No One Really Knows How to Do This

I haven’t written as much lately as I usually do. My dad’s accident caused a lot of problems. I’ll provide an example. On Saturday, I had to do something like 8 loads of laundry, and my dad’s laundry is not simple. We have a horrible “high efficiency” washer that takes two hours to do a load with a prewash.

I want to get an old-fashioned washer that takes half an hour. I do not care how much water it uses. I have a well, and our water goes back into the aquifer through the septic tank. Not that I care whether it goes back. If Al Gore can have a compound with a $3000 monthly electric bill, I can have a real washer. If Leonardo DiCaprio doesn’t like it, he can come here on the jet he uses to fly to environmentalist events, and he can lecture me about it.

The earth was provided by God to make my life easier, so if I damage it a little, tough.

High efficiency washers don’t work all that well. They will accept larger loads than normal washers, but they don’t get them clean, because the stuff in the middle stays dry. Try it yourself and see. In reality, you have to baby them and be careful not to put too much in them. Then when your clothes come out, they smell like mildew. There is nothing you can do about this. You can minimize it by running cleaning cycles with various chemicals, and you can waste your time cleaning the gaskets, but a certain amount of mildew will always remain, and when your clothes get hot and wet enough during the day, they WILL smell, and people will think it’s you.

It’s hard to find a decent washer. Everything is made in China, and nothing is reliable. Horror stories abound. Even Speed Queen makes questionable washers now. I think the best option is to get a mid-priced agitator washer and accept the fact that it will probably die after three years.

I keep learning things about being a caregiver. Here’s one: demented people should not have complicated bedding. My dad used to have a quilt and a blanket, which is a lot for Florida. Right now, he has a synthetic polar fleece blanket which weighs less and is easier to wash. I don’t think he liked giving up the heavier bedclothes, but once the blanket was in place, he forgot all about them. The blanket is a lot easier to wash.

That’s another important thing to remember. No matter how upset a demented person gets about something, he will forget about it in a day. Very often, you will find yourself in ridiculous circular conversations about nonsense that seems very important to the patient. The proper goal isn’t to resolve things. The resolution will be forgotten. The proper goal is to end the conversations peacefully. I don’t lie, but I try to say what will stop the boat rocking.

If you really have to, you can walk away and leave the patient angry. It will pass, because he will forget.

The other day my dad decided we had to go to Sears, right that minute, and get him a lift recliner. There is no Sears near here. There was no place except La-Z-Boy, it was early Saturday evening, and their cheapest offering was $1600, which Medicare would not help pay for unless it was cleared in advance. Was it even in stock? Who knows? I wasn’t going to drive 10 miles just to find out. And who was supposed to deliver it and carry it into the house?

I could not get him to accept the fact that we could not get a recliner at that instant, and I finally had to go away and leave him with his annoyance. There was nothing I could do, and he would have gone on for hours or maybe all night.

Another thing: a demented person with chronic pain will never be quiet about it. Every time they notice the pain, they think it’s a fresh topic that needs to be discussed. My dad’s back is bothering him, so we have repeated discussions about it, in which I say the exact same things: we have an appointment with a doctor, all he can have is Aleve, he already rejected surgery, and maybe he will have to live with pain from now on.

Demented patients may worry a lot, about things that will never happen. The other day he was worried about getting stuck in bed. He can get out of bed without help now, but I discussed various solutions anyway. Mechanical devices.

Ultimately, no matter what strategies we choose, short of assisted living, I am the fail safe. When he asked what would happen to him if something happened to me, I didn’t have anything positive to offer, so I said I guessed we would both die. I said there were some risks I could not avert.

He’s not completely gone. I couldn’t say, “Superman and Tinkerbell will fly in and look after you.” My response had to make sense, so I told him the truth. If I die, he will have very serious problems. Nothing I can do. We can get him some kind of alert device, but will he be able to use it? Maybe.

He didn’t seem all that worried about the “Steve dies” part of the scenario! Not at that moment. He was troubled by the thought of the adverse effect on him.

Should I be determined to make sure his life will be perfectly safe no matter what happens to me? Let me ask you this: have you had kids? Have you ever lived alone with a baby or small child? Did you feel it was irresponsible to live alone with a baby or child, knowing they would be in real trouble if you died suddenly? No. There are limits to what we can do, and we accept them. If I’m severely injured, my dad won’t be able to do anything for me, but I’m not putting MYSELF in assisted living in order to prevent that. Life is full of unavoidable risk.

Think about this: old people, like everyone else, can fall down. Their bones are more brittle than young people’s, and they are more likely to receive brain damage or to break hips. Do we make them wear motorcycle helmets all day? No. Do we force them to live in rooms with padded floors? No. We get them canes and walkers, we keep them off stairs, and we hope they don’t fall. Just because you CAN do something to make someone safer doesn’t mean you should. Death and injury are facts of life, and all you can do is take reasonable precautions.

The only way to keep my dad “safe” is to put him in a wheelchair. Then lack of exercise would kill him in 6 months.

I decided against putting a ramp in front of the house, because ramps don’t work well with people who are still walking. My dad can read. I have signs telling him to stay off the steps. I need to get a little work done on his bathroom, and I’m going to get all the information I can from his doctor today. Until he loses the ability to walk, I think that will do.

Here’s another issue: what kind of vehicle should a caregiver have? I persuaded him to replace his ancient SUV with a new one, and it has worked out extremely well. Would I make that choice now? I don’t know. He could be in a wheelchair a few months from now. How will I get him in and out of the car? In retrospect, I wonder if a van would have been better. You can have them fitted with wheelchair stuff. On the other hand, when he reaches that stage, won’t assisted living be the better choice?

I have to make all these decisions myself. If you’re a caregiver, get rid of the delusion that you have to listen to your patient and give their opinions and desires real weight. You have to talk to them and get useful input to make their lives better, and you have to be considerate, but you can’t let them make final decisions. You wouldn’t hire a demented doctor or even a demented TV repairman, so why would you let a demented relative tell you what to do?

I used to try to persuade him to go along with things. These days, I only do that when it’s appropriate. For example, I used to try to get him to throw things out or give them away. Now I do those things without consulting him. He doesn’t need the NordicTrack any more. He doesn’t need 50 pairs of underwear dating back to Bill Clinton. He doesn’t need a pistol beside his bed. He doesn’t need half a cubic foot of old napkins and paper towels on his dresser. I get rid of things that cause problems, and he rarely notices.

There is one area in which he does whatever he wants. When it comes to legal representation, he’s his own man. I got him his own lawyer, and the last time we consulted him, the lawyer put me in the waiting room so he could talk to my dad privately. He’s still competent to discuss certain things. I don’t know what they said. I didn’t ask. That was necessary, in order to avoid issues with his estate down the road, and we didn’t get the solution I wanted. So be it. Other than that, I butt into his affairs all the time. It makes the wheels of life turn smoothly.

I always feel like there should be some source of ideal advice. Someone out there should be able to give me a list of things to do. It’s not true. I hire professionals, and truthfully, their ideas are sometimes worse than mine. I’m sure I’ve wasted money on them. Everyone who plays this game is winging it, regardless of what you might think. If you’re a caregiver, don’t expect yourself to be perfect. The earth is a corrupt place where things go wrong all the time. You can’t look after yourself perfectly, so hoping to take care of someone else perfectly is fatuous.

I rely on God for guidance. I know that if I maintain my prayer life and use the tools he has given me, I’ll end up where I need to be. I may get off course, but things will work out. I don’t know how people who don’t know God survive.

Actually, I know a little bit. They fail. They flounder. They suffer humiliation and regret. Even when they look successful, they’re face-planting.

I keep having supernatural experiences. As I’ve mentioned before, God gives me little phrases which I write down. I go to them later and repeat them to myself. When I do this, I feel God’s power going through me. It brings peace very quickly, which is something I can’t do for myself.

Today I started doing this, and my insides started gurgling and making other rude noises immediately. I felt a little nauseous. By now I know that these things indicate the presence of enemy spirits.

I don’t force this stuff. It’s not possible. Try to make your stomach growl. Good luck. Can’t be done.

I’ve had this experience before, while casting spirits out and so forth, but this was the first time it happened while I was doing other things. Apparently, the spirits I brought into my life through decades of rebellion are very disturbed by the phrases God gave me.

I decided to see if it happened while I read the Bible. I brought Psalm 32 (appropriate) up on my phone, and I started reading. Sure enough, the same thing happened. That’s new.

Christians don’t fight demons. It’s tragic. Paul told us our primary job was to battle spirits. He said we don’t wrestle with flesh and blood, but with principalities and powers and so on. Remember? Yet we focus on powerless rules and positive thinking, which help no one.

In the post-2000 world, people who believe in spirits are considered crazy. I could probably have my sanity called into question because of the things I write here. Think about that! God is a spirit. If it’s crazy to believe in demons, it’s crazy to believe in God, who told us demons exist and who cast them out, personally.

In the future, and I don’t mean the far future, Christians will be declared incompetent because of their faith. That will be interesting.

Joy Behar thinks Mike Pence is nuts because he believes he hears from Jesus! And she wasn’t afraid to say it on TV, in a country where God used to be honored by default.

She’s a Jew. Her people turned their backs on Moses after he talked to God. They turned their backs on God, too, after he appeared to them every day in a pillar of fire and a pillar of cloud. Her attitude is not something that should shock anyone.

Most Jews are atheists. That’s one reason so many Jews love leftism. Mommy government is a substitute for God’s help. It’s a false messiah. The Jewish prophet Samuel told them what to expect from that idol, but they didn’t listen. American Christians are headed the same way. We want to suck on that black, toxic nipple because we love sin too much to quit.

To get back to my situation, I have to avoid focusing too much on strategizing with my own mind. God gives me solutions when I take my hands off problems. No one can foresee all the problems a caregiver will face, and no human being can come up with the right answer every time. I have to put these burdens on God, who, after all, asked for them.

I need to do some business and get ready for a doctor’s appointment. Hope what I wrote helps someone.

New Progress

The dad saga continues to unfold.

Today we had a breakthrough. Generally, when people tell my dad he has dementia, he uses profanity to dismiss their remarks. If you gently remind him that he doesn’t know his address or have a driver’s license, he comes up with explanations. This morning, he finally listened and accepted the diagnosis.

He was trying to start his day, which took two hours of OUR time. He started asking me things about his condition, so I laid it on him. I said his doctors believed he had vascular dementia. I said he wouldn’t improve. I told him he would continue to get worse, in discrete steps. I told him the worst part: it shortens lives. I said he could be looking at a couple of years.

I don’t believe in soft-soaping people about their medical problems. It’s disrespectful, and it’s a way of controlling them and ignoring boundaries. He needs to know his time is short. He needs to accept salvation and understand his limitations.

I don’t want him to go to bed thinking he has all the time in the world and then die in his sleep and wake up in hell. It’s not a joke or a fable. It’s real, and I know people who are there right now.

Oddly, he wasn’t disturbed at all by the notion that he might not be here in a couple of years. He was much more upset by the increasing difficulty of functioning. He said he might as well kill himself.

He doesn’t mean that. For some reason, he and my sister are incapable of self-harm. Neither of them could seriously entertain the idea. But he’s not happy about his situation.

He still speaks of God, heaven, and hell with total contempt. He thinks it’s all a fairy tale. He says that if heaven exists, he’ll go because he’s a good person. He doesn’t think about bad things he’s done. And being “good” won’t keep you out of hell. You have to accept Jesus.

I’m happy for any improvement in his attitude. If he can accept his diagnosis and prognosis, he can also accept salvation eventually.

I also tried to make him understand that his life can’t necessarily be made easy or comfortable. We may not be able to get rid of his back pain or maintain his mobility, and I can’t promise him he won’t be bored. He has been blessed so far, but God never promised us we wouldn’t have chronic pain or boredom. He may end up in a home where he lacks stimulation. Society provides mechanisms for caring for the demented, but it doesn’t guarantee their entertainment. And entertaining demented people can be difficult or impossible due to their inner limitations.

After he’s gone, I will not accept involvement with other unsaved people, except to tell them about God and move on. I will not become intimate with people who reject God, and I won’t partner with them. I’ve had enough. My relationship with my dad will be the last unequal yoking in my life. And I’m the kind of person who means it when he says things like that. Ask anyone I’ve cut off. I never go back.

A buddy of mine started turning to God, and then he got into a relationship with a Jewish lady. It’s a real mess. She has a mentally ill son who complains and talks about suicide all the time. He’s in an institution right now. My buddy can’t get them to consider prayer and church, which would help. It will never happen. Many Jews conflate Christianity with Nazism, which is insane. You can’t break the spell with persuasion, because it’s supernatural.

Missionary dating doesn’t work. It’s disobedient, so you can’t expect God to honor your choice. Also, he will not violate free will and force an unbeliever to change.

My friend cuts his girlfriend’s grass and helps her out in many ways. He comforts her. He had to cancel a visit to Florida because her son was committed. He has been holding her hand for a week or two, but she won’t take his advice. It’s like he’s watching a ship sink and he can’t do anything to help. Meanwhile his own life is on hold, as if it has no importance.

This is what happens when you yoke yourself to people who reject Jesus. Me, I’m all done with unequal yokings. I can’t take it any more.

On top of all these issues, she appears to do absolutely nothing for him. He was laid up a while back, and she was nowhere in sight. He had to fly to Mexico for dental surgery before that. He went alone.

Here’s what happens when you have vascular dementia: you get worse in steps. You lose the ability to recognize familiar people and perform basic tasks such as bathing. Then you die. It may come from a stroke or heart attack, or your brain may just shut down from lack of blood flow. My dad is several years into an illness that usually takes 5 years to kill. My guess is that blood pressure pills are the only things that have kept him alive. Statins don’t help.

I don’t know whether my dad will wither over a period of weeks or die suddenly. I don’t know whether he’ll last long enough to go into assisted living. I can’t plan that well. I can’t say, “I’ll need to move him into a home on September 5.” Maybe he’ll go to a home, or maybe the coroner will pull up to the house one day and take him. I have to look at the possibilities and plan as well as I can. I count on prayer to make it work.

Honestly, a sudden departure would be easier on everyone concerned. In a facility, he will be reminded of his status every day. He will be powerless. He will be surrounded by people who don’t care about him all that much, and he’ll know it. His desires won’t matter much at all. He’ll do things on their schedule, at their convenience.

I’m not afraid of death. Not even a little bit. I’ve seen a lot of it. You miss people, but losing them doesn’t ruin your life, especially when they go after a long period of sickness or infirmity. When a person has been ill long enough, his relatives will start to feel that death is better than what he is going through, and when he goes, they will feel relief as well as grief. People don’t like to admit that, but it’s true. Suddenly the house doesn’t smell like diapers. You can leave for a day and not worry. You can get rid of the ugly, depressing medical equipment. You can sleep a whole night. You no longer worry about the patient’s future.

When my mom died, my aunt and I put her clothes in the car the next day and gave them away. BANG. Like that. That’s how you do it. You don’t sit around in your moldy, cobwebbed shrine and worship the dead.

I can’t relate to people who are afraid of death, so maybe I don’t understand how they feel when I write bluntly about it. Maybe they think I’m inhuman. Fear of death is a symptom of immaturity, though. It’s not something we should cater to and encourage.

My dad will never drive again. He will never ride the bicycle I bought him. We will never go fishing again. We will never have another real conversation. We are done traveling together. There isn’t much to hope for while he lives. All I want is to see him receive salvation. That will satisfy me.

I don’t like to think about his wasted potential. How different our lives should have been. But if he makes it to heaven, a hundred years from now we won’t be concerned about the things that happened here on earth.

At least he’s starting to acknowledge his mortality. That’s a start.

Give Masonry its Proper Place

My dad’s recovery continues. He fell this week, and he came back from the hospital day before yesterday. I finally got what I consider to be a good night’s sleep last night.

I have been working on his master suite, throwing out crap he has held onto. This is a problem that never stops. He hoarded crap in Miami, and he hoards it now. Wet naps from restaurants. Napkins from restaurants. Receipts from restaurants. Empty water bottles. Toothpicks. You name it.

While I was tossing junk, I came across something disturbing: materials from the Masonic lodge he joined in 1961. A book and a couple of cards.

My dad was never much of a Mason. He probably never gave them a dime or set foot in a lodge after he left Kentucky. Still, I wish he had never joined. Freemasonry is a cult that competes with Christianity, and its ability to draw applicants is based on the belief that it’s okay to cheat non-Masons out of economic opportunities. Reminds me of Islam, which got its start as (and remains) a protection racket. Like a fraternity, the Mason organization is affirmative action for mediocre white men.

I took a quick look at the book. I wondered if I should keep it and learn about Masonry. While I was reading, I saw a laughable passage saying you have to swear you’re not joining for economic advantage. Ridiculous. That’s the only reason for joining. Masons give each other work and blackball everyone else. Look it up. You can be more honest, more skilled, faster, and cheaper and lose work to a Mason, and you will never be told why.

I wonder what happens when a grown frat boy (oxymoron?) Mason has to choose between giving work to a frat brother or another Mason. It must be hard, deciding whom to cheat.

Masons are cowards when it comes to business. They have enough courage to deprive competent people of work they deserve, but they don’t have the guts to admit it. Maybe that’s the worst thing about Masonry (and fraternities): the cowardice. Secret signs. Secret handshakes. Secret sweetheart deals for hacks who do inferior work. Masonry supposedly teaches people how to be morally superior. I guess gutless, clandestine blackballing, and rewarding irresponsibility and incompetence, are signs of good character! Way to go, Masons!

Actually, I think the worst thing about fraternities is the persistence of forced sadistic homosexual rituals for heterosexuals.

I asked God what I should do with this stinking book, and then I threw it out. I happened to have a trash can that contained a misplaced dirty diaper and a mixing bowl one of my pets pooped in, and I could not think of a better place to put the book. That will be where it will rest from now on. Until it disintegrates completely, it will be next to a dirty diaper in a landfill.

It’s appropriate. God likes turning areas used by idolaters into garbage dumps and latrines. Look at the Bible and see.

I didn’t want that filthy book in my home. It’s an insult to God, and insulting God brings consequences. As the Bible says, God is not mocked. Surely honoring God by putting that book in the trash will also have consequences.

You can claim Freemasonry is compatible with Christianity all you want. Any group that makes you partially disrobe and swear loyalty, and which requires you to participate in supernatural rituals, is a problem for Christians. If it’s not obvious to you already, then I can’t explain it to you. Also, Freemasons believe you can only get to heaven through works, and that is the opposite of what God teaches. Hell is full of nice people who rejected Jesus, and heaven is full of thieves and murderers who repented.

There are concentration camp guards in heaven, and some of the people they tormented are in hell. Works don’t get you anywhere.

Corrie Ten Boom told an interesting story. As you should know, she was a Christian woman who was put in concentration camps for hiding Jews. Years after the war, she preached about forgiveness, and a former Nazi she knew from the camps came up to shake her hand. He didn’t know they had already met. He told her he had been a guard, and he asked for her personal forgiveness. She knew she had to accept him, although she didn’t feel like it. When she obeyed, she felt God’s “healing warmth” flow through her. A man like that could never make up for what he did. Not in 10 lifetimes. But God accepted him anyway.

If you need an auxiliary cult to get you through life, you don’t have God’s favor, and something is wrong with your approach to Christianity. It’s that simple. That’s the hard truth.

The Jews used to have synagogues with two altars: one for Yahweh and one for “the Queen of Heaven,” which means the disgusting female false god they worshiped in the Middle East. They also burned their children alive as sacrifices to Molech, in an area which later became a dump. All the while, they called themselves Jews and prayed for God to look after them. Things are no different today. Christians join cults all the time, and they think they’re still Christians.

I feel very good about that book and its resting place with the diaper. I will feel good about it for the rest of my life, when I think about it buried deep inside a reeking landfill. I will feel like it’s an investment I have working for me, just as it was a curse that worked against me when it was in my home.

Life is full of investments. We invest in life and our future dignity, and we invest in death and future humiliation. We even invest when we think we’re not taking sides.

Every drop in the bucket helps. If you have Masonic garbage, astrology materials, yoga equipment, magical crystals, tarot cards, or any other idolatrous paraphernalia in your house, I encourage you to dump it now. Don’t sell it or give it away. Make it unusable. Burn it. You’re going to pick a side whether you want to or not, so try to pick the right one.

Whose Side are You On?

It is 8:18 a.m., and I have been up for almost three hours.

A little before 5:30, my phone started ringing. I assumed it was a robocall, but it was from the hospital. My dad is still there, being observed after taking a fall.

When you have an elderly parent in the hospital, and they call you before dawn, certain ideas flow through your head. You know it’s not good news, and you can’t think of anything trivial that might generate a call.

It turned out he was still among the living. They told me he was combative and that he was cursing the staff and refusing to cooperate. Security people were in the room. They asked me to come and deal with him.

I thought it was 3:27 a.m. I had read my clock incorrectly. I wondered how he could possibly be up that early.

I had them put him on the phone, and he told me the people at the hospital were ignorant and that they were refusing to let him get out of bed purely because of ego. He wanted to use the bathroom in his room, and they wanted him to stay in bed.

Needless to say, it was not long before I found myself driving to the hospital.

When I got there, he was in bed with his feet facing the head of the bed. I started asking him what was happening, and he gave me his opinion of the staff again.

What a mess. He didn’t have any interest in hearing about the medical or legal reasons for discouraging him from walking around. He asked me if I was taking their side.

I don’t know what they did. Maybe they were tactless or heavy-handed. In any case, there wasn’t a whole lot of merit to his complaints. When you’re in the hospital, you work with the staff unless they’re completely crazy. You don’t curse at them or get in physical confrontations with them.

They said they had given him some kind of “medication,” which I took to mean he had been given a sedative or tranquilizer.

I worked with both sides, and we helped him use the bathroom and settle himself into a recliner. I turned out the lights and sat with him, and eventually, he slept. Unlike me, he can sleep in a hospital chair. Finally, he asked to be moved back to the bed, and once he seemed to be inclined to sleep, I left to get some breakfast.

I reminded my dad about what happened to his law school friend Joe. He had surgery to fix an abdominal aneurysm, and while he was in the hospital, he insisted on going to the bathroom by himself. He fell, hit his head on the sink, and died. This is what my dad’s nurse wanted to prevent. I don’t think I made an impression on him.

I’m about to go lie down with ear plugs and a sleep mask and see if I can sleep for a couple of hours. I had been looking forward to a full night of sleep, so I was not happy when the phone rang. I left the hospital after 2 a.m. on his first night there, so last night, I figured I was going to make up the deficit.

If you like to fight with people and get your own way, you need to get over it while you’re young. The last thing you want, when you become demented, is to have the habit of pushing people around. It doesn’t work after life takes all the face cards out of your hand. You may be a big shot today, but when you lose the ability to look after yourself, you’ll be just another patient in a gown, and people with very little status or education will be telling you what to do. You’ll also be wrong consistently, so your battles will be a waste of time, serving only to make other people miserable and motivate them to mistreat you.

You may be the boss today, but there is no way you’ll be able to tell people what to do when you get close to 90. You may lose all your clout a lot sooner than that.

If you’re grateful and considerate, health care people and your relatives will treat you better. They’re human. They can only stand so much crap, and they will reward seniors who make their lives easier.

As for hospitals, they are funny places. They are dedicated to improving people’s health, yet they make it impossible for patients to sleep or walk. Isn’t sleep important to health? Of course it is. But if you go to a hospital, you will find that they leave your door open all night, with the light streaming in. People who work there will walk up and down the halls all night, talking loudly and socializing. You’ll start to drift off, and someone in scrubs will yell, “HEY! TINO! WHASSUP?!”

If I ran an institution that gave care to crabby patients, I’d do everything I could to help them sleep. When hospitals keep patients awake at night, the staff pays for it during the day.

Patients need to walk, too. Obvious? But hospitals don’t make much provision for it. They are actually causing health problems by forcing ambulatory patients to lie in bed.

Hospitals are monuments to mankind’s failure. God wanted to take care of us and keep us well, and we didn’t listen. Now instead of divine health, we have things like catheters and staples and amputations.

I found a nice access ramp I can install to keep my dad from falling on the steps again, and I am sorting through ways to help him get on his feet. We might need to look into an electric cart eventually. I wonder if they can be rigged with GPS so he can only go so far.

The physical side of his problems can be addressed fairly well. I can’t do anything about his attitude or his perceptions, and I don’t think he can do anything, either. He could have changed his way of thinking 10 years ago, but now it’s too much to hope for.

If you don’t get along with people, change your ways now, while you can. Eventually, they will have the upper hand almost all the time. You will be at their mercy, and you better know how to make it flow.

I’m off to bed. Let’s see how long I go before the next phone call.

“Cool Preacher” is an Oxymoron

I just read an interesting article about Carl Lentz. I discovered that he is Justin Bieber’s pastor. Or was. Not surprising.

Who is Carl Lentz? If you don’t know, good for you. I’ll tell you, though. He is part of the hip preacher movement. I used to attend Trinity Church in Miami, and the head pastor’s son, Richie Wilkerson, was a hip preacher who networked with Lentz and other hipsters such as Judah Smith. Their message? “Make me rich.” Well, there was more to it than that. It was more like, “Think I’m cool and make me rich.” They were extremely ambitious people, and their main mission in life was self-promotion. Quite honestly, they were also very ordinary people without much talent or brains.

These kids want to make Jesus cool. Remember, now, Jesus was crucified. He was not popular. He never sought admiration or acceptance. He was the head, not the tail. He led. He never followed. He said what God told him to say, and when people got mad, he didn’t care. Jesus said, “The servant is not greater than his lord. If they have persecuted me, they will also persecute you.” The hipsters think they know better than Jesus.

Actually, they may not think they know better than Jesus. They probably have no idea what Jesus said. They don’t know a whole lot about God or the Bible. They’re very busy flying around to conferences and pumping up their profiles. They don’t have a lot of time for God.

Lentz allowed himself to be interviewed by Joy Behar. That’s amazing. This woman is openly hostile to Christianity. I can already hear the excuses. “Jesus wanted to use her platform to get the word out. Jesus wanted to use Carl to plant a seed in her heart.”

God hates excuses, and he doesn’t need Joy Behar’s TV cameras. Paul and the apostles spread Christianity around the world on foot, without cameras, in a few decades. The idea that God has to go to Joy Behar or any other TV host for help is absurd.

Carl Lentz didn’t go to Joy Behar to convert her or help humanity. He went to drum up business.

Hip preachers have a disturbing crush on celebrities. If you’re famous, they want you to come to their churches, and they don’t care whether you’re sincere. Richie’s dad welcomed Kanye West and Kim Kardashian–the famous sleaze merchant–into Trinity Church, and he bragged about them on Instagram. Richie glommed onto them and officiated at their wedding. Meanwhile, Kim Kardashian went on posing naked. Richie had no problem with that. He couldn’t get attention on his own, so he stuck with her and fed on the dirty crumbs that fell from her table.

If God wanted Richie Wilkerson to get attention, he would give it to him, just as he gave it to Paul. The fact that Richie had to kiss up to two of the most ungodly celebrities in America to get attention proves that God was not on his side.

I’ll tell you what life at Trinity Church was like. They had a green room behind the stage. When anyone remotely famous (or wealthy) showed up, the Wilkersons took them into that room and sucked up to them, trying to get them to join the church and give money. They did it to the Wests, Luther Campbell, various professional athletes, and more than one college athlete. They tended to be clumsy and transparent, and famous people are used to being conned, so the Wilkersons didn’t do very well except for the Wests. Kanye West is not the smartest person on earth, and he has mental issues, so maybe he was especially vulnerable.

Is that how life is at Carl Lentz’s church? I don’t know, but I know that any minister who allows himself to be associated with Justin Bieber, and who allows people to get the impression he approves of Bieber’s lifestyle and personality, is useless and corrupt. Bieber is all about arrogance, sexual confusion, self-promotion, and rebellion. A pastor who is a role model to kids should not pal around with someone like that.

I can hear the response already. “Judge not. Take the log out of your own eye.” You know what kind of people respond to criticism that way? People who want to keep on sinning and who resent being exposed. That’s a little tip for you. Serious Christians love correction.

When I was associated with Trinity, Lentz came and spoke. Church volunteers always helped with events and speakers. The church runs on free labor. People had unpleasant things to say about Lentz. They said he was a diva. They said his favorite shirt didn’t make it to Trinity, so he made someone drive around looking for the same shirt before he would speak.

I am thinking about Lentz because a recent story says Justin Bieber is engaged to a famous model, and Lentz is not enthusiastic. They say Bieber and Lentz had a falling out. I’m not sure what to think. Is this a good thing? Does it mean Lentz started to feel cheap and realized courting celebrities made him look desperate?

Somehow I doubt it.

Bieber just put a photo on Instagram. It’s Bieber and his fiance in a hot tub. They are wearing very little. The model is sitting on his lap, straddling him. They are kissing. This isn’t the kind of thing informed Christians put on social media. It may be a testimony to the weakness of Carl Lentz’s doctrine.

Lentz belongs to Hillsong, a huge, profitable corporation that plants megachurches and sells bad music. Hillsong is becoming the default church for hip young celebrities. That tells you everything you need to know about it. Modern celebrities are extremely ungodly. If they flock to a denomination, it has to be because they know they will not be required to repent.

Without repentance, there is no closeness with God. There is no revelation. There is no power. There is only pride and foolishness.

Christians need to learn to get away from Christian celebrities. Famous preachers do a lot of harm. They have a conflict of interest. They love fame and money, and they turn Christianity into a business. When Christianity becomes your job, and money and fame are your gods, you will do just about anything to keep the business running.

God wants to work through all of his children, and he doesn’t want us to make Christianity a job. It’s not necessary. People who think God needs cameras and money have no faith. Jesus used to gather crowds in the thousands, and he didn’t even have a bullhorn.

God doesn’t want Christianity to be cool. It never will be. We’re against fornication, pride, and rebellion. We’re against greed. How can we ever be cool when we reject everything cool people love?

Jesus told us we would be rejected. Anyone who tries to make his words fail to come to pass is a fool and isn’t obeying him.

I wish the hip preachers would take their salesman skills and leave the church. They should sell cars or real estate, or they should become motivational speakers. They would do a lot less harm.

The World is not Enough

I’ll tell you what. If Earth had a bus terminal, I would be sitting on a bench right now with a ticket in my hand.

God keeps helping me get cleaned up. He keeps showing me the things that are wrong with me. He helps me to be honest with him about myself. It’s like cleaning out a storage unit someone filled with seafood in 1922 and then forgot about. It’s a real mess.

I keep hammering away at the spirits that have taken the place of the Holy Spirit all my life. Pride, anger, lust, and so on. I feel that God has given me new tools to yank these spirits away from the steering wheel so I can take over.

Today I was working at these things in prayer (asking God to do everything for me and trying to avoid “helping” him) and I took a break to look at the news. Oh, man. What a mistake. It was as if I lived next to an ocean of sewage and I opened the door just as a wave was coming in. I read about crime. I read about the sick people who are tormenting conservatives in restaurants and on their own property. Do I even have to tell you what the news looks like in 2018?

Suddenly, the things I had subdued wanted back in. Anger. Discouragement. Self-righteousness. I had to return to fighting to make sure I didn’t slip backward.

What a rotten place this world is. You can’t even read the news without being inundated with temptation. I thought about this, and I wondered if I should quit reading the news.

A few years back, I got rid of Twitter and Facebook. I felt God wanted me to do it. I called it “the little rapture.” It was wonderful. A lot of people wondered where I had gone, and I lost contact with many, but it was worth it. Sorry to say that. Then I moved from Miami to Ocala, which was another little rapture. Now I’m seriously considering minimizing my visits to news websites.

No one wants to be ignorant. On the other hand, how much is awareness worth, if every piece of information comes with provocation or a picture of a Kardashian’s rear end?

Do I really need to know everything that’s happening in the world? God is looking after me. My own knowledge is of limited value. Relying on it is a huge mistake. The more you rely on yourself, the less God does for you.

The more contact you have with God, the more you will want to isolate yourself from this world. God brings peace, love, protection, and success. The world brings fear, anger, worry, and failure. Leaving God’s presence and going out among people is like leaving a comfortable air-conditioned house and walking out into a hurricane. This place is disgusting.

Catholics believe sinners go to a place called purgatory. It’s a temporary hell. God punishes you there until he feels like you’ve had enough, and then you go to heaven. They couldn’t be more wrong. We already live in purgatory. We just don’t realize it because we’re used to it. We live in denial. Even the worst pessimist sees the world as a better place than it is. We make the most of our pleasures and successes, and we avoid thinking about the agony and failure that surround us.

You don’t get to go to a special place to have your iniquities purged after you die. The Bible says hell is eternal, and there is no mention of purgatory. You have your opportunity to get purged right now, and you will never get another chance. If you didn’t care about God here, you won’t care when you’re dead, either. There is no point in giving human beings an eternity of probation.

This is purgatory, and I’ll tell you something else. We are demons, or at least we are the same type of hybrid.

What are demons? Fallen angels? No. That’s what religious authorities who make things up tell us. Demons are our brothers and sisters. They are dead human beings whose bloodlines were polluted with the genes of fallen angels who had sex with women. God sent the flood to get rid of them, but the only pure person on the boat was Noah. The rest were tainted, and they went on to breed.

In English, Bibles say Noah was “perfect in his generations.” In Hebrew, the word translated “generations” literally means “generations,” but in Hebrew, it is used to mean “genealogy.”

In all likelihood, angels have sired more people since the flood. As a result, many of us–maybe all of us–are supernatural bastards. We carry cursed DNA. We are not really God’s children. Not until we accept salvation and repent. This is why the Bible calls the Holy Spirit a spirit of adoption.

Those of us who are currently alive can’t possess people or manifest in them as diseases, but we are still full of evil. We live in bondage to sins we can’t give up, because that’s our inheritance from our evil ancestors. Only the Holy Spirit can remanufacture us.

This world is a nuthouse. You are lucky if you can walk two blocks without witnessing depravity or being tempted. The things we witness cause us to open doors and let demons in. Then we become like them, and we end up with diseases, mental illness, addictions, and other problems.

Every day we get to choose between peace, power, healing, and victory and a pile of shiny objects soaked in poison. We take the shiny objects nearly all the time, and we think we’re doing the right thing.

A human being is like a bus full of idiots. You’re supposed to drive responsibly, but the idiots–spirits of the dead–keep shoving you to the floor and grabbing the wheel. If you don’t know God, you have no authority, so the idiots will win until the day you die. Your choices give them power. Then when bad things happen to you, you go to God and cry, “Why me?”, as if something odd has happened.

Churches pretend demons don’t exist. Churches that admit demons exist claim they’re rare. Christians think only “bad people” can have demons, so they’re insulted when you suggest they have them, too. They turn down relief because they prefer pride and self-righteousness. God is running a free clinic, and we sit outside and fester because we think we’re too good to be sick.

I may have to forget about news sites and let the world take care of itself. I have the delusion that I’m helping humanity and looking after myself when I read the news, but that’s probably not true. There are things I’m better off not knowing about. The world is packed with people who cause their own problems, doing the same counterproductive things over and over, so I shouldn’t get to close to it. I’m trying to become a different kind of person. God moves me forward, and then I get caught up in the world’s issues, and I slide back. I am not cooperating with him the way I should.

Like a friend of mine says, “Not my circus, not my monkeys.” I know that’s how God himself feels, except possibly for the “monkeys” part. God says Satan is the god of this world, so it makes sense that he limits his own interference in the drama.

Salvation is for individuals, not worlds. This place is terminally ill. Focusing on nations and cities is a mistake. You have to think about one person at a time. People can be saved and filled with power, but the world as a whole (or hole) is going to continue to rot. If that were not true, the apocalypse and the Messianic Age would be pointless.

Why did God promise to destroy and remake the world, if we’re going to fix it before he returns? In one part of the Revelation, he kills a third of humanity at one whack. That’s not God giving us an “A.”

I do not want any more sewage tsunamis. I generate enough sewage of my own. I don’t need to take in sewage from leftist criminals and the Kardashians.

I’m so glad I’m out of Miami. I can’t describe it. I wish I never had to think about that place again. I’m going to feel the same way about the earth when I leave.

You can have God or you can have the world. You have to choose, and you are going to choose, whether you want to or not.

America’s Rift Becomes More Obvious

I read something very sad on the Internet today.

Actor James Woods says he has been blacklisted because he’s an outspoken conservative. He’s very talented, and he has a history of solid work, but he is not getting hired like he used to. Now he has proof that the blacklisting isn’t just coming from potential employers.

Yesterday, on the Fourth of July, his former agent, Ken Kaplan, sent him this email:

It’s the 4th of July and I’m feeling patriotic. I don’t want to represent you anymore. I mean I can go on a rant but you know what I’d say.

People in Hollywood love to claim there is no anti-conservative blacklist, but as you can see, the blacklist exists. It’s pretty surprising to see someone blacklisted by his own agent. An agent is supposed to be loyal. This is one of the people Woods counted on to find him work, so it’s bizarre to see Kaplan work against him.

The story is sad, but when I say I saw something sad on the Internet, I’m not talking about the agent’s email. I’m talking about this comment on the story:

I wish i had the power the snap my fingers AND TURN THIS PLACE INTO A NORMAN ROCKWELL PAINTING AGAIN i was born 1956 I WANT GO AND SEE HOME AGAIN

That hit the mark. “Home” doesn’t exist any more on this earth. There are pockets of America in which people behave fairly normally, but the nation has lost its innocence. We are cynical and coarse. We are the kind of people our great-grandparents wouldn’t let our grandparents associate with.

When I was a little kid in Tampa, I could leave my house and play a block away, without getting permission first. My parents didn’t worry about me being kidnapped and sexually abused and murdered. I didn’t have a chip in my arm or a smartphone in my pocket. When I rode in the car with my parents, I didn’t see dirty words on billboards or bumper stickers. When I was at home, and the family watched our only TV, my parents didn’t have to block channels or change channels for me to prevent me from seeing nudity or gay men having sex.

Back then, we didn’t have a lot of naked protestors. We didn’t have cities like modern San Francisco and New York, in which sexually depraved people were allowed to appear nude in public. We didn’t have naked men in women’s locker rooms, exposing themselves to young girls with the backing of the law.

I can’t say life was a Norman Rockwell painting, but it wasn’t disgusting, either. Modern life is revolting.

What do leftists tell us when we say we yearn for the good old days? They say we want to bring back segregation. America had segregation in the good old days, so anyone who longs for those days must want segregation. It’s not a good argument. There is no reason why a God-fearing nation full of decent people has to have segregation or any other ill we had in the past.

I miss the good old days, but I don’t miss going to school without air conditioning. Missing the good things of the past isn’t the same as missing everything about it.

The funny thing is that leftists are now in favor of segregation, even while they use past segregation to criticize conservatives. Leftists want all-black dormitories and student unions. They want all-female gyms. They have special days on university campuses on which they force white people to stay home. Leftists used to work for the right to associate with white males. Now they’re pushing for the right to be separated from us.

I left Miami because the people were too much for me. They are coarse. They are violent. They are arrogant and obsessed with sex. They are racist; it’s not a good place for a white person to live.

I moved to a place where people hold doors for each other and hear Christian music in stores and restaurants. It’s wonderful to be here and to be shielded from provocation and temptation, but it’s a strategic retreat which will be followed by abandonment of the field. No one is ever going to march back into Miami (or New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, or San Francisco) and claim it for God. These places will never recover. Not until after Jesus returns.

We destroyed what we had. It’s not coming back.

Leftists like to tell us we can’t get our innocence back. That’s not true. God restores innocence to people who desire it. The reason we won’t get it back is that we don’t want it. Most Americans like living in a nation with a locker room atmosphere. We’ve become depraved, and one of the consequences of depravity is that you tend to forget how nice life was before you became depraved.

If we could have our innocence restored instantaneously, many of us would be shocked at how much we prefer it. Unfortunately, that’s not possible. God allows people to continue down the self-destructive paths they choose.

What we had 60 years ago was magnificent. We should have held onto it and worked to increase our innocence and holiness. We would be stronger now. We would have more peace. America would be the light of the world. We ought to be mourning for what we lost.

I worked very hard to make myself depraved. I made a deliberate effort to make myself numb to outrage. Now I don’t know what it’s like to be a decent person. I’m better than I was 10 years ago, but I think that if I went back in time and moved to a place like Knoxville or Dallas, I would offend people with my coarseness and assertiveness. They wouldn’t want their kids to talk to me.

For about a decade, I’ve been working to get restoration, and although I am very different from what I was, I’m still a dysfunctional Christian. That says a lot about the nation in which I grew up. As a fairly typical American, I started out as a basket case. There was a lot of work to be done. And I thought I was doing pretty well!

How many Americans, including Christians, are aware of the rot inside and around them? Only a tiny percentage. Very few people are rooted in the Holy Spirit, so very few of us are able to see what’s wrong with us and move away from it. Our situation is grave, and it is made worse by the blindness and depravity of most of the people we look to for instruction. The pope wants rule-followers who worship statues. Popular charismatic preachers respond to cries for help with demands for money. Mainstream protestants teach pride and hard work instead of supernatural restoration, and many have decided that unrepentant homosexuals make good pastors and priests. Who are we supposed to look to for guidance?

When sinners come to us for help, they get a poor imitation of what we were supposed to be. We can give them moral guidance, help them to receive salvation, and teach them to pray. We generally can’t heal their bodies or get them delivered from evil compulsions and delusions. Usually, we can’t cast devils out. We can’t help sexual deviants or addicts who genuinely want to change. Then we get angry at them when they give up on God and start attacking the church. What they do is wrong, but if we can’t help them, their antipathy shouldn’t surprise us.

We’re not responsible for what other people do, but we are responsible for failing to be powerful, informed Christians who are able to provide others with help.

I wish I had a message of hope, but the world is going to go under. If you want hope, here it is: you can be lifted above the mess, and you can help others if they will listen. That’s about it. You’re not going to save your world, your race, your nation, your city, or even your block. You don’t get to decide who gets saved, and you can’t force people to accept help. Noah had to watch bodies sink, and so will we.

It’s wonderful to be out of Miami, but the truth is that the whole world is like Miami. Some parts are nicer than others, but the whole planet is ruined.

Last night I received an analogy. Mankind is like a body with gangrene, which is death. A gangrenous limb isn’t just infected; it’s dead. We treat gangrene by amputation because we can’t reverse death. Antibiotics won’t bring a dead leg back to life. You sever the living tissue from the dead, and you throw out the dead part. That’s what’s on the way. That’s the rapture.

Depravity causes gangrene. A person who is merely sinful can be changed, but a depraved person hates righteousness and shuts out help. Depravity is like a tourniquet you apply between yourself and God.

That tourniquet will be part of your life no matter what you do. It will be between you and God, or it will be between you and people who hate God.

I’ll tell you something interesting. Farmers use rubber bands to castrate cattle. There is a special tool that holds strong bands open. You put a band over the calf’s genitals, and you release it. It snaps shut and cuts off the blood supply, and eventually the dead parts drop off. That’s what people who hate God are doing to themselves. They’re separating themselves from life. We were supposed to help God reproduce, but he will not hold onto the infertile forever.

When we see parades and rallies celebrating sexual perversion, which are among the most obvious symptoms of our decay, we are seeing something beyond sin. We are seeing love of evil and death. It’s almost like prayer and worship. The participants are signalling their willingness to be cut off forever, just as Christians signal their willingness to repent and belong.

I look forward to leaving this place. Heaven will be different. It will be a lot like a Norman Rockwell painting. There will be no obscenity. There will be no violence or hate. People there won’t have dark thoughts or desires. No one there will pull you out of a car and break your eye sockets because you’re wearing a red hat. We won’t have to hear demonstrators telling us heaven belongs to illegal aliens from earth and hell; heaven has perfect border control. No one will be confused sexually. No one will feel entitled to what anyone else has. There will be no racial division, because the only race will be the children of God.

On the whole, I wish I had been born sooner. A lot of people were born after the charismatic revival, benefited from it, and died before they had to watch our country putrefy and face wholesale persecution.

I wonder what I’ll have to witness next. It seems like things can’t get any worse, but I know they can.

More

I stole a metaphor from Robert Bork, who stole it from Joan Didion, who stole it from William Butler Yeats. I may as well show you the poem from which it was taken. It was published in 1919, and it relates to the chaos in Europe following World War I.

If you’re a Christian who knows prophecy, it may give you some chills.

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

More

I feel like adding a few things, to remind us all how crazy things have been. By now, you have probably heard of Kino Jimenez. He appears in a viral video, in which he appears, throwing a drink in a young man’s face and stealing his MAGA hat. It happened in a Texas Whataburger. Jimenez battered the young man and used filthy language to ridicule him. Might as well post a video.

News sites are saying he “allegedly” did these things. They want to avoid lawsuits. Fine. He allegedly did these things. Maybe he didn’t. Maybe the video is the most amazing fake in the history of the Internet.

Here’s what’s interesting. Many leftists are defending the attacker and even suggesting that attacking Trump supporters is a good thing to do. Here are some Internet comments. They were not hard to find. Go to any mainstream news site and look.

Wearing that in public is heedlessly provocative. I don’t support any physical response at all, but others may.

MAGA hats should come with a disclaimer, “if you wear this hat that promotes racism you might get your a33 kicked”

Hey magas. We’re coming for your guns 🙂

You wanna out yourself as a xenophobic racist then don’t be surprised if people react.

boy the butthurt snowflake beta cuck republicans are sure whining up a storm about this.
buy your tissues while you still can

anyone who wears that hat deserves to get beat, period

Here is a really bad idea. Wearing a maga hat into a fast food restaurant… Unless you love spit burgers.

Trumptards only wear their MAGA hats to bed, i wonder why?

Oh man being a magatard in public is a bad idea. Keep it at home.

It’s a freaking lame azz hat, deal with it.

Welcome to 2018 America. Kiss your illusions goodbye.

Don’t Envy Your Heroes

It’s a very slow Independence Day here at The Compound. I could have invited people for barbecue, but I have no grill, nor do I desire one, and I no longer have the old drive to cook for others.

I don’t make a big deal of holidays any more. I used to spend Christmas with my mother’s family in Kentucky. A number of my relatives are dead now, and those that remain don’t seem very interested in maintaining contact. When they travel to Florida, they keep it quiet instead of arranging for visits.

I lost a lot of friends when I left my last two churches. I can’t say I lost friends, really. What happened is this: people who only pretended to be my friends got exposed.

The same thing happened when I started going back to church 10 years ago. My backsliding friends stopped calling me. I had one friend who still called once in a while, but he only called when he wanted something. He needed to use my tools. He wanted to fish on my dad’s boat. Is that a friend? Anyway, I stopped receiving invitations to his home. Christians make people uncomfortable.

He had issues. For one thing, he was envious. If you had things he didn’t have, he was likely to “accidentally” damage them when you let him use them, and he was not the kind of person who offered to fix what he broke.

He had a wonderful neighbor who cut his grass and lent him tools. He borrowed a new power saw and left it sitting in the rain, and when the neighbor complained, instead of apologizing, he said something like, “It still works.”

Dude. That’s why you don’t have anything.

He used to invite himself on fishing trips. He would arrive at the dock late, with a hangover. Very bad form. When we got out of the bay, he would go to sleep on the couch. If a fish hit a line, he would get up so he could reel it in, because that’s the fun part of fishing. If my dad had beer in the fridge, he would drink it.

When we came back in, he wouldn’t help the other guests clean up the boat. He would come with me to the cleaning table and snicker at them while they worked in the sun. When he did that, I decided he was never going to fish with us again. He probably has no idea what the problem was.

On one trip, he drank all of my dad’s beer. He was an alcoholic, so this wasn’t hard for him. Next time he fished with us, he proudly displayed a fresh 12-pack. Which he then drank by himself. He drank my dad’s beer, replaced it, and drank the replacement beer.

People always complained about him. He was burning bridges every day, but he could never smell the smoke. These days, I only think about him when I think about former friends who treated me badly.

If you want to find out how much people like you, stop cooking big meals for them, and stop inviting them to fish on your yacht. You’ll learn more than you want to.

I have never been the kind of person who keeps score. Ordinarily, I don’t sit around adding up the things my friends and I do for each other to see if they balance. It takes me a long time to realize someone is running a big tab. When I finally do the math, the results aren’t encouraging! I know a few people who treat me well, but I’ve known a whole lot of users.

I’m off on a tangent.

Over the years, I have gotten used to doing nothing on most holidays, and the habit of doing nothing is hard to break.

Let’s see.

New Year’s Eve is only for drunks. Martin Luther King Day is only for black people, it’s only celebrated in dangerous neighborhoods, and it’s a day of crime and intoxication. Valentine’s Day is an insulting sham, and I have no one to celebrate with anyway. St. Patrick’s Day is only for drunks. Memorial Day is a barbecue day, and unless I’m doing the barbecuing, I don’t get invitations. July 4 is a barbecue day. Labor Day is a barbecue day. Halloween is a celebration of evil, and it’s also a big day for drunks. Thanksgiving and Christmas are okay.

The Fourth of July will pass without much acknowledgement. I’m grateful for America, but I’m also grateful for not having to shop and cook for people who don’t spend a dime or lift a finger.

It’s more blessed to give than to receive, but I don’t want to be TOO blessed.

Happy Steve Independence Day.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Richard Feynman and Errol Flynn this week. That’s what I sat down to write about.

Richard Feynman was a Nobel-winning American physicist. He was recruited to work on the bomb before he even got his Ph.D. He was a character. He drank and slept around, and he belonged to a Brazilian samba band in Rio. He wrote several interesting autobiographical books. I read them about 25 years ago, while I was preparing to become a physicist.

My understanding is that his books have become more popular since I read them. They have new cover designs now. That’s always a clue that a book has taken off. People seem to revere him the way they revere Einstein. They seem to think he had the answers to life’s problems, and that he would be a good role model.

Einstein was a terrible husband and father. He was a naive socialist. He spent most of his career trying to disprove quantum mechanics. Letters that were uncovered recently suggest that he was a racist. He was not perfect. It’s unfortunate that people think physicists know about anything other than physics. They generally do not.

When I was young, I liked Feynman a lot. He was funny. He seemed humble and honest. When I look at his books now, I have a different feeling. That’s because I’m growing up.

Feynman slept with lots of women, including married women. He put in a lot of time making bad drawings of nudes. He enjoyed Brazilian culture, which is pretty depraved. I don’t think he was humble, either. He loved saying he wasn’t very smart, but his work is full of anecdotes about his extraordinary mathematical accomplishments. He plays them down, but he still presents them, and the obvious intention is to impress the reader.

I now see him as a selfish, dishonest, treacherous person who loved attention. I don’t admire anything about him except for his brain. I was stupid to think highly of him when I was young. I should have thought about the husbands he humiliated.

Feynman was an atheist. I think about that a lot. I sit and read his interesting stories, and sometimes I stop and try to imagine his current circumstances. He’s almost certainly in hell, being tortured. Whatever cockiness he had in life must be long gone.

Sometimes I think about him when I’m lying on my back, and I realize hell is below me somewhere, with Feynman in it. I’m reading his book for light entertainment, but somewhere behind me, on the other side of a thick wall of rock and so forth, he is still alive, crying out in anguish and despair. If he could scream loud enough, I would hear him every day.

I’m used to having Christian heroes and secular heroes. I think of my secular heroes differently now. How many are in hell? How many people are they dragging down with them through their poisonous examples?

The things my secular heroes accomplished are, in the final analysis, excrement. When we are judged, no one will care about discoveries in quantum mechanics. God will want to know who we helped. He will want to know who we introduced to him. What can a Feynman or an Einstein say in response to those questions? “I did exactly what I wanted to do, I made a great deal of money, and I did nearly nothing for other people.” That seems accurate.

As for Errol Flynn, he has been on Turner Classic Movies a lot lately. I never really knew who he was until I started watching TCM. I started reading about him.

Flynn was utterly depraved. He had sex with as many people as humanly possible, male and female. He built a mansion full of peepholes and one-way mirrors so he could watch his guests in their private moments. He was tried for statutory rape, and during the trial, he picked up a teenager who worked in the courthouse. He used to appear at the dinner table, where his mother was seated, fully naked. He exposed himself to strangers.

Flynn had no remorse whatsoever. He wrote an autobiography called My Wicked, Wicked Ways, which was published after he died. He celebrated his sins.

Flynn fell apart, physically. His body couldn’t withstand the burden of sin. He tried to join the military in World War Two, and he was turned down because of an enlarged heart and VD. He would have been about 32.

Flynn dropped dead at the age of 50. He simply quit functioning. The coroner said he had the body of a much older man. A doctor involved with the autopsy was so impressed with Flynn’s genital warts, he sliced them off in order to preserve them for posterity.

Errol Flynn was charismatic. When you watch his movies, he seems noble. He’s inspiring. He’s brave, funny, and self-effacing. It’s astounding how well he played a type which was nothing like the real Flynn.

I decided to buy his book. Curiosity overcame me. I had to see what went on in the mind of a man who had so little regard for others and so little fear of God. I haven’t received it yet.

I think of Flynn the way I think of Feynman. He must be in hell. How could he not be? He practically filed an application. One day he was a declining matinee idol leading a carefree, lecherous life. He was admired and pampered. The next day, he was in a flaming pit surrounded by demons. What must that be like? It’s one thing to die in the electric chair and wake up in hell, expecting the worst. It has to be considerably worse when one of earth’s pampered princes or princesses dies suddenly.

People don’t really die. Their bodies stop working, but human beings continue. Every person ever born is alive somewhere, and only those who accepted salvation or whose sins couldn’t be imputed to them are in heaven. The others are burning, with maggots chewing their bones, and they will never be free.

I have two aunts who are probably in hell. I have a high school friend who probably made it when he shot himself at 25. I have lots of acquaintances who are almost surely feeling the flames right now.

We’re very nonchalant about hell, here on the surface. Many of us choose not to believe, and the rest of us don’t like to think about it. Death will be a real eye-opener for all of us. We will wonder why we weren’t more concerned about damnation.

Feynman. Flynn. Anthony Bourdain. Hunter Thompson. Prince. Michael Jackson. Hugh Hefner. Stephen Hawking. John Lennon. Hell is packed with celebrities many of us envied and emulated. It probably contains a number of popes and televangelists.

These days, I have a new feeling when I watch old movies, and it isn’t good. Hollywood has always been a mess, and I know very well I’m looking at people who have been burning for decades.

I don’t know where I’m going with this. I’m very glad my values have changed, and I hope God continues to improve them. The world is full of fool’s gold, and most of us are diehard fools.

Maybe I’ll review the book when I read it. I don’t expect to have pleasant things to say.

New Wrinkle in Pastor Pedophilia Story

I have said a lot of critical things that needed to be said (never mind the other ones), and I have often been amazed to find out how right I was. Today I’m amazed again.

The pastor of my last church got arrested for molesting his niece. I’ve written about it. He and his wife are extremely proud people, and they turned their church into a cult where they were exalted as though they were somewhere between human beings and gods.

I have talked about their pride and denial, but I didn’t know how bad it was until today.

A friend of mine called me. He was an armorbearer at Trinity Church with me, and I believe he was a deacon at New Dawn Ministries, the church with the pedophilia problem. I don’t recall exactly. Maybe he was an armorbearer. He told me more about the story.

I’ll give you the version I believed to be true. The pastor molested his niece for years. His sister found out and raised hell on Facebook, accusing his wife of covering things up. The pastor confessed in front of the church and stepped down. Weeks later, he was arrested.

That turned out to be wrong. Something is missing, and here it is. His sister did not expose him right away. She told him they could work it out, provided he resign his position and leave the ministry completely. He would have to find another line of work. He stepped down at first, but then he changed his mind and decided to go back to work. That’s when she things went sour.

If you’re shaking your head as you read this, I don’t blame you. It is incomprehensible. This man was looking at decades in prison, and the mother of the victim threw him a lifeline. Instead of getting on his knees and thanking her for a completely undeserved opportunity to escape destruction, he decided to take his chances.

Long before I knew anything about the molestation, I had problems with the pastors because of their pride. They were doing obvious things to ruin the church. The music was deafening. The services ran three or more hours. They offended people with their cultish approach to their jobs.

You couldn’t tell them anything. They were like little defiant kids who wanted the world to know they couldn’t be pushed around.

I knew they were proud and that they were in denial. I didn’t know the head pastor was so deluded he was willing to risk prison rather than admit defeat.

My friend complained about people standing by the pastors after they knew about his crimes. The pastors’ brother-in-law topped the list. After things fell apart, he went on Facebook and posted a meme criticizing people for running after the “shepherd” was smitten or whatever.

If my brother-in-law raped a little girl (my own niece), I would beg her mother for forgiveness for associating with him. I would change the church locks, myself. I would physically restrain him if he tried to preach. I would shut down the sound system and tell everyone exactly what was going on. But his brother-in-law was also proud, and he was ambitious and combative, so he did the wrong thing.

The brother-in-law had problems with me when I was a deacon. He had no humility. When I heard something from God, and it didn’t line up with something he heard on TBN or from some prosperity preacher in Miami, he laid into me. He was not able to consider the possibility that God spoke to me, perhaps because I wasn’t Hispanic or because I wasn’t related to the pastor.

I would completely understand if the brother-in-law had advised people to forgive the pastor and pray for him, but supporting his ministry is unthinkable. We have to forgive, but we don’t have to be imbeciles.

The people who came out of this looking bad are the same people who thought I was a problem. I pointed out issues with the church, and instead of being seen as a helpful counselor, I was considered a traitor. If they had taken my advice, they would still have a church. It would be bigger. It would be more effective. The pastor would probably be working things out with his sister and niece. He would still have a job. The brother-in-law wouldn’t look nearly so foolish.

The pastor is on his way to the penitentiary, and he could get life. The other employees have lost their jobs. The brother-in-law lost a platform he used to promote himself. The pastor’s wife is dying from a brain tumor. I, on the other hand, am enjoying my dream of living in the country, I am no longer being maligned and abused as a church volunteer, and I suddenly seem perceptive to a number of people who used to think I was a crank. I seem smart, for saying what should have been obvious.

I’m not smart. Not about the pastors. A smart person would never have believed in these people. I was just passing on things I heard because I spent a lot of time praying. God might as well have told them to a goose, for all the respect I got.

I wanted the best for them. I couldn’t find a way to get them to receive it.

I’m a bad person, myself. I’m trying to confess and repent as effectively as I can. I don’t want to be self-righteous or proud with regard to the self-righteous and proud. I hope I don’t sound like I’m praising myself. I’m just expressing frustration at a terrible series of events which should have been avoided very easily.

I don’t find confession discouraging. I find it empowering. I get better answers to prayer as I work to clean myself up. I get more authority. I don’t give a crap about my self-esteem. Self-esteem is a lie. It’s a drug our brains manufacture to keep us from dying of shame.

Realizing what I am doesn’t make me sad. It sets me free. Try explaining these things to someone who is obsessed with the fact that God has forgiven him. They think it doesn’t matter what they do or think. They seem to think God adopted them because he admired them so much, not because he pitied them.

When you’re looking at a life sentence, and someone offers you a way out, you take it, and you make a point of showing that person your gratitude for the rest of your life. To do anything else is to pronounce sentence on yourself and put yourself in prison.

Not only was I right about the pastors; I was more right than I could have imagined. I won’t say I wish I was wrong, because that’s a stupid thing to wish for, but I wish they hadn’t turned out to be so disappointing, and I wish they were not being destroyed.

Not Everything is Your Fault

I keep writing posts about my experiences as a caregiver, and then I delete them. Not everything is fit for public consumption. I do have a few general observations that may help people, however.

I would like to let other caregivers know something: if you’re getting annoyed more than you would like, it may not be your fault. Not entirely. Many people are argumentative, dismissive, and inclined to take repeated verbal jabs at their relatives. When these people get older and lose their minds, they are likely to do these things more often. A demented person may forget that he insulted you or argued with you (about something he was clearly wrong about) earlier in the day, so when he does it again, it’s like a new experience for him. A person who needled you twice a week when you were 30 may do it 20 times a week when he becomes demented, and sooner or later, you are going to be annoyed. It’s not you, so be careful how much blame you lay on yourself.

If you have a demented parent who had certain buttons he liked to push when he was younger, he is now likely to push those buttons much more often. And you can’t tell your parents to shut up and get lost. You can’t really unload on them about the rotten things they did when they were young. It serves no purpose, and people will think you’re abusive. You’ll have to have a strong prayer life, and you will have to limit the amount of time you spend with the person you care for. Don’t feel bad if they get lonely. It’s their fault, and the proper cure isn’t to make your own life miserable. There are some problems you can’t fix, so let them go and be at peace.

I’ll tell you something interesting. Jesus snapped at people from time to time. I’m not saying you have license to be obnoxious, but you don’t have to be better than Jesus. At the very least, you are entitled to brief moments of anger which you keep to yourself.

I feel very bad for my dad, and I have been somewhat down on myself because I felt I wasn’t as patient as I could have been. My dad’s life is pitiable. He can’t have friendships now. He never had friends who would be willing to spend substantial time with a demented person. He can’t drive. He can’t do anything interesting with his time. He can’t work the phone or computers well enough to keep up with people. I feel bad because I get annoyed with a person who is in this terrible situation.

At the same time, I know where his problems came from. When he was younger, he made deliberate choices and developed habits he knew were difficult for other people to bear. He really made people suffer. The consequences he experiences now were foreseeable and inevitable. I had nothing to do with them.

It’s not realistic to try to make him happy. That won’t happen. I can’t give him a real social life. I can’t give him satisfying things to do. I can’t work miracles. I have to be satisfied with a reasonable amelioration of his quality of life. Don’t expect too much of yourself.

I look after my dad’s business. I see to it he gets medical care. I make a fair effort to provide him with conversation and contact. That’s all I can do. I’m not going to cook meals from scratch every day or take him to restaurants 5 times a week. I’m not going to sit with him for three hours a day. I’m not taking him on trips; that would be a nightmare. I have no help, and I’m just a human being.

Here’s something else: your charge will surprise you a lot. For example, they will never stop finding new ways to defile your environment with mucus, spit, feces, and urine. You will try to plan for everything, but you will still get blindsided. I don’t think you can do anything about this. I joined an online support group and made ample use of Google, but I have not been able to predict all of the problems that have come my way.

I had to get my own secret refrigerator, and I hide food from my dad. I don’t want him eating things out of the package and getting spit and mucus all over them. I wish I had my own kitchen. I have thought about putting a few items in a big upstairs bathroom.

Support groups help, but they are of limited value, and they can cause you stress if you get too involved. A lot of the people who show up are self-righteous and rude (hello…Internet), and forums tend to be heavily laden with granola-based leftist life forms who like to give people hypocritical lectures in order to make themselves look good. “My 7 rescue cats and I cried a little when we read about the way you’re not composting your mom’s diapers.” Okay.

My advice: ask your questions, ignore the grandstanding and insults, and get out. I quit the group I belonged to because I had started to feel like a Trump associate trying to have a quiet dinner at a restaurant.

I figured something else out recently. You have to be willing to think about assisted living. I want my dad to live in his own home until he dies, but it may not be possible. I don’t know how long I can handle the burden of dealing with him.

I can’t leave for more than a couple of hours unless I find temporary housing for him or get someone to stay with him. I can’t have a clean house. The counters in the kitchen always have spit on them (he uses it as a cleaning fluid) unless I’ve just cleaned them. Smells come out of his bedroom suite. I have stepped in fresh mucus where he blew his nose on the floor. I have to put up with daily interrogations about my efforts to get married and give him grandchildren. I can live like this for a certain amount of time, but it’s not sustainable. If he is still with me a year from now, I will probably be looking for a facility for him.

I’ll tell you what. I never want to be asked about marriage or grandchildren again. If you mess up your kids, you really should not nag them later on about the way their lives turned out. It’s bad form. I’m doing everything I can, but I can’t change reality.

If I get a woman pregnant tomorrow, my dad will probably be dead before the child can talk. His illness is terminal. If he had a grandson right now, things would be bad. He can’t be a grandfather. He can’t take kids anywhere. He can’t buy them presents. He can’t really hold conversations with them. He is never going to be a grandfather, and it would be best if he understood it and admitted it’s his own fault.

As for marriage, well, I’m old, and I’m not much of a draw. Also, God forgive me, when I look at women my age, I think, “No way, no way, no way, no WAY.” Being single is not that bad. I know I don’t look any better than they do, but I can’t change what I feel.

Marriage isn’t just a friendship. If it were, I’d move in with another man. God knows they’re easier to get along with. “Is this your dynamite on the kitchen table, next to the disassembled AR-15?” “Yes.” “Cool.”

Marriage is largely about romance. I’m not going to wake up in despair every morning just so I can have someone on hand to help me if I break a hip. Hiring a caretaker is cheaper than marrying, and I wouldn’t have to let the caretaker kiss me.

After I reached a certain age, I found that I appealed mainly to obnoxious older women other men had rejected for extremely sound reasons. Put me in a church pew, and the 200-pound lady who collects pieces of toast she thinks have Jesus’ face on them will come stand next to me, pressing her body against me if I have no place to run, and then she’ll start telling me how she dreamed about God’s plan for us. “I had a vision of the two of us reciting psalms while you rub Bag Balm on my bunions.” No. No no no no no no NO!

I suppose my dad will nag me about marriage as long as he has breath.

Before I forget, there is one more thing you will learn when you’re a caregiver. People love to sell old people things, and by “sell,” I mean “charge their credit cards without telling them.” My dad’s American Express card has been changed several times because of fraud. Magazines show up. Miracle pills arrive in the mail. Lots of people will want your parents’ money when they get too old to look after it, so make sure you look at bank and credit card statements all the time.

My dad received several ounces of silver plus a $600 bill from a company in Ohio. If it hadn’t been for me, he would still have the silver. I have also had to kill magazine and Internet subscriptions.

I don’t know if any of this information is helpful. I hope it is. I have no one to teach me how to be a caregiver. I’ve learned by making mistakes. Maybe I can help you avoid making mistakes.

Be nice to your kids. They may have a lot of power over you some day.

Big Brother Gives You Permission

Welcome to the Internet’s newest Department-of-Defense-recognized hate and racism site. I hope the hatred will be up to your standards. If not, please leave a comment so I can work to hate even more.

Other websites are helpful in my quest to be the top Internet player hater of my generation. They do their best to provoke me every day.

Today I looked at a story about a black man who sliced and stabbed 9 people in Idaho, at some kind of housing project full of Muslim refugees. I saw the story several times, but it was not until I saw the Fox News version that I saw his photo, and if it weren’t for commenters on stories, I still would not have seen any indication that the refugees were Muslims.

There is a weird conspiracy among journalists now. They write story after story about disturbing crimes committed by minority members, deliberately omitting suspect photos and descriptions. They use code words, however. One popular word is “teens,” as in, “Gang of teens pulls man from car and beats him to death.” “Teen” is used so much, it’s likely to become a synonym for “black.” “Youth” is another one. “Youths swarm convenience store and beat owner.” They also use “urban” to mean “black.”

One day we may have a civil rights organization called the National Association for the Advancement of Urban Teens and Youths.

People are working to conceal the magnitude of the problem of minority crime, and it works. I am old, and I am well informed, but until this year I had no idea that most–not “many”–murders in America were committed by black people. That’s pretty bad, for 1/8 of the population. It’s remarkable that our overseers managed to keep this information from me for so long.

Hispanics are also disproportionally involved in murder. That’s probably because we get a lot of our Hispanics from Mexico, Puerto Rico, and places like Honduras, where you are lucky if you make it to work without being shot. I don’t think we’re seeing a lot of killings performed by Spaniards and Argentinians. I doubt Charo has a rap sheet.

We have a weird attitude toward minority crime. It’s perfectly fine for a leftist politician to complain about crime in minority neighborhoods, as though that crime came from some mysterious source–perhaps elves–but it’s not okay to say minorities are committing too much crime, even though most of their victims are also minorities.

How are we supposed to address a problem if we ignore it?

We live in a country where we are in hysterics about cops who shoot black people, yet we ignore the fact that in order to be shot by a cop, a black person first has to overcome the odds and avoid being shot by his neighbors (or killed in the womb by his own mother).

As a hard core purveyor of racism and hatred, I chose a black man to be my house-sitter in Miami. He lives in my old house while I’m working on getting rid of it. He’s getting his degree at the university. We have had some interesting experiences over the years.

He used to work at the African Heritage Cultural Arts Center in Miami. This is a county white-guilt boondoggle that pays people to teach kids things like music. My friend was a music instructor. He was deeply committed to helping his community. He is highly frustrated by what he sees going on among black people. He gets close to tears about it.

He had terrible problems when he was a teacher. The people who ran the center were inept. Like all government employees, they weren’t chosen based on their merits. They made him wait weeks for paychecks, while he begged people to lend him money for groceries. They also underpaid him. He had problems with the parents of the kids he taught. They wouldn’t bring them to the center when they were supposed to. They were impossible to motivate.

He has a buddy he is trying to help. I’ll call him Joe, and I’ll call my house sitter Bob. Joe came to the house to help us load my things into the rental van. Joe has had some legal issues. I don’t know what they are. Bob is big on mentoring (if you know a lot of black people, you will hear the word “mentor” all the time), and he has been mentoring Joe.

Joe lives in Liberty City, which is a lawless ghetto where people get away with murder all the time because no one will talk to the cops. You wouldn’t believe what goes on in Liberty City. The press keeps it quiet. Here’s an example: every year on Martin Luther King Day, gangs terrorize the area, doing whatever they please. Motorcycle gangs on illegal dirt bikes fill the streets, committing crimes and ignoring traffic signals. Bob’s dad used to make his family stay home on MLK Day, and he guarded his home with a gun.

This stuff also happens in other cities on MLK Day, but the press hushes it up. It’s so bad, ghetto thugs wait for MLK Day to settle scores. It’s like the movie The Purge. On MLK Day, anything goes. It’s a day of terror. The cops let it happen. They can’t do anything about it.

It’s almost understandable that the press would ignore the MLK purge, because in order to cover it, they would have to be on the scene, surrounded by violence. They’re afraid to go, I guess. But they did go to Iraq (???).

Joe’s family does not have it together. His friends generally don’t have it together. The people around him scare him and discourage him. While I was in Miami, there were several conversations about his situation.

Black kids are brainwashed all the time. They’re told they’re doing everything right, and that if they have any problems, white people are the reason. They hear this from educators, not just random malcontents. They are taught that they owe other black people their service. If you’re black, you are not supposed to leave a ghetto and improve yourself. You’re supposed to stay right where you are and somehow force the community to improve.

Clearly, this does not work. No black ghetto has ever gotten better without a population transplant. They only get better when everyone leaves and different people move in. This is actually a bad thing, we are told. It is gentrification, and it’s a great evil, for some reason I don’t actually know. I could look it up.

Bob was brainwashed. He believed he had to stay in Liberty City and lift everyone up, and it broke his heart and his spirit. He got nowhere. His employers didn’t appreciate him; all they cared about was getting paid. The people he tried to help generally didn’t appreciate him. He was punished for trying to help.

I used to tell him this: if you want to help people in the ghetto, move out, get educated, make money, find a nice house in a better place, and go back and help on the weekends. Then you’ll be able to help a few individuals, but the neighborhoods will still be disasters. He finally began to agree with me, and now he lives in a nice neighborhood, and he will have a degree and a position in a good graduate school in a few months. Now Bob is telling other people what I told him.

He even voted for Trump. He knows black people who would need no better reason than that to put him in the hospital.

He told Joe a story which is funny but also sad. Bob used to have fund-raising car washes at the Cultural Center. I used to go and let the kids wash my truck. Last time I went, shortly after I left, some nut started shooting across the street from the lot where they washed my truck. He murdered another man less than a hundred yards from the school, over drugs.

He and Joe were laughing about it. Bob said something like, “Please God, don’t let them kill this white man before he gets out of here.” One of the reasons Liberty City is depressed is that people are afraid to go there.

When the shooting occurred, Bob was upset not only because there was violence near the school, but because it happened when an outsider showed up and tried to be helpful.

I don’t like Liberty City. It is not a nice place for white people. People there may attack you simply for not being black. If a white or Hispanic person has a car accident there, he or she may be beaten to death by a mob. It has happened more than once.

It’s sad that you even have to think about things like that when you visit. “Is a pistol enough? Should I put a rifle under the backseat? Should I put the local police number in my phone contacts?”

I had a long conversation with Joe while Bob was off doing something. I told him sometimes you just have to give up on people. I told him the same things I had told Bob. I told him he could have a good life and a good career, but he needed to get away from people who dragged him down. I asked him about career options he considered. I mentioned the military. I mentioned trades, like machining. I asked him whether he had considered auditioning at the university, to get a music scholarship.

When he talks to me and Bob, he hears one thing. When he talks to the brainwashers, he hears another, and he also hears a message of guilt. “If you leave, you’re a sellout. You’re trying to be white.” And he knows he won’t have nearly as many friends if he leaves. That’s discouraging.

I hope Bob gets through to him. I come from a culture where people drag each other down, and I don’t want to see anyone else trapped in an environment like that. Joe is young. He has time to develop a relationship with God, move to an area with better people, find a decent woman, and cut his ties to those who are completely determined to fail. I can’t go back and undo the damage to my own life, but I can help other people avoid the same landmines.

Miami ghettos are just like the place I came from in Eastern Kentucky, only worse. If you’re from a place like that, and you want to do well, get out. You’re not going to change things. Liberty City will always be a hellhole, and Eastern Kentucky will always have way too many ignorant, racist white people on welfare.

I don’t know if they’ll be official state-recognized racists like me. I had to work to earn that distinction.

It’s not helpful when journalists and politicians pretend people who cause their own problems are victims. They’re just letting abscesses fester and spread instead of cleaning them, and they’re not helping their own credibility. Everyone knows what “teens” and “youths” mean, and everyone knows what’s going on when a story about a violent crime omits the name and image of the suspect. We know he’s black, Hispanic, or Muslim, and his name is something like Devontae, Manuel, or Mohammed. If he’s white and his name is George, his name and photo will be in every story.

Don’t pay any attention to me, however, because I am a known hatemonger. I use plastic grocery bags, and I used to have a shirt with a Confederate flag on it. All the bad things that happen in Liberty City are my fault. I am directly responsible. If you go there and become a victim of a violent crime, while your minority assailant is injuring you, think of me and hope the police catch me.

6-3…6-3…6-3…6-3…

I am blogging from Miami. I had to drive down here to pick up belongings our movers failed to take. I tried to rent a 12-foot van, and I got stuck with a huge 16-foot van that wanders all over the road and catches the wind beautifully.

It’s risky to travel and mention it on the Internet, because it’s an invitation to thieves. This time, I’m okay. For one thing, no one who hates me enough to cause a problem knows where I live now. For another, I have people staying at my house.

Anyway, I made it, and I got great news when I arrived: KENNEDY IS OUT!

If you live in a mine shaft, I’ll clue you in. Kennedy is the swing vote on the US Supreme Court. I forget who nominated him. Reagan, I think. He went native and made a veer to the left, and as a result, we’ve had a number of insane 5-4 decisions that should have been 4-5.

Man, this is good news. Now we have to hope that Trump doesn’t appoint another loose cannon.

People like to say presidents shouldn’t “pack” the Supreme Court. They say he should try to get a cross-section of the political spectrum. Here’s who says that: liars who don’t belong to the same party as the current president. Obama packed the Supreme Court as hard as he could, with Kagan and Sotomayor, and he would have given us another far-left nut had the Democrats not shot themselves in the feet by establishing a precedent which made it hard for Obama to appoint anyone while he was on the way out. Here’s the truth: every president who gets a chance does his best to jam EVERY LEVEL of the federal judiciary with people who think (or refuse to think, depending on party) just as he does.

George Bush appointed conservatives. Obama appointed leftists. Trump will not even consider appointing a leftist or centrist. Not even his sister, a far-left federal judge.

I hate hearing ignorant people say they vote for the man, not the party. They don’t understand that a vote for a president is a vote for a whole bunch of federal judges. The judges may be more important than the president himself. He can’t rule for more than 8 years. A federal judge is like cancer. They never go away.

This is very exciting. Ginsburg is not well. The odds that she will make it through Trump’s tenure are not great. With Kennedy’s long-awaited departure, we will most likely get a fairly solid 5th vote, and Ginsburg could make it 6. Another positive: any conservatives who are thinking of retiring due to health issues can leave safely now. If Thomas goes, we might get a bouncy, vigorous 50-year-old to take his place. SEVEN, plus a younger man to replace Thomas. It’s too much to hope for. I’ll hope anyway.

I don’t know if I’ll be able to publish this blog entry tonight. I’m using a laptop, and it looks like I changed my blog password since the last time I used it. I’m trying to get someone to email me a file containing the info. Maybe it will work.

More

I got my blog working, so I’m here to write a little more.

The thing that interests me about the Kennedy story is the way it will hit leftists. My prediction is that it will set them off. They’re already stretched very tight. The loss of Kennedy is gigantic, and I expect them to lose what little composure they have left.

Think about this: leftists are suddenly against democracy. How about that?

Democracy itself is a leftist structure. Throughout history, nations have generally been ruled by kings. They were ruled by force. Ordinary people didn’t get much of a voice. The Greeks held elections, and the Romans had a senate, but they were unusual. When democracy swept the world a couple of centuries ago, it was seen as something scandalous. The peasants didn’t know their place! Back then, conservatives believed in royalty.

Suddenly, leftists are rejecting democracy. Look what’s happening. Donald Trump was elected legally, in reasonably fair elections. He appointed people legally. How are leftists responding? Are they saying, “Well, we would rather have someone else, but thank God for our system. We will wait our turn and try to do better, working within the framework our philosophical ancestors created.”? No! They’re persecuting conservatives in the streets. They’re rioting. They go to conservative gatherings, where law-abiding Americans try to exercise their freedom of expression, and they start fights and do their best to keep people from speaking. They’re abusing their tech power, banning us from social media. They’re not bothering to vote. They’re trying to take power by throwing tantrums. Suddenly they’re allergic to due process.

I assume they can’t see the hypocrisy. The left’s remarkable capacity for cognitive dissonance has risen to heights no one could have foreseen fifty years ago.

It’s fascinating. If you can’t win on election day, win through violence. Win by ignoring the law. Pretend the election never happened.

Suddenly, leftists hate the Electoral College, which is something that was put in place by voting. It’s not a wacky idea Republicans came up with in a desperate bid to gain power. It was built into our laws from the very start. Its existence was a condition states insisted on before they agreed to join the union. There is nothing illegitimate about it. Everyone agreed to it.

American leftists want their way, and they no longer care how they get it. They want dominion. They want to rule the rest of us as tyrants, and they don’t seem to care who knows it.

How did we get here?

If Kennedy’s retirement, which is a normal action provided for by our laws, doesn’t lead to riots, I’ll be very surprised. If they’re not throwing bricks and bottles by this weekend, I expect them to start when the new nominee is named, or when he is confirmed, or when the court hands down the first decision that really stings.

I have no confidence in the left’s willingness to submit to fair majority rule, when their policies start taking major hits from our highest tribunal. Affirmative action could be outlawed. Abortion could be severely restricted. Bakers might not have to make cakes for homosexual weddings. The list of possible provocations is long, and as the the terrorist Bill Ayers could tell you, the left is not good at withstanding provocation.

Are things going worse for the left than they ever have? Of course not. Trump isn’t that powerful, and there is good reason to believe leftists will be on top in a few years. The left hasn’t become a powder keg because they’re enduring exceptional provocation. They’re just less mature than they used to be. They no longer have any impulse control. Trump isn’t really that provocative. He just looks that way when he’s irritating people who have lost all restraint and civility.

I’m so glad I don’t live in a city. I want to move even farther out later on. When things go completely sour in the US, living in the country won’t save me, but it will be better than living in Miami or St. Louis.

I hope our next justice turns out to be a Scalia, not a Kennedy. I’m for anyone who can slow down America’s descent into utter depravity.

Decorated by the Department of Defense

I just found out my blog has been blocked by the Department of Defense. Amazing! The grounds: “hate” and “racism.” I wonder what that’s all about.

These days, “hate” is like “bullying.” For the most part, it’s a code word for any type of negativity toward homosexuality. I’ll bet that’s what got me flagged. I’m a Christian. I believe the Bible when it speaks against homosexuality and other forms of sexual sin. These days, that’s hate!

I don’t think racism is the issue. I can’t think of anything I’ve written that would cause a problem. I’ve certainly criticized BLM, not to mention affirmative action and corrosive identity poltics, but as of 2018, I don’t think these things would merit a DoD ban. Maybe two years from now they will.

Here’s what I think happened. Someone who looks like Chaz Bono has a job, sitting at a DoD computer, looking for Christian websites to ban. He or she or ze saw my website and pushed the magic button, and there was no oversight, so now I’m gone. There is no committee. There is no hearing. Just a person with a lot of tattoos and a crabby attitude. This is my guess.

The fascinating thing to me is that the DoD babysits employees. You can go to Afghanistan and get your head blown off, but you can’t visit my blog because it’s not safe. If you read my blog, something real bad could happen to you. Worse than breaking your neck on the confidence course or being killed by a grenade in boot camp.

I can understand why they would ban porn sites, gambling sites, and maybe Ebay and Youtube, because they don’t want employees goofing off all day on their computers, but are they really trying to protect their little snowflakes from blogs? Is that a proper function of the Department of Defense? I always think of military personnel as tough individuals who face dangers the rest of us run from, but maybe not all of them are like that.

What an amazing age we live in. Our universities–supposedly bastions of freedom of thought–force conservatives and Christians off campus and pamper the people we offend with puppies and coloring books, and now our military is on the same track!

Here’s what I’m going to do to fight the ban: absolutely nothing. I don’t make money here. I’m not running for office. I don’t care if anyone reads this site or not; not enough to plead my case before the deluded and self-righteous. The government would be doing me a big favor if they shut it down completely. This site can get me in trouble, clearly, but it can’t do much to for me.

I didn’t fight Facebook when they killed my account, either. I started a new one, and eventually, I quit altogether. I am not a joiner, so whenever I get the chance to drop out, I’m likely to take it.

It’s fascinating, watching my predictions come true. It’s really happening. Anti-Christian fascism is here! Now! Today! It’s not “coming.” We have it right now! And I’m already being victimized! I’m not reading about someone else’s problems. It’s me!

It’s shocking to see that our government is this brazen about censoring people for religious and political reasons. And look how they did it! No warning. No notice once it was done. No appeal. No explanation. They MeToo’d me, without even a hint of due process. I have been disappeared, like a Salvadoran whose village picked the wrong team. But this is America! Or at least it used to be.

If this is happening, then the other things I’ve foreseen will happen. They will come after my money and property. Eventually, they will imprison and kill me. I feel like I’ve been projected back into 1930’s Germany, with full knowledge of what lies ahead.

I’ve often wondered what I would have done, had I been a Jew under Chancellor Hitler. It was just idle speculation. It’s not idle any more. They really will come and get me if I live long enough. What will I do?

Again, I will do nothing. I will not join a militia. I will not build a bomb shelter. I will not buy Glenn Beck’s vacuum-packed survival wafers. If they want me, they can have me. When the time comes, put me in a cell and then shoot me. Better yet, just shoot me. When you want this planet, you can have it. I’m not that attached to it. Not if it means being confined here with people who would do this to me.

I’m not afraid of death at all. It’s dying that scares me. I just hope the freak patrol in charge of cleansing sees fit to make it quick.

I feel sorry for conservatives and Christians who are holing up in places like Idaho, rattling their sabers and talking about last stands. It’s not going to work, and even if it did work, the cake wouldn’t be worth the candle. If you have to become a brute in order to take your country back from brutes, you haven’t gained anything. They’ve still won.

The Bible says we’re supposed to be more than conquerors. That means we don’t just defeat our enemies; we turn them into brothers and sisters. Satan always copies God. He thinks the same way. He is more than a conqueror. He doesn’t just want to murder good people. He wants to turn them into bad people. It’s better to die than to cooperate.

I’ve written a lot about how it may be necessary to fend off urban hordes in the future, when the cities dry up and the depraved inhabitants come to places like this to loot whatever remains. My feelings are changing. I don’t think I could take part in that. If I were to use a gun to defend my own property, it would have to be out of fear of violence. I could not do it out of hate or anger.

The Nazis killed many people by relatively humane means. They shot more people than they gassed. The deranged leftists who murdered the last Czar’s children used firearms. Maybe when the chanters and mask-wearers get me, they’ll be as kind as the Nazis. Hopefully they’ll be nicer than the Romans, who crucified Jesus and deep-fried John.

It’s really going to happen. I can’t wrap my head around it. When I was a kid, I thought I’d get a job and marry a woman and have two kids. I thought I’d have a normal life and be part of society. I didn’t expect the entire earth to have a civil war, and I didn’t think I would have to exist as a loner, outside the human family’s general population.

This is just the start. I’m going to lose my Internet access. I’m going to be denied the ability to buy and sell. I’m going to lose my wealth and property. I’m going to be confined. Then I’ll be killed. A lot of people will be taken along with me. It may be a few years, but wait and see.

Come get me. I threaten you with…nothing. You think I’m kidding? You think I won’t do nothing? Don’t push me. I’m not playing.

Humanity is so childish. The thought of stopping the bus and getting off is nothing short of enticing.

I don’t know if military people are (were) reading my blog. If so, sorry to see you go. Sorry to see me go, I should say. Can’t do anything about it.

To whoever flagged me, you need help. God is real. Whatever my faults are, I am telling needy people the truth about him. You are not helping humanity. You are cutting people off from something they need desperately. You’re leaving them in the hands of people like televangelists. You’re not on the right side of history, believe me. Talk to God yourself. Get to know him. Ask him what he thinks. You’ll find out you made a big mistake.

I don’t care about what you did to me. I’m required to forgive people, and like I said, this site isn’t that important to me. If you ever regret what you did, and you wish you could apologize to me, don’t worry about it. Just do your best with the time you have remaining, after you change your mind.

It’s a huge honor to be persecuted. I completely understand why Peter felt he was unworthy to be crucified like Jesus. I’m not worthy, either. It’s very flattering to be attacked for whatever resemblance I may bear to someone who is utterly superior to me. I am not a good person, but I must be doing something right, finally.

Sew a Yellow Cross on Your Shirt

Today is a great day. I was supposed to be in Miami today, but I’m not. I need no additional cause for celebration.

I was supposed to drive down to Miami and retrieve more things the movers left behind. I made a reservation with a rental company. I wanted a large enclosed van. My pickup wasn’t right for the job. The website agreed to a noon appointment. Then when I arrived at the location, it was closed. They close at noon on Sundays, so in order to pick up the van, I would have had to be there earlier.

My schedule has been messed up, and now I’m trying to work things out so I can go later this week. Bad. But I’m not in Miami, so I’m happy. I hate that place so much. Driving down there is like driving to prison to start a sentence.

I’ve had breakfast, and I’ve been reading the news. I see the forces of tolerance just mustered their might to persecute Sarah Sanders. She went to a restaurant in Virginia that had a big homosexual element on the crew, and they voted to throw her off the premises.

We should have known we were sowing for a dim and contentious future back in the Sixties, when we decided civil disobedience was a good thing. We were too stupid to see it. People started holding sit-ins and so on, and eventually young Americans decided rioting was also civil disobedience. Now we call riots “protests.” Okay.

At some point, leftists decided that it was always good to break the law–any law–or to commit any wrong, in order to make a point. This is where we now stand.

Maxine Waters, who has encouraged people to riot in the past, is now encouraging leftist criminals to target conservatives wherever they may be. Leftists have actually showed up at people’s homes–private property–to hound them. Imagine how wives and kids feel when they see angry crowds at their houses. Must be nice.

The restaurant that ejected Sanders is called The Red Hen. Their actions were repugnant, but believe it or not, I support their ability to choose their clientele. They’re wrong to pick on Christians and conservatives, but they should have the right to do it. I’ve started to think the whole business of having the government force us to do business with each other is counterproductive. I suppose there must be exceptions, in important areas like transportation, medical care, and lodging, but generally, I think we ought to be able to say no without having to explain ourselves.

The reason we don’t get along isn’t a lack of laws. We have more laws than we know what to do with. We don’t get along because we don’t hear the Holy Spirit. Two thousand years ago, Jesus died to give us the power to become Holy-Spirit-led. We have not taken him up on it. As a result, we are led by evil spirits, exceedingly stupid people, and our own tiny minds. Our beliefs and motivations come from different sources, so they conflict.

God does not tell different people different things. If we heard from the Holy Spirit and submitted, we would be in agreement, and we wouldn’t be throwing each other out of restaurants.

Division is a frustrating thing. It’s particularly frustrating to see it in the church. We were never supposed to have denominations. If we were united by the Holy Spirit, we would agree on doctrine. There would only be one denomination. Unfortunately, denominations are started or corrupted by people who listen to the devil, and he does his best to pit us against each other with lies and nonsense.

Most Christians are not baptized with the Holy Spirit. Most don’t pray in tongues. Most who pray in tongues don’t do it enough to matter. We don’t confess every day. We don’t cast out the spirits that rule us.

We don’t hear from God. We don’t think God is smart enough or sufficiently engaged to tell us what to do, so we make things up. No meat on Friday. Pray to the “saints.” Homosexual preachers are fine and dandy. God has stopped working miracles. Give preachers money, and God will make you rich. “God helps those who help themselves.” “Christian pride”; I love that one. It’s like “Christian child pornography.” Pride is evil.

The other day I read about a guy who seriously believed Jesus had told him he was proud of him. Jesus is not proud of anyone; not even himself. Jesus can’t have pride.

The Bible clearly states that God fights the proud. God doesn’t fight himself.

One of the biggest lies is this: “Christians have to be more politically involved.” That doesn’t work. That puts us on Satan’s turf, in a game where he chooses the rules and equipment. We need to be more spiritually involved. The government can’t save you from what’s coming, but God can, and he will.

Christians fight each other all day, and we also have to contend with unbelievers who want to remove us from the planet. Instead of using the powerful tools God gave us, we use things like memes and tweets. It’s a bad situation.

We (Americans) don’t have supernatural unity, so we pass laws to keep us from clawing each other all day. It’s the best we can do. When you don’t have a power screwdriver, you use a butter knife or even a fingernail. It’s understandable. Jesus died to take hard work off our shoulders, and we don’t know how to receive the gift, so we work and strive. Laws seem better than nothing.

One of the big problems with human laws is that they are many-edged swords. A law you use to stick it to your enemies may be used to stick it to you later on. If we tell the fragile, bitter employees of The Red Hen they can’t have a safe place where Sarah Sanders can’t terrify them by eating highly pretentious food, can we then tell bakers they don’t have to choke back tears as they make cakes for homosexual marriages?

I prefer the word “homosexual” to “gay.” There is nothing gay about homosexuals. They’re extremely angry. Also, the word “gay” hasn’t always been applied to lesbians. That’s a new thing. It’s why we see “LGBT” instead of “GBT.” Lesbians tend to be a little grim, perhaps because it’s how they perceive masculine men, so it makes sense that people would be reluctant to call them “gay.”

It’s funny, but the First Amendment, which was intended to make America safe for different Christian denominations and perhaps Jews, is a law which has been turned against Christianity. It says the US won’t make any laws respecting the establishment of religions or the freedom to practice religion. That’s all it says. Courts took that and brought us to, “You can’t pray in school unless you’re a Muslim, in which case we will build a special room for you, but you can teach atheism and sexual immorality.”

Maybe the founders should have kept quiet about religion. Was there really any danger of ending up with a state religion? I don’t think so. I think they were paranoid. They passed a law anyway, intending to foster the free exercise of mainstream religions, and now your kids can be disciplined for opening a Bible during their private reading time at school.

It’s amazing how the First Amendment has been perverted. Without it, we would not have Satanic monuments and displays in courthouses and so on.

It’s too bad courts haven’t made the obvious logical jump and used the First Amendment to ban all state-backed coercion that relates to religion. If you push atheism and humanism, obviously, you are teaching about religion, yet the courts don’t see it that way.

Atheism is a religious belief, even if it’s not a religion. It’s a belief about religion.

We should do an experiment. We should get rid of anti-discrimination laws, except for industries that absolutely have to be accessible to everyone. We should go hands-free for a year and see what happens. It would be fascinating have a “purge” and see what business owners really want to do. The sudden jump in anti-Christian and anti-Semitic activity might drive a bunch of us back to God’s throne.

We don’t hear the Holy Spirit, so we are at each other’s throats. This is not going to go away. Things are going to get worse. America celebrates sin more and more. We are astoundingly filthy, even compared to the Americans of 2000. We watch filthy entertainment. We worship truly filthy celebrities. We are cruel and proud. We are cutting off whatever harmonizing influence the Holy Spirit still has, and we are increasing the influence of the spirits that want us to murder each other.

It’s crazy, seeing the bizarre things I’ve predicted come true. When God tells me something and I repeat it, I believe it…pretty much. When it comes to pass, it’s still shocking. For a long time, I’ve been saying we were headed toward a Nuremberg paradigm. Christians and Jews will be driven out of business, academics, and so on, and eventually, the imprisonments and killings will begin. Look what we’re seeing. They’re not murdering us in our yards yet, but many people have lost their livelihoods or important career opportunities because of their support of Christianity. That could not have happened 10 years ago, but now it’s commonplace.

It won’t be long before I’m marveling at the manifestation of worse things I’ve predicted.

I shouldn’t say I predicted anything. I was told things. I can’t predict what will happen 10 minutes from now without help. If I could predict the future, I wouldn’t have rented Black Panther, because I would have known what a clumsy, trite, amateurish movie it was.

You can say Sarah Sanders was thrown out because of politics, not religion. Thing is, politics IS religion. Leftists hate Trump largely because they see him (correctly) as the candidate of Christians. Homosexuals have a real hatred for Christianity. You can Google around and see for yourself. They would love to abolish Christianity.

When Satan’s children want to get rid of you, they start labeling you as the cause of a bunch of society’s problems. That’s what they’ve done to the Jews and Israel. Remember when Mel Gibson got drunk and became psychotic? Demons were controlling him. What did he say? He said, “Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world!” Mel Gibson doesn’t believe that when he’s sober. It’s idiotic. It came from demons allowed in by alcohol. When Hitler wanted power, he blamed the Jews for Germany’s poverty. Personally, I would have blamed the Kaiser or maybe England and France.

“Terrorism is caused by Jews. If we got rid of Israel, Muslims would stop.” “Christians cause gay and trans kids to kill themselves.” “Christians ruin education.” “Jew bankers caused the recession.” “Jew doctors created AIDS to kill blacks.” “Jews control America’s government.”

The enemy is convincing people who don’t hear the Holy Spirit that the answer to the world’s problems is to get rid of Christians and Jews.

Right now, in America, they can’t take us out and curb-stomp us for Youtube, but they are able to scratch their inexplicable itch a little bit, by getting us fired and excluding us from participation in the economy.

Laws aren’t going to save us. If you want protection, to go the only source, and submit. The world is a mess, and the only way to find safety is to step aside and let it proceed without you.

The world is rapidly becoming a place where we will not be able to (or want to) live. We need to be able to let go of it.

A funny thing happened to me yesterday. I was eating a snow cone at a flea market. I was really going at it. A couple of times, I felt a pain inside my chest. I knew it was the sensation of lots of ice melting in my esophagus, but part of me wondered: what if it was something else? Can eating ice bring on a heart attack?

For a few seconds, I was disturbed, but then I thought, “If it has to happen, let it be fatal.” I was ready to go. I didn’t mind at all. Emotional attachment to this world is a bad thing, and God is cutting me loose.

Life is like a birthday cake with a little bit of poop in it. Maybe you can enjoy it when the poop is tiny and it’s way down at one end, but these days, it seems like there is poop in every bite.

I can’t read the news without seeing pictures of half-naked women. I see rainbow flags in the Christian-heavy county where I live. A guy down the road has a concrete lawn jockey with black hands and a black face placed conspicuously in his yard, plus some other stuff that seems likely to be related to racism.

The poop is everywhere. I don’t like it. I don’t even like swimming in public pools.

Don’t fall in love with this place. It definitely doesn’t love you.

Supreme Court Goes After Internet Cheats

What a relief. The Supreme Court has cleared the way for forced taxation of Internet sales.

I must be the only person who is relieved. I can explain.

I live in a state where we are legally required to pay tax on all purchases. If I buy something on Ebay, and the seller doesn’t collect tax, I have to report it and pay it myself.

I’m not going to say I always did this in the past. I do it now. I feel that curses fall on thieves and liars.

The Internet has a way of bringing new curses into people’s lives. It brought us pornography and Internet rage, for two examples. The sales tax thing is another example. The Internet made tax evaders out of most of us. I decided to start tallying up my purchases and sending money to Tallahassee.

I hate dealing with sales tax. I hate making lists of purchases and dealing with the Department of Revenue. Their website is an abomination. You have to enter every purchase on its own line, and if you click the wrong thing, everything disappears. They only let you pay quarterly, so you have three months’ worth of items every time you log in. It’s awful.

Florida doesn’t deserve the taxes. It makes paying them a miserable experience.

Now that Florida has been cleared to force sellers to collect taxes, I may be spared all that work. I sure hope so.

I actually look for items that come with a sales tax charge. I will pay ten dollars plus tax instead of $9.50 for something, simply to avoid the bookkeeping.

The new tax system should be good for America. It will help states collect lost revenue, making them (I naively state) less likely to raise taxes. Florida has no income tax. I don’t want to see Amazon force an income tax on us.

Will the taxes help bricks-and-mortar retailers? No. It’s stupid to suggest they will. Online vendors have lower overhead. Even if they charge for shipping (many don’t), they will still have competitive prices, and on top of that, they have better selection. And customers don’t have to drive. That’s a huge advantage.

Am I going to drive all over town just to get a box of .22 shells, when the Internet cost is $7.00 and the local price is $6.50? Are you nuts?

People keep telling us to support local retailers. I would love to, if I thought it would work. It won’t, so I don’t. In fact, they punish me when I try. They fail to maintain inventory. Their employees disappear when I need help. They don’t put enough cashiers at the registers, so I have to wait. They put me on hold when I call to see if they have what I want.

Real stores will continue to disappear. That’s just how it is. Horses disappeared. Newspapers are disappearing. Deal with it. It’s a bad thing, because it centralizes control of the distribution of goods, but there is nothing we can do.

If you’re a Christian, my advice is to pay your taxes even if you don’t have to. States have been lenient so far, but you never know what the future will bring, and besides, why give the enemy something to bring before God?