The Important Thing is How you Finish the Race

One of the big water hazards Christians have to avoid in the game of life is the belief that anyone who has a supernatural experience is as reliable as Yeshua on all points. This is not true. People who relate credible encounters with God in one form or another may be right about some things and tragically wrong about others because pride leads them to anoint themselves beyond the limits God prescribes.

Often, we treat people who have had supernatural experiences the way Catholics treat their usually-counterfeit relics. Okay, let’s assume you really do have John the Baptist’s toenail, and it’s not a toenail from a crooked priest who wanted to create a tourist attraction. It’s still just a toenail. You’re not supposed to assume it will cure all your diseases, fill you with revelation, and bring you salvation. If a person has an impressive supernatural experience, you’re not supposed to worship that person and go to him for answers on every religious topic.

Lazarus was a rotten corpse when Yeshua resurrected him, but we have no record of people going to him for miracles and correction. It looks like he knew his place.

Yesterday, I saw a couple of wonderful videos featuring a man who said he had died and returned, and he said things that made me feel assured that his experience and the lessons he learned were real. On the other hand, he has a blog, and on that blog, he pushes the antisemitic, incorrect Khazar theory, which was designed to convince Christians of three things: 1) most Jews have no genetic relationship to the Jews of the Bible, 2) we have replaced the Jews in every way, and 3) Jews are not entitled to possess Israel. These are dangerous antisemitic notions.

I’m not sure why we would want Israel anyway. No oil, no water, poor soil, hot summers, biting flies…give me Switzerland instead. Give me the alps. Give me California or Hawaii. Give me New Zealand. Be serious. I want a place that was built for pleasant living. If I want to worship in Jerusalem once in a while, I’ll get on a plane.

The man’s name is Howard Pittman. He said he died from a burst aneurysm and came back to life while doctors worked on him. He said he went to God’s throne room to plead for his life, and God let him live, but God also told him the good deeds he had done all his life were abomination. Pittman said he cited his good deeds, including taking in 32 children and pastoring a church, as evidence God should spare him, and God rebuked him instead.

It is worth noting that he didn’t say God told him he was damned. That’s a different subject.

Basically, he went to heaven. During the 15 minutes he was out of his body, 2000 people died on Earth. This is a credible figure that agrees roughly with statistics. He says 50 of those people went into the throne room before him and received salvation, and the rest did not enter the throne room and went to hell.

If the numbers he cited are right, then at the time of his visit, something like 7% of Christians were being saved, and the rest were damned. You have to assume only about a third of the 2000 people who died were Christians, so you can’t work with the whole 2000. To me, 7% is a relief. I would have expected fewer. I’m sure it would be fewer today; his experience took place almost half a century ago.

He said God told him he had done his works for himself. He also said God sent him back for a three-year ministry. He said God told him not to recruit people or locate people to talk to on his own, and he said that if he tried to find listeners without God’s help, he would be blocked.

He said God told him the baptism with the Holy Spirit was essential, and that shocked him, because he was a Baptist, and Baptists are generally hostile to the Holy Spirit.

He said God showed him that Satan had succeeded in taking control of the church, globally. He said Satan had done this by convincing people that righteousness was simply doing whatever they thought best. This agrees with the Bible. One of the most negative things the Bible says about people is that they did what seemed right in their own eyes. It’s not a compliment.

You can see this in the gay-friendly churches and the whimpering, approval-seeking ministries, like that of Joel Osteen, a useless and embarrassing jackass. “I don’t want to judge nobody. Just keep sending me money.”

His testimony is scary, and I think it is true. But I know how people are, so I decided to go to his website and check him out. There I saw the essay which appears to deny the Jewish claim to Israel.

He did not make the express claim that they are not entitled, but that seems to be the insinuation. He said Askenazi Jews are really the descendants of Khazars who converted, and he seemed to think that only blood descendants of Abraham could inherit Israel. The Khazars were people who lived in an area that was partly in Europe and partly in Asia.

Pittman was wrong for a lot of reasons. First of all, something like half of the Jews in Israel have no connection to Europe. They were driven out of the Middle East and Africa, as well as some other places, and they are unquestionably descended from the Jews (Hebrews, if you want to be picky) of ancient Israel. Many are descended from Jews who never left Israel. Second, conversion is valid, just like adoption. Third, even if Khazars became Jews, they would certainly have interbred with Jews descended from Abraham, and the fair thing would be to assume all are, for purposes of ties to Israel. Fourth, Jews are descended from Jacob, not Abraham, who gave rise to other groups through disobedience to God. Fifth, Ashkenazi Jews have at least some DNA consistent with descent from Jacob.

Pittman used an etymology to prove that “Hebrew” means “descendant of Abraham,” and for all I know, that is true, but if it is, it’s a misnomer. The Bible clearly shows that not all descendants of Abraham are Hebrews.

Looking at the web, I see there is a lot of confusion as to where “Hebrew” came from and who it accurately describes, but in any case, Jewish identity passed through Jacob, not Abraham.

Pittman misused the Bible to “prove” that Ashkenazi Jews can’t be Hebrews because “Ashkenaz” is the name of a Biblical Gentile. However, he failed to point out that the general region of Germany was named for Ashkenaz, and “Ashkenazi Jew” was just a way of describing Jews from that area. It was never intended to describe descent.

Pittman used the nutty pseudo-history of Arthur Koestler, a French Jew, to back up his Khazar notions. The whole Khazar theory comes from Koestler, who naively thought he could end antisemitism by proving European Jews were not related to the Jews who had the Romans murder Yeshua. Koestler made the whole story up, and people who hate Jews now use it as grist for their mill.

Modern testing has shown that Ashkenazi Jews are not related to Khazars, but facts don’t stop people who think conclusions as premises.

Pittman quoted the famous “synagogue of Satan” quotation from Yeshua, which was intended to say that Jews who rejected him were spiritually not Jews. It was not intended to say they were not Jews in any sense.

In John 8:37, Yeshua said he knew his fellow Jews were Abraham’s biological descendants. When he said they were not Abraham’s children, he meant they didn’t behave like Abraham.

You have to be dishonest, misinformed, or stupid to think Yeshua was saying the Jews of his time were not Jews at all. He was one of them. If they weren’t Jewish, neither is he, so he isn’t the Messiah or God.

It’s hypocritical of Pittman to use this quotation to invalidate Jewish claims, because he is the same man who said Satan ruled the worldwide church, which is true. Generally, the church is the church of Satan, and Pittman acknowledged it, but somehow he thought many Christians still belonged to God, and he appeared to believe Christians would inherit Israel.

My best guess is that this man truly visited heaven, and I think God told him some valuable things, but like every other person who has claimed to have such a visit, he was not instantly perfected or turned into an infallible source of spiritual knowledge. I think he became conceited, or perhaps he already was, and he convinced himself he was something he was not.

As things stand, it may be that an experience that should have been a blessing to many people has had a much greater impact as a tool for persecuting Jews. Or maybe Pittman was deceived about everything, and I just can’t see it yet.

He says he was in heaven for 15 minutes, yet somehow that was enough for him to become the source of all divine knowledge. He should have known better.

You have to be very careful about putting too much faith in men who experience supernatural events. They don’t receive omniscience and perfect character. Their purpose is not to become your lifelong teachers. They exist to connect you with the real teacher, the Holy Spirit. Once they succeed at that, they are your brothers, not your masters.

It Means You’re Doing Well

Not long ago, I was praying and prophesying, and I got this sentence: “The world hates me.”

I already knew that. The world hates everyone who might possibly be favored by God. The world hates people who really are close to God, and it hates people it thinks could be close to God now or in the future. It hates people preemptively, just in case they get close to God.

You can see this in action in the press coverage of Israel, a perennial victim of actual, openly confessed, state-sponsored, Muslim-sponsored genocide. The press tells us Israel is committing genocide when, in reality, the Jews are simply responding to a state of siege that has existed ever since Jacob’s time.

Jewish religious authorities missed the Messiah and think they please God when they make turning people away from him their life’s work, so you might say they’re not close to God, but he has not forgotten them. He has said a woman can forget a baby she breastfed, but he can’t forget Zion:

But Zion said, The Lord hath forsaken me, and my Lord hath forgotten me.

Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb? yea, they may forget, yet will I not forget thee.

Behold, I have graven thee upon the palms of my hands; thy walls are continually before me.

If God has not forgotten you, Satan and his children will remember you, too.

When God reminded me that the world hates me, it was helpful, because every so often, while I’m getting along with Satan’s children, one of them lets me know they can turn on me at any time.

I belong to a forum, and people were discussing Popular Mechanics. This used to be a wonderful magazine full of information about tool projects and methods. People were criticizing Pop Mech because, well, it stinks. It’s a horrible, boring magazine of little use to anyone.

As a former subscriber, I mentioned a couple of things I didn’t like about it.

Pop Mech has a relationship with Glenn Reynolds. This makes no sense at all. He has never shown any signs of knowing anything about tools or technology. He teaches law and posts links to things other people wrote on his blog. Far as I know, that’s about it. You might as well hire Tucker Carlson or Rachel Maddow to tell people about tools.

They should have been able to find someone, in the entire United States, who was familiar with tools and could also write.

Who will he write for next? The Lancet?

I didn’t like the articles I saw, either. In the old days, they might tell you how to run a water pipe under a concrete walk or build a meter for testing resistance. When my magazines started rolling in, they were full of useless junk.

First, the articles about tools were lame. “Find Out Which Inadequate Chinese Sustainable Organic Plastic-Handled Toolkit is Best to Keep in Your Frunk.” Stuff like that. And they published articles about “great tools” that were pretty clearly paid placement.

Second, the projects were awful. Simple plans for ugly furniture made of plywood, for example. It was like they had realized American men had stopped producing testosterone decades ago and were no longer capable of operating real tools with any degree of skill, so they pandered to men they assumed were afraid to use tools for fear of scratching their nail polish.

Maybe they dumbed down the projects in a futile effort to fan the flames of women’s nonexistent interest in tools. Women are different from men. They will always be in the minority in STEM fields and anything involving tools. There will probably always be 8 employed male engineers for every female, mainly because women are not interested in engineering. These truths don’t penetrate the skulls of people who are determined to convince the world nurture is everything.

Third, there was a lot of political fluff that was clearly intended to be social engineering. “Meet 10 CEO’s Under 30 who Made it in Spite of Being Gay/Asian/Black/Female/Crippled/Whatever.” Articles like that are a waste of paper. Put them in Mother Jones or something. Nobody opens Popular Mechanics hoping to find out a lesbian illegal alien is running a successful CNC shop that makes can openers from recycled cans.

Girls can use tools, too! Talk about the soft sexism of low expectations. Wow; a woman operated a drill press. Next, they’ll be walking on their hind feet and using iPads to ask for banana slices.

The magazine was boring and of no use whatsoever, so I did not renew my subscription.

Here is a link to the kind of article I never saw when I subscribed: How to do a Complete Brake System Checkout.

Does Glenn Reynolds do his own brakes? Doubtful. I do. Google “Glenn Reynolds” and “wrench” or “tools” and see what comes up. Nothing.

Doing your own brakes is near the very bottom of the list of things you should be able to do if you want to be tool-literate. It’s down there with changing your oil and cleaning a dryer vent. It’s something millions of American men do all the time. Saying I do my own brakes is not much of a boast.

So anyway, I voiced the above concerns on the forum, and my post was deleted. I was accused of “thinly-veiled racism” and “personal attacks.”

This is where we are now. Complaining about worthless and off-topic material in a magazine that spent roughly a century telling people about tools and things that could be done with them is racism and personal attacks.

They didn’t say who I attacked. I think they just threw that in because their feelings were hurt.

I doubt they were talking about Reynolds, because all I said was that he didn’t know anything about tools. Which is true. Ordinarily, when you get in trouble for making personal attacks on a forum, it has something to do with other forum members, but I didn’t say anything critical about members.

Apparently, using the terms “minorities” and “illegal alien” is racism per se now. But what I said was true, of course. Pop Mech praised minority members and women for being successful in spite of being minority members and women. I don’t know if any of the people I saw the magazine promote were illegals. I just threw that in because it was the kind of thing I thought the editors would do. Poetic license.

By the way, “thinly-veiled racism” usually isn’t racism. The hackneyed phrase “thinly-veiled” is a verbal booster seat. It was created so leftists could accuse people of racism when they weren’t. It’s an evil tool designed to put innocent people on the defensive.

The person who deleted my comment was wrong and unfair, and maybe not very bright, but it’s not my place to tell people how to run their Internet forums. They are allowed to be wrong, unfair, and self-righteous, all day, every day.

So what is the connection between God and being slandered on a forum about tools?

The connection is that I have been treated unfairly all my life, in every area of life. Things I earned were given to others. Positions. Titles. Jobs. Money. I have been slandered so much, I can’t begin to recall the instances. When the world hates you because you might be important to God, it doesn’t treat you well in matters not involving religion and then jump in to attack when religion is relevant; it abuses you all the time.

It’s important to realize this, because otherwise you come to trust the world. You think, “If I do what everyone else does, I’ll get what everyone else gets.” It doesn’t work that way.

Look at Israel. The only civilized nation in the Middle East. A nation what works very, very hard to protect enemy noncombatants. A nation that is among the first to offer aid when bitter enemies have earthquakes and so on. But Satan’s children are busy every day, comparing Israel to Nazi Germany and praising its abusers as martyrs and victims.

Look at the way Christians are portrayed on TV and in the movies. They come in two varieties. The first type is a man who seems kind of gay and gains admiration for standing up to people who criticize sin. The other is a vicious, abusive, controlling ogre–often racist–who needs to be exposed and taken down.

How often have you seen real Christians portrayed favorably on screen? Nearly never. Satan owns Hollywood, and real Christians are a threat to his empire.

If Satan thinks you look like someone God might be planning to save and put to work, you are going to be abused. Satan will send people to destroy you. Backstabbing coworkers. Bosses who promote everyone but you. Whorish women. Friends who work to make you fail. Abusive parents and teachers. Prosecutors. The police. Random criminals. Homeless demoniacs.

People who belong to fraternities and secret organizations will blackball your business. Exciting business opportunities that look like they will be your big breaks will disappear after you put in a lot of time and work.

If you expect it, you can avoid that feeling you get when your trust is betrayed. That sensation of having your legs sliced off at the knees or taking a cannonball to the stomach. You can also avoid big losses. Satan likes getting people to invest heavily in schemes that look good but disintegrate like mirages when they think they’re getting close.

If you know the world hates you, you can take such good things as the world offers you, without great risk. You can accept the little bribes and baits without sticking your neck out and going all in.

Satan wants you to keep jumping back on the treadmill. He wants you to think persistence is the key. It’s not. You’ll never be his favorite. You’ll never get the blue ribbon or the gold medal. Your tech startup will never make you a billionaire. Other people will get things you think you deserve. If you know you were not created to be honored and promoted by the world, you will learn to be happy with very good things God provides instead of the outrageous gifts Satan gives the Elon Musks, Jeff Bezoses, Barack Obamas, and Jay Z’s.

Eventually you will learn that the things you thought you wanted were not as good as the things you got.

In 2003, God gave me this: “Our preachers are antichrists.” I learned that by trying to serve preachers, but God reminded me after I quit.

When I belonged to churches, I was frustrated, because I wanted to do so much for people, but worthless preachers and hypocritical, conceited volunteers always shot me down and kept me on the bottom.

Sometimes I wished I could talk to people from the stage, so I could tell them what God had shown me. Things that had been extremely helpful.

At my last church, they let me speak for a few minutes. This was a place where a false prophet could hold the mike and yell all day with the pastor’s encouragement. When they handed me the mike, a horrible stench hit me. They never cleaned it! Perhaps a decade of dried and fresh spit belonging to dozens of people was in the sponge cover. The smell was like the worst bad breath you’ve ever smelled, because that’s what it was: a huge colony of pulsing, multiplying bad breath germs.

Being me, I said something like, “Wow, this thing really stinks!” I probably said they needed to clean it. They wanted me to hold it close to my mouth, but I wouldn’t do it. It was disgusting and probably dangerous. I’m sure I offended people, but they had it coming.

It’s astonishing to me that no one else ever said anything about the smell of a microphone. In my entire life, I have never seen anyone else mention it. Maybe it’s hard to criticize something you love and crave.

I know everyone who used that church’s mikes smelled that stench.

To me, this is a picture of getting something you think is good and then realizing it’s not.

I have been on stage a few times in my life, playing music, speaking, and acting. I don’t like it much. I’m not afraid of it. I have no fear at all of speaking; I don’t understand people who are scared of it. I just don’t like being on a stage. Talking to, or making music with, a few people you know is different. Being on a stage is a job. And if there are lights, you can barely see the people you’re talking to. It’s like you’re performing for the lights.

Making music on a stage is not much fun. The sound is too loud. There are cords everywhere.

I think that when I smelled that microphone, God was telling me I was more blessed than the people who had to hold mikes to their mouths for hours in order to make a living. I could talk to individuals without dealing with microphones, lights, and so on. I could choose the people I talked to instead of spraying throngs of hypocrites with information they had no interest in.

John the Baptist didn’t get a microphone. His father was a temple priest, so he was entitled to be a priest, too, but he ended up in the wilderness eating bugs and talking to people who were willing to walk out and listen to him. On the other hand, the honored religious officials who murdered Yeshua worked in the temple and had riches and glory.

What I have found is that God will look after me financially and otherwise, regardless of the demon-inspired hatred human beings feel for me. I didn’t get many of the prizes and honors I earned in life, but I live in a nice house in a wonderful county. I have no debts. I don’t work. My wife stays here and takes care of our baby, and if you tried to give her a career, she might punch you in the face. I have been able to make a bunch of overseas trips since 2020. My wife and I aren’t afraid to eat in restaurants from time to time.

I consider that abundance. I can feel that I’m well off even if I know someone else has thousands of times as much as I have, or that I don’t have as much as I could have had if I had done things differently.

I didn’t have to wreck my life or sell my soul to get here. God looked after me.

I have very few friends, but then most people who have a lot of friends actually have NO friends. I doubt Oprah has a single friend; she will never know unless she loses her fortune. I have a small number of quality friends. That’s very good. When I was a kid, my mother told me most people are lucky to have one real friend.

I don’t have a jet collection. I don’t have a Bentley or a Bugatti. I don’t own a villa on Laga di Como. Beautiful girls don’t run in and out of my home; they don’t have sex with me so I’ll cast them in movies. I’m not in charge of any armies. I don’t own a crown. I don’t have the stuff Satan gives his temporary favorites. But I wouldn’t know what to do with his gifts if I had them. They would be big, smelly microphones to me.

Get used to being cheated, but on the other hand, get used to being blessed behind the scenes and having a better life than any of the people who hate you. That’s what it all boils down to.

Banning Real AR-15’s in Colorado is Working out Great

Published a day late.

Life has all sorts of filters in it, and the Holy Spirit is the best one. He lets useless people pass through and disappear, but he catches the ones who belong to him and keeps them in your life.

Yeshua told Peter Satan wanted to sift him. That’s filtration.

I started blogging in 2001, if memory serves. I got to know tons of people, and nearly all of them have disappeared from my life. I still hear from Baldilocks (Juliette Ochieng) from time to time, though. We are texting right now. Like me, she tries to get cleaned up and transformed by the Holy Spirit.

She sent a text saying, more or less, that it was a good thing that my son had parents who were full of the Holy Spirit. No doubt about that! It sounds like a compliment to my wife and me, but it’s really not. It’s praise to God. I replied and said it was a testimony against me that I was so useless at the age when most men have kids.

I wondered if this explained Abraham’s advanced age at the time Isaac was born. Abraham was a swell guy, but when he was young, he worshiped demons and fallen angels, just like everyone else in Ur.

Sometimes I get full of myself and laugh at people who seem to be behind me in the race. I am especially critical of people who are being destroyed by belief in the prosperity gospel. But I got caught up in it myself. I believed it even though it was facially absurd. I would not have been a good parent in 1987.

What will be more embarrassing if all my deeds are shown to humanity at the end of the world? Seeing me watching porn, or seeing me send money to Robert Tilton?

Definitely the latter.

Looks like Dad has covid. I woke up yesterday feeling like I had snored a lot and irritated my throat, but it went away. Later on, I got chills, and my nose started filling up. And I had one of the gross digestive covid symptoms.

Covid is like global warming. No matter what the symptom is, it fits.

I think I got the remedial steps in the right order: 1. prayer, and 2. ivermectin. And I shot some spray into one of my nostrils. One open nostril is all you need, and if you alternate nights, you can extend the time it takes for you to become addicted to the spray.

I woke up feeling nearly well, except for some crud in my throat. In fact, my nose dried up before I fell asleep. Both nostrils. That was shocking.

When I treated myself with prayer, I thought of famous people who had turned to solutions other than God. For example, Asa turned to Egypt for help before getting with the priests and prophets, and he and his country got some curses for it.

I thought of Paul.

We are taught to believe that apostles and disciples never made mistakes, with the obvious exception of Judas. That’s wrong, though. We know they sometimes argued with each other. The Holy Spirit tells everyone the same things, so if two Christians disagree, at least one of them is listening to a source other than God. Paul argued with Peter, and he had a big dust-up with Barnabas.

I think Paul made a number of mistakes. When he was in trouble in Jerusalem, he appealed to Caesar for help. As a result, he was whisked off to Rome and deprived of his liberty. I don’t think God was behind that. God showed Paul, Peter, and Silas that he was perfectly willing to work miracles to free them.

I have tried to form the habit of going to God before looking for secular help. I think it’s very important, and it’s a manifestation of faith and humility, which God likes.

In my chat with Juliette, I asked where the preachers were, who were supposed to teach us these things during the last century.

They were trying to make poor people feel guilty for not buying them nicer mansions and jets.

It is exciting that my son has two parents who know the Holy Spirit and who will not be completely useless to him. On the other hand, it would have been more exciting if I had been a fit parent a long time ago, my son were in his forties, and I were playing with my grandchildren.

Looking outside my own little bubble, I see Satan’s children are burning Jews again.

I read about the Egyptian illegal alien who made himself a flamethrower and used it on pro-Israel marchers in Colorado. I keep saying God has shown me that pogroms are coming back and that Jews will not be safe anywhere. Well, here they are. If setting Jews and their friends on fire on a street in the United States isn’t sufficient evidence, what is?

What are Jews making of this, I wonder?

Actually, I know. I can guess.

1. Some Jews who worship the government and think the Tanakh is fiction–the mainstream–are concerned about the future of their nation, and they are supporting Israel.

2. Others in that group are thinking they need to appease harder. And a lot of them are helping the antisemites and marching with them.

3. The Orthodox are trying to come up with explanations that don’t involve mistakes on their part, as though remaining dispersed in strange lands and having no prophets or miracles are evidence they are on the right track.

4. Jews who know their Messiah and the Holy Spirit are thinking, “Well, this is it. We knew this would happen. Time to get closer to God and our Holy-Spirit-led Christian brothers and sisters.”

A flamethrower! What a punch in the face for people who think the problem is over-hyped and soon to pass. What a punch in the face for Coloradans who are working to nullify the Second Amendment. As the flaming gasoline is flying through the air toward you, just call the police, and they’ll arrive by magic and turn it into confetti before it lands.

Far-left politically-fungible Jewish liberal actor Michael Rapaport seems to be waking up, probably too slowly. He now says “the cavalry” isn’t coming to save the Jews. Of course it isn’t. Not unless the cavalry is Christians who are determined to protect however many Jews they can. We won’t be enough.

In the past, Jews have not gotten along well with cavalry. Consider the Cossacks.

When the state turns against you, the cavalry becomes your enemy.

If I were a Jew with a family, I would be looking at homes in places like South Dakota and Tennessee. Places where it’s okay to be armed. So there are no kosher butchers in these places. So there are no shuls. Big deal. Start migrating, and the butchers and rabbis will follow.

How many rabbis were there in Manhattan and Brooklyn when Jews starting settling there? Didn’t stop anyone.

Eat salad for a while. Have frozen meat shipped in. I guarantee you, there are companies supplying Jews with kosher products via UPS.

I’ll bet Messianics are moving.

Actually, Jews should stop stalling and move to Israel. It DOES belong to them, after all, and we know that God wants them there. God doesn’t expect them to live among treacherous Gentiles forever. He didn’t give Isaac the Promised Land so he could move to Colorado and be attacked with a flamethrower. The diaspora is a curse. It’s not normal, and it’s not a blessing.

We are Goldstein

Let’s compare two sitreps.

Me:

Woke up in my nice Sam’s Club memory foam bed. Prayed in tongues and prophesied for 90 minutes. Grabbed my beautiful son, who was in prime morning-baby mood, and messed with him while he burbled with joy. Noticed that he had pooped on his romper during the night. Took him to the laundry room, put him in the special seat in the utility sink, and rubbed him all over with a hot, soapy washcloth while he grinned and tried to eat water drops that got close to his mouth.

Diapered the baby, put the poo items in the washer, threw out the carefully-wrapped diaper, and handed the heir apparent over to mom, who was thrilled to have him back.

Went to the living room and ate a gorgeous toasted bagel with cream cheese, slices of Bermuda onion, smoked salmon also from Sam’s Club, and decaf with too much cream and sugar. Watched a Top Gear clip and made fun of the British.

Unidentified Mainstream West Coast Leftist:

Went on Tiktok wearing a Dodgers jersey. Small confused dog also wearing Dodgers jersey. Screamed in torment about the L.A. Dodgers visiting the White House. Called two talented baseball players DEI hires. Ripped jersey off self. Tore dog’s jersey off so roughly she should be cited for animal cruelty. Announced her plans to burn her jerseys, sparing one that belonged to a player who missed the White House visit because he hurt his ankle. Complained that things should be different, because this is the Age of Aquarius. The demons she worships are letting her down. Imagine that.

Two people. Same world. Same country. Same week.

Leftists are the people who have planted their perversion-celebrating antisemitic flag on joy and love. The people who supposedly do life right. The rest of us–the Gomers and Goobers–are supposedly the miserable potato eaters who don’t know what we’re missing because we’re too stupid and too busy committing incest.

Polls from left-leaning organizations say people on my side are happier, better-looking, and even less mentally ill than the snowflakes, even though they make more money and tend to be more educated. Even the polls are deluded!

Red life is wonderful. The South is the most-fun place there is. I’m missing out on so much hatred and fear.

A young guy bought the house across the private drive a few years back. He bought it from a great older couple, Russ and Sally. Russ played basketball at LSU. As Southern as they come. Heavy accent. He was an ignorant incest-committer who could not read. No, actually, he was a very smart guy with a math degree. He made his money selling medical stuff because the job market for mathematicians isn’t all that great.

The young guy has a land-clearing business. I just wrote a letter for him, telling some authority or other to let him park his diesel grapple, truck, and equipment trailer on his lot. He has a wife and three kids. The kids zip around the property on a quad. We get along great. He came over here and moved problem trees for me without being asked or paid. In fact, he asked permission.

So far, neither of us has left the private non-HOA subdivision wearing black PJ’s from Urban Outfitters and carrying bottles of pee to hurl at the cops. None of the residents of these two properties key Teslas. We haven’t screamed at the sky.

I hang out with my wife and baby son. We pray. We occasionally host overnight visitors. I shoot in the yard. I like running around in the utility cart and working with the chainsaws and the tractor. My lot is so big I have to use a cart to get around, and I have to use the phone to communicate from one end to the other. I write on my blog. I brew beer.

We must be doing something wrong. We could be living it up in Times Square or any neighborhood in Seattle, pooping on the sides of police cars, setting fire to ourselves over Ukraine, calling for the murder of all Jews in Israel, and telling our son he’s a girl.

The other day I told my son I had assigned the male gender to him. I’ve told other people. It gives me a laugh. I tell him not to be a fruit or a leftist when he grows up.

If we’re doing so many things wrong, why is life so good?

My buddy Mike has a son who married a leftist. Their marriage is an equal partnership, so it’s really a matriarchy. They are not interested in our white, European-looking, colonialist God.

Mom is a fake vegan who sometimes eats things like cheese. Dad plays along when he’s in the house. They have two small girls. The last one came in seriously underweight at birth. That’s what happens when you don’t eat meat. Vegetarianism is very, very bad for the unborn and for children. Even our left-leaning medical establishment says so. Know what you’re supposed to eat while breastfeeding? Protein. Look it up.

Guess what breast milk is, by vegan standards? An animal product. We’re not really animals, but leftists think we are. Anyway, they think breast milk is okay for babies, but as soon as they’re weaned, it’s time for sickly white fluids concocted from things like oats and soybeans. Soybeans are toxic until they’re cooked, and they’re full of female hormones, but okay.

Mom and Dad bought their first baby a lesbian costume. A grey sweatshirt with a rainbow on it and a pair of masculine-looking jeans. I would rather have God strike me dead than let me put homo clothes or girls’ clothes on my boy. It astonishes me that there are parents pushing their kids to adopt abomination. A baby is literally better off dying in the crib than going to hell. There is no purpose in having children to fill up hell.

They used to get mad at Mike for using words like “she,” “her,” and “girl.” Like the first baby’s sex was a secret she wasn’t supposed to know. Now they find themselves using these words themselves. I wonder if they cudgel themselves later and sleep in hair shirts made from fake hair. They have even put dresses on the baby.

When the son found out my wife and I were having a baby, he told Mike he wanted to know what we were planning to do to help him cope with life under white supremacy. No joke. My plan is to make sure my son knows there are only two races: God’s family, and everyone else.

They worry all the time. They live in fear. They have little free time. They are unhappy. They are angry at good people.

Life here gets more peaceful all the time. We don’t worry about the future, because someone is planning it for us. I call our house the House of Love, because it’s true.

Here on the blog, I express a lot of annoyance, but that’s not reflective of the atmosphere here or my general attitude. I don’t go around in real life fuming about the world, and I do not hope conservatives start shooting our persecutors. I would like to be raptured. I want to be elsewhere when people on my side look for payback.

Mike’s son and his wife are normal. More typical of this age than my family. That’s terrible.

The centrifuging of society has progressed to an extreme degree, and Satan’s smug children are getting heavily concentrated at the bottoms of the tubes. Their contempt for God’s children is deep and impenetrable. Their hatred is hotter than ever. The spring of future violence is compressed almost to its limit.

Today I read about a poll. About 55% of Democrats said assassinating the president was at least somewhat justified. Elon Musk? A paltry 48%. We’re talking about cold-blooded murder, if it can ever be correct to say leftists have cold blood. It boils all the time.

Democrats are now showing up at hate events wearing hats like that of Luigi, a video game character. They symbolize agreement with Luigi Mangione, the cowardly liberal nutwad who murdered an innocent insurance executive on the street.

Imagine this happening during the last century. What if this were 1964, and Republicans were wearing T-shirts bearing the image of Oswald the rabbit, showing how happy they were that John Kennedy’s brain had been splattered all over his wife’s dress and expressing their hope that more murders would follow?

Couldn’t have happened.

Here’s irony: Luigi hats feature a big “L” on the forehead. What is that the universal symbol for?

Couldn’t be more appropriate. Satan is THE biggest loser in existence, and his children are losers. I mean that literally. Satan is incapable of being blessed, but he is a curse magnet. A black hole for curses. They can fall in, but they can’t get out. His kids are the same way, but curses can’t stick to real Christians.

As usual, things are even worse than I thought they were. How can this be sustainable? If a very comfortable majority of Democrats admit they think it would be good to see the president murdered, and it’s okay to wear a hat celebrating the killing of a husband and father who was no threat to anyone, how long can it be before Democrats start traveling in armed mobs, shooting everyone they think MIGHT be a Trump supporter, true Christian, Zionist, or Jew?

I see that we are lucky leftists hate guns, because it hinders their progress. If conservatives wanted to put death squads on the street, we could do it today, but angry liberal men tend to be weak, soft individuals who don’t know guns work. When you see them running around in their conformist black pajamas (because black is the color of love and joy), you can’t help noticing that their necks and their wrists are often about the same size. They are taking a long time to prepare.

I think Democrats are becoming like Muslims and the Irish-Americans who funded the IRA. Some are willing to become terrorists. The others are not, but many of those who are not are willing to support terror in private.

Let me digress. I learned something interesting the other day from a secular historian. In the early days of Christianity, people dressed normally at funerals. They wore cheerful colors. They knew they were celebrating people’s entry into heaven. They started wearing black because the Catholics and the Orthodox, who ran pagan organizations pretending to be churches, adopted pagan funeral customs. For pagans, death was terrifying.

Now it’s like every leftist event is a funeral. A funeral for civilization and love. They even root for the end of humanity. They think human beings are an infestation, and the world is like a house that needs to be tented for termites.

We are what gives the world purpose. Without us, it would be better to destroy it and save animals suffering.

It’s important to maintain perspective. If you don’t check leftists out once in a while, and your own life is easy and peaceful, it’s not hard to forget that the ship is sinking.

Conventional Wisdom can get you Killed

Let’s vandalize some toxic icons.

I wrote about the great news concerning pistol braces. These things are used as rifle buttstocks, to allow shooters to use rifle-caliber pistols just like rifles, held at the shoulder. The rule banning them was just stayed by a federal judge, and it will remain unenforceable for the next few years, barring a miracle no one who can determine his own gender without professional help wants to see. The courts will be very slow to do anything about it, and they will probably leave the injunction in place and do away with the ban.

I wanted to get one of these things for a Ruger 10-22 pistol as well as an AK-47 pistol. The Ruger is for tooling around the farm in my utility cart. The AK would be for protection while on the road. In a small space, it’s a little easier to swing than a full-length AK. Also, with a short AK, you only lose about 10% of your muzzle velocity, so it’s a good trade.

Ed Bonderenka commented:

That’s good news, but my AR pistol is accurate from the hip with the green laser attached. I mean chew up the bullseye accurate.
For me a brace would just make it bulkier.
But is is a big move because of the constitutional issues, particularly standing against the administrative state.
I might buy one just because.

No argument here.

The web is full of people who parrot gun myths as though they came from Jesus himself, and one of the myths says you can’t shoot a powerful gun accurately unless you shoulder it. Total nonsense. They also say lasers are toys that don’t really work. The US military disagrees, but whatever.

I remember writing some stuff about intending to shoot a 12-gauge from the hip, using a laser. A blogger who used to write a lot about guns said he couldn’t control such a gun with his “gorilla” arms, making the obvious implication about my arms and chances.

I bought a Saiga-12 shotgun. I bought a cheap Chinese laser. I went to a gun range. I put a target up at 50 feet. I put shots in a circle the size of a tennis ball, more or less, from the hip. No problem. Child’s play. With my non-gorilla arms.

Maybe my squirrel monkey arms have something his gorilla arms don’t, but I doubt it. If he had tried what I tried, he would have said something completely different. Maybe he didn’t have lasers in mind. I can’t remember.

Interesting fact: a 12-gauge has more recoil than a .30-06, an AK has much less, and an AR is even further down the list. I’m trying to say that a 12-gauge has all sorts of recoil. Worse than most deer guns.

Another interesting fact: when you use a laser, recoil doesn’t matter much.

“Blasphemy! Blasphemy!”, I hear the gun Sadducees shrieking. They are always the last to accept the obvious truth.

Why does recoil matter when you’re defending yourself? A couple of reasons. It may teach you to flinch, and it will also knock your gun off-target, so you have to find the target in your sights again.

When you have a laser, flinching doesn’t mean much. Where is the dot when you pull the trigger? That’s where the bullet will go. It’s that simple. Try it some time. People say it doesn’t really work. It does. It’s impossible for it not to work. Flinch all you want. As long as the dot is on the mark when the trigger is pulled, you win.

When you have a laser, finding the target again, instantly, is no problem. You have a big, giant beam in front of you. Shoot. Put the beam back on the target. Done. Shoot again. Squinting at black iron sights is a lot harder. Reacquiring your target through a scope is also hard, and in many cases, it will be impossible because you won’t have enough light to see through the scope.

People are taught to obsess on iron sights and scopes. You need to be able to use these things. No doubt about it. But teaching people to rely on them is really, really stupid. Why? Because MOST VIOLENT CRIMES OCCUR AT NIGHT.

YOW. Ouch. That stings, if you’re a gun Sadducee. Make a comment and tell us I’m wrong. Tell us your secret method for using iron sights or a red dot in a dark bedroom. I can’t wait to hear.

It’s not just hard. It can’t be done. So people who advise us to rely on iron sights and scopes aren’t just shooing us away from the best optics; they’re teaching us to be totally helpless IN MOST SELF-DEFENSE SITUATIONS.

That’s pretty bad.

When I get up in the morning, I turn the burglar alarm off. Why? Because nobody is going to break in while I’m here and the sun is out. That’s just a fact. They might break in at night even though they can tell I’m here, because darkness and surprise work to their advantage. They’re not going to show up in the daytime, when the police and I can see them clearly.

It’s true that most burglaries take place in the daytime, but the primary purpose of a firearm isn’t to stop burglaries, which most commonly happen when people are at work. It’s to stop home invasions, which are burglaries that take place in occupied houses.

If you ever have to defend yourself from a criminal in your home, chances are, it will be dark out, and your house may be dark, too. Good luck trying to aim at a burglar when you can’t see your sights. You’re going to spray and pray, just like everyone else who took the bad advice.

My carry pistol has a laser that turns on by itself when I pick the gun up. Wake me up, and I can have it in my hand in one second. That’s pretty good. In one second, I can be well-armed while I pick up a rifle and turn its laser on. After that, my house is a really bad place for a burglar to be.

Burglars don’t use good optics. They don’t even learn how to shoot. They generally use polymer pistols they steal from their neighbors, with whatever ammunition was in them when they were stolen. If I have a rifle with a bright green laser, and my guest has a Taurus pistol he got by breaking into a car, who do you think will get shot the soonest and the most?

How much time do you think I’ll spend making sure I have a good sight picture or just the right grip?

“Hold on, Mr. Burglar! I have to make sure my isosceles stance is just right!” “I have to put on my tactical socks and call Massad Ayoob!” I don’t think so.

If you like spending money, you can do even better. You can get night vision plus an infrared laser criminals can’t see. You’ll see the criminal and the big dot of light, and he will not even know where you are.

That brings me to another creaky talking point: “A laser will tell the criminal where you are!”

He’s almost certainly going to know where you are anyway. I admit, it’s great if he doesn’t, but he probably will. And if you use a laser, by the time you light him up, he will not have enough time to do anything about it. He’ll have a pretty good idea where you are, as you shoot him repeatedly.

And you won’t be helpless because you’re trying to find your tiny black sights in the dark.

You don’t have to walk around with your laser on, lighting up the neighborhood like Rudolph the Green-Nosed Reindeer. You can switch it on right before you shoot.

The Sadduccees love to say lasers make you dependent on gimmicks. Isn’t that better than being dependent on sights you can’t use because it’s dark? Either way, you’re going to be dependent on something.

So to sum up, you can shoot a powerful gun perfectly well from the hip with a laser. It will not be the best answer for killing people at long distances, but if you’re shooting people far away, you’re probably what the law calls “a murderer.” If a criminal is so far away you can’t hit him using a laser, he is probably too far away to pose a threat a jury will confirm.

If lasers are so great, why consider a shouldered weapon? Lasers are pretty bad outdoors in bright conditions. Also, they can malfunction. You may be in a situation where you need to be able to use the sights.

A folding weapon with a laser, to me, appears to be the best option for defense outside the home. When it’s folded, you will be able to maneuver it in the car. The laser will be helpful most of the time. If you have to get out of the car for some reason, you can unfold the stock and use the sights.

You can also stick a red dot on a folding gun along with the laser. A red dot is fantastic for shooting a gun you can’t shoulder. You can nail anyone within a hundred feet without too much trouble.

Maybe I should listen to Ed and forget the brace. If I get a braced pistol, I can fool with it and decide for myself.

Missing Links

Want to feel old? Think about all the blogs that have died.

On very rare occasions, I go through my blogroll to find out if there is any point in keeping links. My standard is a little vague. Basically, if you haven’t posted in a year, your link is probably going to fall. Of course, I have not applied this standard to Acidman’s blog, Gut Rumbles, which is still maintained by his family, 17 years after his death. I also kept Lost in the Cheese Aisle, the blog of the late Steve Krodman, AKA Ellison. He was doing fine, and then one day he was diagnosed with ALS, and he was gone in something like a year.

Seventeen! If Acidman had had a son the day he died, the son would be getting ready to go to college.

No one reading this has any idea who Acidman was, I suppose.

I got rid of Sondra K. today. She used to be huge. Then something happened, and it seemed like the only person who continued posting was Doug M., who is not an adequate substitute. While I was doing my culling, I learned that Sondra’s blog has been replaced by something called Sondra’s Gulch or whatever, and when I looked at it, everything was written by Doug M.

I dumped Smoke on the Water, written by Jim Seigler. He hasn’t published in eternity. He visited the compound a few years back, though.

I got rid of Aaron’s CC, a blog written by my old college buddy. When you try to visit, you get a weird window asking you to download a php file. Maybe that’s a bomb for the folks who put a fatwa on him. In any case, there is no content now. I don’t think I should be sending innocent people to a site that appears to be a booby trap.

Is blogging finally over? Maybe it is. Let’s see if IMAO and The Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler still exist.

The Rott is still up, but not much is happening. IMAO is running, but I don’t see “Frank” anywhere in the text.

Russ Emerson, AKA Tacjammer, has not updated since 2018, so he’s gone. I hope he’s okay. He developed hydrocephalus all of a sudden, and before they put in a shunt, he already had damage to his nervous system.

I wonder if conservative bloggers still think they’re doing something important. Are they still fighting for the cause? I dropped all that years ago.

If you’re still coming by, and I deleted your link, I apologize, but you weren’t using your blog anyway, so you probably don’t care.

Some Things are Worse Than Being Locked Down with Netflix

I don’t read blogs any more. Not even if they’re blogs belonging to people I like. I have no idea what’s happening in the Blogosphere or whether it still exists.

For some reason, I took a look at Chris Byrne’s blog the other day. If you read blogs, you know him as the Anarchangel. Big, strong guy with stronger opinions. Anyway, I was surprised to learn that things were not going well at all. Chris has gone through a pretty miserable experience with recurring cancer, and it has apparently had devastating impacts on his career and marriage.

He wrote a post in February in which he actually celebrated being able to use a Bowflex. That would have seemed impossible in, say, 2005.

I thought I would mention him today in case anyone wanted to get involved in any way. He has a Paypal button, and he is surely in need of considerable prayer.

By the way, his opinion of the global response, including commonly accepted casualty figures, is not all that different from mine.

I don’t plan to resume reading blogs.

My Coronavirus Ordeal Intensifies

The coronavirus epidemic just got real to me. McDonald’s has stopped making all-day breakfast.

Prior to this, I was telling everyone the epidemic was a great misfortune but not a catastrophe. Now I must agree with the toilet paper hoarders. Suffering has begun in earnest.

Today I did my best to adapt. I was determined to be strong. I made myself a big slice of country ham and several bacon-grease biscuits with red eye gravy. I’m no longer sobbing now. I think I can handle this.

Yesterday I learned that two counties not far away have put lockdowns into effect. That was disturbing. It made me wonder if my county was next. I live in the most conservative county (i.e. “sane”) county in the state, so I have good reason to hope for relatively intelligent leadership.

I checked the local paper’s site, and it says they’re not locking us down. They closed Internet cafes, though. Not sure what that’s all about.

Honestly, if I’m locked down, I plan to go out anyway. They don’t have enough cops to prevent it, and there will be enough “essential” businesses open to let me blend it with law-abiders. In truth, I will probably end up obeying the law, because the businesses I frequent are generally on the essential list. Grocery stores. Hardware stores. Places that sell firearms.

I assume this county wouldn’t be crazy enough to close gun stores. Many liberal-dominated cities are shutting them down. It’s obvious that gun stores are essential. The right to self-defense is extremely important. Liberals don’t see it that way, however, and they are always looking for underhanded, back-door methods of taking away our civil rights.

If the disease becomes widespread here, I’ll probably be more careful, but right now, getting this disease is like winning the lottery. It’s not common at all when compared to colds and the flu.

I’m disappointed to see that the government plans to hand out over a trillion dollars in totally unnecessary vote-buying tax money. Our economic problems are being caused by panic, not a relatively minor epidemic. We will have higher taxes because of the handout. We should just get out of the way of progress and let capitalism do its thing.

Here’s something funny: leftist Sweden isn’t imprisoning its citizens. They’re taking a relaxed approach, because, hello…it’s the correct thing to do. Evidently someone over there is capable of understanding simple math. You have to wonder how America’s leftists will take this.

Sweden won’t have a catastrophe. Even Italy didn’t have a catastrophe. No country will.

Here’s something that will raise your spirits or give you heartburn, depending on how you look at it: the lady in charge of the White House response says the initial coronavirus predictions may have been WILDLY (my word, not hers) exaggerated. Welcome to Club Reason!

I’ll embed a video of her appearance. If you don’t want to watch it, I’ll mention a key point. Initial death toll prediction for the UK: 500,000. Current prediction: 20,000.

So they were only off by 96%. No biggie.

Extrapolate to the US, and you get around 80,000. Terrible? Well…it’s the same number of people the CDC says we lost to the seasonal flu last year. Did you mourn all last year? Were there mass cremations? Did we shut down stores and tell grown people they were grounded? Don’t think so.

Here’s a screaming uninentional admission from the video: there is no antibody test. Hello? Remember me writing about the Chinese researchers who said the false-positive rate was 40-80%? Am I a genius because I read a news story and told other people about it?

If you don’t have an antibody test, you’re guessing. They’re judging people by symptoms, and coronavirus isn’t the only bug that causes respiratory failure.

It looks like we’re going to find out we misdiagnosed a huge number of flu patients. The epidemic’s numbers may collapse inward. For this, we deprived each other of toilet paper.

Should we have locked the country down just to be safe? Of course not. We already knew, from looking at the numbers available to us, that this disease was not going to spread that widely. It would have been inexplicable had it come to the US and hit a large percentage of the population. That would have been totally inconsistent with the way it worked in other countries.

We should have sheltered fat people and old people from the disease. I’ll bet we could do a lot of that with a trillion dollars of tax money. Think about this: even if you spend a trillion dollars, if you let people work while you spend it, you have earnings to mitigate the loss.

Not that I think we need to spend a trillion dollars to help “bubble people.” I’m just using the figure we’re actually spending. We could do it for nearly nothing.

It’s scary being part of an unthinking herd. Even if you know they’re wrong, you can still get swept over the cliff with the lemmings. Thank God I’m in the country and among conservatives.

In other news, I watched a Hickok45 video this morning. He’s the old guy in Tennessee who shoots steel in his backyard. He reviewed a Glock 20, which is a full-size 10mm pistol. I was glad to see this, because I ordered a Glock 20. I already have a Glock 29, which is the compact version, but I thought it would be nice to have a bigger one with a bigger magazine, to wear in my yard. I don’t want a heavy pistol bogging me down in the grocery store, and I want to keep my out-and-about gun in a pocket, but it’s okay to have a big carry pistol displayed openly at home.

Should I be content with a compact in the car. I don’t know, but I can legally put an AK47 in the backseat, so it doesn’t matter. I used to keep a similar rifle under the seat of my truck. I’ll tell you what. In a traffic dispute with a carload of bullies, nothing gets you respect like a rifle with a 30-round magazine.

When I saw that ammo hoarding was starting up, I ordered myself some 10mm bullets, primers, brass, and powder. I did not hoard. To hoard is to buy more than is reasonable. Anything up to 1,000 rounds, in a particular caliber and load, is reasonable. Back during the Obama panic, people were buying pallets of ammunition, and a lot of them were flipping them on Gunbroker. That’s hoarding.

Anyone who says a thousand rounds is a hoard is not a good shooter, because that person doesn’t practice. If you practice, you know you can shoot a thousand rounds in a week.

I have another Youtube favorite: Paul Harrell. He’s a true expert. He has won prizes in tons of shooting competitions, and he has been through a bunch of military schools. He was a military instructor. He even killed a guy with a deer rifle. The man was attacking Harrell and his wife, who were on foot, in a pickup truck. Harrell put two rounds through him and got charged with manslaughter, but he was acquitted.

Harrell is a remarkable person. He’s generally a class act, although he has given people the finger in a couple of videos. He’s very smart and very patient. He would have made an exceptional attorney. He thinks his videos through very carefully, and he’s extremely thorough.

About 20% of gun lovers are absolute jerks who ought to be muzzled. Harrell knows this. He knows that no matter how carefully he words his videos, some couch commando will pop up in a comment and “correct” him. Watching him speak is like watching George W. Bush deliver the carefully constructed messages his team crafted in anticipation of leftist distortions.

Recently, Harrell was attacked by a much less popular creator: Caleb Giddings. Giddings was on a “reality” show featuring people who shot well. It was actually a multi-episode game show. He got weeded out and lost, but he still has an ego that won’t quit.

Harrell posted a video about shooting revolvers, and this set Giddings, a competition revolver shooter and former insurance agent, off. Giddings posted a response in which he accused Harrell of ignorance.

I’ll embed the video, but I don’t recommend watching it.

Giddings used the AH word to describe Harrell, and in comments, he made very arrogant remarks about his own shooting ability, compared to Harrell’s. He said something about Harrell’s championships lacking certification from recognized bodies.

Giddings drank Scotch all through is own video, which kind of looks bad given that it was a gun video. Guns and liquor aren’t supposed to be seen together. In Florida, alcoholics and potheads are legally barred from concealed carry, and this is probably true elsewhere. The federal NICS form lists drug and alcohol abuse as things that will prevent a transfer.

I have to admit, I’ve had more than a couple of beers while carrying. This was a long time ago. I wasn’t thinking. It’s a big deal, however. I rarely have more than one drink now, so it won’t be an issue ever again.

Harrell got fed up and responded to Giddings with a one-hour spanking that has to rank as one of Youtube’s all-time harshest rebuttals. He proved that Giddings said a lot of things that weren’t even close to true, and then he crushed what was left of his reputation by displaying a table full of awards. He took a plastic bin full of medals and dumped it on the table.

I don’t know who is the better shooter, but it would take at least two people to carry Harrell’s awards, and he even wins tomahawk-throwing matches, which is a little ridiculous, to be honest. Giddings has his credits listed on various gun-related sites on the web, but they don’t provide long lists of marksmanship championships, and knowing this guy, if there was such a list, it would be on every site he’s involved with.

My guess is that he would fare badly against Harrell.

A bunch of Harrell’s half-million fans went to Giddings’ video and left uncomplimentary comments. The dislike/like ratio was very high.

What did Giddings do? Did he admit fault? Actually, he turned the comments off and hid the likes and dislikes. This is not helping him. It makes him look cowardly and even more dishonest, and on top of that, he can’t get rid of the comments on Harrell’s video, which has a much bigger audience. Giddings only has about 50,000 subscribers, and he will probably have considerably fewer tomorrow.

His personality is very unpleasant. He drips venom. He seems very insecure. He doesn’t honor other people at all. He contemns them, and he does it from a pretty unimpressive position. He’s like a movie character who makes you long for the moment when he finally gets punched in the face. He is not someone you would want to know, unless you’re also a jerk.

Giddings is currently in the Air Force, so I guess he didn’t make it as a professional shooter or insurance salesman. If he had the kind of talent he thinks he does, he would be making a living shooting, like Jerry Miculek. If Miculek acted the way Giddings does, people might understand, but it looks awful coming from a semi-pro with a day job.

It’s very interesting. It reminds me of the days when blogs were actually blogs and not corporate pseudopods. Giddings trolled Harrell, who had done nothing to provoke him, and he got bitten very deeply in the rear end. The Youtube crowd wasn’t having his nonsense.

The whole kerfuffle makes me think of things I’ve done and said in the past. God is love, and his children should also be love. Men should be men, not boys. Not arrogant punks who have no appreciation for anything. I’m glad I’m finally improving.

It’s too bad there are so many insecure macho men in the gun crowd. They ruin things for everyone. I quit using The High Road because there were so many jewels filling the board with poison. I joined another board, and I make liberal use of their “ignore” feature. When someone says something nasty, I try not to respond at all. If I do respond, I try to say something mature but clear. The ignore list is wonderful.

Similarly, I quit watching Gordon Ramsay again. Earlier in the week, Youtube started suggesting his videos again. I don’t know why. I watched several, and then I quit and deleted them from my history. If you keep something bad in your history, Youtube will recommend similar things. Ramsay is a mess. He spreads hate everywhere he goes. I don’t care if it’s an act (it’s not). I don’t need that circulating in my blood.

Every day, when I look at Youtube, I tell it to stop recommending certain channels. The Mormons. News stations. Political vloggers. Movie-related channels. Keep that mess. It makes my stomach hurt.

I guess I’ll try to finish my steel target array today. Then I’ll do a lie-packed video about Jerry Miculek and see if I can get some attention!

Raconteur, Bon Vivant, Lover of Whale Bacon

I made a little joke yesterday, and it did not work out well.

I was writing about the way deaths seem to surround me right now. My dad is dying a little bit at a time. I just learned of the deaths of my second cousin and his mother. To make things worse, I found out a guy I knew from an Internet forum had died. I wrote this: “If most people I know could just remain alive through the end of this week, I would consider it a big favor.”

A comment then appeared, informing me that Steve Krodman, AKA Elisson, had died. It happened on January 11.

I think that’s sufficient for now. I will be just fine if I don’t get any more news of death during the coming week.

Elisson had several blogs. One was called Blog d’Elisson. Another was called Lost in the Cheese Aisle. He wrote well. He was funny. He was a very likable guy.

Back when I had an Internet radio show, Elisson appeared as a guest. He told me about the time he ate whale bacon. He was visiting Japan, and he found out they made bacon from whale meat, so he tried it. That was classic Elisson. It’s hard to think of another blogger who would come up with that story.

I looked at Lost in the Cheese Aisle (are there really stores with cheese aisles?), and I learned that Elisson had ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease. It was a fast-acting variant. In his last entry (dictated), dated December 31, 2018, he said he got his diagnosis in March of last year, so he only lasted something like 9 months. He said he was unable to walk. He spent his time in a wheelchair and in bed, and he required oxygen.

I am not on his blogroll now. I don’t know if that means anything. I don’t recall any flaps between us. Of course, I have become a big proponent of Spirit-led Christianity, and he was Jewish, so maybe he felt I had gone off the deep end. It doesn’t matter to me; I thought he was a great guy. I can certainly understand how my new outlook on life would turn people off. I expect it.

I see he quoted me in his sidebar, with a link. Maybe he had not given up on me.

I wish I could say I think he’s in a happier place, but I can’t. I am very disturbed when I think about it.

I feel like I should hang a sign, like those workplace accident signs. “Nobody I know has died in __ days.”

Life gets serious after you get deep into middle age. When you’re young, you count on people in your age group being around if you want to contact them. Once you hit 50, every time you look someone up, you know you might get an unpleasant surprise.

I have a friend in Miami who is a little older than I am. Smokes like a stove. Smoking doesn’t just cause cancer. It causes COPD, heart attacks, and strokes. It can cause dementia. When I think about him, I get a little concerned. He is determined not to quit, though.

I know of three people from my law school who have died already, and there are probably more. Most people I went to school with were younger than I am.

Death is real, and it’s not far off at all. It’s always waiting to dash out and retrieve, like a ball boy at a tennis match. Or a turkey buzzard beside a busy highway.

When I think about mortality, it helps me adjust to giving my life to Jesus. I’m not giving him much. Barring a surprising outcome, I am much closer to death than I am to my high school graduation, which seems recent in my mind. The persecution I put up with here won’t last long, even if it starts in earnest today. People who are against God can attack me while I live, but they can’t keep me alive past my appointed date. Science has not reached the point where we can put death off indefinitely in order to torment people.

Hell is different, however. The people who end up there will be tormented forever because they won’t be able to die.

On a related note, I think we are working way too hard to extend life. The more I visit my dad in memory care, the more convinced I am. The place is full of people who simply lived too long. Pumping people full of statins, blood thinners, and insulin after their brains stop working is not a kindness. It’s like embalming the living so we can have viewings that last decades.

If we had real confidence in the afterlife and salvation, we would not claw and scratch to stay in this disappointing, unfulfilling world.

These days my dad talks a lot about how nice it will be to be with my mother again.

Steve Krodman was only 66. I wish he had been able to remain here considerably longer, and of course, I wish he had managed to get to know his Messiah. I wish I had known what was going on. At least I could have prayed for him.

Educated American Chooses Witch Doctor Over Pastors

I just got a very strange email.

Back when I thought I was going to be a humorist (i.e. a person who refuses to grow up and uses his shortcomings to amuse others for money), I was part of a group of Internet writers who got books published. If you don’t remember any of that, good for you. It was a silly time. Publishers got the mistaken idea that the ability to generate web traffic correlated strongly with the ability to sell books, and generally, it wasn’t true. They published books by people like Wonkette (Ana Marie Cox), Maddox (no idea what his real name is), Tucker Max, and Glenn Reynolds. A publisher cranked out three of my own books.

As far as I know, the only one of us who made any real money from books was Tucker. He wrote a book about his adventures as a drunken lothario. It was called I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell. It made him look like a real jerk, but I communicated with him a little, and it seemed to me that he was not really the character in his book. He was always polite and helpful. Same goes for Maddox.

Hmm…the Wikipedia entry on Tucker Max says Maddox’s real name is George Ouzounian.

Tucker wrote several more books. I didn’t keep up with him, because while he was succeeding at a game I no longer wanted to play, I was trying to reform and get right with God. I was added to his email list, however, so from time to time, I received news of his adventures.

Today I got a mass email from Tucker, and it was about a surprising subject. He is trying to repair himself using MDMA. He provided a link to his website, where I read an account of his experiences taking MDMA under the supervision of a Peruvian who claims to be a shaman.

MDMA, also known as ecstasy and molly, is related to a drug known as MDA. When I was in college, people said MDA was like LSD, only stronger and more dangerous. I wouldn’t know. I used a number of drugs when I was in college, but I never went near LSD or MDA. I knew people who used LSD had bad trips, and they had a tendency to jump out of windows. One of my freshman roommates used it. Music was playing, and he said he wanted to go outside, via an 8th-floor window, and grab the notes and bring them back inside.

MDMA is supposed to be warmer and fuzzier than MDA. Don’t ask me. I have never tried either, and I haven’t touched an illegal drug in over 34 years. The legal ones are bad enough.

What’s the Christian description of Tucker’s new adventure? “Witchcraft.” That’s what we would call it. In the Bible, the Greek word translated “witchcraft” is “pharmakeia,” which is the word from which we get “pharmaceutical.” It refers to the use of drugs.

If you want more proof that what he’s doing is witchcraft, consider the fact that a self-described witch (“shaman”) is overseeing the process.

That pretty much clinches it.

Tucker’s description of one of his MDMA experiences says that while the drug was working, he became love. That has to be a moving experience for a guy who has tried hard to convince the world he’s a jerk.

It makes me think of the times Jesus visited me. I didn’t become love. Wish I had, because I want to be like God, and God is love. I did feel love, however. I felt it physically, as though love were heat and Jesus were a heat lamp. Jesus radiates love, joy, peace, and protection. This is what we thirst for. We were created to crave it. When drugs give us a phony sensation that feels like God’s love, we think we’re really onto something.

We use drugs and alcohol to simulate the presence and help of God. If you’re a drug user, or you’re mentally ill and you find your prescriptions unsatisfying, the presence of God is what you really want. Drugs make empty promises, but God delivers, and there is no charge on the back end.

When you get into God’s presence, there is no crash. When he departs, you don’t crawl around looking at the rug, hoping to find another crumb you can snort.

Tucker is experiencing the presence of a counterfeit god, and he will have problems because of it. Satan is letting him swallow the tasty bait. The hook will come later. There is always a balloon payment.

Demons will give you nearly anything in order to convince you you’re on the right track. They’re like drug pushers. They do nice things to get you addicted and dependent.

One man who claims he visited hell said he saw cubicles which were made up to resemble heaven. According to him, you can go to one of these boxes during a near-death experience and be surrounded by fake peace and love. You won’t realize you’re in a small box. You’ll think you’re outdoors, in a beautiful place full of trees and flowers. Spirits that look like dead relatives will come up and hug you, and then when you return to earth, you’ll tell people Jesus doesn’t matter. You’ll say love is all that counts and that everyone will go to heaven.

The next time you die, you go to hell for good, and you find out what’s really in the box.

Satan gave Tucker a platform, and now he’s using it to promote witchcraft. It’s really something. It started out as a flippant effort to have fun and avoid growing up, and now suddenly, it’s a very serious place where people are supposed to go for supernatural assistance. How weird is that? It’s as if Pee Wee Herman or Andy Dick opened a church.

I think Tucker wants to help humanity; I don’t think he’s rubbing his hands together like the Wicked Witch of the West over her crystal ball. He’s trying to help people escape inner torment. Unfortunately, he looked for help in the wrong place.

God is love, but not everything that seems like love is God.

Here’s an obvious question: how badly have we failed, to cause intelligent people raised in a Christian country to turn to witch doctors instead of Christians when they need help? If we were doing a good job, wouldn’t most people come to us first and receive deliverance? We don’t have a good reputation, and that’s partly because we let people down.

Who has the biggest platform for spreading the word about God? Televangelists. What do you hear when you tune them in? Intelligence-insulting lies about God’s plans to make you rich for sending in money. Here and there, you’ll hear a useful word about salvation or sanctification, but it’s all buried in fetid, watery, moldy feces. It’s as if preachers had hatched a plan to drive intelligent people away from God.

The righteousness of the church has failed, so Satan is offering people his alternative righteousness, which is actually rebellion. Don’t be a Christian; just be really nice. Unfortunately, being nice won’t keep you out of hell. It’s full of nice people. It’s full of charity workers, philanthropists, foster parents, and kidney donors. No matter how nice you are, you can’t get in without the blood of Jesus.

Being nice won’t free you from demons. It may rearrange them. It may bring you different demons that pump up your pride and make you feel you’ve done the right thing. It won’t set you free.

I’m sorry to see this happen. It’s a deflection. A man tried to move toward righteousness and love, and spirits shunted him off to the side, onto a different path that leads to destruction. It’s a very common thing. I’ll use this as an opportunity to pray. I hope no one listens to the preaching and decides to use MDMA. Drugs open the doors to demons, and getting rid of them is harder than letting them in.

Kiss the Ring, Lest I Crush Your Online Empire

It looks like my blog may be doing better than I thought.

Or maybe it isn’t. I can’t really tell. You know what Mark Twain said about statistics.

If I understand web stats correctly, about 1900 different visitors come to this site every day. This is up from around 700 in 2010, which is as far back as I can check. I went all Jesus freak in about 2008, so that would be when the big plunge took effect. I used to reach thousands of people every day, and then the smell of Christianity drove off most of them.

The traffic collapse was not a big deal to me. I used to have hopes of blogging for a living and using the blog to drive books, but I got over that, and now I don’t care much whether anyone shows up. I should be glad I’m not in the numbers-for-money game, because the bloggers I respect the least are the ones who whored out 100% for traffic. Any idiot can get traffic if he plays the game. Suck up to Glenn Reynolds (or whoever the new traffic-driver is), put pictures of women on your site, link to everyone imaginable, have contests, give things away, and network, network, network. Above all, never EVER go against the party line. Do these things, and you’ll have 5,000 visits per day within a year. You won’t have a soul, and you will be an imbecile no one with any brains respects, however.

I have deliberately avoided capitalizing on my traffic for a long time. I have two reasons. First, for years, there wasn’t enough traffic to capitalize on. Second, if you make money on a blog, you open yourself up to lawsuits in other jurisdictions. It’s a bad idea unless you have huge traffic and income. Nobody wants to open himself up to lawsuits in Guam in exchange for fifty bucks a month. Millions of bloggers are doing exactly that.

You can probably avoid liability by incorporating, if you’re determined to monetize.

In the distant past, I made some change by blogging. I had a few ads. I covered my hosting fees and probably had enough left over for a few cheeseburgers. I got rid of the ads. This blog is a hobby enterprise which costs me money, and that makes me harder to get at, should some slimy, sleazy, louse-festooned demi-person decide to attack me in court.

I used to think only “unique visits” counted when I looked at blog stats, but it appears that this is wrong. People on the web say “visits” are what matter. If what I have read is correct, a person who shows up twice in a day only racks up one visit, so each visit is access by a unique computer. My stats say I’m at about 1900 visits per day. My guess is that maybe 1200 are actual human beings who can read English. Blogs attract all sorts of stat-inflating bots.

If over a thousand people are reading what I say every day, shouldn’t I clean up my act?

When you think you’re reaching a couple of hundred bored individuals per day, and no one is paying you, you tend to feel pretty independent. You don’t like what I write? Get lost. I’m paying for your access to this blog, so what do I care if you leave? That’s the attitude. And you tend to feel that what you write doesn’t matter, so if you’re a slightly bad influence, it’s okay.

I suppose it’s not okay, especially in view of the true volume this site does. I think I will continue to not care if anyone shows up, but maybe I should be more careful about what I write.

In my heart, I always see myself as an obscure, nearly invisible person no one cares about, and I like it that way. I know there are many individuals who share this opinion of me, because over the years, they have come here and left comments to this effect. But I think my perception is exaggerated and not entirely realistic.

Perhaps my view of my impact in the world is colored by my childhood in an abusive environment. I was made to understand that I was powerless, annoying, unattractive, disgraceful, and incapable of holding an opinion worthy of consideration, and I internalized the perceptions of my abusers. You don’t actually have to believe things like that with your mind in order to internalize them. They bypass the mind and get into your flesh, like tapeworms or something. Thinking these feelings away is like trying to think away the flu.

I think I’m better off than a person raised by doting enablers. If you’re going to have delusions about yourself, it’s better to shoot low than high. Proud people do a huge amount of damage to others.

When I write, I don’t think I’m changing the world or turning people’s lives around. I write because I like to write. I have a certain amount of hope that I’ll reach a few people with my testimony, but this is not my main motivation for writing. Should it be? Maybe it should. In the long run, nothing else I write about will be considered anything but afterbirth.

I used to have some hope of impacting the political scene, but I am nearly over that. I have little relapses, but I am out of the loop. I don’t know who the big conservative bloggers are right now. Is Misha still out there? Dan Goldstein? No, it’s Jeff, not Dan. I’m having a hard time remembering who my old allies were. I should look at my blogroll, which is a time capsule dating back to the Bush years.

Pajamas Media and fake corporate blogs really killed conservative blogging! Was I right about that, or what? Conservatives did really well in the blogosphere for a few years, and then Roger Simon bit the head off the golden goose in order to get the eggs. Introducing money and the guild structure into blogging cut the roots of the whole enterprise.

I really caught it for criticizing PJM, too. I correctly diagnosed their problems and predicted their future, and I got reamed out for it all the time. My opinion got the amount of respect it has typically gotten all of my life, from limited thinkers who were not merely wrong but obviously wrong.

I was a traitor! My little blog, not the poisonous, wrongheaded, greedy dreams of the traffic merchants, was the problem. If it weren’t for me, Simon and his pals would be blogging from yachts in Monaco. I took all that away from them!

Too funny.

I rejected PJM and refused to join them, and they returned the favor, in spades. Because it was never about getting the conservative message out, which was something I helped do. It was about making money for the PJ’s.

I was never one of the cool kids, in spite of very good traffic. I started blogging in 2002, I have received tons and tons of links, and Glenn Reynolds has linked to me only once or twice. One of the funniest things that happened during my previous incarnation was receiving an Instalink when Ann Althouse guest-blogged for Reynolds. I wonder how he felt when he saw it. I kind of wonder if she did it to needle him.

It’s strange that I didn’t see that the incurable, terminal pajama blight was inevitable. Maybe I did. I don’t remember. Build a house, and eventually, roaches, rats, and termites will show up. The scent of money was in the air, and eventually hyenas had to smell it.

Where is PJM today? Nowhere. Where is Roger Simon? Is he still alive? He’s not on Fox. He’s not at Breitbart.com. Does he even get to contribute at Hot Air? Somewhere in the dry deserts of Cyberia, there should be a fragment of a statue with “PJMandias” carved into it. All that stuff turned to crap. Total disaster. Simon is more obscure than ever, Bill Whittle is an absolute, complete, utter nobody, Glenn Reynolds is a nobody outside the blogosphere, Michelle Malkin ought to be on a milk carton, and Pam Geller only makes the headlines when someone tries to shoot her. She should be paying jihadis to follow her around.

Where is the PJM cable channel? Where is the PJM satellite? What’s the address of the PJM skyscraper in Manhattan? Where are the revered, gravitas-stuffed PJ pundits we were supposed to see on CNN and the networks?

Where is the mighty PJ media machine which could not help but prevent Obama from being elected twice? It must be around here somewhere.

Wikipedia says PJTV, the rarely viewed PJ video site, went under in 2016. BAH HA HA HA HA. It was all me! I did it! And I’m glad! Do you hear me? GLAD! For my next trick, maybe I’ll generate an earthquake.

When I Googled to find connections (like endorsements and interviews) between Donald Trump’s campaign and PJ Media, excluding results on the PJ site, I got nothing, basically. But I did find PJM’s Youtube channel, which is a testimony to the failure of PJTV, and I also found a story about PJTV’s disintegration. Trump busily covered all the media bases, and he even let little Internet players into the White House press room, but the mighty PJM monolith appears to have escaped his notice.

Look at the damage I did, with my observations. Singlehanded, I destroyed the dreams of millions of conservatives. I killed a brilliant idea that couldn’t fail. I’m amazing. Why hasn’t Soros sent me a check?

I should make cancer go away, too. I’ll start criticizing it.

It occurs to me that a lot of people reading this may not know what PJM is. It failed so completely, most people probably haven’t heard of it.

Ask your barber what he thinks of Instapundit and Pajamas Media for me and tell me what he says. Caveat: not a fair test, if your barber is a former conservative blogger who has to cut hair for a living.

I don’t know if having more traffic than I thought will influence me much. Sitting around analyzing what I write would destroy the pleasure of blogging. I’ll make a little effort, but I doubt there will be a substantial change. I think I will always feel like I’m blogging for 10 or 15 people.

And Now Some Archaeology

I couldn’t resist. I Googled some more.

I remember when Kevin Aylward was a somewhat sheepish noob asking for links on Internet chat. His site, Wizbang, became a right-wing powerhouse. I was not a Wizbang-staff favorite. I felt they were soulless Kool-Aid drinkers who would swallow live snakes for traffic. Anyway, I just checked, and Wizbang is barely breathing.

I happened to see Mary Katharine Ham on the contributor list. You may not remember her. She was a conservative pundit who became famous at about the age of 9 (I exaggerate) based on the following qualifications: she was very attractive, she had a brilliant smile, and she was a woman. I never got the Ham craze. She seemed like a nice kid, but she never said anything remotely insightful or important. As a commentator, she was a nullity. Her success was mystifying, unless you accept the unthinkable proposition that looks matter more than talent. You could go to a random diner in a red state and find 5 uglier people who could do what she did. She has only written one book, with a co-author. Generally, a co-author is a person who writes a book FOR a more-famous person.

Fox dropped her as a commentator. Now she’s a few paragraphs on Wikipedia.

When you’ve been a regular on Fox, the last thing you want is a credit on the front page of Wizbang. It’s like a former Sports Illustrated bikini model working a car show.

Aylward is not mentioned on the front page. Maybe he’s selling real estate or managing a Motel 6 somewhere. If he was smart, he sold Wizbang when it was worth something.

John Cole at Balloon Juice was a big PJ, and in his utter wrongness, he got angry at me for stating the obvious. His site appears to be stumbling on. Somewhere on the web, it says his politics have changed. That’s not unusual. Political people sometimes have epiphanies when they realize their existing political stances don’t generate much attention and/or cash. I don’t know John’s story; maybe he’s sincere, or maybe it embarrasses him to side with people who drive pickup trucks and go to church. I was never a reader of his blog. I didn’t think it was all that good. Anyway, PJM did not propel him to stardom.

The Protein Wisdom blog is dead. I don’t know when that happened. I guess JEFF Goldstein (not Dan) got tired of having his children threatened by leftists nuts. I knew Jeff fairly well by blogger standards; I just forgot his first name. I ran a defunct humor blog called Huffington’s Toast, and Jeff contributed. Anyway, he was PJM. Jeff was a very, very unhappy person, and I would guess that the vitriol he was exposed to through blogging wore on him eventually.

Hot Air is not doing great. They sold out to a corporation. Wikipedia says Michelle Malkin, whose preexisting celebrity jump-started the site, wrote very little of its material. Allahpundit, one of the most talented blog personalities, appears to have remained there, grinding out essays. I hope they are giving him a decent salary. If not, he ought to move on, because blogging isn’t going to get more lucrative in the future.

Malkin herself has not published a book since 2015, and that book had a co-writer. Real writers do their own lifting and do not use co-writers. Her Fox TV presence is reduced now. She founded Twitchy.com, a disheartening site where angry people gather to criticize political tweets. It looks like her star has settled near the horizon, but she probably has a nice income.

Roger Simon is out at PJM. He left in 2013. He is the “CEO Emeritus,” and for those of you who don’t know it, “emeritus” is Latin for “not any more.”

Instapundit is still up, but it’s hosted by PJM, which makes you wonder if the traffic is paying the bills. Reynolds (assuming it’s him) seems to be writing more than he used to. A typical 2005 entry looked like this: “Pie a symbol of capitalist oppression? Ann Althouse has more.” Now I am seeing complete sentences and a few paragraphs. Notable fact: PJM has been in existence since 2004, and Reynolds is still not famous. His recognition factor is probably halfway between those of Ed Morrissey and Mark Steyn. I believe it has peaked. Fortunately he has a lucrative position as a law professor.

John Milner continued drag racing and was eventually killed by a drunk driver. Steve married Laurie, never went east to college, and became an insurance agent in Modesto. Terry “the Toad” Fields was killed in action in Vietnam. Curt went east in spite of all his reservations. He never found the girl in the white T-Bird.

Plus Guns

Today, for the second time since 2002, I had the annoying experience of having a website hacked. Someone left a stupid tag at the top of my home page. I had to drop everything and change every conceivable password, and I exported the entire content of my WordPress blog so I could republish it if the blog vanished.

I suspect there is a hole in WordPress, because my password was a huge jumble of nonsense characters which would have taken a very, very long time to guess. I’m not a computer expert, but I doubt a nerd in Turkey with a 5-year-old laptop has the ability to crack a password as long as a finger, composed of random ASCII. Maybe I’m wrong.

I contacted my hosting company, and their online chat took forever. I tried calling. The phone number took me to an outsourced security company. The guy who picked up the phone told me (this is my interpretation) that my host company’s security is worthless. He said his company would scan my site for $15 per month, which doesn’t sound bad, but then I asked the obvious question. Yes, it’s a yearly deal. So $180.

I tried the support number again, and I got a phone maze that went nowhere at all. That was surprising. Then I got the chat guy (Kumar, no lie), and after much poor communication, he finally assured me that as long as my passwords were fresh, no one but me should be able to get into my email accounts or Cpanel (if you don’t know what that is, forget it).

This killed maybe an hour.

I don’t use lame passwords for my hosted stuff. If you want to get into my business, you will have to find some other way. I assume WordPress provided it, and if that is true, the site may be hacked again, because WordPress has not updated in a while. If this happens, I will probably reinstall the site. It depends on the then-current state of security the host can provide. If I’m going to be reinstalling once per week, I will let it go. There is always Blogger.

I was concerned about my emails, but then I realized there isn’t much for hackers to steal. When you have your own server, the emails are removed as soon as you check them, so there is no giant backlog of sensitive material waiting to be stolen. Unless the host company is stupidly putting deleted emails somewhere where hackers can find them.

This scare made me think about something I expect to happen before long. Eventually, Christians and conservatives will be banned from the web. When we are not banned entirely, we will be hobbled by Nuremberg-style laws that will limit us to very basic participation, free of political and religious content. The big Internet players are not bound by the Constitution, so they will have a good legal opening when they decide to muffle us once and for all.

I assume whoever hacked me is just bored, but it could be someone who has an agenda. It’s not a Christian or a conservative. Actually, some conservatives hate me, but I’m not in the political blogging game now, so I doubt these stunted souls feel motivated to bother me.

While I was fixing my security to the best of my ability, I learned something surprising. I am getting nearly 2 thousand unique visits per day. I figured I was getting more like 80. I had a stat counter that gave me depressing results, but I knew it wasn’t working very well. I guess it was working worse than I thought. My host company’s internal stat stuff told me the truth.

What can I say about this? I thought I was yelling into a bucket, but it appears that I have some readers. They don’t comment much. Maybe most are bots. Years ago, “unique visit” meant a human being had probably come to your blog. Now? Search me.

I don’t think ~2000 people are showing up every day, but maybe it’s ~1000.

Maybe I am reaching some people with my testimony. I will have to think more about what I write, now that I know someone may actually read it.

In other news, I solved my long-range (longish) shooting problem. I was shooting a 17 HMR rifle at 100 yards, and I was getting a lot of dispersion. I was frustrated. Then I learned that a slight wind will blow a 17 HMR all over the place. Also, a gun forum guy told me to get my left hand off the gun. Today I went out with my friend Mike, and we shot a while. There was no wind. I switched to shooting with my left hand down, and here is what I got:

That’s 5 rounds on the left, plus an extraneous round Mike fired just to make my target look bad. What a punk move. Can you believe that? Anyway, that’s a wee bit over 1 MOA, probably. It may be 1 MOA. It’s very close, measuring from the outsides of the farthest-separated holes.

I figure if I practice a little, I will be 3/4 MOA with that gun, and I will be consistent. I won’t have to shoot 50 rounds to get a single 3/4 MOA group I can put on the Internet. This makes me extremely happy.

That gun is a laser. It’s crappy rimfire ammunition, which you can get for 10 bucks per box, and look how accurate it is. IF the wind isn’t blowing. I am reading some surprising distance figures. I thought the gun was useless past 150 yards, but apparently that’s not true unless you want to kill things. People are claiming they shoot targets at nearly 300 yards. If that’s true, this is the practice gun for me. I just need to choose days when there isn’t much wind.

That’s exciting. I can find 300 yards of safe shooting space here, no problem. I could conceivably learn to shoot real distances.

We also shot some grapefruit and ponderosa lemons. I hit one and blew half of it about 15 feet away from the rest. Fun.

It’s really nice to be shooting a rifle well. It was a long time coming. And since I’m not using the best stuff or practicing a lot, I should expect considerable improvement in the future. Too bad they don’t sell a license for shooting hackers.

If the blog disappears, don’t blame me. I’ll make a reasonable effort to keep it alive.

Secular Conservatives: Your Money is on the Dresser

I see Milo Yiannopoulos is in trouble.

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

Isn’t that about right?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It will be interesting to see what happens.

Comments Stolen by WordPress Quirk

For some reason, this site trashed a few comments without asking my permission. If you wondered why your comment did not appear, now you know. I have restored the deleted comments.

Rachel Marsden Must Have Turned Fox Down

I’ve been saying Megyn Kelly’s departure from Fox News would be good for the network, provided they chose her replacement well. It’s very easy to do what she does. There are millions of people who could do it if given a chance.

This morning I saw that they had given the job to Tucker Carlson. I now see Kelly’s departure as a disaster.

This is exactly the kind of move I used to complain about when I was trying to achieve some level of fame as a conservative blogger: conservatives have an inner circle of mediocre people they protect and promote, and if you’re outside the circle, it doesn’t matter if you’re Albert Einstein crossed with Winston Churchill crossed with P.J. O’Rourke. You are not going to get a chance.

Tucker Carlson seems like a nice boy, but he has almost no talent. He’s bad at what he does. He’s not unusually smart. He’s not witty or funny. He’s not perceptive. He has never said anything quotable, and that’s a real problem for a would-be pundit. He’s like Mary Katharine Ham in a suit.

I wonder if the Fox brass bothered to check Carlson’s resume. He has failed twice, and he has never succeeded. His show Crossfire was cancelled, and he had an MSNBC show which failed. Why would you hire someone who already had two swings at the ball? Investing is all about momentum. You don’t invest in something that isn’t succeeding already. Carlson, who is approaching 50, has a very long track record which proves people don’t want to watch him. Didn’t anyone notice?

I guess they really wanted to save 25 million dollars.

The sad thing is that he’s not bad enough to kill a program, so he’ll probably last on Fox, like the orange car at a dealership no one wants to buy. Too good to fire; too weak to succeed. Greta van Susteren was not very good at what she did, but she was good enough to survive, so her time spot remained clogged and wasted for years. Carlson will end up in the same boat.

I’m trying to think of an insider they could have promoted. Greg Gutfeld is smart and talented, but he’s immature and gets on people’s nerves. He doesn’t have gravitas. People can’t respect him.

Now I’m stuck. I can’t think of anyone but Gutfeld.

They need someone with Ann Coulter’s intelligence and Bill O’Reilly’s ability to handle guests. There is probably a blogger or Youtuber out there who could do it, but we will never get to see that person, because if anything happens to Carlson, Fox will go through its entire Christmas party invitation list before talking to anyone new.

Laura Ingraham is smart, but people don’t like her.

I had a weird experience this week, and it dovetails nicely with this subject. I watched a far-left Youtube vlogger, and I enjoyed it. I don’t know how that happened. His name is Jimmy Dore. He’s a comedian who appeared with a group of vloggers who call themselves the Young Turks. Their vlog is as boring as death, but he’s entertaining and smart. I don’t know how he ended up on the left. Childhood trauma, I guess. He’s Irish. Maybe he’s another casualty of cruel Catholic school nuns.

He has been hammering liberals for buying and promoting the “Russians hacked the election” story with no proof. It’s very pleasant to watch. Anyway, he’s really good, and like Conan O’Brien, he shows there is untapped talent out there, if you’re willing to look outside of your ten best friends.

Remember how O’Brien got his job? Everyone said NBC was nuts, hiring a writer who had never worked on-camera. Look how that panned out. If O’Brien had worked for Fox, he would still be in the mailroom, waiting for his gold watch. “Conan…Mr. Carlson says you forgot to use soy milk in his cappuccino! We won’t be needing you in the studio any more. Here’s your old toilet brush.”

The left has people like Colbert and Stewart–real talents–and the right gets Tucker Carlson. And we had plenty of alternatives. It’s a self-inflicted wound. Thank God Neil Cavuto doesn’t have a bipolar son who needs a job, or we wouldn’t even have Carlson.

I checked to see who’s on CNN at 9 p.m., and it’s Anderson Cooper. He starts at 8 p.m. I don’t know how anyone can stand two hours of that, but it’s true. I wonder how Carlson will do against him. I don’t know how Megyn Kelly has done. Well. I know she has done well. I just don’t know how well. I am too lazy to look. My guess is that O’Reilly will feed Carlson enough viewers to keep him on the air.

I don’t care much about this story, but I do find it interesting. I don’t watch Fox or any other TV news station. I see little bits of the news from time to time. Just enough to be disappointed!

Yeah, I’m being not a team player again. Once again, my tiny blog will be responsible for a Fox failure. They should send someone to assassinate me. If they had done that a few years ago, their comedy show would have been a huge hit. Because quality isn’t the problem. The problem is people like me, pointing out the obvious. My power is intoxicating. Behold my blog and tremble!

On the up side, Bill O’Reilly must be the happiest man alive today. Whatever he was worth to Fox last week, it has doubled now.

Maybe they’ll fire him and hire Jiminy Glick.

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Here’s a great question. If they absolutely had to hire from within, why didn’t they consider Andy Levy? He’s as good as Gutfeld, plus he has the ability to be taken seriously.

Is he dead? I don’t keep up.