Cursed Nation Consumes Itself

One of the interesting things about America’s sudden assumption of a kneeling position is that America is not being murdered. It’s committing suicide.

Rioters are doing tremendous damage all over the US, over the death of one black man, and in the process, a number of black people have been killed and many have been hurt. No one is protesting the deaths of the rioters’ victims, which is a little odd.

While all this is going on, many white Americans are enjoying the entertainment. Most of us live in areas that are somewhat safer (for the moment) than the places where rioting is taking place. Many white leftists are getting in their Priuses and joining the rioters. One could reasonably term them “riot tourists.” They go to the riots and hang out long enough to take selfies and post virtue signals on Twitter, and then they go home and sleep in relative safety.

Some white people are posting messages online, saying they support the property damage as long as it leads to “change.” They remind me of liberal Israelis who insist on ceding territory to enemies who have made it very clear they will accept nothing less than the removal of all Jews from Israel.

People are sharing a Twitter video of a young white leftist who supports the rioters. In case the video doesn’t work or stops working later, I’ll tell you what happens. The young man is on an upper floor in an apartment building. He watches the rioters from his windows. For some reason, he feels safe. He gives the rioters a thumbs-up and shouts his support. Then a hard object comes through one window and into his living room. While he reacts in shock and anger, a second window is taken out.

VIDEO LINK

This is turning out to be a recurring theme. An ESPN writer named Chris Martin Palmer posted a number of tweets supporting the rioters, including one that supported the burning of low-income housing which would have housed black people. Then rioters invaded his sister’s gated community, and he called them animals and tweeted that they should go back where they lived. Then he deleted his angry tweet and went back to posting supportive messages.

It is commonly said that a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged, but what can you do to help someone who gets mugged, sees the light for a brief moment, and then drives the lesson out of his mind and lies about it?

The Bible says this: “A reproof entereth more into a wise man than an hundred stripes into a fool.” I’m not God, but I say this: hell isn’t full of sinners; it’s full of people who don’t listen.

It’s telling that he told them to go back where they lived. He was all about rioting as long as it only wrecked black neighborhoods. When it threatened non-blacks, he felt as though lions had escaped from the zoo. They were fine as entertainment, confined in areas far from him and his property, but he didn’t want them in his backyard. In his mind, rioting is only okay in poor neighborhoods.

Here’s something many Americans don’t understand: many leftists don’t see the rioting as a deplorable disaster; they see it as a dream come true.

Leftists love rioting and destruction, and it’s not a new thing. They’ve been this way for as long as I can remember. Leftists love a chance to participate in a riot, and they love bragging about rioting after the fact. Leftist males actually use riot stories to get women into bed. Women tend to be much more leftist than men, and college boys who want sex know it.

I went to Columbia College at Columbia University. I was there for three years, and then I dropped out. Columbia had been the scene of riots. By the time I showed up, the riots were over a decade in the past.

Students during my time there talked wistfully about the riots. It was as though they had missed something really important, like watching Jesus preach in person. Many wished they could have been there. Instructors bragged about their riot-era experiences. It makes a certain amount of sense for kids to have stupid desires, but it’s peculiar for a person with two college degrees at one of America’s top 5 universities to support violence and malice.

During the riots, many students picked a side. There were two groups: Jocks and Pukes. The Jocks were relatively conservative, and they disapproved of the rioting. The Pukes were like the kids who cheer Antifa today. They didn’t reject the term “Pukes.” They embraced it.

The riot nostalgia I saw at Columbia wasn’t an aberration. It’s completely normal. Today in America, many, many whites and Asians are rooting for lawless, mindless people who want to beat, rape, and kill them.

It doesn’t help that modern Americans see nearly every important event on a screen. We feel isolated from events we see. We think we’re safe when we’re not. It’s as if the riots were taking place in movie studios and we can go watch filming for short periods and then run home to drink lattes.

Of course, the cops and National Guard soldiers can’t run home, and running home doesn’t help if your home is in a riot area.

What’s sadder than our suicidal attitude? The fact that we attribute it to the wrong causes and offer the wrong solutions.

Delusion is supernatural. It comes on people when they reject the Holy Spirit. Notice I didn’t say “God.” I mean the Holy Spirit, specifically. He is the one who communicates on God’s behalf. He tells you what’s true and good and what isn’t. Many people who call themselves Christians can’t hear him. Many aren’t really Christians at all. Many who are Christians haven’t been baptized with the Holy Spirit. Many who have been baptized with the Holy Spirit don’t pray in tongues daily. If you’re not praying in tongues, you’re operating in the dark. Lying spirits talk to you all day, and you rarely hear the other side.

America turned from God, and even Christians who claim to serve God rejected the Holy Spirit. We kicked down our own walls and shut off God’s protection. Now we believe lies and hate the truth. We don’t need to be invaded by the Russians or the Chinese. We are destroying our own country.

Here’s something that always happens to people who don’t communicate with God: individuals who are filthy and base receive the ability to dominate them. It’s a form of humiliation. People who are supposed to be priests and kings are knocked off their pedestals, and they find themselves exposed and degraded. They serve hateful people who used to run from them.

You can see this dynamic at work in many Bible stories. Consider Samson. He had nothing but contempt for the Philistines, but he chose fornication and association with idolaters, and one day he woke up and found that people he used to brush aside like flies were able to handle him like a kitten. They cut his eyes out and made him a slave.

When Israel and Judah served God, things went well, but when they turned away, God put the Philistines (Palestinians) over them. He put the Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, and British over them. Jerusalem was sacked because of Jewish rebellion. Samson served to warn the Jews what would happen to them, and he was also a warning to us, but they didn’t listen, and neither have we.

It’s no coincidence that very low people are intimidating America right now. It’s not sufficiently humiliating to be conquered by another country. We have invited domination by people we can’t begin to respect.

Conservatives are saying we need to vote for Republicans, buy guns, and so on. These things won’t help much. America is cursed, and you can’t counter a curse with carnal actions. You have to pray and repent. You have to give your life to God. When you do these things, he puts you back on top.

Many people on the left are glorifying the hordes who are burning and stealing, and they believe angry protests are the answer to what they perceive to be America’s problems. Conservatives are saying we need to swing right. Where is the only sane response? Where are the people who stand up for prayer and repentance?

Why is it that America’s first response was to riot, and the first counter-response was to call for political solutions and arms? In a Christian country, both sides would have gone to God first. When Jonah preached to the Ninevites, the king proclaimed a fast, and Nineveh was spared. We’re not that smart, even though most of us are supposed to be Christians.

Most conservatives don’t really believe in prayer or God’s help. If they did, they would stop promoting carnal solutions. When you use carnal solutions to fight a curse from God, you’re taking a nerf rifle to a gunfight.

Satan doesn’t have to fight us directly. He just has to get us to do his fighting for him. He has succeeded. We are destroying our own country, and he is sitting back doing nothing.

The supernatural is the foundation of the natural, and we are piling bricks on a rotten foundation without trying to stabilize it. As a result, our nation has a terminal autoimmune disorder.

Is there any point in bringing up the fact that rioting is the opposite of social distancing? Liberal mask-shamers were raging all over the US before the riots. Now they don’t make a peep. Actually, they’re probably still screaming at whites and Asians in relatively safe zones.

Guess I’ll let that topic rest.

Psalm 37:19

Today I talked to my friend Tina about a dream she had.

She found herself at a beautiful house. Outside, the sky was richly colored in shades of blue and pink that resembled cotton candy. The house was situated in an a mountainous area. She didn’t need a key to get inside the house. Once she entered, she saw beautiful furniture, just as she would have wanted it.

She said she hadn’t earned any of it. Someone had prepared it for her as a gift.

This weekend, a couple of friends I call Abe and Sarah on my blog visited with their family, and they told me how wonderful the coronavirus weeks had been to them. They were able to work and make money the whole time. They got stimulus money. They paid off their vehicles. They gained weight. They had peace. They lacked nothing.

Tina told me her experience had been very similar. She lost her job at the beginning of the lockdown, and she had to take a job that paid less. Things worked out so she did better financially with the new job. All her bills were paid on time. She was able to save money. She felt peace. She felt God was looking out for her.

My friends and I have been sheltered and pampered while many other people have contended with lack and fear.

How does the dream connect with the protection and provision God gave Tina?

She thought it might be a vision of heaven. I suppose that could be true. It may mean something else, though. It may be God’s way of showing her he will keep protecting and providing, in excellent style.

It may mean God will move her physically to protect her from the turmoil that’s coming to areas where the ungodly live in large numbers or are able to visit without much effort.

I believe hills and mountains usually represent barriers in the Bible. Strongholds. Maybe the hills in the dream are God’s barriers to Tina’s enemies.

We talked about our mutual friend Travis who died on Mother’s Day. We speculated on why he had not been healed.

Today is Travis’s 30th birthday.

I’m beginning to think God was not willing to leave him here for the George Floyd riots. Travis had some problems with anger in the area of race relations, and as of the time he was shot, he had not been able to let it go completely. He thought Colin Kaepernick was a hero, and sometimes he sounded off on social media for the benefit of his Facebook friends. To be completely honest, it was a little bit hypocritical. The Facebook Travis and the private Travis were different. He hadn’t gotten over his desire to be accepted and admired as a champion of the black race.

Privately, Travis Quinn supported Donald Trump very strongly. He once texted me out of the blue to say, “Trump must be reelected.” He always felt he had to qualify things he said about Trump. He would lay out his criticisms and then say, “but…”

It may well be that had Travis lived, he would have been drawn into the hatred we are seeing from rioters all across the country. Satan attacks people through the doors they haven’t closed yet, and Travis was vulnerable in the area of race.

We don’t know how things are going to pan out. It may be that events black and far-left activists will find infuriating are just over the horizon. Maybe things will happen that will motivate people who are presently calm to become radicalized. Maybe Travis would not have been able to resist this temptation, and maybe he would have cut me off.

I suppose a major provocation has to happen eventually. We know the Beast’s hordes will be more murderous than they are now, and in order for that to happen, there have to be excuses. Things have to happen to set them off.

Maybe President Trump will do something that will flood their emotions.

Some Jews believe Enoch never sinned and that God removed him from the earth because he knew that he would sin if he stayed longer.

If Travis is gone because of his weakness for identifying with an earthly race instead of the family of God, it doesn’t answer the biggest question I have about his death. I still don’t know why I thought God said he would be healed. I will have to wait for the answer.

You have to be a hundred percent behind God. Jesus said you can’t wait because you have to bury your father or because you want to say goodbye to your family. You have to get up and go, without looking back. This racial mess is going to cause a lot of weak people to take their hands off the plow.

BLM Invades Paradise

I have been to my first Black Lives Matter protest.

I drove to Ocala today to get some shelves and to see if it was true that there was a protest. Things looked normal until I reached a certain point on State Road 200, which is the city’s main artery. I saw flashing lights, and traffic slowed down. Then I saw police vehicles parked in the street. Then I saw the marchers. Then I heard the screaming.

I would guess there were 400 marchers, and that’s a large number for a small conservative town. There were a few white marchers, but the vast majority were black. They were marching down the center of the road.

It was a peaceful protest, but “peaceful” is a deceptive term. It just means I saw no vandalism or violence. It doesn’t mean “peaceful” in the usual sense of the term. If people were sitting at your dinner table yelling at the top of their lungs with angry expressions on their faces, you wouldn’t say you were having a peaceful evening.

I heard a lot of cars honking. I thought it was coming from people who were angry at the protesters, but then I saw signs saying people should honk in support.

I got stuck in a group of cars that were moving very slowly. Part of the time, this made sense, because there were pedestrians ahead, and the cops were directing traffic. When the pedestrians were no longer in the way and the cops had moved, traffic still moved slowly. Why? Then I looked into the cars around me. Many were being driven by blacks and Hispanics. Some were holding smartphones to film the marchers.

Here is what a cynical person would say: the organizers knew they wouldn’t get a lot of support in Marion County, so they had some of the protesters drive instead of walking. They were instructed to move slowly and obstruct traffic, and to blow their horns to make the march seem more popular.

Call me a cynic.

This is the most conservative county in Florida. You can’t be elected dogcatcher here if you’re not a Republican. Trump signs are everywhere. Yet most drivers support BLM? No.

I saw some people who had come out of businesses, waving in support. That surprised me. Then I looked closer and realized that the ones who appeared white at first actually had olive skin and black hair.

Some marchers had signs advertising the Bridges Project. When I got home, I looked it up. It’s an organization which says its mission is to help blacks and whites get along. Oddly, nearly all of the officers are white. Their site brags that they got Confederate flags removed from certain places.

I do not have any Confederate flags. I had a couple of items with Confederate flags on them, and they had a lot of sentimental value to me, but I got rid of them many years ago, thinking it might be considered tasteless to appear to support the Confederacy. Nonetheless, I take a dim view of the sudden, manufactured flag hysteria that materialized out of nowhere a few years back. One year, no one cared, and the next year, you could literally have a problem for owning Dukes of Hazzard memorabilia. There were a lot of black people who wore Confederate flags because they saw it as a way of celebrating their Southern culture, but even they had to get rid of them.

I am not favorably impressed by any organization that bought into and fed the hysteria, and anyone who wants to have a Confederate tag on his car or a flag on his hat should be allowed to do so without being accused of racism. It’s possible, and healthy, for the meaning of a symbol to change.

I started thinking about what I was seeing at the protest, and I asked God to tell me what to conclude.

First, police brutality is real, and bad, and more likely to be a problem for you if you’re black.

Second, it’s important to fight injustice. Protesting is a legitimate way of doing that.

Those things are obvious.

Here’s where it gets complex. What if you’re fighting a problem we can’t do much more to fix, and in doing so, you do a lot of damage to your country?

We are not going to get rid of police brutality, because this is a very big country, we have thousands and thousands of cops, and we do not have an extremely effective way to screen or control them. We have tools that are limited in their effect. The job attracts bullies, and it always will, and they will never stop getting past the barriers.

The police will continue to murder people occasionally, and some of those people–the minority, if you check the facts–will not be white. These killings will sometimes make the news. It’s not going to stop, even if BLM gets everything it wants. This is undeniable. Instead of reacting to every killing as though it were utterly intolerable to go one more day without a magical cure, we should be asking ourselves what level of damage we have to accept.

We hate traffic deaths, but we don’t consider 40,000 per year to be indicative of a protest requiring street protests. We hate murders committed by civilians, but we aren’t out in the streets over the 16,000 or so that take place every year. More than half of those murders are committed by black people, according to the FBI, and black murderers generally kill other black people, but we don’t see a lot of marchers or signs. Abortion is murder, but there are very few protests over the million or so babies we rip apart every year.

Sometimes we accept the fact that we can’t do much better than we already are without consequences that make the cure worse than the problem.

Putting an end to police murders is not something that can be done abruptly. I can tell you with great assurance that very few protesters are aware of this or would try to understand it if you told them. They want a quick fix. In reality, the best we can do is to improve things incrementally as we come up with new strategies. That takes time, and it will never get us to the zero-murder point.

There isn’t that much that can be done in a hurry, but the protest movement can do a lot of harm. For one thing, it stimulates anti-white racism, which is a huge problem in America. There are many places whites simply cannot go. It’s known. It’s accepted. We don’t need to see the problem exacerbated.

The movement also fuels leftist political campaigns, and leftism is evil. It’s based on class hatred, racism, and envy. It’s based largely on ignorance. Leftist politicians convince voters who cause their own poverty that a cabal of whites–especially Jews–are sitting on a mythical pile of gold somewhere, and that all poverty can be erased if the politicians take it and pass it out. In reality, most poor people will remain poor no matter how much they’re given because they have bad habits. No matter what we do with wealth, it will tend to end up in the same hands over and over.

Leftism destroys initiative, and when it gets bad enough, it drives productive people to emigrate. It leads to totalitarianism, political imprisonment, and often, mass murder. But the average voter who can’t get past minimum wage doesn’t want to, and therefore will not, hear that.

The movement is also likely to drive the police to underenforce. Underenforcement is already a problem in many places. Black neighborhoods are notorious for it. The police don’t like to go in. The citizens don’t like to cooperate. There are many, many black people who can kill just about anyone they want in broad daylight in front of witnesses, because they know nothing will happen. On Martin Luther King Day in Miami, black people who have grudges go out and hurt their enemies because they know the police give up on that day.

How do I know this? Honest black people told me.

What if underenforcement becomes a problem everywhere? We tend to think of police work as a calling, but in reality, it’s just a job. There is a limit to what a person will do for a paycheck. If we’re going to charge innocent officers, drive them out of cities, and terrorize their families, just because they were involved in the deaths of suspects, should we expect good cops to continue taking the risks without which they can’t do their jobs effectively?

The movement teaches minorities to stop growing and improving. It teaches them nothing that happens to them is their fault. That’s exactly the opposite of what they need. The more you examine yourself and make corrections, the more successful you are likely to be. The victimhood mindset is poisonous. It teaches you that other people are villains and that every evil thing you do to them is justified. It’s why Pol Pot was able to convince ordinary people to line innocent individuals up beside ditches and machine-gun them.

Leftism is always about killing the goose that lays the eggs. It’s never about becoming your own goose.

I was thinking about this today, and I started thinking about the American Revolution. No one ever says this country was founded by leftists, but it was. Maybe the chickens are coming home to roost. Maybe the revolution was evil.

The Bible makes it pretty clear that God originally wanted man to be ruled by God himself. After that became impossible, he settled for priests and prophets. After that, he permitted the Jews to have a king, even though he advised them against it and made it clear it was not his will.

Every step away from the type of government God wanted brought heavy curses.

There is nothing in the Bible that supports the next step, which is the step to democracy. In fact, when people in the Bible voted, they generally voted for evil. The Beast speaks through the will of crowds.

King George III wasn’t just a king. He was the leader of the Church of England, and it was believed that he and other kings were anointed by God. It was believed that rebellion against a king was rebellion against God himself. The term “leftist” comes from the democratic rebellions of that era. Maybe the belief that democracy was rebellion against God was correct. Maybe we did the wrong thing.

We rioted a bit ourselves. Remember the Boston Tea Party? It is said that there was no violence, but there was certainly vandalism, to the tune of seven figures in today’s money.

Think of this. Slavery would have ended in America much sooner had we not rebelled. Slavery in England was gone by about 1800. What about the Civil War, which took place only about 80 years after the War of Independence? America lost over 200,000 men. Would that have happened under the crown, with no slavery permitted? Then there’s the War of 1812. Never would have happened.

What about the world wars? Would the Germans have been so aggressive toward an England which controlled the American industrial system? Maybe they would tried to make agreements instead of striving to conquer the British Isles. England would have been an incredibly powerful country.

Maybe we cursed ourselves by founding a leftist nation. Maybe the schisms we are seeing today had their supernatural beginnings as cracks during our revolution.

I suspect that the peaceful people I saw today were only peaceful because they were few in number. I think that if there had been two or three times as many, we would have seen their true hearts. This is how human nature works. You kiss the ring when you’re weak, and you deliver kicks in the teeth when you’re strong. They looked very angry to me. Nothing like the polite, cheerful conservative protesters I’ve seen outside abortion mills.

What do I take away from this? Is God showing me this place isn’t far enough from the Beast’s militia? I have to find out.

It’s so weird that society is going through so much turmoil while I’m ratcheting up my firearms hobby. I’ve been thinking I might visit a local AR-15 manufacturer and pick one up. I was considering going tomorrow. Does that look bad?

There are a bunch of deluded conservatives who think the AR-15 will save them from the left. I don’t see it that way. I don’t even think it’s a great weapon. I think it’s a very flawed weapon, and part of the appeal for enthusiasts, whether they admit it to themselves or not, is working hard to make it function corrrectly. I have bulletproof, 100% reliable Eastern bloc rifles for protection. I think it would be fun to have an AR-15 for varmints, and I think I would enjoy learning about it and reloading for it, but I have yet to be convinced that it’s a great weapon.

It reminds me of the Porsche 911. Porsche came up with an extremely flawed design around 70 years ago, and instead of admitting it and moving on, they modify it and release a new version every year. Meanwhile companies like McLaren make cars that drive rings–or Nurburgrings–around it.

“Conservative Christian Blogger Threatens to Buy Assault Weapon in Response to Peaceful Protest.” No. When you have to start shooting fellow citizens in order to hold onto your country, you no longer have a country worth living in.

I have been thinking Tennessee might be a lot safer than Florida, but today I had a disturbing thought. What happens when leftists take over, if they manage to open the borders? That could actually happen. We’re nearly there now.

Right now, conservatives win a lot of elections, and there are areas where they outnumber leftists. What if people are allowed to pour in without limitation? We could see literally millions of legal hostile immigrants over a period of months. They would need land and houses. They could flood the lifeboat in a hurry, including places that used to seem safe.

I tend to think of America as a stable country, but in reality, anything can happen when irrational people are in charge. Maybe the ground I think of as solid is actually very thin ice, ready to snap unexpectedly.

Here’s a term engineers use: brittle failure. It describes an event in which a structure breaks without warning, with extreme speed. Think of bending a glass rod until it breaks. Maybe America is headed for a brittle failure instead of a gradual decline. It happened a lot in the Bible. Israel had several brittle failures. It’s what happens when you neglect God and feed demons. On the surface, things look good, but underneath, the structure has been removed.

Samson had a brittle failure. Belshazzar had a brittle failure. The Assyrian besiegers who were massacred by angels had a brittle failure. The flood, the burning of Sodom, the destruction of Satan’s kingdom on the cross, the fall of Jericho. It’s a repeating theme. Israel had the opposite of a brittle failure when God created it in one day. Maybe my country will fall in a brittle failure.

And here I am, just a man, unable to figure out the truth. I can’t predict anything.

I was very unhappy to see the protest today. I never thought it could happen here. It’s like Nazis marching in Skokie, a suburb where Jews thought they were safe. I have to pray about this.

Hope I won’t be on Earth when the real fun starts.

Leave, and Take Your $*%@& Peace With You

My friend Amanda sent me a text about trouble in the city of Ocala. Something about avoiding the area. She didn’t have any information, so I checked the local paper’s website. It showed two people holding signs in the street. The only one who can be seen well appears to be white or Hispanic.

I don’t subscribe to the paper, so I can’t see the article.

I’m wondering if anything is actually happening. I feel like driving to town to see what’s up. I need to buy some shelves anyway.

If rioting and idiocy have reached my county in any significant degree, I will consider it a sign that Tennessee is where I need to be. I flat-out refuse to live in fear of George Soros’s bused-in punks. Somebody should put an orange wig and a Trump shirt on him and push him out of a car in Minneapolis.

I wonder how badly things are going to go. We keep seeing Antifa/BLM/flash-mob-looter labor pains. They flare up and go away. Sooner or later, they have to firm up and turn into yet another “new normal.” Is it happening now?

I have bad news. The police will never stop hurting and killing innocent people. It’s normal. It’s even mentioned in the Bible. The police in the time of Jesus were Roman soldiers, and John the Baptist had to tell them it was bad to terrorize people on the side for money.

Police abuse is one of the main reasons the Bill of Rights was written. The upper-class white males who wrote it were afraid of the police, for very good reason.

Police work attracts sadists. It always has, and even though police organizations now try to weed them out with questionnaires and so on, it seems rational to conclude that a significant portion of police officers will always, always be bullies who are only too eager to try out their firearms, tasers, dogs, batons, sprays, martial arts moves, and dangerous, painful restraint techniques.

Taking sadists out of police work should be a priority, but it’s wildly optimistic to expect real results any time soon. So far, mankind has not been able to come up with an effective way to do it. We haven’t even found a way to deal effectively with the terrible problem of domestic abuse among police.

Why write so pessimistically about the problem of police sadism? Because if we can’t get rid of it, we can’t completely stop the abuse. We will always lose a certain number of people to unjustified police violence. Given that this is true, what does it mean if we decide it’s always acceptable to riot when a black person is the victim?

It means we condemn ourselves to a new normal in which riots are considered routine. It means we sacrifice our cities.

It’s not practical. To use a leftist buzzword, it’s unsustainable. We have to live somewhere. We have to have stores and businesses. We can’t burn things down and rebuild them over and over. We can’t have prosperity if people are afraid to go into cities.

A certain subset of American cops is going to keep killing black people as well as other Americans. It’s as certain as hurricane season and the first frost of winter. We will have several notable cases every year for the foreseeable future. It’s shocking that there are so many individuals who believe rioting is the correct way to respond. It’s especially shocking given that rioters do so much more harm to minorities than whites. There is no logic in the system. The people doing the rioting don’t think at all, and many media personalities who should know better are behaving the same way. Of course, they live in expensive houses, not ghettos. When stores in poor areas can’t open, TV heads can still buy food for their kids. They don’t run out of quinoa and ionized water.

None of it makes any sense until you consider the supernatural. The rioters and their supporters are controlled by spirits, and the spirits have a plan. They want to turn America over to people who behave more like animals than human beings. God wants us to be controlled by logic. Spirits want our flesh to control us, because it’s easy for them to control our flesh. Satan wants his thralls to do things that are very clearly irrational and self-destructive. You can’t push those ideas through a logical mind. You have to go in the window, through the part of us we share with alligators and rats.

This is why Jesus said the thief comes in through some way other than the door.

It’s an amazing paradigm. In the new America, not only is rioting acceptable; a person who says rioting is wrong is a racist. A person who says it’s bad that around 20 million pure, innocent black babies full of potential have been killed in abortions is a racist. A person who complains about the extremely high murder rate among blacks, which primarily affects black victims, is a racist. Black people who acknowledge these things are sellouts.

You have to support rioting, and you can’t complain about the things which are really killing large numbers of black people.

In New York City, if you’re an unborn black baby, you will PROBABLY be killed before you’re born. The odds against you are better than 50%. The Klan could never dream of accomplishing that kind of genocide. There are fewer than two busloads of Klan members per state, and they can’t get anything done, but they get more attention than Planned Parenthood, which places over 80% of its murder mills near concentrations of black people. I come from a white region where poverty and unwanted pregnancies are common. Planned Parenthood isn’t anywhere near that area. Their mission is directed at blacks.

It’s very strange. Only one type of violence against blacks seems to matter, and it’s a type which causes a tiny percentage of black deaths. If the perpetrator isn’t white, no one cares. This is even true when black cops kill blacks. They get less attention.

Bad black cops do exist. I had one shove a gun in my face for sleeping in a car. Pretty sure that wasn’t in the handbook.

Something weirder still: people are demanding justice for George Floyd, AFTER his killers have been arrested. It makes sense to complain when the authorities ignore abuse, but what is the point when the suspects have been jailed promptly? You can’t be protesting the way the justice system works, because it’s working. Are you rioting to protest the existence of police brutality? If so, you don’t understand how sadists think. No sadistic cop ever said, “I need to rethink what I do because BLM is burning down a black neighborhood.”

It’s all supernatural, and in the end, of course, black people will be hurt more than anyone. They will lose more property and wealth. They will lose more jobs. Their areas will lose more businesses. No one can be forced to open a store in a riot zone. No one can force home buyers to pay more when unrest causes property values to drop. Maybe things will be different in the future, but as of today, people are free to spend and live where they want.

When Detroit went to hell, nice people left. No one could stop them. When Miami went to hell, nice people left. You can’t make a city completely inhospitable without gutting it.

I’m not trying to change anyone’s mind. There is no possibility that significant numbers of people will change their minds, no matter how many websites point out the obvious. I’m just helping reveal what’s happening.

It can’t be stopped. We can’t change the rioters and their supporters. People who don’t want to be part of the new normal need to get close to God and pray for him to help them move. I suppose every corner of American will eventually rot, but some will rot much later.

Only a small percentage of people are led by the Holy Spirit. One of the wonderful things about him is that he gives people a new race, family, and nation. In Israel, there are churches where Jews and Muslims who used to be supporters of terrorism worship together in love and peace. Here in the US, there are churches where race isn’t an issue. Some people realize that once you become a son of God, you are not supposed to think of yourself as white or black or Jewish or gentile. You’re part of a family, and family comes first. If more people knew this, Satan wouldn’t be getting anywhere with his divisive tactics.

It’s very sad, but we have non-charismatic churches that teach that Jews run the world and want to destroy the rest of us. There are non-charismatic churches that teach rioting and hatred of whites. When you reject the Holy Spirit, you open yourself to venereal disease of the heart.

My last pastor was a man named Albert Santiago, and his late wife was named Aleida. They were Puerto Rican, and they did not consider themselves white. Albert sometimes referred to me as “the white guy.” Until I started attending his church, I hadn’t realized Puerto Ricans considered themselves to be so different. I was used to Cubans, and Cubans aren’t like that.

The other day, a black woman who used to go the the church called me. She knew my friend Travis, who died three weeks ago. She called me to talk about what happened to him. We also talked about church. She told me she was with Aleida a lot before she died.

The pastors grew to hate me, and it affected people who knew me. They told people not to associate with me, and I called the pastors out by name on social media, said I knew all about it, and told people to pay no attention to them. Albert and Aleida were extremely impatient and irritable people, and they saw themselves as royalty, so open defiance filled them with impotent rage.

There was an incident after I left the church. Travis, a large black man, was leaving after playing with the music team. Albert chased him down in the parking lot and started screaming at him, demanding to know about his involvement with me. He wanted to know what I had been saying. It was so bad, a black woman called me from the scene to tell me about it. She wanted my advice. She wanted to know if she should call the police. Travis had to threaten Albert with a beating to get him to back off.

The lady who called me after Travis died told me about her conversations with Aleida. She said she had tried to explain things to her. She said Aleida said I was taking up for “the white guy.” The issues and answers didn’t matter. The truth meant nothing. I was white, so she was right.

The church was charismatic, but obviously, Aleida was not praying in tongues. She was not listening to the Holy Spirit. She didn’t see herself as my sister. She saw herself as a Puerto Rican and me as a white enemy.

This is exactly what we should expect when people don’t let the Holy Spirit work in them. If he can’t work, other spirits can. I wanted to build the church and help the pastors do well, and I didn’t care at all about the races or nationalities of the people I worked with, but the spirits that ruled Aleida wouldn’t let me in because I was white.

You have to be a child of God before anything else. If you can’t put your real family first, you can never really be part of the body of Christ. We are one, every day, all the time.

If I move, I may end up in a place where there is considerable white racism, because I want to be in Appalachia, and I don’t want to be near a city. I hope it doesn’t work out that way, but what if the only choice I have is between racists who hate minorities and racists who hate me? I don’t know if there are any places where the Spirit-led live in sufficient numbers to bring real harmony.

If I have to be concerned that mobs will start pulling their shenanigans here, I will have to look into leaving. I guess I’ll see what’s happening in town and then, if needed, take it up in prayer.

I don’t know if my plan will work. It’s raining. I can see SJW’s rioting in nice weather, but I have to wonder if they have the character to do it in the rain.

Satan Can’t Take Away as Much as God can Give

If things went according to plan, my friend Travis Quinn was buried yesterday. I am told the funeral was set for two p.m. I was not there. Instead, I spent the weekend here at the house, hosting a family that knew Travis.

I don’t know if they want their names on the Internet. I will call them Abe and Sarah. I met Abe when I was an armorbearer at Trinity Church in Miami. He was also on the team. We used to have breakfast meetings at the Denny’s on Hallandale Boulevard. Sometimes I said a few things about the importance of prayer in tongues and the need to be freed from iniquities. Abe was very quiet. I didn’t think he was paying attention. Later, I found out he was absorbing everything. We became very close.

Abe and I got tired of the way Trinity Church used people and taught lies in order to get money. Things came to a head when his son was burned in the church nursery. He had a large blister on his face, covering a substantial area. We thought he might be scarred for life.

When Abe and Sarah asked for answers, no one in the church would talk. The head pastor, Rich Wilkerson, ran away, which was S.O.P. for him. My impression was that a lawyer told him to keep quiet. When Abe and Sarah took their son to the E.R., they became the focus of attention. They were asked a lot of questions. The obvious reason: the doctors and nurses wanted to get them charged with child abuse. Had someone at the church called and admitted fault, everything would have been cleared up. That didn’t happen.

When someone associated with Trinity has a problem, Trinity discards that person, like a tire which has had a blowout. They put on a new tire and keep moving. They know new tires will keep coming in the door. They adhere to the teachings of P.T. Barnum.

Abe and Sarah left Trinity before I did, and we ended up at the same new church, where the head pastor showed an inordinate interest in their young daughter and was later imprisoned for having a sexual relationship with a little girl.

We have been through a lot together. I watched them move from home to home, generally upgrading. They moved to Orlando while I was still stuck in Miami. Now they’re in Sanford. They don’t go to a prosperity church. Things keep getting better for them.

Abe once noted that his financial situation seemed to improve during times when he didn’t give Trinity his tithes.

Abe’s dad was not around when he was a kid, and he was raised by his grandmother. Somehow, he came out of that with an extraordinary determination to be a perfect father. He watches over his family like a sheepdog watching a flock. No one makes a move he doesn’t notice. Sarah is right there with him, presenting a unified front so the kids will have stability.

Abe was like a patient older brother to Travis. Sometimes he needled him a little. He didn’t let Travis pull anything over on him. He caught things I let Travis get away with. I held Travis accountable on many occasions, but Abe had a lot of experience in the area of correcting young people early, so Travis never got away with anything around him.

There are 5 kids in the family. The youngest, Gabby, is my goddaughter. She turned out to be a real firecracker. Always saying or doing something unexpected. She used to run up to people with no warning and wrap her arms around them as tightly as possible. At one point, she became obsessed with a line from the movie The Incredibles. She would put her hands on her hips and announce, “NO CAPES!” for no apparent reason.

Abe and I have often discussed the many sorry individuals Travis associated with, as well as his sorry hometown. Travis was from Miami Gardens, and Abe was from Liberty City. Both are ghetto areas. Abe got his family out of South Florida early, and, like me, he hated the area so much he was highly disturbed when he had to make occasional visits. He wanted South Florida behind him and his family, period. No looking back. Travis wanted out, but he felt trapped by his father’s problems, and he hated to leave people behind. He had many, many music students, and he wanted them to escape Miami’s ghettos. Travis didn’t move quickly enough. Abe and I both believe this is why he died.

Travis spent his last month alone in a hospital room, with few visits and no communication with friends. I asked to be put on the contact list, but it didn’t happen. I was part of a small group of people who tried to look after his interests. We felt helpless because we were shut out. We still can’t understand why it was so hard to get things done. There are things people automatically do for you when you go to intensive care, unless you’re a serial killer or a pedophile. Those things didn’t seem to happen for Travis, and there is no excuse for anyone who should have been involved.

Abe called me a few days before the viewing. He had been planning to go, even though he hates Miami. Sarah had advised him against it. I could tell his heart was no longer in the trip. We discussed the ways in which we felt Travis had been let down, and Abe said he had decided not to go.

People say you go to wakes and funerals for the dead, not the people they leave behind. That’s not necessarily true. The dead have no idea who goes to their funerals, and they have other things on their minds. They don’t make lists and tape them to their refrigerators so they can think about the people who really loved them. We go to wakes and funerals for ourselves and for others. We need to see the bodies so we can feel the reality of what has happened. We need to grieve with people we care about. We want to support other people who need help.

In Travis’s case, there wasn’t much point in attending. We knew he was really dead. We wouldn’t have been surrounded by people who shared our feelings or who would have looked to us for comfort. We wouldn’t have been able to help anyone.

The viewing was set up so only 10 people could go in at a time, with masks. The funeral was closed to everyone except his family. It wouldn’t have been anything like a typical set of death rituals. When my grandfather died, people came from all over three counties and brought food to my grandmother’s house. Guests were everywhere. Many people attended the funeral. There was a big lunch right afterward, at the church. We were inundated with food. My dad had a fifth of Gentleman Jack in the car trunk, and we socialized over that. Afterward, the same night, the socializing continued. People told funny stories. Old relationships were rekindled, if briefly.

The events following my grandfather’s death were curative and uplifting. If we had gone to Miami for Travis, it would have been different. We would have been reminded why we left. We would have experienced much of the rejection all over again.

It would have been like a date with an ex-girlfriend. All the reasons for the breakup would have flooded back to the forefront.

Travis should have had a cortege. He should have had a band made up of his students and people he knew from the University of Miami’s Frost School of Music. There should have been a meal afterward. There should have been conversation. Abe and I knew those things were not going to happen. Part of it was due to the epidemic, and part was due to other people’s choices.

With Travis gone, neither of us has any social connection to Miami.

We didn’t want to have to sit and listen to hypocrites who talked about how they loved Travis even though they were never around when he needed help.

I know who Travis went to when he needed a hand moving. I know who he went to when he needed a place to live. I know who didn’t show up when it was time to carry furniture. No one can lie to me.

Not long before he died, Travis did an interview in which he talked about the importance of giving people flowers while they’re alive instead of waiting for their funerals. That says it all. The people who were good to him while he was alive didn’t have anything to prove after he died.

Abe and his family rolled in yesterday afternoon. I cleaned up the house and gave them the second floor. I went grocery shopping, and they arrived while I was gone. I forgot to leave a key. When I got back home, 4 kids were playing in the pool. The fifth starts a new job tomorrow, and she couldn’t make it.

We fired up the grill and made a tremendous amount of food. Burgers. Hot dogs. Smoked sausages. Grilled chicken. Before we ate, we prayed and thanked God for Travis and for the people who fill the hole he left behind. Abe’s kids made water balloons and took him on in a balloon war. Sarah and I sat in the shade and talked.

A lot of my conversation with Abe and Sarah was about coronavirus. I told them how I had noticed that the epidemic was completely different in godly and ungodly areas. I said I had lacked for nothing. I said that apart from what had happened to Travis, it had been a peaceful and plesant time. I said my biggest problem had been weight gain.

Abe and Sarah corroborated what I saw. There is very little disease where they live. They were able to continue working through the entire lockdown. They paid off their vehicles. They gained weight. They were approved for a home loan. They surprised me by telling me they were moving to Leesburg, much closer to me. It’s a definite step up. They’ll be farther from dangerous Orlando when persecution gets worse.

I always pray for God to move my friends away from the Beast’s hordes. I ask him to put them in houses in Christian areas. I even ask him to make other people pay for the houses.

While we were here having fun, my young friend Tina texted me. She said she had had a dream. She wasn’t sure what it meant. Either it was a vision of heaven or an indication that God was going to give her a big house. She said there was a house in the dream, and she could see hills from it. I told her it sounded like my actual life. I haven’t heard the details yet, but I will get them.

I learned some amazing things while my friends were here. They said Gabby had been very excited about visiting. She said she kept saying, “I’m going to see my god-daddy!” That was wonderful to hear. I don’t get to see the family often, so I always wonder if the kids really know who I am. I guess they do.

After swimming, Gabby and Zoey came out in matching outfits. I’ll have to post a photo. I don’t know where kids come up with these things. They wore multi-colored swim coverups and big clear glasses rimmed with rhinestones. So funny. Gabby is the one on the right.

The kids wanted to see the pasture, so they got in my utility cart, and I took them. The last time they were here, I didn’t have cattle. I told them to expect a lot of manure. They couldn’t stop talking. While I was driving, I kept hearing their comments. “Poop!” “Poop!” “Poop!” “Poop!”

The cattle are curious, so they started moving toward the cart. All the girls started yelling. The cattle scared them. They shouted for me to get away from the cattle. After we opened some distance, Gabby said, “Cows are my worst enemy!” Where do kids come up with this stuff? She also said, “Cows are disgusting.”

I kept reminding them they were full of cows at that very moment.

City kids.

The original plan was to leave them in the pasture and go get their parents. Sarah was excited about the pistol targets I had built, and she wanted to see them. Junior was the only kid willing to stay. The others thought the cattle would eat them. I dropped them all by the house and took Abe and Sarah for a tour.

In the meantime, homemade brownies were cooling in the kitchen.

Back at the house, I made whipped cream, and we had warm brownies with Haagen-Dazs vanilla, whipped cream, and chocolate sauce. Gabby insisted on having real maple syrup instead.

Abe and Sarah and I talked more about the polarization of America and the way God’s people are being sifted out.

The kids did something amazing. They cleaned up the house. They asked for brooms. They did the dishes. Before too long, I saw them mopping. Gabby, Zoey, and Cheyenne handled the kitchen. Junior took care of the trash. It was wonderful. They didn’t have to be asked. I couldn’t stop them.

They even swept up around the bird cages. They did a pretty good job of making friends with Marvin and Maynard.

By the time everyone was ready to go to bed, there was not much for me to do.

This morning, I made biscuits, gravy, and fried eggs. The cleaning continued. Gabby came over to me and hugged me and said she wanted to stay and keep cleaning.

They didn’t complain. They kept thanking me. I kept thanking them back. Abe and Sarah said they raised them to be functional kids, and they were going to be functional adults.

Sometimes having guests is hard. Having this crew is actually helpful. I will think about it the next time I’m a guest.

I took a photo of the ladies working in my somewhat cluttery kitchen. You can see Cheyenne in there to the right of her mom.

I’ve been told I have to have Thanksgiving dinner in their new home, and that I’m not allowed to do anything. I can’t imagine what that would be like.

I could have been in Miami, in a very different environment. I would have seen some people I like. On the other hand, I would have seen some people who don’t like me at all. I would also have been around racists. Some of Travis’s friends don’t like white people. Some have criticized me on the Internet in comments tinged with racism. Apparently, I can’t understand Travis because I’m white. These people weren’t around when Travis was being helped by whites and Hispanics. I guess they were busy being oppressed.

Travis passed on Mother’s Day. I suppose that will color that day in the future for some he knew. The day of his funeral, which should have been a down day for me, was a day of love and celebration. It was a day of very good news for me and others. From now on, when I think of the day of his funeral, I will think of redemption and comfort.

I thought about Job yesterday. He had 10 children, and they all died in one day. Then when his tribulation was over, God gave him 10 more. It didn’t erase what had happened to his first 10, but after the new children arrived, how much room could there have been for grief? The human consciousness is limited. You can’t entertain unlimited grief and unlimited joy simultaneously. Surely sufficient joy will displace grief.

I lost Travis for the time being, but yesterday I had 6 people here doing what he used to do, and I had Tina’s text. I also heard from another young lady I met at Trinity. She’s planning to visit along with her sister and my other godchild.

Part of me wants to say, “This is all wonderful, but I still don’t have Travis back.” It’s a very small part of me. It’s hard to hear it over the rest of me.

I hope Abe and Sarah move soon. Their visits give me life, and my floors will always need mopping.

Wearing a Red Hat is Violence, but a Riot is a Protest

The polarization of Christians and anti-Christians continues, and the Beast’s mob continues to form and train. Donald Trump just took a gigantic step to curtail the political mind control coming from social sites, and black people all over America are rioting because one man died during an arrest.

I’m always amazed to see pundits and pundettes miss the obvious when discussing our nation’s issues. One thing I have not been able to understand is the rarity of comment regarding our lack of protection when using new forms of public discourse. The First Amendment was written in a time when discourse took two forms: actual speech and writings on physical media. You could talk to people, or you could write things and disseminate them on paper or parchment or other materials. The First Amendment prevented the government from interfering, and that was adequate. It didn’t protect people from other entities that wanted to censor. It didn’t prevent private parties from censoring employees, students, and so on. But it took government out of the game.

The primary goal of protection of expression was to allow political dissent, not pornography. Many ignorant Americans would be surprised to learn that, since we generally see the First Amendment invoked in connection with obscenity.

When social media became our most powerful means of expression, everything changed. We entered an era in which a few left-leaning private entities had the power to shut people down without fear of legal resistance. The First Amendment doesn’t apply to Twitter and Facebook. We now live in a time where anti-Christians have a tremendous advantage in communication. The most important public fora are run by anti-Christians, and they can stifle us at will. Their only incentive to refrain has been monetary; they want to present a false image of neutrality in order to keep Christians and conservatives on their sites. They balance this desire with a burning drive to silence us.

The First Amendment doesn’t help Christians if they lack typical access to the public ear. Freedom to criticize Barack Obama doesn’t mean much if you’re restricted to inferior means of communication.

I knew all this, but I didn’t think there was a legal solution to the problem. I didn’t study it. To my surprise, the Trump administration just came up with a weapon. They are taking away special legal protections the anti-Christian social media rulers used to enjoy.

I’m not going to study the matter in depth, because I don’t feel like it, but the basic idea is that it’s hard to sue people who run websites for disseminating content you don’t like, because the law says that as long as they only censor content sparingly and for good reason, they are not considered content creators.

If your neighbor Bob slanders you on Facebook, you probably can’t sue Facebook, because Facebook didn’t utter the slander. They just served as a conduit. According to the Trump administration, that changes when Facebook begins nannying account holders. It’s okay for Facebook to remove child porn and other types of information just about everyone finds unacceptable, but when Facebook starts removing political material posted by conservatives, without a symmetrical response to leftists, Facebook begins to be responsible for the things that are and are not published, as though Facebook itself were creating content.

Twitter inserted a message into a Trump tweet, alerting people to Twitter’s position that the tweet should be fact-checked. Twitter generally does not do this to high-profile anti-Christian tweeters, regardless of what they post. Trump didn’t like it, so now he is trying to expose the social giants to lawsuits.

Isn’t it funny that we call the communication sites “social giants”? In the Bible, giants were evil children of Satan. They ruled the earth and intimidated righteous people.

Does Trump’s tactic have any teeth? I don’t know. The text suggests his order only applies to the executive branch. I don’t know how much power that branch has over the Internet. It would be more powerful if courts had to follow it. Federal prosecutors presumably have to obey, and it seems likely that conservative judges will be sympathetic, but I don’t think it binds anyone in the judiciary branch. Maybe I’m mistaken.

I suppose that in order to find out whether Trump’s order has any effect, people will have to start complaining to executive branch entities and suing in federal courts.

It’s a beautiful gesture, albeit very late in coming. I’ll say that.

I keep telling people Christians will be driven off the web. It’s fascinating to see the battle exposed.

Now, what about unintended consequences? Those are always fun.

I run a blog. I delete ridiculous comments. I remove spam and obscene remarks. If I were to see anything sufficiently offensive to me, personally, I would delete it.

Am I running a public forum? Will I be sued if I delete comments?

Andrea Harris, who used to blog as the Twisted Spinster, called comment trolls “blog roaches.” I agree. A blog is a person’s Internet home, and it’s unreasonable to expect bloggers to host malicious idiots.

Tomorrow, I’m going to let a whole family into my home, and they will spent the night. That doesn’t mean I have to let a vanload of smelly, violent Antifers take the remaining bedroom and urinate on the carpet.

Running a personal blog would be unpleasant and unsafe if I had to let every comment through. I delete very, very few comments, but then my blog doesn’t attract trolls the way it used to. If I had a popular right-wing blog, as I used to, I would be fielding vicious, filthy comments right and left. I used to get a lot of them. People used to threaten to mail me their feces, for example. There are many bloggers who still live under these conditions. What will happen to them if they find out they have to post every comment? Their sites will be ruined. Their enemies may figure out the unintended consequences of Trump’s order, bury them in comments, and then file complaints and even sue them.

Maybe the answer is commenter registration, but I don’t know if it will work. You have to register for Facebook, and they’re still in the crosshairs.

Does it matter if real (i.e. private) blogs disappear? They don’t have the power they once had. Still, it would be bad if an effort to promote speech anti-Christians don’t like ended up discouraging it.

The position of legislators and courts has always been that every individual’s right to free expression is extremely important.

It may be that there is no good way to restrain the political and religious censorship of the left. It will probably turn out to be up to judges. If they interpret the law a certain way, we’ll be okay. But look at all the bizarre anti-Christian interpretations courts have made in the past. For example, somehow we went from refraining from creating laws establishing religions to banning prayer in schools.

As for the rioting, it’s quite a spectacle. A man named George Floyd was killed by the police in Minnesota, and people are rioting in places over a thousand miles away. People are looting stores, supposedly as a means of expressing their political and moral views. A police station was burned in Minnesota, and the police ran away instead of defending it.

It used to be that when the police killed someone, rioters waited for the authorities to fail to react. In the case of George Floyd, they chose rioting as their first option. It appears that no one is backing the cops involved in the killing, yet there are still riots. That’s the Beast in action. He is training people who have a victimhood complex. He wants them to think that every evil thing they want to do is justified, and that mob behavior is righteous.

God showed me that the Beast would work through mobs. There is a body of Christ, ruled by the Holy Spirit, and there is a body of Satan, ruled by demons and the flesh. Satan is teaching his kids to be bolder and bolder. Eventually, they’ll riot with no proximate provocation at all. They’ll gather and go to neighborhoods where people are better off, and they’ll do as they please. The police won’t be able to do much, and in some areas, mayors will actually discourage the police. At least one mayor has already done this.

We’ve already seen flash mobs enter stores, beat people, and take whatever they wanted.

There are areas where America has completely lost control. We don’t like to talk about it, but it’s very obvious. There are places where people of the wrong race simply can’t go. There are places where you can be killed for having a blue bandana in your back pocket.

I knew a Cuban named K.C. He was a former criminal. He lived in Texas, and then he moved to South Florida. He told me he had to call himself “K. Three” because if he said “C,” he risked being hurt or killed. Apparently, the Crips think they own the letter “C.” Yesterday, I read a story about coronavirus (“3oronavirus”?) masks. Authorities delivered a warning to people in a certain area. They said people shouldn’t wear masks in certain colors because gangs might attack them. The victimhood machine rose up and shamed the authorities for trying to save lives, and guess what they got. An apology and retraction!

The Bloods and Crips are not really big gangs. They’re small gangs which belong to a bigger gang: the Body of the Beast.

Decent Christian people are in retreat now. This is how I ended up living in the country. It’s why so many other people are leaving cities. It may also have something to do with covid. It’s hitting cities hard and making people think about rural living. Maybe God is using it to move his people to relative safety.

I expect our retreat to continue and increase. We will see Cambodia-style scenes in America. It will be like the French Revolution, in which evil, bloodthirsty, victimhood-crazed peasants dragged wealthy people out of their homes and cut their heads off. Politicians won’t protect us. They’ll be under the spell. They’ll be against the innocent.

People who are on top socially tend to make a fatal error. They think they put themselves on top. In reality, all power comes from God. If you turn from him, he stops backing you up. That’s what’s happening now. It’s why England lost its empire. Americans who are civilized and well off are like Samson. They think they still have the power to rise up and rend their enemies like kittens, but while they were asleep, Delilah shaved them bald.

It’s very interesting to contemplate my situation with regard to the future wave of murder and confiscation. On the one hand, I get more and more interested in firearms, and my collection of guns and ammunition increases. On the other, I have less and less interest in using them to defend myself. A lot of Christians and conservatives rattle their AR-15’s and say they’re going to shoot “zombies” on their properties when things really get bad. Not me. I enjoy firearms as a hobby. I don’t think guns will save me. The idea of shooting a bunch of people in order to stay on this wretched planet is repugnant to me.

I don’t want to defeat my enemies by becoming like them.

When America devolves into a true idiocracy, won’t rational Christians regard execution as a favor? A bullet in the head would be a “million-dollar wound,” to use the phrase soldiers used during World War Two. It would be a fast ticket home.

Many of us like to say, “Molon labe.” “Come and take them.” Maybe we should mean that sincerely. Allowing yourself to be taken is more dignified than turning into an ape.

I’m extremely grateful to be far from Miami. I hope God moves me even farther from leftists. They are rapidly becoming so impervious to advice that there is no purpose in associating with them.

I expect to witness some very ugly things in the future, from a distance. I feel like a Jew who left Germany in 1934. The stubborn people who stay behind are going to suffer horribly, and no one will be able to help them.

Social Proximation Alert

This weekend, something remarkable may happen. I’m scheduled to have overnight guests.

Guests! In my house! Breathing the same air!

A Democrat governor should swoop in, hanging from a black helicopter, wearing a HEPA-filtered, lead-lined coronaburqa, to spirit me away to a hermetically sealed cell full of Antifa pamphlets and gay pride literature.

I suppose there will not be a lot of hugging or handshaking, but we won’t be wearing diving suits, either.

My friends Alonzo and Teri are planning to come by and invade my guest bedrooms with their 5 kids, one of which is my goddaughter. I use words like “planning” and “scheduled” because my friends have a way of not showing up, but at least we have clear intentions to socialize.

I don’t know what I’ll do with them. I have to figure that out. I assume the kids will spend most of the time in the pool. I don’t know if we’ll be able to go to restaurants. They’re open here, but there may be limitations. I don’t know how they feel when 8 people show up at once.

Are we risking death? Well, as of yesterday, this county had 240 known covid cases, and that includes people who are well and no longer contagious. Based on the length of time that has passed since testing began, I would guess that we only have a few dozen active known cases.

I feel like getting out of the chair and putting my face on the floor and thanking God. In fact, I will.

I’m back. Glad I vacuumed.

Joy is coming back into my life, courtesy of God. Grieving over my loss has been very painful at times, and during the first week I felt as though my purpose here on Earth had been largely nullified, but as God has told me, the way I feel isn’t controlled by my circumstances, and he is able to pour joy and peace into me regardless of what has happened.

If it makes sense to say there are sad things about Spirit-filled Christianity, one of them is this: youth tends to be a much less pleasant time than our later years. People want to be happy when they’re young. They want to be financially comfortable. They want to be successful in marriage and reproduction. They want to have victory in their careers. We talk of getting good things while we’re young enough to enjoy them. Unfortunately, youth is typically a time of weakness and defeat unless we get with God’s program early.

My life is vastly better than it used to be. Sometimes I remember things about the past, and I’m surprised to see how much better things are now.

I used to have headaches every day. I suppose this was true for over 4 decades. I assumed nothing could be done about it. This week I realized I don’t even think about headaches any more. I may have had one the last time I was sick. I’m not sure. I have ibuprofen, but I don’t use it for headaches.

I used to be surrounded by people who treated me badly and got victory over me. Relatives, pastors, employers, co-workers, people I encountered on the web…they caused a lot of problems. Now they’re gone. I don’t even get trolls on my blog. They used to swarm the comments.

I worried a lot, even though I hated worry. I think most people who worry do it willingly. I stopped worrying. A man prayed for me at a Last Reformation event in January and cast out spirits of worry, and I don’t worry now.

I was depressed until I was about 30. It was my normal state. Some people live to seek success and improve their lives. I lived on defense. All I wanted was to be left alone. I don’t mean I wanted to be alone. “Left alone is an idiom.” I wanted rest. I wanted shelter from an endless stream of problems and failures.

I don’t get depressed, unless you count rare, fleeting occasions. To understand depression, I now have to concentrate and bring back memories of my former life.

I feel good physically. I have some little issues, but I almost never take medicine. I took some painkillers on one occasion in January, but I can’t recall the last time I took medicine before that. I used to take acid blockers, ibuprofen, and other things to get me through my days. I used a great deal of caffeine. Not any more.

I get to do things I wanted to do but could not. I wanted to live in the country on a large piece of land. Here I am. I wanted to live in the South. Here I am. I wanted to live among law-abiding American Christians and conservatives. Here I am.

I wanted a lot of tools. I have them. I machine. I weld. I fix electronic devices. I have a tractor and chainsaws.

I wanted to be able to shoot without driving half an hour in horrid traffic and being herded into a crowded range with ridiculous rules created in obeisance to liberal politicians. Now I walk 40 feet from my house and blast away. If I want to shoot targets, I hop in my cart and drive to the berm in my pasture.

I hated Miami so much. I can’t describe it. I was like a prisoner who wanted to break out. I’m so happy to be free. I still can’t get completely used to it. Can it really be true that I won’t have to go back? Miserable place. It’s too bad we can’t rip Miami and New York out of the ground, move them to a desert in Mongolia, and surround them with steel walls.

As far as I know, my friend Travis has not been buried yet. I don’t like the idea of refrigerating a body for three weeks so morticians have to shoot chemicals into it and cake wax on it to hide the dehydration and deterioration. The only announcement I have heard said he was going to be buried on May 30, 20 days after his death. I’m not going to the funeral because I want nothing to do with the hypocrites and racists that made up much of his social circle.

I’m thinking about this now because Travis and I used to talk about Miami a lot. We agreed that it was a terrible place to live, and I told him how I had prayed God would help me never to go back. Sometimes he would call about a problem, and he would say he wanted to work things out so I didn’t have to visit. He said he didn’t want to drag me back there.

It’s very fitting that I’m not going to the funeral. He didn’t want me to have to go to Miami while he was alive, and there is no way he wants to bring that misfortune on me now that he is gone.

When we talked about the area where I live, he invariably said he was jealous. He always said the best people he knew were leaving Miami, and he wanted to join them.

Life keeps getting better for me. If you’re really Spirit-led, that’s how it’s supposed to be. You can’t be considered a success unless things get better with time and then end well. If the best part of your life happened 20 years ago, something is wrong with your relationship with God. As the Bible says, “Better is the end of a thing than the beginning thereof.” If you own the end, you own the whole thing.

Travis’s death caused me a great deal of suffering, but the hard days are over, and things are going to keep improving. Surely God will reward Satan by sending me multiple people to take Travis’s place. I’m not going to end in failure. Even in Travis’s case, I won. Before I knew him, he was headed for hell. I was one of the people God used to help him receive eternal salvation.

The other day I wrote about a revelation I had. God showed me that I should call him my master. I do that all the time now. I wish I could help people understand how powerful it is. I can feel the Holy Spirit growing in power in me when I say it. I feel weight falling off of me. It’s a way of acknowledging that only God gives me victory and good things. When you acknowledge this, he works with more power. He doesn’t want you to help yourself and build up pride.

God isn’t a genie who shows up to give us what we want, without asking for anything in return. He expects us to be willing slaves who are determined to be one with him. A good master feeds his slaves well. He gives them the best medical care. He gives them the best tools and the best workspace he can afford. He gives them complete protection. When he sends them out in his name, he backs them up 100% with his power and authority. What’s not to like?

The word “slave” is deceptive because human slavemasters generally coerce. Satan coerces. You sin until you get a habit, and then the habit takes away your free will. Satan is a pimp. God’s slaves serve by their own free will. They can quit whenever they want.

I’m finally cutting back on reading the news. Covid got me started again. I love not reading that mess.

Why should I read it? It’s for citizens of the world who are Satan’s subjects. I’m a citizen of another country, and I’m not subject to the laws and dangers of this place. If I were visiting Botswana, would I read the newspapers and get upset over politics and problems? Of course not. Those issues are for citizens of Botswana. Why should I waste a lot of time reading about the misery carnal Americans live in? If they want to rip each other’s throats out and insult each other and spit at God, that’s on them. Like a friend of mine says, “Not my circus, not my monkeys.”

I’m an enemy agent; an insurgent. I call people to become citizens of my country. I don’t have to get bogged down in their foreign squabbles. America has economic problems? God says he will supply me abundantly. America has diseases? God says no plague will come near my dwelling. Anti-Christians are becoming more and more violent, and they will eventually form mobs and come after us? God protected Lot, Moses, and Jesus from mobs.

I live in a different reality. I’m here, but I’m not here. We have seen how COVID-19 hits anti-Christian areas much harder than Christian areas. That’s a picture of the way God wants us to live.

If you want life to go smoothly, it’s extremely important to pray in tongues every day. A lot. It’s very important to ask God for correction and revelation. It’s important to remove preachers from betweed you and God. The Bible says God will teach you directly.

It’s important to submit. You have to understand that God is your master, not your concierge or butler.

You need to listen to the Bible. Read it, but also listen to it.

You have to stop trying to change the world. You have to stop trying to adapt to it. Accept the fact that you are rejected, and get used to helping individuals, not neighborhoods, cities, or nations.

Be glad you’re rejected. Satan keeps his enemies close.

I love God’s joy. I have to decide what to do with it. The pool needs some work. I need to get the house ready for guests. I should go buy some driveway sealer. Joy gives you enthusiasm to get things done, because it fills you with hope. It destroys discouragement.

Favor is everything. Line yourself up to receive it. Stop trying to get God to do things your way.

Hope this helps.

Anti-Christians Really are Deluded

I always say we’re moving into the last stages of the age of the Gentiles and that persecution and delusion are ramping up sharply. Today I received a great piece of evidence.

For a long time, Republicans and Democrats have been fighting about covid. Democrats say, very wrongly, that it’s a major threat. Republicans tend to compare it to a severe flu season, and that characterization has been proven right. Democrats support draconian measures which don’t appear to work well, and Republicans express concern that if we stay at home forever, there will be economic devastation. Republicans say Democrat officials want economic trouble so they can use it to depict Donald Trump as a terrible leader during an election year.

I just read that Democrat bigwigs are highly disturbed…DISTURBED…by a Democrat economist’s belief that we are going to receive great news about Trump’s economy in spite of covid.

The optimist’s name is Jason Furman. He’s a Harvard professor who served Obama as an economist. In a video conference in April, he told a group of leaders from both sides this: “We are about to see the best economic data we’ve seen in the history of this country.”

Here’s a terrible quotation from the article:

Furman’s counterintuitive pitch has caused some Democrats, especially Obama alumni, around Washington to panic. “This is my big worry,” said a former Obama White House official who is still close to the former president. Asked about the level of concern among top party officials, he said, “It’s high — high, high, high, high.”

Here’s another one:

The former Obama White House official said, “Even today when we are at over 20 million unemployed Trump gets high marks on the economy, so I can’t imagine what it looks like when things go in the other direction. I don’t think this is a challenge for the Biden campaign. This is the challenge for the Biden campaign. If they can’t figure this out they should all just go home.”

Republicans have been proven right. Democrat politicians want us to be poor so Biden can win. They’re beginning to admit it to journalists.

This is not a small thing. Poverty is very bad. Do I even have to say that? Poverty ruins lives. It costs lives, too. But it truly is what the Democrat establishment wants for us.

What greater delusion could there be? What better evidence do we need before we admit that supernatural delusion is sweeping the country? No one could be this crazy and evil without help from spirits.

Biden is demented, and he’s going to be dead in a few years. It’s obvious to anyone who knows anything about dementia. In what appears to be the most cynical presidential strategy in history, the Democrats are working to engineer an election in which a demented yet widely palatable candidate wins the Oval Office and control of the nuclear football. They are fully aware that if he is elected, he will have to be removed from office, and they’re fine with it. They know the Vice President will be the true leader.

Liberals were never very rational, but this is a new level of insanity.

There is no way to avoid delusion if you aren’t filled with the Holy Spirit and you don’t pray in tongues every day. Sanity doesn’t come from the mind. It comes from the spirit. Evil spirits speak idiocy to us around the clock. You have to have a greater spirit that tells you the truth.

What’s more amazing? That Democrats want us to be poor, or that they’re willing to admit it? How could either of these things be true if they were in their right minds? They think their attitudes are right. No one could be that blind without supernatural help.

Here’s another interesting thing: articles are coming out, admitting covid has hit Democrats much worse than Republicans. If you remove the Northeast from the statistics, American figures don’t look all that bad. If you remove a few liberal cities, they look even better. It’s as though God sent the disease to American leftists.

We disagree on covid policies, not just because Democrats are more afraid of death, and not just because Democrats want to see Trump lose. We disagree because we have different realities. The world looks very different to Christians and anti-Christians.

I have never seen a covid patient. I don’t own a medical mask. I have lacked for nothing, unless you count having to wait longer than usual for a haircut. I have been able to go wherever I want in my area of the state, at any time of day. Apart from a personal tragedy which happened to take place during the epidemic, I’ve had a wonderful, restful time. I don’t think I’m unusual.

The other day I watched Mark Hemans issue a prophecy, and he compared the epidemic to a time of rest. Something about God making people slow down so they could come to him. It has been that way for me. I’ve felt as though I were wrapped in an invisible blanket, held apart from the terror and selfishness. Idle, even by my standards.

I have a cousin near liberal Chicago. She has been a prisoner in her home. She can’t get into Walmart. She can’t buy meat. My cousin near liberal Atlanta can’t get meat. I sent him a photo of my local grocery’s well-stocked meat area, and he said his Publix hadn’t looked like that for months.

It’s no wonder Christians and anti-Christians disagree. We live in different worlds on the same planet.

I keep getting the feeling that something is over. I have the inexplicable feeling that it doesn’t matter what I do now, because something is coming to an end. If your city condemned a house you lived in so an off-ramp could be built, you wouldn’t fix the lawn and hire someone to paint the walls.

When Jesus showed his disciples where to cast their nets, and they filled their boats with fish, they walked off and left the fish to rot. They had found something better to do. I can’t help thinking of that.

Sometimes I think the feeling means I’m going to die for some unknown reason, so I can be removed from this world. Sometimes I think it means the rapture is close.

Maybe the feeling doesn’t mean anything.

People are at each other’s throats down here. On Earth, I mean. It’s getting worse. It will be nice to leave it behind. It’s always great to be extracted from a situation in which people who are basically boneheads are clawing at each other and cannot be helped.

I like the expression “bonehead” because it’s not about intelligence. It’s about unwillingness to listen.

It’s about pride.

I think I’m going to cut down on the use of the words “Democrat,” “liberal,” and “leftist.” I really like “anti-Christian.” It’s much more accurate, and it covers nominally Christian nuts who are conservative yet still controlled by Satan. In the South, there are anti-charismatic, anti-Semitic sects that fit that description.

“Anti-Christian” also connects these people to the Antichrist, whom they already serve.

The sad thing is that writing about the delusion of anti-Christians won’t change anything. Even if a lot of people read my blog, it wouldn’t help people who are against God. They can’t be reached by reason. If what I write serves a purpose, it’s probably to reinforce people who already believe.

Persuasion is fine, but it only works on people the Holy Spirit has prepared. We don’t come to Christ because of logic and argument. We do it because the Holy Spirit reveals Christ to us.

I really hope Biden loses. It was bad enough when we elected an ineffective junior senator who had only worked 143 days. How will God treat us if we knowingly turn our country over to someone who is clearly senile?

Democrats want us to be poor, and now we have proof. How will God react if we elect someone we know wants us to have poverty?

We will probably get what we asked for.

Pro Tip: Wear Shoes

It’s a beautiful overcast day, and I feel like blogging, so I think I’ll tell on myself. Here goes.

I have a burglar alarm. It’s annoying sometimes. This weekend it annoyed me by beeping over and over.

I had a half-hour power outage. The burglar alarm has a UPS-type battery for backup power. When the battery is low, the system beeps. It appears that the outage drained the battery and the system was not able to charge it enough to make the beeping stop. The battery is from March of 2017, so it’s a little bit past the halfway point of its expected lifespan.

The control panel is not a good product. It’s not intuitive. For example, before you enter the security code to turn things on and off, you have to enter a “1.” This should be printed on the panel in big letters in case a friend has to turn the alarm off while you’re away. It has tiny instructions printed on it, and they don’t tell you very much. It has directions for turning off the annoying beep, which it spins as a “chime.” These directions do not work when the power goes out. When you turn off the CHIME, the battery beep does not stop. Because when your battery goes bad, or the system simply isn’t man enough to charge a good battery, you need to be reminded every 90 seconds, forever. Especially when you’re trying to sleep.

I can’t get burglar alarm batteries where I live. I have to order such things, or I suppose I could pay the alarm company $150 to install a $20 product. I ordered a battery with a larger capacity than the old one, and then I thought about killing the beeps.

I did not call the alarm company. I figured it was impossible to kill the beeps using the panel. After all, the CHIME shutoff did nothing.

I decided to try two things. First, I got out an old computer UPS I wasn’t using, and I plugged it in, hoping it would charge its own battery to the point where I could substitute it for the alarm battery. After a few hours, it charged up, but when I installed it, the beeps continued.

My next genius move was to open up the alarm panel and look for the buzzer, which really is a buzzer, not a chime. I think. It certainly looks like what electronics people call a buzzer. My plan was to take my soldering iron, remove the buzzer, and reinstall it when the battery arrived. Or not. You don’t really need a buzzer on your burglar alarm panel. It has a text display, and it also communicates through my phone. I guess the buzzer is nice if you enjoy hearing the CHIME go off over and over as doors are opened and closed. I don’t have much use for that feature.

I plugged my soldering iron in and turned it on. There is no furniture near the panel, so I left the iron on the floor. I wasn’t going to step on it. Who would step on a hot soldering iron, knowing it’s turned on?

While I was doing all this, I decided to call the alarm company. They might conceivably be of use. I talked to some lady who said she would refer me to their technical people and have them call me.

While I was talking to her, I felt a terrible pain in my right little toe. I was standing on the soldering iron.

It’s not that easy to have a calm conversation on the phone when you’ve just stood on a soldering iron, but I found that it could be done. What really bothered me was the smell of burning flesh which filled the area after I moved my foot. Apparently I left a significant amount of myself on the soldering iron.

It was very late, and I figured I would hear from these people the next day, so I heated the buzzer’s lugs and started pulling. One slid out of the PCB just fine, and then the buzzer fell apart. Now I had a permanently deleted buzzer.

Immediately, the phone rang. It was the tech guy. I told him my problem, and he said, “Press the star key.”

Mmmf.

I put the panel back together and went to bed. Before turning out the lights, I hit Ebay and ordered a package of buzzers for $3.65. The pain went away after about half an hour, thank goodness. Falling asleep was not a problem. Too bad it happened pretty close to 2 a.m.

I don’t know if pressing the star key actually works, but I suppose I should have called and tried before mutilating my alarm panel.

For all I know, the panel has been straining to beep all night with its larynx ripped out. I sort of hope so. I like the picture of an annoying adversary screaming at me silently, features contorted with desperation, while I sleep in peace.

Later this week, my buzzers and battery will arrive, and maybe this will be the end of my problems.

Why didn’t I just look up my panel’s manual? You’re so smart. You think you know everything, don’t you? Get ready for some humble pie.

My panel has no manufacturer’s markings on it, inside or out. Seriously. It has a logo sort of a thing consisting of symbols. It’s sort of like the thing Prince used as his name for a while. You can’t search for it on Google.

Today, by sheer luck, I found out what type of panel it is, and I downloaded a manual. Guess what? There are no instructions for turning off the battery beep. Totally serious. What kind of sick mind writes a manual like that?

I can see him now. Some nerd with 42 pens in his shirt pocket, sneering that if people don’t feel like buying spare batteries, they don’t deserve to sleep.

I should have had a spare battery on hand. Actually, I did, if you count the UPS. Not sure the UPS battery is up to the task, though. Can’t tell without a buzzer. BWAH HA HA HA HA.

Should I get a spare battery now? Don’t know. The new battery should last at least three years. Will I still be here?

I’m thinking I should hook the battery up to a car charger the next time this happens. I think the internal charger in the alarm box is junk. It works off a tiny wall wart. I’ll bet I would have to put up with a solid day of beeping even if I had a good battery, because it would take that long to recharge.

I also think I should put a UPS on the wall wart. If the system never knows there’s a power outage, it won’t be aware it has an excuse to bother me. I’m not sure why the internal battery doesn’t provide complete backup. Maybe it’s deliberate. Maybe the company wants me to know the power is out, even if the alarm is working. I don’t see how that helps me, though.

If I add a UPS, the system won’t know there’s an outage for a considerable length of time, and that will give the power company time to fix things before the system finds out. Most outages are short. They wouldn’t challenge a UPS. As for long outages, the UPS will run down, and then I’m no worse off than I was with a depleted internal battery. It will just take a little longer to get there.

Maybe I should get a motorcycle gel battery to replace the internal battery. It seems stupid to protect your house with an expensive system when you’re going to back it up with a $20 Chinese lead-acid battery that won’t keep a PC running for 20 minutes.

I guess a gel battery would need a different charger. Okay, maybe I should get a lead-acid motorcycle battery. Still better than what I have.

In other news, I got another useful revelation.

One of the tough things about serving God is getting humility right. Even when you credit God with the good things that happen in your life, you can do it in a way that draws admiration to you. I’ve noticed that preachers who heal people get a lot of thanks and admiration, and they don’t do a great job of deflecting it.

You can say, “God did this for you,” but that doesn’t capture the truth of what happened. You can’t help but sound a little condescending.

God showed me this: don’t just say, “God did this.” Say, “My master did this.” Call God “my master” whenever possible. Don’t say “the master.” It’s not personal enough. The feel isn’t the same.

I got ahold of this, and I started telling God he was my master. Try it. It feels wonderful. It makes our relationship seem like what it actually is. I feel tension drain out of me when I say it. It’s as if burdens are sliding off of me.

God has to receive proper credit in order for his power to flow through us. It can’t just be words and thoughts. It has to be in our hearts. Using the proper language can change your heart and open you up so he can flow.

You have to try it in order to understand how helpful it is.

God’s glory is a problem if it starts to stick to you. When you’re close to him, it’s easy to end up in a situation where you are overly exalted. It appears that this is what happened to Satan. You need to be able to reflect the glory and prevent it from harming you.

The Bible makes it clear that God does his most impressive work when others are standing aside. When you’re striving, the credit for what you do is yours. God won’t take credit for it or get heavily involved. When he gets the glory, he does the work.

I can’t say enough about it. Give it a try and see how it works out.

My Own Strength Doesn’t Cut it

The fallout from my recent dream has been wonderful so far.

I dreamed the wife of a preacher who had committed suicide threw herself on me and gave me a passionate kiss. It may not sound like a dream that came from God, but it appears that it was.

One of the things I took away from it was a new revelation of the importance of faithfulness to God. Your relationship with God, although not sexual, should be hot, passionate, and exclusive, and you should be appalled by the thought of cheating on him.

You can cheat on God by committing sin or just by conforming to the secular world. You can cheat on him by failing to spend time with him. Many Christians practice idolatry through things like yoga, astrology, the martial arts, traditional Chinese medicine, and so on. Idolatry is the most blatant form of adultery there is.

Anyone who wants to see how Christianity resembles marriage and how straying from God is like having sex with strangers should read Ezekiel 23 in plain English. It’s startling. Here is a link.

I have always hated adultery. It can be hard for a single person to understand how a married person can cheat on his or her spouse, especially if that person is attractive and devoted and has a good personality. I do understand the temptation to cheat on vile people, but I know it isn’t acceptable.

I have never liked the hundred-mile rule. Women may not be familiar with it. It goes like this: “If I’m at least a hundred miles from my wife, I’m single.” I guess this could also be called the convention rule.

If you’re married to someone, you don’t just behave when that person can see you. It’s not okay to commit adultery that person doesn’t know about. Marriage should be characterized by deep trust. Once someone cheats, that trust is damaged very badly.

I don’t understand women who marry men who are unlikely to be faithful. Jada Pinkett Smith comes to mind. She has a famous “open” marriage. Some people seem to admire her for holding onto Will Smith in spite of what he does, but the truth, in all likelihood, is that she simply has no choice other than divorce, and like Camille Cosby, she doesn’t want to relinquish the status he brings. She was a minor celebrity before she married him, and if they divorced, she would fall to a much lower rung on the social ladder.

All this being said, I had a physical relationship with a married woman once. I feel very bad about it. She was in the process of getting a divorce, but it wasn’t final. I told myself that made her single, which was not true. We were in love, and we had plans. I thought we would marry. I used these things to justify what I did. Of course, a physical relationship outside of marriage is never acceptable, so even if her divorce had been final, I would merely have been committing fornication, not adultery. It would not have made our behavior righteous.

But for the divorce proceedings, I would never have touched her. I convinced myself I was still against adultery.

Anyway, regardless of what I did in a time of disgraceful self-deceit, I have always hated cheating.

The passion of the kiss in the dream made me think about the nature of our desire for God. We should be like women who are helplessly drawn to their husbands. The circle of trust around God and us should never be broken. When we are tempted, we should be just as upset as married people who are approached by sluts and players.

We need to start saying “slut” again. There are a lot of women out there who need to have cold water thrown in their faces so they can see what they’re doing to themselves. We shouldn’t let active strippers or other prostitutes work in church ministries. We shouldn’t let career single moms sing onstage. The Bible uses words like “harlot” and “whore” over and over. Pulling punches can hurt people.

It’s too bad there is no similarly powerful word for describing sexually immoral men.

Before I had the dream, I knew my relationship with God was like a marriage, and I knew I was supposed to be faithful, but the knowledge didn’t run deep enough. The dream put it in my heart, and that has been very helpful.

Now when I’m tempted, I think of the way I would feel if I were married and a sleazy woman came onto me. I would be angry because she was threatening one of the pillars of my life. I wouldn’t be nice about it. I would be very blunt with her, and I would let her know I was going to tell my wife everything.

I may have committed adultery in the past, but I certainly don’t want to do it now. I don’t want to be that kind of person.

I am much better at resisting temptation, and I feel that God is more willing to do the things I ask than he was a couple of days ago. That would make sense. Leaders are generally less willing to support followers who are hypocritical or who dishonor them habitually.

It seems like I’m seeing his hand in my life more often. I truly hope so, because when your testimony dries up, you’re in trouble.

Christians whose testimony is weak should be quiet and listen, instead of founding denominations, running churches, and making up doctrine.

Another Win for Mr. Popularity

If I recall correctly, I started my first Facebook account in 2009. Actually, it may have been my second account. I have dim memories of checking Facebook out during my blogging heyday, which would have been several years earlier. I recall wondering why anyone would want Facebook. People “poked” each other and sent each other beer icons. It seemed utterly stupid. That sounds doesn’t sound like the Facebook of 2009. Anyway, my first really active account probably began a little over a decade ago.

I was an armorbearer for Rich Wilkerson at Miami’s Trinity Church, and I had a lot of church friends. I noticed that a lot of the people I knew had been drinking the Social Justice Kool-Aid. They hated Republican politicians, and they put up emotional posts espousing leftist causes. It was very disturbing, because they were very clearly out of touch with the body of Christ.

They were out of touch with their pastor, who was a conservative. He kept his politics quiet.

I got frustrated with Facebook because it showed me that most of the people I knew were hypocrites. They went to church to feel good, but they remained unchanged. You couldn’t tell them anything. When I shared things that would not be controversial at all among Christians who knew the Holy Spirit, I got a lot of static in return.

A few years later, I belonged to New Dawn Ministries. I didn’t know the pastor was an active pedophile. I posted things that would have gotten a lot of likes from knowledgeable Christians, but I got more static, and a lot of it came from the pastors. The pastor’s wife was especially strident and rude. She was a huge believer in the prosperity gospel, and she believed she and her husband were to be treated like royalty. We were expected to submit to them like servants.

I eventually became very open in my opposition to the church, calling it a cult and denouncing the pastors for telling my friends not to talk to me.

During this time, I used a fake Facebook name, as any intelligent person would. Facebook had a rule I didn’t know about. No fake names. Someone turned me in, and my account vanished instantly. The pedophile pastor put up a post about it. His theory was that God had smitten me. He said, “God don’t like ugly.”

I didn’t bother resurrecting that account. I started a new one and continued doing what I was doing. But one day God told me to get off social media. I was only too happy to do that. I called it “the little rapture.” It was very pleasant.

I still avoid Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. A Russian hacker took over my old Instagram account after I deactivated it, so it still exists.

I had found that social media interaction led to a lot of nonproductive stomach-churning argument with people who thought they knew a great deal yet were very ignorant. I wondered if I was supposed to continue. Was what I was doing a ministry? I can’t say, but if it was, it didn’t work very well. The return was not worth the aggravation.

Today I got a reminder of why I quit. I put something on the web a while back, and even though social media sites were not involved, someone who was offended linked to what I had published, and the flying monkeys attacked. It wasn’t a big deal, but it reminded me how vile the Internet is. I was accused of characteristics I don’t have. One person found out I was a Christian and said I was delusional.

A crowd of venomous, deluded people doesn’t like me. This is nothing new, and I know why it happens.

The voice of Internet haters is the voice of the Beast. He speaks through crowds. He has always spoken through crowds.

A crowd tried to rape the cherubs in Sodom, outside Lot’s house. The crowd was against Noah; God killed all of them and only spared 8 human beings. A crowd delighted in tormenting Samson. A crowd listened to Dathan and Korah and opposed Moses. A crowd got Aaron to make a golden calf. A crowd murmured against Moses, Caleb, and Joshua and died in the desert because of it.

A crowd defied God and insisted he give them a king when he wanted to give them prophets and priests.

Elijah was against the majority. In his time, there were only 7,000 men in Israel who didn’t worship Baal. A crowd of kids insulted Elisha, and God sent two bears to maul them. Crowds abused and killed the prophets. A crowd arrested Jesus. A crowd forced Pontius Pilate to kill him, even though Pilate was determined to let him go. A crowed jeered at him while he was dying on the cross.

Solomon literally married a crowd. He had hundreds of wives, and he listened to them instead of God. He worshiped their false gods and died in disgrace. Solomon was a failure. People forget that.

Under Ahasuerus, crowds rose up to murder Jews. Some believe this was a shadow of the Nazi persecution.

Crowds and peer pressure are evil. The Bible is against peer pressure and the voice of the crowd. The Bible says we are to be the head and not the tail. The head leads; it doesn’t follow. When a herd travels, one animal in front turns its head a certain way and walks in that direction, and the other animals follow as though they were its tail.

I have never been good at picking up on the consensus of the herd, and I have always hated peer pressure. Many times, I have tried to give in to it in order to be accepted, but it never worked. You have to be a certain kind of person in order to pull it off.

If you don’t fit in with the herd, be happy, because it may mean you were created to be a child of God.

Jesus said his sheep would hear his voice. There is always symmetry in the supernatural. Maybe there’s another voice you’re not hearing.

The Biblical figures who pleased God were generally outsiders. John the Baptist is a great example. His father was a temple priest, but John was not given a priesthood. He lived in a time when the Romans, not the Jews, chose priests. It was all political, which is another way of saying the Beast made the choices. Moses was cut out of his Egyptian family and social circle. Noah built a huge ship in the middle of the desert, which was certainly not in accord with the beliefs of his neighbors. Lot didn’t fit in with his neighbors. Elijah was rejected by his king and queen and had to go live in the wilderness. Jewish legend says Enoch lived by himself and rarely appeared before other people. Jesus had no home and no title.

The other day I was thinking about myself, and I wondered why I had never had any ambition to speak of. I think most men are driven to succeed by the fear that they will be perceived negatively if they don’t. I would like to be admired and receive approval, but the desires aren’t strong enough to get me out of bed every day at 5 so I can be the best or richest lawyer on earth.

I don’t care for awards. Competitions are inherently corrupt, and if you win a prize, what does it prove? It shows that a bunch of people whose opinions you probably don’t respect felt like acknowledging you for their own selfish reasons. If I think you don’t have the capacity to form an opinion worthy of respect, how can I expect to derive pleasure from your trophy?

Cash prizes…now those are okay, regardless of whether they come from people I respect. I can use money to buy more tools.

Trophies are not very valuable. When you die, they stay here on earth, filling up with dead flies. They’re usually made of plastic, so it’s not like you can melt them down and keep the metal.

Oscars are made of bronze, which is a cheap metal. The gold exterior is plating. Olympic gold medals are currently made of 92.5% silver, which is okay, but have you checked silver’s price lately? Even including the tiny amount of gold on the outside, a gold medal won’t get you far in a barter economy. It may well be that Nobel medals, made of gold alloy, are the only major prizes that have intrinsic value.

The Greeks, whose culture was completely Satanic, loved prizes. They loved honoring athletes, which is very fitting, because athletes have short careers. Satan loves giving people things that rot quickly, in order to deprive them of eternal riches. Greek athletes got all excited over winning crowns made of leaves. Wonder how long it took those to wilt.

I’m sure Michael Jordan has a huge number of prizes. That’s great, but how would he look on the court today? He would have a tough time with talented high school kids. He might do fine for a short time, but forget playing competitively for a whole game. He has prizes for things he can no longer do. If you serve God, you receive prizes in heaven, and they last forever.

Maybe I would feel different if I had won a lot of prizes or if I had received a lot of approval from human beings. Public approval is like a bribe. It clouds your judgment.

I’ve always had the feeling that lack of ambition was a good thing. I think that’s an unconventional belief.

While I was at Trinity Church, I got a prize. They called it the Abishai prize. The idea came from the infected doctrine of Denny Duron, a football coach masquerading as a pastor. His daughter married Richie Wilkerson, who went on to be the proud pastor of Kanye West and Kim Kardashian.

The idea is that Abishai was a nobody. In Duron’s brand of Christianity, Abishai had no talents and received no honor, but he was special because he was happy to continue working without recognition or reward.

In the Bible, Abishai was an honored military man of high rank, so one wonders where Duron got his ideas.

Duron wrote a filthy pamphlet called The Abishai Anointing, and the basic thrust was that some Christians are very special and you’re not. You should be happy to live in the shadow of people like Denny Duron and carry their laundry and so on, because it’s a big honor to be ignored.

Trinity used people and rewarded sycophants and rich people, so the leaders knew there were people who were not happy about being ignored. I suppose this is why they came up with the Abishai award. It was for selfless leaders who didn’t mind being treated like pack animals.

I didn’t completely understand what was going on back then, and I was slightly honored to receive the award, even though I knew they treated me badly. I got my two minutes onstage, and I was expected to be happy about it and find comfort in it during my remaining years of peonage.

One day I popped the prize, which was a cheap certificate, out of the very cheap frame and put a photo in it. I burned Duron’s ridiculous booklet, and I probably burned the certificate. It’s always unpleasant to learn that you’ve been suckered, even partially.

I hadn’t wanted a prize to begin with, but if you’re going to give me one, don’t bend over backwards to make it an insult.

I criticized Duron and his nonsense publicly after that, which could not have done much to enhance my popularity.

It’s a good example of the sort of earthly rewards I’ve received from preachers and churches.

If they really wanted to honor me, they could have made some effort to clean the area where I worked in the kitchen, instead of leaving it to me and my friends to clean piles of mouse manure out of drawers and treat them with bleach. They could have stopped piling junk on the surfaces where I made pizza that netted them $12 per pie. They could have backed me up when they told me to get the kitchen in shape, instead of siding with a hotheaded underpastor who responded to my efforts by standing up for dangerous filth and telling me I was the problem.

The whole church was like a clown act. It was as if little kids had broken into a building and set up a church. The best way to get in trouble was to try to teach people how to behave responsibly. They hated that.

The mouse manure is back. That’s my guess. It’s very dangerous, and feeding people from a kitchen full of excrement is despicable, but Trinity doesn’t care about reality. They only care about image and money.

Today I got a call from my aunt. I rarely hear from her. She wants to decorate my parents’ grave for Memorial Day, at her expense. That’s nice of her.

She never got to hear my dad’s conversion testimony. She was not at his funeral. She had an appointment for someone to come and measure for blinds.

Her son and daughter-in-law were present, and they heard the testimony. I guess they didn’t tell anyone. That’s surprising, because it was quite a testimony, and I didn’t just deliver it so people could be amused at the viewing. I hoped it would help them.

I told her about his conversion today on the phone. I don’t expect anything to come of it, but you never know.

It’s considerate of her to decorate the grave, but I’m not very excited about cemeteries and mortal remains. My mom and dad aren’t in a hole in Kentucky. Everything here on earth will be destroyed, so putting a lot of effort into caring for a grave is not that appealing to me. After my aunt goes, I plan to do nothing whatsoever to maintain the grave. I don’t have any desire to visit it or to see Eastern Kentucky again. It’s a disappointing place.

A tombstone is a lot like a trophy. It honors a person without actually helping them, and a nice tombstone doesn’t make you a success. There are plenty of people in hell who have beautiful graves.

Maybe I should make burial arrangements for myself, but do I really care? At the moment, I have no will. I was working on one, but my friend Travis died, and he’s one of the people I wanted to bless. Now I can’t do anything for him. I suppose I could help other people.

If the money is wasted, which will almost certainly happen if I die intestate, I won’t care. I’m not going to be sitting in heaven watching unimportant things happen on earth.

I don’t care what happens to my body. I won’t be here to see, and if I were, I still wouldn’t care. I’ll be finished with it, forever. I don’t care what happens to things I scrape off a plate after dinner. What’s the difference?

I’ll be glad to get rid of this thing. I miss not being farsighted. I’m not thrilled about sagging and deteriorating. I don’t like the feeling of greatly diminished potential. There are so many things I can’t look forward to now.

People teach that our dead bodies will be raised and transformed. I don’t think that means you have to protect your dead body. I’m sure that if Jesus can resurrect people who died in explosions, he can fix whatever happens to my carcass.

When I let people and things go, I really let them go. I’m grateful for that, because I’ve seen what happens when people hold on too long.

It’s not that I don’t care. It’s that I don’t care about people and things I know I can’t change.

The crowd is getting very ugly. How much time do we have left? Even human promoters pull acts offstage when crowds get sufficiently hostile. How long should we stay here while unbelievers hurl garbage at us?

It’s good to be reminded of my outsider status. Not that it wasn’t already clear.

Sorry, Rocket

They say no good deed goes unpunished, and while this expression is not quite Biblical, it is often proven true.

Last night, I walked into my bedroom, which has sliding glass doors. I looked out through the glass, and what did I see? A miserable, stinking raccoon in MY yard.

I guess it was 25 feet away. It must have seen me through the glass, but it didn’t seem disturbed. Maybe raccoons are too stupid to understand windows.

It was on the small side, and a weaker person might have described it as cute.

I looked at the bolt-action rifle in .204 Ruger lying on my bed (I have a good explanation), and I had the obvious thoughts. I could slip on some earmuffs, open the door a bit, turn on the scope (I have a good explanation), wait for it to boot, and send the coon to coon heaven. Alternatively, I could sneak around the side of the house.

I was tired. I didn’t know what to do with a dead coon. I felt funny about killing a little one. I waved my hand a few times, the coon realized I was not furniture, and he ran off.

This morning I got up and saw that he had disturbed some blackberry briars in pots. One of them is not looking too good now. This is how I am repaid for my mercy.

My new policy: death to all coons regardless of age, size, or how much they remind me of Disney films.

I had a pet coon for about a week when I was a kid. I had to feed it with a bottle. The person who sold it to me told me to rub its belly with a warm cloth to aid digestion. My mother took it to a vet while I was at school, for the usual raccoon checkup, and he told her to get rid of it ASAP. Coons can carry rabies without showing symptoms, and they get mean when they grow up.

That was the end of my coon-keeping days. By the time school let out, the coon had been returned for a refund.

He was very cute. He had little black hands that were cool to the touch and looked like expensive gloves. He waddled when he was full of milk. His distant relations here on the farm are cute, too, but they still have to die.

I haven’t thought much about disposing of coons, possums, armadillos, and coyotes. You can toss a squirrel a good distance from your house and forget about it, but bigger animals stink, and friends show up for the funeral and free meal. I went online and asked around, and the consensus seems to be that tossing is still the way to go. Just increase the distance. Because carcasses attract other varmints, they can lead to more kills and fewer varmint problems.

My grandmother ate coons. She fixed one for my dad and my grandfather, and my dad said that by the time he finished chewing a bite, it was as big as a lampshade. Apparently it just expanded without falling apart. He was not a fan.

She also ate possums and groundhogs. I’m trying to think of an animal she would not eat.

I don’t really see myself eating coons. Also, my understanding is that the pelts are no good this far south. I could see preserving a coon tail for the amusement value.

I’m going to come up with a coon game plan. I think I’ll just use my carry gun if I see one far from the house. If I see one in the yard, I’ll go for the .17 HMR. If I decide to set up a blind and shoot them, I’ll use the .204 Ruger and the computerized night scope with the built-in video camera. At the very least, I’ll keep the tail to freak out visitors, and if I’m feeling really ambitious, I’ll try to cook part of the beast.

There. Plan made.

I could use the 16-gauge with #6 shot or the Saiga-12 with law enforcement loads, but I really like rifled projectiles.

I just got a new stainless barrel for my carry 10mm. Midway USA had a sale. I could not resist. I paid $79, which is a steal. It should be better for shooting lead, and it provides better case support for hot rounds. The tradeoff is that it may be pickier about ammunition. Glock chambers are loose and relatively short, so cases feed easily. Not sure if I should use the new barrel when I carry. I want the gun to feed. That’s for sure. But all my defensive ammunition is test-chambered. I think. It ought to run.

I felt bad about shooting a youngster, but then when it ran off, I felt bad about not looking after my property. Coons are bad news, just like rats. I should have blasted it.

I’m too sweet for my own good. That’s my problem.

I apologize to all red-blooded American males who don’t wear Capri pants or skinny jeans. I have let all of you down.

Misplaced Passion

Last night brought an interesting dream.

I was at a social event in someone’s house. A young woman came up to me and started asking why a certain young man’s family had allowed him to have firearms after he had been found holding a shotgun to his head. I started saying such decisions should depend on his attitude toward guns, because most gun enthusiasts aren’t thinking about violence when they interact with their collections. But I stopped short, because I realized what I was saying was not applicable in a case in which someone had already shown a desire to kill himself.

In any case, his family wasn’t the problem.

The young woman who was talking to me turned into the young man’s wife, and she pushed me back against a wall and kissed me on the mouth very suddenly, with intensity. I realized she was on fire with love for me. I was shocked. Her features seemed swollen as though her love had inflamed her flesh.

Her husband was dead. She was not being unfaithful. Just bold. Like Ruth.

In real life, the man from the dream is alive and has not threatened to kill himself, and I assume his wife and son are just fine. I have never had any designs on the wife, before or after they married. I barely know her. There could never be any type of romance between us. The very thought is beyond absurd. In the dream, she did not represent herself. She didn’t really look like herself.

Her husband is a music leader and former youth pastor. He’s now part of a church which doesn’t promote the Holy Spirit, so whatever his many virtues are, he is probably not in a position to provide her with the knowledge she needs to move ahead with God. Like Travis, he loves performing in front of crowds, and he loves teaching kids. He’s white, but he was very caught up in black culture when I knew him. Maybe he still is. When you get caught up in black culture, you can end up with the same spiritual problems black people have. By seeking approval from black people, you can end up following instead of leading.

I feel like I’m writing about Travis.

After I woke up, I thought about the dream, and I asked God if it meant anything.

The heat and depth of her love had startled me. I thought of the phrase from the Song of Solomon: “I am sick with love.”

Here is the relevant passage, taken from the Complete Jewish Bible:

Like an apple tree among the other trees in the forest
is my darling among the other men.
I love to sit in his shadow;
his fruit is sweet to my taste.
He brings me to the banquet hall;
his banner over me is love.
Sustain me with raisins, refresh me with apples,
for I am sick with love.
[I wish] his left arm [were] under my head,
and his right arm around me.

It made me think about the way husbands and wives are supposed to feel about each other, as well as the way every person should feel about God.

A couple should be completely unified. The Bible says a man and woman are one flesh. They should have deep intimacy and trust. They shouldn’t wonder about each other’s behavior and intentions when they’re apart. Each should put the other above every other person on earth. Their love for each other should be hot and compelling, not lukewarm.

Our relationships with God should also be intense. God should be number one, even above a person’s spouse. We and God should love each other with burning intensity.

As I thought about this, I got a revelation about my unfaithfulness. I’m serious about God, but I wander off and say and do things I should not do. I see now that this is very much like adultery. I have a partner who is always faithful and trustworthy, and he loves me with limitless heat, without reservation. I don’t live up to my end of the bargain.

It’s disturbing to see things this way. I hate adultery and unfaithfulness. I see adultery as something small-minded, trashy people do, like putting used gum on the undersides of restaurant tables or urinating in swimming pools. Adulterers don’t really love their spouses, and they think their sins against them only matter if they’re revealed.

I already knew oneness with God was like marriage, and I knew God compared unfaithfulness to him with adultery and whoring, but it hit home with more strength this morning.

The fact that a firearm suicide was part of the dream made me think about my friend Travis, who died following an accidental shooting.

Travis was not suicidal, but there were self-destructive elements in his life. He never gave up secular music. He never gave up his long list of maladjusted, ungodly, fake friends. He also stayed in Miami even though he knew it was poisoning him.

Travis was a wonderful person, but as someone who loved him pointed out to me, one reason he held onto things that hurt him was that he wanted the admiration of people he knew. Had he left Miami, he would have had to start over somewhere else as a nobody. Many people in South Florida admired him, and he did not want to give that up.

He was not completely honest with himself, and I know he was somewhat different around me than he was with other people. One mistake he made was trying to remain part of the black social justice culture, which is founded on a false victimhood complex. In private, he said this mindset was wrong, but he still used a photo of Colin Kaepernick for a Facebook avatar. I’m not saying the police don’t brutalize people from time to time. It’s the victimhood mindset I’m against.

People who wallow in victimhood are manipulators, and they don’t examine their own contribution to their problems. They don’t grow. They rot.

We all know what happened to Lot’s wife. Our commitment to God has to have depth. We can’t hold onto things from which he wants to free us.

I’m not condemning Travis. I’m just stating facts that matter.

So what does the dream mean? Maybe I’m supposed to take over for Travis. Maybe there is someone he ministered to, and I am going to have to fill his shoes. If so, based on what happened in the dream, that person is extremely thirsty for help.

Maybe it’s more than one person.

I have to hold onto this revelation. I can’t continue mistreating God. It’s vile and unthinkable, but I have done it over and over. If I wouldn’t cheat in an earthly relationship, why would I cheat on God, who allowed himself to be tortured to death for me?

I’m already doing things Travis used to do. There were a couple of young ladies he thought of as marriage prospects, and I ended up texting them a lot. One of them called me unexpectedly the other day, and we had a long conversation. She is disgusted by the people he knew. She lives near Miami, but she has no intention of going to the funeral. Both of us feel that it will be a disgraceful display of false love, from people who did little or nothing for him while he was alive.

She needs someone who isn’t totally useless to tell her things that will help her stay close to God after a major disruption. Travis is actually the third person she’s lost this year, so she really needs something to balance things out.

I thought I wouldn’t hear much from her after Travis died, but I was wrong about that.

While I was typing this, another mutual friend called. He was weighing the pros and cons of going to the funeral. He used to live in Miami, and he hates it. He is disgusted with Trinity Church and Travis’s phony friends. When his son was a baby, he got a big burn on his face in Trinity’s nursery, and the leadership shut him and his wife out when they went to the pastors. Seemed to me they were lawyering up instead of doing the right thing.

My friend isn’t going to the funeral. He made up his mind. He and his family will be here soon for a visit, though.

Rules and doctrine have taken the love out of Christianity. We put these things up like a lattice, and Jesus has to look through it to see us. Now that I think about it, the Song of Solomon agrees: “My darling is like a gazelle or young stag. There he is, standing outside our wall, looking in through the windows, peering in through the lattice.”

We’re supposed to know God personally and have extremely intense feelings for him.

It would be nice if we could go to churches and hear these things. Instead we have to wait for dreams.

Asphalt Looks Better Every Day

Winter was very disappointing. Where I live, the daily highs should be below 80 from November through March, and there should be a lot of days below 70. This year, we got plenty of roasting-hot days in the 90-degree neighborhood. When that happens, you feel cheated, because while summer can trespass on winter and ruin it, there is no possibility we will have cold days in the summer to make up for it.

Now that temperatures are high and we’re getting occasional rain, the grass has started growing. The lawnmower and I are resuming our romance.

Today the mower would not start. I got a click, and that was it. I put a charger on the battery and went to brush the pool.

When I finished brushing the pool, I tried the mower again. It ran. I mowed most of the yard, and then I got off the mower to move a branch. My mower has a seat switch on it that turns the engine off when I get off, but I bypassed it because it’s unbearable. Because the engine was still running when I got off to grab the branch, I disengaged the PTO so the blades would stop spinning.

When I got back on the mower, the PTO would not reengage. I could still ride the mower, but I couldn’t cut anything.

I guess this is what happens when you mow as rarely as I have been mowing.

I almost shut the mower down to look it over, but it occurred to me that it might not start, and I was at least 100 yards from the area where I park it. I drove it back to its spot and shut it down. Of course, it would not start again. I got idiot lights but no starter, no PTO, and no headlights.

I did what I always do. I checked Internet forums. I found a wide array of problems and solutions.

I found out oxidation could cause the mower to act this way. My battery cables had some kind of hard oxide inside the terminals. I had to remove it with a Dumore grinder and carbide burr. I lost my battery brush, which would have done the job in 10 seconds, so this is what I had to resort to.

I let the mower charge while I had lunch, and when I tried the key again, it worked.

I can never decide whether this mower is junk or not. It’s impossible to work on, and it seems much more complicated than it needs to be. It’s full of engineering errors. On the other hand, I believe it’s 28 years old, and it should run for another 20. The John Deere 430 is hard to kill. It’s way too easy to shut down, but it’s hard to kill.

I was unhappy about the failure to start, because I had a special task in mind for today. I wanted to go to the pasture and cut a bunch of weeds that were in an area where I wanted to shoot.

I shoot into a berm made from sand taken from a pond. On one side of the berm, there are no trees within 100 yards. On the other side, there is a nice wooded area, which is exactly where I want to be when I shoot on hot days. Between the wooded area and the berm, there are blackberry and beautyberry bushes. Today I attacked the beautyberries while trying to spare as many blackberry briars as I could. Blackberries are useful. Beautyberries are pathetic. People eat them, but I think they’re trying to prove something. They don’t taste good.

I found that the beautyberry bushes were not easy to remove with a mower. They fold over so low the blades don’t make good contact. But with persistence, I improved my view of the berm a great deal. I suppose I’ll have to attach the bush hog to the tractor and do it right. Either that or I’ll have to use the brush blade on my gas weed eater.

How much do you want to bet the weed eater starts after several months of idleness? Ethanol gas makes it very difficult to keep machinery running here. Even treated ethanol-free gas lets me down a lot.

When I get my shooting lane cleared, I’ll move my targets. I’ll be shooting from east to west instead of the other way around. Right now, I shoot toward a highway. It’s totally safe, but I would feel better shooting toward the big lot full of trees to the west of my land.

My pasture is dish-shaped, so even without the berm, from either direction, I am shooting toward the ground. That’s a nice feature.

I don’t know how people driving on the road would feel if they knew a guy was shooting a 10mm pistol in their general direction, but then they do 70 with cars coming toward them in the left lane at the same speed, and they don’t freak out about that.

Maybe I should have a policy of restricting shooting to experienced shooters. I will never fire a round over the berm, but women and kids do amazing things with firearms.

I feel as though my enthusiasm for life is returning, 9 days after my personal tragedy. I let a lot of things go while Travis was in the hospital, and my motivation was even worse after he died. I seem to be getting more done now.

As I have written before, I believe joy, as used in the Bible, means something other than ordinary happiness. I believe it’s connected with results and expectations. For example, the Bible says, “Weeping may endure for a night, but joy comes in the morning.” That describes a type of happiness which is related to relief. The word “rejoice” comes from “joy,” and it’s always connected to an event. Something hoped for happens, or something dreadful ends, and people rejoice.

The Bible says, “The joy of the Lord is our strength.” That’s literally true. If you have joy, you expect good things to happen. It gives you motivation to keep going and get things done.

Depression is the absence of joy. It’s discouragement. This is why depressed people kill themselves. They don’t expect things to change for the better.

I had been expecting to rejoice when Travis left the hospital. Instead, joy was taken from me, and I didn’t have the strength to do all the things I should have done.

It may seem strange to get this upset by the death of a friend. I may not have written enough about Travis to give people an understanding of how close we were. I would feel bad if any of my friends died, but Travis was like a family member.

This morning I asked God for joy. It appears it worked. I got the pool in order and mowed the yard, and had the lawn tractor behaved, I would have gotten more done.

I’m coming back to life, and I guess most of the world feels the same way. COVID-19 is going away. Leftists are unhappy about it, because they think the disease will put Biden in the White House, but it’s happening. People are going to work. We can’t play hooky forever.

Leftists say there will be a huge second wave. If that’s true, where is it? Right now, the epidemic is disappearing in places that reopened, and areas that are locked down continue to have problems. Reopened areas are not getting second waves, but locked-down areas seem to be prolonging the first one.

If there’s going to be a second wave, why hasn’t China had one?

Right now, the main reason the numbers look as bad as they do is the local epidemic in Brazil. I don’t know if they got the bug later than the rest of us or what, but their figures are very bad. The numbers keep rising. The other major nations are doing great.

I am determined to keep cutting back on looking at the news, but I still see things. I saw that leftists were going after Trump for using hydroxychloroquine, the quinine substitute some countries use to treat covid. They’re furious at him for taking it. They keep citing studies which suggest it doesn’t work. They don’t seem interested in the opinions of competent doctors who think it does.

Why do they care what he takes? What possible reason could they have for objecting? These are the same people who think we should all be able to get marijuana prescriptions for anxiety. Not just marijuana, but cigarette marijuana which damages lungs and gives off secondhand smoke. They think drugs should be legalized. All except one, I guess.

They excoriated Trump for not wearing a mask. They wanted him to wear something they thought would protect him, even though they certainly did not want him to be protected. Now he’s doing something to protect himself, and they’re angry about that.

One of the great things about Trump is that he knows it makes no difference at all what he says or does. When he goes against the left, they pour vitriol over him. When he does what they want, the response is the same. The result: he pays no attention. He actually needles them to make it worse. Needling people is a vice, but it shows how little their raving bothers him. I think he enjoys it.

Trump gets annoyed in the short term, but you can tell he forgets all about it 15 minutes later. I guess that’s why his blood pressure is good.

Leftists are all over the web saying Trump lied when he said the White House physician gave him the drug. The physician had to write a note, correcting them. He took responsibility and endorsed the use of hydrochloroquinine in Trump’s case. I wonder what they’re saying now. They’re probably calling him a quack.

Maybe they’re saying the note is forged.

Watching Trump reminds me of my own experiences. God knew before I was born that I belonged to him. Whatever my faults were, I was not cut out to be a child of darkness. No matter how much I tried to fit into the body of Satan, I couldn’t do it. I was always rejected, trolled, and mistreated. I have often wondered why people constantly popped up to attack me. I didn’t always know my status as a child of God was the reason.

What Trump goes through is very similar. There is absolutely no way to make the people who hate him happy. They will never make peace, admit fault, or forgive.

Sooner or later, you have to quit worrying about being liked. Jesus never worried about it. He said incredibly harsh things to people. He was extremely rude. I don’t think Christians should make rudeness a goal, but we ought to be truthful. We should lead instead of following.

I just read a book by Anthony Bourdain, the chef who died by his own hand in France two years ago. Bourdain was a lover of the pleasures of the flesh.

He was a wonderful writer. His book is very entertaining.

As I read, the thing that struck me about Bourdain was that he was the perfect child of darkness. He was a complete follower. He accepted every vice you can think of. He devoured the corrupt ethos of the people around him like a starving dog on a bowl of chicken livers. I don’t think he ever had an original thought, and maybe that’s why he was not a great chef. Running a kitchen well is only part of being a great chef. You also have to be creative. Bourdain was not. He admitted he was a very ordinary chef.

His description of culinary professionals is revolting. According to him, big-city kitchens are full of sexual deviants, criminals, drug addicts, alcoholics, men who molest other men on the job, thieves, and liars. They are astonishingly nasty to each other. They hurl filthy insults at each other all day. They brutalize each other physically. They enjoy abusing and breaking each other.

Bourdain wrote about this atmosphere with tremendous enthusiasm. He couldn’t get enough of it. He savored it and wallowed in it. When he was a newcomer, he saw how vile older cooking professionals were, and instead of choosing another job, he was filled with drive to become like them. It’s as though they were father figures and he was trying to live up to their debased standard in order to prove something to himself.

He was like a kid who went to a “scared straight” program and thought, “THESE ARE MY PEOPLE!”, and did his best to go to prison.

He was a man of the earth. No doubt about it. He was programmed to go to hell. He was made for it. Hell fits him like a bespoke suit. He was Jewish, which means he was descended from Abraham, but he preferred the other side.

When I say hell fits him, I don’t mean he’s not likable. He is. But he lived like a joyous pig rolling in week-old garbage. I don’t think anything could have changed his attitude. Depravity and misery brought him pleasure. He could never have turned to God, because righteousness appalled him.

There are two families on earth, and only two, and every person belongs to one of them.

When people die, they go exactly where they belong. There is no injustice to it. God may not have created hell for people, but plenty of people fit in beautifully there.

As the decline of the world accelerates, we’re going to see huge numbers of people ganging up on God, Christians, Jews, and Israel. They will be more and more direct and bold in their attacks on God himself. We’re going to marvel at them, and many of us will feel that we have to do something. We’ll think something must be wrong because so many people are competing to get into hell. Nothing will be wrong. We’ll be seeing people who belong in hell, establishing their credentials.

I don’t mean we shouldn’t love them or hurt for them. I’m just saying we’ll be seeing something that makes perfect sense.

We’ll be seeing the Bourdain mindset, sweeping over multitudes.

That was quite a digression, but I won’t delete it.

I feel as if COVID-19 were a sorting mechanism, like a cream separator. It’s doing a great deal to divide people into pro-God and anti-God factions. I don’t think the world will be the same afterward. Some people think masks and social distancing will be the big changes. I don’t think so. I think covid is pushing many, many people into the arms of the Beast. It’s teaching them to cling to the government nipple, trust the state without reserve, and jettison their rights as though they were dirty diapers. It seems like far fewer people are being driven in the opposite direction.

I suspect the main changes will be in people’s attitudes toward governments, rights, God, and those who believe in God.

If we’re really getting close to the end, we should expect all the signs Jesus spoke of. We already have one very strong sign. He said it would be as the days of Lot and the days of Noah. Perversion and wickedness abounded in those days. Genesis said a homosexual rape mob in Sodom tried to violate two angels.

Luke 21 contains the description Jesus gave of the end times. It looks like a lot of the things that have to come to pass haven’t transpired yet. It looks like the rapture can’t come this week or this year, but next year can’t be ruled out.

Enough of that. I’m glad I’m feeling more like getting things done.

Deposits May be Illegal Soon

Yesterday I finished making about 500 .45 cartridges. I say “about” because the actual number is 498. I believe I have finally run out of brass.

I decided to do something about the monumental pile of 9mm brass which is occupying space in my home. I ordered 500 semiwadcutter bullets. I read that semiwadcutters are pretty versatile. They make nice holes in targets, and they are better for self-defense and hunting than round nose bullets.

The semiwadcutter is based on the wadcutter bullet, which should be no surprise. A wadcutter is a cylindrical bullet. The flat face cuts nice round holes in targets, making the holes easier to see. Wadcutters don’t always feed well in semiauto guns because they’re short and flat on the ends. A semiwadcutter has a cone on the front, and the cone has a flat face on it. The longer bullet helps with feeding.

The cost for my ammunition will not be far from what I would pay for factory rounds, but my ammunition should be more accurate. Since it’s for practice, that matters to me.

I started using a Powder Cop on my press. This is a device which sits in a press station. There is a rod in the middle of it, and when a cartridge is raised to the top of the press, the rod hits the powder charge, which lifts it up. If the charge is correct, the rod rises to the right level. If not, it doesn’t. There is a white ring near the top of the rod, and you can set it so it’s level with the top of the Powder Cop when the charge is correct.

The most important thing a Powder Cop does is to alert you when you put a double charge in a shell. A double charge can make a gun blow up. A Powder Cop will also tell you when you have a low charge. That’s not as big a deal, but it’s still important. A weak charge can cause a bullet to stick inside a barrel. If you fire another round without clearing the barrel, your barrel may explode. A bright person will not shoot a weak round without stopping to examine his gun, but not everyone is careful.

Do I like the Powder Cop? No. Not for pistol rounds with short cases. My press is mounted low, so I can’t help seeing into the casings as they go by. It’s very obvious when there is a problem with a charge. I’m used to looking into the casings, so it’s hard to remember to look at the Powder Cop.

Does this mean the Powder Cop is a bad invention? No. Most people mount their presses high, which seems like a mistake. They can’t see into casings. Also, there are types of ammunition that have deep casings, and you can’t expect to see the charges clearly.

Here is what I think. A smart person would rig up a couple of electrical contacts on the Powder Cop. If the rod rose too high, the Powder Cop would close a circuit and sound an alarm or turn a light on. It would not be easy to rig it up for low charges, because the rod goes below the low-charge line every time a round is lowered, but oversized charges are the big problem, and an electrical alarm would tell you about them.

If I put an alarm on the Powder Cop, I won’t have to stare at it consistently.

I suddenly have a good deal of ammunition. I don’t say “a lot.” My notions of how much ammunition a person should have are changing.

I used to feel rich if I had two boxes of ammo for a given caliber. Now I’ve been through two ammunition panics: the Obama panic and the covid panic. I have seen how fast the supply can dry up. Once Democrats take over, it will dry up permanently. When you buy ammunition now, you shouldn’t ask yourself how much you’ll need this weekend. You should ask yourself whether you can accept doing without this or that caliber for the rest of your life. If not, start buying.

It’s not hoarding. True hoarding is something selfish people do, to the detriment of others, during a crisis. If you start stockpiling ammunition now, while the shortage is easing, you won’t hurt anyone else.

You should probably have 10,000 rounds of every caliber you consider important and expect to shoot frequently. That’s for old people. If you’re 25, maybe 40,000. You can’t just think about rounds you’ll carry or use for hunting. You’re going to need to practice, and you will want to be able to give ammunition away sometimes. People you care about are not going to prepare. And you will want to leave something to your family.

You probably can’t afford that much ammunition. You could spend $40,000 on one rifle. You should think about your future and decide what your best choices are.

You can get 10,000 rounds of AK ammunition for about $2,000. That’s not a lot of money at all, for a very important future-proofing purchase. The ammunition is very useful. It’s fantastic for self-defense, and you can even shoot deer with it. The AK-47 is like a .30-30.

A lot of people prefer the AR-15. I don’t know if it will be as useful. I’m not a deer hunter, but I’ve read that the AR-15 is marginal for anything bigger than a coyote. There must be something to it, because some states won’t let you shoot deer with one.

Here’s what I think: with 7.62x39mm, you have no doubt. With .223, not so much.

I am sitting on a nice pile of .22 LR. I think it’s something everyone should have. It’s very cheap, you can hunt anything up to a wild pig with it, it’s great for target practice, and you can even use it for self-defense if you have to. I think I should seal up my .22 LR boxes and leave them alone. I can buy new boxes for shooting and leave the stockpile on the shelf.

Maybe it’s best to think of your ammunition reserves as your ammunition IRA.

The upshot of all this contemplation: I still need to make and buy ammunition. I should also spend a couple of hundred bucks on bullet molds so I can cast bullets.

Preparation may not help once they pass laws against ammunition possession, but you do what you can.

I have no interest in holing up in my house and shooting at law enforcement agents or murderous leftist “zombies,” but I want to continue shooting and hunting, and I would like to have some capacity for defending myself and others.

Yesterday while I was reloading, I listened to the Bible. I heard the account of Jesus’ betrayal. It’s funny how you can hear the Bible over and over and still find new things in it. Here’s what I heard: when the worthless snakes from the temple showed up to arrest Jesus, they asked him who he was, he identified himself, and they all fell to the ground. How about that? He knocked them off their feet with supernatural authority. He showed them they were at his mercy.

He proved he was God, and they got up and arrested him anyway. He humiliated them and made it clear that they were on the wrong side, but they refused to take the opportunity to repent. They condemned themselves.

Peole like to say Jesus was captured, but that’s a damnable lie. He surrendered willingly, and he could have freed himself whenever he wanted.

It seems very clear to me that God wants American Christians to own guns, but I think it’s very unlikely that he endorses the idea of having last-ditch shootouts with our enemies. I suspect he wants us to show that when we are taken and imprisoned and killed, it’s by our consent.

Some conservatives and Christians actually seem to look forward to killing their enemies. That can’t be a holy mindset.

I suppose people are getting tired of reading about the death of my friend Travis. They can always start their own blogs. Today I learned he will have a funeral on May 30. There is no information about the location. It was announced on Facebook. I don’t have an account, and I am not starting a new one.

I hope they’re not doing it at Miami’s Trinity Church or The COOL Church, which is a depressing Trinity branch headed by Travis’s friend Terrance. Seeing Trinity’s leaders posturing at his funeral would be like watching vultures and maggots defile a dead soldier. Terrance cared about Travis, but don’t ask me to vouch for the rest.

I’m not planning to attend. I was very involved with Travis when he was alive. I don’t need to show up now and only pretend I cared. Let the dead bury the dead, as someone once said. Whatever I was supposed to do for Travis is done or not done. There is no changing it now.

Travis won’t look down and count the people at the funeral. He will not even know it took place. He has already moved on to something much, much better. He is not sitting beside Jesus feeling bad because I don’t want to go to his funeral.

Certain people may say nasty things about me if I’m not there, but they do that already, and anyway, they are permanently out of my life. I’ve gotten along fine without their love for 8 years.

I did without it while I was a member of the church.

Trinity’s leaders are a mess, but many of the people are even worse. The best people left. Here’s an example of the kind of thing I might have to deal with. I put up a Youtube video and talked about Travis’s life and death, and someone put this comment up: “WE DON’T EXPECT YOU TO UNDERSTAND IF YOU’RE NOT BLACK SO WHAT’S YOUR POINT!”

There is no possibility that person watched the video.

It’s not someone who was close to Travis. I know all their names.

I really lost a lot when I lost my prayer partner. I am asking God for a replacement. They don’t grow on trees. It’s as if Teller died and Penn had to find someone who could do what he did.

Now that I have the reloading process working well, I may stop posting about firearms so much. I may move to electronics for a while. I have not decided.