Make Sure You Wear Your Mosque

I am getting comments from concerned readers. I better tell you what happened.

As some of you have guessed, I poisoned myself while ingesting the dangerous horse medicine ivermectin, washed down with entire six-packs of Pabst Blue Ribbon. I became quite ill and rushed to the hospital, where they were unable to treat me or even get to me. They couldn’t climb over the dunes of dead, maskless, red-hatted bodies that cluttered the grounds.

I had brought my My Pillow with me for comfort, and I rested my head on it in the parking lot and used a Confederate flag for a blanket. I was so sick, it was all I could do to raise my head every fifteen minutes or so to shout racial slurs, vaccine misinformation, and baseless claims of election fraud.

After several hours, I died, but not before giving a blockbuster, amazingly unwitnessed interview with Bob Woodward, who has an uncanny knack of showing up unnoticed at the deathbeds of conservative figures who can’t stand him yet call on him to come hear them refute everything they have ever said and stab everyone they know in the back.

Sobbing, I told him how much I regretted refusing vaccines and encouraging everyone else to do the same, based on my belief that the vaccines were created by Louis Farrakhan in an effort to make white men impotent. I said I regretted these things even though I hadn’t actually done either of them, and I also let him know I had personally shot video of underage Russian prostitutes relieving themselves on mattresses as Donald Trump and Alan Dershowitz looked on while sucking on crack pipes.

Before dying for good, I coded briefly, visited heaven, returned, and gave confirmation to Woodward: God had assured me that all he really cared about was social justice and environmental extremism, and he said everyone who didn’t support Antifa, BLM, and sexual perversion was going to hell. He also said no one would be allowed into heaven without a mask, a vaccine passport, and carbon credits.

This could all be true, or maybe I just spent a couple of weeks in Turkey on my honeymoon.

Rhodah and I stayed in the Sultanahmet area of Istanbul, and we also visited othe seaside city of Kusadasi, which we used as a base for a guided day trip to Ephesus. We enjoyed Turkey a great deal. The Turks turned out to be charming, friendly, helpful people, even when they were not trying to sell us things, which was not much of the time. The food was pretty good, the exchange rate was excellent, the hotel where we spent most of our time started to feel like our home, and by the time we left, we had made a whole bunch of quasi-friends from among the neighborhood entrepreneurs who accosted us regularly.

I’m too sleep-deprived to write much. I left my hotel at 4 a.m. Eastern time on the 24th, and I got to my house at 3 a.m. on the 25th. Since then, I have slept 4 hours.

I also have some sort of respiratory illness. Covid? Who knows? About 5 days ago, I started feeling nausea, and then things progressed to diarrhea and a sore throat. Eventually, I had bone aches, a slight headache, and a stuffy nose. The final insult was the production of large quantities of disgusting substances inside my nose, which had to be harvested several times a day. I am still not completely done with that.

I also had a low fever, but I will never know the temperature, because I could not find my thermometer to pack it. I know I had a fever because I stopped sweating, and then one night I woke up and saw I had started again. That meant the fever had broken.

Of course, I wonder if coronavirus is the problem. I’m having nearly the same symptoms I had early in 2020 after meeting with a bunch of maskless, pre-vaccine, hands-laying Europeans at a religious event. I feel better this time, and I have been spared vomiting, conjunctivitis, and bottomless watery nasal discharge, but other than that, it’s very similar.

Trying to diagnose myself on the web, I can’t find any other diseases that fit the symptoms. Colds, the flu, and strep throat are out.

Just like last time, the digestive problems only lasted a few hours and submitted right away to loperamide pills. Thank goodness for that. Nothing is worse than using public toilets in foreign countries.

Well, actually, that’s probably wrong. America has some of the filthiest toilets on Earth. Georgia and New York, in particular, stand out in my experience. I’ll bet Toilet Duck doesn’t even have brand reps in those states. It would be like paying people to promote pork in Mecca.

In order to reinfiltrate the US, I had to take a PCR test about 3 days back. I was concerned that I might get stuck in Turkey, but I passed. Suspicious, I Googled. I read that for tests performed during the first few days of infections, the false-negative rate is about 2/3. Information like this helps explain why I believe so little of what our overlords and THE SCIENCE tell us. How can tests be useful when they are USUALLY wrong, in the most harmful way possible, when administered during the time when most patients choose to take them?

Incidentally, a PCR test costs $19 in Turkey, and they come to your hotel. Try getting one that cheap in America.

It’s amazing, the transparent idiocy they shovel at us. Here’s another example: we need to wear masks on planes. Ignoring the fact that masks do virtually nothing as worn by the majority of real human beings, why do mask Nazis never mention the constant replacement of airline cabin air? Every time I get on a plane, I am told it’s nearly impossible to get coronavirus while flying. They say all of the air in a plane is replaced every three minutes, so the viruses get shot out into the sky. If that is true (which I doubt), how can an uncomfortable, irritating mask provide an increase in safety which is worth the misery it causes?

United Airlines says the likelihood of getting covid on a plane is something like 0.003%. Or maybe it’s 0.0003%. I forget. Anyway, it’s basically zero, according to them. THE SCIENCE says a real-world mask worn by a typical person may reduce transmission by something like 15 percentage points, meaning the mask reduction is barely perceptible statistical noise compared to the ventilation reduction.

Imagine this. The government says air bags reduce critical accident injuries by–wild guess–75%. Then some scientist finds out placing live scorpions in your underpants raises the protection to 75.02%. Would you pass a law forcing people to use the scorpions?

We have a couple of problems. First, the data THE SCIENCE provides is clearly bogus a lot of the time. For example, a person who falls off a cliff while sick with covid may get put in the “coronavirus death” tally. Second, the policy makers who use THE SCIENCE to tell us what to do are too stupid to understand and make good use of data, even when it isn’t bogus, and they’re also too biased and dishonest to make intelligent rules even when they understand things correctly.

I really hate wearing a mask on a plane. The mask starts to stink before two hours are up, hot air roasts my face, and more hot air shoots upward under my reading glasses, which makes my eyes hurt. The hot air also fogs my glasses, making reading difficult. On a flight that lasts over 10 hours, it’s like one of those loophole torture methods countries use to abuse prisoners of war without violating the Geneva Conventions.

I have learned how to cope. I buy the flimsiest, least effective masks available. I keep an eye on stewardesses, and as soon as they turn their backs, I pull my mask down below my nose. When I see them coming my way, I pull it back up. I think they know I’m doing it, but after dealing with people like me all day for months, they don’t want to get into it with me. When they offer food and drinks, I put them on my tray table and eat and drink unbelievably slowly with no mask. Sometimes I’ll go half an hour, lifting a cup of warm ginger ale to my lips and pretending to sip while my mouth is closed. When that gets dull, I may get up and go stand in the bathroom for 5 minutes with my mask in my pocket.

I learned the slow-eating tip from my friend Mike, who flies more often than I do. Genius.

Another helpful move: taking that darned mask off and fiddling with it for several minutes because it’s just so hard to adjust so it fits the way Papa Joe wants it to.

When all else fails, there’s always, “Mask? Oh, sorry!” Like you didn’t realize it was under your chin. Pull it back up and then wait for your next opportunity to grab more air.

Only amateurs fight with stewardesses. A real master doesn’t resist. It’s like aikido. You look at the natural motions of your attacker and use them against her, to your benefit. You yield and pretend to comply, and by the end of your flight, your face, or at least your nostrils, has been tasting that sweet cabin air at least half of the time.

If you resist, some snippy steward who has a makeup channel on Youtube will smirk and prance while the police drag you down the aisle at his command. You don’t want to go out like that. Remember Ferris Bueller. What would Abe Froman do?

Am I a bad guy for cheating? Well, not according to THE SCIENCE.

A) Everyone on the plane has been tested very recently, assuring that very few infected people are aboard. I am probably not capable of spreading viruses.

B) Everyone on the plane has either been vaccinated or has recovered from coronavirus, and either type of person has a low probability of being infected anew, MULTIPLIED by a sub-1% chance of having severe symptoms.

C) The airlines claim the chance of being infected regardless of immunity and masking is so low it’s essentially zero.

D) Everyone on the plane risks infection every single day, and all of them risked it getting to the airport and breathing the airport’s filthy air and touching its nasty surfaces. Sitting near a vaccinated, tested person with no symptoms should, if THE SCIENCE is to be believed, be one of the least-risky things a traveler will do during his day of flying.

I would also add:

E) General principles, et cetera, et cetera.

All this being said, I do take the disease seriously. I got the Johnson shot. I got a flu shot because I read it was associated with milder covid symptoms, and I tried to get a pneumonia shot for the same reason. I wash my hands all the time. I try not to do anything stupid. I’m not against intelligent precautions. It’s the other kind that get my goat.

Today I got another PCR test. I don’t trust the test I took in Turkey, and if I’ve been infected, the knowledge could be useful. Proof of surviving covid gives you added social credit which might be helpful in some situations. Israel supposedly gives survivors better treatment than vaccine recipients.

Finding out I’m positive would be better than finding out I’m negative. It would tell me I beat covid, and that would make me feel better about possible future bouts.

I just found out antibody tests are available. If I can get one, and if it won’t be skewed by my status as a vaccine recipient, I plan to take one. If there is any possibility I have had covid, I want to know.

Incidentally, I intended to take ivermectin in Turkey, but I didn’t do it. I told Rhodah to bring some pills for me, but she misunderstood, so she left them at home. Because I thought she was bringing them, I didn’t bring my horse medicine. I really missed it when I started getting sick.

Last night, before going to bed at 4 a.m., I took a dose. When I woke up 4 hours later, I felt much, much better. It was remarkable. I was surprised. Was it the ivermectin? Did God heal me? Was it my body overcoming a disease that wasn’t that tough to begin with? I don’t know, but there is a ton of evidence suggesting ivermectin has helped many people, so maybe it helped me, and I plan to keep using it.

Although I’ve been ill, I haven’t felt very bad. I have felt tremendous enthusiasm for getting out and walking. I felt a strong drive to get out and walk several miles a day in Istanbul. I preferred it to taking trains. I felt sleep-deprived because the sore throat interfered with sleep, and I felt a little worn-out on the nights of high-mileage days, but I didn’t feel fatigued during the day, except when watching my wife try on shoes. I’ve felt lots of physical strength. My worst problem was joint pain that popped up after a day or two. When I walked, I felt like I had mild arthritis. Every time a foot struck the ground, I felt a little pain.

I’m afraid I overworked Rhodah. She was happy to get exercise, but there were times when she wanted to sit down and rest. Even though I was sick, I was usually the one who wanted to keep going. She got short of breath a few times, but I didn’t.

I lost weight while eating baklava and cake. I went down a belt notch. If Rhodah had been as gung-ho as I was, I would have walked more and lost more. I don’t think she was ready for what I kept telling her was “old man strength.”

I hope she starts to have the same feeling. It would be very helpful to her to develop an urge to walk. Apart from the health benefits, it’s a very beneficial urge for a traveler to have, and Rhodah likes travel.

I thought I didn’t feel like writing, but I’ve written a lot.

I plan to go buy Mucinex and soak in a tub of hot water. Hopefully I can expel some of the horrible stuff that is coming loose inside me. Maybe tomorrow I’ll write a little about Turkey.

Getting too Southern for my Own Good

My oldest friend is a guy named Mike. Just to show you what a rotten friend he is, I will post a photo he sent me recently.

This represents part of his output for one week. He bought a Masterbuilt smoker, and he has smoked his weight in pork and chicken.

These days, I stifle my interest in cooking. It’s not good to be a lover of pleasure, and gluttony is an invitation to inhabitation by demons. I rarely cook anything impressive. But here is Mike, telling me one more rack of ribs won’t hurt.

I live in an area where even the worst barbecue is pretty good. It’s not like Miami, where Cubans and yankees think only of money when they prepare food. Still, the obvious truth is that I make barbecue better than any restaurant I’ve been to. Also, it’s much cheaper, and if I barbecue at home, I won’t have to go to restaurants, which are considered prime coronavirus transmission hubs.

These are the thoughts I had as I pitted Mike against mere reason.

Of course, Mike won. I ordered a smoker.

Years ago, I built my own smoker: the Hoginator. I took a big Char-Broil grill and cut holes in it so I could mount to electric heating elements. I cut another hole so I could feed smoke into it. I fabricated a steel smoke box that sat behind the smoker, and it had a hinged door in it so I could shove wood into it. I smoked with flaming wood, the way you’re supposed to, but the smoke box was over a foot away from the smoker, so not much of the heat got into the smoker. I was able to maintain a nice low temperature.

This time, I thought about building another smoker. For about three minutes. Yes, I think men who buy things they can fabricate are really women, but you have to choose your battles. In order to make a really good smoker, I would have to bend and weld a lot of stainless sheet, and I would have to make it double-walled so I could put insulation in it. Forget that. I already paid my dues with the Hoginator. This time, I’m going to let someone else do the metalworking.

Digression: yesterday I finished straightening the mounting tabs on my middle buster and welding gussets in to keep them from bending again. Metal still bends the knee to me.

I ordered a Smokin-It smoker. They’re made in Michigan, hopefully by Southern immigrants. They have double-walled stainless cabinets. People swear by them. I ordered the second-smallest model. I wanted to be able to jam a turkey into it, and the little one did not look promising. Also, when you buy the cheapest model of anything, you’re usually asking for a bunch of after-purchase Band-Aid modifications and add-ons that take the fun out of it. This smoker will come with everything it needs, including wheels.

I believe it’s a little smaller than a waist-high fridge. We shall see.

While I was trying to figure out what to buy, I learned some things.

First, people say Masterbuilts fall apart in a few years. I didn’t want to take a chance. There are competitors such as Pit Boss and Cuisinart, but they look to be of similar quality. I don’t want to drop $250 on a new smoker every three years until I die. The box I bought should last for eternity.

Here’s another thing: propane smokers are hard to use. The temperature fluctuates. Forget it; not interested.

I learned that electric smokers don’t produce smoke rings in meat. A smoke ring is a layer of reddish meat just under the surface. I was upset to read that I wouldn’t be getting one, until I learned that barbecue judges all agree that a smoke ring doesn’t improve the flavor of the food.

Smokin-It has a close competitor called Smokin’ Tex. Smokin-It gives you a lot more for the money, so that’s why I chose their product.

The smoker will be here Thursday, God willing. That means barbecue on Friday. I need to get some ribs.

I don’t do baby backs. I don’t get them at all. I think they’re for suckers. Spare ribs are much cheaper. They’re bigger. They have more fat and flavor. They’re not dry like baby backs. I plan to pick up a rack of spare ribs.

I’m about to dig up my rub recipe. I’m considering adding a little black cardamom.

I would post my rub recipe, but in all honesty, they’re all about the same. Sugar, salt, mustard, pepper, cumin, garlic…it’s not rocket science.

Actually, I shouldn’t say that. A barbecue celebrity named Myron Mixon opened a joint in Miami, and his rub was disgusting. Very litte salt. No flavor. This was after he talked a lot of smack, belittling the competition. His place went bankrupt, even after a lot of Miami people who knew nothing about barbecue posted ridiculous positive Internet reviews.

I prayed before ordering the smoker, and my impression was that God likes it when I entertain friends and that he was in favor of me buying it so I could barbecue for them and still have time to talk about Christianity. I hope my friends don’t read that.

The Hoginator was a lot of work to use. The new smoker should be much less bother.

I should be able to barbecue for 30 people with this thing, so the small gatherings I am likely to draw should be no problem.

Here’s a neat hint for applying a rub: use a bath towel. Drop your ribs on the towel, add the rub, and use the towel to contain the mess while you press the rub onto the meat. When you’re done, roll the towel up with the excess spices in it and put it in the laundry. It won’t stain. This is my original idea, so make sure you send me royalties when you use it.

What about sauce? Here is my conclusion. Store barbecue sauce is so good now, there is not much point in making your own. Yeah, I said it. Stubbs, Sweet Baby Ray’s, Cattleman’s…you name it. There are lots of good ones. Buy four brands every time you barbecue, and make notes on the ones you like.

I will post pork photos eventually.

Fluffy Herald of Relief Appears

I have earth-shaking news. Real American toilet paper is available from Amazon. I don’t mean weird Chinese paper which is somehow puffed up so it takes three rolls to do the job of one real roll. I mean actual American toilet paper. I saw Angel Soft in the listings, and it’s in stock. Other brands must be on the way.

Surely the clouds have parted.

I thought this would happen two weeks ago. It did happen, though, and that’s the main thing. America’s garages and spare rooms can only hold so much toilet paper. People couldn’t keep buying huge quantities forever. Eventually, we had to see a change.

Now what are the hoarders going to do with their house-choking stashes? Check Craigslist next month.

I have a cousin in the Chicago area, and she says she’s down to two rolls. Apparently, the good-natured midwestern folk of Chicago have treated each other very badly during the last month or two. She says they cleaned stores out. Things many Americans were able to buy easily were not available there.

I’ve heard people say Chicagoans are wonderful, friendly, helpful people. Nothing like New Yorkers.

Whatever. The proof is in the pudding.

The other day I heard a quote about hard times. I can’t find it. Paraphrasal: hard times don’t change a man; they reveal him. That’s what I have to say about Chicago’s hoarders, as well as all other hoarders. There is no point in virtue-signaling after you’ve been exposed. Makes you look worse.

The hoarders here are completely nuts. If you go to one store, you’ll find it completely stripped of one type of item, but if you go to another, you’ll see that item for sale, along with things you couldn’t find at the first store. Example: my local Winn-Dixie had a run on potatoes, but a Publix a few miles away had plenty. Two days ago, the only dish powder I could find at Publix cost $14 for 37 loads, so about 38 cents per load. It was that weird encapsulated kind. Anyone who buys that is begging for poverty. I drove a mile to Walmart and found I could get almost whatever I wanted. I bought two boxes of the store brand, which is very cheap and works just as well as Cascade. Paid about half what the fancy stuff cost. I would guess you use half an ounce per load, so 300 loads at 2.58 cents per load. What drives a person to buy pods? It’s madness.

Walmart had paper towels, too. I bought two rolls, just for the thrill. The beef had been raided (unlike Publix and Winn-Dixie), but they had a magnificent, highly marbled cowboy rib eye for a good price, so I jumped on that. It was excellent.

If there were any sense to the hoarding, every store would lack the same things. And no, it’s not a supply thing. It’s not like Publix has a secret potato farm surrounded by guard towers. Hoarder obsessions vary depending on location.

I do not read newspapers, but several times a week, I try to go to the local paper’s website to see if I’m under martial law or anything. I check the COVID-19 numbers. It’s really creeping here. The known total for the county is 121, or about one in 2500. We’re never going to get a major epidemic among the general population. That’s my prediction, anyway. It may find its way into senior facilities, but if we’re at 1/2500 as of April 19, I don’t see us ever ending up like New York.

Speaking of New York, there are a lot of Northerners who live here during the winter, and they’re gone, presumably reducing the travel between here and the north. We had a high percentage of travel-related cases. If you think about it, epidemics can only spread to new areas through travel-related cases.

The median age of the cases here is 50, and it’s probably close to the average, too. Is the virus hitting older people more often? Could be, but it may also be that because most cases are mild or asymptomatic, the people who are reporting their illness are generally those who don’t do as well as the average victim. That would lead to over-reporting of old people, smokers, diabetics, and fat people.

This is not a healthy county. Smoking is everywhere, and the people eat garbage. Obesity almost seems fashionable. Add these factors to the large number of seniors here, and you have a bomb waiting to go off. But it hasn’t and probably won’t.

I have to hand it to the people who run the ALF’s. I know these places are not as clean as typical homes, but someone here must be doing something right. We don’t have a single ALF death cluster, but Massachusetts is jam-packed with them, to the point where they overwhelm statistics for everyone else. Massachusetts has had a bona fide ALF catastrophe. They must be doing very little to protect the elderly.

I would have expected worse performance here.

Apart from having a low population density, I don’t know why we’re doing well. Traffic here is just about normal. It’s not like we’re imprisoned, the way people are in other places. There is still a lot of mingling. I’m considering looking into a haircut next week. The ponytail look is not for me. The Seventies are over, and we should do all we can to put a stake in their heart.

The Johns Hopkins USA graph was still on a plateau last night, which is the last time it was updated. The graph was turning downward again. A plateau is good. We can’t have a true disaster if the transmission rate is sufficiently low.

I wonder how my Ebay bench grinder poverty index is doing. Last time I looked, there were 44 items listed under “Baldor bench grinder.” Let’s see.

It’s down to 41! We’ll see what it looks like after a week or so. Still higher than it was before the epidemic.

Still not ONE major celebrity death.

I suppose I should talk about the supernatural approach to epidemics, since it’s the most important approach.

We got here by neglecting the supernatural, and we should focus on the supernatural to get out.

Disease comes from sin and poor relationships with God. Idolatry, including atheism, is a major cause. Epidemics come to countries where not enough people are repenting and praying. They’re not random things that happen to “good people.” Calling yourself good is actually a great way to invite disaster. The word says God is near to them that are of a broken heart and saves such as be of a contrite spirit, and it says he fights the proud.

The word also says God will heal a country if his people will pray. It doesn’t say, “if everyone in the country will pray.” It says “my people.” God was willing to spare Sodom for 10 righteous people, but he couldn’t find that many.

We should be attacking the epidemic with prayer and repentance. Those of us who are already trying to live God’s way should be praying for revival and repentance, not just an end to the epidemic. Of course, we will be attacked for saying sin is in any way involved in epidemics, even though everyone knows how VD works. Sin even contributes to non-infectious diseases like cirrhosis, lung cancer, COPD, and obesity-related illnesses. The connection between sin and disease should be obvious even to atheists.

Most Christians don’t bless or curse. I guess they don’t know they can. You can speak defeat to problems. You can speak help to people. Isaac did it. Balaam did it. Peter did it. Jesus did it. We should be doing these things.

We should be saying, “I speak defeat to the spirits and people contributing the panic and selfishness.” “I speak defeat to the spirits that spread the disease.” “I speak defeat to the hoarders and the spirits they serve.” “I speak defeat to Satan in his effort to use this disease to turn people into servants of the Beast.” “I speak victory to God’s servants and those who speak the truth about the epidemic.”

Even jihadis know curses and blessings matter. They gather in groups and curse the USA and Israel. Somehow, we don’t think our words have power.

I pray for the epidemic to end, and I also pray for God to defeat the spirits and people who are using it to train people for Satan. I ask God to destroy this plan, and I ask him to spread revival and repentance. I ask him to free people from crooked pastors and dependence on churches, and I ask him to spread true Christianity like a disease, outside of church, from person to person, so people will know him personally, as they are supposed to. I ask him to take Satan’s training exercise away and make it his own.

The Bible mentions several epidemics. Were any NOT caused by sin?

Let’s see.

The Egyptian plagues were caused by sin, and two were bodily afflictions. The hemorrhoid plague in Gaza was caused by sin. The Revelation plagues will be caused by sin. A plague killed 185,000 Assyrians in one night, and it was because they were against God. A plague struck Israel because of David’s sin.

It’s strange that so many Christians think an epidemic is an unjust attack on an innocent society. Where, exactly, is this innocent society? Is it America, which has killed at least 60,000,000 unborn babies since Roe v. Wade? Is it Israel, which has generally rejected Jesus? Is it China, which leads the world in abortion and infanticide?

What does the Bible say about protection from plagues? It says that if you dwell in the secret place of the most high, you shall not fear for the pestilence that walks in darkness. It says that if you make God your refuge, no plague shall come near your dwelling. It says the Hebrews were spared the plague on the firstborn because they obeyed God.

Sometimes famines are epidemics. They can be caused by crop diseases. The Bible says famine comes from curses related to disobedience.

It sure seems like plagues are connected to our attitudes toward God.

If the pandemic is an end-time thing, it will happen again. It may not come as a coronavirus epidemic, but some other global disaster will hit, and it will be followed by others, because the end will be a series of birth pangs. They will precede the emergence of the Antichrist and the return of Jesus Christ. Labor pains get more frequent and more intense, so if you don’t like COVID-19, you will really hate what comes later. It’s time to come inside.

Plus Ham Info

I am trying to avoid getting back into cooking, because the love of pleasure is a bad thing, and I have been gluttonous in the past. Nonetheless, I keep getting ideas whether I want them or not, and I’m glad I’ve developed a collection of my own recipes.

Today I decided to make a few biscuits. I was out of bread because of the trip, and I didn’t want to drive to McDonald’s for breakfast. I found a recipe I created a few years back, and I decided to try it.

The biscuits were very good. They’re certainly better than any homemade biscuits anyone else has made for me. I think they can be better, though. Let’s face it; McDonald’s and Chick-fil-A make really good biscuits, and the rest of us should be up to their standard. Here’s the recipe, as it stands after today:

INGREDIENTS

1 3/4 cups biscuit flour (not self-rising)
1/4 cup starch
1/2 tsp. salt
1 tbsp. sugar
4 tsp. baking powder (not soda)
3/4 cup buttermilk
2 tbsp. bacon grease
2 tbsp. butter

A little starch makes the biscuits less rubbery; biscuits shouldn’t feel like bread. The sugar isn’t there to make them sweet. It’s just enough to round out the flavor. Chick-fil-A uses a great deal of sugar in its biscuits. Too much.

The important thing is to burn and chill the butter. You can put it in the microwave in a Pyrex cup and burn it a little. You don’t need the junk that settles out. Combine 2 tablespoons of lightly burned butter with 2 tablespoons of bacon grease and chill it until it’s solid. Burning the butter a little gives it a lot of flavor. Bacon grease makes the biscuits flaky.

It’s a lot of trouble, but you have to ask yourself whether you want good biscuits or amazing biscuits.

You mix the dry ingredients and then cut the fat in until you have crumbs. Mix the buttermilk in, roll the biscuits out, and bake them at 450 for around 13 minutes.

The only thing I’m not thrilled about is the texture of the tops of the biscuits. I think I know what to do. McDonald’s brushes biscuits with melted butter. I think that’s the answer. I don’t know when I’ll make biscuits again, but when I do, this is what I’ll do.

My grandmother used to put a small amount of grease on top of her biscuits before baking. I’ve tried this, and the fat disappears into the biscuit. Sorry, Granny.

Baking at 450 seems to be important. I used to bake biscuits at 400, but it’s a mistake.

You may not need to use all of the buttermilk, because the actual amount of flour and starch you measure may vary. Truthfully, flour should always be weighed, not measured in cups. When you use a cup, you will get inconsistent results because the flour may be compacted to different degrees. You won’t know how much flour you’re getting. Weighing is the way to go. Use a gram scale. They’re cheap. I need to correct this recipe and turn the flour and buttermilk measurements into weights. It would also be helpful for the hard fat, because it’s not easy to get hard fat into a cup.

You can’t throw up your hands at grams and weighing, just because your great aunt measured everything with a coffee cup with a broken handle. Tradition is great, but being stupid is never a good thing. Your great aunt may also have used a stove heated by burning wood, and you don’t do that. I hope.

This recipe is a work in progress. I don’t know when I’ll be completely satisfied.

I’ve been Googling around, and it appears it’s possible to cure a country ham at home. You have to have a fridge where it can stay for a few months, but after that, the cure keeps it preserved, so you can hang it anywhere. I may try it, if I can get my grandmother’s recipe. There are two kinds of hams available commercially: expensive ones, and bad ones. The real thing at a decent price would be better.

She used to keep saltpeter in her kitchen, so I think that’s what she used instead of pink salt. We used to think she bought it to put in my grandfather’s food, but maybe that wasn’t the case.

Things are going very well today. I have already been used to help two people for God, and it’s not even 11 a.m. Can’t complain about that.

Yesterday a wonderful thing happened. I felt tempted to do something stupid, and God helped me. I was getting close to home on the drive south, and I kept feeling temptation. I used my supernatural tools, and it seemed like I wasn’t winning. Eventually, I spoke God’s help and victory to me, and I spoke his opposition to the people and spirits that were against me.

It was raining very hard when I approached the house. I turned into my driveway, and I pushed the button on the gate remote. Nothing happened. At the same time, I got a message from my phone, saying the power at the house was out. No power, no gate. There was no way I was getting out to climb the fence in the rain.

I reported the outage by phone, and when I checked, the online map only showed one tiny outage in the whole county.

After a while, a pickup showed up, and a man from the power company approached my car. He said he had looked at all the lines near my house, and he couldn’t see anything wrong. He said he was going to turn the power back on in a few minutes.

After another 10 minutes or so, my phone told me the power was on, and I went in. The temptation was gone, and I was fine.

This experience was neat in more than one way. First, it showed that God was really there. He came through for me, fast. Second, it showed that speaking things into existence works, when you do it in accordance with God’s will. It’s a very powerful thing. Third, God did everything for me. He was glorified. I would have failed without him.

This is the kind of Christianity I want. I don’t mind failing and having God take over and give me victory. It’s how things are supposed to be. We’re told to glorify Jesus all the time. That only makes sense if we’re glorifying him for things he does. He would not ask us to glorify him for things we do using willpower. It would be stealing.

When you say, “Glory to Jesus,” you’re really saying, “This is not my job. Jesus will have to do it, and he gets the credit.” Churches have taught us to be tough little soldiers who lift themselves by their own bootstraps, but that’s what the Jews who rejected Jesus taught. It’s pride, and God hates pride. The Bible says God will fight you if you’re proud.

I feel much closer to God today. I feel his reality more intensely, and it’s paying off.

I’m also much less stressed than I was while my dad was alive. Back then, I knew Christians were supposed to have peace, but I couldn’t hold onto it. I was in an unequal yoking I had chosen years before. I chose physics and law and my dad’s company over God, so I had to spend years being pulled out of that mess. I sleep better now. I don’t feel the worry I had to fight last month. I can’t tell you how great it is.

When you get into something God doesn’t want you to be part of, he may not deliver you quickly. You may get a sentence of many years. This is especially true when you marry or reproduce outside of God’s will. I’m lucky it was a parent who didn’t have long to live. What if I had a crazy wife with 40 more years left on her clock?

My dad was transformed at the end, and he became a wonderful father, but that amounted to about a month and a half. Before that, there was always tension.

A real Christian doesn’t get puffed up and tell everyone what he does for God and how “sold out” he is. A real Christian is like a 35-year-old man who lives by taking money from his mother’s purse. God gives us charity, not wages. We are the reason he was crucified. We haven’t earned anything good. If our work pays off, it’s only because God chose to allow it. Many people work hard and fail.

God taught me to say I’m “pleased,” not “proud.” After he taught me that, I thought of the baptism of Jesus. God spoke, and he didn’t say he was proud of Jesus. He said he was “well pleased.”

We have been taught to be self-reliant because our ancestors could not get God’s help and could not teach us how to get it, either.

I think worry will continue to wither.

I don’t know if I’ll go ahead with the ham project or not. Something to think about. I sent an email to a local grocery company to see if they sell uncured hams. If I follow through, I will write about it here.

Love of Food Still Suppressed

I don’t know if my spam filters are deleting legitimate comments. It’s hard to tell, because I don’t see the same things readers do. When I want to find out what’s happening, I have to log out and make comments. The system seems to be working. If it’s killing your comments, you can email me and let me know.

I’m blogging today about my baptism experience. I went to Clearwater to have my water baptism redone correctly, and it produced clear results. The problem with receiving supernatural help from God, though, is that it doesn’t always last. We are ignorant about things like miracles, healings, and deliverance, so we aren’t good about holding onto the changes God makes in us. People get healed and then relapse. Addicts get delivered and then fall back into addiction. You have to be careful not to be too quick to assume you have a lasting result.

On the day of the baptism, before I even went to the tank, I got re-delivered from the love of food. It happened before lunch, and the baptism took place later in the afternoon. My eating habits changed. I felt as though an inner voice was rising up in me to counter the drive to obtain and consume food and drink.

As of today, it’s still working. In fact, I have something interesting to report: I seem to be in danger of eating too little.

Yesterday I had breakfast and lunch, and I figured I was pretty well set for the day. Later on, though, I started to feel like lunch had not been big enough. I felt like my blood sugar was on the low side. It seemed that I needed to eat something more. I had a nearly empty container of ice cream in the freezer, so I took it out and finished it off. After that, I was fine.

I’m very happy about it. A person who had to be reminded to eat is very blessed.

Skinny people love to call fat people undisciplined, but the truth is that nearly all of them weigh less because they don’t like food as much. We all know skinny people who are irresponsible and weak. If people like that really liked food, they would be as big as houses.

Think of all the thin celebrity drug addicts and alcoholics. Here are a few: Jimi Hendrix, Amy Winehouse, Robert Downey, Whitney Houston, Keith Richards, Jim Carrey, Shia Laboeuf, James Taylor, and Jackson Browne. Not models of self-control. If these people had loved food, they would have been morbidly obese.

We know of drug addicts who also became obese. Think of David Crosby, Robin Williams, John Belushi, Jim Morrison, Oprah Winfrey, James Gandolfini, Chris Farley, Elvis Presley, and Artie Lange. John Belushi used to go to restaurants and order entire fried chickens, somewhat like his character in The Blues Brothers.

Many people simply don’t care that much for food. It’s a great thing. It’s completely positive. It doesn’t lead to starvation, because even though they don’t care much for food, their bodies drive them to take in what they need. It just keeps them healthier, more fit, and better-looking than the rest of us.

I love the idea of not loving food. It will bring me a lot of things I want. Who doesn’t want their clothes to fit better? Who doesn’t want to avoid having two sets of clothing: the fat clothes and the “real” clothes? Who doesn’t want to be able to go up a set of stairs without breathing hard afterward?

I’ve never been huge, but I don’t want to be fat at all.

Here’s something interesting: the Bible is very hard on lovers of pleasure. Take a look at this:

But know this, that in the last days perilous times will come: For men will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, unloving, unforgiving, slanderers, without self-control, brutal, despisers of good, traitors, headstrong, haughty, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having a form of godliness but denying its power. And from such people turn away!

Paul criticized lovers of pleasures in the same sentence with blasphemers. Wow.

The kind of pleasure he is talking about is the selfish pleasure of the flesh, not pleasures like the good feeling you get from being in God’s presence or doing good.

Let’s check the Greek.

It comes from the same root as “hedonism,” and here is what Strong’s says about the pleasure involved: “pleasure, a pleasure, especially sensuous pleasure; a strong desire, passion.”

It’s not what you feel after a good prayer session or a miraculous healing.

These days, I find that I sometimes try not to cook as well as I can. I’ll be working on a dish, and I’ll think it’s important to get the very best ingredient or use the best method, and then I’ll correct myself. Food doesn’t have to be sublime. Good is sufficient. Why should I make food that intoxicates me? I don’t need that, and it usually takes more work. I don’t need to be my own drug pusher. The food I make is so good, I may be able to overcome my deliverance if I tempt myself too much.

All the things I’m writing apply to temptations like sex, covetousness, and provocation to anger, too. In modern America, we yield to temptation as a matter of course, but we should be toning it down. You don’t need the best sex possible. You don’t need the nicest car made. You don’t need to be around people who provoke you; it’s not really necessary to have a Twitter account.

Food isn’t the only thing I resist better now.

So far, the baptism seems to have been a big success. Our ignorance about baptism may explain why Christians are so much like other people. We divorce just as much. We look at porn. Many of us are as fat as pigs; we even follow obese preachers who are clearly controlled by their flesh. The Bible says we’re not supposed to be slaves to sin, and it wouldn’t say that if God hadn’t given us the tools to get free.

In order to stay free from an addiction, I believe you have to refrain from tempting yourself with occasional plunges into self-indulgence. I believe you also have to go easy on other people with the same problem, because if you’re self-righteous about it, God may let you fall back into your old habit.

I’m about two and a half weeks into it. I can’t tell you where I’ll be a year from now. I feel very hopeful.

The outfit that baptized me is called The Last Reformation, and I found them on Youtube. I had a habit of looking up street healers and watching their videos. Here’s something strange: I found a number of healers before I found TLR, and now I’m seeing Youtube comments that indicate that they know the TLR people. Some of them have attended TLR events, and some are just friends of TLR veterans.

I think God is knitting people together outside of churches, just as I have been predicting for years. I believe God told me it would happen.

I will never join TLR. I’ve said that before. I’m all done following men and movements. I won’t join a church, either. I know TLR will eventually fall into corruption unless Jesus comes soon, and I’m sure they’re not correct about everything. I don’t want to be part of the mess if they fall. Nonetheless, they seem to be part of a very solid quasi-denomination that has arisen without much human planning.

Once you put a name on a movement and name officials, things start to go south. I suppose it defines a target for Satan and gives him a choke point to attack. It’s normal, and it should be expected. It has never failed. I don’t want to be permanently identified with anything that is likely to fail, but TLR does very good work for the time being.

I will keep reporting on my status. If you want help with your own compulsions, consider getting yourself baptized properly.

There Go my Whole Frame, Outlook, Way of Life, and Everything

I had a fascinating online conversation today. I communicated with a cousin I have only seen a few times in my life.

I do not have a Facebook account, and I count myself blessed for that. My dad didn’t cancel his account after he became demented, and I thought it might be handy to preserve it, so when I got rid of his Twitter account, I left Facebook alone. On occasion, people he knows say things on his timeline. He had a birthday not long ago, and he got messages from a high school friend, a former partner, and a niece. I will say her name is Martha.

I blew off the messages from the school friend and the former partner. I didn’t see the point in encouraging them. I decided I should acknowledge Martha’s post, however. I sent a Facebook message explaining that I didn’t post things publicly, and I thanked her and so on. She messaged me back, and we started talking.

Her mother–my Aunt Norma–was my dad’s older sister. She died at age 82, in 2014. Like my dad, she had vascular dementia. I drove my dad to the funeral in Tennessee. Actually, we flew to Atlanta and drove from there to Oak Ridge. At the funeral, I talked to Martha. My dad was not diagnosed until 2015, but I knew his memory was fading. I wanted to learn about Norma’s illness, in case my dad turned out to have the same thing.

Norma died pretty quickly. You would expect a woman to outlast her brother, but Norma was even fatter than my dad. She may not have had the same grade of health care, either.

Norma’s history is complicated. Her first husband was a man from the town in Kentucky where she and my dad grew up. They had a daughter I will call Lulu. Norma got a divorce, and she married my uncle, a man I will call Melvin. Martha is his daughter from an earlier marriage. He also had several sons. In the end, the household was made up of Melvin, Norma, Lulu, the sons (I’m not sure of their names even though they’re my first cousins), and Martha. After Martha was an adult, Norma and Melvin had their first child together. I will call her Dagmar.

Martha was the last child from Melvin’s first marriage. She never knew her mother. I don’t know if she died in childbirth or what. Maybe she just ran off.

You can tell I’m not close to these people. I don’t know much about them. I’m not sure it’s right to call Martha my cousin. We are not related by blood.

After my mother had her first child, she was surprised that her husband’s mother and sisters didn’t come to help her out. Eventually, one of the sisters let her know that they were distant because they were so glad they didn’t have to deal with my dad any more. I have had very little contact with my dad’s relatives.

I barely know Martha, but on the few times we have communicated, we have had a special rapport. I remember a family picnic back in the Sixties; we went off by ourselves, away from the hard voices and quick hands, and talked. She is a gentle person with a kind heart. That means she’s not much like Norma or Melvin. Norma was a lot like my dad, meaning she was abusive, and Melvin is a spoiled Ahab figure who treated his kids like pack mules.

I was not interested in trying to get to know Martha when I sent her the message, but she isn’t like me, so she responded quickly and started engaging me. We had a long messaging session, and I learned a lot of fascinating things.

First of all, the rest of my dad’s family didn’t know we had a domestic violence problem. I guess when I was a kid I assumed the whole world knew. Martha had to ask me about it, so I told her some horror stories. She surprised me by letting me know Norma (her real first name) used to beat her black and blue.

I never would have guessed. I knew Norma was mean to her kids, but I had never heard anything about physical abuse. I have seen Norma rap her kids on the head with her knuckles, and that’s not an acceptable method of corporal punishment, but I didn’t know she beat Martha.

Norma hated Martha for some reason. She was mean to all the kids, but she really laid it on Martha. In addition to the beatings, she showered her with verbal abuse and humiliated her.

After Martha grew up, Norma told her something amazing. At one point during Martha’s childhood, Norma tried to murder Martha. When she told the story to the adult Martha, she said Lulu persuaded her to stop. Lulu said that if Norma killed Martha, Norma would go to prison, and Lulu would be alone in the world. That stopped Norma. When Norma told Martha this, in her house with Martha’s four kids, she didn’t apologize or show remorse.

This is not a story about a white trash family that sold meth out of a stolen camper. Norma was a respected schoolteacher, and Melvin was a professor of radiation embryology. The problem wasn’t caused by a lack of education or sophistication. It sounds like Norma was a true sociopath who had a hard time understanding right and wrong.

Long ago, my sister told me a strange story about Norma and Lulu. She said Norma used to buy Lulu candy and have her eat it in front of Melvin’s kids.

Melvin was not a great dad. He made his kids pay for their own clothes. He and Norma made them do all the housework. He refused to let Martha go to the doctor when she was sick, forcing her to go to school instead. He didn’t protect her from Norma.

His kids grew up to be independent and hardworking but also full of unnecessary pain.

While I was conversing with Martha, I learned some things about my dad’s father, who died in 1942.

There is a fable about my grandfather (it feels strange to call him that). It goes like this: He died from pneumonia or food poisoning. Later on, the pastor of the church his kids attended told Norma to stand up and tell the congregation her dad died from drinking bad liquor. The pastor was wrong.

I always thought the fable was true, and I thought it explained my dad’s hatred of Christianity. I believed something other than liquor killed my grandfather.

Here is what Martha told me: my grandfather used to get drunk and beat my grandmother. My aunts and my grandmother told Martha about it. He died from uremia caused by drinking bad moonshine.

Moonshine can contain chemicals that injure or destroy kidneys, so uremia could be explained by bad moonshine. Uremia just means your blood is full of urine ingredients. If your kidneys quit working, you get uremia.

The pastor was right about the cause of death. He wasn’t a slanderer. He was just an enormous clod.

Melvin is a Mormon, and Norma joined up, but she was really an atheist. My dad was an atheist for nearly all of his life, and although he asked for salvation in September, I don’t think he really believes at this moment. I wonder if sociopathy is the main reason for their problems with God. Sociopaths think everything they do is right. How can you want or ask for forgiveness if you don’t believe you’ve sinned?

It sounds like my grandfather may have been a sociopath. I wonder. He was not stupid. He educated himself as well as he could, and he went into politics and provided well for his family. It’s not like he grew up in a shack with a chicken tied to the kitchen table. His father had a lot of property, and almost all of his mother’s children went to college. He knew better than to beat his wife.

I also learned that my dad’s remaining sister has Parkinson’s and dementia. She looks better than my dad, but then women dye their hair and wear wigs and makeup.

I’m very glad I talked to Martha. My only other sources of information on the family are my dad, who is demented and in denial, and my sister, who is a compulsive liar.

My dad thinks his father was a saintly man everyone admired. At least that’s what he pretends to believe.

Tonight I told my dad I had talked to Martha. He had no idea who she was. He took a minute to remember her dad, whom he has known since 1962, and he could not recall his last name.

I told him his remaining sister has Parkinson’s and dementia. My feeling is that he needs to hear things like this so he can come to grips with his mortality and secure his salvation. It may sound cruel, but my dad is not the kind of person who would feel alarm over a sister’s dementia. He didn’t start crying and talking about how he loved her. He wasn’t upset when Norma died. The only thing that really bothers him about his sister’s predicament is that it reminds him of his own situation.

I did not tell him I found out his dad died from drinking moonshine, and I didn’t say I knew he beat my grandmother. I may mention it one of these days, just to see if it gets a reaction. It may offend him, but I don’t care about that. When a truth is important, you say it, and you don’t accept responsibility for the way other people receive it. Besides, he would probably forget about it later the same day.

Sociopaths feel little or no remorse, and they apologize rarely, if at all. My feeling is that Norma and my sister are in the category of hard core sociopaths, and my dad is on a slightly lower level. Maybe if he hears a little bit about the bad things his dad and his sister did, it might jar something loose and make him consider his own sins.

As a Christian, I assume there must be a demonic component to sociopathy. Either it indicates demonic control, or demons are attracted to young sociopaths and set up house in them. Serial killers, the best-known sociopaths apart from building contractors and telemarketers, often say they felt foreign presences driving them.

Can you fix a sociopath by casting a demon out? I don’t know. I believe a person who enjoys being evil and approves of it will continue to do evil regardless of whether a demon is present.

A person who wrote a convincing account of a visit to hell said there were people there who, in spite of the flames and torture, still hated God and refused to accept responsibility; they were basically sociopaths. They could not connect their suffering with their moral failings.

They were not full of demons. In hell, demons aren’t invisible beings that live in you and influence you in sneaky ways. They’re visible there, because people in hell are spirits, just like demons. Spirits can see each other. In hell, demons live outside of you; they don’t hide inside you and whisper all day. Presumably, whatever personality you have in hell is 100% you.

Martha has four successful married kids and 13 grandchildren, so it looks like she overcame her background. She says Melvin has a bad attitude toward her family and complains that she praises them too much. He says he still puts her down. She thinks he has always resented her for not being male. I told her it looked like she had a fine legacy and did not need his approval.

Martha is a very nice person. She is also a serious Mormon. When everyone got together for Norma’s funeral, I overheard Martha talking about the Lamanites. This is the Morman term for American Indians. They think Indians are descended from the Hebrews, which is pretty incompatible with modern DNA data. You can’t believe the preposterous Lamanite story without being a very sincere Mormon.

It’s terrible that she is caught up in the cult. I prayed for her, but I don’t see how I can talk to her about Mormonism.

Melvin raised his daughter as a Mormon, but he doesn’t buy into it, himself. A long time ago, he and Norma went to their high priest or whatever Mormons call their clergymen, and they told him they didn’t believe. The high priest told them to stick around for the social life. It’s too bad the pitch that didn’t work on Melvin and Norma succeeded with Martha. One more thing they did to mess up her life.

Now I know my grandfather died from drinking bad moonshine, and I know the abuse problem in my family is even worse than I believed. I won’t whine about it. It’s good information to have.

You Need a Shepherd to Guard You

I feel like commenting on my continuing experiences as a person who has been re-baptized by what, I hope, are proper New Testament standards.

I have already reported that I have had an easier time resisting temptation. If I were a reader of this blog, here is the question I would ask: after almost two weeks, is it still working?

Yes. It is still working. It has gotten better.

Let’s look at love of food, since it’s a particularly irksome problem that runs in my family. Along with drinking, it cost my dad and my aunt their minds. It killed my aunt, it is going to kill my dad, and my sister is obese. I have had problems, too, although I never got over about 213.

I don’t like being fat at all, so if it bothers you to see someone complain about weighing 213 pounds, tough. That’s not far from 50 pounds above what I believe to be a good healthy weight for me. By my standards, it’s disastrous.

Some people are happy if they can shoehorn themselves behind a car wheel. Some people think a person isn’t fat as long as he can buy clothes at normal stores. I don’t see it that way. If you’re uncomfortable and you look like a cherub in a Renaissance painting, you’re fat, even if you’re only “a few” pounds overweight.

Take a look at a 10-pound bag of sugar some time. Fat is lighter than sugar. That means 20 pounds of fat take up more room than two bags of sugar. It’s a lot of material. And you carry it everywhere! That’s something any intelligent person would want to fix.

There are many people out there who think being 50 or 80 pounds overweight is not a real problem. If that’s you, you have two problems: love of food, and supernatural blindness.

For a long time, I’ve known that demons make people overeat. If you have a hard time losing weight, you’re an addict, and addiction is demonic. When I’ve been out of God’s will regarding food, I’ve felt as though something behind me were pushing me, telling me to eat one more bite. I wasn’t imagining it. There really was something there. It was probably with me at birth, and I cooperated with it and cemented its power over me.

It’s unusual to hear a spirit speak in a voice you can hear the way you hear other people’s voices, but everyone hears spirits speak. Sometimes you’ll just feel an urge, but you may actually hear words form in your mind, in your own voice. If you haven’t been purged of evil spirits, you are hearing from them all the time, and they direct a lot of the behavior you think you choose on your own.

Based on my experience, spirits can speak to you in four different ways. I think there is a fifth way, but I’ll focus on the four I have experienced or witnessed firsthand.

First, they can stand outside you and tempt you, before you really have a problem. This is a fairly weak method of control. Say you’re 19 years old, and your best friend wants you to shoot heroin with him. You’re not addicted, and the idea is scary and off-putting, but something inside you wants to be included. This is the first way spirits speak to us, and it’s not that hard to resist. Because resisting is not hard, your guilt is very strong if you give in. You can’t say you were coerced.

The second way spirits can speak to you works like this: you’re in the grocery store, and you pass a display. Twinkies are on sale, two boxes for the price of one. You’re not addicted, but you’ve had Twinkies before, and you like them. Something inside you says, “It’s okay if I buy those, because I’ve been good all week,” and maybe you start to steer your cart over toward them. It’s harder to resist than something you’ve never tried, but you should still be able to break away.

The third way spirits speak to you is from the inside. You see the Twinkies, a spirit you have welcomed, fed, and praised for years says, “We’re buying those Twinkies, plus some chocolate sauce and root beer,” and instead of resisting, you say, “Of course we are,” and you buy the Twinkies and eat them until you can’t push one more bite in. You’re an addict, but it hasn’t ruined your life, and you can restrain yourself for short periods when you’re highly motivated.

On the fourth level, you crave things so badly you will steal from your mother’s purse in order to get them. You will break into people’s houses to get things you can sell. You will rob people on the street with a gun. You will loot your child’s college fund to please your demons. I have not been there yet, but my sister has.

It happens commonly with drugs, but it also happens with gambling, and I have seen it happen with food. America is full of people who ride electric carts because they’re fat. They literally gave up the use of their legs (and paid high social and economic costs) so they could stuff themselves.

I assume the fifth level is possession. I don’t know much about it, but my understanding is that when a person is truly possessed, it’s as though their own personality is strapped down while demons run the body.

I used to live on the third level with regard to some things. There were activities I didn’t see as sinful, so I didn’t try to restrain myself. Also, I was a washing-machine Christian. I figured I could do what I wanted, and God would forgive me later, washing me clean. I thought some things were only a little sinful, so I would sin and then ask for forgiveness. When I tried to break free of these things, I kept going back to them, because while I sincerely wanted freedom, I still had the demons.

To put it plainly, I was full of voices that were not mine. I didn’t hear what Christians call “audible voices,” but I heard them just the same. Even though the voices were not very strong, they still won regularly, because they could not be fatigued. They never gave up. Demons don’t have to rest. No matter how well I fought them with my own will, I eventually gave in. Human beings tire out.

Third-level demons are why dieters have cheat days. If you don’t have a demon, you don’t need to give yourself special holidays when you can sin. If your demon is still with you, you may be able to strike an unstable truce by setting aside days during which you pack yourself with food. I used to do it, and it worked fairly well for a long time. These days were like religious holidays, and the food was like offerings.

Before the new baptism, I heard the voices of my flesh, evil spirits, and other people very clearly, but when I was tempted, the Holy Spirit was not as loud. Now things are different. Let’s say the temptation is food. I’ll be in the kitchen, and something will say, “Go ahead and have a Coke. You behave so well these days, it’s okay.” Then I’ll hear something else, saying, “Or you could forget about it.” Then I’ll stop in my tracks and think about what just happened. Then I’ll drop the idea of having the Coke, and I will be conscious of great gratitude. I’ll feel like something inside me is pushing desire out of my stomach. At times like these, I know I’ve been saved by someone else.

If you have behaviors or thoughts you can’t control, maybe you can understand what a great thing it is to get victory over them. Some Christians have been delivered from drug addiction instantly. They are probably among the most grateful people alive.

People can’t change themselves very well. We struggle to change, we get temporary control, we hang on as long as we can, and then we fall back into our demonic habits. You can’t suppress them forever, because, again, demons do not get tired. Sooner or later, you will falter, and they’ll be as fresh as ever.

Fat people give up and get bariatric surgery because demons don’t get tired. Doctors prescribe drugs to neutralize or replace other drugs, because demons don’t get tired. Smokers who quit either start up again or get fat, because demons don’t get tired. When God delivers you, it’s different. The demons leave. If they stick around, outside of you, trying to catch you at a weak moment, the Holy Spirit rises up and responds, enabling you to resist or at least repent quickly.

Jesus said this:

Most assuredly, I say to you, whoever commits sin is a slave of sin. And a slave does not abide in the house forever, but a son abides forever. Therefore if the Son makes you free, you shall be free indeed.

This essay tells you where I am today. I’m not promising anyone things will continue to go well. This is just documentation. I have ruined deliverance before. I am reluctant to prognosticate. Still, when I blew it in the past, I had not been baptized correctly. I had not made the proper agreement with God. My hope is that the repairs I have made to my foundation will help me stand permanently.

In the Bible, sand represents ideas that don’t come from God. Rock represents ideas that come from the Holy Spirit. Water represents voices and words. Jesus said that if you build your house on sand, it will wash away in the rain. The constant bombardment of demonic words is as persistent and hard to fend off as rain.

When you try to change yourself using strategies that come from men, you build your house on sand. When you let the Holy Spirit do the building, you build on rock.

Unless the Lord builds the house,
They labor in vain who build it;
Unless the Lord guards the city,
The watchman stays awake in vain.

I think Torben Sondergaard and The Last Reformation are right to believe that a proper water baptism is mandatory and powerful. That’s what I conclude from what has happened so far. It looks like true success without it is impossible.

Healer’s Wife has the Claws Out for Him

The other day I wrote about the problems women cause when they do inappropriate things to get attention in church. It was a revelation to me, so I shared it. I mentioned it to two friends, and they agreed wholeheartedly; they took the topic and ran. I touched a nerve.

Today I was watching a healing video in which evangelist John Mellor healed a man who had been injured in an industrial accident. The healing was wonderful, but the video was marred by a female voice. A woman who could not be seen kept yapping at Mellor and the other men at the front of the church. She gave orders they didn’t need to hear. She interrupted. When the man got healed, she made Mellor put the man’s wife on stage, and of course, that took the attention off the healing and put it on another woman.

She was very rude.

It looks like the stage mother was Mellor’s wife. She had an Australian accent (he’s Australian), and she called him by his first name. I could be wrong, though, because she acted like she was his mom.

It was really something. There were five men at the front of the church, and I doubt any of them were under 60. They didn’t need a woman to tell them what to do. It doesn’t take a Ph.D. to run a healing.

At one point, she squawked, “You’re ruining the testimony!” Can you imagine trying to preach with someone like that humiliating you in front of the church?

Unbelievable.

Instead of stepping aside and putting her in her place, Mellor obeyed a lot of her orders. He skipped around like a poodle taking orders from a trainer in a carnival act. “Sit up!” “Do a somersault!” As soon as he turned to move one way, she yapped, and he turned and went another way.

It was very ugly to watch. He seemed completely intimidated. At times he seemed to resist her in a passive-aggressive way, while smiling and joking to simulate the retention of dignity.

I can’t respect him while he allows this to go on. What a poor example he is setting. It would be off-putting to see an unbelieving couple act this way, but it’s worse when they’re Christians teaching other people.

The Holy Spirit speaks to husbands, and husbands are supposed to pass the information on to wives and children. This is the system God has ordained. There is no other. There has never been a women’s liberation movement in heaven. When families get out of order, it causes problems.

It’s very hard to be a father and husband. You are held responsible for everything. If your family lacks, no one will hold your wife responsible, even if it’s because she lost her job. You will be blamed for being a bad provider. If your wife and kids are out of control, everyone will blame you, but if you’re out of control…everyone will blame YOU. You have to make hard decisions, and if your family rebels, you have to fight them as well as the difficulties the decisions present.

Imagine what would have happened had Paul been married to a dominating harpy.

“The Holy Spirit says we have to go to Ephesus.”

“Well, your precious friend the Holy Spirit will just have to settle for Tarsus. There are plenty of people he can save right here. I just made it into the ladies’ auxiliary, and if the Holy Spirit thinks I’m pulling up and starting over in Ephesus, he has another thing coming!”

The other day I saw a preacher talking about hard decisions he had made. He and his wife bought a house and started fixing it up, and they got into debt, which meant he had become a slave to the house. He had to keep his job and stay where he was, in order to pay bills. He felt God wanted him to be free, so they sold the house and moved into an apartment in an undesirable neighborhood. After a while, God told him to move to another town, when he and his wife had no money to make the move. Imagine what he would have gone through, with a woman who wanted to pull in another direction. He would still be in the house, helping her put up pink wallpaper.

Things can be even worse when a wife gets jealous and decides the Holy Spirit is giving orders through her instead of the husband. That’s not how God works. He won’t give you a system and then tell you to corrupt it. He won’t tell you to do something and then tell your wife to tell him to do something else. On the other hand, he MAY tell you to tell your wife to shut up.

God cursed the human race with female rebellion in Genesis 3. He told Adam his wife would desire to rule him. Look it up. It’s not a blessing.

Christians are supposed to form what is called “the body of Christ” or “the bride of Christ.” We are supposed to submit to God as a wife submits to a husband. When a man marries a spoiled hellcat, he finds out how we make God feel every day. We insist that God help us with our own bad plans.

While I was at the TLR event in Dunedin, Torben Sondergaard criticized what he called “the American gospel.” It says this: “God will help you do whatever you choose to do with your life.” Do you want to be a famous singer? God will make it happen. Do you want to be a rich businessman? God will make it happen. Torben reminded us that this is not what the Bible teaches. We are supposed to give up our plans and let God decide what we do.

Pushing God to actualize your dumb plans is manipulation, and God can’t be manipulated. He hates it. It’s like witchcraft.

Christianity is what happens after God wrecks your precious plans.

I’ve seen a terrible problem among Christians. I know people who married the wrong individuals and then turned to God and received the Holy Spirit. Because they were already chained to people who did not listen to God, they suffered a lot.

The world made them suffer, and their spouses made them suffer.

Their spouses made them suffer more than the world did.

What a curse. God told me it’s more important to get the wrong people out of your life than to put the right people in it, and how right he was. I always say cancer is better than marrying the wrong woman, and I have never had reason to backpedal. Cancer kills in a few years. A poisonous spouse does it over half a century, and he or she will also hurt your kids and grandchildren.

Cancer can only kill you once. A nasty wife will kill you 20 times a day.

Here is what Proverbs 21:9 says:

Better to dwell in a corner of a housetop, than in a house shared with a contentious woman.

Here’s Proverbs 25:24:

It is better to dwell in a corner of a housetop, than in a house shared with a contentious woman.

Yes, they’re virtually identical. God felt it was so important, he had to tell us twice.

I wouldn’t trade places with John Mellor for all the money in the world. I don’t care what his wife looks like. I don’t care how much she does for him (service and fawning can be the most powerful forms of control). The world supplies plenty of humiliation and emasculation; I don’t need a wife who will do her best to supplement it.

Speaking of burdens, I have decided I don’t like Christmas any more. I loved it when I was a kid, when other people did all the work and paid all the bills, but I’m fed up with it now. Yes, I said it. The whole holiday needs to be remodeled.

I like doing things for friends and relatives. I like having meals with them. I like buying them things. I do not like doing it all on command, as part of a secular lemming flash mob.

I’m having friends over for dinner tonight, and I look forward to it, but I’m only making four things: rib roast, potatoes, Caesar salad, and Texas trash. You can’t enjoy getting together with people if you’re working like a galley slave.

My feeling is that Christmas works best when you keep the materialism very subdued and you don’t stuff yourself. A lot of people are going to wake up on December 26 several pounds fatter and a few thousand dollars deeper in debt. That’s not merry at all. I’m pretty sure I’m spending less than three hundred dollars on gifts, I don’t plan to jam myself full of food, and I refuse to have cookies and cakes lying around all week. They’re fine to have around while we’re celebrating; after that, they go in the trash.

Christmas is like a bridezilla wedding. We get all worked up over it, trying to make it perfect. We act like it’s the greatest thing that ever happened to us. Then the day after Christmas comes, and BANG, it’s over. Life is just like it used to be, except you have a big mess to clean up.

Jesus is insignificant at Christmas. We barely mention him. I gave someone a gift card from Amazon, and I tried to find a “religious” card. They had ONE religious card. On CHRISTMAS. It was a ridiculous nativity scene with some text that seemed to come from a bored intern at Hallmark. The rest of the cards…snowmen and candy canes.

Thank goodness all those snowmen went to the peppermint cross for us.

Let’s see…Jesus allowed himself to be tortured to death so we could be healed of our diseases, freed from stress, saved from hell, and taken to heaven. Isn’t that more important than a new video game box?
We act like saying “Jesus” is the same thing as dancing and singing in blackface. He’s God! He’s the only God there is! Who cares if his name bothers people? They’re not in charge of the universe. They’re a bunch of deluded mortals we were left here to teach.

I think we pump holidays up in order to comfort ourselves because of the emptiness we feel the rest of the year. If you serve God, you should have ample opportunities to share love all year round.

You know a holiday has gotten out of hand when you look forward to getting it over with.

My roast has been in the oven since 8:30, and now I have to clean up the house and feed my dad. I hope he likes his gifts, and I hope we have no caregiver catastrophes to spoil the day. I expect this to be his last Christmas or birthday at home, so I would like things to go smoothly.

You Need an Edge

Since I spent a grand on being re-baptized (or baptized for the first time, if the original effort doesn’t count), I feel I should follow up here and write about what has happened since.

Before I got baptized, I hoped demons would leave me during the process, ridding me of compulsions and unwanted thoughts. I’m not saying I have institution-grade compulsions or that I hear voices, but like everyone reading this post, I have had drives I could not control, and I have had thoughts I didn’t like.

If you don’t think you have compulsions, ask yourself two questions. 1. Am I fat? 2. Do I want to be fat? If the answers are “yes” and “no,” you have a compulsion. Do you smoke? Do you bite your nails? Do you snap at people even though you try not to? If you look at yourself honestly, you will find your compulsions.

If you don’t find them, then you have a problem with lying.

I know a woman who brought a lot of ridicule on herself by saying, “I don’t have any bad habits.” Everyone who heard it knew how absurd it was, and they were still talking about it years later, laughing at her. You may have denied your bad habits. You may not have been perceptive enough to see your bad habits. You have still had them. I don’t care who you are.

You don’t have to be a serial killer, a junkie, or an anorexic to have bad habits. If your bad habits haven’t ruined your life, it just means you’re high-functioning.

When I was in the tank, I felt things moving around in me, but then I’m a charismatic Christian who prays in tongues for hours every day, so that was normal for me. I feel supernatural things all the time. While they were baptizing me, I couldn’t say I felt an abrupt change. I didn’t see goblins fly off through the air. I didn’t scream or start tossing the people who were helping me.

Honestly, it would have been neat had things like that happened. I’m like everyone else. I love a good supernatural experience.

As I have written previously, I did not feel good at all after the baptism. I felt oppressed, and I had a nightmare later. I woke up many times during the night. I still felt that I had done the right thing, and I knew that unpleasant experiences did not always add up to error. I knew Satan was petty, and I knew he liked to torment people who got breakthroughs, hoping to convince them nothing had changed.

Think about boxers. Sometimes when a boxer lands a nice-looking shot, his opponent will shake his head, trying to say it didn’t hurt. Like my dad once told me, that’s just a way of saying, “You hurt me.” It’s a bluff. Satan is the same way. When you score a goal, he may deny it in hopes you lose faith and give up the progress you’ve made.

I didn’t get an instantaneous improvement from baptism, but I hoped things would improve in the days that followed. That’s exactly what has happened.

I got delivered from the love of food in 2009, and for a long time, I didn’t eat much, and I lost weight. Then I screwed it up by going to an all-you-can-eat rib place, and since then, it has been on and off. The day I was baptized, I found I wanted to avoid food. This happened at lunch, which was before the baptism. I can’t explain that.

I have been very good since then, and it hasn’t taken much effort. Mainly, I have to remember how important it is to hold onto this. I have to value it. I can’t let myself sink into thoughts of cooking and good food. Sooner or later, something bad would happen. If I don’t appreciate what I have, I will lose it again.

I’m also much less angry, and I want to stay away from anger. I was looking forward to watching The Equalizer 2, which is basically an orgy of cruel revenge. I don’t want to go near it now. I don’t want to hear about other people’s suffering. Morbid curiosity, which is actually vicarious cruelty, is leaving me.

I am less worried than I was before. I woke up last night and started worrying about some things, but I shut it off quickly and went back to sleep.

I’m doing better with responsibility than I was last week. I’m very glad of that, because the weight of dealing with my dad has driven me to escape responsibility a lot, and it has caused problems. Much of the anxiety we feel in life is the consequence of letting responsibilities go.

When I think about the difference between being ruled by iniquity–by unhealthy, carnal compulsions–and being ruled by the Holy Spirit, I think about casinos. To run a successful casino, you don’t need to rig the games so people always lose. All you need is a slight edge which is permanent. People think casinos are honest, but that depends on what “honest” means to you. They will tell you the truth about the odds, but the games are all set up so they aren’t quite fair, and this is legal, because it would be impossible to run a casino that didn’t win more often than its customers.

A tiny advantage in the odds of a game adds up to millions over time. The Internet says casinos only have a 52-56% chance of winning at blackjack, for example, but blackjack makes them a great deal of money.

To overcome iniquity and avoid sin, you don’t need to be completely free from carnal desires. You just need to be a little bit less inclined to sin than to do the right thing. Without the Holy Spirit, when temptation comes, you will fight until something tips you over the edge, just barely, and then you sin. When the Holy Spirit helps you, you may get close to the edge, but you don’t go over. That’s good enough. It describes what is happening to me now, most of the time.

Is what is happening to me real? Yes. I can tell you that for a fact. I don’t have the willpower to control myself without help from God. If I did, I would not concern myself so much with things like baptism and casting out demons.

You can’t manufacture willpower. Sometimes people develop it suddenly in response to traumatic experiences. A person who has an extremely unpleasant experience after doing something stupid may be able to give it up afterward out of fear, but an average person can’t choose to become self-disciplined and do it without help. Even if there were a program to help you do it, you would need willpower to make the program work.

Is what is happening to me permanent? I don’t know the answer, since I haven’t lived my whole life yet.

If what is happening to me is related to baptism, why did it start at lunch, before I was baptized? I don’t know. Maybe a spirit that was compelling me saw that it was about to be put out of business, and it gave up. I don’t think demons always wait until they’re cast out to react. A demoniac approached Jesus, yelling and so on, because the demons were upset by Jesus’ presence, and Jesus had not yet done anything to them.

Is there anything disappointing about my post-baptism life? Yes. I want to be free of compulsions and spirits, but I know God wants to give us more than freedom. He wants to fill us with love and peace. I don’t have that yet. Sometimes God’s love flows through me for a while, but it’s not constant. I hope I get there, because the presence of love inside a person is like a healing medicine and a vaccine. It doesn’t just make you nice; it repairs you and protects you. Besides, it’s very pleasant. Much more pleasant than anger and resentment, which go hand-in-hand with fear and worry, not to mention illness.

God himself is love, so if I don’t have love flowing through me all the time, I must not have the full presence of God.

Day after tomorrow, I have to cook Christmas Eve dinner. It’s a concern, because I cook amazing food which is hard to turn down. I’m being conservative. I’m making a rib roast, potatoes, and Caesar salad with anchovies and homemade croutons. My friend Amanda is bringing a dessert; I don’t even care what it is, because I want to avoid pushing for perfection. When I suggested she bring dessert, I didn’t try to think of the best-tasting choice possible.

In addition to this simple meal, I might conceivably make Texas trash. That’s all. I thought about making cheesecake, but my cheesecake is the best I have ever had, and I think I would be pushing my luck. I don’t need that level of temptation.

Today I went to the store, and rib roasts were on sale for $4.99 per pound. Is that God blessing me or Satan tempting me?

I bought a big one and cut it off the bones. I salted it heavily, put it back together, and wrapped it in a clean towel. Tomorrow I’ll coat it with garlic butter. The garlic will sink in while it sits in the fridge. Should be great.

Breakfast today and yesterday: two slices of buttered toast and decaf. Today at lunch, I had tuna salad on a baguette, with water. Later I ate some grape tomatoes. I kept feeling I needed to stay away from the Coke and Powerade.

I don’t know what will happen in the future. I’m not going to claim baptism has changed my life permanently, until I have some evidence that this is the case. I’m just telling you what’s going on right now. If it all falls apart, I will say so.

Rethinking Holiday Gorging

I’m sitting here with Marv while he enjoys his time out of the cage. I’ve been watching Youtube, looking for videos that will be helpful in my efforts to be sanctified and corrected.

I started looking at a Derek Prince video about laziness, but since I am currently caught up in a holiday which has become a celebration of overeating, and because I am not completely happy about it, I changed my mind and started looking for material on gluttony.

I got completely delivered from gluttony in 2009. Then one day I went to Sonny’s Barbecue with my friend Mike, and we had the all-you-can-eat ribs. It seems like ever since then, the victory has been tempered.

Before my deliverance, I used to stuff myself routinely. It’s pretty unusual for me to do that now, but I do eat more than I should. When I moved to this farm, I worked outside a lot, and I lost weight no matter what I ate. Then the work slowed down, and I was in the habit of eating more than I had before, so I picked up some pounds.

I have been thinking about my strange talent for cooking, and I have been considering its negative effects. I can cook a lot of things I really enjoy eating, and that presents a problem. Because I have a long list of recipes, I can always cook something I haven’t had in a long time and tell myself it’s okay to eat it because it’s a rare treat. That might be okay if you can only cook 4 things, but when you can cook dozens, you can have a rare treat several times a week. Every dish is “special.”

I thought about that, and then I asked myself what I’m trying to do when I eat something “special.” There had to be a root iniquity that paved the way for gluttony. I realized I was trying to reward myself. “I worked all day with the chainsaw and tractor, so now it’s okay to have a pint of ice cream.” “I spent 5 hours dealing with a mess my dad made, so now it’s okay to have a big bowl of pasta.”

Why would I do that? Why would I feel like I needed a reward? The answer is self-pity. I allow myself to overeat sometimes because I’ve convinced myself I’m a victim. I feel that I’m owed.

I don’t think of myself as a self-pitying person. When I have a problem, I don’t ask God why it hit such a wonderful person. I assume I’m doing something wrong. I ask for correction. I try to attack the problem. I don’t like self-pity. Nonetheless, it looks like I have it. I may have a flavor that’s different from the ones I recognize, but it’s still self-pity.

Here’s another strange question I asked myself: I can’t do anything sinful to reward myself…so what do I do? Other people get drunk or high on Saturday night. They indulge in sexual sin. They gluttonize. I can’t think of anything I can do, as a Christian.

I don’t know if people are supposed to be able to reward themselves, but we do. Tonight I’m thinking about that, so it’s only natural that I would wonder if there are any rewards I can give myself.

I can turn off the phone and read a good book. I can go for a walk in the woods. I can watch a movie I like. Those things aren’t all that rewarding, though. Not like a pint of ice cream, a line of coke, or a night of fornication. No one ever says, “I’m going to go crazy and spoil myself tonight with a nice walk.”

This is really weird. Maybe we’re not supposed to give ourselves rewards. If not, what are we supposed to do when we’re tired or upset? Do we just take the hit and walk it off? Maybe that’s the actual answer.

It’s not a pleasant prospect. I don’t want to go through life sucking it up and enduring. It would be sort of like going through life holding your breath. Eventually you want to exhale.

Unpleasant things happen to us all the time. Life on earth is like being outdoors in a hailstorm that never stops. You keep getting whacked. One would think God would occasionally provide pleasant experiences to counterbalance the whacks. Surely there must be something.

I’ll have to ask God for the answer. Whatever the situation is, I want to know and accept it.

When you’re a worldly person, you don’t expect to deprive your flesh all the time. You look for cheat days and so on. Christianity doesn’t work like that. You never get a free day to sin. There are no vacations.

I’m always glad to find out I have a character problem, because the information is an open door to freedom. Character problems cause failure and suffering, so when you find out you have a character problem, you suddenly have a way to improve your life. Fix your character, and you will definitely be freed from certain things.

I am not a victim. I like to say that to myself. It’s a little bit like taking a bad-tasting medicine, but it’s a good thing to say. It’s true. People and spirits have done terrible things to me, but that doesn’t mean I’m a victim. My sins and iniquities more than justify every bad thing that has happened. If I admit I’m part of the problem, I claim that in the past, I’ve changed my life for the worse. If I can change it for the worse, I can also make it better. God told me that when I deny an excuse, I take my power back.

I used to drive my sister crazy by saying, “You’re not a victim.” I was angry when I said it, so maybe I should have refrained. It made her furious. It enraged her to be told she wasn’t a victim. False victimhood was a treasure to her; she built her life around it. She truly loved it. She used it as justification to treat people horribly, and she didn’t want it taken away.

I don’t get furious when I say it to myself, but it’s sobering.

When I was young, I was sure I was a victim. I was raised in a house of hatred and abuse. All sorts of misfortune came to me, for no apparent reason. People mistreated me. Maybe I had a point when I was very young, but once I became an adult, I should have knocked off the victim nonsense and taken responsibility.

Interesting stuff.

I really don’t want to stuff myself on holidays any more, and I hate the effort of cooking elaborate meals. Maybe I’ll blow off Christmas dinner entirely. I’m souring on the whole concept of feasts.

What kind of holiday is it if you have to eat yourself sick in order to feel like you celebrated?

New Info on Stone Prevention

I wonder if I should have written about Trump yesterday. I don’t want to write about politics too much. I know government is a false god, and I know Satan wastes our time (our lives) by getting us to scrap in the political arena instead of focusing on prayer and repentance. Nonetheless, I also know God put Trump in office as a favor to his children, and I know the ridiculous attacks on his administration constitute a mass tantrum on the part of Satan’s offspring.

I believe Christians should support Trump and pray for the defeat of his enemies. I speak defeat to Mueller and the rest all the time, in the name of Jesus.

When I write about Trump, there is generally a supernatural angle to it. With that said, here I go, on an almost completely secular tangent.

Maybe 10 years ago, I noticed that my right side hurt. I thought it was a muscle pull. It turned out to be my gallbladder. Over the years, it has caused me some annoyance, including a few attacks I would go so far as to describe as painful. I have spent a lot of time researching gallbladder problems, trying to find out what I had done to cause my issues and what I could do to fix them.

I learned that doctors had ZERO INTEREST IN PREVENTING AND FIXING GALLBLADDER PROBLEMS. This is almost literally true. Here in America, we have a grand total of one gallbladder medicine that works. It’s made from bear bile, and it’s too expensive for people to take regularly. Doctors don’t prescribe it. Instead, they cut people’s gallbladders out, as if God made a mistake by installing them in the first place.

When a doctor removes your gallbladder, he performs a low-risk surgery which pays well for the time spent. It’s much easier than trying to fix the problem, and it’s profitable. Doctors have very little incentive to change their approach, so they don’t. They feel that surgery IS the answer.

Problem: it’s not the answer. You need your gallbladder. It aids in the digestion of food. Your body will adapt to its absence, but it’s not as good as having a functioning gallbladder. Another thing to consider: REMOVING YOUR GALLBLADDER WILL NOT NECESSARILY GET RID OF YOUR GALLSTONES OR PAIN.

How about that? You can have gallstones and pain without a gallbladder! It’s not even rare. It happens a lot. The stuff that turns into gallstones comes from the liver, not the gallbladder, which is just a receptacle. The stones can form in places other than the gallbladder.

Imagine how stupid you would feel, having your gallbladder removed and putting up with diarrhea and so on, and they having a gallstone attack.

In Europe, they use a supplement called Rowachol to get rid of gallstones. It’s basically olive oil, menthol, and some other aromatic substance. I forget. You can make your own Rowachol if you buy the ingredients. People say Rowachol works. I tried it, and it seemed to work for me.

If my understanding of the situation is correct, European doctors consider gallstones treatable, and American doctors don’t even try. Perhaps I’m wrong, but it sure looks that way.

I got the idea that my own problems might be the result of my personality problems, and that means my spiritual problems. I read that some doctors think eating when you’re angry can cause gallstones. I have had a problem with my dad provoking me over and over during meals, so I worked on that, and I asked God for help with the way I responded to provocation. I also thought Miami might be to blame, because to live in Miami is to be provoked nearly continuously. It’s that kind of place.

Here is what I think about provocation and anger. If we are indwelt and led by the Holy Spirit, we should be very hard to provoke, but it’s still a bad idea to be around irritating people and situations, and there is nothing wrong with ridding yourself of annoying people. Even Jesus avoided contact with his persecutors.

That’s my spiritual take on the matter. To get back to the physical, this week I learned something new. I can’t believe I didn’t find out earlier. I read that gallstones (and possibly cancer) may be caused by “slow intestinal transit.” In plain English, that means you’re not pooping soon enough. It means you delay your trips to the can.

Gallstones are made largely from cholesterol synthesized by the liver. When you put off a deuce mission, substances in your intestines pass through the walls and into your blood. Some researchers believe these substances stimulate your liver to make more cholesterol, so you get gallstones.

How about that?

It kind of makes sense. Doctors say many gallstone victims are fat, female, forty, and fertile. Women are more likely to have constipation issues than men. They’re embarrassed about defecation and related matters, to the point where it sometimes amounts to denial, so I suppose they are more likely to procrastinate.

I knew a woman who was unable to use the toilet if anyone except herself and her husband was in the house. Her husband and I knew, or at least assumed, that she had bowel movements like the rest of humanity, and presumably she knew this, but when I was present, everything locked up.

As for fat, well, fat people have a lot more stuff in their intestines, and they probably eat more junk that stops them up.

Forty? My guess is that it’s a factor because older people eat more and move less.

When I was a kid, I was taught that people have to control and train their bodies. You don’t go to the john when your body tells you to; you do it when it’s most convenient. You don’t leave class or whatever. You definitely don’t ask your dad to pull over when he’s determined to set a land speed record while driving you to see relatives; he will make you go in a shoebox. You grit your teeth and overcome. Apparently, that was really bad advice.

The whole topic is pretty gross, but if the researchers are right, it could save people needless pain and surgery.

Without going into specifics, I’m making an effort to change my habits. I am listening to my body. I don’t have gallbladder pain, but I can tell my digestion is not perfect. Might as well do what I can.

Maybe the researchers are wrong, but their theory sounds more plausible to me than the far-fetched explanations I have heard in the past.

With Christian Brothers Like These, who Needs Pagans?

It is Sunday morning, and I am not at church. Praise the Lord.

I suppose I sound cynical. In reality, I would like to attend church. I’ve been looking around online. I say, “Praise the Lord,” because I’ve been part of two cults in a row, and I’m glad I’m not currently being mistreated and milked by any preachers.

Marion County is filled with churches. It seems like everyone I meet is a Christian. That’s the reason the people here are so nice. I’m surrounded by churches, which is good, but I still have to be careful. I can’t just flop down in a chair in the first church I see, because I run the risk of being pumped full of greed-based Joel Osteen/T.D. Jakes/Benny Hinn/Paula White nonsense. Did I mention enough preachers by name? I want to offend as many people as I can.

I look at websites. I rule out all the websites that say, “We believe every individual is filled with the Holy Spirit at the moment he accepts Jesus.” That’s code for, “We can’t get the baptism with the Holy Spirit, so we pretend it doesn’t exist.” I rule out the “Jesus is cool” churches. If I wanted to go to church with confused non-black kids who dress and act like rappers, I’d go back to Miami. And tattoo preachers…no. If you got tattoos before you were saved, and now you can’t afford to remove them, fine, but if you seriously believe God wants you to look like the funny papers, you are way out of God’s will, and if I get around you, I will expect to be taught lies and possibly chastised for not “sanctioning your buffoonery” (to steal a line from Tommy Lee Jones).

I reject all churches that say members have to tithe. Tithing is for Jews, not Christians. Any church that gets excited about tithing is run by a pastor who is a) afraid God will let him go broke, or b) obsessed with money.

I saw a church with a site that advertised the importance of keeping the Sabbath. Not for me. The Sabbath is Saturday, not Sunday, and Gentiles have never been required to observe it. It’s a Jewish thing. It’s great to set aside a day for God, but pretending it’s the Sabbath, or claiming we are required to do it, is legalism and possibly replacement theology.

My plan, as I have said before, is to sit in the back, give just enough money to pull my weight, and be quiet. No volunteering. No church office for me. I want to meet Christians, but I don’t want to get into any more squabbles with carnal preachers and their spoiled wives or kids. I never want to feel that I can’t go home at a moment’s notice, or that I have to refrain from speaking the truth in order to avoid offending a preacher who is driven by greed or pride.

I saw a place that doesn’t look too bad, but they had a video of a lady screaming and waving her arms because…Holy Spirit. That’s not how it works. God doesn’t take away your self-control. The devil does. Self-control is listed in the Bible as a fruit of the Spirit. If you’ve ever been “slain in the Spirit” and rolled on the floor at church, you need to know that God didn’t make you do it.

I just had a thought. Imagine visiting heaven. Suppose God takes you up and shows you what happens there. You look out over the host of angels and the saved human beings…and they’re all screaming like monkeys, waving their arms and legs, and rolling on the ground.

Really?

Is heaven a mental ward?

If you wave your arms and scream in church, it’s not God. You’re just that kind of person.

Prayer in tongues sounds silly, and it’s normal to react to God’s presence with some odd facial expressions and semi-involuntary sounds. That ought to suffice. You don’t need to do the gator.

In all likelihood, I will not find a church that doesn’t have significant problems. I do hope God leads me to one that isn’t completely nuts.

Things are going well between God and me here at home. God keeps showing me things. And he does some impressive deeds. Remember how I burned myself and then had the blister disappear? It appears to be happening again. I keep finding new ways to burn myself on chainsaws. Yesterday I learned that you can burn yourself on the chain. I started a saw and ran it a little bit to warm it up, and then I tried to sharpen it. I grabbed the chain to move it forward, and a searing, inexplicable pain shot up my thumb. I let go and looked. My thumb was burned. Dang it. How do you prevent injuries when you don’t know they can happen in the first place? I didn’t know saw chains could get hot.

I work very hard to protect myself. I study tool safety. I read up on poison ivy. I wear pretty decent protective clothing and gear. When I cut trees, I do my best to figure out which way they’ll go after they’re severed, and I prepare. Then I burn myself on a saw chain. Come on. Is that even fair?

Anyhow, I kept working, and I prayed and commanded my flesh to be healed and so on. I kept thanking God. Over the day, the pain decreased. By the time I went to bed, the burned area seemed flatter and less messed up. I checked it just now, and I had to look for it. I am hoping the healing continues.

I am not satisfied to leave it as it is. Should I grovel and drool and stop praying? Should I say I’m so grateful for what I have, I should be ashamed to ask for more? In short, no. If I did that, the primary reasons would be laziness and lack of faith. I don’t want to spend the day praying and thanking and so on, because I’m lazy, and I’m afraid God won’t finish the job, because I lack faith. The thing to do is to keep going forward and see that God gets as much glory as possible, even if I’m perfectly content with what has already happened.

Jesus didn’t do any half-healings.

Interesting thing…I told my friend Amanda about the other blister that healed, and not long after that, she burned herself. She fought it supernaturally, and it went away. No mark. No blister. How about that?

My character is still disappointing. That’s to be expected. I made self-corruption my special project for half a century, and I did a great job. God has definitely improved me, however, and I look forward to being substantially less contemptible.

My friend Mike is coming down tomorrow to spend a few days. I look forward to that because Mike knows a lot about construction, and I want him to fix my chicken house for nothing he’s a good friend, and I haven’t seen him in a while. He lived near Ocala for a long time. He and his dad raised racehorses. He loves this place and wants to move back. He’ll be beside himself the whole time he’s here. He’ll get to have Krystals and Sonny’s BBQ. He’ll get to go to Rural King. Maybe I’ll let him drive the tractor. No, I think I’ll just let him sit in the seat with the ignition off and go “VROOM VROOM.”

Along with Amanda, Mike has been very helpful with my turbulent Ocala transition. They disagree on one issue, however, and that is the goat question. I would like to have a couple of goats here to eat weeds. Mike thinks it’s a good idea. When I mention it to Amanda, her head spins 720 degrees and flames shoot out of her eye sockets.

I think she’s against it.

We will agree on a few things, however. Sonny’s. Krystal. Rural King. Sonic. Carhartt. Mike-Sell’s Puffcorn Delites. We agree that Miami is a swollen can of pus.

Next weekend, I am virtually certain to be in Miami. Disgusting. Has to be done, however. Miami, like a colonoscopy, is one of those things that has to be confronted head-on. So to speak. I hope I’m not there long enough to let the stink rub off on me.

I have to paint a rental condo. If things go really badly, this is a six-hour job. I know that from experience. The materials cost eighty bucks. Possibly a hundred, if I need primer. The slackjaws in Miami want $2000 for this service. Unacceptable. I’ve painted many condos, and I can’t stomach that price. I figure I’ll paint as much of it as I can, and then even if I have to pay someone to finish it, they’ll be ashamed to charge me a lot.

Well, let’s be serious. It’s hard to shame a slackjaw.

The tree removal work is going well here, but I can see that I’m not going to get the county to move much of the debris. It would take me months to get it to the highway, and I have only weeks.

Yesterday I cut a couple of big oaks that fell by my fence. I cut one section about seven feet long and two feet thick. I tried to roll it onto the timberjack so I could cut it in pieces that might be small enough for the tractor to carry, but I couldn’t do it. I’ll be more accurate here: I could not do it at a level of exertion I considered safe. I refuse to exert myself hard enough to injure myself. I push to something like 75% of my capacity, and after that, I figure it’s time for a helper or a new tool. I don’t want artificial hips or knees, and I don’t want a bad back.

I have a number of oaks just as heavy as the one I worked on yesterday, so progress will be slow. Maybe there’s a better machine for the job. I could rent something once I have all the wood cut up. I should look into that.

I think it’s time to consider the unthinkable: serious exercise. I may get some weights. I don’t want to be so flubbery and soft I get hurt easily. My current workout is paying off about a hundred times as well as expected. I operate one exercise bike with my hands and another with my feet, for a weekly total of about half an hour. Unlike the rest of humanity, I am treated to a full view of myself in the bathroom mirror as I get into and out of the shower, and I am not the same person I was three months ago. But weights would be much better for strength.

I have a Bowflex, which is a fine machine for lazy people who are happy with moderate improvement (me), but I don’t know if it’s possible to get real strength out of it. I have not tried lately. I need to move it out of the garage. I forgot to have the movers (slackjaws par excellence) do it.

In the past, I refused to think about resuming weight training because I was so lazy I knew I would not persist. Now, however, I am getting used to a higher level of mandatory activity, and lifting weights a few times a week would not be much of an increase.

I have to move logs. I have to lift full fuel containers and hold them while I fuel machinery. A little extra strength would be helpful.

When I was in law school, I was pretty sturdy. I maxed out all the machines at the University of Miami Wellness Center. Now I feel like it’s a victory when it only takes me three tries to get out of a chair.

One great thing about exercise equipment is that it’s cheap. Very few people buy it and the use it. Generally, it ends up being used to hold clothing on hangers. I should be able to do quite well on Craigslist for a couple of hundred bucks.

I better get with it. The day is slipping away, in spite of the death of Daylight Saving Time.

Hope your Sunday is going well.

Serve the Bums With Eviction Papers

Time to talk more about God.

Recently I wrote about my bizarre experience with a new supernatural tool. I tried casting things out of myself, in silence. I didn’t say anything aloud. I had no reason to think it would work. I had always been taught that only God can hear our thoughts, so how could a spirit hear me if I cast something out silently? Why should I expect it to obey?

Here is the startling result: my life has changed tremendously. I have so much more self-control, I’m like a different person. I am less lazy. I have fewer issues with sexual temptation. I eat less. I feel better. I have more energy.

I don’t know what to think about it.

It’s always easy to criticize people for their faults. I should know, because I do it all the time. Sometimes it’s appropriate. There are a lot of people out there who just don’t care, or who prefer to do evil. But many human beings fight their character issues every day and fail, and it’s not right to ignore that and treat all of them as if they weren’t trying.

I have fought my faults ever since I realized I had them. I’ve tried to make myself eat less, work harder, have a more positive outlook, and so on. I’ve fought lust and covetousness and everything else. Fighting in my own strength has not been a total waste of time, but it hasn’t worked very well. I have to have sympathy for other people who can’t change themselves. We have strong enemies who work against us. It’s your fault if you’re a mess, but it’s also the fault of other beings who work against God in you, and you need to defeat them as well as yourself.

Any honest person who isn’t completely deluded can relate to what I’m talking about. Diet, exercise, get yourself in shape, and then get fat again and stay that way for five years. Clean up your house, keep it neat for two months, and then fall back into laziness. Set up a homework schedule, stick to it for three weeks, and then go back to watching reruns of Spongebob while high. People are like springs. We can stretch and bend ourselves, but often, we snap back to our original shapes.

The Bible uses a word that means “bend” to describe iniquity. An iniquity is a habit. A person who has a bad habit is like a tree that is bent in a certain direction. We even say a person with a habit has a bent.

When you fight a bad habit, you fight your flesh, and you fight spirits and people that want that habit to remain strong. No wonder we usually fail. We’re outnumbered.

If you can close the door to the spirits and people who work to keep you weak and corrupted, it only makes sense that you will improve. It’s like driving the illegal aliens out of the country so they have to stop voting in our elections.

For a long time, I’ve known that God can remove bad habits without any help from us. He has delivered me from a couple of things instantaneously. I ended up relapsing, but the deliverance was real and supernatural. It’s the correct type of relief to seek. God intended us to receive it instead of working our way out of our messes. The Bible clearly says Jesus bore our iniquities on the cross, not just our sins. But we love pride, so we prefer to use our own puny tools. We take the same hills over and over, because the enemy takes them back repeatedly. You can’t conquer the country if you spend the entire war fighting over one small objective. God wants us to have everything, not just a little corner where we can barricade ourselves in and wait for death. We can’t have complete victory unless we let him do the fighting.

Spirits bring baggage with them. If you accept sin and iniquity, you accept disease, divorce, poverty, mental illness, defeat, and every type of misfortune. Spirits are not good guests. It’s not enough to addict you to heroin or overeating or gossip. They have to trash the place. They have to defecate on the floors and eat the studs. If you can fumigate the house with the Holy Spirit’s help, you can end all that. If not, how can you claim to be surprised when you get bad news? How can you ask, “Why me?” Of course, you.

Churches will never promote this. The churches that believe in the Holy Spirit think Christianity is just a way to get your greed satisfied. The churches that deny the Holy Spirit have no tools and no weapons; they are in love with self-righteousness and therefore weakness. If you want this, you will have to get it directly from God.

Find out what’s wrong with you, confess it to God, and cast it out. You have to be honest. God isn’t going to fix a problem you pretend not to have. Luckily for you, he will even help you with honesty. Ask for it. Cast things out. Pray in tongues. Focus on his kingdom and righteousness, not money and other superficial things.

I feel like someone who is getting over a fever. Sometimes it’s as if the fever has broken. I feel peace. I have fewer destructive thoughts and urges. I am less childish. Then the fever comes back. I get angry, or I feel the pull of gluttony or lust or laziness. Then I remember to use my weapons, and the fever goes away again. I’m not Jesus. I am not a great person all the time. But my base level of evil is not what it was a year ago, and I keep improving. And my good periods are better and longer than they used to be.

If you can rule yourself, the world can’t rule you. You will be the head and not the tail. If you’re not in charge in your own body and mind, you can’t expect a lot of help from God. He wants to live in us, and he doesn’t want to move into a crackhouse where he has one vote along with a bunch of depraved bums and addicts. You will ask him for stupid things, and he will deny your requests, because to grant them will be to serve the demons and the flesh that made you ask.

God is not going to serve the devil. If you serve the devil, God can’t serve you.

If this stops working, I’ll come back and say so, but it has been a while now, and things keep getting better.

I hope God will help you focus on the right things and find his power and help. We were never supposed to be at the mercy of the world, especially inside ourselves.

Also: Gullible Conservatives Pin Hopes on Convicted Con Artist

Couple of things before I get started.

The Pope is fat. He’s about 60 pounds overweight by my estimate. I can say that because I am not Catholic, and I do not consider him a person of special status in God’s scheme. The pope is fat, and he just made fun of Donald Trump, who is thinner…for being fat. Naturally, journalists are outraged. Fat-shaming is evil. We know this because every time someone famous says anything about weight, we have to hear about a week of self-righteous whining. Journalists are piling on the pope for his vile remark.

Whoops. No, they’re not. They’re reporting it with glee and approval, and they agree Trump is fat.

Wonder what the explanation could be. One thing is for sure: it can’t be hypocrisy.

The pope asked Melania Trump if she had been feeding the President of the United States for the Next Four Years (felt like giving him that title) a Slovenian dessert called potica. She’s very gracious, and she and the president took it in stride. She could have said, “No, he eats spumoni. Just like you.”

I shouldn’t pick on the pope. He doesn’t like Trump, but he was probably trying to be pleasant. And he lives in a bell jar filled with people who tell him everything he does is wonderful, so he may be losing perspective. The pope is playing tee ball in the major leagues. Every swing is a homer, even if the Swiss Guard has to pick up the ball and carry it over the very large fence. Which the pope still has. In spite of telling Trump he can’t have one.

To recap, liberal journalists love the fat-shaming, homophobic, anti-choice, anti-Vatican-illegal-immigrant pope. But they’re against cognitive dissonance.

Trump has flip-flopped on some things, but journalists are worse. They can hold two positions at once. They’re like subatomic particles. Their position depends on how you measure them. If Trump calls Rosie O’Donnell fat, it’s very bad, but if a socialist pope calls Trump fat, it’s the funniest thing that ever happened, except maybe the time Reagan got shot.

I wonder what the other pope thinks. Has anyone asked him? I can’t believe there’s a retired pope. I’m in Florida; I should try to look him up.

I would hate to be ex-Pope Benedict. Imagine how annoying it would be, trying to get breakfast in a restaurant. Every time, the waitress would say the same thing: “How about some eggs, BENEDICT?” And he would have to laugh and pretend it’s funny. Popes can’t burn people alive any more. Maybe they can, but they haven’t used the power lately. Burn one waitress, and the breakfast jokes would dry right up.

He probably lives at Century Village, about three hours from me. Either that or an assisted poping facility.

Imagine him trying to talk to Florida retirees. “I can’t understand their German.” “It’s Yiddish. Your former holiness.”

“Your co-holiness”?

I don’t get to vote on popes, but I would have voted against the current one. The last one was all right. He was willing to get in there and bust some heads. The new one wants to be the Cool Pope. He wants to be loved. He wants to be the carpool parent who got in trouble with all the other parents for buying the kids ice cream. He wants to be Divorced Dad Pope, who shows up on the weekend, gives you everything your black little heart desires, and then leaves mommy to deal with the consequences.

Here’s my other thing: let’s shut up about Kim Dotcom. This is the Megaupload guy. His home in New Zealand was raided because of American pressure, and his company was shut down, forcing young men all over America to find new ways to share porn. He insists deceased Democrat grunt Seth Rich was the source of the leaks that saved the world from President Hillary.

Dotcom says he and Seth Rich were in communication before the leaks. He says he’s willing to testify in the US, if he gets a promise of immunity and safe passage. He doesn’t want to get Munsoned.

Some conservatives are excited. Sean Hannity is excited. They really think Dotcom can pull the pin on Hillary’s grenade and melt her down in front of the munchkins.

Here is the problem, and I grant you, it’s a small one: Dotcom is a convicted fraud with a solid reputation for lying. Other than that tiny speed bump, I would say we really have a case here.

Look him up. He was convicted of all sorts of stuff in Germany. Then came the Megaupload mess. I would be afraid to lend this guy five dollars. I’m not going to stick my neck out and say he’s the lancet that will let the pus out of the DNC. In all likelihood, he’s bored, and he needs an occasion for free publicity. The more famous he is, the more money he can make in the future. The Seth Rich mystery presents a big story he can gin up. It will make Democrats suffer for a while, and after his experiences under Obama, he really hates Democrats. What’s not to love? When it’s over, and it turns out to be BS, what will he care? Hello? He’s Kim Dotcom. He’s the Beetlejuice of IT. What did we expect?

Maybe Seth Rich was, indeed, murdered by DNC bigwigs. Maybe Hillary strafed him from her broom. I put the odds that Kim Dotcom knows anything at about 1%.

There’s something about 1% I just love. Some people love 47%. I prefer 1%.

I forgot the other things I planned to write about. Perhaps this is a blessing.

Time to go practice TIG. I hope I have brightened your day.

Let Ronald do the Work

I have decided there is such a thing as food being too good. You don’t actually need to levitate every time you have dinner. Food that’s too good will tempt you constantly. It will be hard to leave alone. You’ll eat more than you should.

That being said, I have a great tip for people who love McDonald’s breakfast food.

I saved some gravy from Thanksgiving. Today before I made my weekly trip to Mickey D’s, I heated the gravy up. When I came home, I did something I’ve been wanting to do for a long time. I dipped Mickey D’s biscuits in gravy while I ate.

This is probably the worst thing you can eat, short of pure nuclear waste. But it was phenomenal. I give credit where credit is due; Mickey D’s makes excellent biscuits. Add gravy, and you have something truly wonderful.

I don’t plan to do this again, because it’s way fattening, but it was a great experience.

If you don’t know how to make gravy, I can help you out.

INGREDIENTS

1 cup whole milk
2 tbsp. grease
1 tbsp. flour
1 tsp. pepper
1/4 tsp. sage
dash of dry white wine
salt to taste

You will want a couple of tablespoons of grease from a Thanksgiving turkey or breakfast sausage or bacon. Something like that. If you use sausage, forget the sage. The white wine is optional.

Get your grease hot (about 4 out of 10 on a digital stove). Fry one level tablespoon of flour in it. You don’t need to burn it. Just get the raw taste out of it. Stir it and smoosh it with a spatula while you fry it.

Add the milk and seasonings. Keep stirring until the gravy bubbles. It will thicken. Add a small amount of wine and cook the gravy until the consistency looks good. Remove it from the pan immediately.

That’s all you need to know. If you like it thinner, use less flour.

This should be more than enough gravy for two people who aren’t trying to kill themselves.

Enjoy.