Seven Months of Rest for Insolent Rodents

Today was the last day of squirrel season. Technically it’s still on. I can run outside and spend the next few minutes trying to kill one in the dark.

I didn’t really expect to get anything. I went out with 2 shells in my gun and a grocery bag in my pocket. My main objective was to check the trail camera to see if it had filmed whatever is crawling under my fence.

I wandered down the fence line, and when I got near the camera, I saw two squirrels playing grab-ass in a tree, maybe 10 feet from the tree the camera was strapped to. I was not all that game for squirrel butchering, but the season was ending, so I decided to look for a shot.

Here is what I THINK I’ve learned about squirrels. If you really want to kill them, put up a feeder and give the squirrels a few months to get used to it. Then get yourself a lawn chair and a cooler and have fun. I suspect that the second-best method is to get a portable blind or a ghillie suit and sit in the woods like a stone. They show up eventually. My method, which doesn’t work very well, is to walk around until I see a squirrel make a mistake. Then I plug him.

The squirrels I saw today made mistakes.

The first one fell out of the tree. That’s kind of pathetic. Squirrels are known for their agility and coordination, so watching one miss a jump, plummet 40 feet, and hit the ground like a ripe coconut was an odd experience.

It ran to another tree and positioned itself around three feet up, halfway concealed. I was not going to shoot at half a squirrel. I pictured three pellets going into it and leaving it thrashing and generally being upsetting on the forest floor. I moved around toward it to get it to move, and it disappeared. I found there was a big hole in the base of the tree, so I knew where the squirrel was. I wished him good day and went after the other one. I was not going to sit out there for an hour waiting for him to come out.

A real hunter would have plopped down and waited, but this is me we’re talking about.

The squirrel’s buddy was still upstairs, thinking I couldn’t see it hiding behind a skinny branch.

I kept thinking about the nervous lady with the neurotic horses. The one who called out to me and asked me annoying questions about shooting. I really, really did not want pellets landing anywhere near her farm. There would have been an international crisis. I kept walking around the tree, trying to make the squirrel show me more fur. Eventually I got a good angle and popped him. Down he came.

He flopped and kicked a bit. I wanted to make sure he wasn’t suffering, but I also didn’t want to be bitten by an enraged squirrel with hot shotgun pellets in its butt, so I gave it a few seconds, and he stopped moving. When I looked him over, I saw that at least one pellet had gone through his eyeball. He probably died instantly. That was good news.

I truly need a .22 sidearm to help squirrels drift off to happy land. The 10mm would have left a gaping hole in the ground surrounded by fur.

I like hunting, but the lady next door has taken some of the shine off of it. I would have a whole lot more squirrels but for her. I think I work way too hard and give up too many opportunities to keep her quiet.

Today I realized there was good news. Squirrels live high in trees where shooting them without dropping rounds on the neighbors takes effort, but everything else I plan to shoot stands on the ground. That means this lady can blow it out…it means she will no longer have any reason to converse with me regarding ballistics.

I make her sound like Mrs. Kravitz from Bewitched had a baby with Rosie O’Donnell, but she may be a nice person for all I know.

Too many granola-heads get involved with horses. My grandparents and their siblings rode horses and mules for transportation. They didn’t enter them in ridiculous shows or confuse them with unicorns.

Now that squirrel season is done I have more observations about hunting.

I am now aware that hunting season interferes with life. When it’s 7 a.m. and I have a choice between doing something responsible and killing a rodent in a tree, I will generally choose the latter. In this regard, I have sunk to the level of sports fans. I don’t want to be like the annoying men all over America who keep the TV blasting during every sports season and never talk to their wives or kids. But I may be headed that way.

I wonder how many lawns in my area will, tomorrow, be mowed for the first time in several weeks.

Also, I now look at just about every living creature I see as though I were trying to shoot it. I think about distance and whether I could make the shot. I wonder which weapon would work. AK-47 for a dwarf donkey, or just a .22 behind the ear?

I am not actually interested in shooting, say, a yippy little dog with pink toenails, standing next to a heavyset lady at Home Depot. Hmmm…maybe I am. No I’m not. But once you start looking at animals with the intention of shooting them, you develop a habit.

I guess this will be disturbing, but I can see how hunting would prepare someone to shoot people. When you aim at a squirrel, you have to get over a sympathy hump before you can pull the trigger, and presumably, the ability to get over that hump would carry over to people if you were in a situation where you had to shoot. Also, butchering warm mammals probably lowers your resistance to inflicting harm on people. I don’t mean these things make you heartless or cruel, but they would help you control yourself in certain difficult situations.

Today I shot a cute little animal through the eyeball, and then I made a big cut over his anus, grabbed his tail and feet, and pulled his fur and head off. After that, I slit him down the belly, split his sternum, reached in, grabbed his esophagus and windpipe, and pulled his heart, lungs, intestines, and whatever else out. Things like that are not easy to do the first time around. It’s not like preparing a nice, clean, gutted, hairless pig from the slaughterhouse.

I’ll tell you what. If society continues to get more polarized and city dwellers start oppressing the rest of us, they really REALLY don’t want to come out here and challenge us physically. Nothing short of full-blown military action could save them. People out here are ready for trouble. Concealment. Long-distance marksmanship. Tracking. Trapping. Silent weapons. Automatic surveillance that works at night. Night vision. Night scopes. There are a lot of people in the country whose skills are dangerously close to those required by guerrillas.

In reality, may of the skills are identical. And people are not as tough, elusive, or aware as game.

I am not the greatest marksman on earth, but I was thinking about it the other day, and I feel better about my skills. I am now capable of shooting rifles with roughly 1 MOA accuracy. I didn’t feel like it was a huge deal when I crossed that threshhold, but I’ve been considering it. It’s not bad!

Imagine you’re in the end zone at a football game, and someone draws a circle around a quarter in the other end zone, and you shoot 5 holes in it without missing. That’s what I did the other day. In the movies, you see make-believe-playing Hollywood fops shooting small targets hundreds of yards away in difficult conditions, but that’s all BS. Those things don’t actually happen. Shooting well is hard. In real life, hitting a quarter you can’t even see without a scope is decent marksmanship.

If you take 50 average guys out of a crowd and give them their choice of the finest rifles on earth, most would be lucky to hit a dinner plate one time out of 10 at that distance. I remember shooting next to a guy in Miami. at 100 yards. He was a good shot, and he had a high-dollar .308 with all the Magpul doodads and whatnot, and he was proud as he could be to shoot 2 MOA. He was bragging about it. I got that beat.

At the time, I thought he was great, but that was before I got it together and bought a gun that worked.

If I can shoot well at 100 yards, I can shoot well at 1000. I just need to find places to shoot and do my homework, so I can learn about wind and other problems. I may never make the Olympics, but with a little effort, I can become a very bad person to mess with. And rural areas are full of people who are way ahead of me.

I used to shoot at pistol ranges, and most people have a hard time keeping all their shots on a target two feet wide. Most people shoot rifles so badly, I seriously feel they should not be allowed to hunt at distances over 50 feet, in order to keep it humane. But that was Miami. A city full of people who came from countries where their grandparents didn’t know one end of a gun from another. People in rural America have been shooting well for hundreds of years.

Next time I get the .17 HMR out, I need to move back to 200 yards and get to work. I have nothing more to learn at 100 yards. If it were in a clamp, the rifle would only shoot slightly better than I shoot now. I need to move back until my groups open up so I’ll be able to see what needs to be fixed.

I almost wish I had used the shotgun all season long. It really brings the squirrels down. I have only missed with it once, and that was a long shot. I didn’t now how much the pellets would drop, and I guessed wrong. The .17 HMR will kill them at greater distance, but it tears them up, and the bullets travel too far. The air rifle is hard to shoot, so I’m not ready to use it full time.

I have a lot to learn, outside of the gun stuff. How to sneak up on game. When to hunt. Where to hunt. How to read poop and tracks. How to bait game. How to get a full cooler of beer into a tree stand.

Fun stuff. I look forward to it. I guess I need to start studying turkeys YESTERDAY and look into decoys or whatever else I need to fool them.

There are special seasons for bowhunters. Is that worth getting into? Sounds like an exercise in self-abuse, but it would be good to have longer seasons. I can’t believe there are people who kill squirrels with bows. I’m lucky to get within 50 feet of one, and they’re very small.

I’m glad I’m learning these skills.

My knife never arrived, so I had to dismantle today’s squirrel with a filet knife and Fiskars pruning shears. It should arrive tomorrow, exactly one day after the last day when I needed it for squirrels. I think it’s safe to say I will never buy anything from Knife Country again, unless I develop an irrational fear of receiving things quickly.

As of tomorrow, I will have to walk right by disrespectful squirrels and do nothing. As if they have some kind of right to exist. That will be tough. But I’ll be installing a squirrel feeder ASAP, so as Mr. Burns said to Homer Simpson, “We’ll see who eats WHOSE shorts.”

Enjoy the grub, boys. It’s going to end up feeding me, too.

Soon the HAL 9000 Will be Picking Out Your Ties

Lots to think about today. It’s generally God-related, so you can’t say you weren’t warned.

First off, I keep feeling a pressing need to confess and criticize myself. I keep having prayer sessions in which I struggle very hard to dig up the worst dirt on myself I can remember. It’s a little nauseating. It makes me wonder if other people are as bad as I am. Part of me hopes they are, which is perverse.

Every person has areas of sin in his life. It’s not hard to put names on them. Lust. Greed. Dishonesty. They’re all bad, but for me, some are harder to think about than others. I don’t know how other people see sin, but for me, sins of cowardice and cruelty are the most embarrassing. They are hard to discuss with God, even though I know he knows all about them before I speak, and they are hard for me to think about.

Between cowardice and cruelty, cruelty is harder to confront. I’m not a serial killer, but I have done some really evil things during my life. They stand out like beacons in the landscape of my past. Like arrest warrants with sirens and flashing lights.

I’ve always known that people, including me, were evil, but I tried not to dive into my personal muck too deeply, and I felt that I was okay, at least by human standards. When I have these sessions with God, though, I wonder how he can want to save me. If I saw someone else doing certain things I’ve done, I would be appalled.

I suppose I would not consider them unworthy of the effort it would take to change them. I know that’s true, because I know people who have done terrible things. I don’t marvel that God would want to save them. I would tell them it doesn’t matter what they’ve done. Murder, child molestation, animal cruelty…I would tell them God is ready to accept anyone who applies. That must be true for me, too.

I know Christians–even those baptized with the Holy Spirit–have demons. Living in a flesh body is a little like driving a school bus full of brats. You have to exercise authority while continuously being challenged and told what to do. When you accept the baptism with the Holy Spirit, he boards the bus, but he doesn’t necessarily ride alone.

I believe that when you refuse to confront your iniquities–your evil inclinations–and tell God about them, you give demons passes. They can say, “We’re allowed to be here. The driver says it’s okay.” I believe it’s important to go through the deworming process. Otherwise, the Holy Spirit sits in the back and lets you and your demons do what you want. I believe it limits his participation in your life.

I have less peace than I want. I think it’s because God showed me how to succeed, and I turned away. Thirty years ago, he told me I needed to pray in tongues a lot every day, and I let it go. I didn’t have the full understanding of it, but that doesn’t excuse me. You’re not supposed to base your obedience on consequences. You obey, whether you understand the consequences or not. If you know you’re supposed to do something, and you don’t do it, you’re guilty. God isn’t obligated to give you an explanatory brochure every time he gives you counsel.

I should have spent these years getting cleaned up, but I spent about 17 of them doing as I pleased. I rarely prayed in tongues. I went entire days without praying at all. I think I tried to be “good” by the world’s standards. I tried not to do things that made other people suffer. I didn’t do a great job. Living by the world’s rules doesn’t make you a moral, disciplined person.

My best guess is that during my time away, I was collecting spirits and feeding them. I was holding the shackles steady while they welded them shut. Now I’m going through a long regurgitation process which would have been much shorter and easier had I listened in the first place.

Some people say that God will eventually show every second of our lives to everyone who has ever existed. Could you stand that? I wonder if anyone would still want to speak with me if everyone knew everything I’ve done, thought, and felt.

Here is what Psalm 32 says:

Blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered.

Blessed is the man unto whom the Lord imputeth not iniquity, and in whose spirit there is no guile.

When I kept silence, my bones waxed old through my roaring all the day long.

For day and night thy hand was heavy upon me: my moisture is turned into the drought of summer. Selah.

America is full of feel-good churches that teach people to ignore their iniquities. How can you be healed if you don’t let the doctor look at the pus? Why are we so afraid of accepting responsibility? We already know God will forgive us, so why not get it over with?

The answer is that preachers are terrified of losing their audience. They love money. Some want to impress their superiors and keep their jobs. Some measure themselves by attendance figures. They look for ways to rationalize flattery and denial. It’s not a mystery.

There is a martial art called aikido. One of the principles is that it’s good to use your opponent’s momentum against him. It can be difficult to stop a hostile person’s movements, but if you can find a way to direct those movements so they cause your opponent to fall or whatever, you can save a lot of energy and effort. The devil uses the same approach. If he can’t lure you to do something new, he can always find the bad things you’re already doing and remove the obstacles.

Flattery is poison. Look what happens to celebrities. Look at Elvis and Michael Jackson. They probably never heard the word “no” after they turned 20. They ended up dressing in costumes, like superheroes. They became completely disconnected from reality. They behaved like spoiled gods. Like Will Smith’s son.

Flattery destroyed them, and it can destroy you, too. The devil saw what these men wanted to do, and he gave them the power to do it. He took away wise counsel and surrounded them with yes-men. After that, he didn’t have to do much at all.

I wonder what my life will be like after I endure most of the major cleaning that has to be done. I assume there will be more peace. It’s hard to imagine that while you’re in the middle of the process.

Let’s change the topic. Here’s something else: I read a strange testimony from a guy named Ken Peters. I am not endorsing him. I don’t know enough about him to do that. In 1980, he had a couple of long, detailed dreams about the end of the world. You can read a transcript of his remarks about them. It’s sobering.

Before I get to the details of his dreams, I want to write about his background. He said he didn’t know the Bible very well, that he knew nothing about prophecy, and that he had not accepted Jesus personally…because he was a “practicing Catholic.” Is that really how it works? I know Catholicism is a mess, but he makes it sound worse than I thought.

Here’s an excerpt:

At the time I received this dream I was not even a believer in Jesus Christ. I was raised in the Catholic Church but had never personally invited the Lord Jesus to come into my heart to be my Lord. As a practicing Catholic, I had no knowledge of what the Bible said about the tribulation period or any of the events of the last days.

Chilling. The Catholic Church is very, very big.

He said his exposure to the Bible was mainly composed of little passages that were read aloud in church services. Apparently, no one shoved a Bible into his hands and told him to read it. Can that be true? Even the worst charismatic preacher will tell you to read the Bible. This is fundamental. The notion of a Christian who doesn’t read the Bible is unthinkable in charismatic churches. I would guess that most Protestants outside of the Episcopal church have the same attitude.

If you aren’t familiar with the Bible, you are a zero as a Christian. You don’t know what you believe. You don’t know whom you believe in. You don’t know where you came from. You have no idea what’s going to happen in the future. You’re probably going to hell, because a valid decision to accept salvation is an informed decision. You can’t tell God you accepted Jesus because Mom said you had to.

Talking to Christians who don’t read the Bible is like talking to foreign spies pretending to be Americans. Imagine a spy who speaks English perfectly but doesn’t know our laws or our customs. When you mention Biblical ideas to such Christians, you get one blank look after another.

I hope Peters was exaggerating.

As for not knowing Jesus on any personal level, I don’t think it’s possible to be saved and not know him. How can you give your heart to him sincerely if you don’t feel he’s there?

Christianity is a relationship with a living God who communicates with you. If you don’t have that, you need to ask God for it, because you’re in trouble. He didn’t just dump us here, like unwanted toddlers in day care, and say he would send a Salvadoran nanny to pick us up. He is right here with us. He said he would never leave or forsake us. His presence is always available.

You can be baptized and go to hell. You can think you’re a Christian and go to hell. Look at the Mormons. You better be careful not to trust your church’s authorities too much. God won’t listen when you try to blame them for your lack of salvation.

A lot of people who say they’ve had visions of hell say it’s full of Christians. That is true. I know it’s true, because there are entire churches full of unrepentant homosexuals. There are gay churches. You can’t get salvation while deliberately building your life around a sin.

Ken Peters, who did not know what the rapture was or what the book of Revelation said, told a disturbing story.

First, he said a horn blew, certain graves flew open, and people ascended into the air and disappeared. That would be unnerving, especially for the people who witness it and realize they’ve made the wrong choices.

He also said there was a two-week period during which everything was disrupted. Broadcasting was disrupted, for example. He didn’t see living people rise into the air, but if all the strong Christians involved in broadcasting, transportation, and so on vanished, a hiatus of chaos is exactly what you would expect to see.

He said he saw an old man who was evangelizing. This man had screwed up as a Christian, but he had repented after the horn blew, and he was helping others. Peters accepted real salvation, not a fake version endorsed by a blind church, and started following him. Side note: Peters is a real Christian today, and he pastors a church.

A new global government formed under a mesmerizing leader. Eventually, the government captured Peters, his wife, the evangelist, and various Christians. At first, they used gentle persuasion to push them to renounce Jesus. When Peters and his wife refused, they were fastened to a table and beheaded with a sword. They preached until the end. The man with the sword put it down and said he was done killing Christians. That happened at the end of the dream.

If you know the Bible at all, you know the Revelation mentions Christians who have been beheaded for their testimony. It’s not something Ken Peters invented. He said the sword looked like the swords on Shriners fezzes. In other words, a sword like those used by Muslims. He dreamed this in 1980, when Islam was not the huge threat that it is today.

As I understand it, in the Bible, the end of the current age works like this:

1. The rapture occurs. Serious Christians are taken, and the rest are left here.
2. Suffering and catastrophe increase in the world.
3. Salvation will still be available, but if you receive it, you will be killed unless you renounce it.

Of course, there are a lot of other details. But as far as avoiding hell goes, that’s the important stuff. My understanding is that it’s much better to get on board now than to be left behind and face increased persecution.

My own dream of the rapture was shorter, and it was symbolic, not literal. I was sitting in my grandparents’ living room, on the floor with my legs crossed. In front of me on the floor was a small dish of poisoned rat bait pellets. My mother was sitting in a recliner in the corner. She was wearing jeans. Work clothing. As far as I know, she never owned clothes like that as an adult. No one else was there.

Our family no longer owns the house, and my grandparents and my mother are dead. This is why I say the dream was not literal. I believe what happened to us in the dream is what will happen to people during the rapture, but obviously, my mother and I won’t be in that room on that day.

I heard a horn. The pitch was low but well within the range of human hearing. It made the entire earth vibrate. I knew with certainty that it could be heard everywhere in the world. I knew the horn itself was thousands of miles away. I felt it was behind me. Given my position, that would have been to the northwest.

I wasn’t afraid, but I felt completely sobered. I knew what was happening was as serious as anything could be.

Three things started to rise: me, the dish of rat bait, and my mother. We were buoyed up toward the ceiling, and we were on our way through it when I woke up.

I was glad the world, in its current state, was over. I felt a great sense of adventure. I felt relief. I also felt that it was an event of global moment, and that there would be astounding consequences for mankind.

Peters mentioned some strange things in his dream.

He said televisions would watch people for the government. In 1980, that was impossible, but it’s happening today. Some TV’s are connected directly to the web. Some have cameras, which is ridiculous.

My TV has an LED screen. Your TV probably uses LED’s too. An LED is a light-emitting diode. Run current through one, and it lights up. Interesting thing: an LED also senses light. You can use them to detect it. I’m not great with electronics, but even I know that it should be easy to make a camera using a grid of LED’s and a lens. For all I know, that’s what’s inside a smartphone camera.

One wonders what kind of visual information an LED TV could gather if it were programmed the right way.

Peters said the government kept track of the locations of all vehicles in his dream. Light posts had cameras mounted on them. We already have that. The government puts some of them out there where we can see them, making no effort to hide them. Other sensors have been put in place quietly, with no explanation.

I think the government knows where most vehicles are, all the time. There are too many sensors and cameras, and there aren’t that many roads. You can’t make your own road. Wherever you go, you have to drive by equipment installed by the government. I think that when a crime occurs and the cops really need to find someone, government nerds know where that person is, and they look for ways to get the info to the cops without letting the public know the capability exists.

He said the government would be able to find us whenever it wanted. That day is almost here, and the technology is focusing on us even when we’re just walking around. You can put a few cameras in a mall or stadium, connect them to computers with facial-recognition software, and make lists of the people who show up.

The government is too stupid and cruel to have this much information.

I don’t know if Peters is a flake or a prophet, but I thought people might want to know about him and read what he said.

I believe the end is right around the corner. Technology is destroying free will. When you can’t do anything without being discovered, you have no free will. Without free will, there is no sin, and there is no righteousness. We will live under coercion.

That’s not God’s style. He needs free will in order for his system to work. Free will is so important, he prefers putting people in hell and roasting them to taking free will away. He could fix is so we never sin, but he doesn’t. The concept of sin makes no sense without free will. Measuring the righteousness of people who can’t sin is like putting an altimeter in a car.

When free will is gone, there will be no reason for the world to go on existing, so the end will come quickly.

I don’t see how it could take even 10 years. I see that as an outside limit. That’s not prophecy. That’s just me, not being totally obtuse.

It would be nice if it were true (from my standpoint), because I don’t like aging. I am not in a hurry to get cataracts, wear diapers, and be unable to carry my own groceries. I like having teeth, too.

Leftists want to do away with free will. They want to be free to take drugs, indulge in obscenity, and have whatever kind of sex they like, but other than that, they are happy to plug into the Matrix and be told what to do. Strange people.

How can anyone trust the government that much? I don’t know a single human being I would trust as much as leftists trust the government. They trust the government far more than Christians trust God.

Do you ever think about how awful the future could be, when you watch sci-fi shows? Think about TNG.

In TNG, there is no money. Okay; how do you get things you want? Obviously, you must have to ask for it. So everyone in the future is a beggar. Mommy, can we buy this cereal? Mommy, can I have these LED shoes? Yeah, that would feel great, for an adult.

Whom do you ask? What if they say no? What if some crooked person persuades them to give stuff to them instead of you?

What if you want to buy a house? What if you want to travel to another galaxy?

Are you allowed to buy and sell? How can you do that without money? What if you want to Craigslist a couch? What if you want to teach piano and charge for it? Do you have to barter? Would you require students to bring you groceries instead of money?

In TNG, it’s very hard for people to hide. They have scanners to find you. If you work for Star Fleet, you have to wear a doodad that broadcasts your location and acts as a phone. What if you’re fed up and you need a few hours by yourself? Do you have to ask permission? What if they say no?

In TNG, they used to beam people up and down without permission. Know what the law calls that? “Kidnapping.” It’s a major felony. In Florida, if you try to kidnap me, I’m allowed to blow your brains out. It’s bad. Imagine living in a world where the government can reach out and suck you out of your beach chair and into jury duty, while simultaneously extracting a fine from “your” bank account.

Gene Roddenberry was a feckless atheist leftist, so naturally, he never thought about the unintended consequences of creating his utopian society. He should have read Orwell.

When I was in grad school trying to become a physicist, I knew a guy whose students called him “Fridge.” He was a very serious guy, but likeable. A little weird. He had no furniture. He said he did his copious homework standing up with his back against a wall, holding a clipboard.

Fridge left the Navy to study physics. He had to struggle to get out. Evidently, the Navy doesn’t have to let you go just because you ask. If you do a good job, like Fridge, they will reward you by holding onto you with a death grip. I asked him how he did it. He said, “I enforced the rules.”

He was in a position sort of like a quartermaster. When things had to be obtained or shipped, papers landed on his desk. Before he decided to leave the Navy, he would work to get things through. The rules were idiotic and restrictive, so he had to bend them all the time in order to make the system work. When the Navy refused to let him go, he stopped bending the rules. He observed them to the point of madness. “This has to be in blue ballpoint. Send it back.” “This has to be in triplicate, not duplicate. Send it back. It’s 5:01. My shift ended one minute ago. Talk to me on Monday.” You can imagine.

The system crashed. Things didn’t go where they were needed. Everyone hated him. They wanted his guts on a stick. He got his discharge. It’s a hilarious story.

It shows what will happen when free will disappears entirely. If we couldn’t break the rules, the world would jam up like a lawnmower with 5-minute epoxy in the engine.

I know another guy, an electrical engineer, who got out of the Navy by pretending to be an alcoholic. Now he’s a lawyer. He told the Bar what he did, and they let him in anyway.

Not relevant, but interesting.

I think things are drawing to a close. It makes me wonder what I should do. Should I still think about moving farther north? Is there any point in ever talking to a woman again, given that we could be raptured the day after I propose? Should I invest?

I’ll put those things in God’s hands, because I have no idea what to do.

I love it here, but I would like to have a year in Appalachia before the curtain falls.

Final thing: God told me something interesting today. When people give you things voluntarily, there are only two explanations. They’re being generous, or they want something from you. Disturbing.

I had a lot to think about when I got up, and now that I’ve written about all of it, it’s your problem. Enjoy the rest of the day.

Overstuffed Preachers Exceed Their Authority

Yesterday I found out I made an error managing one of my dad’s properties, and it’s going to cost some money. Not happy about that. I felt tense about it when I went to bed, and I woke up early in the morning and started praying.

I used to pray for God to make me feel better at times like that, but these days, I ask him to let me feel what I need to feel, and I ask him to change me so I don’t have these problems in the future. It’s better to be housetrained than to wear a diaper.

As wonderful as prayer is when you feel God’s presence, sometimes you feel like doing something else for a spell. I got out my phone and looked around to see if there was anything uplifting to read. I came up against a brick wall.

I looked at a couple of websites run by preachers. I used to find them comforting and illuminating. This time, I could tell there was nothing there for me. I felt like I was looking at the locked doors of unfriendly houses.

One site was Perry Stone’s. He has received a vast amount of knowledge from God, and he shares it all the time. It’s good stuff for any Christian to listen to. For example, he does an exceptional job, connecting the Old Testament and the New Testament. I’m underselling him here. You would have to watch his videos and read his books to understand.

I’ve benefited a lot from Perry Stone’s teaching, but I don’t pay much attention to him now. He has some blind spots. He teamed up with Steve Munsey, my favorite seedy prosperity preacher. Munsey teaches all sorts of garbage in order to get people to give him money. Seeing Perry Stone promote his filth was saddening, because it exposed a big hole in Stone’s discernment.

I took a look at Andrew Wommack’s site. He has a lot of insights that seem to come from God. On the other hand, he says you can’t be blessed financially unless you support the teaching of the gospel with your money. That simply isn’t true. It’s self-serving prosperity preaching, and it comes from a source that has nothing to do with God.

I gave up. I have realized there is nobody out there I want to listen to any more.

Is this a bad thing? Does it mean I’ve turned into one of those nutty Christians who refuse to go to church because they think they alone have all the answers? Not really. I do not have all the answers. My problem with preachers comes from the fact that I’ve gotten used to learning straight from God. When you graduate from something pretty good to something excellent, you don’t have much enthusiasm for what you left behind.

It’s not that I have all the answers. It’s that I’m tired of swallowing wrong answers provided by other people.

It’s a good thing. I know it’s good, because the Bible says so. John told us we did not need men to teach us. James said God would give us wisdom if we asked for it. Paul learned directly from God. He went off into the wilderness for several years. He didn’t go back to his rabbis. God does teach people.

It’s a good thing, but it serves to underscore the poor condition of modern Christianity. Most churches teach complete nonsense, and even good churches aren’t very good.

Christians love Christian celebrities. We look here and there, and we find preachers who seem to have it all together. Then we make the mistake of depending on them. We start quoting them to other people, as though adding “Benny Hinn says” to a sentence gives it divine authority. We put them on pedestals, and then when they make mistakes, those mistakes are propagated downward and laterally through us, sometimes to hundreds of millions of people. We don’t have enough Christians dealing directly with God, to fact-check the rock stars.

Look what Paul said:

For ye are yet carnal: for whereas there is among you envying, and strife, and divisions, are ye not carnal, and walk as men?

For while one saith, I am of Paul; and another, I am of Apollos; are ye not carnal?

Who then is Paul, and who is Apollos, but ministers by whom ye believed, even as the Lord gave to every man?

I have planted, Apollos watered; but God gave the increase.

So then neither is he that planteth any thing, neither he that watereth; but God that giveth the increase.

Now he that planteth and he that watereth are one: and every man shall receive his own reward according to his own labour.

For we are labourers together with God: ye are God’s husbandry, ye are God’s building.

According to the grace of God which is given unto me, as a wise masterbuilder, I have laid the foundation, and another buildeth thereon. But let every man take heed how he buildeth thereupon.

For other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ.

Now if any man build upon this foundation gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, stubble;

Every man’s work shall be made manifest: for the day shall declare it, because it shall be revealed by fire; and the fire shall try every man’s work of what sort it is.

If any man’s work abide which he hath built thereupon, he shall receive a reward.

If any man’s work shall be burned, he shall suffer loss: but he himself shall be saved; yet so as by fire.

Know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you?

If any man defile the temple of God, him shall God destroy; for the temple of God is holy, which temple ye are.

Let no man deceive himself. If any man among you seemeth to be wise in this world, let him become a fool, that he may be wise.

For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God. For it is written, He taketh the wise in their own craftiness.

And again, The Lord knoweth the thoughts of the wise, that they are vain.

Therefore let no man glory in men. For all things are your’s;

Whether Paul, or Apollos, or Cephas, or the world, or life, or death, or things present, or things to come; all are your’s;

And ye are Christ’s; and Christ is God’s.

Satan uses celebrities like the Pope and Joyce Meyer as augers, to drill holes in people’s heads to pour hogwash through. If 10 million people listen to T.D. Jakes and believe him without reservation, in order to spread a toxic heresy, all Satan has to do is convince one man: Jakes himself. Celebrity is a big labor-saver for the devil.

You don’t have to be a big-time celebrity to be dangerous. It works with small groups, too. About 150 people attended my last church, and it was a bona fide cult.

It’s good to know God personally and to have no need of the rock stars, but I do miss learning from preachers.

I still benefit from hearing from other believers. I’ve watched dozens of testimonies this week. Testimonies and teaching are different. Testimony is more factual, and teaching contains more opinion and guesswork. Testimony tends to break down denominational errors of doctrine. It tends to unite people. I would rather hear from a random guy who met Jesus than a pinch-faced old rogue who has five degrees and scolds people for praying in tongues.

There is some nutty testimony out there, but I still prefer testimony to teaching.

I am going to make mistakes. Everyone but Jesus is going to make mistakes. Peter himself, who was supposedly the first infallible Pope, made mistakes and had to be corrected publicly by Paul. If you listen to me or anyone else too long, you are going to run into problems. You have to go to the horse’s mouth. I can tell a beginner a lot of useful things, but the proper function of a witness is to connect people with the perfect source. If you’re still following a preacher or even a friend five years after you started, that person has failed you. Teachers are supposed to be matchmakers, not husbands.

Nobody listens to God. Preachers think, “This is how I want things to be. Is that how they are, God? OF COURSE IT IS. Thanks. I’ll go tell everyone else.” This is how Creflo Dollar ended up believing he needed a jet.

Last night I spent a long time going over my numerous defects with God. It was like digging around in an abscess with a sharp stick. It was very unpleasant, but it was rewarding and important.

I know I’ll have more sessions like that. It’s a daunting prospect, but I have to be enthusiastic about it. A parent who loves you corrects you, and correction brings peace and power in the long run.

I don’t like thinking about what I am. I’m okay by earth standards, but earth standards are very low. Other people see the facade. I stand behind it, where I see what holds it up.

If I were still listening to preachers, I would be trying to apply remedies that actually make things worse. Denial tops the list. “God loves you as you are, so you don’t have to feel guilt. He sees you as perfect, so you don’t need to change.” What? Where does the Bible say that? Of course we have to change. We have to confess. God didn’t put us down here to fester and collapse.

Examining your faults isn’t counterproductive self-condemnation. It’s a diagnostic test, like an X-ray. Before a doctor heals, he examines. The idea that we shouldn’t feel shame or ask God to improve us is lethal. It’s like putting a used, pus-covered bandage on a carbuncle.

Equating self-examination with self-condemnation is immature. God’s purpose isn’t to cheer us up and tie balloon animals for us. He’s a healer, and one of the prices of healing is humility. Denial puts a protective wall around the projects Satan builds inside you, including tumors and God knows what else.

It’s funny; secular therapists understand the importance of honesty and catharsis, but charismatic Christians seem obsessed with covering things up.

As long as I’m here, I’ll mention a word God gave me today. It may not bowl you over. Here it is: “I believe.” My faith was being attacked, and I started repeating this. It turned out to have supernatural power.

I guess I’ll pray some more and check out more testimonies.

Arboreal Rats go Offline; Next up: Mano a Mano With the Wily Possum

Tomorrow, supposedly, my new hunting knife arrives. Anticipation is high. Because getting a new knife will bring me boundless joy? No, it’s just that waiting for things way too long makes them seem more important than they are.

It will be nice to have a good sheath knife, so I’m not going to knock it too much, but I wish it had arrived sooner. I will have one to two days of squirrel hunting, post-knife, before the door slams shut. If I were to kill 4 squirrels, I would be doing great, and I am more likely to get two or less.

I have to find something new to kill. I can kill turkeys as of March 17, but I don’t have a good feeling about it. I don’t think there are many around here. I have spent a lot of time in the woods, and I have never seen turkey poop. I’ve seen a metric ton of bear poop, but no turkey poop.

Today I saw a van-sized pile of something resembling coon poop. I’m familiar with coon poop because they pooped in my pool back in Dade County. This looked like coon poop, but the scale was wrong. Coons poop like beagles, but this was closer to the size of German shepherd poop. I don’t think it was dog poop, because I have never seen a loose dog here, and it had little coon crumbly bits in it. Like granola. Like hippie food. It doesn’t look like Internet photos of coyote or bobcat turds.

If it came from a coon, something is seriously wrong. Either the coon is morbidly obese, or it’s 5 feet tall.

I need to kill coons whenever possible, because there is nothing good about them at all. They do nothing but cause misery. They’re cute and all that. Don’t care. They have to go.

I can put coons on my kill list for the rest of the year, because they have no season. Even the state of Florida hates them.

I can kill possums, too, but that’s about as challenging as shooting a speed bump. It’s like playing Jeopardy against Wolf Blitzer and Vivica Fox.

I haven’t tried it, but they say you can actually chase a possum down and grab it. I feel sorry for them, because they’re ugly and have no self-esteem. They take dumps on my porch, and there are probably other bad things they do. The horse people around me might be glad to see them go, because they give an obscure disease to horses. It’s hard to get motivated to shoot possums, but I suppose I could find it in me.

Skunks. I did not know skunks were bad, but I learned that they carry rabies. That begs the question: if I shoot one, can I skin it? I don’t want to get rabies.

Is rabies a good enough reason to shoot skunks? Maybe it’s a reach. I haven’t heard a lot of stories about people getting skunk rabies and biting their kids.

Maybe we should use T-shirt cannons to fire angry skunks with rabies into extremist mosques on Fridays. Not sure those guys would notice rabies, though.

Armadillos! They dig holes and annoy people. They carry leprosy, believe it or not. Some people eat them anyway. I can’t eat leprosy, even if it’s dead. That’s a dealbreaker. Do I have a legitimate need to kill armadillos? I’ll have to check.

Yes, I do have to kill armadillos. They threaten pipes and foundations.

I’ve found a bunch of burrows on this property. I don’t know what lives in them. They are not large enough, nor do they smell badly enough, to contain hippies. I want to find out what lives in them.

My trail camera arrived today, so I have a great opportunity to film the burrows and check out the residents. Right now, the camera is in the back yard. I want to find out if the bears are visiting. I have this neurotic idea that they waddle in after I go to bed and dance in a big circle under the moon.

How can there be so much bear poop on my property when I haven’t seen a single bear? But it has to be bear poop. Something like that couldn’t come from anything else. It’s huge. Again, hippies can be ruled out.

Maybe big fat ones, like Wavy Gravy or Rob Reiner…

It must be a coon. What else could it be? Maybe it has diverticulosis or some other illness that expands the colon.

Wild pigs are worse than the Viet Cong, but I have never seen one, so I don’t know if there is any point in trying to kill them.

I am not sure there is an important reason to kill bobcats, but it’s an option.

I can kill all the otters I want, but where would I find them?

Okay, let’s see. What should I definitely put on the kill list?

1. Turkeys
2. Coyotes
3. Coons
4. Pigs
5. Armadillos
6. Rabbits

Possibles:

1. Bobcats
2. Skunks
3. Crows
4. Poodles
5. Possums

I know “poodles” shouldn’t be in there. My hands just typed that automatically because it made so much sense.

I’m reading that possums may actually be helpful, apart from the constant porch-crapping.

It’s very hard to get good advice on what to kill. The Internet is full of extremist hippie loons who will happily tell you every revolting animal known to man is beneficial. “Don’t be so quick to shoot that rattlesnake in your daughter’s nursery! Rattlesnakes eat insects and other pests so you won’t have to buy evil pesticides made by Trump-hat-wearing stormtroopers who read the Bible and think men can’t have babies.”

America is being taken over by complete idiots who think we should never kill anything. “The animals were here first.” So what? We’re more important than they are. Conservatives are, anyway. Not sure about hippies.

I don’t know how many bears I’m more important than, but I’m thinking at least 7. This doesn’t include bears that can ride a bicycle in a Chinese circus while holding an umbrella. They would obviously be worth more.

When I go out in the ocean to fish, I find fish who were there first. I kill them anyway. Being in a place first doesn’t necessarily entitle you to anything. How come “They were here first” doesn’t apply when Americans are trying to eject illegal aliens?

The squirrels I’ve been killing were here first, and I will be here last, in my plastic Adirondack chair in the backyard, sipping a tasty beverage and texting my friends. That’s how things are supposed to be.

I have to find stuff to kill, not because I’m bloodthirsty and sadistic, but because you can’t learn to hunt without practice. You can’t take 9 months off every year and expect to be any good.

I’m thinking of getting a tree stand. This is an insane platform you put in a tree. Tree stands have built-in chairs. No recliners, unfortunately. Maybe that will happen eventually. The kind of tree stand I like comes with a ladder. You sit with your rifle 16 feet off the ground, and animals, being not smart, don’t think to look up and spot you. As a result, you can sit in the sky with a cooler next to you and rain destruction on them.

They say squirrels poop on tree stands, which is yet more reason why they deserve no quarter. But I digress.

I wonder if electrifying a tree stand is legal. That’s one way to find out how far a squirrel can jump.

Tree stands are commonly used for killing deer, but there is no reason why you can’t use one to kill other stuff. I think it would be a great move in my location, because it would allow me to shoot downward. That would make shooting safer, and it would mean forgoing fewer opportunities. If I had shot at every available squirrel I’ve seen in the last two weeks, I would be eating squirrel for dinner every day.

I have two weeks to get ready for turkeys. I hope I get at least one. After turkey season ends, I’ll be forced to persecute the wretched inhabitants of the lowest level of animal society. I will feel like a vampire that eats rats. I will feel the way UFC fighters and Olympic wrestlers feel the first time they have to wrestle Triple H. “Glad mom’s not watching tonight.”

I’ll let you know if I pick up anything on the trail cam tonight. I really hope Rob Reiner isn’t in town.

Stick With the Borg or Pull Out the Wires?

Wonder if anyone out there can give me email advice.

My dad insisted on using AOL long after the rest of the galaxy moved on. Now he has a million AOL contacts, plus a massive archive of emails, some of which are not worthless.

AOL is dying. Today I was not able to access my dad’s business emails because AOL was down. Sooner or later, there may come a day when AOL simply evaporates, and that will be inconvenient.

The answer is a new email account. I know that already. But what’s the best answer?

I don’t like the big free email providers. I have a Yahoo account, and Yahoo looks shakier every day. I have a feeling I’m going to lose everything within a couple of years. I don’t like Gmail. I suppose Gmail is considerably more secure than AOL or Yahoo, but titans have a way of crumbling unexpectedly, and anything is possible.

Today I was extraordinarily blessed to find a very compact domain name which is perfect for my dad. It’s 5 letters with a com suffix. That’s just about unbeatable, especially in 2018, when you can literally run a finger over your keys at random, type “.com” after, it, do a search, and find out it’s taken. I bought the domain name, and because I have my own hosting, I added it to my hosting account and created an email address.

Great.

Here’s the question: is this the way to go?

Outsourcing has some benefits. I can go anywhere, take out my phone, enter a username and password, and get my dad’s emails for the last umpteen years (however long he has subscribed). I can do that with a private domain, too, but it’s not as easy. I’ll have to install the account on my phone and every other device I use. I’ll have to put access-related info in files.

I don’t expect to receive tons of email, so I don’t think storage will be an issue. Not to be morbid, but even if we get spam, my dad is not very likely to be around in 5 years, so we won’t have time to run into a glut problem. Even if we do, storage keeps getting cheaper and more abundant.

What would you do? I trust myself more than I trust Google, which is like saying I trust myself more than I would trust Hitler or Stalin, but I don’t want to do a bunch of work for nothing.

I also want to find a way to download and archive every AOL email he has. I have a feeling AOL does not like that and makes it difficult.

Take Popcorn to a New Level

Let me change your life forever.

You love popcorn, right? But it’s boring. You can put butter on it, but it makes it soggy. You can put grated cheese on it, but it falls off goes under the couch cushions. I have the answer: popcorn popped in bacon grease, covered with powdered cheese. You will not believe how wonderful it is.

INGREDIENTS

1/2 cup white popcorn
3 tablespoons bacon grease
1/2 teaspoon salt or flour salt
1/3 cup powdered cheddar

You’re wondering where you get powdered cheddar. I found a pretty good deal on Amazon. The company is Hoosier Farms, and they sell a 1-pound jar for a reasonable price. This is pretty much like the powdered cheese from Kraft macaroni and cheese.

Oh, boy. I just realized I should add this to my homemade macaroni and cheese, to cheat.

Anyway, you just pop the corn in the grease, and when you’re done popping, toss the powder in it. Add the salt to the corn and fat before you pop. It won’t look as pretty as factory-made cheese popcorn, but it will taste 3,000 times better.

Flour salt is fine salt that sticks to popcorn better. You don’t really need it if you add the salt before you pop, though.

You will not be able to stop eating this, so don’t try it and then say I didn’t warn you.

You can get other types of powdered cheese if cheddar isn’t your thing.

Kiss the Ring, Lest I Crush Your Online Empire

It looks like my blog may be doing better than I thought.

Or maybe it isn’t. I can’t really tell. You know what Mark Twain said about statistics.

If I understand web stats correctly, about 1900 different visitors come to this site every day. This is up from around 700 in 2010, which is as far back as I can check. I went all Jesus freak in about 2008, so that would be when the big plunge took effect. I used to reach thousands of people every day, and then the smell of Christianity drove off most of them.

The traffic collapse was not a big deal to me. I used to have hopes of blogging for a living and using the blog to drive books, but I got over that, and now I don’t care much whether anyone shows up. I should be glad I’m not in the numbers-for-money game, because the bloggers I respect the least are the ones who whored out 100% for traffic. Any idiot can get traffic if he plays the game. Suck up to Glenn Reynolds (or whoever the new traffic-driver is), put pictures of women on your site, link to everyone imaginable, have contests, give things away, and network, network, network. Above all, never EVER go against the party line. Do these things, and you’ll have 5,000 visits per day within a year. You won’t have a soul, and you will be an imbecile no one with any brains respects, however.

I have deliberately avoided capitalizing on my traffic for a long time. I have two reasons. First, for years, there wasn’t enough traffic to capitalize on. Second, if you make money on a blog, you open yourself up to lawsuits in other jurisdictions. It’s a bad idea unless you have huge traffic and income. Nobody wants to open himself up to lawsuits in Guam in exchange for fifty bucks a month. Millions of bloggers are doing exactly that.

You can probably avoid liability by incorporating, if you’re determined to monetize.

In the distant past, I made some change by blogging. I had a few ads. I covered my hosting fees and probably had enough left over for a few cheeseburgers. I got rid of the ads. This blog is a hobby enterprise which costs me money, and that makes me harder to get at, should some slimy, sleazy, louse-festooned demi-person decide to attack me in court.

I used to think only “unique visits” counted when I looked at blog stats, but it appears that this is wrong. People on the web say “visits” are what matter. If what I have read is correct, a person who shows up twice in a day only racks up one visit, so each visit is access by a unique computer. My stats say I’m at about 1900 visits per day. My guess is that maybe 1200 are actual human beings who can read English. Blogs attract all sorts of stat-inflating bots.

If over a thousand people are reading what I say every day, shouldn’t I clean up my act?

When you think you’re reaching a couple of hundred bored individuals per day, and no one is paying you, you tend to feel pretty independent. You don’t like what I write? Get lost. I’m paying for your access to this blog, so what do I care if you leave? That’s the attitude. And you tend to feel that what you write doesn’t matter, so if you’re a slightly bad influence, it’s okay.

I suppose it’s not okay, especially in view of the true volume this site does. I think I will continue to not care if anyone shows up, but maybe I should be more careful about what I write.

In my heart, I always see myself as an obscure, nearly invisible person no one cares about, and I like it that way. I know there are many individuals who share this opinion of me, because over the years, they have come here and left comments to this effect. But I think my perception is exaggerated and not entirely realistic.

Perhaps my view of my impact in the world is colored by my childhood in an abusive environment. I was made to understand that I was powerless, annoying, unattractive, disgraceful, and incapable of holding an opinion worthy of consideration, and I internalized the perceptions of my abusers. You don’t actually have to believe things like that with your mind in order to internalize them. They bypass the mind and get into your flesh, like tapeworms or something. Thinking these feelings away is like trying to think away the flu.

I think I’m better off than a person raised by doting enablers. If you’re going to have delusions about yourself, it’s better to shoot low than high. Proud people do a huge amount of damage to others.

When I write, I don’t think I’m changing the world or turning people’s lives around. I write because I like to write. I have a certain amount of hope that I’ll reach a few people with my testimony, but this is not my main motivation for writing. Should it be? Maybe it should. In the long run, nothing else I write about will be considered anything but afterbirth.

I used to have some hope of impacting the political scene, but I am nearly over that. I have little relapses, but I am out of the loop. I don’t know who the big conservative bloggers are right now. Is Misha still out there? Dan Goldstein? No, it’s Jeff, not Dan. I’m having a hard time remembering who my old allies were. I should look at my blogroll, which is a time capsule dating back to the Bush years.

Pajamas Media and fake corporate blogs really killed conservative blogging! Was I right about that, or what? Conservatives did really well in the blogosphere for a few years, and then Roger Simon bit the head off the golden goose in order to get the eggs. Introducing money and the guild structure into blogging cut the roots of the whole enterprise.

I really caught it for criticizing PJM, too. I correctly diagnosed their problems and predicted their future, and I got reamed out for it all the time. My opinion got the amount of respect it has typically gotten all of my life, from limited thinkers who were not merely wrong but obviously wrong.

I was a traitor! My little blog, not the poisonous, wrongheaded, greedy dreams of the traffic merchants, was the problem. If it weren’t for me, Simon and his pals would be blogging from yachts in Monaco. I took all that away from them!

Too funny.

I rejected PJM and refused to join them, and they returned the favor, in spades. Because it was never about getting the conservative message out, which was something I helped do. It was about making money for the PJ’s.

I was never one of the cool kids, in spite of very good traffic. I started blogging in 2002, I have received tons and tons of links, and Glenn Reynolds has linked to me only once or twice. One of the funniest things that happened during my previous incarnation was receiving an Instalink when Ann Althouse guest-blogged for Reynolds. I wonder how he felt when he saw it. I kind of wonder if she did it to needle him.

It’s strange that I didn’t see that the incurable, terminal pajama blight was inevitable. Maybe I did. I don’t remember. Build a house, and eventually, roaches, rats, and termites will show up. The scent of money was in the air, and eventually hyenas had to smell it.

Where is PJM today? Nowhere. Where is Roger Simon? Is he still alive? He’s not on Fox. He’s not at Breitbart.com. Does he even get to contribute at Hot Air? Somewhere in the dry deserts of Cyberia, there should be a fragment of a statue with “PJMandias” carved into it. All that stuff turned to crap. Total disaster. Simon is more obscure than ever, Bill Whittle is an absolute, complete, utter nobody, Glenn Reynolds is a nobody outside the blogosphere, Michelle Malkin ought to be on a milk carton, and Pam Geller only makes the headlines when someone tries to shoot her. She should be paying jihadis to follow her around.

Where is the PJM cable channel? Where is the PJM satellite? What’s the address of the PJM skyscraper in Manhattan? Where are the revered, gravitas-stuffed PJ pundits we were supposed to see on CNN and the networks?

Where is the mighty PJ media machine which could not help but prevent Obama from being elected twice? It must be around here somewhere.

Wikipedia says PJTV, the rarely viewed PJ video site, went under in 2016. BAH HA HA HA HA. It was all me! I did it! And I’m glad! Do you hear me? GLAD! For my next trick, maybe I’ll generate an earthquake.

When I Googled to find connections (like endorsements and interviews) between Donald Trump’s campaign and PJ Media, excluding results on the PJ site, I got nothing, basically. But I did find PJM’s Youtube channel, which is a testimony to the failure of PJTV, and I also found a story about PJTV’s disintegration. Trump busily covered all the media bases, and he even let little Internet players into the White House press room, but the mighty PJM monolith appears to have escaped his notice.

Look at the damage I did, with my observations. Singlehanded, I destroyed the dreams of millions of conservatives. I killed a brilliant idea that couldn’t fail. I’m amazing. Why hasn’t Soros sent me a check?

I should make cancer go away, too. I’ll start criticizing it.

It occurs to me that a lot of people reading this may not know what PJM is. It failed so completely, most people probably haven’t heard of it.

Ask your barber what he thinks of Instapundit and Pajamas Media for me and tell me what he says. Caveat: not a fair test, if your barber is a former conservative blogger who has to cut hair for a living.

I don’t know if having more traffic than I thought will influence me much. Sitting around analyzing what I write would destroy the pleasure of blogging. I’ll make a little effort, but I doubt there will be a substantial change. I think I will always feel like I’m blogging for 10 or 15 people.

And Now Some Archaeology

I couldn’t resist. I Googled some more.

I remember when Kevin Aylward was a somewhat sheepish noob asking for links on Internet chat. His site, Wizbang, became a right-wing powerhouse. I was not a Wizbang-staff favorite. I felt they were soulless Kool-Aid drinkers who would swallow live snakes for traffic. Anyway, I just checked, and Wizbang is barely breathing.

I happened to see Mary Katharine Ham on the contributor list. You may not remember her. She was a conservative pundit who became famous at about the age of 9 (I exaggerate) based on the following qualifications: she was very attractive, she had a brilliant smile, and she was a woman. I never got the Ham craze. She seemed like a nice kid, but she never said anything remotely insightful or important. As a commentator, she was a nullity. Her success was mystifying, unless you accept the unthinkable proposition that looks matter more than talent. You could go to a random diner in a red state and find 5 uglier people who could do what she did. She has only written one book, with a co-author. Generally, a co-author is a person who writes a book FOR a more-famous person.

Fox dropped her as a commentator. Now she’s a few paragraphs on Wikipedia.

When you’ve been a regular on Fox, the last thing you want is a credit on the front page of Wizbang. It’s like a former Sports Illustrated bikini model working a car show.

Aylward is not mentioned on the front page. Maybe he’s selling real estate or managing a Motel 6 somewhere. If he was smart, he sold Wizbang when it was worth something.

John Cole at Balloon Juice was a big PJ, and in his utter wrongness, he got angry at me for stating the obvious. His site appears to be stumbling on. Somewhere on the web, it says his politics have changed. That’s not unusual. Political people sometimes have epiphanies when they realize their existing political stances don’t generate much attention and/or cash. I don’t know John’s story; maybe he’s sincere, or maybe it embarrasses him to side with people who drive pickup trucks and go to church. I was never a reader of his blog. I didn’t think it was all that good. Anyway, PJM did not propel him to stardom.

The Protein Wisdom blog is dead. I don’t know when that happened. I guess JEFF Goldstein (not Dan) got tired of having his children threatened by leftists nuts. I knew Jeff fairly well by blogger standards; I just forgot his first name. I ran a defunct humor blog called Huffington’s Toast, and Jeff contributed. Anyway, he was PJM. Jeff was a very, very unhappy person, and I would guess that the vitriol he was exposed to through blogging wore on him eventually.

Hot Air is not doing great. They sold out to a corporation. Wikipedia says Michelle Malkin, whose preexisting celebrity jump-started the site, wrote very little of its material. Allahpundit, one of the most talented blog personalities, appears to have remained there, grinding out essays. I hope they are giving him a decent salary. If not, he ought to move on, because blogging isn’t going to get more lucrative in the future.

Malkin herself has not published a book since 2015, and that book had a co-writer. Real writers do their own lifting and do not use co-writers. Her Fox TV presence is reduced now. She founded Twitchy.com, a disheartening site where angry people gather to criticize political tweets. It looks like her star has settled near the horizon, but she probably has a nice income.

Roger Simon is out at PJM. He left in 2013. He is the “CEO Emeritus,” and for those of you who don’t know it, “emeritus” is Latin for “not any more.”

Instapundit is still up, but it’s hosted by PJM, which makes you wonder if the traffic is paying the bills. Reynolds (assuming it’s him) seems to be writing more than he used to. A typical 2005 entry looked like this: “Pie a symbol of capitalist oppression? Ann Althouse has more.” Now I am seeing complete sentences and a few paragraphs. Notable fact: PJM has been in existence since 2004, and Reynolds is still not famous. His recognition factor is probably halfway between those of Ed Morrissey and Mark Steyn. I believe it has peaked. Fortunately he has a lucrative position as a law professor.

John Milner continued drag racing and was eventually killed by a drunk driver. Steve married Laurie, never went east to college, and became an insurance agent in Modesto. Terry “the Toad” Fields was killed in action in Vietnam. Curt went east in spite of all his reservations. He never found the girl in the white T-Bird.

Put Down the World and Take a Break

I said I would write about the little phrases God gives me, and I got one today, so here I am.

I was watching a Marvel movie: Captain America: Civil War. Unlike the clumsy and intelligence-insulting Wonder Woman, this is actually a well-written, entertaining film. The idea is that the Avengers get in trouble for running around the world and getting into destructive battles that kill a lot of extras, so they do what no intelligent person would ever do: they agree to be overseen and commanded by an international body. Yeah, that’ll work. You want to replace 6 or 8 smart people with relatively good judgment (neglecting Tony Stark) and replace them with a bunch of idiots from Botswana and Pakistan. Good luck with that.

Anyway, superhero movies draw us because superheroes are false messiahs. Jesus was an extremely special person with extraordinary powers and a unique and vital mission. We don’t like Jesus all that much, so we create little carnal messiahs who have power and special status without the annoying, unglamorous humility and obedience.

Superheroes are proud and full of what my dad calls…okay, I will paraphrase…urine and vinegar. They are energetic people who feel great senses of purpose. They get all sorts of admiration because they’re special. We watch them and experience their strange, special lives vicariously.

People who are anointed by God can get superhero complexes. The word “messiah” means “anointed.” If God works through you, you may start to feel a little too special. You may not even want it. You may realize it’s ridiculous, wrong, and something to be embarrassed about. That doesn’t mean you can shake it.

Elijah appears to have had an issue with the superhero complex. He told God this:

I have been very jealous for the Lord God of hosts: because the children of Israel have forsaken thy covenant, thrown down thine altars, and slain thy prophets with the sword; and I, even I only, am left; and they seek my life, to take it away.

God responded as follows:

Yet I have left me seven thousand in Israel, all the knees which have not bowed unto Baal, and every mouth which hath not kissed him.

Depending on your mindset, you could take this as a rebuke if God said it to you, but to me, it would be a comfort. Nobody who has any understanding of the importance of humility wants to feel too special. It’s good to sit down and hand the ball off to someone else. It reminds you of your real place in the world. It shows you you’re not alone.

I was watching this movie full of fictional special people (played by professional pretenders running around in silly costumes), and I thought about the things God had been doing for me lately. I have had times of real supernatural joy because of the things God has been showing me about the power and deliverance that are coming to me. Sometimes I feel a little special; it’s a delusion. Today I heard a new phrase from God, and it came back to me during the movie: “One of many.”

It will probably be impossible for people to understand, but that made me feel great. IF God is doing big things in me, it doesn’t mean I have to carry a unique burden that sets me apart. I am one of many. I don’t have to be weighed down with pride, which is always heavy. If I’m just one of many, then I’m fine the way I am. I don’t have to carry too much. I have limited responsibility. I have all sorts of allies out there, working around the clock, each in his turn.

I can’t explain it any better than that.

I can relax and join the crowd of God’s children. I don’t have to be conspicuous.

The devil is “special,” and he hasn’t had a vacation in 6,000 years. He’s the father of all snowflakes. He picked up the crown. Now let him carry it in misery.

Every time I think, “one of many,” I feel like weight is falling off my shoulders.

We have a lot of preachers who feel “just a little bit superior,” as the Church Lady used to put it. The late Eddie Long let a nut named Ralph Messer wrap him in a Torah scroll, put him on a throne, and have him carried around while proclaiming him king. Denny Duron, the preacher I wrote about earlier this week, wrote a whole book saying the rest of us were just Abishais.

We should be content to be unrewarded redshirts, like the short-lived ensigns on old Star Trek episodes, while mighty, holy, rich characters like his lordship the messiah Duron and his exceedingly ordinary kids get the attention and cash.

It was clearly his attempt at excusing his money-centered, attention-centered ministry of foolishness.

Jewish sages are probably the most “special” people outside of Christian TV. You should see how young Orthodox Jews speak about them. So brilliant. So righteous. God should be grateful they’re willing to talk to him.

Isaiah said man’s righteousness is like used menstrual rags. He was right.

If you have problems fighting pride, remember this: “one of many.” It will make you feel much better.

Knife Lost in Fog of Cybercommerce

I am quite frustrated. My hunting knife has not arrived yet.

I know everyone wants to read about this. No need to thank me.

I went to Amazon and ordered an Entrek Javalina from Knife Center. I like Knife Center. I have bought stuff from them before. The knife didn’t ship, so I contacted them. They said they didn’t know when they would receive it. What? This would have been good information to have when I placed the order. I thought the website said it was in stock, but they didn’t have it. I canceled and ordered from a different outfit. I elected to pay $7 extra for faster shipping. Squirrel season is nearly over. I can’t let the squirrels down.

I placed my order on the 23rd. I kept getting tracking updates saying the knife was in “pre-shipping,” meaning a label had been printed but the Post Office didn’t have the package yet.

This is 2018. An Amazon “seller” can be a fat guy who never gets out of bed except to go to the Post Office. “Pre-shipping” could mean he put the knife in a box and dumped it in a pile in his bedroom next to a mountain of dirty Star Wars underwear. I contacted the seller to get the facts. All I got back was the shipping date, order date, and tracking number, which is information I already had. I didn’t even get a note. “Sorry; we mailed it yesterday.” Whew! It would be exhausting to type something like that. I guess.

Long boring story short and still boring: I have no sheath knife. The squirrels are mocking me.

On the up side, I have a game camera on the way. I have to find out what’s roaming around in my yard. I thought a coyote dug up my blackberry plant and deposited a coyote stool in its place, but as I spend more time examining poop on the web (not on German websites; don’t worry), I am beginning to think it may be bobcat poo. My friend Mike says cats bury their poo==>bobcats are cats==>do the math.

Should I shoot the bobcat, if it exists? Interesting question.

I never really thought about shooting a bobcat. They don’t sound appetizing. I am not Chinese, after all. Also, I assumed they were protected and sacred on account of being semi-big cats. Turns out they’re not. You can shoot the bejeezus out of them. There is a season, but there is no bag limit.

This is a cut and paste of the bobcat rules:

Dec. 1 – March 31

By all legal rifles, shotguns, muzzleloaders, crossbows, bows, pistols and air guns.

Those with a hunting license may possess no more than 1 bobcat pelt between April 1 and Nov. 30, unless pelt has CITES tag. Also, bobcat pelts may not be taken out of Florida unless tagged. Bobcats may be chased with dogs year round.

Bag Limit: No Limits

Explain that if you can. If I can shoot 3,000 bobcats during the season, Florida will have no problem with it, but I can only keep one skin.

I don’t want a bobcat skin. Cats smell, and bobcat pelts probably smell, too. And what would I do with it? But it makes me angry that I can’t keep them. What am I supposed to do with them if I can’t keep them? Make a big cat-smelling pile of pelts in the pasture? Is it better for bobcat hides to rot than to adorn my tractor seat or whatever? I guess it is.

Why is there no bag limit? What does Florida have against bobcats? Why is there no explanation? Why are we tagging animals we want to get rid of? Once you have it tranquilized in the back of the van, why not put a pillow over its face and get it over with?

I will never understand hunting laws.

I don’t really plan to shoot a bobcat, although maybe I should, because I suppose it’s possible that a time will come when the ability to kill troublesome predators will be important. When Oprah wins the presidency, the economy tanks, and BLM starts sending reparations squads into the suburbs to confiscate groceries.

It would certainly improve my hunting skills.

If only I had a knife to skin bobcats with.

I found a bobcat recipe online. Come on. Seriously?

I remember cutting up a dead cat in college. Let me stress: this was for a course. I didn’t find it on the sidewalk. Anyway, the meat looked pretty good, and through the formaldehyde, there was a smell that could conceivably have been inviting, but there was also a catty sort of musky stankness in there. I would expect bobcat meat to be fragrant, and not in a good way. I can’t help wondering, though.

I did a couple of bad things with that cat. For one, I used its tail to decorate an elevator. One of the elevators in my dorm was missing a button. I uninstalled the cat’s tail and inserted it in the hole. It looked like a cat had somehow shoved itself through a 1″ aperture and gotten stuck inside the panel. It was hilarious. To me, anyway. Also, there was an occasion when I wanted to do some dissection at home, so I checked my cat out and walked across campus with it. I had the option of covering it up, but, well…

They gave us those cats in clear plastic bags. They were stiff, spreadeagled, with startled expressions on their faces. “I thought I was going to be adopted!”

I wonder what people thought.

Final thing: I had a buddy who went to that class with me. He could be squeamish about certain things, including cat whiskers. Every so often, I would yell, “HEY!”, and then when he looked, I would pull out one of the cat’s whiskers with a hemostat.

Good times.

It was not alive. I want to make that very clear.

My knife may not get here for a coon’s squirrel’s age, but the game camera will help keep me amused while I wait. I should call it a trail camera. That’s what Amazon calls it. It will turn on automatically when it sees movement, even at night. I’ll probably get a bunch of videos of squirrels mooning me and giving me the finger.

I’m thinking of getting surveillance cameras for the house. If we ever have to travel and leave the house empty, I would like to have video of any “dreamers” who show up to celebrate the American dream (or Cinco de Mayo) by stealing it. Is that not a PC thing to say? Sorry, but 92% of foreign-born federal prisoners are illegal aliens, so the facts are on my side. For a few hundred bucks you can get wifi cameras and a special router. The cameras will send video wherever you want. You can upload it to the cloud (i.e. Uncle Sam’s secret 4th-Amendment-destruction server farm).

I don’t know if I want video of my property in the cloud. I am completely aware that the government has ways of looking at stuff it has no right to look at, and I shouldn’t help them. I’m not doing anything illegal, but what if that changes? What if the government and I have a falling out and I decide to do something which is moral and correct but illegal? I guarantee you, they’ll be able to subpoena my security footage. Let me check.

Yes, I am correct. My two minutes of research indicate that there are two ways for prosecutors to get your home surveillance footage. They can get a warrant, which takes a little effort, or they can use a subpoena, which is about as hard as placing an order at Denny’s. And if they use a subpoena, they may not have to tell you. Nice.

What if I decide I want TWO bobcat pelts for some compelling reason, such as my truck needs seat covers? I better not tan them in front of my surveillance system.

I think a good alternative would be to store the data on a laptop hidden in the house. Burglars would be too stupid to look for it, the fuzz wouldn’t know about it, and if they found out, they would have to get a full-blown warrant to come get it. And I might not have what they wanted when they asked for it. You don’t have to preserve your home surveillance videos for all eternity. Mainly you want them for the immediate past, so you can nail thieves.

I’m sitting here trying to foil a government grab for bobcat-related data I will never possess, and the actual people who will end up using my plan will most likely be drug dealers and terrorists. Oh well. I’ll be in the cloud, being lazy, hoping for the best and trying to get by with one bobcat pelt. Uncle Sam will get whatever he wants, and eventually I’ll start eating Soylent Green and hating Goldstein every morning.

Did you know there might be cameras on your property right now? Uncle Sam doesn’t really need warrants for yard cameras that are sufficiently far from your house. The law on cameras is extremely oppressive. The government can put cameras in your trees and bushes without consulting you, for no good reason at all. Putting them in your house takes some legal maneuvering, but if you have a pasture or some woods, forget it. They can watch you swimming in your creek naked all day, and there is nothing you can do about it. You don’t have a “reasonable expectation of privacy” a few hundred feet from your front door, on a remote property in the middle of the woods, where you are not suspected of doing anything illegal. How about that?

How about this: a bobcat jacket and matching pants?

Just spitballing.

Liberty is drying up and dying, so maybe there is no point in brainstorming about ways to preserve it. At least if I’m on a big spread in the woods, I’ll have the comforting false impression that I’m free.

I hate to quit when I’m making such a great contribution to western thought, but I have to go to the dump now. I hope my knife gets here while squirrels are still legal.

Maybe They do, but I Don’t

It finally happened. A neighbor spoke to me about shooting guns on my own property.

Today I got the .17 HMR out. I decided to go look for squirrels. I took the .17 HMR even though I knew it would limit the types of shots I could take.

I like the .17 HMR.

I went behind the house and set up a board at squirrel distance, and I shot five rounds into it. I was using FMJ ammo instead of the rodent-exploding kind, and the scope was set for 100 yards and plastic bullets, so I wanted to adjust the elevation. I shot. I walked to the board. I shot. I walked to the board. Et cetera.

I have very little respect for the micrometers. I turned the top one 16 clicks this way, shot, turned it 6 the other way, and so on, and after the last shot, I turned it 4 clicks and didn’t bother checking whether I was right. I knew I was just about on the money. At 25 yards or so, you don’t have to be Werner von Braun to know where the bullets will go.

Maybe 10 minutes later, I took off for the woods. I heard a noise to my right. It was a lady on another farm, calling to me. There is my fence, then there is a strip of land maybe 25 feet wide (half of which I own), and then there is her fence. She wanted to chat.

She asked if I was shooting. I said yes. She asked which direction I was shooting in. No, I was not shooting over her farm, into her barn, at her horses. That’s not exactly what she asked, but she implied that she thought I could be shooting over her farm, and she was very inquisitive. She pressed for details. She should have asked, “Is anything you shoot going over someone else’s land?”, and let it go. That’s all she can complain about, under the law.

She said her horses were going crazy, and that she had had to put them in the barn. This I very much doubt. They were a hundred yards away, with their view of me blocked, and I was shooting a pretty quiet rifle with about 90 seconds between shots. And like I said, five rounds.

Someone else on another property was also shooting. Lots of rounds. No idea where. It didn’t occur to me to ask if that was the shooting she was asking about. But no horse is going to flip out over someone shooting a 30.06 a thousand feet away. That’s not credible. Any horse that acts like that has a mental problem and needs to be medicated or put down. You don’t change your way of life over a defective animal.

I didn’t apologize. You bought a farm, you live in the country, and you WILL have to put up with the lifestyle. In Miami I had to deal with obnoxious salsa parties at 1 a.m. Things can’t always go your way.

I told her I was shooting to sight in the pea shooter for squirrels, and that I didn’t want to cause any one any trouble.

She seemed okay with that. Off I went, to kill squirrels. I didn’t see any, which was okay, because I just wanted to get out and walk around.

After I “hunted,” meaning after I wandered around and then sat on the ground under a tree looking at my phone, someone to the north fired a high-powered rifle three times, rapidly. I wondered if the horse lady thought it was me.

I am going to keep shooting and hunting on my land, because Florida law says I can. There is no such thing as a local gun ordinance in this state. An official who passes one can be fined $5000 and removed from office, which is pretty cool. I can’t be forced to stop. Still, I do not want to be aggravated by ignorant flower children who want to control their neighbors’ farms as well as their own. I do not want to have to talk to this woman every week. I don’t know if she’s an ignorant flower child with a leftist control problem. Maybe she’s a wonderful Republican who prays in tongues. I hope so, because having to bicker with a provincial, intolerant, supercilious flake would ruin this place for me.

If this lady tried to cause a problem, she would be SOL. A rabid liberal named Dziak sued a neighbor over gun-spooked horses in 2014 and got nowhere. Her lawyer fumes about it on his website. Sorry, bud. Welcome to Not New York.

I feel like it’s a message. Tennessee is in my future. If not Tennessee, some place in Appalachia where I can have 300 acres and tell everyone around me to kiss off.

Maybe it would be worth it to move to Eastern Kentucky and put up with the racism. Land is cheaper there than in Tennessee. I put up with complete idiots in Miami, and I survived. I don’t have to hang out with the racists.

Acreage is addictive, at least to me. Some people thought I would miss human beings when I got away from them, but exactly the opposite happened. I wish I had gone farther out and farther north. I would give a kidney to live on 5,000 acres.

No, not a kidney. But I would really like it. If I could get Internet access.

I might give an earlobe.

My family still has 752 acres to get rid of, 15 years after my grandmother’s death. I think the biggest piece is 300 acres. It’s up on a hill next to a national park. I want to go up there, lie on my face, and dig my fingers into the ground.

Perhaps this desire is excessive. I realize that.

Christians are supposed to love people, and you can’t interact with them and serve God if you never see them. On the other hand, you don’t have to have them in your face every day.

Jewish legend says Enoch got to where he only saw people once a year. I wonder if that’s true. Elijah was apparently solitary. John the Baptist lived in the desert. Maybe I’m not completely crazy.

Jesus didn’t spend his whole life in crowds, letting people spit on him and tell him off. He went off by himself and left them to fend for themselves. He left areas where people got on his nerves or threatened him. He eventually got out of here completely, apart from occasional visitations in spirit form. He only had to spend 33 years with this taxing species.

I can see how God might want me to move farther out and see less of humanity. People drag me backward in my walk with him. The vast majority of people I interact with are not positive influences. Let me put it this way: compared to being alone with God, almost no one is a positive influence. That’s a high standard to meet. I’m not strong enough or rooted enough to be immune to temptation and provocation. Maybe more isolation is what I need. I certainly want it. I love my friends, and I want to see them from time to time, but even good Christian friends take my attention off God.

It’s great when good friends visit, and it’s also great when they leave, as long as the visit isn’t too short.

I can tell this is a done deal. I can feel it in my heart. It may be three years from now, but I will be moving on.

I’m going to sit around and look at property, just like I used to do before we moved up here. It will be fun. It will give me something to dream about. This area is wonderful. I thank God for it every day. But something even better may be coming up.

Prosperity Preachers are Demented Wrecks

Interesting stuff is happening in my relationship with God.

I watch a lot of Youtube now. I have to have something to do during meals. Eating with a demented person is something you can only do so often, so I usually eat alone. I also need something to amuse me while I take the birds out. Finally, I am too lazy to go through the ordeal of picking up a book, opening it, and reading. I need to work on that.

I also watch old movies on the Turner channel, plus one TV show, but this doesn’t amount to much in terms of time. I’m very out of touch with current celebrities, and I thank God for that. I read that Ryan Seacrest is in trouble for groping somebody, and it was nice to realize I didn’t know who he was. I knew his name and that he was on TV, but if he walked in here right now, I wouldn’t recognize him or be able to say anything about his work.

When you fall behind on celebrity worship, celebrities start to look funny to you. You’ll see a hysterical news article with a breathless headline about how Kim Zolciak has a problem, and it will be like reading about a random person out of the phone book. “Herbert Loomis Suffers Major Swimsuit Malfunction at Elks Picnic!” “Edna Fanucci SHUTS DOWN Trump’s Latest Tweet!” Who? What?

I don’t know who Kim Zolciak is. I deliberately poked through celebrity names on the web and picked one that sounded utterly obscure.

I’ve been watching a lot of stuff on the One for Israel channel. The link goes to their website, not Youtube. I have not read the site. They’re Messianic Jews. They post all sorts of videos featuring Jews who have accepted Yeshua (not “Yeshu,” which means, “May his name be blotted out forever”). I highly recoomend their videos. They also post videos of Muslim converts.

One message I took from the Muslim videos is that I have let myself get way too angry at Muslims. Islam is a Satanic cult, and the hate it has managed to create in Muslims the world over is remarkable. Many of us think the hate only comes from a few extremists, but ordinary Muslims who convert will tell you different. They will talk about their former hatred of Jews and Christians, and they will even say they enjoyed hearing about terrorism and persecution.

Islam is bad. Much worse than most of us realize. But I had hostile feelings about Arabs and Muslims, generally. I had forgotten that many could be reached, and that many had the potential to be spectacular people. For that matter, there are millions of bad Muslims–the backsliders of Islam–who are not hateful at all.

I watched a video (not from One for Israel) about a Muslim girl named Chaima. She became a Christian. She was a real sweetheart. After God fixed her, I mean. She had been planning to join ISIS and kill Jews and/or Christians, but something changed her. Her mother gave her a bunch of used books, and Chaima found a Bible among them. She started reading it, hoping to prove Christianity was wrong, and instead, the love that fills the New Testament touched her heart, and she became a Christian. Her family rejected her, of course, and now she has no home. She runs around with Christian missionaries, praying for people and participating in healings. She comes across as a sweet-natured girl anyone would want to know. Even someone like me who is fed up with terrorism and the persecution of Christians and Jews.

To digress, I have to say I’m amazed to learn how many Jews know nothing about the New Testament. They say they thought it was about Catholics. They say they were amazed to find out it’s all about Jews, and that it was written by Jews. How can they not know that? Don’t the rabbis tell them anything? Some of them say they didn’t know Jesus was Jewish. I don’t know what to say about that. How can anyone not know?

You can see Chaima’s baptism online. They put her in a kiddie pool, and even though she was all for it, she began screaming and trying to get out. The people baptizing her held her down and prayed in tongues. She says the anger and screaming weren’t hers. It was something else. Makes you wonder how many terrorists could be cured by baptism and casting out demons. But 90% of Christians don’t believe in demons, so I guess the demons are safe.

I should have remembered this: God shops at the dump. That’s where he found me. He doesn’t go to yeshivas and monasteries and look for perfect people who have proven themselves worthy. He goes to the landfill which is the earth and picks out broken, decomposing people who can be repaired. That’s the best he can do, because we are all severely damaged. The super-holy people in the religious institutions are sometimes the worst of all, because their conviction that they’re righteous makes them immune to criticism and improvement.

One for Israel has a neat video featuring a former Muslim in something resembling a burqa. It shows her eyes, so I guess it’s not the full-blown burqa, which comes with a windshield. Anyway, she talked about her hate-filled past. She lived in Kuwait, and she was taught not just that Jews were bad, but that their existence was bad. She was taught that Jews should not exist. This is a commonly held belief among the world’s Muslims, and it’s something American liberals never acknowledge. Leftists (who hate every demanding religion except Islam) say Jews and Christians are just like Muslims; just as bad. But we’re not interested in genocide. Muslims are. This is the difference leftists try to hide. Anyway, she didn’t know any Jews, but she hated them just the same.

She visited a church. She accepted Jesus. How does she feel about Jews and Christians now? Completely different. The nonsense she was taught in Islam is gone.

She seems like she would be a wonderful person to know. I have to remember God can reach into any country and any segment of society, take a person out, and turn that person into my brother or sister.

Jewish testimonies are wonderful, but testimonies from former Muslims can be even more impressive. God does sensational things to reach them. Jesus appears to them. He gives them miracles. I suppose it’s because the barriers between them and him are so high. Often, converts from Islam live under death sentences, even here in the US. We have honor killings right here, under the noses of our quiet liberal press. If they can do it here, imagine what it’s like for converts in Iran, Kuwait, Gaza, and so on.

The covered convert in the Youtube video lives in America, yet she doesn’t show her face. That should disturb people.

We always argue about the solution to Israel’s problems. Most people believe in the “two-state solution,” i.e. the “cut Israel in half and wait for the Jews to be exterminated” solution. Boy, when those Jews are killed, things will be great. The crisis will finally be over. The Muslims will finally be happy, and they won’t bother the rest of us at all, because Islam is the Religion of Peace, and Muslims have no interest in conquering the world and establishing a global caliphate.

Yeah.

We argue all the time about political answers, but the only thing that really works is Christianity. When Israeli Jews and Muslims convert, they start going to church together. They intermarry. Suddenly “us” means followers of Yeshua, not Jews or Muslims. I’ve seen this here in the US, with people from different races. You go to church with black people, and suddenly everyone is on the same team, more or less. It depends on how much the church yields to the Holy Spirit. Anyway, worshiping together destroys boundaries. Everyone in the world is supposed to worship Jesus and be guided by the Holy Spirit, and all of our discord results from rejecting Jesus.

The notion that different religions can coexist in peace is facially absurd. Islam teaches genocide and forced conversion. Christianity says everyone who is not for Jesus is against God, and it teaches that proselytizing is mandatory. Religious Jews absolutely hate Jesus and Christianity, many equating it with Nazism, and they treat converts very, very badly. As long as we have religious division, the best we can hope for is a cold war, and cold wars are like dormant volcanoes. They eventually heat up.

I think the thing that strikes me most about the conversion testimonies is the huge difference between religions in which God is distant (and even cruel) and a religion in which God is very close to you and very concerned about your problems. I feel God’s presence many times every day, and I am no saint. I think nothing of asking God to tell me which restaurant to go to for lunch or which item to take off the shelf at Home Depot. What matters to me matters to him. God is not a far-off intergalactic warlord who is too limited, cold, and busy to talk to me. That’s Satan. He is small, overworked, busy, weak, and cruel, because he is not a god. Satan is Allah, not Yahweh. God is a father to me, with the ability and desire to spend time with me as though I were the only son he had. Testimonies from Jews and former Muslims commonly talk about the amazement people feel when they finally sense God within and around them.

The people who presented Chaima’s story have other videos. They go around praying for people and healing them. They’re charismatics. Their brand of Christianity is very different from the Joyce Meyer/Benny Hinn/Joel Osteen/T.D. Jakes/Kenneth Copeland hogwash we love here in America. They don’t talk about money all the time, the way we do. They go up to people, ask if they can pray for them, heal them, tell them God did the work, and help them accept Jesus. How original! Where did they come up with that? Someone should get a Nobel Prize.

Obviously, I’m being sarcastic. Mainstream American charismatic Christianity has syphilis. It is rotten and demented. How did we jump the gulf and leave the land of love and faith and alight in the region of greed and white trash ostentation?

I say “white trash” because that’s what it makes me think of. Give a white trash family a fortune, and the first thing you know, there’s a helipad in the yard and a gold-plated pickup truck with sable seats, painted in Clemson’s team colors even though no one in the family can get into college. But black preachers are just as bad.

When did Christianity become so expensive? The Apostles got up in the morning, walked outside, and introduced people to God, without light shows, jets, or megachurches the size of airports. Now you have to get dressed up, go to church, be scolded into handing over a minimum of 10% of your income, and listen to a complete fool who seriously maintains you’re obligated to fund his personal 727.

One of the Jewish testimonies I watched contained a story about healing. A family asked a rabbi to come pray for a sick person. The rabbi refused to come unless he was paid a huge amount of money. Thousands of dollars. Apparently, his god charges ransom. “Pay up, or the kid gets it.”

Christians prayed free of charge, and the sick person was healed. I was disgusted with the rabbi, but how are we any better? Yes, Christians prayed for this particular person without being paid, but here in America, thousands of people go to Steve Munsey’s ridiculous church/personal zoo, where he tells them God sells blessings for huge cash offerings. And Munsey is one of many.

My pastor at Trinity Church in Miami was Rich Wilkerson. His son Richie is the hipster who married Kanye West. Richie’s wife Dawnchere is the daughter of Denny Duron, a prosperity preacher who teaches some truly disturbing nonsense. Duron says you have to “manage blessings” by giving donations.

Let’s say you get a raise at work. God will want his cut. Duron believes you are obligated to reward God with a large donation. Better give God a grand before he sends his boys to lean on you.

Of course, if you’re in Duron’s church, Duron, not God himself, will collect the money. The prosperity gospel won’t work for you, but it has worked wonders for Duron and his daughter. It’s amazing how well it works for pastors, in view of the fact that it makes everyone else poor.

Duron also published The Abishai Anointing, a pamphlet which I burned in my backyard. The idea is that God sets special people, like Denny and Dawnchere, apart to be rich and admired, and the rest of us are supposed to be happy as obscure servants who do all the grunt work.

Funny how that pamphlet was written by one of the haves, not a have-not.

Duron is a rabid football fanatic, and he loves using football as a model when he teaches about Christianity. That should tell you how ignorant he is.

What if we were to shut up about money and focus on prayer and love? The prosperity gospel doesn’t work, anyway. We would have more money to spend, and we would have a huge increase in salvations. Our country would be better off. There would be more of us, aligned in God’s will, and the people who are against God would be weakened and stifled, as they used to be.

There is no point in hoping for a healed America, because that bus has left the terminal, but we can certainly hope to help more people and find more power and peace in our own lives. While America’s walls are down and the barbarians are running amok, God can still build a little wall around every child he has.

I don’t know when I’m going back to church. I have almost no desire to return. When I do, I will flatly tell them they can forget about getting a tithe from me, and I will also refuse to serve in any capacity whatsoever. I will give them $25 per week and sit in the back, and my only goal will be to be around other Christians. I don’t want to be part of another misguided volunteer ministry run by someone whose only qualification is that he is more aggressive than I am or that he or she is related to the pastor. I don’t want to hear about how God needs my silly, insignificant talents and skills.

When you show up to serve God, human beings run up to put chains on you.

Instead of “pastor,” American charismatics should say “master.”

The overbearing wife of my last master made the mistake of setting me free, and now that I’m on the lam, when the patrols come by looking for me, I am not going to raise my head out of the bushes and ask to be recaptured. Remember what happened to Dred Scott.

I think the worst thing about slavery is belonging to another human being. Human beings are unfit to rule each other. It’s a wonder God allows us to raise children.

I have to have a better attitude about Arabs and Muslims, and charismatic Christianity is still a very good thing, when you take the money out of it. I suppose that’s the synopsis here. It would be nice to show up and say God told me I was doing everything right, but it looks like that won’t be happening this week.

What Could be Worse Than Gossiping About God?

I had a funny experience last night, if “funny” means “inconvenient and extremely aggravating.”

I was going to sit down and blog again. I had already blogged once, but I felt like doing it again. God is giving me great breakthroughs, and I felt stupendous, so I was going to write about it. But I had to give my dad his pills first.

I went in his bedroom to make the delivery, and then I smelled it. Smoke. I knew right away what it was. The enormous quantity of leaves I had dumped on our burn pile had caught fire. And it was after 9 p.m. For some reason I could smell it from the bedroom.

I looked out a window and saw an infuriating orange glow about 500 feet away. I had to get in the golf cart and ride to the pile to fix it. I must have sprayed 200 gallons of water on it. In the middle of the performance, I went back and got a hoe so I could turn the leaves over and spray the hot stuff under them.

You would not believe how hard it is to put burning leaves out. For some reason, they burn from underneath, not from the top. The top of the pile looks swell, but under it, there’s an inferno going on. You can jam a hose into a pile of burning leaves and let it go for 5 minutes and accomplish almost nothing.

I hadn’t lit the leaves. I burned on Thursday, and I put stuff on the pile on Saturday. Somewhere in there, something was still burning, and it got the leaves going again.

I haven’t looked, but I’ll bet the leaves are gone. They were completely soaked when I left, but knowing leaves, I’ll bet they burned up anyway.

Needless to say, blogging was postponed.

I’m exaggerating the annoyance. I wasn’t happy the leaves were burning, but it wasn’t a major crisis. Just a fine lesson in farm management.

At the moment, nothing important is on fire, so I can write. I just wanted to say this has been a great weekend. Things are going very well. Prayers are being answered. Barriers are being shattered.

At some point during the week, I started feeling a new level of faith, and the message I got was that I was now officially one with God. This is something I’ve been praying for. It doesn’t mean my feet don’t smell or that I’m suddenly a great person. It certainly doesn’t mean I’m God. Somehow I am more closely identified with him now, and that means more authority and relief. Authority and accomplishment come from God alone. Anything you get without his authority is worthless, illusory, or temporary.

If I ran Christianity, people would be transformed instantly when they accepted Jesus. Some people say this happens to them. Hooray for them, but it didn’t work that way for me. It has been a very slow process. I turned back to God decisively in 2007, about 11 years ago.

A long time ago, I had a dream in which I traveled up a filthy canal in Miami. Blind canals collect garbage, grass, and dead and sick fish. This one was no exception. It was full of floating junk. The message I got was that I had spent a long time traveling up a blind canal in my life, and that I had collected a lot of garbage and problems. I was going to have to pass all of them again on the way back out. That’s what happened after the dream, so I think it came from God. I didn’t move instantly into a life of joy and success. I revisited my faults and failures and kept moving past them, in God’s direction.

God’s way of running things is better than the way I would choose, because it’s God’s. I can’t run Christianity. I have bad ideas God doesn’t have, because I lack his knowledge, power, and virtue. My thoughts are below his thoughts, as the earth is below the clouds!

I haven’t always felt joy or peace, even after being given a very strong and consistent prayer life. I have had to fight worry. I have been tormented my people who should have been under my feet. Things haven’t been perfect. But they improve in steps, and I just moved up a notch.

The other day I said I was going to publish phrases God had given me. I will post one now. I can’t recall if I’ve posted it before, but the message will be familiar: “I know the secret.”

Broken record that I am, I will provide an explanation that reiterates that which I continually reiterate: life will eventually work properly if you pray in tongues. That’s the secret. It’s not meditation. It’s not volunteering at church. It’s not yoga or “eating clean,” whatever that is. It’s not garcinia cambogia, St. John’s wort, weed, kratom, kale, Prozac, or coffee enemas. It’s not the false messiah of Marxism or the fake godliness of following rules and hard work. The secret is praying in tongues.

Preachers love to offer us solutions that do not work, usually in exchange for attendance and/or money. It’s like clickbait. Wondering how to get our kids off drugs? Say three “Our Fathers” every morning and throw salt over your left shoulder. Want to end your money problems? Give your mortgage payments to Benny Hinn, so he can get an even bigger yacht, and watch the money roll in. Pray this prayer. Pray that prayer. Wear this or that saint’s medal. One guy says you have to visualize yourself as an unborn baby and forgive yourself in the womb. What?

The man-made gimmicks usually disappoint. They’re like rabbit’s feet and santeria charms.

Prayer in tongues works. Count on it. It may take time, but it works. And it doesn’t cost a dime.

You need authority, because it makes things work. Pardon my language, but authority is what kicks asses and takes names. “Authority comes from time spent in the presence of God.” I put that in quotation marks because it’s another phrase I received. When you pray in tongues, God within you is praying, so of course you are in the presence of God. He does what a person in authority does. He explains. He corrects. He aligns. He defends. You’re like Moses, up on the mountain with God. When Moses came down, he had fresh authority. It wasn’t until after he spent time with God that he had the power and knowledge to rule.

In two cases, that authority was given physical form, in tablets bearing God’s laws. If he had stayed with the people, he would have had a different experience. He would have been soaked in idolatry and whining. The false prophets Israel honored and enriched didn’t have God’s presence. They weren’t the head; they were the tail. They were led by the blind instead of leading them. They were led by human beings. Moses knew God personally, and God himself led him. That’s why Moses had authority and power. He didn’t get his strength from sitting around reading the Torah and the Talmud. The Torah and the Talmud didn’t exist! He didn’t get it by reading the prophets. The Jewish prophets (excluding patriarchs) hadn’t been born yet.

I heard a funny testimony from a Messianic Jew. He said he went to the synagogue and could not find God’s presence to save his life. He had never felt it. He decided to fast on Yom Kippur, and he went to the synagogue to do whatever Jews do on that day. He felt nothing. He asked a rabbi what was wrong. The rabbi said it was his shoes. He was wearing leather shoes, which was against the Yom Kippur rules. The man later accepted Jesus and felt God’s presence. In his testimony, he said, “Really? This is what knowing God is about? You gotta do this, you gotta do this, you gotta do this. You gotta wear the right shoes. That’s what God is concerned about?”

We Christians think we’re better than Jews. We think we don’t make the mistakes they make, but we do all the same things. We make up all sorts of dumb strategies to get God to help us, and of course they don’t work, because they didn’t come from God. God had a lot of strange rules under the old covenant, and they mattered, but things are different now, and your shoes (and wrongheaded Christian rituals and superstitions) aren’t that big a deal.

I am not a good person, but I feel God’s presence every day, many times. It’s available. You can have it. You don’t have to be scholar or an ascetic, either. Those lifestyles are generally for egomaniacs.

Christian and Jewish scholars are like people who write tourism books without going anywhere. “I hear Venice is like this. I hear the subways in Paris are like that.” If you haven’t been there, shut up. Your ridiculous fables are not helping. Who do you think puts them in your heads? Not God. Someone who wants to keep you and God apart.

I’m not making things up. I’ve been there, and you can go, too. Right now. Wear any shoes you like.

If you’re not feeling God’s presence, you’re doing something wrong. We’re not supposed to require signs or chase them, but God’s presence is not a sign, in that sense. It just means he’s there. You should feel it from time to time. It’s not reserved for imaginary “saints” and super-rabbis.

You’re special. You’re as special as Paul and Maimonides.

You can render tongues powerless if you want. You can pray in tongues and then refuse to listen to God. But if you have any desire at all to cooperate, it will work. It will never not work. God told me, “Prayer in tongues never doesn’t work.” I love that.

Think of the thin lines sailors have used to pass heavy objects between ships. If you want to move a refrigerator between two ships, you can’t throw it, and you can’t throw a line heavy enough to carry it. You throw a thin line with a bigger line tied to the end, and the people on the other ship pull it in. They use the thin line to bring them the big line. You can keep doing this to bring larger and larger lines across until you have a line big enough to move the fridge. Tongues work sort of like that. The tongues themselves aren’t everything you need, but they will bring you what you need to get the things you need.

Praying in tongues got me here, and it will get me to much better places in the future. It wasn’t instantaneous, but it worked. The Bible says God is a rewarder of those who diligently seek him, so obviously, we should not be surprised if some changes take time. The word “diligence” makes no sense if you apply it to something that happens in an instant. Diligence means repeated application.

It’s kind of unfortunate that English Bibles use the word “rewarder,” because it makes it sound like we earn what we get. Obviously, we do not. We earn death, failure, and terrible suffering. But God does respond to diligent prayer, whether you call it a reward or not.

Human language is imprecise and ambiguous, even at its very best. The Bible is ambiguous. It can’t be perfect as long as it’s an earthly document. It was never meant to be our primary guidance. It was meant to be a guidepost; a temporary help to get us into God’s presence. Once you know God, the Bible has to be interpreted in light of what he tells you directly. When that happens, you can resolve the ambiguities and fill in the blanks.

The law said not to eat the showbread in the temple, but David ate it and didn’t sin. Why? Because he was a prophet. He heard God tell him to eat it, and God’s authority was above the law. Googling, I see that Jesus mentioned that. No surprise.

Now people will say I’m attacking the Bible or adding to the gospel. No. Not at all. But trying to defend myself will make it worse, so I’ll leave it there.

It was a good week. This year will be better than last year. The year after will be better still. As long as God chooses to not to cut me loose, I am all set. I don’t give any money at all to preachers. I don’t pray to “saints.” I wear the leather shoes every day. I eat as much pork as humanly possible. I have never visualized myself as an unborn baby. I get healings. I get victories. I get correction. I get faith and joy. If it works for me, it will work for you.

Shoo, Squirrels

Every time I hunt, I learn something new. Today I learned that you don’t always want to bag anything.

I have live oak trees, and they never stop dropping leaves. I bought a lawn sweeper to remove them. Live oak leaves are highly resistant to lawn sweepers because they are heavy and flat. They suck on the ground when the brushes of the sweeper pass over them. Also, for some reason my yard contains a lot of Spanish moss. I mean the grass itself, not the trees, contains Spanish moss. It winds around the sweeper’s axle and stops the wheels, and every so often I have to stop the garden tractor and hack at the moss with a knife. I tried removing it with a torch, but it bursts into flame.

Anyway, it takes about three minutes to fill the sweeper with leaves. This removes about 0.001% of the leaves in the yard. I then have to drive to the burn pile in the pasture, dump the leaves, and return. Today I made about eight trips, and I would say I dumped 400 pounds of leaves.

When it was over, I was tired, but it was mostly from aggravation, not exertion. The tractor does most of the work. I wanted to get some exercise, so I picked up the shotgun and headed out.

I kept thinking about the stench and effort of cleaning squirrels, and I realized I would probably be happier if I didn’t kill any. I needed a shower. I had some butchered squirrels I needed to cook later, to keep them from spoiling. I wasn’t all that eager to spend half an hour pulling out squirrel guts.

At first, things went the way they usually do. I saw two squirrels very close to the neighboring house which is three millimeters from my land. I don’t want to be the guy who shoots a shotgun outside their house every day, so I kept walking.

After I had looped back toward the house, I heard a bark, so I started toward it. Ten steps. Stop. Listen. Ten steps. Stop. Listen. I had taken my ear plugs out so I could hear squirrel activity. The barking squirrel wised up and shut his piehole, so I turned to continue toward home. There in front of me, three feet off the ground, 20 yards away, staring at me, was an enormous squirrel.

I had two choices: shoot without hearing protection or take a chance on losing him while I fumbled with ear plugs. I chose the latter course, and he ran up the tree as soon as I was ready to shoot.

I know how to deal with squirrels hiding in trees, so I sat down to wait him out. I didn’t see him again, but a bunch of new squirrels started leaping their way toward me like the Flying Wallendas trying to make a dramatic entrance. They ended up nearly overhead. I could have shot one without getting up. But the angle was such that it was conceivable that some of the pellets would have ended up on someone else’s land, so I let them go. Man, I hate a squirrel.

Up side: no butchering. No funky squirrel smell on my hands and cutting board.

I went in the house and fried the squirrels that were waiting in the fridge. I think I know how to do it now. I put together a likely mixture of flour, salt, pepper, chipotle, sage, and garlic powder. I wet the squirrels down with buttermilk. I coat them with the mixture and fry them in half an inch of fat. It seems to work.

Treating them with baking soda (my prescription for gamy meat) must work, because now they taste exactly like a chicken leg. They’re not quite as tender as chicken, but they’re okay.

The frustration I have with shooting angles makes me feel like I will need more land in the future. I keep thinking about Tennessee. Ocala is wonderful. Compared to Miami, it’s like heaven. But I can see a neighbor’s house from my front porch, and I can’t hunt without worrying about where the projectiles go. If I could find 300 acres in Appalachia, I would be in business.

I could live here the rest of my life and be very happy, but now that I’m hunting, I know I’d be missing out on a few things.

First, the trees here are all live oaks. Literally 90% are either live oaks or some other kind of trashy oak which is even worse. They’re rotten inside and full of huge roaches. The wood is worthless. They don’t produce nuts. I remember the neat trees in Appalachia. White oaks, red oaks, black oaks, chestnut oaks, hickories, locusts, black walnuts, dogwoods, redbuds, cedars, poplars, plums, maples…you name it. If you have your own woods up there, you can cut trees and dry the wood for woodworking. You can eat walnuts, apples, peaches, plums, and cherries. And you don’t have to worry about every fourth tree on your property falling over if the wind blows.

Second, the dirt up there is real dirt. Here, it’s grey sand. In some places it’s white, like the beach. It’s not very productive. The grass in my yard and pastures is Bahia, which is very long and thin. I thought I would be able to have it baled and sell it, but I found out it’s not worth baling. My grandfather had a farm in Kentucky that produced beautiful bales of hay so heavy it was tough to throw them up onto a wagon. A guy I know entered one in the state fair and won a prize. I don’t think you can grow anything like that here.

Third, it’s hotter than I expected. It was in the high 80’s today, in February. In Tennessee, it was in the 60’s.

Fourth, and this is related to the heat: this area has a major mosquito problem, and any day now, three months before I expected it, they will be back in full force. When you go outside in bug season here, you have to wear repellant all the time. I don’t mean when you go to the mall, but on my property, you will get eaten alive. We also have tons of spiders in Marion County, and they build gigantic webs in the woods. You can’t walk 50 feet without getting wrapped in a web containing a spider the size of a grape. In Appalachia, they have ticks, yellowjackets, and hornets. That’s about it.

Fifth, people…keep…moving…to…Florida. Yankees, as always, and since Irma, Puerto Ricans. Florida is now considered a purple state. Our conservatism is fading. I can hear traffic noises when I walk in my woods. I expect it to get worse, and I’m afraid a lot of the new traffic will be cars full of people who vote for socialism, perversion, and authoritarianism.

Sixth, the game here is not that great. If I really tried, I could bring home 20 squirrels a week, but they’re smaller than squirrels up north. You have to be very determined in order to eat them. I haven’t seen a single deer or hog. I heard one turkey call, but I’m afraid it was a neighbor getting ready for the season. We have bears, but the freaks and hippies won’t let us hunt them, because they’re cute.

I sound like I’m knocking this place. I love it here. But I might love it more somewhere else.

I am starting to miss Appalachia badly. I have learned I can live in the sticks and be happy. I don’t miss people or cities at all. I don’t have to have the Guggenheim Museum or the Helen Hayes Theatre five minutes away. I could enjoy Appalachia. I miss the scenery. I miss the waterfalls and creeks, which are things you can’t have in Florida. I mean, yes, we have creeks, but they’re actually sluggish warm streams. Not like the beautiful creeks in Georgia, Tennessee, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, and Kentucky.

I almost wish I had my grandfather’s old farm near Rogers, Kentucky. It was big enough to get lost in, and the back side was high cliffs overlooking the Red River Gorge. But I could never live in Eastern Kentucky again, because of the Defcon 1 racism and the widespread aversion to self-improvement. When I think about that, I always remember my cousin Byrd, who was a judge and an erudite individual. He said, “Just once I’d like to use a three-syllable word.”

Also, people would know me there. They know my family. For that matter, I still have relatives there. My family has never respected me at all, for reason I can’t fathom. I’m the most educated person in my family, by far, and I’m the closest thing my family has produced to a sophisticated person. Nonetheless, they never pay any attention to anything I say. I’ve changed a lot; I’m not the same person they used to know, with the same willingness to put up with nonsense. When you change, and then you go back to people who knew you before you changed, they pressure you to accept the treatment they used to give you, and you may give in and revert. I’m not doing that.

Here’s a story. My family owned a piece of land, by inheritance. We owned it in common. We sold it to another family. Political friends of my late grandfather. They found a problem with it, and they wanted to rescind the sale. I’m an attorney, and I don’t mean an attorney who practiced in the woods in Eastern Kentucky, against people who charge $75 an hour. I practiced with some of the sharpest people in a major market. I practiced intellectual property law, which is the most difficult field. I don’t have any lawyer relatives who are qualified to do that. I told my relatives to take the property back.

We had sold it for $40,000, which is not much money, and it would have been relatively inexpensive to take it back and auction it again. I thought our defense was weak. We would have kept our friends, and we would have moved on. They wanted to hire a lawyer and go to court. Over what probably amounted to $4000!

Guess what they did? They hired the lawyer, and we ended up paying him. My relatives kept quiet about the final result. When I finally got them to tell me what happened, they said we lost the case. Of course we did! Hello? Who predicted that? So we paid the lawyer’s fee, we gave back the money, and we wasted a ton of time. We also alienated people who had always been in our corner. This is an example of how my advice goes over up there.

It’s fine that they disagreed with me, but they didn’t even consider my advice. I was 100% correct, and they could not have been more wrong, and they didn’t have the background I had. They could at least have thought my advice over.

Here’s another story. Kentucky condemned part of a piece of property that belonged to us, to build a highway ramp. When this happens, you need an attorney to negotiate. At the time, my dad was a top-notch lawyer. He was sharp enough to be on the Supreme Court. He told the family he would handle the job for nothing. I said I would work with him for nothing. They turned us down and hired my cousin. He charged a 33% contingency fee. Contingency fees are for poor people, not people who can pay. Anyway, I forget the figure, but I believe he got over $100,000 for an easy job. It’s almost as if they thought it was worth paying six figures in order to avoid trusting my judgment.

I will never understand that.

Anyway, you can tell I am greatly respected.

I suppose there is a good chance I’ll run into racism in a place like Tennessee or Georgia, but I would hope it wouldn’t be as bad as it was in Eastern Kentucky, where it seemed like every tenth word was “nigger.” Even if it was, at least I would be around fresh people. I love my relatives. Don’t get me wrong. But I had a dysfunctional upbringing, my relatives were peripherally involved, if only as witnesses. There is a certain stubborn dynamic among us, and I am not going back.

Visiting? Fine. I hope I eventually get to visit them again, and I like talking to them on the phone. But living in the area where my mother grew up and dealing with certain expectations people have of me and my family…I’m not doing it. I’ll tell you something else. My family has enemies up there, and I don’t even know who they are. For all I know, some of them hate us for good reason. Now that I think about it, the ones my sister alienated have plenty of reason to dislike us. I’d rather go somewhere new and make my own enemies.

I was talking to a friend about this last night, and I put it this way: when you work for a company and get a promotion, they don’t let you stay where you are and boss your old friends around. They move you across the state to boss new people around. Why? Because of the existing dynamic between you and your pals. Your buddies won’t respect you or produce for you, and you won’t assert yourself. If you do assert yourself, they’ll tear you down. People function best where they’re respected and appreciated. I can’t imagine being respected or appreciated in Wolfe County or Powell County Kentucky.

It sounds nuts to talk about moving, right after leaving Miami, but it’s not as crazy as it sounds. I don’t want to be morbid, but my dad is 86, and he has a condition which has a certain expected end, within a period of time doctors say is short. It won’t be long until it’s just me here, and when that happens, my life will be very different. I won’t be a caregiver any more. I won’t need hot winters or a city geared to the care of old people. I won’t have to hire a sitter if I decide to travel and look at land. If I move, I’ll just hire movers, watch them pack, and drive to the new place. I won’t have to do all that while looking after someone who can’t drive, take his pills correctly, shop for food, or be left alone.

It would be nice if I had a wife to move with me, because moving is a chore, but I haven’t made any friends here or met much of anyone. No prospects whatsoever. But I can’t predict the future. Maybe someone will fall from the sky next week.

I haven’t written about it, but God has made real changes in my life over the last week. This will sound weird, but I feel he is telling me I’m finally one with him. It doesn’t mean I’m suddenly a good person. I just feel that I am more closely identified with him now. I am getting faith like nothing I’ve had before. Before I developed supernatural faith, I would try to believe, quit, and fail. After I got faith through prayer in tongues, I felt something in me pushing and holding my faith up, and I believed pretty well. Now I feel insistent faith that doesn’t come from me, and I feel like responding, “ALL RIGHT! I GIVE UP! YOU’RE RIGHT! YOU’RE RIGHT!”

I believe things that weren’t possible before are going to start happening now, so I’m not afraid to think about a final destination north of here.

This farm is great, but I now think I would be better off with less cleared land and more woods. Cleared land requires maintenance. I would love to have 300 acres, including 10 acres or less of pasture, without fancy fencing. Just barbed wire.

Here, the woods require maintenance, but this is a special situation. I’m in a hurricane zone (another issue I would like to leave behind). A rare storm came through and knocked over dozens of big trees. I think they’re still falling. My memory isn’t good enough to recall every tree, but it sure seems like I find more horizontal trees every month. Maybe Irma weakened them, and I’m still seeing the effects. I have the world’s only self-clearing agricultural tract.

Anyway, GENERALLY, woods require no maintenance at all. You just walk in once in a while, shoot some things, and walk out.

A little place in the Blue Ridge region would be really sweet, if I could just find an area where the people were okay.

I’m going to make the best of it here. When my dad’s situation changes, I’ll sell and leave. Then I’ll stay wherever I am until I die and leave this wretched world behind. At the moment, this is my plan.

Life here is really good, so I can’t complain while I’m waiting.

Wish me luck with turkey season. It’s right around the corner, and I have no idea what I’m doing.

Plus Thoughts on Hunting

Hunting was challenging today.

I went out at 4:15, carrying the shotgun. I have received the scope for my air rifle, but I found that the gun is so heavy, the crosshairs jump around a lot at 25 yards. I can’t be sure of getting a clean shot. I am researching ways to fix this. Slings, better ways of holding the gun, and so on. In the meantime, I am using the shotgun. It’s the best combination of humanity and lethality.

Unfortunately, the humanity angle did not play out very well.

I walked around the property. I saw two squirrels on a tree a hundred yards from the house, but by the time I got to them, they were up the tree and out of sight. I could not shoot at them before they went up, because the tree was between me and a neighboring property. Too bad.

I walked down past the way-too-close neighbor’s house I’ve written about before, and of course, two squirrels were jumping around within easy reach. In the direction of the house. Nothing to do but keep walking.

I saw a couple more squirrels and chased them. I chased the first one from tree to tree. He would not stop moving, so I tried shooting when he slowed down. No luck. He eventually went into hiding, so I kept going. The next squirrel I saw was far away when I spotted him, and he had plenty of time to hide while I walked to his area.

On the way back to the house, I saw what may have been the first two squirrels, in the area where I saw squirrels on the way out. I walked to their tree, and of course, they went up and hid. I decided to try some of the tricks I had read about.

I threw a branch to the other side of the tree to scare them around to my side. It worked, but they went back to the other side before I could shoot. I scratched the side of the tree with a branch to make them think a predator was climbing after them, but they didn’t buy it.

Some guy on the web said it was smarter to sit under a tree and wait for squirrels to come out than to give up on them and hope to see new ones. I decided to do it his way. I sat under a tree 20 feet from the one with the squirrels, and I waited.

Eventually, they started climbing down, and I shot one. Hooray. It came down by the base, and I tried to shoot the other one, but it would not present itself. I saw the first one flop around a little, and I thought it was kicking its last. Then I realized it was just wounded. It was trying to climb to safety, but it couldn’t do it. I had to walk after it and shoot it in the head.

I should have finished the squirrel off sooner. I don’t feel good about what happened to it. Lesson learned. Unfortunately, the squirrel, not I, had to suffer in order for the knowledge to pass.

I am taking pains to be humane, but I suppose events like this are inevitable. I don’t like it, but you can’t hunt and expect everything to work perfectly. This is something hunters have to deal with. If you’re going to hunt, you have to accept the possibility that you will occasionally cause suffering.

When I cleaned the squirrel, I noticed it only had three feet. I thought I had shot its foot off, which was even more disturbing than leaving it wounded. I was wrong, though. The stump had healed. This squirrel had been shot before, or something had bitten its foot off. This was one hard luck squirrel. It climbed perfectly well, though.

I think a lot about the ethics of hunting, and I am developing some beliefs. I have realized hunting is important, and that a man should know how to hunt. It’s easy to rely on the grocery store and preach when life is good, but there are such things as hard times and catastrophes. You should be able to provide protein when the stores have been looted and burned. Also, hunting teaches you valuable skills which are useful in self-defense situations. A man should have some ability to defend himself and others. He should be able to defend his land. There may come times when it will be necessary to stop criminals yards away from our houses instead of waiting for them to enter.

During the LA riots, people had to stand on the roofs of their businesses holding guns. Here’s something disturbing a black friend told me: on Martin Luther King’s birthday, his dad guarded his house with a gun. People roam around on MLK Day in gangs, doing whatever they want, and the cops sit by and watch because they’re outnumbered. The newspapers ignore it, so white people don’t hear about it. Sometimes defending your property with firearms is necessary.

They say Southerners had one big advantage in the Civil War: they were hunters. Shooting Union soldiers was not that different from shooting deer and rabbits, so they moved smoothly and quickly into their roles as killers of men. They knew how to hide, stalk, shoot, and care for weapons. Yankees had to be told which end of the gun the bullets came out of. If things get weird in the future, people like me will be a step ahead of vegans and fruitarians from California and Boston.

People who live around me have great weapons. They even have camo, blinds, infrared cameras, and a lot of other stuff that can be used against human beings as easily as turkeys. They have gotten over their squeamishness about shooting living things. This is not an area where gangs of disgruntled Hillary voters can get out of cars, walk into houses, and rape, kill, and steal.

Some of the tasks associated with hunting are unpleasant and gruesome. Pulling the warm, smelly organs out of an innocent squirrel is a very nasty experience. But aren’t such things part of life as a human being? If I’m willing to pay Perdue and KFC to slice chickens open, tear out the guts, and give me the meat, shouldn’t I be honest enough to do these things for myself?

I don’t like killing other creatures, per se, and I don’t want to make them suffer, but this is what I am. I have to man up and accept my role in the world. I am a predator, from a race of predators. I live in a cursed world, and predation is part of it. I am not exempt, any more than God is. God kills and punishes all the time, and I believe he put us in a position where we sometimes have to kill or punish, so we would understand what he goes through. A person who is nice all the time can’t be a good Christian. If you never ruffle any feathers or cause any suffering, you’re shirking. Even Jesus beat people with a whip.

I have no patience with mushy, touchy-feely Christians who reject their obligation to be hard, and who criticize gun owners, the military, hunters, parents who spank, meat eaters, and so on. Their posture is not love. It’s self-righteousness. When you refuse to offend or harm, even when doing so is required, you make yourself out to be better than God, who burned people he loved with hot pitch and drowned the entire human race.

Repeatedly, the Bible says God is a god of love AND JUSTICE. It mentions mercy and justice together, to make a point. God has killed more people than Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, combined, and he will kill more in the future. He’s not going to let us sit back sucking our thumbs, saying we’re glad we’re not like him. Sometimes we have to do hard things to other creatures. We are not better than God.

God is love, according to the Bible. At the same time, the flames of hell are his anger at work. He created hell, and he puts people in it all day, every day.

Absalom was cursed, and he died in disgrace. He undermined his father, David, who had a hard job ruling Israel. He stood in the gate where business was transacted, and he sucked up to the people. He was nicer than David. He took up their causes to spare them dealing with David. Then he declared himself king, and then he had to be hunted like a pig and killed with darts.

He wasn’t better than David. He was morally inferior. He was conceited and manipulative.

When I think of the self-aggrandizing, praise-sucking, warm, fuzzy Christians out there criticizing the rest of us, I think of Absalom. They’re like divorced dads who curry favor with their kids by spoiling them with presents. You know the type. They steal their children’s hearts and make Mom out to be a witch, and then they dump the kids on Sunday and leave Mom to deal with rules and spankings.

Hunting has its ugly side, but on the whole, it’s very pleasant. You get to go outdoors. You turn off your phone. You forget the insane, doomed mess the world has become. When I hunt, I think about two things: hunting, and God. No business. No worries. Every time a squirrel falls, I feel great satisfaction. I’m doing something my grandfather tried to teach me to do, forty years ago, with his shotgun. I love succeeding at it.

There are certain things every American man wishes he could do. Welding, machining, and hunting and/or shooting well are probably the top three or four items. A big percentage of us never learn how to do these things. I already weld and machine, I am shooting rifles well for the first time in my life, and it looks like I’m a reasonably good squirrel hunter. Coyotes, turkeys, and deer are on the way. Nice.

It’s funny, but since I’ve been hunting, I’ve had strange experiences. You know the funny little patterns you see on the insides of your eyelids when you close your eyes at night? For most of my life, I’ve generally seen golden geometrical shapes, like mazes. Now I see trees against the sky. It’s like I’m looking for squirrels.

I really see trees. I don’t mean I see shapes that remind me of trees. I see actual trees, through a glowing golden fog. And if I fall asleep while I’m looking at the trees, they turn into full-blown dream trees against a blue sky.

That has to be supernatural.

God wants me to hunt. I don’t know why, but he does.

I don’t know if I can get the air rifle to work for squirrels, but I’m going to improve my standing rifle shooting. I will continue working on killing squirrels humanely, with precision. I’m going to look into turkey hunting and see what I can do here on the farm. After that, I’ll try to get pigs and coyotes until the fall game seasons start up.

I’ll have to get camo. Unlike squirrels, turkeys see in full color. Squirrels couldn’t give a crap.

No squirrel photo this time. This one was too gross to post. when I fry it, I may post a shot. Thanks, everyone who has given me hunting or shooting tips.

The Strongest Chains are Imaginary

Every so often God gives me a phrase or a sentence. These words turn out to be extremely useful to me. They serve as guidance, but they also have supernatural power. When I sit and repeat them to myself, I feel God’s presence and peace rise up in and around me. It’s actually a problem, because I tend to fall asleep, which interferes with prayer. Sometimes I’ll go down the list and repeat each phrase at least three times.

I save these phrases in digital form. Today it occurred to me that if they’re worth saving for myself, they are worth publishing for other people. Henceforth, I’ll make an effort to post them as they arrive.

Here is one from a few hours ago: “My parents abandoned me.”

That one disturbed me. I don’t feel any qualms about saying my dad abandoned me, because he was never around, and he took no interest in me or my sister. But my mom? She adored me, and she certainly made an effort to straighten me out. I didn’t listen to her as well as I should, and I’m sure I discouraged her.

Still, I realize it’s right to say my mother abandoned me. One reason I learned to cook is that she got up later than I did. I had to feed myself. She didn’t make a consistent effort to take me to church (or to go on her own). She didn’t teach me order or responsibility. I had no set homework hours, for example. She didn’t check to see if I was doing what I should. When I was in high school, I did almost all of my homework after I arrived on campus.

My mother didn’t teach me to bathe correctly! I didn’t know I had a problem. I was dirty, but I didn’t suffer because of it. Kids smell a lot less than adults, and they secrete less grease, so when you’re a kid, being dirty isn’t as unpleasant.

Kids don’t automatically figure out when and how to bathe, and they may not pick it up by having you do it for them when they’re very small. You have to say, “Turn on the water. Get a wet washcloth. Soap it up. Scrub your ENTIRE body. Rinse it off. Go back over anything that still feels oily or gritty. Use the shampoo.” You have to teach them how to tie their shoes. You have to sit them down and make them practice.

My mother didn’t teach me how to tie my shoes until I was in elementary school! She only taught me because she was tired of doing it herself. I should have known when I was four.

When I was old enough to be ashamed of being filthy, and to be responsible for cleaning myself, a Jewish lady in a department store gave me a much-needed clue. My mother had taken me to get pants, and I firmly believe this kind woman took notice of my filth and decided to try to help. Somehow she found a way to work a hygiene lesson into the conversation.

I can’t even remember what the excuse was. There was something we needed to finish. Maybe I objected to buying shirts and socks as well as pants. I hated shopping. The saleslady said, “What do you do when you bathe? You don’t just stand under the water. You go on and soap yourself off and get clean.”

Soap? Washcloths? Really? Every time?

This amazing information changed my life.

Standing under the water was pretty much what I was doing back then! Get in, let the water run over you, and get out. And shampoo…I’m not sure I ever used it without prompting until I was in my teens. Every once in a while, my mother would grab me and make me lie on the counter with my head in the sink, and she would shampoo the dirt out and let me go. For a kid way up in elementary school, it was a disgrace. But I didn’t know. Who was going to tell me?

My mother did a very bad job. I hate to say it. If I had a son with the kind of habits I had when I was a kid, I would be all over it. I would wear a switch out on his sorry behind every day, out of terror for his future. I would feel like the worst parent on earth for letting him slide. I would pray I got him fixed before other people found out.

I know a lady who has a huge, belligerent son. The pediatrician thinks he’s going to be six feet ten inches tall. When he was 5 or 6 years old, he didn’t know how to wipe his rear end. Someone always had to do it for him. You can’t expect kids to be civilized without instruction. That kid is going to be a monster if she doesn’t get him under control.

It’s bad to be too hard on your parents, but it’s just as bad to put them on pedestals and pretend they’re perfect.

Why did God tell me both parents had abandoned me? To make me blame my mother for my faults? No. I’m responsible for my faults. But the truth is important, and I have to know it in order to draw proper conclusions and make proper decisions. Besides, knowing my parents’ shortcomings helps me advise other people (especially kids). Also, the knowledge that both parents abandoned me helps me appreciate God, because as stubborn, uncooperative, and dismissive as I am, he is still working to change me every day. He is 100% consistent. He has perfect attendance. He is better than my parents. He is better than the best parents who ever lived.

Here’s something he told me a few minutes ago: “There is usually a barking dog outside a stronghold.”

That one really hit me. When I heard it, I was watching the testimony of a Jew who accepted Jesus. He quoted his mother’s reaction: “I will never believe in Jesus! I was born a Jew; I will die a Jew! How can you expect me to believe in a God in whose name my people have been killed? I don’t care if it’s true! I will never believe in Jesus!”

That’s some serious barking!

Strongholds aren’t complete without intimidation. They are composed of intimidation plus actual barriers. Let me think of an example.

Think of Brother Andrew, the famous Bible smuggler. He carried Bibles into leftist countries that would have imprisoned or killed him had be been caught. Those countries were strongholds. They had physical barriers in the form of gates, walls, fences, and armed soldiers. They also had barriers of intimidation. They publicized the way they intended to treat missionaries. They did their best to put fear into them so they wouldn’t ever get to the physical barriers. They would be so scared, they wouldn’t even try.

Disinformation is a powerful thing, because it makes your enemies do your work for you. Don’t tell people they’re going to be gassed. They’ll fight and run. You’ll have to kill them and carry them to the ovens, and stripping dead people is hard. Tell them they’re going to get showers. Then they’ll walk to the showers, strip naked in front of total strangers, and put their belongings in neat piles for you.

The talk about prison and execution was the barking of guard dogs. Fortunately, Andrew ignored it, and God blinded his enemies. He ended up driving through checkpoints with uncovered Bibles stacked in the passenger seat next to him. Guards looked right past them, saw nothing, and let him pass. Too funny. When it comes to making fools of people, God has no equal.

The mother of the convert in the Youtube video was barking. The enemy knew someone would come to her eventually and try to open her eyes, so he filled her with irrational rage in order to intimidate. The most obvious proof that her rage was irrational is this: “I don’t care if it’s true!” There is no possible way to rationalize that.

She ended up accepting Jesus at the age of 86. I suppose I should add that, because the question will naturally arise in people’s minds. God knows how to tame a guard dog.

There are some strongholds you should leave alone. God has told me to quit praying for some people. But you can’t assume a barking dog means anything. God has the authority to command you. A dog does not.