This Will Separate the Sheep from the Goats

Either I’m on fire today or I’m just willing to do anything other than clean the pool, so here comes more blogging.

My wife tells me Candace Owens has published authentic texts from some snitch, revealing that Charlie Kirk was, maybe, not happy with Jews because a Jewish donor that gave TPUSA two million a year cut Kirk off for refusing to denounce the raving, ignorant, immature, frat-boy antisemite Tucker Carlson.

Supposedly, Kirk said something about his Jewish donors living up to stereotypes. Maybe I can find it.

I got it! Here: “Just lost another huge Jewish donor. $2 million a year because we won’t cancer Tucker. Jewish donors play into all the stereotypes. I cannot and will not be bullied like this. Leaving me no choice but to leave the pro-Israel cause.”

Kirk supporters will say the texts were taken out of context, but my response to that is that there are many things context can’t fix.

This reminds me of some lines from a Woody Allen movie. A Latin American dictator has been deposed and replaced by a rebel leader who will, of course, be the next dictator, because Latin America. When they try the former dictator, this exchange takes place:

Rebel Leader: You are accused of killing over a thousand people in your term of office… of torturing hundreds of women and children. How do you plead?

Diaz: Guilty… with an explanation.

There are a couple of things wrong with what Saint Charlie said.

1. There is something wrong with anyone who won’t “cancer Tucker,” because Tucker is rapidly moving into Josef Goebbels territory. It’s not subtle. There are no grey areas. It’s not debatable. Reasonable minds may not differ.

2. “Jewish donors play into all the stereotypes” is, well, antisemitic.

I’ve known more Jews than Moses, and while every ethnic group has people who live up to and even exceed stereotypes, I have not found Jews to be particularly stingy or manipulative. Actually, if I had to come down on one side or the other, I would say that on the whole, Jews are more generous than Gentiles, and I haven’t noticed any difference when it comes to manipulation.

I have known some Jewish people who were a bit aggressive, but I can’t say they seem more aggressive than Gentiles. Except with women. That, I have been a witness to. But only in Israel. I don’t know what it is with Israeli men, but they hound women relentlessly,like they have a quota. I haven’t seen it here in America.

There are definitely Jews who don’t like Gentiles, but I don’t think that makes Jacob’s children any worse than the rest of us. It’s not like Gentiles are free of bigotry.

Just to open myself to criticism, I have found other groups to run more truly to stereotypes. American ghetto blacks are frightening. Cubans are hard to live among because of the materialism, machismo, and corruption. Many of my own people are just emotional ghetto whites. I have found Jewish people to be less consistent with stereotypes.

They tend to promote antisemitic notions in their own self-deprecating humor. Maybe they should reconsider that. I learned the only antisemitic jokes I know from Jews.

The third thing wrong with Saint Charlie’s text is that he says he is abandoning Israel because a few Jews quit sending him money.

So he was not Saint Charlie after all. He was Charlie the Whore.

All you folks who got mad when I said he wasn’t a real minister, line up and have a plate of crow with kreplach on the side. I didn’t even insult him. I wrote of him approvingly. I just said he wasn’t a minister.

For the slow, I will explain. You do not change your support for a country or anything else because people stop paying you. Support is supposed to be sincere. If you pretend to support anything just because you are paid, you are a huge and despicable whore, and if your work endangers a small and perpetually-beleaguered country that continually faces unfair existential threats fomented by Satan himself, you may be among the kings of whores.

Is Kirk even in heaven? I doubt it now. How can a professional liar go to heaven? The word says the lake of fire was prepared for “all liars.” It says lying is abomination, just like sodomy.

Everyone lies, but not everyone makes it a career and refuses to repent.

If he lied about Israel, what else did he lie about? Maybe he was not even conservative. Maybe he was like Candace Owens and Arianna Huffington, who defected overnight when they saw the side where the grass was greener.

No one becomes conservative or liberal overnight. This should be obvious.

Andrew Breitbart worked for Drudge, then for Huffington, and then for himself. He flapped like a windsock in a tornado. He was a snake. He was no conservative. I said so, and the usual toadies criticized me for being right. Don’t speak ill of Saint Andrew. Kirk looks even worse.

If there is anything positive in the new Kirk revelations, it’s that it makes me, the main character of the universe, feel even better about not worshiping Kirk. I did think he was a good guy who helped Trump get elected, but I never thought his shtick of sitting in a chair and arguing with unprepared liberals made him a great man.

I guess the fact that I feel better is not all that helpful to the rest of the world, but it’s something.

I told my wife I was upset with Jews for not sending me money. I will be happy to “cancer” Tucker. I do it all the time. I cancered Candace. I’ve cancered all sorts of enemies of Israel. I do it sincerely. Still, no checks.

The fact that I am obscure and have no impact on society could be part of the reason.

I’d settle for hamantaschen. A big tray, once a month. Cherry and apple. I know apricot is more traditional, but cherry and apple would be better. Made with butter. No Crisco. I’ll be watching my doorstep. I’ll even put up a mezuzah.

In other news, I am thinking about resistance training.

Back when I was in law school, I lifted weights a lot. I maxed out almost every machine in the University of Miami Wellness Center (gym, for normal people). I never got big or bulky, except for a 48″ chest. It always blows up, even with slight exertion. A genetic aberration, I guess. Too bad it’s localized.

I thought machines were pretty good, but it turned out they were not. For example, I used to lift 300 pounds very slowly, with deep motions, for 8 reps at a time. I didn’t bounce the weights three inches from full extension and claim I had lifted 300 pounds for real. Then a guy asked me to try a barbell, and I managed one repetition of 220. My strength was real, but it was only good for motion in a straight line with no freedom in any other direction. I could not stabilize a 300-pound bar.

Also, I wondered why I never looked particularly strong. People who were a lot weaker than I was looked better.

Lately, I have been considering doing a little resistance training. I did some last year, but I let it go. I am not trying to look buff or compete in contests. I just want to avoid crumbling faster than necessary in old age. I don’t want to have to ask the wife to open jars for me, and I don’t want to be easily injured because my frame has atrophied.

I learned a few things this week. I sort of knew most of it already, but I didn’t bother to put it all together until today.

A guy calling himself Anatoly popped up in my Youtube feed. He weighs about 180 pounds, but he looks more like 150 because he has no fat. He’s skinny.

He goes to gyms dresses as a janitor. He goes up to guys who are so full of steroids they will definitely die by 60, and he asks if he can try the weights. They laugh at him and make condescending remarks, and then he lifts more than they do, effortlessly.

I must make a disclaimer: I am assuming the bodybuilders in his videos are not shills. They could be.

He’s a powerlifter. He has benched 330, and he has deadlifted 640. People say he has lifted more and that these are old records. His real name is Volodymyr Shmondenko.

Benching 330 is not amazing, but it’s 110 more than I ever lifted. I don’t think he uses drugs, because his numbers are really good but not shocking. I could be wrong, though, because he could be someone who has limited genetic potential and looks like a good natural bodybuilder when he’s on the juice.

I found out that the bench press is not a great exercise. It makes you strong for doing one highly unlikely motion you will never make except when working out or trying to impress someone.

So anyway, I looked at this guy, and I thought I should think about powerlifting.

Here’s something weird: muscle size doesn’t correlate well to strength. For example, Schwarzenegger used to lift something like half of what his workout buddy lifted. His buddy Franco Columbu, was 5’6″ tall. Schwarzenegger’s claims have gone as high as 6’3-1/2″, but some witnesses say 5’11” is more like it. At least he’s taller than Burt Reynolds, who wore three-inch heels.

In any case, he was a lot bigger than Columbu. I saw Columbu lift the back of a Fiat and move it. I think it was in Pumping Iron.

Found it.

I had a fake friend in law school, and he was 6’6″ and weighed 330 (that he would admit). In the gym, he benched less than half of what I did, and I was not maxed out. The machine wouldn’t go high enough.

It’s not because my arms are shorter. I have long arms for my height. He was just naturally weak.

Bodybuilders commonly get two things wrong: they think they’re strong, and they think they can beat other men up. They’re not as strong as they could be, because they work out the wrong way. They can’t beat other people up unless they’re fighting untrained people. Fighting requires skill. Strength is not very useful if you have no skill and your opponent has lots of it.

Most untrained men can’t hit another guy with their left hands. It’s just right-right-right-right. That’s really something. And the rights are usually looping love taps that leave their faces and bodies open.

Bodybuilding is not about being strong. It’s about looking strong. This is why we now have men paying doctors to insert big pieces of plastic in their bodies to look like muscles.

What I’m getting at is that the majority of weight-training wisdom in America is aimed at making men look strong, and the things most men do actually limit their strength gains while filling them with relatively weak muscle.

I should have learned about this back when I was really working out, instead of waiting until I was ready for the shuffleboard court.

I have studied up, and I have learned a few things.

1. Bodybuilding is not a good way to build strength.

2. The really strong guys are powerlifters and strength trainers.

3. Powerlifting is a competitive sport, and while it shares things with strength training, it’s not the same thing. If you want to be strong, you want to use strength-training methods and forget about powerlifting.

4. Isolating muscles, which bodybuilders love, severely limits real-world strength. To become strong, you want exercises that involve multiple groups. The reason to isolate muscles is to make them big and impress all the other possibly-latent dudes in the gym shower.

5. To get strong, you want sets with low repetitions. A maximum of 5. Not the 8 or 12 you may have heard about at the gym. You set weights so you can lift them safely a maximum of three times. You lift until you can lift them 5 times. Then you increase the weight.

This is great, because it means less work.

6. Strength training, which involves heavier weights, is less likely to injure you than vanity training, which requires you to use your joints over and over. This surprised me.

I was very glad to learn that isolating muscles was stupid, because the more you isolate groups, the longer and more miserable your workouts will be. Your body has a lot of muscles to isolate.

It speaks poorly of humanity that so many people are lifting for stupid reasons. Why would anyone want to be weaker than necessary while working out harder than necessary? It’s effeminate, prancing around in shiny thong panties with other men, hoping your calves are more cut than theirs.

Different types of workouts build different types of muscles. Low reps build strong muscles. Supposedly, they also increase your body’s ability to “recruit” muscle fibers, so you get more power out of the muscles you have.

With all this in mind, you can see that it’s incredibly stupid to lift like a bodybuilder. You will work harder, be weaker, and endanger your body more. Also, if you’re looking for workout advice on the web, you have to be careful to detect bodybuilder garbage. Any fitness guy who says the words “big” or “bigger” while demonstrating an exercise should be ignored.

If you look around the web, you can find pictures and videos of men who look like refrigerator repairmen or Uber drivers, lifting enormous weights with their seemingly-flabby, untoned bodies.

All this makes me think of Dwayne Johnson, AKA “the Rock.”

People love this man. He’s a professional nice guy. He tries to avoid saying anything negative. He always smiles. He wants you to see him with his tiny daughter and his tiny dog. He gives people supportive shoutouts. I don’t like him.

I used to think Johnson was great, because I was foolish. Back in law school, I thought WWF wrestling was a hoot, and I watched it diligently. I loved the Rock character. The funny eyebrow. “It doesn’t matter what your name is!” The people’s elbow. Hilarious.

I should not have let the WWF’s excrement enter my mind, but I did.

He became an actor, and eventually, he hit the juice really hard. And lied about it. He says he hasn’t used drugs since he was a teenager, but the world is full of men his age, and so far, he is the only one out of hundreds of millions who has managed to look like the Hulk at age 55.

He lies and says it’s all about diet and exercise, like no one ever dieted or exercised before. Like no one else on Earth worked hard until he invented work.

He claims he has been a workout fanatic since he was a little child, but somehow he was bigger in his mid-fifties, with almost no body fat, than he was at any point earlier in his life when he was blessed with more natural testosterone and better recovery abilities.

People say he’s naturally big because he’s a Samoan, and many Samoans really do have a genetic edge. Well, he’s only half Samoan, his non-Samoan dad was on steroids, and no other Samoan has ever looked like him without drugs, so BS on that. He was half Samoan when he was working out like crazy and 30 years younger, and he was smaller.

Now he has given up drugs because he has clogged arteries, which steroids cause. He has dropped 50 or 60 pounds, or maybe one third of his total muscle weight. People are not 100% muscle. He claims he did it for a movie role. No; he did it to avoid an early grave.

He is a role model for kids, and they go to the gym and try what he claims he does, and they get lackluster results. They don’t look like he does, because they’re not on drugs yet, and they don’t get as strong as they should because they’re doing glamour exercises that make weaker muscles.

Then what do they do? Many do what he really does. They use drugs. Then they blow up and look like him. They go bald early. They get scarring acne. Their testicles all but vanish. Like Johnson, they grow breasts that have to be cut out. They have rage problems. They suffer from depression. They cry for no reason. They remain short because steroids end natural growth.

This is all bad, but it looks like he hurt his health and hurt kids without even getting as strong as he could have. He blew himself up so he could be a shirtless dandy for all his little bros, but smaller guys who don’t look like dangerously overinflated tires are much stronger.

On top of that, many women find grotesque steroid physiques a little repulsive. Steroid users tend to look like they’ve been skinned.

I am probably never going to work out seriously, because I am too lazy. I know I will never do long workouts assiduously, so I have reasonable goals.

I came up with an exercise which turns out to be very, very good for strength development. I put two dumbbells by my feet, I squat to get them to waist level, I curl them to my shoulders, I press them overhead, and then I do it all in reverse.

I don’t strain my back the way squats or deadlifts could. I give both sides of my body the same treatment instead of allowing a barbell to shift the work to my right side. It’s not bad for an old guy who has modest expectations.

I haven’t done any resistance training at all at least since the beginning of the year. I started up today, and I managed 5 reps with 42.5 pounds on each side. It will never win me any prizes, but it’s an okay start for an old man who mostly lifts a fork. Lifting dumbbells is harder than lifting barbells for the same reason lifting barbells is harder than pushing machine handles, so you end up using less weight.

If things go well, I should be up to maybe 60 pounds per side in a few months. I may add another exercise if I think I’ll keep up with it. I should get back to climbing stairs with a weighted vest.

I almost never feel I’m not strong enough, although putting tires back on hubs while sitting on the ground is an area where more power would be nice. I’m doing okay, but I think it’s wise to try get a little better and avoid falling apart too fast.

Preventing injuries is important at my age (or any age), and stronger muscles are harder to hurt.

Hopefully, my arteries will remain clear, my strength will be optimal in relation to the amount of exercise I do, and I will never have to drop 50 pounds in three months and come up with lies to explain it.

Your Good Deeds are a Band-Aid on a Dead Body

Last night I wrote about a three-part dream I had, and the dream included me being raptured by two angels.

The meanings of some parts of the dream were not clear to me at first, but now I think God has shown me what they were about.

I

I was at a corrupt church where I used to serve, and a well-meaning but ambitious and attention-loving person was trying to start a new ministry. He was about to speak. The pastor of the church, who has appeared in other dreams representing a spirit of church corruption, supported him. I wasn’t interested in watching the new minister speak, so I went outside.

This represents me leaving the world of big, established churches. By that I mean anything bigger than house meetings. God told me the age of churches was over. They are corrupt because they teach people to worship and follow men, not the Holy Spirit. Satan corrupts the men, and the men corrupt the church.

II

I was in Kentucky, on my grandfather’s patio. As a child, I defaced this patio while the concrete was still wet, writing my name in it. My relatives said I was in big trouble, but when my grandfather saw it, he was thrilled. He took me on his lap and told me one day I would show it to my son.

In the dream, I saw angels coming down from heaven. I lost all strength and lay down on my stomach on the patio. They lifted me up and raptured me. I was consumed with joy and relief.

Why does God do things for certain people? Because we are his favorites, as I was my grandfather’s favorite grandchild. It’s not because we’re good; we are not. God prefers one person to another for reasons we don’t know.

We see this in the story of John, the disciple who was closest to Yeshua. He was “the one Yeshua loved.” It is believed that every original disciple except John met with a violent death, as did Paul and Stephen, but when Domitian tried to fry John in a cauldron in front of a crowd of pagans, nothing happened to him. He died at a very advanced age, and before he died, he saw the kingdom of heaven come and wrote of it in the Revelation.

Israel preferred Joseph to his brothers. God preferred Israel to Esau. He preferred Isaac to Ishmael. He doesn’t make excuses for favor. He never says he will treat us alike, and it isn’t our place to question it.

Those who don’t have God’s favor hate those who do, and they say it’s not fair. This attitude started with Satan, and it prevails today. The hatred worldly people feel for the favored is like Satan’s hatred for humanity or an older child’s hatred of a younger child with a nicer personality that brings him more attention.

The other day, I heard Lester Sumrall say that the people who are against us, like the atheists and leftists, are just losers trying to “get even.” They refuse to do things God’s way, and they don’t get favor, so their response is to kill those who have it and steal from them.

In English Bibles, we see the word “love” a lot, and we think it only means affection, but it also means preference. God preferred Jacob to Esau, and God’s word puts it this way:

Was not Esau Jacob’s brother? saith the Lord: yet I loved Jacob,

And I hated Esau, and laid his mountains and his heritage waste for the dragons of the wilderness.

Esau’s children, who inherited disfavor from Esau, tried to take the good things God gave Israel, but the word says this:

Whereas Edom saith, We are impoverished, but we will return and build the desolate places; thus saith the Lord of hosts, They shall build, but I will throw down; and they shall call them, The border of wickedness, and, The people against whom the Lord hath indignation for ever.

Actually, Esau himself brought this on his descendants. He sold his birthright for a bowl of soup. Not even a pizza or a prime rib eye.

We see the spirit of envy among the disfavored today. They say Israel, whose inheritance is still largely in the hands of thieves, has too much. They say white people, Christians, heterosexuals, and men have privilege, meaning it’s unfair that we have more blessings than others. They say America is rich because it oppresses and steals, which is patently absurd.

They want to exterminate those who are favored and take what they have, not realizing that without us, the world would be a much worse place for them. They treat each other much worse than we would ever treat them.

I really enjoy knowing I was my grandparents’ favorite, my father’s favorite, and my mother’s favorite. I didn’t appreciate it until I was old, but it was a tremendous gift. Thinking about it warms my heart in a way that brings me new humility. In particular, it makes me love my grandfather more. I wish I had been better to him, although I was better to him than most of my cousins.

I feel safe and comforted. More securely than ever, I know my blessings don’t depend on perfect obedience or past service. I feel I am living within God’s warmth.

I have been bad to people and animals. I haven’t become a missionary. I haven’t given everything I have away. I haven’t packed stadiums and seen thousands rush to the altars. I have sinned a lot. I still have favor. It’s not based on my deeds.

This is where Jews, Muslims, and many Christians get it wrong. God doesn’t weigh your deeds and let you into heaven if the good outweigh the bad. He weighs his love for you and the righteousness of Yeshua, which is imputed to you.

Speaking of people who are called holy because of their conspicuous accomplishments, my wife says Billy Graham is in hell because he fawned on Muhammad Ali and called him a follower of God. Muhammad Ali rejected God when he rejected Yeshua and became a follower of the famous rapist and murderer Mohammed, so he was a rejecter of God, not a follower. Graham was supposed to understand this.

My wife says Graham denied the cross, and as she says, this is the one thing that will definitely send you to hell. You can molest children and then repent and receive salvation, but if you deny the cross and you don’t repent, you are definitely going to hell. Preach all you want. Call a billion people to the altar. It won’t help you.

If being “good” could get you into heaven, then Yeshua was a fool to allow himself to be tortured to death instead of taking his throne and taking back the planet.

Graham was a shameless and spineless sycophant of celebrities, the rich, and the powerful, and he didn’t teach people about the Holy Spirit, so my wife is probably right. He was the Joel Osteen of his time.

People point to his deeds–his crusades and the apparent salvations that took place–and say he was a great man of God. But even if those salvations were proper, which many were not, they wouldn’t overcome rejecting Yeshua, who is God. To reject Yeshua is to reject Yahweh, as Yeshua said.

It appears he also bought into the Jewish media control myth, which is not a sign that he was hearing from God. It’s hard to judge him, though, because the accusations are based on quotations from a tape recording, the quotations were reported by leftists, and we can’t hear the entire conversation to see if there are any exculpatory words in it.

Graham is just one example of people who are widely praised by transactional Christians yet who are probably in hell or headed there.

Now that I’ve had my dream, I think of God, I think of the way my grandfather felt about me, and I know in my heart, not just my mind, that God feels the same way about me. This helps me have faith that he will give me good things and help me improve. My grandfather used to slip me money and do things for me, and God loves me more than he did.

On his patio, my grandfather showed me favor. I think he would have been very angry if any of the other grandchildren had carved their names into the concrete, but he didn’t just let me get away with it; he loved me for it.

In the dream, God showed me favor in the place where my grandfather, who was a figure of God to me, also showed me favor. My grandfather showed me favor even in my transgression, and so does God.

In the dream, God showed me very great favor by removing me from the presence of the rotten human race and all the rotten spirits that conspire with people against God and his favorites.

III

In the third part of the dream, I woke up in a shabby hospital bed in a poor country, wearing clothes someone had put on me. I had been found somewhere, and the people found me unconscious and took me to the hospital because they didn’t know why I was there or what I had come for.

Several young schoolgirls stood at the foot of my bed and stared at me in wonder. A doctor came in to check on me, and I asked him, “Who am I?” I knew, but I wondered if he did.

I think this is about the return to Earth, after the wedding in heaven. We are told we will have to rule here under Yeshua.

When we rule, it will have to be by consent of the ruled. Otherwise, Yeshua will have to destroy them. We will rule because of our identity, not our own righteousness or ability. We will rule by heredity, because we will be kings and queens, not presidents and governors. That means our authority will depend on who we are, and if people consent to be ruled, it will be because they recognize us as members of God’s ruling family.

The other day, God told me something interesting. I already knew he hated democracy, which is an invention of pagans and sexual perverts, but I didn’t realise this: it is only because of the privileges of monarchy that he will be able to return to Earth, take it back, and rule.

If King Yeshua were President Yeshua, he could be voted out permanently. He would have no title. He would be like a tenant, and the Bible shows us owners are better than tenants. If he were voted out, he could never return except as an illegitimate conqueror, usurper, and squatter.

Because Yeshua is a king, his title is eternal. He can’t be voted out. His title can’t be taken away. He can consent for his enemies to occupy his land for a while, but he has the right to return, kill them in spite of whatever improvements they have made, cut off their children’s inheritance, and give the inheritance to Christians.

This is why Israel will never belong to anyone but the Jews.

Yeshua is the king of the Jews, and Israel (not just modern Israel) was given to him and to them by Yahweh, through Abraham. Palestinian savages who are worse than Nazis can cause trouble, and they will eventually overrun Israel in a nationwide campaign of rape, theft, destruction, and murder just like October 7, but in the end, a remnant of the Jews will be preserved, their enemies will be slaughtered by God himself, and the land will be returned to them.

We know from the Bible that Israel’s history of victory will be broken soon, and human animals will invade and have their way, but even if millions are murdered, in the end, Israel will exist, Jews will own it, Yeshua will be on the throne, and his kingdom, which is a continuation of the Davidic dynasty, will be restored.

Thinking about my dream makes me feel loved and comforted. I am not a Catholic or Baptist or Muslim, trying to score points and earn a ticket to God’s presence or heaven. I am a son and heir whom God loves based on my identity. God is willing to give me good things I ask for, just as my grandfather was happy to slip me a 50-dollar bill.

Favor is nothing to be proud of, because pride is always wrong, and it’s nothing to show off, but it’s something to tell the world about. By telling the world, we dispel the myths that keep people in self-condemnation and pride and block their blessings.

I believe being favored by God allows me to help others. When Job’s friends made errors in trying to correct him, God said Job would intercede for them. He was more inclined to listen to his favored one than to ignorant people who wronged him, even if they meant well.

I believe this is a pivotal moment in my life and for my family.

One Day it Will be for Real

I had a wonderful dream last night, or maybe it was three consecutive dreams.

I

I was back at Trinity Church in Miami. I served there as an armorbearer. We had three armorbearer leaders during my time. In the dream, the second guy was about to start a church of his own.

There were chairs set up in a small area, and he was about to speak about his plans. Several people were there, getting ready to sit. Trinity’s pastor, Rich Wilkerson, was one of them. That’s odd, because as far as I can tell, he never supports new ministries he doesn’t control and make money from.

In a dream I had long ago, he appeared as an evil force. I was at a different church by then. In the dream, it was night. The church was dark. I went in, and in a room in the back, with no windows, Wilkerson was sitting at a desk under a lamp, in a little cone of light, hiding. He was running an adding machine and counting money. I took that to mean the church’s pastors had greed issues, and that turned out to be true. Then one was outed as a child rapist, refused to step down, and went to prison.

The guy who was about to speak is a friend, but I wouldn’t want to see him run a church. He is headstrong, and he thinks he knows more than he does. He likes attention and admiration. He likes to be in charge. Basically a good guy, but not pastor material.

I left the room and went outside.

II

Once I was outside, I was not in Miami. I was behind my grandparent’s house in Kentucky. I loved that place when I was a kid. I thought it was heaven. I was my grandfather’s favorite grandchild. My grandparents treated me very well. They treated me like a son. Even as an adult, I could show up at their house whenever I wanted and treat it as my own.

The house had a small patio out back, and one day (not in the dream), my grandfather had it extended. I was probably about 8. When I saw the wet cement, I wrote my name in it with a slingshot handle.

I was told I was in big trouble. I was going to get it when Grandpa got home.

When he saw what I had done, he put me on his lap, and with a big smile, he told me one day I could show my own children what I had done. He thought it was terrific.

In the dream, I was on that patio, which I will never see again, for one last visit. It was dark. It was cool. I was wearing a winter jacket.

I looked at the sky. It was mainly clear with some clouds that shimmered around their borders. There was bright moonlight but no moon. Near where the moon should have been, I saw what looked like a little ship flying around. It was just an outline, like the little ships in the old Asteroids video game. I knew I was seeing something involving spirits. I have seen a spirit clearly, and it was clear with an outline.

At first, I saw one ship. Then I saw that there were two, and they were diamond-shaped. They were circling without changing their altitude. I knew something very important was happening.

My strength left me. I could not move. I lay on the concrete on my stomach. While I was lying there, two angels I couldn’t see lifted me up without changing my position, and we started to rise together.

I knew it was the rapture. I can’t explain how glad I was. I was done with this place. At last. Sometimes it seems like this experience will never end, and in the dream, it was over. Suddenly.

I believe I thought about my wife and son. They weren’t nearby. I believe I thought they were being raptured wherever they were and that we would meet shortly.

III

I woke up in a hospital bed. It was a cheap single bed with a white metal frame. I was in a hospital in a poor country, and they used whatever they could afford.

There was no sheet over me. I was wearing a T-shirt and gym shorts which didn’t seem to belong to me. I got the sense that I had been found somewhere, brought to the hospital, and examined. I was fine.

At the foot of the bed, there were about 5 little girls. I would say they were around 10 years old. They looked a lot like upper-class Indians. They weren’t wearing typical Indian clothes, but they looked like light-skinned Indians. They were carrying schoolbooks as though they had just been walking home from school. They were curious about me.

A doctor in a white coat came in. He also looked like an upper-class Indian. He was there to see how I was doing. I guessed he had been treating me.

For some reason, I said, “Who am I?” It was as if I wanted to find out what he knew about me.

I don’t remember anything that happened in the dream after that.

I woke up full of joy. Even though I had not been raptured, the joy of being lifted up to heaven and dropping all my earthly problems stayed with me for a long time. I feel it now as I type this.

I have died in dreams, and I have been raptured in dreams.

From dying, I know I’m not afraid of it. When I died in dreams, I really believed it was happening, so I know how I’ll react when my time comes.

If I were in a plane right now, and I knew it was going to hit the ground and kill me, I would not feel afraid. I would have an overwhelming sense of the gravity of the situation. I would feel very solemn. I would try to pray to make sure there was nothing to keep me out of heaven. I would be full of excitement, thinking about the fact that I was about to be in heaven with Yeshua. I would be glad my tour of duty here was over. I would look forward to having my curiosity about Yeshua and the afterlife answered.

Being raptured feels very similar.

When I say I’m not afraid of dying, I don’t mean I’m not afraid of what it takes to get there. I don’t want pain or mutilation. I don’t want to be burned. I’m just saying I’m not afraid to see this life end. In my dreams, I found myself in situations where I knew there was no hope of survival, and my end would be quick and painless. If I had been thrown into a tank full of hungry sharks, it would have been different.

I hope I have more dreams like this. I wish I knew how to make myself have more of them. Just thinking about them makes me feel great.

“Welcome to the Two Minutes Tim Cook Hate”

I got annoyed yesterday because I realized I had wasted $429 on a vacuum cleaner which is not as good as a $130 shop vac from Home Depot. Today I’m annoyed about refrigerators.

I had been hearing a lot about Samsung’s new policy of forcing refrigerator owners to allow fridges to display ads in their kitchens. You didn’t dream that last sentence; it’s actually happening.

Today I decided to take a look.

First, let me say that we have all been hoodwinked when it comes to fridges. We pay too much for refrigerators that do things 1) other than refrigerating 2) which are not actually very helpful.

When I was a kid, a fridge was a fridge, not a TV, video game console, telephone, camera, therapist, sex surrogate, French tutor, urologist, dog trainer, palm reader, thought leader, icemaker, or water fountain. Fridges had excellent mechanicals, they lasted 40 years if treated well, and they could be repaired easily.

In the 1960’s, things started to change. Clever marketers decided people wanted their fridges to make ice automatically and dispense cold water through the door. Over the ensuing decades, fridges got more complicated, the mechanicals started to fail after 10 years, and repair became less and less practical due to the use of cheap parts.

My grandparents built a beautiful home in about 1965. My grandmother put two deep freezes in the basement, along with the fridge from her old home. When she died in 2003, these appliances were still working, as were her Speed Queen washer and dryer.

I have seen modern fridges fail in under 5 years.

Consumers love shiny gadgets, so as technology improved, we started seeing truly ridiculous features in refrigerators.

Now you can talk to your refrigerator in America while you vacation in New Guinea. You can tell it what to do. You can make it show you video of its contents. If it gets lonely, it can text you.

They make fridges with external TV screens that allow you to see what you could see if you took your precious little hand and opened the doors.

I thought my old refrigerator was dying last year. Turned out it wasn’t true. We had been blocking the air from the freezer. Moving food around fixed it. Before we got it straightened out, we went to look at new fridges.

Spoiler alert: there aren’t any good refrigerators now. You think your Sub-Zero or Fisher & Paykel is going to last longer than a Frigidaire? It won’t. I talked to an appliance guy who was working on a dryer, trying to find out which brand of refrigerator was best. He was familiar with every brand. He said, “They’re all junk.” I asked if that included the boutique brands. Yes, it did.

Interesting side note: your new refrigerator is full of flammable gas. FLAMMABLE. Isn’t that nice? Good thing to know if you have a house fire. The greenies have panicked us through several iterations of refrigerant, probably needlessly, and now we have reached the point where they think it’s better to have a giant bomb in your kitchen than risk damage to the ozone layer, which seems to be doing very well.

We decided we did not want an icemaker or any type of dispenser. My current fridge has a door dispenser, and we almost never use it.

Here is the dirty little secret of all door water dispensers: they dispense warm water, not cold. At least compared to actual cold water you might keep in a jug inside the fridge. If “cold” means 5 degrees cooler than the tap water from your sink, then yes, they dispense cold water. To me, it means 35 degrees.

Icemakers fail frequently. They are the parts that go bad most often on refrigerators, and they aren’t very good. They have evolved to the point where they dispense ice in awkward semicircular chunks that block the flow of liquid to your mouth. Seems like the ice always smells, too. These machines make so much ice, it sits around absorbing odors for weeks or months. Are you a fisherman? Get ready for gin, tonic, and perch.

Another issue: icemakers and water dispensers kill cubic footage. They take up room. If you see a refrigerator advertised as 22 cubic feet, you have to deduct the volume of the water and ice apparatus, because the manufacturer won’t.

There’s more: these machines have unnecessary water filters. My water is just fine. The manufacturers have started putting digital chips on their filters so you get no ice and no water unless you use their OEM filters, and those can cost $50 to $80 each, although a filter probably costs Frigidaire $5. I saw a guy claim he needed to spend $250 per year to keep up. That’s like 70 cases of bottled water.

My fridge has a filter cartridge (non-OEM), and I never replace it. The water keeps flowing. Sometimes when I feel like it, I push the little button that says to reset the filter life, and the fridge obeys as though I had installed a new cartridge. It has no idea whether the filter is full. It apparently goes by time.

Making your own ice isn’t really that tough.

If I want a big, shiny stainless bottom-freezer fridge from one of the least-worthless brands, it will cost me at least $1500. That’s on sale. I can get a plain old white top-freezer fridge for $850. Nearly the same cubic footage. Maytag sells a 22-cubic-foot model for $1800 (regular price), and I can buy a 21-cubic-foot top-freezer fridge for half of that.

Am I being cheap? Well, sure, but the main thing is that I don’t have to be concerned about repairs to parts I don’t want to buy in the first place. I don’t like waiting for repairmen. I don’t like paying them. I don’t trust them. I don’t enjoy doing appliance repairs.

I could buy a top-freezer fridge and a standalone ice maker for less than the cost of a fancy fridge with no ice maker or dispenser.

The thing that really sticks in my craw, however, is not the ice and water problem. It’s the ad problem.

People bought Samsung refrigerators, thinking they were getting cool gadgets they actually owned, and then Samsung updated their firmware without permission and started showing them ads. That’s immoral. You don’t change a deal once you make it.

I hate unsolicited ads. When I see ads playing on a gas station pump, I face the other way until my tank is full. I have smart TV’s, and I do everything I can to disable their ad functions (which didn’t exist when I bought them). I block and report all spam emails. I put a spam filter on this blog. I pay for Youtube Premium because it kills ads. I quit watching Amazon videos for multiple reasons, and one was that they swindled me on ads. They sold me Prime with the promise that I would see no ads, and then they started showing me ads anyway.

Call me spoiled, but I would rather watch nothing than watch a really good show interrupted by the same ad 30 times.

Video ads are pathetic these days. Some shows can’t get a lot of sponsors, so they run the same three sponsors’ ads over and over. They also increase the frequency of ads as the shows progress. You get a short interruption every 8 minutes toward the beginning, then you get hooked, and then you get a longer interruption, featuring the same ads, every two minutes until the show is over.

It’s also common for video providers to lock up ads while you look at other browser tabs. You move to a new tab while the ad is running, hoping to avoid it, and when you go back, the ad resumes at exactly the same point where you abandoned it.

If I don’t want to buy your silly product during the first three seconds of the ad, I still won’t want to buy it after being forced to see the other 27 or 157 seconds.

I quit watching secular entertainment, so I suffer much less than I used to. I still watch videos related to my interests.

I can’t imagine the misery of going through the work of minimizing the ads in my life and then having them forced on me, on a big screen, in my kitchen.

Do they have sound? Can you shut it off? I certainly hope they default to silence, but I’ll bet they don’t.

The ad-forcing TV’s don’t cost less than the ones that have no screens. They cost more. So where is the ad revenue going? To Samsung, of course. Samsung is subjecting you to torment and taking money for it. You get nothing for your service.

You’re like a prisoner on a chain gang, working for 50 cents per hour while the state charges private land owners for your services. Except you don’t get the 50 cents.

If Samsung put a billboard in my yard, they would have to pay me, not themselves. Common sense?

Samsung fridges have cameras inside them. I’m not kidding. I’m going to guess they film your food and send you ads based on what you eat. They sell the information to other jerks.

I hope some prankster starts putting dummy grenades and pipe bombs in his Samsung fridge.

Samsung says the ads are “curated.” This is a nonsense term intended to make products seem special and consumers feel important. It just means someone chose the ads. This is true of all ads. Also, Samsung’s “curator” is a computer that belongs to Samsung. It’s not a human being. “Curated” means “chosen to appeal to you based on information we shouldn’t have, and provided by predatory corporations.”

It’s odd to use the term “curated” to apply to products which are…advertisements. Ordinarily, marketers use it to apply to things we like and want, not things we hate. Assortments of skin care products. Music playlists.

“We hope you’re enjoying your stay at the Tower of London. Next in our series of curated experiences for valued subjects, the iron muzzle with spikes on the inside!”

Samsung lies and says the ads are intended to benefit you. It’s all about you. For the children. So you can live your best life. Because we are stronger together. And it takes a village. Love trumps hate. Coexist.

If you’re going to lie, at least try to come up with lies that would fool a two-year-old. The lies make this worse, not better.

It will get worse. If our government wanted to do anything about it, they would have done it by now. Our laws are made by people lobbyists pay for service, lobbyists have lots of money, and you can’t expect the same people who take bribes to ban bribes.

Here’s a critical video about Samsung’s disgusting actions. Here is the height of irony: the video was clearly made using AI. AI will defend you against creeping tech tyranny. Yeah. That will happen.

Why are Man Tools Always Better Than Girl Tools?

I’m sitting here today, wondering if I’m stupid.

Something like 18 years ago, I bought a Ridgid shop vac. It looks like it has leprosy. The surface of the plastic case is badly faded. I don’t know what caused this. Apparently, this particular plastic fades with time, and the texture roughens.

This is the only thing wrong with it.

I have used it on machining chips, all sorts of metal debris, sawdust, wood chips, leaves, dirt, bugs, and wet spills. I have used it as a spot cleaner on furniture, wetting the fabric with window cleaner and then sucking it out. I have failed to clean the filter for years on end. Nothing bothers it.

It is reasonable to expect this vacuum to continue working for at least another 30 years without repairs.

You can buy a similar Ridgid for under $130.

Move forward to September of 2022.

I thought I should man up, spend serious money, and get a real house vacuum cleaner. I already had an Electrolux, and it was okay, but the cord rewind mechanism was broken, somehow the main floor attachment had gotten lost, and it was a canister vacuum I had to drag around. I wanted an upright.

The Electrolux had its good points. It was very quiet. It was light. It seemed to do an okay job. But I had to drag it, and Electrolux is extremely feeble when it comes to parts. I had to buy a Chinese floor attachment. Electrolux discontinued the cord retractor, which is a part that fails frequently.

I bought a Shark upright for the low, low sale price of $429.

How can a vacuum cleaner cost $429? That’s a great question. A motor and a cheap body, all made in Asia. You can get a canister vacuum from another respected manufacturer for around $120, so what’s up with Shark?

It’s supposed to have unusually powerful suction. I’ll give it that. It does. Other than that, it’s just bells and whistles, like the motor that speeds up when the vacuum sees more dirt in front of it. Personally, I want my vacuum to run fast all the time. I am offended by products that charge me extra to save energy, unless they save me serious money.

Do you hate it when your TV turns itself off when you leave the room? Me, too.

Like just about everything these days, the Shark came with a proprietary part which has to be replaced regularly. It’s a fragrance cartridge. You put it in the base, and until it runs out of irritating chemicals, it makes your house smell like the perfume counter at Target. Shark charges $13 each, and you have to buy two at a time. Market price for knockoffs: two dollars and change.

The only reason I keep the original cartridge in my machine is to block the hole it fits in. I’m afraid leaving it open will kill the suction. I don’t care about running out of perfume.

I also have a Shark cordless upright, which I will defend. It works very well for what it is, and it’s convenient. It’s no match for a powerful vacuum, but it handles most types of dirt with acceptable success.

The Sharks work pretty well. The corded job sucks like crazy, and the cordless one is probably stronger than my Electrolux. They both choke on anything bigger than 3/4″, though, and wet spills will ruin them.

When a Shark chokes, you have to take the filthy floor part apart. Lovely experience.

Move forward to 2025.

Louis Rossmann is one of my favorite Youtubers. He runs a big electronics repair business in Texas. He used to operate in New York City, but he left because he couldn’t take it any more. New York treats business owners like criminals.

Now that I think about it, it treats criminals like business owners.

Rossmann is big in the right-to-repair movement. He got his start while servicing Apple products.

Apple is one of the most ruthless, immoral, greedy, dishonest companies on Earth. Apple will not give repairmen schematics and OEM parts, and it cheats customers who need repairs.

Apple has a history of cheating us silly, not just with inflated initial costs, but with dishonest repair bills. If you take your Apple product to an Apple repair center with a problem that can be fixed with a cheap part or a cleaning, there is a good chance they will lie to you and tell you to buy a new product.

Forcing people to buy new products is not a small wrong. It’s a big deal when a repair that should cost $35 turns into a $1500 purchase. We’re not all as rich as Tim Cook.

Rossmann saw the replacement swindle more than once, and he was frustrated because he had to find technical documents through back channels. He also had to buy real Apple parts this way, and he had to use questionable aftermarket parts in some repairs.

Now he puts out video after video about RTR, and he goes after companies other than Apple. One of his big beefs right now concerns unwanted ads. Example: Samsung just started forcing refrigerator owners to put up with ads on their fridge doors. They bought the fridges with no ads, Samsung updated the software without consulting them, and now they get annoying commercials while trying to get bologna for sandwiches.

He’s mad at Shark right now because a customer needed new wheels for a 6-month-old machine, and Shark construed its own warranty, which they try to tell us is generous, to exclude just about everything except the motor.

In a recent video, Rossman told the world about his home vacuum: a Ridgid shop vac.

It’s cheap. It’s powerful. You can get attachments to make it work indoors like a home vacuum. It can suck up just about anything, wet or dry. It has a huge capacity.

Need a part? Ridgid will sell it to you. They have a big selection of parts on their site, and Home Depot stocks a lot of parts.

I ruled out shop vacs for indoor use a long time ago, assuming they had to be unsuitable. I guess I was wrong.

Watching Rossman, I tried to rationalize my spending. I thought, “Well, it won’t work on floors. The primitive floor things on my two shop vacs are made for things like garages.” No; you can buy a floor attachment which will actually work. It’s simple and cheap, and it won’t give you a pretty LED light show, but it does work.

I kept trying to defend my expenditures. I said, “It won’t filter the air nearly as well as a Shark. It has no HEPA filter.”

There are problems with that notion.

1. Houses and buildings used to get very clean without HEPA filters. I think the initialism “HEPA” is just a tool to make you feel bad about not spending more money, unless you have some kind of freak allergy. You probably shouldn’t breathe dust while sanding drywall, but the stuff that collects on your exercise bike will not send you to the ER.

2. Ridgid sells HEPA filters for their vacuums.

The video made me think about wet spills.

I have a baby. He poops. He throws up. He spills stuff. My $429 Shark will not help me with any of that.

I have two Rug Doctor shampoo machines. I have the big one for floors and the little one for furniture and stairs. I got them years ago when I was looking after my dad. He spilled stuff. I guess I have $350 invested in these machines.

If I wanted to, I could spray cleaning solution on big carpet spills, suck it out with a Ridgid, and get things just as clean as the Rug Doctors would. I could do this for furniture and stairs, too.

Using a Rug Doctor is unpleasant. You have to fill a clean-fluid tank and then remove and clean out a dirty-fluid tank. Your hands get involved with the filth way too much. With a shop vac, you just carry it outside, pull the lid, dump the water, and put the lid back on.

Here is the thought rolling around in my head: while the big Rug Doctor is superior for shampooing wall-to-wall carpet, a shop vac is better for every other kind of spill.

If I cared enough, I could use a pump sprayer to apply fluid to rugs and then suck it out with a shop vac. Something to consider.

You can’t clean a dirty carpet with a Rug Doctor until you vacuum it. I know this, because I had to take a Rug Doctor apart to remove dog hair after a friend abused it. A shop vac loves dog hair. And nails. And rocks.

The big Rug Doctor is designed to break down. It uses a water pump to shoot cleaning solution onto rugs. The pump is not designed to resist corrosion well. Every so often, the pumps quit, and they have to be replaced. This is a nightmare job. I did it recently.

The little Rug Doctor probably has the same problem. I am waiting for it. If it happens, I’ll probably take it to the dump.

It appears to be a machine with no legimitate reason to exist.

I don’t think a Ridgid cordless can replace a Shark cordless. I have a really good Ridgid cordless I got for sucking goo out of air conditioners. You have to carry it like a suitcase. The suction doesn’t seem all that impressive. Maybe I’m wrong, though.

Shop vacs are incredibly loud, so that’s a problem, but it’s nothing earmuffs can’t fix.

It looks like I spent hundreds of dollars buying myself unnecessary problems. Something to think about for the future.

MORE

I checked, and it appears the Ridgid WD0319 cordless shop vac sucks considerably harder than a cordless Shark Stratos and runs a lot longer on one charge. It lacks motorized rollers and so on, however, and the Shark may seal to rugs better.

I doubt the business about the Shark sealing better, since you can get a rug attachment for a Ridgid.

Tallow Facts for the Callow

Now that I’ve found a good source of affordable beef fat for the deep fryer, I am learning more about french fries.

Interesting fact: while most people think the “french” in “french fries” comes from Belgium, where American soldiers encountered fries and thought they were eating them in France, it may be that the “french” actually refers to a “french cut,” which means “julienned.”

This makes sense to me, since Americans are not really stupid enough to think Belgium is France.

Belgium is generally considered to be the top nation for fry excellence. They have all sorts of shops and stands selling thick fries.

There is a ton of fry folklore out there, and I have fallen for most of it at one time or another. I am here to post the current state of my knowledge.

I’ll list myths and then debunk them. Hopefully, I will not have to come back in a month and debunk the debunking.

1. You have to use Dutch Bintje potatoes for fries. If this were true, there would be no great American french fries, but there are. Maybe Bintje potatoes are better, but you can’t have them, so what difference does it make? The standard US potato is the russet. I have seen Kennebec potatoes recommended, as well as Yukon Golds.

2. You must rinse or soak your fries before frying them. The big problem with this myth is the existence of many Youtube videos featuring professional Belgian fry fryers who don’t rinse or soak fries. Belgium has factories that do nothing but cut potatoes into fries and put them in bags. Fry cooks dump the bags right into fryers. Rinsing and soaking aren’t necessary. I read about an exception for Yukon Golds, which need a rinse to prevent them from getting gummy.

3. Good fries should be cooked twice (not necessarily a myth, although there are dissenters), and you have to refrigerate or even freeze them between sessions. Belgians don’t use refrigeration. They cook fries at around 300° until the appearance gets dull, and then they dump them on shelves near their fryers. Then they fry them again at a higher temperature.

4. Plant-based oils are good for making fries. They’re just not. This absurd notion has been forced on us by vegans and other woke (i.e. mentally ill) people whose biases have nothing to do with making good food. Animal fat makes fries taste better, and it gives them more crunch. I know Five Guys uses peanut oil, and people think they know what they’re doing, but their fries would be better if they used the correct type of fat.

Five Guys is a business, so they want to maximize profits. I dont’ care about that. If Five Guys goes to real fat, the cost will go up a little, and whatever self-righteous vegans are currently buying their fries will stop. I think this is why they use cheap oil.

Food chains claim they use bad plant oils because of health concerns. Yeah. That’s why they serve McFlurries, Frostys, McMuffins, double cheeseburgers, and 50 kinds of sugar drinks. It’s why Culver’s serves fried cheese. Thanks for looking out for us, boys.

Could a lie be more obvious?

“We’re still running a whorehouse, but now every room comes with a Gideon Bible!”

Some restaurants are going back to beef fat now; notably Steak ‘n’ Shake, Outback, and Popeyes.

I now have 50 pounds of beef fat, which is the absolute best affordable frying medium. I paid about $1.40 per pound. I am getting ready to dump the peanut oil from my deep fryer, fill it with beef fat, and live the dream.

I came up with a plan, based on numerous sources. It’s for fat Belgian-style fries around 3/8″ thick. I generally like thinner fries, but I’m going to give the big ones a shot.

1. Cut russet potatoes to size, leaving the skins on.

2. Blanch at 300° until the shine goes away.

3. Rest for 45 minutes. I’ll probably just lift the fryer basket out of the fat and let it sit atop the fryer.

4. Fry at 350° until done. Belgians say the fries will “sing” at this point, meaning the frying noise takes on a higher pitch. I have also noticed that their fries float.

My feeling is that I should do what Belgians do and avoid doing what they don’t do.

The sad thing is that there are “authentic” Belgian fry recipes out there that tell people to soak or rinse potatoes. Why lie like that? People are really something.

If you don’t want to take the trouble of cutting up potatoes and frying them twice, I have good news. I learned that frozen fries are generally blanched before packing. I’ve tried some, and I found that Great Value crinkle-cut fries from Walmart are better than Ore-Ida fries that cost more. If you use Great Value fries, you’re really frying twice, and you’re also satisfying the characters who claim fries need to be frozen.

I won’t say Walmart fries are the best fries around, but they’re exactly like just about all the crinkle-cut fries you’ve ever enjoyed, and they save you some work.

Maybe I’ll get around to making fries later in the week.

I Ham Almost Finished

The final contestant in my country ham tournament of champions came yesterday, and I tried it this morning: Benton’s, from Tennessee.

I received 4 center slices with the bones removed. They were packed in vacuum bags. They came with directions that said to fry them for no more than 30 seconds on a side. You really need to have some grease standing by to get away with that. You need grease to provide thermal contact between the ham and the pan.

I fried a slice without water or grease, and then I used water to deglaze the pan and make a little red eye gravy. Then my wife and I tried the ham.

The bad: it’s salty. Somewhere between Newsom’s, which is fine, and Broadbent’s, which is too salty right out of the box. The slices were too thin at around 5/32″. It’s just a wee bit tough.

The good: classic country ham flavor, although not as pronounced as Newsom’s.

If I were going to go with Benton’s, I would buy a whole ham, slice it thicker, soak the slices for two days, and bag and freeze it. That would kill the excess salt and add moisture. I don’t think it would produce the nice texture Newsom’s has, however.

Maybe Benton’s would agree to sell thicker ham slices. That would be a good deal, because a sliced ham is only ten dollars more than an intact ham.

Benton’s says its hams are 9-10 months old on average, so call it 9. They sell older hams, too. Newsom’s starts at one year, which may explain a lot.

Curing is what makes a ham safe to eat. It takes a few weeks. After that, you can stick a ham in your unrefrigerated closet for a year without problems. It would continue to age and improve, as long as you didn’t overdo it. As I have said before, this could be a good way to avoid Newsom’s high prices and still get the same experience.

Benton’s has an interesting option: deboned hams that have not been sliced. I can get this for $133, which is not bad. They include the bones and trimmed bits, which is very important, because they are useful in soups and greens.

Yesterday, I used the bones from my Newsom’s ham to make Great Northern beans, and the result was glorious. I got rid of some of my unwanted Broadbent’s slices by using them in collard greens, and I made cornbread with a little bit of the grease from the beans. Food doesn’t get much better.

As I have often said, the price of ingredients has nothing to do with the pleasure food gives you. A really good pot of beans with cornbread on the side is as good as nearly anything, anywhere.

The beans cost me $3.98. The onions ran around $1.50.

The ham was so salty, I didn’t have to add salt to either dish.

I had some Oberholtzer’s sorghum syrup from Liberty, Kentucky, and I put it on buttered cornbread. You really have to try this combination to understand how good it is.

My cousin tells me my aunt now recommends Townsend’s sorghum, but they charge so much for shipping, I am not planning to try it. A Tennessee company called Muddy Pond will send you 64 ounces for $48, shipping included. That’s interesting.

It looks like my best sorghum deal is about twice as expensive as my best maple syrup deal, unless you count the $24 half-gallon of maple syrup I got at Rural King. That was an amazing buy.

Ronni Lundy, who wrote a very authentic Appalachian cookbook, recommends Oberholtzer’s and Muddy Pond. I trust her judgment. I’m going to try some Muddy Pond, since I am low on Oberholtzer’s.

I don’t see why it shouldn’t be possible for anyone with sorghum cane to make good syrup. You just boil the juice and bottle it.

Current tournament rankings: 1. Newsom’s, 2. Meacham, 3. Penn, 4. Benton’s. Broadbent’s is disqualified because I felt it was in a lower tier even after two tries.

It’s hard to be certain about the 1-2 and 3-4 rankings. They’re close, and besides, country hams are not completely consistent, so I can’t be sure I got hams that represent their companies perfectly.

I’m pretty sure Broadbent’s is not for me.

When I used to order Gatton Farms and Scott hams, things were simple. I got pretty much what I wanted.

The more I look at country ham, the more I think I should try curing one. It just has to survive a few weeks in my fermenting fridge. After that, I can put it anywhere.

The idea of buying a relatively cheap ham, meaning one that isn’t aged much, and letting it age in my laundry room is also tempting.

I guess I could even take a slice of Newsom’s ham and rub the rind on a new ham to transfer the correct mold.

Anyway, I’m nearly done with the ham tournament. I just have to try all the winners at one sitting.

I’m looking forward to getting it over with. When you eat a lot of country ham, the salt makes you retain water, and it wants to come out at 2 a.m. And 3 a.m. And 4 a.m.

Mild but Tasty

My country ham tournament of champions continues.

I have tried hams from Newsom’s, Meacham, Broadbent’s, and, today, Penn.

Newsom’s is just about perfect. I wish it were not. It’s expensive.

Meacham is very good, but it has a little bit of unique flavor that is not exactly like the hams I ate as a kid. It’s hard to say whether Newsom’s or Meacham is better.

Broadbent’s hams are very salty. The flavor is just okay. I received two packages. The first slices were too tough, salty, and lacking in flavor for me. The second bunch were not as tough or salty, but they were still saltier and tougher than I would have liked, so Broadbent’s is out.

A package from Penn Country Hams arrived. I ordered a half ham. What I really got was between three and four pounds of big boneless slices in vacuum bag inside an insulating bag with one of those synthetic ice pack things in it.

The meat was already warm, but they tried.

I ate plenty of country ham when I was young, and I believe I know what a quintessential Kentucky ham tastes like. As an adult, I used to get them from outfits named Gatton Farms and Scott Hams, and they were pretty much like the hams my grandmother and great uncle cured. That’s the kind of ham I want. The best? That’s subject to debate. It’s what I like. It’s what my grandmother and her brother liked. It’s good.

When I cut the bag open, the ham gave off kind of a barnyard smell. Some hams are like that. It’s almost like manure. In some cases, it’s a great deal like manure. I won’t eat Smithfield-brand hams because the manure smell is about all you get.

It also smelled sort of like peanuts.

A sticker on the bag says “8 Months Old.”

I fried a Penn slice. I didn’t bother with water or bacon grease.

This ham is pretty tender for country ham. It also has a fair amount of fat, although I would say Newsom’s and Meacham probably have more.

Newsom’s falls apart in your mouth like aged steak. I like that. This ham was easy to chew, but it was not the same.

On the salt scale, I would say it’s similar to Newsom’s. Just fine.

The flavor is milder than Newsom’s and Meacham. A good ham has an acidic umami flavor nothing else seems to have. Newsom’s hams nail it. Meacham is close. The Penn slice had less of it.

The ham had a peanutty aftertaste my wife and I both noticed.

I believe this would be a great ham for someone who is scared of real country ham. It’s the real thing, but the move from city ham to this ham is a little less jarring than it would be for other hams.

The verdict: delicious, but not quite what I’m looking for. Newsom’s is a bullseye. Meacham is close, and I think the quality is the same, but it also has that signature Meacham scent. Not bad, but not quite what I’m used to. I’m not just looking for great ham. I’m looking for nostalgia.

This is excellent ham. Eating it is not exactly a hardship. I won’t buy it again, though, because Newsom’s and Meacham are closer to what I want.

Your Typical American Way of Life is Destroying You

The reason we should have continued the unconstitutional banning of open carry in Florida is that we knew that if the ban were dropped, there would be chaos in the streets caused by people carrying guns openly and legally.

This is what millions of leftists told us, including leftists in open-carry states like Washington, Wisconsin, and Oregon, where no such chaos has ever developed.

It has been over two weeks since the first police departments stopped enforcing the carry ban, and here’s a comprehensive list of all the shocking incidents in which nuts used open carry to create public disturbances:

In case you weren’t paying attention, here is the list again:

Even I was overly pessimistic. I figured surely I would see a few patriots carrying openly during the first days of carry freedom, but it didn’t happen.

On the down side, the most combative, irritable element of the 2A population segment is now insisting open carry is now legal in Florida’s “prohibited places,” meaning schools, courthouses and so on.

They have a point. The law listing these places expressly refers to concealed carry permit holders, and it doesn’t even say there is a ban. It says the law doesn’t allow permit holders to carry openly or concealed in these places, and that’s not the same thing as banning it.

Weirdly, the part about open carry only mentions pistols, so I guess the door is open for some brave soul to go to a police station with a rifle on a sling.

Another interesting wrinkle: federal law also creates prohibited places, and Florida can’t override the federal ban. A federal court in a different part of the country recently held that the ban in post offices was unconstitutional, but given the way federal law is changing, I doubt that will help anyone in Florida right away.

My understanding (from not reading the opinion) is that the relevant case struck down all “federal facility” bans. Does that include military bases? You have to wonder. Soldiers can’t carry guns, but I can?

The post office ban is stupid. Nobody robs post offices. Granted, given past behavior, it might be a good idea to disarm employees preemptively, but most of the rest of us have the good sense to commit our crimes in places like banks, trailer parks, and liquor stores.

Where carrying weapons is legal.

It’s also illegal to carry a gun into an Amtrak station. First of all, who goes into an Amtrak station? Second, who robs trains? Jesse James is dead, people. “Hands up! Give me all your stale, half-eaten dinner rolls and empty Dasani bottles!”

Here’s a great law: although you can wander around in a national park armed (because many people find guns helpful when hunting) if you have to relieve yourself, you have to go behind a tree, because going into a mens’ room with a gun is a felony.

You can always leave your gun outside and hope kids don’t pick it up.

Squat on footpath so people step in it: model citizen. Sit on toilet behind locked door: felony.

All federal buildings in national parks are off-limits. I guess a lot of thought went into that law.

It’s like they just said, “We’re still stinging from the passage of the Bill of Rights, and here’s a chance to get even!”

In news which is less irrelevant to me, I keep getting wonderful revelation.

God has been teaching me a lot about holiness. I believe that most people think “holiness” means standing around with a stupid grin on your face, holding two fingers in the air and glowing like a giant lightning bug. Believe it or not, that is wrong. It just means a state of separation and dedication to God. It means you reject the world’s culture and adopt the culture of heaven, because you choose to belong to God’s family.

I used to have the feeling that holiness meant giving up everything that is enjoyable for the purpose of scoring points to get me into heaven. That is not correct, either.

Holiness removes evil spirits and curses from your life, reducing your problems and your suffering. It brings you closer to God and other Christians, increasing your blessings and making you safer.

Satan has salted our culture with poison to make us weak and corrupt and open holes so demons can enter us.

Secular entertainment, including sports, is a real problem. Even seemingly-innocent shows and songs lead to captivity. Entertainment teaches us that fornication, which God says is abomination, is fine. It tells us normal people don’t pray or acknowledge Yeshua during their daily lives. It endorses perversion and cruelty. It glamorizes violence. It promotes drug use, including the use of steroids. Those big, buff actors you’re used to seeing, who used to look like Rob Schneider, didn’t get that way from eating chicken, broccoli, and rice for two months. Wake up.

Dwayne Johnson is on steroids. Face it. Well, he was. Now he’s down about 50 pounds. He reached the age where his doctor told him to knock it off, but he continues to lie and say he didn’t take anything. He has blocked arteries, and steroids cause that.

Shia Leboeuf admits he used steroids; he went from 165 to 220 to 165. Alan Ritchson uses drugs. All sorts of movie henchmen and goons use steroids.

Arnold Schwarzenegger. Dolph Lundgren. Mickey Rourke. Dave Bautista. Even Charlie Sheen and Suzanne Somers used PED’s.

Hugh Jackman definitely used drugs to play Wolverine. He looked better at 55 than anyone reading this blog will ever look at 30 with the best regimen imaginable and no drugs.

People are calling the Rock “the pebble” now. He looks thin, like the new, de-juiced Dave Bautista. He claims he lost weight to play a role, but he’s not going to bulk up again, unless he does it briefly to “debunk” the steroid stories. He’s not going back to long-term juicing, because it could kill him.

Even reality-TV (oxymoron) personalities use drugs. Celebrity chef Robert Irvine’s biceps suddenly fell off a year or two ago. Seems like the late fifties are the magical years when every user’s doctor sits him down.

Actors are telling our kids they can have superhuman physiques by eating chicken and exercising a lot. Then kids find out it’s not true, and while they’re at the gym, they start talking to other kids who look like Ronnie Coleman, and then they start taking drugs.

Entertainment promotes torture. It really does. Goody-goody Tom Hanks tortured a suspect in a lame cop movie. Arnold Schwarzenegger tortured people. Kiefer Sutherland. Josh Brolin. Benicio del Toro. Kathleen Turner. Tommy Lee Jones. Lots of movies and shows feature torture scenes, and we’re supposed to feel good about it because it’s the good guys doing the torturing. The movies make torture, which should turn our stomachs and give us nightmares, satisfying. Just like Stanley Kubrick made rape seem funny and sexy.

Liberal actors are the best gun salesmen there are, after Barack Obama. We watch movies and then go to gun stores and buy the guns the actors held. We even buy stupid guns like the obsolete rifle Tom Selleck used in Quigley Down Under, a movie which sounds like it was named after a disease.

We decorate our guns with a skull logo that was used in Punisher movies. We buy “tactical” clothes actors wear, and we wear them to gun ranges.

You can buy a bobbed lever-action rifle like the one John Wayne used. Wayne was a draft-dodger real soldiers booed during World War II, and he never saved a town from a brutal rancher, but we still like that Italian-made tribute rifle.

It’s a third-rate weapon. Low capacity, low velocity, relatively inaccurate, and slow to cycle. Doesn’t matter.

Sensible gun owners use guns to hunt and to defend life. They teach others to be responsible and humane. Gun owners under the influence of Hollywood are participating in a dangerous form of demon cosplay. They secretly hope for a chance to put their toys and skills to the test on human beings.

Name something bad. Entertainment promotes it successfully. Witchcraft. Socialism. Feminism. Stealing. The murder of the unborn.

PG-rated entertainment and even news sites are gateways to porn compulsions. I could go on about other things entertainment leads to, and I have, in other posts.

Holiness also means dropping people who pull you away from God.

The word says we should not be unequally yoked. People think this is just about marriage. It’s not. It’s about everything. Friendship. Business. Everything.

A friend of mine started a business with some nominal Christians who were, frankly, creeps. I knew it was a bad idea. He thought it would make him rich. He made excuses for them. He gave the business a name that made it sound like it had something to do with God.

His partners undermined him. They let employees walk on him. They overruled his good ideas. They pretty much killed the business. They finally drove him out. He had wasted years of his life.

Now he’s trying his hand at construction, which is something he knew nothing about three years ago. He had a nominal-Christian buddy who was going to teach him everything.

The buddy connected him with irresponsible trash typical of the subcontractor breed. He let him get into pickles that caused great expense and delay. A house that was supposed to be built in a few months is now in its third year, and it’s a mess. I don’t think anyone will buy it unless they want to raze it and use the lot. He should have built and sold several houses by now. He hasn’t seen a dollar in profit.

Say you take three years to build a house, you spend $100,000, and your profit is $150,000. Sounds like you won, but you were supposed to build 5 houses during that time and make $1,000,000 in profit.

When I worked with unbelievers and nominal Christians, they sabotaged and blackballed me right and left. My dad’s partner cheated me. His other partner got us to buy a new building and then got suspended for doing drugs and sleeping with strippers. My first boss in the field of law tried to cheat me and then broke his promise to give me a permanent job. A friend he recommended me to cheated me. When I was a writer, editors gave other people things they promised me. My own family cheats me on my inheritance.

I even got demoted while working in a bar, so a thief could take my place.

When you work with dark-siders, they abuse you, and they also pressure you to do things the devil’s way. You shouldn’t get involved with them in the first place.

If you’re letting demons in with things that seem innocent, it will lead to bondages that clearly are not innocent. Netflix will lead to porn and fornication. News sites can lead to rage. Satan’s kingdom is like a nail. If you let the small, sharp end in, the big fat end will follow.

Demons don’t just do one thing. A spirit that causes anger may also cause health problems. A spirit of pornography may curse your finances. Procrastination can cause high blood pressure because of stress. You won’t necessarily know which ungodly behaviors cause which problems.

Demons are like squatters. Have you noticed how squatters behave? They’re under the influence of demons. They don’t just occupy homes. They tear them up, for no reason. They rip out walls and break windows, even though they live in the houses. To a demon, your body is a house that belongs to someone else.

If you give up evil people and secular entertainment (including sports), and you minimize your exposure to the news, you and your family will be safe. Fewer demons will be able to get at you. Your exposure to troublesome people will be diminished. God will be closer to you. Things will get better, even as they get worse for others.

This is what holiness really means.

This should be obvious, but preachers don’t teach it. Most of them just want your money or a nice secure job. They don’t receive revelation. No one taught them, either. I had to learn these things directly from God because preachers were nothing but parasites to me.

My involvement with preachers was unequal yoking. Think about that. The thing that was supposed to help me.

No wonder God hates bad preachers so much.

My son will hear good things from me. I will introduce him to the Holy Spirit, and after that, if my son chooses, the Holy Spirit will finish teaching him and correct mistakes I’ve made.

This will be helpful to you if you give it a try. I’ve put it out there. I can’t do much more.

Is That a City Burning Over There on the Horizon?

I got nothing done today, and I’m loving it. Instead of painting the kitchen or putting a new oil seal in the tractor’s front axle, I put the family in the car, and we went for lunch and supplies.

The weather is bearable now. The heat has abated, and the rains have tapered off. It’s beautiful here. Even better, we have a new Captain D’s and a Restaurant Depot.

Captain D’s is basically the same as Long John Silver’s. Fish fried in near-tempura batter, served with fries. In other words, fish and chips.

The only local LJ’s is a long way off, and it seems to be making long, slow circles around the drain, so I was very happy when Captain D’s came to town.

Restaurant Depot is a food service company. A grocery store for restaurants. They sell big packages of restaurant-grade food at wholesale prices.

Restaurant Depot is a godsend if you want to make real pizza. They have every flour known to humanity, they carry Stanislaus and Escalon tomato products, and they sell decent mozzarella, which is more than you can say for nearly all grocery stores.

You’re not supposed to shop at Restaurant Depot unless you run a business, but they will let you in for a day if you’re a mere mortal. You won’t have access to alcohol, and there are other perks you won’t get, but you can buy most products at the same prices chefs pay.

Yesterday I found out anyone with a federal EIN could get a Restaurant Depot card, so I decided I needed to become a member. I took care of that today. I feel superior to other people now.

Captain D’s was shocking. Most restaurants here are dirty, and the employees tend to be incompetent. Captain D’s was spotless. The staff was well-groomed, courteous, and efficient. The food was exactly what it was supposed to be. No excuses. The tartar sauce and ketchup were a little subpar, but you’re supposed to use malt vinegar at Captain D’s.

I guess some people would make fun of me for getting excited about fast food, but then the world is full of idiots. A really good burger with fries is just as good as the black cod at Nobu or the pate at Picasso. It’s just a different cuisine.

Any restaurant that does a top-notch job providing tasty food is a good restaurant, and a really good Five Guys is better than a mediocre haute cuisine joint.

I like restaurateurs that do a great job, whether they serve wagyu or food-truck tacos.

Captain D’s is the Chick-fil-A of fish and chips.

Yesterday I ate at a restaurant that put canned green peppers and canned onions on a pizza, so I was ready for some redemption.

I love Restaurant Depot. They really cut through the grocery-store BS.

Huge bag of shelled pistachios: $8. Gallon can of pomace oil: $17. Good mozzarella: $2 per pound.

Best of all for today: 50 pounds of beef tallow for $68. This is about what 40 pounds of peanut oil cost at the grocery, and peanut oil is vastly inferior.

Beef tallow makes crisper fries that taste much better, and that’s why McDonald’s used to use it. It’s perfect for frying chicken, which is why KFC used it for decades before women and vegetarians made them cave in and use rape oil.

I looked at tallow last year, and I saw prices like $150. I was going to spring for it eventually. I like $68 much better, and at Restaurant Depot, I get an extra 10 pounds for the kitchen or my wife’s skin care. Or my baby’s butt.

This is great.

It seems unfair for life to be this sweet while everyone else is gearing up for an unnecessary civil war.

How Can This be a Good Deal for God?

I had a disturbing revelation during the night.

I often wake up at night and spend hours praying. I can’t get back to sleep. God confronts me with things about myself that need to be corrected. Sometimes it’s very unpleasant, but I look forward to it, because I want to be right. That’s just common sense. No one wants to continue being wrong and causing problems for himself and others.

Well. Many people do, actually. Most, I suppose.

Last night, I thought about the blood of Yeshua.

I have the cutest baby son you could ever hope to meet. He is funny. He adores his parents. He loves being hugged and played with. He puts his lips on us and makes hilarious noises. He tries to be a good boy; we can tell by watching him.

A large amount of our time is devoted to showing him love. He gets squeezed and kissed all day. I don’t know how we could love him more. The thought of anything bad happening to him is unbearable to me.

Abraham loved his son, too, and like me, he waited a long time for him. His rebellious wife was disobedient to God and persuaded him to have a troublesome son by a concubine, but the son of promise came later.

God told him to hold his beautiful, cherished son down, slit his throat, and watch him die. Abraham tried to do it, although his heart must have been bursting inside him.

Yahweh went farther than Abraham.

He had one son. Only one. He was perfect. He was full of love. He adored his father. He loved his earthly father. He was completely innocent, even in his thirties. Then God had him tortured to death, slowly, so his blood could be used to wash his enemies.

God loved his enemies–us–so much, he put himself and his son through that.

I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t cut the tip of my son’s finger. I would much rather cut myself. If he were killed, and someone collected his blood, I wouldn’t be able to stand the sight of it. I would want to die.

Here I am, however, continually claiming to be washed in the blood of God’s son, whom God loves more than I love mine.

That is really something. It shows what a serious thing it is when we claim the blood. It also shows how precious it is. We should never speak about it carelessly. It’s a person’s blood, taken by violence for which we are responsible, provided to us by that person’s adoring father.

I kept hearing a phrase during the night: “I am expensive.”

That is putting it very mildly. Imagine how expensive I am, if God traded the life, flesh, and blood of his only son so he could have me. It’s incomprehensible.

God calls his human children a pearl of great price, worth everything he has. He is serious. He paid all he had.

You can be expensive, too, if you want.

In other news, I am done with The Last Reformation. It seems to have deteriorated consistently over the last few years. It’s all Torben this and TLR doctrine that. It’s not what it used to be.

If you look at TLR’s video history, you will see that they used to heal and baptize people. Now, the focus has shifted. “Go on trips with us.” Explanations of doctrine that may be flawed. Complaints about Torben’s enemies and his imprisonment and deportation.

Here’s something important to know: anyone who lacks current testimony and revelation is having problems in his relationship with God. God never stops teaching us and doing remarkable things in our lives.

A lack of testimony is one of the hallmarks of a dead ministry. When you go to a typical church, the preacher gives testimony, but it’s not his. It may be the testimony of people he read about recently. It may be made-up testimony other preachers have been passing around, not knowing it’s fiction. In what may be the worst cases, it may be the testimony of people who lived 2,000 years ago.

Properly, “testimony” means “eyewitness testimony.” If you share your buddy’s testimony, it’s hearsay. It wouldn’t be admissible in a court of law. You’re not a witness. You’re just someone who heard a story.

TLR’s videos used to be full of evidence of the activity of God. Healing and deliverance, mainly. This isn’t true any more. It’s mostly talk, advertising, and teaching of questionable value.

I’ve been to TLR events in St. Petersburg, Raleigh, and Tennessee. I didn’t drive long distances so I could see Torben Sondergaard or learn how to use TLR’s special salvation cards. I didn’t make those trips so I could join their school and live in a dormitory with strangers, as though I were a child in boarding school. I wanted to get closer to God and have him move through me, and I thought they could help.

I met some nice people through TLR, but they were not insiders. I did not see any extraordinary healings. I participated in one deliverance. I had some useful experiences. But the ministry got stuck in a rut, and it is still there.

This is typical of my experience. I find a ministry I like. I involve myself to some extent. I get some good things out of it. I notice that the people who are heavily involved seem to be less blessed than I am, and that they are bogged down in their walks. No one listens when I try to help. I am seen as a problem. The ministry deteriorates. I let it go and move on.

This must be why God doesn’t send me to church. Churches are invariably run by preachers who know less about God than I do and who expect me to regress back to their levels. They can’t tolerate any revelation that didn’t come through them or their revered mentors and forebears. Revelation can’t come through nobodies like me; it has to come through people they know or who were powerful in their denominations. My job is to shut up and accept false correction, and I’m supposed to repent and apologize for actual revelation. Who am I to contradict a guy who has a jet, or even a guy who hangs around with a more successful guy who has a jet?

I’ll say it again: if God speaks to everyone in a church, which is what’s supposed to happen, Satan can’t do much to ruin things. He is weak and limited, so he can’t go after hundreds of Spirit-informed people simultaneously with any chance of success. In a personality cult, which means nearly any church, all he has to do is corrupt the pastor, and then the pastor corrupts everyone else, which is easy, because he hasn’t introduced them to the Holy Spirit. Instead, he introduced them to himself; an ambitious guy who likes telling others what to do.

Who did Satan use most effectively to keep ancient Jews from recognizing Yeshua and becoming blessed and saved? Whores and pagans? No! Priests and scribes. Satan won them over, and they corrupted Jews who thought they spoke for God, and that was the majority.

“I’ve been on 10 trips with Daniel Kolenda.” “I carried Kenneth Hagin’s briefcase.” People attach themselves to preachers and brag about how close they are or were. Many Christians feel that if they know famous preachers personally, they are somehow endowed with the authority and righteousness of Yeshua, even if they have never met him.

Satan wants us to worship preachers because it makes his operation work much more efficiently. He has used preacher-worship in his successful campaign to cripple the body of Christ.

Satan can’t corrupt the Holy Spirit, so if you spend sufficient time with the Holy Spirit every day, Satan can’t destroy you the way he has destroyed most self-described Christians.

I have probably spent a grand total of 45 seconds speaking to Torben Sondergaard at his events. I never had any interest in chasing him around to get his approval. I want people to bring me closer to God, not the other way around. Also, I don’t want to be a typical Jesus-buff pastor-pest. I don’t want to be the guy who stomps past people who are in need of help so I can tell the pastor how wonderful he is and get his approval.

A long time ago, I thought Robert Morris knew a few things, so we had a brief email correspondence. I wanted to learn more. I ended up asking him about a claim he had made that appeared to be wrong, and that was the last I heard from him. Now look what has happened to him. Where would I be if I had made him my guru?

He truly was wrong, by the way, and he should have known it. I think I still have his DVD’s, which I should really throw out.

I must have stirred up his pride, and proud preachers are to be avoided.

I liked Perry Stone because God showed him a lot of things. I never thought he was the new messiah, however. He ended up causing a sex scandal which, due to his dishonest denials and slanderous accusations, damaged his credibility forever.

I never spent significant time carrying anyone’s briefcase, doing his laundry, or helping set up his tent in Africa. I want to hear from God, not preachers.

I like T.B. Joshua, who died in 2021. I like Mark Hemans. I find the BBC’s accusations regarding Joshua to be transparent, debunked, intentional slanders. I haven’t heard anything bad about Hemans. Nonetheless, I don’t assume everything they said or say is correct.

The only problem I have with Joshua is that he had long conversations with people he was delivering. He asked demons all sorts of questions. “What did you do to this woman?” “Why did you do it?” Why would anyone give a platform to a demon? They lie. A demon might be lucky to lie to a thousand people through a person he controls, but put him in front of a popular minister whose videos go all over the world, and he can reach millions.

I believe Hemans gets a little chatty, too.

Here’s a wild proposition: we’re not supposed to let demons teach. Prove me wrong.

On a related note, the rapture has not come, unless I’m such a bad Christian I was rejected.

I saw a lady in a video, claiming her autistic son told her it would happen in September of 2025. She says he told her several true things no human being could know. Christians, who rarely investigate anything, got excited.

It’s the first of October.

Autism is often or perhaps always caused by demons, so this lady was getting supernatural information from a person who was in the grip of evil spirits. And she believed him, and other Christians believed her. That’s weird.

He communicates using a letter board, which is basically a secular Ouija board. It’s supposed to be a spiritually-neutral tool, but there is no reason a demon can’t use it just like a Ouija board.

She may have been making the whole thing up, though. People are contemptible and capable of anything, or, as my mom used to say, “People are no damn good.”

I am going to try to take the blood of Yeshua much more seriously. I already knew what God told me about it, but a revelation from God is somehow much more deeply convincing than common sense or a verse in the Bible.

I hear the baby making flatulence noises and squeaks of joy. I better go love him for a minute.

If You Find This Post Distressing, Blame the Jews

If the rapture doesn’t come soon, I don’t know how Christians will be able to stand living in this world.

Conservatives and Christians are now spewing lies about the Charlie Kirk assassination. Nominal Christians, anyway. No one who listens to the Holy Spirit is fooled by kooky conspiracy theories.

The thing about this that irks me the most is seeing people praise the liars while claiming God’s authority. God didn’t tell you to agree with demonized nuts who say Israel, the FBI, Charlie Kirk’s bodyguards, or anyone other than a Mormon homosexual named Tyler Robinson shot Charlie Kirk.

The chaos is amazing. How are you going to know who to point your AR-15 with Punisher skulls on the magazine at if you can’t even agree on a scapegoat? Are you going to shoot Netanyahu? Are you going to shoot Kash Patel? Figure it out. You’re bringing shame on nutcases everywhere.

I just saw a video by a conservative gun enthusiast. The kind of person who, one would guess, thinks he and his militia buddies are going to fix America for Christ. He and his followers are suggesting the assassination was an inside job because–get this–it looks like some of the bodyguards were wearing AI glasses.

Well. If that’s not proof, I don’t know what is.

They’re saying the people around Kirk were laughing after he got shot. One says Kirk was waving his arm, trying to run things. Another says nobody put pressure on the wound.

Charlie Kirk was shot with a .30-06. The cowardly liberal pervert who shot him used a rifle his grandfather used on deer. The .30-06 is a very powerful round. It’s supposed to blow flesh apart permanently on its way through bodies, causing so much blood loss or other damage the victim is incapacitated as soon as possible.

A hunting round from a .30-06 doesn’t just pass through flesh, leaving a long, thin hole. It tears things up. Hunting rounds are made to expand and/or break up. They’re made to be destructive.

Kirk was shot in the neck, which contains things like the spinal column, spinal cord, jugular veins, trachea, and carotid arteries. These are things we need in order to remain alive and conscious. When the bullet hit him, the flesh around it blew outward around the axis of travel, ripping things up and sending hydrostatic shock into every part of his neck.

He was almost certainly dead as soon as he was struck. They rushed him to a hospital because that’s what you do when someone is shot. They didn’t think he was going to make it. He wasn’t conscious and giving them guidance.

If they didn’t put pressure on the wound, which probably is not true, it would likely indicate they could see he was dead. I’ve seen the footage that supposedly proves there was no pressure, and it is completely impossible to tell whether pressure was applied.

I can’t figure out why anyone would think AI glasses were somehow evidence that Kirk’s team wanted him dead. I’m also amazed that anyone over the age of three seriously thinks these people would have him shot from over a hundred yards, with a cheap surplus rifle with a badly-mounted scope.

The shooter nearly missed. He wasn’t shooting for the side of Kirk’s neck. He was shooting at the center of his chest. No serious assassin takes a risky shot when he can take an easier one. Lying in a prone position, which is the best way to shoot, with plenty of time, Tyler Robinson hit Kirk about 10″ from his most likely point of aim.

The gun used was a poverty gun. Military surplus, made by unmotivated Russian Communists. The scope was mounted badly. It belonged to the killer’s grandfather, who probably paid under a hundred dollars for it before adding a scope and synthetic stock. It was probably something like a 7-MOA gun, meaning it could be counted on to shoot groups about 7″ wide at 100 yards, so more like 10″ at the range at which Kirk was shot. It was not a skilled assassin’s weapon of choice. A $500 AR-15 would have been a lot better.

Check out the deranged comments.

They wanted Charlie dead. He was reaching the youth. He changed people’s hearts and minds. He was a threat to the shadow government!

At this point it is completely obvious that this wasn’t just an assassination, but a professional hit job.

This whole situation smells like a CIA hit. I think the kid who supposedly shot Charlie was a scape goat.

I think he is still alive. It was a setup. Nothing is adding up.

Clear as day they weren’t helping Charlie; but they were tampering with evidence!

The fact that a head of a certain country made 2 videos, within 72 hours, denouncing any knowledge or responsibility in the situation is pretty much the biggest red flag ever!

The guys are smiling because they are activating a secret trapdoor that was under his chair. That blood looked like it was a movie prop burst. I have had a suspicion that he’s alive and that was a dummy that was switched when the security is over him. They handed off a key to that door. Why else are they pouring concrete all around the spot? Israel wanted him dead and so he had to die before they actually killed him.

I rebuke these lies and bind these people to come out with the whole truth.

This assassination is one of the clearest-cut cases of leftist-pervert gun-barrel activism in history. The killer confessed to more than one person. He confessed in writing. His own parents turned him in. He was captured by multiple security cameras. We have the gun. We have the bullet. His dress-wearing XY girlfriend is cooperating with the police.

Even if he had walked up to Kirk in front of the crowd and killed him with a hatchet to the forehead, the demon whisperers would still be spouting their theories.

I want OUT of this place. It was bad enough when everyone on the left was insane. Now the friendlies are wigging out, and they can’t even form a consensus, so I assume they’ll be turning on each other as well as the innocent.

My own relatives have gone nuts.

I remember realizing how unhinged my aunt had become. I was in Singapore at the airport, after a fantastic vacation with my wife, waiting for a flight home. It was after midnight. My aunt called to talk about a property we own in common. I told her it wasn’t a good time because of the circumstances.

She went off on me, demanding to know who goes on vacation in November. She was furious. I couldn’t believe it.

Called me another time about family business, and I told her she needed to start selling things instead of trying to maintain a decaying real estate memorial to my long-forgotten grandparents. She had no idea I was married. Started telling me she had more stuff than I did, as though that excused incompetence. She said I had nothing but “maybe a sorry dog.”

She has apparently forgotten losing her composure and saying nutty, hostile things to me, because the other day, she sent me a text asking if I thought democracy was going to survive. As though we were on cordial terms. I politely declined to discuss it.

I don’t want her in my life as social or even business contact. She is too far gone. I don’t hold onto abusers any more. Blood isn’t really thicker than water. I dream of the day when the last bit of real estate will be sold.

Now she goes on Facebook and posts wacky memes comparing Trump to Hitler and so on.

Hitler sent special trucks around to force Jews to breathe carbon monoxide. He invaded neighboring countries and stole their treasures. He had doctors investigate the cheapest ways to castrate Jewish men and men with mental issues.

Trump is a little different. He’s working to get rid of illegal aliens, bring peace to the world, restore free speech, and make federal laws and regulations sensible. The Hitler analogy is just a bit over the top, except to crazy people who listen to demons all day.

We used to have a great relationship. We laughed and talked together. She was a junior high principal, entrusted with looking after people’s children. Then the apocalypse virus destroyed her sanity.

I have a second cousin about my aunt’s age. Nicest lady you would ever want to meet. At least in the past. Now she’s right in there with my aunt. Check out this masterpiece of delusion she posted on Facebook.

My mother loved her. My other aunts loved her. What happened to her personality? Wait. I know. The Israelis stole her brain and replaced it.

I’ve had it. I want the rapture to come before it gets worse. Maybe you know what I always say: if it’s this crazy now, what will it be like in 6 months?

Last night my wife and I were talking in our big, comfortable bed. Our beautiful, charming, intelligent baby son was lying between us. I started talking about our lives. I started asking if she could even understand how blessed we were. It is something that continually amazes me. God has been so good to us, and I am not good.

We marveled at our situation. Paired up by the Holy Spirit. In strong agreement about nearly everything. Set aside in a peaceful area dominated by conservative Christians who are patient, kind, and full of love, unlike people in Miami or the white ghetto known as Eastern Kentucky. Healthy. Blissfully unemployed. Close to God. Constantly receiving astonishing, helpful Holy Spirit revelation.

On the other hand, all over America, people are going so crazy it’s a wonder they don’t need diapers and spit masks. They are furious at each other over nothing. Leftists are so mad they are quite willing to murder us and our children in the streets, and some conservatives are no better. People live with overwhelming anger and worry, but we are insulated in our cozy little cocoon.

It’s like we’re riding a monorail through Jurassic Park at feeding time!

I don’t know how I would live if I had to be on a quarter of an acre in a blue suburb, or if I were a Jew. Jews need to wake up and move to Israel or far-right counties before it’s too late. Jew-hatred is now treated like a legitimate, acceptable political point of view. It has been mainstreamed.

Candace Owens is getting rich from Youtube, Twitter, and Instagram checks. Youtube and Instagram are run by liberals, and the guy who started Facebook, which owns Instagram, is a Jew! How weird is that?

Anyway, Charlie Kirk was murdered by a lone sodomite, so try not to get worked up by conspiracy theorists.

Until Judgment Day Sorts Out the Weeds

Yesterday was our day of rest. I shudder a little when I hear a Christian call Sunday the sabbath, because “shabbat,” or “sabbath,” is literally the name of Saturday in Hebrew, but anyway, we now rest on Sundays, and we make more effort than usual to be with God.

God told me all my problems, not some, are caused by lack of prayer, so a day dedicated to him will surely improve my life.

God never commanded Gentiles to observe the real sabbath, but the sabbath principle is a helpful one just the same.

A rest day brings people close to God in more than one way. It helps us to sit down and read scripture. It helps us to pray. It helps us to pursue these things as families, building marriages and relationships. Perhaps most importantly, though, it reinforces humility. That’s important because pride is the absolute worst thing a person can have. It’s better to be a humble pedophile who can listen and change than a proud evangelist who isn’t saved and can’t be corrected.

Saturday doesn’t work as well for us. Stores are open later than they are on Sunday, and stores that close on Sunday are open. The Post Office is open. Chick-fil-A is open. There are things a resident of my county can get done on Saturday that are harder to do on Sundays. Also, if God ever tells us to go to church, which he has not, we can add it to our day of rest without shaking anything up.

I have been told that Christians honor God on Sundays because it worked well for the early church. Virtually all believers were Jewish in the beginning, and as Gentiles were brought in, somehow it made more sense to let Jews do their purely-Jewish activities on their sabbath and then come together with them on the first day of the week.

True? I don’t know. Dishonest Christians have made up so many lies, how would I find out? Bad Christians made up the saints and baby baptism. They made up the prosperity gospel. Horrible Christians like Augustine propagated the ethos of polytheistic Greek sodomites in the church. Bad Christians made up all the odd things the Seventh-Day Adventists believe.

For all I know, Joseph Smith thought he was a Christian when he made up Mormonism and claimed an Egyptian writing about preparing the dead for burial was really a biography of Abraham.

When you quit trying to solve your own problems for a day, you are telling God you believe he will work on them for you while you rest, and you are admitting you believe he can do it better than you can. That’s faith plus humility.

At some point during our rest time, we saw a Christian on Youtube, talking about the demonstrable insanity or dishonesty of Candace Owens, who is now calling Israel a “demonic nation” and trying to convince people Israel, not the homosexual activist Tyler Robinson, murdered Charlie Kirk.

After all, Israel has a policy of murdering its American critics, and it makes sense that it started with Charlie Kirk, not Owens, Tucker Carlson, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Al Sharpton, Kanye West, Marjorie Taylor Greene, or Louis Farrakhan.

Owens insists that Robinson, a sexual aberrant Mormon who was in love with a homosexual male crossdresser with whom he shared quarters, is not the actual murderer, and she is suggesting he will be murdered in custody in order to protect the guilty party, who is presumably a mohel or an executive at Manischewitz (perhaps both).

Robinson confessed to his parents and his sex partner, and he did it in writing, not just orally. Owens disagrees, based on what she is hearing from whatever demons she listens to all day in the pursuit of wealth.

Robinson told his father he would rather kill himself than turn himself in. Owens, however, says she knows better. She says he is not suicidal, so if he dies in custody, it will be the work of the same Mossad agent who got Jeffrey Epstein, Nicole Brown Simpson, John Kennedy, and Abraham Lincoln.

As we watched the speaker talk, I was impressed by his intelligence and his understanding of Candace Owens. Then he started claiming Charlie Kirk was an evangelist. Right there, I realized he was caught up in a mass delusion of his own.

It is nothing short of amazing that anyone would call Charlie Kirk an evangelist. He was a politician who debated college kids. He occasionally said good things about Yeshua and Christianity; the same could be said of Mike Lindell and most gangster rappers.

He didn’t teach about God. He didn’t receive or relay revelation from the Holy Spirit, which is something every single Christian is supposed to do. He didn’t cast out demons. He didn’t heal anyone. He didn’t have visions. He didn’t have the supernatural testimony common to men of God. He didn’t create a ministry. He created two political organizations that made him very good money and positioned him to run for lucrative political offices later.

Politics was the spare ribs. Christianity was the coleslaw. It’s obvious. It’s not subject to reasonable dispute.

Even Torben Sondergaard, who does cast out demons and heal people, claims Kirk was a some kind of minister. That is disappointing. It’s also disappointing that his ministry, The Last Reformation, got rid of a comment I posted, disagreeing with Torben.

Torben was censored. He was driven out of Denmark and the USA, and he was imprisoned for a very long time. He should be sensitive about censoring others.

The Last Reformation lost its shine for me a while back. It seemed to be turning into a denomination and focusing way too much on Torben. Also, his right-hand man, a Dane named Jón Bjarnastein, was getting pretty uppity.

When I went to be rebaptized by TLR, Jan talked to me as though I were a child who had never opened a Bible. I’m old enough to be his father.

He has serious pride issues. When I took my friend Mike to an event to be baptized, he refused to let TLR do it. He refused because Jón mocked prayer in tongues while he was speaking to the crowd. He made nonsense noises in an effort to be funny.

I guess every Christian will commit blasphemy a few times before he dies, and it’s usually unintentional, but what Jón did was pretty disturbing, and a man in his position should know better. Mike flat-out said he would not let TLR put him under. We went back to my hotel, and I baptized him.

For a long time, I’ve had the feeling Torben was giving himself to ambition, and when a man who leads an organization becomes ambitious, carnal people will attach themselves to him to “help” him.

This is how Torben got in trouble in Denmark. A TV network offered to film him, and he thought it would help his ministry. He entered into an unequal yoking, they stabbed him in the back, and he and his ministry were slandered so powerfully the public rose up against him in outrage.

Never listen when someone who doesn’t believe in Yeshua says he’s here to help your ministry.

I went to another event by myself, and another young associate talked to me as though I were stupid. For example, out of nowhere, he told me I didn’t have to have Torben himself pray for me, as though I had shown up and refused to talk to anyone else. I have spoken to Torben briefly, but I never chased him around or felt I needed to interact with him personally. I never even sought to be near him in a group. I was there to be with God, not Torben Sondergaard. I didn’t ask him to sign my Bible. I didn’t buy a bobblehead.

I felt unwelcome. Like an outsider.

I always try to be humble when I talk to people in ministry, as long as they’re serious people who seem to be on the right track, but I am used to them responding to humility the same way worldly people with a little authority do. I am used to impatience, condescension, and imperiousness. I am used to resentment and flashes of irritation and even anger. It’s funny how these things are seen as normal among ministers.

Give someone his own desk, a yellow vest, or a name tag, and chances are, he will immediately become the supreme authority of Earth.

This may sound awful, but I don’t care, so here goes. I was disturbed to find out Torben’s wife had a nervous breakdown, went to doctors, and was put on drugs while he was in prison.

“You’re criticizing a woman who was upset because her husband was in prison!” No, my fine troll; of course I’m not. I’m surprised that a Spirit-filled Christian with a powerful ministry could have severe mental issues that had to be addressed with drugs. I’m also surprised that it was concealed for so long.

For me, one of the biggest benefits of spending time with the Holy Spirit is good mental health. I don’t always receive healing for my physical issues, but I can’t say that about things like depression, anxiety, and so on. Those things are defeated, and they have been for a long time. I just assume that anyone who spends a lot of time with God will be protected from them.

I can be depressed for maybe three days. That’s it. And it has to be related to something bad that has just happened. Chronic depression, which is a real mental problem, not an acute response to misfortune, is different. It makes you feel bad for no good reason, and it doesn’t go away.

I always say I was depressed continually for the first three decades of my life. I guess I was actually 35 when it ended, so three and a half years. It hasn’t come back. It’s a major change. The most remarkable and lasting personality change I have ever experienced.

I just assume that people who are with God a lot of the day are not depressed or insane. I don’t see how depression or insanity could happen to them. I don’t think I’m wrong. God promises us peace.

I believe that if your prayer life is strong and you are fighting demons and repenting, your mind will be sound. I haven’t been proven wrong yet.

I don’t think becoming a cessationist Baptist will fix your problems. Christianity is supernatural. It’s not a system of rules. It’s a relationship with a supernatural person. But surely the Holy Spirit helps those who spend time with him.

She had to be treated with dangerous drugs, and as far as I know, the problem was concealed at first. I’m on their email list, and I didn’t hear about it until it had already happened. At least I don’t think so. I can go back and check, but I don’t think I ever received an email that said, “Lene is experiencing mental torment. Pray God delivers her so we don’t have to involve secular doctors.”

When I was being treated for ADD, they gave me depression drugs because they were believed to be effective for ADD as well. I wouldn’t wish them on Hamas. They actually made me depressed. They also made it impossible for me to eat, sleep, relax, or concentrate.

The worst drug was Prozac. Somehow, my doctor got it into her head that it could help. I took it very briefly. I had all the symptoms I mentioned above, and it made my private parts numb. I’m sure you wanted to know about that.

When I quit taking it, the effects took about two months to wear off. Unbelievable. No wonder people who are being treated for depression commit suicide or shoot into crowds.

I never felt like harming anyone, including myself, thank God. Please don’t send the padded bus for me. I have never, ever felt suicidal in my life. Murdering people has never crossed my mind. It’s foreign to me, like wanting to eat liver or listen to Alanis Morrissette. Not my thing.

They did give me one drug that made me confrontational and obnoxious. I found it useful when I needed to be confrontational, but it didn’t help with ADD. It was a bad experience.

Psychiatric drugs have a scary history. They should be tools of last resort. Even caffeine is bad.

If a minister has mental problems, hiding it is the worst possible thing to do. When it finally comes out a) it will make people question God, and b) it will make people doubt the ministry, correctly. They will wonder what else is being hidden from them.

It will also prevent people from praying for the afflicted minister, and it will prevent them from offering advice and correction that could save the day.

You don’t become incapacitated by depression because you’re doing everything perfectly. I believe every mental problem has a solution in God. Who would argue with that? If God isn’t willing to fix every mental problem, why do you think so highly of him and boast that he works miracles?

I suspect they kept the news quiet because it would have made TLR look ineffective. Surely it couldn’t have been to save her embarrassment. There was nothing to be embarrassed about. I think most Christians are eager to admit it when they are down and need prayer.

It did make TLR look ineffective, though, and keeping it quiet made TLR look dishonest.

Now I can expect trolls to pop up and accuse me of picking on a sick woman. Trolls gonna troll. Keep your gaslighting. It just encourages me. Satan is the slanderer, and his nominal-Christian children never miss a chance to be like dad.

I enjoyed dealing with TLR, and they did a lot of good, but I don’t think TLR is the final answer or the last reformation. For one thing, they taught that we should baptize in the name of Yeshua only, which is odd. The Bible doesn’t say that.

Matthew 28:19: Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.

How can anyone miss something that obvious?

To get back to troll-harvesting, I want to write about a conversation my wife and I had. We discussed the numbers obsession many Christians have. Anyone who “saves” 80,000 people at an event is a great man of God, say the quantity-pushers. Anyone who criticizes such people is self-righteous. They’re wrong.

A lot of the quantity gospel depends on the myth of eternal security, which says that if you go to one altar call, you are saved for eternity regardless of what you do later. It’s like you’re a calf, and when you go stand in front of Eddie Long or Jimmy Swaggart for a couple of minutes, Yeshua puts a tag in your ear, and after that, nothing can separate you.

It’s not just a lie; it’s a blatant lie.

Eternal security people love to quote the scripture where Yeshua said no one could take his sheep out of his hand. The problem is that he never said we could not leave of our own free will. We can.

You can raise your hand and cry, leave church, get back in your car, go home, smoke two blunts, and have a threesome with your girlfriend and her sister. You can continue your work as a pimp. You can continue robbing houses. You can even keep your voodoo paraphernalia and continue sacrificing chickens and declaring your love for Bondye or whatever other evil spirit you like.

Do you seriously think you can’t go to hell if you do things like that? Seriously? Really?

Many, many Christians live this way. It’s SOP for American charismatics. My last two churches used to put pregnant trollops on the stage to sing. Trinity Church in Miami had a known car thief on the music team, and he drowned running from the police in handcuffs.

Did he repent and receive new salvation while he was drowning in a canal on Miami Beach? Well, one would like to think so. But based on what his pastors taught him (if he believed at all), he probably thought he would wake up in heaven regardless.

You don’t have eternal security unless you keep living right. I don’t mean obeying rules perfectly, but you have to be with God a lot and have a holy lifestyle, separated from the world.

Salvation is not an event. It’s a way of life.

Because ignorant big-tent Christians love numbers, they love anyone who draws them.

These are the same people who say Mormons are cool because they say Yeshua is their savior. They’re not cool. They’re not Christians. They’re heretics.

I used to work as a volunteer for Pastor Rich Wilkerson, Sr. In around 2012, he came up with a numbers game for us. He called it “the 2020 Vision.” We were given salvation cards. Every time we saw a person get “saved,” we were supposed to fill out a card. Name and date and so on.

The goal was to get a certain number of “souls” by 2020. I think the real goal was to build a huge mailing list without paying an outside company.

Of course, like all Wilkerson projects, the 2020 Vision was plagiarized and came to nothing. He did’t tell us, but I Googled, and the web was full of “2020 Vision” crusades from other preachers, going back years.

One of the big problems with the 2020 Vision is that even if we had seriously tried to “save” people, there was no mechanism for guiding them afterward. Go home, have sex with every girl in the hood, keep trying to become a famous gangster rapper, steal cars…it’s okay, as long as Rich has your card.

I can’t even guess how many present and former Trinity members are on the way to hell, confident that one altar call justified every rotten thing they would ever do.

I mention the 2020 Vision farce in order to show the problem with the numbers people. They prefer hundreds of thousands of fake salvations to a few real salvations.

As my wife and I discussed this, we talked about Yeshua and how different his policy was.

He never talked to a really big crowd. He got 3,000 once, if I recall. Most people he talked to abandoned him. He said things that were very harsh, all the time. He said things he knew would offend people and reduce his stats. He ended up with 11 close followers and a total of 120 in the Upper Room, after around three years of work and thousands of miracles.

He never watered down his message in hopes he would be popular, even though he knew that people who rejected him would burn forever.

My wife and I talked about the way we got together.

Someone I knew had all sorts of online women from dating sites. He kept telling me I should try it. I was okay with dying single, but I tried it anyway. Within about 4 months, I was engaged, and I was married within about 7. My wife and I get along beautifully. We have never had a serious marital problem. We agree and agree and agree. My friend is still single, 4 years later, and he started looking for a wife long before I did.

When I wrote my dating profiles, I used the Yeshua approach, not the quantity-is-king approach. I was not inclusive. I worked hard to drive women off.

I told them what my beliefs were. I told them not to even waste my time if we were not on the same page. I was brutal.

My wife saw it, liked it, and here we are.

I did what Yeshua does. I focused more on running off people who had no chance than on attracting people. I ran off leftists. I ran off cessationists.

I was building a filter. If you want to filter something good out of a substance, you don’t give it holes that hold onto everything. That’s just common sense.

My friend was willing to talk to women who were “spiritual” but not completely in line with him. Cessationists. Catholics. He was open to all sorts of Christians. For a time he even had a Jewish girlfriend, and I don’t mean a Messianic.

My friend has the stats. I have the wife. She and I agree; I did it right, and my friend has done it wrong.

One of the most destructive things women do is going after unsuitable men they think they can change. They do the same thing with shoes. If they’re cute, they buy them, even if it means surgery later. Most men look for women they don’t have to change, but my friend has done it the female way.

My wife and I discussed my method and my friend’s method, and of course, we agreed that my way was the right way. We agreed that it was like what Yeshua does.

There are people out there who think Charlie Kirk is a great man of God because his death inspired a lot of people to go to events and get baptized. But how many of those people will be Christians 5 years from now? How many who will stick around will be baptized with the Holy Spirit, speak in tongues, and be transformed and separated from the world?

A tiny percentage. I promise you.

Also, you can’t become a great man of God after you die. If a million people got baptized because a cocker spaniel died, it wouldn’t make the cocker spaniel a man of God. You are defined by what you do while you’re alive. You can’t become a man of God after you die.

Here’s another problem for the people who want to put Kirk on a pedestal: he thought Catholicism was great, and he took his family to masses. He also hid it, which is not very honest, presumably because he knew the Christian right is overwhelmingly non-Catholic.

A lot of non-Catholic Christians think this is a slander Candace Owens made up, among her many other slanders and fantasies, but it appears to be true. His best friend (he has so many best friends now) says Kirk was drawn to the Catholic Church and loved masses.

Catholicism is WRONG, and I don’t mean wrong in small letters. It’s WRONG. It credits Mary with a type of godhood, which is completely false. It teaches people to wear charms, which come from pagan religions. It teaches people to pray to dead people, which is necromancy. It discourages the gifts of the Holy Spirit. It contains so many major errors, many ex-Catholics who have become charismatics say they were Catholic but not Christian.

God doesn’t put people in the Catholic Church. He pulls them out of it.

Conservative Christians have a lot of fun with the delusions of leftists, but delusion is spreading among us, too. The Charlie Kirk delusion is a glaring example. We also have a problem with Jew-hatred. It used to be confined mostly to the left, but Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson are helping it spread on the right. Conservatives who claim to be Christian but know nothing about the Holy Spirit are easily fooled, so it’s not hard to pull them into Hitler’s camp.

You know who was a big supporter of big-tent Christianity? Constantine. He made Christianity (or a pagan corruption of Christianity) the official religion of the Roman Empire. He was a Catholic.

How did that work out?

Go look at the Revelation.

Istanbul was the capital of the Roman Empire. Why don’t we call it Constantinople any more? Because it’s in a Muslim country where big-tent Christianity failed.

The seven churches of the Revelation were in what is now Turkey. Every last one of them. Who ended up fighting the so-called Christian monarchs of Europe? Turks! Muslim Turks.

Turkey is now a Muslim nation, it has been for centuries, and its government is antisemitic. Many of the common people also hate Jews.

If Yeshua visited Turkey today, he wouldn’t have seven huge churches to talk to. They’re gone. But he could go to Istanbul and see the Hagia Sophia, the huge Catholic church Muslims took over, desecrated, and turned into a mosque.

A person who helps 30 people obtain a lasting relationship with the Holy Spirit, and to obtain salvation, is doing great. Yeshua is God, and he didn’t do much better during his earthly life. A pop minister who helps hundreds of thousands obtain show salvation for selfies and Tiktoks is actually harming people.

The word says this:

Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat:

Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.

That didn’t suddenly change because America was founded or people had big events after Charlie Kirk died. Salvation is still for the few.

This follows:

Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.

Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?

Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit.

A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit.

If you know people who answered altar calls and still fit into the world and embrace its culture, you know fake Christians. They existed in ancient times, and they still exist.

Real Christianity is never going to be popular, and our job isn’t to make it popular. Yeshua himself couldn’t do it. Our job is to spread the real thing and not worry about the people who reject it.

Delusion will increase on the left and the right because leftists hate Christianity and conservatives think they know better than Yeshua. It’s a bad situation. Real revival isn’t coming. I don’t care how many people get on their knees on athletic fields at special post-assassination events. It was never about quantity. It has always been about the truth.

If I annoy big tent Christians by writing these things, it’s a good sign, because they have always been a problem.

That’s the Only Part of You That Will Feast

Today is Sunday, so I won’t be here long.

We don’t cook anything that requires effort on Sundays. This morning I fried up a piece of country ham and two eggs, and because we don’t cook anything that requires effort on Sunday, I added a frozen Fresh Market croissant the store gave us for nothing. We never buy loaves of store bread. My wife makes bread for us. We ran out, and she can’t fix more until tomorrow.

I used Meacham ham which I ordered for my ham search. Along with Meacham, I’m testing Benton’s, Broadbent’s, Penn, and Newsom’s. I already eliminated Broadbent’s. I made red eye gravy with the drippings.

Meacham ham has a unique side flavor, and it smells a little funny before cooking. That threw off my analysis at first.

The smell goes away during cooking, the flavor is strong and tasty, the salt level is just right, the ham isn’t too dry and there is a reasonable amount of fat. It’s very nice.

The other companies are up against the wall now. Newsom’s is nearly perfect, but it costs about twice as much as Meacham, it’s not aged as long, and they won’t slice and bag it. The more I try Meacham, the more I think it’s just as good. Penn and Benton’s might be great. Benton’s can’t match Meacham on price, though. Penn is pretty close.

Penn is sending me a half-ham, sliced and bagged, for $64. It’s only a few pounds, so it doesn’t weigh half as much as a whole ham, but they keep the bones and probably some stuff I would remove and discard. I don’t know if it’s honest to call it a half ham or not, but there is a lot of waste in a whole ham, so maybe it is.

The good thing about butchering a whole ham is that you get a hock and a bone for beans or soup, so losing that is a significant hit.

I ate this in front of my baby son. I guess that was mean, but he can’t have country ham. He will be raised on it, though.

That’s all I got. Enjoy your Sunday.

This Salt Needs to Lose Some of its Saltness

The country ham search continues.

I tried to get some ham from Benton’s in Tennessee, but I made a mistake and ordered the wrong thing. The photo on the site was more than a bit misleading, and somehow I either failed to read all of the copy or I read copy from another product. Anyway, I thought I was getting half a pound of ham slices, but I ended up with paper-thin slices of very old ham intended to compete with prosciutto.

It tastes fine, but I’m not a prosciutto or charcuterie person. My feeling is that if you can afford a fancy board, you can afford bread so you can make a proper sandwich.

Charcuterie is boring. It’s a fraction of a real dish. When you eat charcuterie, you’re eating ingredients.

I think peer pressure convinces people they like charcuterie even though they don’t. It’s not a legitimate course. It’s just scraps of meat on a board.

I contacted Benton’s because I thought they had made a mistake, and they are graciously sending me what I actually wanted. I just have to pay for shipping.

Meanwhile, my second package of Broadbent’s ham has arrived. The first samples I bought were very dry, unbelievably salty, and somewhat leathery in consistency. Also, I couldn’t taste much flavor. I ended up throwing some of the ham out.

Country ham is supposed to be salty, but the slices I received were not normal. It’s supposed to be a little tough, but it should fall apart when you chew it. You shouldn’t feel like a shipwreck victim trying to eat a shoe.

I tried the new package today, and it was better.

The ham is still very salty, but I don’t think it’s quite as extreme as the first package.

The texture is still tough, but it’s not like a hard piece of leather.

I was able to taste the country ham flavor. It was not the near-perfect flavor of Newsom’s, or the unique-but-still-classic flavor of Meacham, but it was good. A little better than the ham slices at Cracker Barrel, I suppose.

The slices were still too thin for me. The perfect thickness for fried country ham is 3/8″, and these looked like half of that. It’s meat. It’s not copying paper. Give the customer something to eat.

If I had to buy a Broadbent’s ham, I would slice it thicker, soak the slices in water for three days, and then store it in vacuum bags. The water would tame the salt and fix the dryness.

This would probably work, but I won’t be buying any more Broadbent’s ham, so I will never find out. Meacham is as good, or nearly as good, as Newsom’s, and it’s much less expensive than Broadbent’s, so I don’t have any reason to buy Broadbent’s.

I don’t know why Broadbent’s hams are so salty and tough. All hams are cured pretty much the same way. They are covered with salt. You would think they would all be equally salty.

Maybe Broadbent’s is using hams that are dryer and less fatty to begin with, or maybe they keep them at lower humidity.

I’m not complaining about the salt because I’m an ignorant person who thinks all country ham is too salty. I know what a ham is supposed to taste like.

The two last contenders are Benton’s and Penn. Both should arrive this coming week. In the end, I will have tried 5 brands of ham, and that will have to be enough.