Actually He Does

I have an exciting event to report. I finished Herodotus a couple of days ago. This must be how a woman feels when she passes a 15-pound baby after two days in labor. Now I’m enjoying a thrilling ride through the world of Greek tragedy, courtesy of Aeschylus. The next reading on the Columbia University Lit. Hum. list is The Oresteia.

When the Greeks put “eia” on the end of something, it means they’re talking about something which is deeply involved with whatever comes before the vowels. For example, in The Iliad, Diomedes has a long stretch where he kills all sorts of people and inspires the other Danaans, and this bit of the epic is called the Diomedeia.

I haven’t finished The Oresteia, but I feel confident Orestes will pop up shortly.

The Oresteia is a trilogy, so of course it contains four plays. Yes, that’s right. Four. The first three are real bummers, and the fourth is what’s known as a “satyr play.” I think that means Charlie Sheen will be involved. I don’t know much about satyr plays, and I doubt I read the one from The Oresteia back when I was 19. This week I read that satyr plays are humorous plays, perhaps intended to offset the dreariness of tragedy and wake up the audience.

I found a neat book on Scrib’d, explaining Aeschylus line by line. The author is a guy named Logan (no adamantium). He supplies all the benefits of a college lecture, without the aggravation of dragging yourself to class in three-degree weather with a hangover. Also, it looks like the entire Cliff’s Notes volume on the trilogy is available online, free, at the Cliffsnotes site.

I am very, very glad to be done with Herodotus. The digressions were killing me. I feel like rewriting it with the crap removed and selling the result to college students, but if they won’t read the original, they won’t read my version, either, and besides, their profs probably like the crap.

Now that I’m way into the Lit. Hum. syllabus, I’m starting to see how it makes sense. Sort of.

Homer helps you understand Greek thought and culture, as well as Greek history (or at least what they thought was their history). The Old Testament…okay, I’m not sure how that fits in. Sappho…let’s face it. She was included to make feminists happy. I read the whole thing, and I got virtually nothing out of it. Feminists like to pretend women played a big role in shaping Western thought, but guess what? They didn’t. Sorry about that. Anyway, you can’t understand Herodotus if you don’t know Homer.

I just realized why the Old Testament was included. Two reasons. First, it allows the far-left nuts at Columbia to pretend they respect the Bible and our predominantly Christian culture, although this is not true. Second, it gives them an excuse to call the stories in the Bible “myths” over and over, as if the creation story were just as inane as the story about Atlas convincing Hercules to hold the world for a minute and then running off. It also gives them an excuse to talk about actual myths that are similar to the Bible, as though they prove the Bible is also a myth. Okay. Whatever. I guess all nickels are made of wood.

Herodotus has some importance because it gives you some notion of the history of the Western world, excluding Egypt, up until the third century BC. It also shows how the Greco-Persian Wars may have been important to the development of modern democracies. The Persians wanted to take over Greece, and they sometimes installed tyrants, which were what we would call dictators. Democracy was developing in Greece at the time of the Greco-Persian Wars, so–I am guessing–academics probably think that if the Persians had won, democracy would have been lost, and we would now live in a mean old right-wing world with kings and emperors, a constitutional right to concealed carry, leaded gas, DDT, and no government-funded sex changes.

If that’s what they’re hoping to teach us, I think they are wrong, because my vast studies tell me the Persians were actually pretty cool. They expected their possessions to send troops whenever the Persians wanted to conquer someone, and they imposed fairly low taxes as tribute. They generally let their possessions govern themselves. That is what I have been told. If it’s true, then wouldn’t the Persians have allowed the Athenians to continue voting on internal stuff?

I suspect that resisting the Persians was a big mistake, and I doubt the imperialist, rapist, thieving, lying, slave-owning Greeks were high-minded sponsors of individual liberty. Like most wars, the wars between the Persians and Greeks surely had a lot to do with preserving the status of the people in charge and very little to do with freedom.

I could be wrong.

Herodotus leads into Aeschylus because Aeschylus was a veteran of the Greco-Persian Wars. He fought at Salamis, where the Greeks beat the daylights out of the Persian navy. Okay, maybe that’s not the strongest connection ever, but it’s a connection. If the Greeks had lost, or if they had won but Aeschylus had fared poorly, we would have no Oresteia. Also, the trilogy is about the things Agamemnon went through after Troy, so it’s linked to Homer.

It’s linked to Sappho because women are just as good as men, and testosterone is bad.

I’ll go ahead and say it. Aeschylus is a drag. I can’t believe the Greeks enjoyed watching this stuff.

The Greeks always used the same set: a big shed. There was space in front of it where the actors stood. Pretty exciting. Sometimes they stood on top of the shed, and sometimes they swung down on blocks and tackles, pretending to be deuses ex machinae. I made that phrase up. They would pretend to be gods who were lowered in, in a creaky and highly convincing imitation of flight, to save Thebes or whatever.

Right away, it sounds bad.

The plays had only three actors, not counting chorus members. And the actors were all male. So let’s say you have a play with eight characters, including three babes. The babes would be played by the same fat, hairy guys who played the men. Hubba hubba. Move over, Sofia Vergara.

Instead of doing the intelligent thing and using more actors, they had the actors use masks. So in one scene, the actor wears his Tevye mask, and in the next, he wears a different mask and pretends to be Tzeitel. His daughter. Totally convincing. No problems suspending disbelief there.

Sounds like something Rupaul probably did when he was a kid.

The chorus is a bunch of people who sing and play instruments. The tragedies of Aeschylus were musicals, and we don’t know the score. I don’t even know what to say about that. Imagine trying to understand “Springtime for Hitler” if you don’t know the tune.

I’m not far into the first play, Agamemnon. So far, it’s a whole lot of whining. Everyone is moaning about how hard life has been since Agamemnon left. Here’s a thought: how about not sacrificing your daughter and sailing off to spend ten years trying to win back your brother’s slutty wife?

Don’t get mad at me for calling Helen a slut. She said the same thing about herself.

Everyone in the beginning of the play talks about how they miss Agamemnon, the guy who murdered Iphigeneia, abandoned Argos (Aeschylus changed it from Mycenae for political reasons), caused all sorts of poverty and disruption, and got a whole bunch of people killed.

Why would you miss this person? He was an idiot and a psychopath. Greek law doesn’t actually require you to wreck your life trying to drag a skeeze back from Troy. He could have stayed home and prospered.

In addition to the chorus and characters, these plays need another component: Homey the Clown. He could confront these people while they’re whining and use his loaded sock to beat some manliness into them.

Doesn’t the word “stoic” come from Greece? I guess the Argives weren’t familiar with it.

The Greeks are really disappointing. They’re brave…when they’re sure their enemies can’t fight back. They’re honest…until you turn your backs on them. They’re merciful…except when they’re raping, murdering, mutilating, torturing, and pillaging. And they’re incorruptible…except when they’re taking every bribe in sight.

Reminds me of the politicians and judges here in Miami.

I’m looking forward to moving on to books that are thinner and which are written in a manner that doesn’t require a decoder ring and a Ouija board. So far, reading the Greeks has been like wading through chest-deep snow. Except for Sappho, which was like playing Wheel of Fortune with two letters and then not getting a prize.

I am hoping to put Aeschylus behind me by the weekend. I am feeling better and better about skipping the reading when I was in college. Some of these books are impacting my life positively; the rest suffer by comparison to Cliff’s Notes. God bless the people who see fit to devote their lives to studying this petrifying material. I hope it was worth it to get out of serving in Vietnam. I am content to hear about the more boring parts of it second hand. Actually, an English translation is second hand by definition, so…

I better shut up before Homey hears me.

Must Love Cats; no Jihadis

Today I read something interesting. The wife of gay Muslim terrorist Omar Mateen–according to a news headline–may be arrested for failing to report him to the FBI as a terrorist threat.

I was surprised when I read that, because I sat through three years of law school, and I had no recollection of anyone telling me I had a legal duty to inform. You can’t conspire to commit crimes, and you can’t help people commit crimes, but as far as I know, you have no duty to warn people that crimes will be committed.

I have done about five minutes’ worth of sloppy Internet research, so I could be wrong, but I found no sites suggesting anyone has an obligation to inform the FBI of threats of terrorism. I found a site about lawyers which said the closest thing we have to such a law involves “misprision of felony,” which makes it illegal (under federal law, not state) to fail to report a felony to authorities.

This law was used to convict one of Timothy McVeigh’s pals.

The article says:

However, misprision of felony requires more than just a failure to warn. Keeping quiet about criminal plans isn’t enough. To be convicted of misprision, there must also be proof of a positive act to cover up the crime, like lying to the FBI, hiding evidence, or harboring the criminal.

She probably didn’t lie to the FBI, since she didn’t talk to them at all. She probably didn’t hide evidence. We don’t have any reason to believe evidence was hidden. So what’s the most likely problem? “Harboring the criminal.”

Can a housewife be said to be harboring a criminal because she shares a home with a husband who is a terrorist?

I have doubts about this. Is it harboring to fail to try to throw someone out of his own house? I’ll bet it’s not. And she may not have known he was a terrorist until after the crime. Knowing he wanted to kill people isn’t the same as knowing he was a criminal. If you conspire with other people to commit a crime, you break the law. It looks like Mateen didn’t conspire, so what crime did he commit prior to the murders? I’m not sure, but planning to kill people, all by yourself, probably isn’t a crime. We jail people for attempted murder, but has anyone ever been convicted of planning to murder, without acting, without partners?

If the FBI knows it can’t convict this lady, what’s going on?

One possibility is that they simply want to look good. They don’t apply realistic, useful scrutiny or restrictions to Muslims who are likely to commit crimes, preferring instead to take the ineffective, politically correct approach, putting the entire population under surveillance. Mateen and his crazy dad fell through the net. Now the FBI has a PR problem. Arresting the wife could make them look like they’re really trying, even though we know they are not.

Another possibility is that they’re trying to scare the hell out of this woman so she’ll talk. It would be unethical to file charges you know are bogus, but law enforcement people do things like that. They did it to George Zimmerman.

She should definitely be investigated. She may be a trove of useful information, and she may be an accomplice, like the wife of Syed Farook. I don’t know if slamming her with ineffective charges will help.

Or I could be wrong, and she may be guilty of violating some law I don’t know about. I’m not a criminal lawyer. But the McVeigh case suggests I’m right. If they had had anything else on Michael Fortier (McVeigh’s friend), they would have used it. Presumably, the same set of laws is at work now.

People are jumping on Trump, who said he appreciated people telling him he was right. Trump has been saying we need to restrict immigration from certain Muslim countries. One clever person said Trump’s idea would not have helped, because Mateen was born in the US. That may sound smart at first, but it’s not. Mateen is a great example of a non-assimilated Muslim with loyalties to other countries, even though he was born here. The mass of Muslims who come here necessarily includes a number of people like him. We can’t deport people who were born here, but it certainly makes sense to vet Muslims we don’t have to take in. Mateen makes Trump’s case stronger, not weaker.

It’s depressing to see leftists using this as an excuse to pimp gun control. Passing laws against semiautomatic rifles would be silly. Terrorists will always have guns. Terrorists aren’t legally allowed to have commercial jets full of kerosene and hostages, but they had them on 9/11.

It seems like the public hates gun control, so I don’t think the new push will accomplish much. Mass shootings (which are getting rarer) make people want to buy guns for protection. Leftists haven’t figured that out yet.

The world is getting so crazy. The preppers look smarter and smarter all the time. The more time passes, the more my ambitions lean toward finding a snug burrow in the country where I can hole up and be left alone until I die.

In a world like this, one of the best defenses is to be invisible. So of course I blog. One day I should probably rethink that strategy.

To be Gay, Divine

First, I feel like I should say something about comments.

Sometimes I close comments on stuff I’ve written. Once in a while, I’m sure I’ve learned something from God, and on top of that, it’s the kind of thing I know will draw contention and fussing. On those occasions, I don’t want the message to be diluted by squabbling. If you want to get a clearer picture of what I’m trying to avoid, imagine the gospels with black letters, red letters for Jesus, and blue letters for hecklers. Most of the print would be blue, the gospels would be a thousand pages long, and no one would benefit from them.

It would be like reading the comments at PJ Media.

You may think you’re THE person I’m trying to discourage, but you are wrong. Depending on the topic, there are various people and types of people I don’t want to get into it with.

I like the new policy, so I’m going to stick with it. I hope that doesn’t offend people. All that much. You can’t comment at all when you watch TV or read a book or newspaper, so it shouldn’t be that hard to bear. You ought to be used to it.

By the way, the kingdom of heaven is not about opinion and discussion. Our opinions are completely worthless. They don’t count. Jesus didn’t form a consensus and then preach it. He told people how things were, and they were free to accept it or reject it. If I put up a post saying Chevy is better than Ford, your opinion means something, but if God shows me something and I repeat it, not so much.

I try to draw distinctions between things I know and things I merely think are probably true. I’m probably doing a poor job of that.

Second, the main thing I wanted to write about: it looks like I may actually be homophobic now, instead of merely being accused of it by annoying people who demonize their enemies.

I’ve always thought the word “homophobic” was silly, because outside of prison, the YMCA, and certain scouting organizations, very few people are afraid of homosexuals. There are lots of people who hate homosexuals. There are lots of people who disagree with homosexuals. Actual fear is not that big a factor. I don’t know anyone who is scared of them. What are they going to do? Gang up and say mean things about your hair? Refuse to plan your wedding? They are not fearsome people.

That’s changing, though, because these days, they are working proactively to impoverish others. They drive people out of jobs and honorary positions. They get courts to fine them into extinction. They get people’s businesses closed over cakes they don’t really want.

Sooner or later, anyone who thinks homosexuality is a bad thing and says so will be removed from all major social media platforms. You won’t be able to promote your business on Facebook or Youtube, and you won’t be able to post a photograph of every single meal you eat, which is not really that important, but still.

It’s a fascinating thing. Homophobia didn’t really exist in the past. The word was just a disingenuous rhetorical device based on victim-mentality fantasy. Now it’s starting to be a real thing, but it’s not the kind of homophobia gays had in mind when they coined the word. It’s fear of having your livelihood and savings taken away.

Maybe I’m not actually homophobic, because I don’t think I’m in a very vulnerable position. But I am concerned about other people who will receive the blows. I must be homophobic by proxy.

I started thinking about this because I looked at the news and learned that the Orlando murderer, Omar Mateen, was gay. I’m not sure I can recall the dots I had to connect to get from Mateen to the new homophobia, but it happened somehow.

His ex-wife says he was gay. Regulars at the bar he shot up say he visited a number of times. He used a gay “dating” (fornication) app. The man was gay.

Interesting tidbit: the ex-wife says the FBI told her not to reveal this.

What possible reason could the FBI have for doing a thing like that? It should concern us.

One of the weird things about the gay PR machine is that they exclude all truly unpleasant people from the fraternity, regardless of the facts. They say gay priests are “ephebophiles,” even when all their victims are male. They say men who rape other men aren’t gay.

Heterosexuals don’t have similar defenses. A priest who has sex with girls is just a bad old heterosexual. Same thing goes for a man who rapes women or little girls. Only gays pick and choose the people they deign to include among their officially sanctioned ranks.

There is a weird collusion going on, protecting homosexuals from criticism, and it sort of looks like the FBI may be in on it. I wonder.

What difference does it make if the worst mass killer in American history is gay? It doesn’t really reflect on other gays. I don’t sit around fretting over the fact that Hitler and Osama bin Laden were straight. Besides, it’s not like we didn’t know gays were capable of violence. Wayne Williams is gay. Andrew Cunanan and John Wayne Gacy were gay. Jeffrey Dahmer was gay. I understand why gays want to project a good image, but irrational, transparent denial of readily apparent facts is not a good approach.

Journalists are not happy about the news. I guarantee you that. They will work to play down the gay angle. They will somehow turn heterosexuality, Christianity, conservatism, and probably even global warming into the problem. They may even go so far as to play up Mateen’s Islamist extremism. Wouldn’t that be something? Obama and the press love to muffle that sort of thing, but now they have to choose: gays or Muslims? Who goes under the bus?

Here’s a crazy idea: how about telling the truth and not worrying so much about the fallout? Life will go on.

Pretend I didn’t say that. It’s insane to even suggest it.

I think they’ll side with gays and go for the Muslim angle. Angry Muslims can’t hurt a career all that much. Actually, they’ll work the ridiculous gun control angle harder than anything.

I checked CNN’s site a minute ago, just to see if they’re as crazy as I thought. And they are. Knock me over with a feather. In the headlines, there is no mention whatsoever of Mateen’s homosexuality. Zero. Never happened. Fox, on the other hand, is touting it, in a somewhat oblique way: “MULTIPLE MOTIVES? Orlando massacre gunman said to have been regular at gay club where he killed 49.”

It amazes me that people criticize Fox. If you don’t look at Fox, you get about half of the news. They get a little weird sometimes, like when they decided to call suicide bombers “homicide bombers,” but they don’t leave you completely in the dark.

The Daily Mail is also all over it. So is The New York Post.

Spin doctors will probably take this approach: Omar Mateen’s religion did not help him to adjust to his orientation, because God isn’t real, so Mateen became filled with self-hatred and confusion and lashed out at the people who tempted him. So God, though nonexistent, will be the real murderer. As usual.

Actually, I agree with part of that. People are full of compulsions they can’t shake, and religion is very weak in the area of setting people free. If Christians had any real power, we would be able to help people change, but as it is, we do a very feeble job. We can’t even help people stop biting their nails; why should we expect them to come to us for deliverance from much stronger compulsions?

No wonder young people go with their existing inclinations instead of trying to alter them. They have no hope. But God isn’t the problem; we are. We turned away from him, we gave up power, authority, and knowledge, so now we’re the tail and not the head.

If I had had gay urges before I knew God, I probably would have gone with them, too. I had no moral objections about homosexuality when I was young.

We live on one of the lowest levels of existence, very far from God’s world. The only frames below us are hell and the lake of fire. Above us, there are a number of levels of heaven. We expect God to live here and fix everything. We think of the world as his, and we criticize him because life here isn’t perfect. But the god of this world isn’t Yahweh; it’s Satan. Things are going extremely well, considering who we put in charge.

Fascinating stuff.

Christians need to build themselves up in prayer and seek correction, power, and authority. We don’t do those things, because we don’t really want to serve God or be transformed. We want him to come down here and pamper us while we serve the devil. We don’t help people change, so they become our adversaries. It’s not rocket science.

The world has failed irretrievably, and human beings, including Jews and Christians, are the reason. When the end comes, we will have to take part of the responsibility for the behavior of the lost. Unfortunately, we can’t help them bear the punishment. Nobody deserves help, but some of us will get it anyway, and the rest won’t.

Pondering the Orlando Killings

I have been thinking about the Orlando gay bar massacre.

Jesus told us not to cast our pearls before swine. He was addressing the general principle that some people are so irrational, it’s a complete waste of time to try to help them. In order to help people change, you have to be able to communicate with them, and it’s impossible to communicate with people who don’t listen.

There are peoples and segments of societies that are so screwed up, they can’t be reasoned with as groups. Many of the world’s Muslims now fall into this category.

Twenty-first-century Muslims kill journalists. They kill missionaries. They crucify children. Now one of them has murdered 49 homosexuals and friends of homosexuals. Muslims kill people who pose no threat to them, and they kill people who can be useful to them.

Gay men are overwhelmingly liberal, and liberals are the friends of jihad. I’m not saying liberals hope Islamists take over the world. I’m saying liberals make waging jihad a lot easier. They blame the West. They recommend unprofitable approaches of negotiation and appeasement. They tie the hands of officials and soldiers who would otherwise take effective steps to fight Islamism.

When Omar Mateen shot up the Pulse disco, he was killing, and making enemies of, people who were useful to his cause.

It’s hard to think of a more senseless crime. Gays aren’t rising up against Islamism, even though they are imprisoned and killed in Muslim countries. Gays tend to vote for politicians who tout diversity to absurd extremes. The gayer America gets, the better things will go for jihadists. By murdering gays, Mateen probably opened the eyes of many people who were helpful to his movement and turned them into enemies.

Now I’m wondering: will this crime produce blowback against those who mindlessly advocate blind tolerance for Muslim extremists? Also, will it produce blowback against Christians and religious Jews, who are also opposed to homosexuality?

The current political climate has similarities to the climate in Germany before World War Two. The Germans and Austrians blamed Jews for all sorts of things. No one wanted to listen to reason. These days, Christians receive the kind of criticism and ostracism jihadists should receive. Our own government, with no cause, sets us aside for the same kind of scrutiny they give potential jihadists. My guess is that somehow, we will catch some of the overspray from this massacre. Some people will surely blame us to the exclusion of Muslims.

I don’t approve of homosexuality. When I was young, I thought it was perfectly fine, but I got to know God, and I realized homosexuality interferes with one’s relationship with him. Then I saw that homosexuals were colluding to persecute Christians and dissolve American Christianity. I am not happy about those things, and I plan to speak honestly about it for the rest of my life. But you’re not going to see me or other Christians, in significant numbers, advocating violence against homosexuals.

I have very little interest in fighting the enemies of God with earthly weapons, including political solutions. I will recommend voting for politicians who will help us, but I don’t contribute to campaigns any more, and I no longer take part in the venomous, infantile political tussle of the Blogosphere (if it still exists). I believe in owning guns for self-defense, but there is no way I would use one to advance my religion. Truthfully, I am becoming less attached to this world, and I realize America is already lost. All I want, while I am confined in this world, is to be relatively comfortable in my own little realm, and to accomplish whatever it is God keeps me here to do.

Christian terror is extremely rare in America, militia groups and other nuts notwithstanding. Once in a while, someone shoots an abortionist, but that’s about it. You don’t see us popping up in the audience at Ellen Degeneres’s show with suicide vests. I don’t think we will ever see much Christian violence in America, and Jews don’t seem to have much interest in it either.

Right now, it looks like the most violent factions in the United States are Muslim extremists and Democrats who go to Trump rallies.

To get back to the principle of pearls before swine, it’s the reason hell was created. It’s not for mean people. It’s for people who won’t listen.

Anyone who still has breath can be saved, if he will listen. Jared Fogle can be saved. Charles Manson can be saved. Kim Jong-un can be saved. If they will listen. Everyone has sinned; the fact that one person has sinned more than another doesn’t make him ineligible for salvation, because you don’t earn salvation by being good. After all, Paul made a living murdering Christians.

The problem is that there are many, many people who use their free will to tune God out. Those people have to go to hell, largely because they are unfit to be associated with in the hereafter.

Here on earth, God will let you be a cruel, insolent sexual pervert and pagan with a thousand obscene tattoos, a split tongue, and fake horns under your skin, but heaven is a clean and peaceful place where that kind of irksome being is not permitted to exist. It’s bad enough, putting up with creation’s brats for seventy to a hundred years here on earth. God is not going to subject himself to their presence for all of eternity.

Would you?

One of the best things God has shown me is that it’s okay and even mandatory to reject certain people. I have improved my life much more by rejecting people than by including them. The people who enrich my life don’t bring me pleasure comparable to the misery caused by people who are toxic. Sounds crazy, but it’s true.

The other day I was thinking about that, and some part of me felt like I should feel guilt over it. Then I thought about Noah. What happened to his relatives? Not all of the people who drowned were strangers or mere friends.

Only eight people are known to have been saved in the ark. Some say Og the giant clung to the outside, but that’s a legend, not scripture. Noah didn’t appear spontaneously from dust; he was the son of Lamech, and Lamech was the son of Methuselah. These people had family. What happened to them?

Noah had a wife, three sons, and three daughters-in-law. They had relatives, too. Surely they must have loved some of them. But when the rains came, none of the relatives were saved.

How awful it must have been, sitting in the ark, knowing that everyone you grew up with was outside dying. But when it was over, the world was cleansed. A lot of horrible, cruel people were gone. Persecution of the righteous was temporarily over. War was gone. Pagan worship was gone. Cannibalism was gone, if we are to believe what we read about the giants.

Sometimes you just have to flush.

I don’t know if Omar Mateen ever had a chance. Maybe he never heard the right words, but on the other hand, he may have been so arrogant and sadistic it was never possible to reach him. If so, he has a lot of company. In any case, he is accountable, and there is no help for him now, nor will there ever be.

Whatever the families of the dead are going through today can’t compare to what is surely happening to Mateen in the hereafter. I suppose many of the victims are in the same situation, though.

It will be nice when the battle for this world is over. It will be wonderful to see an end to disharmony and misery. It’s tragic that so many people won’t get to see it.

More

It’s so easy to get it right these days; disturbing. I feel like a Jew who decided to leave Germany in 1932.

I said people would blame Christians for the Orlando killings, and here is an example that just popped up while I wasn’t looking for it. It’s so crazy, it motivated me to do something out of character. I’m posting a link to Pajamas Media.

People Who Live in the Real World Wouldn’t Understand

I had to clean bird cages today, so now I’m in the mood for anything other than bird cage cleaning. I will write again.

Yesterday I was reminded of one of the big paradoxes of the Internet: being able to shop for things from the convenience of your home results in giant delays instead of time savings.

That’s kind of a distortion, but here’s what I mean: when you try to buy anything on the Internet–even paper clips–you will learn so much about the choices you have that you will spend more time studying and searching than buying.

Yesterday I had to solder something, and I saw that I was out of good solder. I still had bad solder; the kind that never seems to work right. I needed the good kind.

Two years ago, I would have driven to Radio Shack and bought whatever I saw. I would have been finished in 20 minutes. This time, it took me something like three hours. I learned things about solder while I was shopping, and I fell through the Internet-shopping looking glass, where you find out that the thousand things you believed before breakfast are, sadly, impossible.

There are lots of different kinds of solder. I did not know this. I knew about two types: lead-free, which sounded unwholesome, deluded, and leftist, and leaded, which, I figured, had to be the best, because, hey…lead. Anything that contains ingredients hippies hate will always turn out to be the best kind available.

I am not even a little scared of lead. I used to chew lead split shots because I liked the taste, and while I may be strange, I never got stupid or incontinent or whatever. Based on what I’ve read, I think the government keeps adjusting lead standards to silly levels in order to keep EPA bureaucrats employed. If lead was that big a deal, I’d be in an institution. I’m sure it’s toxic, but lots of stuff is toxic, and most of us manage to survive.

I started rooting around on the web, and I learned that there are lots of solder types. When it comes to electronics, the three main types are plain old rosin-cored, RMA (rosin mildly activated), and RA (rosin activated). Also, there are different leaded alloys. Two of the popular ones are 63% lead/37% tin and 60% lead/40% tin. I think. Maybe the tin goes first. On top of this, cored solder can contain 1.1%, 2.2%, or 3.3% flux. The word “flux” refers to the rosin, which is a substance that eats oxidation when it gets hot. Again: I think. Basically it cleans the joint.

Let’s see. There’s more. Solder comes in lots of diameters. You can get 0.015″, 0.020″, 0.025″, 0.031″, and up. If solder is too big, it tends to go all over the place when you solder little things. If it’s too small, it takes forever to fill a joint.

It gets worse. Chinese solder is not reliable. Big shock there. So you have to look for quality brands.

You have to wonder how bad Chinese solder is, since most of our electronic devices are full of it.

I also found out you’re supposed to clean solder joints. I had never heard of that. When you solder, you may unintentionally (or in my case, intentionally) leave melted flux on your joints. It’s ugly, and if I understand things correctly (doubtful), some types of flux can cause corrosion.

I went nuts researching this stuff. I looked at all sorts of nerd forums. I wanted to spend $20-$30 on a pound roll of solder, and I did not want to get the wrong thing.

By the time my eyes had gone buggy from scrolling, I had determined that what I wanted, probably, was 63/37 0.025″ 2.2% RMA solder, from Kester, AIM, Alpha Metals, or Multicore. And it’s impossible to find.

I’m sitting here thinking about the guitar amps I’ve built. Are they going to explode because I used the wrong solder?

I learned that it’s really hard to find the solder I specified above without paying a ton. I had to compromise and get 3.3% flux, which some people say is better anyway.

Now I have to wonder: was I better off when I simply drove to Radio Shack and bought the wrong thing?

The bad solder I already had came from Home Depot. I took a look at it and saw that it was Bernzomatic brand solder. It’s for electrical connections, but it’s not the right thing for electronics. I threw it out. Then I thought maybe I would need it for something, so I took it out of the trash. Then I thought about throwing it out again. Then I put it on the desk and stared at it.

I should also admit that I solder incorrectly a lot of all the time. When you solder, you are not supposed to heat the new solder directly and melt it onto the tip. You’re supposed to heat the wire and apply the solder to it, so the wire melts the solder.

Yeah, right. Try that some time. Your insulation will drip off or go up in smoke, unless it’s Teflon. In real life, you do whatever you have to. I plan to try to solder better, but I’m not going to melt components and insulation.

As for cleaning the joints, I don’t even know how. I think you use a Q-Tip with alcohol on it. I have never had a joint go bad, but maybe I need to try to do things right.

I read that rosin fumes cause asthma. Geez. What am I supposed to do? Solder in the front yard when the wind is blowing? Wear a sweaty respirator? But then I think about the hundreds of guys I know who’ve developed serious asthma from soldering. The ones who didn’t die first from lead poisoning.

I jest.

As I researched, I learned more stuff. You have to try to set your soldering iron so the heat is right. Different solders melt at different temperatures, and some electronic parts can be damaged by excess heat. I sort of knew that. My iron goes to 5, and I have been known to operate it at 4 because it seemed to be hard on PCB’s. But there are irons that actually display the temperature with digital meters. I’m not going that far. That’s just crazy.

Arrgh. I’ll probably go that far. Some day.

It’s frustrating when you splurge for what you think is the best tool available, and then you find out it’s second-rate. I feel like a guy who bought a Bose stereo and showed it off for his friends before learning the awful, humiliating truth.

I’m not sure what my advice is. I’m tempted to tell people to pretend they never read this.

The solder I finally ended up with is Kester 24-6337-9718. If it’s horrible, I’ll tell you. I fully expect to be unable to tell the difference between this stuff and Radio Shack Random Idiot Solder.

If you’re still going to real stores and buying wrong stuff, you should probably keep it up. You will never know the difference, and you will save lots of time. I love the Internet, but sometimes you just want toothpicks; you don’t need the best OSHA-approved, fair trade, organic, North American hardwood toothpicks.

If you use rosin-cored solder and you get asthma, leave me alone. If I told you to jump off the Empire State Building, would you do that, too?

I See Why They Made This Guy Leave Halicarnassus

Committing to read Herodotus is like signing up for a hitch in the military. You can’t appreciate the obligation with which you have buried yourself until you’re in the midst of it. The book goes on forever, and it is literally impossible for anyone except a genetically gifted freak to keep track of everything.

I am not that freak. I am a different type of freak.

Herodotus got on my last nerve day before yesterday. He had the gall to introduce two totally different characters named Miltiades on one page. Come on, man. That’s inhuman. Can I have a roster or something? Maybe one of those photo charts the FBI uses to keep track of Mafia families.

“Here is Miltiades A, also known as ‘Milty Four Toes,’ and this line goes from his photo to Miltiades B, also known as ‘Milt the Stilt.’ He is frequently seen in the company of Aristagoras of Miletus (not Jersey City Aristagoras), sometimes known as ‘Ari Red Sandals,’ and he is believed to be the consigliere of ‘Darius the Bull,’ current head of the notorious Achaemenid Family.”

I stop constantly to Google stuff, but I know it’s hopeless. Herodotus is the unrivalled king of the digressors, and I will never be able to understand it all. It’s my punishment for all the digressions I’ve made on my blog.

I completely set aside Rick Renner’s giant books on the early church, because the reading I was doing on the ancient world was just too much. It will work out well for me in the end, though, because when I resume, I’ll have a few clues regarding the world in which early Christians lived.

I’m also watching Youtubes and shows about the ancient world. I saw a neat one yesterday about Roman engineering. They talked about the Coliseum, properly known as the Flavian Amphitheater. I learned something I had never known before: the Coliseum was paid for through the sale of the treasures stolen from the temple in Jerusalem, and it was built by 1200 Jewish slaves.

I had been under the impression that the emperor Titus was solely responsible for the destruction of Jerusalem, but that’s wrong. His dad Vespasian got the ball rolling. There was a revolt in Israel, and the Romans had to mobilize to squash the freedom fighters. Vespasian ran the Roman effort until he was drawn away to Rome after the death of Nero, and Titus, his son, took over. Titus besieged Jerusalem. He was in charge when Jerusalem fell, and that’s why the Jews complain about Titus all the time, to the point where you wouldn’t even know Vespasian was involved.

The Romans destroyed Jerusalem and the temple in 70 A.D., and the Coliseum’s construction started in 72. Vespasian died in 79. Construction was finished in 80.

It looks like “Colosseum” is the preferred spelling. Wikipedia says this popular, unofficial name may have come from the fact that a “colossal” statue of Nero stood nearby.

Anyway, I find the whole thing fascinating.

I don’t like professional sports. I’ve written about it a lot. Sports figures do silly, unimportant things for a living, such as throwing balls through hoops. They play games invented to amuse children. But we treat them as though they were gods. This problem is ancient; the Greeks did the same thing, and so did the Romans.

In Israel under the Greeks, many Jews wanted to assimilate into the Greek culture, which involved nude athletic competition. This is obviously incompatible with Jewish laws regarding nudity, and it also caused Jews to be ashamed of circumcision, which is an extremely important part of Judaism; it’s an outward sign of their unique contract with God. Many Jews refused to circumcise their sons, and men who were circumcised looked for ways to change their appearance.

The Jews call the Greek system “Hellenism.” There was great tension between the demon-worshiping Greeks and the Yahweh-worshiping Jews. You would think sports wouldn’t have a big impact on religion, but it did. It still does.

Sports corrupt our morals today. Sports make us aggressive, proud, wasteful, and somewhat stupid. We screw up our cities with gigantic, expensive stadiums the public has to pay for, we spend incredible amounts on athlete worship (tickets, licensed merchandise, ridiculous tattoos…), and we neglect useful activities so we can celebrate extremely trivial accomplishments. We encourage people to peak in high school, and we even replace church with an endless procession of Sunday sporting events.

It’s nice to go outside and exercise and enjoy friendly games, but it’s insane to pay an unintelligent person of low character fifty million dollars a year to carry a leather bag around on a field.

If you criticize sports, people act as if you’re blaspheming. They get very angry. Most trivial hobbies aren’t like that. Chess people won’t threaten to beat you up in bars just because you think chess is stupid. Sports people are under the influence of spirits that warp their perception.

Sports arenas are temples where the flesh is worshiped, and the worship of the flesh is the worship of Satan. You can’t exalt the flesh without exalting the devil. It’s not possible. There are only two paths in life: toward God or toward Satan. There are no alternatives. You can’t sit the game out. You’re playing right now, and you are making a choice.

The COLOSSEUM (might as well go with the weight of authority) is interesting, because it was a place where people were killed as part of the exaltation of the flesh. Criminals, Jews, Christians, and political prisoners were thrown into the arena to die in athletic contests. That makes it a temple where people (and animals) were sacrificed. Satan destroyed the real temple and used the proceeds to put up a false one. He replaced the sacrifice of ritually clean animals with the unclean sacrifice of Jews and Christians.

Furthermore, the real temple was a place that was supposed to help the Jews assure themselves a place at the top of the food chain. Worship was supposed to help them live victorious, peaceful lives. The Colosseum was a place where failed Jews were robbed, enslaved, and murdered. They were so defeated, their own treasures were used to build the facility where they were destroyed!

It’s a picture of what has happened throughout history. People who were supposed to serve God screwed up, and they became the slaves of Satan’s worldwide system. It’s a picture of what’s happening in America now.

It’s also very similar to Hitler’s system. The Nazis murdered Jews, took their wealth, and used it to exterminate them. They even made Jews do the dirty work. As Sonderkommandos, the Jews had to lead other Jews to their deaths, sort their belongings for the Nazis, and put their dead bodies in ovens. They were Satan’s sick imitations of the priests in the temple. They weren’t able to warn people; they were forbidden on penalty of death, and people didn’t believe them anyway. The Sonderkommandos were a lot like today’s preachers, who can’t seem to tell us anything that would help us save ourselves.

Jews were even transported in railroad cars designed to carry cattle, which are clean animals suitable for eating and sacrifice. That’s not a coincidence.

Sports fans hate this kind of revelation. They turn red in the face and talk about all the wonderful Christian athletes who pray in huddles and honor God when they win boxing matches. God has to work within the system we’ve given him; it doesn’t mean he endorses it. The first gentile to accept Jesus was a Roman centurion; that doesn’t mean God was a fan of Rome or the occupation.

The world is very, very badly screwed up. Even in America, power has shifted firmly into the hands of Satan and his children. Christians know almost nothing. They have almost no power. We’re like the disarmed Jews who were herded onto cattle cars. And no one cares. No one can hear it. You tell them, and they dismiss you.

I can’t wait to get done with this book. Someone ought to write a new version of it with the digressions separated as appendices. Better yet, a hypertext version with the digressions connected to the main text via links.

If you can hear the truth, be glad. Time is getting short, and you want to be on the right side when it gets completely crazy.

This is Where Trees go When They Die

Life is changing rapidly.

My dad’s problems took another plunge a couple of weeks back, and now I have to handle his business. I have to get his tax stuff fixed up. I have to sort his monumental collection of papers. I have to set his home office up so it actually functions. I also have to apologize to a few people, because some things got screwed up before my dad threw me in the deep end of the pool.

I have realized I don’t know how to set up an office. That’s today’s main challenge.

How can a lawyer not know how to set up an office? Actually, it’s not as crazy as it sounds. Practicing law at home requires very little paperwork. You create paper files for your cases, but as a sole practitioner (I hate “solo practitioner,” and I’m convinced it’s a corruption perpetuated by lemmings), you aren’t going to get into cases that generate tons and tons of discovery, invoices, and checks.

When you start fooling with business, you have to deal with more stuff. You have invoices coming in all the time. You have a lot more bookkeeping.

There is a hoarding streak in my family, and it comes from my dad. We hold onto junk. Over the last year, I’ve been going into my dad’s home office and throwing out pounds and pounds of papers. Do you really need ten pounds (or even one ounce) of The Florida Bar Journal, dating back seven years? I think not. You also don’t need ancient legal files or emails you, for some odd reason, felt the need to print.

Old people (older than I am) seem to think they are legally obligated to print everything they see. I think one reason is that they are way too lazy to learn to use the built-in filing systems on their computers. This takes about three and a half minutes, so I’m not sure why it’s intimidating. They prefer to print everything so they know where it is, and then they put it in random piles which people like me throw out without telling them.

Never buy a printer from an old person. They wear them out.

A friend of mine told me her mother has ONE Word document. When she writes something, she opens the document, modifies it, prints it, and closes it without saving. When she dies, there will be no record that she ever wrote anything. Well…there WILL be the giant, unconstitutional backup the NSA keeps, but they won’t let us access it. That’s a real shame. It would be great to be able to call Obama for a download, every time something important gets deleted. Fortyish wives could send their husbands the naked pictures of themselves they took when they were in their twenties.

Okay, I’m not endorsing that.

Yo, Obama: we know you’re backing our stuff up, so why not let us retrieve it? We could save a lot of money on “cloud” services.

In the future, the government will be happy to produce everything bad we’ve ever said about homosexuality and socialism so they can persecute us. They will be happy to document our porn downloads and sexts in order to discredit us. Seems to me they should also be willing to provide copies when we accidentally delete term papers and family photos.

My dad had ONE folder for everything. Briefs, research, offensive chain emails sent by his incorrigible heathen friends…everything. It had thousands of items in it. Going through that was fun. I’m glad I got the opportunity, though, because it was like having a six-foot-tall pile of horse manure in the middle of the office floor.

As for objects that are physical, not virtual, I will guess that I have thrown out 350 pounds of useless items. As far as I know, he has never missed anything.

Here is a tip for anyone who has to clean up someone else’s business PC: get a solid state hard drive. If you have a separate drive for storage, replace the boot drive with solid state. This will speed the computer up like you would not believe. It makes a big difference when you have 12 years’ worth of files to go through, and you’re searching for every document that refers to “roof” or “plumbing.” You can get a very nice 240 GB solid state drive for sixty bucks, and they’re simple to install. I guess you will have problems if your computer doesn’t use SATA cables, but if it does, a solid state drive will pop right in.

I stuck such a drive in my dad’s office computer, and now Quickbooks opens in fifteen seconds instead of two years. The computer boots so fast you don’t even need to walk away and get coffee.

That boot thing is important, because it’s really hard to convince older people not to use “Shut Down.” They think “Sleep” wears out the computer and drives up their electric bills. Or maybe they think that if they click it, they’ll fall asleep. If you have to work on an old person’s PC, you will get really tired of doing a full three-minute boot every time you sit down.

Today I’m looking around for information on setting up offices; I do not want to reinvent the wheel, although I will probably have to. My dad has investments, so things come in, and things go out. I think I need to put an In/Out thing on his desk, but I’m not sure. I definitely need to cut a hole in his wall and install a new electric socket, and some of his cords and cables need to be made longer or shorter.

I learned something interesting while I was trying to use his PC. Windows 10 has a huge pile of spyware in it. I mean, more than I already suspected. It logs keystrokes. It tracks your location. It tries to send you ads it thinks you will like, so when you let your mom use your PC, it puts up banners advertising midget porn. It listens to you through your mike. It watches you through your webcam.

There is nothing we can do to bring privacy back; the inhuman sociopath nerds won that battle. But you can dig up your Windows 10 privacy settings and turn off a whole bunch of crap, making your PC run better. I had to do that today because I was getting keyboard hesitation. Seems like it’s all cleared up now.

Or not. I had a little issue there. Maybe the keyboard needs batteries. Maybe the computer hiccuped while the NSA installed new stuff to compensate for me turning their crap off.

You may be 95 years old and not too interested in Worlds of Warcraft, but if you have Windows 10, it is taking information from you and putting it in a database for gamers, and I think it’s safe to bet this slows down your PC. It’s hard to believe Microsoft/NSA/Hitler puts this worthless junk in computers by default, but there it is, so you need to root around and minimize the footprint.

I almost look forward to the day when Christians will be banned from the Internet. Think how relaxing it will be. Until they gas us, I mean. I suppose that will be relaxing, too, though.

I should put more thought into the things I write online. One day they may be downloaded and displayed at my homophobia/nondiversity/refusal-to-worship-Emperor-Warren trial, and I really want to make a good impression.

And now back to my search for office advice. I am not optimistic.

Learning Makes Your Head Hurt

One of many great things of getting off Facebook is that it gave me more time to read. Lately, I have been reading a lot. This may sound like nothing new, since I was already reading tons of stuff on the Internet. The difference is that now I’m reading actual books. Some of them are even made of paper!

The Internet is a phenomenal resource, the likes of which the world has never seen. But somehow books are better. When you read a book from beginning to end, you get one coherent viewpoint (if you’re lucky), without a lot of jumping around. Reading things on the Internet is like watching movies on cable. You pick up a little here and a little there, and the big picture suffers. Between the time cable became popular and the introduction of pay per view and the DVR, it’s completely possible that I never saw the beginning of a single TV movie.

At least it feels that way.

I am still working on Herodotus. I got into this book as part of my guilt-motivated program of trying to read the books I pretended to read for Columbia University’s Literature Humanities course, and once I was in, I was disturbed to see how long it took. I read very quickly, and it seemed like I was getting nowhere. Suddenly I had new sympathy for little twerps students who are currently struggling with heavy doses of assigned reading.

Last week I discovered the problem. I had misread the syllabus. Somehow this seems like a fitting punishment for a person who got B’s for doing as close to nothing as possible. I thought I had to start off with pages 1 through 140. Looking at the syllabus through bleary eyes after cracking the 140 mark, I discovered I was supposed to read paragraphs 1 through 140. Or something like that. Herodotus is divided up into little sections which look like paragraphs to me. I would speculate that they are the original Greek page divisions, but it’s my understanding that his work was first written on scrolls.

Whatever.

I was reading well over twice as much as I had to.

The nice thing about this is that my contempt for college students was restored. Little sex-crazed goofs, whining about safe spaces and roofying each other.

When I discovered my error, I decided to keep going, because I knew I would eventually want to finish the entire book, and it would be a bummer to have to go back and read the stuff between the parts I had already read.

So now I’m stuck in the 300’s, plowing through a lot of small talk. It’s really difficult, because he talks about 5,000 ancient countries and cities, and each one has 15 names which he uses interchangeably. I read The Iliad and The Odyssey last month, and even after that, I didn’t know until last week that Lacedaemon was Sparta.

Also, the book must have 3,000 characters, and he brings them in the way pigeons poop on expensive suits. No warning. BANG…there’s Adrastus. Is that the same Adrastus he talked about fifty pages ago? Danged if I know. Flip, flip, flip, flip, flip…

I’m actually looking for a book on the Ionian Revolt, because I have realized that there is no way on earth a human being can understand Herodotus’s summary without help. The weird thing is that any book I read will be based on Herodotus, but at least the author will, hopefully, have unraveled the digressions and put it in order.

Writing the previous paragraph reminds me of another annoying issue that has come up: the proper way to use apostrophes when turning names that end in “s” into possessives. My Lit. Hum. professor taught my class that we should avoid the common practice of simply adding an apostrophe to the end of the word, and I figured he must be right, since he swam in a sea of terminal-“s” names all day, every day, with a Ph.D. to back him up. I stuck with that for decades, but then a few years ago, I read that it’s only okay to add an apostrophe and a new “s” when the result is easy to pronounce. So it’s okay to write “Jesus’s,” but you should never write, “Cambyses’s.”

It’s bothering me right now, so I think I’ll check The Gregg Manual, which is a neat reference book. I probably have Strunk & White somewhere, but I don’t know if they cover this problem.

Well, Mr. Gregg and The Macmillan Handbook of English (saved from my college days) agree: you use an added “s” except when the result is hard to pronounce. But Mr. Gregg says “Jesus’s” is hard to pronounce. Geez. Doesn’t seem hard to me.

One of the aggravating things about grammar is that authorities disagree. People who have different authorities run around correcting each other (especially in Internet comments) when neither side can really claim the high ground.

I may not be able to find a book on the Ionian Revolt. Given that they all pretty much have to restate Herodotus, maybe the people who have considered writing such books have changed their minds. This is a good example of a gap the Internet can fill. Somewhere out there, I promise you, there is a web page that sums it up in an organized manner. There are probably a bunch of websites that will do. Even Wikipedia is better than fighting with an old Greek who loved to gossip.

In addition to ancient history, I’ve been reading up on the Holocaust and submarines. I’ve always wondered how submarines work, and it occurred to me that it’s possible to find out, so I downloaded a free book, and I bought a couple of videos. I also watched some stuff on Youtube.

Torpedoes always mystified me. How can you make an engine burn alcohol under water in a sealed tube? Turns out they had compressed air tanks inside them, to feed the engines! That’s why they left bubble trails. Submariners liked electric torpedoes because they didn’t leave trails. The problem with the trails is that they were like arrows guiding destroyers’ guns directly to the submarines.

If you combine things like books, video, and the web, you can learn a lot in a hurry, in much greater depth than any student could have only 25 years ago. And yet somehow Americans are more stupid than ever! How did we pull that off? It must be the damn cat memes. They take up all the bandwidth and keep us distracted.

I’m making good use of Google Books, Google Play Books, Amazon’s Kindle Store, and Scrib’d, along with various public domain downloads I’ve found, but paper books are still hard to beat. You can make notes in them. You can draw diagrams. You can make corrections. Try that with a tablet. Maybe in ten years. Also, I don’t have to worry that Big Brother Bezobama is going to get mad some day and suck all my books out of my electronic devices. He’ll have to send the jackbooted thugs. And I have all sorts of bullets. He can get at a few things, but the rest are here moldering safely on shelves, coffee tables, and exercise equipment seats.

I feel so smart these days. And I didn’t even have to stay at a Holiday Inn Express and catch a disease from the bedspread.

Before I sign off, I may as well admit that I have a new Facebook account. Because I’m a hypocrite. No, it’s because I wanted to put up a message to the people who wonder where I went. People thought I blocked them and unfriended them. Facebook doesn’t put up an announcement when you leave. So I put up an account with a brief explanation, but I refuse to add friends or spend time on the site. I may use it when necessary; some companies use Facebook to communicate with people, so if I deal with such outfits, I will have access.

I will be the only person on Facebook with NO friends. A new low. At least on Myspace I would have Tom.

I never hear from Tom. I quit looking at Myspace, and he cut me off dead. Some friend.

That’s all I have now. Wish me luck with the Ionian Revolt thing. Agent Mulder has to be right; the truth must be out there somewhere.

You Only See What God Lets You See

You really have to start asking God what you’re doing wrong. It seems extremely obvious once you see that in front of you, but were you putting it into practice before today?

Once you understand that the purpose of your relationship with God is to change you, a lot of missing parts start falling into place. Things you should have realized long ago are brought to your attention.

I inherited some property from my grandparents. My grandfather died first, and he left two very bad, somewhat frivolous wills. The end result was that the things he gave away ended up belonging to six people. We had to pay a law firm $750,000, and every time we wanted to do anything, we had to herd six uncooperative cats and get them all to agree.

Between his death and my grandmother’s death, my grandmother’s estate was planned as well as could be done under the circumstances, but the problems with my grandfather’s stuff bled over into it, so things are still tied up. People have rolled over and given up. It was like trying to push a dead whale up the beach.

I thought about this last week, and I thought about the lessons God had been teaching me. I asked him what I was doing wrong. The answer was that I wasn’t thankful enough. I thought a lot about the aggravation and the screwups, but not as much as I should about the blessing. Naturally, I started working to thank God and praise him.

I felt like I should contact my cousin and see if he wanted to get things moving, but I put it off because my dad was in the process of dropping all of his business affairs on my shoulders. I figured I would do it in a couple of days.

On Wednesday, my cell dinged, and I looked at my messages. My cousin had texted me to ask me for my current email address. He wanted to get moving on the estate stuff.

This is someone I probably haven’t communicated with in five years.

This stuff works. Don’t fool yourself.

One of the problems with getting the estates in order is that my sister has dropped off the face of the earth. She ended up in a shelter before Christmas. My dad and I could not take it any more, so we did not intervene. If that sounds bad, all I can say is, you don’t know her. Everything we try to do for her makes things worse, for her and for us. If you think you can do better, take her in and show me how it’s done.

After talking to my cousin, I knew I had to dig her up so she could receive and sign papers. I didn’t know where she was, so I went through my emails and found the name of the shelter. I prayed for help with this unpleasant job, because I expected to be hit with accusations, slanders, threats, claims that I was persecuting God’s anointed one, and remarks to the effect that I was going to hell. I called the shelter, and the person manning the phone told me they could not confirm or deny that she was there, but they could give her a message.

Thank you again, God. I did not have to talk to her.

I guess the phone person wondered what was wrong with me, because I said “That’s fine!’ in a tone of voice you would expect from a person who had just been told he was healed of cancer. I left my cousin’s contact information with him, and off I went, about my business.

The same basic thing happened with me and my dad.

My dad has memory problems. His doctor called me in last year and told me he had “mild cognitive impairment,” which was a considerable understatement. Things keep getting worse, and I keep getting more involved with my dad’s business affairs. The odd thing about it is that it’s not a gradual decline. It happens in sudden lurches. One month will be like the last, and then there will be an instantaneous change during the course of one week.

Judging by what I’ve seen, he will need an attendant this year, and he will have to stop driving. Truthfully, I don’t think he will be around that long, because the deterioration is accelerating, and dementia eventually causes death. My big goal is to get him to accept salvation. Anything beyond that is just gravy.

One of the big problems with the responsibility transition is that my dad has been claiming his mind was fine. He has held onto responsibilities he should have handed over, so I’ve tried not to push him. As a result, things have gotten somewhat screwed up.

I asked God what I was doing wrong, and I asked him to put an end to the struggle and help me with it. Again, I saw I was not thankful enough. I’m going to inherit what my dad has. That’s a gigantic blessing. I should be more grateful, and I shouldn’t focus on the aggravation. So I tried to correct that.

Yesterday I was talking to my dad about his bills and so on, and he announced that the reason things were in a mess was that two people were trying to run one operation. He said I needed to take everything over, and that he would just sign checks. It was a shock, but it’s exactly what needed to be done. It would have been nice if he had confronted his problem three years ago and started moving responsibilities into my hands, but failing that, this is the best solution.

We all have nagging problems we can’t beat, and one reason–possibly the only reason–is that there are lessons we are resisting. We have an obligation to ask God what we’re doing wrong. Until you do that, you can’t expect much help.

If you look at the Bible, you will see that ancient believers lived under the same conditions. When the Jews had problems, either they asked God why, or a prophet went and told them, in spite of the fact that they hadn’t asked. When they changed their ways, things improved. When they didn’t, things stayed the same or got worse. Sometimes, by the time the prophet showed up, God’s decisions were sealed, and nothing could be done. God knocked Paul off his donkey and told him what he was doing wrong. Jesus himself appeared and told the seven churches what they were doing wrong. It’s not just an Old Testament thing. It’s eternal.

I don’t want to give the impression that I judge my relationship with God by looking at financial issues, but at the same time, financial issues are part of the package. Poverty is not a good thing. It’s a sign that there is an underlying problem. God never “blesses” people with poverty! And the principle I’m talking about applies to relationships, diseases, and all other areas of life. The only reason I’m talking about breakthroughs related to money is that they happen to be the breakthroughs I experienced this week.

What are your stronghold problems? Do you seem destined to die single? Do you have a health problem that won’t go away? Are there vexing people you can’t get away from? Whatever it is, ask God what you’re doing wrong, and remember that if you want him to help you consistently, you have to give 100% of yourself and your wealth to him. You can’t buy blessings a la carte. If you don’t belong to him, you belong to the devil, so there is a limit to what God will do for you.

God has said that his people perished for lack of knowledge. It’s absolutely true. The flip side is that knowledge can make you victorious. Don’t complain and criticize God because he didn’t tell you these things sooner. He told people who came before us, and they let us down. That’s not God’s fault. And anyway, were you even trying? How do you know what God would have told you, had you gotten with his program?

I really want to get my wealth detached from that of my relatives. I don’t want to be unequally yoked with them. I don’t want to share in their curses and problems. I can’t wait to see things start moving.

This morning I asked God about a lot of other problems I have. I expect relief. Finally, I have good reason to expect success.

I feel like I should write more and try to drive important truths home, but there is only so much you can tell people. Sooner or later they have to go to the source and experience things for themselves.

The More Special You Think You Are, the More Special it Gets

I’m always looking for something to watch while the birds are out of their cages. I found a channel that runs old episodes of Barney Miller in order; that was kind of fun, until I got tired of the Seventies a second time. I watch car shows, restaurant improvement shows…just about anything that isn’t the news and doesn’t feature naked people.

The other day I saw a short documentary about a documentary. A man named Klaus Lanzmann made a 10-hour documentary called Shoah, between about 1974 and 1985, and the newer documentary was about the difficulty of creating the longer one.

I had never seen Shoah, so I looked for a copy to buy. I tried to find a legitimate used copy, so the royalties would be paid, but the one I bought turned out to be Korean, which means its legitimacy is dubious. Oh, well. I did try.

The word “shoah” is Hebrew for “destruction.” Some Jewish people prefer it to “holocaust,” which describes an animal burned as a sacrifice. I suppose the notion of sacrifice seems to suggest that God sanctioned the millions of murders and other crimes.

Personally, I think “Holocaust” is the right word.

Not all sacrifices are holy. Pagans have always sacrificed animals. Satanists are known for it. If what happened to the Jewish people was a sacrifice, it doesn’t mean it was a good thing.

When I visited the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and saw their tabletop model of the killing area at Auschwitz, I was surprised how much it reminded me of the temple in Jerusalem. The people who were gassed were treated a lot like sacrificial animals. They were stripped (Jewish priests had to be covered, so that their private parts were not exposed from below; also, Jewish law requires modesty), and everything useful they had was harvested from them. Then they were killed with the blood remaining in them (Jewish sacrifices have to be bled out), and they were burned (Jews are not permitted to cremate their dead). The whole enterprise was hidden, and the point of it was to remove all evidence that the murders and the Jews themselves had existed. One of the worst curses in Jewish culture is to be forgotten; Jews who hated Jesus have written, “May his name and memory be blotted out.”

Auschwitz was a place of unclean sacrifice. It was a parody of the temple. It was Satan’s deliberate insult to God. “You like sacrifices? Here you go.”

The documentary (Shoah) tells a great deal about the extermination camps, using eyewitness testimony. Lanzmann even tricked Nazis into giving interviews. He and his assistant got a bad beating for doing that.

I will watch the remaining minutes of the documentary today. When it’s over, I will have finished it in three days. It’s hard to stop watching.

All the time that I have been watching it, God has been reinforcing a message he gave me a long time ago. The world belongs to Satan, and God is not as closely involved in it as we think. In fact, the world is a death camp. The majority of human beings who are born live as slaves to Satan, and then they die and go to hell. Not just people who aren’t nice; most people.

The world is a failure. It’s as if someone baked a beautiful cake, and before it could be served, a dog lifted his leg over it. It’s not basically okay with pockets of evil. It’s extremely evil with pockets of good. When God comes here, he doesn’t come as the hands-on supreme being who runs the operation. He comes the same way Red Cross volunteers go to POW camps, or the same way spies go into hostile countries during war. He is an insurgent leader, not a resident monarch.

We can’t get this through our heads. Human beings have the unfortunate ability to get used to anything; we laugh at funerals, and even people doing life in prison have days they enjoy. We are used to this horrible world, which is full of murder and anguish, so we think it’s not a bad place. The Holocaust serves to remind us that we don’t live in heaven’s waiting room; we live on hell’s roof, literally.

The Jews are precious to God, but he stood by while terrible things happened to them, just as he has stood by while terrible things have happened to Christians. He stood by because he had been rejected. He had one plan, and man had another, and when man chose his own plan, God folded his arms and waited. That’s how life works, for all of us.

I am tempted to say God is hard, but that’s not sufficient. God is infinitely hard. Stones are hard, but they can be scratched. God is perfectly just; his justice can’t be altered or defeated in the slightest way. There is no bad deed that will not be noted and dealt with justly. God’s commitment to justice is so strong, he came down and let himself be abused and killed by people who were like filthy apes compared to him. He had to have a release for his anger, so he released it on himself. If he will do that to Jesus, who was the only good person who ever lived, of course he will allow evil to land on the rest of us, who are extremely corrupt.

Americans are among the most spoiled people on earth. We feel entitled. We think everyone is entitled to good health, a wonderful spouse, a strong income, a nice home, and happy children who make us proud. We get extremely resentful when we don’t get these things. We have the audacity to go to God and say, “Why me?” We should be saying, “Why me?”, when things go well. Every one of us deserves to be dead, in a pit in hell, burning and waiting for the final judgment. The suffering of persecuted Jews and Christians should remind us that we are entitled to nothing, and that there is no limit to the anguish God will permit for those who rebel.

We are inundated with mercy and patience, and we think it’s approval. We think it’s a reward, when it’s just God, withholding punishment as long as he can. So we go on dancing on thin ice.

Meanwhile, hell continues filling up, and many of the people filling it are Christians.

If you want to do well in this life, you have to stop defending yourself and claiming you’ve been cheated. You have to stop complaining about your problems, as though they were unfair. All the bad things that happen here are more than fair. If it’s better than hell, it’s more than fair. Imagine how you would feel if you had a rotten, murderous child, and you helped him in ways he didn’t deserve, and all he did was complain and accuse you of unfairness. Would you keep helping him?

The world is Satan’s death camp. Before Satan, there was no death. He practically invented it. The world may be more pleasant than Treblinka and Birkenau, but it’s still a death camp. We should not be surprised if Satan allows things to go well enough to convince us life is good; the guards at Auschwitz told their victims they were going to be showered and given nice jobs. They lied right up to the point where the gas chamber doors were shut.

Between God’s mercy and Satan’s propaganda, it’s no wonder we expect too much from life. It’s no wonder we can’t see doom looking us in the face.

I have found that if I praise and thank God correctly, and if I take blame on myself instead of lying and saying I’m a victim, things go better. Problems I couldn’t beat disappear quickly. God works most strongly where he is welcome, and where he is not slandered. The more you defend yourself, the worse your life is likely to be.

When I think about these powerful lessons, I get very disgusted with the preachers I’ve known. I am exceedingly disgusted with the false “house prophet” at my last church. I am very unhappy to realize they poisoned me when they told me I was doing great, and that good things were right around the corner.

These people held me back! They made my life harder! They made me more of a failure! How can you claim to serve God if you reinforce the chains Satan puts on other people? When Jesus announced his status as Messiah, he said he had come to set the captives free, not to make them more the slaves of hell.

These churches taught people that “blessing” means something like money, power, advancement at work, children, or marriage. Totally wrong! Yesterday God reminded me: we are not rewarded for being good; being good is the reward.

Yes, if you improve, good things will come to you, and life will be better, but the real prize is the inner change wrought by the Holy Spirit. Under the law, men were required to behave well. Under the new covenant, we are expected to change so that bad behavior and evil thoughts don’t appeal to us any more. That’s “setting the captives free”; the evil inside us holds us captive. The disciples thought it meant routing the Roman occupiers. Before the Holy Spirit fell on them and changed them, they had the same materialistic mindset modern prosperity Christians have.

I realize why God has kept telling me to speak up. Many times, he has told me to be more outspoken, when people around me were telling me I was too loud. I could have helped more people if I had been louder. That may be held to my account eventually, as Ezekiel predicted.

God owes you nothing. You cause your own problems. Because you cause your problems, you have the power to fix them. The correct way to fix them is to become Spirit-led, ask God what you’re doing wrong, and ask him for grace to change. That’s how life works. You may be looking at painful lessons which are intended to be beneficial and regarding them as unjust attacks from the devil. If you don’t know help when you see it, you will never benefit from it. Help doesn’t always look like a box of frosted doughnuts. Sometimes it’s a disease or a problem with your marriage. The way you react determines whether it’s a curse or a blessing. The outcome of a thing, not the beginning, determines its nature; the outcome determines whether it goes in the plus column or the minus column.

I’ve complained about things I should have thanked God for. No wonder they didn’t work out well. What else should an ingrate expect?

I am closing comments on this post because I don’t want people to be distracted by misguided remarks from folks I am offending. Sorry about that. I hope you understand. I want people to be helped by what I write, so I don’t want the message to be lost in tangential noise.

Put this stuff to work in your life. Don’t wait till the floor caves in under you.

Here’s the Check

Once again, I am very glad God got me off of social media.

In case you don’t know, the social media tyrants are mounting a new initiative to censor “hate speech.” The obvious issue: who gets to define “hate speech,” and who holds them accountable? The answers: the social media tyrants, and no one.

The article I linked to says the point of the initiative is to “combat the use of social media by terrorists.” Comforting, right? Not really. This is the same excuse George Bush and Barack Obama used to erase the Fourth Amendment and destroy the privacy of every American citizen. It’s the reason your vehicle is tracked every time you drive in an American city or on a major highway.

Uncle Sam’s rationale seems to be this: you can’t limit government surveillance to terrorists unless you know who the terrorists are, and the only way to find out who the terrorists are is to direct government surveillance at everyone. Instead of netting the fish you want, you net everyone, scooping up their private information in wholesale fashion, and then you look at the information and other factors to decide who deserved the intrusion.

If you look at the article, you will see that the initiative was spurred partly by a lawsuit filed in France by a French group dedicated to protecting Jews from hate speech. They didn’t just complain about anti-Semitism, though. They complained about “homophobic” speech, as well as “racist” speech.

Who decides what “homophobic” means? Is it homophobic to say you believe what the Bible says about sodomy? Of course it is, as homophobia (a new word designed as a weapon) is now defined. Who decides what “racist” means? Is it racist to use the word “illegal” to describe aliens who are inside the US illegally?

The lawsuit was filed in France, but the social media tyrants operate all over the world. Are they going to have different standards in different countries? If I live in the US, will I be allowed to tweet, “Sodomy will ruin your relationship with God,” on a platform that will be seen in France?

It’s amazing how blind we are to Internet trends. We can’t see the obvious. We didn’t anticipate the corporate takeover of blogs. We didn’t see the liberal conquest of the Internet coming. Now we don’t see that social media sites are going to be used to destroy free speech.

Back when Myspace and Facebook were minor players, people blogged and used independent forums, or they avoided the web altogether. They advertised in the Yellow Pages and newspapers. They didn’t need social media.

Now, people who used to have their own independent Internet outlets are abandoning them for outlets that are controlled by small groups of godless leftist technocrats. And the worst thing about these outlets is that they have no accountability. They don’t charge, so they don’t owe us good service. They don’t work for the government, so they aren’t obligated to tolerate diverse opinions. They can throw you out or delete your writing whenever they feel like it, fairly or unfairly, and they wield their power very arbitrarily. Twitter seems to be the holdout, but they’re part of the new initiative.

It seemed like a great deal when we were given Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, and the other outlets, free of charge. They let us advertise for nothing. They let us air our views without the need for hosting. People became addicted. There are companies and individuals that have integrated all this free stuff into their operations, to the degree that they might fail if they were expelled.

Think about that. Imagine what it would be like to wake up one day and learn that your company’s Facebook site, Youtube ads, and promotional tweets were gone forever, because you expressed your Biblical opinion about gay marriage. What if you also lost your LinkedIn and Google contacts? What would you do?

It’s going to happen. Don’t fool yourself. People who are financially dependent on these services are going to be faced with abrupt, bitter choices. Want to make payroll? Disavow the things you said in good conscience. Retract the things the Holy Spirit told you to say.

Most Christians will cave in, just like the Jews who rejected circumcision in Greek-occupied Israel.

If you have your own blog, and you don’t use social media to make money, you have a little freedom. It won’t last, but for now you can say what you like. There is no safe haven, but when a ship sinks, it’s a good idea to run to the part that sinks last.

I wonder when the ghost of Nuremberg is going to make its formal debut. Right now, it’s hiding in the wings, waiting for its cue, teasing us by exposing a foot or a hand. The stage has to be set. Pretty soon it will leap out in all its glory, and we’ll see how leftists and God-haters really feel about mercy and tolerance.

The devil suffers from fear of the truth, also known by the recently coined term “alethophobia.” The truth is that his ideas destroy people. The more power he has over communication, the better he can hide the truth. He coats his poison with candy, and he doesn’t want anyone to pull back the curtain and show him at work. Always the angel of light, with God always the punisher and mad dictator. Control of the Internet will be a huge coup for the supernatural propaganda machine.

The people who run our world used to go after people who were building bombs and amassing weapons. Now they’re starting to go after people simply for disagreeing with them.

It’s a wonderful end-run around the First Amendment. Entities that aren’t part of the government aren’t barred from restricting speech, and the Internet oligarchs aren’t part of the government. Not officially, even though Mark Zuckerberg visits the White House so often he probably has his own dresser drawer in the Lincoln bedroom. Now that a large percentage of public speech goes through social media, powerful, legal restrictions are possible.

I’m not going to worry about it (or about anything else), but people should be made aware. You have to have your prayer life together. You have to pick a side, because to refuse to pick a side is to pick the devil’s side. The one that loses.

It’s sad to see the great wealth and technological advances of the current age come with such a cost. Human beings find ways to ruin everything.

The Stink Will Dissipate Eventually

The more I learn about God, the less use I have for preachers.

I suppose that sounds trite; lots of people use their complaints about the religious as justification for refusing to attend church. It may also sound proud, as though I’m saying I’m better than the preachers I know of.

Sometimes when you’re right, you sound a lot like people who are wrong. When Jesus stood up in the synagogue in Nazareth and announced that he was the Messiah, his friends and neighbors immediately tried to murder him, because he sounded like the many impostors who had come before him.

People who don’t know God make guesses about him, or they repeat the guesses other people have made. Eventually this garbage becomes doctrine. Then if you come to know God personally, you find that he is not much like the God other people described to you. Then you look at the people who believe nonsense, and you marvel at their willingness to pass it on to others.

My last church had a “house prophet.” I have probably written about him before. The pastor gave him the title. I’ll call him Carlos so I have a temporary handle for him other than his real name.

Carlos is a nice guy. He is nice to the extreme. When he “prophesies,” he almost invariably says nice things. He says the pastors are on the right track. He says the new building is about to be given to them. He tells people great things are about to happen to them. A couple of years back he took me aside and told me about the wonderful wife God was about to give me. He told a childless couple they were going to have twins.

If he comes out with anything that sounds corrective, it’s always about staying the course, supporting the pastors, never saying anything critical, and so on. In short, it’s a lot like the stuff the communists used to say in Russia and China. “Keep your head down. Do your job. Say everything is wonderful. If you complain, you are an enemy of the people.”

The reason he sounds like a socialist mouthpiece is that he gets his material from the same place: Satan. Satan loves controlling information. He loves making people afraid to tell the truth. He loves convincing them they’re doing everything right, so they stop looking for the correct way.

I used to think Carlos was the real deal, but I kept praying in tongues every day, and revelation kept coming, and I realized he and the pastor “prophesied” a lot of things that didn’t happen. I also realized they had serious pride issues, and that they hated correction.

Carlos shows up to church late. He misses services. He misses prayer-line sessions. But he is honored nonetheless. He is always ready to ask for the microphone, and once he has it, he hangs onto it for quite some time. The pastors love him because he always tells them they’re wonderful, so he gets lots of stage time.

Why pick on Carlos? Because he’s an example of a person who speaks for God without getting to know him.

Carlos does a lot of harm. He prevents people from examining themselves and asking God what they’re doing wrong, so he encourages them in destructive error. He predicts nice things that do not happen, so people who hear him come to distrust prophets. He is probably also convincing people God isn’t real, and that church is just a social event where people go to make themselves feel good on their days off from their menial jobs.

Carlos also “corrects” people when they’re right, so he is making them drop the treasures God gives them.

The harm he does justifies criticizing him on my blog, no matter how nice he is. It could be worse. God told Moses to kill people like Carlos.

I’ve learned a lot of things from prayer, and they go against the craziness I heard from preachers. Let’s see if I can list a few things.

1. God is not your fairy godmother, and he has no obligation to make your life wonderful. In fact, the only major obligation he has ever had toward you was the obligation to kill you and put you in hell. There was no way around it, so he took the punishment on himself. Now you think he has to make you rich and help you do stupid things he didn’t tell you to do? Think about that.

2. The purpose of prayer is not to make you feel good; it’s to transform you and help you do what God wants done. It’s very common for people to think prayer went well because they felt good when it was over. That’s not right. It didn’t go well unless you were improved. Sometimes prayer is unpleasant, because it requires confession and repentance. God will open your eyes to your horrible deeds, words, and traits. You’re supposed to admit fault and work through it; that’s the correct path to peace. Simply bathing in God’s presence as though it were a hot tub is not helpful.

3. The presence of God is the best thing there is. We need it. But we limit it by allowing the presence of other spirits. It’s not enough to know you love God’s presence. You should also hate, hate. hate Satan’s presence and the presence of lesser spirits that serve him. Their presence causes things like worry, depression, fear, and disease. God’s presence is peaceful and healing. God removes stress. If you’re not fighting the spirits that compete for space inside you, you are limiting God’s presence and his help.

4. We owe God, and we are far, far beneath him. We are ugly and vile. We are not his buddies. We have to approach him with respect and patience, not an attitude of entitlement. Sometimes we have to wait on him. You wouldn’t go to the Oval Office and demand to be seen instantly, and God is infinitely better than a President. If you’re treating God like your best pal, you’re pushing him away.

5. We have to praise God in order to approach him. You don’t just open your mouth and start begging. He is humble, but he is still God. He has to be honored, just as you would honor a judge. If you spend time praising him before you get into the rest of your prayers, the power will jump up a notch.

6. God does not want your money. He will not reward you for giving backward preachers money. Your prosperity offerings are gone forever. God wants all of you, starting with your heart and mind.

7. God wants to do the heavy lifting for you. He will help you in ways you wouldn’t expect. You can ask for faith. You can ask for humility. You can ask him to help you spend more time in prayer. He knows you’re a bad person; he does not expect you to do everything with your own strength. If you’re striving every day, I have good news: you’re doing it wrong. He wants to put you in a place where his strength goes before you and makes things easier. He is more interested in your submission than your hard work.

8. God lets evil spirits deceive people and destroy their faith. Look it up. The Bible says he sends the spirits. You may wonder how that can be true, if he isn’t willing for anyone to perish. The fact that he wants you to avoid hell doesn’t mean he can abandon justice. A rebellious person is subject to all sorts of curses, and unbelief is a curse.

9. God does not want to help you accomplish your own plans. God is like a husband or father. If you have a wife, you will understand this: part of a man’s job is to show his wife what she actually wants. Women are more confused than men, and they get crazy ideas. A man can help a woman channel her desires correctly so she doesn’t waste her life. We do this for kids, too. God does the same thing with human beings. He knows what will really please you; you don’t. He wants to show you, through the Holy Spirit. Once you’re on his program and not your own, he will start to help you. You can’t expect him to assist you with your own bad ideas. It’s like sending your son to college and then agreeing when he asks for money to quit and become a drug dealer.

I learned things like this by going to God repeatedly, over a period of years. I didn’t read it in a book some preacher wrote to make money. I didn’t pay Rod Parsley to tell me. I didn’t ask for the Pope’s advice. I didn’t read the writings of St. Augustine. I did not consult poor Mary, who must be horrified at the worship she receives. God is here right now; you don’t have to go to intermediaries.

Jesus came to me a couple of times, and I knew who he was. I could not see him, but I knew exactly where he was; I could sense his location and feel him near me. I knew he was not the Holy Spirit. For a long time, I’ve wondered why he would feel different from the Holy Spirit.

This week, I realized something. I knew he wasn’t the Holy Spirit because he was not inside me.

The presence of Jesus, when he’s in the room with you, is a field of peace, joy, love, and protection. It’s indescribable. The Holy Spirit is not as intense. I believe I know why. It’s because the Holy Spirit is supposed to be inside us, and very few people have cleared out sufficient room for him to manifest with any kind of power.

You’re full of other spirits. The Holy Spirit has to take a number. When you start to get delivered, his influence increases. Eventually, what you feel inside you starts to feel more like the presence of Jesus. This is what we should be shooting for, instead of begging for money and healing.

I experienced this by myself. I have never heard a preacher talk about it, and the reason is that it hasn’t happened to them. They keep pushing false doctrine. They don’t have faith in God; they have faith in uninformed people who have told them about God.

So yes, I have less use for preachers than I used to. They pull people backward and waste their time. They don’t fill people with knowledge; they fill them with lack of knowledge, which causes them to perish. Crazy.

If I were “submitted to authority” in a church, I would have to give all this up. Everything God has built up in me would have to be abandoned. No way am I going for that deal. Benny Hinn will just have to find someone else to buy him helicopters and purple suits.

Don’t quit. Get to know God personally. Don’t be discouraged if things don’t go your way immediately; you should expect to wait on him. Be glad he’s willing to deal with you at all. Maintain your prayer life. Ask for God to correct you. Praise him before you pray. Confess everything you can think of.

This stuff works. If you don’t like it, I’ll send back every penny you paid me for it.

We Live in Beeblebroxian Denial

Herodotus’ Histories is not a book. It’s a maze. You enter through the front page, and you never get out.

The Columbia University Lit. Hum. syllabus says to start with pages 1-140. I believe I’m on about 120, and I have really been trying. It is slow work, unless you skim it and let the confusing things lie.

The print is tiny, the margins are small, and I keep running into things I have to look up. For instance, there was an ancient nation that used swipes for irrigation. That’s not even in the dictionary. It’s a counterweighted crane operated by a miserable, but very buff, peasant.

One interesting thing about Herodotus is that he draws connections between Egypt and Greece. I suppose every educated person has heard that the Greeks stole their culture and technology from the Egyptians, but most of us haven’t troubled ourselves to dig into the matter. Apparently, the Greek “gods” were worshiped in Egypt at the time of Herodotus (fifth century B.C.), and if Herodotus is to be believed, many of them were old Egyptian “gods” with new names.

Isis, for example is sort of like Hera, the wife of Zeus. She is also conflated with Aphrodite to some extent. This is the same failed angel or whatever that was worshiped alongside of Yahweh by the ancient Jews. They called her “the queen of heaven,” and they put little Isis/Ashtoreth/Hera/whatever altars in their places of worship.

Zeus is apparently our old acquaintance Baal (or Bel), which means he’s really the devil. The Egyptians called him Amun and Amun-Ra. There was an Egyptian city called Ammon, and Zeus had himself an oracle there. People went to give him offerings and have their fortunes told.

Zeus is an interesting character, because he is the supreme god (I will give up the annoying quotation marks) of the Greeks, and he is strong enough to fight all the others at once, but he is the grandson of the first supreme male god. He had a beginning. His grandfather was Ouranos (Uranus to you and me; Greek for “sky”), and his son was Kronos (Greek for “time”). Gaia, the earth, was the wife of Ouranos and the father of Zeus. She got angry at Ouranos for some reason I forget, and Kronos sided with her and castrated Ouranos. The organs and drops of his blood landed in the sea and became various peoples, Aphrodite, and/or assorted giants, depending on whom you ask.

Kronos fell out with Gaia, and Zeus overcame him and replaced him.

It’s all very interesting, because in reality, the battle between Satan and God is about reproduction. It’s genocidal. Each one is working to exterminate the seed of the other. Satan’s greatest desire is to emasculate God and replace him, and to replace God’s children with his own.

Herodotus is full of accurate pagan prophecies. Modern scholars discount these, saying the prophecies were made up after the events they addressed. Who is to say, though? False religions have real power; talk to a Haitian some day if you don’t believe it.

Herodotus writes a lot about Croesus, the ancient king who is known for his wealth. Supposedly Croesus sent messengers to a bunch of oracles, and he told the messengers to go to the oracles on a certain day and ask what he was doing. On that day, says Herodotus, Croesus put turtle meat and lamb together and cooked them in a bronze pot. The oracle of Delphi spoke of turtle meat and lamb cooking in a bronze pot. After that, Croesus was a major fan of the Oracle of Delphi, and he donated all sorts of treasure.

Are any of the stories true? I don’t know, but I suppose some of them are. The fact that a religious person serves a false deity doesn’t mean his practices don’t work.

Back when I was an armorbearer at Trinity Church, I worked alongside a very reserved, serious Haitian man. He told me about an event he had been to in Haiti. A woman who was a servant in a house presided over it. She was a priestess.

They built a bonfire, and the woman started dancing around it. As things progressed, people became more and more emotional, and she got more excited. She danced closer and closer to the flames. At the end, according to my friend, she was dancing in the fire, unharmed.

This was a guy who talked very little, never gossiped, and never tried to impress anyone. I have no reason to doubt what he said, and I can’t pass judgment on the tales Herodotus passed on. Herodotus made lots of mistakes, and he handed down a lot of gossip. That is true. On the other hand, he went out of his way to distinguish rumors from facts.

My guess is that many of the prophecy stories are true; particularly the ones about Cyrus. His rise was predicted by Jeremiah. He truly did depose his grandfather, as predicted by a heathen. He truly did defeat Croesus and become emperor.

One of the unfortunate things about technology is that we use it to convince ourselves the supernatural doesn’t exist, and that we don’t need God. We can’t seem to measure the supernatural with instruments. When we try to document it, it slips out of our hands. Our earthly power keeps increasing. We cure more and more diseases. We find better ways to protect ourselves from nature. We have decided that we are gods, or if not gods, close enough to gods to justify reliance on ourselves.

We think we’re stronger than we are, so we have stopped looking for help. That’s sad, because the supernatural realm is where all the power and answers are. And our beliefs don’t change God’s order. When you die and find yourself dealing with supernatural beings, you won’t be able to escape judgment by saying you’re an atheist.

I’m glad I’m reading these crusty old books. As I’ve said, I have a couple of huge books about the early church, and knowing a little bit about the world from which the church emerged will surely help me understand them.

I’m also glad I’m not reading on the Columbia University schedule. They give people seven days to cover all the readings in Herodotus. There is no way to do it justice in that time while keeping up with other courses. But that’s how college is. It’s like a bus full of Japanese tourists at the Eiffel Tower. Have you seen what they do? Everyone assembles outside the bus. One person runs forward and takes a picture of the group. He rejoins the group. Then another person does the same thing. When everyone has taken a picture, they get back in the bus and leave.

I always feel lucky to live in a time when we have things like air conditioning, fairly good medical knowledge, and power tools. But when I look at Herodotus, I see him referring to “ancient” people, and he lived 2400 years ago. His “modern” is our “primitive.” That means we are primitive, too. We just can’t see it. I always think it would kill me to go back and live in an age of lesser technology, but I suppose the age I live in is also pretty bad. We can cure a toothache or burn off a wart, but the world is still full of hardship and agony.

I feel like Arthur Dent, who lived in a world surrounded by astounding space ships he couldn’t see, yet thought his own crappy digital watch was pretty cool.

Now I’m bummed. I think I’ll fix a steak.

We’re All Exhibitionists Now

I did my time today working on Quickbooks, and then I relaxed with Herodotus, after which I flew the drone. People probably don’t believe me when I write about my thrilling life.

Accounting is still a horror. I’ve gotten to the point where I understand it well enough to enter things in Quickbooks, and I will be glad to have the skill and knowledge, but once again, I am reminded of one of my dad’s courtroom stories. His client passed out in the street drunk, and a man backed over him and broke his leg. The defendant’s lawyer testified that the man had no damages because a broken bone that has healed is stronger than a bone that has never been broken at all. My dad asked him how much he would charge to break the other leg.

That which has not killed me has made me stronger, but it definitely has not put a smile on my face.

Herodotus is surprisingly entertaining, but after Homer and Sappho, the phone book would be entertaining, so my perceptions may be distorted. I have the Robin Waterfield translation, and I would describe the tone as “folksy.” When you read it, the voice you hear in your head is like an American talk radio host. Somewhat irreverent, not altogether serious, and very informal.

I have been reading about the rise of Cyrus, the Persian emperor who helped the Jews. In case you don’t know, a prophet mentioned Cyrus by name in the Old Testament. I am too lazy to look it up, but the prophet spoke long before Cyrus was born.

I don’t know if Herodotus ever mentions the Jews, but he mentions lots of figures who are either in the Bible or separated from it by only one or two degrees. Sennacherib, Ashurbanipal, Darius, and a bunch of others.

Herodotus wrote about Cyaxares, a Median emperor who married a daughter off to Nebuchadnezzar II, who happens to be the guy who sacked the temple in 586 B.C. Cyaxares was the grandfather of Astyages, and Astyages was the grandfather of Cyrus. Herodotus says Astyages had two dreams that indicated that Cyrus, whose father was a Persian, not a Mede, would depose him and take his empire. Astyages told his consigliere Harpagus to kill the child, and Harpagus delegated the job to a herdsman. You can guess the rest. It’s a lot like the stories of Jesus and Moses. A deliverer is promised, so a heathen ruler tries to kill children.

Cyrus reminds me of Donald Trump. He was extremely bold and decisive, and things went well for him, as though a higher power had given him extraordinary favor. Of course, that’s the correct explanation.

I cant’ say I approve of Cyrus, any more than I completely approve of Trump. Cyrus was not a good person, but he served a purpose, and he did a job.

Herodotus is incomprehensible if you just read what he wrote; you have to look at external sources. I use the Internet to explain things and fill gaps. I use it to put dates beside things. For example, the Scythians ruled the area the Medes later ruled from around 553 B.C. to about 525 B.C., until Cyaxares got them. If you put dates next to things, you get a picture of what was happening outside of Israel when various things happened in the Bible. The dates are highly dubious, but they’re better than nothing.

I don’t know if I would call Herodotus a historian. To me, he’s more of a gossip. He can’t verify what he says, and he admits it, but he passes it along all the same.

It’s a funny coincidence (if that’s what it is), but a good friend of mine generously sent me two huge books about the Revelation, at about the time I started going back over the books from Columbia University’s Lit. Hum. course. I’ve written about this. Evangelist Rick Renner wrote the books, and they’re stuffed with information about the ancient world.

The neat thing about going back over the torment of Lit. Hum. is that it will help me understand Renner’s books. Herodotus will not cover the time period of the early church, which appears to be Renner’s focus; Herodotus died in the fifth century B.C. But he provides a lot of groundwork on the ancient world that provided the foundation of the world that existed in the time of Jesus and the disciples.

After the Greeks and Virgil, Lit. Hum. shoots directly to Augustine, who lived in the fourth and fifth centuries A.D.

I don’t know how anyone learned anything before the Internet. It makes this stuff so much easier.

Abusing my brain with accounting and ancient literature has to be countered with pleasure, so I keep working on my drone skills. Sometimes I’m able to stay aloft for maybe 20 seconds now. The drone doesn’t drop out of the air as often as it used to. Maybe something in the power trains has loosened up.

I made a fourth drone purchase. Revell, a company that makes the kind of plastic airplane models we all used to set on fire when we were 12, makes drones now, and they have a neat one with six props. It has lots of lights on it. Clearly I needed it.

Once my second drone arrives, I’ll have the ability to fly more or less continuously for maybe 15 minutes (my flights are lengthened by frequent pauses to retrieve the drone from behind furniture). That will help me practice efficiently. When I have four drones, I’ll be able to practice considerably more than I want to.

Some day I’ll get a drone with a camera. Sounds extravagant, but you can get all sorts of cool ones for under a hundred bucks. I don’t have any neighbors who sunbathe naked (as far as I know), so I don’t think I can be condemned for operating a camera drone.

Of course, I may get a surprise when I fly it. Hmm.

I think the most annoying thing about camera drones is that the punks who use them to torment us have put us on the defensive. When people complain about drones in their yards, the punks will actually say things like, “You can always stay inside and draw your blinds.”

Technology is going to get incredibly cool, and we will lose all semblance of privacy and liberty. Then Jesus will return. That’s my guess. So I feel like I need to get my droning in while I can.

As I have said before, I don’t think God will tolerate the destruction of privacy and free will. Without them, you can’t have judgment or reward. A world like that serves no purpose.

I’ll put up a Youtube of the hexacopter. I hope you like it. After all, we bought these toys with the rights we held precious.

I Wish I had a Deformed Cat

Yesterday I got curious and looked around the web to see how hard writing is for other people. When I worked for my law school paper, I saw people lock up when they were asked to write a couple of hundred words, and when I was blogging and dealing with bloggers who wanted to write books, I knew people who couldn’t get more than a few pages done. Clearly, my situation is not like that.

On the web I saw people talking about the goal of writing a few hundred or a thousand words per day. It was like they were talking about learning to run ten miles per day; they seemed to consider it difficult enough to make achieving the goal unlikely.

This Saturday, I cranked out something like 3000 words just to relax. If I had to write 4000 per day as a 40-hour job, I would think nothing of it. I once wrote a 48-page legal brief in a day. I believe it was 48. Anyway, it was over 40. It made the judge mad. It was too long.

I wonder what the purpose of this facility is. The fact that you have an ability doesn’t mean you know what to do with it.

Whenever I’m with my dad, and we hear Rush Limbaugh on the radio, my dad says the same thing: he can’t believe a person can talk for three hours a day without running dry. Someone who used to have a radio show once complained to me about this. Apparently, this person dreaded having to come up with material.

It wouldn’t be a problem for me. There is always something to say or write. Life is a constant flow of experiences, insights, and ideas. You can’t say you lack stimulation.

You can’t choose your talents. If I had been given a choice, I would have held onto writing, but I would have traded cooking for something else. I have really enjoyed cooking extraordinary food, but it’s not an important gift. It’s trivial. And you can’t use it all the time. I get up every day and eat the same boring stuff: homemade vegetable soup. I almost never cook anything good for lunch. I grab a protein bar or a sandwich. If I really cooked, I would weigh 400 pounds, and it would slice two hours out of every day.

I am fairly good at a number of things, but the older I get, the more it looks like writing and cooking are the only areas where I really shine. It’s like being good at theoretical physics and tiddly winks. One gift that can have an impact on the world, and another which is more or less a novelty.

I envy people who have gifts that guarantee them a livelihood. Songwriters, in particular. If you write one hit song, you can retire. Even if you go into a coma right after you publish it, the money will continue coming in, and your heirs will also be able to benefit from the copyright.

Doctors are also fortunate. Their incomes may wax and wane, but no one will ever tell a doctor his job has been rendered obsolete. And doctors are welcome everywhere. Back when Haiti was in an uproar over the earthquake, people I knew were going there as volunteers, but I stayed here. I figured the Haitians could do anything I could do, just as well, except for practicing law. What was I supposed to do over there with my legal skills? Sue people? If I had been a doctor, I would have flown over and made myself useful. There would have been a purpose in it.

I can write, but cashing in on it is not that easy. I got some silly books published, but they did not make me rich. I have worked as a copywriter, but that kind of work comes and goes. I used to write for a newspaper magazine, but even if I had done that full-time, I would have pocketed a maximum of $800 a month.

To sell books, you have to write books people want. There has to be a waiting market. That’s not hard if you write novels; people will always want something to kill time on airplanes. But other types of books are harder to sell. And of course, editors are buried in complete garbage. People who absolutely cannot write refuse to stop sending their horrible manuscripts, so it’s hard to rise above the noise.

It’s not easy to cash in on cooking, either. Restaurants are a nightmare to run. There is a ton of regulation. There are piles of paperwork. You have to deal with cooks and waiters, who are right up there with musicians when it comes to honesty and responsibility. You have to deal with things that are totally unrelated to good cooking. Then when you get the business running, you gross $3 million per year and take home $30,000, working 15-hour days, six days a week. And even if your food is great, the public may simply get tired of it.

Lots of people get rich in the restaurant business, but you have to be a fool to risk your capital on it. Even with hard work and talent, it’s a lottery ticket.

I always hope God will arrange it so I will never have to practice law again. The responsibility is just too much, unless you’re the kind of person who doesn’t care. If I represent you one time, I am responsible to you for the rest of my life. And I can be sued for malpractice, at 90, for something I did when I was 40. The statute of limitations is short, but there are ways around it. In continuing legal education, I was taught that you should pay for malpractice insurance for as long as you live! How would you like to do that? You could easily pay out a third of what you earned in your career. Or you can trust your former clients to be nice to you. Yeah. That’s a sure thing.

The other day a friend asked me for legal advice, and I told him what I tell everyone: no way. I don’t care if they get mad. I’m not going to put myself in a position where I have to look over my shoulder for the next thirty years. Friends don’t sue friends, but then friends don’t stay friends, either. Former friends sue lawyers for malpractice every day.

Seriously, I think there is nothing like royalty income. You don’t have to manage property and be abused by tenants. You don’t have to buy and sell securities, risking a beating every time you trade. You don’t have to go to work. You can’t get fired. And copyright royalties are the best, because they never expire. Among copyright royalties, songwriting royalties are probably the best, because you don’t have to perform or promote, once a song gets noticed. You sit back and take money from other people. They do the performing. Their promoters do the promoting. You sit around at home, eating Cheetos.

Oh, well. I can write and I can cook. That’s how it is.

I could go ahead and write a book every three months and see what happens, but there’s a problem. I’m a Christian. You can’t just spew words out for money when God isn’t behind it. You have to wait for him. On top of that, what if I wrote a popular Christian book? Could I take money for that? If God gives you something for nothing, should you charge for it, especially when it’s possible to put it on the Internet and give it to billions of people free of charge?

You can say the laborer is worthy of his hire, but is that really apt, when you have almost no expenses? If you have to give up your job in order to serve God, you should be paid, but what if you don’t?

I think about that when I read Christian books. The writers have a conflict of interest: God versus Mammon.

Some books cost a lot of money to write, but most don’t. If I wrote a Christian book, it would cost me nothing, except for ISP fees. I wouldn’t have to travel or take photographs or pay for a cover design. Even before the Internet age, Paul wrote books, and all he did was dictate while someone scribbled. Worked out pretty well.

I should teach Marv to do something entertaining. Have you seen Grumpy Cat? I saw a news story that says he pulls in $50 million per year for his owners. God help those people if a dog gets him. I would keep him in a safe.

I won’t complain about what God gave me. It’s nice to be able to write, even if I have no idea what the value of it is. The cooking, I’ve pretty much given up on, but I will always want to communicate. And it’s going great guns. Like 50 people read this blog now.

I guess I’ve written enough; I’m procrastinating because I don’t want to study accounting. I better get in on it.

I’ll be back. You can count on that.