The Missing 75% of Christianity

I guess I’m in a rut. I keep watching healing videos on Youtube.

Years ago, God showed me there is symmetry in the supernatural. For example, demons inhabit and even control people; the Holy Spirit inhabits people and guides them. God sent Jesus. Satan will send his own messiah, the Antichrist. God has prophets. Satan has fortune tellers and so-called psychics. Before the flood, Satan had children here who were giants in the flesh but not the spirit. God’s children are nothing special in the flesh, but we are abnormally strong in the spirit. God sends faith, and so does Satan, but we call faith in Satan “worry.”

Before I knew much of anything about God, he showed me something about evil. The worst type of evil, which is very common, is to do great harm to others in order to get a slight benefit for yourself. Consider slavery and other types of human trafficking, for example. Consider meth dealing. A meth dealer might manage to gain an income comparable to that of a Walmart manager, but to get it, he has to ruin the lives of a lot of people.

The healing videos I’ve been watching show me that the type of evil I describe above has a counterpart. Sometimes you can do another person a great deal of good with almost no sacrifice. It makes sense. God says nothing is hard for him, and we ask him for help all the time. When God helps you, he doesn’t have to empty his bank account, strain his back, miss work, or risk injury. He sits in a big, comfortable chair and gives a command. It makes sense that we should usually be able to help people without suffering much. As far as we know, Jesus only had one bad day in his life, and we have no record of Jesus working hard, getting sick, lacking anything, being defeated, or, prior to his arrest, suffering any type of injury.

God never says, “My life is so hard. I do it all for you. I live in a cardboard box and deny myself so you can have what you want.” Over and over, he says nothing is hard for him. He sacrificed his flesh, one time. And he fasted once. That’s all the suffering we know of.

I read a book by a man who said he had been given a tour of hell. He said some people were punished in ways that reflected the evil they did on earth. One man he saw was stingy on earth. In hell, he was imprisoned in a claustrophobic barrel. It was very tight, and he could never get out. He was always very close to escaping, but he couldn’t make it. The idea behind the punishment was that there had been many people he could have helped out of tight places with very little effort, but he had chosen not to.

I’ve seen people who helped others greatly without much pain at all. I know someone who got in trouble for stealing from his place of work. He pawned some things he stole, expecting to redeem them and return them later. The pawnbroker broke his word and sold these things early. Then the employer noticed the things were missing, and the thief was told he had to make it right or face prosecution. It would have been a penitentiary offense.

Someone who was financially comfortable gave the thief around $2000 to settle things. The money meant nearly nothing to the giver. It would never make any difference in his lifestyle. It made a colossal difference to the thief. He was able to stay in college, where he had a full scholarship. He avoided a felony conviction, which would have cost him the right to vote, the right to own firearms and defend his house, and any possibility of finding work that paid more than minimum wage. A felony is a very big deal.

It was a bargain. One person lost something trivial, and the other got his life back.

I think about that when I watch healings. A guy shows up in a truck and gets out, having nothing better to do. He goes up to someone who has a medical problem with makes life miserable. Maybe the problem is incurable or terminal. The healer commands the problem to go. It takes two or three minutes. The person receiving the healing is made well, and the healer drives away to get a cheeseburger. No paperwork. No bill. No debt.

That’s a remarkable thing. No money changes hands. There is no hard work involved. No one is even inconvenienced. You don’t have to pay an insurance company. You don’t have to be stripped naked in front of strangers and have devices and cameras shoved up your genitals or your rear end. You don’t vomit from chemotherapy or void your bowels on the floor because you can’t make it to the toilet. You don’t have to get a fake limb because your illness required an amputation. You’re done, just like that.

God doesn’t remove lungs. He doesn’t give people barium enemas. He doesn’t amputate cancerous lower jaws and leave people looking like frogs. He doesn’t take out prostate glands and leave men impotent and incontinent. He doesn’t do hysterectomies on women who want to have kids.

God is not a hack.

No malpractice! That’s a big blessing. Doctors do some dumb things. They leave sponges inside patients. They amputate healthy legs and leave diseased ones in place. They gave Dana Carvey a coronary bypass and fixed the wrong arteries, leaving the crud in the obstructed ones. Medical people kill patients in droves every day.

There was a news story about a man who awoke from surgery to find he had been castrated. The surgeon took everything; every trace of genitalia. It was a mistake. God doesn’t do things like that.

I rarely go to doctors, because I hate everything about the experience, but even I have had a lot of problems with them. When I was a kid, they were cruel, especially when my parents weren’t around. They’ve charged too much. They’ve charged me for expensive treatments they knew I didn’t need. They’ve treated me for things I didn’t have. In my prayers, I call them “witch doctors,” and I beg God to keep me away from them.

I don’t mean any disrespect. I’m just giving them their due. Doctors do some things very well, and they are really bad at many others. They are dangerously wrong about things. Don’t believe me? Go back and look at what doctors believed in 1980. We thought they knew everything then, and they didn’t. We had very high opinions of them in 1960, 1940, 1920…go back as far as you want. Would you want to travel back to 1920 and be treated by the best doctors in the world? The very idea is frightening. Well, that’s how a person from 2080 would feel about being treated by a 2018 doctor.

Do you know what a cancerous tumor is is? It’s really a wart, or at least something which is like a wart. It’s a wartlike growth inside your body, that grows out of control and assumes complicated shapes that are impossible to cut out. It’s like a wart that grows and spreads. Millions of people are dying every year from growths that are like giant internal warts.

When you look at cancer that way, and you think about how hard it is to cure, you realize how weak medical science is.

Doctors are limited. God finds everything easy, and he never, ever does anything wrong.

What a different world it would be if we believed in healing and received it. Instead of sitting in waiting rooms full of pain and fully justified worry, we would lay hands on each other, repent, get rid of our sicknesses, and go about our lives praising God.

I have had a lot of divine healings. There is nothing like it. I’ll have an issue, and I’ll dread going to the doctor, or I’ll dread waiting for it to heal naturally. I’ll pray and do the other things I do, and first thing you know, I’ll find that the problem is gone or going away. It would be great if I could do this for other people. What a gift that would be. We spend our lives doing things we know are stupid and pointless. We sell securities. We sell real estate. We practice law. We wait tables. It’s all vain. It’s just a way to pass time and put food on the table. Imagine knowing a few hundred people were free from cancer, without medical treatment, because of you. You wouldn’t have to wonder why you were here.

My sister had to have her gallbladder cut out when she was about 23. They almost cut her in half. The scar is enormous. They didn’t have keyhole surgery. At my last church, the pastor’s wife had her gallbladder cut out. Another friend had his cut out after that. My gallbladder acted up, and I prayed. It hasn’t been right for maybe 15 years, and I can’t say I’ve had an instant healing, but it gets better all the time, and I have never had to have surgery. I’ve never mentioned it to a doctor. I don’t have attacks.

I was having attacks a few years ago, and I felt like God told me to eat fat. I went out and ate burgers and pizza. I had milkshakes. These things are supposed to be disastrous for gallbladder patients. I ate these things in front of other people who had gallbladder problems. Some of them ended up having surgery. Here I am, still functioning.

I’ve had a bunch of burns healed over the last year. That got to be routine.

I had a little warty growth on the side of my face. I thought I would have to get it burned off. It started going away. It’s nearly gone. I’ve had others that went away. I don’t bother going to a dermatologist because the growths can’t be trusted to be there when I’m examined.

God healed my knees in church. I felt a pulsating sensation around them, like two spirit hands were massaging them. Now they’re fine.

I had pain in my right shoulder for years. This week I realized it had disappeared.

I had pain in the joints in my hands. I hated it. It made me feel like my time as a capable person was ending. This month I realized it was gone.

Some problems are stubborn, possibly because I am stubborn, but I haven’t had to go to a doctor in…I can’t remember how long. I want life to be like that for everyone.

My great grandmother was a charismatic, and she refused to go to doctors. One day when she was 85, she got in bed and told her family she was going to die. My grandfather refused to come to her bedside. He said she had indigestion. She died. That’s how I want to go. Either that or a meteor. I don’t want to die screaming with poop in my hair because tumors are in my brain. I don’t want to rot away in a nursing home, unable to recognize the people who care for me or remember whether I had breakfast.

If we were showing people God’s compassion and power through healing, surely it would be easier to convert them. If people knew we could consistently cure homosexuality, it would be impossible to find enough people to have a gay pride parade in America, and the homosexuality-driven persecution we are enduring wouldn’t exist.

Right now people just see us as useless characters who tell them to obey unpleasant rules.

The supernatural is extremely important. Without it, Christianity is dead.

I’ll leave you with a video. You’ll see Tom Fischer healing a lifelong friend. The friend says he used to roll his eyes at Tom when he talked about God. Not any more!

Maybe some day I’ll be able to do things like that.

There is no Power Without Responsibility

I’m always disturbed when one of my friends starts to be a fanboi for a successful preacher. Suddenly, instead of hearing about his or her testimony–the astounding things God has done in his or her life–I start hearing about Lonnie Ray McCracken’s latest 3-hour sermon. Instead of my friend’s testimony, which is what I want to hear, I hear Lonnie Ray’s. Which may or may not be BS.

That makes complete sense, doesn’t it? I’m getting a revelation right now. It makes sense that focusing on a teacher would stunt your testimony. When you look at a man instead of God, the man blocks whatever God is trying to send you.

This blog post is changing direction, so I will let it happen.

The New Testament says there were times when a sick person would be healed by the shadow of a Christian. Tom Fischer, the no-jet-having, non-rich street evangelist I’ve been watching, has videos where he heals people by casting his shadow on their afflicted areas.

I watched these videos and received thoughts about eclipses as he cast his shadow. It was as if Satan were a star, shining destructive radiation on people, and Tom Fischer blocked it, like a moon coming between the sun and the earth.

I have often thought that God gave us the sun to symbolize himself and the moon to symbolize Satan. Unbelievers think it’s a coincidence that the sun’s apparent diameter is the same as the moon’s. That’s quite a coincidence. It’s so improbable, it’s hard to comprehend how it could happen. I think the moon appears to be the same size as the sun because God wanted to show us how Satan, who is small and generates no power of his own, can look just as big as God, who is far greater, simply by being closer to us.

The moon and planets are dark. They shine only with the sun’s light.

I believe we have eclipses to show us how a tiny, useless being can come between God and us and make himself seem strong and God weak.

When Tom Fischer stood between the sun and sick people, to me it seemed as if he were eclipsing Satan.

I know I’m using the sun to represent Satan, and I used it to represent God a few words back, but no analogy is perfect, and besides, Satan is the god of this world, according to Jesus.

When a person gets sucked up into celebrity worship and turns a preacher into a little god, it’s as if that preacher performs an eclipse. God is behind him, telling you things and sending you help, but whatever God sends is blocked by the preacher or bent and distorted as it goes around his edges.

Why am I saying this? Because Tom Fischer isn’t my god. I’ve been writing about him a lot, but he’s not my father, and I am not going to call him “pastor” or send him money.

Well. I might send a few bucks to support his street ministry. But I’m not sure about that.

I’m writing all this because I saw a neat Tom Fischer video today, and I wanted to be able to write about it without giving people the impression that I’ve attached myself to a new false god. I still go directly to the source, every day, all day. If Tom Fischer disagrees with the source, I will discard what Tom Fischer says.

I just watched a video in which Tom discusses the difficulty of healing Christians. That’s a great topic. He says it’s actually much easier to heal total heathens than Christians. Why? Because we are more accountable!

I guess I’ll pick on my old churches–Trinity Church and New Dawn Ministries–again. Why not? Trinity is a dangerous, destructive church, and New Dawn Ministries was obliterated and utterly disgraced because of pride and dishonesty. Might as well speak the truth when it can help people. I know there are individuals from these churches who have read my blog in the past, even though they don’t talk about it. The pastors have read it. Think they had the guts to talk to me about it? Come on! Never! If you took all the bone and tissue from the spines of the folks who run Trinity Church, you couldn’t build a backbone for a mouse.

Maybe things I write will get back to them, and it will help them, or maybe things I write will help people they enslave. I don’t know if anyone from these churches still comes here.

People said I criticized Trinity in “the wrong way.” I admit, I called the bigwigs there “idiots,” and I probably should have used a different word. But other than that, I have nothing to apologize for. I was much nicer than Jesus and Moses.

When you kick a rat’s den open and let the sunshine in, the rats will squeak. That’s life.

A friend of mine told me something God told her: if God tells you to tell someone something, you’re not responsible for what they do with it. You’re just carrying a package. Put it down and go on your merry way.

The folks who thought I was too harsh were brainwashed. They had become toadies. They needed to be slapped awake. They needed to see someone contradict their corrupt, uninformed leaders and throw cold water on them. They needed to know I could do that without being struck by fire from heaven. People said, “Touch not my anointed,” but in reality, I was anointed to criticize. Someone had to do it.

New Dawn dried up and died, disproving years of rosy “prophecies,” and Trinity is a financial and spiritual mess. Meanwhile, things are going very well for me, and I am experiencing something I have dreamed of for a long time: rural life far from Miami. I almost can’t believe I’m here. When people said I was disloyal and so on, I said something like, “May God judge between us,” and he did. I am not a good person, and I don’t deserve the good things I get. I’m not saying I’m a great guy or that God rewards me for being wonderful. I’m saying I did a better job of obeying, in this particular set of controversies, and I came out better than the people who were (are) in rebellion.

If you want to know who’s anointed and who’s not, look at the long term and see who remains on his feet.

What could be worse than reviling someone who is telling you what God wants you to hear? Shooting a friend because you’re drunk is very bad, but it can’t compare to sawing a prophet in half because he relays a word from God. I’m not saying I’m a prophet, but God did tell me a few things, and I got ostracized by ignorant people for passing them on.

The things God told these people could have been so helpful it would have amazed them. They turned a blessing into a curse.

I’m going to pick on these churches in ways I didn’t foresee when I said I was going to pick on them. I thought I would criticize them for ignoring the need for repentance, but I think I will also criticize them for doing evil when they knew better. It’s sort of the same thing, really.

The leaders at these churches knew they were wrong. Rich Wilkerson, for example, knew the money-in/money-out doctrine he learned from Steve Munsey was not true, and he knew he was taking money, without God’s permission, from poor people. People like me dropped off packages of truth, and the leaders let them sit outside the doors in the rain. As a result, these churches failed. They could not get healed. Trinity is still open, but it’s hollow and powerless. It’s filthy. New Dawn is gone completely, and several lives have been shattered by systematic sexual predation.

In the video I watched today, Tom Fischer says many Christians have physical problems that are the direct result of sin of which they refuse to repent. Like the preachers at these awful churches, people know they shouldn’t continue doing wrong. They shouldn’t smoke tobacco or fornicate or use drugs or whatever. They continue, and then when a healer shows up and prays with complete faith, nothing good happens. The sin people cling to eclipses the healing power. The devil puts out a “Do not Disturb” sign, and God respects it. Satan has rights.

Smoking tobacco is a sin, by the way. Nicotine is a drug, and cigarette smokers are hard core drug addicts. Every year, tobacco gives millions of people vile diseases and causes them to die, shriveled and incapacitated, before their time, in agony. That’s not the type of outcome which is associated with something that isn’t a sin.

Smoking has had a big impact in the south. I see the results here in Ocala when I take my dad to clinics and hospitals. People with blue skin stagger in, dragging tanks behind them, with tubes in their noses. There are a lot of them. I don’t see the cancer patients. They’re wasting away, and/or screaming in pain, in privacy.

It always amazes me that people are willing to smoke cigarettes. They don’t even get you high. I understand heroin addicts. I’d love to try heroin myself, if it weren’t a sin. Opiates feel wonderful. But to let someone cut your withered lung out so you can suck on a burning weed that does almost nothing for you? That decision is incomprehensible to me.

I used to smoke an occasional cigar. That was stupid, and I regret it. It was wrong. But cigarettes? They’re on a different level. They’re addictive. They are extremely likely to give you cancer. They are guaranteed to damage your lungs badly. Why not just jump off a building?

Other people’s sins always look stupid to me. Thank goodness I’m perfect.

At New Dawn Ministries, we had a head deacon named Ozzie. He had breast cancer. I knew him for a couple of years. During that time, he slowly shrank until he was a stick of a man. He was the former brother in law of the pastor’s wife, if memory serves. He was very close to the pastors. They used to put him in front of the church and call him “Ozzie healed of the Lord.” They tried to cast devils out of him. People fasted for him.

I prayed for him. I had tremendous faith that he would be healed. I felt supernatural faith, telling me it was a done deal. Ozzie was one of my projects.

During this time, God was teaching me about pride. I knew I had to get rid of my inquities, and pride was one of them. I saw that people at the church were very proud.

The pastor’s son, a drug enthusiast and possible dealer with a terrible attitude toward adults, was probably the proudest person there, even though he had much more to be ashamed of than a lot of people. He had absolutely nothing to be proud of. He couldn’t hold a fast food job. He had no money. He had no education. He had no discernible talents. His personality was off-putting. But he glowed with pride. He thought he was a genius. I think he smirked even in his sleep.

The pastors were proud. You could not tell them one single thing. If they had been on fire, and you had told them you needed to throw water on them, they would have burned to death while telling you they didn’t need your help.

These were not impressive people. They were uneducated. They were not particularly attractive or gifted. They hadn’t accomplished much in life. Their church was failing. It had gone from filling an entire building to occupying a tiny rented room in that same building. But they behaved like royalty.

Their “house prophet,” a guy named George, used to stand up and yell for long periods, telling everyone how thrilled God was with New Dawn. We were doing everything right. God was going to give us a big building and this and that. He told a lady I know she was going to have twins. He told me God was about to bring me a wonderful wife. He was always wrong. I came to understand that it was dangerous to let George prophesy over you, because it gave God incentive to prove him wrong.

George never said anything negative, and the pastors maintained that prophets were only supposed to say positive things.

They didn’t mind saying negative things about people, so you have to marvel at the cognitive dissonance.

Interesting story about George: he went to Africa with an older minister. They ministered to people they met. One man was very happy to hear about Jesus. He had lunch with George and the other man. To show George his love, he insisted on feeding him from his own hand. It was some kind of gross African custom.

George, like me, was a germophobe. He didn’t want anything dirty near him. He had to let a man put his nasty hand in food and shove it in his mouth. To me, that meant something. George had used his mouth to do a lot of damage, and God used his mouth to chastise him. Unclean things went out, so unclean things went in. Anyhow, I took it that way.

I told people what God had been telling me about pride and iniquity. He had been showing me I needed to deal with these things in myself, and I wanted other people to know, so they could share the benefit. I told them they needed to repent if they wanted their problems solved. I made them angry. No one listened. Especially Ozzie. “Everything is covered by the blood.” “Faith is all that matters.”

Ozzie dropped dead.

The tumors went to his brain, he went to a hospice, he started raving, and then he was gone.

Ozzie was just as proud as the pastors. This is odd, because he didn’t get excited about God until he was diagnosed. I can understand how a lifelong Christian with great knowledge and a good testimony could be proud, but that wasn’t Ozzie. Like me, he ran to God after a long time in rebellion, because things weren’t working out. He hadn’t led a good life. Adultery had been a major problem.

It was hard to talk laterally to Ozzie. You had to talk up, as though you were talking to someone on a throne. I say this as an older man he should have spoken to with a little honor. He treated me like a child. He was a nice guy, but he knew all the answers.

Ozzie’s death shook the church, and it shook me. I was not used to having great faith and seeing no results. It made me wonder what I could trust. It was like the earth started to crack under me.

Eventually, God told me this: the church had let Ozzie down by not helping him repent. People there got furious when repentance and humility were discussed. They said I was blaming people for their diseases, which is…TRUE. Jesus sometimes blamed people for their diseases, so I should, too.

We had prayed for Ozzie, and God had sent faith, but we had never warned Ozzie about his pride and denial. Actually, I made an effort, but it never caught on or went anywhere. In the end, pride and denial eclipsed God. They were in the way.

Hosea said people were destroyed for lack of knowledge, and it’s still true. And when God sends knowledge, people spit it back up.

To get back to the video I watched today, Ozzie was a classic case of a Christian who could not be healed because he was in rebellion.

In a way, he was destroyed for lack of knowledge. He had the knowledge that he needed to repent and work on pride, because he had heard it from me and maybe from others. He certainly should have seen it in the Bible. He rejected that knowledge, so it was as though he didn’t have it. It did him no good. In another way, he was destroyed because he had knowledge. He knew he was proud. He knew he needed to repent. He was held accountable for that knowledge. Because he knew and did nothing, he could not get healed.

The package was delivered, but Ozzie didn’t sign for it.

Christians are held to a higher standard than other people. If you know God at all, you have to snap out of your complacency and realize the consequences of your deliberate sins will be much worse than the consequences ignorant people face.

Here is why some of the Pharisees Jesus dealt with are burning in hell right now and will remain there forever:

Jesus said unto them, If ye were blind, ye should have no sin: but now ye say, We see; therefore your sin remaineth.

In at least one case, Jesus equated healing with forgiveness. How can you forgive someone who is, at that moment, sinning with no plans to stop? What’s the point? It’s like trying to wash a car while you drive it through the mud.

He also said this:

And that servant, which knew his lord’s will, and prepared not himself, neither did according to his will, shall be beaten with many stripes.

But he that knew not, and did commit things worthy of stripes, shall be beaten with few stripes. For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required: and to whom men have committed much, of him they will ask the more.

A lot of my problems can be traced to this principle. God visited me personally in 1986 and told me what I needed to do, and I wandered off eventually and did whatever I wanted. I did not take him seriously.

Actually, all of my problems can be traced to this. When I got away from God, I stopped praying. God has since told me, “All of your problems are caused by lack of prayer.”

“All.”

I cause my own problems. Maybe you don’t, because you’re a victim and you’re incredibly holy. My hat is off to you. I don’t buy it, but anyway, hooray for you.

Here is the video I watched. I couldn’t find anything wrong with what he said, and I think it will benefit you.

To go off on a tangent, I had an extraordinary experience last night. It’s something I’ve been praying for. I really need this kind of thing.

I was tempted, and I started to fall into a sinful activity. I really did not want to do it. I am sick of sin.

I got close to sinning, but I didn’t feel sufficiently compelled to close the deal. In this life, I feel urges to do evil, and I feel countering urges to do good, and many, many times, the evil urges have been too strong to fight. Last night, I suddenly felt like the vote was 70/30 against sin, and that was plenty. Suddenly I just wasn’t up for sin. I thought of it the way I would ordinarily think of working on my taxes or cleaning the kitchen. I wanted to put it off and not think about it. I was very relieved.

I often see sin and righteousness the way I see the flow of money in a casino. To make money running a casino–to ruin people’s lives and destroy children’s inheritances–you don’t have to rig the games so people lose all the time. In fact, that will assure you of going out of business. No one will show up to play. What you do is rig the games so you have a very small edge. I don’t know what that edge is in any particular game, but my understanding is that the house’s advantage is generally under 10%.

A person can go into a casino and gamble for a very long time before losing all the money he brings with him. In the end, the result is the same as if he had blown everything on one hand of cards, but the loss can be very gradual.

When it comes to sin, I find that my heart and mind are divided. I want to do the right thing, but when it comes to sins I can’t get past, the urge to do the wrong thing has a small edge. If 55% of me wants to sin, and 45% wants me to do right, I will eventually break down and sin. It’s like I’m arm-wrestling someone stronger than me. I can resist for a while, but my arm will eventually go down. I can’t carry the load indefinitely by myself.

In order to be able to refrain from sinning, all I need is a tiny edge. That’s what I felt last night. It’s enough.

Wanting to sin isn’t sin. Being tempted isn’t sin. It’s normal to want money, things, sex, and so on. If you resist successfully, you’re blameless, even if you wanted to sin very badly. You may have an iniquity–an unnecessary and unhealthy urge–you need to get rid of. You may have demons that need to be cast out. But you haven’t committed a violation. A violation is worse than an urge, because it opens the door and gives the enemy more power over you.

God can put his righteousness in you. We don’t have to avoid sin purely through our own willpower. I know this because God has changed my desires before. It’s something to strive to get. I am really hoping to get more of this.

I don’t care at all about the credit. I am past that. I would be completely happy to have God send an angel to slap my face when I want to sin. I don’t care. I don’t care. I’ll be happy to go on national TV and tell the world I can’t stop sinning without supernatural intervention. I just want a clean life.

It’s better to avoid unnecessary sin in the first place than to indulge in sin and develop compelling habits–iniquities–and have to get God to remove them. Unfortunately, I’ve done what I’ve done, so I have things to deal with. If there’s any sin you haven’t tried yet, and you’re thinking of giving it a shot, take my advice and forget about it. You may feel like you’re picking up something very light right now, but eventually it will be very heavy, and you won’t be allowed to put it down.

Gucci Gun Rests Confuse Me

I want to be comfortable when I shoot from a table in order to zero a scope. That means every gun has to have a bipod or a rest. Rests have the obvious advantage that they work with guns that don’t have bipods installed, so I would like to have a nice rest.

Years ago, I got a Caldwell rest. It’s a three-legged thing with a thick screw that supports a tiny beanbag that supports the front end of a gun. I thought it would solve my problems, but I got it to the range, and I found it was so short, I had to mash my face down against the bench to see through my scopes.

I have no idea why rests are so short. My assumption is that manufacturers expect you to use them when shooting prone.

That rest was the reason I started buying bipods. It was useless.

The other day I went to a gun forum and asked if anyone knew of a good cheap rest that was tall enough to use from a table. People meant well, but they gave me suggestions that pretty much started at $140. They recommended a thing called a Bald Eagle. You should see it. It’s full of machined parts. You can move your gun up and down with micrometer-like screws. What on earth?

They’re telling me I will shoot more accurately. Of course, accuracy is not what I’m after. I want to be able to zero guns in at realistic hunting distances. I don’t need 0.0001 MOA. If I can get a gun to shoot close to 1 MOA while zeroing it with a rest, I’ll be ecstatic. In reality, I should be happy with worse accuracy than that.

Here’s my assumption. I know I can shoot 1 MOA at 100 yards, if the gun, ammunition, and weather do their part. I can do that with a bipod, which probably costs $30. That tells me I should be able to get some kind of cheap device, like a big sandbag, that will do what I want. As long as it’s tall enough and steady enough, I can shoot more than well enough to do what I need to do.

Wrong? I don’t think so.

I thought someone would recommend a giant beanbag. That would have been great.

Now I’m trying to figure out what’s going on. I’m asking questions on a gun forum, presumably from people who know a lot more than I do, but I can’t make myself believe I need a ridiculous Buck Rogers gun rest in order to get ready to shoot a damn coon.

Yesterday I sighted my .22 in at “coon distance,” which is an unmeasured distance that looks to me to be about as far as I would be from a coon if I were hunting. My rest was very high tech. It was my left knee. Coupled with a $17 plastic Adirondack chair from Home Depot, it made for a very adequate zeroing support system. I’m probably accurate to within a 1″ circle, and that will kill a coon as dead as Hillary Clinton’s 2020 campaign.

I’m thinking I should make a rest from scrap wood. Plywood base. Flat piece of plywood perpendicular to axis of fire. Another flat piece of wood against it, with a padded notch at the top for a gun. One piece of wood has a slot in it. The other has a thumbscrew in it. You slide the notched piece of wood up or down to get the height you want, you tighten the screw, and you’re all set.

What’s wrong with this plan?

I could also weld a gun rest together. I could have one piece of tubular steel inside another, with a screw going from the outer tube up against the inner tube. Use the screw to set the height of the inner tube, which would have a notch thing at the top.

I can’t help wondering if the guys with the sleds and vises and clamps are nuts. How can you call yourself a marksman if you have a machine doing all the work? Why not build an Arduino trigger-pulling machine and fire the rifle from your phone? You could sit in the house and shoot targets from a rifle set up half a mile away. You could program it to shoot while you’re in the Bahamas on vacation.

Some of these guys made gun rests from car jacks. You know the little scissor jacks people hate? They put beanbags on them. What???

If you’re going to do that, why not use a jackstand from Harbor Freight?

Hmm…I have jackstands. With urethane pads on top.

The things these guys do look so stupid, there must be an explanation I don’t understand.

I’m pretty sure I can shoot 0.75 MOA with my .17 HMR, with just a bipod. If I try, on a calm day. If a green amateur like me can do that without a crazy mechanical helper, then surely a serious gun nut can do it. If that’s true, what good do their wacky toys do them?

What if it turns out my perception is correct, and all these people are wasting their money and compensating for a basic failure to learn how to shoot? Is that even conceivable?

I don’t know the answer, but I am 100% positive I can learn to shoot very, very well without all that crap, and I don’t see why I should buy any of it.

I’m not against spending money when it’s necessary. If I want to shoot well, I can’t get around the need for good ammunition. I can’t get around the need for good stocks that are bedded correctly. There are some things you have to have in order to be accurate. I wouldn’t mind getting dies and whatever to make my own rifle ammunition, because that appears to be completely justified. But before I’ll spend $140 on a gun rest, I’m going to have to see proof that I need it.

Here’s something you wouldn’t expect to make a difference: shoes. A few years ago I realized the tennis shoes I was wearing were hurting my pistol accuracy. Some shoes aren’t stable, so you wobble around a little while you correct your balance. I wouldn’t scoff if someone told me he had special shooting shoes.

I don’t know the answer. I got a monopod yesterday, and I’m going to go try it. I bought a spinning rimfire target so I can shoot over and over without changing paper. I’m going to go sit in my blind, assuming a bear hasn’t filled it with turds, and see what I can do.

Internet sources say Chris Kyle shot from a bipod. He shot people a mile away. Why didn’t he have a sled? What am I missing here?

If anyone out there can help me understand why I need a precision X-Y slide table with a vise in order to shoot a .22, please inform me.

2300 Words to Help You Pass the Time

I got up late today. A couple of months back, I fired my alarm clock. I hate alarm clocks. It doesn’t matter how nice the wake-up sound is. After a week, it will feel like someone shoving hot needles into your ear. I quit using the alarm, so sometimes I get up later than I want to. Daylight Saving Time just started (or ended; I never can remember how it works), so I suppose that makes my body think it’s early.

I’m a morning person now, which is all the miracle anyone needs in order to believe in God. I used to loathe mornings. My natural tendency was to wake up at noon, and when my clock went off at seven or whatever, I always felt like the world had ended. I couldn’t move. I felt like a magnet was sucking me down into the mattress. I just wanted to go back to sleep. I haven’t had that feeling in years. Mornings are just like any other time of day now. But the alarm sound…that, I still hate.

Today I woke up not long after eight, which is acceptable given my current lifestyle, but when I started to pray and get the day going, I conked out without realizing it, and I woke up at 9:45. Big disruption to my prayer life. I have to sit and pray now instead of doing other things.

When I fell asleep, I dreamed I had overslept. I thought I was in my favorite bedroom at my grandfather’s house, and I was trying to see what time it was. I was trying to read the alarm clock, but I couldn’t see clearly. For some reason, I was looking into it from the back. I could see the back of the display, but I couldn’t read anything.

Imagine dreaming you overslept, while you’re oversleeping. But it could be worse. The dream I really hate is the one where I dream I can’t sleep.

My dreams are so realistic, when I look back on them, I have a hard time distinguishing them from reality. Sometimes I think about a place I’ve been, and then I realize that place doesn’t exist. I dreamed I was there, and then the dream was stored in my memory. Sometimes I have to think for a while to determine conclusively whether a place in my memory is real or imaginary.

I have another weird thing that happens when I’m in bed. It generally happens during prayer, because if I’m lying in bed, I’m either praying or sleeping. I’ll fall asleep for an instant, and then I’ll wake up. During that instant, I’ll think about a person I just imagined. I’ll think that nonexistent person is real. That’s not the weird part. The weird part is that in the blink of an eye, I’ll create a complete history of that person. I may think of him or her as having a career and relatives and so on, and it will all seem real. When I wake up, I realize it’s imaginary, but I can’t understand how my mind can come up with all that background in a second or less.

Thank God I forget it. I would hate to have a head full of imaginary buddies, like fake names in Google Contacts.

I guess for a brief instant, my mind turns into Twitter. That’s a place inhabited by imaginary individuals. “Right on, Chrissy Teigen. Women should breastfeed EVERYWHERE, stark naked! And I’m not just saying that because your publicist pays me.”

I have issues with my imaginary people. I don’t just create them with no context. Maybe the person will owe me money, and I’m trying to get it back. Maybe I’m supposed to help the person paint his house. There will always be some kind of story that evaporates along with the character.

I wonder if the oversleeping dream came from God. Maybe looking into a clock from the back means I’m wasting time, trying to get too much detail from God about the supernatural and the way the world works. I’m not supposed to know everything. I can’t carry that.

Or maybe it’s just a stupid dream.

Now that I think about it, I believe the dream is about the natural world. I think I focus way too much on understanding and responding to events with my unaided mind. That makes a lot more sense. God would never tell us to stop trying to learn about him.

We can never understand all that much about what happens around us. We have the illusion that we know a lot and see a lot, but each one of us sees the world through a tiny pinhole. Anyone who tells you different is on a pathetic ego trip and will eventually be humbled pretty badly. People like that are destined to have Zaphod Beeblebrox Total Perspective Vortex moments, only without the hack that saved Zaphod.

Douglas Adams died an atheist, and he was younger than I am now. Terrible to think about. At this moment, he is having a Total Perspective Vortex experience that will never end.

It’s sad to see people you can relate to deny God. The director Joss Whedon is another one. I’ve enjoyed a lot of his work, but he uses the borrowed term “Sky Bully” to describe God. Not only does he reject God; he thinks doing so is a crucial part of maturation. Of the nonexistence of God, he said, “That’s a very important and necessary thing to learn.”

It’s hard to imagine how anything can be important or necessary in a universe where people simply go out, like the glow from a firefly’s tail (or the run of a canceled TV series). If nothing lasts, nothing has any importance. The greatest evil you can do won’t affect anyone for more than 120 or so years. That’s the upper limit of the human lifespan, and in a universe that lasts forever, it’s mathematically indistinguishable from nothing.

Maybe he means believing God doesn’t exist is important if you want to set yourself free to do all the fun things God is against. That’s probably it. It’s suitably trite, like all atheist platitudes.

It doesn’t take much to impress an atheist. No matter how tired their arguments are, they always think they’re fresh and ingenious.

These days, homosexuality tops the list of fun things God won’t let us embrace. We used to think homosexuality was a problem. Now we think God and Christians who are against homosexuality are the problem. It’s just like the notion that Israel, the only civilized nation in the Middle East, is the problem in that part of the world. Muslims (who torture and execute homosexuals, by the way) will love each other and live in joy once we let them kill the Jews. We know this because Muslims have always been so nice to each other. Yep.

Get rid of one set of combatants, and the war will end. That’s what the people who hate us think. Satan’s children don’t realize there will always be conflict. Kill all the Christians, and Satan’s children will eat each other in our absence. They will find reasons. Look how many atheists they murdered in the USSR and China.

Atheists and other unsaved people are the real fireflies. They may entertain us for while, but very, very soon their names will be blotted out forever, and their infantile works will disappear. They will be removed from our presence, and some say our thoughts, for eternity. There won’t be any gay pride marches or BLM or Antifa riots where we’re going. Everyone will be pro-life. Everyone will be pro-Israel. Everyone will love the God of the Jews.

I can’t imagine a world without conflict. I wish I could conceive of the sensation, so I could enjoy it in advance.

Living in Marion County is a little bit like moving to heaven. In Miami, everyone hates each other. Rudeness is normal. Cubans hate blacks. Blacks hate Cubans. White people are unwelcome, and we know it, so we sell our houses and leave.

Up here, people are so nice I still can’t get used to it. Doesn’t matter what their ethnicity is.

Heaven will be nicer yet.

I feel like I’m ascending. This, oddly, is a very Jewish idea. The real name of the Jordan River (“Yarden”) means “descend” in Hebrew, and Jews who leave Israel are “yardim,” or, “those who descend.” When you move to Israel, you make “aliyah,” which means you go up. When I applied to be a kibbutz volunteer, I went through an annoying agency called Kibbutz Aliyah.

Jerusalem is pretty high up, and the Bible describes Jews who went to Jerusalem to worship in God’s presence as “going up.”

Ocala is a monstrous step up from Miami. It’s like moving from the gutters of Calcutta to Beverly Hills, in spiritual terms. Miami is a rotting hole of carnality and ignorance. Ocala is wonderful, but I feel I have another upward step to take before I leave the earth. I seriously believe I’ll be in Tennessee soon. I hope so, because hunting has made me miss Appalachia like crazy.

Last night I went to Gander Outdoors (a sporting goods store) to buy more tools for hunting, and when I got to the register, the lady who rang me up joked with me like I was her cousin. I am not an extroverted person. In Miami, I have to repeat myself all the time because no one understands English, and I’m used to people being cold or hostile. I don’t automatically kid around with strangers. It’s strange to have cashiers and waitresses show me warmth and familiarity.

There is a way southerners talk to each other, and if you’re not a southerner, I can’t explain it, but it’s very welcoming and inclusive. Here, I can fall into it. In Miami, I might as well be talking to porcupines with inflamed hemorrhoids.

Puercoespins con hemorrhoides grandes.

I still have so much healing to do! It’s very hard to let people be nice to me. I can’t believe I was stupid enough to live in Miami. I was blind to what people were doing to me. I tried to make it work. I was descending, the whole time!

Funny thing; I’m from Eastern Kentucky, which is part of a southern state, and I can tell you, people there are not that nice. There is a streak of Celtic blackheartedness in them. Many people in the mountain areas ridicule their kids and spouses. They spit out little barbs all the time. They can’t say nice things to people. They have to find roundabout ways to do it. Up there, a person will say something nasty to you, facetiously, hoping you will see through it and understand they mean something nice. They’re afraid to say things like, “You look very pretty today,” or, “I’m very proud of you.” I have had this problem myself. These days, I feel very liberated when I say something nice to someone without putting a little hook in it.

There is a lot of Celtic blood in the mountains, and Celts are mean. Their tongues are like whips. Don’t let anyone tell you different. Everyone knows the Scots are mean, but the Irish are mean, too. They may hide it better, but there is a lot of hardness in them. They didn’t become the biggest terrorists in Europe because they’re warm and forgiving.

In this country, the Irish have great PR. You watch movies, and you see gentle, half-drunk people who smoke clay pipes and say poetic things. Totally unrealistic. The Irish are angry as hell!

Call me prejudiced. I don’t care. I’m old, and I’m going to die soon. I can say whatever I want. Go ahead and ban me from Aer Lingus. That will teach me.

Miami poisoned me, but when my family moved there, we brought ethnic poison of our own. I never thought about that until now. At least I don’t think so.

Mountain people in Kentucky and other states have problems, but people are nicer in other areas of the South.

I continue watching healing videos on Youtube. They make me wonder what purpose I serve here on earth. I see Christians going out and healing total strangers. What do I do? I blog and manage real estate. I have a strong prayer life, and that’s nothing to sneeze at, but it’s nice to see Christians getting out there and demonstrating God’s love.

I’ve been watching a guy named Tom Fischer. Through his videos, I found someone else. A young man named Troy. He only has a few videos. He heals people, too.

When he talks to people, his face shines. It makes you sense God’s love. That’s impressive. I’ll embed a video.

I can’t do this kind of thing. I have not been called or empowered to do it. Evangelists are salesmen, and as I often say, I couldn’t sell poop to flies. If you know a Christian you want to turn away from God, give me a call, and I’ll talk to him. He’ll be worshiping the devil in a week.

There are things you just shouldn’t try to do until God gives you power.

That’s what anointing is all about. “Anointing,” figuratively, means “authority.” A person with an anointing has a commission–an assignment–from God, and God will help him get it done. If you have an anointing, God will part the Red Sea for you. If not, you may lose your church and be imprisoned for something like fraud or pedophilia.

Tom Fischer goes up to Jews in yarmulkes and gets them to let him heal them in the name of Jesus. If you don’t know Jews, you don’t understand how crazy that is. It’s like selling pork in Mecca. But God helps him get away with it.

I can relate to the prophets, because no one listens to me. If I said something obvious which was so brilliant it could end all of the world’s problems in 5 minutes, people would chase me with pitchforks. My old pastors think I’m an idiot. My relatives think I’m an idiot. Many people I’ve gone to church with think I’m an idiot, and I’m talking about people who, in some cases, are nearly illiterate. People who can barely read and who know how educated I am feel completely entitled to lecture me. It’s something to see.

My dad started telling people I was smart…after he lost his mind. I have no words to discuss that! When I was winning the Miami spelling bee, getting crazy test scores, and doing graduate work in physics, I was still an idiot. But now I’m smart. If he goes into a coma, I’ll be a genius.

He says I’m smart, but he doesn’t think I’m bright enough to decide what to throw out. He takes things out of the garbage. When I really want to be sure I’m rid of something, I have to destroy it before I throw it out. Sometimes I’ll pour dishwashing liquid all over it. He says I’m smart, but people’s actions show what they really think.

Never pay any attention to what people say. Always look at their actions.

Don’t count on me being right about the people in the videos I watch. For all I know, they could be axe murderers. I only know what I see.

One Day Closer to Coyote Bath Mats

I’m trying to figure out whether I qualify to be called an outdoorsman yet.

I’ve done a ton of fishing. You could put me on a 60′ fishing yacht in Boston Harbor and tell me to take it to Eleuthera and catch marlin or yellowfin, and I would need no advice whatsoever, except for a pilot’s help getting across the Devil’s Backbone off Harbour Island. I would just need a credit card and some grunts to do the peon work. I’m not the greatest fisherman on earth, nor am I an expert captain, but I can do it. I can also bleed and clean the fish.

Maybe that counts for something.

I have shot a few rabbits. This is not exactly big game hunting. You walk around, look for rabbits, and plug them. But it is a form of hunting.

I nailed a few squirrels this year.

Today I set my portable blind up in order to see how it worked. I was quite pleased. It sets up fast, and it appears to function. I learned a few things, and I think the bugs are mostly out of my blind-hunting system. I realized I needed a monopod to support my rifle, so I’ll be buying one shortly.

You can spend $200 on a special chair for blinds, and I probably should, but the plastic Adirondack chair from Home Depot is really comfortable.

I set it up near a known choke point: a hole under one of my fences. Coyotes, coons, and foxes use it, so I know that if I sit there long enough, I’ll see something I can kill.

I read up on coons. They love marshmallows. This is supposed to be one of the best baits. I think I may dump a tin of sardines and some marshmallows by the fence, sit in the blind, and see what happens.

I am very sorely tempted to get a night vision scope. I have to think about it. They work great when you know where the game is, but it occurs to me that scopes have small fields of view, so how do you know where to look? Do you have to get a second night vision device with a wider field of view to tell you when the coons show up?

Man, it’s tempting. Shooting animals with a light seems sloppy and crude. Sitting in the dark and blasting them when they have no idea you exist…that’s hunting. If you can do that AND cover your infrared signature so the government can’t see you in the dark, you’re basically Rambo. You are a Carlos Hathcock starter kit.

I’m not much of a hunter, but I feel like I can say I’m a hunter without feeling like I’m totally full of it.

I left the blind set up. It seems to me that animals will be less freaked out by something they’ve seen sitting around for a while. I want to see how it holds up, too.

It’s marshmallow and monopod time. I’m going to run out and see what’s available.

More

I went to Gander Outdoors and got me a monopod and a cool spinning rimfire target that will save me a ton on paper targets and reduce aggravation.

While I was there I saw this dummy, which reminds me why I don’t do tactical. If the Village People knew about 5.11 gear, they would have another member.

Romans 8:15

I feel like I should expound on the things I wrote yesterday.

I wrote about an extraordinarily vile cyst that appeared on my back. All physical ailments come from sin, whether it’s the sin of the person afflicted or the general curse on the world that comes from sin. There is no possibility of illness in heaven, because everyone there is forgiven and purified. I don’t consider it self-condemnation when I say I believe my physical problems are often related to my sins, and that the nature of the problems may tell me about the type of sin that led to their appearance.

A cyst has certain characteristics. It’s a container made of tissue. It’s walled off from the rest of the body. Cysts are full of things that need to be extracted. A cyst may be very stubborn. It may have a sort of opening with a layer of tissue over it that acts as a barrier that prevents the crap inside from being removed. Cysts protect their disgusting contents.

I know demons work in me. We are surrounded by demons in this world, and they whisper to us and prod us, just as God does. They work to modify our acts, thoughts, and emotions.

From past experience, I know that a demon can occupy space inside a person. I had some things cast out of me, and I can tell you I felt them in my abdomen, below the rib cage. I felt their presence there when they became afraid. They became cold. My hands turned cold.

Remember the scene in the first Alien movie, where the creature burst John Hurt’s chest wall and ran off? That’s what it’s like when a demon gets upset. I suppose you could compare it to feeling a baby kicking.

Night before last, I woke up while it was still dark, and I felt a lot of tension inside me. I had been battling anger and cruelty, to get rid of them, and when I woke up, I felt like a battle was going on in and around me.

I felt like a cyst that didn’t want to pop. Like there was only a thin wall between me and a breakthrough followed by peace.

Eventually, I felt some things leave me.

There are also barriers between us and good things. The flesh is a barrier between us and God. The veil in the Temple symbolized the flesh.

Here’s what happens when a spirit leaves me. Suddenly, my mind grows quiet. Usually, I have a nonstop flow of thoughts and words in my head. When something leaves me, it shuts down instantly, and I literally don’t know what to think. I sit and wait for the next thought.

Naturally, this brings peace, because peace is destroyed by thoughts. When you stop thinking, it’s like a fire has gone out.

I told God I had no idea who I was. If I ever get subsantially purified, I will be a person I don’t recognize from the inside. I don’t know what my personality would be like without the corruption and supernatural chatter. I think of the things that go on inside me as parts of me, but many of them are not, so what am I really like?

Secular thinkers tell us to embrace all the garbage inside us. Whatever it is, own it, say it’s natural, and refuse to condemn it. Homosexuality, lust…whatever it is, accept it. That’s not realism or healing. It’s defeat. It’s capitulation. It reminds me of the cessationist doctrine that poisons the body of Christ. “We can’t get miracles or prophecy, so we conclude they don’t exist any more.” Secular people can’t rid themselves of inner problems, so they tell us to love them.

That’s not for me. I’ve had divine deliverance, so I will never stop trying to get more of it. It’s extremely unfortunate that so many people can’t get help, but I’ve received it, and I’m not going to pretend it doesn’t happen. I’m not capitulating, ever. I will never stop trying to get free, because I know God is willing to make it happen.

Why doesn’t God do it right now, completely? That’s what people will ask. God isn’t my butler. He’s not my slave. His chief purpose in the universe isn’t to rush to my side whenever I suffer a little and take the problem away regardless of my attitude and my past. Sometimes he permits suffering to last a while, for reasons of his own. Usually, though, my own iniquity delays his help.

God isn’t a genie. The word “genie” comes from the Arabic “djinn,” which means “demon.” If you want a spirit that gives you whatever you want, whether or not you’re ready, get yourself a demon. You could be the next Tom Cruise.

I’m not going to blame God for anything. That’s a poisonous attitude. Anything he does for me is a gift. He’s not paying a debt or earning a wage. He doesn’t owe me. If he had put me in hell instead of saving me, no one in the universe could say it wasn’t fair and good.

A lot of people refuse to believe in God because he won’t be their slave. “If God is so good, why didn’t I make the cheerleading squad?” “If God is so good, why is my neighbor’s BMW better than mine?” I know a lot of people complain about more serious problems, like death and illness, but many of us are angry at God because he doesn’t fix our petty, disgraceful first-world gripes. We’re not grateful for anything. There are healthy young people who wake up in big houses in the United States of America and feel angry at God because things aren’t even nicer.

I used to be that way. These days I thank God when I get in the car. Have you ever thought about what a blessing it is to have a car? A little over a hundred years ago, you were very lucky to have an open carriage and a horse. That’s how it was for centuries. I can get into a car whenever I want, drive at 100 miles per hour if I don’t get caught, listen to a huge selection of the greatest musicians of the last century, and enjoy whatever air temperature suits me. I can flick a switch and heat or cool the seats. In 1875, this would have been beyond the dreams of sorcerers.

Cars are fantastic. Even crummy ones. Air conditioning is fantastic. Good food is fantastic. Hot water is fantastic. I have machines that wash clothes and dishes while I watch TV (which is fantastic). Have you ever washed a shirt by hand? It’s a nightmare. Think how many shirts you use in a week.

I can see. My back is straight and strong. My feet don’t hurt. I’m not bald. I live in the greatest country the world has ever known. I live in one of the best areas of that country. I know God personally. I don’t have to look at prices when I go to the grocery store. I can buy blueberries in the winter. I have a personal library that would have made Plato faint. By historical standards, I live better than most emperors. Croesus would cry if he could see how I live.

Anyway, the fact that God hasn’t fixed me instantly is the dumbest conceivable argument for atheism and cessationism. His own book doesn’t say he’ll make our lives perfect in a heartbeat.

I believe I’m the focus of a battle right now, more than ever. The things that have run me know their final eviction is close, so they’re raging and fussing. I just have to keep confessing and repenting. They have no chance of success.

I’m so glad I’ve cut back on reading the news. I need to cut back more. My need to know what’s going on is nothing compared to my need to be close to God. The news is a source of temptation. It tempts me to anger and even lust. These days, when you look at a news site, there’s a good chance you’ll see at least one semi-pornographic photo with a link below it. “Kim Kardashian was naked again today.” Wow. Thanks for keeping me in the loop, “JOURNALISTS.”

Bad things are happening in the world. Got it. But I don’t run the world all by myself. I’m not actually required to obsess on the news and pray about every article. God told me I’m “one of many.” I’m busy with something important, so if Christians have to read the news, let the others handle it for a while.

They can keep track of all the important updates from the Kardashians and Chrissy Teigen.

I can’t wait to live in a world where there are no people like that.

To change course, I got another revelation today. God showed me how I differ from most men. I have never, ever known what it was like to want a father.

When I was a kid, I was scared of my dad. When he entered a room, my sister and I tried to leave before trouble started. When he talked to us, we tried to say whatever would 1) prevent him from blowing up and 2) get us excused from his presence. I was always looking for ways to avoid being around him.

When he wasn’t around, my mother, my sister and I would talk about divorce. It’s terrible to say it, but we talked about how great our lives would be if she divorced him. My sister and I encouraged her. Once, when my sister was about three, she held a gun to my dad’s side and told my mother, “We don’t need him.” She wanted permission to shoot.

I’m not writing this to pick on my dad. I’m just sharing what has been going through my mind.

I think I had a bad attitude toward male authority figures, because I was scared of them. I remember two men who didn’t fit the pattern, though. Mr. Hubert, my fifth-grade science teacher, and Mr. Stallings, my eighth-grade English teacher.

I had never had a male teacher before Mr. Hubert. He made me prefer male teachers. He was great. He had all sorts of science stuff going on in the room. He rigged up a desk microphone and PA system to talk to us, even though he was five feet away. He had fish. He had live guinea pigs (donated by me) in a tank. He was gentle and fun to be around.

Oliver “Butch” Stallings. He hated that nickname, so of course, people used it behind his back all the time. Stallings was a 6’4″ blond Aryan who looked like a Calvin Klein model. He was a tyrant. We always had homework. If you didn’t do your homework, you had to write a note to your parents, make them sign it, and bring it back. He didn’t take any crap from anyone. He worked us. People said they hated him, but I don’t think they did. I thought he was great. He made us succeed. Female teachers never did that. They used guilt trips and cajoling, but they didn’t provide order.

Sometimes we loved our female teachers, but they accomplished very little compared to the men. It’s that simple.

Stallings could be a little jerky, but all of his demands served a purpose, and that purpose was to improve us.

Not all of my male teachers were positive role models. My seventh-grade math teacher, Mr. Bubrick, told me he was going to break my arm if I reached under my desk for a piece of paper. I think it was paper. Might have been a pencil. He said, “I don’t care who your father is.” He said he was completely serious. Not sure what that was about. And I believed him, so I don’t understand why he kept trying to convince me.

It wasn’t really necessary to threaten to cripple me. He could have said, “Don’t reach for that,” and I would have complied. I guess he was mentally ill.

We were supposed to write something down. Maybe he was giving us a quiz. I don’t recall, but I assume I failed, because you have to have a pencil and paper in order to write.

On the whole, Mr. Bubrick was not a very good teacher. I’m not sure which careers are best for sadists who threaten to break other people’s children’s bones.

Whatever my positive experiences with men were, I never had any desire for a father figure in my life. I wanted father figures to leave me alone. I didn’t like being cursed at. I didn’t like watching violence that couldn’t be defended against. I didn’t like the burden of racking my brain, trying to think of the right things to say to turn off the rage.

It’s tough dealing with abusive people. Sometimes you can postpone the abuse by saying or doing the right thing, but sometimes they’re determined to abuse, and nothing you can do will stop it, so you end up feeling helpless and unable to control your circumstances. It breeds passivity. You quit trying to fix things you can’t fix, and you focus on learning how to endure them. “Is it over now? No, he’s still going. I’ll hold on a little longer.”

It makes you feel like your face is a pair of wooden shutters you can lock up while a hurricane rages outside. It’s very strange. You lock them up and hope the wind doesn’t blow a tree into them. It’s the best you can do. You can’t control anything outside of you, so you retreat and control a reduced perimeter: your face.

I was talking to God today, and I told him I really wanted a father. At my advanced age, I was asking for one. I have never had a father. The lack of a father wrecked my life. I didn’t have a father to correct me, guide me, supply me adequately, or protect me, and I am damaged. Now I want a father to come in and undo the damage. I want the evil in my heart to be fixed. The fatherless tend to be insolent punks. I don’t want to be an embarrassing middle-aged punk, like Jimmy Kimmel or Sean Penn. I want to be told what to do, by someone who has my best interest at heart.

Churches have tried to teach me God primarily wants me to obey rules. Some churches have taught me God just wants me to give preachers money. It’s unusual for a church to teach people the truth: God wants children. A father knows his children personally, unless he’s a deadbeat dad. He works to raise them. He gives them advice and corrects them. He fights their enemies. He gives them wealth and the ability to get more wealth. He doesn’t sit on a cloud a trillion miles away and ignore them.

The Bible orders us to love God. How can you love someone who is completely uninvolved with you? It’s like telling you to love Prince Charles or Vladimir Putin. Strangers you’ve never been anywhere near.

It’s not enough for God to help me and correct me. I need him to be personally involved, out of love. I need him to exert authority over me very directly.

I can’t tell you how strange it is to want to be adopted and to have a father. It’s like waking up one day and wanting to eat liver (which I hate). I have never really wanted these things before. I have been 100% devoid of empathy for kids who wanted fathers. I could feel sorry for them, but I could not feel what they felt, because I had never felt it.

Sympathy isn’t empathy.

In my heart, I have never had the feeling that anyone wanted me as a son. Not men, I mean. My mother was crazy about me.

This experience makes me wonder just how damaged and abnormal I am. Like Yossarian said, you can’t see the flies in your eyes if you have flies in your eyes.

The natural male response to problems is to say, “I’m okay. Everything is fine.” This is why it’s better to rely on men than women in a crisis. Most women like crying, becoming hysterical, and magnifying their problems. They tend to make a crisis much worse. It’s manipulation. It’s their way of getting other people to take care of them. Men stop thinking about their problems so they can function and get things done.

It’s a carnal approach. It’s something we do because we don’t know how to get God’s help. It eventually shuts off our awareness of our problems. We become numb to them. I wonder how many crippling injuries I have that I’m unaware of. I know God now, so I can get help. I don’t have to shut down the alarms and go to backup systems.

I felt I should write about these things. Preachers have done their best to poison me and keep me ignorant, and they have done the same things to everyone else, so if I benefit from knowing the truth, presumably other people will benefit, too.

I am starting to hate churches. I don’t mean I want to go shoot them up, so please don’t come and take my guns just yet. I mean I have lost patience with them, and I find the idea of being overly attached to one distasteful. It would be like marrying an annoying, hysterical woman who runs her mouth all the time and doesn’t listen. That’s how it was before, now that I think about it. A lot of good things happened at my churches, but stubbornness, pride, and emotionalism stunted everyone. I know a lot of spiritual midgets.

My churches were matriarchal. Trinity was 80% black, and New Dawn was mostly Puerto Rican. Blacks and Latins have matriarchal societies. It’s unhealthy. Matriarchy fosters denial, emotionalism, and immaturity.

I’ll keep you updated on future developments. Hope you’re not too bored.

Too Heavy, and it Smells

This entry will contain what may well be TMI (Too Much Information) concerning a very disgusting physical issue, so don’t say you weren’t warned.

For years, I’ve known our iniquities (our evil inclinations, also known as habits) come between us and the power and love of God. I was talking about it in 2009 at Trinity Church in Miami, in my microscopic, illusory authority as an armorbearer. No one wanted to hear it, because Trinity is built around making people feel good just as they are, without improving them, in order to get them to give the greedy, crooked pastors irresponsibly large donations of money.

I knew about the problem of iniquity, and I worked on it personally, but somehow, there are different levels of knowing you have problems, and the level I was on at the beginning was not that deep.

Think of it this way. You know you’re fat. You don’t do much about it. Then one day–I will assume you’re a woman, here–you see yourself on video in a bikini, and you have to go in your bedroom and close the door and cry. You wish you could find every picture of you at your current weight and burn it. Then you don’t eat for 10 days. That’s a great example of different levels of knowing you have a problem.

I won’t say I didn’t work to change. I certainly did. I never stopped praying about it. But somehow my knowledge and motivation weren’t at the forefront in my heart and mind. I struggled to put them there, but results were slow in coming.

I didn’t feel an immediate need to avert catastrophe.

I think a Christian who turns away from God can get himself sentenced to years of wandering in the wilderness. You spend years filling yourself with filth, and then you turn around, and it takes time to get rid of it, even if you try.

I had a problem with anger and cruelty. When I turned back to God, I didn’t think of myself as a particularly angry or cruel person. I disliked angry and cruel people, and in my heart, I equated that feeling with not being angry or cruel. But I have learned that hating an iniquity is not the same thing as not having it. You may have an iniquity you resist successfully and never act on. It’s still there. You can’t say you don’t have it just because it never wins.

Generally, I was not cruel, but cruelty did leak out of the box from time to time, especially in ways that I thought were acceptable. I made mean jokes and told myself it was okay because I wasn’t serious. Usually I wasn’t serious, but why would I want to say those things, regardless? Why would I be comfortable with them, given that they were part of the realm of cruelty? How did they help the world?

One night several years ago, I drove to church to run security for the evening service, and I felt love descend on me. I felt God’s love for people. I loved everybody. It was great. I was very relieved. I hoped it would stay. It didn’t, however. It was a momentary thing. I didn’t know how to hold on.

I didn’t realize I lived in a way that kept love away.

I was working to get God’s improvement all the time, but I lacked knowledge, and you know what Hosea said about people who lack knowledge. They perish.

There was no one to teach me. There still isn’t, quite honestly. There are all sorts of preachers out there who will give you obvious, powerless advice. “Stop being bad.” “Don’t do that any more.” “Change.” But they are simpletons who don’t acknowledge the supernatural power of habit. They are useless guides who give people burdens they can’t carry. You can’t just change because you want to.

Being good and doing right involve more than choice. We put very real chains on ourselves. Tell a crack addict to knock it off, and see what happens. Even if he would rather kill himself than smoke again, he’s not going to quit just because he knows he should. Iniquities are strongholds. Before you build an iniquity, you have a choice. Anyone can put down his first cigarette and walk away from it. Once you have a habit, you are literally a slave to sin.

Drug rehab has a success rate of something like 2% or 10%, depending on whom you believe. That’s probably lower than the success rate of people who quit on their own. It’s very bad. Almost no one loses weight and stays thing. Anger management classes don’t work. Habits are stronger than the people who possess them. Anyone who says otherwise is ignorant, self-righteous, or unfeeling.

Anger is a habit. Depression is a habit. Anything you can’t quit is a habit.

I had no one to teach me, because Christianity, like Judaism, is about separating people from God. God raises up witnesses and prophets (and one great messiah), and they teach us useful things. Then the fable-writers and bureaucrats take over. They build big buildings for us to sit in. They put on absolutely ridiculous costumes. Have you seen the pope’s hat? It’s beyond comical. Can you imagine wearing that hat to the store?

They create pompous names for their offices. They tell us they’re holier than we are. They make up doctrine, or, like Augustine, they steal it from Satanic religions. Forget Astarte. Now you can pray to Mary!

Want to please God? Eat fish on Friday. Go to church on Saturday. Worship statues. Pray to dead people. Give all your money to a grinning white trash idiot who says he needs a jet. Don’t eat chicken with cheese on it. Shun technology and wear black clothes. Castrate yourself. Live in a monastery and never speak. Work really hard and quote Vince Lombardi, the noted man of God.

First thing you know, they’ve convinced us God doesn’t do miracles any more, and that we aren’t going to hear from him in our daily lives. No tongues. No prophecy. No healing. No help. Lots of duty, but not much love. And love is the reason God created the universe!

Satan? Oh, he’ll be with you all the time. He’s not as lazy as God. He’ll give you diseases, wreck your marriage, ruin your career, make you insane…he’s a hustler. But God won’t talk to you or do anything for you until you die. If he doesn’t talk to Father Garcia, who does such wonderful work with the boys’ dance team, why would he talk to you?

We are raised on other people’s excrement instead of the word of God.

God told me all sorts of stuff. He saved me from preachers. But he didn’t tell me everything at once. It unfolds, day by day. This is unfortunate, because I am mortal. It’s too late for me to have a good life as a young man. The bread is gone, so all I have to work with is the crust. I can forget about a normal family and grandchildren and so on. But I’m glad I’m getting what I’m getting. It’s better to have one good year before you die than to recant as a disgraceful coward on your deathbed.

What I’m getting is certainly preferable to what I deserve.

Lately, the knowledge that I have to get free of anger is pushing to the front of the auditorium. I am acutely aware of it.

The Bible says our righteousness is like filthy menstrual rags to God. If it says that, then it’s true. It is literally true. God isn’t exaggerating to make a point. He is saying we stink in his nostrils, and that the sight of us disgusts him. This is why Jesus had to be crucified in order for God to have a relationship with us. There had to be something put between God and our stink, so God could tolerate our presence.

For a long time, I’ve felt that I stank before God. I know what houses are like when filthy people live in them. In some cases, you can smell the feces, urine, mold, and rot from thirty feet out in the yard. In others, you may walk in the door and be hit instantly with the sharp smell of fermented urine, from bathrooms where no one ever lifts the seat or closes the door. You may smell rotten garbage because the bag in the kitchen is always full. I’ve felt like God was telling me, “I live in you, and I won’t leave you, but you have to stop making yourself stink.”

In the Bible, a body is a house. Things that happen to houses tell us about things that happen to bodies. In the Old Testament, a person who constantly spoke ill of others could develop a type of leprosy that infected the walls of his house. God didn’t do this to people because he had something against houses. He was telling them what they were like, to him.

If you think people can’t stink to God, think about this: prayers and sacrifices smell good to him. The Bible says so. Our prayers rise to heaven and perfume it. If that’s true, what do you think our iniquities and sins do? Look at part of Psalm 38.

For mine iniquities are gone over mine head: as an heavy burden they are too heavy for me.
My wounds stink and are corrupt because of my foolishness.
I am troubled; I am bowed down greatly; I go mourning all the day long.
For my loins are filled with a loathsome disease: and there is no soundness in my flesh.

That’s not about an unbeliever. It’s about one of God’s servants.

People think accepting salvation makes us perfect and clean in God’s eyes, forever. Really? Does salvation make God stupid or blind? You can sin after you’re saved, and God does not like it. You can even go to hell. You can renounce salvation if you feel like it.

There are naked Christian women on stripper poles right now. Does God see them as perfect?

God gets angry with believers. I used to think he didn’t, but I was misled.

In the book of Acts, a believer named Simon tried to buy supernatural gifts from the apostles. This was a man who believed and was baptized. Look what Peter said:

Thou hast neither part nor lot in this matter: for thy heart is not right in the sight of God. Repent therefore of this thy wickedness, and pray God, if perhaps the thought of thine heart may be forgiven thee.

Peter wasn’t even sure Simon, a baptized believer, was forgiven.

At Trinity Church, Simon wouldn’t have been scolded at all. If he had come and donated a lot of money, they would have assigned armorbearers to park his car, follow him around, and usher him to a good seat, possibly next to Kim Kardashian or Luther Campbell. They would have said salvation lasts forever, and that God could not be angry at him, because he was saved.

The fact that God chooses to cover your faults does not mean he is no longer aware of them, or that they don’t make him angry. Not if the story of Simon is true.

I felt that my iniquities made me stink to God. They certainly make me stink to myself. I had to deal with my dad and my sister, who made houses stink, and I felt that God was telling me, “This is what it’s like for me to live in you.” I felt God was using my relatives as teaching tools.

Recently I got a disgusting cyst on my back. It became inflamed and swelled. I have had several of these during my life, probably because of a peculiarity of my skin. Anyway, these things are known for having contents that don’t smell great. But this one…it smelled so bad, I noticed it not just when it was being poked or examined, but at random times throughout the day.

This thing contained a substance that literally smelled like a pile of dead bums rotting in the sun. If you’ve ever been close to a hardcore bum, you know the smell I’m talking about. Fermented excretions and rotten meat. I hope you never have to be exposed to a cyst that expels anything like this, because it makes rotten fish smell like a flower shop. A spray that smelled like this would be effective in wars or in breaking up riots.

I’m physically clean, so this is not something you would ordinarily expect to deal with around me.

I prayed and so forth, and eventually the cyst yielded a huge quantity of seemingly radioactive contents and subsided. Finally, I could stop checking myself and changing shirts all the time.

TMI, I know, but there is a point. It made me think about the things inside me that needed to be cleared up. God will stay with me and keep helping me even if I don’t improve, but I will always have limited power and peace. Certain things won’t be healed. Certain situations won’t work out the way they should. I won’t receive certain good things God wants me to have.

The cyst was on my back, where I couldn’t see it. It was like the iniquities I hide from myself. It was hard to reach. It was hard to work on. It was like the inner issues I deny.

I make God live in a house full of poop and garbage. It’s like he has to go around wearing a bum’s pants. And he’s God! He should never have to deal with any type of filth.

No one ever gets really clean, as far as I know, but I should be doing better than this.

The other day I saw a helpful video related to my issues. Tom Fischer, the street healer, met a young woman who had a problem with one eye. She had accidentally poked herself at work. This girl had been a Christian all her life. He tried to heal her, and nothing happened. Then he asked her if she was angry at her employer. She said she was. She was also complacent in her walk with God.

If you’re complacent, you won’t try to get yourself improved. You won’t examine yourself and take your iniquities before God and get rid of them. Rot will grow in you, and demonic activity will increase in the house which is your body. That’s just common sense.

He talked to her about her spiritual issues, and she repented. Then he was able to heal her.

The video contains a long segment in which he says it’s harder to heal Christians than unbelievers. We are more accountable, because we know when we’re in the wrong.

It’s interesting that it was her eye that had the problem. Jesus said we should take the splinters out of our own eyes–we should confront and get rid of our own iniquities–before helping others with their iniquities.

I’ll embed the video here.

I am not promoting this man as the answer to your prayers. You need to hear from God, one on one. No man can be trusted, and besides, God wants contact with his children. But Tom Fischer can be helpful.

I’m going to keep working on confession and change. People will tell me I’m condemning myself. Well, Peter rebuked Jesus for predicting the crucifixion. We’re supposed to crucify the flesh. If I criticize myself before God, it’s not an execution. It’s a way to get more life. It’s like lancing a cyst. I don’t feel condemned at all. I feel more free.

Anger has weight. It makes me feel like Satan gave me heavy armor to wear, after taking it off a bum. Blech.

It’s true that people do bad things to provoke me, but if I use that to justify anger, I give them control of my heart. I put a valve in their hands, and they can turn it to shut off the flow of God’s help. That’s a double victory for them.

I would stay away from the feel-good preachers if I were you. They’re just putting dirty bandages on your sores, to make the infection increase. Eventually, these things come to crisis.

New Rifle Underwhelms

Today I took my new Marlin 60 .22 rifle out, scoped it, and tried to get it sighted in. It was a nightmare. It was so inaccurate, it actually scared me.

I have a cheap BugBuster scope. This is an amazing Chinese toy that gives 3-9x magnification with a lighted reticle. It’s very neat. I’ve been using it on an air rifle, and it works.

I was going to put my old Bushnell rimfire scope on the .22, but I lost part of a ring clamp. I ordered a scope mount for it. Then I decided I wanted to use the BugBuster instead. The new mount turned out to be too long for the BugBuster, so I had to move the air rifle mount to the Marlin.

Annoying.

I got everything set up, and I put a chair in the pasture about 50 feet from a target. Plenty close enough for sighting in. I shot, and I wasn’t on the paper. That scared me. I don’t want to send bullets over a road or another farm. I moved WAY up and started over. Even at 30 feet or so, I couldn’t do a thing with the rifle. It was spraying bullets into an area 4″ wide, and it was so inaccurate, I couldn’t figure out which way to turn the scope knobs.

I took the scope off and shot offhand at very close range, and I was still all over the place. I went and got a table, and I shot from a rest. Still bad. I switched from cheap Remington ammo to CCI Stingers. No help.

Finally, I went in the house and got my old Nylon 66 rifle. I was wondering if I had forgotten how to shoot. It was already full of cheap ammo. I blasted away offhand, and I shot into a very small area. The ammo worked.

You can imagine how frustrating this was. Nobody wants to go back to a store and say, “This rifle won’t hit the target.” You can imagine the response. “SURE it won’t. It’s a BAD BAD rifle. Maybe you should exchange it for a cast net.”

I threw some more rounds into the Marlin, and it shot just fine. I put more rounds in. Again, it shot well. I didn’t know what to think. It was getting dark, so it was too late to put the scope back on and try everything a second time.

I am perplexed. I know guns like to be broken in, but this is crazy.

At times like this, you start to wonder if you’re really a good shot.

I started trying to find Internet information on problems with new rifles. I found an irrelevant article by Chuck Hawks. This is a noted gun curmudgeon. I’m not sure he has any idea what he’s talking about. He says Smith & Wesson makes garbage, which is pretty much the opposite of my experience. Anyway, he wrote an interesting screed about accuracy.

He seems to think sub-MOA accuracy is mythical. Can that be true?

I have a .17 HMR rifle. The last time I shot it at 100 yards, I got either 1 MOA accuracy or so close to it, it’s virtually 1 MOA. I didn’t get the calipers out. It could conceivably be 1.1 MOA, but it’s not 1.2. It might be 0.95 for all I know. I know what an inch looks like, but I’m not a ruler.

I shot 5 consecutive rounds into a space an inch across. If you measured from the outsides of the holes, you would get a figure of an inch, +/-10%. If we’re going to split hairs, 1 MOA is actually more like 1.05″ than 1″.

Here is something Chuck Hawks said:

I have written it before and I will write it again: these groups are achieved on a word processor, not in the field. At best what the writer means is that once, when the stars were momentarily aligned in the sky, he shot a 1″ group with the test rifle. He will never admit in print that he shot nine other groups ranging in size from 2″ to 4″ with the same rifle.

However, the inexperienced and the gullible take these “test reports” to heart. The most absurd exaggeration is accepted without question, and endlessly repeated (and embellished) online. The boldest liars become authorities on marksmanship and rifle performance. It would be depressing if it were not so absurd!

I’ll tell you right now, I can shoot the .17 HMR in calm conditions and get 1 MOA accuracy or something so close to it, it doesn’t matter. I don’t practice much, I have no training, and I don’t try that hard, so I should be able to do somewhat better if I work at it. This is with a $200 rifle shooting store ammunition. Granted, it’s only 100 yards, but I can do it. I feel sure that if I can do it, a whole lot of other people can do it.

Can I do it while tromping around out of breath in the woods, without a rest? No way. My best guess is that I could shoot 2 MOA consistently if I had trees to lean on, but I don’t think I could do any better. I don’t know, because I don’t have any opportunities to do that kind of shooting. I suppose I could tape targets to trees, walk around, and shoot at them. Even then, it’s not like shooting an animal. Some animals will hold still and pose, making shooting them nearly as easy as shooting paper. Others aren’t cooperative.

Can I do it at longer ranges? I don’t know. The farther you get from targets, the more you have to know about shooting.

The caliber of the gun doesn’t matter. I’ve learned that shooting big guns with lots of recoil is just as easy as shooting little guns. The recoil comes AFTER you shoot, so it doesn’t affect your accuracy. If you can shoot a .17 HMR well, you should be able to shoot a scoped Ma Deuce well.

Hawks says hunters shooting animals with 8″ kill zones at 150 yards or less should be perfectly happy with 4-MOA guns. That sounds awful to me. Are there really guns that shoot that badly? I mean, do they shoot that badly with good ammunition, when held in a sled? To me, that’s how you define a rifle’s capabilities. A person holding a rifle will always shoot imperfectly, so it’s not fair to judge a gun by what it does when a person holds it. The sled should provide the best measure of a gun’s true capabilities.

If I were shooting a 4-MOA gun at 100 yards to sight it in, I wouldn’t know how to do it. If you have bullets splattering all over a 4″ circle, how do you know which way to turn the scope knobs? Do you fire 25 rounds to get some idea where the center of the 4″ circle is and then try to move that to the center of the target?

Hawks says 3 MOA is good enough for 200-yard kills. He also says no hunter should ever take a shot over 400 yards. The idea is that it’s cruel to the animal to risk wounding it without killing it cleanly.

I read this stuff, and then I think about the average shooter. Most people who shoot regularly would be lucky to hit the ground consistently if they tried. That’s my claim, based on what I’ve seen. I’ll bet 95% of hunters can’t shoot 3 MOA at the range, using a rest, with the best equipment in existence. I wonder what interesting stories guides have to tell. They must get a lot of clients whose marksmanship makes for good entertainment.

I think there are a lot of people out there who shouldn’t shoot at game over 75 feet away. Many people shouldn’t shoot at animals at all, except out of necessity.

I want to feel confident when I hunt. I want to know that there is very little chance an animal I shoot will run off and suffer because I didn’t kill it quickly. This makes me wonder about my dream of going out west and shooting prairie dogs at long distances. Maybe it’s a bad idea, or maybe if I do it, I should make a very serious study of accuracy and distance and limit my shots accordingly.

It’s probably a bad thing for hunters to brag about long shots. If a shot was lucky, you shouldn’t have taken it. If you’re really good, I suppose it’s another matter.

I don’t know how good 1 MOA at 100 yards is. Maybe it’s common. But it does sound like it’s good enough to get me in the door. I should be able to hunt competently and responsibly. If I can shoot 2-3 MOA in the field, I ought to be above reproach.

In the movies, people pull of insane shots. It’s all nonsense. In real life, shooting his hard, and even if you do everything right, you can’t shoot like Quigley or James Bond. Chris Kyle couldn’t do it, for that matter. James Bond is a fictional character. Daniel Craig and the rest of the boys never shot anything but blanks. In reality, now that I think of it, they probably couldn’t have hit a watermelon at ten feet. I doubt any of them ever had any training.

Tomorrow I’ll try the Marlin again. Maybe there was some kind of manufacturing crud stuck in the barrel, and I’ve blown it out. If it still shoots badly, I’ll return it.

The trigger is atrocious. It’s as if there are little rocks in the receiver, and you have to break them before the gun goes off. The Nylon 66 has a magnificent trigger. Truly exceptional. I wonder if the Marlin can be enhanced. I hate bad triggers. They say a good shot can overcome one, but I notice serious shooters insist on smooth triggers. If it really didn’t matter, would they do that?

If I can’t get it to work, I’ll probably get a Ruger 10/22. I should be able to get one to shoot accurately. If necessary, I could have the crown worked on. That should be a cheap job.

Time to Get Rid of the Revolving Door

There are certain sins I still fall into, and it’s really annoying. God gives me tools that work to keep me out of trouble, but every so often I slip. Humility is great, but nobody wants to have it forced on them by repeated failures.

I don’t worry too much, because God says, “The steps of a good man are ordered by the Lord: and he delighteth in his way. Though he fall, he shall not be utterly cast down: for the Lord upholdeth him with his hand.”

I don’t think “good,” as used in this passage, means “perfect.” I think it applies to anyone who is seriously on the path.

Hope that’s correct, because no one is good.

I feel like God is telling me I have to get away from the spirit of murder.

A few years back I was in church, and the Holy Spirit was working. I realized I had a spirit of murder, and I got it cast out. I was surprised. Imagine having God tell you you have a spirit of murder. I would have been shocked if it had been shoplifting. Murder is another level.

It doesn’t mean I was in danger of murdering people. In my case, it meant I stabbed at people with words. I have been mistreated a lot in life, which hardly makes me unique and does not excuse anything. One of the ways I responded to mistreatment was to develop the ability to use words with cruelty.

There are some benefits to a murderous tongue. Bullies will be repelled by it, just as they are repelled by physical force. The don’t like being humiliated in front of other people, especially when they don’t have the tools to fight back in kind. I drove a number of vicious people away with words. But it’s not God’s way. It’s necessary to say very harsh things sometimes, but to lash people and take pleasure in their pain and embarrassment is not good.

For a long time, I’ve felt that God wants me to abstain from ridicule. It’s hard to do, though. When you’re good at using a weapon, it’s not easy to make yourself put it down.

Your enemies won’t all stop just because you do. That’s for sure. When you stop ridiculing people, you disarm unilaterally.

There is some hope, I suppose. The Bible says that when a man’s ways please God, even his enemies will be at peace with him. It doesn’t mean no one will ever bother you again, but our sins call enemies who pop up suddenly from beneath the horizon, and reducing sin reduces the number of enemies you yourself attract proactively.

The spirit was cast out, but spirits come back in when you leave the door open and put a refrigerator full of snacks and beer beside it.

I have always been a fatherless person. This morning I was thinking about all the brilliant things I tell kids, and a realization stabbed me in the gut. This stuff is easy, and it’s extremely helpful, but I had no one to do it for me when I was young.

Forgive me for saying I say brilliant things to kids, but it’s true. Every adult who learns from experience and the Holy Spirit has brilliant things to say to kids. I didn’t say the ideas I pass on are unique to me or that I deserve credit for them, but they’re still brilliant. If I tell a young person he has to pray in tongues every day in order to grow, that’s brilliant, but no one will ever call me a sage because I said it. Lots of people say it.

I have been fatherless. No one gave me any wisdom to speak of. My dad was a coarse, scary person who came home every night and watched TV in his underwear in front of the whole family and whoever else came by. He had two kids and an IQ in the 140’s, but that was his life, apart from golf on the weekends. My mother didn’t know all that much, and she was stifled by my dad anyway. I grew like a weed, not a crop plant. I figured things out on my own, and I reached the wrong conclusions. I didn’t know anything of value.

I failed all the time, as a lifestyle. No wonder! I didn’t know anything at all about success. I went to school with people whose parents checked their homework, told them how to get ahead, told them how to deal with dating and marriage, and taught them about money. A lot of other students thought I was the smartest person in a class full of very bright people, but kids with much less ability sailed right past me. I didn’t know they had these advantages over me. How could I have known? I didn’t know why I couldn’t succeed.

Nobody taught me about the Holy Spirit, sanctification, prayer in tongues, hostile spirits, or the kingdom of God. I didn’t grow. I rotted. It’s very easy to tell people their sins sow a harvest of opposition and defeat, but no one around me knew it, and no one told me.

I’m telling you now, for what it’s worth. Maybe you’re fatherless, too. If you cast a spirit out through one door and then hold another door open through habitual sin, the spirit will come back, bringing your old shackles with it. Jesus said a spirit could bring seven worse spirits with it.

Dogs go back to their vomit, and pigs that are washed go back and lie down in feces.

Man, I wish I hadn’t been raised in the dark. I feel like a bonsai tree. What would I have been, with the proper management?

I was also fatherless at church. The pastors above me were all about cash and having their butts kissed. They were little men and women who served their egos, not their flocks.

No wonder the Bible says, “Call no man your father upon the earth: for one is your Father, which is in heaven,” and, “Stop relying on man, in whose nostrils is a mere breath — after all, he doesn’t count for much, does he?”

I remember watching the first Superman movie when I was a kid. Lex Luthor surprised me by saying something my mother always said, and with which the Bible agrees: “People are no damn good.” That saying is attributed to a cartoonist named William Steig, but I have a feeling it’s ancient.

Today I was watching a Tom Fischer video. He’s the guy I wrote about the other day. He does street ministry. He heals people on the spot. He started talking about healings that go away.

Anti-Christian activists love to “debunk” faith healing, pointing to individuals who thought they were healed and were later found to be ill. They don’t realize that even a carnival barker and disgraceful scoundrel like Benny Hinn may get people healed. The problem is that selfish preachers don’t teach people how to stay healed. They just want to use believers to promote themselves and bring money in.

Fischer said a spirit can return more than once, and that this is especially true if you keep sinning. He quoted Jesus, who healed a man and told him to straighten up or else something worse might come to him. I have had that experience. I wouldn’t say worse things have come to me, but things that have been driven off have returned.

One of the most famous exorcisms was performed by Lester Sumrall, in the Philippines. An occultist prostitute named Clarita Villanueva manifested bite marks all over her body. Sumrall cast her demons out and astounded the nation. But he had to do it more than once. The demons tried to undo the exorcism. I’ve heard preachers talk a lot about exorcism, but not many talk about the need for repeat engagements or post-exorcism repentance and sanctification.

This makes me think of Trinity Church and the other church I belonged to. They were extremely weak on repentance. The Wilkersons, who run Trinity, only care about money and getting their faces on TV. They were happy to teach about the things God does for people, but they worked in the ghetto, where sin and denial are gigantic strongholds, and they were afraid that if they taught repentance people would leave. They were probably right. Ghetto people love to scream and roll on the floor in church, but they will still work as strippers, whores, and drug dealers the rest of the week, and they do not like talking about hypocrisy.

Rich Wilkerson allowed Luther “Luke Skyywalker” Campbell to speak at the church. He made my armorbearer team give him a special seat and escort him around as a VIP. Wilkerson bragged on social media about the church’s relationship with Kanye West and Kim Kardashian. Kim Kardashian is one of the world’s most famous and powerful unrepentant sluts! If you haven’t seen Kim Kardashian naked, you must live in an abandoned mine shaft.

Whores stick together, I suppose.

What good does it do you to cast something out and start rebuilding your life when you know your guest is coming back?

No pastor at any church taught these things to me, and I went to church faithfully for 7 years. I was a deacon when the pastor’s wife drove me out of my last church, and I had never seen a sermon about these ideas. Thankfully, God showed them to me without help from pastors.

Denouncing the feel-good gospel is what got me in trouble at church. Rich Wilkerson called me a divider because I criticized Steve Munsey’s money-raising fables, which Wilkerson knows to be untrue. At New Dawn Ministries, the pastor was lazy and emasculated, and his wife, who loved signs and goodies, wore the pants and did his PR. She got fed up with me and blocked me on social media.

The Bible says God is a father to the fatherless. How true that is, if (and only if) you have a strong habit of spending time with him.

Nearly any human being will let you down. You have to have someone you can depend on. You can’t put your complete trust in people who are close to you, and you have to be especially wary of Christian celebrities. You don’t need a megachurch. You need a microchurch, consisting of you and God. That’s the holy of holies. Everything outside of that is inferior and less clean.

I’m going to go back and watch a few more videos. I love watching God work in small groups. The world needs more micro churches. Once you get past 4 members, you need to split up.

The Vogons Were Amateurs

Leftists get very upset when you criticize the government, because when you do, you criticize their god. They know how important it is to their agenda that everyone think the government does a great job. But what happens when you actually deal with the government? They screw up and screw up and screw up, and just as conservatives say, they don’t care, because it’s almost impossible to get government workers in trouble.

Seems like the cops and our precious military personnel are the only government agents they hate.

I am here to criticize the god of the left. I had a horrible experience (again) with the Post Office. No, I am not referring to Shakir the Angry Muslim Mailman, who had the nerve to put tip-soliciting cards in my box on a Christian holiday and who got furious because I used to stamp “DELIVERED TO WRONG ADDRESS!” on the multiple pieces of other people’s mail he gave me each week. No, I am not referring to his successor, the crazy lady with the wrist cast who got the Post Office to force me to move my mailbox 20 feet closer to the driveway (until 10 minutes after she was replaced, at which time it was moved back). I am referring to the problem I had with a knife I ordered.

I picked out a knife on Ebay, and because the price was so low, I splurged on express delivery. I was supposed to receive it yesterday. I signed up for email delivery updates.

By the way, do you have an ex-wife or maybe and ex-boyfriend you want to stalk and murder? The Post Office has a handy service that will help. You can sign up to have photographs of all of their mail emailed to you. You don’t have to provide an ID. The government photographs all of our mail (not in order to gather information on us; oh, no), and they decided to make the pictures available to us so they can pretend it’s a feature, not a grotesque threat to our privacy and liberty. If you’re planning to slit someone’s throat, and you want to know if someone else has been sending them love letters, now you know what to do.

Anyhow, I gave the Postal Service my phone number and received updates on my phone. I wrote about this already.

Yesterday, I received a very nice update. It said the driver had taken the package back to the Post Office.

It did not say, “We are at your gate; please let us in.” It did not say, “We are on the way with your package.” I did not hear a horn honk. They had my number. They were too inept to use it to call me.

Today I gave up and drove to the Post Office.

There aren’t many unpleasant drives in Marion County, but today I found one. I had to drive about 9 miles to get the package, and it took about 25 minutes. That’s urban Miami speed. The roads were torn up. I got stuck behind a country trailer loaded with someone’s personal furniture (I’m sure that was kosher), and he turned at every turn I had to take. I thought I would never get there. I went in and picked up the knife. I talked to an employee just long enough to confirm that they didn’t give a crap about my problem. I went home. Very slowly.

God bless Federal Express. Think how much worse the Postal Service would be if they didn’t have Fred Smith showing them up every day.

I contacted the Ebay seller and told them negative feedback was on the way. We’ll see if they care. You don’t send a small package and demand a signature without informing the recipient.

I can’t believe I finally got my knife. I wasted 10 days trying to get one from an incompetend Amazon seller, and then I thought the Ebay knife was the answer to my prayers. Then they tortured me as much as possible until I got it home.

It looks very serviceable. The blade is very heavy. The edge is great, if the job it did on my junk mail is any indication. The sheath is not elegant, but it ought to function very well. It’s Kydex with a few rivets.

I don’t wear a belt, and the sheath is made for a belt, so I guess I’ll have to come up with a different solution. I’m not defiling my ensemble with a belt. I think people look insane when they combine belts with suspenders. It’s the Lumbergh look from Office Space. Maybe I can get some Kydex and some Internet know-how and make a sheath that hooks over my waistband.

I love micarta handles. Whenever I watch Forged in Fire, I always scream, “USE THE MICARTA, YOU IDIOT!”, because smiths are always choosing nutty handle materials that shatter. As far as I know, micarta is the adamantium of knife handle materials. It’s basically fiberglass made with ordinary fabric.

I learned some surprising stuff about knife steels. I think I have been too hard on 420HC, the metal used in my disappointing Gerber Gator II’s.

The alloy 420HC is cheap compared to 440C and a lot of other metals, and generally, knives made from it are not great. It appears that one company is an exception to this rule: Buck. They take 420HC and harden the edge to something like Rockwell 58. That’s acceptable. I had read that Buck had special heat treating skills, but I assumed it was marketing BS intended to cover yet another great company’s descent into the toilet. It looks like that was wrong.

If what I’m reading about Buck is right, they may be providing very good 420HC knives at very good prices. I am still suspicious, because Buck itself uses the phrase “medium edge-holding” to describe the knives, but maybe they’re okay. This metal has some advantages. It’s very tough, so it can take a beating, and when you get it sharp, you can get it very, very sharp. Some metals are hard to put a serious edge on.

Some day I may try a Buck folder just to see what it’s like. I would not be shocked if I were disappointed, but maybe I wouldn’t be.

I hate a knife that gets dull fast. Sharpening twice a month is okay. Sharpening three times a day is not. There is some very impressive steel out there, and it’s not unreasonable at all to expect stellar performance, so I prefer not to fool around with junk. In the kitchen, cheap steel can be useful, because you can always keep a diamond hone handy, but elsewhere, you want a knife that doesn’t have to be suckled and coddled.

I wish the Post Office had a face so I could punch it. I will pray about that.

Time to go check the game camera. I hope it actually did something last night.

Stay Away From Choke Points

As much fun as it is writing about my new fort and game camera, I feel like writing about God today. If I end up having a topic, it will probably be the upcoming decentralization of the church by the Holy Spirit.

A few days back I wrote about a man named Ken Peters. He had some long dreams about the future. He had these dreams in 1980. He was a “practicing Catholic” (his term) at the time, and he says that because he was a practicing Catholic, he didn’t know anything about prophecy or the Bible. His dreams line up well with what’s happening today and with what many Spirit-filled Christians expect to happen in the near future.

Here’s something I’ve been harping on for years: I believe God has been telling me the day of the bloated, pus-filled megachurch is ending. Is “pus-filled” harsh? I guess it is. Anyway, I think he has told me the day of the bloated, pus-filled megachurch is ending. I expect to see a true grassroots church rise up, connected and taught by the Holy Spirit, with no tithes or church-mandated offerings.

Everyone loves to say, “I hate organized religion.” I think God was the first to say it.

Ken Peters saw post-rapture grassroots revival in his dream. Here’s something he said:

It was almost like everybody was like Jesus walking around doing these works. You did not have to have a pulpit to stand behind to do this in this part of the dream. As a matter of fact I never saw anyone standing behind a pulpit. I think they finally understood the purpose of the ministry is equipping and releasing you to go out and be God’s superstars.

BAM! Am I too old to say that? I want to be cool so the “kids” will “dig” me. I want them to take photos with me with selfie sticks made from recycled materials. I want to wear skinny jeans and grow a beard that looks like Chaz Bono’s. Anyway, BAM!

I don’t really want any of that stuff. I’m just riffing on hip preachers. That includes anyone who inserts “dude” in a Bible verse.

I’m so sick of churches and denominations. I hate being told I have to give money to rich white trash. I’m tired of the idea that gasbag denomination bigwigs have to give God permission to do things. “Sorry, Father. We’re cessationists. Take your miracles outside.”

It just hit me…isn’t this exactly what the rabbinic Jews did to Jesus? He healed people on the Sabbath repeatedly, just to infuriate them, and it worked. Look at John 9:

They took the man who had been blind to the P’rushim. Now the day on which Yeshua had made the mud and opened his eyes was Shabbat. So the P’rushim asked him again how he had become able to see; and he told them, “He put mud on my eyes, then I washed, and now I can see.” At this, some of the P’rushim said, “This man is not from God, because he doesn’t keep Shabbat.” But others said, “How could a man who is a sinner do miracles like these?” And there was a split among them. So once more they spoke to the blind man: “Since you’re the one whose eyes he opened, what do you say about him?” He replied: “He is a prophet.”

“P’rushim” means “Pharisees.”

While I was looking that up, I came across a neat passage from Mark, which preceded a story about a healing. Maybe it’s the same healing (Bartimaeus) mentioned above. James (Ya’akov) and John (Yochanan) had been trying to get Jesus to give them the best seats in heaven, and Jesus set them straight:

When the other ten heard about this, they became outraged at Ya‘akov and Yochanan. But Yeshua called them to him and said to them, “You know that among the Goyim, those who are supposed to rule them become tyrants, and their superiors become dictators. But among you, it must not be like that! On the contrary, whoever among you wants to be a leader must be your servant; and whoever wants to be first among you must become everyone’s slave! For the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve — and to give his life as a ransom for many.”

How apt is that? As soon as you build a church and call a man pastor, you begin setting one believer above another. People start to think they’re supposed to kiss up to God’s special little secretaries instead of talking to their father directly. The whole system falls apart.

I can’t imagine having to live by the claptrap that comes from the mind of a grandstanding socialist pope or his homosexual employees. And the nonsense that comes from greedy charismatics is beneath spitting on.

Churches will come under legal regulation, right here in the USA. Anything resembling guidance from the Holy Spirit will be banned. You wait and see. This is what will happen, if churches are allowed to exist at all. When that time comes, going to church won’t be much better than going to a whorehouse. Satan will be able to control and/or ban churches, just as he does in China and Saudi Arabia. But he will never be able to control individuals. At least not to the point where you can’t pass the message on before being turned in by Siri or Alexa.

Satan is weak and small. He needs human organizations to propagate his authority. God can work through trillions of people simultaneously if he feels like it, with no physical communication between them at all.

The argument that Peters is a prophet is bolstered by his prediction that individuals will spread the gospel in the future. If he had said the pope would do it, I would have quit reading him, possibly after throwing up.

While I was looking at testimonies on Youtube the other day, I found a guy named Tom Fischer. He calls his outfit “Cardboard Box Church.” My best guess is that he and his wife ARE the ministry. He has a blog, and I don’t see any sign of a big building or TV cameras.

This couple walks around talking to people. They ask if they’re in pain. They ask about other health problems. Then they pray for people, or they command illnesses to go. They tell people Jesus loves them. Nothing controversial. Well, his work isn’t controversial unless you belong to “the only church founded by Jesus” or a religion that calls Jesus “May his name be blotted out forever.”

The people in the videos say they’re healed. BANG (I got tired of “BAM!”)! Are they really healed? You will have to ask them. I don’t know everything. Anyway, they do things like lifting crutches up and walking on feet that had been sore minutes earlier.

This is what Christianity is supposed to be. You tell people about God. You tell them he, not you, is the healer. You do what the Bible says Christians are supposed to do, i.e., you get people healed. You don’t beg for money. You don’t say, “Man, I need a jet.” You don’t stand in front of your church, like my last pastor, and tell members they have to give money to you on your birthday, along with cash to honor your dope-dealer son.

You can do individual ministry outdoors. You can do it at the mall. You can do it in your living room. It’s free. No equipment is required. You can even do it by yourself. Prayer, blessing, and cursing are ministry.

Fischer and his wife have videos where they heal people in Israel. That takes guts. The Orthodox are very hard on Christians and Jewish believers who talk to Jews in Israel. You can catch a beating. You may have rocks thrown at you. Being spat on is almost obligatory. And when you accost any Jewish person, anywhere, and mention Jesus, you’re likely to be cursed and called a Nazi. Somehow Christianity has become associated with an anti-Christian political faction, and no amount of logic can shatter the delusion.

It probably doesn’t help that the Hebrew word for Christians is “Notzrim,” which sounds like “Nazi” but is a reference to Nazareth.

I can’t imagine making headway with ANY Jewish person, let alone an Israeli inside Israel. I’ve known tons of Jewish believers, but no unbelieving Jew has ever shown the slightest interest in Jesus around me. I’ve had lots of Jewish friends who didn’t believe, and I went to school with hundreds of Jews, and not one has ever demonstrated any inclination to consider accepting Jesus. I don’t deal with Jews here in northern Florida, but back when I saw them from time to time, I didn’t bother trying to give them what I had. It’s astonishing to see the Fischers pull it off.

Forget Jews; I can’t even talk to Christians about God. They get angry. They become uncomfortable. They tell me they know everything already. I am the least effective evangelist on earth. I am singular. Talking to Jews about Jesus is something I consider impossible.

I’m getting off the topic. To return, I like the kind of ministry the Fischers have, and I know it’s the Christianity of the future. It’s unstoppable. Stopping a church is like forcing a bus to stop. Easy. Stopping billions of Christians is like trying to catch every raindrop before it hits the ground.

I love the way these healings take place. There is no fasting. No one cries or screams. People don’t walk around in circles, begging God to help. Fischer says things like, “Pain, go now, in the name of Jesus,” and that’s it. Very nice.

Imagine how different unbelievers and backsliders would feel if this is what they thought of when they thought of Christians. They’d see us as powerful, helpful people, not fat, crap-spewing leeches who make TV pulpits stink like gangrene. The characters who go on TV and pour vomit into our ears were put there by Satan, not God. They work for Satan. They drive intelligent people away.

I saw a video in which Fischer talks about President Trump. Fischer sounds like a yankee, and his wife has a Jewish first name, so one would not assume he was conservative. His video startled me, because he spoke in support of Trump. He has the same kind of concerns other serious Christians have. He sees censorship increasing. He’s against gun control. He talks about martial law. It’s amazing how the Holy Spirit invariably makes people more conservative.

Conservatism isn’t God’s answer to our problems. When separated from God, it’s carnal. But you can’t be led by the Holy Spirit and be anything but conservative. Liberalism is based on hatred of God combined with covetousness and pride. Leftism tries to make our stupid, cruel, unfair, greedy, incompetent government the messiah. It’s worse than a golden calf. A golden calf can’t take your money or force your kids to sit and listen to homosexual and anti-Christian indoctrination.

I feel like I’m burying myself when I write blog entries like this. I’m giving the devil’s people nails to drive into my coffin.

Imagine what would happen if I ran for office. Imagine me being offered any position of power. The freaks and witches would find my blog and republish excerpts all over the world. They would call it hate. The SPLC, a true hate group, would give me official recognition, simply for believing the Bible.

Right now, it’s legal to say the things I say. That won’t always be true, and there is no legal guarantee that I won’t be punished in the future, for future laws I’m breaking today. As of this minute, our system has a powerful bias against enacting laws that punish people for prior acts, but there is no reason that can’t change. Funny how no one ever talks about that. Our pundits are very obtuse about things that should be obvious. Remember the real estate crash? How many investing geniuses thought it would never come? And we still listen to them.

When the Soviets, who served Satan, went after the Christian Czar and his family, they didn’t give them a trial or think about the legality of the things they had done. They put them in a basement and fired pistols into their brains. When the leftists in Cambodia executed people for crimes such as reading and wearing glasses, no one was interested in prior laws. The statists in Nazi Germany and Austria punished and murdered people who had not committed crimes, and they even did it outside their own borders, to citizens of other countries.

Satan’s people are very efficient. They don’t believe in a God who punishes evil, and they think people are just smart monkeys without enduring spirits. They will kill us here, just as they have killed tens of millions overseas. They will kill us just as we run chickens through mechanized slaughterhouses. They’ve done it before.

The people who will do it are here already. They are your neighbors, coworkers, and relatives. A lot of parents will be turned in or even murdered by their children. Remember when Obama told kids to spy on their parents? That idea didn’t come from his own confused little mind. He didn’t build that. His master gave him a prompt.

Sometimes I think about all the religious and conservative personalities who tussle and quarrel openly with their Satanic counterparts. They feel safe, not because they think God looks out for them, but because they expect our laws to protect them. Big mistake. One day the Internet Wayback Machine, which preserves all sorts of material from the web, will be used to regurgitate evidence to be used at trials. Wait and see. Things people said that were legal in 2005 may get them hanged in 2025.

Fischer says something interesting, and I agree with it. He says the path is becoming narrower. Decades ago, Christians here could get by without real sanctification. As he notes, we like to say, “I am a work in progress,” instead of cleaning our lives up. That won’t fly in the future. You will have to know God personally in order to get protection. I know what it’s like, getting action from God. I’ve done it many times. I know how to lay the groundwork. It takes a long time. You can’t do it the minute the Climate Change Denier Einsatzgruppe pulls into your driveway in a stretch Prius.

Describing churches full of weak believers, Jesus said. “What a terrible time it will be for pregnant women and nursing mothers!” My old church, Trinity in Miami, taught people to stay in sin and worship money. Most of the people at Trinity will join Satan because they never belongd to God in the first place. They’re on Facebook now, promoting BLM, which is a Satanic movement. Most of those who won’t join Satan will be trampled and crushed, because they are corrupt, empty-headed, and feeble.

If you don’t know God personally and communicate with him throughout the day, you are running naked through an electrical storm, and you are not going to make it.

I keep watching Fischer’s videos. I hope I’m right about him. So far, he checks out, but I have made mistakes before.

Advance and be Ostracized

Now that I’m a game camera guy, I’m trying to improve my game camera game.

I started calling game cameras “trail cameras” because I saw other people using that term on the web, and then I found out “game camera” was right after all. Maybe smelly hippies are promoting “trail camera” because it has less of the scent of hunting, masculinity, whiteness, capitalism, and normal sexual orientation. I am not sure.

I went to Amazon and bought a cheap camera, and I got results with it. Then I found out I could have gotten considerably better video with a name brand. I feel like I need to upgrade already.

Here are some things you need to think about when you buy a game camera. They eat batteries, and batteries are not free, so look for one with good battery life. This varies so much, it may literally be worth it to pay three times as much for an efficient camera. Also, the illuminated area in infrared night shots may be small, so get a camera that gives you a whole frame to look at. Finally, ignore the 1080P claims and the megapixel claims. My camera has 1080P and a billion pixels, and it’s still grainy.

I’ll post some photos captured from video. I assume still photos would be much better.

This is a coon by my fence. This is not the whole frame. Only about half of the frame is illuminated.

This is a coyote by my fence. Pretty neat.

This is a fox that jumped on the fence. I didn’t know foxes were this coordinated. He jumped to the top of the fence with no problems, and then he stood there with no wobbling at all.

It looks like the big winners in the reasonably priced camera war are the Brownings. They make a couple of cameras called the Black Ops Pro and the Strike Force Pro, at around $150. They have great battery life. I put 8 new AA batteries in my camera, used it a couple of times, and then lost a night of video because the batteries were dead. The Brownings will go months on a set of batteries. I think you can see why I would be willing to pay more.

I don’t understand why game cameras don’t use wifi the way action cameras do. It would make checking them much easier. You can get full-blown cellular game cameras, but they cost a lot, and you have to have a good cell signal.

All of last night’s creature visits are lost because the camera’s batteries died. I found some old frozen pork in the fridge, so I put new batteries in the camera, put the pork by my fence, and turned the camera on. We’ll see what I get tonight. Whatever it is, it probably won’t be a herd of nocturnal Chassidic Jews.

I bought a portable blind. It’s an Ameristep Caretaker. What this really is, is a small tent made for hunting. It has openings you can shoot out of. It has room for two Adirondack chairs (you can see where I’m heading) and a cooler.

Cooler, scoped rifle, chairs, Christian music on the old Worktunes hearing protectors…I’ll have it made in the shade.

I told the cashier at the store it was too bad the blind didn’t work on people. She started telling me how great it was and how much she enjoyed hers. You have to love this town. Where else would a female cashier have her own blind?

Even if it doesn’t help me kill animals, I can set it up in my upstairs hideaway and have a cool fort, like the ones I made from couch cushions when I was a kid. There will be a secret password, and of course, no icky girls will be allowed, even if they threaten to tell on me. My sweet blind is a cooty-free zone.

You’re not cool enough to join my club, so don’t ask.

I still don’t have my hunting knife, and this strikes me as a good time to excoriate the Post Office. I ordered a knife and paid $15 for 2-day shipping. The Post Office had my phone number, and they were sending automatic texts, telling me about the status of the knife. This afternoon, they sent me a text saying they tried to deliver it and gave up because no one was here to sign for it. They didn’t say, “Help us get in.” They said, “We already left.”

Okay. You have my phone number. You’re at my gate. You have the intelligence to send me a text saying there’s a problem, but you’re too stupid to call me and ask me to come out and sign?

I think you see why I was upset.

They want me to drive 30 miles to pick it up. Nice. I called to see if they could relax the idiotic signature requirement. I couldn’t get through, so I told the computer to call me back. An extremely ghetto lady called and made it clear that she could do nothing at all for me and didn’t care at all whether I ever got the knife.

This is why the guy who founded FedEx is a billionaire. It also explains why postal employees have to wear bulletproof vests.

I don’t know if I’ll ever receive the knife, and I feel sure the $15 will never be refunded.

I had to deal with my dad’s medical chores today, so I didn’t get to shoot or do anything fun. Maybe tomorrow.

Goodbye. I will be in my fort, having a secret meeting. God help any animals that walk through the room.

Gearing up for Coon Armageddon

Here’s how it is.

Florida allows shooting coyotes, coons, possums, and a few other revolting creatures all year long. But there are rules (crazy!). You can shoot a coyote with just about anything, including a submachine gun, but if you want to shoot coons at night with a rifle, you have to use a .22. It can’t be a .22 WMR, either. A plain old .22.

I have a .22. Nice, dependable, accurate rifle. Problem: it won’t take a scope. It’s a Remington Nylon 66, and you pretty much have to take it apart and build a new one to make it hold a zero. The receiver cover flexes, and the scope mounts on it, so you can imagine the problems.

I need a .22 that will take a scope. Like, NOW.

I want a semiauto. Why? Because .22’s aren’t accurate, as firearms go. In better calibers, such as .270 or whatever, bolt action guns are more accurate than semiautos. In a .22, they probably aren’t. Guns are limited by ammunition, and .22 ammunition is not that great, so if you buy a well-made .22, you’re not going to get better performance. I think.

I can’t make .22 ammunition. Come to think of it, that’s one of its big limitations. Preppers think a .22 is the main thing a person will need when the world ends, but they won’t be able to get new ammunition after the apocalypse. Hmm.

I guess the same problem applies to other calibers. I can make my own .45 shells all day, and I can find a way to make bullets, but I still have to buy primers and powder, and eventually, I would need new brass.

Anyway, it’s not practical to create your own accurate .22 LR ammo.

The convenience and low cost of a semiauto outweigh whatever tiny increase in accuracy a bolt gun would provide. This is my opinion, and it could be wrong. I believe I would never be able to shoot at anything over 50 yards away (ethically) with a .22, regardless of how good the gun was, so might as well go semiauto.

I looked at .22’s, and I found three contenders stood out. The Ruger 10/22, the CZ something or other, and the Marlin 60. The CZ costs too much. The Ruger is super popular. It’s the AR15 of rimfires. There are a ton of accessories and so on for it. But the Marlin is supposedly a superior gun with a better barrel crown. The crown of a barrel determines how accurate a gun is. It’s the last thing a bullet sees on its way downrange.

Problem: the Marlin 60 is hard to find right now. Luckily, a retailer near me has some, so I plan to get in the car and snap one up.

I looked around and found that there are some above-average .22 loads out there. Norma makes one. Big surprise. It’s probably two dollars a round. Checking. No, it’s reasonable, but it’s not for hunting. Wolf makes very accurate .22 ammo, but it’s not for hunting, either. CCI has the one I want to try. Hollow points with high velocity. The high velocity means it will cycle in a semiauto (I hope), and the hollow points are good for inflicting tissue damage. They call these bullets “Stingers,” And they cost about 13 cents each. I am hoping this will turn out to be a suitable coyote round. It would solve all my varmint problems.

Gander Outdoors (formerly Gander Mountain) sells the Marlin 60 for $169, and they reopened their store here. They sell Stingers, so I will drop by and see what I can get.

Once I have this thing, I can move my UTG BugBuster scope to it, and God help the coons after that. I won’t be much use for anything far away, but I should be able to crack coon skulls at 50 yards like shelling peanuts.

I really want a night scope. If I get an ATN scope with an infrared illuminator, I’ll be able to annihilate coons and coyotes at night, record video, and post it on Youtube.

I’m thinking I should get a portable blind and a lawn chair. I can sit a ways off from the place where critters cross my fence, and I can pop them in the head in comfort.

In other news, I learned that Florida law has changed. Up until 2016, it was legal to go out in your backyard and shoot at cans, even if you had a quarter of an acre in Miami Beach. I’m sure this made for some hilarious interactions between fun-loving gun enthusiasts and incontinent, shrieking leftists who KNEW they were witnessing felonies. There must have been a lot of unproductive narking to the cops. “Wait; we have to stop calling you pigs for a minute so we can squeal on our neighbors.”

Now the law has changed. If your house is in an area which is primarily residential AND AND AND (not OR) has a residential density of over one dwelling unit per acre, you can’t just walk outside and shoot. There is a release valve, though. You can still have a home gun lane if you take reasonable precautions.

I suppose that’s okay. It appears to be a largely toothless way of telling shooters, “Don’t be an idiot.” Take precautions, and you can still exercise a remarkable degree of freedom.

The FWC site discourages people from shooting anywhere except at gun ranges. Unacceptable and fatuous. Gun ranges are expensive. They have rules that make certain types of practice impossible. They usually don’t have facilities that let you go beyond 100 yards. I don’t know why they would cause problems by telling people to go to ranges. It’s not practical, and when the government isn’t practical in its guidance, it foments disobedience.

They discourage practicing on public land where hunting is allowed. I can’t begin to say how stupid that is.

I used to shoot at Trail Glades, near Miami. It was crowded. It was a long distance from my house. I could not shoot at over 100 yards. I had to pay almost 10 bucks every time. I could not practice rapid fire, which is essential for self-defense (one of the two primary reasons for the Second Amendment). I was around people who made scary safety errors because they were sans clue. Sometimes I had to wait in line for a station. It was bad, and I didn’t go often. It adversely affected my skills and discouraged me from improving myself and from participating in shooting, which benefits the economy and makes us stronger as a nation.

No, sorry. I will not be going to a range any time soon, unless I need facilities I can’t create in my backyard.

It won’t be long before I’m on a bigger piece of land, and after that, everyone can kiss my…can do as they please without worrying about my pleasant shooting exploits.

I learned something else about the law in Florida. It’s a felony to shoot from a vehicle within 1000 feet of any person. I’m really glad I’ve never done that here, as far as anyone will ever know. I don’t really understand it. If I want to shoot targets from the shade of my truck, I don’t see what the problem is. But I’m all about respect for the law, no matter how ill-conceived and silly it is, so I won’t be doing it. As far as anyone will ever know.

I am off to buy another firearm and add to America’s gun woes. Stop me before I plink again.

More

I had to change the name of this entry. I somehow got it into my head that the Marlin .22 people recommend is the Marlin 66, but it’s actually the Marlin 60. I picked one up today. The name of the entry had “66” in it, and that made no sense, so I changed it.

Wolf in Hog’s Clothing

I feel like there are forces out there that only want me to have crap knives.

I decided I needed a sheath knife for hunting. I looked around and settled on a semi-custom job made from 440C stainless: the Entrek Javalina. It’s a 4.25″ knife that comes with a Kydex sheath.

I ordered it on February 23, and I splurged on expedited shipping. I think I paid $7 extra. I kept waiting to be told that had shipped, but the seller, Knife Country, didn’t make a peep.

I finally contacted them to ask what was going on, and all I got in return was a crummy cut and paste of the tracking number and order date. I wouldn’t buy another knife from them if it cost $5 and was forged by Vulcan himself.

The knife finally arrived today, 10 days after I ordered it. Yes, 10. That’s expedited. It arrived the day after squirrel season ended. I took it out of the box…and it was the wrong knife. It was an Entrek Wolf, which is a slightly larger knife with a finger groove and a tanto-style blade.

Talk about annoyed.

I don’t want a tanto blade. I’m not even a Lone Ranger fan. I want a blade with a curve to it, so I can sharpen it easily and cut skin without a lot of effort. I’m sending it back, and in my little Amazon form, I gave Knife Country a piece of my mind. I have to start over. It looks like I’ll end up taking 15 days just to get a danged knife.

The up side of all this is that a look at the Wolf forced me to overcome my prejudices and admit that a finger groove, which makes a knife look kitcheny, is a good thing. It will help prevent my hand from sliding up to the blade.

“Groove” is a knife-nerd misnomer. It’s really a semicircular concave area, not a groove.

The Javalina is a neat, old-school-looking knife, but I now want a finger groove, so I’m ordering a Beaver. Yes, that’s the name of the knife. I went from a filthy hog that roots around in the forest to a fat, waddling rodent with a name that makes immature people titter.

Who comes up with these names? Mr. Entrek’s wife?

The Wolf looks very nice. The blade is around 3/8″ thick, so I don’t think I would have to worry about snapping it on a really tough squirrel pelvis. The edge grind is not perfect, but it’s hand-finished, so you have to deal with little variations.

The knife looked very short when I took it out of the box, so I Googled around, and I saw that 4″ is pretty much standard for hunting knives. I think this is the smallest hunting knife I’ve ever seen. I guess they were bigger in the past, and then people got real and went for practicality, not flash.

I found out Amazon is not the place to get knives. Ebay sells the Beaver for $123, which is a whole lot less than Amazon.

I could build this knife for $60, including heat treating. That hurts. But my belt grinder is in Miami. I don’t have the best tools to shape the blade. Also, there are supposedly tricks to heat treating, so maybe the folks at Entrek know more than whoever I would end up sending it to for treatment.

The blade on the Beaver is bead-blasted, which is not something I like. You can always polish a damaged smooth surface. Once bead-blasting is messed up, you’re done. And I will mess it up. Count on that.

I also have a new folder on the way. I used to carry a Gerber Gator II, which is a really fine knife for people who enjoy sharpening. It’s made from 420HC steel. You can only harden 420HC to about Rockwell 52. I think plastic forks are Rockwell 53. A good knife will be Rockwell 58+. The Gator had a great shape and a wonderful handle, but it got dull every time I used it. I want a knife of roughly the same size, except not junk.

Gerber used to make very, very nice knives. Now Gerber is the new Camillus. If you don’t know how insulting that is, try a Camillus knife. They used to sell them at drug stores. Gerber uses bad steel because it’s cheap.

I tried to find a nice folder in 440C, but it’s not that popular, because knife makers love trendy new steels. I learned that Cold Steel now has a steel called CTS-XHP. I don’t know what it is. I’ve had two little Cold Steel folders, and they were fantastic. I carried the first one for years, and then I lost it and replaced it. It always looked brand new. Weird.

Cold Steel used to use something called AUS8, which is supposed to be slightly less good than 440C, but similar to it. In 2015, they moved to CTS-XHP, which is an American-made wonder steel. AUS8 is Japanese, except for the Chinese version.

Cold Steel put out a crazy video to show why they switched. They took a folder made from AUS8 and used it to chop manila rope. They got it to cut over 1400 times before it got dull. Then they tried CTS-XHP, and they had to quit when they got past 6000 cuts. The guys who were testing the knives were getting sore.

I decided to order a Cold Steel CTS-XHP folder. Then I learned they’re moving to a different steel because CTS-XHP is hard to obtain. Great. I’ll fall in love with this knife, and then when I lose it and replace it, I won’t be able to get the same steel.

If you think you want to try this steel, this is the time to buy a Cold Steel knife, because old stock won’t last forever. The steel they’re using now isn’t as good. How do I know that? Because Cold Steel would still be using CTS-XHP if they could get it.

I hate, hate, hate bad steel. It’s okay for a cheap kitchen knife you can sharpen in 15 seconds, but not for a carry knife that cuts things tougher than tomatoes and celery. There is no excuse for bad steel, and there is no excuse for trying to make people think crap steel is good.

Knife makers are really sleazy about steel. Buck pimps 420HC like it’s a miracle metal, but they use it because they’re stingy, not because it’s good. I’ve seen companies brag about their 440A knives, hoping to make people think it’s like 440C. It’s not; 440A is soft garbage.

You are bored now. I understand that. I don’t care, though.

Entrek knives are probably very good. The one I’m sending back looks indestructible. I guess we’ll find out. I’ll also report on the Cold Steel I ordered.

Wonder what they’ll send me this time.

Fined and Dandy

I finished today’s first prayer session around an hour ago, the breakfast dishes are still with me, and I already have some testimony.

I’ll tell you about the problem I was facing down in Dade County.

I manage my dad’s properties. One is a warehouse. Years ago, someone who was in charge of it did some work. He submitted plans and got a permit, and then he did whatever he wanted. Last year, the fire inspector noticed this, and we were warned that we would eventually be cited. This problem applied to 6 units, so several other owners were on the hook.

I talked to the inspector, and I could not get straight answers out of her. She made it sound like she wasn’t even sure there would be a citation. I was told that the condo association was working on it, and that whoever was in charge of citations would issue a ruling some day.

This dragged on for a few months. That inspector left, and she was replaced with a lady who barely speaks English. I know that sounds incredible, but Dade Couny is like a foreign country. I really mean it’s like a foreign country. I’m not being cute or exaggerating.

I called her and spoke to her, and I didn’t understand her at all. I understood her to say a citation had been issued. We had received a confusing notice. She said to call a third inspector. I put that off for maybe three weeks because I was working with everyone to get the buildings fixed.

Last week the tenants flipped out because the third inspector told them they could have a problem with their occupational license. My realtor contacted me, and we went back and forth.

I had contacted the third inspector about paying the fine, and he had sent me a link to a site that allowed people to pay for inspections (not fines). I paid, and I didn’t see any fines listed. I assumed everything went through one site. I thought that was the end of it. Eventually, I learned that the fine had been multiplied by a large number, with no notice to me. And I had no idea how to pay it, even though I had been contacting the department and asking them.

This was not a catastrophic fine, but it was very, very high. I had received no notice that the fine was increasing, so I was very disturbed.

I believe the problem is that the department held the tenants responsible and sent them all the communications. I didn’t understand that until last week. Anyway, it seemed crazy for the department to pay for its new fleet and headquarters off of one minor violation, with no warning to the citizen being fined.

I should have paid immediately, but the misleading conversations I had with the inspectors led me to believe I could wait and settle up when the dust cleared. I didn’t realize the fine fell under the heading of code enforcement. I had a code issue a couple of years back, and the city threatened to fine my dad $150 per day over something. If I had understood that the fire people worked the same way, I would have kept them on the phone every day until I had gotten the fire fine fixed.

I sent the inspector a bunch of emails on Friday, and on my own, I found a second site where the fine was listed. I paid the original fine, minus the penalties, just to show good faith.

I was stressed out all weekend, in spite of the supernatural tools God has given me to fight worry. One of my shortcomings is that when God gives me weapons, I often won’t use them the way I should. I should have spent much more time in prayer this weekend. I did pretty well, but I should have done better. Every problem–I don’t care what it is–will eventually respond to prayer in tongues. I learned that a long time ago, but I still slack off.

While I was praying this weekend, I thanked God over and over for the ordeal I was going through. Things like this always improve me. I do not enjoy them, but they never fail to produce a harvest.

Last night my friend Amanda said she would pray about the problem. She didn’t know any details. I was glad to hear she was praying. She gets very good results. In particular, she keeps getting burns healed.

Today after prayer, I found I had a voicemail. The inspector, who had been so hard to get information out of in the past, had left me a message. He said I needed to pay the initial fine (he hadn’t checked), and that they would work with me on the penalty.

Case dismissed. Back to Defcon 5. Whatever they end up charging us won’t be anything like what they threatened us with.

God does what he says he will do, and he fixes problems we create and exacerbate.

I can’t tell you how many times things like this have happened to me. I should know better than to get upset. I do know better. That doesn’t always stop me.

God has given me several words concerning worry. They have come to me over the years. One is, “Worry is the voice of Satan.” Another is, “There is nothing good about worry.” A lot of people think worrying makes them righteous, but the Bible says faith is accounted unto us as righteousness, and we know faith kills worry, so how can worry make you righteous? It’s a sick idea.

Today I got another one: “Worry is not allowed in here.” The word “here” refers to my mind and heart. That was helpful.

To understand how these phrases work, you have to repeat them to yourself several times during prayer. They make supernatural energy well up in me. I can feel it. If you just read them on a screen, they look stupid. If they don’t impress you, it’s because you haven’t put them to work.

I got another interesting word today, and I’m sure it won’t impress: “I am a living thing.” What this means is that I am always changing. I never remain the same. I improve or I rot. I can’t stand still. This is a very Biblical idea. Think of manna. If you eat it the same day you receive it, it’s good. If you try to save it and eat it the next day, you find it’s full of worms. You’re not supposed to stay in the same place and cling to the same solutions all the time. You have to grow and increase and receive new things.

I can’t remember how this applies to the situation I’ve been dealing with. Sorry about that.

I wish I could offer a testimony about how I did everything right because God had made me a great person, instead of one about him fixing my screwups, but I am still not perfect yet. Check back with me in a month. Surely it won’t take any longer than that.

In other news, my hunting knife is supposed to arrive today. Squirrel season ended yesterday. I hear tiny high-pitched giggles coming from the front yard.

I found some nice squirrel feeders on Amazon, so the giggling should come to an abrupt stop when squirrel season starts in October. In the meantime I have to figure turkeys out.