Dreams Shaping Up

Interesting things have been happening lately.

For a long time, I have been frustrated by an incomprehensible problem: I am a Christian during the day, but in my dreams, that is not always the case. I do things in my dreams which I would not do during the day, without hesitation or remorse, and I don’t do things I would definitely do while awake.

How can things like this happen? You would think I would be the same person, awake or sleeping, but I recall having a dream where I did something I wouldn’t even desire to do while awake. I can’t remember what it was. Something that would hurt other people, like stealing.

Over the years, I’ve had a lot of dreams in which I was a Christian. The problem with behaving like an unbeliever in dreams seems to have been worse over the last year.

Last night, I had a dream where I was tempted by women, and I started to give in. For some reason, I stopped and used my supernatural tools. I commanded my flesh not to be interested, and I probably spoke defeat to the women and spirits that tempted me.

I don’t recall what happened after that. I think it worked. I’m just glad I made the effort instead of reacting like Larry Flynt.

I’ve been praying to God to help me to be a Christian around the clock, so I feel what happened to me was an answer to prayer.

I used to feel that all bets were off while I was asleep, and when situations I enjoyed presented themselves, I made the most of them. I conjured women for pleasure, for example; I made them appear. In retrospect, that seems a little bit like rape.

I have lucid dreams very often, and sometimes I have taken charge and forced things I wanted to materialize. I now realize iniquity is more important than sin. In other words, the inclination to do evil is worse than the sins we commit, so indulging it inwardly is not acceptable. It’s bad to fornicate while you’re awake, it’s bad to concentrate on sex while you’re awake, and it’s bad to sin sexually in your dreams.

Before Jesus, Judaism was more concerned with acts than motivation. God didn’t expect people to change their natures all that much. He only asked them to restrain themselves. Christianity requires us to change so we don’t desire to sin. You can’t do that if you sin internally all the time. It turns you into a whitewashed tomb, which is the term Jesus used for some religious Jews of his time. You will appear clean on the outside, but inside, you will be full of dead men’s bones (the spirits of demons).

I’m relieved to get this change. Spirit-led Christians aren’t like dieters who get “cheat days.” It’s not okay to sin on the weekends after being good all week. It’s not okay to sin in your dreams. You’re supposed to get free of the compulsion to sin, and you should never go back to it, because you open the door to fresh bondage.

We don’t fight demons. We pursue Christianity as though it were Judaism. We rely on effort, which doesn’t work. We think what we do matters, and we believe that what we want to do or obsess on doing means nothing to God. God gave us all sorts of power at the crucifixion, and we reject it. We want to earn his help or simply help ourselves. Ridiculous. If we could do that, why would God allow himself to be tortured to death in order to save us?

Gun people like to say a pistol is a tool you use to fight your way to a rifle. That’s because pistols are very poor weapons compared to rifles. Similarly, effort should only be a crutch you lean on until God gives you the ability to walk in his power. We hold onto effort. It makes us feel holy, like we’ve paid our debts to God. What does God say about our effort? In the Bible, he compares it to used menstrual rags. Hmm.

Imagine giving your son power tools, materials, and all sorts of instruction and then asking him to build a bird house. Then imagine he throws the tools and materials away and brings you not a birdhouse, but a pile of used menstrual rags he made with his bare hands. Will you be pleased? Probably not. But that’s SOP for Christians. It has been for centuries. We persecute anyone who teaches us to let God do things for us.

“Cheap grace!” “Word of faith heresy!” The responses are always the same.

Moses parted the Red Sea using words of faith, and God cursed him for hitting a rock with his staff instead of relying on words. As for cheap grace, what’s cheaper than the life of a cow or sheep? If I sin and I then kill a sheep, who suffers? Not me. It almost seems like the sheep should be the one who gets salvation. And killing a sheep doesn’t help the person you sinnned against.

God would rather have a birdhouse he essentially built for you than the nicest pile of used menstrual rags–created without his help–imaginable. He is not looking to outsource to incompetents. He is looking to make us extensions of himself.

Sorry for being gross, but God chooses his phrases for good reason.

If I could earn anything on my own or impress God with my works, I think I would know about it by now.

Rehab fails most of the time. Medicine fails every day. Self-help programs fail. Every February, most people who resolve to start working out quit going to the gym. We diet and get fat again. It’s very hard to change yourself, and if you change in one area, you will fail in others. Yet we still rely on our own effort.

I am glad I did the right thing in my dream.

In other news, I have been going over things God told me in years past. I have a Word document where I store such things, and I have a wrinkled printout for reference. For some reason, I left it in my laundry room for months. Yesterday I finally got up and dug it out. When I read it, I get power, peace, and revelation. I don’t know why I neglected it.

I’ve been going over it again. I’m always surprised to see the soundness of things I said about God long ago. I always expect to see terrible errors, but that’s very unusual. I’m doing much better now than I was in 2011, but the things I wrote back then still work. That proves they came from the Holy Spirit. I wasn’t relying on my imagination or listening to demons, like the authors of the Talmud, the Pope, or T.D. Jakes.

This is a big relief. One of the things God told me was, “I have built on a rotten foundation.” He was talking about my own efforts that preceded my decision to submit to him. I wasn’t supposed to be a lawyer. I probably wasn’t supposed to be a physicist or a humorist. I traveled down blind ratholes because I didn’t have God’s guidance. A lot of me has been wasted. At least I wasn’t wrong when I started writing God’s revelations down. Years later, that foundation is holding up.

The Bible uses “sand” to mean the ideas and ways of men. It uses “rock” to mean the ideas and ways of God. It uses “water,” including rain, to symbolize words and voices. The Bible says God’s voice is like many waters.

When you try to find your own way, you build on sand. Then the waters come from people and spirits, and your work washes away. When you listen to God, you build on rock, and nothing can move you.

To the extent that I have been listening to God and trying to comply, I have been building on rock. I haven’t had to go back to my list and cross things out.

Christians are generally weak. Can’t get a word from God. Can’t get a healing. Can’t get financial help. Can’t beat their enemies. Can’t cast out a demon. They play a game of rules instead of getting in touch with God and listening to him.

In the future, when harder times come, the rule-lovers will be unarmed. They will be like cities without walls. Sadly, many of them will be so in love with pride and martyrdom, they won’t have much desire to change.

It’s fine to die as a martyr when God is in favor of it. It’s a victory. Doing it because of pride is ridiculous and wasteful. It’s a defeat and a disgrace.

God wants to tell you things directly. He doesn’t want you to have to wait for a traveling preacher to arrive in order for you to be healed or to receive prophecy. You don’t have to be ordained. You don’t need a church building. You don’t need a giant hat with jewels all over it. If those things mattered, the Pope wouldn’t be a powerless socialist who spreads nonsense and fights God’s children.

God wants you, not the special people on TV. He wants billions of prophets. It doesn’t matter who you are or what you’ve done. He wants every one of us, close to him, like Jesus. He doesn’t want to have to send you messages through other people.

God’s organization isn’t a pyramid. It’s a line, with one level above it. There is God, and on the next level, there are all of us. God doesn’t need to delegate responsibility. He doesn’t need 5 or 6 generals who talk to 30 or 40 colonels who talk to 90 or 100 majors. We’re all supposed to be generals. There are no privates. The Bible says we should be like Christ, not Gomer Pyle. People on TV don’t outrank you. There are people living in trailers who have more power and authority than Joel Osteen will ever have.

If you have to go to church or pay to see a special preacher in order to hear from God, receive help, or get healed, something is very wrong. God is not a respecter of persons. He has no VIP room. We’re supposed to talk to him directly all the time. We don’t have to make appointments with Mary or the so-called “saints.” We don’t have to pay Benny Hinn to ask him for favors for us.

Satan passes power out liberally. He sends lowly, revolting spirits out with the power to make us ill, bend our thoughts, cause accidents, and so on. He gives impoverished people in ghettos and backward nations the power to cast spells and conjure spirits. Yet somehow we think God only works through celebrity preachers and religious bigwigs. Is Satan a more effective manager than God?

The big difference is that Satan’s followers don’t reject his power and persecute everyone who tries to distribute it.

People aren’t listening. Pride tastes like prime steak. Charity tastes like sawdust.

I look forward to whatever God tells me next. There is nothing like revelation that works.

Leftovers Again

I watched the latest Star Wars movie, to kill time while I had the birds out. It was worth the six bucks I paid, but then I’d pay six bucks to watch Steven Seagal beat up Ralph Macchio, so don’t read too much into it.

Macchio is back, by the way. He has a series called Cobra Kai on Youtube. I watched the first two episodes, because they were free. Here is all I’m willing to say about it: it’s nice that he’s working again.

Yes. Nice.

I forgot the name of the Star Wars movie. I think it’s The Last Jedi. Can that be right? I thought Obi Wan was the last Jedi. Then Luke was the last Jedi. Is it just me, or are most Jedis the last Jedi?

My take on the Jedis is that they’re in denial. It’s the least impressive cult in history, unless you count what happened after Kanye West decided to worship himself. Even the Mormons managed to take over one state. At their peak, the Jedis probably had 15 members. The Westboro Baptist Church has that beat. When their entire membership travels, they fill 6 or 7 SUV’s. You could put all the Jedis in one school bus, and I mean a short one (negative connotation possibly intended).

The Jedis need an intervention. They need to lose the robes, run down to their local community colleges, get associates’ degrees, and look for work. In each of their futures, there is a store in a mall somewhere, looking for a management trainee. With luck, they could use their mind tricks to get raises and extra sick days. “You didn’t see Mace Windu driving the company van for Uber.”

The rebels…same deal. They’ve been losing for 40 years. It’s over, people. It’s time to pee on the fire and call the ewok. How many times does your movement have to be obliterated before you get the message? More importantly, when will HOLLYWOOD get the message? I feel like I just ate a plate of hash that was cooked in 1977. It’s okay to let Star Wars go. You let Obi Wan and Yoda die. Now let the series die. Some day someone out there will probably have another original idea. It could happen.

In the latest film, the rebels start out with a few hundred members. Think of that. The galaxy has trillions of people, and maybe 300 aren’t down with the empire. Is that a rebellion or just Occupy Wall Street with spaceships? Crazy thought: maybe the empire is legitimate. Maybe everyone else is okay with the Sith. My suggestion: go to the Jakku DMV, get a government ID, find work, and live as well as you can, under the radar.

It worked for me when Obama was president.

The older I get, and the more I know about life, the harder it is to take movies seriously. It’s twice as hard with Star Wars movies, for obvious reasons. They take place in a galaxy that has incredibly advanced technololgy, yet where soldiers wearing thin vinyl body armor shoot glowing bullets you can easily outrun. A galaxy where the cell phone hasn’t been invented.

They also take place in a galaxy where it seems smarter to cast Carrie Fisher than Harrison Ford.

Harrison Ford looks great. He is totally believable as Han Solo. The late Carrie Fisher looked and sounded awful. She shuffled and spoke haltingly, as though she had dementia. She had a speech impediment because she had bad dentures. Who spends hundreds of millions on a movie and forgets spend 5 grand to have the star’s teeth fixed? And she was, indeed, the star. For lack of competition.

Watching Carrie Fisher was depressing. Why, then, was she in the movie? My guess, based on old age and knowing a few things: Harrison Ford cost too much. He could probably get $20 million for a Star Wars movie. Carrie Fisher had no career and no prospects. She was no longer able to act. She had to be way cheaper.

Lupita Nyongo is doing well and making money. That probably explains why her character was only on the screen for about 20 seconds.

Look at the other actors and actresses. Laura Dern? What? Who? Has she been in a movie since Jurassic Park? Adam Driver? He didn’t exist until Star Wars found him. The actors who play Poe, Finn, and Rey are in the same boat. The inexpensive boat.

Poe and Finn are played by actors who don’t have a lot of talent. The Finn character is not as good as some of the people I worked with in high school plays (and they weren’t good at all). The Poe actor comes across as whiny and not bright. He’s supposed to be the new Han Solo, obviously, but he can’t carry Harrison Ford’s blaster.

Mark Hamill is not a great actor, but he punched above his weight this time. Not sure why they decided to kill him. Worried about a bigger fee next time around?

Yes, Luke Skywalker, the previous last Jedi, is dead. He evaporated, like Obi Wan Kenobi, on purpose. Like Obi Wan’s, his suicide served no purpose whatsoever. The rebels were wiped out, Luke showed up to save a remnant, and once they got loaded up in the Millennium Falcon, he went “poof.” Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t that desertion? Nice friend.

The rebels are down to like 9 people (literally), they’re on the run in a creaky old ship piloted by a chimpanzee, their enemies are doing everything possible to kill them, and Luke is off gallivanting around the Star Wars afterlife with Count Dooku and Greedo. Is there a point to it? Of course not. Obi Wan’s death had no point, either. The Star Wars people don’t have a plan. They never had a plan. When they made the first movie, there were no plans for a sequel. They make this crap up, day by day.

Here’s the plan: “Make new movie; sell more dolls.” That’s what you’ll find buried under George Lucas’s mall-sized house, on a scroll made from bantha hide.

I guess I sound like I’m knocking the movie. I am. But I paid six bucks to see it, and that low figure has to be taken into consideration. There were a lot of explosions. There was some cool CGI. I was amused. I don’t feel ripped off.

I hope they’ll eventually quit making these things. It’s starting to be insulting.

I choose not to discuss the giant multi-nippled beast that supplied Luke Skywalker with nourishment. No; it wasn’t Chewbacca.

One Bubba’s Experience With the Marlin Model 60

This week’s big triumph: I got my Marlin Model 60 .22 rifle set up so it actually works. I installed an M*CARBO trigger kit, plus sling studs.

I needed the trigger job badly. The Model 60’s trigger is so bad people complain about it all over the Internet. To shoot, you pull it back about half an inch, and then you squeeze like crazy and hope something happens. The factory pull weight is so hard, if you shoot a Model 60 after shooting a normal gun, you may think the safety is on. That happened to me.

When a gun is hard to fire, you will tend to take longer to shoot, and the gun’s point of aim may wander while you’re focused on making it go off. It’s very annoying. I suppose you can overcome it, but who wants a lousy trigger?

There are two outfits that I know of that sell Marlin 60 triggers: M*CARBO and some guy whose Internet handle is Arrowdodger. Mr. Arrowdodger sells the KAT trigger, which is supposed to be the very best. I will never know, because he doesn’t respond to inquiries. I don’t know if he’s ill or what, but I gave up. M*CARBO sells a kit which includes a trigger, a bunch of superior springs that go in the general region of the trigger, and replacement recoil springs.

One of the irritating things about the Marlin 60 is that it is not up to the task of firing hypersonic .22 ammunition like CCI Stingers. It’s 2018, and you would think Marlin would have gotten with the times. They have not. According to M*CARBO, you can shoot Stingers and similar rounds if you use a better recoil spring.

They sell two springs with their trigger kit. One is for hypersonic rounds, and the other is for standard velocity. They claim the hypersonic version will work with standard velocity rounds, so I decided to install it, failing to see the advantage of a weaker spring that only works with one kind of ammunition.

M*CARBO (boy, is it annoying typing that) has excellent videos on its site, telling you how to install stuff. I used the video for the trigger kit, and things went well. One minor thing: you should use plastic tools to remove the E-clips on the gun’s receiver. I used a screwdriver, and now I have tiny scratches in the bluing. These scratches are not visible when the gun is assembled, but still.

I got the gun put together and took it outside. I only fired a few times. I used standard velocity ammunition to make sure the recoil spring worked with it. No problems. The trigger is wonderful. You can tell when the gun is going to go off, and you don’t have to be a bodybuilder to shoot it.

Now I can use a wider array of ammunition, and there is some hope that my game will not run off while I’m straining to shoot.

I needed a sling for the gun. It’s annoying, carrying a gun in your hand all day, and without a sling, you have nothing to wrap around your arm to give support when shooting offhand. I had some studs I bought when I got the gun. Studs are little metal things slings attach to. Many guns come with them. The Marlin only cost $170, so you don’t get a lot of frills.

When I bought the gun, I didn’t know it was hard to put a sling on it.

Ordinarily, you run a wood screw into the forward part of a rifle’s stock, or you put a nut inside the stock and use a stud that has a machine screw for a base. To do these things, you have to have some wood to work with. You need maybe half an inch of wood for a wood screw, and in order to use a machine screw and nut, you need to have at least a quarter of an inch of wood clamped between the nut and the stud base.

The Marlin has a tube magazine, like a second barrel, under the barrel of the gun. This takes up room in the stock, and it displaces the wood you need in order to attach a stud. The wood up front appears to be less than 1/2″ thick.

The classic solution to this problem is very bad. You put a normal stud on the buttstock, and you use a special front stud with a ring on it, to clamp around the tube magazine. This puts a lot of strain on the flimsy magazine. It’s a stupid idea. I wasn’t having it. I decided to use the machine screw stud and nut.

The nut on the stud was about 1/4″ tall. That’s too much. I wanted to have at least 1/4″ of wood under the nut after the installation, and I needed the nut to be sunk into the inside of the stock so it would be out of the way of the magazine. I needed a nut somewhere between 1/8″ and 3/16″ tall, and I needed a counterbored cavity inside the stock for the nut to sit in.

I took a belt grinder and thinned the nut down to a little over 1/8″ in height. I didn’t need 1/4″ of threads to make the stud work. It wasn’t going to be under that much stress. What I ended up with was more than adequate.

I used a 3/8″ Forstner bit to start a hole inside the stock. I couldn’t use a drill, because the U-shaped bottom of the inside of the stock wouldn’t permit the bit to rest flat and stay in place. I held the bit in my hand and turned it slowly until I cut away enough wood to get the bit down on the bottom of the interior. After that, I put it in a drill and made a cavity deep enough to sink the nut.

I took a very small drill bit, placed it in the center of the cavity, and drilled through the stock. I put paper towels and a block of wood under the stock to minimize tearout. This gave me a pilot hole for the machine screw hole. I used a bigger bit to enlarge the hole, and I was all set. The nut fit in the cavity, and the stud tightened up in it nicely.

I still had about 1/4″ of excess screw sticking out into the inside of the stock. I took everything to the belt grinder and slowly shortened the screw until it was below the deck. Sweet.

It looks fantastic, and it works perfectly. Much better than yanking on a magazine tube.

The buttstock stud, which should have been easy, was harder to install. The wood used in the stock is very chippy and teary. I knew that from installing the front stud. I had to drill a hole for a wood screw in the rounded bottom of the buttstock, without ripping up the wood.

The directions said I had to create a 1″-deep 5/32″ pilot hole for the screw, and that I had to open the first 1/4″ of the hole up with a 7/32″ bit. No problem, I thought. I drilled a starter hole with a very thin bit and finished with the 5/32″. Then, thinking I was clever, I used a rotary stone from my Proxxon kit (like a Dremel) to chamfer the daylights out of the hole’s opening. I thought this would make tearing impossible. I was wrong. It tore anyway. Now when you look at the stud, you can see a tiny area of torn wood.

This was exasperating. I did my best to prevent it from happening, and it happened anyway. I should have done the entire counterbore with the stone.

I can fix the tearout with filler and stain, and I guess I will. No one will ever see it unless they look at the picture I took. Lesson learned.

Now I’ll be able to carry the gun like a civilized person. I’ll be able to shoot it with a sling. I’ll have a pleasant experience when I pull the trigger.

This gun has really shaped up. It’s going to be superb. Much better than I had hoped. If you don’t mind tinkering with your firearms, you would do well to get one of these things.

In the end, with a sling and scope, it will be about a $350 .22 rifle. That’s not so bad. I felt great about paying almost that much for a .22 pistol with no additional doodads at all.

It’s going to be a real squirrel killer. It may do well on coons and other things, too.

The wood is gorgeous. It has tiger stripes and swirls all over it. It’s so nice, I am tempted to have someone refinish it to bring out the grain. I’m afraid to do it because I am not good with finishes.

I’m no gunsmith, but I had no choice here, unless I wanted to pay a real smith a fortune to fix up a lowly .22. That was not going to happen. I think I did well. A few tiny scratches no one can see, a tiny tear I can fix, and a new and superior method of attaching a sling to a Marlin 60…I’ll take it.

Now that I have a forward stud, I can use a bipod. One of these days I’ll go out back and see what she’ll do. I fully expect 1/2″ groups at 50 yards. I don’t think I can be highly consistent with 3.5-cent ammunition, but I should do well enough to make rodents tremble. That’s all I’m after.

Hope your shooting endeavors are going at least as well as mine.

Tweeting President Opens Embassy in Jerusalem

Trump continues to amaze.

God gave Israel (much bigger than the Israel we know today) to Abraham, and through Abraham and Isaac, he gave it to Jacob. Israel is Jacob’s name. He was named Jacob at birth, but God changed his name later. The Jews are his descendants. Abraham and Isaac gave rise to nations that were not Jewish. Israel did not.

Jerusalem is well within God’s original grant. It is the ancient capital of Israel. The Muslims became attached to it long after God gave it to the Jews. The Koran mentions a mosque Mohammed visited in a dream. It doesn’t name the location. Muslims decided the location was Jerusalem, and they built the Al-Aqsa mosque there, on Judaism’s holiest site.

The Muslims have a thing about taking other people’s real estate and putting mosques on it. It’s a way of marking territory.

The Bible contains a prophecy about restoring Israel in a day. Scoffers thought it was tripe, but on May 14 (today’s date) in 1948, it happened. The UN voted to give Israel to the Jews so they would have a nation and a refuge. Here is the prophecy, in Isaiah 66:8:

Who hath heard such a thing? who hath seen such things? Shall the earth be made to bring forth in one day? or shall a nation be born at once? for as soon as Zion travailed, she brought forth her children.

The nations of the world have been reluctant to acknowledge Jerusalem because they don’t want to increase the price they pay for oil, and of course, they fear Muslim terrorism. Israel has gone along with this in order to have peace. They put ambassadors and embassies in Tel Aviv, and they allow Muslims to control their holiest site. Jews are not allowed to go there and pray. I can go there and pray, and so can Muslims. Not Jews. They stand outside the Western Wall, which is part of the temple’s foundation.

The Jews have wanted Jerusalem back for a long time. The restoration of Jerusalem and the temple is a recurring theme in the Bible. It’s even in the Revelation. Israelis celebrate a holiday called Jerusalem Day, to commemorate the recovery of Jerusalem from the Muslims after the Six-Day War in 1967. It also commemorates restoration of Jewish access to the Western Wall. Jerusalem Day is marked by the Jewish calendar, so the Gregorian date varies. It starts on the night of Iyar 28. This year, it came on the days of May 12 and 13.

Past American presidents have been too timid to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, but now we have Donald Trump, the honey badger of presidents. When he was running for president, he said he would move our embassy to Jerusalem. Being Trump, he tries to keep his promises; he doesn’t know any better! He did what he said he would do.

Our embassy in Jerusalem opened today. It opened during a short period including the sabbath, Jerusalem Day, and the Gregorian anniversary of the reestablishment of Israel. Trump didn’t visit, which seems a shame, but he sent his Jewish daughter and son-in-law. Perhaps that’s appropriate. Israel belongs to Jews, not Christians.

Prophecy watchers must be scrambling to make sense of all this.

Many Christians believe Jesus will come back within 70 years of the reestablishment of Israel. On the Gregorian calendar, that would be today. On the Jewish calendar, the date (Iyar 5) has already passed.

In the book of Matthew, Jesus spoke of a fig tree, believed to represent Israel. Regarding his return and the end of the age, he said, “Verily I say unto you, This generation shall not pass, till all these things be fulfilled.” People take this to mean that the generation that saw Israel’s rebirth would not pass until Jesus returned.

Prophecy students believe that in the Bible, “generation” means 70 years. For this reason, many have concluded that Jesus has to return within 70 years of May 14, 1948. The problem with this interpretation is that he didn’t say he would come back within a generation. He said he would come back before the generation passed. A human being can live to be 120. Maybe longer, as we continue to pervert medical science. The generation that saw the rebirth of Israel should be here until at least 2068.

If he returns tomorrow, fantastic. I don’t think it will happen, though. I believe the rapture comes first, and I think I’m right about the generation math.

Trump does momentous things. He brought North Korea to the bargaining table (probably with the help of the unexpected collapse of their bomb-testing site), and now he has made the first real step toward restoring Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. Love him or hate him, he gets stuff done. Can anyone seriously say God isn’t behind him? Obama traveled the world apologizing for America, and he accomplished very little, apart from increasing the burden of American socialism. Trump advocates for America, as an American president should, and his achievements keep piling up.

One wonders what Jews are saying. American Jews hate Trump. They always vote against their friends and appease their enemies. The Jews are the most suicidal race in history. They adore Obama, and he was a huge enemy of Israel. Now Trump has done something many Israeli Jews wanted to see. Will he get credit? Will American Jews start supporting him? No. Of course not. They will look for ways to discredit him. That’s a given. If Moses came down and put his arm around Trump and endorsed him, most American Jews would curse Moses and say he was an impostor.

Trump is catching it for having an evangelical preacher speak at the embassy opening. Papers say he sent a man who says Jews go to hell. Can we be honest? All Christians believe unbelievers go to hell. Jesus said it. I believe it. Are we no longer allowed to pray for the Jews or help them?

Muslim clerics believe all non-Muslims (and many Muslims) go to hell. Hard core Catholics believe Christians who are not Catholic (me, for example) go to hell. Jews believe Christian sinners go to hell. Can we get over it, please? Religions have different beliefs. Is this news? You don’t have to hate someone in order to think they’re going to hell.

I suspect that if the Muslims gave Jerusalem back, liberal Jews would be happy to let Muslim clerics speak at related ceremonies, even though Muslim clerics think Jews are going to hell AND should be exterminated. They believe all non-Muslims should be second-class citizens living under oppressive laws and special taxes. Is it really that big a deal if a man who rejects Judaism yet supports Israel speaks at these events?

Not unless you have Trump Derangement Syndrome.

I wonder if liberal Jews excoriated Cyrus for his idolatry when he decreed that the temple would be rebuilt.

There are some good deeds you have to do with no expectation of gratitude. There are good deeds you have to do in spite of a firm expectation of persecution. That’s life. I hope the Jews get all of Israel back ASAP, regardless of what some Jews may say about Jesus. I don’t have to be angry at people who don’t like Jesus. He can take care of himself. And it’s his will that Israel be restored.

Jews in Israel don’t always agree with American Jews (thank God), and they seem to like Trump a lot better. A big Israeli soccer team just put “Trump” in its name. A liberal Jew wrote a piece for an Israeli news site, trying to turn Jews against Trump and claiming he moved the embassy to please Christians. Go look at the irate comments from Israelis. One of them calls American Jews “JINO’s,” or “Jews in Name Only.”

A December poll said 65% of Israeli Jews thought Trump’s decision was good for Israel. Another poll showed that a plurality of Israeli Jews would prefer to see Hillary in office even though those polled thought Trump was better for Israel! Liberal bias dies hard.

I don’t know what will happen. I do know that when Cyrus dispatched Nehemiah to rebuild Jerusalem, the non-Jews who lived there took up arms against the Jews. There is nothing new under the sun. Arabs are already attacking Israeli troops, and maybe a new war will start. I don’t think that will happen, because Israel’s enemies are scared of Israel. If they had the guts to start a war, they would be doing it already. They wouldn’t wait for new provocations.

Maybe we’ll see more rioting and terror inside Israel.

One day Jews will start building the temple, and the mosques that are in the way will be taken apart and dumped in the desert. That will be a great thing to watch. Sooner or later, the trampling of Israel will end. God has never forgotten Jacob’s children.

I wonder what Trump will do next. I never thought I’d live to see a president who does so much.

Tree Rat Feast

I had to fry squirrels again today. I had 5 in the fridge, and they were taking up a lot of room. I had them soaking in water mixed with salt and baking soda. The soda was there to kill any gaminess. It works.

The first time I fried squirrels, I had problems. I used shallow oil in a big pan, and it was not that easy to get the meat to brown correctly because some bits liked to stick up out of the oil. Today I did what I should always do. I used deeper oil. I put maybe 1-1/4″ of cheap olive oil in a saucepan. This allowed me to submerge the meat.

I cut the squirrels up differently. I divided them into arms, legs, and torsos. I kept the ribs on the torsos. There isn’t a lot of meat on a squirrel ribcage, but there is enough to make it worth keeping.

I didn’t soak the meat in buttermilk. I didn’t have enough. I drained the brine off with a colander, and then I tossed the meat in a small amount of buttermilk and drained it again.

I used the following seasonings: salt, pepper, paprika, chipotle powder, and garlic powder. The ratio was about a tablespoon of each per cup of flour, except for the garlic and pepper. I guess I used half a teaspoon of each per cup of flour.

I put 3 cups of biscuit flour (no leavening) in a bag with the seasonings, and I shook it like crazy to mix it all up. As I was cooking, I would throw one batch of squirrel parts in the bag, shake it to coat them, and extract them with tongs. It worked well but made a mess.

I added a tablespoon or so of bacon grease to the olive oil, and I used cheap olive oil with virtually no flavor. I would never fry anything in extra virgin oil or any oil that tasted like olives. It’s the wrong oil for high heat.

I used a thermometer and tried to keep the frying temperature around 350 degrees. This is important because if frying oil gets too cold, breading falls off.

I made buttermilk biscuits. The shortening was half butter and half bacon grease. I added a little cream to the buttermilk, and I put a teaspoon or two of sugar in the flour just for kicks.

After the last batch of squirrel came out, I used some of the oil (plus more bacon grease) to make gravy. I used the seasoned flour from the squirrels. I also added sage, more salt, and more pepper.

How did it come out? It was fantastic. The meat was cooked pretty evenly. The breading stayed on. The seasonings were right on target. The biscuits were perfect. The gravy was exceptional. I poured the gravy on the squirrel pieces as I was eating them. I had gravy all over me, but it was worth it.

The only complaint I have is that not all squirrels are tender. Some cook up like rubber bands. You can still eat them, but you have to work at it.

I can’t tell a tender squirrel from a tough one until I cook it. I don’t know what to do. My plan is to continue eating the tough ones along with the tender ones until I have a solution.

The brining is a great move. The squirrels had no gamy flavor at all. They were better than dark chicken meat. The taste is a little richer, with nutty overtones. Makes sense, considering what they eat.

The sight of squirrels doesn’t bother me the way it did between the end of the season and the day I found out I was allowed to shoot nuisance squirrels. After the season, they paraded around in front of me every time I left the house, as if they were trying to make a point. They ate my blueberries off my only producing bush. I was powerless. Then I got cleared to take them down, and that’s what I did. I took them down to Chinatown. Now I see them as opportunities for hunting practice as well as cheap meat.

I don’t think I’ll work too hard to exploit them for meat, however. They’re a pain to clean, they stink, and cooking them is a lot of work. I will try to train myself to throw their dead bodies out into the woods.

I gave Maynard and Marvin some squirrel arms. I thought they would enjoy picking the meat off the bones, and it saved me the aggravation of heating up their regular food.

The new trigger for the Marlin 60 .22 arrived. I’m going to see if I can install it now. It may turn out to be a much better gun than I had hoped.

I learned something disturbing about the Model 60. It’s hard to install a sling. The tube magazine takes up room in the stock, and that means there isn’t much wood to hold a front stud. You need to start with around 1/2″ of wood when you install a stud. I have about 3/8″. I think I solved the problem. I bought a stud with a nut about 1/4″ in height, and I ground it down to a little more than 1/8″. The screw isn’t very thick, and in order for a nut to work, its threaded height only has to equal the width of the screw that goes through it. I should be able to recess the nut into the inside of the stock and still have 1/4″ of wood below it to provide support for it.

I don’t want to ruin this stock by splitting it. The wood is beautiful for the price. Lots of figuring. Can’t figure out this wood found its way into a stock for a $170 rifle.

I need to make a hole inside the stock, wide enough and deep enough to hold the nut for the stud. The nut needs to fit tightly in it so the knurling on the outside of the nut will hold the nut still while I tighten the screw that goes through it. What I need is a counterbored hole. It has to be 1/4″ wide inside the stock, and then it has to decrease to about 0.090″ across for the screw.

I looked at various solutions for this, and I think a 1/4″ Forstner bit is the way to go. This is a wood bit that makes cylindrical holes accurately centered around a chosen point. I can drill the hole for the screw, put the point of the Forstner bit in it, and open the hole up, to a depth of around 5/32″.

They make sling studs for tube magazines. They have little rings that use the magazines for support. I don’t want that. Tube magazines are weak. They’re not made to hold slings, especially if you wrap your sling around your arm to steady your aim. I want a sling, but I’m not willing to bend the magazine in order to get it.

I’m wondering just how accurate a cheap .22 can be. I was hoping for 2 MOA, but maybe it can do better. We will see. Once the stud is installed on the stock, I’ll be able to use the gun with a bipod, and that will allow me to test its accuracy better than I can right now. It would be a hoot to have a .22 that would hunt at 100 yards.

Squirrels, pigs, and rabbits are the only animals I can hope to cook until the hunting seasons open up again. I could try armadillos, but the thought of handling and eating an animal that may be full of leprosy is not appealing. There are recipes for coyote, but I’m not Korean. I’ve read that bobcats taste surprisingly good. Could I enjoy eating a cat, even if it tasted good? It would be hard to get used to.

My grandmother ate possums. I just can’t. Maybe some day I’ll work up to it.

In the fall, deer season will start. I like venison. I’m not crazy about it, but it’s pretty good.

If I get the new .22 trigger to work, I’ll blog it. I look forward to having a trigger I can pull without wondering if I’m about to break it.

“We’re From the Government, and we Want to Help”

I don’t read the news all that much these days, so sometimes I’ll read a story that interests me, and I won’t be aware of other stories related to it. Last month, I wrote about a story that said online DNA-testing companies were supplying information to law enforcement, but I glossed over the bit about the Golden State Killer.

Who is the Golden State Killer? You probably already know, if you are doing a better job keeping up with the news than I am. He’s a serial killer, serial rapist, and career burglar. Decades ago, he terrorized California.

Here’s what happened to him, or at least to the man the cops think is him. He’s an old man now. He was in his house cooking dinner. The police came in and dragged him away. The basis for the arrest: DNA his relatives sent to testing companies appeared to be related to DNA found at one of the crime scenes.

That’s amazing. This guy didn’t have a DNA test. He minded his own business and laid low, and the cops found him anyway because people who were related to him had THEIR genetic material tested. They used a company which makes results available to the public. Can you believe anyone would go for that?

What this means is that law enforcement may have genetic information about you, even though you’re a prepper or a Jesus freak who would never send DNA to a testing service. When I say they “have” the material, I mean someone else is maintaining the records, but they roll over and hand it to the cops so easily, it’s as if the cops themselves have it.

It’s a fascinating development. Only DNA works this way. The cops can’t tell anything about your bank account by looking at your sister’s account. They can’t tell where you live by looking up your aunt’s address. It’s only in the realm of genetics that personal information about your relatives equals personal information about you. And you can’t do anything about it. You can’t resist a subpoena. You can’t block the testing, the way you can refuse to provide your own DNA. You’re stuck. Exposed. You have no recourse whatsoever.

It’s obvious that I’m not happy about it. Here’s what people will say: “You want to protect serial killers and rapists!”

There are a couple of responses to that.

Here is one response: the framers of the Constitution, our legislatures, our courts, many of our corporations, our schools, and our police protect serial killers and rapists. It’s how America was designed. The framers thought it was better to protect criminals than to subject us to things like at-will searches. Our law enforcement agencies apply the policies of the framers every day. Banks, universities, hospitals, employers, and so on refuse to hand over private information unless they have no choice. Protecting criminals isn’t a new idea I just came up with.

Here’s another response: do you really want to go through life naked, even if it means we arrest more criminals? We’re starting to resemble the Borg. One mind, no privacy, no freedom…it would appear to make the existence of the individual completely pointless, apart from his contribution to the unfeeling colonial organism known as the state.

I’ll give you what I think is the typical answer to my question: yes. Most people would be happy to give up all privacy. Most people don’t know what their rights are and don’t care. Fill their food troughs every day and give them big-screen TV’s, and they will serve you.

One of the big myths about America is that our people love liberty. If that were true, we wouldn’t support socialist politicians. We wouldn’t be so quick to demand that the government regulate our behavior. Whenever something bad happens, news reporters put microphones in the faces of ignorant people, and the ignorant people say we need new laws.

Right now, you can’t sell a hamburger in the United States without putting the calorie count on the menu. That’s because of a law Obama pushed for. Telling people how many calories they’re eating is a great idea. Fast food joints should do it in order to make customers happy. But do we really need to have Congress force them to do it? Should we be threatening people with fines and God knows what else?

Americans generally don’t ask themselves whether laws are the best way to address problems. They assume it’s true, because they don’t care about freedom.

The other day I was talking to someone about this, and I suddenly understood why it was successful men that put this country together and drafted the Constitution. They were more educated than the rest of America. They understood the importance of freedom. Because they had money, they knew how hard it was to gain wealth, and they knew what it was to have something to lose. They understood that there is no freedom without capitalism and private property.

If servants and slaves had written the Constitution, it would have looked completely different. It would have looked like the Democrat platform. “Free” money for everyone. High taxes on people who create wealth. Lots of searches and seizures to make sure the evil “haves” paid what they owed. America would never have become a powerful nation. We would have been a weak, ridiculous country like Mexico or Honduras.

We used to have mainly capitalist immigrants. Boy, has that changed. Now we have a certain number of immigrants, but mainly, we have invaders who come illegally. They show up and start looking for welfare offices. They come across the border pregnant so they can force us to pay for their deliveries and coerce us into giving citizenship to their babies. We don’t get to check their criminal backgrounds. We don’t get to ask if they have money, education, or skills. We’re importing hordes of people who want to impose socialism on us.

We are moving toward a future in which rights are not sufficiently important to us to keep our system going. Statists care about unimportant rights, like the rights to smoke weed, engage in various sexual perversions, and have “slut walks,” but the First, Second, Fourth, and Fifth Amendments mean nothing to them. America is filling up with ignorant, gullible, arrogant flakes who spend their time thinking about things like Snapchat and the Kardashians. They get their political opinions, which are nothing more than sound bites, from trashy, poorly educated entertainers. They are too stupid to protect themselves from tyranny.

Here’s what I think will happen, either not long before or soon after the rapture. We will have a big DNA database, and everyone will be in it. Social media will be compulsory. The Fourth Amendment will be repealed or whittled down to nothing by legislation and court opinions. The Second Amendment will go away. Government agents will be able to enter our homes and look at all our records at will. Almost all transportation will take place in self-driving vehicles which are tracked around the clock.

I don’t know whether we will be microchipped, but if we’re not, the government will have other ways to track us, with identification, 24 hours a day. They’re already doing it with our phones. The information is collected and stored by private companies, but Uncle Sam can get it.

The destruction of freedom will be wonderful, as far as the ignorant are concerned. Crime will barely exist. Our streets will be safe. Everyone will be vaccinated. Poverty will be greatly reduced. Traffic accidents will be rare. Things will look great on the surface, and most people will be content. This will be disastrous.

The disaster will be that human beings will think they’ve eliminated the need for God and obedience. We’ll be a big colonial organism that seems to do very well without divine help. We’ll have no dignity, but that’s okay, because human beings don’t really care about dignity as long as they get fed. Oppressive regimes aren’t always unpopular. Sometimes they have overwhelming support from the people. I believe that’s how it will be after we cut God out of the picture.

Christians and Jews will not be factors. We will be seen as infectious agents of discord. “The cause of all the world’s problems.” In the eyes of the somnolent sheep of the Beast, exterminating us will be like killing zombies who carry the plague. God will pull Christians out of the world, because leaving us here will no longer serve any purpose.

Once we’re gone, all hell will break loose, literally. Misery and pain will be everywhere, because the presence of believers is what restrains Satan and prevents God from releasing his wrath.

The Beast may be a man, but he will also be the hive-mind populace, which obeys him in a feeble parody of the body of Christ. The world will be united against God. Mankind will be like a tower of Babel built from human flesh. People themselves will fight God openly. Spirits will have convinced them they can win.

I enjoy the toys of Satan. I enjoy the information age. I like computer programs and the Internet. I like depositing checks using my cell phone, instead of driving to the bank. I’m not blind, though. We’re seeing the beginnings of a technological Goliath with 10 billion brains, held together and coordinated by the Internet.

Tech experts are very stupid. Perhaps “stupid” is the wrong word. They are not perceptive. They have very little insight. They have a very poor record of predicting how the world will react to technology.

No one understood how the Internet would change us in 1995. No one understood how smartphones would change us in 2005. Today, no one understands how total connectivity, including the Internet of Things, will change us.

We can’t resist candy and shiny things. I’m not descended from a monkey, but maybe my flesh is. Unsupervised, it thinks and acts like a monkey. I’m not my flesh, and through the Holy Spirit, God is giving me control over it. Most people are not heavily influenced by the Holy Spirit, and they don’t want to be. The monkey runs things, and spirits that hate humanity control the monkey. We grab at the pretty toys technology offers us, and we are too dumb to understand the cost.

Arthur Koestler compared the growth of the human forebrain, over centuries, to the growth of a tumor in a body. He said our mental abilities had grown, while our character had not. Basically, we have the same urges crocodiles have, controlling powerful human intelligence. He was wrong about evolution, but he was right about our problem. We are smart enough to get ourselves in trouble with technology, and we are too evil to fix the trouble.

Look at the nuclear arms race. Disarmament has never been possible, because there will always be a few countries that resist in order to gain an advantage, and they force the others to stay armed. Think of the danger we face. We can vaporize hundreds of cities, plus the ground under them, and the threat, which couldn’t be any worse, isn’t sufficient motivation for us to do the right thing.

Socialism sounds great on paper, but it doesn’t work, and the reason is human nature. People will not work hard if they’re not rewarded. Socialists are lazy, weak, and unproductive. Capitalism works because it harnesses self-interest. Capitalists work hard because they are compensated for it. Socialism would be wonderful, if we were good. We wouldn’t mind doing our best and seeing other people get the rewards. It will never happen, because we can’t change. A world of powerful technology looks great on paper, too, but it causes problems for the same reason as socialism. Our monkey nature causes us to misuse technology, and we will never stop unless we are deprived of free will.

Socialism will finally sweep the world when technology takes away our privacy, and therefore, our free will. Technology, with its constant surveillance and total control of wealth and movement, will make us slaves, and only slaves can make a socialist state work.

I doubt any of my close relatives have used DNA-testing services. They don’t seem like the kind of people who would do it. I’m not sure, though.

I have cousins who are caught up in the Mormon cult, and genealogy is one of their obsessions. Do Mormons do DNA testing? Could be. I doubt it, though, because DNA testing disproved the nutty Mormon belief that American Indians come from Israel.

I haven’t committed any crimes that involve DNA, so I’m not in danger of being hauled away at the moment. What if relatives of mine have done bad things no one knows about? My dad is 86. He has been around a long time, and he has done a lot of things. What if someone made a false police report in 1952 and didn’t name a suspect, and the cops kept evidence with DNA on it? What if he was present when someone else committed a crime, and he cut himself at the scene? What if he walked by a place where a child had been raped, blew his nose on a napkin, and threw it on the ground?

If you’re reading this blog entry, do you feel confident that no one close to you has a secret DNA could bring to light? Are you sure you won’t lose your inheritance after a midnight raid on a parent’s house? Is it possible your grown daughter might show up broke, with her kids, after the feds drop by and take your son-in-law away?

Crimes from the past are being dredged up after decades of hibernation, and the exposures won’t just harm the guilty. They’ll hit the people around them, too. Even when statutes of limitation have passed, disgrace, civil liability, and financial ruin will be on the table.

Someone in Hollywood should make a movie.

Here’s a fun question: what if you have a hereditary weakness, and it pops up on DNA tests? What if you apply for a job, and your employer’s investigators run a check with a DNA-testing company? What if you’re 60, you really need a job, and three of your grandparents died from severe heart disease in their fifties? What if one of your parents had Huntington’s Chorea?

In the past, once you got away with something without being identified, you were generally in the clear. You could repent, build a decent life, and move on. Now old misdeeds are bursting out of the grave to torment people.

Rebellion and lack of prayer create and feed disasters that grow out of our sight and then jump out and attack. It’s as though we were feeding monsters that live just below the horizon, like the monsters kids hear breathing under their beds. Repentance and prayer shrivel these things and neutralize them, and they create blessings that come to us and surprise us. There is always symmetry in the supernatural.

As our legal protection from disaster wanes, it is wise to increase our supernatural protection. Sow blessings in your future and pour Roundup on the problems you inseminated in the past. Legal protection was always an illusion, anyway. The only safety comes from God. Escape prosecution, and Satan will take it out on you some other way.

The world is getting tiny. Internet companies collect my secrets. Our neighbors watch us with drones flying over our yards. Government and private security cameras film us all day. The dragnet is closing on all of us, and many of us can’t survive the scrutiny. Sooner or later, the ubiquitous, perpetual observation will be like a thick, heavy body cast with a tiny straw through which we suck air, and the government will keep its thumb on the end of the straw, opening and closing it at will. We will try various reforms, but while they may delay the inevitable, they won’t keep it from happening.

The age of technological nudism has begun. Shade will be scarce, and there will be no sunscreen.

Experience is Not the Best Teacher

It is impossible to go hunting without learning something new. Unfortunately, sometimes the tuition comes in the form of animal suffering.

Yesterday I sat down to cull the squirrels around my house. After a while, some showed up. They were closer than usual, and I was using a rifle sighted in at 50 yards.

I have been trying to shoot squirrels in the head. The idea is to kill them humanely and to avoid ripping up the meat. I tried this on the first squirrel yesterday, and he went down, but he wasn’t dead. I figured I had the answer, because I was prepared. I had a pistol with me. I walked over to him and shot him in the head again, and he still kicked. I shot him a third time. Finally, I crushed what was left of his head with my boot.

Lesson: a squirrel’s brain is tiny, and you can shoot one in the head and not kill it. I should be shooting them in the upper body.

I don’t think most hunters care about this, because head shots are commonly used. If they are shooting squirrels in the head all the time, they’re having the same problem I had. You don’t see them on the Internet complaining about how long it takes squirrels to die, so my assumption is that they aren’t concerned about it.

A second squirrel got close to me, and I missed him. The problem was my scope. He was so close, the scope’s zero didn’t apply to him. I shot at him twice, and he ran up the tree.

Lesson: I have to get a target and shoot at various distances to find out how to adjust my point of aim when squirrels are too close.

I found blood on the tree the squirrel was standing on, so I regret not checking the rifle’s trajectory before sitting down to shoot. This is not what I set out to do.

I feel like the best thing is to go for the lungs and heart from now on, even if it ruins meat. It’s not like a fried squirrel is a treasure I can’t afford to miss out on. I can always throw them over the fence and let the crows have them.

The main goal is to thin them out around the house. Meat is just a bonus.

I don’t want to make a big deal out of how unpleasant it was to deal with these botched shots, because I’m not the one who really suffered. I’m not the victim. I caused the problem.

My experiences show how important it is to teach kids to hunt. I shot a few rabbits with my grandfather, but they died quickly, so I didn’t learn much about humane hunting. If I had had someone to show me how to do it right, I wouldn’t be learning things now in unpleasant ways.

I don’t know if he would have taught me anything, had we hunted more. Mountain people from his time were hard on animals. They saw animals as survival tools, so empathy was just an open door to feelings that made the things they had to do with animals more difficult. They kept their dogs outside in winter, and they didn’t hire veterinarians to look after livestock. My grandfather used to shoot his bird dogs in order to train them not to run after rabbits. Nonetheless, there must be a lot of dads and granddads and uncles out there who know how to hunt humanely, and kids who hunt with such people probably avoid a lot of painful mistakes.

I have some fragmenting .22 rounds on the way, and they should dispatch squirrels much more quickly. We’ll see how it goes.

We Have to Call off the Hunt! The Cocoa is Cold!

Because the state of Florida gave me the go-ahead to kill nuisance squirrels near my house (in writing!), today I went out and sat in the blind and dispensed frontier justice. I nailed three of the mangy thieves from something like 40 yards.

This is the right way to hunt! I’m 50 feet from a house with a toilet and refrigerator. I have a nice plastic Adirondack chair under me. I have a cold beverage. I’m sitting in a shady blind under shady trees. The squirrels don’t make me chase them. The present themselves for execution.

The Marlin 60 Remington sent me as a replacement for the one that shot like a musket is wonderful. It has a nicely figured stock, and it shoots great. I used a rimfire scope today, and I popped two of the squirrels in the head. The other one got it in the shoulders. My story is that he moved. You can’t prove me wrong. I killed the only witness.

The trigger is awful. I was trying to shoot today, and for a minute, I wondered if the safety was on. No, that’s just how bad the trigger is. I ordered a trigger kit from an aftermarket company. When I get it installed, this gun should be a prizewinner.

I baited the yard with Mike-Sell’s Puffcorn Delites, which are like Cheetos, only a thousand times better. The squirrels didn’t go for them. I thought it was worth a shot.

I learned something today. You can’t hunt without learning something. I learned I really need to carry my .22 pistol when I hunt.

The third squirrel I shot did not die right away. He was scampering around, so I got up to kill him at close range. When I reached him, I remembered something important: you can’t focus on a squirrel using a rimfire scope if you’re 4 feet away. This was a bad situation. I don’t want game to suffer, and I couldn’t see to shoot this squirrel. I couldn’t use the sights because the scope blocked them. I had to wait until he held still, and then I was able to hold the gun pretty close and finish him off.

I’m sorry it happened, but I don’t feel guilty, because hunting is a good thing, and I did my best. It was a noob mistake. Next time, I’ll have the pistol.

There have been a lot of shots I wouldn’t take. I want to be sure the squirrels drop and die fast. I’m not going to take unnecessary chances on wounding them. But no one is perfect.

I ordered a holster for the pistol, and it arrived this week. Looks like a quality item. I’ll wear it next time.

When you shoot a squirrel through the head, you may think you only winged him. They kick for quite a while after they die. That surprised me.

I got to use one of my hunting knives for the first time. I used my Entrek Beaver. It was not as great as I had hoped. The knife seems like a quality item, but the factory edge doesn’t seem up to the task of slitting squirrel hide. It will do it, but you have to apply pressure and go back over cuts. I will have to see what I can do about putting a better edge on it.

I improved my squirrel-skinning technique. When you have three animals to clean, you learn more than you would if you only had one. I learned the techniques I’ve seen on Youtube won’t work on the local squirrels. The skin is too tough, and it sticks to the squirrels too hard. I wonder if the squirrels north of Florida have looser skin. When you skin a Florida squirrel, you can’t just make a cut above the anus, step on the hind feet, and yank the tail. Nothing happens. You have to make cuts down the legs, shove your thumbs under the hide, and loosen it around the thighs.

Another thing: you don’t want to gut a squirrel before you clean it, unless you have to. When you gut it, poop is likely to go everywhere, and various types of goo will coat the fur and make life difficult. You skin the squirrel first, and then you cut his head off with poultry shears. You shove the shears up the servants’ entrance and cut him all the way to the neck, and then you pull the guts out and throw them as far as possible.

Shears are even better than a cleaver for cutting away all the nasty bits in the crotch.

I plan to kill the bejeezus out of these things until I quit seeing them around the house. They’re terrible. City people think they’re cute. They’re not cute when they’re eating your fruit or ripping the insulation out of your attic. It would be lots of fun to feed them and give them names and keep track of their offspring through the years. And live in a fantasy world. Unfortunately, squirrels don’t know how to behave, so it’s breading and hot grease for the lot of them.

It’s great to learn these skills. Nothing is worse than an urban pansy who can’t do anything. And it’s terrible to live in a state of delusion about wildlife. Most people in America get their knowledge of wild animals from Pixar. You come to see animals differently when you have to fight with them all the time. Life in the country will turn a vegan into a stone-cold killer. Well. A SANE vegan.

Oxymoron?

I have to kill mice. I have to kill squirrels. I have to kill coons. I have to kill coyotes. I have to kill moles. I have to kill gophers. I may have to kill crows. I may have to kill pigs. I have to kill these things just to be considered responsible and not helpless.

Butchering warm-blooded animals is disgusting. I need to get over that. Butchering fish always made me hungry. Squirrels feel sort of like puppies, and they exude a musk which makes the whole animal smell like a huge crotch. When I cut them up, part of me wonders if what I’m doing is normal behavior. It’s irrational, but it’s hard not to feel a little bit like Hannibal Lecter. It’s healthy, though. I’m more in touch with the reality of predation. This is where all meat comes from. Animals don’t unzip big pockets in their sides and hand us steaks.

It has never bothered me to cut on raw pigs or poultry, but they always arrived cold and hairless!

I used standard velocity ammo today. The nominal speed is 1070 fps, I think. Anyway, it’s subsonic, so it’s not as loud as regular .22 ammo. I thought the neighbors might like it. I ordered some ammo which is even slower: CCI Quiet segmented ammo. These are very slow, very quiet rounds that fly apart inside squirrels and kill them fast. They’re supposed to be very accurate, although the low velocity limits the range. CCI claims you can use them without hearing protection. That would be great. We’ll see how they work. They’re twice as expensive as regular ammo, but I wouldn’t expect to use a lot of them.

If the Quiet rounds work, I will have to consider selling the air rifle. I won’t need it. It’s nice to have something that shoots 3-cent ammo, however.

I used Primos shooting sticks today. These are sticks joined at one end. You cross them and put their tips on the ground, and they form a bipod. Much more stable than a monopod. They’re also very compact when you fold them up. I like it.

I will clear the yard of squirrels, or they will reproduce so fast I will have squirrel meat all the time. Either way, I will be happy.

“You Named it After WHO?!”

I just don’t know what to say about this. The mayor of Jerusalem has announced that a square near the new US embassy will be named for Donald Trump. He’s the one who caused the embassy to be built there.

Are they TRYING to make people’s heads pop?

Jews hate Donald Trump. They really hate him. Maybe one in ten voted for him. As a nation, Jews are suicidal. They believe in appeasement and retreat. “You want land? Here’s some land. Are you done killing us? How about some more land?” Trump is ruining their determined secular efforts to give away their capital. Maybe when they’ve given every other piece of land away, the survivors can huddle in the square and chant curses at Trump.

The square is kind of disappointing. It’s small. Still, for many Israelis, it will have to sting, walking by the square and seeing that sign.

I wonder how American Jews will react. I should check Twitter.

Incidentally, I just found out how informative Trump’s Twitter feed is. I should have realized this, since about half of American news stories are based on his tweets. When you read his tweets, it’s like you’re reading the news a day in advance. Because you are.

God is going to preserve Israel regardless of how hard the Jews try to give it away. Leftist Jews won’t take it very well. I think they’re better at being victims than victors. It’s what they’re used to. They’ve trained for it. I assume right-wing Jews will be considerably happier. They’re much less suicidal.

Can’t wait to see the stories about the dedication ceremony. This will be interesting.

Except for Me

An interesting thing happened last night. I wrote about demons yesterday, and I saw one in my bedroom later.

I was sleeping, and I woke up and saw a tall, skinny female figure at the foot of the bed. Its head was maybe 7 feet off the floor, so it had to be hovering. I believe it was trying to look taller and more intimidating.

It had a shag hairdo that went down past its shoulders. I could not see its face. It was black, its gown or robe was black, and the room was dark. I could see light around its hair, as if light were illuminating it from behind.

I hate having my sleep interrupted by bad dreams and creepy experiences. It’s exasperating.

I got very angry and told this thing to get out of my house, and then I went back to sleep.

It seems like we have demons who are closely associated with us, like evil reflections of the guardian angels people talk about. I think that when you cast these things out, they act like jilted ex-girlfriends who can’t handle denial. They come back, like Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction, trying to make you think you can’t get rid of them and hoping you’ll let them stay.

Demons and angels appear to have careers, just like us. They have assignments. Being cast out must be like being forced into retirement. It must be a disgrace that comes with consequences. I can’t imagine Satan being an understanding boss. He is too much of a diva. Letting him down must be like working for Diana Ross and being too slow to bring her her bottle of ionized water. It must be like standing too close to Patti Labelle’s luggage at the airport.

I think Satan is effeminate. It’s a feeling I can’t shake. He acts like a woman. Jealousy, spite, deceit, revenge, bitterness, an obsession with destroying those who reject him, combined with a sick craving to be with them…these are not masculine traits. A masculine spirit would come to you face-to-face and break your arms.

The feminine approach makes sense when your power is limited. When you don’t have brute force on your side, you have to weasel and plot. When you get more power, you can take a more direct and more masculine approach. In his book 23 Minutes in Hell, Bill Wiese said he was imprisoned with two demons who simply walked up to him, grabbed him, and tore him to pieces. Satan has more power in hell than he does here, so he doesn’t have to be coy. Up here he has a vigorous sales campaign going on, so he probably has to be careful not to queer it.

Satan attacks people when they’re asleep. Boy, is that a feminine tactic. Ask John Bobbitt and the other guys who share his fate.

I can’t swear the thing I saw was real, but I was definitely awake.

I can’t stand these things. I wish God would give me the power to twist their heads off. I wanted to get up and crush this thing’s skull. If I could, I would seek demons out and shred them alive, 24/7. Nothing is worse than a bully you can’t hurt. I truly hope they suffer when they’re cast out.

It’s interesting that the spirit and its clothing were black. Black is a very hot “color” among God’s enemies, the leftists. The townspeople in Sundance call the film industry folks who crowd the place every year “the people in black” because that’s what they wear. Black clothing symbolizes arrogance, power, and danger, and it has an anti-Christian feel to it. It seems like the more toxic and lifeless a religion is, the more likely its officials are to wear black.

Satan does a lot of work on the black side of the earth. Half of the earth is always blackened because it faces away from the sun. That’s where demonic activity is highest.

I have two relatives with serious demonic problems. Left to themselves, they close windows and keep their homes dark. They don’t clean. They make houses stink like crazy. Turn on a light, and they turn it off. Open a window, and they close it. Strange.

Christians don’t take demons seriously at all. I don’t take them as seriously as I should. I’m surrounded by these pathetic, poisonous things, like a man swimming in a tank full of sharks at night. I ought to be focusing more on fighting them and cutting off their food.

How many people do medical research every day? Millions, maybe? How different the world would be if we had that many people working to become supernatural warriors.

In related news, I’ve had a new development in my relationship with God. I seem to be able to get into his presence at will, instantly. I keep trying to remember to do it. I stay in his presence as much as I can. It’s a problem when I do it in bed, because I generally fall asleep in a few minutes. I can’t focus on God and also exert effort to stay awake.

One of the things I pray for is for God to help me and my friends stay in his presence as much as possible. I also pray for him to minimize the presence of counterproductive spirits and people in our lives. I believe he is giving me what I ask for.

I can’t say amazing things happen when I’m in his presence. I get huge waves of faith, and I feel very peaceful, but it’s not like lights shoot out of my head and dramatic background music comes on. The fillings aren’t falling out of my teeth and being replaced with enamel. I’m a real person, not an actor in a ridiculous catsuit in a Marvel Movie. Still, I want God’s presence. He makes good things happen whether I feel them or not. I’ve spent a gigantic amount of time in the presence of evil beings. I need to make a switch and stick with it.

The other day, counterproductive thoughts came to me. I heard some kind of filthy joke in my head. I shut it down instantly. I was not having it. Then I realized something: my mind is very clean now, compared to the mind I had even 5 years ago. I was amazed. I used to think trashy thoughts were just fine, and I didn’t think I had an obligation to do much about them. I didn’t think I had much control. How different things are now. We are responsible for our thoughts and feelings, and God would not hold us responsible if we didn’t have the power to change them.

Our filthiness grieves the Holy Spirit. He doesn’t want to be around dirty jokes, lustful conversation, hatred, and so on. Those things make demons comfortable. It makes sense that a person whose mind is cleaner would have more of God’s presence within him.

This new cleanliness is something I’ve been praying for. I knew I was grieving the Holy Spirit, and I wanted to stop. The Holy Spirit cures diseases. He teaches us things. He guides us to victory and success. He’s not merely an option; his presence is necessary. I wanted his help, and he only gives it on his terms. A man of God wouldn’t move into a filthy shack full of meth-addled bikers, yet we expect the Holy Spirit to move into us and share quarters with demons.

The world is nothing like the picture our corrupt, blind society paints. It is very different from our popular conceptions. The supernatural is what matters. Hard work and pride will get you nowhere. You can’t trust your heart. You don’t have what it takes to succeed. You shouldn’t follow your dreams. We don’t know how to live correctly. We are only familiar with the counterproductive crutches and Band-Aids we’ve been taught to use. Carnal tools are just crude compensation for the lack of Holy Spirit power. We don’t know how to live, because we’ve never seen anyone live the way God designed us to.

I look forward to being on the other side and seeing the truth clearly. I want to see the vile things that work against us. I want to know all about their organization. I want to talk to God face to face. I want to hear him confirm the things he has told me down here. When everything is revealed, a lot of people who ridiculed Christians are going to be put in their places. There will be a feast of crow. We’ll see people who laugh at God down here, talking very earnestly about demons and angels.

If things aren’t working out for you, you are probably using the wrong weapons and fighting the wrong enemies. Something to think about while you still have time to change.

Government Signs Off on Squirrel Blitzkrieg

I have wonderful news. A stinking squirrel cleaned the blueberries off my blueberry plant.

Why is this great news? Here’s why:

You may shoot the following species of animals on YOUR private property as long as you check with you local law enforcement agency (Sheriff’s office or Local Police Department) to make sure its lawful to discharge a weapon in the area prior to shooting. Raccoons, Armadillo, Opossums, Most snake [sic], Foxes (during daylight hours only) Wild hogs, Coyotes, Bobcats, Skunks, Beavers, Otters, Gray Squirrels.

That squirrel just signed its death warrant. In blueberry juice.

That block quote comes from a response to a question I asked the Fish and Wildlife Commission, about nuisance animals. It has the force of law. I am now licensed to kill squirrels at will, by the government of the United Nations. Like Carl Spackler.

My friend Amanda graciously brought me a medium-sized blueberry bush, complete with berries. I planted it by the pool. The berries got bigger and bigger. Then they vanished down the unworthy gullet of a predacious rodent. Was I supposed to take that lying down? Oh no, my friend. I’m going all Walken on his behind.

The key to responding to aggression is to turn it into a blessing. That stupid squirrel didn’t realize it was dealing with a lawyer who knows how to read a statute. It thought I had to wait for squirrel season, and then it was going to hide out in the woods and laugh at me. No such luck, you vile aboreal rat. Your butt is MINE now.

It’s even better than I’m making it sound. I can shoot foxes! I just have to find a way to turn them into a nuisance. Maybe I could train them to play loud music while I’m trying to sleep.

I think you pretty much have to have chickens in order to claim foxes are a problem. Would it be unethical to buy a couple of fat, slow chickens solely for the purpose of drawing a foul? It certainly sounds like it’s worth a try.

Amanda has three boys. I wonder if they would be willing to wear chicken suits and sit in the yard. After all, it’s for science.

Okay, okay. I won’t bend the law just to shoot foxes. But the squirrels near the house are in very serious trouble. Finally, the air rifle will earn its keep.

Is it weird to put a blind on your home’s front porch? I don’t care. I am not giving the vermin the fruits of my labor.

I have a few blackberry patches. Will the squirrels eat those, too? If so, I know where to put the blinds. Oh, yes. I do.

I don’t know if I’ll accomplish anything. This area is filthy with squirrels. Maybe they’ll reproduce too fast for me to kill. That’s not so bad. Worst case scenario: I get really good at killing squirrels, and I have a good supply of free meat.

It’s a great day to be alive (for me). I can’t tell you how annoying it is to see those smug squirrels mincing around the yard all day, full of food I paid for.

I will eat my blueberries one way or the other. If I can’t have them in blueberry form, I’ll take them in the form of squirrel meat.

I am Godzilla. Squirrels are Japan. Deal with it.

Supernatural Blindness is the Rule, not the Exception

One of the main symptoms of demonic control–surely the most common one–is an inability to perceive the truth.

People think they believe what logic tells them to believe. The most emotional, least logical person I know loves to say, “I am a slave to logic.” This is a person who has excelled in a profession where the use of logic is key, so you can see why it would be easy to convince him all of his thinking makes sense. People think they draw conclusions through reason, but in reality, we believe what we want to believe, and demons have a lot of power over the desires, and therefore, the beliefs, of people who are not connected with the Holy Spirit.

Some conservatives like to say liberalism is a mental illness. This is true. Leftists are able to believe all sorts of inconsistent things; it’s why the left has so much internal conflict. Leftists think they are driven by compassion and other noble motives, but of course, anyone who knows their history knows they are angry people who turn sadistic and murderous when they get enough power.

Most conservatives are sick, too, and some of us are completely off the wall. There are conservatives who conflate conservatism with what they think is righteous racism. Conservatism has nothing to do with racism, but white racists tend to be conservative, just as non-white racists tend to be fervent leftists.

There are conservatives out there who still believe the birther theory, and some go father, claiming Obama was a left-wing plant, groomed from day one to assume the presidency in spite of his Kenyan citizenship. The state of Hawaii confirmed his place of birth, his mother was a citizen, and a 1961 Hawaiian newspaper had a birth announcement in it, but facts don’t matter to people who listen to demons. They will never believe Obama is a citizen.

Why am I writing about this? Because I just saw a news story so unreasonable, it made me think about demonic deception. A journalist named Greenblatt wrote a book about tyrants, and he compares Donald Trump to Shakespeare’s Richard III.

The story of Richard III is simple. He was not in line to wear the crown, so he killed everyone who stood between him and the throne. He was a completely evil person. He had no remorse or compassion. He came across as calm. He didn’t seem like an exceptionally angry person. He just wanted the crown, so he did whatever seemed likely to put him under it. His problem, more than anger, was an absence of love.

He was a bad person, but I don’t know if I would consider him a good example of a tyrant. A tyrant isn’t just driven by a desire for power (as Richard was); he is also driven by a desire to micromanage the lives of ordinary citizens. I don’t see that in Richard. Sounds more like Stalin or Castro to me.

No person with clear vision could fail to see the perversity of comparing Trump to a tyrant. A tyrant is a person who believes in all-powerful government. Trump is weakening the government and giving power back to individuals and states. He is against tyranny, although perhaps not sufficiently so to please libertarians. It’s impossible to be in your right mind and not see this.

1. Trump lowers taxes. Tyrants are known for increasing them or, in the case of leftist tyrants, confiscating some or all of the people’s property.

2. Trump is trying to reduce the government’s infringement of our Second Amendment civil rights. Tyrants take arms away from people and curtail their rights.

3. Trump is in an open war with the deep state, an ossified, securely entrenched complex of unelected bureaucrats who have tremendous power over us, and whose interests conflict with those of the nation and the administration which is supposed to manage them. Tyrants don’t get rid of oppressive bureaucrats. They multiply them. Think of Goebbels and Beria.

4. Trump made a rule that the government can’t add new regulations without getting rid of old ones. What kind of tyrant does a thing like that? Picture the Sheriff of Nottingham pulling a move like that. It would ruin the Robin Hood myth.

People have pointed out that Robin Hood was conservative, by the way. He robbed tax collectors and gave back to the taxed.

5. Trump instructed the IRS to stop enforcing the Obamacare tax, destroying the extraordinary, tyrannical new power Obama gave that agency.

I feel like I could go on all day.

You have to wonder what acts Trump has committed that could ground a charge of tyranny. My best guess is that the simple act of taking office suffices to stir up the libel. Accepting his Constitutionally sanctioned office after a reasonably fair election, and requiring enraged leftists to accept his authority, must be tyranny.

The anti-Trump character who wrote the book says Trump’s insistence on loyalty makes him a tyrant. That’s crazy. Tyrants insist on loyalty from every citizen. Trump merely demands loyalty from his underlings. That’s just a management style. It may be an excess, and it may be caused by a character flaw, but it’s not tyranny.

Is he saying Trump, who is clearly a champion of liberty in his professional life, is a tyrant solely with regard to those close to him? That doesn’t seem to be true. He has great relationships with his kids, and they would be the first ones to turn on him if he were a tyrant in his personal life. He’s an adulterer, sure, but that’s not tyranny.

If you want to see a politician with a truly tyrannical mindset, you have to look no further than Barack Obama. He forced us to buy medical insurance. He armed the IRS. He pushed socialism, which is inherently tyrannical. He wanted to take away our civil rights in the area of gun ownership. That’s classic tyranny. He did more to gut the Fourth Amendment–an anti-tyranny law–than any president in history. He sanctioned the killing, without trial, of American citizens by our military. He tried to prosecute at least one journalist. Where are the leftist journalists his tyranny upset? A few exist, but they have been marginalized.

It’s remarkable that conservatism has become associated with fascism, which has traditionally been the hallmark of leftist regimes. Communism is fascism, and it’s a leftist system. It infected about half of the world. It still controls China, where you can’t open a church because the government has taken over the religion business.

Doesn’t anyone remember the USSR? People couldn’t travel inside the country without permission. They couldn’t leave without permission. The state murdered them and turned them into slave laborers for doing things like writing pamphlets. How about Cuba? In Cuba, you can go to jail for buying or selling a steak. Slavery is still practiced in Cuba; the state makes slaves of dissidents and forces them to do disagreeable labor. Every neighborhood has government stooges who keep an eye on everyone and turn them in when they violate Cuba’s fascist laws.

Many people think the word “fascism” only applies to right-wing regimes. That’s crazy. Look it up. It’s an extremely ill-defined word. It means “authoritarianism.” It’s not tied to any particular system.

The definition may change to favor the leftist interpretation. Dictionaries used to be useful reference tools, and that’s still true if you use dictionaries written decades ago. Lexicographers used to find out what the correct meanings of words were and record them so we wouldn’t stray. Now they look around to see what ignorant people are saying, and they change legitimate definitions to match our errors. Merriam-Webster just changed the definition of “assault rifle” to include semi-automatics. Try selling a semiauto to any military organization on earth. They’ll laugh you out of the room. They’re strictly civilian weapons, and civilian weapons are not assault rifles.

Perhaps liberal scholars who edit dictionaries are changing the definition of fascism, but in the world of 2018, what’s in the latest dictionary and what’s correct are two different things.

Trump bears little resemblance to tyrants. Obama and Hillary Clinton are much more tyrannical, and Bernie Sanders is definitely a tyrant. Yet Trump, the person who moved our embassy in Israel to the ancient capital of Jerusalem, is the one who gets compared to Adolf Hitler.

Christians have ruined the world. We had a powerful supernatural religion which connected people to God and brought them wisdom, healing, love, provision, and safety, and we exchanged it for Catholicism’s ridiculous system of life-sapping, pathological rules. We turned Christianity into a game with a scoreboard. All that mattered to us were our violations and our forgiveness. We threw away real power, and we threw away the God-given ability to perceive the truth.

If we were still pursuing the Holy Spirit and the inner transformation he brings, we would be able to see the truth, and we would be able to help others see it. You can’t see the truth without supernatural help, because the forces that prevent you from seeing it are supernatural. If people were Spirit-led, they would agree about everything. God is consistent. He tells everyone the same things.

We’re supposed to be baptized with the Holy Spirit, and that’s a baptism which doesn’t necessarily occur at salvation or during water baptism. We’re supposed to pray in tongues every day. We’re supposed to live in a state of confession and cast demons out of ourselves and each other. Every single one of us is supposed to hear from God. We’re not supposed to rely on ignorant old men in bizarre costumes, mumbling through lifeless rituals in gaudy cathedrals.

Our leaders should be setting us free, but they put additional chains on us. The Pope doesn’t know anything about God. T.D. Jakes doesn’t know anything about growing in Christ. A few lost people make their way to the top of corrupt human organizations, and suddenly we think they must know something. The high priests, who are probably in hell, taught in a big shiny temple, and the public adored them. Jesus didn’t spend much time there. He had to teach in streets and in people’s houses.

Most Christians don’t believe in demons. Most Christians who believe in demons think they’re rare, and that they only appear in crazy people. Many Christians think it’s an insult when other people suggest they have demons. We don’t admit we are controlled by demons. We think we’re too good. Because we don’t acknowledge the spirits that run us, they get a free pass to remain in us and invite friends. We develop sick lifestyles in which we share ourselves with them, like roommates sharing apartments. We get sick and die from things caused by spirits that should be cast out easily. We get worse with age instead of better.

I love it when God tells me I’m infected with a demon I didn’t know about. It’s an opportunity to be free of a problem I didnt’ recognize. I don’t find it discouraging or insulting at all. I wish he would give me a typed list of all of them, along with a list of things I need to do to get rid of them permanently. There is nothing like the feeling of relief when one of these things leaves.

Another problem: Christians think a demon only has to be cast out once. Completely wrong. They come back. The Bible calls Satan the Lord of Flies. What do flies do when you shoo them away? They leave for a while and come back. Because we don’t understand this, we get set free, and then our demons return, and we think we’re still delivered. Sometimes we have attitudes and behaviors that keep letting them back in.

Do you think the Pope is telling people about this? Of course not. He has no idea. He’s too concerned about spreading socialism and weakening our objections to poisonous habitual sins. Fighting fallen angels and demons is his job. It’s the sole reason for his office to exist. He has no clue.

Have you ever taken a problem to the government? Sometimes they help, but often they do virtually nothing, or they make things worse. Asking the government to solve a problem can be like adopting a leopard to get rid of your mice. That’s what taking your demonic issues to most preachers is like. They are useless or worse. They work for demons, themselves. How can they be expected to know how to fight their masters?

Priests will actually tell you to pray to saints, which is prayer to evil spirits who hate you. They’ll give you medals to carry. These are idols, and they are connected to demons. No wonder miracles are so rare in the older churches.

You can’t get anywhere with God if you’re relying on help from a Mary action figure on your dashboard.

Christians are obese. We are addicted. We are unable to stop sinning. We are filled with lust and hate. We are mentally ill. We are unsuccessful. We are worried. We are diseased. We are deformed. We lose battles with wicked people who don’t have God’s favor, every day. Somehow, we manage to reconcile our lifestyles of utter defeat with the victorious path the Bible describes. And we think we’re the ones who know the truth!

Prayer in tongues changes things. Like the rudder of a ship, which keeps it on course, a Holy-Spirit-guided tongue guides us out of error, ignorance, and slavery.

Most of us can’t or won’t pray in tongues. We think it’s demonic or that God decided to quit helping us 1700 years ago. Some of us think it’s optional, as if we get to decide which parts of God’s program we should accept. Some people know prayer in tongues brings us closer to God, and they reject it because they don’t want to be that close. They enjoy carnality too much, and they’re afraid God will take control away from them and change their lives in ways they won’t like.

We love struggling and suffering. We love thinking of ourself as shining martyrs whose failures are actually victories. God told me this: “We become proud through struggling in the flesh.”

When you tell God you don’t need his help, or that you don’t want his charity, you might as well be spitting on him and telling him you want Satan to win. God is a rich father, and he wants heirs who receive fortunes they did nothing to earn. No one has ever earned his help, and he is willing to give it to the lowest of the low. Pedophiles, rapists, Satanists…to God, they are not disposable trash. They are prime targets for redemption. The first person he saved was a criminal hanging on a cross.

God wants to cleanse us miraculously and to live inside us and communicate with us. He wants to heal us physically and give our minds rest and peace. We aren’t receiving these things because we rejected his system. People who accept the system have lives that are very different from those who think they have to earn everything.

The world is insane these days. People can believe anything. We fine people for refusing to say men are women. Many Americans think we shouldn’t screen people who enter the country, which is so absurd it shouldn’t even be considered debatable. We have socialist priests, in spite of socialism’s long history of hostility toward God. We have Jews who vote for liberals and rail against conservatives who are their only friends. Craziness is everywhere, and it will get worse. The only people who will have any immunity will be the Spirit-led, and everyone else will do their best to silence us and kill us (as they always have).

The Holy Spirit is the only protection we have from a complete loss of reason, and it doesn’t look like many of us are going to get to know him.

Justice League Expands Frontiers of Unintentional Comedy

Yesterday I made the grave mistake of watching the movie Justice League, featuring scantily clad female role model Gal Gadot, star of the ludicrous Weinstein-tainted abomination known as Wonder Woman. I am here to give my objective, unemotional review. I will start by posting a photo of the unintentionally hilarious DVD-box photo. I think I know what Batman is saying in this picture.

“I can’t believe I ordered the volcano shrimp.”

Look at that. The Flash looks like a transvestite on his way to a rave. Cyborg looks like someone trying to escape from a crushed Fiat in a junkyard. Aquaman resembles a homeless person getting ready to fend off imaginary snakes with a broken umbrella. Batman appears to be distracted by severe lower-GI distress. He needs to visit the Bat-room (old joke). Superman has a thousand-yard stare, as if he’s asking himself if he’ll ever be in another movie where he isn’t wearing blue rubber long johns.

Did Ben Affleck even look at this picture before he signed off? Maybe he was rude to someone in the PR department, and this is his reward. They should have done a product-placement deal with Pepto-Bismol.

If you (correctly) thought Wonder Woman was a dumpster fire on a train headed for a bombed-out bridge, you will think equally highly of Justice League. It is a bountiful smorgasbord of ineptitude and inadvertent humor (the only kind of humor in the movie). It represents the final dregs squeezed out of the dessicated sponge known as the mind of Joss Whedon.

Incidentally, is it necessary for Joss Whedon to be in charge of EVERY comic book movie? Isn’t it bad enough that he IS the Marvel Cinematic Universe? Now we’re running from him when we watch DC movies. He’s like the annoying alcoholic aunt that ruins every family gathering (“Who told Joss? Can’t you people keep your mouths shut? OH, NO! HE FOUND THE COOKING SHERRY!”).

I watch virtually no network TV, but until recently, I recorded every episode of Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., which is a Whedon operation. I had to delete it from my DVR’s series list. I couldn’t take it any more. Every week, they jumped a fresh shark.

“Hydra is gone. Hydra is back. SHIELD is shut down. Now it’s in business again. Whoops. Hydra is gone again. FOOLED YOU! IT’S BACK! Bored? We’ll cut Yo-Yo’s arms off with an electric Frisbee.” It’s like Whedon went on vacation and filled the writers’ office with confused janitors. As I’ve probably said before, I almost expected Scrappy-Doo to join the cast.

Is that reference too obscure? The Scooby-Doo show was terrible. It had one script. A mean guy has a hidden treasure, and he dresses up as a ghost to scare people away while he looks for it. Message: there are no such things as ghosts, kids! Cool kids are atheists! Now make sure you eat plenty of colorful dye and table sugar for breakfast every day.

The show was always bad, but when they really ran dry, they invented Scrappy-Doo, a grotesque Scooby Mini-Me with a tiny, stunted body and a big giant great Dane head. I would call him the Wesley Crusher or Leather Tuscadero of Scooby-Doo. Not an asset.

Whedon was also cramming the S.H.I.E.L.D. show with way too many Hispanic characters. Okay, we get it. You hate Trump. It’s very important to you that other people think you feel real bad about white privilege. But your show looks like a mariachi band. I keep expecting them to break into “La Bamba.” Can’t you find an American Indian or something? If he keeps it up, the show might as well move to Univision and use scripts written in Spanish. Then they can fight a real privileged, white, blue-eyed male villain: Jorge Ramos.

When the movie starts, Superman is dead. Maybe he looked at the script and decided to swallow kryptonite. Anyway, he’s dead, and the world is a mess, because one eccentric in a blue catsuit was solely responsible for our well-being. The whole world is moping.

In the midst of the misery, cheery optimist Batman develops a paranoid hunch. Someone out there is about to try to end the world.

YAWN. Can we have ONE movie where the world isn’t about to end? Can’t we have a movie where, say, Pennsylvania is about to end, but the rest of us expect to come out okay? I realize the stakes have to be high when you spend several hundred million dollars on a comic book movie, but audiences get tired of seeing film directors play the global apocalypse card every week.

Spider-Man movies managed to be bearable without involving the fate of the entire world. Just saying. It CAN be done. Provided you have an imagination and you occasionally think about something other than the mortgage payments on your latest villa on Lake Como.

The first evidence that Batman is right is an attack by what appears to be the Tin Woodsman’s fairy godmother. No lie. It’s one of the worst movie creatures in history. It’s a metal man with little foil wings just about big enough to get a turkey (other than this movie) off the ground. Look.

“I’m here with a quarter for the Tin Woodsman’s loose tooth.”

This is what minions do for money between Despicable Me films.

Batman rounds up Wonder Woman, the Flash, Aquaman, and a guy called “Cyborg.” Wow. Neat name. How long did it take to come up with that? He should have a sidekick: “Really Strong Guy.”

Cyborg is a man whose dad exposed his dead, mangled body to a magical cube in order to bring him back to life. The cube got rid of most of his human parts and turned him into a robot that sulks. Kind of like a titanium teenager. Only one part of his real body is left: a small amount of his head. It’s like Whedon went to the effects people who made Ultron and asked if they had any cheesy prototypes they would part with cheap.

I think I could have designed a better Cyborg myself, using Microsoft Paint. This is one of the few cases where the plastic action figure will probably look better than the actual actor.

Cyborg has no personality. If he ever had a personality, it must have been removed by the same cube that replaced everything except one side of his face. What is his remaining pound or so of meat good for, by the way? A real cyborg is a human being with mechanical parts. This guy is C-3PO plus one third of Mister Potatohead.

Like Wonder Woman, the movie features a battle in which the Amazons, the greatest female warriors in history, are crushed effortlessly, in a few minutes, by a hostile force. It’s because they happen to have a cube like the one that screwed up Cyborg. The villain, an old white guy named Steppenwolf, appears in their fortress and steals their cube. As usual, they fight in highly credible gold bikinis, proving women are powerful and capable and not just sex objects. Yeah. Most people don’t know that the SEAL team that took out Bin Laden wore gold bikinis.

Somehow men will be to blame for this. We are always to blame when women degrade themselves.

Remember; Harvey Weinstein had to sign off on everything.

Wonder Woman’s Wonder mom decides to call her for help, and as the leader of a sophisticated nation of elite forces, she uses some sort of ancient signal fire…because Amazons are too stupid to have cell phones! The Amazons aren’t very good at engineering. And it’s an island where everyone is female. Math is so hard! They need a big strong man!

In backward countries such as America and Russia, military forces use primitive inventions such as tanks, jets, and rifles. The brilliant Amazons ride around on horses, bearing advanced weapons far beyond our inferior testosterone-based technology. They fight with bows, arrows, and pointed sticks.

Who, exactly, are they supposed to fight, riding horses in circles on a tiny island no enemy can get to? Can someone explain this to me? Drop one MOAB, and you own the place. And if you don’t want to fight the Amazons, all you have to do is sail around their island.

It may sound strange for a man to say this, but I actually got tired of staring at Gal Gadot’s rear end in this movie. In one scene, her butt filled the entire screen…while she was talking to someone.

“Mr. Weinstein! Let go of the camera! The union won’t like this!”

They should have called the movie The League of Gal Gadot’s Extraordinary Behind, Thighs, and Crotch, because the camera focused on her pelvis over and over. It amazes me that filmmakers would play voyeur with a character who is supposed to inspire young girls to reach their potential. Well. No it doesn’t.

Ben Affleck looks like what he probably is: a borderline-obese old man who never works out, packed like sausage into a tight rubber suit that strategically shapes his loose meat so it moves to areas ordinarily filled by muscles. He walks like he’s wearing one of those sumo suits people put on in bars, or like a dysentery patient trying to make it to the toilet in time. In all seriousness, I don’t think he can put his arms down. He has no new toys, because DC Films only had SEVERAL YEARS to think them up. He has no superpowers. He needs to go back to the cave and think about retirement. He could get himself a nice cave in Boca Raton.

As for Aquaman, he’s a mean drunk with a bunch of trashy tattoos. He looks like the guys who spend half of their lives working on county farms and the other half on welfare. I could really see him appearing before a judge on a domestic violence beef involving his own mother. I think I saw him last year, in a crew of roofers who worked on my house. He never talks to fish once during the movie. There goes his big gimmick.

You should see the costume he fights in. I’m pretty sure it’s a bullfighting suit. Why aren’t our soldiers taking advantage of this new technology? It’s great camouflage. For battles that take place at Liberace’s house.

Lois Lane is a catastrophe. Henry Cavill is 35 and could pass for 25. He is in incredible physical condition. Amy Adams (Lois) is 43, looks older, and is quite hefty for a woman being paid millions to look good. If you gave me her salary to appear in a film, I think I could find it in my heart to lay off the Ding Dongs for a month. Why is she in this movie? The Lois Lane character shouldn’t be middle-aged or overweight.

It’s impossible to believe Henry would be attracted to her. I’m not. If she started talking to me in a supermarket checkout line, I’d begin inching toward the parking lot. I’ve actually done that.

Here’s the story that drives the movie: Batman, whose voice mysteriously changes every time he puts on his mask and eye makeup (?), assembles the team so they can battle Steppenwolf, and somehow we are supposed to be impressed, even though their best efforts bother Steppenwolf about as much as you or I would be bothered by enraged fruit flies.

SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER the only way they can beat Steppenwolf is to bring Superman back to life so he can do it for them, which explains why Henry Cavill is on the DVD box. Superman kicks the compost out of Steppenwolf with very little help from the Justice League, which makes you wonder WHY THEY ARE THERE.

Whedon’s liberal paranoia is transparent and insulting. The first major villain who appears on the screen is an old white guy with red hair, who wants to bomb civilization back to a “holy” age. Gosh, Joss, who could you have had in mind? The second big villain is the Nordic-looking Steppenwolf, who has a German name and wears Viking-like horns to drive the point home.

In an age where the only serious threats to man’s existence are Islam and North Korea, Joss Whedon is trying to save the world from white men who believe in God. This movie must have been a hit in Riyadh and Pyongyang. Wait…do they ALLOW movies in Pyongyang?

Even more disturbing…the real REAL villain of the movie is a trinity. Steppenwolf’s plan is to gather and unite three magical cubes. I’m not kidding. When they get together, they exude some kind of force that transforms the world into a place where it’s okay to admit Bruce Jenner is a man and where you can buy AR-15’s from vending machines that also sell Bibles.

When Steppenwolf assembles the cubes, he says, “Praise to the unity. The three as one.” Sound familiar at all? Praise? Hello? What kind of people use that word with regard to three powerful entities which are one? What religion could Whedon be sniping at here? So hard to guess.

Steppenwolf’s tin fairies serve him without absolute obedience. Gee. Is there a supernatural being who is surrounded by legions of servants who are commonly depicted with wings? It sounds so familiar…

Joss Whedon is not just an atheist; he’s a proselytizing atheist. He says it’s “very important” to understand that there is no God. He says that now, while he’s fairly young and expects to live a few more years. What he will say when he’s about to die may, and hopefully will be, different.

I don’t think he’ll be a factor much longer. His work is not going well. He must be having some kind of crisis. The crap dialogue in this movie is like something you would expect in fan-created Youtubes. Whedon has scraped the bottom of the creativity jelly jar once too often. There is nothing left. When the characters try to sound dramatic and inspired, they merely sound like Whedon mumbling cliches and platitudes into his mattress as he scrambles to meet a production deadline. He could be replaced easily by a Clever Comic Book Movie Dialogue Generator app. Maybe he already has one on his gluten-free iPhone.

The older I get, the sillier Hollywood seems.

John Wayne never fought a battle. William Shatner is five feet, six inches tall and has never left earth. Humphrey Bogart weighed about 120 pounds and couldn’t even beat up his wife, even when he tried. George Clooney is a college dropout, and the colleges he dropped out of are about as prestigious as barber college. Burt Reynolds is bald, and he was bald when he made his big films. Arnold Schwarzenegger is about three inches shorter than he says he is. Vin Diesel wears elevator shoes. All the action scenes we’ve seen in movies like Star Wars were actually filmed in front of big green screens in very quiet rooms, and the actors looked stupid, yammering about things that clearly were not there.

It’s all make-believe, and it’s just as silly as what kids do when they tie towels around their necks and pretend to be Superman. Batman, King Friday…what’s the difference?

I used to manage to suspend disbelief much better than I do now. These days, when I see grown people running around in superhero costumes, I feel an urge to ask them to hold out their bags so I can give them candy. Ben Affleck looks like a horse’s ass in his Batman rig. The inexplicable McGruff voice is the cherry on the sundae.

A recent news story said we have 14 more superhero movies on the way. That’s the current outlook; more could be scheduled later, depending on how desperate Hollywood gets. Critics are getting tired of them. Maybe audiences will follow. I can’t wait to see the trend end. I admit, I have enjoyed many of these films (especially the bad ones), but they’re not good for us.

I suspect Satan is behind our superhero obsession. After all, he and his friends created real superheroes. We call them demons. Loser angels with no future impregnated women, who, being women, who were probably very impressed by them. You know how women are. They always compete to land the captain of the football team, even if he’s a guy who, in four years, will be driving for Uber in his mom’s car.

Their offspring were beings with great physical stature and strength and the character of rats and hyenas. It is said that they ruled over human beings and even ate us. God killed their bodies, and now they roam the earth as doomed spirits, giving us cancer and starting fights and so on. It may be that in the future, people who are possessed and empowered by demons will appear to be real-life superheroes, and they may wear silly costumes (just like priests and cardinals) and demand worship. If they do, we will already be prepared to serve them. We already know how to make and distribute superhero merchandise.

Superheroes teach us pride. They teach us that flesh beings can be special and powerful in their own right. This is not true. All power and authority come from supernatural sources. If you want God’s power, you can’t run around in a ridiculous costume with a big “S” on it and call yourself “Superman,” which implies superiority. God fights people who have that attitude. In the eternal scheme, they are losers.

I will probably watch more superhero movies before I’m done, as long as they don’t cost me more than $5.99. It’s a guilty pleasure. It will be fun to see how many times the earth and/or the universe will be threatened with total destruction this year.

New Info on Stone Prevention

I wonder if I should have written about Trump yesterday. I don’t want to write about politics too much. I know government is a false god, and I know Satan wastes our time (our lives) by getting us to scrap in the political arena instead of focusing on prayer and repentance. Nonetheless, I also know God put Trump in office as a favor to his children, and I know the ridiculous attacks on his administration constitute a mass tantrum on the part of Satan’s offspring.

I believe Christians should support Trump and pray for the defeat of his enemies. I speak defeat to Mueller and the rest all the time, in the name of Jesus.

When I write about Trump, there is generally a supernatural angle to it. With that said, here I go, on an almost completely secular tangent.

Maybe 10 years ago, I noticed that my right side hurt. I thought it was a muscle pull. It turned out to be my gallbladder. Over the years, it has caused me some annoyance, including a few attacks I would go so far as to describe as painful. I have spent a lot of time researching gallbladder problems, trying to find out what I had done to cause my issues and what I could do to fix them.

I learned that doctors had ZERO INTEREST IN PREVENTING AND FIXING GALLBLADDER PROBLEMS. This is almost literally true. Here in America, we have a grand total of one gallbladder medicine that works. It’s made from bear bile, and it’s too expensive for people to take regularly. Doctors don’t prescribe it. Instead, they cut people’s gallbladders out, as if God made a mistake by installing them in the first place.

When a doctor removes your gallbladder, he performs a low-risk surgery which pays well for the time spent. It’s much easier than trying to fix the problem, and it’s profitable. Doctors have very little incentive to change their approach, so they don’t. They feel that surgery IS the answer.

Problem: it’s not the answer. You need your gallbladder. It aids in the digestion of food. Your body will adapt to its absence, but it’s not as good as having a functioning gallbladder. Another thing to consider: REMOVING YOUR GALLBLADDER WILL NOT NECESSARILY GET RID OF YOUR GALLSTONES OR PAIN.

How about that? You can have gallstones and pain without a gallbladder! It’s not even rare. It happens a lot. The stuff that turns into gallstones comes from the liver, not the gallbladder, which is just a receptacle. The stones can form in places other than the gallbladder.

Imagine how stupid you would feel, having your gallbladder removed and putting up with diarrhea and so on, and they having a gallstone attack.

In Europe, they use a supplement called Rowachol to get rid of gallstones. It’s basically olive oil, menthol, and some other aromatic substance. I forget. You can make your own Rowachol if you buy the ingredients. People say Rowachol works. I tried it, and it seemed to work for me.

If my understanding of the situation is correct, European doctors consider gallstones treatable, and American doctors don’t even try. Perhaps I’m wrong, but it sure looks that way.

I got the idea that my own problems might be the result of my personality problems, and that means my spiritual problems. I read that some doctors think eating when you’re angry can cause gallstones. I have had a problem with my dad provoking me over and over during meals, so I worked on that, and I asked God for help with the way I responded to provocation. I also thought Miami might be to blame, because to live in Miami is to be provoked nearly continuously. It’s that kind of place.

Here is what I think about provocation and anger. If we are indwelt and led by the Holy Spirit, we should be very hard to provoke, but it’s still a bad idea to be around irritating people and situations, and there is nothing wrong with ridding yourself of annoying people. Even Jesus avoided contact with his persecutors.

That’s my spiritual take on the matter. To get back to the physical, this week I learned something new. I can’t believe I didn’t find out earlier. I read that gallstones (and possibly cancer) may be caused by “slow intestinal transit.” In plain English, that means you’re not pooping soon enough. It means you delay your trips to the can.

Gallstones are made largely from cholesterol synthesized by the liver. When you put off a deuce mission, substances in your intestines pass through the walls and into your blood. Some researchers believe these substances stimulate your liver to make more cholesterol, so you get gallstones.

How about that?

It kind of makes sense. Doctors say many gallstone victims are fat, female, forty, and fertile. Women are more likely to have constipation issues than men. They’re embarrassed about defecation and related matters, to the point where it sometimes amounts to denial, so I suppose they are more likely to procrastinate.

I knew a woman who was unable to use the toilet if anyone except herself and her husband was in the house. Her husband and I knew, or at least assumed, that she had bowel movements like the rest of humanity, and presumably she knew this, but when I was present, everything locked up.

As for fat, well, fat people have a lot more stuff in their intestines, and they probably eat more junk that stops them up.

Forty? My guess is that it’s a factor because older people eat more and move less.

When I was a kid, I was taught that people have to control and train their bodies. You don’t go to the john when your body tells you to; you do it when it’s most convenient. You don’t leave class or whatever. You definitely don’t ask your dad to pull over when he’s determined to set a land speed record while driving you to see relatives; he will make you go in a shoebox. You grit your teeth and overcome. Apparently, that was really bad advice.

The whole topic is pretty gross, but if the researchers are right, it could save people needless pain and surgery.

Without going into specifics, I’m making an effort to change my habits. I am listening to my body. I don’t have gallbladder pain, but I can tell my digestion is not perfect. Might as well do what I can.

Maybe the researchers are wrong, but their theory sounds more plausible to me than the far-fetched explanations I have heard in the past.

Leftist Lie Machine Keeps Pumping

It’s amazing how the left has gaslighted the country. They keep telling us the overblown, continually mischaracterized collusion investigation is going to bring President Trump down. They have many of us convinced that “collusion” is a crime, and they keep telling us the charges that have been filed in the case have real relevance to collusion. None of these things are true!

The charges relate to things like lying to investigators (a crime that, by definition, can’t preexist an investigation and therefore could not have taken place during the 2016 campaign), failure to follow obscure administrative rules governing foreign agents, and purportedly unsavory financial transactions. None of those things could be considered collusion, which, again, is not a crime.

There is no crime called “collusion.” No one seems to understand that. Trump could have called Putin every day and told him to like his Tweets, and it would have been legal.

It’s legal for foreigners to try to influence our elections, as long as they don’t cross certain lines, such as contributing to campaigns (*cough cough* millions in unvetted online foreign contributions to Obama’s 2008 campaign *cough*). If you’re the leader of Russia, you can hold news conferences and beg Americans to vote for whoever you want, and Americans can appear with you and say, “Listen to Vladimir!”

If Trump wants, he can consult with Queen Elizabeth, Putin, Duterte, and the Ayatollah Khameini in 2020. He can do it on national TV. It’s not a great idea, but without more, it would be legal.

At its inception, the point of the investigation was to find out whether foreign governments exercised undue or illegal influence on the 2016 campaign, so we would be able to take measures in the future to protect the integrity (LOL) of our elective process. There were no allegations that Trump had committed crimes. None from responsible non-MSNBC employees who actually knew anything, I mean. The public doesn’t understand that. They seem to think they’re seeing a new Watergate. They seem to think Mueller believes Trump was the mastermind behind a sophisticated, broad attempt to defraud voters by illegal means, and that simply isn’t true or even close to true.

Mueller himself seems to have gone completely off the rails. In moves worthy of Brando’s Colonel Kurtz, he has used his powers to go after people for matters unrelated or only tenuously related to the proper subject of the probe. He has managed to create new criminals, by asking previously innocent people difficult, booby-trap questions and then charging them with lying under oath.

People say Mueller is looking for dirt on people with knowledge, in order to scare them into cooperating. Is that okay? Let’s think about it.

Say your son, who is in college in another state, is a drug dealer. Say Mueller is after him. Mueller calls you in for questioning, and like a good citizen, you go. He asks you a lot of hard questions, and your memory isn’t that great, but you answer “to the best of your recollection” (this is what they said to Scooter Libby, who got convicted anyway).

You make mistakes. Mueller records them.

In addition to that, let’s say Mueller somehow finds out you have a foreign-made firearm, and it has an illegal part in it, which you put in by mistake, meant to remove, and then forgot. The part is 100% identical to legal US-made parts in every way. You are now guilty of lying under oath, and you are a felon under a statute known to gun aficionados as 922(r). Then he finds out you have 20 unpaid parking tickets. Mueller charges you with everything he can, and then he says things would go better for you if you had some “helpful” evidence on your son.

Let’s say your defense costs you $750,000. Your IRA is gone. Your house has to be sold. Your daughter has to leave Harvard and go to the University of Mississippi. You have to look for a job at the age of 65.

Is that okay?

This is what’s happening to people right now.

Being charged with a crime and then being set free without prosecution is not a minor thing. People are losing their homes and fortunes. Inheritances are being transferred to the pockets of attorneys. There may actually be individuals who would be better off pleading to felonies fraudulently than defending themselves.

When the Bill of Rights was drafted, the Founding Fathers were looking to protect us from things like this. They said the government couldn’t take things without due process, for example. People like Mueller spend a lot of their time looking for ways to render the Bill of Rights ineffective. Mueller can say, “I never took anyone’s house or money without due process. I never committed extortion.” But he is twisting due process to do the same thing. Is there a meaningful difference?

Many people think Mueller already knows there is no pot of collusion at the end of the Trump rainbow, and that he is going after Trump’s associates unethically just to justify his budget and avoid damage to his own gargantuan ego. That is not unlikely. Prosecutors think about their images all the time. They reject important cases they think they stand a good chance of losing, because they worry about their statistics. It may be that Mueller thinks this way.

Another factor: Mueller is a deep-stater, and Trump has insulted him and the rest of the deep state pretty much continuously since the beginning of the 2016 campaign. A prosecutor is supposed to be impartial, but are they? Judges are supposed to be impartial, but look at the difference in the records of leftist and conservative judges. Is that really the result of unbiased reasoning? Of course not. Mueller is human, and he may well be motivated by animus toward a president who offended him on a personal level.

Most people don’t know that prosecutors are obligated to protect defendants (and witnesses). A defense attorney has virtually no obligation to help a prosecutor, but prosecutors and judges have to do their best to make sure people aren’t harassed or convicted wrongly. Do they do it? Not always, to put it nicely. Is Mueller doing it when he presses charges most prosecutors wouldn’t bother with?

The investigation is interesting, and it has gotten more interesting because a federal judge just poked a hole in Mueller’s balloon. Money quote from a UPI story, regarding the Manafort case:

“I don’t see what relationship this indictment has with anything the special counsel is authorized to investigate,” U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis in the Eastern District of Virginia said.

That’s from UPI, which is basically a leftist organization. It’s not a tweet from Ted Nugent. Isn’t the judge saying pretty much what Trump and his allies have been saying for a long time?

Here’s a quote from the story itself (not the judge, Manafort, or Manafort’s attorneys):

None of the charges relate, however, to Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign or possible collusion with Russia.

That’s not opinion. That’s a statement of fact, like, “Melania Trump wore a red dress.” You have to sit up and take notice when an MSM organization says something like that. You can’t say, “Shut up, Russian bot.”

Another interesting quotation regarding the judge:

He also asked the special counsel’s office to share privately with him a copy of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosentein’s August 2017 memo elaborating on the scope of Mueller’s Russia probe. He said the current version he has been heavily redacted.

That’s BAD for Mueller. It means he can’t go forward until he proves he has the legal right. The judge gave him the burden of proof, and he clearly did it because he thinks Mueller is going to lose. He believes a regular prosecutor should be handling the case. And why is Mueller redacting materials he gives a judge? Ordinarily, we trust judges to do the redacting! How did Mueller get the power to hide things from judges, and why would he do it? Is that acceptable?

Once a regular prosecutor takes over, what will happen? Suddenly the matter will be in the hands of a busy person who has no use for Manafort’s cooperation. The new prosecutor will not have Mueller’s unique motivation to go forward, and he will have to worry about being perceived as a partisan hack. Manafort may be turned loose or given a slap on the wrist.

Another problem for Mueller: precedent. Once a judge decides he’s abusing his power with a defendant, the lawyers for every other defendant will start writing motions. “The prosecution can’t do this or that with regard to my client because…Manafort!” The precedent may not be binding, but any judge worth his salt will give it great weight.

Judges don’t like to do their own homework (which is why post-adolescent clerks do it), and they don’t like bucking a trend. When a judge sees a heavily researched opinion slapping Mueller down, he will have a lot of motivation to follow it. That will be even more true if he’s the same judge who issued that opinion. Citing a judge’s own rulings to him is more persuasive than citing God himself. My dad taught me that. “Didn’t you say, in an earlier case…”

It has worked for me.

The salivating of left-wing pundits is very tiresome. The country needs another issue to talk about. Or maybe it doesn’t. I think Trump is getting a lot of things done simply because the press won’t shut up about collusion. They only have so much bandwidth with which to obstruct him. If they were talking more about the things he is trying to accomplish, they might have a better chance of impeding him.

Is Trump worried? I doubt it. An insider was quoted thus, with regard to Trump’s anxiety over legal problems: “He does. Not. Care.” I thought that was funny. Imagine how many times a billionaire gets sued by the age of 70. It must mean nearly nothing to him. He’s not going to be charged. He won’t be impeached. He will probably win in 2020, based on the bustling economy. If he were impeached, he would probably force the Senate to try him, and that would go nowhere. He may be eccentric, but he’s not stupid or cowardly.

Giuliani is on his team now. I thought that was great news when I heard it. Now I’m not so sure. Giuliani made some startling admissions about the porn star payoff. He says Trump repaid Michael Cohen, who paid a porn star to be quiet about Trump. Had Trump not repaid Cohen, the payment could have been cast as a violation of campaign finance law. Giuliani says the repayment clears Cohen. Now people claiming to know a few things are saying it’s still a violation.

I thought Giuliani was a very, very sharp lawyer who would find the answer behind closed doors and then make his move only after he was sure of his aim. Is that true? It sort of looks like he did a few minutes of Googling on his smartphone and then blurted out a half-baked conclusion that may hang somebody.

I hate seeing lawyers talk to the press. It’s wrong. It prejudices potential jurors. It gives opposing counsel ammunition. I believe it’s unethical, and it is definitely a bush-league tactic. Giuliani shouldn’t do it. They say he’s the guy who invented the perp walk, though, so he must feel differently.

Did the payment violate the law? I can’t judge. I don’t know the law or the facts. Not my field. Maybe Giuliani knows exactly what he’s doing. If so, we will probably see more of him. If not, he will disappear, and we will see more of that new guy Trump hired. I forget his name.

A good lawyer doesn’t shoot from the hip. I do it here, where it doesn’t matter, but if I were being paid, I would be logging a whole lot of research hours, and I would never say anything without preparation and some assurance that I was making things better, not worse.

Giuliani was a government employee, and that kind of work doesn’t draw the best people. Sometimes a bright person slips through, though. I don’t know what the truth is.

I look forward to the judge’s decision on Manafort and Mueller. It could be a beautiful thing.