Fresh Reminders That This is Really Happening

What a week.

Remember me writing about flooding as a likely sign that God is preparing the world for the tribulation? I mused about Hurricane Ida, which was about to hit New Orleans, wondering whether it would signal a continuation of the global flooding crisis. After I wrote that, Ida did terrible damage in Louisiana, and yesterday, it flooded places like Manhattan, New Jersey, and Philadelphia!

I read that New York City had just issued its second flash flood warning in history. There were also floods there in August, when Henri passed over.

During the last week, there have been floods in New Zealand, Nepal, and Mexico.

Seems like the run-up to the rapture is really happening. The flooding problem is not going away. It will be interesting to see if it carries on into the fall.

When I chose this house, I made sure it wasn’t in a flood area. The government has a site where you can check every property in the country.

Of course, leftists look at the floods and blame global warming, which is a backhanded jab at capitalism, which is a backhanded jab at Christianity, America, and white people.

A gradual increase in global temperatures shouldn’t cause an abrupt increase in flooding, which appears to be what we are seeing. Doesn’t matter. Global warming causes every problem, regardless of what it is. It’s not a scientific conclusion. It’s a fundamental premise of a political religion.

My wife knows a lady who prophesies and prays for people. Sometimes she visits the lady. The lady is young, but she has said she expects to die before long, because God will take her before things get bad. This week, my wife dreamed about her. She saw her in church, saying she would be taken away like T.B. Joshua. In the dream, she told the lady they needed to pray to prevent it, but the lady refused. As they were talking, my wife saw a beautiful, green place full of mountains.

The heavenly place turned into an earthly place where a man swam in a river like the Nile. The river looked like blood. A voice asked if Satan was going to come and bring 6 plagues to the earth.

Rhodah is not an end times buff. She is young, and she wants to live out a normal life here. I would be thrilled if the rapture came tomorrow, but Rhodah is less enthusiastic. She has not studied the end times much.

Was T.B. Joshua taken because the tribulation was coming?

The book of Enoch says that when God decided to flood the world, he chose to wait until Methuselah, the grandfather of Noah and the son of Enoch, died. Methuselah was a righteous man, and God did not want to flood the earth while he was alive. When God told Abraham he was going to destroy Sodom, he agreed to forbear if 10 righteous men could be found, but when God sent angels to look at Sodom, the homosexuals there tried to gang-rape them, and 10 righteous men could not be found. God has demonstrated a pattern of sparing the wicked while the righteous are among them. In a parable, he said it was best to let weeds and wheat grow together instead of ripping the weeds out and burning them before the harvest. He said the best thing was to harvest the wheat and then burn the weeds.

Joshua is not well-known in the US, but he was one of the world’s most famous preachers. He did many miracles, and he never had a scandal. He didn’t beg for money or sell his help. He was a youthful and vigorous 57 when he died, and he went quickly, without suffering. Maybe it’s true that God took him because he wanted to spare him.

As signs become clearer, Rhodah is getting more interested in the end times.

On the subject of end times concerns, I decided to get myself some ivermectin, figuring there was no down side to it. When I visited Tractor Supply, I saw that ivermectin was not available, and there was a little notice cautioning people against taking it. I guess they sold out. I bought three tubes on Amazon, though, and Rhodah is bringing some ivermectin for humans to Turkey.

For what it’s worth, I learned that ivermectin has a sister drug which is also active against coronavirus microbes. The name also ends with “mectin,” and people are not rushing to buy it yet. Useful info if you can’t find ivermectin.

Another interesting end time fact: the silicon chip shortage is getting worse, and it wasn’t caused by coronavirus. Trump battled with China because we were being abused in our trade relationship, and that caused some problems with the chip supply. Then a major supplier had a big fire. On top of that, a drought hit Taiwan, making it hard for chip factories to get water for cleaning, which is essential to manufacturing. Right now, a huge number of vehicles is sitting in lots because automakers can’t get chips to finish manufacturing them. Automakers are shutting down production. Electronics manufacturers have products backordered, so you may not see your favorite video console (or motherboard, if we have to talk about things that are actually important to mature adults) until 2023.

Remember, the tribulation will be ushered in by murder and hate, death and disease, and shortages. See Revelation 6. We have all three problems, and we can’t blame coronavirus for all of it, so it’s not like our predicament can be traced to one natural cause or even a few.

By the way, beef is going to be in short supply for at least a year, and rubber supplies are expected to dry up shortly.

There is good news regarding our belated honeymoon, which has been delayed by coronavirus-related visa issues. We had our time wasted by Sweden, Iceland, and Spain, which rejected our applications, and we started looking for other options. We did not want to go to a New World destination, and we didn’t want to go to Egypt again.

We learned that Mexico, which is one of the top easy dates when it comes to visas, would not let Rhodah in unless she applied in South Africa. We looked at third-tier European nations. We learned that Georgia is a good safety nation for a Zambian. They let them in without visas.

We checked Turkey out. I thought it was just another depressing Muslim nation, but I learned that wasn’t true. The Turks are backsliders, so they’re easygoing. They have bars. They let women wear bikinis to beaches. They have a strong reputation for friendliness and great food, and the country is set up well for tourists.

We had some confusion about Turkish visas. Turkey has a website that dispenses electronic visas, but the embassy people in Zambia gave Rhodah the impression she would have to apply in person, which would take weeks.

The e-visa site said visitors from Zambia were required to have tickets from one of three airlines before applying, and I didn’t want to buy tickets in advance because if her application had been rejected, we would have lost a lot of the ticket money. Also, the only airline that offered round-trip flights for the needed route was very expensive.

I decided to apply on Rhodah’s behalf, and I clicked the box saying she already had a ticket. I figured I would find out whether they were checking before awarding visas. If they were not, we could always buy the ticket afterward. If they rejected her, we wouldn’t get a visa, but I would learn something useful.

It took me about 10 minutes to get her a valid visa. The visa itself merely said she had to prove she had a ticket on an approved airline WHEN SHE TRAVELED. That’s a piece of cake.

We are still hearing information from a friend of Rhodah’s, claiming she needs to apply in person in spite of the e-visa, but nothing the Turkish government says in emails or publishes on the web agrees with him. I am making inquiries. We should get final confirmation by Monday.

Now that we have a visa, I’m looking at videos and reading up on Turkey. The exchange rate is insane, so we can expect to pay about $7 for meals for two. The food picture is amazing. Istanbul has restaurants of every type, and the standards are said to be very high. Istanbul is on the water, so there should be things like dinner cruises. We can also visit Ephesus and see the city Paul wrote about.

The temperatures should be below 80, so it won’t be like Egypt, where we had days 35 degrees warmer.

I’m looking forward to visiting another country where Muslims are friendly. In the past, most of my impressions of Turkey came from the movies Midnight Express and Lawrence of Arabia, so it wasn’t a place I wanted to visit. Of course, I was crazy to think movies bore any relationship to reality. I mean, I’ve seen Deliverance, a preposterous movie in which the danger of being sodomized is low in cities and high in rural Appalachia, instead of precisely the other way around, the way it is in real life.

I feel bad about having the wrong idea about people. Turkey’s government may be anti-Semitic, and for all I know, terrorists are getting significant support from individual Turks, but I clearly misjudged the character of the nation.

I’m not crazy about visiting a place controlled by a man who has it in for Israel, but I can’t have everything the way I want it.

The Turks have had floods in 2021. Figures. But they happened on the Black Sea coast, and I don’t plan to go there.

People are supposed to be very nice in Georgia, and the scenery is beautiful, but the food is somewhat scary, and the country isn’t set up all that well for tourism.

My understanding is that Georgians have a love affair with bread stuffed with meat and cheese. They serve many variations on this theme. Sounds good to me, but I don’t know if I could handle it for a more than a couple of days.

Here at the house, things are going great, but I haven’t managed to trap the squirrel that has been chewing on my gate. I put out a live trap, and the bait disappeared twice. Then I tried triggering the trap and saw that it didn’t work. That would have made it more of a feeder than a trap, except that the second bait was a big chunk of rat poison. Whatever critter stole it is probably dead.

I fixed the trap, but the bait disappeared again. I have a theory that a bigger animal is reaching in and taking the bait without setting it off, so I got a larger trap and set it next to the little one. Yesterday, I found a coon in it.

Getting rid of a coon is always a blessing, but the job is not pleasant. I had to shoot it in the head with a .22 pistol. Because it was raining and I didn’t want to carry the coon to the burn pile in bad weather, I chucked it over a fence into some bushes.

Today I went back in dry weather, thinking maybe I should move the coon. It was gone. Evidently, coyotes and/or bobcats remove dead coons without even being asked. That’s nice.

I don’t know how many times I will have to empty the traps. Quite a few, I would think. It’s part of rural life, so I need to get used to it instead of becoming a sissy city transplant who names the squirrels that eat his patio furniture and tries to pet rabid coons.

A disturbing thing about dispatching game and pest animals with firearms is that it makes you understand that you could do the same thing to a person if you had to. Reluctance to shoot is grounded in moral questions and fear of negative consequences, not the repugnance of the act itself, which can be overcome by willing one finger to move. People who live in the country are used to overcoming it because they hunt. A typical hunter has ended many more lives than all but the rarest soldiers, and many are capable of much better stalking and marksmanship than ordinary combat veterans.

Our cities are experiencing a very sudden murder epidemic, and it will surely bleed over into suburbs and the country eventually. When that happens, spoiled urban terrorists who are used to dealing with police who are hampered by rules of engagement and career concerns will find themselves up against millions of civilian men and women who face far fewer constraints and don’t think twice about shooting a warm-blooded creature and pulling its organs out with their bare hands. Video-game-trained urbanites in search of easy prey will probably face an extremely steep learning curve, with lessons written in their own blood. Hope I will not be on earth to see it.

I hope I’m right about the Bible predicting a thousand-year age of love, led by Jesus himself and staffed by rapturees, following the tribulation. It would be wonderful to see the world function the way it ought to.