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.

They Knew Things were Bad when he Knitted Little Colt Sweaters for his Parrots

Today’s exciting challenge: forming a plan for 9mm target ammunition. I’m still not done with .45 ACP, but I will be soon.

I have a couple of 9mm Glocks, and they’re pleasant to shoot. They’re very accurate, and they don’t beat me up. I also have a lot of 9mm brass and maybe 200 Laser Cast bullets. I feel like I need to get rid of the bullets.

I can’t recall making 9mm ammunition, but I have a nearly-empty box of bullets, so it must have happened. I don’t have a recipe. Today I started looking around for one. I don’t want super-hot +P loads for target use. Seems like there is no point. I do want a little recoil, because it makes no sense to practice with ammunition which is way easier to shoot than the real thing. Sure, I shoot .22 pistols, so maybe I’m a hypocrite, but it seems to me that when you shoot a big bore gun, you ought to teach yourself to handle recoil.

I keep wanting to look at new powders. Unfortunately, whenever I look for new recipes, I keep coming back to what I already have: Unique and Accurate No.7. It seems like they do everything. No.7 is really hard to get away from. It’s great for .38 Super, 10mm, and 9mm.

I would like to stop using Unique in calibers other than .45 ACP because it’s dirty. I need to shoot up the vast supply I have on hand, but I don’t want to get crud on every pistol I own, so I figure it’s best to sacrifice .45 ACP.

But wait! I just read something online. An article says Unique isn’t actually dirty. What?

The article says Unique used to be nasty, to the point where unburned grains interfered with the way guns worked. At around the turn of the century, Alliant (the manufacturer) introduced a new, cleaner formula.

If this is true, why does my 1911 always have black residue on it?

Is it possible the residue actually comes from somewhere else?

The lead bullets I shoot come covered with greasy wax. Is it possible this stuff turns into a mist, gets contaminated with soot and then sticks to the gun?

I suppose that is not the explanation. I shoot the same brand of bullets from my stainless .38 Super, and it’s very clean. Unique must be dirty.

Makes me wonder what it was like before they cleaned it up.

Is it really a good idea to make 9mm target ammunition? I should try to find out. Let’s see. I have free brass, so that saves me about 15 cents per round. That means I save $7.50 per box. But I can buy target ammo with brass cases for $9.00, or 18 cents per round. I have 4 boxes I bought for $7.85 plus tax, so it was even cheaper.

Bullets are nearly 7 cents each, or $3.50 per box. Primers run, call it 4 cents, so $2.00 per box. Powder is around 1.5 cents, or 75 cents per box. So $6.25 per box for homegrown 9mm, or $13.75 if I use new brass.

Depending on the breaks, I save between two and four dollars per box compared to factory ammunition. Not a huge savings.

On the other hand, I get very accurate ammunition, I know exactly what’s in it and what it will do, and I get the fun, knowledge, and skill. The knowledge and skill could be important some day. They could make it very hard for us to get ammunition in the future.

I don’t know why homegrown shoots better than factory, but it’s true. Maybe not all the time. Some factory stuff is super-accurate. It’s true for pistol ammunition, at least for me.

I can do better on price if I get a few bullet molds. Lead will always be cheap or free. A good mold runs something like $40, which is far from free, but by the time you’ve made 1000 rounds, you’ve saved around twice the price of the mold, which makes me wonder why I’m not doing it already.

Lead ammo is not useless, even if it’s inferior to jacketed. You can hunt with it. Squirrels and rabbits can’t tell it’s lead. It may not be optimal for self-defense, but it’s still very good. It worked just fine during the Civil War. It still incapacitates a lot of bad people today.

If I were a prepper, I guess I’d stock up on jacketed ammo in a few calibers, but I think it would also be smart to stock up on reloading stuff. Powder and primers are not things you can reasonably expect to make at home.

If things ever got really bad, hunting would become very important, and the hunting laws would be ignored. People would shoot game, and they would also look for ways to eat things like coons, coyotes, and crows. You can eat just about anything made of meat. There are bobcat recipes out there. I guess a feral cat would work just as well, as would a feral dog. They’re pretty abundant.

Mmm. Thoughts of a tasty dystopian future. Cat a l’orange. One more thing that would draw us closer to China.

Crows are supposedly delicious. Soylent Crow.

I don’t think I’ll have problems in the future with ammunition data. In the past, I didn’t do much in the way of taking notes, so I floundered when I started making ammo again. Now I’m acting like the scientist I allegedly am. I write something every time I make ammo, and I include anything that could be relevant. That’s how science works. If you’re really serious, you don’t just record the reagent and the amount and the temperature and so on. You record the type of wood the lab bench is made from.

Don’t laugh. An important discovery in nuclear physics involved something that happened when an experiment was performed on a wooden bench.

I haven’t written down what I was wearing or what kind of bulbs were in the overhead lights, but I record very minor things, such as an incident where debris clogged up my primer-seating punch.

I guess my reloading notes could be used by our future hipster/millennial rulers when they round us up to try us for whatever offenses they can make up. “He made 3000 bullety things, and it also says he ate red meat. EeEeeWWwwWWWwwwWWW!”

What else is happening? I think a lot about love these days. A week or so ago, I was putting Marv back in his cage, and he got very emotional and started nuzzling me with his head. He did not want to go. It made me think about what this world was supposed to be. It was created to be a place where love was like a persistent fog no one could escape.

How often do preachers talk about that? We have completely lost sight of it, but love is the single most important thing in the universe. The physical world and the human race were created so God could have a huge family tied together by love. That’s the only reason. You can cite other purposes, but they all stem from his intention to create a family. Remove love, and they all disintegrate.

We’re very busy attending to responsibilities. We have to work. We have to get the necessities of life. We educate ourselves. We deal with our problems and our human enemies. We also spend a lot of time doing frivolous things to make ourselves happy and reward ourselves for the other things we do. We don’t have a lot of time to lie back on our recliners and think about loving other people. We don’t share affection all that much, with other people or with God.

It’s perverse, if you consider the reason why we’re here. It’s as though God put us here to be farmers, but instead of growing things, we spent all our time polishing our tractors and decorating our barns.

I wonder if the church can change. We focus on rules. We expend a lot of effort trying to do things to impress God. We spend a lot of time criticizing unbelievers without presenting them with solutions. When they look at us, they often see anger and stress, not love.

Some of us are leftist Social Justice Warriors, which is incredible. How could anyone be that wrong?

Satan is great at misdirection. He gets us to prioritize the wrong things.

My friend Travis died a week ago today, and it has been rough, but something good came of it. I got together with a group of people so we could pray and try to help him, and we have been communicating a lot. Now we’re closer than we were. Love has been served. I think the effect will persist.

God is not my Problem

I woke up today and started praising God immediately. It flowed through me like a river’s seasonal flood. It must have lasted over an hour. I did not want to stop.

My friend Travis has been dead for 6 days, but I was praising God with my whole heart. It only occurred to me this morning to think that what happened to Travis might also have been intended to turn me against God.

No success there. I question myself, and I hate evil spirits, but God has never failed or been anything but generous and loving. In the past, I sometimes got angry with God. To my shame, I insulted him once. I can’t forget that. It hurts to remember it. Now I have the grace to side with God. Questioning him makes no sense. I have been here on earth a few short years, and I am small. I don’t know very much, and I am not that smart. I can’t correct the creator of the universe.

Is there a better gift than confidence in God? Without it, you are lost. And “gift” is the right word. You can’t manufacture it, and you are not expected to. Like any good thing inside you, it has to be provided by God, and it’s a manifestation of his presence.

While Travis was in the hospital, I woke up several times and saw spirits in my bedroom. Were they attacking me because I supported Travis?

I was not afraid of them. I hate evil spirits, and I know they do terrible things, but what I feel for them is hate and contempt, not fear.

As far as I can tell, they don’t get anywhere with me. I certainly have moments when they influence me, but as the Bible says, though I stumble, I shall not be utterly cast down. I don’t think they are able to do anything beyond harassment and distraction. The Bible says a thousand shall fall at my side and ten thousand at my right hand, but it shall not come near me; only with my eyes shall I behold and see the reward of the wicked. It’s a promise of protection, and it’s also a promise that God will protect my vision. He says I will see this with my eyes.

Travis invested in people. He had a great number of music students. He ran a drum line, which is a percussion band. The band was made up of ghetto kids. He tried to influence them for the better. He knew many of them were being raised more like wild animals than sheep and more like weeds than crops.

He also had a teaching job at Miami’s African-American Cultural Arts Center.

He experienced a great deal of frustration in his work with kids. Sometimes their parents wouldn’t bring their kids to lessons. The kids themselves let him down a lot. He kept working on people he should have dropped.

He used to hold car washes at the Cultural Arts Center, and the kids did the work. I remember taking my truck once. A few minutes after I left, multiple shots were fired right across the street, and a man was hit. That incident is a small picture of what it was like for Travis to try to help black kids.

He got a return on his investment. It was not all wasted. There are a bunch of kids and young adults in Miami who, thanks to Travis, understand that the way they and their families have lived is not right. They can’t lose that.

What about my investment? Losing Travis was somewhat like losing a son. I feel like I tried to buy something, and the transaction didn’t go through. My check bounced. I felt that a tremendous portion of my legacy had been wiped out.

Things could certainly be better, but because I told Travis things, he was better off when he died than he would have been without me. He repeated what I said to a lot of other people, and they are also better off. Nobody who taught Travis good things should feel completely cut off.

What will happen now? Will God give me anyone to replace Travis? I suppose he will. He has to be angry about what happened. I assume he will turn it around and make the spirits behind it wish they had never thought of bothering me or Travis Quinn.

It will take more than this to cut me off from God. To attack my faith is to attack God himself, because God is my faith. If I generated my own faith by trying hard to believe, I would be wide open to attack. Most Christians generate their own faith because they aren’t baptized with the Holy Spirit and they don’t pray in tongues. I don’t have to do that.

No one is supposed to do it.

Flu Numbers/Black Death Emotions

I keep thinking about COVID-19, AKA coronavirus AKA covid AKA C19 AKA C-19 AKA the Chinese Communist Party Virus. What have I been right about? What have I been wrong about?

When this thing surfaced, I kept looking at the numbers, and I saw that there was no way its ability to spread could, at that time, be compared to the seasonal flu. After a while, I concluded firmly that the disease was never going to be as common as the flu, even though the flu has to battle awareness and a strong vaccination program. That conclusion was completely correct OR there are around 700 million cases we just haven’t noticed. Take your pick. There is no third possibility.

I also opined that covid would be about like a bad flu season in terms of mortality. This was correct. The US is on track to get something like 100,000 reported fatalities, many of which will surely turn out to be bogus, and that’s not radically different from the 80,000 flu deaths the CDC reported for last year. The global figure also resembles flu data. Even if we get 200,000 deaths, that’s 2.5 times the flu figure, and that is within the flu ballpark.

For some reason, covid hit us harder than many other countries, and no, it’s not because Trump. The Chinese completely ignored covid while busily exporting it, and they still have fewer than 100,000 reported cases, and no, it’s not because they’re hiding cases. At least that doesn’t appear to be the reason.

The Chinese can’t really hide things that well. Word about covid got out in January on Youtube. If covid were still spreading significantly over there, it would be impossible to hide it.

People who are ignorant about China think the Chinese can’t communicate with the world. Wrong. Not even close to right. I subscribe to the channel of a South African expat who lived there for many years, and I watched his warnings about covid back in January. Chinese people can get around Internet blocks. This man did it for a living.

Here’s something weird. If you look at flu cases over the years, it appears that the flu also hits Americans with disproportionate zeal. We have something like 1/20 of the world’s population, and we get way more than 1/20 of the deaths. Can that possibly be right? Does it mean covid is behaving normally by flu standards?

I don’t know why America would have more flu deaths, in relative terms, than other countries. Maybe we do a better job of counting.

If the Chinese botchery and deliberate lies didn’t cause flu-like levels of transmission in China, then there is no way whatever it is people think Trump did wrong could have caused our problem. Assuming, in order to conform to Democrat/Deep State talking points that Trump did everything wrong, why did we get more cases than a country where the response was very clearly much worse?

The US makes my prediction look good, but there are many places where my guess about fatalities exceeds the actual numbers.

I didn’t buy the hysteria over the disease itself, but what about the economic pessimism? That, I accepted as gospel. This may have been a mistake. Home prices are not plummeting. The stock market isn’t that bad. We are losing a lot of businesses, but many will come back. Some were dying already because of the Internet, so should we consider them covid losses? When it comes to businesses, covid acts the same way it does with regard to people. It’s very hard on those that were likely to die soon anyway.

I thought the lockdowns were a bad idea for two reasons.

First, we don’t lock down for the flu. This is accepted policy, even among people who smoke dope for breakfast and think Caitlyn Jenner is definitely a woman. There is no left/right contention. The flu kills tens of thousands of us every year, and we don’t wear masks, close businesses, or lock people in their houses. We err on the side of poverty avoidance and personal freedom. It has always been pretty obvious that covid was going to produce flu-like numbers of fatalities, so why the inconsistency in policy?

Second, I thought it would kill the economy. I don’t really need to explain that. It’s a simple idea.

Now I’ll write about things no one else seems to be considering. If I was wrong to think the economy would be destroyed, was I also wrong to object to lockdowns?

If the lockdowns haven’t hurt the economy that much, wasn’t it a good idea to stay home?

If you say we should stay home to save ourselves from what amounts to a couple of years’ worth of flu deaths, then shouldn’t we also lock down for the flu every year? Shouldn’t we force people to be vaccinated? Shouldn’t we wear masks every year between October and April?

We can’t lock down every year. Not if we want to have the standard of living Americans expect. Even if we don’t end up in a depression, we will surely end up like second-rate countries where two-car families are unusual.

Is that acceptable, or should we accept a death rate on the order of 10 to the 5th power, just as we do in the cases of tobacco and opioid users?

I don’t have to take responsibility for that choice, because we have been making it ever since America was founded. The pattern is set. Diseases and other causes of death have always been with us, and we have accepted these things as unpleasant but tolerable and unavoidable problems. Every country in the world has the same history of going on with life in the face of similar epidemics.

When Sweden’s leaders decided not to lock the country down, someone asked one of them about the wisdom of the experiment. He said Sweden was not experimenting; other countries were. That’s really true. Sweden was doing something very normal by global historical standards.

Let me stop presenting this in a rational way for a minute. Let me try the Democrat/Deep State/MSM approach.

THOUSANDS WILL DIE IF WE DON’T FORCE FLU VACCINATIONS AND LOCK THE COUNTRY DOWN EVERY YEAR! IT WON’T JUST BE OLD PEOPLE! IT WILL BE 30-YEAR-OLD MOMS WITH NO UNDERLYING HEALTH PROBLEMS!

Maybe now you see what I mean. You can take the emotional predictions and demands that have popped up with regard to covid and apply them to the flu, seamlessly.

The other day, some anonymous Internet person went on Facebook and said covid had killed fewer people than drug overdoses, and the MSM got so upset, a rebuttal was issued. In essence, the rebuttal said, “This may not be 100% true,” while admitting facts that showed it was probably mostly true.

Whether a death is important to Americans depends mostly on how many cameras are pointed at it. If 40 people die in a fire (or because they’re Christians living in a Muslim country) and it gets very little coverage, no one cares, but if one ER nurse with three kids dies from covid and the entire MSM runs with the story, it’s a national tragedy that requires draconian measures for all of us.

Up in New York, people are disturbed by a news story that says that when new infections were counted, 66% had occurred in people who were observing lockdowns. What does that mean? It seems to mean we are shooting ourselves in the financial foot while also making the epidemic worse. It’s a data point leftists don’t like to talk about.

It makes some sense. Where does covid spread most quickly? Nursing homes, where people are not allowed to leave. “That’s because the people are old.” Is it? We know that covid is much more likely to kill elderly people, but have you seen anyone say they’re more likely to catch it? I haven’t. There is a big difference between infection and death, as Tom Hanks could tell you.

Some authorities are now saying the New York problem is the result of keeping infected people at home with people they interact with a lot. That makes sense to me. We all know how common illnesses spread inside houses. My uncle came to Christmas dinner with norovirus and nearly killed all of us.

What about masks?

I bought the MSM line in that regard. They told us masks were useless because viruses don’t even see normal masks when they go through them. It’s like flying helicopters through the Grand Canyon. The authorities told us NOT to buy masks. If you bought a mask, you were selfish and irrational. At the time, I more or less believed them, but I noted that a mask might help you not to touch your face, and I probably said it would reduce the spray to a less dangerous level. On the whole, I thought a mask was a waste of time for someone in a covid cold spot.

My county has ramped up testing, and we still have about 200 known cases, which makes this place as cold as you can get. Still, I feel like I ought to put something on at the store. What if I’m infected and I don’t know it?

The likelihood that I can protect myself with the kind of mask I can lay my hands on at the moment (without burglarizing hoarders’ houses) is extremely low, but a mask might make some tiny contribution to the protection of others.

Of course, I can also stand 6 feet away from people, which is said to be much more effective (as of 10:57 a.m. Eastern time on May 15, 2020). I’ll just have to quit offering people back rubs in the produce area. I’ll have to curtain my notorious penchant for invading people’s spaces and getting touchy-feely. People who know me won’t recognize me.

I thought the meat shortage might be a big deal, and I made very lame steps toward protecting myself. The shortage has not panned out. I can still buy anything I want. Walmart is selling bacon for $3.00 per pound, which is less than half of what it normally costs in local stores. This is ordinarily a bad area for bacon lovers. My cousin near Chicago can’t get meat without shooting her neighbors’ cats, but people in the Chicago area appear to be extremely selfish and heartless, and hoarding is clearly the reason for her problems.

Two days ago, a story came out saying vitamin D might ease covid symptoms. I take vitamin D, so I did the smart thing. I hoarded.

No I didn’t. I bought one bottle of capsules. I’ll bet the supply takes a big dent shortly. Chicagoans have probably been hoarding since 10 seconds after the story was published.

Here’s something weird. No one can explain why minorities are more likely to contract covid as well as being more likely to die once they get it. They’re saying that even if you correct for racism, oppression, Dukes of Hazzard DVD’s, general nonspecific triggeration, and so on, they still get hit worse.

In my county, something like 16% of the known cases are black. The percentage of black people here is under 12%.

A friend of mine thinks it’s because minorities are poorer and have to go to work while the rest of us stay home, but lockdowns apply to minorities, too, and let’s face it: a lot of black adults weren’t going to work before the epidemic. Just being real. Drive through a black area at 11 a.m. on a Wednesday, and you will see the high black unemployment rate in action. You will see many, many people just hanging around.

I wonder if black people are in worse shape because they trust the government more. Based on what I see online, they seem to be extremely pro-lockdown. They post very angry pro-lockdown memes. Maybe they’re being so obedient they’re spreading the disease more efficiently.

If it weren’t for paying taxes, I would have no involvement with the government at all. I don’t go to government offices for help. No one comes here to help me, unless you count a nice young lady from the University of Florida who showed up to give me non-helpful advice on gardening. When you let the government take care of you, you will have problems.

Black people have a very serious problem with susceptibilty to rumors. The more black people you know, the more you will see it. They join causes very quickly with great fervor. It’s like watching a grass fire spread. They appear to be swallowing Auntie Sam’s covid advice with very little criticality. I wonder if that’s what’s hurting them.

Is the real problem supernatural? I suppose all problems are, in the final analysis. Black people seem to have more setbacks regardless of what they do, and that can’t be 100% natural or even attributable to white people in red baseball caps. If you know a lot of black people, you will know many people who are sick. You’ll see a lot of people in wheelchairs. You’ll know people who had crazy accidents. You can’t explain all those things by looking at their natural circumstances.

My friend Travis had no involvement with gangs, drugs, or violent crime, and he still got shot and died young. He died after receiving a non-life-threatening wound from which he was expected to recover fully. His brother was run over while sitting on a bus bench, in an accident that killed at least one other black person and caused another to lose a leg, and the driver, who was from Africa, didn’t do too well afterward, either. Travis’s dad has MS. Before getting run over while minding his own business on a sidewalk, his brother had cancer.

You can’t put these things down to bad decisions or racism.

Maybe Juliette Ochieng’s thoughts about the curse of Ham are correct. But how do you get rid of it?

It’s strange that covid has spared the Chinese, since they practice traditional Chinese medicine, which is witchcraft.

Back in March, Nigerian preacher T.B. Joshua said rain was falling in Wuhan and taking away the C19 epidemic. Case transmission then dropped to nearly nothing. It seems like no one noticed! The epidemic is still essentially dead in China. If you don’t believe in the supernatural, what’s the explanation?

He made a prophecy, and then he extended it to the whole world. He was wrong about the rest of the world, but how can you explain what happened in China? I think he misinterpreted his own true prophecy.

Overall, it looks like my wild guesses regarding the virus have panned out much better than the predictions the “experts” have made. My main errors seem to have resulted from relenting and believing the high muckity-mucks.

The case numbers are still doing what I said they would do, but they’re doing it two or three weeks later than I expected. A large part of that is caused by greatly increased testing, so I’m less-not-totally-right than it seems.

I expect things to keep dropping off, and if we have a resurgence, I would expect it around the start of November. I think we’ll have a vaccine very, very quickly, and then we’ll get on with life.

I think forced covid vaccination will become a reality in many states, and if the nanny-staters are smart enough to see the leverage they have, they will probably force flu vaccinations, too. Presumably, there will be topless protests by anti-vaxxers, since they’re all women and all women’s protests have to feature nudity.

I like trying to guess what’s going to happen. For one thing, I feel…I KNOW…I am being gaslighted by the pro-hysteria crowd, and for another, it makes me feel like I have some degree of understanding of what’s going on around me. It makes me feel as though I can prepare for things.

Obituary Appears

I hate to keep writing about the death of my friend Travis long after people have lost interest, but things keep developing.

A nurse who worked in the building where Travis died found out about me and provided some information. She was a friend of his sister when she was a kid. She says the hospital was locked up tight with regard to visitors. She says she prayed by his bed. Toward the end, her impression was that he would live. So his friends weren’t crazy when they found it odd that he had passed suddenly.

She’s a black conservative. How about that? You may not understand the hostility she is up against in her milieu.

She knows how I feel about the people who dragged Travis down, and she agrees that sometimes a Christian has to cut people loose.

Travis now has an obituary. Looking at it is like dreaming while I’m awake. Can it really be true?

It says he was born on June 30 and that he lived in Miami Gardens. He was born on June 3, and he lived in South Miami. That’s about all it says, and it’s still wrong. People who know about the errors are telling me how upset they are.

To me, the errors are just more confirmation of things I already knew.

After Travis moved into the house I owned, I told him he wasn’t from Miami Gardens any more. I said he should tell people he was from Coral Gables. Miami Gardens is everything he was rising above.

People are asking about funeral arrangements. So far, the story has been that the epidemic will prevent a real funeral. That’s fine. I don’t want to go to Miami for any reason, and I don’t want to stand among people who patted him on the back in life and did little or nothing for him. I think the others will understand. I certainly don’t want to see conceited pastors who treated him like a sharecropper.

Funerals and tombstones mean less to me than they do to some people. I believe I have only seen my mother’s grave during three trips since she died, and that includes my dad’s funeral. Maybe there were four trips. I don’t think about visiting. There is no one there. My parents are no closer to the graves in Kentucky than they are to me here in Florida.

Talking to the dead is a sin. I don’t try to communicate with my parents. I won’t talk to Travis in this life.

You should be good to people while they’re alive instead of going to a funeral, competing to see who can show the most grief, and climbing into the coffin.

As far as I am concerned, this business is over with. There is a ton of money available for expenses, so my help will never be needed again. I will surely write more about Travis, but I don’t want to go on and on about the earthly business surrounding his hospitalization and death. He is far away. He can’t hear me or see me. He doesn’t know what I’m doing. He will not count the people who go to his funeral. He doesn’t care what happens to his belongings or what kind of funeral he gets. He is doing fine, and he knows who cares about him.

Regarding the concept of leaving people behind, God gave me a new way of looking at the world’s future. I always say the world will become much more vicious toward Christians and Jews and that persecution will be open, violent, and socially acceptable. That’s accurate, and we’re already seeing it, but it’s not the most effective way to describe the future. A better way would be to say that the world is going insane, literally.

One of the benefits of being connected with the Holy Spirit is that he prevents you from being deceived. He counters people and spirits that lie to you and try to control you. He counters spirits of delusion and rage. If you’re not filled with the Holy Spirit, you’re just a sleeper, waiting to be activated by spirits you can’t resist.

As we move toward the end, such spirits will develop great power among the majority of human beings. Maybe they already have. People will literally become insane. They will live in utter delusion, just as the Germans and Austrians did under Hitler. Just as the Cambodians did under Pol Pot. Just as Antifa kids and BLM rioters do.

Just as many nominal Christians do.

People will be insane, and they will prefer it, so conversion will become rare. When that happens, there will be no good reason for God to leave us here, and that explains the rapture.

Inertia Gives Way to Dread

I feel like covid and my friend’s medical crisis put my life on pause. I have to get up tomorrow and live again, before doing nothing becomes an unbreakable habit.

On the day Travis died, there was a lot of communication. I spent a lot of time texting and talking. Yesterday, things died down. People were digesting the news. Today there was a little chatter. I had a very long phone call from a young lady he knew. Listening to her appraisal of the people he knew was like listening to a recording of myself.

Everyone seems to be saying the same things. They can’t understand why things were handled the way they were. They are fed up with Travis’s social circle.

I find myself talking to so many wonderful young women. Where were they when I was 35? Oh, right. I was a physics T.A. at a university. You could station such people strategically around a property to repel women and prevent them from entering.

I used to have someone I could hope one of these girls married.

Some people are holding Travis accountable. For too long, he held onto people who were going nowhere, in a city that was going nowhere. He was not honest with himself about their faults and the power of their negative influence. Sometimes I had to bite my tongue when he praised people he knew. He was in denial.

Today I heard something positive. I had been told that Travis had not had a single visitor during his month in the hospital. Someone now says his mother and brother visited as often as they were allowed. Whom should I believe? I hope the second source is right.

If you knew everything I knew, you would understand why I can’t assume the new information is correct.

In case anyone from Miami reads my blog (doubtful), I sincerely apologize if I said anything that was incorrect. That was not my intention. I don’t think my judgment regarding Travis’s situation has been that great over the last few days. It is an emotional time.

It appears there will be no funeral that amounts to anything. The epidemic still has South Florida shut down. I’m glad for my sake. I told Travis to cut his crowd off. I should be able to take the same advice, and it would be unpleasant to see some of these people. There are roses among the toadstools, but I don’t know if it would be worth it to wade through the toadstools to see them.

People who took advantage of him in life are posting complimentary things about him now that he’s gone. I am told preachers are praising his loyalty. This loyalty is exactly what kept him in trouble.

I am told Richie Wilkerson, Kanye West’s former pastor and the son of my former pastor, posted something. I’m glad I’m not able to see it.

I hear Kanye is now a pastor, at least in his own mind. I just checked, and the pastor’s wife is topless on Instagram with a lei around her neck. Things are going as expected.

I truly believe Kanye West is feeling a call from God, and I think that if he lives long enough, he’ll be all right, but at the moment, he ought to be keeping quiet and confessing his faults to God.

I haven’t done much of anything today, apart from communicating. I stuck a 4-terabyte drive in my new PC. That ought to hold me for a couple of years. There was no way I was going to blow for a solid state that size, if they even make them, but I got a fast hard drive with a big cache. Should be fine.

Why are nonmechanical drives called “solid state” drives? Ordinary hard disks are also solid state. They don’t have vacuum tubes.

I keep having an ominous feeling, as if the end of the world were just around the corner. I have this feeling that we may end up forgetting about responsibilities that seem important right now, because things will happen that will make them vanish into insignificance.

It’s just a feeling. Maybe it’s the pandemic combined with the unusual set of events I’m dealing with in my personal life.

Has there ever been a time like this? The black death certainly had an apocalyptic feel to it. There were places where a third of the people died, whereas covid is still only a little more lethal than the seasonal flu, for all the hype. During plague attacks, everyone saw dead bodies. They were everywhere. I still don’t know a single person who has been diagnosed with covid.

During the black death, the disease, not the panic, was the major problem. The reverse is true now. Confinement has us feeling like there’s a plague when there is not. We have a plague mentality without a plague.

A big difference between the current day and the plague years is that today’s world was already coming to the end of the slack in the rope before covid showed up. In the 14th century, the world was sparsely populated, and we weren’t faced with a rising tide of technology that could be counted on to completely destroy privacy and free will in the near future. To me, this makes the present age seem full of foreboding.

Back when God flooded the world, the earth got a fresh start when things dried up. If we lost half of humanity today, that wouldn’t happen. We would still be besieged by malignant, unstoppable technology. We would still be close to the end of free will and free thought. Humanity would have to be decimated in order for the reset button to work.

It’s wrong to call technology malignant. Technology doesn’t destroy freedom; people do.

Human beings can’t be trusted with pointed sticks or handfuls of sand. It would be insane to hope we could resist ruining the world with computers.

I have this feeling that nothing earthly matters. I feel that if I never pay my bills again or do my taxes, it won’t make any difference, because something is going to come and sweep concerns like that off the table.

I wonder if other people feel it.

It’s very quiet here right now. It feels like the day before a hurricane. If you’ve been through one, you know what I mean. Is God’s orchestra tuning up, to accompany the fateful horn? Doesn’t line up with the timeline I’m familiar with.

Whatever. I’ll get up and start moving again in the morning, God willing. I believe there will be a morning for me.

My new beam reloading scale is at the mailbox, if Skynet 9000 is giving me the straight poop. I guess I’ll go grab it, and in addition to fixing the pool and working on business, maybe I’ll tune the scale tomorrow and see if I can make some ammunition.

My expectations for the future are dramatically changed, but my life is not over yet.