All Your Cheese are Belong to Us

How do you make one of these go away?

A website says they like cottage cheese. Guess I’ll avoid storing it on the deck.

Help

Let’s say you have a dishwasher that just crapped out. And the water line to the dishwasher is copper, and because the dishwasher has crapped out before, the line has become kinked from moving the dishwasher around. And you just lost a foot of tubing because a kink turned into a hole, and you had to cut the tube, roll it back on itself, and mash it shut with Vise Grips.

What do you use to put an extension on the tubing?

Copper is clearly crap. It will cause more problems. Can I join some kind of braided tubing to it? I’d like to use about six feet, so repair people will be able to move the dishwasher all they want in the future.

Time to Take Inventory

Sunday will be an inauspicious day. Tisha B’Av begins on Saturday at sundown.

I’ve written about it before. This is the Jewish holiday–funny word for it–which commemorates God’s pronouncement of a punishment on the Jews. On this day, He told them the generation that left Egypt with Moses would not enter the Promised Land. It’s also the date of the destruction of Solomon’s Temple in 586 B.C.E. and the date of the destruction of the second temple in 70 C.E. And it’s a day on which other great misfortunes have befallen the Jews. You might think of it as Shavuot in reverse. Shavuot, the holiday of the first fruits, commemorates the gift of the Torah. Jews believe that without the temple, they are not able to enter the presence of God and receive and spread His blessings, in the manner in which they did it while the temples were in use.

It’s a tough day for observant Jews. No food, no drink, no sex, no bathing. Apparently, you spend the whole day thinking about what happens to rebellious people. It’s “Scared Straight” for people who believe in God. That’s a good thing. Mercy goes a long way, but eventually, you come to the end of it. And the result is things like the Diaspora. Or maybe your nation loses its political and economic dominance, and you find yourself paying Muslims and socialists $140 for a barrel of oil. A third of your corn starts disappearing into a wasteful ethanol scam, and the price of milk doubles as a result. Then you find your countrymen voting for a shallow, inexperienced, egotistical man who carries a Hindu idol with him wherever he goes. Things like that happen.

People wonder why God permits suffering. Here’s one reason. As soon as the suffering stops, we start to forget Him.

I remember a funny scene in a Burt Reynolds movie. He decided to kill himself, so he swam out into the ocean. Then he changed his mind. And he started promising God things, in exchange for help reaching the shore. The promises got bigger and bigger as he got more worried. Money and service, basically. Then as he got closer to shore, they started shrinking. And when he got close to the beach, he reneged on all of his promises, claiming he was close enough to make it without God’s help.

I don’t know about you, but that principle certainly applies to me. Maybe not as blatantly, but I always find it easier to be a good Christian when I’m in trouble. Religious people are like mental patients who go off their pills as soon as they start to work. They think they’re not crazy after all. When things go well for religious people, we think maybe we’ve been going a little overboard with the prayer and obedience. And maybe we got all that good stuff because we’re smart and we worked hard. We don’t think about all the smart, hard-working people in the world who live in squalor and misery.

I don’t know about you, but I expect to feel pretty uneasy until Sunday night. I was distressed by the predictable Muslim nutcake video, threatening destruction at the Olympics, and the sensation is exacerbated by the dream I had about the melting stadium. I’m not a psychic or a prophet, and the things I dream about almost never happen, but all the same, I don’t like it.

If the Muslim extremists want jihad, the Chinese will be happy to accommodate them. The Chinese don’t fear the ACLU, swing voters, Janeane Garofalo, or tort lawyers. They are leftists who don’t have to be nice, because they’re in control. They have never heard of due process or habeas corpus. Attacking the Olympics would probably be a really bad idea. But if it weren’t for bad ideas, jihadis would not exist.

The other day I listened to Brother Andrew, and he made an interesting point. He said that whatever we may think about Muslims, they are very sincere about one thing: trying to find God. If you can convince a Muslim that Jesus will save him, you will have yourself a very serious and dedicated Christian. He believes we should be turning that to our advantage. Appeasement is stupid–it’s surrender by inches–but what if you can replace a poisonous ideology with a fruitful one? George Bush says we have to fight terrorists abroad, to avoid fighting them here. Brother Andrew says we have to evangelize them abroad, for the same purpose. I guess we ought to be having prayer meetings all over the US, asking God to help us reach the Muslims. Are we doing that? I haven’t seen any evidence. I’m sure some churches are doing it. I know we pray for lower gas prices.

To get back to Tisha B’Av, I believe I have to improve myself while things are going well, to avoid being driven to improve myself by misfortune. My guess is that this is the point of the holiday. It’s a good lesson, and you don’t have to be a Jew to benefit from it.

More

If you have an interest in promoting Christianity in Muslim nations–or in helping existing Christians facing Muslim persecution–you should take a look at this page at Open Doors USA. It’s Brother Andrew’s site. It lists suggested contributions and tells what they will do with the money.

New Trip to Gordon Food Service

I forced myself to get a haircut, and while I was beyond the cave mouth, I made a run to Gordon Food Service for some wonderful Stanislaus Super Dolce Pizza sauce. I bought two gallon cans, for $11.58. The price has gone up, but you can still top around a thousand pizzas for under twelve dollars. And it’s wonderful on pasta.

I checked the frozen cheesecake while I was there. Remember now, this is what you generally get when you order cheesecake in a restaurant. A few restaurants make their own cheesecake, some order from bakeries, and a lot buy pre-made cakes from food service companies. And guess what? They’re full of guar gum and Crisco. The ingredients are listed on the sides of the boxes you never get to see. So when I tell you I have the only good cheesecake recipe in the world, you ought to listen. It’s nearly true. Have you been to the Cheesecake Factory? Cheesecake is their main draw, and their version tastes like sweetened lithium grease.

It’s hard to believe how easy it is to eat well for cheap. They had huge slabs of spareribs for $1.59 per pound. It’s funny, but some of the best foods on earth are also among the cheapest.

I’m going to slop together a pizza, with Costco cheese and Super Dolce. I already know it will be great. I may chop up the provolone to see if I can get away with using four ounces. I’m concerned that by not using slices that totally cover the part-skim mozzarella, I’m inviting scorching. I guess I’ll find out.

Are you as creeped out by the Muslim threat to attack at the Olympics? It has been giving me the willies since yesterday. A few days back, I had a dream about the Olympics, in which a big translucent stadium sort of a thing was essentially melted by a terrorist attack. It glowed kind of a yellowish orange, and it sank inward from the top.

These guys are like psoriasis. They never go away.

More

Now I’m more creeped out than ever. I just took a look at the National Stadium in Beijing, and it sure looks like what I saw in the dream. Although I think the stadium in the dream had translucent sides, sort of like the swimming stadium.

Anyway, I am really tired of videos from Islamist nuts.

I Know how Ford Prefect Felt

I have discovered that I was insane to think I could find a spotting scope that would enable me to see .17 HMR holes in a target 300 yards away. That’s a bummer. I guess this is why people shoot prairie dogs. They’re like little furry Shoot-N-Cs. They’re a certain size before you shoot them, and then they expand and maybe cartwheel on impact, confirming your accuracy. That’s decent of them.

Trail Glades is only a hundred yards long, and they have no prairie dogs. However they do have iguanas. I was shooting a few weeks back, and I saw motion in front of me, and when I looked down, a very disturbed ten-inch-long iguana was looking up at me from a position between me and my target. He took off before anyone could nail him. Which was a good thing, because he wasn’t even big enough to make a decent corn dog.

I am still waiting to see a python out there.

While I was looking at scopes, I discovered something else. Some scopes are actually telescopes. Yes, I realize that any spotting scope is technically a telescope. But some models are sold to amateur astronomers (and perverts) as well as shooters. Naturally, I ended up looking at telescopes.

I can’t believe how they’ve changed. For a relatively low price, you can get a telescope that will allow you to see Jupiter’s stripes.

Looking at telescopes made me sad. It made me miss my mother. When I was a kid, she bought me a Tasco refractor. I believe this was not too long before the Comet Kohoutek fizzle. I used to set it up in my backyard, and I looked at Jupiter and Saturn and Venus and the moon. She would come out and sit in a patio chair and smoke Viceroys and look at the things I found. She really enjoyed that. It’s kind of neat to see for yourself that Saturn really has those funny rings. My dad was not big on spending time with kids, and he spent way too much time in the house, watching TV. But my mother had a wonderful natural curiosity, which she probably learned from her father.

Soon after I got my telescope, Mike decided he had to have one, too. His parents got him one, and we used to take our telescopes down to the bay and look at boats and islands and Miami Beach.

So now I want a telescope. I’m not going to buy one, but I want one. It would cost about four hundred bucks, and I would use it twice.

I have no idea what happened to my telescope. I guess it disappeared along with my oil paints. When you come from a broken home, you lose a lot of stuff stable families manage to keep. There is a lot of moving around, and every time, something gets lost or stolen, or there just isn’t room for it.

The problem with amateur astronomy, as I see it, is that there are about five things up there you can hope to get a good look at, and once you’ve seen them, you’ve seen them. They would cost me eighty dollars apiece. That’s a bit steep.

I rooted around on the web for amateur astronomy photos. Mostly, they’re not great. The resolution is not high. But some are interesting. It’s possible to take shots of the international space station as it crosses in front of the moon and the sun. That makes for some fun photos. Here’s a space station shot, if you want to see what I mean.

Am I the only one who finds space frustrating? When I was a kid, they used to wheel TVs into school classrooms so we could see live video from Apollo missions. Then the shuttle was interesting for a while, and then the government decided to cancel the program. I think it’s because we realized there was no way we were going anywhere else. Mars, maybe, but if we want to go farther than that, we’re going to have to make discoveries that change our understanding of physics considerably. If we could travel at the speed of light, it would still take over eight years to visit the nearest star and return, and it’s not like we could land there and look around. Maybe I’m wrong; do we know if Proxima Centauri has planets?

We realized we were not going to be getting phasers and transporters any time soon, and we were not going to get to shoot Klingons with our photon torpedoes. That had to suck a lot of the wind out of the space program’s sails. Even if it was solar wind.

Frontiers used to be much less intimidating. Once man learned how to sail, we were able to go just about anywhere. Scholars claim the Vikings and the Chinese made it across the Atlantic before Columbus. Whether they did or not, we were sailing all over the Old World many centuries ago. The Apostle Paul had no trouble getting from Israel to Italy and maybe Spain. We figured out how to travel anywhere on the planet, and then we managed to get into space, and then we landed on the moon. And then we looked past the moon and realized we had reached a point of very sharply diminishing returns. We were at the edge of a very deep moat. It’s hard to get excited about spending a big percentage of your tax revenues to go to a couple of crummy little planets from which you can bring back nothing of value.

It’s not breaking out of Alcatraz that kills you. It’s the swim to San Francisco. That pretty much describes how space travel works, if Proxima Centauri is San Francisco.

Maybe we have reached a point where practical efforts are of much less use than theoretical research. If we study and improve physics long enough, maybe an answer will come to us, and after that, building the means will start to make sense. But we aren’t going to get anywhere shooting comparatively slow rockets up there over and over. I wonder how much energy it takes to push a ship eight light years, within a human lifetime. For all I know, it requires a chunk of fuel the size of the earth. Maybe God has provided a key, and we can find it if we look long enough and hard enough.

In any case, I guess I can forget spotting my own shots at 300 yards.

So to Speak

Sometimes I’m glad I have a scientific background, because I can help people with scientifical questions.

My answer to this one is in Agent Bedhead’s comments.

Sorry

One of the hardest things about being a Christian is learning to derive satisfaction from misfortune. Sometimes we are called on to do that. I was listening to Brother Andrew last night, and although I don’t remember exactly what he said, he pointed out that persecution is normal, and that we are told to be glad when it happens, because we will be rewarded for it. I suppose that principle applies to all types of mistreatment. When someone does you wrong or lets you down, and you end up holding the bag, you have to remember that it’s best to take one for the team instead of flipping out or looking for payback, and you have to remember that what has happened is actually a blessing and an opportunity, provided you handle it right.

Sometimes I manage to react the right way, and sometimes I don’t. Okay, a LOT of times, I don’t. But I’m more conscious of my obligation than I used to be, so I suppose things will improve.

This is a prime example of what is meant by “walking in faith.” Christianity calls on us to do things that are counterintuitive and appear counterproductive, but if God is real, He must be watching, and surely He is going to back us up and watch over us. That’s what Brother Andrew believed when he drove his VW into communist countries. There is faith of the mind, and then there is faith expressed in action, and if I understand things right, the latter is much better. It’s what enabled Abraham to hold a knife to the throat of the only son he had had by his one true love–the son through whom the promises of God had to be fulfilled–whom she bore, though infertile, when she was about 90.

How did I get off on this tangent? Might as well run with it.

There are so many counterintuitive obligations in Christianity. You have to give generously to strangers, which is something most unbelievers would consider irresponsible. You have to honor your parents, no matter how awful or how wrong they may be. In order to fully live, you have to count yourself dead to the world. You have to turn down opportunities other people would kill for. So often, you will be asked to do things which would be absolutely crazy, if not for the presumptions that God is there, and that He’ll make it work out.

I experienced this a long time ago, when I went to Israel. Got off the plane on a Friday. No idea how to get to the kibbutz where I thought Aaron was staying. A cab driver offered me a ride, and I hopped right in. He fed me some nonsense about how it was impossible to get a bus on Friday, and he said he would have to drive me to the kibbutz for about sixty bucks. And we would have to go convert some money first. Fine. I had this idea that God wanted me there, so I didn’t worry. We talked as he drove, and I told him how excited I was to be in Israel, and he had an attack of conscience, took me back to Tel Aviv, and put me on a bus for Afula.

I got to the kibbutz. Aaron was gone. It was Friday afternoon. I had nowhere to stay. Now what? They said they had a volunteer shack with an empty bed. So I got free room and board for the night, and I roomed with a guy from Brooklyn who was making aliyah. This guy had completely thrown away his life in New York, so he could become an Israeli citizen and be rewarded with two years in the IDF. I had a great time getting to know him.

Went to Jerusalem. Found Aaron’s shul. Surprised him while he was davening in his Clockwork Orange Purim outfit. Got to join in the Purim festivities. How many Gentiles get to do that? Found a hostel. Went to Tel Aviv and checked in with the Kibbutz Aliyah people–the ones who placed volunteers. Got a spot at a great kibbutz, right next door to the one where Aaron had stayed.

I just didn’t worry, and although I was an even worse Christian than I am now, things worked out and worked out and worked out. I suppose I should have kept it up when I got home. Faith has a kind of momentum to it. If you keep exercising it, it’s not hard to keep it working, but if you stop for a while, it’s hard to start up again. It’s probably easier to go on two missions with no break, than it is to do it with a big hiatus where you sit by the pool and rest up and forget what living by faith was like.

I can’t believe I’ve written all this. I was trying to write a short introduction to a topic, and that topic is persecution. While I was Googling around last night, I came across a site about the persecution of Christians. I thought I should link to it; you might want to see how Christians are being mistreated in other countries. The site is called Persecution.org, and you can probably guess the URL. Coincidentally, a reader emailed me about another site, which is called Persecution.com. It belongs to an organization that smuggles Bibles. I don’t know how reputable it is, but you can always check Charitywatch and Charity Navigator and Wikipedia. If there is anything wrong with a Christian nonprofit, you better believe a liberal will post it on Wikipedia.

As long as I’m rambling, I may as well mention one of the experiences that makes it impossible for me to give up my beliefs. I guess you’ll think I’m nuts, but if you’ve been reading this blog for more than a week and you DON’T think I’m nuts, you haven’t been paying attention.

It was January or February of the year after I went to Israel. I had college friends in Milwaukee. I was staying with my grandparents in Kentucky while I worked at a bar and tried to find a real job. My friends invited me to Milwaukee for a few days of drunkenness, and I snapped at the bait. I got in the ’70 two-and-a-quarter convertible and hit the road. Spent the whole time unbelievably drunk and enjoyed myself. That’s how I was.

I started driving home, over the frozen highways. I believe I was somewhere near Indianapolis when it happened. I had a sensation which was consistent with what I later heard about panic attacks. For no reason whatsoever, a feeling came over me, and I was absolutely positive I was going to die that day. I wasn’t depressed. I was looking forward to traveling. But I had this feeling anyway. I knew I was going to die, more surely than I knew anything else in the world. So I pulled over to pray.

The craziest thing happened. While I was praying, something got in the car with me. Something I could not see. Suddenly, it was on the front seat beside me, in the middle of the seat. It was not inside me; it was very clear that it was just to my right. I could have put my hand within the area it filled and known when my hand was inside it. It was full of love and assurance and peace and warmth. It was a person. It had come to defend me. And while it was there, I realized I was going to be all right. While this person was with me, trouble could not be present, and I could not be harmed. That sums it up.

I have never been able to explain it. I can’t explain why I got upset to begin with. I don’t know why my problem was so important that it justified a manifestation like this. Was I really going to die? I had no reason to think so, and I knew that at the time, even while the feeling had me in its grip.

Afterward, I had the feeling that this was a visit from Jesus Himself. I don’t know why I had that impression. I suppose it could have been explained by an angel or the Holy Spirit, but that isn’t how it seemed to me, and I can’t tell you why.

It didn’t change my life instantly; this wasn’t a Spielberg movie. I didn’t swear off drinking. The visitor didn’t heal my warts or tell me the name of the next Pope. It just came and helped, and I went on with my life. The great value of the experience wasn’t that it suddenly made me a perfect Christian, or that it convinced me that I needed to change. The value was that I had one more inescapable peg to hang my faith on.

Experiences like this are why I think of myself as a prisoner of faith. They explain why I have no patience with people who make intellectual arguments, claiming they prove God doesn’t exist. Don’t even talk to me about it. I just don’t want to hear it. You might as well tell me my shoes don’t exist. People have called me dismissive. Well, if you want to see “dismissive,” try to hand me a stale argument you heard from some smart aleck atheist professor when you were in college. Don’t even waste my time. I may not be a great Christian, but I’m not an idiot, either. “There is suffering in the world, and God is supposed to be all-powerful, and God is supposed to be good, so how can He exist?” You know what? I will ask Him when I see Him. Right now, I don’t care in the slightest, and I am not impressed by the question. It’s not my problem. And when you waste your time trying to prove God doesn’t exist, you are only making trouble for yourself and your family.

Maybe I shouldn’t write about Christianity. Aaron says a man shouldn’t be a rabbi unless he has reached a certain age and had children. There is no way I would hold myself out as an example for anyone to follow. I am not an authority. I am not a scholar. I am sure I would not be a good role model. Still, as long as no one thinks more of me than they should, I think relating my experiences can be helpful.

That’s all I feel like saying. Take it as you will.

Go Look

A reader has gone and started a blog. You don’t know what you’re asking for, dude! But welcome to the fraternity.

For your reading pleasure…Through a Glass, Darkly.

Choices Make for Headaches

Here’s a question for the gun nerds. I think I’ll post it on the Manly Grub forum, too.

How much magnification do you need to be able to see .17 HMR holes in a target 300 yards away?

I was told 10x is all I need, but I would like to avoid using a spotting scope, in the very unlikely event that I am lucky enough to get to shoot at 300 yards.

I have a cheap BSA spotting scope, and I can barely see bullet holes at 100 yards. I’m better off looking through my rifle scope.

Another thing: would it be crazy to put a Burris Fullfield II 4.5-14x on a .17 HMR rifle? They don’t have anything between 9 and 14, so 9 and 14 are the choices. I like my current Fullfield II, which goes up to 9. The 4.5-14x costs about as much as the rifle.

I Feel Like Lot

I made another Costco-cheese pizza yesterday. Blogged it at Manly Grub. I have no complaints. As far as I can tell, their shredded mozzarella is fine, apart from being part-skim. If you like part-skim, there’s nothing wrong with it at all. My one complaint is that the provolone is sliced a little thick. I used a single layer on top of the mozzarella, and I still got some oiling off. This is not exactly the end of the world, but I think the provolone would be better if you could cover a pizza with four ounces (four slices) instead of six.

In any case, the mozzarella is a good buy. If you have to get thin provolone somewhere else, you’re still saving money because the mozzarella is so cheap.

Here’s something that would be fun. Make a pie, add six ounces of mozzarella, and then add 4-6 ounces of very thinly sliced Swiss or Jarlsberg.

I can’t quite get used to Bonta sauce. It’s good, but Super Dolce is fifteen minutes away by car, and to me, it’s better.

People are still giving me comments on rifle scope choices. I have decided the best thing is to get a .22 with peep sights and practice at 50 yards. Once I feel like I can shoot a rifle, I’ll start worrying about the scoped guns.

A reader suggested .17 HMR, which is a fairly inexpensive caliber. The guns cost about what a .22 does, and the ammunition runs around ten bucks for 50 rounds.

I don’t understand ballistics at all. I don’t understand why some calibers are more accurate than others. You would think that if a caliber had accuracy problems, the people who design the ammunition and barrels would fix it, but I guess it doesn’t work that way, because some calibers shoot better than others. That is the situation with .17 HMR and .22 LR. Supposedly you can shoot the toes off a fly with a scoped .17 HMR, and you can actually kill vermin at three hundred yards. I’m starting to think a .17 HMR rifle might be a good move, once I feel good about the way I shoot with open sights.

In connection with this caliber, I found what may be the greatest website in the universe. I am referring to Varmint Al’s. This guy shoots pest animals for money, and he has some crazy gear. He lives in Northern California, where they have a ground squirrel problem, and ranchers pay him to go out and pop ground squirrels on their property. He’s also a machinist, and he has all sorts of skills. He seems to like the .17 HMR a whole lot. You can go to the site and see photos of his many victims.

Last night I tried to find Brother Andrew’s book, God’s Smuggler. The B&N site said a local store had it, but they were wrong. I tried another store, and of course, they didn’t have it either. But if I had wanted books on witchcraft and idolatry, or if I had wanted books by shiny-haired, disappointing televangelists, I would have been all set. They had plenty.

It’s peculiar, but it seems like bookstores down here really push the occult stuff. For years, I’ve noticed that they tend to put it on the eye-level display areas behind the checkout counter. And the kids they hire always seem to be creepy little Goths. Am I the only one who has noticed this?

The second store had Corrie ten Boom, so that’s good.

I took a look at The Screwtape Letters. I don’t think it’s for me. It just doesn’t speak to me. It seems like it’s about an intellectual approach to Christianity, whereas I see Christianity as a matter of faith, character, and emotion. I’ve had certain types of experiences, and I want guidance from other people who have been down the same road. I don’t see how a completely fictional book could serve that purpose. When religious writing becomes too theoretical, it loses me. Even Christians can be effete. I want to hear about things that have worked in practice, in the real world. A real-life example is worth more to me than a library full of theory.

I had to order God’s Smuggler online. I wonder if the US is becoming a country where you can get any kind of porn you want locally, but you have to have a computer to find religious instruction.

A reader sent me a link to some downloadable sermons, and I listened to a Baptist preacher who said he had slowly been squeezed out of the public eye. When he was young, people used to ask him to pray at public functions, but the invitations dropped off with time, and people even turned down the free use of a building belonging to his church, because he refused to cover up the scripture on the walls. In the sermon, he flatly stated that America isn’t a Christian nation any more. Man, that is scary. God made us great, and he can take it all away. It’s strange to realize that the United States needs evangelism. This is one reason I want to move to a nice backward area where you can have a flag in front of your house and go to a church with a heterosexual pastor. Maybe that’s wrong; maybe the proper thing to do is to try to improve the area where you live. But I don’t like being in a place where people are beginning to see Christians as evil. If things continue to deteriorate, I can see us winding up a persecuted minority within 25 years, at least in some areas.

Can Anything Good Come From the Internet?

The other day I asked for book recommendations, and someone mentioned Brother Andrew. I got a ton of good recommendations, and this was just one of them. I’m checking him out online, and I plan to see if I can find his biggest book, God’s Smuggler, locally.

I know almost nothing about this man. People suggested I read his books because I said I enjoyed Corrie ten Boom so much. His story is somewhat similar. He was born in Holland, and he converted to Christianity while recuperating from a war wound. Then he dedicated his life to spreading the Gospel. He is famous for smuggling Bibles into countries where Christian materials were banned. He used to drive through customs checkpoints with Bibles on the seat beside him, in open view, and God saw to it that he wasn’t hindered. Wonderful stuff. I can’t wait to take a look at it. It’s easy to read the Bible, and it’s easy to pray, and it’s easy to go to church. In my view, from what little experience I have as a serious Christian, the thing that divides your life between real Christianity and phoning it in is proving you trust God, by your actions. When you’re not doing this, you’re really almost dormant. When you are doing it, God seems to come alive. Obviously, that’s a trick of perspective. It’s like saying the world seems brighter when you open your eyes. But it’s true.

While Googling Brother Andrew, I just found an exciting website. It’s exciting because it deals with an issue that has been bothering me. I gripe a lot about the way Muslims behave these days, and I support the war on terror. But I never get around to mentioning something else that has been on my mind. These people need evangelism. They think they’re doing right; they are completely lost. They are being used. We have to fight them militarily, but hard as it may be to say, we should also be trying to help them out of their ignorance. I believe that, but I have done virtually nothing about it. And I am not alone, among conservatives. Maybe this is a sort of Achilles heel for us; it’s so easy to talk about nuking them and turning their cities to rubble that we may have forgotten we are talking about human beings. The leftist approach of unconditional forgiveness, appeasement, and self-blame is completely wrong. But Christians should be reaching out to these people. The terrible obstacles that have been thrown up should be a clue that this is something the enemy really doesn’t want us doing, and that it will have a powerful effect.

It turns out that Brother Andrew has a website called Secret Believers. I’ll bet a lot of you knew about it way before I did. It’s a site that helps believers in Muslim countries. They can’t get up on Sunday morning and go to church, but maybe they can use the Internet to help them find their way. This is fantastic. Things like this redeem the Internet. They almost make up for the constant flood of porn.

According to Charity Navigator, almost 80% of donations to Open Doors, the parent organization for Secret Believers, goes to programs. Not administration or fundraising. That’s pretty good. A really efficient charity will be in the high 80s.

I guess people wonder why I have been drawn back to my faith. Why I say I can’t get away from it. I generally keep that kind of information private, largely because I have never succeeded in convincing a single person that God existed. I really don’t have the gift, and I have found sharing my experiences with unbelievers to be a colossal waste of time. But I am getting older, and I care less and less what people think, so I have started to feel more willing to talk about reasons why I believe. I can’t pin it on one or two things. It’s a big three-dimensional matrix of facts and observations, and when you add them together, the sum is faith. It amounts to proof.

I was thinking about one of the reasons yesterday. Back when my mother was alive, she dealt with a person who had become delusional due to drug abuse. And this person was in my mother’s house. And this person hallucinated. Some of my memories of this are a little fuzzy, but as I recall, this person saw little beings on a TV screen, communicating with her and doing various things. She had names for them and so on. It was a complex hallucination. Maybe “hallucination” is the wrong word, since it implies the perception of something that isn’t real. Later, away from the TV, she claimed they were trying to contact her using the phone wires. By making little noises. The phones were on the hook, you understand. But this person heard the noises.

My mother told me about that not too long after it happened. But much, much later, she admitted something to me. She said that when this person claimed the beings were trying to contact her from the phone wires, she was in the same room. And she heard their voices, too. Coming from the phone wires.

It probably doesn’t mean much to you, but you don’t know my mother. She was an honest woman, and she didn’t make up stories to get attention. She was clearly reluctant to let anyone know about it.

That’s just one of many pieces of the matrix. One of the few that don’t come from my personal experience. If it were true, would it prove God existed? No, but it is consistent with the notion that there are evil beings assigned to certain families, to vex, separate, and destroy. I think my family has always had more than its share. When I was very young, I used to wake in the middle of the night and see hideous creatures crawling over the bed and across the ceiling and up and down the walls, and I have never been totally convinced they weren’t real.

One nice thing about hearing things like this from me is that you are reading the words of a person who has absolutely nothing to gain from this. I have no yacht to maintain. No pink silk suits. No private jet. No giant church with forty-foot ceilings. No airtime bills to pay. I will not lay hands on you. I do not want to send you a free book in exchange for a love gift. I may be the worst Christian in my entire zip code. In an odd way, maybe that makes me more credible.

Anyway, Secret Believers looks very interesting. If you know anything about it, let me know. It’s hard to imagine a better cause to give money to.

More

Here’s a link to some mp3s of Brother Andrew’s sermons. I’m listening to “Unhindered.” Very good, so far. Funny, he hasn’t said anything about me sending him a thousand dollars and God making me rich as a reward.

So Sorry

While I should have been doing something else, I happened to end up reading about Mount Everest. I think it happened because a headline about the recent K2 disaster caught my eye.

K2 is in Pakistan. It’s the world’s second-highest mountain, but it’s harder to climb than Everest. One reason is that the surrounding terrain is farther from the summit. I guess that makes sense. You could have a plain at 25,000 feet and then a 4,000-foot climb, and it would be easier than climbing to 28,000 feet from 5,000.

I’m always horrified when I read about mountaineering. I hate the cold. I’m not in love with heights. I can’t imagine deliberately injecting myself into an environment where, if something goes wrong, I could lose my fingers and toes. Apart from that, it looks like a filthy business. How do you wash your hands at 20,000 feet? When you relieve yourself, do you just keep the residue on your hands and gloves until you get home? Probably. And what if you’re taking a popular route, like one of the more touristy Everest paths? People bag their waste these days, but that wasn’t always true. There must be a lot of frozen filth up there.

Another type of trailside debris that would be troubling: frozen bodies. There are about 120 dead bodies up there. They’re heavy, so they’re not easy to bring down. And some can’t be found. One of those is a guy I went to high school with. I was told that he didn’t listen when they told him to stay with the sherpas. Wandered off and presumably fell into a crevasse. After what I’ve seen about this place, well, first of all, I wouldn’t go. But hypothetically, if I were there, you better believe I’d treat every word that fell from my guides’ lips as though it were gospel. Maybe Everest seemed safe to him because thousands of tourists had been to the top. On the other hand, some people just don’t like taking advice. Maybe the same thing that makes you risk your life on a frozen mountain will also drive you to ignore safety warnings. A few added risks make for a better story when you get home.

You never see the bodies when you see Everest on TV or in a magazine, but various websites say some of them are right on the trails and that you have to step over them to get to the top. Imagine what it has to be like for people who know them and who continue to climb. Imagine going to work every day and seeing a dead co-worker sitting in his chair as you walk to your office. And the families! It has to be very unpleasant, knowing that tourists are parading past the stiff, dried-out bodies of your loved ones every year.

I just read about an Austrian who died on Everest. His name was Markus Kronthaler, and his brother Georg led an expedition just to retrieve his body. Markus died near the top, and his brother and his porters had to get close to the top to retrieve him, but they refused to climb a few extra meters and take the summit. They did that to make a point. Shockingly, many people who climb Everest feel no obligation to help others who are in trouble. Because it would endanger them as well? Partly. But also because…climbing Mount Everest is expensive. How expensive? One outfit charges $65,000 per person. That does not include airfare or your personal equipment, so call it, what? Maybe $85,000? I don’t get it; I don’t know what you could do for another person over the course of a few days that would justify a price like that, but I suppose people are willing to pay. Maybe it’s a supply and demand thing; lots of rich people want to go, and there are only so many spots. And it looks like one result is that guides are reluctant to stop and help climbers in trouble. The people who pay them get angry, and it hurts business! So some leave people to die, and this is considered acceptable.

Even worse, some people pose for photos with the dead, and some corpses have been stripped of various items by souvenir hunters.

Imagine a similar situation down here near sea level. Let’s say you go diving with a group. And you get your hand stuck in some coral. And while you’re breathing the last of your air, a guide swims by and ignores you, because the people paying him will be angry if they don’t get to dance with the tame sting rays or whatever. That is essentially the moral structure we’re talking about. I suppose it would happen regularly, if a scuba excursion generated $65,000 per customer. Unbelievable.

Markus Kronthaler couldn’t be helped, but his brother felt that leaving him up there unnecessarily, in plain view of other climbers, reflected a very poor code of ethics. So he spent money on a climb, and he went and got the body, and he refused to climb to the summit. Good for him.

One experienced alpinist has said that it’s unfair to take the risk of climbing Everest and expect to be rescued. Does that really make sense? Isn’t it better to say that it’s wrong to blow $65,000 on an ego trip, unless you’re prepared to abandon it in order to save a life? Think of the two sides of the equation. If you keep climbing, what do you get? A story to tell your friends at cocktail parties. What does the person you didn’t help get? Frozen extremities and slow death from hypothermia, plus the knowledge that no one tried to help. Seems like a very small benefit with a very high price.

I think I’ll stay down here with the oxygen and the grocery stores and the ambulances and cable TV. If other people want to pay sherpas and guides to carry their inexperienced selves up Everest, that’s up to them, but there are a long list of things I don’t want to happen to me, and one of them, I’m afraid, is freezer burn.

Nonprofit About to Get Going

Don’t forget; Baldilocks is still working to get help to the Senator Obama Kogelo School, a little school in Kenya which Obama promised to assist. You remember the story, I’m sure. He was in Kenya in 2006, in his father’s former village, and he said he would help the school get going, and then he stiffed them. Baldi’s dad came to the US on the same plane as Pops Obama, and she would like to see to it that the school gets the assistance it was promised. At last report, she had collected over $3000. So that makes the score Baldilocks: $3000; Obama: 0.

The site for her nonprofit is not up yet, but when it is, you will be able to find it here.

It’s fun to embarrass Obama and show how he mistreated these people, but the real point here is to help. Who knows? Maybe he’ll get wind of the site and take up a collection of his own, using his outstanding contacts and Internet fundraising methods. That would certainly be more efficient than relying on GOP bloggers and readers. Babs Streisand could put things right with a single check.

Of course, one problem with tying his Internet collections to this project is that jihadists and the communist Chinese probably aren’t all that excited about donating money to African charities.

More Scope Info

Remember when I asked for advice about scopes? Chris Byrne tried to post an informative comment, but it was too long for Haloscan, so he reposted it at his blog. You can find it here.

He also posted it on the Manly Grub forum, and you can find that post (and you can reply) here.

Thanks again, Chris.

Fausta Lands a Big Fish

Fausta has an interesting podcast interview lined up. She can explain it better than I can:

“I am thrilled to have as a last-minute guest Marsha Blackburn, who http://blackburn.house.gov/News/DocumentSingle.aspx?DocumentID=99396 is joining the House Republicans protesting Congress adjournment without an energy policy.

The show starts at 11 a.m. Eastern, and you can find it here.

If you’re wondering why Congress adjourned without doing anything about energy prices, I’ll help you out. It’s because–as usual–the Democrats want things to get worse. They think it will buy them votes. I wonder if it has occurred to them that making the public angry at Congress may not be a great idea, when control of Congress is in your hands.