Casting Out Demons is Now a Hate Crime

Something I have been expecting has just happened. The Ewokes and Wokiees have taken a bold leap and declared that Christian deliverance is therapy and therefore subject to social media banning.

In the past, the Ewokes were afraid to mount an existential attack on the church. They criticized it, but generally, they expressed admiration for Jesus–a false leftist Jesus–and even tried to claim Christianity by sending homosexuals to push their way into positions as pastors and priests. Now they’re moving to a new phase of Antichrist “cancellation.” They just banned Youtube’s most prominent preacher for casting homosexual demons out.

The preacher in question is T.B. Joshua, Africa’s most prominent clergyman. A charismatic, Joshua practices healing and deliverance, as well as giving words of knowledge and prophecy.

As a prophet, he is hit and miss. His prophecy for the year 2020 contained a lot of misses. On the other hand, he has a steady flood of people emerging from his church with what they claim to be miraculous healings, and they often supply medical documentation which is shown on camera in his videos.

He has cast demons out of numerous people. This is why his channel is gone. He cast a spirit of lesbianism out of a woman on camera. An anti-Christian hate group run by homosexuals reported him to the Google kids, and they behaved predictably.

The libels coming out now are amazing. The Ewokes removed his channel so people can’t see it, and then “journalists” said things about his video that aren’t true. They said his methods are violent, for one thing. This is a baldfaced lie. I’ve seen them. He taps people and puts his hands on them, but it’s about as violent as a massage. He doesn’t injure anyone or cause them pain.

It’s a great strategy. You say, “T.B. Joshua did THIS.” First, though, you destroy the evidence so people can’t see that you’re lying.

Other people are uploading his videos on their own channels, so the Wokandan Truth Squad is going to have a hard time erasing him completely. Maybe this will open the door to making Youtube a members-only site where you have to agree with their political beliefs in order to be registered.

My Zambian sweetheart texted me today and told me about Joshua’s virtual execution. She said I was right. She said, “They are silencing God’s children.” She said, “The world is ending.”

She is a young woman, and she doesn’t like talk of the end of the world. She wants marriage, a home, and kids. I told her what she wanted was what we call “the American Dream.” But that dream is no longer on the menu because all the things God told me would happen are happening. We will be driven off the Internet. We will be prevented from working. The government will land in the hands of leftists as extreme as the murderers who killed the czar’s children. Our property will be taken. We will not be allowed to buy or sell. Eventually, we will be summarily executed.

The madness will not stop increasing. Satan won the worldwide election.

Only two types of Christians will be spared: those who die before things get really bad, and those who are raptured.

Jesus told us only one of the seven churches would be spared “the hour of temptation” that would come upon the entire world. He was referring to the tribulation. He said the church of Philadelphia would be removed from the earth, but he didn’t promise this to the other churches.

Philadelphia is a city in Asia, but he was referring to part of the modern church. He was referring to Spirit-led Christians who are full of love. In other words, a minority of Christians.

We like to argue about whether the rapture will come before, after, or during the tribulation. We should be more concerned about whether we will make it, although a post-tribulation rapture would be completely pointless. It would be like being sentenced to flogging and being pardoned after the act.

I thought a huge financial decline would follow the mess of 2007, and I was wrong. Other than that, the things I’ve expected have been coming. I said homosexuality would be the club Satan used to beat the church, and I was right. I said we would be excluded from society, and I was right. The other things I foresee will come to pass. They’re in the Bible. It’s not necessary to trust me.

At first, I was angry when I saw that T.B. Joshua had been crucified, but that was my flesh talking. Now I feel a sense of foreboding. The persecution of an African preacher may not seem like a big thing in America, but America is not the center of the universe. It is not mentioned in the Bible, and God has never promised us this nation won’t collapse. Joshua is a huge figure, worldwide, and the moment when Youtube took away his voice was a pivotal moment. As of a few days ago, the entire church is an underground church. Every person who speaks or writes the truth about demons and homosexuality is marked for deletion from the marketplace of ideas. The “hate” label hangs around our necks with the world’s approval.

We are going to lose. Ignorant Christians love to say God will give us victory and we will change the world, but the Bible doesn’t say that. We are going to lose because the world changed so many of us. The man of perdition will be revealed, some Christians will be raptured, others will be tormented and murdered, and the rest will join the Antichrist and burn with him forever.

Long ago, I had several dreams in which I was in a car headed off an overpass hundreds of feet high. I was in Miami, which is a disgusting city of idolatry and trashy morals. The car fell toward the ground, and I saw it through the windshield. I wasn’t afraid, but I felt the same foreboding I feel now. I knew I was going to die. I looked forward to the adventure of going to heaven. These dreams must have been about the time I’m living in now. The world is hurtling toward the end of the age, and I am hoping to be removed instantaneously instead of lingering and suffering.

I was angry to hear that Joshua had been libeled and censored, but now I see what happened as sad. A soundproof wall is being built between real Christians and people we want to reach. It’s fine to create our own Christian-friendly social media sites, but nearly everyone who will join them will be Christians, so what good will they do? Unsaved people are unfertilized eggs, and the gospel is semen. The only reason saved people aren’t taken at the moment of salvation is that we are supposed to reach the unsaved. If we can’t talk to the general public using the Internet, our reach is drastically curtailed, and our ability to serve our purpose is reduced. It’s a move toward the moment when God decides it’s no longer worth it to keep us here.

Years ago, God told me the age of the church was ending. He meant the church dependent on pastors and big buildings. He showed me that Christianity would spread like a virus, outside of church, the way it was always intended to spread. The Ewokes can kick us off Youtube, but they can’t keep us from talking to our friends and relatives.

They have shut down churches. They are taking us off the Internet. They’re pushing the church underground. Eventually, they will have to address the underground church, too. They’ll have to do something about the people who spread the gospel at work, in their homes, in schools, and so on. In order to do that, they’ll have to kill us. It’s coming, and the people who kill us will say they’re doing God’s work.

Think of the gospel as coronavirus and the persecution as lockdowns and masks.

Like any person who is too proud, dishonest, and full of hate to be saved, the body of leftists is showing us we are not wanted on earth. God is going to grant their wish, and they will be destroyed by his cooperation. We will not be able to help them, no matter how much we want to.

I disconnected from most forms of social media a long time ago, and in my Youtube videos, I tell people, “Don’t watch. Don’t ‘like.’ Don’t subscribe. I could not care less.” I’m not going to cultivate popularity by weaseling and pretending. I hope I helped some people. A popular channel full of lies wouldn’t help anyone.

As for my blog, if they take it down tomorrow, I’ll be fine. I won’t grab a rifle and shoot up my hosting company’s offices. I will miss communicating with people, but in another way, I’ll be glad to let the burden drop.

I assume I’ll eventually be disbarred, if I live long enough. Good thing I don’t practice law. I hope I’m not here when they start confiscating wealth and impoverishing believers, but if I am, I’ll ask God to help me not to tap out. I just have to hold onto him until I’m free of the earth, and after that, I will never see the people who hate me again. No spirit that hates me will ever see me again.

I feel like telling my girlfriend “Rebecca” to quit school immediately. I feel like I should buy tickets to any country that will accept us so we can fulfill the in-person meeting requirement of a fiancee visa. If the world is going to get even crazier, it’s best to unite while we can still travel.

Dead Criminal Now a Hero

Welcome back to 2020.

I guess everyone knows there are new anti-police riots taking place. A young criminal named Daunte Wright was pulled over by the police. They tried to arrest him because he had a warrant. He fought with them and drove off. A female cop shot him by accident, thinking she was holding a taser.

The shooting was very obviously an error, and of course, many leftists are saying it was deliberate. Everything is on video. There is no room for doubt. Unfortunately, there is always room for deliberate lies.

The shooting took place near Minneapolis, so there is rioting there. There are also riots in Portland and God knows where else. All over a young man who would never have been in a position to be shot, had he simply done what everyone else does during traffic stops.

People are claiming he ran because he was afraid he would be shot simply for being black. No. Completely wrong. When someone is pointing a pistol at you from two feet away, and you don’t want to be shot, you comply. He ran because he was defiant, plain and simple.

A discouraging thing happened at a press conference. The then-chief of police was talking to reporters. Remember, a reporter’s only job is to gather and disseminate information. A reporter doesn’t tell sources what to say. The chief correctly described the riots as riots, and two reporters scolded him. One said, “Don’t do that.”

This is not what actual reporters do. It shows how arrogant and deluded the left has become. They know they won’t be held accountable, so they pervert the First Amendment on camera, for public consumption.

It’s a symptom of the Antichrist disease. Spirits of delusion rule Satan’s children. Not only do they contemn the truth; they can no longer perceive it.

The best way to defeat an enemy is to convince him to love and believe lies. You can make him fight and destroy himself for you. You can screw his mind up to the point where he will celebrate his own destruction louder than you will. You won’t have to do the work. You won’t have to mount a defense, because he will defend you as well as attacking himself. No wonder Satan loves lies so much.

We already knew that “protest” was the code word for “leftist riot.” Now they’re coming out and admitting it.

The police chief has since been forced out of office by a newly-empowered black mayor. Technically, he resigned, but his summary dismissal was in the works.

The city manager called for due process to be applied before firing the officer who fired the shot, and the manager has been fired.

Leftists have a long history of hatred of due process. The Romanovs had no trial. The legions of innocent people murdered in Cambodia had no trials. Cuban revolutionaries have arrested, imprisoned, tortured, and murdered countless people without trials; Che Guevara took particular pleasure in overseeing firing squads. The Russians and Chinese had no interest in trials.

Anyone who knows anything about our Constitution knows that due process is a fundamental right. It is mentioned in two different amendments. Without it, there would be no hope of justice for anyone. Leftists can’t understand this. Satan has blinded them.

Many leftists are saying, “Rioting works.” They are openly saying rioting is necessary. What is rioting? Most fundamentally, it’s a denial of due process. Ignorant, unprincipled, impulsive people sidestep the government, and they punish and inflict what they see as revenge, with no guidelines or restraint.

A lynch mob is a type of riot. America is now in the hands of lynchers. What happened to Kyle Rittenhouse was an unsuccessful lynching, literally, and the prosecutor who charged him is now part of the mob. The leftist terrorist rioters who are destroying our cities are moving toward a general policy of lynching. It will increase. We have a gutless, amoral, demented, unintelligent, self-worshiping president, and his vain vice president is only better in that her reason is intact. There is no one at the top to resist the lynchers and terrorists.

This is all self-inflicted. It sounds like I’m putting all the blame on leftists, but nearly all of us made this happen. Christians rejected the Holy Spirit. We didn’t intercede. We became followers of depraved people, especially entertainers. We took up false religions. When you do these things, you give your enemies power. They incubate below the horizon, feeding on your pride and disobedience, and they eventually jump into view and conquer you. You put the power to rule and humiliate you in their hands. God didn’t do it. Satan didn’t do it. The left didn’t do it all by itself. America and the rest of humanity are primarily responsible.

We face a future of increased racism from every quarter. We face a future of increased factionalism of all types. People will identify with nations, races, and political groups, and they will hate each other with a fire that can’t be put out, even with blood. Minorities are already full of hatred for whites, Jews, and Asians in the US, and white people are starting to respond in kind. This is how the red horseman of the apocalypse–the spirit of murder–works. It won’t get better, because the only remedy is the one most of us hate: the Holy Spirit.

This morning I watched a Mark Hemans video. He’s an Australian apostle who heals people and dispenses correction. He can’t go to people in person now, so he uses Zoom. He has a big TV with a screen divided into little squares. Each square contains the image of a meeting participant. Typically, there will be multiple pages of screens.

I’ll post a photo of his TV. You’ll see that the faces and names are extremely diverse. His meetings draw black Americans and Africans. British blacks. Asians of every kind. White Americans. White Europeans. Citizens of Muslim countries. There are probably Messianic Jews in the mix. How does this picture differ from the world at large? It differs because it’s a picture of peace. The people in the squares consider each other siblings. They are on each others’ sides. They pray for each other. They love each other. They love being together.

It shows what the world would be like if we all submitted to the Holy Spirit. The Bible calls Jesus the Prince of Peace, and you can see why. No one else can bring peace. No one else can take a Palestinian terrorist and an Arab-hating Orthodox Jew and turn them into brothers. It’s completely normal in charismatic churches that serve the Holy Spirit. Everywhere else, there is enmity and division.

God fills people with love for each other, and it’s better than human love.

I am bored with talk of politicians fixing the world; especially the Middle East. It’s nice that they try, but they’re just polishing the leaves of a tree instead of medicating the roots. The leaves will continue to rot because the roots are infected with the spirit of Antichrist.

God always tells his children the same things. He doesn’t suffer from the inane delusion that debate is healthy. Debate is a curse. He unites people. Satan is different. He tells you one thing and me another. He wants the children of Adam to kill each other and send each other to hell.

BLM and Antifa have no human leadership and no articulated goals. Without an articulated goal, there is no way for a combatant to know when the battle is over. This is why they will never stop fighting. Their true goal, which their father knows very well, is to remove Christians and Jews from the earth, making them endure as much suffering and humiliation as possible in the process. This goal can’t be attained, so the war will never end. It will continue until the rapture.

Most Christians either support the leftists or plan to fight them with ridiculous weapons like rifles. Either way, they support Satan. They are against the leadership of the Holy Spirit, and they are headed for catastrophe. The only weapons and defenses that work are supernatural, and they are not available to people who do things their own way. The word says everyone who trusts in the strength of man is cursed.

You can join God’s family at any time. What you’ve done is irrelevant. It can all be wiped out by the blood of Jesus. All that matters is your willingness to change course. Every intelligent saved person above the age of accountability is filthy and disgusting, but for God’s help. Your mother. Your kids. Your pastor. The nicest people you know. To God, there is no important difference between them and a Satanist who curses God every day. Sin is sin. You can be repaired. Thinking you can’t be fixed is no excuse for remaining as you are.

Preachers generally don’t have the guts, the honesty, or the knowledge to say these things. They want butts in seats and checks in collection plates. They’re like the dogs who started following men centuries ago, in order to eat their table scraps and their feces. They are useless.

Expect new riots with every report of a controversial interracial shooting. The enemy can never be appeased. He’s not after peace. He wants your annihilation.

America will continue to try to appease, as will the rest of the nations, and things will get worse and worse until the end comes. There may be pauses, but the process will not stop for good because people will continue choosing Satan. They will continue to endorse fornication and homosexuality. They will keep punishing and ostracizing God’s children. They will never stop looking for Satan’s solutions, because behaving and submitting are so abominable to them. We have had over a year of coronavirus, and there is almost no move to repent or take responsibility. That’s a pattern that will continue.

It would be nice to be wrong.

Yukon Keep These Potatoes

Things are still going great with my Zambian sweetheart, “Rebecca.” We are still struggling with the question of whether she should continue studying for the Zambian bar exam. We keep getting what seem to be indications that it’s not God’s will. Prayers for his guidance would be appreciated.

There are only two reasons for her to continue. First, there is the possibility that we won’t work out, which seems highly unlikely, and second, it’s generally not a good idea to quit big projects you’ve started. If she quits and something miraculous happens that splits us up, I can easily fund a return trip to Zambia and a new period of study, but she would lose some time.

In other news, I bought a deep fryer. I’m not sure it was a good idea. I am tired of having problems frying things. My chicken has been performing poorly.

In the old days, the portable fryer market was gloomy. They had things like the Fry Baby, and not much more. The Fry Baby is a small electrified bucket that holds oil. They now make a Fry Pappy. It’s bigger, and the reviews are not good. One problem: you have to fry everything at 375 degrees.

Now you can get a machine that will sit on your countertop and fry 2.5 pounds of food per batch. You can get models that have preset modes for various foods. One model, made by Breville, has a special two-part mode for twice-fried fries. Do you trust a stranger to tell your fryer how to make fries? I don’t. My Instant Pot does a great job with rice, however.

The Breville gets a lot of bad reviews because of build quality, so I don’t want it.

I decided to try a T-Fal. Their machine comes apart so you can put various pieces in the dishwasher. It has a big basket which is easy to handle. It also has a filtering mode. After you fry, it filters the fat and stores it in a container which is part of the fryer.

Today I watched some videos about fryers, and I also caught an America’s Test Kitchen video about frying chicken “like the pros.” I thought they did a surprisingly bad job. They used a Dutch oven with a clip-on thermometer, and they fried the chicken right on the bottom of the pot. It came out with dark areas in the areas that hit bottom. I don’t need a fancy kitchen and a staff of professionals to tell me how to burn chicken.

Usually, the people at ATK give great advice. Not sure what happened this time.

T-Fal’s machine looked good on Youtube, and the ATK video made me despair of frying chicken well in a plain old pot. That’s why I ordered the T-Fal. Now I’m not so sure. Since placing the order, I’ve learned some things.

I decided to make fries to see if I could do better than ATK. I looked for recipes online. I wanted to fry twice, the way you’re supposed to. Okay, technically, I wanted to blanch once and fry once. I kept seeing recipes calling for Yukon gold potatoes, which were all I had. I sliced some thin and blanched them in a pot with a thermometer, and then I chilled them.

For some reason, I have a stainless basket which can be used for frying. It has little bumps on the bottom to lift it off the bottom of the pot. I used it for blanching, and it worked very well.

It wasn’t much trouble at all, and I didn’t have to take a fancy machine apart for cleaning. Also, because I now have a dedicated grease-filtering storage canister, handling the oil was easy.

Sadly, the fries were not good. They tasted great, but Yukon Golds are not frying potatoes. Not as far as I can tell, anyway. The fries looked perfect, but they were limp, probably because they were low on starch compared to russets.

It looks like I got snookered by the Internet again. It’s full of recipes written by people who can’t cook at all.

I have made wonderful fries in the past. I always used russet potatoes. I have never had good results frying red potatoes or Yukons. I should have known better than to try Yukons today.

Sources on the web say the Russet Burbank is the top fry potato. I don’t know if the russets I can buy are Russet Burbanks, but I’m sure they will beat Yukon Golds.

To get back to equipment, I’m wondering why I should keep the fryer when I have a pretty good solution on hand already.

ATK’s chicken video got me thinking about Dutch ovens. Le Creuset makes the best, if reviewers are to be believed, but boy, are they expensive. Like $380 expensive for a big one. I’ve been resisting getting one. Today I learned they’re on sale for $250. It’s a manufacturer’s promotion. The big model is over $100 cheaper than the next size down.

I tried finding used Dutch ovens a while back, but it was a waste of time. If you want a Le Creuset cheap, you pretty much have to find it at a thrift shop or inherit it.

I just told Amazon to cancel the fryer, as I was writing this. There is no point in spending $120 on something you may not need. Making my bad fries gave me confidence in my frying ability, even if the potatoes let me down. Had I had russets, I would have had excellent fries, and the basket would have made them very easy to handle.

I think I should buy a Dutch oven and invest in some russet potatoes. I don’t actually need a Dutch oven for potatoes, but it will be useful for other things, and I don’t expect Le Creuset to keep the sale going forever.

Not too much is going on, apart from the above. Still waiting for the side effects from my Johnson & Johnson vaccine. I almost had a headache last night, and I felt sleepy, but then I had eaten a big bowl of garlic rolls, so what was I supposed to expect? I feel a little sleepy right now, but I just ate too many fries.

Great things are happening in my relationship with God, but I can’t talk about them here. I am willing to say I am being much more critical of (i.e. “realistic about”) about myself these days, and I am really trying to dedicate myself to God and get his blessings, starting with transformation, to flow. I still think the apocalypse is about to dawn. This is no time to be lukewarm or proud, and I have been both.

Is it “Pandemic” or “Dem Panic”?

I prayed a lot about the bizarre array of coronavirus vaccines we have available, and as of yesterday, I felt peace about the Johnson & Johnson shot. Yes, it’s made using a cell line that came from the murder of an unborn baby. My take on that is not simple, and my decision took a long time to congeal. I would not accept a transplanted part from an unborn baby, but this individual died in 1985, the cells used came from cultures propagated since then, the pharmaceutical companies didn’t give us any appealing options, and for all I know, all the other vaccines I’ve received were made the same way.

Getting the shot I wanted was a big blessing. Florida is vaccinating like crazy, and most private providers, like pharmacies, are booked up for days. All of the providers that use the J&J vaccine were booked up as of yesterday, and J&J’s production was recently set back by an error that ruined 15 million doses, but today an obscure local pharmacy received a shipment, and I found out about it early on.

A lady in the waiting area wanted to know if the vaccine was a good choice for her. She said she got very ill for up to two weeks every time she took the flu shot. Two things popped into my mind: 1) hypochondria, and 2) the pointlessness of a shot that gives you a condition which is completely identical to the illness it’s supposed to prevent.

I can’t believe her story, because the flu itself usually isn’t severe, and it doesn’t last two weeks for most people. Why would anyone guarantee herself a two-week illness requiring bed rest in order to prevent a disease that only lasts a week? After a couple of bad experiences, most people would opt for the flu itself.

You rarely hear a man say flu shots make him sick. You rarely hear a man say, “Whenever I take the flu shot, I get the flu.” Seems like it’s always a woman. But the web says men are just as likely as women to be hypochondriacs. In my family, it’s a big problem among women but not the men. My aunt, my mother, and my sister have made lots of grave predictions and announcements about their health as well as other people’s.

Maybe the lady from the pharmacy was telling the truth, and her flu episodes have been worse than her vaccine reactions.

I hope I did the right thing, choosing to be vaccinated. I felt strongly that God was telling me to go ahead, but I could be wrong.

Now I’m wondering if I’ll have side effects. I think it’s extremely likely I had coronavirus a year ago. I had a fairly lengthy illness with symptoms consistent with coronavirus, after being exposed to international travelers. Here’s the question: will coronavirus itself give me any immunity to the vaccine?

I would think things would work both ways, but I’m no doctor. The vaccine uses an adenovirus. Maybe people react to the adenovirus as well as the covid material. If that’s true, I guess having covid will not block all of the shot’s side effects.

I don’t care. I’ve never had a noticeable reaction to any vaccine, as far as I can recall. I’m not all that snowflaky about my health. I’m just curious about what will happen.

I feel fantastic today. In fact, that’s how I generally feel. Lots of energy. I suppose it comes from prayer. I don’t know if my friends have noticed, but I’m never the one to say it’s time to stop what we’re doing because I’m tired or sore or whatever. It’s always someone younger than I am. I just realized that. If I started feeling bad, it would be very obvious because of the contrast.

The stats for the J&J vaccine are confusing and not simple. Some make it look inferior to the other shots, but there is additional information out there suggesting it’s better than the drive-by media’s typical presentations imply. It’s supposed to be a near-guarantee you won’t die from covid, so that’s good.

As I always say, if I can’t be raptured, I want to have my head taken off by a meteor. Failing those options, I definitely don’t want to go from covid.

The “guarantee” also includes severe illness and ICU treatment.

There is evidence the J&J vaccine may actually be superior to the other shots because it was developed later, so as usual when it comes to coronavirus, the correct conclusion is that no one really knows the truth. We don’t know why people hoarded toilet paper. We don’t know why states with lockdowns sometimes did much worse than states that respected people’s freedom. We don’t know why we all got fat in 2020. We don’t know why the flu disappeared this season. We just guess and guess and guess.

Whatever. I got the shot. Now I’m going to make pizza.

World’s Least Probable Romance Still Going Strong

I guess I should blog a little more about my impending purchase, and by that I mean my Zambian wife.

No, I have not proposed. But we are moving forward fast, and we are talking about things that have to be done if we keep it up.

It now appears nearly certain that I will have to buy her. If you think you’ve had weird days in your life, wait till you blog about buying a person. It’s hard to top.

She does not want to pay her relatives. She feels they have not been as gracious as they should in the past. She also wants to do the right thing, however, and she is concerned that refusing to pay may be an omission, rooted in bittnerness, which is not God’s will. She is concerned about the scandal.

After praying, we are both inclined to think we should just pay them off.

The good news is that the fee should be lower than her airfare to the US.

In order to avoid creating a scandal in Zambia, we may have to create one here. Like I care.

According to custom, her family is supposed to take part of the cow windfall and put it toward a month of sex and submission lessons for her. I don’t really know what to say about that. It wasn’t my idea. Before the relationship began, I would have been happy to be able to say, “My wife isn’t a giant pain in the butt every single day.” That would have been sufficient. I certainly didn’t expect a prospective bride to get professional wife lessons.

I do not plan to take husband lessons. I have been enduring raging, continuous, tone-deaf, sexist, feminist abuse and mind control for roughly half a century, so I think anything about me that needs to be corrected has already been addressed. It would be more appropriate to give me anti-feminist deprogramming lessons. The garbage they teach has ruined relations between the sexes. Nearly everything they tell us about women is a lie. No wonder we don’t know how to handle them.

I am told Americans like to butt into African culture and try to repair it. Our government uses aid dollars as pry bars to force change, and Africans resent it. It may well be that Obama and/or Clinton tried to turn Africa into a feminist utopia. I don’t know, because I don’t pay attention to stories about insane, intrusive liberal foreign policy. In any case, a Zambian marriage means paying for a wife and giving her sex lessons, irrespective of our government’s wishes.

I have written a letter inviting her to the US. This is needed so our State Department will grant her a visa. If her team approves it, I will have to send it to her place of work via DHS. The mail in Zambia doesn’t work. Big surprise there.

In these letters, you can’t say you are thinking about marriage, because the government will think your visitor will remain in the US. On the other hand, when you want a visa after you’re engaged, you get special treatment, even though it’s obvious the person will remain here. The special document is called a “fiancee visa.”

Tell me how that makes sense. Being in love is a problem, but being engaged is a big help.

We keep praying together every morning, as if it’s a routine thing we have been doing all our lives. We just fell into it, instantly. There is no pushing or prodding. I wake up and send her a text, and we’re off. It’s the most important thing we do.

When we video chat, we both say the same thing: it’s as if we’ve been doing it for years. I feel like I’m continuing something I started with her decades ago.

We’ve found some things we disagree on. She doesn’t like used furniture. I don’t want her to cut her hair. These are the major chasms that obstruct our romance. Other than that, our relationship is a continuous series of strong agreements.

Don’t get the idea she’s just agreeing after I tell her things. Women are famous for pretending to be what you want, only until the ring goes on. Then you’re caught, like an animal in a trap, and in order to get free, you have to chew off your house and retirement account. She talks a lot more than I do, and very often, I’m the one to interrupt to say how strongly I agree.

To sum things off, I feel like I stepped onto a bullet train that was already in motion. No red flags. No games. No walking on eggs. No effort. This is the kind of relationship I always dreamed of, but I didn’t think it could really happen in modern America. Modern American romance is sleazy, even when people think it’s classy. Thinking it’s classy is the saddest part.

I’m glad I’m not talking to a yoga-loving, Biden-voting, walking tattoo gallery who asks her slutty, unfulfilled, man-hating girlfriends how to play me. I said “slutty.” Slutty, slutty, slutty. It’s a good word. We don’t use it enough. America is full of women who are crying out for someone to have a spine and call them out on their errors.

I’m also glad I’m not interviewing with someone who wants to be my new mom so she can tell me what to eat, set my bedtime, “correct” my opinions, and wash my mouth out with gluten-free soap when I say things like “snowflake” or “semiauto.” My mom is dead. I loved her. I will not abide a new one.

It appears I have someone I can pour love into without being penalized. This is what I have always wanted. Maybe America is just not the place to look for wives. Maybe there are countries which produce good husbands, and countries which produce good wives, and they need to be connnected.

I have a lot to be grateful for. More than I ever imagined possible.

If things work out, it will be the most impressive proof of God’s greatness since the parting of the Red Sea. If not, it will simply confirm that I make mistakes.

I Now Pronounce you Man and Mugu

Last night I watched not one but two TV segments about West African dating scammers.

The first segment was created by ABC News in Australia. They sent a reporter to Malaysia and Africa to look into dating fraud. It was pretty disgusting. The second segment was from 60 Minutes in Australia. It was no better.

The ABC reporter went into an Internet cafe, and there were no women there. The place was full of young men pretending to be interested in romance, and many of their victims were also male. What’s worse? Finding out you sent $2000 to a criminal after having cybersex and appearing naked on your webcam, and knowing the video will probably be passed around for laughs for the next 10 years, or knowing the criminal watching you get down with your own bad self is a man?

Ewwwwww.

The criminals agreed to talk to the reporter. This was one of the amazing aspects of the story. They were sociopaths. They felt no guilt over the way they tortured and robbed people.

One of them had a copy of Napoleon Hill’s book in his tiny apartment. He had written notes about his plans for the money he stole. He thinks he’s going to be a world-famous rapper. Sure. That will go well. Glad the retirement money of numerous aging dupes won’t be wasted on a fatuous pipe dream.

He and his buddy said what they did was right because white people had mistreated their ancestors. Does that sound at all familiar? The reparations scam isn’t limited to American leftists. All of Satan’s children, everywhere, want reparations. They’re cursed because they’re evil, and they blame people who are blessed because they fear God.

There is no such thing as white privilege. There is only Judeo-Christian privilege.

The CBS reporter interviewed an incredible woman. She was 53, but she appeared to be around 65. She had given something like 110,000 Australian dollars to a person she thought was a tall, strapping American businessman with a collection of impressive photos.

You feel sorry for her, right? I don’t. Her family was exasperated with her. They knew who would end up supporting her. They told her she was being robbed, and she didn’t listen because she thought a big, handsome man with everything in the world going for him was interested in sexual conversations with a very unattractive old lady carrying maybe 60 extra pounds. She was impervious to reason. She knew she was wrong, but she didn’t care enough about herself or her family to admit it.

A woman who somehow makes money exposing online fraud got together with her, and along with ABC and law enforcement, she proved her Fabio was really a fat African punk who spent her money on champagne and expensive ghetto basketball shoes.

Guess what she did after the sting? She found herself another unlikely profile and got back to work. Unbelievably, she had to be slapped with reality a second time. She is probably still trolling for scammers, unless her family has refused to pay her ISP fees.

One of the news videos showed a whole room full of “victims.” I’m not sure the word “victim” applies. I don’t mean to be cruel, but one look at this bunch, and I knew they were never going to appeal to anyone who was even a little bit attractive. They had to know they were being taken. Sometimes you have to admit the truth and accept what you are. They weren’t having it. Not until they lost their money.

They interviewed a man who was old, bald, on oxygen, and missing two lower incisors. He gave scammers $400,000. He also agreed to go through customs carrying “special chemicals for cleaning money.” He was really carrying cocaine. The authorities took issue. He ended up having to hire a defense lawyer.

A Mexican lady also got caught carrying drugs, and she was sentenced to death in Malaysia.

How does someone gullible enough to fall for West African scammers get $400,000 in the first place?

I have dealt with scammers for years. I used to torment them as punishment, as many readers know. It never occurred to me to send one money. They’re always extremely obvious, if not in the first communication, shortly thereafter. Their English is bad and instantly recognizable as African. They generally say the same stupid things. You don’t have to be a genius to see what they are. Who are these people who believe them and send them not just a little money, but everything they have?

Here’s something really awful: the scammers keep “sucker lists.” Suckers are called “mugus.” If you’re so lacking in common sense you swallow their lies, they put you on their lists and sell your contact information to other scammers.

Now here is the weird part. I signed up for a dating site, a much-younger African lady descended on me, and she turned out to be exactly what she said she was. She looked nice. She was an extremely serious charismatic Christian. She said, “You are the man of my dreams,” not because she pretended to find me sexy but because of my religious beliefs.

I vetted her by looking up her social accounts without telling her. I found years-old Twitter posts and Youtube videos. She was the real thing. An attractive young woman from Africa really did reach out to an older man.

It went nowhere because she was caught up in the prosperity gospel and also wanted to be the husband, teaching me doctrine as though I were 12 years old. Still, she was a very near miss, right off the bat. How often does that happen?

Sometimes Satan sends us highly customized missiles. I can’t tell you how impressed I was with this one. She looked like a gift from God; the makings of a testimony so good no one would believe it. Unfortunately for Satan, the bomb payload was too obvious and too great. When you know what you want, things like lust and loneliness won’t drive you to swallow bait. Neither will a desire to believe God has worked a powerful miracle for you. I didn’t get a miracle. I got a Trojan horse.

Sometimes a little voice says, “You will never get another chance.” That’s irrelevant. I don’t care. The wrong mate is the wrong mate.

I have compromised before. I couldn’t make myself do it again if I wanted to. It’s not in me any more.

I was not a fool, the woman was legitimate, and I got one of the best offers anyone has ever gotten in the history of online dating interactions with Africans. I am not like the people in the news video, who have to sit in classrooms and take classes in order to avoid further predation. Nonetheless, I also got a negative outcome and had my time wasted.

It wasn’t much time. Three days. But it was irritating to have the bait waved at me. I would rather all of the online women had turned out to be patently unsuitable.

Today I’m going down message lists, telling women nothing is going to happen. Some are very pretty, and they may actually be women. They won’t work out. They have nothing to say. Imagine a marriage in which your wife never says anything except, “Okay, dear,” and, “That is very interesting.”

There is another big problem on interracial sites: functional illiteracy. I don’t just mean in Africa. Profiles of American black women, and their messages, are full of terrible spelling and grammar errors. Many do not write as well as first-graders. You may be a good Christian woman. You may be pretty. It doesn’t matter. If you write things like, “I wants my man love me,” in your online communications, what future can you have with a normal adult?

It’s terrible to see. It’s not rare. It’s very, very common.

How can a woman reach the age of 30, in the United States of America, with free schooling, and not be literate? There is no excuse. You can blame your parents for a lot of things when you’re young, but when you’re an adult, you have to address your own issues.

I would say you have to throw out a lot of dirt when you’re digging for a diamond, but I don’t think that’s true for people who are close to God. I believe he pairs people up, the way he always has. Either something will happen, or it’s not his will.

I don’t think law enforcement will ever make much of a dent in the scamming. The people being scammed are too determined. I believe most of them know what’s happening. If you lover tells you his webcam is broken for three straight months, after you’ve sent him several thousand dollars, you know he’s a crook. Some people were born to die in debt, and all the cops in the world can’t save them from themselves.

Dr. Seuss and my Continued Adventures in Online Dating

Someone pray for God to help me not to read the news. Satan’s kids have declared Dr. Seuss a dangerous racist, and he has been removed from a recommended reading list by Satan’s older brother, Hair-Sniffin’ Joe.

I STILL have two Dr. Seuss books, and I used to have a pair of One Fish Two Fish boxer shorts. What has become of the world?

I’m not saying Dr. Seuss was perfect. He taught generations of kids the Grinch, a quasi-hominid notable for its resemblance to Elizabeth Warren, was Jesus Christ. Actually, that’s big plus from the left’s point of view. They hate Jesus Christ even more than they hate Donald Trump. But his books did not promote racism or any other ism. Satan has done a marvelous job, turning mainstream Americans into bona fide lunatics, and you have to wonder who they will go after next.

If you want to go after someone, go after anyone who participated in a Grinch remake. Those people are cultural vandals.

It’s fitting that I use the word “vandals.” Weren’t the Vandals part of the horde that dismantled Rome and sent the world into the Dark Ages?

I don’t know. I didn’t major in history. I got a real degree in a subject you can use to get a job other than driving for Uber.

If you’re a history major, I’m not putting you down. I’m putting down the thing to which you devoted four years of your life and a big chunk of your parents’ life savings. You can get even the next time you bus my table at Red Lobster.

Perhaps we can find some common ground. We all look down on drama and communications majors (i.e. “journalists”).

“I paid $400,000 so you could do WHAT?”

Think about that. Parents could just give their kids the money in trust, in interest-bearing accounts. Much better idea.

A friend of mine says she’s not pushing her kids to go to college. Can’t argue. You need college for some things, but if you want to open a business and make real money, you should start in your teens. I told her this: they need to know the way to make money isn’t to be the guy who drives around in the truck, doing the work. Start out as that guy, buy more trucks, and send other people out to drive around while you get paid for their work.

God bless capitalism. There’s an ism I can get behind. To paraphrase the words of Chico Escuela, capitalism beeng berry berry goog to me; sank you berry moach.

If the Chico Escuela reference seems racist to you, don’t fret. Here’s another Garrett Morris performance which is more in line with the values of the cancel kids. In case you can’t here, he’s singing, “Gonna get me a shotgun, kill all the whiteys I see.” Sometimes I find myself singing this song in private moments.

Think how many tree-trimming trucks you could buy for $400,000.

Today is a slow day. I continue to receive applications from too-young alleged women in Africa on dating sites. I decided to delete all communications with my rejects. You have to clear the table before being served your next course. It’s surprisingly hard to delete Yahoo contacts. Yahoo makes people your contacts without warning you.

As mentioned previously, I exchanged a number of emails from a Kenyan lady. I “archived” her emails and my responses. Then I deleted them. Then I deleted them from the trash bin. Then I searched to make sure I had deleted them. Yahoo wouldn’t give up without a fight. It told me she was one of my “Top Contacts.”

I found out how hard it is to delete a Top Contact. You have to find them in your list of ALL contacts. You can’t delete them from your Top Contact list. And Internet people say Yahoo sends them emails to let them know they’ve been deleted. Ouch. That’s entirely unnecessary.

I think she and the others are completely gone from my throwaway Yahoo account. Don’t hold me to that.

I went to the dating sites and conducted a purge of non-viables. The Kenyan lady would not disappear. The site kept throwing her at me. She had viewed me! I had viewed her! I had favorited her! She had sent me a flirt! Then there was a fairly lengthy text exchange on the site.

I tried to get rid of this stuff, and it kept popping up. I went nuclear. I blocked her. She still popped up until I closed and reopened my browswer.

I wonder if women are going through this with me. Will I get charged with stalking because the Internet won’t let them out of my life?

Women really, really hate each other, and many a woman insists on pretending her current man has never been interested in anyone else. If God blesses me with someone, I don’t want her rooting through my old emails and having an estrogen conniption.

Somewhere out there, I guarantee you, there is a woman demanding that a man tell her who this tramp Siri is.

A person claiming to be a tall, gorgeous young woman from California contacted me a while back. I assumed it was some kind of error. Eventually, we got around to talking. Things went very slowly. Then it happened. Confirmation came. She asked for my name and number so she could text me. This was after maybe 4 online texts.

Scammers always try to drag you off the website so they’ll be outside the site’s jurisdiction.

I decided to give her both barrels. I said I only used the site, and I said I had learned that African scammers tried to take people elsewhere, notably Google Hangouts. Then I casually mentioned what I had learned about them. I said they were generally men, and I said some unflattering things about what they no doubt wanted other men to do to them.

Haven’t heard from her since.

I found a neat story about the scammers. They’re called “cafe boys” and “browsers” in their own nations. They’re extremely gross. They have sexual chats with lonely men. They say their webcams aren’t working, but they send dirty videos of the women they claim to be. The men send them money for plane tickets and so on. Eventually, the victims, called “clients,” get frustrated and insist on up-to-date photographs or videos. Then it’s time to move on.

I don’t think these boys realize they’re homosexuals. They think they’re playing a game. If you can stand to have sex chats with other men, and you look at their nude pictures and videos and try to give them satisfaction, you are a sodomite. No two ways about it.

Homosexuality is huge in Africa. It’s why AIDS was a plague in Africa and a small problem in America. Men don’t get AIDS from women. Magic Johnson is a homosexual. Either that, or he used to shoot up. Judging by his flaming-gay son, I would rule heroin out.

An Australian network did a documentary on the cafe boys, and I found it on Youtube. I plan to watch it today. It should be fascinating.

They go to demon worshipers and have them curse their victims. How about that? The documentary shows a lady in a crazy voodoo getup, performing ceremonies. The boys bring her pictures and so on. If you’ve been taken by one of these characters, you may be under weird voodoo curses, and if you’re not close to God, they may work.

They are clearly working on a lot of Australian men.

I wonder if my two profile pictures have been placed on this lady’s table and whether she has waved chicken feet at them and spat cheap liquor on them. Bad for her if she has. You can’t curse me, but if you try, you will curse yourself and your family.

The older I get, the more convinced I am that black people’s problems are caused mainly by witchcraft. The more I learn about black culture, including things the press, academics, and black people hide from us, the more amazed I am at the pervasiveness of witchcraft.

When Muddy Waters sang that he had a mojo hand and little John the conqueror root, he wasn’t kidding. He really had those things.

I saw a video by Thomas Sowell, in which he utterly crushed the claim that black people do poorly because of slavery. Among other things, he pointed out that the majority of black American kids in about 1960 grew up in two-parent homes. BOOM. There goes the myth that slavery killed black marriage. LBJ killed it. He also talked about the many, many white slaves who were held in America. Asians were also enslaved here. Only blacks continued to live cursed lives a century later. There has to be a reason, and slavery isn’t it.

It’s remarkable that I ended up talking to an African woman who was a serious Christian and who turned out to be completely legitimate in every way. I had proof, six ways from Sunday. Maybe she’s the only one.

It’s too bad she was a decoy and a trap, totally unsuitable for a real Christian man.

Maybe she’ll escape the prosperity gospel some day, and God will pair her up with somebody.

It’s very slow here. I keep feeling like I’m just waiting to be taken away. Guess I’ll go outside and finish my latest welding project. It will be satisfying to unite things successfully.

I Feel Positively Viable

Welcome to one of the weirdest days of my life.

As chronic readers know, I tried online dating briefly a couple of weeks back. To say it went badly would be an understatement. I got no attention at all from women who were not obese, elderly, or impossible to conduct a romantic relationship with due to severe appearance issues, but I heard from hundreds of African scammers pretending to be American ladies.

I quit because the contrast between my happiness before and after beginning the experiment was stark. I gained nothing, but I felt degraded and swindled. Ordinarily, you have to wait for marriage to feel that way.

A few days back, I had a sudden impulse. I felt I should look around and see if there were any sites dedicated to interracial dating.

Here’s something people don’t like to talk about: black women tend to die single. They are grossly undervalued as wives. Asian women are considered the most attractive, and white women come next. Similarly, Asian men are at the bottom of the food chain, but black men are considered very attractive.

Black women are much more likely than black men to be successful, a big percentage of black men are in prison or on probation or parole, black men tend to disfavor marriage, and the ones that do marry often marry outside their race. To make things worse, about 87% of American men are not black.

In addition, many white American men have the sense that white women tend to have princess complexes, and many take men for granted and treat them badly.

There are lots of very attractive black women out there rotting away, getting ready to start their own cat herds. Also, statistics say marriages between white men and black women are much more stable than same-race marriages and other mixed-race marriages.

I thought I would look at a couple of sites and see what my opportunities were. I was not optimistic, but you can’t score a hole in one unless you swing your club.

I learned a few things.

First of all, there are a lot of Africans on interracial dating sites. Plot twist: they admit they’re African. Presumably, a lot of them are not scammers. I’m sure many of them want green cards and are willing to do dishonest things in order to get them, but they can’t all be like that.

Second, I was able to get actual women under the age of 70 and the 300-pound mark to talk to me. That was new. In fact, it’s a little disturbing. Failure is easy to cope with. You just quit and move on. When you succeed, you have to go forward and keep doing things.

My volunteer dating coach Mike told me to put photos of myself in suits on my profile, and it seemed like he wanted me to soft-soap the women. I did the opposite. I said I owned suits and would be happy to send women pictures of them. I said I voted for Trump. I said I didn’t want leftist women lecturing me in my own house, so they didn’t need to apply. I said I had guns and didn’t plan to get rid of them for a woman. I said any woman who would be disturbed by a man getting up every day and praying in tongues for two hours should go away.

First thing you know, I got a message from a lady from Kenya.

Right away, I figured it was some scammer Sheneheh, hoping to tell me a sob story and get some money for liquor and prostitutes. I talked to her anyway, and I asked questions intended to find out whether she was legitimate.

She really startled me. She said we could pray in tongues together. She said she was drawn to my profile because I was a serious Christian. She quoted scriptures to me, and they were appropriately chosen, proving she had actually read the Bible. I asked her how she felt about tongues, and she said prayer in tongues brought us closer to God and brought us supernatural revelation.

Well, now.

After that, I figured she had to be real. Scammers are not sitting around reading the word and learning about tongues.

We talked for a very long time. I was flabbergasted. I was in such shock, I completely forgot to ask about the age difference, which is considerable.

Afterward, I wondered if I was being fooled. Every old man dreams of younger women who find him desirable. We believe what we want to believe. We see what isn’t there. We explain away what is there. This is how we end up homeless at 70 while our ex-trophy wives fornicate in our houses with our former pool boys.

She had given me her first name. Her town’s name was on her profile. I Googled. I found a Twitter account with her photos on it. The owner was giving crooked African politicians hell. It sounded like the person I had conversed with.

Still, a scammer could download Twitter photos.

The confirmation came when I found a Twitter post in which she quoted the same scripture she had quoted me, to prove the same point.

Unbelievably, I had communicated with an actual woman on a dating site, and she really was the type of person she seemed to be.

Is that even possible? It’s like a dream. It never happens.

I’m suspicious of anything that seems too good to be true, or even just barely good enough to stand, now that I think about it. This lady says she has a passport and a visa, and that made things sound worse. It made her sound like she was itching to emigrate. But she also says she would be happy if a man moved to Kenya to be with her.

If this lady is available, there must be others. Is this a resource I should have tapped sooner?

Another attractive lady contacted me today, and guess why she turned me down? I said I couldn’t see myself moving to Zambia. THAT is a sincere woman. The scammers all want to come here.

I’ve always thought online dating was for idiots, and I have cast a jaundiced eye upon men who import wives. It seems like a tacky enterprise, likely to connect a foolish man to a parasite who will drain his bank account and run off. But I met a real woman today. She exists.

Maybe my low opinion of importing wives is tainted by input from American women, who really hate the idea. They really, really hate it. It makes them furious. You can find their crabby remarks online. They say men are looking for “appliances with sex organs.” The reason they’re so mad? The foreign-wife industry highlights the fact that many men are fed up with American feminist women, and it also proves feminists don’t have a monopoly. It makes feminists feel threatened. Many of our post-Steinem girls don’t want to compete with, say, Thai wives who keep a great house, stay home and raise kids, dote on their husbands, and take care of their bodies. Also, as noted above, Asian women, who figure prominently in the importation business, rank higher than white women on the attraction scale.

Feminism is all about manipulation and exploitation, and you can’t manipulate your market if it has better options available.

I don’t know what to think. I’m still formulating my opinions concerning the whole business. I know this: an American woman is the last person on earth to consult at this point. It would be like asking Tim Cook what he thinks about Windows.

Having spent two weeks on a site where all I did was torment scammers, I am now in an unexpected situation. I have more legitimate contacts than I can handle, not just from Africa, but from America. And they’re not train wrecks. Many are beautiful Christian women, and I don’t mean beautiful for their ages. I never saw that coming. Weirdest thing of all: some of them are white.

I believe I have a couple of scammers, but they seem to be in the minority.

I don’t know what to do with these women.

If anything comes of this, I’ll blog it.

There Must be Others

Last night I had a very weird experience.

I have written about my decision to abandon online matchmaking sites. I got some interest from women who were totally inappropriate, as well as perhaps 200 African men pretending to be women. If I wanted to date someone who could be Joe Biden’s older sister, I would call my experience a qualified success, but that’s about it.

I wrote a blog post in which I said maybe it was time to accept permanent bachelorhood.

I felt pretty comfortable with it. My life is very pleasant, nearly all of the women who are in the pool men like me drawn from are unappealing to say the least, and I am well aware that marriage solves problems but also causes them.

So that’s the background.

Last night, I started wondering what had happened to Bevelyn Beatty. This is the woman who poured paint on the BLM vandalism in New York. They call it a mural, but it’s vandalism. It’s “Black Lives Matter,” painted in huge letters on a public street.

Beatty is possibly the bravest woman who ever lived. It may actually be a serious character flaw, because she seems to overdo it. She goes wherever she thinks she should go, and she stands up for God and the unborn. She stands close to pro-abortion escorts outside of abortion mills and tells them they should be ashamed of themselves. A BLM coward stabbed her in Washington, D.C. because she walked unarmed in that leftist stronghold after dark.

I used to subscribe to her Youtube channel because I admired her so much, and because it was nice to see a black female conservative Christian who wasn’t drinking the toxic, demonic, Marxist Kool Aid. I unsubscribed because I had no interest in political activism.

I checked in on her, and she says she has given up on conservatism, sort of. She has apparently realized Christianity isn’t political. All Spirit-led Christians become conservative, but not all conservatives are Christians, and the GOP is not going to save anyone.

She has a friend she runs around with, and she got her friend to give her testimony. I love hearing testimonies, so I started watching. I thought I would tune out in a couple of minutes, but the video was nearly 40 minutes long, and I watched the whole thing. I went back and watched parts of it later. It was wonderful.

Her friend is named Edmee Chavannes. She was born in France, to a Haitian family. She doesn’t say much in most of Beatty’s videos.

She gave a long account of her life, including stories about growing up in sexual ignorance. She had encounters with men, and she learned things along the way. She came close to losing her virginity, but somehow, it never happened. She believes God looked out for her.

She is about 40 now, and she is still hanging on. She said she should make the video in order to strengthen other people who are in the same boat and who feel like freaks.

She talked about her dedication to God. She and Beatty do street ministry in addition to making videos. She is completely sold out.

She said she hated socialism because she had seen it in France. She said that when they had problems, their first response was to go to the government, not God.

Think about this from a man’s perspective. People say, “Lower your standards. You will never get what you require. They’re not out there.” Then you see a nice-looking, godly lady in a video, proving the real thing still exists.

There are two realities: the reality of the cursed, and the reality of the blessed. If you’re blessed, you can’t make plans and decisions based on what happens to cursed people. The fact that other people have to settle for Satan’s table scraps doesn’t mean you have to.

I looked at a lot of profiles when I started fooling with online dating. My thoughts usually went like this: “She looks okay. Oh, boy…yoga. But she says Jesus is the center of her life, so maybe she would drop the yoga if I explained things to her. Horror movies? No, not in my house. Well, are they demonic occult horror movies, or just relatively safe movies about disasters and so on? Maybe I should give her the benefit of the doubt. ‘Libra’? Maybe she just needs someone to tell her astrology is a pagan religion. She’s wearing tights and a top that shows 9 inches of cleavage. Maybe a talk and a trip to Nordstrom would fix that.”

I was starting with a pool in which less than 1% of the members had any hope at all, and I was trying to scrape the dirt off the ones that remained so they could be salvaged.

You don’t want to expect too much from people, and you don’t want to be self-righteous and forget your own faults. On the other hand, I spent decades surrounded by people who didn’t meet my standards, and they mistreated me and made me feel worthless. I worked at cutting them off, systematically. I would rather die tomorrow than jump back in that cesspool. I consider their absence one of God’s greatest gifts. Taking them back would make me miserable.

If I believe I have to lower my standards and accept a worldly woman, am I not saying God can’t provide? Isn’t that the opposite of faith?

If this lady is out there, she’s not the only one, and if God is God, he knows where the others are, and if he wants me to meet one, it will happen. If he doesn’t, well and good. He knows best, and my life is great.

I admit, I wish life weren’t full of long waiting periods. I’m too old to enjoy the blessing of marrying an attractive high school sweetheart and raising kids. I am not likely to reproduce, and if I manage it, I will never see grandchildren unless I’m too frail to do anything with them. I believe the word says people who belong to God will return after the tribulation and lead restored lives on earth. That’s the only hope I have. But even if I can’t get the premium package in this life, a few years with the right person would still be a great gift.

I know; Abraham didn’t have a son by the wife he loved until he was 100. But he lived to be 175. That will not happen to me. Judging by the way my ancestors went, I may not make 90.

If I make it, I will live those years in a disgusting place which is even more hostile than it is now. This country is going to keep getting worse. I wish there were some place else to go, but historically, America was that place, and now the ship has been boarded by pirates.

Speaking of disaster movies, I saw one the other day. It was very bad. It was called Greenland. A comet was breaking up, and bits were hitting the earth. A big piece was on its way to cause the extinction of just about all terrestrial life. The government chose useful people and told them to get on planes so they could be taken to a shelter. The shelter was located in Greenland, which makes no sense at all. That’s the story.

A man, his wife, and his son were selected. The government didn’t know the son had diabetes, and when the family showed up for its flight, the son was rejected. It happened while the man was separated from his wife and son, so he got on a plane while they were in the rejection process.

People found out about the selection process, and they lost their minds in their determination to get on the planes. When the man found out his family didn’t make it, he jumped off his plane, and the rest of the movie was about their struggle to reunite and make it to Greenland.

By the way, all of the bad people in the movie were white. There was one black criminal, but he saved the lives of the wife and child. Several blacks and Hispanics helped the family. Welcome to Wokanda.

I watched the selfish, terror-stricken characters, committing all sorts of crimes in hopes of getting on the planes. I thought to myself, “What is wrong with them?” I watched the husband, who was tormented as he tried to decide whether to stay on his plane. I thought, “Here’s what you do. You get off, and you go die with your family. You don’t struggle with the decision. You go, without hesitation.”

If you know the world is about to end, your big priority shouldn’t be to behave like a rat and strive to survive in a hole. It should be to share love and comfort, not to mention salvation, with the people you love. Obvious?

The characters in the movie lived in an imaginary world with no God and no afterlife. They didn’t pray. They didn’t talk about God. I can’t relate to them. People like that live in a different reality. Even if they made it to Greenland, they weren’t going to survive. People wear out, get sick, and die, no matter what they do. If you’re not ready for that, you are in real trouble.

I can’t live a nice, long fairy tale life. My age and the state of the world won’t permit it. But maybe I can go through what remains of this age with someone I care about, and we can be together when it all ends. That would be worth a lot.

I’ll link to Emdee Chavanne’s video. Maybe some of you will enjoy it.

“Men”? What are These “Men” You Speak of?

I am back to continue documenting the world’s irreversible decline into insanity.

I just had one of the weirder experiences of the pre-apocalypse era. I visited a forum, and people there were complaining about TV. I don’t know much about TV. All I ever see are Youtube and Amazon Prime. I have no idea what funny commercials have appeared since around 2017, so if you make a reference to one in my presence, expect no reaction.

Someone on the forum said they were remaking The Equalizer. This was a show featuring an old white British guy named Edward something or other. We all know how it worked. Someone got bullied, and Ed stepped in and roasted him with a flamethrower or shot him in the head. The show formed the basis for the Equalizer movies. One forum guy called the new show “sad,” and another said it would run 10 episodes and then disappear, leaving people wondering why it had ever been created.

I saw the forum reference to the new show, and I said this: “I’m going to make a wild guess here. She’s a black lesbian.”

Then I decided to Google. Here is what I found.

In case you can’t see the video, it’s a trailer. The show’s star is Queen Latifah. America’s best-known black lesbian, unless Oprah counts.

Denzel Washington, the star of the Equalizer movies, wasn’t good enough for the Ewokes and Woke-iees. That’s what I call them now that they’re getting Star Wars actors fired. Washington is black. He did a great job, although he ripped off his own Man on Fire character. Sorry; insufficient. Washington is a heterosexual.

Is Latifah straight in the show? I know; who cares? Wikipedia says her character is a single mother, but that doesn’t mean anything in 2021. It doesn’t even mean she’s a woman. She could be a transdudette, raising her child on wokeness’s newest fantasy product: “chest milk.”

Every day, normal people who miss America get a fresh axe handle to the face. Iron Man is a woman. Captain Marvel is a woman. Wolverine is a little girl. The captain of the latest Star Trek ship is a black woman. Even 007 is a black lady, and not the Halle Berry/Naomie Harris kind. If the movie she’s in ever comes out, you will not hope to see her in romantic scenes.

I don’t know if the newest Bond film will ever be released. It was shot a long time ago, and it’s still not here. Daniel Craig looks like Bond’s dad in the film, and he’s no longer 007. Who wants to watch that? The film seems to be a breach birth. It won’t come out no matter how long the studio pushes. Obviously, it has problems so bad, they expect it to be a disaster.

It already is a disaster. It was shot a long time ago, and it was supposed to be released about 15 months ago. The studio blames the delays on coronavirus and the departure of the director. The pandemic didn’t exist when the film was supposed to be released, so the studio’s explanation is untrue. Obviously, they have a steaming pile of unappealing footage, and they’re trying to find a way to save it.

I wonder if it will be the first straight-to-DVD Bond release.

When James Bond dies for real, should it be considered a sign that the current age is ending?

It was bad enough when they offered Idris Elba the role. He’s a great actor, and he would be fantastic playing a secret agent in an action role. But James Bond? The James Bond who has a Scottish father and a Swiss mother? No. The Equalizer can be black. Iron Man can be black. James Bond’s ethnicity is essential to his character. Turning him black will turn any Bond film into a wokeness lecture.

A “woke” James Bond. It’s like Ellen DeGeneres holding a revival.

If Idris Elba was a bad choice for 007, a big, brash girl who is short on looks is even worse.

In 2015, the last Bond movie featured a theme song performed by an effeminate homosexual. We should have known it was an omen. James Bond…the most unrepentant, accomplished, heterosexual cinema Casanova since Errol Flynn, introduced by a song performed by a soft little man who likes being sodomized. I wish I could transport a theater full of 1970 fans into a theater and get their reactions.

It’s funny how leftists make money glamorizing characters whose outlooks and behavior they hate. It should drive them crazy. James Bond, John Wayne, Tony Stark, James Kirk, Dirty Harry, Rob Roy, Ron Swanson, Malcolm Reynolds…you would think the left coast types who created these characters, and who must, somewhere deep inside themselves, admire them, handle the cognitive dissonance.

No one wants to watch a big, manly lesbian punch bad guys. Men want someone they want to be like, and women want someone they can dream about. That ain’t Queen Latifah.

Hollywood’s problem is that no one has to go see its movies. You can force employees to endure degrading wokeness training and rules, but if I decide I don’t want to pay to see a woman play the Hulk, there is diddly squat you can do about it. As crazy as the public is, it still wants strong male characters who save attractive female characters. It doesn’t want to see Nancy Pelosi save Richard Simmons, and it never will, because traditional sex roles are hard-wired into human beings.

Will Hollywood continue pushing its warped philosophy until it goes broke, or will it respect its long tradition of hypocrisy, trading principle for profit?

I think the Bond franchise is dead. Craig looks awful, so he can’t do any more films. The latest film appears to be unreleasable. Craig was so good in the past, the studio probably won’t be able to find a viable replacement, even if they reluctantly accept the fact that they need a white man. Maybe they’ll drop this flop and then flounder on for a few releases, trying unsuccessfully to repeat Casino Royale, but I think that will be about it.

It’s natural. They quit making Thin Man and Charlie Chan films, didn’t they?

Hollywood has other problems. If this age continues, it may be a decade before anyone can put 500 people in a theater. Piracy keeps getting better and better, and there is no way to stop it. Also, people are tired. We have seen so much entertainment, there are no new stories to tell us. Certainly not in Hollywood, where creativity goes to have its heart broken.

Here’s a big problem for actors: they are obsolescent. CGI gets better and better all the time, and we will eventually end up with movies which appear realistic yet contain no footage of human beings. The studios will want it because computers aren’t divas. They don’t walk off sets. They don’t overdose or pass out during shoots. They’re much cheaper than actors. They don’t age. They don’t refuse to do nude scenes. We could have 50 more Bond films featuring a young Daniel Craig. For that matter, we could have more John Wayne films. More Clint Eastwood. More Sophia Loren. More Natalie Wood. Alan Ladd was 5’6″ in 1950. In 2030, he can be 6’4″. I would say Christopher Reeve could fly again, but he wasn’t a great actor, so he wouldn’t be resurrected.

It may take 20 years, but sooner or later, there will be no point in hiring actors except for voice work. Even that will eventually be done by computers. Studios will simply pay to use likenesses of dead people. At some point, Hollywood will start creating wildly popular actors from scratch, and the studios will own them. Imagine how jealous Siri and Alexa will be.

We’ve already seen old and dead actors play new scenes as their youthful selves. It wasn’t done well, but it will be done better. The uncanny valley is wide but not infinitely so.

Kirk and Spock, together again. Think of it. Although judging by the way things have gone so far, William Shatner will probably be around for another century. Strap a girdle on him and give him a dark wig, and he’s ready to go.

It seems like nothing is impossible for humanity, given enough time. Machines should eventually become so powerful there is no need for us to do much of anything. It reminds me of what God said before he confused our languages in Babylon:

And the LORD said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.

I believe we will eventually become gods, if we are permitted to live and work. What’s happening with technology is the beginnings of it. I think God puts rebellious creatures in hell not just to punish them, but to keep them in agony so they are unable to concentrate and grow powerful. God’s children are permitted to live forever in peace and pleasure because they pose no threat to the order of the universe.

I’ve often thought the destructive schism between Apple and PC proponents was God’s way of slowing us down for a few years. It was very similar to the Babel story.

It makes sense that God reduced our maximal lifespans from 1000 years to around 100. Think what certain men could do if they lived for centuries.

I don’t enjoy the daily reminders of America’s mass psychosis, but I’m grateful for them, because they help me defeat the gaslighting. Voices around me say, “We’ve had problems before. America will always be here. God defends America. People will swing back the other way.” Those are voices of denial. We have never lived in a time like this. The very nature of our species is changing, too fast for any one of us to keep up or comprehend.

Sometimes Evolution Goes Backward

My goddaughter had a birthday yesterday, so she and her family came to visit. Five kids, or, more accurately, four and one new adult. This gave me a good excuse to keep working with the fancy new ice cream machine. I made four flavors.

I have totally mastered cherry vanilla and butter pecan, and I have great confidence that my next batches of peach and Heath bar crunch will be perfect. It’s time to ask myself what other flavors I need to make before I stop building my ice cream armament. I don’t need a lot of flavors to be happy. As it is, I will never need to buy ice cream again unless I want a novelty like a Nutty Buddy or ice cream sandwich.

I used a bag of crushed Heath bars from the grocery store. This was a mistake. They’re worthless. They’re not just broken. They’re ground. The biggest pieces are like peas. If I do it again, I’ll buy bars and break them.

Based on Internet research saying most people prefer artificial vanilla to the real thing, I tried fake vanilla in one of my flavors. It was not terrible, but it wasn’t that good, either. Expensive vanilla is much, much better.

Here’s what I concluded: most people don’t know what tastes good. I knew that already, because Budweiser is the most popular beer in the country. The guy who is trying to replace Christopher Kimball at America’s Test Kitchen tried fake vanilla in a blind test, and he preferred it. That should have told me all I needed to know. Kimball was the spine that held the organization up. The new guy strikes me as a cooking school wonder who knows everything about food while lacking the ability to create or recognize success. Many of the bad meals you’ve had at restaurants were prepared by culinary school graduates, so it should never surprise anyone when a person with scary cooking credentials can’t cut it.

People worship James Beard, but his recipes aren’t good. The Joy of Cooking should be called The Joy of Indigestion. It’s the way of the world.

One of my guests suggested I try my hand at peppermint. That should be simple. Vanilla ice cream without the vanilla. Add crushed peppermint candy and mint extract.

I can’t eat chocolate without regretting it because of the caffeine and theobromine, but it is conceivable that I might eat it anyway from time to time in the future. I have an urge to try to duplicate Ben & Jerry’s Everything but the Kitchen Sink. It’s chocolate and vanilla ice cream with peanut butter cups and bits of toffee bars mixed in. An Internet search tells me it also contains white chocolate chunks and fudge-covered almonds. I don’t recall running into those items, but then when I eat ice cream, I don’t study it and take notes.

Making a mixed ice cream would be laborious. I would have to make two batches in chocolate and vanilla and combine them. Not sure I want to go through that for a product I don’t plan to eat.

The machine needs a rolling cart, so I blew $88 on steel. I bought 1″ square tubing with 1/8″ walls. I thought thick walls would make welding less risky. Welders can blow through tubing easily. When I saw the price and lifted the steel, I felt I should have gone with thinner tubing. I’m no engineer, so I made a mistake. It’s not a problem, though. I’ll just have a really strong cart I won’t want to lift.

The plan is to put three wooden shelves in it, and I’m going to use the casters that were left over when I put my smoker on a factory-made cart (which I should have built myself).

In related news, I keep wanting to make new workbenches. My old bench of all trades is extremely sturdy, but I built it before I knew anything. It has no wheels, it’s less than ideal for woodworking, and it should probably weigh 100 pounds less.

I finally bought real blades for my Powermatic 66 the other day, and it got me thinking about a woodworking bench. I started thinking about designs. Fresh from the success of building my steel and wood shooting bench I thought I should go against convention and make a woodworking bench with a welded base.

Woodworkers tend to be true believers, and that means they make everything out of wood. They are hostile to certain new ideas, and they really like bench designs that are hundreds of years old. One was created by a famous Frenchman named Roubo. Another one was designed by an Englishman named Nicholson. Actually, these guys may have simply passed on designs that were already traditional. I don’t know.

These benches are very heavy for two reasons, neither of which has anything to do with function. First, wood has a poor strength-to-weight ratio compared to metal, so it takes a lot to do the same job, and second, the people who designed them knew nothing about designing rigid structures.

A typical woodworking bench will have a solid top at least three inches thick. This gives you a nice, stiff surface to work on, and it allows you to make deep holes that will work with bench dogs and holdfasts.

A holdfast is a steel rod with a hook on one end. The hook has a flattened end. You put the other end of the holdfast in a hole and slide it down until the flat part rests on your project. Then you whack the holdfast and drive it into the hole until it wedges in there. It’s a great invention. Really holds things in place, and it’s quick to use. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work well if your bench is thin.

A bench dog is a cylinder of wood that fits in the same holes holdfasts use. You can pull a bench dog up and rest a piece of wood against it while you work it. The dog will keep it from moving away from you. Again, you need deep holes.

At some point during the last millennium, engineers discovered the torsion box. This is a fancy term for a hollow box with supporting members inside it. You build a lattice of crossmembers and then enclose it in two sheets of material like plywood. What you get is a box which is very strong for its weight, and it’s easy to make it flat by sizing the internal members accurately. Many wooden doors are torsion boxes. Nobody wants a door that weighs 200 pounds.

A guy named Paulk designed a bench top which is a torsion box. It’s pretty neat. The top and bottom are several inches apart, and he put holes in the sides of the box so he could reach in and put tools inside it. That feature alone makes the design brilliant. When I first started thinking about building a new bench, I thought I would glue two-by-fours together side by side and make a thick top. Now I realize that was stupid. I want a torsion box.

Problem: how do you put deep holes in a torsion box? The top and bottom may be an inch thick, but there is air between them. I would want holes with wood around them all the way down.

I thought about it last night. Here’s what you do: you add internal members with holes drilled through them. You only need a couple of rows of holes, so you can add two extra members just for drilling them. The holes would weaken the members, so drilling through members that need to be solid would be bad, but adding extra members wouldn’t hurt anything. In fact, you wouldn’t need members running all the way across the bench. You could use cubes of wood.

Problem solved.

What about making holes in the sides of the bench for access to the storage space? Making holes like that in wood is a pain. Why not use steel?

Make yourself a steel frame from tubing. Put plywood on the top and bottom, screwed in for easy replacement. Instead of a few little holes for access, you could have three sides of the bench wide open. One end would have to be covered by an end vise, and part of one side would be blocked by a vise on the front, but other than that. you would have tons of access for storage and cleaning.

Put the box together. Weld up a rolling base. Attach the base to the wood of the box, not the welded base. Install vises. Done.

Any woodworker who is reading this must be screeching by now.

Would the bench top be too flexible to make a good surface for pounding? First of all, why would you be pounding? Woodworking doesn’t require that. Second, many people already use benches with relatively thin tops, and they are doing fine.

I saw a neat bench on Adam Savage’s Youtube channel. A guy named Andrew Klein gave it to him. Klein works for Magswitch, and he also has a side business.

I was awestruck by the bench. It has a base with four legs made from what looks like 5″ steel tubing with 1/2″ walls. The top is two slabs of hardwood that appear to be 4″ thick. It has two geared twin-screw vises Klein makes and sells. The dogs have steel shafts, and the holes contain magnets so the dogs stay up when you raise them.

The more I looked at the bench, though, the more I thought I saw bad engineering.

I don’t know what the bench weighs. Maybe 500 pounds? Savage was happy about that, but overbuilding is one of the best-known hallmarks of bad engineering. I know; I’ve done it. Weight means increased material, production, and shipping costs. It means increased difficulty in handling finished products. It means waste. It’s a clumsy way of handling problems you can’t address properly because you’re not a good engineer.

If you ever read a welding textbook, you’ll learn that one of the main things that drive the study of weldments is a desire to reduce weight. People who don’t know anything about engineering love to talk about how “beefy” their tools are. It’s like bragging that your car has solid tires made of steel. It’s a demonstration of ignorance. I’m no engineer, but even I know these things. You don’t have to be a Georgia Tech grad to get this far.

The bench has no wheels. That’s insane. I say that as the guilty creator of a bench with no wheels. Why would you make an extremely heavy tool you can’t move without a forklift? Smart shop owners put everything they can on wheels. The more you can move things around, the smaller and less expensive your shop can be without sacrificing comfort or much convenience.

What about the magnetic dogs? At first, I thought they were cool. Then I thought about Paul Sellers. He’s a British woodworker who is very big on Youtube. He’s a real expert. His dogs are bits of scrap wood with springs he makes from coat hangers. I have some I made myself. They work great, so why drive yourself nuts with rare earth magnets?

Now, the vises. They are beautiful, and the cost is very reasonable. They are probably a little better than competing vises from companies like Veritas. Veritas uses bicycle chains to connect and synchronize the screws on its vises, while Klein uses gears, and gears are sturdier and don’t need adjustment. Klein’s vises have transmissions so you can shift into high gear and move them fast.

I thought the vises were neat. Then I asked myself: “How are they significantly better than what I have right now?”

I made a Moxon vise for my bench. It’s a long block of maple with two holes in it. Two long Acme screws run through it, and there are handwheels to turn the screws. I can put longer and wider objects in it than will fit in most factory vises. I can put things in it that reach down to the floor; nothing gets in the way. I can fasten it on objects that are tapered because the screws aren’t synchronized. It doesn’t have a speed mode, the way the Klein vises do, but I have never felt I needed that. If I really want that feature, I can create it using half-nuts.

The Veritas vise is also very good, and unlike Klein’s boutique vise, it’s available. I don’t have to wait for a guy to make it in his basement.

The bench top…beautiful. Tombstone-thick maple with a glossy finish. But what is the purpose of all that weight? Answer: to make Adam Savage feel good. If loving your tool is your goal, buy what you like, but what if you just want to make things?

Savage has already put a big sheet of leather on the bench to protect it, and that shows how shortsighted the design is. A bench is like a pair of boots or gloves. You’re not supposed to protect it. You’re supposed to protect the work. A bench shouldn’t be sanded with 400 grit and finished with 10 coats of polyurethane. It should be bare wood. Imagine fussing with a giant sheet of cowhide every time you use a workbench. Ridiculous.

I made a shooting bench from 2″ steel tubing, a few screws, and some pressure-treated two-by-sixes. You could literally rest a car on it. If it weren’t for the two pneumatic tires on one end, you could never wiggle it at all by using tools on it. It’s way overbuilt. It probably weighs 150 pounds now that the wood is dry. I can lift one end of it and roll it 50 yards by myself. I do it all the time. I should have made it even lighter.

If I made a woodworking bench from the same tubing, it would be just as sturdy. Each leg might weigh 7 pounds. What do the legs on Savage’s bench weigh? Maybe 10 times that? For no reason.

I can use 2″ tubing for the base of my bench. I can put a caster on each corner. I can add feet that lower with screws when the bench is where I want it, so it won’t move when I push on a hand plane. It will feel like the Rock of Gibraltar, I’ll be able to move it unaided, I’ll have a ton of handy storage, and when the top gets beaten up, it will take me half an hour to put a new one on.

I can throw two Veritas vises on it, or I can buy two Moxon parts kits (because I am tired of making the parts). No need to wait for vises with transmissions. Done. Bang. Next problem, please.

I looked into leg vises. Long story short: no. Twin-screw vises are better.

Isn’t it bad to have screws in the top of a woodworking bench? No. Why would it be bad? Don’t plane the screws. Don’t chisel them. Countersink them a little to keep them out of your way. No problem.

I can make one bench for wood and another one for general use. I can put my old bench on the burn pile, using the tractor. If I move, my new benches will roll onto a truck.

I really don’t see the point in reverting to Fred Flintstone design policies. It seems to me that a half-ton woodworking bench is like a big sign saying, “I reject every intelligent thing man has learned since 500 A.D.”

I kind of wonder if I need a wood bench at all. Why not use a welding table? I have thought about buying a real fixturing table made from 1/4″ or 3/8″ plate. It’s a steel torsion box. They’re very popular. Why couldn’t I do woodworking on it? Mounting vises would be interesting, to say the least, but there is no reason why you can’t make wooden projects on a steel table.

Something to think about.

Speaking of Fred Flintstone, I saw a video about Nick Offerman. He’s the actor who played Ron Swanson on TV. Swanson is a hilarious caricature of an old-fashioned libertarian, whereas Offerman is your standard Hollywood liberal with full-blown Trump Derangement Syndrome. After watching Swanson, Offerman is a big disappointment. He’s a gun control nut.

I’ll post a video of Ron Swanson just for fun.

Anyway, Offerman is a woodworker. He has a beautiful shop. You can see it in videos. When you look at his setup, you wonder what kind of furniture he makes. It must be cleverly designed and painstakingly crafted.

Well, not so much. He makes Flintstone furniture. I’ll post a photo.

You may think it looks nice. Well, sure. God designed it. Nick Offerman voted absent.

This is a style of furniture which is very popular now. You take thick slabs that could be used to make a lot of quality furniture, and instead of coming up with a real design, you run them through a jointer, fasten them together crudely, slap some Danish oil on them, and call it art. Funny thing: it’s the opposite of art. “Art” means something which has been transformed by the mind of man.

The crude furniture people make now reminds me of the increasing use of the word “rustic” in cooking. You’ve seen it. A “rustic” pizza is a pizza that looks like a kitchen accident because it was made by an unskilled person. “Rustic” means “crudely made due to lack of skill.” Offerman’s table is definitely rustic, although it may be a superficial rusticity. He can probably do a lot better. I hope he can.

I have zero skills, yet given a big enough planer, I could make this table in an afternoon. In gluing extremely thick pieces of wood together, I would waste many pounds of wood which could have been turned into genuine pieces of craftsmanship.

If there is anything good about this style, it’s that it preserves thick slabs of valuable wood until the furniture can be demolished and the wood used in better projects.

Here’s a modern chair made by a guy named Maloof. It’s from the Smithsonian’s collection. Not really my thing, but it’s graceful, skillfully crafted, and pleasing to the eye. Compare it to Fred and Barney’s table, above.

The chair serves to remind us of the difference between art and copping out.

Offerman, like Klein and Savage, has fallen prey to the beefy bug. Instead of a graceful table with a design that required human input, he created a crude device useful mainly for rupturing disks. If God thought like these guys, birds would be unable to fly. A chicken would weigh 40 pounds. All fish would be bottom dwellers. The weight of their bones would glue them to the seabed.

Birds have air inside their bones to reduce weight, but many birds are extremely strong. The other day I saw a video of a cockatoo which probably weighed two pounds, lifting a pumpkin and throwing it off a kitchen counter. That’s not rustic. That’s engineering.

What purpose did Offerman serve here? He didn’t design anything. He found something that occurred under the random influences of nature and presented it nearly as-is. He’s not a maker. He’s a finder.

Offerman’s type of furniture is known as “live edge.” I don’t know why they call it that. The wood is dead. Maybe they didn’t want to call it “rustic edge.”

The idea is that the outermost part of the wood isn’t cut away. You would think it makes every piece of furniture unique, but in reality, it makes them all look the same. Go to Google Images and look up “live edge furniture.” It’s like a giant Offerman exhibit, but he didn’t make any of the pieces.

Live edge woodworkers are fungible. One’s work is just like another’s. There is no need for any particular live edge woodworker to exist. Any other member of the crew can step in and finish his work exactly as he would have.

I could swear I hear Ayn Rand shouting at me.

Mr. Maloof is a real woodworker. Nick Offerman is just a guy who stacks slabs.

Nick Offerman is funny, but he’s not on my list of most-admired people. His Trump issues are disturbing, and he nearly ruined Lagavulin whisky for me. It has been my favorite whisky for many years, because it’s the best whisky there is. Offerman’s Swanson character came alone and started drinking it, and now I feel like I should hide my bottle. Remember how you wanted to hide your cowboy boots after Urban Cowboy came out? Same thing. My guess is that Offerman didn’t know what Lagavulin was until he read about it in a script.

I don’t know if I’ll make a new bench or not, but at least I was saved from the beefy bug. An afternoon of Googling did that for me.

It’s time to go blast some squirrels. They smoke up pretty good. It’s fun being a lot more like Ron Swanson than Nick Offerman will ever be.

MORE

Ready for an whale-choking dose of irony? I just learned that the TV character Ron Swanson designed the Maloof chair pictured above. The exact same chair.

I was looking at clips of Ron Swanson in action, and I came across one in which a lady tried to license a chair design Swanson had created. When they showed the chair, I was stunned. I’ll post a photo.

What are the odds?

Does Maloof know a fictional person is taking credit for his talent?

I don’t watch the show, so there is now way I could have seen Ron with the chair in the past. I found the Maloof chair by Googling “chair” along with “Smithsonian,” figuring the Smithsonian probably had a collection of historic furniture.

If ever you needed evidence that Nick Offerman is inferior to his broadcast persona, look no further.

I checked Offerman’s website and found that not all of his furniture is Flintstone tribute material, so it appears that if he ever got his head straight he could conceivably improve his work and successfully ascend the Swanson Pyramid of Greatness.

Surfing the Shock Wave of America’s Demise

I have often said I don’t get depressed. Depression was my normal state for my first three decades. I was crippled by a very dysfunctional family, I didn’t have enough character to overcome it, I didn’t know enough about God to get his help, and what I did know, I didn’t use. I wasn’t suicidal, homicidal, or ready for an institution, but I felt very bad a lot of the time.

After I was about 30, I didn’t have problems with depression, except for a short period while I was having problems in graduate school. I found some secular tools that helped temporarily, and before they ran out of gas, I turned back to God, and after that, I was fine.

Lately, though, I have started to feel a little listless. The inauguration sowed the seed. Over the last week or so, I’ve felt down, compared to my usual outlook.

Earthly life started to seem pointless. I was confident that America, the last major nation that was dominated by, and hospitable to, Christians, was in its death throes. I looked around me at the hysterical, irrational, ineffective restrictions imposed on us because of coronavirus, and it seemed to me that we were locked in place. Freedom of association was gone. Our ability to gather was a thing of the past. Evangelism and all the other functions Christians are supposed to perform were drastically curtailed, and online resources we used to compensate were being taken away by the cancel kids and their demon masters.

Our ability to accomplish our purpose by conventional means was greatly reduced, and we were headed into a time of extreme persecution which couldn’t end without ending the age we live in. Humanity was done with us for the most part, and only Jesus could rescue us and take us away.

This morning, I thought about it, and I realized the problem was not depression. It was grief.

Depression is sick and irrational. When you’re depressed, you tell yourself things that aren’t true. “I’m a loser.” “People don’t like me.” “My problems will get worse and worse. They will never be solved.” Grief is different. Grief, like joy, is a normal response to real events.

I was feeling grief because I believed my earthly country and my birth world were in the process of dying.

Grief is not an illness. It’s normal and proper. It’s not something you can treat away, because it has a real root that sustains it. Depression can be fixed by using supernatural tools, and even earthly tools can help a lot. Depression is abnormal and unhealthy, so you have to do something about it. Grief, on the other hand, has to be endured until it wears off.

Maybe that’s not completely true, though. Maybe God is willing to give Christians who are close to him supernatural joy to insulate us from grief while the world withers and the majority of people around us give themselves completely and permanently to the Antichrist. That must be true, because it’s exactly how God works, but how effective will his help be? We will still be bombarded with evidence of humanity’s self-destruction every day, and surely this will sometimes upset us.

I wonder if I’m feeling my own grief. I know God grieves, and sometimes he puts his own feelings in us.

I remember the first time I felt his grief. I’ve written about it before. I was visiting the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. I saw huge mounds of shoes and eyeglasses the Nazis and their collaborators took from Jews who were later murdered. I felt grief saturate me, and I knew it didn’t come from me. I’m not so sensitive or empathic that I naturally get upset by sights like that.

I feel grief when I think about that visit. I also feel grief whenever I see a photo or video of the World Trade Center’s towers. That’s not me. I’m more jaded than that.

Am I feeling God’s grief now, or am I just reacting the the prospect of spending the remaining years or days of my life in a nation and a world in which my vile enemies have been given permament hegemony? It’s like being on a ship where a majority of those aboard have voted to beat the rest of us to death and run into an iceberg.

I tend to think of God as someone who is perpetually happy, but that’s wrong. What’s the shortest verse in the Bible? “Jesus wept.” God has expressed sorrow many times. Jesus told the Jews how he had wanted to embrace them and help them, even as their leaders were in the process of working to murder him. Through the prophets, God has told us about his sadness and his anger. I always think of heaven as a place where there is no unhappiness, but that’s wrong. God himself experiences unhappiness. I don’t know if people in heaven can be unhappy, but God can, at least until all his enemies are far away, burning forever, and the suffering of his children is finished.

I don’t know how long I’ll be here, and I still have to function. I have to attend to my responsibilities, and I don’t want unhappiness to become my normal state, so I can’t sit and wallow in grief. I’m going to apply my knowledge and get God’s help every day. Maybe I’ll be on Earth another 20 years and there will be enough pleasure and success in it to make it well worth it. I can’t sit and do nothing and bank on the rapture.

I wonder if there is still some way for things to improve. Will some way for Christians to socialize and do their job materialize? Will a day come when the masks come off? That would be nice. I don’t see it happening, though. We are being lied to on a grand scale. The government pays hospitals richly to call deaths “coronavirus-related,” so we are seeing obscenely inflated tallies which politicians will continue to use to extend their control. We’re supposed to believe America has 450,000 deaths, while Africa, which has a huge, unruly population and very limited medical resources, has a small fraction of that number. There are 1.3 billion people in Africa, and all of Africa has been exposed, so where are the deaths?

We’re also being told the seasonal flu magically disappeared. If the CDC is to be believed, there is no flu epidemic this year. The infection and death rates are close to zero. That doesn’t happen. Obviously, flu deaths are being turned into profitable coronavirus deaths. Either that, or God has restrained the flu and given us an “impossible” scenario in able to make us understand that coronavirus came from him.

Next, we’ll probably be told the vaccines are disappointing. They’ll probably keep telling us they work wonders, to get us to take them, and then those lucrative coronavirus deaths will mysteriously keep coming, enabling the government to keep the shackles in place and increase our ties to the socialist colonial organism.

It will be interesting to see what happens, but I don’t expect things to get better.

I had a weird thought about the way coronavirus attacks prisons and old folks’ homes while sparing the young. Is it possible the plague is focusing on people who are too corrupt to be changed?

It wouldn’t be all that controversial to suggest that prisons are full of hopeless, evil sociopaths who might as well be dead and who would be typical targets for God’s plagues, but can I really be serious when I say residents of assisted living facilities also draw God’s wrath?

Here’s something to think about. It’s a fact. Old unbelievers are extremely unlikely to change. Any evangelist will tell you this. People who can never belong to God because of pride and love of sin will, obviously, get old without improving. What kind of elderly people end up in homes? Not the blessed kind. Dementia and physical disabilities are curses.

Maybe ALF’s are getting hit hard not because of the confinement and the apathy of the caregivers, but because the resident population contains a lot of people whose nature attracts curses such as plagues.

If you’re locked in a building that smells like urine and feces, other people tell you what to do, you don’t know your children’s names, and you’re wearing a diaper, aren’t you cursed already? Why should one more curse be a surprise?

On the other end of the spectrum, children have very little culpability and much more potential, and it’s rare for children to die from covid or even to have symptoms. The older a population gets, the larger the percentage of culpable people becomes, and coronavirus works the same way. The older you are, the bigger the threat.

It looks a lot like progressive punishment.

It’s impossible to make sense of coronavirus. Either the facts they give us are false, or the disease itself defies the laws of nature. Or both things are true.

Nothing about coronavirus makes sense. The Chinese should have nipped it in the bud. They did a much better job with SARS, so we know they could have done better this time. Other countries should have focused on isolating the vulnerable instead of punishing all of us needlessly and inflicting unnecessary economic hardship. Once the virus was established, it shouldn’t have had any effect on the flu rate. It should have hit Africa harder than any other continent, but Africa has been spared, and wealthy America has the worst statistics. It virtually disappeared in China, in spite of everything the government did to help it spread. Established science told us masks don’t do much to stop the spread of respiratory bugs, and experts admitted this at first. Then they got the government to force us to wear masks anyway, and there was no noticeable flattening of the curve. Lockdowns should have worked, but they didn’t affect the curve, either, any more than they would have affected the curse on Egypt’s firstborn. Masks and lockdowns haven’t worked, and we need to be set free in order to avoid a recession, but our liberty is decreasing, not increasing.

The expert explanations are silly theories that are more heavily based on politics than science, and even experts don’t claim their theories are solid. They admit they’re guessing.

This is 2021. We know how epidemics work. Why can’t we figure coronavirus out?

If there is one blessing about the upheavals we see around us, it’s that God is helping us to see who and what can be relied on. I learned I couldn’t trust certain things I did in order to communicate with God. I got the impression that the rapture was coming in December, and it didn’t happen (unless it was really small), so that was a good lesson for me. A whole bunch of people “prophesied” that Trump would win, and some are still doing it while our permanently-gagged ex-President plays golf in Florida. I’ve only seen one individual admit he was wrong. Many people are clinging to bizarre theories and refusing to hold false prophets accountable, but the honest have learned there are certain people they can’t trust. That’s positive.

Here are a few of the preachers who prophesied incorrectly:

Kat Kerr
Kim Clement
Pat Robertson
Bill Johnson
Kris Valloton (admitted error later but pulled down apology video due to pressure from supporters)
Paula White
Hank Kunneman
Jeremiah Johnson
Mark Taylor
Lance Wallnau
Denise Goulet
Greg Locke
Marcus Rogers

Trump advisor Kenneth Copeland, who is about as good a copy of Satan as there could ever be, denied Biden’s victory and went into a bizarre spasm of what appeared to be demonic laughter.

These people, aside from the lunatic Copeland, who is beyond help, should really be talking about their failure instead of holing up and hoping people will forget. No one is going to forget. The enemies of God will still be reminding us when Jesus comes. I’m surprised their prophecies weren’t included in Super Bowl commercials. Pretending nothing happened is disgraceful and silly.

I thought Trump would win, but I never claimed it was a prophecy or a certainty, because I didn’t know for sure. I felt it would be very much in line with the increasing polarization and hate in America. I thought if Trump won, it would inflame already-smoldering insane leftist hate and cause our cold civil war to go hot. That made sense to me, and I also felt great faith for a Trump win when I prayed, but while God was surely willing to answer our prayers, American voters, who actually held the power to decide, were not.

Sometimes we pray to God when the only ones who can answer our prayers are other people.

A guy I used to think heard from the Holy Spirit now says the government of the United States has been arrested. Apparently, the troops in DC have arrested everyone who is against Trump, and he will be brought back in triumph. He has not explained how Pelosi and the rest still appear in public, doing their jobs without shackles. How he can believe what he believes and still be sane enough to function is beyond me.

Trump associated with the wrong people. He palled around with money preachers and self-promoters. Maybe this is why he failed. I can relate. I used to associate with them, too. Maybe if he had been in touch with the Holy Spirit, and he had surrounded himself with real men of God, God would have been able to shape his actions so he would have been more appealing to the electorate.

Too many Christians ended up worshiping Trump, America, and ourselves.

For a long time, I’ve been asking God to take down the corrupt ministries and bring power and help to the people who speak the truth. The money preachers took a big hit when Trump lost, so does that mean God is also helping hordes of obscure individuals who are out there giving people the straight dope? I hope so. I’ve been expecting that to happen for years.

I’m going to keep focusing on prayer and repentance. I’m going to try to get God’s help to increase the activities that work for me. I don’t know how pleasant life can be under the current circumstances, but I want to make the most of it instead of being a whiner and accomplishing nothing.

My Creationism is Better Than Yours

I am free. I deleted my Christian Mingle account. I didn’t just cancel it. I removed it. I also removed my credit card from my account, because I had read about people having difficulty stopping payments.

The last straw came when I realized even the ugly and very old “women” who contacted me were generally men in Africa. It was like a vision of hell. I see hell as a place where nothing goes right and you are reminded constantly that you have failed. That’s Christian Mingle.

When I was a little kid, I had nightmares most nights. I had the same dreams over and over. In one of the dreams, I was at a party. We were outdoors. It was a beautiful day. There was grass under our feet, and we were surrounded by trees. It felt like a birthday party in my honor. I would approach the other partygoers, and adults I really liked would come up to me and smile and hold their arms out. Then every part of them would start to twist and fall to pieces, and as this happened, their expressions would change from warm smiles to cruel leers. The leers would persist until their faces were gone.

This, in a nutshell, is what Christian Mingle is like. You start communicating with someone who has a very interesting profile and reasonably attractive pictures. Then you get a message that says something like, “hi handsome how is you doing come to hangouts for my sexy foto.”

I have always believed my childhood nightmares came from demons who enjoyed bullying children. I guess they moonlight in the pus-oozing souls of dating scammers.

If the scammers are like demons, the management of Christian Mingle is like Satan himself. It oversees them. It knows about the scammers, and it could get rid of the majority of them in a week, with simple software changes. Those changes are not made, because scammers pay. Christian Mingle gets a big percentage of its revenue from them. In reality, they are probably more important to Christian Mingle than real customers. Real customers get disgusted and leave, but scammers stick around like stubborn stains. To leave Christian Mingle would be to give up their careers.

I think some of the morbidly obese women I heard from are real, although they might not be, because Africans tend to think obese women are sexy, and they may assume Americans feel the same way. I think the lady with no hands or feet was real. The 77-year-old was probably real. Other than that, just about everyone was clearly a scammer.

As for my other forays into new Internet arenas, MeWe is going well, and I rarely look at Rumble.

MeWe is the alternative to Facebook. It in no way compares to Facebook. It has a tiny membership. But the people are less insane, censorship and punishment for thoughtcrime are extremely light, and MeWe doesn’t chase you all over the web, selling you to untold thousands of annoying advertisers.

I have had some issues with MeWe. I joined an AR-15 group because the AR-15 is an extremely, amazingly difficult gun to understand, work on, and use, and I thought I would find help. I quit the group because the members were hostile, immature potential mass shooters.

Okay, I don’t know if they’re potential mass shooters, but I think militia membership is a serious possibility for many of them. And I got tired of watching their profane chat roll by in a window I could not completely get rid of.

I dumped the group without notice. It wasn’t for me.

I also declined two contact requests. I realized they were from right-wing spammers who wanted to fill my screen with political memes. I have an existing contact who does the same thing, but I muted him or whatever.

I joined a gun group, and today some idiot put up a porn spam post. It was a photo of a whore in her underwear, and the caption said something like, “Do you want to see my gun?” What is that supposed to mean? I blocked and reported the account, but I still belong to the group.

Other than these problems, the site is okay. I have had useful interactions with other men who use tools.

Rumble seems to be about 98% political content and spam, and political spam. Other than that, not much happens there. But you can put up a video with the title “Sodomy is an Abomination” and not be bothered. I think you can also put up nearly any gun-related content you want. Not sure.

I criticized the movie 2001 here the other day. Then I did something which may sound odd. I borrowed the novel from The Open Library. I finished it yesterday afternoon.

It was a very creepy experience. As I have said, the book ends with a single man aging in luxurious but solitary quarters while a superior being looks after him and installs upgrades. Then he leaves his worn-out body and becomes a giant space baby, implying he has evolved into a better life form. The story bothers me, because I am a single man aging in luxurious but solitary quarters while a superior being looks after me and installs upgrades.

I always say the earth is God’s womb, and our purpose here is to make it through gestation and be born into a better universe.

The book’s author is Arthur Clarke, an eccentric engineer who did something or other that was really important in the development of communications satellites.

Here is the obvious question: why make up a creation myth involving imaginary beings that do pretty much what God does, when you could just accept God? Likely answer: because you’re too proud to do things God’s way. You want to hold onto self-confidence. You don’t want to give up sin. You don’t want to lose your homosexual friends. Hey, living rooms don’t decorate themselves.

You know how the story works. Aliens leave an object on earth, and it improves monkeys so they can use tools. They turn into human beings. Then another object improves human beings so one of them turns into a big onmipotent space baby. In the novel, the space baby goes back to Earth and blows up an orbiting device which threatens to rain nuclear destruction. I think this means he’s ending the nuclear race, but I’m not sure, since detonating the device, for all I know, is his way of spraying away a bothersome human infestation.

My guess is that it’s Clarke’s clumsy, predictable comment on bad, bad nuclear weapons.

Here’s the weird thing about the novel: it posits a world in which evolution does not happen. It’s a denial of science.

If the aliens hadn’t left the big black box with the monkeys, they would have starved to death due to stupidity. The novel doesn’t just imply this. It states it. The monkeys live in a world which has been stricken with drought for 10 million years. They are too dumb to form social attachments. They are even too stupid to fight together when leopards show up. Clarke tells us the idea of uniting against natural enemies doesn’t occur to them. Without help, they will never make it.

This is not the way nature works. It’s amazing how ignorant Clarke was. Even bees will gather to fight intruders. I’m not going to sit here and make a list of animals that gang up on other animals. It’s too obvious a notion to have to defend. Even rats have social attachments.

The idea that animals just give up and die out when nature changes is pretty much the opposite of what the theory of evolution predicts. I studied evolution in college under a naturalist, and while I am no expert, I can give you the basics. The environment provides challenges known as selection forces or something like that. In a sufficiently large population of creatures, there will generally be some individuals that possess genetic advantages that allow them to reproduce a lot in spite of the pressures. Those advantages become more common in the general population as the descendants of the advantaged creatures replace the descendants of the ones that can’t hack it. Sooner or later, the advantages become standard equipment. This, science tells us, is how we made the transition from globs of inanimate proteins, then to people who think Kim Kardashian is interesting, then to monkeys, and then to classical composers and theoretical physicists.

If it sounds like a stupid theory, I agree. There are big holes in it, and you can read about them in works written by evolutionist diehards, not just creationists.

A lot of people think evolution means the process of going from simple creatures to brilliant, complicated creatures. That’s totally wrong. There is no reason why evolution couldn’t make creatures dumber and simpler. The driving force is reproductive success, not nature’s innate craving for symphonies and fusion reactors. It’s a little odd that evolutionists think human intelligence is the product of evolution, given the way trashy people out-reproduce smart ones.

Why an atheist engineer would write an anti-science, pro-creationism book is beyond me. My guess is that he didn’t see it for what it was. He may have been a brilliant engineer, but STEM people tend to be lacking in other types of intelligence as well as common sense.

2001 is definitely a creationist book. It just substitutes black boxes for the actual creator.

Here’s a problem for Clarke: if the super-evolved alien beings were necessary to improve human beings and turn them into similar beings, who did it for the aliens? In his version of science, the ancestors of the aliens would have been just as lame as ours, but they didn’t have other aliens to help them, so where did they come from?

From the vortex of cognitive dissonance. That’s my bet. The same place where Jews got the idea that leftists who hate Israel are their friends and conservative Christians are their enemies. The place where Americans got the idea that the Proud Boys are terrorists but BLM and Antifa are civil rights organizations.

Clarke was not a deep thinker, outside of engineering. It looks like he’s in the same boat as Einstein, a man whose useless remarks about life get way too much admiration, simply because he was good at one thing.

I feel like going outside now and blasting a couple of squirrels I just saw in the yard. Wish me luck.

This Blog is my Silver Alert System

Today I decided to borrow 2001: a Space Odyssey from the Open Library.

Why did I do it? Something akin to morbid curiosity. I wanted to see if the book was as bad as the movie.

You’re not supposed to say 2001 or any other Kubrick movie is bad, but it was. It was extremely boring, and the uninteresting theme could be summarized on a postage stamp. A kid in elementary school (or, more likely, in his freshman year of college and high on weed) could have come up with it, and I’m sure many, many have.

Kubrick made other bad movies. The Shining was awful. I can’t understand how The Killing ever made it past the script stage. I threw out my Paths of Glory DVD. Full Metal Jacket was entertaining until Pyle died, but overall, it was a clumsy slander of the United States and our military.

Dr. Strangelove was a brilliant comedy with a trite, nonilluminating premise, but the credit should probably go to the screenwriter. A Clockwork Orange was very entertaining. Not the healthiest fare, however. Kubrick made beatings, murder, and rape funny. They’re actually not.

I haven’t seen any other Kubrick films. Maybe they’re fantastic and I missed out. I may have seen Spartacus, but I can’t recall. I know I’ve seen bits of it. It appears that it didn’t rock my world.

Kubrick is like Robert Altman. People fawn over him, but when you watch his films, it makes you wonder if they were paid off.

If you’re not familiar with 2001, let me ruin it for you. I’m doing you a favor.

A big box appears to filthy monkeys who will later evolve into us. It magically enables them to use tools, so they learn to use bones as clubs. Then the movie skips a little bit of our history, and we find another box on the moon, where we have a base. The box sends radio waves to Jupiter. How we figure out they were aimed specifically at Jupiter, I do not know. We send a huge spacecraft to Jupiter. The spacecraft’s paranoid computer kills all but one crew member. That crew member ends up alone in a badly decorated hotel room in space, where he spends about 60 years getting old and dying. He expires as another box looks on from the foot of his bed. Then he turns into a giant space embryo.

That’s really all there is to it.

If it doesn’t sound profound or even clever to you, I can relate. If Interstellar is a Shakespeare play, 2001 is a Dick and Jane book.

See the box. See the monkeys. “Dick, do you see the bone?,” said Jane.

One reason I felt like looking at the book (a project I may well abandon) is that I feel somewhat like Dave, the crew member trapped in the hotel room. I am in a luxurious environment, secluded from humanity, while a greater being improves me and prepares me for the next phase of my existence.

My computers have not tried to kill me yet, however.

Or maybe they have, but they’re being really sneaky about it.

I think my ice cream machine will get me first.

In other news, my Christian Mingle situation continues to deteriorate. I complained because I was running into only two types of women: numerous African men, with gorgeous stolen photos, pretending to be women, and a trickle of ugly women who were all too real. Since then, I have learned that some of the ugly women are also scammers.

What does it say about you when African con artists think you’re so desperate you’ll abandon all the rules of Internet safety in order to talk to a woman who looks like Roger Ebert? It’s definitely not a compliment.

If I were that desperate, I wouldn’t be single, now would I?

Desperate people marry young.

It reminds me of one of life’s strange truths: many successful prostitutes are ugly. There are beautiful women all over the world who can’t get a date, yet extremely unattractive women do a brisk trade, charging men for sex. I guess there must be Minglers who jump at the chance to converse with women I would cross the street in order to avoid making eye contact with.

Or maybe African scammers are even worse at their jobs than I thought.

I have noticed that women do something I have done. Sometimes the site sends me matches, and I’ll “like” women who look like possibles, just so they’ll be saved in case I decide to go back to them. When I look for them later, their profiles are gone. It means they looked at my profile, shrieked in horror, and blocked me. Maybe some of them have changed their names and moved to foreign countries.

I can’t complain. I’ve done it, too. I quit, though. Now when someone who could never, ever work out contacts me, I send them a very gentle rejection message. I don’t know if it helps, but it seems like the stand-up thing to do. It has to be better than hiding and treating them as though they’re not important enough to receive a response. I also pray for people I reject.

It won’t be long until my subscription runs out, and then I’ll be free again. Right now, I can’t quit looking. I am driven by curiosity. The desire to check the site is strong, but it’s not as strong as my desire to avoid giving the company more money.

The considerable unpleasantness of being involved in a ripoff dating site full of scammers is greater than the mild unpleasantness of living alone. Reaching out has actually made my life worse.

Am I going to be alone for the rest of my life? Could be. I know I’m not going to hitch myself to a woman in whom I have no interest. Maybe I should try to figure out what kind of preparation a man has to make when he expects to die single. Should I get an alert bracelet in case I fall off a ladder? Should I get disability insurance so I’ll end up in a relatively nice facility if I become demented?

Maybe old single men should form networks and keep an eye on each other. “I’m getting in the shower. If I don’t text again in half an hour, send help.”

I wonder if I could buy one of those 2001 boxes. I don’t know if it would work out. They like standing at the food of the bed, so I would constantly be telling it to get out from in front of the TV.

God will take care of my problems. I won’t worry about the future. Worst-case scenario: I don’t get everything I want here on earth, but in a few short years, I die and go where I really want to be.

Wonder What the Cool Kids are Up to

For around 9 years, I have been watching a popular Youtube machinist. He has gotten caught up in patriotism. He now begins every video with the Pledge of Allegiance, which I skip, and he puts out a lot of products with flags on them. He divorced his wife last year, and I have to wonder if it had to do with Trump and patriotism.

In a recent video, he said he was moving to MeWe and Rumble.

MeWe is a Facebook clone that does less to invade privacy and suppress freedom of expression. Rumble is a Youtube clone that has a similar philosophy.

As I have said many times, I am not impressed with alternative social media sites. They never seem to attract many people, and they will all eventually be shut down by the government or leftist-controlled corporations. Nonetheless, I felt a sudden impulse to follow this guy. Now I have two MeWe friends, and he’s one of them.

I checked out MeWe’s offerings, thinking I might find groups that would put me together with people with similar inclinations and beliefs. I was underwhelmed. Facebook groups have lots of members. MeWe groups’ member counts display numbers like 74 and 199. I reach more people than that right here, and Internet forums are on a completely different level.

Still, I joined a machining group, along with a Christian singles group, a hunting group, and so on.

The singles group is at around 200 members. It’s not exactly dead, but it barely moves. The same day I joined, an unattractive woman started messaging me. I’m not trying to be nasty. Just factual. There was just no way I could ever go near this lady.

Maybe many singles, including me, are holding out for people who are more attractive than they are.

I don’t feel bad about rejecting ugly women, regardless of how I look. Women and men have different wiring, for one thing. After all, Cher married Sonny Bono, and Sophia Loren married Carlo Ponti. Also, if I give up points for looks, what about the points the woman gives up? I’m not going to meet a suitable woman who is as smart as I am, for example. I am not likely to meet someone who is as well off as I am. I can’t expect every woman to match my knowledge, education, talents, or skills. I don’t write women off because they’re not my equals in every area.

It’s okay for me to avoid women who repel me physically. I’m not actually required by law to endure romance and physical contact with them.

The machining group is fairly lively, and it seems clear the members are generally conservative. That’s normal for machinists and other people who use traditional tools. Millennials are effeminate, left-leaning, and less likely to use things like torches and cabinet table saws. They go for 3D printing and desktop CNC, and they call themselves “makers,” which is typically pretentious.

I joined a Christian end times group. It’s generating pedantic posts, carnal arguments based on everything except the Holy Spirit’s guidance, and conspiracy theories. One very active guy appears to be an anti-Semite. He puts up memes criticizing Israel and circumcision. Not sure what circumcision has to do with the rapture, but he is really sore about it. He put up a meme claiming NATO had destroyed Libya’s amazing irrigation network with “nuclear bombs” made with depleted uranium. As everyone knows, depleted uranium is the kind you can’t use in bombs.

He claims women hate circumcision, and that it ruins sex for them by causing all sorts of problems. I’m no sex doctor, but even I know that’s nonsense.

I’ll just exit that group right now. Here goes.

Done.

I have a grand total of two contacts. I am trying to make a point of calling them contacts instead of friends. This morning, I thought I should make an effort to make new contacts. Then I realized I didn’t want to know any of these people.

That is an obstacle.

Not only is it unrewarding to initiate relationships with people you don’t want to know; it’s a little unethical. Why get their hopes up?

Rumble looks somewhat better. If you post a popular video, it may get thousands of views. Not dozens.

Should I start putting videos on Rumble? No. It takes hours for me to upload a Youtube video. I’m not willing to multiply that by two. I fully accept the fact that my Youtube account will be deleted eventually. I don’t care. Sometimes I consider deleting it myself. Also, Rumble itself will surely be taken down before too long, so what would I gain?

Actually, I might drop Youtube and use Rumble exclusively. I’m going to be removed from the web either way, and I might draw a better class of people.

My Christian Mingle account’s remaining time is dwindling. This morning while I was praying, I thought about one more hurdle that makes connecting with Christian women difficult: the serious ones always want to be your mom. They want to lecture and correct. You know what? Biblical marriage is not an equal partnership. The man is required to lead, especially in spiritual matters. No woman is going to scold me for doing what God put me here to do. If you don’t think God will lead you through me, why would you want me in the first place?

Why would I want someone who will not listen to me and who objects every time I do something helpful? I already have parrots for that.

Feminism is really toxic. It has infected Christians very deeply. I’m not sure I know what a correct Christian marriage looks like. I’ve never seen one.

This morning I asked God to tell me what to do and to make things work out, whether for marriage or remaining alone and unharried. I felt a huge burst of faith run through me. I couldn’t form words until it was over. Hoping for the best. It will be good to settle on one side of the question or the other.

Christian Mingle’s software matched me with a new lady yesterday, and we started chatting. She was the first one to write anything. Asked if we could communicate without expectations (be still, my heart), and I said it depended on whether she was a real American woman or the 9000th African scammer I had dealt with. She said she was a real American woman, but after that, she stopped responding. Is she a scammer or just an entitled princess who can’t handle honesty? Or is she just too busy to talk right now? A princess is just as useless as a scammer.

Yes. You’re past 50 and you look it, your online description is lackluster, you have kids I do not want to raise, and still, I’m going to chase you around with a glass slipper and tell you you’re the pinnacle of God’s creation. I don’t think so. We are not Farm Boy and Princess Buttercup. If things go far better than the odds suggest, we might settle for each other, try to hide our disappointment, and be Harry and Sally. Best-case scenario.

I thought she might be a real woman because her profile isn’t all that appealing. The less attractive a woman is, the more likely she is to be bona fide. But maybe highly skilled scammers hack the accounts of women who aren’t high on the food chain, knowing men don’t trust overtures from beautiful young ladies.

It’s not going to go anywhere, regardless of the truth. She’s not for me. I only responded because I thought it might be a thrill to talk to a human being who isn’t a criminal.

If she turns out to be a man from Africa, it will be a harsh statement about Christian Mingle. When even the wicked stepsisters are mirages, things are pretty bad. It’s like picking fruit out of a dumpster and finding out it’s made of wax.

It is truly amazing that Christian Mingle continues to exist and receive payments from hopeful people, given that it does nothing whatsoever to screen out the scammers who make up maybe 95% of the members.

I guess their business model relies heavily on Africans. Companies charge people in poor countries less for the same goods and services than they charge people in the USA, so scammers are probably paying only a few dollars per month, yet because they are numerous and extremely loyal, they may provide the majority of Christian Mingle’s revenue.

Christian Mingle knows where their members really are. It’s simple to determine that automatically. They just don’t care.

I think I’ll leave the Christian singles MeWe group. I’ve literally had more fun at wakes. It’s like a mixer at an assisted living facility.

Done.

I’m not going to worry about marriage or being driven off the Internet. I’m not going to lie awake wondering what the children of darkness will do to us next. God told me all my problems are caused by lack of prayer, so I am praying more, and one of the things I ask for is help to pray more. God has taken extraordinary care of me so far, and I’m sure things will continue to get even better.