Trump Admits He’s not God

I suppose I should blog about God a little bit.

First of all, I wonder how many people have seen Trump’s recent remarks about God. He was in Minnesota, giving an unscheduled talk beside Air Force One. He was talking about the economy, and he said this:

“You know what that is? That’s right. That’s God testing me,” Trump explained. “He said, You know, you did it once. And I said, ‘Did I do a great job, God? I’m the only one who could do it.’ He said, ‘That you shouldn’t say. Now we’re going to have you do it again.’ I said, ‘OK. I agree. You got me.’ But I did it once. And now I’m doing it again. And you see the kind of numbers that we’re putting up. They’re unbelievable. Best job numbers ever. Three months, more jobs in the last three months than ever before.”

I think this is great. I believe he talks to God. I don’t think he’s lying. There is too much evidence out there to deny that he has turned to God in recent years, whether or not you think he’s a good example to other Christians. I am pleasantly surprised to see him show some humility. I didn’t think he knew pride was bad. If he believes God told him he shouldn’t take credit for his success, it’s an indication that he’s growing.

We all know his faults. There is no point in denying them. But Christianity is a process, not a state. We accept Christians who do yoga and have illegitimate babies in strings, but we get upset because Trump owns casinos and has a history of adultery. Who knows what he’ll be like 5 years from now? If your direction is right, your location can’t stop you.

Here’s another thing: I got a nice revelation yesterday, and it looks like it’s surprisingly powerful. It’s very simple. When I interact with another person, or I think of another person, or I see another person, I think, “What can I do for him?” Generally, there is nothing I can do by earthly means, but I can still pray, so that’s what I do.

It sounds like a big nothing, but it isn’t. When you ask yourself what you can do for someone else, it changes your inclinations. Maybe the person is someone who makes you angry. Maybe it’s someone you like. Maybe it’s someone you feel a counterproduction sexual attraction to. When you ask yourself what you can do for that person, your attention shifts away from selfish ideation, and you get a chance to pour God’s benevolence into the world through prayer or other means.

I believe in charity. It’s extremely important. It’s important to do things for people. I have felt this way for many years. Having these beliefs isn’t as powerful as asking yourself what you can do for people. I can’t explain it, but I suggest you try it. I’m making it a habit.

Praying for people isn’t a negligible service. Prayer is more powerful than anything else you can do. You shouldn’t feel you’ve done nothing because all you did was pray. That’s crazy.

The Bible says faith works through love. My sense is that love behaves like a supernatural lubricant that allows faith to flow. I suppose this is because we should be exercising our faith to get things we pray for out of love, not selfishness or duty.

We always wonder why our prayers aren’t answered. Maybe a lot of answers are stuck in the pipe because there is no lubricant. I’ve seen healers tell people they can’t be healed because they don’t forgive. It’s consistent with the notion of love as a supernatural grease.

This morning, I thought about a Bible passage:

There is that scattereth, and yet increaseth; and there is that withholdeth more than is meet, but it tendeth to poverty.

The liberal soul shall be made fat: and he that watereth shall be watered also himself.

The second verse says the generous “soul” shall be made fat. To me, that suggests it’s important to be generous in your mind and heart, not just in your actions. If you make a practice of asking yourself what you can do for other people, you make your soul serve God.

The word translated “made fat” can mean “oiled.”

It all makes sense. The Bible says we are servants. What do servants say when they meet people? What does every clerk in every store say when you walk up? “How can I help you?” They know they’re servants, and Christians generally don’t have the same mindset. We’re always running around squawking, “God heal me! God protect me! God give me stuff so I won’t be poor!” We’re too busy on defense to think about offense. Conquest is all about offense. You can’t conquer by sitting behind a wall, hoping your enemies go away.

Anyway, try it. See what you think. It costs you nothing, and it’s as easy as a thing can be.

Final thing: something wild is going on with my shoulder. My gallbladder is not exemplary, although it’s not bad enough to cause attacks or require surgery. The main problem it causes me is shoulder pain. For some reason, gallbladder issues can generate referred pain in your shoulder, neck, or back.

For quite a while, I’ve had a problem putting my right arm behind my back. I didn’t go to a doctor. I try to get God’s healing and correction when I have a problem, and doctors are useless when it comes to gallbladder disorders. Generally, their kneejerk response is to remove your gallbladder, leaving you unable to digest fat, with a high probability of continued pain from stones. They don’t even try to fix gallbladders.

I didn’t think there was anything wrong with the shoulder itself.

The other day, I moved my arm around to loosen it up, and I heard crackling sounds. I wondered what was up. Maybe my gallbladder wasn’t the problem. Maybe the cartilage in my shoulder had disintegrated. I wondered whether I would have to give up and go to a witch doctor (my term for MD’s). I moved my shoulder vigorously, trying to reproduce the sound. The more I moved it, the less noise I heard. When I stopped, my shoulder felt better and had more mobility.

For the last few days, I’ve been doing this from time to time. It’s better than going to a witch doctor and letting him cut up and damage something God might be planning to heal.

This morning, I reached behind myself for some reason. I can’t remember what it was. Maybe I was scratching. Anyway, I realized my arm was way back there, and I wasn’t feeling pain. I did it without thinking. So now I can reach maybe a foot farther back before I feel discomfort. The change coincides with the revelation about doing things for people.

Thought I should put it out there. I don’t know what will happen next, but I’m thrilled to be feeling better. I went to a Last Reformation event in 2019 and asked for prayer for my shoulder, and I didn’t get results. Maybe God was telling me I needed to think about other people differently.

Yesterday I bucked and moved a tree by myself. I think I took 5 tractor loads to the burn pile, and a lot of the wood had to be lifted onto the tractor by yours truly. I’m out of shape. I don’t exercise. I’m old. I feel great today. I’m not sore or stiff. That’s a blessing. I’m thinking of cutting the rest of the tree down today.

I cut the tree in the middle of the day in August, in Florida. It was not raining. The temperature should have been 98 degrees, and I should have gotten a sunburn. My clothes should have been drenched with sweat. The sun was very gentle. I don’t think we ever broke 90. I didn’t sweat much at all. No problems.

I think I’m doing well for my age. I may look like Wilford Brimley’s dad, but I have a lot of energy, and everything works pretty well. I’ve seen other people my age, or younger, whose condition scared me. I keep hoping I can improve my body’s state by finding out what God is trying to get me to confess and repent of.

People get mad when you say their physical problems come from sin and ignorance. Where else would they come from? Are diseases rewards for righteousness? If the suggestion that your sins or your ignorance are making you sick makes you angry, you have exactly the kind of problem that perpetuates curses. You need to grow up and stop playing the victim.

It may be time to fire up the pole saw. Can’t wait to get the rest of that tree out of my life.

Tree? What Tree?

It’s amazing how many things you can do when the alternative is shoveling out a big wad of cash.

The people who built my house left a large mangy oak in the driveway circle out front. It was originally a double-trunked tree, but by the time I got here, one trunk was gone, and the other leaned away from the house at a 20-degree angle. This remaining trunk had a fork about 30 feet up. A few weeks back, I felt the house shake, and I went out and saw that one fork was lying in the driveway.

I was glad to see it, because I had been wanting to cut the tree, and cutting a leaning tree with a big fork is not easy to do safely.

Yesterday, I went outside and saw that the other fork had snapped off. Great news, right? Not really. It had fallen into another tree. The broken tree was bent at a 90-degree angle, and the upper fork was resting in the top of the second tree. The trees were on different sides of the driveway, so the upper fork was set to land in the driveway as soon as the joint gave out.

Trees and tree parts that hang over areas where people are likely to be found are called “widowmakers” for obvious reasons. Tree surgeous hate them. A widowmaker can fall with tremendous energy, very quickly, without making much of a sound.

I stared and stared at the tree, trying to figure out what to do. I could not cut the base of the broken tree, because that would release the widowmaker, and there was no way to tell what would happen. Also, the part of the tree that was still standing was rotten and might split, creating what’s known as a “barber chair.” A barber-chaired trunk can spring up in one direction and come down in another very quickly, and what happens to you if you’re under it is like what happens when you step on a roach.

I called a local service with great reviews. I didn’t call my usual service because they had given me a $1000 estimate to put the entire tree on the ground. I thought that was insane for 20 minutes’ work. The new outfit came out, left, and sent me an estimate: $1300. For that, they would drop the widowmaker, get rid of a nasty smaller tree nearby, and haul the debris, which I had told them I would do myself.

They also said they might not be able to do the work for two weeks. During that time, I would have to worry about UPS and Fedex drivers who might drive around my pickup, which I had parked in the driveway to keep traffic out.

Suddenly, I had a lot more enthusiasm for cutting the tree myself.

I went to Tractor Supply and bought a 30-foot tow strap, 100 feet of thin nylon cord, and one of those nylon straps you use to buckle cargo down.

I came back to the house, tied a weight to the end of a fishing line, and made a cast. On the first try, the weight went over the widowmaker and landed on the driveway. I tied the thin nylon rope to the fishing line and pulled on it, and that gave me a widowmaker with nylon rope draped over it. I joined the new strap to my old one, end-to-end, giving me a 60-foot strap. I used the nylon line to hoist the straps over the log. Then I ran a 3/8″ chain through the free ends of the straps. I tied a rope to my tractor and connected the chain to the rope.

After a few pulls, the widowmaker came down. Wonderful. I was 40 feet away, in no danger at all. An hour or so later, the widowmaker was out in the pasture, and the cows were eating its leaves. They’re so weird. They think my tractor is the ice cream truck.

I saved myself $1230, and I came out of it with some rope, a tow strap, and a cargo strap. Instead of nothing.

I still have to cut the rest of the broken tree down. I’ll put the cargo strap around it to prevent it from barber-chairing, and I’ll drop it in the driveway. Two to three hours of easy work. The difficult job will be removing the stump.

I would have been happy to give the tree people $500 or even $600, but $1300 seemed like robbery to me. They would have been here about an hour, and they wouldn’t have saved me much work. Maybe I’m cheap. I thought the estimate was way out of line. Even if they had left the tree on the ground, they would have expected $1100, and I would have provided 90% of the labor.

If an old man like me can do a job in an hour without breaking much of a sweat, you probably shouldn’t try to charge $1300. I think they’re overcharging right now because it’s hurricane season. They said people were bugging them to cut trees because of that.

I’m so glad that tree is going away. It was a thorn in my side. I told the tree people they could give me an estimate for grinding the stump, but I have a feeling they’ll be too high. I can get rid of it myself with a chainsaw and a shovel, so I am not open to high three-figure estimates. Time to look for a second peach tree.

It was beautiful, watching that weight sail over the widowmaker in just the right place.

Of course, I prayed about everything in advance.

Now all I have to worry about is a minor roof issue. Wonder what they’ll try to charge me for that.

Protect Yourself From my Blog’s Radiation

If you are lucky enough to see this post, you may not know my website was blacklisted recently. Users, including me, have been getting a terse “IP BLACKLISTED” message on their way in. It has been an on-and-off thing.

My blog is not my life. I don’t make money from it, and no one depends on it for anything important. I started getting the blacklisting message a few days back, but I didn’t try to do anything about it until today. I contacted my host, and they said a perma-something-or-other code in my site’s software was incorrect. They say they’ve fixed it and that the site should work now.

While I was Googling, trying to figure out whether a site could be blacklisted by an ISP, I read a lot about conservatives who have been banned from social media. It’s such a trend, President Trump is trying to get the giants (great, appropriate Biblical term) held accountable for editing their sites, just as I could be held accountable for editing the posts I write. If a platform merely publishes content provided by others, it can’t get in much trouble, but if it starts banning some content and keeping the rest, based on caprice, it ceases being a mere publisher and moves into the realm of content creation.

The tech who fixed my site for me didn’t explain why my site’s code was messed up. Can a thing like that happen randomly? We know it can happen when someone tampers with it deliberately, because the tech was able to tamper with it in order to get the site working again. If it can be repaired by a well-meaning tech, it can be vandalized by an angry, biased tech with a lot of body modifications and gender questions.

I don’t know what happened, any more than I know why the Department of Defense banned this blog from its computers as a hate site. In our new virtual world, accountability is nearly nonexistent. I’ve written about this before. In my state, they block people from becoming massage therapists if they have old arrests on their records, but Satan himself can open and run a hosting company. If an angry tech kid decides to block your site, rummage through your emails, or steal your files, you will never know who did it or why, and you will not be able to do anything about it.

One of the things the founders of this nation hated was prosecution without the right to confront accusers. The right to confront accusers is so important, it’s in the Constitution, and we have used it to put terrified children in courtrooms with the men who raped them. It’s not a trivial or disposable right. The Constitution also recognizes the right to due process prior to deprivation of property. In the online world, it’s different. People will ban or shadow-ban you behind your back, and you may never know who did it or why. You may lose a blog or Twitter audience worth a lot of money to you. A social media audience may be worth millions.

It’s no different from losing a customer list, which is legally recognized as a type of property. In the realm of honorable commerce, customer lists are bought and sold. Their value is protected. It ain’t necessarily so on the Internet. You can lose your list instantly and irretrievably, with no compensation or explanation, based on the whims of hipsters who are still mired in their acne-prone years.

Luckily for me, my readers are worth nothing at all to me.

Don’t take it the wrong way.

I don’t know if I was blocked deliberately or not, but I know I would be safer if I ran a site full of sadistic porn. Tech people lean way left, and leftists adore porn. They think it’s the reason the First Amendment was written. It’s practically sacred to them. Promoting Christianity and criticizing sin are not forms of speech they want to protect. People like me are tolerated, at best.

Speaking of toleration, it’s getting much harder to coexist with leftists. The things they’re doing are astounding. I’ll give you an example, which you may know about already. Leftist rioters use laser pointers to blind law enforcement officers and people who disagree with them.

You can go to Amazon or Ebay right now and buy a laser strong enough to blind people. They’re cheap. Under a hundred dollars. Then you can take it to a rally and aim it at the eyes of a person wearing a Fred Perry shirt. In a fraction of a second, you can injure him badly enough to take him out of the fray, and if you do a good job, you can blind him permanently. In the name of love and inclusion.

It’s not a rare thing. Rioters are lighting up the night. In Portland, they’re using shields with holes for laser pointers. Three federal officers have been injured.

Leftists are not calling for laser control, and that’s an astounding bit of hypocrisy. Lasers do harm comparable to the harm done by firearms. It’s true that it’s hard to kill someone with a laser, but most gunshot injuries aren’t fatal, either. Blinding someone is a big deal. If a person aimed a laser at my face, I would be legally entitled to shoot him. That’s how serious it is. But you can buy lasers all day over the web. You can have a thousand shipped to your house next week, even in Chicago, New York, San Francisco, or Hawaii. No background check. No licensing.

A laser is a great weapon. You can hurt a thousand people on one battery charge, and then you can switch batteries, which weigh a couple of ounces each. Try that with a gun. You can hit people accurately with no training. You don’t have to worry about recoil. Your beam can’t be traced by ballisticians after the fact. You won’t get gunshot residue on your hands or clothing. Lasers are silent. They don’t give off smoke, either. Used skillfully, they incapacitate instantaneously and sometimes permanently.

It makes me wonder why I carry a heavy pistol which is hard to use and legally barred from many locations. My state has very harsh penalties for people who exhibit their guns in order to avoid violence, but you can hold a laser in your hand all day get away with it.

Maybe I should invest in a powerful Ebay laser and blind anyone who attacks me.

Anyway, the sadism of angry leftists, which seems to know no limits, makes me wonder if America is headed toward a Wild West future in which the gunslingers carry lasers and a third of the population is blind.

It’s a real equalizer for rioters and looters. Leftists are generally hopeless when it comes to guns, but lasers can level the playing field very quickly. This is why the UN has banned their use against soldiers. Leftists are using a tool that falls into the same category as mustard gas.

If you’re interested, you can buy glasses that protect you from lasers. Amazon is full of them. If you think you may have to defend your property, you might want to buy pairs for yourself and your loved ones. You might want to buy lasers, too.

I cite the laser phenomenon as an example of the way the world is becoming an unbearable place to live. Life is moving in a very unpleasant direction, very quickly. How bad will things have to get before God removes his children because he’s unwilling to let us remain in a world that resembles hell?

He pulled Enoch out. He pulled Noah out. He pulled Lot out. He pulled the Jews out of Egypt. He pulled Elijah and Jesus out. Eventually, he withdraws his children from torment. It’s a repetitive pattern, and the rapture is just another withdrawal in a long sequence of withdrawals.

I wish there were a door in this room I could walk through right now, to take my place at the wedding of Christ. At the same time, I wish I could do something to help people to be saved.

Killing Christian access to the web, along with depriving us of the right to buy and sell, will surely advance the rapture, if it hasn’t taken place by the time these things happen. God has to have a return on his investment, and he’s not going to leave his most precious capital here forever after it ceases to produce an acceptable profit.

I won’t worry about being lasered. The word says I will see the reward of the wicked with my eyes, plural. Not in my imagination. With my eyes.

We should have known the end was near when liberals started throwing feces.

Taylor and Nova Ride in on a Horse

Remember watching the World Trade Center fall? First, one plane struck. TV heads marveled and speculated, and most of us thought the attack was over and that we were already in the response phase. Then the other plane struck. Then journalists, who are generally neither bright nor knowledgeable about practical matters, tried to guess what would happen next. They wondered aloud about the future of the buildings. How bad was the damage? Would they be repaired?

Of course, every witness who had ever held a tool in his hand knew the buildings were coming down. It was obvious. But when the first tower collapsed, journalists were shocked. It also shocked some responders who had made the remarkable mistake of setting up near the bases of the towers.

Watching what’s happening to America is a lot like watching coverage of 9/11. Things we thought would last forever are being dismantled like props being torn down by invisible stagehands.

It turns out the press is ignoring a lot of what’s happening. In particular, they’re ignoring the transformation of liberal-dominated cities.

A man named James Altucher wrote a blog post about New York, and people all over the net are talking about it. He’s a New York hedge fund manager and entrepreneur. He has mentioned some things the press has surely witnessed yet chosen not to discuss. His blog post is titled, “NYC is Dead Forever…Here’s Why.”

I can give you the basic gist. New York is turning into a ghost town because coronavirus has shown people something that should have been obvious several years ago: we no longer need office buildings to do many of our jobs. People are using a service called Zoom to have virtual meetings, and presumably they also use email, texts, and calls. They’re realizing they are not merely nearly as productive, but more productive, working at home.

That’s a very big deal. Office buildings and commuting are extremely expensive. City rents are obscenely high. Even if human beings resist giving up their comfort of their old ways, and even if stodgy managers push back against telecommuting, accountants will see to it that businesses do whatever makes sense economically. If buildings are unnecessary, many people who used to work in big cities will never return.

To give you an idea of the magnitude of the problem, I’ll share this quotation: “The Time-Life Building can handle 8,000 workers. Now it maybe has 500 workers back.” He uses it as an example when he says there are buildings that are 90% empty.

You have to think about the ramifications.

When you own a big building like that, you make income from it, so you pay taxes. You also pay huge sums of money for maintenance and repairs. You may make mortgage payments to a bank. A lot of money goes in, and a lot goes out. If your occupancy rate drops by 90%, what happens? You end up in a situation where you can’t pay your taxes or your lender. You can’t pay to keep your property up. You have to slash rents in order to maximize your income. You end up with substandard tenants who can’t begin to keep you afloat. Then you abandon your property, and your corporation declares bankruptcy. If Altucher is right when he predicts people will not return to New York, we could be looking at a future in which New York looks just like Detroit.

Detroit is an amazing place. It’s strange that Americans pay so little attention to it. I suppose the liberal press suppresses information about Detroit because it’s a beautiful example of a city utterly destroyed by leftism. If conservatives had ruined it, we would hear about it every day.

As everyone knows, Detroit used to be a prosperous city. Wealthy people and companies built beautiful structures. Now many of the places look like sets from post-apocalyptic movies. That’s not hyperbole. It’s exactly what they look like. These properties can’t be given away. I’ll root around and find videos for you.

It’s not just an inner-city thing. In 2018, the median price of a Detroit house was $35,000, and that represents a huge increase from a few years earlier. I can buy a house in Detroit for less than it would cost me to renovate my kitchen in Florida, and the odds are high that I would lose money, because Detroit property values are probably benefiting from temporary optimism related to a dubious renewal campaign.

I’m not sure, but it looks like suburbs depend on cities to a large extent. If a city dries up, presumably many people, who only live in its suburbs so they can commute, will leave.

Ten years ago, people had to live in New York in order to keep corporations running. Now we are getting close to a model in which a big percentage of people can literally live in Egypt, work in New York, and never, ever have to meet their coworkers.

There are things people like about commuting. It gets you out of the house. You can socialize. You can have lunch at restaurants. You can shop after work. On the other hand, people really, really like working from their couches while wearing stained sweatpants. You don’t have to dress up. You don’t have to be around annoying coworkers and bosses. You may be able to set your own hours. You can forget about trains and traffic. You may save enough money in one year to go to Europe twice. Not that you can go to Europe in 2020, but still. You can buy nicer sweatpants and a bigger SUV.

If Altucher is right, and he surely is, then Manhattan residents should get used to blank storefronts, shuttered restaurants, and a theater scene that looks more like Knoxville than Broadway.

What will happen to the hordes of perennial government sucklings? Many, many New Yorkers live off the labor of others. Who will bums beg from? Who will fund hobby philanthropy organizations? What will happen to locally-funded poverty projects?

If the dogs leave, what will happen to the fleas? They can’t go to the suburbs or the country. People move to those places to get away from them. Dependent people have to have cities in order to thrive. Maybe they’ll be able to get by on what the feds give them.

We already knew the Internet would devastate stores. Now it looks like it will work in concert with coronavirus hysteria to gut cities and suburbs.

Many years ago, I predicted that with the advent of online retailers, people would start moving to the country. It didn’t happen. At least not when I predicted it. It was hard for me to relate to people who actually liked cities, so I think I projected my own desires onto the general public. Many people love city life. Now we may see the abolishment of that lifestyle in many places. We also see how unpleasant life is in cities during crises. Maybe my prediction will finally come true.

Will it happen everywhere? My guess is that leftist cities that reacted hysterically to coronavirus will be hit hardest. They destroyed their economies and forced people to experience a new web-based lifestyle they might otherwise have avoided trying for years. They killed businesses that were necessary to lure people back. It looks like New Yorkers don’t have much to return to. Maybe that’s true in other leftist strongholds where mayors and governors overreacted. Eventually, though, I would expect the trend to spread to other places. Freedom to choose and design your own environment and social circle is very seductive, and financial concerns are compelling.

I saw an interesting Internet comment the other day. Someone mentioned polio. The commenter said a relative had gone through a polio epidemic, and people hadn’t reacted like little girls in a room where a rat has been released. They didn’t kill local economies. People took reasonable measures and accepted the risk. We do the same thing with the flu every year, and the seasonal flu has killed millions of us over the years.

Death is bad, but it’s part of everyone’s life, and liberty and prosperity are very important.

Americans were wrong to flip out over coronavirus. If we hadn’t panicked, we probably would have lost more people, but the effects on our way of life would have been more tolerable. Look at Sweden. They didn’t have lockdowns. They’ve had a fairly high rate of infection, but so what? It has not been catastrophic, and the country keeps chugging along, just as countries do after wars and natural disasters.

It’s interesting to see how coronavirus continues to hit leftist areas more severely. My county has had an explosion in the official infection count, but it’s not a disaster, and we haven’t seen the severe shortages or economic problems places like Chicago have endured. I can think of a few things that have been hard to buy. Disinfectant wipes, alcohol, hand sanitizer, toilet paper, paper towels, and eggs. There are probably some other things I’m not recalling because they have had no significant effect on my life. I never ran out of meat. I was always able to eat nearly anything I wanted. I never had to go home because I couldn’t get in a store.

My cousin in Chicago still can’t get toilet paper. She went through a period where it was nearly impossible to go to stores. Getting inside her local Walmart took hours. Once inside, she couldn’t get meat. For all I know, she still can’t. A few weeks back, long after talk of meat shortages had ceased, I sent my cousin near Atlanta a photo of steaks on sale, and he said it had been months since he had seen anything like that.

I’ve been predicting this county would hit something like 9,000 known cases and then see a sharp dropoff. I based this guess on the New York figures. It looks like I won’t be far wrong. I was mistaken when I thought the US-case collapse we saw earlier in the year would continue, and I didn’t think this county would blow up the way it has, but even true hot spots calm down eventually, and surely that will happen here, in an area where things have never gotten very bad.

Much of our virus-figure explosion is atypical and not useful for drawing conclusions because we increased testing dramatically and because we have a big locked-down prison population that got hit very hard.

To get back to the point, it seems like God has been much gentler to rural and conservative people. We’re getting virus upticks after the nationwide shortages abated and after better ways of addressing the epidemic were learned through the painful lessons endured by New Yorkers, Bostonians, and other subjects of the leftist elite. There is no panic. There is no real deprivation. Economic damage is minimal. As an example of the contrast, South Dakota never had a lockdown, and their governor just turned down a round of government handouts because they don’t need it.

It seems like ungodly people are much more likely to suffer, and they’re much more likely to give up their freedom and dignity because they’re much more afraid of death. This is something to think about as America continues to deteriorate. We will continue to see two different schools of thought. We will see the fear-based, desperate, selfish, bestial mindset of leftists, and we will see a calmer, more altruistic, less hostile attitude among people in areas that are heavily Christian.

People who don’t love God will do nearly anything in a crisis. During famines, they have been known to kill and eat their children. That kind of thing makes sense to people who think this life is all there is and that you have to make the most of it. Real Christians, on the other hand, have a history of allowing themselves to be martyred during prosperous times. Real Christians are less likely to panic. To us, death is like being sent home from a war zone, and maltreating others in order to stay alive is a frightening, off-putting idea.

When I think about leaving this earth, I don’t get scared. I long for it. My body is not what it used to be. I use reading glasses. My appearance is deteriorating. I forget things more often. The thought of being in a renewed body far superior to my earthly body at its best moment makes me wish the end were closer, as does the thought of getting cataracts and arthritis and being unable to do the things I enjoy. I don’t want to be a 75-year-old on this earth, shuffling around in this body. The thought of making it to 90 is genuinely disturbing.

People don’t believe in God generally want to hold onto whatever they have, regardless of the cost. It’s undignified. Look at Joe Biden, with all of his age-denying cosmetic procedures. Sometimes I think he smiles just so he will have something to show the IRS in case they object when he deducts his dental expenses.

I wonder if Hollywood stars are panicking because it’s harder to get elective surgery now. The pandemic must be harder on female stars because they have much shorter shelf lives than men. It’s not unusual for an actress to get her breakthrough during a certain year and be supplanted by younger, more attractive women 5 years later. One season of diminished activity could be very hard on certain female stars; especially those in their mid-thirties.

It will be interesting to see how Altucher’s predictions hold up a month from now. It would really be something, seeing Fifth Avenue turn into the South Bronx.

Biggest Danger to American Christians: Friendly Fire

Christian pride and self-righteousness are very destructive things. They lead us to become the worst enemies of the church. I have very few problems with nonbelievers. The people who mistreat me because of my beliefs are generally Christians. This is normal, and that’s sad.

I published a Youtube video about a rapture dream I had. I’ve written about the dream here. I said my mother and I were in her parents’ house, a huge horn blew from somewhere out over the Pacific, and we rose through the ceiling. In discussing the rapture, I talk about my belief that it will happen before the tribulation. I don’t mean nothing will go badly for Christians before the rapture. I mean whatever happens prior to the rapture will be an hors d’oeuvre, not the main course. I believe the real tribulation will be much worse. Whatever I said in the video was consistent with these beliefs.

This makes me a believer in the pre-tribulation rapture. There are also people who believe it will happen in the middle of the tribulation or at the end.

Have I said I was certain the rapture would come before the tribulation? I don’t think so, because I’m not. I just have a very strong impression that God says it will happen that way, and I have a lot of evidence from the Bible.

Some character with zero Youtube content showed up and started making comments of little value. First, he said something like, “Dude, young men will dream dreams, and old men will have visions.”

Of course, that’s not what the Bible says. Joel said old men would dream dreams and young men would have visions. Everyone knows that. It’s something every Christian should know, like how many commandments there are.

Eventually, I decided to say something. I replied and said, “Have you gone back and checked that yet?”

He (gender assumption) deleted his comment. No reply. Just an effort to hide the mistake. Then he posted a big, long comment saying 2 Thessalonians 2 proved the pre-tribulation theory was wrong and evil and so on. His comment was rude, and he said something about how he would rather be dyslexic than a “pre-tribber.”

This is the kind of thing people get wound up about. Not how to get rid of pride and hate. Not how to get love to flow. Not how to become one with the Holy Spirit.

I replied again, and I mentioned the deleted comment. I pointed out that dyslexia doesn’t make you say–deliberately–things which are incorrect. He really believed the verse said old men would have visions. I said he should try to be more honest. I didn’t think deleting the comment and then lying about it was the best course of action.

The 2 Thessalonians 2 passage he referred to mentions “the day of Christ.” He thought this was a reference to the rapture. I thought about it, and I felt I had a revelation. I said “day of Christ,” which clearly isn’t necessarily the rapture, might well refer to the Messianic Age. The Bible says a thousand years are like one day to God, and there is at least one example of God using “day” to mean “millennium.”

When Eve and Adam (in that order) sinned, they faced a punishment God had ordained earlier. He had said they would die during the day they ate the forbidden fruit. Then Adam lived another 900 years. So God lied, apparently, or…he was referring to a heavenly day, not an earthly day.

Obviously, he didn’t lie.

It seemed to me that this might explain some Biblical references to “the day of the Lord.”

Anyway, the anonymous commenter got really angry and said all I had to offer were “smarmy insults.” Then he demanded I produce documentation proving something or other I said I believed, as though Internet participants were entitled to make each other write research papers. He said, “I am going to dismantle your cult.”

This is when I found out he had no content. I wondered what was setting him off, so I went to see his videos to find out if he was a nutbar. There was nothing there.

I don’t know how he plans to dismantle my cult without creating content on his channel. I didn’t even know I had a cult.

I decided the best thing was to delete his weird comments and get on with life. In a way, this was like the rapture. One of the purposes of the rapture is to put an end to the necessity of dealing with people and spirits who are irrational and emotional and not worth talking to.

It looks like there is a battle going on among the people I call “Jesus buffs.” They’re like Trekkies, except their thing is Jesus. They speak nothing but Christianese. They wear shirts with huge crosses on them. They take pride in having gone to more revivals and concerts than you have. They make a point of telling everyone how they know this or that semi-famous preacher personally. They study the Bible and listen to theorists instead of spending time with God, and they use their studies to prove their strange theories. Generally, they do not claim their ideas came by revelation. They claim they figured things out on their own. Sounds a bit like pride.

I have been lumped in with a faction known as the pre-tribbers. I’m not sure, but I think the mid-tribbers and post-tribbers think we’re going to hell. We’re not just mistaken; we’re mouthpieces for Satan himself. There are also no-tribbers and rapture deniers. I suppose they also think we’re going to hell, along with the mid-tribbers and post-tribbers.

I’m not surprised that people disagree about things. Most Christians do not believe in the baptism with the Holy Spirit, and he is the only source of knowledge. Many who do believe in the baptism and have received it don’t spend time with God or pray in tongues, so they have logins they rarely use. Most Christians don’t hear from God, so they make things up. Even the ones who hear from God don’t get complete information. Disagreement is inevitable. The thing that’s disturbing is the factionalism and hatred, over trivial things.

We are supposed to shed the works of the flesh, and the Bible says factionalism is a work of the flesh. There are times when we have to break with people, and we are often required to point out their errors, just as other people are required to point out our own. That doesn’t mean we’re supposed to hate each other and condemn each other to hell based on whether we use Shiraz or Cabernet Sauvignon to take communion.

I suspect spirits of delusion are sent to Christians because of pride. Many Christians take pride in their denominations and their doctrine, without realizing how crazy that is. In addition to looking down on other Christians, most of us have a condescending attitude toward Jews. The premise is that modern Christians would never have crucified Jesus, had they been around in Pilate’s time. Of course, most Christians would crucify him right now if he came back under an assumed name and taught the same things he taught 2000 years ago. Many feel superior to the Jews who were, and are, against Jesus. They don’t realize faith comes from God, not from innate superiority.

Pride goes before a fall, so it makes sense that so many of us would fall into hateful factionalism.

It’s a very good sign when preachers and Jesus buffs mistreat you. They’re the same sort of people who killed the prophets and clamored for the crucifixion. It’s important to be able to tell when friction from other Christians means you’re on the right track.

Disagreement over the timing of the rapture should not be so significant to us that we attack each other and tell each other we’re going to hell. You don’t have to know the date of the rapture to go to heaven. It’s very telling when a person is so deluded he becomes infuriated with people who disagree with him about relatively trivial things. When all you have to offer is anger, you ought to know you’re not serving God.

We should be living as though the rapture were coming in the next hour, all the time. Knowing when it will happen is not necessary to living a holy life.

Varmint Rifle Becomes Relatively Cheap Teaching Tool

I have .17 HMR ammo figured out.

Today I went out and fired 20 rounds of ammo at 100 yards. I used a 4-bullseye target. My goal was to decide whether I should buy 17-grain or 20-grain ammo. I wanted to get whatever was the most accurate.

Here is the target. I wrote “17” and “20” on it so I would remember what went where. I started at the bottom-left, and I moved clockwise, shooting 5 rounds per target.

The first group came in at just under 1 MOA. That proves this ammo is good enough for hunting. For all I know, it will work for target shooting, too, if I practice more.

The second group does not seem to exist. I was fooling with the scope, and I think I adjusted three shots off the target.

The third group is under 0.7 MOA. For some reason, I fired at the lower-right bullseye, and as you can see, the points of impact are pretty high. I adjusted the scope again, and I shot at the same point of aim, figuring the top bullseye was already messed up. I shot a little over 1 MOA. I think the two holes to the right may be flyers. Maybe I did something new. I felt pretty good while I shot, though.

Anyhow, it certainly looks like the 20-grain stuff is accurate in this gun, and at least one other Internet person got the same result, so I think it’s probably more accurate than the lighter bullets. The 17-grain ammo may not shoot quite as well. I’m not positive, and I don’t want to shoot all day to find out whether it’s 0.3 MOA wilder than the heavy rounds.

The 20-MOA scope base is not working out. It was fine yesterday. I had to move the scope forward last night, and when I did that, things moved around, and when I tried to fix the elevation, I ran out of clicks. Oh, well. A new base is on the way. Not a big deal.

I thought the base might conceivably have some use if I shot at really long ranges, past the subsonic transition, but it looks like it won’t work closer in if the eye relief is set correctly. I’m surprised to see how much the point of aim moved when I moved the scope up one picatinny slot.

It was not a brilliant idea. Even if I hadn’t run out of clicks, you don’t really need a super-low base if you have a mil-dot reticle.

This will give me an opportunity to use the mil dots while I wait for the new base. I’ll try to figure out which dot to place on my point of aim, and it should work.

Now I feel confident ordering more ammo.

Shooting this thing is a joy. No worries about ear damage. No recoil. Excellent accuracy. Nice glass.

Maybe by the end of the month, I’ll be able to post some targets showing that I’ve improved.

Angry Armed Civilians will Make Cops Look Like Wet Nurses

What’s going on here at the compound today? I know people want the inside dope.

I’m eagerly awaiting the arrival of my EGW 20-MOA scope base. It would be neat if I could plop it, and my new scope, on the Savage 93R and start shooting beautiful little .17 HMR rounds today. I don’t think that will happen. The mail arrives late in the afternoon, and there is apparently a new county ordinance that says it must rain torrentially at 4 p.m every day. It will take me an hour just to get the rifle set up. Looks like tomorrow will be the day.

I feel like I should order even more ammunition. I saw some guy on a forum apologizing for only having 20,000 rounds of .22 LR, and I felt inferior. I have a lot of .17 HMR, but Joe Biden just picked Kamala Harris to be the Democrats’ real candidate for the presidency, and supplies may get even tighter than they are now. I enjoy shooting a great deal, and I don’t want to have to quit.

I want to find out whether 17-grain or 20-grain bullets shoot better before I commit. Should I wait for the scope to arrive, or should I use my old one to get it over with? Is it safe to wait a couple of days? Maybe not.

Biden, who is getting an MSM/MeToo pass on exposing himself to female Secret Service agents, will be dead by the 2024 election, and he will probably have his public appearances limited during 2021. Not that anyone will want to see him after he is forced from office. The left will want to move on ASAP so they don’t have to talk about lying about Biden’s illness. They’ll want to pretend they were all about electing a semi-black woman all along.

If Biden wins, we will soon be able to say we’ve had a black president. Obama was half black, and Harris is half black, so together, they make one president. As it stands now, we’ve only had half of one, and his black half wasn’t really black. It was African. His ancestors never worked in the Americas as slaves. They had no idea what cornbread or biscuits were. They made no contributions to the blues, ragtime, or jazz. They never participated in civil rights marches. Obama has no idea what it’s like to part of American black culture, but he could tell you about the comfortable suburban culture of the white grandparents who raised him when his parents ran off.

People are claiming Biden’s selection is groundbreaking. Everyone forgets Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice. They forget Herman Cain’s flirtation with the presidency, which was embraced by conservatives. They forget the fact that Democrat cabinets tend to look like Romney family reunions.

Well…I shouldn’t say that. There is at least one non-white Romney.

I keep asking God whether I should spend money on guns and ammunition. I feel he wants me to do it. I have asked him why. I now think the answer is that it’s for the people who don’t make it in the rapture. Lots of Christians, and nearly all Jews, will still be here, surrounded by violent, infantile people who are no longer restrained by the prayers of the people God removed. They will need guns and ammo to stay alive until they can get right with God. Or maybe God will give them a choice between using the weapons and accepting martyrdom in order to be saved.

I still feel like December will be the month, and somehow, the 11th seems like the day. Not pretending I’m certain, though. I haven’t seen a scroll appear with the date written on it in flames.

Imagine the simian behavior we will see from the left after the election, regardless of who wins. If they win, they’ll gloat and march and riot. It will be remarkable if leftist pogroms don’t begin in November. In January, the DOJ will give them license to riot all they want. If they lose, they’ll riot for months as their way of throwing a tantrum. Ruling by tantrum is their goal already.

I’ve been thinking about what they’re up against. They will need serious supernatural help from Satan. Leftist men tend to be feminine and soft. They tend to be unacquainted with weapons and tactics. Leftist women are women, and women don’t fight very well. On the other side, there are countless conservatives who have been stocking up on equipment since Obama was elected. Some started earlier.

I have been wondering who buys things like plate carriers. A plate carrier is a garment that holds bullet-resistant armor. I’ve wondered who buys dozens of AR-15 and AK-47 magazines. I think I know the answer. People aren’t preparing to protect their houses. You will never need a dozen magazines to put down a deer or a burglar. They’re preparing for civil war, and they’re doing a fine job.

I used to think people would give up their guns, just like Australians and the British. Now I don’t think so. I think the left taught conservatives they didn’t have to obey the law as long as they had numbers. I think tens of millions of conservatives will tell the police to jam it when they ask for their weapons. If you can take over a city with rifles and not be arrested, you can keep your AR-15 collection and your bump stocks and binary triggers.

It looks like leftists will be taking pepper spray, bags of feces, and bottles of urine to gunfights. To harm conservatives in a post-election scenario, you will need to be able to strike from at least 600 yards away, because that’s how far a cheap AR-15 will shoot effectively. No one in history has ever been able to throw pee that far.

Leftists can’t magically become competent at warfare in a month or two, and conservatives have been getting ready since they were born. Rioters do well in cities, where people are disarmed and conditioned to wait for the police to protect them. The farther out looters and arsonists go, the worse things will get for them. We’ve already seen small towns run them off.

They should start wearing camo instead of black.

The antichrist’s troops may have a false sense of safety because they’ve prepared to engage the police in cities. The thing is, the police are pussycats. They have to obey orders. They have to wear cameras. They’re forced to use non-lethal weapons. Civilians aren’t like that. They have real guns and zero oversight.

Because suburban and rural homes and businesses are relatively hard targets compared to urban ones, one would expect the leftist carnage and cruelty to be focused in cities. Of course, that has historically been the case. Rioters and looters are like animals that defecate in their own nests. Cowards who run from the strong attack the weak, and people who are too sorry to work will often be too sorry to travel. Also, many urban guerrillas don’t own cars.

Many people on the left and right seem delighted by the prospect of civil war. I suppose this is how people who have never seen real war think. It may sound like fun while you’re sitting at home cleaning your guns or filling bottles with pee, but it’s not fun when bodies start dropping and survivors have to be fitted with artificial limbs and colostomy bags.

Anyway, if the rapture comes, maybe nominal Christians who live nearby will need to use what I leave behind, to buy themselves time. I hope I’m not here with them.

On a personal level, I keep trying to get God’s help cleaning up my inner filth. I’m much better than I was 10 years ago, but the standard is Jesus, not my old self. I still let God down substantially from time to time.

I had a wonderful revelation. I think all improvement comes through divine revelation and impartation.

I’ll explain the revelation. I thought about gifts I had received from people who loved me. For purposes of this blog entry, you can think about things your mother gave you. You know how that works. She gives you something that really doesn’t work out, but 20 years later, you can’t throw it out, because your mom gave it to you. She saw it on the shelf, and she thought about her baby. She thought about how much she missed you, and she thought about you opening your present and remembering how much she loved you.

Then it turned out you didn’t have all that much use for a bread machine, so you put it in the garage and told yourself you would give it away. But you didn’t.

Every good thing we have is like that bread machine, except that the good things God gives us work.

It’s easy to get used to thinking of God as an enraged father who is fed up with your shenanigans. Things look different when you remember he’s a warm-hearted, generous father who delights in choosing things for you. It makes you feel bad about complaining and about not taking care of his gifts.

This is the person I let down when I sin. Maybe I have made him angry on occasion, but the Bible says I am like a son in whom he delights. My mother and father certainly had faults, but I know what it is to have two parents who delight in me. If I appreciate what they did for me, in their imperfection, how much more should I appreciate what God has done for me?

Thinking about this helps me with gratitude, humility, and obedience.

America is turning into a toilet because we have made ourselves fatherless. What do you see when you watch Antifa and BLM agitators hitting old people, breaking windows, stealing in mobs, and burning buildings? Punks. People who would never, ever do those things if their fathers were beside them. People who need guidance and discipline.

People are like dogs. When you walk a dog, it will see and smell interesting things, and it will try to run off to investigate. That’s when you yank the leash, tighten the choke collar, and make it clear that kind of behavior isn’t allowed to happen. People get stupid, disgraceful ideas. We pursue them. If we’re young and our parents are nearby, we get taken to the woodshed, and that helps prevent us from becoming useless punks. Fathers are generally the most effective dispensers of discipline.

Human fathers are extremely important, but they are just shadows of the father we really need. We cut off his influence when churches slandered the Holy Spirit and did away with the Holy Spirit baptism and prayer in tongues. We reduced God’s ability to correct us. This is why so many Americans think it’s okay to defecate on police cars and take over cities. It would be a great help if God sent out millions of angels who looked just like John Wayne, to shatter tailbones with steel-toed boots. It would save a lot of punks from destruction. Unfortunately, this is not the way God works. Bringing his order into the world has always been man’s job, not God’s.

I can think of a lot of occasions on which a devastating kick to the rear end would have changed the course of my life for the better.

My parents failed me. My dad was an atheist, and he was selfish and brutal. My mother was a nominal Christian. They didn’t put me in touch with God. They often spoiled me, because it was easy for them. Spoiling is a form of neglect.

Systematically, they failed to correct me. It’s a wonder I’m not worse than I am. Fortunately, God gave us this promise: “When my father and my mother forsake me, then the Lord will take me up.” That’s the only reason I am not headed for destruction.

My guess is that people see that verse and think it means God will protect them and give them things. I suppose that’s correct, but fathers and mothers are supposed to prune and shape us like trees. Apart from salvation, these are the best things God does for us. He takes us up and fixes the things our parents ruined.

For a long time, I’ve prayed for God to help me and the people on my prayer list not to be punks.

Churches don’t seem to talk about this. They let the punks teach them. Churches are full of awful ghetto music. Preachers and even their wives cover themselves with trashy tattoos. They try to turn Jesus into an MTV host. When the Holy Spirit is ignored, things like prophecy and healing stop, and church becomes painfully boring. Then preachers try to tart it up by adding worldly features. Meanwhile, the Bible reminds us to “remain unspotted from the world.”

The purpose of the crucifixion was to lift us, not to lower Jesus.

I can still see across the gun room, so maybe it’s time to buy more cartridges. Hope we meet in a better place while someone else is shooting up my ammo.

The End of Days Is no Excuse for Bad Cooking or Poor Shooting

I dare anyone to say I don’t make great use of my time.

Today two wonderful things happened. I got over the local-pizza-ingredient hump, and I put a new scope on my Thompson Center Venture rifle.

I probably should not be thinking about pizza, but the pandemic and the mythical food shortages associated with it shift one’s thoughts in the direction of shopping and cooking, and I am a casualty. Early in the crisis, flour disappeared from shelves, and when it reappeared, bread flour lagged by at least two months. I bought some wheat gluten before everyone else thought of it, and I started fooling around with it. I tried to make baguettes, for example.

Pizza is a mysterious food. It only has three major ingredients, and preparation is extremely simple, but it’s one of the hardest things to figure out how to make. I figured it out when I lived in Miami. It turned out ingredients were extremely critical. I had to use certain things, or it didn’t work. Then I moved north, and I was no longer able to get those things.

You can use just about any flour to make a great Sicilian pizza, but for some reason, thin pizza doesn’t work that way. Most of the flour at your local grocery just won’t cut it. The texture or the flavor or both will be off. Bread flour works well, and some bread flours are better than others. Some people insist on Caputo 00 flour from Italy. It’s a low-ash flour without much gluten. I tried it, and I didn’t think much of it.

A local store started stocking King Arthur bread flour a couple of weeks back, so naturally, I have been making pizza. The flour gave me good results, but I was not completely happy.

I researched, and I decided I should try diastatic malt powder. This is a dough conditioner. You add a small amount to your flour, and it makes the product blow up better and brown better in the oven. I couldn’t find it around here, but Amazon sells it. Today I put a little bit in my flour, and the result was very good. The dough browned earlier, it blew up better, and it wasn’t as chewy as it had been in previous efforts. It rose fast, and the flavor was good.

I knew something good was happening when I rolled the proofed dough out and started tossing it. It had a silky feel to it, and it opened up beautifully. It didn’t even try to tear. Tossing a 10″ pie took less than a minute. It was a snap. I don’t know how malt works, but it worked great today, and I plan to keep using it.

I also tried a new tomato product. Nearly all of the tomato products stores sell are useless for pizza. The manufacturers use unripe tomatoes or the wrong varieties. It’s easy to get or make a sauce that looks red and tasty, but when you take a bite of a slice, you will know you’ve been had.

My go-to sauce is Saporito, from the Stanislaus company. It’s tomato paste, basil, and citric acid. It’s very sweet and fruity. I doctor it up with a few things, and it’s excellent. But I can’t get it around here.

I’ve been trying various items from local stores. Today I decided to try Muir Glen “organic” paste. I put “organic” in quotation marks because “organic” is an empty Pavlovian stimulus which motivates people to spend three times as much for food that isn’t any better. There are no real standards for organic food production, except that you have to put “organic” on the label.

The can says Muir Glen is made in Central California, and the Muir Glen website shows big Roma tomatoes, just like the ones Stanislaus uses. Stanislaus is a California company.

I combined some paste with garlic powder, oil, salt, oregano, and a couple of other things, and I put it on a crust made with diastatic malt. I used sliced Sargento mozzarella and sliced Boar’s Head fontina. I sprinkled oregano and salt on top of the cheese, and I baked at 500° on a preheated stone. I can’t do better than 500° with my oven.

The pizza was very nice. I used too much cheese and not enough sauce, but it was a lot better than pies I had made earlier in the week. I feel like my suffering is over. Not that I plan to make a lot of pizza. I was just frustrated because I couldn’t figure out how to do it with things I could buy here.

I really want to make garlic rolls with malt, but I have to maintain some self-control.

I can supply the ingredient list, if you want to try it.

INGREDIENTS

125 grams King Arthur bread flour
80 grams warm water
2 tsp. instant yeast
1/2 tsp. salt
1/4 tsp. diastatic malt

You can add oil to make it softer. My understanding is that you should knead, add oil, and knead again. Some food reason I no longer recall.

I gave it a pretty decent “kneading” in the food processor, going for at least 30 seconds after it formed a ball. I prepared the pizza on a square of non-stick foil, which I removed from the stone after two minutes. You just pull it out from under the pizza. If you use this method, you won’t have to try to shove a sticky raw pizza off a peel. You put it on the foil, and the foil slides off, taking the pizza with it. After two minutes of cooking on the foil, the crust is strong enough to tolerate having the foil yanked out.

As for the rifle, some Seekins scope rings arrived today, and I was able to mount a Vortex Viper PST 6-24×50 on it. This is a discontinued scope I bought accidentally. I was going to return it, but I decided it would be more than adequate for .204 Ruger, which is only useful at or below 400 yards. I think I did a good job of mounting it. I used a torque wrench and all that. I changed the trigger spring two days ago, so now I have a killer varmint rig with a very light touch. I still have my ATN night scope, so I have the Vortex for daytime, and if I ever decided to try shooting coons at night, I’ll have the ATN ready to go.

Very nice. It’s wonderful when you get a firearm working correctly. I can’t wait to zero the scope and see what the gun can do. Based on earlier results with a scope which is hard to use, I have high hopes of being able to put 10 rounds in a 1″ circle at 100 yards.

People call the Venture a cheap gun. Maybe so. I have never shot an expensive bolt rifle, so I don’t know what I’m missing. I think the most expensive bolt guns I’ve shot were a 6mm and a 30.06, probably Remington, when I was a kid. With the Venture, I have what appears to be a phenomenal trigger and a highly accurate gun, so what’s not to love? The bolt has been very sticky, and that led me to blow a hole in the pasture while trying to close it, but I have been running it back and forth in order to loosen it up, and it seems to be working. I should be able to make it nice and slick with some effort. After that, it will be really hard to see what an additional thousand dollars would have bought me.

On Wednesday, the scope base for my .17 HMR should arrive, unless it’s in the mailbox already. Then I can put an Athlon scope on my Savage 93R, and I’ll be all set for inexpensive, nearly recoil-free 100-yard practice.

Scoped rifles have been a source of frustration for me, and a lot of it has been equipment-related. By the end of the week, I should have 3 rifles set up well with MRAD scopes, and I may even have my AR-15 set up correctly. After that, I should be able to focus on learning to shoot instead of subduing uncooperative weapons.

I’m not shooting today because I don’t want to make my neighbors miserable. Any sane person should be satisfied with three sessions a week.

That’s what I’m telling myself at the moment.

I’m blessed to have a few readers who give me good advice and save me from myself. Jim from the now-defunct Smoke on the Water pops in from time to time to cut through the BS I’ve read and heard. Recently, he provided some tips on leveling scopes, which is a BS-intensive topic from one end to the other. I believe I will only need such information for my Ruger Precision Rifle and LR-308, because nothing else I have will shoot far enough to make leveling matter. Anyway, his comment will be there when I need it.

I still want to get a Tikka T3x in 6.5 Creedmoor. I do not hunt at all, apart from small annoying creatures of the sort taxidermists hide in their back rooms, but I have dreams of getting out there and trying, and I need at least one rifle for large game. The hunting picture is not rosy for me. There is nothing worth shooting (legally) on this property, and I feel funny about wandering around on public land wearing day-glo overalls, surrounded by beer-drunk weekend warriers with itchy trigger fingers and cataracts. Even if I did get out there and try, I don’t know what to do with a whole deer, and I can’t make myself shoot a bird smaller than a turkey. That’s what owning parrots will do to you. It’s really too bad pigs don’t come to visit.

I could pay for a guide and shoot some pigs on a hunting property, but that’s a little bit like going outside and shooting one of the cattle. I hope they would at least let me get out of the truck.

I shouldn’t joke. I remember shooting a rabbit from my grandfather’s Buick Riviera. He was a great grandfather.

My 6.5 Creedmoor dies arrived. I’m waiting for a case trimmer. I think I ordered bullets and powder. Yes, I remember it now. Primers are on their way to the nearest Bass Pro. Once my rifles are functioning, I’ll be able to think about making my first rifle rounds.

That’s all that’s happening here, apart from the apocalypse. Hope you’re enjoying it as much as I am.

Kindly Stop Breathing Near Me

What’s going on with coronavirus? I wish I knew.

My county is up to 6,573 known cases, or about 2.2% of the population, based on a mental calculation I just did, which I am too lazy to check.

Does it mean the virus is spreading as quickly as the number suggests, or does it mean we’re just testing a lot?

You tell me.

The number of coronavirus deaths here is currently 89. That’s about 5 times what it was a couple of months ago. The known-case number has multiplied by something roughly like 20, but the death number is not keeping pace. That seems to suggest that the real infection rate has probably only multiplied by about 5, and that suggests testing is the main driving force behind the known-case number.

Of course, there are reasons why no one can rely on any of these figures. For one thing, medical institutions have big financial incentives to attribute deaths to coronavirus. Because medical people lean left, they also have political incentives. People in my area are talking about falsified records, and I have no reason to doubt what they say. The tests aren’t very good, and people lie.

Another problem: roughly a third of our known cases come from prisons. That’s a freak thing. This county has a lot of prison–not just jail–beds. Compared to other counties, we have more prisoners per capita. Prisons are not normal environments. The residents are confined in very small spaces, and that’s the single most important factor in coronavirus transmission. Also, a disproportionate number are black, and black people are more susceptible to infection.

Prisons are getting a disproportionate death rate. I suppose people in prison are more likely to have underlying conditions. They are not responsible people. A lot of them are probably former smokers. Many are probably obese. Then there is AIDS. And hepatitis C.

Another strange thing: women make up a big portion of the known cases. Is that because we have women’s prisons? Search me.

Anyway, you can’t look at a 2.2% known-infection rate and draw solid conclusions.

For months now, I’ve been hoping the bug would turn out to be more contagious than it appeared. The experts kept telling us it was more contagious than the flu, but the infection numbers are still nowhere close to those we see in an average flu year. The flu takes around 120 days to generate the bulk of its statistics. The consensus is that Coronavirus has been in America for at least 7 months, but a smart person who knows there is air travel between here and China pretty much has to conclude that it actually got here by December 1, 2019. Whether the correct guess is 7 months or over 8 months, if this had been the flu, we would have had something like 40 million known cases by May 1, and unless we are failing to detect cases, that hasn’t happened.

If coronavirus really is more contagious than the flu, then maybe half of Americans have already had it. If that’s true, then it’s typically very, very mild. If it were not, we would have noticed the huge wave of sick people.

We have moderately large wave of people who are known to be infected, and we have a much smaller wave of people who have had symptoms.

The other day, some expert said he thought we probably had 50 million cases. I hope he’s right. That would mean the disease was not as severe as the hype suggested, and it would also mean we were pretty far into the process and therefore much closer to recovery than official figures suggest.

But you can’t trust any of the numbers, so what do I know?

The people who ALLEGEDLY died from coronavirus here were almost all afflicted with “underlying conditions.” We have 89 deaths, including 86 victims with preexisting health problems. That’s a comforting 97%. Unless you have an underlying health condition. Then it’s an extremely alarming 97%.

The news says nearly every infected person here has a known source of infection. That sounds very encouraging. It suggests you’re not likely to wake up sick with no explanation, and that suggests you have some control.

It looks like the local mask ordinance is gone. The city Karens or whatever they’re called passed an ordinance for the city, but the mayor vetoed it. Not sure why. I would have to pay money to read the story; forget that. I don’t think it matters, because businesses have signs up. No mask, no Big Mac. As is so often the case, the private sector is well able to look after itself without government coercion.

I read some interesting stuff today. They say the polio vaccine and pneumonia vaccines may confer some resistance. I’ve had a bunch of polio vaccines. I don’t know if that’s normal. Either you’re supposed to get more than one, or my mother let them give them to me because we moved around and didn’t keep my medical records. I know I’ve had more than one, because I remember how they tasted.

I wonder if I should get a pneumonia vaccine. I don’t see how it can hurt. I should definitely get a flu shot.

I have also read that they suspect that asymptomatic people don’t get sick because they’ve had other coronaviruses, or similar viruses, in the past. That would be great news. When I was a kid, I got a cold about once a month. I must have had everything by now. It would also suggest that vaccines will be incredibly effective. If a cold I had 5 years ago can protect me, surely a vaccine can.

I don’t worry. I think I already had coronavirus, I think God will look after me even if I’m wrong, I have no underlying conditions, I do well with respiratory stuff, and I do not care at all if I die. And besides, worry is sin, it’s faith in Satan, it’s unpleasant, and there is nothing good about it. Not one thing.

Do I worry about other people? Well, if worry is wrong, it’s wrong, no matter who you’re worrying about. I don’t worry about other people. I can’t do anything for them anyway, apart from prayer. I’m doing that.

I keep feeling that the rapture is coming this year. I now, officially, hope this is true. I don’t want to see anyone go through the tribulation unnecessarily, but the more I see of 2020 humanity, the more I am weary of us, and the more weary I think God must be. It must be unpleasant, watching us at each other’s throats over a mild disease, knowing almost none of us will get the message and fast and repent. He offers us all the solutions to our problems, and we are scrapping over masks and disinfecting wipes.

A sea of lies is spewing from leftists these days. It reminds me of the red dragon story from the Revelation. I’m so tired of lies. It doesn’t bother me that people are wrong, but many lies demand a response. Lying works, at least in the short term. I’m tired of contending with liars.

When I think of lies, I think about my sister. She never took responsibility for anything that happened to her. Everyone was out to get her. She was a saint, surrounded by villainous scum. She lied constantly, aggrandizing and exonerating herself and accusing other people of dishonesty. She denied she was a drug addict. She denied being arrested in Florida and Kentucky, even though the whole family knew what had happened. She accused my dad of raping her, in front of two people who had no idea whether it was true or not. She almost got him in serious trouble by accusing a mafioso’s kid of raping her; my dad went to the kid’s house to give him a beating, and fortunately, no one was home. She accused my dad of breaking her arm. She tried to get me in trouble, claiming I kicked her dog. My dad was also accused, and he wasn’t even in the room when the incident supposedly occurred.

You can imagine how tiresome it is, dealing with someone like that for decades. You can never address a problem involving a person like that in an efficient way. First, you have to have an elaborate trial, with testimony, proving that person’s version of the facts is a lie. Then you have to deal with the people that person convinced. Then when you get past one smokescreen of lies, that person puffs out another one, and you’re off to the races again.

Lying is quick and easy. That’s why Satan does it. Refuting lies is a big, big job.

Antifa is based on lies. BLM is based on lies. Leftism is based on lies. Anti-white and anti-Christian bigotry are based on lies. We swim in lies all day. In a healthy society, the truth would be settled and widely known, and people would work together for common ends. We can’t do that. We have an adversarial system. The group that lies and yells the loudest and the most persistently wins.

I’m tired of arguing and refuting. I don’t do nearly as much of it as I used to. I try not to do it at all. Imagine how tired God must be.

We all want immunity these days. Unfortunately, immunity can be fatal. Many, many of us have become immune to the truth. We treat it like a disease. We social-distance from people who spread it. This is what will bring the rapture to pass. When God decides people are so bone-headed the effort of persuading them is no longer worth tolerating the contempt, dishonesty, arrogance, and cruelty, he will pull the plug. Our presence here has to serve a purpose, and once it becomes clear we can’t serve that purpose to a satisfactory degree, we will be pulled out.

Today. Tomorrow. Ten minutes from now. I’m ready. If we can get a real revival worth the abuse we’ll put up with, I’m all for staying, but things do not look good.

I’ve often said the flood was like a flea dip for the earth. I’m sure Noah and his family grieved for the people who died, but imagine the peace they had when they came out of the ark. Imagine having all the annoying, venomous people in your life disappear. That’s what the rapture will be like. People who are removed will find themselves in a world where everyone is in agreement with them, and the rest will be like a swarm of gnats with no one left to bite and drain except each other.

I am not going to worry about other people. I will speak the truth and pray for them, but that’s it. I’m not going to stress myself. If they want to stay here after the rapture and go through hell on earth, that’s their choice. They will still be able to be saved. Maybe when the trees burn up and the fish die and people beg for death, they’ll change their minds. If not, they were not worth pursuing in the first place.

I have no doubt that there are many people in hell who still accuse God and his children and refuse to admit fault. The willful irrationality of human beings knows no limits. I think many, many people will realize God is real during the tribulation yet will continue to revile and defy him. The fact that people are going to be lost shouldn’t destroy our peace. It’s a normal part of the human experience, and it can’t be helped.

Lee Dies Ruin my Day

I have an extremely important message for all users of the Internet.

Do not use Lee carbide 9mm dies on a Hornady Lock n Load AP progressive press.

A while back, I loaded up on 9mm semiwadcutter bullets. I wanted them for practice, and they’re also not bad for self-defense. Then I found out I didn’t actually have 9mm dies.

All the dies I had were made by Hornady, and I wondered if I was cheating myself by not trying companies like RCBS, Lyman, Lee, and Redding. I ordered a set of Lee carbide dies.

The carbide was what got me going. If you use carbide dies, you don’t have to use case lube, and presumably, carbide dies will last a long time.

I took these things out of the package a few days ago. The first thing I noticed was that they didn’t have Hornady-style locking rings. They had weird rings with slots cut into them for grip. It took me a minute to realize they were locking rings.

I stuck the dies on my press, and guess what. They didn’t fit. The threaded parts of the dies were maybe 3/8 of an inch too short. When I screwed them into the press deeply enough to make them work, the locking rings, which were on the upper side of the press (where they should be) were barely engaged. Only a thread or two held them on. At least one of the dies seemed to wobble when I pushed on it.

I Googled around and learned that this is a well-known design flaw. It’s amazing that Lee let it happen. There are probably less than 8 prominent companies that make reloading equipment, and they don’t make a huge number of products. Hornady’s press is very popular, Lee knows about it, and they made no effort to make their dies work with it.

I’ll tell you how you solve the problem. You buy new dies. That’s what I did. But you can also move the locking rings from the top of the press to the underside of the die platform. It allows you to screw the dies down where they need to be without sacrificing locking rings.

The problem with this crude solution is that you end up with dies that take a long time to swap. With Hornady dies, you just twist the die and the whole assembly pops out. The locking ring comes with it. With Lee dies, you have to remove the locking ring first, and Lee makes them tight and puts some kind of sticky goop on the threads to make the rings harder to turn. It’s probably great when you use a Lee press and you’re able to put the rings where they should be, but it’s a royal pain if you own the press I have.

I managed to crank out a few rounds, but I ordered Hornady dies anyway.

Figuring out which dies I wanted took hours. It’s not as simple as it sounds. When I bought dies years ago, they all came with roll crimpers. A roll crimp turns the mouth of the casing inward, and if your crimp is too heavy, it makes the metal bulge out slightly below the mouth. Then you get a round that won’t chamber. This is not a great design for most pistols I own.

There are a couple of other options. One, which I’ll get rid quickly by discussing it first, is the Lee Factory Crimp die. I’m not sure I understand this thing completely, but my understanding is that it pushes a sort of sleeve down over the casing and sizes it from the mouth down. This tightens the casing on the round and makes it less likely that the cartridge won’t chamber. It also makes it less likely that the bullet will be pushed deeper into the casing while its being handled and chambered and so on.

Problem: it’s a Lee product, and it has short threads. Forget that.

The other option is a taper crimp. This compresses the mouth of the casing without forming a rolled area or a bulge. I decided I wanted this.

Now I had to decide. Did I want a set with a separate crimping die, or did I want a set with a single die that crimps and also seats the bullet?

It turned out I had no choice. The Hornady set with the dual-function die cannot be had. The apocalypse has dried up the supply. But I learned that this was a good thing, because a separate crimping die produces better results, and it’s easier to adjust two dies than one dual die.

I found what may have been the last Hornady three-die set on earth, and I ordered it. Before you ask, I could not find other brands. That may not be entirely true. Redding may have a set that costs $200. I didn’t bother with products like that. I also ordered a Hornady taper crimp die.

The set comes with a dual-purpose die, but I can fix it so it seats bullets but does not crimp them. It will go size and decap, expand, fill, seat, crimp.

There will be no room for a Powder Cop, but I think they’re stupid for short casings anyway.

I the end, if I manage to sell the Lee dies, I figure I will come out $50 in the hole. That’s life.

I’ve only made 5 charged rounds, and something is going on with the press. When I pull the handle, the press moves until it gets to a certain point, and then it stops. Then if I push it harder, something gives way, and it finishes the cycle. That’s not good. I seem to produce good ammo, but I have to be very careful with every turn of the handle. I think I’ll end up producing a lot of rounds that have to go through twice. I’m going to leave it alone and start over with the new dies.

I’m using Missouri Bullet cast semiwadcutters. The Missouri Bullet company is not brave like other companies. They will not publish load data. This may be why other bullet makers are more successful. Oregon Trails, for example, wrote a whole handbook which you can download for nothing. Missouri Bullet is cowed by lawyers, so you have to find data for similar bullets and do your own work-ups.

I couldn’t find anything that was really good. I admit, I forgot to check the Lyman manual. Accurate publishes load data (brave) which you can download, and I found a recipe that looked okay. It was for an Oregon Trail bullet I had on hand. Problem: that bullet is shorter than the Missouri SWC. That means using the same overall length will push the bullet farther into the casing. This can increase the pressure and cause problems. How big would the problems be? How would I know?

I measured the bullets and found that the Missouri SWC was 0.06″ longer. I decided to increase the OAL by a fraction of that number, and I used a conservative charge. I ended up with bullets that did about 1080 fps, which is fine for 9mm. The casings looked good, so I don’t think I have pressure issues.

These bullets have lube grooves. Lube is wax. Lube grooves are deep, wide slots that go around the bases of bullets, and they are packed with wax. Because of my long AOL, my bullets each had one groove exposed.

I had to read about this. I found out it’s not a big problem. The cartridges will work. Wax can get on things, however, and I don’t like that. I’m thinking I’ll decrease the OAL and see what happens. I read the SAAMI specs, and I will be well within them. That doesn’t mean it will work, but it means I’m not off the reservation.

I would like to get up to maybe 1175 fps. That figure appears in published loads. It would be really nice to go that fast with 9mm.

You’ll never guess which powder I ended up using. Not unless you’re a stalker who actually reads everything I write and remembers it. I found that Accurate No.7 was a top choice. Is there anything that powder can’t do? If you have No.7 and Unique, you can load just about anything. No.7 is extremely versatile, and it’s also flash-suppressed.

So I used No.7. Not.

I have a bunch of BE-86, and I didn’t have a use for it. It’s also flash-suppressed, and it works for this bullet. It’s what I decided to use. I am very happy.

Now my press is set up for 9mm, but I can’t use it. I have to find another firearm job to do while I wait for new dies.

I’m thinking of buying Lehigh Defense bullets for self-defense. I keep reading about them. They look like Phillips screwdrivers, and they’re solid copper. They have provided very destructive results in testing. They also go through barriers like crazy. Ordinary hollow points have problems with things like windshields and drywall, and if they clog with fabric on the way into a perp, they don’t expand. A Lehigh Defense Xtreme Defender will go right through a windshield, even at an angle, and it doesn’t have to expand, so it doesn’t care about clothing. Bonus: they only weigh 65 grains, so the recoil is light, assisting with followup shots.

A guy on Youtube shot right through heavy bulletproof glass with Lehigh bullets.

A lot of people sneer at these bullets. Yeah. I remember sneering at Facebook. Look where it is now. I saw a Youtube expert say he wouldn’t trust them until they had been tested on live animals and so on. So I guess he only buys hollowpoints that were tested on live animals using the scientific method? What brand would that be?

One of the most lethal and experienced police gunfighters wrote about the real-life problems he had in shootouts. His name is Jim Cirillo. He made it clear that failure to penetrate was a huge problem. He shot a man in the skull with a .38, and the bullet slid around his head under the scalp and never entered the cranium. He and a partner shot a man in the face a number of times, and the same thing happened. The man got up and walked to the police car with them. If he had been up against unarmed women, he could still have raped and murdered them.

Cirillo thought developing bullets that actually get inside criminals was extremely important, and he dedicated years to trying to develop something that worked. He came up with something similar to the Xtreme Defender, but he never perfected it. He wanted something that penetrated auto glass and sheet metal. It looks like Lehigh and some other companies are following his lead.

Lehigh says its bullets are extremely destructive inside a body. This may or may not be true in practice. Maybe they’re no better than hollowpoints. But they have the advantage of piercing things like leather and heavy fabric much better, and right or wrong, testing suggests they will do more damage than hollowpoints. They may be a smart bet.

I’ve seen Paul Harrell, the Youtube guru, test these things. He shot what looked like a 2″ group at 10 yards. This is not great by his standards, and he said as much, but on the other hand, how much will 1″ groups help you when punks attack you in a parking lot? You, the punks, and the coroner will never see the difference between 1″ rounds and 2″ rounds.

Harrell uses a hilarious meat target to evaluate rounds. Xtreme Defenders tore it up like nothing else. He uses watermelons to simulate lungs, and the bullets destroyed them. The issue here is that watermelons aren’t stretchy. Does that mean Xtreme Defenders won’t do all that much damage to lungs, which can stretch and recover? Well, he had pork on both sides of the watermelon, and the pork was ripped up pretty badly. Pork is like human flesh. It suggests, but doesn’t prove, the bullets will work.

Job 1 is to be able to hit important body parts by shooting well. Job 2 is to get the bullets inside the criminal so they can do their work. Everything else takes a backseat.

I’m thinking it over.

As I’ve often said, I have zero interest in shooting anyone, and I have doubts about my willingness to send unsaved people to hell in order to survive on this miserable earth, but when you own equipment designed for a certain purpose, the natural thing is to try to make it work well.

I received a new bolt shroud for my Ruger Precision Rifle. This is a part that attaches to the bolt, obviously. The stock part lets the bolt rattle around a lot. This is annoying, because when you pull the bolt back and then try to move it forward to chamber a round, it may actually bind and get stuck. I don’t mean it gets stuck to where you need a hammer, but you may have to wobble the bolt and push a second time. It’s amazing that Ruger let this happen.

Should I care about a sticky bolt? Yes. I don’t like moving around between shots. You want things to be consistent. If you take your face off your buttstock (that sounds bad) between rounds, you upset everything. I want “BOOM-click-click-BOOM,” not “BOOM-click-rattle-rattle-curse-shove-BOOM.” I don’t actually curse, but the temptation is there.

Today I’ll install the bolt shroud. That should take almost two minutes.

I look forward to trying it. I also got a larger rear bag, and I’m hoping the improved bolt and less-fiddly bag will close up my groups.

I’m also going to see if I can set my Savage 93R in .17 HMR up with a new Athlon scope. I did all the math for the scope, base, and rings, but when I tried putting them together on my AR-15 for laughs, I found out there was an additional factor. Even if your rings and rifle work with your tube and bell, things can bump into the eyepiece, which has a larger diameter than the tube. I couldn’t check the scope on the Savage because I was waiting for a suitable base to attach.

I made an error when I ordered the base. Reflexively, I ordered a 20-MOA base. This is a base with a 20-MOA downward slope toward the front. When you shoot long distances, you may have to drop your barrel over 40 MOA, and you can run out of clicks. An angled base will help. Sadly, I forgot that no one shoots .17 HMR at really long distances. For prey, you can do 300 yards at best. You can shoot longer distances if you’re just happy to hit anything. So I have a 20-MOA base I don’t need. When I set up at 100 yards, I’ll be starting out 20 MOA in the hole.

I don’t know if it will matter. I think I’m going to attach it and use it. If it turns out to be wrong, I can change it later.

If the rings I bought work with the Savage, I’ll be able to set it up today, and I might even be able to zero it.

I already entered the Savage and my Thompson Center .204 in my Kestrel calculator. You have to name your guns. I chose Betty and Veronica. When it comes to the Ruger, I’m torn between Naomi and Tyra.

The weather people are making horrible predictions. I choose not to believe them. It will NOT rain heavily for 10 consecutive days. I’m not having it. I’m going to get the Ruger zeroed, I may get somewhere with the Savage, and there is hope that I will even make it to a gun range.

To sum up:

1. Do not ever buy Lee dies for any reason.

2. Taper crimping is what you want.

3. Lehigh Xtreme Defender bullets seem pretty good.

4. Rings that fit your tube may bump into other things, so don’t throw out the packaging your rings come in.

5. Do not buy a 20-MOA base for a rifle that can’t shoot longer than 400 yards. I think.

6. Accurate No.7 is the flubber of powder. It does just about everything.

MORE

It’s like something is trying to prevent me from shooting.

I installed the new Anarchy Outdoors titanium bolt shroud on the Ruger Precision Rifle, and it’s wonderful. Installation literally takes 10 seconds once you have the bolt out. Now the bolt slides in and out like greased glass. But when I tried to put the new scope base on the Savage 93R, it turned out Amazon had let me down. I needed a base with a 1-5/8″ ejection recess, as described in the ad, and they sent me one with a 1-3/8″ recess. In case you have a Savage 93R with a 1-5/8″ port, you need the EGW base, model 41602. That’s assuming you want 20 MOA.

I have a Smaug-like mass of .17 HMR, and I can’t shoot it because of scope problems. I could just slap the old Burris back on the rifle, but I really want to use an MRAD scope.

On the up side, the low Seekins rings I bought for the Athlon scope are the perfect height, so I don’t have to go through with an Amazon return. I ordered two sets of higher rings. I’ll send one set back and keep one for the T/C Venture. I was concerned Amazon would give me problems because I had already messed up the packaging on the low rings.

I can’t reload 9mm. I can’t shoot the Savage. I can’t shoot the Venture.

I have a jug of Vihtavuori powder for .45 ACP. I have enough bullets to crank out about 300 rounds of JHP. I guess I could do that. I can still shoot the AR-15 and the RPR, and of course, there are always .22’s. Life could be worse.

If You Want the Facts, Ask God for Yourself

If you’re reading this, you missed the Creator’s Calendar rapture.

I wrote about this a day or two back. Someone came to my Youtube channel and posted an article-length comment in support of the Creator’s Calendar, which is a doctrine adhered to by certain fringe Christians. Somehow or other, it’s based on the full moon. This person asked me to take his comment out of spam so it would be published, but I felt strongly that I was not supposed to do that, so I deleted it.

His theory was that the rapture would occur today when the sun set in Jerusalem. I looked up the time. It was 12:33 p.m. Eastern. As I write this, it is 1:00, so the sun has been down in Jerusalem for almost half an hour.

I will go out on a limb and say I don’t think the rapture has taken place. If it has, no one has published anything Google News can pick up.

It will be interesting to see what the Creator’s Calendar guy says in his next video.

A lady predicted the rapture would hit on July 22. Last time I checked, after the critical time had passed, she seemed undaunted. There were people who thought the 25th was the day. Nothing happened, unless the rapture was so small no one noticed.

If you pick a rapture date, and it passes with no discernible change, you have to draw one of two conclusions. You were wrong, or you were deemed unworthy to go. If you made your prediction with great confidence, you should be humble when it turns out to be false. You shouldn’t make up a new theory to explain it.

My big issue with the Creator’s Calendar is that it appears to be the product of study. If you know the Bible, you know God doesn’t do much work through scholars. He reveals things through the Holy Spirit. This is understandable, because if people could figure things out with God’s help, they would exalt themselves. God hates pride. He does things for us so we can’t take credit. Of course, people who are proven wrong often continue exalting themselves as though nothing had happened.

Another problem with relying on study and intelligence is that it pretty much shuts people of lesser ability–a huge percentage of the population–out of intimacy with God. I can tell you from eyewitness experience that God uses lots of people who are not very bright. He fills them with smart ideas. One reason he does this is to humiliate self-anointed sages.

I look at rapture-related videos a lot. I almost always bypass the ones from channels with names like GOD’S ANOINTED MESSENGER or Holy Prophetess La-Qu’isha. I skip the ones featuring people in costumes. If you have a long grey beard, a bizarre robe, and a gold-plated cross a foot long on your chest, you’re playing a role, not hearing from God.

I like the videos ordinary people make in their poorly decorated bedrooms. Those people are less likely to be grifters and nutjobs.

I wish the rapture had been today. Would have been nice.

This morning, I tried to look something up on my phone, and somehow I ended up in a Bible app, looking at Isaiah 1. I don’t know if my fingers slipped or what. I decided to run with it. Isaiah 1 is all about the way God lets rebellious, prosperous nations have it. Along with the ensuing chapters, it seems tailor-made for 2020.

Take a look at this:

The ox knoweth his owner, and the ass his master’s crib: but Israel doth not know, my people doth not consider.

Ah sinful nation, a people laden with iniquity, a seed of evildoers, children that are corrupters: they have forsaken the Lord, they have provoked the Holy One of Israel unto anger, they are gone away backward.

That’s us. We think our prosperity came from an imaginary innate American superiority, hard work, or other sources. God gave us everything, and we’re looking to find any other explanation.

From the sole of the foot even unto the head there is no soundness in it; but wounds, and bruises, and putrifying sores: they have not been closed, neither bound up, neither mollified with ointment.

Your country is desolate, your cities are burned with fire: your land, strangers devour it in your presence, and it is desolate, as overthrown by strangers.

That sounds worse than what’s happening here now, but the types of curses described are the same as some of the ones we’re enduring. Disease and burning cities. As for strangers devouring our country, that’s a perfect description of illegal immigration.

This morning I saw a clip of the 2020 Democratic presidential debate. Until today, I didn’t know Jorge Ramos was a moderator. I was stunned. Ramos is not an American. He’s a hostile alien who supports his own people and government against America. Why not have Vladimir Putin or that Chinese guy whose name I can’t spell as a moderator? It’s obscene. It’s astounding that Americans have gotten this stupid. This kind of stupidity goes far beyond what natural causes can explain. It’s too severe. It has to be supernatural in origin.

If you read the Bible, you know God allows people to be deceived. Look at Isaiah 6:

Also I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, Whom shall I send, and who will go for us? Then said I, Here am I; send me.

And he said, Go, and tell this people, Hear ye indeed, but understand not; and see ye indeed, but perceive not.

Make the heart of this people fat, and make their ears heavy, and shut their eyes; lest they see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart, and convert, and be healed.

The New Testament says homosexuality comes on people as a delusion because of rebellion. Isaiah seems to say the ancient Jews had their own homosexual pride movement. Look:

For Jerusalem is ruined, and Judah is fallen: because their tongue and their doings are against the Lord, to provoke the eyes of his glory.

The shew of their countenance doth witness against them; and they declare their sin as Sodom, they hide it not. Woe unto their soul! for they have rewarded evil unto themselves.

The Bible says Sodom sinned through selfishness, but generally, Sodom is mentioned as a place of sexual perversion.

We do the things cursed nations have done, but we expect to be blessed, because we think the God of the Bible is like the tooth fairy. Imaginary.

That’s a strange belief, in view of the fact that we only exist because he imagined us. There was a time when we were all imaginary.

I always say the rapture is necessary for the tribulation to start, because if Christians remained on the earth, their prayers would prevent it. And God doesn’t want his children to go through it, any more than he wants them to go to hell. Here’s something from Isaiah that supports my belief:

Except the Lord of hosts had left unto us a very small remnant, we should have been as Sodom, and we should have been like unto Gomorrah.

Hear the word of the Lord, ye rulers of Sodom; give ear unto the law of our God, ye people of Gomorrah.

The story of Sodom and Gomorrah is a picture of the tribulation. Abraham got God to promise him he would not destroy these cities if there were 10 righteous men in them. If God would have saved Sodom and Gomorrah for 10 people, he will protect the world while there are hundreds of millions of real Christians here.

Notice he calls the Hebrews rulers of Sodom and people of Gomorrah. He’s not talking to the heathens. The prophesy is for Judah. He’s saying the inhabitants of Judah might as well be Sodomites.

I keep feeling the rapture will be this year. I won’t promise you anything. I won’t tell you to quit your job or load up your credit cards. I won’t claim I know more about God’s calendar than the Jews. Angels haven’t sat in my living room and given me dictation. I haven’t been summoned to the throne of heaven in a vision I will describe in my special set of affordable DVD’s. If I were certain, I would say so. Until that time, I’m not going to say anything is written in stone.

I think it’s close, though.

Fake Forecast

As everyone who knows me knows, I’m a stoic kind of guy. I never complain about anything. It’s not my style. I’m just too manly. So I know people will realize it’s a big deal when I announce that my property is currently being pummeled by Hurricane Isaias, which I mistakenly called “Isaac” the other day.

It’s pretty bad. I would say we are getting gusts of up to 3 mph, if you get on the roof and run as fast as you can, and the skies are full of rain-laden clouds which could, conceivably, release some precipitation, some of which might possibly reach the ground before evaporating.

It’s exactly the kind of disaster you would expect if you had just read a story I saw this morning. Business Insider, also known as Trump Derangement Insider, says Governor DeSantis has declared a state of EMERGENCY EMERGENCY EMERGENCY in Florida, and HURRICANE Isaias is BARRELING toward the coast.

In typical alt-right fashion, the hurricane DENIERS at NOAA are calling Isaias a tropical storm, and their politicized maps show it prancing onshore in South Carolina as what I would call a Category .75.

The willful blindness is staggering. Can’t people see we need sensible gun control and a federal sensitivity commission that oversees the design of microaggressive pancake syrup bottles? How many times does this have to happen before we finally elect Vladimir Lenin’s pickled corpse president for life and declare the Salvation Army a terrorist organization?

I know what you’re thinking. Lenin was a white male. Not a problem. There is no reason why gender reassignment…I mean “confirmation”…surgery can’t take place post-mortem, and afterward, we can touch him up with a coat of brown Krylon.

I’m starting to wonder why I ever look at the news. I can’t help thinking about the old joke regarding the Soviet news agencies Tass and Pravda. “Tass” means “news,” and “Pravda” means “truth.” The Russians used to say, “The news is not truth, and the truth is not news.”

Hurricane news has been nearly worthless for a very long time. It was probably okay when we had three channels and Neil Frank used to go on the news and comfort us with his flattop, but now it’s an endless contest to see who can become most unhinged.

Every time the cone of certain death appears on NOAA’s website, a friend of mine sends me texts telling me we may have to endure the spectacle of Jim Cantore and his Land’s End jacket. I have been spared this time. I think he ought to go ahead and rig himself up with wires so he can appear to have his feet lifted off the ground. Better yet, CGI. He could lounge at home comfortably in boxers while his avatar Jim Headroom held onto a post and let his L.L. Bean duck shoes flap in a virtual breeze.

Isaias is the Smart Car of hurricanes. It qualifies for the title, but only in a way that waters down its meaning.

One of Donald Trump’s greatest achievements was coining and popularizing the term “fake news.” It condensed a pervasive understanding into a solid verbal bullet that could be fired at will from innumerable locations. It was as though America were a crime scene and Trump handed every one of us a can of luminol.

I learned something very interesting yesterday. The people who make up…I mean “compile”…our coronavirus statistics are including old cases in the total. If you get a test that says you USED to be infected, they say you’re a new case. It’s not a conspiracy theory. Bigwigs are apologizing publicly. I know coronavirus exists, and I think a big percentage of the upswing data we’re seeing is real, but I completely understand people who think the epidemic is nearly over. For all I know, they could be right.

I still don’t know a single person who has been diagnosed. We still have only two real celebrities who have died from coronavirus, and they’re not what you would call headliners. Roy Horn and that other guy. Now I have to look it up. Oh, right. Herman Cain. Of course, he was 74, he was already dying from cancer, and he was on chemotherapy. Where are the dead stars? There are none. And it’s not because they have money to protect themselves. Many very famous people are broke.

I keep having the feeling that if Obama were still in office, the MSM would be calling the epidemic itself an alt-right fantasy. I guess they wouldn’t go that far, but the coverage would be very, very different.

If you want to see coronavirus go away, just vote for Biden. A week after he’s elected, if he hasn’t already been forced to withdraw due to his suddenly obvious dementia, coronavirus will go away. It will be just like our war casualties. When Bush II was in office, the press published daily tallies of our military deaths. When Obama wafted into the White House, the stories ceased. I guess our enemies stopped shooting, out of reverence for the left’s messiah.

You have to wonder what the news will look like the day of the rapture. In many liberal cities, it won’t even be noticed, because so few people will be missing. It may take days for our city-bound journalists to realize something is wrong. Maybe they’ll accuse us of hiding. Which wouldn’t be entirely wrong.

“BREAKING NEWS: doctors add new item to coronavirus symptom list as millions of annoying people vanish. Fauci rages: ‘Masks could have prevented this!’ Scientists race to find new rationales for blaming Trump.”

It will be a looter’s jubilee. They’ll take all our liquor and jewelry and throw out the Bibles.

We finally have to wear masks here. I can’t go to Home Depot without one. Finally, I understand what other people have been going through. Masks are fine when you exhale, but when you inhale, they suck up against your nostrils and prevent air from entering. I always wondered why I saw so many people with masks slung under their chins. Now I get it. I do it, too. Expose mouth and nose. Walk down empty aisle. See someone approaching. Raise shields.

My post-upswing guess, based on the New York data, was that my county would top out at about 9,000 confirmed cases. Now I’m not so sure. We have prisons here, and the high rate of prison infections inflates the figures. If the old folks homes get hit, this county will have a major problem, because there seems to be one on every block. We might end up with an astronomical figure that has nearly no relationship to a typical person’s risk of infection. Applying data obtained from atypical people to the rest of us would be sort of like saying an average resident is likely to play shuffleboard and only wear orange.

It would be neat to find news I could trust. It would be neat if Santa and the Easter Bunny landed a Harrier sleigh in my yard and threw me 10 duffel bags full of rubies. Not sure which is less likely to happen.

As for me, I’m back to fasting. I went 9 days and then skipped a day. I was not happy with the way I acted and felt yesterday, so I’m fasting again. For a long time, I’ve asked God to help me fear him, and I have to say that my prayer has been answered. I think the rapture is imminent, I think I need God’s help in the turbulent, disaster-heavy end times regardless of whether the rapture comes soon, and I do not want to be here during the tribulation.

I have been thinking maybe I should fast until 3:00 every day from now on. Maybe I should throw in some all-day fasts. I invested a lot of time in messing myself up, so I should not be surprised if getting clean is not a quick process.

I still think I had coronavirus in February. I’m probably immune. If not, I probably won’t be infected, because coronavirus isn’t very contagious. If I’m infected, I probably won’t get very sick. If I die, I’m ready to go, and I don’t care. Nonetheless, I am trying to be somewhat responsible. I don’t like being sick, and a tiny percentage of coronavirus victims survive and have problems afterward. It’s not like mild sickness and death are the only options. There is an unpleasant middle path. And there is also the possibility that I could infect others.

I should be preparing for the flu. The infection rate is something like 10%–far higher than coronavirus–and the flu is awful. Through insurance, I’ve already paid for a vaccination. I ought to get that taken care of. They say it will halve my chances of getting sick. I haven’t had a shot since 2017, unless I had one and forgot. I made sure my dad got them while he was alive.

Tomorrow is August 4, and a fringe group says it’s the real Shavuot. They say the rapture will happen on that day. I think they’re completely wrong, but wouldn’t it be nice if they were right? Nothing could make me happier. I don’t care when it happens. Tomorrow. December. Next year. Whenever it happens, take me take me take me take me. A lot of leftists brag that they were at Woodstock. The rapture is the Christian Woodstock. You don’t want to have to say you weren’t there.

Every rapture prediction sparks a flame of hope in my heart, even when the predictions are clearly crazy.

I’m glad I had a chance to let everyone know how I was doing during the hurricane. I’m sure my tale of bravery and determination will inspire millions. It’s a good thing I’m so humble, because this is the kind of thing that makes people conceited.

There is a Difference

One of the problems with hearing from God is that you will find yourself in competition with a lot of people who have heard from things like the devil, insanity, a craving for attention, and indigestion. It’s always important to pray for guidance when someone tells you something that supposedly came from God, or when you think you’ve heard something from him.

I’ve watched Sid Roth many times. He has a show about supernatural things that happen to Christians. He has guests who have genuine revelations and so on, but he also hosts nuts and liars from time to time. They generally have books, CD’s, or DVD’s to sell. I’ve checked three of their products out, and none turned out to be worthwhile.

Sid has a Youtube channel, and the other day, he interviewed a guy named James Goll. This man says God visits him and so on. He says Trump will be reelected and that he will appoint a female “Esther” to the Supreme Court.

I have grave doubts about this guy. For one thing, he’s a self-promoter. Look how he introduced himself to Sid:

You know who you’re talking to. I am an intercessor. I’m also a teaching prophet, not only a declarative prophet.

Isn’t that pride?

What, exactly, is a teaching prophet? Is that like the guy who taught Amos, Jeremiah, and Samuel? As I recall, God himself taught them. If the new covenant is better than the old covenant, how come Old Testament prophets were taught by God and New Testament prophets have to have teachers? Does that make any sense?

Goll seems full of himself, and he also makes weird, inexplicable grimaces while he speaks. They remind me of tics. My personal belief about tics is that demons cause them. Something other than the proper inhabitant of a body tells the muscles to do silly things. If something is controlling your muscles, and it’s not you, who is it?

His whole demeanor is off-putting. He seems effeminate. He seems very angry. He’s unpleasant to watch. Spirit-led Christians are generally pleasant to be around. The Holy Spirit always brings harmony and affection.

He reminds me of someone who vanished from my life. This person lectured people, and he was usually angry. He spoke as though he had authority. He said a lot of useful things, but he got very involved with worldly projects and didn’t pray in tongues. If you don’t pray in tongues, you lack real revelation, but you can still fill up on the false kind. You can be led pretty far astray.

He used to invite people to get involved with his projects, saying they could work for him. The projects and jobs didn’t pan out, however. The rosy descriptions never matched reality. He persuaded a big company to do a job for him, and they invested a lot of money in preparation. Then they found out he didn’t have money to pay them. They sued, and he defaulted. He also said things about his technical background which I, as a former physicist, knew could not be true.

You always have to be careful about listening to self-promoters. Sometimes they’re like balloons. Let the air out, and what you have left is surprisingly small.

I looked Goll up. He is part of the Seven Mountain Mandate crowd. Ted Cruz’s dad and Paula White are also adherents, as are the Bethel/Sozo people. They believe Christians will take over the world. Not after the rapture. Now. They want to dominate the government, education, business, and entertainment, among other things.

I’m not a Sozo guy. A friend of mine gave me a Bethel book, and I gave their doctrine the old college try, with sincerity. Nothing happened. They tell you to think back to a traumatic moment in your life and ask Jesus where he was. He’s supposed to say something like, “I was over by the window,” and he explains what was happening. Then you find catharsis and healing. There is nothing even remotely like this in the Bible, and I got nothing from it. I’ve seen Bethel sermons, and most gave me the creeps. I think they’re on the wrong track.

I don’t see Christians taking over the world. We are declining in influence, and our decline isn’t linear. It’s accelerating. The difference between 2000 and 2010 was nothing compared to the difference between 2010 and 2020.

Jesus said the world would hate us. The Bible says it’s a problem if the world loves you. Jesus said his kingdom was not of this world; he rejected efforts to make him a political or military leader. He didn’t even try to run the temple, even though he was the son of God.

In short, I think the Seven Mountain Mandate doctrine is completely wrong. I think anyone who turns the office of prophet into a job and brags about his credentials is bogus. We are clearly told not to seek our own promotion. I don’t believe anyone who boasts and promotes himself, who makes money from Christianity, and who thinks Christians should run the present world can possibly be a prophet.

Prophets hear from God every day. Wouldn’t God tell a prophet if the movement he belonged to was based on misconeptions?

Goll claims Luke 7:44 somehow proves women are supposed to be prophets and pastors and so on. This is the verse about the woman who washed the feet of Jesus with her tears and dried them with her hair. In this story, Jesus talks to a man named Simon, teaching him about what the woman is doing.

Goll says Simon is Peter. Problem: he is not. Not even close. Jesus was invited to have a meal at the home of a pharisee, and that’s where the woman washed his feet. When the Bible mentions “Simon,” it says he was the man who invited Jesus to his house. Not Peter at all. It’s not ambiguous. It’s not subject to interpretation. It’s very clear.

Paul said women should not speak in church, and he was very firm about it. It makes sense, because men bear the burden of leadership in this world, and the human race was cursed because a man let a woman take over the job of religious instruction. When it comes to idolatry, women have a long history of taking the lead. False religions tend to spread among women first. Women are more open to them. This is why they slept with angels in Genesis and gave birth to giants.

If you think women make great leaders, ask yourself where we would be if women voted and men did not. Ellen DeGeneres would be empress for life, and our GNP would be about five hundred dollars. Somalia would be sending us aid.

Paul’s credentials are a lot stronger than James Goll’s. The Bible agrees with Paul, and I agree with him, too.

I came across another person who promoted weird doctrine. I put up a Youtube video, and a commenter posted an extremely long (maybe a thousand words) comment saying he and his family loved Marvel movies and that he expected the rapture to come on August 4, or Shavuot.

Problem: Marvel movies are occult movies. The characters use magic. Dr. Strange is a witch. The Scarlet Witch is pretty obviously a witch. Thor is a false god. The Black Panther uses drugs to make himself powerful. Christians shouldn’t fool with Marvel. I did, and I quit.

Problem: Shavuot was weeks ago. It ended on May 30. It’s a spring holiday.

Christians who have high hopes for August 4 are talking about counting the omer. An omer is a dry measure, like a pint. “Shavuot” means “weeks.” It’s a holiday that takes place 7 weeks after Pesach (Passover). Jews count 50 days between Pesach and Shavuot. I think I have that right. I guess the idea is that the days fill up an omer. Shavuot is supposed to be the same thing as Pentecost, but the Gregorian calendar throws it off. “Pentecost” is a Greek word that means “fiftieth.”

There is zero ambiguity. Shavuot ended weeks ago. It will not come this month.

It appears the August 4 idea comes from an obscure concept called the Creator’s Calendar. There are a few Christians who think the Jewish calendar is wrong. Jesus had no problem with the Jewish calendar, and Paul had no problem with it, but that’s the theory. The Creator’s Calendar says Shavuot will really take place on August 4.

Problem: Shavuot is the festival of the first fruits. You can’t have first fruits of the harvest in August. Not in Israel. The wheat harvest comes in spring.

If the rapture were to come on a Jewish holiday, I would expect it to be Sukkot. This is the week when Jews build temporary booths from branches. The rapture will take us away for 7 years (one week of years), and during that time, we will be celebrating with Jesus. It will be the celebration of his marriage to the church. It looks a lot like Sukkot. On the other hand, Shavuot is the day when the first fruits of the harvest are celebrated, and the rapture looks a lot like Jesus taking his first fruits to heaven.

I don’t know whether the rapture will land on a holiday, but I do know Shavuot was over a long time ago.

The long comment went to spam, and the guy who posted it asked me to restore it. I took a look at it. I think it went where it was supposed to go. He linked to his own video and tried to take over. That’s how spam works. I felt a strong impulse to delete it, so I did.

Prayer in tongues is very important. If you go off course and start believing something that isn’t true, prayer in tongues will put you back on track. Most Christians don’t pray in tongues much, so they drive off the road, stay there, and celebrate being stuck in a ditch.

I keep feeling like the rapture will come in December. I can’t prove it. I can’t say it’s a prophecy. I don’t have a special calendar. I am not a “teaching prophet” who writes books and appears on TV shows. In my entire life, I have made $80 from Christianity, and that was because a disturbed person forced me to take it. I don’t have a jet. I don’t have a beard. I don’t wear a habit or a cross the size of a frying pan. I don’t call myself Apostle Steve. I pray a lot, and I have a persistent feeling. That’s about it. I may be wrong.

I hope I’m right. Can you imagine putting up with another year of this insanity? It gets crazier every day. They’re burning Bibles in Portland now. Finally, someone on the other side is being honest. I’m actually happy about it. I don’t approve of burning Bibles, but I’m glad some of the children of darkness are exposing their real feelings.

I wonder what’s going to happen with coronavirus this year. My best guess was that it would poop out with the hot weather, but I was wrong about that. It’s also disconcerting to see it ramping up in conservative areas. My county is up around 1.5% now.

I think God spared conservatives for a while so we would have time to repent, fast, and pray. We did not do that, however.

Interesting fact: a huge percentage of the cases in my county are among women and prisoners. This is a prison county, so there are a large number of people who are cooped up together. Women make up something like 2/3 of the cases.

It makes sense that prisoners would get it. They are cursed people. Prison is a taste of hell, for people who are headed the wrong way. I’m not sure why women are getting sick. A women’s prison got hit, so that may explain it.

If you remove the prison cases, this county is still doing pretty well. Prisons and old folks homes are outliers. They are not representative of the rest of the population. Journalists don’t like to talk about it, but prisoners and people in homes make up a tremendous part of the coronavirus statistics. Journalists want us to think we’re all equally likely to get it, and that it’s usually a severe disease. Both of those things are untrue.

If there is an up side to the prison and nursing home situation, it’s that people in these facilities don’t get many chances to infect the rest of us.

Some people think bad things have to happen to Christians first, because Peter said something about judgment beginning in the house of the Lord. If you read his words, however, it appears that he is talking about things like confession, repentance, and inner transformation. Not plagues and famines and so on. Bad things don’t have to happen to Christians first. If anything, we should be less likely than anyone to experience things like coronavirus. The fact that coronavirus hit red states hardest at first doesn’t mean it’s not a punishment from God.

I guess that’s all I have. Keep praying, and don’t let anyone sneeze on you.

Enough of This Place

For some reason, I decided to look up Michael Avenatti today. If you doubt the existence of evil spirits, or you doubt that God defends his servants, the Avenatti story should clear up your doubts. Avenatti’s self-destructive, self-deluding behavior is so bizarre, it could be considered insane, and his fall suggests he offended God himself.

As people who watched the news a few years back know, Avenatti dedicated his life to persecuting President Trump. He represented a trashy woman Trump had sex with, and for a time, he was constantly threatening to bring Trump down with other purported bombshells. He said something ill-considered, which later became famous in a way he didn’t like: “Enjoy your time in prison.”

Avenatti appeared to be an extremely successful individual. He drove racing cars and spent money as though there were no end of it. Then he tried to extort money from the Nike corporation, he was convicted of a felony, and it also turned out he was a huge tax alleged evader. The IRS accused him of a number of fraudulent actions. He is also accused of stealing from clients. I can’t recall whether he has been convicted of the tax and theft charges. You can Google and find out.

Apart from Trump himself, he may well have been Twitter’s most well-known participant, baiting and insulting everyone who disagreed with him. He seemed to think he occupied a lofty seat of judgment, as though anointed and invulnerable. Then in 2019, the tweets dried up instantly and permanently. He is barred from using the Internet, and he has gotten in trouble because he is suspected of violating the ban.

I can only imagine what it feels like, having that kind of personality and knowing there are tweeters out there running roughshod over you every day, unrestrained and unpunished. Unblocked.

His account is still up. That says a lot about his pride.

The things we know he did, setting unproven things aside, suggest mental illness. No lawyer or competent law student would commit extortion in writing. How could it have happened? He graduated first in his class at a very good law school. Unless he paid someone to take his classes for him, he had to know he was setting himself up for prison time and a permanent end to his legal career, not to mention intense public humiliation.

The contrast is stark. On the one hand, he was extremely arrogant and self-righteous in his condemnation of others, calling for severe punishments. On the other, he was busy guaranteeing such punishments for himself. How can one head contain the mechanisms for doing both of those things simultaneously? How could he have failed to expect to be fed a near-lethal dose of his own medicine, very publicly? Strange.

I believe that when people behave irrationally, spirits are usually at work. I can’t think of a better explanation for the Avenatti story.

As for Trump, I was calling him “Cyrus” before anyone else said it in a prominent forum. Cyrus was a heathen whom God anointed to rebuild the temple in Jerusalem. He was no man of God, but he was a friend of God’s people, and he defended them and provided for them.

When God chooses you for a job, and someone with mental problems makes a career of trying to bring you down by deceitful means, you are asking for a beating. It sure looks like Avenatti got a divine spanking. No one can say Trump was behind it. Avenatti opened himself up over and over. He begged to be disbarred and imprisoned, and it appears God sent people to oblige him.

To me, his tale underscores the importance of humility and forbearance. If you can’t accept your own vulnerabilities and faults, you’re asking for the universe to reveal them to you in very painful ways. If you’re ruthless in your treatment of people you believe to be guilty, especially when you’re wrong, you can expect severe treatment when your own misdeeds ripen and burst into view.

It’s a scary story. When I think about this man, I do my best not to gloat. I try to focus on forgiveness in my own life. I don’t want to find out what it feels like to be Michael Avenatti.

If California is like other states, Avenatti might be able to get his license back a few years after he leaves prison. Bar associations really do things like that. I know a felon who was disbarred twice. He can also work as a clerk for someone who has a license. He might be better off driving a truck, though. Getting a job unrelated to law would take less time, and he will have to eat while he’s rebuilding.

Avenatti’s fall gives me hope Trump will win again this year. If God was willing to put Avenatti in federal prison and take away everything he had, maybe he’ll be willing to give a comeuppance to the brats who are running amok in our country. I hope so. Four more years would be very helpful, assuming there are four years left before the rapture.

I’ve been watching more rapture-dream videos on Youtube. They’re popping up all the time. Even small children are dreaming of angels with swords or of being transported to new homes.

I used to think I had only had one rapture dream, but that may not be true. I had several dreams in which I died. I can’t recall how many. At least two. They were the same. I was driving a Ford Explorer on a major highway. I was on a section of road that rose far into the air. There was a break in the road, and for some reason, I kept driving. I drove into empty space. The car rotated so it was facing downward. I was hundreds of feet from the ground. I watched the ground approaching. I knew I was going to die.

I wasn’t worried. I was excited about the adventure of going to heaven. I wanted to meet Jesus. I was glad my life here was over. I was also very impressed with the serious and somber nature of the moment. I prayed and tried to make sure I was going to the right place. I woke up at some point in the fall.

It may be that these were rapture dreams. The end of the road could be the end of this age. The fall could be the time I’m going through now, sitting and waiting. Seemingly doing nothing.

I can’t recall who was in the car with me. Wish I could.

Last night I started asking God for more dreams about the future, as well as prophecies and visions. Can’t hurt.

It’s going to be pretty bad if I turn out to be wrong, Biden wins, Kamala Harris becomes our president, America declines into poverty and chaos, and I’m still here. Life will not be worth living in times like that.

I won’t worry. A heavy schedule of prayer in tongues, combined with self-examination, fasting, and repentance will put me on top no matter what happens around me. And as God keeps telling me, I’ve already won. If the rapture doesn’t come in my time, all I have to do is shelter in place until this body quits. The children of darkness hurt people while they’re alive, but they can’t prevent them from dying of old age.

Mike Tyson has Been Punched in the Face More Than Your Whole Family

Not much has happened today. For some reason, it didn’t rain. That was shocking. I was able to mow the yard.

While I was mowing, my tractor pulled one of its tricks on me. I drove through the web of a gigantic spider, and after I stopped the tractor to flail and scream and knock the webbing off of me, with great dignity, the tractor would not start. I put jumper cables on it and went in the house to Google a solution. While I was walking in, a very useful phrase came to me: “I’ve already won.”

I have been saying this a lot lately. Years ago, on a certain day, God told me I would have total victory from then on. At least I believe he did. Since then I have had a lot of very annoying challenges leap up and bite me in the rear end. Things don’t always go smoothly. I used to ask God how that could be considered victory. Then I realized victory is not the same thing as peace. Muhammad Ali defeated George Foreman, but he had to fight several rounds with a broken jaw in order to do it.

I used to feel beaten when things went wrong, because it seemed to happen so often, when it seemed I had done everything right. Now I remind myself: I’ve already won.

If the tractor won’t start, or the new stove won’t fit in the hole in the granite counter, or the people at the ALF where I put my dad for several days are overcharging me and turning bill collectors loose on me, or GEICO is trying to blame me for being backed into in a parking lot, or I just slipped and committed a sin I thought I was done with, it doesn’t matter. I’ve already won. I’ll react. I’ll get God’s help. A solution will come. When it’s over, I will have won.

You can project this principle to life itself. I’m surrounded by sick people. A man who thinks he might be a prophet says we’re going to have 80% inflation next year. Trump is polling badly, and God-haters may put Kamala Harris in the White House next year to abuse people like me. Maybe the rapture won’t come this year, as I feel it will, and I’ll be stuck here to cope with a bad situation when I’m no longer young enough to start over. It does not matter. I’ve already won. The very worst thing that could happen is that I could have 35 bad years and then go to heaven. They can’t keep me alive when my body quits. Escape is guaranteed. Sooner or later, I will be with Jesus, and I will have won everything.

It’s a good thing to keep in mind. It will give you strength.

In other news, we had another day of pre-hurricane weather here. I’ve written about this before. In the days prior to a hurricane, the air is still. Everything is quiet and peaceful, but there is a feeling of impending misfortune in the air. Often, the sun isn’t as bright as it ordinarily would be. Today was like that. It was overcast much of the time, but there was no rain.

Is the storm really coming this year? I’ll admit it: I hope so. Not so much the storm, but the rapture that precedes it.

I know that’s selfish. I’m just tired of living among hostile, impudent, underdeveloped, ignorant boneheads who won’t be helped. I want people to be saved, but I want to live in my own world, with my own people. I want rest.

We have a tropical storm headed for Florida. Isaac. The son of promise. Not a big deal.

I no longer own a single property that can be damaged badly by a hurricane or tropical storm, so this year is completely different from years gone by. It’s a new feeling. I hope Miami doesn’t get pounded this season, but I have no personal stake in it, so I have new peace. I guess heaven will be like that. Right now, my flesh is down here in a world full of microbes, violence, accidents, economic threats, and natural disasters. Once I am removed, I will have no vulnerable parts left on the earth, and most of the people I care about will be safe with me. That will be a nice change.

I’ve already won, and you can win, too. Think it over. You’ll never get another offer this good.