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?

Revelation 12:4

The sad tale of the family who ran my last church continues.

As you know if you’ve kept up, my former pastor is going to trial to determine whether he is guilty of molesting a little girl over a period of years. After he was arrested, his wife developed a brain tumor, and she is dying. The church is long gone.

Here is something their only son put on Instagram the other day, with my redactions:

I want to be honest about his kid without being self-righteous or angry. It’s a hard line to tread, because he is a real button-pusher. He’s very obnoxious, especially to older people. He has never accomplished anything in his life, yet he looks down on individuals who are more intelligent and who have done much better. I’ll be blunt. He’s not bright. He ought to have a little humility.

When I knew him, he couldn’t hold a job. He was not in college. He had problems with the police. He seemed determined to convince people he was a thug, although he was really a soft, chubby mama’s boy who lived with his parents. A friend of mine told me he spent too much time in Liberty City, around true thugs. He was afraid one day this kid would turn up on a sidewalk naked after a thorough beating.

I think the reason he hasn’t been beaten half to death is that no one takes him seriously. Or maybe God is watching over him.

Certain other kids like him in spite of his off-putting personality and unproductive lifestyle. Maybe he is willing to say the things they secretly feel and believe.

I think that if he is determined to air his toxic views, he should wait until his mother dies. She doesn’t need to have his problems on her mind right now.

The two people who “liked” his picture and his ranting, and whose usernames appear under it, are church kids. One is a beautiful girl who was part of the dance team. The other is the stepdaughter of the church’s late head deacon. This man had breast cancer, and he died in spite of all our praying and fasting. He was very proud, and he refused to discuss repentance and confession.

The girl from the dance team is now a professional tattoo artist. God does not like tattoos, which is why Satan inspired the Nazis to tattoo Jewish prisoners.

I can’t tell what’s in people’s hearts. A lot of folks say they can “read people.” They can’t. We can only guess. Anyone can be fooled. I admit, one of these girls didn’t seem very committed, but I did’t expect her to fall away completely. The other–the deacon’s daughter–went to a Christian high school and seemed perfectly solid. Now she’s out there in public, backing up an endorsement of atheism.

When I think about the pastor, the first thing that comes to mind is distress over what has happened to him. I should be more moved by the damage his niece has sustained, but what happened to him is scary, so I suppose it affects me more. I would want to die if I were in his shoes. Barring a technicality, he will be in prison for decades. Bearing that prospect must be extremely difficult, and he has to do it while he watches his wife wither and die.

I think too much about a proud man who doesn’t believe in confession. That’s because I also have guilt. I can relate to the guilty and the threat of God’s punishment. I don’t think enough about the people he hurt.

The church did a lot of good. God manifested himself in the services. He spoke through the pastors. God will speak through an active pedophile! That’s something I never expected. The church attracted a lot of young people, and had the pastor not been destroyed, they might have gone on to have excellent, powerful relationships with God.

Who knows what would have happened, had the pastor repented? Maybe he and his family would have handled things privately. Maybe God would have healed him, his niece, his children, his wife, and his sister. I’m not saying a pedophile is good choice to pastor a church, but God does miraculous things in people who humble themselves.

The pastor waited until God’s patience ran out, and he was exposed by other people. The church crumbled. People who relied on the pastor scattered.

There’s the problem. Reliance. We worship men and women. We put too much trust in them. Pastors heap glory on themselves. They have a VIP mindset. They speak of themselves and other preachers as though they were celebrities. An informed Christian never exalts a man. They don’t talk about their buddies, name-dropping in order to convince people there is a special group of anointed individuals on a higher level. There are only two levels in God’s kingdom: his, and ours. God is only one rank above me. No human being is above me. No one.

At New Dawn Ministries (might as well name the church), we treated the pastors and their silly son like royalty. I didn’t like it, but it’s how things were. We kept having pastor appreciation days. We paid for them to go to spas and resorts. The pastor wanted us to give money to his son, who would have been better served by a foot in the butt and a month on a chain gang. We were supposed to honor the son simply because his dad was the pastor.

I think I gave some money to one of the birthday collections for the pastor, but I stayed away from the other offerings. These people worked three hours a week, and they took whatever they wanted from the church’s donations. They couldn’t be bothered to show up before services or for prayer meetings. I didn’t see any reason to shower them with massages and free dinners.

The church had ranks and positions. One position was “minister.” We had a minister named Sal. He was a lot older than the pastors. One day, he stood in front of church members and put the pastor’s arm over his shoulders. He stooped and told us the pastor was over him. He said something about the pastor being his “dad.”

He was showing us we should be completely submitted to the pastor. Crazy. That’s not in the Bible. Nobody groveled before Paul or called him “father.” Paul was in the business of connecting people with the Holy Spirit. He didn’t build little armies with multiple tiers of authority, putting barriers between men and God.

When a hundred people worship a man, and Satan wants to get those people, he doesn’t have to corrupt all of them one at a time. He corrupts the man they worship, and that man leads the rest of them to destruction. If you are directly connected to God, who can come between you? No one is going to corrupt God.

I don’t like Christian celebrities. I don’t care how many orphans they feed or how many CD’s they sell. They almost always end up glorifying themselves and making others feel as though they were gods. A celebrity is just a person a lot of other people know about. They’re not special. Jeffrey Dahmer was a celebrity.

You can be as good a Christian as Paul and Peter, and if no one knows who you are, it’s irrelevant. Don’t let anyone tell you different. Don’t exalt your pastor. He may teach you error. He may go to hell. If he’s still alive, he has time to fall away.

Sometimes I tell God, “I will stick with you even if everyone else on earth goes to hell.” I don’t mean I don’t care about other people. I mean I am not going to let their nonsense affect my relationship with God.

If you go to a church where the same 5 or 10 people keep showing up on the stage to teach or heal or whatever, your church is a failure. Everyone in a church should have power, and they should have testimonies. If the power and righteousness aren’t spreading, the church has gangrene.

I no longer pay any attention to people who don’t have testimonies. If God is working in your life, you, like every Biblical figure who knew God, will have something to show for it.

I don’t care how many books you’ve read. I don’t care how many mission trips you go on. I don’t care how many orphans you’ve posed with on Instagram. I don’t care if you’re fluent in Christianese. I don’t care if your pastor gave you a black belt in intercession. I don’t care about your nonsensical validations that might as well have come out of cereal boxes. I don’t care. I don’t care. I don’t care. Paul reached people by demonstrating God’s power, not by opening a yeshiva and holding classes. If you can’t demonstrate God’s power, you have nothing whatsoever to teach me, because you don’t really know anything.

It’s hard to think of anything more worthless than a theology degree.

I got an “Abishai award” from the pastors at Trinity Church in Miami. I burned it and used the frame for something else. I was an idiot to go onstage and accept it.

The pastor’s son’s Instagram post underscores something for me: I am surrounded by people who are full of it, and I can’t tell who they are.

I remember my days at Trinity Church. I used to wonder what the parking lot would look like if all the liars left. We wouldn’t have had hundreds of cars any more. How many would we have had? Ten? Five? Three?

People puff themselves up to look bigger than they are. Think about debt. Imagine driving through a neighborhood and seeing all the cars and houses that aren’t paid for disappear. What would remain? How many people are really homeowners? How many people own their cars? That’s what Christianity is like. If God put us through a sieve, most of us would fall right through.

About 80% of America’s homes are occupied by people who rent or have mortgages.

The pastor’s son and his friends were just theater props. There was nothing inside them to give them permanence. Maybe if the pastors hadn’t failed, these kids could have been changed.

It has to be hard to grow up in a pastor’s house, knowing he’s a fraud. It has to affect your view of God himself. We always end up blaming God for what human beings do.

I think about these young people, but I also think about the sincere ones (the ones I think were sincere, anyway). We had kids who got up early on Sunday and waited for the church van. They rode to church without their parents. I suspect that at least some of them were serious. What are they doing now? What do they think about church? What do they think about God?

Maybe they were liars, too. Maybe they only went to church so they could socialize. In any case, they were abandoned. Their parents abandoned them, and then the church followed suit.

Is the son really an atheist? He used to fall on his knees in front of the church and sob as hard as he could. He shook and wailed. He cried for about 45 minutes once. He was completely out of control. That wasn’t an act. Something was going on. But people are irrational. There are people who have seen God manifest himself, yet who act like it never happened. I’ve known people who spoke under the influence of the Holy Spirit in church yet had a different mindset at home.

Many atheists aren’t really people who don’t believe in God. They are people who are trying to punish God by insulting him and pretending he doesn’t exist.

What’s the upshot of all this? I suppose it’s this: confession and repentance are important. The pastor is going to prison. His wife will be dead soon. His son is a punk. Many people who relied on the pastors are in trouble. Confession and repentance could have prevented this from happening, but they are the two things the pastors hated most.

Large Backlog

God has told me a lot of things since the last time I wrote about the little phrases he gives me, so I am here to catch up.

“You are the only authority.”

God has been stressing the importance of getting rid of the spirits I drew into myself in decades of ignorance and rebellion. My so-called teachers didn’t help me with this. My last pastor, to his credit, talked about demons and cast some out, but he didn’t understand how important they were, and he never talked about the importance of confession and repentance. If you don’t confess and repent, the demons you cast out generally come back with friends.

When I was a kid, churches were totally dead and without power. You sat in a pew and listened to useless criticism from a preacher who encouraged you to improve yourself instantaneously, without help, and you sang some boring hymns and, depending on the denomination, maybe you watched the adults eat a cracker. That’s what church was. Later on, I went to churches where they taught that demons were real, but the pastors were mainly concerned with satisfying their greed, so they didn’t do enough to get people delivered.

They didn’t want to tell people they needed to confess or that they had demons. They wanted money, money, money. They wanted butts in seats. They coddled their audiences and tickled their ears with comforting lies. “God is happy with you just as you are.” Imagine going to a doctor with a huge melanoma on your face and having him tell you you’re in perfect health. That’s what they were like.

Only one authority can give me a life of peace and victory. That’s God. There are rich and powerful people who seem to be doing well, but with few exceptions, they’re full of rot and failure. We judge them by the way they look, which is exactly what Satan wants. He holds them up and says, “Look. You don’t need God. Look at Kim Kardashian. Look at Beyonce.” He used to hold up Whitney Houston and Michael Jackson. He held up Anthony Bourdain. He held up losers who looked like winners. Anthony Bourdain is burning in agony right now, and he always will be.

He also points to godly, supernaturally people who live in obscurity and tells us they’re failures.

My life can’t work unless I give God complete authority, casting every competing spirit out, and allow his authority to flow through me. I can’t dip my toe in the pool and expect success. I have to jump in.

“Thank you for beauty.”

Some things work. Not everything is so corrupt I can’t take pleasure in it. I was getting into the shower, and I was looking at this wonderful home God gave me. I was thinking about the way peace and success were increasing in my life. I thought about the beauty of God’s shalom; his peace and prosperity. Then I heard, “Thank you for beauty.” This world is a cesspool and a death camp, but there are little footholds that help us bear it until we leave.

“I have to be a wisdom collector.”

I was thinking about the helpful things I learn. Consider the book of Proverbs. If you read it without thinking, it’s not that impressive, but if you try to apply every proverb, your life changes dramatically. Applying one proverb can be the difference between success and disaster.

Consider the warnings about slutty women in Proverbs 5. Many men have gone insane from syphilis because of brief indiscretions. The flesh has rotted off of their skulls. Go look up pictures. That can happen to you in 30 seconds of fornication. That’s just one way a trollop can destroy you. Millions of men have had good health all over their lives simply because they listened to Proverbs 5 once, and many men and families have been destroyed by quick acts of disobedience.

Wisdom is a big deal. Successful cultures impart wisdom to kids. Consider Jews and east Asians. They give their kids inheritances of wisdom and knowledge. People from these cultures tend to do well and stay out of prison and off government assistance. Now think about cultures that don’t pass knowledge and wisdom on. Think of American blacks, many of whom don’t have fathers. The majority of murders in America are committed by one eighth of the population: black people. They stay on the bottom because they have no guidance. Every generation starts with nothing.

My parents didn’t teach me much of anything. It’s a terrible thing to reflect on. My dad is 86, and he is still a source of destructive advice. I wasn’t cultivated. I grew like a watermelon seed spat out of a car window into a ditch. It’s amazing that I’m not dead. All I had to rely on was my own very poor judgment.

I have to collect wisdom, rely on it, and spread it to other people. There isn’t much hope for me, at my advanced age, but I can help others, and whatever time I have left will be improved considerably.

“You can’t be a worldly person.”

God gave me this for someone else, but it applies to every Christian. It’s not enough to refrain from things like murder, stealing, fornication, and drug and alcohol abuse. We have to insulate ourselves from worldly ideas. We have to quit watching TV all day. We have to stop listening to stupid, sinful entertainers who corrupt our minds. If you make your mind up to live in a godless city, work in a godless office, hang around with godless friends, and absorb godless entertainment, you will stay weak, and God won’t pay any attention to you when you come crying to him with your problems.

Remember the scene in The Godfather, where Amerigo Bonasera came to Don Corleone and asked him to kill the young men who raped his daughter? Corleone said he had always avoided him, thinking he was above him, and then when he needed him, he showed up begging for help. He turned him down. Bonasera hadn’t wanted anything to do with Corleone, but he called on his authority when he had a problem. God isn’t a mafioso, but the Bible makes it clear that people who don’t belong to him get limited help.

I feel like I need to keep moving away from unnecessary exposure to the world of the godless. I shouldn’t get too close to people who are in the process of being destroyed.

“You know already.”

When I confess to God, I have a hard time refraining from covering up. I feel like I have to shape my words so they don’t make him angry. I deny things that I feel. I want to make excuses. The thing is, God knows already. I can’t tell him anything he doesn’t know. The purpose of confession isn’t to inform him. It’s to get clean.

Were Adam and Eve cursed for eating the forbidden fruit? I’m not sure, but I know that even if God had forgiven that, they would still have been on the hook for refusing to take the blame. Eve blamed Satan. Adam blamed Eve. God told me this: “The concealment of a sin is worse than the sin itself.” Sin is bad, but denial is what makes you sick and causes you to rot.

I have to remember that God sees through me, so I can be honest and get cleansed and healed.

“You’ve given me supremacy.”

God has given us authority over everything. Our flesh. Evil spirits. Fallen people. Matter. We are supposed to exercise it, in humility and honesty, giving him the glory. It really works. When it doesn’t work, it’s us, not the system.

“Things get better, or things get worse.”

God was reminding me that it’s impossible to rest and feel like I don’t need to keep confessing and praying. You’re not okay just because you go to church and pray. When you turn back to God, you don’t instantly find yourself in a position of perfect protection and success. You have to keep growing. Every day, you have to dig inside yourself and work with God. If you’re not doing this, you’re rotting. You’re becoming more corrupt. You can’t stand still.

Unfortunately, this world is like an ocean, and we’re all treading water. If you become complacent, you sink.

Christians can be full of demons (most of us are). We can become possessed. We can go to hell; it’s full of Christians. Rest is for the dead, not us. Don’t stop doing maintenance.

“I am watching Satan fail.”

God was encouraging me. Good things keep happening in my life. It’s because God keeps correcting me. He keeps helping me to reach new levels of confession. I let go of things I haven’t wanted to acknowledge. Satan kept me captive by preventing me from confessing. Now that God is succeeding in improving my honesty, Satan is failing, and he will never stop failing unless I stop.

“Thank you for correction.”

God was reminding me what was at the root of the positive changes in my life.

“I am growing in hostile ground.”

This planet is not my home. It doesn’t work. It tries to kill me every day, literally. My body is unrefrigerated meat. Without God’s protection, I would be like a pile of green hamburger in three days. People are constantly trying to take what I have. They are looking for ways to hurt me. Bugs want to sting me. Germs want to make me ill and kill me. Demons swarm on me like flies on manure. This is a terrible place. I can’t let myself get attached to it, and I can’t let myself get the idea that things here will ever be ideal.

Many Christians think they have to change the world. That’s insane. Jesus himself could not change the world. He left. We’re going to be driven out, too. We’re supposed to be working with God to change individuals, starting with ourselves. The world has terminal cancer.

“Thank you for freedom.”

God keeps increasing my power over the spirits that assail me. When I was a little kid, spirits tormented me all day and every night. Loathsome people abused me. I couldn’t get victory over anyone. I had no relief. The more God aligns me with his program, the more power I have to drive my enemies off. He is giving me real freedom that lasts.

“Please save me from myself.”

I am the worst enemy I have. Think about it. No one else can sin for me. No one else can reject salvation. No one else can lie to God for me. I have all sorts of enemies, but the only reason they succeed is that I help them.

If God can save me from myself, no one else can touch me.

“I’ve been abused a lot, and I’m weary of people.”

I feel the air go out of my lungs when I say this. It’s so true. What a revelation.

Why do I love living in the country? Because I’m sick of people. Satan is able to use most people against me. No matter what I do, I can count on them mistreating me and arguing with me. I can count on them doing their best to tempt and provoke me. To make things worse, they never come up with anything new. Nothing is more vexing or discouraging than being attacked with the same nonsense over and over.

I’m not the only one who feels this way. God has the same problem. His love never runs out, but his patience does. Before the flood, he gave mankind 120 years to straighten up. Then he drowned everyone. He’s going to do it again, with fire.

God is exalted. He is to be obeyed and honored. He can’t really be God if he allows himself to be abused forever. It has to be a temporary thing. Order has to be restored.

The closer you get to God, the more alienated you feel. Other people seem more and more foreign. It becomes rarer and rarer to meet anyone who understands you or feels as you do. I find myself wanting to limit the time I spend with people. It’s nice to visit with people I care about, but it’s also very nice when they go home.

Thank God life is short. This place is a madhouse, and it’s dangerous.

God’s Patience is not Infinite

I just had some disturbing news.

If you’ve been reading the blog for a while, you may know that the pastor of my last church was arrested for molesting his niece over a period of years. He was supposed to be tried today, but he got a continuance until August 20. That will be one year to the day from the first morning I woke up in my new home, far from Miami.

The charges indicated that she was less than 12 years old when he started. As I understand it, she told a friend of hers last year, and somehow things escalated. A friend of mine says the pastor confessed in front of the church last summer, and he was arrested in September.

Prison is bad at its best, but it is said to be worse for child molesters. If you’re a child molester, everyone feels morally superior to you, and they feel entitled to mistreat you.

The pastor and his wife were not good to me. They didn’t just reject me. They were nasty about it. The pastor accosted a friend of mine in the church parking lot long after I left and started screaming at him. He got way too close, and my friend threatened to give him a beating.

That’s what things were like.

The church was a cult. When members fell out with the pastors and left, everyone else was discouraged from talking to them. When I left, I found out which church friends were real. The others cut me off and even unfriended me on Facebook, as if merely seeing my Facebook posts would poison their minds.

I told people the church was going to dry up and disappear. At best, I said, they would end up meeting in someone’s living room. The pastors had terrible pride issues. They did things to drive people away, and they got angry when members made suggestions.

The “house prophet” kept “prophesying” that the church would grow, we would get a new building, we would see miracles, this one would have twins, that one would be healed of cancer, and so on. A real prophet would have told them they were blowing it.

Obviously, the church did not survive the arrest. It ran on fumes for a bit and then expired.

Today I found out things have gotten even worse. The pastor’s wife has brain cancer. She is said to have only weeks to live, and I am also told her mind is going. I also heard that the molestation started when the victim was six.

A friend of mine called and told me. I said, “It’s like that family is being destroyed.” He said the person who told him had said the same thing.

It’s like they’re being erased from the planet. What is happening to them is astounding.

Their son is a mess. He’s a petty criminal, and he has all sorts of emotional problems. He ridicules Christianity. He seems to be included in the destruction.

Their daughter seems okay. She married a very nice guy. He’s a preacher. They live over a thousand miles away.

I know what their problem is. They don’t confess. They and others in the church got mad at me when I talked about the connection between misfortune and a lack of repentance. They were 21st-century charismatics. They only wanted to hear about money and miracles. People accused me of blaming others for their problems. Actually, that was correct. We do cause our problems, including cancer and other diseases. But people don’t want to hear it. They want to hear that nothing is their fault.

My mother’s sins made her sick and killed her. She smoked for 50 years, and she died of lung cancer. Using addictive drugs is a sin. AIDS is almost always caused by sin. The sin of gluttonizing puts people in motorized wheelchairs, blinds them, and costs them their feet. It ought to be obvious that sin causes problems. It also prevents God from fixing our problems and healing our diseases.

Many times, I’ve asked God if I should pray for the pastor and his wife, and the answer has always been “no.” The reason? They won’t listen. Their problems are caused by their own decisions. They’ve decided to close their ears, so praying won’t help them. They don’t need miracles. They need to have their minds changed so God’s power can flow through them. God doesn’t change people’s minds. He applies persuasion, but he doesn’t interfere with our free will. His name is Jehovah, not Geppetto.

A person only has so much prayer time, and if you waste it on the proud and stubborn, you will neglect people who can actually be helped. Satan sends us time-wasters who don’t really want to change.

You would expect Christians to do better than this. I’m not surprised that the church failed, because that was obviously inevitable. I’m surprised that this couple’s lives are being completely destroyed. Even a Christian who is off course will usually get a fair amount of help from God. I’m shocked at how little help they’re getting.

Sure, he’s a pedophile. But God helps pedophiles that open up to him and repent. His wife may be brassy and difficult, but she’s not an axe murderer. Whatever their failings are, they acknowledge God. Apparently, it’s not enough to protect them from catastrophe.

We should be afraid of God. Look how badly things can go when we toy with him.

I’m so glad God has helped me to receive correction. He saved me incredible suffering by teaching me about confession and repentance. I didn’t figure it out. I was an idiot who loved sin. He had to show me. I was doing my own thing, screwing my life up as much as possible. I would have continued had he not given me knowledge I didn’t deserve.

I can’t say it enough. Hell isn’t full of sinners; it’s full of people who don’t listen. Heaven is packed to the rafters with sinners. It’s full of murderers, thieves, whores, sodomites, and every other type of transgressor. It’s full of guilty people who confessed and repented. Hell is full of people who thought they knew best. And many of them are very, very nice people who treated others well.

Pride and denial may not take you to hell, but they can bring hell up to meet you while you’re here on earth. They caused Job’s problems.

Scary stuff.

I don’t think I’ll ever pray for my former pastors again, but I will be praying for the people they bamboozled and abused. The Bible says that when the dragon was cast out of heaven, it drew a third of the stars along with it, with its tail. I know a lot of people who have been misled by preachers, and there is more hope for many of them than for their former pastors.

There; I Fixed That for You

In case anyone is wondering, I can tell you why it’s wrong for Google and the other leftist-controlled tech giants are wrong to use their power to censor Second Amendment supporters and starve their businesses.

Many people are upset because the Googsters are punishing users who support the private ownership of firearms. What’s happening isn’t new, nor is it limited to Google. Paypal will not let you use its service to buy firearms. Ebay sells parts but not guns. These policies are pretty old.

By the way, Google just banned the channel for Brownell’s, an old and respected firearms-related company that appears to have nothing to do with the black rifle fad or politics. If Elmer Fudd were real, he would have a Brownell’s account. It’s not a scary company. Google banned them anyway. The account reappeared later, but it’s disturbing that the ban ever happened.

Years ago, Google had no problems with guns. I used to use Google Shopping to look for firearms deals. At the time, it was the best game in town. Google killed firearms ads, and now there are other sources that are as good or better. Google lost business, and gun sellers worked around them.

Google’s new Youtube restrictions are a lot like their Google Shopping firearms ban. Channels that disseminate useful information about guns are disappearing, but in the past they were very common. A huge amount of content is still present. Google hasn’t been able to remove everything overnight. If you see what’s still available, it shows that whatever Youtube may look like in the near future, it has been a prolific disseminator of gun-related content.

People who are angry about the censorship like to talk about freedom of speech and the First Amendment. They’re wrong. Google isn’t bound by the First Amendment. If they want, they can announce a new policy saying all videos have to be about chickens, and it won’t conflict with the First Amendment at all. The Constitution guarantees (supposedly) our freedom from GOVERNMENT censorship. It doesn’t control private companies.

Somehow, we feel that the tech snowflakes are wrong, but we can’t seem to articulate a good reason. I’ll tell you the reason. They’re wrong because they have always been against us, yet they used us for years to build their businesses and get us to rely on them, and now that they feel secure, they are abandoning us.

Gun people helped build Google, Youtube, Paypal, and a bunch of other tech companies. We all know these companies are run and staffed by sissies from America’s coasts. They never wanted to do anything for us, but they whored themselves out anyway because they needed us. They wanted income. They wanted market share. They knew excluding us would prevent them from gaining market dominance, so they choked back their rage and worked with us. Now they’re fat and cocky, so they think they’ll be okay after they stab us in the back.

Is what they’re doing illegal? No. At least I don’t think so. It’s still wrong. It’s still “evil,” to use a word Google self-righteously used in its old corporate motto.

Remember that motto? “Don’t be evil.” Google got rid of it recently. Does this mean they decided it was okay to be evil? No. It probably means they realized how fatuous and naive it sounded.

Imagine if God had told the Jews, “Don’t be evil,” and vanished. What a worthless admonition it would have been. No guidelines. No description of evil. It would have been a catastrophe.

Who decides what “evil” means? “Don’t be evil” is something a two-year-old would say. It means nothing. It’s not surprising that leftists would use it as a motto, because they love claiming moral authority without providing any substance. Conservatives know that righteousness requires thought and effort. It involves close decisions and hard choices. Leftists like to march with banners and wave rainbow flags, but they don’t like being pinned down and asked for real guidance. Their purpose isn’t to fight evil. It’s to be admired. You may sound righteous and intelligent when you say something like, “Don’t be evil,” but as soon as you have to defend your remark and define it, you start to look just as confused as everyone else.

Google’s motto was idiotic, but one would hope that it reflected a sparkle of sincerity. One would hope that the Googsters would ask themselves about the righteousness of using people and then throwing them away. One would hope that they would understand the ugliness and cruelty of deliberately choking off a huge segment of the population, based purely on political differences. It’s not like we’re being denied access to Waffle House when Cracker Barrel is right next door. We’re being denied access to important, unique services.

The posture of the tech overlords is a confirmation of the right’s perception of dismissive leftist elitism. Flyover people are not human beings to be listened to and respected. They are livestock, to be controlled and ridiculed. All the brilliant, correct people are on the coasts. In between, there are only filthy potato eaters. Truck pull watchers. Bible believers. Their beliefs and desires are infantile, and they have no right to govern themselves or participate in the marketplace of ideas.

To the tech overlords, we are like dementia patients. You don’t ask permission when you change the circumstances of a demented person’s life. You go in, wrap him in a wet sheet, shoot him full of Valium, and do what you want. Take his guns. Take his car keys. Block his favorite TV channels. Change his menu. Whatever you want. You are correct to do it, because you are RIGHT.

In the classic novel The Time Machine, the world consisted of two groups. Below ground lived the hairy, brutal morlocks. They concealed themselves in their tunnels. Above ground lived the eloi. They were feckless vegetarians who lived on fruit and vegetables that appeared mysteriously in their midst. From time to time, the morlocks snatched a few of the eloi and ate them. The eloi lived in a fool’s paradise, and the morlocks were realists who controlled the system.

It seems like we live in a funny inversion of the eloi/morlock scheme. The pampered, perfumed eloi, who live in apartments and think food comes from stores, are trying to control the morlocks, who make the country function. The eloi want to force the realists to live by rules based on a distorted perception of the world.

We’re out here growing crops, mining metal, pumping oil, and manufacturing important products. We’re in military bases and on ships around the world, protecting the eloi so they can organize riots and throw urine on the police. They’re in cities drinking $6 coffee and working at jobs with titles like “diversity counselor” and “pet aromatherapist.” They’re working at colleges, teaching real courses like “The Sociology of Miley Cyrus.”

We have effete, utterly unproductive people like Camille Paglia and Joy Behar, trying to explain the world to cattle ranchers and wheat farmers.

Economists love to tell about the impossibility of an island on which everyone makes a living doing laundry for the others. Imagine an island populated by Andy Warhols. Who would make canapes and clean up after parties?

I guess it would be Andre Leon Talley. They could ferry him in. He needs the money.

The contempt, misplaced and nonsensical though it is, is very real, and leftists have proven themselves ruthless enough to act on it. They don’t just promote their toxic ideas through talk. They gag the rest of us and even make it impossible for us to buy and sell.

It’s legal. They can do it. Is it ethical or kind? They don’t care. The left has never been kind, and leftists jeer at ethical consideration. One of leftism’s big draws is that it frees cruel people to mistreat others in the name of “higher” ideals.

If you want to throw red paint on someone or burn down a business without remorse, you need to become a leftist. It’s hard to find justification for such things in conservative or Christian organizations. You won’t see NRA members or Operation Rescue volunteers wearing masks and turning over police cars, but things like that are common among organizations like BLM, Antifa, Occupy Wall Street, and the Environmental Liberation Front.

Back when the tech lions were scared tech kittens, we fed them, with the best of intentions. Now they’re big and strong, and they can do what they’ve wanted to do all along. They don’t realize they’re creating a dystopia. You can’t embark on a policy of oppression without developing a malevolent heart that will never stop looking for new targets. Malice is habit-forming, and so is denial. If you mistreat conservatives and Christians at work every day, you will also mistreat your loved ones and friends. You won’t be able to turn it on and off.

We have laws banning monopolies. A monopoly is a single entity that controls a market niche. We don’t have laws banning ideological monopolies. If every Internet company belongs to a larger leftist cabal–pretty much true–there is nothing we can do. One wonders if there is a way to address the problem. I think that if these companies were all controlled by the Catholic Church or the Assemblies of God, legislators would be looking for a solution.

In truth, we probably need laws (I hate to say that) similar to the laws that govern hotels and transportation companies. Some services are so important, they have to be available to everyone. Holiday Inn can’t ban gun shop owners, and Delta Airlines can’t ban Republicans. Maybe the tech despots need a little bit of the regulation they want to impose on the rest of us.

The Googsters and their ilk don’t get a pass just because what they do is legal. Oppression is oppression, regardless of the source.

Self-Esteem is Just Mind Candy

I suppose I should take a brief break from writing about frivolous things and say a few words about God.

I know I will repeat ideas I have talked about in the past. I will probably repeat facts, too. These things are inevitable. My memory is not great, and apart from that, the things I’m going through today are related to the things I have gone through before.

Satan is real. The other fallen angels are real. Demons, the offspring they created with human women, are real. Human beings didn’t make these beings up in order to create the false impression that they understood the universe and had some control over their destinies. That’s something modern scoffers say in order to create the false impression that they understand the universe and have some control over their destinies.

Egotists who think they’re smarter than the ancients dismiss everything people believed prior to our enlightened age, in which we study at the feet of the body-modified sages of Instagram and Coachella. They don’t know what they’re talking about. The ancients got a lot of things wrong, but they weren’t stupid, and they were right to believe in the supernatural.

Supernatural manifestations haven’t stopped. Most Americans don’t talk about them, but that has more to do with embarrassment than observation. Put 10 educated Americans in a room, get them to loosen up, and several will tell you about their supernatural experiences.

People will tell you supernatural events don’t happen. Cash prizes for proof of supernatural events and abilities exist, and they haven’t been claimed. Skeptics will say this proves the supernatural doesn’t exist. Here’s a problem with this childish argument: if supernatural events take place, there is no reason why they have to be provable. Example: I saw a spirit in my dad’s house in Miami; I saw it clearly, in detail. How can I prove that? I can’t make it come back and pose for a camera. Many people have seen and heard spirits. Jesus has appeared to people in a visible form. If he appeared to everyone on earth tomorrow and didn’t allow photography, there would be no proof of his appearance. Would that mean it hadn’t happened?

Can you prove you’ve ever eaten a hamburger? Can you prove you’ve played checkers? Proving things is not easy, when eyewitness testimony alone is not considered proof.

A long time ago, one of my relatives was in a house where a child was sick. He had a fever. Back then, people didn’t believe in giving water to people with fevers. The child kept begging for water. There was a glass of water in the room. My relative saw the glass jerk toward the child. The child’s mother said, “Give it to him. He’s going to die anyway.”

I can’t prove it, any more than I can prove Jesus (or Socrates or Genghis Khan) existed. I think it’s true, because the story came from a male relative who was not interested in God or the supernatural, but if you want proof, I can’t help you.

Satan is real, and he has many angels and demons who work for him, trying to harm human beings and take us to hell. He works against us every day. We are always surrounded by spirits we can’t see, and they have a great deal of influence on us. If you’re not led by the Holy Spirit, you serve the demons that consider you their workplace. You may not be a serial killer or a witch, but you are a slave to your flesh, and in various ways, you work against the spread of the gospel of the kingdom.

I don’t care who you are. There are demons around you and, except in rare cases, inside you, and you are targeted for destruction. Satan’s crew knows your name, and they are working on you right now. They are with you as you read this.

A huge part of Christianity consists of getting rid of the demons that rule you and replacing them with the Holy Spirit. Jesus was all about demons and the Holy Spirit, but carnal people taught by demons have turned Christianity into a set of rules and/or a niceness contest. They cut the supernatural aspect out of it so successfully, there are many churches in which you can be a respected cleric and teach that Jesus, heaven, and hell (all purely supernatural) don’t exist.

Christians who do believe in demons generally think they’re rare. They think a person who has a demon levitates, lifts cars, beats up policemen in groups, tells the future, and reads people’s minds. That’s like saying every person who has a car drives in the Indianapolis 500. A typical person who is under demonic control has many demons (not just one) and does things like overeating compulsively, smoking cigarettes, beating their wives, feeling morally superior to other people, gossiping, procrastinating, fornicating, lying…nothing sensational. Just things that disgust the Holy Spirit and drive him away.

Most people, including most Christians, are under demonic control. Demons don’t make us 100% evil. They simply corrupt us enough to make us useful.

Demons also bring things like illness, dementia, depression, and psychosis. Even when natural causes seem to be present, demons are often involved.

Jesus intended for us to confess and repent. Modern Christians don’t do these things. We go to church largely for the purpose of protecting our sins. We want to go on sinning, but we don’t want to go to hell, so we go once a week and try to get forgiveness, not realizing how bad that looks to God.

If you don’t confess, you deny you need God’s help, and generally, he will honor your decision and back off. If you don’t repent, even if God helps you, the help may not last. Demons have God’s permission to harm rebellious people. You may get a healing or some other kind of help from God without repenting, but it will probably be temporary.

Getting rid of a demon is like a divorce. If you want to keep your ex-wife out of your house, you have to take the keys away from her.

The evangelist Lester Sumrall rose to fame after casting two demons out of a Filipina named Clarita Villanueva. He had to fast to get them out, and then they returned. He had to go after them a second time. No one should assume demons can’t come back.

Think of all the “false healings” we’ve seen from TV preachers. They claim they’ve cast things out, and the people they’re working on say they’re healed. Then later they turn out not to be healed. Is the problem that they weren’t healed, or is it that no one followed up with teaching on repentance?

We are supposed to confess and repent, and we are supposed to do it continually, every day. In the Bible, we see Jesus casting demons out of people, but we don’t see the follow-up. We don’t read the stories of people who didn’t repent, or who backslid, and then had their demons come back. We have the idea that once a demon is cast out, we’re done with it. Not so. Jesus told us they come back, and they can bring other demons with them.

We were given the practice of communion to keep ourselves clean. Paul said people get sick and die because they don’t do communion properly. That means demons–the spirits that make people ill and kill them–come back to them. The purpose of communion is to confess and repent so demons are kept away and the Holy Spirit is kept close.

When you do communion, the cracker and the wine aren’t what matter. They’re not magical. What matters is the honest, deep, ruthless soul-searching, confession, and repentance that are supposed to precede the eating and drinking. When you eat the cracker and drink the wine, you’re just indicating that you’re one with God. It’s an affirmation. If you haven’t repented, your affirmation is fraudulent.

These truths have become more important to me with time. I have learned that confession and repentance aren’t just about feeling bad and trying to seem holy. They’re about gaining power and peace.

Jesus had perfect victory, even when he was on the cross. He had as much peace as a human being can have on this earth. He had no demons. He never grieved the Holy Spirit. He had all of God’s help. Most of us only get a small fraction of our inheritance. He got the works. We should be getting more than we are.

Our modern gurus fill us with poison. They tell us to feed our egos. “Don’t beat yourself up.” “Love yourself.” Loving yourself is “the greatest love of all.” The woman who taught us that drowned in a bathtub, surrounded by trash and drug paraphernalia. They tell us self-examination is “judgment,” and they say “judgment” is bad. They get this half-truth from Jesus himself, and even people who are against Jesus use it.

Popular wisdom says that if you criticize yourself, you will be depressed and lack the magical panacea, self-esteem. Self-esteem fixes everything. It’s the testosterone of the mind. It gives you strength and energy. It opens doors. Unfortunately, self-esteem only works in the short term, like heroin and cocaine. In the long term, it enslaves you to demons and makes you arrogant and unteachable.

God has been helping me criticize myself, and I’m here to tell you, it’s not depressing at all. It doesn’t weaken me. I feel great after I do it. Don’t you feel good when you get things off your chest? Hiding things is stressful.

When I was young, I suffered from depression. I found a book that explained how depression worked. It was caused by irrational thoughts. I would sit and think about what a loser I was. I would tell myself things would never get any better. I told myself things that weren’t true, and I believed them. The book was right about that, although the author didn’t know demons were behind the thoughts.

Back in those days, when I criticized myself, it sapped my strength. I lost motivation. I felt terrible. If that’s true, why does it make me feel so good today?

The difference is clear.

In the past, I insulted myself without a constructive purpose. The demons I listened to weren’t trying to improve me. They just wanted me to live in defeat and die unfulfilled. They exaggerated and made up my problems, and then they offered no solutions. They told me no solutions existed. That was their strongest tactic. It worked on Anthony Bourdain.

When I criticize myself now, I do it in the presence of God, guided by him. He doesn’t tell me to say stupid things, like, “I’m worthless,” or, “My life will never be any good.” He tells me to admit fault, ask for forgiveness, cast out the spirits related to my sins, and ask for change through the Holy Spirit.

When God moves me to criticize myself, he will get me to say things like, “I haven’t been praying enough.” “I mistreated this or that person.” “I get angry at this type of person for no reason.” “I have been lazy.” He gets me to open up about problems he can fix for me. When I’m honest, he can deliver me from the spirits that drive my faults, and he can increase the Holy Spirit’s influence in me.

When you confess, repent, and cast things out, peace comes back to you. You feel better. Things work out better. You find yourself winning instead of losing. A lot of the things the poisonous secular gurus promise you come to you, and they’re real. They’re not fake goods that don’t last.

The last church I belonged to had an allergy to self-examination. The very mention of it made them angry. They loved pride. They didn’t understand that pride and excuses bring weakness, turmoil, and defeat. Confession and repentance bring healing, victory, and relief from nagging problems. God uses nagging problems to tell you that you need to repent of things.

God doesn’t seem to have much pity for the proud, regardless of what happens to them. I don’t pity them much, either, so perhaps I’m right.

Jesus told us we had to be born again. The process is like gutting a house and rebuilding it. If you want to have your house remodeled, you don’t scamper around telling the contractor everything is fine as it is. You look for things you want to change. You have to be very critical. “I hate this wall.” “I need a window here.” “The kitchen is too small.” If you tell him the house is already perfect, he’ll leave, and nothing will change. If you want to be born again, you have to admit you’re a mess, and you have to be willing to part with a lot of your existing personality.

We don’t teach these things, so we don’t live in the supernatural. God doesn’t do all that much for us. Miracles aren’t commonplace, as they should be. Prophecy is hard to come by. Biblical figures who obeyed God had great supernatural help. You can see it all through the Bible, from Genesis to the Revelation. Somehow we think God changed his ways in about 300 A.D. He didn’t. We did.

It should be uncommon for a Christian to have an incurable disease, but it happens to many or most of us. Confession, repentance, and deliverance are keys to power, and we reject them.

God has been very helpful, showing me these things and helping me to comply. I have confessed some really revolting truths about myself. I don’t feel condemned at all. I feel stronger and more confident. It works. It will work better in the future, because God will make me better at it.

My prayer time is very strange for me now. A couple of times a day, I confess, repent, and cast things out. When I do this, my insides start gurgling. It’s not my imagination. I feel things moving around, and I hear sounds. Physical things a doctor (or anyone sitting near me) could confirm happen. Spirits set up housekeeping in people’s bodies, and when they are disturbed, it causes physical reactions.

I could put my phone on my stomach and record these things. They’re not subtle.

I can’t make my insides gurgle at will, any more than you can. It’s not me. It only happens when I’m spending time with God.

I hope God is showing a lot of other people these things. The world is full of defeated Christians. The situation needs to change. Evil keeps getting stronger, and we seem to do nothing but tread water and hold onto excuses.

Parts Known

I keep having days when I get up, look at the news, and find it hard to believe I’m not dreaming. My dreams are more plausible than actual events I read about.

I went to Drudge today and read about Anthony Bourdain. He is dead. He hanged himself at age 61. The article Drudge linked to didn’t say much, but other articles provide more details.

I thought Bourdain was an elitist, if a self-doubting one, and some of his political pronouncements were typical, fashionable, ill-considered New Yorker prattle, but as a food show host, he was engaging and even likeable.

He seemed like a seeker to me. I don’t think he was a closed door.

There are certain prominent leftists who, even if shrill and unreasoning, seem to have the potential to come to God (or at least the GOP) and escape the bicoastal peer pressure vortex. We have seen individuals like this change course and come out as conservatives and even Christians. Something about Bourdain made me think he was likely to wake up one day. Now that can’t happen.

I don’t know his religious beliefs. He was known for drug abuse and wild living, and he lived in a godless environment, so my best guess is that he was an atheist. He comes across as Jewish, too. Let’s see if I can find anything.

Okay. He was a Jew. His father was Catholic, and his mother was Jewish.

He has said he did not believe in a higher being. He visited the Western Wall, and a religious Jew, perhaps a yeshiva bucher, accosted him, asked him to repeat some words, and said something like, “You are now bar mitzvah’d.” Here is his response:

“I never felt so much like I’m masquerading as something I’m not. I’m instinctively hostile to any kind of devotion. Certainty is my enemy. I’m all about doubt, questioning oneself and the nature of reality constantly. When they grabbed hold of me and in a totally non-judgmental way, you know God’s happy to have you, ahh man my treachery is complete.”

Not good. Tragic.

That there was hope for Bourdain is evinced by his remarks concerning the left’s vicious, condescending, unreflective persecution of “flyover” people. Here is a quotation from his exclusive interview with Reason.com:

The utter contempt with which privileged Eastern liberals such as myself discuss red-state, gun-country, working-class America as ridiculous and morons and rubes is largely responsible for the upswell of rage and contempt and desire to pull down the temple that we’re seeing now.

I’ve spent a lot of time in gun-country, God-fearing America. There are a hell of a lot of nice people out there, who are doing what everyone else in this world is trying to do: the best they can to get by, and take care of themselves and the people they love. When we deny them their basic humanity and legitimacy of their views, however different they may be than ours, when we mock them at every turn, and treat them with contempt, we do no one any good. Nothing nauseates me more than preaching to the converted. The self-congratulatory tone of the privileged left—just repeating and repeating and repeating the outrages of the opposition—this does not win hearts and minds. It doesn’t change anyone’s opinions. It only solidifies them, and makes things worse for all of us. We should be breaking bread with each other, and finding common ground whenever possible. I fear that is not at all what we’ve done.

The truth was gnawing at him, but he made a fatal choice before it had time to work its way through.

It’s hard to imagine what could make a spirited, extremely successful, highly admired man of 61 to put a belt around his neck and die. Depression is always irrational, though. People always think there has to be a reason, but individuals with what appear to be relatively trouble-free lives kill themselves every day.

Little voices tell them things are worse than they are, and the biggest lie they tell is that things will never be any better. People listen. Without the countervailing voice of the Holy Spirit, all we have to battle the round-the-clock murmuring of demons who don’t need sleep are our own objections. A depressed person is like a sole suspect who is interrogated by tormentors working in shifts. He gets tired, and his abusers are always fresh and energetic.

Mr. Bourdain’s actions have probably assured that he will never see his God-fearing friends again.

Hell is a serious matter. No matter is more serious. It’s astounding how much suffering we are permitted to bring down on ourselves in fleeting moments of recklessness.

Famous tweeters are wishing him rest. How inappropriate. Right now, there is nothing he would not give to be back here with all of his problems.

The other story that got my attention is about the University of West Alabama. This is a government-run school. As a government-run school, it is bound by the Bill of Rights. If UWA suppresses the civil rights of its students, it can be sued, and the state and the feds can come in and force the administration to bend the knee and repent.

UWA passed a speech code for text messages and other electronic communications! Unbelievable. Do the administrators live under a rock? How can they think they can do this?

More amazing: they did this in Alabama, which is not known for its leftist ethos. It shows that education is infected–gangrenous–all over America. Educators are completely out of touch with the decent people who trust them to mold their children’s hearts and minds. If it can happen in Alabama, it can happen anywhere. How did the people of Alabama let things get this far?

Here is what the policy bans:

Examples of cyberbullying and cyber harassment include, but are not limited to, harsh text messages or emails, rumors sent by email or posted on social networking sites, and embarrassing pictures, videos, websites, or fake profiles

“Harsh text messages or emails.” The government can’t ban those. It’s way too vague. If you text people telling them their children are dead, and it’s not true, yes, that’s a crime, but angry and insulting words are protected by the First Amendment. If UWA’s unconstitutional policy were applied nationwide, most celebrities would be put on trial for their tweets about Donald Trump.

Imagine what life would be like if one American couldn’t send another American a text reading, “Leave me alone, you idiot.” Courts would be so busy prosecuting texters, they would have time for little else.

“Embarrassing pictures.” Who defines “embarrassing”? Do they mean revenge porn? I’m all for banning that. I’m for bringing back obscenity laws, generally. But people end up in all sorts of situations which are embarrassing and yet legitimate topics of public discourse. What if a student photographs another student who fumbles during a football game? Should he be expelled? What if a student records an insane instructor calling conservatives filthy names and publishes it so something can be done? That has happened more than once, and it’s important that students be encouraged to continue exposing deranged teachers.

UWA bases its Orwellian code loosely on an existing Alabama statute. Under certain circumstances the statute makes a criminal of a person who:

Directs abusive or obscene language or makes an obscene gesture towards another person.

or

Communicates with a person, anonymously or otherwise, by telephone, telegraph, mail, or any other form of written or electronic communication, in a manner likely to harass or cause alarm.

Obviously–I don’t even have to check–the state can only get away with enforcing this law in extreme situations. I can go to Alabama right now and drive around giving people, including the police, the finger, and if I am arrested, I will eventually prevail in court, and I am likely to motivate the legislature to change the law. The law is poorly drafted, overbroad, and vague, and the UWA code, which draws strength from it, is even crazier.

UWA’s Committee for Snowflake Coddling looked at a law which has been challenged many times–a law which people involved in education should consider threatening and even oppressive–thought it didn’t go far enough, and made it worse!

Everyone understands the importance of limiting genuinely harmful communications that have no legitimate purpose. I get that. But Alabama already had a law for that purpose. UWA wasn’t satisfied. They wanted to shackle people and back the shackles up with the threat of inflicting permanent damage on their lifelong earning potential.

When I was a student at Columbia University, I knew a young lady named Cathy. I’ll tell you what I was told about her. I did not witness it; it’s what I was told. One of the Columbia University Lions–a football player–had sex with Cathy in a dorm room. Unbeknownst to her, several other football players were hiding in the closet with the door ajar, enjoying every moment.

If this happened today, video of Cathy would probably be on the Internet, and it would almost certainly have been exchanged via email.

Things like that have to be banned. Everyone understands that. But we all know UWA isn’t setting its sights that high. If they were, they would have been satisfied with state law. In all likelihood, they want to go after everyone who says a girl is fat. They want to go after anyone who uses the accurate term “illegal alien,” calls Bruce Jenner a man, or says, rightly, that gay relations are sinful. Anyone who supports the Second Amendment via electronic means will do so at his peril.

Maybe I’m wrong, but what are the odds? We’re talking about a demographic that provides puppies and coloring books to students traumatized by the results of a fair and legal presidential election.

In order to be true to its mission, a modern university has to be more accepting of controversial speech than the rest of us, not less. Galileo was controversial. Darwin was controversial. If they weren’t hypocrites, educators would be using the power to censor speech very sparingly. They appear to want a tool for swatting people who disagree with them.

Since I have brought up Orwell, I’ll bring up a very prescient term he used: “doublethink.” He knew exactly what modern leftists would be like.

Doublethink means cognitive dissonance. It means believing two or more contradictory things, simultaneously. Doublethink is in play in many areas of leftism. It’s in play when universities, which sponsor all sorts of offensive speech and behavior, pass draconian speech codes which give them the leeway to censor nearly anything they want.

It’s amusing that universities sponsor debate teams while chilling speech.

If a private college with an unusual mission passed a speech code, I wouldn’t be nearly as amazed. If a hypothetical Billy Graham University rejected government money and told its students they couldn’t say “heck,” well, okay. But a secular government school? Come on.

Cognitive dissonance will increase. Those who rule us will get crazier and crazier, and their skulls will get thicker as their ability to listen and change wanes. Get ready for it. It may be hard to believe that things can get any worse, but it has happened elsewhere, and Americans are no better than Cambodians or the Burmese.

If, in the mind of a leftist not currently confined to an institution, a boy with boy parts and boy DNA can be a girl, no absurd conviction, and no cruelty it is used to justify, are impossible.

Human beings don’t believe what reason tells them to believe, even when the truth is obvious. We believe what we want to believe, and our desires are becoming less and less compatible with the safety of those who disagree with the rising left.