting by mistake. A bunch of people got off our boat at Inis Oirr (also spelled Inisheer), and we heard someone wonder aloud whether they knew what they were doing. The island is really tiny, so you really need a good reason do debark there.

The ferries have indoor and outdoor seats. Unfortunately, we did not know about the indoor seats until we were seated on the top deck. Luckily for us, I had brought Rhodah a Carhartt jacket and Keen hiking shoes, along with wool socks. I was outfitted similarly. While the other passengers froze in hoodies, we were almost comfortable in the frigid wind.

On Inis Mor, we were accosted by an old taxi driver named Joe. He had a little bus, and he said he would drop us at Ard Einne. Joe was not a big talker, so he didn’t make it clear we would be joined by several Irish people he was picking up.

They were taking the 15-Euro tour of the island, so we decided to join in. Joe showed us the sights.

We stopped at a seal colony. The seals were about 200 yards away, sitting on rocks about the size of seals. When a rock moved, you knew you were looking at a seal. Not the greatest photo opportunity.

We also stopped at the Seven Churches, a bunch of ruins that included small graveyards. No one except me wanted to get out of the bus, so Joe drove on. He seemed displeased.

After that, he dropped us at the entrance to the island’s main attraction: a Bronze Age fort on a high cliff by the sea. “Coincidentally,” he happened to let us off at a place where there were three sweater stores, an ice cream shop (closed), and a busy cafe. We didn’t buy anything. The prices for woolens were the same as they were in Dublin, and I assumed the food at a place where they dropped tourists had to be bad.

Joe didn’t tell us about the fort, or maybe he did. I couldn’t understand much he said. After a few minutes of looking at sweaters we didn’t want, we went outside and saw that he and our new friends were gone, along with our luggage. Another driver told us we were supposed to walk to the fort and back. Joe would return for us. The people we had arrived with were already walking.

The fort was basically two rings of crude stone, and I would say it was half a mile from the stores. All uphill. Rhodah got winded again, but we eventually made it.

When Joe finally took us to Ard Einne, it looked like a scale model of the place I had seen on the Internet. I was ready for that. I was not ready for the room, which was so small, we had to maneuver to walk around the tiny double bed. The room was also cold, because the proprietor had opened the windows to air it out. She said the heat would come on later, so all would be fine. She said the comforter was quilted, as though that solved our problems. We got her to give us a blanket anyway.

Next time I visit a cold destination, I am going to put a space heater in my luggage. The next parsimonious B&B proprietor will find out about it when he or she gets her electric bill after we leave.

The door to the room was immediately to the left of the front door. There was no foyer. Very strange. Ordinarily, you would find a closet in a location like that.

The door was thin, and the B&B’s common room was across the hall, so we could hear everything everyone said.

The bathroom was so small, I couldn’t close the door without crumpling the bathmat. There was a sign on the room door admonishing us to take quick showers, presumably to save the owner money. That went over poorly with me, and of course, I paid no attention to it. If anything, I felt motivated to take unnecessarily long showers in order to get more for my Euro.

I’ll say this for Ard Einne: we only saw one beetle in the bathroom. And he was small.

The place was nearly empty, so I’m not sure why she put us next to the front door. Rhodah wondered if racism was involved, but the innkeeper was very nice, apart from putting cash before our comfort, so I doubt that was the case.

At night, we were very cold. The weather was below freezing, and the radiators, which came on late in the day, were tiny and not very warm. Heating oil isn’t free.

Breakfast at Greenmount House consisted of a generous buffet, as well as a number of dishes cooked to order. At Ard Einne, there was no buffet. Each of us ordered something from the menu, and that was it. There was no one else in the room. We only saw two other people while we were there, so we didn’t understand why we ended up in such a bad room.

The strange thing is that Ard Einne got all sorts of great reviews. I don’t know if they were fake or not, but we barely slept, and we were thrilled to leave.

During our only evening on the island, we ate at Joe Watty’s Bar. It was a big surprise. Everything was excellent, from the Murphy’s to the chocolate brownie.

Watty’s is a typical pub. Unlike the B&B, it was warm, proving there was no impediment to heating buildings on Inis Mor. Rhodah had fish and chips, which were very nice by Irish standards, and I had lamb stew. The only way the stew could have been better was if it had been made with beef. I got a generous serving, and I enjoyed all of it. The desserts were top notch. The service was good. It’s too bad there were no Joe Watty’s branches in Dublin.

I don’t know who Joe Watty is, but Marco Pierre White isn’t fit to mop his floors.

We spent our last two days in Dublin. There isn’t a lot to say about that. We stayed in the Trinity City Hotel, which I recommend. Don’t splurge for the hotel’s big Georgian suites. They’re old and weird. Just get a nice room with a king size bed. Everything in the hotel’s more modern rooms works fine, and the beds are great. They even have modern air conditioning and heat, unlike the suites.

I doubt I’ll ever return to Ireland unless a strange sequence of events drives me to move there. I just can’t see paying to visit again. I would love to have a house there in a rural area on maybe 30 acres of land, where I could hide out and wait for the rapture, but I don’t want to go back for 10 days so I can kiss the Blarney Stone or see how Guinness is made.

While we’re on the subject of Gaels, I have no desire to visit Scotland, either, even though I have a lot of Scottish blood. There is something dreary and depressing about the Scots, and if the Internet and eyewitness accounts are any indication, they don’t do much other than get drunk, curse, and fight. Scottish food is terrifying, and as for history, even less has happened in Scotland than Ireland. They don’t even make good beer. I tried a McEwan’s Scotch Ale once, and it wasn’t an experience I would want to repeat. As I recall, it was like drinking a rancid fruitcake.

The Irish are very musical, but somehow, the gift of music appears to have completely missed their cousins the Scots. I can’t figure that out. Go to Youtube and search for Scottish music, and two things come up: bagpipe dirges and the Proclaimers. If you don’t remember the Proclaimers, do yourself a huge favor and don’t go look them up. There are some sounds you don’t want in your brain.

We are getting to work on Israel now, so we ought to be there in the worst possible season: summer. Which month will it be when the biting flies hatch? I can’t remember. I wonder if the food is like it used to be. Back in my day, the Jews couldn’t cook anything except cookies and sandwiches, so in order to survive, I had to find Arab restaurants.

Whatever happens, it should be a great trip. There is more to life than nice weather and good food.

Side note: don’t make the mistake of traveling to Ireland with Delta Airlines. They gave me a cheap rate up front, and then they charged me about $140 for my luggage. Also, it is literally impossible to get in touch with them unless you have an afternoon to kill. I called them for information, and they told me I would be on hold for 90 minutes. I can call obscure airlines from backward countries that just got telephones and have a real person on the line in a minute or less, so Delta has no excuse.

I guess I should also remind people to buy travel insurance. The best company I’ve found is Heymondo. EDIT: not true. Heymondo refused to pay every claim we made. Your American health insurance is no good in other countries, and airlines are extremely unreasonable about trip changes and lost luggage. Rhodah’s large suitcase got lost somewhere in Ireland, France, South Africa, or Zambia, and Aer Lingus, Air France, and KLM have been utterly worthless. Only South African Airlink has made any effort to help. I called Heymondo, and they got on the case, pun not intended. They will confirm the loss, meaning they will call the airlines and get respect we could not get, and that could result in a genuine effort to locate it. If they can’t get the bag, they will give Rhodah $1700, and that’s better than the pittance the carriers offer. Her insurance ran around $60, and it was a great investment.

Flying is a horrible experience now. They used to let you make reservations by phone, with no ID and no payment in advance. Then after you paid, if you canceled your trip, they gave you a full refund. They didn’t search anyone; I used to take a knife with me on flights. Islam put an end to that. I didn’t have to take my shoes off. I didn’t have to have my picture taken over and over. No one took naked pictures of anyone. The stewardesses were pretty young women. Now, they treat you like a bothersome object that might explode at any time. Then there is the moronic mask rule.

My dad used to fly all over the country for his law practice, and when he got older, he said he was glad he didn’t have to do it any more because it had become so unpleasant. He used to zip around in business or first class, and the airlines treated him like a human being, but when he made his last flight in 2007, they saw him as just another annoyance with a wallet.

During my return trip, I realized I had lost all enthusiasm for air travel. Rhodah wants to see the world, but I have had it. I suppose we will continue traveling until she gets her green card, and I know Israel will be worth the pain, but after that, I want to quit for good.

Look what we got during our Ireland trip. Multiple check-ins. Long lines. Repeated searches. Masks. Tests. Tourist food. Tourist sweaters so shabby they weren’t worth buying. Thin tourist T-shirts that rivaled Pakistani-made rock concert T’s. Lost luggage. Uncaring airlines. Airports full of bad, dirty, overpriced food. Trashy airline passengers that made our trips unpleasant. Cramped seats. The Irish were great, but that only counts for so much.

I don’t know what Israel is like in the summer now, but when I was there many years ago, summer was peak tourist season, and things should be even worse with travel opening up after a long prohibition. Ireland was slow because of the season, so we had that going for us.

I am content to wait out the rest of my life in America unless Jeff Bezos buys me a jet.

This is What Saving $880 Looks Like

Day before yesterday, I made a repair. I spent about $20, and I saved myself somewhere in the neighborhood of nine hundred.

My mother bought my dad a giant Tumi suitcase. He didn’t use it because he liked garment bags. I inherited it in nearly-new condition.

Tumi makes expensive stuff. The current product which is closest to my bag runs $850 on Amazon. That doesn’t include tax. Tumi does not sell repair parts because, well, because their customer support is garbage. If your Tumi bag breaks, you have to ship it to a repair center at your expense. My bag is about a yard tall, so imagine what that would cost me.

When Rhodah and I visited Turkey, we used taxis. They were generally great. They usually provided two options for about the same cost: car or van. Obviously, we hired vans.

One day, we needed a ride to the airport in Istanbul. The company we chose assured us they would get us there very early. Then we sat in the lobby of our hotel and waited. “Very early” became an impossibility. I started calling them, and they were not very good about responding.

Eventually, they called the hotel, not me, even though they had my number. They said the driver had to park several blocks away. They said he had been held up by traffic. This was not a good excuse. If you drive a taxi in Istanbul, you know the traffic is bad, and you plan around it. It wasn’t a special day. Nobody set off a bomb on the highway. There were no earthquakes. The driver couldn’t expect anyone to believe his lateness was not his fault.

He was supposed to come to the hotel and move our bags for us. Instead, a hotel clerk hauled them a quarter of a mile or more, over cobblestones. One of the wheels on my bag came loose, and it fell off somewhere during the ride. Tumi bags cost a lot, but the wheel was held on by two small screws driven into plastic, so it wasn’t attached very well.

Later, I gave the taxi company a bad review. They had been late. They had parked far away. They hadn’t moved our luggage as they were supposed to. They caused my wheel to break, and there was no way to get Tumi to fix it. I was going to have to pay a great deal of money for a new suitcase or come up with my own repair.

They started emailing me, making excuses. They offered to refund my money. I said their excuses were just that, and I said the refund wouldn’t begin to pay for new luggage. I never got my refund. The refund should have been their first step, and they shouldn’t have asked for a good review in return.

Why did I give them a bad review? Aren’t Christians supposed to forgive? Sure we are, but the purpose of a bad review isn’t to punish. I posted my review to prevent other tourists from having problems with the company and to motivate the company to improve.

Anyway, I was looking at new bags this week, and it appeared I could get something decent from L.L. Bean for around $270, but I really didn’t want to pay. The suitcase is strong and spacious. Apart from cobblestones, it handles abuse very well. And money is money.

I went to Tractor Supply, where all great luggage repair stories begin. I got me a caster and some screws, bolts, washers, and nuts. I brought the caster home and drilled the axle to remove the wheel. I drilled holes in the plastic housing where the old suitcase wheel had been. I ran a 1/4″ bolt through the holes. I stuck the wheel in there and tested it.

The wheel dragged a little. I saw it was slightly too wide for the cavity it sat in, so the sides rubbed. I got some coarse sandpaper and sanded the wheel and cavity. Eventually, it turned fairly freely. I realized it would free up more after half a mile or so of rolling through airports, so I stopped. I mixed some 5-minute epoxy and applied it over the outer end of the bolt so it couldn’t turn or back out of the hole.

Guess how long it takes 5-minute epoxy to cure. Twenty-four hours. They should use it to seal up Grant’s Tomb. It takes about an hour for it even to harden partially. I’m not sure why the government allows them to call it 5-minute epoxy.

Now I have a better wheel than the one the suitcase came with. It’s a little taller than the other wheel, but suitcase wheels slip as they turn, so it doesn’t matter. The wheel I installed will be there long after the other one fails.

Two of the screws I bought were longer than they needed to be, so I’m going to replace them with shorter ones. I’m using lock nuts, so they shouldn’t come loose.

I learned a bit about luggage. For example, when it comes to soft luggage, you want Cordura, not ballistic nylon, even though Cordura is actually a type of ballistic nylon. If the specs on your new bag say “ballistic nylon,” it’s a cheaper fabric that isn’t as durable. When it’s Cordura, the manufacturer will be sure to inform you.

I have no idea how nylon can be ballistic. That’s a question for another day.

I learned a lot of people are buying hard-sided luggage these days. I didn’t want that. What happens when you put one ounce too much in a hard bag? Either you can’t close it, or you break something inside it. And hard bags sometimes crack.

Most people want luggage with 4 wheels. It’s easier to roll. Sorry; not for me. A 4-wheeled bag can roll away from you on a slope. You always have to hold onto it. Also, those wheels hang out there in space held on by weak spindles that break easily. And luggage makers aren’t helpful with repairs. My bag has two wheels. It rolls just fine, and the wheels are much less likely to break. If I have to stop on a slope, I can let go of the bag, and it won’t go anywhere.

These days, people make fun of travelers who use big checked bags. Chuckle all you want. I am not too sorry to stand at a bag carousel for 20 minutes. It’s not that hard. In exchange for this meager effort, I get three times the capacity other people get. I need capacity. I’m taking my wife a Carhartt jacket, waterproof hiking shoes, an assortment of wigs, long underwear, and a huge trove of makeup. If I used a tiny stewardess bag, I’d have no room for my own clothes.

Now I know more about luggage than I ever wanted to know. Maybe reading this will help someone else avoid problems.

It’s not Something in the Water

Rhodah and I are going through the Bible. She decided she wanted to start at the Revelation and go backward. We are now on Romans. We haven’t discussed it yet. We will probably do it today.

While I was reading today, I came across a passage which is very relevant to our time. Really, it’s almost an entire chapter. It shows why America is in the state it’s in.

Homosexuals and the people who want to give in to them in order to have peace sometimes say Jesus never said anything about homosexuality. Of course, that’s ridiculous.

First, Jesus is not the only person who spoke by God’s inspiration in the New Testament. The entire Bible is full of the words of prophets and apostles, and these people spoke with God’s authority. It would be asinine to claim to be a Christian and insist on discarding the entire Bible except for the words Jesus spoke. Sexual sin is criticized throughout the Bible in both testaments, and Jesus approves of the Bible. If you doubt that Jesus approves of the Bible, and you insist you’re a Christian, you are beyond the reach of reason.

Second, people who had the authority of Jesus criticized homosexuality repeatedly in both testaments. Jesus is God. He has always been God. If you don’t believe that, there is no point in engaging you in an effort to determine which Christian doctrines are correct, because you deny Christianity as a whole. Jesus gave Moses the law. Jesus created Adam and commanded him. Jesus spoke through people like Elijah and Jeremiah. When any anointed person criticizes homosexuality, he speaks for Jesus.

Paul had the authority of Jesus and Jehovah, and he said these things:

For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse:

Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened.

Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools,

And changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and fourfooted beasts, and creeping things.

Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonour their own bodies between themselves:

Who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed for ever. Amen.

For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature:

And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompence of their error which was meet.

And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not convenient;

Being filled with all unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder, debate, deceit, malignity; whisperers,

Backbiters, haters of God, despiteful, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents,

Without understanding, covenantbreakers, without natural affection, implacable, unmerciful:

Who knowing the judgment of God, that they which commit such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but have pleasure in them that do them.

It’s undeniable. Paul condemned homosexuality in both men and women. You can find other similar material in the New Testament.

What’s interesting about the passage is that it provides an explanation most serious Christians aren’t even looking for. Most of us are busy complaining about persecution from pro-perversion people, without trying to find the root cause. Romans 1 tells us the cause. Men rejected God, so God stopped protecting them from perverted desires.

I believe Christians tend to think of perversion as something that popped up on its own and motivated people to attack the church. The truth is that it became widespread because people gave up on God. The church helped that process along. If I’m a Christian, and I fail to help people avoid idolatry, and then they become perverts, I am responsible for the sin of not warning them and praying for them. I’m not responsible for their choice to be perverts or the things they do; that’s on them, and they have no excuse. But I have done wrong.

Paul says men turned to idols, so God gave them over to sexual perversion. Giving men over to something isn’t the same thing as inflicting it on them. When Paul gave a sinner over to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, he didn’t invite Satan to attack him; Satan was already trying to do that. He is always looking for ways to attack every human being. Paul merely quit praying for God to spare the sinner the consequences of his sin, and then the man had no protection, so Satan had better access to him.

For a long time, I’ve believed the decline of England was caused by greed and pride. England was once a powerful Christian nation. The British evangelized the world. When they became wealthy and amassed an empire, they became proud and obsessed with wealth and power. I believe the men turned work into an idol and abandoned their families.

By the beginning of the 20th century, England was pretty godless. The English elites accepted perversion in private, regardless of what they said in public. The men had become effeminate, and they still are. A typical British man who is not from the working classes is hard to distinguish from a flaming American homosexual.

Put Elton John in a business suit and a fake beard and tell people he was a straight English businessman, and no one would doubt it.

It became common for British men to ship their sons off to boarding schools so they could succeed. A British boarding school is essentially a sodomy academy. British men made their sons fatherless voluntarily, and Satan stepped in and filled the paternal role.

English men have become effeminate. Even the straight ones seem gay to Americans. To me, it appears that the British received the punishment of Romans 1, and Americans are receiving it now. We succeeded them in evangelism, and we have also succeeded them as idolaters and perverts.

It’s as though Christianity were a wave that moved through nations. It starts small, builds to a peak, and then disappears. When it’s building, things are wonderful, but afterward come chaos, hatred, defeat, and depravity.

Gay activists, who somehow love to teach Christianity in spite of their hatred of it, like to tell us Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed for selfishness, not for perversion. That’s not true. They were destroyed for both. The Bible mentions both as the causes of the rain of fire. It makes sense. It is believed that their area was very wealthy, and that they abused the poor as well as anyone who came to visit. They became powerful, they made wealth and heathen deities their gods, they became selfish and cruel, and they became sexually perverted.

After they became perverted, they became so depraved God was no longer able to reach them, so he rained fire on them. He burned them all, including old people, babies, women, pets, and livestock. Just to get rid of them for the sake of future generations they were going to contaminate.

Now America is like Sodom. By and large, we have no interest in God or righteousness. We love money, power, and admiration. We are obsessed with pleasure. We are also so sexually perverted, about one quarter of our young people claim to be LGB-something. That’s a big jump from the 1% we dealt with in the past.

In addition to these problems, we are much weaker and more vulnerable than before. We have to bow and scrape for China. That could never happen to a nation that had God’s favor. We got hit worse by coronavirus than anyone else. We are watching our wealth evaporate under Biden, as he drags us into an unnecessary conflict and kills American jobs. Our government is paying millions to put illegal aliens on planes and fly them to cities where they can settle and work against us.

For decades, we’ve been marching to the top of a cliff, and I think we are finally in the process of sliding off.

As written previously, my wife dreamed she was in a field with another woman, running from vicious dogs. The world was falling apart. They saw people running in various directions. People were running from one place to another, thinking they were headed to safety, but they passed people running in the opposite directions. No matter where people came from, they thought things had to be better elsewhere, but things were just as bad in the places they were running to. There was no escape.

My wife and the woman tried to go through a gate and into a house where people seemed safe. The woman was allowed in, but when my wife begged to be allowed in, a tall man with goat’s horns and charred skin came out. He owned the house.

It was obviously a picture of the tribulation and the mark of the beast. Things are going to be very bad everywhere, and Satan will offer people false safety in exchange for taking the mark.

Money won’t protect you. Buckets of freeze-dried disaster food won’t save you. Underground bunkers, real estate, stocks, ammunition, solar power, private wells, and militias won’t save you. The beast definitely won’t save you. God is shaking the world to show us he is the only thing we can hold onto. He will show us none of our false gods can help us.

It’s just like what he did in Egypt, which was a picture of the rapture. He sent 10 plagues, and each plague was designed to humiliate one of Egypt’s false gods. For example, the plague of darkness humiliated Ra, the false sun god.

We wanted to have our own way. We wanted to find security through wealth and political power, not prayer and submission. We wanted to appease perverts and pretend their disgusting activities were not sins, contradicting God himself. Now God is showing us where our safety and stability really came from. He is showing us they can be taken away.

Patriotism can be idolatry. Many conservatives worship America. They think it can never fall. The Roman Empire fell, and so did the British Empire. The Ottoman Empire fell, too. The various empires based in Babylon fell. The monuments of the pharaohs ended up buried in sand. We can fall, and we are falling. Your collection of AR-15’s won’t help you in the long run.

Many conservatives want nothing to do with humility, prayer, patience, or love. Many conservatives are just like the people they hate. Tattooed. Pierced. Proud. Fornicators without shame. Eager to shoot and kill. Some even worship ridiculous European deities and pretend to be Vikings. Many of us have rallied behind homosexuals like Tammy Bruce and Milo Yannopoulos. Many people think the battle is between right and left, but fundamentally, it’s between God’s family and Satan’s. Conservatism is a natural manifestation of closeness to God, but plenty of conservatives have nothing to do with God.

In short, a lot of people aren’t getting it. Not getting it is what causes plagues and floods.

The church should be standing up for righteousness, confession, repentance, Bible study, and prayer in tongues. We shouldn’t be compromising, because compromise is idolatry, and idolatry leads to destruction.

We shouldn’t be so afraid of other people. The only power they have to harm us is the power God gives them.

We Should Switch Names

This was written on March 6, but I didn’t publish it right away.

I have no interest in coin collecting. When I was a kid, my mother tried to get me interested in coins and antiques. I never developed any enthusiasm for coins. I didn’t get anywhere with antiques, either, although I enjoyed going through The Antique Trader, looking for old swords and daggers. My mother should have encouraged me to collect them. I’d be sitting pretty now. She was more interested in things like plates.

It’s remarkable how rich you can get collecting almost anything. Just refuse to clean out your garage for 30 years, and you’re bound to end up with a sizeable pile of assets.

Although I didn’t become a numismatist, I ended up with a few coins, including junk silver, which is the common term for circulated silver coins. Before 1965, US dimes, quarters, half dollars, and dollars were 90% silver. My grandfather was very sharp, and when the change came, he instructed the toll collectors in his area to save silver for him. He paid the state back at face value. When he died, I got a share of the coins.

He was a judge, and he had a lot of clout, so he could do things like that.

Now you know about my history as a coin collector. It is sparse.

A year or two back, Youtube started recommending videos made by a collector. He calls himself a silver stacker, which means he likes to invest in silver bullion and coins. He talks about developments in the precious metals and coin markets. He shows people things he has bought. He interviews shop owners.

I wondered why I was receiving these recommendations.

He published some interviews featuring a man known as the Coin Guy. His name is Guy Ventre, and he has a shop in my area code. I would guess he’s in his late sixties. He moved to Florida from New York, and he has a son who works in the business. His son’s name is Nathan.

The interviews were fascinating. The Coin Guy is not a highly educated man, but he’s very smart, and he reads. He keeps up with various news sources, including The Wall Street Journal. He reads books. He loves history. In the interviews, he provides all sorts of historical insights into coins and metals.

The Coin Guy wears what looks like a Smith & Wesson Chief’s Special on his hip, openly.

He talks a lot about the insanity of fiat currency. He reminds people of what happened in the Weimar Republic, where inflation became so bad, people had to carry bags of money in order to buy groceries.

As new interviews popped up, it became more and more obvious that he and the interviewer were both conservative and concerned about the zombie apocalypse.

The Coin Guy gives talks to kids, trying to interest them in what he does. He is very involved at his church.

I added all these things up. Coin dealer. Metals dealer. Believer in portable wealth. Doesn’t trust the government. Retailer. Born in New York. Smart. Erudite. Family-centered. Last name Ventre. Son named Nathan.

My conclusion: Messianic Jew. Had to be.

Why did “Ventre” make a bell go off? Because I knew a Jewish girl named Ventry.

I found out I was wrong but not far off. In an interview, Mr. Ventre said he had learned, as an adult, that he was part Jewish. Evidently, it was more obvious to me than it was to him. He’s not a Messianic Jew. He’s a Christian with some Jewish ancestry. Enough to be helpful, I think.

I believe I know why Youtube recommended him. I think conservatives and Christians are more interested in coins and metals than other people. I had always thought of these fields as areas that drew Jews, Middle Easterners, and Asians, but based on what I’ve learned, plain old conservatives are very much part of them now.

I took an instinctive liking to this man. He seemed like the kind of virtuous American male you don’t run into often these days. He talked a lot about honesty and reputation. He discussed his hopes for young people and his fears for America, which are, let’s face it, coming true.

A couple of days ago, he told a story about his daughter. She was getting married, so he bought her a bracelet with diamonds and jewels. He paid $2000 for it, and it appraised for more like twice that. When he had it appraised, his wife said, “Sell it.” He refused, saying it might be the thing that got his grandchildren across the Canadian border some day.

I started thinking about the apocalypse. What do we know about it? Here is one thing we know: when it comes, there will be no way to protect yourself. Only God will be able to protect people. If you have money, metals, junk silver, jewels, and securities, they won’t do you any good. No one is going to want to trade food for Bitcoin or Mercury dimes when people are starving.

Will food, land, and barter goods help people? My guess is that they will provide something of a cushion, but the problems of the apocalypse are murder, death, and lack, joined with delusion and a coercive one-world religion. Food and land won’t keep killers away. They won’t keep disease (death) away. When the government belongs to the likes of BLM and Antifa, and they serve the beast, the government’s agents won’t respect your locks and gates, so land won’t help much.

The only answer will be to know God through Jesus Christ. It won’t be enough to ask for salvation and try not to sin. You’ll have to communicate with the Holy Spirit every day and obey him. God is shaking the world so people’s hands will come loose from the things they cling to in vain. His hand is the only thing that will help us.

If we stack silver, silver can lose its value. If we try to grow food, it can be destroyed by bad weather, bugs, and disease. If we store things in our houses, those things can be taken from us. God is quite literally the only thing no person or spirit can take away.

Our enemies only have as much power as God allows them to have. Remember what the Bible said about Jesus. He wasn’t captured by hostile Jews. He turned himself in. He let them know they had no power except that which God gave them. When they approached him, he knocked them to the ground with supernatural power, showing he was God. They knew he was God, but they chose to arrest him, beat him, and have him killed anyway. The men who did this had no excuse when they died and were judged.

You may not be Jesus, but if you belong to God, Satan and his people can’t do anything to you unless God allows it. What he allows depends on your relationship with him.

Sometimes I think I should buy several buckets of disaster food, but I don’t think I’ll ever become a real prepper, because you can’t really protect yourself from the tribulation, and I don’t expect to be here when it happens. I expect to be raptured.

These things were on my mind after I saw the video.

Today, my wife told me about a dream she had last night.

The tribulation had come. She was with another woman. It wasn’t a person she knew in life, but she knew her in the dream. People were running to and fro, looking for safety. There was no refuge. People running away from one place would run past people running to the place they had just come from. People thought other places might be safer, but people who had been to those places knew better.

Vicious dogs were chasing my wife and the woman. There was a gate, and my wife wanted to go through it. She and the woman ran through. Behind the gate, there was a house. My wife knew people in the house were safe, but she couldn’t go in. The other woman was allowed inside. While my wife begged to know how to get in, a giant came out. He had goat’s horns. He was grey. His skin looked as though it had been burned. Suddenly, she knew she had to submit to him, or he would not let her in.

Of course, he was the beast. The house was a place of false safety, for godless people who accept his mark. The woman was a damned soul who submitted to him.

These are my interpretations.

It’s a lot like the Jewish temple, now that I think about it. The temple had an outer area for everyone, and it had areas deeper inside. The farther in you went, the closer to God you had to be. The most sacred place was the holy of holies, where only the high priest could go, and even he could only enter once a year. It makes sense that Satan would work the same way, since he copies God. The house must have been like the priests’ court in the temple. It was for people who proved themselves close to Satan.

God uses sheep to lure people to his altar. Why wouldn’t Satan use dogs and wolves to drive people to his? He used them to drive people into Hitler’s death camps, which were parodies of the temple.

The dream has me wondering: how close is the end?

In related news, I am no longer quite sure who has the moral high ground in the Ukraine/Russia dispute. I haven’t been keeping up with it. Americans on both sides of the political spectrum seem to be overwhelmingly against Russia, but I wonder how many of them know any more than I do.

It makes me uncomfortable to find out I’m siding with people like Bill Maher.

I don’t watch Saturday Night Live, but I decided to take a look at last night’s opening skit because of the war. I thought they might say something about Biden’s dementia and overall weakness encouraging Russia and China to take aggressive action, or maybe about Biden considering boycotting Russian oil and buying from the Venezuelan dictatorship instead of letting Americans drill, but instead, the skit was about Fox News and Donald Trump.

Apparently, some Fox personalities were supportive of Putin in the past, or maybe they didn’t condemn him strongly enough. I can’t really tell, and SNL is (putatively) a comedy show, not a news show.

Biden’s dementia and incompetence are clearly much bigger factors in our current predicament than the words of a few news personalities and a former president, but you can’t expect New York leftists to miss a chance to deflect.

Today, while taking a very brief look at the news, I saw a magazine opinion piece praising Biden for sticking to his guns regarding oil. That amazed me. The argument is that global warming is so terrifying, we need to do everything we can to stop it.

What isn’t so clear is how drilling for oil here instead of in Saudi Arabia, Russia, Iran, and Venezuela will make the oil any more of a warming threat. We still have to burn oil, so it appears to me that the locations of the rigs aren’t very relevant. It seems to me that the main impact of restricting domestic production is to weaken America and strengthen our enemies. We send our money overseas, we kill our own jobs, and we give our enemies control of our oil supply, so we have increased incentive to kowtow to vile regimes.

But perhaps I am wrong.

Maybe the writer was pushing a toxic leftist talking point: emissions should be stopped by curtailing consumption. If so, it’s hard to imagine a dumber position. Consumption equals progress equals prosperity equals a better standard of living. Consumption equals better medical care, schools, and food. It equals peace through enhanced military power. It equals better times for people who rely on charities.

Rational people generally agree that poverty is bad, but there are a lot of people on the left who dream of $15 gas. They truly believe it’s a good idea.

Elon Musk, the foremost proponent of the so-far nonexistent electric revolution, is saying we need to drill more. That’s really something. This is the guy who was going to save us from carbon.

Most people don’t know it, but it is impossible to create a practical electric 18-wheeler. Tesla delivers its electric cars on the backs of diesel trucks. Tesla owners get furious when this is mentioned. Tesla makes big trucks, but truck production is really just a vanity project.

The batteries for a Tesla semi weigh about 7 tons, so they displace a lot of paying cargo. They provide little range. They wear out fast, and semis rack up miles quickly. They cost a screaming fortune: $250,000. I don’t know, but I’ll bet they’re also made with materials we have to get from our enemies. Let’s check.

Yes, China controls 80% of the market for battery raw materials.

The guy who says we have to go electric is clearly worried about the cost of the diesel he uses to deliver his cars, and it’s obvious he is aware his battery trucks aren’t actually useful. If they were, he would be tweeting about the need to get more of them on the road to make us energy-independent.

In any case, even he admits Biden’s policy is destructive and foolish.

The wacky beliefs people are falling for now are strong evidence that supernatural deception is more prevalent than ever. A sign that things are wrapping up.

I take prophetic dreams seriously. My wife has had them before, and so have I.

I got into a conflict with a woman I had dated. One night, I dreamed she was a giant cockroach in my kitchen. She was around a foot tall. She had strange packages attached to her under her wings, like bombs on an airplane. I knew they were full of her eggs; bad future developments she hoped to bring upon me. I knew who the roach was because she was the same color as the woman’s skin, and like the woman, she had a round belly and frizzy hair.

The roach got ready to fly toward me and attack me. I tried to discourage her, but she was too enraged to listen. She flew into the air and into a running fan. It destroyed her and shot her remains into the air, spraying me with her guts. The bombs, which were intended to hatch into problems for me (such as the awful children we might have had), were destroyed. I was unscathed, but I was still covered with brown slime. This is a very accurate metaphor for what eventually happened between me and the woman. I came out on top, but I was still defiled and embarrassed. When I awoke from the dream, I knew how things would turn out.

My wife recently dreamed a man she knew was having premarital sex with his girlfriend, and she called him to tell him. Eventually, he admitted the dream was correct. She also had a dream that correctly showed that the girlfriend’s sister and mother were witches and that they had had a supernatural battle.

I dreamed I took my dad to Chick-fil-A. He was very old and nearly bald. He was feeble. As we walked to a table, waiters cheered. They were elated to see him. I knew this meant he would be saved, and sure enough, it happened later.

In my most obvious rapture dream, I was lifted to heaven on an invisible tsunami that covered the world. Oddly, I had a little tray of roach poison pellets in front of me, and it went with me. Because of this dream, I expect to make it.

Yesterday, I felt an urge to watch a few minutes from movies about Noah. I don’t watch fiction now, but I felt I was supposed to see these things. Noah’s deliverance symbolized the rapture as well as baptism.

The first movie was the John Huston classic. I wanted to see it because I remembered the way Noah’s hostile neighbors looked. They reminded me of today’s hipsters. They were bald, and they looked creepy. They adorned themselves with skulls. Have you noticed all the bald men around us? It seems like half of America’s men are bald, with creepy convict chin beards and tattoos. I thought it was strange that the movie’s characters were so much like them, given that the movie was made in the 1950’s.

Modern Americans are determined to look the way losers looked in 1960. Here’s something God once told me: we become what we imitate.

I saw a funny scene. One of Noah’s sons was asking him if he was sure the world would flood. He said the crops weren’t being looked after, and the weather was dry. His mother scolded him for doubting his dad. Then she turned to Noah and said he needed to take one son off the ark project and send him to fix the roof on Noah’s house. She was worried it would let water in when the rain started. Noah looked at her in disbelief, smiled, and agreed.

When the flood came, there was a moment when screams could be heard coming from outside the ark. That is something I’ve thought about in the past.

The second movie was the Russell Crowe version. Not much of interest there. I saw some short clips.

It portrayed the fallen angels as saviors of mankind, which is obscene, given that all the evidence we have says Satan is their leader. Failing to appreciate your allies is bad, but giving credit to your enemies is beyond stupid. The purpose of the flood was to kill the descendants of the angels.

I feel like John Huston’s Noah. I just can’t believe the things I do now matter. Why bother fixing the roof? My inescapable, persistent feeling is that if I let nearly all my earthly responsibilities go, it will make no difference at all in the long run, because my wife and I will not be here.

Jesus showed the disciples where to cast their nets, and they caught so many fish, they realized they were seeing miracles. Afterward, they walked away from the boats and left the fish to rot. Check the Bible and see. It says that. Imagine doing that today. What if you owned a big grocery store? Would you be willing to walk away and follow Jesus, allowing the inventory to go bad and the building to fall apart?

When the rapture comes, that’s what will happen. No one who goes will care about their savings, their wills, their houses, their careers…none of it.

If the rapture doesn’t come soon, then I guess we’re just stuck here, and we’ll have to take it a while longer.

We have been cleared for a trip to another country: Ireland. They insisted on getting confirmation that Rhodah was really my wife, even though we sent a PDF of our marriage certificate. Barring a sudden ascent into the clouds, we will probably have to make two more trips before she comes to the US. Ireland is somehow connected with the Schengen-area countries, so we expect her Irish visa will give her credibility if we decide to try another country in Europe later.

Israel would be the best possible destination, but they’re so crazy over there, I don’t count on anything.

I have never had much interest in visiting Ireland, because nothing has ever happened there, but the people are said to be very nice, and they have great seafood. It should be fun. I wasn’t interested in Turkey, either, and I had a great time there.

Americans Eager to Pile on Putin not Discouraged by Absence of Information

I feel like I’m the only person in America who doesn’t have a position on Putin and the Ukraine.

I have always thought Putin was ruthless, and I believed the people who accused him of poisoning dissenters. The thing is, even if those things are true, it doesn’t mean he’s wrong about Ukraine.

When he invaded Ukraine, my instinct was to go along with everyone else in the West. We are used to thinking invasions are bad. We don’t like occupiers of peaceful nations. Every intelligent person is against war. Leftists said Putin was wrong. Most conservatives agreed. I figured he was wrong.

Now I realize I don’t know who is right. I have not studied Russia or Ukraine.

I’m also wondering whether Americans should be heavily involved in the matter. I always say America shouldn’t be the world’s nanny or policeman. Shouldn’t I take that position with regard to Ukraine? It’s important to get involved when a bad actor is causing problems for the whole world, and we unquestionably had to fight the Cold War, but do we really need to jump in every time two far-off nations go at it?

Maybe we should limit our involvement. Maybe it’s shouldn’t be a huge concern to us if Russia invades its smaller neighbors. Ukraine chose not to join NATO, so it seems like our obligations are limited. It seems to be like Taiwan, which has no defense treaty with the United States.

There is no domino effect today. Neither Russia nor China is trying to build an empire of foreign colonies. During the Cold War, we had plenty of reason to think we had to fight communism overseas, because the Soviets truly did want to export it, by force, to the entire world, but neither Putin nor Xi has any interest in invading the United States.

I can’t find unbiased information on the war. Putin claims neo-Nazis are very powerful there, and they need to be taken down. I tried to Google this, and I got flooded with recent stories suggesting Putin’s claims were delusional. Then I changed my search. Suddenly, I was swamped with stories from several years ago. They came from the same news outlets that ran the anti-Putin stories. They said Ukraine was full of dangerous neo-Nazi militias that had to be stopped.

So Putin is delusional now, but he was right several years ago?

Putin claims drug addicts are powerful in Ukraine. I Googled Ukraine and heroin and learned that Ukraine is a huge conduit for heroin from places like Afghanistan. So apparently, Ukraine is the Colombia of the region, except it doesn’t do much of the growing.

Obviously, drug lords truly are a big problem in Ukraine. Big enough to justify military intervention from Russia? No idea. But it’s clear Russia has a legitimate concern.

I don’t think it’s all that important to decide whether Ukraine or Russia is right. To me, the question is whether we should be on the verge of a shooting war with Russia, over a distant land with which we have no defense treaty, in a time when Russia’s danger to us is nearly zero.

Maybe sometimes we should let other countries handle their own problems. I can see why we would work through diplomacy and humanitarian aid, and sanctions seem reasonable, but we are sending arms in a big way. Is that called for?

We are provoking an old-fashioned man modern Americans don’t understand, and many of the men who serve him are as old-fashioned as he is. We are wearers of skinny jeans. We whine about our feminine sides. We wear makeup and tights and cry when people get our pronouns wrong. Putin is different. He’s like our great-grandfathers. He has no feminine side. He’s the kind of man that was considered normal for thousands of years, before feminization hit the West.

My grandfather used to have his dental work done without anaesthetic. That’s what men used to be like. When his bird dogs got distracted by rabbits, he shot them to teach them to stick to birds. I worked in a bar a friend of his owned. The friend had an emergency appendectomy. The next night, he was back at work with a drink in his hand. A young man bothered him, and he threw the young man to the floor so hard I heard his bones hit the stones. That sound was how I knew there had been an altercation. He didn’t spill his drink.

When my grandfather bought pigs, he hired some friends to help him. They got out their pocketknives, grabbed the pigs, held them by the legs while they screamed, and cut their testicles out. They thought it was fun.

Men used to be different, and in many places outside America, they have not changed.

Many Russians are much tougher than we are. Putin is much stronger than Biden, and Harris isn’t even worth discussing. I suspect we are poking the bear a little too hard, without a compelling interest.

Maybe Russia is wrong, but governments are doing wrong all over the world, and we’re not supporting shooting wars against them. Saudi Arabia is full of slaves. Muslims use kitchen knives to cut girls’ clitorises out, and they sew their vaginas shut. Thailand tolerates child brothels. China mutilates dogs and boils them alive, and we all know what they do to human beings. Let’s not even discuss North Korea. The fact that a government does evil has never been sufficient justification for American intervention. It has always required more than that. Somehow, intervention had to be linked to preventing the evil from spreading far beyond the evildoer’s borders. Ukraine is right next to Russia, it used to be part of the USSR, and Russia isn’t going to use Ukraine as a launching pad to take Poland or Germany.

I admit, I know little about what’s happening. I have looked for information, but most of what I see doesn’t address the question of why America should be involved.

What happens if Ukraine loses? They get a new government. What about their human rights? I have Googled, and it appears Ukraine’s human rights record is similar to Russia’s, so it’s not clear they would lose significant ground. It sort of looks like being sucked into Russia wouldn’t do Ukrainians much harm, especially compared to the harm that would come from war on a wider scale.

Perhaps I’ll be furiously anti-Russia tomorrow, but right now, I have the impression that America should step back a little.

Is our position being driven by American leftists who are still pushing the Trump/Russia myth? Are they trying to punish Russia for supporting Trump (as China supported Obama and Biden, without repercussions)? Are they angry because Russia is less submissive to the alphabet crew than Ukraine? I wonder.

The web says Russia is not always nice to “LGBTI” people. What on Earth is I? Wasn’t it “LGBTQ+” last week? Does I mean you have sex with iguanas or what?

What happened to Q? What have they done with all the Q’s? I hope they’re okay. We may need to file for writ of habeas Q.

Maybe I is the new Q. Maybe they should call them IQ to keep things clear.

I don’t even try to keep this stuff straight. Even the people who seriously believe in it have fights all the time. No one can get it right.

My views on politics have changed. I used to be very patriotic, and I thought our republican system of government was the best kind. Now, I feel inclined to support America primarily because I live here and have citizenship, not because I have an overpowering, unreasoning sense of loyalty. If I had the opportunity to move to a place where I would be happier, I would probably take it. I think we should never have rebelled against England, and I think a good king is better than a republican government.

The best government is the government of Jesus Christ, but we won’t have that until he returns. After that, the best government is government by the Holy Spirit, dwelling in people and creating harmony of desires and beliefs. Unfortunately, that will never happen during the present age. After that, the best system is a theocracy in which Spirit-led priests and prophets tell us what to do. Then follows a Spirit-led king. Republics are further down the list.

Rule by the people is a degenerate notion. We are allowing all sorts of unintelligent, uninformed, malicious, selfish people vote on matters that are of great importance to all of us. We have chosen to be ruled by the stupid. It’s a wonder we have survived.

Our republican system appears to be a descendant of Greece’s direct democracy, in which every eligible resident voted on the issues. We generally rely on representatives instead of referendums, but the basic idea still comes from Greece, which had a pagan civilization that competed with the God-ordained system of Israel. It’s shocking how badly Greek thought has infected our own, given that the West has had the advantage of Christianity for over a thousand years. We should be further along than this.

I don’t believe God wants us to be a republic.

People are criticizing Putin, calling him a king. I have no problem with him becoming a king. What about his excesses, though? What about poisoning dissidents and so on?

This week, I listened to the books of Samuel. I heard some interesting things about kings.

The first kings of Israel were Saul and David. Neither was perfect, and Saul was worse than David, but both were considered good kings. Saul lost his mind toward the end, and he did some things that displeased God, but overall, he was not considered disastrous, as Solomon was. We know Saul was saved in spite of his failings, because the spirit of Samuel, who was a righteous man, told Saul he would soon be joining him. The people voted for Saul, but they didn’t have the power to vote him out, so he was not like a president. God himself elected him and approved of him.

Saul and David did some disturbing things.

Saul tried to kill David and his own son, in his own house. Imagine what would happen if Joe Biden tried to murder Hunter at the White House. Saul also killed a bunch of priests for helping David.

In order to persuade Saul to give him his daughter for a wife, David killed 200 Philistines, sliced the tips of their penises off, and presented them to Saul. David got a loyal army officer killed so he could have his wife. David told Solomon to kill a man who had insulted him.

Today, Saul and David would be considered serial killers and war criminals.

These men were chosen by God, and they were not considered evil kings, but we condemn a modern de facto king for poisoning his enemies. If Putin is bad, then David, Saul, and all the other kings of the Bible were war criminals, murderers, thieves, and human traffickers. We still admire a number of them, though.

God gave Nebuchadnezzar the Babylonian Empire. He also turned Israel over to Nebuchadnezzar and let him kill the king’s sons in front of him and blind the king. He let him castrate the sons of the nobility and make them slaves in his palace. Daniel was almost certainly castrated. God didn’t disclaim Nebuchadnezzar. He called him his servant and took credit for giving him his empire not once, but twice.

We expect to have a lot of control over kings these days. Is that system better than the old one? One of the things that make America weak is the rapid turnover in the White House. A real king could get things done, but a president knows he has a short time, and he has to kiss a lot of behinds and compromise. A foreign ruler with a longer reign can blow off much of what a president says, because he knows he will be around when the president is gone.

Obama killed all sorts of people without due process. His underlings say he insisted on being present to watch drone strikes, meaning he witnessed his enemies having their arms and legs blown off. Every president does things like this, even if Obama’s enthusiasm was exceptional and disturbing. Reagan bombed Khaddafi’s house. Hillary Clinton joked about Khaddafi’s death, which we helped bring about. Bush II killed a huge number of Muslims.

Trump appears to have singled out Michael Avenatti for sadistic treatment in the federal prison system. Bill O’Reilly was repeatedly audited under the Clintons. Trump is experiencing selective prosecution by allies of Obama and Biden who ignore misdeeds committed by their friends. Biden’s DOJ is going after 1/6 conservatives and ignoring similar and worse crimes committed by BLM and Antifa members.

Janet Reno murdered a lot of people in Waco, under Clinton. Waco is inside the United States. The dead were citizens.

Every ruler does a lot of evil. Maybe we should take a more mature view.

We have the idea that it’s impossible to enjoy life except in a system like America’s, but that isn’t true. If you’re close to God and you accept your position in life, you can be happy under most systems. Republican government is a relatively recent development in the West, but millions of people here had happy lives before it arrived.

I don’t know enough about Ukraine or Russia to take a side, but I’m pretty sure we are going overboard.

Famous Chefs Focus on the Wrong Kind of Dough

Today, I am making pizza. I can’t seem to stop doing it. I made myself an excellent thin pie which was just about perfect, so I had a recipe I should have clung to. Naturally, I decided I had to go on and make a less-thin pie with a different crust recipe. While I have been fooling with it, I have gone looking for helpful advice.

It’s surprising how hard it is to get solid information about food. You would think it would be simple to find great advice in this, the Internet’s fourth useful decade. Not so. People who have no idea what they’re doing post recipes and include the word “best” in the descriptions, and many of them seem to have credentials, so it’s easy to get sucked in.

It’s a little like America’s Got Talent. A small percentage of Americans can actually sing, but there are many, many more who clearly can’t yet insist on auditioning. People who ought to know perfectly well they can’t sing show up in droves, and the judges have to waste their time listening to them.

How you can get to be an adult and not realize you can’t sing is beyond me. Surely many of the bad performers that have made the judges suffer had already been informed.

People post bad recipes, and they also give bad general advice about cooking, and many of the worst offenders have big followings.

Long ago, I quit watching the Food Network. I had tried recipes and gotten poor results, and it was not my fault. I found out that famous TV chefs had published a lot of useless, time-wasting material. I had a realization: it wasn’t just that they couldn’t cook. They had jobs that required them to produce an endless stream of good recipes, and there was just no way for mere mortals to fill the demand, so they published a lot of things that weren’t tested properly. They hired ghost cooks to send them things, and many of those cooks weren’t very good.

The goal of a famous chef isn’t to produce good food or teach other people to cook well. It’s to maintain a huge income stream. You can’t do that without providing way more content than a real human being can create responsibly.

I have learned I can’t trust famous chefs, and I have also learned that a cooking school degree is meaningless. America is full of trained chefs who serve terrible food. Cooking well requires a little ability and a lot of humility. You have to know good food when you taste it, and cooking school can’t teach that to everyone. You also have to keep testing yourself. You have to taste the food you make. You have to ask for advice. You can’t just say, “I went to Cordon Bleu, so I know this dish is going to come out right.” I knew two Cordon Blue chefs who couldn’t cook as well as I could, and among the total population, I’m probably a 90th-percentile cook. After several years of college, a chef should be a 99th-percentile cook.

A professional chef once made me a dessert as a gift, and I had to throw it out. It smelled like a wet dog, and this person apparently couldn’t tell, in spite of making a good living in kitchens. I didn’t tell this person how bad the dessert was. I was afraid it would be devastating.

Here’s what I always say: think about all the bad food you’ve had at expensive restaurants, and then consider the fact that most of it was made by trained chefs.

Recently, I’ve been hearing a lot about a person named Kenji. Based on what I read, I thought he might be a useful resource. He is famous for his methodical, fact-based approach to food, and people cite him as though they were citing God himself. They don’t even use his last name. He publishes recipes at a site called Serious Eats.

He grew up eating pizza from a place I liked: Pizza Town, near Columbia University. He also ate at V&T’s, an Italian joint near Columbia. I probably had hundreds of slices of Pizza Town pizza during my New York years, and I grew to like it. Pizza is that way. You will start to like whatever you eat regularly.

In reality, Pizza Town was not that great. Their thin pizza crust was pretty hard, and I believe they used Stanislaus sauce (paste plus basil) straight from the can, with a little water added to reconstitute it. I developed a taste for it anyway, and I had it in mind when I started making pizza, but there are better places. V&T’s was actually very good, although Kenji says it made “good-bad” pizza, whatever that means. V&T’s pizza’s big flaw was that it was very wet, so it had to be eaten with a fork.

V&T’s was significantly better than Pizza Town, so it’s odd that Kenji preferred Pizza Town.

Today I decided I would check Kenji out, and that’s how I learned the facts mentioned above. He has a recipe for New York pizza. He has a separate recipe for the sauce. I thought it would be smart to look at his sauce recipe. He ought to know what he’s doing, right?

Here is the main ingredient for his sauce: “1 (28-ounce) can whole peeled tomatoes.”

Poof. There go my Kenji hopes.

Pizza is extremely ingredient-sensitive. You can completely screw up a tested recipe by using the wrong flour, tomatoes, or cheese. You can buy the right type of ingredient but the wrong brand, and things will go sideways. There are all sorts of whole peeled tomatoes out there. Some are very good. Most–most–are so bad, it is not possible to make an acceptable pizza with them.

You can be a mediocre cook and not know the importance of using the right tomatoes in pizza sauce, but you can’t be a towering food genius and not know.

It is not possible for a person who understands pizza sauce, and who wants others to do well, to recommend “1 (28-ounce) can whole peeled tomatoes” without specifying brands. The tomatoes are the most important thing to get right. Good tomatoes are so helpful, many good pizzerias use sauce that is nothing more than tomatoes and water. You can get away with that if your tomatoes are right. If they’re wrong, nothing you add to them will save your pie.

He also says, “Canned tomatoes invariably have some citric acid added to them in order to increase their acidity.” That’s not true. Everyone who makes pizza knows this. Many pizza makers hate citric acid, so they insist on acid-free sauce. I’m used to citric acid, so I don’t care, but many people insist on brands like Escalon, which preserve tomatoes without it.

You can’t say all canned tomatoes have citric acid in them if you know anything about pizza sauce. Every pizza enthusiast knows better.

He also specifies “bread flour” for the dough, leaving it at that. First of all, that’s the wrong flour. It’s a second choice, for people who can’t get high-gluten flour. I use bread flour (King Arthur) and add gluten. I can’t get high-gluten flour around here. When I used to use high-gluten flour, I found that different brands gave different results, and I settled on Gordon Food Service Primo Gusto. I tried all the big names and ended up with a store brand.

He uses only mozzarella in his recipe, which is questionable at best, and he doesn’t recommend a brand. That’s a serious problem. There are cheeses that fit his specs that don’t work well. Right now, I have a block of Walmart low-moisture whole-milk mozzarella, which meets his specs, and it makes bad pizza. It’s extremely important to try different cheeses and pick the best ones.

My guess: his pizza is excellent, because he has a brand of tomatoes he likes, not to mention a brand of flour and a brand of cheese. But he’s useless to me as a source for a pizza recipe, because he isn’t specific. Fortunately, I already know which ingredients to buy.

His ingredient input is unhelpful, but he may be helpful with other things, like methods. He holds himself out as a sort of scientific chef who tests things instead of accepting dogma. He made several batches of pizza dough by different methods, and he came up with an interesting result: a food processor made better dough than a mixer.

That interests me, because I’ve been using food processors to make dough since around 2009. People have told me it didn’t work, but I was doing it, so I knew it did. It’s strange how people will insist things don’t work when great numbers of other people are already doing them.

His food processor gave pizza crusts bigger air holes. He said this:

Only the food processor-produced dough created a crust that was perfect in both texture and flavor. Tender, chewy, and crisp all at once, with that coveted slick layer at the sauce-crust interface and a thin layer of melted cheese just hinting at brown, it was the archetypical New York pie, and it had just come out of my own oven!

That’s reassuring. To many people, kneading dough with a chopping blade in a food processor is unthinkable, but they’re wrong. I was also reassured to see that his dough recipe was pretty much like mine, except he likes a lot of oil.

He may not be a real pizza expert, but he probably knows what a New York crust is supposed to taste like.

He has a German-style joint in San Mateo, California, which is basically San Francisco. His restaurant is called Wursthall, and I looked it up. Overall, it gets unexciting reviews on Yelp. So-so food, according to many. Some reviewers who don’t give good ratings mention him as the factor that drew them to try the place, and then they talk about the disappointing fare.

Here’s a disturbing review:

Wow, this place is really expensive. It is like being at a giants game. Two beers, a salad and chicken sandwich for $70!!!
And slow beer delivery to boot.
Won’t be returning anytime soon.

That price appears to be no exaggeration. The menu says a sandwich platter runs $16, and most beers cost $8 per pint, with some costing a lot more.

The restaurant specializes in sausages like bratwurst, served as sandwiches. Call it what you want: it’s a hot dog. It may be the best hot dog on Earth, made with unusual ingredients, but it’s still just a hot dog. It can’t be worth $16. I don’t care if the cost of making it was $50. If you’re spending a lot on gourmet ingredients, make something other than a hot dog. That’s my advice.

I would never go to a sit-down restaurant with tablecloths in order to get a hot dog platter. I could see spending $15 on a really good bratwurst on a fantastic bun, plus sides and a good beer, but…no, actually I couldn’t.

I’m not sure there is any German-style meal that’s worth more than $20. Maybe if you threw in strudel. German food is generally pretty gross. Sausages in a pile of beans, with melted cheese on top. Potato salad that tastes like pickled potatoes. Pickled this. Pickled that. There is a reason why young chefs train in Paris, London, and New York instead of Berlin.

Does German haute cuisine even exist? I don’t think so.

I think nothing of giving a steakhouse $75 for dinner, because steak costs money, and a really great steak is as good as any food on the planet. I don’t mind paying $20 or more for an excellent pizza, because pizza is wonderful, and one pizza will feed at least two people. I don’t mind paying $25 for excellent Southern food. It’s well worth it. A sausage on a bun is different. It can’t be all that good, no matter how you make it. Wienerschnitzel, which is actually Austrian, can’t be all that good. German dumplings can’t be all that good. Pig snouts and feet can’t be that good. Their desserts are wonderful, but then they have to be, to make up for everything else.

If Kenji’s knowledge is unsurpassed, why does he have 777 Yelp reviews and only a 4-star rating? He also gets 4 stars from Tripadvisor users. He gets a lot of bad reviews. Overall, he’s doing okay, and he gets plenty of stellar reviews, but if he’s the once-in-a-generation food genius people make him out to be, he should be stunning people with his food, consistently, and that is not happening. And he’s making the same things over and over, so he should have everything perfected by now. His food should be as good as it could possibly be.

Based on what I know of the steak, I don’t buy the sizzle. I don’t think this man is a reliable resource. I guess that explains why I’ve never been impressed by Serious Eats.

I am reminded of Bruce Lee. He weighed about 135 pounds, and he squatted 95 pounds, which is not an impressive weight for a strong woman, but people think he was the greatest fighter who ever lived and that he had superhuman strength. He never fought anyone in a ring with a camera going and judges present. No competitions. He ran from scrutiny. People seriously think he could have flattened the best heavyweight UFC fighters, which is ridiculous. He didn’t have the training to handle the little ones, let alone the big ones. Their way of fighting didn’t exist when he was alive. If you don’t prove yourself, your reputation is just words.

Maybe Kenji does superhuman work when he’s not making New York pizza or running a German restaurant, but what I know so far is discouraging.

I don’t like James Beard, either, and there is a prestigious award named after him. I had three or four of his cookbooks, and the recipes just were not good. I believe I threw them out.

I also think poorly of Mario Batali’s skills. I went to two of his restaurants, and both served me bad food.

I have seen Alton Brown ruin steak, and he also recommended Shun knives, which are fragile and expensive, not to mention poorly balanced. He touted them enthusiastically, until he stopped and started touting completely different knives. My guess is that the wind of money blows him around like a windsock. America’s Test Kitchen, which actually tests things, recommends cheap Forschner knives, and so do I.

Bobby Flay published a prime rib recipe that, for very obvious reasons–the wrong oven temperature–produces a hard lump of unappealing meat. Prime rib is easier to get right than a cheeseburger. All controversy concerning prime rib methods should have ended by about 1900.

Now that I think about it, Myron Mixon, the TV barbecue king, opened a restaurant in Miami, and it was very bad. I tried it. I make much better barbecue at home. Barbecue is simple, but he couldn’t do it. His restaurant went out of business. He claimed his partners ruined everything. That’s hard to believe. I could write two paragraphs and show you how to make perfect dry-rubbed ribs. Anyone can do it. Even with bad partners, Mixon should have been able to teach his staff how to make ribs. Mix seasonings according to boss’s recipe, put on ribs, smoke ribs. That’s all there is to it.

Today’s experience confirms what I already believe: as helpful as outside advice is, there is no substitute for personal experience in the kitchen. Few experts can be trusted, and some of the most respected are the least reliable. Most people who buy cookbooks can’t cook, so even if millions of people recommend a celebrity cookbook, it means nearly nothing.

Reading about Kenji also makes me regret posting recipes that were not as great as I thought they were. That has happened. I have sometimes misled people and contributed to the clutter of unneeded recipes. I have made both the America’s Got Talent error and the Food Network error.

On the other hand, I have come up with a number of truly magnificent recipes, so there’s that.

I have never had a cheesecake that compares to mine, or a Sicilian pizza that comes close. I have never had beer or steak that compares to mine. I made sourdough garlic rolls that seemed to come from heaven itself. I could never eat a standard Thanksgiving turkey after eating my boneless turkey stuffed with cornbread dressing. I’m crazy about the Alfredo-ish sauce I came up with recently. I have a pretty decent list of victories.

Maybe the recipes that weren’t that great can be forgiven in view of my successes. I am, after all, an amateur.

I don’t think the pizza I’m working on right now will be a victory. It looks like the dough will not be elastic enough to give me big bubbles. I hope I’m wrong, but at least I’ll know, and I’ll have meticulous records to incorporate the new knowledge.

Kenji claims New York pizzerias commonly cook at around 500°, so that’s good news. He should be right about that, given the fact that he grew up in New York. I have a better source, though. A guy on a pizza forum says 500° will work fine, and he is a paid consultant who has helped New York pizzerias. That puts him higher on the authority scale. Unlike Kenji and Bruce Lee, he has produced results on the battlefield. Professionals in the nation’s top market are willing to pay for his help.

In a side note, Kenji’s restaurant is near San Francisco, and he got attention for saying people in Trump hats would not be served there. Here is the text:

It hasn’t happened yet, but if you come to my restaurant wearing a MAGA cap, you aren’t getting served. Same as if you come in wearing a swastika, white hood, or any other symbol of intolerance and hate.”

He said it hadn’t happened, and there are two reasons for that. The first is that there aren’t many Trump supporters in San Francisco, and the second is attitudes like Kenji’s. Conservatives know they aren’t safe in San Francisco, so they are reluctant to out themselves. They don’t want food full of boogers. They don’t want to be attacked physically. Leftists talk a lot about safe spaces, with reference to trivial things like hearing words that upset them, but they have a history of creating actual unsafe spaces in which conservatives are threatened with actual harm or battered.

His remark, itself, was a declaration of something at least approaching hate. Ironic. He couldn’t see the beam in his own eye.

Delusion is getting very bad in the US. A friend of mine has a far-left adult son who is literally deranged. Yesterday, my friend brought up the Ukraine invasion, and his son told him he didn’t want to hear about it because it was just an unimportant conflict between white people. That’s startling. It’s a lot like Whoopi Goldberg’s crazy remark about the Holocaust being unrelated to race. The Germans were white, and so were the Jews, so the Jews don’t get to be real victims like, I suppose, Jussie Smollett.

It’s not a problem when children and other civilians are hurt and killed, or when soldiers suffer the same fates, as long as they’re white. That’s my friend’s son’s position. And he’s white.

The son’s mother used to be conservative and probably still is, but she has started listening to leftist 1984-style “thought leaders” and parroting their absurdist, racist hate speech to her son. My friend is considering letting his son know his mother used to be conservative, and he is also considering telling him she is probably only pretending to be a leftist in order to avoid upsetting him and being rejected. My friend hasn’t done these things. He is not sure they will help.

The mother has never been quite right. She has claimed to have a psychological disorder, officially diagnosed, which makes her extremely uncomfortable whenever she doesn’t get her way. I don’t think that’s a real disorder. Not unless it’s demonic. To me, it sounds like she’s just spoiled, controlling, and misandrist. Which can also be demonic, now that I think about it.

How can you abandon your right to think and let some hateful, willfully ignorant idiot on Youtube do it for you? How can you trust another person that much, especially when that person’s idiocy is extremely obvious? It’s unusual to trust Jesus himself that much, and he’s always right. God has said he sends supernatural delusion to rebellious people, and we see it all around us now.

The other day I heard a Holy Spirit-filled conservative say maybe we should just quit obeying the law because Biden was incompetent. That’s also delusion. It proves being baptized with the Spirit isn’t enough. You have to pray in tongues and ask for correction every day.

In 2 Thessalonians 3:2, Paul calls the Antichrist “the man of lawlessness.” Satan is really pushing lawlessness now. There are truly stupid and dangerous laws we shouldn’t feel compelled to observe, but these days, people are encouraging disobedience that isn’t really justified. Thanks to the toxic philosopher Henry David Thoreau, leftists think breaking laws is highly virtuous, and in recent years, they have been breaking good laws like never before. Conservatives have become jealous, so they are also becoming lawless. It’s not good. Even if disobeying the law brings short-term benefits, it contributes to a culture of lawlessness. If you like that kind of thing, take a look at Somalia. That’s where we are headed.

My guess is that things will become so chaotic, the world will be ripe for the Antichrist to step in and restore order. Isn’t that pretty similar to the Saul Alinsky plan? It should be, since Alinsky took dictation from Satan himself.

Human interaction is rapidly being reduced to, “I got you,” and, “I got you back.”

Last night I dreamed I was at my dad’s home back in Miami. I was looking after him. I heard motor noises outside, and I realized trespassers were in the yard. I went into the garage and yelled through the doors, telling them to take off. I started opening the doors, hoping they would flee. They did not.

When I walked outside, they were working on the driveway. I became enraged. I thought they were driveway gypsies. Maybe you don’t know what those are.

Gypsies, or Romani, as they prefer to be called, have a long history of cheating people on driveway work. We are supposed to treat gypsies as though they were wonderful people who are oppressed unfairly, but the truth is that their culture permits and encourages stealing and swindling, so I can’t really go along with the white privilege guilt trip and manipulation.

Here is a gypsy legend most people don’t know of: many gypsies claim the nails for the crucifixion were provided by a gypsy blacksmith. In addition to the three we know about, there was a fourth nail intended to go through Jesus’ heart. The blacksmith refused to provide it, meaning he stole it, and as a reward, God exempted them from the 7th commandment. This means they are allowed to steal.

Not a great pillar for a culture to stand on.

It’s a horrible, sick, stupid, gypsy-destroying rationalization, and it would make no sense if it were true, because Jesus’ heart was pierced by a Roman spear after he died. Stealing a nail wouldn’t have helped him. A nail through the heart while he was still living, on the other hand, would actually have been merciful.

My mother was crazy about gypsies. I have dim memories of her taking me to see them when I was very young, in Tampa. I haven’t thought about that in years. They must have had a community there. She liked having her palm read, which is, of course, idolatry.

Anyway, gypsies (and other people) are known for showing up at the homes of elderly Floridians and offering to do driveway work cheap. They’ll say they have materials left over from other jobs, so they quote low prices. The problem is that the material is basically paint, so it comes off quickly.

In the dream, I thought gypsies were after my dad. For some reason, I reacted like a rabid dog. I have run actual driveway gypsies off, and I was polite. In this dream, I was a different person.

I started calling them filthy names involving excrement and sex acts performed on other men. I really laid into them. One of them approached me, and I slapped him so hard, he should have been on the ground. He came up behind me, and I pulled his glasses off his head with my teeth and threw them on the pavement.

I saw that they had cut a big hole in the driveway. One was carrying a piece of lumber I thought he had stolen from us.

I kept excoriating them, and the guy with the glasses and another man who was like a foreman kept asking me to let them explain. I was not having it. I made them leave. They fixed the hole they had dug. I was not afraid of them at all.

One of them came over to me and asked me why World Relief, a huge Christian charity, had been mailing me. He apparently wondered why a person like me would be hearing from a charity. He was a young black man, and he was very polite and respectful. None of them treated me the way I treated them.

I had a tablet, and we started looking at it. We were looking at sites dealing with World Relief. I was not angry at him. My tablet had a protective plastic film on the screen. I wondered why I had never removed it.

Anyway, they left, and when I woke up, I tried to find out what the dream was about. Were they demons, trying to break through God’s hedge of protection and harm me? Were they angels, sent to help me because I had done alms in the past? Why was I so angry?

I started to feel very bad about all the times I had mistreated people who were helping me. I had been nasty to educators, for example, over trivial things. It’s amazing that I could have been stupid enough to give people a hard time when they were trying to help me get an Ivy League degree. I had been nasty to other people who had tried to give me helpful advice. I had rejected other people’s input because I was proud and wanted to get by on my own ideas so I could have the glory.

When I was a kid, my parents did a poor job. They didn’t teach me much of anything in the way of wisdom or good habits, and perhaps as a result, I learned to think for myself. In doing so, I lost respect for other people’s advice. I was very smart, so I was used to being the brightest person in the room, and I started feeling I was always right.

Maybe the dream was about the way I had rejected helpful correction and ended up suffering unnecessary defeats. I reinvented the wheel many times, often incorrectly, instead of building on other people’s good ideas.

I also felt bad about the many times I had jumped into or started angry arguments, treating people who were merely wrong as though they were trying to do me harm.

Maybe the dream was about these things, or maybe the men were demons.

The other day, I dreamed a kid and a young man were trying to harm me, and I beat them brutally, crushing the young man’s face. In that case, there was no doubting their hostility, and I have no doubt they represented evil spirits. This time, I don’t know.

I hate demons with a hate I can’t describe, so maybe they did represent demons. If I could, I would do things to them that would make Josef Mengele throw up. I can understand why God plans to burn evil spirits forever. In my dreams, I break their bones and mutilate them. It’s not possible for me to feel that way about a human being.

Even if the gypsies represented demons, I still believe it was very good for me to confront my faults last night, so it’s a win. We are in the apocalypse, so a spirit of murder and hatred has been released on the world, and I need to avoid opening the door to it.

I can’t really see myself pleasing God by calling demons names involving gay oral sex. I would think that if I were fighting demons in a dream, in obedience to God, I would be somewhat more dignified.

Last night I thought about all the things he has shown me lately. He keeps telling me to change so I will not be like the rest of humanity. While I was in bed thinking about this, I put my face in my hands and told him I was going to end up surrounded by people I couldn’t even communicate with. I would be so different, and other people would be so deaf, I wouldn’t be able to explain much to them. Even if I didn’t become particularly good, I would understand things I couldn’t make other people understand.

I wasn’t complaining about his demands. I just felt I needed to tell him.

In my mind, I had an image of a long train full of people, hurtling toward a cliff. I could watch, but I couldn’t stop it.

I started asking God how people were supposed to learn. Who was supposed to teach us? Instantly, I realized I already knew the answer: the Holy Spirit. Churches are like grocery stores where half the food is poisoned, and we can’t rely on them. We have to hear from the Holy Spirit himself, one on one, as John taught. That means prayer in tongues, and not just a couple of minutes per day.

We can’t find reliable pizza information easily, and it’s hard to get good information about God. From human beings, I mean. Yet we still push people to turn pastors and priests into little gods who can’t be questioned.

I hope God restores the Holy Spirit as a teacher before the world ends. If not, I think the apocalypse will continue to progress without interruption.

Pump up Your Pizza

I have been fiddling around with thin pizza, and I have figured out some things.

I love my recipe for thin pizza, but I am fairly sure it would be better if my oven were a little hotter. I got stuck with an old 500° oven. In addition to the temperature issue, it also blows a thermal fuse whenever I try to use the self-clean cycle. I can’t clean it unless I do it manually. That will not happen. I’m not sure why ovens have to be cleaned, however. They seem to work fine whether you clean them or not. Is cleaning just a vanity thing, or will my oven eventually explode?

The oven also has a display that has grown so dim, I have to use reading glasses to read it.

My oven in Miami went to 550°. I have been looking around for something new that will do that. I learned that many brands only go up to 500° in bake mode, which is ridiculous, given that pizza making is more popular than ever. You can bake a good New York pizza at 500°, but hotter is better.

I discovered that Frigidaire, the manufacturer of my last oven, still makes hot ovens. I started trying to find one that will work for me.

Of course, ovens have changed a lot since the last time I bought one. They have a lot of silly “smart” features I don’t want. Why on Earth would I want to talk to my oven from across town? It’s bad enough getting distress calls from the vacuum cleaner. Smart features just add expense and more risk of failure. I guarantee you, your smart 2022 smart oven has parts that won’t be available in 2027.

Ovens with phone apps are patently stupid, like refrigerators that send you movies of their contents, but ovens have other new features that could be great.

I have learned about oven spring. This term refers to the way bread blows up when you put it in the oven. I thought I could get peak oven spring with any old oven, but that’s wrong. To get good oven spring, you need steam in your oven when baking starts. Steam keeps the outside of your bread elastic so the bread can puff up. You can force your old oven to do steam by putting things like skillets full of water-soaked rocks in it, but it’s a pain, and it’s not optimal. They now make ovens that do steam baking, imitating the ovens real bakers use.

Today I baked a pizza, and when I put it in the oven, I threw about a quarter-cup of water in the oven below it. This helped the dough blow up beautifully, but you can’t keep throwing water in an oven that isn’t made for it. I found a Frigidaire that has a steam-bake setting. Will it work? I don’t know, but it’s worth a try.

New ovens also have better convection and air-fry capabilities, and it’s not hard to find one that has a probe to measure the internal temperature of meats. You can also find ovens that somehow skip the preheat business, and you can get ovens that proof bread.

I found a Frigidaire that does all this stuff. Man, is it expensive. I know I’m cheap, but $2300 for a single oven seems like a lot to me. It could be worse. Other ovens break the $4000 mark.

I’ll post a photo of today’s pizza. You can see how big the air holes in the crust are. Very nice. Unfortunately, the cheese I used is disgusting. I decided to try Boar’s Head provolone, and for some reason, the only provolone they make is the low-sodium kind. I decided to try it, thinking maybe all provolone was low-sodium cheese. The pizza just didn’t taste right. Also, I fermented the pizza too fast because I was in a hurry, and that didn’t help the taste.

I learned something else about oven spring. If you rest your dough before turning it into a ball or loaf, it will spring better.

I make phenomenal Sicilian pizza. I make the dough in a food processor, I make a puck out of it, I put it in a very oily pan, and I let it rest for around 20 minutes. After the time is up, the dough, which was initially more like hard, lumpy batter, is smooth and stretchy. At this point, I stretch it to fit the inside of the pan and let it rise again. It’s always magnificent.

I had read that thin pizza (and baguettes) needed to be stretchy and tight before final proofing, and today, I thought about those Sicilian pies and that stretchy dough.

This afternoon, I tried resting dough for thin pizza. Using the food processor, I blended everything but the oil and waited 10 minutes, for sound reasons which escape me at the moment. Then I processed the oil in and waited 20 more minutes. Then I kneaded the dough in my hands a few times to move the outside in and the inside out, and I formed it into a ball. The ball had a nice, tight surface, and when I put it in the toaster oven to proof, it stood up nicely instead of flattening out the way my dough balls used to.

Combined with the steam, the resting helped the dough puff up in the oven.

Obviously, you have to ask which change made the most difference: the steam or the resting. Answer: the resting. I think. I made two pizzas today, and I didn’t add water to the oven the first time until the pizza had already been baking for several minutes, so I don’t think the steam did much. Both pizzas were made with rested dough, and both blew up well. The second one was better, but the improvement between it and the first one was smaller than the improvement between the first one and the ones I used to make.

I’m trying to convince myself to buy the Frigidaire, and I plan to rest my dough from now on. And I’m not buying any more Boar’s Head provolone.

Under Biden, we now have an oven shortage, so I feel like I need to get an oven right away, before things get worse. The Frigidaire is on sale for about 10% off, which is remarkable given the supply chain problems.

Rhodah and I have been praying for Biden, and today we prayed for the leaders of Russia and Ukraine and their people. We didn’t just offer bland, “Oh, please prevent war,” prayers. We prayed for God to correct people and help them to become Spirit-led. I think it’s dumb to pray for things to go well for people without praying for God to correct and repair them.

We also prayed for special protection for God’s children in these countries. God’s children; not everyone. Most people are not God’s children, and many people can’t be helped because of their rebellion. Many have come under curses they will just have to put up with until they repent.

I have not been keeping up with the news, but I can’t help hearing some things, so I know about Russia and Ukraine. Would Putin have attacked with a functioning chief executive in office? I don’t know, but I don’t see how Putin could pass up the chance to run wild with Biden in charge. America is much weaker now that Trump is gone, and of course, this matters to our enemies. They will pull things they would never have tried with Trump or even Obama.

Obama didn’t put America first, and our enemies often played him for a fool, but he was also warlike and egotistical, so he didn’t always roll over.

If I were Putin, Xi, or Kim Jong Un, I would be thrilled to be up against Biden. They must have been ecstatic when Trump lost.

My friend Mike has a pal who hates Trump. Before Biden won, this person said he would rather see America destroyed than see Trump reelected. A lot of people felt this way, and now they’re eating their words. Very sad. I would rather see Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, AOC, or even Whoopi Goldberg elected rather than see my country destroyed.

Whether we could elect any of these people without destroying America is another question.

I don’t know how serious the Ukraine situation is for America. I have no idea whether there is or is not a danger of a world war. I do know the apocalypse has started, however, so I suppose anything is possible.

I have been putting dry food in containers in case I need it, and I’ve considered getting an upright freezer for meat. I found out I needed to make sure I didn’t get a frostproof model.

In the past, freezers kept food in good shape for a very long time. They were not frostproof, and they didn’t have warm cycles. Frostproof freezers actually warm up every so often. It ruins food.

If you put ice cream in a frostproof freezer and leave it unopened, it will degrade. The ice crystals will melt and refreeze over and over, and the refrozen crystals will be a lot bigger than the original ones. This ruins ice cream’s texture. The same thing happens in other foods.

Apparently, you have to avoid frostproof freezers or eat your frozen food pretty quickly, which defeats the purpose of a freezer. I don’t look forward to defrosting a freezer once a year, but it sounds better than eating freezer burn.

Maybe I’ll get a freezer. Might as well have decent food while everything disintegrates.

Would Jesus Approve This Message?

A reader asked why I don’t write the same kinds of things I used to. Another reader asked where a recent piece had gone. I can answer both questions at once.

God changed me, and he keeps making improvements. Years ago, I had a different outlook, and I had less understanding. I was happy publishing things I wouldn’t want to publish now.

When you start out as a Christian, you will probably get the idea that Christianity has a lot of rules for rules’ sake. You may feel there is a big scoreboard in heaven, and your good deeds and sins move the numbers up and down. As you learn more from the Holy Spirit, you start to realize the things you do and say can cause a lot of harm. You also learn that things you used to think were harmless can wreck your life.

The other day, I put a comment on a Youtube video. The Youtuber was a Christian who had performed a lot of healings. When I first started watching his videos, I thought he was pretty solid. After Trump lost the election–and he really did lose–this man started publishing baseless theories. He said Trump would be back in office by August. He said Trump had arrested the federal government, and that he was going to imprison his enemies and go back to the White House. He said coronavirus vaccines were made using Satan’s DNA, taken from Satan’s body.

I told this man he needed to start praying in tongues a lot, because he was saying things that were obviously not true. I said prayer in tongues was necessary to bring guidance. He rejected my suggestion, calling it legalism.

He doesn’t know what legalism is. Legalism is a school of thought that says we please God by obeying rigid laws. It’s a big deal among Jews. Observe a sabbath, score points. Pray over a meal, score points. Even the good deeds and Torah study of your children can increase your score and make up for your failures. Many Christian denominations are legalistic.

The advice I gave this man wasn’t legalism. It was our father’s common sense. I was pointing out causal relationships.

If I say you should quit smoking cigarettes because there is about a one in 6 chance you will get lung cancer, I’m not being a legalist. I’m letting you know there is a relationship between an unwise practice and a terrible disease. If I tell you failing to pray in tongues will cause you problems, I’m not telling you God will punish you for disobeying a rule. I’m saying you will miss out on God’s method of building and guiding you.

Christians who are led by the Holy Spirit, as they are supposed to be, don’t obey rigid written laws. They are still under law, though. They are under the law of the Holy Spirit. What he says is law. We can eat pork and work on Saturday, but we still have to obey God when he gives us commands.

The commands God gives us are related to the results we get. They help us to become like him and to cause his will to be done here on Earth.

Everyone is spirit-led. Some are led by the Holy Spirit, and others are led by Satan. There is no neutrality. You are serving God or Satan. If you don’t listen to the Holy Spirit, you end up obeying spirits that are assigned to destroy you and the people you interact with.

Every spirit has a nature and lives according to certain principles. The Holy Spirit is humble and loving. Every single spirit that doesn’t serve God is malicious. Spirits that oppose God get into your mind and heart and push you to become like them. If you stick with them, you will develop the same ideas, emotions, and beliefs they have, and you will act on them.

God’s blessings depend largely on obeying the Holy Spirit and rejecting evil spirits. When you give in to an evil spirit, you reduce your blessings and protection. This is what Solomon meant when he said, “Whoso breaketh an hedge, a serpent shall bite him.” In the Old Testament, hedges are barriers of confinement or protection, and serpents represent evil spirits. Things and people that are earthly in the Old Testament represent supernatural things. Under Moses, the Hebrews sinned, and they were bitten by snakes, literally. The remedy was a brass serpent made by Moses. Afflicted people were healed when they looked at it. It represented Jesus, becoming our curses on the cross.

The Hebrews who were bitten by snakes represented Christians who are attacked by spirits. The Hebrews broke God’s hedges by disrespecting God and Moses, so snakes were allowed to attack them. When we choose sin, God has to allow demons to attack us. Demons can cause illness and death. They can prevent and end marriages. They can harm our children. They can cause poverty and addiction. It’s a very serious thing when you let them in.

When I write things that are snotty or otherwise unacceptable, I break God’s hedge of protection and let serpents in. They could be diseases. They could be other problems. I want an intact hedge, so sometimes when I see that I’ve done wrong, I go back and correct things.

As I have written, I had a dream about water recently. I was driving a strange vehicle like a fighter jet. It traveled on the ground. I had to stop and fill its tank with water. Apparently, it ran on water. When I started scooping up water to fill it, I found dead things in the water. I had to scoop them out first in order to get clean water.

This was God’s way of telling me I was filling myself with Satan’s water of death. Through prayer in tongues, the living water flows through me and builds me up and cleanses me. Through things like secular entertainment and other counterproductive activities, I let Satan’s water of death flow through me, diminish me, and make me filthy. After I had this dream, I quit reading the news and watching fiction.

Last night, my wife Rhodah had a dream. She was in her front yard. A woman she knew came up with a container of water, and she threw it in the yard. The water had snakes in it. Rhodah scolded her and told her to stop. One of the snakes wrapped itself around her toe. She had to fight. God was showing Rhodah what he had shown me.

We live in a time of greatly increased demonic activity. The apocalypse is here, and as the Bible says, Satan is angry because he knows his time is short. He has clearance to release more evil spirits than before. These days, you can’t get away with the things you got away with in the past. You need a strong hedge of protection.

To keep your hedge strong, you should try not to indulge in things like pride, anger, greed, gluttony, coarseness, perversion, and covetousness. You should try not to be malicious. It’s not easy to be a humorist without indulging in those things.

I delete things I should not have written for the same reason I won’t watch things I shouldn’t. I don’t want to defile myself and open the door to curses.

Sorry if I seem like a killjoy. This is just the way things are.

The piece I just took down was about Meta and its awful fake universe. I was pretty hard on STEM people. I woke up in the night and felt I had to delete the piece. It would be hard to get rid of all the things I regret publishing, but it’s easy to delete new ones, so why not do it?

It’s no great loss. I don’t make money from blogging, and no one will ever miss my lost works, because I am obscure. My blog posts will not be mourned like the scores Chopin had burned when he died.

STEM people are a real mess. Many feel great hostility toward Christianity, and they sincerely believe the nasty, authoritarian, individuality-destroying, tech-centric world they are trying to build is a good thing. They don’t need Christians making fun of them. We need to encourage them to join us.

I’m not missing out on anything by changing what I see, hear, and write. There are plenty of things in life to keep us occupied and entertained without opening ourselves up to the dark culture of the godless world. It’s not like I sit around in an empty room, wearing a hair shirt and beating myself with a cudgel. You don’t really need the world’s sick culture in order to enjoy life. It causes more displeasure than pleasure, and it makes you weak and vulnerable, not to mention useless and hypocritical.

I don’t really care about this blog. If someone hacks it and removes the whole thing, I won’t go into hysterics. I don’t know whether anyone else should care about it. If anyone does, it’s flattering, but the blog is still not very important, and it would be better if I had never written my books.