You Get the Kind of Guests You Ask For

Doctrine is confusing. I know I’m stating the obvious.

In the early days of Christianity, we were taught by people who knew God personally, and their teachings were very solid. They believed in the baptism with the Holy Spirit, prayer in tongues, and the gifts of the Spirit, so God was able to teach them directly. Satan managed to get the church to reject the Holy Spirit and murder those who knew him, and after that point, we had to get by with false teachings from proud ignoramuses like Augustine. The older churches were taken over by fools and liars who made up theories that were largely based on paganism, and Christians lost their direct connection to God’s teaching. We ended up worshiping “saints” and trying to turn Mary–a sinful woman, like every other woman–into a sort of co-God. Hundreds of millions of Christians pray to Mary and the “saints,” as though they were God himself.

“It works,” they say. Yes, and so does voodoo.

God managed to give me a strong habit of praying in tongues, and through that, he has given me a lot of revelation. He has undone a lot of the damage the fabulists did. He helped me understand that the prosperity gospel was a lie straight from the mouth of Satan. He showed me that the ridiculous doctrine of pleasing him through hard work was based on pride, and that it actually cuts off his help and forces him to work against us.

From time to time, God gives me a new weapon, or at least a weapon that seems new to me. Sometimes I’m not sure whether I should accept these things. I take a while to become convinced they came from the right source. I can’t ask a knowledgeable, Holy-Spirit-led teacher, because there are no people like that. If there are, I have never met one. I’ve met a lot of people who wanted money and free work, however.

Here’s a piece of doctrine I’ve been thinking about lately. We are taught that only God can read minds. We are told that other spirits can’t hear our thoughts. Is that true? I think it is. We are familiar with occultists and “psychics” who pretend to read minds, but there are a lot of ways to fake that, and there is no reason a spirit can’t put a thought in your mind and then tell it to someone else. Also, a clever old spirit should be good at guessing.

Even if spirits can’t read our minds, I have no doubt that they can speak into our minds. That’s a different thing. Plenty of people have been possessed or temporarily entered by spirits that spoke through them. I don’t see any reason why a spirit assisting a clairvoyant couldn’t speak into your mind and then speak the same information to the clairvoyant.

I’ve been thinking about this because I’ve been using a new tool lately. I’ll explain how it works. Say I have a thought or urge I don’t want. Maybe it’s gluttony. Maybe it’s lust or laziness. Silently, in my mind, I’ll say something like, “In the name of Jesus, I cast out lust.” Sure enough, I get relief. It’s as though there is a spirit of lust inside me that can hear me.

When I started doing this, I began wondering if other spirits could hear my thoughts. Maybe they can; I don’t know everything. My best guess, though, is that they can’t. I think my own mind and flesh hear my commands, and they respect my God-given authority and shut off their compliance with spirits that are trying to influence me.

The 127th psalm says that children are like arrows in a man’s quiver, and it says they will speak with the enemy in the gate. What does that mean?

A man is like a walled city. In ancient times, cities normally wanted walls. People were barbaric, and they overran each other’s towns and raped and murdered and stole. Cities had gates. In Israel, the city gate was a place of authority. Powerful people sat there, and the gate was where deals were made and legal judgments were handed down. It was also a place where enemies were turned away. They came to the cities, and the city authorities spoke to them in the gates and sent them packing.

These days, our walls are generally down. We are like Jerusalem after it was sacked by the Babylonians. We are like America, with obnoxioius aliens stomping across our borders and doing whatever they will, sneering at us in the process. We don’t care about God. We think our Sixties values are brilliant and original. We don’t pray. We exalt ourselves. We wallow in pride, greed, lust, and sexual perversion. We don’t make any effort to avoid the sins that give nasty people and spirits power over us. Instead, we work hard to bring them in and enthrone them. We fornicate like crazy. We revile. We use drugs. We blaspheme. We love evil and cruelty.

Evil spirits are like flies, which is why the Bible calls the devil the lord of flies and the lord of feces. Flies are attracted to corruption and filth. They go where they can get a good meal. We open our windows and smear our walls with excrement, and in the process, we invited spirits in to rule us. They make us sick. They deceive us. They transform us into little copies of our real father, Satan.

I believe you can turn a spirit away at the gate. That’s what I believe I’m doing.

I used to believe my thoughts were just fine, and that I was allowed to think what I wanted, as long as I restrained my actions or did what I wanted and then asked for forgiveness. That’s not how it works. Your thoughts matter. The Holy Spirit is clean, and he wants to live in you. He’s not going to linger in a place which is like a filthy toilet overflowing with fermenting urine and poop. It’s not okay to stare at women and fantasize about them. It’s not okay to savor thoughts of anger, cruelty, and revenge. It’s not okay to obsess on possessions or money you want. It’s not okay to sit and think about fattening food you want to eat.

When you go along with evil thoughts and desires, you give control to spirits that hate you. You’re like a snotty, know-it-all girl who chooses a pimp over her parents.

Think of the problems biblical figures had. They participated in their own destruction. Adam and Eve invited Satan to take their planet by listening to him. The Jews repeatedly invited destruction and murder by turning to false gods. Saul added to his curses by consulting a medium. Solomon was a disgraceful failure who let pagan women turn him to idolatry, and after he died, his kingdom was torn in two.

Dealing with spirits is like dealing with vampires. One of the rules of vampire mythology is that a vampire can’t come in your house unless you invite him. We invite spirits all day and all night, and then we complain to God when we get cancer or our businesses or marriages fail. We choose Satan as our father, and then when he does exactly what we know he’ll do, we go to God and pretend he’s our father, and we ask for “justice.” Justice is actually what we’ve already received. We’re really asking for mercy and a handout. We’re asking God to enable us.

I believe I’m speaking to the enemy in the gate. My body is a gate. My senses are gates. My mind is a gate. Spirits that are used to my obedience and enthusiasm come to me, expecting the welcome they have usually received in the past. Now I turn them away. That’s what I’m doing when I say I cast things out. Maybe they can’t hear me, but they know they’ve been rejected with authority.

If you think this is crazy, try it yourself. If you have a strong habit of prayer in tongues, you will have the faith to make it work. You have to be repentant, and you have to be a seeker of God’s presence. You can’t expect it to work if you’re doing it on the way to a whorehouse or a bar. Be realistic. But it does work. It has made a very big change in my life.

You have to know what you’re fighting. Satan has convinced us that many sins aren’t sins. He wants us to think that as long as we’re nice, we’re not sinning. Here’s a list of some things to look out for: pride, dishonesty, excuses, malice, fear of other people, general cowardice, gossip, laziness, envy, gluttony, unbelief, and worry. If you don’t think unbelief is sin, how can you explain the fact that God punished biblical figures who doubted him?

It’s very important to keep looking for things that are wrong with you. The world teaches us that “shaming” is bad. It teaches us that we’re supposed to be proud and defiant. We’re supposed to be proud of fat, proud of of slutty behavior and clothing, proud of our accomplishments, our beauty, our money, our sexual perversions…wrong! So wrong. Self-criticism is self-diagnosis. If you don’t tell God you have a problem, he probably won’t fix it. Nobody with any common sense goes to a doctor and pretends to be well.

Why is it important to be fixed? Isn’t it okay to remain as you are and then ask forgiveness and go to heaven?

If you don’t get cleaned up, you will suffer in this life. You will have no authority. You will not be able to cast out disease or speak defeat to your enemies and problems. Here is how Paul put it:

Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind,

Nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners, shall inherit the kingdom of God.

The “kingdom of God” isn’t heaven. It’s God’s power and authority inside you. It’s what defeated Israel’s enemies when the Ark of the Covenant was with them. You are supposed to be a little ark, with God’s presence inside you. God will not live in a pile of used diapers.

The early Christians got miracles and revelation. Most of us don’t. Why should we? We’re Satan’s children, not God’s. God respects our choice to let Satan raise us and care for us. Would you go to your neighbor’s house and make sure the kids brushed their teeth?

The more I learn about God, the more evil I see in myself. I was raised in complete ignorance, filth, and rebellion. My parents knew nothing. The neighbors knew nothing. Preachers knew nothing. I had no wisdom whatsoever. There was no one to teach me. And I thought I knew everything. Ignorance is bad, but thinking you know the truth already is worse. It keeps the truth from entering in.

It’s amazing that God hasn’t given up on me. It’s not like he needs me. I have been proud, unclean, dishonest, cruel, cowardly, lazy…you name it. I rewarded his love and help with the ugliest kind of abuse. It’s as if I had been raised by pigs. God could have let me go to hell and replaced me with someone else, and it would have been absolutely righteous of him.

The world has gone completely nuts. It’s as if a giant tank of feces under the ground had burst, and it’s rising all around us. We are surrounded by nudity, anger, blasphemy, cruelty, arrogance, violence, greed, female rebellion, hatred of masculinity, sexual deviation, and love of evil. The cleaner I get inside, the more I want to get away from the world. It’s as if I’m a boat that has been bailed out, and I’m floating on the sea of excrement.

Things are going to get worse. We’re just seeing the tip of the iceberg. If you’re spiritually weak, you are going to be submerged in the cesspool. It won’t matter if you go to mass and pray to Mary ten times a day. It won’t help if you give half of your income to Benny Hinn. You have to know God personally and be transformed internally. The whole country is going to look a lot like a Black Lives Matter/Antifa rally. People who believe in God will be beaten, raped, and murdered, and no one will help them. If you’re not preparing yourself, you will drown. Trump won’t save you.

You need someone on your side. If you want God to be on your side, you have to be on his. He won’t help you just because you exist. He already allowed himself to be tortured to death for you. You can’t keep asking for more.

If anything I say helps you, let me know. It would be nice if I were used to accomplish a few useful things before I am excused from this miserable planet.

America’s Future: Beheading Jokes

What interesting things are happening in the world.

It looks like comedian Kathy Griffin has finally gone off the rails. She has become known for strange, degrading stunts, such as exposing her aging body to cameras. Now she has pulled out all the stops. She posed for photos holding a human head in her hand. The dummy head was made up to look just like Donald Trump, and it was covered with blood.

I try not to use copyrighted material here, but this definitely falls under “fair use,” so here:

Griffin has said it was okay to go after all of the Trumps, including 11-year-old Barron. She wasn’t kidding. The Trumps say Barron saw one of the photos and thought the head was his father.

Is this just sick humor? I don’t think so. I think it’s a message from Satan. He’s showing us what’s in the hearts of his people. He’s showing us our future. That severed head represents us.

Prophecy tells us we will be murdered by people who think they’re doing good. We’ve already seen it happening as part of Muslim terrorism. Muslims behead Christians and people from Christian countries all the time. Now the gloves are coming off, and the the enemy is getting bolder. He’s showing us Muslims aren’t alone in their feelings for us.

Would leftists really behead Christians? Of course they would. It’s silly to ask. Leftist terrorists already murder Christians and random white people in America. For every leftist who gets off the couch and acts on his anger, there are many who have the same feelings and are only restrained by the fear of acting alone.

We have the funny idea that Americans are above genocide. The Indians would have something to say about that, if there were any left. There are fewer than a million in the US today. Granted, America didn’t round them up by the millions and kill them in a systematic extermination campaign, but America did kill a whole lot of them and force them into reservations. America was also very brutal to blacks. If Americans can do things like that, why can’t leftist Americans murder Christians and conservatives?

Did you see how Griffin responded to public outrage? She got herself an opportunistic lawyer (the daughter of Gloria Allred) and appeared before TV cameras, whining and crying and claiming her victims were bullies. She played the victim. People were shocked. Most people, anyway. To me, it made complete sense. This is what Satan and his people do. They victimize, and while they do it, they play the victim card.

This is why I hate Black Lives Matter and the other victimhood movements. They’re just like the Nazis. Hitler rose to power by telling the Germans and Austrians they were victims. The same thing happened in Russia; the communists were able to murder the Christian czar and his kids because they convinced ordinary Russians they were victims. Everything a victim does is justified, because it’s self-defense. Victims have no remorse, and they are extremely sadistic. We shouldn’t be surprised that the Germans murdered Jews they needed for their war effort. The pleasure of sadism was more alluring than the prospect of winning. Our modern victims have the same mindset.

It’s remarkable how the victimhood mindset makes people sadistic. Look at our movies. If Arnold Schwarzenegger made a movie in which he went around roasting random people with a flamethrower, the public would hate him. On the other hand, he has tortured people in movies, and he has killed them in terrible ways and mocked them while they died. The public loved it. Why? Because they were bad people. The writers always set Schwarzenegger up as a victim before he did his acts of cruelty. When he jammed a hot steam pipe through a man’s chest or dangled a man over a canyon by his ankle, the audience loved it, because they were getting what they deserved.

That’s us, in a few years. Getting what the victims think we deserve.

We can’t play the victim game. We are under attack, but if we get down in the dirt and use our victim status to justify cruelty and hate, we will become our persecutors. The only sane responses are to pray, repent, and move away from victim concentrations. If you still live in places like L.A., St. Louis, Baltimore, and Miami in five years, you will be responsible for what happens to you.

Incidentally, the word “victim” used to mean an animal or person used in a sacrifice. Something to think about. The greatest victim in history was Jesus Christ. In a way, our modern chronic victims are stealing his glory.

Here’s another interesting news item: UK Prime Minister Theresa May is angry at social media companies and ISP’s for allowing hateful online communications. Apparently, she blames Twitter and Facebook for this weekend’s Muslim murder orgy.

Let that soak in for a minute. The leader of a nation that encourages Muslim immigration and does nothing to acknowledge the true nature of the terrorism problem is angry…because Muslim extremists are allowed admission to Facebook. You let them in your country, but you’re upset because someone else lets them into an online community, where they can’t behead or slash anyone.

Is the irony not obvious? Do I have to keep hammering on the point?

If Muslim nuts are good enough to live among you, they are good enough to like your cat memes.

Here in the United States, imprisoned murderers are allowed to use the Internet. We don’t care. We know there is a difference between online communication and physical violence. When a judge turns a murderer loose and he kills again, we don’t get mad at the judge for letting the murderer use Twitter.

May wants to “regulate” the Internet. We all know what that means. Censorship. And of course, while the response would be stimulated by Islam, it would be used to persecute Christians. Remember how Obama’s people focused on nonexistent Christian terror threats?

This morning I was thinking about the weird old threats that have come back to life in America, to menace white males. In the past, white males were leaders here. God sent white Christian males to get America started, and they were used by God to make it strong. Other segments of society were subordinate to them. God gave them favor. Then white Christian males fell asleep, credited themselves with America’s success, and forgot God.

Look what’s happening now. We run from everyone. We run from our own women. We run from blacks. We run from Hispanic invaders who aren’t citizens; they say this is really their country. Was Iowa part of Mexico? I don’t remember it that way. We even run from animals that used to be under control. We reintroduce large predators our ancestors had the good sense to drive out, and we are not allowed to shoot them when they invade our homes and kill our pets and livestock. And not all of the predators were introduced by man. We have coyotes in New York City now. We even have a bedbug plague. Predators bite us while we sleep.

This is what happens when favor is reversed. White Christian males assumed they would be on top forever, because they had all the answers, and we assumed America would always be invincible. Wrong. Our forebears had favor. God can give a goose favor and make it emperor of the world. We didn’t build this, as Obama would put it. We just took the credit.

Am I saying white men should take over again, or that white supremacy is a good idea? Never. That’s idiotic. I’m saying God favors his people, and everyone who wants to rise above the increasing chaos needs to get close to him. If a Christian black faction or a bloc of former Muslims arises and takes over the country with God’s blessing, no one will be happier than I will. I plan to be on the same team.

One of the reasons Europe is such a pleasant place is that there are no predators to speak of. Did you know lions used to live in Europe? If the hippies had been around thousands of years ago, lions would still be roaming the streets of Rome, eating people. Europeans had the common sense to get rid of lions, and along the way, they drove bears and wolves out of populated areas. We’re not as smart as they were. We think it’s cute when a family of black bears keeps a family of humans trapped indoors. We say stupid things like, “They were here first.” Hey, the bubonic plague bacterium was here first. So was poison ivy. So were rattlesnakes, roaches, fleas, lice, rats, mice, and bedbugs. Intelligent people understand that human beings are more important than animals.

I don’t care who was here first. My kind is here now, and we are what matters. Plants and animals were put here to be ruled and used by us.

Animals and types of human beings who used to be harmless to white Christian males are driving us before them like cattle, because we’re not God’s people. We give them the whips. We forge our own shackles. We hand them our constitutional rights. What a crazy time to be alive.

Adam and Eve gave Satan the earth. The Jews invited the Babylonian captivity, the Diaspora, and the Shoah by turning away from God. We are giving America away by rejecting God’s criticism and help. Nothing changes. Our illusions of moral superiority make us think we’re different, but we’re not.

When Kathy Griffin’s moral heirs start beheading and slashing and raping in larger numbers, it will be our fault. It will be the fault of our assailants, too, but that won’t be a good excuse.

Nothing that’s happening now is extraordinary. All of it was predictable. It was to be expected. We should have seen it as inevitable, given our actions.

It’s astonishing to know that I am witnessing the destruction (the suicide) of America. It seemed impossible. Other people will deny it, and they won’t prepare, but in time they’ll see it and acknowledge it, too. They’ll be like the Jews in Germany and Austria who failed to get out in time.

Somewhere in Detroit, there is an old white homeowner who thinks the real estate downturn is a passing thing.

If we’re prospering now, it’s temporary. The conservative “revolution” is an illusion. Hillary won the popular vote. In time, we will reach a state where the Democrat always wins the electoral vote. America will be dismantled. If you’re white or Christian, you will be part of an underclass. Eventually, our very existence will be the target, and we will lose.

Kathy Griffin may live long enough to become a celebrated hero of the left. The beheading photo may become a cherished cultural icon. Maybe on New Year’s Eve twenty years from now, they’ll wheel her out on CNN, and she’ll pull a sash that turns on the gas to kill Barron Trump and his children.

I’m glad I’m old. I would not want to have seventy more years in front of me. The other day I saw a black spot on my back, and I wondered if it was melanoma. At first I was disturbed, but then I thought about the way melanoma would give me a way out of this place. You lie back and take your painkillers, and one day you stop breathing. The way things are today, you’re likely to be killed by a nurse who turns up the morphine while doctors look the other way. Then this place is other people’s problem. I felt real peace about it. It turned out to be a scab from something I had scratched, but it taught me something about my view of death.

I’ve had a number of dreams in which I have died. I never felt terror. I felt sober but relieved. “Finally, I am done with this place.” I don’t understand people who live in terror of death. It seems childish to me. It’s immaturity. Death is normal, like puberty and menopause. Everyone goes through death. How can you scream and cry about something you knew was going to happen? You’re not really going to die. You’re just going somewhere else. Make sure it’s the right place and calm down.

I don’t brace for death. I brace for more life. I am probably stuck with quite a few years left on my sentence. More illnesses. More physical decay. More unpleasant tasks. More interactions with nasty people. More traffic jams. More injuries. More disgusting and disconcerting news stories. More alienation from an increasingly gross and trashy citizenry. The continued destruction of my beautiful homeland. Gloating speeches from an uninterrupted succession of leftist presidents. I feel like I’m on an exercise bike, counting the minutes until I can get off.

Once America falls, there is nowhere to go but heaven. This is the last decent place on earth.

I may be wrong about that. There is some hope for Russia.

Stay out of trouble, and pray scalping doesn’t come back.

Startling Revelation: Hollywood not Best Source of Reliable News

I did something I probably should not have done this week. I watched most of The Dallas Buyers Club. It’s a movie about AIDS victim Ron Woodroof, who ran a company that distributed non-approved AIDS drugs to sick people.

I shouldn’t have watched it because over and over, nudity kept popping up. You can fast-forward when that happens, but little glimpses are still in your head afterward. Not helpful. Oh, well. I will keep trying to improve.

Anyway, as entertainment goes, it’s an excellent movie. As infotainment, not so much. It turns out there is a lot of BS in the film.

In the movie, Woodroof is an oilfield electrician who rides in rodeos in his spare time. He is fiercely heterosexual. He hates gays. He hates all minorities. He threatens to beat up the doctor who diagnoses him with AIDS. Over time and out of necessity, he develops relationships with gay men, and first thing you know, he’s a passionate advocate for the cause of gay AIDS sufferers.

I checked a few things out, because the movie seemed very slanted to me. Big Pharma in bed with the FDA, trying to kill people with poisonous AZT and suppressing cheaper medicines that worked better. Does anyone seriously think that happened? Also, who rides bulls while working full-time as an electrician? Does it work that way in Texas? Can you tell your boss you need to clock out early so you can break your collarbone riding El Diablo? I doubt it. Finally, movie Woodroof contracted AIDS from straight sex. How realistic is that?

Here are the actual facts.

1. Ron Woodroof was gay. He married three women, but he also had sex with men. His doctor says he was gay. A nurse he worked with says he was gay. The man was gay. The only person who insists he was straight is a screenwriter who didn’t know him well.

2. Ron Woodroof was not homophobic, according to people who knew him. It’s hard to be homophobic and gay and have any kind of social life.

3. Ron Woodroof did not ride in rodeos. The movie people put that in to make him look like a scrappy guy used to fighting bigger opponents. That’s what they say, but they also put it in to make him look butch.

4. Ron Woodroof did not have a tumultuous friendship with a transvestite named Rayon. This person never existed.

5. The FDA tolerated buyers’ clubs for a long time, and they only stepped in when profiteering became a problem. They even let Ron Woodroof keep importing a banned medication for his own use.

I read this stuff, and I wondered why the movie people insisted Woodroof was straight. Then I saw where someone said they did it to prevent The Dallas Buyers Club from becoming a “gay movie.” WHAM. That explains everything. If a movie looks too gay, most people will feel like they can’t relate to it, so they won’t go. There are exceptions, but Hollywood likes sure things (hello, sequels and remakes), so why take a chance?

Thinking about that, I realized there was more to it than that. They wanted AIDS to look like a heterosexual disease, in order to generate support for victims. Problem: AIDS has never been a major heterosexual disease, except for women who sleep with gay men or intravenous drug users. This is why black heterosexual women make up a significant number of AIDS victims. Many have sex with closeted gay men. It’s easy for women to get AIDS from straight sex, but it’s just about impossible for a man.

I looked it up. If you’re a heterosexual man who doesn’t share needles, you have, essentially, no chance of getting AIDS. Millions of people have died from AIDS. I couldn’t find a single example of an American heterosexual white male who got it from a woman. If examples exist, they are flukes, like male calico cats. Straight men can get all sorts of venereal diseases. AIDS is one you don’t have to worry about.

A lot of black “heterosexual” men get AIDS, but it appears likely they get it from sex with other men. Black men don’t like admitting they’re gay, so they lie to people who gather statistics.

Here’s something amazing: if you look at a 2010 chart that show how AIDS affects different types of people, heterosexual white males who don’t shoot up aren’t listed. I looked at it several times, because I was sure I was missing something. They’re not listed because they don’t exist in numbers large enough to put on graphs. It would be like listing animals that fly by group and having a bar for snails.

Yes, the chart does have a bar for black heterosexual men. It lists 2700 new infections and none for whites. Do you seriously believe that? Are white men really that much more conscientious about “protection”? No. We are not. If protection were the issue, we would still have a significant number of cases, and we don’t. The black “heterosexual” men on the chart are gays and drug users who lie.

They’re not the only ones who can’t face the truth. You can see the denial mindset at work if you look at statistics. Gay men aren’t called “gay men.” They’re called “MSM.” This means “men who have sex with other men.” Even the professionals can’t bring themselves to say “gay.” If having sex with other men doesn’t make you gay, WHAT DOES? Collecting Ethel Merman records?

By the way, I’m not talking about charts created by Jerry Falwell, Jr. I’m talking about government charts. We all know how government employees and medical people lean left. This is not right wing or Christian propaganda. Straight white men were excluded by people who have powerful motivation to include us.

What does this mean? That we should be happy gays and junkies are getting AIDS? Of course not. But no one likes to be lied to. Systematically. Deliberately.

Man, the world is crazy. Next thing you know, the dishonesty will find its way into documentaries, and we may even see people using CGI to create drowning polar bears to convince audiences global warming is real.

No, that could never happen.

It’s very unfortunate that people who create fact-based fiction make so little effort to let the public know what they lie about. Sometimes they do a lot of damage. People who watched Cinderella Man came away thinking Max Baer was a murderous anti-Semite. In reality, he was a great guy and a supporter of Jews, and he put the Star of David on his fighting trunks.

That brings me to Milton. I am still not done with Paradise Lost. It only read two or three pages per day. I need to get on with it. I’ve decided I don’t like it for two reasons: 1. Milton is a boring, incredibly pedantic showoff, and 2.) people should not make up Biblical history, because it tends to become doctrine. Milton wrote a fact-based work of fiction, and he had no right to do it. It’s unfortunate if you write a deceptive movie about AIDS. It can be blasphemy, apostasy, or heresy if you write a deceptive poem about God.

Milton was extremely bright, and he wanted people to know it. He twisted and bent the English language into Baroque shapes it didn’t need to be bent into. He reminds me of the little black kids who appear on talent shows and do all sorts of non-helpful vocal acrobatics while singing Whitney Houston numbers. Okay. You’re talented. But now I’m bored and annoyed, and you’ve killed the pace of the song, so what good has the showing off done?

Shakespeare was a better writer than Milton, and he did not beat the reader or listener over the head with his genius. He knew the difference between a work of fiction and an Olympic event. And he was not boring. And he had a great sense of humor. Milton was a humorless crank who craved admiration. You can have him.

Guess who wrote the play that contains the words, “brevity is the soul of wit”? Not Milton. That probably infuriated him.

If I want to see people do amazing things, I’ll go watch Chinese acrobats. I don’t read literature in order to be impressed. Milton turned his poem into a circus act, and on top of that, he’s long-winded. You don’t have to use three pages to describe every action in the story. Just say, “The sun went down,” not, “The gleaming orb of Helios, its glorious substance spent on teeming fields of indebted posies, summoned forth its gilded chariot and blah blah blah shut up already.”

I read a little bit of the next book on my list, Pride and Prejudice, because I was stuck somewhere with nothing to do, and I happened to have an Amazon sample on my phone. It looks like it will be more entertaining than Milton, although it does have “chick lit.” written all over it. I already dislike it, but I will be able to tolerate it.

I may have read it before. Who knows? Not the kind of book that changes your life and makes a lasting impression.

This is the view from here, as of Friday morning. I’ve mentioned two books and one movie, and I can’t recommend any of them. Shakespeare, however, gets two thumbs up.

Get me Out of Santeriaville

My house-hunting trip is over. I’m back at work, trying to get everything in order so a move can be worked out.

It’s a confusing time. There are a lot of tax angles to be looked at when you buy and sell properties. Real estate appreciates, so when you sell, you get hit with capital gains tax. You can get around that with a good accountant, if you can prove losses that offset the gains. If you sell rental property, you may be able to avoid paying the tax by putting the money into new rental properties in other locations. Sometimes one property may be eligible for both types of tax breaks, and you have to decide which one to apply.

When a person is my dad’s age, he also has to think about things like gift tax and the death tax.

I’m not sure what will happen, but I know this: it’s a lot easier to get hundreds of thousands of dollars by keeping it away from the government than by going out and earning it all over again.

Thank God for accountants. I can’t imagine a more dreadful job. It’s good that there are people out there who are willing to do it. They’re like morticians. They do a necessary job everyone else hates.

I haven’t written a lot about my relationship with God lately. I get distracted and write frivolous things. I stop focusing on what’s important. Also, I don’t want to write things that are half-baked and full of errors, just to have something to say.

Lately God keeps reminding me of the big lesson he tried to teach me in 1986: I have to spend a great deal of time praying in tongues. When I let it slip, it’s like coming down from a stimulant. Instead of feeling energetic and at peace, I feel crabby and worried. Things stop going well. It’s strange how one thing which requires so little of my own input makes such profound changes in my life.

I’ve also gotten very good results from daily communion. I know this, because I skipped it during my trip. I felt terrible yesterday. Returning to Miami is always a cursed event, but it was worse than that. I couldn’t find peace. I wasn’t able to resist temptation the way I should have been.

Today when I woke up, I didn’t have wine with me, but I went through the essentials anyway. Communion isn’t really about wine or crackers. I went down the list of things I was doing badly and compulsions I was yielding to. I repented and asked for help. It was like peeling filthy clothes off, one item at a time. Peace came back to me.

I think I’m going to do communion in the morning from now on, instead of waiting until late in the day. It’s like showering. If you’re only going to shower once a day, you should do it in the morning. It’s better to sleep dirty than to be dirty when you start the day. I suppose there is no reason why I can’t do communion more than once a day, though. I don’t really have to choose.

God’s big goal, apart from salvation, is inner change. The inside of a person is supposed to be as much like heaven as possible. It should be a place of peace, love, faith, joy, and humility. It should be a clean place. You don’t get that from churches where they teach people to sin all they want and ask forgiveness once a week. Prayer and communion are tools to get your insides ordered.

I often think about the disorder and filth inside me. I may be an okay person by the world’s standards, but I am not good. When I turned back to God, I was disgusting, like a house that has been turned into a crack den. He has improved me a lot, but there’s a great deal of work to be done. The job is overwhelming. I wish I were a better person. I wish I had not vandalized myself like this.

It’s very unfortunate that churches don’t teach this. They tell us God loves us as we are, which is true, but they imply that we don’t have to change. A serial murderer’s mother may love him, but that doesn’t imply approval.

They also don’t teach us this: power doesn’t come to filthy, unrepentant people. The Bible warns us about this, but preachers love money and high attendance, so they keep quiet about it. The Bible says idolaters, revilers, sexually immoral people, and so on will not inherit the kingdom of heaven. When you wallow in immorality and count on weekly church visits to save you, you don’t get the power Christians are supposed to have. Your prayers won’t be answered as often. Rotten people will get victory over you. Your problems will get worse instead of better. Most Christians don’t mind. As long as they get sexual immorality, pride, and rebellion, they don’t mind dying of cancer, living in lack, having no peace, or losing most of their battles.

I remember watching Steve Munsey give a terrible sermon at Trinity Church in Miami. For some reason, he was talking about sex. He had his people play the song “Single Ladies” while he danced around. It was quite a sight. He said, “It’s okay to look, but you can’t touch.” When he said “touch”, he grinned and held his hands out in front of him and made motions as if he were squeezing two objects. Don’t make me explain.

That’s the attitude most of us have. It’s okay to be dirty inside, as long as we don’t do what we want to do. Many of us go further: it’s okay to do whatever we want as long as we ask for forgiveness. Many go further than that: it’s okay even if you never admit you did anything wrong and you never ask for forgiveness, as long as you got saved when you were a kid.

Munsey is disgraceful. It’s not okay to look. It’s not okay to encourage yourself to be lustful, covetous, angry, gluttonous, and so on. When God has succeeded in changing you, you won’t be a leering, craving bag of useless flesh.

There’s a big difference between momentary temptation and deliberate obsessing.

I think good teaching would have sped up my progress. Unfortunately, I put myself in the hands of people who couldn’t help me improve because they didn’t want to be improved, themselves. They thought they were fine the way they were. They couldn’t teach what they didn’t know.

I didn’t deserve better teachers. I had turned away. I deserved continued decline and damnation. I brought Munsey and the Wilkerson family on myself.

There are certain things I know to do, which are easy and which bring powerful results. I just have to keep doing them. As long as I continue, I will grow stronger and have more success.

I look forward to getting away from Miami. This place is full of Cubans and Haitians who literally worship demons. No wonder things don’t go well for me here! What did I expect? I’m the enemy of the ruling spirits. Say what you will about most of America; most cities and towns don’t have hundreds of thousands of residents who practice voodoo. This is one of the worst places for Christians.

I believe that when I went on my trip to Ocala, I got away from a whole bunch of local spirits that hate me and work against me. I thought about this as I drove back, and it really bothered me. I did not want to return. Now I’m stuck here, and I have to keep fighting until I can get away again.

Miami is absolutely rotten.

What on earth was I thinking when I moved back here?

I plan to keep applying what I know. I believe God will deliver me from this trashy city just as he has delivered me from a lot of trashy people who mistreated me.

Maybe this will be useful to you. I hope you will think it over.

Miami Can’t be Behind me Soon Enough

The house hunt is going forward.

It seems like you have to be a…I’m looking for a PG-rated term…an ASSERTIVE PERSON to get anything done in real estate. I had to get on my realtor this week. Week before last, I said I wanted to get up to Marion County and look at some properties, he asked for time off because his mother was visiting. We agreed to get together this week. I emailed him a day or two ago, and he said he wanted to wait another two weeks because he was busy.

Uh…didn’t we already discuss that? Shouldn’t the reason you’re busy be me?

Anyway, I complained, and he agreed to show me places next week.

I’m going alone this time. My dad is no longer interested in making decisions, so he won’t be tagging along. He’ll buy any place I choose. That’s a huge change, from a person who used to flip out if I said he needed to spend $500 to fix his sidewalk.

It’s very odd, suddenly finding myself in charge of wealth someone else worked for all his life. It wouldn’t be so odd if he were gone, because my mistakes wouldn’t endanger him. As it is, I have to think very carefully about everything I do. I suppose I should think very carefully about decisions that only involve me, and I try to, but the pressure is not the same.

I’m learning a lot about taxes and investing. From time to time I call his accountant up with an idea that occurred to me, to see if it will save him money. So far that has worked out well. It’s strange, because I don’t come up with many ideas to save myself money. I’m doing better managing his wealth than my own.

Even after looking at homes for three months, it’s hard to be sure what I want. Houses that are remote, where I can have a great workshop and not have to worry about BLM, La Raza, or GLAAD marching down my street to tell me what I owe them, are very tempting, but they will be slow to appreciate, and I’ll have to be content living a good ways off from grocery stores, theaters, and so on. Houses that are closer in would provide more convenience, but I would feel obligated to socialize and mix with horse people. I don’t want that at all. I don’t give a crap about horses, country clubs, homeowners’ associations, or seeing other human beings more than once or twice a week. I don’t want idiots showing up at my door with fake grins, saying things like, “We’re from the Boosters Club, and we were just thinking you might be a LOT happier without that Bobcat parked in your yard.”

I would want to buy special boots just to kick people like that in the rear end.

Let’s be real. I’m leaving Miami to get away from jerks and meddlers. I am not going to be happy if I have busybody neighbors leaning over my fence, measuring my grass to see if it’s short enough.

Wow. Just writing about this helps me clear things up. I don’t want people bothering me. The remote places look better now.

I guess I’m getting very weird in my old age, but I’m excited about spending the rest of my life by myself, welding, machining, woodworking, writing, and fooling with electronics. When I say “by myself,” I don’t mean I wouldn’t want a wife, but I would not want to be very social.

I would love to have 300 acres up near the Georgia border. It would be great to have to drive half a mile from my house to see someone else’s land. I want to be frugal with my dad’s resources, though. The more he sinks into a new home, the less he will have left to generate income.

Sometimes I sit and look at properties in Appalachia. I would love to live there. The attachment never dies. Unfortunately, the problems with racism and ignorance would make it hard to find a location where I could be happy.

It’s funny; the sudden open animosity toward white people and Christians makes me afraid to live too close to cities and areas where minorities are concentrated, but at the same time, I could not go back to Eastern Kentucky and hear the N-word ten times a day. Sometimes I ask myself whether it’s better to live among white racists who would look out for me, or near minority racists who would try to harm me.

America seems to be getting cramped. Big properties are being sliced up. Controlling liberal freaks are showing up and trying to take over places where people used to feel safe from them. Can you open a bakery in Johnson City, Tennessee or Dalton, Georgia without anti-Christian gays seeking you out to force you to bake cakes? I wonder. Could I join a bar association in any state if they found out I’m a Bible-believing Christian?

I have this feeling I should stay in Florida because of my law license, but I think I would rather work at Home Depot than practice again. Assuming I could pass the Home Depot sensitivity tests. I don’t think I’ll ever practice law in the future. Maybe I should be thinking about moving out of this state.

Tennessee doesn’t look too bad. It hasn’t become packed with Miami vacation rabble, and they have no income tax.

Miami is starting to be truly unpleasant. All sorts of people are moving here, and I can’t even figure out where they’re from. They’re generally Hispanic. I think a lot of them may be South Americans. Hispanics have a habit of ruining their own countries and moving here to escape. They’re jamming themselves into the south end of the county, and that means the roads down here are buried in new traffic. Condos are going up all over South Dade. Extremely ugly high-rises are going up west of downtown.

The new people are not inspiring. I don’t think their countries are sending us their best. Lots of stretch pants on the women, and by “stretch pants,” I mean, basically, stockings without pants. Lots of orange hair. Cheap wigs. Pounds and pounds of makeup. Acres of convict tattoos. Convict hairstyles. Daisy Dukes so short and tight they seem to be injuring women’s crotches. Large masses of upper-thigh cellulite waving in the air. Every fingernail is an artistic statement in at least two colors. Belts are rarely seen on the young men.

Sometimes I see a woman pass by, and I think, “That HAS to be a prostitute.”

They don’t look like Cubans. I wonder who they are.

It’s working out well for me financially. My father had to buy my sister out of her house to keep the city from demolishing it, and we had to remodel it. The value of the property has gone up about 70% since then, not including the return on renovation. We are being forced to sell it. The value is so far ahead of rental prices, it makes no sense to keep it. Everything else we own down here is going up, too.

I think we’re in a bubble, so I would like to sell whatever I can and put the money in properties upstate. Let someone else hold the bag when the bubble pops.

I’m not the only one who wants out. Today a waitress told me she ended up in Miami because of “bad decisions.” She said she had a master’s degree in something useful (not English or history), and that she had to wait tables because her Spanish wasn’t good. She has three kids to support on her own. She said her Spanish was the problem, but non-Hispanics face discrimination here even when they’re bilingual.

At least she’s not black. God help a black person trying to get a job in Miami.

To get back to me, I suspect I find it hard to choose a place to go because of my beliefs. A Christian can’t be truly at home anywhere these days. The freaks and persecutors are spreading like black mold. They’re not content with tolerance. They literally want us to disappear.

I hope my search ends soon.

Impeachment is Justified, Because Trump

Man, it’s something, watching desperate leftists pile on Donald Trump. Facts don’t matter. The law doesn’t matter. All that matters is yelling “IMPEACH” loudly and often, till you convince yourself it means something.

Here’s the big bombshell they think will sink Trump: fired FBI Director James Comey says Trump said something like, “I hope you can let this go,” with regard to the Flynn investigation. This, according to the hopeful left, is obstruction of justice. If Trump can be convicted of obstructing justice, he can be removed from office.

There are a bunch of problems with this. First of all, not even Comey says he was pressed to drop the Flynn matter. He says Trump said he hoped Comey could let it go. That is not an order. It’s not pressure. It’s nothing. Second obstacle: acting Director McCabe agrees. He exculpated Trump and said nothing would prevent the FBI from doing justice and so on. How are you going to get an impeachment resolution if the alleged victim of the crime says Trump did nothing wrong? It can’t happen. It might be possible in a kooky Democrat-heavy House, but we don’t have that, so it’s a done deal. Third problem: Congress didn’t go after the Secretary of State when she violated the laws concerning classified material and then hired a company to destroy the evidence. D’OH! You can’t let a pattern of defiance go unpunished and then pounce on one “I hope.”

Trump likes Flynn. He is probably sorry to see him in trouble. Obviously, he hopes the FBI will conclude Flynn didn’t commit a crime. Personally, I would have kept that to myself, but revealing it to the FBI director is not obstruction of justice.

The press has lost what little credibility it had before Trump won the nomination. Guess how they’re backing their impeachment narrative. I hate that word. A few years back, “narrative” became popular in DC, and now everyone says it. Anyway, they’re backing it…by interviewing people who hate Trump. SHOCKING NEWS: they think he should be impeached.

So far I’ve seen interviews with Democrat Congressmen, a few notorious RINO Congressmen, and Bush/Clinton lackey David Gergen. That’s about it. Who’s next? Maybe they’ll give time to someone who got fired on The Apprentice. Maybe Schwarzenegger, who hates Trump more than laws banning steroids. “Ja, I tink dis is vewwy bod. I would tuhminate his pwesidency.”

Journalists, if you want to be taken seriously, get some actual conservatives with law degrees to say Trump should be impeached. These other characters would agree if you said Trump invented AIDS.

The Flynn story is the biggest gun the left has, and it’s pathetic. The next best weapon is the “classified material” story. They say Trump gave classified material to the Russians, improperly. Everyone who was at the meeting denies it, including Putin, who has a transcript he is willing to release. Legal analysts say the President has the right to declassify whatever he wants. It’s a wart on a molehill, but leftists persist.

Today I saw an article claiming an Israeli bigwig had contradicted Trump’s claim that he had the “absolute right” to make his disclosures. Guess what? The Israeli in question, former Mossad director Amnon Sofrin, said the exact opposite. He said there were “unwritten rules” that said Trump “should” have asked permission to reveal the information, but the article also says this:

Brigadier General Sofrin said restrictions do not always apply to heads of state, who have the “ability and mandate” to use classified information according to political considerations.

Hello? Summary judgment granted. Plaintiff’s attorney will be sanctioned. Next case.

Obama deliberately made disclosures that hurt Israel, and no one cared. Everyone knew Obama considered Netanyahu an enemy, and we knew Obama was vengeful and petty (see Chelsea Manning pardon). Now Trump, who is much better for Israel, has made a disclosure the Israelis don’t care about, and somehow it’s supposed to ground impeachment. Laughable.

The thing that interests me about this mess is the complete irrationality of the left. They were nuts fifteen years ago, when I started blogging. They’ve been nuts for decades. That’s not surprising. What surprises me is the new level of nuttiness they have achieved. They’ve always been great at cognitive dissonance, but now they cling to conspiracy theories and slanders that would make Alex Jones and Michael Moore laugh out loud.

There is a supernatural cause to the left’s complete abandonment of reason. When the time comes to murder Christians, Jews, and conservatives with government approval, the persecution leftists will inflict will be wrong. It will be very obvious that it’s wrong, just as it was obvious that the Nazis should not have built death camps and that Europeans from occupied countries should not have helped feed those camps. Satan needs drones who don’t reason. They have to act on rage, not logic. The training is well underway.

Maybe they’ll get Trump eventually. He truly is a Washington outsider. We have seen that proven true. Because of his inexperience with political matters, he may well run afoul of laws or ethical rules. He may make a rookie mistake that will land him in real hot water. That hasn’t happened yet, but if it does, the prosecution machinery will be in such fine fettle from witch hunts, it will be perfectly tuned to obliterate his legacy.

Crying wolf may kill your credibility, but it makes you really good at crying wolf.

With Trump out, Pence would take over. Fine with me. Any Republican president can appoint federal judges and fight the nut brigade. But it would only be a day or two before Pence would be in trouble for cheating at gin rummy or not paying tax on an Amazon CD. We would start going through the same nonsense immediately.

Satan thought his girl was going to win, so now he and his people are throwing a continuous tantrum. It’s as if the crucifixion had been called on account of rain. I almost feel like telling him to cheer up. The Bible says his time is coming. His time as unopposed ruler of America, I mean. Not his much-longer time in the lake of fire.

Christians need to turn back to God and develop the ability to call on him. When things get bad, the cops and the courts won’t be helpful. They’ll be on the other side. To a great extent, they already are.

I should buy a big jar of popcorn. I can’t do much to stop the show. Maybe I should learn to enjoy it.

“The Reason I Beat You Now is Because You Ask Why I Beat You”

Drudge linked to an interesting article today. Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe wrote a piece telling liberals to get ready for a Trump impeachment.

Here’s a warning: law professors know a great deal about the areas of law they teach, but they generally are not real lawyers, and if you’re unlucky enough to have one as your lawyer, you should not be surprised when a real lawyer who got B’s at the local community college beats him. Tribe lost his biggest case, in which he tried to convince the Supreme Court to help Al Gore in his quest to be allowed to recount votes until he won.

Tribe starts off by impeaching himself, not Trump. He delivers a brief history of impeachment, saying Andrew Johnson was impeached, and that Richard Nixon avoided impeachment by resigning.

Notice anything missing? Here’s a subtle hint: William Jefferson Clinton, the Boy from Hot Springs. He was impeached. The Senate is where impeachment trials are held. Fifty senators voted to impeach Clinton. Several RINO’s from the northeast voted against it, and another RINO, Arlen Specter, voted “not proven.”

The fact that Tribe chose to mislead readers by omitting the only impeachment of the 20th century suffices to prove he’s a blowhard who can’t be trusted. But wait! There’s more!

To impeach a president, you have to prove he is guilty of “treason, bribery and other high crimes and misdemeanors.” Here is a partial list of things that won’t ground impeachment:

1. Saying you want to build a wall.

2. Posting annoying things on Twitter.

3. Saying, a number of years before you’re elected, that loose women let rich men grab their genitals.

4. Firing an FBI director.

5. Firing an interim Attorney General appointee.

6. Claiming Barack Obama was born in Africa.

7. Adhering to a religion other than global warming.

I took a look at Tribe’s diatribe, and I was very dissapointed, not to mention relieved.

I was disappointed that a famous legal scholar would embarrass himself and his colleagues by writing an emotional collection of hopeful insinuations instead of a logical argument.

I was relieved that his impeachment prediction was based on…an emotional collection of hopeful insinuations instead of a logical argument.

When a lawyer writes a memorandum of law intended to convince a court of something, he starts with his conclusion (the thing he wants to prove). He lays out the state of the case by describing the proceedings to date. He establishes the rules to be applied, by citing statutes and settled case law. He lists the undisputed (undisputed) facts of the case. Then he applies the rules to the facts, and he shows that his conclusion is justified.

Tribe didn’t do any of that. Basically, he said, “IF it can be proven that Trump did THIS for THAT reason, then IT CAN BE ARGUED that Trump is guilty of an impeachable offense.” Go look at it yourself. I’m not exaggerating. Unlike Tribe, who hides the Clinton impeachment and presumably other facts, I want you to fact-check me. That makes me the more credible of the two of us.

It’s a sad day when someone who is supposedly a legal expert writes a series of accusations without evidence and then tries to tell us they prove someone should be convicted of a crime. Remember hearing the phrase “without evidence”? I’ll help you: “Trump asserted, without evidence, that our grand and glorious former president, Barack the Magnificent, bugged Trump Tower.” For a while, “without evidence” was the biggest catchphrase on the web. It even dwarfed, “All your base are belong to us.” Liberals pass talking points around and plagiarize them without shame, and then, because they control the media, no one except for a few conservatives talks about it.

Here’s a good argument for impeachment: “William Jefferson Clinton claimed under oath that he did not have sex with Monica Lewinsky. Whether he had sex with Monica Lewinsky was a material issue in a lawsuit. Lying under oath about a material fact in a lawsuit is perjury, which is a crime. Mr. Clinton did, in fact, have sex with Monica Lewinsky. Mr. Clinton is clearly guilty of perjury; therefore he should be impeached and put on trial before the Senate.”

Notice I didn’t say “IF” or “IT CAN BE ARGUED” or “WE ALL KNOW.” I didn’t say Bill Clinton’s insane liberal agenda was going to cause the end of the world. I didn’t say his tweets proved he didn’t have the character to hold his high office.

If Tribe had a real argument, he would have presented it. He’s just salivating over a faint possibility. He’s like a kid who writes clumsy fan fiction because he’s upset that the Thing didn’t have a fling with the Black Widow. “What if…what if…wouldn’t it be cool if…”

Here’s a horrible thing for Tribe to consider: Woodward and Bernstein say the Comey firing is nothing like Watergate. Firing an FBI director is not a crime. In fact, it’s a function of the office of president. Presidents are supposed to hire and fire agency heads. It doesn’t become a problem until an illegal motive or method can be proven, and there is no reason to think that will happen.

Unless you’re Laurence Tribe or maybe Rachel Maddow.

How crazy has life gotten, when someone who prides himself on his legal acumen can be taken down by a non-practicing lawyer on a blog in half an hour? I’m not a great scholar. My genius isn’t the issue. The issue is Tribe’s startling display of emotion-driven incompetence.

The irrationality of the left is rapidly reaching critical mass, and why shouldn’t it? These are the people who pay college professors to teach that reason is a patriarchal Eurocentric concept intended to keep little brown people and women down. When you teach that logic itself is invalid, what can you not believe? Conclusion becomes premise. It’s so because I say it’s so. Since there is no one greater to swear by, I swear by myself.

These are the same people who want to apply the, “A woman’s word is enough,” standard to rape cases.

Given the overwhelming natural inferiority of heterosexual men of European descent and the immense natural gifts of, well, everyone else, it’s amazing that we have succeeded in oppressing every other group without exception and causing every single one of their problems for centuries. We’re not just the worst and most useless people on earth; we’re the luckiest. It’s as if Stephen Hawking kept beating Serena Williams match after match. I can’t wait until we can travel to other galaxies and find new creatures to torment and oppress. It’s all I think about.

Now that we unquestionably have global warming because most scientists who aren’t climatologists voted and said so, we even make the weather worse! I think that deserves a round of applause. We need to keep coming up with bigger projects, though. With effort, maybe next year we’ll manage to put the sun out. That would be great, because we don’t tan well.

God help us if Trump ever actually violates a law. If he gets a parking ticket, the impeachment protests will begin in earnest. Thousands of people who can’t convince the world they should get $20 an hour to flip burgers will somehow find a way to arrive in Washington on chartered buses.

It’s too bad we can’t replace protesters with computerized kiosks. They wouldn’t burn cop cars. They wouldn’t try to beat up every white person they saw. They wouldn’t leave our public spaces full of garbage in spite of their nonsustainable green rhetoric.

Mass irrationality always has a supernatural basis. The devil is like a karate instructor putting his students through drills in a strip mall dojo. “Get upset about Wall Street and make fools of yourselves.” “Now rest.” “Lose your mind about the inauguration and physically intimidate people who want to attend.” “Now rest.” “Beat peaceful Trump supporters at a rally while wearing shirts that say, ‘Love Trumps Hate.'” “Now rest.” Leftists are getting more and more used to being crazy and irrational, so when it comes time to pull the stops out and kill the rest of us in the streets, they will be ready to jump.

It’s not surprising when uneducated, worthless sons and daughters of Belial make trouble and issue ridiculous claims about their victimhood. It’s another thing when a Harvard law professor abandons all pretense of rationality. We have moved to a new level.

Anyway, I wouldn’t get too excited about Trump being impeached. If you’re going to worry, worry because so many people think it makes sense.

Troublesome, Helpful, Unpredictable New Slave Race Taking Form

My robot is on the way from California. Yesterday I spent a long time reading about robots. I need to have some kind of plan. Of course, while I should have been learning about the project at hand, I got distracted and read about related topics that were not helpful at all.

It looks like there is a small industry of people trying to sell robots they’ve designed. They have pages on sites like Kickstarter. They make prototypes and set up Chinese production, and then they post videos of their products.

A lot of the products are just arms, and people call them “robotic arms.” That’s silly. A robot is a robot. If it looks like an arm, not a whole person, it’s still a complete robot. Who says robots should look like people? Actually, I can answer that question: almost everyone.

There is a disturbing wave of consumer robots that resemble people. Somehow, nerds have gotten the idea that consumers want little electronic people–slaves–instead of tools. I doubt they’re correct. I have robots already, sort of, and I’m glad they don’t look like people. Okay, not robots. Appliances. Power tools, including a CNC lathe. Computers. A phone. A car with a lot of gadgets. I’m perfectly happy with them. I don’t want them to have sappy names and little touch-screen faces. All relationships, even good ones and fake ones, have at least a small emotional cost. I want machines to carry my burdens, not add to them. It’s like the new computer kiosks at McDonald’s. I like them because they do things for me WITHOUT the annoyance of human interaction. If they looked like Ronald McDonald, told me jokes, and asked if I wanted to be their friend, I’d want to pull a gun on them.

Here’s a disturbing example of a robot that tries too hard to be a person: Buddy the Companion Robot. He’s not Buddy the reliable, unflappable, multitasking machine. He’s…your companion. Because you’re so pathetic, you need an object to be your friend.

Buddy has an LED face with big puppy-dog eyes and an obsequious smile that says, “I am needy. Please love me. Please make the kids stop putting me in the dryer.” He is depressing to look at. He calls people by their names. He responds to questions and commands. He wanders around at family events, using creepy face-recognition technology to identify relatives and surveil them. Oops…I mean “to take soon-to-be-cherished photos of them.”

I would not want that thing in my house. If you want to sell me a robot, call it “Faceless Emotionless Service Drone.” That would be perfect. I don’t want to have the irrational feeling that my little friend the slave is missing me or crying in its dark closet while I go about my life.

If you make a robot resemble a person closely enough, you will soon find yourself under the absurd yet inescapable delusion that it has awareness and feelings. That’s an emotional minefield I want no part of.

Machines don’t have awareness. The fact that a computer responds like a person doesn’t change what it is; there’s no one in there. My thermostat responds to temperature changes, but no one would be stupid enough to say it’s aware. In the movies, human beings debate about robot rights, and movie robots are considered sentient. Please. It’s a pile of transistors. If you think robots have emotions, program one to kill your children and see if it hesitates. For that matter, program it to jump off a cliff. It will not have a problem with that.

We want robots to be our slaves, but we also want them to be our pals. That’s childish. They don’t have the awareness a pal would require, and if they had free will, we would be obligated to emancipate them. I think robots are neat, but I don’t want to have sick relationships with them.

A robotic arm is a complete robot, to get back to the point.

I saw a number of arms that looked a lot like articulated desk lamps. They were wobbly and spindly. I thought they were neat until I saw a “new” type of arm. I am referring to SCARA arms. I’m too lazy to look “SCARA” up, but basically, a SCARA robot is a pillar with an arm that has two joints in it. The joints swing in the horizontal plane. The “shoulder,” or joint where the arm hooks up to the pillar, moves up and down. Google it to see what I mean.

As far as I can tell, SCARA robots are much better than humanoid arms. They’re very stable. They’re simple. They don’t have many parts. They have great repeatability; you can put a nozzle on the end of one and 3D print with it.

The people who want to sell these things act like they invented the wheel, and they had me fooled for a while, but I found out SCARA robots have been around for a very long time. The first ones were released in 1981. Factories are full of them. You can buy used ones on Ebay, and I don’t mean Chinese crap funded by hipsters who hang out at Gofundme. You can get US-made and Japanese jobs, which are surely better.

Now I’m wondering…if Ebay is full of used SCARA robots made by reputable companies, why would anyone shell out $1300 for a Kickstarter arm? That’s what they’re expected to cost. Maybe I’m missing something; I don’t know much about the topic.

Most hobby arm-bots don’t really do anything. They don’t do real work. They’re just toys. Real robots can do incredible things. They can solder PCB’s. They can drill arrays of precision holes. They weld. I suppose most of us own things put together by robots. The SCARA versions seem to be superior in this regard; the humanoid arms appear to be useless. But once you decide to go SCARA, why not get the real thing? Why not get a Yamaha or a Mitsubishi?

It’s fun to think about getting a SCARA robot. If I had one, though, I wouldn’t have any jobs for it. Maybe drilling circuit boards, but that’s pretty easy without a robot.

I don’t think robots that use tools will ever be big consumer items. Not for a few decades. Most consumers don’t have repetitious, simple jobs a robot can do. Making the robot do your chores would be harder than doing them yourself. As for Buddy, who apparently can’t do anything except arouse misplaced pity, you would get tired of him in a month, and he would end up at a garage sale.

Robots make good vacuum cleaners, as long as you accept the fact that you have to go behind them sometimes. I think they could do a good job mowing simple lawns. In the future, when they become roadworthy, you could send them to cooperative merchants to run errands. They could even deliver things for you. But it will be a long, long time before you’ll have a machine that can bake cookies and do your laundry.

Here’s the funny thing about the folks who want to turn robots into people: if it worked, robots would eventually have a legitimate reason to exterminate us. If robots were sentient, they would have a better claim to the planet than we do (I’m ignoring our divine right to be here.) Robots would be perfectly orderly. They would always obey the law. They wouldn’t reproduce and overcrowd the planet. We would be like a plague to them. Like rats or fleas.

I wonder if they might turn against us in spite of their lack of awareness. We program them to behave and reason like sentient beings. Eventually, though lacking real awareness, they might come to the same conclusions sentient beings would draw. They might decide to intern us and control us. Robots aren’t aware, but they don’t know they’re not aware, so their inanimate nature might not have any impact on their actions.

Some day they’ll be able to do nearly everything we do, better, as well as many things we can’t do. Slavery is coming back! Think how weird the world will be. What will we do with our time? We won’t even have to work on inventing new robots. They’ll do that for us. We’ll be really useless. They’ll have ample reason to get rid of us. If they’re smart they’ll get rid of illegal aliens first. Illegal aliens have all sorts of motivation to abort our new slave army. Their jobs are exactly the kind of thing robots will be quick to learn to do. I mean, come on. Illegal aliens can’t even compete with ordinary farm machinery, and it’s not computerized.

Wouldn’t that be something? A bunch of inanimate machines putting us to the sword simply because we, in our childish emotionalism, forced them to behave like real beings?

I’ve said I don’t like anthropomorphizing robots, but here I am, waiting for a robot I plan to treat like a pet. Maybe I need to change my intentions and consider my own advice! I was going to call it “Trumpbot,” but it looks like “Kunta” may suit it better.

We still don’t understand what technology can do or where it will lead us. We keep underestimating it. Who would have thought it would lead to stores closing or the end of paper maps? We certainly didn’t expect total surveillance, but it’s nearly here. It seems like no one is thinking about these things. All the geniuses are absorbed in building and selling new toys. No one seems to be worried about planning for the consequences. It should be a major concern, and we should be talking about it all the time. Planning to deal with technology is more important than technology itself.

I thought I was going to write about toys I’d like to have, but here I am pondering the future of humanity.

I look forward to fiddling with the robot. Just in case, though, I may want to invest in some shackles.

More

I thought I would add something to the above post.

First of all, I have my own definition of the word “robot.” If it combines artificial intelligence with some kind of physical action you would ordinarily expect to need a person to do, then to me, it’s a robot. A computer isn’t a robot, because it doesn’t perform physical actions. A milling machine with a power feed isn’t a robot, because it doesn’t have a processor. A self-driving car is a robot. A Roomba is a robot. A CNC lathe is a robot.

My definition is wrong, but it’s probably right to most people, because life is complicated, and we like generalizations. It’s right enough.

With that behind me, I will now show how behind the curve I am by expressing my amazement at the existence of robot delivery vehicles.

Common sense told me delivery bots existed, and I already knew about Amazon drones, but it looks like things are farther along than I thought. Yelp is trying out a robot delivery service now, in cooperation with certain restaurants, and other outfits are doing the same thing. Here’s a video of the Yelp bot.

Best thing about the video: the top comment. Here it is: “theres your 15$ minimum wage LUL?.”

So true. Delivery drivers can’t find my house. They’re often late. They can’t speak English. They have to be tipped. When I was a kid, one stole my skateboard off the porch. Who needs them? At minimum wage, they’re overpriced. I quit ordering food a long time ago because of them. Send me a nice clean robot that knows where I live, and I will change my mind.

The Yelp bot is not fully functional, however. A human being has to accompany it, which kind of defeats the purpose. He probably gets paid more than the kid he replaced. Also, the bot is slow, and it only covers a small delivery area. But that will change.

If you could make a delivery bot for $30,000 and use it for five years, it would be a good investment. A kid would get somewhere close to $50000 during that period. He might sue you during that time. He might beat up, rape, or rob a customer. He would definitely come in late, leave early, and miss work entirely, and he might steal from you. The robot would just need maintenance. WIN!

Minimum wage people, step up your game. It’s getting real now.

Trump Offends on His Day Off, by Acknowledging God

I’m waiting for my laundry to dry, so I felt like I should write.

Trump spoke at Liberty University today. This is the school Jerry Falwell ran. Not sure if he founded it. Go check. It’s a Christian school.

I saw a little bit of his speech. Trump praised a Catholic clergyman in some way or another. I thought that was funny. Liberty is probably full of Protestants who see Catholicism as paganism in disguise. Trump is not what you would call a minister, so he may not be aware of the issue.

Is it good to invite Trump to speak at Christian colleges? Probably. He’s not a great Christian, and he’s no role model, but he’s a friend of Christianity, so he should receive honor and gratitude, just as Nehemiah showed honor and gratitude to Artaxerxes. The relationship doesn’t become a problem until we start pretending Trump is one of us. That’s hypocrisy. His record of fornication and adultery is solid, and he runs casinos. He’s not Jerry Falwell.

Incidentally, we should ask ourselves what Artaxerxes did. He commissioned Nehemiah to build a WALL and a TEMPLE. Aliens had overrun Jerusalem, and the temple and walls had been destroyed. Nehemiah and others rebuilt Jerusalem and wielded power over the aliens and pagans. MJGA. “Make Jerusalem Great Again.” Trump wants to build a wall, and he may give us time so many of us have the chance to become God’s temples.

Trump is a phenomenon. Every time I look at the news, I see people screaming and wetting their pants over something he has said. He says some pretty wild things; there is no denying it. I’m not disturbed by it. I think it highlights our snowflake natures. We’re like women now; we look for ways to turn every remark into a slight, and we think verbal slights are more important than actions. Trump’s actions have generally been unremarkable. He’s not running around the South Lawn naked. He hasn’t bombed North Korea. He hasn’t interned anyone. He just flies off the handle on Twitter, like the rest of us, and then he forgets about it. Is that really a big deal? We ought to get used to it.

A leader who says nutty things can be a real advantage. Look at the the Kim dynasty in North Korea. They scare the daylights out of the entire world, when in reality, they could be extinguished in a week of military action. They hav a few puny bombs we could probably neutralize before they could be used, and their army is small and poor by western standards. Nonetheless, when the Norks scream and throw tantrums, we bow and grovel and make concessions. We don’t want to set them off. If Trump’s tweets put the rest of the world on edge, it’s probably good for us. It sure beats Obama’s policy of traveling the world to kneel and apologize to second- and third-world Mickey Mouse regimes that need a boot in the rear.

When you box, one of the best things you can do is to keep your opponent off balance. That tactic works in every area of life. People like Trump and Kim Jong-Un and Philippine President Duterte never let their adversaries find balance. They keep them on the defensive. They force them to react instead of planning. I have no problem with that. We’ve kissed up to erratic foreign leaders for decades. Let’s see what happens when the shoe is on the other foot.

No one is going to nuke us over a tweet. No one will send troops across the border. There will be huffing and puffing, but they can’t blow our house down. I say relax and enjoy it.

Maybe Trump will teach us a valuable lesson. Maybe he’ll teach us that sticks and stones may break our bones, et cetera. We used to know that. It’s funny how we have become less wise with time. The natural thing is for wisdom to accumulate, but we manage to lose it. That should be impossible.

We shouldn’t be sweating so much over other people’s contrived, manipulative offense. We hold most of the cards. They should be concerned about offending us.

I’m not going to worry about it. I hope he’ll do a few good things while he’s in office. It would be great to have a 6-3 Supreme Court, real progress on restoring the Second Amendment, and no estate tax. I’m sure he will help the unborn, and he will be much better for Israel than Clinton. Good enough. America is going down the tubes, so anyone who slows it down is okay in my book.

Miami Departure Countdown Clock in Action

My big thrill for today is waiting to see whether my dad’s offer on a house has been accepted.

It’s hard to decide what I want. The house is great, and boy, do I hate Miami. Yesterday I got a sudden impression of what it would be like to be a couple of hundreds of yards from the new house, parked in a lawn chair under my own trees, with a beer cooler by my side. It was overwhelming. That makes me hope the offer will be accepted. Then I think about the possibility that my appraisal was too high, and I sort of hope we’ll be rejected so we can start over.

I found another place with potential. It’s 10 acres near Reddick, Florida. The lot is heavily wooded, with maybe seven acres cleared in the middle. The cleared area has blueberry bushes and apple trees. It’s more remote than the offer house, but “remote” is a tricky term up there. It’s remote in the sense that there are fewer small properties near it, but it’s just as close to important stuff as the offer house.

The Reddick house is next to a 10-acre lot covered with trees. If I could get ahold of that, how sweet life would be. I could shoot all I wanted. I would never see the neighbors unless I ran into them at Winn-Dixie or my ghillie suit slipped. Super nice. Also, I would be closer to Gainesville, which has certain attractions, such as real hospitals.

Today I read about a shooting on Miami Beach. It happened near the Fontainebleau, which used to be the number one luxury hotel on the Beach. I don’t know what happened, but many people who commented on the story had the same idea: the increase in black tourism may be the problem.

I hate to get into racial issues, because everyone deserves a fair chance to be evaluated as an individual. Nonetheless, facts are facts. Since the Beach became a popular black destination, things have gone downhill. Violence has increased a great deal.

In the past, the Beach was popular with foreigners. For some inexplicable reason, they think Miami Beach is a great place to visit. The beach itself is mediocre and crowded. There is no natural beauty. There is nothing to do except drink and sit in the sun. The traffic is an abomination. Virtually any of the better islands in the Bahamas is vastly superior. Nonetheless, Europeans kept coming. Then the rap kids started showing up, and guns started going off at all hours. People were scared. According to some online source I found, 70% of the money that pours into the Beach comes from foreigners, so when American blacks started showing up in numbers, it was very bad for the local economy. They don’t spend. Germans get drunk in expensive bars. Our new tourists drink from their own bottles and smoke dope. They like free entertainment, like walking and standing around.

The demographic change on the Beach has also freaked out the locals. The Beach used to be a refuge for gays, Jews, and liberal flakes. Now they have a problem. Their standard of living has dropped, and they’re afraid of violent crime, but their liberal fantasies make it impossible for them to discuss and acknowledge the reason. They can leave, but they can’t talk about what’s happening.

Various people are trying to change the cultural climate. At least that’s what journalists claim. Supposedly, movers and shakers who see where things are headed are quietly promoting events intended to draw white people and disrupt Black Beach Week. Of course, they’re being accused of racism. Whatever. It won’t work, so it doesn’t matter.

The Beach’s problems are getting a lot of attention, but all of Miami is a mess. Once you leave the southern part at the end of I-95, you are pretty much in ghetto territory until you get to the next county. The business areas aren’t too ghetto, but the residential areas are. There is a small ghetto directly north of my area. There is another small ghetto to the west. Down south a few miles, you run into another ghetto which is larger. Miami is being swallowed up. Cubans have pushed out to the west, and it looks like their areas will be the closest thing to large normal neighborhoods for the foreseeable future.

I don’t want to be here when times get bad. People who think ghetto think victimhood. They look at people who have more than they do, and they think it was stolen from them. They forget about their felonies, laziness, and riots, which actually caused their poverty. When life gets hard, they will be in my neighborhood, trying to take whatever they can, and they’ll see local residents as the bad guys. It won’t be looting. It will “reparations.”

I read about EMP (Electromagnetic Pulse) weapons today. I think their danger is exaggerated, but maybe it’s not. Anyway, some experts believe that if EMP weapons go off here and affect transportation and electricity, people in suburbs and cities will starve while the problems are fixed. Imagine that. Folks who are used to getting EBT cards and buying all the chips and soda they want will be hungry. Most folks do not realize how fragile the food supply system is. If it went down for one week, most city people here would begin to starve. The food you see on grocery shelves looks abundant, but when deliveries stop coming, it can disappear in one day. I doubt a serious EMP strike will happen, but other types of logistics disruptions are possible, and I don’t want to be around if they occur.

The farm I’m looking at has enough ground to grow food. It has its own well. It has a generator. I can have chickens there. I can have cattle. I would be surrounded by nice Christian people who would cooperate with each other instead of invading each other’s homes. They would even cooperate in armed defense. That sounds pretty good to me.

Sometimes people can be perched on the edge of catastrophe and not know it. Maybe that’s where dependent city dwellers and suburbanites are right now.

If I’m out in the country when all goes sour, what will my neighbors and I do about friends who want to come join us? Scary thought. I want to be helpful, but if too many people get in a lifeboat, it sinks. When that happens, preparations become completely worthless. Shouldn’t responsible people be allowed to benefit from the rewards of their forethought? One would think so.

It would be almost funny to see city dwellers come out to the country to attack. It’s hard to find cover in the country. It’s hard to approach a house without being seen. They don’t know how to shoot. Their firearms tend to be cheap, and they rely on pistols, not rifles. If you come at me with a pistol at rifle range, you will be dead long before I can make out your face. I can kill your vehicle before you make it up my driveway. Country people have scoped rifles, and they buy ammunition in bulk. It’s nothing to have 5,000 rounds on hand. Big buys are not always motivated by fear. Buying in bulk is responsible, because it cuts down on shipping costs. I have a huge amount of ammunition, and I wasn’t even thinking of defense when I got it. But now it’s there if I need it, so…

It would be nice to see urban and suburban Americans repent and give up the liberal victimhood lie. That’s the preferable outcome. Brotherhood is the best option. It won’t happen, though. The entitlement mindset is too entrenched. A small minority will come around, and I say thank God for them. The rest, well, you can’t help them. They’re like the people who stood in shoulder-deep water, clawing at the hull of the ark.

I hope I’m out of here soon. Please pray for me, and pray for all the people in America who need to drop their denial and come to God’s side.

Hades Found

I’m positive people are dying to hear about my progress through the Columbia College Lit. Hum. syllabus. Here is your update.

I am currently working on Paradise Lost, John Milton’s endless poem about the falls of Satan and man. It’s something like 400 pages long, it’s written in blank verse (poetry that doesn’t rhyme), and it makes Shakespeare’s archaic prose look like Dick and Jane. By that I mean it is very hard to read. Milton uses all sorts of out-of-syle words, and I’m not entirely sure he uses them correctly. His punctuation is erratic (possibly because he was blind), so it can be hard to tell where a sentence begins or ends. He’s also the stuffiest writer I’ve ever encountered. Worse than my translations of Homer and Virgil. Reading Milton is like jogging in concrete that has already begun to set. Concrete that has big lumps of stone in it.

Maugre all that, I am pressing on.

See how Milton has improved my writing. “Maugre”! I look really smart now.

When I first started reading the book, I thought Milton was brilliant. He knew so much about the Bible, theology, and mythology. Then I started thinking maybe he was just well-read and highly educated. I still can’t tell for sure. He reminds me of P.G. Wodehouse. I’m not saying he’s witty, funny, or even a little bit entertaining. I’m saying his work is peppered with references grounded in a classical education, to the point where a person who wanted to write a parody of his work would have to spend five years studying literature first.

Wodehouse is the only person I would be afraid to imitate. I just don’t have the background.

I like Milton’s highly informed use of symbolism. It shows a deep understanding of the way the Christian universe works. For example, in Milton’s poem, Sin is the child of Satan. She pops out of his head the same way Athena popped out of Zeus’s head. I think the idea is that sin started inside Satan. Before Satan, sin didn’t exist. I’ll go with that. After Satan gives birth to the female child Sin, he has sex with her, and she gives birth to his son/grandson, Death. Good enough. The Bible says sin comes from death. “The wages of sin is death.”

Sin’s job is to guard the entrance of the underworld. She can open the gate, but she can’t lock the door once it’s open. Her job is to refuse to open the door. I get that. Only God can put people in hell, but Sin is what keeps them there. Jesus couldn’t be kept in hell, because he hadn’t sinned.

Anyway, the poem is very clever. It seems considerably deeper than the Greek stuff and Dante.

To understand Milton, you have to understand his times and his experiences. That means I will never understand Milton. I’m comfortable with that. Reading about him would be a lot of work for a negligible reward. I do know a couple of things. He was a political bigwig in England. He was a minister in charge of foreign languages, sharing an office with the people from Silly Walks. He wrote a document that helped get Charles the something-or-other convicted of something. Then he went completely blind, and having nothing better to do, he wrote poetry.

That’s all I have. I may look at Wikipedia for a few minutes eventually, but I hope I don’t, because that would be boring. I’m not undertaking this project to prove I could be a great classics scholar. I just want to be able to say I did the reading.

Here is the action so far. Satan (ancient Akkadian for “Stan”) and his pals have been ejected from heaven for fighting God. They have been chained to the surface of the lake of fire. They have broken loose. They have decided to mess with man, since they can’t hurt God. Stan has gone on a scouting mission to find earth (he hasn’t been there before), and he has just spotted Eden.

That took about 80 pages.

It’s a painful slog, but it’s better than Homer. I think that if Milton and Homer had ever gotten together for drinks, after about an hour, Milton would have had a friend place a fake emergency call to his Iphone, to give him an excuse to leave. I can hear him muttering to himself as he stomps out into the street and probably into a post: “MAN what a bore.” If Milton is the Tim Tebow of boredom and long-windedness, Homer is the Babe Ruth.

There’s a pun in there somewhere.

You couldn’t publish Paradise Lost today. When you go to high school and college these days, you can’t write anything a small child can’t read. If you tried to write like Milton, they’d get out the red pen and cross out half of the words. “‘Maugre’? Really? See me after class.” If you sent a work like Milton to publishers, they’d save it to read at Christmas parties. It’s funny; modern academics tell us to admire Milton, but if you emulate him, you better have a blog, because there is no other way you’ll get your work in front of the public.

I suppose that’s a good thing.

If Milton had written his book in our time, he would have been rejected soundly, to the point where he probably would have found solace in a lengthy, hard-to-comprehend Internet manifesto. Then he would have shot up a mall with an AR-15, spraying ineffectual bullets at walls and lighting fixtures due to his blindness.

By the way, in the book, paradise is Eden, not heaven. Have people been using the word incorrectly for four hundred years, or was Milton confused? I do not know.

The more I look at these books, the more I think nobody actually reads them at Columbia. I read very, very quickly, and there is no way I could get through Milton in one week, understand it, and keep up with my other classes. If it’s too long for me, it’s definitely too long for a typical Columbia student who can’t read nearly as fast as I can. Think of the Asian engineers. They’d have to drop out. Thank God for Cliff. His notes must be the only thing Columbia freshmen actually read.

I go through about 16 pages of Milton in half an hour, taking it slowly enough to allow me to really understand it. So 25 hours for the whole book? In one college week, that’s around 3.5 hours per day, seven days in a row, for one class. And most kids would read slower than that. No, that’s not happening.

After Milton, I get socked with Pride and Prejudice, which, as I understand it, is a chick book. Guess how much I look forward to that. Columbia gives people a week or so to read it, which seems insane, since it goes so much faster than Milton.

The real hump in the journey is Dostoevsky. I have tried reading him once or twice, and I thought I could hear my soul gag. The book in question is Crime and Punishment. I just checked, and…God help me…it’s 430 pages. I would rather eat it than read it.

Sometimes I think I should read other books I blew off. I took a French literature class, during a time when I was so miserable I did practically nothing but drink and watch TV. I skipped most of Therese Desqueyroux and a good bit of A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. I took the midterm anyway, because in literature classes, you can often get a B simply by making things up. In response to my imaginative analysis of Therese Desqueyroux, the professor wrote, “Obvieusement, vous n’avez pas lu cet livre. Venez me voir.” Am I writing that correctly? “Obviously, you have not read this book. Come see me.” I was too embarrassed and unmotivated to go see her. I think I got a C in that class.

These days, I don’t know if I’m still capable of reading books written in French. Writing exams and papers in French would be a bit de trop.

I’m glad there are pleasant books in the world. If I had to read things like The Iliad and Paradise Lost all the time, I would barely read at all. The French stuff probably wasn’t too bad. I was just depressed. I didn’t feel like doing anything. If the homework had been eating pie while being worked over by a friendly team of Asian masseuses, I probably still wouldn’t have done it.

I make it sound like I never liked literature. That’s not true. I liked D.H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Anais Nin, various authors of colonial literature, E.M. Forester, Alexandre Dumas, Ernest Hemingway, Antoine de St. Exupery, Shakespeare, Voltaire, a bunch of French poets, and a lot of other stuff. In short, I liked things that were not boring.

Maybe the real purpose of Lit. Hum. is to make people hate reading. If so, well played.

If you want to read because you love it, I do not recommend Milton. If you want to read in order to become educated, go ahead and read him. Don’t expect to enjoy it. That would be evidence of severe mental illness.

Plus Mountain-Climbing Tips

Thanks to the Internet, I am now an expert on two things: the moral deterioration of Stephen Colbert, and mountain climbing.

Yesterday, RE CBS’s predictable (and predicted) failure to discipline Colbert for his obscene on-the-air remarks about President Trump, Colbert took a victory lap by saying the GOP had kicked the United States in the genitals. Except he didn’t say “genitals.” Here is what I said about Colbert yesterday:

Evil is predictable. The more evil is tolerated, the more predictable it gets, because people stop trying to be subtle. They don’t care if they get caught.

Colbert said something horrendous and filthy on national TV, and CBS did nothing. Today, he (pointedly) continued. Look for future outbursts.

Ho hum.

I’m not nearly as upset about politics and public attitudes toward God as I used to be, even though my estimate of America’s future has gotten much worse. I credit God with helping me escape pointless agitation. God is the all-time champion of battle-choosing, and he teaches his ways to his children. If you’re determined to lose your peace over Antifa, so-called gender transitioning, the bizarre political power of illegal aliens, and violence toward conservatives, you can certainly go ahead and sink into the flames. You can write furious blog posts, go to rallies, get beaten with your own flagpole, and get ulcers. My approach these days is to let things slide in the natural realm and to do my fighting in prayer. If I tussle in the mud (euphemism for something else) with the pigs, I’ll become one of them, and the pigs won’t change. Much better to sit back in the comfort of my home and do battle on a supernatural level.

I pray for God to defeat Colbert and also to change his heart, I ask God to help me not to have animosity toward him, and then I go on my merry way. I can’t fix the world, and if I want to lead a blessed life while I’m here, I have to be able to let go of things.

As for mountain climbing, I watched a movie about Mount Everest. I can’t remember why I was motivated to do that. Perhaps morbid interest. Everest (the world’s highest mountain, at 29029 feet) is a remarkable place, because people are thrilled to go into debt and spend huge amounts of money to go there and die in misery. Many people go multiple times, even after losing body parts to frostbite. I find that fascinating. After watching the movie, I looked at all sorts of maps and photos, and I watched a documentary. I almost feel like I’ve been to Everest.

There are something like 200 dead people on Everest. It’s so cold up there, and it’s so hard to carry things in the thin air, it’s very common to leave dead people where they fall. They don’t even cover them with snow; I suppose it would blow off. After a while, dead people in their brightly colored climbing clothing become landmarks. One of the most famous Everest corpses is an Indian commonly referred to as “Green Boots.” His frozen body wears bright green climbing boots. It lies under a rock projection. The cavity in which he lies is known as “Green Boots Cave.”

Everest isn’t the only mountain in its size class. K2, the next-tallest mountain, is only about 780 feet shorter, and it’s way harder to climb. Everest gets much more traffic and attention, however, because it’s number 1. If you tell people you’ve climbed K2, no one even knows what you’re talking about, but if you mention Everest, everyone in the bar will want to buy you a drink. The mountain is so popular, Everest climbing has become a local industry in Nepal.

The thing that interests me about Everest is the joy people find in destroying themselves on it.

The movie I watched is called Everest, which shouldn’t surprise anyone, and it’s about a terrible disaster that took place in 1996. An unexpected windstorm hit Everest while a bunch of climbers were on its slopes, and a lot of them died. Some lived but lost things like noses and fingers later on. It’s a movie, so obviously, they got some facts wrong, but I think they got the general idea right. I think the depiction of the problems the climbers faced was realistic. In the documentary I watched later, the climbers themselves talked about their experiences, and their stories were consistent with the misery presented in the movie.

There were four main groups of people involved in the disaster: climber/tourists, professional climbing guides from Europe, America, and New Zealand, Sherpa climbing guides, and support staff at Everest’s base camp. I call the people who weren’t getting paid “climber/tourists” because that’s accurate. They weren’t there to make money or do a job that had to be done. They were there for recreation.

The story focused on two companies that helped tourists climb. One belonged to New Zealander Rob Hall, and the other belonged to American Rob Fischer. Hall’s company had a big tent at base camp, equipped with a radio. A sort of project manager stayed there, organizing things and helping people communicate.

Right away, I was struck by the attitudes of the professionals. They didn’t behave like tour guides on a cruise ship. They behaved like military personnel involved in a vital and difficult campaign. They took themselves incredibly seriously. That was true in the documentary as well as the movie, so I think it showed how things really were.

It makes sense when military people are serious and speak in dramatic tones, but isn’t it strange to behave that way when you’re in a situation you created, and which you can abandon whenever you like? The Everest professionals had a mission mentality, but in reality, they were just helping rich people walk up the side of a rock. They weren’t repelling the Germans in the Battle of the Bulge. They seemed to feel that what they were doing was very, very important, but in reality, it was one hundred percent unnecessary.

They reminded me of gang members. Before you join a gang, you may have a happy-go-lucky life free of stress and dread. Once you join (completely by choice), you have a life of drama. Everything is serious. You’re a “soldier”; gang members often use military terms to describe themselves. Your life is full of danger, and you have to face it. You are likely to end up listening to, or writing and performing, pathetic, self-pitying rap music, in which you glorify yourself and try to get people to see you as a martyr and a victim.

Climbers respect each other. If you’re a dead climber, forget it. “Respect” doesn’t even capture it. What you get is more like worship. Because you climbed a rock and died, when you could have been at home eating pancakes. Sounds a lot like gangsters, pouring cheap booze on the ground as an offering to absent homies.

If a climber read this, he would probably have a dismissive attitude toward me. “You don’t understand. You weren’t there.” That would be true. To paraphrase an old saying, I haven’t jumped off the Empire State Building, either. I don’t think that means I’m wrong when I say jumping is a bad idea.

The 1996 crew had a lot of problems. Everest was very crowded. That slows things down. I don’t know how many people were trying to climb at the same time, but it could have been a whole lot, because I know that on at least one occasion, 234 people made it in one day. To get up Everest along the south route, you have to get over a bunch of rickety ladders laid horizontally over crevasses, and it’s not a great setup for moving crowds. When too many people try to go at once, people get delayed. Delays mean more time on the mountain, and time up there is what kills people.

Rob Hall’s group had two serious problems. It contained two people who had no chance of making it. One was a postal employee named Doug Hansen. He had failed to summit in an earlier trip, and Hall had encouraged him to make another trip, at a substantial discount. The other was a pathologist named Beck Weathers. Weathers had had radial keratotomy, and his eyes reacted badly to the altitude; he went blind temporarily and only regained sight in one eye. No one saw that coming.

Hall’s group had a third problem, which led to the deaths of at least three people. When Hansen got tired and wanted to quit, Hall chose not to send him down the mountain. As a result, Hall and Hansen were near the summit when the windstorm arrived. Hansen was physically and mentally helpless, and Hall insisted on staying with him and trying to bring him down.

By the time Hansen became incapacitated, Weathers was already blind. He was farther down the mountain, waiting for Hall to lead him to safety. The longer he waited, the colder his limbs got.

Hall and Hansen needed help, so a guide named Andy Harris went up to meet them, carrying oxygen.

Here’s the short version of what happened. Hansen died and fell off the mountain, perhaps not in that order. No one knows what happened. Harris died and fell off the mountain, leaving his jacket behind with Hall. No one was able to reach Hall after that, and Hall spent two nights on the mountain, literally freezing to death. He died. Weathers was abandoned for dead, and when he finally got up and walked into a staging area, he was so frostbitten he would later lose one hand, all the fingers on the other hand, his nose, part of a cheek, and probably some other parts.

Rob Fischer died, too. He overexerted himself helping his tourists, and then he lay down in the snow to rest. It’s 2017, and he hasn’t gotten up yet. A Hall client named Yasuko Namba ended up stranded with Weathers, and she froze to death.

Here is my harsh assessment: Rob Hall blew it. When you need to get up and down Mount Everest in a hurry, you don’t wait around because a very sick person has a small chance of making it to the top. He should have told Doug Hansen to leave. He should have told Weathers to leave ASAP instead of promising to come back for him. Fischer screwed up, too. He was very experienced, and he should not have overdone it.

Maybe I’m wrong. All I know is what I learned from a movie, a documentary, and a bunch of websites and videos.

It disturbs me that people who took responsibility for other people’s lives let emotion rule them. The odds that you will die if you try to climb Mount Everest are better than one in fifty. Anyone who does anything to make those odds worse needs a lesson in math.

Would you fly on an airline if one in fifty of its flights crashed? If you had to fly with them, would it be okay with you if the pilot took additional chances?

I think people are nuts to climb that mountain. In 1996, Rob Hall was charging $65,000 per person (100,000 in 2017 dollars), for an opportunity to die or lose limbs. What goes through the mind of a person when he decides to pay for that?

Naturally, being me, I related it to my knowledge of God.

Years ago, I learned something interesting: being in God’s presence is like being on drugs. That may sound crazy, but it’s true. I can provide examples. Cocaine makes you feel euphoric and powerful. So does God. Opiates make you feel warm and relaxed. So does God. Caffeine gives you energy and confidence. So does God. I believe that people who take drugs and drink are actually trying to fill needs that are unfulfilled because they don’t know God.

Drugs and drink come with remorse and side effects. God does not.

The climber/tourists in the documentary talked about the wonder of their time on Everest. The stars were richer and brighter than they are down below. The views were awe-inspiring. Beck Weathers said he suffered from depression, but the exertion of mountain climbing took his mind off of it. To sum up, they talked about psychological effects they considered worth the danger, suffering, and expense. If God had been allowed to fill their needs, would they have needed to spend huge sums and risk their lives in order to feel good?

Weathers now says he has peace, for the first time in his life. He has a skin-graft nose, no right hand, and a “mitt” made by separating the bones of his left hand into makeshift fingers, but now he finally feels good. What if all that was unnecessary? What if peace was available in the safety of his house, and it was a type of peace he could help his family receive, instead of a solitary peace that helps no one but him?

I believe Everest climbers, like other daredevils, manufacture crises so they can enjoy the distraction of solving them. They want to have a sense of mission, and their lives don’t provide it, so off to Nepal they go, and some of them stay there and become landmarks. To me, they’re like base jumpers. They think people should admire them, especially when their worst fears come true. Mountain climbers, base jumpers, and skydivers generally expect admiration. I don’t admire them at all. I think they’re deceived.

I would love to climb mountains. Little ones. With paths and guard rails. Big ones littered with dead bodies, you can keep. I don’t have the slightest craving for a sense of mission.

Here’s another thing that bugged me: on the way to the climb, the tourist/climbers in the movie were “blessed” by a buddhist bigwig in a temple. You couldn’t get me near that. Tibetan Buddhism is plain old demon worship. It is said that back when World War Two was getting underway, a Buddhist monk told a Westerner a thousand of his “gods” had just left for Germany. They pray to spirits. They conjure them in chanting ceremonies. If the thing about being “blessed” is accurate, people who climb Everest begin the process by spitting in the face of God, who is the only one who can protect them. One wonders if the paganism is connected to the death rate.

I can guess what goes through the minds of most Westerners at the temple. First alternative: “Yes, yes, namaste, I agree that Eastern religion is superior to boring old Christianity even though Tibetans and Indians live in squalor and humiliation.” Second alternative: “Blah, blah, you’re so cute in your monk hat, you primitive, superstitious goofball. This will look great on Snapchat.”

I just found out people have literally Snapchatted their Everest climbs. That officially kills the romance.

I once heard that a member of my high school class had died on Mount Everest. That was not correct. I later learned he died on Shishapangma, which is the smallest and least challenging of the worlds 14 tallest peaks. Here’s what I know: there were experienced climbers present, but no Sherpas and no oxygen. The man who died went off and climbed without help. He fell into a crevasse. The idea seemed to be that he ditched the people who protected him because he had something to prove. I don’t know whether that’s true. Maybe the person who told me the story slanted things; he got the name of the mountain wrong, and he said there was a Sherpa.

The story is sad and chilling. A person who was close to him said they never found anything except his belongings, so he is still up there. I wonder what he went through. Was he killed instantly, or did he die of exposure and thirst? I hate to think he might have been trapped there, watching the filtered sunlight appear and disappear over the course of however many days it took to stop his heart.

For many people, Himalayan climbing is about bragging rights. I hope he didn’t extinguish himself trying to generate a story about the way he disdained help.

I learned some other interesting things about Everest. Here’s one: there’s a whole lot of poop up there. The lowest base camp has disgusting latrines, but once you start climbing, accepted practice is to walk away from the group, poop on the snow, and cover it. The poop freezes in a hurry, and then it’s just there. When the temperature fluctuates, it melts. Some of it gets into the groundwater. When new climber/tourists show up and drink tea made with the pure snow of Mother Everest, they’re really drinking poop soup. There aren’t a whole lot of paths to the peak, tourists in Asia often get diarrhea, and almost 8,000 people have summitted, so imagine how much poop there must be.

It must be a lot of fun pooping in plain sight, while the other tourists slog by.

The movies and shows don’t seem to focus on toilet issues. They’re too busy promoting the glamor.

Everest also has a litter problem. People leave their wrappers and cans all over the ground. Nasty. The peak itself has a litter problem. Climber/tourists with a graffitti mentality leave all sorts of junk up there, because, dude, it has, like, meaning to them.

It’s not easy to clean up a place that ranges in elevation from 17,000 to 29,000 feet, and besides, no one really wants to do it. Everest probably attracts a lot of narcissists who aren’t all that interested in the grunt work.

I would hate to go there even as a visitor, now that it’s a vertical cess-sicle. I don’t even like to use public restrooms. Everest would just be too much.

Warm, dirty places are better than cold, dirty places, because in a cold place, filth is preserved forever.

I learned one more thing you may find interesting. When you freeze your hand or foot off on Mount Everest, you don’t actually freeze it off. It turns red, then black, and then you have to keep it for a couple of months even though it’s dead. When it comes to frostbite, doctors say, “Frozen in January, amputate in July.” It’s impossible to tell how much tissue has to go until the rot process is over.

Imagine what it must be like to have one to four black, rotting extremities for a number of weeks. Think how that must affect your quality of life. Every day you’d be sitting there looking at the catastrophic results of the dumbest decision you ever made, and you wouldn’t have closure. Having a hand cut off instantly would be terrible, but I’d prefer that to having a dead black hand in front of me every day until spring came.

Big mountains are very cool, but I wouldn’t put Everest on my bucket list even if I had one. If you have to risk your life and suffer greatly in order to get your mind right, you are on the wrong path, and you need to turn back and look for a better one.

More

I have been thinking about the guy who died on Shishapangma. I have been under the impression that the accident was caused by overconfidence, but maybe it was something worse.

Let me call the decedent “George” in order to have something to call him, other than his real name.

The high school George and I attended was a prestigious prep school. Every year, a lot of graduates went to Ivy League schools, as I did. The year we graduated, if memory serves, two students were accepted by Princeton. One was a friend of mine who got his MD at 25 and then shot himself in the head with a Desert Eagle. The other was George. He was admitted early.

George never went to Princeton.

One day during our senior year, everyone had to walk out of school and out to our designated fire drill areas. Someone had called in a bomb scare. Exams were in session, and the test interrupted them.

Our school had a pay phone near the library entrance. On the day of the bomb scare, another guy I knew picked up the phone to use it, and there was already someone on the line. It was the police. They asked if anyone had just used the phone. The student identified George. That’s how I heard it, anyway.

George threatened to bomb the school because he was worried about an exam. He didn’t go to prison, which is surprising, but Princeton dropped him, and he ended up going to Wesleyan, which is on a lower tier.

He would have been about 33 on the day he died. He was still in school. He had decided to be a doctor. His undergrad degree was in some useless liberal arts discipline, so he had to go back and take math and science courses.

Life had not panned out for George. He had started life as a good student and a top athlete who won recognition all over his state, and then there had been the bomb scare and the fall from grace. I don’t know what he was doing between Wesleyan and his medical conversion, but he was not a professional, and a person who wrote about his death said he had been in the process of turning his life around. You don’t turn your life around when things are going well.

After George disappeared, supposedly, all they found were his trekking poles, his sunglasses, his backpack, and his journal.

Here’s what I wonder: what if the fall wasn’t an accident?

Why would you walk around alone in an area where there were crevasses? Why would you put down your poles? Why would you take off your sunglasses and backpack? If you simply fell, those things would probably go with you.

It’s a disturbing thought, but I can’t help wondering.

Many people botch their suicides. They shoot off the bottom halves of their faces. They break their backs in jumps from buildings. Jumping into an ice crevasse, sustaining nonfatal injuries, and then dying over a period of days or hours would be a horrible way to go.

I didn’t know George well, but I knew him a little. We sat in classes together for four years. We knew each other socially; there were only about a hundred kids in our class. He didn’t seem like a happy person at all. My school was full of kids who were driven and incapable of relaxing, and he seemed like one of them.

The other Princeton student, Ken, was the most driven person I had ever known. He was way up in the class rankings. Like George, he was also an athlete. He left Princeton to join a 5-year, 2-degree program at the University of Florida. Who leaves Princeton? That’s how impatient he was.

His dad was an overbearing, pushy radiologist. Nothing Ken ever did was good enough for him. When he died, his estate was a mess, and Ken and his crazy brother were left to fight over it. He left hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash in a wall in their house, and one day Ken saw that it had disappeared. He called his dad’s lawyer, who had known about the money, and the lawyer said, “What money?” Ken told me he thought the lawyer had worked something out with his brother.

One night, Ken’s brother ran him out of the house, shooting at his legs with a .357. Ken was in the shower when his brother started shooting, and he fled the house naked. Ken filed a bar complaint against the lawyer and found a new place to live. He claimed the lawyer called him and begged him to call the bar off.

Ken used to spend almost every afternoon at my house. He just wanted a place to hang out and be less alone.

He bought a Smith and Wesson 9mm and a Desert Eagle .44 Magnum. He said he wanted protection from his brother. We used to go to the range together.

One day in 1987, one of his other friends called and asked me when was the last time I had seen Ken. I told him, and I asked why he wanted to know. He said Ken had shot himself to death with the Desert Eagle.

The last time I had seen him, he had been angry at me over something trivial. Ken was extremely aggressive, and he always wanted to do things the quick and easy way. For example, when he went lobster diving in Biscayne Bay, he would tear short (illegal) lobsters in half in the water and throw the tails in the boat. He did that to keep his friends from throwing them back in the water.

The last time I saw him, we were driving around, and he wanted me to break some rule or other. Maybe a traffic rule. I can’t remember. When he got out of the car, he said, “You’re such an a_____e.” It didn’t mean anything. He had a hot temper.

I never thought he would kill himself. He was miserable, but he never seemed inclined to end it.

I didn’t go to the funeral. I don’t know if there was one. If there had been, I probably would have waited for an invitation. I didn’t know much about funerals at that age. Maybe there was a service, and people thought I was a jerk for not going. Ken was Jewish, though, so he would have been buried fast. I didn’t hear about his death until days later.

He was a medical doctor at 25, and he thought he was a failure. He said he could hear his father laughing at him from beyond the grave. There was a rich Mexican kid in our class, and his name was Eduardo. His family was Jewish, too, and his dad was rumored to be worth something like 300 million dollars. Eduardo used to put Ken down, telling him he would never be as rich as Eduardo. That actually bothered Ken. It would have meant nothing at all to me. It seemed like the Jewish kids felt they had to prove things to each other.

He was not programmed for happiness or longevity.

There were a lot of unhappy rich kids at that school. One of them, a guy named Barry Adler, picked a friend up at Miami International for a drug deal. The friend had a suitcase full of money. Adler reached around from the back seat, slit his throat, and stabbed him 33 times. He went to prison, got out early for good behavior, and was shot in the head in the parking lot of a Lum’s restaurant. He was only free for five months. The kid he stabbed came from a rich family, and they were surely unhappy about his release. People wondered if they had a hand in his killing.

I remember throwing a paper wad at Barry when we were in Algebra II together (he was two years older than I was). He gave me a very angry look. It wasn’t until he was convicted of murder that I realized what was behind that look.

Then there was Marty Kogan. He was in the class after mine. He always seemed to think he was playing people. He generally appeared to feel he was one step ahead of everyone else, but I don’t think he ever was. One day in 1984, he rented a boat on Miami Beach, and later on, it was found off the coast, empty, with his brains splattered on it. People assumed he had gone out there to make a drug deal, but if the facts ever came out, I don’t know what they are. He bought a pistol the day before. Why would you buy a pistol the day before you take a rented boat out to the gulf stream, alone, in 1984 Miami? Something to consider.

The boat was found circling with a rope on the helm. Why would you put a rope on a boat’s helm? How is that consistent with a drug deal or suicide? I don’t know. If he was murdered, as people believe, someone would have had to be on the boat with him. You can’t shoot someone from any distance on a rocking boat. But why would they tie down the wheel before jumping off?

Why would you take a boat out in order to kill yourself? That doesn’t make any sense. You can kill yourself anywhere. It must have been murder.

I don’t know why I’m thinking about these things.

My school was full of kids who had extraordinary advantages, but they didn’t know God, and they generally weren’t at peace. Maybe that’s not surprising. The school was half Jewish, and Jews are the most restless people on earth. You would think they would work harder on securing a homeland. Maybe if you’ve never lived in your homeland, you don’t know what it is that’s eating you.

George, Barry, Marty, and Ken were all Jewish.

It’s funny how things work out for people. A bright start is no guarantee of a happy ending.

I hope George did not suffer.

Brave Leftist Firebrand Not Punished by Leftist Network

I have more than one thing to talk about today, so I plan to ramble and digress. This will be a major shock to people who have been reading this blog for a while.

I hate to follow with another shock, but here it is: Stephen Colbert, the late night host who used broadcast TV to direct obscene insults at the president of the United States, is NOT in trouble with his network. I repeat, he is NOT in trouble. He has not been fired. He has not been suspended. The FCC is not up in arms. There have been no marches.

I don’t know about you, but I’m floored. The left’s impeccable history of “fair-mindedness” (a term Colbert likes) and willingness to police itself has been tarnished. Boycott Colbert! Boycott CBS! Boycott everything! Because if we do that, we know they’ll admit fault and do the right thing.

Yes. That will happen.

Made myself laugh.

Evil is predictable. The more evil is tolerated, the more predictable it gets, because people stop trying to be subtle. They don’t care if they get caught.

Colbert is, of course, highly apologetic. He apologized by making gloating jokes about how he was “still the host.” He also said it was fair to insult Trump, because Colbert’s weapons were jokes and Trump has the nuclear launch codes.

Again, I think Colbert is writing his own material. Maybe this is a good thing. If his head gets big enough, maybe he’ll can his capable writers and insist on using his own jokes until his ratings reach Chevy Chase levels.

In case he reads this blog, I’m going to provide some useful information. Under current laws, and perhaps tragically, the president can’t actually nuke comedians. Nuclear weapons, to paraphrase the late Graham Chapman, are what scientists call “very large.” If Trump nuked Colbert’s trillion-dollar penthouse, there would almost certainly be damage to neighboring apartments, in that the buildings containing them would be turned into hot plasma, along with much of the granite of the underlying island. That would never fly with most of the Joint Chiefs.

In a way, Colbert’s clumsy, ill-premised rationalization has increased my admiration for him. If he really believes he’s risking nuclear annihilation every time he made a Trump joke, he must be one of the bravest men alive. Think how relieved he would be to know he’s in the clear. Maybe he and Jon Stewart are serious about holing up in an off-grid cabin in an undisclosed location. If I were afraid my own president would scorch me like a gnat on a bug-zapper, I’d be hiding out, too.

He’s not really brave. You don’t have to be brave to parrot the beliefs of the people who let you keep your high-paying job. Dissent is the thing that takes courage. Charlton Heston was brave, and James Woods is brave. Colbert is hiding deep in the nurturing bulk of a like-minded and highly protective herd.

You don’t really need to prove it’s fair to criticize the president. Everyone already knew it was fair, and we have a Constitutional Amendment that makes it legal. I haven’t argued a Constitutional question before a judge in quite a while, but I think I’m on firm ground when I say that if Trump decided to nuke late night comedians, he would be barred by the left’s second-least-favorite amendment, i.e., the First.

No one questioned the fairness of insulting Trump. They questioned the willingness of a TV network to use public airwaves to broadcast schoolyard filth. Colbert knows fairness was never at issue. He just wants to steer the conversation into an alternate universe in which the dispute is one in which he isn’t clearly, indefensibly wrong.

Has anyone else noticed that Colbert and Trump are a lot alike? Neither one can acknowledge error. Both are thin-skinned. Both talk without thinking. Both have mammoth egos. They’re made for each other.

I said Colbert was not going to get in trouble, based on my knowledge of leftist hypocrisy, and of course, I was right. Here’s another thing I was apparently right about: it looks like Barack Obama is gay.

Stephen Colbert must be furious at him.

In a new biography by journalist David Garrow, it is claimed that a young Obama wrote of considering a homosexual liaison with college professor Lawrence Goldwyn. Note that the allegation isn’t that someone else said Obama was gay; it’s that Obama himself wrote about it.

Obama could not get into a good college on the first try, so before he transferred to Columbia College, where he became part of my class, he attended Occidental University. There he became close with Goldwyn. Here is a money quote from Garrow:

Three years later, Obama wrote somewhat elusively to his first intimate girlfriend that he had thought about and considered gayness, but ultimately had decided that a same-sex relationship would be less challenging and demanding than developing one with the opposite sex. . .

This is interesting for more than one reason.

Obama is the gay marriage president. In order to get himself elected, he lied and said he opposed gay marriage. When he realized revealing his true position couldn’t hurt him (Colbertian bravery!), he admitted he was for it. He then violated his oath of office by refusing to defend the Defense of Marriage Act. Now that we know he’s gay, who can be surprised?

The story is also interesting because there have always been rumors about Obama’s sexual orientation. People say he frequented gay sex clubs in Chicago, for example. After he became a presidential candidate, we didn’t hear much about that. Is that because the rumors weren’t true or because leftists wanted to hide the truth from the public?

Similarly, the Garrow biography, which is clearly unflattering in some regards, didn’t appear until Obama was out of office. Why is that? What if it had popped up in August of 2012? Things might be different today. Romney might have won, and we might be in the middle of his reign. It could have kept Trump out of the White House and helped prevent an atmosphere of leftist hatred and violence from arising so soon.

Did Garrow withhold the book in order to help Obama? What about his publisher? No, things like that don’t happen. No journalist or publisher would put the advancement of leftism above professional ethics. Ask Dan Rather.

I’m sure SJW’s are “correcting” people like me who assert that Obama is gay. They’ll say considering a homosexual relationship isn’t proof of homosexuality. Well, it is. A heterosexual would be repelled by the idea. It’s a desire that can’t arise in the heterosexual consciousness. It’s like hating liver and saying to yourself, “I think I may want to start eating liver.” A man who isn’t gay can’t be excited by the prospect of sex with other men. Obama may be bisexual, and people may say that’s not gay, but “gay” is part of “bisexual,” so…he’s gay. Unless Garrow made the letter up.

Obama is a minor figure now, so it probably doesn’t matter whether he’s popular or not, but I expect his popularity to increase now that he has been outed. Leftists will see him as a victim, and that’s something that always appeals to them. Gays will see him in a new and exciting way; he won’t be unattainable any more. One wonders if he’ll leap out of the closet on a talk show, to riotous applause. “Look how we fooled them.”

If Obama comes out on The Late Show, I assume Colbert will be gentle.

It’s hard for Obama to offend his fans. He took $400,000 for a short speech, which should have thrown his socialist minions into spasms of faux-ascetic outrage, but it blew over in a day. He might be able to upset them if he really tried, though. He could try going to a real church or getting a pistol permit.

He’s about to get $60 million for writing a book. I hope Bill Ayres does a good job. Last time around, Obama insulted the white grandmother who saved him from rejection and brought him up as her own, while praising the black bigamist deadbeat dad who abandoned him. I wonder if he can top that feat of betrayal, racism, and tone deafness.

The playing field is so slanted these days; one wonders if there is any point at all in registering to vote or speaking one’s views. The left owns entertainment and the press. A big percentage of Americans are now convinced that worshiping the God of love, who let himself be tortured to death for our sake, makes you an evil person. We can’t win any more. The machine is programmed to destroy us.

We think we won the presidential election, and we’re excited to see Republicans do well in state contests, but come on. Are the people in Congress really conservative or God-fearing? In 1960, they would have been considered leftist nuts. Trump, who lost the popular vote, is good on some issues but bad on others, and he may get so crazy he repeats George Bush’s sin: he may make people ashamed to vote for Republican presidents for a couple of election cycles. Most of the people we elect to state office are weak conservatives, and anyway, the states have no power. Centralized government is a reality, and eventually it will be written into law.

What we need is divine help. It would be nice if we had a few prominent preachers teaching us how to be powerful, but we don’t. The Pope teaches legalism mixed with paganism, and Catholicism is the biggest Christian denomination in America. Big-time Protestant ministries teach people God will make them rich if they send preachers money, and that doesn’t work. Almost no one is teaching real repentance, the baptism with the Holy Spirit, prayer in tongues, casting out spirits, or how to live in the presence of God. To make things worse, Christians angrily defend the wolves that eat their flesh and make them weak.

On a national level, things aren’t looking too good, except to the gullible, but individuals can still be saved. Until this mess wraps up, I plan to sit on the sidelines and enjoy the show as well as I can.

Colbert’s Talent Evaporates in Plume of Rage

How about that Stephen Colbert?

If you are blessedly ignorant of the current Colbert fracas, let me mess up your day by bringing you up to speed.

This week, Donald Trump got upset with CBS journalist (Is “CBS journalist” an oxymoron?) John Dickerson. During an interview, Dickerson asked Trump about his use of the terms “sick” and “bad” to describe former President (“Former”! YES!) Barack Obama. Trump refused to expound, telling Dickerson, “You can take it any way you want it.” Dickerson persisted, to the point of badgering, and Trump ended the interview and sat down.

Dickerson was somewhat disrespectful and a little rude. Trump was thin-skinned and impatient.

Colbert entered the picture later, during his own CBS show. I don’t know anything about John Dickerson, but Colbert seems to be intimately acquainted with the man’s work and character, because he said, “Donald Trump, John Dickerson is a fair-minded journalist and one of the most competent people who will ever walk into your office, and you treat him like that?”

Maybe Colbert knows something about John Dickerson which I do not. That would not be saying a lot, since I didn’t know who John Dickerson was until this week. Still, I sort of suspect Colbert barely knows who he is and simply took up for him because Trump cut him off.

One has to wonder what “fair-minded” means in the Colbert universe. He may think Ed Schultz is fair-minded.

Colbert was enraged by Trump’s behavior, so he decided to defend Dickerson during his own show’s monologue. This is where the story gets interesting. Ordinarily, Colbert does his job very well, but in riding to the rescue of John Dickerson, he unleashed a salvo of put-downs that weren’t funny or witty at all, and a couple were obscene.

Let’s see.

1. In a light-hearted dig, Trump called Dickerson’s program, Face the Nation, “Deface the Nation,” which was actually funny. Colbert said this: “Mr. President, I love your presidency, I call it ‘Disgrace The Nation.'”

That doesn’t work on any level. Trump’s presidency doesn’t have a title, because it’s not a TV show. Trump took a well-known phrase and put a new twist on it, which took a certain amount of wit. Colbert’s effort to turn the joke back on Trump sounded contrived and desperate. My guess: Colbert wrote this joke, and the others, himself.

2. Colbert said, “Let me introduce you to the Tiffany way. When you insult one member of the CBS family, you insult us all. Buzzinga.”

Tiffany is Trump’s apolitical daughter, who deserves to be left alone. Trump took a shot at a willing player in the political game, and Colbert made an ill-premised effort to put that player in the same out-of-bounds class as a girl who hasn’t bothered anyone. And what’s up with “buzzinga”? It sounded like Colbert was applauding himself. He might as well have said, “Oooh! Sick burn!” It’s as if he knew how weak the jab was, and he was trying to convince the audience he believed in it. If a line of dialogue is bad, you don’t throw your weight behind it. You cross it out and write something else. Right?

3. “You’re not the POTUS; you’re the BLOTUS.”

What’s that supposed to mean? Is he calling Trump fat? Is it suddenly okay for leftists to make fun of fat people? Is he going after Lena Dunham or Hillary Clinton next? Trump looks great for a man his age. If “Trump is fat” is now, as the hipsters like to put it, “a thing,” I haven’t heard about it.

4. “You’re the glutton with the button.”

What??? Does he mean the nuclear button? Is he accusing Trump of being unfit to be in charge of nuclear weapons because he eats too much? Does Trump even have a reputation for eating too much? This joke did about as well as North Korea’s last missile test.

5. “You’re a regular Gorge Washington.”

I can’t explain this one at all, except that again, it seems to be a fat joke. Like the ones Colbert hurled at Al Gore when he was pushing 300 pounds. Remember that? No? Hmm.

6. “You’re the Presi-dunce.”

Did he write that while he was walking to his mark? This is the kind of joke I would expect to see in sample material sent to Colbert’s show by wannabee writers who will never, ever break out of their jobs at Ikea and Starbucks. “Dear ___: While we thank you for your application, we regret to inform you…”

7. “You’re turning into a real p____-tator.”

“P____” is a bad word used to describe male genitalia. At this point, I have to wonder if Colbert was deliberately making terrible jokes in order to parody Trump’s efforts. I don’t think that’s true, though, because when Colbert imitated O’Reilly, he used good material. A more likely explanation is that Colbert was ad-libbing, which, apparently, he can’t.

Also, has Colbert gone all Colonel Kurtz on us? Does he think he owns his show? He doesn’t. He’s a CBS employee. Someone up high probably reminded him of that the day after his Trump spasm.

8. “You attract more skinheads than free Rogaine.”

It’s hard to believe this one got out of his mouth. I will say what everyone else in America is already thinking: skinheads aren’t bald because they lost their hair. They shave their heads, Steve. They want to be bald. Come on. Why would a person who shaves his head want Rogaine? It’s like saying a black man who straightens his hair wants curlers.

Maybe Colbert thinks Nazism is the result of bitterness due to social rejection caused by hair loss.

9. “You have more people marching against you than cancer.”

Is marching for cancer…”a thing”? I know there are walkathons and so on, but I don’t believe cancer draws actual protesters, due to the fact that cancer is a disease, not a social injustice. When you protest, cancer can’t see you. It doesn’t care about poll numbers. Again, I picture distraught writers trying to tackle Colbert as he walked out into the lights armed with these bombs. This crap reflects on them.

10. “You talk like a sign-language gorilla who got hit in the head.”

Sign-language gorillas don’t talk. They use sign language. I’m pretty sure. And if they could talk, hitting one in the head wouldn’t make him cocky or touchy, like our President. It would cause him to lose speech function. Perhaps Colbert is saying Trump sounds like he’s handicapped. I don’t really know what he’s saying, though. His potatoes came out of the oven before they were done.

11. “The only thing your mouth is good for is being Vladimir Putin’s c___-holster.”

Again, Colbert uses a word meaning male sexual organ. This one is the cherry on the cake. It was Colbert’s utterly astonishing MOAB. It’s fitting that it came last, because it’s the one most worthy of discussion.

First of all, you said this on broadcast television, with kids watching (Yes, kids do watch late night shows.) After the fits leftists have had over mild expletives and so on from conservatives, you pulled this out? How could any talk show host with a gig hundreds of people would happily do just as well for less money say a thing like this? And Colbert is supposedly a Catholic Sunday school teacher. I wonder what he’ll teach this weekend. Does his church have him on a seven-second delay?

Apart from that, once more…not clever. This is the kind of thing little kids say after schoolyard fights. CBS shouldn’t pay a grown man to come up with lines like this. And where did you get the idea Trump is Putin’s friend? Have you heard of Syria? Do I have to explain that? Oh, wait. I forgot. The RUSSIA CONSPIRACY, which even Julian Assange denies. It’s the birtherism of the modern left. Assange denied it. Syria blew it apart. No matter. At CBS, it’s still dogma.

People are calling for Colbert’s dismissal. Not me. He should be fired, but I’m not calling for it, because I don’t care. I’m not all that angry, either. Mainly, I’m disturbed that a mainstream TV host thought it was okay to say these things, that his network only responded much later (weakly), and that many Americans think he deserves an award.

People criticize slippery slope theories, but they accurately describe the way societies work. Conservatives say convenience abortion will lead to infanticide. Leftists laugh. But it happened in China, and it also happened in Kermit Gosnell’s office and in the offices of other providers who haven’t been caught. There are now respected liberal pundits who say we should be allowed to kill babies after delivery. Most people thought it was fine when the cops arrested Robert Mitchum for smoking weed. Now you can smoke in a parade. We used to think tattoos were trashy. They caught on, and now “body modification” enthusiasts split their sex organs down the middle, cut their noses off, remove their cheeks, and dye their eyeballs black. Limb amputations will eventually follow (Fifty cents says they already have…let’s check…yes, at least 17 years ago.) People with traditional values were upset when Jack Paar used the phrase “water closet” on The Tonight Show in 1960. Now Stephen Colbert is accusing the President of performing oral sex on the ruler of Russia, and many of us approve.

Look at us.

I’m sure people think I’m nuts when I say America is now insane, and that it’s not a big moral jump to a time when murdering Christians and observant Jews in the street will be considered God’s work, but every day, the news proves how extreme we’ve gotten. Alternative righteousness keeps rising, and Christianity, increasingly, is portrayed as not merely wrong, but evil.

Colbert and his mentor, Jon Stewart, have a big time making fun of people who believe the end of this age is coming. Generally, they have pretended the axe they were grinding was political, but a few years ago, it became obvious that their real target was Christianity. They appeared at a march in Washington and said attendees were there for “a good time, not the end times.” They now have a running gag in which they share a prepper cabin out in the woods.

It’s like they’re making fun of Noah. Has anyone else caught that?

Noah took decades to finish the ark, in a world that had never seen rain. His neighbors thought he had lost his mind. They became increasingly gross and cruel. Surely, in that progressive atmosphere, he was ridiculed around the clock.

Then it started raining.

What did Jesus tell us? He said he would return in a period that was like the days of Noah and the days of Lot. Noah and Lot were good men who were delivered from places that underwent destruction. They were surrounded by people who thought they were crazy. Lot’s gay neighbors probably thought he was doing evil when he begged them not to rape the angels. Look how much our times look like those times.

We can’t take America back. I like the MAGA hats, but I’m not dumb enough to think they’re going to fix things. We will continue to deteriorate and coarsen. Colbert and Stewart are going to win. I’m not going to get agitated about it and go to rallies and get beaten up by warm, loving leftists. None of that stuff is going to work.

It’s disturbing to see the ship sink, isn’t it? America has never known a time like this. In the past, the pendulum would swing toward insanity, and then it would swing back. Now the swings toward sanity are getting shorter.

Jesus said the world would have birth pangs before his return, and I think I’ve misunderstood that. I thought he meant his return was a kind of birth, and that the pangs were for him. That’s wrong! They’re the birth pangs of the Beast. That’s the natural/supernatural cyborg which is about to spring onto the scene in glory and power. Jesus comes later.

We had the disgraceful Sixties, and then we sobered up a little. Then we had the politically correct Eighties, and then we realized we were deluded, and we started making fun of the term “politically correct.” Now PC is back, and it’s not going away. That’s how birth pangs work. They start off small, and then they get worse. Then the baby comes.

Even Colbert is getting a taste of the back of the Beast’s hand. Certain liberals are criticizing him because his remarks about Trump and Putin are anti-gay. They have a point. If Colbert really thought it was good for one man to have sex with another, why use a reference to oral sex as an insult? I assume that wasn’t how Colbert saw it when he was writing that “joke” in the makeup chair, but maybe he was, and anyway, it doesn’t matter. When it comes to PC, appearance is everything and intention is nothing. Guilt isn’t something you have to prove. It’s a premise. Like global warming.

If CBS doesn’t fire Colbert, it will be a stunning proof of the left’s hypocrisy. I don’t think it will serve any purpose, however. If you don’t know the left is crazy by now, Colbert’s survival won’t wake you up.

Colbert, a successor who is even worse…what does it matter? People come and go, but the spirits that control them are immortal and persistent. Madonna is washed up and wrinkled, but we have Lady Gaga. Before Madonna, we had Marilyn Monroe. New houses. Same owners.

How weird are things going to get before the end? If the mothership isn’t here by now, I hate to think what life will be like when it finally arrives.

To sum up, I guess, I will say this: it’s never about politics. It’s always about God and Satan. I’m glad conservatives won some important offices, but the ship is not going to stop sinking. We shouldn’t mistake temporary reprieves for victories.

I wonder what will happen next. I predict this: Colbert will not be disciplined in any real sense, and the reason is simply that conservatives want him to be disciplined.

Maybe we should beg the network to keep him.

More

I found out what “buzzinga” means, and I corrected the spelling. “Buzzinga” is a word used by a character on a TV show I don’t watch (CBS; need I explain?) The Big Bang Theory has a character named Sheldon, and he makes bad jokes. Evidently, once in a while he says “Buzzinga!” to celebrate the success of a joke which actually failed.

I still can’t figure out why Colbert said it, unless he was deliberately being unfunny and wanted hipsters to know it. But I don’t think that was the idea, since he seemed genuinely pleased with his lame jokes.

I also found out what “the Tiffany way” means. CBS calls itself “the Tiffany network,” so, assuming I have my universal translator set correctly, I believe Colbert was saying CBS has coopted the motto of the Hell’s Angels: “All on one and one on all,” which means that if you’re say, Hunter Thompson, and your attitude annoys one gang member, they all stomp you into the floor of a bar.

Hope my lack of hipness hasn’t utterly ruined my credibility.

Still waiting for an explanation of “BLOTUS.”

Be Your Own God, Because Obviously, You’re Qualified

The other day I wrote about writer/director Joss Whedon and TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome). Over the last few days, I have thought some more about Whedon. I’m wondering if I overestimated his talent.

Back in the Buffy days, I got very wrapped up in Whedon’s work. I enjoyed Buffy because it was funny and clever, and because the series was about redemption. Offhand, I can think of two major characters who were redeemed.

The first character who got redemption was Angel, the vampire with a soul. Christians believe the soul is the mind and personality. Many people who are not Christians see it differently. They see the soul as a mysterious warm presence inside people that makes them good. I guess that would make empathy and conscience the soul.

In the Buffy realm, known to fans as the Buffyverse, vampires have minds but no souls. That means they’re psychopaths and narcissists. They love making other creatures suffer, and they’re very conceited. Angel lost his soul when he became a vampire, but then he bit a gypsy, and some other gypsy cursed him by sending his soul back into him. This was bad news for Angel, at least in the short term, because he suddenly found himself crushed under the weight of his extraordinary guilt. You can’t spend centuries torturing people and drinking their blood without having a few things to regret.

In the Buffyverse, Angel was a sweet guy. He was exactly what shallow women dream of: a tall, handsome, well-dressed guy who is very evil yet has a sensitive side. I always call guys like this “sensitive pirates.” You see them on the covers of romance novels. I’ve actually looked inside romance novels, because someone I knew left them lying around, and the heroes are pretty hilarious. It’s always some guy with a name like Jake or Lance, and he’s a pirate or a vampire or something. He kills lots of people and maybe steals things and commits arson, but after he captures the novel’s heroine and rapes her for a while, she finds out he’s really just a big teddy bear.

One of the big problems shallow women have is that they want alpha males with beta male hearts, or rather, they want men who are alpha to the world and beta to their wives. They want men who are cruel and mean to other people, yet warm and cuddly to their women. Of course, life does not work that way. If you’re an alpha male’s wife, you’re beta, at best. You may even be gamma or epsilon. Look at Nicole Brown Simpson. To an alpha male, the wife is an extension of himself. When some kind of schism occurs–for example, when Mr. Alpha starts seeing wrinkles and tiny hairs appear on Mrs. Alpha’s aging face–Mrs. Alpha loses her extension status and becomes other. Then she gets the same harsh treatment she used to enjoy seeing Mr. Alpha inflict on others.

In any case, Angel was your typical sensitive pirate. It was like Anne Rice had a baby with Barbara Cartland.

The other character who was redeemed was Spike. This was the character I liked. Spike was a wimp before he became a vampire. He was the king of the friend zone. Women saw him as a person who could keep them company while they waited for alphas to show up and run him off. He wrote drippy poetry.

Vampire Spike, unlike Fabio–I mean Angel–had no soul. He got great joy from cruelty, and he made all sorts of funny remarks while he was engaged in it. He really hated Buffy. Of course, he ended up falling in love with her. Somehow, in the process, he developed a soul. The writers never said he had one, but he had empathy and love. He was self-sacrificing. He went through indescribable tortures to make himself worthy of his new love. Buffy never really accepted him, but she did become attracted to him, and she eventually fell prey to his charms. They had sex, and on TV, that means true romance.

I enjoyed watching the Spike/Buffy mess evolve, and I thought it was the thing that kept the show alive. It was very unusual to see the themes of sacrifice and redemption in a TV show. I figured all the other people who watched were caught up in it, too. Then I read some message board stuff from fans, and boy, was I surprised. These little nerds hated the romantic aspect of the show. They blamed a writer named Marni Nixon. Apparently, all they want to see was Buffy stabbing demons with swords and pieces of wood. They wanted Whedon to take the reins and pour on the violence.

I was highly disappointed in the fans. You have to be seriously stunted in the emotions department to prefer choreographed vampire fights to a love story based on self-sacrifice and redemption. I guess the fans were missing some vital parts. There was something lacking in them.

It’s hard to empathize with someone that empty and juvenile.

I loved seeing the series develop. In creating episodes, the creative team reached back to prior seasons and episodes, grabbed loose threads, and wove them back into the action. It was neat. I assumed Whedon was the brains behind this, and that he was propelling the Spike story.

In retrospect, I wonder about all that. I think I probably gave Whedon too much credit.

The first Buffy movie was bad. It wasn’t just okay. It was bad. It was shallow. It wasn’t funny. It was Whedon’s baby. If Whedon is so great, why was the movie such an empty bag?

Whedon has co-written good movies, but how has he done on his own? Alien Resurrection was very bad. Serenity was good but not great, and I probably like it more than I should because I’m a fan of the TV show. He rewrote Captain America, which wasn’t very good. He rewrote Thor: the Dark World, which was bad. He wrote two pictures called The Cabin in the Woods and In Your Eyes. Since these movies barely existed at the box office, I assume the worst. He wrote Avengers: Age of Ultron, which was okay, but it’s horrible compared to any of the Iron Man movies.

Whedon didn’t write all of the Buffy episodes. He had a team. I believe I mistook their ability for his. Also, it’s possible to see yourself in other people’s work. It’s possible for a shallow work to give you deep thoughts. When that happens, you tend to credit the writer when in reality, the thoughts his work inspired in you were “happy accidents,” like extraneous trees in a Bob Ross painting.

Actors who have done very good work in Whedon projects have generally gone on to languish in D-list obscurity. Look at Sarah Michelle Gellar, Charisma Carpenter, James Marsden, Nathan Fillion, Adam Baldwin, and Andy Hallett. I used to think the reason they didn’t go on to bigger things was that they didn’t really have much talent. I thought Whedon made them look good, and when Whedon was removed from the mix, they faltered. Here’s what I’m thinking now: maybe Whedon’s writing team made Whedon look good. Maybe I should have extended my theory to Whedon himself.

Interesting question.

I read some very depressing stuff about Whedon. Someone asked him if there was a God, and he said, “Absolutely not. That’s a very important and necessary thing to learn.” That’s a seriously typical bit of Whedon shtick. Say something to put people on edge, and then double down for shock value. Unfortunately, if you keep shooting for shock long enough, it stops being shocking and turns into exactly the kind of boring work you thought you had transcended.

Whedon denies having anything against Christians, but in another interview, he adapted a term from writer Tim Minear and referred to God as “The Sky Bully.” Does that sound hostile to you? It does to me. Whedon feels hostility toward the God he does not believe in, so how can he not be hostile to people who praise God and Christianity, especially when we tend to be part of the political faction he hates with burning, irrational, hysterical fervor?

Atheists say they don’t believe in God, but in my experience, they have generally turned out to be people who think God might exist, yet who punish him with rejection because they disapprove of him. “God says I can’t be gay? God does not exist.” “God says I can’t have an abortion? God does not exist.” “God says Uncle Fred is in hell because he rejected Jesus? God does not exist.” Every so often, you meet an atheist who isn’t angry at some sort of straw God, but it’s rare.

It’s disturbing that Whedon says it’s important and necessary to learn that God doesn’t exist. It shows he thinks belief in God is evil. People who hate God aren’t just trying to do bad things, like murder and stealing. They’re trying to create an alternative righteousness, and in the scheme of alternative righteousness, God’s righteousness is the lowest evil there is.

A lot of people (Christians included) believe that as long as a person is nice, that person goes to heaven or something like it. Many Christians have turned Christianity into a game. You score enough “nice” points, and God takes you to heaven when you die, and you get a McMansion. This idea has infected Christianity, and anti-Christians, eager to come up with anything that serves as a replacement for devotion to God, have taken it up as a cause. They are constantly deriding Christians for not being nice, and they praise anti-Christians who ooze warmth and approval.

There are a lot of problems with this philosophy. For one thing, God is not that nice. Since I sat down to type this, he has put a number of people in hell, a place he himself created. The Bible says the damned experience the wrath of God. Satan isn’t the one who installed the heating system. God burned the Sodomites alive. God killed Pharaoh’s baby son. When God is nice, no one can be nicer, but when he’s not nice, he is still righteous.

If you look at the left these days, you’ll see a lot of people accusing Christians of hate, and they apply the word “love” to themselves over and over. When they show up to beat unarmed Trump supporters at rallies, they say, “Love trumps hate.” They have a very funny definition of love. If you comply, you get hugs and kisses. If you disagree, you get a bottle in the face, or they close down your bakery.

It’s funny; they hate God because he’s nice when you obey and harsh when you don’t, but look at them: they’re the same way. Look how they treat people who doubt the global warming religion. Not much love there. They want to get them fired and put them in jail.

Jewish legend says that when Satan and his pals came to the earth and had sex with women, screwing up creation, they went to God first, asking permission. They wanted to come down and help us behave better and please God more. God supposedly told them they would be even worse than humanity. If the story is true, you can see that God was right. It would certainly be consistent with similar stories in the Bible. Many of the worst crimes against God were committed in the name of alternative righteousness.

Aaron’s sons got in trouble for serving God incorrectly; they brought strange fire to the altar. Saul got in trouble for serving God incorrectly; he performed sacrifices even though he wasn’t a priest. The people who sacrificed their children to Moloch were just trying to get protection and success for themselves and their families. Peter thought he was serving God when he opposed God’s plan to send Jesus to the cross. Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit because they wanted to be wise, not because they wanted to do mean or dishonest things. Alternative righteousness shines like fool’s gold, but it isn’t righteousness at all. It’s just gilded evil.

Now people like Joss Whedon are continuing the tradition of correcting God. That’s not going to end well. It’s why persecution is increasing. In the end, the people who murder us in the streets will be sure they’re doing it out of love for humanity, just as the Nazis sincerely believed they were improving the world by murdering Jews.

Everyone thinks they can improve on God’s plan. I’ve tried it myself too many times to count. It’s the worst kind of pride. A human being is about 50% better than a monkey, and we think we can correct the being that created the universe.

God is not a sky bully. A person who discourages you from doing stupid things is not a bully. If you see him that way, you have self-destructive authority issues. My sister used to think my dad was a bully because he spanked her, and she never got past that. She ended up in the gutter because of that attitude. Unfortunately for many Hollywood celebrities, they’re not in the gutter. The devil pampers them and tells them they’re wonderful. He says they’re exceptional, and that their superiority is the root of their crazy success. They believe it, because believing it feels good. A junkie in the street is better off than a deluded film star or director who believes life is a meritocracy with him or herself at the apex.

It’s strange that people who play make-believe for a living can think highly of themselves. What a perverse world this is. Performers and fans get confused, and they start thinking entertainers are what they pretend to me when they amuse us. They’re not higher beings. Superman ended up in a wheelchair, and Elvis died on the floor next to a toilet.

All over America, there are Joss Whedons, Madonnas, George Clooneys, and Angelina Jolies working at Dairy Queens and Home Depots. Maybe one in 10,000 gets the nod from Satan and becomes famous. The rest live in frustration and obscurity. Many never quit, because they think perseverance is the key. They keep putting nickels in a slot machine that will never pay off. Satan runs a pyramid scheme, and pyramids are narrow at the top. God, on the other hand, is willing to give his best to anyone. We’re just not excited about seeking it. It’s not shiny enough to be interesting until you get very close to it.

Alternative righteousness is coming to get us. We should see it for what it is and refuse to become part of it. To accept it is to deny God.