Xe Were a Symbol of Patriarchy, so Skeletor Killed Xem

I can’t get used to the spectacle of watching America crumble around me. It’s like the earthquake scene in the first Superman movie. Big chunks of my world keep falling from great heights and landing all around me.

Today’s casualty: He-Man.

In case, like me, you were grown when the first He-Man show came out, or, also like me, you thought it was just too dumb to watch, I can give you what little I know about it. A guy named Adam lives in a universe where another guy named Skeletor is trying to ruin everything. It’s like Adam is Trump, and Skeletor is AOC. In times of trouble, Adam transforms himself into a bodybuilder named He-Man, and he prances around in a bondage harness and fur jockstrap, fighting Skeletor and other evil people.

My understanding is that the sole purpose of creating the show was to produce a half-hour-long commercial for Mattel toys. If so, it was brilliant. Ordinarily, manufacturers have to pay networks to run their ads. Networks pay to run shows. If McDonald’s had thought of this, Ronald McDonald would have a talk show.

I guess I should make it clear that when I say “big chunks of my world” falling, I’m not saying He-Man is important to me. It meant a lot to millions of kids who had very poor taste in entertainment, and it still means a lot to a surprising number of adult nerds. It’s a big chunk of the world I live in, but I won’t miss it.

Anyway, guess who ruined He-Man forever? Kevin Smith.

Maybe you have no idea who Smith is, so I’ll fill you in. Many, many years ago, Smith made a shoestring-budget film about two clerks who worked at a tiny New Jersey strip mall. He named it Clerks. The movie shocked the world by making money, and for a long time afterward, Hollywood was willing to risk actual movie budgets on Kevin Smith films. Over time, it gradually became apparent that Smith wasn’t a very good filmmaker. He had modest successes, buy he also poisoned various projects and found himself exiled to the lower strata of off-camera creative personnel.

After making Jersey Girl, which critics lined up to nuke, he did something very predictable: he made Clerks II, for the obvious reason that he realized he was not good at coming up with new ideas. When the movie was rolling out, he was quick to tell the world he wasn’t running back to his roots simply because he had failed in the big leagues. In doing so, he revealed that a) he probably was not the most truthful person on earth, and b) he was aware that critics and fans knew exactly what he was doing.

The movie made $27 million, which means it was profitable, but you have to balance that against its $5 million budget. Any movie will make money if you and your wife act in it, and you film it on your cellphone.

He is currently working on Clerks III, by unpopular demand.

Interesting thing: a movie has to make much, much more money than its budget in order to be profitable. I used to believe you just compared the budget to the box office take, but that’s wrong. The budget doesn’t include the cost of marketing the film, distributing it, and so on. Many flops have earned more than their budgets.

Kevin Smith is basically Quentin Tarantino without gifts for plot, structure, and action. Like Tarantino, he is great at writing funny conversations, but he can’t write a good story, and nothing of interest happens in his movies. If you like getting stoned or coked up and sitting around a table at a dive bar having funny conversations with your friends, you will like some of his films, but you will never mistake him for Guy Ritchie even Joss Whedon. He should be hiring himself out to soup up talking scenes in other people’s movies instead of trying to make his own.

Since you don’t care about He-Man spoilers any more than you care whether Mr. Whipple got therapy after they caught him squeezing the Charmin, I’ll just tell you what Kevin Smith did. Netflix made a new He-Man series, and they hired Kevin Smith to direct it. He killed He-Man in the first episode and replaced him with…you’ll never guess…a woman!

Why do people keep hiring Kevin Smith?

His series got a 33% rating at Rotten Tomatoes, which, in my experience, is the best site for gauging whether or not a movie or show is bearable. A rating of 33% means a movie is comparable to spending two hours passing a kidney stone. In the comments to the official trailer on Youtube, He-Man’s fans are universally enraged. One called him “Karen Smith.” People are calling the show “She-Man” and “He-Ma’am.”

Imagine this. You’re a Tom Sawyer fan. Hollywood says it’s coming out with a brilliant film about Tom’s continuing adventures. For months, you look forward to it. Then you stand in line to see it on the first day, and 4 minutes after the opening credits, Indigenous Person Joe blow’s Tom’s head off with a shotgun, and from then on, the movie is about Becky Thatcher, a black girl who has male genitalia. That’s how crazy Smith’s series is.

The unnerving thing about He-Man’s assassination is that it was so predictable. It’s exactly what you would expect Kevin Smith, or any other director capable of being hired these days, to do.

Also disturbing: critics claim they love She-Man. Their reviews and those of actual fans seem to have been written in different universes, about different shows. Obviously, fans hate the show, but critics are either afraid to say so because their employers are Ewokes, or the critics are, themselves, Ewokes.

No one over the age of 8 should care what happens in a stupid cartoon or movie, but He-Man’s abrupt firing is part of a broader pattern. Masculinity is being stamped out. Whiteness is officially a problem. Christianity is considered evil. Jews are seen as aggressors in the Middle East. Everything is topsy-turvy, like never before.

Iron Man is a woman. Thor is going to be a woman. A shockingly wrinkled and non-dashing James Bond will be humiliated and replaced by a black woman if the next film ever comes out. Captain Marvel is a woman. The Ghostbusters are women. On the other hand, there is no Wonder Man, nor will there be a Black Widower, Scarlet Warlock, Cat Man, or Biff the Vampire Slayer.

Now that I think about it, our president will soon be replaced by a black woman, barring a medical miracle.

All the things I’ve been predicting for years are happening. It’s real. The world is going insane in preparation for the revelation of the Antichrist.

I would say Jews felt like this in Germany and Austria in the 1930’s, except they didn’t have any prophets telling them the future. I guess godly Jews felt this way when Nebuchadnezzar came to call, and I suppose Christians had this feeling when Rome’s armies surrounded Jerusalem.

The big difference between modern people and those I mention above is that we have nowhere to go. In 1935, Jews could leave Europe, and in 590 B.C. and 65 A.D., Jews and Christians could leave Israel. We, on the other hand, are stuck here. There is no alternative Earth for us to flee to.

As if things could not get any weirder, leftists tycoons are now fleeing to New Zealand and building multi-million-dollar bunkers. If you have $10 million to invest, New Zealand will give you residency. Leftists ridicule prophecy, and they claim to support all the “progressive” things that are being done to destroy civilization, so why would they flee? It looks like they know what’s happening and plan to keep the pedal to the metal, regardless. Maybe they want the apocalypse but don’t want to be personally inconvenienced.

Who thinks like that? If you thought your own policies would lead to a civil war or other manifestations of chaos, why would you continue to hold them?

Of course, there are plenty of conservative Christians who actually look forward to civil war, so it’s not like all the people with extremely poor judgment are leftists.

I wonder what’s next. The Ex-Men? The Queen Lantern? Wonder if She’s a Woman? Aunt Man?

How about some things for the kids? Peter Pansexual. Popeye and Bluto Redecorate the S.S. Brokeback.

What’s happening in the runup to the rapture is like Atlas Shrugged, except no one is flying Christians to a hidden city in the Rockies.

I wish someone would send me an invitation with directions to the place where Jesus will pick me up. I would get in the car right now. I wouldn’t even put on my shoes.

This Seems Totally Normal to Me

When I asked my new wife Rhodah what her favorite food was, all she said was, “meat.” It was nice to hear that in these times of self-righteous, controlling vegetarian women.

When we got together in Egypt, I took homemade beef jerky and dried apples to keep me alive on flights. Naturally, she took a big share of the jerky. Now she wants me to bring more, as well as a good supply of dried apples and Colgate toothpaste with Scope. I had a nearly-fresh tube with me on the trip, and she confiscated it. Now she’s hooked.

Recently, a mouse invaded my house. Before I managed to trap it and stamp on it, it found my jerky stash. I had a lot of inviting foods within mouse reach, but it only broke into the jerky and a bag of emergency rice. It nibbled on some containers holding bird food, but it gave up before it got in.

Jerky was clearly the mouse’s favorite item, and that makes sense, because making each bag required about two pounds of fresh beef. Jerky is expensive, and pests always destroy the expensive stuff. Now beef prices are going insane, just when I have to replace my contaminated jerky and also make more for Rhodah.

Yesterday, I got a blessing. A local store was selling London broil, which makes very nice jerky, for $4 per pound. I bought about 5 pounds. I may go back today and buy 5 more. Maybe I should buy 10 more and load up the freezer. I don’t want to spend the whole week making jerky. If I freeze it, I can dry it later. I doubt freezing has any serious effect on the texture and flavor of jerky.

I have around 2.5 pounds of marinated beef in the dehydrator right now, and I have over a pound marinating. I decided to use the same marinade twice. What kind of bacteria can grow in cold soy sauce and Worcestershire with added hot pepper sauce? Reusing the marinade will save me a couple of bucks.

I have discovered that the dehydrator will hold about 9 pounds. I need to get about that much meat together before turning the machine on again. These small batches increase the work.

Here’s a useful tip: you can finish jerky in the fridge. Your refrigerator IS a dehydrator, as you have surely already noticed. I want my jerky heated to reduce germs and add flavor, but once it has been heated, it can go in the fridge if it comes out too wet.

Will jerky and other emergency foods save us if society gets crazier and food gets scarce? I doubt it. Even if I store enough food for 6 months, which is pretty optimistic at my character level, a real food disaster would last longer than that, and we would still starve. I’m not sure why I bother. I guess doing something feels better than doing nothing.

Maybe we could manage to grow our own food, given 6 months to try. That’s something to think about. The soil here is useless, the weeds and pests are overwhelming, and it’s impossible to grow food by conventional means, but we might be able to build raised beds and fence them in.

I have read that potatoes do well in sand, which is the kind of soil I have. That would be helpful. Potatoes are high in calories and vitamin C. Sweet potatoes might grow here, too.

Protein is the big challenge. I think I could reliably kill three squirrels a week without running out, but that would change if desperate neighbors started poaching. You can eat any mammal, so coons and other pests could make our menu, and crows, which we have in abundance, are supposedly delicious. There was a time when people who ate them called them “black partridges.” Maybe things wouldn’t be so bad.

Crows are very smart, though. I could probably kill 10 today if I tried, but would they be as cooperative tomorrow?

One big advantage to eating crows is that most people would be slow to start. I doubt anyone here would try them until they ran out of other ideas.

In any case, I look forward to having jerky again. The store stuff can’t compare to homemade.

I hope Rhodah will let me keep some.

Florida Upswing Defies Logic

Florida is a giant coronavirus hotspot! We just had over 50,000 new cases pop up in one day! Or did we?

Florida is home to a person who will certainly be the GOP presidential candidate, or his running mate, in 2024. Keep that in mind. The worse our stats look, the more hope Democrats have of reelecting a dementia patient. They want to blame the local coronavirus upsurge on our governor, Rick DeSantis.

The list of worst-hit areas includes blue strongholds in California and northeastern states. I wonder how DeSantis managed to infect people over a thousand miles away, under the watchful eyes of infallible leftist politicians.

Here’s something interesting: at more or less the same time, the nation of Zambia had a new wave of cases. Zambia and Florida have about the same populations. Both places have the delta variant, which is supposedly the reason for Florida’s monster virus wave.

Facts to keep in mind: Florida’s vaccination rate is around 50%. Zambia’s rate is under 1%. Zambians don’t practice social distancing in any serious way. I know this from watching them on live video as my wife moves about in the capital, Lusaka. They have things like Zoom classes for students, but when people are out and about, they don’t stay far apart. They do wear masks, but then they were also wearing masks when their recent case increase started. Masks didn’t stop it.

Contrast: Zambia’s case numbers have plummeted. Their wave is nearly over, and Florida’s chart shows a continued increase. Why?

It’s not the masks. Even pro-maskers don’t claim masks are that effective. It’s not vaccines. Zambians aren’t getting them. It’s not social distancing, because Zambians aren’t doing anything Floridians aren’t doing.

I am not against vaccines. Let me make sure I say that. I am for anything that actually works and doesn’t destroy our economy or our civil rights.

I got the J&J vaccine. I don’t trust the mRNA vaccines because they mess with genetic material. Doctors tell us they don’t affect our DNA, but then doctors have told us many, many things that were the opposite of true. They said cocaine wasn’t addictive, and they also told us to eat lots of trans-fats. I believe in conventional vaccines, so I got one. Still, Zambians aren’t vaccinated, and their coronavirus wave dried up. Floridians are vaccinated, and our wave is supposedly increasing fast.

Here’s something else that’s weird: Florida is reporting new cases every other day, and the authorities are attributing all cases to the days when they report. On a day when they don’t report, the graph says zero. The next day, the chart will combine all cases for that day and the previous day. This is how we get a nasty-looking chart with scary daily figures. We aren’t really having 50,000-case days, but our keepers keep giving us graphs with 50,000-case bars.

Why are the authorities doing this? Could it be because they like those high, fictional, vote-swaying spikes?

Medical people lean way left, and they get tons of government money. They are rewarded financially for reporting coronavirus cases. Many coronavirus diagnoses are made subjectively, based on symptom presentations which can also be consistent with other illnesses. Should we trust our medical personnel to report honestly? I don’t.

Another interesting fact: Florida’s coronavirus death rate isn’t going up like the infection rate. Why? They’re telling us the new variant is worse than the original disease and kills younger people. Why is the death increase so small?

Florida is reporting insanely high infection numbers, but the death rate is lower than it was in April, before the wave hit. It’s comparable to the lowest rates we’ve had since spring of last year. It’s a little higher, but not much.

We haven’t come up with a flood of better treatments since April. The comparatively low death rate can’t be attributed to medical advances.

Could it be because vaccines are allowing infections but preventing deaths? It appears to be true that vaccines allow a lot of infections while preventing deaths, but if that explained the graphs, the death rate would still be a lot higher than it was in April. The number of vaccinated people hasn’t changed all that much since then.

Most people who are getting sick (we are told) are unvaccinated. I’m inclined to believe that, because the vaccines are generally believed to reduce infection rates. Our new wave of unvaccinated victims should be giving us a big increase in deaths. They are not. Why is that?

The natural explanation that seems to fit the death graph best is this: the infection numbers are grossly exaggerated.

I don’t know if it’s true, but it fits the facts which are available to me.

The only real conclusion you can draw from the confusion surrounding coronavirus is that “the science” isn’t up to this fight. Scientists and the politicians who obey them have no idea what’s happening. Their predictions fail over and over. Their protective measures, apart from vaccines, very clearly do not work, regardless of what studies seem to show. The only real study is reality, and it says masks and hiding don’t help.

Digression: when did the word “science” start requiring a definite article? I remember when we used to say “science,” period. Now we say, “the science.” Strange.

It’s fashionable to run around saying, “I trust the science,” but a) “the science” contradicts itself repeatedly, b) “the science” has failed to stop the pandemic, and c) “the science” used to tell us margarine would prevent heart attacks, train passengers would suffocate in tunnels, the dinosaurs became extinct because they were too big, fever patients and athletes shouldn’t be given water, and stomach ulcers were caused exclusively by stress, not bacteria.

Science has told us many stupid things, even recently. Remember global cooling? I do.

Science doesn’t like to talk about its howling errors, and the more recently they were made, the more it wants to cover them up. Fortunately, it has a helpful pal: “the journalism.”

My belief is that coronavirus makes no sense, and can’t be conquered by science, because it’s a plague with a supernatural origin, just like AIDS and syphilis. When things make no sense, there is often a supernatural cause.

Coronavirus has never made any sense. It made no sense when the Chinese government covered it up and spread it around the world. It made no sense when their domestic outbreak disappeared almost instantly. It made no sense when people who stayed home got the disease at much higher rates than people who walked around freely. It certainly made no sense when Andrew Cuomo sent infected people into nursing homes to kill thousands of vulnerable seniors.

We know coronavirus makes no sense, because scientists are on TV every day saying things like, “We think maybe,” and, “We don’t really know,” in connection with what should be very obvious questions.

Fauci has no idea what’s happening. Neither does Biden, although to be fair, you could say that about his efforts to work a smartphone or dress himself. The CDC is clueless. The only thing man has done so far that has helped has been to develop a few half-effective vaccines.

I think coronavirus is one of God’s efforts to humble mankind. It bobs and weaves like Floyd Mayweather, and our punches keep hitting the air. I expect this to continue.

In a rational world, there would have been global fasting and repentance. We would have abandoned sin. We would have flocked to churches. During the Black Death, people threw jewelry over monastery walls to please God, and the monks threw it back because they thought it would make them sick. The world isn’t acknowledging the fact that we brought this problem on ourselves by offending God over and over as a matter of policy.

The Bible shows that plagues don’t go away until people repent or God decides enough people have died. We are not going to repent, so I think we’ll just have to wait until God feels the punishment is sufficient. Maybe it will never stop. The common cold didn’t. Neither did the flu. Coronavirus seems likely to turn out to be the third major permanent plague.

People who are against God seem to be unified in one belief: conservatives and Christians are the reason the plague continues. It’s not the world’s newfound love of female sluttiness or male-on-male anal sex. It’s not the increasing popularity of paganism in once-Christian countries. It’s not the decline of Christianity. Humanity wants evil trends much more than it wants God, so it is convinced they’re indisposable. The problem has to be the Trump voters and bitter clingers.

We should not be surprised. Europeans blamed the Jews for the Black Death. Clearly, there was a connection between festering lymph glands and the consumption of gefilte fish.

Leftists and other anti-God factions want us gone from the planet. Many of them are eager to get the go-ahead so they can start killing us. Coronavirus is just more fuel for the fire of persecution.

The children of darkness have a murderous, irrational hatred for Christians and conservatives, and many Christians and conservatives have irrational phobias about vaccines. A number of us have even flipped out and committed crimes over mask requirements. Insanity rules on both sides. Evil spirits are successfully motivating untold millions of people, filling them with delusion because they don’t spend time with the Holy Spirit. He’s the only one who dispels all delusion, but only a tiny percentage of human beings commune with him every day.

It’s a recipe for widescale violence. The word says a spirit of murder will be released at the beginning of the tribulation, and we are already seeing it at work.

Murderous feelings are not just increasing among people with differing opinions about coronavirus; they are increasing, and leading to actual murders, among black people. I didn’t learn this until today. Most Americans are probably aware that there has been a gigantic increase in the murder rates in our cities since the pandemic started. What they may not know is that it’s a black phenomenon. Other groups haven’t been caught up in it yet. It’s very strange.

The press won’t tell us because their propaganda protocols forbid it; negative news about black people is to be suppressed.

Why would a murder epidemic hit black people and leave the rest of us nearly untouched? It makes no sense at all. It’s true that even before coronavirus, black people were committing over half of America’s homicides, but the rest of us were murdering nearly as many people. Our rates should have shot up, too, but they haven’t. Another strange thing: property crimes haven’t skyrocketed at the same time Why not? If a general atmosphere of lawlessness were the problem, wouldn’t burglars and rapists be affected?

It’s extremely odd. During Black Lives Matter’s biggest year, more blacks than ever were killed here. Only a very small percentage of people killed by blacks were not, themselves, black.

It’s almost as though God were mocking BLM. Maybe he is; BLM mocks him. Last year, about 8600 black people were murdered in the US, less than 200 were killed by police, only a tiny handful were killed wrongly by the police, and still, BLM ignores black murderers and their black victims and screams about defunding the only people who are paid to protect blacks from blacks.

Anyway, bad trends tend to hit black people first and then emerge into the general population. Consider illegitimacy, rap, and sagging. My feeling is that the murder problem is hitting blacks first because evil usually hits them first, and it will spread among other Americans later.

I don’t know why curses often hit black people first, but they clearly do. It doesn’t seem like it’s always behavior-related. During my time on the earth, I have developed the impression that bad things are more likely to happen to black people even when they are exemplary individuals. My suspicion is that it’s because they are fewer generations removed from witchcraft, and spirits that owned their ancestors don’t want to let go of them.

As non-blacks move farther from God and participate more and more in idolatry, we are probably moving toward a future in which most of us will have the same problems black people have.

I guess I’m rambling now. I don’t think human reason is going to save us from the pandemic. I suppose that’s my main point. I think we’re sliding into the tribulation, and things will get worse and worse because we refuse to admit guilt. I think we will eventually see old-style plagues that make us regret using the word “plague” to describe a minor problem like coronavirus. I believe it’s time to prepare so you have some chance of being raptured before things get really bad.

One More Door Closed

I was about to write, “I’m afraid I may start to appear obsessed with the rapture, but…”, and then I realized I don’t care if people think I’m obsessed with the rapture. If the rapture is really almost here, we should be obsessed with it. So here I go.

I have a Youtube channel. Actually, I have several, but Youtube denied me access to some by changing the login procedures. I guess the videos on those channels will be up, being ignored, when the Lord returns.

I don’t link to my main channel from my blog. I don’t have any desire to involve my blog readers with my videos.

Originally, my channel was about tools. Over time, it changed, and for quite a while, it has mostly been about God.

Yesterday I made a video about my recent boat dream. I was on a boat that started to sink, and I told someone to start the engines and get the boat moving so the water would run out. The dream was about prayer in tongues. When you don’t pray in tongues often enough, your life becomes like a sinking boat.

Last night, I tried to upload the video. Ordinarily, Youtube takes you through a few pages, and on the last page, you click a button labeled “Publish.” After that, the video finishes uploading, Youtube processes it, and it appears before your audience.

This time, the “Publish” button was greyed out. I was informed that Youtube would run a “check” on the video before it appeared. The ostensible purpose was to check for copyrighted material in order to prevent me from infringing.

Uploading finished some time last night. It’s 1:20 p.m., and the video is not published.

What’s happening? Will it ever appear? No idea.

Earlier today, when I realized the video was going to be a pain to publish, I felt God was telling me I didn’t have to do videos any more. I felt he was saying, “You said what I told you to say, and virtually no one listened. It’s only going to get worse. You are free to delete your channel so you won’t continue fighting a pointless battle.”

Yesterday, I had a similar feeling. I was praying with Rhodah. We were interceding for other people. We have a long list of people we have prayed for. I thought about all the people who hadn’t changed one bit since we started praying. I realized the problem wasn’t with God or ourselves. The people we had prayed for were refusing to change.

I came up with a list of people who had shown improvement, and we prayed for them. If you’re going to sow, you should sow in good soil. There is no point in continuing to pester God about people he has already tried to help.

I have been thinking about a lot of applicable scriptures.

A certain man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard; and he came and sought fruit thereon, and found none. Then said he unto the dresser of his vineyard, Behold, these three years I come seeking fruit on this fig tree, and find none: cut it down; why cumbereth it the ground? And he answering said unto him, Lord, let it alone this year also, till I shall dig about it, and dung it: And if it bear fruit, well: and if not, then after that thou shalt cut it down.

And into whatsoever city or town ye shall enter, enquire who in it is worthy; and there abide till ye go thence.And when ye come into an house, salute it. And if the house be worthy, let your peace come upon it: but if it be not worthy, let your peace return to you. And whosoever shall not receive you, nor hear your words, when ye depart out of that house or city, shake off the dust of your feet. Verily I say unto you, It shall be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah in the day of judgment, than for that city.

Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn again and rend you.

This all relates to the rapture. God is going to pull us out when our presence on earth ceases to produce adequate results. The phrase “turn again and rend you” is a description of persecution from an unreceptive world.

Jesus mentioned pearls because we are his pearls.

Again, the kingdom of heaven is like unto a merchant man, seeking goodly pearls: Who, when he had found one pearl of great price, went and sold all that he had, and bought it.

We have been taught that the pearls are the good things we say to other people about God, but that isn’t true. Jesus is the merchant in the parable, and Jesus had no need to buy the gospel. He bought the saved. The word says we were bought with a price. Jesus gave all he had on earth in exchange for us.

When Jesus went to towns where they rejected him, he didn’t stick around, begging and cajoling. He left quickly, sometimes speaking judgment against them.

Jesus isn’t going to leave his pearls here forever. There is a limit to what he will let us endure.

I don’t pray for my sister to be saved. I used to. Then God showed me she was the obstacle. I was willing, the many people who have prayed for her were willing, and God was willing. God didn’t deny our requests. My sister denied his.

In 2015, God told me he had cut my dad off. I stopped praying for his healing and salvation, knowing it was a waste of time. My dad became demented and sick, and it wasn’t until he had been nearly destroyed that he accepted salvation.

On the other hand, there are people who listen to me and put what I tell them to use. I don’t have to chase after them and beg them. Life is much better when I focus on such people. The others bring discouragement. They make me doubt God, even though they, not God, are the ones denying my prayers.

God gives up on people. That’s not a popular thing to say, but it should be repeated over and over. He gave up on Sodom and Gomorrah. He gave up on Pharaoh and the Egyptian army. He gave up on the entire world in Noah’s time. He gave up on the Hebrews under Moses, and Moses had to remind him of Abraham in order to dissuade him from killing them all. He will give up on you, too, if you become so stubborn you can’t be helped. It’s important to know when you’re fighting a battle God told you to give up.

I think God is about to give up on the world. He has given us every chance. He even sent a plague, and there has been virtually no effort on our part to repent and get relief. Even in the midst of a pandemic, the celebration of sin, including homosexuality and pride, is burgeoning like never before.

Revival is going nowhere. There are individuals who are being used successfully to save others, but the numbers are minimal. There is no big movement anywhere. God restored the Holy Spirit to us over 100 years ago, and the response has slowed to a trickle.

I used to think the rapture and tribulation couldn’t come until we saw armies surrounding Jerusalem. In the book of Luke, Jesus said this:

And when ye shall see Jerusalem compassed with armies, then know that the desolation thereof is nigh. Then let them which are in Judaea flee to the mountains; and let them which are in the midst of it depart out; and let not them that are in the countries enter thereinto. For these be the days of vengeance, that all things which are written may be fulfilled. But woe unto them that are with child, and to them that give suck, in those days! for there shall be great distress in the land, and wrath upon this people. And they shall fall by the edge of the sword, and shall be led away captive into all nations: and Jerusalem shall be trodden down of the Gentiles, until the times of the Gentiles be fulfilled.

He said that during a discussion of the end, but if you look at it closely, you can see it’s not about the apocalypse. It’s about the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. He said Jerusalem would be trodden down until the times of the Gentiles was fulfilled. That trampling, and that age, clearly started when the Romans sacked Jerusalem. Muslims are trampling the temple area right now.

When will the age of the Gentiles be fulfilled? When we become as hard-headed as the religious Jews of Jesus’ time. We’re already there.

Should I be so pessimistic about other people when I took so long to come around? After all, the Hebrews danced naked before a golden calf, and Moses still asked God to save them, and Abraham prayed for the Sodomites. I think it’s different today. Christians have been interceding for the lost practically forever, and they haven’t changed.

It seems like the world is stuck in the mud. Travel and commerce are restricted. The plague and the hysterical responses to it are getting worse, so relief may not be coming. All over the world, people are staying home and doing nothing. Maybe this is the end of progress. Maybe we’re just waiting for a big event.

It will be interesting to see how the year finishes.

Recurring Dream Explained

This morning I had a dream which seems to have been very helpful.

I was on my dad’s boat, fishing with a woman. I believe she was my first cousin. I was reeling in a sailfish. I couldn’t tell what it was until it got close to the boat. It was very thin, and it was black. I had the feeling that, somehow, it wasn’t a very good fish. It was as though the fish didn’t have much character, like a junkie who only goes to detox when there is absolutely no choice.

While I was reeling it in, I noticed the boat was sinking by the stern. I told the woman to go up on the flybridge, start the engines, and get the boat moving so the water would go out the scuppers.

I had had so many dreams like this, I wasn’t afraid of sinking. Telling her to start the mains seemed routine.

I looked off to the side of the boat, and I saw the head of an enormous shark. It looked like a great white. The whole shark would have been something like 50 feet long. It was waiting for the boat to sink.

The boat started to move, and the stern rose. Everything was fine.

I’ve had many dreams in which my dad’s boat started to sink. The answer was always to fire up the engines and start moving. I never thought about the deep meaning of getting underway in order to keep from sinking.

I’ll give my interpretation of the dream.

The boat is my life. The woman is people I’ve helped to get close to God. My cousin is a person who has suffered a lot of rejection. She’s exactly the kind of person God chooses.

Fishing is evangelism. Fish are people you reach for God. The black, skinny fish was a bad harvest. It represented people who pretty much have to be dragged to the altar, whining the whole way. The dregs.

Starting the engines and getting underway is praying in tongues. Sinking is falling under the power of the unsaved world and the people and spirits who make it up. The shark is Satan, waiting for me to sink so he can have me. He can’t sink the boat, but he can have me if I let it sink.

The lesson is that if I don’t keep praying in tongues, I am going to be overwhelmed by the cursed world and sink in it. If I keep praying in tongues, I will stay afloat. I think the sailfish shows that the harvest is getting very thin, but I’m not sure.

In the Bible, the Sea of Galilee symbolized Satan’s stolen world. When Peter sank, it showed what happens to us when we don’t focus on Jesus. He was not able to stay above the water using his own faith. He made it a few steps, and then Jesus had to lift him. Only God can lift us out of the world’s clutches, and he only does it when we focus on him instead of the waves.

Noah and his family floated while everyone else sank. Moses was saved because he floated on water until he was pulled out. The Hebrews walked toward their promised land on dry sand between walls of water. Jesus didn’t just walk on water; he walked on the storm above the water.

Noah’s contemporaries sank. The Egyptian army sank. Jonah sank. He was in rebellion against God. He hid his face from him.

When you pray in tongues, the water of God fills you, and it drives out the water of the world. Water is voices and words. When you focus on the world, as Lot’s wife did, the water of the world pours into you, and you start to sink.

This is why God tells people to get rid of secular entertainment and stop using social media. These things fill you up and make you sink down to where the sharks can get you.

My first rapture dream involved floating. I was sitting on the floor, and I started rising as though water were rising under me. I can understand why God used that imagery.

I feel I should be praying in tongues whenever I can. I should develop the habit of praying in tongues all the time, except when I have to focus on something else.

The rapture and the start of the tribulation are the same thing. One person’s flood is another person’s salvation.

God has said he won’t destroy the world with water again, so the rapture won’t be a flood of physical water, but the supernatural water of filthy voices and words is now a flood, and it gets higher every day. Eventually, it will lift God’s children off the earth, and Satan’s children will stay here under the water. That’s fair, since it comes from their mouths.

The Revelation says Satan sent a flood from his mouth to carry away the woman who gave birth to the Messiah. We see that flood today all around us, from leftists and the disgusting people who contribute to the rot of our culture. Jesus said the things a man says defile him, and the same goes for Satan.

If you can defile yourself by speaking, you can sanctify yourself by speaking. That’s how the symmetry works.

I plan to try to keep speaking in tongues during the day. I am sure it will pay off, because it always has.

If This Isn’t the Bottom, it Will Do Till it Comes

I don’t know how well my readers keep up with public morals. Maybe it will be helpful for me to let you know about a couple of new music videos.

The singer in the videos calls himself Lil Nas X. Apparently all rappers have to be “Lil” something. He is a homosexual. He is a pagan. Not long ago, he started selling converted Nike sneakers called Satan Shoes. Every shoe had liquid in the sole, and supposedly, the liquid contained human blood. The shoes said “Luke 10:28” on the sides.

One of his new videos is called “Industry Baby.” It’s supposed to be a protest against incarcerating criminals. I have not seen the video, but I have read a description, and a disturbing still popped up on my Youtube feed. In the video, Mr. X goes to prison. When he arrives, he dances naked with a group of naked black men. Their genitals are blurred digitally.

In another video called “Montero,” he goes to hell and gives Satan a lap dance. He says, “I’m not fazed; only here to sin.”

The worst thing about these videos is that the public loves them. Americans love a video full of naked, dancing homosexuals and another video showing a homosexual giving Satan a lap dance.

These are popular mainstream videos. “Montero” reached number one on the charts. Your kids can log into Youtube and see them. They’ve already seen them, unless you’re very lucky.

I wish it were possible to take this video back to 1950 and show it to Americans so their reactions could be filmed.

Some people say I’m an alarmist and that America is just going through one of its normal culture swings. It’s pointless to address blindness that profound. America is finished. It’s obvious to you, or it isn’t. If it’s not, all the explaining in the world can’t help you. There was an election. Jesus ran against Satan. We elected Satan. Now America belongs to him.

Our culture is the world’s culture. Foreigners follow us. The problem is global.

How long can it be until Jesus comes to get us? How much more filth will we have to endure? Is it still worth it for God to wait? Is the number of people being saved greater than the number of people losing their salvation? We have to be close to the crescendo.

How much lower can we sink? Maybe this year we’ll see music videos featuring naked women with dogs.

Moses must have felt like this the first time he came down the mountain with God’s tablets. He looked at the pagan Hebrews and saw them singing naked before the golden calf, and he threw the tablets down and shattered them.

The scene he saw must have been a lot like a modern rap video. Naked people, singing and dancing for Satan.

Moses told those who belonged to God to take swords and kill people who worshiped the calf, and after that, God sent plagues among the Hebrews.

God isn’t going to respond with violence now, although plagues are already here. He’s not going to tell us to grab our rifles and kill Satan’s children. Things don’t work that way under the new covenant. He has to do something, though. We can’t stay here indefinitely while the sewage rises past our chins, and we can’t put an end to the world’s decline into damnation.

I don’t think there is any hope of recovery. God doesn’t override free will, and the will of the people is fixed against him.

Meanwhile, my own life is like a bulletproof, stink-proof bubble. I’m not out raging in the streets. I’m not involved in the vaccine wars or the coronavirus passport wars. I’m sitting in my comfortable home, waiting for Fedex to bring an engagement ring. I’ll also be working on travel plans today so my wife and I can enjoy a luxurious honeymoon in Europe. We’ve already spent time praying in tongues together and discussing prophetic dreams and the decline of mankind, and we intend to pray again today. It’s like the lost live on one planet, and we live on another.

Why am I waiting for an engagement ring two weeks after my wedding? It took a long time to have it made. As I’ve written before, I gave Rhodah one of my mother’s old rings when I proposed. It was just a marker.

The jeweler sent me an email describing the ring. She said it looked so good, she had shown it off to her coworkers. She said I had knocked it out of the park. I hope that is true, but I can imagine a jeweler saying that to every customer.

It will certainly be much prettier than the lookalike diamond rings nearly all women get. Now it just has to survive an appraisal. After that, I can hand-deliver it to Rhodah in Spain, assuming Spain is where we start our honeymoon.

Last night I finally got some good information on Stockholm. I watched a long video from a travel Youtube named Rick Steves. It turns out there is more than enough to do there to keep us occupied for two weeks. Our intended destinations are Iceland, Sweden, and Andorra, and Andorra involves a bus ride from Spain. I’ve been trying to find things to do in these countries, and I had been afraid Stockholm would be as boring as Scandinavian humor. If Stockholm can amuse us for two weeks, it will, of course, work very well for the shorter time we intend to spend there.

I didn’t want to go to Spain at first. The impressive cultures in Europe are found in places like France, England, the German-speaking nations, the Netherlands, Russia, Greece, and Italy. In my mind, Spain is more of a middlebrow destination. There is almost no great Spanish literature, for example, and the composers and artists are weak. Also, I’m concerned that it may remind me of South Florida. It may not be so bad, though. I looked at a video last night, and Spain seemed more like a serious country than Cuba, Mexico, and Miami. The construction looks nice. Things seemed to be maintained well. I didn’t see a lot of poor-taste architecture. Maybe we should budget several days in Barcelona and see what happens. The food certainly looks promising.

I think we will probably ditch Iceland. Reykjavik looks like a low-stimulation city. I am told Iceland’s appeal lies in the rural areas. They have a highway called the Ring Road, and it surrounds the nation. You’re supposed to rent a vehicle and see all the natural spectacles on the road, and this takes about two weeks. I’m sure it’s fun, but I’m not spending two weeks in Iceland, and I would much prefer the museums, cruises, and continental food of Sweden.

Iceland would add a couple of thousand dollars to the cost of the trip, for very little return.

Iceland has one attraction Sweden can’t match: The Blue Lagoon. I capitalize the words because it’s a business. They had hot runoff water from a geothermal project, so they diverted it into a natural rock basin. The rock is white (or they painted it). They created a giant outdoor pool which is light blue. You can stand in it and get drunk. People don’t seem to swim or sit. Unfortunately, you have to buy a ticket, and the cheapest ticket costs about a hundred bucks. Also, you have to book your spot days in advance.

Sounds like a lot of fun, doesn’t it? You get herded to your spot, which you can’t leave, and when your time is up, they tell you to get out. While you’re there, you stand in non-chlorinated water thousands of tourists stood in before you got there. And I’m sure they all got out when they had to urinate, just like Americans.

I don’t get hot springs. I have a bathtub. What’s the difference? I don’t like hot tubs, either. Why would I want to sit in water where strangers soak their backsides and privates?

Bathwater is bathwater. Adding a pump, some bubbles, and a giant margarita doesn’t change that.

A friend’s sister told me a story while she and two friends were staying at the Cheeca Lodge resort in Islamorada. They were enjoying a hot tub, and some other guests came along and started badgering them to get out. They were offended.

The other guests walked off for a minute. Two of the girls got out of the tub. The third concentrated for a few seconds, said she was finished, and got out as well.

Iceland also has small, natural hot springs outside the city. They present challenges, however. If you’re not familiar with your spring, you may wade into an area hot enough to cook your skin. That has to be fun. I’ve never seen a blister the size of a welcome mat.

These are the things I concern myself with while America watches naked homosexuals dance on mainstream TV.

The ring just arrived. Have a nice day.

You and Your Feelings May go to Hell

I used to wonder how a few decades of sin could reasonably ground a sentence of eternity in the lake of fire. One day, I got what I now think was a revelation. The more exalted the person you sin against, the greater the punishment should be. God is much better than we are, it’s impossible to comprehend, so a sin committed against him must be the worst possible type of offense.

This morning, I listened to Bill Wiese for a few minutes. He’s the author of 23 Minutes in Hell. In this book, he says God put him in hell for a short time. Now he goes around speaking at churches. Around 10 years ago, he spoke at a corrupt church I was attending. He seems to be telling the truth.

In the video I watched today, he rebutted myths about hell. One myth was the notion that a mere lifetime of sin shouldn’t be punished for eternity. To my surprise, he gave the same explanation I had received, and he cited Thomas Aquinas as a corroborating source.

I have no faith at all in any of the Catholic church’s sages. Their church is an idolatrous mess that belongs to Satan. Still, it was interesting to learn I wasn’t the first person to have the idea about punishment varying with the nature of the person offended, and even a blind hog finds an acorn once in a while.

Wiese said it would be much worse to punch his mother than his brother, and of course, that’s true. It’s also worse to harm old people than young people; in Florida, there are enhanced penalties for hitting people over 65. People who harm pregnant women get long sentences, unless they’re abortionists. Anyone who tries to harm a president or even jokes about it can get in very big trouble.

He went on to divide punishment into three types. The last type was retributive. It applies to people who go to hell. He says they go there because they deserve it. I don’t think that’s the best explanation. I also think he should talk about the lake of fire more than hell.

Hell is inside the earth, and like the earth, it won’t exist forever. You can’t spend eternity in hell. The Bible says the final destination for the damned is a lake of fire, and they will burn there forever. The lake of fire is not hell. The Bible says hell will be thrown into the lake of fire.

The creatures that go to the lake of fire certainly deserve it, but the best reason for putting them there is to keep them away from everyone else. Jesus earned heaven for the rest of us, and heaven can’t be heaven if filthy creatures are allowed to go there and associate with the chosen. The blessed earth of the Messianic Age can’t be blessed if we are still surrounded by, and dominated by, sexual degenerates, socialists, racists, liars, and rioters.

Wiese and other people who say they’ve been to hell say it stinks. Wiese says it stinks so badly that the smell alone would kill a living person. Why does it stink? We don’t dump garbage there. It should be impossible for bacteria to cause rot in a place heated by fire. The answer has to be that the stink comes from the damned themselves.

Living among filthy people here on earth is like wading in feces and urine. Even if you try to live right, you can’t help but be soiled a little. Their filth assaults you from computer screens, TV screens, and even billboards. Their filth sprays you when you hear them talk on the streets. Even if you live a blessed life here, if you love God’s ways, you long for a clean home free of BLM “murals”, “chestfeeding” “men,” Satan-worshiping musicians, and revolting pagan religions.

The rapture will be a huge relief to people who are tired of vile comedy, disgusting music videos, and government-backed coercion to participate in perversion and lies. We will be cleansed and improved, and finally, we will live among people who are like ourselves.

There will be no arguments. There will be no riots. We will all love each other. We will agree about everything. There will be no “woke” censorship, and no one will want to say anything that needs to be censored. There will be no secular government. There will be no taxes. There will only be one religion. There will be no carnal people blaming the blessed for their own self-inflicted poverty and trying to take what God gives his children.

Our bodies will be perfect. There will be no disease, deformity, or injury. Imagine that. There are no dentures or reading glasses in heaven.

We will be separated from the people and spirits that stink.

I watched another video today, from Messianic Rabbi Zev Porat. It was about scent. He went through a number of scriptures indicating that stench is a sign of disfavor. When people in ancient times fell into disfavor, they said they stank. For example, Jacob said his sons’ actions had made him stink to neighboring nations, and he was afraid they would come and destroy him.

I used to live in Miami, which is a vile city full of proudly trashy people. People there are rude, selfish, arrogant, ignorant, and ungodly. They have no class. Demon worship is huge there. Racism among Hispanics and blacks is also huge.

I came to hate Miami. Living there was a punishment. It was as though the whole county stank. When God moved me north, I was ecstatic. Since then, I have come to hate Miami more. You would think the sensation would wear off, but it increases. The more God cleans me up, the more distressed I am when I think of the years I wasted in Miami, among people who hate him.

Maybe this hurts your feelings because you live in Miami. There are a lot of stubborn people with hurt feelings in hell. Miami is packed with people who worship their feelings and get furious when someone tries to help with correction.

Being moved from Miami to Marion County was a type of rapture, just as giving up social media was a type of rapture. I gave up Marvel movies. That was a type of rapture. My latest little rapture: giving up fiction. I don’t read or watch it. God is closing the doors I opened to demons and trashy people.

God isn’t going to come down and grab carnal Christians who are happy fitting in with the crowd. He’s not going to rapture Christian pot smokers or those who are shacking up. He’s not going to take gay Christians or those who fight for their inclusion in the church. He’s going to take people who are already raptured internally. If you’re not sick of the earth, you will stay here.

Before being raptured from Sodom, Lot was vexed by the stink of the city’s sins. The Bible says so. When the angels came for him, he didn’t ask if he could have one more lap dance before he left. He didn’t go hug his wife’s gay friends. He didn’t complain. He took off with his rescuers and didn’t look back. His wife looked back, and she was killed along with the sinners. It was a picture of the way women tend to lead people into idolatry. If she had submitted to her husband, she would have lived, but she thought she knew better.

Lot’s departure is a picture of the rapture. God isn’t going to kidnap anyone. He’ll be coming for people who are eager to leave.

The rapture will be like dumping a girlfriend. Every man knows how this works. You don’t have an instantaneous conversion. You don’t cling to a woman in the morning and dump her in the afternoon. Things build up over time, and before you tell her she’s done, you discard her in your heart. One day you realize you’ve already abandoned her internally, so you decide to give her the news.

In my heart, I’ve already dumped the earth. I know many other people feel the same way. We’re just waiting for the buses.

We want to get away from the filth and stink. We have stench fatigue. We are thirsty for peace, love, agreement, and cleanliness.

Prayer and sacrifices please God, and the word says they smell good to him. Surely, then, people who belong to him also smell sweet. The rest stink and have no favor.

The word calls Satan the Lord of Dung and the Lord of Flies. What are demons like? Flies. They alight wherever they can and spread problems. What is dung like? It stinks, like sin. It draws flies.

We stink because we hate authority. We don’t give God honor. We dishonor people who should be honored. We have become a nation of punks. God hates a punk. Satan is a punk. He had no respect for the most high. He thought he could do better. Most people are very much like him now.

It’s amazing whom we choose to honor. We worship the most disgusting, diseased, infectious, punk celebrities ever. Whores and witches. Hateful toddlers in the bodies of wealthy men. Megan Thee Stallion. Kim Kardashian. Jay Z. Lady Gaga. Madonna. Illiterate athletes who beat their women and abandon their kids.

We used to honor people like Jesus, Moses, Abraham Lincoln, and George Washington. Now we despise them and everyone like them. The dominant culture is against them.

Jewish law doesn’t support convenience abortion, but it allows for the stoning of punks. You can read it for yourself. It shows how God feels about punks. A parent who has a worthless, insolent child is entitled to have him stoned to death. Americans worship worthless, insolent people, and we imitate them. We conform to their image instead of God’s.

I regret ever having or cultivating self-confidence. I can’t believe I fell for the religion of self-esteem. I regret learning to be disrespectful to God and my betters. Self-confidence is the punk’s drug of choice. The reality is that we are all evil, and none of us can do anything without God’s help. God told me this a while back: “It’s impossible to build anything without humility.” This is why he destroyed the tower of Babel. It was built without God’s help, in order to dethrone him and make men their own gods.

We don’t criticize ourselves enough. We don’t praise God enough. At church, they teach us to pray for money, healing, marriage, children, and relief from things like addiction. They don’t tell us to lie on our stomachs and apologize. They don’t tell us to admit we’re worthless and evil. They tell us we’re wonderful just as we are. When you don’t admit your faults, you tell God not to fix them, and he complies.

God is wonderful. He is right about everything. His ways are right. He has always made the very best decisions possible. It is your duty to honor him and love him and to despise everything that is against him. You also have a duty to honor every anointed person who comes to him in your name, and you have a duty to withhold honor from punks.

America has a punk culture, and many of us will get a punk’s reward. There will be no punks in heaven. No one will raise his hand to a parent or speak disrespectfully to anyone who speaks the truth. There will be no gangster rappers or heavy metal musicians. There will be no pride banners, nor will there be any such thing as critical race theory.

I keep praying for God to clean up and multiply the rapture people and come for us soon. I say “us” because I want to be among them. I don’t want to spend another year looking at news stories about castrated men winning prizes in women’s sports. I don’t want to be here when the gloves come off and civil war starts in earnest. I don’t want to see people using the huge inventory of guns and ammunition they’ve been buying since Obama was elected.

So far, I have never been told my income will be cut off because I refused to call a man “she.” I haven’t been forced to yell “Black lives matter” in order to avoid a beating. I haven’t had my wealth confiscated so it can be given to useless people who will buy drugs, beer, and lottery tickets with it. I don’t want to be on earth when these things get close to me. I hope I will never have to say “President Harris.”

My suggestion is to ask God to start rapturing you now. The longer you wait, the harder it will be.

Honeymoon Options Down to Four

Rhodah and I just scored two new countries in our search for acceptable honeymoon destinations: Spain and Andorra.

I can travel all over the place without a hassle, even though my state is running about 10,000 new coronavirus cases per day. Rhodah, as a Zambian, is about as welcome internationally as a new airborne variant of cholera. We found out the Swedish embassy in Lusaka would process visas for both Sweden and Iceland, so we made an appointment, and I told her to ask them to name every other country they represented and to apply for visas to all of them.

Today they told her they processed Spanish visas, and that made me think of Andorra.

In case you don’t know, Andorra is the Liechtenstein of the Pyrenees. Resting between Spain and France, it’s one of Europe’s smallest countries. Even smaller than Otisburg. The people there are wealthy, and it’s a tax haven. It’s sort of like a little Catalan-speaking Switzerland.

Andorra features beautiful mountains, tax-free shopping, and excellent food. It has the disadvantage of being somewhat like Spain, which makes it at least a little bit like Miami, but you can’t have everything. About 70% of the residents are foreigners, so maybe I won’t feel like I’m in Little Havana. The official language is Catalan, not Spanish. That gives me hope.

To get into Andorra, all you need is a way into France or Spain. Andorra doesn’t issue visas. They just assume you’re okay if you made it to the border.

Although Andorra is a wealthy country, hotel rates are not particularly high. Another plus.

We spent some time trying to create a viable itinerary including Iceland, Sweden, and Andorra, but I don’t think it’s realistic. We are going to be stuck in Spain for one or two nights, and that cuts down on our time to visit desirable countries. My feeling is that it’s time to cut Iceland loose. It’s a hard choice, because Sweden isn’t all that exciting, either, but Sweden looks like the lesser of two evils.

Rhodah has not traveled much, so she wants to hit a lot of destinations in a short time. I think there is a better way. My feeling is that it’s better to spend 10 days in one location than 5 days in 10.

My mother made the mistake of inviting my aunt along on a trip to Europe, and my aunt had never been out of the country. She made the second mistake of choosing an organized tour. Once they were in Europe, my aunt caused problems by insisting they take part in every single outing and activity the tour company lined up for them. My mother was too busy to enjoy herself. It’s easy to go abroad and end up spending way too much time on planes and in buses, trains, and cabs, rushing around.

Oriental tourists have a reputation for zipping around in buses, taking pictures of themselves in front of things. They used to, anyway. A friend of mine told me about seeing them pour out of buses and line up in front of landmarks. The Asian at one end would run forward, turn around, and take a photo. Then the next Asian would follow suit. When everyone had taken a picture, they got in the bus and left. This is not tourism. This is documentation. It’s like birdwatching, except you’re the bird.

The people he saw learned nothing at all about the places they visited. Saying you’ve been to a country after acting like that is like saying you’ve been to the Grand Canyon because you saw it from a plane window.

My buddy Mike had a worse situation than I do. His girlfriend wanted to go to Paris for a weekend. Fly in on Friday. Spend Saturday and Sunday rushing around to see the highlights. Home on Monday night. It would have been a total waste of time and money. They would have felt awful on Saturday as well as the tiny fragment of Friday they would have experienced, and they would still have been jet-lagged on their return flight.

She also wanted to fly in early in the day. Fine idea, except the difference between an early arrival and a later arrival was $1800, or maybe $150 per hour per person, on the most unpleasant, least-rewarding day of the trip. Kind of steep when only one party is paying.

Her work schedule made it impossible for her to get more free time. I’m glad Rhodah and I don’t have that problem.

In the end she was unable to go at all because of the possibility she would get stuck in France because of a positive coronavirus test. She has kids. Now they’re going to a beach in Florida, in the summer. Who does that? Not me, thank God. If I absolutely had to go to a beach in the summer, I’d go to Long Island or the Carolinas. Definitely not one of Florida’s low-grade beaches.

Anyway, we are now leaning toward two main destinations plus some unavoidable time in Barcelona. There is pretty much no Spanish-speaking destination I want to see. To me, they’re in the same pile as Muslim countries and drab Eastern European nations where donkeys sleep indoors and women, being less valuable, are kept in barns. Live in Miami for a few decades, and you may also develop an allergy to Spanish.

Maybe I should go to Colombia to get over it. The Colombians I’ve known were easygoing, polite, and very friendly. Hispanics from different countries are different.

I have had some concerns about how much time we should spend abroad and how much I should spend, but I’m starting to wonder if it matters.

Last night, I was watching Youtube before bed, and I came across a video about the meteor which supposedly killed the dinosaurs. They call it Chicxulub. I decided I wanted to see a video of an animated simulation of the crash, but no good ones turned up. Instead, I started seeing videos from the 1998 movies Deep Impact and Armageddon.

In 1998, true to form, Hollywood displayed its inability to produce original ideas by simultaneously releasing two movies about asteroids hitting the earth. In one movie, a team flew to the asteroid and blew it up. In the other, Earth shot missiles at the asteroid and failed to bring it down, so the world ended, putting an abrupt halt to Morgan Freeman’s white-privilege-poking presidency.

I had no interest in watching this kind of thing when I turned the TV on, but here I was, watching, on the same day I saw videos about supposed once-in-a-millennium floods in China and Europe. I had also been reading about people getting coronavirus twice, although there is reason to doubt at least some of those stories.

While I was praying later, I started talking to God about the tribulation. I started asking if the end was really upon us.

Sometimes when I pray, I’ll hear a phrase over and over, so I’ll write it down. I think they come from God. They have proven reliable so far. A year or two back, I heard, “Almost done.” I thought God was talking about the current age.

Last night, I kept hearing, “Armageddon.”

Was it God? Was it me? Was it a spirit? I don’t make any claims.

If the end of the world, preceded by the rapture, is imminent, then who cares how long my honeymoon is or what I spend? I’ve only flown first class once or twice in my life. Maybe it’s time to live it up.

Hmm. A first-class ticket to Barcelona would cost at least $8000. Are there really people who pay that? We would probably spend around $80,000 on tickets if we went that route. I hate to sound cheap, but…

The world seems stuck. It seems like nothing is going forward. Even the Olympics are blighted. They aren’t allowing people to attend, so when you check out events, you see quiet, empty stadiums where the only people are TV crews, coaches, and the strange, unhappy, often drug-distorted characters who devote their lives to the procurement of fleeting glory most of us don’t even notice.

They’re holding the 2020 Olympics, and it’s 2021. What will they do in 2022? It’s silly enough to have the games every two years. Things will look even worse when they hold them two years in a row.

I would be perfectly happy to leave the earth from Andorra, holding my wife. The prospect of a future full of new variants, decreased freedom, increased leftist oppression and violence, shortages, and chronic guerrilla warfare is not inviting.

By tomorrow, we should have enough information to create an itinerary. I am looking forward to trying some of that crazy Spanish ham.

Plus Indoor Hunting Adventures

Yesterday, I went squirrel hunting. In my living room.

Ordinarily, this type of activity takes place outdoors and during squirrel season, but this situation was a little different.

I was sitting with Marvin, watching Youtube, when I started hearing banging noises. It sounded like someone was outside vandalizing my air conditioner. I got up and looked, but I couldn’t see any problems. I considered grabbing a rifle.

The noises persisted, and eventually, I realized they were coming from the fireplace. I was not happy about this. A few days earlier, I had seen a fat mouse hop out of the fireplace and run out of the room. I had to put poison and traps out, and before long, the mouse had defiled $40 worth of magnificent beef jerky plus a big bag of rice. I think the mouse is dead now, because he definitely ate the poison, and the Internet says it’s lethal after one feeding. I hope this is true. I haven’t smelled dead mouse yet.

Hearing the noise in the fireplace, I was afraid the mouse’s family was dancing in the flue. I got a light and started poking around, and whenever I jiggled the flue, I heard something big jumping and scampering.

The flue got stuck, and when I applied a little too much force, it opened, and a stinking squirrel landed in the fireplace. I jumped back because I was not eager to be chewed up by a vicious rodent. The squirrel ran into a corner of the fireplace and hid behind my portable light.

I had a problem. There is no way a human being can catch a squirrel. If he had left the fireplace, he would have gone God knows where, and I would have had to share the house with a starving squirrel until he got too weak to hide. By then he probably would have destroyed half of my possessions, and poop would have been everywhere.

I prayed he would stay in place, and I went and got my useless, overpriced pellet rifle. I paid $500 for it, and I have shot it maybe twice. I figured a .22 would damage the fireplace after passing through the squirrel, so the pellet gun was the way to go.

Finding pellets held me up. Then I had to look for goggles in case I had a ricochet. Then the gun refused to cock. I finally got it done. I went to the fireplace, held the gun’s muzzle close to the squirrel, and blasted him. I was hoping to hit the upper body, but it’s not easy to aim a gun at something 8 inches away, especially when you have to work around a plastic light and a big grate.

Sadly, the squirrel did not die immediately. It ran out of the fireplace and into the kitchen. Then it ran to the stairs, started running upstairs, turned around, and went into my bedroom. It ran to the sliding doors, which were closed. Then it went in the bathroom through the east door.

I shut the bedroom door to keep it from going out into the house, I opened the sliding doors, and I went in the bathroom from the west door to see if I could chase the squirrel out. He was not in the bathroom, but I saw a big smear of blood on the floor.

As far as I can determine, he ran out the sliding doors, and I hope he is now dead. The plan was not to make the squirrel suffer. I just wanted him out of my life.

The big lesson I have learned here is that as a former Miamian, I need to learn about fireplace and chimney operation and maintenance. I don’t know how the mouse and squirrel got into the chimney, and I need to keep the flue shut tightly so anything that makes it into the chimney is prevented from entering the house.

I think one problem was that the flue was not closed properly. When it’s really closed, it’s hard to open. It sticks. A rodent could never pry it open. When I started fiddling with it yesterday, it was not closed well. There were little gaps through which I could see into the chimney.

Another problem: filthy creatures are able to enter the chimney from above. I have to go up on the roof and see what the problem is. Surely there is some kind of metal feature designed to keep animals out.

When the flue opened all the way yesterday, dirt and dead bugs fell out. I think maybe rodents have been catching bugs and eating them in the chimney.

I learned some things about rat poison. The one you want is called bromethalin.

Anticoagulants like warfarin (coumadin) have been popular for decades, but rodents develop resistance to them, and they have to eat a lot before the poisons kill them. Bromethalin is better. It’s a nervous system poison, and the rodents die after a single serving. A poisoned mouse may live for a couple of days and pollute your precious beef jerky before he croaks, but he will croak.

Another good thing: bromethalin will not poison predators. If you poison squirrels with it, they will poop it out before dying, so you don’t have to worry about killing hawks and owls that eat their bodies. Disadvantage: it won’t kill feral cats, coyotes, coons, or possums, either.

I have too many squirrels, and shooting them is inefficient. I have mice in my outbuilding. I can put bromethalin bait out and thin the herd, and it will benefit not only me, but all the birds of prey in the vicinity.

I’ll bet you can find a website that says bromethalin kills all sorts of desirable wildlife. That’s leftist nuts for you. They would spin fables about water if they thought it killed vermin.

Maybe I could maintain a bird feeder if I used bromethalin. I could put a poison station beneath it for the squirrels. I don’t think a bird would try to eat it. It comes in huge, hard chunks. Maybe there is a way to do it.

Tomcat is a brand of promethalin baits. You can get it at Home Depot.

In other news, the tribulation really does seem to be rumbling to life. It appears to be manifesting in the weather. Europe has been having crazy floods. I think I wrote about the European problems. Germans have been dying. Germans! When you read that it rained in India and a hundred or a thousand people died, it’s not surprising, because India is a backward country full of people who lack common sense. The Germans are different. They’re sharp, and they are very responsible. In order for a flood to kill Germans, it has to be truly exceptional.

China has had floods. Dams have burst.

It’s funny how people who dislike God seem to pick up on the approach of the end. Far-left extremist Maureen Dowd just published a column about the floods, entitled Apocalypse Right Now. Unfortunately, she sees the floods as proof conservatives cause all the world’s problems. She says the flooding was caused by global warming.

There is a huge problem with that argument, and it’s pretty obvious. Global warming is a slow process. It can’t happen in one year, between 2020 and 2021. If the globe is warming, and if it causes flooding in Europe, then we would have seen floods for a number of years. The floods wouldn’t just leap out and surprise us. There is no gradual trend of increased flooding in Europe. Had there been, Europeans would have been ready this year instead of getting caught totally unprepared.

Leftists love to point to any example of bad weather and blame capitalism. They did it after the active hurricane season of 2005. After that, we had a bunch of very quiet years. Where did global warming’s hurricane-stimulating effects go during those years? Same place the left’s hysterical claims went. They shut up when the evidence turned against them. They only listen to “the science” when it agrees with their economic and social justice theories.

When conservatives say cold weather proves global warming doesn’t exist, leftists love to say, “Weather isn’t climate.” This means “weather” describes short-term events, whereas “climate” describes conditions that change very slowly over many years. Maureen Dowd is doing exactly what leftists accuse us of doing. Europe had one rainy summer, and she says it proves her view of the climate, which just happens to go hand-in-hand with environmental extremism, the destruction of industry, redistribution of wealth from responsible countries to chaotic ones, and socialism, is correct.

The evidence for climate change is not good, and the evidence that mankind causes it is even worse, but that doesn’t prevent leftists from latching onto sporadic weather events and trying to use them to prove Karl Marx was right. Marx is their messiah. Christians do the same thing. We look at the world and try to prove events prove Jesus is God, and sometimes we go too far. One big difference, however, is that many of our efforts are supported by prophecy.

Dowd’s irrational, facile column is evidence the tribulation may be near. Prophecy says God will release a spirit of murder into the world. Dowd is intolerant and irrational. She sees “them” (us) as the source of humanity’s problems, much as the Nazis saw the Jews, Gypsies, and Communists as wellsprings of humanity’s ills. Dehumanizing and demonizing other groups is the foundation of genocide, which is the purpose of the spirit God will release. You can’t have genocide until you make one group of people think of other groups as disposable, subhuman vermin.

I can provide a parallel. It would have been pretty hard to get me to embark on a squirrel genocide program, had experience not taught me they were bona fide pests with nearly no redeeming functions. These days, I find killing a squirrel rewarding, even if I’m put off by their suffering. Killing them is necessary and righteous, like killing roaches. I would be thrilled if grey squirrels went extinct this afternoon.

We’re seeing the spirit of murder in the left’s reaction to people who resist masks and vaccines. They often say they’re the reason coronavirus hasn’t been wiped out. They say they’re killing people, equating them with murderers. They’re taking steps to prevent resistors from buying, selling, traveling, speaking, and doing business. It’s very much like what the spirit of Antichrist did to the Jews of Europe. They were excluded from many jobs. They lost the right to disseminate their opinions, even by carrier pigeons, which they were forbidden to own. Eventually, they were segregated, concentrated, and exterminated, and the Nazis did this because they thought a day would come when they could say, “Finally, our problems are over.”

Of course, people who resist masks and vaccines are proxies for conservatives and Christians.

Conservatives and Christians generally don’t use carrier pigeons, but maybe we should start buying them, along with CB’s and ham radios. We are being tossed off the Internet every day.

If you listen to enraged leftists these days, you can sense that they feel like the Nazis did. They want to make us as though we did not exist. They want us to have no power of any kind. It’s not just obscure tweeters and commenters. Keith Olbermann, who had a popular television shows on popular networks, said Trump supporters should be arrested and prosecuted, and the mainstream left was fine with it. He called us “maggots,” which is exactly what Castro’s supporters called the innocent people they beat, robbed, enslaved, jailed, tortured, deported, and murdered in Cuba.

On the right, there appears to be a rising tide of kooky voices calling for civil war and blaming minorities for most of our ills. They are far fewer in number than leftist nuts, who have been dominant in leftist culture for a long time, but they’re here. These people also serve the Antichrist. Jesus never called for us to buy rifles and shoot our way out of our problems. He told the disciples to buy swords for the defense of individuals, but he never suggested organized armed resistance.

Over the last year, we have seen lack, disease, and hatred, which are symptoms of the arrival of the three horsemen. We have seen signs in the heavens. We haven’t seen earthquakes, which Jesus predicted, yet. Some Christians say earthquake activity has suddenly increased, but it isn’t true. Maybe we should consider increased activity a crucial sign. It would be easy to spot, and it would be unique in mankind’s history. We have had wars, plagues, and shortages ever since the world was created, but we haven’t had global outbreaks of earthquakes.

I keep feeling like I’m just waiting to leave. I can’t make myself feel that life will return to normal. I keep feeling that none of the earthly things I do are important. It’s as though I were in a burning building, waiting to be rescued, and I no longer needed to think about mopping floors or fixing plumbing leaks.

A guy I like to watch just put up a Youtube video about a dream a friend of his had. I watched, and at first, I wasn’t sure what to think. Then suddenly I felt I knew what the dream meant.

The friend dreamed a group of people were in a building, and they were high up, looking toward a city which resembled London. The city was being destroyed by an earthquake. As they watched, their own building moved toward the city.

A man showed up to lead people out of the building. Some followed. He took them up on a high ridge where there was snow and ice, and they walked toward a destination. The building went over a waterfall, into an abyss.

A similar ridge appeared nearby, and a woman was seen on the ridge, trying to take a quicker route to the same destination. She fell off and went into the abyss.

A man appeared via a flight of stairs. He climbed up to the first ridge and joined the rescued people. He said he had come from hell.

They learned their destination was Zion, the city of God.

I’ll tell you what I think God told me.

The city that resembled London was the carnal world. The isolated building was the location of the church. The destruction of London was the tribulation.

People who stayed in the building were carnal Christians. They kept their eyes on the carnal world, so they were sucked down with it. They were like people who live on social media sites; like Lot’s wife. She was still part of Sodom, so she stared at it with yearning, and she shared its fate.

The Christians who left were people who listen to the Holy Spirit and reject the Antichrist’s world. The man who led them was an evangelist. The ridge was Jesus. It was Jacob’s ladder, which is Jesus. A ladder is a type of stairway, and it’s a type of path, and Amos 9:6 says God builds his steps in the sky.

Jesus is a path. He called himself “the way” or “the road,” using the same word the Greeks use on street signs. The path is narrow. It’s easy to fall off, just as it’s easy to fall off a ridge. When you fall off a ridge, there is no way to go but down. It’s the same with Jesus. There are no lateral or upward moves.

The second ridge is an alternative route preferred by human beings. Any path but Jesus leads to hell. You can’t design your own Jesus. You can’t insist on a god who loves homosexuality, selfishness, and pride. The woman represents people who try to save themselves through the false messiahs of idolatry, including worship of self, man, and government. She’s a woman because women are the first to lead us into idolatry. Think of Eve, Jezebel, and Solomon’s wives. Men are supposed to lead, and the human race is supposed to be God’s submissive wife.

The man who came up from hell is a person who received salvation during the tribulation. Missing the rapture doesn’t condemn you to hell. You can still be saved, but you will wish you had listened sooner.

Zion is the new Jerusalem. It’s where the saved will go. It’s described in the Revelation.

This is what came to me, and I think it’s right.

I would love to say I hope I’m wrong, but I would only say that to comfort other people. I hope the rapture is close. This place is just too messed up to continue.

I used to tell God I was ready to go, but I wanted him to look after my dad and my pets. Then my dad died. Then one of my pets died. Marvin is okay; I hope God will take him along with the chosen. There seems to be no good reason to leave him here.

I used to feel bad because I might leave the earth unmarried. I felt a little cheated. I wanted to have the love of an attractive woman, chosen by God, before the end, and the pool of women who seemed available at my age looked more like a punishment than a reward. I’m just being honest.

I met a wonderful lady, much younger and more attractive than I had any reason to expect. We spent time together in Egypt. We did’t cross the line, but we shared love and deep affection. Then we married after we parted. Even if God harvests his crop before we get together again in person, I am content.

I have hope we will come back after the marriage of the lamb. The Bible suggests the raptured (not the resurrected) will return after Satan is imprisoned, to enjoy long lives on a blessed earth. That would be nice, but I will be thrilled to be anywhere where I don’t have to live amid curses, evil spirits, and toxic people.

Finally, Something the Swiss are Really Bad at

It looks like my wife and I will not be honeymooning in Switzerland. I bought Pimsleur’s German course and started listening to Youtube French conversation videos for nothing. “Ich mochte bier trinken.” That cost me fifteen bucks.

The Swiss are allowing visitors to come in from all over the world, but they have made the visa process very hard for Africans. Citizens of countries that don’t have Swiss embassies have to apply through embassies in countries that do. In Rhodah’s case, that means South Africa.

Switzerland belongs to the Schengen group of nations. More or less, this means mainland Europe. These countries cooperate on immigration matters. If Rhodah had ever had a Schengen-area visa, she would be able to apply to the Swiss embassy in Pretoria by email. Because she hasn’t had a Schengen visa, she has to go in person and have her fingerprints recorded.

She lives over 700 miles from Pretoria, which is near Johannesburg. She doesn’t want to travel alone, so she would have to have a friend go with her. Each of them would need two coronavirus tests in order to enter South Africa and re-enter Zambia. A coronavirus test takes 24 hours, so they would have to spend at least two nights in South Africa.

If either of them tested positive on the way home, she would have to stay in South Africa until she tested negative. During this time, I would be paying for her food, lodging, and repeat testing. If only one tested positive, the other would be left alone in South Africa, because the healthy one would have to get out as quickly as possible in order to avoid testing negative and being trapped.

Best-case scenario: I’m out something over $2000, and we get a visa in a little over two weeks. Worst-case scenario: Rhodah and/or her friend get trapped in South Africa, and one or both of them could be there for a month or more.

We could take a chance and try it, and I could forget about the money. Things would probably go well. There’s another problem, however: South Africa is disintegrating. Racial and political violence have resulted in nationwide looting and arson over the last two weeks. Pretoria has been hit. I can’t send two women there while the nation is falling apart. Black women are safer there than Indians and whites right now, but what kind of man sends his wife to a riot zone?

If you don’t know what’s happening in South Africa, I have two possible explanations for your uninformed status: 1. our leftist press doesn’t want to show you anything negative involving the post-Mandela rainbow paradise, and it isn’t anxious to show hordes of looters and arsonists who are all black, and 2. American journalists aren’t all that interested in what happens in other countries unless it somehow reflects poorly on Donald Trump, conservatives, or Jesus.

For a long time, I’ve watched videos from a South African Youtuber. He calls himself Serpentza. He moved to China in his mid-twenties, and he lived there for 14 years. He married a Chinese woman and moved to the US. I started watching his videos because it was interesting to see what was happening in China. He didn’t mention South Africa often.

Early last year, he started putting up ominous videos about coronavirus. This was before Americans had any idea what it was. He said it was a big problem in China and that the CCP was covering it up. He turned out to be completely correct. Now he’s putting up videos about South Africa. He put up a two-hour video this week, and he made some surprising claims.

He said the looters were organized. In some cases, they show up in convoys, including buses. One group showed up in armored cars, armed with machine guns. They confronted 30 armed guards protecting a property and told them to leave or die. He said the looters use common strategies suggesting organization. They remove their car tags, and when they are confronted, they recite the same excuse. They claim they need food.

There are many Indians in South Africa, and, along with whites, they are being targeted. Militias are forming. The Indians are using rifles to drive looters away, on a grand scale.

He says looters are also destroying black businesses and burning down food stores and other businesses that are essential to the distribution of food. Obviously, these behaviors harm black people. They can’t snap their fingers and make groceries appear to feed their families. It’s not a big surprise to anyone who knows that looters are not protestors. They’re all about hate and free merchandise.

The problems arose because a former president named Zuma was charged with over 700 counts of corruption. Zuma is popular among Zulus and the poor. He repeatedly refused to show up for trial, so he was sentenced to 15 months for contempt of court. When he turned himself in, the violence and destruction started.

I watched some of the video last night, and I kept thinking about the tribulation. Three spirits resembling horsemen will go out, and they will cause murder, shortages, and disease. The spirit of the Antichrist–the Beast–will go out and cause people to yield to peer pressure, not reason or the Holy Spirit. They will behave like beasts in a herd. We’ve seen it in BLM and Antifa, and now we see it among Zuma supporters.

Under the influence of the Antichrist spirit, people act like sharks in a feeding frenzy. They don’t think. They let hate and other iniquities possess them. They give up human status.

This is the world’s future, and I think it will be the near future. More and more, we will be ruled and tormented by crowds of vicious, demon-controlled berserkers who pretend to be victims.

Serpentza interrupted his video with some footage of his half-Chinese daughter playing with American kids. Various races were represented. They played together in harmony, as kids of different races generally do in America. He scolded all the liars who pretend America is a racist country. He said they had never seen real racism. In South Africa, rural whites are being beaten, cut up, raped, and killed by black Africans so frequently, it looks like a movement. In America, unhinged snowflakes say our country is racist because we have Thomas Jefferson on the nickel or because Barbie has blue eyes and a flat butt.

There is a huge gulf between “country with limited racism problems” and “racist country.” America is not a racist country, even if racism has not been completely eradicated.

Watch the video if you want, but it’s full of profanity.

He came to America to get away from hatred spawned by identity politics. He will be disappointed. It’s much better than South Africa, but it’s deteriorating quickly. Overt racism toward whites, Asians, and Jews is now mainstream on the left, and the Antichrist’s white children are starting to look for the answers in secession, rifles, and racism directed at non-whites.

No one is going to win in the Antichrist’s future. Everyone who gets caught up in the hatred and false victimhood will lose.

Rhodah and I are now stuck with honeymoon alternatives like Iceland, Sweden, and Mexico. There is no way I’m going to Mexico. A friend of mine goes there for dental work, and he says it’s like a crummy neighborhood in Miami, only worse. That leaves Iceland and Sweden, unless we want to visit a depressing Muslim country or a European country known primarily for vampires and werewolves.

Iceland has astounding natural beauty. Not as good as Switzerland’s, of course, and no alps. The food picture doesn’t look good: pickled things, rhubarb jelly, rotten shark meat, and high-end hamburgers. The people are supposed to be great. Nothing has ever happened there, however. In Iceland, you’re not going to get a tour involving Roman buildings, Renaissance art, a world war, a famous composer, or anything else. Because nothing has ever happened there.

My guess:

Nature: A
Food: C
People: A
Relevance to my existence as a Westerner: F

Sweden has SOME natural beauty, but overall, it appears to be flat and not rich in landscape features. The food sounds somewhat better than Iceland’s. They really do eat meatballs. I could probably eat those twice in 10 days without feeling oppressed. I don’t know if the burgers are any good. Sweden is reasonably close to the rest of Europe, though, so maybe there are some decent non-Scandinavian restaurants. A few things have happened in Sweden, but offhand, I can’t think of any. I would have to say that culturally and historically, it’s probably only marginally ahead of Iceland. The people are known for a total lack of reluctance to engage in any type of sexual activity. My understanding is that getting a one-night-stand there is about has hard as hailing a cab. This national characteristic would not have much relevance to two Christians enjoying their honeymoon.

I haven’t known many Swedes, but they seem somewhat rigid and stuffy, except when it comes to sex with strangers.

Score:

Nature: B
Food: B
People: B
Relevance to my existence as a Westerner: C

Iceland gets a 2.5 GPA, and Sweden gets a 2.75.

Let’s do Switzerland, for a giggle.

Nature: A+ (rough draft for heaven)
Food: A
People: A
Relevance to my existence as a Westerner: B

I get 3.825. That will get you into a good state university. With a 2.75, you’re probably looking at community college.

Now Mexico:

Nature: B
Food: A-
People: C (hello, robbery)
Relevance to my existence as a Westerner: B

I get 2.925. That’s surprising, since, to get me to go there, you would literally have to drug me. The food really pumped up the score. Truthfully, though, American Mexican food is way better than authentic Mexican food.

I only gave it a B for nature because it has nice beaches and good fishing. If you ever see me on a beach, it means my ship sank. I can’t understand people who like beaches. It seems like mental illness to me. You lie on a lounge chair and sweat under the broiling sun, doing nothing, or you swim in water than stings your eyes. It’s okay for walks, but that’s about it. I sort of suspect there is an upper intelligence limit for beach people. Intelligence correlates with susceptibility to boredom.

If lying in intense sun is so wonderful, why do all cultures love air conditioning and shade? A beach is like a sauna that gives you skin cancer. And the Japanese used saunas to torture POW’s.

Next, Egypt:

Nature: D (hot sand, 3 trees)
Food: C
People: A
Relevance to my existence as a Westerner: A

The land of the pharaohs gets a 2.75.

The only place that tops Switzerland on my list is Israel. I’ll score it even though I can’t go, due to the fact that my brief presence might cause a coronavirus wave in a country where even the dogs and cats are vaccinated. Way to commit economic suicide, guys.

Israel makes so many bad decisions, it makes me wonder if anti-Semitism is even necessary.

Nature: B
Food: B
People: B
Relevance to my existence as a Westerner: A

I get 2.6. Maybe my scale should be weighted. The food in Israel was not great when I lived there, but I give it a B because surely it has gotten better by now. The people get a B because a lot of people there can be annoying, even if you love and support them. Just keeping it real. Not comparable to the French, though. As for nature, it’s nice in some parts and the rest is desert.

My scoring system appears to be useless, because here is my actual list, in descending order of preference:

Israel
Switzerland
Sweden
Iceland
Egypt
Mexico
Random Turkish Prison
Whale’s posterior
New York City
Miami
Hell

The drop from Egypt to Mexico is bigger than it looks. I think Egypt is probably a decent destination in the winter. I had a great time there in the summer, but the smells and the weather were problems.

Rhodah is going to talk to the Swedish embassy on Monday. They do both Iceland and Sweden, so they can give us guidance.

I’m very disappointed. I was hoping to share a magnificent destination with my bride, but now I suppose we’ll spend a lot of time trying to build a second-choice country up, saying things that start with, “Of course, it’s not Switzerland, but…”

“Check out the breakfast buffet! Free rotten shark!” “Hey, look who’s buying a Big Mac! Stellan Skarsgård!” “Mmm…who wants Swiss chocolate when you can have boiled whale!”

As I said above, once Rhodah has been given a visa to one Schengen country, Switzerland will let her apply for a Swiss visa by email. I wish we had known this in June. We could have applied for a bogus Swedish visa. As it is, the earliest we could hope to be in Switzerland is late September, after the polar ice re-forms. Brown leaves, fog, and grey skies.

Wish I had better news.

On the whole, though, I can’t complain. I have a wonderful wife and nothing but first world problems.

The God of Cessationism Doesn’t Exist

Rhodah and I had a productive prayer session today.

Like many African Christians, Rhodah is open to the supernatural. She knows God still speaks to people and works miracles. This is one of the characteristics I had to have in a wife. I didn’t need a cessationist, covering her eyes and pretending all the wonders God was still doing were imaginary. I believe–I know from experience–that God still gives people miracle healings, and I had to have someone who would be on my side when I tried to get them.

Rhodah had a mysterious pain in a certain part of her body. It had been bothering her for days. We prayed about it, and it started to get better, but today I decided we should do what I had been taught to do in Last Reformation events, and we should also add some oil. The Last Reformation doesn’t generally apply oil to people, but the word says to do it.

I had her apply oil, and then I commanded her ailment to leave. I told it it was bound and muzzled. I commanded her body to be remade in the area where the pain had been.

She felt heat in the area where she needed help. This is a common thing with people who get miracle healings. Afterward, she couldn’t find the pain.

I am pretty sure I’ve had a calcium deposit in my shoulder. For maybe a couple of years, I’ve had problems putting my arm behind me. Reaching for things in my back pocket was sometimes very painful. It hasn’t been too bad lately, but I thought was should go for a healing anyway.

I applied oil (supplied by Rhodah when we were together in Egypt), and she prayed and so on. Afterward, the pain was nearly gone. I can reach up and touch the middle of my back now, and I haven’t been able to do that in a long time.

Afterward, I said, “You know what? We’re going to have a good marriage.” When both spouses submit to God, a marriage goes better.

I told God I would give my testimony before other people, so here it is.

I could have gone to a doctor. They can scrape deposits off joints. I wanted God’s healing instead, so I put up with the pain. God’s healing is better.

Hope you find encouragement in this information.

Eat Your Hearts Out, Single Ladies

Here is some interesting news: I am married.

I used to wonder if God had decided I was supposed to be single all my life. It seemed like there was no one for me. Then I tried a couple of interracial dating sites, and within 11 days, I had found someone I could find no reason not to marry. Three days later, I told her I loved her. We kept talking, and I never did find any reason to think she wasn’t perfect for me.

Two months later, we flew to Egypt to meet each other. We already knew we were going to be married. We thought we would be applying for a fiancee visa for her, and to get that, we needed to prove we had met in person. A few days into the trip, I proposed.

Later I found out it would be better to marry and apply for a spouse visa. To get that, we needed to have a wedding and then get together a second time, to show the State Department the marriage had been consummated.

We looked for countries where we could both travel during the pandemic and which would be willing to allow us to marry on their soil. Iceland looked good for a while, but we eventually decided it was best to avoid the expense, time waste, and trouble of going to a foreign country simply to marry. I found out we could marry online, so we chose to do that instead. Marrying online left us free to honeymoon in a nicer place than Iceland.

Last week I got us a Utah marriage license, and today we had a Zoom ceremony attended by 17 friends and relations.

We have known each other 129 days.

Before we met each other, the field of marriage was like a wall of thistles to us. There was no way to get through. Once we came together, everything fell into place without effort.

I say I didn’t find any reason to think she wasn’t perfect for me. It’s really that simple. I never had a particular kind of person in mind. I never had a list; this age, that height, and so on. I just wanted a good Christian woman who knew God very well and who was attractive and compatible with me. Other than that, she didn’t have to have any particular traits. I was open to anything, as long as I couldn’t find any deal-breaking qualities.

It sounds like it should have been easy, but my efforts yielded nothing of use until I met Rhodah. She doesn’t match some target image I created. I just can’t find any problems with her. Since then, it has been as though we were sliding down a greased path.

Grooms are supposed to have cold feet. I didn’t. I felt a very small amount of anxiety, but the truth is that I have felt more nervous about stock trades.

Today hasn’t been a nerve-wracking day. It’s about like yesterday, except now I’m married. The big difference is that I feel I can relax more with Rhodah. There is a part of you you will always hold back when you’re single, and now that part of me is hers, permanently.

I don’t feel bad about having an online wedding, and neither does she. I feel as though I should feel bad, but I don’t feel bad. It seems as though it was the most natural choice in the world.

I don’t feel like I married my girlfriend. I feel like I married my wife.

Now we have to get her a Swiss visa while the door is still open, and we have to make plans. I have a ring on the way. It has to be appraised before I approve it, and then we have to meet in Switzerland.

There really are low-maintenance women out there. They are rare, and when you know one, it takes a while to believe what you see. Rhodah is low-maintenance. She didn’t buy a dress for the ceremony until today. She had me on video chat while she visited the mall. She kept telling me she hated shopping. She couldn’t wait to go home. She looked at about 6 dresses, total.

What kind of woman hates shopping? What kind of woman agrees to an online wedding ceremony, enthusiastically, goes to the mall on her wedding day to buy the dress, and then complains that she hates shopping?

The low-maintenance kind.

She looked beautiful, too. She wore a nice royal blue dress with a modest cut. We’re hoping to redo our vows with a preacher, so there was no point in buying a gown for today’s event.

It was wonderful having so many friends watching. I think of myself as a hermit, but I had over a dozen good friends watching, and I could have had a few more. How many people have a dozen worthwhile friends? Most people don’t even have one.

Almost all of my friends entered my life through church. I think that explains things.

To make the day even better, I found out I still had a pearl necklace that belonged to my mother. I had thought my sister had taken it. It has two strands of pearls and a diamond locket with a ruby in the center. Our wedding ring is a ruby with a diamond halo. Now Rhodah has something to wear it with.

I wish she could have my mother’s gold Rolex with the malachite face and diamond bezel, but that went to a pawn shop in Miami a long time ago, along with the other things I didn’t ask for.

I’m a husband. I can say “my wife.” From now on when I fill out forms, I have to check the “married” boxes. I don’t need a will; I have someone who will automatically inherit everything. When I’m with a single woman who seems eligible, I won’t have to wonder if I should do anything, because I shouldn’t.

I also have someone to support, but the same God who brought me a wife will help me feed her. After all, as the Bible says, “He who finds a wife finds a good thing and obtains favor from the Lord.”

I don’t know if I’ll still want to blog. We’ll have to see how things unfold.

“Deputy Clerk Osmond Just Logged In”

Today I have something I didn’t have yesterday: a marriage license.

It’s so strange to use phrases like “fiancee” and “marriage license.” They used to seem like they were only parts of other people’s worlds. Barring unforeseen problems, soon I’ll be saying “my wife.”

Rhodah and I gave up on marrying in person. The only non-tropical location we could find within reasonable distances was Iceland. I didn’t want to meet in a warm New World setting like Cancun and Jamaica. Who wants to get married in a hot place full of drunk, sweaty tourists? I have had enough of the tropics.

Iceland sounds like fun, but we would be blowing like $3000 just to get married, only to go somewhere nicer as soon as the wedding was over. Getting married an hour from your house and then going where you really want to go is fine, but wasting 5 days and lots of money on a second-place destination is not.

Today I finished our online application in Utah County, Utah. I don’t even know the name of the county seat. Just the county. For $70, they set us up very quickly. You upload a few documents and fill in some blanks. Then you enter payment, and a minute or two later, you are licensed.

In the confirmation email, they provided a link to a page where we can make an appointment with an officiant from the clerk’s office. They have spots open as early as Monday.

The strange thing is how stress-free all this is. We aren’t second-guessing ourselves. We’re not nervous. The main thing that concerns me is how relaxed I am. How can it be this easy?

I have two friends who want to be our official witnesses, so scheduling will revolve around them. Once Rhodah and I have a time that works for both of them, we can deal with other people who want to sit in. I don’t know if it’s possible to include “guests.” I’ll find out tomorrow.

Thanks, everyone who offered to witness in my comments. Had I not had potential witnesses on tap, you would have been life savers.

It’s a shame Rhodah can’t come to America. Biden’s idiotic travel ban has nothing at all to do with science. The leftists who elected him are hysterical and irrational when it comes to coronavirus, so he is maintaining the bans to keep them happy.

America was the single biggest coronavirus hotbed for a long time, and we already have the delta variant here, so, as scientists have said, there is no point at all in restricting travel. Coronavirus is here, so what are we trying to keep out? Pressure to return to sane travel policies is mounting, but Biden looks out for himself, not America, so he is taking his time.

I told Rhodah someone should chloroform him and fix things while he’s out. His wife probably already has a kit.

People whose businesses are dying because of leftist hysteria vote, so maybe Biden’s self-centered reluctance will hurt him in 2024, assuming he hasn’t already been removed from office because his dementia has progressed.

Once we’re married and can show we had a honeymoon, we can apply for a spouse visa. Then we wait. In the meantime, we will have to meet for trips every so often. Maybe Biden will have a lucid moment and okay tourist visas.

Switzerland says it may let us in for a honeymoon, but getting a visa for Rhodah may involve a lot of work. There aren’t a lot of other pleasant honeymoon destinations. Sweaty, beachy countries, Muslim countries, and European countries where people’s names have no vowels. That’s most of it. I think Thailand is open, but flying to Thailand is like driving to Jupiter.

Really long trips aren’t that bad if you have someone with you or you’re not meeting anyone, but it’s unpleasant to work them out when you have to meet another person. This is especially true when it’s someone whose welfare is your responsibility.

I like Switzerland. I can communicate in English and French. I’ve been there before, so I won’t be confused. It’s probably the safest place on Earth. The food is good, and they have interesting, decadent Swiss stuff full of potatoes and melted cheese. It may well be the most beautiful country there is. The weather is excellent.

I really don’t want to end up in a place like the Czech Republic, Albania, or Turkey. I don’t want to deal with countries I know nothing about, weird alphabets, regimes that torture people for wearing shorts, or the depressing atmosphere Islam invariably generates. I admit, it might be fun playing drinking games with Melania Trump’s family.

Tomorrow we should have some idea whether Switzerland will cooperate. If not, we may have to go to Iceland whether we want to or not. The sun is shining all day there now. That would be weird. I assume they make really good blackout curtains. Not like the crummy ones we have here that always let the sun blaze through an opening 5 feet long.

I am not all that comfortable about the ring, because buying rubies is so complicated. I found a nice stone and a magnificent setting. I’m unsure about the company that sells it, and I can’t find what I want anywhere else. I read a few disturbing things about them. Someone claims the president went to prison for defrauding people. They have a no-cost return period, though, so I would be able to have it appraised here.

You can’t get a good deal on a ring. All you can get is the best bad deal. Buying women’s jewelry is like buying coffins and anything made by Apple. You will always overpay. Buyers have spoiled sellers for centuries, treating their fungible goods as though every piece were a treasure and every occasion was as important as the second coming. “How often does little Ashley graduate from T-ball camp?”

You pretty much have to spend x, knowing the seller paid x/4 or less. I don’t mind. I just wish jewelers wouldn’t pretend rings were investments. Take my money, but don’t ruin the experience by insulting my intelligence. Something you buy for x and sell for a fraction of x is not an investment. No one has ever paid retail for a ring and then turned around and made money.

My plan is to buy the ring, have it appraised, and be content if the RETAIL (not resale) value is somewhere close to what I paid. If that’s true, then everything will be fine. I don’t want to find out I paid a lot and gave Rhodah a piece of junk. I want her to be thrilled.

The web says jewelers mark up wedding rings by 300 to 1000 percent. When you’re getting soaked like that, it has to be for love.

My buddy Mike used to know the Zale family, from Zale’s Jewelers. He wanted to buy a girl a ring, so they showed him a bunch he could choose from at cost. He says the thousand-dollar rings were down around $100. Don’t think about this if you’re a man and you’re still paying off a ring.

I’ll probably order the ring tomorrow. I’ll do my best to have it checked out. If we keep it and start having doubts about it later, we can always buy a different center stone. Rhodah absolutely must be happy with it.

I feel like I’m dreaming as I write about these things. In February, I was alone and willing to accept it. By mid-March, I was in love and thinking seriously about marriage. It’s early July, and I may be 5 days away from a crazy online wedding.

Who says we don’t serve a great God?

Listening to Ezekiel Finally Pays Off

Today I had one of the strangest thoughts I’ve had since becoming a Christian. I ran it by my fiancee Rhodah to see how it checked out with her. I didn’t want to call it “revelation” until I had talked to someone who was full of the Holy Spirit. Now I’ll run it by you.

For at least a couple of years, I’ve felt as though my earthly responsibilities didn’t matter much. I didn’t feel it mattered whether I invested or concerned myself with taxes. I felt it didn’t matter if I let home maintenance tasks go. The feeling I had was that the age during which these things had meaning, if ever they did, was about to close. If you knew you were going to move to Mars tomorrow, for good, you wouldn’t paint your house today. If you knew you were going to die next week, you wouldn’t bother counting calories this week. If you were on a sinking ship, you wouldn’t fight over who got to sit at the captain’s table for dinner.

I do try to take care of my responsibilities, but my motivation is not strong. I almost feel as though I’m humoring myself when I cut the grass or consider building a tractor shed.

Of course, I often wonder if the Holy Spirit is telling me the rapture is coming soon. Is he saying handling the mundane obligations of life is a waste of my time, because I won’t be here to eat the fruit, whether good or bad?

I never had much ambition. Now I have none at all. It doesn’t bother me at all that I’m not a high-earning patent attorney, which is what I would be had I cared about practicing law. It doesn’t bother me that I dropped out of college when I was a pre-med student. I don’t feel bad about the people I could have healed or the discoveries I might have made. I don’t feel pain over abandoning physics as a graduate student. I never think about my career as a writer, which is over after three books that didn’t go anywhere. There are people out there ignoring their families, working late nights, and cutting throats in order to win awards and recognition. It never bothers me that I haven’t won a prize since I came in first in The Miami Herald spelling bee.

Other people remind me of bugs, fighting over the choicest balls of dog poop. The things they chase may bring them pleasure for a short time, but none of it goes with them to heaven. Think about it. What will LeBron James be the second after he dies? Penniless, unemployed, obscure, and uninfluential. What will Jeff Bezos be? Poor. What will Beyonce be? A person who walks everywhere, because she has no limousines, and whose autograph no one wants. If there are lines, she’ll have to wait in them just like everyone else. If there is clothing, hers will be just as cheap as the next person’s. She will have no gold albums. She will have no Grammys. She won’t even have her weaves.

I’ve noticed that wealthy Jews love putting their names on things. I think this comes from their ancient relationship with God, even though they don’t know it. The ancient Jews knew there was no bigger curse than to have your name forgotten. Most Jews are distant from God, but the concept remains ingrained in their collective memory. Rich Jews donate money to all sorts of philanthropic projects, and what is the condition? Someone’s name has to be mentioned. The Morty and Sadie Weinberg Cancer Pavilion. Fishbein Hall. The Saul Rosenstein Observatory.

It’s all pointless. Two weeks ago, I visited structures built by some of the most powerful people on earth. I took pictures in King Tut’s tomb. I posed on the empty sarcophagus deep inside the Great Pyramid. The human beings who built these things made people tremble with fear. They were considered Gods. They had the power to execute people arbitrarily. They were wealthier than Bill Gates. Now tourists take funny selfies in the burial chambers the pharaohs thought people would forever be afraid to desecrate.

I saw a fancy box containing the mummified guts of a pharaoh. They looked like old bread crumbs. The pharaohs don’t scare anyone now, they have no power, and although their names survive in heiroglyphics, their language is dead, and no one is sure how to pronounce any of it.

We fight over excrement. When we get the big balls of excrement we want, we perch on top of them, possibly decorated in fancy clothes, and we toot our horns so people with less excrement can ooh and ahh. Then we die, our dung balls go to other people, and our bodies themselves become excrement. The excrement of lowly creatures like worms and beetles. Even embalmed people rot eventually.

You know what Jesus is going to do when the tribulation is over? He’s going to destroy every pyramid. All of them. Egypt. Mexico. Turkey. He’s going to destroy Angkor Wat, every mosque, every Hindu temple, and every Buddhist shrine. He’ll destroy every dirty movie and book. He’ll destroy every print, tape, and disk of The Wizard of Oz. He’ll destroy every naked Renaissance statue and painting. He’s not going to care about the loss to history. He won’t care about the artistic merit or the financial value. It will all burn.

No one in heaven will know you were your high school class’s valedictorian. If you hold an Olympic record on earth, you won’t hold it when you die, because there won’t be any Olympic records. There won’t be any Nobel Prizes in heaven. There won’t be a bestseller list.

It’s all garbage. Earthly achievement means absolutely nothing in the long run, and everyone will be alive to see the long run. Some will live on in heaven, and some in hell and then the lake of fire. No matter who you are, you will live to see your wealth taken and your accomplishments disappear.

The only things that will be remembered will be things we did for God, and our only treasures will be people we helped save. Cleaning ladies will be honored royalty in heaven while billionaires and famous actors scream and cry in hell without a trace of dignity.

To get back to the point, I was never highly motivated to “make something of myself” on earth, and now I feel even less motivated. I don’t owe the world that. I do have a duty to do God’s work, but I don’t have any obligation to become a doctor and cure cancer. I don’t have an obligation to become a soldier and defend my flag. I don’t owe the world books, symphonies, inventions, or paintings.

The thoughts I had today made me feel less ambitious than ever.

I was in the car, listening to the Bible, and I didn’t understand what I was saying. I figured it had to be Ezekiel. When I hear the Bible, and I understand nothing, it’s always Ezekiel. I looked at my car’s display, and sure enough, I was right.

The prophet was talking about winged beings that flew in God’s presence, and it said their wings made a sound like many waters.

I started thinking. In the Bible, waters are words and voices. The Sea of Galilee represents the world, and the world, really, is made up of voices. God spoke it into existence, and people and spirits shaped it and filled it with words. The powers that run the world use the power of words. Laws are words. Prayers are words. Blessings and curses are words.

The Bible says Jesus is God’s word, and it also says his voice is like many waters. It doesn’t say “water.” It says “waters,” plural. “Many waters” means “many voices.”

Why would Jesus sound like many voices? Are there more than one of him?

I thought about the Beast.

As we all know, there will be a man called the Beast. What many of us do not understand is that the Beast will be a figurehead. He will be controlled by Satan, and he will be the voice of all the people in the world who do not belong to God. They will worship him and be ruled by him, but his rule will be a fiction. In reality, Satan will control him, and other spirits will control the people who are under his rule. The Beast will be a follower pretending to be a leader.

The people of the Beast can also be called “the Beast.” They will be one with him. They will be his body, just as we are the Body of Christ. Satan is small and weak, and he is not omnipresent, so he can’t have a unifying spirit like the Holy Spirit. There is always symmetry in the supernatural, though, so he will have a counterfeit. The Holy Spirit teaches all of God’s people the same things, and he empowers them. Satan will use the Internet and cell phones, or whatever comes after the Internet and cell phones, to simulate the Holy Spirit’s work.

Even now, we are seeing mobs guided by Satan via cell phones. Kids coordinate on social media, and they converge on stores and empty their shelves. The police can’t react in time. In the future, we’ll see many more mobs, and they will be bigger. Before long, electronic connectivity will replace the government. Governments are slow and clumsy. Internet mobs are too quick for governments to stand up to.

So the Beast won’t just be Satan or a man or a mob. He will be a combination of all of these. Many voices, acting as one.

There is always symmetry in the supernatural. If the Beast is a combination of voices and the persons they represent, and Satan always copies God, why can’t God be a similar type of being?

Today it occurred to me that God, on the throne of heaven, may be a combination of all the beings who serve him. Cherubs, angels, seraphim, people, and whatever else there is. All of humanity’s worst parts are settling into the Internet, like dregs at the bottom of a bottle of wine, and the Internet will be the Beast’s nervous system. All the filth in cyberspace will be in the mind of the Beast. I now think God the Father is the sum of all the best parts of the beings who are on his side.

It would explain why he speaks of himself in the plural. It would explain why his voice is like many waters.

If what I am saying comes from God, then every Christian is already part of God. What did Jesus say? He said he was in the Father. I believe Rhodah pointed that out to me. As she told me today, the Bible says that in God, “we live and breathe and have our being.”

It’s very nice to have a woman who knows God.

If our spirits are already part of God, then each of us has an innumerable number of powerful beings who are on his side, as long as we are not in rebellion. No wonder the word says, “The LORD is the strength of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?”

We are in the majority, all the time.

It appears that it works like this: every life comes from God. The lives of the innocent, including the forgiven, are attached to him. The lives of the rebellious are cut off from him, so they rot. Christians and other beings that are not damned are distinct persons, but we all have roots in God. Viewed with this in mind, the trinity makes sense.

My hand is part of me, and I give it life, strength, and commands, but it’s not the core of me, and if I sever my hand, I still exist.

If this is how it works, then it should not be that hard to get in touch with God and make the communication channel deeper and wider.

It would also seem that lower creatures would return to God at death, because they can’t be guilty of sin. Without sin, there can’t be a separation.

God doesn’t destroy beings he has created. Even Satan has eternal life. Instead of being destroyed, he will live on in a lake of fire. If God doesn’t destroy Satan and his fellow rebels, why would he destroy your cat?

Since I became aware of these ideas, I have felt less concerned than ever about what happens here on earth. I feel like an ambassador who could be recalled at any moment. If you were an ambassador in some messy little country, and that country had a revolution full of bloodshed and pain, you would be displeased, but you wouldn’t worry, because you would know our military would come and get you, unless you served under Barack Obama. The Bible says we are ambassadors, and we serve a leader who won’t abandon us.

I feel very disconnected to things here. I like it. I don’t like this place. I don’t like living in a body that can be hurt. I don’t like waking up and wondering if I’ll have a physical problem that day. I don’t like aging. I don’t like being surrounded by proud people who are impossible to communicate with and who get filthier every day. I don’t like living under the threat of man’s ridiculous, unfair laws. I don’t like death. I’m tired of death. I’ve seen so many deaths, and I’m only maybe two-thirds of the way through my life. I’m entering the death-rich third, which will also include my own death, unless the rapture comes first.

Feeling disconnected to Earth makes me feel like my trip to heaven is close. Maybe it isn’t, but I like the feeling. I am at peace today.

I want to marry Rhodah and have her with me during whatever time I am required to endure here, and I want to be useful in saving people and reducing their suffering. These are the only major goals I have now.

This all seems correct to me. Maybe it will be helpful to you.

In 2021, You Can Marry Anyone, Anywhere

If you’re trying to marry someone you can’t visit because of coronavirus, I have help for you, and it doesn’t matter where you live. I thought I had written about this already, but I can’t find any sign of it.

Utah County, Utah, now allows people to apply for marriage licenses and get married online. They don’t care where you live. You can be in different countries.

Jews have been taking advantage. Israel refused to recognize certain types of marriages performed in Israel, so Israelis started marrying online and then insisting their government approve their unions. This practice became so popular, Israel made an official policy decision to reject Utah marriages.

Utah County’s website will help you get a license by uploading your identification, and it provides email addresses for judges who will perform your ceremony via Zoom. There are also links to officiants who are not judges.

Problem solved.

What if you don’t want to have an online wedding in your pajamas? Iceland will help.

It’s easy to get married in Iceland, but you have to give them proof you’re single. They need a “no impediment” document from every state where you’ve lived since you were 18. In some American states, you can’t get this proof. I have lived in Kentucky, and Kentucky says I can’t have a document because I’m not a current resident. This is an idiotic requirement, but there you go.

The way out: Iceland accepts foreign marriage licenses. You can get a license from Utah County and use it in Iceland. There are probably other countries that will let you do the same thing. I have not checked.

Rhodah and I now have at least two choices. Iceland and Zoom.

It would be nice to get married in person, and I think it’s safe to say a lot of women would flip out if they found out they couldn’t start their marriages with real weddings. Rhodah does not care. As I wrote yesterday, she is strictly low-maintenance.

My only problem with an online wedding is that it will make me feel like I let her down, but as she points out, I didn’t cause the coronavirus problems. And she does expect a big fat ring and a nice honeymoon.

This week, we’ll find out if we can get her into Switzerland, where we would like to honeymoon. If we can do that, we may go ahead and do a Utah marriage. Even if we can’t, we might settle for Cancun. Hope that doesn’t happen.

Why get in a hurry? Because Utah is examining its online marriage process. The window could close. Getting married online can’t hurt us, but delaying might.

I think we should get a license tomorrow, regardless of what we do. Then we can sit back and plan at leisure. We need the license either way.

I have no reservations about marriage at all. You’re supposed to wonder if you’re making the right choice. You’re expected to get cold feet. Not me. I admit, it’s a little scary to know I’ll be responsible for another person, but that’s the extent of my negative emotions.

I’m not asking myself if there is someone better out there. I don’t doubt Rhodah’s sincerity. I don’t worry that she’s going to steal my life savings and turn out to be from Nigeria.

Compared to a fiancee visa, a spouse visa for Rhodah looks like the way to go. It may cost us a couple of extra months, but there is less hassle and less expense, and we will not have to walk on pins and needles when we’re together, for fear of committing sexual sin.

One nice thing about marrying quickly is that it will put yet another barrier between me and my sister. She would no longer be in a position to inherit, and she would have no standing to involve herself in my affairs if I became disabled. I don’t think she would have me killed for money, but I have been wrong about her before. I’m pretty sure that even if she was willing to kill me for money, she wouldn’t kill me simply for getting married and putting her out of contention.

All I have to do is live a few more days.

The fact that these thoughts are in the mind of a rational person says something about how she has lived her life.

What kind of officiant should we get? I have been sorting through them. A religious ceremony would require someone meeting certain standards. I don’t want a gay tree-worshiping pagan. I don’t want a Mormon. I don’t want a woman. He has to be a Christian of some kind.

I think it’s best to have a civil marriage. It counts in God’s eyes, and in a civil marriage, the officiant’s religious beliefs would be irrelevant. I would still want a man, though.

We need two witnesses. My buddy Mike is in. Do I invite all my friends? I can just imagine them, delaying everything while they try to figure out how Zoom works. I think I should pick one other person and let it go.

If you’re struggling to get married, think about Utah. It may be the answer to your prayers.