I Transgress in my Sleep

The publication date on this post is approximate. It was published months after it was written.

Every day, you learn something obvious which was somehow concealed from you in the past.

This morning while I was praying, I heard my dad yelling from downstairs. Our house is large, and he has a huge bedroom suite on the south end, on the first floor. My bedroom is on the second story at the extreme north. Perhaps you are reading something into that, and if so, you are right. There are things I don’t want to hear or smell.

I use a white noise machine when I sleep, because the crows here show up at dawn every day and have a party in the yard. It also helps block incredibly loud TV noise from downstairs. I was praying with my machine still on, and I also had Julie True music playing on my phone. I was not in an optimal position to hear people yelling downstairs, and this was by design.

When I realized my dad was hollering, I walked out to see what was up. The day had not even started, he was already angry with me, and I had done nothing wrong.

He complained that he hadn’t been able to find me. I always sleep in the same room, because there isn’t one farther away from his bedroom, and it had probably taken less than a minute for me to respond to his shouting. He was very upset with me.

He wanted to know if I had “a plan” for breakfast. This is his way of saying, “I want you to take me to a restaurant to eat.” He never asks me to take him. For some reason, he always wants me to say it’s my idea. He asks about twice a day, and obviously, I say no most of the time. You can’t blow $20,000 a year on restaurant food, and even if I could, I don’t want to spend half of every day in restaurants.

Dining out with a dementia patient is not a wonderful experience. I park. I walk to the restaurant door. I turn and wait, in the sun or rain. My dad gradually makes his way to me. We go in and sit. He asks what I recommend. If I’m trying to read the menu to see what I want, he bombards me with questions, most of which he could answer for himself. “What do they have here?” He asks that while holding a menu in his hand, and he seriously expects an answer. “Veal piccata. Is that any good?” “Eggplant. Have I had that before?” You can imagine what it’s like, trying to choose something while this is going on.

While the food is being prepared, he always complains. He gets very angry. “Damn!” “They’re slow here!” “They must have sent the staff home!” He does this every time.

He always demands that I provide a topic of conversation. “What’s on YOUR mind today?” I always say, “Nothing. What about you?” If I volunteer anything, he will shoot it down as though I had said something stupid, and I will have to repeat myself over and over because he doesn’t hear well and doesn’t listen.

As soon as his food arrives, he seems to forget I exist, and he dives in. Sometimes he will say, “Lotta food,” before he goes at it. While he eats, he will be completely silent. As he winds down, he may say, “Lotta food,” another three or four times.

Sometimes I don’t order anything. I am not that interested in restaurant food. When I do order, I have to be careful where I look while I eat, because he displays chewed food a lot, and things fall onto his shirt. I have to be careful to make sure my beverage is out of his reach, because he may grab it so he can look at it, and if he does that, he will smear God knows what all over the rim of the glass. If there are condiments, I have to make sure I use them first, before he contaminates them.

Once he’s done eating, he wants to talk again. Immediately. He gets cranky if I don’t prevent him from experiencing a brief hiatus between eating and being entertained.

When we leave, it takes him a long time to get to the car, and then he invariably tries to get me to go to the grocery store.

It’s not a recipe for great digestion. It’s why I eat my meals upstairs at home.

Anyway, this morning I told him we weren’t going anywhere, and I went back to my room. Then I had a thought: he was mad at me from the instant we started interacting, I hadn’t done anything wrong, and this was not unusual.

It’s remarkable how much time my dad spends being angry with me.

He gets angry because he’s bored. He’s going to have to live with that. Dementia produces boredom. It’s unavoidable, and it’s going to get worse. He also gets angry because of his medical issues.

He has a back problem. He tried to carry a bunch of stuff up a boat ladder in 2014 because he didn’t want to make two trips to his car, and he fell and injured his back and head. His doctors recommended surgery, but he didn’t want it, so now he has chronic pain. It’s mild, but he isn’t willing to put up with it.

It’s probably too late for surgery. I don’t think any responsible doctor would operate on an 86-year-old man with dementia unless there were no choice. Imagine how hard it would be to care for such a person during recovery. “You have to stay in bed.” “WHY???!!!” “Because of your surgery.” “WHAT SURGERY???!!!”

He watches a huge amount of TV. He always has. He keeps seeing infomercials for quack back cures. A few times a month, he decides to order a Dr. Ho back belt. This is a ridiculous belt gullible people buy. Dr. Ho says Medicare will pay for it, and my dad likes likes the idea of getting free medical supplies. Old people love free stuff, and Medicare scammers know it. I guess they’ve seen old people at restaurants, emptying the napkin dispensers into their purses and pockets.

He has managed to get on the phone a couple of times to try to order it, and I have always succeeded in putting the kibosh on it. I don’t want these people calling me on the phone, and I don’t want to spend the rest of my life helping my dad with a back belt that doesn’t work.

He has called other quack outfits in the past. I can’t tell you how much time I’ve spent on the phone with Chinese people in boiler rooms, telling them to stop calling.

According to one customer, Dr. Ho charges Medicare $1300 for his belt, which appears to be worth about $25, and then you get a copayment bill which may be in three digits. The belt has a 57% one-star rating on Amazon. I am not sure why Dr. Ho is not in prison.

This week my dad got mad because I couldn’t fix his back problem. There are only two options, according to his doctors. The first is surgery, which is not realistic now, and the second is opioids. That’s it. There is no third choice. If magical back belts worked, he would already have one.

He asks me for painkillers, and I tell him not to take them unless the pain is severe. I explain that they cause addiction. This makes him angry. As if addiction were my invention.

He asks me how many pills he’ll have to take before he becomes addicted, and I tell him I don’t know. I tell him no one knows, which is true. It’s common sense. He gets mad and tells me I refuse to answer his questions.

I tell him there are some problems doctors can’t fix, and he gets even madder. He says we need a second opinion. He doesn’t remember the doctors he has talked to already. I have to remind him. Then he says we need to go to more doctors. Obviously, I can’t go along with this. I can’t get in the car and go to a new doctor every time a dementia patient forgets or refuses to believe his diagnosis.

When I refuse, he gets mad because I refuse.

He has decided all medical problems can be fixed. I remind him that my mother died from cancer. I remind him of other people we know who died from incurable diseases. He doesn’t care. He’s positive I’m wrong. All diseases can be cured.

Sometimes I tell him we’re not going to the doctor or a restaurant, and I leave and refuse to talk any more. I go upstairs, or I run an errand or work on the tractor. He’s still angry, but I take off, and I don’t give him any explanation. It sounds awful to leave a grown man standing there, irate and demanding answers, but I do it, and when I do it, I think of the terrible truth: when he sees me an hour later, he will have no recollection of what happened. In reality, it doesn’t matter what I say. I could refuse to talk to him at all, and he would forget.

This is one of the weirdest things about dealing with demented or insane people. They sound a lot like the rest of us, but you can’t take them seriously. When they talk, it’s as if it were raining. You don’t reason with rain. You wait for it to end, and then you go on about your business.

We’ll be discussing Dr. Ho again within the week. Probably today.

Dementia is insanity. Above, I said, “demented or insane,” as if there were a distinction, but to be demented is to be incompetent, just like a schizophrenic. If you’re demented, people can’t treat you with the same dignity they give rational human beings. They can’t let you take the lead, ever.

In normal relationships, you listen to what others say, and sometimes you do what they want to do. This is true even when you deal with children. When a demented person offers ideas, suggestions, commands, and threats, it’s different. You may get useful information you can use to improve their quality of life. You may realize something is bothering them, and you may be able to fix it. But you don’t let them tell you to do this or that, because their ideas are almost always off the wall, and they will repeat them several times a week.

I’m getting pretty far afield. To get back to my original topic, the revelation I got was that my dad is a very angry person, and it’s not good for me to be around him too much.

I knew that already, but I didn’t feel it the way I feel it today. I feel a little bit like I’m living next to a factory that gives off dangerous fumes.

My dad is usually, not occasionally, angry when he is dealing with other people, and he feels no compunctions about venting on them. When the food comes too slowly or his back hurts, it’s okay to yell at me. It’s okay to curse and bark and make lunch unpleasant. It’s okay to say mean things to waitresses.

This is nothing new. My dad has been like this all his life. My sister the felon is the same way, only much worse. I can’t comprehend it. How can you feel entitled to be nasty to people all the time? If I behaved that way, I would expect to get punched in the mouth about twice a week. It reminds me how difficult it is to pick a fight. Lucky for some people.

It’s remarkable how bad behavior works against demented people and others with disabilities. The amount of time able people will want to spend with you will diminish in proportion to how badly you treat them.

The other day I had to tell my dad something obvious, which he doesn’t seem to think about. I said, “No one is obligated to spend time with you.” I was trying to get him to work on one of his bad habits, and I had to tell him people complained about him. Instead of thanking me for telling him, he demanded to know who they were! They were the problem!

I didn’t tell him, of course. I’m not going to spy on people and betray confidences. Besides, he would forget.

My dad has gross habits, and I had to tell him he simply needed to do what other people do. That was the solution. He didn’t have to climb mountains or slay dragons. He just had to do what the rest of us do all the time, every day, without complaining or even thinking about complaining. I said, “You’re not special.” I felt like I was feeding him a big, bitter pill. Most people wouldn’t have had a problem with it at all.

He’s really in a pickle, and I can’t do much to help. I can’t fix it, and it’s not my fault if I have to limit the time I spend with him. His ship is destined to sink in the near future, no matter what medical science does for him. I’m going to go on living for quite some time. I can’t strap myself to him and sink with him.

When I was in law school, there was a crippled student in my class. His name was Andrew. He was horribly deformed. He was about three feet tall, and he had very short arms and legs. He lived in a wheelchair.

Andrew was obnoxious, or at least the people I knew felt he was. He seemed to feel his condition entitled him to favors. Clearly, that was wrong. Life doesn’t work that way. People aren’t nice to the handicapped because they have to be. It’s a choice made out of compassion.

I didn’t really know Andrew, but some of my friends did. I remember watching one of them interact with him. Her name was Carol. We were eating pizza in the student lounge. Andrew rolled up and said he wanted some, in a presumptuous way. Of course, he hadn’t been around when we paid for it. Carol told him we were eating all of it ourselves, and she was very blunt about his bad manners. Andrew said, “Well then I might just leave.” He thought that was a real threat, but he was making a pest of himself, so the thought of him leaving was hardly distressing.

Carol said, “Okay. Goodbye.”

She was absolutely right. This young man thought he was going to be a lawyer. Supposedly, he expected to be treated like other people. He wanted the same rights and courtesies. If you want to be treated like an adult, you have to act like one. He was acting like a spoiled child, and Carol treated him like one.

Carol did him a favor. She gave him a wake-up call. If he was really going to practice law, he was going to have to get used to a world in which people held him accountable every day. Disability can get you a lot of favors, but in the end, you have to make some effort to do what’s right, because your disability is not someone else’s obligation.

When you get old, even if you’re disabled, people will only go so far to make you happy. You will have to work with them a little, because a person’s capacity to put up with bad behavior is limited. People need to get away and recharge. They can’t put up with abuse around the clock, even if they want to.

Other people aren’t your diapers. That’s just how it is.

I want to be a pleasant person when I get old. I really do. I don’t want to be the old guy who hurts people’s feelings. It’s bad enough, being the guy who cares for the old guy who hurts people’s feelings.

Fight or Die

Today I am trying to step back and get some praying and study done. I just watched an interesting video by a man named John Ramirez, and I’m reading one of his books.

Ramirez is a Puerto Rican who grew up in the Bronx. He claims he was a very highly ranked devotee of Hispanic and Haitian devil worship. In Miami, people know these things as Santeria, espiritismo, and Haitian voodoo. Other islanders in South Florida call it obeah. I guess Miami has everything.

He says that when he was practicing Satanism, which is a more concise term for his religion or any occult faith, he spent a lot of time cursing people. He found it easy to curse two kinds of people: non-Christians and weak Christians. A Christian who denied the supernatural side of Christianity didn’t have protection.

People he cursed had major problems. It worked. It was easier and more effective than going after them directly.

God keeps showing me that the supernatural is all that matters. Christians fight other people all the time, and we fight circumstances. We think we’re good Christians because we’re nice and we obey rules, many of which were made up by deluded human beings. We are trying to cut off the blossoms while we ignore and even fertilize and water the roots. Most Christians are losers, because they fight things at the wrong level.

I spend a lot of my time speaking blessings and curses, just like a voodoo practitioner or a sorcerer…or Jesus. Christians are divorced from the supernatural, but Jesus was obsessed with it, and so are occultists. Read the red words in the Bible. What did Jesus talk about? Sure, he told us to be good to people, but he also spoke miracles into existence. He cast out devils. He cursed things and people. He killed a tree by speaking to it. If you read a story about someone born in 1985 who went around doing the things Jesus did, you might think he was a warlock, not a messiah. That’s how brainwashed we are now.

If Jesus came back today and acted exactly like he did 2000 years ago, the authorities would try to put him in a mental home.

“Homeless; says he has no place to lay his head. Talks to trees. Says other people have demons. Didn’t eat for 40 days. Psychiatric hold and tox screen recommended.”

We need to get over the idea that being nice is all that counts. Jesus didn’t tell us to be nice because being nice was our purpose or because it would fix the world. He told us to walk in love because it produced supernatural results, just as walking in hate and selfishness does. He may have told us to behave a certain way in the natural, but he was mainly concerned about the supernatural effects.

Leftists are now the largest anti-God faction in America, and they hate being told so. Many even claim Jesus was a leftist, because he advocated giving to the poor and so on. Of course, the big difference between Jesus and Bernie Sanders (or Vladimir Lenin) is that Jesus advocated giving others YOUR OWN money and things, not your neighbors’, and he told us to do it out of love, not because the government forced us to.

Leftists go to the polls and tell the government to take things from other people and give those things to them, and then they call themselves unselfish. Meanwhile, conservatives earn less money and give more to charity.

The Democratic Party is the party of Satan now. Anyone who doesn’t believe that needs to explain a simple fact: when witches gather to curse politicians, they ALWAYS curse Republicans. Never leftists.

Good luck trying to respond to that.

Christians avoid developing supernatural power. Even though we worship someone who walked on water and talked to Satan and demons, somehow, we have decided that trying to do supernatural things is evidence of insanity. That’s amazing. I wish occultists felt the same way.

Here’s a good question. If occultists are holding big meetings to curse Donald Trump and Brett Kavanaugh, why aren’t we meeting to curse leftism and the Democratic Party? I don’t mean we should be cursing people with disease and damnation and so on, but we should be cursing their efforts to oppose God and Christians. Why don’t we do that? The enemy’s soldiers are warring vigorously with us, and we don’t even show up. We are unarmed, and we aren’t at the battlefield.

We’re not even meeting to pray for leftists to be led out of their poisonous delusion. Preachers are generally gutless and insincere, so they’re terrified of mentioning politics. They should be openly opposing leftism and encouraging us to use supernatural tools–not voter drives, campaign donations, and stupid signs–to defeat it.

Most preachers are ignorant and powerless, so they teach nonsense instead of giving us weapons that work.

Preachers do not understand a simple truth: there is symmetry in the supernatural. When God comes up with something good, Satan copies it. Occultists don’t curse and bless because Satan is a genius who gave them weapons we don’t have. They do it because God himself does it. It works. God started it. Jesus did it. Moses did it. The prophets did it. Peter did it. We’re supposed to do it, too.

Whenever you see enemies of God doing something, you should ask God if there is something similar we’re supposed to be doing. Satan doesn’t come up with anything new. Compared to God, he is very stupid.

I can’t say all of my problems are fixed, but I have gotten tremendous mileage out of blessing and cursing. I curse my problems. I curse spirits and human adversaries with defeat. Of course, I also pray for my enemies and God’s; it makes no sense to fight them without adding any hope to their lives.

When praying, blessing, and cursing don’t work, ask God to show you what the hindrance is. You may be trying to get something you shouldn’t. You may also be hindered by a sin you haven’t acknowledged or turned away from.

I wish I could tell you how many times I’ve overcome people, spirits, and problems by blessing and cursing. I do it all the time. I’ll even speak defeat to the difficulty of finding my car keys. If there is an area where you have problems, of if there is an area in which Satan will attack you, God will help you in that area. He never roped off regions of activity and told us we were on our own against our enemies.

Don’t be shy about asking God for help with trivial things. Satan attacks in trivial areas. God will not leave you to fight by yourself. What kind of father would do that? Pray, bless, and curse often throughout the day.

Some people think we abuse God when we ask for too much or we pray too often. Really? God wants to be with us all the time. How is he supposed to do that if we’re not communicating with him?

Prayer gets better the more you do it. Don’t be ashamed to use little things as an excuse to pray. Don’t listen to anyone who tells you God doesn’t want to hear about your little problems.

God is not busy. He has infinite time. He has never slept; not once. He has infinite power. Nothing is hard for him. He has said so repeatedly. You’re not burdening God when you ask for help. That isn’t possible. He doesn’t have your limitations. When you ask him to help you decide what to have for lunch, he doesn’t have to step away from fighting a hurricane or an epidemic. He doesn’t have to put people on hold.

Satan is the finite one. Everything is easy for God, and he almost begs us to ask for help. The Bible says to acknowledge him in ALL our ways. God will never say, “Don’t you think I have better things to do than to help you get your lawnmower started?”

Many people think John Coltrane was the best jazz musician who ever lived. He was known for practicing 8 or more hours a day. He always had his horn with him. Don’t expect to be the John Coltrane of prayer if you have the practice schedule of Henny Youngman.

One of the biggest problems I have is a habit of trying to fix my problems on my own before I pray, bless, or curse. The supernatural things should always come first. The supernatural existed before the natural universe was created. When I put my own strength first, I delude myself with pride, and I motivate God to refrain from helping.

Don’t say Christians shouldn’t speak curses. Don’t wave a finger and say, “Out of the same mouth proceedeth blessing and cursing. My brethren, these things ought not so to be,” without understanding it. Jesus blessed, and he also cursed. When James warned us about cursing, he was talking about reviling and cursing for no good reason. He didn’t mean you couldn’t speak defeat to your santero neighbor who leaves chicken parts in your yard.

If it’s wrong to curse, and Jesus cursed, what does that make Jesus?

It’s disturbing to read about the hard work Satanists put in, casting spells and decreeing curses. They’re battling us every day, and we’re sitting around watching Joel Osteen mumble self-help garbage he cribbed from secular motivational speakers. We’re sending money to Rod Parsley and waiting for God to send us our “miracle harvests” that never come. We’re at war, and we’re forfeiting.

I can’t tell you how much I wish I had had someone to teach me how to fight when I was young. I went to preachers, which was the only thing I knew to do, and they put millstones around my neck. They lied to get my money. They taught fables. There was literally no one I could go to for instruction. Not one person. The things that are so helpful to me now were hidden from the church because the people who came before us threw them away. I had no one to teach me, and the preachers I went to for help had had no one to teach them.

We’re going to lose the war for humanity. The Bible makes that clear. Our rejection of the supernatural, in favor of feel-good sermons and carnal effort, is the reason why. It’s amazing how easy it is to delude us and pull our teeth. We look back at Samson and think he was an idiot, but we’ve done the same thing he did. We sleep with our heads in Satan’s lap while he shaves away God’s glory and power.

Samson put his head in Delilah’s lap, and she soothed him until he fell asleep. She had been vexing him continuously in order to get him to reveal his secret, so he must have been worn out. He looked to a woman for peace–the same woman who took his peace to begin with–when he should have been spending time in God’s presence. We do the same thing. We listen to relaxation CD’s. We meditate. We do yoga. If Samson had been spending time with God, he wouldn’t have needed help relaxing.

The world is doomed, but no individual has to go down with it. I’m going to keep doing what works, even if every other person on earth goes to hell.

I Have Been Processed

If you read my last post, you know I’ve been installing new smoke detectors. I installed three, liked what I saw, and bought 5 more. I just tried to install the three remaining upstairs detectors, and I discovered two of the new ones I bought were missing parts. Now I’m stuck until tomorrow, because I’m not going to Home Depot three times in one day.

I finally found out why people like hardwired smoke detectors. They can communicate with each other, so if an alarm goes off in one end of your house, the detector in your end may also go off. This prevents you from sleeping through a fire in a distant room.

I’m not all that worried. I sleep in a room at one end of the house. I can clearly hear the alarms in the upstairs hall, my bedroom, and the bedroom next to mine. I would surely be awakened by the alarms in the other two upstairs bedrooms, even though they’re farther away. Besides, I don’t know whether my old detectors communicated. I can’t even find out how they’re wired up. They don’t have a circuit breaker. That’s ridiculous.

They’re intolerable. They have no UPS and no way to hook one up, and they seem to go off every night because they’re sensitive to power outages, so I’m going to take my chances with 11 battery-operated detectors, including three that are connected to a blaring whole-house alarm.

I can’t understand the purpose of the hardwiring. Hardwired detectors still need batteries. I can get battery-powered detectors that communicate. Seems like the only feature hardwiring provides is an endless stream of late-night false alarms caused by AC power failures.

What’s the purpose of the alarms? The batteries will keep the detectors working, so what do we care if the power goes out for an hour?

The detectors I’m removing were made in late 2016, so they shouldn’t be obsolete, but they clearly are.

In other news, my dad went to church today. I took him to Middlebrook, the slick charismatic megachurch I visited last week. I’ve already written about it. It’s a big, efficient church that runs three quick, impersonal services every Sunday. It’s sort of a drive-by experience, but it’s good enough for now.

We sat in the back, and Pastor Tim Gilligan started talking with about 35 minutes left on the big countdown clock on the rear wall.

Right away, I knew what I was dealing with. He started his sermon by mentioning Rick Warren.

If you don’t know who Rick Warren is, you must have forgotten the 2008 fiasco in which he moderated a “forum” featuring Barack Obama and John McCain. He sat and smiled and asked softball questions, pretending to be a Christian authority while giving equal dignity to a Republican and a leftist extremist who favors abortion so strongly he refused to vote for a law requiring doctors to give care to babies who survive the procedure.

If you can’t figure out that God is against the murder of the unborn, you have no business standing behind a pulpit. It’s not a hard question.

Warren gave the invocation at Obama’s 2009 inauguration. It was a good deal. Obama got to pretend he respected God and Christians, and Warren got promotion.

I can’t read Warren’s mind, but he seems to run on attention. He is a huge networker and self-promoter. People say he’s noble and unselfish because he’s a “reverse tither.” He makes a gigantic amount of money, and he lives on 10% and gives the rest to the church. There are a lot of problems with that logic.

First, as Jesus noted, if you want to be considered generous, look at what you have left, not what you give away. Warren is not poor. Second, as any informed Christian knows, we are discouraged from talking about what we give to others, yet Warren makes sure people know. Jesus said people who do that get their reward here on earth. Third, again, tithing is from the Jewish law, so if you’re tithing in any manner, reverse or otherwise, you’re showing your ignorance. Fourth, not all greed applies to wealth. Some people are greedy for admiration and attention, and it’s just as bad.

Pastor Gilligan quoted Warren’s appalling book, The Purpose-Driven Life. I probably sighed. This book is a carnal attempt to replace the Holy Spirit with human effort. When I was an armorbearer at Trinity Church in Miami, the leader of our team told us to buy the book. I read a few pages, and then I threw the book out. Before I threw it out, I tore it in half so no one else could read it. I didn’t want to be responsible for the harm it could do.

Warren is not a charismatic. He knows nothing whatsoever about the Holy Spirit. He believes the gifts of the Spirit are optional, and he magnanimously chooses to tolerate them in his church, but it seems clear he doesn’t believe they’re real. If he thought they were real, they would be hugely important to him. People are dying all around us. If healing is real, it’s a big deal. It would certainly be more important to him than his pathetic, ineffective, God-negating, third-tier motivational drivel.

Warren thinks Christianity is about working hard and being nice. Be nice all the time. He thinks our job is to make the world a nicer place. Jesus, on the other hand, was intolerant of other religions and said the world would end in catastrophe. He says he will return and kill so many people his robe will be red with blood.

I’m not saying we’re supposed to go out and kill people. Just that the notion of reforming the world with niceness is Satanic, not Christian. The world is going to fail, just as it did before Noah. We’re not going to fix it, and anyone who tries is fighting God and denying prophecy.

Warren is a proud and condescending man who likes being nice and working really hard. Jesus, on the other hand, never worked in the Bible. Paul chose to work, but he didn’t have to. The Bible doesn’t say God wants us to work hard. It says work is a curse that fell on us because of disobedience. Hard work did not exist until Adam and Eve sinned and lied to God. Jesus didn’t reward anyone for hard work. He rewarded them for faith, compassion, and sincerity.

Remember Mary and Martha? Jesus and his boys were eating in their house, and Martha was working herself to death, trying to serve everyone. She told Jesus to yell at Mary, who was sitting and listening to him instead of helping. Jesus said Mary, not Martha, had the better part. Rick Warren would have sided with Martha.

Here’s something God told me: “We become arrogant through striving in the flesh.” When we work hard and succeed, we credit ourselves, not God. God wants the glory, and God is not a cheat. If he wants the glory, it means he expects to do most of the work. He’s not going to let you bust your hump so he can take the credit. Who could worship a God who makes people give him glory for their own achievements?

It’s disturbing to see any Christian support Warren. It proves they don’t know much. Gilligan is a wonderful speaker, but he isn’t worth listening to when it comes to God.

He also promoted tithing. That’s an error which is to be expected in charismatic churches. Charismatics like money a little too much; more than they like the Holy Spirit. Tithing brings a lot of money in. Pastors are afraid to rely on freewill offerings motivated by the Holy Spirit, probably because they don’t know the Holy Spirit and have not taught their flocks how to hear from him. Tithing is not scriptural. Gentiles have never been required or even allowed to tithe. It’s an Old Testament thing. Also, the tithe wasn’t composed of cash. It was things like sheep and grain.

The Bible says were are not under the Jewish law, and we quote that scripture all the time. We can eat pork. We can eat shrimp. We can work on Saturday, which is still the sabbath. We do not have to observe the Jewish feasts. Somehow, though, pastors think the law of the tithe, which didn’t apply to us in Paul’s time, applies now.

Okay. Middlebrook is a feel-good church with no depth. Maybe that’s fine. My dad doesn’t need to study at Paul’s feet right now, and neither do I. As a dementia sufferer who just accepted salvation, he just needs to be among Christians and know God’s presence. Pastors are generally useless, but powerful Christians can be found in great churches, and you have to attend and tolerate the prattling of pastors in order to meet them. My hope is that my dad will pick up a few basic things, that he will sense God’s presence, and that he will meet other Christians.

A friend of mine also attended today, and when we texted later, she mentioned her negative feelings about Warren and tithing. I didn’t prompt her. It’s not easy to slide that stuff past intelligent people.

She has kids. They need to know Christians. Maybe Middlebrook will get them through Christian preschool, and then the Holy Spirit can take over.

I’m just happy my dad went to church. That’s a huge milestone.

He didn’t like the sermon. He may be demented, but a highly intelligent person who becomes demented will still see things ordinary people do not. My dad didn’t hear prophecy or see anyone healed. God didn’t speak to him (or anyone else) through Gilligan. He never sat up in his chair, and said, “That word was for ME!” On the other hand, he only had to sit still for 35 minutes, the music was done well, and getting on the road back to the house was easy.

The musicians at Meadowbrook were beyond reproach in their proficiency. Very, very impressive. Everyone sang on key. They were good looking, too. The songs were very bad, however. I am guessing it’s new stuff Hillsong put out after I quit going to church. Listening to Hillsong is like having a paste of Wonder Bread and mayonnaise jammed in your ears. It’s completely uninspired because the motivation is money and attention, not the glorification of God.

I don’t know where the songs came from, but they were really bad. It’s unfortunate that such talented musicians had to play this material. I couldn’t pick out the melodies because they were so flat and monotonous. The opposite of catchy. I sang in the Spirit instead.

Lionel Richie is one of the most successful songwriters in history. He has said that when he writes a song, he starts with a hook and writes the song around it. The hook of a song is the catchy part that sticks in your memory and makes you want to hear it again. The songs I heard today didn’t have any features like that. They droned and meandered pointlessly. The musicians at Meadowbrook were fishing for men without hooks.

I noticed one other thing about Meadowbrook. There were a number of pretty women. That’s an oddity in Ocala. I can’t explain it, but while the men here look pretty much like the men everywhere else, good looking women are as rare as hen’s teeth. Whenever I see one, it makes an impression on me, because it doesn’t happen most days.

I can’t understand the lack of beautiful women here. Somehow, though, Meadowbrook has attracted a relatively high percentage of beauties.

I don’t think it means anything, but it’s weird.

I plan to keep going back until something better pops up. Maybe this as as good as we can do. That’s okay. I don’t need or depend on a church, and I don’t think my dad is going to get so far in his devotion that he requires top-notch instruction.

As annoying as the fakery and grandstanding in ethnic churches are, I do miss the moves of God. I have heard a lot of inspired words in ethnic churches, and I have had healings and so on. I don’t those things will ever happen at Meadowbrook. They don’t have time for it. Maybe it’s because the people aren’t poor. When you go to a Puerto Rican church, you sit with people who are on parole, on drugs, suffering from diet-induced diseases, and so on. You’ll sit with prostitutes and former pimps. Most people around you will be poor. They aren’t like the successful, corn-fed Christians of Middlebrook, who show up in nice shiny cars and clean, pressed clothes. Maybe desperation adds something Middlebrook lacks.

The lack of God’s participation makes for a boring sermon. When you’re used to hearing God speak through preachers, a speaker who relies on his own ability is pretty dull. Gilligan is very, very good at what he does, like Dave Chappelle or Fidel Castro, but 35 minutes of human effort, when you came expecting to hear from God, are way too much. I like a good speaker, but a plain old orator can’t compete with someone through whom God speaks. Not even close.

I’m not looking for perfection any more, except in my own relationship with God. A weak and superficial church will do, as long as they don’t cause me a lot of problems.

The services I’ve seen have been so backward and uneventful compared to my own daily prayers, I have no hope that Meadowbrook will ever be important to me. Maybe it’s time for me to sit back and rest. I was hoping to find a church where I could rest instead of being used and slandered, so maybe I got what I wanted.

“WAKE UP!!! NOTHING IS WRONG!!!”

I am learning more about the tyranny of smoke detectors.

For quite a while, I’ve been dealing with late night/early morning smoke alarm beeps. I didn’t know what was going on. I didn’t know anything about smoke detectors. I didn’t have them in Miami. I had an alarm system, and fire detection was part of it, so there were no electronic warts on the ceiling.

I thought my various stressors were waking me up at night, but now I think it has been the smoke detectors all along. It seems like I wake up pretty consistently a couple of hours before dawn. Sometimes I hear smoke detectors. Sometimes I don’t. That would make sense if the detectors were waking me. There would be times I awoke after the beeping stopped, so I wouldn’t realize what had disturbed me.

I started tearing into the detectors the other day, and I found out I had two sets. One belonged to the burglar alarm people. That set is wireless, and it runs on batteries. The other set belonged to the house. It was hardwired, and it also had non-rechargeable 9-volt cells. Really stupid. If you have a battery-operated device connected to AC, why wouldn’t you use rechargeable batteries and put a charger in the system?

I started calling the burglar alarm people to complain, and that’s when I found out they hadn’t caused the problem. They told me about the hardwired detectors.

I changed the batteries in the hardwired detectors, and they still went nuts at night. I found out a lot of things can set them off. Check out this list.

1. Bugs. If a bug–even a tiny gnat–flies into a smoke detector, you get an alarm. Nice, especially in Florida, where absolutely everyone has at least a few roaches. The geniuses who installed my system cut holes in the ceiling for AC power, and they didn’t seal them, so when a bug gets into the attic and decides to descend into a room, guess where it goes? Figure it out.

2. Humidity changes. I can’t believe this one. Am I supposed to live in a sauna?

3. Dust. Yes, dust. My AC ceiling warts sit under an attic insulated with fiberglass. What does fiberglass shed constantly? And as I said, the holes for the wires aren’t sealed.

4. Power outages. Let that sink in. We have power outages several times a week. They’re very short; usually, the computer doesn’t even turn off. Nonetheless, they happen, and for some reason, some detectors are engineered to poop the bed every time power goes out or even fluctuates. What were the engineers thinking? And why is there no UPS on the system? Hello? Obvious?

5. Temperature changes. This one blew me away. What does the temperature do every single night? Think. Think hard. If you know the answer, you’re smarter than an engineer.

If you hate your hardwired detectors, I have moderately good news for you. I’m convinced all smoke detectors are garbage, but some are better garbage than others. The law in Florida has changed, and now not all of us have to have hardwired smoke detectors. A substitute is available. For $25, you can get a disposable lithium-powered smoke detector that will run 10 years. It doesn’t care if the power goes out, because it doesn’t know. It’s not connected to your house wiring.

Obvious question: why disposable? Why not let people charge the batteries after 10 years? Call me cynical, but I suspect profit was on someone’s mind.

I don’t know what the law actually says, because I don’t care. I have two independent sets of smoke detectors, and it’s clear that the law approves of the 10-year kind in many applications, so it’s obvious to me that I won’t lose anything by dumping my obsolete hardwired detectors and installing new ones that allow me to sleep once in a while. If I’m committing a felony, take me away. I absolutely have to sleep, either here or in prison.

I’ve read that you shouldn’t replace hardwired detectors with lithium jobs. Sleep in my house for a week, and then try to say that with a straight face. You’ll need another kind of lithium. The kind that requires a prescription.

By the way, if you go for a new hardwired system (fat chance), it will come with a UPS. So what was immediately obvious to me took engineers years to figure out.

Today I’ve been ripping out the old detectors and putting up new ones. I love taking the batteries out of the old ones, pressing their test buttons, and listening to their death squeals. Never again, my little friends. You are washed up. You messed with the bull, and you got the horn.

I wish I had known all this before I spent over $40 on 9-volt batteries. I won’t run out of them for a decade.

There are a lot of smoke detector options out there. You can get wifi-enabled detectors that connect to Alexa. No idea what the purpose is. Maybe you can tell the smoke detector to order you a tent so you’ll have a place to sleep when your house burns down.

The other day I told someone the thought of having Alexa spy on me all day made me heave. This person said, “Alexa doesn’t ‘spy on you all day.'” They said it just listens for the cue word and then comes to life.

Uh…how does it listen for the cue if it’s not spying on you? Earth to suckers: if it’s not listening, it can’t hear when you call.

Don’t worry, though. No company would ever collect data it claims it doesn’t collect, misuse data it collects from customers, or lose any of it to hackers. None of those things could ever happen.

I’m no expert, but my tentative advice to people with hardwired smoke detectors is to get rid of them. Sleep is important. It’s amazing that engineers can’t figure that out.

I only bought three new detectors, figuring I would put them in the important areas of the house, i.e., near my bedroom. Now that I see how easy they are to install, I’m going to get more.

The detectors have tiny stickers on the side where you can write the installation date. Another genius move by the engineers. I have 10-foot ceilings. I can’t read those stickers. I took a marker and wrote “10/18” on the faces of the detectors, in big numerals. I can see it without getting on a ladder. Maybe I deserve a patent.

The new detectors have a voice feature. They are designed for bedrooms. No kidding. Somehow the voice is important for bedroom use. When you push the test button, you get beeps plus a very breathy blonde voice cooing, “Firrrre. Firrrre.” Maybe they’re designed for men. They should go all the way: “Firrrre, baby. Oh…TIGER…Firrrre!!!”

Some day I’ll figure out how to seal those holes. Right now I just want to wake up at eight instead of four.

Time to Pay the Piper, Little Buddies

Today I had some fun with a new project. I added a spray boom to the utility cart.

You may wonder what a spray boom is.

When I moved to this farm, the seller left me a 25-gallon spot sprayer. This is a contraption with a polyethylene tank and a wand you hold in your hand. You hook it to a cart battery and drive around, shooting various types of poison at plants and bugs.

Last week I started using the spot sprayer, and I saw that it was good. I found a huge jug of concentrated glyphosate in the workshop, and I obliterated a huge number of troublesome weeds. So much better than paying $18 for a tiny jug of Roundup with a wimpy squirt pistol.

Unfortunately, it was a pain to use. I had to steer the cart with one hand and spray with the other, and I could only cover a three-foot swath. I would like to spray my pastures, and there is no way I’m doing it three feet at a time.

I looked into the matter, and I learned about spray booms. A boom is a rigid beam or pole. A spray boom has nozzles attached to it. You attach it to a vehicle, and it will spray a nice, consistent swath. You don’t have to hold anything in your hand.

I also looked into boomless sprayers. A boomless sprayer doesn’t have a rigid support member. It only has one nozzle, and the nozzle sprays out to the sides. With the right pump and nozzle, you can spray a swath 25 feet wide.

A boomless sprayer is better for most people. It’s less cumbersome, it’s cheaper, and it will do most of what a boom sprayer will do. It’s not as good for hitting plants that are behind other plants, however.

I was going to order myself a boomless sprayer, but I decided to hit Rural King today, to see what they had. They stock a two-nozzle boom that will attach to “most” spot sprayers. It was only $49. I didn’t know what to do, so I prayed. I felt like the boom sprayer was the right choice, even though I wanted the other one, which cost over twice as much.

I got the thing home, and I found out it only fits “most” spot sprayers if you do some work on it. It had a strange “return” nipple on it, to return unused stuff to the tank. My sprayer doesn’t do that. It just pushes stuff out. Nothing goes back. I had to find a way to stop up the return nipple. My machine tools are still in Miami, so I couldn’t make a threaded plug.

I decided to plug it from the inside with an old foam earplug. There was no way the pump would be able to push it out, and it would seal the nipple nicely. It worked perfectly.

Of course, the one-size-fits-all struts that came with the boom would not attach to my sprayer or cart. I ended up taking the tailgate off and using Irwin clamps to attach the boom to the rear of the dump bed. It turned out this was an ideal solution. Instead of a bulky sprayer with steel struts on it, I only have to deal with a small boom and two clamps. Excellent. When I prayed for guidance, I felt like the boom was a bad idea, but it worked out great.

I didn’t know what kind of fertilizer to use on my grass. The whole point of buying a boom was to avoid using hobby-grade products that come in tiny packages. I assumed that Rural King would have some kind of soluble fertilizer in big bags, for tractor-pulled sprayers. Unfortunately, they only had one product: ammonium sulfate. Fifty-one pounds for 11 dollars. It’s sort of like ammonium nitrate, only cheaper.

For 11 bucks, I was willing to take a chance. It was way cheaper than things like Scott’s Turf Builder, and because it was soluble, it worked in a sprayer. I wouldn’t have to push a spreader like a peasant.

I mixed 10 or 15 pounds of ammonium sulfate with 25 gallons of water, and I added some 2,4 D just for fun. Off I went. It worked great. Now I have to see how it affects the grass. I hope the yard doesn’t die.

It would take a long time to spray my 13-acre pasture this way, but it could be done, and it would be better than paying someone else $75 per hour or whatever. I would like to get rid of the weeds that are taking over. If I could do that, I might have an easier time getting someone to mow my land for the hay, and besides, it’s not a good idea to let weeds eat a pasture.

I sprayed a little bit of my small pasture, just to see how well the chemicals worked.

I may upgrade my pump and try a boomless sprayer for the pasture. I think the boom sprayer is better for the yard, because it won’t hit shrubs accidentally, but when it comes to larger areas, it’s clearly better to spray 25 feet at a time instead of 6.

I couldn’t find insecticide for the sprayer. That’s not totally true; they had malathion. I want some something better. Maybe I can buy several jugs of concentrated imidacloprid. The yard needs something powerful.

Hmm…Ebay has super-concentrated imidacloprid, cheap. It’s considered safe, and it does a great job on bugs, even underground. SOLD.

We had a lot of problems with moles and/or gophers last year. Today I read that the way to get rid of them is to kill the grubs they eat. Wish I had known that last fall. I’m going to blast the whole area around the house with imidacloprid. I should also soak the bases of the oaks near the house, to kill the bugs that make them fall over.

I really want to get the lawn and grounds under control. I was afraid of spending money last year, and I was busy coping with downed oaks. I was also very ignorant. All these things contributed to the chaos the yard is now experiencing. I think the sprayer will make a big difference, provided I don’t kill everything with it while I’m learning about chemicals.

Maybe I’ll post a photo of the cart with the sprayer rigged up.

With God’s help, this farm will survive me. It just has to last long enough for me to figure out what I’m doing.

Democracy is not a Blessing

I seem to be writing a lot today.

I wanted to mention something God showed me last night. For years–since before pundits started saying it–I’ve been saying the Internet, TV, and the telephone were going to merge. It was obvious, even when 1 MBps was a big deal. Crank up the speed, reach more people, and you find yourself in a situation where it makes no sense to have three wires doing, poorly and expensively, what one wire can do very well.

For a long time, we’ve been able to place landline and cell calls over the web. Over the past few years, we’ve been using the web instead of cable TV. If it weren’t for my dad’s needs, I wouldn’t dream of paying for TV. I have had cable, and now I’m stuck with DirecTV. Both are inferior to the Internet.

It will be an embarrassment to mankind if cable TV and ordinary cell and landline service still exist in 5 years.

I thought I was clever when I saw the future of TV, the Internet, and the telephone, but last night God showed me something very obvious which I missed: the Internet is going to replace the government. Not only that, but Satan is all for it.

The political left belongs to Satan. In case anyone is interested, this is why we see witches getting together frequently to curse conservative politicians but never liberal politicians. The left is against Jesus, Israel, Jews, Christians, conservatives, sexual morality, cleanliness, good manners, and nearly every type of good behavior one can think of. If you want to find someone who thinks burglary should be legal, you have to look to the political left.

Look how leftists are acting now. They hate our current democracy. That shouldn’t surprise anyone; they supported Castro and Stalin. We have a democracy (please, nerds, no “republic” comments), and it’s not giving leftists what they want, so they have decided they’re not bound by its authority.

They attack conservatives on the street. They accost and frighten conservative politicians and their families. They doxx conservatives. Their leaders tell them to go after us in public places. They’ve gone berserk with civil disobedience.

Trump was elected fairly, in accordance with the law. Our Supreme Court justices were appointed and confirmed legally. Our GOP-controlled senators and representatives were put in place legitimately. We have a lot of conservative governors, and they won their seats in elections. Leftists aren’t having it. They’re not just complaining about the results; they’re saying the system itself has to be discarded and rebuilt so it works in their favor.

Suddenly, leftists hate the Electoral College and call it racist. They have no idea why it was created. They’re making up slavery-related stories in order to turn anyone who supports the College into a target for damaging accusations that are impossible to disprove.

They’re upset because Hillary Clinton got the popular vote but not the office of president. They say the person who gets the popular vote should get the job. Great logic. If that’s true, then we should abolish the Senate. Wyoming is basically empty, but it has the same number of senators as California.

The Senate is racist! Wyoming must be a racist state.

Leftists want a system in which the majority gets its way fast. They want hyper-democracy. They don’t want to be hindered by laws or morality. They believe they know best and that the rest of us have no rights except the right to be managed.

In the past, there was no way for citizens to get around the need for government. We didn’t have the ability to coordinate quickly and effectively. In order to influence society, we had to rely on representatives and tedious processes. That won’t always be true. Computing power is increasing all the time. Our ability to network and act quickly is increasing. We live in a world where a bunch of ghetto kids who feel like destroying a mall can organize their attack in hours.

In the future, leftists will be able to use the Internet and their personal devices to put mobs wherever they want, faster than the rest of us can react. When they want something, they won’t have to vote. They’ll show up in numbers the government can’t cope with, and they’ll rule by force.

At first, the new government will appear in isolated guerrilla actions. We’re already seeing that. As things develop, the left will cohere, and they will act with one deranged mind a good part of the time. Eventually, they will be like one communal organism, with what almost amounts to a single consciousness. They’ll be wrong about everything, but it won’t matter. They’ll be unified. Just as Spirit-led Christians have the mind of Christ, they’ll have the mind of the Beast.

Tech companies are run by extreme leftists, so they’ll be on the side of the mob. They’ll pretend to be dismayed at first, just as they pretend to want to be fair to us now, but gradually they will out themselves as supporters and architects of the revolution.

This has to happen. We can’t keep binding our minds together more and more effectively without developing a hive consciousness.

The hive will be very powerful, and when people are powerful, their real natures emerge. They don’t have to hide any more. They don’t have to pretend to have compassion or to care about fairness. Cruelty and deliberate injustice will surge to levels we can’t imagine right now.

Computerized persecution will be a wonder to behold. The other day I was in line at a grocery, and I saw all the technology around me. I realized it was a small step from persecuting Christians and conservatives on Facebook to fixing things so we could not buy food. “Your chip says you’re against gay marriage. You can’t shop here.”

If God lets the world continue long enough, technology will destroy and replace individual sovereignties. Countries will become obsolete. When we’re thinking and feeling across borders, with lightning speed, conventional governments won’t be able to regulate us.

The bizarre, infantile, cruel mob behavior we’re seeing from the left today is the Beast, taking baby steps. They’re going to get better and better at it, and because they control technology, we will not develop electronics-based power along with them.

The other day I dreamed I died. Nearly. For some reason, it seems like when I dream of death, I always die in a falling vehicle. Remember the death of the Illinois Nazi in the original Blues Brothers movie? That’s what it’s like. Somehow or another, I find myself and my vehicle plummeting, and it doesn’t scare me at all, because I’m tired of this place. When I think I’m about to die, I feel like I’m embarking on a thrilling adventure.

In my latest dream, I was driving a big vehicle like a bus. I was on an impossibly high overpass. A storm surrounded me and lifted the vehicle off the overpass, and I figured I would die when I hit the ground. I prayed intensely, trying to make sure I had salvation sewn up while I still had time. Suddenly, I saw a bright light, and it occurred to me how similar it was to the “white tunnel” stories people like to tell.

Unfortunately, I did not die. It turned out the bright light experience was the result of slamming into the ground and losing consciousness.

I was very disappointed. That’s how tired I am of this earth. Surviving what I thought was a fatal accident was a big blow. I was thinking, “Now not only do I have to stay in this miserable, evil place where I don’t belong; I may have to face all sorts of surgeries and physical therapy, and then I may be crippled. Great.”

I’ve had funny experiences during prayer when I felt like I would leave my body. I’ve had supernatural chest pains during prayer. I didn’t ask God to protect me and keep me alive. No way. I told him to do whatever he wanted to do. Any excuse to get sent home from the front.

Our future with a digital antichrist put together from juvenile, trashy individuals that hate me for existing is not alluring. This world is a mission field, so I know I have to stay here a while, but when it gets too sordid, and too much of the population has become unreachable and filled with apelike, unrestrained hate, I want out.

The left doesn’t want us on the planet any more. I am in complete agreement, but God’s plan doesn’t let me off that easy.

It’s astounding to see the capabilities electronics have given us. Unfortunately, the increase in power has been accompanied by a degradation of our humanity. It has eroded kindness and civility. We can’t handle the power. It’s going to destroy us. We will continue to use it to indulge, magnify, and mutate our basest drives.

By “us,” I mean the species. Myself not included.

This stuff will happen. It may not happen exactly as I describe, but it’s coming. You don’t need prophecy to see it coming. It’s the obvious, inevitable result of the changes we’re going through. We created new toys we are too stupid and venal to use in a mature fashion.

I don’t like being old. I hate reading glasses and knowing my potential is limited. I don’t look forward to falling apart. But I’m very glad I’m not young. The lucky people are the ones who are at the end of their lives. I read about a famous person’s death recently, and before I had time to censor myself, I thought, “Good for him!” He won’t have to suffer the indignity of being crushed by the autonomy-sapping strangler figs, Alexa and Siri.

I can’t believe people want Alexa in their homes. Imagine the digital surveillance records they’re creating. And they trust Jeff Bezos with it! A merchant! When did he prove he was worthy of that? Jeff Bezos is doing things that would have made J. Edgar Hoover faint from ecstasy.

One nice thing about my age is that it limits what the left can do to me. I’ll be gone in 30 years, more or less. That’s all the time they have to work on me. Then I get my vision back, along with perfect health, safety, and an atmosphere of overwhelming love. What if I were 20? It would scare me to death. Even with God at my side, helping me, I would not want to be here for another 70 years. I can see why Jesus left when he was young.

Our dystopian future will make films like Soylent Green and Alien seem idyllic, at least for people who see it for the horror it is. It makes me glad I’m mortal.

Life Isn’t a Disney Cartoon

I love confirmation.

In “Christianese,” or the jargon of charismatic Christians, “confirmation” is what happens when you think God is doing or saying something, and then you get independent corroboration. For example, during your morning prayers, you get a strong impression that God wants you to spend more time in confession. Then later in the day, a Christian friend calls you and starts telling you about a revelation he received about confession. That’s confirmation.

I few days ago, I wrote about the importance of confession. I wrote about the way your prayers can be hindered by refusing to confront sin and iniquity. I said pride kept people from getting healed and so on.

A friend of mine who is not a Christian posted a familiar scripture in the comments: “God is near to all who call on him.”

The problem with the comment was this: you have to read the whole Bible and consider it when you look at individual verses. Otherwise, you get the wrong idea.

Imagine this. You buy a band saw. You want to know how to turn it on, so you read part of the manual. The part you read says to flip the “ON” switch. You flip the switch, and nothing happens. What went wrong? You failed to consider the page that said to plug the saw in.

God is in the business of answering prayers and helping people. When he doesn’t answer, it doesn’t mean he just didn’t feel like it. He is honest. He has promised to answer prayer, and he means it. Either you asked for something you should not have asked for, or something blocked the response. God is near to all who call on him, EXCEPT for those who have problems that put him at a distance or motivate him to close his ears.

I started looking for scriptures one should think about in addition to the one about God being near, and in a few minutes, I had posted a large collection.

I’ll repost the scriptures here. I doubt you’ll ever hear Joyce Meyer or T.D. Jakes mention them.

“Though the Lord is on high,
Yet He regards the lowly;
BUT THE PROUD HE KNOWS FROM AFAR.”

“Because I have called and you refused,
I have stretched out my hand and no one regarded,
Because you disdained all my counsel,
And would have none of my rebuke,
I also will laugh at your calamity;
I WILL MOCK WHEN YOUR TERROR COMES,
When your terror comes like a storm,
And your destruction comes like a whirlwind,
When distress and anguish come upon you.

THEN THEY WILL CALL ON ME, BUT I WILL NOT ANSWER;
THEY WILL SEEK ME DILIGENTLY, BUT THEY WILL NOT FIND ME.
Because they hated knowledge
And did not choose the fear of the Lord,
They would have none of my counsel
And despised my every rebuke.

Therefore they shall eat the fruit of their own way,
And be filled to the full with their own fancies.
For the turning away of the simple will slay them,
And the complacency of fools will destroy them;
But whoever listens to me will dwell safely,
And will be secure, without fear of evil.”

“If I regard iniquity in my heart, THE LORD WILL NOT HEAR.”

“Behold, the Lord’s hand is not shortened,
That it cannot save;
Nor His ear heavy,
That it cannot hear.

But your iniquities have separated you from your God;
And your sins have hidden His face from you,
SO THAT HE WILL NOT HEAR.”

“The eyes of the Lord are on the righteous,
And His ears are open to their cry.

THE FACE OF THE LORD IS AGAINST THOSE WHO DO EVIL,
To cut off the remembrance of them from the earth.

The righteous cry out, and the Lord hears,
And delivers them out of all their troubles.

The Lord is near to those who have a broken heart,
And saves such as have a contrite spirit.”

“Then the Lord said to me, ‘Do not pray for this people, for their good. When they fast, I WILL NOT HEAR THEIR CRY; and when they offer burnt offering and grain offering, I will not accept them. But I will consume them by the sword, by the famine, and by the pestilence.’”

“Because of the multitude of oppressions they cry out;
They cry out for help because of the arm of the mighty.

But no one says, ‘Where is God my Maker,
Who gives songs in the night,

Who teaches us more than the beasts of the earth,
And makes us wiser than the birds of heaven?’

There they cry out, but HE DOES NOT ANSWER,
BECAUSE OF THE PRIDE OF EVIL MEN.

Surely God WILL NOT LISTEN TO EMPTY TALK,
Nor will the Almighty regard it.”

“THE THOUGHTS OF THE WICKED ARE AN ABOMINATION TO THE LORD,
But the words of the pure are pleasant.”

“THE LORD IS FAR FROM THE WICKED,
But He hears the prayer of the righteous.”

“When you spread out your hands,
I will hide My eyes from you;
Even though you make many prayers,
I WILL NOT HEAR.
Your hands are full of blood.”

“GOD RESISTS THE PROUD,
But gives grace to the humble.”

“You ask and DO NOT RECEIVE, because you ask amiss, that you may spend it on your pleasures.”

“Husbands, likewise, dwell with them with understanding, giving honor to the wife, as to the weaker vessel, and as being heirs together of the grace of life, THAT YOUR PRAYERS MAY NOT BE HINDERED.”

Wow. That’s pretty clear.

When things go badly for you, there is always a reason. God has promised he will do whatever we ask in the name of Jesus, provided it comports with his will, yet many people go down in flames while praying in the name of Jesus. Does it mean God lied? No, it means we do things that interfere with his help.

Look at the Old Testament. What do you see? People get in trouble. They consult God. He tells them what they’re doing wrong. They repent. God fixes their problems. It happens over and over. If there are any examples of people who pleased God, living in defeat over the long term, I am not aware of them. The Jews under the Egyptians were idolatrous. The Jews who had problems with the Philistines were idolatrous. The Jews who were taken to Babylon were idolatrous. You won’t find examples of people who behaved extremely well, living in defeat their entire lives and then dying in misery.

I’m not saying people who are faithful to God don’t have problems. They are attacked in various ways, and they have a tendency to die as martyrs. But an upright person who isn’t ignorant will be able to defeat most attacks and will not live in subordination over the long term, and there is a difference between martyrdom and failure.

Jesus was a complete success, yet he was martyred. That was his choice. It wasn’t a defeat. He sent Judas to turn him in. He waited for the high priest to come and take him. He prevented his armed disciples from defending him. He refused to mount a legal defense. It was time for him to go, so he went. Jesus suffered for a single day, by choice, but we have no record of him suffering even once before that. We never see him work. We never see him get sick. We never see him injured. He never even loses an argument.

There is no record of Jesus ever losing, but then he never did anything wrong.

Many holy men in the Bible suffered. Paul got beaten and stoned. Elijah had to run from Jezebel, who worshiped devils. Paul and Elijah weren’t perfect. They were like us. They made mistakes, and surely those mistakes gave their enemies the upper hand from time to time. Paul had issues with pride. Elijah ridiculed the prophets of Baal instead of standing by with humility. It makes sense that things went wrong for them on occasion, but in the end, they still prevailed.

Think about David. His infant son died, and this was a punishment from God. It was predicted. David prayed and fasted, but his son died anyway. It wasn’t because God doesn’t answer prayers. It was because David’s sin closed God’s ears. David murdered Uriah and had sex with his wife.

The Bible says God himself killed David’s baby.

I spent a good part of this morning throwing out music CD’s and related books I felt were coming between me and God. I should have done it decades ago. I chained myself to demons, and then I prayed to God, asking him to free me from their attacks. I was under a delusion. I was like an unfaithful wife who still expects her husband’s support. God did an awful lot for me, in spite of my rebellion, but some strongholds refused to budge.

The Hebrew word translated “iniquity” in the Bible means “crookedness.” Think of a tree which is bent as it grows. When you cut it and try to straighten it, it always springs back to its bent shape. It’s like the lady Jesus healed; the one who couldn’t stand straight. When you cultivate iniquity, you put habits in yourself, and they act like springs. When you try to do what’s right, you can’t sustain it. The force of habit, which is driven by demons you invited, eventually overcomes you.

Iniquity and habit are the same thing.

By holding onto cultural garbage, I reinforced and protected my iniquities. I gave new power to the very things I was asking God to take away from me.

I used to say my dad would be my last unequal yoking. When he prayed for salvation, I thought I was through. I was wrong, because I was still yoking myself with the world. The ridiculous music I had collected was a yoke. Fortunately, it’s a lot easier to throw out a CD than to abandon a father.

I was thinking about this today while I looked at Youtube. I was looking for Christian material. I found some. There’s something interesting going on in Sweden, of all places. Europe is an atheist/pagan stronghold now, so it’s amazing when anyone there supports God. There is a movement called The Last Reformation. Charismatic Swedes are going around praying for people, baptizing them with the Holy Spirit, and so on.

They have some Youtube channels, and today I looked at one to see what was available. I saw a title: “Our sins hide Gods face, so that he cannot hear us.” Okay! That sounded good. Then I looked at the date: October 10. Two days ago. One day before I got agitated about the music.

That’s what confirmation looks like.

I’ll embed the video here. I think you’ll like it. If you’re humble, I mean. If you hate advice and think you already have all the answers, it will make your stomach hurt.

He talks about confessing to everyone you feel you’ve wronged. We are not really obligated to do that, so I don’t endorse his message 100%. Sometimes ungodly people use our confessions against us, and besides, once you’re over the age of three, trying to dig up everyone you’ve wronged is far too burdensome to even consider. God will give you the opportunity to confess and apologize to everyone you really need to speak to. Nonetheless, I know he is right about confessing to God and forgiving everyone.

I don’t know what else I have to get rid of, but I can’t wait for God to show me. I am tired of being hindered, and knowing I do it to myself makes it even worse.

Who Really Chains You Down?

Today I’m doing something interesting. I’m throwing out compact disks.

For maybe 9 years, God has been helping me understand that iniquity and sin ruin our relationship with him. If you go to a charismatic church in the US, you won’t hear that. You’ll hear, “It doesn’t matter what you do. God is crazy about you! All you have to do is believe…AND GIVE US A HUGE PERCENTAGE OF YOUR INCOME!” If you talk about repentance and the common demons that attach themselves to Christians who don’t get sanctified, they get very angry, and they drive you out of their churches.

I have been asking God to change me for a long time, and he has been doing it, but I was so corrupted in the beginning, it took me a long time to improve.

I had a dream a number of years ago. I was in a big boat, cruising up a dirty canal in Miami. The canal was full of floating trash and dying fish. The canal was only open to the bay on one end. In order to get to the clean water of the bay, I had to turn around and go past all the filth I had seen on the way up the canal.

God was showing me that when I turned back to him, I would have to revisit my sins. I would have to go back, past all the rotten things I had done in the past. It would take time.

I have improved in steps. I would give this or that up, and then I would plateau. Then I would give something else up. There were things I couldn’t get rid of.

Last night I started thinking about my music collection. It has been sitting in boxes in a storage room for a year. I haven’t bothered fooling with it. A lot of it is also stored on electronic devices.

A while back, I threw out my only Aerosmith CD. Maybe that was before I left Miami. I can’t recall. I figured I would eventually get around to deleting it, and everything else that was offensive, from my devices.

I wake up in the middle of the night a lot, worried. I have help from my smoke detectors. I didn’t know how they worked until a week ago. It turned out I had two sets of detectors. One belonged to the alarm company, and one was built into the house. Even though the house detectors are connected to AC, they still have batteries, and the batteries don’t charge. You have to replace them. When you don’t replace them, they start going off in the middle of the night. Never during the day.

I found a great deal on batteries, on Amazon. I ordered them. They cost about a third as much as batteries from the drugstore. I figured I could deal with the beeping for a couple of days while I waited for the batteries.

Amazon canceled my order without explanation. I ordered the batteries again. Amazon canceled again. I suppose I spent almost two weeks waiting for the batteries. During this time, I was being awakened a lot. When I awakened, I had to pray and use my supernatural tool set to get peace.

Yesterday I deleted Aerosmith from my main computer. When I woke up, I thought about it. I thought about the problems that still cling to me. I felt that I needed to get into my CD’s, throw out the ones that were problematic, and ask for forgiveness. I’ve been doing this today.

I can’t believe how much garbage I’m throwing out, and I’m amazed that I allowed so much of it to remain so long.

Get this: I had two Enya CD’s. I bought them ages ago. Enya’s music is lowbrow, but it’s relaxing, and it makes a good stereo sound great. Why did I have this filth, after turning back to God? Enya is a pagan. Her music is for people who worship demons. I was very angry with myself when I saw the CD’s.

I also had relaxation CD’s. I am very wary of these. Relaxing in God’s presence is wonderful. We’re supposed to do it every day. Relaxing without him can open doors. Relaxation and hypnosis are tools demons use to get at us. Even though my relaxation CD’s were not religious in nature, I threw them out.

I had music from a company called Hearts of Space. I don’t know if they still exist. They used to produce collections of music to show off stereos, and it leaned toward the occult. A good stereo will simulate a large space very well, and New-Agey music is heavy on ambience effects.

I had a little bit of rock and roll. Gone. I don’t need it. How much brains do you need to realize rock culture belongs to Satan? It celebrates rebellion, drugs, and fornication. What else do you need to know? It embarrasses me that I didn’t throw it out a long time ago.

I threw out blues music. I guess I’ll get rid of all of it. I’m not done yet. I threw out B.B. King, Albert King, Big Joe Turner, Lazy Lester, Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Howlin’ Wolf, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Johnny Winter, and a pile of other things.

I have excellent taste in music, so I’m throwing out a lot of things that have real artistic quality. I’m not a teeny bopper or a woman. I don’t listen to Hanson, Kenny G, Beyonce, or Lady Gaga.

It’s amazing, the junk women like.

I’m wondering if I should dump Johnny Cash. People think of him as a country musician, but he started out in rockabilly, and he was an amphetamine addict. He had problems with the law. He broke up June Carter’s marriage. Not a great role model.

It’s tough, throwing out my blues CD’s. Pete Johnson, Jimmy Yancey, Ben Waters, Willie Smith, Albert Ammons, Meade Lewis…most people don’t even know who they are.

I pitched almost every Cuban album I had. Cuba is extremely screwed up. Cubans are passionate about voodoo; it’s why Cuba fell to Castro. The famous song “Babalu” is about a demon Cubans worship. I threw out Cugat, Beny More, Orquesta de la Playa, and Miguelito Valdes. I have been throwing out albums that are not easy to find. To buy them, I had to look them up on obscure websites.

Freddie King. Jackson Browne. Buddy Guy. Duane Allman. It’s a massacre.

When I’m done with the trash, I have to start deleting things.

For months, I’ve been asking God to show me the ropes that attach demons to me, and I know these CD’s are among them.

I wonder if I’ll be able to keep my jazz and classical music. It’s less offensive, but apart from a few classical tunes, it’s not pro-God. Jesus said those who were not for him were against him.

Whatever. I can’t have this mess clinging to me any more. How can I ask God to set me free while I hold onto my chains?

One reason I didn’t do this sooner is that I was afraid of going too far. When I was in my twenties, I went through a period when I wanted to get rid of everything that seemed ungodly, and I threw out things I should have kept. I burned some diaries I wish I still had. Having been through that, I was afraid of going overboard again.

Is it really possible to go overboard? Isn’t it better to overdo it and then have things restored to you than to refuse to go far enough? I’m not sure. The main thing is to be guided by the Holy Spirit. If you do the sorting yourself, you’ll be guessing, and you’ll make mistakes.

I have DVD’s I should dump. The entire Blackadder collection, for example. I loved The Big Lebowski, but I threw it out a long time ago because of the nudity. Anything that has nudity is already gone, as far as I know.

If I were a parent, I’d probably be taking a hard look at Pixar and Disney. Disney has always been creepy, because they struggle so hard to avoid promoting Christianity. They look for substitutes. I would also get rid of everything remotely related to Harry Potter. I can’t believe parents let their children look at that filth.

Later on, I’ll visit the dump. If you were to meet me there, you could make a huge CD score. You could get a lot of carefully collected top-quality music for nothing. It’s not going to happen. This stuff will be crushed and buried.

Might as well do it now. There will be no ZZ Top in heaven, so why listen to it on earth?

Christian entertainment is pretty thin. I can’t replace the things I’m discarding with Christian material of equivalent quality. It doesn’t exist. That’s too bad, but then we live in a sick world that ignores God.

I expect what I’m doing to improve my life. I wish I had started sooner. Take a look at your house, and see if there’s anything you should get rid of. Ask yourself how you would feel if Jesus walked in and saw it. Maybe that will help.

More

I finally found the last big box of CD’s. Thank God, it was mostly box sets. That made sorting it a faster job. All of the CD boxes have been purged.

I still have some box sets somewhere. Really nice stuff. Howlin’ Wolf. Buddy Guy. It has to go.

I’m wondering what to do with my copy of the movie Schindler’s List. It’s a remarkable movie about a pivotal event in human history, but it has full frontal nudity in it. This was not necessary, but you know how filmmakers are. They have to shock and titillate. Spielberg should have created a version with no nudity, for younger audiences.

I guess I’ll dump it. I can live without it.

I still have a few music books related to rock and the blues. I will dig them up and consign them to the dumpster.

I am Short 4 Tons of Metal

It has been a year since I’ve used my machine tools. I am not happy.

I left my tools in Miami. I had enough problems without moving them. Now I have to get it done. I have sacrificed an entire year of machining.

When you have machine tools and you move, you have headaches. It’s going to cost me $4000 just for a rigger, which is a company that moves machinery. On top of that, I have to get some new wiring. My lathe runs off a machine that turns single-phase power into triple-phase, and that machine needs a 60-amp socket. My welder and plasma cutter need 60-amp sockets. My smaller 3-phase tools need 30-amp sockets. Then there are the table saw and band saw.

I’ve been putting off getting the wiring done. There are several reasons. For one thing, it’s hard to decide where to put the machines.

I have a thousand-square-foot workshop, which sounds huge, but I have two tractors I keep indoors. My garage is also large, but I keep two motorcycles in it. I don’t actually ride them, of course, they’re here.

Mixing metalworking and woodworking machines is not a great idea. They won’t damage each other, regardless of what people claim, but life is easier when you don’t have sawdust all over your metal tools. It’s nice to have a fairly neat metalworking area.

Another thing: putting woodworking tools in a garage that shares a door with your house causes problems. Sawdust will find its way into the house all the time. Metalworking tools create chips which stick to shoes and make it indoors, but at least chips aren’t dusty, and they’re a lot easier to sweep up than sawdust.

Today I made a plan. It’s official. It’s carved in stone. I think. I’m going to keep all the wood stuff in the workshop, and I’m going to put the metal machines in the garage. I’ll put enough outlets in the workshop to allow me to weld out there if I want. I’ll need that when I work on farm machinery. Mainly, though, I’ll weld in the garage.

I have no idea what 240 outlets cost. The shop has NO 240 power. None. It has very little 120 for that matter. The shop needs several 240 outlets plus a couple of 120 boxes. I’m imagining four-digit prices. I hope that’s wrong.

The garage will probably be cheaper to work with. It’s full of 240 stuff already.

I called an electrician, and I’m getting an estimate. We will see what happens.

Guess what I did when I needed 240 power in Miami. I installed it myself. The wiring back there was a scandal anyway, so nothing I did could have made things any worse. The Ocala house is different. It’s magnificent. I am not going to hack it up if I can avoid it.

Once the juice is installed, I’m going to have my machines moved. Then I can feel like a whole man again.

It’s terrible, not having a mill, a lathe, a real compressor, a vertical band saw, or a drill press. I wouldn’t wish it on Michael Avenatti. When you’re used to having tools, losing them is like being paralyzed.

I’m not saying other guys who don’t have machine tools are less than men. Of course, it’s true. I’m just not saying it.

If the electrician doesn’t give me a heart attack, I could be milling and turning again in 3 weeks. That would be sweet.

After that, I have to look into air conditioning for the garage and a big fan for the shop. I have to have it. Have to.

I don’t want to screw up my beautiful garage with a hole in the wall. A friend of mine suggested a window unit. That would still be slightly hideous, but it wouldn’t be permanent. I’m looking into it. One problem with a window unit is that it will require brackets on the outside to support it, and they may have to be fastened to the wall. I don’t have a nice, smooth stucco wall. I have Hardie board siding, which is like concrete clapboards.

Whatever; whatever. I have to get this done. Half of me is still in South Florida. That is not acceptable.

I can’t wait to have a real shop again.

Don’t Hold Your Breath

I don’t read blogs any more. Can’t make myself do it. As far as I know, the Blogosphere has been dead for a long time, and my interests have changed, so I have less in common with people I used to exchange links with.

Today I made an exception. I checked sites on my blogroll to see if I should continue linking to them. Anyone still blogging in 2018 makes the list. If you are dead, you probably make the list. Other than that, it’s a case-by-case thing.

By the way, Steven den Beste died in 2016. Just found that out. Sad. He was always nice to me.

I took a look at Ed Bonderenka’s blog, where I saw a humorous meme about Ruth Ginsburg’s decline, and I got to wondering if people understand something: it does not matter if RBG loses her mind.

Believe it or not, a federal judge doesn’t need to be mentally competent to remain in office. If you can breathe, walk, and sit up straight, and you don’t throw fits or anything, you can be a Supreme Court justice.

Judges of all types are very lazy, and many are also overburdened. As a result, we have a system in which the taxpayers support squads of lawyers who do the actual work. These people are known as clerks.

It’s a big honor to clerk for a federal judge, and the pay is okay, although the big draw is the career boost, not the money. A friend of mine pulled $50K down, with federal benefits and short, short federal hours, right out of law school. That was at the district court, or lowest, level. She offered to recommend me for the job when she quit, but I was not interested. I think it would have been fun, because working as a judge is like doing crossword puzzles all day. It’s stimulating mental exercise, by law standards. Also, a court clerk has zero responsibility compared to a real attorney. You can’t be sued for malpractice when you clerk. That’s nice. But I was a real lawyer, and I expected to continue building a lucrative career. I couldn’t see settling for $50K per year for several years, while abandoning the juicy job I had, working with my own father and his partners.

I have never been interested in glory. I went to law school so I could make money. I didn’t give a crap about the law review, the silly honor societies, clerkships, or awards. I still think that stuff is for insecure people who have a grossly inflated notion of the nobility of what is actually a fairly grubby profession. If you were an Eagle Scout or a participant in Junior Achievement, or if your dad was a janitor and you can’t believe you have a real college diploma, a clerkship is for you.

I can’t find it in myself to be impressed by lawyers. When I was in grad school, I rode elevators in the math and physics building with Nobelists and near-Nobelists. After that, I went to law school, where anyone who chases ambulances successfully is treated like a god. Once your IQ hits maybe 145, you have reached a point where you can do an excellent job with any task the law offers. If your IQ is 180, it won’t make you a better lawyer. You will just be a very good lawyer who is bored.

I worked hard during my first semester, and a nutty professor killed my shot at being invited to join the law review. After that, I resolved not to work. I used to tell people you can work 80 hours a week and get A’s, or you can work for three days at the end of the semester and get a B.

When I was an undergrad, I took mostly math and physics courses. Homework for my liberal arts courses took a couple of hours per week to knock off. My math work, which most people probably would have considered very hard, probably took six hours per week. I would guess physics took four hours per day, minimum. If you got a liberal arts degree, and then you went to law school, you may think you accomplished something. I’m sorry to tell you, but you were always in the shallow end with the toddlers.

When I was in law school, I eventually quit taking notes. I sat in class and wrote a few things in order to look like I was doing something, but basically, I quit…taking…notes. It wasn’t necessary. I used to play video games in class. I wore out my laptop, playing a Beavis and Butt-head game in Ethics, and I got an A.

The game was very silly. Toilets would fly through the air, and I would hit keys in order to shoot them down. I’m not kidding. This is what I did.

Sorry, lawyers. Your job just isn’t that challenging.

The people who graduate first in their law school classes, and the people who end up on the Supreme Court, are not geniuses. They are just good students. There’s a difference. My dad was third in his class, and he was a phenomenal lawyer, and I’ve always been a lot smarter than he is.

Anyway, clerking was not for me.

When a federal judge gets a case, he turns his clerks loose on it. They read the things attorneys file. They do the judge’s legal research for him. They even write opinions. Of course, this isn’t 100% true. I’m sure some judges do more than read and stamp the work of clerks, but if you think a judge’s name at the end of an opinion means he wrote it or is even highly familiar with the case, you’re dreaming. He may have done the work, and he may not.

Federal judges, often, are neither bright nor competent. They are probably, on average, not as sharp as their clerks, who have to demonstrate their ability in order to get their jobs. Federal judges get their appointments for political reasons. It’s not about merit. They don’t read filings. They don’t understand the law. They don’t understand the facts. When they rule correctly, it’s always somewhat surprising, and often it’s for the wrong reasons.

I guess the last paragraph was tangential. I get frustrated when I think of the things I’ve seen judges do. I’m not just complaining about the times I lost, either. I got a case dismissed by judges who let me pull the wool over their eyes. I made arguments I knew were vulnerable to attack, and the judges and opposing counsel were too dumb to do their homework, so I won.

So sorry. Better luck next time. I’m not going to help a judge who’s not intelligent enough to see why he should rule for my opponent. Unlike a judgeship, the lawyering business is a meritocracy, and the fittest win.

If I had been the judge or my opponent, things would have turned out differently. They disgraced themselves and proved their incompetence by letting me win.

I knew how to get the case dismissed. I knew how to prevent it from being dismissed. I knew how to win it, if I were in my opponent’s shoes. Fortunately, I was the only one who knew these things.

This is how you tell good lawyers from bad. Take the same case. Give it to two lawyers. See who wins. Turn it around and make them argue the other sides. Who wins now? Same guy; trust me. Unless one side is completely hopeless.

Now you know why O.J. Simpson was acquitted.

My dad used to say this to me: “Don’t complain about other people’s incompetence. That’s your competition.”

If you think lawyers are generally smart, you have been fooled. Most are only fit for simple fields like criminal and family law. Maybe they can write wills and deeds. If you made them litigate, they would drown immediately. I believe a lot of people end up working as judges because they can’t make it as litigators.

That’s also where law professors come from, but for a different reason. They have no guts. If you got A’s in law school, but the thought of appearing at a hearing or wondering where you’ll get your next paycheck makes you vomit blood, you’re probably going to be a professor some day. Professors want to nestle in their cribs and be taken care of.

Here’s something judges will hate reading: a big part of a lawyer’s job is to tell a judge what to think and say. The judge rolls in at 11 a.m., looks at filings he can’t understand, scratches his head, and wonders what to do. You take advantage of that by spelling out the law very, very clearly. You convince the judge that all he has to do is repeat what you say and rule in your favor. That’s really what lawyers do. We even draft orders for judges and include them with our filings. Sign it, stamp it, and you’re off to lunch, and no one realizes you have no idea what you’re doing.

I’ll tell you a funny true story. My uncle was a judge. He was not a great judge, but he was a great guy. He went to a judge conference. There was a seminar about ruling on objections. One of the judges admitted he used a deck of cards. He drew cards. Red card…sustained. Black card…overruled. The other judges were aghast.

During the seminar, they saw how this guy ruled when he actually tried to apply the law.

They told him to keep using the cards.

Not my story. My uncle’s.

Stuffy lawyers who perpetuate the myth of the nobility of the law can’t stand reading things like that. “HARUMPH! HARUMPH! You, sir, are no officer of the court! You have no respect for our august chambers!” These are the same guys who get drunk every Friday at 4 p.m. and hit on their paralegals. Same guys who make fools of themselves in bars every weekend. It’s all a sham. I wonder how many lines of coke have been done prior to hearings in courthouse bathrooms, by phonies who loved to talk about the dignity of the law.

Back to the topic. RBG doesn’t have to do much. She can assign things to clerks and wait for the results. I don’t know, but it’s reasonable to think she can even assign the task of assigning tasks to clerks…to clerks. She has to show up for work, sit in hearings, and basically, not expire.

Some conservatives are itching to see her step down because of incompetence. They say chemotherapy wrecked her brain, which may well be true. It does that. I’ve seen it. Doesn’t matter. Her leftist clerks will sleep in her house, feed her, bathe her, dress her, and carry her to work in a shopping bag, if that’s what it takes to prevent Donald Trump from nominating a third justice. If Scalia had become demented under Obama, his clerks would have done the same thing for him.

A justice isn’t an individual. A justice is an association. RBG consists of one elderly woman and a crew of underlings. The head doesn’t have to be completely functional in order for the body to go on living.

In order for RBG to go away based on disability, she will have to be such a mess there is no way to prevent her continued employment from turning into the theater of the absurd. She will have to say crazy things in front of the public, or she will have to be so demented she can’t be managed. Short of things like that, she will be on the bench as long as she can fog a mirror.

Stick With It

Right now, I’m listening to a Tom Fischer video about our purpose. Earth is a disgusting place full of astounding agony and injustice, and heaven is a place of eternal joy, peace, safety, and victory, so why doesn’t God take us there as soon as we receive salvation? The answer is in the Bible, which says he leaves us here to reach others.

A Christian is supposed to be an ambassador, and his body is supposed to be an embassy. An embassy is a building which stands in one nation and belongs to another. The ground under it is considered part of the other nation, and the other nation’s laws apply there. That’s what a Christian should look like. A Christian’s body houses an agent of a foreign government, and within us, that government is supposed to be sovereign.

I don’t think about this as much as I should. Christianity is promoted to us primarily as a way to get our problems solved, and we have plenty of problems, so most of us never reach the point where we devote most of our energy to advancing God’s kingdom. We’re always trying to fix things like family dysfunction, poverty, and cancer. It’s not easy to focus on pulling other people into the lifeboat while we’re busy bailing.

I should write more about God.

Yesterday I got a big reward. A young friend of mine left the ghetto and got himself a music scholarship at the University of Miami, and since then, I’ve been doing what I can to help him succeed. Primarily, I’ve been telling him about the tools and weapons God has given me. Prayer in tongues, blessing, cursing, cutting off the unequal yokings in our lives…things like that.

This week he contacted me and said he was discouraged. He didn’t know if he could succeed. He received a scholarship, but they didn’t give him money to live on, and the money they paid him for working in the band wasn’t sufficient, so he has had to hustle and work. As a result, he had to take incompletes in some courses.

I wrote him an email and reminded him he already had the tools for the job. I told him he needed to make time for prayer in tongues no matter what. I told him he had to get rid of the unequal yokings in his life. He’s black, and I’m sorry to say it, but black people are surrounded by a lot of individuals who are poisonous. They are pumped full of leftist gibberish and identity politics. They are coerced to identify with a race instead of the body of Christ. I told him to stay away from leftism and BLM.

He called me last night, and I assumed he wanted to tell me about his problems. Instead, he thanked me for the email and told me how it was paying off. He said he was getting his prayer life together, using the power of blessing and cursing, and putting things in God’s hands as his problems confronted him.

He had taken an exam. It intimidated him. He remembered what to do. He spoke defeat to the difficulty of the questions, and he remembered to do it during the exam. He asked God for help. He waited and let God give him the answers. It worked.

That really touched me. I went from algebra ignoramus to grad student in a top physics program in under 4 years. I eventually quit physics and took up law, which is infinitely easier. I had problems in grad school because I was burned out, and I was doped up on ADD drugs that made it impossible for me to eat and sleep. I had no one on my side. I was away from God, so when I prayed, I felt as if I were praying from within a dark cistern made of brass. The prayers seemed to bounce off the ceiling. Actually, they did bounce off.

Even though I was in rebellion, I had one good tool, and I failed to use it. When you study physics, often you get extremely hard problems. Professors will assign problems they, themselves, can’t solve. I spent a lot of long nights going in circles, trying to find answers. Eventually, I learned that if I closed my eyes and thought about other things, the answers came to me, but I could never make myself do it consistently, so I quit.

My friend is doing what I couldn’t make myself do. He is giving up pride and letting God give him victory. I wish I had done that myself, but at least I managed to help someone else do it.

It’s strange, but it seems like most of my friends are helpless. They have all sorts of problems. They struggle financially. Some have problems with transportation. They have family issues they can’t beat. When I need help, there is very little they can do for me, but I am able to do them considerable good, with virtually no sacrifice on my part.

I know that anyone who listens to me will cease being helpless. I didn’t save myself or bless myself. I don’t think most of my friends understand that I am not special. They think I have special abilities, or that I’m such a great person, God does more for me than he does for other people. In short, they seem to have swallowed a lot of toxic nonsense.

Everyone can be blessed. Everyone. You don’t have to be a saint. You don’t have to be smart. You don’t have to be white. You just have to do what God tells you to do. Get baptized with the Holy Spirit. Pray in tongues as much as you can stand to, every day. Read the Bible. Listen to Christians who are blessed, not liars and confidence artists. Cut your ties to people who don’t serve God; just cut them off, and quit whining and making excuses. Get to know real Spirit-led Christians. Confess and repent, daily. Quit complaining to God as though he owed you something; you deserve hell, so whatever you’re getting is a bonus. You really do deserve hell. Stop defending yourself. Finally, give up pride and get used to giving your problems to God and waiting for his help. Pride in your own abilities is sin.

Read the above paragraph and apply it, and you’ll be fine. You really will. It’s all you need. Take care of the things I wrote about above, and God will handle the rest.

Your race isn’t your savior. Your political party isn’t your savior. Self-esteem isn’t your panacea; it’s a poison that will eventually destroy you. Psychiatric drugs aren’t the answer. Self-help books won’t get the job done. You need to give yourself COMPLETELY to God and follow HIS program. He has a program, and now you know what it is.

When you have problems you can’t overcome, it’s because you failed to do one or more of the things I just told you to do. There is no point in asking why. You already know, and you know how to fix things, so get to it.

Do things your own way, or according to the tenets of backward denominations who reject the Holy Spirit and scripture, and you will live as the tail and not the head. That’s just how it is. You can’t force Catholicism or other man-made doctrines to work. God will not have it.

You don’t need me or any other person to help you. Depending on me is the height of idiocy. I have done too many stupid things to number. I am not reliable. Submit to God, do things his way, and he will make your life work.

I hate it when people tell me I’ve done things for them which I have not done. I don’t change people’s hearts. I don’t heal anyone. I haven’t used my amazing mind to figure out how to get blessed. I was an idiot, and God told me a few things, and now I pass them on. I was tired of living with my own screw-ups, so I reluctantly listened to God.

Anyone who credits me with things God has done is speaking for Satan and putting me in danger. God owns the glory, and it’s a disgrace to me when someone praises me for what he does. It can provoke God to act against me, and it’s a form of idolatry. Wood and stone idols are better than human ones. At least they haven’t sinned habitually and disgraced themselves.

I can’t wait to see the future blessings that will unfold in my young friend’s life. I’m going to have at least one friend who isn’t helpless.

Guilty

I am following up on the story of the pastor of New Dawn Ministries, the last church I belonged to. After a number of delays, his case crossed a threshold on October 5.

There were 8 charges. According to a county website, he was charged with 4 counts of lewd and lascivious molestation on a child under 12. It says he was charged with 4 counts of lewd and lascivious conduct (different thing) with a child under 16.

Last Friday, he was adjudged guilty on one count of lewd and lascivious conduct with a child under 16. He was also convicted of one count of lewd and lascivious molestation (not conduct) with a child under 12. He took a plea, which means he said he was guilty.

“Molestation” is a worse crime than “conduct,” and it carries a much heavier punishment.

A person guilty of L&L conduct has:

Intentionally touched the victim in a lewd or lascivious manner; or
Asked the victim to commit a lewd or lascivious act…

A person guilty of L&L molestation has:

“In a lewd or lascivious manner, intentionally touched the breasts, genitals, crotch, butt, or clothing covering those areas of the victim; or
In a lewd or lascivious manner, intentionally forced or enticed the victim to touch the breasts, genitals, crotch, butt, or clothing covering those areas on the defendant…”

I thought he was accused of rape, but that may not be the case. The prosecutors may not think he committed rape, or they may think it’s too hard to prove.

I am not a criminal attorney, so I am not completely sure how the process works at this point. I worked for the PD in Miami very briefly, and then I put in some time as an intern with the legal aid people in domestic violence. What I recall is that people who took pleas were sentenced immediately, because part of the plea process is negotiating a sentence. There is no point in having hearings to decide on a sentence when a defendant has already agreed to a punishment. Perhaps that isn’t always the case, however. Maybe my former pastor hasn’t been sentenced yet.

The clerk’s site says he will have to surrender on December 5, so he must not be in prison or the county jail right now. Maybe he got a break because his wife is dying from a brain tumor. Maybe the court is giving him time so he can be present when she dies. I’m just guessing. There has to be an explanation.

The site also says something about a probation agreement being unsealed. Certain sexual crimes require post-incarceration probation.

Florida has a number of mandatory minimum (“man-min”) sentences on the books, and child molesters are among the targets. Lewd and lascivious “molestation” of a child under 12 carries a man-min of 25 years followed by probation. That’s not the maximum; you can get life. Once you’re in prison in Florida, the best outcome possible is to shave 15% off your sentence through “gain time.” It’s not clear to me whether a molestation defendant is allowed this option. Some courts have said they are not.

The punishment for L&L conduct is not as bad, but it’s still very severe. It’s not like you can pay a fine.

One would assume that a convicted child abuser would do serious prison time no matter how well things went for him in court. Thing is, man-mins are pure fiction, at least with regard to certain crimes. My sister was charged with two man-min offenses, and she was convicted of one. She never spent a day in prison. She put in a fair amount of time in the county lockup because she paid little attention to her felony diversion conditions before her trial, but the county lockup isn’t prison.

Although convicted, my sister was sentenced to probation, not prison, and she failed to comply with the conditions. After she disobeyed the court, she went to prison, right? No, the court simply said she had “failed.” Apparently, this means she will not be eligible for probation if she is convicted of new crimes. Basically, it means she was not punished at all.

All this shows that mandatory minimums don’t always have teeth. Whether they’re enforced uniformly in molestation cases, I could not say. Florida has the nation’s harshest child-protection laws, so it’s not a great place to live if you’re a molester. Maybe molesters never get what are called downward deviations (sentence reductions) in man-min cases. A Florida Supreme Court case (Rochester v. Florida) suggests they do not.

I could figure this stuff out and provide a certain answer if I were being paid and took the time to do quality research, but that’s not happening, so I’m making a fair effort and hoping I’m right.

I don’t think I’m going out on a limb when I say that a middle-aged man who molests his own niece for years, in Florida, is absolutely sure to do multi-year prison time. Surely there is no way the courts will allow him to avoid incarceration.

The grapevine (relatives of the pastor) says his sister is pushing for 7 years, and that his wife is somehow involved in a sympathetic filing asking for no more than 2.5. The relatives don’t really know what’s happening, however. It’s gossip. If the state websites are correct about his status, my former pastor is looking at over 25 years, no matter what.

I don’t like rooting for someone to go to prison, because I’m a bad person myself, and I certainly don’t want to be exposed or held accountable. I believe it’s important for this man to be imprisoned, however, because child molesters often have multiple victims. We don’t know who else he has hurt or will hurt. We don’t know whether he can control himself. Also, I think his niece would be harmed by the knowledge that the justice system cared about her so little it allowed her molester to remain free. I don’t know how she could feel safe in that situation. She should be able to associate with her family and friends, secure in the knowledge that she won’t see her uncle walk in the door. She shouldn’t have to worry about seeing his car creep by while she stands in her yard.

Whether society really needs to put him away for 25 years (or even 85% of 25 years), I could not say. He shouldn’t be able to be near her until she’s an adult, at the very least.

I have told all I know. It’s a very sad story. If the man-min means anything in his case, his family is in for an extremely rude awakening, and the free world may never see him again. For a 51-year-old, 270-pound diabetic who absolutely refuses to eat vegetables, 85% of 25 years could well equal a life sentence.

This is certainly a different outcome from the one we used to hear about from Jorge, our “house prophet.” He told us we were all going to mount unicorns stuffed with gold bars and ride them into the gates of the Emerald City, more or less. One rosy prediction after another. We would have a big building. There would be miracles. None of it happened. And I was the jerk because I was “negative.” I didn’t buy into everything that was said.

I may have been less than positive, but the bad things I thought would come to pass, did. Those things happened, and it didn’t stop there. The end of the church and the destinies of the pastors were actually much worse than I thought they would be.

The strange thing is that the pastors did give us truths from God. He spoke through Pastor Albert many times. I benefited a lot from listening. It goes to show you that you can’t assume a person is right with God simply because God speaks through him. Consider Balaam.

In other news, it looks like Hurricane Michael is going to miss me and everything I own. That’s a relief. I can’t tell you how many hours I spent last year, cutting, moving, and burning trees my myself. I didn’t enjoy using buckets of pool water to bathe, either, and caring for a dementia patient without electricity or water pressure is an ordeal I wouldn’t wish on anyone.

On the down side, Michael is headed for an area not too far from Milton, Florida, where some friends of mine live. Milton is on the east side of Pensacola. It seems like the Gulf Coast gets whacked a lot these days.

If the forecast is right, Milton will only get tropical storm-force winds. That’s a lot better than 125-mph winds, which have 4 times as much energy.

Ocala is wonderful, but Michael has me thinking about Tennessee. I can’t lie. It seems like I go through the hurricane waiting game every year, and it gets old. Eastern Tennessee has no real natural disasters to worry about. I’m sure they have occasional tornadoes and floods, but it’s not like living in a hurricane zone, and they don’t get frequent earthquakes or tidal waves. Also, it’s maybe 6 degrees warmer than Kentucky in the winter, and there is no state income tax.

Be an Expert Woodworker Tomorrow for $300

My life has been changed.

I have wanted to do woodturning for a long time. I didn’t have room for a wood lathe in Miami. I made myself a toolrest for my metal lathe, and I worked it out so I could use a small 4-jaw wood chuck held in the jaws of my metal chuck, but I didn’t get to do anything once I had the equipment made. I thought my metal lathe would follow me to Marion County quickly, but it hasn’t, so I got myself a little Harbor Freight lathe yesterday. I got 20% off, naturally.

The lathe is surprisingly heavy. It’s around 80 pounds. I expected a wood lathe to be much lighter than a metal lathe of the same size, but the difference is only about 20%. I did not enjoy carrying the lathe from the car to the workshop.

A fair number of Internet monkeys make fun of this lathe and call it a toy, but it’s pretty much the same Chinese lathe you will get from respected companies like Rikon and Jet. I’m sure there are little differences, but the bed is flat, the motor runs smoothly, and all the parts seem to be well-made.

You can turn a cereal bowl on this lathe if you want. That’s about the outside envelope. That’s fine by me. I only got it so I would have something for little jobs. I don’t want to get sawdust all over the metal lathe and my metal shop every time I want to make a tool handle.

I was nervous about turning the lathe on. It comes from the factory fully assembled and ready to go, apart from screwing in one handle, so turning it on is about all you have to do. I did do one other thing: I wiped all the bright metal surfaces with Corrosion-X to prevent rusting. Things rust badly here because of the cold weather. You would think Miami would be worse, but I never had problems with rust there, except for the time I stored muriatic acid in my garage.

I don’t want to talk about that.

I found a round piece of wood which may have been a broom handle at one time. It was about 1-1/4″ thick. I sawed a piece off with my Veritas dovetail saw. It’s incredible, using a wood saw that actually works. I stuck the wood on the lathe and fired it up, and I got out my never-used Ebay NOS Sears Roebuck HSS turning tools.

I don’t know what I was nervous about. Woodturning is for idiots. Comparing joinery to woodturning is like comparing technical drafting to fingerpainting. My training consisted of watching a few Youtube videos, but I did everything perfectly.

I should not say “perfectly.” I caught the wood on the end of chisels three times. Everyone does that, though, so it doesn’t mean I’m inept.

In a few minutes, I had created the shape of a nice file handle. I sanded it down, and I got it ready to part off. Then I realized part of it still contained wood from the outside of the broom handle. That part hadn’t been turned down enough, so it wasn’t round. I went back to clean it up, caught the wood, and tore off a big piece of my file handle. I tried to clean that up, caught the wood again, and snapped the handle at the parting points. I was all done.

The wood was coarse, dry, brittle, and easily split, so it wasn’t an ideal test of my skills. I probably could have split it with my fingers. I didn’t know how weak it was when I put it on the lathe.

This is really cool. Everyone who uses tools dreams of buying a powerful tool and doing great things with it quickly and easily. Wood lathes fulfill that desire, just as tractors and plasma cutters do. I had never turned anything by hand before, and had the wood not given way, I would have made a perfectly fine file handle my first time out.

I’m going to find myself some better wood and see what I can do. Everyone who uses tools has a ton of files, so I have a great excuse for making a dozen or so handles.

If you have the urge to do woodworking, but you’re lazy and cheap, woodturning is for you. You just need a lathe, a few chisels, a bench grinder with quality wheels, some sandpaper, and some discarded wood. You can add doodads if you want, but you can do a lot with the things I just mentioned. You can pick up an unused set of HSS Craftsman chisels on Ebay for under a hundred bucks.

A Youtube woodturning guy says woodturning is woodworking for people with ADD. I could not agree more.

You’ll have to find a way to deal with the sawdust. My suggestion is to put your lathe bench on wheels and roll it outside or to your open garage door.

It’s great when a plan works. If I make anything that isn’t totally stupid, I will post photos.

I Have Been Processed

I visited a church today.

I am not interested in hearing from preachers any more, because as far as I know, none of them are really on track. Preachers from Spirit-led churches are obsessed with money and fame. Preachers from old-line churches never knew much to begin with. These days, when I listen to preachers, I don’t hope to find a great teacher. I listen to see how toxic they are. If a preacher isn’t likely to do a great deal of harm, he’s okay. That’s all I can hope for.

I have zero interest in preachers, but my dad needs to have some sort of connection to Christians, and I would like to meet a few, myself. Also, my dad is not a sophisticated Christian, so it won’t harm him all that badly to listen to preachers who don’t know much. They have a certain amount of useful, basic knowledge, and he can benefit from receiving it. He can’t rely on me for everything. I’m just one person.

There are a lot of churches in Marion County. I have been looking at them online.

I wanted to avoid minority churches. They’re way too emotional, and they’re even more phony than white churches. Also, I can’t deal with Obama/BLM worship and leftism. You can’t be a mature Christian and fall for that nonsense, and minority churches produce a lot of extremely immature Christians. Hello…Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson…both reverends.

I looked at churches that were more mainstream. A lot of the websites made it clear that the churches to whom they belonged to didn’t know anything about the Holy Spirit. I wrote those places off. I also saw what looked like typical megachurches or wannabee megachurches. I was reluctant to visit them. I don’t want to be subjected to the Benny Hinn/Kenneth Copeland/Joel Osteen craziness if I can avoid it.

I settled on a place called Meadowbrook. I’ll be honest. It looked like a megachurch online. It looked typical. “Let’s make Jesus cool and turn the church into a smooth-running mall complete with a restaurant and shops.”

My impression was correct. I showed up a couple of minutes after the 11:30 service was supposed to start, and what I saw was a large, very nicely kept lower-tier megachurch. They had a cafe and a shop. Everything was highly organized. They had a big check-in counter for kids. It was like going to a mall, except unlike a mall, it was busy.

The sanctuary was a lot like the sanctuary at Trinity Church, the unsuccessful mini-megachurch I belonged to in Miami. The walls and ceilings were black. I don’t know why churches do that. It makes things easier for the video people, and it’s cheap to maintain, but it’s not exactly warm. It’s like worshiping in the Batcave. I would guess the place holds 1500 people, and it was nearly full.

The music team (I refuse to call it a “worship team,” as though all worship were music) was excellent. Everyone who sang could carry a tune. I don’t know if the musicians were good, because churches will not let musicians solo. You can go all Star Search with your voice if you want, but it’s a sin to do the same thing with piano keys. Anyway, they did a great job, and they weren’t singing in Spanish, which was nice.

The people in the crowd looked great. They weren’t sloppy or ghetto. Lots of mixed couples and families. Everyone looked clean and alert. They were very nice.

They didn’t have any offering cards in the chair backs, so I stiffed the church. I wasn’t going to chase down an usher. They should be able to look after the offering cards without being micromanaged by visitors.

The pastor, a Mr. Gilligan, is a talented speaker. He’s smart, and he’s very funny. He taught a reasonably sound message about how we need personal relationships with God. Can’t argue with that. He didn’t give much practical information (“Do this, then do that…”), but not many preachers do. They tell you you’re doing things wrong, but they don’t tell you how to change.

There was a countdown clock on the back wall. I was happy to see that. My last pastor loved attention, and he was happy to speak for three hours. Gilligan gave himself half an hour, and when the clock reached zero, he wrapped things up.

I wouldn’t want a church to allow a clock to rush a pastor if supernatural things were happening, but this service wasn’t like this. No one was prophesying or healing anyone.

When he was done speaking, he called on a younger pastor to say some few things. “This is happening next week; that’s happening next week.” I asked God if I should get up and go, to avoid traffic, and I felt I had the go-ahead, so I got up and left. I wasn’t the only one. When the sermon is over, people at this church MOVE. I assume they want to get to Cracker Barrel before everyone else.

It’s important for me to maintain my independence from now on, so leaving early helped me establish boundaries. I MAY attend, sometimes. I may or may not give you money. I will not be an usher. I will not cook in the cafe. I will not sign a membership contract. I will not bring my tools to the church so I can be part of a dangerous, ineptly supervised building crew. I will not go on retreats where I have to share an outhouse with strangers.

Consider me a permanent guest. If I come back.

My take on Meadowbrook is that it’s a reasonably good church. It appears to be refined and processed to a somewhat excessive degree, but nobody begged me for money, nobody tried to make me join a pastor cult, and I didn’t have to deal with ladies yelling, “SANTO!” and literally having screaming conniptions in their seats.

I found the church impersonal. I got the impression that the people who attend only see each other for an hour a week. Usually, pastors in Spirit-led places interact with people they know during sermons, but Gilligan might as well have been preaching on closed-circuit TV from a remote location. He might as well have been a hologram. He interacted with the crowd, but not individuals. Maybe that’s a good thing this time around. It will make it easier to keep a safe distance.

I think it’s good enough for my dad.

I need to learn their policy on concealed carry. I do not like leaving my pistol in the car. Once it’s out of my pocket, I forget about it, and then it’s in the car all day, instead of where it should be.

The church had a bomb scare last month. Some guy who had been Baker Acted several times showed up with a backpack and box. The church’s security people cuffed him, and the cops blew up his property. I don’t know if that means they’re in favor of concealed carry, because it makes the church safer, or they’re against it, because they are afraid of nuts.

I’m impressed that they have trained security people who carry handcuffs. I was an armorbearer at two churches, and we were pretty unsophisticated. We had a Florida Highway Patrol officer who served at Trinity Church, but the rest of us were winging it.

I may go back to Meadowbrook next week with my dad. I hope so. He needs to have some sort of reconciliation with Christians, not just with God. He has a lot of crazy ideas about us.

Today I was texting someone about Meadowbrook. I said all churches were disappointing. That doesn’t mean they’re completely useless. If you’re smart, you don’t go to drink the Kool-Aid and believe everything you’re told. You pick up basic training, and then you get to know God on your own time. After that, God takes over and teaches you things that are true. If you continue to go to church, you go to be among Christians, not to hang on the pastor’s every word. Christians need each other.

Truthfully, preachers seem to be the most useless people in churches. They get in the way and put heavy burdens on everyone. The people you really need to know are sitting in the pews.

It was very nice to sit in a big room full of Christians again. I guess I do that every time I go to the nearest Sonny’s Barbecue, but you know what I mean.

The next service is a week from today. Perhaps I will be there.

Plus Thoughts on How Women are Blowing it

Here’s an experience I never thought I would have: I just took my dad to a Vietnamese nail spa for a pedicure.

Interesting story: the Vietnamese manicure/pedicure industry began with actress Tippi Hedren. She was trying to help refugees from leftist oppression. Some Vietnamese ladies noticed her manicured nails, and they couldn’t get over them. Hedren hooked them up with some training, and the rest is history.

As I noted in another post, my dad has suddenly started having trouble taking care of his toenails. They have gotten thick and hard. I am not willing to become a toenail technician, and I lack the training anyway. I got him an appointment with a podiatrist, but to make sure he doesn’t hack up his toes before he sees the doctor, I located a nail salon and arranged for them to do what they could.

Here is what may be the most bizarre photo I have ever taken.

We got him into one of their NASA recliners, and I took the one next to it so I could interpret. He can’t hear, and the nail lady had a serious accent, so someone had to be the middleman.

I sent a photo to a friend of mine who is a nurse, and she noticed that his ankles are smaller where the socks used to be. Evidently something is amiss. He has never had edema. I’ll have to let his doctor know.

I know virtually nothing about pedicures, so I was surprised at the elaborate production I witnessed. They put his feet in a jacuzzi with a disposable liner. They trimmed his nails and ground them with a rotary tool. They did something or other to the skin on his lower legs, which was about like you would expect, given his age. They really cleaned him up. I was impressed. I plan to take him back several times a year, if the podiatrist signs off.

I had never been to a Vietnamese nail salon before, due to my not being gay. I once got a manicure in a Cuban place. It’s not the same. Cubans are angry, nervous people. The lady who worked on my hands was pleasant, but the ambience could not compare to that of the Vietnamese place. I can’t tell if Vietnamese people are angry and nervous or not, because they’re very quiet and polite, but however they may feel inside, they know how to promote an atmosphere of serenity.

Had I not dropped a sledgehammer on my little toe in the recent past, I would have been strongly tempted to give them a shot at my feet. My nails are affected by what I believe is a neoprene allergy, so they can always use some work.

I’m surprised we don’t see more men getting Vietnamese pedicures. When you go to one of these places, you see a side of women we have forgotten about in the West. Women have a special ability to soothe and heal, but these days they’re very busy #MeTooing everyone and insisting on showing us their tattooed artificial breasts in restaurants, so they seem annoying and somewhat dangerous.

Men hate being mothered, because it’s insulting, but they do like being assisted once in a while.

I don’t think modern American women understand how their image has suffered. I hear men talk when women aren’t around. We think a great deal about the abuse we have to put up with in order to be near women. We think about the danger of losing what we have worked for. We wonder if it’s worth it. We talk about the pleasures of sex, but we don’t talk much about how nice women are to us…because they aren’t. We don’t think about it very much. Not only is it not a conspicuous virtue of women which we discuss often; it’s barely considered part of their makeup.

That’s a shame, because if things were working correctly, we would think about it a lot. We would appreciate it. When we thought of women, instead of thinking about being criticized and exploited, we would think about the thoughtful things they do to make our lives easier. Raising kids and looking after houses don’t count, because women do those things for themselves. They marry men because we make those things possible.

When women divorce us, they generally keep the kids and houses. What does that tell you? They keep what they really wanted in the first place.

We have very low expectations. We hope for sex, children, and a certain amount of cooperation with the chores of life. We don’t talk much about affection and kindness, because we no longer expect those things.

When men discuss potential mates, they say they’re attractive, they work hard, they have good senses of humor, they’re smart…they say a lot of things, but they don’t say, “I know she’ll be there, always taking my side and trying to find a way to make my life easier.” I’ve never heard that, and I’m old! I’ve never seen it in a movie or in a book. How can that be? It’s amazing.

“Bridezilla.” Have you seen that word? Look it up. It speaks volumes.

One of my best friends always has a girlfriend or someone to date. When one drops out, a new one pops up. I hear a lot about the things he does for them. He fixes their houses. He mows their yards. He helps when their kids are put in mental institutions. He let one drive his car for months; it still has a vanity tag she designed on it. She was making $200,000 a year at the time.

I never hear him say, “Last week, Lulu took away my cell phone, made me a pie, and gave me a manicure.” They do absolutely nothing for him. Nothing. Never. I asked.

He’s typical. Think about it. You know it’s true.

This week I read about a woman who forced her fiance to finance a $100,000 wedding ring. Wonder of wonders: the engagement collapsed. Now she wants to keep the ring…which he is still paying for. That’s the American woman in 2018, summarized neatly.

A Vietnamese nail lady isn’t going to compensate for a bad marriage, and she won’t care about you. She would probably make a bad wife; a lot of men find Asian women sneaky and domineering. Those things are true, but at least she will spend half an hour reminding you that women have hidden potential. If men knew this, they would be lining up at nail salons, just to escape reality briefly.

I’m glad I got to do this for my dad. I was so tired of finding him annoying. Before he prayed for salvation, it seemed like I was subject to provocation a hundred times a day. I hated being angry. I fought it constantly. I was not interested in blaming him; I just wanted it out of me. Now I don’t have to fight it, and I can do thoughtful things for him without feeling resentful.

I don’t know what the podiatrist can do for him, but I’ll bet it won’t be a good substitute for a pedicure.