Today I am Casting Stones

I had a couple of healings this week.

The day after my dad prayed for salvation, a package arrived from Amazon. I had ordered a rawhide hammer. This is a very heavy steel hammer that holds two rawhide faces. Very useful. The hammer came in a box.

I put the box on a kitchen counter about 4 feet off the floor, and it slipped off and fell on my left little toe. The heavy steel head of the hammer was in the end that hit me. The only thing between me and the hammer was thin cardboard. I was barefoot, and the floor is hardwood.

You might say it hurt.

Later on, my foot turned several different colors, including vivid blue, bright red, and purple. My little toe took the blow, but the colors spread over a wide area. Of course, I prayed a lot, and I started right after the hammer hit me. I always pray as soon as I receive an injury, and sometimes I don’t even curse first. The sooner you attack, the more likely you are to prevent problems from setting in.

I have a lovely photo of my foot, which I took in case I wanted to document a healing, but I will spare you. It would ruin your next meal.

Apart from the initial pain, it wasn’t that bad. I was able to walk without suffering, although I couldn’t wear one of my pairs of boots because of the swelling.

Early the next morning, I awoke with some pain, so I spent a good long time praying. I went back to sleep, and when I woke up, the colors in my foot were muted compared to the day before, and the pain was gone. I was no longer nervous when I walked without shoes. You know how that works. After you bang a toe on something, the thought of hitting something else is terrifying.

My foot still looks bad, but I have to work it pretty good to make it hurt.

Sometimes I quit praying after I get most of what I asked for. My foot wasn’t totally healed, but it was well enough to make me feel that I didn’t want to sit and pray any more. Maybe I should push for the full healing every time.

After I hurt my foot, I started having symptoms consistent with the presence of a kidney stone. I didn’t have pain. I had a strange feeling that I wasn’t well. You will understand if you’ve been there. I also had some other symptoms.

I wasn’t worried. If memory serves, this was my 6th stone. The first and second ones were not much fun because I didn’t know God very well. After that, God healed me consistently. I prayed in a church parking lot and felt one move, and then it passed. I prayed in church about another one, and I passed it in the men’s room. I prayed in church about the next one, and it also passed in the men’s room.

Last night I asked friends to pray for me, and I also drank 4 beers and a bottle of water to help things along. Beer is great for moving kidney stones. This morning the stone passed. I still don’t feel quite normal, but I suppose that’s to be expected when something has been poking at your insides for several days. I guess there could be more stuff lodged in there, but I doubt it. That has never happened to me before.

I know why I got the stone. I haven’t been drinking enough water. I drink purified water to prevent stones, but I tend to put off opening bottles because I don’t like going to the store and buying more. Kind of a counterproductive regimen.

I got healed, so I have a duty to glorify God. That’s why I’m blogging right now.

I hate going to doctors. I consider it proof of failure. God has healed me of lots of things, and it’s the correct way to get healed. He doesn’t charge. He doesn’t leave scars. There are no side effects. He will even show you why you had the problem in the first place so you can change and avoid future issues. Doctors charge too much. They screw up. They cause pain and humiliation. You know how it works.

Doctors tend to be very patronizing. They talk to patients as though they were mentally retarded. As a person of faith, I don’t want to put myself in situations where I end up discussing prayer and demons with doctors. They don’t know the first thing about the supernatural.

Tell a doctor you’ve seen a spirit, and he will diagnose you as insane, and a judge will back him up. A modern shrink wouldn’t hesitate to put Jesus in a mental institution. He talked to spirits and claimed he worked miracles. I don’t want to be around doctors unless I have to. They live in a different world, and it’s a world of blindness and delusion.

It always disturbs me when Christians say, “God will use doctors to heal you.” Okay, yes, that happens. But it’s not divine healing. Divine healing is miraculous. If a Christian has to go to a doctor to get help, it means he failed to get the supernatural healing which is his inheritance. Surgery and drugs aren’t “miracles,” because man can take credit for them.

Life is hard because we rely on carnal tools instead of getting supernatural help. Christians aren’t supposed to work 12-hour days at jobs they hate. They’re not supposed to push themselves. Hard work is a curse, and it takes you away from God. It makes you a prisoner who can’t respond to God when he calls on you, and it makes it very hard for you to spend adequate time in prayer.

The worse your relationship with God is, the more you will have to rely on weak, carnal tools. Your enemies are spirits, and they use powerful supernatural tools. It’s as if you’re going up against a machine gun with a wooden spoon. A Christian should never brag about working hard. It’s like bragging about paralysis or deafness. Besides, God hates bragging.

God told me this: we become arrogant through striving in the flesh. I also heard this while I was praying the other day: “You fought for David.” Remember the story about David witnessing the spirit army that fought his enemies? We are not supposed to fight alone.

God wants us to have supernatural tools that make life easier. When we reject them, we have to use carnal tools. If you don’t have a machine gun, pick up your wooden spoon and do your best, but you should be looking for the machine gun. All of us should be looking for supernatural healing. It beats spending a lot of money and being cut up, pierced, rectally violated in front of strangers, and drugged.

Elisha was ill when he died. I don’t know what happened, but my guess is that he had some sort of iniquity that opened a door. He was able to heal others and raise them from the dead, so he should have been able to heal himself. If I can do it, surely he could.

I hope I don’t have any healings this coming week. By that I mean I hope I don’t need any. Protection is better than healing, any day.

I was about to wrap this entry up, but there is more. Danged if I didn’t just pass another stone. Maybe there are more to come. Anyway, they’re emerging.

If you feel like praying for me, I would appreciate it. I hope I never see another urologist or x-ray technician.

A Thoughtful Enemy is Still an Enemy

I don’t want to get stuck to the tar baby known as politics today, but I have a few comments about the underhanded effort to keep Brett Kavanaugh off the Supreme Court.

Alan Dershowitz is calling for an FBI investigation, and he says the confirmation vote should be delayed. This looks bad, right? Dershowitz has supported Trump against the special counsel over and over. He must be a Republican, and if a Republican isn’t supporting Kavanaugh, something must be fishy.

I’m sure some people are saying that, but Dershowitz is a liberal. He has taken issue with the special counsel’s tactics based on his concerns about corrupting our justice system. He’s not doing it because he supports Donald Trump. He voted for Hillary. He would be very disappointed to see a new conservative justice appointed.

The fact that someone as liberal as Dershowitz has been standing up for Trump merely shows how far gone the left is. He felt he had to speak. It doesn’t mean he’s on our side. He has made it clear that he is not, and he seems frustrated that so many people don’t believe him.

Democrats want to push the confirmation back as far as possible. They might take the Senate in the midterm elections. If they can do that, Kavanaugh is dead, and they might be able to prevent Trump from putting any new justices on the court. They could also kill his other judicial picks. It might be the start of an era of total leftist domination of two branches of our government.

Dershowitz is unquestionably hoping to see the Senate go blue, so I wouldn’t get too excited about his opinion on the Kavanaugh confirmation.

I would support an investigation if it were August. It would surely help Kavanaugh, at least in the minds of reasonable people. The more digging is done, the more obvious it will be that Kavanaugh is telling the truth. The problem is that Dianne Feinstein deliberately ran out the clock, withholding the Ford accusation until it would jeopardize Trump’s chances of appointing a new justice. You can’t sit on your hole card for weeks and then pretend it’s acceptable to ask for an additional lengthy delay.

Moving on to another point, the American Bar Association recommends that the Senate wait for an FBI investigation. That’s important, right? After all, it’s a bar association.

Wrong. The ABA is not a bar association, in spite of its name. They can’t regulate lawyers. They can’t issue or revoke licenses. No lawyer has to belong. I joined in law school to get some discounts on things, but I quit as soon as I could. Why? The ABA is notorious for its leftist activities. Of course they’re against Kavanaugh and Trump. It would be a miracle if they took any other position.

Look the ABA up and find out about their positions. You’ll quickly realize their recommendation carries no more weight than one coming from Al Sharpton.

I could start a club tomorrow and call it a bar association. I could call it the Official Bar Association of the United States of America. No one could stop me. I could accept conservative lawyers only, liberal lawyers only, or even people who weren’t lawyers at all. I could use the name for a strip club and only accept exotic dancers. Don’t get too excited by the ABA’s important-sounding name. It’s just a bunch of liberals who somehow got a lot of influence over law students and a certain segment of America’s lawyers.

I can’t think of a single attorney in my family, judges included, who belonged to the ABA.

What does it mean if the GOP pushes for a quick Senate vote on Kavanaugh? Does it mean they hate women? Does it mean they think an investigation will hurt Kavanaugh? Of course not. It means they want to get him confirmed or gone quickly, so they have a chance to get someone else confirmed before they lose the Senate. They need to move fast. It won’t be that long before newly elected leftists senators, if any, will be sworn in.

The GOP needs to get the vote done now, for better or worse.

They should remember this: they will be hated and slandered no matter what they do. The left has become so unhinged, it’s impossible to placate them. The GOP should quit trying to appease the unappeasable and do what’s right for the country. Maybe some of them realize that.

God has shown me an important principle: you have to let people make peace with you and make amends. You don’t do it for their sake. You do it in order to avoid becoming a hate-filled chunk of stone who is not worth talking to. If you want allies and friends, you have to allow your enemies to be reconciled with you. Leftists don’t understand this. They don’t provide due process, and they don’t accept apologies. They don’t acknowledge atonement. They’re not smart enough to realize this destroys our motivation to work with them.

Kavanaugh SUPPOSEDLY committed a misdemeanor around 40 years ago, as a minor, and since then, he has behaved beautifully. His accusers are not credible. Their witnesses contradict them or refuse to back them up. He has a calendar which shows he was not present when his first accuser says she was molested. Sane people wouldn’t have dignified her claims with a response, and even if they were true, it’s ridiculous to persecute a middle-aged, reformed man over something he did at 17.

You can’t win with leftists. They’re all over social media reviling him as though Kavanaugh had been proven guilty, and as if his alleged misdeed were right up there with cannibalism (or killing unborn babies). The GOP can’t get a fair shake, so they should do what they think is right and take the heat for it.

Leftists always turn on people who threaten their power. Remember McCain? He was a hero to leftists because he constantly stabbed his party in the back. Then he was nominated as the GOP candidate for president, and suddenly, he became a dangerous reactionary throwback. People said he was senile. Then he got sick and died, and suddenly he was a hero again. It’s a waste of time trying to curry favor with these people. They never give an inch.

The Senate should vote and get it over with. If Kavanaugh is confirmed, the kerfuffle will end. A year from now, leftists will be hollering about something else. They will still libel him whenever possible, but like Clarence Thomas, he will be a back-burner enemy unworthy of much effort.

I’m a Sucker for Misdirection

I have to quit digging into the fuss over Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. Carnal people are fighting a carnal battle, and I’m allowing myself to be dragged into it. Christians are supposed to focus on the supernatural. We’re supposed to fight principalities and powers, meaning spirits, and I’m getting worked up over the bickering of people who are as low and worldly as monkeys. They have no idea who the real enemies are or how to fight them.

If leftists are firing salvos of lies in order to destroy unborn children, we should realize it’s because they let themselves be controlled by demons. They don’t know the Holy Spirit. They don’t hear God’s voice. They wander around lost, spitting poison at those who support God. Often we return the favor.

People who serve demons are like sharks’ teeth. Sharks have teeth that grow in rows that move forward over time. When a front tooth falls out, the tooth in the row behind it moves up. We’re trying to pull teeth when we should be neutralizing the sharks. Defeat one human being who serves the devil, and another one will be found to take his place.

The Bible says we are more than conquerors. A conqueror defeats. A person who is more than a conqueror turns enemies into allies. America is full of leftists who are on their way to hell, and we are no better than they are. The difference between us is that we accepted forgiveness and help. We should be using supernatural tools to defeat leftists, turning the battle over to God, and we should be fighting the spirits that hold them captive.

If enough Americans knew God, leftism wouldn’t be a problem here. Leftists would be few and powerless, as they used to be. We gave God’s human enemies power by turning away from the only one who ever gave us victory.

I should be writing about the things God is doing, instead of complaining about blind, venomous people who rot our nation.

Last Saturday, my dad prayed for salvation, and our whole relationship changed. I should be writing about that every day.

The improvements I started seeing after my dad prayed seem to be permanent. He doesn’t drive me crazy any more. We spend more time together. I think more about helping him and less about avoiding provocation.

Yesterday I waited for him to get up and dress so we could have breakfast together. I took him to Cracker Barrel, and we talked. He still says a lot of the same repetitious things, but he’s not goading me any more. I don’t look at the time on my phone and wonder how much more time I should put in.

After breakfast, I took him to the mall to get some new pants. You have to keep an eye on clothing when you care for a dementia patient. They will wear rags if you let them. For some reason, he needs shorter pants now, and the cuffs of some of his old pants have become worn from dragging and catching things. He has pockets that are developing holes, too.

I made the mistake of parking near Macy’s. When we went in, I saw that they had a lot of upscale stuff but nothing suitable for my dad. He doesn’t need Polo. He needs moderately priced pants of decent quality. Things I buy him may not last long, so there is no point in spending a lot.

We had to walk across the mall to another store. That took a while. I would walk a bit, and then turn and wait. Sometimes he fell 50 feet behind me. I had to remind him to take long steps and avoid looking at the ground. His physical therapist is trying to teach him those things.

At another store, they were selling no-iron pants for two-thirds off. I couldn’t believe that. I had him try some on to figure out his size, and we bought three pairs for under $60. If they work out the first time he wears them, I’ll run back and get three more.

I wondered if these were the last pants he would ever need.

Trying on pants took a long time. I got him slip-on shoes, but they’re not as easy to put on as I had hoped, and sometimes it takes several minutes for him to get his feet into them. I sat on a chair in the changing area and read the news on my phone.

On the way back to the car, I had him stand at an exit, and I told him I’d get the car and come back for him. When I drove back a minute or two later, he had started walking, so I had to stop in the road to get him.

It’s very strange, not being provoked all the time. It reminds me of the story about Jesus releasing a woman who couldn’t stand straight. In the past, I had to reject and defeat anger many times every week. It was as if my dad were firing flaming arrows at me. Every time I put one out, another one came over the wall. That’s not happening any more.

You have to avoid unequal yokings. It’s not something you have a choice about. They will make you suffer. I yoked myself to a man who hated God, and it caused me a lot of problems. When I spend too much time thinking about politics, I’m doing the same thing. I’m yoking myself to people who get off on being angry and malicious.

Yesterday, I realized something. My mother married an atheist. That’s what ruined our family. I had never seen it that way before, but now I see that it’s obvious. There was an unequal yoking, and it paid dividends of failure and stress. If I had had two Christian parents with good prayer lives, my life and my sister’s life would have been completely different. We would have been raised in love and peace instead of fear and violence.

Don’t date an atheist. Don’t date a Jew, apart from Messianics. Don’t date a pagan, a Mormon, or a Jehovah’s Witness. Don’t date anyone who worships Mary or “saints.” If you do, you’re poisoning your future. When you go home at night, you have to be among people who don’t play for the other team. You have to be with people who are on your side. You can’t expect things to go well when you bunk with your enemies.

Christianity can’t be reconciled with any other faith. It’s wrong to try. Jesus had no tolerance whatsoever for other religions, and you can’t change the rules.

Paul warned us, and my mother didn’t listen. It caused decades of needless pain. It wrecked her legacy.

Sure, my dad finally came around. At 86. After his wife killed herself with a nicotine addiction. After his daughter destroyed herself. After I did my best to ruin my own life. God wanted to prevent those things.

I’m glad my dad made it, but think how things might have been had my mother married a Christian. My dad’s belated salvation doesn’t make my mother’s choice acceptable or right.

I was in a sexual relationship with an atheist. I can’t believe I was that stupid. It ended up causing me a lot of misery. Thank God it was cut short. I have often thought about the suffering marriage would have caused, and it’s scary.

I’m still reading Pat Conroy’s The Death of Santini. It’s a history of his family, beginning after he became famous. It’s a disturbing read. It’s a book about a destroyed family. The Conroys are just as tormented and crippled today as they were in 1960.

One would expect the son of a wife-beater and child abuser to be soft-hearted and repentant, but that’s not Pat Conroy. He depicts himself as obnoxious and violent. In his book, he threatens to beat his siblings. He threatens to beat a building manager who has to evict his grandmother. He did these things long after he became wealthy and famous.

His brothers and sisters are not success stories, either. He writes about his schizophrenic brother, Tom, who hated him for trying to help. Tom jumped off a building. He writes about his sister Carol Ann, who also had mental issues and who raged at her family all the time.

His dad didn’t change. He denied the things Conroy wrote about him, and he behaved better in order to prove Conroy was wrong. He continued to bluster and deflect.

The Conroys come off as a family with very little class, if you want the truth. The father beats everyone. The mother beats Carol Ann with a broom. The grandmother sleeps around and drinks herself unconscious. The sons are angry and bitter. If there is a moment of redemption in the book, I haven’t seen it yet. Instead of coming together, the Conroys merely squelch their hatred and force themselves to get along in spite of it. That’s not what God wants for us. He wants to take hatred out of us.

The Conroys were Christians, but they were not Spirit-filled. They were Catholics. Conroy’s uncle was a priest who beat him when he was a child. Catholicism doesn’t teach people how to know God personally or how to tap into his power and become like him in their hearts. It’s very sad. They made an effort to please God, but they weren’t shown how to make it work. The church helped destroy them.

They were worldly people, and worldly people don’t heal.

I wouldn’t have wanted to know Pat Conroy. He was apparently quite a jerk, for lack of a kinder term. I want to be less of a jerk, and I don’t want jerks in my life.

My own experience tells me there is something better. God changes relationships on a very deep level. I’m thankful for that. Hosea said God’s people perished for lack of knowledge, and I am very grateful for whatever knowledge I have that the Conroys didn’t.

My dad is changing, and that’s wonderful, but he has taught me never to go near anyone else like him. Never, never, never, NEVER. I don’t care what you claim you can offer me. If you’re on the other side, you will keep your distance. I can do good things for you. I can treat you with courtesy and respect. I can pray for you sincerely. That’s all you get. You can’t be in the inner circle. It’s not worth it. I’m too old for it.

If you’re a young Christian, think about the company you keep. You are making choices that could have evil results that last for centuries. If you choose to go against God, he may not listen to your cries for help when you get what you deserve. He let the Jews walk in the desert for 40 years because they wouldn’t listen.

It’s amazing how ignorant we are. It’s a wonder our problems aren’t much worse. We don’t understand the basic principles that bring us success and protection.

New Client Has Baggage

Interesting developments in the bizarre case of Julie Swetnick. This is the woman who claims she went to more than one party at which young men used alcohol (something you drink voluntarily) or drugs in order to get sexual access. She claims she was raped at such a party, and she says she saw men lining up to rape women, although she chose not to inform the police at the time.

She would have the Senate Judiciary Committee kill Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination based on the fact that he was “present” at these parties. She doesn’t say he participated in sexual abuse. Just that he was present. So he was somewhere on the premises when other people did bad things.

She doesn’t explain why she went to more than one such party. Most people wouldn’t make a habit of going to parties where rape was a likely outcome. But I digress.

Her ex-boyfriend, a Democrat named Richard Vinneccy, says he had to get a restraining order against Swetnick. He claims she threatened his child, who was a baby at the time. He says she is not trustworthy. Again, this is a Democrat talking.

Sure, he’s an ex-boyfriend, and I have criticized the credibility of ex-girlfriends. But let’s be honest. Men handle rejection better. Generally, we’re not the ones who vandalize our ex’s cars and call their offices 500 times a day. For the most part, men move on. We don’t have biological clocks, so it’s not that bad if we get dumped in our thirties or forties, and we don’t see girlfriends as salvation from poverty or retirement plans.

It appears that Vinneccy moved on. He married another woman and had a baby, and it appears he still needed to get a restraining order to protect him from Swetnick.

Her lawyer, of course, is Michael Avenatti, the obnoxious and aggressive man who represents aging stripper Stormy Daniels in her quest to extort more money from Donald Trump.

What does Avenatti say now? He says he “knows nothing” about a restraining order.

Here’s the thing: I’m a lawyer, too. Unlike journalists, who know little and do even less, I am aware that restraining orders are documented on court websites. As it happens, Ms. Swetnick had her domestic problems in Dade County, Florida, where I used to work. I use that county’s court website all the time, even though I no longer practice, because so many people I know are or were in trouble.

Avenatti knows he can take three minutes and look the restraining order up. He chose not to, so he could say he knew nothing about it.

I know about it, and now so does everyone who reads this blog. And we’re not even being paid.

I can’t get a picture of the order online, but I can produce pictures of the docket page and other information. The pictures show that Vinneccy was the one who complained and Swetnick was the respondent. It also shows that all this took place in family court, under the heading of DOMESTIC VIOLENCE.

It’s not possible to get complete images of the documents in the case. Some are not in the system, and some are partial. Nonetheless, AVENATTI COULD HAVE LOOKED THIS UP IN THREE MINUTES, as I did.

Whatever Swetnick did, it appears it was sufficient to convince a judge he needed to issue an order keeping her away from her ex-boyfriend and a helpless infant.

You’re welcome. Maybe there is a real journalist out there who will send someone to the family courthouse tomorrow and get the documents.

Innocence is no Excuse

It’s time to confess. I am not fit to sit on the Supreme Court. Decades ago, when I was in high school and college, I went to parties where women may have been gang-raped.

I don’t actually know of any rapes that occurred at parties I attended. That’s no excuse. They may have occurred. I’ve been to parties in houses, university buildings, dormitories, and apartment buildings, and I couldn’t see everything that happened while I was there. For all I know, women were being raped in closets, bedrooms, and stairwells.

Brett Kavanaugh’s latest accuser says he was present at a party where she was raped by several men other than Kavanaugh. I can’t point the finger. I’m just as bad as he is, and if you ever went to a party when you were young, so are you, even if you’re a woman. To be present is to be an accomplice.

She also says Kavanaugh and his pals put alcohol in punchbowls, in order to make women more cooperative. I’m guilty, too! I have put vodka in punch women drank, not that it ever got me anywhere. Kavanaugh and I are just like Bill Cosby.

I’ve bought women a number of drinks. I admit it. I gave them alcohol, and I didn’t do anything to prevent them from drinking it. I never handed them printed disclaimers, listing the possible consequences of drinking and drunkenness. I didn’t bat drinks out of their hands. I never held them in headlocks and forcibly dragged them away from their drinks.

Clearly, putting alcohol in punch at parties is extreme and unusual, and it’s a practice which cannot be tolerated. It’s unheard-of. Until I read about Kavanaugh, I thought I was the only one who had thought of it. All over America, people must be shocked to learn that things like this happen.

I put liquor in punch, and I was present when all sorts of felonies, for all I know, were committed. Maybe people were murdered and then dragged off and buried quietly. Maybe friends of mine went off by themselves to use the phones to commit wire fraud. Maybe they brought little printing presses to parties and ran off sheets of counterfeit bills.

Actually, now that I think of it, I was present in a dormitory when at least one felony was committed. When I was a freshman, a guy named Kerry called a girl on the phone, said he was me, and threatened her. I don’t remember. The senior who was paid to live on our floor burst into my room in the middle of the night with someone else (can’t remember who), turned on the light, and started asking me if I had made the call. They asked if I had threatened to rape and kill someone.

Yes, of course I had. On my own phone, from my own room, using my real name, with three witnesses trying to sleep in the same small suite, because I am stupid and very curious about prison food.

I don’t recall how I knew it was Kerry. Maybe I’m wrong about that. He was a messed-up guy, and he was my prime suspect. It may have been a guy named Greg, or maybe they did it together. Maybe it was someone else.

Kerry got involved with a girl called Rude Ruth who used to use the men’s showers. She eventually moved into his room, and his roommate had to leave. I remember the time a bunch of people from our floor went to a Pink Floyd concert and dropped acid. Kerry came back and assured the rest of us that he had seen God.

Greg was like a character from a Kevin Smith movie. He was the king of prank phone calls. He liked calling foreign students and telling them they hadn’t paid their phone bills. I listened in once. He handed the call over to me without warning, saying I was the president of the phone company, a Mr. Cosmo Bogus.

For some reason, a few people I knew had invented a game in which they called people, said they were me, and threatened them. No idea what that was all about. They even did it during the spring of my sophomore year, while I was in another state on medical leave. Anyway, I was present on campus some of the time when these things happened, so I can’t be a Supreme Court justice.

Kavanaugh’s new accuser says she felt like there MAY have been drugs in the punch she drank. She’s not sure. She says, “I may have been drugged.” It seems she can’t tell the difference between vodka and a huge dose of Quaaludes. That’s unusual.

Her strange remarks, if true, mean she is open to two possibilities: 1. she was drugged, or 2. she got plastered of her own free will and then blamed the people who gave her drinks. Why is option 2 newsworthy, and why would the boys be at fault if she got herself drunk?

Talk about reasonable doubt. When the victim can’t even stand behind her own accusation, there is no way the rest of us should dignify it with support. Whether she got raped is a separate question, but the spiking/drugging allegation is facially untenable.

I don’t know if it’s economically possible for a college student to spike punch with Quaaludes. You need at least a couple of pills per victim in order to accomplish anything, and a college punch bowl holds five or more gallons. Five gallons, 20 quarts, 40 pints, 80 cups…so call it 160 pills per bowl. Not cheap. And the men who drank it would be drugged too, which kind of defeats the purpose.

I suppose a clever rapist would spike individual drinks. That’s a different kind of situation, though. College punchbowls are filled by groups. Spiking a punchbowl would require a conspiracy, in order to prevent everyone at the party from passing out at 10 p.m. Spiking individual drinks would be done by one or a few individuals, probably secretly. If some low-life were sneaking around putting pills in the drinks of girls he had selected for himself, Kavanaugh probably would not have known about it.

He was present, though, so he’s guilty. So are all the women who were at the parties. They were present.

We’re supposed to believe this lady was raped by multiple assailants and that she didn’t follow up until 2018. Maybe it happened, but it’s hard to believe. Even in the mid-80’s, rape was considered a serious matter, and the police were more than happy to investigate complaints.

How crazy are the accusations going to get? If being present when something bad is done disqualifies you from holding government office, no one stands a chance. Maybe there are a couple of Mormons who could squeak by, but the rest of us? No way!

I’ve seen drugs being sold. I’ve seen beatings. I’ve seen thefts. When I was in college, I heard all kinds of gross language and saw revolting behavior. Sometimes I participated in the language and bad behavior. Thank God I’ve never run for office.

Aren’t people allowed to change and be forgiven? Even if Kavanaugh is somehow culpable in these far-fetched stories about trivial misdeeds (some committed by other people), does anyone really care what he did when he was 18? Maya Angelou was a prostitute. Mark Wahlberg was a violent racist street punk. Will Smith was charged with aggravated assault. Do we ever get to move on?

Democrats have a jihadi-like fervor when it comes to legal protection for those who tear unborn babies apart in the womb. They think anything they do in order to keep the unborn unprotected is morally acceptable. This is the basis for their deranged attacks on Kavanaugh.

I think Christine Ford is lying, and I think the gang rape accuser is either lying or making a very dishonest, immoral effort to connect Kavanaugh to something he had nothing to do with.

New Helpers Leaving Soon

For some time now, I have been driving to finish up some tax and bookkeeping work. Ordinarily, this would put me in a murderous rage. There is nothing I hate worse than accounting and taxes. I can’t understand how accountants even exist. How can there be people who can stand this kind of work? As for taxes…just take the money. Don’t ruin a month of my life just to make it sting more.

I always say I long for the old days, when you could opt to skip the lengthy ordeal of figuring and paying your taxes and choose instead to be burned at the stake.

In spite of the misery, I feel better than expected. I am still raking in the dividends of my dad’s prayer for salvation.

The strain that used to pervade our relationship is gone. I’m not thrilled when he makes a mess or does something else that causes me unpleasant toil, but the annoyance is gone. I don’t feel like he’s the enemy any more. The mess is the enemy, and my dad and I are on the same side.

When I started seeing progress in my dad’s feelings toward God, I saw the change in our relationship coming. I started to see it the day before he prayed for forgiveness. I assume God showed it to me, because it wasn’t something obvious. Preachers don’t tell you you will suddenly get along with relatives after they pray for salvation.

Today I got some jarring news. His occupational therapist visited, and she told me her work with him would be ending soon. Medicare will pay for occupational therapy as long as it works. Because of my dad’s dementia, he is not making progress. She has to show him the same things over and over. Medicare wants a better return on its investment.

It’s a harsh reminder of his mortality and of what we face before he goes. He is at the peak of his ability right now. He can get worse, but he can’t improve. This is as good as it gets, and it won’t be this good for long.

I have to think about hiring someone to come work with him a few times a week. The therapist said she would recommend people.

As I suspected, his change of heart toward God is making things harder for me. It will be harder to let him go. When someone is provoking you all the time, your concern for him will be masked by a desire for relief. When the provocation goes, the things it obscured rush in.

That’s a good thing. It’s better to be sad when someone dies than relieved.

The therapists will come for a few more weeks, and then we’ll be on our own. I’ll have to make decisions. In a way, I’ll be facing them alone, but in another way, we’ll be facing them together.

If you’re old, and you’re straight-arming God, knock it off. Don’t wait until you’re 86 and you can’t find your way home from the store. Don’t give up decades of closeness to your family and Christian friends. What are you giving it up for? Pride? What good is that? It’s a cage that keeps people away.

I wonder what kinds of things I’ll be writing about in the future. I suppose it’s best not to guess. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.

It’s not my burden to carry. I have a God who carries things for me.

Tomorrow’s Big Scoop: Kavanaugh Cheated at Monopoly

The Beast is still after Brett Kavanaugh. Moloch never sleeps.

This weekend and today I read about Kavanaugh’s newest accusers. They remind me of something I have often said: the reaches your enemies have to make in order to accuse you are a testimony to your innocence.

Kavanaugh is in his 50’s. If he there were any serious character issues that affected his behavior as an adult–a real adult, not a teenager–we would know all about them by now. Instead, we have three things:

1. He supposedly groped a girl when he was 17.

2. He supposedly exposed himself to a girl during a drinking game at 18.

3. A friend of his named Mark Judge supposedly joined others in having sex with a drunk girl.

Amazing. This is their ammunition. Kavanaugh must be a pretty solid guy, if this is the best they can do. Imagine what they could have done with Bill Clinton or Keith Ellison.

Let me point something out. If the Democrats nominated someone who committed several violent crimes as a teenager, and it was a person who had since reformed, no one would care. Such a person would be approved. Kavanaugh may or may not have done a couple of stupid, relatively trivial things when he was a teen, and there is no evidence that he behaved badly during the ensuing three and a half decades, yet we are supposed to believe he’s unfit to serve on a court.

Robert Byrd put away his Klan robes and became the majority leader of the Senate. Let’s not even discuss Ted Kennedy, who was a grown man when he left a woman to suffocate in a sunken car he had wrecked. Why are we even talking about Kavanaugh?

As for the accusations themselves, the person who made accusation 1 named 4 witnesses, and none back her up. The person who made accusation 2 also has no corroborating witnesses. Accusation 3 is the lamest of all. It’s about someone else! Democrats want us to punish Brett Kavanaugh for something Mark Judge did.

They’re not scraping the bottom of the barrel. They’ve drilled holes in it, and they’re sifting the dirt underneath.

I can’t help thinking about my law school. There was a notorious young woman there who supposedly snorted cocaine off a young man’s private parts. What if someone nominates her to a judgeship? Things will go badly for her. If she’s a Republican.

Maybe we should impeach every judge who went to Woodstock.

Sexual sin is bad, but the general rule is that we don’t consider it when we choose government officials. Leftists love sexual sin, when leftists are the ones committing it. What self-respecting leftist would condemn a college drinking game involving nudity? Aren’t these the same people who get public nudity bans struck down? Aren’t they the ones promoting public toplessness?

Burning Man has an orgy area. Hello?

Leftists promote female nudity as hard as they can, but they’re upset about a momentary indiscretion from a drunk teenager.

The left is confused. They want to celebrate every type of sexual sin, yet somehow they also want to be puritanical and vindictive. It won’t work.

They also want to kill due process. Aren’t they the ones who want us to give illegal aliens endless hearings and appeals? Aren’t they known for promoting due process safeguards for guilty suspects? When did we decide men are the only people who don’t get the benefit of the Constitution?

Here’s an important point about the accusation against Mark Judge: it was made by an ex-girlfriend. Come on. If you really want to bury someone, who do you go to for material? Ex-wives and ex-girlfriends top the list.

Women handle rejection very, very badly. Women who have boyfriends dream of marriage all day. They feel they have to be married by certain ages, and if they don’t make it, they feel it somehow invalidates them as women. They sit around writing their “married names” to pass the time. They make up weird wedding rules. They flip through narcissistic magazines aimed at brides.

Generally, long relationships are ended by men, not women. Women get old, younger women are always available, and relationships with no roots suffer their expected ends. The world is full of ex-girlfriends who are nearing or past menopause, and they are not known to be forgiving or honest.

An ex-girlfriend is likely to see a former boyfriend as the person who ruined her life. Many of them will jump at a chance to return the favor.

Even if the accusation is true, it doesn’t say the drunken girl Judge had sex with didn’t consent, and again…not Kavanaugh. Tomorrow, my former pastor will be sentenced for child molestation. Should I have to serve part of his time because I knew him?

Maybe Hillary Clinton should be tried for the things Bill did.

I don’t think these women are telling the truth. I believe people would be backing them up if they were, and besides, sexual loose cannons usually have multiple accusers with strong testimonies. Sexual aggression is a lifelong habit. Two uncorroborated yarns don’t turn Brett Kavanaugh into Bill Cosby. They simply make his accusers look desperate and dishonest, and they make leftists look like tyrants.

Kavanaugh will make it, unless a better accusation emerges. We need to pray for God to help him. The more Supreme Court justices we have on our side, the easier our future will be.

Healing for the Heel

My dad prayed for salvation a couple of days ago, and the results have been surprising.

As I have mentioned many times, my dad was always an enemy of God and Christianity. He wasn’t just an unbeliever; the very thought of Christianity made him very angry, and he felt compelled to insult it and ridicule those of us who believed. He seemed beyond reach, and given that he asked for salvation at 86, it’s obvious that there was good reason to consider him a particularly hard case.

I have had a lot of personal issues with my dad because of my beliefs. I started turning back to God in 2007, and worldly people–friends and so on–started rejecting me. I didn’t reject them. I still made an effort to socialize with them, and I didn’t preach to them. They pushed me away or simply dropped me. Family bonds are harder to break, so, of course, my dad and I did not abandon each other. Things grew tense, however.

Paul warned Christians not to be unequally yoked. The use of the term “yoked” comes from the practice of using oxen as draft animals. When you want to use oxen, you attach two of them to a yoke. Obviously, you can’t get much work done when the oxen want to go in different directions. Paul was telling us that unbelieving companions would pull us away from God and drag us into disobedience. That’s what my relationship with my dad was like. He treated my Christianity as an unfortunate eccentricity that had to be indulged. To him, it was as though he were dealing with an autistic child or a mental patient caught in the grip of a temporary delusion. Very often, he got angry with me. He thought I was unreasonable.

As he slid into dementia and I gradually moved into an undesired position of authority, he sometimes cursed me, and he delivered ultimatums he couldn’t follow through on.

He got especially angry when I refused to drive him places on demand. I had other things to do, and I didn’t have time to ferry him around without notice. I was looking after him and his interests, and that’s why I was busy, but he didn’t understand. He would yell that he wouldn’t be treated like a child. Even after losing his license, he would insist he was going to drive himself where he wanted to go. That was impossible. He doesn’t know his address, and he doesn’t know how to get anywhere. He would have come home in a police car.

He developed or continued bad habits that seemed to be designed to make me miserable. He rubbed spit on walls, counters, and anything else he thought was dirty. He put dirty dishes and utensils away without washing them. He did awful things in bathrooms. When we ate together, I had to move my beverages away from him, because he would pick them up with his dirty fingers and examine them, defiling the surfaces I had to touch with my lips in order to drink.

My solution, here in our new home, was to take over an upstairs den. I put the main desktop there, along with a TV, stereo, printer, and workbenches with tools. I also hid my personal stash of food where he couldn’t get at it and do appalling things with it. I set a downstairs bathroom apart for guests and kept him out of it.

He had a knack for making me feel soiled and violated. He broke boundaries people are supposed to respect. You don’t touch other people’s food. You don’t expose yourself to them unnecessarily. You don’t blow your nose on the floor. Abusive people have a way of forcing intimacy on others in disgusting ways. My belief was that the spirits that had made him abusive were targeting me with special behaviors they knew would drive me crazy.

I have been limiting the time I spend with him. I can only take so much. Every so often, I would think to myself, “It’s been a while. I should go and see what he’s up to. Maybe I should take him to lunch.” I would go and do my duty, and then I would retreat again to recharge.

Before I changed my ways, we used to spend time together for fun. We fished a lot. Lately, it has been a job. Every minute I have spent with him has been work.

Suffering the unending stream of senseless provocations was like being jabbed with a hot needle over and over, and he thought I had a problem because I didn’t want to be with him all the time. He was not able or inclined to consider how I felt. It didn’t matter to him; he was only concerned with what he considered bad service. As his dementia got worse, and he realized how much he needed me, he made certain adjustments, but for the most part, I think he was considering his own welfare. If I die tomorrow, he will fall completely apart, and some stranger will have to rescue him.

That’s how things have been.

Yesterday was different. He still called for me at random times with various demands, but I didn’t jump when I heard his voice. I didn’t struggle with anger. I was better able to feel concern for his welfare, because it was not masked by the sensation of being shocked with an invisible cattle prod. I didn’t mind spending time with him. It wasn’t work any more.

To say the change was welcome would be to understate things. Abiding anger is an iniquity. It’s poison for a Christian. Everyone gets provoked from time to time, but to live in a state of provocation is not acceptable. It interferes with your relationship with God.

I used supernatural tools every day, more than once a day, to get rid of anger and to help myself forgive. God showed me ways to deal with it, and that was very helpful, but it’s much better not to be provoked in the first place.

Provocation is temptation.

The strange thing is that my dad’s behavior hasn’t changed tremendously. He is more cooperative and less irate, but he’s still doing gross things around the house. They don’t bother me the way they did last week.

Last night, I asked God what was going on, and suddenly, I thought about words from Genesis. God said he would put enmity between the seed of woman and the seed of the serpent.

So the Lord God said to the serpent:

“Because you have done this,
You are cursed more than all cattle,
And more than every beast of the field;
On your belly you shall go,
And you shall eat dust
All the days of your life.

And I will put enmity
Between you and the woman,
And between your seed and her Seed;
He shall bruise your head,
And you shall bruise His heel.”

This explains a lot.

The world is divided into children of God and children of Satan. There are no exceptions. The people who ran away from me were the seed of Satan. The pastors who abused me were the seed of Satan. There has been anger and tension between me and people who were against God, even when I tried to get along with them. Until my dad asked for salvation, he was on the other side, so friction was inevitable. We were trying to make a fatally flawed paradigm work.

Am I saying my dad was my enemy? I’m afraid so, although I’m sure he didn’t see it that way. He made life unpleasant and difficult. He added to my burdens for no reason. From the day I was born, he did things to poison my happiness and my progress. Even when he tried to do good things for me, often, he was also doing and saying things that exacted a high price.

How can I be surprised? In Genesis, God said he himself would put enmity between my dad and me.

Enmity isn’t always open, and enemies aren’t always aware they’re enemies. Often they believe they’re being helpful. That type of enemy is the most dangerous. It’s hard to motivate yourself to fight someone who insists he loves you.

Unequal yokings don’t work. The more you associate with an unbeliever, the more problems you will have. You may get along with them when things are going well, but introduce a few challenges, and things will break down. You will turn to God, and your associate will turn on you.

You can see this in America’s current state of polarization. The God-friendly right and the God-hating left are at each other’s throats. People who used to get along can’t be civil to each other any more. Your family can lose its business simply because you don’t want to bake a cake that celebrates an abomination.

It’s impossible to make another person understand the feeling of relief I have. No one wants to be at odds with a family member, especially if it’s a person you can’t avoid. Toxic relationships with parents are very damaging, and when those relationships are fixed, it brings peace and strength.

I don’t know how much time I have left with my dad. I hope we get a reasonable interval in which to enjoy a corrected relationship.

Do not develop close relationships with unbelievers. The secular world will tell you it’s open-mindedness and love. It’s not. It’s surrender. It’s currying favor from people who will betray you.

Be nice to them. Pray for them. Don’t date them. Don’t marry them. Don’t partner with them in business. You’re asking for trouble, and when you call on God for help, he may not listen. You know better. God has a long history of ignoring pleas for help from people who reject his warnings. He has done it to me. I am a witness.

I’m not going to have any more unequal yokings in my life. For a long time, I’ve been saying my dad was going to be the last one, and I haven’t been kidding. It’s rebellious and wrong, and anyway, I can’t take it any more. I’m too old for the drama.

Here’s something else: I understand why so many people have reacted negatively to me. For my entire life, I have put up with unexpected attacks from people I did nothing to harm. It still happens today. It doesn’t matter what I do. I don’t have to provide a reason. Now I get it. They don’t belong to God, or they are deep in rebellion, which, according to God, is as bad as witchcraft. Why would I expect witches to like me?

Never date an atheist or an unbelieving Jew. Don’t join clubs with weird mystical rituals. Don’t join fraternities or sororities. Limit your interactions with homosexuals. Avoid involvement in leftist politics. Be careful about the jobs you accept.

You may think you’re a Christian who has a successful, close relationship with someone who is against Jesus. You’re wrong. Either you’re a poor excuse for a Christian, or you’re in denial about the quality of the relationship.

Paul knew what he was talking about.

Did This Really Happen?

Tonight my dad prayed for salvation.

This is the guy who used to ridicule Christianity and Christians. He once called the pope a “fat greasy wop” in order to antagonize my mother and our Irish neighbor. As recently as a few weeks ago, he was insisting his conception of God was much more sophisticated than anything Christians believed in.

People with vascular dementia slip in steps. One day you’re on a certain step, and the next day, you’re on a lower step. It happens that quickly; overnight. You may stay on the new step for a month or a year. Then something happens, and you move to a step which is lower still.

At some point during the last week, my dad moved to a new step. His physical therapist pointed it out. I noticed it, too. Suddenly he was less argumentative. He wasn’t fighting with me all the time. For example, if I said he needed to stop messing with the mail, instead of insisting he was going to continue opening it, he would apologize for forgetting.

He has been contrary all his life. It has ruined relationships for him. Now, suddenly, he is listening.

Yesterday he said he would be willing to learn about salvation. Today I put him in the car and took him to the grocery to pick up something he needed, and I used the time to talk to him about God.

On the way to the store, he agreed to join me in prayer that God would show him he was real. On the way back, he prayed for salvation. He even recited the Lord’s Prayer by heart. I don’t know where that came from.

He wasn’t crying and begging God for forgiveness. He didn’t say he had had a sudden supernatural revelation. He simply said he trusted my judgment. That’s appropriate. We are supposed to be witnesses, and all a witness strives for is trust. New Christians listen to us when we give our firsthand testimony, and God helps them to believe what we say.

He says he’s willing to go to church. I want to find a decent church to visit. A Christian has to know more than one other Christian. Otherwise, the one he knows runs the risk of becoming a sort of idol. My dad needs to see God through multiple pairs of eyes.

I hope he understands what he did well enough for it to take effect.

As far as I know, this is the first time in my life I have gotten anyone to ask for salvation. No one else has ever listened to me. I am the world’s worst evangelist. I’ve laid hands on a couple of people so they received the baptism with the Holy Spirit, but I never got anywhere with salvation.

They say God gives crowns to those who help people to get saved. Maybe I finally have one waiting.

Suddenly, my dad doesn’t look good. He didn’t look good last week, but he looks worse now. He is less sure of himself. The steam has gone out of him. He seems sort of transparent. It’s not pleasant to see. Today while he was out walking, he asked for a ride in my golf cart, but he couldn’t lift his foot high enough to get in.

Maybe I’ll be able to take better care of him now. Cooperation makes a big difference.

I’ll bet God says that about me all the time.

Clouds Dissipating?

Thank you, God. The weather is changing.

It’s 89 degrees here, but it took until after 12 p.m. to get that hot. A couple of weeks back, we were looking at low 90’s, and things heated up faster. It’s dryer now, too, and it’s much more pleasant in the late afternoon and evening.

Last night I went outside as the sun was starting to dim, and I didn’t begin sweating immediately. I could have stayed out and not suffered. I didn’t even get bitten by bugs.

I wasted a lot of good weather after the summer of 2017 died. I put outdoor jobs off. This time I plan to pounce. When it’s cool enough to work, I will cut, mow, or burn something, or I will take some guns out and shoot.

I keep thinking I would like to pull out and make a permanent move to Tennessee eventually. A few days back, I decided to check the weather up there. It was not as great as I had hoped. In fact, it was pretty close to what we were having here. Maybe September in Tennessee is just as hot as it is in Florida.

I checked the forecast for the upcoming month, and it looked considerably better. Where my area has lows in the high 60’s, Tennessee expects lows maybe 10 degrees lower. That means fewer bugs and more good weather for outdoor activity.

What I do will depend on my dad. It’s impossible to make solid plans when you’re dealing with dementia. This winter, my dad may be exactly like he is now, he may be worse (somewhat or a great deal), and he may not be around at all. As long as he’s living at home, I won’t want to move. If he’s not living here, I can do whatever I want. If he’s in a facility, I can move and then find a new facility up north. If the end comes, I’ll have no strings to consider.

There is good news regarding my dad. Yesterday we went out to lunch. I asked him if he ever thought about making plans for the hereafter. He asked what he could do, and I said he could receive salvation. He asked how to do that, and he said he was willing to listen to anything I recommended.

Did it mean anything? What demented people say varies from one day to the next. I can’t tell you whether this is an important development. I told him I would tell him all about salvation later. I didn’t want to hold a revival in an Indian restaurant.

Maybe I was wrong to hesitate. He could have passed away last night. I plan to bring it up again today.

I believe God has told me my dad will be saved, so I don’t feel I have to be in a rush. If God says he’ll be saved, it will happen.

My dad’s attitude seems to have changed during this month. I don’t know what’s going on. Maybe a stroke affected some little part of his brain that generated anger and pride. Maybe God is restraining poisonous spirits that have always controlled him. His physical therapist says he has slipped over the last week, so maybe there is a physical explanation.

It would be fantastic to have a dad who isn’t angry and proud. I can’t imagine that. He has always released his negative feelings freely. When I’m angry at someone, I remain polite and work with them, and I try to spare their feelings. My dad has always vented his inner feelings directly onto people, with no hesitation. If he suddenly started acting like the rest of us, I wouldn’t know what to do. It would be like having him replaced with a different person.

People have always walked on eggs around my dad. Imagine suddenly being able to speak freely around a person like that.

It’s a strange thing; inner changes that would help him prepare for his departure would also make it harder to let him go.

Being around an angry and very vocal person is like being struck with a whip all day. No matter how much you love the person, you get angry, over and over. Repentance is something you repeat many times per week. You can’t help looking forward to spending time away from them.

It’s not hatred or vengeance. It’s fatigue and a desire for relief. What is it like when such a person puts the whip away?

I hope he’s serious about God. I have always expected him to wait until the last possible second, but maybe it won’t be quite that bad. It would be nice to have some time with the new version of him before he goes.

A Woodsman has to Keep his Head

Today I tested the axe I hung. I went out and found a particularly hateful and evil tree, i.e. a live oak, and I cut it down. The axe worked just fine, and the head didn’t loosen or fly across the woods. People who advise me have been badgering me to put metal wedges in the axe, so now I feel I have the go-ahead to give them the official thumb-nosing they deserve.

Cutting the tree was a very bad experience in a couple of ways. First, it involved exercise. Second, it served to underscore the total superiority of chainsaws. A one-minute job became a ten-minute job.

I’m not completely sure what I’ll do with the axe in the long run. I just feel like a farm needs an axe. There must surely be jobs one needs an axe for.

It’s really heavy, or maybe I’m just old. Weren’t axes a lot lighter when I was 16? Of course they were. I’m sure of it. And my feet weren’t as far away as they are now. These days, my feet are like grown children who moved to another state. They only visit me a few times a year.

When I was a kid, I wondered why old men’s toenails grew so long. Now I know.

I was thinking it might be good to cut down several small trees per week, just for the exercise. Swinging an axe vigorously is extremely unpleasant, so it has to be good for me.

Live oaks are a pestilence. I am planning to kill every small live oak I see, and I treat little maples as though they bore golden apples. I want the maples to dominate. It’s not my fault people let live oaks grow here in the past, but it doesn’t have to continue on my watch.

I suspect that my small Home Depot Fiskars hatchet will always be more useful than an axe, but I’m still glad I learned about axes. Knowledge and skill are good things to have. Being stupid is not a virtue unless you’re a hereditary Democrat trying to live on the government teat.

I noticed one surprising thing while I cut the tree: I wasn’t immediately soaked with sweat. Three days ago, I would have been. The weather is going to change soon, whether it likes it or not. That will be great. Also, I was not attacked by mosquitoes. As far as I can tell, we have had about 5% of the activity we had last year. I may be wrong, but I seem to remember being scared to go outside in the post-Irma period. I spent a lot of time shopping for mosquito remedies. I haven’t felt the need this year.

There are a lot of things I want to do on the farm, but lately, working for 5 minutes has meant needing a complete change of clothes and a shower. That’s discouraging. You find yourself asking yourself if it’s really worth it to move the branch lying across the driveway. Maybe you can just drive around it…

If the weather is really turning the corner, I’ll be able to make up for some of the shameful laziness I displayed last winter. I treated the good weather like it would last forever, and then it left.

I’m hoping to get more done this year. Right now, I’m trapped in a period of excessive bookkeeping activity, so I can’t do much, but I expect that to pass in a few days, and after that, I may actually be free to get some things done.

I continue to search for a double-bitted axe at a decent price. I have ordered two old ones from Ebay plus a new one from Amazon, and none have been satisfactory. Once I have a double-bitted axe, my collection will be complete. Except for a small axe which is larger than a hatchet. And maybe some other axes.

I’m going to flop on the couch with the birds and drink a small amount of medicinal Scotch. Between the bookkeeping and the horror of ten minutes of exercise, I feel I deserve to be indulged.

If I locate another axe, you will read about it here. I hope someone invents one that swings itself.

Kavanaugh Kerfuffle Disappoints

Here are my thoughts about the Christine Blasey Ford accusation. She accused Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of holding her down and trying to pull her bathing suit off. She says it happened about 40 years ago, when they were in high school. He says it never happened, and that he had no idea who had accused him until she gave the press her name.

1. When I was in high school, I was on an ultimate Frisbee team. One day a girl showed up. Her name was either Lisa Snapoff or Lisa Popoff. I can’t recall. She showed up with the team captain. He said she had told him I had had a crush on her in junior high.

She was not very attractive.

She kept talking to me as if she knew me well.

To this day, I have no idea who she is or whether we went to school together. My private junior high probably had 100 students per class. She was not in my class. I would have known her. Maybe she went to my elementary school. Anyway, you can’t have a crush on a person whose existence you’re unaware of. My guess is that she was something related to a stalker.

2. A woman who was angry with me swore a number of ridiculous lies to a court and made false claims to another authority.

3. My sister berated my mother, in front of her sisters and me, for letting my dad rape her all during her childhood. Never happened. Systematic rape of a sibling who shares a house with you is something one notices eventually.

4. My sister accused a boy of raping her, and my dad went to his house to give him a beating. He said he was very angry when he found out the story wasn’t true.

5. My sister’s dog was not housetrained. I chased it out of a room, and my sister turned my father and me in to the Humane Society, claiming we had kicked the dog. My father wasn’t even home when it happened. I don’t know what she expected the Humane Society to do. They started sending me letters asking for money.

6. My sister accused my dad of breaking her arm. I was present, but out of sight, when they had their disagreement. He didn’t break anything. When she called me about it, threatening to have him arrested, I had to listen while she placed an order at a drive-through, paid, and took a Coke from the cashier. With her supposedly broken arm.

7. Someone I know married a thief, fraud, and domestic violence perpetrator who ended up in prison. Before they divorced, the thief said a number of things in couple’s therapy. RE the Kavanaugh thing, my friend says the media needs to be aware that things people say in couple’s therapy (like the things Christine Ford supposedly said) are not necessarily true. This is the voice of experience.

8. The Innocence Project has freed over a hundred convicted rapists. Sometimes a woman says one thing, and the DNA says something else.

Women lie to get at men they want to hurt. Women who want attention lie about being abused. People lie in couple’s therapy.

Christine Ford is on the far left. Many people on the far left treat opposition to the murder of the unborn the way they should treat support for the murder of the unborn. It enrages them, and they feel anything they say or do to fight those who defend the unborn is justified.

Maybe he’s guilty. My guess is that he isn’t. If he is, it happened when he was a kid, it was brief, she was not stripped, raped, beaten, confined against her will, or injured, and she apparently had no problem pushing him off. After 40 years, it’s time to get over it. Even if he did one stupid thing when he was in high school, he has since proven he deserves to sit on the Supreme Court.

Any conservative who is nominated is going to face attacks like this. Feminists are insanely devoted to the perpetuation of the in-womb murder of their own children, as if having to bear a child one conceived deliberately were an unjust and severe punishment. They will stop at nothing to crush those who might make the murder of the unborn harder to do.

If leftists can tolerate Bill Clinton, who did far worse things, and who was an elected official when he did them, they can tolerate a man who groped a girl in high school and then behaved well as an adult. If they can tolerate Ted Kennedy and Jesse Jackson, they can tolerate Kavanaugh.

I say it’s time to confirm him. Clarence Thomas made it, and this man will, too.

The Tools Make the Man

I’m thinking of buying a set of hookaroons.

A hookaroon, also known as a pickaroon, is a logging tool. It’s an axe handle with a pointy steel head at the end. The point is perpendicular to the handle. You swing it at logs, and the point goes in. Then you use the axe handle to move the logs around.

It sounds a little stupid. After all, you can bend over and pick a log up, using gloves. That doesn’t sound so bad, does it? It’s the easiest thing in the world, until you do it a hundred times in one day. Maybe you’re in great shape, and bending over to lift things doesn’t bother you, but most people would feel pretty sore after a day of picking logs up off the ground.

A lot of people use a single hookaroon, but some say you’re supposed to hold one in each hand. They work well in pairs. That makes them expensive.

I ordered another item: log tongs. These come in different sizes. Big ones hook up to tractors. You hold little ones in your hand. They’re like big scissors with points on the tips. When you slip one over a log and pull, the points go into the bark and hang on. The theory is pretty much like hookaroon theory. You don’t have to bend as far to pick things up, and you don’t have to rely on your hands to give you a grip.

If you have big log tongs on a tractor, you don’t have to deal with looping chains or straps around logs. You attach the tongs and take off. I would be a little nervous about tongs flying off and killing me if I applied a lot of tension. I suppose you have to use common sense.

Most people don’t use proper logging tools. They don’t even know what they are. Sometimes that makes sense. If you do very little work with trees, you shouldn’t waste a lot of money on tools. I have a lot of trees, though. I need to do things right.

A cousin of mine lived with his mother on a farm my grandfather owned. His dad’s business failed, and then there was a divorce. My grandfather allowed my aunt and her son to live on the farm rent-free. They relied on a wood stove, so my cousin had to use a chainsaw and a maul. He never learned how to do things right. There was no one to teach him.

I can tell you two lessons he needed to learn. First, he needed to learn that whenever a striking tool or a wedge or chisel gets mushroomed, you’re supposed to grind the mushroomed bit off ASAP before pieces fly off and hit you. He also needed to learn to wear safety glasses.

I don’t have any metal wedges. I have plastic ones. They’re light, they work great, and they don’t mushroom. Also, if the saw hits them, the plastic loses. Won’t hurt the saw. I just paid $11 for two new wedges.

I’m not sure, but I think metal wedges are used for splitting, and plastic ones are used for felling. I don’t know if a plastic wedge could take the pounding a splitting wedge takes, but it will definitely stand up to being hammered into a saw kerf so you can cut up a tree.

One day I was with my cousin while he used a maul and wedge to split logs in his driveway. This is a stupid thing to do, in my opinion. You should use better tools if you can. We didn’t know that, and my aunt didn’t have a lot of money anyway.

I have probably written about this before. My cousin took a swing at the wedge, and then he fell down holding his leg. He looked fine, and the maul hadn’t hit him. He was in real pain. After the chaos subsided, he pulled his pant leg up, and we saw a little lump on his shin. It was a piece of steel. There was a matching cavity on the maul. A chunk of steel the size of a .22 round had gone through his jeans, penetrated his skin, collided with his shin bone, and slid about two inches up his leg.

You’re wondering why I mentioned glasses. What if the steel had flown toward his eye?

We took him to the emergency room in Lexington, and my aunt worked on the insurance forms. She asked me what I would say he was doing when he got hurt. I said, “busting wood.” Days later, she got documents from the insurer, and it listed her city of residence as Busting Wood, Kentucky.

Guess she filled in the wrong box.

My cousin didn’t know which tools to use or what kind of safety equipment to buy, and he didn’t know how to take care of tools, so he got shot in the leg. That’s what it adds up to.

I have no plans to split logs, because I dread using my fireplace. It makes a mess. If I did decide to split logs, I’d use an electric motor with a conical screw on it. They use them in Europe. You bolt a motor to a table, and you attach a screw to the shaft. The screw is pointed at one end and maybe 2-1/2″ wide at the other. When you shove a piece of wood into it, the screw bores into it and splits it. It’s incredible. Looks much better than slow hydraulic splitters.

You can buy a splitting screw that fits a tractor PTO shaft.

I don’t know a whole lot about splitting logs, but the screw looks better than hydraulic splitters. They’re very slow, and they cost a lot.

I’ve also ordered a set of mesh glasses. These are safety glasses with stainless steel mesh instead of polycarbonate. When you work outdoors with plastic glasses, they fog up and fill with sweat. That can’t happen with mesh.

People say mesh doesn’t do a good job of deflecting fine wood dust. My take on that is that anyone who eats a lot of dust needs to learn how to sharpen a saw. Sharp saws make chunks, not dust. I may be wrong; maybe a sharp saw makes enough dust to cause problems. I’ll find out when I try the glasses.

You’re not supposed to use a chainsaw to make cuts above your shoulders unless it’s a pole saw. My guess is that people who shoot a lot of crap into their faces are violating this rule. Held at a safe level, a chainsaw will naturally shoot debris at your right leg or maybe your right side.

They make hardhats with mesh visors and built-in earmuffs. I may get one. I already have a hardhat, but I only use it when I cut things that can fall on me. I’m hoping I can use the mesh glasses with the hardhat and avoid a cumbersome apparatus with everything attached.

In October, the weather will become bearable, so my tree-cutting efforts should accelerate. I look forward to getting more of this crap moved out. Last year, it often seemed very difficult, but then I didn’t have the right tools until I was pretty far into it.

Try cutting up a big live oak without a pole saw. It’s a nightmare. You can’t get close enough to the branches, and a lot of things you want to cut will be above your shoulders. A pole saw really tames a big fallen tree.

I don’t know if I’ll be able to burn everything I cut, but at least it will be on the ground where it will rot quickly.

Studying and springing for the things you need pays off. I’ve been working on the farm for a year without killing myself or even injuring myself seriously. I did burn the hair off my ankles once, but that was an improvement.

I don’t know what else I should get. I’m sure things will come to my attention. Here’s to another year with 10 complete fingers and no disks that don’t work.

“Don’t Bother God; We’ll Tell You Everything You Need to Know”

Last night I watched an interesting video in which a woman gave her testimony. She said she had been thrown out of a bus and killed. She said she found herself in hell and started crying out to Jesus. He took her to heaven and talked to her.

I am suspicious of people who tell stories about visiting heaven and hell. Many of them are fabulists who are looking for earthly rewards. A good hell story can make you rich. You can spend the rest of your life speaking at churches and taking offerings instead of working, and you can write books that sell. Some people want money. Others have a bizarre craving for fame. Because hell stories tend to pay off in one way or another, you have to scrutinize them carefully and ask God whether they are true.

There are a lot of hell stories that don’t ring true. One famous “witness” I don’t trust is a young lady named Sarah Boyanga. She says Jesus took her to heaven a number of times in 2012, and that he told her things she was to share with the world.

Boyanga claims Jesus showed her heaven and hell. She says she saw Michael Jackson and Amy Winehouse in hell. She says demons forced Jackson to dance, and while he was dancing, they threw spears into him.

She also says we need to pray for two minutes before we go to bed. Two minutes. She says this makes Jesus very happy.

I’ve been praying in tongues every day for years, and I can tell you it’s not a two-minute thing. You need to devote time to it. Around 20 minutes into it, it gets better. The more you pray in tongues, the better things go for you.

Jesus prayed all night before he was crucified. He criticized the disciples for refusing to pray “one hour” with him. Not two minutes.

When Elijah prayed for the drought to end, he sat down for quite a while, and he didn’t quit until he saw a cloud appear.

I don’t care who gets mad at me. I’ll say it. Sarah Boyanga is wrong. God is a father, and fathers want to spend time with their children. Prayer is the way we spend time with God.

Every successful parent knows there is no such thing as “quality time.” You can’t raise a child well, spending two minutes per day with him. I don’t care if it’s the best two minutes possible. Quantity matters, and no god who loves parents and children would create a system in which he only spent two minutes per day with his own offspring.

I suspect that her dad got her to make up stories.

Her dad is Benjamin Boyanga, and he runs a church in London. Obviously, a famous daughter can only help him make money.

I don’t believe Sarah Boyanga, but I think the lady who got thrown out of the bus is telling the truth. Her name is Paulina.

She was riding a bus. She was hurled out, and her skull was fractured. One hour after she died, she awoke in a hospital morgue.

Prior to the accident, she was a practicing Catholic. She went to mass. She confessed. She took communion. She prayed to Mary and the other “saints.” She had a big figurine collection. She tried to be good to people.

Paulina says she was thrown into hell, and evil spirits started ripping her flesh and telling her she was doomed forever. She didn’t believe she belonged in hell, because she was a Catholic. She cried out to Jesus, and he took her to heaven to talk to her.

She says she walked up a path to a waterfall, and Jesus was at the source of the water. She says the water cleansed her of “the dirt” from her past life.

That’s very interesting, because other people say water flows from the thrown of God, throughout heaven. The first psalm says a righteous man is like “a tree planted by the rivers of water.” Referring to the Holy Spirit, Jesus said he would cause living water to flow from within us, and that we would never thirst. Prayer in tongues is a sanctifying flow of living water. The words flow through us, from Jesus.

She also speaks of the peace of the presence of Jesus. When she was near him, she felt overwhelming love and peace surrounding her. That’s correct. I felt these things when Jesus visited me. I don’t think anyone could be near Jesus without feeling these things. It’s odd when anyone who claims to have met Jesus doesn’t mention the love and peace. Sarah Boyanga doesn’t mention feeling these things the first time she met him.

Paulina tried to tell Jesus she didn’t belong in hell because she was a good person, but he listed some things she had done to get herself in trouble. Her stepmother was a witch, and in order to get Paulina’s father, she had cast spells on Paulina’s mother, who died. Paulina had not forgiven her. Also, Paulina had led a worldly life, drinking and going to clubs and so on. Jesus also criticized her for worshiping Mary.

In the video, Paulina uses the words “Christian” and “Catholic” as though they were mutually exclusive. She says she used to be Catholic. She tried going back to her Catholic church after she met Jesus, and it didn’t work. She says she is a Christian now. That’s remarkable. She doesn’t just say her new path is a little better. She utterly rejects her old path.

Paulina claims she wanted to stay in heaven, but Jesus told her she had accomplished nothing for him on Earth. He said Christians obtained crowns in heaven for helping people receive salvation, and that she hadn’t done that. He said that if she made it to heaven, it would only be by the skin of her teeth. She chose to go back to Earth and serve God.

Catholicism is very strange. Catholics don’t talk about their view of other denominations much, but they believe we all go to hell, except possibly for a few super-worthy exceptions. They think people are born damned because of something called “original sin,” and that Mary was somehow spared this at the moment she was conceived. They say she never sinned, and that she remained a virgin all her life, even though the Bible says Jesus had brothers.

Obviously, if Mary didn’t sin, she didn’t need Jesus. How can anyone believe that? She would have been capable of saving us, herself. She could have spared her son by submitting to crucifixion. No normal mother would allow her son to die when she could take his place.

Catholics have a very long document called The Catechism of the Catholic Church, and it spells out official doctrine. It’s unbelievably tedious, which is one sign God had nothing to do with it. It’s full of references to the works of “saints” and so on. It’s like the Talmud, which is another collection of carnal material whose adherents obey it and reject scripture.

The catechism says “tradition” rules. It’s talking about things celebrated Catholics have said in the past. Augustine was a former pagan who knew nothing about God and twisted Christianity to fit his Hellenistic beliefs, but to Catholics, he is as much an authority as Moses or Paul.

We all remember what Jesus said about tradition. He said the Jews, by their tradition, nullified scripture, which is the word of God.

The catechism says all revelation comes through the pope and his bishops. Apparently, God is not allowed to talk to anyone else.

Nothing has changed. The pharisees just exchanged their Jewish robes for mitres, and Satan still runs the biggest church there is. It would be remarkable if he didn’t.

The catechism contains the idolatrous material about Mary. Not helpful. It’s like a cyanide pill at the bottom of an ice cream soda.

It doesn’t matter what a church’s name is or what its doctrine is at the outset. Sooner or later, Satan will take over, and men’s fantasies will supersede scripture. It happened to the Jews. It happened to Catholicism. It happens to charismatic churches.

It appears to be a lot easier to get to hell than I thought it was when I was young. It’s important to stay on top of things and remain informed.

Another Sunday at Home

I thought I was going to church tonight. God keeps telling me not to join a church, but when I asked if I could visit, it was another story. I thought tonight was the night.

I looked around on Google, and I found a Spirit-filled place that looked okay. I decided to try their 6 p.m. service. I got a shirt out and started ironing it. Then I looked at a video.

They were singing in Spanish.

I have done the ethnic church thing. I was an armorbearer and all-around slave at a Haitian church, and then I was an armorbearer, deacon, and doormat at a Puerto Rican church. I’m not ready to go down that road again.

I found that black churches don’t just tolerate hypocrisy; they expect it. How you act at home means nothing as long as you jump up and down and pretend to care about God at church. I found out that Puerto Rican churches are full of emotional people who get angry over nothing and can’t accept correction. There was way too much loud music, screaming, and rolling on the floor at both churches. I’m ready to sit among people who are a little less inclined to histrionics.

I don’t want to go to another church where everyone pretends to know the Holy Spirit yet thinks Barack Obama is practically Jesus. I can’t deal with Christians who are so ignorant they think Jesus was a leftist.

I looked at some other websites, and then I decided to let it go. I got up and finished putting the new handle in my axe.

I have to say that I think I did a really good job. I haven’t used the axe yet, but it looks great.

I was considering using a wood-swelling product to make the head stick to the handle better. I even bought some. The chemical in wood-swellers is dipropylene glycol. You mix it with water in four-to-one ratio. Wood-swelling products are very expensive, but pure dipropylene glycol is fairly cheap on Ebay. I ordered a bottle. I also bought a gallon jug of RV antifreeze at Tractor Supply, for $2.50. Some brands contain dipropylene glycol. I thought I might install the axe handle and then soak the head in antifreeze for a while. RV antifreeze is not like the antifreeze in your car. It’s food-safe. It’s used to protect freshwater pipes.

I finally installed it the old-fashioned way. I coated the wedge in wood glue, pounded it in, cut off the excess with a coping saw, and sanded the top of the handle to make it look nice. Here is the result.

I may soak it tomorrow anyway. Can’t hurt, right?

RV antifreeze is diluted dipropylene glycol. The stuff I ordered is pure. I have a second axe head on the way, and I plan to use the pure stuff on it.

Assuming the handle I bought is sound, I think the axe I fixed up today should be very pleasant to use.

It’s nice to know I did it right. Thank God for Youtube. When it comes to hanging axes, the world is full of BS, and the people who spread it make themselves sound highly confident.

They remind me of preachers.