Take Charge

Time to get back to writing about God.

I had a big development during the last few days. I’m always learning things about God, and when I apply them, things happen. Sometimes I learn things and then I forget them and learn other things. Then God reminds me of the things I forgot, and I apply them along with the new things. That creates a synergy, so I’m better off than before. It’s better to do several things right than one thing.

A few years back, I noticed that people in the Bible gave commands to their minds and spirits. They spoke to them as though they were servants. You can see this in the psalms. The authors will command their souls to do this or that. I believe the soul is the conscious mind. Also, the Bible says the spirits of prophets are subject to them, and Jesus sent his spirit to God when he died, implying he had authority over it.

I have started commanding my spirit when I pray. I command it to believe, to submit to God, to love, to forgive, and so on. The results are startling. I feel movement inside me. I hear groans coming from within me. It’s very strange. It’s overwhelming.

I find that it works. I have much more control over what I think about and what I feel. Since I’ve been doing it, things have gone more smoothly for me. It seems that I dont have to exert much effort in my natural strength, as long as I cover the bases in the supernatural.

That makes sense to me, because the most blessed people in the Bible were not hard workers. The Bible doesn’t say Abraham was rewarded for his hard work. He was rewarded for faith. When Moses started working hard, it was not perceived as something to admire; it was a problem. God gave him helpers to fix it. Joseph wasn’t put in charge of Egypt because of hard work. His relationship with God did it. You can find example after example in the Bible, but you will never find anyone who won God’s favor by striving.

Over and over, in the Bible, hard work is equated with servitude and defeat. It was part of Adam’s curse. Samson was cursed with hard work. Esau’s sons were cursed with servitude. So were Canaan’s descendants. Freedom from hard work is shown as a blessing. One of the nicest things God promised people was that they would live in houses other people built and have wealth other people accumulated.

Some extremely odd and unlikely things have happened to me lately. Walls I thought would never come down crumbled so fast my biggest problem was adjusting. It’s hard to stay on your feet when you get a huge blessing.

I can give you some examples. Excuse me if I repeat things I’ve mentioned before.

Several years ago, I made a deal with my dad. I would not leave Miami without him, provided he bought a place somewhere else, big enough for both of us, and moved with me. All sorts of barriers rose up. We had problems with his real estate. We had to buy my sister out of the house he owned with her and renovate it. One contractor abandoned the job. The other was very slow and inept. The city held us up for months.

A few months back, my dad claimed he had never made any promise to me. I assume he forgot, due to his memory issues. I thought I was going to have to go alone and then have to deal with his problems and responsibilities from a long distance.

I don’t want to get into all the details, but since then, one by one, his objections have disappeared. I didn’t beg him or fight with him. His mind simply changed, overnight. He decided he would move, grudgingly. Then he decided he wanted to move, provided we got his Miami house renovated first, which was completely impractical. He started saying he couldn’t stand Miami any more. Then, very suddenly, he said we could buy a new place and move before fixing the house. On his own, he started feeling bad about making me work so hard to get this done.

I found places on the Internet. I thought small, because I didn’t want to shock him with a big expense. He asked if I was sure I didn’t want to get something nicer. He said I would inherit it, and if I got married I would want a nice place. I was amazed.

We looked at places in Marion County. The one I liked best seemed remote. I was concerned he might be bored. He was also concerned. He indicated he didn’t want to be so far out. I thought we would have to start looking again. Then out of the blue, he started saying he thought it was fine. He really liked it. He wasn’t worried about driving ten minutes to get to a drugstore or having a limited number of places to go to for lunch.

The game field keeps changing so fast I can’t steady myself well enough to plan firmly.

The place I’m considering has a 25-by-36-foot workshop with a concrete slab. It has never been used. It has a big three-car garage with a beautiful epoxy floor. It has ten acres of secluded, peaceful land. The shop contains a tractor, a bush hog, and a John Deere Gator that appear unused. It’s like someone prepared the place for me, knowing I was on the way.

Can I trust the blessings I’m getting? How do you cope with the change when you go from struggling and waiting to having things handed to you? I feel like one of the four lepers who looted the empty camp of the Syrians in 2 Kings 7. They must have looked around and said, “Is this really for us?”

I don’t know if I’ll get that place, but I’m getting out. That’s a done deal.

I feel very bad for the people I know from church. Just about all of them are stuck in the fake prosperity maelstrom. The Steve Munseys and Benny Hinns and Joel Osteens are bleeding them to death. They are either leaving church in disgust or staying and getting weaker and weaker. I wish everyone could come with me.

The things Jesus said about the crooked Jews of his time are true of Christian leaders today. They don’t know the way into the kingdom, and they keep other people out. They teach people poisonous garbage in order to turn them into slaves and get them to contribute obscene amounts of money, so the preachers can spend it on the kind of trinkets known to be appealing to common white trash.

In the battle for the Pacific, the Japanese came up with smart tactics. At first, they attacked Americans on the beaches of the islands they invaded. They sent waves of soldiers to charge American guns, and they lost thousands of men. Later they let our troops land with little opposition, and they hid in huge, bomb-proof cave complexes stuffed with food and ammunition. Our casualties went way up. This is why we dropped atomic bombs on Japan. They would have used the same strategy on a gigantic scale.

The money preachers are like the Japanese. Some of the devil’s sons go after people in porn theaters and casinos, where no one is even close to God. Other sons wait in their big concrete churches, and they let us come to them. Then they attack on their own turf. They wait for us like goaltenders in hockey goals. Churches are like choke points. A lot of seekers come in the doors, and preachers pick them off by the millions. They teach them lies and keep them weak. People fail just when they think they’re finally almost home.

If this move works out for me, it will be after a long period during which I haven’t given preachers one red cent. It will happen after I spent years of “touching God’s anointed,” criticizing the prosperity preachers and accusing them of serving the devil. What would they be able to say, presented with my testimony? “Just you wait. God is going to get you any minute now!” Right. Just like he’s always one service away from giving the slaves their thirtyfold, sixtyfold, and hundredfold financial windfall. I’ll be dead and living in heaven before they see that money.

Sometimes I almost wonder if it’s possible for anyone other than a preacher to get into hell, what with all the clergymen crowding their way in.

If you want to help, pray for God to guide me and help me end up where he wants. That would be a big favor. I can’t seem to do much for my friends, but maybe I can get out of here and put some space between me and the mess.

A Man has to Eat

The northern Florida dirt issue is getting more complicated.

First, I found out almost no land in Marion County is considered prime farmland. That hurt. Then I found out the property I liked was only about 30% “farmland of local importance.” Now I’m concerned about shade.

The three best acres of the property are next to a fence. Trees grow along the fence. The trees give shade. The fence runs north to south. I’m on the west side of the fence. That means the trees will kill at least some of the sun until maybe noon. They’re tall trees, so I suppose some sun will slip in under them, but it’s not ideal.

I looked at a list of vegetables that don’t need full sun, and it made me feel better. The list goes like this:

1. Everything except corn and tomatoes.

I guess that’s not really right, but a whole lot of things are on the list. Taters. Beans. Peas. Carrots. Anything related to cabbage, which means just about every type of greens.

Peppers need sun. I guess I could put a raised box with fake dirt in a sunny area.

I don’t know how good farmland has to be, in order to work. I grew a fine crop of beans in my sand yard in Miami. I had one 30-foot row, and I did pretty well until fungus killed everything.

Do I really need raised beds? Why not get a backhoe and dig a square pit about 20 feet on a side and a foot deep? I could fill it with composted horse manure, better dirt, pixie dust, and whatever else it takes to grow food. I guess there must be a reason why this is a stupid idea, because it seems so obvious and no one does it. Or maybe they do. Do they?

Sweet corn would appear to be an important thing to learn to grow. When the nutty left starts driving Christians out of grocery stores, you won’t be able to get by with just cabbage and tomatoes. I wonder if there’s a way to force sandy ground to produce corn.

Once you learn to grow stuff, you have to figure out how to preserve it. Root crops keep a long time. I can dry beans and turn them into shucky beans. Other stuff would have to be canned. That’s a drag. But I already have the equipment.

Fruit trees. Is there a fruit tree that will grow in sandy soil? I would love to have peaches.

The owners of the place I like killed all the trees on about seven acres of it. I can’t understand that. I guess they wanted the horses to be happy. What about the people? People like trees. How can you have a huge lot with no fruit trees? That’s insane.

I’ll get the answers. One way or another it will work.

Like This Wasn’t Complicated Enough

The home-shopping experience is getting more complicated, which should not be a surprise. I know very little about buying houses (even though I should), I know even less about buying farms, and I overthink everything I buy. When I buy a pair of pliers on the web, I have to look at a hundred websites to make sure they’re the best pliers on earth. Imagine how bad it is trying to buy a house.

I did not know soil varies greatly over small distances. I figured you would have one kind of soil in one part of a county and maybe another kind in another part. I didn’t think different kinds of soil would be swirled around and mixed so every single farm in a county would have to be examined separately.

I found out about soil variations today. There’s a government website called Web Soil Survey, and you can use it to find out what kind of soil you have under you. You can look at very small areas, like 15 acres.

I found a nice farm with a green house. I checked the soil. Only about 30% of it is nice enough for the government to consider it farmland. The other part…who knows? The government divides things into “prime farmland,” “locally important farmland,” and…crap, I guess.

If I understand the soil report, I can grow 20000 pounds of tomatoes per acre per year, but it looks like I can only plant an acre or two. Hmm…I probably won’t need more than 3000 pounds for personal use, so maybe that’s okay.

I can grow 60 bushels of corn per acre per year. Whoopee.

I can’t grow watermelons very well, according to the government’s pessimistic report. Suddenly I really want those watermelons.

How do I figure out how the land itself affects the value of the property? I guess this is where appraisers come in.

I’m not interested in becoming a farmer, but what if that changes? What if I find out there is huge money in growing exotic artichokes or something? What if our economy tanks? What about the inevitable day when leftists exclude Christians from buying and selling?

I don’t know if I can accomplish anything with two or three acres of tillable land.

Can I grow anything on the remainder of the property? Search me. It’s something called “Arredondo sand.” Sounds like a paint color. What if I make the property a free dumping ground for horse manure for a year? Will that help?

The property next door is sitting on a pile of Kendrick loamy sand, which extends slightly into the lot I’m looking at. This extension is the fertile part of the lot. I can’t believe that guy got 100% Kendrick loamy sand! Lucky so-and-so.

For fun, I looked up the 300-acre farm my grandfather owned in Kentucky. Virtually all of it is prime farmland, which means plants grow like crazy. I didn’t appreciate it when I was a kid.

Sooner or later I’ll get the answer. It’s too complicated for me, but surely prayer will get the job done.

Make Sure you Pack the Skillets and the AK-47

It has been a hard week. I spent two days in Ocala, looking at houses with my dad and my old friend Mike.

I would have blogged the trip from Ocala, but trip blogging is just an oblique way of begging thieves to rob your empty house, so I kept quiet.

For several weeks, I’ve been digging up properties online and talking to a realtor. I ran into some obstacles. First of all, Florida contains a whole lot of extremely ugly houses. I’m not picky, but there is such a thing as a house too ugly to live in. I found a number of places I could not stomach. Very sad, because sometimes great properties have bad houses.

I had another problem: a surprising number of people put two-bedroom houses or trailers on nice farms. I can’t figure that out. I suppose some of the smaller homes used to be caretaker shacks on larger farms, and once the farms were cut up, the main houses went with other parcels.

Third thing: some of these places were just too remote. I’m all for breathing room, but half an hour is too long for a drive to the nearest drugstore. Also, my dad will be with me, and I don’t think he would be thrilled about living in a place where there are only three or four decent restaurants within a half-hour’s drive. And if he needs medical care, it would be best to be fairly close in.

One place had a shop building that almost made me faint. It was maybe sixty feet long and thirty feet wide. I was told it was an RV barn. Think what I could do with that.

I found a couple of places that stood out. One is a mint-green farmhouse a rich couple used as a vacation home. They fixed it up perfectly, and then they rarely used it. It has a small barn, a beautiful shop with a concrete slab, and the nicest house I have ever been in. They even bought a new tractor and a small four-wheel drive utility vehicle. The machinery still has tags on it. It has never been used.

The mint color is odd, but I can fix that myself for a few hundred bucks.

I’ve never seen construction to equal that house. Everything fits perfectly. The woodwork is finished to perfection. The garage has a brand-new epoxy floor. It’s stunning. It would be impossible to build such a house in Miami, because no one here could do it even if they wanted to. People here have no skill.

I don’t know how they did it.

You could put a dirt berm up behind this place and shoot rifles all day. How sweet would that be?

Unfortunately, it’s pretty far out, and I don’t think the price is realistic. The owners got hammered, paying $100,000 more than what it’s probably worth now.

It’s not in the high-rent area of the county, but they’re asking a high price, and I doubt it will appreciate quickly.

The other place I like is a frame house on 16 acres of woods. I don’t want that many trees, but you can have your land timbered selectively, and because the wood is useful, you make money on the process. I could mark the trees I want gone and open it up without destroying the privacy.

The house has no outbuildings (bad), but it does have a nice 3-car garage with a gun room built into the side of it. The gun room has a heavy steel door. A smart person could open it up in a few minutes with an angle grinder, but most thieves are stupid and in a hurry.

Can’t hurt.

We would have to add a shop building. That would take time. I suppose my stuff would fit in the garage until then.

This house is closer in. No issues with distance.

I think the second house is best, but man, that first house is something. It’s magnificent. It’s like someone knew I was coming and built it for me. “Here’s your unused shop, complete with electricity and concrete slab. Here is your new tractor. Here is your huge garage. Here is your steel gate. Here is your emergency generator. Did we forget anything?”

It was wonderful to not be in Miami. The people in Marion County were great. Everyone was polite, and I only heard one conversation in Spanish.

Mike used to live in Ocala. His parents had a thoroughbred farm there, and after that, he and his wife lived near the city. He was a great resource. He knew where the best soil was. He knew what different areas of the county were like. On top of that, he’s an incredile schmooze, so he got people to open up and tell us about the properties we looked at. One lady operated a soap company out of her home. She made him take free soap and tried to get a date. She said he was cute.

Not to be outdone, I also attracted attention from females. While we were walking around the soap lady’s farm, a white horse noticed me and trotted over to the fence like she couldn’t believe I had finally arrived. She was thrilled to see me. She stuck her head over the fence and tried to get me to come over. When I walked around a barn and reappeared on the other side, she saw me, and she ran over to flirt some more.

I tried to take a dignified photo of her from the side, but she lunged at me, and this is what I got:

Mike was not happy. He has been around horses for most of his life, and she didn’t give him the time of day.

I have to decide what to do. Try to buy one of these places, or wait for something new?

There are worse problems to have. I could be upside-down on a Miami mortgage, forced to rot here until I pay it off.

Nip-Slip Media Goes After CINC

I get tired of being proven right when I don’t want to be.

Today CNN has a story. President Trump had a screaming, knock-down, chair-throwing fight with insiders Steve Bannon and Reince Priebus. And how do they know that? BECAUSE THEY SHOT GRAINY, INCONCLUSIVE VIDEO THROUGH THE WHITE HOUSE WINDOWS WITH A TELEPHOTO LENS.

This is how crazy the left has gotten. They are literally stalking the president.

Raise your hand if you remember all those times the American press made voyeur videos of Obama and then blew them up all over the Internet.

Me, neither.

Go watch the video. I did. Here’s what I saw: some figures are in the White House, talking. Bannon’s face is visible. You can see a guy who looks like Jared Kushner. You can see the back of a blonde woman’s head. Bannon seems a little excited. For a few seconds.

If you can see anything more than that, I credit you on your exceptional eyesight or, in the case of CNN, imagination.

CNN’s talking head claims Reince Priebus is in the video, but I can’t see him. If I recall correctly from personal experience, Reince is about 5’2″ tall, so he would not be that easy to spot.

I went to college with Barack Obama and law school with Reince Priebus. Unexpected difference: people I know actually remember Reince.

Bill Clinton held Dick Morris down and choked him. Why was there no kerfuffle? No one cared. No one in the press was out to get Clinton. CNN never got exiled to the sidewalk during the Clinton years.

When I think about Trump, I always think of the expression “to damn with faint praise.” You know what it means. Andy Griffith provided a famous example: “You don’t sweat much for a fat girl.” The other side of the coin is praising with faint damnation. The press makes Trump look good by hammering him over insignificant or imaginary faults.

Trump got mad! We think! IMPEACH! IMPEACH!

Seriously?

I’d be mad, too, if I just found out my business was wiretapped. Actually, I am mad, because I did find out I was wiretapped. We’re all wiretapped. All of our communications go into government servers, in a violation of the Fourth Amendment no judge seems brave enough to call out. I found that out quite some time ago. The conspiracy nuts were right. How can that happen?

Digression.

Rush Limbaugh calls the MSM “the Drive-By Media.” Maybe we should call them “the Taxi Driver Media,” or “the Fatal Attraction Media.”

I hope Baron Trump doesn’t have any pet rabbits.

Here’s a nutty idea: how about covering things that actually happened, instead of things you really hope happened?

Trump and journalists share a common flaw: the inability to admit fault. Trump rarely, if ever, says he made a mistake. When Trump rightly says people don’t trust the press, only a tiny handful of journalists discusses the possibility that there is a reason for their unpopularity.

Trump didn’t create the notion that the press is unfair. The public figured that out a long time ago. The only novel thing about Trump is that he talks about it while serving as president. The press has been crazy-biased for decades, and they refuse to admit it. How can you expect someone to take you seriously as an institution that gathers and reports facts, when you think you’re immune to bias? It’s patently insane.

The press is trying to tell us Trump threw Priebus and Bannon off Air Force One. They said he told them they couldn’t fly to Florida with him. Sounds juicy! Oops…it turns out he said they should stay in Washington and work, because a lot of things are going on right now. Not really the same thing, is it?

What is wrong with these people? Can’t they even try to be fair?

The devil’s people hate Trump because he’s helpful to Christians and Israel. That’s the bottom line. Trump is not a man of God, but what’s happening to him is still religious persecution, because the primary motivation behind the left’s rage is hatred of Christians and Jews. What we’re seeing now is the reeking blossom of a new age of open persecution from respected institutions.

If you think it’s bad now, wait a few years.

I have a new level of empathy for illegal aliens. I wish I could emigrate to heaven. This place is completely out of hand. Unfortunately, God’s border patrol has a perfect record. I will have to wait here, south of the border, as my asylum claim gets better and better.

I’m glad I’m as old as I am. I would hate to be 20 and have maybe 70 years of this craziness stretching out before me. I don’t know how the apostles dealt with it.

Poor President Trump. Wiretaps at home, and peeping toms at the office. The first paparazzi president. I should quit looking at Fox and CNN. From now on, I’ll just check TMZ. Maybe Trump will get out of his limo carelessly and show CNN his underwear. “GOP ROCKED BY REINCE PRIEBUS SEX TAPE!!!”

When is checkout time? My bags are just about packed.

Eating Clean for the Mind

I finished Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle. I enjoyed it. I knocked it off in three or four days, which shows the difference between reading things you enjoy and things you only read out of duty. I’ve been suffering while reading relatively small passages from the books on the Columbia College Lit. Hum. syllabus. Reading 50 pages of Philip K. Dick in one day is a pleasure. Reading 20 pages of Cervantes is a chore.

Dick is very clever, but I don’t think he’s all that deep. Here’s one thing you notice about him right away: all of his characters sound the same. It’s as if one person is talking all through the book. In that respect, he resembles Ayn Rand. Maybe Rand wrote that way because her books involved two opposing sets of characters, and the characters in each set shared the same mind. Dagney Taggart and Hank Rearden were pretty much the same person.

Perhaps, like most people who write science fiction, he was more interested in the physical world than in human beings and their personalities.

When I put his book down, I finally got to open Helmet for My Pillow, the first-person World War Two chronicle written by marine Robert Leckie. His book, along with one by fellow marine Eugene Sledge, was used as a basis for the Band of Brothers companion series, The Pacific.

While I’ve been reading Leckie’s book, I’ve continued watching the Ken Burns series, The War, which also covers World War Two.

I had a disturbing revelation last night, after watching the show. The War followed the story of a soldier named Corado Ciarli, who died as part of the invasion force that landed at Anzio. The Anzio invasion and the ensuing campaign have been criticized as incompetent and very wasteful of human life. General Mark Clark took too long preparing to attack the Germans, and by the time he felt ready, they, too, were prepared. They spent weeks showering the Allies with bullets and artillery rounds from high ground, and there was very little cover on the ground below.

The soldiers in the invasion suffered terribly. Ciarlo wrote home very often, and guess what he told his family? Nothing. He said he was in great health. He bragged about how much he ate. He kept telling them he wished them the best. Meanwhile, he was living in a hole, waiting to die.

He had two brothers, a sister, and a mother back in Waterbury, Connecticut. He could have vented to them in order to reduce his own stress. Instead he kept it light. Because he loved them so much, he put their welfare first.

Here’s the revelation: my life has been pretty twisted. I grew up in a city where people are nasty and aggressive. I don’t know what it feels like to have a sibling I can write to the way Ciarlo wrote to his. I can’t imagine filling letters home full of expressions of love and praise. My family was not like that.

My neighbors had screwed-up families, too. A gay man across the street tied his lover up and murdered him, castrating him in the process. The family across 10th Avenue lost a son to a heroin overdose; one night, an ambulance appeared at the house, and the next day one of the kids told my sister, “My brother died,” as if he were talking about a visit from a TV repairman. The lady next door had a heroin-addict son who slapped her around, and her release was vodka, which she chugged from water tumblers.

I can’t imagine what it’s like to live in a healthy environment. I lived in Texas for a few years, but I was a graduate student in a physics department, so I was exposed to a lot of dysfunctional people. Texas was my best shot at normal life, and it didn’t work out.

I watched the war shows and learned about the veterans, and I realized their outlook on life was far superior to mine. Their values were much healthier. They grew up before Saturday Night Live, The National Lampoon, South Park, The Family Guy, and M*A*S*H (book, movie, and series). They weren’t constantly bombarded with filthy, counterproductive entertainment. It’s no wonder they were nicer people than I am.

Last night it occurred to me that reading Leckie’s book and watching these war shows was good for me. It was exposure to a frame of mind I didn’t know much about, even at my age.

Now, what about Lit. Hum.?

I’ve been thinking about the books I’ve read so far. Homer, Plato, Boccaccio, Virgil, Cervantes, and so on. For the most part, they’re not helpful. They’re morally corrosive.

Homer and Virgil lionized immature, lustful, greedy, sadistic morons who actually preferred war to peace. Plato praised a lifestyle in which homosexual predators “helped” young boys by having depraved relationships with them. Boccaccio is cynical and sexually amoral. Cervantes comes across as a sociopath who doesn’t know it when his sadism crosses the line and offends readers.

Ovid was full of whining. It’s like his book was written by the Cathy Bates character from Misery, or Glenn Close’s famous attention-starved would-be murderess. One bitter, unforgiving female stalker after another. A churning sea of daddy issues.

Herodotus and Thucydides weren’t too bad, but they were hardly uplifting.

Shakespeare stands out. King Lear promotes moral standards I can agree with. Fathers should stand up and be fathers. Children should love and honor their parents. Kings should be kings, not hosts of traveling debauches. Men in power should listen to good advice from people of proven character. Shakespeare is a good influence. But one robin doesn’t make a spring.

My social environment is bad. Much of the entertainment and study I’ve chosen during my life has been harmful to me. I have let these factors shape me into a person for whom my respect is necessarily limited.

What should I do?

Leaving Miami seems more important than ever. This place is just no good. No matter what I do to try to improve myself when I’m on my own, I find myself being pushed backward when I’m among people. That wouldn’t happen everywhere. The other day, when I was in Orlando (not a city known for the kindness of its residents), I felt that my interactions with people improved me. I was embarrassed when I dealt with them, because it was so obvious to me that they were nicer than I was.

Living here is bad. Belonging here is worse!

It’s interesting to me that generations of academics have chosen morally destructive works to put before their students. Maybe it was inevitable. I suppose that during the Middle Ages, with the limited supply of works to choose from, it would have been hard to justify keeping Homer and Plato out of curricula. Nonetheless, the truth is the truth: academics have a long history of corrupting the young.

I wonder now: should I keep reading this stuff?

Here’s what I have left: Milton, Jane Austen, Dostoevsky, Virginia Woolf, and William Golding. I substituted Golding for Toni Morrison. I read her book a long time ago, and I’m not interested in reading it again. I see her as an overrated affirmative-action pick.

If I quit reading, I’m abandoning a project, and that’s poor discipline. On the other hand…man, this stuff is nasty.

Crime and Punishment is 692 pages. I wish I had not looked that up.

You can make yourself spiritually ill by feeding yourself poison, but you can also feed yourself good things that make you stronger. I could read more nonfiction. Of course, I read the Bible.

I’m grateful for one thing: I’m not sitting here writing about how going back over this material has opened my eyes and shown me that liberal academics and non-Christian (or weak Christian) authors have all the answers. An awful lot of kids come out of college thinking they finally know the truth: God is dead, morality is a destructive fantasy, cynicism is the highest virtue, and so forth. I never felt that way, except maybe about cynicism. Even when I was young and stupid, I had a tiny seed of common sense that told me there were a lot of silly people working at Columbia.

I didn’t swallow all of the Kool-Aid at Columbia, but a whole lot of people have fooled me during my life. I have chosen many toxic influences.

America is very, very sick now. Our culture of cruelty, pride, lust, pleasure, and greed reached critical mass long ago. The chain reaction has been triggered, and we can’t overcome it. I wish I had turned from it sooner. Most people will not turn.

Good news for me, I guess. Bad for other people.

Maybe someone else will read this and realize they, too, have been poisoned.

Influences Matter

I have a little time to fill, so here I am.

I haven’t written much about my relationship with God lately, so I thought I’d catch up. Things are continuing to improve.

If I could only stress one thing, it’s this: the most important thing you’re supposed to do, after receiving salvation, is to become like God. You’re supposed to be transformed by the Holy Spirit, so instead of having the mind and heart of an educated monkey (selfish, violent, sex-crazed, aggressive, greedy…), you have the heart and mind of a being who is made of love and faith.

You can watch Christian TV all day and never hear this. That’s amazing. It’s as if Procter & Gamble gave an ad company ten million dollars to make Tide commercials, and instead, they made Bugs Bunny cartoons.

The “dead” churches–the ones that deny the spiritual gifts–teach about inner transformation, but they teach that you have to do it by yourself, which is impossible. This is what the Jews taught. It didn’t work for them, either. Jesus came to put the Holy Spirit inside us, to do the work, and he was murdered for it. The churches that deny the Holy Spirit murder Jesus every day. They turn a powerful sacrifice into an ordinary homicide.

A monkey can’t give birth to a saint. It doesn’t work that way. Without the addition and help of the Holy Spirit, we are just monkeys.

God has shown me that if I have stress in my life, it’s not normal or acceptable. I think many Christians think we should admire their stress and misery. On their own, without God’s involvement, they decide to put themselves in difficult positions, “for God.” Then God doesn’t help them, because he’s not an enabler, and they think their unnecessary, pointless suffering makes them holy and special.

Look at the Bible. When people had stress, it meant God wasn’t blessing them. Over and over, people with problems went to God, asked them why, and (if they listened to his advice) got their problems fixed. The Bible hammers this lesson home: when things go badly, there is a problem with your relationship with God.

As far as we know, Jesus only had one bad day in his life, and there is no known example of him working hard.

American Christians teach kids to be proud. That’s sickening. They tell kids to believe in themselves and in hard work. The Bible says just the opposite. It says people who believe in themselves will suffer and fail. It says God works against proud people and helps the humble. A humble person, in Christian terms, is a person who lets God do the work and take the credit.

When blind people approached Jesus, he didn’t build laboratories and concoct medicines to help them, using his own mind. He listened to the Holy Spirit and allowed himself to be a conduit for miracles. If Jesus had tried to do medical research instead, he would have failed. God wouldn’t have helped him. God has all the power. Our little tools are very weak. We rely on them too much, and in doing so, we isolate ourselves from the only source of real help.

I’m not saying you can do nothing but lie in bed and pray all day, or that nothing bad ever happens to good Christians, but we suffer and work much, much more than we are supposed to.

Here’s a lesson I’ve had difficulty with: when a problem pops up, BEFORE I TRY TO FIX IT OR ASK ANYONE FOR HELP, I’m supposed to pray about it, curse it, and speak victory to myself and the Lord. If I do anything else, I am actually making the problem stronger. I’ve taught this to other people, but somehow, I still have to be reminded.

The other day, a friend came over for prayer, and he had some sort of problem. I said we should get on the Internet and look for an answer, and he had to stop me. He said he wanted to pray first, because we needed to lay a foundation for success before using our own strength.

That was really something. He was throwing my own words back at me, and he was 100% right. I felt so stupid.

If you’re going to fix all your problems yourself, why are you a Christian? What do you need God for? You’re living like an atheist.

Here’s another thing: I think we’re supposed to perceive the presence of God as much of the time as possible. When his presence is inside you, it makes it much easier to reject things like anger, lust, and fear. The love and peace are too enjoyable to give up. Focusing too much on hard work will cut his presence off. You won’t feel it when it happens, but afterward, when he’s gone, you’ll realize you blew it, and you won’t feel good at all.

I believe the presence of God is one reason I need to get out of Miami. This area is full of people who worship demons every day. It came with them from the islands. There are all sorts of people here who are demon-controlled drones. They provoke and annoy, all day. When you are constantly wronged, as people are here, focusing on God’s peaceful, loving presence is a challenge.

I find that I get connected with God, and then I go about living my day, and the first thing you know, someone does or says something nasty. If the plan works, I forget about God and think about anger. If I continue with it, his presence leaves. Then I’m in trouble.

This is one of the purposes of the Internet. Satan uses it to provoke people. You go the the web to read the news, and the first thing you know, you’re reading filthy, vicious comments from people who hate God. It’s like having Miami piped into your house.

This must be one of the reasons God got me to quit social media. I was provoked by ignorant people all day, and most were Christians. I would go on Facebook and see people praising Black Lives Matter or supporting homosexual “marriage,” and I let it destroy my peace. I had kids from my church try to set me straight on sexual sin. Young kids, with no education, no prayer lives, and no understanding.

A carnal Christian would say, “If you loved them, you would stay forever and be insulted and provoked.” Of course, that’s wrong. Jesus avoided annoying people, and I’m not better than he was. He spent a certain amount of time with them in order to reach the ones God had sent him to, but that was about it. He didn’t sit in the outer court of the temple for days on end, yelling, “LOL LOL STFU!”

I get stirred up just thinking about it. God’s presence…God’s presence…look back at the target…

I feel better now.

Last night I watched some Youtubes about the Jay Leno/Conan O’Brien/David Letterman feud. Maybe you remember this. Jay Leno was pushed off The Tonight Show, and he agreed to go and pass it on to O’Brien. Then NBC brought him back for a ridiculous show that came on before O’Brien’s and killed The Tonight Show’s audience. Then Leno graciously (not) agreed to take The Tonight Show back.

I watched various talk show conversations about this. I was impressed by the talent of the comedians as they ripped Leno and discussed their frustration. It made me think about myself. Humor is one of my talents. I could do the kind of thing they do. I couldn’t help feeling a little left out.

Then I remembered…you can’t have that mindset and also have the presence of God. Their careers are traps. The money and admiration are poisons that keep them asleep so they can’t see how lost they are.

Americans get nastier all the time. Our connection to God gets weaker. I can’t be part of that. Some talents are not supposed to be used.

Here’s another thing: I believe God is confirming what I’ve said about churches. People I respect keep leaving them. Churches belong to the devil. They poison people.

You decide you need God, you go to the people who are supposed to put you in touch with him, and they feed you a lot of nonsense that limits your proximity to him. That’s Satan’s system, not God’s.

Jesus didn’t hesitate to call the Judaism of his time “the synagogue of Satan,” but somehow, we think our churches are healthy and well. Christians are positive Jews are idiots, and that we’re the ones who do it all correctly. That’s wrong. We’re just like the Jews; we are no better. Look how many of us live under the law! Our churches generally belong to Satan.

You can go there and receive salvation, and you may learn some useful things, but in the end, you have to know God personally. A person who continues relying on church year after year is like an adult who hasn’t cut his mother’s umbilical cord.

The Bible calls them babies and says they suckle instead of eating meat.

Last night God told me something that made sense of his plan to move away from churches: in the future, church will be illegal. There won’t be many churches, and apart from the demonic government-controlled church, they will be underground. If we can’t carry on our relationships with God in private, we will be in real trouble.

We have to learn to get by without a sick dependence on organizations.

Eventually I would like a church to visit, simply to be around other Christians, but I won’t volunteer there, I won’t even consider receiving a title, and they’ll get little or no money from me. I am all done with Satan’s hamster wheel.

I was talking to a friend yesterday. Another friend is a sub-pastor at a church we know. He’s talking about quitting. He’s getting great results with the people he works with, but he knows the organization is filthy. Good for him. Why feed the wolves? You don’t need a church in order to reach people. John the Baptist was cut off from the temple, where he had a hereditary right to be a priest, but look how well he did.

God doesn’t need our help. We are positive he does, but he doesn’t.

Because I have been set apart, including my escape from social media, I am provoked and tempted less than I used to be. I look forward to living in a place where the pollution levels are lower still. I think I’ll sin less, be under less stress, and spend much more time in God’s presence.

Prepare for the mess that’s coming. Don’t say nobody told you.

Secular Conservatives: Your Money is on the Dresser

I see Milo Yiannopoulos is in trouble.

Let’s see if I understand this right. He is gay. He is conservative. He is loved because he is aggressive and angry, and probably because conservatives like to point to him and say, “See? We’re all about the gay.”

Isn’t that about right?

To me, he’s just Ann Coulter or Ted Nugent with gay mixed in. I’m not suggesting he’s as smart as Ann Coulter or even Ted Nugent, but he seems like someone conservatives love simply because he makes their adversaries suffer. I never thought he was good for the GOP.

It seems like conservatives are divided. There are those who admit that the GOP is the party of Jesus and those who think we’re just the party of stinginess. Yiannopoulos appealed to the latter group.

When I say we’re the part of Jesus, I just mean Christianity is the primary thing that binds us, and it’s the primary reason people hate us. I’m not suggesting the Republican party is a religious organization or that we’re as morally superior as we like to think we are.

People are accusing Yiannopoulos of endorsing pedophilia. I don’t know if that’s correct, but based on my reading of his remarks, it seems pretty close to the truth.

Most of us don’t distinguish between pedophilia, which is the abuse of prepubescent children, and the abuse of teenagers for whom puberty has at least begun. Yiannopoulos seems to be in favor of the latter. It’s not pedophilia, exactly, but it’s still bad, so the difference may not be very important here.

He talked about lusting after older men and having sex with them at the age of 13 or 14. He described himself as the aggressor. He also said positive things about relationships in which older homosexuals serve as emotional anchors for “boys” with whom they have sex.

It seems fair to say that Yiannopoulos supports sexual relationships between teenage boys and grown men. Isn’t that exactly what homosexuals are always telling us doesn’t really happen (in spite of the fact that our cities are full of teenage male prostitutes)?

Does that make him sufficiently immoral to justify the things CPAC, his publisher, and (allegedly) Breitbart are doing to him, to distance themselves from the smell of his scandal? I think so. The mistake was embracing him to begin with. His moral positions put him too far outside the camp, and apart from that, do we really need someone who makes us appear more mean-spirited? Aren’t we trying to fight that baseless image?

It’s always hard to decide whom to align oneself with. President Trump is an adulterer who owns casinos where people go to get drunk and gamble. On the other hand, he is helping Christians, Israel, and the unborn, and we had no better alternative. If we’re to be criticized for backing him, it should be for backing him in the primaries, not the general election. In the general election, the alternative was a bona fide horror.

Solutions that offend God are bad, regardless of which political party resorts to them. I shouldn’t say “resorts” with regard to the Democrats, because they don’t have to be coerced to oppose God. They voted against him four times, by voice, on TV, at their own convention. They oppose God in their hearts, so they jump at any chance they get to offend him with their actions and policies. Anyway, Yiannopoulos was a stealth dumpster fire from the time he first gained prominence. We shouldn’t have expected anything good to come from promoting him.

We will reject him now, in all likelihood, and you know what Shakespeare said: “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.” He’s not a woman, but given his temperament, he is likely to react like one. He may become the ex-girlfriend from hell. Remember David Brock?

You have to wonder what feckless conservatives have told him in confidence. Will he disappear quietly, or will some outfit like Huffpo (founded by a scorned traitor) seduce him and use him against us?

I just remembered…Breitbart himself…Saint Andrew…helped start Huffpo. What funny heroes we have.

I didn’t develop my opinion of Breitbart from watching the news or reading his site. I developed it from behind-the-scenes knowledge, starting before his site existed. When I see the T-shirts with his face on them, I don’t get the same feeling other conservatives get.

Politics is interesting, but religion is what makes or breaks a nation. I may comment on political stories because they’re intriguing, but I am not a participant in the political game. Not even on a blogging level. I never link to anyone any more. I rejected PJ Media when they asked about writing for them. I don’t contribute to campaigns. I will never go to a Trump rally. That stuff doesn’t work.

It will be interesting to see what happens.

Choosing Houses Takes Horse Sense

I feel a little better now that the shock of driving to Miami from America is wearing off.

Today I’m working on various responsibilities and preparing for a visit to Marion County to see the area and visit some houses. The knowledge that getting out of Dade County will take months is weighing on me.

I went to a forum to ask people from the Ocala area some questions, and while I was there, I couldn’t resist looking at posts regarding Miami. People were considering moving there.

I had to say something. I was honest. I said the people were very rude and the traffic was horrible. I said Miami had no culture. I said black people got bad treatment here, which is very true. Cuba had a political revolution, but it never had a civil rights revolution.

Some character popped up and accused me of creating an account just to “bash” Miami. Yeah, okay. What about the people who said they agreed with me? I didn’t see a convenient explanation for their remarks.

To prove Miami had culture, this person posted a video of someone singing in a bar!

I don’t know why a person who lives in an unpleasant city would pimp it to unsuspecting visitors. Why bring people here with crazy expectations? I would be pretty upset if I moved here thinking this was a nice place to live. If people tell you the truth, at least you can prepare and adjust.

It’s tough to figure out which properties are best. It seems like people in Marion County don’t follow the universal rule of pricing houses 5-10% higher than what they really expect to receive. The prices seem completely random. The realtor is sending me places with asking prices more than 15% above my limit, and he says they’re “negotiable.” If your asking price is nearly 20% higher than what your house is worth, you’re not a negotiator. You’re a scam artist. You’re trying to fleece somebody.

If you don’t know what properties really cost, it’s hard to decide which ones to look at. If your baseball glove budget is $50, and the store prices the good ones at $75 and sells them for $50, you’re going to look at the cheap ones and end up paying $30.

I wonder what a baseball glove costs. The last time I bought one, my dad was not in a spending mood, so I got one from KMart for $5. I cut the label out so I wouldn’t have to hear about it from the other kids.

Wow. I just saw one for $99.

I don’t even have a KMart glove now. I think it was one of the many items that belonged to me that got discarded when my parents moved. I guess I can get by without one at my age.

I have to have a place for tools, and that doesn’t mean half a garage. It means serious room. Some places don’t have workshops. Some have barns with tooly-looking areas that have concrete floors. How hard is it to turn them into shops? Search me.

There are a number of great properties with really bad houses. Florida is known for ugly houses. If you want a geodesic dome made of pink fiberglass, this is the state where you should look for it. It’s sad that so many nice lots have houses that look like machine gun bunkers or log cabins.

Who, in his right mind, builds a 3500-square-foot log cabin? You will never be able to sell a log cabin house to any family that contains a heterosexual woman. Repairs and alterations will be nearly impossible. Every time you hang a picture, you’ll damage your ridiculous wooden walls in ways that can’t be fixed. Is it even possible to insulate these monstrosities? I don’t know. But they’re surprisingly popular.

One of the nicest properties has a house which is “stucco over frame.” Is that even a recognized construction medium? I can’t even tell what it is. I guess they put some kind of siding over wooden studs and then slop cement on it.

I don’t know anything about rural property, so I don’t know what pitfalls to look out for. I don’t want a place that floods whenever it rains. I don’t want drainage problems, swamps I’m not allowed to drain, or nuclear waste.

I’ll have to trust God and do my best.

It’s my own fault I’m in Miami. I chose it. I didn’t serve God, and I didn’t have his guidance. There was a period during and after law school when I was reasonably happy here; I deluded myself. If I had listened to God, I would have landed somewhere else a long time ago.

Don’t be like me. If you’re young, start listening now.

Miami is a Disease That Dies Hard

I just got back from Orlando, and already, two Miami imbeciles have practically run me off the road.

I had to sit down and decompress when I got home. I can’t interact with people until I have a candy bar and a few minutes to cope with the grief of returning to this place.

A friend of mine who moved to Orlando renewed his marriage vows, and I was invited. Yesterday I drove up and got a hotel room. I was startled by the traffic on the Ronald Reagan Turnpike (I refuse to call it by its former name). All the way past Palm Beach, it was packed. Things have really changed.

I was disturbed by the way people treated me in Orlando. They were so nice, it made me jumpy. It made me realize something about myself: I’m not just afraid of rejection; I’m afraid of acceptance.

I’m used to avoiding talking to people in Miami, because much of the time, conversations here are hostile or awkward. In Orlando, people forced me to have longer interactions. They held doors for me. The people at McDonald’s gave me helpful tips on prices. I didn’t know what to do. I wasn’t used to conversations lasting a whole 30 seconds.

When people accept you, you have to come up with something to say to them. I didn’t realize I would have to deal with that.

It’s not a humorous exaggeration when I say I was disturbed by the nice manners I encountered. Here in Miami, when a person tries to strike up a conversation with you, it usually means they want to do something bad to you. In my case, it’s mostly telemarketers and addicts (i.e. “the homeless”). I have become conditioned to cut communications short. I was very grateful for the good treatment I got in Orange County, but it also put me under a very real kind of pressure I was not used to.

When I got to the hotel, I learned that I had come on the wrong day. I had made a computer error. I reserved a room for Friday night, and I showed up on Saturday. My card had already been charged. When the clerk realized what had happened, she got on the computer and worked it out so I got a free room last night. The bill said “0” on it. They didn’t have to do that. The place was packed, due to the arrival of a geriatric biker gang (the Grandparents of Anarchy). They could have charged me or rented the room to someone else who would have paid. I didn’t know what to think.

People made a point of coming up to me and introducing themselves at the wedding, to make sure I wasn’t isolated the whole time.

Over the last month, lots of people have told me how much they hate Miami. I went to Home Depot, and the lady who designs kitchens said she hated Miami. I went to the flea market, and the old guy I bought wrenches from said he wouldn’t live in Miami if they gave it to him. I hired a guy to demolish my dad’s deck, and he said he hated Miami, too. At the wedding, my friend’s uncle said people in Miami seemed like they always wanted to fight.

I felt sadness come over me today when I realized I was nearly in Dade County. It was really happening. I was leaving northern Florida and coming back. It was like getting on a bus leaving San Quentin and then being pulled off by a guard.

I realized how much this rotten city has damaged me emotionally. I’m not cut out for this place. I don’t enjoy fighting with people. I’m not willing to cut a stranger’s throat to get a nicer car. I’m tired of living among atheists and demon worshipers. What other major American city has hundreds of thousands of people who literally practice voodoo? Even New Orleans can’t compete.

Before today, I had never seen myself as a person the city itself had harmed. That was a revelation.

Miami-boosters have no idea what life is supposed to be like. Childishness, racism, and aggression are all they know. It’s a good thing they like it here, because maybe it will make them less likely to invade and ruin other places. Miami has always been flypaper for jerks.

This weekend I had another revelation: Miami people have the Sodom mindset. Sodom and Gomorrah were famous for mistreating strangers. Jewish lore says Abraham’s servant Eliezer went to Sodom, and a man wounded him with a rock. A Sodomite judge told Eliezer he had to pay the man for the beneficial bloodletting. Eliezer wounded the judge and told him to pay the man what he owed Eliezer.

Anyway, people here treat strangers very badly. That’s why road rage is so bad here. People here like to use the word “random” to describe strangers, as if not knowing a person justifies whatever you do to him.

Miami is filling up like a tick, as people from other countries jam it to the rafters. The traffic is terrible, and the crude, congested skyline looks like it was moved here from Brazil. The ironic up side is that the more crowded this place gets, the better off I’ll be in Ocala. I’ll inherit what my dad owns here, and the population increase is raising prices fast. The annoying people I leave behind will, if God permits, provide for my ease in old age.

People who think this is a neat place are like men who have never seen a real woman, whistling at Bruce Jenner and trying to get his phone number. If you don’t know what the real thing is like, you can’t be expected to recognize a fake.

I’m going to bust my hump getting out of here. If I have to get in the car three or four times a year and drive down here to manage my dad’s real estate, that’s fine. That is a small price to pay. The hotel bills will be deductible.

Bad Day for Press Elites

Yesterday I had one of the strangest experiences of my life. I saw a president who had absolutely no fear of the press.

President Trump had a press conference, and he was so honest about the deceitfulness and malice of the press, the news has reverberated all over the Internet.

I hadn’t been following things all that closely. I had been seeing and hearing little bits of information suggesting Trump was panicked, frustrated, exhausted, and furious. When I saw him speaking, I saw something completely different. He was happy. He was smiling. He was confident. He never raised his voice. He said very critical things about the press, but he wasn’t emotional about it at all.

Critics are making utter fools of themselves as they trample each other trying to spin the conference. Trump gutted them, so they’re toiling away, trying to stanch the bleeding with a transparent gauze of lies and insinuations.

One major paper (member of an endangered species) criticized Trump for saying the press would spin things and accuse him of “ranting and raving.” That same article had a headline that used the word “rant”! How biased can you be? How blind can you be to your own dissembling?

The reporters in the press pool were livid. Their anger, and the sense that they were being thrashed, was obvious on their faces. They were combative. They kept firing jabs that had nothing to do with learning the truth and everything to do with trying to find a hole in Trump’s defenses. Trump kept turning these jabs around on them, making them wish they had never spoken. It was as if they were punching themselves in the face.

Their emotionalism was exactly what they falsely attributed to Trump.

“Journalists” are describing him as angry and frustrated. They’re saying he was unhappy. What a lie! They’re also complaining that the conference ran 77 minutes. It ran long because Trump was having fun. Watch it for yourself. Presidents who are uncomfortable do not prolong press conferences. Trump was having a ball.

One outlet said Trump “imploded.” Again, watch the conference. He couldn’t have been happier at his own birthday party, and he scored point after point while they kept missing the pinata.

Actually, it was more like they were hitting the pinata, but when struck, instead of raining candy and free prophylactics, it rained manure.

One sucker was dumb enough to suggest Trump’s willingness to respond to press aggression was an attack on the First Amendment. Good Lord. How can expressing yourself freely be a threat to free expression? Who thinks like that?

What he really meant was, “I hate it when people hit back.”

When Trump decided to run, I thought it was a stunt. I said he didn’t want to be President. I said he just wanted free publicity. I didn’t think he was a real conservative (I still doubt that).

When he got the nomination, I consoled myself with the knowledge that he would fight illegal immigration and appoint solid judges. I figured that was the best I could hope for. And he wasn’t Hillary. That’s a major point in his favor.

Now that he’s president, I’m more impressed with him than I ever expected to be. If you look at what he’s doing, and you pay no attention to gossip and slander, you can see that he’s an extremely dynamic and capable president. Maybe some of his policies are wrong, and he does need to shut up on Twitter, but this is a man who took a $1 million loan, multiplied it by 9,000, and paid it back.

Try that for yourself. If you have $10,000 in the bank, see if you can die worth $90 million. Trump didn’t have his fortune handed to him by his parents, the government or a lucky break with a tech startup. He’s not a Rockefeller, a Perot, or a Zuckerberg. He had to beat thousands of highly competent, dishonest, ruthless individuals. We should have realized he would be a dynamo in the Oval Office. Now, instead of competing with real estate investors and hoteliers, he’ll be using the same exceptional skills to defeat world leaders who are hostile to our interests. Think about that. I guarantee you, investors are harder to defeat than politicians.

Whatever he does, right or wrong, he will be extremely effective and fearless. What other president compares? Obama was a limp dishrag and career bagman who avoided responsibility and obeyed his handlers. Bush II bent over backwards not to offend. Clinton was an unprincipled mouthpiece for special interests. Bush I was weak and too eager to please, and in all likelihood, he’s really a liberal who was forced to run as a conservative. You have to look back to Reagan to come up with anyone who was even close to Trump in his willingness to act independently, without apology.

Trump didn’t really talk to the press at his conference. He talked to the public, and he worked to provoke and expose the press. The press room was a courtroom, and although he was supposed to be the defendant, he was the prosecutor. It was brilliant. The networks donated 77 minutes to him, and he used it to strip them naked and horsewhip them in front of America. That’s how he got elected, so we shouldn’t be surprised. No one in history can match Trump’s ability to get his enemies to give him free promotion.

Look at the “lies” the press is accusing him of telling at the conference. He said he had the biggest electoral college landslide since Reagan, and he was wrong. Who cares? Are we ever going to have a depression or a war because the president doesn’t know who got the biggest electoral landslide? He said the Ninth Circuit, a notoriously incompetent and biased panel, was ‘in turmoil” and he guessed it had a reversal rate of 80%. He admitted he wasn’t sure of the figure, and the press ignored that. “AHA!”, shrieked the press; the actual rate is 79%! And other circuits have high reversal rates, too. Wow. That’s important. Because when Trump makes trade deals, protects our borders, and runs the military, it’s crucial that he knows circuit court reversal rates, to the exact percentage point.

The insignificance of the misdeeds a man’s enemies attribute to him is a monument to his character and achievements. When the press gets excited about electoral college vote figures, you know they’re scraping the bottom of a very tired barrel.

I can’t get over it. I expected much less from him.

His critics will probably never give up, even when they realize they’re ruining their own reputations. If the country does well under Trump, they will look like complete morons. They’re so emotional and deluded by passion, they can’t see that they’re undermining themselves.

It reminds me of a story my dad used to tell. A union of Basques in Spain went on strike against a firearms factory. One day someone came to them and told them the strike had destroyed the company and all of their jobs. They held a massive victory celebration.

Man, this is strange. I don’t know what to make of it. It has to be the supernatural at work. God must be giving Trump favor, in spite of his faults, in order to help God’s people prepare for the harder times ahead.

It’s sad to see conservative Trump-haters clinging to their bitterness and rage. Fine; Trump may not be a real conservative. He’s an adulterer. He’s arrogant. Whatever. He’s still on our side, and he will definitely be our candidate in 2020, so unless you’re so childish you would rather have Governor Moonbeam or Al Franken, you better change your diapers and work with what we have.

One neat thing about Trump is that he exposed the Deep State, which is the throng of mostly-liberal career bureaucrats who run our executive agencies. Presidents come and go, but like J. Edgar Hoover, Deep Staters stay at their little desks and become permanent fixtures with immense power to blackmail and obstruct. Trump offended these people, so now they’re emerging from the cover of their holes to attack him. Suddenly the public knows they exist, and that they’re extremely dangerous. They’re like the palace eunuchs in imperial China.

Bureaucrats don’t care at all about the countries they supposedly serve. They care about their tiny empires. They worship the idol of job security. Most people don’t understand that. Trump is giving us a real education.

Chuck Schumer is afraid of the Deep State. He said the intelligence bureaucrats have “six ways from Sunday” to get even with people. Now we’re seeing that this is true. They and the other Deep Staters are actually leaking classified conversations, not to help America, but to take down the person who trained a spotlight on them.

Imagine voting for Chuck Schumer for president. “Elect me. I’m terrified of the FBI.”

One has to wonder what the administration will be like when it’s more than three weeks old. That’s how far in we are, and liberals and anti-Trump conservative crybabies are already saying the administration is a failure. By the end of this year, a whole lot of Trump enemies will have been fired, and some may be under federal criminal indictment. What will the battlefield look like when Trump’s treasonous soldiers aren’t fragging him ten times a day out of pure spite?

I would have been thrilled with any of a number of conservative candidates. I would even have accepted Bush, but he was unelectable because of his name. I voted for Cruz in the primary, but I would have been okay with Paul, Perry, Rubio, Carson, Hunter, Palin, Brownback…maybe even Christie. I didn’t want Trump. But now that he’s here, I will be honest about his good points and his successes, especially when they’re shocking and unprecedented.

If you really care about America–more than you care about being vindicated in your criticism of Trump–pray God guides him and gives him success, and that God drives off the ungodly people around him. Seeing America collapse prematurely may be an alluring notion to you now, but you won’t enjoy it if it actually happens. Trump is a barrier between us and the people who will eventually start murdering us in the streets. Call me crazy, but I want to keep that barrier strong.

As Problems Go, This is a Nice One

I’m writing because some websites are failing to load for me. I figure they’ll probably kick in just as I start getting interested in this blog post.

I’m trying to look at Marion County properties a realtor emailed me. Before I contacted a realtor, I went to Zillow and other sites and found a few properties worth saving. Now I have a bunch of new ones to look at. You would think an Internet search would turn up everything worth looking at, but the realtor found a lot of fantastic stuff that didn’t appear on Zillow.

It looks like the hard part will be narrowing the choices down. I’m overwhelmed. These places are so beautiful, I can’t believe I could end up living in one of them.

For some reason, the prices of properties don’t seem strongly related to the acreage. A place with 10 acres will not necessarily cost much less than one with 31 acres. Obviously, this means I’m excited about the big places. With 10 acres, shooting in my yard could conceivably annoy neighbors. If I get 31, as far as I’m concerned, they can put their complaints in a sock, because I will be way too far away for anyone to have a legitimate gripe.

Why do people live in Dade County (now named Miami-Dade because Spanish-speaking foreigners can’t figure out that “Dade” means “Miami”)? The lots are small. The traffic is starting to rival Hong Kong’s. The people are very, very rude. You have to repeat yourself over and over when you buy things, because half of the population can’t understand English. If everyone here were getting rich, I would understand the draw, but Miami is a poor city. I guess the allure is the knowledge that you can move here, refuse to learn English, and do okay.

There are a lot of variables to look at when I go through these properties. I want reasonably good soil so I can grow food when America finally collapses, so I am looking at the photos and trying to weed out the places that are all pine and no hardwood. I don’t want too much horse stuff. Supposedly, keeping one small barn on a property will bring some sort of tax advantage, but some of these places have tracks and 5000 square feet of stalls.

The north part of the county might be better for my dad, since he will need to be reasonably near good medical care (i.e. Gainesville).

The thought of having a workshop I can roller skate in is intoxicating. I watch other people’s Youtube videos, and some of their shops are nearly empty. It makes me want to jump through the screen and lie down on the cool, satisfying concrete. I can’t imagine what it’s like to have that kind of space. Some of the places in Marion County appear to have shops as large as 2000 square feet. I would never, ever leave. I would move the bed into the shop.

Now that I think about it, I’m not sure what I need a house for. Oh, yeah. Now I remember. My dad will want a place to sleep.

You know what’s really exciting? We could conceivably have a tractor. A man with a tractor is a man to be reckoned with. In addition to chores like bush-hogging (boring!), you can use a tractor to move machinery, do light earth-moving jobs, and generally wreak havoc. I don’t know if I would actually use one. I might just go out into the shop and hold it, like a Hillary voter holding a rented puppy.

I always say I have no ambition. Now that has changed. My ambition is to move to a rental property, screw around with my tools, have all sorts of prayer meetings, get old, and die. Judging from what I’ve learned so far, when I get up there, I may have a lot of competitors in these pursuits.

This morning I read something from 2 Peter:

For if God did not spare the angels who sinned, but cast them down to hell and delivered them into chains of darkness, to be reserved for judgment; and did not spare the ancient world, but saved Noah, one of eight people, a preacher of righteousness, bringing in the flood on the world of the ungodly; and turning the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah into ashes, condemned them to destruction, making them an example to those who afterward would live ungodly; and delivered righteous Lot, who was oppressed by the filthy conduct of the wicked (for that righteous man, dwelling among them, tormented his righteous soul from day to day by seeing and hearing their lawless deeds)— then the Lord knows how to deliver the godly out of temptations and to reserve the unjust under punishment for the day of judgment, and especially those who walk according to the flesh in the lust of uncleanness and despise authority.

Reading that made me very emotional. To think that God might get me out of here and put me among better people…that is true generosity.

Lot lived in Sodom, and God called him righteous. If you read about Lot, though, you will see that he wasn’t what we would call a saint. He wasn’t on the same level as Abraham. Lot’s deliverance shows that God will help people who fail a lot. That tells me he is willing to help me.

I can’t go back and rejoin the crazy, ungodly world. Life has gotten truly insane. If you’re any kind of a Christian, you now have a target on your back. People will do their best to take away your livelihood and blackball you so you can’t get hired or own a business anywhere. You can’t even have a bakery, because vicious people who don’t really want your cakes will come to you and order wedding spreads just to get you put out of business.

Our culture has gone nuts. This week a female performer named Beyonce (you probably know who she is) did a dance number for the Grammys in which she dressed up as a voodoo “goddess,” put a halo on her head, and had other dancers worship her. She threw in elements of the Hindu “god” Shiva. People lapped it up. If you criticize her on Facebook, her warped fans (the “Beehive”) will come after you and heap abuse on you.

A few years back, Madonna did a similar act in which dancers dressed as demons worshiped her.

Americans see nothing wrong with things like this now. Satan is officially mainstream. People think it’s cute. They don’t realize these “gods” represent real spirits that hate Yahweh.

We’re so filthy now, and so proud, most of us are beyond God’s reach. Persecution will now increase, and it won’t be that long before the state treats us the way Nazi Germany treated Jews. If you think it can’t happen here, wake up. The Germans and Austrians were more civilized and orderly than we are now, and they built the death camp ovens.

I can’t go back. I can’t give up what I have. I can never rejoin the devil’s system, so I will always be faced with bitter, cruel opposition. Unless God wants me to live in complete subjugation and misery, he will have to provide a way out, and I think that’s what he’s doing.

The sites loaded, and I went over the properties and made notes.

You can get more property for your money when you move away from Ocala and Gainesville, but then you have to think about the aggravation of driving half an hour to get to Lowe’s or the nearest hospital. Also, my dad likes to have lunch in restaurants. I just looked at a place called Williston, and it appears that the choices are basically fast food, two BBQ joints that get dubious reviews, and diners.

On the whole, a restaurant shortage in a wonderful place is a much better problem to have than being stuck in a rude, crowded city and having restaurants that are sort of okay.

I really want to go lie down on a concrete shop floor. Like, now.

If I ever manage to choose a place, you will read about it here.

Talk to my Taillights

This is a momentous day, or rather, yesterday was. I was working on the problem of leaving Miami, and I realized there was no point in limiting myself to South Florida. Things have worked out so that I will be able to go where I really want to go, farther up the state.

Four years ago, I decided to leave this area, and I went to Ocala and looked at houses. My father was extremely disturbed by this, and I agreed to linger here while he got his affairs in order, with the understanding that we would both leave eventually. Finally, things are more or less organized, and I have realized I can manage his properties just as well from Ocala as I can from places closer to Miami.

It’s funny, but when you’re used to certain problems and certain options, you may not be aware of it when your options change. You have to sit down and reassess things. Sometimes you will think you’re still trapped when the cage door is actually open.

I was looking at properties in Broward County, which is where Fort Lauderdale is. To the west of the city, there are semi-rural neighborhoods where you can cover your lawn with Trump signs without having your house egged. It’s a nice area; no doubt about it. Still, the good houses are already taken, and if you want two acres (the minimum amount of land required to maintain sanity), you will pay out the nose. Also, Broward is 28% Hispanic.

Am I saying I don’t want to live around Hispanics? Not exactly. I’m saying I don’t want to live in a foreign country, which is what Miami is. This county is about 65% Hispanic, and that doesn’t include illegals and tourists. When you go to a mall, you can expect the people around you, most of whom were born in America, to speak Spanish to each other and the clerks maybe 75% of the time. That gets old.

I actually lived in a foreign country where I heard English spoken more often. I spent four months in Israel, and virtually everyone spoke English.

When you turn on the radio here, you may try five stations before you hear anything but Spanish.

If you think wanting to live in an English-speaking country makes me a bad person, wait till you read this: I am also tired of Hispanic culture.

Here in Miami, people talk really loud, all the time, and when they sit in groups, everyone talks at once. People are angry maybe 60% of the time, for no reason at all. People are very aggressive; I think that’s a Cuban thing, not a Hispanic thing. Other Hispanics are less confrontational. Anyway, people here are extremely emotional, and they have no respect for rules (even good ones). It had probably been forty years since Castro’s victory when Miami Cubans learned it was not okay to walk straight to the head of lines in stores and restaurants.

In Miami, one has the persistent sense of being threatened. Everyone wants to deny you the right of way in traffic. Everyone wants to get in front of you and get to whatever it is you want before you do. Everyone wants to get over on you in business. People tailgate and drive with their high beams on. People talk in front of you in Spanish so they can take advantage of you (pretty funny when they do it to Cubans who don’t look Cuban). It makes you feel like you’re Captain Kirk and you can never lower the deflector shields.

I know a Cuban lady who demanded a transfer out of Miami because she couldn’t stand the way people treated her American husband. She told me horror stories. They would be waiting in a restaurant, and the people who worked there would talk to Cuban customers, calling her husband dirty names and saying they would make him wait while the Cubans got tables. They didn’t know she understood.

It’s not like every American is treated badly all the time. Many, many Hispanics treat us very well. There are hundreds of thousands of wonderful Hispanic people here. But it doesn’t take many bad apples to ruin things, and it’s difficult for a person who has lived among nice people and knows how much better life is supposed to be.

People here hate it when you criticize Miami. They love it because they have never been anywhere else in America, and because most of them are in the top caste. If you’re Hispanic, life is good here. Everyone speaks your language, you have big advantages in business, and people will treat you better than they treat Americans (especially black Americans). If you’re Cuban and you grew up here, no wonder you think it’s paradise. You’re like a Brahmin in India. You don’t know what it’s like to be blackballed.

I have a black friend who moved to Orlando. He’s a hard-working man who is doing a terrific job supporting five great kids. He doesn’t speak Spanish. He applied for 27 jobs here and got no calls. He applied for three in Orlando and got three offers. His wife, who speaks only English and Creole, got a good job, too. Hello? Can anyone guess the reason?

My friend says he absolutely hates to visit Miami. It depresses him and makes him angry. He and his family are thrilled with Orlando, even after two years of getting used to it.

Broward County is 28% Hispanic (and that figure is increasing fast), but up around Ocala, the percentage is more like 8%. That means everyone has to learn English and make an effort to fit in with the existing culture. I’ll take that.

My dad has dementia, and it won’t be long before he will need a place to go every day to be with other people his age. In Miami, he would be surrounded by old people he couldn’t talk to. They would talk to each other all day in Spanish, and then once in a while they would talk to him in English. That’s no good. I always say no one wants to get old in Miami.

I looked at properties on the Internet, and I was dazzled. I got brave, and I removed the “2 acres+” filter from my searches. I changed it to 5 acres. Then 10. Then I went nuts and changed it to 20. I found a place with 56 acres. I found one with 107 acres.

I found houses that had magnificent outbuildings built to be workshops. You know why? Because people up there are like me! Oh, my God. It was too good to be true. One place had several welding stations, 200-amp service, and a lift. It even had a bunker with a steel door. It’s like I dreamed that place. All it needs is a machine gun nest.

That was a joke…or was it?

Yes, it was a joke. Calm down, DHS.

Of course, if it wasn’t a joke, I would definitely pretend it was a joke in order to fool people. Just saying.

I’ll finally be able to practice shooting in my own yard. I’ll be able to practice correctly. No slow fire. Think how good I’ll be. I will be positively dangerous.

My new mission in life is to get my dad’s house ready so he can rent it out after the move. I am doing that as quickly as I can. I would like to fix it up so he can charge a lot, but he is resisting moving out until it’s done, which makes the whole process much harder. My current strategy is to get it done, quick and dirty, and get the hell out. If he has to charge 30% less, well, life will go on.

I gave up on local contractors. I went to Home Depot and told them, essentially, “Give my dad a new kitchen right now.” They’re coming in the next few days. I’m going to have his rotten deck pulled out. I’m not going to worry about the terrible 1950’s windows or the 9000 other problems that will take too long to fix. Once we’re gone, maybe I can do more.

Why is all this happening so fast? I can answer that. A stronghold is being broken. I chose to live in this rotten city, and I chose to rebel and do my own thing, so God required me to have my nose rubbed in this place. I’ve turned back to him, and he has restored things in my life one by one, on his own schedule. I have started apologizing to him for choosing Miami. Now things are breaking loose.

One of the neat things about God is that he may be very quick to break a stronghold that looks like it will last forever. That’s important to know, especially for people like convicts who think they will never be free from the consequences of their actions. God gave birth to Israel in one day. He shook a prison and freed Paul and Silas. He still does things like that.

I can’t wait to leave this area. I won’t miss one thing about it. Not for one second. I will never come back without a compelling reason.

Won’t I miss the culture of a big city? Excuse me while I laugh. Miami has no culture at all, unless you count the new rap culture of Miami Beach, which is now the top vacation destination for ghetto thugs. There is no real orchestra here. There is no classical station. There is virtually no jazz. The museums are hilarious. There is no architecture, unless you count a few cheesy Art Deco hotels. No, I don’t think I’ll miss that.

I definitely won’t miss the gay scene. I wonder what life is like on South Beach now that it’s an uncomfortable mixture of gays and rap fans. I know everyone is complaining, and charges of racism are flying around.

It’s not about race. It’s about shootings, beatings, noise, property damage, intimidation, and theft. It’s about scared Europeans who spend more money, who go someplace else now.

Why am I writing about this? Not my problem.

If you want to be helpful, do me a favor and pray God will help me get all this done, and that he will guide us to a peaceful home. I would appreciate that.

Now I have to call a guy to rip out the deck.

More

I arranged for a demolition guy to remove my dad’s deck, so I feel pretty good about that. I felt like expounding on my remarks about Miami culture, so here I am

God has helped me to turn my back on my own culture. I used to be proud of my Eastern Kentucky heritage, for some reason I no longer recall. Now I realize Eastern Kentucky is full of racism, alcoholism, ignorance, violence, and God knows what else. It’s a white ghetto. It keeps getting worse because people who have a better mindset keep leaving.

Eastern Kentucky is not going to get better. Lyndon Johnson’s vote-buying money didn’t fix it, missionaries didn’t fix it, and if Trump takes a shot at it, he won’t fix it, either. People up there cause their problems, and every day, they choose to cling to ways that keep their problems in place. I am not stupid enough to worry about people who don’t care about themselves.

A side effect of my sudden willingness to criticize my own culture is a willingness to criticize other cultures. Miami is very messed up, and I am trying to be honest about it. I may sound harsh or even bigoted, but when something is messed up, and you speak the truth about it, you aren’t going to say positive things.

To show that I’m not always negative about other cultures, I will also say that I now think certain American cultures are superior to my own. On the whole, I think people in the middle of the country, in places like Iowa, Nebraska, and the Dakotas, are the least dysfunctional. I think their culture is flat-out superior to Appalachian culture and Southern culture as a whole.

People in the heartland commit less crime, and they generally treat each other better. They may not be the most exciting people on earth, but on the other hand, they cause less trouble than the rest of us, and they haven’t completely lost their humanity, even in polarized 2017.

A bigot thinks his culture is the best in the world. That’s not me.

Southern culture, like the culture in Ocala, isn’t the absolute best, but it’s pretty good, and it’s a thousand percent better than what we have in South Florida.

A wise person doesn’t cling to backward ways out of pride. I would like to be wise eventually.

If I offended anyone, well, I don’t apologize. Wronging someone and offending them are two different things.

Out Top Gear-ing Top Gear

If I haven’t posted much lately, it’s because I am exhausted from recreation.

My oldest friend (not literally oldest, but the one I’ve known the longest) decided he wanted my dad’s 1995 Ford Explorer, which I was about to sell on Craigslist. It has at least 146,000 miles (for a while he couldn’t find a mechanic who could fix an odometer), it leans to the left, it smells really interesting, and my dad had the heat disconnected because it went bad and would have cost $800 to repair. I told my friend (Mike) it was “a real piece of crap,” but he wanted it to plow his driveway in New Hampshire, so we cut a deal for $500, and he flew down to get it.

My dad keeps saying Mike “stole” it. Guess I’ll be hearing that for quite some time.

It seemed to be okay before Mike came down, and then when he arrived, the overdrive wouldn’t work, and it lost something like a quart of oil every hundred miles. I have a recollection of adding oil to it recently, but I didn’t know it had a serious leak.

Some interesting facts that make the story richer: Mike’s birthday was yesterday, and he forgot to renew his driver’s license. When we tried to address this online, we found that New Hampshire’s online renewal system only works if you have the code they mail you before your birthday; the code Mike didn’t bring. Can you renew over the phone? Sure. The paperwork takes maybe a week to arrive by mail, and during that time, your license is not considered valid.

Also, Mike decided not to bring his winter clothes, because Florida is warm. Think about that.

He said, “When I left, it was forty degrees.” I pointed out that sometimes weather changes. I think that was helpful.

I had told Mike the car was only guaranteed until he got it out of my dad’s driveway, but he drove it to Delray Beach and back (funeral: a friend’s father had died), and it came back two quarts low, so I reluctantly decided his friendship was worth more than $500, and we spent several days doing a Top Gear-style restoration to get the car ready for the trip north.

During this time, Mike scored a number of free meals off of me via guilt trips, and I also gave him a treasured possession: the world’s best bottle opener.

Mike loves my tool collection. While I was showing it to him, I showed him the severed end of a 1 1/2″ box wrench. I had it on hand because I had bought a $9 Chinese wrench and modified it to use as a tool post wrench. I’ll post a photo. I had cut one end off to make the wrench shorter. You don’t want a really long tool post wrench, because if you have too much leverage, you may crack your compound slide when you tighten the nut.

Mike thought it was disgraceful that I hadn’t turned the wrench end into a project, and he suggested a bottle opener. That actually sounded good, so while he was at the funeral, I got to work. I had a piece of 304 stainless steel, and I cut a semicircle out of it, using a hacksaw and my belt grinders. I then welded it across the wrench opening. Because I am having all sorts of problems with my helmet, I couldn’t see what I was doing, so I left big globs of weld on the wrench, and I had to grind it down to make it pretty.

I was going to keep the opener, but then I thought of Mike’s frozen corpse sitting in a Ford Explorer with a seized engine, surrounded by puzzled state troopers, one of which was busy writing his dead body a ticket for driving without a license, and I decided to make it a birthday present, because that would completely make up for sending him to an untimely death.

Before turning the opener over to him, I put a lanyard hole in the end of it. Now Mike has the world’s heaviest keychain.

Mike thought a new ABS sensor might fix the overdrive problem, so we spent a day crawling around under the Explorer, and we got a new one installed. We put a quart of Lucas Engine Oil Stop Leak in the engine, and that seemed ( ! ) to reduce the leak’s flow to an acceptable rate.

Unfortunately, the transmission fluid level was low, and Mike added too much, so we spent the next day looking for someone to flush the transmission. Mike figured he might as well flush it instead of just having the level reduced. The weather had turned cold and rainy, so that was fun. I wore traditional Miami cold weather gear: a hooded fleece jacket with shorts. Maybe not the best choice.

Sears gave Mike a service appointment, but when we arrived, we learned that a Sears appointment is really an appointment to stand in line. It seems to serve no purpose at all. When we got to the front of the line, they refused to service the car because of the mileage. You would think they would have mentioned this on the phone, but Sears is dying, so I guess the people who work there are not knocking themselves out in order to get promoted.

I did offer to give the money back and put the car on Craigslist, but by now Mike was on a quest. He wasn’t about to surrender. Thank God.

The next day he got up early and bought an inverter from Harbor Freight. This is a device that turns DC into AC. He figured he would install it inside the car and connect a 1500-watt space heater to it. I am completely serious. My suggestion was to stop at Salvation Army stores during the trip and buy a used down jacket and gloves.

He collected me, and we decided to go to a Salvation Army store to see if they had anything he could use to keep himself alive. Miraculously, they had an unused electric blanket. I thought that was the answer. Put the blanket on, turn on the inverter, and drive. That has to be better than a heater, which blows hot air in random directions. It was like five bucks, so Mike decided to buy it. I also found an incredible deal: a #6 Wagner Ware skillet in perfect condition. Mike is my friend, so of course, my first impulse was to grab it before he got to it and buy it for myself, but I already have three #6 skillets, so I decided to let him have it. If he hadn’t bought it, I think I would have shot him. It’s the perfect size for cornbread. He got it for $3.75. Talk about “stole.”

We spent most of yesterday running cables through the car’s firewall and installing the inverter. He fired it up, and sure enough, it powered an electric drill. Now that he’s gone, I’m kind of wondering if it’s okay to use an inverter while the car is running, but I guess he’ll have to find out on his own. Maybe I should disconnect the phone.

He won’t be able to get a heater until he gets to Fort Lauderdale. In Miami, stores only order a few heaters every year, and on the first cool day, Cubans storm the aisles and buy every last one. The ones they can’t use, they sell for a massive profit. Probably. That’s what they do with generators during hurricanes. Anyway, there are no heaters here today.

I am still dealing with the virus I got a couple of weeks ago. I don’t have congestion or anything, but I have a crappy feeling that gets worse with exertion and lack of sleep. Last night I collapsed on my bed and started sweating, even though the mattress was cold. I thought for minute that I might be dying. I was cool with that. I still had Mike’s money, so I was dying a winner.

I slept about nine and a half hours, and then I got up to say goodbye to Mike. I still don’t feel rested, but I think a day of total loafing will put me right.

I shouldn’t worry about Mike. He’s a possibility thinker. Whatever happens, he will come up with a solution that will get him to New Hampshire. Anyone who would put a space heater in a $500 car can be trusted to look after himself.

I was hoping to talk to Mike about God while he was here, but he kept me so busy, I didn’t make as much progress as I had hoped. I managed to get him to sit still for a prayer session with my friend Travis and me. Mike loved it, and he talked about it before he left. He had been in a hurry to get to a car parts store, so he almost missed the session, but I got him to put it off long enough to pray. I told him you pray BEFORE you fix the problem, not afterward. That’s an extremely important thing to learn.

Considering all the barbecued ribs I bought Mike during the week, I’m not sure the car sale will show a profit, but at least it’s gone.

If you have a junk car, and you want a really interesting cheap project to improve it, I highly recommend an inverter. It will allow you to use power tools when the car breaks down. You can’t beat that.

I can’t wait for night so I can sleep some more. And I’m going to miss that bottle opener.

Humanity Screeches its Way Into Menopause

This is not a pleasant morning.

Last night I saw news items about the women’s march on Washington. Was it about women’s rights? No, it was about obscenity, hate, and rebellion, with women’s rights as a side dish provided as an excuse.

I saw a short video of Madonna, a near-billionaire who has the audacity to stand in front of cameras and call herself a victim. She is angry at the world because people no longer find her physically attractive. She believes we are obligated to reward her with lust and attention.

Madonna is like Cher; she used her sex appeal to become famous, and then that appeal slipped away, as it always does, and she began to be more of a curiosity than a hip entertainer. These are women who got everything they wanted during this life, and they are terrified to see it sliding through their fingers. They may not believe in heaven and hell, but they’re smart enough to know they won’t necessarily be rich, attractive celebrities in the hereafter, and it upsets them every day.

Madonna said she had thought about blowing up the White House.

What can you say about a person that deluded? She’s so angry about Donald Trump, she wants to assassinate him and kill whoever else happens to be in the White House at the time. This is a celebrity? This is a person people admire? Can that really be true?

I started to watch a few minutes of Scarlett Johannson’s speech. This is a woman who has a reputation, in real life, for being easy. She started out with a question about women visiting their gynecologists.

I shut it off. I don’t want to hear about it. You should be able to discuss your rights without discussing your genitalia.

Today I’ve been reading about the pink knit hats women wore to the march. Get used to seeing them, because feminists plan to keep wearing them all over the US. You will see them in the workplace, at stores, and in parks. You will see them when you go to your kids’ schools to participate in events.

The hats are named after women’s private parts. The color is supposed to resemble the color of women’s genitals. I won’t even tell you what the hats are called; the name contains a vulgar slang term I probably never heard until I was ten.

This is what America has become.

These women are pigs. They are depraved. They can’t tell good from bad any more. Not only are they filthy and cruel; they are self-righteous about it. If you criticize their filth, you will be criticized in return, the way sane people would have criticized these women in 1950. Evil is treated like good, and good is treated like evil.

I’ll tell you what; I don’t want to be here any more. I don’t want to live in a world where I am showered with obscenity every time I go outdoors. It’s too much.

It’s going to get a lot worse. Google photos of naked people on the streets of New York and San Francisco. The press keeps this stuff quiet, but public nudity is now legal in these places.

I’m not sure what we’re supposed to do. We’re entering an age when a simple visit to the grocery store will be a gauntlet. Are we supposed to wear blindfolds and use GPS to take us up and down the aisles?

I wonder how long we’ll have to endure this. When will God come and relieve us, as he relieved Noah and Lot? Ten years? Two hundred?

Christians can’t fit in any more. All we can do is sit and wait for it to end, like people caught in a downpour.

It’s very sad to see lukewarm Christians and prosperity-gospel Christians trying to assimilate. They’re giving up everything that makes them Christians. Many of them are giving up their salvation. Just to fit in, in this nuthouse.

They say Enoch had a place where he went off to be with God, while he was still on the earth. They say he emerged from time to time to tell people things, and that afterward, he would return home. I wish I had something like that. I am stuck here in the midst of the depraved. I don’t even have an ark to hide in.

If God permits the earth to endure much longer, we will see times that make today look like the Victorian Era. We will tell our children women used to have to wear clothes in restaurants, and that there were words people couldn’t say on television. They won’t believe it unless they see video.

It’s terrible to see women making themselves so vile. When you consider what women could be, maybe by reading Provers 31, and then you see what they choose to be instead, you can’t help but marvel at their blindness and perversity.

Honestly, if there were a bus to heaven loading up outside my house right now, I would walk out the door and get on board. I wouldn’t look back for one second. I hope my dad accepts salvation, and I would want someone to look after my pets. That’s all I care about. I have no earthly ambition whatsoever. I don’t want to join the herd. I am sick of what people have become, and I know they will continue to rot and become more disgusting.

This place is temporary. No one seems to understand that. You were never intended to camp out here, grab as much stuff as you can, and hold onto it until people pried it out of your wrinkled claws. We were never intended to kill the unborn and use their flesh to cure our diseases. We were never intended waste our lives building monuments to ourselves.

If Madonna feels bad about the way she looks now, wait ten years. She already looks bad for her age. When she looks bad for seventy, she may very well do nothing but sit in a chair and scream all day. She should be trying to make peace with God and looking for things that last. Instead she’s proclaiming her victimhood and exposing her withered buttocks to see if people still care.

In ten years, she’ll probably appear in nude photoshoots, and the people who publish them will accompany them with articles berating men for finding her repulsive.

Man, this place is a mess. I didn’t think it would happen this fast.

The devil’s children thought this election was a lock. They thought their time had come. God put Trump in place to give us time to get it together, and now the children of darkness are angry. They’re throwing a tantrum. When Trump is gone, they will do more than protest. All their pent-up hate will be released, with the power of the state behind it. They will make the Nazis look like Quakers.

I’m not telling anyone to fight it. You can’t. It’s going to happen. We’re going to lose. You can’t prevent that by buying guns or voting for Republicans. All I can say is that you need to prepare yourself. Get as close to God as possible, because you will need his help every day, and when he calls his people away, you do NOT want to be stuck here.