He is God, and This is the Christmas Season

I was just reading about Kim Jong-Un, North Korea’s eccentric leader. The guy Obama and Bill Clinton allowed to build nuclear weapons. I should also add Bush, since he didn’t stop it.

Like all serious leftists, he has a bee in his bonnet about God. Socialism has always been about dethroning God and replacing him with an impossible messiah in the form of a benevolent mommy state.

Kim (I assume that’s his family name) has decided to attack Christmas. He has banned all gatherings involving singing combined with alcohol. If he ruled Ireland, he could simply have banned wakes.

My first thought was that Kim would fit in really well on America’s coasts. The leftist war on Christmas is very real. Bill O’Reilly was ridiculed for acknowledging it, but he was right. These days, a store employee who says “merry Christmas” is regarded as though he had said “Heil Hitler.” A crazy judge just issued a ruling in which he made the utterly fatuous claim that Christmas has a “secular half.” Look it up. He was being generous. These days, Christmas (the mass of Christ) has a secular 95%. We see a whole lot of reindeer and snowmen, and we hear the word “holidays” a lot, but we don’t hear a whole lot about Jesus.

Once again, I am reminded how much I hate Miami. Where I am now, things are very different. I don’t live near a mainstream city. After I moved here, I noticed something incredible. You can walk into a business belonging to a national chain here and hear Christian music playing in the background, and when you leave a store, they usually wish you a merry Christmas.

The first time I noticed the music, I marveled at the courage of the store manager. I was thrilled, but I also felt like we were getting away with something. I wondered if the manager would get in trouble.

It’s very sad that we have to pretend this isn’t the Christmas season. What other major holidays are there at the end of December? Atheists don’t have holidays, unless Festivus counts. Kwanzaa is a made-up holiday created by a white-hating black supremacist, and no one pays much attention to it. Chanukkah is real, but let’s face it: we didn’t start decorating our houses because of a holiday that applies to 3% of the population. Yom Kippur is much more important than Chanukkah, and you will notice there is no Yom Kippur season. We don’t even celebrate Purim, the fun Jewish holiday where everyone gets hammered.

This is the Christmas season, plain and simple. It always has been, at least since we stole December 25 from the pagans. Without Jesus Christ, the messiah, the sole incarnation of God, the “holiday” season would not exist. Tell me I’m wrong.

I don’t know what God thinks about the Christmas season, except that I’m sure he appreciates us acknowledging Jesus. We don’t know the correct date, and we adopted a lot of pagan nonsense when we created the holiday. We are extremely materialistic at this time of year. I’m so sick of it, I give very cheap presents these days. God may not be all that happy with the way we handle things, but I’m sure he is offended at the way leftists treat the name of Jesus. We censor it like a curse word, while promoting the open use of all actual curse words.

Cover your eyes, if you’re a leftist. I am about to blaspheme your god.

Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus. Merry, merry Christmas. Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas. Have a great time, celebrating the birth of the only supreme messiah; God in the form of a man. Roast a reindeer for your family and tell your kids there is no Santa Claus.

Jesus is God. Jesus, Jesus, Jesus. J-E-S-U-S. If I ever said “season’s greetings,” I now repent. Jesus allowed himself to be murdered in order to save me from myself. The least I can do is say his name.

Yesterday I saws the testimony of a converted Jew from Israel. His grandfather was a very rich rabbi and a member of the Sanhedrin. When this man told his grandfather he had accepted Jesus, his grandfather threw dishes at him and opened up his forehead, leaving a scar. He ran him off. When his grandfather died, he left him a fortune worth over $40 million, on the condition that the grandson renounce Jesus. The grandson rejected it. His family told him he was dead. His mother said he was worse than a terrorist. He had to go live in a tent and wash dishes for an Arab who hated Jews. Seven famous rabbis from the Sanhedrin invaded his tent and spat on him. He never gave up on Jesus.

But we don’t have the nerve to say “Jesus” or “Christmas” at Banana Republic, in a putatively Christian nation.

We’re so brave!

We’re being conditioned to hate and deny the name Jesus. In the future, leftists will have the power to kill us for our beliefs, right here in America, and we will be asked to renounce the Lord in order to save our lives. By then, we’ll be used to being embarrassed by the mention of his name. We’ll be used to hiding our beliefs, as though we were hiding pornography addictions. If you can’t say “merry Christmas” today, you may have a hard time standing up for Jesus when a government stooge tries to get you to renounce salvation in exchange for a few more years of life.

Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus. Get over it.

Never forget that this is the Christmas season. You can call a cat a chicken if you want, but the truth is the truth.

Plus More Testimony

I got a nice surprise today. My sliced country ham arrived, and it’s much better than I expected.

I ordered it from Gatton Farms in Kentucky. I quit using them a long time ago, because they sent me a ham that wasn’t smelly enough. A few days ago, I started looking for a new ham, and I decided to try buying a Gatton Farms ham (because the price isn’t bad) and letting it sit around for a week or two before refrigerating it, to see if it improved. When the ham arrived today, I couldn’t resist frying a couple of slices. The last country ham I had was from Cracker Barrel, and it was pretty bland.

The new ham looked promising right out of the box. The slices were vacuum-sealed in clear bags, and the color was dark and nasty-looking, the way it should be. I flopped a couple into a skillet and gave them about three minutes on a side, after adding two tablespoons of bacon grease for good thermal conduction.

When I took them out, I poured off the excess grease, added a little water to the skillet, and boiled it down to make redeye gravy. Some people call cream gravy redeye gravy, but it’s much simpler. Cream gravy is bechamel sauce made from pork grease and pepper, more or less. Redeye gravy is what you get when you deglaze a skillet with water and then reduce it. People will tell you to add coffee to it, but my grandmother never did.

I’m very impressed. The ham and gravy were nicely acidic, the way they should be. The meat wasn’t too dry. It was nice and salty. I didn’t add water to cut the salt.

I don’t know if they’ve improved their curing method or if the disappointing stuff they sent in the past was just bad luck.

My half-gallon container of sorghum molasses hasn’t made it here yet. I look forward to trying it. I want to make biscuits and eat them with ham, butter, and sorghum. I hope the sorghum is thick. I’ve had sorghum so thick it made me want to chew on it.

Things are going very, very well in my prayer life. God has been helping me to spend more time praying in tongues, in several sessions every day. I can’t tell you why, but when I do this, life just flows. Problems solve themselves. Stress disappears. When I don’t do it, problems pile up.

I got a phrase during prayer the other day. It was, “I know the answer.” It just means I need to quit asking God for new answers and start applying the answer he already gave me. In 1986, he told me I needed to pray in tongues for long periods every day. For a long time, I’ve known that it works, but I haven’t applied it enough.

I always say I would be the most boring preacher alive, because I would always say the same thing: get baptized with the Holy Spirit and pray in tongues as much as you can. I keep coming back to it. It never doesn’t work.

It’s a great message. Think of all the effort it obviates. Denominations are teaching people to slave away at unpleasant methods that do not work. They tell them to make pilgrimages on their knees, give all their money to grinning monkeys on TBN, go on long fasts, pray this canned prayer, pray that canned prayer, pray to this or that false “saint,” give up good food for Lent, avoid meat on Fridays, and a whole list of other useless tasks, when what people really need is to connect themselves to God’s power and let him do the work.

Yesterday I had a funny thought. Imagine you dig ditches for a living. One day your foreman comes up to you and tells you to dig a ditch of a certain size. You give yourselves blisters and make your back sore, digging the prettiest ditch in history. Then the foreman makes you and all the other workers assemble to praise him for the great job he did. “You’re so worthy. Look at this great ditch you gave us, o foreman. We thank thee for thy ditch.”

How would you feel about that guy? You’d think he was an parasite and a colossal jerk. But somehow, we expect to do all the work to straighten out our lives…AND praise God for it.

Is God a colossal jerk? Does he want credit for the things you do? If you have to do the work, what, exactly, are you supposed to praise him for?

God wants to do the work. We know this because he wants the praise. He doesn’t want you to praise him for what you do without his help. When you pray in tongues, he does the work. He gives you the words. He answers the prayers. You’re barely involved. It only makes sense that you would praise him when you see the results, because there is no way you can take credit. You had no idea what you were saying!

God fixes people’s problems, and he even wants to do the work of changing your character. Your catastrophically disordered and disabled character is too screwed up for you to fix. You already blew it. The damage is done. If you could repair it, you wouldn’t need Jesus. The crucifixion would have been a waste of time. It’s as if you spent your life mining sin, and while you were a thousand feet down, the mine collapsed on you. You can’t move the timbers and boulders. You’re pinned. God understands that, and when you keep trying to dig yourself out, your pride tries his patience. It proves you haven’t learned anything. It drives him to stop helping you.

We are heirs, not self-made men. We don’t have to reinvent the wheel. We’re supposed to sit back and let God give things to us. It’s humiliating, but then it should be. Humiliation just indicates that we finally understand what we are.

Here’s something I realized the other day: when God gave his stamp of approval to Jesus, he didn’t say he was proud of him. Remember? Jesus was baptized, and when he rose from the water, the Holy Spirit alighted on him, and God said, “Behold my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased.” Not, “of whom I am very proud.”

Sometimes when I accomplish something satisfying, I think about that. I feel like saying, “I’m proud of this,” but I know better than to do that. The correct thing to say is, “I am pleased that this is done.” We like to say we take pride in our work. That’s wrong. We should say we take pleasure in doing it well, and that we’re grateful God helped us. I think about that a lot. You don’t need pride. It’s a poison. You can be satisfied with what you have and what you do, without ruining everything by bringing pride into it.

God himself is not proud. That’s incredible. The Bible says it’s true, though. God himself, who has more reason to be proud than anyone, is humble. But somehow we, who offend God constantly and live on his mercy, think our asinine pride is a virtue.

I hope things continue to go well. I know from experience that I can always find a way to drop the ball.

I don’t care if anyone agrees with me or not. What I am doing was not my own idea, and it works. I can’t force anyone else to accept it. I wish they would. I’m not going to be disturbed if they tell me how offended they are by “cheap grace” and so on. Maybe they’re so great they can save themselves. I’m not, and clearly, I am not required to.

Yankees Ruin Everything

I feel like writing about something trivial.

Yesterday or the day before, I decided I needed a country ham. More accurately, I needed some form of country ham. Whole or sliced. I was not sure which way to go. Country ham sellers don’t charge much for slicing and bagging ham, and it’s a big help, but I was thinking I might want to age whatever I bought, and I don’t think hams will age well in individual slices.

My grandmother used to make her own hams. They hung a couple of years, and they were wonderful. They had a fermented smell to them, as country hams should, and because they came from pre-food-hysteria hogs, they had a lot of fat. The nincompoops who run the food industry have ruined hogs. They breed them for leanness, which is obscene. Pork has to have fat in order to work. You can’t make gravy without it, and just try making sausage from lean meat. I tried to make sausage from grocery pork, and it was like rubber. I had to grind fatty bacon into it to make it work. Granny used real pork from properly overweight pigs.

I should have looked for pork belly to grind into it, but as I recall, pork belly was hard to find before the fakes and hucksters on cable TV started using it.

When you buy a ham these days, chances are, you will get an abomination which has hung for six months or less. That doesn’t work. It takes a long time for ham to ferment and get the right flavor.

If you go to Cracker Barrel, they will serve you Clifty Farms hams. Unless things have changed, these are 6-month hams. Plenty of salt, but not much flavor. If you go online and buy a ham, you are very likely to get a 6-month ham unless you make a special effort to avoid it. If you’re going to settle for that, you might as well go to the grocery store and buy their fake country ham.

A long time ago, I discovered Gatton Farms. The company has a different name now. They were in Kentucky. They sold very nice hams. Then I noticed the product had changed. The flavor was gone. They told me they were curing their hams for a relatively short time. I switched to Scott Hams, and they were much better, but they went out of business, probably due to incompetence. It was impossible to get them to answer an email, so they were probably irresponsible in all other aspects of their business.

They sold really good sorghum. They sent me a broken jar, and I was never able to get them to respond to my communications so I could get it replaced.

A cousin of mine swears by Col. Newsom’s hams. He goes to pick them up in person. They’re very pricey. They charge $107 per ham, which is about 50% more than I feel like paying. They say their current hams have been hanging about a year, though.

Yesterday, I gave up and ordered some slices from the Gatton Farms people. It will surely be better than Smithfield or Clifty Farms, and it will put something on the table while I look for alternatives.

Here’s an idea I had: why not buy a crummy young ham and hang it a while? Aging is aging. A ham won’t know whether it’s hanging in my closet or in a barn in Kentucky. I may give it a try. It would certainly make the house smell nice. I can get by with my questionable slices while my project ham grows pleasantly funky.

Because all things are made in China and sold via Amazon, I went to Amazon to see if they had hams. Sure enough, a few vendors appeared there (not really Chinese). The ratings were not helpful, though. It was a bunch of city people, whining because they didn’t like country ham per se. “One star! Very salty! WAAAAH!!!! WAAAHHHH!!! MOMMY!!! GLOBAL WARMING!!!” Hey, if you don’t like country ham, why did you buy it? It’s supposed to be salty.

Some companies are selling neutered country ham. “Our delicious hams are not salty!” Then they’re not country ham. It’s as if Guinness decided to sell dyed Budweiser.

The slices should be here in a few days. I feel like letting them sit on the counter for a week to rot. Can’t hurt.

It’s too bad Scott Hams went out of business. They had great hams, sorghum, and some other interesting stuff. Smoked jowls. Real bacon.

I get very good bacon right where I am. I may have written about it. My friend Amanda works at a university, and the university has a “meat lab,” whatever that is. It must give the hippies the cramps, just knowing it’s on campus. State universities have to support agriculture, so the transvestites, communists, and jihadists can’t do much about the meat lab. They sell “bacon steaks,” which are slices of bacon about 3/8″ thick. Really nice, with lots of smoke flavor. I close my eyes and chew and wish it were non-sustainable whale bacon (which really exists).

I’m not as interested in food as I used to be, but I’m not going to dispose of my entire heritage. Country ham is a must, just like biscuits and gravy.

To get back to sorghum, I found a decent buy on Amazon. If you spring for half a gallon, you can get it for $40. That’s not bad, considering the total lack of local availability. The brand is Oberholtzer’s. I have not tried it, but Kentucky is the best place to find good sorghum, and Oberholtzer’s is a Kentucky company.

Most molasses is blackstrap, and it’s bitter. Sorghum, as I understand it, is not really molasses, but it tastes like it, without the bitterness. No one in Kentucky will accept blackstrap.

I’m giving the ham and the molasses a shot. I will report when I have the data.

Self-Righteousness is Cancer

I decided to take down yesterday’s blog post and start over. I have more more important things to write about than the saga of Al Franken and Roy Moore.

God has been giving me a lot of help lately. He has been helping me to see how screwed up I am, and how far I am from the person he wants me to be. It really started to hit home after my former pastor was jailed for child molestation. We all plant the seeds of our own destruction, and even if we don’t end up facing public disgrace, those seeds need to be rooted out and replaced with seeds of blessing. They do harm, even if they don’t become full-blown disasters.

During the last century or so, Americans have taught themselves to love sin and pride. As a result, we no longer fear punishment, and worse, we are no longer able to perceive our baseness. When you don’t notice your symptoms, you don’t know you have a disease, so you don’t try to get healed.

Sometimes I watch old TV shows and movies. I see grown men and women using separate twin beds. I see well-made movies about mature topics, in which the dialogue is completely G-rated. Then I see modern entertainment. Performers on broadcast TV–not just cable–joke about oral sex. Sometimes we actually see them having sex. We see them naked. We hear all kinds of filthy language. This happened within the span of one lifetime. Surely that’s unprecedented.

If you had been born in 1750, in 1825, you would have found yourself in a world that had not changed much. Prices would not be much different. Technology would only be a little better. People’s manners would be about like they had been when you were born. Consider the last century. When I was born, there was no Internet. There were no personal computers. Most Americans attended church and owned homes. Women wore slips. The only really dirty movies were illegal stag films shot in cheap motels. You could make it to college before finding out what the word “condom” meant.

Now the world is a locker room patrolled by sex-crazed, pride-crazed bullies. The filth of society commands our attention. We used to look up to people who at least pretended to have morals. Now we make the Kardashians rich. We worship illiterate rappers who tell our kids they want to kill the police. Public nudity is legal in many of our cities, and if you don’t want your kids to see it, you can just stay home.

We are completely jaded. Our consciences are seared. We have absolutely no fear of God.

We go to church, and preachers don’t tell us to repent. They tell us God is all for homosexuality, and that he creates homosexuals just as they are. We are told pride is a good thing. We are told to relax and stop feeling guilty, because Jesus (if they admit he was real) carried all that on the cross. Just enjoy yourself, scrupulously avoid criticizing sin, and give preachers your life savings instead of paying your just debts.

Preachers are cowards and pinworms. They don’t have the guts to tell people things that will save them. They only care about money and fame. They do their damnedest, perhaps literally, to avoid saying anything that might cause even one paying person to walk out the door. God will hold them accountable. They represent him to people who need him desperately, and they lie and keep them from finding him.

I feel like I know a little bit about God, but I’m like a pair of socks that has only been through the prewash cycle. The wash and rinse haven’t even started. No one around me knows enough to teach me. I have to go to the source–the Holy Spirit–because preachers are slime. The very best preachers I know of are hopelessly inadequate.

Last night, I suddenly realized I had wronged someone, and once God showed it to me, I did not understand how I could have missed something so obvious. I still don’t understand. Spiritual blindness is supernatural. It defies explanation. I talked to God about it for a long time. I know there must be other obvious sins in my life, thriving under my defective radar. How did I let this blindness happen to me? I adopted the standards of a world which is literally the ceiling of hell instead of thinking about the standards of heaven, which is my real home.

Pride is not okay. Sexual sin is not okay. Cruelty is not okay. Name a habitual sin. It’s not okay. But our culture praises sin so highly, we actually compete to see who can be best at it. We spend our lives tying weights to ourselves, to drag us down toward hell. How shocking it must be for a modern American to die and stand in God’s presence. It must be overwhelming to see how wrong we are about everything, and how beautiful life is supposed to be.

If you want to ask God for something, ask him for correction. Ask him to fix your roots, not your leaves and fruit. The apparent things will heal, once the hidden things are put in order. Forgiveness is great, but as Paul put it, it’s not an occasion to the flesh. It’s not permission to sin. Repentance and clean living are important. You need to be set apart, not just after you die, but right now.

You also need to know that God expects to do the hard work for you. You can’t fix yourself. You can’t even diagnose yourself. You have to have his help, and he allowed himself to be tortured to death so he could give it to you. Don’t be ashamed to ask for handouts. You can’t earn anything. You are too wicked and weak. Accept the fact that you’re a criminal and a charity case, and be willing to be given the things you can’t provide for yourself.

Preachers tell us fear of the Lord isn’t really fear. They say it’s reverence or awe. That’s misleading. Read an interlinear Bible. The word translated “fear” means “terror.” No one wants to admit that God is dangerous, but he is. He is the most dangerous being there is. He, not Satan, created hell, and he is the one who puts them there to burn. He allows bad things to happen to sinners who don’t repent. His love is the best thing there is, but his enmity is a horror that defies description. There is no defeating it. There is nowhere to hide. There is no shelter. No one can hold him back. We have to be afraid to do evil, instead of seeing God as someone who changes our filthy diapers once a week and then sends us home to continue sinning.

The filthier you are, the more you will suffer as God’s enemies gain power in America. The disciples were stronger than common people, and Jesus was stronger than the disciples. You can’t complain if you don’t change, and then you find that you’re the tail and not the head. That’s how things are supposed to work. It doesn’t mean something went wrong. It doesn’t mean bad things happen to good people. You will have brought it on yourself, and accusing God of letting you down will just make it worse.

Ask for the ability to see what’s wrong with you, and don’t be a wimp about facing the discomfort. You can’t fix an abscess without ripping off the scab and cleaning out the rot. We put scabs on ourselves. We put thin skins of denial over our iniquities. It’s like shoveling dirt over a seed. They continue to grow. The demons that live in us keep getting more powerful. We need to confront our faults and our denial and have our inner illegal aliens torn out and driven off.

Repentance brings new power. Denial blocks God’s power. Don’t be discouraged by the need to repent, because it will open a channel to great strength and peace. You’re not beating yourself up for nothing.

This world is really nasty. Try to snap out of your trance before it destroys you.

It’s Good to Feel Bad

I am having a surprisingly good day, and the events surrounding my former pastor helped make it happen. I know that sounds bad.

I am tired of calling him “former pastor,” so I will give him a phony name. I will call him Eduardo.

Eduardo’s situation is hard for me to accept. In a very short time, he went from respected pastor to homeless, penniless outcast. It may turn out that he lost his entire future. He may be given a life sentence. If he gets convicted on the worst charges he faces, he will spend 25 years in prison. No parole. No time off. Presumably very few visits.

When I found out about it, I had a strange reaction. I felt as though I were the one in jail, awaiting trial. I felt as if I were the one who had been exposed. It drove me deeper in to self-examination, and that has paid off.

A long time ago, God showed me that Holy-Spirit-filled churches were wrong to talk about money and blessings all the time. The prosperity gospel doesn’t work; it makes people poor, and it prevents them from looking for the truth about God’s desires. God showed me that we should be focusing on getting ourselves rehabilitated. We need to have our characters changed supernaturally. That comes first. The other things are relatively unimportant.

I made some effort to get correction. I pray for it every day. I encourage my friends to pray for it. I cast things out of myself. I spoke defeat to the spirits I had allowed to enslave me. It did me a lot of good. I recommend you do these things, too. But the Eduardo scandal has moved me to go further.

I was making what I thought was a pretty good effort. I was patiently waiting for the fruit to grow. Over time, I became more and more honest with God. In prayer, I confessed to everything I could think of, as sincerely as I could. But there were still nagging issues. I still had bad habits that seized me once in a while. I didn’t feel as much love for God or human beings as I wanted. I didn’t pray enough. I was putting in at least three hours a day, and that sounds like a lot, but I needed more than that. I knew it and admitted it, but I couldn’t find the determination to do it consistently.

If the good things God promises aren’t coming through, you are doing something wrong. There is no other explanation.

What Eduardo did was absolutely disgusting. I am not saying that to condemn anyone. It’s necessary for me to mention it in order to talk about what I’m going through. What he did was not sex with a teenager, which would have been bad enough. It was pedophilia. Women may get angry at me for saying this, but it’s completely normal and unavoidable for a man to be attracted to a young girl who looks like a woman. Undeveloped children are another story. That’s a sickness.

I suppose I should try to head off female outrage, so I will say something about my past. The most attractive female I ever knew may well have been a 14-year-old I knew in Israel. I was working on a kibbutz. A woman who was a journalist in Finland worked as a volunteer, and she brought her troubled daughter, Anke. Anke was completely mature, physically. She could have passed for 25. Without makeup or retouching, she looked the way models looked in Playboy magazine. Stunning. She was also promiscuous. One night she came up to me and asked me if I wanted to make out. Even at 22, I was not totally stupid. I turned her down. And I was not exactly dripping with women! I got very few opportunities for sex and romance. I was not happy.

I was not willing to touch her. Doesn’t mean I wasn’t attracted to her. She was physically magnificent. I just knew it was wrong. I knew she was messed up, and I knew people took advantage. I did not want any part of that, and I certainly did not want to be exposed. Later on, I saw a friend of mine from New Zealand, rolling around on a bed with her with his lips pressed against hers. He was older than I was. Part of me was jealous, but I was also disappointed in him.

Anyway, male sexual attraction is unrelated to morality. It’s purely physical. A man doesn’t stop being attracted to a girl the second he sees the wrong year on her driver’s license. Anyone who expects us to find beautiful teens unattractive is living in a fantasy world. If you think a man–even a moral man who behaves himself–can’t find your daughter attractive because she’s in the 8th grade, you are ignorant.

Eduardo would be somewhat less disappointing if a stunning high school junior had thrown himself at him and gotten her way, but the victim was a little girl who probably weighed 80 pounds when the whole business started. The attraction itself is outside of normal male parameters. It’s like being attracted to another man or a pet. Also, the corruption is worse. Having sex with a round-heeled cheerleader would be very bad, but an 11-year-old? You’re introducing her to types of filth and evil she shouldn’t even be aware of.

So. That’s how I see his actions. I understand lust for females who have been through puberty. I can see how someone could slip under the right circumstances. I can’t relate to lust for little kids. How can the temptation exist?

I’ll say something else that may surprise women. Little boys are not that pure. Something to think about when you’re undressing in front of them or saying things you should not. When I was in the second grade, my favorite teacher left to get married. She took me aside to tell me she would miss me and that I should be nice to the new teacher. The whole time, I was looking down the front of her dress. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Second grade. Be careful around boys.

What Eduardo did is shocking, but I have done bad things, too. While I was praying last night, I dredged them back up in my mind and threw them out in front of God. I had done that a lot in the past, but I hadn’t felt the same level of shame and fear. Eduardo unlocked those things for me. I was able to feel more shame, as well as the fear of God.

Eduardo is where he is because God did not protect him. He got outside the realm of protection. He didn’t protect Eduardo from the girl, her mother, or the cops. Fear of God means fearing losing his protection. You really need to be on his good side, because if you’re not, he will let extremely ugly and humiliating things happen to you.

Tongue-talking preachers like to try to make us feel better. They get so excited about refraining from condemning people, they lead us to treat our sins as though they don’t matter. That’s a big mistake. Accepting shame and fear opened doors in me. I felt good about feeling bad, if you can understand that. I felt like I was letting pus out. I stopped trying to feel good about myself. I just wanted it all out of me.

God helped me to spend an adequate amount of time praying last night, and I put in two hours of prayer in tongues this morning. I was very serious. I was intent on getting it done. I had the motivation I had been lacking. I welcomed fear and shame. I knew that walls would be breached, and things that had been inhabiting me would be exposed and driven out.

When I was young, I thought self-esteem was a panacea. I had low self-esteem, and I thought high self-esteem would make me succeed in life. We hear this all the time from educators and TV shrinks. The problem is this: sometimes low self-esteem is healthy and appropriate. High self-esteem is unjustified. We go into ghettos and teach immoral future sociopaths they’re beautiful, talented, and good…when they’re not. We put lipstick on pigs and send them out into the world. It doesn’t work. We teach pride, and what does the Bible say God does to the proud? He fights them.

Eduardo is one of the proudest people you will ever meet, and his wife and son are just like him. Pride got him where he is. He was completely unable to listen and learn.

Today I believe it’s okay to feel bad about what I am. If it brings God’s help to me, it’s great. It’s not that painful, and it takes less effort than lying to myself all the time. I really want my inner self to change. If permitting myself to be ashamed is all it takes, it’s a bargain.

One nice thing about accepting and confessing shame is that you can’t invite exposure or a fall. No one will ever say, “You held yourself out as a rotten person, but here’s what you REALLY are!” That kind of thing only happens to the proud. Pride goes before a fall. If you’re already ashamed, where can you fall to?

I believe God will help me more now. It’s consistent with scripture. He has certainly been more helpful since I found out about Eduardo.

The path of divine improvement has plateaus. It’s like peeling an onion. Every time you reach a new plateau, it’s a good thing, but you have to keep going. You can’t say, “I’ll just stay here and be satisfied.” You grow or you rot. You can’t stay still.

I am better than I used to be, but I still need lots of work. Admitting it and feeling shame and remorse will help make it happen.

To get more information, look at Psalm 32. I think it will help. It says God will help a man who confesses, when the great waters rise. The great waters are the voices of the ungodly. They control this nation. Their filth is flooding us out. When things get even worse than they are, you will need God to lift you up.

Don’t let self-righteousness pull you under. At the mercy of these people (and the spirits they serve) is not where we want to be.

If You Want to Survive, Keep Improving

I am still upset about my former pastor’s molestation arrest.

Last night I woke up full of anxiety. It’s odd, but I felt as though I were the one who had committed the offenses. I felt as though I were the one who had to be concerned about punishment.

I kept having thoughts about my own sins and irresponsible acts. I have gotten away with a lot in this life. So far!

I suppose it’s harsh to compare myself with someone who is charged with molesting a girl under the age of 12, but I am not nearly what I should be. And it’s better to be too contrite than not contrite enough. If other people have to fall, I should try to benefit by observing their fate and trying to avoid it through confession and repentance. There isn’t much to be gained by patting myself on the back and telling myself I’m doing fine.

I thought about my past and the divine opportunities I’ve missed. I didn’t hear from God until I was about 22, so maybe I should get a little slack for my failures up to that point, but at 25, I was baptized with the Holy Spirit, and God had made it clear I was supposed to pray in tongues every day. I didn’t do it. I fell away. I got worse instead of better.

It’s funny, but it didn’t seem like a big deal at the time, and it wasn’t deliberate rebellion. I didn’t decide God wasn’t real. I didn’t doubt that prayer in tongues was important. I just wandered off. I was distracted and forgetful.

I don’t know why God was so distant when I was a kid. I heard from the devil all the time, and there were plenty of evil people around me to abuse me and mislead me, but I didn’t get visits from God, and I didn’t know any righteous people who could help me get to know him. I hear from God every day now. I don’t understand I why made it into my twenties without hearing from him once. It’s very strange, because it seems unlike him.

God is always right and good. I can’t criticize him just because his actions don’t always suit me. What he did was correct. And once I started hearing from him, I should have held on for dear life.

Heaven is very far away, and help here on earth is not automatic. We’re like egg cells. You know how that works. The body produces a lot of them, and very few get fertilized and become human beings. The rest get washed out of the body and die. A lot of people are born, but not many come to know God, and not many are saved.

The earth is a very bad place, much more like hell than heaven. We’re just too used to it to see the evil.

Often, I feel like I’m much better than I am. I feel that the overt things God has done in my life are some sort of stamp of approval. I know better, and it bothers me that I could feel that way. Sometimes I make myself think about the bad things I’ve done and thought, just so I can regain perspective. God fights the proud. I do not want God to fight me. Not over an idiotic misperception.

It disturbs me when people tell me I’m a good person. I feel like they’re driving nails in my coffin. I am a product of 20th-century America. I am a mess. If I succeed in concealing it, it doesn’t mean you should reward me for it. If God tells me things, it’s because I needed to be told, not because I was perfect.

God told me something interesting: if you’re 99% good and 1% bad, you’re bad. That’s the way it works in heaven. Being good by earthly standards is different. The standard is much lower. Heaven has quality control. Nothing imperfect gets through the door.

I’m not saying I’m only 1% bad. Just making a point.

I got up and paced the floor, and I thanked God for the correction. I asked him to send more. I asked him to help me to be judged privately by him, and I asked him to help me avoid being judged publicly. In the past, when I felt negative feelings, I worked with God with the intention of getting rid of them. Last night, I said I was fine with feeling bad. Sometimes you need to feel bad for a while.

Too many of us go to church to be helped to feel good in spite of our sins. We don’t have any intention of changing. We just want God to wink at us and tell us this week’s sins are forgiven, and then we want to go home and resume sinning. You can’t enter the kingdom of heaven that way. If you want power and help on this earth, you have to love correction. Christians die of cancer. They go bankrupt. Their wives cheat on them. They get killed in church by mass murderers. You need to get close to God if you want help. His help isn’t for rebellious Christians. It’s for the contrite.

While I was lying in bed praying, I thought about the pastor. At that very moment, he was lying in a jail 300 miles away, with no prospect of relief. As bad as things were at that moment, they were likely to get worse. Some of the charges carry a 25-year mandatory minimum. No parole until every day is served. No time off. And inmates do not like sex offenders. Guards look the other way when they are mistreated. Unless he catches a break from the prosecutor or judge, or there is a technical issue that helps him, he may die surrounded by evil people who live to torment him. He may have to put up with that for 40 years.

It’s too much to absorb.

I thought about a testimony I read. A lady named Mary Kay Baxter said Jesus had taken her through hell. The people there lived in flaming pits, with huge maggots chewing tunnels through their bones. The guards were huge fallen spirits that hated the damned. It sounds so much like prison. Prison is a picture of hell.

I would be happier had I learned the pastor had died. He would be better off.

I still don’t understand how it happened. I don’t think he has no conscience. Maybe he was unprotected because he was too proud to develop spiritually, and when a loathsome spirit came to him with a sick urge, he could not fight it off. This life is a war, not a pleasure cruise. We’re supposed to train for battle.

I don’t know the answer, though.

When I was done praying and exercising God’s authority, I went back to sleep and slept soundly and peacefully. That was nice.

I hope my distress improves me. I don’t think anything better can come of this.

Surprising News from Miami

This can’t be right. I got bored and Googled a few people I know in Miami, and it looks like a former pastor of mine has been arrested for child molestation. Eight counts.

The mugshot is on the web, and it sure looks like him. The name is correct. The age is different from the age on a people-finder site, but it’s off by less than a year.

He used to have a Facebook page with his wife. Now she has her own, and his doesn’t come up. The church’s website is down for “maintenance.”

This is a guy who was not good to me. He ran a cult, and he and his wife broke up friendships. He would not listen to anyone. He was too proud. Not my favorite person on earth. But this news is very upsetting. I would not wish this on anyone.

I have to wonder if it’s true. He is in jail in Miami. The judge denied bond for some of the counts. The inmate search page has domestic violence notes. If he got into it with his wife, maybe she accused him falsely. Women do things like that.

Then again, maybe I’m wrong to suggest she would do it.

For the record, I never saw the slightest hint that he was capable of this. It does not ring true. Maybe it is true, but it doesn’t sound right. I’ve known people who seemed creepy and perverted, and he is not one of them. I never heard him say anything libidinous. I never saw him put a hand on anyone. I never saw him stare at a child. He didn’t seem particularly involved with kids at the church. Many molesters become teachers, youth pastors, scoutmasters, and so on, so they can get close to kids. I never saw any of that.

The clerk’s site doesn’t mention child pornography. It would be odd for a pedophile in 2017 to lack pornography.

Sometimes when something bad happens to someone who is out of line, it’s hard not to feel satisfaction. Not this time. If he gets convicted, his life is over. Everyone on the outside will hate him, and so will all of the prison inmates he lives with.

Am I wrong to feel sympathy for the accused and nothing for the victim? I don’t know who he is alleged to have molested or what he is alleged to have done. I don’t know the first thing about it. If there are victims, those are the people I should feel bad for.

Maybe I feel sorry for him simply because I know him.

If there really is a victim, I may know that person, too.

This is staggering. I did not like the things he did, but I don’t want to see this happen to him. I suppose it didn’t “happen to him,” though. If he’s guilty, he himself made it happen, intentionally.

After I left the church, I used to ask God if I should pray for him and his wife, and I kept feeling that God was telling me not to, because they could not be corrected. Maybe I was right about that.

It may sound funny to say I didn’t pray for someone who mistreated me (and others), but I’ve found that effective prayer takes time, and you have to try not to waste that time on the wrong people. Some people who harm you can be changed. Others can’t, and the time you waste praying for them could be spent on people who would be improved by it. You can’t pray all day. Your prayer time and energy are limited. You have to choose your battles. More accurately, you need to get God to choose them for you.

America is going to go down the toilet, and a lot of people are going to waste their time praying for God to fix it. That’s a great example of misguided prayer. You can’t pray against prophecy. When my sister ruined her life, I felt that God didn’t want me to pray for her any more. There was no way to penetrate her self-righteousness and utter lack of honesty. I try to get God to help me pray for people who can change, so my time here on earth amounts to something.

Man, this is bad. And one of my best friends was counting on that church to provide a career. There were kids who went to that church without their useless parents, because they wanted to know God. People depended on that church.

I reserve judgment. I don’t know whether he’s guilty or not. Most arrestees are guilty of at least what they’re charged with, but you never know.

I reserve judgment. I don’t know whether he’s guilty or not. Most arrestees are guilty of at least what they’re charged with, but you never know.

Be careful whom you worship with, and don’t let your desire to see the best in people lead you to associate with the wrong individuals.

I’m glad God got me out of that place. At first, I thought the pastors were wonderful, but they kept hitting me over the head with their faults, and then they did something stupid that made it too awkward for me to continue attending.

I was a deacon. I’m glad I won’t be known as a deacon of a church with the molestation scandal.

A friend just confirmed it. He molested his niece. The niece told her mom. Her mom put it all over Facebook. He apologized to the church and stepped down. Terrible.

For a while after he left, my friend pastored the church. I guess that fell apart.

Confessing in front of the church was the right thing to do, I suppose, but it will all but guarantee a conviction.

Hope this is the most disturbing news I get this week.

Calls God’s Judgment Down on Man Who Rejected Him

I have to ask: is James Comey the pettiest politician ever?

Maybe I should not ask. The president is vying for that title as well. But I think Comey has him beat. If Comey had fired Trump a long time ago, Trump would not still be tweeting about Comey. He eventually moves on. Comey is like a jilted ex-girlfriend. You dump a woman because you realize she’s toxic and impossible to help, and then years later, fat and undesirable, she’s hovering over a keyboard in her manless apartment, trying to turn people against you on the Internet and using clothes she didn’t return to you to clean the litterbox used by her many cats. That’s Comey.

Michael Flynn lied to the FBI about his Russian contacts. In a moment of insanity, Attorney General Sessions appointed Robert Mueller to investigate Russian interference with the 2016 election. Now Mueller has decided to prosecute Flynn in hopes of squeezing him for dope on everyone else who might be involved. There is no reason at all to think Trump–Comey’s ex-boyfriend–is in trouble. Even if it were proven Trump colluded every day, “collusion” is legal, and there is no evidence that Trump is guilty of this non-crime. But Comey, in lieu of vandalizing Trump’s car like any normal ex-girlfriend, posted this weirdness on Twitter:

But justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.

That’s supposed to be Amos 5:24, but Comey got it wrong, and somehow he has not seen fit to correct it. The actual quotation is, “But let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” That’s from the English Standard Version of the Bible. I could not tell you anything about that translation. I had never heard of it until today. I wonder if it’s one of those “evolved” translations that endorse homosexuality and call God “She.”

I took a look at Amos, and his words seem irrelevant to the version of Trump that exists in Comey’s mind. Amos was complaining about idolatry. He was criticizing the Jews for turning away from God. He said they shouldn’t hope for the day of the Lord, because it would make them even more miserable. It would be a day of judgment.

I don’t think Donald Trump is rooting for Jesus to come. I’m sure he’s basically for it, but I don’t see him as a person who thinks about it a lot. I don’t see him as a highly religious yet hypocritical figure who needs to fear God’s judgment because he has held himself out falsely as a godly man. Trump is pretty worldly.

People who aren’t close to God quote scripture pretty badly, and Comey appears to be an example. “Oh, this is a good one! Justice flowing down on people! I’ll just cut and paste!” They don’t understand the context of the quotations they wield like pea-shooters. If you’re going to get mad at someone and quote scripture at him, you should at least read the book from which you’re cribbing.

I would quote Amos 5:24 with regard to America’s future. I would definitely quote it in reference to filthy prosperity preachers who make Christians poor and pretend God put them up to it. Quoting it at a former employer, as a vague indication that I hope God gives him a sharp kick in the butt…that, I would not do. I would look small, and people who actually read the Bible would consider me ignorant.

When you read a thing like this, you wonder. Does Comey have a job? Does he do anything? Is he sitting around texting random acquaintances, hoping it will shame someone into inviting him to a Christmas party?

If I were a friend of his, I’d be telling him to drop the bone already. Let it go. Life is about the future, not your unsatisfying past with the guy who didn’t appreciate you. Living well is the best revenge, isn’t it? Stop sitting around pouting. Join Crossfit. Take the wife on an Alaskan cruise. Buy a set of Bob Ross DVD’s, some oil paints, and some single-malt Scotch and just go crazy.

Learn Hindi. Take a Thai cooking class. Join a Bible study group and read the whole book instead of random snippets you hope might embarrass an inattentive billionaire.

James Comey is not a happy little tree. Not by a longshot.

Nothing bad will happen to Trump unless he lies to the investigators or tells someone else to. Impulsive as he is, he is probably smart enough not to do those things, especially after what happened to Scooter Libby.

It seems like the whole world has turned into junior high. Maybe it always was, but it didn’t seem this blatant.

When I got done with my utterly heinous voyage through the Columbia College Literature Humnanities syllabus, I found myself in need of things to read (other than STEM books), so I bought myself the complete works of William Shakespeare on Google Play. I’m reading Richard III. Here is a great quotation from Richard himself: “\

[T]he world is grown so bad that wrens make prey where eagles dare not perch. Since every jack became a gentleman, There’s many a gentle person made a jack.”

Isn’t that beautiful? Talk about apt. Our heroes are semi-literate rappers who want to shoot our president and the police. Our great ladies are Instagram sluts with sex tapes and nude photos they themselves leaked. Every jack has become a gentleman. And people like Comey, who should be gentle persons, lower themselves in the public eye every day.

Here’s an apt Bible quotation. In Isaiah 3, God describes what happens to a nation that forgets him:

For behold, the Lord, the Lord of hosts,
Takes away from Jerusalem and from Judah
The stock and the store,
The whole supply of bread and the whole supply of water;

The mighty man and the man of war,
The judge and the prophet,
And the diviner and the elder;

The captain of fifty and the honorable man,
The counselor and the skillful artisan,
And the expert enchanter.

“I will give children to be their princes,
And babes shall rule over them.

The people will be oppressed,
Every one by another and every one by his neighbor;
The child will be insolent toward the elder,
And the base toward the honorable.”

That’s us. Our President fires off angry tweets all day. Our journalists, politicians, and entertainers expose and pleasure themselves in front of female coworkers. We fawn on unsavory idiots like Kim Kardashian, J.K. Rowling, George Takei, and Chrissy Teigen. Our educators tell us men are women and women are men, and that white people, who developed the greatest civilizations in history and gave us science, medicine, engineering, and the very best of the arts, are the main problem with the world. They are now telling us a white student can decide to be black. I predicted that a long time ago. It won’t be long before they tell us you can choose to be an espresso machine.

Our idols are sleazy, impulsive, incurably conceited ignoramuses. The worst people in society have the greatest influence.

We were better off in the days when everyone understood that entertainers were base. When you turn on the TV and look at Bruce Jenner, the Kardashians, Charlie Sheen, Kevin Spacey, and the rest, you realize we had more sense back in the old days. It used to be understood that when entertainers came into a town, they had to be watched and isolated, and they had to be sent on their way after a few days. We knew their presence meant theft, swindling, prostitution, the corruption of our youth, and a bunch of other ills, so we didn’t let them hang around. Now we worship them as gods.

If J. Edgar Hoover were alive, he would marvel at Comey’s lack of gravitas. Hoover was weird, but he wouldn’t have lowered himself to tweeting smug, hopeful Bible quotations about annoying presidents.

Dignity is dead. The modern peasantry won’t let you have any. The pillars of communities run from tattooed, pierced cretins who ought to be in the stocks. It’s too bad we quit using words like “knave” and “slattern.” We need them now more than ever. Kids grow up having no idea what class is, so they don’t know what they’re missing, living in a juvenile and impudent society.

Comey probably thinks he’s the exact opposite of what he is. He probably thinks he looks like the voice of maturity.

Remember what Mr. Lebowski said? “The bums lost.” He was wrong. The bums won. The slouching, dope-smoking, sexually polyvalent, arrogant-for-no-conceivable-reason looters of civilization won. They lowered our standards so much, even those of us who think we recognize class and breeding can’t tell butter from margarine.

I wish I had never been influenced by them. To one extent or another, all of my life, I have degraded myself by emulating know-nothing pinheads who, in a sane world, would have been servants and laborers. When I look at Comey, I see the damage I have done myself.

It makes sense. God puts halfwits in charge of fallen countries, and if you corrupt yourself, he will put a halfwit, i.e. you, in charge of your affairs.

The movie Idiocracy is turning out to be a blueprint for our future. I’m so glad I’m not young. As bad as things were when I was a kid, at least I was around to see a shadow of the country we used to have.

Whiny Texts From Lonely Appliance

The increasing automation (and tyranny and surveillance) of the machines around us bugs me, but in spite of my paranoia, I decided to get a Roomba. In case you just got here from Mars, a Roomba is a robot vacuum cleaner. It’s a flat, round robot shaped like a layer cake pan. It wanders around in random directions, changing course when it bumps into things. It doesn’t learn the floor plan. The idea is that if it moves around randomly for a solid hour, it will cover just about every part of the house.

The first floor of the new house is mostly hardwood and tile. The birds live in the kitchen, on hardwood. They throw things on the floor all day, and they give off dust. Without the Roomba, I would have to vacuum every day. That’s not going to happen. We have a whole-house vacuum system, but it’s a drag to use. You have to get a 30-foot hose and a heavy attachment out of the closet, and then you have to go from room to room, plugging the hose into various outlets. It’s even more fun when you have to carry it upstairs. I know I’ll never do that. I have delegated the responsibility to the Roomba.

I don’t know what early Roombas were like, but here is a guess: lame NiMh batteries that pooped out quickly and had be replaced often, combined with poor obstacle management. Am I close?

The Roomba I bought has a lithium battery, and lithium batteries aren’t bad. They wear out, but not like NiMh. They run a long time on a charge. I can’t complain much about the battery.

The Roomba also has wi-fi. By the way, what does “fi” mean? It’s not “fidelity.” So what is it? I guess I should look it up.

According to Wikipedia, it doesn’t mean anything. It’s a stupid pun on “hi-fi.” Okay.

Also, it’s not “wifi,” “wi-fi,” or “Wifi.” It’s “Wi-Fi.” I’ll try to remember that. But I won’t try very hard.

The Roomba came with a charger which the manual refers to as a base. You put the charger on the floor, and you rest one side of the Roomba on it. This puts the Roomba’s contacts on the base’s contacts and allows the Roomba to charge. After a couple of hours, the machine is ready to clean. When it finishes a session, it returns to the base and backs onto it.

My verdict? Fantastic. But flawed. Based on my experience, I wouldn’t even consider getting rid of the Roomba, but it has issues.

1. It dies on carpeting. Sometimes my dad leaves his bedroom door open. The bedroom is carpeted. The Roomba plows around for a while and then quits. I don’t know if it’s supposed to like carpeting. I got it for bare floors, so I don’t care. But every time it gets on a carpet, bad things happen.

2. The Roomba gets confused. On one occasion it went into the laundry room and ran under some clothes that were hanging out of a basket. It wasn’t obstructed, but it decided it was on the edge of a cliff, and it shut down.

3. The Roomba is needy. When it has a problem, it sends me a whiny text begging for help. “I’m on the edge of a cliff.” “I need to be moved.” “I need to be put back on the base.” “You’re ignoring my texts.” Whatever. I bought this thing to help me AVOID work, and it’s constantly asking me for help.

We have two coffee tables on a cheap area rug. Today, for the second time, the Roomba decided to climb onto the rug. Once it was up there, instead of cleaning and moving on, it shut down and pouted. I don’t get that at all. Just move off the rug. It’s downhill.

The up side of wifi…Wi-Fi…is that I can use my phone to push the Roomba around. It has a calendar feature, so I told it to vacuum the house every morning after breakfast. I can also tell it to start or quit on demand. I can push the “locate” button and make it sound off with its little electronic song. It tells me when its battery is low, so I know better than to start it at the wrong time.

It cleans pretty well. It’s my sweeper, and sweeping is not demanding. It has a rotating brush that hangs out from under it, and the brush whacks dirt so it goes under the machine. I assume it has suction, because it makes a sucky sound while it cleans. The crap goes into a bin I have not had to empty yet. The Rooma will whine when it’s full. I would say it sweeps better than I would, were I to do the unthinkable and pick up a broom. It may work better than a vacuum cleaner, because it doesn’t disturb dirt as much while it operates. The exhaust from vacuum cleaners blows dust around.

According to the Roomba site, my Roomba is supposed to work on carpeting. It does not. Wish it did. Doesn’t. I think it would work very well on firm, shallow carpeting, but it can’t deal with a normal area rug or normal bedroom carpeting. I may be wrong, but it seems like the difficulty of moving on carpet kills the battery. Maybe if you have carpeting, you have to have more than one Roomba and confine each to a small area. That would cost an insane amount of money, though.

One reviewer says the Roomba stops on dark carpeting because it thinks it sees empty space (a cliff) under it. I don’t know, but my dad’s bedroom carpeting isn’t dark, and the Roomba goes in there and conks out.

Maybe I’m doing something wrong. I don’t care enough to find out. You can get little devices to keep your Roomba from going where it should not.

As long as it cleans bare floors, I will keep it. I do not wish to be a bird valet for the rest of my life. Maynard and Marvin are incorrigibly messy, and if I didn’t have the Roomba, I would be vacuuming every day. Actually, I would be failing to vacuum every day, and the house would be gross.

Interesting note: the reviewer who said the Roomba doesn’t like dark rugs also says it chips paint. I will have to check. That will not be permitted.

Roombas don’t like clutter, so you have to keep junk off the floor. My strategy is to let it run, see what it runs into, and take appropriate action. I’m not going to wander through the house trying to guess what the Roomba will hate.

Final thing: after you use the Roomba for a while, you will start to find dusty corners in your house. The Roomba can’t get into corners, so the dust will flee into them and stay there, taunting the Roomba. Cleaning corners is easier than cleaning a whole house, though.

I’m glad the Roomba doesn’t have a camera, a mike, or an Internet connection. Those would be dealbreakers. My devices spy on me enough as it is.

If you have parrots, you need one of these things. Or you just need to quit having parrots. I don’t know if I would recommend the Roomba to normal people. It ran me almost $300. If I didn’t have two thoughtless characters throwing food on the floor all day, I would consider that a high price to pay for ordinary floor hygiene.

I may get a second Roomba for the second story. Not sure yet. The second story is a lot cleaner.

I hope the Roomba people come up with new devices for other types of cleaning. I have a dishwasher, but putting dishes into the machine and unloading it manually…that’s just too much. I have important things to do. A robot ironer would be fantastic. I prefer cleaning toilets to ironing, even in a house with a spacious laundry room with a built-in ironing board.

I’m going to go check for paint damage. Keep your fingers crossed.

No Room for Manspreading on the Group W Bench

Matt Lauer is out! That was fast!

Without wasting time repeating the scant details of the story, I will go right into a discussion of the thought Lauer’s ejection brings to mind: news organizations are in trouble because they’re hypocritical. The hypocrites in the news attack everyone else ruthlessly (and, let’s admit it, joyfully), but they don’t report on themselves, and they work hard to cover up for employees who act up.

“Wait!”, you’re saying, “News organizations reported on O’Reilly and Rose when they fell!” Yes. Organizations O’Reilly and Rose didn’t work for! That doesn’t count. Venal, ambitious people love it when their competitors get in trouble, so naturally, news people report on scandals at competing companies. The don’t talk a whole lot about their own scandals, until they have no choice.

Sexual abusers and other bullies almost always have long histories. A normal guy generally won’t go nuts, put his hand up one secretary’s skirt, and then never do it again. Bullies are egotists who lack compassion, and they are driven by powerful urges they can’t or won’t resist. They become bullies at early ages, and their behavior persists for their entire lives. Over time, they develop long lists of victims, as well as long lists of silent witnesses. When a sex bully works for a company for a long time, people find out what he does, and they keep it quiet.

If Lauer was a sex bully, a lot of people at NBC knew it. They knew for decades. They worked for a news organization, so they knew what was happening was legitimate, important news. They chose not to report on it, just as Fox, CBS, and PBS chose not to report on O’Reilly and Rose. As a result, the perpetrators had free run of the hen houses, long after their proclivities were known.

There is no way to justify treating outsiders harshly while coddling and shielding guilty insiders. News is news, no matter where it occurs. If journalists knew anything about ethics, they would realize this, and we would hear about abusers from their own companies first.

If Matt Lauer had come up with a cure for cancer, NBC would have reported on it first. No doubt about it. News companies are happy to report positive news about insiders. They should report the negative things, too. They should be completely neutral and open as to the professional affiliations of the people they report on.

One of the things they teach lawyers is that we should present our clients’ negative information before the opposition gets a chance to do it (unless we can get courts to suppress it). When you get in front of your client’s faults and misdeeds and tell them to a finder of fact, you get the first shot at shaping the story. You get to present excuses and explanations. You make yourself and your client look honest. When you wait for the opposition to bring out the dirt, they get to twist things in the minds of the fact-finder, poisoning them against you and giving you a wall of disapproval you have to dismantle. And they make you look dishonest.

Scientists are taught that no one is objective. We are taught that experimental results have to be reproducible, so we don’t end up believing results that only occur in the laboratories of experimenters who want them to occur. We are taught to use double-blind studies.

As a lawyer and former scientist, I acknowledge the importance of fairness and objectivity, even if I am not particularly good at maintaining either. Journalists don’t care. They publish things that advance their preconceived agendas, not so they can inform, but so they can manipulate the public.

Journalists don’t care about ethics. Supposedly, journalistic ethics are codified, and journalists who go to journalism school study the subject, but in reality, that stuff is a joke. In practice, almost anything goes. If journalists had ethics, we wouldn’t have a left-wing news establishment that lies to us and covers up stories like the Menendez trial as a matter of policy. It could not happen. It has happened, so there is no need to explore the subject further. No reasonable person can look at the news and conclude that journalists try to be fair.

If journalists weren’t hypocrites, there would be no conservative or liberal news channels. MSNBC wouldn’t be liberal, and Fox wouldn’t be conservative. All channels would be neutral.

If journalists had ethics, the news would be very boring. Journalists would simply tell us what has happened. They wouldn’t sneer and smirk. They wouldn’t jab each other on Twitter. They wouldn’t scream and yell on TV panels. The news would be what NPR news pretends to be and isn’t. No one would watch or read it. Publishing news takes money, and that means an audience has to be attracted to look at ads. For that reason, among others, the news is a circus, and it attracts people who are entertaining, not people who are honest or intelligent. It attracts partisan squabblers. It’s also the reason most national-level female news people are exceptionally good-looking. Attractive news anchors who are borderline stupid tend to succeed in spite of their lack of brains.

There are a lot of female news anchors who couldn’t finish a crossword puzzle if the price of failure was death. Yet somehow we allow them to present and even interpret the news. Crazy.

Everyone who worked with Matt Lauer knew he was a problem, and everyone covered up. And in the aftermath, no one with any power or audience will say the networks need to start reporting on themselves. It will never happen. It would be Jerry Maguire behavior. Anyone who had reported on Lauer at NBC would have been congratulated, like Jerry Maguire in the memo scene, and then they would have been slowly eased out onto the sidewalk. Anyone who pushes self-examination now will get a warm clap on the back and a slow spiral into obscurity.

A while back, God told me this: “The concealment of a sin is worse than the sin itself.” That’s true. God forgives sin all the time. Heaven is packed with sinners. What he does not forgive is sin that has knowingly, persistently been denied. That principle works on earth as well as in God’s court. If Lauer and O’Reilly had come clean privately twenty years ago, they would still have their jobs today. Something would have been worked out. Instead, they denied and pretended, and the infection kept growing. Nobody squeezed the pustules. They just applied Clearasil until they exploded on prom night.

It amazes me that O’Reilly claims he executed settlements to protect his kids from scandal. Wouldn’t trials that exonerated him have protected them better? Of course they would. No one believes him. Trials would have confirmed many of the accusations. When he uses his kids as human shields, he’s just looking out for himself, badly.

Lauer must be huddled up with a whole platoon of handlers right now. They must be sweating bullets, trying to craft a statement. Al Franken and Kevin Spacey tried to make themselves look good in their responses to exposure, and they ended up buried under hails of contemptuous tweets from people whose intelligence had been insulted. Lauer and his team must be wondering what he can say that won’t backfire. I very much doubt he’s cloistered with his wife and a clergyman, confessing his heart out, repenting, and trying sincerely to find a path to redemption.

I really hope he doesn’t go the rehab route. Trying to convince people that sexual bullying is a disease that requires treatment is annoying, and apart from that, it’s trite. Harvey Weinstein and a slew of others wore that excuse out. Sexual predation isn’t opioid addiction. It just means you’re a jerk who enjoys humiliating other people and treating them like toilets. Sexual predation isn’t just sex. It’s driven by cruelty. Even when the acts themselves are not cruel, the victim mistreatment that follows exposure usually is. Ask Hillary Clinton.

I think about the guilty people who haven’t been outed, who will have to report on Lauer. I wonder if it will be possible to see the fear in their faces. They will be wondering if video of their reporting and commentary will be replayed when their turns come.

The iceberg is still there. Lauer is part of the tip. He’s not the train’s caboose. There is a nearly inexhaustible supply of candidates for exposure, like oil reserves sitting in the ground. It will take a very, very long time to go through our reserves.

I am ashamed of my own sexual sins. I hope they never end up in the public eye. I’m glad my sins aren’t worse. I hope God will continue helping me. I hope he will keep changing my heart so I indulge less in all types of sin.

Get ready to see more icons fall. I wonder what kind of people will replace them.

Approach the Throne With Awe and Bacon

This is easily the greatest day of my life. I am still not in Miami, and I have a new recliner.

My new house has a big upstairs room which I have turned into my command post. I started out with two plastic Adirondack chairs from Home Depot; perhaps this is appropriate, since I graduated from the Adirondack-Florida School for boys. Anyway, for almost three months, I sat on those chairs, and then I got a couch, which was fantastic yet lacking in foot support. Now I have a proper recliner, with a motor in it to make sure I don’t get PTSD from turning a lever.

This is magnificent. I don’t know why I haven’t had recliners all my life. I have always loved them.

Two days from now I will have a real TV stand, so I’ll be able to get the TV off the floor. I’m not worthy. I’m not worthy.

I even have a lamp now. I stole one of my dad’s end tables from the living room, and I commandeered the elbow LED lamp I used to use for my garage electronics station. I was going blind from relying on the overhead lights. This is bliss. This is paradise.

I am never getting out of this chair. I’m going to be like one of those obese people you read about, who end up welded to their chairs. I’ll find an enabler to bring me root beer and donuts.

Well. I guess I won’t.

I’m not sure what else to do with this room. I have been considering putting my electronics stuff here, with a dedicated desk, but it would be 50 yards from the rest of my tools. Inconvenient if I needed regular tools while working on electronics, or electronics tools while working on regular stuff. I could duplicate a few things to reduce the walking. Maybe I could put my electronics tools in a new box I could move to the workshop when needed.

I have considered putting my CNC lathe up here. It’s small, so it’s suited to an indoor location, and it would be good to have it near the big TV for CAD purposes. I don’t know if I can carry 110 pounds of awkward metal up the stairs, though. Actually, carrying it back down would be worse.

I picked a Barcalounger Vintage recliner. The Vintage line is supposedly better than the basement-grade recliners they sell for $300. I hope so. I read a lot of recliner reviews while shopping, and they were generally discouraging. China this. China that. I decided I would have to quit nitpicking and worrying and buy something.

The recliner I picked is a little funny-looking, but it was discounted heavily, and it has cloth cushions. For some reason, that spoke to me. I love leather furniture, but recliners are about comfort, and when it comes to comfort, cloth is king. When you look at this recliner, it says, “I don’t care what I look like. I just want to embrace you and make you fall asleep watching Forged in Fire.”

But enough about my plans for the week.

Oh, this is great. This is magnificent. You don’t know how great real furniture is until you sit on a plastic chair for three months.

Sorry if you’re annoyed that I wrote about a chair. I had to share my joy. I will try to show restraint when the ottoman that matches the couch arrives.

No promises.

Press Corps Journalist Wages Fact-Free Pie Jihad

Is it funny when deranged leftists attack the president’s press secretary because they think she took credit for someone else’s pie?

I suppose it is, but it also highlights a disturbing trend: Satan is teaching Americans the truth doesn’t matter.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders baked a pie. She put a photo on Twitter. The URL for the photo has the letters “pbs” in it, but the photo has nothing to do with public broadcasting. The “pbs” is just a string that occurs in the URL of a Twitter server. The pie was a chocolate pecan pie made with what appears to be a store-bought crust. Such pies are extremely easy to make. You mix the ingredients, dump them in the crust, add pecans from a bag, and bake.

This is all the background you need.

A leftist journalist (but I repeat myself) named April Ryan accused Sanders of lying. She did not believe Sanders herself baked the pie.

It is not clear why Ryan thinks Sanders didn’t bake the pie. One guess: Ryan can’t cook. A person who can’t cook might think baking a pecan pie is a big deal. Ryan probably gets most of her food from delis, vending machines, grocery story freezers, and big plastic bags marked “Lays.”

It doesn’t help that the pie had a near-perfect crust, or that the background of the photo was pure white, as you might expect in a shot by a professional photographer.

Sanders baked the pie. Her relatives confirm it. She has a long history of baking pecan pies for gatherings. No rational person seriously thinks she stole a pie photo. It’s possible to upload a photo to Google and search to see where it appears on the Internet, and when you do that with the Sanders photo, nothing comes up. Also, there are 170 million people in the United States who would love to embarrass Sanders, and none of them has come up with the original source of the photo. No photographer. No one who runs a stock photo service. No one.

Sanders…baked…the…pie.

Nonetheless, even now, if you look at Twitter, you’ll see Ryan and the flying monkeys high-fiving each other, as though they had “TAKEN DOWN” or “SHUT DOWN” (trendy, annoying leftist Internet cliches) the press secretary. And they think it’s important.

We should be taking their infantile, tone-deaf antics seriously, because they show how America has changed. Even during the Bush Derangement Syndrome years, it would have been very unusual for a professional journalist from the White House press pool to gin up a blood libel like this, about a matter completely unrelated to a press secretary’s job, on a holiday when we are supposed to be unified in reverence, peace, and gratitude. It would not have been necessary for conservatives to complain. Even liberals would have ridiculed the journalist.

Today liberals who seem to agree that Ryan was mistaken are attacking Sanders for provoking Ryan. By working for Trump. As always, conservatives must be put on the defensive. If your nutty leftist neighbor attacks you from behind and breaks six of your ribs, it’s your fault for not letting him tell you how to landscape.

In 2017 America, childishness and dishonesty are acceptable for leftist journalists. No one notices the lack of dignity and professionalism.

The left is in a state of frenzy. It’s a sort of cold riot. George Orwell, who predicted a lot of what we are currently experiencing, coined the term “cold war” to describe a state in which nations live in great tension, under the threat of war, while not engaging in full-blown combat. What we have now are hundreds of millions of disgruntled, pouting leftists who are not (always) out in the streets burning cars, yet who fester with rage and look for every opportunity to direct harassing fire at conservatives and Christians.

Ms. Ryan can’t march up to Mrs. Sanders’ podium, shove a spear through her heart, and announce that Antifa and BLM are now in charge. We haven’t reached that stage yet. But she can use Twitter to launch a ridiculous and very personal attack on Mrs. Sanders’ credibility and then stir up and encourage the idiots who buy into it. It’s the Internet equivalent of slashing tires and egging houses. And it’s bullying.

I don’t know if Mrs. Sanders lies or not. It doesn’t matter. If she lied constantly, it would not justify perpetrating a fanciful and sophomoric canard, and the ensuing campaign of ridicule and persecution, based on the origin of a pie. And what about failing to admit fault when the pie attacks were proven wrong? It will never happen. It will be like the Dan Rather forgery case. “We lied, but we did it for a good reason, so it’s okay.”

Rioters don’t think. They show up believing they’re right and that everything they do is justified. They are like kindling waiting for a match. They don’t question themselves. They see their victims as the aggressors. That’s why they’re able to beat people to death and set fire to buildings. Self-examination and accountability aren’t on the table. Neither is truth.

We should not be surprised. Reason tends to debunk leftism, so decades ago, many leftists adopted the position that logic itself was a Eurocentric, male-imposed construct intended to disempower women and minorities. Look it up. I’m not making it up. Robert Bork wrote about it.

It you can’t allow yourself to be proven wrong, you can’t change. This is why the left’s abandonment of reason is so dangerous. A person who can’t be corrected is depraved, and the depraved are beyond redemption. Depravity is why hell exists. The Bible refers to this condition as a seared conscience. Nothing penetrates. There are some beings who can’t be fixed, so they have to be confined eternally in order to protect the redeemed from their presence.

Satan is bringing hell up through its ceiling, onto our streets. He is bringing hell’s culture up onto the earth’s surface. It’s a marvel.

No wonder the Bible says God will return to purge the earth. The infection has won. Gangrene has taken over. There is nothing we can do to fix it. Only God himself can set things straight, and he will have to do it by binding and eliminating his enemies. He will have to use force. They have made themselves too stupid to change.

I feel bad for the Trumps. They will never have peace on this earth. Trump will leave office in 2021 0r 2025, and he and his family will still have to live on this planet. They will be under attack until they die, and the people who are out to destroy them will never relent, because they can’t be reasoned with. Barron Trump’s grandchildren, if he has any, will have to have their own professional security people. No President has ever been hated this much.

The leftists will eventually win, and when they do, they’ll bring out their lists. They will remember everyone who offended them, and they will punish. Remember the Cambodian killing fields? That same hatred exists here. I hope Trump dies of old age before they get their hands on him. I don’t even like to think about the imaginative torments they would impose. It would be worse than what happened to Mussolini and Khaddafi.

Totalitarianism is on the way. There aren’t enough Americans who serve God to prevent it. Most American Christians have no roots in the Holy Spirit. They will do whatever Satan tells them to do. He is already getting them conditioned.

I don’t think there is anywhere we can go. America is the last big country that’s safe for Christians and Jews. Europe is out. Asia is out. Africa is out. A last stand is inevitable.

I hope I’m not here to see it. I would rather die this year than live under unfettered leftists. I’m not alone. There is a reason why Cubans put their families on rafts. There is a reason why a man would let himself be shot several times, running away from North Korea.

April Ryan is a fool, but she has a lot of power behind her. We can laugh at her right now, but we should take the spirits that empower her very seriously.

CNC Lathe Next

My friend Amanda has a son who has some cognitive issues. Oddly, in some cases, people with his problem turn out to be unusually well suited to the trade of CNC machining. Mental characteristics that cause problems in many areas of life can be assets in machining. There’s a dude in California who runs a school that trains such people.

I learned about this from a TV show called Titans of CNC. A man named Titan Gilroy was convicted of a violent crime, and when he got out of prison, he learned CNC and started a big, successful shop. Now he teaches inmates at San Quentin. He has a son with Asperger’s, and he discovered that his son was very good at CNC. Now he works with the guy who runs the school.

I mentioned this to Amanda a few weeks back, and I said I had some interest in CNC and robotics. We showed her son some Youtubes, and he seemed interested. That’s good, but it’s also a problem. I have only one CNC tool, and it’s a home-built adaptation which I haven’t perfected. Not counting my vacuum cleaner, I have only one robot, and when I bought it and assembled it, I was not able to make it work.

Since showing her son the videos, I have retrieved my CNC lathe from Miami, and I am ready to see if I can make it work. Last night, I took the robot out of the box I had tossed it in, and after an hour or so of reprogramming and researching, I figured out what was wrong with it. Now it’s working.

The robot is a B-robot, from a company called JJ Robots. It’s a two-wheeled balancing robot a little bigger than a box of Pop Tarts. It’s based on an Arduino Leonardo board.

Here’s how it works. It has a tiny board containing circuitry that measures the robot’s vertical orientation. This shouldn’t amaze anyone. Cell phones have circuits that tell them whether they’re level or not. The robot checks the board’s output, and then it accelerates in the direction of the tilt, bringing it back to vertical again. In other words, when the robot starts to fall in a certain direction, it takes off in that direction, bringing itself back under its top. It can do this so often it appears nearly stable.

I found I had installed the orientation board sideways, so the robot was sensing angular deviation along the wrong axis. The robot can’t fall from side to side, so the board’s input was useless. I reinstalled it according to the directions.

The robot still refused to stand. I took a look at what it was doing. It was accelerating away from the direction of fall, making the fall worse. I then turned the board 180 degrees, and everything worked.

Now I have a self-balancing robot.

I had some other problems with it, and they’re even more boring, so I don’t want to get into them too much. I found I could not upload programming to the Arduino. Somewhere on the web, someone said I had to press the board’s reset button immediately before uploading. Not exciting, unless you’re a nerd.

The robot has wi-fi. When you turn it on, you connect your phone to the robot’s network, and then you use an app to steer the robot. Obviously, it needs an onboard camera, like a drone, so you can see what the robot sees as it moves. Maybe I can figure that out some day.

Anyway, next time Amanda brings her son around, I can show him the robot and see if he has any interest. Maybe in a week or two, I can get the lathe working better.

It’s a little strange that I decided to buy and assemble a robot, but the whole exercise has turned out to have a purpose I could not have anticipated. That’s God for you.

Robotics and CNC are not the same thing, but it’s basically the same skill set, applied in different ways. Programming, boards, and servos or steppers. My guess is that a person who has CNC aptitude also has robotics aptitude. The question is which one he will like well enough to stick with.

Her other two sons are interested in music, but the instruction opportunities are limited. I suggested Adventus Piano software for one and Justinguitar.com for the other. Justinguitar.com is a teaching site run by, as you might guess, a guitarist named Justin. It has lots of exercises and videos. It’s not a teacher, but it’s a whole lot better than nothing.

The hard thing will be to get them to learn to sight-read. This is much more important than learning to play. Any idiot can learn to play songs by memorizing them. Ask me how I know. A real musician can read music, and he must also understand theory. A singer who can sight-sing and who understands theory is a better musician than an untrained pianist who plays extremely well.

Math, languages, and music. You have to learn while you’re young. After you’re seven or eight years old, your aptitude drops off, and as far as I know, you can’t get it back.

It’s hard to tell when you’ve scored a point with her kids. Other kids get excited. Hers just sit and think, and sometimes they want to know how soon you’ll be finished so they can do something else. She says it’s working, though.

Sooner or later, if they want to get anywhere with music, they’ll have to find people they can play with.

The robot is interesting to me because the concept doesn’t have to be limited to a tiny machine. The stuff that tells it what to do could be installed on a robot the size of a building. I could yank the guts out of it, find a way to make it run bigger steppers, and make a robot big enough to run around the yard. Jam a lithium battery in there, and it could run for an hour. Not sure what accessories I could add to it to make it useful. Anyway, it doesn’t have to be a small toy. Could it ever be useful for anything? That’s a hard question. I would have to come up with a function for it.

I wish I could make it paint the fence or kill squirrels.

Now that the major crises of moving are abating, I feel like I’m getting my life back. I had time to work on the robot. I’m anxious to get my machine tools up here. Next year, life should be less hectic, and I should be able to get more done. Maybe I’ll be able to make some knives. Right now I can’t run my big grinder without a gas generator and an adaptor (which I don’t have), so knife-making is not possible.

I’m giving up on tree removal. The trees that cause problems will be moved. The rest will be ignored until it’s convenient to do something. It’s just too much work. Surrendering will give me more free time.

Guess I’ll go check out robot accessories. If I can find one a kid could use to drive his brothers nuts, I think it will be a hit.

My Doctor is Better Than Yours

I have a new testimony. I guess no one will be surprised to read that.

I got some neat healings after moving to Ocala. I burned myself twice, and twice I attacked the problems supernaturally. In both cases, the blisters went away and didn’t come back. I can’t tell you how happy I was. What’s worse than a painful burn on a finger? Every time you do anything, you apply pressure to it, and pain shoots through you. I was spared that.

Last week I injured myself in a brand new way. I always make fun of the warnings on Q-Tip boxes, because Q-Tips are useless if you can’t stick them in your ears. And what kind of idiot hurts himself by shoving a Q-Tip in too far? That was what I asked myself. Now I know the answer. I poked myself in the left ear, and it started to bleed. I had to remove dried blood from my ear canal.

Over the next few days, I started feeling more pain, not less. And I continued finding blood in my ear.

Last night, I woke up, and there was pain in my ear and my left jaw. It was pretty bad. Like a serious earache. I was not happy. I wondered if I was going to have to go to the doctor with a problem caused by ineptitude. And what if the Q-Tip wasn’t the problem? What if I had a giant tumor or something in there, and the Q-Tip simply brought it to light?

Of course, I thought of the burns, and I got to work, after taking some ibuprofen. I asked God to heal me, and over and over, I thanked him in the name of Jesus and gave him the glory, saying I was healed.

I would say I kept doing this for an hour. I had nothing else to do. Then I fell asleep. The pain had abated considerably. Was it the ibuprofen? I didn’t know. Generally, I have found that OTC painkillers don’t do a whole lot. Aspirin is completely useless, and comparing ibuprofen to opioid painkillers that actually work is like comparing a cup of tea to two lines of cocaine.

The best thing about this approach is that when I do it, I start to feel God’s presence, and I am able to remain in it. That’s better than the healing. God’s presence is beautiful, and besides, it brings you authority as well as peace.

In the morning, I had almost no pain at all. I can find the pain if I look for it and move my jaw the right (i.e. wrong) way, but most of the time, it’s not there. I still have some congestion in the ear, but I don’t need a doctor any more. I plan to sit down from time to time and have more sessions with God to complete the healing.

Many of us believe in healing but wrongly assume that if it isn’t instantaneous, it’s not coming. That’s not correct. Even Jesus took several tries to heal a man. Healing may be instantaneous, but it can also be a process, like toasting a piece of bread. You don’t pull your toast out after ten seconds and claim the toaster doesn’t work.

Here’s another thing to think about. When you get natural healing, you don’t expect it to be instantaneous. No one takes an antibiotic and then complains because he’s still sick five minutes later. When a doctor puts a new hip joint in you, you don’t get up off the table and try to dance. God took a week to create the world, and when he ended the drought for Elijah, the miracle started with one tiny cloud, but we expect him to heal us in the blink of an eye.

I hate going to doctors, because I love God’s healing. When a doctor fixes you, God gets no glory, and it does nothing to help you grow spiritually. Also, doctors charge a lot, they do procedures which are painful and humiliating, they make a lot of mistakes, and they can only fix a small percentage of our problems. When they do fix us, much of the time, the fixes are limited, temporary, or accompanied by new problems.

My sister got lung cancer. She was treated with radiation and chemotherapy. The cancer went into remission, but now her brain is fried. She has a head start on dementia. Personally, I would have chosen death. Set me up in a comfy bed, give me Dilaudid on demand, and come get me when I stop breathing. My aunt also lost her mind from cancer treatment. A radiation technician burned my mother’s esophagus so badly she starved. My dad’s dementia may have been caused by his atrial fibrillation and/or blood pressure medications, and you don’t want to know what he went through after he was diagnosed with prostate cancer.

Bobby Riggs got prostate cancer. His doctors castrated him, and he died anyway. That’s what I call defeat. Pain, impotence, incontinence, death…and public humiliation.

I could sit here and list medical failures all day, but God’s healing never fails. He heals correctly, without side effects. He doesn’t make you take insulin every day for the rest of your life. He doesn’t make you sit down for dialysis several times a week. He doesn’t make you take poisonous drugs to keep you from rejecting your new heart.

Medical science is a lot better than nothing, but it can’t come close to the success of the real thing. I prefer to stay away from doctors unless I have no choice. God’s healing is something we should be pursuing, but most people don’t believe it exists, and most of the people who do believe do it wrong, so we’re discouraged. We don’t try very hard to get it.

I can’t promise you my ear problem won’t flare up and send me to the ER, but I got a healing last night, so I’m reporting it. I have no reason to doubt that I will continue to receive healing. I’ll be honest if I have to get treatment.

The last time I got burned and healed, I was worried that I might have to come here and retract my testimony, but it didn’t happen.

I believe the approach I took works for everything, not just healing. I’m trying to use it to get things that are more important. I have been asking God to increase my love and faith. These are things that would be highly useful to me. More useful than a healed blister. I feel that I should ask for things that will build my roots, not just my leaves. If the roots are strong, the leaves and fruit will take care of themselves. When you ask God for a car or an acquittal or some other superficial benefit, you don’t address the foundational issues that put you in a position where you had problems in the superficial realm. Why were you poor to begin with? Why were you on trial? The more screwed up your roots are, the more problems you will have.

God approved of Solomon because Solomon asked him for wisdom, not money or power. Wisdom is better than money or power. Similarly, love and faith are better than many of the other things I want. If I have love and faith, my life will go better, and I will fall into fewer traps and dilemmas.

I remember the comedian Marsha Warfield describing her main activity in church as “asking for stuff.” She was right on the money. “Give me this. Give me that.” We should be asking for inner change first.

I will keep you informed about my ear problem. I hope what I wrote will help you get God’s power flowing in you.

Turkey Vanquished; Lit. Hum. Defeated

Thanksgiving dinner has come and gone. Could have been worse. My friend Amanda came by with her kids, and we shared the load. The turkey came out great, and Amanda supplied pies.

I nearly got a hall pass this year. This morning, a huge blob of thunderstorms went through my area, and I lost electricity. You don’t want to be without power on Thanksgiving morning. I couldn’t cook, bathe, or even wash my hands. Possible down side: highly screwed-up Thanksgiving for two families. Possible up side: no cooking.

The juice returned after maybe 90 minutes, leaving me still obligated yet behind schedule. I did the best I could, and we ended up eating later than I had hoped.

I learned something new this year. Cracker Barrel stays open on Thanksgiving. I called them, told them my power was out, and asked if they were open. The lady told me to come on down and not to worry. I love the people here. She really felt bad about my power outage.

While I waited for the power to come back on, I killed time reading the last of Lord of the Flies. This is the last book on my version of the Columbia College Literature Humanties reading list. I have finally done all the reading. I should look my old professor up and tell him. I really annoyed him. If I went to his office today and told him I had finished my reading, he would probably punch me in the face. He would still remember me; the king of wasted potential.

My conclusion, after putting myself through this ordeal: books that were great for their time are not always great books. Some are very bad. Crime and Punishment comes to mind. Also, Columbia College includes a number of overrated writers in their curriculum for the sake of political correctness, and they don’t mind sacrificing their students’ time or their students’ parents’ money on the altar of diversity.

When you consider what Columbia charges parents, the only reasonable position to take is that every single word a student reads should be important. Jamming Alice Walker down someone’s throat in a course that costs $4000 should be illegal.

Academics are quite possibly the single most likely group to see the emperor’s clothes when they’re not there. Academics are herd creatures, and they are incapable of independent thought. If an academic thinks other academics think Virginia Woolf’s wretched, inept To the Lighthouse is a great book, that academic is certain to agree. Students are forced to read a lot of overrated crap, simply because college professors are incapable of dissent.

It makes sense that professors are afraid to have dissenting opinions. Generally, they are mediocre intellects. They are fungible. Fire one, and you can find a dozen to replace him the next day. When your product is a commodity, not a franchise, you have to be very careful not to make anyone mad, because you are expendable. On the other hand, if, say, a top-flight professional athlete feels like saying what’s on his mind, people will put up with it, because such athletes are hard to replace.

When I was at Columbia, a baseball player named Chris got the idea that someone was after his ex-girlfriend, Carolyn. Chris was maybe 6’5″ tall. Strong guy. He walked up behind the other man, who was much smaller and wearing glasses, and he attacked from the rear, giving him a severe beating. Nothing of significance happened to Chris. He was hard to replace. If a random history professor had done that, he would have been fired.

Carolyn was a babe, incidentally. Really beautiful. She took me aside at a party one night and started talking to me. Good thing I had no game whatsoever, or I could have ended up with a concussion.

I just Googled her, out of curiosity. She died suddenly in 2010. Sad.

Not really interested in what happened to Chris. I hope the guy he beat doesn’t have dementia from it.

Some of the Lit. Hum. books I read were bad, yet important historically or advanced for their times. Virginia Woolf was just bad. For any era. Awful.

Vogon-poetry awful.

I’m glad I did the reading. I learned a few things. I got a clearer understanding of the development of western literature and culture. Nonetheless, I suffered considerably.

As for Lord of the Flies, I read it in a few days, whereas other Lit. Hum. books took weeks. The reason is this: it wasn’t as painful to read. It had a plot. It had action. The characters, though shallow and unappealing, had distinct personalities. Some did, anyway. It was nice to get into a book without dreading the battle to get back out.

If you haven’t read the book, stop reading, because there will be spoilers.

I’ll tell you how the book goes. There is a war. We are told almost nothing about it. A bunch of kids are put on a plane. The point seems to be to get them out of danger, but it’s not very clear. The plane crashes on a tropical island, and the adults on the plane die. The kids have to fend for themselves. They end up electing a leader. A violent rival takes the kids away from him. The rival’s new gang murders two kids and tries to kill a third (the first leader), but before they can get him, a boat shows up, and the kids are rescued by the British navy. Suddenly the scary gang that tried to kill the former leader looks like what it is: a bunch of little kids with pointed sticks.

The book has weaknesses. For one thing, Golding can’t describe anything. If he tried to describe a square cardboard box to you, you might think he was talking about a crystal chandelier. He tries to describe the island and other things, but you never get a clear idea what any of it looks like. You have to give up and not worry about it. You can’t even tell how many boys there are. Also, the characters are very thinly drawn. They don’t have interesting characteristics that make them stand out from each other.

Golding tried to describe coconuts, and he said they looked like skulls. The only coconuts that look like skulls are husked coconuts. With the husks still on, as they would be found on an uninhabited island, they look nothing like skulls. It’s like Golding only saw coconuts on Gilligan’s Island, where they fell pre-husked.

Like most Lit. Hum. books, Lord of the Flies does not contain a single laugh. I’m not sure how anyone can write two hundred pages without saying anything funny or clever, but Homer did it, Virgil did it, Woolf did it, Dostoevsky did it…it’s remarkable, how many Lit. Hum. authors were not even slightly witty or inclined to humor. It’s like they shared a bizarre mental illness.

Cervantes made jokes, but they were cruel and stupid. Here’s the kind of thing Cervantes would have found amusing: a man tries to hit his servant in the face with a club, but he misses, falls, and knocks all of his front teeth out on a fence post.

Lord of the Flies has a plot, which is a nice thing for a book to have, but it’s not intricate, original, or clever. There are no brilliant twists or turns. Kids get marooned. Kids form violent factions. Kids kill other kids. Kids are rescued. I don’t think the plot is what makes the book.

One important character is a dead person. I’m referring to the Beast. Some of the kids think there is a big, hairy creature on the island, and that it may eventually kill them. They make expeditions to find it and kill it. Meanwhile, an aerial battle takes place above the island. A man parachutes out of a plane. His dead body lands on a mountain in a sitting position, with his parachute still attached. When the wind blows, he raises his head as though he’s looking at people. One of the kids sees him one night, and he decides he’s the Beast.

To flesh out the character of the Beast, a kid named Simon has a psychotic episode. A boy named Jack leads a group that kills a pig, and they leave the pig’s head on a stick as a sacrifice to the Beast. Simon looks at the head one day, and it starts speaking to him, saying it’s the Beast and that he’s not wanted on the island. Simon is the first boy the gang murders.

The Beast device taps into some pretty weird, primal notions, or at least it seems that way to me, a religious nut.

The Bible tells us a Christ-hating upstart called the Beast will rise up to try to take God’s place. Most eschatologists think the Beast will be a ruler; a man. My own suspicion is that the Beast is just the spirit that rules the carnal masses. Beasts are ruled by their flesh. Destructive, ignorant people are ruled by their flesh. The word “carnal” means “ruled by the flesh.” Maybe there will be a single man who personifies the Beast, but I think the Beast will be the masses. Think Antifa. Think BLM. Think Pol Pot.

In Lord of the Rings, a boy with common sense tries to lead the group. His name is Ralph. He’s a builder. He gets himself elected chief. He tries to make rules. He tries to make the kids keep a signal fire going. His enemy is Jack, and Jack is neither a builder nor a thinker. He’s a looter and destroyer. Jack leads a troop called the hunters. They kill pigs for everyone to eat. Jack is too dumb to think about signal fires. He is a populist. He appeals to the basest drives of his friends. He tells them they’ll hunt all day and “have fun.” He offers to do away with rules.

Ralph’s consiglieri is a fat kid nicknamed Piggy. In a violent book about kids, you don’t have to be told what will happen to Piggy. Piggy is very smart, and he gives excellent advice, but he is prime bully bait, so he can never be the chief. Piggy can barely see. He wears glasses. Jack attacks him, breaking one lens of his glasses, leaving Piggy half blind. Later in the book, he takes the glasses with the remaining lens, leaving Piggy to be led around like Homer.

Piggy is like a prophet. In the Bible, prophets were sighted, but in other traditions, they had vision problems. Tiresias was blind. The cyclopes gave up binocular vision for limited clairvoyance; they were able to see their own deaths. I’m too lazy to look up other blind prophets.

Like a prophet, Piggy sees the truth, and he is attacked and eventually killed for it. Weird.

The dead aviator is a good choice for the image of the Beast, because he’s all flesh, with the mind and spirit gone. He rots. Carnal people rot, figuratively. It takes effort and gumption to make people rise above hogs and monkeys, just as it takes energy for the body of a living person to fight off disease and decomposition. What do you see when you look at Antifa and BLM? Rot. Human beings acting like animals. New generations becoming less intelligent and less powerful than their predecessors.

The aviator has no power of his own. He moves, literally, with the wind. A beastly (carnal) leader is like that. They don’t really lead. They follow. The voice of the crowd blows them this way and that. Remember Obama? Interesting.

The word “spirit” literally means “breath,” which is a type of wind. We live because the breath of God is in us. The Beast of the Apocalypse will have the spirit of Satan in him, animating and empowering him like a wind in a parachute.

Simon is killed by Jack’s mob as he tries to tell them the Beast is a dead body. They don’t pay attention to anything he says. They’re in the grip of a bizarre, tribal bloodlust, like backward natives jumping up and down in Africa. After they kill him, a wind fills the aviator’s chute, lifts him off the mountain, and drags him over the site where Simon is killed. The aviator then plunges into the sea.

In the Bible, seas symbolize masses of beings. More specifically, they symbolize their combined voices. When a lot of people speak against you, it’s like sinking into a sea. When Peter looked only at Jesus, he was raised above the sea, and it became the platform that supported him. God promised Jesus he would make his enemies his footstool. When Peter stood on the sea, it was a picture of God’s children resting their feet on hostile humanity.

A leader who rose from a sea of carnal voices deserves to sink into a sea. Isn’t that Satan’s future? When he is exposed as a powerless manipulator, the beings he fooled will want some payback, and presumably, he will sink into their midst and be tormented without mercy.

The boys’ adventure made me think about fatherlessness. This is a fatherless world, because we reject the Father and his messengers. Wisdom and knowledge are treasures, and we are supposed to pass them on to new generations, but we reject God, throwing these treasures away. As a result, every generation has to start from scratch, and we never reach the heights we were designed for. The boys in the book had no fathers. They were alone. One adult could have provided them sufficient wisdom to bring them order and peace, but lacking an adult, they listened to Jack instead. They were like modern Americans. We don’t know God, so we listen to doomed imbeciles like Kanye West and the Kardashians. With every generation, we get weaker, not stronger.

When the naval officer showed up at the end of the book, he was like Jesus, returning to order the world. When he showed up, with true authority on his side, Jack suddenly looked very small and powerless. His power instantly vanished, and Ralph’s power reappeared. The Bible says people will marvel when Satan, who scared us so much, is revealed. We will be amazed at how puny he is.

I found these ideas interesting as I read the book. Lord of the Flies was the only Lit. Hum. book that stirred me on a spiritual level. It wasn’t illuminating, but it made me think about things I already believed.

My guess is that William Golding never considered any of these things. I would also guess that my take on the book is nothing like the interpretation promoted by the sheep of academia.

It was pleasant to read a book that wasn’t excruciatingly tedious and which gave me things to think about.

Should I go ahead and read the books on Columbia’s Contemporary Civilization list? I don’t know. They’re horrible. Hobbes. Locke. Macchiavelli. Plato. Yech. Besides, I probably did the reading for that course when I was at Columbia.

I never did Art Humanities (another core course). I believe I started and then dropped it. I don’t know how I would go about recreating that course on my own. It wasn’t just readings. There were a ton of slides. I love slide courses. Sit around in the dark, look at slides, write some BS on the exam, and get at least a B.

If I decide to do any more studying, you will read about it here, if you can stand it.

Hope I didn’t spoil the book for you, but if I did, it’s your own fault, because I warned you.

Happy Thanksgiving. Don’t mention Christmas to me.