Can These Dry Bones Live? Lightroom and Photolab say Yes

Today is the day of the week we reserve for God and family, so I will not be writing long.

I have been trying to save photos I took before I got my current phone and cameras. I got my old phones running and dumped a lot of things into my cavernous storage drive. I still can’t get the Galaxy S2 going, but I may be able to do it eventually.

I am learning two big lessons: first, there is nothing like having lots of photos of people and pets you love, and second, you should not throw out old shots until you have learned to use editing software, because often, a shot you thought was not worth keeping will, upon editing, turn out to be a digital heirloom.

As usual, I can’t upload the best examples of what I’m doing, and that is a major handicap when writing about photography, but at least there will be the writing, and that’s something.

I found a photo of my dad, taken in 2017. Thing is, it’s not a photo of my dad. We were at Tractor Supply, picking up the only decent new chainsaw in the county. A hurricane had just hit us with tropical-storm-force winds, and I managed to buy a Jonsered saw a few minutes after it was made available online.

My dad was not behaving all that well that day. In the car, I had tried to reason with him about something or other, and as we approached Tractor Supply, he told me to go to hell three times. Then he forgot all about it, and he was amazed when I brought it up.

I made it into the store before he did, and I saw something funny: a colorful metal chicken sculpture. I took a shot of it with the store window behind it. I guess I wanted to text it to a friend.

I was going through my old shots yesterday, and when I looked at the chicken photo, I saw that my dad was visible in the window, in the parking lot, on his way to the door. Maybe I included that on purpose.

It was not the kind of image that cheers people up. He looked frail and uncertain. Nothing like the strong, blustery, confrontational man he had been for most of his life.

I threw it into Lightroom, which I am trying out. The software lit up the chicken’s colors. I cropped the image to reduce distractions. I probably fiddled with the color. Now I have a touching shot of my late father fit to put on a wall.

I also found a photo of my buddy Mike standing next to a burn pile. It really captured him, so I cropped it and fixed the colors and lighting.

I won’t post these shots, but maybe I can find some other zombie photos that were saved by editing. Not prizewinners, but worth the effort.

I have been trying not to get snobby about JPG’s. It is true that they are far inferior to raw photos for editing, and if you screw up a raw shot, you are much more likely to be able to turn it into a masterpiece, but JPG is not a bad format. If it were, people wouldn’t convert photos to JPG before saving them to disks or printing them. The phone shots I have been salvaging are all JPG. I will continue shooting in raw, but I’m not going to give up on old photos just because they’re JPG’s.

I’m also trying not to get snobby about lenses.

I have gotten used to listening to experts, and they are extremely picky. They find all sorts of faults with lenses. Many of these faults can be fixed after images have been captured, but they still sound bad somehow.

I am not stupid. I know that as long as a lens is pretty sharp and can produce images in real-world lighting conditions, I can use it to make excellent photos nobody will ever find fault with. In the real world, nobody gets out a microscope when looking at photos.

I happen to have a 9 mm manual focus lens I got for travel, and I tried to shoot my son with it. Even with focus peaking, I got images that were not sharp. Then I saw a video about a new, inexpensive 9 mm that has autofocus. I watched a couple of videos, and I ordered it. Now I have two 9 mm lenses, which seems like a waste of money, but the new one arrived yesterday, and I already have several fantastic photos.

It was a good investment.

The experts said it had something called “moustache distortion,” which was not easily fixed unless software companies made special profiles for this lens. Who cares? If a million people look at these wonderful photos, not one will notice distortion.

A lens may be soft in the corners or produce vignetting or have some other issue and still be a fantastic investment. Excellent photos taken with a middle-of-the-road lens are better than perfect photos you never get to take because you can’t afford the best.

I’ve spent a considerable amount of money on lenses, but if all I had were an APS-C camera and an 18-135 mm kit lens, I would be able to produce great work as long as the photographer was up to the task.

As an aside, I am getting irritated with people who think every portrait has to be tall and cropped and has to be shot with a long lens. Everyone seems to think human beings should be isolated in photos, and people seem to be obsessed with bokeh, the pleasant blurring that surrounds foreground subjects.

Guess what? A 9 mm lens is about as wide as they get, and it is magnificent for taking people’s pictures. If you want the standard waist-up photo which is taller than it is wide, which is exactly as creative as a passport photo, good for you, but wide photos allow you to add important context, and if you make a habit of leaving it out, in the future, people will wish you hadn’t. “Is that Daisy’s tail? Why didn’t you get her face?”

They also give pictures a dramatic look you can’t get with longer lenses.

As for bokehmania, it’s a restrictive, dogmatic fad. Sorry, but it is. When you want it, you want it, but it’s not for every photo. Often, it will cost you context you should have kept.

I should not be harsh or irritable. Most people are never going to think for themselves, and it is unfair to ask them to, but it would be nice if they didn’t insist on pushing the rest of us to put on their shackles. I am about to quit a forum because there is an old guy there who can’t think outside the box and gives me rude lectures when I don’t climb in there with him. He knows a lot of things, but too many of the things he knows are not true.

His photos are not good, by the way. I have encountered some extremely capable photographers on forums, and this guy is not one of them. My policy these days is to listen to people whose work is excellent. The rest are less credible.

I better stop. If you’re planning to learn photography, I suggest you be careful not to dump old photos because you think they’re embarrassingly bad in view of your new skill and knowledge. Run them through the editing process, and you may find there are a lot of babies in the bathwater.

Everything is a Subject

Today I listened to Saul Leiter talk. He was a famous photographer known for unconventional and extremely creative compositions. He did a lot of street photos. He said something I agree with. He said there was always something to photograph.

I agree with that. I think that a good photographer should always be able to find a subject, even if it’s a sock or a bar of soap. You just have to be able to see what it can become. Believing this doesn’t make it easy, however.

Today I was in the shower, and I saw the light coming in through a glass block window high on the wall. I wondered if there was a way to turn that into something.

I took a few shots with an 18-50 mm zoom, and it was no good. I couldn’t get far enough away to get much in the photo. I decided to try out a very odd lens: a Laowa 9mm zero-distortion lens. I got it for travel. I thought it would be good for shooting indoors. It goes down to f/2.8, which is better than the zoom, so I thought it might handle low light better and also fill an optical niche.

I got one or two shots I felt were worth editing. It would help me learn to edit, and for all I knew the photos might turn out to be better than I thought. I have learned that you don’t know what you have until you edit.

Well. Thats an exaggeration. Sometimes it’s clear you have garbage, but often shots that look like they could never be redeemed turn out to be acceptable. The right crop, the right color adjustments…you might save something you think was not worth shooting in the first place.

I picked the shot I thought was closest to good, and I turned it into this:

WordPress will not upload a file produced by Photolab, or at least it won’t for me, so I had to save this a second time using a website. I don’t know if all the quality will be there. This was already reduced to 700 pixels in width, which was bad enough. It will do for blogging.

It will not win any prizes, but it’s a lot better than what I started with. It doesn’t look like a soccer mom made it by dropping her camera in the bathroom. You can tell someone thought about it and tried to get the best composition possible with the raw material. There are several shapes that interact with each other to make a composition.

It’s not what I hoped for at all. I wanted to make something from the light coming in the window, but then I got all excited about the brooding black and white look. I can get some sunstars if I edit it differently, but I haven’t done that yet.

I might do it again from a different perspective.

I guess I could call it “New Year’s Hangover,” although I didn’t have a hangover when I shot it. Imagine some guy lying on the floor of his shower, unable to believe he has to stand up and function.

I also shot a bottle sitting on the edge of the bathtub. I had an idea. Shots of people walking away look good when they are next to things like walls that shrink in the distance. I thought maybe I could play around and get something similar from a bottle sitting next to a wall. I came up with the following photo.

It’s not what I wanted, but I enjoyed fooling with it. I think I need to shoot it over again from a slightly different angle. When the light is right. Not now. Then maybe one day I can find an extremely short person to take the bottle’s place. He will have to be about 9 inches tall.

I will continue shooting in the house, and I should be able to get some very nice pictures in the workshop, where there is so much interesting junk.

Maybe if I plan these things a little better, I can get some shots that are really good.

MORE

I wrote something incorrect earlier.

I posted a black and white photo of my shower, and I said I had managed to get sunstars out of it earlier. It turns out I was confusing it with another photo which I like better. The sunstars are still in the other photo, and I will post it below.

I think this is the image I wanted to publish in the first place. The angles are more dramatic, and that glass block wall on the right adds interest.

This is not the Kind of Flock God has in Mind

I am enjoying life more and more. At the same time, I continue to say there is no hope for the world and that immense suffering is on the way for humanity. There is no inconsistency. God helps my family and me to have increased love, protection, transformation, and abundance in our little cocoon, but around me, the human race is destroying itself with technology.

Case in point: the destruction of free will.

I have been writing about this for ages, and I still have not seen anyone else point out the obvious: God’s plan depends of free will, and free will diminishes as surveillance increases. This is one of the reasons why God doesn’t walk around in plain sight, correcting us at every turn. He knows that if we did, he would never see us being ourselves. We have to be free to be ourselves. Without the freedom to behave badly, we never learn to behave well for the right reasons. Instead, we do whatever we think we should do to win approval and blessings and avoid punishment.

If we didn’t have free will, our interactions with God would be like scripted plays. They would be like the scripted interviews hostages and prisoners of war have been forced to give. Our obedience and expressions of love would be a lot like our forced contributions to social programs through taxes. They wouldn’t be motivated by our true feelings, and we wouldn’t deserve any credit for them.

Today I learned there is a name for the obvious change surveillance makes in people’s behavior. It’s called the Hawthorne Effect. It was named after the Hawthorne Western Electric plant, where researchers concluded that increased attention stimulated workers to be more productive.

The legitimacy of the Hawthorne Effect is disputed, but it is unquestionably true that people change their behavior when they think they are being watched.

God’s kingdom depends on judgment, and you can’t judge people who have never been free, whether they were unable to behave well or badly.

I learned about the term “Hawthorne effect” from a video I saw today. Many people are up in arms about our new surveillance state, and the latest big offense has been the spread of spying systems made by a company called Flock Safety. It’s a lovely name. They should have gone ahead and added “for the Children” to the end of it.

Flock makes revolting systems that automatically surveil people in public. Their cameras pan and zoom, and when they see human beings, they lock onto them. They even blow up and capture things people are looking at on their phones. They store videos the government has no business with.

Some of you are already in videos like this, and things you think no one but you knows have been recorded and put in the hands of the government.

God help any man whose ex-wife or ex-girlfriend works for a municipality that uses these cameras. God help any woman whose stalker is a city employee.

Municipalties love these systems because the kind of people who run for public office tend to be tyrants who like telling the rest of us what to do. That’s a fact. They have bizarre, unrealistic ideas about imposing order on others, and they don’t care about the humiliation and oppression that result. These are the kind of people who say, in complete seriousness, “You won’t mind surveillance if you don’t have anything to hide.”

They don’t understand that the Bill of Rights was not written just to prevent disasters. It was written largely to prevent rudeness. An occasional strip search isn’t going to ruin your life. Neither will random urine tests. Neither will police stops without reasonable suspicion, just to see if you’re up to anything. But the Bill of Rights limits the use of such tools to an extreme degree. Why? Because having no privacy is intensely humiliating. A government that treats you rudely as policy is unbearable.

I think it goes without saying that the people at Flock are incredible jerks. How could they do what they do if they weren’t?

Activists who are going to lose are exposing Flock and trying to persuade cities and towns not to buy their Nuremberg-worthy products. I say they will lose, because I know something most people don’t understand. The vast majority of Americans are only too happy to sell their freedom for trinkets.

When I was a kid, TV programs and movies were full of BS about the American spirit and our willingness to die for dignity and freedom. I don’t think we were ever willing. I think Americans fought the British because of money. I think Americans fought the Japanese and the Nazis mainly because they were angry about Pearl Harbor. Sure, the had concerns about liberty, but it seems to me Americans were concerned about extreme oppression by foreigners but not about milder creeping oppression by our own countrymen.

I believe Flock will win because most Americans will show up at town halls and say they want safe cities. And I am sure local politicians fear having distraught families show up with photos of dead loved ones and demand to know why there were no surveillance cameras to prevent their murders.

Personally, I would stand up and say the loss of a certain number of lives is acceptable if it means we keep our freedom. That is supposedly the rationale we relied on when sending many thousands of young men to die in wars, and it should also apply to civilians. But I would be treated like a heartless monster. By stupid people.

Anyway, it turns out the nincompoops who actually run these systems do a horrible job of keeping evildoers from accessing the videos, and once they have them, they can use facial recognition to learn their names and all sorts of private details of their lives.

An activist named Benn Jordan just made a video showing a whole slew of surveillance videos he downloaded from towns across the US. He was able to take these videos and invade people’s privacy to a horrifying degree. I will embed the video here so you can see.

This isn’t the far-off dystopian future. This is the dystopian present. It’s here right now.

By the way, don’t think that living in the country makes you safe. The government can put cameras on your property without warrants. Look it up. Most people don’t know it. The cheaper camera technology gets, the more likely rural Americans are to find themselves under surveillance on farms and even in little cabins in the woods where they think no one will know if they hot-tub naked or shoot protected predators that menace their families and livestock.

Check the video out. This is the future we have chosen because we don’t have the guidance of the Holy Spirit.

Keep Buying Lenses, and Eventually, You Will be Talented

I took the old (a week old) A6700 out in the yard again today, and I took some photos that I consider worth not deleting. I also got some wonderful shots of my son in the house, but I won’t be uploading them here. It seems like all my really good photos are of things I don’t share.

The other day, as I have written before, I took a shot staring up into a live oak, and all I expected to get out of it was some experience running the camera, but when I edited it, I liked it. Now that I have seen that the tree has potential, I am determined to try to get some quality shots out of it. I took a few snaps, and I created a better photo than the first one, although it is still not going to win prizes. Here it is:

While I was doing this, I saw that I was able to bring out colors on the shady side of the tree, and I found a nice area of the tree that would fill a frame and make for a better composition. I cropped that area and exported it as a JPG in order get an idea what the new shot would look like.

Because the crop is pretty harsh, the photo is extremely fuzzy. I think I should take the A7IV out with a bigger lens and see how much detail I can get.

I have to do what I can before the red leaves fall off the other tree in the pictures, because those red leaves are important to the images.

I also took some more cow photos, and they were as bad as the old ones. I used the proper ISO and so on, but there is no way to get cow photos in the shade at full zoom without getting a ton of grain. At least I think there isn’t.

I made a valiant effort to find things out there to shoot. I keep telling myself a good photographer can find subjects anywhere, so I don’t want to give up. On the other hand, I am not a good photographer yet, so how much can I expect at this stage?

I found some colorful leaves to shoot, and from that, I learned that you never shoot a leaf with the light behind you. The glare on the leaf will kill the whole project.

I took a shot of a peach blossom, just to see what would happen. The idea was to fake macro by zooming in. The photos are very pretty, but you wouldn’t want to blow them up. The grain is too much.

These are like shots from a low-budget version of James Cameron’s Pandora.

It’s a shame I can’t post shots of my son, because they are on another level. He makes it easy. He is as good a model as any professional in New York or Paris. His skin is perfect. He is relentlessly cute. He comes up with all sorts of poses. I don’t know what I’m going to do with all the top-notch photos I’m taking.

I got a Viltrox 27 mm f/1.2 lens for the A6700, and when people say it’s amazing, they are not lying. It seems like every image is beautiful. I shoot my son during breakfast every day, and the Viltrox is now my official breakfast lens.

Viltrox is Chinese, and it is shaming Sony and Canon and the rest by making exquisite lenses at Chinese prices. I figure I should snap some up before the inevitable price increase that will follow mass recognition.

I am sorely tempted to get a Viltrox 75 mm f/1.2 as well, for outdoor shots of my family.

I took a lot of atrocious photos today, but the ratio of atrocities to usable shots is shrinking, and I am fully able to work Photolab, so now I am finally able to edit with some degree of competence. I also got a new TV and calibrated it for editing, so if my photos look weird on your screen, it’s your fault, not mine.

I am considering driving downtown from time to time and doing some street photography. I can only take so many photos of bewildered cattle. When summer returns, which I dread, there will be more bugs and flowers and so on to shoot right here.

It would be wonderful to have a big zoom for birds and animals. The Sony 200-600 mm would be a joy to have. I don’t know how often I would use it, though.

Things are going well, and I see no reason why they shouldn’t continue to do so.

Photographs are neat because they don’t necessarily show what subjects look like, but they do show how you feel about them. If you love what you’re shooting, other people will see that you love it. Of course, if you feel hatred or contempt, they will also see that, but let’s dwell on the positive here.

I have a Flickr account now, so I’ll be using that to post big photos here. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to overcome WordPress’s upload preferences well enough to post them to my own server. I’ll keep fiddling with it.

The Water is Rising

I used to watch a pair of biracial conservative Youtubers known as the Hodge Twins. They say they were raised leftist but came around later in life, and I thought that was good. They were also very funny. On the other hand, they were clearly ignorant in spite of understanding the evil of leftism, and they made a lot of crude remarks.

I quit watching them, but a couple of days ago, I heard about them again. Guess what? They hate Jews. I had no clue.

They’re 100% on board with Candace Owens, and they gave Nick Fuentes a softball interview. They have a podcast, and some white weirdo they talked to said “Hitler was based!” One of them agreed. He said he had read one of Hitler’s speeches and concluded that we needed someone to say the same things today.

Hitler was based? A person really sad that in front of the public, with pride? In America? After the well-known events of the last century?

I wonder what the twins would say if they knew how Hitler felt about blacks and biracial people like themselves. Their parents’ marriage would have been called “race defilement.” The twins might have been castrated like many other biracial people. The Nuremberg laws were extended to apply to blacks. Hitler claimed the Jews brought blacks into Germany to bastardize the white race.

The existence of the video is bad, but the worst is yet to be discussed.

I looked at the comments on one of their videos, and they were almost unanimously supportive. A lot of them claimed the Jews had been expelled from 109 countries, and that there had to be a good reason. I had never seen that one before.

I would have been disturbed if 5% of the comments had been antisemitic, but it was more like 98%.

Jews are not upset enough. Even the ones who are very upset are not upset enough. Things are even worse than the most vocal coalmine canaries seem to think. Conservatives are finally starting to live up to the libels leftists have projected onto them for decades. They are becoming Nazis.

The worst development of all is that many or perhaps most of the conservatives who have turned against Jews are claiming it’s their Christian duty.

What?

Christianity is an offshoot of Judaism. In the beginning, all Christians were considered Jews. They truly were Jews, even in places like Asia Minor. Christianity was just a new Jewish sect. Gentiles weren’t a big factor until later. Every single apostle was Jewish.

As for today, we are required to worship a Jew who said, “Salvation is of the Jews.” He told Jews, “You are the light of the world,” confirming what the Jewish prophet Isaiah had said. When he first announced his status as Messiah, he did it by reading from Isaiah in a synagogue.

I’m not saying modern Jews are on the right track or spreading salvation, because those things are not generally true, but the church is inextricably entwined with Judaism, and hating Jews is antithetical to our core beliefs.

Yeshua sits on the throne of David, which is the throne of Israel. The Old Testament says so, and the New Testament agrees. He truly is the King of the Jews, whether or not they agree. But we’re supposed to give Israel to murderous Muslims and kill Jews? How is their king supposed to feel about that?

I don’t want to waste a lot of time debunking patent idiocy. It’s like going to a mental asylum and debating people who think they’re cats. The big point here is that Jews are in big, big trouble, right now, not in 5 years or 10 years or 50 years.

A huge majority of American Jews has empowered their enemies and libeled and opposed their friends for many decades. They have had way too much faith in America’s hospitality. They have concentrated themselves in areas where their enemies concentrate. They have been huge proponents of self-disarmament, otherwise known as gun control. Now they are not ready for what is going to happen.

They still have many friends in conservative areas, but I don’t think we can do much to help Jews. I think they will stubbornly cling to the urban centers they love, just as many European Jews refused to get out before the Holocaust. They love the culture. They want to be able to walk to synagogues on the sabbath. They want to live close to kosher butchers and restaurants. They think of our cities as their homes.

The election of New York Mayor Mamdani, an obvious antisemite, is amazing. About a third of New York’s Jews voted for him. I don’t know what is more surprising: that a third of them voted for him or that it wasn’t the historic 90% Democrats get. Anyway, even a third is a figure way too large to be consistent with sanity.

What were they thinking? American Jews are appeasers. Were they thinking that voting for blatant antisemitism was a good way to curry favor with their enemies? Was it supposed to be yet another self-hating, self-destructive, pointless olive branch?

Historians think 10% of German Jews voted for Hitler. It shouldn’t be a surprise.

You have almost no guns. You are surrounded by people you hate you, and they now appear to be a majority. The government is turning against you. You are far from most of the people who are inclined to help you. How could anyone think this was a desirable outcome?

The prophets tell us terrible things are in store for Jews in Israel. It will be like October 7, all over the country. If it will be that bad inside the Jewish state, I have to wonder what it will be like in gentile nations.

What are Christians supposed to do? How much is possible? Not much, I suppose. My wife and I pray for the Jews and Israel twice a day, but a lot of the good things we pray for can’t happen unless Jews accept their Messiah, and that is not within our control or God’s.

This isn’t like the 1930’s. With the technology human beings now have, you won’t be able to hide Jews behind false walls in your house. You won’t be able to take in their kids and pretend they’re yours. None of that stuff will fly in the age of total surveillance, cashless transactions, drones, and thermal cameras. Every Jew will need the help of God himself. They will need the kind of help Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego got.

Christians are in trouble, too. The rapture and tribulation are real events, and they are coming. Most people who call themselves Christians are only Christians in name, and they will be stuck here during the tribulation, experiencing the worst suffering humanity has ever known. They can’t be helped unless they listen and repent before the rapture.

I suppose nominal Christians are just as bad off as Jews, except their holocaust will come later.

As for the rest of the world, they have always been in trouble, and that will not change. They will think they’re doing good when they go after Christians and Jews, but they will come to regret it.

I can understand how antisemitic conservatives exist, because conservatism is not a religious position. Heathens like Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk are conservative. What is astonishing is that people can be convinced they are Christians and that Yeshua wants them to torment, expel, and kill Jews.

These days, boys believe they’re girls, and many Americans agree. When we started seeing the trans movement gain credibility, we should have realized no insanity was beyond us.

I don’t know why I’m writing this. What’s going to happen is going to happen. The only thing worse than witnessing destruction is witnessing self-destruction.

New Year’s Tree

I am still fiddling with Photolab9, trying to improve a photo of a tree. I shot it yesterday, thinking the only purpose of shooting was to learn how to use the camera and lens, but later I saw that with editing, the photo was very nice. It lacks a compact subject that ties it together, but such subjects aren’t always necessary, and also, there is nothing wrong with a photo that serves as a non-distracting background.

Google AI told me to use Photolab’s AI masking tools. These are somewhat like the old magnetic lasso tool in Photoshop Elements, except they require less work and give you less control. The magnetic lasso would let you draw a border around an area and apply changes within it. It would automatically cling to the object to avoid selecting things outside of it. The AI mask simply guesses and grabs a large area it thinks you want to isolate, so it may include or exclude things against your will.

I have not been able to get the mask to work well enough. It grabs the entirety of the tree’s canopy, so if I try to brighten up the trunk and limbs, I will also ruin the color of the sky behind the canopy.

I decided to try Smart Lighting instead. It tries to compensate for things like inadequate flash.

The first version of the edited photo is in yesterday’s blog post. Here is the new one:

I think this is considerably better than the first version. I lose some of the encompassing feeling of the dark tree, but on the other hand, I get a lot of detail on the side facing me. Sadly, reducing this to blog size really makes it coarse.

I can’t upload a better version because WordPress rejects files over a certain size. Maybe it’s a webhosting issue. I will look into ways to put bigger shots on the web so I can link to them.

AI thinks there is a way to make the mask work. Maybe I’ll figure it out later.

Last night, I had an emotional experience. I had been editing photos for a long time, and I started thinking about the way photography had opened my eyes to how much beauty there was around me.

That sounds trite, but there is more to it than it seems.

I don’t like this world. The suffering here is beyond anything we can imagine. We are numb to it because we have to get used to it in order to survive without being miserable around the clock, but it is here. All around us, creatures are always suffering tremendously, and it would never have gotten this way had we let God rule us.

There are a lot of sickly people in this county, and then I’m out and about, I see them. When I spot somebody with enormous, swollen legs, a hunched back, morbid obesity, or some other serious problem, my heart sinks, and I think, “This place is horrible,” referring to the entire world. It reminds me how much pain there is and how unusual it is for us to be able to do anything about it.

Heaven isn’t like this. The Messianic Age will not be like this. We did this to ourselves.

I said photography shows us the beauty of the world, but that’s not really true. It makes the world look more beautiful than it is. We choose subjects we like, and we choose our variables and edit our shots to bring out beauty they don’t really have. We bring out a little bit of the much greater beauty God intended them to have.

It’s like there is a black sheet between us and God, with little holes in it, and what we see in beautiful photos is like looking through the holes briefly and seeing what the world is supposed to be like.

The tree I photographed doesn’t look as good as the photo. It’s my effort to show what an ideal version of the tree would look like. A version in a world that isn’t cursed.

When I edit photos, deep relaxation settles over me, and I believe it’s because I feel as though I am making things right. I am creating images that feel a little bit like they were shot in heaven.

Maybe God helped me get back to photography and start creating better pictures in order to provide a painkiller to reduce the pain of living in this world. My life is wonderful, but I still hate it here because of the suffering of the creatures around me who are not so blessed and who are so hard to help.

Maybe God is reminding my heart that something better is coming.

I don’t just see beauty in photos, of course. I see it in love; in the relationships I have with God and the people who know him.

In 2018, I was praying, and in my mind, I kept hearing, “Thank you for beauty.” I wonder if God was hinting at things to come.

When I went out to shoot yesterday, a group of sandhill cranes were eating in the pasture. These are 4-foot-tall birds just made for wildlife photos. Unfortunately, I could not get anywhere near them, and my 50mm zoom made them look like ants in photos. I wonder if I should consider getting a real telephoto lens. Is it worth it? This farm is loaded with birds and squirrels, and we occasionally see coyotes, foxes, possums, and coons.

I may try it. The more beauty I can grab while I live in this rotten world, the better I’ll feel.

Some Day I Will be the Richard Avedon of Beef Cattle

I have settled on the Sony A6700 as my main APS-C camera, and I am learning to use Photolab9 to edit photos.

I thought Photolab was a better choice than Lightroom and Photoshop, based on some confusing information I worked pretty hard to obtain. I thought I was being told Photoshop was not good for working with raw files, but in a comment, a reader said that was not correct, so I went back to my research and discovered that just about everyone agrees with him. Nonetheless, I have Photolab right now, and it’s a top-notch program, so I am learning to use it. Maybe I’ll eventually give up, join the Adobe subscription herd, own nothing, and be resentful.

Today, in order to learn, I decided to do a photo walk around the property. I can’t publish all the photos that came out reasonably well, because I want to keep some private, but I can show a few things that seem to have worked. The ones I won’t publish are considerably better, but even these mediocre-to-bad shots have some value. I had to shrink them quite a bit, so the original large files are a lot nicer.

It was a productive experience, and I really enjoyed the camera and lens. I found the A6700 much more pleasant to work with than the A6400 it is replacing.

I think I would have done a lot better had I gotten out earlier. I started after the light had started dying, so it was a short session, and that cost me opportunities.

My single biggest problem is inability to deal with lighting challenges, so I think shooting in bad light is good for me, but this lens may not be up to it without a tripod and low shutter speeds. I’m not sure yet. Maybe I should have risked lower speeds today to find out.

I bought a Sigma 18-50mm zoom to go with this camera, and that’s what I used today. I like fast primes, but I have to learn to use slower lenses and zooms.

First off, the worst of the lot. I came across the cattle working on a round bale in the shade, so I thought I would see how well I could handle the poor light. The cow in the sun is the star of the picture, and unfortunately, her face is pretty grainy, but this would be just barely good enough for social media, if I had social media. I wonder if I had the camera focused in the wrong plane.

Hmm. Maybe it wouldn’t be good enough.

I figured this shot told a sort of story. The cows are all staring at me, and they have stopped eating, which makes it seem as though something that would be important to a cow has happened. The cow in the sun looks as though some higher being has selected her for some special purpose, which is not likely but gives the picture some appeal.

I also shot a photo of a chain hanging on a gate. Not the most exciting subject, but the light was excellent, the gate had interesting color and texture, and it was an opportunity to work on composition. I don’t know if it’s possible to do much more with this subject, but it helped me get used to running the camera.

The focus is not great. I may have alternate shots that will look better. The bokeh seems fine.

I just checked the original large JPG, and the focus is considerably better.

The weirdest shot is an upward look into the branches of a live oak. I was trying to find a composition in it. I did not expect much from it. In fact, I assumed it would be trash, but once I started playing with the raw photo, surprising colors came out. I really enjoy looking at this picture, so it must be okay.

I’m not sure how to crop it. Sometimes I like one version best, and sometimes I like another one.

It’s a shame I can’t post the full version, because people will probably look at this small, crude one and wonder why I didn’t delete this picture. There is a world of difference. I would never have expected this photo to be so pleasing to look at, but there it is.

I’ve learned that you can’t tell whether a photo is good until you edit it. They will really surprise you.

I got a very good shot of my wife with my son sleeping by her side, and I also got a nice shot of some mailboxes in good light as well as a surprisingly pleasing shot of the workshop with a sun star over it.

I have seen people claiming that high ISO numbers are no problem, but that doesn’t seem to be true. I use Photolab’s denoising, which is supposedly better than Adobe’s, but it looks like there is still no substitute for good light and a fast lens. Or a slow shutter.

I took a lot of useless pictures today, including shots I knew would be useless. I took shots I didn’t expect to work out, just so I could get used to running the camera and lens.

I hope to get out earlier tomorrow. If I get out earlier, I won’t have to struggle so hard to find things to take pictures of.

Life Never Gives me a Straight Answer

My photography journey gets weirder and weirder.

A couple of years back, I got better photo gear and bought Photoshop Elements 2024 for editing raw photos. I did quite a bit of research and still ended up making some bad decisions.

On the gear end, I failed to realize that I really needed wide-aperture lenses if I wanted indoor photos and other low-light shots that truly looked good. I think middle-of-the-road optical quality is less harmful than a small aperture. Nearly all lenses shoot photos that are sharper than most people can appreciate, so it’s not a big deal if your lens isn’t optically excellent, but if your lens is too slow, you have to use high ISO settings that create a lot of noise, and software that cleans up noise is not as good a solution as not having noise in the first place.

I think this is right today, but I could be wrong.

On the software end, I bought Elements, a program that is good for editing JPG images but unbearable for raw files. I didn’t know the difference. I thought that if I bought a photo editing program, it would naturally be good for everything from snap to print. It looks like that is not true. I have spent many hours trying to edit raw files in Elements, and often, I spent so much time trying to make the program work, I ended up editing nothing or nearly nothing.

When you edit raw in Elements, you can’t go straight to the bit where you get to create a finished photo. You go to an incredibly nonintuitive middleman program where you do certain things to the raw file and then export it as a JPG. Then you use what everyone thinks of as Photoshop to edit the JPG.

Unbelievably (to me, at least), every edit you do to a raw file in Elements is instantly saved, permanently, so you’re stuck with it forever unless you can figure out how to undo it, and there is no simple “undo” function as far as I know. Maybe there is, and I have forgotten it. To me, this seems like common sense: don’t save a file until you’re satisfied with it. Is that crazy? That’s how most programs work. If you have a Word file open, and someone sits on your keyboard and ruins it, it’s not instantly saved, overwriting the original.

I have seen all sorts of photographers praise Photoshop, and I haven’t been able to understand why they like it. Today I learned a few things. As is so often the case these days, a chat with AI answered questions multiple human beings failed to answer in the past. Ominous.

1. Editing raw is generally a completely separate process from editing JPG’s and other images. Raw edits are generally (not always) global, like changing brightness or reducing noise. JPG editing can do things like that, but you can’t make adjustments as large as the ones you can make in raw, and JPG editors are better at things like removing and inserting objects.

2. Most pros are not all that concerned about creating beautiful, detailed images. They are pumping out prom pictures and family photos in JPG form at low resolution. They are largely interested in erasing zits and removing boogers from noses.

3. A lot of pros use Adobe Lightroom to get their raw files in shape, and then they take them to Photoshop to cut out the warts and pimples. Supposedly, Photoshop does things like that very well, without a painful learning curve.

I wish I had known all this two years ago.

As far as I can tell at this stage, it looks like it works this way: subscribe to Lightroom and Photoshop. Use Photoshop on JPG’s. Maybe Elements can do the JPG work. I don’t know yet, because I NEVER GOT PAST THE HORRIBLE RAW INTERFACE.

When my son was born, a nice photographer who presumably had a contract with the hospital showed up in my wife’s room and offered to take photos, and we hired her. The photos are not good. They’re sort of okay, and they serve the purpose of documenting the existence of a new person. We were given JPG files she had already edited. We have never received raw files. She probably photographed 10 babies that day. She was not in the art business. She was in the documentation business. She was putting food on her table.

I think this is the sort of person you usually end up talking to on the web when you ask for help with photography. Lightroom is good at improving raw files, and it helps organize the thousands of mediocre photos a typical photographer will take in a year, so when someone wants reprints, they are easy to find. Photoshop makes people and things look a little better. The people you ask for advice will generally have these things in mind, and they won’t mind paying for expensive Adobe subscriptions because they get paid for their work, and Adobe makes for an efficient business.

I think that if I really wanted to make life simple, right now, I would get Lightroom and use it. Then I would try to edit everything in Elements 2024, which is a non-subscription product. Then if that didn’t work, I would subscribe to Photoshop and use it to finalize JPG’s. Then I would delete Elements, because it would serve no purpose.

Instead, I bought Photolab9, which is a competitor to Photoshop. It is not a wannabe clone, as far as I know. It is better than Adobe’s stuff for a lot of things. It has fantastic denoising. It keeps up with new lenses as they are released. It makes working with raw files easy. It produces glorious JPG’s.

Does it remove boogers well? I don’t know. I am not in the booger-free-portrait business. I haven’t tried it. I have Elements, though, and one would hope it would suffice for the retouching stuff.

Photolab lacks some important Photoshop features. It won’t put cat ears and noses on people, and it won’t surround you with stars and butterflies after you get dressed for the prom. I’m not sure Photoshop actually does those things, so perhaps I’m being unfair, but it has some icons that look like they are intended to create equally pleasing and classy effects. I think I can do without all that.

Ansel Adams managed.

Photolab has opened my eyes. I have used things like Befunky.com and free Canva Affinity to edit things. I generally made small changes. I changed exposures and cropped and so on. With Photolab, I have been able to do more. It has a ton of useful presets that will move my images into the general ballpark where they need to be before I work on them. It lets me change one part of a photo without changing the rest of it. It will bring out things that were barely visible before. I was actually able to change the composition of a photo by increasing the color saturation of the clouds and sky. It turned an acceptable photo into one I really love.

Now I’m looking more closely at raw files to see if I can turn dumpers into keepers.

I don’t like overworked pictures. They’re tasteless. A lot of people jack up colors and make other changes that make photos look the way you would expect them to look on picture placemats for tourists in Thailand or the Philippines. I’m not interested in that stuff. I believe Photoshop excels at it, partially explaining its popularity.

No one ever went broke investing in bad taste.

I have a feeling I will start seeing the above sentence on the web in people’s online profiles, not attributed to me. Story of my life.

I don’t like Adobe. I don’t like the forced-subscription model. I don’t like the way they turned “free” Acrobat into an annoying ad platform for things I don’t want. I am hoping Photolab will turn out to be a better choice. These days, Adobe is offering Lightroom plus real Photoshop for $10 per month, so if I change my mind, all is not lost.

Oops. I just found out Elements uses a very limited color palette for certain useful tools. Forget Elements, I guess. Funny how they didn’t mention that when they sold it to me. “Pay once and create inferior images for life.” I guess it’s just for people using Pinterest and Instagram.

I would post some shots to show people what I’m talking about, but my best pictures include the wife and son, and I am not going to make them Internet curiosities at this point.

Ripe Pomegranate Versus Sour Grape

God has started showing me things about favor, which is disparate treatment. For example, if your neighbors have their houses washed away in a flood, but the water goes around you, it’s favor. If there is an economic crisis, and somehow you make money instead of losing, it’s favor.

I prophesy. I saw a Derek Prince video a long time ago, and he made a good argument for at-will prophecy. You can’t say what you want to say, and you can’t tell people’s fortunes or pick winners at the racetrack, but you can open your mouth and let God say whatever he wants, in the language you normally speak. It appears to work, although I have had some glitches. I believe errors come from letting the flesh crowd in.

For a good long time, I’ve heard myself saying, “Be with me and receive favor.”

I believe that for my entire life, I have received favor. My life was a mess when I was young, and I failed at all sorts of things at which I should have excelled, but on the other hand, I was spared calamity over and over. Problems that should have hit me hit other people. It has been a lifelong pattern.

I believe that most of the problems I had were caused by Satanic persecution. The people of this world, including Christians, generally belong to Satan, and if evil spirits think God is likely to do good things with you, they and their puppets will do a lot to suppress you. They will blacklist you, steal from you, take jobs away, prevent you from getting jobs in the first place, drive potential spouses off, cause whatever wealth you have to be destroyed and wasted, cause people to libel and slander you, and, of course, cause you to be driven out of churches.

I had disfavor from Satan and his worldly people, and it destroyed my worldly success, but I had God’s favor to keep me from being wiped out while he waited for me to come around, know him, and receive sufficient favor from him to overcome Satan’s disfavor. Once I got close to him, things got better and better for me, and it has never stopped.

Some misguided Christians like to wear T-shirts with “Favor ain’t fair” printed on them. That’s ridiculous. It’s insulting to God, who is always more than fair. The intention is good, but the slogan comes from a ghetto mentality that says anyone who is not blessed is being treated unfairly. Blessed people don’t earn what they get, so the disfavored think favor, which comes by God’s righteous judgment, isn’t fair to everyone else. People who hate favor think they are better than God.

Favor certainly seems unfair to many people, and I can make a partial list. Feminists, leftists, antisemites, and vocal atheists hate favor. BLM and Antifa people hate favor. It’s impossible to be a real Democrat and not hate favor.

God isn’t the only one who shows favor. Satan does it, too, on a grand scale. Look how rich Oprah Winfrey and Megan Thee Stallion are, to name but two of his proteges.

“Protégé” is a French word meaning “protected.” You can’t be protected in this life unless there is a protector. Someone stronger than you who does the protecting.

What do favor-haters do? They try to steal the fruits of favor, and they like to kill the favored.

If you examine the Bible, you will see lots of favor-haters and favor-stealers. Satan, Eve, Cain, Haman, Dathan, the religious Jews who had Yeshua murdered, Adonijah, Absalom, Jezebel, Joseph’s brothers, Balak, Balaam…read for yourself. The best way to become hated in this world is to become one of God’s favorites.

All sorts of favored people were murdered or tormented. Abel, Job, the prophets who were all killed by religious Jews, and the martyrs of the New Testament come to mind.

Being a favorite is like being the pampered youngest child the older siblings hate. The hatred is irrational and unfair, and it is solely based on a perceived difference between the treatment you get and the treatment your siblings got. You don’t have to harm them or actually receive more than them to be hated. Favor-haters are unjust.

I was the favorite in my family, and I can tell you a story that will illustrate my point. When I was very small, on Christmas, my sister got angry at my parents. She said, “Steve got two presents, and I only got three!” That’s how favor-haters think.

Favor-haters covet. If you have favor, they covet everything you have. At the bottom of their hearts, they want to replace you. They want you to die so they can take what you have. What they really wish is that you had never existed.

Favor-haters portray themselves as victims. They libel the favored. They make up stories about how you got your favor. You got it through racism and sexism, they say. You stole it from other nations. You ran the government and the banking system behind the scenes.

If you’re favored, they come up with excuses to steal from you, convict you of made-up crimes, and even kill you. Socialists have murdered millions of people using libels as excuses. Our modern domestic terrorists in BLM and Antifa will do the same if they ever get power.

In the Christian church, they go after people who are close to God. If they don’t get miracles, prosperity, healing, revelation, safety, and so on, and you do, they will claim you got what you have by earthly means.

I know a Christian who is very bitter, and she was telling me tongues aren’t for everyone. They clearly are; the Bible says so, and every time anyone in the New Testament got saved after the gospels, they spoke in tongues. It’s a universal gift.

She also told me God doesn’t make people wealthy, because it will destroy them. She did allow for some exceptions; those who are so mature, they can handle wealth.

I set her straight, and I am sure I offended her. I didn’t offend her by criticizing her. I offended her by saying good things about the way God treats people.

She is very angry. Whenever she has a conversation, she focuses on other people’s sins and how badly she has been wronged. My understanding is that unforgiveness blocks healing and tongues, so I would like to see her admit that she ruined her own life. If she did, she could be filled with the Spirit and be filled with blessings. This is why I told her the truth instead of sparing her feelings.

I told her God made me wealthy after I quit going to church and giving offerings, as I got closer to him and spent a tremendous amount of time speaking in tongues. She contradicted me. She told me I was well-off because I was “born into it.”

This is a lie Satan tells all the time. “You’re doing well because you’re white.” “You’re doing well because you’re male.” “You were born in a wealthy family.” “You got lucky in the job market.” “You got lucky in investing.”

My dad was born poor. His dad was born poor. My mother’s father was born poor. I couldn’t succeed at anything when I was young, no matter how I tried or how much ability I had. I was sabotaged and stabbed in the back over and over. I had nothing until I was in my thirties, and even then, I didn’t have much.

By the time the lady I was talking to was born, her father was wealthy. He bought her a brand-new car on her wedding day. He let his daughters run up bills at department stores. He paid for their schooling. When he died, with a net worth that was probably close to 15 million dollars, the person I was talking to got a fourth of it. Now it’s mostly gone. What happened to it? If being born into wealth makes one prosperous, where is her prosperity?

God gave her a husband who was a good provider, and she drove him away. Then he made her affluent. She was set up for life, twice.

She is in no position to speak as though God didn’t give her prosperity, and saying I was born with a golden safety net is wrong. I inherited, to be sure, but that was late in life. My sister was in the same position I was in, and now she has almost nothing. What she inherited, she spent. She blew it on things like cars, clothes, furniture, drugs, and Whole Foods cooked prime rib for her dog. Then she pretty much forced my dad to delete her from his will, twice without a break.

The lady I talked to is not filled with the Holy Spirit, so spirits of envy, anger, and bitterness don’t have much opposition. Such spirits drove her to deny what God, in his overwhelming love and kindness, had done for me. These spirits want everyone to think poverty is standard for Christians.

God kept telling me to be with him and receive favor, but I don’t think I fully understood it until very recently, when God started telling me 1) never to reject favor, 2) never to apologize for favor, 3) never to feel guilty about favor, 4) never to question whether favor was right, and 5) always to declare that the favor God gives me is righteous; how can I criticize what God does?

I am taking his advice. Now, I defend favor.

If you think about it, giving people good things they don’t deserve is the foundation of Christianity. None of us deserve to be saved or helped, but God is love, so to protect us, he allowed himself to be tortured to death and took the blame for our sins. That’s all of us. The pope. Your favorite evangelist. All the “saints.” Everyone. God can’t fix us if he doesn’t give bad people good things. The system wouldn’t function.

When I was in my thirties, I rejected favor, and it caused me a lot of misery. My mother was dying from cancer, and my sister, as usual, was abusing her. She didn’t take care of my mother. She was not helpful at all. She was her usual narcissistic self. My mother wrote a diary in which she criticized her, and after she died my sister stole it (along with the painkillers we had to keep in a locked box) and threw it out. She later bragged to me that she had thrown it out, with a delighted, spiteful, sadistic smile on her face.

One day my mother told me to help her, because she was going to disinherit my sister. This was favor. I should have kept my mouth shut.

Instead, I rejected favor, which means I questioned it. I didn’t realize God was behind it. I was making myself out to be more just than God. I talked my mother out of cutting off my sister, so the only bonus I got was in the form of a couple of small investment accounts that went straight to me.

If I had listened, my sister couldn’t have stolen from my grandparents’ estates. Her ability to make me miserable would have been greatly reduced. I would inherited twice as much. But I opened my mouth and ruined it because I didn’t understand what was happening.

God wanted the one-heir solution, and I pushed for, and got, the two-heir solution.

When my dad talked about disinheriting my sister, I kept quiet and didn’t try to influence him, so he cut her out. I can’t even guess at the pain this saved me.

I never tried to mediate between them. I never questioned his decision. I never went to her and tried to get her to try to restore her relationship with him, although I consistently prayed God would make it happen and that she would be put back in the will.

She knew she had been disinherited, and amazingly, although she was a dishonest, greedy, manipulative person who loved inherited wealth, and who stole from estates, she never tried to get herself put back in the will.

Learning to accept favor without questioning it has improved my faith. When I ask for things now, instead of being derailed by feelings of unworthiness, I say, “I receive favor. I will not reject it. I will not apologize for receiving it. You are right to do this for me.” I don’t look at other people’s problems and feel that it is somehow wrong for God to treat me better.

Satan and his children don’t sit around questioning their unfair decisions to abuse me and treat me worse than other people. They never have. His children never question his decisions to fill them with money and power and make them famous and admired. Why should I question God’s decisions to help me? Do I know more than God? Would I rather he didn’t help me?

I don’t question his righteousness when bad things happen to me. Should I think he’s wrong when God does me good? What’s the difference?

When God began telling me to receive his favor, I started trying to obey him. I would tell him I received it. After he told me not to reject it and so on, I augmented my responses, as I have written above. As for “be with me,” I now believe that means I’m to spend time in the Spirit, praying in tongues, entertaining his presence, worshiping him, humbling myself, and so on. If I’m in the Spirit, who is God, I am with God. According to his commandment, the time for proactively receiving his favor is when I’m in the Spirit.

All favor is inheritance. Satan’s children inherit from their father. The Jews and God’s children inherit from God. There are no self-made people, although there are a lot of proud and deluded people who think they did everything on their own. They commit the sin of Nebuchadnezzar, who took credit for his kingdom and then went mad for several years.

Inheritance is right. It is good. You will never make leftists believe that. They pass laws to take inherited wealth away. They murder people who inherit wealth, and they give it to fools who destroy it. They say this is “equity,” meaning inheritance is inequitable. Meanwhile, God calls his children heirs, not employees or earners. He tells us we receive good things we don’t deserve.

We are supposed to give our kids what we have, starting with the knowledge of the Holy Spirit. We are supposed to set them up in life and give them fortunes when we die, as Proverbs says. We are not supposed to throw them out of the boat with nothing so they can pull themselves up by their own bootstraps and reinvent the wheel with every generation. That’s idiotic. It’s as if the wealth of a parent were a big, elaborate sand castle, to be kicked over so the kids can suffer for no reason.

Will unearned wealth destroy immature people? Sure. But so will earned wealth. And if you give your children an inheritance of holiness and revelation, they will probably be blessed by every bit of earthly wealth they receive. Saying wealth destroys people only makes sense when the wealth is not coupled with the knowledge of God, which every Christian is supposed to have. If you say wealth destroys Christians, you’re really saying it exposes people who haven’t been transformed by the Holy Spirit. The wealth doesn’t destroy them. Spirits and their flesh do. Wealth can’t hurt anyone. It is completely good.

Nearly all Americans look down on heirs, but nearly all Americans want to leave their children fortunes. The only thing more amazing than the hypocrisy is that no one ever talks about it. I have never heard a single person other than myself mention it.

If you sneer at heirs and call them things like “nepo-baby,” “trust fund baby,” and “trustafarian,” you shouldn’t give a penny to your kids. You should add up all the things your grandparents and parents did for you, and give away whatever the monetary value is. You won’t.

As for the obligations of heirs, people who are given things are supposed to be humble and grateful and fear God. They should never be proud. They should never make fun of the poor, which I have done, since I have made fun of just about every type of person. To make fun of the poor is to reproach God, as the Bible says. I was very disturbed to find out I had reproached God.

Heirs should be generous. We are objects of generosity. The Bible says God rewards us in this life, not just in heaven, for generosity.

The story of creation, good, and evil is a story of class warfare. There are two classes: the class composed of God and the spirits and people who will always receive his help, and the class of Satan and the spirits and people who have no chance because of their evil decisions. The evil class is the ghetto class of the universe. The protestor class. The social justice warrior class. The left wing of the universe. They can’t be blessed by God, so they devote their lives to trying to harm him and his favorites and working to steal what God gave them.

In our political system, conservatives more or less represent the first class, and leftists more or less represent the second. Politics isn’t religion, and there are plenty of godless, useless conservatives who are mistaken about the class they are in, but the distinction between the classes is valid. It’s not really possible to be a serious leftist and belong to the first class. No one who actually knows God can remain a leftist.

The word says that during the millennium, people who are raptured because of their closeness to God and his righteous nepotism will return to Earth and rule with Yeshua. They will be kings and queens. Proper royal persons rule by inheritance. They are not elected by mobs run by Satan. They are not people who worked their way up from the mailroom. The monarchs will all be heirs. Who has the right to question that?

This revelation is life-changing for me. It will make things go much better in my walk with God. It will annoy many blind Christians, but they are always annoyed with me anyway, so it won’t be a significant change.

Kirkland Scotch is a Winner

Every weekend, I take the family to Costco for pizza, a sundae for my son, and whatever unneeded items clever false-bargain marketing can persuade us to buy. Today before our trip, I decided to look into Costco booze. They sell an XO brandy for $48, and I prefer it to Remy Martin and Hennessy, which would cost about 4 times as much. I figured I should look for other things.

My favorite Scotch is Lagavulin 16, an Islay whisky which is very smooth and tastes and smells of iodine. I know that sounds bad, but it’s not. It’s wonderful. I read that Costco’s Kirkland Signature Speyside single malt was very good, and it sells for under $60, so I wanted to try it. They sell it at various ages. The 18-year is supposed to be great.

I have only had Scotch that old once, and I didn’t think much of it. I used to drink Macallan 15 before the price went through the roof, I tried the 18, assuming it would be better. After trying it, I thought it was a waste of money. Somehow harsher than the 15, which was just plain perfect. Maybe I should have added water to it. I don’t know. Today I read that a lot of people prefer the 15.

In any case, I wanted to try any Speyside Scotch Kirkland had to offer, as long as it was old, but they didn’t have any today. They had about 15 tons of ghetto Mexican booze of every conceivable kind, so I am guessing someone at Costco thinks everyone in Florida is Cuban and all Hispanics love tequila.

I don’t think I will ever be convinced there is such a thing as really good tequila or rum. I think these spirits are sort of like Irish whiskey, except that Irish whiskey isn’t ghetto. I have had Irish whiskey I really liked, but it had zero complexity and was in no way comparable to Scotch at the same price. I have enjoyed 5-star Barbancourt rum, but you could never get me to trade Knob Creek or even Korbel brandy for it. I don’t think good tequila exists, although some people claim it does.

In order to simulate quality, tequila producers are allowed to add things like sugar and glycerin to their rotgut. That tells you a lot. Also, the upscale tequilas and mezcals we see today were nowhere to be seen 50 years ago, suggesting they are recent creations born in marketing meetings.

I was disappointed today when I looked for Speyside Scotch, but I did bring home Kirkland 16-year old Highland single malt, which ought to be something like Macallan. They are both Highland Scotches.

I don’t have any Macallan to compare it to. I have been seeing it priced at over $160, and it’s just not worth it. I have some Lagavulin, so I’m comparing Kirkland to that. I can’t compare the flavors apples-to-oranges, but I can compare quality.

Aroma: Kirkland doesn’t have any. Almost. You can tell there is Scotch in the glass, but that’s about it. I think if you put Jameson’s in there, it would smell about the same. As for Lagavulin, it punches you in the face with that beautiful iodine smell before it gets close to your nose.

How about taste?

Kirkland is sweet, and of course, like just about all bourbon and Scotch, it tastes a bit like sherry. Dried fruit and so on. Those sherry barrels are everywhere. I’m not even sure I would like whiskey if it weren’t for the sherry barrels. This whisky is extremely, and I mean extremely, smooth. It feels like sweet oil in your mouth, but then strangely, it burns a little going down. Usually, I don’t like that, but Kirkland has made it very pleasant.

There is complexity, but it’s subtle. You have to think about what you’re drinking in order to taste it. There is a little smoke, but you don’t really notice it until after you swallow. It’s very good.

Lagavulin smacks you with iodine and smoke. Not the dirty-ashtray flavor I got from Ardbeg Corryvreckan, which I ended up pouring out to save cabinet space. It’s perfect. A little sweet. Almost as smooth as Kirkland. The sherry flavor is there. It combines with the smoke and the iodine to create a perfect drinking experience. Not as much burn on the way down.

So what is my conclusion?

For sixty bucks or whatever I paid for the Kirkland, it is fantastic. It’s not that there are a ton of positives; there just aren’t any negatives. Nothing jumps out at me and says, “If only this were fixed.” I think a little more aroma would be nice, and maybe the flavors could be less subtle, but when I drink Scotch, I am disturbed more by what’s wrong with it than I am by what could be more right.

Is it as good as Macallan 15? Can’t say. It has been too long. I think Macallan may be more complex. For twice the price, it should be.

This reminds me of a very good blended Scotch, but with that single-malt edge.

I would buy this again. No question. But I would still like to have a bottle of Macallan 15 again some day. Kirkland won’t make me forget it. Not unless it beats it head-to-head.

More

I published this entry too soon.

It turns out Kirkland Scotch tastes better after you drink it than while you’re drinking it. A couple of minutes after you put it down, all sorts of pleasant flavors, including a little iodine and smoke, rise up inside you.

In view of this, I would say it’s just about perfect. You just have to know what to look for when you drink it.

If I had to make a choice, I think I would say Lagavulin is a little better because of the superior aroma and the up-front flavor punch, but I’m not sure. Maybe if I drank a shot of each of these every day for a month, I’d end up preferring Kirkland.

There is no Substitute

In 2009, I spent a day or two fasting and praying, and then I sat down with my reward snacks to break the fast. I had a bag of fattening treats. I ate some, but I quit early. I just didn’t feel like continuing. After that, for maybe two years, I lost weight and kept it off. My appetite was reduced. Something inside me kept turning down that next doughnut or slice of pizza. I lost weight during months when I worked in a church kitchen, churning out delicious pizzas and garlic rolls.

It wasn’t difficult. I was just a different person. I didn’t have to rely on willpower. I have never had much of that.

I told a friend about it, and he fasted, and then he dropped dozens of pounds. Then one day we went to Sonny’s BBQ together and had the all-you-can-eat ribs. After that, I started eating more, and eventually I lost my deliverance, and the spirits God had been holding back returned. I gained weight.

It seems clear to me that I sold myself back to demons by jamming myself full of ribs. I showed a lack of appreciation for what God had done for me, so I got an appropriate reward. Eating those ribs was like jumping off the temple roof.

I didn’t know what I was doing wrong. Why didn’t I know? Because the church has belonged to Satan since, at the latest, 150 AD. He got our forebears to kick the Holy Spirit out. He taught us pride. He made us think “God helps those who helps themselves” was in the Bible. He convinced us the baptism with the Holy Spirit either didn’t exist or was automatic upon receipt of salvation. He told most of us prayer in tongues came from demons. He taught the rest it was only for some people, or that it only counted if we spoke in human languages, or that we were only supposed to do it for a few seconds here and there.

The church belongs to Satan, and it teaches us, basically, spiritual feces. No wonder Paul called his pre-blinding teaching “excrement” (skubalon). Preachers teach us to keep trying really hard in our own strength, and they teach us to swallow their regurgitated sewage uncritically so they can control us and have cushy lives financed by our unscriptural tithes and offerings.

Nobody–not one preacher in my entire life–ever taught me that overeating was caused by demons or that they could be expelled. They never taught me that if I got deliverance from demons of addiction, I had to be careful to keep demons from coming back. They never taught me that the Holy Spirit, not preachers and dried-up, error-filled books, would teach me everything I needed to know. They taught me filth, so I went into battle armed with filth, and Satan won.

It’s unusual for a preacher to tell people gluttony is sinful. Obese preachers are everywhere, and virtually none of them talk about the sinful aspect of overeating. Churches are full of enormous Christians who think they’re doing great.

To understand how weird this is, imagine a preacher who preached while holding pornographic magazines in his hands.

In nearly all churches, gluttony is seen as a cute, harmless habit. One that leads to obesity, ugliness, diabetes, diabetic offspring, obese offspring, blindness, impotence, amputations, arthritis, dementia, heart attacks, strokes, miscarriage, hearing loss, incontinence, kidney failure, cancer, infertility, asthma, gallbladder disease, inability to marry due to a degraded appearance, and a long list of other problems. But go ahead and tell me it’s not a real sin like fornication.

The list of things gluttony causes is worse than the list of things caused by heavy smoking.

Gluttony killed my father and his sister, after destroying their minds. You know people it has killed. But by all means, tell me it’s not a real sin.

Are preachers entirely to blame? Nobody taught them, either.

They’re to blame for persecuting those who tell them the truth. That’s for sure. Modern Christians are no better than the Jews who killed the prophets.

For a long time, I have tried to get God to bring deliverance back, and it looks like it’s here. Over the last few weeks, I have gone down about 12 pounds without work. I’ve also maintained a routine of lifting heavy weights, and my arms and chest (especially the chest) have gotten bigger while I lost weight. That means some of the fat loss is masked by muscle gain. Not much. I would guess three to four pounds. More than enough to notice.

People say you can’t lose fat while adding muscle. I don’t know where they hear these things. Total lie.

I don’t have a disease. I’m not repelled by food. I feel as though there is a restraining hand across my stomach, pushing me back when I consider what I should eat. Something says, “You can’t have that. Here is what you should have instead.”

During the day, I am often a little hungry, and I can feel my body leaning toward ketosis. That shows how much I have cut my intake. I often feel crabby because I haven’t had enough carbohydrate, and when I do, I’ll eat a small item that has a lot of carbs per cubic inch.

When my wife was pregnant, we tried to get protein into her to improve lactation, so I bought big jugs of whey protein powder from Nutricost. They sell it cheap, and it doesn’t have sugar or creepy artificial sweeteners in it. She didn’t finish the protein, so I have been using it from time to time when I just don’t care enough to make proper food. I dump blueberries or half an apple into the Vitamix, and I add whole milk, some cream, protein powder, and maybe some yogurt. I drink it and go on with my life.

I push it down so I will have something inside me to keep my body going.

It’s just like a delicious milkshake. I love it.

No, I don’t! Did you really believe that? It’s borderline gross. Anyone who tells you healthy food tastes just as good as real food is lying or mentally ill. I get so tired of hearing it. “It’s just like a milkshake!” “It’s just like a cookie!” No, it’s not! Stop lying. The concoctions I create don’t taste particularly good, but then as God has told me, I don’t have to like everything I eat.

I started out by trying to reduce foods that have high glycemic loads. Things that make the body pump glucose into the bloodstream (and cells) in a hurry. Not so much a low-carb plan, but one that doesn’t wake the pancreas up after every meal with a blow to the face with a hammer. I’m sticking with it. I don’t want cravings. I don’t want to continue living with insulin resistance and metabolic syndrome.

I want to give my fat pants away instead of storing them in case I need them again.

Maybe some poor family needs curtains.

Sometimes I have something I like. I ate Thanksgiving dinner, and we really did thank God and try to make it about him instead of football and stuffing. The other day, friends visited, and we went to P.F. Chang’s and then had eggnog and homebrew. On weekends, I take the family (God has given me a family) to Costco. We eat Costco pizza, and I let my hair down by drinking a Coke. But I will never say, “I’m not fat any more, so it’s time go to back to gluttony.” Sporadic departures from my lifestyle don’t hurt anything. Thinking the lifestyle is temporary will. It would be like jumping off the temple roof.

I don’t know why God decided to help me again. I hope I have enough information to hold onto deliverance this time.

I couldn’t fix this on my own. Like most overeaters, I can tell you everything about dieting. Calorie restriction. Low-carbing. In the past, I have had many temporary successes. The problem is that I can’t produce lasting success without deliverance and the Holy Spirit.

Because I had been delivered in the past, once I started overeating again, I refused to go back to conventional dieting. I found it preferable to stay fat than to accept an inferior solution, and I couldn’t have won on my own anyway. I made some effort to restrain myself, but not much.

Google AI says the long-term failure rate for fat people who lose weight is estimated at 90-95%. Essentially, that means human effort does not work. For all we know the tiny percentage of winners use drugs (including nicotine) or have other conditions that keep weight off. It may be that virtually no one who gets thin stays that way without crutches. If you lost weight and kept it off, and you smoke cigarettes, you don’t count as a winner. You just traded one demon for another one that is nearly as bad.

Look at what has happened over the last 20 years. We got very excited about bariatric surgery. We’ve seen celebrities lose weight using surgery. Maybe you know friends who’ve had it. I do. The ones I keep up with are fat again. Celebrities get fat again. Al Sharpton is the only one I know of who kept the weight off, and I think he has a health problem, because he is nearly emaciated. I don’t think the surgery went right.

After surgery failed most fat people, we turned to fat drugs, starting with Ozempic. Oprah took it and lied about it while she was dishonestly promoting the ineffective Weight Watchers program. Weight Watchers made her resign, or she resigned as damage control. John Goodman took it. Lots of obese celebrities use it. Whoopi Goldberg. Elon Musk.

Most famous drug users won’t tell us. The ones who resist telling us are so obsessed with admiration, they want us to think they did it on their own simply by being better than we are. They’re like the steroid freaks who claim they don’t use drugs.

Some of them admit they’ve used drugs, and some admit they quit because the side effects were worse than being fat. The side effects include persistent nausea and vomiting. Drugs can cause intestinal blockage, pancreatis, gallbladder disease, kidney damage, and permanent vision loss. Other possible effects include depression and suicidal ideation. The drugs can also make your face and butt shrivel, which may sound good if you weigh 300 pounds, but the degree of fat reduction can make people appear grotesque. They even have terms for it. Ozempic butt. Ozempic face.

Bottom line: nothing but God really works. There are crutches and temporary fixes, but without help directly from God, a fat person will almost certainly die fat. The odds in your favor are so poor they are negligible.

Odds are interesting, because most people don’t consider them as often as they should. Today I found out your odds of dying if you try to go into space are around one in 30. Rich people still buy tickets, however.

Maybe the odds are decreasing now that private industry has taken over. I hope so.

Your odds of overcoming drug or alcohol addiction through a secular program are down around 15%. If you use Teen Challenge, a Christian rehab program, it’s more like 67% or 80%, depending on whom you believe. Why would you bother with a secular program? How many times do you want to go through rehab?

I don’t see Oprah ever beating her addiction. She has stated that she is not a Christian, and she financed an anti-Christian cult. She said she refused to be a Christian because God called himself a jealous God. Jealous like a parent who doesn’t want to see his kids kidnapped and raised by gypsies, but that’s beside the point.

Gluttony is addiction, and like other addictions, it is characterized by looking in the wrong place for something you should be getting from the Holy Spirit. Food gives us comfort, but the Holy Spirit is the comforter. Food acts like a drug. It elevates your mood. It helps you to be cheerful and patient. It mimics the fruit and gifts of the Spirit.

I will keep praying God rids me of the rest of my bad habits, and I will pray he does the same for my wife. She has a severe weight problem for the first time in her life. As a leader, I should always face things and find solutions first, so it is my hope that now that I’m delivered, I can help her to be delivered as well.

This Much Memory Should be Illegal

It’s an interesting day here at the Armed Northern Florida Compound.

I think I have solved my photo-editing problem. I bought Photoshop Elements 2024 because I got very bad advice. It turned out to be a horror for editing raw files. Useless. Then I tried Affinity, a free program which works very well. It turned out not to be the answer, because I bought a Canon Powershot V1 for shooting while out and about, and I learned that Affinity would never, ever be set up to take this camera’s raw files and produce photos without black (black) corners. I had to download Canon’s free program, and it works, but I don’t want it. I want to use one good program well, not 53 programs badly.

Adobe Lightroom appears to be a perfect solution, except that it costs a fortune. Adobe has adopted the lamprey business model. They went to subscription-only, so stupid people who can’t multiply by 12 will think it costs $20. Of course, it’s really $240 per year. Every year.

Enter DXO Photolab9. I’m not sure, but based on video reviews and tutorials, it looks like it will do everything Adobe does, considerably better, and while it is expensive, you don’t have to pay for it over and over and over. It is particularly good at fixing noisy photos, which is a huge plus for me. Low light is always an issue. It also updates lens profiles fast. Adobe can’t deal with my lens, but Photolab can.

I have a trial version, and I am going to go through tutorials before I make sure I should pay. It costs $240, just like Lightroom, but you only pay once. Until you upgrade, yes, but the upgrades are cheaper than a Lightroom subscription.

It looks great so far. Extremely intuitive by editing-software standards, which means not all that intuitive, but usable. And it has sorting features that should make dealing with thousands of old photos easier.

In addition to all that, I decided to mirror my phone photos and videos to Google’s cloud. I don’t like clouds or Google, but I don’t think this will allow Google to spy on me for the feds or basically turn me over to Big Bro. Not that there is any point in spying on me, because it would be unbelievably dull, but it’s the principle of the thing.

Finally, I received my new hard drives today. I have a new editing PC, and I’m going to keep all my media on backup drives, not C. It’s hard to find deals on hard drives now. Apparently the AI revolution is somehow drying up the supply. Inexplicably, however, I found two pro-grade 14TB drives on sale from the manufacturer, cheaper than their consumer drives. I saved a hundred bucks moving from consumer to pro, and I also got 14TB per drive instead of 10. I wasn’t looking for 14TB, but if it’s cheaper, why not?

I formatted one drive and installed it in my old PC so I can move all my media files to it, and I formatted the other and put it in my new PC. When the files are moved, I’ll install the second drive in my new PC, and then I’ll set them up so my stuff is synched. I’ll put stuff on the first drive, I’ll save edited files there, and I’ll have my PC set up to sync everything to the second drive.

What if my house burns down? Well, that would be bad. Maybe I should eventually find a big cloud I trust.

I got my first real PC in about 1993, and it had a 340 MB drive. I told somebody about it, and he rolled his eyes and said, “Oh, that MIGHT be enough.” It seemed outrageous. Huge. As of today, on one PC, not counting C, I have 41,000 times as much space.

That figure comes from AI, so feel free to double-check. “AI” often means “Artificial Idiot.”

AI claims the best Apollo spacecraft computer had about 72KB.

It says my toaster has more memory than that.

I think I should put a big external USB drive on my PC for additional peace of mind. I could put it in the workshop and bring it indoors for synching once a month. I can’t do much better than that without an annoying subscription that will go way up in price once I’m comfortable with it. You know it will.

I will now buckle down, clean my glasses, and watch the rest of a Photolab tutorial. I hope this program turns out to be what I need, because Adobe is just too annoying to live with.

Crazy, or Just Plain Mean?

The Rob Reiner story is very disturbing.

As everyone knows, Reiner has a drug addict son named Nick, and a few days ago, the son cut Reiner’s throat as well as his wife’s throat. They died, and a daughter found their bodies after rigor mortis had set in.

I can understand a lot of crimes of violence, which doesn’t mean I approve. I can understand having a sadistic, parasitic spouse killed. I can understand domestic violence. I can see why a person who has had a few beers might flip out during an argument and hit someone over the head with a beer bottle. I understand a person who successfully defends himself with a gun and then keeps shooting after the assailant is incapacitated. People get angry sometimes.

Slitting your mother’s throat? I can’t comprehend that. How can anyone get that angry? Slitting your parents’ throats when you know they would otherwise leave you set for life is also incomprehensible. You would think selfishness would kick in.

Nick Reiner has a defense attorney, and his name is Alan Jackson. Presumably, he is extremely expensive. He handles high-profile cases in Los Angeles, and he appears to have a big staff. Who is paying this man? Reiner appears to be indigent, and you would think his siblings would be reluctant to help. Maybe Jackson is doing it pro bono, which really means pro publicity.

To someone like Jackson, this case is worth 7 figures. That’s a lot of charity. I believe charity is extremely important, but don’t come to my house and ask for 7 figures.

I hope no one thinks I’m criticizing this man for representing a murderer. Murderers are supposed to have representation. I’m just marveling that Reiner could get representation this expensive, as an indigent drug addict whose wealthy family is presumably far past estranged.

As a sibling, do you really want to help your vicious, murdering brother to stay free while you live on millions you inherited and he did not? I wouldn’t. I have a second cousin who was disinherited and then emptied a deer rifle, a shotgun, and a pistol into his brother.

I suppose it would be best to refer to the murderer as Nick in order to avoid the confusion that would arise from typing “Reiner” over and over, as well as the awkwardness of calling him “Nick Reiner” 50 times.

People are saying Nick is mentally ill. Some seem sympathetic. They seem to think his addiction or his mental illness caused the murders. I can pretty much guarantee you Jackson will push this angle, because there is no way he can convince a jury Nick didn’t do the crimes.

As for me, I suspect Nick is just a rotten human being.

Let’s talk addiction. I know a little bit about dealing with addicted relatives, and not the nice kind. Not the kind of addict who says, “Hey, I broke my leg a month ago, and I’m still on Percocet. I better do something.” I mean the kind of addict who has to be forced into rehab and always quits. The kind that abuses and bleeds people until they die and then looks for new victims. The kind of addict that turns 65 with no signs of repentance and every sign of becoming more evil.

People say drugs drive evil behavior. I’m sure that’s true in many cases, but I believe that a person who starts doing evil things, is confronted with it repeatedly, is offered help repeatedly, and consistently demonstrates that he greatly prefers to continue doing evil things…was probably evil to begin with.

The Reiners were leftists, and leftists promote the delusion that people are good. They get upset when you tell them some people are just plain evil. They don’t like it when you say many people simply prefer being evil and cannot be changed. It’s true, though, and the Bible says it’s true.

Rob Reiner said his son was resentful because his parents wanted him to stay in rehab, which is different from detox in that it takes many months. This should tell you a lot abut Nick. It suggests he preferred doing drugs and doing as he pleased to receiving help and living a successful life.

As for mental illness, I don’t know if it’s a valid excuse here. Some nice people with good intentions have delusions that seem to come from nowhere. On the other hand, I believe you can make yourself mentally ill by choosing to be a jerk all your life. I think that if you love lies, you will lie until you can’t tell the truth from lies. I think that if you love rage and sadism, and you indulge in them long enough, you become a rotten, sadistic, angry human being, and while your therapist may claim it’s a mental illness, it’s really a habit you formed deliberately, reinforced by demons you don’t want to get rid of.

I don’t think you can choose to be a bona fide psychotic who sees imaginary people, but I think you can choose to be consumed with hatred and lies. Medical science says we can rewire our brains to some extent, habits are real, and so are demons.

Some people who don’t have the facts yet are reflexively claiming Nick is schizophrenic, which could mean he was so psychotic he didn’t understand what he was doing. Maybe he thought his parents were vampires or something. Could be the case, and it would be grounds for acquittal, but on the other hand, it could be a label a therapist gave him in order to be nice and help his parents avoid concluding they had raised an evil man. Therapists are not very reliable. They get things wrong all the time. They can be biased. They can be dishonest. If they couldn’t be dishonest, lawyers wouldn’t hire them to examine their clients.

Sorry if that last sentence is disturbing.

Lawyers are pretty truthful, believe it or not. Laymen often say otherwise, but it’s true. Lawyers don’t always present all of the truth, because that isn’t their job. They present truth and speculation that may help their clients. To a layman, that may seem like lying, but it isn’t.

On the other hand, they hire experts they know are crooked. There are pro-plaintiff experts and pro-defense experts. Defense lawyers know who they’re hiring when they choose their experts. They know their experts may not be all that truthful. Is that dishonest? I suppose it is to some degree, but I think many lawyers would say they aren’t competent to say for sure whether pro-defense experts are more honest than pro-plaintiff experts.

I can assure you, there are lawyers who hire experts they know are crooked, but anyway, lawyers themselves generally tell the truth, because if they get caught lying, it can get them in serious trouble.

It’s generally not necessary for a lawyer to lie. Parties and witnesses tell so many lies, there are plenty to go around without any help from lawyers.

I don’t think Nick saw vampires. He clearly had a history of scary behavior. His own sister turned him in, and she must know him very well. She found her parents with their throats cut and their bodies going stiff, and she immediately told the police her brother was the best suspect. She knew what he was capable of. Also, he went to a party with his parents the night before they died, and he got into loud arguments with them and another actor. No one has said he was angry because he thought they were aliens who had come to destroy the planet or because he thought God had told him they were going to kill him and harvest his organs.

So what about the Reiners? Were they bad parents? Did they bring this on themselves?

They were definitely bad parents. Any parent who doesn’t raise his children to know Yeshua and the Holy Spirit is a failure. It seems they loved their son a great deal and tried their best to fix him, but love and loyalty aren’t enough to make you a successful parent. You have to co-parent with God.

In all likelihood, this man never had an encounter with the Holy Spirit or Yeshua. There is no way his liberal Jewish parents would have introduced him. They were hostile to God’s ways. They promoted evil and called it good. For example, they were known for their strong support of pushing society to accept sexual perversion, which destroys lives.

Would it have mattered if they had accepted Yeshua, been baptized with the Spirit, prayed in tongues every day, been transformed, and done their best to guide Nick in the same path? Maybe not. Like I always say, God raised Satan. He also raised the rest of the angels, and a third of them are evil.

I’ll say this: the odds of Nick’s salvation would have been a whole lot better.

I don’t say they were failures as parents because their son is what he is, and I don’t say he would definitely have been different had they done better. I say they were failures as parents for the same reason I would say any parent, liberal or conservative, who didn’t introduce his children to God was a failure.

God is real. His love is real. He truly does help people. There is no other solution.

As for me, I was not all that satisfied with my own response to the killings. When I read about the discovery of their bodies, I briefly wondered if it was God’s judgment, and I also hoped they hadn’t been killed by a conservative or nominal-Christian nut. My first response should have been grief combined with empathy. These things followed immediately, but they should have been first.

I never said I was good. Just that I am being improved.

Donald Trump has embarrassed conservatives with his response. In part, he said this:

A very sad thing happened last night in Hollywood. Rob Reiner, a tortured and struggling, but once very talented movie director and comedy star, has passed away, together with his wife, Michele, reportedly due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME, sometimes referred to as TDS.

I think it is objectively true that Rob Reiner was somewhat deranged. His self-reporting on his mental state with regard to Trump is well known, and he said a lot of things that were legitimately indicative of an unbalanced mind. But you can’t relate that to the evil that lived in Nick or the resulting murders. Obviously, Nick did not cut up his parents because his dad had severely irrational beliefs about conservatives.

I have no idea what “reportedly due to” is supposed to mean here. I don’t think anyone–not even Tucker Carlson or Alex Jones–claimed Nick went crazy because of his father’s political delusions.

As a new father with concerns about his family, I now have some ability to comprehend how far off base Trump was. Trump has a big family, so he should have more insight than he does.

There is a religion which could be called Trumpism. A religion which says Trump is infallible and that conservatism will solve all the world’s problems. It’s spreading these days, and it is dangerous. God is conservative, but conservatism can, and does, exist among people who serve Satan. Conservatism is a fruit of submission to God. It is not a good substitute. Without knowledge of the Holy Spirit, you can turn into Candace Owens or Nick Fuentes. Such people are as dangerous as any far-left agitators.

The president needs to wake up and apologize, which is not very likely. Sometimes I think he is getting a bit deranged, himself. During the last half of the year, he has said and done some kooky things.

President Trump is a friend of the church and Israel, but that doesn’t mean he’s with us all the way. He is definitely not our Messiah. He is not even our Josiah.

Today my wife and I prayed for the Reiner family, with special emphasis on Nick. I have no doubt that he is a vile person, but that has never been a barrier to salvation. If you are willing to listen, you can be renewed, no matter what you’ve done or what you have been. I am concerned that people are not likely to pray for him, so we jumped in. Will it pay off? That’s completely up to Nick. It’s possible, if he will listen.

Connections are Everything

Lately, in my relationship with God, he has been underscoring an extremely important principle he taught me years ago.

I went to hopeless carnal churches, sporadically, when I was a kid. I got nothing from it. Later in life, I belonged to charismatic churches which were still surprisingly carnal. During that time, I grew a lot, but I can’t think of any part of that growth that came from listening to the people up front. It came in spite of them.

God told me that I was supposed to pray in tongues a lot, and that he would improve me through it. He told me I needed to be rid of my iniquities; the bad habits that drove sin. He told me I needed to be rid of demons. He showed me he wanted to do most of the work.

I quit going to church, and things got much better. That has continued to this day. When I talk to people about God, I tell them the same things God told me. I don’t tell them to find a preacher to teach them. I don’t recommend a denomination, although there are plenty I could tell people to stay away from.

Yesterday, I got stuck at the post office for about two hours. My wife had made a very bad decision without asking me. She bought maybe 75 pounds of stuff to send her relatives. I once sent a letter to her in Zambia, and it cost $155. I would have told her to send money and tell them to go to a mall. They have malls in Zambia.

I got her to reduce the gifts to a weight that would fit in a large Home Depot box, and we searched around for the best shipping deal. The Post Office came out on top, to the tune of over $500. What are the contents of the box worth? My guess: under $200.

Dealing with the box has been a miserable experience. Getting her to take things out of it. Looking for shipping options. Trying to tape it up to prevent it from bursting (Home Depot boxes are made from recycled cardboard that repels tape).

Yesterday, we sat in the Post Office for ages while she filled out customs forms. Needless to say, we will not be sending any more boxes to Africa. I had a lot of time to read the Bible.

Once you have a consistent habit of spending time in the Spirit, the Bible’s purpose changes. In the beginning, it’s your handbook. You have to consult it in order to know what to do. Once you get to know the person who wrote it, it becomes an instrument of confirmation. The Holy Spirit tells you things, and then you see them confirmed in the Bible. Often, he will tell you things that seem to conflict with the Bible, and then it will turn out the Bible you have is wrong because of a poor interpretation and translation.

In the post office, I read from John 16. Yeshua was getting ready to be crucified, and he was telling the disciples things so they would be prepared for his death and the aftermath.

These things have I spoken unto you, that ye should not be offended [made to stumble].

They shall put you out of the synagogues: yea, the time cometh, that whosoever killeth you will think that he doeth God service.

And these things will they do unto you, because they have not known the Father, nor me.

But these things have I told you, that when the time shall come, ye may remember that I told you of them. And these things I said not unto you at the beginning, because I was with you.

But now I go my way to him that sent me; and none of you asketh me, Whither goest thou?

But because I have said these things unto you, sorrow hath filled your heart.

Nevertheless I tell you the truth; It is expedient for you that I go away: for if I go not away, the Comforter will not come unto you; but if I depart, I will send him unto you.

And when he is come, he will reprove the world of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment:

Of sin, because they believe not on me;

Of righteousness, because I go to my Father, and ye see me no more;

Of judgment, because the prince of this world is judged.

I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now.

Howbeit when he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he will guide you into all truth: for he shall not speak of himself; but whatsoever he shall hear, that shall he speak: and he will shew you things to come.

He shall glorify me: for he shall receive of mine, and shall shew it unto you.

All things that the Father hath are mine: therefore said I, that he shall take of mine, and shall shew it unto you.

A little while, and ye shall not see me: and again, a little while, and ye shall see me, because I go to the Father.

Here, you can see Yeshua said the Holy Spirit would guide us into “all truths.” He calls him the Spirit of Truth.

He didn’t say the Spirit would give us a few helpful tips when we couldn’t get our priests or preachers to return texts. He said “all.”

He said the Holy Spirit would hear. Yahweh speaks, Yeshua hears, Yeshua repeats, the Holy Spirit hears, the Holy Spirit repeats to us, and we are supposed to hear and repeat.

Look what Yeshua said about religious people, not atheists and pagans. He said religious people would expel his followers. Why would they do this? He told us. He told us the religious persecutors would not know God.

He didn’t say they wouldn’t read the Bible. He didn’t say they wouldn’t go to church. He didn’t say they wouldn’t baptize or cast out demons. He said they would not know God. This is what separates ignorant persecutors from the childen of God. As Paul said, as many as are led by the Spirit, they are the sons of God.

You can claim this only applies to Jewish Messiah-deniers, but that is not true. Christians are no different. Nominal Christians have burned a lot of people, including actual Christians, to death.

If you think you’re a good Christian because you go to church often, you study the Bible, you give to ministries, you serve as a volunteer, you go on mission trips, and so on, you are deluded. Those things only count when you do them because the Spirit told you to.

No one has tried to kill me for telling the truth, but I was rejected by two churches in a row, and the first church I belonged to, back in the 20th century, had problems that motivated me to leave.

Lots of Christians have attacked me for telling the truth. The pompous. The arrogant. The deluded. People who wanted money, admiration, and promotion. People who memorized Bible phrases they didn’t understand, to justify obeying their childish flesh. I went on to greater blessings, and they stayed as they were or got worse.

Now that I think about it, I can’t recall ever having friction with other Christians because I was doing something wrong. It was the right things I did that set them off.

I’ve had trouble with people who rejected the Holy Spirit and therefore did not know God. If they had known God, they would have heard me when I told them things God had told me.

Heaven is like an exclusive nightclub. If you’re not on the list, you don’t get in. How do you get on the list? You have to know someone.

If you don’t know the Holy Spirit, you can’t know Yeshua. He doesn’t live inside us and tell us things minute by minute. He tells the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit lives in us. Sure, Yeshua comes to people whenever he wants and interacts with them, but he doesn’t do what the Holy Spirit does. God is triune, and we have to accept every part of him.

When Yeshua came to me, he most definitely remained outside of me. I can tell you that for a fact.

As for the Holy Spirit, he definitely lives in me, even though there is no shortage of wickedness inside me that still needs to be cleaned out.

If you’re not speaking in tongues a lot, you’re not receiving most of what the Holy Spirit wants to say to you. You’re listening to dangerous prattle that comes from evil spirits, arrogant men, and your own imagination. You’re creating your own religion, or you’re following a false one other people made up.

I hope this is helpful to you, because we are living in a dangerous time that is going to become much more dangerous.

There is Nothing Like an Equal Yoking

Last week, a church buddy from way back remarried. I don’t know who is happier; him or his friends.

He was married to his first wife for something like two decades, and they had 4 children together. The kids are wonderful. He is an extremely dedicated husband and father, he pursues God through the Holy Spirit, and the results show it. The ex is another story.

She blamed him for a lifestyle she found unsatisfactory. She hounded him constantly, persuading him to move several times and change careers. She used to threaten to divorce him and take the children away. He suffered so much, he wanted to die.

I talked to her once about his suffering, and she didn’t understand. She didn’t see the problem. She said, “I was just trying to motivate him.” That was how she felt about driving someone to consider suicide. There was no remorse. No repentance. Just an explanation of behavior she thought was reasonable.

One day he sent me a picture of a list she had made. She went to the Internet and researched poisons, and she created a long handwritten list, complete with details about how much he would suffer and how long it would take him to die.

She alienated his friends. He raised her illegitimate daughter along with his own kids, and the wife turned her against him.

She believes her emotions are correct. If she goes into a rage and hits someone or verbally abuses them, she has no regrets. If she’s angry, she must be right. The person she abuses is to blame.

Naturally, she’s a leftist. Leftists are known for believing their irrational rages are correct and give them license to abuse and even kill. Back before the 2016 election, she decorated her purse with conspicuous anti-Trump material so the whole world had to see how eccentric she was. She was ignorant, and it didn’t bother her. She once told me she was against Republicans because they took prayer out of school.

One day, she beat herself up. Literally. She attacked herself to make it look as though he had been beating her. She did it in front of the children, which is beyond stupid. She called the police, and of course, the kids told them what she had done. She was eventually convicted of various crimes, and a court forced her to avoid contact with the family.

After all this, she and her Christian-rapper new boyfriend broke into my friends’ home, stole the kids’ official papers, took his passport, and even stole his grandmother’s ashes.

We prayed for her for years, and you can see the good it did. You can pray for anyone and have the faith of Yeshua himself, and if they aren’t interested in repentance, nothing will happen. You can pray for Satan if you want, and you can say “in the name of Jesus,” and you can believe as hard as you like. Don’t expect results.

He found himself a nice lady who works at the hospital where he works. They hit it off. Now they’re married. They went to Orlando for the weekend, and on their way down and the way up, we spent time with them.

She is humble. She is gentle. She loves him passionately. She is properly submissive. I won’t say he is happy for the first time in his adult life. It goes beyond that. For the first time in his life, he is not completely miserable.

Last night, we had some of my Christmas ale, and we talked in my kitchen. They played with the baby. We talked about the changes in my friend’s life.

Eventually, we got around to sharing testimony and revelation. We took communion. We repented. We talked about what God was doing for us. Everyone was receptive.

I really enjoyed this. Every day, we pray God will bring us together with people who receive revelation from the Holy Spirit and who appreciate it when other people receive and share revelation. We are both tired of being persecuted by Christians who won’t listen and who try to correct us with nonsense they’ve heard from preachers who have never known God. You have to spend a certain amount of time with such people if you want to be around Christians at all, but you need to recharge with an inner circle that supports and understands you.

The other day, I was on the web complaining about the way Internet forum members treat people. I mentioned certain types of forums that are much worse than average. I mentioned Christian forums.

I will not belong to a Christian forum. They’re horrible. They’re full of self-righteous, ignorant, untransformed people who believe gossip from preachers and denominations instead of revelation they have received (should have received) from the Holy Spirit. They don’t examine themselves, because they think they’ve made it. They join forums so they can “correct” people in order to look holy to strangers. No matter what you say on a Christian forum, someone is likely to find imaginary fault and start condescending and belittling.

It’s persecution. People don’t realize this, because they have no idea what persecution is. Anyone who speaks against Holy Spirit revelation is a persecutor. For that matter, anyone who is against Yahweh or Yeshua is a persecutor. When Yeshua blinded Paul and knocked him off his donkey, he accused Paul of persecuting him. Paul was fighting proper beliefs in Yeshua and the Holy Spirit.

Churches have done a big percentage of the persecution Christians have experienced. They have a long history of torturing, imprisoning, and burning people who heard from the Holy Spirit. This is because Satan runs nearly all churches. He sets up denominations so they allow you to get a little closer to God, but not close enough.

Speaking against the fruit and gifts of the Holy Spirit is persecution. It is also standard procedure in churches all over the world.

Preachers repeat garbage long-dead men who didn’t have revelation made up. Adherents absorb it, and then, with their flesh under the influence of demons, they persecute people who speak the truth. This is the main reason I don’t go to church. God made me understand it was a poor use of my time.

Some people quit going to church because Christians have hurt their feelings. I suppose there are people who think that happened to me. Not true. Other Christians have been nasty to me, but I left because God told me to and because I was wasting my time in church. I was tired. When I spoke revelation, which has turned out to be right and which I live by to this day, people who didn’t pray in tongues tried to correct me. Some were downright snotty. This was especially true of the prosperity people and sycophants who were close to pastors.

Weirdly, people who were not nearly as blessed as I was tried to correct me. I mean people who had serious problems that were very clearly not in God’s will and which were caused by problems with their walk with him.

You can’t always say a person is closer to God than someone else because his life is easier, but when a person’s life is a mess and he never has any revelation or testimony, the problem is unmistakable.

I have called these people boneheads, which I supposed is insulting, but the point was to describe their condition. Their heads are like blocks of solid bone. There is no way for revelation to penetrate. Revelation comes by the Holy Spirit, and he can’t get into a bonehead. It took him quite a while to get anywhere with my own thick skull.

If you can’t receive revelation, you can’t recognize it when others relate it. Talking to stubborn boneheads who live in the flesh is like talking to a dog or a rock.

As God himself told us, it is not possible to please him in the flesh, but nearly all Christians are determined to do it. He told us we should worship him in Spirit and in truth, but almost no one spends real time with the Holy Spirit, and that includes most people who claim to be Spirit-filled.

I quit going to church and hanging around with incorrigible boneheads. Suddenly, there were fewer vexatious people in my life. I quit tithing, which, I was told, would bring me prosperity. Then God made me wealthy without work. God got me out of the hellhole known as Miami. He gave me a wonderful home. He brought me a wife who loves revelation and responds to it by nodding and quoting confirming scriptures. He brought me the cutest, most charismatic baby son imaginable.

I received miracle healings when I was a churchgoer (never through preachers). I received all sorts of wonderful correction straight from God; revelation kept pouring in. And I couldn’t share it with much of anyone. My buddy who just got married was one of the few, and even he had some rough spells.

Fred Stone, the father of tarnished evangelist Perry Stone, was a real man of God, and he told an interesting story.

When Fred Stone was young, he ran around with an older man named Rufus Dunford. Mr. Dunford was apparently an apostle. He worked miracles and so on.

One day Fred Stone was driving him around, and Mr. Dunford asked him to pull over so he could go into a cobbler’s shop that belonged to a German. They went in, and Mr. Dunford started speaking to the cobbler in German. Mr. Dunford did not know German, but God poured it through him.

Mr. Dunford told him he needed to be saved. The cobbler asked him if he was a Catholic priest. When Mr. Dunford said he was not, the cobbler said something like, “You must be one of those [expletive] holy-rollers,” and he picked up a hammer. He was very angry. Mr. Dunford left without further effort.

When he got back in the car, he told Fred Stone the cobbler was “a spiritual swine.” He was referring to a principle Yeshua taught when he said, “Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn again and rend you.”

Mr. Dunford said the cobbler was going to die soon, and God had sent him into the shop to give him a final warning. He never went back to try again.

We are God’s pearls. People don’t understand that. Yeshua told us what pearls are in the story of the pearl of great price. He said the pearl of great price was the kingdom of God. He told us the kingdom of God was in his followers.

Yeshua was telling us we shouldn’t chase swine, which is a much harsher term than “bonehead.” We have to live in this world, and we have to warn people, but we aren’t supposed to waste our lives relentlessly pursuing people who will never listen and who will persecute us and even gladly do us harm.

The swine principle applies to evangelism and teaching, meaning we shouldn’t try to force them on swine, but it also applies to subjecting ourselves to their presence.

I believe this explains why so few people who get revelation are allowed to appear before churches. Yeshua is protecting his pearls by refusing to cast them before swine. What would be the point, apart from creating evidence to be used to judge the swine later?

God wants to save sinners, but on the other hand, he loves his children, and he doesn’t want to submit them to unlimited persecution and temptation. When you hang around with people who will not listen, they will try to turn you away from the truth, and they may mistreat you.

They can also be extremely condescending and pompous. “I drove the church bus for 25 years, little lost sheep. I did 15 mission trips to Africa. I have every single Joyce Meyer DVD. You are clearly listening to demons instead of the Holy Spirit, and you are lucky a man as holy as I am is here to rebuke you and clear all this up.”

I always try to avoid condescension when I talk to people. I try to be humble. Unfortunately, to proud people (including those who don’t know they’re proud), humility is an invitation to condescension and misguided rebuke. It’s like blood to a shark. They jump at the bait, and then you wish you had kept your mouth shut. When they’ve done it a certain number of times, you stop talking to them. They condition you to give up on them, just as God gives up on people.

I avoid debate. Yeshua didn’t tell us to debate people. It doesn’t work. He didn’t do it. He said his peace and moved on.

I should add that I’m really good at debating. I have an extremely high IQ, I’m familiar with the Bible, and of course, I’m a lawyer. The reason I avoid debating isn’t that I can’t beat you at it. I avoid it because I don’t want to fall into the trap you’re in. When I refuse to engage, it’s not because you scored a stunning point or delivered a sweet burn. I can respond just fine. I choose not to, for the same reason I wouldn’t put a nickel in a rigged slot machine.

In the Bible, you can see a pattern that shows that people who were close to God were not very gregarious. True prophets didn’t hang out at the temple or kings’ palaces. John the Baptist was a priest by birth, but he lived in the wilderness. Yeshua spent a lot of time away from people. Moses spent a lot of time alone with God. Immersing yourself excessively in the company of hard-headed people will not make you more productive.

Paul’s story is interesting. He knew all about organized religion and doctrine. He was a student of the great rabbi Gamaliel. He read out his earthly resume in his letters. After Yeshua gave him his own personal tribulation, he repented of flesh-based persecution and became a believer. He knew about the church, but he avoided it. Why?

He said he went into Arabia for three years and then he spent another 14 years away from Israel and the new church. He spent time with God, learning from the Holy Spirit. Go read it yourself. Then he returned and became the most effective apostle. He even corrected Peter.

No man taught him, but he had so much revelation, he wrote around a quarter of the New Testament.

I tell people they need to learn from the Holy Spirit, not preachers, and they argue with me. Why don’t they argue with Paul? He didn’t volunteer to wash a preacher’s car and carry his briefcase. He didn’t become a deacon or an usher. He spent time alone with God, and he came back filled with the truth.

I tell people they need to spend a lot of time praying in tongues, because it will fill them with revelation. They argue with me. Richie Wilkerson, the guy who married Kanye West and Kim Kardashian, went to the trouble of preaching against my revelation in front of a full church. Most Christians struggle with a basic and axiomatic truth.

The word says that if you pray in tongues you edify yourself. If that is true, it is not possible for praying in tongues a lot not to be helpful. This should be obvious, but people fight it.

I tell people they need to learn from the Holy Spirit instead of corrupt denominations that teach useless error. They argue with that. Yeshua said it. John said it. Paul confirmed it. Somehow when I say it, I’m wrong?

Why am I wrong? Because no one points TV cameras at me? Because I don’t have a jet? If TV cameras, fame, and wealth were signs of God’s authority, wouldn’t Whoopi Goldberg be an apostle? Jim Bakker had TV cameras. So did Jimmy Swaggart.

John and Yeshua said the Holy Spirit would teach us all things. ALL. Were they confused? If I’m wrong to say the same thing, prove them wrong.

A preacher’s role is to be a matchmaker and a sort of daycare worker. You tell people about Christianity. You get them baptized with water and the Holy Spirit. You show them how to spend time with God. You share your testimony. You try to provide guidance until they get their legs under them. You do NOT tell them you are their “covering” or their “father” or that they have to continue in your church and your teaching. You do NOT tell them to obey you. But these are things most clergymen do.

They say God is our father, and then they expect us to live lives in which we don’t ever meet with him. Is that how fatherhood works? Maybe in the ghetto.

If you don’t know your father, expect to think, feel, and behave like the fatherless.

Talking with someone is dialogue. Talking about what someone said is often just gossip. You’re supposed to talk with the Holy Spirit instead of relying on what some dodgy dead person may or may not have heard from him tens or hundreds of years ago. The vast majority of preachers are just gossips. They repeat slanders and speculation. We are supposed to be witnesses. A witness knows what he says is true. I talk about things I have personally experienced, and I relate revelation I personally received after time with God.

My last pastor, the pedophile rapist, made us give him–not the church, but him–cash offerings on his birthdays. You’re not supposed to give an offering to a person, but okay. He scolded us when we didn’t give him enough. He told us we were supposed to give his smirking, obnoxious, drug-dealing, atheist son money and honor him because he was the son of the pastor.

At Miami’s Trinity Church, Rich Wilkerson and his wife Robin told us, “Grow where you’re planted,” meaning, “Don’t go to the church across the street and give them your money. Stay here on the plantation and pick that cotton.” He told us God would make us wealthy if we gave him money. More money, I should say, since he already had a mansion in Golden Beach with a yacht moored behind it.

These guys made doctrine up, and they related doctrine other fools had made up. The pope does the same things. Most preachers do. On the other hand, the Holy Spirit always tells the truth.

I hope I get to spend more time with my friend, because a lot of people I know are draining. That includes people I love and want to keep in my life if possible.

Christians are the new Jews. We are just as hard to talk to and persuade.

I know it’s hard to give up on ideas you have held close to your heart for years. On the other hand, the truth is the truth, you need it, you won’t succeed without it, and all the wishing in the world will not make your cherished gossip the truth.