Whedon Sits on a Hornet’s Nest

I’m kind of disappointed to see what’s happening with Joss Whedon.

To those who have never heard of him, Whedon is the man who wrote the Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie. He was also in charge of the series, and he now has a big TV/movie empire. He’s a big player in the Avengers movies, and he is also behind Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD. Whedon is what film critics call an auteur. He’s like Kevin Smith, only not long-winded, not as aggressively filthy, and much better at writing action scenes.

Whedon created Firefly, my favorite sci-fi series. The network destroyed it by rolling episodes out in sort of a random order. Too bad.

If you haven’t seen Firefly, it works like this: the Democrats take over the solar system. They interfere in people’s lives, pretty much the way they do in real life. The aim is to produce a lovely classless society in which everyone loves whales, never secretes testosterone, and never puts recyclables in the trash bin. The Democrats, known as the Alliance, mean well, but like our own Democrats, they don’t understand that totalitarianism is bad.

The Firefly solar system is full of tiny asteroids which have been converted into earth clones. Miraculously, and to the extreme indignation of Sir Isaac Newton, these little worlds have exactly the same gravity as earth, and they are able to hold onto gaseous atmospheres.

Not everyone loves the Alliance. Future space Republicans form a confederation and fight back, and they lose. After that, most assimilate, but certain hard core right-wing individuals continue resisting. They live on fringe worlds and make money doing various illegal things.

The show takes place on a ship (a “firefly”) captained by Malcolm Reynolds, who was a sergeant in the rebellion. Malcolm is clearly conservative. He hates the government. He wears a six gun. He grew up on a farm. He’s ex-military. He is aware that he’s male, and he’s in love with a woman. Who was born a woman.

Reynolds is supposed to be a hero, but Whedon himself admitted he and Reynolds probably would not have much in common politically. You know what that makes Whedon. A conservative in denial. He’s like Chris Rock or the pre-conservative Dennis Miller. I don’t think he’ll ever come out of the closet, because the force of denial is strong in this one.

Incidentally, Reynolds is not really a hero. The premise of the show had a lot of problems, and one of them is this: there was never any reason why Reynolds couldn’t go home and go back to farming. In the show and the movie based on it, he killed people and risked lives to keep his ridiculous ship in the air. Okay, space. He never had the slightest justification, until the movie came up with a Democrat plot to conceal a utopia experiment that turned genocidal.

Reynolds would have hated giving up, but it would have been better than stealing and killing for a living. Whedon never confronted that. Liberals are good at cognitive dissonance. It makes their existence possible, just like the atmospheres on little asteroids.

Anyway, Whedon has been going nuts on Twitter. He accused Trump of raping a 13-year-old, which came as news to me. On the night of the election, he put up a snarky meme, pre-celebrating Hillary’s non-forthcoming victory. We all know what he saw the next day, when he turned on NPR or visited The Daily Kos. That must have hurt.

His latest misadventure, over which the Twits are tearing him apart: posting a “humorous” meme with cancer patients in it. Paul Ryan, who, according to most experts, is not Donald Trump, met with some ladies who beat cancer, and Whedon said this: “Tonight on White House Wife Hunt, Donny makes host P. Ryan give 2 more contestants the ‘Not a 10′ card.”

There are a number of problems with this, beyond the strange Ryan/Trump conflation. Whedon is saying Trump would not marry any of the cancer patients because they are not “10’s.” That’s not all that funny, and it wouldn’t be funny even if people didn’t see it as cruel. Whedon is very talented, so it’s not clear why he would post a lifeless, unclever joke. On top of its overall weakness, the joke only works if you accept the premise that the women are not good looking.

You can see how this worked. Whedon, who is a suspiciously, deliberately conspicuously ardent fan of powerful women, is so angry at Trump, he lost sight of the fact that his unfunny meme was an oblique shot at the appearance of several very vulnerable women. Feminists are never supposed to mention womens’ appearance, except to say that all women are extremely, extremely beautiful, even if they’re clearly not. Whedon disparaged the looks of several women, and not only did they qualify as protected individuals by virtue of their exalted gender; they were cancer patients who, presumably, need all the help and reinforcement they can get.

Whedon exposed himself as an insincere feminist, or at least a feminist with troubling undercurrents running around in his skull. Maybe that meme was really a Rorschach test.

That being said, I think the reaction is a little overblown. I don’t think he sat down at the computer with the intention of being cruel to sick people. He was simply addled by Trump Derangement Syndrome, which is what Bush Derangement Syndrome turned into at some point during 2016 (much to the delight of George Bush). He was blinded by his strange hatred of conservatives.

He probably still thinks he didn’t do anything wrong.

People are talking about boycotting Marvel. Yeah, okay. I’ll get right on that. I think the last two movies I saw in theaters were Iron Man and Logan, and they were around eight years apart, so I believe I can commit to a boycott lasting around…eight years. I also promise not to watch Marvel movies on cable, unless nothing else good is on, and while I do record the SHIELD show, I will try to feel really bad when I watch. I always zip past the commercials, so in a way, I’m boycotting the show WHILE watching it.

I promise to stop buying comic books, ASAP. And I won’t go to cosplay conventions. These aren’t things I actually do, so abstinence should be a cinch.

What Whedon needs isn’t a boycott. He needs to sit down in a cool, dark room and ask himself why he created Malcolm Reynolds. His characters are all about guns, military weapons, martial arts, killing, and blowing stuff up in the name of America. One of the big things that drives Reynolds is his hatred of God and Christianity, and Whedon gave him a preacher father figure to help him work that out. Whedon is not Lena Dunham. Somewhere inside him, there is the stunted seed of a Ted Nugent. He just won’t admit it and come to terms with it.

He can say his movies are just fantasy. Isn’t that what pre-arrest pedophiles say about their picture collections and chat rooms? If conservatism isn’t in you, why is it coming out in your screenplays?

If you’re really a conservative at heart, who knows? You might even have a thirst for God. That wouldn’t be cool, and it wouldn’t help your career, but a relationship with God is better than the phony love of West Coast sycophants who will happily eat your gutted corpse the first time you stumble badly enough.

It has to be hard to listen to reason when Hollywood is paying you trillions and telling you you’re a genius. Camel, needle, et cetera.

I have to wonder if Whedon’s involvement with occult shows and movies opened him up to demonic influence. Toward the end of the Buffy shows, he seemed to turn into a demon rights activist. A lot of his energy was devoted to lambasting human characters who were against demons. In the Whedon scheme, demons are a race, and being against demons is bigotry.

Demonic influence would certainly explain Whedon’s irrationality. When things don’t make sense, I look for a supernatural cause.

What interesting days we live in. Thank God I don’t have a Twitter account, myself. I’m glad I’m not involved in this mess.

Familiar Face in the News

Benny Hinn is in the news.

Yesterday I read that the IRS raided one of Hinn’s operations and carried out files. No word on the rationale. Of course, the news outlets were electrified. You know the drill “Bad Christian Proves Faith is a Lie; Stupid Trump Voters, Wake up!”.

I saw another interesting article about the kerfuffle. A young man whom Hinn claims to have healed is mad. William Vandenkolk is 25. He is blind. When he was 9, he appeared on stage with Hinn, and was alleged to have received a healing.

The article describes Vandenkolk as “legally blind,” which is a vague term. Back when the Miami Dolphins were actually a good team, one of their best players was legally blind. His name is Manny Fernandez. I don’t recall exactly how it worked. I assume he was able to correct his vision with glasses, to the point where he was able to play. Anyway, “legally blind” and “blind” are not the same thing. The article doesn’t say how well Vandenkolk sees today.

The article is interesting, because Vandenkolk, a hard core Hinn critic, doesn’t say he wasn’t healed. He says that when he appeared onstage with Hinn, “he felt he could see people’s faces clearly in the crowd.”

That sounds pretty miraculous to me. It must have been a huge change from Vandenkolk’s usual condition, because it meant enough to him to motivate him to call it a healing. At the same time, it looks like the change was temporary.

The article puts the world “healed” in quotation marks: “Man ‘healed’ as child by televangelist Benny Hinn speaks out.” What’s the gist? Is the writer saying Vandenkolk wasn’t healed? Vandenkolk’s testimony suggests that he was. If the healing didn’t last, it’s unfortunate, but let’s be real; in the natural course of events, blind people don’t even have brief moments when their vision works. A fleeting miracle is still a miracle, isn’t it?

Is the writer suggesting Vandenkolk is lying? Is he trying to say Vandenkolk himself isn’t sure whether he was healed? The matter should have been explored and explained clearly.

What is Vandenkolk’s beef with Hinn? The temporary nature of his healing? The story doesn’t say that, but it does say Vandenkolk thinks Hinn ripped him off. Hinn’s ministry allegedly raised a lot of money to help Vandenkolk, and Vandenkolk says he never received it.

It would be hard for the government to go after a faith healer whose miracles didn’t work, but it’s not so hard to nail a charity that steals from the people it purports to help.

I don’t like Benny Hinn. He’s a prosperity preacher, and the prosperity gospel is a lie that makes people poor and prevents them from getting closer to God. He teaches Steve Munsey’s ridiculous, ineffective, Biblically illiterate get-rich methods, which serve primarily to enrich preachers. I think Hinn knows he teaches lies. That being said, it’s not impossible for a person to be healed at a Benny Hinn meeting just because Hinn is a disgraceful grifter.

Vandenkolk could have been healed by his own faith or the faith of someone present, other than Hinn. Who knows? I think a real journalist who did not have an axe to grind would have acknowledged the big story here. It’s not news if someone like Hinn takes someone’s money, but it’s very big news if a blind person receives his sight supernaturally, even if it doesn’t last.

If Hinn’s star falls because of this, fine. He is not a good person, and his ministry is toxic. But it will be a net loss if Christianity itself is disgraced through this scandal. How many people have been separated from God by their anger at crooked preachers? Hundreds of millions, at least. If Hinn implodes, we need other ministries to rise and fill the hole. I hope God will raise up sincere, powerful ministers to take the places of people like Hinn and Joel Osteen and T.D. Jakes. When God took Pharaoh off the backs of the Jews, he didn’t leave them wandering around on their own. He gave them Moses.

I have no sympathy at all for Hinn. The sooner his poisonous, fraudulent act is put to rest, the better.

MIG Skills Improved by TIG Failures

As a master of all conceivable types of TIG welding, I feel it is time to bless the confused and evil-smelling masses with an update on my metal-joining escapades.

A while back I got myself a length of 2″ x 1/8″ flat hot-rolled steel from Home Depot. The price was not that bad, and the metal looked surprisingly good. I needed something to practice on, and the nearest metal dealer is way down the road.

I was confused by the appearance of the steel. I’ve had hot-rolled that looked like it had lumpy black enamel on it, and I’ve had hot-rolled that had a nice matte black scale that looked like the black oxide they put on tools, but this stuff wasn’t black at all, and it was smooth. I wondered if it could possibly be cold-rolled. I’ve never had any reason to buy cold-rolled steel, so I don’t really know what it looks like.

Hot-rolled steel is steel which has been formed while red hot. It’s cheaper than cold-rolled, which is not as hot when formed. I assume hot-rolled is cheaper because it’s easier to form hot steel. Hot-rolled comes with black mill scale on it, and mill scale is harder than steel. Mill scale interferes with welding. MIG will produce useful, if ugly, welds through mill scale. It’s my understanding that stick will burn right through it, although I don’t know. TIG hates scale. The arc will wander around, and I believe the impurities cause porosity. I assume black iron oxide is less conductive than iron, so that must be what causes the arc problem.

The metal I bought did, in fact, have scale on it. I guess it was thin scale, because the metal isn’t black, but I can tell it’s there, because a flap disk bounces off of it. It takes forever to remove it.

Removing the scale has been the single most annoying thing I’ve had to do in my pursuit of TIG excellence.

I got myself a nice flap disk just for scale removal, but as noted above, it didn’t work too good. Then I tried the belt grinder. This is a 3-HP steel-eating machine that can consume a piece of angle iron like a fat kid sucking up a strand of spaghetti. The scale is too much for it. It comes off, but it’s very slow. Grinding disks work, but they gouge the work, and only a small part of a grinding disk contacts the metal, so removing scale is like using a Sharpie to turn a shoebox black.

I cleaned some pieces anyway, and I graduated from laying beads on flat metal to making fillet welds. Here’s the problem with that: when you weld one side of a piece of metal, new scale grows on the other side, so if you prepare two pieces of metal and do a fillet weld on one side, you have to descale them all over again before you do the back.

You can prevent metal from re-scaling by directing inert gas at the back side. That would require more tools and a lot of aggravation, so I’m not going to do it.

My solution is to TIG my clean metal, and then, when new scale appears, move on to MIG. The new scale isn’t bad enough to bother MIG.

If you want to avoid scale removal, buy cold-rolled, weld aluminum instead of steel, or get “pickled and oiled” steel. This is hot-rolled which has been de-scaled with acid and then oiled to keep new rust from forming.

I got a pleasant surprise from all of this. While I was struggling to learn TIG, I got a lot better at MIG. TIG takes a lot more skill, and the skills transfer to MIG. For TIG, you have to develop the ability to see what you’re doing. You have to have a steady torch hand. Same stuff applies to MIG. When I went back to MIG, I found myself producing very decent welds. I could see the puddle much better than I had in the past, and I was better at aiming the torch.

I cut two short pieces of steel, offset them a little, and clamped them together for lap welding. You see the result below. It looks better in person. Anyway, there isn’t much porosity, the welds are pretty uniform, and everything is just about where it’s supposed to be. If I put in another week, I should be able to make welds nice enough to put where people can see them. There are basically two grades of welds: display-worthy and not. Most MIG welders never get to the point where they can make welds that look good enough to be placed on the front of things.

The horrible mess behind the nice weld is a TIG weld I put down later. I cleaned everything very well, except for the underside of the top piece of metal. When it got hot, it started pumping fumes into the weld.

I bought a nice belt grinder, and while I like it a lot, the welds in it are total garbage. They look like a monkey did them. Belt grinders don’t take much stress, so monkey welds are fine, but it’s an example of the low standards most welders adhere to. I’ve seen a lot of photos of welds done by amateurs and even by professionals who aren’t primarily welders, and crap welding is the norm. I would like to do a little better than that.

My MIG welds are now better than my TIG welds. I never thought they would be this good, and I almost wonder if I should have bought the TIG welder. One of the main reasons I bought it was that TIG welds are more precise and better looking.

No! That’s insane. You should always buy whatever tool you think it is that you want. There is no such thing as a tool you don’t need.

I’m still not satisfied with my helmet. I was having a problem where all I could see was a hot weld arc and a sea of blackness. I was literally positioning the torch, flipping the helmet down, and welding where I THOUGHT I needed to be. I improved things by adding a magnifying lens and turning the shade down to the minimum, but things could be better. I’m thinking my issue may be caused by age. I don’t see contrast as well as I used to.

A couple of days ago, I had a weird experience. I’m pretty sure I welded with the helmet turned off. That means I had a shade somewhere below 5. I was protected from UV, because the glass alone will do that, but I don’t think I had any help with the glare. I saw pretty well. It took me a minute or so to realize what was going on. Now I’m wondering if I even need to turn the helmet on.

If my eyes are so bad I can weld with the helmet turned off, how am I able to drive and get around? Search me.

I finally found a really excellent Youtube welding resource. There are tons of welding videos on Youtube, but some are better than others. A welder named Jody runs a site called Welding Tips and Tricks. He fills the Internet with helpful videos that took a lot of work to create. All he asks in return is that you buy his product, the TIG Finger. This is a knitted fiberglass thing that goes over your finger to keep torch heat off of it. Very useful.

I hate to say this, but a competitor of his makes a knockoff “Finger” with a wrist strap to keep it from falling off, and I bought one. I kept dropping the original TIG Finger every time I put the torch down. Oh well. I did buy the original, so I think I’m off the hook. If you know where to get the fiberglass, you can make your own and avoid getting caught between bitter competitors.

I’ve put in all this work, and now I wonder if I should have started with stick welding. A stick welder will weld crappy metal outdoors in the wind (not suitable for MIG and TIG), and stick welders aren’t expensive. Bonus: no gas required. For some reason, people look down on stick, but I’ve seen the welds, and they look very nice. My TIG has a stick clamp, so I can learn stick whenever I choose.

One of these days I’ll do a TIG weld correctly, and you will see pictures here. I’m still working on my beer opener. I turned the end of a big Craftsman wrench into an opener, and I’m going to put it on a stainless back plate and mount it on a wall. Once that’s done, I’ll order an Swag Offroad finger brake kit for my hydraulic press (don’t ask) and weld it together so I can have one more tool I don’t use.

If you want to feel like a man and not a hopeless metrosexual snowflake, get yourself a MIG or stick welder and get started. It doesn’t even matter if you don’t need to weld anything. That’s not the point. If you can’t weld, there is something wrong with you. You need to fix it.

BYE

Thanks for the prayers and kind thoughts regarding the move out of Miami. I really need those prayers.

Today I’m trying to figure out where to put my tools. If the deal goes through, I’ll have a 900-sq. ft. garage and a frame outbuilding the same size. I’m thinking I should put my metalworking tools in the garage and most of my woodworking tools in the outbuilding. Woodworking makes a real mess.

The new garage is 33 feet across the front and 25 feet deep. I have to decide where to put things. I feel like I only have to worry about the big compressor, the mill, and the lathe. Everything else is on wheels or light enough to move.

I’m thinking the lathe should be positioned so the tailstock faces a garage door. if I ever have to turn a long part, I’ll be able to open the door for clearance. Right now, my mill is in a corner (the classic Bridgeport location), and I’m tired of it. The space behind the mill is inaccessible and useless. I think I should put the mill along the same wall as the lathe. That will allow me to use the space behind the table for carts and so on. I could put a cart back there and put my heaviest rotary table on it.

I’m not sure about the compressor. I suppose the location should be sort of central, but I don’t want it out in the floor. I guess I could put it along the back wall in the middle.

The garage will have to have A/C. I can’t sit out there in 90-degree heat. I guess that means a split unit, and that won’t be cheap. A wall unit would probably be too small. I’ll also need upgraded power. I can’t run a 7.5-HP lathe on 15 amps at 120 volts. I’m wondering what a 3-phase run would cost. A lot, I suppose.

When all this is said and done, my big table saw, which I love, will be 100 feet away from my machine tools. So will the big vertical band saw. That’s inconvenient, but I don’t want to ruin a big new garage by cramming woodworking tools into it.

The house has a barn. I think that would be a good place for the tractor. It would really open up the outbuilding. I will never have a horse (I hope) so it’s not like the barn will be unavailable.

I don’t even know if the seller will talk to us after getting lowballed. You have to have a backbone when you buy expensive stuff, though. You can’t just give someone a hundred grand to make them like you.

The realtor asked about earnest money. That sounded odd, in the context of a cash sale. The purpose of earnest money (a deposit) is to put a buyer’s head in a vise so he will have motivation to get a loan. If you don’t get it done, the seller keeps your money. If you’re planning to pay cash, it should be enough that the seller knows you have the loot. When the deal closes, it’s a simple sale contract. As soon as the inspections are done, you write a check. You’re already obligated, if you screw up, the seller can sue you, and he knows you’re not judgment-proof, so what’s the purpose of a deposit? An executed contract should be enough.

If this deal doesn’t work, the next one will. I will escape Miami’s gravity well. The joy of leaving this place for the last time may be too much for my system to cope with.

Everybody hates Miami. I mean, nearly everybody. If you speak no English at all, and/or you’re extremely rude and coarse, and you love taking 15 minutes to drive three miles, it’s the place for you. Otherwise, no.

I will post updates as things change.

Time to Chop Miami’s Stubborn Tentacles

The house hunt has moved into a new stage. I made an offer on the green house I wrote about a while back.

I am not what you would call a savvy real estate buyer, even though I was a realtor in a past life. I did mostly rentals. While I was part of some sales, real estate is boring, and I forgot a lot of what I had learned. I did the best I could this time around. I picked my dad’s brains. He has bought a ton of real estate. In fact, he’s buying the new house. That was the deal we made. I would not leave Miami until he did, and he would buy a nice place where we would both live. He needs looking after these days, my mother has been dead for 20 years, and there is no one else who will do it.

I considered hiring a single-agent realtor. Ordinarily, realtors look out mainly for themselves. They deal “fairly” with buyers and sellers, but if you’re a buyer, they’re not on your side. There are things they won’t tell you, and they don’t care if you lose your life savings. A single-agent represents you alone and has a fiduciary duty to you.

The problem with hiring a single-agent realtor is that they get a big fee up front, and they can’t show you any of their own listings. That’s not good, if your agent works for a big company. Also, you’re kind of stuck with the agent you hire. I decided to forget about it and negotiate and so on for myself.

I don’t know a whole lot about northern Florida house prices, but after looking at a bunch of places, I got a feel for the situation. The house we liked seemed overpriced by around 15%. The sellers paid even more for it, so they got burned, and they were still burning me after pricing the house to take a loss.

I decided to get an appraisal. I may not be much of a buyer, but I’ve been involved in a lot of sales, and an appraisal just seemed like common sense. I had a listing agent, a transactional agent, and a seller, all trying to get as much money as possible, and none of them represented me. I paid some guy to appraise the place, and lo and behold, the price came in slightly lower than my own guess. The listing price is 18% higher.

The agent was amazed that I had it appraised. He said very few people do that. Seriously? Do people really make bids on houses without getting appraisals? I can’t comprehend that. How do you know what to offer? Asking prices are fantasy figures. Realtors make a little effort to look at comparable sales, but in the end, they guess. Appraisers aren’t like that. They take measurements and use tables and so on, and THEN they factor in other sales. No price is carved in stone, but an appraisal means a whole lot more than an asking price.

Maybe I’m missing something here, but it seems crazy to make an offer on something without knowing the value. The appraisal was expensive, but compared to the difference between the asking price and the appraised price, it’s microscopic. Seems like a good investment.

The agent was trying to tell me I couldn’t get burned. He said his contracts always say the deal is off if the house doesn’t appraise for more than the purchase price. So you’re supposed to make an offer based on nothing and then pray the bank’s appraiser proves you’re right? With real money you actually worked for?

I think the sellers are old. The house has two lift chairs in it. By that, I mean they boost you to your feet when it’s time to go watch Judge Wapner. God rest his soul. Young people don’t have lift chairs. Maybe they’re old and rich and don’t care at all about money. There must be some reason why they spent way too much on the house and equipment and then never felt like they had to visit.

I don’t know what the story is. I’m not all that optimistic about getting the house. The asking price and offer are nearly $200,000 apart. They may just tell us to jam it.

It would be nice to make a deal. The house has a fantastic attached garage plus a detached garage big enough for all sorts of stuff. I can put a split air conditioner in the main garage and stick my machine tools in there. I’ll never leave. It’s almost a thousand square feet. The lot is big enough to feel relaxed on, although sooner or later someone will try to build on the pasture next door. Maybe we should try to pick it up.

I can’t imagine life with no traffic. What’s it like? I barely recall.

I don’t think I’ll be able to shoot out back. The lot is pretty flat. Maybe if I put up a berm.

I feel good that I made a move. It makes me nervous, handling my dad’s money. He’s all for it, though, and both of us hate Miami. I needed to break the ice and start something moving. Now if this deal doesn’t work, I’ll be less stiff about starting the next one.

What will I miss about Miami? There must be something. Fishing was fun, but I’m over it. Boating to the Bahamas was a neat experience, but I’m old, my dad can’t be allowed to steer the boat, and there is no one to go with us. Also, the Bahamas are all about drunkenness and fish. I don’t care if I never see another fish again, and I have developed an aversion to bars.

Miami has no culture at all. The restaurants aren’t great. The air smells like damp socks. There is no twilight, because of the latitude. After May 1, it never gets cool at night. The traffic is getting so bad, in a year, everything may have to arrive by drone. All the ethnic groups hate each other. Gas is expensive. Food is expensive. Politics are getting more and more liberal; young Cubans want to be social justice warriors and teach their conservative parents a lesson.

Horrible things happened to my family in Miami. I can’t even drive up I-95 without thinking about the past. I remember my dysfunctional childhood and the decades of misery we went through with my sister. I remember my mother dying in Baptist Hospital, after a short, bleak life in which not one of her dreams came true. She was treated very badly. She was never appreciated. God did her a favor when he took her away from us.

I never have anything to do with the people I went to high school with. They remind me of a terrible time in my life, and I was never close to any of them anyway. I thought I had a few friends, but I didn’t know what real friends were like until I got older. If I were in a mall right now and I saw someone I went to high school with, I’d turn away and wait for them to move on.

I should be able to think of something I’ll miss if I work on it long enough, but right now, it’s not coming. Even the churches here treated me badly.

Let’s be honest. I won’t miss Miami at all. That’s my nature. When I cut the cord, it’s really cut. Ask any of the many people I’ve abruptly ejected from my circle. I expect to be glad I’m not in Miami, every day for the rest of my life.

People in Marion County will not turn out to be the answer to my prayers. I know that, or at least I think I know that. But they’ll speak English, they’ll be polite, and they’ll have a lot more in common with me in terms of religion and politics. That’s good enough. I don’t think I’ll ever feel at home on earth, but some places are better than others.

Because this will be a cash deal, I could conceivably find myself moving stuff north before summer starts. I didn’t think about that until today. Generally, closings take a long time because of mortgage delays. Man. This is starting to feel real. Ack. God will get me through it.

Prayers would be appreciated.

And I’m “Peaked in 2000” Ann Coulter

I made a big mistake yesterday. I watched some clips of a Comedy Central roast. Depraved, vicious, unimaginative humor at its best. Not a positive contribution to my life.

You will want to know who they roasted. Answer: Ann Coulter. The problem is this: they claimed they were roasting Rob Lowe.

Rob got quite a few zingers; no doubt about that. But if you look the roast up and see how people reacted to it, you will find that most of the venom was heaped on Ann Coulter. Lowe faded into the background, as if his presence were an afterthought.

If you look at Youtube and check out pirated clips of the roast, you will see an endless array of watchlists and videos with titles like, “ANN COULTER DESTROYED AT ROB LOWE ROAST!!!!!!!!!!!” People who hate Coulter have carpet-bombed Youtube with their videos. It’s almost as if an old Nazi collaborator from Hungary were paying them to do it. It’s relatively difficult to find clips focusing on the other attendees. The Youtube hive, with its editing, did its best to make Coulter’s weak performance seem like a Hindenburgian disaster. That’s something of an exaggeration.

I didn’t see the whole thing, because, why would I? To call it mean-spirited would be like calling Rosie O’Donnell a tomboy. All Comedy Central roasts are mean-spirited, and they’re also extremely tasteless. If you want to watch third-tier comedians you dimly remember call each other things like “whore” and, well, other things I don’t want to repeat here, Comedy Central roasts are right up your alley. If you’re looking for clever, relatively gentle ribbing, forget it.

There used to be something called The Friars’ Club, and they put on roasts. Dean Martin was the host, I think. They roasted people like Sinatra and Milton Berle. The roasts were funny and clean. The meanest person who appeared was Don Rickles, and if you think Don Rickles was mean, you completely missed the point of his act. What Comedy Central does now is much different. It’s as if a bunch of mentally ill teenagers broke into the Friars’ Club studio while Dean was away. On top of the crudeness and hostility, the performers tend to be people who have a hard time finding work. David Spade, Lisa Lampanelli (who?), Jeff Ross (who?), and other D-listers show up, probably to get money to pay for groceries.

The shots at Ann Coulter were really something. Some were well within the expansive bounds of Comedy Central roast standards. Others were so vicious, they were too disturbing to be funny.

The thing the performers, writers, and professional audience failed to understand is this: roasts are only funny when you pick on people you don’t actually hate. When Norm MacDonald picks on David Spade, it’s fine, because they get along in real life. When people who truly want to see Ann Coulter die insult her, it’s an off-putting glimpse of real hatred, which is not funny.

It’s strange; it sounds like I’m endorsing their usual standard of abuse. I’m not. They have no concept of boundaries. I’m just saying that whatever limits they generally recognize were violated egregiously when Ann Coulter showed up.

Here’s the meanest thing they did to her: when she took her turn at the end of the roast, a lot of the people in the room refused to laugh. Some just stared at her. It was obvious that they decided, in advance, to see to it that she bombed. That’s a very cruel thing to do to an entertainer.

Here’s an interesting thing about comedy: it only works when the audience consents. If the audience isn’t with you, you WILL bomb. It doesn’t matter how funny you are. This is true of all performing acts, but it’s particularly true of comedy.

I remember seeing Steve Martin perform when I was in high school. His opening act was John Sebastian, the singer who wrote “Welcome Back” and “Coconut Grove,” among other circa-1970 hits. Nobody wanted to see him sing. It was a mistake to book him. He had a tape machine with him instead of a band. He went through his whole set while people screamed at him, booed, and gave him the finger. No encore. He looked like he wanted to grant the audience’s wish and disappear. When the tape ended, he was dying to get off the stage. Steve Martin came out, did his set in a hurry, and left as soon as he could without violating his contract. He seemed furious.

That’s what the Coulter roast was like.

Coulter is a tough bird, but she was clearly knocked off balance by the toxic deluge of abuse. Even Jewel, whose stage persona is an inoffensive, girlish waif who sings about love and daisies and so on, said this: “I do want to say as a feminist that I can’t support everything that’s been said tonight, but as someone who hates Ann Coulter, I’m delighted.” This was after an SNL cast member named Pete Davidson called Coulter the c-word.

Coulter’s delivery was slow, and it sounded as if she had been drinking. Her jokes were not great, but they seemed much worse than they were, because so many people in the studio had decided to punish her with silence.

Coulter’s performance was marred by her choice of material. Years ago, her buddies got together and wrote a Fox News comedy show called “The Half-Hour News Hour.” It featured people like Manny Coto (who?) and Mike Rowe (no threat to Dave Chappelle). The show was really bad. After the roast, she said she and her friends had written her jokes. Naturally, I thought of the Fox show. I strongly suspect the same crew was the engine behind her Comedy Central bus plunge. “We’re going to roast Major Strasser. Round up the usual suspects.”

Conservatives hate new talent. They’re all about promoting people who already have a piece of the pie. They support hacks. The Fox show was a great example of what happens when a movement eats its young. Coulter gets exposure, P.J. O’Rourke gets exposure, Tucker Carlson (unbelievably) gets the Megyn Kelly and Bill O’Reilly shows, Mike Rowe gets called in to write things, but talented people who haven’t made it yet are ignored.

Remember Allahpundit? Excellent writer, right? Where is he now? Writing for Hot Air. A contrived corporate blog. We will never see him on TV. He will never be asked to write for a major TV show or a conservative movie comedy. Jeff Goldstein never made it. Moxie never made it. What’s-his-name at IMAO never made it. Nobody gets called up from the minors except for untalented tokens who prove how diverse we are.

Of course, Coulter bombed. The whole room hated her, and she was playing in an NFL game backed up by a squad of midgets. Okay, not NFL. More like a college team on whatever level is below MIT.

I sound like I support Ann Coulter. I don’t. I got over that years ago, when I saw how nutty she really was. I’m just marveling at the cruelty of the left and the foolishness of Team Coulter and the conservatives who decide who makes it and who doesn’t.

For all her faults and errors, which are substantial, Ann Coulter is brilliant. She’s the one who labeled illegal aliens “undocumented Democrats.” She has an extremely rare ability to think on her feet and cut opponents to the quick. On Comedy Central, she looked like an amateur who was out of her element. Nice job, leftists and GOP-approved Coulter stooges.

I don’t actually care about what happens on pity-inducing TV roasts staffed by performers we feel sorry for. What really interests me about the story is the Christian angle. While Coulter is the farthest thing from a preacher, and while she is not a good role model for any Christian, she belongs to the faith, and she sometimes promotes our beliefs. People on the left hate her for that. They can’t tell a saint from Judas Iscariot. We’re all evil in their minds, and all cruelty toward us is considered justified. This, not her harsh humor, is the main reason she was treated so badly.

I sincerely believe there were people on the dais who would publicly celebrate if Ann Coulter were burned alive in a house fire. I think some of them would happily beat her to death with their own fists. Their hostility is representative of the general mood of leftists. Right now, lynchings are illegal, so leftists content themselves with beating Republicans at political rallies. In the future, they will have more “flexibility,” as Obama once put it. When those days come, we will see people act out, with their bodies, the hostility the roast performers heaped on Coulter with their tongues.

In 1900, no one would have thought the civilized, orderly Germans and Austrians capable of shooting babies or pushing Jews into gas chambers. At that time, they were not allowed to do things like that. As the government became more supportive of violence and hatred, people showed what they were really capable of doing. We’re going to see that level of brutality here, before long. We’re already seeing it at Trump rallies. Think how bad it will be when the gun-grabbers disarm the prey. The violence will come to our doorsteps, even in places like Florida and Texas.

What a strange time to be alive.

Many times, I’ve thought to myself that Jews in prewar Europe should have known what was coming. I’ve wondered why they didn’t leave while they could. Now I look around at American Christians, and I ask similar questions. Don’t we know what’s on the way? Why aren’t we leaving big cities and blue states? When the real violence starts, the TV segments and Youtube videos won’t come from West Virginia and Wyoming. They’ll come from places like L.A, D.C., and New York City. Conservatives in those places are already afraid to go out in public with conservative gear on, and they’re afraid to expose their beliefs at work. If things are already that bad, why stick around?

Jews are going to get the worst of it. Christians can move to the country, but Jews are city people. Orthodox Jews are literally incapable of surviving on their own. They have to have synagogues, yeshivas, kosher butchers, and so on. They’re not allowed to hunt. Look where they concentrate. Chicago, New York, L.A., Boston, and South Florida. Liberal areas with big, angry ghettos. Not a promising picture. At least the Jews in Florida can carry guns.

When the mobs come for Jews, most Jews will be surprised. “We voted for government programs! We voted for ‘immigrants’! We rode with the Freedom Riders! We fought poll taxes and literacy tests!” It won’t matter. Persecution isn’t based on your behavior. It’s based on God’s love for you. Anything God loves is hateful to Satan’s children.

It’s sort of like the Army’s hatred of Clevinger in Catch-22:

Yossarian had done his best to warn him the night before. “You haven’t got a chance, kid,” he told him glumly. “They hate Jews.” “But I’m not Jewish,” answered Clevinger. “It will make no difference,” Yossarian promised, and Yossarian was right.

I don’t care what happens to Ann Coulter’s career. She is not helpful. But I do care what cruelty to Ann Coulter presages.

Oh, well. I’m on my way out of this place. I’m going to move to an area where you have to have Amazon Prime to get a bagel. If riots go mobile and start visiting red areas, I won’t have to use my guns to protect myself. My neighbors will beat me to it. I should be safe much longer than anyone in South Florida.

Killing O’Reilly

Bill O’Reilly is out! How about that?

What a tragedy. I use “tragedy” in the classic sense, sort of, meaning a story of a person’s self-inflicted, predictable downfall. O’Reilly is the author of his own mess.

O’Reilly has been hit with numerous harassment complaints over the years, and he and/or Fox shelled out millions to shut them down. He admits no wrongdoing and claims the payoffs were motivated by a desire to protect his kids from scandal. There are two problems with that claim. First, as Bill Cosby and Bill Clinton demonstrate, a large number of accusations of bad behavior toward women, from credible accusers, is, in and of itself, strong evidence of guilt. Second, one plaintiff included transcriptions of recordings of his obscene phone calls in her complaint. Unless she and her lawyer were eager to face perjury charges, sanctions, bills from O’Reilly’s lawyers, and disbarment, those recordings exist, proving his guilt.

If O’Reilly isn’t guilty, it’s the best frame job in the history of frames. The logical conclusion is that he is an unrepentant serial abuser, upon whom punishment and disgrace make no impression at all.

What a victory for feminists, right? Wrong, of course. Feminism had nothing to do with this. If mistreatment of women in the workplace meant anything to feminists, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, George Stephanopoulos, Dick Morris, and a whole lot of other Democrats and Democrat employees would have been taken down years ago. This crusade wasn’t about feminism. It was about silencing a conservative. It was 100% hypocritical.

Is it sad that the crusade worked? It’s sad that anyone would work so hard to prevent another person from exercising his right to free speech, but it’s not sad that O’Reilly got the boot. It’s not right to subject someone to constant verbal violation on the job. Harassment is bullying. It’s a big deal. No one in his right mind would want his sister or daughter to work with a powerful man who called her on the phone and told her about things he wanted to do to her in the shower, as O’Reilly apparently did. No one would want his sister or daughter to think her livelihood depended on sucking up and taking it.

I know, without checking, that many conservatives are up in arms today about this giant loss. I disagree. Conservatism doesn’t depend on one man’s television show, and a conservative who makes a mockery of Christian beliefs while carrying the standard of old-fashioned morality makes liars out of us.

For a long time, I’ve written about the conservative media zero-sum mentality. A few people have made it as conservative pundits and writers. Instead of bringing up new talent (apart from blacks, gays, and pretty girls who make us look inclusive), we protect the queen bees at the top and keep new talent down. The kingmakers who work behind the scenes aren’t interested in princes; they behead them in private. They direct too much of their energy to propping up relics who totter and wheeze on their thrones. It’s not about the cause; it’s about greedily hanging onto little bits of turf. Conservatives think there can only be so many right-wing successes, so they shoot down newcomers.

The O’Reilly mess is a great example of the zero-sum mindset in action. Many, many people can do what O’Reilly does, as well or better. He didn’t make the time spot. The time spot made him. Look at Tucker Carlson. For all his mediocrity, he is ruling in Megyn Kelly’s old spot. I thought he would flounder, but conservative viewers have nowhere else to go at 9 p.m. Put a reasonably competent conservative on at 8, and butts will still fill seats.

O’Reilly is a very good entertainer, but anyone who knows what Youtube is can turn on a PC and find ten individuals, working out of basements, who could do his job just fine. He’s not a great thinker. He’s not a great debater. He’s just a guy with a B+ wit and a talent for pleasing a crowd.

They say Eric Bolling might get Bill’s job. That will work fine. Gutfeld is smarter and funnier, but he’s annoying and immature, so I don’t see it happening. He would probably be a smash hit, though, because he’s a better troll than O’Reilly, and the 8 p.m. slot has been a troll slot for 21 years. Give him a sharp producer and a few strong lectures about manhood and gravitas, and he could be transformed into a prime time powerhouse.

I strongly suspect O’Reilly’s production team deserves more credit than he does. If that’s true, they can put just about anyone in that chair and make it work.

I wonder what happened to Andy Levy. He could do it. He would certainly get more respect than Gutfeld. Jon Scott could replace O’Reilly. Laura Ingraham wouldn’t be too bad, but she can be annoying.

How about Jeanine Pirro? Sometimes she seems a little off the wall, but then so does Bill. She’s confrontational without being off-putting. She’s smart, by journalist standards; she was a federal judge. She would be harder for liberals to pick on, because she’s a woman. Maybe she’s the best choice. I can really see that working.

Losing Bill O’Reilly is a positive. The only way this can hurt Fox is if they turn left. They should not put Shepard Smith in there. They should not kiss up to the left with a hire that will make conservatives retch.

I used to be a big O’Reilly fan, but some people do not grow on you. I don’t know if he got worse with age or if I just became more sensitive to his faults. He talked over people. He was a blowhard. He got way too emotional. He could not admit error. I think I stopped watching him regularly in around 2000. Watching him was a little like riding a motorcycle into a hailstorm without a helmet.

There is a religious angle to all of this. I used to wonder what Jesus meant when he said, “Agree with your enemy quickly, when he is in the way with you, or he may hand you over to the judge.” A preacher named Andrew Wommack gave me a good answer. He said it meant to admit fault when accused, instead of letting the matter fester until it comes up before God. We know the enemy can approach the throne with our sins and ask for the right to harm us. If we repent, we can avoid that. It certainly looks like O’Reilly handed himself over to his enemies by falsely maintaining his innocence. You don’t have to make gross remarks to your coworkers, and you definitely don’t have to continue doing it after being caught and sued numerous times.

Here is what Psalm 32 says:

When I kept silent, my bones wasted away
because of my groaning all day long;

day and night your hand was heavy on me;
the sap in me dried up as in a summer drought. (Selah)

When I acknowledged my sin to you,
when I stopped concealing my guilt,
and said, “I will confess my offenses to Adonai”;
then you, you forgave the guilt of my sin. (Selah)

This is what everyone faithful should pray
at a time when you can be found.
Then, when the floodwaters are raging,
they will not reach to him.

Waters are voices that rise against you. If you are honest with God, he will rebuke them and keep you safe. If not, sooner or later, you will start to sink.

This idea is on my mind all the time. God keeps showing me my disgusting problems. I work to confess them to him, and I ask him for his help with that. I used to think I was a pretty good guy, but I was deluded. I am not good at all. I am lucky so many things have been kept out of the light. I keep asking for patience and correction.

It’s like God gave me a relativey clean barn when I was born, and I spend decades shoveling manure into it. Now there’s a whole lot of hardened manure, and I can’t move it out without help.

I hope Fox makes a good choice, but I’m not going to get agitated, because the welfare of this country depends on our relationship with God, not the secular blather of TV commentators.

Once again, I’m glad I’m out of the conservative blogging mosh pit. If I were still getting 3000 visits per day, I would be buried in critical comments today. I don’t miss that nonsense at all.

All is Not Well on Gilligan’s Island

Vince Gilligan has blessed us once again. The second episode of the third season of Better Call Saul has aired. I have thoughts concerning this momentous event.

Jimmy McGill (Saul) has a girlfriend named Kim. She is supposed to be a straight arrow. She’s an associate with his former firm, Hamlin, Hamlin & McGill. His brother, Chuck, is the most-senior senior partner. Chuck took Kim’s only client, and Jimmy got the client back for her by falsifying documents Chuck was using in his representation. Chuck got Jimmy to admit what he did, and he recorded the confession without telling Jimmy.

Now Jimmy knows about the tape. A grunt at HHM found out about the tape, and he told Kim. Kim then went to Jimmy, demanded $20 cash from him in order to be able to represent herself as his criminal defense attorney, and told him about the tape. She wanted to tell him about the tape, but she was concerned that her remarks would not be confidential. As his attorney, she figured, she would be able to speak under cover of attorney-client privilege. Does that work when you know about the crime before you become the defendant’s attorney? I do not know. It smells off.

The HHM boys can’t play the tape for the client, because that would make them look like vengeful idiots, and it would offend the client. Going to the cops would not be a slam-dunk (in BCS logic, anyway), so there is no point in trying. Chuck has a plan for the tape, and it involves further action. In Episode 3, he showed what the plan is.

Kim had a lot of Jimmy-related problems before the tape kerfuffle arose. She has committed two crimes with Jimmy. On one occasion, she helped him con a very sharp, successful securities trader into buying them hundreds of dollars’ worth of drinks. Second, she got Jimmy to help her con an amorous engineer into giving her a $10,000 check to invest in a non-existent enterprise. She didn’t profit from these crimes, apart from the free booze. She didn’t cash the check. Still, they were serious crimes.

Here’s another thing: squat cobbler. Jimmy had a drug-dealer client. The client was robbed of some drugs plus a baseball card collection. Stupidly, the client called the cops, thinking he could get the baseball cards back without having any issues related to the drugs. He didn’t mention the drugs. The cops found a suspicious cavity in his house, suitable for hiding illegal items. The cops kept calling the client, claiming they were real excited about the cards, but they really wanted to get info on his suspicious hiding place.

In real life, the answer to this problem would be to tell the police this: “If you find the cards, let me know, but I don’t want to be bothered until then.” Better yet: “I don’t care about the cards. Let it go.” The cops can’t make you come to the police station over and over just because they feel like it. Jimmy’s answer, however, was to claim his client hid embarrassing fetish videos in the hole, and that they featured vignettes of him sitting on pies and crying. Jimmy made up the name “squat cobbler” to describe the fetish. He told Kim about it, so now she probably has a legal obligation to tell the bar association. But she has not done so.

Kim has bar trouble waiting to bite her on the butt, along with two solid criminal cases which would bring bar troubles of their own.

What is Vince Gilligan going to do with this? More importantly, will he bring the Skipper into it?

Here’s what I’m thinking. During the Heisenberg years, Kim Wexler is dead or in prison. We never saw her in Breaking Bad, which took place after the Saul prequel. That means something happened to her. Gilligan has put several nice traps in front of her, and they are waiting to spring open and swallow her.

Jimmy is a tragic figure. He screws up and screws up and screws up. He knows he’s ruining his future, but he can’t stop. It’s his nature. Tragic figures are more interesting if their screwups hurt the people they love. I think Vince Gilligan will pull that string eventually.

We’re supposed to think Kim is pure and responsible, but she is neither. She committed two ridiculous, brazen crimes, in a sparsely populated state, against two victims who were highly likely to run into her later in the course of business. She concealed a crime (Jimmy’s) that would send a goody-two-shoes like Chuck running to the bar with bells on. She also recommended Jimmy, a con artist, for a job with another firm. This is not how pure, responsible people act. Maybe Gilligan is planning to shatter the audience’s rosy estimation of Kim.

Scenario: the securities trader walks into HHM one day looking for representation. The partners haul Kim out and sing her praises to him. “This is the gleaming angel that will handle your case.” We already know the securities trader is a shrewd and somewhat nasty character. Would he nark on Kim immediately and go to another firm? Of course not. He’d smile and shake her hand and act like he had never seen her before. Then in private, they’d talk. He’d be able to make her do anything he wants. Sex. More crimes. Squat cobbler. Who knows?

Scenario: the amorous, rejected engineer comes to HHM for help. Kim is assigned. Because he’s not sharp or nasty, he flips out instantly and starts ranting about her crime in the lobby. Kim’s life is thrown into turmoil. She loses her job. Prosecution is a real possibility. Chuck may squeal on her; it’s what he loves.

Maybe the engineer will turn out to be nasty after all. That would be more interesting than a nasty guy we already dislike.

She has bills to pay. Maybe she’ll have to start working for Jimmy. Maybe Jimmy will call Mike Ehrmantraut to come up with a way to squeeze the engineer. Blackmail is a possibility. Maybe the engineer has a trove of squat cobbler videos. Mike goes to the engineer’s house to “reason” with him. The engineer tries to shoot him. Mike shoots first. Kim is overwhelmed with guilt, so she kills herself.

Kim is going down. That, I am sure of. Maybe there will be some kind of standoff, and Kim, wanting to restore sanity, will get in the way and take a bullet.

I’m not sure why I watch this show! It’s kind of depressing, knowing it has a miserable ending. Jimmy is going to end up managing a Cinnabons stand in a mall in some flat state full of wheat. Walter White will die. Jim’s romance with Kim will end in failure. Mike will be shot in the belly by a high school teacher. Badger will never get his GED. Q will get distracted and let two planes crash into each other.

In any case, it’s fun to guess. My sincere apologies to anyone who doesn’t watch the show.

Christian Apathy and Self-Righteousness Feed Persecution

Fascinating news on the persecution front: a reporter from Mother Jones has criticized the police for failing to prevent liberal goons from beating Trump supporters in Berkeley.

Maybe I’m reading too much into it. You can look at the story for yourself.

Before I go on, you should know that Mother Jones is a disgraceful far-left rag. It’s named for a woman who helped found the IWW, a socialist labor organization. It’s not Infowars, Zerohedge, The Blaze, Hot Air, or WND. Mother Jones is not an organization that favors the right or even treats us fairly.

For some reason I can’t fathom, Trumpers decided to have a rally in Berkeley. This is a little bit like the Anti-Defamation League protesting in front of the Fuhrerbunker. When a conservative demonstrates in Berkeley, knowing he will not be allowed to bring arms, he is almost demanding a beating. I’m not saying it’s okay to beat conservatives; just that they knew or should have known what was coming.

The rally was set for noon, and like most modern conservative functions, it was attended primarily by violent leftists. They arrived hours early and waited for the victims to show up. The rally started, the beatings began, and the police sat by and watched. Their participation was very limited.

The reporter’s name is Shane Braun. He shot a video of two cops sitting around watching the riot. Here’s a partial transcript:

“I’ve been watching all day people get beat up pretty bad and I haven’t seen you guys around much,” Bauer said.

“Okay, and?” the officer responded.

You can see the whole story at The American Mirror.

One Trumpite was surrounded by a mob and beaten with fists, feet, and a skateboard.

So what’s my take on this? Anger? Outrage? A call for conservatives to beat up liberals? Not really. I’m here mainly to criticize conservatives.

First of all, most of the red hat wearers seem to be unaware that we brought this problem on ourselves. Christian or not, conservatives are beaten because the left hates God. In the leftist mind, we are associated with Jesus, and Jesus is against abortion, drugs, uncleanness, insolence, pride, free contraception, and the division of Israel. Even if you’re a conservative atheist, if you get a beating from a leftist mob, it’s rooted in persecution of Christians. Strong Christians get a lot of protection from God. Weak ones raise up and feed their own enemies. Our rebellion and pride caused the goon organizations to form and strengthen, and we also gave power to the spirits that encourage mayors and cops to get in on the persecution.

Second, we are losing battles God never asked us to fight in the first place. Remember the Bible? When God sent his servants into battle, and they were in a state of obedience, they won. When they got into squabbles on their own, or they went into battle spiritually naked, they lost. Does anyone seriously think God told the demonstrators to go to Berkeley? Of course he didn’t. This wasn’t his operation, so he had no obligation to provide air support. Like a good friend of mine likes to say, “Not my circus, not my monkeys.”

Third, where is our spiritual warfare? We’re having ridiculous rallies all the time, but where are the huge prayer meetings and mass repentances? When things don’t go our way, we’re supposed to come before God with contrite spirits and ask him to correct us so his blessings can flow. I’m sure some people are doing that, but I haven’t seen it on the news. If there was a movement of repentance and prayer, we would know about it, just like we know about the pointless rallies.

We never stop blaming the godless for what’s happening in America, but aren’t we supposed to be the ones who have the most power? We haven’t used it. Instead, we’ve attached ourselves to the mob. We participate in their sins. We admire them. We fawn on their nastiest celebrities. We listen to their corrupt music. We elect abortion lovers. If we had been praying and repenting daily, we wouldn’t be in this mess.

We’ve let ourselves down, and we’ve also let the godless down. Many of them can be saved, but we’re too busy acting just like them to pray for them and provide an example.

If you think I’m wrong, and that numbers and might are all that matter, consider a few things. In Genesis, eight people defeated the entire human race and came through its destruction unscathed. After that, Lot and his daughters walked out of Sodom unharmed. Gideon and 300 men wiped out the Midianite army. Samson killed a thousand men by himself. David, who was too small to wear a man’s armor, killed Goliath with a sling. Jesus walked unharmed through a crowd of people who wanted to throw him off a cliff. The Jews couldn’t touch him until he gave himself to them.

If it seems shocking that the police would allow masked criminals to beat peaceful demonstrators, wake up. Who is the God of this world? It’s not Yahweh. He’s an absentee owner. Satan rules this planet, with limited interference from God. Things are going to get worse, not better, and the answer is not to study rioting and become as proficient as those who hate us.

We’re supposed to do well because of grace, not hard work or the power of our own puny arms. We don’t get grace, because we teach each other that God helps those who helps themselves (the opposite of Biblical teaching). Every time one of us gets a stick across the face, it’s because we told God, “We got this,” and God folded his hands and said, “Fine with me.”

I get way too upset with the left. That’s silly. They’re not in the camp. They’re doing what they’re supposed to do. Satan’s children are supposed to be willfully stupid, violent, and deluded. They’re not going to change because we fight them or criticize them. Generally, they’re going to hell, and God is not overly concerned about their behavior. Our concern should be with our own hearts and minds. We should be thinking about our own shortcomings and repenting.

Don’t ask me to go to a rally. Even here in Florida, where I would be allowed to take guns, I wouldn’t go unless I felt God wanted me there. I don’t want to be identified with the people who think screaming and fighting are the way to win.

I have to say that it would be a different picture if leftist criminals attacked a conservative demonstration in a state with sane gun laws. In California, we see what happens when only criminals have guns. Has leftists ever managed to beat Trump supporters at rallies in Texas or Florida? I wonder. Criminals go where they know they’re welcome.

Living in areas where Satan’s children have complete dominance is a bad idea. My best guess is that God wants most of us out of such places, just as he wanted Lot out of Sodom. We’re not going to win the Bay Area or Key West over. We’re never going to get anywhere in Baltimore or Chicago. If you stay too long, you’re just putting God to the test, expecting him to save you from your own bullheadedness.

Most Christians who live in godless areas aren’t there because they want to convert people. They almost always have carnal reasons. The climate. The schools. The culture. No one moves to Miami Beach to get closer to God.

I was so stupid to come back to Miami, where maybe 40% of the population actively worships demons. But I suppose God put me here because it’s where I belonged at the time. I was rebellious, so I belonged with the rebellious.

Persecution will increase, and people who insist on subjecting themselves to it unnecessarily will continue riding in ambulances. I want no part of the battle for the sidewalk.

Mike Ehrmantraut is a Spendthrift

I’m highly distraught today, with ample reason. I’ve been watching Better Call Saul, and the writers completely screwed up the scenes in which Mike Ehrmantraut tries to kill Hector Salamanca with a scoped rifle.

Sorry if you’ve been asleep for two years and consider anything in the above paragraph to be a spoiler.

Mike went to some kind of outlaw gun dealer, and the dealer sold him a “7.62” bolt-action rifle with a scope. He sold it to him out of the back of a car, in the desert. They acted like they were handling canisters of sarin gas; as if there would be big trouble if anyone found out the deal was going down.

I have all sorts of problems with this.

First of all, what is a “7.62” sniper rifle? The Russians have a 30.06 equivalent called the 7.62mm x 54R, and you could certainly use it in a sniper rifle, but I’ve never heard of anything like that. Nothing modern, in a bolt action.

The Soviets used to use 7.62mm x 54R in their battle rifles, and they had sniper versions. That was like a billion years ago. Later on, they had a semiauto called the SVD or Dragunov. Other countries produced an AK74 version called the Romak III, PSL, and God knows what else. Mike’s gun didn’t look like any of these guns. It looked like a deer rifle with a cheap plastic camo stock. Is there a 7.62 rifle that looks like that? I’ve never heard of it.

Second thing…it’s 100% legal to own a sniper rifle, even in most totalitarian states where Hillary got most of the votes. Sniper rifles, with a number of weird exceptions, are similar, or even identical, to hunting rifles. In Vietnam, our snipers used the Winchester Model 70, which was (and is) a common deer rifle. Carlos Hathcock, the king of Vietnam snipers, used a Model 70 in 30.06 with an 8-power scope. I don’t actually recall the highest power among my (completely legal) scopes, but I believe it’s 14. Leupold sells a 25-power scope. You can just walk into a store and buy it, in front of a cop! No desert. No car trunk.

All Mike had to do was walk into a sporting goods store one state over, buy a deer rifle with cash, and go home. Or he could buy a used one in a private sale. He could shoot Salamanca with that and leave a mall-bought 30.06 round in him, and no one would have been able to trace it back to him. There are probably a hundred thousand 30.06 rifles in New Mexico. Throw the gun into a river, and you’re golden.

Mike’s rifle had what is known as a bull barrel or varmint barrel. This is a heavy barrel about an inch in diameter. The idea is that it will be slower to heat up and deflect than a thin barrel. Question: why do you need a bull barrel when you’re only shooting Hector once or twice? It’s not going to heat up. The gun would be heavier to carry through the desert than a gun with a regular barrel, and the cops would wonder why your sporting rifle (in a caliber not generally associated with prairie dog and coyote hunting) had a barrel like that. That barrel says, “I think I’m cute.” Way too flashy.

Here you go; I found Mike’s ideal rifle: the Savage Arms Model 11 BTH. It has a nifty target stock. Retail: $982. Legal, and not too expensive. Spend $500 on glass, and you’re ready to pop Salamanca.

Here’s something else that bugs me: Mike has terrible taste in pistols. I’ve seen him use a Beretta 92 and some kind of magnum snubnose revolver. Why? Why? Why?

The Beretta is a great-looking gun, but it’s not all that reliable, and it’s heavy. That stupid revolver is useless at over 20 feet, it’s heavy, it only holds 6 rounds, the recoil would be crazy, and it takes a long time to reload. A real Mike Ehrmantraut would have carried a Glock. It’s homely. It’s cheap. It’s incredibly reliable. It’s accurate. It’s light. It holds up to 18 rounds. You can’t trace the bullets because of the way the barrel is cut. Glocks are easy to find, and they are extremely common. No cop is going to say, “Well, we may not have a witness, but how many guys carry a Glock?”

I guess now I’ll Google and see if I’m wrong.

Well, now. Knowing relatively little about rifles, I did not know this: some people refer to the .308 Winchester round as 7.62mm. If you’re a gun person, you know that 7.62mm equals .30 caliber. Personally, when it comes to American rifles, I have always heard “308,” and I happen to have one, but maybe I’m out of the loop. Thing is, who carries one in bolt action? It’s a machine gun caliber, and it’s also used in the AR10, but bolt action?

Hmm…one website says .308 is the “standard” for sniping. Is that true? I hear so much about things like .338 Lapua and whatnot. I always assumed the .308 was out of style. I just figured we had gone straight from 30.06 to things like the .300 Winchester Magnum.

Google says Georgia Precision makes a bolt action .308 for snipers, and it does have a camo stock and bull barrel. Buy why would Mike want one? The recoil is bad, and .308 is not the greatest round for sniping. I mean, if you’re going to go with a Rolls-Royce, why not get a kooky boutique caliber that has less recoil and more accuracy? Why not a Creedmoor or Grendel or .260 Remington?

A slug in one of those calibers would be rare enough to get the cops’ attention, though. I guess .308 makes more sense. Same slug as a 30.06.

The Georgia Precision gun costs $4100 without glass or even a free beer coozy. What?? Mike wasn’t crazy. He would never have spent that much money to shoot a guy at 200 yards. I’ll tell you who would have: the guy whose Adam’s apple Mike bent in the parking garage. Remember? The guy who did a voice for a famous video game. After taking his gun and hitting him in the throat with it, Mike made fun of his Wilson Combat 1911. Guns like that are for plastic surgeons and securities traders who close both eyes when they shoot.

Imagine this. The cops find a dead Mexican with a weird .308 Prvi or Lapua or some such round in his chest. Then they find you with a $4100 .308 rifle. Is that a good situation to be in? No. You want a 30.06 with ammunition from Bass Pro Shop, plus a used rifle that cost you $750. If it’s accurate enough to hit an antelope, it will work fine on Hector.

Next time, maybe I’ll write about Mike tailing people in a highly distinctive 1988 Chrysler New Yorker. In a world jammed full of silver Japanese sedans, who in his right mind spies on people in an American car so out of style and butt ugly it would stand out in a wrecking yard even after crushing?

I guess I need to learn more about sniper rifles, but I am positive the Better Call Saul 7.62mm mess made no sense at all. You don’t need a rare gun in order to be a sniper, and whatever you buy will almost certainly be legal.

Autistic Man Saved by Horrific Marksmanship

I just saw an interesting story on the web. Miami cop Jonathan Aledda just got charged with “Attempted manslaughter,” according to the news. I find it hard to believe that’s a real charge. Manslaughter, by definition, means the killing of a human being “without malice aforethought.” Officer Aledda definitely intended to kill somebody, so it sounds like attempted murder to me, and I seem to recall that in Florida, attempted murder was replaced by things like aggravated assault and aggravated battery.

I’m too lazy to check.

Here’s what happened. An autistic man was sitting in the street waving a toy truck and screaming. One of his caretakers, a black man (spoiler alert, I guess) was with him. The caretaker’s name is Charles Kinsey. The cops somehow got the idea that the autistic man was a criminal waving a gun. The cops tried to kill the autistic man, and one of the bullets hit Kinsey. The other two didn’t hit anyone at all.

Kinsey was lying on his back with his arms in the air for quite some time, yelling in a loud voice that the man with the truck was autistic and that he was a caregiver. He made everything extremely clear, and he asked the cops not to shoot him. Because he has seen the TV news.

Naturally, Aledda, a SWAT team member, shot anyway.

No one has come up with a credible reason for the shooting. There is a video of the incident, and a person sitting at home looking at a PC can instantly tell there was no reason to shoot anyone. Somehow that escaped the cops on the scene. At the very least, it escaped one of them.

I keep thinking about that charge. Now that I reflect on it, it’s a strange fact pattern. Usually, when you have someone who is injured by someone trying to kill with a firearm, the person injured is the intended victim. In a situation like that, aggravated battery with a deadly weapon seems like the obvious charge. Since Kinsey wasn’t the intended victim, maybe the State’s Attorney decided attempted manslaughter made more sense. Aledda had malice aforethought, but the malice was toward the autistic man, not Kinsey.

I don’t know the answer. It shows you how weird the law can be.

To me, the case is interesting for more than one reason. Obviously, I am very curious to hear Aledda’s defense. The cops were on the scene for a long time, and they communicated with the victim. They had to know there was no danger. Why shoot? Everyone wants to know. The other thing that’s interesting is this: Aledda is a SWAT officer, he used a highly accurate rifle, he was 152 feet away (50 yards), and none of his bullets hit the target.

That’s interesting to me, because I’m always talking about how badly cops shoot. They show up at the range with black tactical pants covered with velcro and zippers. Their hair is full of gel. They’re covered with suspiciously swollen muscles. They wear $300 sunglasses. They look like movie action heroes. Then they start shooting, and they’re lucky if they hit the paper.

It’s weird to be this right about something that shouldn’t be true at all. The cops should be some of the best marksmen on earth. The government pays for their ammunition. They shoot for nothing. They get free “expert” (?) training. Think how good an average person would be, with a local government to pay for ammunition, targets, and range fees. If I shot 250 rounds a week, I’d be ready to perform in a Wild West Show.

Aledda isn’t even a normal cop. I completely understand why an old guy who works a school crossing might not be a great shot. He might not see much reason to put in range time, and he would not be selected for his marksmanship. But SWAT? Special WEAPONS and Tactics? Shouldn’t they be able to shoot?

In case you’re not a shooter, and you don’t understand what shooting at fifty yards is like, I’ll put it like this. Shooting while standing, with no breath control, using a dubious .22 rifle, I could kill rabbits all day at fifty yards. Aledda missed something ten times as wide as a rabbit, THREE TIMES.

He had great equipment. He had a cop car to rest the gun on. The target was stationary. He had ages to aim. Come on!

It’s amazing that he missed at all, and it’s even more amazing that he started firing with Kinsey so close to the target. That would be a dumb idea for a good shot, but as one of the world’s worst rifle shots, Aledda had to know how enormous an area his shots were likely to cover.

I keep thinking about those charges. I would have gone for attempted murder (autistic) and aggravated battery (Kinsey). I think. Seems to me Aledda committed two crimes. After all there were two victims, and they were harmed in different ways by the same actions. The autistic man was assaulted, and Kinsey was battered.

Another question: why three shots? If you shoot at someone close to someone you think is innocent, and you miss the intended target once at close range, isn’t it an indication that you’re not up to the job? Shouldn’t you realize, after missing the first shot, that it’s time to give the rifle to someone else?

Surely he didn’t hit Kinsey with one of the first two shots. Firing again after shooting an innocent person would be beyond comprehension.

I don’t get this case at all. Maybe Aledda is so incompetent, I just can’t wrap my mind around it. I keep looking for an explanation, but maybe it’s right in front of me, and I can’t ingest it.

What’s the lesson from this story? That’s a good question that just occurred to me. I can think of some things.

1. The cops really, really cannot shoot. It’s not my imagination. If you’re anywhere near a cop with a gun in his hand, run for cover, because absolutely anything is possible. Never, ever, ever bet your life on a cop making a good shot or even not making a catastrophically bad one, and if you’re ever in a tight spot with a cop, do not even think of giving him your carry piece based on the assumption that he’s more capable of using it than you are. Don’t trust those tactical pants! You don’t shoot with your pants.

If you’re in a mall and someone starts shooting it up, don’t hide behind a cop. Hide behind an old guy like me, in work shorts and an NRA T-shirt. He’ll kill everyone in the place while the cop is still trying to rack his slide. Find a guy with a Trump hat and offer to spot for him.

Don’t assume a cop will be a better choice because he’ll be cooler under fire. Watch Youtube. They scream and jump up and down just like the rest of us. I can do that, even without training.

If a criminal comes to your home or business to hurt you, do not call the cops and then leave your gun under the mattress. Get it out and shoot the criminal while he’s as far away as possible. If you wait for the cops, they’ll miss, and they might hit you.

They might do that even if the criminal is dead when they arrive. Pray no one from SWAT shows up.

2. It really is possible to get shot by the cops when everyone else on the scene already knows there is no reason to use force. Telling them everything is okay, and making it clear in as many ways as you can imagine at the time, may not save you.

I don’t know how that knowledge can help you.

3. The people who keep criticizing cops for killing people instead of wounding them or shooting guns out of their hands need to put a sock in it. We are talking about individuals who usually miss the criminal entirely. Asking them to shoot someone in the hand is like asking a person with Parkinson’s to perform a sobriety test. It will never happen. Be glad they’re shooting at center mass, with the intention of killing. It’s their best chance of solving the problem.

New York cops fired 41 rounds at innocent, unarmed, nonthreatening Amadou Diallo with no opposition to mess with their aim. Guess how many rounds hit him? Nineteen. Less than 50%.

4. This was not a Black Lives Matter moment. It was more like an Innocent People Holding Toy Trucks Don’t Matter moment. The autistic man is Hispanic, and he’s the one Aledda tried to kill. BLMsters are saying the shooting proves the cops hate black people and want to kill them, but Aledda was actually trying to protect a black person. Talk about bitter irony.

I guess I’m being hard on Aledda. He probably meant well. But his actions seemed so insane, it’s inconceivable to me that he has any business on a police force, and let’s not forget: he shot one innocent person and nearly killed two. What he did had very bad consequences. If he gets off, he should go find a new profession. I don’t think he should get off. According to centuries of precedent, the kind of bad judgment he appears to have displayed is criminal.

Cooperate with the police at all times, and do everything you can to help them. You never know how much help they may need.

I’m not Actually Allowed to Say “Nuthouse”

If I could send a letter to heaven, it might say something like this:

Dear Mom:

Hi from earth. I’m glad you’re in heaven, but I wish I could five more years with you, to treat you better. Life down here is interesting.

Donald Trump just got elected president. No, really. Also, homosexual marriage has been recognized legally for several years, and if a Christian baker refuses to make a gay wedding cake, he can be fined hundreds of thousands of dollars and have his business destroyed.

Do you remember Bruce Jenner? The guy on the Wheaties box? He has been castrated. He paid a doctor to do it. He didn’t have cancer. He just thinks he’s a woman. I know how crazy that sounds. The really weird part is that the medical establishment backs him up. There are a lot of people like him now. If you’re a man, you can just decide you’re a woman, and they have to let you go into women’s bathrooms and locker rooms and undress in front of little girls. You don’t even have to have surgery or shave your beard.

I’m not joking. Ask Jesus.

I read that Bruce is worried that heterosexual men won’t want to date him. I don’t know what to say about that, except that I think his fears are well-founded.

Remember Sonny and Cher? Remember their little blonde daughter Chastity? She says she’s a man now. She had her breasts amputated. Cher was always a full-throttle leftist, but she flipped out when she found out Chastity was a lesbian. I guess the whole thing seemed more appealing when it was other people’s kids.

The North Koreans have nuclear missiles now. They don’t work very well, but they keep working on them. Remember how Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter let them have nuclear reactors and said they were only going to be used for peaceful purposes? That worked out about as well as I expected.

The guy who ran North Korea died, but his son is in charge, and he’s just as deranged. He’s threatening to nuke us right now. Trump is trying to do something about it, but don’t be surprised if you see a sudden wave of new arrivals from the West Coast, Japan, and South Korea in a year or two.

The government takes all our emails now and stores them. They say it’s to prevent terrorism. In 2001, Muslims flew two jets into the World Trade Center and murdered 3000 people. Since then, Americans have completely abandoned the notion that they’re supposed to be free, except when it comes to strange sex acts, obscenity, abortion, and drugs. We do whatever the government wants. For a long time, we had x-ray machines in airports, and they took naked pictures of us as we were headed for our planes. I am totally serious. We still have uneducated security officers putting their hands all over travelers, including their crotches.

The government also keeps records of all our phone calls, without warrants. They have computers to make transcripts and check them to see if we say things the government doesn’t like. It kind of makes you wonder why we sent 405,000 men to die in World War Two. We thought we were fighting for the Bill of Rights, but we’ve given it up in exchange for fancy portable phones and safety from terrorist attacks, so I suppose it would have been smarter to let the Nazis take over without a fight. The end result would have been similar in many ways. We did help end the Holocaust, though.

Our phones have cameras in them now, and the government can turn the phones on without our consent. They can listen to us and film us. How about that?

Our highways have lots of cameras on them, and many also have mysterious sensors every half-mile. We have things in our cars that tell the government when we pass through toll gates, and the government keeps the records of where we go. Cop cars have cameras that read our license plates all day and check them against government databases. No one seems to mind.

Public nudity is legal in many places now, and many people seem obsessed with it. You can go to a parade in a big American city and see naked men walking around. There are lots of very vocal women agitating for the right to go around topless, although no one has managed to explain why this is necessary. Some are doing some really gross things involving confronting the public with their monthly biological cycles. I am too embarrassed to elaborate. It won’t be too long before sane people and their kids are only safe in their own houses. I think that’s the goal, though. To drive us out of public places.

Cash is disappearing. We pay for everything using credit cards, bank cards, and even our cell phones. It won’t be long until the government convinces us cash has to be abolished. When that happens, I don’t know how we’ll be able to hide wealth or keep it out of the government’s hands. If they get mad at us, they’ll be able to find all the money we have and freeze it instantly. I’m sure they would never do that, though. Not unless they had a really good reason. We can always trust the government.

I hope that last part made you laugh.

Here’s something interesting: Satanists are putting statues and other stuff up on public property. If you’re a Satanist, and you complain enough, you may be able to put a statue of Satan up at a courthouse. Can you imagine what would have happened if someone had done that when you were a kid?

Creepy false religions are doing very well, but Christians have a lot of problems. Anyone who won’t renounce God’s condemnation of homosexuality is pretty much ineligible for a high-profile secular job. They call us “homophobes.” You don’t have to be an activist to get in trouble. Just sitting in the back of a church will get you canned.

The latest Pope is a socialist. Not a big surprise, I guess. Catholicism is what it is. He is constantly criticizing conservatives, gun makers, capitalists, and anyone who believes in secure borders. Oddly, he lives in a palatial fortress which is also a country, and it has a huge wall around it. The people who guard him carry machine guns. I assume he is aware of this.

The Confederate flag is gone now. When you were still here, as you know, a lot of Southerners used it as a symbol to show they loved the South. There were even black people who liked it. About two years ago, a strange spell fell on people, and we instantly decided there was no difference between a Confederate flag and a swastike. I know you will find that hard to believe. You can’t have one on a car tag or a T-shirt now, unless you want to have all sorts of problems. If a kid wears a shirt like that to high school now, he will be sent home and suspended. And all this happened almost overnight. It makes you wonder what else can happen that fast. Next time it may be the cross.

White people are under attack these days. Colleges teach courses about the “problem” of whiteness. I guess next they’ll be talking about the White Question and the Final Solution. The weird thing is that this is happening while we’re in the majority, and we’re participating in it. Thank God everyone else is perfect, right? I think the rest of the world would miss us if we disappeared. Judging by what goes on in places where there aren’t many of us, I mean.

We can’t complain. If you complain, society labels you racist. Which is a little weird, since a complaint would be a response to racism. Do you remember the “political correctness” craze of the Eighties, and how funny it was, and how Americans laughed about it when it was over? It’s back, and this time, no one is laughing. This time, it’s here to stay. Everyone is offended, all the time, and society assumes that anyone who is offended is right except for Christians, men, conservatives, and white people. Strangest thing I’ve ever seen.

Fighting won’t help, but then you know that, because you know God’s heart. Fighting is carnal, and it makes things worse. The answer is to turn back to God and get his help, but we are not going to do that. We have more faith in Donald Trump than Jesus Christ. Trump is very angry and forceful, so he makes a lot of Christians feel like they’re winning. We love our secular messiahs. They fight for us and don’t expect us to change.

Quite honestly, I would like to join you soon. I enjoy life, but people like me are being painted into a corner. Every day is like a little Kristallnacht. There is no future for us here. Things are going to get worse and worse, and the most disgusting, cruel people on earth are going to be in charge of us.

I think about the Jews who left Europe in the Thirties. They were the smart ones. I would do the same thing, but we only have one planet! Where would I go? My plan is to move somewhere safer than Miami and hope I am allowed to come see you before things get too bad.

We still haven’t found a way to extend human life, but people keep trying, and they think they’re getting closer. What on earth is wrong with them? Seventy years in this place are enough, don’t you think?

It must be nice up there. Perfect health (you must look younger than I do) and safety. No hateful, ignorant people spitting at God all the time. No disagreement. No one forcing you to say perversion is a virtue. No one forcing you to call men women. No one coming into your country with hostile intentions and demanding to be allowed to stay. If there’s one place that has secure borders, it’s heaven!

I miss you, but I’m glad your sentence–your tour of duty–is over. You weren’t treated well, and you never got the things you should have received. I wouldn’t bring you back to this place for a billion dollars. I’m glad you’re surrounded by love, and that the people and spirits who mistreated you can’t reach you or even communicate with you.

Thanks for all you did for me. I finally appreciate it.

The Devil is no VIP

Today I was looking at the Bible, and I decided to try to get the answer to an old question. When Jude and Peter complained of preachers who spoke evil of “dignitaries,” what, exactly, were they talking about?

Jude contrasts them with Michael, who, when arguing with Satan over the body of Moses, refused to make a “reviling accusation.” Instead, Michael called on God to rebuke Satan. Based on this passage, some people believe Jude and Peter were criticizing people who said mean things about fallen angels. The idea is that such beings are still “dignitaries” in heaven.

I dunno ’bout that.

Most people believe Beelzebub or Beelzebul is Satan. In any case, just about everyone believes he’s a fallen angel. The names the Bible give him don’t mean “dignitary.” Quite the opposite. Depending on who you ask, they mean “Lord of Flies,” “Lord of Garbage,” or “Lord of Feces.” Even if it means “Lord of Flies,” the word “Flies” connotes feces, because that’s what flies feed on. “Beel” is just “baal,” or “lord.”

How can God warn people against insulting Satan while permitting them to call him “Lord of Feces”?

In 2 Kings (as Trump and I call it), Jehu defeated Ahab and Jezebel, who worshiped Baal. Then he proclaimed a solemn assembly to honor Baal, and he called for all Baal worshipers to meet in Baal’s temple. Once they were inside, he told his troops not to let any escape, and that anyone who let a man escape would have to be killed in his place. The idolaters were killed, the temple was burned, and Jehu turned it into a public toilet. After that, untold thousands of Jews went there and relieved themselves all over it, with God’s approval.

In Ezra 6, Cyrus decreed that the temple would be rebuilt. The penalty for resisting his edict was to be hanged on a timber from your own house, and to have the house turned into a public toilet. To harm God’s house was to harm your own house.

In Jerusalem, many Jews worshiped Moloch, whose name is thought by some to mean “King of the World.” The consonant trio MLK is found in the Hebrew word for king. Melchizedek was the king of Jerusalem. The man whose ear Peter cut off was named Malchus.

Moloch was the Planned Parenthood of the Mediterranean area. If you wanted to succeed in life (sound familiar?), you would take your baby to a priest of Moloch, and the priest would put it in the hands of a bronze statue representing the false god. Under the hands there was a flaming brazier. The baby would fall into it. According to Jewish history, the pagans played drums to drown out the screams so the ambitious parents wouldn’t pity their babies. They roasted live babies just as the priests roasted clean sacrificial animals.

Moloch worship took place in Gehinnom (Gehenna), a valley next to the city of Jerusalem. When God’s servants overcame the pagans, Gehinnom became a place where Jews dumped their excrement and garbage. You can’t keep excrement in a city with no sewers. It’s where Judas fell when he hanged himself.

There is a pattern here.

The Bible makes it plain that we’re not supposed to gloat over defeated enemies, and I believe it also shows that we’re not supposed to ridicule them. But it seems permissible to call them what they are, and Beelzebub’s unflattering title is apt.

Some people who claim to have visited hell say it stinks. They say the stench is unimaginable. Rotten flesh, garbage, feces…you name it…multiplied by a thousand. They also say Satan and the demons and fallen angels have authority in hell, even if they can’t keep Jesus out or keep the saved in. Hell is like Satan’s headquarters. That makes sense, if you think of the connection to excrement and garbage. If God made Satan’s earthly house a place of filth, surely he wouldn’t hesitate to do the same thing to his palace under the ground.

I think it’s fine to call Satan the Lord of Dung and to say he’s unclean. Those are facts, not slurs. If that’s true, then who are the dignitaries the apostles refer to?

I agree with people who say “dignitaries” means God’s anointed human servants. Preachers who serve the enemy have a millennia-long history of reviling and slandering God’s people. The preachers Jude and Peter referred to do the same things. They’re with us now. If you don’t believe me, go to a prosperity gospel church, as I did, and see what they say about you when you talk about their errors. The people at Trinity Church had secret meetings about me after I left, and the pastor of New Dawn started yelling at a friend of mine in the parking lot, interrogating him about me.

Michael and Satan are similar beings. They’re on similar levels in the hierarchy of creation. Michael was not entitled to hurl slurs at Satan. Similarly, one human being shouldn’t hurl slurs at another human being. That, I believe, is the point of the comparison. We probably shouldn’t hurl slurs at anyone. The Bible says the kingdom of God won’t come to revilers.

People who are controlled by evil spirits often surround themselves with filth and darkness. I have a couple of relatives who love the dark. One allowed her house to fall apart as she sank into depravity. The walls became coated with mold. The floor was coated with a film of urine and feces from rats and a dog. Bugs were everywhere. The house stank. You could smell it from the yard. It was dark inside. The shades were always down, and she kept most of the lights turned off, even when her electric bills were paid through a charity program. It was like this for years, even after the dog died. Think about it: it’s a picture of hell. I don’t think that’s a coincidence.

She hated having the doors opened or the shades drawn. That’s not normal. The natural reaction from a person in a house like that would be to welcome fresh air and light.

I don’t know if the spirits turned the house into a facsimile of hell to make themselves feel at home and to torment the owner, or whether God allowed it to happen so they would have to work in a nasty sty befitting their supernatural status. Anyway, the resemblance to accounts of hell is obvious.

Here’s something interesting: when people sacrifice or give prayer to God, it fills heaven with pleasant smells. Look it up. If that’s true, given the symmetry of the supernatural, shouldn’t the curses on the spirits in hell make it stink?

I don’t think the spirits that oppose God are entitled to much honor. It wouldn’t make sense, considering how filthy they are. They love evil and hate good, and filth is evil.

I suspect that the lion’s den in the story of Daniel was a picture of hell. Think about it. There were no water hoses in Babylon. Standards of animal care in the ancient world would have been low. They wouldn’t have kept the den very clean, and it was full of huge cats that relieved themselves at will. The den would have been a dark pit full of dry bones (like hell), and the smell would have been beyond description. Daniel was able to visit, but he couldn’t be tormented or held there, just as Jesus visited hell and could not be held. Interesting.

By turning away from God for most of my life, I made myself a sort of outhouse for the wicked. I gave up protection, success, peace, and honor. I allowed myself to be filled with dead men’s bones: the spirits of the children of the angels. I let supernatural bullies move in and torment me. They sent their human servants to overcome me. I loved darkness and filth and hated light and cleanliness. I seemed okay by earth standards, but then so did the hypocritical priests who hated Jesus. Whitewashed tombs look fine from outside.

If you’re like me, my situation should sound familiar. Abusive people (mostly “friends” and relatives) used me like a toilet. When they wanted this or that, they walked over and defecated their problems into me and walked away relieved. Then I was left with the mess, and it festered inside me. I was like a diaper they passed around. Do you have an addict, a molester, an abusive boss, a friend who puts you down all the time, or a wife-beater in your life? Has someone spent your inheritance? Does someone who claims to love you make you pay his gambling debts? You should be familiar with the sensation I’m describing. The reason you’re in this position is your failure to align yourself with God.

Now I’m going through the slow process of having God wash out the filth I packed into myself over the course of decades, and the feculent abusers in my life are being driven out and beaten, as they should be. I hit plateaus. I slide backward from time to time. It’s not instantaneous, and it can be fatiguing. That’s all my fault. God never slipped up. I did. I won’t complain. In spite of the setbacks, it’s wonderful.

The Bible says the kingdom of God is inside us. The supernatural realm is symmetrical. If the kingdom of God isn’t inside you, then hell must be. The Bible says you can’t be neutral.

It’s a very good sign when a prosperity preacher condemns you and calls you a traitor. It’s an undeserved honor. No one should be discouraged when it happens. These people push others into hell, and they keep them out of the presence of God. Peter and Jude warned us about Joyce Meyer and Benny Hinn and the rest. It shouldn’t upset us when we see their prophetic words proven true. We should see it as encouragement.

I don’t have anything nice to say about Satan. He rules the universe’s septic tank, and one day it’s going to be pumped out. It can’t happen fast enough for me.

Plus Wild Guesses About Foreign Policy

I am trying to make sense of the Syria bombing.

I think it’s safe to say that most Trump voters want the US to spend less time being the adult in a room full of children. We have spent a lot of time trying to save nations that didn’t deserve or consent to be saved. To provide two examples, the Somalis and Afghans aren’t ready for civilization. The South Vietnamese weren’t unified in support of freedom and capitalism. The Iraqis are still pretty wobbly. We assume everyone loves democracy, but a lot of people in Iraq actually prefer a dictatorship; something about having a big, strong scary warlord look after them.

Trump the candidate was against intervening too much in the affairs of other countries. Trump the president just bombed Syria over a completely internal matter: the gassing of Syrians by the Syrian government. What a bizarre week this has been. Many liberals actually took a break from vandalizing Ivana Trump shoe displays in malls to back up Trump’s Syrian adventure. Many conservatives are wondering if Trump has gone native in liberal, globalist DC.

To add to the complexity, Trump greatly offended Vladimir Putin when he bombed Syria. The baseless leftist narrative up till now has been that Trump is Putin’s puppet. Somehow, Putin bribed a billionaire to run for president and do his bidding. Because it’s so easy to find things a billionaire can’t get without Putin’s help. Such as…???

Trump gave up billions of dollars in potential earnings to become president, yet we’re supposed to believe he has some venal motive involving compensation from Putin. What compensation could Putin offer that would begin to make up for what Trump gave up voluntarily? No such compensation exists.

Liberals could not understand that, so they pushed the ridiculous Russian Connection. What can they say now? That it’s an inside job? That Putin got Trump to bomb Syria to cover up their ties? It looks like the Russia canard is finally dead, except among the truly insane.

Maybe nuclear war will convince the stragglers Trump is sincere.

Some conservatives like the fact that Trump showed courage and initiative. Obama’s foreign policy consisted mostly of apologizing and selling out American workers. Trump realizes he’s our president, not China’s or Mexico’s. It’s good that Trump is not letting us get pushed around quite so much. I can see why people are happy he took some sort of stand on something.

I’m not sure what to think of the attack. I don’t read the news as much as I used to. My overall impression is that what Trump did will work out well, provided he stops now.

It’s hard to argue with anyone who sends 59 affordable missiles, with no boots on the ground, to kill totalitarian goons who use poison gas on civilians (or anyone else). You can argue that every nation in the world has an interest in deterring the use of gas. But now the Syrians, no doubt with Russia’s help, are attacking the gassed area again, with conventional weapons. Trump needs to let that slide. When you go from punishing the use of gas to punishing other countries for suppressing rebels, you cross the line from reasonable intervention to overweening nannyism. All over the world, various nations are attacking each other with conventional weapons, and we need to understand that it’s not always (or often) our place to jump in and break it up. Often, it’s not even possible to do an effective job. We just waste money and lives, and we make the world resent us even more.

If Trump stays out of Syria now, in my opinion, it will show he knows what he’s doing. If he decides to be the Lone Ranger plus the Magnificent Seven, it will suggest he’s winging it and forgetting all about his campaign platform.

Whatever he does, he needs to coerce the Muslims to accept Syrian refugees. It’s amazing that we’re expected to take them when the Saudis are afraid of them.

It’s hard to guess what he’ll do. He has been a conservative for less time than it takes paint to dry, so for all we know, he could morph into Obama this year. How sincere is his conversion? No one knows.

If he goes all New World Order on us, at least we got Gorsuch out of it, and we stopped Hillary Clinton. Unless two Supreme Court justices die in the near future, we should have a relatively sane panel up there determining our fate. That’s a big deal. One more Ginsburg would almost be grounds for mass suicide. Cuba-style property seizures and the internment of conservative undesirables would be less than a decade away.

Here is how I feel: Ronald Reagan and George Washington didn’t run in 2016, so we voted as well as we could. Trump is much better than the president we deserve, so I am content.

In other news, I am planning to make an offer on a house. My dad and I made a deal a long time ago, and now he’s holding up his end. He’s going to get a place up north, and I will go with him and look after him. For what we are willing to spend, given the location constraints you get with an elderly person, we are pretty much limited to properties under 25 acres. We found a neat place in northern Florida, and I am hoping we can work something out with the sellers.

I can put up a photo or two. The green paint is not what I would have gone with, but it’s helpful if it discourages other buyers.

The place comes with a big outbuilding, a small horse barn, and a lonnnnnnnng driveway with a sturdy steel gate. You can see a grand total of one other house from the yard. There is a big 3-car garage which will be perfect for machine tools and a split air conditioner. I would rather have 300 acres farther out, but this is good enough. It’s a whole lot better than what I expected.

The property appraised for much less than the asking price, so that’s a concern. The sellers got royally taken when they bought the farm, and they may not realize that yet. When they get their own appraisal, maybe they’ll see things our way.

Some people are surprised I paid for an appraisal already. I don’t get that. How else would I know what to offer? Realtors pull listing prices out of thin air. Also, appraising is not a guessing game. There are rules and tables and so on. You have to be trained and licensed. It’s much better than relying on your gut instinct. That being said, my gut instinct was pretty close to the appraised value.

If I lose a few hundred bucks because the sellers won’t listen to reality, good for me. It beats overpaying by a hundred grand.

Obvious.

I don’t think anyone should criticize me, given that the sellers overpaid by maybe $200,000.

I can’t wait to leave Miami. There is literally nothing here I will miss. You don’t have to worry about me turning into a pillar of salt. To me, “goodbye” means “goodbye.” Ask anyone I’ve cut loose. I don’t come around a week later asking to be taken back. I amaze people with my clean breaks. I don’t miss the friends I cut off. I don’t miss anyone I dated. If I decided to rid myself of you, it was because you made me miserable and made my mind up for me.

My dad has had it with Miami, too. The traffic is much worse than it was even five years ago, and the people are as rude as ever. He can’t really get around any more; he forgets where he’s going. If he has to go anywhere other than a few very familiar places, I have to drive him. Maybe in northern Florida, with its simple grid and low traffic, he would be able to do a little more driving without fear of becoming a silver alert.

The other night, I was lying in bed, and I started imagining how nice it would be not to have the neighbors’ security lights shining in my window, and to be awakened by the alarm clock instead of construction crews and garbage men playing rap music on their truck radios. I can’t even imagine it. And what does a dark sky look like? What does twilight look like? Do they have twilight in northern Florida? We don’t have it here. It’s sunny, then a little grey appears in the sky, and then BLAM, it’s dark. Then, if it’s Saturday night and you’re trying to sleep so you can get up early for church, the loud salsa music starts.

If this property doesn’t work, I’m going back to the list to check the next two options. I will not waste time.

What’s happening is the breaking of a stronghold. I chose Miami. I chose rebellion. I chose to turn down a life of prayer. I gave myself to the filthy spirits that run South Florida, and they held on tight. Then I wised up, and it took me quite some time to break the chains I had put on myself. You can’t expect God to jump up and rescue you instantly when your problems were caused by rejecting him. It will be very kind of God to save me at all. I’m not upset that it took so long. I’m just glad he’s willing to do it while I’m still alive and relatively able.

Maybe if the Norks bomb Miami and Atlanta, I’ll be far enough away to avoid fallout and grow my own food. The farm has a well and a generator. Whatever happens, it will beat being in Miami, surrounded by God-hating throngs of people who will gladly invade my house and take what I have just because I’m an old white Christian who supports Israel and voted for Trump. Miami is mostly ghettos, and ghetto people don’t take care of themselves. They let other people care of them, in exchange for votes. They are not prepared for an interruption of the food supply. They don’t save money. If life gets hard, they will invade homes to loot, and if they find the residents inside, they will punish them as 1% oppressors.

You don’t have to be a white supremacist to be concerned about anti-white racism. It’s very real, it’s widespread, it’s extremely cruel and ruthless (because it’s based on a victimhood mentality) and it’s nothing to take lightly. It simmers all the time, but as I personally witnessed after Hurricane Andrew, disasters make it boil over into plain view. We can’t change it, but we can make some effort to protect ourselves with distance. And there are some places where whites, blacks, and Mexicans are not at each other’s throats, believe it or not.

After Andrew, many people had to sit in their front yards holding firearms. And that was just a hurricane. The looters still had food, and the government was busy helping them with their needs. They didn’t loot because of need; it was just sorriness and meanness. A lot of people are just waiting for an excuse to hurt others.

No one, regardless of race, should live within 20 miles of a ghetto. I’m about two miles away from two ghettos, and seedy, violent downtown Miami is only five miles away.

I would appreciate prayers regarding my choice of geographical location and the purchase of a house. I don’t know what I’m doing. Only God knows where I should be.

Thanks for any help you can give me. I look forward to blogging my move.

Wrong Articles Lovingly Crafted by Men Wearing Spanx

I guess I’ll never get tired of bashing Popular Mechanics. I subscribed a few years back, and I let the subscription lapse because the magazine was worthless. It was full of articles introducing suspiciously diverse startup executives with an average age of 15. “Chu Ming Wai is one of Silicon Valley’s first lesbian, Chinese, vegan, body-mod enthusiast 3-D printer designers, and her new printer, the Sapphobot, only prints using free-trade tofu thread!” Yeah, okay; I’m aware that people who aren’t old white men start companies. What does this have to do with choosing the best drill press?

They also filled their pages with articles that were really ads, and the ads were for bad products. One wonders if payola was involved. “You really need this wi-fi-ready solar-powered hammer that also plays Justin Bieber MP3s! Watch as transgender startup exec Devadip Jaigurudevaom-Gonzalez uses it to peel sustainable-farmed vanilla beans for his homeopathic mocha and quinoa-paste enema!”

The magazine proudly features articles written by people who admit they don’t know anything about tools. What????!!!! I don’t think it was always like that. I’m pretty sure it used to be staffed by incredibly savvy old guys who wore khaki pants up to their armpits, slicked their hair with Vitalis, killed all sorts of Japanese on Okinawa, and knew how to weld mine-damaged landing craft hulls with a Zippo.

Glenn Reynolds writes for Pop Mech. Come on. You and I both know what’s in his tool collection: a hammer with one broken claw and a butter knife he thinks is a screwdriver.

I just found an interesting Internet post from Pop Mech. Some Redditor was using an angle grinder with a cutoff disk, and the disk blew up. He posted a photo of himself wearing safety glasses in which a disk fragment is deeply imbedded. Pop Mech’s title: “This is Why You Wear Safety Glasses.”

Here’s the thing. When you use a cutoff disk with an angle grinder, you don’t wear safety glasses. You wear a face shield, ear plugs, safety glasses, leather gloves, a leather apron, and a dust mask. Better yet, hand the grinder to someone like Reynolds and dare him to do the job.

It’s no wonder they were wrong. The guy who wrote the piece is a kid named Eric. From his aggressively hip, kooky byline photo, he appears to be about nine. I looked at his stuff. It’s all about encryption, ISP’s, and wearing women’s underwear. I may have made that last bit up. Anyway, he’s no Charlie Allnut. He probably whispers “lefty loosey” when he backs out the screws on an Ipad.

Electronics and Mechanics, in the Pop Mech sense of the word, are about as closely related as the Bolshoi Ballet and plumber’s crack. There is nothing mechanical about turning on your PC and logging into 4chan.

Grinders are fascinating, because they look safe but they’re incredibly dangerous. I was using one a few years back, and even though I was wearing glasses and a face shield, a piece of a wire knot flew right into my eye. I never did understand that. But grinders are treacherous.

The guy in the Reddit photo did not do it right, regardless of what Eric the Half-a-Handyman thinks (obscure reference). He only wore glasses. If the fragment had missed them, it could have torn through his lips and gone into his mouth. It could have shredded a thumb. It could have gone into his belly.

Grinder bits have been known to go through face shields, enter people’s abdominal cavities, and tear fingers off. Writing this, I’m starting to wonder why I own one.

When you use a grinder, you have to be very smart. You can’t put pressure on it. You have to keep as much of yourself as possible out of the disk plane. You can’t twist the disk. You have to leave the guard on the machine. You have to make sure no one is in front of you. Come on, Eric. You’re getting paid. You should know this.

Of course, while I’m willing to lecture and criticize, I use a grinder unsafely all the time. I have to knock that off. I don’t even own an leather apron. I don’t wear gloves when I use it. I really need to get on top of that, as of today.

I read an interesting remark about combat, from one Paul Schussel. He’s a World War Two vet. He said you go into battle thinking, “It can’t happen to me.” Then you start thinking it can happen to you if you’re not careful. Then you realize it WILL happen to you, no matter what you do. If you don’t get sent home, eventually you will be hurt or killed. Tools work the same way. Bad stuff is going to happen, and the more you like and use tools, the sooner and more often you can expect it. You need to be serious and knowledgeable about safety. Unlike Eric, Devadip, and Chu Ming.

Pop Mech used to be a neat and very manly magazine. I know because you can find PDF’s on the Internet. “Build Your Own Metal Lathe.” “Build a Bullet Trap for Your Basement.” “Use Your Cranium as an Anvil for Making Horseshoes.” “Set Fire to Your Face With an Acetylene Torch, Deliberately, and Stand in Front of Your Horrified Kids Laughing to Show Them What Kind of Men Came Back From Iwo Jima With Sea Bags Full of Japanese Ears.”

Those days are gone forever. Maybe the smart move is to collect old PDF’s.

I don’t have time to gripe about safety all day, so I’ll offer a brief tip. If you haven’t been trained to use a drill press, bench grinder, angle grinder, table saw, or metal lathe, and you use any of these tools regularly, you are probably going to send yourself or a pal to the ER one day. For no good reason at all.

Eric, meanwhile, will be defying the odds if he scalds his pinky steaming almond milk for his cappuccino.

Happy tooling.