Yes, Mr. Reeves, You Are

Is it hubris for a guy who never served in the military, worked in law enforcement, or became a firearms instructor to second-guess semi-famous gun gurus? Because I do it.

It’s not hubris. You don’t have to be a genius to know when someone is obviously wrong.

Here’s another interesting thing: you can be a cop (even SWAT) or a Navy SEAL with two tours in miserable Islamic strongholds or an NRA-certified instructor and still be full of opinions that conflict with reality. Also, there is a reason why people don’t get promoted in the military or law enforcement. You don’t want to put much stock in what people who ended their careers near the bottom say, unless they have other credits that prove their expertise in the areas in which they profess to be expert.

I worked as an armorbearer in a big church, and we walked around with firearms under our shirts. It was probably stupid of me to join. Our leaders were two ex-military guys: Army and Air Force. The Army guy said he had been a miltary narc for 4 years, and the Air Force guy helped maintain planes, if I recall correctly, and also did air traffic control.

I was not working under Douglas MacArthur and Curtis LeMay. I was working under two guys I liked a lot, who had never gotten to do heavy thinking or command a lot of people.

Eventually, I noticed they made bad decisions pretty often, and there were important, fundamental concepts they did not seem to understand. I had an epiphany: these guys were enlisted men. They were not officers. They had never been in any danger of becoming officers. They were great guys, but truthfully, their role in the service was to execute orders given by other people. When things got more difficult than that, they were in over their heads.

There are a lot of self-styled gun and tactics experts on the web who never made it past sergeant. How much can they really know, if their superiors didn’t think they had the makings of decision-makers and policy creators?

As for NRA training, maybe I should look it up now.

Here is what the site says:

Candidates must have completed the basic course in the discipline they wish to be certified to teach, e.g. NRA Basics of Pistol Shooting (Instructor Led Only), NRA Basic Rifle Shooting, etc.

Candidates must possess and demonstrate a solid background in firearm safety and shooting skills acquired through previous firearm training and/or previous shooting experience. Instructor candidates must be intimately familiar with each action type in the discipline for which they wish to be certified.

Candidates will be required to demonstrate solid and safe firearm handling skills required to be successful during an instructor training course by completing pre-course questionnaires and qualification exercises administered by the NRA Certified Training Counselor.

Candidates must satisfactorily complete an NRA Instructor Training Course in the discipline they wish to teach (e.g., NRA Basic Pistol Course), and receive the endorsement of the NRA Training Counselor conducting that training.

Okay, so, not to denigrate the program, but I think I could do this in a month. I think the lady who served me today at Sonny’s BBQ could do it. Maybe she has. This is red Florida.

I was going to say “a month or two in my spare time,” but all my time is spare.

I had two instructors I think were fantastic. I took a precision rifle course, and the instructors were former military snipers. They had probably killed dozens of people. I think they really knew what they were talking about, as far as hitting things with bullets, and I’ll bet they were great at the things snipers need to be good at. Not being shot. Picking places to shoot from. Planning escape routes. Fooling the enemy. Whatever. They had gone to war, engaged with people who were trying really hard to kill them, killed them instead, and come home intact. I would listen to anything they had to say about the topics mentioned above.

Beyond that, I would feel free to question their opinions. If they got out of their lanes when giving advice, I would take their backgrounds into consideration when weighing it.

The other day, I saw a Youtube guy telling people how to take a pistol away from an armed assailant. He said he was a former CIA officer. That’s his big credit.

Man. The CIA doesn’t teach most of its people much about self-defense or the martial arts. A lot of them do things like writing book reports.

Lanes are important. Don’t try to disarm a person with a pistol. Sometimes it’s best to comply.

Is it obvious I’m going to express my disappointment with a gun guru today? I guess it should be. Actually, I am disappointed in two.

I wrote about one the other day. James Reeves. Not the country singer.

He works at The Firearm Blog, and he seems to be focused mainly on tricked-out AR-15’s and plastic pistols. I think he shoots a lot of steel in hobby competitions. He’s supposedly a lawyer, but I haven’t seen any evidence that he has a substantial practice, and he has said things about the law that don’t seem very smart to me. His bio says he is an NRA/Louisiana State Police certified concealed weapons instructor.

My guess is that Reeves makes most of his money being a professional gun celebrity.

I took my course from a certified concealed weapons instructor in South Miami. I stood at the counter in his gun shop for 45 minutes, and he told me things like how it was bad to shoot people more than 7 yards away unless they were “big niggers.” Maybe things are different in Louisiana, but I’m not impressed with concealed weapons instructors.

I’m not sure why the cops would be any good at teaching people to carry concealed weapons. They don’t carry them. Am I right? Except for backup guns, they carry everything on their huge belts, right out where you can see it.

I hate to praise Massad Ayoob, who has no idea where his lane ends and everyone else’s begins, but I would listen to him before I would listen to a real cop. Concealed carry is his thing, and even though he worked as a part-time cop doing nearly nothing, he is what I would call a civilian, so he can see things from a civilian’s perspective. Just don’t listen to his legal advice.

I found a Reeves bio that lists some credits. He was named a “Rising Star” and “Top Insurance Lawyer” somewhere.

Oh, boy.

Let me tell you now cheesy lawyer credits work. One day you open your email, and there is spam from America’s Most Amazing and Incredible Trial Lawyers. Guess what? You’ve been nominated to be on the list! You’ll be in their deluxe, bonded-leather-bound directory! Or you can upgrade to top-grain leather! You’ll get a gorgeous faux wood plaque to display in your office!

Just send in $150.

Lawyers who lack mental horsepower use bought titles like this to impress rubes. They join organizations. They give presentations. If you can’t win cases, you have to do what you can to make people think you’re a big deal.

I probably still get these things. I haven’t seen my email in a while. Top Lawyer! Master Litigator! If you think credits like this mean anything, you deserve a lawyer who has paid for the whole set.

“Top Insurance Lawyer” is not something I would put in my bio, if I had one. It’s like “Fastest Plow Mule in Arkansas.”

Insurance companies don’t hire good lawyers. My grandfather got rich in a crack between two hills in Eastern Kentucky, beating insurance lawyers. Consider John Edwards. He’s an idiot, but he got rich beating insurance lawyers. Think of all the tort lawyers on billboards that cost a ton of money to buy. That money came from insurance companies that settled or lost cases.

Settling is losing.

My dad told me this: insurance companies don’t hire the best lawyers, and they don’t hire the worst. Their actuaries think hiring the mediocre pays off best in the end. It averages out. The mediocre are cheaper than the best.

Reeves could still be a great lawyer, though, right? A great lawyer could be on these lists.

Doubtful. Too many things he says seem to me to be things that could not come out of the mouth of a great lawyer. But maybe he’s just not trying hard.

Lawyers who are really good don’t have to pump up their credits. They just win and win and win. My grandfather never had an ad. My dad never had an ad. His firm never had an ad. My dad used to get angry when he saw lawyers’ fat faces grinning oilily from billboards.

Reeves says nutty things about guns. He did a video in which he laughed at people who replace the guide rods in Glocks, even though this is a part which is both essential and known to fail frequently. Then he advised people to take their tiny, concealable guns and bolt a bunch of stuff on them, making them as easy to conceal as refrigerators. Quite honestly, I think he is one of the worst gun celebrities on the web to take advice from. What he says seems nonsensical to me.

He seems to be prominent in the cult of AR bros. If you do competitions on the weekend and paid more than $900 for your BCG, you probably love him.

The other person who disappoints me is Clint Smith. If Colonel Jeff Cooper is like Jesus to gun lovers, Clint Smith must be the Apostle Peter, because he learned at Cooper’s feet and taught under Cooper at Gunsite.

Reeves did a video, and he asked Clint Smith what was the best “urban rifle.” Whatever that means. It sounds like something a white supremacist uses to shoot up a ghetto because he’s fed up with rap.

In the end, the answer provided by the video turned out to be…you’ll never guess…an AR-15. Pimped out to the tune of $3000. That figure was part of the theme of the video. Best “urban rifle”…for $3000.

I have more than one AR-15. People love to say guns are not toys. My AR-15’s are toys. I have one I have not even shot yet. I do not have any plans to go near these guns in self-defense situations. The platform is not nearly as reliable as other platforms, and the caliber is not even close to the best for self-defense.

I would guess I have $1600 in the most expensive AR-15, and it would be more like $1200, except I went nuts and used a White Oak Armory upper. I don’t even know where you would put $3000 in an AR-15 unless you had some kind of nutty optics, or maybe you had the handguard covered with Cerakote Punisher Pokemons to match your neck tattoos.

You could use a $200 trigger, which is a total waste of money unless you want accuracy far exceeding anything you might need for self-defense, at the expense of safety. You could have a $1200 upper, which would serve no purpose at all in a defense rifle.

To Reeves, $3000 is apparently cheap, because he also has a $6,000 video. You can buy almost 4 Ruger Precision Rifles for $6,000. Why on Earth would you blow $6,000 on a gun notorious for getting its owners killed?

When you put all this money into a gun, you make yourself look like someone who really hopes he gets to shoot somebody with it.

What is an “urban rifle”? That’s where Smith comes in.

According to Thunder Ranch’s site, their urban rifle course is about using a rifle to defend yourself at handgun distance.

Either that’s BS, and Thunder Ranch is really teaching people how to mow leftists down at long distances as part of a militia, or somebody doesn’t understand “handgun distance.” You don’t need an AR-15 with a long barrel to defend yourself at handgun distances.

What does handgun distance have to do with “urban”? Don’t Smith’s techniques work on farms?

Here is what I think, as a very good but not top-level pistol shot. To me, “handgun distance” means 50 yards or less. If you get within 50 yards of me, and you scare me, and I have a pistol, I can kill you pretty easily unless you move around a lot or really rattle me. Anything beyond that, to a person on my level, is rifle distance. But to be really clear, I wouldn’t want to defend myself with a pistol at any distance. It’s a weapon of last resort, vastly inferior to any long gun.

A pistol is the Denny’s of guns. No one ever says, “I plan to eat at Denny’s soon.” They drive around, see that everything else is closed, and “end up” at Denny’s, as one comedian put it. When you can’t put your hands on a real gun, you end up with a pistol. Col. Cooper, PBUH, believed this.

I’ll be generous and assume Thunder Ranch’s typical students can hit people with pistols most of the time at 50 yards. This probably isn’t true, but still. If it is true, why teach a pistol-distance course and push an unreliable platform made to shoot up to 600 yards?

AK-47 or variant. Vz58. Tavor. VEPR. Saiga-12. Aren’t any of these more trustworthy and lethal than an AR-15?

If you’re 600 yards away, running is better than all of them. Or just jog in a circle. It’s really hard to hit people that far away.

Let me talk about investing. Something I don’t do much, but I do know one thing: I know what’s most important for an investor. High returns? No. NOT LOSING YOUR CAPITAL. If you don’t have capital, you are all done investing, and you have to get a job.

How does this relate to self-defense shooting? Simple. The big priority to an intelligent person isn’t to have the lightest trigger, the cutest nitrided barrel, the most expensive lower, or the greatest accuracy. The big priority is to NOT GET SHOT.

In a violent engagement, winning is not as important as not losing. That’s why it’s called self-defense, not adversary-offense.

Any rifle or shotgun will hit a burglar very easily within legitimate self-defense distances. A pellet gun will do it. You don’t need a $6,000 Daniel Defense gun with your girlfriend’s picture engraved on it. You want a gun that goes off every time and packs a punch. Period. In other words, not an AR-15. It fails on both scores.

While you’re jacking around with your $6,000 underpowered range toy you bought on credit to impress the other guys, trying to make it chamber or eject a round, a burglar with a stolen .22 revolver and mismatched rounds he found in a drawer will perforate your organs multiple times.

I don’t know if Clint Smith really thinks you should use a $3,000 AR to protect your family. Maybe that’s all James Reeves. But I know he recommends the AR over guns like the AK-47. That’s nuts. I don’t care if Smith taught Jason Bourne everything he knows. I don’t care if he served 50 tours in Vietnam. Don’t care. Don’t care about his SWAT credentials. The AR should be nobody’s first choice.

What are Clint Smith’s credentials? He says he did two tours in Vietnam. This was the war where lots and lots of American soldiers died holding jammed full-auto AR-15’s. Yes, I know they called it an M16, but an M16 is an AR-15.

He was on a SWAT team. Where? Indiana. Where in Indiana? A big city like Indianapolis where a SWAT team might actually do something, or a small town where there were only three team members and they rode around in a minivan? Can’t see it on the web.

He was a Marine. Well, a lot of Marines were shot and killed by barely-trained Viet Cong guerrillas with crusty AK-47’s.

Was he an officer? Was he an enlisted man? Did he work in an armory? Did he see combat in Vietnam, or did he pass out uniforms and boots? Don’t know.

Clint Smith is not shy about tooting his own horn. If he’s out there telling people he’s a two-tour Vietnam veteran and a former SWAT team member, he’s fine with self-promotion. He’s not modest. If he had been a captain or higher in the Marines, wouldn’t he say so?

If he left the service as an enlisted man, how much does he really have on the ball?

I guess a sharp person could stop me here and ask me why I doubt Clint Smith but admire Paul Harrell, who may well have been an enlisted man. Harrell served in the Army and Marines, and he was a firearms instructor. He was a combat veteran, but no one seems to know his rank.

Here’s the difference: Paul Harrell was a genius who stayed in his lane. He had an incredible mind. He was able to do complicated 20-minute monologues from memory with no pauses or stumbles. He always admitted his limitations. He considered every angle. He was nothing short of amazing. He was also an astonishing, dominant competitor with every firearm known to man, and he could even throw an ax accurately. He was Jack Reacher.

Clint Smith is no Paul Harrell.

Most enlisted men are not terribly smart, but sometimes one slips through. We will never see the equal of Paul Harrel again.

What if Smith loves the AR-15 not because it’s a good weapon, but because it reminds him of his days in the field and makes him feel like a Marine again? What if he’s emotionally attached to it? It’s a real possibility.

I would fight a burglar with a sling made from Dylan Mulvaney’s pink jockstrap, with Che Guevara’s face stenciled on it, if I knew it was the best weapon for the job. I picked Glocks for carry even though they’re ugly and depressing to look at because I knew they were reliable. Then I switched calibers. I may switch to something better and get rid of the Glocks. I don’t care about them.

It doesn’t bother me that AK variants have killed a lot of Americans. Using an AK doesn’t make me a communist or a terrorist. Our soldiers have picked up and used them. Using an AR doesn’t make me a patriot, either.

The Israelis still use the AR. Maybe someone will say this. Know why they use it? It’s cheaper than better guns. They prefer the Tavor and the Galil, but Israel has limited funds. If they had the money, I’m sure they’d be all-IMI.

Maybe buying Colts helps keep Big Bro America happy.

All this being said, I’ll bet Clint Smith and Thunder Ranch can teach you great things about how to use your badly-chosen AR-15. They must be among the very best at that, not that it’s rocket science. I guess you could take your training with an AR in order to make them happy, and then you could go home and get a better rifle for actual use.

They probably do a wonderful job, but there are probably people within an hour of my house that would do just as well. This stuff is very, very common knowledge. There are no secrets, and there isn’t that much to it.

The average IQ of military inductees is just below 100, and they learn this stuff just fine in a few weeks.

I should get a new soapbox before this one wears out.

This is my take on James Reeves, TFB, Clint Smith, Gunsite, insurance lawyers, Paul Harrell, the AR-15, other guns that actually work, and enlisted men. It’s worth at least twice what you paid to read it.

And now let’s spend a few minutes with the other Jim Reeves.

The Strangest of Bedfellows

Here’s a video of the song that won the Eurovision contest in 1965.

It may be hard to believe people took this seriously. As you can see, there were no bearded men in women’s underwear on the stage. No shaved male butts. No one simulated sodomy. There was no transvestite content of any kind, nor were there any transparent costumes, men wearing only jockstraps, or ladies wearing items intended to make them look as though they had male genitalia.

What was wrong with these people?

In 2024, Eurovision was more appropriate for our more-enlightened era. Witches. People with perversions too varied, novel, and obscure for me to understand and describe. People insisting on being called “they.”

The contest also featured calls to remove an inherently offensive competitor: the nation of Israel. This nation offends by existing. The judges don’t have the power to annihilate nations, yet, but they could, at least, have spared the contest’s fragile contestants and viewers the sight of a modestly-dressed Israeli Jew standing before decent people–meaning those with piercings, clad in cutting-edge opposite-sex brothel attire that would have shocked Weimar–singing a song that wasn’t even about sexual depravity.

To be more serious, I don’t want to post disgusting photos of the contestants here, but you can see a whole bunch of them on The Daily Mail’s site, itself known for content approaching soft pornography.

LINK.

This year’s winner is a person who calls itself Nemo. It is from Switzerland, and it claims to be non-binary. It appears to be a man, like the majority of truly attention-crazed perverts.

Here is something interesting: many Muslim countries have pulled out of Eurovision, clearly because of the homosexual and fetish content. After all, Muslims are the ones who still execute homosexuals.

Just kidding. They pulled out because Israel was allowed to compete. Some pulled out. Some never joined. In 1977, Tunisia decided not to join because Tunisians didn’t want to “broadcast Israeli content.” They didn’t want to offend Allah by acknowledging Israel’s intolerable, unbearable existence.

That was back when most people in the West hadn’t started opening up about hating Jews for no reason. It’s hard to remember how it felt to live in that world.

Muslim participation now is found chiefly outside the venue, where Muslim and other antisemitic patrons of the arts protest in favor of genocide. Maybe Eurovision should be a quiz show instead of a song contest. They could have contestants try to answer the Jewish Question.

“‘Who is Adolph Eichmann?’, Alex.”

What an amazing synergy. People who murder homosexuals in the streets with their government’s full approval, and homosexuals who post Tiktok videos threatening to kill people who don’t want them to show their genitals to little girls in locker rooms. What would happen to either group if the other were given absolute power?

Satan has won. We have to absorb it. Obviously, he can never win a war, but he has won the battle. He now possesses the world. The next phase will be a supernatural retreat involving the withdrawal of God’s children. After that, God will release demons and fallen angels on the world with almost no restraint, and the people who wanted to be rid of us will crave death. Then, like MacArthur, Yeshua will return, and he will kill so many people, the Bible compares them to grapes being stamped. It says his robe will be wet with their blood.

God’s harvest, the “fullness of the gentiles,” is pretty much complete. So is Satan’s harvest; the future and eternal occupants of the lake of fire. There is just a little harvesting left to be done, and the tribulum is the tool for the job.

The first Eurovision contest of the tribulation may be something to see. Maybe the terror and suffering will not have reached their peak when it airs, and the perverts and God-haters will finally get to put on the kind of show they wanted to give us from the start. Maybe they’ll combine ritual abomination sex with executions.

Am I reaching anyone when I say these things? Few people, if any. Nearly all of humanity is afflicted with supernatural numbness. People should be horrified by spectacles that would have made their grandparents vomit, but they see them as fun and new.

The world is a sore full of pus, and it’s time for the lancet. Christians are accomplishing nearly nothing now. God’s enemies, on the other hand, are sweeping the world suddenly, like Sherman’s troops destroying Atlanta. They are experiencing success they could not have dreamed of even 25 years ago.

Cops walking in the aftermath of an antisemitic mob crime (any illegal takeover is a mob crime) in Texas found something really interesting. They found propaganda, and one of the statements in the propaganda was this: “We will not be satisfied with co-existence.”

What have I been saying? Now I have corroboration. The story of the world is a story of genocide. There are two races: God’s children, and everyone else. Satan wants to get rid of God’s children, and God wants to get rid of Satan’s. Each wants to remove even the memory of the other’s children from the world.

This is why many blind Jews who can’t see their Messiah call Yeshua “Yeshu,” which is code for, “May his name and memory be blotted out.” Not all Jews who use this slur know what it means, but some do. They are repeating a curse reflecting the desire of their father, Satan. Similarly, gentiles who are children of Satan want to remove all Jews and Spirit-led Christians from the world.

All peoples have problems, but the Jews are unusual in that their problems are existential. Most persecuted peoples are threatened with marginalization and poverty and so on, but the Jews have been threatened repeatedly with annihilation. That’s not normal. Oddly, Jews themselves tried to annihilate Messianic Jews while Christianity was in its infancy. Paul was originally in the genocide business, at the behest of the religious establishment in Jerusalem.

Appeasers, both Jewish and gentile, need to understand that there can be no appeasement. Handing over land won’t work. Being nice to perverts won’t work. The final goal of the children of Satan isn’t land or wealth or any of that. It’s the absence of Jews and real Christians from the earth.

People look at the crazies rioting on campuses, and they think, “Kids. It’s always something with them. This will blow over.”

No, this is different. They want to kill us, and they are eager to get started. They will not shrink from it. They don’t have normal empathy. They are sadists. Hurting others brings them pleasure and makes them feel virtuous. It raises their social status, just as it raises the social status of Palestinian terrorists who share photos and videos of people they have raped and murdered.

All the stuff I’ve talked about is coming true, and it will only increase. People need to spend hours in prayer every day, getting God’s revelation and preparing to go.

This is the End, my Friend

Ever heard of Eurovision? I heard of it through Monty Python. A sketch featured a quiz show, and one of the participants, Mao Tse Tung, answered a question about the Eurovision Song Contest.

I assumed Eurovision was a TV network. Then I thought it was the name of a contest. Now I see that it really is a network. In Europe, I suppose.

Right now, the Eurovision Song Contest is taking place in Malmo, Sweden. Entrants from a bunch of countries sing songs, and somebody decides which one is best.

Israel and Australia are competitors this year. So is Iceland. Not sure why it’s called the “Euro” vision contest. Maybe the network is popular in those countries. There must be a lot of people in Israel who are really tired of trying to learn Hebrew.

Speaking of Israel, throngs of demonized people are ruining the contest by waving Palestinian flags and presumably calling for death to this and that country. They booed Israel’s contestant off the stage after about 15 seconds.

A British commentator says perverts are also roaming about outside, calling attention to their genitals in the name of love, inclusion, decency, and in all likelihood, holiness. And maybe the prophet, who can’t enjoy it because he’s in hell.

Speaking of LGBTetc. matters, I saw a really funny African interview the other day. A homosexual was being interviewed, and in a question about the all-inclusive term “LGBT,” the host said, “Where is the H?”

I thought that was brilliant.

The Israeli contestant has to be escorted by dozens of police vehicles, because she is in country largely controlled by hostile, pro-terror Muslims. Sweden.

What would happen to her if the police weren’t there? Go watch the video of Shani Louk. And don’t forget: the people who shot the video and exposed it to the world were the people who stripped, killed, and surely raped her. They were, and are, proud of it.

Queers for Palestine is there. I have a new name for the organization. “Queers for Murdering Lots of Queers.”

They stand up for those who fight genocide by raping Jewish women while mutilating them, and who support Islam by throwing screaming, crying, suspected, untried homosexuals off tall buildings. While proudly filming it.

They are supporting the people who will eventually slaughter them all over Europe while fighting their “real” enemies: Jews who overwhelmingly support perversion and every other leftist mistake.

The Swedes, if you can still call them that, are making some effort to tone down the anarchy, but overall, they are accepting defeat and bending the knee. Sweden was lost a long time ago.

The Jews lost their battle when they rejected Yeshua, and now the gentiles are finished. It’s not a close call. Europe is gone. The Muslim countries are insane. The blue states are never going to recover. India, Japan, Burma, and a bunch of other countries have firmly rejected God. Evangelizing them will not work. It has had its chance. The communist countries that haven’t reformed died inside during the last century. Even where I live, in what may be the most Christian county in America, there are tons of homosexuals. The horse business attracts them like flies. Lots of women with short hair and men who love dressing manes.

Here in the US, senile, lying, unintelligent Joe Biden, whom we elected without coercion, just said people are dying in Gaza because Israel targets population centers with bombs. This is like saying Israel’s problems are caused by eating too much pork. It’s the opposite of true. It’s one of the most antisemitic things I have ever heard from anyone, and he said it on national television. It’s fundamentally the same as the blood libel, but the scale is thousands of times greater.

The ship is taking on water. The pumps are too small, and crazy passengers keep shutting them off. The stern is under water. When is Yeshua going to come lift people off the bow?

It’s so strange, being sane and living in a world where the majority is psychotic. Most people believe whatever the people around them say is true. That’s how they determine what truth is. The real truth has never changed. God knows the truth, and he shows it to his people. We sit in wonder as the mental cases around us insist that men are women and schoolchildren are cats. They throw healthy breasts, the contents of penises they have hollowed out like bagels, and testicles into waste bags, and they call it health care. They keep screaming that self-defense by actual genocide victims is genocide.

The terrible truth is that God hates a lot of people now. People say God loves everyone and hates no one, but the Bible says he hates some of us. He hates the lawless. He hates habitual liars. He really hates slanderers. Satan slanders him all day.

One of the words translated to describe God’s hate has been used to describe people who are unloved. Does God really love everyone? No. The Bible says he will cast the Antichrist and the false prophet into the lake of fire alive. He’s not going to do that out of love for them. They are almost certainly alive now. They are human beings, and he hates them.

The Bible says God is love, but he is also fury and permanent condemnation. The flames of hell and the lake of fire don’t come from Satan. God provides them, around the clock. What God is to you depends on what you are to God.

A gigantic segment of the human population is beyond hope now because they love lies and slander. The idea that lying is a bad idea never enters their excuse-hardened minds. They can’t be saved because they can’t admit fault. An admission of fault is truth.

God hates a lot of us, not just our sins, and he is also aware that many of us can’t be saved, so he has no motivation to keep trying. People who hate him also hate his children, and the longer he keeps helping the wicked through forbearance, the more they hurt us. No father likes seeing his children tormented and killed.

The Jews were taught to leave the corners of their orchards unpicked and to leave fallen grain on the ground. The purpose was to feed the poor. The world is like a farm that has already seen the harvest. Back when billions were willing to listen, harvesting people was easy and fast. Now it’s slow and difficult and produces poor results. God isn’t going to keep investing in it.

I can’t wait to live in a place where things are normal. Every day, people, spirits, and other creatures try to rob me and kill me. I have a list of passwords a mile long because of this. I have locks and alarms. I have guns. I have insurance. I’ve taken vaccines and antibiotics. I use pesticides and mouse traps. I shot a coon in the head. I’ve killed lots of squirrels.

Think how different life would be in a place where people were in agreement about everything and the creatures around us weren’t always trying to murder us.

Imagine knowing you will never have another awkward encounter with an angry man in women’s clothing. Parents, imagine not having to think about countering the filth your kids are taught in schools. Jews…well, do I have to even tell you? Hitler got a third of you, and he had a lot of help from people he conquered. Imagine not being a prey species.

This has to end.

My Pantheon of Losers

Today I had a good experience. I woke up and felt love for God flowing through me.

The most important commandment is not to obey God, but to love him. Jesus made this clear. After that, we are supposed to love our neighbors as we love ourselves. Preachers don’t push the first two commandments much. They push rules, or they tell us to give them money, or they tell us God just wants to help us do what we already want to do. Mainly, they want us to show up in great numbers and pay their bills.

I pray every day for God to help me get love flowing through me. When it happens, I drop everything and sink into it. I stayed in bed for a long time, telling God I loved him and asking for more.

Afterward, I started thinking about contemporary American culture, which is actually the counterculture. We originally used to use the word “counterculture” to describe people like beatniks, hippies, leftists, drug enthusiasts, and sexual deviants, but their culture is dominant now, so it’s silly to say “counterculture” as though we were talking about rebels. We’re talking about obedient, mainstreamed sheep. The word “counter” means “against.” “Counterculture” used to mean “the culture which is against mainstream culture.” Now it just means “the culture which is against God.”

What happens when you go to high school and college? Do they teach you the Bible is true? Do they tell you how important capitalism is? Do they reinforce proper sex roles? No. They promote the counterculture. Old, fat, pampered professors pretending to be rebels repeat the myths they were fed by their own professors. Their eyes shine when they talk about sick individuals like Jack Kerouac, Sylvia Plath, and Karl Marx.

I bought into this nonsense when I was a kid, even though I felt contempt for most of my professors. I read the diaries of Anais Nin. I read everything Henry Miller wrote. I loved Fritz Perls. I read the authors of the 1920’s Paris scene. I admired the spiritual grandchildren of the counterculture’s founders. I actually sent letters to TV networks, hoping to get jobs writing for infantile shows like Saturday Night Live. When I went to college, I used Animal House as a pattern for my behavior.

I never became a socialist, and I could never get excited about hard rock or hard bop jazz, but I wanted to be like my counterculture heroes.

Why did I want that? They were miserable people. They killed themselves because they were so miserable. They drank themselves to death. They overdosed. They made other people unhappy. Their kids were screwed up. Their marriages failed.

What did counterculture idols do for others that made me want to like them? Did Jim Morrison heal anyone? Did Gore Vidal raise the dead? These people were useless. They were completely selfish. They were narcissists, elevating themselves briefly on rotten podiums so other idiots could throw roses.

It’s amazing that I ever wanted to fit in with them.

I had a hero vacuum. My dad was no father at all, most of my best friends were creeps, I had no older brother, my older sister was a sociopath, my mother was weak, and I did not have anyone to introduce me to the Holy Spirit. Kids with hero vacuums often fill the vacuums with losers. I suppose this is why it’s so easy for gay men to get teenage boys to come live with them. My great uncle did it.

Today I looked at a couple of videos featuring William Burroughs. An heir to the Burroughs business machine fortune, Burroughs became, perhaps, the leading eminence grise of the counterculture, possibly because he was one of the few who lived long enough to fulfill the grise part.

He was an unrepentant junkie. He blew his wife’s brains out while he was under the influence, and somehow, he was never prosecuted. He spent his life pursuing fake Eastern enlightenment. He built himself an orgone box and sat in it. He dressed like a model grandfather, wearing a suit and hat and carrying a cane, and he spoke with great conviction, trying to convince impressionable young people that his sorry, disgraceful ideas were genius. Young acolytes thought he was a god.

He wrote the most disgusting book I have ever tried to read: Naked Lunch. It’s so gross, I won’t even quote from it. It’s full of stream-of-consciousness sexual depravity. I bought a copy to see what it was all about, and I threw it out because it was so sick. If you’ve ever seen a video about a joke called “the aristocrats,” you’ve seen similar material.

While watching videos, I learned that Burroughs enriched the world by dying at 83, with an adoring minion by his side, doing Tibetan meditation. You can go see a video of the minion rhapsodizing about what a great time they had. This is a big thing with counterculture people. When someone dies disgracefully, they talk like it was a birthday party or a wedding. Hunter Thompson blew his defeated brain through the back of his skull while his grandchild was in the next room, and his wife and son poured drinks and toasted his dead body. Then Johnny Depp paid several million dollars to build a cannon to shoot his ashes into the sky.

Burroughs was an apostle of self-destruction, but he and his peers are nearly worshiped in America’s universities.

My experiences this morning gave me a fresh understanding of the ugliness and evil of American culture, and they helped me understand how long it has been since our country was healthy.

I would say the counterculture really got cranking about 100 years ago. Prior to that, we weren’t all that excited by the kind of garbage people like James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway pumped out. Once the floodgates opened, the flow increased exponentially. By the time I was in college, the game was over. Things didn’t look as bad as they do now, but America was already finished.

It’s easy to get the impression that the world started disintegrating in around 2000, but it’s not true. The decay has accelerated greatly since then, but the America of 2000 was already lost.

Knowing this, I feel more comfortable with the idea that the rapture could come immediately. I feel less inclined to look around and think, “It’s too early. Things aren’t that bad.” Things are that bad. The flow of bodies into hell must resemble Niagara Falls, and every body matters to the God who threw them into the flow.

I feel much better about throwing out my big CD collection. I kept some things, but I believe all of my jazz is gone. Art Tatum. Billie Holiday. John Coltrane. Lester Young. Oscar Peterson. Junkies, prostitutes, weed addicts, mystics…the landfill is welcome to them. I never had anything in common with them. Not at the root. They were always headed for a completely different destination.

Christians like to criticize each other for dropping secular entertainment. We criticize people who tell their kids to stay in on Halloween instead of dressing up as devils and witches. We treat people who don’t give their kids Disney DVD’s as though they were superstitious idiots. We are making a big mistake. Looking back on my experience, I am more in favor of separation from the world than ever. I wish I had thrown Miles Davis, Stevie Ray Vaughan, B.B. King, and Lynyrd Skynyrd out way earlier. I apologize for nothing, except for being too slow.

The Bible asks what light has to do with darkness. I can see why. Most people are on a bus for hell. Why would I accompany them even part of the way? If you don’t want to finish something, don’t start it.

I’ll see every saved person who has ever lived in heaven, over and over, for eternity. Our relationships will continue forever. No saved person will ever see William Burroughs, Jimi Hendrix, Jerry Garcia, Thelonious Monk, Mahatma Gandhi, Frank Sinatra, or Sylvia Plath again. Why bother becoming acquainted with them now?

If there is a library in heaven, Burroughs and Kerouac will not be in it. Neither will Sartre or Marx. There won’t be any movie theaters, and if people like Leonardo di Caprio and Meryl Streep make it to heaven, they won’t be celebrities there. If there are lines, they will have to stand in them like everyone else. No one will ever hear the Beatles or the Rolling Stones in heaven. Anything evil thing you have to give up when you die shouldn’t be in your possession while you’re alive.

I feel very bad about admiring losers when I was young. I would have been better off if I had gotten to know God but lost both legs. I wish there had been someone around to teach me better. When I tried to find God, I found loser preachers like Kenneth Copeland and Benny Hinn, who taught me the secrets of remaining poor and distant from my creator. It’s terrible that losers still have so much influence. They have more influence than ever.

I wish my past were a bellyful of vomit so I could throw it up and flush it.

Meet the Poet Laureates of God’s Garbage Dump

I am supposedly an adult, and this blog does not attract children, so I feel it’s okay to quote some gross language today. Don’t read if you’re not up to it.

One of the left’s current darlings is a Hispanic rapper from the Bronx. You would have to look up her real name to find out what it is. She calls herself Cardi B, which is a variation on “Bacardi.” Apparently she is so fond of rum, her friends named her after it.

She and another woman who, unbelievably, calls herself Megan Thee Stallion, has the current #1 rap hit in the USA, and it has been at #1 for 4 weeks.

For some inexplicable reason, many black people in this country have taken to calling attractive women stallions. It’s sad. It shows that there are a huge number of Americans who have no idea what a stallion is. Of course, it’s a male horse that still has all parts of its reproductive system. How did people get this ignorant? It’s pretty much the opposite of a symbol of feminine beauty. “Stallion” is a timeworn slang term for a man who has sex with a lot of women.

If you don’t know what “stallion” means, you are extremely, extremely ignorant. You must know nearly nothing. God bless our liberal-run schools.

To get back to the hit, the title is “WAP,” and that’s short for “Wet Ass P*ssy.” They gave it that grotesque title, and they didn’t even know enough to use a hyphen.

I wanted to see what the fuss was about, so I watched the video. I turned the sound off, because I hate rap. I hate black rap. I hate white rap. I hate Christian and conservative rap. I hate it all, except for rare songs which somehow rise above the pack. I don’t like rap because I don’t like being yelled at and because it promotes a filthy, subhuman culture of pride, promiscuity, anti-white racism, and violence.

The video is beyond belief. It’s one of those things that make you wonder if you’re really awake. Miss B performs in her underwear, in something which I believe is called an all-in-one. I looked it up. It has big holes through which her breasts hang out, and her nipples have little covers glued on them.

I want to be clear. Her breasts, which are enormous, are exposed all the way to the base, and only her nipples are covered.

The sentence, “There’s some whores in this house,” is played 79 times during the video. It appears that “whores” refers to Miss B and Miss Stallion. They rap about sex, using coarse slang terms to describe the unimaginative things they do with men.

We now live in a country where the entertainment industry thinks it’s okay to promote ignorant ghetto dwellers calling themselves whores. And at the same time, you can be fired from your job if you’re a man and you tell a coworker she’s pretty.

The lyrics aren’t real lyrics. It’s like something a person on PCP would murmur after being tased by the police. They probably took about 15 minutes to write.

Does anyone remember real songs? I would say “Stardust” is my favorite pop song, or at least near the top. Look at the lyrics:

And now the purple dusk of twilight time
Steals across the meadows of my heart
High up in the sky the little stars climb
Always reminding me that we’re apart
You wander down the lane and far away
Leaving me a song that will not die
Love is now the stardust of yesterday
The music of the years gone by.

Sometimes I wonder, how I spend
The lonely nights
Dreaming of a song
The melody
Haunts my reverie
And I am once again with you
When our love was new
And each kiss an inspiration
But that was long ago
And now my consolation is in the stardust of a song

Beside the garden wall, when stars are bright
You are in my arms
The nightingale
Tells his fairy tale
Of paradise, where roses grew
Though I dream in vain
In my heart it will remain
My stardust melody
The memory of love’s refrain.

I may as well post a video, featuring Nat King Cole. Remember all his great songs about shooting cops and pimping?

He had one of the very best voices in the industry, and he was also a highly accomplished jazz pianist. I don’t know if he ever wore lingerie with strategic holes cut in it, but sometimes you have to excuse people based on the times in which they lived.

So this is where the world has ended up. We went from banging sticks together to Mozart to Nat King Cole to a couple of disgusting gutter denizens labeling themselves whores and singing about their genitalia.

Often I feel that the rapture will take place in December. Then I ask myself if the world is sufficiently far gone for the rapture to be necessary. Then I see something like this new video.

How much more depraved can we get? What’s next? Music videos featuring human sacrifice?

We are no longer merely descending into the realm of beasts. We are plummeting.

I thought I should let people know what’s happening. Intelligent, moral people don’t keep up with rap, so there must be many, many Christians who are unaware of this song. I didn’t know about the lyrics until today, even though I had seen the video.

If our most popular musicians are producing things like this now, and our music industry is behind them, and critics are giving them rave reviews instead of vomiting, try and imagine what we’ll be seeing in 2021. I don’t have the imagination for it. I guess it will be pure porn, and we’ll move from straight to gay to whatever comes after gay.

Look at the lyrics on the web. It’s like the things I imagine demons saying to each other in hell. What could demons be saying that could be worse?

Of course, Joe Biden just did an interview with her. That’s how little there is to him. He’s a mist of a man. Black and Hispanic women are whores, right Joe? That’s okay with you?

President. He’s running for president of the United States.

I hope we don’t have much time left. Living in this world is starting to be like living in a pile of soiled underwear. Thank God I live in the country, where things are still bearable.

I don’t know if there is still any point in leaving Christians on earth. I enjoy my life, but I would love to spend some time in my real home in heaven, where everyone is in agreement, and the only whores are whores that repented.

We Worship People our Ancestors Would not have Permitted in Their Homes

Note: I wrote this a couple of days ago. Something kept telling me not to publish it. Today I felt that I was released.

I am disturbed today.

This morning during my prayer time, I picked up my phone for a minute, and somehow I ended up Googling Stanley Kubrick. From there, I went on to read up on Dr. Strangelove, Terry Southern, the beat generation, William S. Burroughs, Rip Torn, Saturday Night Live, and a number of popular movies.

I have never liked Stanley Kubrick movies. The only exception is Dr. Strangelove, which was a pretty fair picture of the way human organizations work. It was like Dilbert’s view of the Cold War.

I just realized I liked another Kubrick movie. I don’t like it now, however. When I was a kid, I watched A Clockwork Orange, and I got caught up in the way it made extreme cruelty and rape funny. I think most people who like the movie like it for its humor, and that’s unfortunate, because it shows how our consciences have been seared. I should never have found it funny. I should have left the room in shock.

I never thought much of 2001. It was an extremely boring movie. The plot could have been summed up in less than 10 seconds. It was not clever. It was not funny. It was not moving. It was like something a high school student could have written.

Full Metal Jacket was somewhat like A Clockwork Orange. Thanks to R. Lee Ermey, Kubrick again succeeded in making depravity amusing. The rest of the film was just sensationalism, pessimism, and hatred of humanity. There was no plot. It’s not clear if Kubrick had any type of structure in mind when he made the film.

He obviously hated the military. That much is clear. Of course, his freedom to make his films was built on the corpses of dead soldiers.

Terry Southern rewrote Dr. Strangelove, which means he made a small contribution to the film, but many people think he wrote the whole thing. He was a Texan. He was a pal of beatniks and counterculture apostles. He ran around with William S. Burroughs, who is the very face of depravity and damnation. You haven’t debased yourself with literature until you’ve read his book Naked Lunch.

Terry Southern wrote Easy Rider, which was an exceptionally poisonous movie. He also wrote The Magic Christian, a cult film in which Peter Sellers convinces people to humiliate themselves in exchange for money. I don’t think Southern ever turned down money, but he seems to have been pretty disgusted with other people who thought about things like paying bills.

There is a scene in The Magic Christian in which Sellers’ character fills a tank with excrement and slaughterhouse waste and then adds a huge amount of British currency. People walking by start trying to pick notes out from outside the tank, and they end up swimming in it in order to maximize their success.

I read that Mike O’Donoghue tried to get Southern to write for The National Lampoon, which spawned P.J. O’Rourke, John Hughes, and Doug Kenney, who would probably have become famous, too, had he not fallen off a cliff.

I could say the Lampoon spawned me, too. A lot of the humor I’ve written was influenced by the Lampoon. Many of the self-destructive things I did in college were inspired by the spirit of Animal House.

As I read about various people and movies, God showed me that our secular culture is generated by a club, or, more accurately, a family. Directors know actors and screenwriters. Actors and screenwriters know musicians. The whole crew is in bed with leftist journalists and politicians; in fact, Southern, not Hunter Thompson, is said to have been the father of “the New Journalism.” It’s a big, sprawling guild, spreading infectious pus over America from a thousand points of darkness.

I’m so sorry I ever had an interest in popular culture. I see how poisonous it is now.

I used to fantasize about working for the Lampoon. I once sent submissions to a show SNL spun off, hoping to be hired as a writer. I’ve written a gigantic amount of sick humor on the Internet. I got three books published. I knew I could write humor as well as anyone. I thought it was only a matter of time until I was recognized.

I have to thank God my career didn’t go anywhere. What would have happened to me? I would have become convinced I was on the right track. I would have had no incentive to turn to God.

When I think of popular culture, I think of carnies. A carny is a person who works for a carnival. Carnies are typically moral nullities. They have been rejected by decent people for centuries.

Carnies have a reputation for coming to town, conning people out of their money, stealing things that aren’t locked up, seducing women, and enticing men with sex. Their reputation is well-deserved. They do all these things. A carnival is like a traveling apparatus for spreading disease. You could say carnies are like reverse evangelists.

The other day I saw an episode of American Pickers. This show is about two men, Mike Wolfe and Frank Fritz, who roam around buying collectible items from people. They have a female assistant named Danielle. She’s a stripper. She is covered with tattoos.

In the episode I saw, Danielle and Mike visited an artist who collects flash art. You may be wondering what that is. It’s wall art used in tattoo shops. Tattooists create posters of their designs, and they hang them on their shop walls. You look at the flash art and choose the tattoo you want.

Danielle was beside herself with awe as she looked at the tacky, sleazy, artistically feeble posters of filthy drawings. It was as though someone had given her a private viewing of Michelangelo’s statues. She was looking at garbage, mind you. She knew the names of the “artists.” She spoke of them the way a pianist might speak of Art Tatum. She spoke with true reverence.

Imagine speaking of a pornography dealer or a pimp with reverence. That was how it sounded to me. Actually, many Americans do revere a pornography dealer. In his last decades, Hugh Hefner–a giant among degenerates–was treated like an elder statesman.

She talked about the connection between carnivals and tattoos. She said she was a carny at heart.

The posters featured things like nude, whorish women with exaggerated physiques. Very tasteless.

As I watched her, I thought about what America had become.

America is in love with evil, and the people who lead us in our love are bound together surprisingly tightly. Look at one prominent exponent of sin, and you will be presented with links to others. It’s like a game of six degrees of Satan.

We have many celebrities who are open about loving evil. Consider rock music. On the other hand, we have a lot of evil-loving celebrities who appear squeaky clean or at least morally neutral. Look how Disney kids turn out. Britney Spears. Christina Aguilera. Shia Laboeuf. Lindsey Lohan. Miley Cyrus.

In order to become prominent in the arts or journalism, you almost have to be in the club. I didn’t know that when I was trying to get in. I was running from God, but I had enough of the smell of Christianity on me to make me an impossible fit. The vast bulk of the arts are harmful. The arts have been instrumental in promoting our decline as a civilization.

The arts promote leftism, sexual sin, hatred of authority, emasculation, cruelty, narcissism, drug abuse, pride, anger, the rejection of logic, and selfishness. It’s amazing we’ve done as well as we have, under the influence of the arts.

I feel bad about trying to get into the club, and I also feel bad about holding onto certain things too long. I feel bad about amassing a big blues and jazz collection, which I discarded not long ago. I feel bad about owning literature that poisoned me.

When I was young, I owned a lot of books by Henry Miller and Anais Nin. That could never have happened, had I known anything about God. I was ignorant. I had no one to tell me I was hurting myself. My own mother introduced me to Henry Miller!

I admired Hunter Thompson, who was one of the biggest failures in modern history. I watched other people destroy themselves, and I wanted to take my turn.

I have a friend who loves Harry Potter. I could not convince her to give it up. The books brought her comfort while she was growing up with abusive parents. I don’t think she understands that she brought demons into her life, and that they are connected to her current problems. It’s bad that I lived in ignorance for so long. I wish I were better able to help other people get out of it, but human beings tend to wait for their own self-generated disasters instead of learning from the bad choices of others. My own experience is an example.

I’ve been watching a lot of Mark Hemans lately. He’s an Australian healer who goes around casting out demons and teaching. He sometimes tells people they collected demons via one-off experiences. For example, getting one tattoo or talking to one “psychic” can invite a demon that never leaves and nearly destroys your life.

How many times have I opened doors? I can’t count the dirty movies, books, magazines, and websites I’ve seen. My uncle took me and my cousin to a dirty movie, which wasn’t even very good, when we were 8 and 7, and I watched Deadpool when I was deep into middle age. I watched many things in between. I’m not even mentioning the non-mainstream things I’ve seen.

My uncle also took us to see Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex. I don’t know what he was thinking.

I consulted a psychic once. I let my mother have my astrological chart done. I used various drugs. I said all sorts of careless things.

Christians tend to think that as long as they go to church and reject the worst sinful activities, it’s okay to be part of mainstream culture. That’s not true. Things we think are harmless can be very damaging. I saw Hemans tell a lady to go home and throw out her daughter’s fairy tale books. He said they were a reason demons were afflicting her daughter. How many Christians have shelves full of Pixar and Disney films about supernatural creatures?

There is no significant difference between watching fetish pornography and watching John Wick or a Harry Potter film. A demon is a demon, no matter what vehicle it arrives in.

I can’t believe I let myself watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I must have been insane.

When I think about the things I’ve ingested, the sensation I have is a wish that I could vomit everything out and be clean. I have been praying for hours every day for years, I have been baptized with the Holy Spirit, I am very sincere about serving God, and still, this is where I am. What must life be like for Christians who are not even trying?

Maybe Satan doesn’t mind it all that much if you get baptized with the Holy Spirit, as long as you hold onto your culture. If you go home and wallow in worldly filth and defend it to other people, you aren’t a big threat, and you are likely to return to him. You are also likely to serve him very powerfully even while you think you’re on God’s side. Christian TV is full of preachers who do tremendous work for Satan and almost nothing for God.

Understanding all this, I believe I know what’s happening with Kanye West. He is not a sound Christian. He is very dangerous. He has let worldly Christians and his own flesh convince him that he’s supposed to help God out with his fame and money. He wants to show the world a rich, famous Christian can do powerful works for God, and that Christians are the ones who are supposed to have the TV cameras and big venues.

West is under the spell of Richie Wilkerson, who is as toxic as preachers get, short of starting cults in the Amazon basin. Richie has no interest in God. He believes in money and fame. Richie’s mom and dad run a cult church where money is god, and the apple fell right next to the trees. Richie thinks earthly promotion is proof of God’s presence, even if you have to debase yourself to get it.

If you look at things Richie says in public, you’ll see he’s very defensive. He’s always defending what he’s doing. He knows he’s in the wrong.

Paul made it clear we are not supposed to associate with Christians who continue in willful sin, yet Richie has no problem using his closeness to Kim Kardashian to promote his ministry. After years of connecting with Richie, Kim Kardashian still works for the devil. She is a powerful promoter of sexual sin. She has not repented. Kanye West, if he has changed at all, is an embryonic Christian who should not be leading anyone. When Richie hangs out with them and endorses what they do, he is not being loving and inclusive. He is just whoring out and being a follower. This is exactly what his dad does, with less success.

I think there is hope for West, but I think his breakthrough won’t come until he gets free of the Wilkerson curse. Until you see him abandon and denounce his secular works–completely–don’t be fooled. He’s still deceived.

I was there when people who actually cared about God fled the Wilkerson church. I know what I’m talking about. The Wilkersons had secret meetings about me, and Richie actually preached publicly against what I was saying in private. They are not nice people. They grin and smile and talk about love when they’re really just trying to seduce people so they can take their money. Then if you tell people what they’re up to, the Wilkersons call you a hater.

It’s a wonderful pose. You smile and forgive in front of the crowd, and you claim you love everyone who is against you. The idea is to make yourself look holy, and to make people who speak for God look wicked, while you pick people’s pockets.

Satan appears as an angel of light. Why? Because people like to be kissed and coddled and told they don’t have to change. They prefer flatterers who destroy them to honest people who love them and want to help them.

People like the Wilkersons defend themselves with numbers. “Look how many people came to church today.” They don’t know how few of those people belong to God. They use the wrong bait, so they attract the wrong people. The Bible says, “Better a little the righteous man has than the riches of many wicked.”

When Jesus becomes popular, he ceases to be Jesus. He said the world would hate his children, and it does. You can’t have a glamorous, worldwide movement everyone approves of and expect God to be part of it.

The best that can be said for Richie and Kanye is that some people may go to their events and get to know God in spite of the errors of the organizers. How well such new Christians would do would depend largely on their willingness to ignore everything Richie says and find better teaching. I improved a great deal at Trinity Church, but the better I got, the more I disagreed with the management. Had God not given me a prodigious habit of praying in tongues, which brings revelation, I might still be at Trinity, drinking the Kool Aid.

Leaving Trinity was wonderful. It was like a graduation. I felt like a runaway slave. The rapture will feel the same way.

Even the pharisees who rejected Jesus and are now in hell taught some useful things, as Jesus himself said. That’s how it will be with Kanye’s new project.

I will keep looking at my life and trying to rid myself of anything toxic.

Goodbye, Billie Holiday

Yesterday was a good day. I got rid of most of my jazz albums.

A year or two ago, I put all my blues CD’s in bags and took them to the dump. It was somewhat unpleasant, but I also felt unburdened. I knew God didn’t like them, and that they opened doors to spirits that hated me. At that time, I didn’t feel compelled to get rid of my jazz, but a while back, I started to feel it was time.

I talked to my young friend Travis about it. He’s a jazz musician. The thought of getting rid of jazz recordings disturbed him, but he took notice of something. Many jazz musicians have had filthy, ungodly lives. I agree.

Chet Baker was a junkie and a sociopath, and he killed himself by jumping or falling out of a window. Billie Holiday was a junkie. Louis Armstrong was a marijuana addict who destroyed his talent with drugs. Bix Beiderbecke drank himself to death. Thelonious Monk was mentally ill. Miles Davis was a wife beater who had drug problems. John Coltrane was a zealous Buddhist; so was Maynard Ferguson.

Heroin addiction has been so common among jazz musicians, it almost seems mandatory.

If you want to make it in jazz, what do you have to do? Play in bars. There is no way to avoid it. You can’t start out at Carnegie Hall. Bars, other than male-only establishments, were created to facilitate fornication. We don’t say that out loud, but it’s true. The secret to making a bar succeed is to attract women, not men. When women come, men follow in hopes of fornicating with them, and men pay the checks. You can look this up.

Centuries after Eden, women still lead men to perdition. We are supposed to lead. Without God, men are followers.

Jazz is not godly music. That’s obvious. You may cite exceptions. Dave Brubeck tried to create Christian jazz; he was a Catholic. But he wasn’t listening to the Holy Spirit. It was a carnal idea.

I don’t know how much jazz I had. When I cleaned out a USB drive containing all the albums I had ripped, Windows said I had gotten rid of 680 items, and I know I didn’t have all my albums on the drive.

I had two huge Art Tatum box sets. I had Billie Holiday. I had Dinah Washington. I had a set of Lionel Hampton LP’s in great condition. I haven’t located the Art Tatum sets, but when I do, they’re gone. The other things are already in the landfill where no one will ever see them again.

While I was at it, I came across Etta James, and I got rid of her albums, too.

I was allowed to keep a few things. I had some Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw. I have an Ella Fitzgerald box set. There is very little left, though.

You can’t have objects that displease God. He has helped me to understand that having such an object is like painting a sign on your wall, welcoming demons to toy with you and dominate you.

We hold onto things like pornography, astrological paraphernalia, playing cards, dope, items related to yoga, and idols we think of as art, and when problems come, we pray to God for help, while holding onto the things that hold the door open for Satan. It doesn’t make much sense.

I’ve thrown many things out. I threw out my dad’s Masonic stuff (freemasonry is an occult religion). I threw out a treasured souvenir figurine he and my mother got on a trip to Italy. I threw out expensive porcelain because the shapes represented evil things. I threw out thousands of dollars’ worth of Cuban cigars. I’m glad it’s all gone. I’m glad no one else will ever have it; it would just poison them as it did me.

I have an expensive Muslim prayer rug in Miami. I told my house-sitter to get rid of it.

When the apostles taught in Ephesus, converts made a big pile of religious books worth a great deal of money, and they burned it. Paul didn’t say, “Let’s keep them as investments.” He didn’t say, “They have important historical value.” He didn’t make the excuses we would make today.

Here’s a good thing to know about spending time, money, and effort on ungodly things: the more you invest, the more you will lose when you finally repent and have to get rid of what you’ve built. It’s best not to invest much.

Derek Prince told an interesting story. He inherited some Chinese art from his grandfather. It consisted of two depictions of dragons. They were worth a lot of money, and they had great sentimental value. God asked him what a dragon represented in the Bible. Knowing the answer, Prince got rid of the artwork.

At the time, Prince was having a problem with inherited property. I can relate. Like me, he had irresponsible relatives who kept delaying the distribution of some of his wealth. When he got rid of the dragons, the wealth was released. I believe I have delayed God’s help by holding onto counterproductive music. Things are going great for me, but I have some nagging problems that resist resolution. I want to see what happens now that I’ve cleared away some supernatural obstacles.

God hates carnality. Anything you create, without being told to do so by God, is a carnal work. All carnal works will eventually be burned, and it won’t just be things like jazz compositions. Many Christians have done carnal works in God’s name. They’ve written Christian books God will burn in front of them. They’ve built churches and orphanages God didn’t want them to build. When the world is judged, all that stuff will be destroyed. People will come to God full of confidence, thinking he’s impressed by their works, but he will destroy what they’ve created and tell them it was the result of iniquity.

Might as well start the destruction while you’re alive, instead of waiting until it’s too late to do anything to purify your life.

No one in heaven listens to Lionel Hampton or Dizzy Gillespie. No one listens to rock, the blues, disco, or rap. It’s wrong to try to hold onto these things here on earth.

It may well be that all of the jazz giants I enjoyed are in hell right now, never to be heard from again.

The Lord’s Prayer says, “May your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” We’re supposed to bring a little bit of heaven into the earth. We’re not supposed to bring worldly things into our godly lives. It’s perversion. We can’t live here without getting a little soiled, but there is no excuse for increasing the problem unnecessarily.

I suppose people say I’m a fanatic, but so was Jesus. He was, and is, much more fanatical than I am. Enoch was a fanatic. Noah was a fanatic. Moses, the other prophets, John, Paul, Peter, Stephen…all fanatics. We’re supposed to be fanatics. The Bible says, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.” Nothing ambiguous there. I may seem fanatical, but I don’t begin to approach that standard.

I wonder what else I have that I should destroy. I don’t want any more signs on my walls, inviting my enemies and granting them permission to harm me.

Additional Obstacles to Holiness Revealed

I’m sitting here watching Youtube videos from The Last Reformation, and I just had a weird experience. I realized my mother received a word from a false prophet, and I needed to renounce it.

In around 1990, I went to the Bahamas. My dad and I took his boat over. We went to Harbour Island, which is just off Eleuthera.

My mother never liked the boat, but she showed up for a time. She flew back to Miami on her own.

The airport at Eleuthera is a few miles away from Harbour Island. You have to take a water taxi to get there. I went with my mother and helped her with her luggage and so on. Then I left.

When my mother and I were reunited, she had a strange story to tell me. Before I left the airport, I saw a female janitor. She was an older lady with a rag wrapped around her head. She was mopping and so on. After I left, she approached my mother. She said, “Where’s Stephen?” My mother didn’t know what to say. She told her I was gone. The lady said, “Stephen is a good boy.” Then she went back to cleaning.

Obviously, the cleaning lady at North Eleuthera Airport did not know me or my mother.

God says things to me from time to time, and a couple of years ago, he gave me this: “I am not the good boy.”

I never put these things together until today. God told me the opposite of what the cleaning lady told my mother.

Today I renounced what the cleaning lady said. I used to have a vague idea that maybe her words meant something. Maybe they meant I would be used by God. For all I knew, she was a Spirit-led Christian. Now I know better. God doesn’t tell people they’re good, because they are not. He may say he is pleased with you, but he will never say you’re a good person or that he is proud of you. He’s not even proud of himself. When he praised Jesus, he didn’t say he was proud. He said he was pleased.

Bahamians practice obeah, which is voodoo. Like all voodoo, it comes from Africa.

I don’t know what the cleaning lady was into, but it looks like she had a spirit of divination, and these spirits always cause problems. They never willingly do anything that will help people. Even when their messages seem helpful, they come from white-hot hate and sadism, and they are designed to do damage.

It’s funny, but even though the Bahamas are full of witchcraft, Christianity is also big there. They’re more open about it than we are. We hide our Christianity in America, because we want to be cool, and because we have a pathological fear of promoting Christianity in public forums. It’s like we think it’s a crime, like housing discrimination.

I just Googled to learn about Bahamian witchcraft, and I found a neat article in The Freeport News. This is a major newspaper. The title of the article: “Is your relationship bound by witchcraft?”

I suppose people who are very used to seeing the supernatural at work through witchcraft are less likely to be ashamed of their beliefs when they become Christians. It’s too bad Americans don’t have that mindset. We’re very ashamed of Jesus. In the Bahamas, a city’s main newspapers can have a column by a serious minister of the gospel. In America, printing such a column would provoke the same reaction as publishing articles promoting Nazism.

In other news, I just found out I have more things to get rid of. I have two flamenco CD’s by a prominent artist I will not name. I don’t want people to run out and buy his music because I praised his talent. He’s very, very good. I had been under the impression that his work had no supernatural significance, but I just learned that he is considered a New Age artist.

As I have pointed out before, “New Age” is Hinduism, which isn’t “new” at all. It’s demon worship. There is more to it than Hinduism, but Hinduism is a big part of it.

Satan loves to repackage his moldy, infected crap and tell us it’s new.

More CD’s for the dump. I can’t have this excrement around me. Anything that opens the wrong doors has to go.

I haven’t gone through my jazz albums yet, but I think some of them need to go. Nina Simone was not a good influence for anyone. Neither was Miles Davis. John Coltrane was a mystic who blended things like Buddhism and Hinduism, and he apparently had a demonic revelation that gave him the entire theme and structure of the album A Love Supreme instantaneously. That album was dedicated to his eclectic false religion.

Whatever. Small sacrifices to make, in exchange for a better relationship with God.

It’s astounding, how so many poisonous things in my life escaped my notice. Supernatural blindness is really something.

Australian Preacher Has MSM Success

Today I am thinking about an Australian man who heals people in the name of Jesus.

I know God works miracles. He has done it for me, and I don’t just mean he has done unlikely things; he has done physically impossible things right in front of me. I also know that there are a lot of criminals out there pretending to heal people. As a person who witnesses the supernatural from time to time, I am always looking for others like me, and I view them with skepticism because many who claim to fit the bill are liars.

The situation is more complicated than that. There are terrible preachers who sometimes get people healed. Also, there are people who get healed temporarily. A person might throw his back brace away at a meeting and then collapse a few hours later. We need to be set free from charlatans. We need healing. We need the healing to last. Finally, we need to be born again so we don’t continue to be attacked and harmed.

Supposedly, people have been healed at Benny Hinn appearances, at least temporarily. Benny Hinn is a greedy, twisted man who teaches the false prosperity gospel, and the damage his teachings do is far greater than the good that accrues from any healings that take place. It doesn’t do you a lot of good to have your slipped disk fixed if you go on to live in heresy and never receive Holy Spirit correction and restoration.

You will lose your body eventually, so having it repaired is a limited benefit. Your heart and mind are different. They will be with you in heaven or hell. You need to have them repaired. That’s the big priority.

I look for people who carry out God’s commission. We have been told we are supposed to heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse lepers, and cast out demons, so if anyone is out there doing these things, I want to know about it. I want to be part of it. This world is a rotten place, and almost all of us live cursed lives of defeat and hopelessness. I would like to see people win for a change.

There are a lot of healing videos on Youtube, but the healings aren’t documented all that well. Were they real? If so, did they last? It would be nice to see more healings that have survived real scrutiny.

The Australian healer I watched is named John Mellor. He’s a remarkable case. He says he drives an old Holden, which is a GM car about like a Chevrolet. He says he doesn’t own his own house. He says the offerings he has received haven’t been sufficient to offset what he has spent. It looks like he’s not a typical TV profiteer. On top of all this, secular journalists in Australia have done stories on him, and they bear out the claims of healing.

How about that? Close-minded people masquerading as reasonable skeptics always say that if healing were real, it would be documented. Here’s a guy who passes that test, but skeptics still attack him.

I’ll embed a video you might like. A journalist from Australia’s A Current Affair went to see Mellor. He had a neck problem, and he decided to let Mellor take a whack at it. Mellor prayed for him, and in his narration, the reporter said, “A warm, tingling sensation spreads across the top of my spine.” His pain left, and he said, “It is real. I can feel it.” A later broadcast said the reporter’s healing had persisted.

Mellor also prayed for a little boy who was hydrocephalic. He couldn’t walk or talk. Nothing happened when he prayed, but a couple of weeks later, the boy improved, and now he walks and talks. I’ll embed that video, too.

In a third case, Mellor prayed for a boy who was mentally abnormal due to a chromosome problem. The boy didn’t receive a healing, but his father did. His father had been afflicted with arthritis for decades, but after Mellor prayed for him, he was able to run again.

Anyone can put up a video and claim somebody got healed. How many healers can get the secular, anti-Christian press to confirm their successes?

Naturally, Mellor has not won the approval of every journalist. A crippled preacher teamed up with the BBC to “debunk” his healings. According to Mellor, the BBC edited the video dishonestly. He cites facts the BBC concealed. I’m not going to sit through a long TV show in order to do a in-depth analysis, but I can say this: if you have ANY documented long-term healings, you can’t be debunked.

Generally, healing preachers are quiet about their failures. When healings are undone, you generally don’t see TV preachers devote air time to them. Mellor appears to be different. He admits he doesn’t always succeed, and the coverage shows one person who was healed temporarily and then relapsed almost immediately.

I’m impressed. You can make a ton of money healing people, and Mellor hasn’t done it. You can protect a profitable healing ministry by covering up failures. It appears that Mellor isn’t doing that. He’s a hard man to criticize with any credibility.

I would love to do what he does. I hate physical and mental problems. I hate knowing that we are subjugated by demons who are supposed to be under our feet. I hate the powerlessness of the church. If we were doing what we were commissioned to do, we would be bringing a lot more people to Christ. Imagine how different things would be if homosexuals knew they could be changed in one prayer session. Instead, we send them away to find their own toxic solutions.

There are two things the church should be working on. The first is getting people healed and delivered. We do those things very poorly.

Charismatics have more success than anyone, but we’re not that good. For example, most terminal cancer patients we try to help, die.

If you go to the Catholics or other dead churches, you can pretty much forget about being helped. They think miracles are rare or that they don’t happen at all.

The second thing we need to work on is getting people born again. That means getting them saved, filled with the Holy Spirit, and purged of iniquity. We need them to be sanctified so their problems don’t return or increase.

The fact that you’ve been healed or delivered from demons doesn’t mean you’re fine. If you have sickness or demonic problems, it means doors were opened. You need to close those doors. You have to confess and repent, over and over. You need to take communion. You need to go through your house and throw dangerous things out. What good is a healing if the sickness returns or you go to hell?

God is about love and justice (see Psalm 101). When you focus too much on love and forget justice, you leave doors open. Many Christians are so excited about warm, fuzzy feelings, they refuse to judge sin. They enable. They do things for sinful people in order to make themselves feel good, and they leave the sinners wallowing in their filth, open to attack.

Jesus was a very rude person, because he needed to be. He told people exactly what they needed to hear. He did not worry about their precious feelings. What did he tell people he helped? “Go and sin no more, lest a worse thing come upon you.” If we get people delivered, and we don’t let them know they’re still in danger, we do Christianity a disservice. Their problems may return or increase, and then they’ll testify against God.

I wish preachers had had the guts to tell me the truth. I needed it, and they handed me lollipops instead. They were afraid I’d quit giving them money and free work. They could have shortened my captivity and weakness.

God keeps showing me things I need to change. I keep throwing things out. I can’t expect God to bless me if I hold onto garbage that offends him. Most preachers keep quiet about this issue.

I have thrown out all my blues and rock CD’s. I threw out all my music materials related to the blues and rock, as well as other anti-Christian music. As of yesterday, I still had a few things buried in boxes. I got up last night, dug them out, and put them in the trash.

When I was going to feel-good churches, I thought it was okay to have worldly entertainment. As recently as a few weeks ago, I was okay with Marvel movies, which feature a lot of witchcraft. I was blinded.

I had a pair of “four vices” cufflinks. They are menswear classics. They feature four pictures. One is a racing horse, another is a hand of cards, the third is a slutty woman, and the fourth is a bottle. They celebrate gambling on horses, gambling at cards, fornication, and drunkenness. I thought they were cute. Last night I put them in the trash. I was paying tribute to dangerous sins. I was insulting God by owning these, but at the same time, I was asking him to heal me and help me.

There are a lot of blockages in my life. I have had kidney stones, gallstones, nasal allergies, and so on. I believe God is showing me what I do to him by holding onto anti-Christian items. I block him, so I am blocked. These things may seem innocent, but they’re not. They’re a big deal.

It’s not okay to own recordings of people like Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, singing songs about women’s bodies. Holiness matters. Can you imagine Paul listening to that junk between meetings? Never. It’s inconceivable. Yet we listen to the blues and worse, and we expect God to think it’s fine.

Many people testify that God gave them sudden help when they got rid of pagan carvings and artwork. It’s not uncommon for people to have little African figurines. In Miami, Haitian paintings related to voodoo are common in the homes of educated white people. Items associated with idolatry are little openings, like cat flaps, that let demons enter your house and you. You have to be willing to dump these things. You can’t serve two masters.

My dad went to Europe with my mother and a couple of other relatives a long time ago. In Florence, they saw a statue of a fat naked man riding a tortoise. My mother thought it looked like my dad. She bought him a little copy. He still has it. I’m planning to throw it out. Why would a Christian want a thing like that in his house? The souvenir value doesn’t justify it. The artistic and historical value don’t justify it. Nothing is worth opening yourself to a relationship with demons.

Oh, boy. I just looked the statue up. It’s from the gardens at the Pitti Palace. It represents Bacchus, a violent, drunken “god” from the ancient pantheon! Great. I have an idol in my house. Out it goes, ASAP.

My grandmother’s father wouldn’t allow playing cards to come into his house. When I was a kid, I thought that was weird. He knew something I didn’t. He was even afraid to let his daughters cut their hair. Maybe that comes from the verse that says a woman’s hair is her crowning glory. My grandmother’s hair wasn’t cut until after he died, and she was about 18.

I still have some bad music stored on devices I don’t use. I need to get rid of it.

Last night, I threw out my Firefly DVD set, as well as my old copy of the book Serenity. Joss Whedon is in a pit of delusion. He is filled with burning rage all the time. I used to watch his shows. I loved Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I watched Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. until it deteriorated to the point where it became unwatchable. I have watched some of his Marvel movies. No more. He is completely controlled by hostile spirits, and I don’t want to share in it.

I threw out my copy of Hannibal, the book the movie was based on. The whole Lecter universe is evil. Author Thomas Harris must live in a very dark world.

Because I moved last year, I have an inventory of all the books I owned before leaving Miami. It has been helpful, because I can look at the list and pick out the things that need to go. I had a Toni Morrison book. Sick stuff. It’s in the trash. She’s the woman who wrote Beloved, which is a novel about a demonized Reconstruction-Era black girl who is murdered by her mother and then returns from hell.

I’m glad I don’t have any Alice Walker novels. She’s a witch and a raging Israel-hater.

Man, this world is dark. Jesus was not kidding when he said Satan was the god of this world. Look at the people who make it in the arts. Whedon. Walker. Morrison. J.K. Rowling. The Beatles. Rihanna. When I was writing books, I never had a chance, and I didn’t know it. The available seats were reserved for the family. It’s too bad I didn’t understand the rules.

I hope John Mellor is the real thing. I would love to do what he does. If God used me like that, I would want to work it out so I never took an offering. When you accept money for working for God, you open yourself up to slander. It’s not that easy to attack a preacher who works for nothing. The enemy’s children would still try, though.

Can you imagine driving cancer out of another person or making a lost leg grow back? Imagine what it was like to be an apostle. They raised the dead so they got new chances at life. They fixed cripples. They filled people with the Holy Spirit and helped them become as powerful as they were. It must be the most satisfying thing imaginable. It has to be worth throwing out a few unimportant midbrow books written by people who were ignorant about the most important thing in life.

As liberating as the message of sanctification is, it’s sad to think about it, because I know 95% of Christians will reject it. They want their cigarettes and weed. They want their ungodly entertainment. They want to live in sin with boyfriends and girlfriends. They want to fit in. People who talk about sanctification will be marginalized as kooks and legalists.

Maybe you’ll like the Mellor videos. If there are bad things about him I don’t know, maybe you can tell me about them. In any event, I like his line of work.

Who Really Chains You Down?

Today I’m doing something interesting. I’m throwing out compact disks.

For maybe 9 years, God has been helping me understand that iniquity and sin ruin our relationship with him. If you go to a charismatic church in the US, you won’t hear that. You’ll hear, “It doesn’t matter what you do. God is crazy about you! All you have to do is believe…AND GIVE US A HUGE PERCENTAGE OF YOUR INCOME!” If you talk about repentance and the common demons that attach themselves to Christians who don’t get sanctified, they get very angry, and they drive you out of their churches.

I have been asking God to change me for a long time, and he has been doing it, but I was so corrupted in the beginning, it took me a long time to improve.

I had a dream a number of years ago. I was in a big boat, cruising up a dirty canal in Miami. The canal was full of floating trash and dying fish. The canal was only open to the bay on one end. In order to get to the clean water of the bay, I had to turn around and go past all the filth I had seen on the way up the canal.

God was showing me that when I turned back to him, I would have to revisit my sins. I would have to go back, past all the rotten things I had done in the past. It would take time.

I have improved in steps. I would give this or that up, and then I would plateau. Then I would give something else up. There were things I couldn’t get rid of.

Last night I started thinking about my music collection. It has been sitting in boxes in a storage room for a year. I haven’t bothered fooling with it. A lot of it is also stored on electronic devices.

A while back, I threw out my only Aerosmith CD. Maybe that was before I left Miami. I can’t recall. I figured I would eventually get around to deleting it, and everything else that was offensive, from my devices.

I wake up in the middle of the night a lot, worried. I have help from my smoke detectors. I didn’t know how they worked until a week ago. It turned out I had two sets of detectors. One belonged to the alarm company, and one was built into the house. Even though the house detectors are connected to AC, they still have batteries, and the batteries don’t charge. You have to replace them. When you don’t replace them, they start going off in the middle of the night. Never during the day.

I found a great deal on batteries, on Amazon. I ordered them. They cost about a third as much as batteries from the drugstore. I figured I could deal with the beeping for a couple of days while I waited for the batteries.

Amazon canceled my order without explanation. I ordered the batteries again. Amazon canceled again. I suppose I spent almost two weeks waiting for the batteries. During this time, I was being awakened a lot. When I awakened, I had to pray and use my supernatural tool set to get peace.

Yesterday I deleted Aerosmith from my main computer. When I woke up, I thought about it. I thought about the problems that still cling to me. I felt that I needed to get into my CD’s, throw out the ones that were problematic, and ask for forgiveness. I’ve been doing this today.

I can’t believe how much garbage I’m throwing out, and I’m amazed that I allowed so much of it to remain so long.

Get this: I had two Enya CD’s. I bought them ages ago. Enya’s music is lowbrow, but it’s relaxing, and it makes a good stereo sound great. Why did I have this filth, after turning back to God? Enya is a pagan. Her music is for people who worship demons. I was very angry with myself when I saw the CD’s.

I also had relaxation CD’s. I am very wary of these. Relaxing in God’s presence is wonderful. We’re supposed to do it every day. Relaxing without him can open doors. Relaxation and hypnosis are tools demons use to get at us. Even though my relaxation CD’s were not religious in nature, I threw them out.

I had music from a company called Hearts of Space. I don’t know if they still exist. They used to produce collections of music to show off stereos, and it leaned toward the occult. A good stereo will simulate a large space very well, and New-Agey music is heavy on ambience effects.

I had a little bit of rock and roll. Gone. I don’t need it. How much brains do you need to realize rock culture belongs to Satan? It celebrates rebellion, drugs, and fornication. What else do you need to know? It embarrasses me that I didn’t throw it out a long time ago.

I threw out blues music. I guess I’ll get rid of all of it. I’m not done yet. I threw out B.B. King, Albert King, Big Joe Turner, Lazy Lester, Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Howlin’ Wolf, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Johnny Winter, and a pile of other things.

I have excellent taste in music, so I’m throwing out a lot of things that have real artistic quality. I’m not a teeny bopper or a woman. I don’t listen to Hanson, Kenny G, Beyonce, or Lady Gaga.

It’s amazing, the junk women like.

I’m wondering if I should dump Johnny Cash. People think of him as a country musician, but he started out in rockabilly, and he was an amphetamine addict. He had problems with the law. He broke up June Carter’s marriage. Not a great role model.

It’s tough, throwing out my blues CD’s. Pete Johnson, Jimmy Yancey, Ben Waters, Willie Smith, Albert Ammons, Meade Lewis…most people don’t even know who they are.

I pitched almost every Cuban album I had. Cuba is extremely screwed up. Cubans are passionate about voodoo; it’s why Cuba fell to Castro. The famous song “Babalu” is about a demon Cubans worship. I threw out Cugat, Beny More, Orquesta de la Playa, and Miguelito Valdes. I have been throwing out albums that are not easy to find. To buy them, I had to look them up on obscure websites.

Freddie King. Jackson Browne. Buddy Guy. Duane Allman. It’s a massacre.

When I’m done with the trash, I have to start deleting things.

For months, I’ve been asking God to show me the ropes that attach demons to me, and I know these CD’s are among them.

I wonder if I’ll be able to keep my jazz and classical music. It’s less offensive, but apart from a few classical tunes, it’s not pro-God. Jesus said those who were not for him were against him.

Whatever. I can’t have this mess clinging to me any more. How can I ask God to set me free while I hold onto my chains?

One reason I didn’t do this sooner is that I was afraid of going too far. When I was in my twenties, I went through a period when I wanted to get rid of everything that seemed ungodly, and I threw out things I should have kept. I burned some diaries I wish I still had. Having been through that, I was afraid of going overboard again.

Is it really possible to go overboard? Isn’t it better to overdo it and then have things restored to you than to refuse to go far enough? I’m not sure. The main thing is to be guided by the Holy Spirit. If you do the sorting yourself, you’ll be guessing, and you’ll make mistakes.

I have DVD’s I should dump. The entire Blackadder collection, for example. I loved The Big Lebowski, but I threw it out a long time ago because of the nudity. Anything that has nudity is already gone, as far as I know.

If I were a parent, I’d probably be taking a hard look at Pixar and Disney. Disney has always been creepy, because they struggle so hard to avoid promoting Christianity. They look for substitutes. I would also get rid of everything remotely related to Harry Potter. I can’t believe parents let their children look at that filth.

Later on, I’ll visit the dump. If you were to meet me there, you could make a huge CD score. You could get a lot of carefully collected top-quality music for nothing. It’s not going to happen. This stuff will be crushed and buried.

Might as well do it now. There will be no ZZ Top in heaven, so why listen to it on earth?

Christian entertainment is pretty thin. I can’t replace the things I’m discarding with Christian material of equivalent quality. It doesn’t exist. That’s too bad, but then we live in a sick world that ignores God.

I expect what I’m doing to improve my life. I wish I had started sooner. Take a look at your house, and see if there’s anything you should get rid of. Ask yourself how you would feel if Jesus walked in and saw it. Maybe that will help.

More

I finally found the last big box of CD’s. Thank God, it was mostly box sets. That made sorting it a faster job. All of the CD boxes have been purged.

I still have some box sets somewhere. Really nice stuff. Howlin’ Wolf. Buddy Guy. It has to go.

I’m wondering what to do with my copy of the movie Schindler’s List. It’s a remarkable movie about a pivotal event in human history, but it has full frontal nudity in it. This was not necessary, but you know how filmmakers are. They have to shock and titillate. Spielberg should have created a version with no nudity, for younger audiences.

I guess I’ll dump it. I can live without it.

I still have a few music books related to rock and the blues. I will dig them up and consign them to the dumpster.

This Land Isn’t Your Land, Especially if You’re Mexican

In prayer this morning, I felt nausea again. I started thinking about Woody Guthrie. I believe God was directing my attention back to him. When I think about the indifference I used to feel with regard to Guthrie, I feel like someone gave me poison. All my life, people tried to make be think Guthrie was a sweet guy who wrote upbeat songs. In reality, he was dark and angry, and he was an enemy of God. I can’t believe schoolteachers made me sing his ridiculous anti-God anthem. Schools were already insane when I was a kid. Worse than I have realized.

Guthrie was an atheist, and he was against Christianity. There are apologists who claim otherwise, but that’s just part of the left’s sick effort to lay claim to the church in order to destroy it.

Here’s something Guthrie wrote: “Love is the only God that I’ll ever believe in.” Sounds nice, right? The Bible says God is love. But it also says he is a God of justice. Furthermore, it says he is a humanoid being who sits on a throne in heaven, and it says he gets angry and kills people, sometimes by the millions. God is love, but not everything that feels like love is God.

When you say, “Love is the only God that I’ll ever believe in,” you are expressly denying the God of the Bible, because he is more than that.

Here are the words that follow the quote above:

The books of the holy bible never say but one time just exactly what God is [not true], and in those three little words it pours out a hundred million college educations and says, God Is Love.

And that is the only real definite answer to ten thousand wild queries and questions that I my own self tossed at my bible. That is the only really sensible, easy, honest, warm, plain, quick and clear answer I found – when I was ready to throw so-called fearful cowardly thieving poisoning religion out my trash door, it was those three words that made not only religion, but also several other sorts of superstitious fears and hatreds in me meet one very quick death.

Pretty clear.

Guthrie claimed he thought about Jesus all the time. That probably is not true, and if it were true, it would not make him a Christian.

Leftists love to try to own Christ. They say he was a homosexual, even though he supported the Jewish law, which describes homosexuality as an abomination. They say he was a socialist, in spite of the commandment against coveting. They say Christianity is only about being nice to people, in spite of the overwhelmingly negative nature of Jesus’s remarks about humanity. Meanwhile, they deny the existence of Satan and hell. They deny the existence of heaven. They seem to think Jesus was a deluded sissy who ran around teaching pacifism and mindless approval. They think he was wrong about God, but right about being nice. The left’s Jesus is a straw messiah. You can’t get redeeming blood out of straw.

If Jesus was wrong about God, why should we listen to him about being nice? A wrong Jesus would have no more authority than Stuart Smalley. He wouldn’t be an authority figure. He would be ridiculous, like Rod McKuen or Leo Buscaglia.

I learned something else about Guthrie: his twisted song about America contained verses we don’t teach our kids. Look:

As I went walking I saw a sign there
And on the sign it said “No Trespassing.”
But on the other side it didn’t say nothing,
That side was made for you and me.

In the shadow of the steeple I saw my people,
By the relief office I seen my people;
As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking
Is this land made for you and me?

Guthrie was a communist, and that explains the first stanza above. Attacks on property rights were very important to union organizers trying to force their way onto company properties in order to recruit. Laws were made, to force property owners to let them in.

The second verse is another of his attacks on Christianity. “If God is so wonderful, why is there suffering?” Never mind our utter failure to cooperate with God.

In the early 20th century, God gave man a huge gift. He poured his Holy Spirit out on a bunch of believers in a church on Azusa Street in Los Angeles. They began speaking in tongues. They got a taste of the power of the early church. What happened afterward? America rejected the gift. The Azusa Street miracle produced a wave of Holy Spirit evangelism which gave rise to the charismatic movement, but what percentage of American Christians listened? Very small. Even today, the message of the Holy Spirit is generally rejected, and the churches that accept it are mainly concerned with money. They are run by greedy idiots, and the people in the pews are greedy, too. The movement never became what it should have.

The Azusa Street Revival occurred between 1906 and 1915. It petered out. Then we had a pretty rough century. We had 2 world wars, a depression, 2 failed wars in Asia, and the spiritual cancer of the 1960’s. The 1960’s were Satan’s revival, and unlike Azusa Street, this revival succeeded. It’s 2018, and we still live in the culture of the 1960’s.

P.J. O’Rourke said something interesting. He visited a university decades after the Sixties, and he he saw kids who still dressed and acted like Sixties students. He understood how strange that was. It would have been like going to a university in the Fifties and seeing kids wearing raccoon coats and listening to Jelly Roll Morton. It shows what the Sixties did to us. They never ended.

The last century was rough, but it wasn’t because we didn’t have socialism or because we believed God would help us. It was because we hated God and rejected him. We hate him now more than ever.

Here’s another song Guthrie and his kind used to sing. The name is “Long-Haired Preachers” or “The Preacher and the Slave.” It will make you sick, if you have any kind of feeling for God:

Long-haired preachers come out every night
Try to tell you what’s wrong and what’s right
But when asked how ’bout something to eat
They will answer with voices so sweet

Chorus:

You will eat, bye and bye
In that glorious land above the sky
Work and Pray, live on hay
You’ll get pie in the sky when you die

And the starvation army they play
And they sing and they clap and they pray
Till they get all your coin on the drum
Then they tell you when you are on the bum

If you fight hard for children and wife
Try to get something good in this life
You’re a sinner and bad man, they tell
When you die you will sure go to hell

Workingmen of all countries unite
Side by side we for freedom will fight
When the world and its wealth we have gained
To the grafters we’ll sing this refrain

Last Chorus:

You will eat, bye and bye
When you’ve learned how to cook and to fry
Chop some wood, ’twill do you good
And you’ll eat in the sweet bye and bye

That’s more like it. That’s more honest. You can teach kids that “This Land is Your Land” is a good song, because the limited version they learn omits the anti-God business, but the song above lays it all right out there: “Give up God, and you will prosper.”

When this song is sung, you’re supposed to chant, “That’s a lie,” between verses, until you get to the last 2 verses, which celebrate carnal effort. At the end of those verses, you shout, “That’s no lie!”

So faith in God is a lie, to leftists. Nothing new there.

How can anyone hate the Salvation Army? It’s an organization that has helped save countless people, not just from damnation, but from things like alcoholism, drug addiction, prostitution, and poverty.

It’s the craziest thing. God has increased the numbers of his children by sending preachers around, and he has used hymns to get his point across. In Guthrie’s time, Satan used preachers, too, and they used music. They went to migrant camps and preached atheism, covetousness, violence, and the victim mentality the left is famous for. Never say Satan doesn’t have preachers.

The Azusa Street Revival failed, but Guthrie’s God-hating socialist revival worked. We never learned how to be blessed by God. We learned how to carry signs and take things from other people.

I feel like I understand the world better than ever, and it’s not pleasant. I see why God is exasperated. Nothing he does for us works. We rejected him in Adam’s time. We rejected the laws of Moses. We rejected Jesus and the Holy Spirit. When Jesus comes down personally, to reign in the Messianic Age, we will reject him again, even without curses and problems to complain about. It does not matter what God does. We will always reject him. No wonder he’s going to destroy the world. Everyone, even God, reaches a point where he says, “Enough.”

You can’t talk to victimhood junkies about God. You have to get close to God in order to see how right he is, and they hate him so much, they won’t accept the milk, let alone the meat. They won’t hear him. They won’t give him a try. They want to have all of their problems fixed, right now, without any type of repentance or accountability. Giving them blessings would be like giving a fortune to a 2-year-old. It would just make things worse.

I wonder what it will look like, when people reject Jesus during the Messianic Age. It’s hard to believe anyone could be that stupid, but we know it will happen. It’s hard to believe Adam and Eve rejected God, or that the Jews rejected him after seeing the pillar of fire and cloud. It’s hard to believe when another person misses the obvious, but we’re doing it right now, and we think we’re the smartest people who ever lived.

There are reasons for failure and suffering. It’s not random. It’s not caused by rich people who hoard an imaginary cache of golden eggs. Kill the rich, pass out their money, and what do you get? Poor people who have one great Saturday night and then return immediately to poverty. Poverty isn’t just a lack of wealth. It’s a lack of the inner qualities that draw wealth. Money doesn’t give you those qualities. Trash with cash is still trash.

America is disgusting. We are ungrateful and spoiled. We bite the hand that feeds us all day, every day. Eventually we will be presented with bills.

Lukewarmness is poisoning us. We think we please God while we keep one foot in the Sixties. That’s not possible.

I feel queasy because of what God is teaching me, but I appreciate it. Medicine doesn’t have to taste good. I am very disturbed by what I see around me and inside me, but thank God I’m able to see it.

Wealth Disparity Just a Pretext

Today I looked at an old movie during breakfast. Last night, I came across Bound for Glory while taking the birds out for amusement, and I watched for a while. Today I watched some more of it.

Bound for Glory is about Woody Guthrie, the communist musician who wrote the song This Land is Your Land, putting the words to the melody to an existing hymn. It starred David Carradine, the guy from Kill Bill and Kung Fu. He was a childhood hero of mine. I didn’t realize Kung Fu and eastern mysticism were BS. He died naked, while abusing himself, hanging by a belt in a hotel closet. Not the way an old man should go. No dignity.

Don’t get my started on Kung Fu. When I was a kid, I broke my arm imitating Carradine’s wandering idiot. A Phys. Ed. teacher told me to jump off a high beam made from an old telephone pole, and to hit the ground rolling. I jumped headfirst because I had seen David Carradine’s stuntman do it. Thank God my neck wasn’t broken.

I thought the movie would be interesting because it would tell me things about the Depression, but it left me a little nauseated.

I don’t know how true the movie is. It was based on Guthrie’s autobiography of the same name, but the movie’s “facts” don’t look much like the facts on Wikipedia’s page. Some of it is true. Guthrie was a union agitator and a communist. He didn’t join the Communist Party formally, but he did what he could to advance its twisted agenda.

The version of Guthrie presented in the movie was supposed to be flattering, but I found him disgusting. Carradine’s Guthrie is a smirking, smug, arrogant, selfish jerk who cheats on his wife without even thinking about it. He condescends to everyone around him. Very off-putting.

The movie promotes unions and leftism, and as I should have expected, it attacks Christianity. Movie Guthrie’s agitator pal Ozark Bule goes to migrant camps and sings a revolting song about pie in the sky when you die. The idea is that preachers tell you you’re going to get good things in heaven, which is a “dirty lie,” and that you should stand up and demand good things here on earth.

There is a scene in the movie in which Guthrie ask a preacher for an odd job so he can eat. The preacher gives him a speech about having no work to give him and not wanting to make things worse by giving him charity, and he gives Guthrie nothing. The message: “God isn’t going to do anything for you, and people who believe in him are your enemies.” Don’t think about the huge body of charity work Christians have done over the centuries. That’s irrelevant.

I found out that Guthrie wrote This Land is Your Land as a rebuttal…get ready…for God Bless America, which was getting heavy radio play at the time. Can you believe that? What a peek into the hidden heart of leftism. How can anyone find God Bless America offensive? Look at the lyrics. It acknowledges that God has blessed America, and it asks him to guide her. Only a leftist could find outrage in that. It doesn’t promote capitalism. It doesn’t attack unions. It is astounding that anyone would find it provocative.

This Land is Your Land doesn’t mention God once. It merely suggests that everyone in America owns all of America. In other words, if you don’t have everything you want, it’s because some rich person is hoarding it, and you have the right to take it.

When I say the movie was nauseating, I am not exaggerating. I feel physical nausea. The “heroic” leftists in the movie are sleazy people with dirty, defiled lives. They have no interest at all in God, except to fight the notion that he exists. They think all their problems can be solved be battling in the flesh. They think people who have more than they do are morally inferior parasites.

I’ve known successful people, and I’ve known poor people. The poor are morally inferior to the rich. In most cases, this is why they’re poor. They commit most violent crime and property crime. They have worse problems with pride. Many poor people are so intoxicated with self-love, they give themselves names, like comic book superheroes. I know two guys who call themselves Cheno Lyfe and Dunamis. I don’t think Dunamis is a proud guy, but he got caught in the name trend, which came from pride. We all know of pride-crazed poor people who became rich and held onto their bizarre handles or invented new ones: Jay-Z. Eminem. J-Lo. Dr. Dre. Snoop Dogg.

Success doesn’t make you a good person, but on the whole, successful people are better than poor people. Who would you rather live among?

The sick leftist notion that poverty equals holiness and wealth equals depravity is poisonous. It put the bodies of countless nice people in ditches in Cambodia. It built Castro’s torture chambers. It built the gulags. It killed 100 million people during the last century.

There’s a gag-inducing scene in the movie which could probably be used as a litmus test to distinguish good people from bad. Guthrie chases a woman in order to have sex with her. She’s a volunteer who fed him at a soup kitchen. When he finally gets into her house, he sees that she’s rich. After he has had his way, he scolds her for her money and asks if it embarrasses her. During the same conversation, with his smirk bright as ever, he tells her he has a wife and kids, and that he has to leave her because he has started to care. No shame. Just a big grin. Then he walks out.

If you can watch that scene and admire the character Carradine is playing, you’re probably going to hell, because you are completely unfamiliar with love, and you are blind to cruelty.

I wonder: how bright is the line between God’s children and the future residents of hell? More than ever, I feel like we only have 2 classes and 2 races. Once class/race is those who choose God, and the other is those who despise him. Leftism is associated strongly with the latter group.

The movie reminds me of something they used to do in communist countries. You have a teacher ask a room full of kids to pray to God for food. Then when they get nothing, you tell them to pray to Mao/Stalin/Castro/Barack Obama/whoever for food. Then you wheel in a cart full of pastries and pass them out. Leftists want us to think violence and agitation get our needs filled, and they want us to hate God for failing to cater to our whims.

In East Germany, there used to be posters that read, “Without God and without sun, we will get our harvest done.” The average American does not understand how deeply leftism is entwined with hatred of God. Socialism was invented to turn the government into a messiah, in order to replace the Lord.

When I was at Columbia University (before Obama was admitted belatedly as a transfer student), I used to hang around with Woody Guthrie’s heirs. I was not interested in their politics. I did not realize you had to swing that way to really be part of the gang. We used to play instruments and sing in our dorm rooms. They were social justice warriors. Now, of course, 98% of them are bank presidents and lawyers and so on. Not one that I know of went on to become a bona fide, to-the-bone agitator.

One of the agitators was named Dave. He had a beat-up Gibson J45. At the time, I did not know this was the signature guitar of leftist troubadors. He was one of the people who used to come to my dorm room and play and sing. When I left Columbia for one of the last times, I caught a cab, and Dave was at the wheel. On the way to LaGuardia, he told me how he was hoping to go to Nicaragua and work for the bloodthirsty Sandinistas. I looked him up today. He’s a partner in a New York law firm. Still sings. I wonder if he thinks he’s a real Guthrie heir.

I didn’t understand that he and my other music buddies were part of the other class. I wish I had. I would not have messed with them. I wouldn’t have gone to Columbia in the first place. A person of my race has no business there. I was ignorant, though. I didn’t know the world was divided, or that there was no way to cross the gulf.

Dave was a nice enough guy, and I had fun with the others, but these were relationships without futures.

Satan tries to convince us that people are all more or less the same. Not true. There are two groups, and everyone belongs to one or the other. If you hang out with the other group, you will suffer eventually. I did. You can be nice to them. You can do business with them. You can’t become part of their family, though.

You can’t join the other race, but you can let them drag you to hell, where, in addition to being damned, you will be a misfit.

Interesting stuff. There was no one to teach me these things when I was young.

I am not a Woody Guthrie fan. I literally find him disgusting now. I don’t mind being rejected by the grey people; the people with dark lives. Life around them is depressing and anxious. There is no real love among them.

More

Today after I wrote this entry, a strange feeling came over me. I felt like I was saying goodbye to the children of darkness.

I feel like a sliding door has come down between me and people who won’t listen to God. They’re on the other side, continuing to scrap over cheap trinkets, and I have a feeling I would describe as resignment. It’s not going to work out between us, and I might as well let them go.

As the Bible says in many places, God sets his people apart from the world. We are not called to have 5,000 Facebook friends. If you can go anywhere and be accepted, you’re not close to God. A child of darkness is welcome in a much wider variety of social circles. A person like that can go nearly anywhere and adapt. Fewer things are forbidden to them. If you’re close to God, you have to be careful not to get too close to the wrong people. It’s like working at a hospice and making friends with every patient you work with. The friendships have no future.

It’s almost as though people who are against God aren’t real. No matter how solid they look now, in a few years, they will vanish forever.

I know many people I will never see again. People I know are in hell. I could give you names. Some are relatives. I know a lot of people who are virtually certain to go there. It’s funny; we laugh and joke with our non-saved friends here on earth. We don’t feel afraid for them. We don’t think much about their terrible destinies.

Christian friendships are different. Christian friendships will last forever. We will know each other and enjoy each other’s love and faithfulness a billion years from now.

If you’re a Christian, and you want to do it right, you have to stop trying to fit in. Strangely, though, we have a lot of prominent clergymen telling us to be friends with everyone. We have hip young pastors telling us to try to be cool. Love is their excuse, but the truth is that they’re greedy. The more their congregations conform to the world, the more people go to their “churches,” and the more money comes in the door.

If you look like the worldly, you talk like the worldly, you think like the worldly, and you vote like the worldly, you are a person of the world, not the church.

So much of our activity here is wasted. All sinful activity is wasted. Then there are our other pursuits, which, although not forbidden, serve to render us useless. We get caught up in chasing goals that mean absolutely nothing to God. We’re so proud when we succeed! We want to be noticed. We like reminding ourselves. We collect ridiculous trophies and medals. We put plaques on our walls, celebrating our vain accomplishments. Salesman of the Month. Who’s Who in America. WBC Lightweight Champion. Whatever. We die, and then it’s all garbage. If we’re rich, we may try to be keep our names in people’s mouths. We may have our widows put our names on the fronts of hospitals and dormitories. As if such things help or matter to dead people.

There are parks and museums named after people who went to hell before they were built. They were in hell, thinking about anything but parks and museums, while people they left behind got things rolling and gave speeches and cut ribbons. How weird is that? You can be in hell, crying and screaming, while your smiling widow cuts a ribbon in front of a library with your name on it.

“Wherever he is, he must be smiling.” We ought to stop saying that.

This life looks stranger and stranger to me all the time.

Good Fathers Don’t Abandon Children

I have been a little reluctant to blog something that has been happening to me. Sometimes you think God is doing something for you, but he’s not. Then you tell people about it, and you find out you were wrong, and you have to retract it. I did not want that to happen.

Supposedly, a number of people “healed” by Benny Hinn later turned out to be mistaken. Is that because they were never healed, or is it because they were healed and then lost it? Search me.

Some Christians think any story that glorifies God is a good story, so preachers go around telling a lot of lies they’ve heard from other preachers. They don’t check. For example, as I think I’ve mentioned before, there is the tale of the 2 Moravian slaves.

Two white men from Moravia, wherever that is, found out about the slave trade in the Caribbean, so they wanted to evangelize the slaves. The only way to do it was to sell themselves as slaves, to be taken to the people they wanted to help. They stood on the dock, with the Vistavision cameras rolling and the Warner Brothers orchestra playing in the background, as they waved goodbye to their families, knowing they would never see them again. But it was okay, because they were going to be miserable slaves for Jesus. And the rest of us should feel really bad and do extremely unpleasant things in order to please God. Who promised that his yoke was easy and his burden was light (SHHH!).

Of course, it’s a lie. It was not possible for white men to become slaves in the Caribbean. And think about this: who would sell them? You can’t have a slave without an owner. If you sell yourself, aren’t you, based on your ownership status, a free man?

Anyway, it didn’t happen. Look it up. Two Moravian guys went to the Caribbean to preach, and both went home soon afterward. Yawn. How is this even a story? How many people take trips so they can preach? A whole lot.

Telling people ridiculous fables of superhuman devotion and suffering is a bad idea. It makes people think they’re not good enough to become Christians, which is an absurd notion, since a Christian, by definition, is a bad person who takes credit for the righteousness of Jesus. It makes Christianity sound painful and miserable, when in reality, the Christian life is more pleasant than the heathen life. It also makes people think Christianity is a lie. If a preacher will tell one lie, surely he’ll tell another, right? It’s like telling your kids Santa is real and then yanking the rug out from under them when they’re 7. “If Santa isn’t real, then what about Jesus?”

I won’t “help” God with myths and lies. For that reason, I don’t like to give a testimony unless I’m pretty sure it’s solid.

Here is the testimony.

I used to play stringed instruments. I went back to it a few years back. Several joints on my left hand swelled up and looked grotesque, and they hurt. I quit. I tried again. I quit. I tried again. I quit.

I was starting to play again before I moved away from the stinkhole known as Miami, but I got busy with other things, and I let it go.

Here in Marion County, I decided to get back on it. I have a nice big room where I can practice. I picked up the banjo again (sorry), and then I got back to the guitar. I play a dreadnought with medium-gauge strings and a hard pick. Not easy on the hands. Eventually, I decided to brave the mandolin, which is the least ergonomic instrument there is, unless you count playing the drums with your face.

The mandolin stresses the joints like crazy, because the fingerboard is cramped.

I took action in the supernatural. I spoke defeat to the joint issue and the spirits behind it. I commanded myself to be healed.

That was a month or more ago, and my fingers are fine. Sometimes I think they’re going to swell up and hurt, but they don’t. A healing can be hard to accept. Sometimes we’re afraid to have faith.

I have never had problems with my joints, except for a slight stiffness in my knees, which God healed during church services, and the finger thing, and some pain in my hands. I bounce around like a high school kid. I jump onto my truck. I jog up stairs. My hands were the only areas of concern. I had the guitar issue plus some other joint pains.

The other pains are leaving along with the guitar problems. I realized it this morning. I can do things that used to make my hands hurt. That’s very nice. Our hands are our main interface with the world. Lose your hands, and you become isolated from objects you need to manipulate.

I’m not going to promise you my hands will remain well. Just telling you what happened.

I can’t listen to teachers who have no testimony. Like the Pope. If you haven’t had a miracle, you’re doing Christianity wrong. You can have miracles and be a bad Christian, but you can’t be a good Christian without experiencing miracles. Why? Because God is not stingy with the children he loves, and because this world is a battlefield. God isn’t going to sit back and let us be annihilated without providing for us. He will let you lose if you’re ignorant, but if you have knowledge, you will receive help.

It’s funny; people dismiss the miraculous, saying we’re not supposed to follow signs. That’s not very smart. We are not supposed to follow signs, but signs always follow us. Jesus said they would, and he is not a liar. If you’re not seeing signs, you should be concerned. God is doing everything right, so you must be the problem.

If someone appears to work a miracle, and you assume he knows all about God because of it, you’re making a big mistake. Look at the millions of people Benny Hinn has messed up. On the other hand, if you blindly swallow everything you hear from a person who has never experienced a miracle, what are you thinking? If the cord is plugged in, the motor will run. That’s a fact. If the motor never runs, it’s not plugged in.

Testimony is better than teaching. Teaching is like gossip. It’s second-hand. Every person who repeats a rumor may distort it. The Bible praises witnesses more than teachers. A teacher tells what he heard. It’s hearsay. A witness tells you what he saw.

There is a reason the words “witness” and “testimony” appear in the Bible over and over.

The Bible doesn’t say we overcome by listening to teaching. It says we overcome by the blood of the Lamb and the word of our testimony. Teaching is sometimes better than nothing, but it’s way overrated, and it’s very, very dangerous.

Here is what James said about teaching:

Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers, since you know that we will be judged more severely. For we all stumble in many ways; if someone does not stumble in what he says, he is a mature man who can bridle his whole body. If we put a bit into a horse’s mouth to make it obey us, we control its whole body as well. And think of a ship — although it is huge and is driven by strong winds, yet the pilot can steer it wherever he wants with just a small rudder. So too the tongue is a tiny part of the body, yet it boasts great things. See how a little fire sets a whole forest ablaze!

Our job isn’t to become sages who walk on air and make people kiss our feet as we pass. It’s to introduce others to the Holy Spirit, so he can teach them. Look what John said:

As for you, the Messianic anointing you received from the Father remains in you, so that you have no need for anyone to teach you. On the contrary, as his Messianic anointing continues to teach you about all things, and is true, not a counterfeit, so, just as he taught you, remain united with him.

And now, children, remain united with him; so that when he appears, we may have confidence and not shrink back from him in shame at his coming.

Authority comes from time spent in the presence of God, not time spent in the presence of a rabbi, a preacher, or the greatest apostle.

Guess I’m digressing.

Anyway, my hands feel great.

Yes it Is

Suddenly I find myself gifted with something I did not expect: free time.

I had a horrendous time making the move up here, and then Irma came and made things 20 times worse. I had to buy 3 chainsaws. I burned one tree after another. I ended up with 3 different pairs of work boots, 5 pairs of Carhartt jeans, suspenders, and 2 pairs of overalls. Not to mention a collection of baseball caps, which you actually need for farm work because the sun is annoying and things hit you in the face all the time. I was busy, busy, busy.

Now things have slowed down. It turns out you don’t absolutely have to get rid of every downed tree on a property right away. Once you dispose of the ones that block roads, land on fences, threaten passing cars, mash your chicken coop, and so on, it’s not imperative that you maintain a fierce pace cutting up the ones lying on their sides in the woods. I will be moving trees for a long time, so there is no point in getting in a hurry. Also, it appears that the bugs are capable of disintegrating a live oak in under 2 years, so they will probably end up doing much of the work.

Here’s another interesting thing: the grass stopped growing. Things grew quickly here when I arrived, but once we had a couple of freezes, the landscaping workload looked very different. I can’t mow. I’m afraid to plant things. Some things I used to trim are either dead or playing possum. Mainly, I just clean up. And now I have child labor to help. My friend Amanda has 3 boys just the right size to be exploited by a non-recycling, yoga-hating, organic-food-ridiculing conservative. We are teaching them capitalism by forcing them to pick up sticks in my yard, for a suitably unconscionable weekly pittance.

I think putting the boys to work was a good move. They will learn that you can’t spend your whole life playing video games all day, and because they will get to spend some of the money, they will learn that affluence and work are connected. And they’re doing man’s work, which is fun. I taught them how to drive the EZ-GO and run the dump bed, and they zip around all over the place, presumably feeling important and grown up. Kids need that. You can’t give people responsibility without authority. It’s demoralizing. Ask a Border Patrol agent.

When my friend Mike was here, he was an even better overseer. He had them throwing stuff on the burn pile while it was actively burning. Don’t know if Amanda knows that. Mike is very good with kids, especially compared to the DNA source who abandoned these boys.

Mike is coming tomorrow. I guess we will devise new torments for them. And they WILL like it. I told him he is the guest slave driver.

Their attitude is great. I think the money helped. The first time they worked, it was a gift to me from their mom, and after a short time, one of them came up to me and said, “Can we be done now?” That is changing.

My biggest contribution to their upbringing is Frisbee. Somehow they ended up throwing one of my disks, and I found out they didn’t have proper Frisbees. I got each one a Diskraft disk (better than Frisbees) for Christmas. They are starting to get it. Sometimes a disk will make it all the way to an intended recipient, and I have seen a few catches.

Wham-O brand Frisbees are Chinese these days, so Diskraft is the way to go.

Boys are like car engines. They function best under a load. You have to give them things to do. I know this because my parents did not do this.

To return to the point, I am less busy now, and it makes me nervous. I feel like there is something I should be doing. Of course, that’s true. There is always something I should be doing. But I wonder if I’m missing anything.

I now have time to exercise and practice music. I didn’t expect that. I took up the mandolin, banjo, and guitar again, and this week I started looking at piano instruction.

Amanda’s boys need to learn music, if they want to be civilized, so I have been helping her find options. Lessons would be great, but they’re not cheap. One son wants to learn piano, and another likes the guitar. The third mentioned the saxophone.

I can help a little with the guitar, and I recommended a site called Justin Guitar for materials and videos. It’s not a teacher, but it should be helpful. For piano, I found something new: Playground Sessions. Quincy Jones is the “co-creator,” which probably means someone paid him money to use his picture.

I tried Playground Sessions myself, and I am impressed. You download free software and pay a small fee every month. You get video lessons and interactive sheet music. You connect a MIDI keyboard to the computer, and you play along with the software. You get background music and a countdown, and you get a score every time you try to play something. They have a real program, not just random pieces, and you learn things in an order that builds your skills. I really like it. It’s what I was looking for years ago when I tried Adventus Piano Suite, which is a very annoying piece of software which sort of comes close to teaching piano.

If you want to learn to play an instrument, you really need to learn to sight-read and play with accompaniment. I learned to play the banjo using tablature and my memory, and it was a very bad choice. It was better than no music at all, but I was musically illiterate. It’s a gigantic handicap. And if you can’t play along with other people, you’re useless most of the time, and you won’t be able to connect with anyone else musically. Also, your timing will be bad.

Learn to sight-read. Learn to play in a group. If you can’t do these things, you’re a crippled musician. Like me.

Cutting news websites out of my life increased my free time. I used to look at them periodically throughout the day. Now I start to look at Drudge, and I remember I don’t do that any more. Then I have to find a way to fill the time I’m not wasting. I still glance at the news, but not much.

I can read again. I can exercise. I may start to do things with tools again, and I mean things not involving dead trees.

If you’re interested in piano, take a look at Playground Sessions. It may be a good idea even if you’re taking lessons. If you have a spacy teacher who isn’t organized, look at it and find out what he or she should be teaching you.

Time to practice.

CNC Lathe Next

My friend Amanda has a son who has some cognitive issues. Oddly, in some cases, people with his problem turn out to be unusually well suited to the trade of CNC machining. Mental characteristics that cause problems in many areas of life can be assets in machining. There’s a dude in California who runs a school that trains such people.

I learned about this from a TV show called Titans of CNC. A man named Titan Gilroy was convicted of a violent crime, and when he got out of prison, he learned CNC and started a big, successful shop. Now he teaches inmates at San Quentin. He has a son with Asperger’s, and he discovered that his son was very good at CNC. Now he works with the guy who runs the school.

I mentioned this to Amanda a few weeks back, and I said I had some interest in CNC and robotics. We showed her son some Youtubes, and he seemed interested. That’s good, but it’s also a problem. I have only one CNC tool, and it’s a home-built adaptation which I haven’t perfected. Not counting my vacuum cleaner, I have only one robot, and when I bought it and assembled it, I was not able to make it work.

Since showing her son the videos, I have retrieved my CNC lathe from Miami, and I am ready to see if I can make it work. Last night, I took the robot out of the box I had tossed it in, and after an hour or so of reprogramming and researching, I figured out what was wrong with it. Now it’s working.

The robot is a B-robot, from a company called JJ Robots. It’s a two-wheeled balancing robot a little bigger than a box of Pop Tarts. It’s based on an Arduino Leonardo board.

Here’s how it works. It has a tiny board containing circuitry that measures the robot’s vertical orientation. This shouldn’t amaze anyone. Cell phones have circuits that tell them whether they’re level or not. The robot checks the board’s output, and then it accelerates in the direction of the tilt, bringing it back to vertical again. In other words, when the robot starts to fall in a certain direction, it takes off in that direction, bringing itself back under its top. It can do this so often it appears nearly stable.

I found I had installed the orientation board sideways, so the robot was sensing angular deviation along the wrong axis. The robot can’t fall from side to side, so the board’s input was useless. I reinstalled it according to the directions.

The robot still refused to stand. I took a look at what it was doing. It was accelerating away from the direction of fall, making the fall worse. I then turned the board 180 degrees, and everything worked.

Now I have a self-balancing robot.

I had some other problems with it, and they’re even more boring, so I don’t want to get into them too much. I found I could not upload programming to the Arduino. Somewhere on the web, someone said I had to press the board’s reset button immediately before uploading. Not exciting, unless you’re a nerd.

The robot has wi-fi. When you turn it on, you connect your phone to the robot’s network, and then you use an app to steer the robot. Obviously, it needs an onboard camera, like a drone, so you can see what the robot sees as it moves. Maybe I can figure that out some day.

Anyway, next time Amanda brings her son around, I can show him the robot and see if he has any interest. Maybe in a week or two, I can get the lathe working better.

It’s a little strange that I decided to buy and assemble a robot, but the whole exercise has turned out to have a purpose I could not have anticipated. That’s God for you.

Robotics and CNC are not the same thing, but it’s basically the same skill set, applied in different ways. Programming, boards, and servos or steppers. My guess is that a person who has CNC aptitude also has robotics aptitude. The question is which one he will like well enough to stick with.

Her other two sons are interested in music, but the instruction opportunities are limited. I suggested Adventus Piano software for one and Justinguitar.com for the other. Justinguitar.com is a teaching site run by, as you might guess, a guitarist named Justin. It has lots of exercises and videos. It’s not a teacher, but it’s a whole lot better than nothing.

The hard thing will be to get them to learn to sight-read. This is much more important than learning to play. Any idiot can learn to play songs by memorizing them. Ask me how I know. A real musician can read music, and he must also understand theory. A singer who can sight-sing and who understands theory is a better musician than an untrained pianist who plays extremely well.

Math, languages, and music. You have to learn while you’re young. After you’re seven or eight years old, your aptitude drops off, and as far as I know, you can’t get it back.

It’s hard to tell when you’ve scored a point with her kids. Other kids get excited. Hers just sit and think, and sometimes they want to know how soon you’ll be finished so they can do something else. She says it’s working, though.

Sooner or later, if they want to get anywhere with music, they’ll have to find people they can play with.

The robot is interesting to me because the concept doesn’t have to be limited to a tiny machine. The stuff that tells it what to do could be installed on a robot the size of a building. I could yank the guts out of it, find a way to make it run bigger steppers, and make a robot big enough to run around the yard. Jam a lithium battery in there, and it could run for an hour. Not sure what accessories I could add to it to make it useful. Anyway, it doesn’t have to be a small toy. Could it ever be useful for anything? That’s a hard question. I would have to come up with a function for it.

I wish I could make it paint the fence or kill squirrels.

Now that the major crises of moving are abating, I feel like I’m getting my life back. I had time to work on the robot. I’m anxious to get my machine tools up here. Next year, life should be less hectic, and I should be able to get more done. Maybe I’ll be able to make some knives. Right now I can’t run my big grinder without a gas generator and an adaptor (which I don’t have), so knife-making is not possible.

I’m giving up on tree removal. The trees that cause problems will be moved. The rest will be ignored until it’s convenient to do something. It’s just too much work. Surrendering will give me more free time.

Guess I’ll go check out robot accessories. If I can find one a kid could use to drive his brothers nuts, I think it will be a hit.