“Let us Big, Strong Men Tell You What to Buy”

I had a fascinating experience today.

One of my house’s AC systems went out because of a slow refrigerant leak. The system is 22 years old, so it’s a wonder it lasted so long.

Last year, it did the same thing, and a local company sent a guy out. He could probably have convinced me the unit was shot, but instead, he cleaned it up, shot refrigerant into it, and got it working. The cost was under $300, and a new AC system costs more than that when you divide the price by the lifespan, so it was a good deal at the time. He said we would see how things went. Now I know how that worked out. We gave it the old college try.

He was honest with me, so I made a note to remember the company. I will call it Sweatbusters.

I called Sweatbusters today and told them to come out, see if the unit was dead, and give me repair and replacement options. They took a long time, so I thought they weren’t serious, so I called another outfit which showed up in about 90 minutes.

The second outfit, which I will call Freezcorp, sent two guys. A technician and a salesman. Uh oh.

They said the system was kaput. They didn’t offer a repair option. They started throwing numbers like $15,000 around. Keep in mind, this is a 2-ton unit, and I replaced a 5-ton unit for $7000 in 2017.

They said Lennox made the best machines. I needed a Lennox. I also needed a new air handler cabinet, even though the old one looks fine. The salesman gave me the reason: the old one had had a big heavy machine sitting on it for 22 years. They said a new system would have a UV light to kill germs and mold and give me hospital-quality air. They would put one big filter on the air handler so I could stop putting filters in my numerous ceiling returns.

They said I could pay something like $180 per month for Freezcorp to come out and fix the system for nothing. Okay, not for nothing. For $180 per month. This would include changing filters. I have never had any problems changing air conditioner filters. They were willing to finance the job at 7.9%. I don’t blame them. I would like to lend people money at 7.9%, too.

I said I had heard Bryant was a good choice because their units were made by Carrier in Carrier factories. Carrier is supposed to be one of the two best American brands. They said Bryant was made from Chinese parts. I definitely didn’t want a Bryant. Bryant bad. I already have a 5-ton Bryant, so that didn’t sound good.

They finally wrote me an estimate. For $9200, which was a huge discount, Freezcorp would put the system in tomorrow. This was after I rejected the UV nonsense and all the smart idiocy that allows your neighbors’ children to hack your system and set your thermostat at 90° in August at 3 a.m.

I can’t believe anyone wants a smart home. Yes, I’m going to put cameras throughout my house so Russian hackers can film me on the toilet and curse at me while I’m trying to sleep. It’s totally worth it so I can change my toaster’s darkness setting while I’m traveling.

I told the salesman I was used to dealing with contractors because I have rental properties. I said I did not jerk people around. I was going to buy a unit, and it would be this week, but I wasn’t going to make the decision standing in my driveway. I said I would not show his bid to anyone else, and I would get back to him if I was interested.

Sweatbusters finally arrived. No, I did not need a new air handler box. No, I did not need UV lights sterilizing my air. I think he thought I was poor because I complained so much. He said I could have a 14-SEER Rheem system for something like $5600.

I was so ecstatic, I told him to look at 16-SEER and Carrier. He came up with about $7600. It sounded great to me. More efficient and, supposedly, better quality. I asked if $6500 would work, but all I could get out of him was 3%, which was nothing to sneeze at.

I know I said I wasn’t going to make a decision in my driveway, but I did. I said, “Let’s do it.”

He admitted the old unit might be repairable, which was more than anyone else would do. I didn’t care, because I think the world is ending, and if I squeeze several more years out of the old unit, God only knows what I’ll pay for a new one when it dies.

He flat-out admitted the new system won’t last 22 years. He said they’re all Chinese now. Some are assembled in America, but they’re all Chinese.

I probably could have done somewhat better, but I didn’t want to spend the rest of the week haggling.

He went to his Sweatbusters truck, got his tools, and checked my refrigerant level. It was two pounds low. He got a jug of refrigerant and pumped it up. No charge. The new system won’t be installed until next week, so he wanted to make the old one run until then. Now the unit will work for another 10 months.

The jug of refrigerant cost his company $1500, up from $400 in the recent past. One Monday, he went to work, and the price had changed. And the supplier was selling old stock it had already paid low prices for.

Anyway, he gave me a week of cool nights for nothing and said they would do it again if the air got hot before the installation.

He told me why Freezcorp wanted me to buy a Lennox. Lennox owns Freezcorp. They can’t sell Carriers even if they want to, and they don’t want to.

I guess naming Lennox makes changing the name of the contracting company pointless.

It seems to me that this is how you do business. You don’t treat a customer like a mechanic treats a woman. Freezcorp treated me like a complete moron. I’ve probably had 8 air conditioning systems installed or given major repairs in the last decade. I’m not that stupid.

My dad got fooled into buying a UV light for his system. I think it cost $1500. It was a galvanized box with a light fixture inside it. Cost to manufacture probably $25. I Googled it. They do absolutely nothing, and even if they did, the tubes go bad fast. I have never known anyone who got sick because his air conditioner didn’t have UV lights. Have you? No. Of course not.

All I wanted was an upper-tier AC system without a bunch of garbage attached to it, and I would have bought it tomorrow from the first company had they given me the option. Instead, they insisted on trying to rip me off. They preferred insulting my intelligence and trying to cheat me to making a fast, honest, and substantial dollar. There are some people you just can’t do business with even if you try.

Mike told me I should have bought the system and installed it myself. Yeah, maybe in February. Not in June. This is not the time to become an instant HVAC tech.

Tonight I will have cool air, and next Wednesday, I will have lower power bills and less concern about the condition of my systems. Even if this system stinks, it shouldn’t start to show it until 2032.

Am I in a position to tell contractors they should do business like Sweatbusters? I don’t know. You can make a lot of money lying to people. Like P.T. Barnum said, there is one born every minute. I guess it’s completely possible to build a huge customer base composed entirely of extremely gullible people. If it weren’t, companies like Bose and Starbucks would not exist.

Why Does an American Hand Grinder Cost $345?

The other day I had to get a bolt out of a rusted nut, and the only way was to destroy it. There was no way to get good leverage to twist it, and it was in a place where I could not heat it. Enter the drill.

My plan was to drill straight down into it through the end. The drill bit would cut into the threads and loosen the remains of the bolt. In order to do this, I needed a way to make the bit center itself in the end of the bolt. Otherwise, it would walk around and give me an off-center hole.

I have a Dumore hand grinder. Tool people love these things. They are American-made tools similar to Dremels, but they’re bigger, and they only have one speed: maximum. My Dumore’s top speed is (was) 25,000 RPM.

I got my Dumore on Ebay. It was barely used. I thought it was a bargain. They sell for $345 new, and I think I paid something like $45. Anyway, it wasn’t much.

The Dumore ran, but it faltered a lot, and I had to spin the spindle by hand to get it started. I figured it had bad brushes or something, so I didn’t send it back.

I got it to run while I was working on the bolt. I used the Dumore to put a cup-shaped hollow in the end of it to keep the drill bit from wandering. After that, I decided it was time to fix it. I checked the commutator brushes, which looked new. On the advice of a forum guy, I filed a little bit off of their ends to make them conduct better. I also cleaned the commutator with Scotchbrite and De-Ox-Id, which is a product made for cleaning electrical contacts.

When I put the grinder back together, it wouldn’t do anything at all.

I thought I had to save it. I had a wonderful American-made industrial tool in great shape, apart from not working. It was worth working on. Surely.

I sought advice and did a bunch of things, and nothing worked. Finally, I looked at the armature wires under magnification. Most of them were detached from the commutator, so there was no hope at all that it would run. Current would not go through the commutator.

I believe this explains the grinder’s willingness to run after I spun it by hand. In order to run, it needed current to go through the armature windings, and that meant it needed them to be connected to the commutator bars. When I spun it, I moved the brushes from disconnected bars to connected bars, and the grinder ran. This is my theory.

I went to Dumore’s site and looked at their parts area. They had a diagram of a similar grinder. The commutator was available, but of course, it was part of an armature. The armature sold for the low, low price of about $128, plus shipping. I contacted Dumore, and they told me the armature didn’t fit my grinder. They didn’t make armatures for it any more. They recommended a guy named Larry, in Detroit. I called him, and he laughed. He said he hadn’t seen a grinder like mine in around 20 years. He did not have any armatures.

I started prying the tiny commutator bars open and soldering the wires back on with a magnifying visor, but then I thought about it. The soldering would take maybe 4 hours, and then I would have a tool which might be unbalanced because of the presence of the solder. The armature had been balanced at the factory, prior to my work, and you can’t balance an armature dynamically at home. An armature which is balanced when at rest may go nuts when it spins. This must be due to other problems in the inertial tensor, which only motion can reveal. My guess. You could make an object with perfect distribution of mass around an axis that still had uneven distribution relative to other references. Imagine a cylinder like a rolling pin with a pound of lead at one end and another pound at the other end, on the other side of the axle.

While I was doing all this, I was also thinking about new grinders. I am not poor. I can buy a $345 grinder. Maybe that was the answer. Bite the bullet. Get it over with. Move on. I would have a great grinder for the rest of my life, and I would never miss the money.

Then I did more studying.

My grinder is about 12″ long. It has a grand total of two bearings in it. It has a heavy plastic body. It has a crummy on-off switch held in place by the pressure of the rear plate, which screws onto the back of the grinder. It doesn’t seem all that great.

People claim Dumore grinders run forever, and what you pay for is the quality of the parts and assembly. They’re smooth. They’re balanced. Unlike other grinders.

Are these things really true?

No. At least it doesn’t look like it.

Guess what Dumore charges for the high-quality bearings in my grinder. They charge about $4.40 per bearing. I’ll tell you something I have learned as a tool person. Really precise bearings don’t sell for $4.40. They are very expensive. Conclusion: Dumore doesn’t use fantastic bearings that last longer or run smoother than regular bearings.

I looked at Makita. Their model GD0603 is about the size of my grinder. It has 25% more power. Guess how many bearings it has. Four. One is a lot bigger than the Dumore bearings, and big bearings distribute wear and heat much better. The Makita’s bearings cost more to replace.

The GD0603 has a nice quality on-off switch. It has a nominal speed 3000 RPM faster than the Dumore. It comes with a wire bail so you can hang it and put a flex shaft on it. It has a two-prong plug instead of three prongs because Makita insulated it properly.

Makita sells every part of the grinder, and it’s easy to take apart and repair.

Wait…Dumore is a high-end company. They put the money in the armature. It’s balanced better than the Makita, and it runs smoother.

Really?

Makita started as an electric motor company, and here is one of the things it was known for: balancing armatures. Makita still balances its armatures dynamically.

Ooof.

Makita also powder-coats its stators so they don’t short out when junk gets in and lands on them. Dumore…not so much.

The Makita sells on Amazon for $124. I looked at reviews. Some guy said he bought his first one in 1998, and he only replaced it recently. Did he have to replace it? I doubt it. Every part can be replaced. Even the armature, which, though BALANCED, costs under $20.

Here is what I can’t figure out: how can the Dumore possibly be worth three times the cost of a Makita? Not only do I not see how it can be better; I can’t see how it could be anywhere near as good. Yes, the Makita is made in China. So what? Makita is a Japanese company, so I very much doubt they make garbage in China, and anyway, grinders are very simple machines.

I got a Makita. I will probably throw the Dumore out. I may get a bigger Makita, too, since I can get both Makitas for a lot less than one Dumore.

Once again, I feel I got stung by the old iron bug. “Old iron” is what stubborn old coots call ancient American tools. They go to their graves making fun of Asian tools and shrieking that anyone who is too cheap to pay the extremely large premium for Caucasian-made tools is a fool. Sometimes they’re right, but the problem is that they can’t tell when they’re wrong, which also happens a lot.

I think the Sino-Japanese Makita is head and shoulders better than the American Dumore ever was. Maybe an engineer could explain why I’m wrong, but I don’t see a way for him to approach the Makita in order to attack. Cheaper. Better bearings. More bearings. Better switch. Insulation. Low noise rating for protection-free grinding. Lower cost. Balanced. Cheap parts readily available. Easily repaired. More powerful.

Why do old Dumores last so long in commercial shops? I think it’s because they have to, just like American cars that last 80 years in Cuba. No one wants to spend hundreds of dollars to replace a hand grinder. A $128 armature and 9 dollars’ worth of bearings make more sense than a new $345 grinder. On the other hand, throwing out a Makita that costs a third as much isn’t intimidating. If Makitas don’t last as long, I think it’s because people can afford to throw them out and replace them. They would probably last as long as Dumores or longer if people felt motivated to treat them well and repair them. I’ll bet if Makita made no changes other than raising the price to $1500, they would last 50 years. People would say, “I paid a lot for that Makita, but I’ve rebuilt it 10 times, and it runs like new.”

If I’m wrong, explain it to me. But you can’t mention the bearings, construction, materials, or balancing, because I’ve already considered those things. Good luck.

Is Your Church Really a Church?

Last night, my wife had an interesting dream.

A number of babies had died, and they were in refrigerators in a morgue. Although they were dead, they cried all night. The crying disturbed the people in the area. Many of the people were also dead. Her late father was there.

Rhodah went to the morgue and opened a drawer that had a baby in it. She told the baby he needed the Holy Spirit, and she laid hands on him so the Holy Spirit filled him.

A giant approached her and tried to make her stop, but she told him she was above him spiritually, and she ran him off.

My interpretation is that the babies are Christians who are failing to grow because preachers teach them garbage. Only a tiny percentage of Christians are getting the truth and power. Most Christians go to churches that tell them sexual perversion is good, that ridiculous Catholic traditions will save them, that the Holy Spirit doesn’t do anything through people any more, and other such slanderous nonsense that keeps people weak and sends them to hell.

The giant was a spirit that runs churches. Its job was to keep Christians tiny and weak and put them in hell. It couldn’t fight Rhodah because she has the Holy Spirit and God’s authority. It was under her heel.

Later, Rhodah watched a sermon and got revelation while she listened. Satan only has power over people who are on Earth or in hell. Once you leave this place and go to God, Satan can’t touch you. There are no exorcisms or healings in heaven. No one needs them.

When we are resurrected, we are far above Satan and every other supernatural power that seems strong in this filthy world.

In other news, I had a bad experience day before yesterday. I woke up at around 5:15, and I decided to pray. I also decided to check Youtube to see if any good Christian content had popped up. My TV has Roku installed, and even though I never agreed to it, Roku’s home screen gives me ads every day.

The ad I saw that morning featured 4 things from the Discovery Channel. Two were advertised using pictures of male perverts in pinkish-blond wigs. They were supposed to look like women. They looked pretty similar even though they advertised different shows.

One of the shows was called “Trixie Motel,” and it features a pervert who calls himself Trixie Mattel. It’s a reality show about a motel, apparently. Another was called “The Book of Queer.” I don’t know what it was about. The third was called “Generation Drag.” Sounds like it’s about our upcoming generation, in which most people will be one type of pervert or another.

The fourth thing was called “Always Proud.” I think it’s the name of the Discovery Channel’s campaign to promote deviant sex. I didn’t check. You can Google it if you care.

I took a picture of the TV, and later I sent it to Rhodah. She looked sad after she saw it, and I asked her why. She said this world was no place to raise children.

That was exactly what I thought when I saw it.

Is this what gay rights advocates were hoping for decades ago, when they crusaded for change? Did they really want to force this kind of thing into our homes? They said they just wanted to be treated fairly and left alone. How well does this jibe with that claim?

Kids use Roku. Now, all over America, they are turning their TV’s on and seeing two sick people advertising sodomy-based programming. No warning. No chance to opt out.

What’s the answer for Christians? Do we give up television? Do we lock up remote controls and select shows before allowing kids to enter the room?

Children are ignorant and driven by peer pressure. They will see those ads and feel they represent normal morality because they’re on TV. Some will resent their parents and ridicule them for being concerned about the ads. Seeds of rebellion will be sown, and some will mature into damnation.

We want to think we raise our kids, but more and more, Satan jumps in and becomes their real parents.

Eventually, sin in a society can reach a point where merely living in that society, without participating in sin, is intolerable to Christians. The everyday world becomes like a pornographic theater. A person can’t avoid being bombarded with filth. What do you do then?

Merely seeing and hearing certain things is harmful. You don’t always have to participate in evil in order to be damaged by it. This is why David said, “I will set no wicked thing before mine eyes: I hate the work of them that turn aside; it shall not cleave to me”

I wish I could send a picture of the ad back to Billy Graham in 1970 so he could show it to billions of people and say, “This is your future if you don’t repent.” I don’t think they would believe it, though. In 1970, advertising homosexual entertainment to innocent children would have caused rioting.

Monkeypox is also driving interesting stories. Scientists have decided to rename it because “monkeypox” is a racist term. Supposedly. Monkeypox comes from Africa, and a few people are publishing racist memes comparing Africans to monkeys. This somehow makes the name racist. This is the kind of nonsense our scientists are concerned about.

They are also very worried about stigma. Nearly everyone who gets monkeypox outside of Africa is a male homosexual who exposes himself to it deliberately through mindless promiscuity, so naturally, there is some concern that people will see the epidemic as a gay phenomenon, which it unquestionably is.

You’re not going to get monkeypox. If you think you’re going to develop pustules between your buttocks because you stood behind someone at the grocery store, worry no more. People outside of Africa are getting it through anal and oral sex performed with no precautions whatsoever. If that’s not you, relax.

Of course, if you married a homosexual and don’t know it, or you’re just telling yourself it’s not true, all bets are off.

There is no point in getting angry at homosexuals and stoning them or whatever, because they are not going to give your kids monkeypox without some form of molestation. The stigma is justified, but hostility is not.

Anyway, all over the world, wokester doctors are afraid people will blame homosexuals for the epidemic, which would be correct, so they are trying to think of ways to prevent this while also alerting homosexuals to the danger their behavior presents. I don’t see how this can work, but it’s what they’re doing.

“Attention LGBT people: Trump-pox [guessing at the new name] affects you disproportionately in a very big way, but this is definitely NOT NOT NOT a homosexual disease–REALLY it isn’t–but if you could just stop doing the things male homosexuals do much more than anyone else, or you could make some tiny effort to block transmission (sorry for the microaggression), you would be a lot safer, even though what you do is fantastic and should be encouraged in every first-grade classroom.”

There is just no way to do it.

Deborah Birx, the disease bigwig who clashed with Trump, is now praising the LGBT-etc. commmunity for the way it has handled monkeypox. She says they are incredibly responsible.

Here are some thoughts.

1. Why is “L” even included? Lesbians aren’t getting monkeypox. They may be safer than the rest of us. Lesbians say they don’t have all that much sex. They are not as sex-crazed as male homosexuals. My understanding is that they are more about security and comfort than sex.

2. If homosexuals had been extremely responsible, they wouldn’t have an epidemic. How can responsible people continue to spread a disease, the propagation of which pretty much requires frequent careless sex with strangers?

3. Let me suggest that heterosexuals are the ones who have been most responsible, since we don’t get monkeypox. We fornicate a lot, but somehow it’s still not a problem, so clearly, we are doing a better job of policing ourselves. Unless monkeypox itself is somehow homophobic in additon to being racist.

Rhodah and I are going through Ezekiel now. Ezekiel preached to the Hebrews after the Babylonians conquered them but before they destroyed Jerusalem and took the Hebrews into captivity. In Ezekiel’s time, Nebuchadnezzar was content to take tribute from the Jews and rule them through a puppet king.

Ezekiel and Jeremiah predicted the siege and destruction of Jerusalem. God had put Nebuchadnezzar over them as a punishment and to make them repent of witchcraft and idolatry, which were practiced even by priests, inside the temple. Nebuchadnezzar was their rightful ruler, but they rebelled against him without repenting before God, so God let Nebuchadnezzar destroy the temple, wreck the city, take Hebrews to Babylon, and castrate the princes, including Daniel and his friends.

The Hebrews had set up an idol in the temple itself, and God called it the image of jealousy. Letting heathens destroy the temple was a lot like executing an adulterous wife, which was lawful in that time. It makes sense that God let the heathens take all the holy things away and kill the priests. The holy things and the priests were defiled.

What did Ezekiel predict? Famine, pestilence, and killing. God made the same predictions for the entire world in the Revelation, about 7 centuries later.

By destroying Jerusalem, God was showing us the tribulation.

In Ezekiel, God criticized the Hebrews because they were stubborn and arrogant. He said that if he spoke to other peoples, they would listen and repent. We see an illustration of this in the story of Jonah, in which the king of Nineveh made his entire nation fast and repent in order to avoid destruction. We also see it in the early church, which had a poor start among Jews but then spread rapidly among heathens.

Christians put down the Jews. We like to say we aren’t like them. We say we would have listened to God and that we would have worshiped Jesus instead of killing him. Those things were true of many of our heathen predecessors at one time, but are they true now? Of course not.

We are doing exactly what the Jews did. We have become extremely proud. We have rejected Jesus. Most of us think science has debunked the Bible. We think Jesus and Moses were wrong about perversion and pride. We worship money, the government, ourselves, the environment, and filthy spirits.

There is one big difference between us and the Jews. When the Jews refused to listen, there were still other people God could reach. That isn’t true now. The gospel has been preached to every nation, and it has been rejected. Who is God supposed to talk to now that we have turned him down? Martians?

Since no one remains to become God’s new people, it looks like there is little point in delaying the apocalypse. God allotted two millennia so he could evangelize the heathens, but now there are no heathens left to convert. There are individuals here and there, but there are no new nations left to preach to. Jesus didn’t say he would come back when every person had been reached. He said every people. That has been done.

God commanded the Jews not to harvest the corners of their fields. They had to leave the corners untouched so the poor could eat. The world is now like a harvested field. You can’t go in and convert a nation. You have to pick and nibble at the corners. We are in an age of gleaning.

The Old Testament isn’t just for the Jews, no matter how much major Christian denominations want us to think it is. It exists to teach Christians. It shows us how the universe works. It shows us how God rewards obedience and rebellion.

What happened to the Jews was no surprise to people who knew the scriptures. The books of Moses predicted all of it. Rebels get certain rewards, and God listed them so the Jews would be able to avoid them. The same principles apply to Christians, too. The Jews didn’t listen, and neither have we, so those of us who are in rebellion–the vast majority–should expect the punishments of Ezekiel.

One nice thing about Ezekiel’s prophecies is that he said God sent angels out to mark those who were distressed by Israel’s defilement. The agents of destruction were forbidden to touch them, so they weren’t destroyed by murder, disease, and famine. Presumably, this principle applies today. In the Revelation, God commands the destroyers, “see thou touch not the oil and the wine,” and he seals his children in their foreheads so they are set apart.

Jesus will return. Modern Jews tell us he can’t be the Messiah because he was killed. They say the Messiah can’t be killed. That’s completely wrong. In Daniel 9:26, God says the Messiah will be cut off. This has long been known to be a prophecy about the Messiah. “Cut off” means “killed” in the Bible. The verse says the Messiah will be killed “but not for himself,” indicating he dies because of others. To pay for our sins, obviously.

Jesus died with one week of years of work left to do, and the Revelation says the tribulation will last seven years, to be followed by the thousand-year rule of Jesus. He will come back, take us away with him to rest while the world is purged, and return afterward to rule.

It’s no surprise to hear about a dream in which an evil spirit runs the church. Nearly all churches belong to Satan. Most reject the Holy Spirit, and the ones that don’t are generally obsessed with money. Jesus called the mainstream religious Jews of his time “the synagogue of Satan,” and we are no different.

Ezekiel was told to warn people, but over and over, God told him to warn people whether they listened or whether they rebelled. He made it clear Ezekiel was not responsible for their reactions. He could only be held responsible for delivering the message. God let him know the Hebrews would not listen, but Ezekiel still had to speak. I am warning people, so it’s not my problem if they don’t listen. I don’t expect much. Almost no one has listened to me in the 15 years since I turned back to God, and two terrible pastors who worked for Satan labeled me an enemy of the church.

Ezekiel described God’s wheeled throne, which came to Earth in one of his visions. The throne was surrounded by something resembling a rainbow. I think this must have been the shekinah, which is the glory of God.

Rhodah and I both thought of the connection to the homosexual supremacy trend. By using the rainbow, aren’t they glorifying themselves as gods when they are the furthest things from it?

It’s so appropriate. Homosexuals love glory. They crave attention like no one else. This is why they fill up the entertainment industry.

It’s very unfortunate that they call their movement “pride.” It’s prophetic. It foreshadows what is going to happen to those who don’t repent. “Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.” Pride is something to be feared, like melanoma or anthrax. Celebrating it is like celebrating a positive biopsy.

I write these things on Juneteenth weekend. Juneteenth is now a federal holiday. I just found out. The confused weakling Biden signed it into law as part of his continuing work to give himself the most loathsome and pitiable legacy of any would-be dynasty founder in American history.

Biden has dedicated his life to aggrandizing himself and his family, and he seems to have wanted to turn the Bidens into the new Kennedys. His best son died young, his other son is a drug addict and whoremonger who was thrown out of the Navy and will never be anything but a disgrace, and his daughter is a drug addict who says her sexual urges are uncontrollable. Then there is his failed presidency. Nothing he tried to build will be anything but a notable and ineffaceable pile of excrement.

I hate the term “Juneteenth.” It’s a silly, frivolous term. A slang term. We don’t have a federal holiday called “Turkey Day,” but “Juneteenth,” which isn’t even clever, is on the list. It is also called “National Independence Day,” but “Juneteenth” is on the bill that made it a federal holiday.

I wondered why it wasn’t called Emancipation Day, because I thought it commemorated the freeing of the slaves, but I found out that was wrong. We already have a bunch of Emancipation Days. Various states use different dates. Juneteenth is the day Texas recognized emancipation.

So now America has a whole bunch of holidays celebrating the same thing, and we have lost another day of work, at least for government employees and certain others. And we still have MLK Day.

I would be all for a federal emancipation holiday, because the ending of slavery was extremely important, but we have gone way overboard into the sea of wokeness. How many days do we need?

Trump tried to make Juneteenth a federal holiday, too, so maybe I shouldn’t single Biden out, but Biden is much more of a follower, and his legacy is rapidly becoming unparalleled in its vileness.

One problem with creating another holiday centered around black people is that it results in a lot of crime. MLK Day is a day of unrestrained brutality in black areas. Gangs rule the streets even more than usual. Throngs of kids and disgraceful adults ride around on illegal dirt bikes, blocking traffic and committing crimes against helpless victims. People who have grudges settle them on MLK Day because they know the police will be restrained on orders from above. Black people shoot, rob, and rape each other on this day. The press doesn’t cover it much because that would be racist.

Juneteenth is also a day of crime. You can Google and read about the many killings that have taken place in the past. By creating another black holiday, the government has actually guaranteed the deaths of more black people.

Wokeness always causes more problems than it solves. Very sad.

I don’t know how much worse God will let things get before he wraps things up. I hope people who read this will heed Ezekiel’s warning.

Trump Has Nothing on Me

Today I outdid myself. I got banned from Skype…for ETERNITY.

Air France is holding my wife’s luggage hostage in Johannesburg. It has been in their hands for 52 days. We have been through amazing struggles, trying to get them to spend 10 minutes tossing it on a plane to Lusaka, as we paid them to do, but they refuse. If they can hold onto it long enough, they can auction it along with all the other luggage they refuse to look for.

We are far from alone. Go to Air France’s Twitter feed and look at all the furious tweets about lost bags. They don’t care at all. Means nothing whatsoever to them.

We have made small advances in our efforts to battle the 5 airlines and 1 airport involved in this mess. We have found that doing two things over and over are somewhat helpful: calling the airlines and visiting the Lusaka airport.

I called Air France in Johannesburg, because Air France/KLM here in the US refuses to help. They were eager to take the money, you understand, but that’s about all the customer support we got. I got a cell bill for $86 and accomplished nothing.

I found out I could make calls cheaper on Skype, so I paid for “unlimited” (mind the asterisk) international calls, and today, I started calling Air France in Johannesburg again. Over and over, their phone system hung up on me. I didn’t get to speak to human beings. Every time the system hung up, I called back. Then Skype told me I was suspended.

It’s hard to describe how hard it is to get through to Skype support. Log in. Click this link. Log in again. Click that link. Log in again. Click another link. Click more links. Chat with a entry-level employee. Receive a security code by email, after a failed attempt. Chat with a higher-level employee. I would guess it took me about 20 minutes.

The entry-level guy told me things would be cleared up right away. The supervisor told me that was not quite correct, because I was actually being banned permanently. I asked why, and he gave me a list of things that MIGHT have been the reason. Spamming and so on. I told him I was trying over and over to connect with a faulty phone tree, but that didn’t interest him. He said he didn’t even know why I was banned. It looks like the algorithm is the real supervisor. I’m not sure what the actual people are for.

He kept saying “this account” is banned. Naturally, I tried to get clarification. I asked if that meant my cell number was banned in perpetuity. For all I knew, I could start a new account and begin calling again. He confirmed that my number could never be used again.

So that’s it. No international Skype. I believe the ban only applies to international services, but I’m not sure. Let me try calling a US number.

I’m not sure, but it looks like I can only call people who have Skype accounts. I am not able to find a way to call random US numbers.

Obviously, I’m not getting a new cell number, so that’s it for Skype.

The supervisor was very timid. I think he was afraid I was going to go off on him. He kept waffling and avoiding giving me clear answers. I was polite, but I was blunt. While trying to decode his answers, I said it looked like the algorithm was in charge, which was apparently true. I don’t think tech people like having the unpleasant aspects of their defective systems pointed out. Or, more likely, he was afraid to express himself freely on a monitored system. “Yes, the algorithm is an idiot and a tyrant, but that’s 2022 for you. Wait…a flashing chat window just opened up on my Apple watch…”

I wonder who will ban me next. I have been exiled from 4 forums and Skype.

The rapture represents God’s response to Satan banning his children from the earth. When I find myself ostracized these days, I see it as part of the process. I really hate being part of the matrix. It’s an evil thing. Anyone who is happy in here is sick and feckless. It may seem nice when you’re part of the gang, but when you become “other,” your problems may mount in a very big hurry.

What would you do if your phone, Internet service, TV, credit cards, and bank account stopped working today? What if you tried to start your car, and you found it had been disabled remotely? What if your computers’ operating systems were suddenly closed to you? All those things are going to start happening to God’s children soon. Being de-Skyped without explanation made me think about that. Is there a way to prepare? Not really. You can’t buy enough dried food and gasoline to fix a problem like that. The only way to prepare is to get close to God and try to be raptured.

I didn’t do anything wrong today, but I still got pushed out of the herd again. It’s my destiny. It’s a supernatural thing. If you get close to God, it will happen to you, too, but you should be glad, because to be pushed away from Satan’s flock is to be pushed toward peace, healing, prosperity, joy, and eternal life in heaven. To be accepted is to be drawn closer to hell.

The world hates us. Jesus said it would. Don’t act surprised. Don’t get the idea something is wrong. Embrace it. It’s a very good sign, and if it’s not happening to you, something is badly wrong.

I Can’t Stand the Heat

I feel like my enthusiasm for blogging is drying up. I think I’m just tired of this world. Seems like every time I turn around, I see an angry man in a dress or some other indication that we live in a world of unsavable people. I keep seeing indications that the system is increasingly rigged to exclude Christians and drive them to renounce their salvation in exchange for the ability to participate in our economy. Or in exchange for Facebook likes, which are extremely important.

In 2022, it is literally impossible to interact with many important companies unless you own a smartphone. Not just a cell phone; a smartphone. Of course, phones can be stolen and hacked, so chips will be next. It will turn out to be possible to hack and even cut out other people’s chips, but never mind. They won’t talk about that until after we have them. Articles are popping up on the web saying we will definitely be chipped; the only question is when.

They’re telling us a digital currency is in the works. I don’t see why that’s a big deal, because our currency is already digital. Yes, you can go to your bank and get cash, even though there is not much need for it, but most American dollars are imaginary. They don’t exist as gold, paper, or coins. Only a small percentage are in cash. The rest are moved around among computers. That’s digital, no matter what you want to call it. DIGITAL digital currency will simply be somewhat worse. They can already freeze, refuse, or confiscate your imaginary money, but you can store up cash as a defense. When we go full-throttle digital, the government will tell us our cash is no longer legal tender, so whatever you have in your mattress will be ready for the landfill.

Today my wife said something about the Euphrates drying up. She said it had been prophesied, and it was starting to happen. I looked it up. The Revelation says an angel will pour out a vial, and the Euphrates will run dry. News stories say both the Tigris and Euphrates are disappearing, and they are predicting the Euphrates will be gone in 20 years unless things change.

It’s really happening. The end, I mean. The apocalypse used to be fodder for kooks, but now it’s actually underway. Signs are everywhere. Satan is tightening the noose around the necks of sane people, and we are about to see a big showdown between the godless and those who refuse to become part of the new totalitarian cyborg world. People will be forced to choose, and those of us who don’t want to join will be characterized as haters of everything good.

I’m blogging right now because a couple of strange things have happened, and I felt I should report them. I blogged earlier in the day because I felt obligated to write about a recent trip. I don’t know when I’ll blog again. Maybe I’ll just write about trivial things. Pizzas and barbecue.

Night before last, I dreamed I was in my dad’s house in Coral Gables. I was at the stove, cooking. My dad came in, put his arms around me, and held me tight so I couldn’t move. He said a nonsense word: “ditewide.” For some reason, I believed this meant the world was ending.

It’s an anagram for “wide tide,” which could refer to the rapture, which will be a global tide that rises and lifts God’s children out of the reach of the godless and Satan. I don’t know. Maybe it doesn’t mean anything at all.

My dad was holding onto me the way a father would hold onto a child while waiting for something like a fatal explosion.

I looked toward a computer monitor on the kitchen counter, hoping to see news. I figured there would be stories coming out if the world were ending. I had the feeling nuclear weapons were being used. I didn’t see any news.

Last night, before I went to bed, I started hearing something in my head, over and over: “tetelestai.” I wasn’t sure what it meant. I thought it came from the Bible, but I couldn’t remember. I had a feeling it meant, “It is finished,” and that it was what Jesus said just before he died.

I looked it up, and sure enough, it’s what he said. It’s a Greek word. I know I have heard it in the past, but if you had put a gun to my head yesterday and commanded me to tell you what Jesus said before he died, I would have come up blank. I would not have been able to recall. If you had spoken the word, told me where it came from, and asked me what it meant, I would have given you the right answer, but it would have been a guess.

According to a source I looked at, tetelestai is something a worker might say to his boss at the end of the day, indicating that his work is done. Or you might say it to indicate a bill has been paid. Both readings make sense in the context of the crucifixion.

Jesus said “tetelestai” because his job on Earth was over. He had completely defeated Satan and all his other enemies. He had provided salvation for all the people the Father had selected for him. Similarly, the job of the church will eventually end. We are living in the age of the church, which started when Jesus rose. Our job is to evangelize and fight Satan. One day, God will declare that our job is done, and he will rapture us because leaving us here no longer serves a constructive purpose.

Is God telling me our job is over? Is he telling me it’s very nearly over? I don’t know, but I know I didn’t start repeating “tetelestai” in my head on my own.

God tends to give people a lot of warning, so even if my experiences came from him, I don’t know when the end will happen. When God says “soon,” he may mean two centuries from now.

Famous Chefs Focus on the Wrong Kind of Dough

Today, I am making pizza. I can’t seem to stop doing it. I made myself an excellent thin pie which was just about perfect, so I had a recipe I should have clung to. Naturally, I decided I had to go on and make a less-thin pie with a different crust recipe. While I have been fooling with it, I have gone looking for helpful advice.

It’s surprising how hard it is to get solid information about food. You would think it would be simple to find great advice in this, the Internet’s fourth useful decade. Not so. People who have no idea what they’re doing post recipes and include the word “best” in the descriptions, and many of them seem to have credentials, so it’s easy to get sucked in.

It’s a little like America’s Got Talent. A small percentage of Americans can actually sing, but there are many, many more who clearly can’t yet insist on auditioning. People who ought to know perfectly well they can’t sing show up in droves, and the judges have to waste their time listening to them.

How you can get to be an adult and not realize you can’t sing is beyond me. Surely many of the bad performers that have made the judges suffer had already been informed.

People post bad recipes, and they also give bad general advice about cooking, and many of the worst offenders have big followings.

Long ago, I quit watching the Food Network. I had tried recipes and gotten poor results, and it was not my fault. I found out that famous TV chefs had published a lot of useless, time-wasting material. I had a realization: it wasn’t just that they couldn’t cook. They had jobs that required them to produce an endless stream of good recipes, and there was just no way for mere mortals to fill the demand, so they published a lot of things that weren’t tested properly. They hired ghost cooks to send them things, and many of those cooks weren’t very good.

The goal of a famous chef isn’t to produce good food or teach other people to cook well. It’s to maintain a huge income stream. You can’t do that without providing way more content than a real human being can create responsibly.

I have learned I can’t trust famous chefs, and I have also learned that a cooking school degree is meaningless. America is full of trained chefs who serve terrible food. Cooking well requires a little ability and a lot of humility. You have to know good food when you taste it, and cooking school can’t teach that to everyone. You also have to keep testing yourself. You have to taste the food you make. You have to ask for advice. You can’t just say, “I went to Cordon Bleu, so I know this dish is going to come out right.” I knew two Cordon Blue chefs who couldn’t cook as well as I could, and among the total population, I’m probably a 90th-percentile cook. After several years of college, a chef should be a 99th-percentile cook.

A professional chef once made me a dessert as a gift, and I had to throw it out. It smelled like a wet dog, and this person apparently couldn’t tell, in spite of making a good living in kitchens. I didn’t tell this person how bad the dessert was. I was afraid it would be devastating.

Here’s what I always say: think about all the bad food you’ve had at expensive restaurants, and then consider the fact that most of it was made by trained chefs.

Recently, I’ve been hearing a lot about a person named Kenji. Based on what I read, I thought he might be a useful resource. He is famous for his methodical, fact-based approach to food, and people cite him as though they were citing God himself. They don’t even use his last name. He publishes recipes at a site called Serious Eats.

He grew up eating pizza from a place I liked: Pizza Town, near Columbia University. He also ate at V&T’s, an Italian joint near Columbia. I probably had hundreds of slices of Pizza Town pizza during my New York years, and I grew to like it. Pizza is that way. You will start to like whatever you eat regularly.

In reality, Pizza Town was not that great. Their thin pizza crust was pretty hard, and I believe they used Stanislaus sauce (paste plus basil) straight from the can, with a little water added to reconstitute it. I developed a taste for it anyway, and I had it in mind when I started making pizza, but there are better places. V&T’s was actually very good, although Kenji says it made “good-bad” pizza, whatever that means. V&T’s pizza’s big flaw was that it was very wet, so it had to be eaten with a fork.

V&T’s was significantly better than Pizza Town, so it’s odd that Kenji preferred Pizza Town.

Today I decided I would check Kenji out, and that’s how I learned the facts mentioned above. He has a recipe for New York pizza. He has a separate recipe for the sauce. I thought it would be smart to look at his sauce recipe. He ought to know what he’s doing, right?

Here is the main ingredient for his sauce: “1 (28-ounce) can whole peeled tomatoes.”

Poof. There go my Kenji hopes.

Pizza is extremely ingredient-sensitive. You can completely screw up a tested recipe by using the wrong flour, tomatoes, or cheese. You can buy the right type of ingredient but the wrong brand, and things will go sideways. There are all sorts of whole peeled tomatoes out there. Some are very good. Most–most–are so bad, it is not possible to make an acceptable pizza with them.

You can be a mediocre cook and not know the importance of using the right tomatoes in pizza sauce, but you can’t be a towering food genius and not know.

It is not possible for a person who understands pizza sauce, and who wants others to do well, to recommend “1 (28-ounce) can whole peeled tomatoes” without specifying brands. The tomatoes are the most important thing to get right. Good tomatoes are so helpful, many good pizzerias use sauce that is nothing more than tomatoes and water. You can get away with that if your tomatoes are right. If they’re wrong, nothing you add to them will save your pie.

He also says, “Canned tomatoes invariably have some citric acid added to them in order to increase their acidity.” That’s not true. Everyone who makes pizza knows this. Many pizza makers hate citric acid, so they insist on acid-free sauce. I’m used to citric acid, so I don’t care, but many people insist on brands like Escalon, which preserve tomatoes without it.

You can’t say all canned tomatoes have citric acid in them if you know anything about pizza sauce. Every pizza enthusiast knows better.

He also specifies “bread flour” for the dough, leaving it at that. First of all, that’s the wrong flour. It’s a second choice, for people who can’t get high-gluten flour. I use bread flour (King Arthur) and add gluten. I can’t get high-gluten flour around here. When I used to use high-gluten flour, I found that different brands gave different results, and I settled on Gordon Food Service Primo Gusto. I tried all the big names and ended up with a store brand.

He uses only mozzarella in his recipe, which is questionable at best, and he doesn’t recommend a brand. That’s a serious problem. There are cheeses that fit his specs that don’t work well. Right now, I have a block of Walmart low-moisture whole-milk mozzarella, which meets his specs, and it makes bad pizza. It’s extremely important to try different cheeses and pick the best ones.

My guess: his pizza is excellent, because he has a brand of tomatoes he likes, not to mention a brand of flour and a brand of cheese. But he’s useless to me as a source for a pizza recipe, because he isn’t specific. Fortunately, I already know which ingredients to buy.

His ingredient input is unhelpful, but he may be helpful with other things, like methods. He holds himself out as a sort of scientific chef who tests things instead of accepting dogma. He made several batches of pizza dough by different methods, and he came up with an interesting result: a food processor made better dough than a mixer.

That interests me, because I’ve been using food processors to make dough since around 2009. People have told me it didn’t work, but I was doing it, so I knew it did. It’s strange how people will insist things don’t work when great numbers of other people are already doing them.

His food processor gave pizza crusts bigger air holes. He said this:

Only the food processor-produced dough created a crust that was perfect in both texture and flavor. Tender, chewy, and crisp all at once, with that coveted slick layer at the sauce-crust interface and a thin layer of melted cheese just hinting at brown, it was the archetypical New York pie, and it had just come out of my own oven!

That’s reassuring. To many people, kneading dough with a chopping blade in a food processor is unthinkable, but they’re wrong. I was also reassured to see that his dough recipe was pretty much like mine, except he likes a lot of oil.

He may not be a real pizza expert, but he probably knows what a New York crust is supposed to taste like.

He has a German-style joint in San Mateo, California, which is basically San Francisco. His restaurant is called Wursthall, and I looked it up. Overall, it gets unexciting reviews on Yelp. So-so food, according to many. Some reviewers who don’t give good ratings mention him as the factor that drew them to try the place, and then they talk about the disappointing fare.

Here’s a disturbing review:

Wow, this place is really expensive. It is like being at a giants game. Two beers, a salad and chicken sandwich for $70!!!
And slow beer delivery to boot.
Won’t be returning anytime soon.

That price appears to be no exaggeration. The menu says a sandwich platter runs $16, and most beers cost $8 per pint, with some costing a lot more.

The restaurant specializes in sausages like bratwurst, served as sandwiches. Call it what you want: it’s a hot dog. It may be the best hot dog on Earth, made with unusual ingredients, but it’s still just a hot dog. It can’t be worth $16. I don’t care if the cost of making it was $50. If you’re spending a lot on gourmet ingredients, make something other than a hot dog. That’s my advice.

I would never go to a sit-down restaurant with tablecloths in order to get a hot dog platter. I could see spending $15 on a really good bratwurst on a fantastic bun, plus sides and a good beer, but…no, actually I couldn’t.

I’m not sure there is any German-style meal that’s worth more than $20. Maybe if you threw in strudel. German food is generally pretty gross. Sausages in a pile of beans, with melted cheese on top. Potato salad that tastes like pickled potatoes. Pickled this. Pickled that. There is a reason why young chefs train in Paris, London, and New York instead of Berlin.

Does German haute cuisine even exist? I don’t think so.

I think nothing of giving a steakhouse $75 for dinner, because steak costs money, and a really great steak is as good as any food on the planet. I don’t mind paying $20 or more for an excellent pizza, because pizza is wonderful, and one pizza will feed at least two people. I don’t mind paying $25 for excellent Southern food. It’s well worth it. A sausage on a bun is different. It can’t be all that good, no matter how you make it. Wienerschnitzel, which is actually Austrian, can’t be all that good. German dumplings can’t be all that good. Pig snouts and feet can’t be that good. Their desserts are wonderful, but then they have to be, to make up for everything else.

If Kenji’s knowledge is unsurpassed, why does he have 777 Yelp reviews and only a 4-star rating? He also gets 4 stars from Tripadvisor users. He gets a lot of bad reviews. Overall, he’s doing okay, and he gets plenty of stellar reviews, but if he’s the once-in-a-generation food genius people make him out to be, he should be stunning people with his food, consistently, and that is not happening. And he’s making the same things over and over, so he should have everything perfected by now. His food should be as good as it could possibly be.

Based on what I know of the steak, I don’t buy the sizzle. I don’t think this man is a reliable resource. I guess that explains why I’ve never been impressed by Serious Eats.

I am reminded of Bruce Lee. He weighed about 135 pounds, and he squatted 95 pounds, which is not an impressive weight for a strong woman, but people think he was the greatest fighter who ever lived and that he had superhuman strength. He never fought anyone in a ring with a camera going and judges present. No competitions. He ran from scrutiny. People seriously think he could have flattened the best heavyweight UFC fighters, which is ridiculous. He didn’t have the training to handle the little ones, let alone the big ones. Their way of fighting didn’t exist when he was alive. If you don’t prove yourself, your reputation is just words.

Maybe Kenji does superhuman work when he’s not making New York pizza or running a German restaurant, but what I know so far is discouraging.

I don’t like James Beard, either, and there is a prestigious award named after him. I had three or four of his cookbooks, and the recipes just were not good. I believe I threw them out.

I also think poorly of Mario Batali’s skills. I went to two of his restaurants, and both served me bad food.

I have seen Alton Brown ruin steak, and he also recommended Shun knives, which are fragile and expensive, not to mention poorly balanced. He touted them enthusiastically, until he stopped and started touting completely different knives. My guess is that the wind of money blows him around like a windsock. America’s Test Kitchen, which actually tests things, recommends cheap Forschner knives, and so do I.

Bobby Flay published a prime rib recipe that, for very obvious reasons–the wrong oven temperature–produces a hard lump of unappealing meat. Prime rib is easier to get right than a cheeseburger. All controversy concerning prime rib methods should have ended by about 1900.

Now that I think about it, Myron Mixon, the TV barbecue king, opened a restaurant in Miami, and it was very bad. I tried it. I make much better barbecue at home. Barbecue is simple, but he couldn’t do it. His restaurant went out of business. He claimed his partners ruined everything. That’s hard to believe. I could write two paragraphs and show you how to make perfect dry-rubbed ribs. Anyone can do it. Even with bad partners, Mixon should have been able to teach his staff how to make ribs. Mix seasonings according to boss’s recipe, put on ribs, smoke ribs. That’s all there is to it.

Today’s experience confirms what I already believe: as helpful as outside advice is, there is no substitute for personal experience in the kitchen. Few experts can be trusted, and some of the most respected are the least reliable. Most people who buy cookbooks can’t cook, so even if millions of people recommend a celebrity cookbook, it means nearly nothing.

Reading about Kenji also makes me regret posting recipes that were not as great as I thought they were. That has happened. I have sometimes misled people and contributed to the clutter of unneeded recipes. I have made both the America’s Got Talent error and the Food Network error.

On the other hand, I have come up with a number of truly magnificent recipes, so there’s that.

I have never had a cheesecake that compares to mine, or a Sicilian pizza that comes close. I have never had beer or steak that compares to mine. I made sourdough garlic rolls that seemed to come from heaven itself. I could never eat a standard Thanksgiving turkey after eating my boneless turkey stuffed with cornbread dressing. I’m crazy about the Alfredo-ish sauce I came up with recently. I have a pretty decent list of victories.

Maybe the recipes that weren’t that great can be forgiven in view of my successes. I am, after all, an amateur.

I don’t think the pizza I’m working on right now will be a victory. It looks like the dough will not be elastic enough to give me big bubbles. I hope I’m wrong, but at least I’ll know, and I’ll have meticulous records to incorporate the new knowledge.

Kenji claims New York pizzerias commonly cook at around 500°, so that’s good news. He should be right about that, given the fact that he grew up in New York. I have a better source, though. A guy on a pizza forum says 500° will work fine, and he is a paid consultant who has helped New York pizzerias. That puts him higher on the authority scale. Unlike Kenji and Bruce Lee, he has produced results on the battlefield. Professionals in the nation’s top market are willing to pay for his help.

In a side note, Kenji’s restaurant is near San Francisco, and he got attention for saying people in Trump hats would not be served there. Here is the text:

It hasn’t happened yet, but if you come to my restaurant wearing a MAGA cap, you aren’t getting served. Same as if you come in wearing a swastika, white hood, or any other symbol of intolerance and hate.”

He said it hadn’t happened, and there are two reasons for that. The first is that there aren’t many Trump supporters in San Francisco, and the second is attitudes like Kenji’s. Conservatives know they aren’t safe in San Francisco, so they are reluctant to out themselves. They don’t want food full of boogers. They don’t want to be attacked physically. Leftists talk a lot about safe spaces, with reference to trivial things like hearing words that upset them, but they have a history of creating actual unsafe spaces in which conservatives are threatened with actual harm or battered.

His remark, itself, was a declaration of something at least approaching hate. Ironic. He couldn’t see the beam in his own eye.

Delusion is getting very bad in the US. A friend of mine has a far-left adult son who is literally deranged. Yesterday, my friend brought up the Ukraine invasion, and his son told him he didn’t want to hear about it because it was just an unimportant conflict between white people. That’s startling. It’s a lot like Whoopi Goldberg’s crazy remark about the Holocaust being unrelated to race. The Germans were white, and so were the Jews, so the Jews don’t get to be real victims like, I suppose, Jussie Smollett.

It’s not a problem when children and other civilians are hurt and killed, or when soldiers suffer the same fates, as long as they’re white. That’s my friend’s son’s position. And he’s white.

The son’s mother used to be conservative and probably still is, but she has started listening to leftist 1984-style “thought leaders” and parroting their absurdist, racist hate speech to her son. My friend is considering letting his son know his mother used to be conservative, and he is also considering telling him she is probably only pretending to be a leftist in order to avoid upsetting him and being rejected. My friend hasn’t done these things. He is not sure they will help.

The mother has never been quite right. She has claimed to have a psychological disorder, officially diagnosed, which makes her extremely uncomfortable whenever she doesn’t get her way. I don’t think that’s a real disorder. Not unless it’s demonic. To me, it sounds like she’s just spoiled, controlling, and misandrist. Which can also be demonic, now that I think about it.

How can you abandon your right to think and let some hateful, willfully ignorant idiot on Youtube do it for you? How can you trust another person that much, especially when that person’s idiocy is extremely obvious? It’s unusual to trust Jesus himself that much, and he’s always right. God has said he sends supernatural delusion to rebellious people, and we see it all around us now.

The other day I heard a Holy Spirit-filled conservative say maybe we should just quit obeying the law because Biden was incompetent. That’s also delusion. It proves being baptized with the Spirit isn’t enough. You have to pray in tongues and ask for correction every day.

In 2 Thessalonians 3:2, Paul calls the Antichrist “the man of lawlessness.” Satan is really pushing lawlessness now. There are truly stupid and dangerous laws we shouldn’t feel compelled to observe, but these days, people are encouraging disobedience that isn’t really justified. Thanks to the toxic philosopher Henry David Thoreau, leftists think breaking laws is highly virtuous, and in recent years, they have been breaking good laws like never before. Conservatives have become jealous, so they are also becoming lawless. It’s not good. Even if disobeying the law brings short-term benefits, it contributes to a culture of lawlessness. If you like that kind of thing, take a look at Somalia. That’s where we are headed.

My guess is that things will become so chaotic, the world will be ripe for the Antichrist to step in and restore order. Isn’t that pretty similar to the Saul Alinsky plan? It should be, since Alinsky took dictation from Satan himself.

Human interaction is rapidly being reduced to, “I got you,” and, “I got you back.”

Last night I dreamed I was at my dad’s home back in Miami. I was looking after him. I heard motor noises outside, and I realized trespassers were in the yard. I went into the garage and yelled through the doors, telling them to take off. I started opening the doors, hoping they would flee. They did not.

When I walked outside, they were working on the driveway. I became enraged. I thought they were driveway gypsies. Maybe you don’t know what those are.

Gypsies, or Romani, as they prefer to be called, have a long history of cheating people on driveway work. We are supposed to treat gypsies as though they were wonderful people who are oppressed unfairly, but the truth is that their culture permits and encourages stealing and swindling, so I can’t really go along with the white privilege guilt trip and manipulation.

Here is a gypsy legend most people don’t know of: many gypsies claim the nails for the crucifixion were provided by a gypsy blacksmith. In addition to the three we know about, there was a fourth nail intended to go through Jesus’ heart. The blacksmith refused to provide it, meaning he stole it, and as a reward, God exempted them from the 7th commandment. This means they are allowed to steal.

Not a great pillar for a culture to stand on.

It’s a horrible, sick, stupid, gypsy-destroying rationalization, and it would make no sense if it were true, because Jesus’ heart was pierced by a Roman spear after he died. Stealing a nail wouldn’t have helped him. A nail through the heart while he was still living, on the other hand, would actually have been merciful.

My mother was crazy about gypsies. I have dim memories of her taking me to see them when I was very young, in Tampa. I haven’t thought about that in years. They must have had a community there. She liked having her palm read, which is, of course, idolatry.

Anyway, gypsies (and other people) are known for showing up at the homes of elderly Floridians and offering to do driveway work cheap. They’ll say they have materials left over from other jobs, so they quote low prices. The problem is that the material is basically paint, so it comes off quickly.

In the dream, I thought gypsies were after my dad. For some reason, I reacted like a rabid dog. I have run actual driveway gypsies off, and I was polite. In this dream, I was a different person.

I started calling them filthy names involving excrement and sex acts performed on other men. I really laid into them. One of them approached me, and I slapped him so hard, he should have been on the ground. He came up behind me, and I pulled his glasses off his head with my teeth and threw them on the pavement.

I saw that they had cut a big hole in the driveway. One was carrying a piece of lumber I thought he had stolen from us.

I kept excoriating them, and the guy with the glasses and another man who was like a foreman kept asking me to let them explain. I was not having it. I made them leave. They fixed the hole they had dug. I was not afraid of them at all.

One of them came over to me and asked me why World Relief, a huge Christian charity, had been mailing me. He apparently wondered why a person like me would be hearing from a charity. He was a young black man, and he was very polite and respectful. None of them treated me the way I treated them.

I had a tablet, and we started looking at it. We were looking at sites dealing with World Relief. I was not angry at him. My tablet had a protective plastic film on the screen. I wondered why I had never removed it.

Anyway, they left, and when I woke up, I tried to find out what the dream was about. Were they demons, trying to break through God’s hedge of protection and harm me? Were they angels, sent to help me because I had done alms in the past? Why was I so angry?

I started to feel very bad about all the times I had mistreated people who were helping me. I had been nasty to educators, for example, over trivial things. It’s amazing that I could have been stupid enough to give people a hard time when they were trying to help me get an Ivy League degree. I had been nasty to other people who had tried to give me helpful advice. I had rejected other people’s input because I was proud and wanted to get by on my own ideas so I could have the glory.

When I was a kid, my parents did a poor job. They didn’t teach me much of anything in the way of wisdom or good habits, and perhaps as a result, I learned to think for myself. In doing so, I lost respect for other people’s advice. I was very smart, so I was used to being the brightest person in the room, and I started feeling I was always right.

Maybe the dream was about the way I had rejected helpful correction and ended up suffering unnecessary defeats. I reinvented the wheel many times, often incorrectly, instead of building on other people’s good ideas.

I also felt bad about the many times I had jumped into or started angry arguments, treating people who were merely wrong as though they were trying to do me harm.

Maybe the dream was about these things, or maybe the men were demons.

The other day, I dreamed a kid and a young man were trying to harm me, and I beat them brutally, crushing the young man’s face. In that case, there was no doubting their hostility, and I have no doubt they represented evil spirits. This time, I don’t know.

I hate demons with a hate I can’t describe, so maybe they did represent demons. If I could, I would do things to them that would make Josef Mengele throw up. I can understand why God plans to burn evil spirits forever. In my dreams, I break their bones and mutilate them. It’s not possible for me to feel that way about a human being.

Even if the gypsies represented demons, I still believe it was very good for me to confront my faults last night, so it’s a win. We are in the apocalypse, so a spirit of murder and hatred has been released on the world, and I need to avoid opening the door to it.

I can’t really see myself pleasing God by calling demons names involving gay oral sex. I would think that if I were fighting demons in a dream, in obedience to God, I would be somewhat more dignified.

Last night I thought about all the things he has shown me lately. He keeps telling me to change so I will not be like the rest of humanity. While I was in bed thinking about this, I put my face in my hands and told him I was going to end up surrounded by people I couldn’t even communicate with. I would be so different, and other people would be so deaf, I wouldn’t be able to explain much to them. Even if I didn’t become particularly good, I would understand things I couldn’t make other people understand.

I wasn’t complaining about his demands. I just felt I needed to tell him.

In my mind, I had an image of a long train full of people, hurtling toward a cliff. I could watch, but I couldn’t stop it.

I started asking God how people were supposed to learn. Who was supposed to teach us? Instantly, I realized I already knew the answer: the Holy Spirit. Churches are like grocery stores where half the food is poisoned, and we can’t rely on them. We have to hear from the Holy Spirit himself, one on one, as John taught. That means prayer in tongues, and not just a couple of minutes per day.

We can’t find reliable pizza information easily, and it’s hard to get good information about God. From human beings, I mean. Yet we still push people to turn pastors and priests into little gods who can’t be questioned.

I hope God restores the Holy Spirit as a teacher before the world ends. If not, I think the apocalypse will continue to progress without interruption.

Pump up Your Pizza

I have been fiddling around with thin pizza, and I have figured out some things.

I love my recipe for thin pizza, but I am fairly sure it would be better if my oven were a little hotter. I got stuck with an old 500° oven. In addition to the temperature issue, it also blows a thermal fuse whenever I try to use the self-clean cycle. I can’t clean it unless I do it manually. That will not happen. I’m not sure why ovens have to be cleaned, however. They seem to work fine whether you clean them or not. Is cleaning just a vanity thing, or will my oven eventually explode?

The oven also has a display that has grown so dim, I have to use reading glasses to read it.

My oven in Miami went to 550°. I have been looking around for something new that will do that. I learned that many brands only go up to 500° in bake mode, which is ridiculous, given that pizza making is more popular than ever. You can bake a good New York pizza at 500°, but hotter is better.

I discovered that Frigidaire, the manufacturer of my last oven, still makes hot ovens. I started trying to find one that will work for me.

Of course, ovens have changed a lot since the last time I bought one. They have a lot of silly “smart” features I don’t want. Why on Earth would I want to talk to my oven from across town? It’s bad enough getting distress calls from the vacuum cleaner. Smart features just add expense and more risk of failure. I guarantee you, your smart 2022 smart oven has parts that won’t be available in 2027.

Ovens with phone apps are patently stupid, like refrigerators that send you movies of their contents, but ovens have other new features that could be great.

I have learned about oven spring. This term refers to the way bread blows up when you put it in the oven. I thought I could get peak oven spring with any old oven, but that’s wrong. To get good oven spring, you need steam in your oven when baking starts. Steam keeps the outside of your bread elastic so the bread can puff up. You can force your old oven to do steam by putting things like skillets full of water-soaked rocks in it, but it’s a pain, and it’s not optimal. They now make ovens that do steam baking, imitating the ovens real bakers use.

Today I baked a pizza, and when I put it in the oven, I threw about a quarter-cup of water in the oven below it. This helped the dough blow up beautifully, but you can’t keep throwing water in an oven that isn’t made for it. I found a Frigidaire that has a steam-bake setting. Will it work? I don’t know, but it’s worth a try.

New ovens also have better convection and air-fry capabilities, and it’s not hard to find one that has a probe to measure the internal temperature of meats. You can also find ovens that somehow skip the preheat business, and you can get ovens that proof bread.

I found a Frigidaire that does all this stuff. Man, is it expensive. I know I’m cheap, but $2300 for a single oven seems like a lot to me. It could be worse. Other ovens break the $4000 mark.

I’ll post a photo of today’s pizza. You can see how big the air holes in the crust are. Very nice. Unfortunately, the cheese I used is disgusting. I decided to try Boar’s Head provolone, and for some reason, the only provolone they make is the low-sodium kind. I decided to try it, thinking maybe all provolone was low-sodium cheese. The pizza just didn’t taste right. Also, I fermented the pizza too fast because I was in a hurry, and that didn’t help the taste.

I learned something else about oven spring. If you rest your dough before turning it into a ball or loaf, it will spring better.

I make phenomenal Sicilian pizza. I make the dough in a food processor, I make a puck out of it, I put it in a very oily pan, and I let it rest for around 20 minutes. After the time is up, the dough, which was initially more like hard, lumpy batter, is smooth and stretchy. At this point, I stretch it to fit the inside of the pan and let it rise again. It’s always magnificent.

I had read that thin pizza (and baguettes) needed to be stretchy and tight before final proofing, and today, I thought about those Sicilian pies and that stretchy dough.

This afternoon, I tried resting dough for thin pizza. Using the food processor, I blended everything but the oil and waited 10 minutes, for sound reasons which escape me at the moment. Then I processed the oil in and waited 20 more minutes. Then I kneaded the dough in my hands a few times to move the outside in and the inside out, and I formed it into a ball. The ball had a nice, tight surface, and when I put it in the toaster oven to proof, it stood up nicely instead of flattening out the way my dough balls used to.

Combined with the steam, the resting helped the dough puff up in the oven.

Obviously, you have to ask which change made the most difference: the steam or the resting. Answer: the resting. I think. I made two pizzas today, and I didn’t add water to the oven the first time until the pizza had already been baking for several minutes, so I don’t think the steam did much. Both pizzas were made with rested dough, and both blew up well. The second one was better, but the improvement between it and the first one was smaller than the improvement between the first one and the ones I used to make.

I’m trying to convince myself to buy the Frigidaire, and I plan to rest my dough from now on. And I’m not buying any more Boar’s Head provolone.

Under Biden, we now have an oven shortage, so I feel like I need to get an oven right away, before things get worse. The Frigidaire is on sale for about 10% off, which is remarkable given the supply chain problems.

Rhodah and I have been praying for Biden, and today we prayed for the leaders of Russia and Ukraine and their people. We didn’t just offer bland, “Oh, please prevent war,” prayers. We prayed for God to correct people and help them to become Spirit-led. I think it’s dumb to pray for things to go well for people without praying for God to correct and repair them.

We also prayed for special protection for God’s children in these countries. God’s children; not everyone. Most people are not God’s children, and many people can’t be helped because of their rebellion. Many have come under curses they will just have to put up with until they repent.

I have not been keeping up with the news, but I can’t help hearing some things, so I know about Russia and Ukraine. Would Putin have attacked with a functioning chief executive in office? I don’t know, but I don’t see how Putin could pass up the chance to run wild with Biden in charge. America is much weaker now that Trump is gone, and of course, this matters to our enemies. They will pull things they would never have tried with Trump or even Obama.

Obama didn’t put America first, and our enemies often played him for a fool, but he was also warlike and egotistical, so he didn’t always roll over.

If I were Putin, Xi, or Kim Jong Un, I would be thrilled to be up against Biden. They must have been ecstatic when Trump lost.

My friend Mike has a pal who hates Trump. Before Biden won, this person said he would rather see America destroyed than see Trump reelected. A lot of people felt this way, and now they’re eating their words. Very sad. I would rather see Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, AOC, or even Whoopi Goldberg elected rather than see my country destroyed.

Whether we could elect any of these people without destroying America is another question.

I don’t know how serious the Ukraine situation is for America. I have no idea whether there is or is not a danger of a world war. I do know the apocalypse has started, however, so I suppose anything is possible.

I have been putting dry food in containers in case I need it, and I’ve considered getting an upright freezer for meat. I found out I needed to make sure I didn’t get a frostproof model.

In the past, freezers kept food in good shape for a very long time. They were not frostproof, and they didn’t have warm cycles. Frostproof freezers actually warm up every so often. It ruins food.

If you put ice cream in a frostproof freezer and leave it unopened, it will degrade. The ice crystals will melt and refreeze over and over, and the refrozen crystals will be a lot bigger than the original ones. This ruins ice cream’s texture. The same thing happens in other foods.

Apparently, you have to avoid frostproof freezers or eat your frozen food pretty quickly, which defeats the purpose of a freezer. I don’t look forward to defrosting a freezer once a year, but it sounds better than eating freezer burn.

Maybe I’ll get a freezer. Might as well have decent food while everything disintegrates.

Would Jesus Approve This Message?

A reader asked why I don’t write the same kinds of things I used to. Another reader asked where a recent piece had gone. I can answer both questions at once.

God changed me, and he keeps making improvements. Years ago, I had a different outlook, and I had less understanding. I was happy publishing things I wouldn’t want to publish now.

When you start out as a Christian, you will probably get the idea that Christianity has a lot of rules for rules’ sake. You may feel there is a big scoreboard in heaven, and your good deeds and sins move the numbers up and down. As you learn more from the Holy Spirit, you start to realize the things you do and say can cause a lot of harm. You also learn that things you used to think were harmless can wreck your life.

The other day, I put a comment on a Youtube video. The Youtuber was a Christian who had performed a lot of healings. When I first started watching his videos, I thought he was pretty solid. After Trump lost the election–and he really did lose–this man started publishing baseless theories. He said Trump would be back in office by August. He said Trump had arrested the federal government, and that he was going to imprison his enemies and go back to the White House. He said coronavirus vaccines were made using Satan’s DNA, taken from Satan’s body.

I told this man he needed to start praying in tongues a lot, because he was saying things that were obviously not true. I said prayer in tongues was necessary to bring guidance. He rejected my suggestion, calling it legalism.

He doesn’t know what legalism is. Legalism is a school of thought that says we please God by obeying rigid laws. It’s a big deal among Jews. Observe a sabbath, score points. Pray over a meal, score points. Even the good deeds and Torah study of your children can increase your score and make up for your failures. Many Christian denominations are legalistic.

The advice I gave this man wasn’t legalism. It was our father’s common sense. I was pointing out causal relationships.

If I say you should quit smoking cigarettes because there is about a one in 6 chance you will get lung cancer, I’m not being a legalist. I’m letting you know there is a relationship between an unwise practice and a terrible disease. If I tell you failing to pray in tongues will cause you problems, I’m not telling you God will punish you for disobeying a rule. I’m saying you will miss out on God’s method of building and guiding you.

Christians who are led by the Holy Spirit, as they are supposed to be, don’t obey rigid written laws. They are still under law, though. They are under the law of the Holy Spirit. What he says is law. We can eat pork and work on Saturday, but we still have to obey God when he gives us commands.

The commands God gives us are related to the results we get. They help us to become like him and to cause his will to be done here on Earth.

Everyone is spirit-led. Some are led by the Holy Spirit, and others are led by Satan. There is no neutrality. You are serving God or Satan. If you don’t listen to the Holy Spirit, you end up obeying spirits that are assigned to destroy you and the people you interact with.

Every spirit has a nature and lives according to certain principles. The Holy Spirit is humble and loving. Every single spirit that doesn’t serve God is malicious. Spirits that oppose God get into your mind and heart and push you to become like them. If you stick with them, you will develop the same ideas, emotions, and beliefs they have, and you will act on them.

God’s blessings depend largely on obeying the Holy Spirit and rejecting evil spirits. When you give in to an evil spirit, you reduce your blessings and protection. This is what Solomon meant when he said, “Whoso breaketh an hedge, a serpent shall bite him.” In the Old Testament, hedges are barriers of confinement or protection, and serpents represent evil spirits. Things and people that are earthly in the Old Testament represent supernatural things. Under Moses, the Hebrews sinned, and they were bitten by snakes, literally. The remedy was a brass serpent made by Moses. Afflicted people were healed when they looked at it. It represented Jesus, becoming our curses on the cross.

The Hebrews who were bitten by snakes represented Christians who are attacked by spirits. The Hebrews broke God’s hedges by disrespecting God and Moses, so snakes were allowed to attack them. When we choose sin, God has to allow demons to attack us. Demons can cause illness and death. They can prevent and end marriages. They can harm our children. They can cause poverty and addiction. It’s a very serious thing when you let them in.

When I write things that are snotty or otherwise unacceptable, I break God’s hedge of protection and let serpents in. They could be diseases. They could be other problems. I want an intact hedge, so sometimes when I see that I’ve done wrong, I go back and correct things.

As I have written, I had a dream about water recently. I was driving a strange vehicle like a fighter jet. It traveled on the ground. I had to stop and fill its tank with water. Apparently, it ran on water. When I started scooping up water to fill it, I found dead things in the water. I had to scoop them out first in order to get clean water.

This was God’s way of telling me I was filling myself with Satan’s water of death. Through prayer in tongues, the living water flows through me and builds me up and cleanses me. Through things like secular entertainment and other counterproductive activities, I let Satan’s water of death flow through me, diminish me, and make me filthy. After I had this dream, I quit reading the news and watching fiction.

Last night, my wife Rhodah had a dream. She was in her front yard. A woman she knew came up with a container of water, and she threw it in the yard. The water had snakes in it. Rhodah scolded her and told her to stop. One of the snakes wrapped itself around her toe. She had to fight. God was showing Rhodah what he had shown me.

We live in a time of greatly increased demonic activity. The apocalypse is here, and as the Bible says, Satan is angry because he knows his time is short. He has clearance to release more evil spirits than before. These days, you can’t get away with the things you got away with in the past. You need a strong hedge of protection.

To keep your hedge strong, you should try not to indulge in things like pride, anger, greed, gluttony, coarseness, perversion, and covetousness. You should try not to be malicious. It’s not easy to be a humorist without indulging in those things.

I delete things I should not have written for the same reason I won’t watch things I shouldn’t. I don’t want to defile myself and open the door to curses.

Sorry if I seem like a killjoy. This is just the way things are.

The piece I just took down was about Meta and its awful fake universe. I was pretty hard on STEM people. I woke up in the night and felt I had to delete the piece. It would be hard to get rid of all the things I regret publishing, but it’s easy to delete new ones, so why not do it?

It’s no great loss. I don’t make money from blogging, and no one will ever miss my lost works, because I am obscure. My blog posts will not be mourned like the scores Chopin had burned when he died.

STEM people are a real mess. Many feel great hostility toward Christianity, and they sincerely believe the nasty, authoritarian, individuality-destroying, tech-centric world they are trying to build is a good thing. They don’t need Christians making fun of them. We need to encourage them to join us.

I’m not missing out on anything by changing what I see, hear, and write. There are plenty of things in life to keep us occupied and entertained without opening ourselves up to the dark culture of the godless world. It’s not like I sit around in an empty room, wearing a hair shirt and beating myself with a cudgel. You don’t really need the world’s sick culture in order to enjoy life. It causes more displeasure than pleasure, and it makes you weak and vulnerable, not to mention useless and hypocritical.

I don’t really care about this blog. If someone hacks it and removes the whole thing, I won’t go into hysterics. I don’t know whether anyone else should care about it. If anyone does, it’s flattering, but the blog is still not very important, and it would be better if I had never written my books.

We Pay Hollywood to Poison Us

I keep asking God to wake me up so I am no longer so jaded I think circumstances in this world are normal. It appears he is listening.

The other day, I watched an Amazon show called Reacher. I should not have done this.

The show is based on the Jack Reacher novels. Jack Reacher is an imaginary and impossible retired Army major who is the best at absolutely everything. If you have seen the two Jack Reacher movies featuring Tom Cruise, you know what I mean. He’s the best precision rifle shot. He can beat up 5 men at once. He has the deductive skills of Sherlock Holmes.

He’s a revenge hero, about like a Steven Seagal character, only somewhat less silly. All of the novels and movies, and the Amazon series, start the same way. Somebody really obnoxious does some extremely cruel, infuriating things, Reacher gets caught up in it, and eventually, he kills a bunch of people in sadistic ways.

I have been trying to limit my intake of entertainment containing violence, but I felt it was okay to see the TV show. It was not good for me. Don’t read further unless you like spoilers.

One of the early episodes featured a man who had been nailed to a wall, naked, and castrated. They showed the corpse without warning, fully exposed. Eventually, Reacher did the obligatory thing and fornicated with a deputy who was helping him, and she popped into the scene with her breasts exposed. It was completely gratuitous. Another man was burned alive after killing his own father by cutting his throat clear through the windpipe.

Before I watched the show, I had started looking at Game of Thrones clips on Youtube, out of curiosity. If you haven’t seen this show, you’re in for a disgusting experience. It’s about a storybook world full of things like giants and dragons. The main characters are nobles who do unbelievably gross things to each other. They torture and mutilate each other on camera, and there are a lot of gruesome deaths. It’s not The Waltons.

When I saw the clips, I marveled at what was passing for prime time entertainment in America. When I was born, married TV couples had to sleep in twin beds, and injured characters never looked all that bad, even when they were dead. Now shows contain bits of pornography, and characters slice people up on camera.

I felt bad after watching Reacher and the Game of Thrones clips. I had no good excuse for watching.

Last night, I had a strange dream. I was driving a big, powerful vehicle something like a fighter jet with no wings. For some reason, I was Scottish. No idea what that was about. I was at something resembling a gas station, and I needed to put water in the vehicle’s tank. It didn’t seem to require gas or jet fuel. There was a tank of water beside the vehicle, and it had no top. I used a soup can to scoop water out of the tank and pour it into the vehicle.

My parrot Marvin was with me. He was a sort of helper. He was eagerly climbing in and out of the vehicle’s pipes, trying to inspect and put everything right. He was concerned about something. He stood on the ground beside a pipe and drew my attention to it, and it coughed out a small spray of blood.

I looked at the water I was trying to scoop up, and nasty things were floating in it. I saw dead leaves and a dead lizard. The water itself was clear, but a lot of stuff had found its way into it.

I found myself trying to scoop up the junk and dump it on the ground so I could get at the clean water. I started complaining to a lady who provided the water. She was English, and she worked for an Englishman who wasn’t there. She didn’t care about my problems.

I woke up. It was about 4 a.m. My wife and I both tend to wake up and pray at about this time.

When I woke up, I thought about Derek Prince. He is the English evangelist from whom I learned to prophesy at will. I started asking myself whether he had been wrong.

Water represents the flow of the Holy Spirit, and powered vehicles represent God’s grace. I thought maybe bad teaching had contaminated the gifts of the Spirit. Maybe Prince’s teaching was wrong, I was letting demons prophesy through me, and this was blocking God’s power in me.

I asked God to show me the truth, and I mentioned the verse in which Paul told us to covet prophecy. He said it was better than tongues. I knew people were supposed to prophesy, but was I doing it right?

I turned on the TV and watched Derek Prince’s video. He cited 1 Corinthians several times. He claimed Paul said we could all prophesy. Here is 1 Corinthians 14:31: “For ye may all prophesy one by one, that all may learn, and all may be comforted.”

I thought about that. “May” and “can” mean two different things. I wondered if Prince had gotten them confused. Did God really tell us we had the power to prophesy, or merely permission to do it if we could?

I went to the Greek. It uses the word “dynasthe,” which is related to “dynamis,” which is where we get “dynamite.” It means “are capable.” Paul said, “You are all able to prophesy one by one.”

That seems pretty clear. It is undeniable that God wants us all to desire prophesy and to try to develop it, and it certainly looks like he has said we have the ability.

The word translated “prophesy” is “propheteuein,” and it literally means “prophesy,” which means to speak the words of God, including revealing future events.

I don’t believe Derek Prince was wrong. There is too much evidence that he was right.

Then I thought about Mount Hermon, at the north end of Israel. Its Hebrew name is Ba’al Hermon, or “Lord of the Curse.” There is some argument as to whether this interpretation is correct, but it makes sense. Enoch said it was the place where Satan and the rebel angels came down and bound each other by a mutual curse. They planned to have sex with women, and they swore loyalty to each other.

Mount Hermon’s snows are one of the three main sources of the Jordan. At the bottom of the mountain, there is a place called Caesarea Philippi. It was dedicated to evil. There is a spring there, and the water that comes from it turns into a stream that feeds the Jordan.

The spring is quiet now, but it used to be very vigorous and turbulent. Pagans used to throw dead animals into it after they were sacrificed. They defiled the Jordan this way. The Jordan has supernatural significance. It feeds the Sea of Galilee, which symbolizes the earth in the Bible. The fish in the Sea of Galilee represent humanity. The Jordan emerges from the south end of the Sea of Galilee and goes through the desert to the Dead Sea, which contains no fish and represents the lake of fire.

It seemed to me that my dream was about defiling myself with things like secular entertainment, news, and combat sports. The living water comes to me clean and clear, like the snow of Mount Hermon. Then I combine it with worldly filth by allowing corrupting images and sounds into my mind.

I saw an image in my mind. I saw storefronts owned by Satan. In the stores, his underling spirits sat, waiting for customers. When people walked in, the spirits waited on them, loading them up with goods. No charge. Not up front, anyway.

If you don’t go into a store, the spirit that runs it can’t come out and drag you in. You give them permission to work in you when you walk in the door. I think I’ve been doing this.

I made a list of things I felt God wanted me to give up or greatly reduce: social media, fiction, news, anything to do with violence or fighting, everything related to the occult, and all types of input intended to be erotic.

I don’t think it’s possible to cut the news out of your life entirely. You will occasionally pick things up whether you want them or not. You can minimize it, though. As for social media, I’m already done with it, except for Youtube, which seems to have a purpose. I don’t need to watch violence or occult material, so these things aren’t problems. Abandoning fiction will be a little hard, but in the end, it’s all foolishness, and the people who run the fiction industry hate Jesus, so I should know better than to let them influence me.

Erotic entertainment is clearly evil and unnecessary. I don’t think any Christian disputes that.

Day before yesterday, before I had the dream, I decided to fast from news. Now I’m avoiding everything on the list. Fiction is the biggest challenge. I feel like I’m in withdrawal, as though something wanted me to rent a movie.

Hollywood is extremely evil. It’s a shame Christians don’t talk about this more. It’s a hive of homosexuality, even among male celebrities most of us think are straight. It pumps out material hostile to Jesus, white people, men, America, and the church. It promotes pride, cruelty, racism, and violence. It glorifies Satanic religions such as Buddhism and witchcraft. It’s remarkable that we continue paying Hollywood to direct its sewage pipes into our living rooms.

We should be able to look at the lives of entertainers and realize they have nothing good to tell us. How many are on drugs? How many have fallen so far they had to go to rehab repeatedly? How many have died from drug overdoses and suicide? How many are extremely promiscuous? How many have sexually-perverted children? It’s strange that we admire people who have failed at life and who are generally going to hell.

I think that if Moses could come to Earth, walk into a typical American’s house, and turn on the TV, he would stalk out in about three minutes, asking for forgiveness and wondering why God hadn’t incinerated the entire family.

We shouldn’t be angry at show business people, but we shouldn’t admire them or buy their product, either.

As I have said before, I believe the rapture is a process, not just a sudden event. I believe the people who will be taken in the event will be those who have already been raptured internally and removed from the company of irredeemable people.

The whole concept of rapture is interesting to me. The other day it occurred to me that the first rapture we know of took place when God raptured himself away from Adam and Eve.

I plan to keep prophesying, and I will continue to try to reduce the flow of worldly pus and excrement that pollutes my life.

The More They Tell us, the Less we Know

It is always astounding to me to see how well the global battle against truth is going.

In a sane world, you would expect a pandemic to give rise to greater effort to disseminate truth. A world of people facing the same problem should be as united as possible in looking for answers. We should be listening to everyone who might have good information. Instead, we are shutting people down and listening to a few elite voices who keep turning out to be wrong. And the things they’re wrong about are not always hard to understand. They don’t have that excuse. They’re very obviously wrong about simple things.

Masks don’t work very well. They do virtually nothing on jets, where the air is constantly replaced. Kids aren’t in much danger and shouldn’t be kept out of school. Natural immunity is pretty much the same thing as vaccine-based immunity and should get just as much respect. Unless you’re fat, old, or sick, your chance of having serious problems are very low. If you are fat, old, or sick, the vaccines won’t work as well for you and may do nothing at all. Social distancing doesn’t work very well. It is not possible to end the pandemic, so we need to learn to live with it until we have a cure. The suffering caused by draconian anti-transmission measures is extreme and important, and it has to be considered when we think about restricting people’s freedom. There is credible evidence, but not conclusive proof, that ivermectin has helped many people, and there is no evidence that it is unsafe, even in animal preparations.

These are obvious truths, but the establishment has denied all of them.

On the other side of the coin, a lot of people outside of the establishment are telling us the vaccines made them magnetic. Some say the shots contain microchips. Some say the shots kill more people than the virus. Look around, and you will see people saying coronavirus doesn’t actually exist. There is a long list of wacky anti-establishment claims no one over the age of 10 has any excuse for believing.

There are rabidly pro-establishment leftists out there who believe ridiculous things. A survey of Democrats found that about 41% thought at least half of covid patients ended up in the hospital. No wonder they’re so vicious toward people who resist vaccination, masks, and so on. They really think covid is up there with Ebola and the plague.

Even Republicans had an exaggerated impression of the risk. They came in at 26%. The real risk at the time was 5% or less.

Americans have suddenly developed a deep love of censorship. How could that happen? How could people suddenly become that stupid? The evils of censorship, apart from censorship of obscenity and certain other types of expression which present extraordinary dangers, have been obvious to Americans since before America existed. The First Amendment was drafted in order to placate fears of representatives of colonies who were nervous about joining the union. Before America could exist, censorship had to be limited in writing.

To paraphrase Santayana, once again, we are forgetting the lessons of the past, so we will have to relearn them. The natural thing is for a society to know more than it did in the past, but somehow we manage to know less. That’s an accomplishment.

Now Israeli researchers are telling us vitamin D deficiency multiplies a covid patient’s risk of death by 14, and that figure is corrected for things like age and comorbidities.

Is it true? If it is, why didn’t we know it a year and a half ago?

A friend of mind thinks doctors who pushed the vitamin D theory were censored. That could well be true. In 1972 America, a tin foil hat was the mark of a lunatic. In 2022, every intelligent person should wear one. Conspiracy theories keep being confirmed.

One sign that a person is influenced by demons is sudden, disproportionate anger. I can explain what that looks like. If you tell me you think the vaccines contain spores that impregnate people with aliens, I will think you’re insane, but I will not get angry at you. Joe Rogan said he took doctor-prescribed ivermectin pills, and he didn’t claim he knew they cured his illness, but leftists got extremely angry at him, and now they’re trying to force him off the Internet or whatever it is that you call the system over which Spotify operates. I don’t even know.

They are furious at Rogan. They don’t merely agree to disagree. They don’t say other people should write and say things intended to convince us Rogan is wrong. They want to end his career.

That’s probably demonic.

It’s not just leftists. Back when masks were new, a friend of mine threatened to physically assault someone who tried to walk in the wrong direction in a store aisle. He was going to put his hands on them and prevent them from getting by, and this would have been a crime. The threat itself was a crime. I’m talking about a gentle conservative person who is now baptized with the Holy Spirit.

It seems clear that spirits have been released, and they are fighting to control information and spread anger. Given that this is how things are now, it would not surprise me at all to learn that doctors have been fired or threatened for promoting vitamin D supplementation.

What about the information the doctors themselves have, though? If spirits are pushing censorship and disinformation, they are probably corrupting research, too. This will sound insulting, and I guess it is, but doctors and other researchers are notorious for stupidity when it comes to designing studies, implementing their plans, and interpreting their results. Remember when doctors fed egg yolks to rabbits and convinced a generation of Americans eggs would kill us, while promoting the consumption of trans-fats?

We know there are many, many doctors who are afraid to talk about promising treatments and preventative measures, as well as the obvious failings of the solutions we now have. On top of that, spirits may be promoting bad research and flawed interpretations.

The sentence that came into my mind when I started thinking about the knowledge crisis is, “The truth has gotten lost.” Can anyone say it hasn’t? The establishment clearly does not know the truth. It clearly punishes people who promote beliefs not in line with its panic-driven, debunked protocols and theories. It seems likely that research is producing bad conclusions. Where are we supposed to look for facts we can rely on?

For the zillionth time, I ask myself why I write about the end of the truth. No one who is deceived will understand or believe me, and the people who are not deceived don’t need to be told. As always, I remind myself that I do it to fight gaslighting. If you don’t tell the truth and hear the truth from others, you risk losing it.

I was already taking vitamin D before I heard about the Israeli research. It is supposed to promote muscle strength, and failing muscles are supposed to be a leading cause of falls among old people. I don’t want to head down that road. Also, I had heard claims vitamin D helped prevent coronavirus infections and mitigated symptoms. I plan to keep taking it.

While I was reading about the Israeli research, I saw a mainstream website listing an interesting symptom of vitamin D deficiency: frequent colds. What? How did I get this old without knowing this?

Maybe it’s because of the huge anti-supplement bias in the medical profession. Doctors are determined to prove pills don’t work, but of course, they do. They love to point to studies suggesting huge doses of supplements won’t turn you into an immortal, but they always seem to avoid some uncomfortable facts. First, vitamin deficiencies are not rare at all, and second, supplements fix deficiencies.

There is an obvious (to people other than doctors) difference between 1. striving for superhuman vitality longevity and 2. taking proven steps to end harmful, common deficiencies.

Doctors love to tell us to eat a balanced diet in order to get all the nutrients we need. Here’s the truth: you’re not going to do that. Neither do they. No one but health freaks do it. They tell us to eat certain amounts of this and that every day. It’s unrealistic. On a typical day, I probably eat 6 different things. Most people probably eat fewer than 10, even when they’re trying. You can’t master the establishment’s ridiculous food pyramid, eating like a normal person. Doctors all have to get through 2 semesters of calculus and 2 semesters of physics, but somehow they can’t understand this.

With presumably straight faces, they have told us to eat 25 grams of fiber per day. Try that some time. To give you an idea how hard it is, consider this: a bowl of raisin bran (a food people only eat to obtain fiber) contains three grams. You would have to eat 8-1/3 bowls per day. You would do nothing but sit on the toilet. You would have to have your own office and work with the window open. You could forget about carpooling.

On a typical day, I get up and eat close to a pound of fibery stuff, including raw vegetables and one apple. That is exemplary by America standards. It’s exemplary by human standards, period. Maybe gorillas in zoos do as well. You’re not doing it. I promise you, in spite of my exceptional performance, I am not getting 25 grams of fiber per day.

An article about the Israeli study said 80% of Middle Easterners have vitamin D deficiencies. Four out of five. What do Middle Easterners eat? The healthiest diet on the planet. The Mediterranean diet. The diet doctors go on and on about. Where do they live? Sunny places with few clouds. Still, they have this problem. If they have it, surely most other peoples have it. Supplements are the only smart answer, but don’t tell your GP that unless he wears sandals to work and shops at Whole Foods.

Okay, so the establishment believes vitamin D deficiency leads to colds. We also know colds are caused by viruses. We know there are families of viruses, and many colds are caused by coronaviruses. Call me crazy, but it sounds likely that vitamin D protects against some coronaviruses. If it protects against some, would it be strange if it protected against COVID-19?

Even if it doesn’t, why aren’t doctors promoting vitamin D for cold prevention? Nobody wants a cold! Don’t they care? Besides, the common cold kills thousands of people in the US every year. Look it up.

Whatever. I’m taking vitamin D.

By the way, two days ago I watched a Christian lady on Youtube. She was talking about her Facebook ban. She used to post Christian material, and one day she got banned for posting something offensive. Here it is:

If I shut up heaven that there be no rain, or if I command the locusts to devour the land, or if I send pestilence among my people;

If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.

That has to be the most homophobic, patriarchal, Eurocentric, racist, ageist, transphobic thing I’ve ever read.

That was me, being humorous. It’s about as inoffensive as the Bible gets, but Facebook told her it was offensive and banned her. No appeal allowed.

I don’t know if they decided she was promoting alternative cures for coronavirus or what. The point is that things are much, much worse than we think they are. The tipping point is well in sight. Unless something miraculous happens and Americans turn back to God and get his help to overcome the wokiees, it won’t be long before we will be just like the Christians of Ephesus.

When Rhodah and I visited Ephesus, our guide showed us symbols carved on the stones. They were circles divided in 4 wedges, just like pizzas. They are called “ichthus wheels.” The wheels and lines represent the first letters of words meaning “Jesus Christ God Son Savior.” We were told Christians carved them in order to let other Christians know they were around without inviting the Romans to torture them to death.

This was how Christians got around the Facebook and Youtube bans of their time. We are being pushed toward a day when similar measures will be needed, but they probably won’t be practical because electronic surveillance will prevent us from doing much of anything in secret.

I don’t know if you should take vitamin D or not. Decide for yourself.

The Bucket is not on my Bucket List

Now that I’m a Northerner, I continually learn new things about winter-related problems.

I moved 300 miles north from Miami, to a farm on the tundra near Ocala. In my 4.5 years here, we have had at least 5 days of freezing weather. Okay, 5 days containing at least an hour of freezing weather. Whatever.

The first time it hit, it killed a bunch of ornamental plants. I could not believe the previous owners had paid good money for plants that had to be pampered, so I said, “good riddance.” I never replaced them. I’m not going to run outside with a stack of old sheets every time the thermometer dips.

Two days ago, they told us the weather would get cold, and I paid no attention at all. I figured anything 27° could kill or damage wasn’t worth having.

The power company sent me texts saying I would be entered in a prize drawing if I responded with a photo of my thermostat set at 65°. They were trying to get people to reduce the load on the grid. Naturally, I complied. Then I put the temperature back on 75° where it belonged. They didn’t say I had to LEAVE it at 65°. That law school education keeps paying off.

No, I didn’t really do that. I just considered it a reminder to use both sides of the electric blanket later on.

It was my civic duty. If the power people are failing to maintain an adequate grid, they don’t need customers enabling them. They need to feel some pressure so they build up the system. Sure, I got a little hot during the night, and I had to roll back the covers so the sweat could evaporate, but that’s okay. A man’s got to do what he’s got to do.

This morning when I got up, things seemed fine. I have towels I put on furniture in case Marvin feels like pooping, so I threw a bunch in the washer with bleach. Then I made breakfast. After breakfast, I tried to use the kitchen faucet, and nothing came out. I checked the washer. The wash cycle had run, and the water had been pumped out, but the towels were sitting in the bottom of the tub doing nothing because no new water could come in.

I had frozen up my water system at 27°. I hadn’t known it was possible. I realize water freezes at 32°. Nothing gets past me. But my water pumps are deep below ground, the pipes by the house pump are generally insulated, and the pressure tank is large, so there is no way it can freeze up during a short frost.

It turned out the pressure switch was the problem. It has 1/4″ tubing connecting it to the system, and the tubing has no insulation because Florida. The tubing froze up fast, so the pressure switch did not work. The water I ran earlier in the morning came from the reserve in the pressure tank.

This serves to remind me why I have so much contempt for engineers and people who build things. The water system has 2″ pipes which will never, ever freeze, and they’re covered with insulation. It has 1/4″ tubes which will definitely freeze and shut down the system, and they’re naked as jaybirds.

It also serves to remind me I need to put poison out for the squirrels. Shooting is too slow. They ate part of the pipe insulation.

After an hour or so above 32°, the water came back on, and all I had to do was open a tap and let the rust out. It always gets rusty when the system goes on and off.

What a relief. I had been worried about the pressure tank. I thought maybe there was something in there that could be harmed by a quick freeze. Something expensive that couldn’t be fixed on a Sunday.

It was scary, thinking I only had 5 flushes remaining between me and the inevitable Home Depot bucket. I had oatmeal and hot cocoa for breakfast, and well, you know how that works.

Thank God that’s over. Think I’ll go relax in the living room, which is currently at a bone-chilling 73°. Hey, I wonder if my heat pump can break a hundred. Think I’ll go find out.

Hip Pains and Chills

Wouldn’t you know it? I trusted the political and medical establishment, and I paid the price. I got a booster yesterday, and last night I had chills.

Both my original vaccination and my booster came from J&J. After the first shot, I seemed to feel a little tired for a few days, but the sensation was so slight, I wasn’t sure it had anything to do with side effects. I didn’t have any other symptoms, such as chills. Last night, my nose ran briefly, and then my butt started to hurt. I used nasal spray so I would be able to sleep, and I figured that would fix everything.

I had to get up and go to my garage for something. It was cold out there. For some reason, we get a type of cold weather here that seems to get into the bones even if you’re indoors. I can’t explain it. When it’s both cold and wet, I sense the cold even in the house. We are having that kind of weather now. When I got back from the garage, I felt cold. I shivered a few times, and I realized I was having chills.

I took a hit of ivermectin, put wool socks on, got in bed, turned the electric blanket up all the way, and roasted myself all night like a yam.

I took the ivermectin because I thought I might have coronavirus, not shot side effects. There is no reason why you can’t get sick the same day you get the shot.

I started having weird thoughts. The shot uses adenoviruses to make the body produce antibodies to the covid spike protein, so I assume that means it actually gives people adenovirus infections. What if taking ivermectin, which may have antiviral effects, fights the infection and makes the shot less effective?

Like I always say, I don’t know if ivermectin does anything for me or not. My symptoms used to collapse after I took it, but that could be coincidence, and I don’t know whether I had covid or other things. But I couldn’t help wondering if it might work against the booster.

I wondered why I was having a reaction I didn’t have the first time around. Is my body getting annoyed with the shots for some reason? Is it losing its ability to cope? Will I be dead before I have to make my next American Express payment?

The web says the J&J booster is exactly the same as the vaccine, so my issues aren’t caused by a higher dose.

When I got up today, my butt still hurt a little, and my nose still felt a little funny, but that was about it. I guess my hip joints will return to normal today.

I had a hard time getting my body warm. It surprised me that I had to use the blanket’s top setting. If my wife had been with me, I think she would have had to make some kind of arrangement to get away from the heat. I wasn’t sweating at all, so I had no reason to turn the heat down to a reasonable level. I considered throwing a couple more blankets on the bed, but I didn’t really want to walk across that cold 75-degree room and lose all the heat I had stored up under the covers.

The experience brought back memories. When I was a kid, it seemed like I had tonsillitis once a week, so I had many fevers. They gave me lots of shots. I doubt the shots did anything but hurt, because there was never any reason to think the infections were bacterial. I remember getting 6 million units of penicillin once. The syringe looked like a basketball pump.

Back then, doctors liked to give people giant doses of antibiotics whether they made sense or not. I don’t know why they did that. Maybe they made a lot of money on the shots.

Doctors do things like that. The doctor who gave me 6 million units used to tell his Medicaid patients their Medicaid would be canceled if they didn’t come in once a month, and he added his own pharmacy to his practice, creating an obvious conflict of interest.

My mother got so used to my fevers, she once went out to dinner with my dad when I was up over 103. I don’t think that was a good idea, but it happened. As I recall, I had a bottle of alcohol to rub on myself if needed.

I wandered the empty house in a daze, wearing nothing but a pair of gym shorts. I was nearly delusional. It was somewhat pleasant, like being on drugs.

Last night I thought about that, and I remembered something I had forgotten. Fevers and chills can be enjoyable. When you have chills, it feels great bundling up and baking yourself until you warm up. When you have a fever, you enter a dreamy, somewhat crazy state that makes it very easy to sleep.

I used to behave very oddly when I had childhood fevers. One one occasion, my mother put me in the car in my pajamas and housecoat to take me to the pediatrician. I was really gone. I obsessed on the fact that I might get another one of those shots. I was a great big 12-year-old kid, and I started crying about it. I was not a cryer, but on that day, I couldn’t help myself. I could not face that shot. And of course, I got it.

So how am I now? I almost have a headache, my nose is not quite right, my appetite is not good, and I’m still waiting for the hip pains to disappear completely. Oddly, I have lots of energy, as usual.

Is the shot doing me any good? No idea. The web says J&J immunity begins to develop after 12 days. Or 14. Or 29. As always, I would like to thank THE SCIENCE for all its help. Another great job of pinning down the facts.

Here’s a question. If coronavirus can run its course in as few as 5 days, which must indicate the development of immunity, why would a shot take 29 days to generate helpful antibodies? Does that make sense to anyone?

No, it doesn’t make sense, and THE SCIENCE doesn’t have the answer. These are my assumptions, anyway, based on two years of science’s abject, indisputable failures. When it comes to coronavirus, THE SCIENCE is a D student, but people still brag that they trust it. This is like bragging that your car’s GPS has a 2002 map update installed.

I don’t trust THE SCIENCE. I rely on it because there is no alternative and because I want to get on airplanes without a hassle. I hope the shot will prevent me from dying if I get sick, but its health benefits are not nearly as certain as its social benefits.

My real source of protection is God, but unfortunately, they won’t let you on a plane just because you pray.

Fully Vaccinated, AGAIN

Yesterday I wrote a long piece in which I listed 13 coronavirus lies and errors, plus one human rights atrocity, all of which were perpetrated by the establishment. This morning I took it down. I felt like the world didn’t need another angry blog post.

I hear phrases which I believe are from God, and two days ago, I heard one that surprised me: “This is a world of love.”

The world is full of true hate now. People who used to find each other merely annoying are now completely ready to put each other in camps and exterminate each other. So how can this be a world of love? I think I know the answer.

It has become very obvious to me that God’s children and Satan’s children experience the world differently. I often say we share the same planet but live in different universes. The children of darkness are losing their minds over politics and coronavirus, and so are many nominal Christians. Meanwhile, people who are close to God are much happier. Many are experiencing the best years of their lives. The years 2020 and 2021 were wonderful for me, and it looks like 2022 will be even better.

There is always symmetry in the supernatural. God and Satan. Jesus and the Antichrist. Magic, which is evil, and the supernatural tools of Christians, which are good. It makes sense that Satan’s children, which means all the people who are not involved with Jesus, would start experiencing hell on Earth while God’s children would start doing better than ever.

The day before the phrase came to me, I woke up and felt love flowing through me to God. This is something for which I have been praying for years. When Jesus visited me, his love bombarded me as though I were standing next to a heat lamp, and I believe I’m supposed to radiate love, too. Sometimes it flows, and sometimes it doesn’t. I’m not Jesus. When I feel it flowing, I try to hold onto it and make it last. I stayed in bed for a couple of hours.

The Revelation says a spirit of murder will be released on Earth during the apocalypse, and it’s already here. It has been at work for several years. If that is true, then surely God will counter it by pouring love through people who can carry it.

So it should be a time of love for Christians who keep praying for correction and deliverance. Meanwhile, it’s a time of hate for people like Howard Stern, who is so afraid of death he says people who won’t accept vaccination should go home and die. It’s a time of hate for a lot of leftist celebrities, as well as leftist Tweeters who make fun of unvaccinated people who get sick and pass away.

The apocalypse is a centrifuge. It separates darkness from light.

I think what I heard came from God. I get tired of being provoked. Many times, I have removed my own remarks from the web. I would like to become a constructive force.

Speaking of vaccines, I got a booster today. We are inundated with disinformation and misinformation, so sometimes it is not possible to make intelligent decisions about coronavirus. I made the smartest decision I could.

I hate the lies the establishment has told us about strategies for fighting the disease. I am also very critical of the vaccines. They are not good at all. They do a very poor job of preventing infection. They do nothing at all to prevent infected people from spreading coronavirus, although somehow, many Americans have gotten the baseless impression that they do. They don’t do a good job of preventing deaths among high-risk people. On top of that, credible research suggests mRNA shots damage DNA. There are a couple of worthwhile benefits to shots, though.

First, they make it considerably less likely that certain people will have severe symptoms. This seems to be true, although one wonders what they will tell us tomorrow. Some people get vaccinated and boosted and die anyway, but it looks like shots save some lives. Now that I have a wife, I feel obligated to try to live. Not that I was excited about the prospect of dying with a tube down my throat. As I have often said, give me a meteor strike to the head any day. Second, boosters shut the covid police up and make life easier for those who comply. It’s less of a hassle to get on a plane or cross a border, for example.

Third, I guess, if you’re up on your shots, people are less likely to celebrate when you die. That’s a depressing truth. The link I just posted goes to a story about Meat Loaf’s new detractors.

A lot of leftists are making fun of Meat Loaf because they think he died unvaccinated. They’re saying, “Now we know what he wouldn’t do for love.” They’re putting variations of this unclever remark next to their real names on Twitter, which shows you how much progress the spirit of murder has made. Imagine being proud of being cruel to the family of a person who just died. Isn’t that what made leftists hate the Westboro Baptist Church?

I got the shot mainly for love. Interesting parallel. Meat Loaf may have gotten it, too. The buzzards and hyenas tearing at his body don’t know; they’re just assuming he didn’t because he was against mandates. He was old, overweight, and severely asthmatic, so he may have been in the huge group of people shots and boosters do not help at all. Maybe he took two or three shots and still died. I don’t think leftists like hearing about it, but that happens a lot. They like to think they can protect themselves, but they’re fooling themselves. Some people can reduce the risk by taking shots. For others, nothing works.

I don’t trust the mRNA shots, so I got another J&J shot. I believe it is likely to provide some protection in the unlikely event I get Delta, which is very rare now. I believe it may possibly provide some protection if I get Omicron, which is everywhere. I know there is a blood clot risk from the shot itself, but it’s very low, and I already beat it once.

The one thing I’m sure the booster will do for me is this: it will make traveling to Ireland less of a hassle. Ireland does not require vaccines now, but if you’re vaccinated, you can go there without taking a PCR test. These tests give false positives, and they can also be inconvenient. It’s best to travel between Wednesday and Friday, because you may have trouble getting a PCR on a weekend. If you take your test on a Monday or Tuesday, things will go more smoothly.

It is unlikely that I would have a problem getting a test result early in the week, but I might.

Why would I need a test if I’ve already had the shot? Because by Ireland’s standards, I was unvaccinated until this afternoon. To be exempt from testing, you have to have had your last vaccine shot or booster within 270 days of travel. My vaccination was a long time ago.

Rhodah and I are hoping to meet in Ireland soon, so now we have one less thing to worry about. Assuming I don’t die from blood clots. THE SCIENCE says the risk disappears after 28 days. Hope that’s true.

We chose Ireland because the rest of Europe is convinced I want to move my wife from inexpensive Zambia to an expensive country, permanently. They think she will never leave. I’m not sure who they think will pay her bills if she moves to France or Switzerland. Not me! If I was going to move her, I would put her in Turkey or the Dominican Republic. I wouldn’t send her to a place where breakfast costs $20.

Rhodah went to the Irish Embassy in Lusaka, and they were extremely kind to her. She met the ambassador. They said they would get her in. Ireland is a slam dunk, and tourists give it raves, so Ireland it is.

Now we just have to motivate ourselves. We have gotten very complacent. We talk on video chat all day, and our lives are easy.

I wonder what, if any, side effects I’m going to have. Last time, I seemed to feel a little tired after the shot. I don’t remember any other problems. I was almost unable to feel today’s shot, but my arm started hurting afterward, which is weird. By the time I got in the car, it was over. I walked right out after the shot. No waiting period. Remember when they used to make us wait, to see if we would faint or something? Not any more. No one cares. We’re over it, I guess. I didn’t even get the information sheet my consent form said I had received. I checked the box that said I had received and read it, and they didn’t bother giving it to me, because no one cares any more.

I wasn’t excited about getting a booster, because I believe it’s extremely likely they will start using mandatory boosters to control us eventually. I don’t want to get in the habit so I’m afraid, after too many authoritarian strings are attached, to stop taking the shots. I prayed about it, though, and I felt God was telling me to go ahead. The mark of the beast may involve vaccinations, but it’s not here yet.

Now if I get sick and die, I’m going to start a Twitter account while I’m expiring, and I’m going to needle celebrities who said I was going to be safe.

Okay, I won’t do that. But it’s a funny idea.

Doctors Reluctantly Admit What Bright Children Knew a Year Ago

Meant to publish this earlier in the week.

As a man with a spousal visa application pending, I am always interested in coronavirus news. Today there are some interesting stories.

First of all, I guessed wrong when I said Omicron should be pretty much over with by January 15. I based that guess on what happened in South Africa, but the US and other countries are taking longer to recover. It’s now looking more like the first week of February.

Okay, I still did very well for a layman who bases his predictions on a few skimmed news articles. About 10 days ago, “experts” were still making it sound like the world had ended.

It also looks like people all over the world are going into Florida mode. Even the timid, self-emasculated government slaves known as Australians are being allowed to socialize more normally. Some of them are, anyway. Kansas City has abandoned its unrealistic contact-tracing program. Israeli doctors are admitting we are not seeing a “pandemic of the unvaccinated,” saying the difference in the infection rate between vaccinated and unvaccinated people is miniscule. They’re also expressing surprise that vaccines didn’t end the pandemic. Some places are abandoning vaccine passports.

How surprised should we be?

The pandemic can’t go away through vaccination unless we have great vaccines or cures and nearly everyone uses them, forever. A couple of years ago, I thought our vaccines could work, but that was before I knew something everyone ought to know by now: dogs, cats, rodents, deer, hippopotamuses, and, presumably, all sorts of other animals are infected. People who don’t think clearly are asking whether they can transmit the disease to humans. If interspecies transmission isn’t possible, how did deer get it? Of course it’s possible.

If every person on Earth were magically cleared of the virus this minute, the pandemic would come back soon, because animals would give it to us. We can’t vaccinate all the deer. We’re not going to vaccinate all the dogs. It’s not just an epidemic; it’s a panzootic.

We were able to get rid of smallpox because we didn’t have to worry about vaccinating the entire mammal population of the world, and because the vaccine was good. Now we have a bunch of crummy vaccines and at least billions of carriers we can’t cure or prevent from spreading the disease. On top of that, there is no reliable cure.

A CDC page says this: “cats, dogs, bank voles, ferrets, fruit bats, hamsters, mink, pigs, rabbits, racoon [sic] dogs, tree shrews, and white-tailed deer can be infected with the virus.” Hamsters are being euthanized because they are susceptible, so that means rats and mice are carrying it, too. Have I seen proof? No, but come on.

In late 2020, CNN made the patently stupid remark that infection was rare in animals, as though it were meaningful. They should have known that if some animals had it, others were going to get it. Maybe animal infections were rare back then, because the pandemic was young, or maybe there hadn’t been enough testing to reveal the full extent of the problem, but here’s the remarkable fact CNN overlooked: contagious disease case numbers grow over time.

I am not at all reluctant to suggest that CNN’s people didn’t understand this, even though it’s the single most obvious fact about contagious diseases. It’s what “contagious” means. Journalists are incredibly dumb about science. They are just not bright. It’s terribly unfortunate that we rely on a body of unintelligent people to give us information about anything.

Scientists are defending their vaccines, pointing to other shots that have low efficacy rates. Flu shots, for example, often miss the mark. Supposedly, this means our covid vaccines are okay. Their defensive arguments are clearly wrong. The smallpox vaccine has a no-infect rate of 95%. The polio vaccine is 99% effective. Indisputably, there are such things as good vaccines. Covid vaccines have a no-infect rate not far from zero, which, by any reasonable scientific standard, is not high. The best you can reasonably hope for after being vaccinated and boosted is that when you get sick, you won’t have severe symptoms, and they can’t even guarantee that. They used to tell us severe cases were impossible for the once-vaccinated, and a couple of months down the road, they sang a totally different tune.

Right now, there are only two intelligent reasons to get vaccinated. 1. To shut people up so you can get on with your life, and 2. to provide a significant but not huge increase in your chances of avoiding severe symptoms such as death. With Omicron’s dramatically decreased severity, reason 2 is getting weaker by the second. Unless you’re a cast member on My 600-Pound Life, Omicron is not likely to do you in.

A 40% efficacy rate for a flu shot is not terrible, because the flu is only rarely a serious disease, it almost never amounts to a national or global crisis, and we get a new flu (or flus) every year, so if one year’s vaccines aren’t great, there is always next year. An ineffective coronavirus vaccine armory is much worse. Coronavirus isn’t going away at the end of every year, and unlike the flu, coronavirus has disrupted civilization.

Unless the virus decides to keep getting less dangerous until the end of the world, the only answer to our problem is a really good vaccine or cure. We will continue to be exposed to covid forever, so as long as new Delta-like variants remain possible, we need something that reliably prevents severe symptoms.

All the vaccines stink. Drink that in. They stink. It’s probably a good idea to take a non-mRNA shot if you’re fat, sick, or old, but don’t expect the moon. If you squeak by with a really bad week of fever, aches, and other problems, you are doing as well as you can reasonably hope to.

If you take an mRNA shot, you have to worry about the DNA damage credible researchers say mRNA shots do, so you could be replacing a minor problem with a major one. I might conceivably take a Johnson & Johnson, Astrazeneca, or Novavax booster, but I have no interest in something that prevents my cells from repairing mutations.

The medical establishment is amazing. They try to ram antioxidants down our throats because they prevent mutations. They tell us to stay out of the sun because UV rays cause mutations. They tell us smoking causes mutations. Then researchers say mRNA shots prevent cells from repairing mutations…and everyone is quiet. If the risk isn’t real, shouldn’t they at least have told us that? They haven’t.

But we should trust them, because science. Right? Wrong. The medical establishment is politicized. Along with the press and the government, it hides things from us. It’s no wonder there are so many insane conspiracy theories about coronavirus. How many times do officially-endorsed lies and omissions have to be revealed before people start turning to alternative sources?

In Europe and other parts of the world, anti-vaccination riots have been going on for months, and not even Fox News covers them. The people at Fox pretend to be MSM outsiders, but it’s a very thin facade. Fox made its employees submit to vaccinations and tests. If riots can take place in high-profile places in Europe and we have to go to Youtube to find out about it, it proves we can’t trust the establishment. Like we needed more evidence.

Since beginning to write this piece, I have learned that Fox has just “discovered” the foreign riots. Congratulations, Fox, and welcome to last year.

We have no way of knowing whether the mRNA shots are safe, because no one in a position of power will even confront the question.

How many times have establishment claims about these shots been proven badly wrong? Many. In view of that, how can we trust the establishment now?

The establishment is run by people who don’t believe in God and have a phobia of death and a love of authoritarianism and elitism. They are genuinely scared of covid. They can’t be trusted to tell us the truth. They couldn’t make themselves do it if they wanted to. Fear leads to rationalization. It causes people to convince themselves the truth is wrong.

The establishment makes up narratives and feeds them to us, we occasionally see through them, we look for other sources, and then we start believing nutcases who say they’re injecting us with cameras or sterilizing us or God knows what else.

Solomon said, “A good name is better than precious ointment,” and the establishment’s name is no longer good at all. It’s not even good enough for government work. Credibility is something that should only be sacrificed with great reluctance, because sooner or later, you will want to use it in a very critical situation. The establishment didn’t take this into consideration.

Our anti-coronavirus measures are not working, and, as everyone with common sense predicted, fatigue has set in. People are saying, “A few deaths are okay as long as I don’t have to wear a filthy mask and recycle my own stale breath for 10 hours a day.” They want to send their kids back to school. They want to socialize, which is essential to mental health. They are remembering something they had forgotten before the pandemic started: liberty is worth the sacrifice of a certain number of lives.

You can’t make relatively free people hide in their houses and wear ineffective masks forever. They got us to comply by assuring us it was all temporary, but since they started saying that, children have been born and learned to walk and talk. Increasingly, people are not buying it.

A normal social life is not a luxury; it’s a necessity. Anyone who thinks otherwise is an ignoramus. Isolation ruins our mental and physical health. It’s remarkable that we hear so little about this. The leftists who control education and government whine about things like how much room pigs and zoo animals have to move around, but they think human beings can hole up in their homes with no ill effects.

How could anyone have been stupid enough to think zero covid was possible? How do people like that get degrees in medicine and positions in government? We should have isolated fat, sick, and old people who were willing to be isolated, and we should have been much less demanding regarding the vast majority of us.

Now people are so tired of the nonsense, even if a good approach pops up, many of us won’t want to hear about it.

The most remarkable thing about our situation after two years of coronavirus is that there has been no revival. It used to be that people were smart enough to know epidemics were caused by sin and backsliding. Not any more. America has gotten much more vociferous and fanatical in its promotion of sexual perversion, idolatry, pride, and other things that bring calamity on us. God has no reason to relent and help us out.

Because we have dug in our heels, I think Omicron will be a pause, not a finale. Either a worse variant will follow it, or some other apocalyptic evil will hit us. I hope the break will last long enough for my wife and I to get together permanently. I would be shocked if the world’s descent into chaos actually stopped.

By the way, I had an interesting revelation the other day. For some time, I’ve believed coronavirus was partly a punishment for perversion. I saw the parallel between the modern world and Sodom. Now I feel I know more about that.

Homosexuals love to claim Sodom was not punished for perversion. They cite a Biblical passage that says Sodom’s sin was selfishness. Of course, the Bible does say Sodom was punished for perversion, but why would it also mention selfishness?

England used to be America. England was the world’s big superpower, and they spread the gospel. As England’s power and wealth increased, men became drunk with ambition and greed. They were taken away from their families by their ambitions. They forgot God, too.

When men aren’t around to raise their sons properly, sexual perversion flourishes. This is why homosexual antics are such big problems at boarding schools. British men were selfish and greedy, and now British males are effeminate. It’s pretty easy to tell a typical gay American from a straight one, but most educated Englishmen seem gay regardless of their orientation.

Think about it. Pick a British or near-British celebrity at random. Piers Morgan: effeminate. Hugh Grant: effeminate. Jeremy Clarkson: effeminate. James May, Richard Hammond, Peter O’Toole, Oliver Reed, Hugh Laurie, Rex Harrison, James Mason, Colin Firth, Christopher Lee, Claude Rains, Richard Burton, Laurence Olivier, Cary Grant, Ian McKellen, Patrick Stewart, John Cleese, Eric Idle, Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton…you could make a list a yard long. The exceptions are often men who came from the lower classes, where success was presumably less of a problem.

It looks like focusing on money and power neutralizes the effectiveness of fathers, and that’s how perversion creeps in. It makes sense, because homosexuality and other perversions are commonly associated with prosperity. It’s remarkable how many high-profile people have homosexual or otherwise unusual children. Will Smith, who may hold the world record for selfishness and ambition, has two. Stephanie Seymour produced two. Dick Cheney has one. Jackie Chan, Cher, Jamie Lee Curtis, Magic Johnson, Dwyane Wade, Sally Field, Annette Bening, Barba Streisand (no surprise), Marie Osmond, Charlize Theron, Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt, R. Kelly…again, the list is long.

The British abandoned God for Mammon, they became effeminate, and then they lost the wealth and power for which they had traded God. It’s very interesting. It explains what’s happening to America. Men pattern themselves after their fathers, and when Dad isn’t around, Mom becomes the father.

I still see America continuing to sink. Christians are obsessed with money and “living their best lives,” so they are not helpful to people who are looking for answers. They don’t heal people. They don’t work miracles. They don’t prophesy. We complain a lot about how nonbelievers are ruining the world, but as a friend of mine says, fish rots from the head. We were supposed to lead and show our love, but we’re not doing it, and we are reaping the harvest.

I hope we get a real remedy for coronavirus, but it won’t fix the rot that brought us here.

My Greens are Greener Than Your Greens

It’s amazing how stupid people are. Unfortunately, I am a person, so my generalization applies to me.

When I was a kid, there was no such thing as a plastic trash bag. People put their trash in paper grocery bags that leaked and tore. Garbage was disgusting. You would simply throw your bags into your rusty galvanized can, and it would rot and ooze until pickup day. The cans stank even when they were empty. Indoor cans also stank and had to be washed out. It’s not like that today. I have indoor cans that have never been washed, thanks to plastic bags. They still look and smell new, apart from the holes my pets have chewed in them.

Digression: I use the words “trash” and “garbage” interchangeably, because the dictionary gives pretty much identical definitions for them. A lot of people think “trash” means dry stuff like paper, but Mr. Webster disagrees.

It’s sort of remarkable that the human race didn’t start using plastic as its default material for trash bags until I was out of diapers. In patent law, one of the requirements for a new patent is that the invention must be “nonobvious,” and that means it’s not obvious to “one skilled in the art.” The use of plastic for trash bags should have been obvious to everyone, not just bag manufacturers. Plastic bags already existed. For some reason, the little wires in people’s heads didn’t touch, and we were deprived of a great boon for a disgracefully long time.

The Internet says plastic bags were first used for institutional trash in 1950, and Glad introduced plastic trash bags to the public in 1966. They took a surprisingly long time to catch on. Paper bags were commonly used during the first few years of the next decade.

We didn’t have trash bags, but we did have Baggies. These were thin polyethylene bags for food storage. People put them in lunchboxes and so on. They came with little wire ties because the bags didn’t have zipper closures on them. Baggies, or a similar product, were introduced in 1957, so why did consumer trash bags take so long?

When zipper bags came out, the writing was on the wall for Baggies. When I go to the store, I can’t find Baggies. I guess they were discontinued long ago.

I have bought zipper bags for decades. I don’t like them. They’re small and expensive, and the zippers often fail. The zippers are stiff, so the zipper end of a bag always has to be relatively straight. You can’t gather it up.

Really cheap people wash them and reuse them, but who wants to do that? It comes across like a mental disorder, and the bags take forever to dry. Said the guy who actually tried it.

I used to walk around in grocery stores, lamenting the absence of Baggies, pushing a cart containing produce I had stuffed in bags that were almost exactly like Baggies. Again, the little wires failed to make contact.

I started eating salads for breakfast recently, and that means I had to deal with lettuce. I ended up with a storage problem.

It all began with concerns about washing lettuce. I wondered if it was really necessary. I doubted restaurants did it. Washing lettuce is time-consuming, and in the end, you get wet lettuce which is hard to dry.

I checked the web to learn whether washing lettuce was actually important, and I read some disgusting stuff. Evidently, it really is important. Things like sand, bugs, worms, frogs, and fecal bacteria are found on vegetables, even if the packaging says, “Pre-washed.”

As if it were necessary, I am reminded why I have no respect for vegetarians. They love telling us they’re “eating clean” and that meat makes us sick. They also have a big bias against cooked food. Guess what? Frog poop isn’t clean, but a nice steak is. Bacteria can’t do much to the inside of a steak, because it takes them weeks to get there. Microbes can’t do much to people who eat cooked food, because cooking kills germs. Their precious salads kill lots of people every year! Have you ever noticed that nearly all germ-related food recalls involve vegetables?

Okay, that’s not totally true. Ground beef gets a few recalls. But it’s worth the risk, because it’s meat!

You can use a device called a salad spinner. It’s basically a spinning colander in a bowl. You spin your greens and hope the water goes out through the holes. I started looking for a salad spinner. I could not find one that didn’t get awful reviews. They break. They warp in the dishwasher. They’re useless.

OXO used to make a good one, but of course, they quit and replaced it with one that falls apart.

Until I figure out what to do about a salad spinner, I will be rinsing lettuce in the sink and standing the leaves up in a colander to dry. Then I have to store the ones I don’t eat right away. That involves bags.

I can use gallon zip bags at a minimum of about 13 cents each. Okay, I admit it. This adds up to maybe $12 per year, so I can probaby swing it, but it still annoyed me. The bags are not as versatile as a produce bag, they hold a lot less, and I can get produce bags for three cents each.

Needless to say, I just ordered 700 produce bags off Ebay.

“Wow, an eccentric saved himself $7 per year. Why should I care?” I’ll tell you why.

I have a big roll of Costco plastic wrap. It’s useful for covering bowls, but that’s about it. When you wrap things like cheese and bread, it’s a pain to use. It clings to itself and wads up, and you can never open it up so you can use its full length and width. It’s narrow, so it can be hard to get it to cover a dish or bowl well without using several wraps.

It gets on my nerves.

A big ol’ produce bag will hold a fairly large dish or bowl. You can just shove it in there. The bag won’t stick to itself, either.

“The bag won’t close!” Sure it will. If whatever you put in it is under a certain size, you can tie an overhand knot in the open end of the bag. If it’s bigger, you can rest the bag on top of the open end, closing it.

It’s genius.

Obvious genius.

I can also use a produce bag to line the bottom of Marv’s pooping basket. I have a big basket for him, and he sits on the handle when he has to poop. When I’m lucky. I used to put newspapers in the bottom, but I quit subscribing. A three-cent bag will do the job fine.

I already use big cheap bags to line his cage. They’re fantastic. So much cleaner and easier to handle than paper. Every day, he gets a new bag. His poop tray stays clean.

I bought the cheap bags for him, but now I use them for trash.

I found that trash bags ran around a quarter apiece, which is ridiculous. We buy very tough bags when we don’t really need them. If you’re a lazy sack of manure, and you only take your trash out once a week, okay, maybe you need a strong bag. You’ll want something tough so you can crush the trash every day with your shoe to make room, and while the trash is sitting in your kitchen, it will rot and feed roaches, ants, and mice. If you’re a clean person, you’ll remove all the edible garbage from the inside of your house every night, and you’ll get rid of it before it causes problems. You only need your bags to hold a reasonable amount of trash, and they don’t have to hold it very long.

I buy 30-gallon bags for 10 cents each. They’re wonderful. A truck just pulled up and dropped 1500 of them on my porch.

I was an idiot to buy Hefty bags. They’re for suckers. There’s a reason why you never see them at malls, stadiums, and so on. Their crews use cheap bags like mine.

I can still use zip bags and plastic wrap for certain purposes, but basically, I have switched over.

If I still lived in Coral Gables, where the nutbars have banned economical, environmentally sound plastic grocery bags, I would buy a stack of those bags and take them to the store with me. I would drop them in front of the cashier and say, “You encourage people to bring their own bags. Eat your words, baby.”

There is a ban on providing plastic bags for customers. There is no ban on customer-owned plastic.

I may get a couple of rolls of mid-size produce bags, between my trash bags and the produce bags I just ordered.

Of course, I feel bad about filling landfills with so much plastic. It probably adds up to half a pound per month. Clearly a crisis. I’m sure it would be a lot better to use several pounds of paper bags which never degrade once they’re covered with fresh trash. Your greenie virtue-signaling bags will still be intact when your great-great-grandchildren are in assisted living. Then there’s the environmental damage associated with the paper industry.

Don’t think about it. Listen to great geniuses like Jessica Alba and Whoopi Goldberg. How can they be wrong if they’re famous?