Molto Bene

My world of perpetually entry-level technology and engineering gets more interesting all the time.

I bought a digital storage oscilloscope. I will need to learn how to use it. I found out Tektronix (a top-level oscilloscope maker) has published a series of exercises designed to teach people how to use DSO’s. The exercises require an Arduino board. I bought one today.

I sort of glanced at Arduino a year or two ago, but I never got into it. It sounded like cheating. I wanted to learn how to design circuits from the ground up, and that’s not how Arduino works. They supply you with a prefab board you can program. I was offended! I thought I should learn electronics so well I could build whatever I wanted out of the drawers at Radio Shack.

I now think I was stupid. Designing circuits from individual components is not simple. It’s probably best left to real engineers. And aside from that, real engineers don’t build everything from resistors and capacitors. They use integrated chips which contain a whole lot of ready-to-wear circuitry. I think getting into Arduino would be a good idea, unless I want to create my first complex circuit when I’m 80.

What is Arduino? Glad you asked.

I don’t know a whole lot about it, but the idea is that a company in Italy sells you a board with a microcontroller and a USB port on it, and they tell you absolutely everything about its design and how to use it. In other words, it’s “open source.” Then you use C to write programs for the microcontroller, and you use the board for projects. There are additional boards called “shields” that snap into the main board, and you can build circuits that are more complex.

You can download a free program that allows you to write code for your boards. You connect them to your PC using USB.

It’s pretty cool, and I am hoping it will also be a gateway to bigger things that don’t require me to be dependent on Arduino.

“Arduino” is a hard word to type. The letters don’t seem to follow each other naturally.

I learned some stuff which may be even cooler than the Arduino stuff. If you use Arduino boards, you will shell out at least five bucks per board, even for Chinese clones, and they take up a fair amount of space. There’s an alternative. There is a family of integrated circuits called “ATTINY,” and they’re the size of op amps. If your project is simple enough, you can program an ATTINY and move your project to it. You can start on an Arduino board and move to an ATTINY.

This is remarkable. I’m talking about a chip the size of a Tic Tac.

Here is the bad news: it’s hard to get an Arduino board without resorting to mail order. Radio Shack sells them; good luck finding a Radio Shack within 20 miles in 2016. If you live in a city full of educated, cultured people (i.e. not Miami), you may be able to find other sellers, but in my area, you are better off shopping for churros, women’s stretch pants that display every possible crease and contour of the pelvic region in minute detail, or really fancy tire rims.

I shelled out $25 for an Arduino Uno board today, and that’s a lot of money for what you get. When you buy the original Arduino stuff, you’re actually making a donation to the Arduino movement, so it’s overpriced. I didn’t feel cheated, though, because it seems like a worthy cause to me. If you buy clones, you’re not hurting anyone, because there are no patents, so if I ever need more boards, China, here I come.

I ordered a few ATTINY’s because they’re so cheap. I plan to play with them eventually. I would love to create a digital tachometer for my drill press. I would be the boss nerd of my whole block.

I don’t promise all of what I wrote is correct. But it could happen.

My studies with the Radio Shack Electronics Learning Lab are zooming along quite well. Now that I’ve given up on the idea of writing reports, I’m flying through several projects per day. It was a good move, because it would have taken me a year to do it the other way. Whatever I lose in depth of study, I more than gain in progress from concept to concept.

Today I get started on doing something or other with the lab’s digital display. That’s pretty cool. In my mind, electronics can be separated into two categories: stuff that has alphanumeric displays and digital components, and all the other stuff. That’s probably not quite right, but it’s how I see things. To me, making the leap from stupid circuits that turn LED’s on and off to circuits that put numbers on an LCD screen is a very big deal. It’s a jump from 1920 to 1975. It’s a jump to a realm which includes nearly every interesting electronic device a normal person owns.

You would think a Radio Shack product with the phrase “Learning Lab” in the name would be a kid’s toy, but it’s not. It’s very useful. If it included an oscilloscope, it would be considerably more advanced than the equipment I used in my first college electronics class.

One of the great things about it is that all the things you need for a whole series of projects are included. You can teach yourself electronics using a powered breadboard and your own components, but amassing the materials will be a giant pain in the butt. The cost of the Learning Lab is way more than offset by the grief it will save you.

Unfortunately, you can’t have one. They don’t sell them any more. But there are similar products out there. And you can find them used on Ebay.

The only problem with the lab is the analog meter on the board. I don’t use it. I use a Fluke meter which works better and is harder to blow up.

I guess I’ll fire up the Arduino and try to figure out how to use it. If all goes well, I should have a working minion by Tuesday.

I’m Old Enough to Scope it Out and Keep it Loose

Sorry for the really obscure Amazing Rhythm Aces reference.

I have done the unthinkable. I have replaced my Bronze Age Hitachi oscilloscope.

To be more rigorous, I have SUPPLEMENTED my Bronze Age Hitachi oscilloscope. I don’t plan to throw it out, but I got a new scope which will probably see more use.

I got the Hitachi because I was nostalgic for the days when I used to be intelligent, i.e., the days when I was studying physics. I took two electronics courses in college, using Tektronix scopes, and when I decided to revive my interest, I found a creaky Hitachi offered for fifty bucks (maybe it was seventy-five).

My college electronics courses were truly, truly useless. I’m not sure why they bothered. They took the physicist approach, and physicists can’t do anything. If you want to know where an electron in a certain type of potential is likely to be at a certain time, a physicist can help you, but if you want to design a simple headphone amplifier, you might as well hire a bartender. Physicists learn nothing which is of practical use.

My first course was full of calculus, and it centered on the theory behind simple electronic components. We built ridiculous things like differentiators and integrators. When was the last time you went to Best Buy to look at a new 55″-screen integrator? Never! People don’t use integrators. They use stereos, computers, and smartphones. I didn’t learn how to make one useful thing.

My second course was called “advanced,” but it was about things like shining a UV light on a piece of metal and counting the electrons that left its surface. I’m sure Samsung pays top dollar to designers who can count electrons.

Say what you will about engineers. They may be creepy and scary, but they can actually do things.

The Hitachi was useful when I built guitar amps. I used it for monkey jobs, such as finding out how far a signal went in a circuit before being cut off by one of my wiring mistakes. You can’t do that very well with a multimeter. You need a picture, because AC signals on multimeters don’t tell you much.

Unfortunately, the Hitachi is an analog scope, so it doesn’t tell you anything. It just gives you a picture of the signal. If you want to know the voltage or frequency, you have to work it out with a calculator or multiply in your head. Up-to-date nerds use digital scopes. They have little readouts on the screen, and they tell you stuff about what you’re seeing. They also store information so you can look at signals later.

I don’t recall whether the Tektronix scopes I learned on were digital or analog, but given the era, I would guess that they were analog.

You can go on Ebay and get old digital scopes from American companies for not too much money, but they have certain parts that tend to blow, and you may or may not be able to fix them. Also, the cheap new Chinese scopes have more features. I decided to go Chinese.

The Chinese oscilloscope game is quite interesting. There are a number of companies that make scopes that look pretty much alike, and it seems like every budget scope costs exactly the same amount: $400. But it gets complicated. Some scopes are built well, and others aren’t. Some scopes can be hacked, and others can’t. You have to shop carefully.

The scope I got is rated for 50MHz, but here’s something interesting: the frequency is limited by software, not hardware. In other words, the manufacturer makes a scope that will work fine at 100MHz, and they program it so it only goes up to 50 so they can charge less for it. Weird. Naturally, nerds have found the hack that restores its full capability, so once I hack my scope, 100 MHz will be well within range.

There are other hacks for oscilloscopes. I don’t know what they are. I do know that the big drawback to low-end Chinese scopes is crummy software. They tend to have bugs that pop up, and people complain, and the manufacturers have to come up with solutions. It’s my understanding that American scopes are less buggy, which is one reason they cost four times as much.

It will be a little weird, turning on a new scope that does what it’s supposed to do, without requiring a nurse or a shaman to make it function. I haven’t had that experience in well over 20 years.

I found a neat resource: the forum at Eevblog.com. This is a website started by an Australian geek named Dave. I tried another forum, but the people were just a little too obnoxious. I don’t know why electronics turns some people into the fat kid from Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, but it does.

Dave’s videos are neat, too. He’s a real engineer (someone who gets paid to do electronics), so he knows a few things, and he spills his guts regularly on Youtube. He takes scopes apart, which is nice. I decided to get a Rigol DS1054Z largely based on his dismantling video. The scope looks a little “Hello Kitty” on the outside, but on the inside, the build quality is very impressive.

Will I ever need even 10% of the scope’s capabilities. Not this year. Well, that means not in the next three days. Okay, not in 2017. I think. But who knows what I’ll be doing in 2018? Can’t hurt to plan for the future. I would really love to learn a little about digital circuits, and you need a digital scope for that.

The Hitachi’s problems appear to be fixable, and I feel obligated to try a repair. On the one hand, it’s practically worthless even when running normally. On the other hand, it’s a sophisticated, top-quality instrument that must surely have cost over a grand new, so it seems a shame to turn it into a parts cadaver.

Why didn’t I fix it before buying a new scope? First, I am lazy, and I like to buy new stuff. Second, I was really dreading fixing it. Third, when you need to fix a scope, one of the things you should have on hand is…a scope. That works. I should find the Rigol useful while operating on the Hitachi.

I can’t figure out what “Eevblog” means. I believe “vblog” is Australian for “vlog,” but what’s “Eev”? I saw something indicating it means “electron volt,” but if that’s true, what does “eV” mean? Short answer: it means “electron volt.” “EE” means “electrical engineer.” That still leaves “v” to be dealt with.

Well, my brain must have been short-circuited. The “V” is from the “vblog” part, not the “EE” part. Okay, so it’s “EE Vblog.”

Australians. Whatever.

I remember Dice Clay wondering aloud whether we do nuclear testing there.

I think we do.

If I get the Hitachi to function, I will almost certainly write about it here. You have been warned.

You Have More Control Than You Think

I’m a little reluctant to testify about things that could still go wrong, so I have been sitting on something for a few days. I feel like it’s safe to write about it now.

I have been exposed repeatedly to someone who has a persistent cold. I hate colds. I’m pretty sure I had one long cold from the time I was born until I was 12 years old. I was sick a lot, and it made me miserable. I hate the snot. I hate not being able to breathe or sleep. I hate it. I hate it all. I did not want to get another cold.

Over the last couple of years, I’ve had tremendous success, speaking defeat to various problems. It sounds crazy, but it’s very Biblical. For instance, Jesus told a tree, “May you never bear fruit again.” It dried up promptly. Jesus followed up with a famous saying which has not worked very well for Christians since he died: “Assuredly, I say to you, if you have faith and do not doubt, you will not only do what was done to the fig tree, but also if you say to this mountain, ‘Be removed and be cast into the sea,’ it will be done. And whatever things you ask in prayer, believing, you will receive.”

If you have a problem you can’t solve, you can say, “I speak defeat to [insert problem here] in the name of Jesus.” You have to have faith, and to have faith, you need to pray in tongues habitually. If you do it with the right preparation, it works surprisingly well.

Every day, I’ve been speaking defeat to this illness.

On Saturday, I started to feel strange. I felt the beginnings of pain in my bones. It was as if someone had draped a shawl over me, and everywhere a shawl would have touched–my outer arms, my shoulders, the back of my neck, and my head–I felt an ache starting up. I continued speaking defeat and looking for problems in my mindset or behavior that might open doors.

I started sweating, like a person whose fever was breaking. The pain went away. I never developed congestion or a runny nose. My throat didn’t get sore. It’s Wednesday, and I’m still fine.

I can’t say I have had no problems at all. For several days I had a strange sensation, as if I were enveloped in a cloud of someone else’s anger. I felt like something wanted in, and it was angry because it was forced to stay outside. I had problems sleeping on Saturday night.

One day my nose ran a little, but I had just sprayed a really filthy bathroom (not mine, I hasten to point out) with bleach. You can imagine the fumes I breathed.

Many of the emotions and drives we think are our own come from spirits. I know that for a fact. I remember walking into the National Holocaust Memorial and being overwhelmed by the grief of the Holy Spirit. It’s very common for mentally ill people to hear voices telling them to kill people they are not angry at. They kill their mothers, spouses, children, random strangers…the anger comes from somewhere else. One of the greatest rock and roll drummers shattered his mother’s skull with a hammer because voices wouldn’t leave him alone.

The fruit of the Spirit come from the presence of the Holy Spirit, so presumably, many of our viler drives come from loser spirits causing problems on their way to burn for eternity.

We have come to accept illness as normal. I don’t think it is. I think you get more power over it as you give more power over yourself to God.

David wasn’t well when he died, and Elijah died from an illness. We know Timothy had health problems because Paul said so. Does that mean we have to be ill? I don’t think so. Elijah made mistakes. He had to run from Jezebel because he ridiculed the prophets of Baal. Timothy probably made mistakes, too. We don’t know how many of the apostles’ problems were caused by their own errors, but surely many were. The Bible never holds any of them out as perfect.

A couple of weeks back, I looked into making a buffer arbor for my belt grinder. Every tool person needs to be able to buff things. I got on the web and looked into buffer safety. I found out buffers are extremely dangerous. A well-known knifemaker was killed by a buffer not too long ago. It grabbed a knife out of his hand and threw it into his heart. Buffers are scary.

I asked buffer users for advice. I wanted to know whether buffer accidents were inevitable or just the result of user error. Everyone agreed that buffer accidents are caused by bad practice, not some insurmountable characteristic of the machinery.

“User error.” That’s the phrase people use. If you run your hand through a table saw because you’re too cocky to use a push stick, it’s user error. It’s somewhat dishonest to call it an accident, because if you adopt bad practices, you almost assure that a disaster will occur eventually. If you willfully expose yourself to an avoidable risk, is it an accident when you get hurt? Not really. You consented. You ordained it.

I bring this up, because I have been thinking about it in connection with the problems we have here on earth. I believe most are the result of user error.

To make things more confusing, let me bring in the concept of inheritance.

The Bible says a righteous man builds up an inheritance for his children’s children. We always assume this refers to wealth. The truth, though, is that the best thing you can pass on to people is knowledge and wisdom, and that is most true of knowledge and wisdom concerning God.

Think of the way earthly inheritance works. Somewhere in a family’s line, a person who has nothing finds out how to get wealth. He works hard. He suffers. He has setbacks because of his ignorance. When he is old, he passes his wealth on, and his children don’t have to suffer as much or work as hard as he did. They do better than he did in life.

Knowledge and wisdom are supposed to work the same way.

People in good families pay attention to their kids. They don’t let them grow up untended, like weeds (as I did). They teach them how to do well and avoid pitfalls. God is a father, and he is a good father, not an inattentive or selfish one. He wants us to have knowledge and wisdom so we can avoid unnecessary suffering. He doesn’t want us to repeat the stupid mistakes our parents made.

When you learn about tool safety, you’re inheriting wisdom. The first guy who was hurt by a buffer probably didn’t have anyone to warn him properly. Ever since then, knowledge has accumulated, largely because of accidents in which people have been maimed. If you inherit the wisdom others accumulated with great suffering, you can make yourself safe. If you refuse, you get hurt just like they did, and you bring it on yourself.

When we suffer diseases and other setbacks in life, very often, it’s the result of user error.

The church rejects a huge percentage of the inheritance Jesus died to bring us. We reject prayer in tongues. We reject communion. We reject the fruit and the gifts of the Spirit; we feel we have to change ourselves. Like people who reject inherited money because they have the fantasy that they can be “self-made,” we want to make ourselves holy and earn God’s help.

We want to earn gifts. How is it a gift if you earned it?

We are supposed to be the earth’s nobility, and nobility comes through inheritance, not effort.

Healing and other helps from God are connected to confession, repentance, and obedience. Does this mean we earn his help? No, it just means we cancel it out by opening doors to the enemy. When you lie to God and pretend to be righteous, and when you habitually disobey him, you give other spirits rights. You drive the Holy Spirit out by dishonoring him. If you want the promises of the Bible to work, you need to make communion often. You need to admit that you’re responsible for the sacrifice of Jesus, and that you’re a taker, not a giver. God doesn’t owe you good things, and you need his help to control your flesh.

I still remember my friend who died from cancer. Everyone in my church kept telling him he was healed, but people got very angry when I said we needed to confess and get rid of sin and pride in order to close doors to disease. My friend was arrogant. That was just his nature. The church reinforced that. Now he’s dead. We invited God in one door and the devil in through another. God doesn’t like to share. He is “God,” not “a god.” He has to be given special honor.

One of the greatest things about having a good relationship with God is seeing other people inherit through me. There are a handful of people who have listened to me when I talked about things God showed me. Now sometimes I learn from them. They got things flowing, and they hear from God directly instead of waiting for me or some other human being to tell them things. That’s how it’s supposed to work. They will have better lives than I did. They will inherit instead of working. They won’t have to build up the same little stash of wealth that I did, all over again.

The church gave away inheritance a long time ago. Every generation starts over, in the dirt, and we die spiritually poor. If God manages to get some knowledge into someone, we ignore or murder that person. We don’t heal the sick very much. We only rarely raise the dead. We make the promises of the Bible seem like lies, because we rejected the knowledge that makes them work.

I’m very, very glad I’m not sick today. That’s all I can tell you. I can’t force people to listen or benefit. I plan to keep going forward, even if everyone I know dies in defeat.

I hope I don’t wake up tomorrow with a cold. That would be embarrassing.

Keep praying in tongues. Keep taking communion, with an emphasis on confession, repentance, and admitting you need help. Keep speaking defeat to pride and self-deceit. See what happens. It certainly beats giving a fifth of your paycheck to a white-trash liar in a purple suit.

No Roast Beast This Year

Christmas has not been bad. It’s just me and my dad now, but life is peaceful, and my relationship with God is rewarding.

I don’t hear from my other relatives much. My sister is not really part of the picture now, and the others just don’t contact me often. It’s always about business when they do. I guess I offended them in some way, but I don’t know what I did. My grandfather left a screwed-up estate, and that tends to create alienation among relatives, but I have never taken a dime or a single article I wasn’t entitled to, and the only time I offered to work for the estate, I refused to charge. Oddly, they chose a cousin who took 33 percent of the proceeds of his work.

Could have saved each one of them thousands of dollars. Whatever their reason for turning me down was, it must have been compelling. Or maybe they just didn’t think it through.

I did hear from one aunt. Her relationship with the others is not great, but I don’t have any problems with her. She was upset because Obama jabbed Israel in the eye, refusing to oppose an anti-Israel UN resolution. She believes God will punish the US because of it, and history appears to show that she had good reason to be concerned.

For years, Democrats ridiculed people who said Obama had problems with Israel, but at some point during his administration, the gloves came off, and now people admit he’s Israel’s enemy. No apologies from the apologists, however. No admission of error.

The Bible predicts that God will start defending God personally when all the nations of the world turn against it. Has that happened, with the UN resolution? I’m not sure. We elected Trump, and he appears to be a rabid Israel fan. Ordinarily, you would think that would count for something. But he got fewer votes than Hillary Clinton, an enemy of God from the word “go.” That counts for something, too.

I am not worried, because worry is wrong. Besides, my relationship with God is going very well, so I don’t expect to suffer as badly as other Americans. I’m not all over the web calling the Israelis Nazis and comparing the Jewish state to South Africa. I hope as many people as possible get it together and stop provoking God, but I’m glad I’m withdrawing from the mass of ignorant people who are doing their best to bring on disaster.

The day was productive for me, by my standards. I spent a lot of time organizing and moving useless items into places where they will not be in the way as much. I spent some time reading an old quantum mechanics text, and I watched a quantum mechanics lecture on Youtube. I did a couple of simple problems. I am trying to pick up bits of the knowledge that leaked out of my head after I quit graduate school.

I also spent time with my handy-dandy Radio Shack Electronics Learning Lab. I have been going through the projects and writing up lab reports, because reports help you learn things, but the more I got into it, the more I felt it was counterproductive to write things up. The material in the workbook does not lend itself all that well to report writing, and writing slows the process down by a factor of maybe ten. I started going through the book assembling and dismantling the projects one after the other, without writing anything. It seems to be the right way to do it. If I really feel the need, I can write about certain subjects, but I believe writing about everything will keep me busy until I’m 70.

It’s nice to do things right, but if you overthink and do them TOO right, you fall behind and never get anywhere. I wish I had understood that when I was in grad school. I felt like I had to understand everything, backward and forward.

I’ve been fiddling with the test equipment I own. I found out I don’t have a cord for my ancient HP signal generator. The resulting kerfuffle is really something. A thousand years ago, when it was made, they used a connector called the PH-163 or Belkin 17952. It’s sort of like a modern computer power cord connector, but it has oval pins. In 2016, a PH-163 cord will run you thirty bucks, not including shipping. Forget that. I ordered a male PC connector, and I’m going to rip the old connector out of the box, carve up the sheet metal, and put the new one in. I don’t even know if the signal generator works, so I’m not going to Sotheby’s to bid on a priceless antique cord for it.

My old Hitachi oscilloscope has a messed-up volts/division knob on one channel. It’s very hard to turn, as if someone put glue in it. I tried running Kroil into it, but it didn’t loosen it up completely, so I guess I’ll have to dismantle the scope and take a look at the pot/rotary switch/whatever behind the panel. I have no idea whether it can be fixed.

I’m also getting a funny display when I check the square-wave calibration function, and from what I’ve read, that means parts on the PCB have to be replaced. Fun, fun, fun. I don’t know how much effort I want to put into a scope that cost 50 bucks, but I plan to see what I can do.

It’s time to get a real scope. That means digital. I thought I might try to get an old Tektronix or HP, but people seem to agree that you’re better off getting a new Chinese job. I may splurge for a Rigol DS1054Z. They get raves. It would be nice to work WITH a scope instead of working ON it.

When people talk about the old scopes, they say they do most of what the new ones do, and the quality is better, but they also say this part burns out and that part quits working, and then you either have to become an oscilloscope technician or buy another one.

I don’t know much about it, but it looks like you can hit Ebay and pick up a 20-year-old scope that does what a modern Chinese one does, for maybe 40% less than Chinese. But is that a good idea? I saw a technical guy tear down the Rigol, and it’s no Alibaba toy. It’s built like Kim Jong-Un’s armor-plated underground end-game outhouse.

The Hitachi was fine when I was basically using it to see if I was getting any AC signal at all, without worrying whether the display was correct. I was working on tube amps, and that doesn’t require a lot of precision. I can’t get by with grossly distorted waveforms for the rest of my life. Sooner or later I’ll need to know what a signal really looks like.

I dread opening the box up and looking for problems. I’ll probably have to remove and store thirty knobs to get the front panel off, and they’re attached with microscopic set screws.

One of the big down sides to fooling with electronics is that you have to join forums frequented by guys who have never, ever, for very solid reasons, gotten a date. Some of the people are nice and helpful, but others think that because they’ve spent their entire lives staring at circuit boards and watching Japanese cartoons instead of engaging with human beings, the rest of us should crawl to them on our faces and shower them with offerings of Jolt cola and Skittles before begging their forgiveness for existing.

You really have to finesse them to get what you want without falling into the mud-wrestling pit. You have to know when to say, “Great. Thanks for the information,” when you have received no useful information at all and simply want to end the interaction.

I guess it’s insulting to humor and cajole people you could never respect, in order to get answers out of them, but you can only treat people as well as they let you.

Anyway, it was a pleasant, peaceful day. It would be nice if I woke up tomorrow and the half of my family that died from old age and cancer was still here, and we were all in Kentucky sitting around a Christmas tree, but things are good, and they’re getting better.

If You Paid for it, it’s not a Gift

I wrote about the help God has been giving me with love. The process has not stopped, so I felt like I should keep writing.

Someone asked me how I go about loving certain people. Many human beings are venomous and obnoxious. That’s reality. A commenter wanted to know if I tried to think about the good parts of people.

That gave me pause, because the answer surprised me: I don’t.

That proves what’s happening to me is supernatural. I can’t do what I’m doing. It’s not me.

Sometimes when God makes an improvement in you, you forget what it was like before he fixed you. That’s the situation I’m in now. A couple of weeks ago, I would have had to grit my teeth and focus in order to try to love certain people. That’s not what’s happening now. It’s more like turning on a flashlight and letting the beam shine. I have the power to turn it on or shut it off, but I didn’t put it in myself. There is something inside me that wasn’t there before, and it doesn’t depend on the person toward whom I direct it.

That’s part of the beauty of it. If other people’s bad qualities prevent you from loving them, then they control you, right? They can always take away your love. How can you be the head and not the tail if other people can take your love at will?

We love saying other people can’t steal our joy, but we don’t say that about love very much. Love is more fundamental than joy. Love gives rise to joy, so if you can get ahold of love and hang onto it, joy will follow.

Saying, “You can’t steal my joy,” is a little selfish, because it leaves love out of the equation. It’s sort of like saying, “You can’t keep my paycheck,” when you haven’t been going to work. Not that love is work. I just mean love comes before joy, like work comes before a paycheck.

Maybe I shouldn’t have used work in the analogy. Hopefully, you get the idea. Sunshine comes before photosynthesis. Investing comes before interest. Planting comes before reaping. Wind comes before waves.

I don’t care how rotten people are; they can’t take this from me. I won’t have it. I’m not their slave.

I may not like everyone. There are many people I refuse to associate with, because associating with them is a nasty and unprofitable experience. There are a lot of people I can’t help but contemn. But I don’t have to hate them or live with anger because of them.

I feel a lot better now. Often in the past, I felt bad because anger was still in place. The root of anger will keep bearing fruit as long as it’s not pulled up. Whatever I tried to do with the root of anger in place was sabotaged by the root’s presence. It’s like trying to build a house right next to a tree. The roots will grow under the house and break the foundation, over and over. If you kill the tree, the house can be built. Now I have more power to cut the roots whenever they try to spread.

Christians in the US need to get ahold of this right now, because we’re very busy humiliating people who are against God, and anger is breaking up our foundations. We are crowing about Trump’s win, as if it proved we were the master race. That’s kind of crazy. If you’re going to be nasty and cruel, wouldn’t it make more sense to do it when you lose, not when you win? Anyway, it will bring a backlash of defeat. A certain number of people here have to deal with our win correctly in order to motivate God to keep helping us.

I believe an increased flow of love will improve my health and enable God to bless me more. I think that when your love is constipated, it’s like having obstructions in your lymph system and urinary system and so on. Things that should be cleansed get blocked and encrusted with filth. Destructive pressure builds up. Your body and mind will attack themselves. Seems that way, based on what I’m experiencing now.

It’s highly disturbing that famous preachers keep lying to us about money and keeping us convinced that God’s big priority is making us rich. Look at what we could be getting, if we weren’t deceived. We are chasing things we can’t get. We are chasing blessings that don’t exist, and when you do that, you’re really chasing curses. We’re offending God with our covetousness, and we are not chasing the good things he actually wants us to have.

People like T.D. Jakes, Joel Osteen, Paula White, and Benny Hinn are poisoning us. It’s as if we’re all swimming in a septic tank, and these people are holding our heads under the surface. The evil they do is astounding, but we deserve it, because our desires give them opportunity.

The Pope…I don’t even know what to say about him. How can any Christian over the age of 12 love socialism? Who has killed more Christians than the socialists? Who has burned more churches? Who has touted man’s nonexistent power to change and help himself more? No one. The Pope is toxic and ignorant.

Cold, intellectual preachers are killing us,too. God doesn’t want engineers. He wants people with hearts like his.

The sad thing is that we have no leadership. Where are we supposed to turn? No one on earth–no one prominent–is teaching the things God has shown me directly. People say no church is perfect, but the truth is, no church is even adequate. Churches are poisonous. If you want to benefit from a church, go and get yourself saved and baptized with the Spirit, start praying in tongues as much as you can, and beg God every day for correction and knowledge. Then learn to ignore the garbage your church teaches you. This is your only hope of making real progress.

Be extremely careful about accepting any type of promotion from a church. It’s almost always a trap. When you’re part of the team, you have to parrot the party line, even if the party line is killing people. Don’t get attached to anything but God. Don’t owe anyone but God. You don’t need to be a youth pastor or deacon in order to serve him. You don’t need a “platform.” You can do just fine on your own, once you’re able to hear from God.

You don’t need a license from a man or an organization.

Jesus had no position in the religious hierarchy. Neither did John the Baptist or any of the apostles. Look at the prophets. They were rejected. Amos was a vinedresser. Elijah and Elisha were solitary. Elisha was a farmer. Moses was a shepherd. David was a shepherd whose brothers hated him. Meanwhile, the vast majority of priests amounted to absolutely nothing. Try and name a priest from the Bible who is honored today, to the degree that Stephen or Moses is honored.

The Jews killed Isaiah. They tormented and imprisoned Jeremiah. They stoned Stephen. If men love you and honor you, look out! It’s the devil, trying to put you to sleep on his lap so he can shave your head and put out your eyes. God help you if someone tries to point a TV camera at you. It takes God-given strength to endure that without being corrupted.

The Bible clearly says that God sets the godly apart for himself. That doesn’t mean he sets them apart in churches. It means he sets them apart, with him. In his presence. When you’re in church, be careful. Think like a person in a hospital ward during a plague. Avoid being infected. Avoid indiscriminate intimacy with the infected. This is part of what it means to be the head and not the tail.

To be holy, you have to have flexibility. Men will bind you with chains and straps so they can control you and tell you what to say. If you accept the chains, the Holy Spirit will go somewhere else. He is not going to be dishonored and compete with men for your loyalty. He is humble and patient, but he is still God, and he requires a certain amount of honor. Every day God gives up on people he loves, and he, personally, has them thrown into hell. If you tax him long enough, he will give up on you, too.

You can do what you want. Never forget that. It should scare you.

Don’t worry about the difficulty of doing what God wants. He does not want you to do it with your own strength. It offends and grieves him when you do that. He expects and demands that you accept his help. Don’t be discouraged. Look for his help.

We are heirs, not employees. How would you feel if you tried to give your son a fortune, and he insisted on getting a job at 7-Eleven and living in an efficiency?

Remember all those times in the Bible when Jesus worked really hard and got blisters? Neither do I! Never happened! God isn’t impressed or pleased with your hard work. He created hard work as a reward for the cursed. Learn to receive charity. Jesus himself was not too good to do that. Who are we to insist on deserving good things?

Imagine how terrible life would be if we got what we deserved.

Love is available. Faith is available. Victory is available. It has already been paid for, by someone else.

I don’t know if I’m doing a good job of testifying, since I’m not making many people angry. I guess I’m being spared their participation here. If what you say pleases everyone, it’s wrong. Real testimony gives rise to hate and murder.

If I can get good things from God, anyone can. Keep banging on the door.

Forget the Palmer Worm

Since I wrote about my literature-reading habits today, I might as well follow up with some info on my technical reading.

It will sound stupid to a person who isn’t mathematically or technically inclined, but there is a special kind of pleasure associated with reading a well-written text or how-to book for STEM people. Believe it or not, there are texts which could actually be described as “beloved.” Herbert Goldstein’s Classical Mechanics and Morse and Feshbach’s Mathematical Methods of Theoretical Physics come to mind. It’s very hard to write a good STEM book, so when someone does it right, you almost feel like putting the book in bed next to you, like a little boy curling up with a new toy fire engine.

When I came to Miami from Texas, I had a lot of technical books, and I had to store them. I didn’t know carpenter ants ate paper. After several years, I checked on the books, and a lot of them were ruined. I had lost Richard Feynman’s autobiographical books, two neat quantum mechanics books by someone named Cohen-Tannoudji, Amit Goswami’s Quantum Mechanics, and a number of other books I liked. I lost my Japanese edition of Krazy Kat, which I treasured.

I had a copy of Mathematical Methods of Physics, by Mathews and Walker. I had bought it new. The bugs left most of it alone, but they ate a big hole in the spine, and it bothered me every time I looked at it. I felt so bad about it, I looked around online for a replacement, even though I didn’t need the book. If you check prices for new copies, you will understand why I didn’t buy one. They are not cheap.

This week I started Googling again. I found someone selling a new copy for well under the market price, and I decided to take a chance. It’s on the UPS truck right now, on its way here. I hope it’s really a new copy.

I also replaced some Schaum outlines. These things are priceless for STEM students. Textbooks tend to be pedantic, terse, and incomprehensible. Schaum’s authors know that if people can’t understand them, they won’t get paid.

I don’t know how much I’ll use these books. Honestly, I don’t think Mathews and Walker is a good text. It just bugged me. I can sell my chewed-up copy for about what the new one cost, so no loss.

There are also some books I’m glad I sold or lost. J.J. Jackson’s book on E&M is pretty horrible. I think I still have Fetter and Walecka’s abominable mechanics text. If so, I should start using the pages to locate end mills on workpieces.

Ants eat books. Believe it. Don’t take any chances when you store your library.

Avoid

I have a few minutes to kill, so I feel like writing about my Lit. Hum. project.

Literature Humanities is a mandatory course I pretty much blew off when I was at Columbia University, and I am going back over the reading to punish myself. So far, it has worked really well. I feel I have been punished greatly. I suffered through Plato’s bizarre tribute to homosexual predators, and I waded through the tedious, venal muck of Homer and Virgil. I am still buried in Boccaccio’s Decameron, and if memory serves, I will soon be tormented with Dostoevsky. I dread that like you can’t imagine.

I loved literature when I was young, and then I got over it. It looks like I’m not going to get a relapse any time soon. Literature is full of whining and self-pity. It’s unrealistic. It takes place in imaginary worlds where there is no loving God. It reinforces just about every type of evil urge a person can have. It tends to promote sexual sin, socialism, irresponsibility, and atheism. I’m starting to wonder how much of it a person can be exposed to without harm.

It kind of reminds me of rap music.

I liked Boccaccio when I started reading his book, but love has withered on the vine. His book goes on forever. It would have been much better had two-thirds of it been burned by his editor. It contains dozens of highly similar stories, and they’re not very imaginative. In terms of literary quality, I would rank it right up there with the Nancy Drew mysteries and John Grisham.

That’s not a compliment. John Grisham writes very badly, and his work doesn’t show much familiarity with the practice of law, which is odd, given his original profession. The wealthiest writers make up one set, and the best make up another. The intersection of these sets is small.

I think I can say with confidence that no one was ever moved or inspired by Boccaccio. There are no memorable quotes, either. You don’t put down the book and exclaim, “Wow! That’s brilliant!” He will never make anyone forget Joseph Heller or William Shakespeare.

Now that I’m farther into the book, I realize there’s a lot of filth in it. I mean real gutter porn, with no real literary value. It’s not even clever porn.

He reminds me of Cervantes. I haven’t read Cervantes since college (I took Columbia’s famous Don Quixote course, which was a farce and a waste of money). I don’t think Cervantes was much of a writer. He was just windy and irreverent. You can’t seriously commpare him to a French homologue such as Rabelais. He isn’t as erudite, nor is he as funny. If you want to read a brilliant, offensive book written several centuries ago in a place other than England, try Voltaire’s Candide. Don Quixote functions best as a doorstop.

Sometimes I think Cervantes gets air time simply because people are desperate to pretend Spain has a rich literary tradition that compares with northern Europe. Were that true, we would have found out about it by now.

I was going to read all of Boccaccio, even though the syllabus doesn’t demand it, but now that I see what a drag his book is, I am adhering to the schedule. I guess I’ll be done in a week. I would be moving faster, but I have other books on my plate, and they’re actually entertaining and/or full of useful knowledge, so they get priority.

I wish I had more good things to say about Boccaccio, because that would mean I was enjoying the book.

The moral, as always, is that you should read certain books in order to be educated, not in order to be entertained or impressed. And of course, they are useful to people who want to be punished.

Don’t Air Your Grievances; Give Them the Air

God keeps showing me good stuff and cleaning me up.

One of the needs I have been concerned about for the last few years is the need to love. A while back, God told me he created the universe for love, and that is consistent with my concerns. Love is important. Apparently, it’s one of the most important things there is. Also, on the occasions when Jesus visited me, the single sensation that impressed me the most was the warmth of the love that radiated from him. I also felt peace, protection, relief, and faith, but love stood out.

God can project his love through you, and that’s the kind of love he wants you to have. It’s hard to make yourself love without his help. We are fully of emotional scars. We feel cheated and wounded, because that’s what we are. Other people and malicious spirits prey on us, starting before we’re born. They get great pleasure from our suffering and humiliation. It’s as if they love bathing in our blood.

Years ago, while I was on my way to a church service, God’s love fell on me, and while it rested on me, I felt new love for other people. It didn’t matter who they were. I didn’t have to push it. The strength came from God. It was a great thing, but I wasn’t able to hold onto it. Ever since then, I’ve been aware that I needed it, and I wanted it back. Many times, I’ve asked God for this.

We live in a society of self-proclaimed victims, and I have been one of them. A person who thinks he’s a victim doesn’t feel obligated to love. On the contrary; victims feel entitled (their favorite word) to harm others. It’s not sin to them. It’s payback, karma, reparations, justice…there is always a name attached to it that makes it sound holy.

I had a warm personality when I was born, but according to my mother, that dried up during my first year of life. She thought it was because of an illness I contracted, but it may have had more to do with the presence of two abusive people in the house. My mother used to find my sister next to my crib, pinching me to make me scream.

In this world, we are taught to hold things against people and to feel cheated. I fell for it. Also, I got tired of opening up to people, only to have them mistreat me in return. People are truly sadistic. Many of them see openness as a welcome opportunity to violate and torment another person. It’s like a windfall to them. They pleasure of harming others is so pleasing to them, they can’t believe their good fortune when they get a chance to cause suffering. I found that I could protect myself by closing up and by using words to hurt back or to attack preemptively. I was rewarded for it, too, because I was funny. People admired me for it. They paid me with attention.

I became like the people from whom I wanted protection. I thought I was a good person because I wasn’t actively looking for opportunities to hurt people, but I was contributing to the atmosphere of defensiveness and malice. In Miami, everyone is familiar with this atmosphere, because people here are very antagonistic to each other. Everyone you see is a threat that has to be scared off or defeated. I believe this is largely due to the ways of the people who have made big cultural contributions here. Before Cubans arrived, the dominant culture was from New York, and after that, the aggressive ways of Cubans dominated our interactions.

I don’t want to be like that any more. I don’t care how other people treat me. I don’t want whatever petty victories they get to be augmented by the larger victory of depriving me of the ability to love.

Over the last few days, I’ve finally gotten relief. I feel like a passage inside me has reopened, and I’m able to let God’s love flow toward people. It’s extremely helpful. It cuts off tension and ugly thoughts before they get a chance to bloom. It’s relaxing. It’s healing to me.

I write about this because people need to know it’s available, and they need to know it’s essential. The Holy Spirit will give you a lot of great things, but without love, they’re very incomplete and ineffective. The propagation of love is the purpose of the universe, so if love doesn’t flow through you, whatever you’re doing in life is a waste of time and a failure.

One of the great things about this is that it helps you forgive nasty people. That’s important, because we swim in a sea of uncleanness and sadism these days. The Internet seems to be growing these things in us. Christians, especially, are subjected to constant provocation. We can’t sit back in self-righteousness, remain angry at unbelievers, and feel like we’re superior. We have to actively, deliberately focus love on them, even if we only do it internally. God is giving me the habit of doing this, and I can feel the pressure and tension inside me abating.

Love is not just a gift we give to others. It’s a gift we give ourselves. I say we give it, but in reality, we just let God run it through us. Love is power and internal healing. It will bring you victory, because God favors people who love, and he opposes people who are bitter and angry all the time.

It doesn’t matter what other people have done to you. To put it bluntly, whatever it is, they probably haven’t beaten you with a scourge and nailed you to a cross. You have to get over it and let it go, and only God can give you the ability to do these things.

I strongly suspect that a lack of love causes physical problems. In particular, I think it causes illnesses in which the body and mind attack themselves. Arthritis. Allergies. Psoriasis. Ulcers. High blood pressure. Heart disease. If you’re full of a desire to harm others all the time, and that desire can’t be fulfilled, surely you will end up harming yourself, simply because you’re available as a target.

My advice is to make love a priority. Quit thinking about what you “deserve.” Quit obsessing on “justice.” If we really got what we deserved, and if God gave us justice, it would be a lot worse than what we actually experience. We belong in hell, so maybe we should stop complaining about slights.

Think it over. I know it will help you.

In Summary, You Should Just Die

I’ve been looking at news sites on the Internet a lot this year, and I have some information for people who want to skip the effort and reap the benefit.

1. You are obligated to find fat women attractive. It is not a matter of choice. You DO find them attractive, even if they’re not. If you say you have a problem with this, people should use filthy, insulting language to help you get over it.

2. It’s a good thing when a woman exposes her breasts in a restaurant, because asking her to put a thin piece of cloth over them while she breastfeeds is oppression, sort of like…no, EXACTLY like…forced genital mutilation. Also, breasts have nothing to do with sex. That may surprise some women and result in the rewriting of a number of sex manuals.

3. Principals and teachers who correct girls who go to school dressed like sluts need to be “shut down,” and a really good mother will respond with an obnoxious Facebook tirade, preferably with a photo of herself dressed in slutwear. Corollary: even though every type of sexual sin is good, boys who look at girls dressed like sluts are oppressors and need to be shamed relentlessly.

4. If Donald Trump said or did it, it is very, very bad.

5. The proper term for a person who doubts the climate is changing due to human activity is the same term you use for someone who pretends Auschwitz didn’t happen: “denier.” It is not necessary to respond with facts. Deniers are close-minded, but people who insult them and refuse to listen to them are open-minded.

6. It was very, very important for electors to betray their states and vote against Trump, even though he would have won anyway, because the vote would have gone to the House of Representatives. Who are you to argue with an actor from M*A*S*H?

7. When an actress or model or reality TV bimbo wears something skimpy, it’s an important news story.

8. White people need to shut up while everyone else explains why we are the cause of every evil in the world, including evils that occur in places like China and Africa. “Whiteness” is like a form of criminal insanity, and it should be treated, but it can’t, so just suffer and hate yourself until you die. Corollary: every cruel thing people who are not white do or say to white people is good.

9. KARDASHIANS!!!! LOOK!!!! KARDASHIANS!!!

10. It’s great when a hunter gets death threats, dies, suffers a gruesome injury or gets cancer. No sane person questions this or sees anything wrong with celebrating.

11. Your sexual orientation is forced on you from before birth, but you can choose your actual sex at will, and it’s a great day for America when a male sex offender can walk into any locker room or rest room he wants and expose his genitals to young girls.

Saved you a lot of reading.

Joy Comes in Bags From China

This week I decided to bite the bullet and go through the projects that come with the Radio Shack Electronics Lab Learning Kit. I bought one when Radio Shack closed a bunch of its stores last year. It’s kind of a neat tool for learning about electronics. Cheap, too.

The lab is basically a breadboard (six columns) with various things you can connect to the components. Built into the lab, there are switches, an analog meter, a buzzer, and other things that can be useful.

I think the best way to do this is to keep a lab notebook and do reports. As a former physics teaching assistant, I should have no problem with that. I have to make up experiments, though, because the stuff in the Learning Lab books isn’t written for people who collect data and do analysis. The writer, a well-known electronics teacher named Forrest Mims III, just wants people to build stuff, see if it works, and move on.

I decided to do things like changing component values and writing small tables. Then I can compare the results with the mathematical formulas associated with the circuits. Short and easy, except when ineptitude gets in the way.

Writing things down is very important when you do anything technical. I say that as a person who doesn’t do it. I have suffered the consequences.

This isn’t the only thing I’ve done to amp up my electronics game. I bought a bunch of cheap components on Ebay. This was a genius idea I should have had ten years ago.

When you build circuits, you’re always in need of this resistor or that capacitor, and if you don’t have them on hand, you have to drive to Radio Shack, drive to a different store, or order the parts online. My local Radio Shack, where I used to shop for parts when I built current and temperature controllers for a professor’s laser diodes, bit the dust in 2015. We have an incredible electronics supermarket in Miami, but it’s expensive and far away. Ordering online is fine, but if you did it for every part in a simple circuit, your build would take six months, and buying one part at a time anywhere is way expensive.

I found some guy selling 1% tolerance 1/4-watt metal film resistors for $15. How many? Which values? Try 2800! All values! Nearly. You get like half a pound of resistors in a huge number of values. I also found great deals on film caps, Chinese ceramic caps, and a few potentiometers in common values. For the heck of it, I picked up some IC’s and sockets. Can’t hurt.

Here’s the rub: the resistors have thin leads. This doesn’t bother me, because I would much rather have a thin lead than wait ten days for a resistor.

The resistors arrived today, and I decided to check one. I was suspicious of the 1% claim. I don’t need 1%; 10% will be fine and dandy. But you want to know what you bought.

I hooked a resistor to a meter and heated it with a soldering iron. The value was 430 ohms. The resistor measured exactly 430, which was way beyond any level of precision I’ll ever need, and it didn’t move when I heated it. SOLD!

Even if the resistors aren’t great, they’ll allow me to build things without waiting, and if I have to, I can get better stuff to replace them in permanent projects.

Caveat: some guy on the web says he scraped the paint off his cheap “film” resistors and found carbon resistors inside. Not that a 1/2-cent carbon resistor that works is a bad deal.

The soldering iron is also news. Twenty years ago, when I got my Weller soldering station, I thought I was the coolest kid in school. I was used to pencil irons that weighed a pound and had to be placed in cereal bowls because they didn’t have stands. I started looking into different irons this year, and I found out my Weller was strictly low-budget.

It turns out you can pay a thousand dollars for a soldering station, and they come with lots of crazy attachments. Also, cheap stations don’t have enough power. They take too long to melt solder, and this can actually screw up your joints.

I thought about getting a Hakko. They’re very popular. But I kept looking, and I found myself a dream come true: the Ersa I-Con Pico. Yes, it has THREE names.

Ersa is a snooty German company (what a rarity), and they make high-end soldering stuff. The station I got is like their Maverick or Vega (remember those?). Still, it’s way better than my Weller or a Hakko. It has a digital display. It pumps out about 80 watts. It gets hot in ten seconds. Best of all, it has a tiny iron a little bigger than a pen.

The general rule with cheap irons is that they’re too long and too heavy. There’s no reason for it, as far as I know. It’s just a fact of life. It can be very hard controlling a soldering tip four inches from your hand. The Ersa’s tip is like two inches from your fingers. Beautiful!

I think this is an example of having a lame tool you didn’t know was lame until you replaced it with something good.

I haven’t soldered anything yet. The package just got here. On Sunday. Amazon is starting to scare me with their newfangled speedy deliveries. I half expect to wake up and hear Jeff Bezos singing in the shower.

In summary:

1. you need a pile of cheap electronic components from Ebay;
2. you need a better soldering iron; and
3. you should really try an organized approach to learning about electronics.

I preach to myself.

One more tidbit: if you have a cheap multimeter and you want to kill yourself because the Chinese probes won’t hold onto anything, spring for some Fluke spring-loaded probes. I finally did. What a difference. I had cheap Chinese ones, and the plastic flaked off until they refused to hold anything. I could have cobbled a solution together, but I bought new probes, and now life is sweet.

I think I may sever the Chinese probes, toss the ends, and attach alligator clips.

With my new soldering iron.

Hmm…I think that might be “cobbling a solution together.”

BTW, I found out how you’re supposed to make shrink tubing contract. They sell miniature heat guns for the purpose. You can buy a fancy “rework station” that includes a heat gun. I think that’s a stupid move, because one part of any all-in-one tool will always break before the rest, and often it can’t be fixed. So there you would be, with your fancy station, a heat gun that doesn’t work, and another heat gun sitting beside it taking up space.

And the new heat gun wouldn’t match the station, which kills the fun of the whole all-in-one ethos.

A company called NTE makes a small heat gun that gets good reviews. I may get one. It’s about $20. I’m tired of roasting my shrink tubing with a lighter.

Hope this is helpful to you. Probably not, though.

Paranoid, Vicious, and Irrational are the New and Future Normal

People think America is forever. I think they’re taking the little notations on the stamps seriously.

America is not stable. America is temporary. America can fail, and it already has. This country is like a weed that has been sprayed with Roundup. When you spray a weed, it looks green and healthy for quite some time before it yellows and dies. You can’t judge things by their current appearance. You have to be aware of what’s in the pipeline.

Empires develop, mature, rot, and die, just like people. Americans don’t understand that. We think we’re the master race, and that we’re just too darn smart to end up like the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Jews, the Babylonians, the Persians, the Romans, the English, and all the other people whose empires disappeared. We’re myopic. We can’t see things in perspective because we’re too conceited to think straight.

Christians are some of the worst offenders. Ever since Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire, we have had it pretty good. God has given us half of the world. By and large, we have been more powerful than idolaters. We showed up in countries they occupied, and God drove them out before us. Now we seem to think God is going to conquer the entire world for us, and that we will usher in an age of peace and joy.

We’re insane.

The Bible makes it clear: we will fail, Satan’s people will conquer us, and we will have to be removed from the earth so Jesus can return and defeat Satan and his children. Robert Schuller and Rick Warren can’t change that. We are not merely likely to fail; it’s guaranteed.

Persecution is already here, and it will get worse. People who think we can’t be put in camps and executed live in a dream world. Among many Americans, the desire is already there, and the only thing holding them back is the knowledge that they don’t have sufficient numbers yet.

I saw something really disturbing yesterday, and it got me thinking about this.

A man named Kurt Eichenwald appeared on a show with conservative personality Tucker Carlson, and Carlson asked him about some explosive things he had said about Donald Trump. For one thing, Eichenwald said he believed Trump had been confined to a mental institution in the 1990’s. Carlson kept challenging him to discuss his remarks, and Eichenwald responded like a lunatic forced to defend his delusions.

Eichenwald refused to answer Carlson’s questions and tried to filibuster until time ran out. All the while, he kept trying to put Carlson on the defensive so the discussion would turn away from his own deeds. He held up a notebook that said “Tucker Carlson Falsehoods” on the front, and he threatened to start talking about its contents.

Obviously, this strange man had prepared himself carefully so he would be able to deflect attention from his own actions. What does that mean? It means he was frightened of Tucker Carlson. You don’t create a crazy notebook like that and wave it like Van Helsing waving a cross unless you’re afraid.

Why, then, did he choose to be interviewed? I suspect the answer is egotism. Many people have a bizarre, inexplicable desire to be on television, even when the attention is unfavorable. Even accused and convicted criminals will agree to interviews. Charles Manson loves to be interviewed. He is apparently so insane and so conceited, he thinks he can defeat any interviewer and convince the world he’s as wonderful as he thinks he is. I suspect Eichenwald is in the same boat. He probably adores attention and felt he was getting a chance to slay a conservative dragon and come away with hundreds of thousands of fervent admirers.

Just guessing, but that’s consistent with my knowledge of human nature.

Here is something scary: Eichenwald isn’t an isolated fringe nut. I think “fringe nut” is apt, but he’s a prizewinning journalist and a senior editor at Newsweek. This man is accepted and admired by his peers. They approve of him. He’s a leader. He’s not some crank who works in the mailroom.

Talk about having your worst fantasies confirmed. It’s shocking how the right’s negative perceptions about leftist journalists are proven true over and over.

Carlson never got a straight answer from Eichenwald. He clearly thought the man was mentally ill, and that was my impression, too.

After the interview, Eichenwald did what defeated political operatives often do these days. He tried to win, on Twitter, a battle in which he had been crushed in a serious national forum. He put out a flurry of disturbing tweets about the CIA and not being able to find his notes. He then deleted a bunch of it. Of course, conservatives screenshotted his ravings, so the coverup makes him look worse than the Tweets did.

Here’s something even scarier than the respect Eichenwald gets from his peers: I went to liberal websites to read about his self-immolation, and liberals were crowing about the way he “shut down” Carlson. I’m not kidding.

Tucker Carlson isn’t much of a pundit. He reminds me of Mary Katharine Ham; someone who gets attention without demonstrating any discernible gift. But next to Kurt Eichenwald, he looked like Winston Churchill. There was not much dignity in the interview, but what little there was belonged entirely to Carlson.

I don’t write much about politics, so why write about this? Because the comments reminded me of something: there is no limit to the absurdity of the things people can believe when they don’t have the Holy Spirit. The Germans and Austrians were nice, orderly people, but in a generation, it was possible to convince them it was a good idea to murder the Jewish race. The beliefs and intentions of a nation can change very quickly when people are detached from the anchor of God’s instruction. In four or five years, most Americans–think about this–have become convinced Bruce Jenner is a woman.

The wacky commentary I saw regarding Eichenwald reminded me just how much American leftists hate the rest of us, and how impervious they are to reason and common sense. You think they wouldn’t murder us if they could? That’s probably what Cubans thought of their neighbors in 1955. It’s what Cambodians thought before communists started rounding people up and shooting them.

Persecution isn’t “coming.” It’s here. Now. Today. We may win some battles here and there, as we did in the presidential election, but the tide is going out, and we are going to lose. We’re not preparing for that.

The hatred of the left is like a slingshot that has been drawn back. Once the restraint is removed, it will fire. There won’t be any hesitation or remorse.

We can’t beat the problem politically. We can’t beat it by moving to the country, storing canned goods, and buying guns. Those are stopgap solutions. The answer is to draw close to God and get his favor. You will still be on the losing side, but you will live in victory until the end. Whatever suffering will come will come, but you will be spared any suffering that isn’t necessary.

The devil and his people are throwing tantrums right now. They thought we were done. The polls looked good for them. They could almost taste our blood. Then their prize was pulled away. No wonder they use words like “grief” to describe their reaction. They thought they already owned us. Slavery was almost legalized, and we were the slaves.

Our defeat was postponed, and many of us are acting like we won the future (to steal a gaffe from Obama). We didn’t get a mandate. We didn’t even get a plurality. We got four to eight years of space, in which to prepare for harder times. The idiots who are strutting and ridiculing leftists are going to regret it when Trump’s socialist successor takes office. This is the age of the Internet. Names have been provided and recorded. Offenses have been recorded. Even trivial things like memes have been noted. Think you won’t be punished for things like that? Thailand jails people for insulting their king. Castro had bloggers beaten. You think Lawrence O’Donnell and Keith Ellison wouldn’t do things like that? Who are you trying to kid? What planet do you live on?

Trump’s election was a miraculous gift from God. It wasn’t proof the country had rejected liberalism. It was a brief reprieve. It’s shocking that conservatives are so stupid they can think otherwise. Clinton came out two million votes ahead! Wake up.

Buy guns. Get out of the cities. Can’t hurt. But if you want real help, you’re going to have to know how to get it from God. You’re not going to develop that ability overnight. You should have gotten started already. It may be too late. You should do whatever you can, starting now.

Our battles are supernatural, and you need supernatural weapons and armor. You can’t say you didn’t know. Excuses are not acceptable currency. They won’t buy you help.

I hope someone out there listens and puts this information to use. As for me, I plan to be on the ark even if everyone else on earth drowns.

Support Comes When You Need It

Here is my report on the latest supernatural events in my life.

Last night I woke up between 4 and 5 a.m. I assumed the construction crew across the street had started early again, but when I saw the clock, I realized they weren’t there.

When I wake up in the middle of the night, I always start to pray. Very often, I’m aware that I didn’t pray enough the previous day, and besides, what else is there to do?

I felt rested, as though I had already slept all night.

As I was praying, I got a very strange sensation. I felt very strongly that I had been accepted by God. I don’t know if I can explain that. I felt like my application to join the team had been approved, and I was now part of the army or strike force or whatever.

I felt like I was part of something.

This is a feeling I haven’t had in a while. Maybe ever. I have always been an outsider, wherever I went. Maybe I reject people because of the way I was mistreated when I was a kid. I don’t know the answer. I’ve never been a real part of an inner circle anywhere. These days, my relatives in Kentucky don’t invite me or my dad to holiday meals. His relatives (we aren’t close enough for me to think of them as my family) have never included me in anything.

When I was a political blogger, I had some blogging friends, and I was on the right-wing side, sort of. But even then I was rejected. I told the truth about Pajamas Media, and I said Ann Coulter was a liability. I said Ted Nugent was an embarrassment. I was completely right, as time has proven, but no one ever came back and said they were wrong to shut me out. No one likes to admit fault, and besides, who knows what I might say in the future to alienate people?

At my last two churches, I had titles. I was an armorbearer at both churches, and I was a deacon at the second church. The first church came to see me as a threat to their disgraceful lies, and the pastors at the second church saw me as a loose cannon. I woke up one morning and found out the pastor’s wife had put on his pants and blocked me on Facebook.

One of the things I look forward to when I get to heaven is being part of an organization I can sink into. I want to have complete faith in my leader. I don’t want to be ruled by idiots and predators. I want to be able to trust my friends. I want to belong. You can’t get that here on earth. Even the church is screwed up. At best, you can have the sort of status prophets had. You can show up once in a while, say things that make everyone mad, and then go back home to be at God’s side.

Since last night, I’ve felt enrolled or enlisted. Whatever you want to call it.

It’s crucial to be part of God’s organization. For a long time, I’ve known that benefits are connected to membership. I remember the analogy I used to repeat. If a random person goes into a Fedex office and demands a jet to take him to another city, they’ll throw him out. If a Fedex executive does the same thing, they’ll click their heels, promise to get him a jet, make him coffee, and apologize for taking so long. Why? Because he’s united with the organization. He speaks with its authority.

Charismatic preachers teach people to beg God for nice things, but they don’t teach us to give ourselves to him completely. We want the jet, but we don’t want the job. Of course, God doesn’t listen. Why would he?

We don’t get much because we’re beggars. God gives us a lot of charity, but that’s because he’s kind. It’s not because he approves of us. We get table scraps. Sons sit at the table with the father and eat full meals.

It’s very unusual for me to give something to a bum. I know what they are. Almost all of them are rebellious addicts and criminals. The press doesn’t like to talk about that. They call them “homeless,” as if homelessness were something like earthquakes. As if people’s homes just disappeared for no reason. They don’t talk about the felonies, the drugs, and the alcohol. They don’t talk about the pride and stubbornness that put people on the street. To God, most of us are just like these people. If he blesses us too much, it’s enablement.

To enable someone is to push them into hell. It feels nice and makes you think you’re holy; it makes you think you’re better than everyone else, and it gives you grounds for insufferable self-righteousness. But it’s evil.

I used to try to get the help without offering myself in return. That’s insane. I was like a dirty bum who walked onto a military base, stood in a chow line, and demanded the same food the soldiers got. I was like an illegal alien, showing up to vote in an American election or demanding welfare. I had no standing. I couldn’t produce the correct ID, issued by the right authority.

If I want real help, I need to be enlisted. Soldiers get a salary, plus food, clothing, health care, and retirement benefits. Surely God is a better father and employer than Uncle Sam. Surely I can count on him when everyone else lets me down.

What we are eligible to receive is better than a salary. Salaries, like death (the wages of sin) are earned. We receive an inheritance. That’s something someone else worked for and built up. We don’t have to earn. In fact, trying to earn will cut off your blessings in God’s kingdom. It’s pride.

I feel like I moved up a level this morning. No, like I was moved up by another power.

It seems to me that while God works through miraculous ways, his help doesn’t necessarily arrive all at once. You can limit it through rebellion or unfaithfulness. Also, the crap you’ve piled on yourself before coming to him may take a long time to grind off. I stuck with God for years, and that was necessary because of the mess I had made of myself. He didn’t exactly reward me for long service. It just took a long time to prepare me for promotion.

It appears that a job in God’s kingdom is like a job anywhere else. Seniority matters. You will probably have to stick with him for quite some time to get things working right.

The unfortunate thing about this is that the people who need him most are the kind of people who hate waiting. They’re spoiled. They are screeching, entitlement-minded brats. Black Lives Matter. Occupy Wall Street. Bernie Sanders and his Bernout Army. The news that they will have to be patient and wait for God’s favor is exactly the kind of thing that will drive them away. They would rather live in their dirty diapers and take things by force.

You’re not entitled to anything except punishment and damnation. Who wants to admit that? People hate it when you say, “You’re not a victim.” They get very angry. Victimhood is like a pacifier they suck on all day. Pull it out and hear them scream.

I used to have the entitlement mindset. Meanwhile, the God who owed it to the universe to destroy me was working to save me. He had already allowed himself to be tortured to death for me, and I was blaming him for not doing better by me. I was blaming him for problems I had caused, and I was busy causing new ones!

I feel wonderful today. I am full of optimism for myself. I can’t say I feel it with regard to most people I know. That’s very sad, but I can’t go back to what I was. I won’t let their backward hearts draw me away from the only good path there is. I’m not going to give up “holy privilege” so I can avoid Christian guilt. The up side to getting on the ark is that you are lifted above the flood. The down side is that you watch your friends drown.

Keep moving forward. There is nothing behind you but death and torment, and what’s in front of you is better than you can imagine. That’s my advice for this Sunday.

Explain This if You Can

I welded something successfully today, and I can’t figure out why it worked.

I bought a motor on Ebay. It had a cast iron base. The seller packed it badly, and the possibly resentful USPS people who handled it broke a foot off of it. I got a full refund, but I didn’t have to surrender the motor, and I haven’t found anyone who wants to buy it.

I looked into ways to put the broken bit back on. Ordinarily, people braze cast iron. It’s considered very difficult to weld (adding steel filler to it with high heat), because cast iron expands and contracts differently than welding wire, and the welds tend to pop as the work cools. To braze, you have to heat the part to something like 400 degrees. Then you melt bronze (I think) into it with a torch, and you cover the whole mess with welding blankets while it cools.

No way could I braze this thing, because if you heat a motor to 400 degrees, the windings melt.

You can also TIG weld it, but I don’t have a TIG welder.

I found some guy on the web claiming you can MIG weld cast iron with only a slight preheat–about 100 degrees–using non-magnetic stainless wire. You then “peen” the welds with a hammer or needle scaler to somehow or other counteract the problem with the welds opening. Maybe it expands the weld material horizontally.

It sounded nuts, but I asked around and couldn’t find a better idea, so I decided to try it.

Today I cut shallow v-grooves in the places where the parts met (standard when welding thick parts), and I cleaned them with alcohol to make sure there was no loose graphite on them. Cast iron is full of graphite, and supposedly it contaminates weld filler and causes problems.

I clamped the parts together with a Bessey clamp knockoff and started welding. Naturally I forgot to turn on the gas. The first two tacks were giant blobs that looked like sponges. I ground them down to start over, but I didn’t get all the crap out. Oddly, the welds held, and I was able to remove the clamp.

Someone on the web suggested using high wire feed. That was bad advice. Even after I turned the gas on, the wire spewed into the welds and made more blobs. I turned the feed down, but I never got it low enough to be controllable.

I also had trouble with my mask. I don’t think it darkened at all on the first two welds. I had to adjust it to the darkest level in order to see anything.

I continued making very small welds, peening, and waiting. That’s part of the technique.

When cast iron welds fail, they make a sound like “tink.” I never heard that sound. That surprised me, because what I was doing was sort of a Hail Mary job. I didn’t think it would work.

I got it welded up, and then I spent about ten years cleaning it up with the angle grinder and a rotary tool. A bolt has to go through the motor base, and that means a washer has to sit flat on top of it. The base will sit on a platform, so it has to be flat on the bottom.

Everything went fine, apart from welding very clumsily and making a mess. When it was done, I beat the part with the hammer’s handle, and I tried to pull it loose with my hands. I couldn’t budge it. I think it’s actually welded. It’s probably a D on a scale of A to F, but it’s not going to be under much stress. Maybe it’s not good enough, but I can tell you this: there is no way in hell I’m going to redo it until it fails again.

Because the weld didn’t fail, I’m not sure if I learned anything about welding cast iron. If it had failed, I would have known the method didn’t work. Because it doesn’t appear to have failed, I’m not sure what’s happening. Sometimes really bad welds seem acceptable at first.

Here’s something weird that appears to be true: it seems like it’s possible to weld stainless directly to cast iron, and that would mean it’s possible to build up stainless weld on a cast part. If that’s true, you should be able to coat one side of a part with stainless weld, make a stainless replacement for the other piece, and weld it to the congealed filler. If my weld fails, I plan to try that. Can’t hurt. Hey, it’s a free motor.

I don’t know what to do with the motor. I now have three pretty good motors sitting around doing nothing. The one I fixed is really nice. Maybe I could try to build a 6×48 belt sander. I don’t really need one, but they’re great tools to have. It would be nice to build one and have a disk sander on the side.

I wish I had some cast iron scrap. I’d practice welding it to see if my results could be trusted.

Also, it would be nice to improve the appearance of my welds. When I weld, all I see is arc glare and red metal. It’s blind luck if I hit the joint.

Here’s a photo. It may not look like it, but the welded-on part is aligned perfectly.

Try to Contain Your Excitement

I keep learning things about tools. It’s astonishing how much there is to learn about using the few simple items I have in my garage. People who really know tools must have stores of knowledge comparable to engineers.

A week or two back I created a new handle for my blow gun. Then something happened that required me to switch a tool from one air compressor to the other, and I realized I had a male fitting on the end of one hose and a female fitting on the end of the other. I could not switch tools without switching the fittings on tools.

This one left me scratching my head. Surely there was a right way to do this. Everyone else uses male or female fittings, but not both.

I kept thinking about the pluses and minuses, and I realized female was the way to go. If you put a male fitting on the end of a hose, the compressor will discharge every time you remove a tool. A female fitting will have a valve in it that shuts the air off.

Here’s the question: why did I have a male fitting on one hose? I must have asked about the correct fitting a long time ago, when I got my first compressor. I must have had the right information. My best guess is that I installed a new hose, ran out of fittings, and used what I had. Then I forgot to get a new fitting.

Anyway, whatever the explanation is, here is the answer: put a female fitting with a swivel on the end of your air hose.

In researching this, I also got into the subject of different types of air fittings. I know of three types, offhand: automotive, industrial (I think it’s also called “mechanical”), and universal.

In the past, I never thought about the type of air fitting I was buying. I just assumed they were the same. Then I found out about the different types, and I had a new research project on my hands.

Which is the best kind? NO ONE KNOWS. People do whatever they want. Believe it or not, there are regional preferences. In some areas, you want automotive, because that’s what everyone else has. In other areas, you want industrial.

To make things worse, there are rarer types. Some are supposed to provide superior flow.

A guy on a forum provided a great solution to my problem: universal female coupler and industrial male couplers. A universal female coupler will work with all male couplers. I went to Home Depot last night and got me a universal female coupler.

The replacement hose I bought is a Flexzilla. I agonized about which brand to get, and finally I decided to give Flexzilla a try. It’s bright green, so if you step on it, it will be a choice and not a mistake. It has no memory (I can relate). It’s light. I like it. If I hadn’t gotten a Flexzilla, I would have gone with rubber. Poly is too stiff.

I found out that machining coolants are more complicated than I thought. When I started, I learned to use WD40 on aluminum and Ridgid threading oil on steel, and that was about it. The other day I picked up a fantastic indexable end mill from Shars (where low-budget machinists shop), and I found that the finish varied, so I started looking into the problem. That’s how I ended up reading about coolants.

First, let me say the cutter is great. The big gripe with indexable cutters (cutters with several carbide inserts in the end) is that they give poor finishes due to minor differences in the heights of the cutting surfaces. I cut a piece of mystery steel, and the first 75% of the performance gave me an astonishing silky surface. Better than I could ever get with an end mill. The problem is that the finish got worse after that.

I am not knocking the product. It proved it can do a great job. I recommend cheap Shars indexable end mills. I paid a little over $30 for a 2″ mill complete with three no-name inserts, and it works. Check prices on American indexable end mills and see why I’m so happy.

I was cutting with a light application of Ridgid oil, even though a lot of people don’t use oil with carbide and steel. I read up on it, and I found a couple of sites that said interesting things. First, coolants and lubricants may be counterproductive. Second, it may be possible to grind HSS tools for aluminum that require no lube at all. Two different subjects (aluminum and steel).

One site said that liquid coolants chill carbide edges as they land on them, causing tiny stress cracks. Then the edges break down prematurely. The site suggested that the wear you avoid by using coolant is outweighed by the damage the coolant does. It said something about commercial shops spending 16% of their machining budgets on cooling and only 3% on tooling, which suggests the coolants cost way too much.

I don’t know if it’s true. I plan to throw some steel on the mill and find out.

Another site said clearing chips was the most important part of preventing finish issues. That sounds likely to me. The part I was machining had little swirling scratches on it, and I know they weren’t caused by the inserts. I think they were caused by bits of metal caught under the inserts. If that’s true, then I can get a beautiful finish on steel simply by blowing air on parts as I cut. It will blast the chips out. I think the oil may have made the finish worse by making chips stick to the metal.

A company called Kool Mist makes little devices that blow a mist of air and coolant on parts as you cut. I’m thinking I may get one and omit the liquid. It would blow chips away from my cuts. I’m positive I don’t need anything other than a light squirt of WD40 for aluminum, and it may be that I don’t need any liquid at all on steel.

I read that stainless is too gummy to cut without coolant, so I guess you just have to accept that.

To get back to the HSS/aluminum thing, I find it hard to believe that it’s possible to machine aluminum dry. It’s impossible with carbide in a mill, because the aluminum welds itself to the cutter instantly. I’ve never tried HSS dry on a lathe, but you can get away with carbide, although the finish is bad if you don’t lubricate.

I’m wondering what kind of rake I need to machine aluminum dry with HSS. Maybe I can find the info online.

I don’t think I want to machine that way as a habit, because I love carbide. You don’t have to grind it. Grinding lathe cutters takes a long time. Carbide inserts last forever in aluminum, and you can get a very nice finish. If I start messing with additional HSS tools, I’ll want to get more tool holders, and they weigh about ten pounds each. I feel like HSS is an answer to a problem I don’t have.

Why did I get into this quest? Because I failed at fly-cutting. A machinist I respect told me to fly-cut with high RPM’s, so that’s what I did with my mystery block. The edge of the bit kept wearing down as I cut. I had forgotten this crucial information: he was referring to aluminum, not steel. When I finally did it right, I had to turn the mill at about 100 RPM, which is ridiculous, and the finish was not that great. The end mill flies through work, and the finish is superior. Done deal.

Remember the treadmill my neighbor threw out? Probably not. I have the motor out, and I may want to machine the shaft to take a new pulley. A forum guy warned me about a potential problem. He said that if you take the armature out of a permanent-magnet motor (like a treadmill motor), the magnets will instantly demagnetize, resulting in reduced performance. Like life wasn’t complicated enough. He said you have to put a piece of steel between the magnets when you take the armature out.

This led to more research, and I learned some stuff.

In the dank, dreary past, many magnets were made from an alloy called Alnico (aluminum, nickel, cobalt, iron). If you shake it too much, it loses magnetism. If you drop it, it loses magnetism. If you take an armature out of a motor with Alnico magnets, it loses magnetism. Engineers designed iron objects known as “keepers” to insert in motors to prevent demagnetization when motors (or similar devices) are disassembled.

I found a couple of sites that said that Alnico is history (unless you play the guitar). Now cheap magnets are made from barium-ferrite powder, which can be cast in useful shapes. Barium-ferrite is supposed to be way less snowflaky than Alnico. More than one website told me it does not require a keeper.

The motor I have almost certainly has barium-ferrite magnets, because the next step up is rare earth, and rare earth magnets cost a lot. So I should not need a keeper (not the magnet kind). But the forum guy claims he ruined three treadmill motors just by removing the armatures briefly. So now I’m thinking I should find a piece of pipe and make a keeper, just to avoid the issue.

My small belt grinder has an armature that has been removed, and it works fine. I asked some electronics nerds on a forum, and they claim no keeper is required.

My advice: if you take a treadmill motor apart, use a keeper. Maybe it’s unnecessary, but it definitely won’t hurt, and it will cost you nothing or about two bucks.

What else have I learned? Let’s see. Belt grinders are fine for grinding HSS bits, but the bench grinder is faster, and it’s probably cheaper. Belts wear out fast.

Deburring…I learned about deburring. This means the removal of sharp burrs from metal parts. I have a worn-out belt on my small belt grinder, and I’ve been using it for deburring. It’s fantastic. One or two five-second passes will put a beautiful soft edge on a part. Try it. Don’t even bother with files. They’re for losers.

That’s all the earth-shaking information I have at the moment. I’ll leave you with a video of a guy using an indexable end mill to make a giant steady rest.

Time to Commence Deportations

I had a good experience this morning, and I figured I should share it.

For a long time, I have been obsessed with getting correction from God. He showed me that he wasn’t my genie or butler. His primary job isn’t to fix all my problems and make me rich, contrary to what I had heard from every single prominent charismatic preacher I had listened to. God helped me understand that the earth is like a uterus, and we are supposed to develop here before entering a superior world. That only happens when we accept correction. If you reject correction, you reject growth.

God also showed me that Christians–even Spirit-filled Christians–have resident demons. We give them power through our backward actions and beliefs. Youth is a particularly dangerous time, because young people don’t know anything. Their doors are wide open. By the time you get saved, you may have done a gigantic number of damaging things that opened you to demonic influence.

Let’s see if I can think of some dangerous things we do. Drugs, erotic entertainment, fornication, cultivating self-confidence, gossiping, hurting people unnecessarily with our words, violence, covetousness, cruelty, cowardice, gluttony, and idolatry spring to mind.

This morning I felt a horrible sensation inside me while I was praying. I felt that something foreign was there, and it was disgusting. Whatever it was, it was full of anxiety that radiated outward into me. I hated it. I wanted it out. I started asking God to tell me what it was and to help me get rid of it.

I started thinking about my experiences with drugs. You probably think I’m going to say I was a stoner in high school. No, I’m thinking mainly about stimulants and prescription drugs, and I’m including caffeine.

A year or two back, God told me this: “Caffeine destroys peace.” That’s clearly true, as anyone who has used a lot of caffeine knows. It makes you feel cheerful and energetic at first, and then you metabolize it, and you feel grumpy, anxious, and irritable. You may get headaches. If you quit for several days, you may get what doctors describe as “flu-like symptoms.”

I’ve used caffeine a lot. When I was in law school, I drank a quart of coffee during my first class of the day in order to help me deal with the boredom. Law isn’t all that boring, but it’s not exciting, either. It’s not physics or math. I needed help to make it palatable.

I’ve also used caffeine to get rid of headaches. Stimulants are great for headaches.

After I started praying in tongues daily, my caffeine tolerance disappeared. The other day I drank a glass of iced tea, and nine hours later, it kept me awake. I never had that problem when I was young.

I used several drugs in college. I never liked dope, but I did smoke it a few times just to be sociable. I tried a couple of weird drugs just because friends showed up with something new, and we tried them together. I also used cocaine, a stimulant, on a number of occasions. I liked it a lot, but when you come down from cocaine, you feel tremendous anxiety and guilt. I used nitrous oxide a few times. For some reason, it was popular at Columbia.

I don’t think the recreational drugs I used in college caused terrible problems, although I’m sure they generated some negative results. I think prescription drugs and caffeine were more harmful.

When I was being treated for ADD, they put me on Ritalin, which is a type of speed similar to amphetamines. Ritalin was great. It killed my headaches. It made me feel extremely relaxed. It helped me concentrate. But I developed such a tolerance I could take over a hundred milligrams a day. The pills kicked in in five minutes (not the expected half-hour), and they sometimes quit working after an hour or two, very suddenly. When that happened, I had to chew one or two 20-mg. pills to get back on my feet. It happened during my Advanced Mechanics exam during grad school, and also during the LSAT.

They put me on some other drugs which were horrible. They gave me an oil-soluble stimulant that stayed in my body for days. It made me angry and assertive, and it gave me a sex drive that would shame Bill Clinton. They also gave me some antidepressants which were supposedly helpful with ADD. I hated them. They filled me with anxiety and caused other problems.

Anyway, I didn’t use these things occasionally or sparingly, like recreational drugs. I used them daily, and I used some in huge amounts. I had to tell my doctor I was done with them. I quit. I never got addicted, so when it was time to quit, it was just a matter of throwing them out.

The time I spent on those drugs was the most miserable time of my life. No sleep. Very little food. Constant anxiety. Anger. Crazy sexual desire I could not get rid of. The last drug they gave me kept affecting me for weeks after I quit. It was bad.

I feel like I let some things in, and maybe some are still here! I believe I have to shut some doors.

I’ve been avoiding caffeine, but every so often I’ll have a Coke or some tea because I’m tired of water, and I’ve been having hot chocolate with breakfast because I want to add calcium to my diet. Chocolate has small amounts of caffeine, plus a milder stimulant called theobromine. Today I drank a boring glass of cold milk before breakfast. I just bought two bags of little dark Hershey bars to make hot chocolate, and I guess I’ll have to throw them out.

I wonder if the problem with drugs is that they take the place of God and deny him his glory. If I had had the presence of God and a good prayer life, I wouldn’t have gone to doctors to help me study. God would have helped me.

I know that the presence of God is like the effect of a drug. He emanates peace, joy, love, and a sense of complete relief and safety. Those are the things we try to get from drugs. Even things like beer and coffee. Living close to God is like being on a pleasant drug most of the time. There is a sort of buzz to it.

All over the US, doctors are pumping kids full of stimulants and antidepressants. It’s a wonder they’re not all insane.

I don’t have much faith in psychiatric drugs. People develop tolerances. Their responses change. If you know anyone who is bipolar, you know that every so often they flip out, and sometimes it’s because the medicine doesn’t work any more. We do what we can to help ourselves because we can’t find God’s help, and our own help isn’t very good.

We call people who drink and smoke weed “self-medicating,” but really, the whole human race is self-medicating instead of finding God’s cures.

It reminds me of what the Bible says about money. If you get it the wrong way, it causes remorse. God brings blessings without remorse. There is no crash after a dose of God’s presence.

Chocolate is great, but if it’s opening the door to illegal immigrants in my heart and mind, I can live without it.

Communion is essential. It’s mandatory. Christianity does not work without it. We have to examine ourselves with God’s help and get his correction. When we don’t do this, we continue damaging ourselves. This is why Paul said poorly performed communion causes disease and death. This is why God has made correction so important to me. It’s a cure. It’s a key that opens prison doors.

If you don’t have wine and crackers, do whatever you can. Pray for correction. Be as honest as you can with God. Pray for honesty! You can do that. God doesn’t want you to do it on your own.

I’m sick of certain parts of my personality, and I don’t think they’re completely mine. I have unwanted supernatural guests that influence me. That has to change. I feel like I live in a house with pigs that run around defecating on everything. That must be what it’s like for the Holy Spirit, who has to inhabit this mess.

Keep asking God what you’re doing wrong. Keep praying in tongues. Never forget that you’re surrounded by spirits, or that you have to address this problem. That’s what I take away from this.

Christians don’t want to hear this. They’re too arrogant. They think they’re perfect, and that no spirit other than God has any claim to them. People like that will be stuck here when God’s servants are taken from the world. Then maybe they’ll learn.

The other day God gave me this: “Thank you for giving us redemption instead of denial.”

I look forward to improving, and I definitely look forward to feeling more of God’s presence.