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.

Connection Lost

It’s a very beautiful day here at the farm. The air is cool, and the sun is shining.

My friend Travis died yesterday, after I prophesied that he would be healed and after a friend who is very honest and very smart said God told her the same thing.

Travis has no problems, and his family has a ton of money for his burial, assuming the Gofundme dollars go where they’re supposed to. For the first time in years, I know I won’t have to do anything for Travis. His problems are gone, but the rest of us have to sift through the repercussions of his passing.

Travis was a lot like a son to me. I won’t say “like a son.” I say “a lot like a son.” If he had been my son, I would have done more for him. Did I do enough? Should I have paid his rent every month? Should I have bought him a car so he wouldn’t have had to ride a terrible hand-me-down bicycle to class in the rain?

Whether my record is acceptable or not, he was much like a son, and he was also my prayer partner. When I wanted to talk to someone about real Christianity, without having them misunderstand or argue about doctrine, Travis was my only resource. All of the best prayer sessions I had were with Travis. He made more progress than anyone. He taught me things.

Everyone sins, and Travis was not perfect, but he was serious. He contacted me often, and when I sent him helpful material, he generally used it. Most of my friends don’t make great use of the things I tell them. He had a friend named Joe, and Joe wanted to improve, too. They used to send each other Whatsapp videos sharing things God had shown them.

Maybe I’ll bring criticism on myself for saying this, but how many young black people do things like that when they’re not at church? There is a lot of posing in black churches. Kids at Trinity Church in Miami Gardens wave their hands in the air for Jesus and then have sex in the stairwells. When I was there, active strip club employees worked there.

It’s very sad, but I was Travis’s best friend. He knew hundreds of people, and he had lots of relatives, but an old white man who lived 15 miles away and then 300 miles away was his best friend. I know several black people who say I’m their best friend. That shouldn’t have to happen. You should be able to connect with someone in your family or in your ordinary social circle. There should be someone in that collection of people you can rely on.

I was the first person he thought to contact after calling 911. Not his mother. Not his brother. Not his friends.

The black person who treated him best was the young lady I keep calling Martha. I think she would have made a magnificent wife for him. She had his back all the time, and she still does.

He knew some other people who did very generous things for him, but I still ended up with the title of best friend. The title was welcome in the sense that I was honored and glad to be held in that regard, but it was unwelcome in the sense that it should not have been necessary for it to fall to me.

When Travis died, I lost a friend, and that’s bad enough, but I lost the closest thing I had to a son, and I also lost the single biggest contributor to my Christian walk. On top of that, I lost what I thought was a connection to God.

I thought I was learning to prophesy. I was practicing all the time. It was somewhat difficult to do. It was hard to let go, and it was also scary because I was concerned that I would say something stupid and wrong. A few weeks back, I decided to quit restraining myself. I decided to go with it, do it as much as I could, and let God work it out.

I started prophesying in bed for long periods. I prophesied while I drove. I would walk through grocery stores, prophesying silently.

I heard beautiful things about God’s love for me. I heard that he would keep me safe and prevent things I worried about from happening.

Jesus definitely visited me back in the Eighties. I am not wrong about that. It was very obvious. When he visited me, I knew exactly where he was located, and I physically felt the heat of his love. I felt complete peace. I knew everything was going to be all right. I didn’t have to try to believe it. I knew it. You can’t feel any other way around him, unless he’s against you.

When I prophesied, it filled me with peace and reassurance, and I said things that were consistent with what I felt when Jesus came to me. I never heard anything inconsistent with his nature, which I knew from meeting him, or the Bible.

A few times, I said specific things about the future. I believe there were two occasions when I said Travis would be healed. I can’t think of any other things that were shown to be wrong. Some are still in the future, though.

I felt great about this new connection with God. I can’t tell you how pleasant it was to believe I was hearing him tell me things in English. As Paul said, there is a lot of profit in speaking God’s word in a language you can understand. I thought I had finally gotten to the point where I had that going for me.

Of course, I counted on the scriptures. Regarding the possibility that a person might ask God for a gift and receive something evil instead, he said this:

And I say unto you, Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you. For every one that asketh receiveth; and he that seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened. If a son shall ask bread of any of you that is a father, will he give him a stone? or if he ask a fish, will he for a fish give him a serpent? Or if he shall ask an egg, will he offer him a scorpion? If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children: how much more shall your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask him?

He said this right after he gave us the Lord’s Prayer, in which he said, “Give us this day our daily bread.” To me, “bread” means God’s word; his communication. Jesus said he was the bread of life, and he said he was the head of the church, which is the body of Christ. The head has to communicate to the body’s parts.

This is what I stood on, and then I said someone would be healed, and he died.

I can’t behave like a preacher who makes a wrong prediction on Youtube and then has his people take the video down. That does happen, and it’s very harmful.

I have to look over the things I believe, and I have to learn which ones are true.

Prayer in tongues is real. There is no question at all about that. It has never not worked for me. It changed my life. I can keep that.

I have received a lot of phrases and sentences during prayer. I have not had problems with them. I have relied on them, and they have held up.

Blessing and cursing work. They don’t get me the desired result every single time, but most of the time, they do. And it seems that how well they work depend on the power of the forces that are against you. It’s probably more difficult to get results when powerful spirits are against you, and obviously, you wouldn’t expect to succeed if you make a mistake and say something God is opposed to.

It seems that it’s often necessary to repeat the same blessing or curse, like a boxer who keeps punching the same opponent.

Casting out demons works. Healing works, although the results are inconsistent and some physical problems seem to have great authority and resistance.

Asking God yes or no questions seems to work the vast majority of the time, but it is not unusual to be wrong, so maybe I should let that go.

Reading the Bible and listening to an audio version work. These things will change you and revive you every day.

It looks like my big problems involve getting the word of God to flow through me at will, in forms my mind understands.

So what’s the problem? Doesn’t God want me to prophesy? No, he wants it. Paul made that clear. The apostles were prophets, as was Jesus, and Paul said we should covet the gift of prophecy, which is specifically listed among the gifts of the Spirit. He said this as a general admonition. He didn’t say, “Only a few people will prophesy.” He told all of us to seek the gift. If it weren’t available to all of us, he would not have done that. I wouldn’t. It would be irresponsible.

God does want me to prophesy, and he will help me do it.

If God wants me to prophesy, is the problem that I’m trying to do it the wrong way? Are we not able to prophesy at will?

The Bible says the spirits of the prophets are subject to the prophets. You can speak in tongues whenever you want for as long as you want, so it is certainly possible to control your spirit in the exercise of at least one gift.

Here is what Paul said about prophesying:

Let the prophets speak two or three, and let the other judge. If any thing be revealed to another that sitteth by, let the first hold his peace. For ye may all prophesy one by one, that all may learn, and all may be comforted. And the spirits of the prophets are subject to the prophets.

That is very unambiguous except for the last sentence, and even though that sentence is not completely clear in English, it seems to indicate that a person can prophesy or stop at will. I will look at the Greek.

The word translated “are subject to” is hupotassó, and it means to be under the command of another. It’s the same word that was used to tell us demons had to obey Jesus. It’s the word that was used to tell us demons have to obey us, for that matter. The word translated “prophets” means “interpreters or forth-tellers of the divine will.” It doesn’t mean “encourager” or “exhorter” as some people claim. Some say Christian prophets aren’t supposed to reveal facts or tell the future, but that’s clearly wrong. The New Testament uses the same word Paul used to describe Old Testament prophets. If you’re a Christian prophet, you’re supposed to have the same gift Elijah and Isaiah had. You’re not just a motivational speaker.

There are plenty of prophecies about the future in the New Testament. Remember Agabus. Don’t forget Jude. Don’t forget the Revelation.

If Christian prophets don’t foretell the future, why did Agabus tell Paul he would be imprisoned if he went to Jerusalem? Why did Jesus, our model, foretell the future?

The idea that Christian prophesy doesn’t involve telling the future or revealing hidden facts is clearly nonsense.

Let’s add up the things we can’t question.

1. We are all supposed to be able to prophesy.

2. In prophecy, we are supposed to tell the future and reveal hidden facts.

3. God says he will give us real gifts, not demons, if we ask.

4. When we exercise the gifts of the Spirit, our spirits are forced to obey us, just as demons are forced to obey us.

These statements can’t be refuted without contradicting scripture, unless there is something I still don’t understand about our spirits being subject to us.

Regarding Travis, we did what Paul said to do. I thought I got a word, and the Tina, independently and before she was informed, believed she heard the same thing. The Bible says, “Let the prophets speak two or three, and let the other judge.” I didn’t find any fault with what Tina said, nor did she find any fault with what I said.

Well, maybe we didn’t do what Paul said to do. Neither of us found fault, but I don’t recall specifically asking God whether what she said was right, and she may not have asked him whether I was right.

Here is an interesting thing about Paul’s instructions: if he advised people to judge what prophets said, he must have expected errors. Christians are often taught that if a prophet errs, he is not a prophet, and I have even heard Christians say that in the Old Testament, a prophet who made a mistake had to be killed. I tried to look that law up, and I was not able to find it. I found a passage saying no one should be afraid of a prophet who made mistakes. Maybe the Jews were required to stone prophets who erred, but I haven’t found it, and we know from the Bible that they had plenty of false prophets who were proven wrong in their own time. Were they executed? The Bible doesn’t say they were.

The Jews only executed true prophets.

It really looks like a prophet should be able to prophesy at will. It’s hard to interpret Paul’s words any other way.

So what does this mean? Is it a matter of practicing until you’re sure you know the difference between God’s voice and your own?

I miss God intensely. I feel like I’m fasting from his company. I keep wanting to let his voice flow through me again in English, but I refuse to try. I thought we had gotten closer than ever. It seemed like a major breakthrough. Once I got things going smoothly, I wanted to hear from him all the time. I wanted his companionship and correction. Now I think I’ll just say stupid, damaging things my mind wants to hear.

False prophecy is harmful. God rewards people for listening to true prophets, and you will have problems if you hear one and don’t listen. There is symmetry in the supernatural, so it must be harmful to listen to a false prophet, including yourself. I don’t want that.

I’m in a very strange position. I lost a friend, a son figure, and my only real prayer partner, and I also feel as though I lost God’s company. That’s a lot to lose in one hour.

Part of me wants to stop eating and drinking until I get an answer. This situation is intolerable.

The idea of fasting AFTER someone dies is not normal.

I’ve considered other explanations. Will Travis be resurrected? I prayed for it, with a friend. Is it possible that Travis was about to be healed, but his relatives or someone else prevented it by taking him off life support at the wrong time? Would God say he was going to do something and then let a human being prevent it from happening?

I’m not the only one who wonders if Travis was terminated by human beings, because the circumstances of his death don’t make sense, and it is troubling a bunch of people who are baptized with the Holy Spirit. Independently, they are saying something is fishy. But would God tell you he was going to heal someone if a mere human being could stop it?

Was Travis “healed” by being removed from his body? Come on. That’s unworthy of consideration.

I will hold onto the things I know to be right, and I will try to find out what went wrong with prophecy. Sooner or later, I will do it correctly. The Bible clearly says it’s part of my inheritance. I can’t give up pursuing it, because God says we’re supposed to do it. It’s not up to me to pick and choose.

I rarely feel lonely for people, but feeling lonely for God is too much to take. It has to be fixed.

We are confident, I say, and willing rather to be absent from the body, and to be present with the Lord

I have bad news. This afternoon, someone sent me an Instagram photo indicating that my friend Travis has died.

To a person who looks with the natural eye only, this is not shocking. Travis had been in intensive care for weeks following an accidental shooting which led to complications. To people who have felt great faith that Travis was going to be healed, it’s a major blow.

A year or two back, I listened to Derek Prince as he taught people to prophesy. I decided to try it. Paul tells us to covet prophecy, and he says it’s a better gift than tongues in some ways. God clearly wants us to do it. I started doing it once in a while, and then I made a point of doing it a lot every day.

I heard positive things. “I will build you up.” “None of the things you worry about will happen to you.” “My love will pour through you.” I rarely heard anything negative. That concerned me, because I knew from prayer in tongues that it was possible to get in the way of the Holy Spirit and add your own material. I prayed repeatedly for guidance. I had other people pray. I did not want to be a false prophet.

The other day, I heard myself saying Travis would be healed. Yesterday, someone who is very, very honest said God told her the same thing.

Look, it can still happen. He can still recover. As I said before, Lazarus stank when he was healed. He was dead and rotting. But generally, the dead stay dead.

I knew before this happened that if Travis died, I would have a major problem apart from the grief. I knew I would have to question what I thought I heard from God. That’s a big deal. I have been relying very strongly on what I thought was God’s voice for years. How much am I wrong about? What do I have left to hold onto?

You can’t sweep problems like this under the rug. Pretending things didn’t happen is not acceptable. You have to hold yourself accountable.

It’s as though I built several rooms onto my house, and one or more have to be torn down. I can’t entertain guests in a house that isn’t habitable. How can I talk to other people about God right now?

What can I tell the world about Travis?

He had a bad start. He got in trouble a lot when he was a kid.

He excelled in music when he was in elementary school. By the time I met him, he played 11 instruments well.

His Dad tried to raise him and his siblings well. His mother and father split, and his father deteriorated. He was isolated from the family.

I met Travis at Trinity Church in Miami. I believe he was 17. We were on the security team. We became unlikely friends. In prayer sessions behind closed doors, we talked about things the pastors didn’t want to hear about: prayer in tongues, casting out demons, confession, and transformation through the Holy Spirit. Travis got hooked, and he started to change.

He kept growing, and our friendship grew. I started making pizza for the church’s cafe, and Travis became my sous chef.

We knew the church was a mess. We both left. He came to the new church I joined. We left that one, too. We started spending a lot of time praying at my house. During one session, Travis had a vision of a woman he believed would be his wife. He never saw her face.

Travis was a teacher. He worked at a government-funded center, teaching ghetto kids music. He wanted black children to be successful and appreciated. That desire burned in him. He could not accept the way black people in America were living.

He was hurt over and over by the things that happened to young people he knew. He was frustrated with their parents, who wouldn’t drive them to lessons. Kids had unwanted babies. They got shot. One friend from church got caught driving a stolen Mercedes, and after the police handcuffed him, he jumped into a canal and drowned.

Travis wanted to see black people rise up and do well, and over and over, he was slapped in the face by deaths, illegitimate births, and incarcerations. It caused him tremendous pain. He could not let go.

He wanted to be the first member of his family to get a degree. He had started college at FAMU in Tallahassee, but he got caught up in a marching band scandal and left. I encouraged him to go to the University of Miami and audition, and one day, he went without telling me and got a full ride, less room and board.

He worked harder than any student I ever knew. He lived in rented rooms. He slept on people’s couches. He sometimes rode a bicycle 15 miles at night to get home from jobs. He was promised a car, but by the time he got it, it was in such bad shape it had to be scrapped. His cheap, wobbly secondhand bicycle was stolen by someone who must have been desperate as well as heartless. He had to scrounge up a new one. He never quit.

When I left Miami, I made him my house sitter until I sold the house. I told him he was the Fresh Prince of Coral Gables. He loved the peace and safety.

During his time there, I got baptized at a Last Reformation event. I told Travis about it, and he got so excited, he borrowed a car and drove to my house near Ocala to be baptized in my pool. He couldn’t submerge completely in my tub. It was 51 degrees out when he went into the pool. He drove up in a borrowed car, stayed one night, and drove back.

When the place finally sold, I was concerned about him, but he landed on his feet. He found a place near school. He struggled, but he didn’t live in the street.

When COVID-19 hit, he had a problem. He played gigs to make money, and the gigs were gone. We prayed over the phone. He said God would handle it.

He got a respiratory bug in March. He had a high fever and aches. I told him to get checked, but he stayed home. Some friends and I prayed, and his symptoms dropped off to nearly nothing overnight.

Travis got in contact with me a few times about a friend who wanted to get a firearm. He asked me for advice. I saw nothing odd about it. I suggested a Glock. A simple, reliable gun. I said I would consider .45 ACP if it were me. I probably mentioned .40 S&W.

On April 9, my phone rang. The caller ID named Travis, but the voice was someone else’s. The man on the other end said he was Travis’s friend. He said Travis had been shot accidentally. He stressed “accidentally.” I asked if they had called 911. Hoping for a break, I asked where Travis had been shot. The friend said, “in the chest region.” No break.

I could hear Travis in the background pleading with God. He wasn’t afraid to die. He just didn’t want to die that way, so soon. He said, “Not this way, God!” That was the last time I heard his voice. His friend hung up.

After that, the information dried up. No one answered his phone. I started accounts on Instagram and Facebook, hoping to alert his family. I found his brother and let him know. I thought the family would handle things.

I didn’t want to go online and say, “TRAVIS HAS BEEN SHOT.” I thought it would make his family panic. Now I wish I had done it. Maybe more people would have tried to help. I worked with some friends who tried to look after Travis’s affairs, and the family was not responsive. We didn’t hear from them for days. I assumed things were going well because the early report was that the injury was not life-threatening.

Travis lived out his final days in a remarkable state of isolation. There was no phone in his room. He was intubated at least part of the time. They didn’t give him a laptop so he could Skype. The hospital was so strict, they would not allow cards into the room. Recently, a nurse told Martha Travis had never had a visitor.

We knew very little about what was happening.

As far as I know, he didn’t die from a gunshot wound. He died from complications. He wasn’t getting oxygen. He had an infection. He was tested regularly for covid, but the tests were negative. Of course, the tests are not reliable. He may have had covid in March, and he may have relapsed after the shooting.

Would things have been different with better communication? I don’t know, but things were handled very badly.

I thought I could point to Travis as a success story. Someone whose life had successfully repaired, partly with my participation. I thought I would see his wife and children. I thought I would be at the wedding.

He’s in heaven. That’s for sure. If he had any issues with God, you can be sure he cleaned them up while he was alone in the hospital. You can say that makes him a success, but it’s not the kind of success I had in mind.

I thought God had given him to me as a sort of son, to make up for my failure to marry.

Now the crop is gone, and it’s late in the season.

Is it right to feel sorry for him? He has seen Jesus. He is perfect. He is happy. He is fulfilled. He is safe, forever. He’s with my dad. Surely they have talked today.

I suppose if I grieve, I’m really feeling sorry for myself, not Travis. He’s practically a god now.

Over the last few days, I’ve been telling God I would be happy to take Travis’s place. It didn’t matter to me. I enjoy life, but it’s not like I have a lot of meaningful irons in the fire (one less now), and I am not far from elderly.

Now I’m still here, he’s gone, his wife will have to marry someone else, and his kids will not be born. There will be no one to help his dad, who has MS and lives in a facility, unless God sends him a friend. His dad had been very bitter, but he had come around. He had started praying with Travis. He had started calling him often instead of shutting him out. Where does a 59-year-old man in a wheelchair go to replace a son like that?

Will anyone try to save Travis’s family now? Who else will care?

I spoke to my friend Freddly about the news. She’s a nurse in a management position, and she deals with dying people, including covid patients. She is very experienced. She says something is wrong. She says young men don’t just die suddenly, even when they’re intubated and connected to ECMO machines. She says that happens to the elderly. The nurses knew Martha had a special relationship with Travis. According to Freddly, they would have made sure Martha was informed had he taken a sudden turn for the worse. Even though she was not his wife, they would have seen to it that she had a chance to come to his bedside had they thought he was about to die. They didn’t do that. Two days running, they said there was no change, and there is no chance they were wrong. They told her he was in the same condition at 9:30 this morning. So what happened?

She said she wished she could look at his chart.

It’s good to have an expert to talk to, not that it does much good now.

I talked to a mutual friend today. He was on the Trinity Church security team with Travis and me. He wants to go to the funeral if there is one. My concern is that Trinity will be in charge. I don’t want to see people who used Travis using him as a tool to boost their profiles. I am also not excited about being among people he knew who let him down consistently. But on the other hand, it might be good to show up, welcome or not, and hold my head up and look them in the eye.

I don’t want to go to Miami. Not even for this. I don’t know how it will play out.

It was a great, great privilege to know Travis and to be of some assistance to him. I’m glad he’s out of harm’s reach now. He could not catch a break in this life. It seemed like it rained on him every day. He fought the curses of black life, and he still died like a black man who was still immersed in them. That’s all finished now. I will take the good with the bad.

I won’t get to see him stand at the altar, and I won’t get to hold his kids. I won’t have a third godchild or a boy named after me. That’s okay. We have a father who makes all things right, even if it has to wait until after the resurrection.

I look forward to seeing him again. Until then, I will remember how blessed I was to know him in this life.

A friend who led the armorbearer team at Trinity Church just did a final roll call for Travis via text message. His call sign was Bass Clef.

So that’s it. Travis didn’t sound off here, but he was present at a better roll call today. It won’t be that long before I sound off as well, and then all our troubles here on earth will be forgotten.

Hope Your Morning was This Good

Some good things are happening today. First, “Martha” texted and said my friend Travis is still with us, and his condition has not changed. As always, I call that a win. Finding out that he’s alive is great. Learning that he hasn’t gotten worse is icing on the cake. Now we’re just waiting to hear that he’s improving. If you’ve been praying, thanks.

I sent the news out today via text, and my friend Tina responded. I wrote about her the other day. She called me after reading about Travis on Instagram, and since then she has been part of the prayer team.

Today Tina received the news, and I also said I had been saying, “Travis is healed, and Jesus Christ is glorified.” She said this was confirmation of what the Lord had told her the day before. Naturally, I had to ask for more information, so she called.

I can’t recall everything she said, but I can hit the high points.

Yesterday, she spent time praying for Travis in the Spirit and with her understanding. She said the Lord told her her prayers were answered. She said he said Travis was going to be healed, and that he would be healed in such a way that the doctors and providers would know the healing didn’t come from their efforts.

She said God told her she didn’t have to ask for healing. She said he told her to command it and declare it done, so that’s what she has been doing.

I hadn’t told her what I was doing. Our choices were made independently.

She said God told her he was going to work on Travis’s family. That will be nice to see.

Tina is praying for God to help the providers do things they could never do without his help. I am agreeing.

Bonus: I put Tina in touch with Martha, and they hit it off. They are very similar. Two young black women of excellent character who are responsible and successful. Tina can help Martha get to know God. Martha and I texted for a very long time yesterday. I suppose God is drawing her to people who can give her a little guidance.

I had a real text storm today. My friends are really getting behind Travis.

In the midst of all this, I made myself biscuits and gravy. I forgot to halve the recipe, so I ate a little more than I should. The biscuits were wonderful. I keep tinkering with my recipe.

Here is what I did today:

INGREDIENTS

1-3/4 cups AP flour (not self-rising)
1/4 cup starch
2/3 cup milk
1-2 tsp. salt
4 tsp. baking powder (not soda)
2 tbsp. cold bacon grease
2 tbsp. hard butter
2 tsp. sugar
1/2 tsp. citric acid

I should increase the acid slightly, but these were wonderful.

Maybe I can wind down a little now. Who wants to clean my kitchen?

Only Took 5 Months

Not long after the covid hype started, I began searching the news to see if any major American celebrities had died. I don’t mean people like the guy who played Otis the Drunk on The Andy Griffith Show. I mean people whose names a typical American would recognize. We finally have an example. Covid has been here since last fall, and Roy Horn died on May 8. I would call him a minor major celebrity. He’s not Tom Brady or Jennifer Lopez, but people have heard his name.

It’s remarkable how long it took. I thought we would have a couple of dozen by now. It’s even more remarkable when you consider the fact that many foreigners are famous in America.

Of course, he was in very bad shape. He was 75, and he had been crippled by a tiger bite. He was also a homosexual, so he may have had other health problems from substance abuse or infectious disease.

How are things in northern Florida? Great. That’s just how it is. Sorry if you live in New York or New Orleans. I’m not trying to make you feel bad.

We’re still waiting for the meat shortage to hit. It doesn’t look like it’s coming. I went to the grocery yesterday, and the place was swimming in chicken, beef, and even pork, which has been hit hardest. Ground chuck patties were selling for $3 per pound.

I always look at the hoarder stuff when I’m there. They had a lot of Bounty paper towels (cheap brands don’t count), and they were putting toilet paper on the shelves late in the afternoon. They even had a bottle of Dawn, which I bought. I thought I needed it for the laundry room sink, but I didn’t. Sorry about that. There was still no rubbing alcohol. People are probably pouring it on their food.

The meat problem was supposed to be here by now, wasn’t it? It has been 11 days since I noticed the story, and people were talking about a two-week delayed impact. That means everything should be gone in three days. We’ll see.

After shopping, I texted my poor cousin near Chicago. She still can’t get meat. People are still insane there. Going to Costco is like trying to beat the crowds in the movie Soylent Green. Her son says it takes hours to get in the door.

This mess is not the same for liberals and conservatives. Liberals are more hysterical, their areas are suffering the most, and the vast majority of the suffering is caused by bad behavior, not covid. It appears they really do treat others much worse than conservatives. The way they clean out stores is a wonder to behold.

Shouldn’t be a surprise. Leftists are the only people who riot and lynch. Conservatives don’t know how. When you see conservatives fighting in the streets, it’s because leftists came to their events and attacked.

It’s not like goods aren’t being shipped to liberal cities. They are. Cities are very powerful, and those in power will see to it that goods come in. Obviously, the problems arise once they get there.

Cities will get goods even if rural people have to starve. There is no electoral college for food distribution. Food will go to the power centers.

People who are against God are much more afraid of death. They think this life is all there is. What a pity. This life is pretty dreary. Childhood is hard and very degrading, then you can expect to get a job you don’t like, then your body falls apart slowly, and then you die. If this is all there is, your prospects are horrible, and the threshold for choosing suicide should be very low.

If you’re afraid of death, you are capable of just about anything. Hungry human beings have been known to eat their children.

I suppose they have a better excuse than well-fed women who have abortions.

The Christian attitude is much different. Think of all the Christians who have allowed themselves to be murdered for the good of humanity.

It’s strange that San Francisco is doing so well. It makes me wonder if something much worse is in store because of their rebellion.

I should mention my friend Travis, who is still in intensive care. The nurses open up to us occasionally, so bits of information get out. The latest news is excellent as far as I’m concerned. He is no worse. That indicates they’re not talking about unplugging things. His situation is far from good, but it’s not the kind of crisis it appeared to be two days back.

If no one you know has died in a hospital after a long illness, I’ll tell you how it works in most cases. The staff will know when your loved one is very likely to die within a day. They know the signs from experience. They will tell you to get your butt to the hospital if you’re not already there. A couple of days ago, it looked like we were in that situation, but now it’s clear that we’re not. It was misinterpreted by relatives who had been ignoring Travis and were shocked to learn he was on an ECMO machine. I’m not saying a person can’t seem stable and then die suddenly, but we had one set of expectations, and now it’s clear that we are looking at a different paradigm.

I only have two medical professionals among my close friends. Both work with gravely ill and dying people. One started out as a hospice CNA, and now she manages other nurses. She has seen hundreds of people die. She is on Travis’s prayer team. She is very positive today. She said, “We’ve got a fight!” That’s correct. We weren’t told to come drive him home, but we have a fight. She also said, “He can bounce back.”

The other professional runs a hospice. His basic sentiment was that if a person isn’t declining, he can turn around.

Of course, this is just speculation in the natural. Lazarus stank from decomposition when he was healed, and Jonah, who died, was pulled back from sheol.

I have been seeing demons in my bedroom, and my belief was that they were the demons that were trying to kill Travis. Last night, I bound and muzzled them in the name of Jesus. I spoke defeat to them. I forbade them to come near me or Travis. I slept the whole night through. I was surprised when I woke up. I have been waking up before dawn, consistently.

It will be nice when we get a better report. I’m tired of feeling distressed when a text notification goes off. I’m okay, but that doesn’t mean this isn’t unpleasant.

I’m planning to make .38 Super defensive ammunition. I don’t need it, but I feel stupid owning a gun and having so little real ammunition for it. Also, it will be fun.

I did not take notes when I reloaded a decade ago. I think all of my .38 Super reloads are from that time. To get information, I had to go back through blog posts. I’m learning my lesson. I’m creating text documents with lots of facts. I even use the outline feature. It’s almost as if I used to be a scientist!

You would think a former scientist would have done it this way from the start, but I didn’t.

It looks like I had a lot of problems in the past with the Hornady Lock-n-Load AP press. I was getting a lot of unprimed cases. Because of that, powder spilled everywhere. I was using Accurate No.7, and the grains are tiny. They went right into the workings of the press and gummed it up.

I was not happy with Hornady. The press is a good product, but you can’t pop one on your bench and expect things to go perfectly. There are a lot of adjustments to be made, and there are things that are not deburred well or massaged at the factory. Hornady support has a great reputation, and that’s good, because press buyers need it. You can root around the web and read about all the problems they have.

People told me to buy a Dillon press, but if you check the web, you’ll see that Dillon owners complain just as much. Many knowledgeable people say Hornady’s products are the best. It appears that brand loyalty is the main reason people say either brand is better than the other.

Progressive presses are complicated, and they have to be set up just right. A manual isn’t enough. You have to have experience and good advice, and you have to be good with tools. That’s just how it is.

A well-adjusted Lock-n-Load will work great. Until it doesn’t. Then you will lose one or more rounds because the press has gone crazy, and you’ll have to make an adjustment. Then it will work great again.

When you get a press running, you may forget all the breakdowns and struggles you had getting it to where it actually worked. I did. New users who are frustrated aren’t whiners. They’re not imagining things.

A guy who calls himself 76Highboy has great videos on running the Hornady press. It’s great to see how well he knows the machine. There is no problem he can’t help you fix or avoid. But the fact that his videos have to exist tells you how hard it can be to make a Lock-n-Load work.

He’s a bona fide Lock-n-Load guru, and his dad was a proficient reloader, but he obviously had a lot of problems, because he had to learn to fix them.

Here’s something weird. The powder measure requires a fatter O-ring than all the other stations. Hornady will never tell you that. Also, you may have problems with metering the powder because of static electricity, so you should rub the affected parts with a dryer sheet.

My press had at least one defective primer seating punch. It has two, and I have only checked one. It was obstructing the slide that loads the primers. The manual doesn’t tell you about that. I had to grind material off the slide with a Dremel so it wouldn’t hit the punch. A punch that sits too high will prevent primers from loading, and then you fill unprimed cases with powder. The powder leaks through the primer holes, and then your press locks up or fails to register correctly.

When I switch to my other punch and slide, I’m going to grind the other slide before I even check to see if it works. The alteration won’t hurt it, and if the slide needs it, it will save me a ton of misery. I’m also going to stone the slide to get rid of burrs, as Highboy76 recommends.

Every Lock-n-Load should come with a friend who finally got his to work.

People will tell you you’re the problem when you’re really not. You can say a press operator is the problem if he wasn’t born knowing how to deal with the product’s many issues. That’s not really fair. It’s like saying you’re the problem if you don’t know exactly the right way to jiggle your defective toilet’s flush handle.

If a product you paid good money for doesn’t do exactly what it’s supposed to do when you follow the manual, the product or the manual is the problem. Don’t blame yourself.

I need to get out and shoot the .38 Super more. It’s wonderful. I’m concerned about losing casings, though. I’m thinking of using a red marker to color them and make them stand out after they land in the pasture.

Some day the Beast’s cruel, infantile children will take our guns away, and I won’t be able to shoot steel in my own yard. I need to take advantage of what I have while I still can.

This is Really Easy

Why go out and build a church when God will bring a ministry to your door?

I don’t seem to have time to do any of my typical activities today. I have been involved in prayer and ministry since before dawn.

A short time ago, I got a surprise call from Tina, a girl I used to drive to church. I shouldn’t call her a girl. She must be 25 now. She was a UM student, and she lived near my house, so I was the natural choice when she needed transportation on Sundays.

She had a suboptimal upbringing. I don’t know all the details, but I believe her sister had to raise her. She turned out well anyway. She participated in beauty pageants in order to get scholarships, and she also worked. Right now she’s supporting herself and getting a master’s degree. Probably an MBA. I didn’t think to ask.

She just found out that my friend Travis is in the hospital. She wanted to know what was going on, and she offered her help. She is stuck in Miami temporarily. She said that if he needed to stay here for a while, she would take time off from work and drive him up.

Tina is a charismatic. Full of the Holy Spirit. I think her walk was impeded somewhat by her experience under my last pastor, but she’s a very serious person, so I think she’ll be okay.

She knows Travis well. She was in school when he got his scholarship and started attending UM.

I gave her the lowdown on the situation, and I put her in touch with Kalea, the young lady who is doing most of the work. I think they’ll get along very well. Two young, responsible, successful black women who love God.

She didn’t know my dad had died. I told her about it, and I told her how God had changed him. She said her grandmother in the Virgin Islands has dementia and needs help approaching God.

For those who don’t know, my dad was touched supernaturally when I played audio from Derek Prince videos for him. This is how God saved him. I told Tina all about it, and I suggested she find a way to play this material for her grandmother. She doesn’t know if it can be done. I told her God had some way of reaching her, so it didn’t matter.

I told her a little bit about the way the country is turning sour for Christians, and I let her know cities would not be good places for us in the future.

She says she will keep in touch. She may get to visit the farm. Depends on Travis’s situation.

Who knows? Maybe her grandmother will be helped.

It’s strange; I know all these attractive young single women, and I’m an old guy who lives with two birds. They should all be married to suitable young men by now. It seems like the more together a young woman is, the harder it is for her to find a husband. It’s as if good character and brains negate the power of good looks. Women who are less worthy seem to get married right away.

It’s funny. Tina was very reserved when I used to drive her to church. Sometimes I wondered what she was thinking. Was she comfortable with me, or was she just happy to have a ride? We had some conversations, but most of the time, she played her cards close to the vest. On the phone, she’s much easier to communicate with. It’s nice to know she has a positive opinion of me.

I had hopes she and Travis would work something out. Didn’t happen. I hope God will supply all of these women with men who are not totally useless.

I have to go out and look for a big postcard for Travis. I meant to do it yesterday, but I could not get away. I didn’t even get to go to Walmart for one of my regular curiosity tours. I don’t know whether they have pork or toilet paper. This kind of thing is actually interesting to me now.

I used to tell Travis it was funny how he ended up ministering to so many good-looking women. Now the shoe is on the other foot, except my motivation isn’t subject to credible suspicion.

Maybe I can get some things done now.

Still Kicking

My friend Travis is still alive. I call that a victory, and I thank God and everyone who prayed.

Yesterday, his brother said he and his mother were rushing to the hospital because Travis was on life support. I say “said” because I can’t assume his mother actually went without confirmation. I know a little bit about her, and I’m not willing to place a bet.

Based on various bits of information, my guess is that Travis was no worse off than the day before, but because his family was not paying attention to his case, they were shocked to learn he was connected to machines. His friends already knew.

His brother has a big social media following, and yesterday he posted a request for help. Travis was shot a month ago, so you may be wondering why the post went up yesterday. I’m right there with you.

Now a large number of people SAY (I am consistent) they’re praying for him, and there is a GoFundMe page which is currently at about $5100.

I’m not donating. Why? A wise woman pointed out that the money may be misused by those who gain control over it. I hope that doesn’t happen, and I hope the money does some good, but I’m not taking a chance on my money going to a casino or some other rathole.

You don’t actually need GoFundMe to give your friends, or their landlords, money. You just need it to put your name on the web so people can see that you donated.

I’m already wondering whether he will become a fundraising tool for a couple of churches. Travis and I met at Trinity Church, a horrible money-centered church in Miami Gardens. The pastors are drawn to publicity like flies to a substance familiar to farmers. After Trayvon Martin was killed while beating an innocent man’s head on a sidewalk, Trinity’s pastor Rich Wilkerson made a cringey video with Martin’s mother, asking her for her deep ideas about Christianity.

It’s only a matter of time until Wilkerson finds out Travis is getting social media attention. I’m sure he would have some sincere desire to help, but I think he would also be highly motivated to help himself.

A Trinity underpastor named Terrance started a church. It’s called “The COOL Church,” which ought to tell you everything you need to know. To be “cool” is to be loved by the unsaved world. Jesus said the world would hate his followers. To strive to be cool is to curry favor with Satan, the inventor and arbiter of cool. Christians have a real problem with clergymen who suck up to ignorant children. They promote Christian rap, which is insane. They dress like hipsters. They study the latest slang. In reality, Jesus was the opposite of cool, and we should be, too.

“Cool” is the Beast’s term. It’s his stamp of approval.

Terrance is very proud and very concerned about appearances. He strives to be as cool as possible. He cultivates admiration. Older people can’t tell him anything; he knows it all. For all his carnal good intentions, he’s a toxic pastor. That’s all there is to it. He has been very good to Travis, even allowing him to stay in his house for a long period, and I have no doubt that he cares, but he’s not strong in the Holy Spirit, and he’s a leftist and a Social Justice Warrior, which shows he has not been getting God’s memos.

The problem I see here is that people who go to these churches–hypocrites–may send a lot of money and make a big fuss on the Internet, and they may be used to seduce Travis and make him think Miami and these churches aren’t so bad after all. I’m sure some true Christians are actually praying, and that’s great, but overall, it doesn’t smell good.

You don’t really need 10,000 Christians to pray for you. You need one solid Christian.

There are a lot of healings and miracles in the Bible. Try to find one that required more than one person’s effort.

Last night, I saw another spirit in my bedroom. The other spirits I’ve seen since Travis was shot seemed menacing or creepy. One was actually sitting on me, trying to beat me up. The latest spirit looked like a cute little dog. Of course, I cursed it and ran it off.

Why do spirits always show up beside or at the foot of beds? It must be in their handbook.

My impression is that Satan is not getting top results from angry, nasty spirits, so he is sending warm, cuddly ones. Hence the social media campaign. If he can’t kill Travis, at least he may be able to convince him he should stay in Miami and bask in the worthless flattery of hypocrites.

I feel that this ordeal is being used by God to make Travis understand how important it is to cut people off and move. When he comes to, he will see who was with him from the start and who let him down. It will not be pretty. It would be very unfortunate if he went through all this and didn’t get the message. God uses progressive discipline. I would not want to experience whatever comes after being shot and put on life support machines.

People lie to Travis constantly. “We appreciate you, bro.” “We got you.” “We need you to help us change Miami Gardens.” They flatter him and lay guilt trips on him. They play the race card. It’s disgusting to watch. Miami and Miami Gardens aren’t going to be changed, except that they will become more rotten as more Christians leave.

From my perspective, this mess has been extremely helpful. Obviously, I suffer because my friend is in the ICU, but I am communicating a lot with people I texted for prayer. They are surprising me. People I thought might not be all that helpful are very serious about praying and helping. They’re serious about improving. One young lady said, “You know I listen to you, right?” I guess I didn’t. It’s always a shock when I find out someone listens to me.

The young woman who is doing most of the lifting for Travis is incredible. She keeps asking me about God, and I tell her everything I can. I hate talking to people who aren’t receptive, and I’m very used to it. There is nothing like talking to someone God has already softened up. It’s a lot like love at first sight, except it’s not romantic.

They’re the only people who get saved. You can’t badger someone into heaven. People are like fruit. They fall when they get ripe.

She’s very smart. She’s very honest. She did not hesitate to bring up a fault which might be contributing to Travis’s reluctance to leave Miami. She thinks for herself. When I tell her things, she checks them out. That’s exactly how it’s supposed to work. I’m not the Oracle of Delphi. People should ask God whether what I say is right.

She was raised in a solid two-parent household, and she talks about how crucial it is to have a real family. She talks about the way black people have been weakened by the one-parent model. I haven’t heard any victimspeak from her.

She’s not a joiner. She has no Facebook account. She has very few Instagram connections. She’s not posting provocative photos every day, trying to land a man. She is smart about people. She knows how low they are.

Travis used to show up at my house in her car. That amazed me. Virtually none of his friends do anything for him. They always say they’ll be there to help, and then they don’t show up. They talk a great game and then run off. It astounded me to see that someone was willing to let him drive their car for days on end.

I suggested she consider going to a Last Reformation meeting and getting baptized with the Holy Spirit. She was on their website before I could follow up. She’s going to check them out thoroughly and think it over. I told her she might also receive the baptism at home, given the fact that travel is a problem now. God is not unreasonable. He baptized me with the Holy Spirit while I was alone.

Travis is extremely blessed to know her. She makes me wish I were 30 years younger.

I’ve had a productive day of serving God, and the clock reads 10:43. That’s not bad at all. I didn’t have to get on a plane and go to Somalia and live in the dirt, battling six different kinds of diarrhea. I didn’t have to go to a seminary and dodge homosexual advances for several years. I didn’t have to carry Kenneth Copeland’s mink-lined briefcase and take care of his dry cleaning for a decade. I certainly didn’t have to be Rich Wilkerson’s degraded, used underpastor and then get him to sponsor my cool new church. God did the work, and that’s how it’s supposed to be.

Is it wrong to feel so good while my friend has a machine breathing for him? I don’t question it. Life contains plenty of suffering. I don’t need to cultivate and water it.

This morning I woke up early and spent a long time praying. When it was over, I wanted to catch up on the sleep I lost, so I stayed in bed and slept. I dreamed Travis was here, in a guest bedroom. He was smiling. His face almost glowed. I told him I had missed him and that I was happy to see him. I started asking him what he wanted to do. Did he want to stay on earth or go? He didn’t acknowledge my questions. He was talking about other things.

It was just a dream, but it felt great anyway.

Several days before my mother died, she was moved to a new hospital room, and my dad and my sister didn’t tell me. I didn’t get to talk to her for a while, and I thought it was okay, because we would be reconnected soon. Then she lost consciousness for good, and I didn’t get to talk with her again. All I had was a saved answering machine tape with a message she had left months before. I feel regret over what happened. Thanks to the dream, I don’t feel that way about being cut off from Travis.

I have been thinking about the way healers do things. I’ve been on a Last Reformation outing, and I’ve watched Tom Loud and others on Youtube. They simply command illness and abnormalities to go, and they command flesh to be repaired. I’m doing this for Travis now. I hope you’ll do it, too.

I also curse the campaign of seduction. It wouldn’t do Travis much good to survive and then become part of the Wilkerson soul-grinding combine.

DEPORTED

Something very strange has been happening here at the farm.

I keep waking up and seeing spirits in my bedroom. I can’t see spirits as a general rule, but I have seen a few while wide awake, and I have seen more spirits just after waking up. I don’t know if spirits remain visible until you wake up, and I caught a few that failed to hide themselves quickly enough, or if there is something special about the instant of waking up that permits people to see spirits. Anyway, that’s when it has been happening to me.

One was shaped like a fat man. Sort of like the Michelin man. He was a clear shape, like the predator character in the Schwarzenegger movies. He had projections on the side of his head so he resembled a man in a bowler hat. It didn’t occur to me until just now that his profile was like my friend Travis’s. Travis has struggled with his weight.

Another was just a dark shape in an upper corner of the room.

After that, I woke up and saw a dark male shape in what looked like a black bodystocking. Even his face was covered. There was a bright red patch on his head, toward the left side, near the top. He was sitting on me, trying to kill me. I couldn’t even feel it. He was so weak he couldn’t make me feel a blow.

The last one I saw was shaped like a two-by-six. It looked like a dark grey two-by-six standing upright by the bed.

Spirits do not scare me. I hate them. I yell at them and tell them to get off my property in the name of Jesus. I always tell God I wish he would let me rip them to pieces. I would pull their eyes out of the sockets. I would do terrible things to them. I suppose God feels the same way and created hell for that reason.

Tonight it occurred to me that these might be the spirits that are trying to kill Travis. Maybe they’re coming here because they’re angry at me for frustrating them. Filthy things.

If this is the case, and they’re hoping for a break, they will never get it. I would give them tortures worse than hell if I could, until they were so terrified of me they would never come near me again.

Traditional churches don’t teach people how to fight spirits, but Paul said we were supposed to do it. He said our weapons were not carnal but mighty, to the pulling down of strongholds. “Carnal” refers to squabbling with human beings. “Strongholds” refers to spirit power. He said we don’t wrestle against flesh (men) but “against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.” The church doesn’t teach you this. It teaches you to be nice and work real hard. And to hand over your money.

I will never stop fighting these things. I ask God to give me grace to keep it up.

Technology is no Substitute for God

While I am praying and texting about my friend Travis, I am taking a break to post a video. I think people will really like it. It’s about a healing.

I’ve watched a bunch of healing videos on Youtube, and one of the healers I like best is Mark Hemans, the Australian melanoma survivor. He has healed a number of autistic kids.

Autism seems to be everywhere now. When I was 19, I made a friend, and his dad was suspected of having Asperger’s. Before that, I can’t say I personally knew anyone who was autistic or even seemed autistic. Now three of my friends have kids who have been diagnosed, and I don’t have all that many friends.

Is it over-diagnosis? No. I know a fair amount about two of the kids, and they definitely have problems. It’s not imaginary.

People blame vaccines and all sorts of other things for autism. To me, it seems demonic. I don’t see any reason to go beyond that explanation. I think the vast majority of mental problems come from being under the influence of spirits other than the Holy Spirit. Without the Holy Spirit, you have no mental or emotional immune system.

Mark Hemans is having online meetings because he can’t travel. The other day, a lady asked for prayer for her son. He had a lot of problems. He didn’t make eye contact. He didn’t show affection. He didn’t understand manners. After Hemans prayed for him, things changed. You can watch the video yourself. I can’t imagine how wonderful it must be to have a son suddenly begin communicating and displaying normal emotions.

There are a bunch of videos of kids being delivered from autism. It’s a wonderful thing to see.

Shooting Story Defies Belief

I have a little more information about my friend Travis, who was shot on April 9.

He is on a machine that helps oxygenate his blood. I forget the name. He is sedated. He has had an infection. We are now being told he has had no visitors. I hope that isn’t true. It is not possible to send him anything because the covid rules are far beyond reasonable.

I completely understand that the hospital doesn’t want covid sweeping through the trauma center, but no one is getting covid from cards or flowers. Emotional support is extremely important at a time like this, so depriving patients of contact is very harmful. There has to be a reasonable effort to balance risks. They could at least show patients cards and flowers briefly.

I am planning to send a card even if he can’t receive it. The nurses will see it, and they will know people care whether Travis lives or dies. Hospitals let unwanted people die. This is something many medical people would deny publicly with red, flustered faces, but it’s a fact, and medical professionals are much more open about it in private. Travis is costing the hospital a lot of money, no one is visiting him, and he’s black. Also, he has a gunshot wound, and that surely has to affect the way he is perceived by people who are tired of treating minority members who have been shot because of their own unwise behavior.

I wonder if they know the shooting was accidental.

I’m going to look for a big post card. If I send a card, the nurses will be able to read it and learn that Travis is not disposable and that he has a future.

It may well be that everyone at the hospital is pulling for him very sincerely, but when it comes to human nature, it’s generally not smart to assume the best.

I hope the information about visitors is wrong. He has a mother, a sister, and a brother who are perfectly capable of showing up. I would have expected his siblings to make it.

His dad, who is not yet 60, is in a nursing home due to MS. Travis was starting to have great success helping him forgive and turn to God. Now his dad is cut off from that, and he is isolated from an important source of help.

Nothing about the situation makes sense, and no one can do anything to change it by natural means. That means it’s a supernatural situation. The battle is taking place on a higher plane.

Satan hates Travis and wants to prevent him from fulfilling his destiny. Somehow he was able to get him shot and infected, and he has been able to keep him isolated. I can’t tell you exactly what God has been doing. Unlike Satan, he is not predictable. He may be showing Travis just how wretched and toxic his social circle and environment are. For a long time, God has been telling Travis to cut ties. Travis is reluctant to unload people he cares about. He has taught music to a lot of ghetto kids, and he has seen a number of them die or go to prison. He wants to make a difference, and it has been hard for him to admit he can’t. Free will is an obstacle that stops God himself. It’s no wonder the free will of people who don’t listen has stopped Travis so many times.

God is definitely showing Travis who his real friends are. A number of people are praying for him and looking for opportunities to help him. A young lady who graduated before him is doing wonderful things for him. She got his landlord to cooperate. She calls the hospital and updates me so I can report to other people. It’s too bad they’re not married. I don’t think he could do any better. She is very impressive.

When Travis gets out and has a lot of things to get squared away, his family will not participate to any significant degree. He will be helped by friends.

Travis might have to move up here for a while. That’s how badly his life has been shaken up. It would also be God in action. Getting out of Miami is important for Spirit-led people. There are plenty of people who pretend to be Spirit-led there, but the real children of God have been leaving for years.

If God has left you in Miami, it’s probably so you can suffer with the wicked, not so you can change your neighborhood.

I feel very good about the situation during my time with God. I’ll go out on a limb and say it: believe Travis will make it. Appearances don’t matter, because God is able to do anything. I hope the profit Travis derives from this ordeal is tremendous.

More

After posting, I got an unexpected text from Travis’s brother saying Travis was on life support and that they were rushing to the hospital. I texted everyone who is praying for him and gave them the news. I told his brother not to let the medical people give up on Travis.

Afterward, I learned some things from the young woman who is helping Travis.

His brother and mother have not responded to communications for two weeks. At some point, his mother said she was going to take over and didn’t need help. She didn’t put the young lady on the communication list.

The young lady says Travis is still on the same ECMO machine he was on yesterday. For all we know, his brother thinks an ECMO machine is the same thing as life support. That would be a distortion. While they are used to keep people alive, many people are treated with ECMO machines temporarily and then recover. Its main purpose is to assist recovery by taking the burden off the heart and lungs.

It is starting to look like his family got a nasty surprise today because they hadn’t been paying attention. His brother is reacting as though a sudden and likely final crisis had occurred, but it may just be that he is excited because he went a long time without news and then got an update that surprised him.

When my dad died, the ALF called me and said I needed to go to his side. Several hours later he was dead. It wasn’t a big shock to me because I visited him daily. It’s not clear that Travis is in a similar situation. Nothing is clear.

In the midst of the texting that is happening today, a friend of mine who is a nurse said she would be willing to be named as my health care surrogate. That was very touching. I am not afraid of death at all, but I don’t want to be tortured for months by care providers. I may take her up on her offer. She has more firsthand knowledge about looking after dying people than anyone I know.

I certainly wouldn’t want my sister to be named by default. If I become incapacitated, she needs to be as far away as existing technology can put her.

Maybe You Didn’t Have the Flu in December

In spite of the update on my friend’s continuing difficulties in recovering from a gunshot wound, I am continuing with life as I pray. I feel like going over the coronavirus news.

Here’s a nice development: a lot of people are settling on the term “covid” to describe the disease. I like it. “Coronavirus” isn’t a disease. It’s a general term describing a type of virus. There are coronaviruses that cause other illnesses. “COVID-19” is a pain to type. It has five capitals followed by a hyphen and a number. Tiresome. I’ve been calling it “C19,” which is about like “C-19,” a term that has appeared elsewhere on the web. I think “covid” will do very well, and it’s probably what people will call the disease next year.

It appears that the authorities are finally allowing themselves to believe covid was here earlier than originally thought. It’s surprising that they resist. The disease started in Hubei Province (which I have mistakenly called “Wuhan Province” many times), and while it was spreading there, among millions of people, many individuals from the area flew to the US. It would have taken a series of miracles to prevent covid from infecting people here last fall.

A lady named Patricia Dowd died on February 6. The official conclusion is that she was infected in early January, but the nature of her physical problems suggests that it was earlier than that. Her family says she was ill in early January, meaning she was probably infected in December.

An article about Dowd, who worked in an area with ties to Wuhan, suggests covid could well have been here in November.

It seems undeniable that covid was here much earlier than we have been told. Why, then, didn’t we see a major epidemic during the winter?

It certainly looks like covid spreads much more slowly than the flu. People say the opposite, but the numbers are what they are: 650,000,000 cases of flu, most of which occurred during a short period in the case of a widespread vaccination campaign, compared to 1/200 as many covid cases since last year. How can you reconcile those figures without admitting that covid is less contagious? The best explanation would be that it hit a great number of people, but it’s generally too mild to be noticed.

The Chinese did everything wrong, and they didn’t have a flu-sized epidemic.

Or maybe they did, and it wasn’t noticed because the illness isn’t that bad. Maybe we have had a big epidemic, too.

It’s confusing. If we had a big epidemic, where are the pre-March deaths? Why did deaths ramp up in March? Were these people who got sick much earlier? Were many of them really flu victims?

I am told that reporting deaths as covid-related brings big money into hospitals. Are care providers above fudging their data? Of course not. People are people, and hospitals are always hungry for money. Also, and perhaps this is most important, biased people do dishonest things without realizing it.

Doctors screw up very, very often, and they lie a great deal. Don’t bother contradicting me. I have a sister who is an opioid addict. People like her don’t have to go to illegal pushers. They walk into doctors’ offices and say something hurts, and they get what they want. They just have to know the right doctors, and drug addicts tell each other which doctors are easiest. They network. I’ve seen it personally.

Right now, doctors in America are prescribing marijuana, in a smokable form that damages lungs and gives off secondhand smoke, for people who show up and say they’re nervous or have headaches. They know they’re enabling addicts and abusers. They know what they do is dishonest.

If you want proof that drug users network and keep track of crooked doctors, just watch Drugstore Cowboy, a movie about a group of users who travel around in search of drugs. It was based on the actual experiences of a drug user. The phenomenon is nothing new. Many decades ago, celebrated addict William Burroughs wrote of compliant doctors, whom he referred to as “croakers.” Burroughs, an exceedingly evil and depraved individual, actually appeared in the film.

In addition to dishonesty motivated by financial concerns, doctors are also susceptible to political bias, and they overwhelmingly lean left. There is a longstanding leftist campaign to hype the epidemic in order to hurt Donald Trump. It’s a bad idea, because it appears to be driving people to him, but the campaign unquestionably exists. No honest person could deny it.

It seems like the conclusion best supported by the facts is that covid deaths are grossly overreported, and it may also be that they were underreported early in the year. If you put these things together, and you add increased testing in March, you end up with a graph that humps up suddenly during that month, and that’s what we got.

All I can do is guess. You have to take the known facts and make the theory fit them. You can’t make up your own reality to fit your theory. Unless you’re WHO or the CDC.

In my county, there were 193 known cases as of last night. Oddly, a bunch of local artists took the time to create sidewalk art nearly deifying medical workers. That’s delusional, given the extremely low risk these people face, not to mention the special benefits they and their families enjoy. They still have high-paying jobs, they got things like masks, alcohol, and hand sanitizer when the rest of us were barred, and very few of them have even seen a known covid case. This isn’t New York.

Weird. It seems consistent with the delusion that has overtaken the country as a whole.

Medical workers here have it great. They are extremely privileged. Still “heroes,” however.

I am now eligible for testing, and I’m thinking of doing it. They’re testing anyone who shows up. I would love to know whether the mystery disease I had in late January was covid. I don’t have a lot of faith in the tests, though, and as I have said before, if there is one good way to get covid in this county, it’s by going to a hospital unnecessarily.

Imagine getting tested, feeling great about a positive result and the attendant immunity, and then getting covid for real.

It is simply amazing how wrong and useless our medical and political establishments have been. Is this just my impression? On the one hand, Satan is definitely using this disease to train us to obey the Beast and worship our keepers, but on the other, look how incompetent they are.

Reuters says covid is helping Trump. It says people don’t think Biden will handle covid and the economy as well. I think Biden is hindered by two other facts: he is holed up in his mansion like the Omega Man, and he’s sinking into dementia.

No matter how you slice it, hiding in a bunker is not the way to make people believe in you. Trump’s approach is completely different. He still won’t wear a mask. He projects confidence and power. He’s on television all the time, taking punches and giving back better than he gets. Biden is only seen as a lonely, distant face, in basement-based TV interviews and depressing Youtubes no one watches, denying he’s a rapist.

Why are people saying “assault” instead of “rape”? What he’s accused of is rape. The fact that he is accused of using his hand doesn’t matter.

His Youtube channel is so unpopular, it comes up 8th in a Youtube search for “Biden.”

His latest video, uploaded yesterday, has 10,000 views. At the top of the Youtube “Biden” search list, there is a video from The Today Show. The title: “Michigan Governor Talks Reopening, Joe Biden Sexual Assault Allegations.” You have to see that headline before you can scroll down to Biden’s video. The video about Whitmer and rape has 44,000 views. You also have to pass this headline from The Hill: “Krystal and Saagar: Obama team SOUNDS ALARM on Biden’s failing basement campaign.”

“Basement campaign.”

That one has 419,000 views, and it was released within 24 hours of Biden’s video. The people in the video are liberals who think Biden can’t win.

I subscribe to a lot of Youtube channels. One of them put up a video today. It’s not as old as Biden’s video. The title? It’s “1000cc Trophy Kart Build Pt. 3 | Mounting the Rear Axle.” It has 1.5 times as many views as Biden’s video.

Go-karts. No kidding.

I don’t even remember why I subscribed to that channel.

A channel called SeekingWisdom Ministries [sic] has a video newer than Biden’s. “Final Countdown! True Disciples Rising!” This…I am not making this up…is a kid who makes Christian videos in his bedroom. It’s literally like Wayne’s World for Christians. I’m not knocking him. I subscribed. But what I say is true. He has 11,000 views. Biden is eating his dust.

Take a look.

Here’s something interesting I learned from a professional Youtuber. Subscribers mean absolutely nothing. You can have 10 million subscribers and still have an unsuccessful channel. Views are everything. Even if subscribers mattered, this kid still beats Biden handily. He has over 62,000 subscribers. Biden has 49,000.

Am I crazy, or is this news? It seems like a big deal to me.

Biden’s comments are turned off.

If you don’t know what that means, I’ll tell you. Turning off comments is something Youtubers do when they’re in big trouble. If comments are good for your channel, you leave them on.

Case in point: a few weeks back, a very angry young man with a gun channel attacked Paul Harrell, who is one of Youtube’s top gun gurus. This young man was on a firearms reality show, and he has won some prizes shooting revolvers. Harrell has won more prizes than he can carry, and he has great credentials unrelated to competition. The young man disagreed with Harrell’s ideas about defensive revolver shooting, which is something professional speed shooters don’t necessarily know anything about. In his attack, he said a lot of things that were very clearly wrong, and he did it in a very nasty way, calling Harrell at least one profane name.

Harrell put up a calm rebuttal video which was the equivalent of nuking the other guy from orbit. Harrell has 10 times as many subscribers, and a whole bunch of them went to the other channel to post vicious, yet often accurate, comments. Suddenly, the comments disappeared, as did the little graphics showing how many people liked and disliked the video.

It was, and still is, a sorry spectacle. Anyway, it helps to show why a channel would disable comments. It’s not a sign of confidence.

In that respect, it’s like hiding in your basement when you should be making campaign speeches.

Can’t he leave? Isn’t campaigning an essential business?

The White House has a channel which, effectively, belongs to Donald Trump. Comments are enabled. Donald Trump has a personal channel. Comments are enabled.

It looks like these two channels get relatively little traffic for famous channels, but they feature pretty boring content. Footage of rallies and so on. Trump’s channel gets considerably more traffic than Biden’s, however.

Biden should bail out and get treatment. Maybe doctors can do something for him. In a world that made sense, I would expect him to be removed from consideration, but this is not that world. Maybe he’ll make it to election day. What a mess that would be.

The election is 6 months off. Biden will probably be considerably and obviously worse than he is now. His dementia is not one of the slow kinds.

Maybe the DNC can’t get rid of him. After all, he is protected by the Constitution and the election laws. I suppose they don’t have the power to force someone to step down. If they did, they would have done it to Bernie instead of killing his campaign through sabotage.

So we have a demented, arrogant, extremely driven candidate who is the only person who can end his own campaign. That’s really something.

He backed down in 2016 because of pressure from Democrat bigwigs. Maybe he won’t do it twice. I think he lives in a Biden-centric universe, and he will probably insist on having his turn.

Obama came out and backed him. That would be hard to retract.

Interesting.

If he were elected, he would be the Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the presidency, except he would have a lot more power, and he would be much harder to control. How would we address the problem? Many dementia patients become combative and paranoid, and Biden is already showing signs of both problems. They also exhibit profound denial. He might have to be forced from office.

It’s an engrossing puzzle, but the bottom line is that whatever America’s problems are, we need to repent and pray. Our disease and leadership problems are the result of sin, period. If we want things to get better, we have to go out the same way we came in: via the supernatural route.