Notice his Hostility Toward Government Employees!

Today Mike and I got to help my dad run his boat up the Miami River to the yard. It was a pleasant ride, tarnished–as usual–by the people who open and close the bridges. The fine person who has the incredibly demanding job of raising and lowering the South Miami Avenue bridge–working a total of perhaps forty minutes per shift–refused to even answer our hail. While I wait for these characters to get it in gear, I often think of the old story about Ted Turner, climbing his own mast just to punch a bridgetender in the face. I don’t know if it’s true. But I would certainly understand.

When we got to the Brickell Avenue bridge, which had a prominent sign saying morning openings were only restricted before 9 a.m., we were told we had to wait until 11. And we had arrived at 10:45. The bridgetender seemed very nice on the radio; maybe the insane unannounced restrictions weren’t her idea.

Anyway, we made it to the yard without incident.

Tonight Mike and I made pizza. I mean we BOTH made pizza. I picked up cheese and sauce during our Gordon Food Service mission yesterday, and tonight we put on a tour de force. I made a pie, and Mike made a second pie plus garlic rolls swimming in Costco olive oil. The cheese was GFS mozzarella/provolone blend. It was excellent. The pizzas were slightly different, but each was sublime in its own way. I felt pretty good about it, because Mike had had to attend a funeral during the afternoon, so I had to make all the dough on my own.

I bought an interesting product this week. Sourdough starter from King Arthur Flour. I created a bigger batch of starter from it, and today I put it in the dough. I only had about three hours for the pizza dough and one hour for the roll dough. It made the pizza dough noticeably better. From now on, it will be standard. I have read that it makes dough’s texture better, and that seems to be true.

I was relieved, because the last two pizzas I made were a little off. I still got it. You can’t touch this stuff at any Miami pizzeria I’ve been to. They’re nowhere near as good. Now that I think about it, even though I lived in New York, the best pizzerias I’ve known were in the northern half of this city. Weird. But I lived near Columbia University, and there were only two pizzerias in my area. I’m sure there were better offerings all over town. And on average, New York wins, hands down.

Mike and I will be going to church either tomorrow or Sunday. I’m all excited. As much as I’ve gotten from my renewed relationship with God, I have been utterly unable to pass that success on to anyone else. Maybe to some extent through my blog, and maybe through prayer, but not directly. Now I have someone who is completely open to it and eager to take a closer look.

I have the funniest idea about my machine tools. Remember how I developed an interesting in machining because I wanted to make a device to crack stone crab claws? I’m thinking I may manufacture a bunch of different cracking devices. All sorts of different designs. They run through my head at night. Electric ones. Ones with gears. Some with cams. I may do it. Although putting them on the web might make it impossible to patent them. I might come up with something that was so much fun to use, it would have commercial value. Let’s face it. Virtually all nutcrackers are garbage. I’m sure it’s fun building weird one-cylinder engines, which seems to be what every home machinist does, but that doesn’t appeal to me.

What am I going to do with that gallon can of hot fudge sauce?

Great Day

Mike and I spent the day running around. The mother of one of his employees died, and she’s Jewish, so you know what that means. A very prompt funeral. We had to run up to Delray to get Mike’s suit. We visited the Fort Lauderdale Gordon Food Supply, which beats the daylights out of the one here on Flagler Street. I took photos of some interesting goodies, and I’ll upload them eventually. After that we hit Sonny’s barbecue.

We talked a lot about our dysfunctional families, and I told him something that occurred to me this morning in the shower. As far as I can tell, families do not work without God, period. You may have some pieces of the puzzle: wealth, fame, looks, or maybe brains. Your kids may be healthy, and they may be achievers. Your marriage may last. But it won’t really work as a whole. There will be significant failure somewhere in the picture. There will be important problems you absolutely have no chance of fixing. I think the reason for this is the same reason we have physical pain. When you have physical pain, it tells you something is wrong. It tells you that you need to fix something. It can prevent you from making a problem worse. Maybe you need to have a tumor removed or a bone set. Without pain, you might not do what you need to do. The failures we experience here on earth tell us we need to turn to God. They tell us our lives do not work properly without him. And as you turn to him, the pain abates or disappears entirely or, very often, turns to joy and peace.

What kind of God would let you and your spouse and your kids and your siblings have peaceful, prosperous lives without him? It would be a disservice. It would prove he didn’t care.

Mike had a lot of insights into my family’s troubles, and I was glad to have his input. He seemed to benefit from what I had to say, too. We’re going to try to attend the Saturday evening service at my church. I told him God has been fixing my family, and I’m hoping he can see the same kind of healing in his own life.

In other news, the guy who sold me my lathe emailed. He’s been looking it over and running and cleaning it and getting it ready for shipping. He says it appears it has “seen very little use.” That’s exciting. I was puzzled at first, because it had sat in a prison for over forty years. I had assumed it had been used a lot in vocational training. Then I realized it might be difficult to get backward, hardheaded criminals to take advantage of a great opportunity to learn a lucrative trade. So maybe their stubbornness will cause me to receive a substantial benefit intended for them. The Bible says “the wealth of the sinner is laid up for the just.” The lathe sale would be a pretty blatant example of unteachable people ignoring a blessing, leaving it to pass into the hands of someone more open to God’s instruction. Not that I am calling myself just. I do think I’m trying harder than most convicts.

I bought a gallon can of hot fudge today, just because I could. Sometimes I think I have a very big screw loose.

Look Out

Mike is in town, so the overeating started last night. Someone please intervene.

Today we have a number of options. Costco. Gordon Food Supply. And he was so impressed with my trash pile mahogany boards, he wants to make one. Go figure. He also wants to bust out the motorcycles.

I’m trying to get him to hang out long enough to visit church.

With a reader’s help, I think I figured out what I need to do about my router fence. All I need is something that extends out from the back side of the Biesemeyer. The parallelism is outstanding, and the precision is hard to beat. I could add a DRO to the Biesemeyer system, too, or I could must mount a dial indicator and some sort of screw adjustment on the router part. Anyway, this should be very easy compared to the harder solutions I found, and it should be much cheaper than the expensive ones.

I also have 3,000 pistol primers on the way! Do you care? Probably not. But I’m ecstatic. These things have been hard to find. And these are Federals, which may solve the problems I’ve had with .357 ammunition failing to fire properly. Federals are soft, and the new spring in my 27-2 is weak, so this should be a good combination. I also broke down and got a chronograph. There is just no way to avoid it. I can’t keep putzing around, taking a face shield to the range and praying the first shot doesn’t blow my 1911 apart. That is not the right way to work up a load. And I would very much like to create loads for Wolf primers, because they’re dirt, DIRT cheap.

Mike wants to make a video teaching people how to make 10-minute pizza. We ought to do it. I’d pay ten bucks for something like that, wouldn’t you?

Life is sweet

The Router is Going DOWN

I have seen the bacon AK-47 and the heavy girl on American Idol. Thanks for sending the links.

I think I have the router problem beat. Yesterday someone at Sawmill Creek suggested a fence made by Pinnacle. It’s mounted on a ram that sits on a platform you clamp to the table. The ram is moved by a screw. You can make an adjustment of 0.001″, and the depth adjusts by up to a foot.

Hard to top that.

Because I’m getting into both woodworking and machining, I have noticed that there are a lot of machining ideas that woodworkers ought to try. The gadget mentioned above is similar to the y-travel on a milling machine table. It seems very obvious when you’ve seen a mill. Day before yesterday, I put a DRO on my planer. I can’t even describe how great it is. I never even glance at the old tape-measure scale; I can’t, because it’s covered up now. The DRO gives me thousandths, and an adjustment of 0.002″-0.003″ is no problem. I was doing it without thinking, the first time I used the DRO.

It turns out Wixey makes a DRO for my router lift. Gee, do you think that might be better than making crappy “gauges” out of scrap and counting turns on the router lift crank? It just might.

Mike will be in town tonight. I must prepare to grapple with my appetite. He’s in the mood for Cuban food. This is very bad.

Board I made from garbage pile mahogany:

It is now dead flat.

I am Considering an Exorcism

I got my box parts all ready to go today, and then I turned to the most dreaded machine in the garage. The router. This thing is possessed. And I knew I had to make it behave, in order to produce a decent box and avoid ruining all the preceding work.

I learned a lot. Mostly, I learned that anyone who tells you a stick with a screw through one end and a clamp on the other is a good router fence has been smoking too much pressure-treated sawdust.

One of the things that sets great tools apart from good tools is the ability to do repetitious jobs without driving you insane. The stick with a clamp is a good tool. To make ONE router cut. If you have to make the same cut over and over, at different intervals in the same piece of work, you might as well kill yourself. When you move the stick, the angle to the table changes, and if you’re using stop blocks, each one MOVES relative to the router bit.

If you’ve used a router, you know exactly what I mean. If not, go look at Lolcats.

The best kind of router fence moves at both ends, and it remains parallel to the front of the table when you move it. And you can adjust it with screws and dials, not rulers and tape measures and bits of wood that you use to bang it into place.

There’s a guy named Pat Warner who makes incredible router fences. He can adjust cuts to within a few thousandths, I think. I used to think he was nuts. Maybe he is, but he can do things with a router that I can’t, and there are things that would take me half an hour that he can do in three minutes.

I made LOTS of mistakes routing the compartments for the lathe tools. I can sort of cover them up in the final assembly, but the truth is, it’s time to man up and look for a decent router fence. This fumbling around is just idiotic. And I need to get a Harbor Freight digital caliper and cut it up and turn it into a depth gauge.

Today I wondered why they don’t make milling machines for wood. A router is just a crappy version of a milling machine. Why not go whole hog and hang it from a ram over a table? Then I realized…nobody wants a five-thousand-dollar router. Except maybe Pat Warner.

They make something similar to a milling machine. I think it’s called an overhand router. You can find it on the Grizzly site.

The table saw is the greatest invention in history. It does exactly what I want, and it does it easily. The router is vicious and unpredictable, and the only way I’m going to subdue it is through superior technology. The clamp and stick are not working out.

Keep This Quiet

Midway USA has Federal small pistol primers in stock.

My Skills Scare Me

I got ready to make the parts for my trivial 5″ x 7″ x 2″ tool box, and I felt I didn’t have a nice enough piece for a lid, so I took a really oddly shaped piece of mahogany and jointed and planed it down to 3/8″! There is no stopping me! Although I’m kind of starting to realize why people buy jointers instead of using sleds.

The table saw continues to be an amazement. Anything you want to cut, you just cut. Any angle. Any measurement. As long as it fits, the saw will do it with very little skill required.

The piece of mahogany I decided to try to use for a lid had a lot of little curly knots in it, like eddies in a pink mahogany stream. But it turned out a different piece was actually better suited for the top, so I turned the curly piece into a lid and two sides. I think it’s going to look incredibly good for something I just slapped together.

I needed a piece of 3/4″ mahogany for the inside of the box. I don’t have the technology to make dividers right now; I’d need a 1/8″ router bit for that. So I’m routing out cavities for the tools. That means the wood has to be thicker than the cavities are deep, and the cavities will run to a depth of 5/8″.

I didn’t feel like thicknessing a third board, so I took a piece of curly mahogany and glued it to a piece that’s sort of spalted, like the top. I’m hoping they’ll hold together. I guess I could cheat and run a few screws into it. The curly piece will be the box bottom. That will look pretty good.

I slotted the sides of the box so the bottom will fit into them. I got some burning in the bottoms of the slots. No idea what causes that. I thought it was from cutting too slow, but I’ve been trying to squirt pieces through the saw quickly. The burned bits won’t be visible, but it would be nice to know how I created them.

I was way too lazy to make appropriate jigs. Luckily the saw is so precise, I can get away with that. But if I want miter keys, I’ll have to give in and build something to hold the box as I run it over the saw. That might take ten whole minutes.

Now I have to get up and head-butt Maynard a few times. It’s intended purely as violence, but he mistakes it for affection, so everyone is happy.

Explain

I don’t understand what Drudge is saying in his headline right now. Why is Dennis Prager watching us?

Plus Uncle Ted, the Water Dog Whisperer

The mahogany I cut to size yesterday continues its mysterious dance. Sometimes it bows this way. Sometimes it bows that way. This morning when I got up, one piece was flat.

Here’s another interesting thing it does. This wood appears dry, but it still has some water in it, and it migrates to the lower side over time. Today I found discoloration on the bottom side of the wood. I turned it over, and in forty-five minutes or so, the discoloration was gone.

I don’t think any of this matters. The box I plan to make will be seven inches long, so the warping over the length of the box will amount to about a third of a millimeter. Close enough for government work.

Speaking of government work, are you as amused as I am by Obama’s stated intention to go easy on tax delinquents? Apparently, his plan is to find them and appoint them all to his cabinet. That’s what he’s done so far. Give this man credit; he may be presiding over the disintegration of the greatest nation on earth, but he is immensely entertaining.

Readers have pointed out that Obama’s dog–a Portuguese water dog–was a gift from Edward Kennedy. This is the kind of thing The Half Hour News Hour team would have made up, but for the fact that they had absolutely no talent. You can almost picture Ted, sitting on a dock with a Scotch in his hand (or both hands), trying to teach his special dog to retrieve a dummy from a submerged Oldsmobile.

Speaking of conservative disasters, I see that the GOP has shriveled to the point where Bob Shrum now feels entitled to make fun of it. Can you imagine anything worse? This man’s name has literally become a verb, synonymous with both “fail” and “cause to fail.” “My souffle looked good in the oven, but then it Shrummed.” “Ned Rice and Sandy Frank Shrummed the hopes of conservative humor.”

You know what this reminds me of? The Star Wars scene where Han Solo is about to be fed to the giant underground worm, and Jabba’s rat-like pet is talking smack to him. The rat is an incredibly pathetic creature in its own right, but it has Jabba backing it up, and Han Solo is such a mess, the rat can probably take him. So the rat feels entitled to ridicule. If Shrum is the rat, maybe Robert Gibbs is Jabba. I’m not sure.

Geez, what happened to us? Well, I know what happened. Big-tent, amoral secularism. We used to rout the enemy, and now they rout us. Man, I wish I could find a new country to move to. A place where religious conservatives are in charge. This is the difference between me and a liberal; they always want to stay where they are and ruin the countries they live in, instead of moving to leftist cesspools like France. Me, I’d rather just get out. I wish Texas would secede so I could apply for a homestead.

Yeah, that secular conservatism…that stuff is working out real good. Let’s keep it up! We’re on a roll! The last thing we want is to turn back to God and go back to the misery and failure of THE REAGAN YEARS.

The Bible says not to worry, because evil comes of it. Too bad the GOP never learned that. We got a little worried, and we decided the item we needed to get rid of was God. Now look at us.

Hey, you know that business about letting illegal aliens vote? It’s going to continue and expand. How do I know? One of the signs that a nation is cursed is that aliens within its borders will increase and gain power over it. Look it up.

Today at our weekly breakfast, I told my dad we should just send the welfare money directly to Mexico. Why make them move? It’s cheaper for everyone to just pay them where they are.

I need to join a new party. I cannot be part of an organization so degraded it can legitimately be ridiculed by the likes of Shrum.

More

When I wrote this, I didn’t know Rick Perry was flipping out and trying to declare Texas a sovereign nation. Where do I apply to join the militia? I can smoke pigs like nobody’s business, and I will bring a fine assortment of deadly firearms.

I Made Lumber!

I guess I must be the greatest tool expert who ever lived. I don’t see how there can be any doubt, because today I installed a WIXEY DIGITAL READOUT on my planer, and I used the planer to joint and thickness a mahogany board!

Bask in the light of my greatness, tiny unimportant people.

I ordered a set of indexable lathe tools. The case they came in was mashed. I had a bunch of mahogany I had rescued from a trash heap. I decided to make a new case. To do that, I had to have finished wood. To get that, I needed to install the readout that had been sitting on the dining room table since the Bush administration.

It’s pretty cool. I like digits better than the tape-measure-type scale that came with the planer.

I really enjoyed myself. I installed the readout, and then I planed a short board to 0.930″ (that was the thickness when it finally got flat on both sides). I squared one end of the board on the table saw, made a makeshift jig, and jointed the edges of the board. Then I squared the other end and resawed the board on the bandsaw. After that, I planed the results. Now I have two bookmatched mahogany boards. They’re gorgeous, too.

Problem: the wood is not really seasoned. It bowed a little when I resawed it. I don’t really care; I’m cutting it to such short lengths, the bowing will probably be too slight to amount to anything, and it’s just a crappy box to hold some tools.

I stuck it on a table with some junk mail under it and books on the ends of each board. Hopefully that will reduce the bowing.

Tomorrow I get to cut the pieces, rout out holes for the tools, and turn the results into a box. It should be a blast.

Things worked out well. You have to plane a board in order to install the DRO, and a DRO is a nice thing to have when you thickness a resawn piece of wood, so one project fed into the other.

That mahogany is going to be amazing. Some day. When it’s really ready.

No pictures. Too lazy.

More

One reason wood warps when you resaw it is water. Wet wood likes to be big. Dry wood likes to be small. The wood I resawed today was not very far into the seasoning process. Presumably, the inner parts were wetter than the outer. That would explain why it bowed away from the saw cut. The wet sides expanded when the saw released them, and that made them longer than the dry sides, so they took on a curve toward the dry.

I hoped that when I took it into the air conditioning, the wet sides would dry and contract, and the wood would start to straighten. And that is exactly what’s happening. One board is nearly straight now.

The question of the moment is, will it stop when it’s straight, or will it keep going until it bows in the other direction?

Arf

Couple of things.

As expected, the Obamas demonstrated remarkably bad taste in choosing their dog. They chose the Portuguese water dog, which, whatever its positive traits may be, is a remarkably ugly creature. I have never understood people who buy hairy dogs that gather drool, snot, and eye secretions in their face hair, like mops.

The shocking part? They chose a working breed.

If I had to have another dog, I think I’d look for a Shepherd mixed with something else to tone down the inbreeding and avoid the hip problems. And now that I think about it, those are good considerations to keep in mind when choosing a wife.

I don’t know why they bought a dog. Liberals and dogs don’t mix, except in the sense that liberals often have to be pried loose from the jaws of watchdogs and dogs belonging to the police. Liberals are supposed to own cats, who, like the people who vote for liberals, consume wealth and attention and in return, provide nothing but scorn.

Here’s a fact for people who think George Bush is dumb: he was smart enough to choose a dog that bit reporters whenever possible.

Second thing: I notice that a tennis player named Federer has married his “longtime girlfriend.” Ladies who choose to live with single men (every man who is not married is single), let me tell you what it means when your live-in boyfriend proposes after a period of years. It means he gave up and decided you were the best he could do. If he had thought you were a catch, he would have married you sooner, to keep someone else from getting you. Or it could mean he hates being with you less than he hates dating.

Felicitations. You are a reserve parachute. Who says romance is dead? Get down on your knees and thank Gaia no one better showed up.

Buffett Orders Chinese

Stocks are diving today because GM is going to declare bankruptcy. But I think they should be diving for another reason. A Drudge-linked article just exposed the tip of the iceberg that will probably sink America’s auto industry. Warren Buffett just bought 10% (as much as he was allowed) of Chinese automaker BYD.

I have been harping on this for quite some time. Liberals are worried that union workers in the US might be reduced to a mere 200% or so of the daily wage they’re actually worth, as a result of our domestic woes. That’s silly. Our real problem is the huge, highly motivated, highly capable Asian labor market, which is going to make cushy American union jobs a fond memory. If Obama were competent, and if our Congress were not dominated by effete liberal kooks, we might have some chance of fixing our internal problems. But how are we supposed to stop the Chinese and the Indians? We can’t. They’re smart, they work harder than us, they work cheaper than us, and there are over two billion of them. And protectionism, our only remaining weapon against them, has proven ineffective and destructive.

Take a look at this quotation about BYD’s founder, largest stockholder, and CEO:

Wang entered the automobile business in 2003 by buying a Chinese state-owned car company that was all but defunct. He knew very little about making cars but proved to be a quick study. In October a BYD sedan called the F3 became the bestselling sedan in China, topping well-known brands like the Volkswagen Jetta and Toyota (TM) Corolla.

Not exciting? Look again. He didn’t beat the incompetents at the Big Three. He beat TOYOTA, and our homegrown companies are to Toyota as Chuck Wepner was to Muhammad Ali. And he did it in half a decade. He also stomped Sony and Sanyo; he produces batteries cheaper than they can. Not cheaper than they do. Cheaper than they can. And the secret is cheap Chinese labor. China is the Wal-Mart of human beings. The supply is high, and the cost is low.

BYD has an electric car. Here, let me save myself the effort of paraphrasing:

BYD has also begun selling a plug-in electric car with a backup gasoline engine, a move putting it ahead of GM, Nissan, and Toyota. BYD’s plug-in, called the F3DM (for “dual mode”), goes farther on a single charge – 62 miles – than other electric vehicles and sells for about $22,000, less than the plug-in Prius and much-hyped Chevy Volt are expected to cost when they hit the market in late 2010. Put simply, this little-known upstart has accelerated ahead of its much bigger rivals in the race to build an affordable electric car.

Isn’t that special? The Big Three take eons to get anything to market, and when they do, it’s often disappointing. But this Chinese nobody appears to be able to put competent innovative products on showroom floors, and he has only been making cars–not just electric cars, but cars, period–since 2003.

What’s the quality like? It doesn’t matter. Two reasons. First, the price is so low, the quality would have to be abysmal to affect sales, and it’s probably not abysmal. Second, the quality is getting better. I don’t know that because I checked. I know it because I’ve seen the trend in Chinese products AND I’m not a moron.

It looks like we may be headed in the sad direction of electric cars and other depressing little poverty jalopies. We are told that these machines are “progressive” and “green,” but that’s leftist lipstick on a very big and smelly pig. In reality, they reflect our decline as a nation. They are symptoms of failure.

The Chinese ride bicycles to work. It’s green as hell, but that’s not why they do it. They can’t afford cars. We’re headed in that direction, and they’re headed in ours. The Chinese will upgrade from bicycles, and we’ll downgrade from real cars that provide safety, comfort, and jobs. So there is probably a bright future in BYD’s silly little half-cars. And if there isn’t, they can make ordinary cars and still beat us like rag dolls. There is no law that says they can only make nutty little Urkel vehicles. The Japanese started with econoboxes, and now they sell big belching land yachts.

The sense that I get when I look at the world is that God doesn’t bless the US the way he used to, but he continues to bless individual believers very powerfully. I continue to believe that our rebellion–our disgusting behavior and attitudes–have cost us our role as the world’s leader, and that we’re never going to get it back. China and India aren’t going away. Neither is Russia, which sabotages us and assists our enemies whenever possible. When I read stories like the BYD article, it confirms what I have suspected. It’s time for individuals to put God first and work to get his blessings, because the rising tide that used to lift all boats has disappeared. In the past, anyone could make it in the US. In the future, you’ll have to make it on your own merit.

I read another article recently which bolstered this notion. Some guy who used to be a stockbroker was delivering pizzas for a living. He had a huge house, and his income had been as high as $750,000 per year, and he was working for a pizzeria to feed his family. That’s a great example of what I’m talking about. I know utterly ordinary people who have gotten rich simply because the US was a prosperous country where even the most unimpressive human being could get lucky. Some of these people credited themselves; that’s human nature. But the fertile, friendly environment in which they worked is what made them. God provided that.

I’ll tell you what qualifications you need to be a stockbroker. None. You do not have to be a financial expert. You do not need an IQ above 90. You do not need any talents. You don’t need to be able to predict what the market will do. All you have to do is persuade other people to buy and sell securities. Period. Bottom line. End of story. That’s it. If you can sell a TV at Best Buy, you can be a stockbroker. It’s a fantastic job for someone who isn’t bright and doesn’t have a postgraduate degree. A chicken can do it. And jobs like that used to be a lot easier to come by, because of America’s wealth. Now they’re drying up, and people who thought they were successful because of their innate superiority are finding out how lucky they really were.

If you don’t believe any of this, get in your car and go talk to three brokers. While you’re there, ask how they did on the SAT. Give them a crossword puzzle, and tell them if they can do it in an hour, you’ll give them your retirement money. Good luck.

The pizza job is not the anomaly, here. The anomaly is an ordinary person with pizza-delivery-grade skills, making $750,000 a year in commissions. It’s so easy to be greatly blessed and not realize it.

I say the Chinese will dominate the US auto market within ten years. And the Big Three will be gone or bought out. I’ve been told I’m wrong, because the Japanese used to be in this same situation, and their labor costs went up. Are labor costs going to go up in China, where they have almost a billion and a half people who need work? Compared to the US, Taiwan has low labor costs, and they pay about eight times what the Chinese do. EIGHT. I think there’s still a lot of headroom in the Chinese cost structure. I’m no expert, but I don’t think Chinese manufacturing expenses are going to increase fast enough to help the Big Three. It didn’t happen in Taiwan, and China is in a much better situation.

Get ready for your first Chinese car. It’s coming.

Short One

Someone I know appears to be having some sort of psychological crisis. I hope some of you will take the time to pray for her and her marriage. Thanks.

Hindsight Can’t Save God’s Enemies

I will never understand why my family didn’t make a bigger fuss on Easter when I was a kid. For some reason, my sister and I always received chocolate rabbits and baskets of candy, and that was nice, but I don’t recall Easter having the kind of religious significance Christmas had. Even now, it sort of slips by me.

That’s a shame, because Easter, or more accurately, Passover, is what made Christianity possible. The crucifixion and resurrection are the events that made it unnecessary for human beings to pay for their sins.

I think the second psalm is a great thing to read on Easter, because it reveals the true nature of the events that took place over that fateful Passover, two thousand years ago. I do not mean this in an irreverent way: the crucifixion was a trick. Were it not for the terrible suffering and ugliness, you might almost compare it to a practical joke. Religious people tend to think of spirits as brilliant beings who know all sorts of things about the future, but the truth is, God has a long, long history of making fools of them. He encodes his plans in prophecy, and his enemies can’t figure out what it means, and then he brings things to pass, and his enemies are caught flatfooted. That’s what the second psalm is all about. It was written about a thousand years before Jesus, but it clearly describes not only the crucifixion and resurrection, but the fact that the spirits who rule this world will not understand it and will be unable to prevent it from ruining them. Take a look.

1 Why do the heathen rage, and the people imagine a vain thing?

2 The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the Lord, and against his anointed, saying,

3 Let us break their bands asunder, and cast away their cords from us.

4 He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh: the Lord shall have them in derision.

5 Then shall he speak unto them in his wrath, and vex them in his sore displeasure.

6 Yet have I set my king upon my holy hill of Zion.

7 I will declare the decree: the Lord hath said unto me, Thou art my Son; this day have I begotten thee.

8 Ask of me, and I shall give thee the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession.

9 Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron; thou shalt dash them in pieces like a potter’s vessel.

10 Be wise now therefore, O ye kings: be instructed, ye judges of the earth.

11 Serve the Lord with fear, and rejoice with trembling.

12 Kiss the Son, lest he be angry, and ye perish from the way, when his wrath is kindled but a little. Blessed are all they that put their trust in him.

The Bible often has multiple meanings woven into its text. For exampe, “kings of the earth” might refer to some of David’s enemies, and “his anointed” might refer to David. But to a Christian, it’s pretty clear that they also refer to the spirits that rule this world, and Jesus, respectively.

This isn’t just about nations that are hostile to David. It’s about spirits that oppose God. They fought Jesus, and they believed that by putting him to death, they were destroying his power. Instead, they magnified it and spread it to humanity, even beyond the Jews. To “the heathen” and “the uttermost parts of the earth.” “Holy hill of Zion” refers to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Jesus referred to his own body as God’s temple. He said, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” His body is where the kingdom of God, on earth, inside men, began.

This psalm ridicules the non-human powers that have the foolish pride to fight with God. It shows God can take their most promising plans and use them to skewer them. He can delude them into destroying themselves with their own weapons. And he can reveal it all in advance, to human beings to whom he has given ears to hear. The second psalm is a perfect picture of what God intended to do, if you’re able to perceive it.

I wish we would give up our ridiculous traditions of moving Easter away from Passover and referring to it by a disgusting pagan name. The parallels between the first Passover and the one that included the crucifixion are overwhelming, but we have obscured the connections by turning Easter into a bizarre day that celebrates rabbits that lay eggs. And if you can’t see Passover in Easter, you probably can’t see Shavuot in Pentecost, either.

Anyway, happy misplaced Passover. Whatever you choose to call it.

Disco Garage

I got the stereo shelf up. I had a couple of little shelves for the speakers, but it turned out there was room on the TV shelf. I realize this is not the best position for good sound, but these speakers reek. And they don’t seem to bother the TV.

It turns out the stereo’s tuner is on the part I destroyed and threw out, so it looks like I’ll be buying a cheap receiver. I can’t complain. So far I have about thirty bucks invested in this.