Steps are Treacherous

This morning has been quiet, for a bad reason. My dad is in the hospital.

Yesterday, I took him to the grocery. When we got back, he tried to carry some bags into the house. While I was looking away for a moment, he fell on the steps on front of the house. The back of his head hit the walk, and he started bleeding.

I had him lie still while I looked him over, and then I managed to help him to his feet. If there is one thing harder than caring for an older person who isn’t together any more, it’s caring for one who outweighs you by 40 pounds.

A cloudburst started while he was on the ground, making the process that much harder.

I was afraid he was very badly injured. I took him to the ER, and they admitted him and gave him CT scans. I got home after 2 a.m. I’m not sure of the merits of the nearest hospital. I know ER visits take time, but 7 hours seem like a lot.

I had to tell them to clean him and change his underclothes. That should have been obvious. I also had to ask them to feed him.

It appears that he is not seriously hurt. I’m amazed, because he hit the bricks pretty hard.

Now, of course, I am thinking of the newly revealed holes in my caregiver strategy.

If he goes down again and can’t help me lift him, I am going to have a problem. I may have to use the tractor. I can’t figure out how other people handle this issue. I’m going to look it up.

I just realized I could have shoved an inflatable mattress under him and turned it on.

A tech at the hospital guessed what type of steps we have. Red brick. He said people have accidents on them all the time. I didn’t know this. How on earth could I have guessed? They seem like fine steps to me. Now I’m wondering what I can do to make them safer. I think he needs some sturdy temporary steps laid over them, with a handrail at the side.

I’m Googling, and it appears I can buy a temporary ramp with one handrail. Maybe that’s the thing to do.

He goes for long walks up our street, which has virtually no traffic. It’s a private road. What if he falls down a quarter of a mile away? I have a phone app that tracks him, but it won’t tell me if he falls, and he has trouble making calls.

I’m not sure what to do. I want him to be safe, but let’s face it: he’s going to die soon. Nothing I do can prevent that. And death–even death by accident–is part of life. It’s not an abnormal event that only happens to careless people.

I want him to enjoy himself, so I don’t want to keep him indoors or prevent him from walking, even if there is some risk. It’s better to die taking a pleasant walk near your beautiful farm than in a smelly bedroom where all you do is watch TV.

When you’re a caregiver, you never stop getting surprises. You can’t guess all the bad things that happen to old people, and you won’t automatically take all the right precautions. Does that mean you should opt for assisted living as early as possible? No. You have to think about quality of life, and things have to get pretty bad before being shoved into a senior warehouse becomes the optimal choice.

Maybe 30 years ago, we made one of our only two nursing home visits to his mother. The place smelled like urine and feces. An old lady who had no idea where she was was pushing herself around in a wheelchair with one foot, making noises and looking confused. My dad leaned over and whispered, “If I ever have to go to a place like this, kill me.” He probably still feels that way.

I don’t know what to do to minimize the risk of injury from falling. Should he wear a bike helmet everywhere? He would never go for that.

I wish I were doing a perfect job, but unfortunately, the first time you do this, you learn as you go.

I can’t get the nursing station at the hospital to answer the phone, which is not a big shock after last night. I’m about to throw some clean clothes into the car and see if I can bring him home.

If you have someone who is going to need care in the future, get ready for the unexpected. You can’t protect them perfectly, and when bad things happen that you could have prevented, it won’t necessarily mean you’re irresponsible. You can’t predict the future, and there are no schools that teach people how to look after their parents. You can’t anticipate everything. You do your best and accept what comes.

Our Expensive Friends the British at it Again

The news continues to amaze me.

Donald Trump is in the UK. I’m not sure why he bothered. He would have gotten a better reception at a La Raza conference. He is attracting all sorts of criticism.

Our good and barely affordable friends the English welcomed the president of the United States with a giant helium balloon resembling a diapered orange baby with the president’s face on it. Then a bunch of them went nuts because he “embarrassed” the queen (not really a queen at all, unless prom queens and homecoming queens are also real queens). Now they’re letting him have it because his security cost their taxpayers money.

That last one gives new resonance to the expression “tone deaf.”

I wonder if anyone reading this remembers a couple of little altercations known as World War I and World War II, and I wonder if they’re familiar with a US-funded organization known as NATO. For decades, we have been paying for Europe’s security, in exchange for their antagonism in international trade.

Trump played golf at his own resort in Scotland, and the security bill came to 5 million pounds. Let me see. What does one American fighter jet cost, before maintenance, fuel, and parts? We probably haven’t made a fighter for less than 5 million pounds since the Korean War. And they’re all over Europe, waiting to carry American men and women into the skies to die for foreigners who hate them.

Here’s a proposal: repay us for all we’ve done for you, and the US will reimburse you to the tune of 5 million pounds.

Here is what Trump did to “embarrass” the faux queen, who is actually a German relative of Kaiser Wilhelm: he got ahead of her while they walked together. This is a violation of “protocol.” As numerous Internet commenters have noted, “protocols” of monarch worship haven’t applied to Americans since the 1770’s.

Our forebears killed a lot of Englishmen to free us from the obligation to treat royals like gods. Thanks to them, I am the social equal of any royal, and so are you.

The British should be on board with our refusal to observe protocol. They, themselves, are rude to the queen all the time. When she visits the House of Commons, the Doorkeeper of Commons slams the doors in her representative’s face, in order to show the queen who’s boss. Also, she can’t enter when they’re doing business. The royals are washed up, and it’s okay–even important–to give the public little reminders.

What Trump did was completely appropriate, and I very much doubt the queen cares. She knows she’s not a real monarch, and she also knows the president is more important and more powerful than any British royal will ever be. Her job isn’t to rule. It’s to act as a sort of hostess. Like a geisha. Or a Wal-Mart greeter.

She’s very lucky to have her job and her immense holdings in 2018, and she knows it. Her grandchildren will not be kings or queens, and they won’t receive government salaries. Their fortunes will probably be nationalized. Unlike the salaries and pensions of presidents, they were obtained by force, at the points of swords and pikes.

It may be that Trump made a point of walking in front of the queen, to remind her and everyone else that he represents a nation of people who don’t kowtow to monarchs. If so, good for him. Won’t hurt her a bit.

She’s not a queen, and even if she were, she’s nothing to me or you. Just a lady who works for a country with interests that often conflict with our own. We are not British. If I were waiting in line at McDonald’s, and the queen came in, I would expect her people to stand behind me until I got served.

Here are some things the Trumps didn’t do to antagonize the queen: they didn’t give her a cheap iPod, they didn’t give her a cheap set of DVD’s that don’t work in UK players, and neither of them hugged her. The Obamas did all of those things. They also removed Winston Churchill’s bust from the Oval Office. The British lent it to us, and Obama moved it to an obscure location in the White House residence.

Obama’s dad was an African, and Africans don’t like Churchill very much. Thing is, Obama was the president of the United States, not Kenya. And his deadbeat bigamist dad wasn’t one one-hundredth of the man Churchill was.

Speaking of Churchill, President Trump is in trouble for posing for a photo in his chair. Some of the British are furious. They seem to think he hip-checked British security, dove into the chair without permission, and shouted “INSTAGRAM ME!” to his wife. Doubtful. The odds that he was not asked if he would like to sit in the chair are vanishingly small. Sooner or later, we will probably see the British government confirm that he was invited to sit.

Tomorrow is a business day. I expect that’s when they’ll get around to it.

Leftists are funny people. They agree that Churchill was a mass-murdering racist and war criminal, but they pretend to be upset when Trump sits in his chair, as though he were lying on top of Lenin’s corpse (which they truly revere) as a gag.

It doesn’t matter what Trump does. Criticism will follow. If he had bowed to the queen, the left would rip him for bowing. If he had refused to sit in Churchill’s chair, The Daily Mirror would tell us, “TRUMP TOO GOOD TO SIT IN WINNIE’S SEAT.”

He might as well attend all of his UK events naked with an entourage of prostitutes in fright wigs. The tone of the coverage, abroad and at home, will be the same regardless of what he does.

It must be unpleasant to be an Englishman who hasn’t swallowed the Kool-Aid. I know there are millions of people over there who wonder what kind of insanity has taken hold.

I feel like leftists are working to get Trump reelected. Their hatred and their lack of respect for democracy and our laws are offending people all over America.

In order to win in 2020, they have to attract people other than illegal aliens, witches, men who have had themselves castated, and millennial socialist airheads. They have to attract the center.

Admittedly, centrists are the dumbest people on earth, and they are highly gullible, but they are capable of shock and outrage, just like the rest of us. They must be asking themselves, “Do I want people like Bernie Sanders and Maxine Waters to have complete power over me? Do I want to keep the property I’ve worked for and give it to my kids, or do I want to risk putting my country in the hands of outright lunatics?”

Maybe we have a chance in 2020. It may be that the left’s hate will win that election for us, in spite of their willingness to naturalize a brick if it will vote for them. We might get one or two more Supreme Court justices, along with a number of federal judges. That would be very helpful.

If these things happen, look out in 2024 (or even earlier, if the left’s anti-democracy leanings result in an attempted revolution). The fury that would build during an 8-year Trump administration would be without limit. Post-election riots would be a given. If Trump wins again, I want to be at home in the country, armed and far from cities, on Wednesday, November 4. Better yet, I’d like to be with the Lord, in a world where leftism can’t exist.

Leftists hate democracy. That’s why they love revolutions and suspending elections. They talk about “the voice of the people,” but they have a long history of suppressing it in favor of the voices of a few elites. Leftists created the gulags and the killing fields. They’re not above overthrowing or killing our legitimate elected rulers or even other leftist elitists.

Leftists killed John Kennedy and Leon Trotsky. A leftist tried to kill FDR. A leftist killed President McKinley. A leftist rushed President Trump in Ohio, hoping to spit on him. A leftist rushed President Reagan while he was accepting an award, smashed the award, and tried to prevent him from speaking.

They think everything they do is right. That’s why they beat Trump supporters up. It’s why they thought it was okay to send a busload of criminals into Karl Rove’s yard.

Trump is doing fine. If he ruffles feathers in Britain, it’s a non-story. He’s not their president, and if the UK isn’t treating the US right, he’s obligated to fight them. If the PM wants to criticize America, great. She doesn’t work for us.

In the end, both sides will cooperate to hammer out agreements. No one is going to war over an armchair.

“Cool Preacher” is an Oxymoron

I just read an interesting article about Carl Lentz. I discovered that he is Justin Bieber’s pastor. Or was. Not surprising.

Who is Carl Lentz? If you don’t know, good for you. I’ll tell you, though. He is part of the hip preacher movement. I used to attend Trinity Church in Miami, and the head pastor’s son, Richie Wilkerson, was a hip preacher who networked with Lentz and other hipsters such as Judah Smith. Their message? “Make me rich.” Well, there was more to it than that. It was more like, “Think I’m cool and make me rich.” They were extremely ambitious people, and their main mission in life was self-promotion. Quite honestly, they were also very ordinary people without much talent or brains.

These kids want to make Jesus cool. Remember, now, Jesus was crucified. He was not popular. He never sought admiration or acceptance. He was the head, not the tail. He led. He never followed. He said what God told him to say, and when people got mad, he didn’t care. Jesus said, “The servant is not greater than his lord. If they have persecuted me, they will also persecute you.” The hipsters think they know better than Jesus.

Actually, they may not think they know better than Jesus. They probably have no idea what Jesus said. They don’t know a whole lot about God or the Bible. They’re very busy flying around to conferences and pumping up their profiles. They don’t have a lot of time for God.

Lentz allowed himself to be interviewed by Joy Behar. That’s amazing. This woman is openly hostile to Christianity. I can already hear the excuses. “Jesus wanted to use her platform to get the word out. Jesus wanted to use Carl to plant a seed in her heart.”

God hates excuses, and he doesn’t need Joy Behar’s TV cameras. Paul and the apostles spread Christianity around the world on foot, without cameras, in a few decades. The idea that God has to go to Joy Behar or any other TV host for help is absurd.

Carl Lentz didn’t go to Joy Behar to convert her or help humanity. He went to drum up business.

Hip preachers have a disturbing crush on celebrities. If you’re famous, they want you to come to their churches, and they don’t care whether you’re sincere. Richie’s dad welcomed Kanye West and Kim Kardashian–the famous sleaze merchant–into Trinity Church, and he bragged about them on Instagram. Richie glommed onto them and officiated at their wedding. Meanwhile, Kim Kardashian went on posing naked. Richie had no problem with that. He couldn’t get attention on his own, so he stuck with her and fed on the dirty crumbs that fell from her table.

If God wanted Richie Wilkerson to get attention, he would give it to him, just as he gave it to Paul. The fact that Richie had to kiss up to two of the most ungodly celebrities in America to get attention proves that God was not on his side.

I’ll tell you what life at Trinity Church was like. They had a green room behind the stage. When anyone remotely famous (or wealthy) showed up, the Wilkersons took them into that room and sucked up to them, trying to get them to join the church and give money. They did it to the Wests, Luther Campbell, various professional athletes, and more than one college athlete. They tended to be clumsy and transparent, and famous people are used to being conned, so the Wilkersons didn’t do very well except for the Wests. Kanye West is not the smartest person on earth, and he has mental issues, so maybe he was especially vulnerable.

Is that how life is at Carl Lentz’s church? I don’t know, but I know that any minister who allows himself to be associated with Justin Bieber, and who allows people to get the impression he approves of Bieber’s lifestyle and personality, is useless and corrupt. Bieber is all about arrogance, sexual confusion, self-promotion, and rebellion. A pastor who is a role model to kids should not pal around with someone like that.

I can hear the response already. “Judge not. Take the log out of your own eye.” You know what kind of people respond to criticism that way? People who want to keep on sinning and who resent being exposed. That’s a little tip for you. Serious Christians love correction.

When I was associated with Trinity, Lentz came and spoke. Church volunteers always helped with events and speakers. The church runs on free labor. People had unpleasant things to say about Lentz. They said he was a diva. They said his favorite shirt didn’t make it to Trinity, so he made someone drive around looking for the same shirt before he would speak.

I am thinking about Lentz because a recent story says Justin Bieber is engaged to a famous model, and Lentz is not enthusiastic. They say Bieber and Lentz had a falling out. I’m not sure what to think. Is this a good thing? Does it mean Lentz started to feel cheap and realized courting celebrities made him look desperate?

Somehow I doubt it.

Bieber just put a photo on Instagram. It’s Bieber and his fiance in a hot tub. They are wearing very little. The model is sitting on his lap, straddling him. They are kissing. This isn’t the kind of thing informed Christians put on social media. It may be a testimony to the weakness of Carl Lentz’s doctrine.

Lentz belongs to Hillsong, a huge, profitable corporation that plants megachurches and sells bad music. Hillsong is becoming the default church for hip young celebrities. That tells you everything you need to know about it. Modern celebrities are extremely ungodly. If they flock to a denomination, it has to be because they know they will not be required to repent.

Without repentance, there is no closeness with God. There is no revelation. There is no power. There is only pride and foolishness.

Christians need to learn to get away from Christian celebrities. Famous preachers do a lot of harm. They have a conflict of interest. They love fame and money, and they turn Christianity into a business. When Christianity becomes your job, and money and fame are your gods, you will do just about anything to keep the business running.

God wants to work through all of his children, and he doesn’t want us to make Christianity a job. It’s not necessary. People who think God needs cameras and money have no faith. Jesus used to gather crowds in the thousands, and he didn’t even have a bullhorn.

God doesn’t want Christianity to be cool. It never will be. We’re against fornication, pride, and rebellion. We’re against greed. How can we ever be cool when we reject everything cool people love?

Jesus told us we would be rejected. Anyone who tries to make his words fail to come to pass is a fool and isn’t obeying him.

I wish the hip preachers would take their salesman skills and leave the church. They should sell cars or real estate, or they should become motivational speakers. They would do a lot less harm.

The Plutonium of Words

It’s amazing how we have decided to let leftists nuts appoint themselves unquestioned arbiters of all types of behavior.

This week, John Schnatter, the founder of Papa John’s is in the news. He was forced out as chairman because he used the word “nigger” in a phone call. He was talking about the NFL’s policy regarding kneeling during our national anthem. He said other people had bounced back from race-related PR problems. Specifically, he used these words: “Colonel Sanders called blacks ‘niggers.'”

You can’t say that word now, according to the nuts who put themselves in charge. In the past, the rule used to be that you couldn’t use it in a disparaging way. Now you can’t use it, period. You can’t even say, “It’s never acceptable to call someone a nigger.”

Of course, the rule doesn’t apply to black people. Why? Because we can’t get them to stop saying it, if you want the truth. The left’s excuse is that black people “own their blackness,” whatever that means.

You can still say kike, wop, the “C” word, spic, yid, redneck, cracker, and a whole host of other interesting words. If you’re a liberal, you can use the “C” word however you want. You can use it to describe the president’s daughter on national TV. No one else gets to use it. You can still say “redneck,” and Southerners are the biggest offenders. As for other slurs, you can’t use them to describe people, but you can say things like, “Michael Jackson shouldn’t have used the word ‘kike’ in a song.” You don’t have to say “K-word” and hope people figure out what you mean.

“Nigger” is apparently radioactive, or maybe it makes people burst into flames. When you hear it, stop, drop, and roll. Unless the person who said it is black. After you’re put out the flames, demand that someone be fired from his job.

A person with common sense can see why the bizarre new prohibition is a bad idea. If you can’t ever use the word, then we have to stop publishing Joseph Conrad’s The Nigger of the Narcissus. We have to burn some of Mark Twain’s books. We have to burn all the old copies of the original Roots TV series, which was full of white people using unfortunate language.

Quentin Tarantino must be in big trouble. Remember Pulp Fiction? He acted in that film as well as directing it. His character used the word “nigger” over and over in one scene. That film has to go. It’s too dangerous.

A lot of people who work for dictionary publishers need to be fired. Their books not only contain the word; they tell people what it means so they can use it more effectively.

Wikipedia has a whole page dedicated to it! RACISTS!

You know what? Leftists don’t get to decide what the rest of us can say. They have never had that right. If they want to criticize people for using the N-word to insult other people, fine. I’m right there with them. It’s an ugly thing to call someone. But they can’t prevent us from saying it when it needs to be said. It’s perfectly all right if you want to take your son aside and tell him he should never call anyone a nigger.

Here’s something weird: black people are allowed to call people who aren’t black “niggers.” How did that happen? I’ve been called a nigger. Totally serious. How did we end up here? How much crazier can we get?

My personal recommendation, and I hope you won’t call me crazy, is that we all quit calling each other niggers or niggas or niqqas or whatever other permutations exist. Let’s not do that, and if we need to discuss the word itself, let’s just man up and say it.

TALKING ABOUT the word is not the same as ENDORSING it.

If John Schnatter should be criticized for anything, it should be for making terrible pizza that costs a great deal of money. A large Papa John’s mess with a beverage will run you about 30 bucks now. That’s insane. It tastes like a sponge covered in ketchup. I had to eat a couple of them last month. Awful. Thank God I was hungry. I can’t believe the chain stays in business.

DiGiorno pizza is better, and you can get the equivalent of a Papa John’s large for 8 dollars. It’s not great, but “better than Papa John’s” is a low bar to clear.

Leftist weirdos: you are not in charge. You don’t get to tell other people what to say. “Illegal alien.” “Pro-life.” “American Indian.” Freedom to disagree is still “a thing,” as leftists like to put it. It’s not like God has ruled in your favor, granted an injunction, and denied our appeal. Deal with it.

If you’re black, feel free to discuss the words “redneck” and “cracker” in my presence. Actually, black people DO discuss these things with me, and I couldn’t care less. I would prefer not to have these terms applied to me, but if you want to talk about them, you will not get any objections from me. You don’t have to apologize or say “the R-word.” I don’t care. I am not trying to catch you offending me so I can silence you. I don’t recognize my right to silence anyone.

Enjoy your freedom of speech. Stand in the street in front of my house wearing a shirt that says “BLM” on the front and “Impeach 45” on the back. God bless you. I’m fine with it. You’re wrong, of course, but you can say what you want.

If anyone notices this essay, I’ll get criticized for writing it. No one will listen, and America will continue getting crazier. I won’t convince anyone. After I’m dead, people will realize I’m right. Until then, I’ll be lumped in with Lester Maddox. I still feel like speaking the truth. It’s not as if people like me had any chance of satisfying judgmental leftists.

Plus More Marvel Emasculation

I made the mistake of watching another Marvel movie. Even worse, I bought it.

I was tired of my 1995 integrated amplifier. It was great in its day, but in a 2018 living room, it’s like a demented grandfather in a room full of Silicon Valley whiz hipsters, yelling into a disconnected candlestick phone while everyone else Whatsapps.

It can’t do HDMI. It can’t switch video sources. It’s not fun hooking it up to a subwoofer. To watch TV and use the computer, I had to juggle remotes way too much. Finally, it didn’t sound good. I have DirecTV (the Less-Attractive Rob Lowe of TV providers), and the only way to connect the box to my amp was to use an S-video adapter which provided pretty bad sound.

I did what I believe was the smart thing. I bought an Onkyo receiver which was discontinued a year or two ago. I paid less than 40% of MSRP, and all I’m giving up are some ridiculous Amazon-compatibility features. I don’t want that stuff. Amazon spies on me enough as it is. I would never have an Amazon spy device in my house.

The new receiver has fewer wires hanging out of it than the old one, and it does more. It has crazy video menus that allow you to set your system up to work with your speaker inventory and its positions. I can aim movie dialogue at my head when I sit in my favorite seat. It’s also nice to be able to switch video sources without touching the TV remote.

I got it hooked up, and I realized I needed a loud, trashy movie with lots of special effects. In short, I needed Marvel.

The latest Avengers movie won’t be available for a couple of weeks (something like that), so I chose Spider-Man: Homecoming.

I didn’t understand the significance of the “homecoming” connection. It turns out the movie takes place during homecoming at Peter Parker’s high school. That doesn’t help me all that much, because I don’t know what “homecoming” means. Every school celebrates homecoming, but no one ever explains what it means. No one comes home on homecoming, and if they did, wouldn’t they celebrate at home instead of wasting the occasion on bepimpled, empty-headed cheerleaders and wedgie merchants?

I will spew spoilers at will, so if you run into one after this sentence, it’s on you.

Here’s how the movie works. Peter Parker (British actor Tom Holland) has been discovered by Tony Stark, who has provided him with a stupid electronic suit that talks to him. In the comics, Spider-Man has incredible strength and agility, and he’s pretty capable. He doesn’t need a set of computerized long johns to look after him. In the movie, he is an inept 15-year-old who is lucky to best common street punks. He can’t find his way around. He can’t make anyone respect him. He can’t run fast. He gets winded easily.

Yes, Spider-Man gets winded easily. Evidently someone on the writing team failed to look “superhero” up on his iPhone. A superhero is not a great, plucky kid who struggles to defeat stronger enemies with humor and humility. A superhero is someone who can do things like melting steel with his eyes or lifting an aircraft carrier with one hand. Nobody wants to see a superhero gasping for breath.

Tony Stark ignores Peter and leaves him in the hands of Tony Stark lackey (and real-life Obama lackey) Happy Hogan, who has turned bitter and jealous (not unlike Obama). In earlier movies, Happy was a good guy who supplied comic relief. In this film, he’s jealous of Spider-Man, and he treats him the way I treat telemarketers.

Hogan manages Parker by cell phone, hanging up on him and ignoring everything he has to say.

While Peter waits to be called up for service, he goes through the usual high school ordeals. He falls for a gorgeous girl, and people pick on him. Nobody tries to beat him up, so we never get the satisfying and anticipated scene where Parker humiliates a bully without even trying. But an obnoxious Pakistani kid manages to make him an object of universal ridicule.

Is it diversity when a movie has an obnoxious bully who isn’t white? I’m not sure.

Peter’s enemy is Michael Keaton, so in a way, we’re watching Spider-Man vs. Batman.

Keaton plays a blue-collar guy who runs some kind of salvage company. He gets a contract to collect superhero-battle debris after a big Avengers kerfuffle. Marvel-y government types show up after he has spent a ton of money hiring people and gearing up, and they throw his crew off the site without so much as a written citation.

Hello, Marvel: “due process.” It still exists, even after #MeToo and 911. In the real world, Keaton would hire a lawyer and either drive the government off or get a huge settlement. In the movie, Keaton punches a Peter Strzok type in the mouth and leaves.

Keaton still has a bunch of weird alien technology in his possession. The scraps come from the fight with Ultron, who was not an alien, but…okay. He decides to make arms and sell them to criminals. He builds himself a giant set of wings driven by what appear to be enormous computer fans, and he flies around causing problems. He wears goggles with little green lights in them. Put it all together, and you get the Green Goblin.

Keaton’s character is wonderful. He’s a better actor than Willem Dafoe, and the part is written well. He’s not just a nut who hates the world. He’s a small businessman trying to look after his employees and his family. I mean, yes, he murders people, but he has a little depth.

Peter discovers Keaton’s crew and starts following them around and screwing up their operations. In the process, the goblin crew accidentally cracks the Washington Monument. Peter’s friends are inside. They’re on some kind of nerd-competition field trip. His dreamboat love interest, Liz, is among them. He saves her, as Spider-Man. In a later scene, he asks her to be his date at the homecoming dance, and she agrees. Of course, she has no idea that the two awkward 5-foot-tall men in her life are one and the same.

It gets weird when Peter’s aunt (Marisa Tomei), drives him to pick her up and the Green Goblin answers the door. Liz the crush is Michael Keaton’s daughter. On the way to the dance, he figures out that Peter is Spider-Man, and he threatens to kill him and everyone he cares about if he doesn’t lay off.

Obviously, they end up fighting, and Peter wins (after losing badly), saving Keaton’s life in the process.

It sounds good, but throughout the movie, Parker keeps screwing up and getting bested. The Green Goblin’s illiterate thugs defeat him. Four random punks armed with Green Goblin merchandise defeat him. The Green Goblin defeats him twice. I’m pretty sure Liz could beat him up. Of course, she’s taller than he is.

What’s the point of putting radioactive spider venom in him and turning him into a freak if he can’t do anything? He’s even worse than Captain America. The Hulk is the toughest Marvel hero. Then comes Iron Man, because he has the best stuff. Then comes Thor. Then Captain America. Way down on the list, sitting in a corner listening to Justin Bieber MP3’s on an iPhone with a pink Hello Kitty case, is Spider-Man. He’s like 5 inches shorter than 5’7″ Robert Downey. He’s out of shape. He’s about as hard to ambush as Helen Keller. Why does he even get a movie? Even Ant Man is tougher.

His love interest is a former Disney girl named Zendaya, i.e. Mary Jane. Her character is a tortured urban kid with a very sour outlook on life. Sarcasm is her only talent. She’s very funny, and Zendaya plays her beautifully, but there is no romantic interaction between M.J. and Parker, and even if there were, it would be disappointing. I don’t want to be mean, but a female lead should have the looks to pull off her role, and this girl does not. It’s impossible to believe that Parker would want her.

The girl who plays Liz, on the other hand, is a stunner. Not only that; she likes Parker. You want to see them get together. And her dad is a villain. That makes for all sorts of writing opportunities for future films. No, we get the feminist version of Mary Jane. You WILL love the smart girl, no matter what she looks like. Dissent is not permitted.

No, no, no. Doesn’t work. I hope the next Spider-Man movie starts with Peter Parker finding out Dr. Octopus ran Mary Jane through a chipper, so Peter and Liz can go put an end to his shenanigans.

Mary Jane wouldn’t mind. She’s always depressed.

I’ll tell you something about men. We don’t fall in love with women just because we are ordered to. The feminists can’t make male moviegoers find Zendaya attractive. I don’t care how funny she is.

Movie heroes aren’t supposed to have ordinary lives. They don’t marry the homely girl who makes her own sweaters. Moviegoers want to see characters do things they can’t do. We are all perfectly capable of marrying disappointing women. Why would we pay to see Tom Holland do it?

Sure, Mayim Bialik is nice, but everyone wanted to see Johnny Galecki marry Kaley Cuoco.

Imagine a movie where the protagonist has a dream of becoming a concert pianist. He practices and practices, and his beautiful love interest encourages him and tells him to believe in himself. Then at the end, he gives up, gets a cubicle job, and marries a plain girl with a congenital odor problem that requires her to bathe with prescription soap. Who wants to see that? I certainly don’t. I want to see movie heroes do better than I do.

I’m tired of wimpy Marvel heroes. Thor got neutered in his last movie. Iron Man is on Zoloft. It seems like the Hulk–a certified moron–is the only real man in the bunch, unless you count Scarlett Johannson.

On the up side, the movie was a fairly good test for the new receiver. The room shook, and I didn’t feel like the characters were talking from beside the TV. I love this receiver. Given that I only buy new ones every quarter of a century, that’s a good thing.

Spider-Man: Homecoming is sort of okay. If it pops up on your cable system without an additional fee, it’s worth watching. Just be prepared for disappointment.

I had to buy it. Amazon didn’t list a rent option. Now I’m stuck with this thing for as long as Amazon acknowledges my right to it. Ten bucks, down the toilet.

I’m not buying The Avengers: Infinity War. I hope.

Meet the New Upstairs Maid

A few months ago, I bought a Roomba. The house I now live in has a built-in vacuum system, which is impressive, but there are problems with it. First of all, I am lazy, and the central system will not run by itself. Second, the system has a 30-foot hose which is not much fun to carry upstairs and from room to room. It’s actually easier to carry a vacuum cleaner, now that I think about it.

The big advantage of a built-in vacuum system is not convenience. Not unless you have several expensive hoses so you can leave one in every room. The advantage is cleanliness. A central vacuum does not expel dust into the air like a regular vacuum. Everything it takes in goes out of the house and into the remote canister. That’s nice, because nothing gets blown back into the air, and you never have to buy bags.

The Roomba is great, with certain reservations. It runs every day, and it usually gets stuck at least once. It thinks area rugs with patterns are “cliffs.” It sends me messages saying it’s trapped on a cliff and makes me go pick it up. I’m positive it’s female. So needy. It even sends me messages when I’m out of town. I don’t know how it does that. I never gave it my number. “I’m stuck on a cliff, and you’re out gallivanting around without a care in the world.”

I spend a lot of time picking the Roomba up, moving it eighteen inches, and turning it back on. “There, there. You’re safe. And you don’t look fat.” But it’s worth it. It beats doing the entire job of vacuuming with my own two hands.

The Roomba can’t climb stairs. As far as I know. This is its biggest flaw. As a result, I was forced to buy a second vacuum. A Eufy. Reviewers liked it better than the Roomba, and it’s cheaper. It has no phone capabilities. After dealing with the Roomba’s constant cries for attention, I viewed this as a plus.

The Eufy is running right now. It has two side brushes, and the Roomba has only one.

Uh oh. I just heard a crunchy sound.

It was nibbling on an adaptor cord. No harm done. When I got up to save it, I started moving things around and clearing the floor. I didn’t realize how messy the room was until I turned the Eufy on. It is training me to be neat.

The machine has been running for about 10 minutes, and I have had to get up twice. The first time, it was in my bedroom, making a distress beep. It had sucked up the little wire antenna from my clock radio, and it had used it to pull the radio under the bed. I got there before it did whatever nefarious deed it was trying to conceal.

This house has two staircases. I was worried that the Eufy would fall down the stairs as soon as I turned it on, but I have watched it back away from the stairs already, and it seems to have some sense of self-preservation.

Another nice thing about the Eufy: it doesn’t have to ram into the wall in order to know it’s time to turn around. It senses walls from a few inches away. This should make it easier on baseboards and furniture.

Months ago, I knew the Roomba might damage the paint on my baseboards, but I pictured myself sweating over a real vacuum cleaner, like a peasant, and I decided I didn’t care. Paint is cheap.

I like this machine. It’s lower than the Roomba, so it doesn’t hit as many things. It’s very quiet, too. I hope it works out.

I’m a dusty guy. I don’t like to vacuum, and I tend to create clutter, so dust is one of my curses. The Roomba has sucked up all sorts of dust downstairs over the last few months. If the Eufy does the same thing up here, dust will no longer be a problem.

It’s quiet. What happened? Just a minute.

It was in my bedroom again, at the other end of the house. Maybe going after the clock radio again. VENDETTA!

Here’s a photo of the Eufy, shortly after I launched it on its maiden voyage. It has a glass top, so it probably won’t get scratched up like the Roomba. Or maybe it will. I don’t know.

I’m stuck here writing about vacuum cleaners because it’s too hot to move. Outside, I mean. The fricking daily rain turns this area into a steam bath. Today we had blazing sun and almost no clouds, but I promise you, it will be raining shortly. I don’t even have to look.

Another fun purchase: I’m getting a ballast box for my tractor. Not the little tractor. The big one. My tractor came with a bush hog attached, and people advised me to leave it on. They said the weight would be helpful when I lifted stuff with the front end loader. That’s true, but it also makes banging noises, and it digs trenches in the dirt when I turn. I need some other form of weight.

You can buy weights made for tractors. You can get steel weights that go on the front, and you can get giant steel disks that mount on the rear wheel hubs. I don’t need weight up front, obviously, and the wheel hub weights look like a bad move.

When you lift stuff with a front end loader (or “FEL,” as we tractor experts call them), you turn your tractor into a seesaw. The fulcrum is the front wheels. You can actually lift the rear wheels off the ground if you lift too much with the FEL. Supposedly, this is bad. You want to reduce the weight on the front tires because the front end of a tractor is wimpy. Stressing the front suspension repeatedly leads to problems and repairs.

If you put a big weight behind the rear wheels, you create a lifting force on the front wheels. Think about it. Wheel weights can’t do that. They put weight on the wheels themselves, so there is no helpful new seesaw effect with the rear wheels as the fulcrum.

A ballast box is a big steel box you fill with heavy stuff. You mount it on your three-point hitch, behind the rear wheels. It improves your rear wheel traction and takes weight off the front axle. I need one.

You can fill them with concrete or rocks. I decided to use sand. The upper area of a ballast box is a good place to put things like chainsaws. If I use sand, I’ll have a nice soft bed for my tools. I’ll have to keep sand out of them, but it will be better than bouncing on concrete. Also, I can drain sand out if I want to. Some day I may want to transport my ballast box. It weighs 132 pounds empty and about 982 full. You can see why I might want to dump the sand. Can’t dump concrete.

I tried to remove the bush hog once. It did not cooperate. But I know it’s possible. The whole purpose of a three-point hitch is to allow you to change implements, so there has to be a way to get my bush hog loose.

I didn’t want to remove it, because I knew I would have to leave it out in the weather. Having looked at it carefully, I know realize this is a stupid concern. The paint is in bad shape. It has clearly seen plenty of rain in its day. I don’t think it will hurt it to sit outside.

The tractor stays indoors. Unlike the bush hog, it looks great.

In a few days I’ll have a ballast box, and then I can run to Home Depot for 16 bags of sand. I have sand on my farm, but it’s full of bugs and poop. I want nice sand, not a fire ant farm full of gopher droppings.

I haven’t seen the Eufy in a while. Hang on.

Bedroom. It found a flashlight on the floor and tried to eat the lanyard. Then it turned itself off out of spite.

Still better than doing the work myself.

Once I manage to get the ballast box working, I plan to start using a harrow to drag my yard. I have lots of crap stuck in the grass. Spanish moss and live oak leaves, mainly. I can’t take it any more. It has to go. I think a harrow is the only thing that will get it loose. I can’t use one with the bush hog attached. I can get one for the garden tractor, but it would be small and therefore inferior.

Maybe I’m wrong. A small harrow would get into more places.

If I can get used to swapping implements, I can get a box blade and really get stuff done. I could level roads, which would be nice.

I can hear the Eufy. Things must be okay.

I keep getting more things done than I used to. God is freeing me from restraints. Supernatural stuff is going on. God keeps showing me that the things I thought he was telling me really did come from him.

It’s a relief. It means life will continue to improve, not just while I’m here on earth, but after I die.

People don’t believe what I say. That’s unfortunate, because it would help them. Pride in doctrine is a major stronghold.

The Eufy is back! Oh, no. It found a USB cord. But it escaped!

I should get another one of these things. Maybe they get lonely.

The second story of this house is probably 2500 square feet, and the Eufy is killing it. I think I’ve found my dream wife.

If I ever get the ballast box working, I’ll blog it. I can’t wait to use the tractor without having to hear the bush hog bouncing up and down.

The World is not Enough

I’ll tell you what. If Earth had a bus terminal, I would be sitting on a bench right now with a ticket in my hand.

God keeps helping me get cleaned up. He keeps showing me the things that are wrong with me. He helps me to be honest with him about myself. It’s like cleaning out a storage unit someone filled with seafood in 1922 and then forgot about. It’s a real mess.

I keep hammering away at the spirits that have taken the place of the Holy Spirit all my life. Pride, anger, lust, and so on. I feel that God has given me new tools to yank these spirits away from the steering wheel so I can take over.

Today I was working at these things in prayer (asking God to do everything for me and trying to avoid “helping” him) and I took a break to look at the news. Oh, man. What a mistake. It was as if I lived next to an ocean of sewage and I opened the door just as a wave was coming in. I read about crime. I read about the sick people who are tormenting conservatives in restaurants and on their own property. Do I even have to tell you what the news looks like in 2018?

Suddenly, the things I had subdued wanted back in. Anger. Discouragement. Self-righteousness. I had to return to fighting to make sure I didn’t slip backward.

What a rotten place this world is. You can’t even read the news without being inundated with temptation. I thought about this, and I wondered if I should quit reading the news.

A few years back, I got rid of Twitter and Facebook. I felt God wanted me to do it. I called it “the little rapture.” It was wonderful. A lot of people wondered where I had gone, and I lost contact with many, but it was worth it. Sorry to say that. Then I moved from Miami to Ocala, which was another little rapture. Now I’m seriously considering minimizing my visits to news websites.

No one wants to be ignorant. On the other hand, how much is awareness worth, if every piece of information comes with provocation or a picture of a Kardashian’s rear end?

Do I really need to know everything that’s happening in the world? God is looking after me. My own knowledge is of limited value. Relying on it is a huge mistake. The more you rely on yourself, the less God does for you.

The more contact you have with God, the more you will want to isolate yourself from this world. God brings peace, love, protection, and success. The world brings fear, anger, worry, and failure. Leaving God’s presence and going out among people is like leaving a comfortable air-conditioned house and walking out into a hurricane. This place is disgusting.

Catholics believe sinners go to a place called purgatory. It’s a temporary hell. God punishes you there until he feels like you’ve had enough, and then you go to heaven. They couldn’t be more wrong. We already live in purgatory. We just don’t realize it because we’re used to it. We live in denial. Even the worst pessimist sees the world as a better place than it is. We make the most of our pleasures and successes, and we avoid thinking about the agony and failure that surround us.

You don’t get to go to a special place to have your iniquities purged after you die. The Bible says hell is eternal, and there is no mention of purgatory. You have your opportunity to get purged right now, and you will never get another chance. If you didn’t care about God here, you won’t care when you’re dead, either. There is no point in giving human beings an eternity of probation.

This is purgatory, and I’ll tell you something else. We are demons, or at least we are the same type of hybrid.

What are demons? Fallen angels? No. That’s what religious authorities who make things up tell us. Demons are our brothers and sisters. They are dead human beings whose bloodlines were polluted with the genes of fallen angels who had sex with women. God sent the flood to get rid of them, but the only pure person on the boat was Noah. The rest were tainted, and they went on to breed.

In English, Bibles say Noah was “perfect in his generations.” In Hebrew, the word translated “generations” literally means “generations,” but in Hebrew, it is used to mean “genealogy.”

In all likelihood, angels have sired more people since the flood. As a result, many of us–maybe all of us–are supernatural bastards. We carry cursed DNA. We are not really God’s children. Not until we accept salvation and repent. This is why the Bible calls the Holy Spirit a spirit of adoption.

Those of us who are currently alive can’t possess people or manifest in them as diseases, but we are still full of evil. We live in bondage to sins we can’t give up, because that’s our inheritance from our evil ancestors. Only the Holy Spirit can remanufacture us.

This world is a nuthouse. You are lucky if you can walk two blocks without witnessing depravity or being tempted. The things we witness cause us to open doors and let demons in. Then we become like them, and we end up with diseases, mental illness, addictions, and other problems.

Every day we get to choose between peace, power, healing, and victory and a pile of shiny objects soaked in poison. We take the shiny objects nearly all the time, and we think we’re doing the right thing.

A human being is like a bus full of idiots. You’re supposed to drive responsibly, but the idiots–spirits of the dead–keep shoving you to the floor and grabbing the wheel. If you don’t know God, you have no authority, so the idiots will win until the day you die. Your choices give them power. Then when bad things happen to you, you go to God and cry, “Why me?”, as if something odd has happened.

Churches pretend demons don’t exist. Churches that admit demons exist claim they’re rare. Christians think only “bad people” can have demons, so they’re insulted when you suggest they have them, too. They turn down relief because they prefer pride and self-righteousness. God is running a free clinic, and we sit outside and fester because we think we’re too good to be sick.

I may have to forget about news sites and let the world take care of itself. I have the delusion that I’m helping humanity and looking after myself when I read the news, but that’s probably not true. There are things I’m better off not knowing about. The world is packed with people who cause their own problems, doing the same counterproductive things over and over, so I shouldn’t get to close to it. I’m trying to become a different kind of person. God moves me forward, and then I get caught up in the world’s issues, and I slide back. I am not cooperating with him the way I should.

Like a friend of mine says, “Not my circus, not my monkeys.” I know that’s how God himself feels, except possibly for the “monkeys” part. God says Satan is the god of this world, so it makes sense that he limits his own interference in the drama.

Salvation is for individuals, not worlds. This place is terminally ill. Focusing on nations and cities is a mistake. You have to think about one person at a time. People can be saved and filled with power, but the world as a whole (or hole) is going to continue to rot. If that were not true, the apocalypse and the Messianic Age would be pointless.

Why did God promise to destroy and remake the world, if we’re going to fix it before he returns? In one part of the Revelation, he kills a third of humanity at one whack. That’s not God giving us an “A.”

I do not want any more sewage tsunamis. I generate enough sewage of my own. I don’t need to take in sewage from leftist criminals and the Kardashians.

I’m so glad I’m out of Miami. I can’t describe it. I wish I never had to think about that place again. I’m going to feel the same way about the earth when I leave.

You can have God or you can have the world. You have to choose, and you are going to choose, whether you want to or not.

America’s Rift Becomes More Obvious

I read something very sad on the Internet today.

Actor James Woods says he has been blacklisted because he’s an outspoken conservative. He’s very talented, and he has a history of solid work, but he is not getting hired like he used to. Now he has proof that the blacklisting isn’t just coming from potential employers.

Yesterday, on the Fourth of July, his former agent, Ken Kaplan, sent him this email:

It’s the 4th of July and I’m feeling patriotic. I don’t want to represent you anymore. I mean I can go on a rant but you know what I’d say.

People in Hollywood love to claim there is no anti-conservative blacklist, but as you can see, the blacklist exists. It’s pretty surprising to see someone blacklisted by his own agent. An agent is supposed to be loyal. This is one of the people Woods counted on to find him work, so it’s bizarre to see Kaplan work against him.

The story is sad, but when I say I saw something sad on the Internet, I’m not talking about the agent’s email. I’m talking about this comment on the story:

I wish i had the power the snap my fingers AND TURN THIS PLACE INTO A NORMAN ROCKWELL PAINTING AGAIN i was born 1956 I WANT GO AND SEE HOME AGAIN

That hit the mark. “Home” doesn’t exist any more on this earth. There are pockets of America in which people behave fairly normally, but the nation has lost its innocence. We are cynical and coarse. We are the kind of people our great-grandparents wouldn’t let our grandparents associate with.

When I was a little kid in Tampa, I could leave my house and play a block away, without getting permission first. My parents didn’t worry about me being kidnapped and sexually abused and murdered. I didn’t have a chip in my arm or a smartphone in my pocket. When I rode in the car with my parents, I didn’t see dirty words on billboards or bumper stickers. When I was at home, and the family watched our only TV, my parents didn’t have to block channels or change channels for me to prevent me from seeing nudity or gay men having sex.

Back then, we didn’t have a lot of naked protestors. We didn’t have cities like modern San Francisco and New York, in which sexually depraved people were allowed to appear nude in public. We didn’t have naked men in women’s locker rooms, exposing themselves to young girls with the backing of the law.

I can’t say life was a Norman Rockwell painting, but it wasn’t disgusting, either. Modern life is revolting.

What do leftists tell us when we say we yearn for the good old days? They say we want to bring back segregation. America had segregation in the good old days, so anyone who longs for those days must want segregation. It’s not a good argument. There is no reason why a God-fearing nation full of decent people has to have segregation or any other ill we had in the past.

I miss the good old days, but I don’t miss going to school without air conditioning. Missing the good things of the past isn’t the same as missing everything about it.

The funny thing is that leftists are now in favor of segregation, even while they use past segregation to criticize conservatives. Leftists want all-black dormitories and student unions. They want all-female gyms. They have special days on university campuses on which they force white people to stay home. Leftists used to work for the right to associate with white males. Now they’re pushing for the right to be separated from us.

I left Miami because the people were too much for me. They are coarse. They are violent. They are arrogant and obsessed with sex. They are racist; it’s not a good place for a white person to live.

I moved to a place where people hold doors for each other and hear Christian music in stores and restaurants. It’s wonderful to be here and to be shielded from provocation and temptation, but it’s a strategic retreat which will be followed by abandonment of the field. No one is ever going to march back into Miami (or New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, or San Francisco) and claim it for God. These places will never recover. Not until after Jesus returns.

We destroyed what we had. It’s not coming back.

Leftists like to tell us we can’t get our innocence back. That’s not true. God restores innocence to people who desire it. The reason we won’t get it back is that we don’t want it. Most Americans like living in a nation with a locker room atmosphere. We’ve become depraved, and one of the consequences of depravity is that you tend to forget how nice life was before you became depraved.

If we could have our innocence restored instantaneously, many of us would be shocked at how much we prefer it. Unfortunately, that’s not possible. God allows people to continue down the self-destructive paths they choose.

What we had 60 years ago was magnificent. We should have held onto it and worked to increase our innocence and holiness. We would be stronger now. We would have more peace. America would be the light of the world. We ought to be mourning for what we lost.

I worked very hard to make myself depraved. I made a deliberate effort to make myself numb to outrage. Now I don’t know what it’s like to be a decent person. I’m better than I was 10 years ago, but I think that if I went back in time and moved to a place like Knoxville or Dallas, I would offend people with my coarseness and assertiveness. They wouldn’t want their kids to talk to me.

For about a decade, I’ve been working to get restoration, and although I am very different from what I was, I’m still a dysfunctional Christian. That says a lot about the nation in which I grew up. As a fairly typical American, I started out as a basket case. There was a lot of work to be done. And I thought I was doing pretty well!

How many Americans, including Christians, are aware of the rot inside and around them? Only a tiny percentage. Very few people are rooted in the Holy Spirit, so very few of us are able to see what’s wrong with us and move away from it. Our situation is grave, and it is made worse by the blindness and depravity of most of the people we look to for instruction. The pope wants rule-followers who worship statues. Popular charismatic preachers respond to cries for help with demands for money. Mainstream protestants teach pride and hard work instead of supernatural restoration, and many have decided that unrepentant homosexuals make good pastors and priests. Who are we supposed to look to for guidance?

When sinners come to us for help, they get a poor imitation of what we were supposed to be. We can give them moral guidance, help them to receive salvation, and teach them to pray. We generally can’t heal their bodies or get them delivered from evil compulsions and delusions. Usually, we can’t cast devils out. We can’t help sexual deviants or addicts who genuinely want to change. Then we get angry at them when they give up on God and start attacking the church. What they do is wrong, but if we can’t help them, their antipathy shouldn’t surprise us.

We’re not responsible for what other people do, but we are responsible for failing to be powerful, informed Christians who are able to provide others with help.

I wish I had a message of hope, but the world is going to go under. If you want hope, here it is: you can be lifted above the mess, and you can help others if they will listen. That’s about it. You’re not going to save your world, your race, your nation, your city, or even your block. You don’t get to decide who gets saved, and you can’t force people to accept help. Noah had to watch bodies sink, and so will we.

It’s wonderful to be out of Miami, but the truth is that the whole world is like Miami. Some parts are nicer than others, but the whole planet is ruined.

Last night I received an analogy. Mankind is like a body with gangrene, which is death. A gangrenous limb isn’t just infected; it’s dead. We treat gangrene by amputation because we can’t reverse death. Antibiotics won’t bring a dead leg back to life. You sever the living tissue from the dead, and you throw out the dead part. That’s what’s on the way. That’s the rapture.

Depravity causes gangrene. A person who is merely sinful can be changed, but a depraved person hates righteousness and shuts out help. Depravity is like a tourniquet you apply between yourself and God.

That tourniquet will be part of your life no matter what you do. It will be between you and God, or it will be between you and people who hate God.

I’ll tell you something interesting. Farmers use rubber bands to castrate cattle. There is a special tool that holds strong bands open. You put a band over the calf’s genitals, and you release it. It snaps shut and cuts off the blood supply, and eventually the dead parts drop off. That’s what people who hate God are doing to themselves. They’re separating themselves from life. We were supposed to help God reproduce, but he will not hold onto the infertile forever.

When we see parades and rallies celebrating sexual perversion, which are among the most obvious symptoms of our decay, we are seeing something beyond sin. We are seeing love of evil and death. It’s almost like prayer and worship. The participants are signalling their willingness to be cut off forever, just as Christians signal their willingness to repent and belong.

I look forward to leaving this place. Heaven will be different. It will be a lot like a Norman Rockwell painting. There will be no obscenity. There will be no violence or hate. People there won’t have dark thoughts or desires. No one there will pull you out of a car and break your eye sockets because you’re wearing a red hat. We won’t have to hear demonstrators telling us heaven belongs to illegal aliens from earth and hell; heaven has perfect border control. No one will be confused sexually. No one will feel entitled to what anyone else has. There will be no racial division, because the only race will be the children of God.

On the whole, I wish I had been born sooner. A lot of people were born after the charismatic revival, benefited from it, and died before they had to watch our country putrefy and face wholesale persecution.

I wonder what I’ll have to witness next. It seems like things can’t get any worse, but I know they can.

More

I stole a metaphor from Robert Bork, who stole it from Joan Didion, who stole it from William Butler Yeats. I may as well show you the poem from which it was taken. It was published in 1919, and it relates to the chaos in Europe following World War I.

If you’re a Christian who knows prophecy, it may give you some chills.

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

More

I feel like adding a few things, to remind us all how crazy things have been. By now, you have probably heard of Kino Jimenez. He appears in a viral video, in which he appears, throwing a drink in a young man’s face and stealing his MAGA hat. It happened in a Texas Whataburger. Jimenez battered the young man and used filthy language to ridicule him. Might as well post a video.

News sites are saying he “allegedly” did these things. They want to avoid lawsuits. Fine. He allegedly did these things. Maybe he didn’t. Maybe the video is the most amazing fake in the history of the Internet.

Here’s what’s interesting. Many leftists are defending the attacker and even suggesting that attacking Trump supporters is a good thing to do. Here are some Internet comments. They were not hard to find. Go to any mainstream news site and look.

Wearing that in public is heedlessly provocative. I don’t support any physical response at all, but others may.

MAGA hats should come with a disclaimer, “if you wear this hat that promotes racism you might get your a33 kicked”

Hey magas. We’re coming for your guns 🙂

You wanna out yourself as a xenophobic racist then don’t be surprised if people react.

boy the butthurt snowflake beta cuck republicans are sure whining up a storm about this.
buy your tissues while you still can

anyone who wears that hat deserves to get beat, period

Here is a really bad idea. Wearing a maga hat into a fast food restaurant… Unless you love spit burgers.

Trumptards only wear their MAGA hats to bed, i wonder why?

Oh man being a magatard in public is a bad idea. Keep it at home.

It’s a freaking lame azz hat, deal with it.

Welcome to 2018 America. Kiss your illusions goodbye.

Citric Acid Saves the Day

I have a great tip for people whose dishes and glassware have mineral deposits on them.

Florida gets its water from limestone aquifers. Limestone is made of a calcium compound, plus other things. Limestone dissolves in water, to some extent. For this reason, the water here leaves white mineral deposits on things like dishes, counters, and faucets.

The scale in Miami was noticeable but tolerable. Here, it’s much worse. Maybe it’s because we have a well. Maybe we need a tank to let some of the crud settle out.

I thought about having a water-softening system installed, but it seemed like an expensive solution to a minor problem. I looked around on the web to see what I could do.

I found a product. “Lemon” something or other. Too lazy to Google. You put a small amount in your dishwasher when you run it, and it dissolves scale.

Okay, I Googled it after all. It’s called Lemi Shine. Amazon charges about $20 for 36 ounces.

That’s expensive. I can get a huge box of Cascade for a few dollars, so why does the additive cost so much? Unacceptable.

I rooted around some more and found out what Lemi-Shine contains. It’s citric acid, which is a common food additive also known as “sour salt.” Well, now.

Guess what Amazon charges for 5 pounds of pure citric acid? Fourteen bucks. That’s 80 ounces. I can probably do even better on Ebay.

I got myself 5 pounds of citric acid, and I started using it. I throw a tablespoon in before I start the machine. Now my dishes are scale-free (or getting there). I saved a ton because I didn’t buy Lemi Shine, and I don’t have to worry about a water softening apparatus.

Here’s something else: you can put a citric acid solution in a spray bottle and use it on counters and so on. It works, and unlike vinegar, it doesn’t stink. Bonus! And you can flavor food with it.

I read that you need about two tablespoons of citric acid in a quart of water in order to descale surfaces. I’m going to mix some today.

I tried putting CLR in my dishwashwer. Bad idea. It turns dishwashing powder into little bricks that don’t dissolve.

My bag of citric acid ought to last me several months. I am quite happy about it. Give it a shot, if you can’t see through your drinking glasses. I’m sure it will work, and over time, it will also clear the scale out of your dishwasher.

Don’t Envy Your Heroes

It’s a very slow Independence Day here at The Compound. I could have invited people for barbecue, but I have no grill, nor do I desire one, and I no longer have the old drive to cook for others.

I don’t make a big deal of holidays any more. I used to spend Christmas with my mother’s family in Kentucky. A number of my relatives are dead now, and those that remain don’t seem very interested in maintaining contact. When they travel to Florida, they keep it quiet instead of arranging for visits.

I lost a lot of friends when I left my last two churches. I can’t say I lost friends, really. What happened is this: people who only pretended to be my friends got exposed.

The same thing happened when I started going back to church 10 years ago. My backsliding friends stopped calling me. I had one friend who still called once in a while, but he only called when he wanted something. He needed to use my tools. He wanted to fish on my dad’s boat. Is that a friend? Anyway, I stopped receiving invitations to his home. Christians make people uncomfortable.

He had issues. For one thing, he was envious. If you had things he didn’t have, he was likely to “accidentally” damage them when you let him use them, and he was not the kind of person who offered to fix what he broke.

He had a wonderful neighbor who cut his grass and lent him tools. He borrowed a new power saw and left it sitting in the rain, and when the neighbor complained, instead of apologizing, he said something like, “It still works.”

Dude. That’s why you don’t have anything.

He used to invite himself on fishing trips. He would arrive at the dock late, with a hangover. Very bad form. When we got out of the bay, he would go to sleep on the couch. If a fish hit a line, he would get up so he could reel it in, because that’s the fun part of fishing. If my dad had beer in the fridge, he would drink it.

When we came back in, he wouldn’t help the other guests clean up the boat. He would come with me to the cleaning table and snicker at them while they worked in the sun. When he did that, I decided he was never going to fish with us again. He probably has no idea what the problem was.

On one trip, he drank all of my dad’s beer. He was an alcoholic, so this wasn’t hard for him. Next time he fished with us, he proudly displayed a fresh 12-pack. Which he then drank by himself. He drank my dad’s beer, replaced it, and drank the replacement beer.

People always complained about him. He was burning bridges every day, but he could never smell the smoke. These days, I only think about him when I think about former friends who treated me badly.

If you want to find out how much people like you, stop cooking big meals for them, and stop inviting them to fish on your yacht. You’ll learn more than you want to.

I have never been the kind of person who keeps score. Ordinarily, I don’t sit around adding up the things my friends and I do for each other to see if they balance. It takes me a long time to realize someone is running a big tab. When I finally do the math, the results aren’t encouraging! I know a few people who treat me well, but I’ve known a whole lot of users.

I’m off on a tangent.

Over the years, I have gotten used to doing nothing on most holidays, and the habit of doing nothing is hard to break.

Let’s see.

New Year’s Eve is only for drunks. Martin Luther King Day is only for black people, it’s only celebrated in dangerous neighborhoods, and it’s a day of crime and intoxication. Valentine’s Day is an insulting sham, and I have no one to celebrate with anyway. St. Patrick’s Day is only for drunks. Memorial Day is a barbecue day, and unless I’m doing the barbecuing, I don’t get invitations. July 4 is a barbecue day. Labor Day is a barbecue day. Halloween is a celebration of evil, and it’s also a big day for drunks. Thanksgiving and Christmas are okay.

The Fourth of July will pass without much acknowledgement. I’m grateful for America, but I’m also grateful for not having to shop and cook for people who don’t spend a dime or lift a finger.

It’s more blessed to give than to receive, but I don’t want to be TOO blessed.

Happy Steve Independence Day.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Richard Feynman and Errol Flynn this week. That’s what I sat down to write about.

Richard Feynman was a Nobel-winning American physicist. He was recruited to work on the bomb before he even got his Ph.D. He was a character. He drank and slept around, and he belonged to a Brazilian samba band in Rio. He wrote several interesting autobiographical books. I read them about 25 years ago, while I was preparing to become a physicist.

My understanding is that his books have become more popular since I read them. They have new cover designs now. That’s always a clue that a book has taken off. People seem to revere him the way they revere Einstein. They seem to think he had the answers to life’s problems, and that he would be a good role model.

Einstein was a terrible husband and father. He was a naive socialist. He spent most of his career trying to disprove quantum mechanics. Letters that were uncovered recently suggest that he was a racist. He was not perfect. It’s unfortunate that people think physicists know about anything other than physics. They generally do not.

When I was young, I liked Feynman a lot. He was funny. He seemed humble and honest. When I look at his books now, I have a different feeling. That’s because I’m growing up.

Feynman slept with lots of women, including married women. He put in a lot of time making bad drawings of nudes. He enjoyed Brazilian culture, which is pretty depraved. I don’t think he was humble, either. He loved saying he wasn’t very smart, but his work is full of anecdotes about his extraordinary mathematical accomplishments. He plays them down, but he still presents them, and the obvious intention is to impress the reader.

I now see him as a selfish, dishonest, treacherous person who loved attention. I don’t admire anything about him except for his brain. I was stupid to think highly of him when I was young. I should have thought about the husbands he humiliated.

Feynman was an atheist. I think about that a lot. I sit and read his interesting stories, and sometimes I stop and try to imagine his current circumstances. He’s almost certainly in hell, being tortured. Whatever cockiness he had in life must be long gone.

Sometimes I think about him when I’m lying on my back, and I realize hell is below me somewhere, with Feynman in it. I’m reading his book for light entertainment, but somewhere behind me, on the other side of a thick wall of rock and so forth, he is still alive, crying out in anguish and despair. If he could scream loud enough, I would hear him every day.

I’m used to having Christian heroes and secular heroes. I think of my secular heroes differently now. How many are in hell? How many people are they dragging down with them through their poisonous examples?

The things my secular heroes accomplished are, in the final analysis, excrement. When we are judged, no one will care about discoveries in quantum mechanics. God will want to know who we helped. He will want to know who we introduced to him. What can a Feynman or an Einstein say in response to those questions? “I did exactly what I wanted to do, I made a great deal of money, and I did nearly nothing for other people.” That seems accurate.

As for Errol Flynn, he has been on Turner Classic Movies a lot lately. I never really knew who he was until I started watching TCM. I started reading about him.

Flynn was utterly depraved. He had sex with as many people as humanly possible, male and female. He built a mansion full of peepholes and one-way mirrors so he could watch his guests in their private moments. He was tried for statutory rape, and during the trial, he picked up a teenager who worked in the courthouse. He used to appear at the dinner table, where his mother was seated, fully naked. He exposed himself to strangers.

Flynn had no remorse whatsoever. He wrote an autobiography called My Wicked, Wicked Ways, which was published after he died. He celebrated his sins.

Flynn fell apart, physically. His body couldn’t withstand the burden of sin. He tried to join the military in World War Two, and he was turned down because of an enlarged heart and VD. He would have been about 32.

Flynn dropped dead at the age of 50. He simply quit functioning. The coroner said he had the body of a much older man. A doctor involved with the autopsy was so impressed with Flynn’s genital warts, he sliced them off in order to preserve them for posterity.

Errol Flynn was charismatic. When you watch his movies, he seems noble. He’s inspiring. He’s brave, funny, and self-effacing. It’s astounding how well he played a type which was nothing like the real Flynn.

I decided to buy his book. Curiosity overcame me. I had to see what went on in the mind of a man who had so little regard for others and so little fear of God. I haven’t received it yet.

I think of Flynn the way I think of Feynman. He must be in hell. How could he not be? He practically filed an application. One day he was a declining matinee idol leading a carefree, lecherous life. He was admired and pampered. The next day, he was in a flaming pit surrounded by demons. What must that be like? It’s one thing to die in the electric chair and wake up in hell, expecting the worst. It has to be considerably worse when one of earth’s pampered princes or princesses dies suddenly.

People don’t really die. Their bodies stop working, but human beings continue. Every person ever born is alive somewhere, and only those who accepted salvation or whose sins couldn’t be imputed to them are in heaven. The others are burning, with maggots chewing their bones, and they will never be free.

I have two aunts who are probably in hell. I have a high school friend who probably made it when he shot himself at 25. I have lots of acquaintances who are almost surely feeling the flames right now.

We’re very nonchalant about hell, here on the surface. Many of us choose not to believe, and the rest of us don’t like to think about it. Death will be a real eye-opener for all of us. We will wonder why we weren’t more concerned about damnation.

Feynman. Flynn. Anthony Bourdain. Hunter Thompson. Prince. Michael Jackson. Hugh Hefner. Stephen Hawking. John Lennon. Hell is packed with celebrities many of us envied and emulated. It probably contains a number of popes and televangelists.

These days, I have a new feeling when I watch old movies, and it isn’t good. Hollywood has always been a mess, and I know very well I’m looking at people who have been burning for decades.

I don’t know where I’m going with this. I’m very glad my values have changed, and I hope God continues to improve them. The world is full of fool’s gold, and most of us are diehard fools.

Maybe I’ll review the book when I read it. I don’t expect to have pleasant things to say.

New Wrinkle in Pastor Pedophilia Story

I have said a lot of critical things that needed to be said (never mind the other ones), and I have often been amazed to find out how right I was. Today I’m amazed again.

The pastor of my last church got arrested for molesting his niece. I’ve written about it. He and his wife are extremely proud people, and they turned their church into a cult where they were exalted as though they were somewhere between human beings and gods.

I have talked about their pride and denial, but I didn’t know how bad it was until today.

A friend of mine called me. He was an armorbearer at Trinity Church with me, and I believe he was a deacon at New Dawn Ministries, the church with the pedophilia problem. I don’t recall exactly. Maybe he was an armorbearer. He told me more about the story.

I’ll give you the version I believed to be true. The pastor molested his niece for years. His sister found out and raised hell on Facebook, accusing his wife of covering things up. The pastor confessed in front of the church and stepped down. Weeks later, he was arrested.

That turned out to be wrong. Something is missing, and here it is. His sister did not expose him right away. She told him they could work it out, provided he resign his position and leave the ministry completely. He would have to find another line of work. He stepped down at first, but then he changed his mind and decided to go back to work. That’s when she things went sour.

If you’re shaking your head as you read this, I don’t blame you. It is incomprehensible. This man was looking at decades in prison, and the mother of the victim threw him a lifeline. Instead of getting on his knees and thanking her for a completely undeserved opportunity to escape destruction, he decided to take his chances.

Long before I knew anything about the molestation, I had problems with the pastors because of their pride. They were doing obvious things to ruin the church. The music was deafening. The services ran three or more hours. They offended people with their cultish approach to their jobs.

You couldn’t tell them anything. They were like little defiant kids who wanted the world to know they couldn’t be pushed around.

I knew they were proud and that they were in denial. I didn’t know the head pastor was so deluded he was willing to risk prison rather than admit defeat.

My friend complained about people standing by the pastors after they knew about his crimes. The pastors’ brother-in-law topped the list. After things fell apart, he went on Facebook and posted a meme criticizing people for running after the “shepherd” was smitten or whatever.

If my brother-in-law raped a little girl (my own niece), I would beg her mother for forgiveness for associating with him. I would change the church locks, myself. I would physically restrain him if he tried to preach. I would shut down the sound system and tell everyone exactly what was going on. But his brother-in-law was also proud, and he was ambitious and combative, so he did the wrong thing.

The brother-in-law had problems with me when I was a deacon. He had no humility. When I heard something from God, and it didn’t line up with something he heard on TBN or from some prosperity preacher in Miami, he laid into me. He was not able to consider the possibility that God spoke to me, perhaps because I wasn’t Hispanic or because I wasn’t related to the pastor.

I would completely understand if the brother-in-law had advised people to forgive the pastor and pray for him, but supporting his ministry is unthinkable. We have to forgive, but we don’t have to be imbeciles.

The people who came out of this looking bad are the same people who thought I was a problem. I pointed out issues with the church, and instead of being seen as a helpful counselor, I was considered a traitor. If they had taken my advice, they would still have a church. It would be bigger. It would be more effective. The pastor would probably be working things out with his sister and niece. He would still have a job. The brother-in-law wouldn’t look nearly so foolish.

The pastor is on his way to the penitentiary, and he could get life. The other employees have lost their jobs. The brother-in-law lost a platform he used to promote himself. The pastor’s wife is dying from a brain tumor. I, on the other hand, am enjoying my dream of living in the country, I am no longer being maligned and abused as a church volunteer, and I suddenly seem perceptive to a number of people who used to think I was a crank. I seem smart, for saying what should have been obvious.

I’m not smart. Not about the pastors. A smart person would never have believed in these people. I was just passing on things I heard because I spent a lot of time praying. God might as well have told them to a goose, for all the respect I got.

I wanted the best for them. I couldn’t find a way to get them to receive it.

I’m a bad person, myself. I’m trying to confess and repent as effectively as I can. I don’t want to be self-righteous or proud with regard to the self-righteous and proud. I hope I don’t sound like I’m praising myself. I’m just expressing frustration at a terrible series of events which should have been avoided very easily.

I don’t find confession discouraging. I find it empowering. I get better answers to prayer as I work to clean myself up. I get more authority. I don’t give a crap about my self-esteem. Self-esteem is a lie. It’s a drug our brains manufacture to keep us from dying of shame.

Realizing what I am doesn’t make me sad. It sets me free. Try explaining these things to someone who is obsessed with the fact that God has forgiven him. They think it doesn’t matter what they do or think. They seem to think God adopted them because he admired them so much, not because he pitied them.

When you’re looking at a life sentence, and someone offers you a way out, you take it, and you make a point of showing that person your gratitude for the rest of your life. To do anything else is to pronounce sentence on yourself and put yourself in prison.

Not only was I right about the pastors; I was more right than I could have imagined. I won’t say I wish I was wrong, because that’s a stupid thing to wish for, but I wish they hadn’t turned out to be so disappointing, and I wish they were not being destroyed.

Not Everything is Your Fault

I keep writing posts about my experiences as a caregiver, and then I delete them. Not everything is fit for public consumption. I do have a few general observations that may help people, however.

I would like to let other caregivers know something: if you’re getting annoyed more than you would like, it may not be your fault. Not entirely. Many people are argumentative, dismissive, and inclined to take repeated verbal jabs at their relatives. When these people get older and lose their minds, they are likely to do these things more often. A demented person may forget that he insulted you or argued with you (about something he was clearly wrong about) earlier in the day, so when he does it again, it’s like a new experience for him. A person who needled you twice a week when you were 30 may do it 20 times a week when he becomes demented, and sooner or later, you are going to be annoyed. It’s not you, so be careful how much blame you lay on yourself.

If you have a demented parent who had certain buttons he liked to push when he was younger, he is now likely to push those buttons much more often. And you can’t tell your parents to shut up and get lost. You can’t really unload on them about the rotten things they did when they were young. It serves no purpose, and people will think you’re abusive. You’ll have to have a strong prayer life, and you will have to limit the amount of time you spend with the person you care for. Don’t feel bad if they get lonely. It’s their fault, and the proper cure isn’t to make your own life miserable. There are some problems you can’t fix, so let them go and be at peace.

I’ll tell you something interesting. Jesus snapped at people from time to time. I’m not saying you have license to be obnoxious, but you don’t have to be better than Jesus. At the very least, you are entitled to brief moments of anger which you keep to yourself.

I feel very bad for my dad, and I have been somewhat down on myself because I felt I wasn’t as patient as I could have been. My dad’s life is pitiable. He can’t have friendships now. He never had friends who would be willing to spend substantial time with a demented person. He can’t drive. He can’t do anything interesting with his time. He can’t work the phone or computers well enough to keep up with people. I feel bad because I get annoyed with a person who is in this terrible situation.

At the same time, I know where his problems came from. When he was younger, he made deliberate choices and developed habits he knew were difficult for other people to bear. He really made people suffer. The consequences he experiences now were foreseeable and inevitable. I had nothing to do with them.

It’s not realistic to try to make him happy. That won’t happen. I can’t give him a real social life. I can’t give him satisfying things to do. I can’t work miracles. I have to be satisfied with a reasonable amelioration of his quality of life. Don’t expect too much of yourself.

I look after my dad’s business. I see to it he gets medical care. I make a fair effort to provide him with conversation and contact. That’s all I can do. I’m not going to cook meals from scratch every day or take him to restaurants 5 times a week. I’m not going to sit with him for three hours a day. I’m not taking him on trips; that would be a nightmare. I have no help, and I’m just a human being.

Here’s something else: your charge will surprise you a lot. For example, they will never stop finding new ways to defile your environment with mucus, spit, feces, and urine. You will try to plan for everything, but you will still get blindsided. I don’t think you can do anything about this. I joined an online support group and made ample use of Google, but I have not been able to predict all of the problems that have come my way.

I had to get my own secret refrigerator, and I hide food from my dad. I don’t want him eating things out of the package and getting spit and mucus all over them. I wish I had my own kitchen. I have thought about putting a few items in a big upstairs bathroom.

Support groups help, but they are of limited value, and they can cause you stress if you get too involved. A lot of the people who show up are self-righteous and rude (hello…Internet), and forums tend to be heavily laden with granola-based leftist life forms who like to give people hypocritical lectures in order to make themselves look good. “My 7 rescue cats and I cried a little when we read about the way you’re not composting your mom’s diapers.” Okay.

My advice: ask your questions, ignore the grandstanding and insults, and get out. I quit the group I belonged to because I had started to feel like a Trump associate trying to have a quiet dinner at a restaurant.

I figured something else out recently. You have to be willing to think about assisted living. I want my dad to live in his own home until he dies, but it may not be possible. I don’t know how long I can handle the burden of dealing with him.

I can’t leave for more than a couple of hours unless I find temporary housing for him or get someone to stay with him. I can’t have a clean house. The counters in the kitchen always have spit on them (he uses it as a cleaning fluid) unless I’ve just cleaned them. Smells come out of his bedroom suite. I have stepped in fresh mucus where he blew his nose on the floor. I have to put up with daily interrogations about my efforts to get married and give him grandchildren. I can live like this for a certain amount of time, but it’s not sustainable. If he is still with me a year from now, I will probably be looking for a facility for him.

I’ll tell you what. I never want to be asked about marriage or grandchildren again. If you mess up your kids, you really should not nag them later on about the way their lives turned out. It’s bad form. I’m doing everything I can, but I can’t change reality.

If I get a woman pregnant tomorrow, my dad will probably be dead before the child can talk. His illness is terminal. If he had a grandson right now, things would be bad. He can’t be a grandfather. He can’t take kids anywhere. He can’t buy them presents. He can’t really hold conversations with them. He is never going to be a grandfather, and it would be best if he understood it and admitted it’s his own fault.

As for marriage, well, I’m old, and I’m not much of a draw. Also, God forgive me, when I look at women my age, I think, “No way, no way, no way, no WAY.” Being single is not that bad. I know I don’t look any better than they do, but I can’t change what I feel.

Marriage isn’t just a friendship. If it were, I’d move in with another man. God knows they’re easier to get along with. “Is this your dynamite on the kitchen table, next to the disassembled AR-15?” “Yes.” “Cool.”

Marriage is largely about romance. I’m not going to wake up in despair every morning just so I can have someone on hand to help me if I break a hip. Hiring a caretaker is cheaper than marrying, and I wouldn’t have to let the caretaker kiss me.

After I reached a certain age, I found that I appealed mainly to obnoxious older women other men had rejected for extremely sound reasons. Put me in a church pew, and the 200-pound lady who collects pieces of toast she thinks have Jesus’ face on them will come stand next to me, pressing her body against me if I have no place to run, and then she’ll start telling me how she dreamed about God’s plan for us. “I had a vision of the two of us reciting psalms while you rub Bag Balm on my bunions.” No. No no no no no no NO!

I suppose my dad will nag me about marriage as long as he has breath.

Before I forget, there is one more thing you will learn when you’re a caregiver. People love to sell old people things, and by “sell,” I mean “charge their credit cards without telling them.” My dad’s American Express card has been changed several times because of fraud. Magazines show up. Miracle pills arrive in the mail. Lots of people will want your parents’ money when they get too old to look after it, so make sure you look at bank and credit card statements all the time.

My dad received several ounces of silver plus a $600 bill from a company in Ohio. If it hadn’t been for me, he would still have the silver. I have also had to kill magazine and Internet subscriptions.

I don’t know if any of this information is helpful. I hope it is. I have no one to teach me how to be a caregiver. I’ve learned by making mistakes. Maybe I can help you avoid making mistakes.

Be nice to your kids. They may have a lot of power over you some day.

3D Printing Almost a Reality

This week’s exciting development: I am now a big 3D printing expert. And my opinion of the whole enterprise is even more negative than it used to me.

I want to be good at CAD. It’s useful for CNC machining. It’s useful, period. You don’t need CNC in order to have uses for CAD. You can design stuff with CAD and build it with files and grinders if you want.

CAD is good. Printers use files that come from CAD. Printing will make me better at CAD.

I also want to be able to print a useful part from time to time. Most things that come out of 3D printers are unbelievable useless crap, but you can also design metal parts in CAD, print them in plastic, and see if your design makes you happy before committing. You can use printing as a step in designing metal parts, but plastic is strong enough for some parts, so you can also print certain things which you can use.

I ordered an Anet A6 printer. This is the upgraded version of the Anet A8. Right away, you can see that the 3D printing collective has issues. Why would an upgraded version of something have a lower model number? And what is Anet going to call the printer that comes after the A0? The -A1?

The A6 arrived last week, and I started assembling it on Sunday. They send you a box containing stacked styrofoam trays full of parts, and you get to put them together. There are no written instructions. You get a USB drive with a PDF file. I think the drive may actually be a micro SD card in a USB adaptor, but it’s in a USB port right now, so I don’t want to take it out and check.

The instructions aren’t perfect, but there are very good Youtube videos.

I would say I have another two hours of assembly to go. It’s about a 5-hour job. Am I complaining? Yes. Well, no. If the printer came assembled, it would cost a lot more.

I’ll put up a couple of photos. One is the printer by itself, with the print bed installed upside down. I’ll fix that. The other is my assistant, Johnathan. He lives in one of my storage closets. He gets fed as long as he continues performing menial tasks for me.

Actually, he belongs to my friend Amanda. He is her youngest son. He likes building things from Legos. Working on a 3D printer is a step up for him.

I spelled his name right, so don’t correct me in the comments.

Notice how well the new workbench is serving me. It’s a joy to use.

The printer’s frame is made from black acrylic. They cut it into useful shapes with a laser or something. Maybe I should have bought a laser instead of a printer.

The sheets arrive covered with paper decals. The acrylic is manufactured with a big protective decal layer on each side. You have to peel it off every part. This is why the printer takes 5 hours to assemble instead of three.

I may get the printer running today. In anticipation, I’ve been looking at videos. The news is not all good.

The first thing that surprised me is this: it takes forever to print things. I’ll post a video in which someone prints–get ready for this–a giant orange Baby Groot. Dolls are very big among male scifi/comics fans. Troubling. Anyway, the Groot has two parts, and each part took around 5 hours to print.

Will the things I make take that long? Not for the most part. I expect to print a lot of small items. Still, 5 hours! Man! What if I need to print something big, and I have to make several versions to get it right?

I’ve also learned that printing is not precise. I’m not sure what kind of tolerances you can expect. From looking at things on the web, I get the idea that you would be lucky to stay within 5 thousandths of whatever it is you’re trying to print. That may not sound bad, but it is. Imagine you’re printing a knob to go on a 1/4″ shaft, and it’s supposed to rely on friction. If it’s 5 thousandths too big, it will slip, and if it’s 5 thousandths too small, it won’t go on the shaft.

Based on what I’ve seen so far, I expect to find myself using drill bits and sandpaper a lot.

I may have a way to mitigate the time problem. I’ve noticed that people tend to print solid objects. By “solid” I mean “not hollow.” They’re filling their prints with plastic that doesn’t do anything but add weight. It’s stupid. I’m wondering if I can create designs with a lot of hollow space to avoid wasting time and filament.

Here’s another bummer: prints fail a lot. You can set up a job that takes three days to print and have it go crazy late on the second day. After that, the printer will keep wasting filament on a doomed print while you’re off somewhere looking forward to handling the finished item.

A web printing guru says the smart thing is to rig a camera up so it sends you video of the printing process. Then you can shut it down when it goes sour.

I sort of hope printing hobbyists don’t see this, but here goes: I am very disappointed in them. It looks like all most of them do is turn machines on and print other people’s designs. I saw an instructional video today, and the guy in the video had a lot of ridiculous garbage on the shelves behind him. How many skulls and unicorns does a grown man need? What is that junk good for?

It’s like painting by numbers, which, I should stress, is a perfectly legitimate hobby. If it makes you happy to print Thanos heads all day, go for it, but you’re not really learning anything. You’re also filling your living space with things that will motivate people to apply unkind labels to you.

Here’s what I wonder: who is creating the designs people use? I have CAD, but there is no way on earth I could create a Groot doll. CAD uses lines and simple curves. Can you imagine how many tiny lines and curves are in a Groot doll? Someone must be sculpting these things by hand and then scanning them into CAD programs. I don’t know how it’s done, but your 12-year-old 3D-printing nephew isn’t designing plastic skulls by himself. If this is true, then what are most printer owners really accomplishing?

It looks like there are people who use printers as tools, and there are other people who don’t learn anything from 3D printing except how to assemble rickety machines and make them function.

Home 3D printing technology is still in its wobbly infancy. That’s what I take away from all this. The machinery has huge limitations, and part quality is not great. It will be a fun, cheap way to improve my CAD and Gcode knowledge, and I’ll get some useful things printed, but 3D printing is closer to the realm of Ron Popeil than that of Haas Automation.

Big Brother Gives You Permission

Welcome to the Internet’s newest Department-of-Defense-recognized hate and racism site. I hope the hatred will be up to your standards. If not, please leave a comment so I can work to hate even more.

Other websites are helpful in my quest to be the top Internet player hater of my generation. They do their best to provoke me every day.

Today I looked at a story about a black man who sliced and stabbed 9 people in Idaho, at some kind of housing project full of Muslim refugees. I saw the story several times, but it was not until I saw the Fox News version that I saw his photo, and if it weren’t for commenters on stories, I still would not have seen any indication that the refugees were Muslims.

There is a weird conspiracy among journalists now. They write story after story about disturbing crimes committed by minority members, deliberately omitting suspect photos and descriptions. They use code words, however. One popular word is “teens,” as in, “Gang of teens pulls man from car and beats him to death.” “Teen” is used so much, it’s likely to become a synonym for “black.” “Youth” is another one. “Youths swarm convenience store and beat owner.” They also use “urban” to mean “black.”

One day we may have a civil rights organization called the National Association for the Advancement of Urban Teens and Youths.

People are working to conceal the magnitude of the problem of minority crime, and it works. I am old, and I am well informed, but until this year I had no idea that most–not “many”–murders in America were committed by black people. That’s pretty bad, for 1/8 of the population. It’s remarkable that our overseers managed to keep this information from me for so long.

Hispanics are also disproportionally involved in murder. That’s probably because we get a lot of our Hispanics from Mexico, Puerto Rico, and places like Honduras, where you are lucky if you make it to work without being shot. I don’t think we’re seeing a lot of killings performed by Spaniards and Argentinians. I doubt Charo has a rap sheet.

We have a weird attitude toward minority crime. It’s perfectly fine for a leftist politician to complain about crime in minority neighborhoods, as though that crime came from some mysterious source–perhaps elves–but it’s not okay to say minorities are committing too much crime, even though most of their victims are also minorities.

How are we supposed to address a problem if we ignore it?

We live in a country where we are in hysterics about cops who shoot black people, yet we ignore the fact that in order to be shot by a cop, a black person first has to overcome the odds and avoid being shot by his neighbors (or killed in the womb by his own mother).

As a hard core purveyor of racism and hatred, I chose a black man to be my house-sitter in Miami. He lives in my old house while I’m working on getting rid of it. He’s getting his degree at the university. We have had some interesting experiences over the years.

He used to work at the African Heritage Cultural Arts Center in Miami. This is a county white-guilt boondoggle that pays people to teach kids things like music. My friend was a music instructor. He was deeply committed to helping his community. He is highly frustrated by what he sees going on among black people. He gets close to tears about it.

He had terrible problems when he was a teacher. The people who ran the center were inept. Like all government employees, they weren’t chosen based on their merits. They made him wait weeks for paychecks, while he begged people to lend him money for groceries. They also underpaid him. He had problems with the parents of the kids he taught. They wouldn’t bring them to the center when they were supposed to. They were impossible to motivate.

He has a buddy he is trying to help. I’ll call him Joe, and I’ll call my house sitter Bob. Joe came to the house to help us load my things into the rental van. Joe has had some legal issues. I don’t know what they are. Bob is big on mentoring (if you know a lot of black people, you will hear the word “mentor” all the time), and he has been mentoring Joe.

Joe lives in Liberty City, which is a lawless ghetto where people get away with murder all the time because no one will talk to the cops. You wouldn’t believe what goes on in Liberty City. The press keeps it quiet. Here’s an example: every year on Martin Luther King Day, gangs terrorize the area, doing whatever they please. Motorcycle gangs on illegal dirt bikes fill the streets, committing crimes and ignoring traffic signals. Bob’s dad used to make his family stay home on MLK Day, and he guarded his home with a gun.

This stuff also happens in other cities on MLK Day, but the press hushes it up. It’s so bad, ghetto thugs wait for MLK Day to settle scores. It’s like the movie The Purge. On MLK Day, anything goes. It’s a day of terror. The cops let it happen. They can’t do anything about it.

It’s almost understandable that the press would ignore the MLK purge, because in order to cover it, they would have to be on the scene, surrounded by violence. They’re afraid to go, I guess. But they did go to Iraq (???).

Joe’s family does not have it together. His friends generally don’t have it together. The people around him scare him and discourage him. While I was in Miami, there were several conversations about his situation.

Black kids are brainwashed all the time. They’re told they’re doing everything right, and that if they have any problems, white people are the reason. They hear this from educators, not just random malcontents. They are taught that they owe other black people their service. If you’re black, you are not supposed to leave a ghetto and improve yourself. You’re supposed to stay right where you are and somehow force the community to improve.

Clearly, this does not work. No black ghetto has ever gotten better without a population transplant. They only get better when everyone leaves and different people move in. This is actually a bad thing, we are told. It is gentrification, and it’s a great evil, for some reason I don’t actually know. I could look it up.

Bob was brainwashed. He believed he had to stay in Liberty City and lift everyone up, and it broke his heart and his spirit. He got nowhere. His employers didn’t appreciate him; all they cared about was getting paid. The people he tried to help generally didn’t appreciate him. He was punished for trying to help.

I used to tell him this: if you want to help people in the ghetto, move out, get educated, make money, find a nice house in a better place, and go back and help on the weekends. Then you’ll be able to help a few individuals, but the neighborhoods will still be disasters. He finally began to agree with me, and now he lives in a nice neighborhood, and he will have a degree and a position in a good graduate school in a few months. Now Bob is telling other people what I told him.

He even voted for Trump. He knows black people who would need no better reason than that to put him in the hospital.

He told Joe a story which is funny but also sad. Bob used to have fund-raising car washes at the Cultural Center. I used to go and let the kids wash my truck. Last time I went, shortly after I left, some nut started shooting across the street from the lot where they washed my truck. He murdered another man less than a hundred yards from the school, over drugs.

He and Joe were laughing about it. Bob said something like, “Please God, don’t let them kill this white man before he gets out of here.” One of the reasons Liberty City is depressed is that people are afraid to go there.

When the shooting occurred, Bob was upset not only because there was violence near the school, but because it happened when an outsider showed up and tried to be helpful.

I don’t like Liberty City. It is not a nice place for white people. People there may attack you simply for not being black. If a white or Hispanic person has a car accident there, he or she may be beaten to death by a mob. It has happened more than once.

It’s sad that you even have to think about things like that when you visit. “Is a pistol enough? Should I put a rifle under the backseat? Should I put the local police number in my phone contacts?”

I had a long conversation with Joe while Bob was off doing something. I told him sometimes you just have to give up on people. I told him the same things I had told Bob. I told him he could have a good life and a good career, but he needed to get away from people who dragged him down. I asked him about career options he considered. I mentioned the military. I mentioned trades, like machining. I asked him whether he had considered auditioning at the university, to get a music scholarship.

When he talks to me and Bob, he hears one thing. When he talks to the brainwashers, he hears another, and he also hears a message of guilt. “If you leave, you’re a sellout. You’re trying to be white.” And he knows he won’t have nearly as many friends if he leaves. That’s discouraging.

I hope Bob gets through to him. I come from a culture where people drag each other down, and I don’t want to see anyone else trapped in an environment like that. Joe is young. He has time to develop a relationship with God, move to an area with better people, find a decent woman, and cut his ties to those who are completely determined to fail. I can’t go back and undo the damage to my own life, but I can help other people avoid the same landmines.

Miami ghettos are just like the place I came from in Eastern Kentucky, only worse. If you’re from a place like that, and you want to do well, get out. You’re not going to change things. Liberty City will always be a hellhole, and Eastern Kentucky will always have way too many ignorant, racist white people on welfare.

I don’t know if they’ll be official state-recognized racists like me. I had to work to earn that distinction.

It’s not helpful when journalists and politicians pretend people who cause their own problems are victims. They’re just letting abscesses fester and spread instead of cleaning them, and they’re not helping their own credibility. Everyone knows what “teens” and “youths” mean, and everyone knows what’s going on when a story about a violent crime omits the name and image of the suspect. We know he’s black, Hispanic, or Muslim, and his name is something like Devontae, Manuel, or Mohammed. If he’s white and his name is George, his name and photo will be in every story.

Don’t pay any attention to me, however, because I am a known hatemonger. I use plastic grocery bags, and I used to have a shirt with a Confederate flag on it. All the bad things that happen in Liberty City are my fault. I am directly responsible. If you go there and become a victim of a violent crime, while your minority assailant is injuring you, think of me and hope the police catch me.

6-3…6-3…6-3…6-3…

I am blogging from Miami. I had to drive down here to pick up belongings our movers failed to take. I tried to rent a 12-foot van, and I got stuck with a huge 16-foot van that wanders all over the road and catches the wind beautifully.

It’s risky to travel and mention it on the Internet, because it’s an invitation to thieves. This time, I’m okay. For one thing, no one who hates me enough to cause a problem knows where I live now. For another, I have people staying at my house.

Anyway, I made it, and I got great news when I arrived: KENNEDY IS OUT!

If you live in a mine shaft, I’ll clue you in. Kennedy is the swing vote on the US Supreme Court. I forget who nominated him. Reagan, I think. He went native and made a veer to the left, and as a result, we’ve had a number of insane 5-4 decisions that should have been 4-5.

Man, this is good news. Now we have to hope that Trump doesn’t appoint another loose cannon.

People like to say presidents shouldn’t “pack” the Supreme Court. They say he should try to get a cross-section of the political spectrum. Here’s who says that: liars who don’t belong to the same party as the current president. Obama packed the Supreme Court as hard as he could, with Kagan and Sotomayor, and he would have given us another far-left nut had the Democrats not shot themselves in the feet by establishing a precedent which made it hard for Obama to appoint anyone while he was on the way out. Here’s the truth: every president who gets a chance does his best to jam EVERY LEVEL of the federal judiciary with people who think (or refuse to think, depending on party) just as he does.

George Bush appointed conservatives. Obama appointed leftists. Trump will not even consider appointing a leftist or centrist. Not even his sister, a far-left federal judge.

I hate hearing ignorant people say they vote for the man, not the party. They don’t understand that a vote for a president is a vote for a whole bunch of federal judges. The judges may be more important than the president himself. He can’t rule for more than 8 years. A federal judge is like cancer. They never go away.

This is very exciting. Ginsburg is not well. The odds that she will make it through Trump’s tenure are not great. With Kennedy’s long-awaited departure, we will most likely get a fairly solid 5th vote, and Ginsburg could make it 6. Another positive: any conservatives who are thinking of retiring due to health issues can leave safely now. If Thomas goes, we might get a bouncy, vigorous 50-year-old to take his place. SEVEN, plus a younger man to replace Thomas. It’s too much to hope for. I’ll hope anyway.

I don’t know if I’ll be able to publish this blog entry tonight. I’m using a laptop, and it looks like I changed my blog password since the last time I used it. I’m trying to get someone to email me a file containing the info. Maybe it will work.

More

I got my blog working, so I’m here to write a little more.

The thing that interests me about the Kennedy story is the way it will hit leftists. My prediction is that it will set them off. They’re already stretched very tight. The loss of Kennedy is gigantic, and I expect them to lose what little composure they have left.

Think about this: leftists are suddenly against democracy. How about that?

Democracy itself is a leftist structure. Throughout history, nations have generally been ruled by kings. They were ruled by force. Ordinary people didn’t get much of a voice. The Greeks held elections, and the Romans had a senate, but they were unusual. When democracy swept the world a couple of centuries ago, it was seen as something scandalous. The peasants didn’t know their place! Back then, conservatives believed in royalty.

Suddenly, leftists are rejecting democracy. Look what’s happening. Donald Trump was elected legally, in reasonably fair elections. He appointed people legally. How are leftists responding? Are they saying, “Well, we would rather have someone else, but thank God for our system. We will wait our turn and try to do better, working within the framework our philosophical ancestors created.”? No! They’re persecuting conservatives in the streets. They’re rioting. They go to conservative gatherings, where law-abiding Americans try to exercise their freedom of expression, and they start fights and do their best to keep people from speaking. They’re abusing their tech power, banning us from social media. They’re not bothering to vote. They’re trying to take power by throwing tantrums. Suddenly they’re allergic to due process.

I assume they can’t see the hypocrisy. The left’s remarkable capacity for cognitive dissonance has risen to heights no one could have foreseen fifty years ago.

It’s fascinating. If you can’t win on election day, win through violence. Win by ignoring the law. Pretend the election never happened.

Suddenly, leftists hate the Electoral College, which is something that was put in place by voting. It’s not a wacky idea Republicans came up with in a desperate bid to gain power. It was built into our laws from the very start. Its existence was a condition states insisted on before they agreed to join the union. There is nothing illegitimate about it. Everyone agreed to it.

American leftists want their way, and they no longer care how they get it. They want dominion. They want to rule the rest of us as tyrants, and they don’t seem to care who knows it.

How did we get here?

If Kennedy’s retirement, which is a normal action provided for by our laws, doesn’t lead to riots, I’ll be very surprised. If they’re not throwing bricks and bottles by this weekend, I expect them to start when the new nominee is named, or when he is confirmed, or when the court hands down the first decision that really stings.

I have no confidence in the left’s willingness to submit to fair majority rule, when their policies start taking major hits from our highest tribunal. Affirmative action could be outlawed. Abortion could be severely restricted. Bakers might not have to make cakes for homosexual weddings. The list of possible provocations is long, and as the the terrorist Bill Ayers could tell you, the left is not good at withstanding provocation.

Are things going worse for the left than they ever have? Of course not. Trump isn’t that powerful, and there is good reason to believe leftists will be on top in a few years. The left hasn’t become a powder keg because they’re enduring exceptional provocation. They’re just less mature than they used to be. They no longer have any impulse control. Trump isn’t really that provocative. He just looks that way when he’s irritating people who have lost all restraint and civility.

I’m so glad I don’t live in a city. I want to move even farther out later on. When things go completely sour in the US, living in the country won’t save me, but it will be better than living in Miami or St. Louis.

I hope our next justice turns out to be a Scalia, not a Kennedy. I’m for anyone who can slow down America’s descent into utter depravity.