Plus Thoughts on How Women are Blowing it

Here’s an experience I never thought I would have: I just took my dad to a Vietnamese nail spa for a pedicure.

Interesting story: the Vietnamese manicure/pedicure industry began with actress Tippi Hedren. She was trying to help refugees from leftist oppression. Some Vietnamese ladies noticed her manicured nails, and they couldn’t get over them. Hedren hooked them up with some training, and the rest is history.

As I noted in another post, my dad has suddenly started having trouble taking care of his toenails. They have gotten thick and hard. I am not willing to become a toenail technician, and I lack the training anyway. I got him an appointment with a podiatrist, but to make sure he doesn’t hack up his toes before he sees the doctor, I located a nail salon and arranged for them to do what they could.

Here is what may be the most bizarre photo I have ever taken.

We got him into one of their NASA recliners, and I took the one next to it so I could interpret. He can’t hear, and the nail lady had a serious accent, so someone had to be the middleman.

I sent a photo to a friend of mine who is a nurse, and she noticed that his ankles are smaller where the socks used to be. Evidently something is amiss. He has never had edema. I’ll have to let his doctor know.

I know virtually nothing about pedicures, so I was surprised at the elaborate production I witnessed. They put his feet in a jacuzzi with a disposable liner. They trimmed his nails and ground them with a rotary tool. They did something or other to the skin on his lower legs, which was about like you would expect, given his age. They really cleaned him up. I was impressed. I plan to take him back several times a year, if the podiatrist signs off.

I had never been to a Vietnamese nail salon before, due to my not being gay. I once got a manicure in a Cuban place. It’s not the same. Cubans are angry, nervous people. The lady who worked on my hands was pleasant, but the ambience could not compare to that of the Vietnamese place. I can’t tell if Vietnamese people are angry and nervous or not, because they’re very quiet and polite, but however they may feel inside, they know how to promote an atmosphere of serenity.

Had I not dropped a sledgehammer on my little toe in the recent past, I would have been strongly tempted to give them a shot at my feet. My nails are affected by what I believe is a neoprene allergy, so they can always use some work.

I’m surprised we don’t see more men getting Vietnamese pedicures. When you go to one of these places, you see a side of women we have forgotten about in the West. Women have a special ability to soothe and heal, but these days they’re very busy #MeTooing everyone and insisting on showing us their tattooed artificial breasts in restaurants, so they seem annoying and somewhat dangerous.

Men hate being mothered, because it’s insulting, but they do like being assisted once in a while.

I don’t think modern American women understand how their image has suffered. I hear men talk when women aren’t around. We think a great deal about the abuse we have to put up with in order to be near women. We think about the danger of losing what we have worked for. We wonder if it’s worth it. We talk about the pleasures of sex, but we don’t talk much about how nice women are to us…because they aren’t. We don’t think about it very much. Not only is it not a conspicuous virtue of women which we discuss often; it’s barely considered part of their makeup.

That’s a shame, because if things were working correctly, we would think about it a lot. We would appreciate it. When we thought of women, instead of thinking about being criticized and exploited, we would think about the thoughtful things they do to make our lives easier. Raising kids and looking after houses don’t count, because women do those things for themselves. They marry men because we make those things possible.

When women divorce us, they generally keep the kids and houses. What does that tell you? They keep what they really wanted in the first place.

We have very low expectations. We hope for sex, children, and a certain amount of cooperation with the chores of life. We don’t talk much about affection and kindness, because we no longer expect those things.

When men discuss potential mates, they say they’re attractive, they work hard, they have good senses of humor, they’re smart…they say a lot of things, but they don’t say, “I know she’ll be there, always taking my side and trying to find a way to make my life easier.” I’ve never heard that, and I’m old! I’ve never seen it in a movie or in a book. How can that be? It’s amazing.

“Bridezilla.” Have you seen that word? Look it up. It speaks volumes.

One of my best friends always has a girlfriend or someone to date. When one drops out, a new one pops up. I hear a lot about the things he does for them. He fixes their houses. He mows their yards. He helps when their kids are put in mental institutions. He let one drive his car for months; it still has a vanity tag she designed on it. She was making $200,000 a year at the time.

I never hear him say, “Last week, Lulu took away my cell phone, made me a pie, and gave me a manicure.” They do absolutely nothing for him. Nothing. Never. I asked.

He’s typical. Think about it. You know it’s true.

This week I read about a woman who forced her fiance to finance a $100,000 wedding ring. Wonder of wonders: the engagement collapsed. Now she wants to keep the ring…which he is still paying for. That’s the American woman in 2018, summarized neatly.

A Vietnamese nail lady isn’t going to compensate for a bad marriage, and she won’t care about you. She would probably make a bad wife; a lot of men find Asian women sneaky and domineering. Those things are true, but at least she will spend half an hour reminding you that women have hidden potential. If men knew this, they would be lining up at nail salons, just to escape reality briefly.

I’m glad I got to do this for my dad. I was so tired of finding him annoying. Before he prayed for salvation, it seemed like I was subject to provocation a hundred times a day. I hated being angry. I fought it constantly. I was not interested in blaming him; I just wanted it out of me. Now I don’t have to fight it, and I can do thoughtful things for him without feeling resentful.

I don’t know what the podiatrist can do for him, but I’ll bet it won’t be a good substitute for a pedicure.

Childhood in Reverse

When you look after someone who has dementia, you will get hit in the face with surprises. I don’t think it ever stops while the patient lives. It’s impossible to predict all the things that will come up.

Demented people start wearing dirty clothes over and over. They decide they don’t need to bathe. They suddenly need diapers. They have to be denied access to car keys. They may start “sundowning,” becoming agitated and paranoid for no reason after sunset. You may have to elder-proof your house, hiding things that may get your patient in trouble. It’s like having a child who becomes less capable instead of more.

You will fail to take care of every problem, because often, you won’t know what’s happening until it’s in full swing. Example: the other day I realized I didn’t know what my dad was using to shave. It’s not natural for me to check on another man’s razor every week. He did it himself for about 70 years. I took a look, and I think he may have been using the same blade for weeks. I got him a bag of disposable razors, opened it, and left it on his bathroom counter.

Thank God he can still shave.

This week, he surprised me again. He started asking strange questions about toenail maintenance. He asked what he should use to trim his nails.

He has two toenail clippers, but he didn’t know it. I had to tell him where they were. He got them out and went to work, and he couldn’t cut his nails. He asked me to help. I thought he was just clumsy because of dementia, but I found that his toenails had grown thicker. The clippers don’t work very well.

How was I supposed to see that coming? I’m old, and this is the first time I’ve heard of anyone’s toenails getting thicker.

I checked the Internet, and sure enough, this happens to old people. I don’t know if it’s a fungus or what, but it’s common.

I had to spend two hours looking for a podiatrist. His primary care doctor refused to refer us to one. I don’t understand that. I’ve never had a doctor refuse to recommend a specialist. Referrals help doctors make money. Usually, they love to network.

I checked reviews, and I found that some of the local podiatrists were not popular with their patients. I read about rude receptionists. I read about dismissive podiatrists who bloviated at length and didn’t listen.

I’m not sure how a podiatrist can get a big ego. They’re just barely doctors. They don’t go to medical school. They go to podiatry school, which is not the same thing. I can tell you without researching that they do this because they can’t get into medical school. That conclusion is just common sense. Anyone who has the ability and credentials will try to get into medical school, not podiatry school.

I went to a podiatrist once when I was a kid. I had a wart on my foot, and my mother wasn’t having it. He put salicylic acid on it and waited for it to rot, and then he scraped it out. While he worked on me, he said gross things to my mother. He discussed his daughter’s female problems, and he kept telling us the little core of the wart looked like a sperm cell. He seemed to have an unprofessional interest in my mother, and he may have thought making icky remarks about sexual matters would put thoughts in her head. He kept an oily smile on his face while he spoke. Very strange. Anyway, he was extremely pompous, even for a doctor.

In my podiatrist search, I found a couple of doctors who looked okay, but they couldn’t see us for about two weeks. I couldn’t believe it. How can a podiatrist be that busy? Besides, we’re talking about a patient who can’t remember anything. My dad is going to be asking me about his feet several times a day until he gets treated, and if they can’t fix him in one visit, he will ask me about his feet every day until the symptoms go away. On top of that, God only knows what he might do to his toes while my back is turned. I can’t wait two weeks.

I gave up and called a place with mediocre reviews and a couple of doctors whose exotic-looking names put them solidly in the class of people who could not get into American graduate schools. Surprisingly, they gave us an appointment with a doctor whose last name is English. He will look at him on Monday.

This is a funny town. I can put my dad in an assisted living facility in two days, but getting help with an ingrown toenail takes two weeks.

He has also surprised me with sudden problems preparing food. Up until last week, he was able to use the stove and microwave. He made his own breakfast every day. The last time his occupational therapist came, she noticed he was having difficulty. Yesterday he tried to scramble eggs, and he set off the smoke alarm.

It was quite an experience. The alarm company called three times, using different numbers. I spoke to them by cell phone, and I gave them the code and told them everything was fine. Then they called our landline, which I never use. They told me the fire truck was on the way. Apparently, their policy is to ignore anything you say over a cell connection. They told me the had to hear from us via the “residence phone.”

I was planning on getting rid of the landline. I only got it for my dad, and sooner or later, he will stop caring about it. Now it looks like I have to keep paying for it in order to avoid visits from the fire department.

I got my dad some microwave breakfast food, and today we prepared it. We got Jimmy Dean’s McMuffin knockoffs. It was not a great experience. My dad had trouble with the wrappers and so on, and he complained about the challenge of getting the muffins ready to eat. I had to help.

Now what do I do? Maybe it’s time to start fixing him breakfast every day. If so, it’s going to have to be something quick that doesn’t make a big mess.

He also needs new shoes. Last year, I got him two pairs of top-notch waterproof slip-on shoes. They worked great. He needs tough, waterproof shoes because this is a farm, and he likes to walk. Suddenly, however, he is having problems putting the shoes on.

I can’t think of any shoe that will slip on easily and also stand up to the rigors of farm life. I suppose I should buy him slip-on sneakers and get used to replacing them.

Last week, I had to get him new pants. He hates throwing anything out, and his old pants were not looking good. He kept asking me about ways to fix them. I took him to the mall, and we got him 5 new pairs of no-iron pants. I should get him a few more.

I learned something distressing. The baggy, cheap-looking grey pants he had been wearing frequently turned out to be Zanellas. The last time he shopped for a blazer and pants, almost 20 years ago, I sent him to a high-end shop I used, and they sold him the pants. Zanella pants are handmade in Italy. They cost about $250 when he bought his. I had been throwing them in the washer over and over because it never occurred to me to check the label. I had to put them in the trash.

I had a strange thought: would he have decent pants for his funeral? Then I remembered his will. He insisted on cremation. I guess he can do whatever he wants with his dress pants.

When he dies, I am not going to buy a $10,000 coffin and fly it to Kentucky so it can be burned. His will forbids that, but I wouldn’t do it, regardless. His sister’s funeral taught me some things. They put her remains in a tacky plastic box that looked like a beer cooler. You can check something like that as baggage, and it probably costs under a hundred dollars, even with the shameless funeral home grief-extortion premium. I can’t see going with a plastic box, but I’m sure there are tasteful options that are far better than a coffin.

When my dad dies, I’ll be handling everything myself. I won’t have people to assist with the arrangements. I will look for options that make the process easier. Omitting the enormous casket will certainly help. I’ll be able to carry him to the funeral home myself, straight from the baggage claim.

I would never permit myself to be buried in an expensive coffin. It goes in a hole where no one will ever see it after I’m gone. You might as well put a gold Rolex on my chest and bury it with me. Idiocy. Wealth is for the living. The dead don’t own anything, and they aren’t here to enjoy wealth.

My mother’s coffin cost $7000. It was beautiful. I haven’t seen it since 1997.

I don’t like cremation, because God doesn’t like it, but I’m very much in favor of cheap coffins.

I need to sit down and make a list of bad things that are likely to happen as my dad declines. It’s shocking that websites for caregivers don’t do that. It’s such an obvious need. Dementia patients have similar experiences, so the changes are very predictable to people who have already seen them. Why not make a simple list so people can prepare themselves?

No one bothered to make a list for me, so I will do it myself. Maybe I’ll post it here so other people can find it.

Does it seem morbid or callous to talk about his end so bluntly? It shouldn’t. My dad has a fatal disease, and he’s not going to live long. If he had a brain tumor, no one would fault me for making preparations and discussing contingencies candidly. Dementia is different. People pretend it’s not a terminal illness. They live in denial, and their doctors encourage that.

Vascular dementia kills pretty quickly. It’s not like Alzheimer’s, which can take over a decade to do its work. You get your diagnosis, and something like 5 years later, you will probably be gone. There are a lot of cancers that take longer to kill, yet people see vascular dementia as a tolerable chronic condition, not the death sentence it really is.

I don’t play around with the facts. I have no relatives whose feelings might be hurt. My mother is gone. I have enough problems without jerking myself around.

If you’re not honest with yourself about a person’s imminent passing, you are likely to make dumb mistakes. You may buy a vehicle your charge won’t be able to get in and out of in six months. You may put your charge in a home with too many steps and so on. You may fail to get his estate arranged. You may end up handling funeral arrangements in a rush.

I may have made some bad calls already. I made my dad get a new (nearly) SUV last year, and it’s much better than a car, because he doesn’t have to squat to get in. A van might have been smarter, though, because an SUV won’t work well with a wheelchair or cart. I don’t know if he’ll be able to get out of the SUV in three months. What do I do then? Maybe I’ll look for a minivan with 150,000 miles on the odometer.

I may have chosen a bad dentist. Last time he saw her, she gave him a tooth-coating treatment that cost three figures. Naturally, they asked him, not me, for permission. I found out when I paid the huge bill. Hello? All he needs is to hold his dental structure together. He doesn’t need bleaching, veneers, new implants, fancy crowns, or a custom grill with diamonds in it.

I’m going to try another dentist.

You have to be careful around medical people. They will recommend expensive treatments a dementia patient can’t benefit from. A friend of mine is in the hospice business, and he told me about a shocking case where a doctor tried to give a pricey elective treatment to a dementia patient who was over 90.

Doctors and dentists love money; don’t let anyone tell you different. There are people who make a living teaching doctors and dentists how to find ways to charge more. Look it up if you don’t believe me.

My dentist back in Miami tried to charge me a separate fee to search my mouth for cancers. That was clearly a new “revenue enhancing” gimmick. I declined. The startling thing is that he was trying to get paid extra for doing something he was already ethically obligated to do. If a dentist sees a big discoloration in a patient’s mouth, he has an obligation to say something. I hope my old dentist isn’t ignoring lesions because people aren’t paying extra to be informed.

I want doctors to avoid giving my dad unnecessary treatments. One of his doctors said something about a surgery he didn’t need, and I turned it down. I can’t recall what the procedure was. The doctor didn’t think about what it would be like, trying to get a dementia patient to cooperate after a procedure. It would be very hard for me, and it would also be hard for nurses in a hospital. He has already proven he is capable of defying them and cursing them out.

I don’t need to spend two weeks trying to prevent my dad from pulling out the stitches on a new tummy tuck. That’s not going to do either of us any good.

Here’s what a dementia patient needs: tasty food, cleanliness, peace, human interaction, and prayer. It’s too late to worry about optimal nutrition, regular workouts, cosmetic dentistry, vacations, and tailored clothes. The primary goal is to make things go smoothly, and anything that interferes with that is toxic. Dementia patients need routine, and a row of fresh stitches is not routine.

I have the impression that he won’t be here much longer. He doesn’t eat as much as he used to. He was always a ravenous eater; now he merely overeats. In spite of overeating, he is slowly losing weight. He is losing strength in his legs; standing up keeps getting harder. I have the sense that his body is letting go of life.

I wish he had accepted Jesus a long time ago instead of last month. It has changed our relationship for the better, but we have a short time to profit from it, at least here on earth. I wonder what things would have been like if he had gotten off his high horse in 1990 or 1960.

My mother married an atheist, and you see what happened. If you’re married to an unbeliever, look and see what your future and the future of your children may be like. It will be your fault. Sorry to tell you that. Don’t run to God and ask him why bad things happen to a good person like you.

You can say it was all worth it because my dad finally came around. No; it wasn’t worth it. None of it was necessary, and God had something much better in mind.

Imagine what might have happened had my mother obeyed God and married a man of prayer. He would have treated her better. She might have been spared two miscarriages. She might have had better children, and they might have had better lives.

She might be alive today. God helps people quit smoking, and he also heals cancer.

She probably wouldn’t have had a child who was a sociopath, a narcissist, a defiant and hopeless addict, a pariah, and a felon. I doubt she would have had a son who had as many problems as I have had and who took as long to grow up.

I’m not sure my sister and I were ever supposed to exist. I can’t say the universe is better off because we do. The children my mother should have had would surely have been better.

In The Tragedy of King Lear, Gloucester said his bastard son Edmund “came something saucily to the world before he was sent for, yet was his mother fair, there was good sport at his making, and the whoreson must be acknowledg’d.” Then Edmund went on to cause a lot of suffering. As a person who was conceived out of bounds, I have to say I feel a sense of fellowship.

My mother made a foolish mistake, and it paid off in destruction and suffering that continued long after she died. I am still working through it today. That’s how it is. If you made the same mistake she did, you need to get to work right now and get whatever help is available.

I better make that list. Best to get ahead of these things.

Forgive me, readers, for I have sinned. My last blog entry was three days ago.

On September 22, my dad the angry atheist prayed for salvation, and later, I reported that there was an unexpected benefit to this startling event: the two of us got along better. I was less driven to avoid him. His frustrating mistakes and deliberate bad behavior tapered off, and when they occurred, they bothered me much less than they used to. I found I needed less solitary time for recharging.

I am here to report that things haven’t gone back to the way they used to be. My dad and I are spending more time together, and life is going pretty smoothly.

I suppose it makes sense that a child of God would look for opportunities to get away from a child of darkness and regroup. Spending time with God is beneficial. When he’s with you, he helps you. He tells you things. He drives away spirits that make you suffer. He may work miracles in your body. It’s only natural that spending time with beings from the other side would wear you down.

Something new is going on. These days, God’s presence comes to me in the afternoon and brings peace. The house starts to feel like a church. I have been in God’s presence every day for a number of years, but he hasn’t always brought peace with him. In the past, it was mainly power.

For years, I’ve been praying for God to make my house a place of peace, where people live in his presence. I hope what I’m seeing is the answer to those prayers.

The children of darkness don’t have peace. They may have money, looks, fame, admiration, and so forth, but it’s hollow because they don’t have the peace God brings. Many of them have to fight constantly to keep what they have. Many have to pay huge prices in order to get the outward appearance of success.

I now believe that if you don’t have peace, you must be under the influence of spirits that are against God. A lack of peace indicates that you have a spiritual issue that needs to be addressed.

God will allow us to have problems. He will allow us to be persecuted. Nonetheless, we’re supposed to have peace. If you feel rushed, worried, or pressured, a supernatural force is trying to control you. God doesn’t use things like anxiety and fear to motivate people who are cooperating with him.

When I think of the worst people I’ve known, I realize they tried to control me by taking away my peace. They tried to scare me. They pressured me. They laid false guilt trips on me. They tempted me to do things I knew I shouldn’t do. Rotten people make you feel rotten. They may not make you feel bad at first, but it will creep up eventually. Dependence on a toxic person is like dependence on drugs or alcohol. The first time you get drunk or high, it feels fantastic. The thousandth time, it’s unrewarding.

The reason it’s so easy for me to cut people out of my life is that I hate being manipulated more than I hate losing people.

Toxic people and toxic spirits are alike, because spirits run people. Spirits that are out to get you may make you feel blessed at first, but once they have control, they make you suffer for their pleasure.

I want God’s presence. I want his peace. I don’t want to worry any more. I don’t want to feel pressured.

If you’re in a close relationship with someone who isn’t on board with Jesus and the Holy Spirit, you need to cut the cord before the ties get too strong. You know better. You can’t say you weren’t warned, and God often closes his ears to people who deliberately do stupid things.

In other news, I’m still fooling around with tools. I think it’s time to move my machine tools here. I’ve decided where to put them. I have to get an electrician to give me an estimate on some 60-amp sockets.

I decided to get some CBN wheels for my bench grinder. CBN is cubic boron nitride. It’s extremely hard. Only diamond is harder.

When I started using machine tools, I learned I needed special grinding wheels in order to shape cutting tools for the lathe. Lathe tools are made from sticks of high speed steel (“HSS”) which is an amazing type of hardened steel that doesn’t soften when it gets red hot. When you shape lathe tools, you can use the cheap grey wheels that come with grinders, but they don’t work very well.

The best moderately priced choice is white bonded aluminum oxide. This is a substance made from crumbs of aluminum oxide held together with resin. A white wheel will shed particles as you grind, and that exposes new sharp edges to keep the wheel cutting well.

I probably spent $200 on a pair of white wheels, and they work fine on HSS. Problem: when you’re a woodworker as well as a machinist, you use tools that are made from tool steel. Tool steel loses its temper when it gets hot. I don’t mean it gets angry. It gets soft. White aluminum oxide wheels will work on tool steel (plane irons, chisels, and so on), but they will heat the metal fast, so you’re likely to burn your tools.

Another problem with aluminum oxide: because the wheels are friable, they change shape as you grind. You have to buy tools that reshape them. The best tool is a stick of carborundum. Diamond tools work faster, but they smooth the wheels too much, reducing their cutting ability. A smooth wheel generates more heat.

Here’s yet another problem: aluminum oxide is ceramic, and all ceramic wheels explode. Bench grinders are extremely dangerous. The wheels can develop cracks (grinding brass or aluminum can make them crack), and then they shatter. Flying fragments can penetrate your skull or your genitals. It’s bad.

Want more bad news? You can’t grind things on the side of a ceramic wheel. I know; I know. You’ve been doing it for years, and you’re still alive. You’re lucky. One day you’re going to get hurt. Pushing on the side of a ceramic wheel will eventually crack it.

Aluminum oxide wheels are problematic, so what’s the answer? Diamond wheels! That must be it. Diamond is super hard, and diamond wheels are made of metal with diamond particles stuck to them, so they can’t blow up.

Sadly, this is wrong. Diamonds are carbon, and carbon dissolves in iron, nickel, and cobalt. That’s why steel is possible. It’s iron with carbon dissolved in it. If you get diamonds hot while you grind a steel tool, they will start to dissolve into the tool. That’s bad for the wheel. Probably doesn’t do the tool a world of good, either.

CBN is very, very hard. When you can’t have a diamond, CBN is a good second choice.

Like diamond wheels, CBN wheels are metal disks with abrasive particles stuck to them. They don’t wear down like aluminum oxide. You never have to dress them to restore their shapes. Because CBN is very hard, it lasts for decades. Because CBN wheels are mainly metal, they conduct heat well. Grinding with CBN wheels generates heat, but they also carry heat away, so it’s hard to hurt a tool steel blade by burning it.

It’s pretty cool.

The only drawback to CBN is this: you can’t use them on soft steel. If a steel object isn’t hardened, the steel will clog the CBN wheel, and then you have a problem.

I’ve been fooling with planes and chisels lately. I have a Stanley 60-1/2 block plane I ordered, and I also have a flat-bottomed Millers Falls #14 plane. Both irons needed reshaping. I got myself an XX-coarse DMT diamond stone, but it’s very slow. I know I said you shouldn’t use diamond wheels with steel, but flat diamond stones are okay. They don’t get hot enough to make the diamonds dissolve.

I have a couple of other ways to fix the irons. I have a belt grinder and a bench grinder. The belt grinder is hard to use accurately with edged tools. The bench grinder isn’t much easier. On top of all that, they both burn tools.

I would like to accumulate more edged tools, but I don’t want to spend the rest of my life using slow abrasive methods to work on them. CBN looks like the answer to my prayers.

I ordered a pair of wheels. One is 180 grit, and it has a flat face and two flat sides. Because it’s not ceramic, it’s okay to grind on the sides of it. That will be very useful.

Ordinarily, you would use something like 80 grit for a coarse wheel, but CBN cuts much faster than aluminum oxide, so you can use a finer grit and get a better finish. BONUS!

The other wheel is 600 grit, and it has radiused edges. It’s crazy. You can use the flat face to sharpen things, and you can do pretty weird stuff with the rounded edges and the sides.

Because a metal wheel can’t blow up, you can take the guards off a bench grinder with CBN wheels. You still have to be concerned about getting caught in it, so you have to apply the relevant safety rules, but it’s not going to kill you.

I’m looking forward to using these wheels. I am not going to mess with any chisels or planes until the wheels get here.

The wheels cost a fortune, but only about 1.8 times what ceramic wheels cost. They will never wear out or explode, and I will never have to dress them. They’ll save me a ton of time, and they’ll do a better job. They’ll do things the ceramic wheels can’t do, period. It’s worth it.

I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that white wheels are obsolete for my purposes. Their only real virtue is price, and it’s an illusion when you consider the fact that ceramic wheels eventually have to be replaced.

What will I do when I want to grind unhardened steel? Simple. Belt grinder.

I’m planning to start using the bench grinder to shape all of my blades. A wheel makes an arc in a tool, so the profile is sort of hollow. It’s called a hollow grind. This gives you a bevel that doesn’t contact a flat stone along its entire length. The heel will touch the stone, and so will the edge, but the part between the heel and edge will not.

When you start a bevel on a grinder and then move to a flat stone, you end up cutting less metal on the stone. Only a small percentage of the bevel touches the stone, and you only have to grind that percentage off. It makes the work go faster.

You can also get a hollow grind on a belt grinder. Belts go around wheels and pulleys, so you can hold your bevel against a rounded surface. You can also buy a platen which has a radiused surface, so it’s like a small segment of a big wheel.

I was thinking I might try to shape a blade on my oscillating belt sander. This is an easy-to-use woodworking tool that moves a sanding belt up and down while it runs on two vertical pulleys. It might work. It’s very controllable. I have this feeling people don’t understand how useful this tool can be. I’m still getting the CBN wheels, though.

The weather is getting very nice now, so working outside and in the shop will be more pleasant. I wish I could have done more last year, but it seemed like I was always reeling from some calamity or other.

I’m also spending time fooling with math and physics. I’ve been doing problems. Strength of materials. Differential equations. Quantum mechanics. Whatever seems interesting. Maybe I can get back some of what the years took away, and adding some mechanical engineering would be great.

My engineering studies started very well, but I ran into an integral that showed me how much I had forgotten. Building up integrals from scratch used to be second nature to me, but I’m having to go back and re-learn it. It ought to go pretty quickly, since I’m just renewing abilities I used to possess.

I bought a new copy of a book I used to have: Amit Goswami’s Quantum Mechanics. I bought it as an undergrad because I hated our assigned text: Gasiorowicz. I left it in storage in Miami, and ants ate it. Made me really mad. I don’t need it, but it always bothers me when I think of the books I lost, so sometimes I replace one just to make myself feel better.

That’s it for today. I plan to sit down and see if I can integrate. if not, well, I’m still reasonably young. I can always take up something less challenging, such as writing legal memoranda or fingerpainting.

Every Spirit You Serve Has Power Over You

For a long time, God has been showing me the importance of sanctification. Part of that is praying in tongues, which brings you into God’s presence and increases his influence in you. Another part is confession and repentance. Christians–and I mean Bible-thumping, tongue-talking Christians who think God has solved all their problems–get sick and die because they won’t confess.

Many Christians hate to hear this. That’s understandable. A demon that can make you sick and tempt you to sin can also make you angry at a knowledgeable Christian who threatens its power.

Christians are full of demons. We let them in by living like unbelievers. We live according to the world’s standards, and God is just a side dish. If God is a side dish to you, you will be a side dish to him. You may benefit a lot from an adulterous relationship with God, but you will have a lot of problems you can’t solve.

Remember the kings of Israel and Judah. Things went well under the ones who did a thorough job of fighting idolatry. The ones who chose to tolerate a few shrines caused problems for their subjects.

A Christian who is listening to a demon or fallen angel may tell you things that sound nice. That’s Satan’s default method. If he can make himself sound holy, he can put you on the defensive and shut you up. Remember how Jesus rebuked Peter when Peter disagreed about the need for the crucifixion. Peter sounded pretty holy. He was defending God against filthy people who wanted to abuse him physically and kill him. Nonetheless, he was speaking for Satan.

When I talk about confession, Christians tell me, “We are not under condemnation! God’s grace covers all!” They think they’re helping, but they’re trying to poison me with contaminated candy.

I don’t want to hear that crap. I want to be supported when I do the right thing. I’m not condemning myself when I confess. I’m setting myself free and receiving power.

My former pastor is in the process of being convicted of child molestation. They keep moving his sentencing date. He’s on for October 5. He had many chances to avoid prosecution. He could have fought his demons and won. God could have given him favor with the mother who offered him mercy, had he taken her up on it. God could have caused the cops, the prosecutor, or the judge to make mistakes that would have prevented his conviction. He would not listen.

His uncle came to visit me recently. We’re on very good terms. Pastor Albert drove him out of the church, just as his wife did me. He told me something Albert said. There was a service, and things were happening around the altar. When Albert walked away, he said this: “I think we have so much grace, we don’t even have to confess.”

He’s going to prison. His wife is dying from a brain tumor. His son is a drug dealer who hates God.

Albert’s problems could have been avoided through confession and repentance, but he was too proud to listen.

His wife’s former brother-in-law Ozzie had the same attitude. He had breast cancer. We prayed and fasted for him. We cast the disease out. He still died. I used to tell him repentance was crucial. He gave me the TBN happy talk about how there is no condemnation for us, misapplying scripture. He probably thought he was right on the day he died.

Without exception, the people who try to “correct” me are people who have major problems they can’t get away from. Meanwhile, I get healed right and left, and I am taken care of financially. I get revelation. Prayers get answered. Enemies get defeated.

Who are you going to listen to? The person who got results, or the person who is still on the bottom?

I’ll be blunt. No one should preach from a deathbed. No one under the age of 85. Don’t coach when you’re in the process of losing.

I’m a bad person. I’m not kidding. I have said, thought, and done all sorts of vile things. God doesn’t help me because I’m wonderful. If I were wonderful, I would not need his help. I’m not saying I’m better than people who can’t get help from God. I’m saying I get better results because they persist in mistakes I have decided to stop making.

I get more help than many people who are better human beings than I am.

Grace doesn’t mean you can do whatever you want. It means it doesn’t matter what you did in the past. You’re not allowed to continue sinning without consequences, and cancer and other major problems are all on the table.

God just helped me deal with a problem I needed to acknowledge. I was angry at unbelievers. The other day I wrote a piece about the new peace between my dad and me. I said I thought it came from the fact that God sowed enmity between his children and Satan’s. My dad was an unbeliever, and he was very, very trying. He made me angry all the time.

I was right to conclude that there was enmity between us because of God’s curse, but I was wrong to think it explained my own anger. My dad wasn’t a believer, so it made sense that he would be angry at God’s children and be our enemy. I, on the other hand, belonged to God, so I was not entitled to be angry at the lost. My dad was my enemy, but I did not have permission to be his.

A long time ago, God gave me this phrase: “I am no man’s enemy.” Now I see what it means.

I used to fight the anger I felt toward my dad, but my victories didn’t last long. I had to fight over and over. Today I realized I had to cast out the spirit that made me angry at all unbelievers, not just my dad. It made no sense for me to work hard to love my dad while making much less of an effort to love other children of darkness.

Unbelievers are very annoying. They say vile things about us. They persecute us like crazy. They get us fired from jobs. They hurt us physically. They murder us. Their hatred and aggression will always be with us. We have to react correctly. We have to stop screaming back. You don’t have to pal around with the lost. You should avoid dealing with them unnecessarily. You should not accept them; that’s not expected. But you shouldn’t rail against them or carry corrrosive anger toward them.

If my enemy does something to torment me, that’s a victory for him. If I carry anger because of it, and I get sick or die as a result, that’s another victory. I have to play to win.

Here’s a neat Tom Fischer video in which he talks about the way diseases come back to Christians who live in rebellion instead of confessing and repenting. I hope it brings you success and supremacy.

Today I am Casting Stones

I had a couple of healings this week.

The day after my dad prayed for salvation, a package arrived from Amazon. I had ordered a rawhide hammer. This is a very heavy steel hammer that holds two rawhide faces. Very useful. The hammer came in a box.

I put the box on a kitchen counter about 4 feet off the floor, and it slipped off and fell on my left little toe. The heavy steel head of the hammer was in the end that hit me. The only thing between me and the hammer was thin cardboard. I was barefoot, and the floor is hardwood.

You might say it hurt.

Later on, my foot turned several different colors, including vivid blue, bright red, and purple. My little toe took the blow, but the colors spread over a wide area. Of course, I prayed a lot, and I started right after the hammer hit me. I always pray as soon as I receive an injury, and sometimes I don’t even curse first. The sooner you attack, the more likely you are to prevent problems from setting in.

I have a lovely photo of my foot, which I took in case I wanted to document a healing, but I will spare you. It would ruin your next meal.

Apart from the initial pain, it wasn’t that bad. I was able to walk without suffering, although I couldn’t wear one of my pairs of boots because of the swelling.

Early the next morning, I awoke with some pain, so I spent a good long time praying. I went back to sleep, and when I woke up, the colors in my foot were muted compared to the day before, and the pain was gone. I was no longer nervous when I walked without shoes. You know how that works. After you bang a toe on something, the thought of hitting something else is terrifying.

My foot still looks bad, but I have to work it pretty good to make it hurt.

Sometimes I quit praying after I get most of what I asked for. My foot wasn’t totally healed, but it was well enough to make me feel that I didn’t want to sit and pray any more. Maybe I should push for the full healing every time.

After I hurt my foot, I started having symptoms consistent with the presence of a kidney stone. I didn’t have pain. I had a strange feeling that I wasn’t well. You will understand if you’ve been there. I also had some other symptoms.

I wasn’t worried. If memory serves, this was my 6th stone. The first and second ones were not much fun because I didn’t know God very well. After that, God healed me consistently. I prayed in a church parking lot and felt one move, and then it passed. I prayed in church about another one, and I passed it in the men’s room. I prayed in church about the next one, and it also passed in the men’s room.

Last night I asked friends to pray for me, and I also drank 4 beers and a bottle of water to help things along. Beer is great for moving kidney stones. This morning the stone passed. I still don’t feel quite normal, but I suppose that’s to be expected when something has been poking at your insides for several days. I guess there could be more stuff lodged in there, but I doubt it. That has never happened to me before.

I know why I got the stone. I haven’t been drinking enough water. I drink purified water to prevent stones, but I tend to put off opening bottles because I don’t like going to the store and buying more. Kind of a counterproductive regimen.

I got healed, so I have a duty to glorify God. That’s why I’m blogging right now.

I hate going to doctors. I consider it proof of failure. God has healed me of lots of things, and it’s the correct way to get healed. He doesn’t charge. He doesn’t leave scars. There are no side effects. He will even show you why you had the problem in the first place so you can change and avoid future issues. Doctors charge too much. They screw up. They cause pain and humiliation. You know how it works.

Doctors tend to be very patronizing. They talk to patients as though they were mentally retarded. As a person of faith, I don’t want to put myself in situations where I end up discussing prayer and demons with doctors. They don’t know the first thing about the supernatural.

Tell a doctor you’ve seen a spirit, and he will diagnose you as insane, and a judge will back him up. A modern shrink wouldn’t hesitate to put Jesus in a mental institution. He talked to spirits and claimed he worked miracles. I don’t want to be around doctors unless I have to. They live in a different world, and it’s a world of blindness and delusion.

It always disturbs me when Christians say, “God will use doctors to heal you.” Okay, yes, that happens. But it’s not divine healing. Divine healing is miraculous. If a Christian has to go to a doctor to get help, it means he failed to get the supernatural healing which is his inheritance. Surgery and drugs aren’t “miracles,” because man can take credit for them.

Life is hard because we rely on carnal tools instead of getting supernatural help. Christians aren’t supposed to work 12-hour days at jobs they hate. They’re not supposed to push themselves. Hard work is a curse, and it takes you away from God. It makes you a prisoner who can’t respond to God when he calls on you, and it makes it very hard for you to spend adequate time in prayer.

The worse your relationship with God is, the more you will have to rely on weak, carnal tools. Your enemies are spirits, and they use powerful supernatural tools. It’s as if you’re going up against a machine gun with a wooden spoon. A Christian should never brag about working hard. It’s like bragging about paralysis or deafness. Besides, God hates bragging.

God told me this: we become arrogant through striving in the flesh. I also heard this while I was praying the other day: “You fought for David.” Remember the story about David witnessing the spirit army that fought his enemies? We are not supposed to fight alone.

God wants us to have supernatural tools that make life easier. When we reject them, we have to use carnal tools. If you don’t have a machine gun, pick up your wooden spoon and do your best, but you should be looking for the machine gun. All of us should be looking for supernatural healing. It beats spending a lot of money and being cut up, pierced, rectally violated in front of strangers, and drugged.

Elisha was ill when he died. I don’t know what happened, but my guess is that he had some sort of iniquity that opened a door. He was able to heal others and raise them from the dead, so he should have been able to heal himself. If I can do it, surely he could.

I hope I don’t have any healings this coming week. By that I mean I hope I don’t need any. Protection is better than healing, any day.

I was about to wrap this entry up, but there is more. Danged if I didn’t just pass another stone. Maybe there are more to come. Anyway, they’re emerging.

If you feel like praying for me, I would appreciate it. I hope I never see another urologist or x-ray technician.

A Thoughtful Enemy is Still an Enemy

I don’t want to get stuck to the tar baby known as politics today, but I have a few comments about the underhanded effort to keep Brett Kavanaugh off the Supreme Court.

Alan Dershowitz is calling for an FBI investigation, and he says the confirmation vote should be delayed. This looks bad, right? Dershowitz has supported Trump against the special counsel over and over. He must be a Republican, and if a Republican isn’t supporting Kavanaugh, something must be fishy.

I’m sure some people are saying that, but Dershowitz is a liberal. He has taken issue with the special counsel’s tactics based on his concerns about corrupting our justice system. He’s not doing it because he supports Donald Trump. He voted for Hillary. He would be very disappointed to see a new conservative justice appointed.

The fact that someone as liberal as Dershowitz has been standing up for Trump merely shows how far gone the left is. He felt he had to speak. It doesn’t mean he’s on our side. He has made it clear that he is not, and he seems frustrated that so many people don’t believe him.

Democrats want to push the confirmation back as far as possible. They might take the Senate in the midterm elections. If they can do that, Kavanaugh is dead, and they might be able to prevent Trump from putting any new justices on the court. They could also kill his other judicial picks. It might be the start of an era of total leftist domination of two branches of our government.

Dershowitz is unquestionably hoping to see the Senate go blue, so I wouldn’t get too excited about his opinion on the Kavanaugh confirmation.

I would support an investigation if it were August. It would surely help Kavanaugh, at least in the minds of reasonable people. The more digging is done, the more obvious it will be that Kavanaugh is telling the truth. The problem is that Dianne Feinstein deliberately ran out the clock, withholding the Ford accusation until it would jeopardize Trump’s chances of appointing a new justice. You can’t sit on your hole card for weeks and then pretend it’s acceptable to ask for an additional lengthy delay.

Moving on to another point, the American Bar Association recommends that the Senate wait for an FBI investigation. That’s important, right? After all, it’s a bar association.

Wrong. The ABA is not a bar association, in spite of its name. They can’t regulate lawyers. They can’t issue or revoke licenses. No lawyer has to belong. I joined in law school to get some discounts on things, but I quit as soon as I could. Why? The ABA is notorious for its leftist activities. Of course they’re against Kavanaugh and Trump. It would be a miracle if they took any other position.

Look the ABA up and find out about their positions. You’ll quickly realize their recommendation carries no more weight than one coming from Al Sharpton.

I could start a club tomorrow and call it a bar association. I could call it the Official Bar Association of the United States of America. No one could stop me. I could accept conservative lawyers only, liberal lawyers only, or even people who weren’t lawyers at all. I could use the name for a strip club and only accept exotic dancers. Don’t get too excited by the ABA’s important-sounding name. It’s just a bunch of liberals who somehow got a lot of influence over law students and a certain segment of America’s lawyers.

I can’t think of a single attorney in my family, judges included, who belonged to the ABA.

What does it mean if the GOP pushes for a quick Senate vote on Kavanaugh? Does it mean they hate women? Does it mean they think an investigation will hurt Kavanaugh? Of course not. It means they want to get him confirmed or gone quickly, so they have a chance to get someone else confirmed before they lose the Senate. They need to move fast. It won’t be that long before newly elected leftists senators, if any, will be sworn in.

The GOP needs to get the vote done now, for better or worse.

They should remember this: they will be hated and slandered no matter what they do. The left has become so unhinged, it’s impossible to placate them. The GOP should quit trying to appease the unappeasable and do what’s right for the country. Maybe some of them realize that.

God has shown me an important principle: you have to let people make peace with you and make amends. You don’t do it for their sake. You do it in order to avoid becoming a hate-filled chunk of stone who is not worth talking to. If you want allies and friends, you have to allow your enemies to be reconciled with you. Leftists don’t understand this. They don’t provide due process, and they don’t accept apologies. They don’t acknowledge atonement. They’re not smart enough to realize this destroys our motivation to work with them.

Kavanaugh SUPPOSEDLY committed a misdemeanor around 40 years ago, as a minor, and since then, he has behaved beautifully. His accusers are not credible. Their witnesses contradict them or refuse to back them up. He has a calendar which shows he was not present when his first accuser says she was molested. Sane people wouldn’t have dignified her claims with a response, and even if they were true, it’s ridiculous to persecute a middle-aged, reformed man over something he did at 17.

You can’t win with leftists. They’re all over social media reviling him as though Kavanaugh had been proven guilty, and as if his alleged misdeed were right up there with cannibalism (or killing unborn babies). The GOP can’t get a fair shake, so they should do what they think is right and take the heat for it.

Leftists always turn on people who threaten their power. Remember McCain? He was a hero to leftists because he constantly stabbed his party in the back. Then he was nominated as the GOP candidate for president, and suddenly, he became a dangerous reactionary throwback. People said he was senile. Then he got sick and died, and suddenly he was a hero again. It’s a waste of time trying to curry favor with these people. They never give an inch.

The Senate should vote and get it over with. If Kavanaugh is confirmed, the kerfuffle will end. A year from now, leftists will be hollering about something else. They will still libel him whenever possible, but like Clarence Thomas, he will be a back-burner enemy unworthy of much effort.

I’m a Sucker for Misdirection

I have to quit digging into the fuss over Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. Carnal people are fighting a carnal battle, and I’m allowing myself to be dragged into it. Christians are supposed to focus on the supernatural. We’re supposed to fight principalities and powers, meaning spirits, and I’m getting worked up over the bickering of people who are as low and worldly as monkeys. They have no idea who the real enemies are or how to fight them.

If leftists are firing salvos of lies in order to destroy unborn children, we should realize it’s because they let themselves be controlled by demons. They don’t know the Holy Spirit. They don’t hear God’s voice. They wander around lost, spitting poison at those who support God. Often we return the favor.

People who serve demons are like sharks’ teeth. Sharks have teeth that grow in rows that move forward over time. When a front tooth falls out, the tooth in the row behind it moves up. We’re trying to pull teeth when we should be neutralizing the sharks. Defeat one human being who serves the devil, and another one will be found to take his place.

The Bible says we are more than conquerors. A conqueror defeats. A person who is more than a conqueror turns enemies into allies. America is full of leftists who are on their way to hell, and we are no better than they are. The difference between us is that we accepted forgiveness and help. We should be using supernatural tools to defeat leftists, turning the battle over to God, and we should be fighting the spirits that hold them captive.

If enough Americans knew God, leftism wouldn’t be a problem here. Leftists would be few and powerless, as they used to be. We gave God’s human enemies power by turning away from the only one who ever gave us victory.

I should be writing about the things God is doing, instead of complaining about blind, venomous people who rot our nation.

Last Saturday, my dad prayed for salvation, and our whole relationship changed. I should be writing about that every day.

The improvements I started seeing after my dad prayed seem to be permanent. He doesn’t drive me crazy any more. We spend more time together. I think more about helping him and less about avoiding provocation.

Yesterday I waited for him to get up and dress so we could have breakfast together. I took him to Cracker Barrel, and we talked. He still says a lot of the same repetitious things, but he’s not goading me any more. I don’t look at the time on my phone and wonder how much more time I should put in.

After breakfast, I took him to the mall to get some new pants. You have to keep an eye on clothing when you care for a dementia patient. They will wear rags if you let them. For some reason, he needs shorter pants now, and the cuffs of some of his old pants have become worn from dragging and catching things. He has pockets that are developing holes, too.

I made the mistake of parking near Macy’s. When we went in, I saw that they had a lot of upscale stuff but nothing suitable for my dad. He doesn’t need Polo. He needs moderately priced pants of decent quality. Things I buy him may not last long, so there is no point in spending a lot.

We had to walk across the mall to another store. That took a while. I would walk a bit, and then turn and wait. Sometimes he fell 50 feet behind me. I had to remind him to take long steps and avoid looking at the ground. His physical therapist is trying to teach him those things.

At another store, they were selling no-iron pants for two-thirds off. I couldn’t believe that. I had him try some on to figure out his size, and we bought three pairs for under $60. If they work out the first time he wears them, I’ll run back and get three more.

I wondered if these were the last pants he would ever need.

Trying on pants took a long time. I got him slip-on shoes, but they’re not as easy to put on as I had hoped, and sometimes it takes several minutes for him to get his feet into them. I sat on a chair in the changing area and read the news on my phone.

On the way back to the car, I had him stand at an exit, and I told him I’d get the car and come back for him. When I drove back a minute or two later, he had started walking, so I had to stop in the road to get him.

It’s very strange, not being provoked all the time. It reminds me of the story about Jesus releasing a woman who couldn’t stand straight. In the past, I had to reject and defeat anger many times every week. It was as if my dad were firing flaming arrows at me. Every time I put one out, another one came over the wall. That’s not happening any more.

You have to avoid unequal yokings. It’s not something you have a choice about. They will make you suffer. I yoked myself to a man who hated God, and it caused me a lot of problems. When I spend too much time thinking about politics, I’m doing the same thing. I’m yoking myself to people who get off on being angry and malicious.

Yesterday, I realized something. My mother married an atheist. That’s what ruined our family. I had never seen it that way before, but now I see that it’s obvious. There was an unequal yoking, and it paid dividends of failure and stress. If I had had two Christian parents with good prayer lives, my life and my sister’s life would have been completely different. We would have been raised in love and peace instead of fear and violence.

Don’t date an atheist. Don’t date a Jew, apart from Messianics. Don’t date a pagan, a Mormon, or a Jehovah’s Witness. Don’t date anyone who worships Mary or “saints.” If you do, you’re poisoning your future. When you go home at night, you have to be among people who don’t play for the other team. You have to be with people who are on your side. You can’t expect things to go well when you bunk with your enemies.

Christianity can’t be reconciled with any other faith. It’s wrong to try. Jesus had no tolerance whatsoever for other religions, and you can’t change the rules.

Paul warned us, and my mother didn’t listen. It caused decades of needless pain. It wrecked her legacy.

Sure, my dad finally came around. At 86. After his wife killed herself with a nicotine addiction. After his daughter destroyed herself. After I did my best to ruin my own life. God wanted to prevent those things.

I’m glad my dad made it, but think how things might have been had my mother married a Christian. My dad’s belated salvation doesn’t make my mother’s choice acceptable or right.

I was in a sexual relationship with an atheist. I can’t believe I was that stupid. It ended up causing me a lot of misery. Thank God it was cut short. I have often thought about the suffering marriage would have caused, and it’s scary.

I’m still reading Pat Conroy’s The Death of Santini. It’s a history of his family, beginning after he became famous. It’s a disturbing read. It’s a book about a destroyed family. The Conroys are just as tormented and crippled today as they were in 1960.

One would expect the son of a wife-beater and child abuser to be soft-hearted and repentant, but that’s not Pat Conroy. He depicts himself as obnoxious and violent. In his book, he threatens to beat his siblings. He threatens to beat a building manager who has to evict his grandmother. He did these things long after he became wealthy and famous.

His brothers and sisters are not success stories, either. He writes about his schizophrenic brother, Tom, who hated him for trying to help. Tom jumped off a building. He writes about his sister Carol Ann, who also had mental issues and who raged at her family all the time.

His dad didn’t change. He denied the things Conroy wrote about him, and he behaved better in order to prove Conroy was wrong. He continued to bluster and deflect.

The Conroys come off as a family with very little class, if you want the truth. The father beats everyone. The mother beats Carol Ann with a broom. The grandmother sleeps around and drinks herself unconscious. The sons are angry and bitter. If there is a moment of redemption in the book, I haven’t seen it yet. Instead of coming together, the Conroys merely squelch their hatred and force themselves to get along in spite of it. That’s not what God wants for us. He wants to take hatred out of us.

The Conroys were Christians, but they were not Spirit-filled. They were Catholics. Conroy’s uncle was a priest who beat him when he was a child. Catholicism doesn’t teach people how to know God personally or how to tap into his power and become like him in their hearts. It’s very sad. They made an effort to please God, but they weren’t shown how to make it work. The church helped destroy them.

They were worldly people, and worldly people don’t heal.

I wouldn’t have wanted to know Pat Conroy. He was apparently quite a jerk, for lack of a kinder term. I want to be less of a jerk, and I don’t want jerks in my life.

My own experience tells me there is something better. God changes relationships on a very deep level. I’m thankful for that. Hosea said God’s people perished for lack of knowledge, and I am very grateful for whatever knowledge I have that the Conroys didn’t.

My dad is changing, and that’s wonderful, but he has taught me never to go near anyone else like him. Never, never, never, NEVER. I don’t care what you claim you can offer me. If you’re on the other side, you will keep your distance. I can do good things for you. I can treat you with courtesy and respect. I can pray for you sincerely. That’s all you get. You can’t be in the inner circle. It’s not worth it. I’m too old for it.

If you’re a young Christian, think about the company you keep. You are making choices that could have evil results that last for centuries. If you choose to go against God, he may not listen to your cries for help when you get what you deserve. He let the Jews walk in the desert for 40 years because they wouldn’t listen.

It’s amazing how ignorant we are. It’s a wonder our problems aren’t much worse. We don’t understand the basic principles that bring us success and protection.

Innocence is no Excuse

It’s time to confess. I am not fit to sit on the Supreme Court. Decades ago, when I was in high school and college, I went to parties where women may have been gang-raped.

I don’t actually know of any rapes that occurred at parties I attended. That’s no excuse. They may have occurred. I’ve been to parties in houses, university buildings, dormitories, and apartment buildings, and I couldn’t see everything that happened while I was there. For all I know, women were being raped in closets, bedrooms, and stairwells.

Brett Kavanaugh’s latest accuser says he was present at a party where she was raped by several men other than Kavanaugh. I can’t point the finger. I’m just as bad as he is, and if you ever went to a party when you were young, so are you, even if you’re a woman. To be present is to be an accomplice.

She also says Kavanaugh and his pals put alcohol in punchbowls, in order to make women more cooperative. I’m guilty, too! I have put vodka in punch women drank, not that it ever got me anywhere. Kavanaugh and I are just like Bill Cosby.

I’ve bought women a number of drinks. I admit it. I gave them alcohol, and I didn’t do anything to prevent them from drinking it. I never handed them printed disclaimers, listing the possible consequences of drinking and drunkenness. I didn’t bat drinks out of their hands. I never held them in headlocks and forcibly dragged them away from their drinks.

Clearly, putting alcohol in punch at parties is extreme and unusual, and it’s a practice which cannot be tolerated. It’s unheard-of. Until I read about Kavanaugh, I thought I was the only one who had thought of it. All over America, people must be shocked to learn that things like this happen.

I put liquor in punch, and I was present when all sorts of felonies, for all I know, were committed. Maybe people were murdered and then dragged off and buried quietly. Maybe friends of mine went off by themselves to use the phones to commit wire fraud. Maybe they brought little printing presses to parties and ran off sheets of counterfeit bills.

Actually, now that I think of it, I was present in a dormitory when at least one felony was committed. When I was a freshman, a guy named Kerry called a girl on the phone, said he was me, and threatened her. I don’t remember. The senior who was paid to live on our floor burst into my room in the middle of the night with someone else (can’t remember who), turned on the light, and started asking me if I had made the call. They asked if I had threatened to rape and kill someone.

Yes, of course I had. On my own phone, from my own room, using my real name, with three witnesses trying to sleep in the same small suite, because I am stupid and very curious about prison food.

I don’t recall how I knew it was Kerry. Maybe I’m wrong about that. He was a messed-up guy, and he was my prime suspect. It may have been a guy named Greg, or maybe they did it together. Maybe it was someone else.

Kerry got involved with a girl called Rude Ruth who used to use the men’s showers. She eventually moved into his room, and his roommate had to leave. I remember the time a bunch of people from our floor went to a Pink Floyd concert and dropped acid. Kerry came back and assured the rest of us that he had seen God.

Greg was like a character from a Kevin Smith movie. He was the king of prank phone calls. He liked calling foreign students and telling them they hadn’t paid their phone bills. I listened in once. He handed the call over to me without warning, saying I was the president of the phone company, a Mr. Cosmo Bogus.

For some reason, a few people I knew had invented a game in which they called people, said they were me, and threatened them. No idea what that was all about. They even did it during the spring of my sophomore year, while I was in another state on medical leave. Anyway, I was present on campus some of the time when these things happened, so I can’t be a Supreme Court justice.

Kavanaugh’s new accuser says she felt like there MAY have been drugs in the punch she drank. She’s not sure. She says, “I may have been drugged.” It seems she can’t tell the difference between vodka and a huge dose of Quaaludes. That’s unusual.

Her strange remarks, if true, mean she is open to two possibilities: 1. she was drugged, or 2. she got plastered of her own free will and then blamed the people who gave her drinks. Why is option 2 newsworthy, and why would the boys be at fault if she got herself drunk?

Talk about reasonable doubt. When the victim can’t even stand behind her own accusation, there is no way the rest of us should dignify it with support. Whether she got raped is a separate question, but the spiking/drugging allegation is facially untenable.

I don’t know if it’s economically possible for a college student to spike punch with Quaaludes. You need at least a couple of pills per victim in order to accomplish anything, and a college punch bowl holds five or more gallons. Five gallons, 20 quarts, 40 pints, 80 cups…so call it 160 pills per bowl. Not cheap. And the men who drank it would be drugged too, which kind of defeats the purpose.

I suppose a clever rapist would spike individual drinks. That’s a different kind of situation, though. College punchbowls are filled by groups. Spiking a punchbowl would require a conspiracy, in order to prevent everyone at the party from passing out at 10 p.m. Spiking individual drinks would be done by one or a few individuals, probably secretly. If some low-life were sneaking around putting pills in the drinks of girls he had selected for himself, Kavanaugh probably would not have known about it.

He was present, though, so he’s guilty. So are all the women who were at the parties. They were present.

We’re supposed to believe this lady was raped by multiple assailants and that she didn’t follow up until 2018. Maybe it happened, but it’s hard to believe. Even in the mid-80’s, rape was considered a serious matter, and the police were more than happy to investigate complaints.

How crazy are the accusations going to get? If being present when something bad is done disqualifies you from holding government office, no one stands a chance. Maybe there are a couple of Mormons who could squeak by, but the rest of us? No way!

I’ve seen drugs being sold. I’ve seen beatings. I’ve seen thefts. When I was in college, I heard all kinds of gross language and saw revolting behavior. Sometimes I participated in the language and bad behavior. Thank God I’ve never run for office.

Aren’t people allowed to change and be forgiven? Even if Kavanaugh is somehow culpable in these far-fetched stories about trivial misdeeds (some committed by other people), does anyone really care what he did when he was 18? Maya Angelou was a prostitute. Mark Wahlberg was a violent racist street punk. Will Smith was charged with aggravated assault. Do we ever get to move on?

Democrats have a jihadi-like fervor when it comes to legal protection for those who tear unborn babies apart in the womb. They think anything they do in order to keep the unborn unprotected is morally acceptable. This is the basis for their deranged attacks on Kavanaugh.

I think Christine Ford is lying, and I think the gang rape accuser is either lying or making a very dishonest, immoral effort to connect Kavanaugh to something he had nothing to do with.

New Helpers Leaving Soon

For some time now, I have been driving to finish up some tax and bookkeeping work. Ordinarily, this would put me in a murderous rage. There is nothing I hate worse than accounting and taxes. I can’t understand how accountants even exist. How can there be people who can stand this kind of work? As for taxes…just take the money. Don’t ruin a month of my life just to make it sting more.

I always say I long for the old days, when you could opt to skip the lengthy ordeal of figuring and paying your taxes and choose instead to be burned at the stake.

In spite of the misery, I feel better than expected. I am still raking in the dividends of my dad’s prayer for salvation.

The strain that used to pervade our relationship is gone. I’m not thrilled when he makes a mess or does something else that causes me unpleasant toil, but the annoyance is gone. I don’t feel like he’s the enemy any more. The mess is the enemy, and my dad and I are on the same side.

When I started seeing progress in my dad’s feelings toward God, I saw the change in our relationship coming. I started to see it the day before he prayed for forgiveness. I assume God showed it to me, because it wasn’t something obvious. Preachers don’t tell you you will suddenly get along with relatives after they pray for salvation.

Today I got some jarring news. His occupational therapist visited, and she told me her work with him would be ending soon. Medicare will pay for occupational therapy as long as it works. Because of my dad’s dementia, he is not making progress. She has to show him the same things over and over. Medicare wants a better return on its investment.

It’s a harsh reminder of his mortality and of what we face before he goes. He is at the peak of his ability right now. He can get worse, but he can’t improve. This is as good as it gets, and it won’t be this good for long.

I have to think about hiring someone to come work with him a few times a week. The therapist said she would recommend people.

As I suspected, his change of heart toward God is making things harder for me. It will be harder to let him go. When someone is provoking you all the time, your concern for him will be masked by a desire for relief. When the provocation goes, the things it obscured rush in.

That’s a good thing. It’s better to be sad when someone dies than relieved.

The therapists will come for a few more weeks, and then we’ll be on our own. I’ll have to make decisions. In a way, I’ll be facing them alone, but in another way, we’ll be facing them together.

If you’re old, and you’re straight-arming God, knock it off. Don’t wait until you’re 86 and you can’t find your way home from the store. Don’t give up decades of closeness to your family and Christian friends. What are you giving it up for? Pride? What good is that? It’s a cage that keeps people away.

I wonder what kinds of things I’ll be writing about in the future. I suppose it’s best not to guess. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.

It’s not my burden to carry. I have a God who carries things for me.

Tomorrow’s Big Scoop: Kavanaugh Cheated at Monopoly

The Beast is still after Brett Kavanaugh. Moloch never sleeps.

This weekend and today I read about Kavanaugh’s newest accusers. They remind me of something I have often said: the reaches your enemies have to make in order to accuse you are a testimony to your innocence.

Kavanaugh is in his 50’s. If he there were any serious character issues that affected his behavior as an adult–a real adult, not a teenager–we would know all about them by now. Instead, we have three things:

1. He supposedly groped a girl when he was 17.

2. He supposedly exposed himself to a girl during a drinking game at 18.

3. A friend of his named Mark Judge supposedly joined others in having sex with a drunk girl.

Amazing. This is their ammunition. Kavanaugh must be a pretty solid guy, if this is the best they can do. Imagine what they could have done with Bill Clinton or Keith Ellison.

Let me point something out. If the Democrats nominated someone who committed several violent crimes as a teenager, and it was a person who had since reformed, no one would care. Such a person would be approved. Kavanaugh may or may not have done a couple of stupid, relatively trivial things when he was a teen, and there is no evidence that he behaved badly during the ensuing three and a half decades, yet we are supposed to believe he’s unfit to serve on a court.

Robert Byrd put away his Klan robes and became the majority leader of the Senate. Let’s not even discuss Ted Kennedy, who was a grown man when he left a woman to suffocate in a sunken car he had wrecked. Why are we even talking about Kavanaugh?

As for the accusations themselves, the person who made accusation 1 named 4 witnesses, and none back her up. The person who made accusation 2 also has no corroborating witnesses. Accusation 3 is the lamest of all. It’s about someone else! Democrats want us to punish Brett Kavanaugh for something Mark Judge did.

They’re not scraping the bottom of the barrel. They’ve drilled holes in it, and they’re sifting the dirt underneath.

I can’t help thinking about my law school. There was a notorious young woman there who supposedly snorted cocaine off a young man’s private parts. What if someone nominates her to a judgeship? Things will go badly for her. If she’s a Republican.

Maybe we should impeach every judge who went to Woodstock.

Sexual sin is bad, but the general rule is that we don’t consider it when we choose government officials. Leftists love sexual sin, when leftists are the ones committing it. What self-respecting leftist would condemn a college drinking game involving nudity? Aren’t these the same people who get public nudity bans struck down? Aren’t they the ones promoting public toplessness?

Burning Man has an orgy area. Hello?

Leftists promote female nudity as hard as they can, but they’re upset about a momentary indiscretion from a drunk teenager.

The left is confused. They want to celebrate every type of sexual sin, yet somehow they also want to be puritanical and vindictive. It won’t work.

They also want to kill due process. Aren’t they the ones who want us to give illegal aliens endless hearings and appeals? Aren’t they known for promoting due process safeguards for guilty suspects? When did we decide men are the only people who don’t get the benefit of the Constitution?

Here’s an important point about the accusation against Mark Judge: it was made by an ex-girlfriend. Come on. If you really want to bury someone, who do you go to for material? Ex-wives and ex-girlfriends top the list.

Women handle rejection very, very badly. Women who have boyfriends dream of marriage all day. They feel they have to be married by certain ages, and if they don’t make it, they feel it somehow invalidates them as women. They sit around writing their “married names” to pass the time. They make up weird wedding rules. They flip through narcissistic magazines aimed at brides.

Generally, long relationships are ended by men, not women. Women get old, younger women are always available, and relationships with no roots suffer their expected ends. The world is full of ex-girlfriends who are nearing or past menopause, and they are not known to be forgiving or honest.

An ex-girlfriend is likely to see a former boyfriend as the person who ruined her life. Many of them will jump at a chance to return the favor.

Even if the accusation is true, it doesn’t say the drunken girl Judge had sex with didn’t consent, and again…not Kavanaugh. Tomorrow, my former pastor will be sentenced for child molestation. Should I have to serve part of his time because I knew him?

Maybe Hillary Clinton should be tried for the things Bill did.

I don’t think these women are telling the truth. I believe people would be backing them up if they were, and besides, sexual loose cannons usually have multiple accusers with strong testimonies. Sexual aggression is a lifelong habit. Two uncorroborated yarns don’t turn Brett Kavanaugh into Bill Cosby. They simply make his accusers look desperate and dishonest, and they make leftists look like tyrants.

Kavanaugh will make it, unless a better accusation emerges. We need to pray for God to help him. The more Supreme Court justices we have on our side, the easier our future will be.

Healing for the Heel

My dad prayed for salvation a couple of days ago, and the results have been surprising.

As I have mentioned many times, my dad was always an enemy of God and Christianity. He wasn’t just an unbeliever; the very thought of Christianity made him very angry, and he felt compelled to insult it and ridicule those of us who believed. He seemed beyond reach, and given that he asked for salvation at 86, it’s obvious that there was good reason to consider him a particularly hard case.

I have had a lot of personal issues with my dad because of my beliefs. I started turning back to God in 2007, and worldly people–friends and so on–started rejecting me. I didn’t reject them. I still made an effort to socialize with them, and I didn’t preach to them. They pushed me away or simply dropped me. Family bonds are harder to break, so, of course, my dad and I did not abandon each other. Things grew tense, however.

Paul warned Christians not to be unequally yoked. The use of the term “yoked” comes from the practice of using oxen as draft animals. When you want to use oxen, you attach two of them to a yoke. Obviously, you can’t get much work done when the oxen want to go in different directions. Paul was telling us that unbelieving companions would pull us away from God and drag us into disobedience. That’s what my relationship with my dad was like. He treated my Christianity as an unfortunate eccentricity that had to be indulged. To him, it was as though he were dealing with an autistic child or a mental patient caught in the grip of a temporary delusion. Very often, he got angry with me. He thought I was unreasonable.

As he slid into dementia and I gradually moved into an undesired position of authority, he sometimes cursed me, and he delivered ultimatums he couldn’t follow through on.

He got especially angry when I refused to drive him places on demand. I had other things to do, and I didn’t have time to ferry him around without notice. I was looking after him and his interests, and that’s why I was busy, but he didn’t understand. He would yell that he wouldn’t be treated like a child. Even after losing his license, he would insist he was going to drive himself where he wanted to go. That was impossible. He doesn’t know his address, and he doesn’t know how to get anywhere. He would have come home in a police car.

He developed or continued bad habits that seemed to be designed to make me miserable. He rubbed spit on walls, counters, and anything else he thought was dirty. He put dirty dishes and utensils away without washing them. He did awful things in bathrooms. When we ate together, I had to move my beverages away from him, because he would pick them up with his dirty fingers and examine them, defiling the surfaces I had to touch with my lips in order to drink.

My solution, here in our new home, was to take over an upstairs den. I put the main desktop there, along with a TV, stereo, printer, and workbenches with tools. I also hid my personal stash of food where he couldn’t get at it and do appalling things with it. I set a downstairs bathroom apart for guests and kept him out of it.

He had a knack for making me feel soiled and violated. He broke boundaries people are supposed to respect. You don’t touch other people’s food. You don’t expose yourself to them unnecessarily. You don’t blow your nose on the floor. Abusive people have a way of forcing intimacy on others in disgusting ways. My belief was that the spirits that had made him abusive were targeting me with special behaviors they knew would drive me crazy.

I have been limiting the time I spend with him. I can only take so much. Every so often, I would think to myself, “It’s been a while. I should go and see what he’s up to. Maybe I should take him to lunch.” I would go and do my duty, and then I would retreat again to recharge.

Before I changed my ways, we used to spend time together for fun. We fished a lot. Lately, it has been a job. Every minute I have spent with him has been work.

Suffering the unending stream of senseless provocations was like being jabbed with a hot needle over and over, and he thought I had a problem because I didn’t want to be with him all the time. He was not able or inclined to consider how I felt. It didn’t matter to him; he was only concerned with what he considered bad service. As his dementia got worse, and he realized how much he needed me, he made certain adjustments, but for the most part, I think he was considering his own welfare. If I die tomorrow, he will fall completely apart, and some stranger will have to rescue him.

That’s how things have been.

Yesterday was different. He still called for me at random times with various demands, but I didn’t jump when I heard his voice. I didn’t struggle with anger. I was better able to feel concern for his welfare, because it was not masked by the sensation of being shocked with an invisible cattle prod. I didn’t mind spending time with him. It wasn’t work any more.

To say the change was welcome would be to understate things. Abiding anger is an iniquity. It’s poison for a Christian. Everyone gets provoked from time to time, but to live in a state of provocation is not acceptable. It interferes with your relationship with God.

I used supernatural tools every day, more than once a day, to get rid of anger and to help myself forgive. God showed me ways to deal with it, and that was very helpful, but it’s much better not to be provoked in the first place.

Provocation is temptation.

The strange thing is that my dad’s behavior hasn’t changed tremendously. He is more cooperative and less irate, but he’s still doing gross things around the house. They don’t bother me the way they did last week.

Last night, I asked God what was going on, and suddenly, I thought about words from Genesis. God said he would put enmity between the seed of woman and the seed of the serpent.

So the Lord God said to the serpent:

“Because you have done this,
You are cursed more than all cattle,
And more than every beast of the field;
On your belly you shall go,
And you shall eat dust
All the days of your life.

And I will put enmity
Between you and the woman,
And between your seed and her Seed;
He shall bruise your head,
And you shall bruise His heel.”

This explains a lot.

The world is divided into children of God and children of Satan. There are no exceptions. The people who ran away from me were the seed of Satan. The pastors who abused me were the seed of Satan. There has been anger and tension between me and people who were against God, even when I tried to get along with them. Until my dad asked for salvation, he was on the other side, so friction was inevitable. We were trying to make a fatally flawed paradigm work.

Am I saying my dad was my enemy? I’m afraid so, although I’m sure he didn’t see it that way. He made life unpleasant and difficult. He added to my burdens for no reason. From the day I was born, he did things to poison my happiness and my progress. Even when he tried to do good things for me, often, he was also doing and saying things that exacted a high price.

How can I be surprised? In Genesis, God said he himself would put enmity between my dad and me.

Enmity isn’t always open, and enemies aren’t always aware they’re enemies. Often they believe they’re being helpful. That type of enemy is the most dangerous. It’s hard to motivate yourself to fight someone who insists he loves you.

Unequal yokings don’t work. The more you associate with an unbeliever, the more problems you will have. You may get along with them when things are going well, but introduce a few challenges, and things will break down. You will turn to God, and your associate will turn on you.

You can see this in America’s current state of polarization. The God-friendly right and the God-hating left are at each other’s throats. People who used to get along can’t be civil to each other any more. Your family can lose its business simply because you don’t want to bake a cake that celebrates an abomination.

It’s impossible to make another person understand the feeling of relief I have. No one wants to be at odds with a family member, especially if it’s a person you can’t avoid. Toxic relationships with parents are very damaging, and when those relationships are fixed, it brings peace and strength.

I don’t know how much time I have left with my dad. I hope we get a reasonable interval in which to enjoy a corrected relationship.

Do not develop close relationships with unbelievers. The secular world will tell you it’s open-mindedness and love. It’s not. It’s surrender. It’s currying favor from people who will betray you.

Be nice to them. Pray for them. Don’t date them. Don’t marry them. Don’t partner with them in business. You’re asking for trouble, and when you call on God for help, he may not listen. You know better. God has a long history of ignoring pleas for help from people who reject his warnings. He has done it to me. I am a witness.

I’m not going to have any more unequal yokings in my life. For a long time, I’ve been saying my dad was going to be the last one, and I haven’t been kidding. It’s rebellious and wrong, and anyway, I can’t take it any more. I’m too old for the drama.

Here’s something else: I understand why so many people have reacted negatively to me. For my entire life, I have put up with unexpected attacks from people I did nothing to harm. It still happens today. It doesn’t matter what I do. I don’t have to provide a reason. Now I get it. They don’t belong to God, or they are deep in rebellion, which, according to God, is as bad as witchcraft. Why would I expect witches to like me?

Never date an atheist or an unbelieving Jew. Don’t join clubs with weird mystical rituals. Don’t join fraternities or sororities. Limit your interactions with homosexuals. Avoid involvement in leftist politics. Be careful about the jobs you accept.

You may think you’re a Christian who has a successful, close relationship with someone who is against Jesus. You’re wrong. Either you’re a poor excuse for a Christian, or you’re in denial about the quality of the relationship.

Paul knew what he was talking about.

Did This Really Happen?

Tonight my dad prayed for salvation.

This is the guy who used to ridicule Christianity and Christians. He once called the pope a “fat greasy wop” in order to antagonize my mother and our Irish neighbor. As recently as a few weeks ago, he was insisting his conception of God was much more sophisticated than anything Christians believed in.

People with vascular dementia slip in steps. One day you’re on a certain step, and the next day, you’re on a lower step. It happens that quickly; overnight. You may stay on the new step for a month or a year. Then something happens, and you move to a step which is lower still.

At some point during the last week, my dad moved to a new step. His physical therapist pointed it out. I noticed it, too. Suddenly he was less argumentative. He wasn’t fighting with me all the time. For example, if I said he needed to stop messing with the mail, instead of insisting he was going to continue opening it, he would apologize for forgetting.

He has been contrary all his life. It has ruined relationships for him. Now, suddenly, he is listening.

Yesterday he said he would be willing to learn about salvation. Today I put him in the car and took him to the grocery to pick up something he needed, and I used the time to talk to him about God.

On the way to the store, he agreed to join me in prayer that God would show him he was real. On the way back, he prayed for salvation. He even recited the Lord’s Prayer by heart. I don’t know where that came from.

He wasn’t crying and begging God for forgiveness. He didn’t say he had had a sudden supernatural revelation. He simply said he trusted my judgment. That’s appropriate. We are supposed to be witnesses, and all a witness strives for is trust. New Christians listen to us when we give our firsthand testimony, and God helps them to believe what we say.

He says he’s willing to go to church. I want to find a decent church to visit. A Christian has to know more than one other Christian. Otherwise, the one he knows runs the risk of becoming a sort of idol. My dad needs to see God through multiple pairs of eyes.

I hope he understands what he did well enough for it to take effect.

As far as I know, this is the first time in my life I have gotten anyone to ask for salvation. No one else has ever listened to me. I am the world’s worst evangelist. I’ve laid hands on a couple of people so they received the baptism with the Holy Spirit, but I never got anywhere with salvation.

They say God gives crowns to those who help people to get saved. Maybe I finally have one waiting.

Suddenly, my dad doesn’t look good. He didn’t look good last week, but he looks worse now. He is less sure of himself. The steam has gone out of him. He seems sort of transparent. It’s not pleasant to see. Today while he was out walking, he asked for a ride in my golf cart, but he couldn’t lift his foot high enough to get in.

Maybe I’ll be able to take better care of him now. Cooperation makes a big difference.

I’ll bet God says that about me all the time.

Clouds Dissipating?

Thank you, God. The weather is changing.

It’s 89 degrees here, but it took until after 12 p.m. to get that hot. A couple of weeks back, we were looking at low 90’s, and things heated up faster. It’s dryer now, too, and it’s much more pleasant in the late afternoon and evening.

Last night I went outside as the sun was starting to dim, and I didn’t begin sweating immediately. I could have stayed out and not suffered. I didn’t even get bitten by bugs.

I wasted a lot of good weather after the summer of 2017 died. I put outdoor jobs off. This time I plan to pounce. When it’s cool enough to work, I will cut, mow, or burn something, or I will take some guns out and shoot.

I keep thinking I would like to pull out and make a permanent move to Tennessee eventually. A few days back, I decided to check the weather up there. It was not as great as I had hoped. In fact, it was pretty close to what we were having here. Maybe September in Tennessee is just as hot as it is in Florida.

I checked the forecast for the upcoming month, and it looked considerably better. Where my area has lows in the high 60’s, Tennessee expects lows maybe 10 degrees lower. That means fewer bugs and more good weather for outdoor activity.

What I do will depend on my dad. It’s impossible to make solid plans when you’re dealing with dementia. This winter, my dad may be exactly like he is now, he may be worse (somewhat or a great deal), and he may not be around at all. As long as he’s living at home, I won’t want to move. If he’s not living here, I can do whatever I want. If he’s in a facility, I can move and then find a new facility up north. If the end comes, I’ll have no strings to consider.

There is good news regarding my dad. Yesterday we went out to lunch. I asked him if he ever thought about making plans for the hereafter. He asked what he could do, and I said he could receive salvation. He asked how to do that, and he said he was willing to listen to anything I recommended.

Did it mean anything? What demented people say varies from one day to the next. I can’t tell you whether this is an important development. I told him I would tell him all about salvation later. I didn’t want to hold a revival in an Indian restaurant.

Maybe I was wrong to hesitate. He could have passed away last night. I plan to bring it up again today.

I believe God has told me my dad will be saved, so I don’t feel I have to be in a rush. If God says he’ll be saved, it will happen.

My dad’s attitude seems to have changed during this month. I don’t know what’s going on. Maybe a stroke affected some little part of his brain that generated anger and pride. Maybe God is restraining poisonous spirits that have always controlled him. His physical therapist says he has slipped over the last week, so maybe there is a physical explanation.

It would be fantastic to have a dad who isn’t angry and proud. I can’t imagine that. He has always released his negative feelings freely. When I’m angry at someone, I remain polite and work with them, and I try to spare their feelings. My dad has always vented his inner feelings directly onto people, with no hesitation. If he suddenly started acting like the rest of us, I wouldn’t know what to do. It would be like having him replaced with a different person.

People have always walked on eggs around my dad. Imagine suddenly being able to speak freely around a person like that.

It’s a strange thing; inner changes that would help him prepare for his departure would also make it harder to let him go.

Being around an angry and very vocal person is like being struck with a whip all day. No matter how much you love the person, you get angry, over and over. Repentance is something you repeat many times per week. You can’t help looking forward to spending time away from them.

It’s not hatred or vengeance. It’s fatigue and a desire for relief. What is it like when such a person puts the whip away?

I hope he’s serious about God. I have always expected him to wait until the last possible second, but maybe it won’t be quite that bad. It would be nice to have some time with the new version of him before he goes.

Kavanaugh Kerfuffle Disappoints

Here are my thoughts about the Christine Blasey Ford accusation. She accused Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of holding her down and trying to pull her bathing suit off. She says it happened about 40 years ago, when they were in high school. He says it never happened, and that he had no idea who had accused him until she gave the press her name.

1. When I was in high school, I was on an ultimate Frisbee team. One day a girl showed up. Her name was either Lisa Snapoff or Lisa Popoff. I can’t recall. She showed up with the team captain. He said she had told him I had had a crush on her in junior high.

She was not very attractive.

She kept talking to me as if she knew me well.

To this day, I have no idea who she is or whether we went to school together. My private junior high probably had 100 students per class. She was not in my class. I would have known her. Maybe she went to my elementary school. Anyway, you can’t have a crush on a person whose existence you’re unaware of. My guess is that she was something related to a stalker.

2. A woman who was angry with me swore a number of ridiculous lies to a court and made false claims to another authority.

3. My sister berated my mother, in front of her sisters and me, for letting my dad rape her all during her childhood. Never happened. Systematic rape of a sibling who shares a house with you is something one notices eventually.

4. My sister accused a boy of raping her, and my dad went to his house to give him a beating. He said he was very angry when he found out the story wasn’t true.

5. My sister’s dog was not housetrained. I chased it out of a room, and my sister turned my father and me in to the Humane Society, claiming we had kicked the dog. My father wasn’t even home when it happened. I don’t know what she expected the Humane Society to do. They started sending me letters asking for money.

6. My sister accused my dad of breaking her arm. I was present, but out of sight, when they had their disagreement. He didn’t break anything. When she called me about it, threatening to have him arrested, I had to listen while she placed an order at a drive-through, paid, and took a Coke from the cashier. With her supposedly broken arm.

7. Someone I know married a thief, fraud, and domestic violence perpetrator who ended up in prison. Before they divorced, the thief said a number of things in couple’s therapy. RE the Kavanaugh thing, my friend says the media needs to be aware that things people say in couple’s therapy (like the things Christine Ford supposedly said) are not necessarily true. This is the voice of experience.

8. The Innocence Project has freed over a hundred convicted rapists. Sometimes a woman says one thing, and the DNA says something else.

Women lie to get at men they want to hurt. Women who want attention lie about being abused. People lie in couple’s therapy.

Christine Ford is on the far left. Many people on the far left treat opposition to the murder of the unborn the way they should treat support for the murder of the unborn. It enrages them, and they feel anything they say or do to fight those who defend the unborn is justified.

Maybe he’s guilty. My guess is that he isn’t. If he is, it happened when he was a kid, it was brief, she was not stripped, raped, beaten, confined against her will, or injured, and she apparently had no problem pushing him off. After 40 years, it’s time to get over it. Even if he did one stupid thing when he was in high school, he has since proven he deserves to sit on the Supreme Court.

Any conservative who is nominated is going to face attacks like this. Feminists are insanely devoted to the perpetuation of the in-womb murder of their own children, as if having to bear a child one conceived deliberately were an unjust and severe punishment. They will stop at nothing to crush those who might make the murder of the unborn harder to do.

If leftists can tolerate Bill Clinton, who did far worse things, and who was an elected official when he did them, they can tolerate a man who groped a girl in high school and then behaved well as an adult. If they can tolerate Ted Kennedy and Jesse Jackson, they can tolerate Kavanaugh.

I say it’s time to confirm him. Clarence Thomas made it, and this man will, too.

“Don’t Bother God; We’ll Tell You Everything You Need to Know”

Last night I watched an interesting video in which a woman gave her testimony. She said she had been thrown out of a bus and killed. She said she found herself in hell and started crying out to Jesus. He took her to heaven and talked to her.

I am suspicious of people who tell stories about visiting heaven and hell. Many of them are fabulists who are looking for earthly rewards. A good hell story can make you rich. You can spend the rest of your life speaking at churches and taking offerings instead of working, and you can write books that sell. Some people want money. Others have a bizarre craving for fame. Because hell stories tend to pay off in one way or another, you have to scrutinize them carefully and ask God whether they are true.

There are a lot of hell stories that don’t ring true. One famous “witness” I don’t trust is a young lady named Sarah Boyanga. She says Jesus took her to heaven a number of times in 2012, and that he told her things she was to share with the world.

Boyanga claims Jesus showed her heaven and hell. She says she saw Michael Jackson and Amy Winehouse in hell. She says demons forced Jackson to dance, and while he was dancing, they threw spears into him.

She also says we need to pray for two minutes before we go to bed. Two minutes. She says this makes Jesus very happy.

I’ve been praying in tongues every day for years, and I can tell you it’s not a two-minute thing. You need to devote time to it. Around 20 minutes into it, it gets better. The more you pray in tongues, the better things go for you.

Jesus prayed all night before he was crucified. He criticized the disciples for refusing to pray “one hour” with him. Not two minutes.

When Elijah prayed for the drought to end, he sat down for quite a while, and he didn’t quit until he saw a cloud appear.

I don’t care who gets mad at me. I’ll say it. Sarah Boyanga is wrong. God is a father, and fathers want to spend time with their children. Prayer is the way we spend time with God.

Every successful parent knows there is no such thing as “quality time.” You can’t raise a child well, spending two minutes per day with him. I don’t care if it’s the best two minutes possible. Quantity matters, and no god who loves parents and children would create a system in which he only spent two minutes per day with his own offspring.

I suspect that her dad got her to make up stories.

Her dad is Benjamin Boyanga, and he runs a church in London. Obviously, a famous daughter can only help him make money.

I don’t believe Sarah Boyanga, but I think the lady who got thrown out of the bus is telling the truth. Her name is Paulina.

She was riding a bus. She was hurled out, and her skull was fractured. One hour after she died, she awoke in a hospital morgue.

Prior to the accident, she was a practicing Catholic. She went to mass. She confessed. She took communion. She prayed to Mary and the other “saints.” She had a big figurine collection. She tried to be good to people.

Paulina says she was thrown into hell, and evil spirits started ripping her flesh and telling her she was doomed forever. She didn’t believe she belonged in hell, because she was a Catholic. She cried out to Jesus, and he took her to heaven to talk to her.

She says she walked up a path to a waterfall, and Jesus was at the source of the water. She says the water cleansed her of “the dirt” from her past life.

That’s very interesting, because other people say water flows from the thrown of God, throughout heaven. The first psalm says a righteous man is like “a tree planted by the rivers of water.” Referring to the Holy Spirit, Jesus said he would cause living water to flow from within us, and that we would never thirst. Prayer in tongues is a sanctifying flow of living water. The words flow through us, from Jesus.

She also speaks of the peace of the presence of Jesus. When she was near him, she felt overwhelming love and peace surrounding her. That’s correct. I felt these things when Jesus visited me. I don’t think anyone could be near Jesus without feeling these things. It’s odd when anyone who claims to have met Jesus doesn’t mention the love and peace. Sarah Boyanga doesn’t mention feeling these things the first time she met him.

Paulina tried to tell Jesus she didn’t belong in hell because she was a good person, but he listed some things she had done to get herself in trouble. Her stepmother was a witch, and in order to get Paulina’s father, she had cast spells on Paulina’s mother, who died. Paulina had not forgiven her. Also, Paulina had led a worldly life, drinking and going to clubs and so on. Jesus also criticized her for worshiping Mary.

In the video, Paulina uses the words “Christian” and “Catholic” as though they were mutually exclusive. She says she used to be Catholic. She tried going back to her Catholic church after she met Jesus, and it didn’t work. She says she is a Christian now. That’s remarkable. She doesn’t just say her new path is a little better. She utterly rejects her old path.

Paulina claims she wanted to stay in heaven, but Jesus told her she had accomplished nothing for him on Earth. He said Christians obtained crowns in heaven for helping people receive salvation, and that she hadn’t done that. He said that if she made it to heaven, it would only be by the skin of her teeth. She chose to go back to Earth and serve God.

Catholicism is very strange. Catholics don’t talk about their view of other denominations much, but they believe we all go to hell, except possibly for a few super-worthy exceptions. They think people are born damned because of something called “original sin,” and that Mary was somehow spared this at the moment she was conceived. They say she never sinned, and that she remained a virgin all her life, even though the Bible says Jesus had brothers.

Obviously, if Mary didn’t sin, she didn’t need Jesus. How can anyone believe that? She would have been capable of saving us, herself. She could have spared her son by submitting to crucifixion. No normal mother would allow her son to die when she could take his place.

Catholics have a very long document called The Catechism of the Catholic Church, and it spells out official doctrine. It’s unbelievably tedious, which is one sign God had nothing to do with it. It’s full of references to the works of “saints” and so on. It’s like the Talmud, which is another collection of carnal material whose adherents obey it and reject scripture.

The catechism says “tradition” rules. It’s talking about things celebrated Catholics have said in the past. Augustine was a former pagan who knew nothing about God and twisted Christianity to fit his Hellenistic beliefs, but to Catholics, he is as much an authority as Moses or Paul.

We all remember what Jesus said about tradition. He said the Jews, by their tradition, nullified scripture, which is the word of God.

The catechism says all revelation comes through the pope and his bishops. Apparently, God is not allowed to talk to anyone else.

Nothing has changed. The pharisees just exchanged their Jewish robes for mitres, and Satan still runs the biggest church there is. It would be remarkable if he didn’t.

The catechism contains the idolatrous material about Mary. Not helpful. It’s like a cyanide pill at the bottom of an ice cream soda.

It doesn’t matter what a church’s name is or what its doctrine is at the outset. Sooner or later, Satan will take over, and men’s fantasies will supersede scripture. It happened to the Jews. It happened to Catholicism. It happens to charismatic churches.

It appears to be a lot easier to get to hell than I thought it was when I was young. It’s important to stay on top of things and remain informed.