Hoping for Competent Baptism

I booked a hotel room for an event run by The Last Reformation. Everything is set, and I am ready to go.

I’m looking forward to it. I’ve been extremely disappointed in the activities I’ve been involved with in churches. I am wondering if it’s really true that TLR is onto something better. I can’t help being reluctant to let myself hope.

When I belonged to Trinity Church in Miami, there was no street outreach. None. Zero. There was no outreach of any kind, except for nagging people to come to church. We had buses for bringing the poor to church, but the church refused to fund them. We had a prison ministry, but the church refused to support it. Not much happened.

At New Dawn Ministries, we occasionally (rarely) went to a poor neighborhood and distributed food and prayed for people. That was better than nothing, but the results were not impressive. How many demons did we cast out? Zero. How many people got healed? Zero. How many accepted Christ? Zero. How many decided to come to church? Almost none.

The church had a “health fair.” They passed out free stuff and helped people connect to free services. If it was evangelism at all, it was barely so.

It’s too bad we didn’t have as many outreach days as we had pastor appreciation days. We would have been very busy.

TLR’s people claim they cast out demons, heal the sick, and start people out as disciples. If that’s true, they are wildly exceeding the performance of any church I have ever been a part of (or known of).

I am wondering if I’ll finally make new Christian friends. It would be nice to have more people I can relate to. At the moment, I have ONE person I can really discuss God with. One. And he lives 300 miles away. I know other Christians, but they don’t have the same level of revelation at the moment. When I talk to him, we’re always finding that God is showing us the same things. That’s what happens when people hear from the Holy Spirit instead of men. Oddly, a group of young men we both know are getting the same revelations.

I know people who have just gotten started with God. I know people who went a certain distance with God, decided it was far enough, and got off the bus a little bit early; I don’t mean they quit Christianity, but they decided not to get in too deep. I know people who seem to be involved in unproductive doctrine. I know all sorts of Christians in various situations, but right now I’m only hearing about personal revelation from one.

The farther you go with God, the lonelier you will be. Maybe “lonely” is the wrong word; it has a negative smell to it. I’ll put it this way: the fewer peers you will have. You may know hundreds of people who go to church, but you won’t know many who want to go all the way with God. The more things God shows you, the fewer people you will know who will understand and accept them.

You can see this principle in the design of the temple. It had an outer court where just about anyone could go. It had an inner court for people who were closer to God. It had a holy of holies where only one person could go, once a year. I don’t think it’s rare for Christians to make this analogy. Things people in the inner court knew were hard to discuss with people in the outer court. It must also have been difficult for the high priest who entered the holy of holies to share with those who only made it to the inner court.

The closer you get to God, the closer the people who don’t understand you will be to God. That sounds weird, but it’s true. There must be a lot of advanced people to whom I would come across as a complete spiritual swine, barely worth talking to.

I don’t want to waste a lot of time trying to buddy up to Christians who don’t believe in casting out demons or healing. I don’t want to sit on my beliefs so I can get close to people who pray to statues or think Mohammed was God’s messenger. Christians are supposed to live in unity, but you’re not supposed to give up unity with God to get close to people.

Unequal yokings are very burdensome. All of us need people who are in alignment with us by the power of the Holy Spirit. Otherwise, you spend your whole life changing other people’s diapers and listening to their angry, misguided accusations.

One of the most tiring things about unequal yokings is the repetition. A person who is out of line with the Holy Spirit will never stop challenging you. They are likely to feel resentment. They are likely to gaslight you and put stumbling blocks in front of you. They may tempt you with coarse pleasures, to prove you’re really just “a regular guy.” They are likely to betray you repeatedly. You don’t need that in your life. The Bible says God sets the godly apart for himself, and it’s important to let him do it. Otherwise you live weighed down like a pack mule.

It’s funny; we are supposed to cast our burdens on Jesus, but Christians who are out of line with God cast their burdens on us.

We’re supposed to be holy, and that means our friends should be holy. It’s not optional; there is no other path. It’s true that Jesus associated with unbelieving Jews, drunks and prostitutes, but he was visiting, not cohabitating. He didn’t open businesses in partnership with them. He didn’t marry prostitutes. He went to them as a leader, to offer them a better way, and then he backed off and went back to people who had already accepted him. He left the outer court and went back to the inner court.

Maybe I’ll meet a couple of people to expand my social circle.

People are talking about a one-world religion now. It looks like Kenneth Copeland may be part of it. That would not be a surprise, because he is a nasty person and a fountain of evil doctrine. He has hosted events where he tries to bring conflicting denominations together without correction. It’s not right. You can’t make Catholicism work. You can’t reconcile Islam or Mormonism with God. Unity with misguided religions is disunity with God.

Satan loves to tell people there are many paths to God. He has been doing it since the days of pantheism. It’s a wonderfully seductive message, because it’s much easier than trying to sell one particular religion. You want Krishna? You can have him. You want the angel Moroni? You want Zeus? You want saints to pray to? Fine! It doesn’t matter which path you choose, as long as it takes you to hell.

Jesus made it very clear that there is only one way. If you deny that in order to increase church attendance, you are helping people on their way to damnation.

The Bible mentions a one-world religion, and it’s called the worship of the Beast. You can look it up in the Revelation. Lots of unity there. There will be so much unity and dedication, they will execute you if you refuse to join.

That’s what I call unity. It’s not going to be a good thing, however.

Christianity is all about separation from the world. It’s about holiness, sanctification, and repentance. You can’t have the old wine and the new wine. You have to let the old wine go. It will cost you friends and relatives. So be it. There is no point in starting relationships you can’t finish. You need friends who won’t be in hell when you’re in heaven.

I don’t believe anyone has a lot of real friends, but I hope I can get to know a few people I can relax with. I want to know people who will pull me forward instead of backward.

People will read this and think I’m a snob. Maybe so, but that’s not what I’m talking about. I don’t want to reject anyone or feel that I’m better than anyone. I just need rest. I need spiritual support around me. I can’t get it from everyone I know. If you’re not giving to me, you’re taking from me. I have to have a few people who give. I’m not God. I can’t sustain my own strength.

It has occurred to me that some Internet nut might figure out where I am and try to meet me at the event and force a friendship. I hope no one tries, because it would be a waste of time. Stalking is not friendship.

I also hope I won’t run into old women who think every single man they meet was sent by God! That happens a lot as men get older. “I had a dream that we were married!” “I’ll let you know when God gives ME that dream. Until then, wait for my call. At a large and comfortable distance.”

God gives those who delight in him the desires of their hearts, according to his own promise. I do not desire a 65-year-old woman who is looking for a meal ticket who rubs her feet every night and doesn’t mind sharing a house with 7 cats, so if such a woman has dreams about me, they came from a source other than God.

I’ve done my time as a caregiver for the elderly. I think one stretch is enough!

I can’t wait to get baptized correctly. I have to find out what it’s like. It’s amazing to me that I got this old without understanding how important it was. I hope it brings me improvement.

I know Satan has a plan to prevent me from going to the event. He also has a plan to screw the event up for me. He probably has a plan to prevent me from walking in whatever progress I make at the event. He is predictable; I’ll say that for him. I am praying for defense and help.

Whatever happens, you will read about it here. Pray it works out well.

No Brakes

My dad has only been enrolled in a hospice for one day, and I am already thinking I may have made the wrong choice.

My friend Mike is a hospice executive. He has been advising me to get hospice services for a long time. I have been trying to decide among a CNA, an ALF, and hospice care. I wanted to save money, get better care for my dad, and put some order back in my own life. Those were my goals.

Yesterday, the hospice sent a nurse around to evaluate my dad and see if he was an appropriate candidate for hospice care. He got the go-ahead from a doctor via telephone, so we signed up. I was told we could get equipment and a number of helpful services, all on Medicare’s dime. What’s not to love? Even if he goes to an ALF, they can care for him. The ALF will let them come in.

Hospice care is for people who are dying, and my dad is in that group. His dementia will kill him before long, no matter what anyone does for him. If he lasts two more years, he’ll be doing great. He could have more strokes and go next month, however.

It seemed like a no-brainer. Who turns down free government health care? I saw no down side, so I signed him up during the first visit.

There were a couple of things that confused me, however. The doctor talked about cutting off some of his medications. Blood pressure pills and a statin. When she said we should stop giving him the statin, the nurse agreed, saying there was no point in it any more.

I told them he had a cardiologist, and I said we would have to run things by her. They agreed. I thought maybe the hospice doctor had different ideas about statins and blood pressure medications for elderly patients.

Today I talked to Mike, and he explained something to me. They want to cut off the circulatory medicines because they may be keeping my dad alive.

When he said that, I realized I had misunderstood how hospice care works. They aren’t just interested in providing care. They want to pull out the stops so he declines and dies faster.

This is not the kind of thing you ordinarily expect to hear from medical professionals.

Apparently, once you put someone in hospice care, they are supposed to cut off all treatment which is intended to cure the patient or prolong life. I did not understand that. I thought they just provided care for terminally ill people, without getting involved in decisions about treatment.

For quite some time now, I have been against taking heroic measures to keep my dad alive. I have been afraid his cardiologist would try to get him a heart bypass, for example. You can imagine the difficulty of caring for a dementia patient who wakes up every day unaware that he is recovering from major surgery. It would be very hard, and then he would still die from dementia in a fairly short time.

I don’t want doctors to do backflips to extend my dad’s life, because it will just make everyone involved miserable. On the other hand, I never dreamed they would want to take him off his prescriptions. Prescribing a few pills is not a heroic measure. He’s going to fade and go pretty soon whether he takes them or not. I don’t see the harm in giving them to him while he is still able to walk, talk, and exercise a certain amount of reason.

My aunt started speaking gibberish when vascular dementia got her, and she became bedridden. Fair enough. When that happens, I won’t even want to give him aspirin. It’s pointless to turn a strong body into a life support system for a brain that doesn’t work. I do not like the idea of cutting his medication off now, however. I would not have supported measures to make my aunt speak gibberish sooner.

If we deprive him now, I feel we will be attacking both mind and body. His mental problems are caused by circulatory issues, and it may be that his pills retard the progress. The mind isn’t the villain here. As long as it works to some degree, it should be defended. When the mind is gone, the body becomes, in a way, the enemy. You can keep a body pumping blood for a very long time after someone’s natural lifetime has passed.

I’m a very smart guy, so there are distinctions that are concealed from other people yet which are very obvious to me.

For one thing, I understand the big difference between proactive measures and passive measures. Putting a pillow over someone’s face is proactive. So is assisted suicide. I’m against those things, because they exceed the authority God has given man. On the other hand, allowing someone to die naturally without extraordinary intervention is often morally correct.

Major surgery would be proactive and an extraordinary effort, in the case of an 87-year-old man with rapidly progressing dementia. So would hooking hooking him up to pumps and tubes. These things would be true even if he still recognized people and was able to enjoy life to some extent. The benefits, if any, would be outweighed by the additional suffering, and they would be fleeting. Giving him three or four pills a day, while his mind is still firing on a few cylinders, would be proactive but not extraordinary.

Taking away a dementia patient’s heart pills seems a little like kicking at his cane while he shuffles by. He will go in his own good time, and he won’t inconvenience the rest of us by holding on for a decade like an Alzheimer’s patient. There is no need to grease the chute.

Suddenly I feel, in my heart and not just my mind, how serious this situation is. He’s really going. His problems are so bad, I can legally withhold medication from him in order to hasten his death, and then I can inherit from him with the full consent of the local state’s attorney. How wrong that feels. Think what the Menendez brothers would have given to be in my shoes.

Society isn’t just willing to help my dad pass without turmoil; it wants him to get it over with, and it assumes I’m on the same page.

I can’t believe there is no one to advise me. What a strange system we have.

Mike has been more helpful than anyone, but I still misunderstood him, and there is no one else to answer my questions. Because my dad has Medicare and a supplemental plan, he is well-funded, and everyone is eager to sell him tests, therapy, and treatment, but no one wants to sit down with me and tell me what’s what. I am learning things as I go, when I should at least have a pamphlet to tell me what to do.

I’ll admit something. I have prayed, telling God that if my dad isn’t going to change inside, I would like him to go sooner rather than later. Does that make me a bad person? I don’t want to have to deal with abuse and selfish behavior for the next ten years, toward no constructive end. I don’t want to be trapped in caregiving forever, and I don’t want to keep pumping time into an unequal yoking. Still, I don’t want to get involved in carnal efforts to end his life.

How different things would be, with a different patient. If my dad were 6, I’d be pushing for every conceivable treatment. If he were his current age and sound of mind, I’d be taking every reasonable measure to keep him alive as long as he wanted. Because he is very old and afflicted with incurable, progressive, fatal dementia, I can’t think that way. As far as his needs go, I can only think of two things: his comfort and his salvation.

I wonder what my mother would do if she were here. I think she would do exactly what I’m doing. She would work to keep him going as long as practical, and then she would let go out of fatigue and resignation.

We will see the cardiologist tomorrow, and I will do my best to pin her down and get some real input concerning his medications. I will let her know about the hospice doctor’s recommendations. As of right now, I plan to insist he continue to receive his pills, even if it means taking him out of the hospice program. If he becomes incoherent later, we’ll start over, and I’ll probably let them make the changes.

I believe God told me he had cut my dad off. I think he told me my dad was going to decline and go away, because he had held onto the hardness of his heart into old age. I accept that, even though I still work on his salvation, which is a separate matter. I believe God has told me my dad will be saved.

If he were a Christian, I’d be doing my best to get him healed of his dementia. As it is, I think it’s too much to ask for. His attitude toward God is not good. I can’t tell you how many times I prayed about his dementia in the past. It didn’t work, and I finally quit. If, by some work of God, his heart changes in the future, I’ll do my best for him, but right now, I’ll be satisfied if he gets a firm grip on salvation.

I thought I had accepted my dad’s mortality, but now that they want to take him off his prescriptions, I feel that I have been in denial. It’s strange; had I awakened yesterday and found him dead, I would have been okay with it because I am prepared, but the thought of depriving him of medical treatment and watching him fail is sobering and somewhat repugnant.

I feel I have a plan now, so tomorrow we’ll put it into effect. If we have to give up the hospice benefits for now, so be it. I can’t push my dad into the grave just because he’s rude and hard to care for. An ALF will take the weight off my shoulders without involving me in something morally dubious. There is more than one way to deal with verbal abuse and horrifying hygiene problems.

If you’re in the same position I’m in, you should think about what I write. It can help you avoid the mistakes I make.

Look at the Hand, not the Puppet

I have been thinking about Michael Avenatti. As expressed in earlier blog posts, I have been asking myself how a law school valedictorian could do so many stupid things. I forgot something important: when reality doesn’t make sense, you should look for a supernatural cause.

Avenatti went to a top law school and graduated first in his class, but consider the bad moves he has made. His most prominent client says he filed a defamation suit without her consent; that’s highly unethical. He filed the suit without researching it; the suit was dismissed before it got anywhere because it was based on remarks that were clearly not defamation. He then went to Twitter and committed a glaring ethical infraction, calling President Trump’s lawyer dishonest.

In addition to these errors, it appears that he struck a woman and threw her out of his apartment. According to the police, he said, “She hit me first,” which is about as close as you can get to a confession without confessing. It’s not something a good lawyer would say. A good lawyer would refuse to speak at all, and he would call an attorney friend from jail. This is very basic stuff.

He also went after the alleged victim on Twitter, questioning her honesty. This is something a rapper might do. No competent attorney would even think about it. If he is found guilty, it will be used to show he has no remorse, and that will be considered when he is punished. It could make the difference between piddling community service and time in jail.

He said the Democratic Party needed a white man to run for President in 2020, because white men get more respect. He said this to Time Magazine, not to a friend in a dark restaurant booth.

Let’s not even consider his other legal problems. Child support issues. Eviction attempts. A huge judgment in a case filed by a former business associate. The IRS is after him. His life is utter chaos.

How did this happen?

I believe it’s simple. God is looking after Donald Trump.

Back when it started to look like Trump was going to win, I began to see the parallels between Trump and Cyrus the Great, the heathen king God anointed to help the Jews and restore the temple.

The prophet Isaiah operated during the 700’s, B.C. This was long before Nebuchadnezzar conquered Jerusalem and sacked the temple; these events took place between 605 and 580 B.C., more or less. Long before Jerusalem fell, Isaiah said this:

Who says of Cyrus, ‘He is My shepherd,
And he shall perform all My pleasure,
Saying to Jerusalem, “You shall be built,”
And to the temple, “Your foundation shall be laid.” ’

“Thus says the Lord to His anointed,
To Cyrus, whose right hand I have held—
To subdue nations before him
And loose the armor of kings,
To open before him the double doors,
So that the gates will not be shut:

‘I will go before you
And make the crooked places straight;
I will break in pieces the gates of bronze
And cut the bars of iron.

I will give you the treasures of darkness
And hidden riches of secret places,
That you may know that I, the Lord,
Who call you by your name,
Am the God of Israel.

For Jacob My servant’s sake,
And Israel My elect,
I have even called you by your name;
I have named you, though you have not known Me.

Isaiah predicted the restoration of the temple decades before the temple was sacked.

Please note: this happened before Cyrus the Great was born. There was a Cyrus before him, but that Cyrus was also born after Isaiah wrote his prophecy. We know of no natural reason why Isaiah would have expected a person named Cyrus to show up and help the Jews.

Cyrus got the restoration of Jerusalem started, even though he did not belong to the Jewish religion.

Here is what the book of Ezra says; it’s the announcement Cyrus made in his first year of rule:

All the kingdoms of the earth the Lord God of heaven has given me. And He has commanded me to build Him a house at Jerusalem which is in Judah. Who is among you of all His people? May his God be with him, and let him go up to Jerusalem which is in Judah, and build the house of the Lord God of Israel (He is God), which is in Jerusalem. And whoever is left in any place where he dwells, let the men of his place help him with silver and gold, with goods and livestock, besides the freewill offerings for the house of God which is in Jerusalem.

Cyrus was not supposed to be the emperor. He overthrew his grandfather, Astyages, and took the throne. God’s anointed ones have a way of receiving power unexpectedly.

Herodotus has a remarkable story about Cyrus. He claims his rise was prophesied to Astyages, and he says Astyages ordered him to be killed. A shepherd passed his stillborn son off as Cyrus, and he raised Cyrus in secret.

Historians don’t like this story, but it is very consistent with Satan’s treatment of other prophesied deliverers. Consider Joseph, Moses, Jesus, and the early church. Joseph was sold, Moses was saved from Pharaoh’s command to slay the firstborn of the Jews, Jesus was saved from Herod’s command to slay the male infants in Bethlehem, and people like Paul did their best to murder the first Christians.

Satan is big on murdering the young. He loves abortion. The Revelation portrays him as a dragon, waiting to consume the messiah as soon as he is born.

Digression: some people say the plagues of Egypt, including the killing of the firstborn males, were designed to humiliate Egypt’s false “gods.” For example, the plague of darkness humiliated Ra, the sun god. The other day, I heard someone say the Egyptians communicated with their gods through firstborn sons. If this is true, then when God killed the firstborn, he cut the Egyptians off from the spirits they served.

There is always symmetry in the supernatural. Jesus is the firstborn of the church, and he intercedes with the father for us.

Digression over.

Trump has been supportive to Christians, Jews, and Israel. He hasn’t been ideal, but he has done many helpful things, including a real Cyrus move: he recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. Leftists went ballistic over that. Barack Obama was an enemy of Israel and the church, and people who hate Trump say he is destroying Obama’s legacy.

Before Trump was elected, I started to think he was a Cyrus figure, and I said so here. Later on, I saw other people saying the same thing. I think it’s true. If it is true, then naturally, Satan wants Trump gone. That would certainly explain the explosion of Trump and Trump-supporter persecution that has come from people on the left, millions of whom are so far gone they speak and behave as though they were mentally ill.

They ARE mentally ill. Demons are driving them to say and do nutty things. This is how Avenatti ended up where he is today.

God has his anointed, and so does Satan. God anointed people like Moses and Jesus. He also anointed Trump. Satan has anointed people like Pharaoh, Haman, Eichmann, Hitler, the Beatles, Louis Farrakhan, Ellen Degeneres, J.K. Rowling, Beyonce Knowles, Oprah Winfrey, Barack Obama, and Michael Avenatti.

Christians have done a very bad job. We have lost a lot of our knowledge. We have made up bad doctrine. We fell asleep in Delilah’s lap, and Satan shaved our heads. We are weak. We are very selfish. We try to get salvation and favors from God, but we don’t do the other thing he asks: we don’t give our lives to him. As a result, we have evangelized very poorly, there isn’t enough prayer in the world, America has turned to idolatry, and people like Michael Avenatti have been empowered to harass us.

Avenatti never hears from God. He can’t hear the Holy Spirit, telling him he is ruining his own life by fighting God. He thinks he’s doing great things, and Satan has helped him a lot. His problem is that Trump’s anointing is greater than his. Trump’s supernatural sponsor is God, not a defeated angel who built a kingdom on libel and disinformation.

Things could be worse for him. He could be like Oprah or Beyonce. They serve Satan without much opposition. When that happens, it often means God has given up on a person. If God his opposing Avenatti, it may be that he still wants to get through to him.

I don’t think Avenatti is going to have a comeback. His spiritual backing seems to be too weak. Satan has limited resources, and he can’t give his complete support to every person who does his will. Also, a lot of Christians are praying for Avenatti to fail in his efforts to destroy Trump. I certainly am.

I don’t think many people pray for Beyonce Knowles to be defeated. A lot of Christians think she’s a fine role model. Same goes for Oprah, who actively opposes Christianity and supports a cult.

If Trump really is anointed after the pattern of Cyrus, he will be invincible until he achieves his purpose. That doesn’t necessarily mean he will complete the projects he has started. Cyrus didn’t. It just means that whatever work God has anointed him to do will be done. If that means God chose him to do something that requires 8 years in office, 2020 is in the bag. If Trump’s part of the job is already finished, maybe someone will take him down soon.

We should be praying for Trump and his family to become Spirit-led. Trump is not a highly developed Christian, to put it gently. The closer he is to God’s will, the better we can expect him to do. We should also pray for God to correct Avenatti and help him join the body of Christ.

Trump has his issues, but history shows that he is capable of change. That’s more important than starting life with good character. God can only help people who can change. I don’t know if Avenatti is capable of it.

Hell is not full of sinners. It’s full of people who don’t listen. If you can listen and change, it doesn’t matter what you are when you begin your walk with God. You can make it.

It will be interesting to see what happens between Trump and Avenatti. It’s like watching the angels fight. I hope both of them come around, but whatever happens, I hope Christians will understand that this is a supernatural battle, and I hope we will learn from it.

Related: Boy Named Trump Forced to Change Last Name

Counting his Chickens Before the Eggs Have Been Laid

I have a couple of interesting things to write about today.

First, Michael Avenatti keeps whiffing at the plate. He is coming apart like Charlie Sheen at a Mormon retreat.

Avenatti represents porn actress (“star” is not an appropriate word to use for people who compete for the worst jobs in the movie industry) Stormy Daniels. She has sued Donald Trump based on two legal theories. One is that Trump defamed her by suggesting she lied about him. The other is that a nondisclosure agreement Trump got her to sign is invalid.

When you’re a public figure, which, regrettably, Daniels is, it’s hard to sue for defamation. Not only do you have to prove someone lied about you; you have to show they did it with malice. Daniels couldn’t even clear the first bar. Her suit was rejected because Trump’s remarks concerning her were just bloviation, or “rhetorical hyperbole.” True or untrue, his remarks were not serious statements of fact.

Daniels has to pay about $300,000, including money for filing a meritless claim. No matter how you look at it, this reflects more harshly on Avenatti than Daniels.

Avenatti went to a very good law school and graduated first in his class, yet somehow, he wasn’t able to get a run-of-the-mill tort case before a finder of fact. The case never got off the ground. He should have seen that coming. A law student shouldn’t screw up this badly. I know. I did better work, before federal judges, when I was in law school.

I don’t get Avenatti. Doesn’t his academic success mean anything? How can a person who did so well in law school do such a poor job? As far as I know, the most successful lawyers are not all top students, because law school and the practice of law are not the same thing, but you would still expect a valedictorian to be able to read and apply the most basic rules of defamation law. The problems with Avenatti’s case would come up, literally, within the first four or five minutes of research.

Maybe he’s a bad lawyer. It looks that way. It’s hard to see how a good lawyer could do something this stupid. He has made a lot of money, but successful lawyers are not always good lawyers. Look at Michael Cohen. The world is full of terrible lawyers who got rich fast by chasing ambulances, running firms that were really referral services, lobbying, and so on. Maybe Avenatti is like John Edwards. Maybe he’s just an ambulance chaser with a lot of gall.

Here’s the other thing I find interesting about the legal fees award: Avenatti committed a gross, public ethics violation in a ludicrous attempt to defend himself. Responding to Twitter users who were ridiculing his failures, he called Trump’s lawyer (who beat him) “dishonest.”

Here is the text of his remarkable tweet:

Charles Harder and Trump deserve each other because they are both dishonest,” Avenatti tweeted. “If Stormy has to pay $300k to Trump in the defamation case (which will never hold up on appeal) and Trump has to pay Stormy $1,500,000 in the NDA case (net $1,200,000 to Stormy), how is this a Trump win?

It is unethical for one attorney to insult another. That may be hard to believe, if you think TV shows are a good guide to what goes on in law practice, but it’s true. Take a look at what the Florida Bar says about it:

Whether orally or in writing, lawyers should avoid vulgar language, disparaging personal remarks, or acrimony toward other counsel, parties, or witnesses.

One idiot in Florida got suspended for two years, simply because of his rudeness. It’s not a joke.

Avenatti works in other states, but I’m sure the rules are the same there.

How can you be at the top of your law school class and be unfamiliar with a basic rule of ethics?

I can’t figure out how he did so well. Did he blackmail his professors to give him good grades? It’s a mystery.

In his unethical attack on Trump’s lawyer, Avenatti said something else that was bizarre. He suggested Trump had actually lost. You just read it. He asks how Trump can claim victory if he gets $300,000 in fees in the defamation case and loses $1.5 million in the NDA case. The big problem with this argument is that Trump has not lost the NDA case, and there has been no $1.5 million verdict.

What on earth is Avenatti talking about?

He reminds me of a scene from an Albert Brooks movie. In the movie, Brooks and his wife sell everything they have, buy an RV, and start touring the country. They plan to live on their savings. At their first stop, Las Vegas, the wife loses everything playing roulette. While Brooks is yelling at her, she says, “I’ll win it back.”

Avenatti is saying, “I’ll win it back.” Actually, it’s worse. He’s basically saying he already won it back.

Meanwhile, Daniels says she was not behind the defamation lawsuit. She said he filed it without her consent. That’s unethical, too.

I admit, I don’t know the rule he broke, and I don’t remember being taught that it was unethical to file suits without getting permission, back when I was busy getting an easy A in Ethics, but come on. The rules also don’t say it’s unethical to show up in court naked, but it’s still pretty obvious that it’s a problem. He created a giant debt for this woman. She may have to take her clothes off 50 or 60 times to square it. You can’t do that to a client!

Some things are so obviously unethical, it’s not necessary to draft a rule to prohibit them. Putting a bomb in opposing counsel’s car is unethical. Hitting on a judge to get favorable rulings is unethical. Filing a lawsuit without asking your client for permission is so far out of bounds, I doubt ethics experts have even considered the question.

No, they probably have. There are so many crazy, untalented, desperate lawyers; I’m sure Avenatti isn’t the first to pull this trick.

I predict Avenatti’s other lawsuit will fail, and I can more or less guarantee that he, not Stormy Daniels, will be paying the $300,000 that just got awarded. If he doesn’t, she may hire a real lawyer and sue him. If she does, I hope he hires a real lawyer instead of trying to represent himself.

Unbelievable. How did a public figure this strange even come to exist?

Second thing for today: my dad is enrolled in hospice care.

If you have an older relative who has a serious medical problem that MIGHT be fatal soon–just MIGHT–you may be able to get a lot of free hospice stuff from Medicare. I’m surprised at what we got. We’re getting a social worker, nursing visits, possible CNA help, an oxygen concentrator (which he doesn’t need), a box of emergency morphine, and a lot of other things I can’t remember.

They’re going to work with him for a few weeks, and if it appears that he’s declining badly, he’ll stay in the program.

The only question now is this: will it make my life easier or harder?

My dad’s care is going to be pretty good no matter what. The real purpose behind the effort I’m making is to save my own life. I need backup and rest. When people come to your house to help a disabled relative, it’s not helpful unless you can stay out of it. If you have to sit and watch, or you have to answer questions, or if you have to participate in any way at all, it adds to your burden.

We’re going to see what happens. If they make things worse, I’ll send them packing.

Meanwhile, he’s all set up for a brief ALF stay. I’m going to drop him while I travel for a couple of days. I may give him up for more time than I have to. Why not live a little? Anyway, he’s going to give it a try, and this will help him get used to the idea.

He’s going to be in an ALF eventually, unless he dies suddenly. Within a few months, he will have to go, so he might as well start accustoming himself.

I’m surprised they’re bringing emergency drugs. They like to have such things in the house in case he has a sudden need. He’s very lucky I’m the one caring for him. I’m not going to break into the stash on the first day, turn off the phone, and take all the morphine. Not everyone in the family has my self-control.

When my mother had cancer, we had to buy a locking box for her Dilaudid. The day after she died, my aunt showed us the box. It was open and empty. That didn’t take long.

I’ve been reading about the nonexistent “opioid crisis.” There is no crisis for responsible people, unless it’s the crisis of being unable to get drugs they need. The crisis people are the addicts. The government is taking a gun control-type approach, attacking law-abiding people in order to control the lawless. They’re cutting back on prescriptions and even counting people’s pills. Sounds smart, but in reality, addicts will still get whatever they want. I say that as the brother of an addict. You could seal my sister in a steel box on Mars, and within an hour, she would have at least two bottles of Vicodin.

Addicts are phenomenal networkers. Addiction is an incredible motivator, and they learn fast. They have networks of friends and doctors with foreign-sounding names. They know who will write prescriptions and who won’t. They know which pharmacists are friendly and which ones are smart. They have a remarkable underworld the rest of us never see.

A whole lot of the opioids addicts take are coming in from China. Tormenting the rest of us at CVS won’t have any effect on their supply. If I were an addict, I would bypass the medical system entirely. It’s expensive, it requires a lot of acting, and it leaves a paper trail. No one ever gets prosecuted for doing fentanyl or heroin they bought on the street, and when you buy it, you don’t have to wait in line at the pharmacy.

In view of the idiotic restrictions we are now seeing, I am shocked to learn that someone is about to bring me morphine in a box. I didn’t even ask for it, and I have no idea what I would use it for. They didn’t check to see if I was an addict. They just said, “Here it comes.”

The world has never made much sense. I should learn not to be surprised so easily.

I hope hospice works out. In any case, it will be good preparation for the future, because he WILL need it before long.

It’s nice to get “free” stuff from Medicare, but I still hate socialism. I would much rather have the crazy taxes he has paid throughout his life. We could pay for his medical problems and have enough left over to buy a big house.

I’m sure I’ll write about our experiences.

More

Someone must have reminded Avenatti about the rules of ethics and the elements of defamation, because he deleted the tweet in which he called Trump’s lawyer dishonest. My bet: Trump’s lawyer called him up and gave him a law lesson plus the threat of a severe paddling.

Avenatti has spent the day firing off desperate, frenzied tweets trying to shift the attention to other people’s supposed shortcomings and misdeeds. It’s not a good look, and it doesn’t work. All he’s doing is calling attention to the blood in the water.

Mother of All Witches

The other day, a friend called me about a girl he likes. He is looking for a Christian wife who will be aligned with him spiritually, so he won’t have to fight his wife as well as the world.

He seems to feel the girl has him on probation. She has been hurt before, so she is always evaluating him. He also said things indicating that she was manipulative. For example, she bought him some shoes, and while they were having some conversational friction, she took out the receipt and showed it to him. Who buys gifts and keeps receipts to show the recipients? If you do that, it’s not a gift. It’s a leash.

You never, ever remind people of the things you’ve done for them. If they can’t figure it out, you probably need to let them go, and if you feel entitled to remind them, you are not generous at all, no matter what you give. You are simply using false generosity to bend other people to your will. You are trying to get them to do things out of guilt, without changing their hearts. That guilt will eventually become resentment.

My mother always told me that if you lend people money, they will come to resent it. I never understood that until this minute.

I told my friend what I had been taught about witchcraft. Just as Christians see slander as murder, we also see manipulation as witchcraft. You may not have a crystal ball and a charge account at the local botanica, and you may pray to God every day and orally renounce other spirits, but if you’re trying to enslave other people, you might as well be a full-blown witch.

I told him it might be time for this girl to go, but I also told him she might be unaware of her problem. I said he should speak directly to her about it, including the witchcraft angle.

I have been listening to Derek Prince’s teachings, and he has videos on witchcraft. He spoke about a Christian woman who brought her son-in-law to him so he could be advised and cleansed. Right away, if you’re a man, you see the issue here. This is not a mother-in-law’s place. It’s demeaning and emasculating for a mother-in-law to behave this way, even if she has good intentions. Anyway, Prince told her she was the problem, and he ended up casting demons out of her.

She did not resist; she had been unaware of the issue, and once she was informed, she wanted to be free.

My friend spoke to the young lady, and she did not take offense, so maybe all is well. Thank God they are not living together or sleeping with each other. That would make things a lot worse, and there could be a pregnancy which would put a hook in his nose for 18 years.

At some point while I was thinking about this, I realized something: Eve was a witch. I assume this is a revelation that came from God.

In the Bible, drug abuse is considered witchcraft. New Testament translations translate the Greek word “pharmakeia,” which means mixing drugs or poisons, as “witchcraft.” Drugs have always been associated with witchcraft.

If you don’t think drugs and witchcraft go together, it’s easy to provide examples. Tobacco use came from American Indian occult rites. Central American witch doctors use peyote. In Siberia, witch doctors ate mushrooms containing psychedelics, and their followers drank their urine in order to get high with them. Mexican witch doctors use salvia divinorum to enter trance states. Wiccans and worshipers of false Norse “gods” use mandrakes.

Anyone who lives in the post-Sixties era knows that people who use drugs are often trying to get in touch with God or the supernatural realm. If you haven’t noticed, you must live in a mine shaft.

What are drugs? The word itself comes from a word referring to the storage of medicinal plants. In modern times, many drugs don’t come from plants, but many do. Cocaine, opiates, LSD, various mushroom drugs, and weed are examples. That covers the majority of the world’s commonly abused drugs.

A plant substance that alters the mind is a drug. What did Eve eat? A plant substance that altered her mind. The fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil expanded Eve’s consciousness. This was what Satan promised her, and he delivered. He was the first drug pusher.

The presence of Satan is another indication of witchcraft. Witches consort with evil spirits.

Final thing: the Bible says, “Rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft.” Eve is the first human rebel named in the Bible.

To sum up, Eve ate a drug while consorting with an evil spirit, in a state of rebellion. She was a witch, plain and simple. She also demonstrated typical behaviors for a female witch. She rejected male authority, and she controlled her husband.

Jewish legend says Eve was not the first. It says Adam had a wife named Lilith, who was even worse. It says she defied God and used his name to fly away. Then she bore children who were abominations. God promised to kill many of her children every day. This story must be the reason for the name of the Lilith Fair, which was a recurring event in which godless female performers got together.

I can check.

Here you go; I have Sarah McLachlan’s explanation for the name:

I was talking to a friend about the concept and said, “I need a name.” She goes, “Have you heard the story of Lilith?” In Hebrew mythology Lilith is Adam’s first wife, before Eve. He asked her to lie beneath him, and she said, “No, we’re equal.” She left, and she was made into a cautionary tale. I thought, Perfect protagonist! Obviously words are important to me, and Lilith on its own didn’t seem like enough. I loved the play on words of fair being the sort of old-fashioned fair, and fair being equal.

Legend says Lilith had sex with Samael, and “Samael” is believed to be another name for Satan. Samael was the leader of the fallen angels who came down on Mount Hermon in The Book of Enoch and had sex with women, creating the race of half-breeds (Nephilim) which was largely exterminated in the flood.

It makes sense that Satan would go after women, because he and his friends could not have had children through men.

Satan uses women very effectively in the establishment of false religions. Women are usually the first ones to run to cults. The Mormons approved polygamy because they had a woman surplus.

Derek Prince said that he had traveled far and wide, and he believed that America was the most female-dominated nation on earth. Scary. Whatever women’s virtues may be, they were never supposed to rule men. When God cursed humanity in Genesis, one of the curses was that wives would desire to rule over their husbands. That curse is still with us.

The new culture of offense is feminine in origin. Men judge other people by their actions; women get extremely wound up over their words. If you speak to a woman with flattery but treat her badly, she will stick with you, but a woman is likely to leave a man who treats her well and doesn’t butter her up with words on a regular basis. American culture is busy crucifying people based on trivial words, many of which the speakers didn’t even mean.

American women are setting themselves up as society’s “moms,” snapping at our heels and suppressing us as though we were naughty children under their authority, and men are getting caught up in it, too. Men are more feminine than ever.

Women do not get along as well with other people as men do. Their influence brings division over trivial things. This is one reason why America is breaking into venomous factions. Under the influence of toxic femininity, we are acting like spoiled girls in a sorority house. “You said this.” “You said that.” We no longer care about proportion or good intentions. It’s as if America were a junior high school, and we were all 13-year-old girls fighting over who gets to be on the pep squad.

It’s interesting stuff.

Satan is effeminate, he spreads effeminacy and homosexuality, and the Bible says a spirit called “wickedness” is female.

It makes a certain amount of sense. In relation to God, all creation is feminine, and only God is good. Evil only exists within that which is created. From God’s perspective, that makes evil a somewhat feminine phenomenon.

It’s fascinating to see how ancient, important and damaging witchcraft, drug use, associating with evil spirits, and female rebellion are. It’s not something most preachers will talk about. They don’t see it, and if they did, well, most of them are caught up in feminism. They want butts in seats, so they say what makes women happy. After all, men have given up their leadership roles in families, and women are the ones who go to church, take their children to church, and choose churches. It was never supposed to be this way.

There are millions of women who drive their kids to church while their worthless husbands and sperm donors sleep. It’s not very common to see a man take his kids to church while mom sleeps off a hangover.

I see Eve very differently now. Perhaps you will, too.

High Hopes for December

I am still looking forward to seeing The Last Restoration in action at an upcoming event. In case you haven’t been following my blog, TLR is a charismatic group that provides people with proper baptisms and helps them to operate in the gifts of the Holy Spirit. They don’t just pray for you and give you advice; they expect you to do the same things for others. If you get healed at a TLR event, they will expect you to turn around and get someone else healed.

One of the big problems with modern charismatic Christianity is selfishness. We don’t go to church to serve God. We go to help ourselves. We want to be forgiven. We want to be healed physically. We want God to give us money, spouses, and houses. We want to feel better. We want to be saved from hell.

That’s not how it’s supposed to work.

The other day, I saw a link to a TLR video criticizing the sinner’s prayer. I was amazed. I wondered what they could possibly have found wrong with it. It’s the prayer people say in order to receive salvation.

I took a look, and it turned out they had a point. The sinner’s prayer is about salvation. You confess, forgive, say you believe, and ask for forgiveness and salvation. You do not beg God to help him give your life to him. If you don’t ask Jesus to help you follow him, praying the sinner’s prayer is selfish!

We don’t want people to go to hell, so we run around making them say the prayer. We think this is the most important thing we can do, but is it? Jesus said he would return after the gospel of the kingdom was preached to all peoples, but we are focusing way too much on the gospel of salvation, which is not the same thing. A pimp can pray the sinner’s prayer and get back in his fancy car and go back to work. We’re supposed to repent and have the Holy Spirit put the kingdom of God inside us.

I felt selfish when I thought about the video, but then I remembered something. When I turned back to God in 2007 and started going to Trinity Church in Miami, I wanted to serve.

Twice in my life, I have decided to start attending church. Both times, I expected to be helped and guided by people who knew what they were doing and could put me on the right path. Both times, I was wrong.

When I joined Trinity, I became an armorbearer. I joined the prison ministry. I joined the prayer team. I drove buses to homeless shelters to bring people to services. I cooked. I showed up to help them build a set for a drama production. I did lots of stuff.

As an armorbearer, I was walled off, the way an oyster walls off an irritating piece of sand in its shell. The prison ministry went nowhere and did nothing at all, and the supervising pastor ran off because he realized the church was jerking him around. The church quit supporting the buses. They drove me out of the kitchen. I gave up on the drama team because they dropped part of a set on me and nearly killed me. They were unsafe and inept, and they would not listen to correction.

When I moved to New Dawn Ministries, things went well at first, and then I got walled off again.

I have also made outreaches in other very significant ways.

I had some selfish desires when I was at Trinity; no doubt about it. On the other hand, I tried very hard to serve. Sometimes they made it impossible, and other times, they merely made it unpleasant and pointless. Same goes for New Dawn.

After I left New Dawn, I felt that God did not want me to join any more churches or serve any more pastors. I still believe these things. Pastors do a tremendous amount of harm. They are very effective obstacles.

I have been somewhat too hard on myself, remembering the selfish desires very well and forgetting my sincere efforts to serve.

I feel that over the last couple of years, I have forgotten about service, or at least I have put it on the back burner. Jesus didn’t go to the cross so I could have a big house and hide from the world every day. He wanted me to help him reach others. The Bible says this is the reason why we don’t drop dead and go to heaven as soon as we ask for salvation. It makes sense. What other reason could God have for leaving us in this filthy place, surrounded by hate?

The driving reason that makes me want to see TLR at work is a desire to get my baptism done correctly and obtain whatever supernatural freedom and power I was supposed to get the first time around. That’s fine, but without more, it’s selfish. The video about the sinner’s prayer reminded me that there was a price. I’m going to have to have some involvement in evangelism.

I don’t look forward to standing on the sidewalk with grinning Danish people, trying to get random individuals to submit to prayer. I am way too shy to accost strangers, and in Florida, there is always the possibility of a shooting. Still, I have to reach people in some way or other, or I am wasting my time here on earth.

God’s power is like electricity, and electricity won’t flow well without a completed circuit to ground. The people we help are the ground.

I think TLR is the real deal. I don’t think they have every piece of the puzzle, but they seem to be right about what they’re right about, and they appear to heal people.

I saw an interesting video the other day. They were in an airport in Russia. A young man had a disgusting hand problem. A bone in his hand was loose, and it could be seen pushing up the skin when he manipulated it. Torben Sondergaard prayed for him briefly, and the bone stopped moving. That was really something.

TLR coaches Christians who have already spent a lot of time praying for the sick. Their disciples say they generally failed to get healings in the past, but after the TLR training, they get them quickly and often. That interests me. I find I have to push a lot to get healed. I have to pray and then spend a lot of time praising and thanking. It seems I’m doing something wrong. I’m working too hard.

I don’t know how well their methods work on longtime Christians. Another healer reports that it’s easier to get unbelievers healed than Christians. He says we stay in our sins, and it blocks our healing. You can see this in Isaiah 59. He believes God gives unbelievers more slack, because they don’t know what they’re doing wrong. Does TLR have the same problem? I’ll bet they do. We’ll find out.

I’m the world’s worst evangelist. Unless you count my dad’s questionable request for salvation, I have never gotten a single person to accept Jesus. I’m tired of having a terrible sales presentation.

One of my oldest friends is homosexual and solicits masochist partners on perverted websites, and I can’t tell him for a fact that I can set him free. I know other people who need help, and I can’t promise fast relief. It would be nice to have something stronger and faster to offer.

We have to give our whole lives to Jesus. That’s a fact. We have the idea that if we move a few inches closer to him, our lives will go smoothly. In truth, it invites attack without preparing us to deal with it. A lot of our defeats are caused by our refusal to jump into the deep end.

Derek Prince said something interesting in one of his books. People think the baptism with the Holy Spirit will end their problems, but he said you don’t how what spiritual warfare is until you get the baptism. It’s a provocation. Unless you follow up, it’s like putting on an army uniform, insisting on living behind enemy lines, and turning down weapons.

I’ve learned there are additional things I have to get rid of. I call it “anger porn.”

Ever watch a Steven Seagal movie? How about Jack Reacher? How about violent Marvel movies? Ever watch people shoot criminals on Youtube? This stuff feeds self-pity and anger.

Anger porn movies often follow a common plot. A very, very bad person does something extremely cruel to someone the hero cares about, like John Wick’s ridiculous puppy. The hero finds out, and then he spends the rest of the movie working up to the scene where he doles out incredible cruelty to the villain. How many times have you seen it? The villain gets burned alive, crushed to death, slowly torn in half…something that would be a horror to watch, but for the earlier scenes in which he provoked extreme anger.

Moviemakers and TV people set us up to enjoy cruelty. They even make torture acceptable. How many times have you seen someone like Arnold Schwarzenegger torture someone? Americans are supposedly kind people who find torture repugnant, but at the movies, we root for it, and it makes us feel satisfied.

I have a self-pity problem. I know it. Without realizing it, I have used it to excuse all sorts of things. I overeat in order to comfort myself, because somewhere in my heart, I feel that life has been unfair to me. I say harsh things in order to punish people. I have cruel thoughts. I do things I should not, because I feel that past mistreatment makes them justified.

If you knew me, you wouldn’t think I was like that. I try to be nice to people and treat them fairly. These negative things are all very muted, and I fight them. Nonetheless, the drives are still there.

Self-pity and cruelty are siblings. If you pity yourself, you feel that cruelty is not only permissible but virtuous. You tell yourself rage is “righteous anger.” You make lots of excuses for yourself. BLM and Antifa are self-pity movements, and the small number of conservatives who are reacting with racism and hate are also motivated by self-pity.

Self-pity leads to jealousy. It leads to taking pleasure in the suffering of people who have things you think you have been cheated out of. It leads to stealing and vandalism. It’s a big deal. Rioters riot because of self-pity. They want to “get even” with far-off, faceless Caucasians or Jews or Asian storeowners who keep them down and seem to own everything.

Self-pity interferes with confession and repentance, which are gateways to peace, love, and freedom. Self-pity walls demons in and gives them job security. It’s like tenure.

I am all done with superhero movies, which are stuffed to bursting with egregious cruelty. I don’t care what Thanos or Lex Luthor has done. It’s not helpful to me to applaud while either of them is dismembered or boiled or whatever.

If you keep a door open, you can’t complain about the rats in your house.

I just threw out the only remaining DVDs I considered problematic, from the standpoint of cruelty and anger. One was an old James Caan movie called Thief. I also found a The Family Guy DVD set hiding in a box. I believe I bought it while my cable was out due to a hurricane. Sick stuff. I found a The Twilight Zone box set, which I also threw out. Too much occult content.

Derek Prince pointed out something interesting. God told the Jews to get rid of cursed objects in order to avoid being destroyed along with them. Fine with me. Anything is better than being on God’s bad side. God himself tried to kill Moses for failing to circumcise his son, and I don’t think I’m a bigger favorite than Moses.

I’m glad I don’t have tattoos God hates! You can’t just throw those out.

Christianity doesn’t work very well for most of us, but on the other hand, we do so many things wrong, there is no way we can blame the faith itself. It reminds me of what I say about recipes. If I give you a recipe, and you make changes when you cook it, you have no business coming back to me later and complaining about it. You didn’t really use my recipe, so you don’t know what it’s actually like. If you make up your own recipe for Christianity, you can’t comment on the validity of the faith.

I would like to continue getting rid of the things I mixed into Christianity, and I would like to keep gathering things I’m leaving out. I believe getting rid of cursed objects and practices is powerful, and I expect to get good results from outreach, too.

Maybe one day we’ll start doing Christianity nearly right, and then Jesus will be able to return for a spotless bride, as the Bible predicts.

If you read Ephesians 5, I think you will find confirmation that what I’m saying is right.

If You Investigate Anyone Long Enough, You Will Find a Crime

For a long time, I’ve been critical of the non-thinking extremists who have been calling for Trump’s impeachment, but it’s starting to look like they might finally have a hook to hang their hopes on.

One of the unfortunate characteristics of the impeachment enthusiasts is their lack of familiarity with the law and the concept of due process. They seem to think you can impeach a president simply because you don’t like him or because he does things you disagree with. Of course, this is not the way it works.

The Constitution says, “The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” Leftists need to be aware that this list does not include things like getting a draft deferment for bone spurs, banning travel to the US from Muslim countries, being rich, enforcing immigration laws, marrying models, or calling backward African countries mean names. You have to do something illegal in order to get in trouble. For example, Bill Clinton committed perjury.

It’s also important to point out that impeachment is not removal from office. If it were, Clinton would have been forced out. Impeachment is like being indicted. The House impeaches and refers the matter to the Senate, and the Senate functions as a court and holds a trial.

A lot of people who know virtually nothing about the law think Trump should be impeached based on “collusion” with Russia prior to the election. That’s wrong. Collusion is not a crime. If Trump had wanted, he could have made a promise to collude one of his campaign planks, and no one could have done anything about it.

Robert Mueller is investigating collusion; that’s true. But that’s not because collusion itself is illegal. It’s because it’s a public policy concern. We don’t want the Russians or anyone else deciding who wins our elections, even if they do it legally. We were okay with it when Obama put up websites that allowed the Chinese to contribute to his campaign without security checks, but now, somehow, we care.

Several people have been indicted, but none of them have been indicted for collusion per se. They have been indicted for illegal acts which are not collusion.

Some of those acts were not even committed until Mueller applied skillful pressure.

Mueller can’t prosecute anyone for collusion, so it’s a little weird that he was appointed in the first place. Why appoint someone to investigate something which is not a crime? I don’t know the answer. One would expect Congress to take up such matters, just like they get involved in things like protecting kids from music albums with dirty lyrics.

Here’s something else that’s weird: we don’t have a complete description of the things Mueller is allowed to investigate. Why is that? The secrecy is disturbing. Isn’t this the kind of thing the Bill of Rights was supposed to prevent? It reminds me of The Count of Montecristo.

We have some snippets from Rod Rosenstein, indicating that Mueller is allowed to see if Paul Manafort “committed crimes by colluding with Russian government officials with respect to the Russian government’s efforts to interfere with the 2016 election.” That makes it seem like there is a crime called “collusion,” but there isn’t. The wording is unfortunate. It should say, “committed crimes while colluding.” As far as I know, you can collude all you want, but if you commit crimes while you’re at it, you have a problem.

Rosenstein may have the mistaken belief that collusion is a crime. Let’s assume he thinks it is. The fact that he mentioned it in a memo to Mueller doesn’t mean anything at all. Rod Rosenstein doesn’t write our laws. He may have made a huge blunder.

Collusion could involve things like bribes, fraud, illegal contributions, and so on. On the other hand, it appears it can be done without committing any crimes at all. Banning collusion itself would probably be unconstitutional, based on all sorts of issues, including the right to free expression and the right to free association. It would also be awfully hard to define collusion well enough to put it in a written statute.

If I were wrong about this, surely someone would have pointed to an applicable law by now. The left is jam-packed with people who desperately want collusion to be a crime, and many of them are attorneys, but if anyone has come up with such a law, it has not made the news.

I’m no expert, and I have done no research, but I do have a little common sense, and besides, Alan Dershowitz agrees with me. He’s a pretty sharp guy, and I have considerable faith in him.

No one has been indicted for “collusion.” All the people who have gone down have been indicted for other things Mueller discovered while he was supposedly investigating collusion.

That’s where Trump’s problem comes in.

Former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen got himself indicted for a number of things. None could be considered collusion. Mueller had some issue with Cohen, which has not been revealed, and somehow the FBI was able to turn it into a warrant of astounding reach. Generally, law enforcement can’t grab all your files and then go through them to see if there’s anything incriminating. The Constitution calls that “unreasonable search and seizure.” They have to come up with evidence that you may have something juicy, and they have to limit the scope of their warrants. This is especially true when they go after a lawyer’s files, because lawyers and clients are entitled to confidentiality. In Michael Cohen’s case, they were able to barge in and take everything he had.

The feds have Cohen hanging by a hook in his nose, and Cohen knows just about everything about Trump’s dumbest move.

Trump apparently slept with Stormy Daniels, an aging porn star, and he directed Cohen to pay her to go away. The feds say this is a violation of federal campaign law, because it constitutes a contribution.

It’s a little odd. If Trump paid the money, the payment was legal, because you can spend whatever you want on your own campaign. If Cohen footed the bill, it’s a felony, but Cohen, not Trump, is the criminal. We are now being told that Cohen paid and Trump reimbursed him secretly. That brings up a question: is it legal to contribute to your own campaign through a straw man? I have no idea.

What if Trump expected Cohen to absorb the loss? Is there such a thing as “conspiracy to make an illegal campaign contribution”? Maybe that would be a crime. Still, Trump was relying on a licensed attorney’s advice. Is making a bad decision based on bad legal advice, and then committing a highly technical violation of obscure laws, something that would ground a felony conviction?

Dinesh D’Souza went to prison for straw man contributions, but he was contributing to another person’s campaign, and his scheme was his own idea. He didn’t have a leg to stand on. Trump spent money on his own campaign, which is legal, and he did it on the advice of an attorney. Can he get indicted for telling Cohen to pay, when he secretly intended to reimburse him? Is this something election law expressly prohibits? Does it fall under the general scope of catch-all laws againt fraud? If so, impeachment may be on the table after all.

Trump arrived on the scene as an amateur politician. When his campaign started blowing up, he had no idea what he was doing. He was probably amazed to see himself succeeding, and he had to rush around to find a team to guide him. In all likelihood, he knew very little about campaign laws when he paid Daniels off. He probably thought it was completely legal. Obviously, he did not consult a qualified attorney. Cohen is a fixer; he went to the country’s worst law school, and he is probably not an expert on anything. Election law is a specialty, and Cohen is not someone you can rely on to help you avoid violations.

Dershowitz (a Democrat) actually does research, and he thinks Trump has not committed any crimes. He knows much more than I do, so maybe I should just listen to him and leave it at that. Still, I have not seen anyone discussing the issues I’m bringing up, and they seem very obvious to me.

If I were on the impeachment bandwagon, I would be trying to find ways to go after Trump for fraud or conspiracy. If I were Mueller, I would be exploiting this angle. If I were a New York state prosecutor in Manhattan, I would be waiting for Mueller or other federal prosecutors to come up with something, and then I would see if I could do anything under state law (because if I were a New York state prosecutor, I would almost certainly be a leftist).

Let’s see. What would I ask?

1. Was the payment to Daniels a campaign contribution? If not, everyone goes home. If so, on to question 2.

2. Did Trump direct Cohen to make the payment? If not, Trump goes home, and maybe Cohen goes to prison. End of story. If so, on to question 3.

3. If Trump directed the payment, did he say up front that he would reimburse Cohen? If so, things look pretty good for Trump, and maybe Cohen has an out because he didn’t actually make a contribution, but we still have to ask question 4.

4. Is it illegal to make a clandestine contribution to your own campaign, using a straw man? If so, trouble for Trump and Cohen. Now comes question 5.

5. If it’s illegal to make a clandestine contribution to your own campaign, using a straw man, can you be held accountable, as an ignorant layman, when you do it on the advice of your inept attorney? If not, Trump goes home, and Cohen faces the bar association and the feds. If yes, Trump has a problem, and impeachment may happen, if Democrats decide that alienating 50% of the country and focusing America’s attention on Trump and not their own message are good ideas.

6. If Trump is impeached, will he leave office? No. Don’t be stupid. He doesn’t care at all. It’s barely conceivable that he might step down under immense pressure, in order to allow a more viable candidate to run in 2020, but that doesn’t sound like Trump. Impeachment might make him more viable, because angry Republicans would make an unprecedented effort to get to the polls to teach Mueller and the Democrats another lesson.

7. If he doesn’t leave office, will be be convicted in the Senate and forced to quit? No. The GOP controls the Senate.

Whatever the law and facts turn out to be, it doesn’t seem likely that Trump will be impeached. It’s a bad political move for the left. I think they’re stuck with him until at least January of 2021, no matter what.

It’s interesting to see the disastrous effect the ill-advised special counsel appointment has had. At the start, you would have thought Mueller would look for evidence of illegal tactics used in collusion, and that would have been the end of it. Far from it. Mueller has turned his mandate into an excuse to attack every close Trump associate with regard to every misdeed they have committed in their entire lives. I didn’t see that coming. It didn’t happen in Watergate or the Ken Starr investigation. Think of the people Ken Starr could have put away, had he been as ruthless as Mueller.

When Mueller was appointed, Trump associates who had nothing to do with Russia must have felt safe. They didn’t realize he was going to do his best to get them prosecuted for everything they had ever done.

Imagine being a Trump associate who did wrong in the past and then cleaned up his act before getting caught. Think how you would feel. At first, you would feel wonderful about cleaning up your life, and you’d be looking forward to a life of atonement and safety, Then after Mueller started taking people down for things completely unrelated to Russia, you would realize your neck was on the chopping block after all, simply because you decided to work with Trump.

The Mueller investigation is a dream come true for deep state Democrats who work for the feds. They have carte blanche to investigate people they hate, in just about every area of their lives, and they’re doing it. They’ll get some people indicted, and they’ll ruin the rest financially, because they have to pay lawyers.

Think how discouraging this will be to other conservatives who may want to work for GOP candidates. If you’re a big wheel, by the time you hit 45, you will probably have done something a prosecutor can work with. At the very least, you will have done something a deep stater can use as justification for investigating you and making you sink your entire net worth into attorney fees. There go your kids’ college funds.

When they can’t find old crimes, the investigators can create new ones. They put people in front of microphones and ask them hard questions requiring supernatural recall, and when they make mistakes, perjury charges become a threat. Once that happens, the feds make the terrified witnesses sing for their freedom. It’s a very nasty business.

The Mueller appointment was a stupid move. Congress could have handled this just fine, and they should have. After all, they’re the ones who make the laws. If reform is required, Mueller and the FBI are powerless to implement it. It requires legislation. Collusion is not a crime. If we need laws to limit it, Congress, not the FBI, will have to make them.

Wouldn’t it have been something if Ken Starr had acted this way? Federal prisons would have had to stay open late to process Clinton cronies. Whitewater, Hillary’s illegal enemies list, the corrupt use of Arkansas state troopers to procure women for Bill…the prosecutions would have gone on for years.

I hope we’re not seeing a pattern for future special counsels, but I guess we are. They will all want to measure up to Bob the Terrible.

Planning to run for office some day? I admire your guts. Maybe you should just stay in the private sector.

Glimpse of Freedom for Me

Today I passed a milestone. I took my dad to visit an assisted living facility.

People in my shoes refer to assisted living facilities as “ALF’s,” so I will do the same.

Back in September, I checked out a few places because I knew my dad’s condition was going to force him out of the house before long. I went to several places in the Ocala area, and I also visited one farther south. I learned a lot. None of the places I visited were bedlam-style asylums, but I saw that the system was tiered. The bottom tier is somewhat grubby. The top tier is made up of resorts that would be fine places for able people to visit, were the old people to be cleared away.

I thought my best bet was the top tier. The nicest place I visited was beautiful. It has very high ceilings, lots of windows, and an abundance of new paint and tile. It seemed to be run well. I felt that a person of my dad’s means, accomplishments, and social standing might be best served by an institution of this grade.

ALF’s are divided into sections for advanced dementia patients and individuals who are merely old and in need of some help. The main sections are a lot like retirement communities, except there is more of a communal atmosphere. They have common rooms for things like TV, reading, and puzzles, and they have dining halls. The memory care areas are less like apartment buildings and more like hospitals. If my experience is any indication, they are more likely to smell.

The worst place I visited was the memory care section of a lower-tier facility. The inhabitants were in a bad way. The attendants were busier than they were in the main area, because they had to watch the patients constantly. It was more closed off than the main area, because the patients had to be confined for their own good. My dad doesn’t need that level of care yet, thank God.

I called around this week, and I decided to take another look at the second-nicest ALF, which is close by. It’s not as new or fancy as the ritzy place down south, but the people are very nice, and it’s easy to get to if I want to take him to lunch or a doctor’s appointment.

It’s better than I remembered. The dining room, in particular, made a good impression. It looks like a restaurant. They have nice furniture, tablecloths, and waiters. When mealtimes roll around, he can plop down and boss people around, ordering whatever he wants as long as it’s on the menu. I wouldn’t mind eating there myself. It would be more convenient than doing dishes.

The rooms are nice. They’re just like hotel rooms. He would have a fridge and a giant TV. One nice thing about it is that they don’t have DirecTV, which is what he has now. Don’t listen to Rob Lowe. DirecTV is a nightmare. It’s torture even for a person of sound mind. The system is maddeningly slow, most of the channels are pay-per-view or shopping channels, the receivers have to be cycled over and over because they quit, and the picture disappears when it rains hard. The ALF has a normal cable system with 80 channels.

I can’t tell you how many times my dad has bellowed for immediate help with DirecTV. We had two sessions today, and one lasted about 15 minutes.

The more I think about it, the more I think it will work. The nicer place is nicer, but the half-hour drive would be a nuisance. If he goes to the ALF we visited today, it will be no trouble at all to visit him or take him out to do things. That’s a huge plus, because his main gripe is the he won’t see me as much. He doesn’t say it, but I know.

I can understand why he’s upset. If I had a son who jumped up and catered to my unreasonable whims seven days a week, day and night, I would want him around, too. I hope there is more to it than that, but in any case, I am a gigantic convenience to him.

I don’t care if he’s here nearly every day, as long as I can take him back in the afternoons. The ability to dump him and go home and clean up and sleep, all by itself, is worth the cost of the ALF. Until today, I had been thinking of ALF’s as places where people become separated from relatives and go on to live separate lives, but I have realized that it doesn’t have to work that way. You can use an ALF as a place to deposit a parent most of the time, to preserve your sanity, while taking him out regularly to keep him from feeling abandoned.

I don’t know how hard it is to put up with a routine of checking a parent out and taking him back. Maybe it’s too stressful for them. I hope not. You don’t want to jam someone into a home and then wait at a distance while he dries up and dies.

The cost is not that bad. Somewhere in the thirties. Obviously, we have to spend whatever is appropriate, but money is money, and getting good value for what you spend is always a blessing. The general rule in life is that one does not want to spend more than one takes in, and if one can observe that rule even in retirement, without cutting corners, it’s a great thing.

He is still unhappy about the ALF plan, but as of the moment, he is willing to do it. He has to do it, so he needs to adjust. Things are going to get worse and worse. It’s not like his doctor is going to give him a pill next year, cure his dementia, and turn him into Brad Pitt. He is going to have to have an ALF. Before long, he’ll have to move to the memory care section of an ALF. I don’t really know what comes after that. Maybe it’s the last stop. Anyway, he keeps saying he doesn’t like it, but often you have to shut up about what you like and choose from what’s available. When he was drafted, he didn’t get to stay home because he didn’t like it. You make tough choices, or someone makes them for you.

I’ll send him for a short stay when I travel this month, and we’ll see what he thinks. If he likes it, we can sign him up, and then we’ll be all set. Afterward, I’ll spend several days dancing in the front yard. The house will be clean. I’ll be able to have a coherent thought once in a while. I’ll still be able to see my dad, but I’ll be able to send him back to his comfy room (which someone else cleans up) before the sun gets low in the sky.

I won’t have to do 10 extra loads of laundry every week. I’ll be able to use the refigerator in the kitchen instead of the special, clean, locked fridge in the laundry room. I’ll be able to sit in the living room instead of hiding upstairs. The inside of the car won’t have to be cleaned with bleach and disinfectant wipes all the time. I won’t have to sit in the upstairs room cringing as I listen to the sound of him blowing his nose over and over on the living room floor. I may not be able to stand the freedom.

I could conceivably have a guest. I could get on a plane and visit someone. I remember doing things like that.

My dad likes to nag me about marriage. The other day I told him no woman would move into this house with me with things as they were. He said she could take over cleaning up after him. He really said that.

Truthfully, I am not interested in romance with women in my age group. I feel like I missed the marriage boat. I’ve seen my dad surrounded with the paraphernalia of old age and decrepitude, and I am not eager to start a marriage with a woman who already has the starter kit. It’s one thing to marry a young woman and get old with her. It’s another thing to start out with a first wife who reminds you of the time your grandmother forgot to close the door while she was getting dressed for church. With sex and reproduction off the table, I’d be better off splitting a house with a close male friend. We would have the same tastes in everything, and each of us would have someone close by in case he had a heart attack or a stroke.

When you live with another man, you never get the silent treatment because you used the special decorative soap or said you didn’t want to go to the cat show. You don’t have to ask if it’s okay to spend $1500 on a third rifle in the same caliber. You don’t have to tell people they don’t look fat when they are clearly obese. Another man will never say nice things to you and then stare at you, waiting for you to say the same things back even though you don’t mean them.

Another nice thing about men is that they forgive, for real. We are too lazy to carry grudges. I would say maybe 20% of women are able to forgive.

Men who live together don’t have to recycle or eat salad. Cans, bottles, newspapers, batteries, motor oil…it all goes in the kitchen trash, and you never have to eat arugula.

I think men and women look at marriage very differently. A woman can be very happy with a man who is completely unattractive, as long as he gives her financial security and a face to talk to. Men are not wired for that kind of relationship. Women, to be honest, are a pain to put up with as live-in companions. You have to have something beyond friendship to make it work. Romance helps you forget the sacrifices and annoyances. It can even make the irritations seem charming.

Women are harder to get along with than men, and that’s why they can’t stand each other. Men would feel the same way about women, but for romance.

I can write these things because I’m not married. If I had a wife, I’d have to sleep in a hotel tonight. Even though I’m right.

To get back to the point, I feel that my dad was mistaken to hope that a woman would marry me and then cheerfully assume all responsibility for his messes. I don’t think that kind of assumption has been reasonable since about 1750.

If things work out, I may have something resembling a life by the end of January. It may be a permanently celibate life in a house with no pictures on the walls and no special decorative soaps, but I expect to enjoy it all the same.

Neil DeGross Tyson?

I guess everyone on earth will eventually be accused in the #MeToo frenzy, and then, having run out of scapegoats, we will have to start accusing each other’s pets.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson is currently in the grip of the feminist thumbscrews. The accusations don’t look all that exciting.

The first one came in October of last year. A woman who used to know Tyson claimed she was drugged and raped.

The alleged victim bills herself as a “renowned musician, healer, and teacher.” As soon as you read that, the bells start to go off. It’s not the kind of thing stable people tend to put on resumes. If you are renowned, you don’t have to tell people. That’s what “renowned” means. If you’re a real musician, you will generally identify yourself with an instrument instead of making a vague claim that looks like puffery. If you’re a doctor, you will say so. “Healer” sounds like someone who hangs around health food stores and has a collection of magic crystals. If you’re really a musician and healer, can you possibly have time to be a teacher? Maybe. If you’re a substitute teacher.

People who have actual careers can usually come up with unambiguous titles for themselves. Someone I went to law school with put up a self-worship website that listed his qualifications something like this: “attorney, warrior, scholar, poet, humanitarian, activist, inventor of the doorknob, Navy SEAL, 93rd-degree black belt in all known martial arts, astral projectionist, minor deity, leaper of tall buildings in a single bound, and close personal friend of the Pompatus of Love.” In reality, he was a failed attorney on his way to an endless suspension based on a complete refusal to do any work or respond to bar inquiries. He has been on suspension for around eight years, which is maybe seven years and nine months longer than they usually last.

The accuser has a music page on Amazon. I looked up one of her CD’s, and it has 4 reviews. Enough said. I can’t find anything online identifying her as a working teacher.

She says he gave her something to drink, and that all she remembers is finding herself back at work the next day. Look at this:

The ONLY way you could EVER be with a Black Goddess, a true Celestial Being, not just one that talks about them, would be by DRUGGING HER, THEN DRAGGING HER TO YOUR BEDROOM, WHILE FULLY UNCONSCIOUS, TAKING OFF HER CLOTHES, AND THEN, WHO KNOWS WHAT WITH HER, OR FOR HOW LONG, WHEN SHE AWAKENS, UNABLE TO MOVE, YOU CONTINUE YOUR DEMONIC ACTS.

Okay.

He gave her something to drink. She indicates she doesn’t know what happened after that. Somewhere else, she said she woke up naked with Tyson on top of her.

She says she doesn’t know how she got home, and she doesn’t recall waking up. She just remembers enough to get Tyson in trouble.

So you’re unconscious because you’re on some substance or other, you come to briefly, and then you pass out again. Then you tell your story and think people will find it so credible they’re willing to go along with the destruction of a man’s career and marriage. I dunno. If you had a good story, and you were willing to go public, why didn’t you call the police and have evidence taken?

How do you know you didn’t get drunk deliberately, black out, and then imagine the battery? Grad students have been known to drink and take drugs.

I feel like a person who is willing to make a rape accusation has a responsibility to preserve whatever evidence she has. “Believe the woman” is a fun slogan for non-thinking individuals to toss around in order to get social media likes, but in reality, life can never work like that. Our legal system runs on evidence, and it has to be that way. The alternative is deliberate systematic injustice on a nationwide scale.

Here is something she wrote about herself, for her website:

Tchiya is a “Keeper of the Dream”. The healing energy of her life is illuminating her music. Her natural singing voice & lyrics embody the spirit of beauty and variety as well as metamorphosis of rebirth, love & hope. The lion is her ally. Tchiya embraces the lion and learns to balance power, intention and strength with the feline grace and majesty. Her heartfelt change is transformational, leading the way to rebirth and clarity – that we are all related to one another.

Wow. I think she got a hearty dose of the liberal education complex’s self-esteem Kool-Aid.

I’ve seen this a lot. Educators tell minority kids they’re brilliant and handsome and as talented as Mozart, regardless of what the truth is, and the kids start to believe and repeat it. It makes adjustment hard when real life hits them in the face and tells them they need to think about managing Taco Bells or becoming x-ray technicians.

Hey, maybe he’s guilty. I don’t know. But this is not the kind of evidence that convicts people. My best guess is that this woman is seriously mentally ill. Whatever the truth is, her accusation is worthless, so it shouldn’t count against Tyson.

As a Christian, I suspect this lady is a witch, so she may have all sorts of problems. She is into astrology and mysticism.

What about the second accuser?

Her name is Katelyn Allers. She has a large tattoo that wraps around her upper body. She says she showed it to Tyson. While he was looking at it, he lifted part of her dress off her skin to expose more of it. There are photos, and she is smiling.

This is pretty weak. She consented to his exam, and she cooperated physically. She says it was not assault (“battery” is the correct word, but still). If it’s not battery, why are we hearing about it?

This may seem rude, but it’s pertinent: in the photos, she is a very unattractive woman. Very. Yes, women who aren’t beauty queens are often victims of sexual mistreatment, but lustful men at social gatherings are not all that likely to lose control and grope women who are not appealing. It brings no pleasure and serves no purpose. The most plausible interpretation of the story is that Tyson actually wanted to see the tattoo, and that Ms. Allers fell under the spell of #MeToo and raised a stink. If we were talking about Scarlett Johansson, and she were frowning in the photos or punching Tyson in the face, there would be a story here, but as it is, I find the allegations (or Allersgations) incredible.

The third accuser is the first one to come up with anything disturbing, unless accusing someone without solid evidence is disturbing. She says she was Tyson’s assistant. She says he invited her to his home at 10:30 p.m. to drink wine and unwind.

Okay; this is not proper employer conduct. Granted.

She says he took off his shirt and lounged around in a sleeveless T-shirt (sorry about the mental image), playing sex-based music on his stereo and replaying the dirty parts. She claims he said something about needing “release” and not wanting to hug her because it would leave him wanting more.

Not good. He’s married, for one thing. Also, an employee shouldn’t have to be concerned about gross, inept overtures from a superior. Still, she could have said “no” and left at any time, and for all we know, things would have been fine. This is not Weinstein or Spacey territory. It may not even rise to the level of harassment. It’s a bad idea to try to commit adultery with a subordinate, but it’s not necessarily grounds for a lawsuit, and it’s not even close to criminal.

Do I even have to say it’s a little weird to see leftists getting upset over attempted adultery? Aren’t they in favor of all types of fornication? Here’s a quick question: does anyone remember who was president in the 1990’s? Has anyone heard the name “Lewinsky”?

The fourth accuser should never have made it into the press. Essentially, she says Tyson was drunk and propositioned her. She was at a party with her boyfriend, and Tyson tried to get her to go to his office for what he said, or she presumed, was sex. This is not sexual misconduct. It’s a very normal effort to get consensual sex.

Ever hit on a coworker at a Christmas party? Congratulations. Now you’re a sex offender.

Here’s what I think, as a former sort-of physicist: Tyson is not a hit with the ladies. This is normal for physicists. When I was a grad student at U.T. Austin, one of the other guys said that when the told girls he was a physicist, they took off so fast they left skid marks. Tyson has probably had many awkward interactions with women during his life, because that’s typical for members of his occupation.

Physicists tend to be socially incompetent. Maybe Tyson simply isn’t able to discern and deal with boundaries like most successful men. When he goes overboard, he may simply be trying too hard to imitate alpha males he has observed.

It’s 2018, and he wears Jheri curls. Cut him a little slack. He may be a bit lecherous, and maybe he needs a lecture about fidelity, but he’s not Bill Cosby. Not unless the lady who says the lion is her ally is actually telling the truth.

I am not a Tyson fan. He seems supercilious and contemptuous to me, particularly with conservatives and Christians. I’m not the kind of person who would defend him reflexively. But #MeToo is a movement with no safety catch, and when people are targeted, others should stand up for their right to a defense, and they should also be willing to point out weaknesses in the accusations.

Now watch him turn out to be a serial rapist. I may be totally wrong about him. I’m just looking at the material we have in front of us right now. Based on that, I think he ought to be encouraged to act his age, and that should be the end of it.

Also, maybe he should be a little slower to get self-righteous with Donald Trump, whom he threatened to grab by the crotch because of his amorous proclivities. A sleeveless T, Luther van Dross, a single woman, and a married professor don’t add up to moral authority.

Fresh Threshold Crossed

This is an interesting day. My dad has forgotten how to make breakfast, and he has also forgotten what he usually eats.

For years, he has been getting up and making himself scrambled fake eggs, turkey “bacon,” and toast. He has a special stainless skillet. He can’t use Teflon because if he burns it accidentally, the fumes can kill my pets. He has been handling his own breakfast needs one way or another ever since I was a kid, and now, at least for today, he can’t do it. Maybe tomorrow he’ll remember again.

I have to adjust. Cooking real food for him would be time-consuming, and I have other things I have to deal with in the mornings. For example, I now have to go in the bathroom while he showers and prevent certain problems from arising. I am also wiping kitchen surfaces with a weak bleach solution and bringing him the clothes he is supposed to wear every day. If I simply hang clothes in his closet, he will wear them multiple times without putting them in the laundry.

I’m going to get some sort of prepared frozen stuff we can throw in the microwave. It will do for now. Maybe I can come up with something better later.

Another problem with cooking for him is that he would expect me to eat with him, and that’s something I want to limit. His manners have never been great, and things have gotten worse. It may seem like a little thing to a person who has never looked after a demented person, but looking at chewed food and enduring other unmentionable issues during meals takes a toll on you if you do it every day.

I can imagine indignant people telling me I need to get up at 5 a.m. and make him fresh, healthy, delicious food every day. Here’s the thing: his diet is not going to be great from now on, and I’m okay with it. His diet has never been good, it was his own choice, and the damage is already done. As long as he enjoys what he eats, his diet is fine. He will be gone in a couple of years no matter what he eats.

You have to ration out the time you spend working with demented people unless you want to end up in a mental home, and all time spent with a demented person is work. The repetition, the insults, the gaslighting, and the mess and filth wear you down, and human beings can only take so much without rest.

Other people will try to make you feel bad about refusing to turn yourself into a slave, and your patient is likely to be chief among them, but you can’t pay any attention. Your life is more important than an aging parent’s. The natural and divine orders agree: the old are supposed to sacrifice themselves for the young, and doing it the other way around is a malignant aberration.

Imagine what would have happened had Isaac Newton given up his career to look after his mother. No, I’m not Isaac Newton, but everyone has a life and a purpose.

In more encouraging news, my dad is suddenly taking a better attitude toward assisted living.

While we were discussing his breakfast problem, he asked me if he was senile. He realized being unable to fix breakfast was not normal. I discussed his dementia with him again, and I brought up assisted living. I told him his care was starting to put demands on me which I could not meet. He tried to tell me I didn’t do much for him, so I reminded him of the things I do. I said the ALF I was considering was a short distance away, and that I could take him out for lunch several times a week. I reminded him that we had an appointment to visit the place tomorrow.

He was surprisingly agreeable. He said he would do what I thought was best. Of course, he won’t remember that later today. His behavior tomorrow will depend on how he feels then. We’ll have to take up the subject all over again, de novo, as appellate courts put it.

What made the difference? I think it was prayer. The last few days were very hard, and yesterday I did what God always tells me to do. He says, “Do what you already know to do, before complaining and asking for more.” I used the power of blessing and cursing, and I prayed for God to do specific things. After I prayed, I thanked and praised God for a very long time. This is a very strong tactic, and most of us don’t do it.

I was so weary, I was thinking of fasting until tomorrow morning. No food or water. I asked God about it, and he seemed to be against it, so I had breakfast. I got good results, so I think I did the right thing.

Nothing is worse than being tied to someone who is against God. That’s the big lesson I’ve learned. I didn’t choose my parents, but I chose to stay close to my dad after I knew what he was, and after that, every bad thing that happened between us was my fault. I know people who turned to God after marrying awful spouses. They suffer like crazy. Many people have abusive friends and bosses. We’re not supposed to start down these roads. It can be extremely costly.

Tomorrow we will visit the ALF, and we will see what happens. He will be staying there temporarily week after next, so that will give him another chance to get used to it.

I was thinking of putting him in a ritzier place farther away, but the people at the closer facility seem nicer, and it will be more convenient if I have to go get him for errands and outings. If it turns out to be a bad fit, I can move him to the other one.

If I had to choose, I would prefer to drop dead at 70 instead of putting my child through what I go through. Of course, I don’t have a child, so I don’t have to worry about that. My nonexistent wife and kids have been spared, so I will have to carry my own weight if something goes wrong.

I can say this: if anyone ends up caring for me, they won’t have to worry about being abused or gaslighted. I don’t have a perfect record, but basically, I am not like that. I don’t think I would compound the fun of changing diapers and mopping walls with insults and guilt trips. I hope not.

After several years of caregiving, I can’t imagine what it will be like to be free. I’ll be able to travel. I’ll have a clean house. I won’t have to hide upstairs when I eat. I will miss my dad sometimes, even though I will see him often, but on the whole, it will be like getting out of jail.

Looking into Respite Care

I have resumed looking into assisted living options for my dad.

We have started having hygiene issues which are too hard for me to cope with. There are some things a person can’t tolerate. I no longer believe in-home care will work. I can’t predict when he will have another problem, and he will not tell me when one occurs. By the time I find out about the next event, I’ll have a Herculean cleaning and disposal job ahead of me. Kiss a day and a half goodbye. I can’t afford that kind of time drain, and I haven’t mentioned the health risk to me or the misery of living with filth.

It’s very hard to figure out what to do with a person who has vascular dementia. The disease progresses quickly compared to Alzheimer’s, so what works one month may not work the next. I have been trying to choose among in-home options as well as assisted living.

My dad doesn’t have a temporary or trivial problem. My dad is dying. His condition is fatal, incurable, and irreversible. That has to be a fundamental premise all his care providers have to acknowledge. Doctors have a tendency to avoid talk of death until a patient burdens them, personally. Up until that time, they treat, treat, treat, wasting money, wearing down caregivers, and putting off important decisions until everyone involved is rushed.

Doctors like money, and they don’t like helping people make decisions. A friend of mine interned in a hospital when I was in college, on his way to becoming a very unhappy radiologist. He said he listened to the doctors when he rode the elevators. The young doctors talked about medicine, and the older doctors talked about money.

When I talk to a doctor about my dad’s care, I’m thinking about doing the right thing. I’m sure the doctor thinks about that, too, but he also thinks about the money he will make by ordering additional treatments which he knows have no potential to help. I have to be willing to be assertive with doctors.

If you’re in denial about death, you may find that a doctor will take advantage and agree to charge you for treatments you don’t need. You have to be aware of this unless you want to be milked like a cow before you die.

It’s not just the money. Medical treatment brings other problems. Say my dad gets a back operation and can’t move for six weeks. I’ll have to hire someone to come and deal with him every day. I’ll have to be in charge of whatever regimen he is given while he recuperates. I’ll have to go out and buy new things he needs. I’ll have to wrestle with him every day and make him cooperate with measures the purpose of which he does not remember. That’s not acceptable.

What if his cardiologist tries to give him a quadruple bypass? Guess who will be looking after him while he heals. I’ll get even more behind in my other responsibilities, which are very important. Then he’ll still die in a year or two, from dementia. The doctors would make money. The drug companies would make money. My dad and I would be left holding the bag.

You can’t just accept every treatment doctors offer you. Treatment often makes things much worse. Look at Kanye West’s mother.

My dad is dying, dying, dying. I refuse to pretend it’s not happening, and I hate it when people other people soft-soap me about it. It’s not helpful. He probably has less than two years left. During his remaining time, he will get worse in sudden steps. He will forget more and more people, including me. He may lose the ability to talk. He is already losing the ability to walk, and he will probably become unable to get out of bed. Someone else will have to bathe him and change his diapers while he waits for the end.

I can’t slap him in a facility and expect things to be fine and dandy until he dies. He is losing the capacity to live in his home without major problems, and he will also reach a point where the slight demands of assisted living will be too much for him.

If he deteriorates over a long period, I will have to make a lot of difficult adjustments. If he dies suddenly, whatever arrangements I have made up to that point will suffice, and I will be spared further confusion and effort. I don’t know which of these two alternatives I’m facing.

Last week, he was open to assisted living. He now says he will kill himself if he has to go. Not helpful. It’s not true, either. He would never harm himself. Some people are incapable of that kind of thing, and my dad is one of them. Still, it means he will not do the mature thing, and it means he will make me suffer until he adjusts to his fate.

My current plan is to put him in assisted living for a few days. It’s called respite care. I’ll take him to a nearby facility, which I have already called, and I’ll leave him there while I visit a Christian conference in another city. I don’t know if he’ll like it or not, but that’s not something that has to be considered. Fate doesn’t always give you choices. He has to do this.

I think once he’s there, he’ll realize it’s better than living at home. He’ll have people to talk to and boss around. He won’t have as many challenges as he has here. He’ll be overfed, which he likes.

As always, the resources available to me are very poor. When I Google, I get thinly disguised ads. When I contact people, I get mobbed with sales calls and spam. My dad’s doctors are probably good at treating the sick, but they are not helpful in dealing with patients who will soon be dead from dementia.

I joined an online support forum, but the people there were so obnoxious and self-righteous, I quit.

Even Yelp and Angie’s List don’t help.

On Friday, we will be visiting the place where my dad will be staying while I’m gone. I hope the visit isn’t a circus, but I won’t let his selfishness deter me. I’m going to that conference, and he is going to submit to respite care whether he likes it or not.

I hate to say it, but I look forward to the days when I no longer have to do this. The hardest things to take are the abuse, the lack of gratitude, and the filth, in that order. He called on God for salvation back in September, and things got very peaceful for a while, but since then he has denied his faith, and tension has returned. I think the cause is supernatural. Satan wants me to be angry and forget about love.

Christians are supposed to flee temptation. A person who has had problems with gluttony shouldn’t keep bowls of candy in his house. Abusive people are just like bowls of candy. They tempt. My dad tempts me to be angry. Even if it’s my fault when I give in, it’s still a bad idea for me to be exposed to such a person more than is necessary.

It shows why we’re not supposed to have unequal yokings. I will never have another one unless it is forced on me.

Restoration Threatens the God of This World

I have been watching videos from The Last Reformation during breakfast.

I have written about The Last Reformation already. It’s a movement that started in Denmark, of all places. Europe gave up on God a long time ago, and the Scandinavians are generally not interested in him. They are known for arrogance, hard work, socialism, and sexual sin. It’s strange to see Scandinavians being used to do a major work for God.

TLR promotes proper water baptism. That’s interesting to me, because in today’s Christian church, almost no one knows the purpose of baptism. The Catholic-penumbra churches are especially ignorant. They don’t baptize at all. They sprinkle babies with water. Baptism means complete immersion; it comes from Jewish ritual immersion, and the Jews go under. You can’t baptize a baby, because baptism requires a conscious decision to serve God.

If you were sprinkled when you were a baby, and that’s all you have, you have not been baptized.

Most churches that immerse are wrong, too. They think baptism is a sort of initiation rite, like a college graduation. They think it means you acknowledge Jesus before men, and that’s it.

Torben Sondergaard, the big figure in TLR, says baptism isn’t just a symbol or a way to become a member of a church. It’s for remission of sin.

Why is that interesting? Because it’s what John the Baptist (the Complete Jewish Bible calls him “John the Immerser”) said. He called people to be baptized in repentance. Once his ministry got going, Jesus came for the first time.

Now we have a group pushing baptism combined with real repentance. If they’re doing things correctly, aren’t they doing the work of John the Baptist? If that’s true, then could it be that they are preparing the world for the return of Jesus? Perhaps this is their purpose.

The Bible says Jesus will return after the “gospel of the kingdom” has been taught to all peoples. Most churches aren’t teaching the gospel of the kingdom. They teach the gospels of salvation, hard work, positive thinking, licentiousness, greed, anger, and so on. Some of the gospels they teach are true, and many are wrong. In any case, most churches aren’t teaching people about establishing the kingdom of God inside themselves.

Remember, Jesus said the kingdom of God was within us. The disciples expected him to conquer the Romans and establish the kingdom on earth, but he left the Romans in charge and focused on changing people internally.

There is a difference between teaching about Jesus and teaching the gospel of the kingdom of God.

TLR is teaching total repentance. They are teaching the baptism with the Holy Spirit and prayer in tongues. They expect the people they minister to to become ministers themselves, immediately. If that isn’t the kingdom of God in operation, it’s certainly much closer to it that what you will see on TBN and Daystar, and it’s light years ahead of what the Pope teaches.

In Acts 2, at Pentecost, Peter told the Jews they needed to be baptized for the forgiveness of sin, and that if they did, they would be baptized with the Holy Spirit. Jesus himself was baptized with the Holy Spirit when he was immersed. The Holy Spirit manifests at TLR baptisms all the time. People begin speaking in tongues while they’re still in the tanks, and demons leave them.

I received things out of order. I got the baptism with the Holy Spirit before I was (badly) baptized with water. I want to get everything corrected. I still have problems with demons, and I want them to end.

Generally, we don’t teach people to become ministers. We aren’t really interested in becoming pro-active and serving God wholeheartedly. We go to church as a matter of duty and fear, hoping to be protected and helped without giving too much of ourselves to God in return. We are satisfied with treading water when we should be walking on it.

Peter taught that the flood, which drowned beings that later became demons, was a shadow of New Testament baptism. That can’t be a coincidence.

When you watch TLR at work, you have to ask: is Elijah finally here?

In the Old Testament, Elijah was one man. In the New Testament, John, who continued his ministry, was only one man. Elijah and John lived under the old covenant. Under the new covenant, things are different. It’s about reproduction and multiplication. Just as Israel was a man and a nation of men, Jesus is God and a nation of men. He has a body made of of many people. One of the main purposes of his coming was to allow him to generate countless powerful replicas of himself to carry on his work. If Jesus has a body, can’t the work of Elijah also be carried out by many people?

It’s as if Jesus were Ulysses and the church were Penelope, beset by crass, selfish suitors while her husband makes his way back to her. The important components of Christianity are like axe heads that have to be lined up before Jesus can shoot his arrow through them and take his authority back. Proper baptism is an axe head.

I hope TLR is evidence that the Elijah anointing is back, because it would mean this tawdry, cruel world was coming to a permanent end, to be replaced by something much better.

God has taught me a great deal, but there are still a lot of holes in my knowledge. They should not be there. I let myself down by giving up on prayer many years ago, and churches let me down by replacing sound knowledge with paganism and self-help nonsense. I suppose churches have been useless since the beginning of the Middle Ages. It’s very sad. But how can I condemn when I made myself useless? God would have taught me a lot more by now, had I held onto what he showed me and put it to use consistently.

I am looking forward to seeing TLR in person. I fully expect Satan to come up with all sorts of obstacles to keep me away, so I am praying for a clear path. My young friend Travis is trying to get free to go. I hope he makes it. He has the same concerns I do. I’ve told a bunch of friends about it, but only one really seems motivated.

Unexpected Present Arrives

If you don’t want to hear about moderately gross medical stuff, this would be a good time to head on over to Youtube and watch some cat videos.

I have had kidney stone issues this fall. I thought I had only been having them for a couple of weeks, but my memory failed me. I just checked, and I started having trouble in September.

I went to doctors for my first two stones (over a decade ago), but after that, I got used to receiving sudden healings after prayer, so I quit relying on doctors. I believe I passed two stones at one church and a couple at another. I no longer remember for sure. When I had problems this fall, I figured I would rely on God again.

I drank a lot of water and beer, and a stone came out in late September. I figured I was done. Hooray! Then last month, more stones came out. I passed several in one day. I did not know what to make of it.

I have felt a little weird since then, and I had some more symptoms. I didn’t think I still had stones. I figured I might have a lingering infection caused by the stones.

This morning I was surprised by the unexpected launch of yet another stone, and it was a lulu. I think it’s a personal best. I’m going to say it’s 4 millimeters long, although I haven’t measured it. I did save it, just so I could marvel at it. Also, if I have more problems, a doctor may want it. And it makes a nice paperweight.

I’ll tell you something weird. When a stone which has been driving you nuts for a long time comes out of your body, it will somehow seem precious to you. I feel like having mine set in a ring.

Here’s something weirder. Now that it’s out, things in that general area are working better than they have in years, not weeks. What’s up with that? I’m wondering if I had bladder stones for years and didn’t know it.

A small kidney stone can become a bladder stone if you don’t blow it out of your bladder. Then it can grow and cause annoying symptoms. When I was dealing with my long parade of stones over the years, it never occurred to me that they could end up my bladder. I’m not a doctor. What do I know? I knew I was getting old, so if the system didn’t run quite as smoothly as it did when I was in high school, I chalked it up to age and did not worry about it.

I have been reading about bladder stones today. Usually–not occasionally–they have to be removed by some horrible mechanical process. They use a device made by the same people who make those crane arcade machines that pick up stuffed animals. I’m pretty sure.

I’m not saying it’s EXACTLY like the crane machines. I believe they put a little oil on it before they use it. If the Obamacare death panel agrees to spring for it.

Evidently, if I were not among the blessed, I would have been in for a very unpleasant and, probably, expensive procedure.

I must have had a bunch of stones for quite a while. I thought I was drinking tea (causes kidney stones) and getting away with it, but I was mistaken.

If things really are as they seem, then not only am I healed of various stones; other common problems I had assumed were developing are not. That would be nice. My dad is a prostate cancer survivor, and I do not wish to have any problems with that particular bit of the anatomy. Some men do, and some men don’t, and I want to be in the latter group.

Man, I hope I’m right. It would be like Christmas in December.

Okay, EARLY December.

Sometimes I’ve wondered what I would do if I had this or that disease. In the case of prostate cancer, I have always felt like I should go for palliative care without trying to cure the cancer. Take dilaudid, watch TV, arrange my estate, and wait for the end.

I’m a Christian, and I don’t believe in suicide, but I’ve never heard anyone say it’s a sin to decline treatment. That loophole has helped a lot of people who could not find divine healing.

Prostate cancer treatment is unbelievably humiliating. You end up in diapers, perhaps permanently, and you lose all sexual function. It’s like my Great Aunt Berthy once said about being hooked up to machines and tubes to stay alive: “It’s not worth it. Not to stay here.”

She made it to 98, and she kept a big garden well into her eighties. I mean like half an acre, with hand implements. She had a root cellar sort of a structure behind her house, built into a hill. She kept it full of things she canned, plus her famous liniment, which burned like lye. She also kept bees. Big lady. Looked like she was 6 feet tall to me. She once shot a guy for bothering her chickens.

I am not overly attached to this life. The more I learn about God and heaven, the more horrified I am to be here at all. This is a very rough place. Injuries. Aging. Disease. Death. Income tax preparation. Jury duty. Killer bees. Paper cuts. Liver. The worst.

When I realize there is a place like heaven, I can’t believe I live on hell’s roof in a body which is nothing but a sack of vulnerable, malfunctioning, unrefrigerated meat.

I suppose that almost sounds pessimistic.

I’ve seen movies about angels and divine beings that have decided to become human for some unbelievably stupid reason or other. The second Superman movie! Remember that? Christopher Reeve gave up his superpowers. What a moron. What was the first thing that happened to him afterward? A middle-aged truck driver who was smaller than he was beat him bloody with one cheap shot. He bled all over the floor at a diner. First time he ever felt pain.

He brought that on himself. At least he was smart enough not to stick it out. Think how he would have felt, buying reading glasses at 40 or rupturing a disk at 70 while lifting a grocery bag full of prune juice.

He would have loved Obamacare. Shelling out $800 per month to be treated like a lab specimen.

Think how he would have felt, 30 years after Lois ran off with Jimmy Olson and took the Fortress of Solitude with her, lying in a doctor’s office with a bulky camera on a greased stalk invading his formerly immortal person. Imagine the regret. DOH!

No, no, no. If you have a choice, inside a flesh body is not the place to be.

I am extremely happy about the way things turned out. I did not expect to come out of this better off than I was before I got sick.

In what may be related news, I got a serious blessing last night.

For some time, I have been trying to get more love to flow through me. I had health issues that involved blockages, and I felt that they were God’s way of showing me how I blocked the fruit of the Spirit from flowing through me. I knew from past experience that God was able to open me up and make love flow normally, so I prayed for it a lot. I was tired of being provoked. I was tired of hostile emotions, including things like envy and malice.

Last night during prayer I started focusing on loving God and people. I sort of pushed from the inside and tried to hold the channel open. I know that sounds weird. I made myself think of the most infuriating people I knew of, and I forced myself to feel warmth toward them.

Since then, I’ve been doing pretty well with it. I have been choking the negative things off before they can get a grip. I know God is helping me, because I have tried this before, and it didn’t work.

I have had problems with worry. The Bible says, “Completed love casts out fear.” Jesus has visited me twice, and I felt love radiating from him like heat from a fire. While his love was bathing me, I could not feel fear. The desire to be rid of worry was one of my main motivations for trying to open up to love. I don’t know why love erases fear. It’s not intuitive. It’s true, however.

I do not want worry or fear. I don’t want their sibling, doubt. I do want love. We’re supposed to be little replicas of Jesus, and when people interact with me, God’s love should flow through me toward them.

God once told me he created the universe for love. That’s really something. Who else would create a universe for love? Others might create it for power or entertainment or fun. God made love the top priority. In heaven, we are going to be irradiated with each other’s love all the time. How strange that will be. Down here, we’re so busy putting out fires, being reactive, we don’t have that much time to think about love. That’s even true in churches, where we focus a lot on duty or the things we hope God will do for us.

If God’s love flows through you, your circumstances won’t be able to make you worried or afraid. That’s something very few preachers teach, and it’s not something we commonly think of as a goal.

It must have been love that enabled Jesus to face the cross. It seems that way, based on John 3:16. A parent will fight a tiger to save a child, and God is no different, except in degree.

I had a spiritual breakthrough last night, a kidney stone I didn’t know I had flew out the next morning, and afterward, I was in better shape than I had been in years. Is it a coincidence? It doesn’t look like it.

I plan to keep at it. I am determined not to be an angry or worried person for the rest of my life. I can’t make God happy and succeed for him if I’m nothing like him in my heart and mind.

I hope this is helpful to people, and I hope they get to read it. A hacker screwed up my site last night, and I had to do some work to fix it. I don’t know what other tricks he has up his sleeve, and I’m not willing to put a huge amount of work or money into making the site totally secure. If it goes down, it goes down. I’ll get over it.

I’m not sure why I attracted the attack. Maybe it was random, or maybe someone out there has a problem with Jesus.

I believe I’ll go drink more water now. I want EVERYTHING to flow.

Additional Obstacles to Holiness Revealed

I’m sitting here watching Youtube videos from The Last Reformation, and I just had a weird experience. I realized my mother received a word from a false prophet, and I needed to renounce it.

In around 1990, I went to the Bahamas. My dad and I took his boat over. We went to Harbour Island, which is just off Eleuthera.

My mother never liked the boat, but she showed up for a time. She flew back to Miami on her own.

The airport at Eleuthera is a few miles away from Harbour Island. You have to take a water taxi to get there. I went with my mother and helped her with her luggage and so on. Then I left.

When my mother and I were reunited, she had a strange story to tell me. Before I left the airport, I saw a female janitor. She was an older lady with a rag wrapped around her head. She was mopping and so on. After I left, she approached my mother. She said, “Where’s Stephen?” My mother didn’t know what to say. She told her I was gone. The lady said, “Stephen is a good boy.” Then she went back to cleaning.

Obviously, the cleaning lady at North Eleuthera Airport did not know me or my mother.

God says things to me from time to time, and a couple of years ago, he gave me this: “I am not the good boy.”

I never put these things together until today. God told me the opposite of what the cleaning lady told my mother.

Today I renounced what the cleaning lady said. I used to have a vague idea that maybe her words meant something. Maybe they meant I would be used by God. For all I knew, she was a Spirit-led Christian. Now I know better. God doesn’t tell people they’re good, because they are not. He may say he is pleased with you, but he will never say you’re a good person or that he is proud of you. He’s not even proud of himself. When he praised Jesus, he didn’t say he was proud. He said he was pleased.

Bahamians practice obeah, which is voodoo. Like all voodoo, it comes from Africa.

I don’t know what the cleaning lady was into, but it looks like she had a spirit of divination, and these spirits always cause problems. They never willingly do anything that will help people. Even when their messages seem helpful, they come from white-hot hate and sadism, and they are designed to do damage.

It’s funny, but even though the Bahamas are full of witchcraft, Christianity is also big there. They’re more open about it than we are. We hide our Christianity in America, because we want to be cool, and because we have a pathological fear of promoting Christianity in public forums. It’s like we think it’s a crime, like housing discrimination.

I just Googled to learn about Bahamian witchcraft, and I found a neat article in The Freeport News. This is a major newspaper. The title of the article: “Is your relationship bound by witchcraft?”

I suppose people who are very used to seeing the supernatural at work through witchcraft are less likely to be ashamed of their beliefs when they become Christians. It’s too bad Americans don’t have that mindset. We’re very ashamed of Jesus. In the Bahamas, a city’s main newspapers can have a column by a serious minister of the gospel. In America, printing such a column would provoke the same reaction as publishing articles promoting Nazism.

In other news, I just found out I have more things to get rid of. I have two flamenco CD’s by a prominent artist I will not name. I don’t want people to run out and buy his music because I praised his talent. He’s very, very good. I had been under the impression that his work had no supernatural significance, but I just learned that he is considered a New Age artist.

As I have pointed out before, “New Age” is Hinduism, which isn’t “new” at all. It’s demon worship. There is more to it than Hinduism, but Hinduism is a big part of it.

Satan loves to repackage his moldy, infected crap and tell us it’s new.

More CD’s for the dump. I can’t have this excrement around me. Anything that opens the wrong doors has to go.

I haven’t gone through my jazz albums yet, but I think some of them need to go. Nina Simone was not a good influence for anyone. Neither was Miles Davis. John Coltrane was a mystic who blended things like Buddhism and Hinduism, and he apparently had a demonic revelation that gave him the entire theme and structure of the album A Love Supreme instantaneously. That album was dedicated to his eclectic false religion.

Whatever. Small sacrifices to make, in exchange for a better relationship with God.

It’s astounding, how so many poisonous things in my life escaped my notice. Supernatural blindness is really something.

Australian Preacher Has MSM Success

Today I am thinking about an Australian man who heals people in the name of Jesus.

I know God works miracles. He has done it for me, and I don’t just mean he has done unlikely things; he has done physically impossible things right in front of me. I also know that there are a lot of criminals out there pretending to heal people. As a person who witnesses the supernatural from time to time, I am always looking for others like me, and I view them with skepticism because many who claim to fit the bill are liars.

The situation is more complicated than that. There are terrible preachers who sometimes get people healed. Also, there are people who get healed temporarily. A person might throw his back brace away at a meeting and then collapse a few hours later. We need to be set free from charlatans. We need healing. We need the healing to last. Finally, we need to be born again so we don’t continue to be attacked and harmed.

Supposedly, people have been healed at Benny Hinn appearances, at least temporarily. Benny Hinn is a greedy, twisted man who teaches the false prosperity gospel, and the damage his teachings do is far greater than the good that accrues from any healings that take place. It doesn’t do you a lot of good to have your slipped disk fixed if you go on to live in heresy and never receive Holy Spirit correction and restoration.

You will lose your body eventually, so having it repaired is a limited benefit. Your heart and mind are different. They will be with you in heaven or hell. You need to have them repaired. That’s the big priority.

I look for people who carry out God’s commission. We have been told we are supposed to heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse lepers, and cast out demons, so if anyone is out there doing these things, I want to know about it. I want to be part of it. This world is a rotten place, and almost all of us live cursed lives of defeat and hopelessness. I would like to see people win for a change.

There are a lot of healing videos on Youtube, but the healings aren’t documented all that well. Were they real? If so, did they last? It would be nice to see more healings that have survived real scrutiny.

The Australian healer I watched is named John Mellor. He’s a remarkable case. He says he drives an old Holden, which is a GM car about like a Chevrolet. He says he doesn’t own his own house. He says the offerings he has received haven’t been sufficient to offset what he has spent. It looks like he’s not a typical TV profiteer. On top of all this, secular journalists in Australia have done stories on him, and they bear out the claims of healing.

How about that? Close-minded people masquerading as reasonable skeptics always say that if healing were real, it would be documented. Here’s a guy who passes that test, but skeptics still attack him.

I’ll embed a video you might like. A journalist from Australia’s A Current Affair went to see Mellor. He had a neck problem, and he decided to let Mellor take a whack at it. Mellor prayed for him, and in his narration, the reporter said, “A warm, tingling sensation spreads across the top of my spine.” His pain left, and he said, “It is real. I can feel it.” A later broadcast said the reporter’s healing had persisted.

Mellor also prayed for a little boy who was hydrocephalic. He couldn’t walk or talk. Nothing happened when he prayed, but a couple of weeks later, the boy improved, and now he walks and talks. I’ll embed that video, too.

In a third case, Mellor prayed for a boy who was mentally abnormal due to a chromosome problem. The boy didn’t receive a healing, but his father did. His father had been afflicted with arthritis for decades, but after Mellor prayed for him, he was able to run again.

Anyone can put up a video and claim somebody got healed. How many healers can get the secular, anti-Christian press to confirm their successes?

Naturally, Mellor has not won the approval of every journalist. A crippled preacher teamed up with the BBC to “debunk” his healings. According to Mellor, the BBC edited the video dishonestly. He cites facts the BBC concealed. I’m not going to sit through a long TV show in order to do a in-depth analysis, but I can say this: if you have ANY documented long-term healings, you can’t be debunked.

Generally, healing preachers are quiet about their failures. When healings are undone, you generally don’t see TV preachers devote air time to them. Mellor appears to be different. He admits he doesn’t always succeed, and the coverage shows one person who was healed temporarily and then relapsed almost immediately.

I’m impressed. You can make a ton of money healing people, and Mellor hasn’t done it. You can protect a profitable healing ministry by covering up failures. It appears that Mellor isn’t doing that. He’s a hard man to criticize with any credibility.

I would love to do what he does. I hate physical and mental problems. I hate knowing that we are subjugated by demons who are supposed to be under our feet. I hate the powerlessness of the church. If we were doing what we were commissioned to do, we would be bringing a lot more people to Christ. Imagine how different things would be if homosexuals knew they could be changed in one prayer session. Instead, we send them away to find their own toxic solutions.

There are two things the church should be working on. The first is getting people healed and delivered. We do those things very poorly.

Charismatics have more success than anyone, but we’re not that good. For example, most terminal cancer patients we try to help, die.

If you go to the Catholics or other dead churches, you can pretty much forget about being helped. They think miracles are rare or that they don’t happen at all.

The second thing we need to work on is getting people born again. That means getting them saved, filled with the Holy Spirit, and purged of iniquity. We need them to be sanctified so their problems don’t return or increase.

The fact that you’ve been healed or delivered from demons doesn’t mean you’re fine. If you have sickness or demonic problems, it means doors were opened. You need to close those doors. You have to confess and repent, over and over. You need to take communion. You need to go through your house and throw dangerous things out. What good is a healing if the sickness returns or you go to hell?

God is about love and justice (see Psalm 101). When you focus too much on love and forget justice, you leave doors open. Many Christians are so excited about warm, fuzzy feelings, they refuse to judge sin. They enable. They do things for sinful people in order to make themselves feel good, and they leave the sinners wallowing in their filth, open to attack.

Jesus was a very rude person, because he needed to be. He told people exactly what they needed to hear. He did not worry about their precious feelings. What did he tell people he helped? “Go and sin no more, lest a worse thing come upon you.” If we get people delivered, and we don’t let them know they’re still in danger, we do Christianity a disservice. Their problems may return or increase, and then they’ll testify against God.

I wish preachers had had the guts to tell me the truth. I needed it, and they handed me lollipops instead. They were afraid I’d quit giving them money and free work. They could have shortened my captivity and weakness.

God keeps showing me things I need to change. I keep throwing things out. I can’t expect God to bless me if I hold onto garbage that offends him. Most preachers keep quiet about this issue.

I have thrown out all my blues and rock CD’s. I threw out all my music materials related to the blues and rock, as well as other anti-Christian music. As of yesterday, I still had a few things buried in boxes. I got up last night, dug them out, and put them in the trash.

When I was going to feel-good churches, I thought it was okay to have worldly entertainment. As recently as a few weeks ago, I was okay with Marvel movies, which feature a lot of witchcraft. I was blinded.

I had a pair of “four vices” cufflinks. They are menswear classics. They feature four pictures. One is a racing horse, another is a hand of cards, the third is a slutty woman, and the fourth is a bottle. They celebrate gambling on horses, gambling at cards, fornication, and drunkenness. I thought they were cute. Last night I put them in the trash. I was paying tribute to dangerous sins. I was insulting God by owning these, but at the same time, I was asking him to heal me and help me.

There are a lot of blockages in my life. I have had kidney stones, gallstones, nasal allergies, and so on. I believe God is showing me what I do to him by holding onto anti-Christian items. I block him, so I am blocked. These things may seem innocent, but they’re not. They’re a big deal.

It’s not okay to own recordings of people like Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, singing songs about women’s bodies. Holiness matters. Can you imagine Paul listening to that junk between meetings? Never. It’s inconceivable. Yet we listen to the blues and worse, and we expect God to think it’s fine.

Many people testify that God gave them sudden help when they got rid of pagan carvings and artwork. It’s not uncommon for people to have little African figurines. In Miami, Haitian paintings related to voodoo are common in the homes of educated white people. Items associated with idolatry are little openings, like cat flaps, that let demons enter your house and you. You have to be willing to dump these things. You can’t serve two masters.

My dad went to Europe with my mother and a couple of other relatives a long time ago. In Florence, they saw a statue of a fat naked man riding a tortoise. My mother thought it looked like my dad. She bought him a little copy. He still has it. I’m planning to throw it out. Why would a Christian want a thing like that in his house? The souvenir value doesn’t justify it. The artistic and historical value don’t justify it. Nothing is worth opening yourself to a relationship with demons.

Oh, boy. I just looked the statue up. It’s from the gardens at the Pitti Palace. It represents Bacchus, a violent, drunken “god” from the ancient pantheon! Great. I have an idol in my house. Out it goes, ASAP.

My grandmother’s father wouldn’t allow playing cards to come into his house. When I was a kid, I thought that was weird. He knew something I didn’t. He was even afraid to let his daughters cut their hair. Maybe that comes from the verse that says a woman’s hair is her crowning glory. My grandmother’s hair wasn’t cut until after he died, and she was about 18.

I still have some bad music stored on devices I don’t use. I need to get rid of it.

Last night, I threw out my Firefly DVD set, as well as my old copy of the book Serenity. Joss Whedon is in a pit of delusion. He is filled with burning rage all the time. I used to watch his shows. I loved Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I watched Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. until it deteriorated to the point where it became unwatchable. I have watched some of his Marvel movies. No more. He is completely controlled by hostile spirits, and I don’t want to share in it.

I threw out my copy of Hannibal, the book the movie was based on. The whole Lecter universe is evil. Author Thomas Harris must live in a very dark world.

Because I moved last year, I have an inventory of all the books I owned before leaving Miami. It has been helpful, because I can look at the list and pick out the things that need to go. I had a Toni Morrison book. Sick stuff. It’s in the trash. She’s the woman who wrote Beloved, which is a novel about a demonized Reconstruction-Era black girl who is murdered by her mother and then returns from hell.

I’m glad I don’t have any Alice Walker novels. She’s a witch and a raging Israel-hater.

Man, this world is dark. Jesus was not kidding when he said Satan was the god of this world. Look at the people who make it in the arts. Whedon. Walker. Morrison. J.K. Rowling. The Beatles. Rihanna. When I was writing books, I never had a chance, and I didn’t know it. The available seats were reserved for the family. It’s too bad I didn’t understand the rules.

I hope John Mellor is the real thing. I would love to do what he does. If God used me like that, I would want to work it out so I never took an offering. When you accept money for working for God, you open yourself up to slander. It’s not that easy to attack a preacher who works for nothing. The enemy’s children would still try, though.

Can you imagine driving cancer out of another person or making a lost leg grow back? Imagine what it was like to be an apostle. They raised the dead so they got new chances at life. They fixed cripples. They filled people with the Holy Spirit and helped them become as powerful as they were. It must be the most satisfying thing imaginable. It has to be worth throwing out a few unimportant midbrow books written by people who were ignorant about the most important thing in life.

As liberating as the message of sanctification is, it’s sad to think about it, because I know 95% of Christians will reject it. They want their cigarettes and weed. They want their ungodly entertainment. They want to live in sin with boyfriends and girlfriends. They want to fit in. People who talk about sanctification will be marginalized as kooks and legalists.

Maybe you’ll like the Mellor videos. If there are bad things about him I don’t know, maybe you can tell me about them. In any event, I like his line of work.