Spared

In case anyone cares, Hurricane Idalia came and went and did nearly nothing in my county. God was kind.

It was an interesting few days.

Even though I am in an area which has never experienced a true hurricane, we do get winds high enough to make a real mess. They don’t push houses over or throw cars around, but they can down enough trees to result in a cleanup effort that lasts months. Also, because I lived and owned houses in Miami, where hurricanes hit with their full force, I am conditioned to stress myself while observing the progress of storms. I know what it is to go days without running water and weeks without power.

If you own commercial property, or you own a home that’s part of a bigger common structure, hurricanes aren’t much of a problem for you. It’s hard for winds to damage warehouses and condos. A house is another story. Houses are built and landscaped stupidly, as though daring hurricanes to come through and ruin people’s lives.

It wasn’t until surprisingly recently that Florida had quasi-intelligent building codes for houses, and it still hasn’t caught up with regard to landscaping. You can build a house with 100-foot-tall trees 5 feet from the eaves, and no one will bat an eye.

Should the government be involved in telling you what kind of trees you can have, at your own risk? No, but people should be using common sense without the government’s involvement.

The house I live in now had a 40-foot maple tree about 15 feet from the garage when I moved in. Lightning killed it soon after I arrived, but I probably would have left it in place had it not been destroyed by nature. I should have planned to get rid of it as soon as I saw it.

I still have some big, feeble trees within falling distance of my house and shop. I’m considering hiring a company to come in and knock them all over so I can move them. They’re going to fall on their own sooner or later, with or without hurricanes, so I might as well get ahead of them. For $4500, I can get a whole day of work from a crew with some pretty impressive machinery.

The guy who built this house did some surprisingly stupid things. I guess the trees I have to get rid of now looked neat when they were smaller and stronger, and his wife probably insisted on leaving them where they were.

I’ve learned some things about tree removal. First, never pay a tree service. Tree services use wimpy tools to peck at large problems. A couple of outdoorsy-looking ladies who run a local service tried to charge me $800 to fell one oak without bucking or removing it. This would have been a 10-minute job. If I had to pay them to fell the other trees I don’t like, I suppose I would be looking at a $10,000 bill. That’s ridiculous. For $4500, I can get 8 hours of tree destruction, along with all sorts of trimming, ground grooming, and rock removal.

The $800 tree ended up costing me $0 to move. It was a tall oak that had broken about 30 feet up. The top part of of it got caught in another tree, so the top was resting horizontally on the other tree, waiting to fall on me if I cut the trunk.

I took a fishing pole and cast a weight over the horizontal part. I used the line to pull a heavier line over the tree. Eventually, I had a tow strap and a chain attached to the tree, and I attached it to the tractor and yanked the tree down. Zero risk of injury and equipment damage. I used a chainsaw to get rid of the stump and waste wood, and that was that.

I like paying other people to do certain types of jobs, but if you’re going to yank my chain with an $800 bid for a job that will take you 10 minutes, I’m going to get creative and send you home with nothing. If these ladies had offered to do it for $250, they would have gotten my business, and I would have called them for all my future work. As it is, they will have to find comfort in the hollow victory of refusing to get realistic with their rosy pricing schedule.

I’m considering buying an excavator. I can get a decent one for $30,000. I wouldn’t buy a new one, because buying new equipment is stupid for amateurs and most professionals. An excavator would allow me to push most problem trees over, and I could also move trunks with it. I could remove all the annoying boulders in the yard and sell them for landscaping. I could pull stumps out quickly and easily. I could fix problems with soil distribution. I could build and repair berms and do light grading.

Biden and BRICS are probably going to destroy the dollar, so putting $30,000 into a machine that depreciates at a glacial pace is smarter than keeping the money in the bank. And who knows? I might even be able to make some money with an excavator if I had to.

I’ve pretty much decided that small landowners who don’t grow crops need two machines: a track loader, often misgendered as a skid steer, and a small excavator. A skid steer is a track loader with wheels. It’s not as good. It tears up the ground, for one thing.

A track loader can do everything a tractor can do except for farming, which I don’t do, and it does everything much, much better. It can lift at least twice as much for the same size machine. It can run bigger attachments. It can rip out stumps a tractor can’t budge. It can lift huge loads when rigged with a fork.

A track loader comes with a cage that protects the operator. A tractor will let things fall on you and kill you.

Track loaders cost more than tractors, but you get what you pay for.

I don’t need a track loader nearly as much as I need an excavator. The tractor, for all its shortcomings, does a whole lot of things reasonably well, and I improved it a lot by modifying it. If I can move soil, tear out stumps and rocks, and remove most trees with an excavator, it will be worth its weight in gold.

I’m always thinking of adding a building to hold stuff I don’t want to park in the rain. Problem: trees and rocks are in the way. With an excavator, I could clear the land myself, pretty easily.

As for Idalia, it made a big mess up the coast. I looked at videos of buildings besieged by storm surge, and it was disheartening.

The brutal truth is that most people who got flooded asked for it. It’s possible to build things on concrete stilts or raised mounds of fill, and people don’t do it, even though the cost of flooding is much greater than the cost of building correctly.

News stations always try to terrify us with claims that 12-foot storm surges are on the way. They’re not telling the whole truth.

First of all, the first three or four feet of surge only get the water up to the level of the ground in most of Florida, so those feet don’t count. Second, the worst storm surge I ever heard of in real life occurred during Andrew, and it was around 8 feet. This is a big deal if you’re right by the water and you built stupidly, but if you’re inland or you built correctly, it’s not a major problem.

If you go watch surge videos, you’ll generally see water coming up one to two feet on the sides of buildings very close to the water. Very bad, but not what the news nuts predicted. To listen to them, you would think houses were going to sink in up to their eaves. Real castastrophic, house-high storm surge is pretty unusual. You can find videos of it hitting places like the Bahamas, and it’s totally different from typical mainland Florida storm surge.

What they want you to think storm surge is like:

What it’s really like most of the time:

If you go on the web, you will see ridiculous stories claiming Katrina produced 28 feet of storm surge. Actual highest recorded value: 11.4 feet. Momentary waves aren’t storm surge. Flash floods from rain aren’t storm surge. Storm surge is standing water with a height that changes gradually. If 28 feet of water had gone across Mobile, it would no longer exist.

To Florida people, hurricanes are a lot like skin cancer. Except for melanoma, skin cancers are about as dangerous as hangnails, and you can cure them yourself with a can of computer dust spray and a Q-tip, in about two minutes. Floridians don’t get upset about them, but Yankees who get tiny basal cell carcinomas cut out have the gall to call themselves cancer survivors. As for storm surge, people who aren’t from Florida wave their arms and become incontinent when it’s mentioned, but most of the time, for at least 99% of the state, it’s not that bad.

I’m about 90 feet above sea level, I’m not in a flood plain (I checked before buying), and I’m in a place hurricane-force winds can’t reach. If I get my trees fixed up, hurricanes will mean nearly nothing to me. They don’t mean a whole lot now.

It’s terrible to see that people in Florida’s internal corner got surge flooding, but this is something you have to expect when you build a certain way. It’s not merely possible; it’s certain to happen sooner or later. It doesn’t make any sense to complain as though you had been hit by a meteor. You knew it was coming when you decided not to elevate your building.

I’m glad the storm is over, because I didn’t need any more stress after a 30-hour-long trip from Singapore. The flights alone accounted for about 24 hours, and the seats were like bricks situated under vises. The bricks pulverized my tailbone, and the armrests squeezed my arms against me. I made the mistake of buying exit row seats, and apparently, the seat bottoms are even less forgiving than the ones in the other coach seats. I was in real pain a lot of the time. A seat you can live with for three hours may seem a lot different after 10.

I think I also had coronavirus, which added to the suffering. I didn’t have a fever, a runny nose, a sore throat, or loss of my sense of smell, but I had a generally crummy feeling accompanied by the speedy and continuous accumulation of disturbing things in my nostrils. My wife had congestion and some throat problems, so I think I probably caught some of it, too. I wouldn’t have suspected anything had she not been sick.

Watching a storm approach is always draining, and combined with my other problems, it made for several unpleasant days during which I could not fully let go and recover from the trip. It was a little perfect storm that was reluctant to let go. Now I’m finally unwinding.

I Definitely Picked the Wrong Week to Stop Sniffing Glue

The Cone of Certain Death is once again upon me.

Before I went to Hong Kong and Singapore, I prayed repeatedly that God would keep hurricanes away from my house while I was gone. He came through. Now, three days after my return home, we are getting the usual pre-storm hype. MAJOR Hurricane Idalia is BARRELING DOWN on me, and doom is assured.

I never pay any attention to the Panic…I mean “Weather” Channel. I don’t listen to the TV nuts. I watch the NHC site and keep track of changes in the forecast paths and the expected width of the storms. Right now, things are looking good. I am completely outside the area where the eye of the storm is expected to go, by maybe 75 miles, and the path updates are trending westward, away from me.

When Irma hit in 2017, the remains of storm went pretty much right over my house, and a lot of trees went down. This time, the storm is going to be very far away. My best guess is that I won’t get much wind at all.

The wind forecasts over at Accuweather are disturbing but probably wrong by a wide margin. They’re calling for sustained winds of 55 mph at some point. I think that’s way off, based on about 30 years of observing storms and forecasts. Last year, a storm passed by, and I noticed a breeze of maybe 10 mph at the exact time the forecasters were claiming 50. It was amazing to watch. How can you keep a 50-mph forecast on your site when you know perfectly well you’re 40 mph off?

My theory is that they lie deliberately in order to cover their butts and increase ratings. Scared people keep their TV’s on.

It’s dismaying to live in a state with tropical weather problems and to know that the people I rely on to inform me are very nearly worthless.

People who don’t live in Florida like to tell me I live in a hurricane zone. Insurance people like it more than anyone. Thing is, hurricane winds have never been recorded where I live. I looked it up. You can’t say you’ve been in a hurricane unless there was at least one minute during which the wind never dropped below 74 mph. That does not happen here.

We barely get tropical storm winds, which start at 39 mph.

Forecasters deliberately conflate gusts with sustained winds. You can have hurricane-speed gusts without clearing the hurricane bar. It’s normal to have brief blasts of high winds when you’re not really experiencing a hurricane. Still, forecasters love to talk about the gusts and play down the low sustained winds, which are what actually count.

They are predicting tropical storm winds from around 7 a.m. to about 1 p.m. I will be amazed if we get them at all.

Accuweather is reporting a hurricane warning for my area. A watch is when you MAY get a hurricane. A warning is when you WILL get a hurricane. The warning here started yesterday at 5 p.m. and ends tonight at 1:15. Someone explain that to me. How can they be sure a hurricane will hit, when they, themselves, say it won’t? Why did the warning start a day and a half before the high winds were expected?

The storm won’t even be here by 1:15, so how can the warning end then? Whatever arrives will get here tomorrow morning at about 7.

I need to check the definitions. Here they are, from the NHC:

Hurricane Watch
A Hurricane Watch is issued when sustained winds of 74 mph or higher are POSSIBLE within the specified area of the Watch. Because hurricane preparedness activities become difficult once winds reach tropical storm force, the Watch is issued 48 hours in advance of the onset of tropical storm force winds.

Hurricane Warning
A Hurricane Warning is issued when sustained winds of 74 mph or higher are EXPECTED somewhere within the specified area of the Warning. Because hurricane preparedness activities become difficult once winds reach tropical storm force, the Warning is issued 36 hours in advance of the onset of tropical storm force winds.

Let’s see. A hurricane warning is issued 36 hours in advance of the onset of tropical storm force winds. So, if hurricane winds had been expected, that would have been 7 p.m. yesterday, which is later than 5 p.m. So 34 hours, not 36? Why? And hurricane winds were never expected, so why post the warning at all?

Am I wrong, or are they ignoring their own rules?

Okay, here is what’s certain: there will be no hurricane here. Period. Count on it. It just does not happen.

Here is what is extremely likely: we will not get a tropical storm here. We might, but we probably will not. If we do, it almost certainly won’t last long, because hurricanes are more or less circular, and circles are small far from their centers. I will be far from the center. The region of high winds that passes over me will be small, if it exists at all. Because it will be small, it will pass over quickly.

There is a small possibility we will get worse winds than I expect, along with a bunch of downed trees. That looks like the worst case, unless tornadoes count. You have to be really cursed to get hit by a tornado. They are not common during hurricanes.

It’s good that I’m on the east side of the storm, with a coast between me and the eye. The only possible high winds will be from the south and west, and they will have to go over land to get here. On the down side, I have some big trees to the south of my workshop.

I haven’t prepared at all except to get some water. I can bathe in the pool and use the water to flush the toilets. I can drive to get food if the power goes out. Not much can be done.

I have ingredients for pizza.

I prayed about the storm, and I cursed it and so on. I think God told me there was no reason to get involved in preparation, so I’m relaxing. Tomorrow we’ll find out if I’m hearing from God or just lazy and prone to believing what I want.

As for the rest of the state, things look good. Forecasters are certain it will hit land north of me and east of the panhandle. In other words, it will strike an area where very few people live. Not comforting to the inhabitants, but it’s better than seeing Fort Lauderdale slammed.

Here’s some idiocy from The Drudge Report’s leftist owners:

Honestly, it’s like they sleep on rubber sheets.

Deceased Bizarro Food Influencer Strikes Again

In case anyone who reads this blog is wondering where I’ve been, I have two things to say that might be clues. You really have to try Ki’s Roasted Goose in Hong Kong, and you should avoid the chili crab at Keng Eng Kee Seafood in Singapore.

My wife and I keep meeting abroad while we wait for her American visa, and we just spent two weeks in the Far East.

I have never had any interest in seeing Hong Kong (or any Far Eastern destination), but beggars can’t be choosers, and very few countries will let my African wife visit without a fight. China will not accept her, but Hong Kong, which is part of China, lets Zambians in straight off the plane. She wants to see as many countries as she can, and she didn’t want to revisit our prior destinations without including something new, so we threw Hong Kong into the mix.

Before the trip, people gave me a lot of bad information. Somehow, the Internet has made it harder to learn the truth about other countries. It should have made it easier. Because there is so much money to be made from cheap Internet exposure, people who have a lot of eyeballs on them are able to charge a lot for lying about hotels, restaurants, and attractions, and they are making the most of it. Also, forums are full of people who give bad advice for no clear reason.

Regarding Hong Kong, I was told I should get a hepatitis shot or immunoglobulin because something like 6% of the population has the disease. I was told I could get typhoid from eating raw food. People said I should avoid the tap water. I also read that I might be arrested and imprisoned for no reason.

Regarding hepatitis, it’s not easy to get without close contact, so that’s not a real problem. Typhoid affects people who eat dubious things like raw oysters, and I won’t even eat cooked ones. The tap water comes from a completely modern purification system, and it contains chlorine, just like the tap water you probably drink.

I think the people who get arrested are generally Americans with Chinese backgrounds, or Chinese people with American green cards. If you go to Hong Kong to protest the CCP, you may have a problem, but I went to eat restaurant meals and be with my wife.

I was also told people in Hong Kong would be rude, but they seemed fine to me. Of course, I spent most of my childhood in Miami, so I barely notice rudeness that would put most people in therapy.

I guess I can tell you some useful things about Hong Kong.

First, the food is generally very good. It’s not always fantastic, but you will find very little food that is truly disappointing. We went to a number of places, recommended and unrecommended, and the only truly worthless one was the Peninsula Hotel. Everything else was either good or excellent.

Singapore is different. People claim it’s the food capital of Asia, but that’s completely baseless. There is good food there, and there is also a lot of really bad food. You have to talk to locals in order to find out where you should eat.

The Peninsula has a famous high tea service. This is a British thing. “Tea” is a beverage, but the British think it’s lunch. They have a pretentious custom of sitting down in the afternoon and eating really awful girl food with hot tea. Scones and cucumber sandwiches figure heavily.

The Peninsula’s high tea is a tourist thing. It has no redeeming features whatsoever apart from the nice atmosphere. It has no inherent value. They charge you around $250 for tea and a weird three-tier tray of worthless food. You take selfies and enjoy feeling important, and then you leave.

The lowest tier on the tray holds cranberry scones which are overworked. A scone is a sweet biscuit, and when you work biscuit dough too much, it gets gummy, sort of like Pillsbury canned biscuits. The Peninsula’s scones were okay, but not like the real thing. The second tray held cucumber sandwiches with the crusts removed. If you have to remove the crust from your bread, you made bad bread. The crust is supposed to be the best part. The cucumber stuff is just cucumber mashed up with something resembling mayonnaise mixed with low-fat sour cream. Pointless. You also get weird little pastries full of a similar condiment mixed with lumps of bad smoked salmon. It’s hard to make me dislike smoked salmon, but the Peninsula Hotel pulled it off.

The top tier contains about three pastries per person. They are small and not very good. All you need to know. They had something on there that was sort of like a tiny raspberry shortcake, and it was acceptable, but the other items were gross.

We took a food tour in Hong Kong the day after we arrived, and it was really helpful. We had beef brisket and noodles in a soup pretty much like pho. Very, very good. The name of the restaurant is Sister Wah. We also had dim sum at the Imperial. Excellent. We finished up with roasted goose at Ki’s Roasted Goose, which is a chain. We met Mr. Ki himself. He happened to be at the location we visited that day. Very friendly guy. Funny.

Ki’s taught me that America’s rejection of goose is a huge mistake. It’s far better than our standard poultry, including duck. It’s sort of like fatty, juicy, delicious pork. Chinese people gut and clean their geese, and then they slow-roast them. They apply stuff to the skin. I would guess it’s mainly MSG and some kind of sugar solution. In the end, you get a very, very juicy goose with a crisp skin that will make your eyes roll back in your head. Sort of like Peking duck, but much better.

We had roasted goose twice, and it was fantastic both times. The vegetables were also very, very good. If you go to Hong Kong and eat every meal at Ki’s, no one will be able to criticize your judgment.

They give pork belly the same treatment. It’s nothing short of amazing.

The meat is served with plum sauce and beautifully prepared rice. It doesn’t need anything else. Adding too much stuff to it is like pouring sauce on a good steak.

We assumed roasted goose would be all over Singapore, but it isn’t. They use duck because of bird flu issues. It’s good, but you can’t compare it to goose, and Singapore cooks just aren’t as good as Hong Kong cooks.

The dim sum was wonderful, but I would recommend staying away from the steamed barbecue pork buns Youtubers brag about. They’re not great. The pork is very sweet, and there is no acidity or heat to balance the sweetness. Steamed pork buns are popular for breakfast. I would sooner hit the nearest McDonald’s.

Hong Kong is also known for egg tarts. An egg tart is a tiny pie crust filled with egg custard. Maybe it’s exciting to Asians, but I’m used to flan and creme brulee, so I found it lacking. I would not order one again.

We didn’t eat any expensive food in Hong Kong, and by “expensive food,” I mean legitimate expensive food, not garbage like the Peninsula Hotel’s farcical tea. I don’t think there is any point in looking for high-end restaurants in Hong Kong, because the food is so good everywhere else.

Hong Kong is hot, and the wind never blows. Well, it blows, but you feel it mostly when you’re up on a hill or a building, because Hong Kong buildings are tall and close together. The humidity is amazing, and I am saying this as a person who lives in Florida. Laundry takes forever to dry. There is mildew everywhere. When you walk down the streets, water from air conditioners drips on you no matter where you are.

Hong Kong is built below some steep hills, and the buildings pretty much stop at their bases, so the hills are not very developed. We took a tram up the side of Victoria Peak and shot some video. We were around 1800 feet above the narrow streets, and the difference was amazing. The air was cooler, and it actually moved. And we were in the clouds part of the time. Worth the money and time. Victoria Peak is not an alp, but it punches above its weight.

I picked up some camera stuff in an area known for electronics stores. The selection was fantastic, as was the help. Much better than the US. Prices were about the same, though.

The subway and buses were wonderful. When you get to Hong Kong, you buy something called an Octopus Card, and you load it with money. After that, you use it to take you everywhere. We only took two cabs the whole time we were there.

The subway I know best is the one in New York. It stinks of urine, it’s a great place to get beaten or killed, and passengers are constantly harassed by young fatherless morons. It’s really dirty. You can’t use the restrooms because they never work, they are never cleaned, and they belong to violent drug dealers who don’t like visitors. Hong Kong and Singapore have clean, efficient, safe subways. Very different. Best way to get around.

The harbor is nice. You can take a ferry for almost nothing, and it gives you good views of the impressive skyscrapers and peaks. When tiny waves rock the boat, the Chinese people go, “WOOOOOOOO!” Makes a big impression on them.

We stayed in Sheung Wan, a real Hong Kong neighborhood a short distance from the busier areas. We used an apartment-hotel, so we had the luxury of access to washers and dryers. Unfortunately, the staff and other guests were always using them. In the future, I would choose a place with laundry machines in the suite itself.

The neighborhood was full of conveniences such as 7-Eleven, McDonald’s, and bakeries. Very livable.

American cities are full of grandmother-raised, fatherless minority kids who are constantly looking for victims. It was strange to be in busy cities where you don’t even think about things like that. It was very strange not to see ghettos. A typical big American city is MOSTLY ghetto.

Singapore was great, as always. They have cards similar to Octopus Cards, and we used ours to go all over. Our experience with the food was not all that great, though. Liars like Anthony Bourdain have polluted the world with corrupt reviews pushing bad restaurants, and we got burned again.

Bourdain and a popular food vlogger with a channel called Marion’s Kitchen have promoted Keng Eng Kee for seafood. We tried it. Disgusting.

They sold us a $95 chili crab. They said it was a whole kilogram. It looked like a crab, but it was really a collection of shell parts from unrelated crabs, piled up to look like one creature. It appeared they had boiled a lot of crabs in a sauce much like the glop in a can of Spaghetti-O’s. If you took that stuff and added a small amount of Texas Pete and a ton of sugar, you would have nearly the same thing.

There was no meat inside the crab body. The sauce was full of tiny slivers of overcooked meat, however. I believe over 3/4 of the kilogram was sauce and shell.

Our “crab” had three claws. They were poorly cracked, and the meat wasn’t worth the effort of extraction.

We also had deep-fried prawn rolls. Imagine balls of almost-decayed shrimp and vegetables, battered by a machine in a factory and fried in old oil. That’s what we got, as far as I can tell. No salt or seasoning. Worthless.

My wife ordered chicken wings seasoned with shrimp paste. Take several old chicken wings, salt them very lightly, and fry them in old oil. You will get pretty much what she got. The shrimp flavor was barely detectable. A total waste of money.

We also had pork ribs in coffee sauce. They fry boneless pork in breading. It’s almost certainly cheap pork shoulder. There are no bones. Then they soak it in a sweet coffee-based sauce. It’s okay, but the sauce takes all the crunch out of the breading. I think they let the ribs soak in it en masse instead of applying it right before serving.

Anthony Bourdain and the other people who recommended Keng Eng Kee knew they were lying, but I guess they got some cash. Locals recommend a chain called Jumbo. We didn’t try it.

Would I go to Hong Kong again? I guess so, if it were convenient. I would go for the food. My wife would go for the shopping. Hong Kong has huge Western-style malls. I don’t think Hong Kong can sustain a tourist’s interest for more than 5 days, but it’s pleasant.

Having visited Hong Kong, I now realize Singapore’s reputation as a food city is undeserved.

On our last visit to Singapore, we found some good places to eat, but we also found bad ones. Just like this time, Anthony Bourdain’s lack of integrity figured in our misfortune.

Singapore has facilities known as food centers or hawker centers. They are similar to American parking garages. They have no outer walls. They contain rows of food preparation stalls made of stainless steel, and every stall is a separate business. You can get many types of food in a food center. Chinese is most common, but you can also get Indonesian, Indian, Thai, and Malay food. Food centers are very cheap. You can get a good meal for about $7.50 US.

Before his ignominious demise, Bourdain the pretend regular guy hyped a food center stall known as Tian Tian Chicken. It sells Hainanese chicken, which is a bizarre dish consisting of limp, lukewarm steamed chicken draped over rice. For some reason, Chinese people love Hainan-style chicken. I don’t think anyone else does.

We went to Tian Tian, and we had to wait in line for about 10 minutes. It’s always busy. They sold us a plate of food, and we tried it. The chicken looked almost as though it had been boiled. It had almost no flavor. The rice was anointed with a sauce pretty much like the liquid from Campbell’s chicken noodle soup, only not as good. We threw out most of the dish and found a local guy who showed us better places. He said only tourists ate at Tian Tian.

I’m not sure Anthony Bourdain even knew what good food was. He raved about Waffle House. I’m not from Mars; I’ve been to Waffle House. They give you 20% of the pleasure you get from Cracker Barrel, for 80% of the money. Waffle House is where you go when Cracker Barrel and McDonald’s are closed. It’s kind of astonishing that a renowned food authority would be willing to endorse a place everyone knows is a dump, but somehow Bourdain did it and got away with it.

On this latest trip, we hit the food centers again. Some food was very nice. Some was pretty bad. Just like last time. You really need local guidance or the willingness to buy several plates of food and throw out the ones you don’t like.

We only saw one food center in Hong Kong, and we didn’t get around to trying it. Based on our other experiences in Hong Kong, I’ll bet the food is good.

We found a good Chinese chain in Singapore: Din Tai Fung. It’s based in Taiwan, where leftism has not yet succeeded in destroying the character of the people. Din Tai Fung is basically a dim sum joint. A huge variety of dumplings and similar items, served by hustling waiters who never stand still.

The big problem with the Din Tai Fung we tried is that it’s too busy. It’s in the basement of the Raffles City hotel, which sits on a mall, and there is a ton of foot traffic. You have to wait up to half an hour to get into Din Tai Fung there, and dishes you want disappear from the annoying electronic menu while you’re trying to order them. Nearby, in the Suntec City mall, there is another Din Tai Fung, and you can walk right in.

Unfortunately, Rhodah discovered Shake Shack during our trip. We ended up visiting twice. I don’t like Shake Shack. It’s a costlier version of Five Guys, which is a costlier version of Wendy’s. It sells pretty good burgers and fries, along with mediocre shakes and very bad ice cream. Unlike Five Guys, it doesn’t offset the enormous cost of the burgers by giving you three times as much fries as you actually want.

Rhodah thinks Shake Shack is wonderful, so I guess we’ll be buying more $25 fast food meals in the future.

We also visited Five Guys twice. I can take it or leave it, but Rhodah loves it. We paid about 45 US dollars for two burgers, a soda, a shake, and one order of fries. That’s even worse than the price here.

One of my big gripes with Shake Shack and Five Guys is that they serve big balls of grease that harden in your intestines and resist expulsion. I love fattening food as much as anyone, but there is a point where it becomes overkill. When you do something to a dish to make it fatty, there should be some purpose other than one-upping the restaurant next store.

We hit Ruth’s Chris again, but this is our last time, because it costs twice what it costs in America, and the food isn’t that great. Her steak was undercooked, which is inexcusable. What is Ruth’s? A steakhouse. How do you cook steak to medium doneness? Well, figure it out after 96 years of serving steak. I can teach a person how to do it in 30 seconds, so Ruth’s should be able to get it done in 96 years.

Ruth’s also served me crab cakes that didn’t taste great. Making a good crab cake is extremely simple. The final insult was banana cream pie made with green bananas. Singapore may well be the banana connoisseur’s Mecca. You can go into a market there and see numerous varieties of bananas. Ruth’s ought to be able to find decent ones for pie, and a competent chef will not put green bananas in anything.

If we ever go to Ruth’s Chris again, it will be in the US, and we will stick to steak and potatoes.

We ended up taking a food tour, even though we were familiar with Singapore. I arranged it because the Hong Kong tour was so helpful. We tried Malay, Indian, and Chinese food.

Malay food looks great but doesn’t have much zing to it. It’s on the bland side. They sometimes supply pepper sauce, and my advice is to ladle it on. When a plate of colorful Malay food arrives at your table, you may expect all sorts of powerful flavors, but it’s an illusion.

I can’t say enough about Indian food in Singapore. We tried it in a number of places, and apart from one food center stall, every place did a fantastic job. Whether the bill was $135 or $58 (Singapore dollars), the food was about the same.

On our first trip, we blundered into a place called HeritageOne, in Little India. The food was top notch. Better than the expensive places we visited. I recommend it highly, even though they don’t serve samosas. It was so good, we made a second visit when we returned to Singapore.

On our tour, we were given Indian pancakes and puri with various sauces. Wonderful. The food was so good, I was able to forgive the name of the restaurant: Kamala.

Having spent a total of around 24 days in Singapore, I feel like I know a little about it now. My conclusion is that you can get good food, and you don’t have to pay a lot for it, but there is also a lot of expensive food that isn’t great. It’s best to avoid tourist-heavy areas. The food will cost you twice as much as food elsewhere, or more, and it won’t be any better.

We did some things we didn’t do on our first trip. We rode the big Ferris wheel in Singapore, and we visited Gardens by the Bay.

I guess soon every big city will have a Ferris wheel. London has one, and so does Hong Kong. Singapore’s wheel is named the Singapore Flyer, and it has big air-conditioned cars. Not much to say about it except that I guess it’s worth the money.

Gardens by the Bay is a big landscaped area featuring a couple of indoor gardens and several big steel towers shaped sort of like trees. They’re actually shaped more like funnels. Little steel tornadoes.

The main indoor garden is not great. Just a bunch of well-tended plants with little signs on them. We didn’t see the second indoor garden. It’s based on the movie Avatar, and we both hate Disney. James Cameron makes fairly good movies, but as a human being, he’s kind of irksome. A billionaire whose moneymaking enterprises burn enough oil to run a major city, yet who preaches environmental asceticism to the peasants who pay his bills. He also claimed he found the tomb of Jesus Christ, which is pretty funny. I mean the tomb where his dead body was buried and rotted. Cameron apparently thinks any ossuary in Jerusalem with the name “Yehoshuah” on it must belong to Jesus. “Yehoshuah” was a common name in Israel during the life of Jesus. Like “Bob” in the US today.

The funnel towers look great in photos of Singapore, but in reality, they’re a lot like carnival construction in ordinary attractions like Six Flags. They’re also much smaller than the photos lead you to believe. You can go up to the top of the main funnel and take photos of Singapore. That’s fun.

We were suckered into riding on Singapore’s only cable car development. It takes you to a tourist island known as Sentosa. The cars are not cooled, so you get hauled up near the sun, right by the equator, in a little glass box.

The ride was okay, but Sentosa itself is run-down and boring. Not much to see. We paid for two cable car trips, but we only used one. We used it to get to Sentosa, and then we used it to leave.

Singapore is great, and I enjoyed both of my trips a great deal. If I sound negative, it’s because I’m mentioning the lows as well as the highs.

I feel like I was blessed this time when I found my flights. Nothing over 24 hours long. I still suffered quite a bit. My first flight went over the North Pole, and it lasted about 18 hours. That’s 18 coach hours. With no empty seats to speak of. On Cathay Pacific, which has tiny seats apparently designed for Asians. On the way home, I had to take a 15-hour flight from Dubai at 2:30 a.m., and it was jam-packed. If a flight leaving at 2:30 a.m. on a Sunday is popular, when are the slow times?

On the flight, I learned something interesting. Indians have body odor problems. That’s not me being racist. It’s a fact. For some reason, Indians have resisted taking anti-B.O. steps Westerners have come to consider normal. You can read about it on the web. The flight I took from Dubai was very popular with Indians, so there were some pretty fragrant people on board, including the guy sharing my row with me, who also appeared to be mentally ill. They always find me.

Will we return to Singapore? Not soon, I hope. In fact, I have reason to hope we won’t be traveling much in the future. Rhodah finally has her embassy interview appointment, so if things go as they usually do, she will be here before the end of October.

Our immigration saga has taught us to feel like making overseas trips twice a year is normal, and of course, it isn’t. We want to see Israel together, and I would like to take her to Europe, but this business of constant foreign travel will presumably have to stop. We have to have money to live on when we get old, and neither of us wants to work.

We both wonder if God has a reason for sending us to Singapore and making us like it so much. Sometimes I think he’s showing us a place we can escape to when perverted America becomes too dangerous for us.

It was very strange, being in a country where no one is afraid of sodomites or rioting punks.

While we were there, the city was having some kind of night festival, and there were activities and displays all over the place. One night while we were walking home, we went through Fort Canning Park, which is a big green space in the middle of town. We saw many people walking with their children, enjoying the festival. We never thought about street crime, except to notice that it wasn’t an issue. We didn’t have to worry about riots or fights. None of the parked cars we saw that night had broken windows. No one tried to sell us drugs. No whores accosted me. We didn’t smell weed. It was completely different from the filthy international disgrace which is urban America.

It occurred to me that life there was normal. It was the way it was supposed to be, and it was something I could not have in my own country, the world’s biggest Christian nation.

I don’t want to take Rhodah to New York. How would I keep her safe? I would be surrounded by armed punks, and I would not be allowed to have a pistol. We would have to play roulette with our lives and property. I can’t even take her to Paris or London without careful research about the safe areas.

We will never have safe cities again in America. That’s amazing. We just have to support the police, punish and restrain criminals, and allow people to carry guns. It’s that simple. But it will never happen. As long as this age lasts, our cities will be disgusting cesspools of cruelty.

I’ll probably write more about the trip when my brain gets over 12 hours of jet lag.

Truth is Simple

The other day, God told me this: “When the truth is lost, everything is lost.”

Sometimes the things he says sound trite yet turn out to be very deep and important. For example, he told me he created the universe for love. Sounds like a Seventies greeting card, but it’s actually true. Often people wonder what their purpose is. The Bible actually tells us. We were created for God’s pleasure. So what is his greatest pleasure? God said, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.”

So it should be clear his top priority is love. If that is so, then it must be the reason for the creation of the human race.

Also, love is the reason Yeshua chose to be tortured to death. He didn’t do it because we deserved salvation. Far from it. The Bible says all have fallen short of the glory of God, and that includes people like Moses and Daniel. Without the cross, both would have gone to hell.

The Bible says God chose to be crucified because he loved the world. He was like a mother jumping in front of a bullet to save a child. Justice didn’t enter into the decision, except in that justice was the bullet.

As for the truth, it’s so important, it’s one of the things God identifies himself with. He says he is love, and he also says he is the truth. I shouldn’t have to name the verses. If you’re a Christian, and you don’t know where he said these things, you need to start reading the Bible. It says God’s people perish for lack of knowledge, which is what you have if you’re not reading.

I am a lawyer and a physicist. Maybe I shouldn’t say I’m a physicist, having forgotten nearly everything I learned in college and grad school, but anyway, I was trained in law and physics. One thing the study of law emphasized in my mind is this: a determined idiot can make an argument for anything. My dad always said he wouldn’t give a dime for an associate who couldn’t argue both sides of a case.

As a lawyer, you’re not allowed to lie, but you are supposed to present your client’s case in the way most likely to help your client, and along the way, you may end up relaying lies your client told, because you don’t know they’re lies. If you do your job well, you present arguments that make it sound like truth and justice are on your client’s side, even if he’s a filthy rodent who ought to be sterilized for the good of future generations.

Judges are often stupid, not to mention lazy, so they often don’t know what the law is until a lawyer tells them, and they aren’t expected to research the facts of cases. Lawyers count on the limitations of judges when they do their work. They also count on the incompetence of their adversaries. You present the facts and laws that make your client look good, and you hope no one in the courtroom will be smart enough to find the weak points.

We’ve all seen lawyers argue passionately, as though from righteous indignation, when representing people who were very clearly guilty. A smart person knows better than to believe anything a lawyer says, when the lawyer has an axe to grind.

As for the rest of the population, they are considerably worse than lawyers, having no bar associations or judges to answer to. A huge percentage of human beings don’t care at all about the truth. It’s just a baby gate between them and whatever it is they want.

Our schools, politicians, and journalists now push woke canards; outright lies anyone can disprove with a few minutes of Googling. The people who profit from the lies don’t care. “White people invented slavery.” “Masculinity is toxic.” “Women are more peaceful and reasonable than men.” “Black people can’t be racist.” Every day, conservatives who haven’t learned anything about human nature waste their time trying to 3wn the libs, debunking claims everyone already knows are false. I’ve done a lot of it right here.

I shouldn’t say the time has been wasted. It’s a response to gaslighting, and when you’ve been gaslighted, it’s important to repeat the truth to yourself and others so you don’t end up in the Goebbels gravity well, where a lie has become the truth. But it’s a waste to the extent that you hope you’ll convince the liars they’re wrong, and that they will admit it. Many of them already know they’re wrong. Many have become so deceitful, they literally can’t tell the truth from lies. Many don’t care whether what they say is true. Truth, like math, is one of those things leftists claim is inherently racist, patriarchal, and Eurocentric. It’s white. I’m not kidding; you can use your browser and find them saying these things.

People who can’t be corrected suffer from what Dietrich Bonhoeffer erroneously called “stupidity.” Actual stupidity means lack of intelligence. Bonhoeffer used the term “stupidity” to describe a willful blindness to the truth. We have always had lots of people who suffered from this problem, but today, it is reaching an unsustainable crescendo. When you’re so “stupid” you are willing to devote your life to causes you know are completely wrong, there is no point in trying to save you. It’s time for you to die and burn in hell, because otherwise, for the rest of your existence, you will be a source of unbearable misery to others.

These days, the truth is lost because people do not care about it. Even when you try to determine the truth, it may evade you. Go to “authoritative” sources, and they will tell you ridiculous things.

They will say homosexuality is normal and healthy. They will say a man who says he is a woman is, in fact, a woman, even if there is nothing remotely feminine about him. He can even keep his genitals and his beard and continue to dress and behave like man, including in his romantic life. Still a woman.

Joe Biden is the perfect president for this time, because he is competely unfamiliar with the truth, except perhaps as a thing that occasionally derails his career. People who haven’t gotten the message argue with him as though he were a decent person who cares what’s true and what isn’t. It means nothing whatsoever to him. No more than it means to a monkey. He gets a stimulus. His little brain whirs briefly, searching for an answer that will bring him the best possible result over the next 24 hours or 30 seconds, and then it spews out, often in a raised voice and with a furious expression (to the extent permitted by botox), as though the person who he’s talking to should be put in a gulag for insulting his exalted holiness.

He has always been a tremendous, fluent liar, and now that he’s demented, he appears to be merging deliberate lies with the delusions that characterize dementia. He really seems to believe his own shtick now. He may well think Hunter Biden is a smart person, which, only too clearly, is like thinking a hamster should try out for Jeopardy.

When my dad became demented, he told his dentist we had taken his 46-foot yacht to Italy. And she bought it. Probably voted for Biden.

Back when covid was big, I used to use the infection numbers to construct differential equations in order to predict how it would spread. It worked incredibly well for a time, and then one day, I realized the numbers the press/government leftist establishment was feeding us were pretty much imaginary. Or maybe they were complex, because they were partly real as well.

We were bribing hospitals with tens of thousands of dollars per patient to diagnose them with covid, and there was no reliable test. There still isn’t. The guidelines, which I read, said you could base a diagnosis on symptoms, which covid shared with things like the flu. I feel like one of two things, or a combination, was happening. Either I was failing to predict the real spread accurately because the numbers were imaginary, or I was doing a great job of predicting the imaginary spread.

I really tried to learn the truth, but I could not. The American government was exercising censorship, including prior restraint (look it up), of speech regarding an extremely important matter involving both politics and the public good. People were fired for discussing covid. For example, universities fired people who were not even health workers.

I couldn’t find out whether ivermectin worked, because there was so much censorship and disinformation. I couldn’t find out whether masks worked. The definitive answer was yes for several years, and now it’s no, and it turns out the people who said it was yes always knew it was no.

It was a bat virus transmitted by pangolins in a wet market. It was a man-made virus that escaped from a lab in a city with wet markets. Take your pick. Our keepers insisted it was natural. Now most of them quietly admit it came from a lab, but the establishment refuses to confront the more-important question: how is it okay that we were lied to for so long, or that people who told the truth were abused like political dissidents in South America or Russia?

There were so many lies, and the truth was so successfully suppressed and punished, that I truly could not find out what was happening. Neither could you. You still can’t. You may think you can, but if so, you’re dreaming.

We are drowning in lies every day, in all sorts of areas of conversation. To fight it is to bear the curse of Sisyphus. You fight every day, and in the end, you get nowhere.

If we can’t learn the truth, we can’t be saved from hell. We can’t plan intelligently. We can’t identify our friends or our enemies. We become our own enemies, because we draw invalid conclusions and labor under their weight, working against our own good.

One of the great things about being Satan and having a Biden-like view of the truth is that he is able to use his enemy’s soldiers to fight his battles. Why send your own troops out when you can get the enemy’s troops to kill themselves and each other? Imagine how different World War Two would have been, had Hitler been able to convince Allied servicemen to poison themselves and shoot each other. Think how much money he would have saved on arms and ammunition. A liar enslaves other people, making them the eager, convicted servants of their enemy. It’s amazing, really.

This is why women lie so much, instead of attacking directly. A man will start a fight and risk being beaten up, while a woman will simply tell lies until innocent dupes harm whomever she’s mad at. This is why there are so many false rape accusations. No work. No expense. Little risk. Pull the strings, sit back, and watch. Why wear yourself out battling an ex-boyfriend when you can pick up the phone and make the government put him in jail, charge him with crimes he didn’t commit, and confiscate all his firearms? You can’t show up at his house in 4 squad cars, hold several guns on him, beat him up, give him a rectal search, and put him in jail, but you may be able to make somebody else do it.

Even our courts are losing the power to force people to listen to the truth. They make legal determinations, and government officials simply ignore them. They create sanctuary cities, for example. They refuse to enforce abortion laws. The truth is that what you want to do is a serious crime? So what? We’ll pretend the law says something else. Enjoy yourself.

If God is the truth, and God is salvation, and we have rejected the truth, then we must have rejected salvation, and the rapture must be at hand. A world where the truth can’t function is a world where evangelism is crippled and not worth the effort, and I am sure God doesn’t waste his time or ours.

To sum up, what God told me isn’t trite at all. It’s not a platitude. It’s an explanation for what is about to happen.

More Rot from Tinseltown

Paul Reubens, AKA Pee Wee Herman, is in the news today. He just died from cancer. All sorts of touching tributes are appearing.

Unfortunately, the admiration is badly misplaced.

Reubens was caught with numerous images of underage boys performing sex acts. He managed to plead down to a misdemeanor, but pleading to a lesser doesn’t mean you’re not guilty of the original charge. Prosecutors and judges like to clear their calendars, so they love plea bargains, and Reubens was connected.

After he was convicted and forced to register as a sex offender, he made a lot of claims, suggesting the illegal images were nothing like the description the DA gave, but the DA’s office responded and said they were much worse than what Reubens described to the press.

Unfortunately, it is very fashionable to admire men who spend an inordinate amount of time with other people’s children, and women are largely to blame. Women are generally blind when it comes to male perversion, and they often jump on and berate anyone who says men who hang around kids shouldn’t be trusted. They end up enabling perverts who do great damage to children. Scoutmasters. Priests. Youth pastors. Everyone knows a horror story.

Paul Reubens shot to fame by creating a children’s TV show. If you’ve seen the show, you know how creepy it was. Not as creepy as Mister Rogers, but still, pretty strange. He built a character who was a male adult who seemed to have bypassed puberty. The other characters were too hip for a kids’ show. Children should not be made to find the counterculture alluring.

I call it “the counterculture,” but of course, it’s the establishment culture. Conservatives and Christians are now the counterculture.

Since I brought up Fred Rogers, I might as well point out that he admitted he was attracted to men. Big surprise there. He was extremely effeminate.

I never liked his show. For that matter, I never liked Sesame Street. When I was a kid, I watched Superman, Batman, and cartoons. Now that I think about it, Batman and Robin were not quite normal. They inspired the Ambiguously Gay Duo. But the show I used to watch was free from rainbow references. Anyway, Sesame Street was boring (How many times can you get excited about counting to 8?), and Mister Rogers seemed to be aimed at toddlers.

I suppose Rogers and Reubens helped set us up for the perversion wave that destroyed America permanently. They got young males used to things their dads had no use for.

If you let the TV raise your kids, they will grow up to have the TV’s values, and they will side with the TV against you, because the TV is their real parent.

This country is all done. God is completely out of place in the world he gave us. We’re like teenage punks who smoke weed and lock their parents out of their rooms.

Jack a Little too Nimble?

I skimmed the latest Trump indictment, and I was surprised.

I look at things like this as fairly as I can, and there is no doubt that Trump has done at least a few things that could justify some kind of legal response. He’s a bull in a china shop. He says and does what he wants. He’s very careless. He said the prosecutor working on his case looked like a crackhead. That being said, this latest thing looks even weaker than the New York case, which appears to be a complete scam.

Basically, it boils down to this, as I see it: Trump said he really won the election, and he made interference claims that were not true. Somehow this amounts to inciting insurrection. I would be astounded if this case went anywhere. After appeal, I mean. Juries are stupid and dishonest, and if you find the right area of the country, you can convict a conservative of anything.

What if we held leftists to similar standards? Al Sharpton encouraged rioting, and it resulted in the murder of an Orthodox Jew. Maxine Waters encouraged rioting. Celebrities have said stupid things like, “Rioting works.” Our country has been torn apart by riots based on lies that have been thoroughly debunked many times.

Far as I know, Trump always told his supporters to protest peacefully. If a few simpletons got carried away and listened to the beer instead of their common sense, and if they let undercover feds talk them into rioting, that’s not Trump’s fault.

Sometimes I think we could end the rioting problem simply by making the FBI stay home.

The theory behind the FBI agent-provocateur talk goes like this: people protest peacefully and legally, and it irks powerful politicians or swamp denizens because they can’t do anything about it. They send feds to The Gap to buy a bunch of matching outfits, they add masks, and then they merge with protesters and pretend to be on their side. Then they urge the protesters to do stupid things. When the protesters listen, they say, “This is an illegal riot, and we now have the power to arrest people,” and they put people in handcuffs and disperse the crowd.

First Amendment? No longer a problem.

Does it happen? Probably. Is it as widespread as people think? I would be surprised if it were. How can I know? I have no way of finding out.

We know the feds and local law enforcement have been very cruel and unfair to conservatives and Christians. So have corrections officers, who are part of the same organism. I don’t know how low they will stoop.

It’s unquestionably true that many government types hate the Bill of Rights. You can see them slobbering and raving on Youtube. You can read about their backroom discussions. The Bill of Rights means nothing at all to many Americans. Perhaps most. Law enforcement and other types of government work draw bullies and sadists; they always have. Even John the Baptist had to tell soldiers not to terrorize people. No one should doubt the government’s willingness to cheat or the eagerness of many government employees to do great harm to the innocent.

Encouraging people to riot is entrapment, and an entrapped person can’t be convicted or even arrested. Unfortunately, entrapment works, and it can be very hard to prove.

Seeing the shifty and cruel ways of today’s government makes it clear that one of the main purposes of the Second Amendment was to make our keepers afraid of us. They’re supposed to be part of us, but they go native. This country was founded by people who were fighting their own government, and they wanted people who came after them to be better able to do the same thing.

I think Trump will be cleared of nearly every charge once the process has played out. Then whoever is in office will have to decide whether to pardon him of any charges that stuck.

This is a time for Joe Biden to sit down and think about his future. It’s pretty obvious he took bribes and helped his family get rich by selling influence. If he isn’t impeached, it will be a miracle. He could also face criminal charges.

What happens then, if he has lost the election but refused to pardon Trump? What if a Republican is in the Oval Office? If Trump gets convicted of anything before the election, and he’s still polling well, Biden would be smart to give him a break.

I was thinking today that we might conceivably end up in a situation where two presidents who are bitter rivals have to pardon each other in order to save themselves. Biden pardons Trump, who wins the election, and then Trump pardons Biden. That would be funny.

Biden is somewhat stupid, and he is also senile and stubborn, so he may not be able to think clearly enough to consider the consequences of letting Trump convictions stand.

When the Jack Smith stuff started, I figured Smith was just a serious prosecutor who wanted to be thorough. Now he’s starting to look like a corrupt nut. But I could be wrong. Maybe when the evidence will come out, there will be some as-yet-unknown facts that justify blaming Trump for January 6. My bet: it won’t happen.

Hunter Biden Does it Again

So what will have to happen before the leftist press admits there is a problem with the Bidens?

Yesterday’s hilarious revelation: Hunter Biden referred to himself and his friends as “Aryan godlike men.”

“Aryan.”

Try to imagine the array of instruments of torture that would be in preparation right now, had any member of the Trump family so much as said the word “Aryan.”

Here is an excerpt from a Hunter Biden email:

Your question — why does Super Chair love me so much? — is easily answered. It has nothing to do with me and everything to do with my last name (and I bring along very handsome Aryan godlike men wherever I go)

I don’t really know what an Aryan is, and I am too lazy to check, but my understanding is that the term is related to “Iranian,” and I believe it has nothing to do with blonde Europeans from countries where humor is believed to be a symptom of mental illness.

Okay, I’ll look.

Wikipedia says it applied to Indo-Iranian people, whatever they were. They are remarkable for not having a noun associated with their place of origin. There are Indo-Iranians, but there is no Indo-Iran.

You know, it’s amazing how smart the Nazis were to settle on that term. Whenever I see video of Indians wandering around in Mumbai or Iranians burning American flags, right away, I wonder if I’m looking at Germany or Austria. It’s nearly impossible to tell Germans, Indians, and Iranians apart. Those square jaws. That fair skin. Those piercing blue eyes.

Shameless liars are trying to get Hunter off the hook by attributing the remark to a Chinese guy. It was Biden that wrote the email, and he doesn’t say he was quoting. There is no reason at all to think anyone but Biden chose the word “Aryan.”

Does it sound like something a serious business contact would say, or does it sound like a snotty, sarcastic, elitist, racist paraphrase from a spoiled rich kid whose life is one continuous toga party?

The words came from Hunter, not a Chinese contact. It’s clear.

As we all know, the Nazis had this idea that there was a race of Aryans who were innately superior to everyone else and destined to rule over other races. To the Nazis, “Aryan” pretty much meant white people from Europe. Officially, it even included swarthy Italians. In modern usage, we all know what it means. It means people who look like Chris Hemsworth and Uma Thurman, except they’re supposed to be intelligent and talented, not actors.

When you use the word “Aryan” in a positive way, to describe the people in your tightly-knit, exclusive work circle, it’s very likely you are something of a white supremacist. A real white supremacist, not the kind leftists keep moaning about.

The term “white supremacist” is thrown around very irresponsibly these days, almost always in a libelous, baseless way, but there truly are wealthy white men out there who think their kind is the acme of creation.

It sounds like Hunter Biden is way too excited about his whiteness, which is funny, because he’s supposed to be part of the political party that has turned whiteness into a bad thing. Democrats are constantly jousting at white supremacist windmills, imagining wrongs that haven’t taken place, in order to get power over innocent people and abuse them, but here is the son of a Democrat president, using the absolute worst kind of white supremacist language–pseudoscientific Nazi jargon–to describe himself and his buddies.

I thought Hunter’s choice of words was interesting, because it reminded me of the privileged Northeastern frat boys I knew when I was in college. Columbia didn’t have much of a frat system because it was dysfunctional. It had frats that were even more embarrassing and silly than real frats at normal schools.

Columbia had a frat which was officially named Delta Psi. It was commonly known by another name, and it was packed with Northeastern kids who looked like Brooks Brothers mannequins. People who went on to join the wealthy elite and glide above the unwashed herd of random riff raff with undistinguished DNA.

For a long time, I’ve referred to frats as “affirmative action for mediocre white men,” and I stick by what I said. The purpose of a fraternity is to promote people who don’t deserve opportunities, over those who have merit but lack connections. Blackball and boost. Shoot the innocent from cover, and promote the undeserving. This is the entire purpose of fraternities. If they didn’t help weak-minded members defeat abler competition, no one would join or pay dues.

My impression is that Hunter and his pals belong to the same social stratus as the Bushes and Romneys. The secret handshake club. The people who belong to country clubs you can’t join. It makes sense to me that they would see ethnicity as one of their unifying and empowering traits.

Donald Trump, in bizarre contrast, the supposed patron of elites and racists, is the son and grandson of immigrants. He’s still kind of an upstart. An outsider who has to be tolerated.

I don’t think the Illuminati exist, and I know the Jewish conspiracy is a myth, but there really is a powerful, secretive guild of wealthy elitist Americans, and Hunter Biden’s remarks seem to confirm that he has made it his business to be part of it.

So, what happens now? I’ll tell you. It will turn out to be perfectly okay for the son of the president to use Nazi terminology, which was a basis for genocide and conquest, in an admiring way, to cast himself and his pals in a favorable light. No problem.

CNN won’t even notice. A royal got in trouble for wearing a Nazi uniform in jest, but Hunter Biden will not be punished for proving he believes handsome “Aryan” men are godlike.

American Jews will stand with Hunter, because they always commit political suicide. They always side with their enemies in American politics. Maybe some Orthodox Jews will get upset, but nobody pays attention to them.

I kind of wonder what Netanyahu will be thinking the next time he has to show up to kiss Joe Biden’s ring.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe the human race won’t disappoint me quite as much as it usually does. Maybe someone on the left will start a stampede and hold the Bidens accountable.

I guess it’s a bad sign when you’ve known someone all your life, and you’re still disappointed when they do what they’ve always done. Says something about your ability to embrace reality.

A Computer Said it, so it Must be True

I guess everyone knows Joe Biden has finally acknowledged his illegitimate granddaughter, Navy Joan Roberts. On a Friday. Knowing the story would be buried.

I asked ChatGPT to provide the explanation Biden refuses to give us, and it wrote this:

As the President, it is my duty to address the recent media coverage surrounding my granddaughter, Navy Joan Roberts. I want to set the record straight and provide clarity on the situation. Contrary to the baseless claims made by some media outlets, the reasons for recognizing Navy were entirely reasonable and had nothing to do with negative press coverage.

You see, the whole thing started with a mix-up in our family’s scheduling system. We have a highly sophisticated system to keep track of our family gatherings, which includes all our grandchildren. However, due to a glitch in the software, Navy’s name got lost in the digital abyss, and we were entirely unaware of her existence until recently. It was like she fell into a digital black hole, and we had to send a team of tech experts to rescue her name from the clutches of the cyber realm.

As for the stockings at Christmas, well, it was all a grand experiment, you see. We decided to conduct a social study to assess the emotional impact of stocking numbers on children’s psyches during the holiday season. By hanging only six stockings, we wanted to gauge if the grandchildren would exhibit a heightened sense of camaraderie or, conversely, if any feelings of exclusion would arise. Rest assured, no grandchild was harmed during this audacious psychological study, and we concluded that stockings had little effect on their emotional well-being.

Regarding my son Hunter’s struggles, we couldn’t possibly acknowledge Navy publicly until we conducted a thorough genealogical investigation. Our team of genealogists scoured historical records and even delved into ancient family folklore to confirm the legitimacy of her lineage. It’s not every day that we welcome a new grandchild into the family, so we wanted to be absolutely sure.

Now, as for the bad press, I must say that such an assertion is absolutely preposterous! The media may claim that we were pressured into acknowledging Navy due to negative headlines, but I assure you that our decision-making process is far more impervious to external influences. We make our choices based on the alignment of celestial bodies, the predictions of fortune cookies, and the flip of a well-worn coin.

In conclusion, let me assure the American people that there is absolutely nothing ridiculous about our reasons for recognizing Navy Joan Roberts. Everything was handled with utmost seriousness and precision, from the technological rescue mission to the grand Christmas stocking experiment. And while the media may continue to speculate, our family remains united, our decisions unwavering, and our commitment to serving this nation resolute. Thank you, and may the whimsical winds of fate forever be in our favor.

Looking at this essay, which was generated in around two seconds, I have to wonder why Biden still has that crazy, incompetent girl acting as press secretary.

I also wonder whether anyone under the age of 50 ever writes anything any more, given that ChatGPT is capable of things like this.

What if leftists learn that ChatGPT can write mildly funny prose? They might suddenly become able to meme.

Maybe I’ve posted this before, but anyway, so far, this is the best use of AI I’ve seen:

No Riots, no Burning Buildings, no Pink Hair, no Problem

Rhodah and I are still waiting for our embassy interview so she can be brought to the US. We made the mistake of obeying the law instead of shoving her in amongst a group of military-age Somali males crashing the border in Texas, so we are still not finished.

Looks like we’re going to Hong Kong and Singapore so we can be together. I just bought a new camera so we can finally have a trip where we come back with decent video. It hasn’t arrived yet.

I don’t understand my feelings about Singapore at all. It’s a big city. Not a lot of green space. People generally live in apartments instead of houses. Hot weather all year. Lots of things I would ordinarily hate. Nonetheless, I really like Singapore, and so does my wife. I feel at home there. I wouldn’t mind living in Singapore if I had to.

Things to like about Singapore: minimal sexual perversion and coercion, extremely low crime, high standard of living, all types of goods in great abundance, stability, good food, and nice people. While the weather is hot, it’s not as unpleasant as Florida or Georgia. Mass transit is cheap and safe, and unlike New York’s trains and stations, Singapore’s don’t reek of urine.

There are nearly no bums in Singapore. We saw one lady begging, but she was an outlier.

What can you get in the US that you can’t get in Singapore? Guns are a lot easier to get here, assuming you live in a free state, and you can own them for self-defense and even carry them. In Singapore, you can get a license to keep a gun in your home, but they are rarely granted. Sounds bad, but on the other hand, you’re safer in Singapore without a gun than I am here with one.

Singapore is often called repressive, but whether a repressive government significantly impacts your enjoyment of life kind of depends on what it represses. If government restrictions don’t affect the kinds of activities in which you participate, you’re not likely to be bothered by them.

I think most people who call Singapore repressive are sexual perverts and perversion promoters. If you go online and look up Singapore repression, you’ll see that perversion is the main topic. Singapore only decriminalized sodomy last year. They shouldn’t have done that, and they’ll regret it, but it shows why perverts find Singapore unappealing.

We found the cost of living in Singapore to be reasonable. We stayed in a nice hotel for something like $230 per day. It was somewhat nicer than Hyatts and Sheratons here. We were able to get a lot of great food for between $5 and $10 per meal, and that’s Singapore dollars, which are somewhat smaller than ours. The trains were cheap. Not much to complain about.

Singapore is like a little bomb shelter for conservatives, if you want the truth. It’s not too close to China or Russia. It’s too far away for American perverts and socialists to invade profitably after they take over the US and our military. It’s too far away for social invaders from Central and South America to barge into. It’s not filling up with Islamists. It doesn’t need aid, so it won’t end up like Christian Africa, where we twist arms by connecting charity to filthy sexual aberrations God hates.

Is conservativism really about liberty? I wonder. Maybe it has more to do with safety and wealth. Do I really want a bunch of guns if crime is extremely low and the government stays off my back? I like shooting as a hobby, but I could give it up if the return were worth it.

In America, I have some guns for fun, but I keep others in order to defend myself, my wife, guests, and my property. My government is increasingly hostile to affluent Caucasians who mind their own business, and so are leftists, especially minorities. We also have a problem with crime that is not politically or racially motivated. In other countries, my situation would be different, and so would my attitude toward arming myself.

Here in the USA, we have a big population of blacks and Hispanics, and they commit a gigantic amount of violent crime and property crime. Most crimes of both types are committed by these groups. They have backward cultures that glorify the abuse of innocent people. This is reality, not the woke explanation. Statistics compiled by nonpartisan entities prove these things. White people do bad things, too, but at a much, much lower rate.

Other countries are different. Singapore is around 75% Chinese (non-red), and the rest of the people are mostly Indians, Malays, and Indonesians. Singaporeans like to work and make money. It’s a hard place to start a street gang or do a drive-by. It’s a hard place to riot and destroy homes and businesses. It’s not likely one or two ethnic groups will team up against another, as American blacks and Hispanics have teamed up on whites, and try to take what they have and turn them into milk cows.

We also have a sick government which is becoming more dangerous every month. Professional victims are taking it over. They’re getting rid of cash bail and decriminalizing theft. They are trying to destroy rural areas and suburbs, pushing people into cities where they are easier to control and prey on. It’s not merely likely that sane, decent Americans will eventually have to fight the government. It’s certain. We will see secession and/or guerrilla warfare when things get too hot, and unarmed “haves” will be slaughtered publicly, with their executions posted on social media. We’ve seen the same basic thing in revolutionary France, Cambodia, China, Russia, Cuba, and other places where smelly, ignorant, hateful mobs took over.

In the USA, unless you are willing to trust God and accept martyrdom, it makes no sense to be unarmed, but there are places where arms are a much lower priority.

If you have retirement money, life in Singapore is easy. You just live. You don’t have to endure endless daily bombardments with terrifying news about your once-great nation. “Will the Democrats force my county to put housing projects on formerly-private estates?” “Will the Democrats impose wealth taxes and impoverish me in my old age?” “Will my children be unemployable because they refuse to call male perverts women?” “Will my daughter have to be naked in front of males every day at school?” “Will Antifa/BLM nuts climb my fence and kill and rape my family?” These are things people in Singapore don’t worry about, but they are very real possibilities in the US.

As I’ve gotten older and learned more from God, I’ve become less impressed with the US and democracy. This is not the best country to live in. Not any more. And democracy is overrated. A good king, or “dictator,” as kings are called now, is better than democracy, any day. I’d rather have Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis as a king with a lifetime term than the situation we have now. I’d even take Rand Paul or Ted Cruz.

Democracy is a degenerate system of government, one step above rioting. It puts power in the hands of ignorant, malicious, bigoted imbeciles who have tremendous incentive to loot. Looters have more power than builders, because everyone gets one vote, and looters are more numerous. It also gives too much power to women, who, as a group, invariably vote stupidly.

In the US, we have the idea that it’s sort of illegal or shameful to contemn representative democracy. It’s neither. It’s perfectly acceptable to push for a monarchy or theocracy if you like. You just have to do it without committing offenses like treason and sedition.

I can say these things because I’m not a politician or any other type of person who depends on the love of the mob.

Anyway, America-worship is based in delusion. America is still very high up on the list of desirable places to live, but it’s not the best, and it will eventually become intolerable. Probably before Singapore and even places like Kenya and Uganda.

We are told to be grateful to America for what it has done for us, as though it were person with feelings; a rich mommy that sent us big checks every month. In reality, America never did anything for me. God did. He can bless me anywhere. Look how well Joseph, Esther, and Daniel did under tyrants. Look what he did to Laban because of Jacob. America is just an instrument God used to bless me.

America doesn’t actually care about me. If I died right now, no flags would be lowered. God and certain people care about me.

I’ve done a lot for America. I paid taxes and stayed out of trouble. I submitted to institutionalized racism in the form of affirmative action. I contributed to charities. I registered for the draft, which is a very big deal, at least if you intend to back up your word when called. No entity but America ever asked me to offer it my life and risk being maimed and forgotten.

If I should be grateful to anyone here, it should be the servicemen who fought so I didn’t have to.

I’m extremely grateful for every good thing I have, including the diminished rights I still possess, but I’m grateful to God, not nations. I want to continue to be an asset to America, but if I move to another country, I’ll try to be an asset there, and that country will have whatever loyalty I’m required to extend. I wouldn’t want to be like the disgraceful, parasitic people who become US citizens and then fly flags from their old countries. Dance with the one that brought you, right?

I am censored, libeled, and ostracized from the marketplace every single day, and America’s government–my country’s government–is behind it. That’s really something. I never had these problems during the last century, apart from the time I got desperate and applied for a government job. White people were not the target hiring pool. Other than that, I was nearly a full US citizen.

How grateful should I be for the good things when I’m already fairly well down the Nuremberg rabbit hole, with increased persecution soon to come? Should Jews who were once treated well in Germany have been grateful to their government in 1930? Am I wrong for weighing the very bad along with the good?

These things matter. Losing free speech is not a small thing. Being excluded from economic participation is not trivial.

To get back to travel, we’re only looking at Hong Kong because Rhodah wants to see it. If it were up to me, I would skip it.

I haven’t been to Hong Kong, but I’ve been researching. I’ve been told the people are rude, largely because so many have moved there from the workers’ paradise on the mainland. Funny thing about workers’ paradises; everyone in them always wants to move back to capitalist oppression.

Communism has made or kept the mainland Chinese coarse and selfish, and tourists in Hong Kong have to deal with them because they wait tables and drive cabs. Also, it looks like hotels and other facilities are more run-down in Hong Kong. People are less likely to speak English, even though it’s an official language. Everyone in Singapore speaks English, and they place a high priority on education. They’re not coarse, either. We didn’t see people spitting or littering. Everyone was courteous.

Look, Singapore is better than American cities. Better, not different. Let’s just say it. On average, American city dwellers are inferior to Singaporeans. Inferior. That is the right word. Some people are better than others.

Regarding Hong Kong, I have to say that the food looks very good.

Maybe I’ll be pleasantly surprised.

Hong Kong Chinese are supposedly more cultured than mainlanders, which is not a high bar to clear. On the mainland, people urinate on the streets and let their kids poop there. Sometimes they pull these stunts in Hong Kong, and it doesn’t fly. Mainland Chinese tourists have terrible reputations in every single country they visit, as do Chinese businessmen.

Capitalism makes people better.

Having lived in Northern Florida, far from abusive, dangerous wokiees, for 6 beautiful, precious years that are like enormous pearls to me, I am disturbed whenever I think about visiting places where people are rude and selfish. I get Miami flashbacks. It’s too bad God won’t evacuate that place and put a fence around it to prevent it from coming back.

Hong Kong still uses the Hong Kong dollar, and I have read that people expect cash, so that’s a drag. As much as I hate the war on cash, electronic money is great for tourism.

I should have bought a better camera sooner. In fact, I did. I tried, I mean. I started Youtubing unsuccessfully in around 2016, and I have bought two unsatisfying action cameras. The latest, in 2019, was a Gopro. The cameras haven’t worked out. You really have to control them from phones in order to get them to function, and they’re very hinky. They turn on and off without warning. They refuse to connect to my phone and tablet. They change video modes unexpectedly. My Gopro ruined a video I made in Turkey. It’s just voices and a still photo. Unacceptable, when so much is at stake.

Phones are fine for photos, but I want something dependable for video, and it has to work without a phone.

My phone cost $750, and it does a ton of things. Oddly, the camera I bought costs about $150 more, and all it does is shoot photos and video.

I had a hard time choosing. I finally went with a Sony ZV-1 II. This is considered a point-and-shoot camera, although you can mess with a lot of settings, including the f-stop. I also considered the ZV-E10, which is similar but allows you to change lenses.

The ZV-E10 is more of a grown-up camera. No doubt. You can travel with a standard lens for vlogging and a zoom lens for versatility. Also, the sensor on the ZV-E10 is better. Thing is, it costs a lot with an extra lens. A good zoom lens will run around $650. Maybe I should have sprung for it, but the trip itself is not cheap, and I’m in the middle of Florida’s homeowner insurance explosion crisis, so I’m not feeling like this is the time to throw cash around. Although it probably is.

Our lives are great, but the rapture can’t come soon enough. I can’t wait for the day when I find myself looking back at Earth the way I now look back at the open latrine known as Miami.

Curses, all Around

I’ll tell you what. Satan gets bolder and bolder as the rapture approaches.

His latest trick: getting people to pretend two movies are really one, in order to make it look like a movie he hates is not doing as well as it is.

As we all know, Sound of Freedom is a gigantic hit, and that is in spite of studios refusing to release it for years. Sound of Freedom is about the buying and selling of children, who are enslaved for all sorts of purposes, from prostitution to serving as camel jockeys in Muslim countries. Slavery is still big among Muslims.

Two other movies just came out: Barbie and Oppenheimer. Totally different movies. The industry, in a move that has never happened before, is calling them “Barbenheimer.” The idea is that people are supposed to go see both on the same day, which no one in his right mind would ever do, because they are very different. The news is full of stories saying Barbenheimer is a huge hit.

Sound of Freedom is extremely popular with Christians, and it’s not popular in Hollywood or among perversion enthusiasts on the left. The press has repeatedly attacked the movie. One national news outlet actually hired a reviewer who appears to be a defender of pedophilia and, if smoke means fire, a pedophile, himself.

Hollywood preys on children. Everyone knows this. Greedy, stupid parents shovel their kids into Hollywood’s maw every day, and the ones that get jobs are used and abused. Many are raped, and that includes boys, because Hollywood is so gay-friendly. These things also happen to men and women, as Harvey Weinstein could tell you. The last thing Hollywood wants is exposure. Entertainment people are busy virtue-signaling with one hand while destroying lives with the other.

Corey Haim and Corey Feldman were raped. Michael Jackson raped kids. Erik and Lyle Menendez were raped by their Hollywood dad. Even Shirley Temple was raped, back when Hollywood did a better job of hiding perversion. Errol Flynn committed statutory rape. Then there are Jeffrey Jones, Kevin Spacey, R Kelly, Roman Polanski, Kirk Douglas…I don’t want to spend the rest of the day typing names. Brooke Shields had to do full-frontal nudity when she was 11, in a movie about child prostitution, and somehow no one got arrested. I saw the movie when it came out, and it didn’t even get an X rating.

Here’s what I think. People in Hollywood are very, very unhappy about the success of Sound of Freedom. Actually, that’s a fact, not my opinion. They’ve been criticizing the film ever since it came out. It seems obvious that because of their anger, some people got together and hatched a plan to steal the spotlight. This has to be why “Barbenheimer” is now a word.

It’s not going to work. Sound of Freedom has made over $100 million already, and Elon Musk is going to put it on Twitter, or X, as he now calls it. Go figure Elon Musk.

It’s never going away, and its success could actually spur the production of more shows and movies. As much as Hollywood hates exposure, it also loves money, and loyalty is not in the Hollywood dictionary. If the numbers look right, someone will make films.

Anyway, as God has told me repeatedly, when things don’t make sense, you look for a supernatural cause. In the case of Barbenheimer, it’s obvious. Satan motivated his faithful Hollywood slaves to minimize the impact of a film exposing one of his favorite things.

If you need more proof, consider the fact that Tom Cruise made a point of appearing before the press, buying tickets to both movies on the same day. Cruise is the quintessential Hollywood drone. He has no soul left. And he pushes Scientology, a cult known for human trafficking. When Scientologists or their family members misbehave, they risk being put in a private prison and forced to do slave labor.

They say the Church of Scientology uses confidential information to control actors, so it may be that Cruise himself is, in a way, being trafficked. When you join, they hook you up to a proprietary galvanometer, and you have to tell them about every sexual experience you’ve had.

I used to think God was against the death penalty because it prevented people from receiving salvation, but I don’t feel that way any more. A lot of people need to be executed in order to protect the rest of us. Kidnapping and child rape should be capital crimes, period. Pull the switch and put them down. Some crimes are so outrageous, the continued existence of the perpetrators is not acceptable.

Join me in cursing the entertainment industry, including sports, every day. Fighting these spirits and people with argument and political maneuvering won’t work. We need the power of God on our side. We know this age will end with a Christian-free world completely ruled by Satan, but that doesn’t mean we can’t lay down harassing fire while we’re here.

Maybe Success Doesn’t Look the Way we Expect

I keep getting revelation these days, and I don’t know what to do with it. It’s like receiving so much money, you can’t spend it. I’m glad I get it, and I share it with my wife, but I always think about the billions of people out there who aren’t getting it.

I often feel discouraged because so few people listen when I pass things on, but today I was thinking about it, and it occurred to me that I was probably reaching all the people God expected me to reach.

I’ve written a lot of stuff here. I’ve joined churches and tried to tell people things. I used to have social media accounts, and I used them as well. I’ve used Youtube. I have never gotten a big response. The churches were run by crooks and an arrogant child rapist, and the leadership saw me as a threat instead of an asset.

The other day I thought about these things, and I wondered what would have happened to me had I gained a big audience. Things would have been monetized. Parasites would have popped up and started giving me “advice” about the things they could do to “help” me get God’s message out, in exchange for advancing their own selfish goals. A lot of leftist nuts would have discovered me, and they would have tried to make my life miserable.

I would have faced all sorts of temptations, and I would probably have given in a lot. I might have ended up as useless as Benny Hinn.

Christians tend to respond to worldly success with self-destruction.

More positively, it occurred to me that what was happening to me was what I had predicted years earlier. I said God was giving up on big churches, and he was starting a true grassroots church in which each person would reach a few other people, outside of organizations and church buildings.

If I was right, then I’m just one of a great number of obscure people, each of whom who reaches a few others, and things are going as well as they can, in a world where most people hate God’s ways and are heading for hell with great determination and enthusiasm.

Years back, I heard God say, “One of many.” I knew what it meant. It meant I was one of many people who were being corrected and informed. It made me glad, because I didn’t want to be on my own or part of a tiny group shouldering a lot of weight. I also did not want to be well known.

Looks like things are going as God said they would, so I shouldn’t be discouraged. I am probably accomplishing more or less what I’m supposed to. After all, Jesus did his job perfectly, and when the day of Pentecost came, there were only 120 people in the room. When Joel Osteen, a teacher of lies and fables, sneezes, more than 120 people say, “God bless you.” A big audience is generally a sign of failure.

Lately God has been showing me more about the symmetry of the supernatural realm. It never ceases to amaze me. God and Satan. Yeshua and the Antichrist. Heaven and hell. Grieving the Holy Spirit and casting out demons. The body of the Christ and the body of the Antichrist. Elijah and the Antichrist’s prophet. For everything in the kingdom of God, Satan has a counterpart.

I was thinking about the polarization of the world the other day. I often say the world is being centrifuged instead of using the term “polarized.” A centrifuge separates things. It acts like a filter. Increasingly, we see the world divided into two camps. On one side, leftists who hate Christianity, and, by extension, Yeshua. On the other side, conservatives who are more or less on the side of God.

If you think leftists don’t hate Yeshua, remember: they now call us “Christofascists.” That’s about as blasphemous as you can get.

The sifting of the world is not a purely political sifting, because there are plenty of antichristian conservatives who think guns and rallies, not supernatural warfare, will save the world. Those people work for Satan regardless of what they think. Still, while not all conservatives are with God, everyone who belongs to God is conservative. For the left, it looks better to attack conservatives as a whole than to single Christians out, so Satan goes after the entire political right.

When Paul’s ship sank, it was because he was aboard. It had nothing to do with the heathens who were with him, but Satan was willing to kill them anyway in order to get Paul. Same with Jonah. Christians are on the conservative ship.

What God has shown me about the world’s state of hate-based division is that it comes from the spirits who control most human beings. Satan, fallen angels, and demons have become much more effective at transforming and controlling leftists. “Radicalizing,” if you prefer.

The rapture, tribulation, and millennium are coming soon. To a lot of Christians, that sounds great, because it means we get out of this trashy world where creatures are at each other’s throats around the clock. But consider it from the perspective of evil spirits. Satan has had thousands of years in which to enjoy tormenting people and convincing them to go to hell. In a few years, that will come to an end. After the tribulation, he and the spirits that serve him will be chained in hell, and they will stay there for a millennium. After that, they will be released briefly, be thoroughly routed, and then be dumped in a lake of fire, to thrash in agony, forgotten, forever.

Obviously, they are not happy about this. What we are seeing is a cascading proliferation of tantrums from the spirit world.

War in the spirit world is about to flare up like never before, so things are going badly on Earth, and division is worse than ever. The insanity and hatred of the left are reflections of the feelings and beliefs of the spirits that control leftists.

It’s kind of funny. Leftists are now telling just about all successful people they live on stolen land. That’s how evil spirits see us, too. They used to have bodies, and they were the ruling class. Then God humiliated them and gave the planet back to normal human beings. The spirits don’t accept the fact that they were always slum-class usurpers.

God showed me something else the other day. He explained why Satan is willing to fight him, even after spending so much time in the throne room. Satan has seen God’s limitless power, so why fight?

First of all, he has nothing to lose. He can’t be forgiven, so he’s going to burn. Second, he is literally insane. You can see this insanity mirrored in his children. The kooks with Seventies-throwback multicolored hair who can’t figure out what a woman is.

Sane people keep scratching their heads, wondering how anyone can swallow notions that are indisputably wrong and absurd. It’s not hard. You just have to be separated from the Holy Spirit.

Back to symmetry. Only the Holy Spirit prevents delusion and teaches truth. Studying the Bible won’t do it. Neither will praying with your unaided mind all day. You have to be baptized with the Holy Spirit, and then you have to pray in tongues a lot every day. You have to spend time submitting to him. Then he will teach you through revelation.

Judaism and most churches promote ridiculous lies no adult should be able to believe, and it doesn’t matter how smart their scholars and clergymen are. It doesn’t matter how much they study. The mind can’t understand the supernatural without help. Only a small percentage of people are taught by the Holy Spirit, and only they are truly sane and informed.

Churches dumped the Holy Spirit very early in their history, so we have been flying blind for a couple of millennia. The Jews have no guidance, either. They haven’t had a prophet they accepted for about two and a half millennia. They had habits of murdering prophets and worshiping fallen angels, so God gave them a drought of prophecy. This is stated in the book of Amos, not the New Testament. It’s not an antisemitic myth.

This is why Catholics literally pray to saints and figurines and Jews pray to their ancestors. It’s why healings and miracles are uncommon in Judaism and old churches. It’s why we now have proud perverts, including women, running churches and even Orthodox synagogues.

If you don’t learn from the Holy Spirit, you die in ignorance and error, and it can be really profound.

Here’s the interesting thing: this applies to spirits as well as people.

We know that angels dwell around the throne in heaven, and evil spirits don’t. The Bible shows that Satan sometimes appears before God, but he and his minions aren’t allowed to dwell there. Spirits that serve God are welcome to stay there and bathe in correction and every other good thing that comes from God’s presence.

Satan and the other evil spirits have been starving for God for thousands of years. During that time, they have become more and more insane, because there was no Holy Spirit among them to keep them rational. Satan is literally deranged. He probably thinks he can win.

God is righteous, and “righteous” simply means “correct.” Look it up. The less time you spend with God and his children, the less right you become. “Right” and “rational” mean the same thing, and the insane are irrational.

I could write about this stuff all day. The manifestations of supernatural symmetry are everywhere. Whenever you see something that belongs to God or Satan, look for a homologue on the other side. You may learn something new.

Pray Your Way Out of Here

I believe I got a revelation from God the other day, and while that happens all the time, I think this one will be very useful to other people, so I am writing about it.

The tribulation is coming. The Bible makes that clear. During the tribulation, life on Earth will be more miserable than ever. People, trees, and fish will be killed off. Animals will kill people. Plagues will abound. Starvation and lack will sweep the world. Nobody in his right mind would want to be here while all this is happening.

Before the tribulation, the rapture will come. People who are close to God will be taken to heaven alive, to celebrate the wedding of Yeshua. The Bible says the church is his bride. The tribulation and wedding will last 7 years, and whether you experience it as a time of horrible suffering or a big party will depend on where you are.
So how can the tribulation happen if people are praying for the world? Won’t God listen to them?

God grants our prayers. Christians know this. He doesn’t grant every request, because we pray incorrectly most of the time. We ask for stupid things, or we ask without faith or love. We ask while we’re immersed in sinful behavior that blocks the answers. But when we ask correctly, we get what we want. It would not make sense for the tribulation to take place while a lot of people are praying. They would pray for God to mitigate it.

God has to remove people who are close to him from the world before the tribulation can happen. This is why the rapture comes before the tribulation. He won’t want us here asking him to show the world mercy. In addition, he will not want us to be here to suffer with people who rejected him. Plagues are not for the righteous.

What else do we know about God? Here’s one thing: we are supposed to love him. This is the most important commandment, according to God himself. Yeshua, who is God, said it. He even put it above obedience.

We are supposed to be grateful to God, and grateful children show their love for parents by doing things for them. But how do you do things for God? He isn’t hungry. He doesn’t need shelter. He has no diseases. He can defeat all of his enemies.

Yeshua made it clear that when we do things for others, we do them for him. We show our love for him by doing charity. If you give money to a poor person to pay his light bill, for example, it’s as though you took pity on Yeshua himself.

Of course, churches barely mention this. The dead churches are too busy embracing perversion and teaching rules. The Holy Spirit churches are too obsessed with taking people’s money.

They don’t teach us how to obey the most important commandment. It’s astounding, if you think about it.

Intercession is one form of charity. You take time out of your day to pray for God to help other people, expecting him to grant your requests. It’s not a small thing, regardless of what leftists like to say on Twitter these days. It’s more powerful than direct action, by far.

We are told to intercede not just for people we like, but for people who are hateful. Jesus himself did this as he was being crucified.

So, if you add it all up, you get this: if you’re a prodigious intercessor, God will want you off the earth before the tribulation. If you’re down here showing your love for God by praying for both nice people and the obstreperous and vile, you are using God’s power to hold back disaster. The tribulation, which has to come, can’t come while intercession is blocking it.

For these reasons, I believe that if you make a practice of interceding a lot every day, you are likely to be taken in the rapture.

Interceding has other benefits. God blesses people who do what he tells them, and also, it appears that when wicked people can’t receive the blessings you ask for, they go back to you. Interceding makes you more like God in your heart. It also helps you enter and stay in his presence.

I am trying to put this revelation to work every day. Hope it works for everyone who reads this.

Oh, Boy! Fetch the Condiment Sommelier!

We live in a time of bizarre and unpredictable shortages. A week or two ago, a new one popped up: sriracha sauce.

When I was young, sriracha was just something you expected to see on the table during rare visits to Thai restaurants. No one was excited about it. It went well with Thai food, but it wasn’t that great with most other things.

At some point, hipsters discovered it, and for no good reason at all, they developed a sriracha obsession. They use it inappropriately on all kinds of things, including tacos and something called avocado toast.

Don’t get me started on avocados. They shouldn’t even be called fruit. They’re okay in guacamole, but you could just as easily make it from something like zucchini or yellow squash, because avocados have nearly no flavor. When I was a kid, there were two avocado trees in my yard, and I can’t recall eating a single one. I let them rot on the ground.

It’s bizarre to me that women love avocados so much. It’s like eating thick green water. And mashed avocado looks exactly like baby poop.

The web says a lot of implausible Paltrowesque things about avocados. It claims it gives women shinier hair, clearer skin, better vision, lower blood pressure, smaller waists, bigger bustlines, more hits on Instagram, and a higher chance of landing rich boyfriends.

I made some of those up.

In my defense, the ones I made up are probably just as valid as the others.

I guess I’ll take heat for this, but fooling women is just about the easiest way there is to get rich. My mother once paid $18 for a bar of soap. She had it for years. I think she was afraid to use it.

If it weren’t for female gullibility, the Mormon church would still be meeting in people’s living rooms in upstate New York.

I don’t know why pretentious millennials got so excited about sriracha, but they seem to have very empty lives. I guess they’ll jump at anything that gives them a reason to celebrate.

Anyway, there is a big ol’ American company that makes what is probably the best-known sriracha. The familiar one with the rooster on the bottle. The company is called Huy Fong Foods, Inc. It’s in California. I don’t know too much about what hipsters like, but it appears they think Huy Fong has no equal. An article I saw said Huy Fong used to buy peppers in the US, but they started buying in Mexico.

Hmm. Things are going so well in California. I wonder why anyone would decide not to buy California produce and to outsource to Mexico. Yes, it’s a real puzzle. We should assemble a think tank.

Mexico’s pepper fields are doing poorly due to drought, which is caused by global warming, Donald Trump, and misgendering. As a result, Huy Fong has cut production back. People have started putting Huy Fong sriracha on Ebay, and some have paid $70 for a single bottle. Right now, Amazon’s cheapest bottle is $25. The next-best deal is about $43. That’s a big bottle, though; 28 ounces. Normal bottles are not available from Amazon.

When I saw the story, I wondered how stupid millennials were, so I looked around the web to see if anyone was selling Huy Fong sriracha at the regular low price, and I didn’t see any. I didn’t want it, because I still have about 7/8 of a bottle I bought years ago. This stuff lasts forever. I was just curious, and I thought it would be funny to find a $5 bottle on the web while men who were allergic to testosterone were paying 14 times that much.

While I was thinking about this, I remembered a long-abandoned quest. The quest for Shark brand sriracha.

I used to live in Miami, and Miami has lots of Thais. It has great Thai restaurants. While I was there, I learned to love sriracha, but it was not Huy Fong. It was Shark brand. A local joint served it.

Shark sriracha is sweet and has a complex taste. You can literally pour it on white rice and enjoy it. I like dumping it on Thai food in restaurants, but I can’t do that where I am now, because they don’t have it.

While I was thinking about Huy Fong, Shark came to mind, and I decided to make another effort to find it. I succeeded.

I found an Asian grocery site, and I ordered two bottles. I got two because they had both medium and hot sauce. I didn’t know which one I liked. I was giddy to find there were different grades. They sell for about $13 and $16, respectively, and the bottles are huge: 25 ounces.

I spent a little, it’s true, but I wasn’t buying something I can ordinarily find at Publix. I have never been able to buy Shark locally. I would have had to pay a lot to get Shark even without a shortage.

My sauce arrived today. I just tried it.

This stuff is wonderful. Both grades. I would not buy the hot version again, however, because it tastes almost exactly like medium, and it costs three dollars more.

I guess this will irk any hipster who reads this, but Huy Fong is American, and Shark is made in Thailand. Hipsters are all about being authentic and original, while aping each other’s tattoos and wearing old people’s discarded clothing, so you would think they’d be all over Shark.

Googling around, I see some people agree with me. Serious Eats had a sriracha contest, and Huy Fong was beaten by Polar brand and Shark. Huy Fong is very good, and I’m not knocking it, but Shark is better.

Interesting note: sriracha is easy to make at home, so anyone who blew $70 on a bottle is either rich or foolish.

Huy Fong makes one pepper product I can’t live without: chili garlic sauce. This is a thick sauce made from vinegar, chilies, salt, and garlic. It doesn’t scream “ORIENTAL” when you use it, so it’s versatile. I love it in hummus, and you can use it to heat up nearly anything.

I wonder what it costs right now. I used to go through a lot of it back when I was hitting the hummus hard.

The Asian site I went to for sauce had a lot of other interesting stuff. I popped for some red curry sauce. I have a tendency to assume Asians make everything from scratch, but on the web, I’ve seen them pouring all kinds of stuff out of cans and bottles. I want to see if I can make a decent red chicken curry with packaged sauce as a base ingredient.

It’s very hard to stop collecting hot sauces. I have Crystal, Frank’s, two kinds of Huy Fong, three kinds of El Yucateco, two kinds of Shark, and sometimes I also keep two kinds of Matouk’s.

I hope this blog post is useful to you. Maybe someone whose handlebar moustache is drooping from sriracha deprivation will see this, try Shark, and never look back.

Enthusiasm Outpaces Skill

Yesterday I fired up the new Walmart pizza oven and made a Neapolitan-style pie. I am here with the results.

After reading about Neapolitan pizza and consulting experienced people, I decided to use these dough ingredients:

INGREDIENTS

100 grams Primo Gusto high-gluten flour
60 grams water
0.75 teaspoons salt (supposedly 3 grams)
1/8 teaspoon yeast

When you bake like an intelligent person, you weigh everything carefully, and you list the weight of each ingredient as a percentage of the weight of the flour. I was told that Neapolitan pizza requires a dry dough with 60% hydration, meaning the water should weigh 60% as much as the flour. The ideal salt percentage is said to be 2.5-3%, which is common to a lot of breads. I use measuring spoons for yeast because I’m not going to sit around weighing tiny amounts of leavening. It’s not critical.

I usually go with 67% hydration, a small amount of sugar, and a little oil (except for Sicilian), so the dough I made for Neapolitan was pretty stiff.

Unfortunately, the grams-to-teaspoons conversion I used for salt appears to have been wrong, so I may have used about 50% more salt than I should have. Salt slows fermentation, and too much salt ruins the flavor of bread.

I let the dough rise for two hours at room temperature, and then I refrigerated it. Early the next day, I set it out to ferment at room temperature again. I got these instructions from the web.

When the oven was hot, I didn’t have a lot of time to wait for the dough. Late in the afternoon, I took it out to shape it, and although it had doubled in size, it was awfully hard compared to my usual dough. I stretched it anyway.

I made a small pie because I don’t have a peel the right size for this oven. It’s on the way. I have a peel 9″ wide, so I sized the pie to fit it.

For sauce, I pureed Cento San Marzano peeled tomatoes. They were really sour. They say you shouldn’t put anything but salt in Neapolitan sauce, but I was the one who had to eat it, so I left the salt out and added a little sugar and pressed garlic.

Pizza without garlic is a missed opportunity.

I also mixed a little fresh basil into the sauce. A lot of people dump fresh basil on finished pies or bake it on top of the sauce and cheese. Those people are nuts. Fresh basil is not tasty at all, and baking it on top of everything can burn it. I think they do it for the sake of appearance.

A destructive obsession with presentation is one of the hallmarks of bad cooks. The world is full of bad cooks, including cooks with degrees, who proudly present beautiful bad food, thinking they’ve done something wonderful.

For cheese, I tore up about 2 ounces of Belgioioso fresh mozzarella and dumped them on the sauce.

I did something I should not have done. I decided to try my usual method of loading the oven. Most people put corn meal or semolina on their peels to make raw pizzas slide off. I don’t, because it’s a dumb thing to do. It makes a mess, and often, it doesn’t work. I put a sheet of nonstick foil on my peel. I slide the foil and pizza onto my steel, and two minutes later, I pull the foil out. Works great for New York style pies.

Looks like it does not work for Neapolitan, however.

I put the pie in the oven, gave the hot stone some time to dry up the underside of the crust, and tried to pull the foil out. It hung on something, and when it came out, it had a little hole in it. I don’t know if it stuck to the pie or what.

Neapolitan pies in cheap ovens cook quickly on one side, so you have to turn them. When I tried to turn the pie, it resisted. Turned out there was a tiny hole in it, and sauce had gone through and hit the stone, gluing the pie down in one spot. I broke it free, but by the time I got it moving, one side of the pie was black.

When I took the pie out, it had problems.

The dough was underfermented, which is one reason it was hard. This prevented it from blowing up properly, so the pizza was somewhat heavy. It also tasted salty. Finally, the bottom was undercooked. It should have been partially charred. I think the foil did me in. I’ll post pictures.

I think this oven will make good pizza if I get things right. Today I’m making another pie, fermented overnight at room temperature. It should be much poofier. I’m also going to use the hated corn meal.

I don’t know if I’ll be able to make big pies, because the heat is so intense near the back of the oven. The bigger a pie is, the closer the rim will be to the heat.

The sauce was surprisingly good. I make a more flavorful sauce for New York pies, and I’m sure it would be better than yesterday’s sauce on Neapolitan pizza, but it was okay.

The cheese was also surprising. If you put fresh whole milk mozzarella on a New York pie, it shrinks and shoots water and grease onto the pizza. In yesterday’s pie, it just melted and spread out. No problems at all.

Will I continue and then move on to an expensive gas oven? Can’t say, but so far, the results are encouraging.

Over Over Over

I believe God is preparing people to be raptured, by making them want to abandon this world. I keep seeing disgusting things in the news.

Today I saw stories that reminded me how much I wished the rapture had already happened.

I think the worst story was about a young child whose pediatrician asked him if he was a sexual pervert. Maybe you’ve seen this. The kid wants to play football, so his dad had to get him checked out. The doctor asked the boy whether he was non-binary, gender-fluid, or otherwise counted among those who practice abomination.

We used to be upset because doctors were asking patients whether they owned guns. It was a remarkable effort to propagandize and establish a non-governmental watch list of gun owners. Now that they’re alerting small boys to the wonders of sodomy, the gun questions seem pretty innocuous.

The story made me very angry. I can understand how a father would want to punch a doctor in the face. If the creepy bachelor next door, who has a really neat electric train set, asks your young son whether he’s a pervert, the natural response is to want to punch him in the face, and it would be tough to get a jury to convict a parent who obeyed the urge. It’s no different when the person who defiles your kids wears a stethoscope.

I don’t want to be angry at anyone, and that is especially true of those who deserve anger. I don’t believe anyone should use violence unless there is no other choice. It’s not right to punch creepy doctors. I’m just saying it’s natural to be enraged when an idiot contaminates your child.

I also read about two new black mass shooters, one of whom is swishy. I’ll just say “swishy.” I’m tired of trying to find polite terms.

A man named Kimbrady Carriker shot a bunch of people in Philadelphia. He used a semiautomatic rifle. Internet detectives Googled social media photos of him wearing women’s clothing, including a brassiere and fake breasts. Conservatives are calling him “trans,” and leftists are calling them bigots because he has not expressly labeled himself trans.

Look, you can’t have everything your way. You can’t have 597 different genders and expect the rest of us to guess which one applies. Things are so confusing, the last trans shooter was “misgendered” by leftist journalists for two days. Even they couldn’t figure it out.

You don’t need a title in order to belong to the tranny camp. Richard Speck, the nurse killer, was trans. There is a grotesque video of him in prison, prancing around in women’s underwear, topless, with huge breasts produced by injections.

A whole lot of violent criminals in prison are trans, and prison isn’t always what makes them that way. For many, it’s just a safe place where they can express themselves. I don’t think homosexuality makes you a violent criminal, but from history, it seems obvious that violent criminals are more likely than normal people to be homosexuals.

A man who wears dresses and false breasts is definitely trans-something, whether leftists would call him transgender, transsexual, transvestite, or transistor radio. He’s effeminate. He is perverted. He is an alphabet person. The LGB’s own him, regardless of whether he has chosen a label. He’s not a normal heterosexual man.

Anyway, that’s not the most interesting thing about him to me. I find him interesting because he’s black. We keep seeing minority mass shooters in the news. For decades we were told only white men do mass shootings, but now, whenever I see a mass shooting headline, I think, “black,” because we keep seeing black and Hispanic shooters in the news.

So, what’s happening? Has it always been this way, or is mass shooting among minorities become a new trend? It’s hard to say, because the press has a long history of suppressing news about black crime. When you get to know a few black people, they will open your eyes by telling you how things really are.

Now for the other shooter I read about. In Queens, a nut named Thomas Abreu rode around on a scooter, shooting random people. He killed an old man. He’s black. You can look at his last name and say he must be Puerto Rican. Well, Puerto Rico is an island, not a race. He’s black. Look at the pictures.

He appears to be a non-effeminate male, but the way things go these days, that conclusion could change at any minute.

The last big shooter in Baltimore was black, too. Then there was the Mexican guy who shot people in Texas.

Maybe the problem is that “mass shooting” has been redefined. If I recall correctly, you used to have to shoot quite a few people to be called a mass shooter, but now they’re including characters who shoot 4 victims. Most homicides in the US are committed by black people, and the lower the number of victims a shooter needs to be on a list, the more black people will make the cut. My guess is that we are now counting a whole lot of lesser mass shootings, and those often involve black shooters.

I don’t know, though.

Anyway, the stories are discouraging because they seem to show how minority communities are collapsing. And they go hand in hand with the shoplifting stories.

Blue cities are going the way of Detroit because of theft and other crimes. In San Francisco, normal retailing is rapidly becoming impossible. I saw a video of a Safeway supermarket in San Francisco. It’s like airport security. Metal fences everywhere. Receipt scanners. Exits permanently locked. Makes me wonder what will happen when fires–I mean “oxidizing protests”–break out.

When I was young, someone who was inexplicably proud of having moved to California told me the rest of the US got things 5 years after they did. I think there is truth to that, and it’s not encouraging.

I don’t understand why people from Southern California are arrogant about living there, as if they were a higher form of life. In order to qualify, you just show up. Charles Manson lived there. So did Harvey Weinstein.

What do suburbs have in great abundance, compared to cities? Caucasians and Asians. The shoplifting epidemic is largely black. It’s like the actual witches who run BLM have convinced a substantial percentage of black people they already own whatever is on store shelves, so when they take it, it’s just an advance on reparations.

What’s going to happen to America if black areas destroy themselves entirely? What if they become like Somalia? They were awful before this business started. I don’t know how families will survive when life becomes one continuous riot.

The increase in black crime is going to make it harder for black people who want to leave. When they show up in the country and in suburbs looking for housing so they can raise normal children and not be shot at twice a month, people will find ways to avoid renting and selling to them. They already do. Housing discrimination is very hard to prove. The reparations/victimhood mindset is going to turn many black people into prisoners of ghettos.

I also saw a bunch of headlines about states banning “gender-affirming care” for minors. There is so much wrong with that phrase. I don’t need to read the stories to be disheartened. The headlines themselves show that mainstream America is dead.

First of all, they’re not “affirming” anything. You can’t affirm a delusion. The term “gender-affirming” was crafted by pro-perversion people to move the goalposts and make it seem like the claimed genders of confused people are indisputably correct. They make it sound like settled science. That’s not true at all.

An enormous percentage of people who let doctors hack them up and fill them with hormones and hormone blockers later realize they were going through temporary phases or pressured by stupid parents who wanted to use their children as virtue-signaling accessories.

The other problem with the phrase is the word “care.” Castrating your little boy is not care. Slicing your little girl’s breasts off is not care. Skinning her arm and leg, destroying her genitals, and crafting a hideous, non-functional imitation penis from the scraps is not care. Reinforcing damaging delusions is not care.

What do you do now if you want to raise a normal child who is not sexually perverted, has a good relationship with the Holy Spirit, and isn’t convinced white people and capitalism are evil? Not just homeschooling; you have to find a doctor who isn’t nuts. How do you do that? Will they put little decals on their office windows?

What’s life like for normal people in San Francisco? You get up in the morning and get your kids together for prayer. Then you get started on their homeschooling. Then you go to the grocery alone so they won’t see nude men strolling down the sidewalk. Then you enter the store through the one unlocked exit, buy your food, put it in ridiculous paper bags that rip, and go through a security checkpoint. Then if your kids have to visit the doctor, you go in and sit beside them, holding your phone up to record everything in case the doctor or a nurse with purple hair commits a verbal molestation.

Then if your wife divorces you and decides your son is a girl, you may get in trouble with the government if you try to prevent her from castrating him.

We are done here. We need God to come and get us.

It’s sad that people don’t realize the nuts have won. There are people who think the Bud Light disaster proves there is still hope. That’s wrong. One of the curses of godless people is that those they hate rule over them, even as minorities. Read the Bible and see. It doesn’t matter that most Americans quietly disagree with the loonies. Satan gives them power over us because we turned away from the Holy Spirit.

You have to remember the symmetry of the supernatural. One person accompanied by the Holy Spirit can defeat 10,000 heathens. Similarly, one heathen can defeat 10,000 Christians who abandoned the Holy Spirit and followed the world.

We’re not seeing a fight between solid Christians and the godless. We’re seeing a fight between the openly godless and a nation of fake Christians who made themselves their own gods. Both sides belong to Satan.

Back when I was attending worthless Trinity Church in Miami, I thought I was surrounded by Christians. At first. Then I saw all the Obama stickers in the parking lot. I saw Oprah’s magazine on a coffee table in the pastor’s son’s office. Oprah is openly against Christianity. Then I saw the children of prominent church members on Facebook, sassing adults who criticized homosexuality.

I watched Rich Wilkerson, the head pastor, lie to crowds of poor people to get their money. He told them to pay him before paying their utility bills. He said God would reward them with money, which did not happen.

I used to think the people he lied to were victims, but that’s not really true. He told them what they wanted to hear. “Keep doing what you’re doing, and God will save you anyway.”

This was his own plan for life, and he spread it to them. He was giving “doctrine affirming care.”

Most Christians around the world are like the ones I knew in Miami. The rapture will come, and they’ll still be here, among their real brothers and sisters, in a world ruled by their real god.

I want this mess to end soon. My wife and I are in little safe cocoons, enjoying ourselves, but the barbarians are taking more and more ground around us, getting closer every day. Sooner or later, they’ll be in my yard, and the government will be on their side. They’ll be the government. I’m not going to join the dupes who plan to fight them. I just want God to evacuate us.