Can YOUR President Walk on Bottled Water?

Had to edit this after a commenter pointed out the nomination deadline was in February.

New Trinket for the IWhine

Here are two things you should never doubt again.

1. Bush Derangement Syndrome is a bona fide mental illness.

2. The spirit of Antichrist upholds and promotes anti-Jewish, anti-Church leaders.

If you have better explanations for Barack Obama’s unexpected Nobel Peace Prize, I would love to hear them.

This guy is starting to remind me of Al Bundy. If you don’t recall, Al was a high school superstar. A jock. He peaked at 18. Then he ended up selling shoes. Obama will peak during the 12 months following the 2008 election. After that, a legacy of abject bundicity. Which is a noun I just coined.

Now that I think about it, the Antichrist will be a lot like Al Bundy, too. A short time in the sun, and then eternity in the deep fryer. God’s shoe store.

Obama is hostile to the necessary, God-mandated, inevitable recovery of the missing parts of the Jewish homeland, and the terrorists made it clear they preferred him to McCain, but even Muslims found this award confusing and inappropriate.

When nutty things happen, look for a spiritual reason. That’s what I have learned. This explains lots of things. The housing bubble. The disproportionate success of moderately talented people like Michael Jackson, Elvis, and Madonna. Oprah’s $31 million starting salary. Israel’s military victories. Bill Gates. And the bizarre and increasingly shameless worship of a mediocre and obscure junior senator who had the White House handed to him in a gift-wrapped package.

When his fall comes, he is going to hit the earth so hard he will go clean through it and pop out in China. His new policy–this is so stupid it amounts to psychosis–of openly attacking critics in the press is likely to accelerate his descent pretty dramatically.

Last night I watched a Perry Stone live webcast. He said he always prays for our leaders to come around and submit to God, so they’ll provide a friendly environment for the church. Same here. I long for the day when Obama says he has discarded the tiny idol he carries. The pocket-sized figure of the Hindu antichrist. I want to see him throw out the two-foot-tall gilded version he keeps in the White House. I want him to admit that Jeremiah Wright is a sad excuse for a preacher. And I’d like to see him quit stabbing the Jews in the back.

I want to see him straighten up and succeed or continue in foolishness and fail miserably. The former is preferable, but anything is better than success on Obama’s spiritually dysfunctional terms. No nation has ever been blessed for irresponsibility, man-worship, and Jew-baiting.

Question: will he donate the money to charity? Tough call. It’s fairly certain that he thinks he earned it. And at heart, he’s spoiled, ungrateful, and selfish. But his ego and his image would benefit from a conspicuous donation to a cause beloved by leftists. And I’m sure he expects to earn millions after he leaves office, although he’s likely to be a one-termer, which means he won’t pull down Bill Clinton money.

Whatever happens, I’m sure he will manage to embarrass us yet again.

Hold the Fries, Heathen

Man, am I wiped out. A family crisis developed, and my dad invited me to lunch to discuss it, and I ate a cheeseburger and a tiny container of mysterious “veggie slaw.” I feel like I ate a bowling bag full of greased marbles.

Two months ago, I would have barely noticed a meal this small. It’s amazing how I’ve changed. I had a generous breakfast today, because I was running behind on calories, but it wasn’t huge. Other than that, I’ve had two tiny bowls of All-Bran and part of a Lindt bar. I don’t think I could eat another thing all day.

My dad refuses to believe it’s an answer to prayer. He says fasting shrunk my stomach. I can’t agree. I’ve fasted before, and it never affected my appetite in the days that followed. I think if two cherubs flew in bearing a cake decorated with the message, “Way to go. Love, J.C.”, he would still insist there was an earthly explanation.

I feel almost sick. I could not be happier.

The 33-waist pants in the closet are calling to me. I still remember the days when I thought of them as my fat pants. Right now, I’d be thrilled if I could get into them with a crowbar. And I’m not that far off.

I’ve achieved absolutely nothing today. Started working on the book. Then I had to go with my sister so she could have her head shaved. Then family crisis. Then lunch.

If you want to start taking a woman’s cancer seriously, watch somebody shave her head. It’s very disturbing. It drives the truth home in a big way. I don’t think it would mean as much if it were a man. Men shave their heads for all sorts of reasons. They lose bets. They want to make it harder for the cops to identify them. They fall asleep drunk and fall prey to their so-called friends. When a woman shaves her head, you know something is up.

Hope this day’s supply of drama has run dry.

And None of You Deserve it, Anyway

I have been thinking about the prayer meeting I went to yesterday, in which we focused on the ill effects of complaining.

At the meeting, I felt like adding my input, but I kept quiet, because once my mouth is open, it tends to stay that way. The other guys have been building the church for years, and I don’t want to show up at this late date and act like I know something they don’t.

If I had spoken my piece, I would have said this: complaining can be truly magical. A person who really knows how to complain can take any situation and turn it into a stinking dungheap.

I’ll try to capture the pain of dealing with someone like that. I’ll provide a composite character, and I’ll call him Ned. The phone rings, and it’s Ned. He wants to talk about a situation which appears to be going quite well. Let’s say Ned’s sister’s son is having a birthday, and the party is tomorrow. The kid is happy. The sister is happy. The cake has been ordered. The guests have been invited. The weather looks good. The clown is fresh out of rehab and appears to be behaving himself. Here is what Ned says:

1. I know the best place to get a cake, but Myrtle (the sister) hates me because I was popular when we were in high school, so she insisted on going to the stupid bakery down the street, which is run by Haitians, and–God bless them, you know how I hurt for them and how much money I give to Haitian charities, unlike you–they are not clean people, and I am not going near that tuberculosis-infected cake. I hope everyone enjoys it in spite of the bad things I have a duty to say about it in front of the guests, because I am not a petty person like Myrtle. I guess somebody in the family has to be the spiritual one, and I don’t mind, because that’s how Jesus and I roll. And if Myrtle gets a loathsome disease, I wouldn’t be surprised, because God withdraws his blessings when you mistreat people. But I really hope she doesn’t, because I just don’t have it in me to wish anyone ill. I thank God I am not built like that.

2. Little Elroy (the son) is bucktoothed, and I was the one who made them take him to the orthodontist, so they owe me, but they still insisted on having the party at their house instead of Chuck E. Cheese, which would have been a way better idea. And they never thanked me, and when my gout acted up, it was over a day before they called, and they didn’t even offer to mow my yard so my toe could rest.

3. I had to go without Crown Royal for a week to buy Elroy’s present, and it’s much better than anything anyone else got him, but what can you expect, when his dad is a pothead and his mom spends all her money on tacky jewelry and Hummel figurines? I know they will never thank me for it, even though I will call attention to it by putting it in a huge gift-wrapped box next to the pathetic presents they got him, and I will make him pose for about fifty digital pictures while he opens it, because I’m the only one who cares enough to preserve the precious memories of his childhood.

4. I may be late to the party because my bursitis, which could actually be bone cancer, is bothering me, and no one cares enough about me to pick me up so I don’t have to drive. I know everyone is just waiting for me to die so they can put my model train collection on Ebay, so nothing surprises me any more. It’s a good thing I’m so spiritual. Otherwise I might resent them. It’s sad how they envy me, but luckily it doesn’t bother me at all.

5. The present you got Elroy is stupid and embarrassing, but you never listen to me, so go ahead and give it to him. I hope you kept the receipt. If not, maybe they can take it to Goodwill.

6. Let’s just try to have a good time, if you can find it in your heart to stifle your negative personality for three hours. God knows I don’t ask for much. I know you don’t think about personal sacrifice the way I do, so I will understand if you embarrass everybody and ruin the party.

And Ned wonders why his calls go to voicemail all the time.

Anyone else would say, “Oh, boy! A birthday party! Sounds like fun!”

When something is wrong, and there might be a solution, you have to speak up. That’s not the bad kind of complaining. The bad kind is a sort of reverse alchemy, which turns gold into lead. A skilled complainer can take the greatest day of your life and turn it into something out of a Kafka story.

There is also a bad kind of optimism. “This space shuttle was designed by geniuses! Freezing weather won’t hurt it!” “Icebergs? This ship is unsinkable!” “Housing prices are going to go up 20% a year for the rest of our lives! Go ahead and take that loan!” “Experience? A President doesn’t need experience! If old, experienced people knew anything, the world would be perfect by now!”

You know what I’m talking about. There is nothing wrong with pointing out that the emperor is naked. Jesus did it all the time. A smart person knows when criticism is helpful and when it is not.

If you want to know what hell is like, travel with a master complainer. “You never take my secret shortcut. This will add hours to the trip.” “Wake up. This room is no better than the last one. We have to move again.” “Take off my SHOES? I demand to speak to the president of the airline!” “Go ahead and eat at McDonald’s if you want. I’ll sit in the car, and then we can go someplace clean.” “Waitress! This muffin is asymmetrical!”

Life is full of real problems. You don’t improve it by conjuring new ones.

Back when I was in college, I had a buddy who joined the Peace Corps. I don’t know if that was a great idea. He wrote me letters in which diarrhea figured heavily, and he said the Senegalese felt that he should build their bridge (or whatever) singlehandedly, while they observed from comfy lawn chairs in the shade. But he was very game.

While his trip was in the planning stages, we went to an Ethiopian restaurant in Manhattan. They screwed his order up pretty badly, and we ended up waiting while things were put back the way they should be. And he told me this was the kind of thing that made travel interesting. When something goes wrong, you can whine and stamp your feet and make silly threats, or you can find the good that comes of it. Who knows? When they bring you the wrong dish, it might be something you like better than the right dish. We agreed that when you travel with another person, the smart thing was to avoid people who couldn’t tolerate surprises, because they made travel a painful experience.

Life is a journey. I suppose the principle applies to every day that we live. Don’t pair yourself up with a happiness-seeking mood torpedo.

The worst thing about pointless, self-indulgent complaining is that it makes people hate to be around you. And that makes you more bitter, so you complain more. Eventually, you decide you are the only correct person on earth, and that the reason no one invites you anywhere is that they are embarrassed by your perfection.

People don’t owe you their company. And if it brings them down and gives them ulcers, they have an affirmative obligation to avoid it.

It’s funny how Christianity improves my attitude. I expected it to drive me away from things like sexual sin and unforgiveness and so on, but it has wider effects than that. For a long time, I’ve thought that soldiers were a lot like Christians, and the more I progress, the more I think that is true. After all, the Bible calls God “the Lord of hosts,” and the word translated “hosts” means “armies.” Positive thinking. Responsibility. Unselfishness. Esprit de corps. These are all ideas that apply equally to the military and the church. No wonder soldiers make such fantastic Christians. It’s plug and play.

Probably a Right-Wing Terrorist

I just got back from my GAP (“God Answers Prayer”) group meeting, up at the church. My second visit today. I can’t tell you how wonderful it is to be included, and to meet the devoted men who help make the church work.

The pastor’s theme for tonight was the harmfulness of complaining. I told him earlier today that if I could not complain, I wouldn’t be able to say much at all. Anyway, it was great to listen to the ex-military guys talk about the zero-tolerance policy the service has toward complaining. When you hear things like that, it helps you realize how our military gets so much done, in spite of bureaucracy and confusion.

They talked about weather they had endured. One guy said he had seen temperatures of 166 degrees in Iraq. I assume that’s inside a vehicle or something. They both said that when the temperature drops at night, even though it’s still warm, you feel like you’re freezing. One said he had a picture of himself shivering in a sleeping bag, in front of a thermometer reading 110 degrees.

They’re not so tough. Sometimes, when I practiced law, the girls in the office forgot to buy half and half for my coffee. I had to use that awful powdered stuff. I don’t like to talk about it. It was horrible. But I keep that to myself because I’m a stoic.

I used to drive home from the courthouse or a club or a restaurant, get out of a two-seat convertible, and walk in past an empty garage. Tonight I drove home from a prayer meeting at church, got out of a four-wheel-drive diesel pickup with an eight-foot bed, and walked into the house carrying a Bible and a pistol, past a garage loaded with tools.

What a change. I feel like I’m arriving.

Church on Wednesday Morning

I had an interesting morning at church. I went up to have a meeting about the book I’m helping the pastor write. He hired a publicist for the church, and he put us together so we could talk about the project.

This lady is the daughter of a guy who had a huge church, and she knows all sorts of people in Christian publishing. She and the pastor are making plans for a whole series of books. Oddly, I’m working on the second one, before the others come out. In any case, it will be great to have someone else involved, who can put in the time the book needs. The pastor is just too busy, and it’s not really his thing, anyway. He already created the DVD series this book will be based on, so it makes sense to hand the writing, editing, and PR off to someone else.

I’m starting to feel like people there know who I am, and that I will be able to be a part of the operation, instead of wandering in, warming a chair, and going home. I hope my involvement continues to increase. It can be tough to do well in the secular world once you’ve sold out to God, so I need all the support I can get.

I went to lunch with the pastor and the PR lady, and one of the church leaders joined us, and I met a few other folks. I can never remember names, but I’m going to make an effort.

The church has a cafe. If you’ve been reading my blogs for a while, you can see the potential for hilarity here. I was telling them about my book and the horrors I have created. This weekend, I’ll be helping out in the cafe. They’ll probably have me emptying trash bags and cleaning up, but if I end up helping with the cooking, I’ll try not to give in to my natural instincts.

The food at the cafe looks really good. The pastor says people from the area drop in and eat. Heathens, I mean. Okay, not heathens. Necessarily. But not church members. I think he said it’s five bucks for a meal. Not bad.

The pastor says he wants a copy of my book. I guess I’ll give him one. After reading it, he may wonder if he picked the right guy to write Christian material. On the up side, I might make a good subject for a sermon.

I talked to him about gluttony. He agrees that it’s a sin, just like drunkenness, but you don’t hear much about it from preachers. Strange. Think about it. If you gluttonize consistently, you ruin your knees, your arteries, your heart, your pancreas, and maybe your brain. You can become diabetic and end up having your feet amputated. If you become obese, you annoy and inconvenience other people all the time. Have you ever lived with a food addict? You can’t have decent food or drink. They inhale it before you can get to it. You buy six tangerines on Monday, and on Tuesday, they’re all gone. You have to eat peanut butter sandwiches because the jelly disappears in two days. Gluttony causes a lot of problems. It’s not a trivial thing. How can a thing that makes you ugly, sick, uncomfortable, and annoying be trivial?

That being said, I do miss it. But I still enjoy food. I just enjoy it in human amounts.

There are demons around us. Christians get embarrassed when you mention them, but they surround us. Jesus and Paul talked about them all the time. I think every person has a certain number of resident demons who work to control his life and lead him to ruin. What else do they have to do? I don’t think you have to be foaming at the mouth and bending bars in your teeth to have one or more demons. I think addiction, which is less spectacular than foaming at the mouth, is generally demonic. It controls your life, against your will, like the Biblical demon that made the boy fall in the fire. And gluttony is addiction. If it were not, people would be able to control it. They can’t. Almost every person who diets down to normal size blows back up again. How is that different from cigarette or heroin addiction? You have a self-destructive habit you can’t control…isn’t that addiction?

Surely one demon will attract others. Isn’t that the way life works? If you have a serious problem you can’t control, you tend to get other problems later. If you can’t control what you eat, it will weaken your will in other areas, and sooner or later, you’re likely to have other moral problems. At least I think so.

It’s natural for Christians to think they have to have one area in their lives where they can let loose. But we’re not supposed to be natural. Shakespeare used the word “natural” to describe men who were controlled by their primitive urges. The idea that we have limited strength, and that we can only expect to win in certain areas of our lives, is probably wrong. I think we were probably intended to be hooked up to the Holy Spirit, in a way that gradually rids us of destructive urges and habits. Maybe we’re not supposed to be perfect, but I don’t think we’re supposed to dedicate portions of our lives to failure. Isn’t that what you do, when you decide it’s okay to smoke because you’ve quit taking drugs and drinking too much? How is it different if you decide you have to give up all your vices except for stuffing yourself? My diet used to work like this: 1500 calories per day, except for Saturday, which I called “fat day.” On that day, I ate everything I could carry home. If addiction is caused by hostile spirits, isn’t fat day appeasement? Isn’t appeasement just a way of delaying further aggression without preventing it? Look how well it worked in Israel.

I’m completely thrilled that I am not overeating these days, but I continue to hate fasting. It’s not as painful as it used to be, but it’s no joy, either. On the days when I fast, I look forward to that next meal. I don’t celebrate with a hoglike feast, but the first bite of whatever I eat comes as a great relief.

Life continues to improve. I assume an occasional fast is necessary to the process. I’ll live.

I think this is what Jesus meant by “free, indeed.” You can have your stomach stapled and send money to Dr. Phil, but only one power in the universe truly destroys addiction.

I could really go for a pie right now.

One More Machine to Nag and Belittle Me

Unbelievably, I got my truck’s stereo installed.

Having the correct instructions makes a world of difference. Once the Crutchfield guy explained everything, the receiver slid right in. After that, the challenge was to get various cables installed.

1. Rear-view camera. The cable was already tied to the frame, but I only got to the underside of the cab, because I couldn’t figure out how to get it through the floor. After I took the floor console up, I was able to remove the 4WD shifter, run the cable up through the hole, and reinstall the shifter. The cable is pretty well mashed against the body, but it works. I guess I could fabricate a rubber gasket kind of a thing with a channel for the cable.

2. USB. I found an old cable and ran it behind the dash into the glove compartment. My technique consisted of shoving the cable through a hole over and over, until it emerged where I could grab it and pull it into the glovebox. You can’t teach this kind of skill. It’s just a gift. Some people would use fish tape or grabby things on telescoping rods. Real men prefer trial and error.

3. GPS. I popped the trim off the forward side of the dash, rested the antenna on it, ran the cable under it, stored the vast majority of it in an empty speaker hole, and ran the end to the receiver. The antenna looks almost like it was born there.

I don’t quite get the rear-view camera. It points downward, to such a degree that if a person stood behind the truck, it would only show him from the knees down. But maybe this is good enough to keep me from ramming parked cars and posts.

The GPS is fun. I didn’t want it, but of course, I will use it constantly. The voice is named Rebecca. That’s actually the name on the screen. As I have often said, female voices are appropriate for GPS, because men are so used to women telling them what to do.

I still have to get front-door speakers, and I have to put the speaker and tweeter in the right rear door. And I have to put in a new dash panel. But that stuff is really easy.

I am all done with Crutchfield. They do a fairly good job, but for under a hundred bucks, Best Buy would have done this in two hours.

I learned a few things. First of all, if you can do a procedure in the house instead of your car, do it. It took me maybe forty minutes to connect the Clarion wiring adapter to the one from Crutchfield. If I had done that in the truck, I’d still be there, ready for a padded room. Second, get a bag of cable ties before you start. Third, pay someone else to install the stereo. Did I mention that already?

I have two extra screws now. I know where one of them goes. The other, I’ll have to think about. I hope it’s not the main screw that holds the truck together.

Learn from my mistakes. I never do, but somebody should.

No Screws

Looks like I owe the people at Crutchfield an apology. I said their instructions for taking apart my dashboard were wrong, but–heh–it turns out I missed a page. How about that? It was only a seventy-dollar mistake. A commenter said the part I busted was a tiny doodad available in auto parts stores, but it’s not, so I had to get a new panel. I could have crammed the old one back in there, broken, but the idea made me mad.

My other complaints, I stand beside.

Against my better judgment, I decided to give the stereo installation another shot. This time, the dash came apart correctly, and I didn’t destroy anything. But the instructions for fitting the receiver to the dash were wrong. The receiver came with something called a DIN sleeve, which is a sleeve of thin perforated metal. The receiver slides into it. The instructions said to beat on this thing until it gripped the adapter that mates the receiver to the truck, but for reasons even more boring than this blog entry has already become, that did not work. The receiver projected out too far.

I called them up to whine, and they pointed out that there were some other parts I could use. I might have realized this, had the receiver adaptor thing come with instructions instead of a tiny diagram with almost no text. It turns out this will work, IF I can find screws to attach the new parts to the receiver. So I have to go to the hardware store.

I was afraid I’d have to drill holes in the truck to mount the GPS antenna, but the Crutchfield tech said I could put it on my dashboard. That would be a whole lot better.

I guess the only thing that will cause a real problem is running the rear-view camera cable. I still haven’t found a place where I can get it into the cab from outside the truck. Maybe I can find a crack in the transmission-hump opening. If I can do that, forget the custom installation guy. I’m home-free.

This was an unbelievably stupid idea. I will never do this again.

After I move my old Alpine to my dad’s Explorer.

Car Stereo Fail

I thought Crutchfield was great because they gave me lots of free stuff with my new car stereo, and they helped me choose products, and they supplied all sorts of literature to help me do the installation.

I have changed my mind. I am feeling a wee bit crabby.

The adapters they sent for the speakers don’t fit. The speakers I got for the front doors are not the ones they should have recommended. The installation information is just plain wrong.

I had a horrible time putting speakers in the rear doors. One is still awaiting installation. I had to cut a hole in the door panel for a tweeter (not mentioned when I bought the speakers), and the bit jumped and gouged the panel. Nice.

They said I needed something called a trim panel tool to pull the center panel off my dashboard. They said this in the installation information they sent me. Not over the phone, when I ordered the stereo. When I could have told them to include the tool, you understand.

I decided to yank on the panel with my fingers. It popped out! Fantastic. But it was stuck at the bottom. I pulled a little more. One side came free. Then I realized I was breaking the little plastic tabs that were screwed into the dash. The tabs the installation instructions failed to mention.

Now I have to get a new panel. I’ll bet that’s fifty bucks.

Yes, I can make a forty-minute drive to the junkyard region of Miami, walk around in the broiling sun for three hours, and hope to find a used one for forty-five dollars. Somehow, it does not appeal to me.

I got a rear-view camera from Amazon. I installed it on the license plate frame, in about two minutes. Then I got under the truck and started running the cable to the cab, tying it to the frame with cable ties as I went. I got to the cab…and there was no place to insert the cable. I poked around under there for quite some time before I concluded that Dodge was against me installing my own camera.

I quit. I gave this the old college try. I called a stereo place, and they’re going to do this for me. It will cost a fortune, but I’ll have my stereo.

I’m not a total idiot with tools. If this was as easy as Crutchfield said it was, I’d be done already. But it’s not easy at all. If I gathered all the parts and did the job myself, it would take two days, eight hours a day, minimum. And I’d ruin the truck in the process.

The speakers, I can do. Thank God for that.

Why didn’t I learn from my last Crutchfield experience? I got a stereo for the T-bird, and the website said, “It Fits!” What it did not say was that the T-bird’s computer was integrated with the factory stereo. It’s nearly impossible to remove the old audio system. People who put new stereos in Thunderbirds routinely leave the old stereos connnected to the computers and put them in the trunk. The T-bird’s new stereo is still here, waiting to be installed. I’m donating it to my dad’s ancient Explorer.

What was I thinking when I decided to try Crutchfield again?

I can’t be too hard on myself. Circuit City is gone. Best Buy’s service is not good. Sound Advice went out of business. That means I have to go to a boutique to get a stereo and have it installed, unless I want it done really badly. I was hoping to avoid boutique prices.

Until I started looking for a new stereo, I didn’t realize Miami only had one major car-stereo retailer. That’s pathetic.

Try Bacteria

I took a bunch of Tobago seasoning peppers, pureed them, stirred in a spoonful of yogurt and a little pressed garlic, and put the mixture in a container on the kitchen counter. A smart person would have nuked them first to kill whatever exotic bacteria were clinging to them, but you know me. I smirk at death.

After a week or two of fermenting, they smelled fantastic. But I couldn’t figure out what to do with them. Today I plopped a load of this stuff on a sub, and it was fantastic. Much better than banana peppers.

I didn’t make this idea up. They do it in the islands. Some people leave it in the sun to rot.

It would be even better with Home Depot cayenne peppers.

Give it a shot.

Will Our Grandchildren Know What a Hurricane Is?

Dan from Madison is upset that I haven’t mocked the Global Warmers this year. Usually I put up a hurricane frequency chart and then gloat about the utter wimpiness of the season.

Here is the chart:

As you can see, it peaks and centers at September 10. This is October 3, and a rough guess, by eyeballing, says 3/4 of this year’s hurricane probability is gone.

I will try to be a nice person and not gloat, but I think I should remind everyone how certain the Gore groupies were that we were going to die in a wave of killer storms. There was no room for doubt. It was a sure thing. Then we had four weak seasons in a row. This year has been the weakest yet. It’s as if hurricanes are becoming extinct.

If they were wrong about the consequences of global warming, why would they be right about global warming itself? By the convoluted logic of the left, global warming (and chiggers and leprosy and the McKinley assassination) was somehow caused by the election of George Bush, whom they all hated. Anything that tended to discredit Bush got them excited, so global warming had them doing cartwheels. This means their opinions on global warming were so colored by bias that they were essentially worthless. If George Bush had been tied to waffles, naked liberals would have been out in the streets demanding laws banning them, and liberal scientists would have linked waffles to everything from trout infertility to Down Syndrome.

Now that I think about it, back in 2004, one candidate was tied to waffles. But it wasn’t Bush.

Man does all sorts of bad things, but he is not capable of changing the weather. Not yet. God is not ready to hand that power over to us. And judging by the hurricane situation, he seems bent on proving it.

Even if we could increase the temperature by a couple of degrees, we would simply be going back to a state that has existed within the last thousand years, and if my meager knowledge of history serves, it did not destroy all life on the planet. In fact, it extended growing seasons and made winter less miserable.

Often, what a person says depends on what his reward is. This is a good thing to keep in mind when you come across nutty arguments purporting to explain things that otherwise might be considered acts of God. Rational beings have an unlimited capacity to rationalize and deceive, and they often use these tools toward evil ends. The Bible tells us that toward the end of time, we will see earthquakes, famines, perversion, wars, and signs in the heavens. Weather anomalies fall in the last category. Someone is at work, trying to explain them away. And I don’t mean Al Gore.

Last night I found I had a new Robert Morris on the DVR. His show has been featuring a series on the Holy Spirit. Wonderful stuff. This guy seems to be right on the money. Last night he explained that the Pentecost phenomenon the disciples experienced after Christ’s ascension is for every Christian, even now. He dismantled the “it only happened once” argument.

I was a little sad while I watched it. He said something that occurred to me years ago: the first mass baptism of the Holy Spirit was presaged by the confusion of tongues in the story of the Tower of Babel. Jesus has a pattern of undoing bad things that happened in the past, such as the fall of man. In the tower story, man tried to make himself all-powerful by his own efforts, and the rewards were failure and disunity, and the disunity was imposed via linguistic barriers. In the Pentecost story, men submitted to God’s will in their quest for the power to serve, and they were united and empowered successfully, and the evidence was a new common language. The connection is obvious. I knew that a long time ago, but the information was of no use to anyone but me, because I didn’t do anything with it.

Some people claim the gift of tongues is exclusively for corporate worship, and that it is always accompanied by interpretation, but that’s an assumption. The Bible does not say that. Some say the fact that the foreigners who heard the disciples heard their own languages means that the gift of tongues always manifests itself in languages already known, but that, too, is an assumption, and it contradicts the references to “unknown tongues.” Jesus himself referred to the gift of tongues when he told the Samaritan woman at the well about “living water.” The first psalm mentions it, when it prophesies that believers will be like trees planted by rivers of water. The twenty-third psalm refers to the baptism of the Spirit, using oil as a symbol: “Thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.” I think Zechariah referred to tongues prophetically when he wrote about Zerubabbel (“seed of Babel”) having a big role in reforming Judaism. The seven-bowl menorah in the Holy of Holies, fueled by oil (symbolizing the Spirit) is a reference to the baptism of the Spirit.

The scriptures refer to tongues over and over, both explicitly and prophetically. The reason Christians fight it is that the enemy is terrified of the Holy Spirit. After all, the Holy Spirit is what enabled Samson to slaughter a thousand idolaters in one day. It teaches you what the scriptures mean. It frees you from habitual sin. It improves your character. It tells you the enemy’s secrets. The enemy would rather face weak Christians who are not connected to the power supply. Better yet, teach that weakness is righteousness and defeat is success. Teach that the baptism of the Holy Spirit is heresy. So when you are weak and you fail at what you were intended to do, you have the crazy idea that everything is going according to plan. Our successes are supposed to outnumber our defeats, by a huge margin. You may be martyred some day, but you’re not supposed to lose consistently, over the course of your life.

Anyway, a long time ago, a few things were revealed to me, and I was probably intended to go out and spread the news, like Robert Morris, but I left the church and wasted two decades walking in circles. When you don’t do what you’re asked to do, someone else gets to do it. I wonder how much better my life would have been. This guy has a magnificent church. The music team is beyond belief. He has a wonderful mission. I think he’s doing it right.

Age is Ruthless

Val’s dad is having health problems. A few years back, he was a strong septuagenarian. He was active. He worked at his welding. Now he’s having serious problems with arthritis and diabetes. He just can’t do what he used to do. I know how tough it is to see a father age.

You prayed for my sister, and things are going as well as they possibly could. Can you pray for Val’s dad, too? You might mention Val and his wife Maggie, too. This has not been an easy year for them.

I’m trying to drag them to church, because I know it works. Maybe this will be the weekend.

This is Not What a Leader Does

The four-year-long amateur hour at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue continues. We thought we had elected suave, surefooted Stefan, but in fact, it was plain old Steve Urkel. The guy whose life is a never-ending wedgie. Even prominent leftists have started complaining about the incompetence and inexperience of Obama and his staff, and the same liberal members of Congress who claimed his experience didn’t matter are now snubbing him right and left because his juvenile mistakes have wrecked his political capital.

He is living up to the sobriquet “Carter II” by involving himself in minutiae. Carter used to insist on deciding who got to use the White House tennis court; he made up the schedule while he should have been thinking about the country’s problems. Obama has flown to Denmark, at huge expense, to try to bring the Olympics to Chicago. Can you imagine George Bush insisting on handling something this unimportant? Oh, well. Once a bagman, always a bagman. When you build a career by flunkying for machine bosses, it’s probably not easy to stop running errands.

Where is the outrage over Obama’s third vacation? Every time George Bush left the White House grounds, the liberals at CNN, CBS, and the other mainstream outlets screeched about his penchant for vacations. He never took a vacation; he just moved his office from time to time. Hopefully, that is generally true of Obama as well. In any case, it didn’t matter to the Bush-era press.

Obama blew a king’s ransom on a trip to New York. He holed up in Martha’s Vineyard. Now he’s flying to Denmark for a trip which is clearly primarily recreational. And it’s only the beginning of October, in his first year as President! And the press doesn’t care, any more than they still care about mounting military deaths in Iraq, which they portrayed as a major crisis before the election.

It’s almost as if there were a TOTALLY HYPOCRITICAL DOUBLE STANDAND.

Almost.

It would be a tragedy if Obama seemed to succeed. Appearing to succeed while doing the wrong thing is worse than failure. It assures that you will continue doing the wrong thing in the future. So when I see Obama do something dumb and sure to fail, it encourages me. I want to see the US prosper because we behave responsibly and please God, not because we robbed our children’s piggy banks to pay for a heavily leveraged plateau in our slide toward weakness and defeat.

It’s remarkable that Obama and his blunderkind advisors thought the Olympics trip was a good idea. Several cities are vying for the games, so the odds that Obama will lose are high. If he had stayed home, no one would have imputed the loss to him, but now it will be an Obama failure. On top of that, the trip confirms his image as a lightweight. You would not send Ronald Reagan or Abraham Lincoln to beg for an Olympiad, any more than you would send them to pick up the Secretary of State’s dry cleaning. But Obama? It fits.

I’m guessing that none of Obama’s confidants, nerdy though they are, were members of their high school chess clubs. They are incapable of strategic thinking. That’s just swell, given that America is fighting two wars right now. I suppose it explains his decision to abandon missile protection for our loyal allies in Eastern Europe, at a time when Russia is resurging as an enemy and Iran is developing long-range nuclear weapons.

What Obama gaffe DOESN’T it explain? He alienates a new sector of his base every week. Doctors. Cop unions. Car unions. Jews. When health care craps out, he’ll alienate blacks. Prior to the election, the big media outlets actively suppressed negative coverage (even more than they do now), so Obama never learned to think ahead. When you live in a bubble, you need no immune system. Now that criticism is increasing, he has no one to protect him from his own fecklessness.

I don’t recall the press and the entertainment industry (same thing, really) doing much to help Carter, once he started circling the drain. SNL made his embarrassing health problems weekly fodder. Stories about the sad state of the country filled the airwaves.

While he was running, the press treated him like–wait for it–a messiah. I recall that clearly. They adored him. Then he became an embarrassment. Did the networks stand up for him? If so, I have no memory of it. Once Obama’s incompetence is established beyond dispute, he’ll fare no better. Sooner or later, we’ll see video of him smoking cigarettes. The liberal press will discover Bill Ayers and Tony Rezko. They’ll finally take notice of the other kooks he has hired. They’ll realize he’s unfair to Israel. These are my predictions.

Is he smoking cigarettes in our White House? He must be. He’s still addicted, and you don’t make the President stand outside when he has a nicotine fit. There must be ashtrays in the White House again! Either that, or he flicks the ashes on the floor. When did we last have ashtrays and cigarette butts in the White House? Was it under Ford? Nixon?

I always pray for him and his wife and the Bidens to humble themselves, acknowledge God (the real one, not the Jew-baiting Jeremiah Wright straw god), and start leading us in something resembling righteousness. I also wish he’d quit carrying that Hindu idol around and get rid of the big gold-plated one the Indians sent him. But an ego like Obama’s is tough to penetrate. And he does not admit fault. A leader takes responsibility for the things his underlings do. Obama throws them under the bus immediately. He does the same thing with his associates, like Wright and Blagojevich and Ayers and…well, I don’t want to make a long list. When Obama’s regime crumbles, one of the worst things about it will be listening to the whining and excuses.

He’s the Michael Jackson President. He surrounded himself with people who tell him he can do no wrong, and he believes them. Therefore his life is decadent, and he has no judgment. He does things no shrewd or mature person would do, and unless he changes, he will fail.

He’s in for a fall. And then we’re stuck with him for three more years. As anyone who lived under Carter during his humiliating tenure can tell you, a permanently hamstrung President is hard to live with. Pelosi and Reid will rule the free world, and our enemies will walk all over us.

God Hears

My sister’s cranial MRI was clean! I know people have been wondering. When I prayed, I felt by faith that it would be so, but it’s still a great relief. Thanks for all the prayers. I would have told you sooner, but I just found out. I told her my readers were praying, and she thanks you all.

After You Put Them in a Hydraulic Press

Okay, I just found out what “it fits” means to the folks at Crutchfield. It means the product you bought can be installed in your vehicle without using a plasma cutter, in a professional manner worthy of Jethro Bodine.

I got the speakers today, and I figured I’d put them in, since they would be easy. WRONG. For reasons too boring and complicated to mention, they were not right for my existing screw patterns. The adapters Crutchfield supplied worked for the front doors, but not the back. The Crutchfield guy I talked to said they didn’t actually look at the speakers when they decided whether they fit. They just go by outer dimensions. Swell.

It turned out Alpine supplied some adapters in the bottom of the box. They worked fine with the front speakers, and after modifying one with the milling machine–no joke–they can be used in the back. I now have two speakers installed, but no tweeters. They didn’t bother explaining that the tweeters were separate. I have to buy a 2″ hole saw and cut holes in the inner panels of my doors.

There are things in the box that must be crossovers. I assume it goes receiver-speaker-crossover-tweeter. If not, there will be explosions and fun.

What does installation cost? Sixty bucks? What a bargain. Seems that way now, anyhow.