My Pantheon of Losers

Today I had a good experience. I woke up and felt love for God flowing through me.

The most important commandment is not to obey God, but to love him. Jesus made this clear. After that, we are supposed to love our neighbors as we love ourselves. Preachers don’t push the first two commandments much. They push rules, or they tell us to give them money, or they tell us God just wants to help us do what we already want to do. Mainly, they want us to show up in great numbers and pay their bills.

I pray every day for God to help me get love flowing through me. When it happens, I drop everything and sink into it. I stayed in bed for a long time, telling God I loved him and asking for more.

Afterward, I started thinking about contemporary American culture, which is actually the counterculture. We originally used to use the word “counterculture” to describe people like beatniks, hippies, leftists, drug enthusiasts, and sexual deviants, but their culture is dominant now, so it’s silly to say “counterculture” as though we were talking about rebels. We’re talking about obedient, mainstreamed sheep. The word “counter” means “against.” “Counterculture” used to mean “the culture which is against mainstream culture.” Now it just means “the culture which is against God.”

What happens when you go to high school and college? Do they teach you the Bible is true? Do they tell you how important capitalism is? Do they reinforce proper sex roles? No. They promote the counterculture. Old, fat, pampered professors pretending to be rebels repeat the myths they were fed by their own professors. Their eyes shine when they talk about sick individuals like Jack Kerouac, Sylvia Plath, and Karl Marx.

I bought into this nonsense when I was a kid, even though I felt contempt for most of my professors. I read the diaries of Anais Nin. I read everything Henry Miller wrote. I loved Fritz Perls. I read the authors of the 1920’s Paris scene. I admired the spiritual grandchildren of the counterculture’s founders. I actually sent letters to TV networks, hoping to get jobs writing for infantile shows like Saturday Night Live. When I went to college, I used Animal House as a pattern for my behavior.

I never became a socialist, and I could never get excited about hard rock or hard bop jazz, but I wanted to be like my counterculture heroes.

Why did I want that? They were miserable people. They killed themselves because they were so miserable. They drank themselves to death. They overdosed. They made other people unhappy. Their kids were screwed up. Their marriages failed.

What did counterculture idols do for others that made me want to like them? Did Jim Morrison heal anyone? Did Gore Vidal raise the dead? These people were useless. They were completely selfish. They were narcissists, elevating themselves briefly on rotten podiums so other idiots could throw roses.

It’s amazing that I ever wanted to fit in with them.

I had a hero vacuum. My dad was no father at all, most of my best friends were creeps, I had no older brother, my older sister was a sociopath, my mother was weak, and I did not have anyone to introduce me to the Holy Spirit. Kids with hero vacuums often fill the vacuums with losers. I suppose this is why it’s so easy for gay men to get teenage boys to come live with them. My great uncle did it.

Today I looked at a couple of videos featuring William Burroughs. An heir to the Burroughs business machine fortune, Burroughs became, perhaps, the leading eminence grise of the counterculture, possibly because he was one of the few who lived long enough to fulfill the grise part.

He was an unrepentant junkie. He blew his wife’s brains out while he was under the influence, and somehow, he was never prosecuted. He spent his life pursuing fake Eastern enlightenment. He built himself an orgone box and sat in it. He dressed like a model grandfather, wearing a suit and hat and carrying a cane, and he spoke with great conviction, trying to convince impressionable young people that his sorry, disgraceful ideas were genius. Young acolytes thought he was a god.

He wrote the most disgusting book I have ever tried to read: Naked Lunch. It’s so gross, I won’t even quote from it. It’s full of stream-of-consciousness sexual depravity. I bought a copy to see what it was all about, and I threw it out because it was so sick. If you’ve ever seen a video about a joke called “the aristocrats,” you’ve seen similar material.

While watching videos, I learned that Burroughs enriched the world by dying at 83, with an adoring minion by his side, doing Tibetan meditation. You can go see a video of the minion rhapsodizing about what a great time they had. This is a big thing with counterculture people. When someone dies disgracefully, they talk like it was a birthday party or a wedding. Hunter Thompson blew his defeated brain through the back of his skull while his grandchild was in the next room, and his wife and son poured drinks and toasted his dead body. Then Johnny Depp paid several million dollars to build a cannon to shoot his ashes into the sky.

Burroughs was an apostle of self-destruction, but he and his peers are nearly worshiped in America’s universities.

My experiences this morning gave me a fresh understanding of the ugliness and evil of American culture, and they helped me understand how long it has been since our country was healthy.

I would say the counterculture really got cranking about 100 years ago. Prior to that, we weren’t all that excited by the kind of garbage people like James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway pumped out. Once the floodgates opened, the flow increased exponentially. By the time I was in college, the game was over. Things didn’t look as bad as they do now, but America was already finished.

It’s easy to get the impression that the world started disintegrating in around 2000, but it’s not true. The decay has accelerated greatly since then, but the America of 2000 was already lost.

Knowing this, I feel more comfortable with the idea that the rapture could come immediately. I feel less inclined to look around and think, “It’s too early. Things aren’t that bad.” Things are that bad. The flow of bodies into hell must resemble Niagara Falls, and every body matters to the God who threw them into the flow.

I feel much better about throwing out my big CD collection. I kept some things, but I believe all of my jazz is gone. Art Tatum. Billie Holiday. John Coltrane. Lester Young. Oscar Peterson. Junkies, prostitutes, weed addicts, mystics…the landfill is welcome to them. I never had anything in common with them. Not at the root. They were always headed for a completely different destination.

Christians like to criticize each other for dropping secular entertainment. We criticize people who tell their kids to stay in on Halloween instead of dressing up as devils and witches. We treat people who don’t give their kids Disney DVD’s as though they were superstitious idiots. We are making a big mistake. Looking back on my experience, I am more in favor of separation from the world than ever. I wish I had thrown Miles Davis, Stevie Ray Vaughan, B.B. King, and Lynyrd Skynyrd out way earlier. I apologize for nothing, except for being too slow.

The Bible asks what light has to do with darkness. I can see why. Most people are on a bus for hell. Why would I accompany them even part of the way? If you don’t want to finish something, don’t start it.

I’ll see every saved person who has ever lived in heaven, over and over, for eternity. Our relationships will continue forever. No saved person will ever see William Burroughs, Jimi Hendrix, Jerry Garcia, Thelonious Monk, Mahatma Gandhi, Frank Sinatra, or Sylvia Plath again. Why bother becoming acquainted with them now?

If there is a library in heaven, Burroughs and Kerouac will not be in it. Neither will Sartre or Marx. There won’t be any movie theaters, and if people like Leonardo di Caprio and Meryl Streep make it to heaven, they won’t be celebrities there. If there are lines, they will have to stand in them like everyone else. No one will ever hear the Beatles or the Rolling Stones in heaven. Anything evil thing you have to give up when you die shouldn’t be in your possession while you’re alive.

I feel very bad about admiring losers when I was young. I would have been better off if I had gotten to know God but lost both legs. I wish there had been someone around to teach me better. When I tried to find God, I found loser preachers like Kenneth Copeland and Benny Hinn, who taught me the secrets of remaining poor and distant from my creator. It’s terrible that losers still have so much influence. They have more influence than ever.

I wish my past were a bellyful of vomit so I could throw it up and flush it.

Is This Really Earth?

I feel bummed out today. I can think of three reasons, and one contains a movie spoiler, so don’t read if you like James Bond.

1. I started drinking coffee because I was sick, I got used to it, and today I didn’t drink any. Going off caffeine depresses your mood temporarily.

2. I am sad because of the way computers are taking over the world and turning us into a bot swarm made of tattooed meat. It makes me feel sad for the world, and it makes me feel cut off from my own species.

3. I found out James Bond died, for sure, in the latest movie. Somehow, that seems like the latest in a long series of Satan’s blows at masculinity and America. I realize James Bond is supposed to be a British agent, but be serious. He has always acted like an American, he has always used props England could never afford or produce, and he has always been on our side.

Films like the James Bond series are made pretty much exclusively by Americans, except for the Bond films themselves.

A number of years ago, I said computers would eventually learn things about us before we did, or before we wanted them to be known by others, even if they weren’t programmed to do it. I said people would find out they had things like cancer because their computers would start showing them ads for things sick people buy. It had to happen whether we told computers to do it or not, because life isn’t that complicated. One human being is much like another, and we react to experiences very similarly. If enough people Google chemotherapy drugs AND Hungry Man Dinners AND Air Supply CD’s AND orange socks, sooner or later computers will see the correlations, and they will start recommending things that make unsuspecting Internet users realize they’re sick.

Computers that aren’t necessarily intended to pry into our private business and draw disturbing conclusions about us will certainly do it, because they don’t know any better. They will detect correlations we haven’t figured out, before we do, and they will let us know about them.

Today I found out it had already happened.

The father of a young woman in Minnesota found out she was pregnant by looking at ads Target sent to his house. She was buying things women tend to buy when they’re with child, and Target started offering her other things that were clearly aimed at pregnant women. Her dad got angry and went to Target to talk to the manager. He thought Target was pushing an innocent virgin to get pregnant. Then she told him she was expecting.

If it has happened to one woman, and we know about it, the same type of thing has happened to millions of other people, and in all likelihood, the people who store and weaponize our personal information are usually the only ones who are aware it’s happening.

If there is a mercy in the story, it’s that Target’s computers were helped by a human being. Do computers still need help? I’m sure they need a lot less now.

The Target story came out in 2012. That was 9 years ago. Computers have gotten much sharper since then. I’m surprised we’re not already hearing knocks on our doors. Criminals probably tend to buy certain things, depending on their crimes of choice. Are the cops teaming up with nerds to create pre-crime bureaus?

Of course they are, now that I think about it. We’ve already seen them at work. In 2013, two murderers set off a bomb at the Boston Marathon, and the bomb was made from a pressure cooker. Not long afterward, the husband of then-blogger Michele Catalano got a visit from the authorities. He had searched for pressure cookers online. It turns out pressure cookers are also used to cook food.

The fuss over his search went away, but you have to wonder how many other people are on lists now. The pressure cooker incident drew negative attention to the government. Do you think that made them quit what they were doing, or do you think they just decided to keep it quiet? I’ll bet Edward Snowden knows.

I’m an attorney, so I know a little bit about evidence. If the authorities do something improper to get evidence, the evidence may be inadmissible, and in some cases, they may cause a public stench which is too big a price to pay for a conviction. It would make sense, then, for the authorities to avoid using such evidence in court. That being said, crooked law enforcement people could obtain evidence in objectionable ways, cover their tracks, and then dig up more evidence which can’t be shown to be tainted.

I guess I’m conflating two things. It bothers me that the Internet is developing deductive powers that seem godlike to human beings, and it also bothers me that we can’t prevent the government from using technology to make the Fourth Amendment even more of a fiction than it already is.

There is nothing we can do about any of this. It’s way too late. Technology is too decentralized and too tantalizing to control, and besides, man is just like a monkey. When you give a monkey a stick, it will always look for someone to hit with it.

You don’t have to shop online to end up in a database, by the way. Wal-Mart sends me emails when I shop in person, congratulating me on my newly purchased canned peas and elbow macaroni. I have no idea how they know it’s me. Credit card, I guess.

Both of the grocery stores I use regularly have loyalty programs, so they know what I buy, too. So does CVS.

Today I feel like there is no reason for me to be here. On Earth. I’m being absorbed nonconsensually into an electronically connected, increasingly trashy, authoritarian global family I want nothing to do with. My fellow Americans have gone completely insane, to the point where they try to get people fired for calling men, men. Evangelism is going almost nowhere. Free will is vanishing. It appears that economic disaster is going to hit us any minute now. On top of all this, every time I go anywhere outside my state, I have to wear a mask that does absolutely nothing except for making me very uncomfortable.

What are my wife and I still doing here?

Freedom, order, morality, and prosperity are unnatural. Throughout history, most people have been oppressed, lawless, corrupt, and poor. Like the Chinese. God alone has made a few nations havens where people behaved reasonably well. Now America has fired God.

Yesterday, I saw a fascinating video about real estate. A South African who lived in China said the real estate markets in places like Canada, Europe, and America were being propped up and ruined by the Chinese. He said the Chinese shelter their money in real estate, and many of them want to get out of China. Rich Chinese people show up in places like Vancouver and pay top dollar in cash, driving up home prices. Then they lie and say their income is very low, like under $15,000. China won’t help other governments verify their claims. They end up owning expensive homes in the West while contributing very little in taxes.

He said this is what happens when a low-trust country interacts with a high-trust country. I thought that was brilliant. He gave me labels for characteristics I have observed for a long time. People from corrupt places like China, Mexico, and India move to places like the US, where people are relatively honest, and they bring their dishonesty with them. They use our trust and honest against us. Over time, we become like them. It’s really something.

Christianity made America a decent place to live. In addition to all of our computer-related problems, I think we are becoming a low-trust country. If that’s true, most of the US will start looking a lot like Detroit. Every drugstore will have a bulletproof glass wall we have to shove our credit cards through. Going to Denny’s after 6 p.m. will be like sitting in the front row at a UFC match.

I’m digressing. I started out with technology, and now I’m talking about other things that are making us rot.

Trashy people are like another species. You can’t communicate with them even if you speak the same language. There is never cooperation. There is only detente. I love living in a county where people are good to each other. I don’t know what I’ll do if the disease of trashiness spreads here.

Why hasn’t anyone made a movie about the network of computers turning into near-gods? Of course, they have, but the movies I know about were not realistic. They took place far in the future. They generally featured scary computer systems put in place by malevolent traditional corporations run by white men in suits. They didn’t involve Amazon, Google, and Ebay. They didn’t show people wondering why Facebook knew things about them before they did.

I used to say that TV, phones, and the Internet would eventually be the same thing, and it is now true. No one who has the Internet needs a phone company or cable TV. Here’s another prediction: everything will be the same thing. The online world will be seamless. Entertainment, shopping, socializing, communicating, doing business…you’ll be in the same virtual environment all the time, probably around the clock except for sleep breaks. Banking will be in there, too, and cash won’t exist, so the web’s control over you will be complete.

Buckle up. It’s coming.

Man is too stupid and mean to do this right. It’s not even a possibility. An orange vest from Home Depot will turn most people into tyrants. The ability to control the human race like a flock of pate ducks is a much greater temptation.

I’m going to go pray until I fall asleep. I feel very pessimistic about the world. I think my own future, and my wife’s, are solid. God keeps making things better and better for us. It’s just depressing, thinking about everyone else.

Saturn Munches on his Wokiee Babies

I turned my PC on just now, and I saw Microsoft’s annoying daily photo and question. A question of my own popped into my mind. How long will I continue to have this?

This morning I read that an army of sexually confused people and their supporters were terrorizing a leftist professor in England. Her crime: claiming that “some” so-called trans people, who still had male parts, were actually men. Which, of course, they are, except the word “some” is not helpful.

Human beings all over the world acknowledge that the fundamental purpose of a university is to discover and disseminate truth, and because human beings aren’t sure what the truth is, it is universally accepted that people at universities should be allowed to present their opinions, regardless of what they are, as long as they don’t do things like advocating genocide and so forth.

Actually, I believe people are allowed to advocate genocide, as long as they’re Muslims and they’re advocating the destruction of the Jews.

Anyway, university people claim the right to debate is sacred, but we all know it isn’t. When Christians and conservatives show up to speak on campuses, it’s common for them to be driven out and physically attacked, and often, their appearances are canceled for the “safety” of the precious snowflakes their correct ideas might bruise.

The gender-blender patrol is determined to deplatform the lady professor in question, on top of getting her fired, and she’s a leftist! Increasingly, the left is eating its own. The only ones who will be spared will be the most-left, leftiest leftists. Then I guess they’ll eat each other, too.

It was Stalin who had Trotsky murdered, wasn’t it? Saved capitalists the trouble.

It reminds me of a battle royale. If you’re not a wrestling fan, you may not know what that is. A wrestling promoter will put maybe 20 wrestlers in a ring and tell them to throw each other out onto the concrete. In the end, the wrestler that remains is the winner. Who, on the left, is worthy of the prize? How far left can you get?

We like to say there is a political spectrum, like the color spectrum and the tone spectrum. When you go past the color violet, you get into the ultraviolet band, and supposedly, if you could see it, it would start to look red, because the spectrum would repeat. When you go past G on the scale, you hit a new A, and the scale starts over. Is there a weird, primal form of conservatism to the left of left? Maybe the leftmost leftists will start looking like Pat Boone and Charlton Heston.

Diversity is now thoughtcrime. The whole basis of the pro-diversity movement has been called into question. We have been told repeatedly that diversity brings strength, but leftists clearly don’t believe that, because they are trying to increase their strength by doing away with it.

Without realizing it, they have promoted and then denied a Darwinian sort of theory. In the theory of evolution, genetic diversity is important, because when new selection pressures, like diseases, arise, populations that are genetically too similar can’t fight back. Supposedly, you need a variant or mutant or whatever that can resist, in order to preserve the species. Leftists love to tell us diversity is strength, because a country that contains different types of people will have a wider variety of tools, including ideas, to help it survive.

Now they’re telling us diversity is bad. We need a purebred intelligentsia in which every member can be counted on to respond to every stimulus and challenge in exactly the same way, like the genetically similar banana trees all over the planet which are currently disappearing because they can’t respond to a certain fungus.

It’s a bizarre spectacle.

What does genetic diversity really do? Does it preserve species, or does it do away with huge swaths of them in favor of a few special groups?

Incidentally, I don’t believe in diversity. Diversity is weakness. The strongest society is one that adopts the correct ethos, universally. Unity is strength. The only powerful nation is the family of God, and when that family works correctly, there is zero debate, and there are no opinions, only facts. This is why God and his children will always win in the end. My problem with the left’s orthodoxy isn’t that it stifles debate. It’s that it stifles the wrong people; the ones who have the right ideas.

I don’t think diversity of thought is good, but the left’s sick, cruel orthodoxy is still hypocritical and worthy of comment.

I’m using a donated operating system. Microsoft gave us Windows 10 because it figured it would use it to make so much money off of us, it would be more profitable to give it away. Windows 10 was created by people who, generally, would be happy to see me tied to a post and shot in the head. They are happy to tolerate people like me while we increase their wealth and power, but they long for a world free of dissidents who get in the way of their plan to turn man into a big colonial organism that loves perversion and electric cars and hates coal and Christianity.

Whenever Microsoft wants, it can turn off my Windows machines. It can force fatal updates. I compute at their sufferance. How long will it be until they flip the switch?

If you’re like me, they’ll flip your switch, too, even if you have Unix, Android, or Apple. If they can’t brick your computer and phone, they’ll block you from the web. It will happen. Get ready. Right now, we’re useful, like a host organism the parasites aren’t done eating. When they decide the cake isn’t worth the candle, we’ll be discarded.

In the future, a person who isn’t on the web will barely exist. They will be worse than untouchables.

I just remembered something from Orwell: “unperson.” An unperson was an individual who had been disempowered, captured, and killed by the state. Unpeople were also erased from all records. They didn’t just stop existing. They had never existed at all.

That’s us, before too long.

I keep repeating it: one of the biggest Biblical curses is to have your name and memory forgotten. Orthodox Jews call Jesus “Yeshu,” which is a made up name. It’s a series of Hebrew letters that stand for a phrase that mean, “May his name and memory be blotted out forever.”

Leftists work for Satan, and they want to remove the memory of Christians and Jews from the world. It’s an old theme. God wants to purify the world of people who serve Satan.

Look what Psalm 9 says:

Thou hast rebuked the heathen, thou hast destroyed the wicked, thou hast put out their name for ever and ever.

O thou enemy, destructions are come to a perpetual end: and thou hast destroyed cities; their memorial is perished with them.

But the Lord shall endure for ever: he hath prepared his throne for judgment.

When you to go hell, God doesn’t just put you in flames, in the hands of tormenting spirits. He takes away your name. This is probably why Satan is generally called “Satan” instead of his given name. “Satan” just means “adversary.”

You can see it in the story of Lazarus the beggar, which was true. Jesus never called it a parable. Take a look.

There was a certain rich man, which was clothed in purple and fine linen, and fared sumptuously every day:

And there was a certain beggar named Lazarus, which was laid at his gate, full of sores,

And desiring to be fed with the crumbs which fell from the rich man’s table: moreover the dogs came and licked his sores.

And it came to pass, that the beggar died, and was carried by the angels into Abraham’s bosom: the rich man also died, and was buried;

And in hell he lift up his eyes, being in torments, and seeth Abraham afar off, and Lazarus in his bosom.

And he cried and said, Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus, that he may dip the tip of his finger in water, and cool my tongue; for I am tormented in this flame.

But Abraham said, Son, remember that thou in thy lifetime receivedst thy good things, and likewise Lazarus evil things: but now he is comforted, and thou art tormented.

And beside all this, between us and you there is a great gulf fixed: so that they which would pass from hence to you cannot; neither can they pass to us, that would come from thence.

Then he said, I pray thee therefore, father, that thou wouldest send him to my father’s house:

For I have five brethren; that he may testify unto them, lest they also come into this place of torment.

Abraham saith unto him, They have Moses and the prophets; let them hear them.

And he said, Nay, father Abraham: but if one went unto them from the dead, they will repent.

And he said unto him, If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded, though one rose from the dead.

Lazarus was a real person, and even in death, he had a name. Abraham, though dead, had a name. Moses had a name. What about the rich man in hell? No name. “A certain rich man.” What about his brothers? No names. The prophets weren’t named, but they were too numerous to list.

Abraham called the rich man “son,” to show he was Jewish and that being Jewish was not a guarantee of salvation.

Interesting digression: Abraham said that if the brothers didn’t listen to Moses and the prophets, who talked about Jesus incessantly, they wouldn’t believe one who returned from the dead. This was proven later, in John 11. Jesus resurrected a man named Lazarus, and instead of listening to Lazarus or taking the miracle as a warning, the Jews in charge of the temple conspired to murder Jesus.

We’re all sitting on virtual thin ice, counting on our enemies to continue enabling us. We feel secure, like rich Jews in Germany in 1930. We think our enemies will never cancel us because we’re too useful and too numerous, and because America isn’t like that. We’ll find out we’re wrong, just like the many famous people the social giants have already crippled. When they want, they’ll be able to get rid of us in days, if not minutes, and they’ll do it with eagerness and no hesitation. They probably have lists.

Being deplatformed is a big deal in terms of a person’s power in the natural world. Look what it did to Trump. No one listens to him any more. Few people know how he feels about current events. Random people with Twitter and Facebook accounts reach thousands or millions, but Trump sits in his social media dungeon, coming out periodically for ineffective visits with people like Sean Hannity. He’s like a prisoner in a penitentiary, telling his visitors to pass notes for him.

George Takei is more powerful than Trump, when it comes to shaping opinions.

George Takei is a horrible, bottom-tier actor. Had it not been for Star Trek, which allowed him to become rich, he would have ended up waiting tables or selling real estate. He has nothing important to say. He’s not particularly smart. Still, because of Facebook, he has a bigger voice than our last president.

This morning I watched a few minutes of an Adam Savage video. He was touring the preserved shop of his dead coworker Grant Imahara. He was wearing a shirt that had “#justicenerd” printed on it. That ended whatever pleasure I got from his channel.

I looked the tag up, and it’s about approval-craving nerdy people grandstanding for “social justice.” Presumably, Savage will be fist-pumping when people like me are rounded up by leftist goons. I like watching Youtube partly because it’s an escape from the Beast’s politics, but he even pops up in tool videos. It will be hard to enjoy watching Adam Savage, knowing he hates me.

It’s too bad Christians can’t unplug and go away right now instead of waiting, but where would you go, and what would you do? You would have to pay all your bills using the mail. You would have to go to your bank in person every week. You would have to call or visit people every time you needed to communicate with them. In many areas, people are required to have computers in order for their children to participate in public schooling. What would your kids do? And shopping would be a nightmare. Imagine being limited to the tiny selection of overpriced things local businesses sell.

It would be like having no phone in 1990.

Maybe the Mark of the Beast will be proof you’re entitled to Internet access. That would make a lot of sense. It’s definitely not a vaccine or a tracking chip.

Oddly, Satan’s children are eagerly working to produce a type of outcome God is working to produce reluctantly. In heaven, there will be no protests or sexual perversion. There will be no environmentalist extremists. There will be no one who doesn’t worship Jesus. There will be no socialism or feminism. The works of the children of darkness will not exist, and the children themselves will be locked away forever, without names, never mentioned. Without influence. Irrelevant. Like trees falling in a far-off forest.

There is always symmetry in the supernatural.

If there were an Uber I could call to take me to heaven, I would be on the phone right now. The world will never be any more hospitable to people like me than it is right now. Today is worse than January 1, and the next January 1 will be worse than today.

I’m Practically a Tarantino Character

To my perhaps everlasting disgrace, I took until today to finish assembling my new AR-15.

I started ordering parts in January. White Oak Armament said they could have an upper in my hands in something like two months. I no longer recall the exact figure. Over the ensuing weeks, the date kept falling backward, suggesting the White Oak people were putting people in front of me. Either that, or they were having problems getting parts and materials. The upper finally arrived in late June!

I can’t recall whether I’ve blogged about the upper, so here I go. I went with .204 Ruger. I know, I can hear readers shaking their heads. “Too small for burglars! Too small for deer! Too big for squirrels!”

I got it for things like coyotes and coons, okay? I admit, I’ve only shot one coon here, and I shot it in the head with a .22 pistol while it was trapped in a cage. But I figured I would shoot more stuff. Also, I thought .204 Ruger would be nice for target practice at ranges up to maybe 400 yards. It’s a nice, accurate round, and ammunition is…was…relatively cheap.

Maybe it was a stupid idea. I just like .204 Ruger.

I got a 22″ stainless fluted barrel with a threaded muzzle and a very nice M-Lok handguard. They put a flash hider on it, too. I don’t think I paid for that. The fluting cost me $110, and it probably saved me half an ounce of weight, but it looks cool.

Of course, I bought a pricey Gucci lower, right? No. Lowers were hard to come by, and a good price on a fairly ordinary one popped up, so I pounced. I got a plain old Anderson Industries lower. I am no expert, but I think the people who spring for expensive lowers are probably the same people who get American Express black cards just so other people will see them when they use them to pay for overpriced pants at Duluth Trading Company. The lower I bought appears to be very, very well made, and Anderson makes the same lowers for status brands. I don’t know how an expensive lower can make a gun run better. If you want your gun to run better, buy something other than an AR-15. Isn’t that the cheapest, most effective step?

I wanted a lower with no forward assist, or as I would call it, no “shell jammer.” When a shell doesn’t want to go into your chamber, in what conceivable world is forcing it a good move?

The trigger was pretty pooptastic, but that’s milspec for you. It’s to be expected.

I decided to put a LaRue MBT-2S straight bow trigger in it. This is a sister to the triggers I put in my other AR’s. The pull is a bit heavy, but it’s a top-quality trigger. It seemed to me that putting a 1-pound trigger in a gun I wanted to use for hunting was not smart, even if a hair trigger produced better accuracy.

I also got an “Adaptive Tactical EX Performance Adjustable MILSPEC Stock w/ Buttpad,” as the confirmation email reads. This is an inexpensive buttstock with a very nice pad on it. I have one on my .223 AR. I have one I plan to put on my LR-308. Milspec AR-15 buttstocks dig a hole in your shoulder when fired prone, and the Fuddly buttstock that came with the LR-308 is heavy, ugly, hard, and non-adjustable. You can get expensive buttstocks for AR guns, but I don’t know if there is any point. I shoot about 0.5 MOA with the factory stock on my RPR, and everyone hates that stock. I don’t think the stock makes much difference unless you’re a super-precision shooter. I mean, 0.5 MOA is pretty good by most people’s standards. I think that if you can shoot a gun that well, you can do just about anything it was ever designed to do.

I still need a sling and a doodad to attach a swivel to the handguard, so I have ordered these things.

I had a 4-14x Primary Arms scope on my other AR-15, but back when BLM and Antifa were really raging, I put a mid-range red dot on that gun so I would have one more gun I could use in a zombie situation. Now the Primary Arms is on the .204. It’s very, very nice for ranges under 500 yards. It’s no Nightforce, but then the .204 Ruger doesn’t shoot very far, so expensive glass seems wasteful to me.

I had to find .204 magazines. You can use .223/5.56 magazines for .204 Ruger, but you may have feed problems. I got some 10-round aluminum mags made for this round.

I’m hoping to get accuracy that beats my regular old AR-15. I like accuracy. If I can get below 1 MOA consistently at 100 yards, I will be as happy as a clam. If I can get close to that at longer distances, so much the better.

Ammunition is now the problem. I have a pretty decent amount of Fiocchi varmint ammo, which is pretty good, but I don’t know when I’ll be able to replace it at any price. Maybe I should be brave and shoot a box every couple of months.

With this gun, in my area, I should be able to kill anything that walks. We don’t seem to get deer or bears here. Everything else is smaller.

I would love to use this gun on squirrels, and I may do it. The season is nearly here. Dissolving a squirrel at 150 yards would be satisfying.

Today, in addition to installing the trigger, I used Mobil aircraft grease to lube everything that should be lubed. I also used Hornady One Shot and a Boresnake on the barrel. There isn’t much left to be done.

I hope I get around to shooting. Marriage and trips damaged my enthusiasm this year.

I wish I could go back to Altus Shooting and take another rifle course. To do that, I would need a lot of good 6.5mm ammo. I have cheap 1-MOA FMJ, and I have the makings for a lot of precision hunting cartridges, but I have very little match target ammo. I would like to redeem myself after showing up for the first course with a badly chosen gun and malfucntioning scope. I did fine, which was miraculous, but an RPR and a Vortex Viper would have made me look much better.

Maybe I should consider a better .223 barrel for my other AR-15. The one I have is good, but it’s not White Oak Armament, and I wonder if a high-end barrel would make it shoot better. The ammo I have is highly regarded, so I don’t think I can blame it. The last time I shot the gun, the old buttstock started gouging me, so I quit. I got the scope zeroed and then shot 4 groups. The first three were not much worse than 1 MOA, and the 4th, which I shot after the pain started, opened up. I don’t know whether the pain, the barrel, or the difficulty of shooting a gas gun well did me in. I should have shot more after changing the buttstock.

Maybe I shouldn’t complain about shooting well enough to hope to kill a coon at 200 yards, but where is the fun in shooting if you don’t keep trying to improve?

I also broke down and bought a new Gerber knife. I know. Gerber. But hear me out.

I realize Gerber is not what it once was, but they still make a few neat things. One is the Gerber Gator II lockblade knife in 154CM. This is what I bought.

I have two Gerber Gators in 420HC steel, which is a cheap steel that both sharpens and dulls quickly. But for the softness of the steel, these are great knives, which is why I have two. Sharpening a knife is not a long job for me, and these knives are very tough and comfortable to use, and they cost very little. I don’t carry them any more, but I used to. They were okay.

The Gator II I bought is similar to the Gators I have, but the steel is better. My first good knife was a Gerber in 440C stainless. About 35 years ago, I used it to whittle on an oak stick for about an hour, and when I was done, I was amazed to see it would still shave hairs. These days, 440C is considered somewhat outmoded. You can spend a lot on fancy new steels and get way better performance. You can also spend a little, but not much, more on 154CM and get considerably better performance. This steel is made by a company called Crucible, and while it may not be the latest and greatest, it should outperform 440C, which is similar to it, and bury 420HC.

The new knife has a big rubbery handle, and it seems pretty solidly made. I thought it would be nice to have something I wasn’t afraid to use for things that would threaten the beauty of my higher-end knives. I guess that’s silly, but there it is.

I paid $50 for the knife. For comparison purposes, you pretty much have to spend twice that much to get a really neat steel, unless you come across a bargain, like the $87 Cold Steel Swift in CTS-XHP I found on Ebay. I think it will turn out to be a great buy, and if I lose it or break it, I’ll get over it fast.

I thought I might get out and shoot today. Looks like that won’t happen, so I’ll walk instead, armed with a knife, pistol, and rifle. God bless America and the freedoms he gave us. They may be gone soon, but today I will indulge.

Plus Disease Updates

I thought I married a woman. In reality, I married a bathtub.

Rhodah’s stay at her previous lodgings came to an end this week, and now we are renting a sort of townhouse in Lusaka. The major bonuses in my eyes: more room, a nicer home, a good location, and security. The only thing that matters to Rhodah: a bathtub with hot water on demand. It seems like it’s very hard to catch her out of the tub.

Until recently, she was sharing student housing with some other law students, and their home had no hot water. They had a water heater, which they call a geyser (pronounced “geezer”), and they had a tub, but the water heater probably hasn’t worked since Cecil Rhodes installed it. She had to heat water herself, put it in buckets, and use it to wash. I used to tell her to get a new one. I was happy to pay, even though the apartment was rented. Couldn’t get her to do it.

I just tried to call her, and of course, a bath was in the works. She says she will call me when she is finished. I don’t know if that means one hour or three hours.

I imagine this behavior will continue for at least two weeks. Women love their tubs, and she has been deprived for a long time. She says her skin falls off when she uses a tub. Apparently showers don’t exfoliate everyone.

As for me, I really think I have coronavirus. My symptoms are down to almost nothing, but I am not 100%.

Let’s recap. I started out with a brief spell of unusually foul diarrhea, with mild nausea, combined with a sore throat. Then I got mild joint pain and a good case of sinusitis, and things accumulated in my nose and sinuses all day. Then that pretty much went away, and I had several days during which I felt faint. Yesterday was the last one. During much of the nose-harvesting stage of the illness, I got very sleepy relatively early in the day, but I didn’t feel faint or weak.

A couple of days back, I noticed that food didn’t taste right. I haven’t lost my sense of taste or smell, but some things just taste wrong, and when I’m not eating, I have a metallic taste in my mouth. It’s hard to taste certain flavors.

The sore throat was strange. At times I felt as though my throat had been burned. Drinking acidic beverages wasn’t fun. I also had periods during which my throat was very dry for no apparent reason.

I passed two PCR tests, and my thermometer has never gotten up to 98 degrees, so not everything points to coronavirus. On the other hand, taken as a whole, the symptoms don’t point to anything else.

Today my strength and energy are good, so I assume I am moving into a new phase.

I can’t help feeling that ivermectin helped. Three times, I felt a lot better several hours after taking it. I felt worse when I stopped. It’s not like I did a study, but you don’t necessarily have to test 10,000 patients in order to learn something. At the beginning of the 20th century, we had all sorts of highly effective medicines and treatments we still use, and they didn’t come from studies. The discovery of penicillin came from a guy looking at dirty culture dishes. Without a study, I learned I can’t tolerate even tiny amounts of caffeine. I learned that 1/8 of the normal dose of Prozac drove me around the bend and caused bizarre symptoms for weeks after I quit taking it. I didn’t have to compile statistics. It was obvious.

Whatever I have, it’s not going to be a problem. It’s pretty unusual to get a disease, have mild symptoms, recover almost completely, and then die. And I don’t consider dying to be a bad thing.

I confess I’m not wearing a mask in stores. If PCR tests can’t detect the virus in me, what are the odds I’m spreading it? Maybe I’m being irresponsible, though.

I will say this for myself: I rarely go out, and I don’t stand close to people because I’m a normal American in a rural area.

Something great happened today. One of my favorite Youtube guys posted a video. He calls himself Brother Grahame. No one watches him. Every so often, he puts up a video in which he relays what he thinks is a word from God.

He had a long dry spell, as have most of my other favorites. Today he posted a video delivering helpful advice for people who think the rapture is coming yet don’t know what to do.

It boils down to this: repent. Consecrate yourself. He put it this way: if you knew the rapture were coming in 10 days, what would you do? You already know, so do it. Quit watching garbage. Give up the recurrent sins you think don’t matter. Spend time with God.

I thought it was great. Much better than what Joel Osteen is probably saying right now. Let me guess. “Live your best life. Believe in yourself. Keep sending me and my wife money.” Tony Robbins should sue him.

I saw another neat video a couple of days back. My favorite Messianic rabbi, Zev Porat, shot down a revered rabbinic tradition. He also exposed the dangerous holes in the education of a respected rabbi who was unfamiliar with the Bible, preferring secondary sources like the Zohar and the Talmud, which are full of gossip.

He went to the Western Wall, intending to talk to Jews. A rabbi confronted him and threatened him with violence, including death. It was shocking, really, Ordinarily, I associate that kind of behavior with Islam, but it does happen in Judaism. Christians have pretty much given it up. He told Porat he would start a riot if he didn’t leave, and it would have been a pretty one-sided riot, with only one person on Porat’s side. He also told him he could have him killed.

This is pretty extreme. Rich Wilkerson had secret meetings about me and tried to discredit me to other Christians, his son preached ignorant messages which were clearly intended to refute things I said, and Albert Santiago the child rapist told people to shun me and threw a screaming fit in his church’s parking lot while attempting to interrogate one of my best friends. That’s about all the persecution I’ve experienced. No one has threatened to kill me yet, except for my sister, and that had nothing to do with doctrine.

In America, Christians still are not threatening to kill each other. Even BLM isn’t there yet. It’s just Antifa and a few Muslim nuts at this point.

By the way, leftist violence has not stopped. The press has simply decided to ignore it. An Antifer recently pulled a pistol and shot someone he disagreed with in Portland. Like most Antifa cowards, he was covered in black from head to toe to escape responsibility for his filthy behavior, but he was caught on video, and he has been identified and arrested.

He’s an unlikely outlaw and gun owner. He’s a wimpy, effeminate leftist. He’s simultaneously skinny and fat. He has a gut, combined with long, spindly limbs and no muscle tissue. He didn’t shoot to protect himself. People were running around sort of randomly, and he took out a pistol and fired, with poor technique, at some people who were out of the frame. He didn’t warn anyone. It looks like he did it just for the fun of hurting someone.

That’s how riots work. They are driven by sadism. You’re there because you want to cause other people pain and make them feel powerless, so you dance in and out like Floyd Mayweather, inflicting injuries, running away, inflicting injuries, running away…it has nothing to do with winning battles or advancing causes. It’s all about the pleasure of hurting and humiliating others.

Back to Porat. He challened the rabbi. He started discussing the traditional prohibition on combining milk and meat. He said it was not in the Bible. The rabbi agreed to let him stay where he was if he could prove it.

Porat turned to the passage that says Jews are forbidden to boil a kid in its mother’s milk. The rabbi got all excited, thinking he had won. Then Porat pointed out the context. He said it was in part of the word that concerned pagan practices. He said boiling a kid in its mother’s milk was something pagans did as part of their religion. It wasn’t like eating a pig, which is expressly forbidden in the dietary laws.

You can check for yourself. Here is Exodus 23:19, which appears in a list of required Jewish religious practices as well as prohibitions concerning heathen religious practices: “The first of the firstfruits of thy land thou shalt bring into the house of the Lord thy God. Thou shalt not seethe a kid in his mother’s milk.”

It’s also in Exodus 34:26, which occurs in the same basic context: “The first of the firstfruits of thy land thou shalt bring unto the house of the Lord thy God. Thou shalt not seethe a kid in his mother’s milk.

If you Google around, you will find that the Canaanites liked to boil a kid in its mother’s milk in order to assure a good harvest. Like ancient Christians and even modern Christians, ancient Jews had a habit of taking up idolatry in order to conform to the nature of the people around them.

Porat asked the rabbi if Abraham was righteous, and the rabbi said he was. Porat then turned to a passage which showed Abraham serving milk and meat…to God himself!

I’m not a Jew, so I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about kashrut when I read the Bible. It had never occurred to me to go over the details of Abraham’s meal and compare it to Jewish tradition, so I never noticed what he served. Now that I’ve seen it, it’s very obvious, and it’s shocking that the issue isn’t better known.

You have to see it for yourself. It’s part of Genesis 18.

And the Lord appeared unto him in the plains of Mamre: and he sat in the tent door in the heat of the day;

And he lift up his eyes and looked, and, lo, three men stood by him: and when he saw them, he ran to meet them from the tent door, and bowed himself toward the ground,

And said, My Lord, if now I have found favour in thy sight, pass not away, I pray thee, from thy servant:

Let a little water, I pray you, be fetched, and wash your feet, and rest yourselves under the tree:

And I will fetch a morsel of bread, and comfort ye your hearts; after that ye shall pass on: for therefore are ye come to your servant. And they said, So do, as thou hast said.

And Abraham hastened into the tent unto Sarah, and said, Make ready quickly three measures of fine meal, knead it, and make cakes upon the hearth.

And Abraham ran unto the herd, and fetcht a calf tender and good, and gave it unto a young man; and he hasted to dress it.

And he took butter, and milk, and the calf which he had dressed, and set it before them; and he stood by them under the tree, and they did eat.

Notice: he served beef, butter, and milk, together. To God himself. The Jewish God.

How about that?

It sounds pretty good. I like beef fried in butter, with a potato buried in sour cream. Of course, potatoes come from the New World, so Abraham didn’t have that option.

Needless to say, the rabbi was dumbfounded, and Porat was not beaten or driven off.

Apparently, some rabbis have noticed the contradiction. One argument they make is that milk was served first, which would be permissible. Unfortunately, there is no indication of that in the text, and it says, “he set it before them,” meaning both beef and dairy items. There is no indication that he served milk and butter first, and besides, who would drink milk and eat butter while letting beef get cold? It’s not credible.

Another explanation is even stranger: Abraham created a special calf which could be eaten with milk. Really? He was trying to get the most important guests imaginable to sit and wait for food, and he wandered off and used magic to create a calf instead of getting the food ready quickly? Why?

Maimonides, who has been shown to be wrong about other things, claims the visitors were angels, and that it was permissible for angels to eat meat with milk. Well, Abraham didn’t address them as angels. He said, “My Lord.” The Bible says, “The Lord said to Abraham.” The word translated “Lord” is Yahweh. Is Yahweh an angel?

You really have to twist the text to get away from the obvious meaning.

Why does Porat do things like this? I can’t speak for him, but I know he shocks religious Jews with their ignorance of the Bible. Secondary sources are everything to them, just as they are to Catholics and Mormons. He also likes to show them how the word conflicts with the traditions of men.

It’s encouraging to watch these videos. Through Porat, God is showing Abraham’s children how they have been disinformed and kept in the dark. It helps them see the truth. He says many, many people in Israel secretly believe in Yeshua now. They just keep it quiet for obvious reasons. People, including black-clad religious Jews, email him and other Messianic ministers all the time, asking for materials and instruction.

Until recently, I thought it was no good for a Jew or anyone else to believe secretly, because the word says that if anyone denies Jesus before men, he will deny him before the Father, consigning them to hell. Now I think I was wrong. Keeping quiet is not the same thing as denying. A denial is proactive. Silence is passive. It’s not an act. I think Jews and former Muslims who take a “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach should be fine, as long as they never cross the line into denying Jesus.

Heathens love pressuring people to deny Jesus. It’s a very big deal to them, because they serve Satan, and they know that to deny Jesus is to be damned. The Vikings used to torture people to make them deny Jesus. Socialists have done it, too. Lots of pagans have done it. Paul had believing Jews imprisoned and killed by the Jewish authorities, and the Jews of his time beat and threatened Jews who evangelized, just as Porat has been threatened and assaulted. Muslims crucify Christians today, hoping to get them to recant. The Mark of the Beast will be a public renunciation of Jesus, and the Bible says people who take it will be lost. That means the Democrats and worldly Republicans will be coercing people to give up salvation, which is “Yeshua” in the Hebrew language.

Pretending to believe something because you’re afraid is not really believing. If you threatened to burn me at the stake, I would tell you I was certain Joe Biden was an avocado if you wanted. It wouldn’t mean I believed it. You can’t go to God and say, “I believed what the rabbis told me because I was afraid of them.” You can only say you pretended to believe.

I keep hoping the rapture comes soon, because I don’t like this world at all, but because I don’t have certainty, I have to continue living and attending to various responsibilities. Rhodah and I have to keep working on a green card. We have to think about a possible future together here.

This week, a stranger came up to her and started prophesying. He said she was newly married. He said God had given her a good man who loved her a great deal. That all sounded great. Then he said God was going to give her twins.

Twins! Oh, boy. If God wants to give us twins, may it be so, and I will be grateful. May his will be done, always. But wow. Twins?

Needless to say, we are praying for God to let us know if the prophecy is correct. Rhodah thinks it’s great. I am unnerved by the prospect of going from no babies to two babies, instantly.

We are working on her green card. We haven’t even finished the forms. It’s a lot of work, and her information just changed because of her move.

England now says she can visit. We’ll see if it’s true or just another European lie. Other countries pretended to welcome Zambians and then proved they actually wanted to keep them out. They made excuses, pretending they thought a married woman with an expensive ring and an American husband with assets was likely to stay in their countries illegally. Some countries, including America, claimed Zambians could visit, but then they made it impossible to apply for visas.

I doubt their sincerity.

A few weeks back, she heard an audible voice say, “October 26th.” We are wondering what that’s about. Was it a demon, spreading confusion? Was it God, telling us when we would be together again? I don’t put a lot of credence in it. It’s October 7th. We would have a hard time even getting back to Turkey in 19 days. America and desirable European destinations seem as unlikely as Mars.

I haven’t been able to attach any significance to the date. It’s not a Christian or Jewish holiday.

Now that my strength is returning, I feel the familiar urge to get out and walk a long distance. I guess I’ll get on it after lunch.

Wonder if Hefner is Watching from Hell

Welcome to the fifty-cent tour of the end of the world. I am your guide. Today’s exhibit: a male homosexual on the cover of Playboy.

Is this a groundbreaking move? Depends on how you look at it.

In reality, America’s favorite porn rag Playboy featured a homosexual in 1991. His name is Caroline Cossey, and he goes by the name “Tula.” Tula did a naked pictorial, so I assume he has had surgery. I know he has prosthetic breasts, because at the time of his pictorial, a friend of mine said it looked like he had two servings of flan moving around under the skin of his chest. Flan is caramel custard, and it is shaped like a tapered hockey puck.

In 2017, Playboy featured another male homosexual. His name is Ines Rau. I have not seen his photos, but again, since he appeared nude, he must have had himself castrated and so on before doing the shoot.

The latest gay Playboy cover model is a man named Rock, and he doesn’t pretend to be a woman. I haven’t seen any indication that there are any photos of him inside the issue, so perhaps the porn-consuming world has been spared nudes. On the cover, he appears in a bunny costume with the top pulled down so his nipples can be seen.

The children of darkness are celebrating Rock as though he had come up with a cure for cancer. Not sure what that’s all about. All he did was put on a slutty costume and pose for a photo. They’re also calling him Playboy’s first openly gay cover model, which is clearly not true. They’re taking advantage of his ill-conceived appearance to reinforce the canard that male “transgenders” are women, not what they truly are: male homosexuals who want to look like women.

So what is the purpose of Playboy’s weird efforts to coerce lustful heterosexual men to look at other men?

Playboy may or may not have a goal; it’s run by confused people who probably don’t have an articulated agenda. They serve spirits, however, and those spirits do appear to have a goal: to spread homosexuality among men incrementally.

Leftists love to tell us homosexuals are “born that way,” and I’m sure that’s true in many cases. Some people are born thieves. Some people are born aggressive and violent. Some people are born liars. All of us are born with negative drives, so there is no reason why a person can’t be born with homosexual inclinations. That doesn’t mean all homosexuals are gay in the crib. People’s sexual desires can be changed. Many men have been content with heterosexuality for decades and then plunged willingly into homosexuality after events, such as imprisonment, that applied new pressures to them.

People are herd creatures. Most will go along with the majority when it makes no sense at all. Put an average person in a room with ten other people who insist that President Biden is a chicken, and the odds are surprisingly high that he will agree. Convince a significant percentage of the world’s influential males that vaginas and male excretory orifices are fungible, and most of the rest will eventually come to agree.

I think homosexuality will soon be the majority preference, and we will also continue to see increases in incest and bestiality. I say “continue” because we are already seeing increases. Pedophilia is already considered normal and healthy in some places, such as Afghanistan and New Guinea, proving being “born that way” is not a prerequisite for a society to endorse a vile perversion. It will probably become a global norm. It will start with psychologists telling us there is good pedophilia and bad pedophilia. We will be told we have to consider nuance. Diagnostic tests will be produced, “proving” some kids benefit from sex with “caring” adults. Wait and see.

When things get sufficiently crazy, men and women who used to hide in the shadows will be emboldened, and we should expect a rape epidemic that applies to every possible type of victim, including men and pets. This appears to be what happened in Sodom, where a mob of sexual-majority members tried to rape two angels in front of a house, as though they were entitled. Now we can see how it could happen here. We can see how things that used to be repugnant to nearly all of us can go mainstream.

A strange thing is happening in the world. Free people are behaving more and more like prison inmates. We dress like them. We emulate their tattoos and other body modifications. Many men use steroids and work out excessively, like prison inmates. I suppose we should not be surprised when we see free men adopting sexual morals historically seen in prisoners.

Prisoners are the world’s biggest losers. Prison is a foretaste of hell, and hell is the eventual home of all losers, because they follow the universe’s biggest loser, Satan. As Americans lose God’s favor because of rebellion, we develop the characteristics of losers. That’s what’s happening.

It’s not a coincidence that rape is a huge problem among men in the military. One of the single best ways for a man to become a rape victim is to enlist. Look it up. I will make people angry by saying this, but I think it’s because military service, like imprisonment, is a curse.

Think about it. A soldier is a slave. He is told where to live, what to wear, what to eat, when to get up, when to go to bed, and what to do. Like a slave, he can be imprisoned for running away. He can be ordered into situations where he is expected to die. Would you go to work every day if your boss had the power to do that? Our freedom and prosperity are built on the dead bodies of soldiers, and I certainly appreciate what they do for us, but can you say you’re blessed when you have given up your civil liberties for low pay and a high risk of disability and death, followed by the impoverishment of your wife and children?

I think the most blessed men are the ones who get sent home from their physicals for things like flat feet. I used to see things differently, but I have come around. I admire courage and self-sacrifice, but no reasonable person can walk through a VA hospital and envy the forgotten men who live there. I would never encourage a young person to enlist.

Fatherlessness is one of the worst curses. It destroys families and puts sons in prison. What does combat duty do? It makes children fatherless.

I think things really started to change when the movie The Hangover – Part 2 came out. It was about a group of purportedly heterosexual men having problems after a bachelor party in Bangkok. They visited a strip club featuring gay men dressed as women, which is something straight men wouldn’t do, because they wouldn’t enjoy it. At the club, one of the men followed a performer around and eventually got him to sodomize him, causing both men to achieve sexual satisfaction complete with evidence, in front of his friends and everyone else who was there.

In real life, most men would be destroyed by such an experience. They would cut off their friends and move far away. In the movie, the man who got sodomized was about as disturbed as you or I would be if we got drunk and let a homely girl give us a lap dance. His friends weren’t very upset, either. Audiences were expected to roll with it. No big deal! It’s something you do after a few drinks with your buddies. You tip a cow. You get an ugly tattoo. You strip and let another man violate you from behind while everybody watches.

It was a great move by Satan. You put herd creatures in movie theaters, as assembled herds, you loosen them up with funny scenes about moderately depraved behavior typical of American males, and then you slip public emasculation in as though it were an afterthought. It worked. Audiences didn’t throw up and walk out. Critics didn’t go off like daisy cutters. Suddenly, the things that happened in the film were acceptable.

Could that have happened in 1950? Decades of slipping had us primed.

Human beings can get used to anything. I mean anything. The ancient Jews used to burn their babies alive, in public. Other peoples in the region killed their firstborn sons and embedded their pickled remains in the walls of their houses to bring good fortune. Women in Africa don’t just endure having their genitals sliced up for Islam; they hold girls down when their times come. Nice Southerners flogged the flesh off the backs of slaves. Under the right circumstances, cannibalism can become routine. There is nothing we can’t come to see as normal. It’s our nature as herd creatures. If the people around us accept something, it must be wrong for us to reject it, so we join in.

There is no natural morality. Anyone who thinks there is needs to go watch some videos of monkeys and apes, or they could read about the things the Japanese did, with the public’s cheering support, during the last century.

The ability to get used to depravity and abomination is what will allow the Beast to emerge. The Beast will a man, but he will also be the herd, thinking, feeling, and acting as one. The man will seem like a leader, but he will really be a follower, guided by the animal (hence “Beast”) desires of the debased masses. The Beast likes sexual perversion, so we will have it.

The only remedy to the brainwashing of the Beast is the Holy Spirit. He is God’s GPS. If you pray in tongues every day, God will be your anchor, and you will not stray far from him. When everyone around you endorses evil and persecutes you for rejecting it, only the Holy Spirit will be able to prevent you from falling in with the other lemmings.

The world is going to get more and more disgusting, and only Spirit-led Christians will float above the sewage. But for the Holy Spirit, they would dive in and swim with the lost.

Jesus says only the church of Philadelphia–the church of brotherly love–will be spared the hour of temptation that comes upon the entire world. We are neck-deep in temptation now. We are tempted to do evil, and we are also provoked to anger by the disgusting morals of the children of darkness. That provocation is just another temptation. Christians will go to hell because they die angry at people who hate God.

I keep asking God to fill me with love and help me not to think too highly of myself, because I don’t want to be damned for unforgiveness and pride.

I hope the rapture comes soon, because the world provokes people like me every day. We are constantly insulted, libeled, and subjected to various types of attacks. Sooner or later, temptation will be too strong for anyone. I want out before that happens. How am I going to resist the apocalyptic spirit of murder, which manfests in anger and unforgiveness, when I can’t resist pizza and ice cream?

I don’t think the true hour of temptation is here yet, because the rapture hasn’t happened. Or if it has, nearly all of us missed it. Things are very bad now. I don’t want to be here to see them get significantly worse.

The Dogs Return to Their Vomit

Ordinarily, I do not watch fiction, but for better or worse, I made an exception this week. I watched a bunch of clips from the TV series Vikings.

I was interested because angry, confused Caucasians have been adopting the Vikings, or at least their inaccurate perceptions of Vikings, as their role models. Americans are forming gangs. BLM is a gang. Antifa is a gang. Militias are gangs. A number of gangs think they’re defending the legacy of the Vikings.

There was a Viking named Ragnar. Or maybe there was not. Some historians think the person Viking fans think of as Ragnar the vicious, Aryan-looking king was actually a woman. Anyway, old stories written down long after the figures they describe died say Ragnar had several sons, and they all became leaders. They did things like invading England and battling Christian armies.

The TV series is based on the stories about Ragnar and his sons. Her sons. Zis sons? What’s the possessive pronoun for a gender-fluid Viking?

The show popped up in 2013, just in time to fuel mounting racist hatred, and it ran for 6 seasons.

The show promotes some pretty sick values. The characters are like Crips or MS13 members. They’re all pumped up about drama, honor, violence, cruelty, and revenge. The male leaders are excited about hacking other people up and being hacked up, themselves. Even the women are macho. Unrealistically, they go into battle and kill men with swords. In the real world, this doesn’t happen. There have been female snipers and pilots, but there has never been a female SEAL, because women can’t cut it in infantry-style roles. Real female Viking soldiers would have lasted a few undignified moments on the battlefield, after which the men who killed them would probably have made the obvious use of their dying bodies.

In the show, Christians are depicted negatively, even though the actual Vikings ended up embracing and spreading Christianity. On the other hand, the fake Norse gods are portrayed as real and admirable. Old one-eyed Odin literally shows up and talks to people, encouraging them in their stupidity. If Jesus shows up and tells people to embrace love and return good for evil, I haven’t seen it yet. The show depicts Valhalla as a real place instead of what it actually is: another name for hell.

The show is full of gore, and it depicts a revolting, probably fictional punishment called the blood eagle. Here’s how it works. You restrain your enemy so his back is exposed. You cut two big flaps in the skin of his back so it can be peeled away from the spine and hang off the sides of the body. You take an axe and sever the ribs from the spine, and you open the chest from the back. You pull out the lungs and drape them over the shoulders of the victim, and then you wait for him to die.

Apart from the fact that this torture probably never happened, there are problems with it. First, when you open a person’s chest, he dies, right away. Lungs don’t work unless they’re in airtight cavities. Second, lungs aren’t attached to us by big, long strings of tissue. You wouldn’t have enough slack to drape a person’s lungs over his shoulders.

It’s amazing that we think this stuff is entertaining and permit it to be shown on mainstream TV channels. It’s also dangerous. It gives ideas to people who are fully capable of cutting other people up. It would be bad enough to show real tortures on TV. Giving barbarians ideas for better ones is unconscionable.

The characters in the show look like models from Nazi propaganda posters. Tall. Pale skin. Square jaws. Big muscles. Piercing blue eyes. Blond hair. They look like Dolph Lundgren in Rocky IV. They’re also covered with markings, and they have creepy, tribal-looking hairstyles of the sort which have long been popular among society’s biggest losers: prison inmates.

They look scary, and that is deliberate. The show’s creators want to comfort intimidated, well-behaved Caucasians by convincing them they, too, can be physically intimidating.

I’ll be honest. Non-black Americans are afraid of blacks, and their fears are based partly in fact. While black criminals overwhelmingly attack other blacks when it comes to violent crime, because most of the people they encounter are black, they prefer victims of other races. Honest black people admit this. I have had them tell me and my friends we were not safe in their areas, in order to protect us.

Black people commit most homicides and most violent crime in the US. You can look it up. Maybe you should, especially if you’re black. The truth is important. You should consider it when forming your political and social opinions.

A lot of white people want to be feared, too. It bothers them that no one is scared to insult them or confront them. By conforming to an imaginary, violent Viking ideal, they convince themselves white people are just as tough as blacks and Mexicans.

The push to identify with Vikings started a few years before the show was created. The show was just a way for amoral Hollywood types to capitalize on an unhealthy micro-zeitgeist.

The whole thing is somewhat ridiculous. Westerners (not so much white people) are already the most powerful enemies anyone can have. Our nations are declining, but we have ruled everyone else for centuries, and we still do. Our internal institutions defeat and control people inside our borders who don’t conform to our standards of behavior. Maybe a typical white person would not fare well in a street encounter with non-white criminals, but overall, the system Westerners created is very dominant.

Our weapons are downright horrifying. I don’t just mean nuclear bombs. Go watch a video of an armed C130 using computer-aimed guns to pour lead into a building. If one of these things showed up over your house, there would be absolutely nothing you could do. No hole would be deep enough to save you, and the computers could see you and your family in the darkest night.

Gangs are a real problem for American minorities. Now the gang mentality is picking up new traction among Caucasians, and it will do us just as much harm. Nuts with Viking-rune tattoos are probably going to take white supremacy, which is a tiny, overhyped problem in America, and turn it into a real cancer of large proportions. Then the lives of many white Americans will be just as wonderful as those of minority members who live in gang-dominated areas.

Viking buffs aren’t just adopting the look and the feeling. Some are taking up the ridiculous religious beliefs of the Vikings. They literally believe in Odin and Valhalla. What possible basis could there be for taking that nonsense seriously? The people they admire gave it up hundreds of years ago. If you’re going to embrace the silly hairstyles, why not go all the way and become Christians?

Here are some facts. White blood isn’t superior. White people are not the answer to the world’s problems. Non-white blood isn’t the source. Western culture truly is superior; that’s obvious. But its most important virtues come from Christianity, not white skin or weird European religions involving Wagner characters. Christianity is not a white religion. Anyone can join, and when enough people in a culture join, that culture will reap the benefits.

Most people can sense the hatred that floats in the air now, and many feel a need to join a group and take a side. Satan is exploiting this, driving us to join the wrong groups. He has us dividing ourselves up according to race and nationality. In reality, we should be aligning ourselves with the correct faction in the war between God and Satan.

If you’re a Christian, your brothers aren’t the people who look like you. They’re not even your biological relatives. Every real Christian learns this. In the kingdom of God, brotherhood is based on submission to the Holy Spirit, who is a sentient being who comes to live in us. He tells all of us the same things. He does the same things to transform all of us. He unites us, and that brings us power. Not power to grab an AR-15 and shoot up cities. Power to bless and to be blessed. Power to heal and be healed. Power to forgive and love. Power to get protection from the people who want to make us suffer and die.

Power to be raptured when the time comes to extract us from the LZ.

Sometimes I’m disturbed when I see people pouring into the United States, and I get the feeling that excessive immigration is a problem. It’s not true, though. Immigration itself is neither good nor bad. It depends on who we accept.

If we were only letting Spirit-led Christians in, I would be the biggest open-borders advocate on earth. What they looked like and where they came from would mean nothing at all to me. I wouldn’t care whether they spoke English or had jobs lined up. Bring them in. I wish they would come and flood the place. Africans. Chinese people. Arabs. Bring them in. Do it.

Superficial differences between peoples are not problems in my eyes. The problem is that we are generally admitting people who do not, and will never, belong to Jesus. That makes America an increasingly cursed and hostile place.

I would rather live in a serious Christian country, where the Holy Spirit has really taken hold, and where people are otherwise very little like me, than in the United States. No doubt about it. As for living among tattooed Juggalos with freckles and blue eyes, no, it’s hard to imagine anything worse.

It’s sad that so many American Caucasians feel fake nostalgia for a barbaric, largely imaginary past in which infantile values predominate.

This morning, I was praying, and I kept telling God how much I hate this place. I mean the earth. I asked his forgiveness for complaining. He put me here to do something, and my desire to leave is not as important as the job he created me to do. Nonetheless, I have the same feeling I used to have in Miami, before I escaped to Northern Florida. I am unwanted here on earth. I will never fit in. I can barely talk to people because they have become so crazy and close-minded.

Paradoxically, even though I am sick of Earth, my life is easy, and I enjoy it. I just want to continue it elsewhere, elsewhere, elsewhere. I want to be in a place populated by immigrants, where no immigrant who is against God will ever set foot.

In heaven, we’re all immigrants and adoptees.

God gave me a burning desire to get out of Miami, and within a few years, he fulfilled it. I hope he will do the same thing this time. I can’t wait to be in a place where I don’t read hateful Internet comments every day. I can’t wait to know I will never have to hear about BLM, the NFAC, Antifa, or the Proud Boys again. I don’t want to see Biden any more, with his medically frozen forehead and tiny, confused eyes, struggling to hold onto the precious as the world becomes more and more confusing to him. I want King Jesus as the sole branch of government.

I don’t want to be nagged about nonexistent white privilege, which I couldn’t control even if it were real. I don’t want to hear depressing news about minority crime and abortion. I don’t want to hear that populist socialists are going to tax what I have so their constituents can have the satisfaction of seeing an old white man who never harmed them lose everything and end up greeting people at Wal-Mart.

I never want to wear a mask again.

Imagine living in love and unity with every person you see. Imagine being closer and more devoted to every one of countless fellow citizens than you have ever been with anyone on Earth. Imagine perfect health, perfect vision, and complete peace. This is what home offers Christians.

To sum up, I am not planning on getting any rune tattoos, nor will I ever take up arms and try to make Ragnar proud. I plan to pray in tongues as much as I can and stay as close to God as possible. This strategy works and works and works. The other stuff will probably factor into the worst suffering Americans have ever endured.

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One more thing: in case you didn’t know, Playboy just put a man on its cover. Not even a shemale this time. Just a gay man in a bunny costume.

What worse surprises lie in store? Should we brace for impact, or did we just experience it?

This is Why God Flooded the World

As I said yesterday, a preacher caught up in the Kenneth Copeland false-prosperity lie tried to tempt my wife to turn against me and persuade me to get back into the toxic doctrine of Christian tithing. I felt I should write more about it today.

Lots of people have told me I am too hard on prosperity preachers. With fear in their voices, they have cautioned me about going too far, as though they were concerned that giant hailstones might materialize and kill us just for discussing it. Meanwhile, God has blessed me more than anyone I know, including the people who warned me and reviled me.

After listening to my wife yesterday, I feel these people have it backward. I told God I regret going too easy on the thieves and liars. It’s easy to sit back and murmur, “Judge not.” It is often a coward’s excuse. It takes integrity to call a popular preacher a whited sepulchre or son of Satan.

She told me a disturbing story. A friend of hers is against the prosperity gospel, but he is still a dedicated charismatic. He prays in tongues every day, and he believes in all the activity of the Spirit of Holiness. Some years back, however, he was trapped in the harness of Mammon, following and repeating the garbage money preachers propagate. Things went badly for him even though he gave money, and he got so frustrated he got angry at God and questioned his faith.

What does this prove? It proves what I’ve been saying about Mammon’s gospel is true: it turns people against God.

I’ve been in his shoes. I remember feeling angry at God because I was supporting slimy ministers who flew around in private jets. I was doing my part, wasn’t I? Surely God was just testing my faith by making me wait. But how long did he expect me to take it?

Here’s a little tip: God is always right. He always does everything right. He does things as well as they can possibly be done. He doesn’t need our advice. He doesn’t need our suggestions. We haven’t thought of anything he hasn’t considered. If things aren’t going well for you, it’s not because God is dragging his feet or unaware of a better way. You’re the problem.

All over the world, there are people who have gone from financial security to penury by giving money to Kenneth Copeland and his buddies. How do you think these people feel about God, now that they live in homeless shelters or with their children? Do you think their misery has brought them closer to God? How about the people who have to pay their bills now? Are they more or less inclined to give their lives to Jesus and be baptized with the Spirit of Holiness?

I’ve been involved in bringing friends back to God’s side after money preachers pulled them away. I’ve seen Mammon at work in their lives. It’s not theoretical. It happens every day. It’s a major part of the purpose of the prosperity gospel. Satan designed it to keep Christians poor, and he also uses it to convince them Christianity is useless.

Remember what Jesus said? If you cause one of his children to take offense, it’s better for you to have a millstone hung around your neck and to be thrown into the sea.

Kenneth Copeland and Benny Hinn are going to hell. So is Joyce Meyer. So is Steve Munsey. So are all the others. If they don’t repent while they’re alive, they will all burn. Real evangelists lead people to their own future home, and so do the evangelists of hell. There is always symmetry in the supernatural.

In the time of Jesus, millstones were turned by animals such as donkeys. Beasts of burden represent the flesh. Preachers who give people unscriptural burdens take them out of the realm of the spirit, in which God does most of the work for them, and puts them in the realm of the flesh, in which they do the work themselves and it doesn’t profit them. People who rely on the flesh are no better off than donkeys.

A sower plants seed so it sprouts and brings a return. A miller grinds and kills it so it can go into someone’s belly and be destroyed. The Mammon preachers are eating their flocks instead of growing them.

Samson was an ordinary man. The only time he had unusual strength was when the Spirit of Holiness filled him. When he chose heathens over God, the Spirit left him, he was blinded without difficulty, and he was forced to turn a millstone, like a donkey. Unfortunately, he was no longer strong, so he was worse off than a donkey.

The blindness symbolized the spiritual blindness of carnal believers. They don’t hear from God. The millstone symbolized the life of a carnal believer. They serve Satan’s children, doing work that is beneath the dignity of a son of God. They go in circles. Samson walked many miles while he was a slave, but at the end, he was right where he started.

I fully expect Paula White to go to hell. I think Rod Parsley will be right there with her, along with T.D. Jakes, Joel Osteen, Fred Price, Jesse Duplantis, and Creflo Dollar. Lots of lower-tier money preachers like my old pastors will be dragged down with the tails of the celebrities. Maybe God will get through to some of them before they die, and he will give them opportunities to be saved, but I expect most of them to be lost. They’re denying the truth now, so why would they change their minds later? They love money and admiration more than God or people. Their kind is like a plague of disease-bearing fleas, dragging Christians with good intentions down to the pit.

I think Oral Roberts is in hell already. He jumped into the money gospel headfirst, and I never heard that he repented. I think Eddie Long is down there with him.

Yesterday, I looked at Kenneth Copeland’s Youtube channel. He blocks comments, and he also conceals his likes and dislikes. Why? Because he hates the truth. He’s afraid of it. Cockroaches are afraid of sunlight. If he didn’t ban the truth, his videos would draw thousands of critical, helpful comments, warning people not to listen to him. Obviously, he conceals the public’s opinion of him because he has been outed many times in his comments. If people were patting him on the back, he would want everyone to see it.

I hope I’m doing a little better by publishing these things. The last thing I want is to share in the curses of people like Kenneth Copeland.

Sounds Like my TV When Kenneth Copeland is On

Coronavirus is spiking in blue states where Christianity is unfashionable but masks, vaccines, and lockdowns have near-sacred status. What’s going on?

When purple Florida got hit with a big spike, leftists piled on Ron DeSantis, claiming he caused it. DeSantis is a big proponent of vaccines, but he tried to allow parents to opt out of draconian mask laws for schoolchildren. Leftists started claiming, falsely, that he was banning masks in schools. He has also been instrumental in saving Floridians from blue-state-style mask laws and hard core lockdowns for adults.

Let’s go back over some facts. First of all, masks are ineffective as worn by nearly the entire general public, second, children are at very, very low risk of having serious problems if they contract coronavirus, and third, Florida parents have always been free to make their kids wear masks not just at school, but everywhere. Finally, lockdowns and mask mandates have not proven effective; they have often been followed closely by coronavirus spikes, as was seen recently in Australia.

It’s somewhat comical. When Florida spiked, it proved DeSantis, and by extension all Southerners, Christians, rural residents, and conservatives were backward and evil. Leftist journalists could not stop hammering these themes home. When blue states spiked, however, everything went quiet. Well, not totally. Some leftist journalists kept hammering DeSantis, exactly the way they didn’t hammer Cuomo when his isolation orders killed thousands of senior citizens.

People buy into anti-covid measures because it makes them feel better, not because they work. When a stubborn pestilence hits, everyone wants to feel a sense of being in control. When the Black Death hit, Europeans gave huge sums of wealth to the church because they thought God would heal them in exchange for money. Some people attacked Jews, believing they caused the plague. Doctors wore masks outdoors, just like humanists in Boston and New York do now. Many people flagellated themselves with whips, thinking they would beat God to the punch and divert his wrath. Others resorted to aromatherapy, which was just as useless then as it is now.

Lockdowns make us feel like we have control, even though they do not work unless they are extremely, extremely strict. Social distancing doesn’t work at all, but again, it makes us feel powerful. Ivermectin, vitamin D, famotidine, zinc, and azithromycin haven’t been shown to work reliably, but many people take them anyway. No intelligent person wants to die without trying every reasonable, harmless preventative and remedy, if there is any chance any of them will work.

I have taken ivermectin. I’ve tried vitamin D and zinc, but my usage has been spotty. I bought famotidine just in case. I got myself vaccinated, and I even got a flu vaccine because doctors reported that people who got flu shots were less likely to have severe covid. I will go so far as to admit that wearing a mask makes me feel safer, even though I am aware that it doesn’t help. Even pro-mask researchers tell us masks don’t protect the people who wear them; they’re to protect people around us.

I’m not immune to the irrational drive to take measures in which I have little faith, and I admit it, so I don’t feel bad about criticizing other people who behave similarly and refuse to admit they’re deluding themselves.

I’m getting a little sloppy here. Not all anti-covid measures are delusional. Taking things like ivermectin, which are backed by considerable, if inconsistent, evidence, is optimistic, but not delusional. Getting vaccinated is not delusional, because so far, vaccines protect most people to some degree or other. Pinning your hopes on a mask or on the types of lockdowns free societies can manage is delusional. Making people wear masks on jets, where the air is replaced every three minutes, is beyond delusional. Telling small children to wear masks, which don’t work and which will never be worn properly by most kids, is so delusional the word “delusional” is inadequate to describe it.

Anyway, blue state people appear to have way, way too much confidence in the anti-covid strategies which are currently available in America, and they are also way too scared of the disease itself.

A study showed that 41% of Democrats think over 50% of coronavirus patients require hospitalization. The real answer is below 5% and may be as low as 1%. And “hospitalization” is a broad term. My dad spent several days in the ICU because he had a nosebleed he caused with a Q-Tip. I required hospitalization to have a broken arm set. I wouldn’t dream of assuming that everyone who gets coronavirus treatment at a hospital is in serious trouble. In any case, blue state people are clearly SEVERELY deluded when it comes to the danger the disease presents. They think covid is much worse than it is, and they think preventative measures are much better than they are.

Blue state spikes are severe blows to the sense of control blue state people have inculcated in themselves through bias and stubbornness. One wonders how they will feel as things get worse. Last year, they showed themselves extremely fragile in the face of the corona threat. They posted videos of themselves, screaming. They cursed 2020 as though it were a person. This year, they are doing a little better, but their hatred of people who question anti-covid tools is rupturing their relatively calm facades like magma bursting through the earth’s crust.

Joe Rogan chose not to get vaccinated, and when he got covid, he took ivermectin and other remedies and recovered from his mild symptoms in a few days. His colleague and fellow mediocre comedian Howard Stern lost his mind over this. He said people like Rogan should go home and die. He said, “F___ your freedom.”

Here is some of what Stern, who used to hold himself out as a big proponent of freedom, said:

We have no time for idiots in this country anymore. We don’t want you. We want you to all either go to the hospital, stay home, die there with your COVID, don’t take the cure but don’t clog up our hospitals with your COVID when you finally get it.

Stay home, don’t bother with science, it’s too late. … We want you to go away, We want you to leave the country. Go somewhere where they have ultimate freedom, wherever that is, some bizarro world where you don’t have to take the vaccine. … I don’t know when nonsense became such a thing.”

Needless to say, Stern is campaigning for forced vaccinations, using shots which still have not been approved by the FDA.

His language is remarkable. It shows how Beast-think, the mindset of the Antichrist’s children, works. As I keep saying, the Antichrist isn’t just one man. It’s a body of people with one demon-sculpted mindset. It’s a hive mind. Stern doesn’t hesitate to show that he believes he speaks for the masses. “We” don’t want you. “We” want you to die at home. “We” want you to leave the country.

It’s a genocidal mob mindset. It’s about race, which is another way of saying it’s about family.

There are two races of human beings: the children of light, and the children of darkness. Throughout history, the spirits behind each group have been battling to rid the earth of the other group. The children of darnkess like to talk about inclusivity and cooperation, but it’s not what they want, any more than real Christians want to go on living in a world which has gotten too filthy and hateful to tolerate. They want us gone, and we look forward to a world without them. In the future, they will kill us in droves, like their spiritual leftist ancestors who delivered French loyalists, including an anointed king, to the guillotines in carts.

As plagues go, coronavirus is mild. It’s nothing like smallpox or the Black Death. We have to wear masks and endure some other inconveniences, but there is food on our tables, and the government is not nailing our front doors shut. Not in America, anyway. Yet. Look how crazy we are, though. Imagine how crazy we will get if things get significantly worse.

Leftists already fantasize about removing people from the world in order to create a corona-free utopia where everyone uses the correct pronouns. They take pleasure, publicly, when one of us dies. Many of them discuss the prospects of our deaths openly, with joyful anticipation. That’s how it is now, during a lackluster plague. If a new smallpox pops up, we will murder each other like rats. People will barricade themselves indoors with supplies taken from neighbors they have killed.

It’s going to happen. The Bible predicts it. What if it happens sooner rather than later? What if we don’t have to wait for another disease to bring things to a head? What if covid itself gets worse?

Right now, the vaccines are looking pretty good, so blue-staters still have one peg to hang their suggestive pink hats on, but the vaccines disappoint more and more every day, and there is no reason why something can’t happen to make them completely ineffective at preventing coronavirus from coming back like a brand new disease. What will blue-staters do then?

The new blue state spikes don’t seem to make sense. Blue states have higher vaccine rates, and vaccines seem to work fairly well, so what happened?

For a long time, THE SCIENCE has made predictions that haven’t turned out to be right. It looks like that is still happening. High-vaccination states are getting lots of coronavirus, including severe cases. Meanwhile, Zambia, with its sub-2% rate, no lockdowns, and poor social distancing, only had a tiny spike this summer, and it disappeared very quickly with no action at all from the government.

Leftists keep telling us vaccinations will fix everything, but that hasn’t happened in the US. Meanwhile, other countries with low rates aren’t having problems.

Imagine how leftists would be spewing if Florida’s shot rate were under 2%. They would literally froth at the mouth. We would be lucky if they didn’t come down in chartered buses to kill us. They would have to be driven off the streets with water cannons and rubber bullets. Florida’s shot rate is over 30 times Zambia’s.

Maybe it won’t impress leftists to see someone compare Florida with Zambia. How about Zambia and enlightened, far-left Massachusetts? The shot rate in Massachusetts, which is similar to Florida’s, is over 35 times Zambia’s. Zambia has about 3 times the population of Massachusetts. Zambia’s current new case rate is 45 per day, so divide by three, and you get 15. Surely Massachusetts has fewer cases. Maybe one or two per day, right? No. It’s 1539. At its very peak, Zambia never got much above 3500, which corresponds to about 580 for Massachusetts.

On a per-unit-of-population basis, Massachusetts is doing about 2.5 times as badly as a country where people ride around in vans with multiple strangers and almost no one has been vaccinated.

Maybe a leftist will read this and hope I’m cherry-picking. No such luck, chest-feeding comrade. It gets worse when you look at long-term stats. Massachusetts has had 4 times as many cases and 5 times as many deaths. That’s in absolute terms, not relative. Zambia should have had 12 times the cases it has had, and 15 times the deaths, adjusting for population. Throw in the lack of vaccinations and the general lack of a real response, and a good leftist who genuflects for St. Fauci would expect Zambia to have maybe 50 times the cases and 60 times the deaths Massachusetts has had. I would argue that Zambia is doing roughly 50 times as well as blue-state alarmists would generally expect. Or Massachusetts is doing 50 times worse.

It’s not lack of exposure. Zambia has had coronavirus for a long time, including the delta variant. It’s not race. Black people in the US do worse than white people.

I always say this: when something doesn’t make sense, there is generally a supernatural explanation. I think Zambia and similar countries were spared simply because they were not cursed with the same curses Florida, Massachusetts, Hawaii, New York, and other coronavirus hotspots received. What we are seeing appears to be the beginnings of the apocalypse, and God has said that during the apocalypse, human beings will not be able to fix their problems.

Why would God go easy on zany African countries while allowing relatively responsible Americans to be pummeled? I don’t know. I do know that Zambia is a Christian country, as stated in its constitution, and homosexuality is not promoted there the way it is here. Zambians openly oppose it. Maybe that has something to do with it.

Plagues don’t just happen. They are punishments. America has been punished worse than any other nation, including the nation that released coronavirus on the world. Why is that? Could it be our status as the world’s leading exporter of homosexuality and other types of sexual sin? We actively punish countries that don’t go along with our weird new sexual morality, inside their sovereign borders. Africans talk about it all the time. They hate it. The Chinese tell them to side with China because China won’t force perversion on them.

We have done something to bring this on ourselves. That’s certain. We don’t acknowledge it. We don’t have national days of fasting and repentance. That must be why the disease keeps defying logic. Because we aren’t turning back to God, it will surely run its course. Whether that means dying out by an appointed date or clinging to us forever, I don’t know.

Right now, it looks like the current global wave is pooping out. Maybe we’ll never have another one. I hope we won’t. I’m not optimistic. Too many things point to the end of the age.

It looks like waves are hitting something like 8 months apart. If that is true, then it would be a very good sign if we didn’t have another one by the end of May. If something happens anywhere near the center of the interval between August and the beginning of April, it would seem to be a sign that things are worse than we think. If we get hit in, say, January, I will consider it a bad omen.

In unrelated news, today I experienced a remarkable attack on my marriage. I generally expect spirits that influence my wife or me to be the hostile agents. I need to get over that. Experience has taught me that my biggest enemies are Christians who are influenced by spirits.

I was granted persona non grata status at my last two churches because I stood up for what was right. While I served at these churches, nearly all of the people who made my life difficult were pastors and volunteers. No one else bothered me much. Now it’s happening again.

My wife went to church today, and her pastor told her I needed to join a church and start tithing. As if that’s not bad enough, he tried to get her to manipulate me. He tried to get her to stand with him, against me.

He belongs to a group of churches overseen by a man named Oyedepo. Oyedepo is a padawan of Kenneth Copeland, a vile, greedy, hateful liar who destroys people’s lives by sucking up their savings and turning them against God. Oyedepo loves the prosperity gospel. He has 4 jets, which is pretty good for a Nigerian who collects money from poor Africans.

The pastor believes Christians are supposed to tithe, and he believes in “seed offerings.” When you give a seed offering, you pay God to give you more money. You give him a hundred dollars, and soon he turns around and gives you a thousand. The bigger the seed, the bigger the harvest. Kenneth Copeland is very excited about that last bit. People have given him their homes and retirement accounts because they believed God’s big priority was to make them rich, not to transform them and fill them with the gifts and fruit of the Spirit. Generally, people who give such offerings die waiting for God to get back to them, not realizing he already has.

I’ve written about all of this before.

Paul told us the law had been fulfilled and that Christians were not under the law, and people like Copeland repeat this a lot, while insisting we are still under the law of the tithe, which has never, ever applied to gentiles.

I used to tithe and give financial offerings, and I never, ever got a return. I never saw anyone else prosper from tithing. I did see a lot of people lose their jobs and homes while tithing.

Rhodah’s pastor didn’t come to me like a man. He told my wife to teach me bit by bit, to bring me around. He said this to her secretly, sort of like Satan, making plans with Eve while Adam was busy elsewhere.

I don’t think he thought of himself as Satan. I think he has good intentions. I think he’s just ignorant and trapped by the spell of Kenneth Copeland.

The prosperity gospel is a pyramid scheme, and like every pyramid scheme, it turns every hopeful beneficiary into a salesman. Rhodah’s pastor hopes to get rich, so he sells the prosperity gospel to people who will give him money. Some of the people he convinces will surely become preachers, and they, too, will look for potential donors to rope in.

The Bible is very critical of conflicts of interest. Today I looked for verses saying not to take bribes because they pervert judgment, and I thought I would find one. I found a whole bunch. Preachers who hope to become prosperity gospel millionaires can’t think clearly, and God warned us about them.

Last night, before I heard about this, I started thinking about the roles of husbands and wives. I realized I could not think of a single male in the Bible who pleased God by listening to his wife. I could, however, think of a bunch whose wives caused problems.

Adam was cursed for listening to his wife. Go read it. This was the first sin God named. He mentioned the fruit later. Eve was the first drug abuser and pusher. She ate a mind-altering plant and pushed someone else to use it. What she did was very serious, and Adam’s primary sin was going along with it instead of doing his job as a husband.

Job’s wife tried to get him to curse God.

Sarah laughed when God said she would have a son, and she didn’t believe his prophecy. She goaded Abraham into sleeping with a servant and giving rise to a race that still causes the Jews great trouble today.

Lot’s wife didn’t want to leave Sodom. She thought she knew better than her husband, and as a result, he was left without his helper. God killed her. Then his daughters took on the role of wives in her absence, getting him drunk and having sex with him.

Leah deceived Jacob, pretending to be his wife so he would sleep with her. Because of her lie, he was forced to work 7 more years for Laban.

Potiphar’s wife accused Joseph falsely, and Potiphar lost his major domo because be listened to her.

Moses had problems with his wife, who refused to let him circumcise their son. God got so angry, he tried to kill Moses. Only then did the wife perform the surgery herself, to cool God’s anger.

Samson was betrayed by his wife and Delilah, who sided with other people instead of demonstrating a wife’s proper submission and loyalty.

Bathsheba tempted David, leading to the murder of Uriah. His wife Michal ridiculed him instead of honoring him, causing God to curse her womb.

Solomon served his heathen wives instead of God, and he died in disgrace. He failed as a ruler and a father, and he plunged the Hebrews into centuries of bloody division.

Jezebel ruled Ahab and turned Israel into a slaughterhouse for prophets.

Herod’s wife forced him to murder John the Baptist.

It’s a long list, and there are probably other examples. Abigail and Pilate’s wife are the only wives I can think of who had more sense than their husbands.

Rhodah told me about her pastor’s plan on the morning after I thought about these things. God was preparing me.

Rhodah did two smart things. She told her pastor my history and explained that I was not an ignorant person who needed to be taught about tithes, and she also told me everything he said.

I told her to inform him he was not to go through her again. If he had something to tell me, he was to come to me, not my wife. I also told her never to give him any of my money again. Not for prosperity purposes. I said she could give him a few bucks now and then to keep the lights on, but that was it. I said I did not want to be cursed for giving prosperity donations.

It’s surprising that a preacher would not see the problems I identified. You don’t talk to another man’s wife when you can talk to the man. That’s inappropriate. You never try to get a man’s wife to side with you against him.

If he has a problem with this, tough toenails. It would not be the first time I put a preacher in his place and got blowback, so I don’t care. The team is Rhodah and me, not the preacher and Rhodah. If our marriage tanks, he’ll be just fine. He’s not risking anything when he meddles. To me, it’s different. Rhodah is all the flock I have, and she can’t be replaced easily. We have a sacred relationship we are obligated to protect. The relationship between a preacher and a woman who sits in his church is nothing.

It would be nice to go to church, as he suggests, but the age of the church is over, and coronavirus has made attending church impossible. I guess he doesn’t know how things work here.

The more I thought about this demonic attack, the more revelation came to me. I remembered Albert Santiago, the crooked preacher of my last church. A convicted pedophile, he was known for breaking up friendships. If you disagreed with Albert, your friends were told to cut you off, and most would do it. I had another crooked preacher: Rich Wilkerson, of Miami’s Trinity Church. He ruined relationships by turning volunteers into slaves. I remember a sad tale of two young people who had a dream courtship and engagement, only to have it ruined because Trinity’s inner circle pressured the woman not to move to Los Angeles with the man.

Cults interfere with relationships between Christians. Santiago did it. Wilkerson did it. Rhodah’s pastor is doing it. But he is trying it on the wrong couple. He ran into the wrong husband.

Today I prayed for God to destroy and expose Copeland’s and Oyedepo’s foul ministries. I hope Rhodah’s pastor comes around and gives up their poison. I prayed for his correction.

It goes to show how vigilant you have to be. You have to pray in tongues so God gives you revelation, and you have to understand the way the world is supposed to work. God is a father, and one of a father’s functions is to prepare his children to deal with scammers and liars. People who don’t have fathers like that end up buying time shares. Or giving money to Kenneth Copeland.

The Placebo Effect is Better Than no Effect at All

There have been interesting developments in my treatment of my mysterious new disease.

I passed two PCR tests, so I figured the most likely thing was sinusitus. Nonetheless, I put myself through several days of consecutive ivermectin doses, as recommended by doctors in a country where ivermectin is not a politicized drug. I also got myself some amoxicillin and started using it yesterday, figuring it could not hurt.

Yesterday, I didn’t take ivermectin. PCR tests are not accurate by any reasonable definition of the word, but two passed tests told me the odds against me having coronavirus were high. The recommended ivermectin program I was following said it was time to quit, ivermectin was iffy to begin with, and it seemed pretty unlikely that I had covid, so it seemed like I should stop.

Background: the first time I took ivermectin after returning sick from Turkey, it was around 3 a.m. I had just arrived from the airport. I went to sleep an hour later, and when I got up after 4 more hours, I felt much better. My sore throat was not nearly as bad as it had been, and I had a feeling of wellbeing. The drug had been in my system for about 5 hours.

I wondered whether ivermectin could really have done anything in 5 hours. Maybe I was just getting well on my own. Maybe my body was subduing covid, a bacterium, or a virus.

Yesterday, on my first day off ivermectin, I felt good when I got up. I had taken ivermectin every day for the previous 4 days, and while I was still blowing heinous substances out of my nose, I was doing okay. I felt good until mid-afternoon. Then things got worse. I felt feverish, my throat felt sorer, I was very sleepy, and my congestion seemed more severe.

I didn’t know what to do. Based on the tests, it looked like I didn’t have covid, but what if I did, and what if ivermectin had been reducing my symptoms and keeping my lungs clear?

I decided to take a dose before bed. When I woke up later to blow my nose, the feverish feeling was gone, as was the the difficulty of staying awake. My throat was less sore. Once again, I had recovered substantially, several hours after a dose of ivermectin.

So what’s happening? Why did I get worse when I quit? Did I sabotage my recovery by skipping a day of ivermectin, or did I experience a normal fluctuation in the progress of a common non-coronavirus infection? Why did I get well twice, right after taking ivermectin?

Seems like there are four likely possibilities.

1. I have covid, and ivermectin suppresses the symptoms as long as I take it every day.

2. I have something else, and ivermectin suppresses the symptoms as long as I take it every day.

3. I have covid, ivermectin has no effect on it, and the symptoms fluctuate because that’s what covid does.

4. I have something else, ivermectin has no effect on it, and the symptoms fluctuate because that’s what sinusitis does.

If a “journalist” from Rolling Stone were writing this, he would add another alternative.

5. I am slowly dying from ivermectin poisoning, like all those superstitious, flat-earth, Christian sexual conformists who died in the parking lot of that hospital in Oklahoma while misgendering trans nurses.

Whatever is happening, I am now very hesitant to stop taking ivermectin. What if it’s blocking a coronavirus surge? How would I know?

Alternative 2 is interesting. No one ever discusses ivermectin as a possible remedy for viral infections other than coronavirus, but why can’t it be? There are lots of non-covid coronaviruses out there. Maybe they share vulnerabilities with covid, and maybe viruses that aren’t related are in the same boat.

Again, how would I know?

As for amoxicillin, the Internet reading is depressing. A lot of it says bacterial sinusitis goes away after 10 days with amoxicillin treatment, but without treatment, it takes about a week and a half. It looks like doctors are just like me; they prescribe dubious medications simply because they enjoy feeling like they’re doing something.

I really blaspheme doctors. I know that has to annoy people who see them as gods who are much more powerful than they really are. I’m realistic. To me, medicine is no different from shoe repair. It’s something you should evaluate based on logic. To many other people, doctor worship is a religion. Doctors do lots of great stuff, but they are completely useless for many conditions, and because they’re human, they make mistakes and kill a lot of people who show up with things their art can cure.

Can covid cause sinusitis? Yes. Of course not. Definitely. Commonly. Rarely. Never. As usual, THE SCIENCE has no answers, or, rather, it has too many, and all but one, which THE SCIENCE can’t identify yet, are wrong and, in at least some cases, fabricated.

There is one right answer, and we don’t know what it is. We’re like Bruce Lee, kicking mirrors to find out which opponent is real.

I looked at a bunch of non-fringe sites today. Some said sinusitis almost never manifested with coronavirus. Others said there were a few cases, but they were always fungal and found in people with things like diabetes, which I do not have. Others said it was easy to confuse covid symptoms with sinusitis, and the message was that covid sinusitis was common.

It’s amazing how THE SCIENCE is still unable to answer simple, obvious questions after almost two years of the Kung flu, which is, by the way, a CHINESE VIRUS.

I love saying that on a site that hasn’t been censored yet. Chinese virus. Chinese virus. Hong Kong Flu-ey. Flu gu gai pan. Flu shu pork. There are four lights and two genders. Speaking the truth is so liberating in 2021. I think people who haven’t gone crazy yet should get together in rented halls and take turns standing at podiums, saying true things we’re not allowed to say any more. It would be great.

Yes, it’s a Chinese virus. No, you should not hit Chinese people on the subway. Especially if they’re from Taiwan or they were born in the US, or they’re actually Japanese. You shouldn’t beat the Korean deli owner who came into your poor neighborhood and became successful while you didn’t, even though you’re a natural-born US citizen who has been dutifully collecting welfare and waiting for serious wealth redistribution for 60 years. Simple?

We should be able to live by these guidelines. It’s not that hard to acknowledge the origin of the virus and the culpability of the CCP while refraining from racist violence. It’s very important to admit, publicly, that the virus is Chinese, because the CCP needs to be held accountable every single day.

Imagine what headlines about the CCP would look like if the communists were capitalists. “FORCED ABORTIONS CONTINUE.” “CCP REFUSES TO END THE HORROR OF ORGAN HARVESTING.” “THE TRUTH ABOUT YOUR SLAVE-MADE PHONE.” It would be wonderful.

I have been going over the symptoms of covid and ordinary sinusitis, and it appears that diarrhea and nausea–my first symptoms–do not occur in sinusitis. Sinus infections also cause headaches and face pain. I have had no face pain, and while I did have a headache, it was so mild there was no point in taking anything for it, although I did, because I was feeling snowflaky.

If it’s true sinusitis never causes gastrointestinal problems, then I must have coronavirus, right?

My insistence that negative PCR’s don’t mean a lot is not fringe stuff or Q Anon drivel. Read and find out for yourself. Even moon-barking, vaccination-Nazi Huffpo published an article by a sick person who got 5 consecutive negatives. People don’t all shed the same numbers of viruses, and virus-shedding varies in different parts of the body and at different times during infections.

I’m going to keep taking ivermectin, because once, I got worse when I stopped taking it, and twice, I got better right after taking it. Maybe it’s chance, but maybe it’s not. I’ll keep taking amoxicillin because there is a miniscule possibility it will cure me of bacterial sinusitis, which I may have, in a shorter time than would be accomplished by doing nothing. I will keep taking guaifenesin every day in order to continue expelling quarts of mucus from my head with minimal difficulty. I will also drink water and take potassium citrate to prevent guaifenesin from giving me kidney stones, because it can do that.

Finally, I plan to get out of the house and walk. I have been huddling indoors because it’s hot, not because I feel bad, which I don’t. Turkey ran around 78 degrees while we were there, so now I’m phobic about going outdoors in steamy Florida. I think inactivity makes respiratory bugs worse.

I’m going to order even more ivermectin, while vendors are willing to sell it. Two months from now, we may start seeing stories in which people like Fauci admit they were wrong about ivermectin. Maybe it will turn out to be very useful for certain people. I want to be ready if that happens, and I don’t mind spending a low three-figure sum in preparation. If it turns out to be useless, I can give it away to horse people.

I would like to have maybe a dozen tubes for myself, and just as many for Rhodah. That ought to get us through a number of bouts, assuming the drug does anything. It could keep us alive until THE SCIENCE finally comes up with something that actually works.

I don’t plan to go to a doctor unless I feel bad. I have been to doctors for stuff like this, and they’re always disappointing. Your average doctor is not House, M.D., and he doesn’t have a team of tormented Ivy League overachievers staying up all night using imaginary Star-Trek-grade equipment to find out what’s wrong with you. Most doctors compare limited, familiar lists of symptoms, just as I have, make educated guesses, and prescribe common drugs every layman knows about. Where I live, I’ll get a guy named Pradeep who had to take the US licensing tests three times before he was allowed to practice. He’s not going to pull a miracle cure out of the air. If there are doctors like that, they’re in New York and Boston.

I’m not kidding about the doctors here. American doctors shun rural communities, and our government gives foreign doctors special incentives to work in them. Look it up and feel bad about doubting me.

The harsh reality is that doctors are a lot like the police. When someone steals your TV and tools, the cops come over and write things down, and then they go back to the police station, file what they wrote, and forget all about you. If the criminal is still standing in your yard when they show up, they will probably do something, but other than that, no, you are never going to see your stuff again. They will not try to dig up “leads.” They will not slip twenties to informants. The only way you will get anything back is if someone does the cops’ work for them and basically drags them to wherever it’s located.

These things aren’t just true of relatively minor crimes. Even the families of murder victims can expect to do a lot of their own legwork, if they expect to get any results.

Doctors don’t sit up nights trying to figure out what’s wrong with you. They assume you have whatever common illness comes closest to explaining your symptoms, and they prescribe exactly what other doctors prescribe. If there is anything remotely unusual about your symptoms, expect them to be just as clueless and ineffective as you are. You’re going to need a specialist, and they screw up a lot, too. Medical history is full of stories of frustrated patients who ended up doing their own research and diagnosing themselves.

I started taking ivermectin as a lark. I never expected to be afraid to stop taking it. Coronavirus is an endless stream of surprises, and sadly, many of the people who get surprised the most are doctors the rest of us depend on.

Horse Paste and Pills for Tropical Fish

I’m all excited today because my amoxicillin is almost here.

I got sick in Turkey, and while the symptoms don’t quite fit strep throat, they are not the most typical symptoms of covid, either, so I feel like I should cover all the treatment options. In the case of covid, that means ivermectin, supplements which probably don’t help, and waiting. In the case of strep, it means amoxicillin.

Today I read that it takes people at least three days to feel better after taking amoxicillin for bacterial infections, so in all likelihood, even if I have strep, taking an antibiotic won’t necessarily make a big difference. I am getting better every day, so even if I do nothing, if I have strep, I should be better in three days regardless of what I do.

Maybe amoxicillin won’t help at all, but I like feeling like I’m doing something.

I ordered 300 500-milligram pills, for $34. This is a huge amount of amoxicillin. My wife and I should be covered for several years.

Why haven’t I gone to a doctor? Because I don’t see any point in spending real money on a minor problem which is clearly going to go away soon whether I treat it or not.

Another reason I haven’t gone to a doctor: I have no faith in them. I will explain.

I am old, and when you’re old, you are full of knowledge you picked up from unpleasant experiences. I have learned that doctors are very good at treating highly treatable problems with which they are very familiar. Outside of that set of ailments, they are bumblers, and they often make things worse.

If you have a wart on your foot, or a broken arm, or you need a coronary bypass or a boob job, a doctor can help you out. If you have a collection of symptoms that don’t quite fit any disease you can find on the Internet, your doctor is likely to be stumped, and he will probably fall back on trial and error, giving you one treatment after another until one works, you leave him and go to another doctor, or you die.

Given human nature, this makes sense, and the principle doesn’t just apply to doctors. Today I realized all professionals are the same way. They are used to seeing the same problems over and over, so they are good at doing a limited number of things, but they get confused when you give them new challenges. Take them a few inches outside the box, and they flounder.

Most professionals are mediocre. Your doctor is probably mediocre. You aren’t qualified to say whether he is or not. You like him because he’s nice to you. That’s what we mean when we use the phrase “good doctor.” Unless you’re exceptionally blessed, your doctor will generally screw up when presented with novel tasks, and you won’t figure it out until he has led you around the mulberry bush for quite some time.

I can back my position up with countless tales of botched diagnoses and treatment, and I know you can, too, even if you’re a doctor and what I say makes you mad. Doctors give each other bad treatments, just like they do the rest of us.

I used to get tonsillitis over and over when I was a kid. People, especially doctors, don’t believe me when I say that. They say my tonsils would have been taken out. Sorry, but what I say is true. The doctors I saw didn’t believe in tonsillectomies.

They gave me antibiotics, which probably were not appropriate. One told my mother I had a herpes virus in my throat, and that the way to keep it from flaring up was to force me drink milk laced with bacteria every day. They all had diplomas up on their walls, but none of them ever solved or understood my seemingly simple problem.

Another doctor told my mother I had a cleft palate. I don’t know if he had murdered a real doctor and stolen his diploma or what, but that’s not a mistake a real doctor should make. Of course, he was wrong.

Another doctor used to tell my mother to keep me out of school whenever my temperature was above 99. He didn’t bother telling her many people have normal temperatures that high, so I got very, very familiar with the Mike Douglas Show while we applied his advice. I could turn a minor cold into a two-week vacation.

I feel like I should only go to doctors for problems only doctors have any chance of treating. These ailments fall into two categories: simple minor ones and complicated serious ones. Right now I have a simple minor problem I can handle as well as a doctor, so I’m staying home.

Remember how we respected doctors 60 years ago? We thought they were wonderful. Meanwhile, they were withholding water from fever patients, smoking in exam rooms, prescribing thalidomide, killing pneumonia patients by telling them to lie flat on their backs, and doing countless other things that made us worse off than if we had never seen them. Human beings probably thought just as highly of doctors back when they were doing bloodlettings with dirty instruments and going from surgery to surgery with pus on their hands. The farther back you look, the more physicians look like witch doctors. Fifty years from now, if the world survives, today’s doctors will also look bad. They are today’s witch doctors. I keep that perspective in mind when I think about medical treatment. Often, I tell God, “Please keep me away from the witch doctors.”

If doctors were really all that great, they would have come up with a credible consensus about coronavirus and masks, and they still have not done that. All they have is a party line determined by politics, not science. They wouldn’t have made fools of themselves by saying it was impossible for the vaccinated to have serious symptoms; vaccinated patients are dying all over the world. They still argue about whether it’s okay to eat eggs. They can’t cure cigarette or opioid addiction. They can’t even fix fat people. It’s important to know what doctors are good at and which challenges reveal how far they still have to go.

Enough of that. Back to me.

Today’s new symptom: food tastes funny. Does it mean I have coronavirus? No idea. Coronavirus is commonly associated with the disappearance of the sense of taste and smell, but this usually happens early, not a week into the disease, and I can still taste and smell things. My food tastes funny, and the flavors are weak, but I can taste it. I had hot chocolate this morning, and I would say it tasted like a mouthful of pennies.

Don’t pretend you don’t know what pennies taste like. You were a kid once.

The worst symptom I have is the constant accumulation of thick, chunky mucus in my nose, like rice pudding with raisins. I have to get up once a night and blow it out. I don’t sleep well. But for that, I would not mind being sick. I have all sorts of energy, and when I’m sick, I’m able to tolerate stimulants, so I’m enjoying coffee and chocolate. On the whole, but for the mucus, it may be preferable to being well. I’m looking forward to having a Lindt bar later. Don’t know if I’ll be able to taste it, but I am determined to try.

I say I have all sorts of energy, but that’s not totally true. At around 8 p.m., I start to flicker out and fall asleep wherever I am. I don’t think that’s because of the disease, though. I think it’s because of the lack of sleep. Also, I was going to bed 7 hours earlier last week, so I may not be in sync with Eastern time yet.

I’m not using ivermectin today, because my course of paste is done, but nonetheless, I have three new tubes on the way. I have no intention of running out while THE SCIENCE is still chasing its tail, trying to figure out whether ivermectin works while uninformed and dishonest physicians lie about it to the press. If they decide it works, the supply will disappear instantly. I plan to be ready.

It’s safe to give billions of doses to Africans for worms, but it’s lethal for Americans with coronavirus. Yeah, okay. Makes complete sense to me.

The vaccines have killed a few people, but ivermectin hasn’t, even when self-administered by bona fide imbeciles. Interesting fact.

Two deaths have been “linked to” ivermectin. After a year and a half of covid disinformation, we all know what “linked to” means. If you get a mild case of covid and fall off a ladder, your death is covid-linked. The ivermectin victims probably died in a car wreck.

About 8,000 people are reported to have been killed by covid vaccines. Not that I’m an anti-vaxxer. I’m vaccinated. I’m just pro-truth.

I hate the way the truth has disappeared. I may not say what you want to hear, because I may not have accepted all of your side’s covid dogma, but I strive to strain out the BS and present the truth. Most people are not doing that. They are telling us there are invisible microchips in liquid vaccines that pass through tiny needles, during a chip shortage. They are telling us masks are highly effective when they barely work at all. They are saying vaccines are the mark of the beast when the Bible makes it clear they are not. The Chinese are claiming the Chinese virus started in a lab in America, which is clearly a giant lie. American journalists are still repeating the moronic claim that an Oklahoma hospital turned away gunshot victims because there were so many people showing up with terminal cases of ivermectin poisoning.

I think the best lie is the magnetism story. People are posting videos of themselves with metal objects stuck to their arms. They claim the vaccines made them magnetic, causing things like copper coins to stick to them. Hello? Copper isn’t magnetic. If copper is sticking to you, you need to start using a washcloth, because your body’s own undisturbed grease is making things cling. If you’re dirty enough, I suppose nearly anything will stick to you.

People who can’t hear the truth can’t be helped, and they are very easy to control. The world’s new truth-deafness is being used to make human beings blame and hate each other, and it will form the basis of the murder pandemic predicted in Revelation 6. It’s already happening.

The only people who can’t be deceived are those who hear from the Holy Spirit, and if you’re not praying in tongues, you’re not one of those people. Christians who call tongues “gibberish” are already out there teaching anti-Semitism and preparing misguided militias to take on mirror-image dupes who think white people cause all the world’s problems.

A lot of the people who believe the chip stories are Christians. It’s embarrassing. Can you imagine how hard and expensive it would be to make a radio chip small enough to go through a hypodermic? The only implantable chips that small have to use ultrasound, not radio, and they only started making them this spring, in a university lab, not in factories. Have you been scanned with an ultrasound probe since getting your vaccine? I haven’t. What would be the point? If they can make you sit still for a probe, they already know where you are, right? What would the chip tell them that they don’t already know? Furthermore, I have to ask: are you walking around with a GPS-enabled phone which constantly tells Google your location to within a couple of yards, while whining about an imaginary locating chip?

You’re not magnetic. You don’t have a chip. The vaccines are not the mark of anything, yet. On the other side of the coin, ivermectin is not poisonous and may be helpful, masks don’t work in practical use, vaccinated people die every day, and closing borders no longer serves any purpose whatsoever, except when we do it to keep illegals out.

When you reject the truth and tell the lies one camp loves, you can be sure at least one faction will love you. When you accept truth and reject lies from all sources, people on every side will hate you.

I cannot wait for this snot to go away. My pills are still not here.

I think I’ll go out and kill squirrels out of season. I have nothing better to do, and I have some legitimate scores to settle. I hope everyone who reads this is preparing for the apocalypse, because the mass delusion which is leading us to an orgy of murders is, like coronavirus, untreatable except by divine means.

The Key is to be Enthusiastic About It

I decided to load up on pharmaceuticals today.

While I was in Turkey, I developed a sore throat. This happened shortly before I was due to take a PCR test to determine whether I would be allowed to fly home to the US. Something similar happened on my recent Egypt trip. I got a cold. Both times, I was concerned that I might get stuck in a hotel in a foreign country while coronavirus ran its course. I was also concerned that I might take a long time to get over the bug. Extending a foreign trip can be fun, but after a month or so, it would be less fun.

Obviously, I passed both times. I am here in my gun room, typing away.

Does this mean I didn’t get coronavirus? Maybe not. In spite of inexplicable, delusional MSM articles calling the PCR test “highly accurate,” in fact, reputable sources (not Mike Lindell or Alex Jones) claim the reverse is true. Some analysts have found false-negative rates as high as 67%.

I’m pretty sure I did not get covid in Egypt, because all I had was a runny nose. In Turkey, things were different. Things started much as they had in early 2020, when I got a mystery ailment with symptoms consistent with covid. I started out with foul-smelling diarrhea that didn’t last long. Then I felt nausea. Then I got a sore throat and a low fever. Then I got thick nasal discharge, which is still with me. In 2020, I had conjunctivitis, similar diarrhea, brief nausea and vomiting, a runny nose that persisted for a long time, and a dry cough coupled with sharp but mild chest pains.

In Turkey, I wondered if I had strep. I don’t think I did, because nausea and diarrhea are not common with strep, and they’re common with coronavirus.

In 2020 and on my Turkey trip, I got very strange diseases which could have been covid but didn’t seem to be anything else, based on my layman’s scrutiny of Internet symptom lists.

I took ivermectin before leaving for Istanbul. I expected to take more in Turkey. I had my wife pick up tablets in Africa, and I told her to bring some for me so I could avoid depleting my American stash of horse paste. She misunderstood me and left them behind, so by the time I got sick, I had been off ivermectin for maybe 10 days. People who push ivermectin for coronavirus prevention claim you only need one dose per month. Whether that’s true or not, I don’t know, and for that matter, I don’t know if ivermectin helps even when administered as directed by my fellow fringe nuts.

Following guidelines provided by actual doctors who treat coronavirus patients, I’ve been taking ivermectin every day for several days. They recommend a 5-day course for active cases. Today is my last day. Hope I don’t drop dead tomorrow.

Yesterday, based on my travel problems and the general craziness of today’s world, I decided I should pick up a few disaster medications. Shortages are everywhere, the Revelation promises more plagues, and it’s not always easy to get to a doctor, especially when you’re traveling.

I ordered more ivermectin, amoxicillin, metronizadole, azithromycin, and doxycycline.

How did I get the antibiotics without prescriptions? I did it the same way I got the ivermectin. I took the veterinary route for most. You can get all sorts of prescription medications that way, and the prices are nice and low because malpractice lawyers haven’t managed to wreak havoc on the cost of veterinary medicines.

I already have enrofloxacin (a ciprofloxacin relative) and something called ronidazole. I picked these up for Marvin. Enrofloxacin is not approved for humans, and it belongs to a family of drugs which can cause tendon damage and severe nightmares, so I am not planning on using it, but Marv or some other pet might need it in our dystopian future, so I’m keeping it. Ronizadole is considered dangerous for people, so it will also stay in my pet-medicine stash.

I plan to pick up a few more things. I’m considering antifungals.

Ciprofloxacin is a preferred drug for treating anthrax, which is a popular biological weapon. Because cipro is so scary, doxycycline, the other preferred drug, looks better to me.

Despite the dishonest MSM hubbub, there is no ivermectin supply crisis. It may be hard to find locally for some people, but you can still get it online for under $8 per tube. Nobody’s horse is going to die because you or I buy a few tubes, and if horses do die, I don’t care, because people are more important.

Reader Ed Bonderenka alerted me to a different ivermectin preparation. Apparently, ivermectin penetrates skin, so you can apply it externally. Drug companies sell very inexpensive topical drenches.

I don’t know how safe these products are for people. A cow has very thick skin, so it may be that drenches are made very strong in order to get through it. Don’t ask me. Interesting alternative, though.

Taking a drench internally looks like a bad idea. You would have to drink 2 ml of isopropyl alcohol with every dose. Alcohol is part of the product.

I’m strongly tempted to drive to Tractor Supply and grab a vial of injectable penicillin for $18. They don’t sell oral preparations, but there is no reason why you can’t measure out the injectable stuff and swallow it. What if I have strep? Penicillin would probably help.

Or I could just drive to an urgent care doc-in-the-box like a normal person.

There is something appealing about off-the-grid medical care, though, as long as I’m not wading into the deep end. I’m not transplanting lungs or doing heart bypasses.

Playing amateur doctor when I don’t really need to is not the point here, even though I do it sometimes. The purpose of snapping up a few medications is to prepare me and the people I know for times in which we have to be our own pharmacies.

Maybe I should also stock up on loperamide (Imodium), famotidine (acid blocker), ibuprofen, antibiotic ointment, bandages, topical antiseptics, swabs, tape, gauze, vitamins, and whatever else intelligent people keep on hand during apocalypses.

I guess it would be smart to stock up on toiletries, too. That 3-in-1 shower goo is a big convenience. Shampoo, wash, and shave, without getting out of the shower or leaving hairs and dried shaving cream on the sink, and it doesn’t leave soap scum behind.

Should I grab a few ladies’ products? I’m in the dark there. I can ask Rhodah and order a bale of them on Ebay.

Costco says toilet paper may disappear again soon, so I may add to my monumental collection, along with more paper towels. Walmart’s high-end towels seem like a real bargain.

Batteries. Obvious.

Okay; I paused and ordered a few more things. For a couple of hundred dollars, I got enough antibiotics to provide a measure of protection for two or maybe three people. I could never have persuaded a doctor to give me this stuff. One online vendor even threw in two Cialis tablets, which, let me stress, I did not ask for. That stuff scares me.

I’m leaning toward buying dry disaster food, although I think the only real answer is to grow things. It would cost a lot of money to buy food for 6 months, and it would take up a lot of room. When it ran out, my wife and I would be right back where we started. Until now, my plan has been to have enough food for one month, eat it, and then die without complaining.

In case anyone cares, the Florida coronavirus spike is over. The press is not talking much about it, because the end of a spike doesn’t make Ron DeSantis look bad. They’re also not talking about Florida-style spikes that have, and are, taking place in blue states. When a spike hits a red state with a governor who may run for president, it’s proof Republicans are idiots. When a spike hits a blue state, it’s a mystery. Which probably proves Republicans are idiots.

I’m wondering what will happen. Will the end of the wave of spikes also be the end of coronavirus as a major epidemic, or will the virus find a way to come back and keep biting us in the butt?

One thing is for sure: whatever happens will prove we need more government control, more socialism, and confiscation of wealth. You can bank on that. Democrats believed those things were called for before coronavirus ever became a problem.

Will we ever get real vaccines? The ones we have now are terrible; that is indisputable, as the many, many dead “breakthrough” victims could tell you. Will covid turn out to be like AIDS, which is impossible to eradicate? Both diseases are curses which came as rewards for rebellion against God, so maybe both will be with us until God destroys the human race again. Humanity is not going to repent. We’re not going to admit fault or confess that only God can save us. God has no reason to take covid away.

Maybe old people, fat people, sick people, smokers, and people who vote for Democrats will have to live like bubble boys forever.

Now that I think about it, our flu vaccines are also really bad. Smallpox is gone. Polio is gone. The measles are gone. The flu infects millions of us every year.

I can’t tell you how happy I am to be back in Florida. As soon as I found my car at the airport, I put my gun and huge, sharp knife back in my pockets, and I’ve only worn a mask once since I got home. While I was in Turkey, I kept reaching for my right front pocket because I thought I had left my gun in a restaurant or something. At least they let me carry a small Spyderco.

Rhodah and I are trying to get our US visa application submitted today, and after that, we need to start working on visas for another third-country trip. We will probably be apart for quite a while, so another trip will be needed.

Israel is still, predictably, overreacting to covid. Other desirable countries will be cold by the time we are approved to visit. Greece is a good target, and they claim they accept Zambians. Italy is still closed. France could work, if we can convince them Rhodah doesn’t want to squat and collect welfare. That should be easier now that she has visited two countries without trying to stay.

Paris in winter is not that alluring, but it’s warmer than New York. There are warmer destinations in France, so we should have good options.

Biden, or whoever is doing his job, finally faced reality and decided to open America’s borders somewhat wider. I don’t know if it will help Rhodah or not. America does not care about Zambians, so even when a president helps visitors from other countries, Zambians may remain stuck in the pipeline.

I guess all we can do is pray, try to be ready for the rapture, and make earthly plans as well as we can.

Mary Slept Here

Guess it’s time to write some more about our Turkey trip.

I thought it would be strange to go to Turkey and stay in one city the whole time, so I looked for other destinations. I didn’t come up with a whole lot. My understanding is that in Turkey, the main options are Istanbul, the Mediterranean coast, and Cappadocia. After that, I think you find yourself confronted with sites featuring ancient ruins you probably won’t want to travel to see.

Cappadocia is a weird place full of peaks left behind by erosion. The peaks are very small, like 4 stories high. In ancient times, people decided to dig caves in them, so now there is a sort of cave city there. Tourists go and walk around in the caves, and they also, for reasons unknown to me, hire hot air balloons and look at the rock formations from above.

The rock formations are very ugly. No one but me seems to have noticed that.

I didn’t think Cappadocia was worth a long trip from Istanbul, but I mentioned it to Rhodah anyway, and, like me, she did not see the appeal.

I decided to look into Ephesus, which is near the seaside town of Kusadasi. Ephesus used to be a very rich port, but silt kept piling up until it was miles from the sea, and then a malarial swamp developed, killing the inhabitants. In the 290’s BC, a ruler, Lysimachus, built a new city farther toward the coast, and he pressured the Ephesians until they moved there. The temple of Diana stayed behind, at the original location. Built by Alexander in the 320’s, the temple we know today is older than the ruined city Rhodah and I visited.

Obviously, Ephesus is where Paul’s Ephesians lived, so it’s of interest to Christians. John is also believed to have lived there, except for a spell in Patmos, after which he returned. There are Catholic stories claiming Mary lived there, but they have no basis in fact.

The ruins of ancient Ephesus are pretty darn ruined due to Turkey’s earthquake problem and the ancients’ unfamiliarity with rebar. A lot of the old buildings there have been re-erected. Archaeologists found things lying on the ground, and they stacked them back on top of each other. Some buildings are in better shape. There is a group of homes called the terrace houses, and while the houses have no roofs, a lot of the walls and floors are still in place, though cracked and distorted.

Ephesus had a library of 12,000 scrolls, and the walls and facade are standing, but the facade was actually found in pieces on the ground. The facade of the building, which is known as the Library of Celsus, is what you will usually see first if you Google photos of Ephesus.

The library was not there when John and Paul were there, so if you go to Ephesus, don’t get all soppy about looking at the same building they saw.

Ephesus was the site of the famous temple of Diana, the remains of which are pretty far from the excavated town. Basically, the temple consists of a column which has clearly been re-erected from random segments found on the ground. You can see the outline of the foundation, and there are a lot of stones, but for centuries, people looted the site in order to avoid quarrying, so there isn’t a lot there.

The temple sits maybe 15 feet below the surrounding area. It appears that silt accumulated and buried it, and archaeologists only dug out the temple’s immediate surroundings. Because it’s so low, it fills in with water in the rainy season.

What I’m getting at is this: it’s not much of a sight. If you go to Turkey, don’t feel bad about skipping it.

We were shown something puzzling in the main town, and I seem to be the only one who understands why it’s puzzling. Here and there, the stone was marked with pizza-shaped graffiti. I mean foot-wide circles divided into eight parts by straight lines. We were told a mark like that was called an ichthus, and that Christians made them.

To me, an ichthus is what we Americans call a Jesus fish. The word “ichthus” means “fish.” In Turkey, it’s different.

The vertical line represents an iota, which, I guess, is the first letter of “ichthus.” The two diagonal lines make a chi, which must be the second letter. The horizontal line turns the circle into a theta. The circle is an omicron, I think. Somehow or other, you can also get a sigma out of the symbol. Iota, chi, theta, omicron, sigma. Ichthus. I am not looking this up, so feel free to correct me.

I just checked, and there is no omicron. There is an upsilon, which looks like a Y.

We were told that Christians used graffiti to let each other know they were around, without risking imprisonment and execution. The guide said the ichthus signs were secret messages.

Okay, here is the puzzling part: how do you make a big, complex symbol on stone in the middle of a city without attracting attention?

If I knelt to make an ichthus on a marble paving stone in the middle of a street, I would make a lot of noise for quite a while, and people would notice me kneeling there. You can’t do it without getting caught. Doing it at night wouldn’t help, because people would hear it and yell at you for keeping them awake. Ancient times were very quiet, so carving stone in the middle of a street would be noticed.

I hate to say it this way, but something is fishy here.

That was not deliberate. My puns are better than that.

I mistakenly thought Rhodah and I paid for a “private” tour of Ephesus and related sites, but it turned out we were part of a four-person group. The others were a Romanian woman who married a Turk, and her half-Turkish son. She spoke no English, even though we specified English when we paid, and neither did her son. Because of this, we had to hear everything twice.

They were very nice, but it was disturbing to see this woman and her adolescent son smoking cigarettes together whenever they got the chance.

It reminded me of Eastern Kentucky.

We couldn’t get an Ephesus tour without a tour of Mary’s House. This is ridiculous shrine up on a mountain. The claim is that John looked after Mary there. There is no tomb because Hellenistic churches (Orthodox and Catholic) have a baseless teaching that Mary was assumed into heaven, and also because, hello, Mary never lived there. She lived in Jerusalem.

The “house” is about the size of a large garden shed. We had to wait to be allowed to pass through, because they only let groups of 4 or fewer in. We walked into a closet-sized room with an altar, and then there was another room about the same size, and then we were out. I looked around to make sure we hadn’t gone the wrong way.

If Mary’s House had an air conditioner, a 5,000-BTU unit would be more than ample. It’s that small.

Outside, they had a row of taps where people could collect water from a holy spring. I was glad to see this, because my hands were a little grimy.

Christians and even Muslims go to the house and hope to receive miracles. They drink the water and rub it on themselves. I just wanted to get road filth off my hands.

I don’t like fake religious sites, and I don’t like seeing people kiss and rub stones or drink plain old spring water, hoping God will finally notice them and help them out. If your church is so weak your best hope of help is a 0.00001% chance that idolizing a rock or a fake bone from a saint’s arm will bring you relief, your church is wrong, wrong, wrong.

Muslims have a very odd view of Jesus, by the way. They venerate him as a prophet, and they also believe he was wrong about nearly everything. They treat him the way nearly all Catholics treat the pope.

We also saw the Basilica of St. John, which is a big, ruined church. They say John’s remains are under it, and it is conceivable that they are. They have to be somewhere, after all.

Our hotel was in Kusadasi, at the base of a hill, next to the sea. It was beautiful, but not the greatest hotel.

I’m not sure, but I think Germans have a strong connection to Turkey, and I suspect the hotel we stayed at–the Korumar Deluxe–belongs to a German company. It was full of Germans.

Americans like hotels built for individualists. We like square footage, nice bedclothes, and good food prepared to order. Germans, on the other hand, are more like geese which move in tightly packed flocks. Maybe this is why they invented goose-stepping. They are more in tune with the ordered, Spartan life.

Our hotel had rows upon rows of small, identical rooms. The rooms had no tubs. Each bed had only one sheet and one thin cotton blanket too small for the mattress. There was no complimentary bar soap; they had a men’s-room-type dispenser by the sink and in the shower, and the shower soap was also supposed to cover shampooing and conditioning.

Rhodah was not happy. She wanted another sheet, plus something resembling a real comforter. She complained, and they brought a second blanket just like the first one. She complained again, saying it was too small. They nodded and brought a third one…just like the other two.

I paid for the all-inclusive plan, because it didn’t add much to the bill and might save us trouble getting food. I learned the restaurants served meals during certain time windows, and we needed to be sure we got to our seats while the buffets were running.

The food was sort of okay, but I would call it institutional. The croissants were not croissants, and they seemed to contain no butter. The steam pans were full of casserole-y items which appeared to be made from inexpensive cuts of meat. At breakfast, the scrambled eggs contained no milk, and they were scrambled until they had the consistency of apple sauce. They sat in water that had drained from them. The orange juice was neither orange nor juice. It was like something a summer camp would serve if the proprietor couldn’t make himself spring for real Tang.

The salads and desserts were not bad, however.

On the second night, we decided to eat in town. I asked the desk clerk to recommend a seafood place, and I instructed him to pick a good one, not one that belonged to the brother of the hotel’s owner. He sent us to the Kazim Usta, a waterfront place in the marina.

The restaurant was magnificent. It was cheap. It had a wide variety of dishes. Everything was cooked beautifully; better than I would have expected in America, where proper fried calamari doesn’t exist. The service was friendly and skillful. The location could not have been better.

I think we paid about $30, including drinks. Wonderful.

We got up and walked through Kusadasi’s bazaar. The shops I liked best had signs saying, “Genuine Fake Watches.” They weren’t quite as naggy as the Istanbul shops.

We picked up some costume bracelets for Rhodah. Stone beads are a big thing in Turkey. The shop owner had a long conversation with us. Like us, he knows our governments’ coronavirus tactics are about control, not disease prevention. Believe it or not, a lot of Turks refuse to take the vaccines. They don’t trust them. They also know the world is going crazy. It’s not just right-wing American Christians who see the writing on the wall.

I’ll provide some advice now.

If you want to go to Istanbul and branch out to other parts of Turkey, do not rent a car before you leave America. It will cost 4 times as much as doing it in Turkey via Rentalcars.com, which generally throws in insurance in case you break something. Stay away from companies like Hertz and Enterprise. They will charge you like a tourist.

Don’t rent a car in Istanbul unless you plan to take a long trip outside the city. You will probably have to pick it up at the airport, which means an expensive 60-90-minute trip just to get the car. If you manage to pick it up near your hotel, which will probably be in Sultanahmet, you will have a fine time navigating the narrow, twisted, busy streets, and you won’t be able to park.

The time you think you will save by driving instead of going through security and flying to another city will evaporate fast, and it will turn out that flying doesn’t take much longer.

If you’re planning to spend a fair number of days touring around, renting and driving may make sense.

Turkish drivers are relatively sane. They drive better than people in Miami, which isn’t saying much. There has never been a Cuban F1 driver, and there never will be. On the driving-skill chart, they are just above Chinese people.

Anyway, you can drive in Turkey without problems, but maybe you shouldn’t.

If you want to see the sights near Kusadasi, look into individual trips instead of packing everything into one tour. We wasted over an hour on Mary’s phony house. I’ll bet you can hire a guide who will only take you where you want.

Don’t take a long day tour unless you have to, because they will give you bad food. We were told we would get a wonderful lunch in a Turkish restaurant, but we got dubious buffet food in steam tables. Obviously, the guide had a deal with a bad restaurant, and the owner knew he didn’t have to make good food because his guests had no choice.

Never, ever eat at a buffet in Turkey. There is no excuse for it. You are literally better off skipping a meal entirely and finding a real restaurant later than eating the glop they provide at buffets.

Don’t get an all-inclusive plan in Kusadasi. You’re better off spending three dollars on a cab every time you want food. It’s depressing, watching frugal Germans eating price-driven cafeteria rations.

Finally, if you want a fake watch, make sure it’s a genuine fake watch. There is nothing worse than a counterfeit fake.

That’s all for today. The wife is paging me.

Glimpses of Reality

I had a supernatural experience last night, so I feel I should testify for the benefit of other people.

I’ll lay some groundwork first.

Sometimes I see strange things at night. Some are clearly supernatural, but I’m not sure about others.

Often, especially when praying in tongues, I see things through my closed eyelids. Sometimes a little flash of light will go off, as though a tiny star were appearing for an instant. Once, I saw something like that heading for me, and it entered me. I saw it before it got to me, and I saw it go in. My eyes were closed the whole time. I saw the object, but I never saw myself or the room.

Manifestations like this are supernatural. There is no room for doubt.

I have also had the sensation I could see things around me in my dark bedroom. I would feel I could dimly perceive my dresser or TV, or the light that comes in through the glass panes on the bedroom door. I thought it was possible there was a natural explanation. Maybe old eyes don’t close as tightly as young ones. Maybe I thought my eyes were closed, but they were slightly open at the outer corners.

Last night, I woke up at 3 a.m. I was lying on my back. I prayed. I started getting the feeling I could see things through my eyelids.

I closed my eyes tightly and moved my hands in front of my face. I could see them. I only saw dark shadows, but I was sure I was seeing them. When I moved a hand from side to side, the shadow moved the same way. When I moved it up and down, so did the shadow.

Maybe I was just seeing shadows because the room wasn’t completely dark and light was coming through my eyelids. I needed to find out.

I put my left hand over my eyes and repeated the test with my right hand. I still saw the shadows. I literally saw through my left hand, over and over, in the dark. It was unquestionably true.

To make things weirder, the ability to see through objects wasn’t persistent. Sometimes it went away for short periods, and I couldn’t see anything.

What was happening?

The Holy Spirit provides gifts, listed in the first book of Corinthians. One gift is discerning of spirits. Many people think this means sensing that a person teaching doctrine is inspired by a false spirit. I don’t think so. There is also a gift called the word of knowledge, and it would cover smelling out false doctrine, so why would you need a separate gift? Also, we know that Spirit-filled Christians often see or otherwise perceive supernatural beings and objects with their eyes, and none of the other 8 gifts listed in the Bible cover that, so it would make sense for discernment of spirits to cover it.

I discerned the shadow of my hand; no doubt about it. “Discern” is precisely the correct term.

A long time ago, I fooled with designing 3D video games. A game called Duke Nukem 3D offered a program that allowed people to build virtual gaming arenas. The game itself contained creatures and objects that looked more or less real, but the design program was not like that. It showed an empty, gridded space, and when a person added things, they showed up as frames that looked like they were made of wire. To see the completed game environment, you had to finish the program, and it filled in the frames.

I think the universe works the same way. The natural world is superimposed on the supernatural world. I believe that if I were blind in the natural world yet sighted in the supernatural world, I would still see people and objects, but I would only see their supernatural parts.

In all likelihood, I saw through the veil of the natural world last night.

I believe a person who prays in tongues grows in the spirit and becomes more and more part of the supernatural world. The natural part of him, and its earthly interests, become less important to him. This is how Christians should be. This is why Jesus criticized Peter for savoring the things of man and not the things of heaven. Peter objected the crucifixion, but Jesus knew it had to be allowed to happen.

In the natural, being crucified was a very bad thing. Natural people love their earthly lives. They say stupid things like “YOLO,” they use juvenile terms like, “bucket list,” and they think the fleeting victories they get here are very important. To such a person, being murdered in early adulthood would seem like a catastrophe.

To a man-God living in the supernatural, familiar with the delights of heaven and well aware of the tawdriness and worthlessness of earthly success, crucifixion would look different. It would look like an opportunity to save billions of beloved children from hell, escaping this unpleasant, disappointing world and the problems of the flesh in the bargain.

I think that because I’ve been watering my spirit through prayer in tongues for a long time, my spirit has been growing and overcoming my flesh, like a tree growing in a crack in a granite cliff. A growing tree can shatter rocks and push them aside. I believe this is why Jesus compared the kingdom of heaven to a tree.

I think I see things through my eyelids because my eyelids are flesh, and my spirit is becoming stronger than my flesh. I can close my physical eyes, but I can’t close the eyes of my spirit.

The veil of the temple represented the flesh. Behind it, the holy of holies, where God was present in great power, represented the supernatural realm. Outside was the natural realm. I think God is thinning my veil.

The veil also represents a woman’s hymen. The earth is God’s uterus. We are his unborn babies. When we die, we do what babies do. We go from a world of darkness to a world of light. Why would a baby have to pass through a hymen? Women who have had sex have no hymens. I suppose we have to go through the veil because we were inseminated by God, not men. In the kingdom of heaven, we are probably virgin births.

We say Jesus was born of a virgin, but that’s an oversimplification. Mary was a virgin with respect to men. She was not a virgin with respect to God. He impregnated her. My dad impregnated my mother, and that caused the birth of my body, but no man could impregnate my spirit. Only God could do that.

This is what I feel is coming to me at the moment, so I haven’t sat down and tried to find fault with it.

For years, I’ve felt that my mind was in conflict with the Holy Spirit, striving for control of me. For example, when I’m enjoying the presence of God, it’s hard for me to remember words and use the full power of my reason. I have to stop to think clearly. I suppose it makes sense that if the mind of my spirit would battle my natural mind, the eyes of my spirit would try to subordinate my natural eyes.

I don’t know what the purpose of the gift is. I hope it increases so I can see things clearly instead of looking at shadows.

I suspect that visions take place when our spirit eyes take over. My visions happen when I’m waking up or going to sleep, when my flesh isn’t ready to resist. At such times, it must be easier for my spirit to take control.

I had a vision the other day. My wife and I were in bed. I had been telling her I felt she needed to stop looking at Facebook so much. Everyone knows what it is to feel rejected when a companion chooses to Facebook for long periods instead of talking to the person he or she is with. My wife has looked at Facebook for periods as long an hour when we were in the same room, on our honeymoon.

The vision came as I started to fall asleep. I saw my wife dressed for bed, walking away from me with her back turned to me. She was standing in the bed, but her feet were on the ground. She passed through the bed as though it weren’t there.

Days later, she was in bed with me, dressed the same way. I started caressing her arm, expecting to talk and share affection, and instantly, she sat straight up and started staring at her phone. It was as though she had instantly forgotten I existed. My hand fell off of her. I realized it was exactly what I saw in the vision, except that she was not standing. She was in the same place, facing away, wearing the same things.

I think I may have seen my wife’s spirit in the vision. In real life, her body stayed beside me, but in the vision, her spirit went away from me.

The vision was helpful because when I told her about it, things changed. She started leaving her phone in the hotel when we went out, and it made a tremendous difference. Before she cut back on Facebook, I felt like Patrick Swayze in Ghost, trying to get Demi Moore’s attention.

I know God wants her off Facebook, because he gave her a dream which made it clear, and he gave me a vision. I got off in 2015, if memory serves. Never missed it once. Satan uses Facebook to manipulate people and keep them in his herd.

Before television, people talked to each other, and when television arrived, many people complained bitterly about the way it killed human interaction. Smartphones are much, much worse. No one ever walked down a busy sidewalk, holding a television and staring at it, ignoring friends and loved ones. Go to Youtube. Pick a video of a busy street scene. Choose it at random. You’ll see dozens of pedestrians walking while glued to their phones.

Anyway, it was startling to have a vision and then see it come true the same week.

I guess it will be hard to get to sleep for a day or two, because I will lie in bed covering my eyes and trying to see my hand in front of me.

Make Sure You Wear Your Mosque

I am getting comments from concerned readers. I better tell you what happened.

As some of you have guessed, I poisoned myself while ingesting the dangerous horse medicine ivermectin, washed down with entire six-packs of Pabst Blue Ribbon. I became quite ill and rushed to the hospital, where they were unable to treat me or even get to me. They couldn’t climb over the dunes of dead, maskless, red-hatted bodies that cluttered the grounds.

I had brought my My Pillow with me for comfort, and I rested my head on it in the parking lot and used a Confederate flag for a blanket. I was so sick, it was all I could do to raise my head every fifteen minutes or so to shout racial slurs, vaccine misinformation, and baseless claims of election fraud.

After several hours, I died, but not before giving a blockbuster, amazingly unwitnessed interview with Bob Woodward, who has an uncanny knack of showing up unnoticed at the deathbeds of conservative figures who can’t stand him yet call on him to come hear them refute everything they have ever said and stab everyone they know in the back.

Sobbing, I told him how much I regretted refusing vaccines and encouraging everyone else to do the same, based on my belief that the vaccines were created by Louis Farrakhan in an effort to make white men impotent. I said I regretted these things even though I hadn’t actually done either of them, and I also let him know I had personally shot video of underage Russian prostitutes relieving themselves on mattresses as Donald Trump and Alan Dershowitz looked on while sucking on crack pipes.

Before dying for good, I coded briefly, visited heaven, returned, and gave confirmation to Woodward: God had assured me that all he really cared about was social justice and environmental extremism, and he said everyone who didn’t support Antifa, BLM, and sexual perversion was going to hell. He also said no one would be allowed into heaven without a mask, a vaccine passport, and carbon credits.

This could all be true, or maybe I just spent a couple of weeks in Turkey on my honeymoon.

Rhodah and I stayed in the Sultanahmet area of Istanbul, and we also visited othe seaside city of Kusadasi, which we used as a base for a guided day trip to Ephesus. We enjoyed Turkey a great deal. The Turks turned out to be charming, friendly, helpful people, even when they were not trying to sell us things, which was not much of the time. The food was pretty good, the exchange rate was excellent, the hotel where we spent most of our time started to feel like our home, and by the time we left, we had made a whole bunch of quasi-friends from among the neighborhood entrepreneurs who accosted us regularly.

I’m too sleep-deprived to write much. I left my hotel at 4 a.m. Eastern time on the 24th, and I got to my house at 3 a.m. on the 25th. Since then, I have slept 4 hours.

I also have some sort of respiratory illness. Covid? Who knows? About 5 days ago, I started feeling nausea, and then things progressed to diarrhea and a sore throat. Eventually, I had bone aches, a slight headache, and a stuffy nose. The final insult was the production of large quantities of disgusting substances inside my nose, which had to be harvested several times a day. I am still not completely done with that.

I also had a low fever, but I will never know the temperature, because I could not find my thermometer to pack it. I know I had a fever because I stopped sweating, and then one night I woke up and saw I had started again. That meant the fever had broken.

Of course, I wonder if coronavirus is the problem. I’m having nearly the same symptoms I had early in 2020 after meeting with a bunch of maskless, pre-vaccine, hands-laying Europeans at a religious event. I feel better this time, and I have been spared vomiting, conjunctivitis, and bottomless watery nasal discharge, but other than that, it’s very similar.

Trying to diagnose myself on the web, I can’t find any other diseases that fit the symptoms. Colds, the flu, and strep throat are out.

Just like last time, the digestive problems only lasted a few hours and submitted right away to loperamide pills. Thank goodness for that. Nothing is worse than using public toilets in foreign countries.

Well, actually, that’s probably wrong. America has some of the filthiest toilets on Earth. Georgia and New York, in particular, stand out in my experience. I’ll bet Toilet Duck doesn’t even have brand reps in those states. It would be like paying people to promote pork in Mecca.

In order to reinfiltrate the US, I had to take a PCR test about 3 days back. I was concerned that I might get stuck in Turkey, but I passed. Suspicious, I Googled. I read that for tests performed during the first few days of infections, the false-negative rate is about 2/3. Information like this helps explain why I believe so little of what our overlords and THE SCIENCE tell us. How can tests be useful when they are USUALLY wrong, in the most harmful way possible, when administered during the time when most patients choose to take them?

Incidentally, a PCR test costs $19 in Turkey, and they come to your hotel. Try getting one that cheap in America.

It’s amazing, the transparent idiocy they shovel at us. Here’s another example: we need to wear masks on planes. Ignoring the fact that masks do virtually nothing as worn by the majority of real human beings, why do mask Nazis never mention the constant replacement of airline cabin air? Every time I get on a plane, I am told it’s nearly impossible to get coronavirus while flying. They say all of the air in a plane is replaced every three minutes, so the viruses get shot out into the sky. If that is true (which I doubt), how can an uncomfortable, irritating mask provide an increase in safety which is worth the misery it causes?

United Airlines says the likelihood of getting covid on a plane is something like 0.003%. Or maybe it’s 0.0003%. I forget. Anyway, it’s basically zero, according to them. THE SCIENCE says a real-world mask worn by a typical person may reduce transmission by something like 15 percentage points, meaning the mask reduction is barely perceptible statistical noise compared to the ventilation reduction.

Imagine this. The government says air bags reduce critical accident injuries by–wild guess–75%. Then some scientist finds out placing live scorpions in your underpants raises the protection to 75.02%. Would you pass a law forcing people to use the scorpions?

We have a couple of problems. First, the data THE SCIENCE provides is clearly bogus a lot of the time. For example, a person who falls off a cliff while sick with covid may get put in the “coronavirus death” tally. Second, the policy makers who use THE SCIENCE to tell us what to do are too stupid to understand and make good use of data, even when it isn’t bogus, and they’re also too biased and dishonest to make intelligent rules even when they understand things correctly.

I really hate wearing a mask on a plane. The mask starts to stink before two hours are up, hot air roasts my face, and more hot air shoots upward under my reading glasses, which makes my eyes hurt. The hot air also fogs my glasses, making reading difficult. On a flight that lasts over 10 hours, it’s like one of those loophole torture methods countries use to abuse prisoners of war without violating the Geneva Conventions.

I have learned how to cope. I buy the flimsiest, least effective masks available. I keep an eye on stewardesses, and as soon as they turn their backs, I pull my mask down below my nose. When I see them coming my way, I pull it back up. I think they know I’m doing it, but after dealing with people like me all day for months, they don’t want to get into it with me. When they offer food and drinks, I put them on my tray table and eat and drink unbelievably slowly with no mask. Sometimes I’ll go half an hour, lifting a cup of warm ginger ale to my lips and pretending to sip while my mouth is closed. When that gets dull, I may get up and go stand in the bathroom for 5 minutes with my mask in my pocket.

I learned the slow-eating tip from my friend Mike, who flies more often than I do. Genius.

Another helpful move: taking that darned mask off and fiddling with it for several minutes because it’s just so hard to adjust so it fits the way Papa Joe wants it to.

When all else fails, there’s always, “Mask? Oh, sorry!” Like you didn’t realize it was under your chin. Pull it back up and then wait for your next opportunity to grab more air.

Only amateurs fight with stewardesses. A real master doesn’t resist. It’s like aikido. You look at the natural motions of your attacker and use them against her, to your benefit. You yield and pretend to comply, and by the end of your flight, your face, or at least your nostrils, has been tasting that sweet cabin air at least half of the time.

If you resist, some snippy steward who has a makeup channel on Youtube will smirk and prance while the police drag you down the aisle at his command. You don’t want to go out like that. Remember Ferris Bueller. What would Abe Froman do?

Am I a bad guy for cheating? Well, not according to THE SCIENCE.

A) Everyone on the plane has been tested very recently, assuring that very few infected people are aboard. I am probably not capable of spreading viruses.

B) Everyone on the plane has either been vaccinated or has recovered from coronavirus, and either type of person has a low probability of being infected anew, MULTIPLIED by a sub-1% chance of having severe symptoms.

C) The airlines claim the chance of being infected regardless of immunity and masking is so low it’s essentially zero.

D) Everyone on the plane risks infection every single day, and all of them risked it getting to the airport and breathing the airport’s filthy air and touching its nasty surfaces. Sitting near a vaccinated, tested person with no symptoms should, if THE SCIENCE is to be believed, be one of the least-risky things a traveler will do during his day of flying.

I would also add:

E) General principles, et cetera, et cetera.

All this being said, I do take the disease seriously. I got the Johnson shot. I got a flu shot because I read it was associated with milder covid symptoms, and I tried to get a pneumonia shot for the same reason. I wash my hands all the time. I try not to do anything stupid. I’m not against intelligent precautions. It’s the other kind that get my goat.

Today I got another PCR test. I don’t trust the test I took in Turkey, and if I’ve been infected, the knowledge could be useful. Proof of surviving covid gives you added social credit which might be helpful in some situations. Israel supposedly gives survivors better treatment than vaccine recipients.

Finding out I’m positive would be better than finding out I’m negative. It would tell me I beat covid, and that would make me feel better about possible future bouts.

I just found out antibody tests are available. If I can get one, and if it won’t be skewed by my status as a vaccine recipient, I plan to take one. If there is any possibility I have had covid, I want to know.

Incidentally, I intended to take ivermectin in Turkey, but I didn’t do it. I told Rhodah to bring some pills for me, but she misunderstood, so she left them at home. Because I thought she was bringing them, I didn’t bring my horse medicine. I really missed it when I started getting sick.

Last night, before going to bed at 4 a.m., I took a dose. When I woke up 4 hours later, I felt much, much better. It was remarkable. I was surprised. Was it the ivermectin? Did God heal me? Was it my body overcoming a disease that wasn’t that tough to begin with? I don’t know, but there is a ton of evidence suggesting ivermectin has helped many people, so maybe it helped me, and I plan to keep using it.

Although I’ve been ill, I haven’t felt very bad. I have felt tremendous enthusiasm for getting out and walking. I felt a strong drive to get out and walk several miles a day in Istanbul. I preferred it to taking trains. I felt sleep-deprived because the sore throat interfered with sleep, and I felt a little worn-out on the nights of high-mileage days, but I didn’t feel fatigued during the day, except when watching my wife try on shoes. I’ve felt lots of physical strength. My worst problem was joint pain that popped up after a day or two. When I walked, I felt like I had mild arthritis. Every time a foot struck the ground, I felt a little pain.

I’m afraid I overworked Rhodah. She was happy to get exercise, but there were times when she wanted to sit down and rest. Even though I was sick, I was usually the one who wanted to keep going. She got short of breath a few times, but I didn’t.

I lost weight while eating baklava and cake. I went down a belt notch. If Rhodah had been as gung-ho as I was, I would have walked more and lost more. I don’t think she was ready for what I kept telling her was “old man strength.”

I hope she starts to have the same feeling. It would be very helpful to her to develop an urge to walk. Apart from the health benefits, it’s a very beneficial urge for a traveler to have, and Rhodah likes travel.

I thought I didn’t feel like writing, but I’ve written a lot.

I plan to go buy Mucinex and soak in a tub of hot water. Hopefully I can expel some of the horrible stuff that is coming loose inside me. Maybe tomorrow I’ll write a little about Turkey.