This is What Saving $880 Looks Like

Day before yesterday, I made a repair. I spent about $20, and I saved myself somewhere in the neighborhood of nine hundred.

My mother bought my dad a giant Tumi suitcase. He didn’t use it because he liked garment bags. I inherited it in nearly-new condition.

Tumi makes expensive stuff. The current product which is closest to my bag runs $850 on Amazon. That doesn’t include tax. Tumi does not sell repair parts because, well, because their customer support is garbage. If your Tumi bag breaks, you have to ship it to a repair center at your expense. My bag is about a yard tall, so imagine what that would cost me.

When Rhodah and I visited Turkey, we used taxis. They were generally great. They usually provided two options for about the same cost: car or van. Obviously, we hired vans.

One day, we needed a ride to the airport in Istanbul. The company we chose assured us they would get us there very early. Then we sat in the lobby of our hotel and waited. “Very early” became an impossibility. I started calling them, and they were not very good about responding.

Eventually, they called the hotel, not me, even though they had my number. They said the driver had to park several blocks away. They said he had been held up by traffic. This was not a good excuse. If you drive a taxi in Istanbul, you know the traffic is bad, and you plan around it. It wasn’t a special day. Nobody set off a bomb on the highway. There were no earthquakes. The driver couldn’t expect anyone to believe his lateness was not his fault.

He was supposed to come to the hotel and move our bags for us. Instead, a hotel clerk hauled them a quarter of a mile or more, over cobblestones. One of the wheels on my bag came loose, and it fell off somewhere during the ride. Tumi bags cost a lot, but the wheel was held on by two small screws driven into plastic, so it wasn’t attached very well.

Later, I gave the taxi company a bad review. They had been late. They had parked far away. They hadn’t moved our luggage as they were supposed to. They caused my wheel to break, and there was no way to get Tumi to fix it. I was going to have to pay a great deal of money for a new suitcase or come up with my own repair.

They started emailing me, making excuses. They offered to refund my money. I said their excuses were just that, and I said the refund wouldn’t begin to pay for new luggage. I never got my refund. The refund should have been their first step, and they shouldn’t have asked for a good review in return.

Why did I give them a bad review? Aren’t Christians supposed to forgive? Sure we are, but the purpose of a bad review isn’t to punish. I posted my review to prevent other tourists from having problems with the company and to motivate the company to improve.

Anyway, I was looking at new bags this week, and it appeared I could get something decent from L.L. Bean for around $270, but I really didn’t want to pay. The suitcase is strong and spacious. Apart from cobblestones, it handles abuse very well. And money is money.

I went to Tractor Supply, where all great luggage repair stories begin. I got me a caster and some screws, bolts, washers, and nuts. I brought the caster home and drilled the axle to remove the wheel. I drilled holes in the plastic housing where the old suitcase wheel had been. I ran a 1/4″ bolt through the holes. I stuck the wheel in there and tested it.

The wheel dragged a little. I saw it was slightly too wide for the cavity it sat in, so the sides rubbed. I got some coarse sandpaper and sanded the wheel and cavity. Eventually, it turned fairly freely. I realized it would free up more after half a mile or so of rolling through airports, so I stopped. I mixed some 5-minute epoxy and applied it over the outer end of the bolt so it couldn’t turn or back out of the hole.

Guess how long it takes 5-minute epoxy to cure. Twenty-four hours. They should use it to seal up Grant’s Tomb. It takes about an hour for it even to harden partially. I’m not sure why the government allows them to call it 5-minute epoxy.

Now I have a better wheel than the one the suitcase came with. It’s a little taller than the other wheel, but suitcase wheels slip as they turn, so it doesn’t matter. The wheel I installed will be there long after the other one fails.

Two of the screws I bought were longer than they needed to be, so I’m going to replace them with shorter ones. I’m using lock nuts, so they shouldn’t come loose.

I learned a bit about luggage. For example, when it comes to soft luggage, you want Cordura, not ballistic nylon, even though Cordura is actually a type of ballistic nylon. If the specs on your new bag say “ballistic nylon,” it’s a cheaper fabric that isn’t as durable. When it’s Cordura, the manufacturer will be sure to inform you.

I have no idea how nylon can be ballistic. That’s a question for another day.

I learned a lot of people are buying hard-sided luggage these days. I didn’t want that. What happens when you put one ounce too much in a hard bag? Either you can’t close it, or you break something inside it. And hard bags sometimes crack.

Most people want luggage with 4 wheels. It’s easier to roll. Sorry; not for me. A 4-wheeled bag can roll away from you on a slope. You always have to hold onto it. Also, those wheels hang out there in space held on by weak spindles that break easily. And luggage makers aren’t helpful with repairs. My bag has two wheels. It rolls just fine, and the wheels are much less likely to break. If I have to stop on a slope, I can let go of the bag, and it won’t go anywhere.

These days, people make fun of travelers who use big checked bags. Chuckle all you want. I am not too sorry to stand at a bag carousel for 20 minutes. It’s not that hard. In exchange for this meager effort, I get three times the capacity other people get. I need capacity. I’m taking my wife a Carhartt jacket, waterproof hiking shoes, an assortment of wigs, long underwear, and a huge trove of makeup. If I used a tiny stewardess bag, I’d have no room for my own clothes.

Now I know more about luggage than I ever wanted to know. Maybe reading this will help someone else avoid problems.

Thin Pizza is for Apostates

Lunch was okay today, and by “okay,” I mean the closest thing to heaven I expect to experience in this life.

I have been making thin pizza after thin pizza, wondering why the pies didn’t make my eyes roll back in my head the way my Sicilians do. I finally realized this: thin pizza is inherently not as good as Sicilian. It’s not possible to make a thin pizza that compares to my Sicilian, so I have been wasting my time chasing a culinary unicorn. I’m wondering if I should ever make thin pizza again.

Today I decided to make a full-size Sicilian, meaning a quarter sheet. The measurements are about 9″ by 13″. It may not sound like a big pan, but a Sicilian made in it will feed three reasonable people or me and one of my friends.

I haven’t messed with my Sicilian recipe much, because it was incredible the first time I made it back in 2009. I have made little changes, but it’s nearly the same pie it was then. Today I decided to get brave and innovate.

I have been experimenting with twice-melted cheese. When you reheat pizza, the texture of the cheese is usually better than it was the first time around. With that in mind, I wondered why I shouldn’t melt my cheese, cool it, put it on the pizza, and bake it a second time.

I used twice-melted cheese today. I made a mixture of Boar’s Head mozzarella, Publix sliced provolone, and Cracker Barrel extra-sharp white cheddar. I used a quarter sheet as a mold and shaped a piece of nonstick foil around the bottom of it. This gave me a foil tray slightly larger than the bottom of a quarter sheet. I mixed my cheeses, put them in it, and heated them until they bubbled. With great care, I was able to get the foil out of the oven and chill the cheese without any accidents. At room temperature, it formed a sort of cheese placemat.

I used slightly more dough than I usually do, and I chose to parbake it. Ordinarily, I don’t do this. I put my stretched dough in a very oily pan and baked it at 500° for 9 minutes. I was surprised how long it took to start to look cooked.

I had 6 precious cans of Stanislaus Saporito sauce. I had been reluctant to use them, because the nearest source is 90 minutes away. I had been working with Cento tomatoes and Glen Muir paste to come up with an acceptable, readily available substitute, but today, I had to have Stanislaus.

I thought about the economics. I hesitated to use Stanislaus because the cans contain around a gallon, and the cost about $7 each. When I use Cento and Muir Glen, I spend over $5, and the amount of sauce I get is a small fraction of what a can of Stanislaus produces. I realized I was tormenting myself over nothing. Stanislaus is actually cheaper, even if you throw a lot out.

I broke the can into four nearly equal parts, took a little out for today’s pie, and froze the rest in bags. I should have good-quality sauce for a month or two, and even if it deteriorates, it will still be a lot better than Cento and Muir Glen.

I put 8 ounces of sauce on the parbaked crust, which is a third more than usual. I applied my sheet of cheese. I had a little bulk Italian sausage, so I put that on the pie, too.

When I baked the pie, it took forever to cook. I had added dough, I had interrupted the baking by parbaking, and I believe the twice-melted cheese took longer to brown than cold cheese. When I put it on the pie, it was already covered in fat, and fat slows browning.

I was hoping the cheese would crawl over the edges of the crust and burn against the pan, and that did happen, but not to the degree I had hoped.

After I pulled the pie out and cooled it a little, it popped right out of the pan. The crust was nicely browned. The cheese was limp, cooperative, and gooey. The sauce was a home run, plain and simple. I felt stupid for using store ingredients.

The crust could have been crunchier and lighter. The top could have been a little more brown. There could have been more browned cheese around the rim. The pizza was hard to handle, so it got a little beaten up. In spite of all that, this pizza was exquisite.

I don’t know if I’ll keep fooling with cheese sheets. I don’t think they improve things. Not sure yet. I will try to let the next crust blow up more so it will be airier; I was in a hurry today. I will increase the heat to get better crunch. Of course, I will use more sausage. Other than that, there is not much to say. I can’t get a pizza like this anywhere except in my kitchen. When I die, America’s best street-style Sicilian (to my knowledge) will die with me.

I’ve been watching pizzaiolos on Youtube, and some of them make Sicilian. Some call it “grandma pizza,” which makes it sound gross and inferior. I don’t think much of the way they make it. They make very thin crusts. What’s the point? If you like thin crusts, make a thin round pizza right on the stone. The joy of pan pizza is in the crust. It should be thick enough to give you the sense that you’re eating homemade bread.

I think my pizza is better than theirs. I’ve had Sicilian in Miami and New York, made by actual Italians. I’ve had excellent Sicilian in Hollywood, Florida, at a place called Vannucchi Brothers. I know what good Sicilian is. When I watch someone make a Sicilian on Youtube, I have a pretty good idea what the taste and texture will be like. I think they do it wrong.

Urban mythology says all pizza made in New York is perfect. That’s completely untrue. There are bad pizzerias in New York, and even the good pizzerias generally aren’t making astounding pies. New York pizzaiolos are stuck with ancient traditions that may or may not work, and which may be rooted more in economy or laziness than a desire to make excellent food. It shouldn’t shock anyone when I say I can make better pizza.

In Pennsylvania, there is an elderly lady named Norma Knepp. She took over a pizza concession at a farmer’s market a few years back. She had never made pizza before. She got some advice and worked up a recipe, and she ended up winning a big competition in New York City. If New York Italians knew everything, that would never have happened. They are beatable.

Along with the pizza, I had a Coke. I chilled the can in the freezer along with a very heavy glass. When I poured the Coke into the glass, ice crystals floated to the top. That’s how you serve a Coke. I want a special cooling device made with a Peltier cooler to keep my glass of Coke at freezing temperatures while I eat.

I still have enough pizza for a day or two of fine eating. I may fry the slices in a pan before or after heating them in the toaster oven, to make the crust crunchier.

I have pizza figured out. You don’t make thin pizza unless you have a special craving or a finicky guest. You make Sicilian, like a man. You use real tomatoes from a serious company. Thin pizza and store tomatoes are foods of a lower order.

I don’t think my thin pizza can get much better, because no matter what I do, it will always be thin pizza. The pizza of the undiscerning.

No Oil Crisis Here

When it comes to pizza dough, it looks like a small amount of oil goes a long way.

Day before yesterday, I made a 12″ pie with 225 grams of flour and no oil except for some applied to the outside. I found the crust leathery, which is what I wanted, but not quite as crunchy as I desired.

Having obtained the leathery crust I was shooting for, I started to feel I didn’t want it after all. I decided to try to make it slightly less tough, with more crunch.

The pizza before last was made with a teaspoon of cheap olive oil, and I thought it wasn’t tough enough. Pizza with no oil was too tough. I decided to try half a teaspoon.

I fermented the dough overnight in a fridge, and today I baked at 550° on a quarter-inch steel. I baked it slightly longer than usual. You can see the result below.

I think this is what I’ll stick with for a while. It was a perfect pizzeria-quality pie, except of course better. All of the ingredients are sold at my local Publix, so I don’t have to worry about local availability.

I used about 4 ounces of Boar’s Head sliced mozzarella and 2 ounces of Cracker Barrel extra sharp white cheddar. I cut the cheese in small pieces, tossed it to mix it up, and applied it.

The cheese was good. I found I wasn’t thinking about it while I ate the pizza, and that means I didn’t see anything wrong with it. I believe the cheddar loosened the mozzarella up and added some zing.

I also used big chunks of Publix bulk Italian sausage, which is now my default pizza sausage. Much less aggravation that sausage in a casing, and it cooks beautifully.

Next time, I’ll cook the pie for 8 minutes instead of 9. This one was wonderful, but it didn’t need to be quite so well done.

Now that I have a grip on dough management, I can make dough up to three days in advance. That will give me flexibility. I may make a ball now for day after tomorrow.

I’m thinking about making mozzarella. I read about making it at home, and it seems like a good way to get it the way I want it and save half of the cost. I learned that you need unhomogenized milk to make it, and that’s expensive, but you can make your own unhomogenized milk by adding heavy cream to skim milk. If I can make low-moisture mozzarella at home, I should be able to get a better product without shelling out 10 dollars per pound.

I have read that you can make mozzarella from queso blanco. Evidently, queso blanco is what you get if you start making mozzarella and stop before you’re done. If this is true, I could make nice cheese without all the work of starting with milk.

Once I can make cheese, I think I’ll be stuck. There won’t be anything left to figure out. Maybe at some point I’ll develop an interest in high-temperature pizza. That would supply fodder for new projects.

After writing all this, I had a revelation. I figured out why my thin pizza hasn’t been as good as my Sicilian.

Back in 2009, a recipe for astounding Sicilian pizza simply fell into my head, and since then, I have been making the best Sicilian I know of. I have never had a restaurant pie as good. I have improved my recipe a little, but even the first version was beyond compare.

Once I had Sicilian under control, it was natural to try to conquer thin pizza. I already knew how to make a pretty good thin pie, but it didn’t bring me the same level of ecstasy as my Sicilian. Over the years, I have made a lot of progress, and for a long time, I’ve been making thin pies better than restaurants do. I was still never quite sure I had the perfect recipe.

A few minutes ago, I had a revelation. I now know why I do better with Sicilian than thin pizza.

Sicilian pizza and other forms of pan pizza are objectively superior to all types of thin pizza.

Why didn’t I see this sooner?

Sicilian combines a crunchy, fried, buttery crust with a thick layer of delicious fresh bread. If you want, you can spread cheese all the way to the sides and get magnificent baked cheese all the way around your crust. There is no way to make a thin pie give you all that potential for joy. A thin pie has a small rim, a fat rim, or no rim, and it can be puffy and soft or crunchy. It’s not fried. You can’t make it buttery. The crust under the sauce and cheese isn’t crunchy and aromatic like Sicilian crust. It’s like burned leather. It has almost no bread flavor, because it’s so thin.

Sicilian pizza is Godzilla. Thin pizza is Japan. It’s that simple. It doesn’t matter how well you make your thin pizza. It’s still not going to be as good as Sicilian. Even Pizza Hut pan pizza, which is made with fake cheese and spray-on butter, is better than a really good thin pie.

I have been striving for a goal I had already reached.

I think now I have pizza peace. I’m sure I’ll keep messing with thin pizza variations, but I’ll give up the idea that it will ever make me as happy as Sicilian.

I had the feeling I should get a propane oven that reached high temperatures, but that’s stupid. The best New York pizzerias cook at around the same temperature I do. A hotter oven would not make things any better.

I already make the best garlic rolls possible, so I have nothing to strive for in that area. When it comes to pizza and rolls, I believe I can be content with small changes from now on.

Let’s just hope I don’t go Neapolitan. I don’t want to open that can of elmintiasi.

It’s not Something in the Water

Rhodah and I are going through the Bible. She decided she wanted to start at the Revelation and go backward. We are now on Romans. We haven’t discussed it yet. We will probably do it today.

While I was reading today, I came across a passage which is very relevant to our time. Really, it’s almost an entire chapter. It shows why America is in the state it’s in.

Homosexuals and the people who want to give in to them in order to have peace sometimes say Jesus never said anything about homosexuality. Of course, that’s ridiculous.

First, Jesus is not the only person who spoke by God’s inspiration in the New Testament. The entire Bible is full of the words of prophets and apostles, and these people spoke with God’s authority. It would be asinine to claim to be a Christian and insist on discarding the entire Bible except for the words Jesus spoke. Sexual sin is criticized throughout the Bible in both testaments, and Jesus approves of the Bible. If you doubt that Jesus approves of the Bible, and you insist you’re a Christian, you are beyond the reach of reason.

Second, people who had the authority of Jesus criticized homosexuality repeatedly in both testaments. Jesus is God. He has always been God. If you don’t believe that, there is no point in engaging you in an effort to determine which Christian doctrines are correct, because you deny Christianity as a whole. Jesus gave Moses the law. Jesus created Adam and commanded him. Jesus spoke through people like Elijah and Jeremiah. When any anointed person criticizes homosexuality, he speaks for Jesus.

Paul had the authority of Jesus and Jehovah, and he said these things:

For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse:

Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened.

Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools,

And changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and fourfooted beasts, and creeping things.

Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonour their own bodies between themselves:

Who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed for ever. Amen.

For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature:

And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompence of their error which was meet.

And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not convenient;

Being filled with all unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder, debate, deceit, malignity; whisperers,

Backbiters, haters of God, despiteful, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents,

Without understanding, covenantbreakers, without natural affection, implacable, unmerciful:

Who knowing the judgment of God, that they which commit such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but have pleasure in them that do them.

It’s undeniable. Paul condemned homosexuality in both men and women. You can find other similar material in the New Testament.

What’s interesting about the passage is that it provides an explanation most serious Christians aren’t even looking for. Most of us are busy complaining about persecution from pro-perversion people, without trying to find the root cause. Romans 1 tells us the cause. Men rejected God, so God stopped protecting them from perverted desires.

I believe Christians tend to think of perversion as something that popped up on its own and motivated people to attack the church. The truth is that it became widespread because people gave up on God. The church helped that process along. If I’m a Christian, and I fail to help people avoid idolatry, and then they become perverts, I am responsible for the sin of not warning them and praying for them. I’m not responsible for their choice to be perverts or the things they do; that’s on them, and they have no excuse. But I have done wrong.

Paul says men turned to idols, so God gave them over to sexual perversion. Giving men over to something isn’t the same thing as inflicting it on them. When Paul gave a sinner over to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, he didn’t invite Satan to attack him; Satan was already trying to do that. He is always looking for ways to attack every human being. Paul merely quit praying for God to spare the sinner the consequences of his sin, and then the man had no protection, so Satan had better access to him.

For a long time, I’ve believed the decline of England was caused by greed and pride. England was once a powerful Christian nation. The British evangelized the world. When they became wealthy and amassed an empire, they became proud and obsessed with wealth and power. I believe the men turned work into an idol and abandoned their families.

By the beginning of the 20th century, England was pretty godless. The English elites accepted perversion in private, regardless of what they said in public. The men had become effeminate, and they still are. A typical British man who is not from the working classes is hard to distinguish from a flaming American homosexual.

Put Elton John in a business suit and a fake beard and tell people he was a straight English businessman, and no one would doubt it.

It became common for British men to ship their sons off to boarding schools so they could succeed. A British boarding school is essentially a sodomy academy. British men made their sons fatherless voluntarily, and Satan stepped in and filled the paternal role.

English men have become effeminate. Even the straight ones seem gay to Americans. To me, it appears that the British received the punishment of Romans 1, and Americans are receiving it now. We succeeded them in evangelism, and we have also succeeded them as idolaters and perverts.

It’s as though Christianity were a wave that moved through nations. It starts small, builds to a peak, and then disappears. When it’s building, things are wonderful, but afterward come chaos, hatred, defeat, and depravity.

Gay activists, who somehow love to teach Christianity in spite of their hatred of it, like to tell us Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed for selfishness, not for perversion. That’s not true. They were destroyed for both. The Bible mentions both as the causes of the rain of fire. It makes sense. It is believed that their area was very wealthy, and that they abused the poor as well as anyone who came to visit. They became powerful, they made wealth and heathen deities their gods, they became selfish and cruel, and they became sexually perverted.

After they became perverted, they became so depraved God was no longer able to reach them, so he rained fire on them. He burned them all, including old people, babies, women, pets, and livestock. Just to get rid of them for the sake of future generations they were going to contaminate.

Now America is like Sodom. By and large, we have no interest in God or righteousness. We love money, power, and admiration. We are obsessed with pleasure. We are also so sexually perverted, about one quarter of our young people claim to be LGB-something. That’s a big jump from the 1% we dealt with in the past.

In addition to these problems, we are much weaker and more vulnerable than before. We have to bow and scrape for China. That could never happen to a nation that had God’s favor. We got hit worse by coronavirus than anyone else. We are watching our wealth evaporate under Biden, as he drags us into an unnecessary conflict and kills American jobs. Our government is paying millions to put illegal aliens on planes and fly them to cities where they can settle and work against us.

For decades, we’ve been marching to the top of a cliff, and I think we are finally in the process of sliding off.

As written previously, my wife dreamed she was in a field with another woman, running from vicious dogs. The world was falling apart. They saw people running in various directions. People were running from one place to another, thinking they were headed to safety, but they passed people running in the opposite directions. No matter where people came from, they thought things had to be better elsewhere, but things were just as bad in the places they were running to. There was no escape.

My wife and the woman tried to go through a gate and into a house where people seemed safe. The woman was allowed in, but when my wife begged to be allowed in, a tall man with goat’s horns and charred skin came out. He owned the house.

It was obviously a picture of the tribulation and the mark of the beast. Things are going to be very bad everywhere, and Satan will offer people false safety in exchange for taking the mark.

Money won’t protect you. Buckets of freeze-dried disaster food won’t save you. Underground bunkers, real estate, stocks, ammunition, solar power, private wells, and militias won’t save you. The beast definitely won’t save you. God is shaking the world to show us he is the only thing we can hold onto. He will show us none of our false gods can help us.

It’s just like what he did in Egypt, which was a picture of the rapture. He sent 10 plagues, and each plague was designed to humiliate one of Egypt’s false gods. For example, the plague of darkness humiliated Ra, the false sun god.

We wanted to have our own way. We wanted to find security through wealth and political power, not prayer and submission. We wanted to appease perverts and pretend their disgusting activities were not sins, contradicting God himself. Now God is showing us where our safety and stability really came from. He is showing us they can be taken away.

Patriotism can be idolatry. Many conservatives worship America. They think it can never fall. The Roman Empire fell, and so did the British Empire. The Ottoman Empire fell, too. The various empires based in Babylon fell. The monuments of the pharaohs ended up buried in sand. We can fall, and we are falling. Your collection of AR-15’s won’t help you in the long run.

Many conservatives want nothing to do with humility, prayer, patience, or love. Many conservatives are just like the people they hate. Tattooed. Pierced. Proud. Fornicators without shame. Eager to shoot and kill. Some even worship ridiculous European deities and pretend to be Vikings. Many of us have rallied behind homosexuals like Tammy Bruce and Milo Yannopoulos. Many people think the battle is between right and left, but fundamentally, it’s between God’s family and Satan’s. Conservatism is a natural manifestation of closeness to God, but plenty of conservatives have nothing to do with God.

In short, a lot of people aren’t getting it. Not getting it is what causes plagues and floods.

The church should be standing up for righteousness, confession, repentance, Bible study, and prayer in tongues. We shouldn’t be compromising, because compromise is idolatry, and idolatry leads to destruction.

We shouldn’t be so afraid of other people. The only power they have to harm us is the power God gives them.

We Should Switch Names

This was written on March 6, but I didn’t publish it right away.

I have no interest in coin collecting. When I was a kid, my mother tried to get me interested in coins and antiques. I never developed any enthusiasm for coins. I didn’t get anywhere with antiques, either, although I enjoyed going through The Antique Trader, looking for old swords and daggers. My mother should have encouraged me to collect them. I’d be sitting pretty now. She was more interested in things like plates.

It’s remarkable how rich you can get collecting almost anything. Just refuse to clean out your garage for 30 years, and you’re bound to end up with a sizeable pile of assets.

Although I didn’t become a numismatist, I ended up with a few coins, including junk silver, which is the common term for circulated silver coins. Before 1965, US dimes, quarters, half dollars, and dollars were 90% silver. My grandfather was very sharp, and when the change came, he instructed the toll collectors in his area to save silver for him. He paid the state back at face value. When he died, I got a share of the coins.

He was a judge, and he had a lot of clout, so he could do things like that.

Now you know about my history as a coin collector. It is sparse.

A year or two back, Youtube started recommending videos made by a collector. He calls himself a silver stacker, which means he likes to invest in silver bullion and coins. He talks about developments in the precious metals and coin markets. He shows people things he has bought. He interviews shop owners.

I wondered why I was receiving these recommendations.

He published some interviews featuring a man known as the Coin Guy. His name is Guy Ventre, and he has a shop in my area code. I would guess he’s in his late sixties. He moved to Florida from New York, and he has a son who works in the business. His son’s name is Nathan.

The interviews were fascinating. The Coin Guy is not a highly educated man, but he’s very smart, and he reads. He keeps up with various news sources, including The Wall Street Journal. He reads books. He loves history. In the interviews, he provides all sorts of historical insights into coins and metals.

The Coin Guy wears what looks like a Smith & Wesson Chief’s Special on his hip, openly.

He talks a lot about the insanity of fiat currency. He reminds people of what happened in the Weimar Republic, where inflation became so bad, people had to carry bags of money in order to buy groceries.

As new interviews popped up, it became more and more obvious that he and the interviewer were both conservative and concerned about the zombie apocalypse.

The Coin Guy gives talks to kids, trying to interest them in what he does. He is very involved at his church.

I added all these things up. Coin dealer. Metals dealer. Believer in portable wealth. Doesn’t trust the government. Retailer. Born in New York. Smart. Erudite. Family-centered. Last name Ventre. Son named Nathan.

My conclusion: Messianic Jew. Had to be.

Why did “Ventre” make a bell go off? Because I knew a Jewish girl named Ventry.

I found out I was wrong but not far off. In an interview, Mr. Ventre said he had learned, as an adult, that he was part Jewish. Evidently, it was more obvious to me than it was to him. He’s not a Messianic Jew. He’s a Christian with some Jewish ancestry. Enough to be helpful, I think.

I believe I know why Youtube recommended him. I think conservatives and Christians are more interested in coins and metals than other people. I had always thought of these fields as areas that drew Jews, Middle Easterners, and Asians, but based on what I’ve learned, plain old conservatives are very much part of them now.

I took an instinctive liking to this man. He seemed like the kind of virtuous American male you don’t run into often these days. He talked a lot about honesty and reputation. He discussed his hopes for young people and his fears for America, which are, let’s face it, coming true.

A couple of days ago, he told a story about his daughter. She was getting married, so he bought her a bracelet with diamonds and jewels. He paid $2000 for it, and it appraised for more like twice that. When he had it appraised, his wife said, “Sell it.” He refused, saying it might be the thing that got his grandchildren across the Canadian border some day.

I started thinking about the apocalypse. What do we know about it? Here is one thing we know: when it comes, there will be no way to protect yourself. Only God will be able to protect people. If you have money, metals, junk silver, jewels, and securities, they won’t do you any good. No one is going to want to trade food for Bitcoin or Mercury dimes when people are starving.

Will food, land, and barter goods help people? My guess is that they will provide something of a cushion, but the problems of the apocalypse are murder, death, and lack, joined with delusion and a coercive one-world religion. Food and land won’t keep killers away. They won’t keep disease (death) away. When the government belongs to the likes of BLM and Antifa, and they serve the beast, the government’s agents won’t respect your locks and gates, so land won’t help much.

The only answer will be to know God through Jesus Christ. It won’t be enough to ask for salvation and try not to sin. You’ll have to communicate with the Holy Spirit every day and obey him. God is shaking the world so people’s hands will come loose from the things they cling to in vain. His hand is the only thing that will help us.

If we stack silver, silver can lose its value. If we try to grow food, it can be destroyed by bad weather, bugs, and disease. If we store things in our houses, those things can be taken from us. God is quite literally the only thing no person or spirit can take away.

Our enemies only have as much power as God allows them to have. Remember what the Bible said about Jesus. He wasn’t captured by hostile Jews. He turned himself in. He let them know they had no power except that which God gave them. When they approached him, he knocked them to the ground with supernatural power, showing he was God. They knew he was God, but they chose to arrest him, beat him, and have him killed anyway. The men who did this had no excuse when they died and were judged.

You may not be Jesus, but if you belong to God, Satan and his people can’t do anything to you unless God allows it. What he allows depends on your relationship with him.

Sometimes I think I should buy several buckets of disaster food, but I don’t think I’ll ever become a real prepper, because you can’t really protect yourself from the tribulation, and I don’t expect to be here when it happens. I expect to be raptured.

These things were on my mind after I saw the video.

Today, my wife told me about a dream she had last night.

The tribulation had come. She was with another woman. It wasn’t a person she knew in life, but she knew her in the dream. People were running to and fro, looking for safety. There was no refuge. People running away from one place would run past people running to the place they had just come from. People thought other places might be safer, but people who had been to those places knew better.

Vicious dogs were chasing my wife and the woman. There was a gate, and my wife wanted to go through it. She and the woman ran through. Behind the gate, there was a house. My wife knew people in the house were safe, but she couldn’t go in. The other woman was allowed inside. While my wife begged to know how to get in, a giant came out. He had goat’s horns. He was grey. His skin looked as though it had been burned. Suddenly, she knew she had to submit to him, or he would not let her in.

Of course, he was the beast. The house was a place of false safety, for godless people who accept his mark. The woman was a damned soul who submitted to him.

These are my interpretations.

It’s a lot like the Jewish temple, now that I think about it. The temple had an outer area for everyone, and it had areas deeper inside. The farther in you went, the closer to God you had to be. The most sacred place was the holy of holies, where only the high priest could go, and even he could only enter once a year. It makes sense that Satan would work the same way, since he copies God. The house must have been like the priests’ court in the temple. It was for people who proved themselves close to Satan.

God uses sheep to lure people to his altar. Why wouldn’t Satan use dogs and wolves to drive people to his? He used them to drive people into Hitler’s death camps, which were parodies of the temple.

The dream has me wondering: how close is the end?

In related news, I am no longer quite sure who has the moral high ground in the Ukraine/Russia dispute. I haven’t been keeping up with it. Americans on both sides of the political spectrum seem to be overwhelmingly against Russia, but I wonder how many of them know any more than I do.

It makes me uncomfortable to find out I’m siding with people like Bill Maher.

I don’t watch Saturday Night Live, but I decided to take a look at last night’s opening skit because of the war. I thought they might say something about Biden’s dementia and overall weakness encouraging Russia and China to take aggressive action, or maybe about Biden considering boycotting Russian oil and buying from the Venezuelan dictatorship instead of letting Americans drill, but instead, the skit was about Fox News and Donald Trump.

Apparently, some Fox personalities were supportive of Putin in the past, or maybe they didn’t condemn him strongly enough. I can’t really tell, and SNL is (putatively) a comedy show, not a news show.

Biden’s dementia and incompetence are clearly much bigger factors in our current predicament than the words of a few news personalities and a former president, but you can’t expect New York leftists to miss a chance to deflect.

Today, while taking a very brief look at the news, I saw a magazine opinion piece praising Biden for sticking to his guns regarding oil. That amazed me. The argument is that global warming is so terrifying, we need to do everything we can to stop it.

What isn’t so clear is how drilling for oil here instead of in Saudi Arabia, Russia, Iran, and Venezuela will make the oil any more of a warming threat. We still have to burn oil, so it appears to me that the locations of the rigs aren’t very relevant. It seems to me that the main impact of restricting domestic production is to weaken America and strengthen our enemies. We send our money overseas, we kill our own jobs, and we give our enemies control of our oil supply, so we have increased incentive to kowtow to vile regimes.

But perhaps I am wrong.

Maybe the writer was pushing a toxic leftist talking point: emissions should be stopped by curtailing consumption. If so, it’s hard to imagine a dumber position. Consumption equals progress equals prosperity equals a better standard of living. Consumption equals better medical care, schools, and food. It equals peace through enhanced military power. It equals better times for people who rely on charities.

Rational people generally agree that poverty is bad, but there are a lot of people on the left who dream of $15 gas. They truly believe it’s a good idea.

Elon Musk, the foremost proponent of the so-far nonexistent electric revolution, is saying we need to drill more. That’s really something. This is the guy who was going to save us from carbon.

Most people don’t know it, but it is impossible to create a practical electric 18-wheeler. Tesla delivers its electric cars on the backs of diesel trucks. Tesla owners get furious when this is mentioned. Tesla makes big trucks, but truck production is really just a vanity project.

The batteries for a Tesla semi weigh about 7 tons, so they displace a lot of paying cargo. They provide little range. They wear out fast, and semis rack up miles quickly. They cost a screaming fortune: $250,000. I don’t know, but I’ll bet they’re also made with materials we have to get from our enemies. Let’s check.

Yes, China controls 80% of the market for battery raw materials.

The guy who says we have to go electric is clearly worried about the cost of the diesel he uses to deliver his cars, and it’s obvious he is aware his battery trucks aren’t actually useful. If they were, he would be tweeting about the need to get more of them on the road to make us energy-independent.

In any case, even he admits Biden’s policy is destructive and foolish.

The wacky beliefs people are falling for now are strong evidence that supernatural deception is more prevalent than ever. A sign that things are wrapping up.

I take prophetic dreams seriously. My wife has had them before, and so have I.

I got into a conflict with a woman I had dated. One night, I dreamed she was a giant cockroach in my kitchen. She was around a foot tall. She had strange packages attached to her under her wings, like bombs on an airplane. I knew they were full of her eggs; bad future developments she hoped to bring upon me. I knew who the roach was because she was the same color as the woman’s skin, and like the woman, she had a round belly and frizzy hair.

The roach got ready to fly toward me and attack me. I tried to discourage her, but she was too enraged to listen. She flew into the air and into a running fan. It destroyed her and shot her remains into the air, spraying me with her guts. The bombs, which were intended to hatch into problems for me (such as the awful children we might have had), were destroyed. I was unscathed, but I was still covered with brown slime. This is a very accurate metaphor for what eventually happened between me and the woman. I came out on top, but I was still defiled and embarrassed. When I awoke from the dream, I knew how things would turn out.

My wife recently dreamed a man she knew was having premarital sex with his girlfriend, and she called him to tell him. Eventually, he admitted the dream was correct. She also had a dream that correctly showed that the girlfriend’s sister and mother were witches and that they had had a supernatural battle.

I dreamed I took my dad to Chick-fil-A. He was very old and nearly bald. He was feeble. As we walked to a table, waiters cheered. They were elated to see him. I knew this meant he would be saved, and sure enough, it happened later.

In my most obvious rapture dream, I was lifted to heaven on an invisible tsunami that covered the world. Oddly, I had a little tray of roach poison pellets in front of me, and it went with me. Because of this dream, I expect to make it.

Yesterday, I felt an urge to watch a few minutes from movies about Noah. I don’t watch fiction now, but I felt I was supposed to see these things. Noah’s deliverance symbolized the rapture as well as baptism.

The first movie was the John Huston classic. I wanted to see it because I remembered the way Noah’s hostile neighbors looked. They reminded me of today’s hipsters. They were bald, and they looked creepy. They adorned themselves with skulls. Have you noticed all the bald men around us? It seems like half of America’s men are bald, with creepy convict chin beards and tattoos. I thought it was strange that the movie’s characters were so much like them, given that the movie was made in the 1950’s.

Modern Americans are determined to look the way losers looked in 1960. Here’s something God once told me: we become what we imitate.

I saw a funny scene. One of Noah’s sons was asking him if he was sure the world would flood. He said the crops weren’t being looked after, and the weather was dry. His mother scolded him for doubting his dad. Then she turned to Noah and said he needed to take one son off the ark project and send him to fix the roof on Noah’s house. She was worried it would let water in when the rain started. Noah looked at her in disbelief, smiled, and agreed.

When the flood came, there was a moment when screams could be heard coming from outside the ark. That is something I’ve thought about in the past.

The second movie was the Russell Crowe version. Not much of interest there. I saw some short clips.

It portrayed the fallen angels as saviors of mankind, which is obscene, given that all the evidence we have says Satan is their leader. Failing to appreciate your allies is bad, but giving credit to your enemies is beyond stupid. The purpose of the flood was to kill the descendants of the angels.

I feel like John Huston’s Noah. I just can’t believe the things I do now matter. Why bother fixing the roof? My inescapable, persistent feeling is that if I let nearly all my earthly responsibilities go, it will make no difference at all in the long run, because my wife and I will not be here.

Jesus showed the disciples where to cast their nets, and they caught so many fish, they realized they were seeing miracles. Afterward, they walked away from the boats and left the fish to rot. Check the Bible and see. It says that. Imagine doing that today. What if you owned a big grocery store? Would you be willing to walk away and follow Jesus, allowing the inventory to go bad and the building to fall apart?

When the rapture comes, that’s what will happen. No one who goes will care about their savings, their wills, their houses, their careers…none of it.

If the rapture doesn’t come soon, then I guess we’re just stuck here, and we’ll have to take it a while longer.

We have been cleared for a trip to another country: Ireland. They insisted on getting confirmation that Rhodah was really my wife, even though we sent a PDF of our marriage certificate. Barring a sudden ascent into the clouds, we will probably have to make two more trips before she comes to the US. Ireland is somehow connected with the Schengen-area countries, so we expect her Irish visa will give her credibility if we decide to try another country in Europe later.

Israel would be the best possible destination, but they’re so crazy over there, I don’t count on anything.

I have never had much interest in visiting Ireland, because nothing has ever happened there, but the people are said to be very nice, and they have great seafood. It should be fun. I wasn’t interested in Turkey, either, and I had a great time there.

Papa Who?

Today I gave my shopmade pizza steel a try.

Yesterday I made a pie on a makeshift steel, and it was a big improvement over a stone. I thought the pie was imperfect, though, because it was done more on the bottom than the top, and I didn’t think the rim was crunchy enough.

I decided to make another pie. I didn’t use any oil, except for an extremely thin film on the pan where I left the dough to rise. I reduced my sugar from 2.5 teaspoons to 1.5 teaspoons. This is for 225 grams of King Arthur Bread Flour.

I was afraid the dough would rip when I tossed it. Oil prevents that, probably by preventing the dough’s surface from drying during tossing. In the old days, I had some problems. When I took the dough out today, it worked fine. I believe the night in the fridge helped the dough become stretchier, so even though it probably dried out a little while I was working it, there were no holes

I baked today at 550° using convection. I moved the steel higher in the oven than yesterday.

After 9 minutes, I had a very nice pie. Pictures follow.

The crust was leathery, which is something I was shooting for, but the rim didn’t crunch quite as well as I wanted. The underside of the pie was beautiful. It had plenty of charring, but not enough to make the pie taste burnt.

For cheese, I used 1/1/1/ provolone/mozzarella/cheddar. It was very nice. I may reduce the cheddar next time.

When I was at the store yesterday, I bought cheese and bulk Italian sausage. Today when I got ready to make the pie, these things were nowhere in sight. I decided to check the car. When I opened the door, I smelled the odor of dead pig. The sausage had expired during the night. I had left all three items out there.

Before I assembled the new pie, I bought new stuff. I used the room temperature cheese from yesterday, though. I didn’t think sitting in the car would hurt it.

I put a number of globs of sausage on one half of the pizza. I was afraid I was using too much, but it turned out I should have used a lot more. I used raw sausage. I used to think pizza sausage had to be cooked in advance, but that’s wrong.

The steel is a big blessing. It produces better pies than a stone, and I have the satisfaction of knowing I made it myself.

Some people recommend half-inch-thick steels, but that seems to be overkill. Mine is 1/4″ thick, and it cooks the bottom of a pizza like nobody’s business. I think a thick steel would burn it.

Now I need a pizza stand to raise my pies off the dinner table. Not that I sit at the table. Come on. I’m a man, after all. I’ll start doing that when my wife moves in and not before.

My next pie will contain a tiny amount of oil. I wanted a leathery crust just like the ones I used to eat at Pizza Town in Manhattan, and now that I’ve made one, I think I went a little too far. Maybe a very small amount of oil will make the crust slightly less chewy without making it mushy like Papa John’s.

New Pizza Steel Almost Ready

This is a big day. I just made myself a pizza steel.

I realize it’s not likely anyone wants to read about it, but then I don’t blog for hits.

For years, I’ve used a stone I bought at Bed Bath & Beyond. I’m pretty sure that’s where I got it, anyway. It has been so long, I forgot.

It was much better than a pan, and it did a fantastic job of making the bottom of a Sicilian pizza crunchy, but I always felt my thin New York pies were A- pies, not A+ pies. Sicilian is easier to make than thin pizza. If you can stuff dough into an oily pan, and you can find good ingredients you should be able to make a good Sicilian. New York pies have to bake faster, and you have to have a good balance of heat on the bottom and top.

I was also using way too much yeast, and that hurt the flavor.

People on a pizza forum told me steels were all the rage. I was surprised, because I had tried a round Lodge cast iron pan, and I had given it away because the results were so bad.

When I looked at steels on the web, I saw they were selling for $120, which seemed ridiculous, given the price of steel plate. Eventually, I saw them selling for as little as $59, but that’s still a lot, and they weren’t the steels people recommended. Also, the steels I saw were small. Fourteen by fourteen or so.

Yesterday, I swung by the metal place, and I got me a 16″ square of 1/4″ hot-rolled. I got lucky and received a piece with nearly no rust. It hasn’t rained much here lately. Cost: $27.46.

Today I used a big Metabo angle grinder and a Walter cutting wheel to knock the corners off the steel. After that, I deburred it and knocked the rust off with a smaller grinder and a Walter flap wheel. Then I used the 2×72 grinder to round the corners. I deburred the corners with the smaller grinder, and I was ready to go.

I took it in the house, washed it in the kitchen sink, applied coconut oil, and stuck it in the oven, which is now running at 500°. My favorite seasoning fat is bacon grease, but I thought it would be fun to try coconut oil, since it’s essentially tree lard. Vegetable oil and peanut oil give off blue smoke and stink. Burning bacon grease just smells like food.

It looks beautiful. I can’t wait to try it.

Yesterday’s pie was great, but it was more done on the bottom than the top, and it was softer than I wanted. The crust was also sweeter than I liked. On advice from forum people, I am doing my next pie differently. I’m baking it higher in the oven, and I’m cutting the sugar by 40%. Moving the pie higher should help the top cook faster, and cutting the sugar should make it crunchier and let me cook it longer. Sugar speeds up crust browning.

I’m also making the pie with zero oil, except for an extremely thin film I put on the pan I’m using for proofing the dough. I like the flavor and consistency of oil-free dough. I have been using one teaspoon of olive oil in 180 grams of flour, which is not much. I use it because oil prevents the dough from drying out fast while you toss it, and this makes tearing less likely. My forum advisors claim I can do without the oil if the dough is fermented properly, so I’m doing a day-long fermentation in hopes of getting a tear-resistant dough. I can toss a dough that’s prone to tearing, but it’s always possible I’ll get one or more small holes that require repairs.

I’m going to try something like 4/2/2 provolone/mozzarella/white cheddar. I want cheese that’s a little more sour and less rubbery than 50/50 provolone and mozzarella.

I’m definitely picking nits. My pizzas are very good as they are.

I grabbed some bulk Italian sausage at Publix today. Tomorrow, I hope to soar.

Americans Eager to Pile on Putin not Discouraged by Absence of Information

I feel like I’m the only person in America who doesn’t have a position on Putin and the Ukraine.

I have always thought Putin was ruthless, and I believed the people who accused him of poisoning dissenters. The thing is, even if those things are true, it doesn’t mean he’s wrong about Ukraine.

When he invaded Ukraine, my instinct was to go along with everyone else in the West. We are used to thinking invasions are bad. We don’t like occupiers of peaceful nations. Every intelligent person is against war. Leftists said Putin was wrong. Most conservatives agreed. I figured he was wrong.

Now I realize I don’t know who is right. I have not studied Russia or Ukraine.

I’m also wondering whether Americans should be heavily involved in the matter. I always say America shouldn’t be the world’s nanny or policeman. Shouldn’t I take that position with regard to Ukraine? It’s important to get involved when a bad actor is causing problems for the whole world, and we unquestionably had to fight the Cold War, but do we really need to jump in every time two far-off nations go at it?

Maybe we should limit our involvement. Maybe it’s shouldn’t be a huge concern to us if Russia invades its smaller neighbors. Ukraine chose not to join NATO, so it seems like our obligations are limited. It seems to be like Taiwan, which has no defense treaty with the United States.

There is no domino effect today. Neither Russia nor China is trying to build an empire of foreign colonies. During the Cold War, we had plenty of reason to think we had to fight communism overseas, because the Soviets truly did want to export it, by force, to the entire world, but neither Putin nor Xi has any interest in invading the United States.

I can’t find unbiased information on the war. Putin claims neo-Nazis are very powerful there, and they need to be taken down. I tried to Google this, and I got flooded with recent stories suggesting Putin’s claims were delusional. Then I changed my search. Suddenly, I was swamped with stories from several years ago. They came from the same news outlets that ran the anti-Putin stories. They said Ukraine was full of dangerous neo-Nazi militias that had to be stopped.

So Putin is delusional now, but he was right several years ago?

Putin claims drug addicts are powerful in Ukraine. I Googled Ukraine and heroin and learned that Ukraine is a huge conduit for heroin from places like Afghanistan. So apparently, Ukraine is the Colombia of the region, except it doesn’t do much of the growing.

Obviously, drug lords truly are a big problem in Ukraine. Big enough to justify military intervention from Russia? No idea. But it’s clear Russia has a legitimate concern.

I don’t think it’s all that important to decide whether Ukraine or Russia is right. To me, the question is whether we should be on the verge of a shooting war with Russia, over a distant land with which we have no defense treaty, in a time when Russia’s danger to us is nearly zero.

Maybe sometimes we should let other countries handle their own problems. I can see why we would work through diplomacy and humanitarian aid, and sanctions seem reasonable, but we are sending arms in a big way. Is that called for?

We are provoking an old-fashioned man modern Americans don’t understand, and many of the men who serve him are as old-fashioned as he is. We are wearers of skinny jeans. We whine about our feminine sides. We wear makeup and tights and cry when people get our pronouns wrong. Putin is different. He’s like our great-grandfathers. He has no feminine side. He’s the kind of man that was considered normal for thousands of years, before feminization hit the West.

My grandfather used to have his dental work done without anaesthetic. That’s what men used to be like. When his bird dogs got distracted by rabbits, he shot them to teach them to stick to birds. I worked in a bar a friend of his owned. The friend had an emergency appendectomy. The next night, he was back at work with a drink in his hand. A young man bothered him, and he threw the young man to the floor so hard I heard his bones hit the stones. That sound was how I knew there had been an altercation. He didn’t spill his drink.

When my grandfather bought pigs, he hired some friends to help him. They got out their pocketknives, grabbed the pigs, held them by the legs while they screamed, and cut their testicles out. They thought it was fun.

Men used to be different, and in many places outside America, they have not changed.

Many Russians are much tougher than we are. Putin is much stronger than Biden, and Harris isn’t even worth discussing. I suspect we are poking the bear a little too hard, without a compelling interest.

Maybe Russia is wrong, but governments are doing wrong all over the world, and we’re not supporting shooting wars against them. Saudi Arabia is full of slaves. Muslims use kitchen knives to cut girls’ clitorises out, and they sew their vaginas shut. Thailand tolerates child brothels. China mutilates dogs and boils them alive, and we all know what they do to human beings. Let’s not even discuss North Korea. The fact that a government does evil has never been sufficient justification for American intervention. It has always required more than that. Somehow, intervention had to be linked to preventing the evil from spreading far beyond the evildoer’s borders. Ukraine is right next to Russia, it used to be part of the USSR, and Russia isn’t going to use Ukraine as a launching pad to take Poland or Germany.

I admit, I know little about what’s happening. I have looked for information, but most of what I see doesn’t address the question of why America should be involved.

What happens if Ukraine loses? They get a new government. What about their human rights? I have Googled, and it appears Ukraine’s human rights record is similar to Russia’s, so it’s not clear they would lose significant ground. It sort of looks like being sucked into Russia wouldn’t do Ukrainians much harm, especially compared to the harm that would come from war on a wider scale.

Perhaps I’ll be furiously anti-Russia tomorrow, but right now, I have the impression that America should step back a little.

Is our position being driven by American leftists who are still pushing the Trump/Russia myth? Are they trying to punish Russia for supporting Trump (as China supported Obama and Biden, without repercussions)? Are they angry because Russia is less submissive to the alphabet crew than Ukraine? I wonder.

The web says Russia is not always nice to “LGBTI” people. What on Earth is I? Wasn’t it “LGBTQ+” last week? Does I mean you have sex with iguanas or what?

What happened to Q? What have they done with all the Q’s? I hope they’re okay. We may need to file for writ of habeas Q.

Maybe I is the new Q. Maybe they should call them IQ to keep things clear.

I don’t even try to keep this stuff straight. Even the people who seriously believe in it have fights all the time. No one can get it right.

My views on politics have changed. I used to be very patriotic, and I thought our republican system of government was the best kind. Now, I feel inclined to support America primarily because I live here and have citizenship, not because I have an overpowering, unreasoning sense of loyalty. If I had the opportunity to move to a place where I would be happier, I would probably take it. I think we should never have rebelled against England, and I think a good king is better than a republican government.

The best government is the government of Jesus Christ, but we won’t have that until he returns. After that, the best government is government by the Holy Spirit, dwelling in people and creating harmony of desires and beliefs. Unfortunately, that will never happen during the present age. After that, the best system is a theocracy in which Spirit-led priests and prophets tell us what to do. Then follows a Spirit-led king. Republics are further down the list.

Rule by the people is a degenerate notion. We are allowing all sorts of unintelligent, uninformed, malicious, selfish people vote on matters that are of great importance to all of us. We have chosen to be ruled by the stupid. It’s a wonder we have survived.

Our republican system appears to be a descendant of Greece’s direct democracy, in which every eligible resident voted on the issues. We generally rely on representatives instead of referendums, but the basic idea still comes from Greece, which had a pagan civilization that competed with the God-ordained system of Israel. It’s shocking how badly Greek thought has infected our own, given that the West has had the advantage of Christianity for over a thousand years. We should be further along than this.

I don’t believe God wants us to be a republic.

People are criticizing Putin, calling him a king. I have no problem with him becoming a king. What about his excesses, though? What about poisoning dissidents and so on?

This week, I listened to the books of Samuel. I heard some interesting things about kings.

The first kings of Israel were Saul and David. Neither was perfect, and Saul was worse than David, but both were considered good kings. Saul lost his mind toward the end, and he did some things that displeased God, but overall, he was not considered disastrous, as Solomon was. We know Saul was saved in spite of his failings, because the spirit of Samuel, who was a righteous man, told Saul he would soon be joining him. The people voted for Saul, but they didn’t have the power to vote him out, so he was not like a president. God himself elected him and approved of him.

Saul and David did some disturbing things.

Saul tried to kill David and his own son, in his own house. Imagine what would happen if Joe Biden tried to murder Hunter at the White House. Saul also killed a bunch of priests for helping David.

In order to persuade Saul to give him his daughter for a wife, David killed 200 Philistines, sliced the tips of their penises off, and presented them to Saul. David got a loyal army officer killed so he could have his wife. David told Solomon to kill a man who had insulted him.

Today, Saul and David would be considered serial killers and war criminals.

These men were chosen by God, and they were not considered evil kings, but we condemn a modern de facto king for poisoning his enemies. If Putin is bad, then David, Saul, and all the other kings of the Bible were war criminals, murderers, thieves, and human traffickers. We still admire a number of them, though.

God gave Nebuchadnezzar the Babylonian Empire. He also turned Israel over to Nebuchadnezzar and let him kill the king’s sons in front of him and blind the king. He let him castrate the sons of the nobility and make them slaves in his palace. Daniel was almost certainly castrated. God didn’t disclaim Nebuchadnezzar. He called him his servant and took credit for giving him his empire not once, but twice.

We expect to have a lot of control over kings these days. Is that system better than the old one? One of the things that make America weak is the rapid turnover in the White House. A real king could get things done, but a president knows he has a short time, and he has to kiss a lot of behinds and compromise. A foreign ruler with a longer reign can blow off much of what a president says, because he knows he will be around when the president is gone.

Obama killed all sorts of people without due process. His underlings say he insisted on being present to watch drone strikes, meaning he witnessed his enemies having their arms and legs blown off. Every president does things like this, even if Obama’s enthusiasm was exceptional and disturbing. Reagan bombed Khaddafi’s house. Hillary Clinton joked about Khaddafi’s death, which we helped bring about. Bush II killed a huge number of Muslims.

Trump appears to have singled out Michael Avenatti for sadistic treatment in the federal prison system. Bill O’Reilly was repeatedly audited under the Clintons. Trump is experiencing selective prosecution by allies of Obama and Biden who ignore misdeeds committed by their friends. Biden’s DOJ is going after 1/6 conservatives and ignoring similar and worse crimes committed by BLM and Antifa members.

Janet Reno murdered a lot of people in Waco, under Clinton. Waco is inside the United States. The dead were citizens.

Every ruler does a lot of evil. Maybe we should take a more mature view.

We have the idea that it’s impossible to enjoy life except in a system like America’s, but that isn’t true. If you’re close to God and you accept your position in life, you can be happy under most systems. Republican government is a relatively recent development in the West, but millions of people here had happy lives before it arrived.

I don’t know enough about Ukraine or Russia to take a side, but I’m pretty sure we are going overboard.

Steel Life

Today I finally tried my new oven, along with a pizza steel. I had been using baking stones for years, but people on a pizza forum said steel was much better for New York pizza, so I decided to try it.

Naturally, I barely had to move in order to get a steel going. I had a big sheet of 1/4″ plate on hand already. It had a small amount of rust, so I put it in the kitchen sink and used a Fein Multimaster to knock it off. Then I coated it with lard and baked it to season it.

I still get to do things like that until the wife moves in.

My old oven only went to 500°, which is at the low end for New York pizza. It also had a failing display, and I couldn’t use the self-cleaning cycle because it would blow its thermal breaker. The new oven does 550°, it’s bigger inside, and it will clean itself with either steam or high heat. The steel I used today is a plate I intended for use as an outdoor griddle, and it’s almost 18″ square. It would never fit in the old oven, but it just barely fit the new one, so I used it.

I picked up a slightly smaller piece of steel this afternoon, so I’ll still be able to make the griddle.

Why do people use pizza steels instead of stones? Simple. They transmit heat faster. Would you rather touch a 550° stone accidentally, or would you prefer to touch a steel? Exactly. The steel would burn you faster, making it harder to pull your hand back in time. The same principle applies to pizza. The steel will brown the crust faster at the same temperature.

I stuck my dough in the fridge last night. I don’t have any faith in long fermentations at low temperatures, because my refrigerators are too cold to allow yeast to do much. I do have faith in a long rest’s ability to improve dough’s texture. Today I took the dough out of the fridge a few hours before I intended to bake, and it blew up well.

I had been concerned about unsatisfactory oven spring, and I also wanted to make a pie with no oil inside the dough. Pizza dough is just plain better without oil in it. End of story. I didn’t put any oil inside today’s ball, but I did oil the outside before refrigerating it.

A completely oil-free dough will work great, but it will tend to tear during tossing. This is why I oiled the outside. I hoped it would prevent tearing.

When I got the dough out of the bowl, it had some nice big bubbles starting. I consider pizza a failure without big bubbles in the crust. When I worked at Domino’s, they made us break the bubbles. That’s Domino’s for you.

The dough tossed very easily. I had to be careful not to open it too much. I was making a 12″ pie with 400 grams of dough. It could easily have opened up to 16″ if I hadn’t been careful.

I left a fairly large rim, thinking I would need a lot of dough for a big rim.

The pie blew up beautifully. The rim was so big, I may reduce it next time. It’s almost like a doughnut with a pizza inside it.

The crust was nicely browned on the bottom. The upper part was browned, but it could have used a little more heat to crisp it up.

Here are some shots to show the details.

I measure my ingredients very carefully, so I am sure this pie was made with the same things as the previous one. Strangely, this one tasted sweeter. It also cooked much faster. I find myself wondering if these things are somehow related.

I have been advised that sugar makes dough softer, so maybe I need to cut back. I guess I can do that the day after tomorrow and see what happens.

Pizza steels are obviously great. That, I am sure of. The Sicilians I finished on stones were wonderful, but they could just as easily be finished on steels, and the thin pizzas didn’t cook as well as the one I made today.

The store-bought steel that was recommended to me costs $120, which is ridiculous. At that price, they are begging potential customers to make their own. I paid under $28 today for a 16″ square. I’m going to grind the corners off, which anyone can do, and then I’ll season it and be done with it.

I already made nice New York pies in an ordinary oven, but it looks like the steel makes them better, and it will also reheat faster than a stone, so you can make several pies at one gathering without a lot of down time.

In short:

Steel: recommended.

Buying a steel someone else made: not recommended.

Now what do I do with my stone?

Famous Chefs Focus on the Wrong Kind of Dough

Today, I am making pizza. I can’t seem to stop doing it. I made myself an excellent thin pie which was just about perfect, so I had a recipe I should have clung to. Naturally, I decided I had to go on and make a less-thin pie with a different crust recipe. While I have been fooling with it, I have gone looking for helpful advice.

It’s surprising how hard it is to get solid information about food. You would think it would be simple to find great advice in this, the Internet’s fourth useful decade. Not so. People who have no idea what they’re doing post recipes and include the word “best” in the descriptions, and many of them seem to have credentials, so it’s easy to get sucked in.

It’s a little like America’s Got Talent. A small percentage of Americans can actually sing, but there are many, many more who clearly can’t yet insist on auditioning. People who ought to know perfectly well they can’t sing show up in droves, and the judges have to waste their time listening to them.

How you can get to be an adult and not realize you can’t sing is beyond me. Surely many of the bad performers that have made the judges suffer had already been informed.

People post bad recipes, and they also give bad general advice about cooking, and many of the worst offenders have big followings.

Long ago, I quit watching the Food Network. I had tried recipes and gotten poor results, and it was not my fault. I found out that famous TV chefs had published a lot of useless, time-wasting material. I had a realization: it wasn’t just that they couldn’t cook. They had jobs that required them to produce an endless stream of good recipes, and there was just no way for mere mortals to fill the demand, so they published a lot of things that weren’t tested properly. They hired ghost cooks to send them things, and many of those cooks weren’t very good.

The goal of a famous chef isn’t to produce good food or teach other people to cook well. It’s to maintain a huge income stream. You can’t do that without providing way more content than a real human being can create responsibly.

I have learned I can’t trust famous chefs, and I have also learned that a cooking school degree is meaningless. America is full of trained chefs who serve terrible food. Cooking well requires a little ability and a lot of humility. You have to know good food when you taste it, and cooking school can’t teach that to everyone. You also have to keep testing yourself. You have to taste the food you make. You have to ask for advice. You can’t just say, “I went to Cordon Bleu, so I know this dish is going to come out right.” I knew two Cordon Blue chefs who couldn’t cook as well as I could, and among the total population, I’m probably a 90th-percentile cook. After several years of college, a chef should be a 99th-percentile cook.

A professional chef once made me a dessert as a gift, and I had to throw it out. It smelled like a wet dog, and this person apparently couldn’t tell, in spite of making a good living in kitchens. I didn’t tell this person how bad the dessert was. I was afraid it would be devastating.

Here’s what I always say: think about all the bad food you’ve had at expensive restaurants, and then consider the fact that most of it was made by trained chefs.

Recently, I’ve been hearing a lot about a person named Kenji. Based on what I read, I thought he might be a useful resource. He is famous for his methodical, fact-based approach to food, and people cite him as though they were citing God himself. They don’t even use his last name. He publishes recipes at a site called Serious Eats.

He grew up eating pizza from a place I liked: Pizza Town, near Columbia University. He also ate at V&T’s, an Italian joint near Columbia. I probably had hundreds of slices of Pizza Town pizza during my New York years, and I grew to like it. Pizza is that way. You will start to like whatever you eat regularly.

In reality, Pizza Town was not that great. Their thin pizza crust was pretty hard, and I believe they used Stanislaus sauce (paste plus basil) straight from the can, with a little water added to reconstitute it. I developed a taste for it anyway, and I had it in mind when I started making pizza, but there are better places. V&T’s was actually very good, although Kenji says it made “good-bad” pizza, whatever that means. V&T’s pizza’s big flaw was that it was very wet, so it had to be eaten with a fork.

V&T’s was significantly better than Pizza Town, so it’s odd that Kenji preferred Pizza Town.

Today I decided I would check Kenji out, and that’s how I learned the facts mentioned above. He has a recipe for New York pizza. He has a separate recipe for the sauce. I thought it would be smart to look at his sauce recipe. He ought to know what he’s doing, right?

Here is the main ingredient for his sauce: “1 (28-ounce) can whole peeled tomatoes.”

Poof. There go my Kenji hopes.

Pizza is extremely ingredient-sensitive. You can completely screw up a tested recipe by using the wrong flour, tomatoes, or cheese. You can buy the right type of ingredient but the wrong brand, and things will go sideways. There are all sorts of whole peeled tomatoes out there. Some are very good. Most–most–are so bad, it is not possible to make an acceptable pizza with them.

You can be a mediocre cook and not know the importance of using the right tomatoes in pizza sauce, but you can’t be a towering food genius and not know.

It is not possible for a person who understands pizza sauce, and who wants others to do well, to recommend “1 (28-ounce) can whole peeled tomatoes” without specifying brands. The tomatoes are the most important thing to get right. Good tomatoes are so helpful, many good pizzerias use sauce that is nothing more than tomatoes and water. You can get away with that if your tomatoes are right. If they’re wrong, nothing you add to them will save your pie.

He also says, “Canned tomatoes invariably have some citric acid added to them in order to increase their acidity.” That’s not true. Everyone who makes pizza knows this. Many pizza makers hate citric acid, so they insist on acid-free sauce. I’m used to citric acid, so I don’t care, but many people insist on brands like Escalon, which preserve tomatoes without it.

You can’t say all canned tomatoes have citric acid in them if you know anything about pizza sauce. Every pizza enthusiast knows better.

He also specifies “bread flour” for the dough, leaving it at that. First of all, that’s the wrong flour. It’s a second choice, for people who can’t get high-gluten flour. I use bread flour (King Arthur) and add gluten. I can’t get high-gluten flour around here. When I used to use high-gluten flour, I found that different brands gave different results, and I settled on Gordon Food Service Primo Gusto. I tried all the big names and ended up with a store brand.

He uses only mozzarella in his recipe, which is questionable at best, and he doesn’t recommend a brand. That’s a serious problem. There are cheeses that fit his specs that don’t work well. Right now, I have a block of Walmart low-moisture whole-milk mozzarella, which meets his specs, and it makes bad pizza. It’s extremely important to try different cheeses and pick the best ones.

My guess: his pizza is excellent, because he has a brand of tomatoes he likes, not to mention a brand of flour and a brand of cheese. But he’s useless to me as a source for a pizza recipe, because he isn’t specific. Fortunately, I already know which ingredients to buy.

His ingredient input is unhelpful, but he may be helpful with other things, like methods. He holds himself out as a sort of scientific chef who tests things instead of accepting dogma. He made several batches of pizza dough by different methods, and he came up with an interesting result: a food processor made better dough than a mixer.

That interests me, because I’ve been using food processors to make dough since around 2009. People have told me it didn’t work, but I was doing it, so I knew it did. It’s strange how people will insist things don’t work when great numbers of other people are already doing them.

His food processor gave pizza crusts bigger air holes. He said this:

Only the food processor-produced dough created a crust that was perfect in both texture and flavor. Tender, chewy, and crisp all at once, with that coveted slick layer at the sauce-crust interface and a thin layer of melted cheese just hinting at brown, it was the archetypical New York pie, and it had just come out of my own oven!

That’s reassuring. To many people, kneading dough with a chopping blade in a food processor is unthinkable, but they’re wrong. I was also reassured to see that his dough recipe was pretty much like mine, except he likes a lot of oil.

He may not be a real pizza expert, but he probably knows what a New York crust is supposed to taste like.

He has a German-style joint in San Mateo, California, which is basically San Francisco. His restaurant is called Wursthall, and I looked it up. Overall, it gets unexciting reviews on Yelp. So-so food, according to many. Some reviewers who don’t give good ratings mention him as the factor that drew them to try the place, and then they talk about the disappointing fare.

Here’s a disturbing review:

Wow, this place is really expensive. It is like being at a giants game. Two beers, a salad and chicken sandwich for $70!!!
And slow beer delivery to boot.
Won’t be returning anytime soon.

That price appears to be no exaggeration. The menu says a sandwich platter runs $16, and most beers cost $8 per pint, with some costing a lot more.

The restaurant specializes in sausages like bratwurst, served as sandwiches. Call it what you want: it’s a hot dog. It may be the best hot dog on Earth, made with unusual ingredients, but it’s still just a hot dog. It can’t be worth $16. I don’t care if the cost of making it was $50. If you’re spending a lot on gourmet ingredients, make something other than a hot dog. That’s my advice.

I would never go to a sit-down restaurant with tablecloths in order to get a hot dog platter. I could see spending $15 on a really good bratwurst on a fantastic bun, plus sides and a good beer, but…no, actually I couldn’t.

I’m not sure there is any German-style meal that’s worth more than $20. Maybe if you threw in strudel. German food is generally pretty gross. Sausages in a pile of beans, with melted cheese on top. Potato salad that tastes like pickled potatoes. Pickled this. Pickled that. There is a reason why young chefs train in Paris, London, and New York instead of Berlin.

Does German haute cuisine even exist? I don’t think so.

I think nothing of giving a steakhouse $75 for dinner, because steak costs money, and a really great steak is as good as any food on the planet. I don’t mind paying $20 or more for an excellent pizza, because pizza is wonderful, and one pizza will feed at least two people. I don’t mind paying $25 for excellent Southern food. It’s well worth it. A sausage on a bun is different. It can’t be all that good, no matter how you make it. Wienerschnitzel, which is actually Austrian, can’t be all that good. German dumplings can’t be all that good. Pig snouts and feet can’t be that good. Their desserts are wonderful, but then they have to be, to make up for everything else.

If Kenji’s knowledge is unsurpassed, why does he have 777 Yelp reviews and only a 4-star rating? He also gets 4 stars from Tripadvisor users. He gets a lot of bad reviews. Overall, he’s doing okay, and he gets plenty of stellar reviews, but if he’s the once-in-a-generation food genius people make him out to be, he should be stunning people with his food, consistently, and that is not happening. And he’s making the same things over and over, so he should have everything perfected by now. His food should be as good as it could possibly be.

Based on what I know of the steak, I don’t buy the sizzle. I don’t think this man is a reliable resource. I guess that explains why I’ve never been impressed by Serious Eats.

I am reminded of Bruce Lee. He weighed about 135 pounds, and he squatted 95 pounds, which is not an impressive weight for a strong woman, but people think he was the greatest fighter who ever lived and that he had superhuman strength. He never fought anyone in a ring with a camera going and judges present. No competitions. He ran from scrutiny. People seriously think he could have flattened the best heavyweight UFC fighters, which is ridiculous. He didn’t have the training to handle the little ones, let alone the big ones. Their way of fighting didn’t exist when he was alive. If you don’t prove yourself, your reputation is just words.

Maybe Kenji does superhuman work when he’s not making New York pizza or running a German restaurant, but what I know so far is discouraging.

I don’t like James Beard, either, and there is a prestigious award named after him. I had three or four of his cookbooks, and the recipes just were not good. I believe I threw them out.

I also think poorly of Mario Batali’s skills. I went to two of his restaurants, and both served me bad food.

I have seen Alton Brown ruin steak, and he also recommended Shun knives, which are fragile and expensive, not to mention poorly balanced. He touted them enthusiastically, until he stopped and started touting completely different knives. My guess is that the wind of money blows him around like a windsock. America’s Test Kitchen, which actually tests things, recommends cheap Forschner knives, and so do I.

Bobby Flay published a prime rib recipe that, for very obvious reasons–the wrong oven temperature–produces a hard lump of unappealing meat. Prime rib is easier to get right than a cheeseburger. All controversy concerning prime rib methods should have ended by about 1900.

Now that I think about it, Myron Mixon, the TV barbecue king, opened a restaurant in Miami, and it was very bad. I tried it. I make much better barbecue at home. Barbecue is simple, but he couldn’t do it. His restaurant went out of business. He claimed his partners ruined everything. That’s hard to believe. I could write two paragraphs and show you how to make perfect dry-rubbed ribs. Anyone can do it. Even with bad partners, Mixon should have been able to teach his staff how to make ribs. Mix seasonings according to boss’s recipe, put on ribs, smoke ribs. That’s all there is to it.

Today’s experience confirms what I already believe: as helpful as outside advice is, there is no substitute for personal experience in the kitchen. Few experts can be trusted, and some of the most respected are the least reliable. Most people who buy cookbooks can’t cook, so even if millions of people recommend a celebrity cookbook, it means nearly nothing.

Reading about Kenji also makes me regret posting recipes that were not as great as I thought they were. That has happened. I have sometimes misled people and contributed to the clutter of unneeded recipes. I have made both the America’s Got Talent error and the Food Network error.

On the other hand, I have come up with a number of truly magnificent recipes, so there’s that.

I have never had a cheesecake that compares to mine, or a Sicilian pizza that comes close. I have never had beer or steak that compares to mine. I made sourdough garlic rolls that seemed to come from heaven itself. I could never eat a standard Thanksgiving turkey after eating my boneless turkey stuffed with cornbread dressing. I’m crazy about the Alfredo-ish sauce I came up with recently. I have a pretty decent list of victories.

Maybe the recipes that weren’t that great can be forgiven in view of my successes. I am, after all, an amateur.

I don’t think the pizza I’m working on right now will be a victory. It looks like the dough will not be elastic enough to give me big bubbles. I hope I’m wrong, but at least I’ll know, and I’ll have meticulous records to incorporate the new knowledge.

Kenji claims New York pizzerias commonly cook at around 500°, so that’s good news. He should be right about that, given the fact that he grew up in New York. I have a better source, though. A guy on a pizza forum says 500° will work fine, and he is a paid consultant who has helped New York pizzerias. That puts him higher on the authority scale. Unlike Kenji and Bruce Lee, he has produced results on the battlefield. Professionals in the nation’s top market are willing to pay for his help.

In a side note, Kenji’s restaurant is near San Francisco, and he got attention for saying people in Trump hats would not be served there. Here is the text:

It hasn’t happened yet, but if you come to my restaurant wearing a MAGA cap, you aren’t getting served. Same as if you come in wearing a swastika, white hood, or any other symbol of intolerance and hate.”

He said it hadn’t happened, and there are two reasons for that. The first is that there aren’t many Trump supporters in San Francisco, and the second is attitudes like Kenji’s. Conservatives know they aren’t safe in San Francisco, so they are reluctant to out themselves. They don’t want food full of boogers. They don’t want to be attacked physically. Leftists talk a lot about safe spaces, with reference to trivial things like hearing words that upset them, but they have a history of creating actual unsafe spaces in which conservatives are threatened with actual harm or battered.

His remark, itself, was a declaration of something at least approaching hate. Ironic. He couldn’t see the beam in his own eye.

Delusion is getting very bad in the US. A friend of mine has a far-left adult son who is literally deranged. Yesterday, my friend brought up the Ukraine invasion, and his son told him he didn’t want to hear about it because it was just an unimportant conflict between white people. That’s startling. It’s a lot like Whoopi Goldberg’s crazy remark about the Holocaust being unrelated to race. The Germans were white, and so were the Jews, so the Jews don’t get to be real victims like, I suppose, Jussie Smollett.

It’s not a problem when children and other civilians are hurt and killed, or when soldiers suffer the same fates, as long as they’re white. That’s my friend’s son’s position. And he’s white.

The son’s mother used to be conservative and probably still is, but she has started listening to leftist 1984-style “thought leaders” and parroting their absurdist, racist hate speech to her son. My friend is considering letting his son know his mother used to be conservative, and he is also considering telling him she is probably only pretending to be a leftist in order to avoid upsetting him and being rejected. My friend hasn’t done these things. He is not sure they will help.

The mother has never been quite right. She has claimed to have a psychological disorder, officially diagnosed, which makes her extremely uncomfortable whenever she doesn’t get her way. I don’t think that’s a real disorder. Not unless it’s demonic. To me, it sounds like she’s just spoiled, controlling, and misandrist. Which can also be demonic, now that I think about it.

How can you abandon your right to think and let some hateful, willfully ignorant idiot on Youtube do it for you? How can you trust another person that much, especially when that person’s idiocy is extremely obvious? It’s unusual to trust Jesus himself that much, and he’s always right. God has said he sends supernatural delusion to rebellious people, and we see it all around us now.

The other day I heard a Holy Spirit-filled conservative say maybe we should just quit obeying the law because Biden was incompetent. That’s also delusion. It proves being baptized with the Spirit isn’t enough. You have to pray in tongues and ask for correction every day.

In 2 Thessalonians 3:2, Paul calls the Antichrist “the man of lawlessness.” Satan is really pushing lawlessness now. There are truly stupid and dangerous laws we shouldn’t feel compelled to observe, but these days, people are encouraging disobedience that isn’t really justified. Thanks to the toxic philosopher Henry David Thoreau, leftists think breaking laws is highly virtuous, and in recent years, they have been breaking good laws like never before. Conservatives have become jealous, so they are also becoming lawless. It’s not good. Even if disobeying the law brings short-term benefits, it contributes to a culture of lawlessness. If you like that kind of thing, take a look at Somalia. That’s where we are headed.

My guess is that things will become so chaotic, the world will be ripe for the Antichrist to step in and restore order. Isn’t that pretty similar to the Saul Alinsky plan? It should be, since Alinsky took dictation from Satan himself.

Human interaction is rapidly being reduced to, “I got you,” and, “I got you back.”

Last night I dreamed I was at my dad’s home back in Miami. I was looking after him. I heard motor noises outside, and I realized trespassers were in the yard. I went into the garage and yelled through the doors, telling them to take off. I started opening the doors, hoping they would flee. They did not.

When I walked outside, they were working on the driveway. I became enraged. I thought they were driveway gypsies. Maybe you don’t know what those are.

Gypsies, or Romani, as they prefer to be called, have a long history of cheating people on driveway work. We are supposed to treat gypsies as though they were wonderful people who are oppressed unfairly, but the truth is that their culture permits and encourages stealing and swindling, so I can’t really go along with the white privilege guilt trip and manipulation.

Here is a gypsy legend most people don’t know of: many gypsies claim the nails for the crucifixion were provided by a gypsy blacksmith. In addition to the three we know about, there was a fourth nail intended to go through Jesus’ heart. The blacksmith refused to provide it, meaning he stole it, and as a reward, God exempted them from the 7th commandment. This means they are allowed to steal.

Not a great pillar for a culture to stand on.

It’s a horrible, sick, stupid, gypsy-destroying rationalization, and it would make no sense if it were true, because Jesus’ heart was pierced by a Roman spear after he died. Stealing a nail wouldn’t have helped him. A nail through the heart while he was still living, on the other hand, would actually have been merciful.

My mother was crazy about gypsies. I have dim memories of her taking me to see them when I was very young, in Tampa. I haven’t thought about that in years. They must have had a community there. She liked having her palm read, which is, of course, idolatry.

Anyway, gypsies (and other people) are known for showing up at the homes of elderly Floridians and offering to do driveway work cheap. They’ll say they have materials left over from other jobs, so they quote low prices. The problem is that the material is basically paint, so it comes off quickly.

In the dream, I thought gypsies were after my dad. For some reason, I reacted like a rabid dog. I have run actual driveway gypsies off, and I was polite. In this dream, I was a different person.

I started calling them filthy names involving excrement and sex acts performed on other men. I really laid into them. One of them approached me, and I slapped him so hard, he should have been on the ground. He came up behind me, and I pulled his glasses off his head with my teeth and threw them on the pavement.

I saw that they had cut a big hole in the driveway. One was carrying a piece of lumber I thought he had stolen from us.

I kept excoriating them, and the guy with the glasses and another man who was like a foreman kept asking me to let them explain. I was not having it. I made them leave. They fixed the hole they had dug. I was not afraid of them at all.

One of them came over to me and asked me why World Relief, a huge Christian charity, had been mailing me. He apparently wondered why a person like me would be hearing from a charity. He was a young black man, and he was very polite and respectful. None of them treated me the way I treated them.

I had a tablet, and we started looking at it. We were looking at sites dealing with World Relief. I was not angry at him. My tablet had a protective plastic film on the screen. I wondered why I had never removed it.

Anyway, they left, and when I woke up, I tried to find out what the dream was about. Were they demons, trying to break through God’s hedge of protection and harm me? Were they angels, sent to help me because I had done alms in the past? Why was I so angry?

I started to feel very bad about all the times I had mistreated people who were helping me. I had been nasty to educators, for example, over trivial things. It’s amazing that I could have been stupid enough to give people a hard time when they were trying to help me get an Ivy League degree. I had been nasty to other people who had tried to give me helpful advice. I had rejected other people’s input because I was proud and wanted to get by on my own ideas so I could have the glory.

When I was a kid, my parents did a poor job. They didn’t teach me much of anything in the way of wisdom or good habits, and perhaps as a result, I learned to think for myself. In doing so, I lost respect for other people’s advice. I was very smart, so I was used to being the brightest person in the room, and I started feeling I was always right.

Maybe the dream was about the way I had rejected helpful correction and ended up suffering unnecessary defeats. I reinvented the wheel many times, often incorrectly, instead of building on other people’s good ideas.

I also felt bad about the many times I had jumped into or started angry arguments, treating people who were merely wrong as though they were trying to do me harm.

Maybe the dream was about these things, or maybe the men were demons.

The other day, I dreamed a kid and a young man were trying to harm me, and I beat them brutally, crushing the young man’s face. In that case, there was no doubting their hostility, and I have no doubt they represented evil spirits. This time, I don’t know.

I hate demons with a hate I can’t describe, so maybe they did represent demons. If I could, I would do things to them that would make Josef Mengele throw up. I can understand why God plans to burn evil spirits forever. In my dreams, I break their bones and mutilate them. It’s not possible for me to feel that way about a human being.

Even if the gypsies represented demons, I still believe it was very good for me to confront my faults last night, so it’s a win. We are in the apocalypse, so a spirit of murder and hatred has been released on the world, and I need to avoid opening the door to it.

I can’t really see myself pleasing God by calling demons names involving gay oral sex. I would think that if I were fighting demons in a dream, in obedience to God, I would be somewhat more dignified.

Last night I thought about all the things he has shown me lately. He keeps telling me to change so I will not be like the rest of humanity. While I was in bed thinking about this, I put my face in my hands and told him I was going to end up surrounded by people I couldn’t even communicate with. I would be so different, and other people would be so deaf, I wouldn’t be able to explain much to them. Even if I didn’t become particularly good, I would understand things I couldn’t make other people understand.

I wasn’t complaining about his demands. I just felt I needed to tell him.

In my mind, I had an image of a long train full of people, hurtling toward a cliff. I could watch, but I couldn’t stop it.

I started asking God how people were supposed to learn. Who was supposed to teach us? Instantly, I realized I already knew the answer: the Holy Spirit. Churches are like grocery stores where half the food is poisoned, and we can’t rely on them. We have to hear from the Holy Spirit himself, one on one, as John taught. That means prayer in tongues, and not just a couple of minutes per day.

We can’t find reliable pizza information easily, and it’s hard to get good information about God. From human beings, I mean. Yet we still push people to turn pastors and priests into little gods who can’t be questioned.

I hope God restores the Holy Spirit as a teacher before the world ends. If not, I think the apocalypse will continue to progress without interruption.

Pump up Your Pizza

I have been fiddling around with thin pizza, and I have figured out some things.

I love my recipe for thin pizza, but I am fairly sure it would be better if my oven were a little hotter. I got stuck with an old 500° oven. In addition to the temperature issue, it also blows a thermal fuse whenever I try to use the self-clean cycle. I can’t clean it unless I do it manually. That will not happen. I’m not sure why ovens have to be cleaned, however. They seem to work fine whether you clean them or not. Is cleaning just a vanity thing, or will my oven eventually explode?

The oven also has a display that has grown so dim, I have to use reading glasses to read it.

My oven in Miami went to 550°. I have been looking around for something new that will do that. I learned that many brands only go up to 500° in bake mode, which is ridiculous, given that pizza making is more popular than ever. You can bake a good New York pizza at 500°, but hotter is better.

I discovered that Frigidaire, the manufacturer of my last oven, still makes hot ovens. I started trying to find one that will work for me.

Of course, ovens have changed a lot since the last time I bought one. They have a lot of silly “smart” features I don’t want. Why on Earth would I want to talk to my oven from across town? It’s bad enough getting distress calls from the vacuum cleaner. Smart features just add expense and more risk of failure. I guarantee you, your smart 2022 smart oven has parts that won’t be available in 2027.

Ovens with phone apps are patently stupid, like refrigerators that send you movies of their contents, but ovens have other new features that could be great.

I have learned about oven spring. This term refers to the way bread blows up when you put it in the oven. I thought I could get peak oven spring with any old oven, but that’s wrong. To get good oven spring, you need steam in your oven when baking starts. Steam keeps the outside of your bread elastic so the bread can puff up. You can force your old oven to do steam by putting things like skillets full of water-soaked rocks in it, but it’s a pain, and it’s not optimal. They now make ovens that do steam baking, imitating the ovens real bakers use.

Today I baked a pizza, and when I put it in the oven, I threw about a quarter-cup of water in the oven below it. This helped the dough blow up beautifully, but you can’t keep throwing water in an oven that isn’t made for it. I found a Frigidaire that has a steam-bake setting. Will it work? I don’t know, but it’s worth a try.

New ovens also have better convection and air-fry capabilities, and it’s not hard to find one that has a probe to measure the internal temperature of meats. You can also find ovens that somehow skip the preheat business, and you can get ovens that proof bread.

I found a Frigidaire that does all this stuff. Man, is it expensive. I know I’m cheap, but $2300 for a single oven seems like a lot to me. It could be worse. Other ovens break the $4000 mark.

I’ll post a photo of today’s pizza. You can see how big the air holes in the crust are. Very nice. Unfortunately, the cheese I used is disgusting. I decided to try Boar’s Head provolone, and for some reason, the only provolone they make is the low-sodium kind. I decided to try it, thinking maybe all provolone was low-sodium cheese. The pizza just didn’t taste right. Also, I fermented the pizza too fast because I was in a hurry, and that didn’t help the taste.

I learned something else about oven spring. If you rest your dough before turning it into a ball or loaf, it will spring better.

I make phenomenal Sicilian pizza. I make the dough in a food processor, I make a puck out of it, I put it in a very oily pan, and I let it rest for around 20 minutes. After the time is up, the dough, which was initially more like hard, lumpy batter, is smooth and stretchy. At this point, I stretch it to fit the inside of the pan and let it rise again. It’s always magnificent.

I had read that thin pizza (and baguettes) needed to be stretchy and tight before final proofing, and today, I thought about those Sicilian pies and that stretchy dough.

This afternoon, I tried resting dough for thin pizza. Using the food processor, I blended everything but the oil and waited 10 minutes, for sound reasons which escape me at the moment. Then I processed the oil in and waited 20 more minutes. Then I kneaded the dough in my hands a few times to move the outside in and the inside out, and I formed it into a ball. The ball had a nice, tight surface, and when I put it in the toaster oven to proof, it stood up nicely instead of flattening out the way my dough balls used to.

Combined with the steam, the resting helped the dough puff up in the oven.

Obviously, you have to ask which change made the most difference: the steam or the resting. Answer: the resting. I think. I made two pizzas today, and I didn’t add water to the oven the first time until the pizza had already been baking for several minutes, so I don’t think the steam did much. Both pizzas were made with rested dough, and both blew up well. The second one was better, but the improvement between it and the first one was smaller than the improvement between the first one and the ones I used to make.

I’m trying to convince myself to buy the Frigidaire, and I plan to rest my dough from now on. And I’m not buying any more Boar’s Head provolone.

Under Biden, we now have an oven shortage, so I feel like I need to get an oven right away, before things get worse. The Frigidaire is on sale for about 10% off, which is remarkable given the supply chain problems.

Rhodah and I have been praying for Biden, and today we prayed for the leaders of Russia and Ukraine and their people. We didn’t just offer bland, “Oh, please prevent war,” prayers. We prayed for God to correct people and help them to become Spirit-led. I think it’s dumb to pray for things to go well for people without praying for God to correct and repair them.

We also prayed for special protection for God’s children in these countries. God’s children; not everyone. Most people are not God’s children, and many people can’t be helped because of their rebellion. Many have come under curses they will just have to put up with until they repent.

I have not been keeping up with the news, but I can’t help hearing some things, so I know about Russia and Ukraine. Would Putin have attacked with a functioning chief executive in office? I don’t know, but I don’t see how Putin could pass up the chance to run wild with Biden in charge. America is much weaker now that Trump is gone, and of course, this matters to our enemies. They will pull things they would never have tried with Trump or even Obama.

Obama didn’t put America first, and our enemies often played him for a fool, but he was also warlike and egotistical, so he didn’t always roll over.

If I were Putin, Xi, or Kim Jong Un, I would be thrilled to be up against Biden. They must have been ecstatic when Trump lost.

My friend Mike has a pal who hates Trump. Before Biden won, this person said he would rather see America destroyed than see Trump reelected. A lot of people felt this way, and now they’re eating their words. Very sad. I would rather see Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, AOC, or even Whoopi Goldberg elected rather than see my country destroyed.

Whether we could elect any of these people without destroying America is another question.

I don’t know how serious the Ukraine situation is for America. I have no idea whether there is or is not a danger of a world war. I do know the apocalypse has started, however, so I suppose anything is possible.

I have been putting dry food in containers in case I need it, and I’ve considered getting an upright freezer for meat. I found out I needed to make sure I didn’t get a frostproof model.

In the past, freezers kept food in good shape for a very long time. They were not frostproof, and they didn’t have warm cycles. Frostproof freezers actually warm up every so often. It ruins food.

If you put ice cream in a frostproof freezer and leave it unopened, it will degrade. The ice crystals will melt and refreeze over and over, and the refrozen crystals will be a lot bigger than the original ones. This ruins ice cream’s texture. The same thing happens in other foods.

Apparently, you have to avoid frostproof freezers or eat your frozen food pretty quickly, which defeats the purpose of a freezer. I don’t look forward to defrosting a freezer once a year, but it sounds better than eating freezer burn.

Maybe I’ll get a freezer. Might as well have decent food while everything disintegrates.

Would Jesus Approve This Message?

A reader asked why I don’t write the same kinds of things I used to. Another reader asked where a recent piece had gone. I can answer both questions at once.

God changed me, and he keeps making improvements. Years ago, I had a different outlook, and I had less understanding. I was happy publishing things I wouldn’t want to publish now.

When you start out as a Christian, you will probably get the idea that Christianity has a lot of rules for rules’ sake. You may feel there is a big scoreboard in heaven, and your good deeds and sins move the numbers up and down. As you learn more from the Holy Spirit, you start to realize the things you do and say can cause a lot of harm. You also learn that things you used to think were harmless can wreck your life.

The other day, I put a comment on a Youtube video. The Youtuber was a Christian who had performed a lot of healings. When I first started watching his videos, I thought he was pretty solid. After Trump lost the election–and he really did lose–this man started publishing baseless theories. He said Trump would be back in office by August. He said Trump had arrested the federal government, and that he was going to imprison his enemies and go back to the White House. He said coronavirus vaccines were made using Satan’s DNA, taken from Satan’s body.

I told this man he needed to start praying in tongues a lot, because he was saying things that were obviously not true. I said prayer in tongues was necessary to bring guidance. He rejected my suggestion, calling it legalism.

He doesn’t know what legalism is. Legalism is a school of thought that says we please God by obeying rigid laws. It’s a big deal among Jews. Observe a sabbath, score points. Pray over a meal, score points. Even the good deeds and Torah study of your children can increase your score and make up for your failures. Many Christian denominations are legalistic.

The advice I gave this man wasn’t legalism. It was our father’s common sense. I was pointing out causal relationships.

If I say you should quit smoking cigarettes because there is about a one in 6 chance you will get lung cancer, I’m not being a legalist. I’m letting you know there is a relationship between an unwise practice and a terrible disease. If I tell you failing to pray in tongues will cause you problems, I’m not telling you God will punish you for disobeying a rule. I’m saying you will miss out on God’s method of building and guiding you.

Christians who are led by the Holy Spirit, as they are supposed to be, don’t obey rigid written laws. They are still under law, though. They are under the law of the Holy Spirit. What he says is law. We can eat pork and work on Saturday, but we still have to obey God when he gives us commands.

The commands God gives us are related to the results we get. They help us to become like him and to cause his will to be done here on Earth.

Everyone is spirit-led. Some are led by the Holy Spirit, and others are led by Satan. There is no neutrality. You are serving God or Satan. If you don’t listen to the Holy Spirit, you end up obeying spirits that are assigned to destroy you and the people you interact with.

Every spirit has a nature and lives according to certain principles. The Holy Spirit is humble and loving. Every single spirit that doesn’t serve God is malicious. Spirits that oppose God get into your mind and heart and push you to become like them. If you stick with them, you will develop the same ideas, emotions, and beliefs they have, and you will act on them.

God’s blessings depend largely on obeying the Holy Spirit and rejecting evil spirits. When you give in to an evil spirit, you reduce your blessings and protection. This is what Solomon meant when he said, “Whoso breaketh an hedge, a serpent shall bite him.” In the Old Testament, hedges are barriers of confinement or protection, and serpents represent evil spirits. Things and people that are earthly in the Old Testament represent supernatural things. Under Moses, the Hebrews sinned, and they were bitten by snakes, literally. The remedy was a brass serpent made by Moses. Afflicted people were healed when they looked at it. It represented Jesus, becoming our curses on the cross.

The Hebrews who were bitten by snakes represented Christians who are attacked by spirits. The Hebrews broke God’s hedges by disrespecting God and Moses, so snakes were allowed to attack them. When we choose sin, God has to allow demons to attack us. Demons can cause illness and death. They can prevent and end marriages. They can harm our children. They can cause poverty and addiction. It’s a very serious thing when you let them in.

When I write things that are snotty or otherwise unacceptable, I break God’s hedge of protection and let serpents in. They could be diseases. They could be other problems. I want an intact hedge, so sometimes when I see that I’ve done wrong, I go back and correct things.

As I have written, I had a dream about water recently. I was driving a strange vehicle like a fighter jet. It traveled on the ground. I had to stop and fill its tank with water. Apparently, it ran on water. When I started scooping up water to fill it, I found dead things in the water. I had to scoop them out first in order to get clean water.

This was God’s way of telling me I was filling myself with Satan’s water of death. Through prayer in tongues, the living water flows through me and builds me up and cleanses me. Through things like secular entertainment and other counterproductive activities, I let Satan’s water of death flow through me, diminish me, and make me filthy. After I had this dream, I quit reading the news and watching fiction.

Last night, my wife Rhodah had a dream. She was in her front yard. A woman she knew came up with a container of water, and she threw it in the yard. The water had snakes in it. Rhodah scolded her and told her to stop. One of the snakes wrapped itself around her toe. She had to fight. God was showing Rhodah what he had shown me.

We live in a time of greatly increased demonic activity. The apocalypse is here, and as the Bible says, Satan is angry because he knows his time is short. He has clearance to release more evil spirits than before. These days, you can’t get away with the things you got away with in the past. You need a strong hedge of protection.

To keep your hedge strong, you should try not to indulge in things like pride, anger, greed, gluttony, coarseness, perversion, and covetousness. You should try not to be malicious. It’s not easy to be a humorist without indulging in those things.

I delete things I should not have written for the same reason I won’t watch things I shouldn’t. I don’t want to defile myself and open the door to curses.

Sorry if I seem like a killjoy. This is just the way things are.

The piece I just took down was about Meta and its awful fake universe. I was pretty hard on STEM people. I woke up in the night and felt I had to delete the piece. It would be hard to get rid of all the things I regret publishing, but it’s easy to delete new ones, so why not do it?

It’s no great loss. I don’t make money from blogging, and no one will ever miss my lost works, because I am obscure. My blog posts will not be mourned like the scores Chopin had burned when he died.

STEM people are a real mess. Many feel great hostility toward Christianity, and they sincerely believe the nasty, authoritarian, individuality-destroying, tech-centric world they are trying to build is a good thing. They don’t need Christians making fun of them. We need to encourage them to join us.

I’m not missing out on anything by changing what I see, hear, and write. There are plenty of things in life to keep us occupied and entertained without opening ourselves up to the dark culture of the godless world. It’s not like I sit around in an empty room, wearing a hair shirt and beating myself with a cudgel. You don’t really need the world’s sick culture in order to enjoy life. It causes more displeasure than pleasure, and it makes you weak and vulnerable, not to mention useless and hypocritical.

I don’t really care about this blog. If someone hacks it and removes the whole thing, I won’t go into hysterics. I don’t know whether anyone else should care about it. If anyone does, it’s flattering, but the blog is still not very important, and it would be better if I had never written my books.

Putting John 12:25 into Action

My wife and I have a good testimony today.

If you read yesterday’s blog entry, you know it was about the filthiness of the world and how numbed we are to it. I mentioned a corrupting TV show I had watched. I also mentioned Game of Thrones, a very disgusting show I had seen recently in Youtube clips. The premise of the blog post was that by allowing the wrong secular material into my home, I had given evil spirits permission to cause me problems.

In the course of writing, I brought up the trashiness of show business people. I don’t know any non-inflammatory words that work better than “trash,” “trashy,” and “trashiness,” or else I would use them. I could say “depravity,” but it wouldn’t have the same flavor.

“Trashy” is appropriate, because people who reject God make themselves disposable and end up in the lake of fire, which is God’s garbage dump. In the Bible, Jesus used the word “Gehenna” to refer to it, and Gehenna was Jerusalem’s dump.

I wish there were a way to give you all the revelation I’ve received, but the truth is that you have to get it from the Holy Spirit. It’s too complex to lay out in an organized way, and even if I could do that, you would need the Holy Spirit to make it impact your heart. God has shown me a lot of things that are interrelated, concerning the kingdom of Satan. Satan has lots of different projects that tie together, and many of them have roots hundreds or thousands of years old. Most people consider many of his projects innocent, and it’s not obvious that they’re related. God has to show you how things really are in order for you to understand.

I wrote about the perversion problem in show business. I’m not a Q nut, so I don’t know what QAnon’s theories are. I’ve heard little things, and most sound implausible. I’m not promoting that stuff. What I’m saying is that show business people have been perverts, thieves, liars, narcissists, and whores for as long as show business has existed, and Satan uses them to corrupt the rest of us.

While I was writing yesterday, I Googled Scotty Bowers in search of information. His story is instructive. Bowers was a Marine in World War II, and he served in the Pacific. When he got back, he got a job at an ARCO station in Hollywood. One day Walter Pidgeon drove in and hit on him. They went to Pidgeon’s home and engaged in sodomy. After that, Bowers became a pimp, although he claimed he never demanded money for his services. The gas station became a meeting place for homosexuals and also straight showbiz types who wanted prostitutes.

Bowers wrote a tell-all book which came out in 2014, and he startled the world by revealing names. People who knew him, Gore Vidal among them, vouched for his honesty. I will reveal some of the things Bowers claimed. You can find this stuff all over the web.

Spencer Tracy was a homosexual who used his services. Katharine Hepburn hired so many girls, Bowers estimated the number at 150. He got Rock Hudson prostitute work before Hudson started making money, and Bowers paired him with Cary Grant, who had a long-term sexual relationship with Randolph Scott. Bowers had sex with Laurence Olivier and his wife Vivien Leigh, separately. He hired women for Wallis Simpson, the Duchess of Windsor, and he hired couples and young men for her husband, Prince Edward. He himself had sex with Prince Edward. Bowers set up Cole Porter and Charles Laughton. He got girls for Bill Holden. He had a threesome with Ava Gardner and Lana Turner. He had J. Edgar Hoover. He had a lot of disgusting adventures with Gore Vidal.

These are the claims. I think Bowers told the truth.

Many famous people have gotten angry at Bowers for exposing the dead, but no one has proven him wrong about anything. He had a great reply to a man who said some of the dead had descendants who didn’t know they were gay. Bowers asked the man what was wrong with being gay. If being gay is fine, how is it a bad thing to out someone, especially if they’re not around to suffer the repercussions?

That’s a good question for a leftist. I would have an answer, but a leftist would not.

While I was searching, I found a 90-minute documentary about Bowers on Youtube. I decided to watch it. I wouldn’t recommend it for anyone who doesn’t have a special reason for watching. I don’t think women should see it at all. There are some sudden moments of male nudity in it. I don’t have the homosexuality problem, so they didn’t do anything for me. There were also two brief bits of female nudity. I would not have watched had I known about the nude bits.

As I watched the documentary, I felt fastened to my chair. I felt as though I were seeing the world for the first time, even though I already knew about most of what I saw. It was like an intervention.

First of all, a bit about Bowers the person. He said he had had sex with men, women, and animals. He wasn’t ashamed of it at all. He thought it was fine. He said he had started charging priests for sex at the age of 11, and he didn’t feel exploited, because it was his idea. He also said he found girls for a lesbian teacher when he was the same age. He scoffed at the idea that anyone had damaged him or taken advantage. He was a self-starter. How would you like to learn your fifth-grade son was seducing priests?

Based on experiences with stereotypical behavior from gays, you might expect a man like Bowers to be bitter, spiteful, effeminate, and malicious. That was not the case, if the documentary gave an accurate impression. He was a masculine war hero who served as a Marine paratrooper at Guadalcanal and Iwo Jima. He was warm. He was patient. He was hard to provoke. He refused to take advantage of his wealthy, vulnerable contacts or the people he sent them. He had property which he looked after himself, doing his own roofing and plumbing. He became wealthy because grateful people gave him things, not because he charged or threatened them.

In his 90’s, as a millionaire, he regularly, cheerfully did handyman work for two old Jewish ladies who had money yet only paid him $5 per hour. He had a two wives he treated well. He loved his daughter, who died after a failed abortion. He loved his pets. He set food out for the local skunks at night. He helped his prostitute friends achieve financial freedom.

It’s a strange picture.

Bowers presents an example of what I call the alternative righteousness. He was nice. He tried to help people. He was honest. But he rejected Jesus and the Holy Spirit completely. He obviously believed he didn’t need God to be good. This is a common problem. People who belong to Satan say Christians are nasty and hateful, which is generally not true, and they claim their own love and warmth prove non-Christians have the answer.

Salvation is not about how nice you are. In the gospels, Jesus himself was rude nearly all the time. It’s about your status as a member of the family of God. Nice people pour into hell every day.

You may think you’re good, but God’s standard is perfection, and in comparison, our righteousness is like used menstrual rags. The Bible says so. Also, you’re not as good as you think, even by man’s standards. If you think you’ve never done anything wrong, you are not honest.

The only righteousness that gets you into heaven is the righteousness of Jesus. He took your punishment. In order to put on his righteousness and be protected from justice, you have to submit to him and give up willful sin. You don’t get salvation just because he paid for it. You have to sign up. Confession is part of that.

Watching the video, I saw how depraved Bowers’ circle was. It defied belief. It made me realize how stupid I had been to ever think I could fit into the world of the arts. That whole world was created by Satan, for his children. They are different. Their depravity is as hard for me to understand as my faith and desire for righteousness would be for them. I am not a good person, but these people are like another species.

I saw Bowers greet other old men he knew. They would kiss on the lips and hold hands. They called each other things like “baby” and “sweetheart.” They were sexually attracted to each other and felt no embarrassment about it at all.

Some of the men were obvious queens, but others would have fit right in beside the Christmas tree, surrounded by their adult kids and grandchildren. No one would have suspected anything.

He had a female friend who had written a book about the closeness of combat soldiers in World War II, including sexual closeness. It was full of pictures. She showed it to him. They were both so proud of it. He cried while he looked at it. It contained photos of soldiers marching naked or just standing around nude. Those photos will permanently change the way you think about the Pacific campaign, not to mention your grandfather’s generation.

He had many friends who were prominent behind the camera, not just in front of it. The video showed how deep the ranks of showbiz homosexuals are.

Bowers called ordinary Americans with solid principles “squares” a few times during the video. He felt contempt for them, and so did the people he was talking to. When he talked about arranged marriages for homosexual stars, he said it was for the benefit of the squares.

The other day, I saw Joe Rogan give his explanation for the psychological problems actors have. He said actors have to audition constantly, so they are conditioned to seek acceptance constantly. He said they are generally admiration-junkies already, which makes things worse. He said the mindless leftism of actors could be explained partly because they put food on their tables by groveling in front of leftist casting directors. Actors crave approval and admiration, and their destinies are in the hands of capricious leftists, so they shape their behavior accordingly.

I don’t think Joe Rogan is much of a thinker, but I believe he’s right about this. It helps explain the monolithic leftism of Hollywood.

I would add to it. Showbiz people have contempt for the people who watch them. There is no doubt about it. They make their living deceiving us, so they get used to thinking of us as slow and gullible. They work to create suspension of disbelief. Example: Robert Downey isn’t a reformed crackhead and high school dropout; he’s a genius far greater than Einstein, in a magical suit that flies at supersonic speed and fires missiles that destroy tanks.

They don’t stop at the temporary suspension of disbelief which is needed for movies and TV. They keep putting on a show when they’re not working. “We’re compassionate.” “We’re intelligent.” “We’re more informed than you.” “We’re highly moral people.” Hollywood treats us like suckers, and we lap it up.

Showbiz people convince us they’re smart, which isn’t true at all. Talent and brains are completely different things. They convince us they’re erudite, which is utterly false. They convince us they’re our moral superiors, which is laughable. The saddest thing is that they also convince themselves. They’re the worst suckers of all, because they manage to believe their own lies. Naturally, thinking so highly of themselves and seeing how readily we can be deceived, they don’t respect us.

No wonder Bowers used the term “squares” in complete seriousness. For most of us, it’s a joke term, but he said it from the heart. He felt we needed to be humored.

He was a nice guy, but he thought you and I were morons, to be led to the box office by the nose. To him, convincing Americans Spencer Tracy was straight was no worse than convincing us Laurence Olivier was Prince Hamlet.

The children of darkness think people with morals are children, to be managed and milked by their betters. By people who know the real truth. Great geniuses and saints like Whoopi Goldberg and Harvey Weinstein.

I don’t think I can make you understand how I felt as I watched. It has to happen to you, with God’s help. The Holy Spirit has to drive revelation home.

For a long time, I’ve been saying there is one planet, but there are two universes. Here on Earth, God’s children live in one universe, and the children of darkness, who are depraved and blind, live in another one. Things look completely different to them. To you and me, it’s very clear an 11-year-old boy prostitute who pursues sex with priests has a problem. In a million years, you could never have made Bowers or his friends understand that. It would be like telling them the tooth fairy is real. You could never make them understand how filthy their world is, because they love the filth. It comforts them.

Paul said, “For the preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness; but unto us which are saved it is the power of God.” This is so true. How you perceive the gospel depends on which universe you live in, and people who reject Jesus are in the process of perishing every day. It’s almost as though they were dead when they were born. They have no future. We are moving toward heaven and eternal joy, and they are simply moving toward death, like the death of a rat or a dog, followed by eternal pain.

The documentary showed Bowers’ arty friends and some of their art. Photos of naked men and nearly-naked teen boys. Creepy, erotic paintings. I realized no art critic who is taken seriously would ever criticize the morality of these works. A mainstream critic might find a lack of artistic merit in some of them, but that would be about it. Mainstream critics love Robert Mapplethorpe’s pictures of men with bullwhips inserted in their rear ends.

It drove a point home: the arts are not for God’s children. Satan owns them. Even if you try to fit in, you will just be strung along and dumped. You can be involved in Christian music, but that’s about it. And now that I think about it, the gospel industry is full of drugs, fornication, and homosexuality.

Some of the men in the video complained about the way they were treated back when cops used to raid gay bars. To show how “evil” society used to be, the video’s creators inserted a clip from a 1967 news program. A journalist on the program said homosexuality was a mental illness which was becoming an epidemic. A mental illness!

I thought about that. This was 1967, and the network was CBS. I believe I can tell you when things changed. It was only a few years later. In the 1970’s, prime time TV shows began presenting homosexuality in a positive light. Example: Billy Crystal played a homosexual on Soap, which started airing in 1977. How quickly things changed.

It amazes me that CBS, which was one of only three big television networks in America, broadcast that program as late as 1967. Dan Rather was already a CBS White House correspondent. CBS was by no means a conservative organization.

Movies and TV shows are generally corrosive because they are made by corrosive people. Even material that seems innocent involves the efforts of many lost individuals, and when we support them, we enable them to go on to make projects that are more harmful.

Ricky and Lucy slept around while they were married. Dad Brady was busy with sodomy off-camera, and he died from AIDS. Mom Brady gave the mayor of New York pubic lice. Then there is Dr. Cliff Huxtable.

I was telling Rhodah about all this today, and she started talking about Game of Thrones. She didn’t know I had been watching clips or that I had written about it yesterday.

She used to watch the show. She said she had been under the false impression that it was harmless because it was entertainment. Now, she knows better. She wants no part of it. She came to this conclusion long before we talked.

I think God motivated me to watch Game of Thrones clips as preparation for our conversation. I think he also got me to watch Joe Rogan.

While we were talking today, Rhodah went to Facebook and deleted her account again. I hope it’s permanent this time.

If you want to get close to God, you should stop paying for shipments from Satan’s sewage plant. It opens the door to demons. You can cast them out on Sunday, but if you invite them back on Tuesday night, what do you expect God to say when they petition him for permission to return? How seriously do you expect God to take you when you ask him to keep you free?

I can’t change your heart or your mind. All I can do is plant the seeds and water them with prayer. I hope you will consider what I’m saying and that God will make the danger real to you. The end of the age is coming soon, and even it it isn’t, why should you contaminate yourself? Why commit adultery against God? It can’t be a good idea.

We Pay Hollywood to Poison Us

I keep asking God to wake me up so I am no longer so jaded I think circumstances in this world are normal. It appears he is listening.

The other day, I watched an Amazon show called Reacher. I should not have done this.

The show is based on the Jack Reacher novels. Jack Reacher is an imaginary and impossible retired Army major who is the best at absolutely everything. If you have seen the two Jack Reacher movies featuring Tom Cruise, you know what I mean. He’s the best precision rifle shot. He can beat up 5 men at once. He has the deductive skills of Sherlock Holmes.

He’s a revenge hero, about like a Steven Seagal character, only somewhat less silly. All of the novels and movies, and the Amazon series, start the same way. Somebody really obnoxious does some extremely cruel, infuriating things, Reacher gets caught up in it, and eventually, he kills a bunch of people in sadistic ways.

I have been trying to limit my intake of entertainment containing violence, but I felt it was okay to see the TV show. It was not good for me. Don’t read further unless you like spoilers.

One of the early episodes featured a man who had been nailed to a wall, naked, and castrated. They showed the corpse without warning, fully exposed. Eventually, Reacher did the obligatory thing and fornicated with a deputy who was helping him, and she popped into the scene with her breasts exposed. It was completely gratuitous. Another man was burned alive after killing his own father by cutting his throat clear through the windpipe.

Before I watched the show, I had started looking at Game of Thrones clips on Youtube, out of curiosity. If you haven’t seen this show, you’re in for a disgusting experience. It’s about a storybook world full of things like giants and dragons. The main characters are nobles who do unbelievably gross things to each other. They torture and mutilate each other on camera, and there are a lot of gruesome deaths. It’s not The Waltons.

When I saw the clips, I marveled at what was passing for prime time entertainment in America. When I was born, married TV couples had to sleep in twin beds, and injured characters never looked all that bad, even when they were dead. Now shows contain bits of pornography, and characters slice people up on camera.

I felt bad after watching Reacher and the Game of Thrones clips. I had no good excuse for watching.

Last night, I had a strange dream. I was driving a big, powerful vehicle something like a fighter jet with no wings. For some reason, I was Scottish. No idea what that was about. I was at something resembling a gas station, and I needed to put water in the vehicle’s tank. It didn’t seem to require gas or jet fuel. There was a tank of water beside the vehicle, and it had no top. I used a soup can to scoop water out of the tank and pour it into the vehicle.

My parrot Marvin was with me. He was a sort of helper. He was eagerly climbing in and out of the vehicle’s pipes, trying to inspect and put everything right. He was concerned about something. He stood on the ground beside a pipe and drew my attention to it, and it coughed out a small spray of blood.

I looked at the water I was trying to scoop up, and nasty things were floating in it. I saw dead leaves and a dead lizard. The water itself was clear, but a lot of stuff had found its way into it.

I found myself trying to scoop up the junk and dump it on the ground so I could get at the clean water. I started complaining to a lady who provided the water. She was English, and she worked for an Englishman who wasn’t there. She didn’t care about my problems.

I woke up. It was about 4 a.m. My wife and I both tend to wake up and pray at about this time.

When I woke up, I thought about Derek Prince. He is the English evangelist from whom I learned to prophesy at will. I started asking myself whether he had been wrong.

Water represents the flow of the Holy Spirit, and powered vehicles represent God’s grace. I thought maybe bad teaching had contaminated the gifts of the Spirit. Maybe Prince’s teaching was wrong, I was letting demons prophesy through me, and this was blocking God’s power in me.

I asked God to show me the truth, and I mentioned the verse in which Paul told us to covet prophecy. He said it was better than tongues. I knew people were supposed to prophesy, but was I doing it right?

I turned on the TV and watched Derek Prince’s video. He cited 1 Corinthians several times. He claimed Paul said we could all prophesy. Here is 1 Corinthians 14:31: “For ye may all prophesy one by one, that all may learn, and all may be comforted.”

I thought about that. “May” and “can” mean two different things. I wondered if Prince had gotten them confused. Did God really tell us we had the power to prophesy, or merely permission to do it if we could?

I went to the Greek. It uses the word “dynasthe,” which is related to “dynamis,” which is where we get “dynamite.” It means “are capable.” Paul said, “You are all able to prophesy one by one.”

That seems pretty clear. It is undeniable that God wants us all to desire prophesy and to try to develop it, and it certainly looks like he has said we have the ability.

The word translated “prophesy” is “propheteuein,” and it literally means “prophesy,” which means to speak the words of God, including revealing future events.

I don’t believe Derek Prince was wrong. There is too much evidence that he was right.

Then I thought about Mount Hermon, at the north end of Israel. Its Hebrew name is Ba’al Hermon, or “Lord of the Curse.” There is some argument as to whether this interpretation is correct, but it makes sense. Enoch said it was the place where Satan and the rebel angels came down and bound each other by a mutual curse. They planned to have sex with women, and they swore loyalty to each other.

Mount Hermon’s snows are one of the three main sources of the Jordan. At the bottom of the mountain, there is a place called Caesarea Philippi. It was dedicated to evil. There is a spring there, and the water that comes from it turns into a stream that feeds the Jordan.

The spring is quiet now, but it used to be very vigorous and turbulent. Pagans used to throw dead animals into it after they were sacrificed. They defiled the Jordan this way. The Jordan has supernatural significance. It feeds the Sea of Galilee, which symbolizes the earth in the Bible. The fish in the Sea of Galilee represent humanity. The Jordan emerges from the south end of the Sea of Galilee and goes through the desert to the Dead Sea, which contains no fish and represents the lake of fire.

It seemed to me that my dream was about defiling myself with things like secular entertainment, news, and combat sports. The living water comes to me clean and clear, like the snow of Mount Hermon. Then I combine it with worldly filth by allowing corrupting images and sounds into my mind.

I saw an image in my mind. I saw storefronts owned by Satan. In the stores, his underling spirits sat, waiting for customers. When people walked in, the spirits waited on them, loading them up with goods. No charge. Not up front, anyway.

If you don’t go into a store, the spirit that runs it can’t come out and drag you in. You give them permission to work in you when you walk in the door. I think I’ve been doing this.

I made a list of things I felt God wanted me to give up or greatly reduce: social media, fiction, news, anything to do with violence or fighting, everything related to the occult, and all types of input intended to be erotic.

I don’t think it’s possible to cut the news out of your life entirely. You will occasionally pick things up whether you want them or not. You can minimize it, though. As for social media, I’m already done with it, except for Youtube, which seems to have a purpose. I don’t need to watch violence or occult material, so these things aren’t problems. Abandoning fiction will be a little hard, but in the end, it’s all foolishness, and the people who run the fiction industry hate Jesus, so I should know better than to let them influence me.

Erotic entertainment is clearly evil and unnecessary. I don’t think any Christian disputes that.

Day before yesterday, before I had the dream, I decided to fast from news. Now I’m avoiding everything on the list. Fiction is the biggest challenge. I feel like I’m in withdrawal, as though something wanted me to rent a movie.

Hollywood is extremely evil. It’s a shame Christians don’t talk about this more. It’s a hive of homosexuality, even among male celebrities most of us think are straight. It pumps out material hostile to Jesus, white people, men, America, and the church. It promotes pride, cruelty, racism, and violence. It glorifies Satanic religions such as Buddhism and witchcraft. It’s remarkable that we continue paying Hollywood to direct its sewage pipes into our living rooms.

We should be able to look at the lives of entertainers and realize they have nothing good to tell us. How many are on drugs? How many have fallen so far they had to go to rehab repeatedly? How many have died from drug overdoses and suicide? How many are extremely promiscuous? How many have sexually-perverted children? It’s strange that we admire people who have failed at life and who are generally going to hell.

I think that if Moses could come to Earth, walk into a typical American’s house, and turn on the TV, he would stalk out in about three minutes, asking for forgiveness and wondering why God hadn’t incinerated the entire family.

We shouldn’t be angry at show business people, but we shouldn’t admire them or buy their product, either.

As I have said before, I believe the rapture is a process, not just a sudden event. I believe the people who will be taken in the event will be those who have already been raptured internally and removed from the company of irredeemable people.

The whole concept of rapture is interesting to me. The other day it occurred to me that the first rapture we know of took place when God raptured himself away from Adam and Eve.

I plan to keep prophesying, and I will continue to try to reduce the flow of worldly pus and excrement that pollutes my life.

The More They Tell us, the Less we Know

It is always astounding to me to see how well the global battle against truth is going.

In a sane world, you would expect a pandemic to give rise to greater effort to disseminate truth. A world of people facing the same problem should be as united as possible in looking for answers. We should be listening to everyone who might have good information. Instead, we are shutting people down and listening to a few elite voices who keep turning out to be wrong. And the things they’re wrong about are not always hard to understand. They don’t have that excuse. They’re very obviously wrong about simple things.

Masks don’t work very well. They do virtually nothing on jets, where the air is constantly replaced. Kids aren’t in much danger and shouldn’t be kept out of school. Natural immunity is pretty much the same thing as vaccine-based immunity and should get just as much respect. Unless you’re fat, old, or sick, your chance of having serious problems are very low. If you are fat, old, or sick, the vaccines won’t work as well for you and may do nothing at all. Social distancing doesn’t work very well. It is not possible to end the pandemic, so we need to learn to live with it until we have a cure. The suffering caused by draconian anti-transmission measures is extreme and important, and it has to be considered when we think about restricting people’s freedom. There is credible evidence, but not conclusive proof, that ivermectin has helped many people, and there is no evidence that it is unsafe, even in animal preparations.

These are obvious truths, but the establishment has denied all of them.

On the other side of the coin, a lot of people outside of the establishment are telling us the vaccines made them magnetic. Some say the shots contain microchips. Some say the shots kill more people than the virus. Look around, and you will see people saying coronavirus doesn’t actually exist. There is a long list of wacky anti-establishment claims no one over the age of 10 has any excuse for believing.

There are rabidly pro-establishment leftists out there who believe ridiculous things. A survey of Democrats found that about 41% thought at least half of covid patients ended up in the hospital. No wonder they’re so vicious toward people who resist vaccination, masks, and so on. They really think covid is up there with Ebola and the plague.

Even Republicans had an exaggerated impression of the risk. They came in at 26%. The real risk at the time was 5% or less.

Americans have suddenly developed a deep love of censorship. How could that happen? How could people suddenly become that stupid? The evils of censorship, apart from censorship of obscenity and certain other types of expression which present extraordinary dangers, have been obvious to Americans since before America existed. The First Amendment was drafted in order to placate fears of representatives of colonies who were nervous about joining the union. Before America could exist, censorship had to be limited in writing.

To paraphrase Santayana, once again, we are forgetting the lessons of the past, so we will have to relearn them. The natural thing is for a society to know more than it did in the past, but somehow we manage to know less. That’s an accomplishment.

Now Israeli researchers are telling us vitamin D deficiency multiplies a covid patient’s risk of death by 14, and that figure is corrected for things like age and comorbidities.

Is it true? If it is, why didn’t we know it a year and a half ago?

A friend of mind thinks doctors who pushed the vitamin D theory were censored. That could well be true. In 1972 America, a tin foil hat was the mark of a lunatic. In 2022, every intelligent person should wear one. Conspiracy theories keep being confirmed.

One sign that a person is influenced by demons is sudden, disproportionate anger. I can explain what that looks like. If you tell me you think the vaccines contain spores that impregnate people with aliens, I will think you’re insane, but I will not get angry at you. Joe Rogan said he took doctor-prescribed ivermectin pills, and he didn’t claim he knew they cured his illness, but leftists got extremely angry at him, and now they’re trying to force him off the Internet or whatever it is that you call the system over which Spotify operates. I don’t even know.

They are furious at Rogan. They don’t merely agree to disagree. They don’t say other people should write and say things intended to convince us Rogan is wrong. They want to end his career.

That’s probably demonic.

It’s not just leftists. Back when masks were new, a friend of mine threatened to physically assault someone who tried to walk in the wrong direction in a store aisle. He was going to put his hands on them and prevent them from getting by, and this would have been a crime. The threat itself was a crime. I’m talking about a gentle conservative person who is now baptized with the Holy Spirit.

It seems clear that spirits have been released, and they are fighting to control information and spread anger. Given that this is how things are now, it would not surprise me at all to learn that doctors have been fired or threatened for promoting vitamin D supplementation.

What about the information the doctors themselves have, though? If spirits are pushing censorship and disinformation, they are probably corrupting research, too. This will sound insulting, and I guess it is, but doctors and other researchers are notorious for stupidity when it comes to designing studies, implementing their plans, and interpreting their results. Remember when doctors fed egg yolks to rabbits and convinced a generation of Americans eggs would kill us, while promoting the consumption of trans-fats?

We know there are many, many doctors who are afraid to talk about promising treatments and preventative measures, as well as the obvious failings of the solutions we now have. On top of that, spirits may be promoting bad research and flawed interpretations.

The sentence that came into my mind when I started thinking about the knowledge crisis is, “The truth has gotten lost.” Can anyone say it hasn’t? The establishment clearly does not know the truth. It clearly punishes people who promote beliefs not in line with its panic-driven, debunked protocols and theories. It seems likely that research is producing bad conclusions. Where are we supposed to look for facts we can rely on?

For the zillionth time, I ask myself why I write about the end of the truth. No one who is deceived will understand or believe me, and the people who are not deceived don’t need to be told. As always, I remind myself that I do it to fight gaslighting. If you don’t tell the truth and hear the truth from others, you risk losing it.

I was already taking vitamin D before I heard about the Israeli research. It is supposed to promote muscle strength, and failing muscles are supposed to be a leading cause of falls among old people. I don’t want to head down that road. Also, I had heard claims vitamin D helped prevent coronavirus infections and mitigated symptoms. I plan to keep taking it.

While I was reading about the Israeli research, I saw a mainstream website listing an interesting symptom of vitamin D deficiency: frequent colds. What? How did I get this old without knowing this?

Maybe it’s because of the huge anti-supplement bias in the medical profession. Doctors are determined to prove pills don’t work, but of course, they do. They love to point to studies suggesting huge doses of supplements won’t turn you into an immortal, but they always seem to avoid some uncomfortable facts. First, vitamin deficiencies are not rare at all, and second, supplements fix deficiencies.

There is an obvious (to people other than doctors) difference between 1. striving for superhuman vitality longevity and 2. taking proven steps to end harmful, common deficiencies.

Doctors love to tell us to eat a balanced diet in order to get all the nutrients we need. Here’s the truth: you’re not going to do that. Neither do they. No one but health freaks do it. They tell us to eat certain amounts of this and that every day. It’s unrealistic. On a typical day, I probably eat 6 different things. Most people probably eat fewer than 10, even when they’re trying. You can’t master the establishment’s ridiculous food pyramid, eating like a normal person. Doctors all have to get through 2 semesters of calculus and 2 semesters of physics, but somehow they can’t understand this.

With presumably straight faces, they have told us to eat 25 grams of fiber per day. Try that some time. To give you an idea how hard it is, consider this: a bowl of raisin bran (a food people only eat to obtain fiber) contains three grams. You would have to eat 8-1/3 bowls per day. You would do nothing but sit on the toilet. You would have to have your own office and work with the window open. You could forget about carpooling.

On a typical day, I get up and eat close to a pound of fibery stuff, including raw vegetables and one apple. That is exemplary by America standards. It’s exemplary by human standards, period. Maybe gorillas in zoos do as well. You’re not doing it. I promise you, in spite of my exceptional performance, I am not getting 25 grams of fiber per day.

An article about the Israeli study said 80% of Middle Easterners have vitamin D deficiencies. Four out of five. What do Middle Easterners eat? The healthiest diet on the planet. The Mediterranean diet. The diet doctors go on and on about. Where do they live? Sunny places with few clouds. Still, they have this problem. If they have it, surely most other peoples have it. Supplements are the only smart answer, but don’t tell your GP that unless he wears sandals to work and shops at Whole Foods.

Okay, so the establishment believes vitamin D deficiency leads to colds. We also know colds are caused by viruses. We know there are families of viruses, and many colds are caused by coronaviruses. Call me crazy, but it sounds likely that vitamin D protects against some coronaviruses. If it protects against some, would it be strange if it protected against COVID-19?

Even if it doesn’t, why aren’t doctors promoting vitamin D for cold prevention? Nobody wants a cold! Don’t they care? Besides, the common cold kills thousands of people in the US every year. Look it up.

Whatever. I’m taking vitamin D.

By the way, two days ago I watched a Christian lady on Youtube. She was talking about her Facebook ban. She used to post Christian material, and one day she got banned for posting something offensive. Here it is:

If I shut up heaven that there be no rain, or if I command the locusts to devour the land, or if I send pestilence among my people;

If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.

That has to be the most homophobic, patriarchal, Eurocentric, racist, ageist, transphobic thing I’ve ever read.

That was me, being humorous. It’s about as inoffensive as the Bible gets, but Facebook told her it was offensive and banned her. No appeal allowed.

I don’t know if they decided she was promoting alternative cures for coronavirus or what. The point is that things are much, much worse than we think they are. The tipping point is well in sight. Unless something miraculous happens and Americans turn back to God and get his help to overcome the wokiees, it won’t be long before we will be just like the Christians of Ephesus.

When Rhodah and I visited Ephesus, our guide showed us symbols carved on the stones. They were circles divided in 4 wedges, just like pizzas. They are called “ichthus wheels.” The wheels and lines represent the first letters of words meaning “Jesus Christ God Son Savior.” We were told Christians carved them in order to let other Christians know they were around without inviting the Romans to torture them to death.

This was how Christians got around the Facebook and Youtube bans of their time. We are being pushed toward a day when similar measures will be needed, but they probably won’t be practical because electronic surveillance will prevent us from doing much of anything in secret.

I don’t know if you should take vitamin D or not. Decide for yourself.