Time to Buy a Kevlar MAGA Hat

God gives me phrases from time to time, and last year, he said this to me: “The hate is already here.” I guess it sounds stupid to say God was right, but boy…was he right!

He was referring to the hatred of the Beast and his children. The Bible tells us the world will be given over to sin before Jesus returns. The spirit of antichrist will assume the function the Holy Spirit was intended to perform: it will fill human beings and bind them together as one.

We are seeing their unifying hatred expressed now. The fundamental purpose is to oppose Jesus, but the spirit of antichrist attacks indirectly as well as directly. We see it going after males, whites, conservatives, heterosexuals, Americans, hunters, people who eat meat, and southerners, even though you can belong to those categories without belonging to God.

Here are some examples of people and groups the Beast’s children attack every day: Donald Trump, the NRA, the GOP, Fox News, George Zimmerman, every Christian denomination that isn’t Catholic and doesn’t support homosexuality, the Jews, and Israel.

We see the spirit of antichrist supporting sexual deviants, rebellious females and children, the proud, the violent, the trashy, atheists, pagans, Muslims, leftists, enemies of America, and the less-succesful minorities.

Here are some examples of people and groups the Beast’s children support: the Kardashians, every major rapper, Rachel Maddow, Keith Olbermann, the Pope (leftist), the Clintons, Barack Obama, Lady Gaga, Michael Moore, Spike Lee, Bernie Sanders, Caitlyn Jenner, George Clooney, Stormy Daniels, CNN, MSNBC, PETA, Greenpeace, David Hogg, and the deceased felon Trayvon Martin.

The Beast’s crowd hasn’t been beefing all that much with the pope, and that makes sense, because he is one of them. He is very weak on criticizing sexual perversion, he swallows everything leftists say about the environment, he adores celebrities, and he has no supernatural power whatsoever. He teaches Christians to be weak and carnal, so he’s more of a Beast asset than enemy.

It’s too bad Christians don’t label the opposition. Too many of us are caught up in political conflict. We label the MSM and the SJW’s, but we don’t have a name for the body of people who are controlled by the spirit of antichrist. My own name for them is “ACC.” The Antichrist Community.

We overuse the word “community” now. Everything has a community. The LGBTQetc. community. The black community. The People Named Fred Community. People who are completely unaware of each other’s existence or their bond have communities.

The world will be ruled by a human being the Bible calls the Antichrist, but in order for him to get anywhere, people will have to be susceptible to control by deceptive antichrist spirits. The body of Christ needs the Holy Spirit to unite and empower them, and the ACC needs spirits of antichrist for the same purposes.

The hate is already here, and it’s strong enough to drive things like massacres. We already see it at work in physical attacks on people the ACC doesn’t like. GOP offices are vandalized and burned. An ACC member shot up a baseball diamond while GOP members were playing. A man shot up a Trump property. Another man attacked Trump and had to be restrained. There have been numerous beatings of Trump supporters by ACC members. There are neighborhoods where a red hat will virtually guarantee that you will be attacked. Facebook, Twitter, Google, and the other tech powers are doing their best to silence non-ACC people.

There is no corresponding hate apparatus on the other side. There are a few nuts who go off the rails, but you can go nearly anywhere in America wearing a T-shirt that says, “Black Lives Matter,” or even, “Satan is God,” without any fear of harm. There is no huge tech effort to silence Keith Olbermann, Spike Lee, or Michael Moore. It doesn’t matter how much Lee or Moore lie in movies and interviews. They are safe.

It’s going to be a real spectacle when the ACC slips its restraints. Right now, you can’t march on a Christian’s home, drag the family out, and kill them on the street, but there are plenty of people who are itching to do that. When the atmosphere changes sufficiently, we will see things like that. Take away the threat of arrest, and the ACC will express itself fully, as it did in Cambodia, Austria, and Germany. We think people behave because they’re not really that crazy. That’s wrong. They’re just unwilling to do time. There are millions of people in America who would kill God’s children today if they knew they would get away with it.

Would you hesitate to wear a shirt with Trayvon Martin’s picture on it in Utah or Wyoming? Of course not. You might get some nasty looks, but you would be safe. Would you wear a MAGA hat in Baltimore or Compton? There is no way you could get away with it. Sooner or later, you would be harmed. In places where human beings have already been trained to ignore the law and give in to their impulses, the batteries are already happening.

I don’t understand why the ACC associates white Caucasians with God. Jesus was a Semite whose ancestors were from Iraq and Egypt, so he probably had fairly dark skin for a Caucasian. Maybe the association comes from the fact that white people spread Christianity throughout the world.

Maybe 10 years ago, God showed me that we build our own enemies. Our enemies are like hurricanes forming way across the ocean where we can’t see them. We refuse to pray. We sin freely. We deny God. Many of us take up false gods. When we do these things, our enemies are conceived and fed. Eventually, they appear and overcome us. Then we ask stupid questions, like, “Why do bad things happen to good people?”

God’s children used to be dominant in America. For all our failings, we were still doing well enough to receive God’s favor. He limited the power of the ACC. Then we turned away. Now we’re so corrupt we stink, and ACC factions that ran from us decades ago sit in positions of power. They play the tune, and we dance, and many of us are dumb enough to think voting for Republicans will fix things. Political problems are just expressions of problems in the supernatural. As long as we are against God, he will limit the good things he does for us, and he will let our enemies torment and humiliate us.

It’s upsetting to live in a country where the paradigm is one of endless retreat. I moved away from Miami, to a place where Christians are safer. I didn’t conquer Miami for Jesus. That was not possible, because people there want sin and have no interest in God. Eventually, the county where I live now will be as filthy as Key West or Seattle.

Maybe I’ll be able to move again, but the water keeps rising, and the islands will keep getting smaller and farther apart. Eventually, there will be no place on Earth where we can stand without suffering more than God will permit, and we’ll have to leave.

I wonder if I’ll be able to see what goes on here on Earth after the ACC declares total victory. I almost hate to miss the show. When history is made, for good or bad, it’s natural to want to watch. I suppose the suffering would be a little too much to stand, though.

Help is Coming

I had the weirdest dream last night. This morning, really.

I ordered a second refrigerator for this house. That’s not part of the dream; it happened. My dad does disgusting things around food, and I could not take it any more, so I ordered a fridge from Home Depot’s website. They were having a sale.

The delivery people called and told me they would arrive today some time between 7:30 and 11:30 a.m. You read that correctly. To arrive at 7:30, they would have to call me by no later than 7:15, and that means I would have to be up, around, bathed, and clothed by 7:00 in order to leave a margin of error. No prayer. No breakfast. No attending to my other responsibilities. They refused to work with me.

I was not happy. You don’t force customers to roll out of bed to accommodate your schedule. No one does that. You give them options.

Last night, I dreamed that the delivery people called. I was in an apartment that belonged to me. I realized I had to rush to my father’s house to meet them, so I took off running. Oddly, it was attached to my apartment. I ran through a door, and I was in the house.

I heard a Hispanic guy talking loudly in my garage. Many delivery people here are Hispanic, so that made sense. I ran to the garage, and they already had the door open. A guy with a crazy robotic exoskeleton the color of a school bus or construction machine had the fridge in the machine’s arms, and he was charging up the garage steps. He was really moving. All I could do was get out of the way. There was some kind of railing, and I had to grab it with both hands and somersault over it. That was easy for me. In my dream, I was in shape!

It didn’t seem strange to me that he was encased in a hydraulic suit. We have self-driving cars and delivery drones now, so I figured it was another sudden advancement I hadn’t kept up with.

A few minutes later, I was awake, talking to a Hispanic delivery guy who was on his way to my house.

I asked God if the dream meant anything, and here is what I got: he’s going to send strong spirits to get things done for me, and they will act quickly and without a lot of warning. It has something to do with provision, which explains the refrigerator.

I’ll take all the help I can get. Being an heir is a lot better than working hard.

I felt I should blog the dream. If I’m wrong, I’ll look stupid, but if not, God will get the glory.

I’ve already moved things to the new fridge. I’m going to put a lock on it if necessary. I’m really going to enjoy opening a refrigerator and not seeing greasy fingerprints on everything, along with dried-out food in packages that have been left open.

In other news, the Dade clerk’s website posted an update today. It says my former pastor will be pleading guilty on September 25. I’m still amazed at how things turned out for him.

I’ve Seen Living, and This isn’t It

Today has not been the jolliest of days.

I toured two assisted living facilities earlier. This is my first foray into the world of parent storage. It’s hard to think of it as anything other than storage. Once you move to one of these places, you cease to accomplish anything of worth on the planet. You sit in God’s waiting room, killing time until his receptionist calls your name.

This was my first visit to this kind of business since maybe 1990, when my dad and I visited his mother. I don’t call her my grandmother because she had no interest in my sister or me. Her facility was a small hospital. They didn’t try to make it look like anything else. My grandmother lived in a hospital room, not an apartment. Some patients there were mentally okay, and some just made grunting sounds and wandered around. The air smelled like urine, feces, and ineffective cleaning chemicals that failed to mask odors.

I’ve written about this place before. While we were there, my dad whispered that if he ever ended up in such a place, I should kill him.

The people were very nice at both places I visited today. This is northern Florida, so one would expect them to be nice. I have no doubt that my dad would be treated with kindness, consideration, and patience at either one.

The first place was relatively upscale. They had private rooms which were really suites. They showed me one. My dad would have a small living room, a kitchen area, and a separate bedroom. He could have his own refrigerator. The living room would have a TV, and he could have another one installed in his bedroom.

The halls in this place are maybe a hundred feet long. At mealtimes, the residents make their way to a dining room which is probably 60 feet square. Attendants sit along one wall, like ball boys at a tennis match, waiting to jump out and help anyone who falls over or chokes.

There were a lot of women at the tables. Men do themselves a favor by dying younger than women. It seemed to me that most of the people were a little more frail than my dad, but maybe I’m just used to thinking of him as strong and vital.

While we were walking around, a man left the dining room with a walker. He moved very slowly. He was wearing funny socks with little rubber things knitted into them for grip. No shoes. An attendant carrying a walker chased him down. She had another walker in her hand. His. He had taken someone else’s.

They had a room with chairs and a DVD player. They also had an activity room with a piano, lots of books, and plenty of games.

They didn’t have much in the way of outdoor facilities. They allow residents to walk beside the road in front of the place. Not sure how good an idea that is.

The lighting was a little gloomy, and the paint was somewhat yellowish. The air wasn’t all that fresh, but the aromas of things like diapers and disinfectants were muted.

If you store your dad at a place like this, you can visit whenever you want. You can check him out and take him to lunch. You can bring him home on weekends. You can use it as a firewall to keep your dad away from you while you try to get things done, but you don’t have to leave him there all the time.

I suppose the danger is that you’ll check him out so often, the home will fail to serve its purpose. I started thinking about how I could take him out for lunch and bring him home for visits, and then I realized I wouldn’t benefit much from moving him in if I overdid those things.

The second place was less expensive. The rooms were just rooms. No suites. They opened onto little living room areas with kitchens. There were no stoves or conventional ovens, for obvious reasons, but they had microwave ovens and refrigerators.

They had a little courtyard where people could garden or sit in the sun. They had some barbecue grills. One still had stickers on it, but another had been used. They didn’t have any place for people to walk. My dad takes long walks every day. He would have to walk in circles in the courtyard.

The second place had two levels, a la Dante. One was for people who weren’t too far gone mentally. The other was for people who were completely out of it. The lady who gave me the tour said my dad would be given an assessment to determine where he belonged. He is clearly in better shape than the residents of the second place, but six months from now, he may fit right in, or he may be so far gone he’ll be in a hospice.

The second place had two smell levels to go along with the care levels. The area for people who could dress and feed themselves only smelled a little bit. The other area smelled like what it was. The more feeble people get, the dirtier they are, even when attendants are scurrying around behind them wiping things up.

I “met” three ladies who live in the memory care area. One seemed very happy. She was smiling and engaging the attendants, enjoying the attention. She was in a wheelchair. She was wearing black pants that had white discolorations in the crotch area. I knew what that was. Prolonged contact with urine bleaches fabrics.

I’m not accusing anyone of failing to look after this lady. For all I know, fabrics get bleached like that after attendants remove them promptly and put them in hampers.

There was another woman who seemed very young to be there. I would guess she was around 65. She looked like she must have been beautiful in her youth. Her jaw was set, and she sat staring at the TV with a grim expression. Her hair was mostly white, with some brown areas. Most women that age dye their hair, so it was a little strange to see one whose vanity was being ignored. It was a quiet admission of surrender. Her hair color wasn’t important any more.

I asked the lady giving me the tour things about getting my dad installed there. I wanted to know how long it took and so on. I told her he was determined never to be put in a home. She started telling me how people adjust. Some of them ream their kids out every time they visit, calling them traitors and so on. Then when the kids go, they forget all about it, literally, and go back to palling around with their new friends.

It made me think of my first day of school. No kid wants to start school, but once you’re there, you don’t mind it. If you’re lucky. My first “school” was more like a pre-K day camp, so I enjoyed it.

I feel like I’m considering sending a kid to camp. At first, you look forward to having some time to yourself, but then you think about the days when you’ll be alone at home, wondering what he’s up to.

My dad is making some effort to avoid causing me problems, but he still does a lot of things to make moving him to assisted living easier to face. He does unbelievably filthy things in the bathroom and kitchen. Sometimes he is abusive. He offends my friends, not with his disability, but with insulting or gross remarks.

I am somewhat grateful for his bad behavior. It must be very, very hard to put a considerate, cooperative parent in a facility. It will be harder than I expected when my dad’s time comes, regardless of how difficult he makes life here at home.

I don’t think he’ll be happy in a home. Not while he still has some of his marbles. He’s very smart, apart from the dementia. He will understand exactly what’s happening. He will know what it means. He will feel the sting of the loss of status and power. It will be harder to maintain the shield of denial.

I’m wondering about home care. I was advised to get him evaluated for home hospice care. Today I learned that Korean War veterans are eligible for $1800 per month in assistance. That would pay for a lot of personal attention. Maybe it would be better to have someone come here for a few hours a day to look after him. It’s hard to say. In a home, he would have people his own age to socialize with, and they would have activities, but it would still be a home. Here, he would be able to stay in his house and be around me, but he could forget about karaoke and all that other nonsense.

There is no good answer. I need to stop looking for one and settle on the best bad outcome. He’s going to suffer. He’ll suffer the indignity of regimented life in a thinly disguised asylum, or he’ll suffer boredom and increased isolation here.

When my mother got cancer, no one expected or looked for a perfect solution that would avoid all pain and grief. We just looked for the best deal we could get, which turned out to be 8 months of unpleasant, expensive, utterly pointless treatment followed by death.

Dementia is like cancer. When you get it, you will suffer, no matter what anyone does to help you. The suffering probably varies in direct proportion to the size of your ego.

When you become demented, the best thing anyone can do for you, apart from helping you receive salvation, is to give you up to laziness and the diet and activities of your choice. Trying to fix you is cruel. It prolongs a bad experience for no constructive purpose. My dad’s doctors should take him off his blood pressure, cholesterol, and blood clot medications. I should let him drink 5 shots of hard liquor a night, the way he used to before I got his doctor to stop him.

His new cardiologist is talking about the possibility of more “aggressive” treatment. Cynical me, I see that as an effort to milk more money out of Medicare. My dad is like a toothpaste tube full of tax and insurance money, and medical professionals want to squeeze every drop out before giving up on the tube.

He doesn’t know his address or phone number, and he wears a diaper. He can’t get better. He will continue getting worse, and then he will die. If treatment accomplishes anything at all, which is not likely, it will only be the prolongation of his struggle and humiliation. It may keep his heart beating longer, but his dementia won’t even be slowed down. It is 100% incurable and impossible to retard.

When we go to the grocery store, my dad stops in the bakery and ice cream areas. I let him buy what he wants. If he forgets to get ice cream and baked goods, I remind him, because he bugs me about it if we run out. He probably eats a gallon and a half of ice cream every week, and he likes pies and cookies. That’s fine. It’s not making anything worse. The problem is the ice cream he ate when he was in his fifties and sixties. That’s the ice cream that made him demented, and he can’t uneat it now.

If I tried to stop him, I would have to hear about it every day. When he starts demanding ice cream, I take him to get it.

He reminds me of my aunt. One day her neck started to itch, and she went to her primary care physician. She had a skin rash, and it turned out to be caused by small cell lung cancer. After she was diagnosed, she continued to smoke. It didn’t make things any worse. She was killed by the half-million cigarettes she smoked before she got sick.

My grandfather had a heart attack at the age of 85. He was strong and healthy at the time. He was still practicing law and enjoying life. He got angry at a hired man who disobeyed him, and he got out of his car and chased some cattle on foot. Later on, he had chest pains, and they took him to the hospital in Lexington. A few days later, he was dead. He was lucky, and so was my grandmother, who would have had to look after him. Look what they missed. Even my mother was lucky, compared to my dad. And what if she had been cured of cancer? She would be 83 now, struggling with the job I’m trying to do.

Tomorrow I visit another home, and then I’m done with that for the week. I’ll be looking into hiring an attendant, and I’ll eventually ask his doctor about home hospice care. Tonight I may tell my dad where I went today. I’m not sure. He has to know sooner or later.

I don’t know what can be done when a patient refuses to move into a facility. Do they Baker Act them and hogtie them? The people I talked to today didn’t seem ready for angry patients who are determined to escape.

The sooner we start talking about it, the sooner he will accept it. I think.

I strongly advise people to take care of their brains. Lay off the booze, don’t smoke, and avoid obesity. If you start to slip, draw up legal documents indicating you don’t want your shell to be propped up forever with blood thinners and beta blockers. Otherwise, get ready to see your family suffer needlessly and your estate drained. Even with Medicare, you may shell out $75,000 per year. How long can you keep that up?

This stuff is real. We hide it behind hedges and fences and drawn blinds, but it’s coming for us. Might as do what you can to prepare. It’s better than letting your selfishness cause your family to be blindsided.

Exiles From Ruptured Church Sift Through the Ashes

Today two friends from my old church, North Miami’s New Dawn Ministries, came by to visit. They’re a married couple. I will call them Pepe and Lourdes. Pepe is the uncle of the pastor’s wife.

If you read my blog regularly, you know the pastor was charged with several counts of child molestation. He started molesting his sister’s daughter when she was 5 or 6, and it continued until she was in her teens. He confessed in front of the church. It’s not like his guilt is in doubt.

I am told it happened like this: a friend of the victim told the pastor’s sister, and she went after the pastor. She told him she would keep it quiet if he resigned and stopped preaching. He continued preaching, so she called the police. She hit Facebook and exposed everything, and she accused the pastor’s wife of turning a blind eye.

Today I learned something new: the pastor is still preaching. My friends say he even preached in jail. Is that commendable? You tell me. A truly repentant rapist could tell other prisoners about his filthy deeds, and he could talk about how he failed God and how God was helping him go forward. Is that what’s happening? Doubtful. Based on the pastor’s past behavior, it would surprise me.

Anyone can repent. Anyone can change. People have to be permitted to change. They have to be forgiven. None of this means we have to take them back or restore them to their former positions.

He killed his church, so if he is preaching outside of jail, some idiot who runs a church must be allowing him to speak. I hope he’s not receiving offerings. God will only stand for so much.

I learned something else, about a branch the church tried to open while I was a member. The branch was in Winter Haven. People from the church supported the place with offerings. New Dawn Winter Haven closed, and no one informed the members in Miami. The pastors kept the branch’s Facebook page open. I wondered why they didn’t inform us and take the page down. I think I know the answer. Today my friends said they continued accepting offerings after the branch closed. A cynical person would say they kept quiet about the branch’s collapse so they could continue taking money from donors.

Pepe was eating with the pastors, and a relative who didn’t know the church’s failure was a secret mentioned what had happened. The pastor’s wife’s eyes opened wide. She knew they had been busted. Pepe had been supporting the dead church. He asked where his donations had been going.

Sounds a lot like wire fraud, but it looks like it was par for the course. It was not the first allegation of financial corruption.

I don’t know what to make of my former pastors. People who deal with addicts say they reform only when they hit rock bottom. My pastors don’t seem to be that teachable. Rock bottom is when you’re sitting in jail charged with numerous counts of molestation. If you’re still trying to hold services after that, there is probably no hope for you.

The pastor’s wife is dying from a brain tumor. Their petty criminal son is keeping Twitter hot with crazy posts insulting God in profane terms. Looks like he is still not very close to the moment of repentance he needs. The whole family is crumbling.

If I had to guess, I would say the pastor is preaching in order to make money. He had a government job as an inspector, but he quit to preach full-time. That job is gone forever, so he has to preach or start mowing yards. Maybe he is preaching because he doesn’t want a minimum-wage job that requires exertion. He’s a very lazy man, and his pride makes him a poor fit for a zero-turn mower.

On September 12, he is expected to take a plea. Pepe says he was looking at 25 years. He was eligible for more time than that, but maybe the prosecutors told him to expect 25. The clerk’s website mentions a plea, so maybe he’ll do better. If he’s certain he’s going to prison, he has no motivation to develop a new career right now. He could still pick up some offerings while he awaits sentencing, however.

He’s not going to get probation. He can forget that. He’s going away. You can’t confess to raping a 6-year-old or even a 14-year-old and get probation.

Maybe when he preached in jail, he was sounding other prisoners out to find out if preaching can protect him from beatings. Maybe he hopes prison inmates will overlook the nature of his crimes if he preaches convincingly and develops a following.

His continued preaching is a mystery to me. I don’t know what the explanation is. I very much doubt he has turned a corner, so I’m looking for other motives.

Pepe and Lourdes got pushed out of the church. It didn’t matter that they were the pastor’s wife’s uncle and aunt. We had several positions in the church. Armorbearer, deacon, and minister were positions. Pepe was a minister. This was as high up as one could get without running the place.

Pepe got upset because the pastor’s wife booted people off the prayer team. We had a team that prayed together over the phone. A lady named Daisy had a mentally impaired daughter named Bianca, and they were on the team. They left the church, and the pastor’s wife said they had to leave the team. A friend of mine in another city also got kicked off. She got the boot because she was my friend. That’s my impression, anyway. Pepe was not happy, and he said so. The pastors drove him out.

Pepe is retired. He worked for the government, fixing diesel equipment. He somehow ended up with a double pension at a relatively early age. He left Miami last year and moved to Kissimmee. He loves it up here. He and I were extracted from the snakepit of Dade County, and our lives are very pleasant now. The pastors are still down there, and you can see how things worked out for them.

It’s almost as if being persecuted by these people is an indication that your life will go well.

Maybe it is.

I’m not better off than the pastor because I’m a good person. I am far from good. My hope is that God is helping me because I keep confessing and repenting. Today Pepe said the pastor once told him he thought the grace the church was experiencing was so great, there was no need to confess. It appears that he was wrong about that.

Human beings impress me, for good or bad. Some people do unselfish things I can’t imagine doing. Some people behave so stupidly, I can’t comprehend it.

In a few days, the pastor will either plead guilty or go to trial. If he pleads, his sentence will be on the clerk’s site shortly thereafter.

I never thought I would see something like this happen to him. It has to be the power of pride.

Levi’s Joins the Fight Against Civil Rights

I have two points to make:

1. The Levi’s people are pushing gun control and even pressing employees to take part, so they are now on my list.

2. The CEO of Levi’s, one Chip Bergh, never washes his pants and thinks he’s doing a good thing, so he probably smells like a bum in August.

3. Levi’s jeans aren’t very good.

Okay, three points.

Today I read that Levi’s is getting on board with Michael Bloomberg’s anti-civil-rights campaign. They are going to push for “sensible” laws, i.e. the eventual confiscation of all firearms. I’m not sure how many pairs of Levi’s I’ve seen at gun ranges. A lot, for sure. I wonder if Mr. Bergh is aware that many people who stand up for their civil rights do it in Levi’s.

While I was reading about Levi’s doing its best to kill sales, I came across a disgusting article. Mr. Bergh says it’s wrong to wash jeans. EVER. If you must do something about the filth, you’re supposed to do it as rarely as possible. Says the fragrant Mr. Bergh, “A good pair of denim doesn’t really need to be washed in the washing machine except for very infrequently or rarely.”

In a way, he’s right. The jeans don’t need to be washed. They don’t need anything. The people who wear them need them to be washed.

Let’s get real. Jeans cover the pelvis. This is where genitalia and anuses are found. In an ideal world, the contents of these body parts would never, ever come in contact with one’s pants. This is not an ideal world, however. Things go wrong. Our digestions have bad days, resulting in fecal issues. Urine goes where it shouldn’t. Unfortunate things that emerge from our genitals go where we don’t want them to. Things like this happen to everyone, including people who lie about it. Over time, anyone’s pants will eventually develop smells and even stains.

Then there is sweat. It contains oil, salt, and bacteria. It lifts dead skin off and onto our clothes. You can’t just leave it there.

Wearing filthy clothes will eventually cause people to avoid you and maybe even fire you, and it also leads to things like boils and skin infections. I don’t know, but I would guess that lice prefer dirty clothes, too, and lice are not things of the past.

The fact that Bergh thinks filth is okay tells you his values are not in line with those of relatively sane people, i.e. conservatives and Christians. He is way off in that “calling evil good and good evil” area. He works for a major corporation in San Francisco, so no big shock.

Imagine standing next to a man who has defecated maybe 600 times and urinated a couple of thousand times without washing his pants. No, don’t.

If it’s not obvious to you what’s wrong with Bergh’s plan, there is no point in talking to you. Either it’s obvious, or you are under a delusion.

He’s wrong. That’s what I’m getting at.

He’s also wrong when he uses the term “good denim” to refer to Levi’s.

Levi’s uses crappy fabric. Not all cotton is the same. Some cotton has long fibers. Some has short fibers. Long fibers are stronger and nicer. I’m sure there must be other characteristics that set good cotton apart from bad.

Cheap cotton falls apart faster. The way Levi’s do. If you wear a pair of Levi’s long enough for them to fade from WASHING (Mr. Bergh), they will start to tear at the crotch. The buttonholes on the fly will start to fail. The belt loops will tear the pants. You may get other rips even if you don’t make them deliberately. This happens because Levi’s fabric is not “good denim.”

I have Carhartt jeans. I started buying them last year, when I realized dressing like a Miami boat bum was not going to work on a farm. I have some pairs that are around a year old, and I have some pairs I got last month. I wear them every single day. I wash them after almost every use. I use them for farm work and hunting. It’s hard to tell the new ones from the old ones. That’s “good denim.”

Carhartts also fit better than Levi’s. They sit at the waist, not down at the hipster level where they cut you in half every time you bend. Levi’s sit right where a beer gut makes its first fold. This is why so many men with beer guts are able to wear size 30 Levi’s, and it’s why they look so bad doing it. Levi’s make your legs look short, and they slice into you every time you move. Carhartts make your legs look longer, the way pants are supposed to.

Here’s what you can put in a pair of Carhartt jeans: a Glock, a big knife, a big cell phone, a bunch of car keys, a wallet, a bandana, some cash, and whatever fits in the remaining secret pocket. You can also put something in the hammer loop. You can put more stuff in two Carhartt pockets than all the pockets in a pair of Levi’s. You can’t even fit one Glock in there.

Carhartt jeans have triple seams. Levi’s jeans…not.

Carhartts run about $40. For that you get a pair of jeans which is stronger, longer-lasting, better-looking, more comfortable, much more useful, and less of a threat to the Bill of Rights. I don’t know what Levi’s (which are made in China in spite of their liberal pretensions) cost, but it’s more than $40.

The choice is obvious. If you’re a 9-year-old girl who wants to look like Rihanna, and your sexually ambiguous parents don’t care if your overpriced jeans fall apart in 6 months, you want Levi’s. If you’re a grown American who cares about civil rights and wants superior pants at a good price, you want Carhartt.

I can’t say I’m going to boycott Levi’s because I don’t wear them. I found something much better a long time ago, so Levi’s are no longer a factor in my life. I just thought I’d let Levi’s wearers know what they’re missing. Levi’s are the Budweiser of jeans. Great advertising, at least in the past, but no substance.

People say great things about Wrangler and Lee, which are also cheaper than Levi’s. Something to think about.

Demons

I just read something interesting. Dennis Rader, the BTK Killer, claims a demon drove him to torture and murder people for sexual gratification.

A 2005 interview aired last night. I didn’t see it. I read about it today. I don’t see much of the material online. I do have a quotation.

I personally think, and I know it’s not very Christian, but I actually think it’s a demon that’s within me. At some point in time, it entered me when I was young, and it basically controlled me.

What is it that bothers me about this quotation? Two things.

First, this man’s life, and the lives of his victims, may have been destroyed unnecessarily by ignorance about demons.

Second, he says the notion of having a demon inside him is “not very Christian.”

This man was a churchgoer. He presumably sat through a lot of sermons. Why didn’t he know how common demons are or how to get rid of them? His religion let him down, just as it lets everyone else down. The people in charge of doctrine teach powerless garbage they steal from secular and pagan sources, and they fail to tell us how to lead victorious lives.

Jesus cast demons out of people, and so did his disciples. His followers are supposed to do it today. Many do. Yet there are preachers all over the world who seem to think demons are rare or even imaginary, or that they can’t afflict Christians.

It’s as if we have roach problems, and when we hire exterminators, they tell us roaches are imaginary, or they come to our houses and spray distilled water or even pancake syrup on the baseboards.

Demons love church; they filled Italy’s churches with nude sculptures and paintings. They love infesting Christians. They love warping our desires and harming our bodies. They enjoy killing us with diseases. They rule over us, like the gentiles who occupied Jerusalem and Israel. We’re supposed to be the head and not the tail, but we are servants in our own flesh houses. We can’t even rule our minds and bodies.

Some people are skeptical of claims like the one BTK made. They see them as efforts to evade blame. Does that make sense in the context of the story of a man serving multiple life sentences? He says he’s a serial killer. He confessed. He has no hope of ever seeing the light of day again. What does he have to gain by saying a demon was involved?

I don’t know what his intentions were, but I’m sure he wasn’t expecting people to think more highly of him because of demonic influence.

It’s interesting that sex drives so many serial killers, and it is perhaps more interesting that most people don’t know it.

To a normal person, tying someone else up and killing them would not be sexually rewarding. The thought of it would tend to kill arousal and make sex impossible. To Dennis Rader, it was the height of sexual expression and pleasure.

When people talk about Ted Bundy, they rarely mention his practice of burying dead girls in secret places so he could go back and have sex with their decaying corpses. We talk about him as though anger were his big problem. It’s not that simple. He had a powerful sexual fetish involving dead bodies.

Jeffrey Dahmer was driven by sex. He was a homosexual, and he wanted mindless sex slaves. He experimented on his victims, trying to turn them into obedient servants. He injected things like hydrochloric acid into his victims’ brains, hoping it would destroy enough tissue to make them obedient.

Some child murderers get tremendous sexual pleasure from torturing children sexually. There was one who nicknamed himself “Pliers” because of his fetish. He used pliers on the private parts of teenage girls. He was proud of it.

Satan’s children seem to think it’s very important to play down the link between sexual perversion and violent crime. I suppose that’s because Satan doesn’t want to stink up his bait. He uses sex to lure people into demonic oppression. He doesn’t want people who indulge fetishes, including homosexuality, to connect their practices with things like rape, murder, torture, addiction, or disease. He hides behind a flag decorated with a rainbow, not a dead child.

BTK left DNA evidence at the scenes of his crimes, and I don’t mean blood or hair follicles. You can guess what it was. He was so aroused, he did what aroused men do, right there at the murder scenes with freshly killed bodies.

The Bible says Jesus’s followers will cast out demons, but very few of us are doing it. It should be a staple on the menu at every church. Strange. How did we get here? We worship an exorcist, but most of us can’t do what he told us to do.

I believe BTK. His claim makes perfect sense to me. I doubt it exonerates him, although it is possible for a demon to override human will. It’s definitely a contributing factor.

Jump Before Your High Horse Gets too Tall

I had a fun visit from my friend Amanda and her kids today. When that was finished, I thought I would sit down and study mechanical engineering for pleasure. I was mistaken. I ended up watching a movie called Mrs. Skeffington.

Spoilers lie ahead.

The movie is good but not great. The star is Bette Davis. The movie starts in 1914. Unbelievably, Davis plays a gorgeous girl from a rich family. Bette Davis was not gorgeous, so some suspension of disbelief is required. The makeup people did a bang-up job with her, but she was still a B- on her very best day, even through a lens smeared with vaseline.

There is a reason why homosexuals like her more than straight men.

Bette’s brother loses the family fortune, and then he goes to work for a brokerage. He steals money by submitting false orders.

Claude Rains plays Job Skeffington, a rich Jewish man who runs the brokerage. He comes to see Bette and her brother, and he ends up telling Bette what happened. Bette tells him the family can’t cover the debt because their fortune is gone. Rains agrees to let things ride for a while.

Davis chases Rains and gets him to marry her, in order to get the debt canceled. He moves into her family’s mansion, saving it from creditors. Bette likes him, but she doesn’t love him. She has a bunch of desperate suitors who continue to pursue her after she marries, and she doesn’t discourage them. She loves the attention. Men are crazy about her. Wherever she goes, they trample each other trying to get to her.

Davis and Rains have a baby. Their marriage gets worse. The irresponsible brother dies in World War I, and Davis becomes bitter because she is stuck in a marriage she only created in order to save him.

Davis steps out on Rains with other men. Eventually, she finds out he has been cheating on her with his secretaries, and she divorces him. He gives her a huge fortune, purely because he’s a kind person. She practically forces him to take the daughter and raise her. Rains and the daughter take off for Europe, and Davis avoids her for years.

The Nazis overrun Europe. The daughter flees to America. Rains stays behind and gets put in a concentration camp.

Davis goes sailing with a man in his late 20’s. She is about 50, but she looks 30, so he is in hot pursuit. She catches a chill out on the water and contracts diphtheria. When she gets over it, she has the wrinkles of a 70-year-old, and a lot of her hair has vanished for good.

While she recovers, she sees Rains sitting in the room with her. Bothered by the hallucinations, she goes to a rude therapist. He tells her she needs to take her husband back. He says her suitors never really cared for her. She gets mad and says she can still get attention from men. He dares her to prove it. She throws a party and invites her old beaus.

At the party, people are horrified by her appearance. The wives of her former suitors are overjoyed. She tries to seduce one of the men, and as tactfully as he can, he makes it clear he has no interest at all.

One of her suitors is broke. He shows up after the party and pretends to be in love with her. She pretends to be broke, too, and he takes off. This is when she realizes things are not going well.

The daughter tells Davis she is marrying the young man who took her mother sailing. Ouch.

Davis ends up alone, miserable, and ashamed to take her ugly face outside.

In the end, Rains returns from Europe. He has been in a concentration camp, and somehow he ended up broke and blind. He still loves Davis. She takes him back.

Shorter version: beautiful woman uses looks to control men; then she becomes ugly very quickly and has to adjust to the loss of her powers.

Why did I watch this movie? God shows me things for reasons.

I feel it was about my dad. He used to be a powerful figure in a number of lives. His family and his employees had to toe the line. People who didn’t really like him all that much treated him well because they had to or because they wanted something from him. Now he has no power over people, and no one is kissing up to him any more. He has to ask for things instead of giving orders. If he’s not nice to people, they don’t have to be nice to him or even suffer his presence.

I only have two friends I see regularly. One has a strong maternal side, so she doesn’t mind dealing with him. Not that much, anyway. She doesn’t pretend his behavior is acceptable, but she tolerates it out of kindness. The other friend is a man who, obviously, lacks a maternal side. He is nice to my dad, but that’s largely a courtesy to me. He comes to visit, and he realizes that in order to spend time with me, he has to endure a certain amount of rude behavior from my dad. He humors him and invests some time talking to him, but he only does it to keep things going smoothly. We look for excuses to do things without my dad.

In the past, he spent more time with my dad, because they had common interests and enjoyed talking about them. Things have changed. My dad’s behavior is worse, and the conversation isn’t good.

There is nothing wrong with looking for ways to get away from my dad. My friends are my friends, not his, and they come to see me, not him. They’re not obligated to let him mistreat them or impose on them. Also, if he is indulged, he will dominate the conversation to the point where I am cut out of it completely. He would see nothing wrong with having a long conversation with my friends, in which I did not get to talk to them once. He has done it in the past. It was bad when he had all his marbles, but when it’s a dementia conversation, it’s even worse.

He doesn’t have a single friend, unless you count another dementia sufferer he hasn’t spoken to in months. He uses me to get contact with other people. It’s as if I’m growing apples and picking them for myself, and he is taking them off my plate and eating them in front of me.

He didn’t grow any apples for himself. His friendships were phony. His friends were people he did business with.

Mrs. Skeffington could not wrap her head around the obvious. She looked somewhat grotesque after her illness, and there was nothing wrong with her vision or her mirrors. She could see herself clearly. Nonetheless, she pretended she was still a beauty who could gather crowds of adoring men simply by showing up. She had to have her denial shoved in her face before she admitted what was already clear to everyone else.

My dad’s biggest problem these days is dementia. His second-biggest problem is his refusal to admit he has it. He is not so demented that he can’t see what’s happening. He knows he can’t drive. He knows he can’t practice law. He knows he can’t take care of himself. Obviously, he understands these things. Still, a few times a month, he insists on telling me there is nothing wrong with him.

Because he refused to admit he had a problem back when things weren’t so bad, he didn’t prepare at all. He thought he would die at 100, still at the top of his game. He didn’t tell me anything about looking after his investments. He didn’t plan his estate to any great extent. He didn’t give away cash every year to beat the IRS.

He never made any plans to wrap up his law practice. He simply stopped getting business. People he had represented for decades hired other lawyers.

His investments got messed up. He couldn’t keep records well. He got in trouble because he refused to pay a just debt. I had to step in and figure it all out, instead being brought in 10 years ago and being allowed to modernize everything.

After the transition was made, he insisted on interfering from time to time, and he was always wrong because he was no longer fit to run things. He finally reached the point where he could not interfere much, and it made things go much more smoothly. I no longer had to argue with him in addition to doing his work for him.

He made no plans at all for his eventual deterioration. He refused to make a living will. He didn’t educate himself about assisted living and so on. He never thought about leaving Miami in order to avoid dying surrounded by old Cubans who could not converse with him.

He tells himself he’s a great guy who was a fantastic husband and father. He tells himself his family consisted of three total screwups and one saint. He says he’s a good person who hasn’t done anything wrong. Who says things like that? Virtually everyone is willing to own a certain number of misdeeds and admit regret, even if they aren’t completely honest.

I believe God wanted me to see the movie so he could tell me this: “Your dad put himself where he is today. He did this to himself. Whatever happens to him now is completely his fault. It was to be expected. And he is still making his problems worse.”

Sometimes you have to watch people sink. It happens to us all, many times in life. We have to stand by and observe while self-destructive people crash and burn in slow motion. I marvel when I think how hard I worked to try to get my sister to let me help her.

The fact that someone else is failing and suffering badly doesn’t mean you are supposed to do something about it. It doesn’t mean you failed. God does everything that can be done to help people, and he still watches them burn in hell. You’re not more capable than God.

We try to help people, and often, it works. But there are many people who can’t be blessed because the blessings can’t get through the thick armor of pride. You can’t always help.

I can do a lot to make my dad’s life better, but there will be a great deal of suffering I can’t touch with my best efforts, and I have to feel in my heart that this is not my fault.

When I was teaching physics at the University of Texas, my head T.A. told me about the written exam. We let students work together on lab reports, but they had to take the written test alone. He said we were uncoupling the cars in order to see who was pulling the train. God is uncoupling the cars. My ability to help my dad is decreasing week by week, and soon it will disappear. Then he will be alone with God, and I will be sitting on the sidelines.

We all end up alone with God eventually. The earlier you meet with him, the better off you will be.

There is nothing wrong, abnormal, unexpected, or unjust about my dad’s situation. It’s a small taste of the justice we deserve for abandoning God. We all deserve hell. My dad isn’t in hell. He’s getting a mild preview in order to motivate him to come clean.

These unsubtle lessons keep coming. I have one father who didn’t prepare himself or me, but I have another one who is preparing me very thoroughly.

I don’t recommend the movie. It’s okay if you’re tired and you just want a reason to eat popcorn, but that’s about it.

New Correction From God

This week my copy of The Death of Santini arrived.

If you read this blog, you know I have been reading about the dysfunctional family of the author Pat Conroy. The movie The Great Santini was based on Conroy’s dad, but the real-life Santini was much worse than the Robert Duvall version. He was a habitual wife-beater, and he beat his children with his fists. He even beat strangers who tried to stop the beatings.

I bought Conroy’s autobiographical book My Losing Season because I found out it contained material about his dad. I felt like I had to read it.

Something supernatural is going on. Conroy is not a skilled writer, and he can be annoying, but I still feel compelled to read his books.

Today something odd happened. I went to Youtube to watch a couple of Christian videos, and as might be expected, I drifted off into garbage video. I watched some Jack Reacher clips. For some reason, I clicked on a video from a show called True Detective. I have never seen the show. The caption said the video was about a character named Ray Velcoro, beating up a bully’s dad. That appealed to me. Morbid curiosity.

The video is easy to summarize. Velcoro’s young son is a fat victim. He had some expensive basketball shoes. Another boy stole them and cut them up. Velcoro berated, insulted, and threatened his son (like Pat Conroy’s dad) until he gave him a name. Velcoro went to the boy’s house, got his dad to bring him out for a lecture, and beat his dad senseless in front of him.

The bully’s name was Aspen Conroy.

That’s not a coincidence. It can’t be. Pat Conroy is a well-known writer who appeals to soft left-wing males, and soft left-wing males are the kind of people who get hired to write TV shows.

The writers chose that name for a reason, and I came across the video for a reason.

My dad was a bully. My sister was a bully, too. She always found people to torture, wherever she went. She probably has some victims right now. She always liked picking on homosexuals. She and her friend used to torment an effeminate young man when we lived in Miami Shores. I thought his name was Sally because that was what they always called him.

She also tried to feminize straight men who attracted her abuse. Like a bull lesbian, she likes men to be small and weak. Maybe that’s a response to her aggressive, assertive, intimidating father.

My dad was a bully, and now that I’m in charge, the bully aspects of his nature cause problems. He curses me when I tell him things he doesn’t want to hear. He tries to make me think I’m crazy when I disagree with him. He holds me responsible for things like his boredom, his incurable back pain, everything that goes wrong with the house…you name it. I am the genie who has a duty to appear on command, wave a wand, and make all discomfort and resistance vanish instantly.

He also has some extremely filthy habits which derive from a lifetime of treating other people like porta-potties.

To me, the big problem with my dad isn’t the way he treats me. It’s the way I respond. I get angry with him. I’m not saying I scream at him or physically abuse him. I just get angry. I behave like someone who isn’t angry, but I still feel it, and I have to fight it using supernatural means. I don’t want to be a place where anger sits and festers. What happens in the world outside of me is beyond my control, and I have low expectations, but I don’t want the filth inside me.

I believe God is telling me it’s wrong to hate bullies.

How many times have you heard someone say, “I hate bullies.” We say it without guilt, as if hating bullies makes a person righteous.

Bullies are horrendous. They taunt. They rape. They invade our boundaries and put their hands on others. They look for the things that disturb us most, and those are the things they do. The humiliation of others brings them joy. They do things like shoving people’s heads in toilets and holding people down and spitting in their mouths.

A bully doesn’t just hurt you while he’s with you. He leaves pain inside you and makes you hate yourself for losing. Nonetheless, we’re not entitled to hate them. If you accept hate, you damage yourself and grieve the Holy Spirit, so it’s another victory for the bullies. It’s the biggest victory a bully can get.

Cursed people who serve demons are always looking for dance partners. They latch onto others, and if they succeed, demons join with the others, and sick relationships are established. This is why beating a woman is one of the best ways to keep her from leaving you. The demons want to keep dance partners together.

I have to get over the idea that it’s okay to hate a bully. Self-righteousness is poisonous. Besides, I have bullied people. Not a lot, but I have done it. Something came over me, and I yielded. I did what I hate. Who am I to feel like I’m in a superior class?

Two things are true, and at first glance, they may seem inconsistent. First, we are not to develop relationships with bullies. It’s correct to cut them loose instantly and to refuse to take them back when they whimper and beg for forgiveness. Forgiveness and taking people back are different things. As for taking up with a bully, it’s like dating a pimp; you’ll get what you asked for, and God won’t listen when you ask for deliverance. Second thing: we are not supposed to hate bullies. You can cut a mentally diseased person out of your life without hatred.

Unless I am literally forced to accept relationships I don’t want, my dad will be the very last abusive person in my life. I wasn’t to blame for being born in a house with two bullies, but I am responsible for the problems caused by new bullies I choose to tolerate.

I have to keep a watchful eye on my social circle, but I can’t harbor active malice toward those who mistreat me. It’s like a break in the skin where demons can enter.

If you’re not submitted to God, he will put people who hate you over you. The Bible says so. It leads to bad marriages, horrible jobs, tyranny, and toxic friendships. God will make you the tail and not the head. I put contemptible people in positions of power over me, and I didn’t know I was doing it. The reason I didn’t know is that I wasn’t close to God. He would have advised me, had I been spending time with him.

I can’t imagine what it’s like to be my dad or my sister.

My sister is vicious and mentally ill. No one can stand her. She has no law license, and there is no way she’ll ever meet the requirements to get her license restored, because she would have to admit what she has done, apologize to the bar, and complete a rehab program. She used her looks to control men when she was young, but now she is old and physically repulsive. She was disinherited 14 years ago. Her cancer is in remission, but cancer comes back.

My sister thinks she’s a holy woman. She thinks God and the world have cheated her. Everyone who knows her thinks she deserves worse and is glad to be free of her. Her relatives dread contact with her, as do many of her former business contacts.

My dad’s life has no meaning. He wakes up in a smelly bedroom, bathes in a filthy bathroom, puts on the same basic outfit every day, and then thinks about nothing except his own comfort and pleasure until he falls asleep. He can’t do anything to entertain himself. He can’t have a real conversation. He doesn’t have a single friend, and he can’t make new ones. He doesn’t have the comfort of prayer.

I think the only reason he has for living is fear of death. He can’t be thinking about heaven. He may die this year, but he refuses to think about the afterlife. He is dying from a terminal disease, and he insists he’s in great health and ought to live to be a hundred.

I can’t help thinking of David Carradine, a screwup and human cipher who met his end in a closet in Thailand, naked, obsessing on his own base pleasure.

My dad and my sister have no one they can talk to about their thoughts and feelings, and if they did, they wouldn’t do it. They think they’ve done everything right, so there is nothing to talk about. I’ve never heard my dad say anything introspective. I don’t think he permits that kind of thought.

Whatever. Regardless of what happens to the people around me because of their bad choices, I don’t want their poison to contaminate me.

Pat Conroy’s parents had 7 children, and 5 attempted suicide. One succeeded. His dad, the bully, wasn’t suicidal. What he did to his family must not have bothered him much. He died from cancer. He must have succeeded in pushing his poison into his kids permanently.

I will continue listening to God and trying to get correction, and as for my dad, I look forward to the day he accepts salvation. There is nothing else of value he is capable of accomplishing in this life.

If Reality Calls, Say I’m not In

I had an interesting experience this week. I came up against a startling example of the Dunning-Kruger effect.

In case you don’t know what the Dunning-Kruger effect is, I will tell you. It’s a strange syndrome in which people who aren’t bright or capable believe themselves to be smarter and more capable than others. I run into it all the time, and I’m sure you do, too.

You could also call it the Appleby Syndrome. In the novel Catch-22, the character Orr says character Appleby he has flies in his eyes. He says, “How can he see he’s got flies in his eyes if he’s got flies in his eyes?”

I don’t know if Dunning-Kruger is a form of projection or what, but it’s exasperating. It’s annoying to get in a squabble with a person who is not smart enough to be right about anything and not smart enough to know it.

I can understand lacking intellectual power. What I can’t understand is going through life getting C’s and D’s, getting a 900 on your SAT’s, ending up running a backhoe for a living, and still thinking you’re smarter than doctors and scientists and everyone else. How can you fail to notice your limitations?

People like to blame tests. “They’re biased.” No, they’re not. Unless you mean they’re biased in favor of smart people.

All over the US, there are slow black kids who sincerely believe they’re brilliant and that white people have rigged tests to keep them down. They go on social media and write about the intellectual superiority of the black race, and they call white people “Neanderthals.”

Educators tell them these things. Maybe I should put “Educators” in quotation marks. White kids are lucky they have a less-powerful excuse-making industry working on them.

Dunning-Kruger people aren’t rational. Lack of intelligence isn’t their real problem. There are lots of slow people who don’t try to tell the rest of us what to do. Dunning-Kruger people have psychological problems. They bully and pout and control, because they are crazy and insecure.

I was participating in an Internet forum. Someone asked a question about physics. Incredibly, a bunch of ignorant people started weighing in, as if their wild and pitiable guesses, which they presented as fact, were anything but ludicrous and useless.

You may be the smartest layman on earth, but if you haven’t studied physics, you don’t know the first thing about it. When you talk about physics, it’s as if you suddenly decided you could play the cello or speak Urdu. You’re going to make a fool of yourself, and even worse, you lack the ability to understand people who try to explain why you’re wrong.

If you say stupid things about physics, you then need to take at least two semesters of calculus and two semesters of university physics in order to be able to understand why what you said was stupid.

I decided to chime in on the forum, and I gently said people who didn’t know anything about physics should be quiet and let people who knew some things talk. One forum member is a physics major, and he was trying to be helpful, but an insecure, bullying blowhard kept interjecting with infantile nonsense.

Naturally, the blowhard homed in on me, and he made a bigger fool of himself than he already had. He was so determined to find something to be right about, he even “corrected” my English. I referred to electrical engineers as “EE’s,” which is correct. When you refer to something by its initials, and you pluralize it, you put an apostrophe before the S. It’s not mandatory, because people keep getting dumber and grammarians are now dumbing down the rules to suit them, but it’s right.

Soon writing will disappear entirely, and we will simply grunt and point.

He finally managed to get his milligram of flesh. I said “EE’s” was an acronym and told him to look up the rules, and after what must have been an all-night Googling session, he said it was an initialism. Hooray. Victory. But he was wrong about everything else, including the apostrophe. The apostrophe rule applies to initialisms.

He sent me a private message, as if he thought I craved even more exposure to him, and he filled it with links on initialisms. I told him never to bother me again, and I blocked him by all means possible.

Some people are just too crazy to live. This guy is more obsessive than an ex-girlfriend who can’t handle rejection. This must be how James Woods felt after he dumped Sean Young.

The enemy likes anger and conflict, so he sends annoying people to God’s children. The way to handle it is to take the supernatural approach. Forgive them, speak defeat to them and the demons that run them, and pray for God to help them and also keep them away from you until they shape up. Unfortunately, I did those things after he had already started to dig into my skin. I didn’t get into a flame war or sink to his level, but I put things in the wrong order. I responded first and took the supernatural approach afterward.

I hate to say it, but I just realized Dunning-Kruger has blossomed in my dad. My biggest problem with him is his belief that he can win arguments and be the leader. He can’t accept what he has become. He even hits on women. After a certain point in a man’s decline, all women are out of his league. All of them.

Nobody will date a demented man who is pushing 90, apart from sociopathic whores and possibly demented women.

Romance, sex, and marriage are out of the question for demented people because they lack the capacity to consent. It’s like statutory rape.

My dad is mentally hobbled, but he is still smart enough to realize it, and he is able to yield to me and stop questioning what I do. There are times when he defers without any hesitation and admits I have to be in charge. Unfortunately, there are many times when he gives in to his habits of pride and bullying.

I should be able to get cooperation by saying, “We have discussed this many times, and you have forgotten, but it’s taken care of, so please let me handle it.” If he truly respected me in his heart, he would accept that.

The other day he decided he wanted to write short stories on the computer. He can’t use a computer. I wish he could, because he needs activities, but there is no way. He used to use Wordperfect and Word to write legal briefs, but now he asks if there is a “machine” he can use for writing or to “look things up on.” That’s how little he remembers. I showed him his laptop and reluctantly agreed to spend some time showing him how to use it, but when the appointed time came, he had forgotten, and I didn’t remind him.

If he had remembered, I would have been put through an hour of hell. “Goddamn it, stand here next to me and show me how to do this!” Pardon the language, but that’s what used to happen before he gave up using computers.

“Just show me.” “I did show you.” “No you didn’t!” “I did; you just don’t remember.” “Just give me a chance, damn it!” “Dad, we’ve done this many times, but you forget later.” “Just try it this time, and if it doesn’t work, to hell with it.” “Dad…that’s what you said last time.”

Most of the time, he doesn’t tell me to go to hell, but sometimes he does. Then he forgets about that. He forgets he was angry. He resets so the process can start over again. One of my challenges is to break cycles of futility.

My dad cannot write fiction. He never could. He has never written a book or short story, as far as I know. He has STARTED stories. He has always wished he were a writer, but you can’t write unless you have something to say. Like most people, he does not, and even if he did, he is demented now. If I don’t help him use the word processor, I’m not preventing him from having a good time writing. I’m preventing him from driving both of us crazy while he wastes his time.

He couldn’t write even if he used a pen, and he can’t use the computer for any purpose. He can’t save files. He can’t open applications. He can’t do it.

He quit using the computer long ago, on his own.

I have never understood people who wished they were writers even though they were not motivated to write. Such people are much more common than actual writers. Go figure.

“Writer” doesn’t mean “person who identifies as a writer.” It doesn’t mean “person who wears a tweed jacket with leather patches on the elbows, smokes a pipe, and lives in New England.” It means “person who writes.” If you don’t write, you’re not a writer. Best to admit what you are and look for something else to do.

I write, but I don’t tell myself I’m going to write novels or short stories, because I know I’m not.

While the forum discussion about physics and Dunning-Kruger issues was going on, there was some mention of engineering and how it differs from physics. One big difference is that physicists can’t do anything. An engineer may be able to fix a broken lawnmower. Most physicists wouldn’t stand a chance, because we study variables and chalkboard models, not real objects.

If a physicist is able to do anything practical, it means he went beyond his education. It’s that simple. Physics prepares you to understand engineering, but it’s not engineering.

I feel I should have majored in mechanical engineering with an EE minor. I was not cut out to unravel the mysteries of the universe through physics, but I’m smart enough to design and build a guitar amp or a tractor implement.

I decided to take a look at ME major curricula on university websites, to see what ME’s (apostrophe) had to learn. I was surprised at how basic it was. When I was in school, I had to take a bunch of advanced stuff undergrad ME’s never have to conquer.

I may try to learn a few things. I found a Youtube Ph.D. who teaches engineering, and I looked at his solid materials course, which is one of the first courses engineers study. I found out I was supposed to be familiar with a topic called statics, so I dropped solids and looked at that. In maybe 45 minutes, I was up to lesson 21. I kept skipping lessons. Statics is very, very simple for a physicist. Even a bad one.

I don’t know how far I’ll go. It’s nice to see how accessible it is.

I am not Responsible for Anyone Else’s Reward

Yesterday I wrote about my experiences coping with my dad’s dementia. I stood up for myself, and I said I was putting myself first for practical reasons. I wondered how people would take it. It would certainly look better to say, “I don’t care what happens to me; I will sacrifice everything to make sure he has the best experience possible.” But I am not suicidal, nor am I obsessed with making other people think I’m a saint.

It’s perverse and unnatural for the young to sacrifice themselves for the old. The old are supposed to sacrifice themselves for the young. That’s one reason why abortion is an aberration. New generations are the future. The old are supposed to set the young up to survive. Parents don’t throw their kids in front of cars to protect themselves. They lay down their lives for their kids.

So far, I have only seen three responses, and they were all positive. I thank the two commenters who backed me up. The third response came as a text message.

I’ll tell you something about the way my family has always worked. My dad and my sister have always gotten their way by putting other people on the defensive. If you don’t like the way things are going, accuse someone else of selfishness or some other shortcoming, and keep the pressure on until they give in. Come to think of it, even my mother, who was a much nicer person, was not above this. I faced a constant stream of accusations when I was a kid, and after I grew up, the flow didn’t completely stop.

There is a word for this: “gaslighting.” If you have a problem, make someone else think he’s the one who is screwing things up. If you succeed, you skate away, and the person you gaslight is left with the burden and self-doubt, not to mention the burden of disproving the slander.

Leftists are great at this. If you believe in Jesus, it’s not humility or a desire to see God’s love spread. It’s hate. Somehow. Christians have to defend themselves against ridiculous hate charges all the time. Refusing to bake a cake is now considered hate. I wish refusing to bake me cakes were the worst thing my enemies could think up for me.

It’s good to have people who back you up against gaslighters. Even if you know you’re being libeled, it’s helpful to have someone else confirm it.

I’m pretty good about goaltending, when it comes to gaslighting. When my dad accuses me of things, instead of responding, I’ll say, “Don’t try to put me on the defensive. I know you like to do that, but I’m not doing anything wrong. I’m trying to fix a problem you caused.”

Try that with a gaslighter some day. It’s like a karate kick that sweeps their legs out from under them. They collapse. They usually have nothing left to hit you with. They don’t expect you to go on the offensive against their unfair tactics, so they don’t prepare.

This is a great tip. You won’t understand how great it is until you try it.

Putting innocent people on the defensive is a powerful tactic for narcissistic, selfish people. When you do it, you put the burden of proof on the other person. Instead of discussing the real issues, the victims feel like they have to put energy into defending themselves. Don’t fall for it. The fact that someone else goes off on a tangent doesn’t mean you have to go with them. Keep talking about the subject at hand, or bring up something the accuser is desperate to keep off the table.

Jesus was great at this. He was the king of the non sequitur counterpunch. People would make crazy accusations against him, and he wouldn’t respond to them. Instead, he would say whatever he thought people should hear. It made him a very unpleasant person to accuse.

If you have a jealous sibling, whom we’ll call Bob, and he accuses you of, say, using hints to get your parents to help you buy a car, there is no reason why you can’t say something like, “I don’t need a thing, mom and dad. Don’t worry about me. Maybe you could help Bob out, though. He needs a lawyer to get a DWI dismissed.”

Yesterday, my dad said something off the wall. He said I didn’t do anything for him. That’s serious, jaw-dropping gaslighting. He didn’t mean it. He knew it wasn’t true. He was just looking to knock me off balance and make me defend myself.

I decided to respond, since it was a softball. I said I drove him to restaurants, stores, and doctor appointments. I said I did his laundry and cleaned his house. I said I changed his bed for him. I said I took care of his business affairs. I said I maintained his property. I didn’t mention hauling bags of goods covered with reeking excretions to the dump.

It’s kind of hard to think of anything I don’t do for him. He makes himself meals, bathes, and dresses himself. That’s all he does. He can’t do anything else.

A gaslighter will say nearly anything, whether they can prove it or not, so sometimes they really step on a landmine.

Here’s a great moment in gaslighting. Maybe I’ve mentioned it before. My grandmother was around 90. I knew she loved country ham, but she was no longer able to cure her own. I ordered her a great ham from a website. One day I was at her breakfast table, and my sister, who was about 40 at the time, said, “Why don’t you fix some of that country ham Steve bought so you could cook it for him?”

That’s a beauty. She banked a gaslighting shot off my grandmother in order to hit me. No one saw it coming. Everything was cordial up to that point, and then BANG! There it was. JFK couldn’t have been more surprised when the first bullet hit him.

Of course, everyone in my family knew my sister was a fool and a liar, and I took care to respond and set things straight, so I came out unscathed. Still, you have to marvel. What kind of person even thinks of saying a thing like that?

I appreciate it when people tell me the gaslighting is nonsense. It helps.

I am not especially militant or selfish when it comes to looking out for myself when dealing with my dad. I could have said worse things. Here’s something longtime reader Ed Bonderenka said this in a comment, about someone he knows:

I pray he goes peacefully, and if God won’t heal him, soon.

I didn’t go that far. I didn’t say anything like that about my dad, but it’s perfectly moral and acceptable. It’s not selfishness. It’s love.

Sometimes I feel like I blew it by looking after my dad so well, because had I allowed him to keep drinking and sleeping without a CPAP, both of us might have been spared these years of destroyed dignity and disgusting sights, sounds, and smells. The only profit he can get out of life now is salvation, so that’s all I ask for. I used to pray for healing every day. I quit a long time ago. God cut my dad off because of his stubbornness, and I respect that. I just want him to make it to heaven.

My dad’s sister’s dementia went quickly, and she died after a couple of years. She suffered less than he will, and her kids and grandchildren suffered less than I will.

I don’t push things any more. I accept his mortality. I take him to doctors and give him his pills, but if he wants to eat ice cream and cookies every day, I let him. I couldn’t stop him without extreme measures and a lot of fighting. I don’t look for supplements for him. I’m not looking for experimental dementia treatments. If he exercises, great. If not, equally great. I’m not going to struggle to keep him alive in this state. I’m not required to try to make up for someone else’s decades of willful self-neglect.

He apparently agrees, because when I got him his own lawyer, he got himself a living will, rejecting extraordinary measures to support life. I was surprised. In the past, I could never get him to come down on one side or the other; he always told me to decide for him when the time came. I kept telling him it was not my place. Now I don’t have to worry.

I am trying to look after myself today. No restaurant trips. No long conversations about my crimes and failures as a son. No doctors. No business. I hope it pans out. If not, I’ll move it to Sunday. In any case, I will make sure I get what I need. I’m the only one here who has to go on living.

How to Survive Internet Shopping

I come from white collar roots. My mom’s father was a judge. My mom went to law school and ended up getting a degree in social work. My dad was a lawyer. His dad was a bookkeeper who later became a sheriff. I know a little bit about some of my ancestors, and I don’t know of any who were tradesmen. Not one.

Because of my background, I don’t have anyone I can go to when I need information on things like metalworking, woodworking, and so on. I rely a lot on Internet forums. They’re very useful.

Today someone on a forum tried to make fun of me for buying a tractor attachment on Amazon, so I shut him down pretty good. I was polite, but by the time I finished explaining my choice, he looked silly. People who make fun of Amazon users in 2018 are like the people who made fun of the first firearms. Not smart.

In case you buy stuff online, which is like saying, “in case you live on earth in 2018,” let me tell you why you should use Amazon, Ebay, and Paypal. Some conservatives hate these companies for various reasons. I’m not going into that. I’m just going to write about the ways these companies can help you avoid being abused.

In 2009, I bought a used metal lathe from a company called Plaza Machinery. It’s now out of business. The owner died, which means that legally, I can’t be sued for libeling him. I will omit his name, nonetheless, simply because I think it’s what a Christian should do.

I wanted a Clausing 5914 lathe. He said he had one. He gave me a price. He sent pictures. He said it had seen very little use. He said it had a 3-phase motor. He insisted on payment by check or money order.

NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER pay for anything using a check or money order if you have a choice. Cash is even worse. Don’t do it. Don’t. You’re begging to be cheated.

I paid by check.

When the lathe arrived, I saw that it was a Clausing 5936. This is a pretty stupid lathe, for various reasons. It had a single-phase motor. It was beaten up. It had been used for decades in a prison, as a teaching tool.

When I complained, the seller was nasty to me. He made some feeble efforts to fix things. He sent me an ancient 3-phase motor. He said he would take the lathe back if I paid for half of the shipping. That’s a hefty three-figure sum, and I’m not the one who caused the problem.

He cheated me. It’s that simple. He may also have committed fraud. If he knew the lathe was the wrong model, and he misrepresented the condition, then it was fraud. Would an established machinery dealer know the difference between two lathe models? Would he be able to tell if a lathe had a lot of wear on it? Draw your own conclusions.

He eventually refused to communicate with me.

I could have sued him, but because of my religious beliefs, I chose not to. I made do with what I had.

Why did he refuse to accept credit cards? I don’t know, but I know that if you pay for something using a card, you may be able to get the card company to reverse the charge or at least dispute it. I wonder if he thought about that when he formed his policy.

It’s just possible.

Anyone who refuses to take credit cards is probably a crook. There is no other solid reason for refusing. Credit cards are convenient. They result in higher sales. They allow for easier bookkeeping. In order for a businessman to choose to forgo the profitable practice of accepting cards, he has to have a very powerful motivation.

Was the guy from Plaza Machinery a crook? Judge for yourself. I’m not taking a position. Maybe he was simply demented, and he really thought he was doing the right thing.

Plaza Machinery. Remember that name. They may resume operations. Put that name on your list of companies to think about if you ever buy machinery. I’m not saying you should reject or endorse them. Just think about them.

Personally, I would not buy oxygen from them if I were suffocating. It would probably turn out to be chlorine gas, and my estate wouldn’t get a refund. You have only yourself to blame if you step in the same anthill twice.

Because I paid with a check, had I wanted to take action, I would have had to go through the aggravation of suing. That would be easy for me because I’m a lawyer, but it’s not easy for most people. It’s a painful process, and it’s slow. Collecting is not fun, either.

Now let’s talk about the tractor attachment I just bought. I could have ordered it through various sites. I chose Amazon because I knew Amazon would make some effort to look out for me. I knew the dispute process would consist of writing a few emails instead of going to court.

NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER buy through a little backwater website when you can buy the same product from Amazon or using Paypal. If you want Lulu’s Famous Patented Eyebrow Tweezers, do not buy them from Lulu’s site unless she offers Paypal. Use Amazon, or put yourself at Lulu’s mercy.

The tractor attachment was beaten up when I received it. I complained. The seller took it back. They sent me another one which was beaten up. I complained again. They would have taken that one back, too, but I was tired of the process, so I accepted their offer of a discount.

Why did they do all that? Their company has a dubious reputation when it comes to customer relations. Why did they do so much for me? Simple. The power of Amazon. They don’t want bad reviews because they kill sales. They don’t want Bezos down on them.

Had I bought the same item from a small website, they might have told me to go get bent. Because I used Amazon, I had some leverage.

I’ve bought a lot of things off Ebay. I always use Paypal. When I have problems, I do NOT NOT NOT use the Ebay resolution process. It is completely useless, and it wastes days or weeks. NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER use Ebay’s resolution process.

When I’ve had problems with Ebay sellers, I have ended up using Paypal’s resolution process. It’s faster. It works. Paypal favors buyers, as they should. Most of their customers are buyers, not sellers. Paypal has stuck it to sellers for me. There was nothing the sellers could do. They had to eat my problems, as they should.

Why is it that some Ebay sellers don’t accept Paypal? A cynical person would say that it’s because they enjoy cheating helpless buyers. I’m not a cynical person, so I won’t say that.

No, no. I won’t.

If you’re shopping on the web, and you see something you want, your first move should be to look for a way to get it on Amazon or pay with Paypal. If you can’t do that, use the biggest, friendliest site you can find. If you have to use a crappy Wix-based site the seller’s nephew put together, make sure you pay using American Express, which has a fairly good system for helping customers. If you can’t use American Express, accept the fact that you’re dropping your pants for the enemy and hope for the best.

Last year, I bought some mulching blades on Amazon. I learned something interesting. While Amazon claims to have a great guarantee, every seller has variations on it, and in order to know what their policies are, you have to locate an obscure page where it is laid out. I found that out after I bought the blades. Think about it the next time you buy something there.

I’m getting off track.

I bought the blades, and then I found out I couldn’t use them. The seller wanted me to pay a very high restocking fee (also known as a “BS fee” or “customer abuse fee”). I sent the blades back, and then the seller didn’t acknowledge it.

I complained to Amazon. Guess that they did? They gave me a 100% refund. The seller had to eat a big plate of festering crow. I was out clean, but for the cost of return shipping. I’m not sure I even paid that.

What if I had bought the blades from the seller’s Homestead or Tripod site? I would probably still have them, or I would have a Priority Mail receipt and no money.

Why am I so pro-buyer? Simple math. Internet sellers cheat buyers all the time, day in and day out. It probably happens 30 million times a day. It’s much less common for buyers to cheat sellers. It’s not easy to cheat a seller. Once you pay, you’ve done your job. Your money can’t be defective or disappointing the way a product can.

Read this carefully, and remember it: when you shop on the web, do your best to use Amazon or Paypal. Never use a check or money order. Always use a credit card. If you read this and don’t do what I tell you, you will suffer, and you will bring it on yourself.

Reading Pat Conroy for the First Time

A week or two ago, I picked up The Great Santini on my DVR. I search for upcoming movies and set them to record so I’ll have something to amuse me during meals and when I have the birds out of their cages.

I’ve seen the movie many times. Years ago, cable movie stations had very few offerings, so when something appeared in the lineup, you were likely to see it 15 times before it went away.

If you haven’t seen it, I can bring you up to speed. It’s from a book by Pat Conroy, author of The Prince of Tides and The Lords of Discipline. It was inspired by his own upbringing. He was the son of a World War Two marine pilot, Don Conroy. In the movie, Robert Duvall plays the dad part. His character is Wilbur “Bull” Meechum. He’s an abusive alcoholic.

Meechum is extremely arrogant. He is controlling. He humiliates his kids. He can’t stand to see them grow up and outdo him. He drinks heavily. He provokes his superiors with sophomoric behavior. At one point, he comes home drunk and threatens his wife physically.

Michael O’Keefe plays the Pat Conroy part. He’s Meechum’s oldest son, Ben. The movie focuses on things that happen during his last year in high school, in the town of Beaufort, South Carolina.

While I was watching the movie, I felt a sudden need to buy the book.

I was watching a scene in which Bull Meechum gets angry because Ben is beating him in a basketball game. The family is watching while they play. Everyone is rooting for Ben. They’re even talking smack about Bull, but they’re careful not to go too far. At one point, they realize things are getting out of hand. One of them says Bull is getting “that look.” They expect bad things to happen.

If you’ve lived with abuse, you know what that means. Abusive fathers are like dormant volcanoes. Most of the time, you can sit by a volcano without worrying, but once in a while, signs of an upcoming eruption appear, and you have to do something. If your dad is abusive, you have seen him blow up many times, and you are familiar with the signs.

You can’t always predict an abusive event. Sometimes they come out of nowhere, and they pull the floor out of your stomach. But any kid or wife who has a brain will learn to pick up on any signals that may be available, in order to be ready for the times when it’s possible to prepare or escape.

I guess it’s cowardly to say it, but it’s a relief to be outside the room when the explosion comes. Learning the art of the quick, silent exit is very helpful.

Abusive fathers are like volcanoes in another way. When a volcano goes off, you can’t do anything to stop it. It doesn’t care what you do or say. It has to run its course. When an abusive father blows up, he won’t be interested in appeasement or apologies. Say you’re sorry a hundred times, and he’ll just get mad at you for apologizing. There is something inside him he wants to release, and you’re trying to interfere.

I watched that scene, and then I looked for the book online. I found out it was fiction, and then I learned there was a nonfiction version. It’s called My Losing Season. It’s about his senior year on the basketball team at the Citadel. It covers much of the ground the novel is based on.

I deleted the movie the same day I watched the basketball scene. I didn’t watch any more. It’s a depressing movie, and while I enjoyed it when I was young, I now think it’s overrated. The story isn’t stitched together well, and a lot of the dialogue is clumsy. Duvall is perfect in his role, and he gets all the good lines, but Michael O’Keefe is not a good actor.

I’ve been reading the book for a while. I have to say that I’m disappointed in Conroy. I never wanted to read his work before, and although I may possibly read The Great Santini in the future, I have no interest in looking at his other books.

Conroy is not a gifted writer. He doesn’t string words together well. He has no feel for the language. He can’t be funny or witty. The quality of his work is reminiscent of the stuff career ghostwriters do. You can tell writing is hard work for him. That may be the worst thing you can say about a writer.

It’s disappointing. Conroy is held out to be a gem among southern writers. That’s not true. He’s no Carson McCullers or Truman Capote. Not by any stretch of the imagination. And I’m not sure he’s not all that southern. His dad was from Chicago, and he was a marine brat, raised in a number of different places. His mother was from Alabama, but that doesn’t make him James Dickey.

Why has he done so well? I think it’s because he was something of a leftist. His work appeals to leftists. He succeeded very early in life when his book The Water is Wide was turned into a movie. The theme was one that leftist moviemakers can’t stay away from: idealistic white man descends from white heaven and teaches poor black children. How many times have we seen that? Write a book like that, and you’re practically guaranteed to get film offers.

Such movies are, by their very nature, condescending. They exemplify the soft racism of low expectations. If you’re a black kid, and you want to succeed, find yourself a white liberal Jesus to tell you about Shakespeare, Beethoven, and basic personal hygiene. The implication is that black people will never be able to do anything for themselves. Somehow that is lost on the people who make the movies.

Moviemakers are crazy about teacher movies. The Dead Poet’s Society. Lean on Me. Teachers. The Principal. To Sir, With Love. The Man Without a Face. The Miracle Worker. Stand and Deliver. Mr. Holland’s Opus. Blackboard Jungle. I’m going to run out of space.

At least To Sir, With Love broke with precedent. The teacher was black, and the students were hopeless white kids.

Leftists are in love with teachers because they compete with ministers and parents and turn kids against God and capitalism. Leftists generally think belief in God is a serious problem, like blindness or cystic fibrosis. They see it as something that has to be treated. That’s the spirit of antichrist.

Conroy has almost no talent at all, but that’s okay, because sometimes what you have to say is more important than how you say it. My Losing Season is still interesting to me. He voluntarily gave the world a window into the world of an abused and neglected son, and I wanted to read it in order to feel less exceptional.

The Santini novel and movie are gentler than reality. In real life (if Pat Conroy can be believed), Donald Conroy was worse than Bull Meechum.

I’m not all that far into the book, but Don Conroy has already done a lot of vile things. More than once, he has hit his son in the face, hard, with no warning. He has told his son he’s a sissy and a loser, but he didn’t use the word “sissy.” He has bet his son his basketball team will lose. He has sucker-punched his son to the floor at a school event, in front of a crowd. He has thrown a glass of iced tea at his son’s face, opening up his eyebrow to the point where it had to be stitched.

I saw some and heard some very bad things when I was a kid, but Don Conroy is on another level. He truly wanted his kids to fail. I can’t say my situation, or my sister’s, was as bad as Pat Conroy’s. His dad gave his kids prolonged beatings. My sister and I didn’t have to deal with beatings or injuries. My dad was never out to destroy us; he hoped we would amount to something. I don’t think it pained him when we enjoyed ourselves. I don’t think he ever came home looking forward to tormenting us in order to blow off steam. Some people have had things worse than we did.

Don Conroy’s sowing produced quite a harvest. One of his sons was schizophrenic, and a daughter was institutionalized. You may believe a parent can’t make a kid mentally ill. I disagree. I think anyone can be abused into insanity, if you start early enough. Even during breaks from the abuse, an abused person suffers the lingering effects of the inner bruising. The echoes don’t die down the minute the mistreatment stops.

Pat Conroy himself suffered from depression, and he tried to kill himself at least once.

Abusers listen to demons. They don’t know the Holy Spirit. They have no one to counterbalance or run off the evil spirits that rule them. Many abusers don’t care. They don’t examine themselves. They feel no guilt. Spirits use them to torment their families, and that helps other spirits get into their spouses and kids. Secular therapists talk about “cycles of abuse” and so on. It’s all nonsense. Spirits follow families, and spirits that run your relatives will try to run you, too.

A good father helps his children to know the Holy Spirit and to increase his influence in them. If you’re not for the Holy Spirit, you’re against him. As Jesus said, there is no neutrality. A bad father helps demons gain control of his children.

Wikipedia says Don Conroy reformed, and that he and his son became close. Is that encouraging? No. The answer is no. It’s better than not reconciling, but the damage was already done. Forgiveness is wonderful, but it’s not restitution. When you’ve ruined decades of someone’s life, there is no way to make up for it.

If you’ve abused your kids or your spouse, there is nothing you can do to fix it. You can make the future much better than it would be had you not repented, and you have an obligation to do that, but you can’t pull healthy childhoods and marriages out of your ear and hand them to the people you hurt, to be inserted in the places of the experiences they actually had.

You can’t say, “Presto! Now you had normal relationships in high school and a wonderful prom. Presto! Now you graduated from college at 22 and didn’t quit because I drove you crazy. Presto! Now you married your college sweetheart at 23 and had three great kids. Presto! Now the cops never came to our house. Presto! Now you’ve never seen your mother with two black eyes.”

Think about this. If you change when you’re 60, and you become the best dad or husband on earth, what are you really giving your family? You’re giving them what you already owe them. You don’t deserve a medal for getting back on course and doing what you were already supposed to be doing. No matter what you do, you will die deep in debt, with nothing to be proud of and plenty to be humiliated about.

You have to change. No question about that. You have to seek forgiveness. You have to patch things up as well as you can. But don’t delude yourself. You still come up way short.

Redemption is magnificent, but it can’t compare to doing the right thing in the first place. Like God says, “Obedience is better than sacrifice.”

I don’t know if I can recommend the book or not. A lot of it is about basketball, and those parts are so boring it defies description. I don’t care who set a pick on whom in a playground in 1957. Even if I didn’t find basketball itself boring, I think I would find reading Conroy’s sports recaps tedious.

The way Conroy writes about other athletes is a little off-putting. There is a lot of description of other men’s bodies and movements. “Bobby Feeny’s supple form arched through the air as his soft hands cupped the worn Spalding, and I foresaw giving him a firm pat on his talented fanny after his successful jump shot.” I’m exaggerating, but only a little. You can write about a ball game without making people want to close the door and give you your privacy.

I have a feeling all of Conroy’s books are depressing. I’ve read a little about him, and he seems like a depressing person. I don’t think I’ll create a collection.

Be good to your kids. If you can’t manage it, leave and pray your spouse remarries. Your children will remember everything, and your actions will leave marks whether you can see them or not.

Dementia Update

I feel like providing some updates on life as a caregiver.

When you have a parent who is slipping, you have to make sure his estate is organized so there isn’t a bloodbath after he dies. One thing you have to do is to make sure he has his own representation. You don’t want to go into a courtroom after his death and say, “I did this or that because I figured it was a good idea.” You want to be able to point to his attorney and say, “He had his own counsel, and he did what he wanted to.” If a decedent’s estate plan is clearly his own, it will stand up to challenges. Besides, letting them make their own choices is the right thing to do.

My dad has an attorney, and one of the things he advised us to do was to take my dad’s properties out of his name. I have been going about this over the last couple of months. It’s finally done. It could have been done sooner.

I was reluctant to take the attorney’s advice, so I didn’t move as fast as I could have. Here’s the reason: I believe God has told me my dad will not last long after everything is in order. My dad is very stubborn about accepting salvation. I think God has accepted his decision not to repent and experience a long, redemptive period as a saved person prior to his death. I believe my dad will not accept salvation until death is staring him in the face, and I think God is not going to keep prolonging his life. It would serve no purpose.

This is consistent with his medical prognosis. He is several years into a type of dementia that typically kills within about 5 years of diagnosis.

When I worked on getting the properties fixed up, I felt like I was pushing my dad closer to the grave. I felt as though I had a certain amount of power over the amount of time he had left. You can understand why I would find it hard to get things wrapped up.

My dad’s type of dementia progresses in steps. He has plateaus during which things seem static, and then he changes perceptibly overnight. He is worse than he was a month ago. He has started shuffling very slowly now, and he sometimes has to be helped out of chairs. Taking him to the grocery wasn’t all that difficult last year. Now I have to move very slowly in the aisles. He takes a long time to move through a store. His feet move quickly, so he sounds like he’s marching, but his steps are miniscule.

I’m wondering if he needs an electric cart. He refuses to use the ones stores provide, though.

His manners are getting worse, although not as quickly as his other problems. He has always enjoyed blowing his nose on the ground and sidewalks, with people all around, and he has gotten worse with age. The other day he blew his nose on the floor of a restaurant. No one saw him, thank God. I had to let him know that if his manners deteriorate too much, I won’t be able to take him to restaurants because it won’t be fair to other people. In the past, when I reminded him that bad manners could result in his becoming isolated, he would say, “Who cares?” Now he listens, but I don’t think he can change.

I don’t know what I’ll do when he loses all restraint. I’m not going to be a public spectacle. That’s too much to ask. I’ll have to quit taking him out. It’s better for him to be bored and isolated than for me to be run out of every restaurant in town.

One of my big challenges is limiting his intolerable behavior. He rubs spit on counters in order to clean them. He eats food out of packages with dirty fingers and utensils. I don’t even want to discuss his bathroom. So far I’ve been able to find ways to reduce my exposure to an acceptable level, but when it gets to be too much for me, I’ll have to ship him out. I can only stand what I can stand.

He is also inclined to be more clingy these days. He keeps asking me to come up with some kind of device that would allow him to summon me to his side instantly, 24 hours a day. Of course, that can’t be done. He can go to assisted living, where they can confine him and keep close tabs on him, but a human being who has other responsibilities can’t pop up on command like a genie. Sometimes I have to mow the yard. Sometimes I have to run errands. I have to handle business. Often I need to be by myself, just to avoid having the same argument for the 10th time in a week. Until he’s ready for a new standard of care, he’s going to have to risk short periods when he’s out of my sight.

I don’t think that’s a big problem. A certain amount of risk is unavoidable, and even in a hospital or a home, it would be impossible to protect him every second. His best friend from law school died in a hospital. I think I’ve written about it before. He got up to use the toilet because he was too mule-headed to call for help, and he fell and hit his head, right there in his room. I don’t think my dad is any less safe here than he would be in a home, and he gets to enjoy his property and spend time with me.

I can get him one of those panic buttons old people carry, but he won’t remember what it is. He has a cell phone, and he can’t use it.

I think he’s going to come unglued when he has to move. He wants to be with me. If he goes to a home, I will probably see him for a couple of hours three times a week. You can’t attend to your responsibilities if you spend half of every day at an assisted living home.

It’s hard to decide how much of myself to give to him. I’m entitled to a life. I’m not part of his body. But I want to do what I can.

He’s going to suffer. That’s inevitable, no matter what is done for him. He didn’t play his cards right in life, so he ended up with brain damage and a dysfunctional family that can’t do much for him. My sister is gone, and if she were around, she would make things so much worse he would want to die. I have no wife to help me look after him. He has no grandkids to help him pass the time.

I can’t insulate him from all consequences, and that isn’t my fault. No one is obligated to give a parent a perfect world. I couldn’t do that even if I had five married siblings sharing the load. But no one has provided me with clear rules about what to give and what not to give. Am I doing enough? I hope so. I have to make choices all the time.

He’s not able to enjoy reading any more, apart from newspapers and magazines. He gets bored watching TV. At the same time, he’s intelligent enough to need activity and things to think about. That’s the problem.

He’s in an impossible situation. Even if he were surrounded by servants all day, and they did exactly what he wanted, he would still be unsatisfied, because he simply can’t do what it takes to keep himself occupied and content. That’s the cold reality of it. He is going to suffer, no matter what anyone does for him. It’s not the nature of the world that makes him suffer. It’s the disease itself.

The only real remedy would be to be magically transformed into the able person he was 25 years ago. He wouldn’t be happy, because he was very, very unhappy then, but he would be unhappy for reasons he would like better.

He’s bored and lonely, and he’s angry because he’s bored and lonely, but he can no longer do the things a person has to do to maintain relationships and stave off boredom. He can’t enjoy books. He can’t use a computer without someone sitting beside him the whole time. He can’t ride his bicycle or even a tricycle. I don’t think he could manage shuffleboard because of his balance.

In a facility, he would be doing what he does here. He wouldn’t be able to play games. He wouldn’t read books. He wouldn’t be able to focus on hobbies. He might get more conversation, though. That would be a plus.

I’ve learned something disappointing: when I feel like I’m not handling things well, and I call in “experts,” their solutions are generally worse or no better than mine. The main difference is that we have to pay them. When you lose your mind, you’re not going to be able to go to a doctor, write him a check, and get all your problems fixed. There is no safety net out there, waiting to take all your cares off your back. There is no system. Your children or spouse, with no training at all, will be much more helpful to you than professionals. Even if they screw up.

My dad let himself down. His doctors let him down, not that they could have helped had they done things right. For all my mistakes and failures, I’m doing a better job than anyone involved. I’m not bragging. I’m making a disturbing observation on the way the world works. Get ready for it. If you’re obese and you drink too much, this is the paradigm you’re going to be dealing with. Hope someone in your family loves you.

I’ve come to believe we do too much to keep demented people alive. We can’t fix dementia itself, but we can keep people on drugs that keep their bodies working after their brains have shut down. I wonder why we do that.

My dad will never practice law again. He will never have a date or another wife. He will never travel. He won’t make any new friends, because he would keep forgetting who they were. Is it a good idea to keep feeding him pills to keep his blood pressure down and his arteries clear? I wonder if I made a mistake when I got his doctor to make him stop drinking. Maybe if he had continued, he would be with the Lord now, in a perfect body with a clear mind.

I pushed him to get a CPAP a few years ago. I thought it would prevent dementia. That didn’t work out too well.

It’s strange; I procrastinated with his property issues because I felt like I was killing him by getting things in order, but I feel funny working so hard to keep nature from taking its course, when the only result is increased suffering.

I have one major goal for him, and it’s not a cure. I just want him to receive salvation so he can go to heaven. I want him to accept Jesus. After that, what happens during his remaining time on earth will not be that important. He can’t be made happy. He can’t be made strong. He can be saved, however, so that’s what I pray for.

Learn from my experience. You are going to die, so get ready. Think of your spouse and kids. Prepare so everyone can relax.

Tide of Filth Continues to Rise

I’m not sure why I still look at the news at all. For a while, I really cut back, but I started to drift back into it after God showed me a few things, and now I read a fair amount. I can’t say it’s as damaging as it used to be, but it’s still gross and unpleasant.

Today’s menu: the destructive perpetuation of black victimhood politics, the promotion of outright hatred for white people, and a famous actress pushing the delusional notion that comments from actresses will cause men to find overweight women attractive.

I can probably find an article about “slut-shaming,” too, if I look for a few seconds. “Principal gives braless teen detention; Twitter isn’t having it.” Something like that has to be in there somewhere. The left has decided that young girls, who are not to be objectified sexually, are empowering themselves when they do everything humanly possibly to assure that they are…objectified sexually. And teachers and principals who object are somehow out of line.

Let’s see. “White privilege” article. I’m still waiting for my weekly Caucasian stipend check. “Whitewashing” article. White people are no longer allowed to use chopsticks in movies, I think. Not sure.

Well, I don’t see any new articles about spoiled girls in tube tops, but I did see this, from a well-known, big-time outlet: “Trump’s Matter-of-Fact Fascism.”

What?

I’m wondering if the person who wrote that headline has any idea what has happened under real fascist regimes. I also wonder if they understand that the biggest purveyors of fascism are leftists. The term “fascism” is not tied to the right or left wing. It’s very vague. It refers to all governments that are oppressive and cruel.

Think about this: China and the USSR. Game over. If right-wing fascists did their best to promote their ethos, starting today, and they succeeded beyond their fondest hopes, it would be decades before they caught up with the big dogs.

I’m not sure right-wing fascist can even exist. Right-wing people support freedom of contract, freedom of religion, capitalism, private property, and the right to own and carry guns. How can you reconcile those things with fascism? Leftists, on the other hand, believe in socialism, central control of all wealth, disarmament of all citizens, and tightly regulated trade. How can you have those things without fascism? Cuban is a fascist state. So is North Korea. So is Nicaragua. So is Vietnam. So is Burma. Hmm.

I have to point out a few things.

Unattractive women are going to remain unattractive regardless of how many Yahoo Lifestyle articles criticize men who find unattractive women unattractive. Even if I wanted to find Melissa McCarthy attractive, I could not make myself do it. And I don’t want to. I don’t want to, and there is no reason why I should try.
God made some people desirable, and he also made the others. That’s how things are. Some people are smart. Some people are talented. Some people are charismatic. Some people were born with a huge genetic edge over the rest of us. Part of maturity is accepting what you are and refusing to blame other people for treating you…wait for it…appropriately.

I don’t understand why leftists want to force men to like unattractive women. When did this become a legitimate, useful project?

Where is the movement to force women to be attracted to short men and unsuccessful men? Can I have an update on that? Women say men are shallow because we like beautiful women, yet men under a certain height find it very hard to get dates, even if they’re real catches. Men who don’t earn a lot have trouble landing women, too. How come no one ever bemoans the loneliness of Gary Coleman and Vern Troyer? Maybe it’s because women who reject short and unsuccessful men aren’t doing anything wrong.

The rules of attraction are what they are. It’s not wrong, and it’s not a conspiracy.

Men–even men who are not attractive–prefer attractive women. They always will. People like chocolate bars better than liver. People like silk better than burlap. There is no use raging against things that can’t be changed, and using inalterable conditions of life to justify tormenting innocent people is immoral and cruel.

As for black victimhood politics, all I can say is that it’s a great strategy for making potential employers look for ways to reject you without inviting lawsuits. If, before you even start to work, you have a chip on your shoulder and an entitlement attitude, plus some overt racism, your resume is going to the bottom of the pile, and that’s not discrimination. That’s common sense. No one wants to hire a lawsuit time bomb.

Spoiled girls in tube tops…where do I begin? Men look at women. It’s not because we’re pigs. It’s biological. If we could turn it off, a lot of us would. I certainly would. I’ve learned to avoid sexual provocation; I don’t encourage my own desires. It leads to spiritual problems, and I don’t like being controlled by sleazy women with IQ’s that resemble my house’s thermostat settings.

Stop blaming us for something we can’t control. You are not helping. But then women who tempt men aren’t trying to help. They’re looking for power and an excuse to cause suffering.

It’s disrespectful and thoughtless to expose yourself at school or at your job, and it makes you look like a bimbo, which, if you do expose yourself, you probably are. Boys going through puberty need all the help they can get, and dressing like a whore in order to get attention from boys, and in order to control them, is not something a quality person does. School administrators realize this, and if they tell you to put on a longer skirt and stop showing your underwear (if you are thoughtful enough to wear underwear), it’s not oppression. It’s sound educational policy, and it’s also in your best interest.

Being thought of as a whore will curtail your social and employment opportunities, and it will eventually lead to misery. If you want to peak in 11th grade, slut it up, but in a couple of years, you will be an object of ridicule.

Slutty women have no idea how people talk about them when they’re not around. That’s too bad.

When I was in college, I visited Georgia Tech with a friend. We stayed in a frat house. The frat guys had a sort of mascot. I have no idea what her name was, because they called her “the whore.” She was a student. She was a cute little blond girl. She liked hanging around with the boys. When she was present, they treated her nicely because she provided a service. When she was out of the room, they would say things like, “Where’s the whore?” She probably never found out. This is what life is really like when you’re promiscuous and provocative.

One of the reasons I visited was that I thought I was in love with a girl who went to Emory. My friend got to Georgia Tech a few days before I did, and being the kind of friend he was, he invited her for a visit and made out with her. At one point she had quite a few drinks and sat on some bleachers above the guys, and she did not sit in a ladylike manner. When they looked up, they saw a lot more than they needed to. From then on, she had a secret nickname, too, and it’s too crude to mention here. The implication was that she omitted her undergarments and displayed her privates. My friend (someone I ejected from my circle years later) would probably still use that nickname today if we discussed her.

It’s not easy for a provocative woman to get respect from men or anyone else. She may get tolerance, and she may intimidate with social pressure, but she can’t get respect.

Incidentally, I say “dressing like a whore” with considerable forethought. I’ve seen how actual whores dress. Many mainstream women and girls of 2018 dress the way prostitutes dressed in 1995, and this is especially true of celebrities. Leftist heroin Chrissy Teigen appeared on TV wearing a dress that exposed her genitals and then made fun of people who were upset.

“Whitewashing”…who cares? Is it really a big deal if Tom Cruise stars in a movie about samurais? Is it going to bring back railroad coolie camps? I don’t think so. All movies are silly, when you get right down to it. Actors hate hearing that, but it’s true. It’s maladjusted, angry people playing make-believe. We make too much of it.

No one minds “blackwashing.” Well, that’s not entirely true. I thought it was weird when people talked about hiring Idris Elba to play James Bond. He’d do a bang-up job, but James Bond is half Scottish and half Swiss, and he has always been played by white men, so watching Idris Elba play him would be like sitting through a pointless, carping lecture which would go completely against the politically incorrect underpinnings of the James Bond universe. It would be like going to a Stones concert and having Keith Richards stop the show and give a lecture on temperance.

I think Tom Hardy will be the next James Bond. Who else could follow Daniel Craig? And he’s young enough to make an investment in him worthwhile. Idris Elba is pushing 50.

Anyway, no one cared when Denzel Washington played the Equalizer, a character that was originally white. No one cared when Jaden Smith played the Karate Kid. It’s hard to believe people get agitated about things like this.

What was I referring to when I mentioned hatred of white people, above? I was talking about a woman named Sarah Jeong. I assume she’s Korean. The New York Times (which really is failing, as the president says) hired her the other day. Problem: she has a bunch of fairly recent racist tweets. And they’re not mild. They’re not “arguably” racist. They are worse than most of the things Nazis said about Jews. At least the Nazis pretended to have reason on their side.

You can go look the tweets up. I am not going to quote them.

Her excuse is that she was being provoked by vicious racist tweets aimed at her. Does that really fly? No. If a Jewish extremist tweets that all gentiles are monkeys, it’s still not okay for me to call him a kike or say Hitler was right. It doesn’t work that way. Even if it did, why did she leave the tweets up for two years? No, that dog won’t hunt.

People are defending her. That’s disturbing.

God told me something a while back. He said, “The hate is already here.” He was referring to the hate that will eventually cause mainstream Americans to torment and murder Christians. For some reason, leftists conflate Christians and white people, so Jeong’s bizarre tweets appear to be symptomatic of the hate God was telling me about.

It’s scary that she was tolerated for two years after tweeting these things, but it’s a helpful warning, too. Buy guns if you want. Buy a plot of land in Idaho and learn to grow your own food. Can’t hurt. But what you really need is to get close to God and learn how to get his protection. Guns and homegrown carrots won’t be the best answers when things get really bad. Carnal tools have never been the best choice.

Leftists, some of them prominent, now use the Internet to call for the slaughter of conservatives, whites, and Christians. It’s just words now (unless you get beaten up for wearing a red hat), but what people need to understand is that the tweeters and Instagrammers aren’t kidding or bluffing. They are fully willing to do what they say should be done. They are being restrained right now, but that won’t always be true.

People do what they’re given permission to do. When the government and our famous bellwethers give Americans permission, we will be beaten and killed, wholesale. Don’t think for a second that Americans are above it. Americans can be just as vicious, sadistic, and self-righteous as anyone else, when they lose touch with God.

I’m glad I moved to the country, but as long as I’m on this planet, I will never be far from the kooks and crazies. Ever notice how many leftist-nut stories come from Texas? Texans are WAY overrated. They will lie down for just about anything these days. They hire all sorts of poisonous educators now, and when there’s a conflict, they roll over and play dead. How did that happen?

I’m glad I’m not closer to the flames, but I haven’t escaped. I’m just retreating and enjoying temporary cover. If you think you’re doing better, you’re out of touch with reality.

The Bible says that if riches increase, we should not set our hearts on them. It’s the same way with everything that belongs to the earth. Our bodies. Our nation. It’s all temporary. I no longer feel attached to this life. I can’t wait to leave. I am not depressed, and I would never even think about suicide, but I know this place is messed up. I’m like a Peace Corps volunteer who can’t wait to come home from Sudan.

I look forward to being out of the reach of leftists and violent crusaders forever. I look forward to being surrounded with like-minded brothers and sisters in perfect, immortal bodies. I look forward to not needing reading glasses any more, now that I think about it.

Northern Florida is a glimmer of the life to come. I see very little hostility or disagreement here. I experience a lot of warmth and kindness. I hear people talking about God, without shame or reluctance. Heaven will be like this, only many times better. If they had an Internet in heaven, it wouldn’t be polluted by the sordid antics of Kim Kardashian and Chrissy Teigen. It would be full of love and agreement.

I feel like I’m in a lifeboat, watching the Titanic sink. I can’t do one thing to stop it. All I can do is pull people aboard.

I guess I’ll close now. I need to go catch up on pithy articles about society’s great need to promote topless breastfeeding in restaurants.

Ninth Circuit Experiences Brief Spasm of Lucidity

I always tell people they’re…misguided…when they don’t realize it’s impossible to vote for an individual in a presidential election. People say dumb things like, “I vote for the man, not the party.” They don’t understand that a president isn’t just a man. He is also part of a team, and when you vote for the captain of the other team, you gut everyone on your own team. Conservatives who voted for Hillary Clinton or who refused to vote at all weren’t just attacking Donald Trump. They were attacking every conservative politician in America.

One of the president’s most important jobs is to appoint federal judges. These people are very dangerous. They are accountable to no one, and they rule for life. I say “rule” because that’s accurate. They decide what the law means. If a federal judge says a law against arson actually bans cheating at tiddlywinks, that’s what it means, until another judge overrules him. The text of a law means nothing until a judge tells us what it means.

We have a bunch of federal circuits. Each circuit is composed of areas from several states. Some circuit panels are more sane than others. The worst circuit in the US is the Ninth Circuit, which rules over California, Hawaii, and some other western states. They are completely unhinged. They routinely agree with far-left eccentrics, and their decisions can be very damaging.

This week, the Ninth Circuit did a shocking thing. An appellate panel changed the law in Hawaii, and the ruling applies to all other Ninth Circuit states. The court held that OPEN carry of weapons was protected by the US Constitution. Not concealed, mind you. They say regulating concealed carry may be okay. They decided to protect OPEN carry. We don’t even have that in Florida, which has a reputation for loose gun laws.

Believe it or not, Hawaii and California were already open-carry states. In Hawaii, you could carry openly with a carry permit. The problem was that carry permits were impossible to get. The new case makes it much easier to get permits.

Prior to the decision, Hawaiians were not allowed to have weapons in their vehicles. It was open season on people in cars. Can you believe that? Now they can walk down the street with holsters on their hips.

The opinion is startling. In its lengthy endorsement of the famous Heller case, it firmly, decisively rejects the “militia” connection liberals have tried to tack onto the Second Amendment. All cases holding that 2A doesn’t apply to individuals are now bad law in the Ninth Circuit. They were already bad law because of the Supreme Court’s Heller decision, but now the Ninth has expressly adopted Heller just about as hard as possible. Courts can play games with rulings from higher courts. They can deliberately misconstrue and delay. “Sorry; your transmission was garbled.” This new case is an unconditional surrender.

The opinion also defines the phrase “keep and bear” very clearly. As I have often said, and as some courts have said, “keep and bear” means “own and carry.” This is obvious to anyone who owns a dictionary, but liberals dispute it. The Ninth Circuit now says its subjects are allowed to carry outside their homes. It points out that the right to carry means nothing if it doesn’t apply outside the home. The founding fathers didn’t include the word “bear” so you could carry your rifle in circles in your living room.

The most satisfying part of the case is a long passage in which the court compares deprivation of the right to carry with Reconstruction-era confiscation of firearms from freed slaves! You really have to read it to believe it. Leftists want us to forget something very important: the right to own and carry arms is a CIVIL right, and people who support 2A are civil rights activists.

It’s interesting to look at the history of the case.

The suit was filed by a man named Young. He was upset because Hawaii did not like issuing permits. Hawaii would only give permits to people who were special. Security guards were able to get permits. Magnum, P.I. was able to get a permit. Probably Higgins, too, because of his MI6 connections. Maybe Don Ho. People who showed extraordinary, urgent need could (supposedly but probably not really) get permits. Mr. Young sued the state and his county.

The lower court judge is named Helen Gillmor. See if you can guess who appointed her. I’ll tell you: Bill Clinton, husband of the unelected woman who anointed herself healthcare empress. Gillmor is an undistinguished lawyer who went to school in New York and Boston. She is a former PD, which speaks volumes. PD’s are delusional in their hatred of everything good. Perhaps I exaggerate, but the job attracts real kooks.

Gillmor made some crazy rulings. She appears to have had no respect for Mr. Young’s pro se lawsuit, so she did some frivolous things in order to turf his case into a black hole, surely hoping the Ninth Circuit would back her up. For one thing, she denied that 2A granted rights to individuals. That’s not even close to what the case law says.

The appellate judges who fixed things were named Ikuta and…some Gaelic name I’m not going to go back and look up. One is a Bush II appointee, and the other is a Reagan appointee. The third judge dissented. Bush II appointed him. Oh, well.

Why talk about the judges? Because their history is more important than the law. Their biases determined what they ultimately decided. Clinton’s girl bent over backwards to distort the law to suit her frustrated wishes, and two judges appointed by Republicans straightened things out.

If you didn’t vote for Trump, you voted against your 2A rights. Even if you stayed home, you helped activist judges who don’t mind if their actions give criminals the power to kill or rape you at will. You should be ashamed of your ignorance, your childishness, or both.

One of the most beautiful things about Trump’s victory is his work to appoint conservative judges. Obama appointed all sorts of crazies. Now Trump is working to dilute the cesspool. He can’t fire the nuts, but he can fill spots with people who will fight them. That’s very important.

We’re about to see Kavanaugh seated on the Supreme Court. No one can predict what a justice will do once he has no one to answer to (Reagan appointed Kennedy), but more likely than not, Kavanaugh will be very helpful to us. Ruth Ginsburg is in bad health, and Clarence Thomas is getting old. We may have a chance to get rid of a socialist who has said she wants to repeal 2A, and we may be able to replace a faithful servant with someone younger. This is a very big deal. But the never-Trumpers don’t get that. They would rather be petty and watch their rights disappear so they can tell the rest of us they told us so.

The never-Trump plan is not working out well. The economy is strong. Trump is doing a lot of great things. He needs our help, because he runs again in two years, and the alternative will be someone like fake Indian Liz Warren or Kamala Harris. I wonder how long the pouters will sit on the sidelines and pray for Trump to fail. The more he succeeds, the dumber they look.

Enemies are bad. Treacherous friends are worse. That’s why armies have traditionally fed and sheltered POW’s while hanging spies. The GOP has a lot of spies right now.

I completely understand that Trump rubs people the wrong way, and that he is disappointing on a personal level, but that doesn’t justify turning on the rest of us.

I have never seen a candidate I supported in the primaries win a presidential election, but that didn’t drive me to sit in a corner and suck my thumb. I held my nose and voted for McCain and Romney. I preferred Cruz to Trump, but I voted for Trump in the end. You have to buy off the rack. You can’t always have the candidate you want. It’s important to grow up and do what you can.

The Hawaii case shows what can happen if we keep Republicans in the White House. Why are so many of us working against that?

I don’t know why I write about this stuff. In reality, prayer and repentance are what matter. If people are voting stupidly, it’s because we have turned away from God and opened ourselves to deception. If we don’t turn back to God, all the conservative policy in the world won’t help us. Still, it’s nice to see America’s decline retarded.