And Messing With Texas

Just when I think I’m out, they pull me back in.

I went to Wal-Mart today to pick up some items I needed, and while I was there, I thought about the total lack of snacks for tomorrow’s Thanksgiving meal. I felt like I had to do something. I fell back on my old standby: Texas trash.

Texas trash is Chex cereal mixed with a lot of other stuff and baked. It’s supposed to be acidic and spicy.

I like to start with prepackaged Chex Mix, simply because it’s most of the way there when you buy it. You don’t have to add crackers or anything. The Chex people took the peanuts out of Chex Mix a long time ago, so that’s the main solid ingredient you need to add.

Two years ago, I found a recipe online and changed it (because it was sad and lame), and I was pretty happy with it. Today I looked at it, and I decided it was not manly enough. Seemed like there was too little of everything in it. I came up with this:

INGREDIENTS

family-size bag (5 cups) cheddar Chex Mix
2 cups cocktail peanuts.
1/4 cup butter
1/4 cup Worcestershire sauce
3 tablespoons Frank’s hot sauce
1 teaspoon chipotle powder
1/2 teaspoon garlic powder
1 teaspoon celery seed
1 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon prepared mustard (I used French’s)
1-1/2 tablespoons brown sugar

I heated the butter and liquids and stirred the seasonings into the mixture. I put the Chex Mix on a roasting pan, tossed it in the mixture, and put it in the oven at 250°. Last time, I baked it for one hour. I don’t think that’s enough. I want it to have some crunch. I’m going for 1-1/2 hours.

The mustard made a huge difference. It added more acid, and it contributed zing without heat.

If I were making this for myself, I would double the chipotle powder.

Bacon grease might work better than butter. Black cardamom might be a good addition.

I don’t know how it will come out, but at least I can say I have one snack to offer.

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I tried the trash, and I could not stop eating it. I had to drag myself off of it. I liked it so much, I decided to double the sauce. I edited the recipe to say 1 bag of Chex Mix instead of 2.

Now how do I keep from eating it once it’s ready?

“I’ll have a Quart of Pie Filling and an RC”

It’s 11 a.m., and I’m already cooking for tomorrow.

I was asked to make a sweet potato pie this year, but I decided to exercise my veto power and make two pecan pies instead. Pecan pie is better, and I don’t know how to make a sweet potato pie anyway. This morning, before breakfast, I started putting my ingredients together.

It’s very bizarre, having a talent I don’t particularly care about. I do not have much interest in good food, but somehow I am still capable of producing extremely tasty dishes without any training and without much effort. I throw things together, and the results are just crazy.

I generally use the recipe on the side of the Karo syrup bottle, with little modifications. Today, out of laziness and curiosity, and because I had a new ingredient on hand, I changed things more than usual.

First, I added some corn starch to the recipe. I always put liquor in my pecan pies, and I don’t want the texture to suffer because of the added liquid. I added half a teaspoon of starch to each pie to make sure it doesn’t go wobbly. They have never gone wobbly in the past, but the starch still seemed like a good move.

Second, I used brown sugar instead of white sugar. I used up nearly all of my white sugar yesterday while coming up with a better substitute for Honeybaked ham, and I did not want to wait around today until I could get to the store. I had dark brown sugar, so I used it. I also used dark syrup, as I always do.

For all I know, I always use brown sugar. It sounds like me. I can’t recall.

Third, I used an expensive type of vanilla extract. I’m not sure I ever knew what real vanilla tasted like until I got this stuff. I’ve always used things like McCormick and Kirkland extract, and they smell exactly like the stuff my grandmother and mother used. My new bottle is from a company called Sonoma, and it has a different smell to it. I decided to try it.

Fourth, I added salt. Good cooks don’t make sweet things without salt.

I gave up on making my own pie crust years ago, simply because I didn’t want to. If I were to make a pie on a random day in July, I would make my own crust, but there is something about an obligatory holiday meal that makes me want to cut corners. This year, I went with frozen Pet-Ritz crusts, which Internet sources seem to favor. Of course, homemade crust would be better.

I mixed my ingredients up, filled my pie crusts, and set my timer. Then I decided to wash the mixing bowls (one per pie) so I could use them later for cornbread. Needless to say, I had to taste the pie mix that was clinging to them

I can’t describe how wonderful this stuff is. I ate every drop I could scrape up. I could not stop. I kept thinking of things I wanted to do with it. I want to make a batch and put it on ice cream. It’s astounding.

For quite a while after I finished cleaning the bowls, I found myself announcing, “MAN, that was good!”, at random intervals.

I feel like making a batch without eggs, heating it to activate the starch, and then beating eggs into it.

I assume it will make good pies. There is no reason why it shouldn’t. I can post the ingredients.

INGREDIENTS

1 cup dark Karo syrup
1 cup dark brown sugar
3 eggs
3 tbsp. butter
1 shot Knob Creek
1 tsp. high-end vanilla extract
1/2 tsp. starch
1/2 tsp. salt

Yes, it has raw eggs in it. I don’t care. So does zabaglione. So does the real recipe for key lime pie. If you’re afraid of raw eggs, you’re going to miss out on a lot of good food.

I wonder if I should have used more starch.

Cook’s Illustrated says 185° is the magical final measurement for pecan pie filling. They also say to heat the filling before putting it in your crust. I did not know that. I would have tried it. They tend to be right about things like that.

Some people say to tap the pie and see how much it jiggles. That sounds like very poor advice. Judging a digital thermometer reading is a lot easier than trying to guess what “jiggle” means to someone else.

If the pies turn out to be as good as I think they will, I will follow up.

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My pies are done. Wouldn’t you know it? The Karo recipe goes overboard on cooking time. I reduced it and still ended up with pies that were hotter in the center than I wanted. They’ll be fine, though.

I have to go buy new glasses now. While my dad was alive, we used Mason jars because they were cheap and hard to break, but now I can have real glasses. I also need a giant platter for my oversized turkey.

Still not happy about that.

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It looks like I took notes when I cooked last year’s food. I used a tablespoon of vanilla per pie, and it worked very well. I should have done that this time!

Welcome to the Real Clone Wars

I can’t resist a puzzle.

I decided to try my hand at faking a Honeybaked ham, using a ham from a local store plus whatever I had in the kitchen. I think it will be very good.

INGREDIENTS

1. Honey glue

1/2 cup orange blossom or other light-colored honey
2 tbsp. prepared yellow mustard
1 tbsp. butter

2. Sugary crust

1 cup caramelized sugar
1 cup dark brown sugar
1/2 tsp. salt
2 tbsp. cloves
1 tsp. nutmeg
1/4 tsp. allspice

First, I had to make caramel sugar. It did not really work. I put sugar on a pan and baked it at 300°. After a couple of hours, it began to turn brown, but it also started to melt, which it’s not supposed to do. I think the pan got hotter than 300° because I had it too low in the oven. It would probably work better if I put the pan on a high rack with a sheet of foil on the rack below it to keep radiant heat off the pan.

I scraped as much of the sugar off the pan as I could and chilled it to solidify it. Then I ground it in a coffee grinder (so I didn’t have to drive 10 miles for more sugar). I got caramel dust. I was shooting for granules.

I figured I could fix the problem by mixing it with brown sugar, which is granulated, so I did. It worked reasonably well, but it was not the answer I wanted.

The measurements for the crust spices are as close as I could get while working frantically and making mistakes. I was surprised to see that the crust needed salt, because earlier today, it did not seem to work.

When I opened up my ham, I saw my first challenge. It was floppy. Spiral-cut hams are not very stable. I tied it up with twine to make it hold its shape, and it worked pretty well.

I turned the cold ham downward so the cut part was on the bottom. I covered it liberally with the honey mixture. Then I patted the crust stuff all over it.

It didn’t look too good. The finely ground caramel sugar looked like chalk dust. I was afraid it would be like mud. Also, the color didn’t look like the old Honeybaked hams I remember. It was sort of beige.

After the ham sat for a few minutes, the juice soaked through the crust. Suddenly the color was perfect, at least where the juice had finished soaking in.

I slapped the ham on a plate, covered it with foil, and put it in my spare fridge. It has two days to do its thing.

Why didn’t I bake it? Because it was already baked.

Honeybaked does not bake its hams after applying the crust. How do I know this? Because the crust on mine has no cuts in it. A ham can’t be cut until after you bake it. The ham was obviously baked, sliced, and then covered with crust ingredients.

If their hams were baked with the crust in place, the crust would not be crunchy. It would melt.

I think the honey coating may have been a waste of time. A lot of it slid off, taking the mustard with it. I’m not sure yet. Maybe it’s better to put mustard powder in the crust mix and forget the honey and butter.

The flavor of my creation is wonderful. Whether it turns out to be a good clone or not, it should be very nice, as long as the sugar doesn’t fall off or melt completely.

The underlying Smithfield ham is fine. It’s tender and tasty, and it’s already spiced. No problems there.

The ham came with a packet of glaze. I decided to try it, to see if the pros would shame me. I almost spat it out. It was disgusting. It had a chemical taste to it, as though someone had contaminated it with mop water. Do NOT use the glaze packet that comes with a Smithfield ham.

Now I have around 14 pounds of ham, including one bone. Not sure what I’ll do with it. Do I keep my homemade version for myself and start eating it tonight, or do I share both with my guests? The Honeybaked ham is guaranteed to be okay. Mine still has not passed the final test, so maybe I should withhold it.

I think it’s safe to say I will never buy another Honeybaked ham. There is no reason to. Preparing a crusted spiral-cut ham is obviously very easy, and you can save $60 doing it, which is astounding.

I may try darkening the crust with a torch, since people who claim they worked at Honeybaked say this is what the chain does. Unfortunately, I have seen people lie before, claiming they have KFC’s secret recipe and so on, so I don’t know how reliable the torch info is. I can’t do it with the twine on the ham.

There is a lady who claims she has the real Honeybaked recipe, and she published it. Sure, sweetheart. The company just tells random employees its most important secret. That totally happens, because unlike every other food company with secrets, Honeybaked somehow needs to tell grunts and peons everything.

No, here is what Honeybaked does. They mix their ingredients behind closed doors in a single facility, they ship the mix to stores, and no one who works at a store has ever been involved in the mixing process in any way. Take that to the bank. I guarantee it. Anyone who claims to have the recipe is pulling your…ham.

If people actually had the recipe, they would look at Honeybaked’s $80 hams, realize they could get rich selling the same thing for $40, and open stores. That has not happened. Whenever a company overcharges dramatically for a product or service someone else can provide, someone else provides it, fast.

If you try making a clone, mix a test batch of the ingredients and try it on a ham sample first. I’m concerned about the amount of powdered cloves I used.

Maybe you can find a source of granulated caramelized sugar. I’m too lazy to look. It would save you some pain.

I’m glad I found out about caramelized sugar. I can think of a lot of uses for it. The burned sugar I already knew about is bitter, and caramel flavor without bitterness is a good tool to have.

Even if it turns out my recipe needs work, it’s still time for you to join the ham revolution. Nobody should ever pay $80 for a spiral-cut ham.

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I decided to try using a torch on the ham. I was wondering how to get around the twine, but then I realized that as long as the ham was face-down, it would support itself without help, so I cut the twine off. I should never have tied the ham up. It was unnecessary.

I applied the torch. I didn’t want to blacken the ham, but I did want a little burning here and there, and that’s what I got.

Here’s what I think: it’s a mistake to burn the crust at all. Something in the ingredients–maybe cloves–does not react well to burning. Maybe it’s the nutmeg. After all, people smoke clove cigarettes, and they don’t complain. Whatever it is, it gives off a non-helpful odor when it burns.

I think the key is to heat the crust until it starts to melt and then hardens into a sort of scab. Then stop.

After the torching was done, I found neat little crust flakes came off the ham when I fiddled with it, just as they used to back when I ate real Honeybaked hams. There was a little bit of the burned flavor in the ham, and I could do without that, but it was still pretty impressive.

Apart from using too much heat, I can’t find anything to complain about. The ham tastes wonderful. I hate to say it, but a little voice keeps telling me to get another one and see if I can do the torch bit more skillfully, just to show that Honeybaked can be defeated with ease.

If I do this again, I’ll let the ham sit and drain for an hour before I start. Smithfield packs its hams in water, and they release it after you cut the bags off of them. If you don’t release it into a pan, it will be released into your crust.

This has been a great experiment. Very empowering. It will be a long time before anyone sees me spending $11 per pound for ham again.

Let’s Bust up the Honeybaked Cartel

I wrote a long post yesterday, but I deleted it because it seemed too negative. I complained about the cost of holiday food. I have a lot going for me, and I have good friends who are coming to share a meal with me, so I should not be crabby. I should never be crabby, really. Crabbiness is not a fruit of the Spirit.

That being said, I have to confirm the primary thesis of the post I deleted, to wit: Honeybaked hams cost way too much!

This year, I’m sharing food expenses. My friends are bringing sides. I’m on the hook for a turkey, a ham, and two pies. I figured the meal would be cheaper than usual, but then I went shopping yesterday and spent over $130.

There were four reasons the food cost so much.

1. I could not get a normal-sized turkey because people who fry turkeys snap them up early. I had to get an 18-pounder, so I paid for three extra pounds.

2. I bought Korbel brut to flavor the turkey and dressing. Poultry without white wine is wrong. We should probably be marinating fried chicken in it.

3. I bought pecans for pies. Nuts are crazy expensive. I don’t know if there was a nut blight or what, but the only cheap nuts now are peanuts. I spent $11 on 16 ounces of pecan halves.

4. I bought a Honeybaked ham. It seems pretty well established that all the other brands are inferior, so I paid the price for the real thing. For a tiny 4.5-pound ham, I paid about $50.

This is a lot of money for a tiny ham. Even Omaha Steaks, which is basically a scam operation that preys on people who have no sales resistance, sells hams cheaper.

Omaha Steaks and other food truck scams have an annoying and insulting Jedi trick they play on people. The guy parks his freezer truck in your driveway, and then he comes to your door and says, “Come see what I’ve got in the truck.” He starts walking backward while looking at you to motivate you to follow. It’s definitely something they teach in their training. The natural response is to follow. The countermove is to shut the door while they’re backing away, and if you want to keep it civil, say, “No thanks! Have a great day!” They will not come back to your door. It’s too awkward. Walking away is supposed to compel you to follow, like the motion of a fishing lure, but it also establishes their motion toward the truck, and once you shut the door, they pretty much have to continue.

I feel for the truck people. I know exactly what happened to them. Someone from Omaha Steaks convinced them to finance a truck and a bunch of substandard food, on the assurance that their methods can’t fail. They work up their courage and go out and try it, and people like me shut the door on them. Ouch.

No one likes to be treated like a cat chasing a laser pointer. If I don’t cooperate, it’s on you, buddy. Welcome to sales.

I’ve actually had their steaks. Thin frozen cuts of what appeared to be plain old supermarket-grade beef. Not good at all.

Of course, I’m assuming all the truck salespeople who pestered me were real Omaha Steaks affiliates. Maybe they were not. But if you Google around, you will find some pretty sad-looking photos of real Omaha Steaks frozen wonders. They look just like the ones I tried.

To get back to the Honeybaked story, my local grocery is selling similar hams right now for under $20, or $4 per pound. They sell bone-in spiral hams for $2 per pound, which is a monumental discount over Honeybaked. I can buy sliced, packaged country ham shipped to me for something like $7 per pound. Clearly, $11 per pound is too much for a Honeybaked ham.

I thought about it yesterday, and it occurred to me that a smart person should be able to duplicate (and improve upon) the taste of a Honeybaked ham at home. I went to my kitchen and mixed up some ingredients.

My efforts were based on the way I remember Honeybaked hams tasting in the distant past. I haven’t had one in years, and I can’t break into the one I just bought. The ones I’ve had tasted like sugar and cloves. That’s about all.

There are clone recipes on the web, but they don’t look good. Some include onion powder, and I don’t see that working at all. At least one includes cinnamon. Honeybaked hams do not taste like cinnamon.

I fiddled around for a while, and I think I can tell you what was in the glaze on the hams I remember: white or light brown sugar, light honey, cloves, nutmeg, mustard, and caramel. Allspice may also be in there somewhere.

For mustard, you can use whatever you have. I used French’s yellow mustard, which is as unpretentious as mustard gets. I would not use mustard powder, because the acidity of prepared mustard is helpful.

You may be wondering how to get caramel to put in your glaze. I learned some new things about caramel.

It’s always possible to burn sugar in a pan to get caramel. The problem is that you end up with a hard piece of sugar glass. It’s not easy to break up so you can apply it to things. Also, it will have some bitterness, which you may not want.

What if you want caramel-flavored granules with no bitterness? You just bake granulated sugar at 300° until it turns brown. It stays in grain form, and it doesn’t get as bitter as burned sugar.

I’m thinking you could use this in your glaze as an addition to plain sugar, or, by controlling how dark it gets, you could replace the plain sugar entirely.

It’s supposed to be an excellent cookie ingredient. Look it up.

Do NOT put cinnamon in your glaze. I tried it, and it makes the glaze smell funky, like something that has been sitting at the bottom of a laundry hamper for a month. It’s a very bad idea.

I looked at some copycat recipes, and while I reject their ingredients, I think their cooking methods aren’t bad. It appears that you just smear the ham with honey, bake it until it’s warm, apply the rest of the glaze ingredients, and then broil it or use a torch to set the crust.

One lady suggests applying butter with the honey. I don’t think the Honeybaked people do that, but it sounds like a good way to one-up them. Nearly everything needs butter.

I can’t tell you how much of each ingredient to use, but you should be able to figure that out by trial and error. I would say maybe 1/4 teaspoon of cloves per ounce of sugar, to start. You don’t want much mustard at all. You want it to be a subtle background ingredient. You don’t want much nutmeg, either.

I would use prepared mustard and mix it with the honey.

If I were doing this, I would use orange blossom or sourwood honey. You don’t want a dark honey with a strong flavor. The honey is mainly there to hold the sugar mix in place.

Don’t put salt in the glaze. It makes it taste worse.

I feel like trying this just to stick it to the man, even though it will cost me more money and I don’t want another ham.

If Honeybaked charged half as much as they do, they would still make a killing, and people like me would not be scheming to outwit them.

I may try this. It’s bugging me.

Bring on the Styrofoam Containers

Last night I was in prayer, and I spent some time thinking about the negative effects popular culture has on me. I thought about the things I still need to clean out of my life.

I thought about the nazirites. I don’t know much about the concept, but in the Old Testament, a nazirite was a person who was dedicated to God. They had to obey conditions going beyond the Jewish law. Samson was a nazirite from birth. He was not allowed to drink wine, let a razor touch his head, or touch a dead body.

It seems like Spirit-led Christians have to be a lot like nazirites. You can’t listen to rock or let your kids have a Pirates of the Caribbean DVD like everyone else, but on the other hand, you get to know God personally, and he gives you things like the ability to heal, prophecy, and the ability to work miracles. He warns you about things that take other people by surprise.

I thought about the verse in the 91st psalm, which says, “A thousand shall fall at thy side, and ten thousand at thy right hand, but it shall not come nigh thee. Only with thine eyes shalt thou behold and see the reward of the wicked.”

When I think about this verse, I am glad to know I’m protected, but I also think about the other people–the vast majority of the earth’s inhabitants–who are not.

In God’s eyes, “the wicked” can be defined this way: “those who have rejected Jesus Christ.” That’s all it takes. You can feed the sick. You can give a stranger a kidney. You can give to the poor. That’s not what God looks at. It doesn’t help. What matters is whether you accepted the sacrifice. It’s not about what you’ve done, because the evil you do is expunged from your record when you receive salvation.

There are reformed pedophiles in heaven, but Mother Teresa, who spoke against faith, may be in hell.

I am not a mushy person who cries at movies, but last night it disturbed me to think of the problems unbelievers are headed for. I felt the sorrow of the Holy Spirit. For a minute, I held my head in my hands and thought about the future of those who won’t listen.

It can’t be repeated often enough: hell is not for “bad” people. It’s for people who don’t listen.

Heaven is for bad people. Jesus was crucified for bad people. If people had been good, he would have had no reason to be crucified, so he would not have done it.

Heaven is for bad people because there is no other kind of person.

If it weren’t for bad people, heaven would be empty except for God, the angels, and people who either died before they could sin or had some issue that made it unreasonable to require them to accept Jesus. It would be full of aborted children, the retarded, and people who lived on secluded islands or in rain forests.

There are a lot of Christians out there who are in danger of hell. I’ve known plenty of Christians who lived in fornication even while serving at church. They thought it was okay to live with people they weren’t married to. I’ve known Christians who used drugs. The world is full of Christians who participate in other religions, such as astrology, fortune-telling, and yoga. I wonder what will happen to them.

I saw a testimony from a Christian who claimed she had visited hell. She said God had told her she was going there because she lived with her boyfriend. How many Christians would believe that today?

There was a young lady who used to sing at my last church. She was single. She had a baby. Okay; I could accept that. People who choose to fornicate repent, as I did. Sometimes people have children in marriage, and then they end up single. No problem. And it was good that she didn’t have her baby killed.

Then another baby popped up. I thought maybe she had slipped. Then she came in with a third one. I was only there for three years, so she was maintaining a high level of production. I can’t even guess how many kids she has now.

The pastor had no problem with putting her on the stage as a corrupting example, because he liked her voice. She must have thought she was doing fine, but she was continuing in a major sin, knowingly and without coercion, without repentance.

God forgives just about anything, but you’re supposed to repent. You can’t go to Jesus and say, “I plan to visit a prostitute this evening, so could you go ahead and forgive me now?”

We’re so terrified of “judging” that many of us have decided anything goes. That’s not how it works. For example, you can be a homosexual and be forgiven, but you can’t get saved, marry another homosexual, and then expect God to tolerate it.

Wrong is still wrong.

I keep seeing people on Youtube, talking about their recent rapture dreams. It’s shocking how many people are dreaming of the rapture. It happened to me in 2016, and now there is a wave of others who have had the same experience.

When I think of the way technology is destroying free will, the astounding filthiness of modern culture, and the tide of rapture dreams, I feel that time is very, very short, and only a small percentage of Christians are ready.

Missing the rapture is a big deal. You will have to live on a planet that isn’t protected by the prayers and presence of God’s children. The terrible things God keeps away from the world today will be released. Plagues that used to go away will rage without hindrance. Meteors that used to miss the earth will land here. Storms that would have missed major cities will strike them and rest over them. And if you profess faith in God, you will be executed.

This is all bad, but there is more to think about. If you’re not fit for the rapture, how can you think you’re fit to be saved when you die? It doesn’t make sense.

Many preachers teach people that all you have to do to be saved is to raise your hand and ask, and Christians like to believe it, because it means they can go on enjoying sin. It’s a very dangerous teaching. You’re supposed to change. The word says you’re supposed to become the righteousness of God. Should you really expect God to reach down into your bedroom and lift you off the earth while you’re lying in bed with your girlfriend, smoking a joint, and playing a violent video game?

We should be looking for ways to do a lot for God, but instead, we keep trying to find out how little we can do and still avoid hell.

Jesus said very clearly that we would not see him coming. He said he would return at a time when we did not expect it. That means we will not know when it’s coming. Any human being who tries to pin down the date will be wrong. But he did tell us there would be signs to tell us when the end was near. We keep seeing those signs.

What does “near” mean to God? To me, it would mean a year or less, but I’m just a man. For all I know, to God, “near” means a century from now. But with the end of free will approaching quickly, it’s hard to believe we will be waiting that long.

We shouldn’t be trying to guess the date so we can sin until the previous week. We should live as though he were coming this afternoon. Living for God is always the right thing to do. You shouldn’t have to be motivated by a crisis.

It’s a weird time to be alive. One way or the other, it will be a relief to see things reach a resolution.

I have to go get a turkey and a ham now. Friends are coming for Thanksgiving. I don’t want to cook at all, but I can’t stand the thought of a lame turkey with bones in it, so I’m going to bone and stuff a bird. My friends have agreed to supply the rest of the food. They’re planning to go to Cracker Barrel for it. I’m all for that.

There was a time when I would have rebelled at the thought of eating restaurant food on a holiday, but those days are done. I am somewhat tempted to abandon the turkey project, if the truth be told. Even without side dishes, the turkey will be a two-day effort.

I’m so tired of cooking and cleaning, I don’t look forward to the food.

I think we make too much of holidays. I know I’ve written about that before. People go into debt on Christmas. That’s ridiculous. We celebrate the birth of the one who told us not to borrow…by borrowing. Holiday meals are also over the top.

When my dad was alive, I had to cook a ton of stuff. He insisted on cranberry sauce, which is sad and inferior compared to relish, and he demanded oyster dressing, which is, quite simply, disgusting. I always made sauce, relish, oyster dressing, and normal dressing. Then there were the other dishes. Yams, potatoes, beans, two kinds of pie…it’s just too much.

I can’t understand why anyone would put nasty canned oysters in dressing. Why not toss a few slugs in there while you’re at it?

Maybe it tastes great, but I can’t get past the smell.

I have been asked to fix a sweet potato pie. I have no idea how to do that. I figure it’s a pumpkin pie made with yams. I think I’ll just crank out two pecan pies instead. They’re much better, and the preparation time is only a few minutes.

Someone asked me to make a sweet potato pie a few years back. They had invited me and my dad to Thanksgiving dinner, so I was happy to do it. I told them I didn’t know how to do it, but they were okay with that. I substituted yams in a pumpkin pie recipe, and everyone was happy.

Here’s something you need to know, if you can’t cook. When you know a good cook, and you want them to fix something for you, you do NOT ask for something they’ve never cooked. They’ll just open a cookbook and use someone else’s bad recipe. Being a good cook doesn’t mean you can cook anything anyone wants, on demand. It means you can cook certain things you’re familiar with.

I knew a professional chef who collected cookbooks. She was willing to cook anything on a one-off basis. It generally did not work well. It all depended on which recipe she used. She didn’t write recipes, so when she needed a dish, she just cracked a book. Most cookbooks are bad. When she happened, by chance, to find a good recipe, she did okay, but she couldn’t hit the gong consistently.

Make me work out of cookbooks, and you will get similar results.

The sweet potato pie I made was not good. It was sort of okay.

A good cook isn’t someone who can take a cookbook, follow it precisely, and make good food. A good cook writes or improves recipes. You can also fake being a good cook by collecting proven recipes.

I look forward to seeing my friends. That will be great. The food, I could not care less about. When I think of big meals, I think of dirty dishes and trips to the dump. I picture myself in the kitchen, alone, at 10 p.m., with a pot in one hand and a brush in the other.

The best holiday meal, to avoid hard work, is prime rib. You only use two things: a roasting pan and a serving platter. You salt and season the meat, roast it at 200° until it’s around 95° inside, remove the foil, crank the heat to 500°, and brown it. Done. Cleaning up after prime rib is easy. Of course, many people I know will not eat properly cooked beef, so prime rib can be a problem.

Women, especially, tend to reject beef unless you ruin it by serving it well done. When I used to give my dad prime rib, I had to put his perfectly prepared serving in the microwave and ruin it first. If you only eat beef well done, you might as well buy the cheap stuff, because you have the palate of a terrier.

I don’t care much about food any more. I don’t know anyone who can cook well enough to make me happy. I don’t know of any restaurant that prepares food that compares to my own. I am tired of doing dishes and cleaning the stove. It’s hard to get excited about a turkey.

Today I’m roasting a chicken because I could not think of anything else I wanted badly enough to work on. Throw it in the oven with seasonings and vegetables, take it out three hours later…done. Good enough.

We should really abolish mandatory holiday meals. It’s so much better when you can share a meal whenever you want, just because you want to. Making giant holiday meals and splurging on Christmas gifts is like going to homeless shelters to feed people on Thanksgiving and Christmas. If you’ve been a jerk all year, go ahead and ruin your holiday, because you deserve it, but we should be charitable all year long.

I wonder how people who run homeless shelters feel about folks who drop by to hand out food on holidays. I can guess. They resent them for not showing up the other 364 days of the year. It’s like going to church on Easter and Christmas to make up for backsliding. You just make the volunteers mad and jam up the parking lot. And those awful hats. No one can see around them.

Okay, okay. I will be grateful. I have wonderful friends. I have a beautiful house in which to host the meal. I can afford good food. I will work on my attitude. I really will.

I have to get up. The turkey and ham aren’t going to buy themselves.

We Worship People our Ancestors Would not have Permitted in Their Homes

Note: I wrote this a couple of days ago. Something kept telling me not to publish it. Today I felt that I was released.

I am disturbed today.

This morning during my prayer time, I picked up my phone for a minute, and somehow I ended up Googling Stanley Kubrick. From there, I went on to read up on Dr. Strangelove, Terry Southern, the beat generation, William S. Burroughs, Rip Torn, Saturday Night Live, and a number of popular movies.

I have never liked Stanley Kubrick movies. The only exception is Dr. Strangelove, which was a pretty fair picture of the way human organizations work. It was like Dilbert’s view of the Cold War.

I just realized I liked another Kubrick movie. I don’t like it now, however. When I was a kid, I watched A Clockwork Orange, and I got caught up in the way it made extreme cruelty and rape funny. I think most people who like the movie like it for its humor, and that’s unfortunate, because it shows how our consciences have been seared. I should never have found it funny. I should have left the room in shock.

I never thought much of 2001. It was an extremely boring movie. The plot could have been summed up in less than 10 seconds. It was not clever. It was not funny. It was not moving. It was like something a high school student could have written.

Full Metal Jacket was somewhat like A Clockwork Orange. Thanks to R. Lee Ermey, Kubrick again succeeded in making depravity amusing. The rest of the film was just sensationalism, pessimism, and hatred of humanity. There was no plot. It’s not clear if Kubrick had any type of structure in mind when he made the film.

He obviously hated the military. That much is clear. Of course, his freedom to make his films was built on the corpses of dead soldiers.

Terry Southern rewrote Dr. Strangelove, which means he made a small contribution to the film, but many people think he wrote the whole thing. He was a Texan. He was a pal of beatniks and counterculture apostles. He ran around with William S. Burroughs, who is the very face of depravity and damnation. You haven’t debased yourself with literature until you’ve read his book Naked Lunch.

Terry Southern wrote Easy Rider, which was an exceptionally poisonous movie. He also wrote The Magic Christian, a cult film in which Peter Sellers convinces people to humiliate themselves in exchange for money. I don’t think Southern ever turned down money, but he seems to have been pretty disgusted with other people who thought about things like paying bills.

There is a scene in The Magic Christian in which Sellers’ character fills a tank with excrement and slaughterhouse waste and then adds a huge amount of British currency. People walking by start trying to pick notes out from outside the tank, and they end up swimming in it in order to maximize their success.

I read that Mike O’Donoghue tried to get Southern to write for The National Lampoon, which spawned P.J. O’Rourke, John Hughes, and Doug Kenney, who would probably have become famous, too, had he not fallen off a cliff.

I could say the Lampoon spawned me, too. A lot of the humor I’ve written was influenced by the Lampoon. Many of the self-destructive things I did in college were inspired by the spirit of Animal House.

As I read about various people and movies, God showed me that our secular culture is generated by a club, or, more accurately, a family. Directors know actors and screenwriters. Actors and screenwriters know musicians. The whole crew is in bed with leftist journalists and politicians; in fact, Southern, not Hunter Thompson, is said to have been the father of “the New Journalism.” It’s a big, sprawling guild, spreading infectious pus over America from a thousand points of darkness.

I’m so sorry I ever had an interest in popular culture. I see how poisonous it is now.

I used to fantasize about working for the Lampoon. I once sent submissions to a show SNL spun off, hoping to be hired as a writer. I’ve written a gigantic amount of sick humor on the Internet. I got three books published. I knew I could write humor as well as anyone. I thought it was only a matter of time until I was recognized.

I have to thank God my career didn’t go anywhere. What would have happened to me? I would have become convinced I was on the right track. I would have had no incentive to turn to God.

When I think of popular culture, I think of carnies. A carny is a person who works for a carnival. Carnies are typically moral nullities. They have been rejected by decent people for centuries.

Carnies have a reputation for coming to town, conning people out of their money, stealing things that aren’t locked up, seducing women, and enticing men with sex. Their reputation is well-deserved. They do all these things. A carnival is like a traveling apparatus for spreading disease. You could say carnies are like reverse evangelists.

The other day I saw an episode of American Pickers. This show is about two men, Mike Wolfe and Frank Fritz, who roam around buying collectible items from people. They have a female assistant named Danielle. She’s a stripper. She is covered with tattoos.

In the episode I saw, Danielle and Mike visited an artist who collects flash art. You may be wondering what that is. It’s wall art used in tattoo shops. Tattooists create posters of their designs, and they hang them on their shop walls. You look at the flash art and choose the tattoo you want.

Danielle was beside herself with awe as she looked at the tacky, sleazy, artistically feeble posters of filthy drawings. It was as though someone had given her a private viewing of Michelangelo’s statues. She was looking at garbage, mind you. She knew the names of the “artists.” She spoke of them the way a pianist might speak of Art Tatum. She spoke with true reverence.

Imagine speaking of a pornography dealer or a pimp with reverence. That was how it sounded to me. Actually, many Americans do revere a pornography dealer. In his last decades, Hugh Hefner–a giant among degenerates–was treated like an elder statesman.

She talked about the connection between carnivals and tattoos. She said she was a carny at heart.

The posters featured things like nude, whorish women with exaggerated physiques. Very tasteless.

As I watched her, I thought about what America had become.

America is in love with evil, and the people who lead us in our love are bound together surprisingly tightly. Look at one prominent exponent of sin, and you will be presented with links to others. It’s like a game of six degrees of Satan.

We have many celebrities who are open about loving evil. Consider rock music. On the other hand, we have a lot of evil-loving celebrities who appear squeaky clean or at least morally neutral. Look how Disney kids turn out. Britney Spears. Christina Aguilera. Shia Laboeuf. Lindsey Lohan. Miley Cyrus.

In order to become prominent in the arts or journalism, you almost have to be in the club. I didn’t know that when I was trying to get in. I was running from God, but I had enough of the smell of Christianity on me to make me an impossible fit. The vast bulk of the arts are harmful. The arts have been instrumental in promoting our decline as a civilization.

The arts promote leftism, sexual sin, hatred of authority, emasculation, cruelty, narcissism, drug abuse, pride, anger, the rejection of logic, and selfishness. It’s amazing we’ve done as well as we have, under the influence of the arts.

I feel bad about trying to get into the club, and I also feel bad about holding onto certain things too long. I feel bad about amassing a big blues and jazz collection, which I discarded not long ago. I feel bad about owning literature that poisoned me.

When I was young, I owned a lot of books by Henry Miller and Anais Nin. That could never have happened, had I known anything about God. I was ignorant. I had no one to tell me I was hurting myself. My own mother introduced me to Henry Miller!

I admired Hunter Thompson, who was one of the biggest failures in modern history. I watched other people destroy themselves, and I wanted to take my turn.

I have a friend who loves Harry Potter. I could not convince her to give it up. The books brought her comfort while she was growing up with abusive parents. I don’t think she understands that she brought demons into her life, and that they are connected to her current problems. It’s bad that I lived in ignorance for so long. I wish I were better able to help other people get out of it, but human beings tend to wait for their own self-generated disasters instead of learning from the bad choices of others. My own experience is an example.

I’ve been watching a lot of Mark Hemans lately. He’s an Australian healer who goes around casting out demons and teaching. He sometimes tells people they collected demons via one-off experiences. For example, getting one tattoo or talking to one “psychic” can invite a demon that never leaves and nearly destroys your life.

How many times have I opened doors? I can’t count the dirty movies, books, magazines, and websites I’ve seen. My uncle took me and my cousin to a dirty movie, which wasn’t even very good, when we were 8 and 7, and I watched Deadpool when I was deep into middle age. I watched many things in between. I’m not even mentioning the non-mainstream things I’ve seen.

My uncle also took us to see Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex. I don’t know what he was thinking.

I consulted a psychic once. I let my mother have my astrological chart done. I used various drugs. I said all sorts of careless things.

Christians tend to think that as long as they go to church and reject the worst sinful activities, it’s okay to be part of mainstream culture. That’s not true. Things we think are harmless can be very damaging. I saw Hemans tell a lady to go home and throw out her daughter’s fairy tale books. He said they were a reason demons were afflicting her daughter. How many Christians have shelves full of Pixar and Disney films about supernatural creatures?

There is no significant difference between watching fetish pornography and watching John Wick or a Harry Potter film. A demon is a demon, no matter what vehicle it arrives in.

I can’t believe I let myself watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I must have been insane.

When I think about the things I’ve ingested, the sensation I have is a wish that I could vomit everything out and be clean. I have been praying for hours every day for years, I have been baptized with the Holy Spirit, I am very sincere about serving God, and still, this is where I am. What must life be like for Christians who are not even trying?

Maybe Satan doesn’t mind it all that much if you get baptized with the Holy Spirit, as long as you hold onto your culture. If you go home and wallow in worldly filth and defend it to other people, you aren’t a big threat, and you are likely to return to him. You are also likely to serve him very powerfully even while you think you’re on God’s side. Christian TV is full of preachers who do tremendous work for Satan and almost nothing for God.

Understanding all this, I believe I know what’s happening with Kanye West. He is not a sound Christian. He is very dangerous. He has let worldly Christians and his own flesh convince him that he’s supposed to help God out with his fame and money. He wants to show the world a rich, famous Christian can do powerful works for God, and that Christians are the ones who are supposed to have the TV cameras and big venues.

West is under the spell of Richie Wilkerson, who is as toxic as preachers get, short of starting cults in the Amazon basin. Richie has no interest in God. He believes in money and fame. Richie’s mom and dad run a cult church where money is god, and the apple fell right next to the trees. Richie thinks earthly promotion is proof of God’s presence, even if you have to debase yourself to get it.

If you look at things Richie says in public, you’ll see he’s very defensive. He’s always defending what he’s doing. He knows he’s in the wrong.

Paul made it clear we are not supposed to associate with Christians who continue in willful sin, yet Richie has no problem using his closeness to Kim Kardashian to promote his ministry. After years of connecting with Richie, Kim Kardashian still works for the devil. She is a powerful promoter of sexual sin. She has not repented. Kanye West, if he has changed at all, is an embryonic Christian who should not be leading anyone. When Richie hangs out with them and endorses what they do, he is not being loving and inclusive. He is just whoring out and being a follower. This is exactly what his dad does, with less success.

I think there is hope for West, but I think his breakthrough won’t come until he gets free of the Wilkerson curse. Until you see him abandon and denounce his secular works–completely–don’t be fooled. He’s still deceived.

I was there when people who actually cared about God fled the Wilkerson church. I know what I’m talking about. The Wilkersons had secret meetings about me, and Richie actually preached publicly against what I was saying in private. They are not nice people. They grin and smile and talk about love when they’re really just trying to seduce people so they can take their money. Then if you tell people what they’re up to, the Wilkersons call you a hater.

It’s a wonderful pose. You smile and forgive in front of the crowd, and you claim you love everyone who is against you. The idea is to make yourself look holy, and to make people who speak for God look wicked, while you pick people’s pockets.

Satan appears as an angel of light. Why? Because people like to be kissed and coddled and told they don’t have to change. They prefer flatterers who destroy them to honest people who love them and want to help them.

People like the Wilkersons defend themselves with numbers. “Look how many people came to church today.” They don’t know how few of those people belong to God. They use the wrong bait, so they attract the wrong people. The Bible says, “Better a little the righteous man has than the riches of many wicked.”

When Jesus becomes popular, he ceases to be Jesus. He said the world would hate his children, and it does. You can’t have a glamorous, worldwide movement everyone approves of and expect God to be part of it.

The best that can be said for Richie and Kanye is that some people may go to their events and get to know God in spite of the errors of the organizers. How well such new Christians would do would depend largely on their willingness to ignore everything Richie says and find better teaching. I improved a great deal at Trinity Church, but the better I got, the more I disagreed with the management. Had God not given me a prodigious habit of praying in tongues, which brings revelation, I might still be at Trinity, drinking the Kool Aid.

Leaving Trinity was wonderful. It was like a graduation. I felt like a runaway slave. The rapture will feel the same way.

Even the pharisees who rejected Jesus and are now in hell taught some useful things, as Jesus himself said. That’s how it will be with Kanye’s new project.

I will keep looking at my life and trying to rid myself of anything toxic.

Coercion Results in Welding Table Purchase

It seems like the exciting news never stops. I have made a decision regarding buying a welding table.

Why am I buying a table at all? I still haven’t finished painting the grinder pedestal I welded together. A fine fabricator I turned out to be. I keep putting things off.

The finish on the top is going to have to be sanded and repainted at least one more time. I also need to enlarge or replace a couple of holes for the bolts that hold the grinder on. I put them in the wrong places.

I really will finish the pedestal. I could use it right now (after using the drill twice). I just want it to look a little better.

Anyway, I had a couple of table ideas in mind. One was to build my own table, which would be somewhat challenging…without a welding table. Another was to buy a Fabblock table from Weldtables.com and assemble it myself. The Fabblock I wanted, plus legs, runs $800 plus shipping. Ow.

There was a third alternative, but my opportunity to try it was temporary, and I let it slip by. Now I have another opportunity, so I’m pouncing.

Northern Tool sells Klutch tools. I think it’s their house brand. They have a welding table that usually sells for almost $400. For some inexplicable reason, they put it on sale for $179. I noticed it a while back. Then, while I was fighting temptation, they took it away! Fiends!

This is a very nice table. The top is 4mm thick, which means it’s around 1/6 of an inch. It has 16mm holes all over it. It comes with a bunch of clamps and fixturing tools. You can open the box, put it together, and start welding without buying a single clamp.

People say the top is generally very flat, but you may get a lemon with a 1/16″ crown or dip. I think it’s worth the risk. It might be possible to improve a warped table, and in any case, it shouldn’t be hard to shim workpieces and get them flat. A 1/16″ bend is not hard to compensate for.

Is it the table of my dreams? No, but it’s very cheap and very good, and if I move to Tennessee, it will be a lot easier to move than a Fabblock. If Northern Tool kills the sale price again, I should actually be able to sell it locally for more than I paid. Then I can buy a Fabblock when I’m firmly situated.

I can use this table to build a bigger table, if I want. That may actually be the best move. My milling machine is about to be returned to me, so preparing slats for a shopmade table will be easy.

Northern Tool made it impossible to say no. They brought the low price back, and then they sent me an email saying they would give me a $10 gift card for ordering online (code 268178). That brings the price to $169 plus tax. The other day I spent $180 on a lame restaurant meal. How can I say no to a welding table that costs $11 less?

Strong Hand Tools makes wonderful [Chinese] stuff, and their version of the Klutch table costs about $430. Strong Hand is actually kind of disturbing, because it’s one of those companies that show us the future. Their products are Chinese, but the quality is really good. I have their version of the famous Bessey clamp, and it looks like an improvement to me.

I can’t wait to abandon my Harbor Freight table. For the money, it is a stellar tool, but when you consider what they cost, that’s faint praise. It’s wobbly, it’s not flat, and it’s small. I may keep it for use as a portable, which is the purpose it’s made for. I do not plan to weld on it in my shop unless I have no choice.

Now I need to get wheels for the new table. Once that’s done, I’ll be sitting pretty.

Speaking of Chinese, I finally have a good source of Chinese food. The only local place I have tried was a disaster. It was hot and dirty, and the proprietress kept screaming at the cook in Chinese. Their kung pao chicken was pretty bad, and instead of cooking the peanuts in sauce, they just dumped dry raw peanuts on top of the food.

Small towns are known for terrible Chinese, as is Miami. My area had only one decent place, and they tore it down to build something or other.

I know good Chinese food. When I was a student at Columbia University, I had access to very good Szechuan places. For example, I used to eat at the Hunan Balcony on upper Broadway. I also know bad Chinese food. The oil smells rancid. The meat always seems to be nearly spoiled. The smell when the kitchen door opens is scary. All the sauce is basically duck sauce. The seasonings are off.

I found myself a recipe for kung pao chicken, over at Epicurious. It’s from a book by a lady named Kuan. I used Epicurious because I’m not a Cook’s Illustrated subscriber any more, and I hate Cooks.com and the Food Network’s revolting recipes. When I think about the Food Network, I always think about Bobby Flay’s inept 325° prime rib recipe. Don’t buy a rib roast and cook it at 325°. Just buy some liquid rubber, pour it in a roast-shaped mold, and let it cure for several days. Same result.

The recipe called for a couple of weird items. It called for black vinegar and hoisin sauce. I went to an Asian grocery to pick up the vinegar. I told the girl there the local Chinese food was heinous. She said it wasn’t Americanized. I can understand why she would stand up for her pals, but no, it has nothing to do with being Americanized. Bad food which is authentic is still bad food.

I can’t tell you what authentic Chinese food tastes like, and I’m not sure I want to find out, because authentic Mexican food is garbage compared to American Mexican food. I can tell when a person is a bad cook, however, regardless of the cuisine.

She sold me a big bottle of black vinegar for $4. I would say it tastes like malt vinegar that has been strained through dirt. I don’t like it. I suspect her brand is really cheap.

I got my hoisin sauce at a supermarket. They had several brands. I don’t like buying prepackaged sauces, but in order to make hoisin sauce, you have to ferment soybeans. Not going to happen. Also, let’s face it: Chinese cuisine standards are pretty weak. I have zero doubt that I have never had a Chinese meal that wasn’t made with stuff from bottles and cans.

Making the dish was not easy. It did not require skill, but there were a lot of ingredients, and the recipe was confusing. Basically, you marinate chicken, prepare sauce ingredients in another bowl, fry the chicken, throw the sauce in, throw in a few more ingredients, and call it good.

The recipe said to put corn starch in the chicken marinade. I am not a Chinese chef, but I’m not an idiot, either, and I don’t see how this can work. If you put starch on meat and then throw it in a hot pan, what happens? The starch burns instantly and sticks to the pan. This is what happened to me, and it was not a surprise. I ended up with a layer of burned stuff on my skillet.

I don’t have a wok. I don’t even have a burner that will work with a wok. I used a 14″ stainless skillet. I don’t think the food really fried all that much, because I don’t have a way to provide that much heat, but here’s the thing: the texture and so on were exactly like what I’ve experienced at good Chinese restaurants, so if I’m doing it wrong with my skillet, they’re also doing it wrong with their fancy woks, and it doesn’t matter at all.

The recipe had virtually no vegetables in it, so I added diced bell peppers, both red and green. So much for authenticity.

I also tripled the sauce recipe. People who commented over at Epicurious said the recipe was extremely dry, so I took their advice and multiplied by three.

The result was very nice, but there was a dirt aftertaste I did not like. I considered the hoisin sauce and the dirt-tasting black vinegar, and I chose the most likely culprit.

Yesterday I made the dish again. I made a lot of changes. No corn starch in the marinade. I halved the black vinegar and made up the difference with balsamic. I cut the number of chiles in half. I also added a can of baby corn, because I like baby corn.

I figure I can add whatever I want to the dish. Here’s a known fact: all spice Chinese chicken dishes taste nearly alike. Kung pao has peanuts. Ta chien has baby corn. Orange chicken has citrus peels. Other than little differences like these, they’re pretty similar. I like baby corn, and I think it belongs in kung pao chicken, along with tasty bell peppers. So there. I would have put little Asian mushrooms in it if I had been able to find them. I think water chestnuts would also be good.

How was the food? Amazing. Best “Chinese” food I’ve ever had, hands-down. There was still a slight dirt taste from the awful black vinegar, which I plan to eliminate next time by blending malt and cider vinegars, but other than that, it could not have been better. I especially liked the way the tiny bits of fresh ginger exploded in citrusy flavors when I bit down on them.

There was too much starch in the sauce. The recipe called for an obscene amount, which I knew was wrong, but I gave the author the benefit of the doubt. The sauce was clumpy and didn’t flow well. Next time, I’ll use half as much, if that.

The recipe calls for one pound of chicken and supposedly feeds 4 people. I am totally serious. I used two pounds, and I plan to get a total of three dinners out of it.

Here is what I learned: professional Chinese chefs are not very good. They must not be putting their hearts into what they do. No surprise. Anyone who has smelled the rear of a typical Chinese joint knows they’re not doing everything they should.

I can’t cook any Chinese dish except this one, and I’ve only cooked it twice, and my recipe still needs work, yet my version blows the real thing away. That’s a scathing indictment of restaurant chefs.

If I decide to learn how to cook anything else, it will be pan-fried dumplings. I can’t think of any other Chinese dishes I like enough to learn how to cook.

I can’t understand why professional cooks are so bad. It’s not just Chinese cooks. It’s nearly universal. It’s like cooking school fundamentally does not work.

I don’t feel like buying a wok or a propane burner, because my food comes out nearly the same as wok-cooked food. I don’t know if stir-frying is really frying, except when there are only a few little things in the wok. Adding a lot of food pretty much moves you into the simmering arena.

What a beautiful future I see stretching out before me. Myself, seated at a wonderful welding table, consuming the best Chinese food in North America. It’s hard to imagine how things could get better, unless I moved a couch into the shop.

Now there’s an idea.

More

I went and got the table. The box was very difficult to get in the car. The weight is only 73 pounds, but it hangs way out there when you’re trying to wrestle with it, and the Northern Tool cart kept trying to scoot around the parking lot while I maneuvered the box.

I thought I felt something going funny in my back, so I slowed down and tried to use common sense. I hate that. Prayed in the car on the way home, and my back seems okay.

I can’t tell you whether it’s a good table until I use it, but things look okay right now.

The top is not far from 3/16″ steel, which is very good for a cheap table. It’s also nearly flat. It looks like it has a 1/32″ crown in the middle. It’s hard to get upset about that. I doubt I’ve ever welded anything that warped less than 1/32″.

The legs have a funny rectangular brace that goes around them. It’s held on by friction, which is not good. The frame has little hooks which fit in holes on the legs and pinch them. I figure I can stabilize it by drilling holes and adding some screws.

The legs have M10x1.5 threaded holes for the feet. I am looking around for casters that will screw into those holes. The table is light enough to pick up and move, but casters would be better.

I can tell it’s going to fit well in my shop, because I’m already using it to hold things I should put away instead.

The square inchage is 864, which is considerably better than the Harbor Freight table, which comes in at just under 600. Also, because the table has round holes instead of long slots, I should not have any problems with objects falling through it. That was always a concern with the other table.

If you follow the directions, the table takes an hour to assemble. If you just guess, you can do it in about 15 minutes.

I have not tried the clamps yet, but they must work, because people are not howling about them all over the web.

I sprayed it down with lanolin and mineral spirits. I want to keep the top shiny and silvery for as long as I can.

Not much to complain about here. I finally have enough tools to weld relatively well. Now all I need is skill.

Libertarians Will be Disarmed Wholesale

I saw an interesting story on the web. I found out what happened to the host of FPSRussia.

If you don’t know what FPSRussia is, you must be a woman or a liberal. FPSRussia is a Youtube channel featuring automatic weapons and explosives. The star, who no longer produces videos for the site, called himself “Dmitri Potapoff.” He spoke with a Russian accent and fooled a lot of people, although smart viewers realized it wasn’t all that likely that a Russian was able to get ahold of machine guns and make videos without being imprisoned immediately.

Here’s a video. Language alert.

The host’s real name is Kyle Lamar, and he’s from Georgia. Our Georgia. He has had some trouble with the law.

In 2013, his house was raided by the ATF and the state of Georgia. The justification was that he was making money using explosives on Youtube. He continued making videos after that raid, so I suppose it didn’t amount to anything. In 2015, he was raided again, and he had to take a plea and spend a short time in what he calls “federal prison.” Other sources call it a halfway house, but I guess he knows where he was.

It’s a weird story. He had a pal who had a gun business, and one day, his pal turned up dead. He was in his office, and his surveillance equipment was gone. Someone had shot him in the back of the head. Some people thought Lamar did it. Conspiracy theories abounded. I suppose it makes sense that when a person gets shot in the head from behind, in his own secure office with a surveillance system, you would assume he was murdered by someone he knew, but I think that’s about all the theorists have.

It was not long after the murder that the 2013 raid took place.

The 2015 raid involved drug trafficking, if you believe the prosecution. They were monitoring his mail, and they found a small package of hash oil in a mailbox he rented. The total amount was 25 grams, which is just under one ounce.

He says the Georgia side of the 2015 case was dismissed because the warrant was bad. The feds, however, had a better case. They based their search on the fact that he appeared to be a marijuana user and owned guns.

To me, this is what’s interesting about the story.

When you fill out a 4473 form during a background check, you have to say you don’t use illegal drugs. You can probably guess how many people lie on the form. Maybe 40%? Weed is really popular.

Even if weed is legal under the laws of your state, it’s still illegal to the feds, so yes, if you smoke a doobie once a week while floating in your pool, you are a federal criminal. If you didn’t mention it when you bought your guns, you are a felon.

How about that?

I’ve filled out more than one of these forms. I have never admitted that I use weed. I haven’t admitted it because I don’t use weed. I never liked it, and by the time I bought my first gun under the background check law, I was years past my last effort to try to like it. I have no interest whatsoever in drugs.

Lamar says he was charged with possession with intent to distribute. In other words, he is a convicted drug dealer as far as the feds are concerned. When you have certain amounts of certain drugs on hand, the law presumes you’re a dealer.

I have no idea how much hash oil you need to get high, but it’s hard for me to believe that a person who buys less than an ounce online is planning to sell any of it.

The other day, I saw a photo of Billy Ray Cyrus’s wife standing in front of their open weed safe. There were bags and bags of weed in it. I don’t know if they’re insane or what. I can’t see any reason to own that much dope. How much can two people smoke? Here’s the thing to think about: why haven’t the Cyruses been arrested? I don’t know how much weed a weed store keeps on hand, but I’ll bet you could run one for a month on what the Cyruses have in their safe.

Another question: why haven’t the feds closed down all the “legal” marijuana stores in states that have changed their laws? What could be easier? You don’t have to tap phones. You don’t have to get warrants. You just go in during business hours and arrest everyone.

There must be a reason. I see something online about the Supreme Court making it illegal for the feds to shut down medical marijuana stores, but what about stores that don’t hide behind medicine? I’m too lazy to look it up.

I looked around online (welcome to the federal list, me), and there are sites advertising weed extracts for sale. I guess Lamar didn’t have a hard time finding what he wanted. Did the feds shut down the company that sold him the dope? I don’t know.

Here’s what I wonder: how many Americans who own guns have set themselves up for drug-based searches and confiscation? The number must be in the tens of millions.

It’s a dream scenario for someone like Elizabeth Warren. When the political timing seems right, you tell the DOJ you want the drug laws enforced, and they send the FBI around, knocking on doors. First thing you know, tens of millions of guns are behind locked doors and slated for destruction, and millions of Americans are felony defendants who are likely to take pleas and give up their gun rights.

Lamar thinks he had around $400,000 worth of guns. Now they’re scrap metal. He can’t have a gun again, under federal law, until the laws of Georgia say he can.

I am suspicious of the federal claim that Lamar was believed to be using illegal explosives. These days, anyone can go to a gun store and buy explosives legally. You can get exploding targets made with a composition called Tannerite. One target won’t hurt anyone, but you can buy a lot of Tannerite, concentrate it, and create an explosion strong enough to throw a refrigerator the length of an NFL pass. Youtube is full of Tannerite videos. The fact that you blew something up doesn’t mean you made explosives.

Maybe misusing Tannerite is a crime, but if so, why would you need to search someone’s house? Finding boxes of Tannerite wouldn’t prove anything. The videos would be the proof.

Message for the DOJ: I do not use Tannerite.

I get it. It’s neat to blow things up. It’s just not my bag. I like to shoot for accuracy. You can’t really tell how well you’re shooting when every shot blows a target up.

I guess there are people in power who think I’m part of a dangerous movement because I pray in tongues and enjoy shooting. I’m also the proprietor of a DoD-banned “hate site,” although I have never been told what the basis for that strange honor is. My guess is that a heavyset female soldier with a short haircut and no makeup read my site one day, saw that I was a Christian, and put me on the ban list with a couple of mouse clicks. I don’t think they have educated people or highly ranked officers looking at blogs. They probably farm the work out to privates or civilian hipsters. I’m sure no one over the rank of private has any idea my site is banned, except for military people who used to visit.

I’m not thrilled with the way our rights have been destroyed, but I don’t want anything to do with insurrection or any type of armed resistance. When they find a way to take my guns legally, my plan is to stack the guns by the front door, invite the feds in, offer them donuts, and help them carry my guns to their van. I have more important things to think about. If a Christian is going to give up his life and go to prison, it should be because he did something like smuggling a Bible or casting a demon out of a sick kid. You shouldn’t go out shooting because you want to keep two Glocks and a Taurus .38.

I don’t think Lamar was making illegal explosives. He wasn’t convicted of that. I have to doubt that Obama’s FBI suspected it. My hunch is that they saw all those guns, as well as his wild videos, and wanted to shut him down. Maybe they were also trying to get information on the murder of his friend. The drug thing was incidental. It was just the key that opened the door for them. They would never have gone after him just for buying hash oil. Think how many Democrats would in federal prison today if they routinely went after people who bought hash oil.

Speaking of our rights, it’s remarkable how the noose is tightening. On Sunday, I drove to Sanford, Florida, as the government already knows from recording my toll payments, credit card transactions, and cell phone locations. I drove to the same area several months ago to buy a buffer. This time, there were new cell towers everywhere. There were so many, the landscape was defaced. They looked positively sinister. It was as if they were looking down on us and monitoring us, like giant concentration camp guards. And, of course, they were!

I visited Sanford in June and then again in November. During the short interim, telephone/surveillance towers sprang up like ragweed. Things are changing much more quickly than I expected, even though I’m one of the people who keep saying things are going to change more quickly than we expect.

I used to worry about creeping totalitarianism, but now I don’t, because I know we can’t stop it. I pay for everything electronically, leaving a digital trail. I don’t use a VPN service. I don’t keep a hundred pounds of gold under the floor. I can’t grow my own food. I don’t even have a decent generator, which would be useless anyway if I couldn’t get gas. I trust God to protect me as well as possible, and I accept the fact that Christians are going to lose. Americans are going to lose all of their rights, except for those relating to things like sexual perversion, obscenity, and drug use, and America will be just as scary as Cambodia used to be. Hoarding guns, buying Bitcoin and shooting FBI agents will not change that. The important thing is to get aligned with God and prepare for the rapture.

The other day God told me the rapture was going to be a hypocrite filter.

I know someone who lives in total denial. This person always pretends everything is going fine in his walk. He even teaches others and holds himself out to be a man of God. When you try to give him useful information, he says he already knows about it. He wants people to think he’s doing great. In reality, he needs to get real and stop bluffing. He needs prayer in tongues. He needs deliverance and confession. He needs to quit trying to tell people his carnal efforts at ministry were ordained by God.

Christians who are living that way will be able to pull it off for a time, but what will they say when solid Christians are taken and they’re still here? “Jesus lost my boarding pass”?

I used to wonder if the rapture would actually be a wave of executions, but I have looked at the Bible, and it makes it clear that people will literally vanish. When Jesus “meets us in the air,” it won’t be because our bodies have been shot in the head. It will be a supernatural event. If it happens and you’re still here, you will be in real trouble, and you will have no possible defense for the decisions you’ve made. You will be exposed. I hope to avoid that.

Fighting the government in the streets is pointless. Jesus isn’t for it, and it will not do anyone any good. People who know Jesus won’t be involved. If a war takes place, it will be between various factions, all of which belong to Satan.

Jesus will have a political reign, but it won’t happen during this age.

What an interesting time to be alive. Me, I would have preferred to be born in 1930.

If Spiritual Gifts are Biscuits, Love is the Gravy

I had an exciting morning. Maybe it’s strange to type that at 10:15 a.m., but I will stick with it.

Around 8 months ago, I dreamed about a woman I know. She was on a university campus, trying to get students onto a bus for some kind of outing she thought was related to serving God. I never saw her or the bus, but I knew they were nearby.

The university was dedicated to show business, which is ironic, considering how little education you need in order to be a performer. It was as thought Disney had built a college.

I was a Jewish man, and I didn’t look like myself. I appeared to be about 65. I was wearing a sportcoat and nice pants. I was walking briskly to a place where I was expected to speak.

A warm wind arose and started blowing toward me from the front. It lifted me like a kite. It felt wonderful. Very comforting. Although it was a headwind, I was propelled forward, as though I were falling in that direction. I was moving higher, however.

Eventually I came to a cluster of water oak trees with thick, shiny foliage. I reached out and grabbed the branches to steady myself.

I wasn’t upset or scared. I was enjoying myself.

The wind felt great against the front of my body. It was like a loving, supportive caress.

I woke up, and I was lying on my stomach. My hands were up as though I were holding onto branches. I still felt the love and warmth. It was as though the mattress loved me.

Ever since I turned back to God and started thinking about the two visits Jesus paid me in the Eighties, I have been trying to get a good grip on the sensation of supernatural love. During his visits, I physically felt his love radiating toward me and through me. Sometimes I get that feeling these days. I felt it this morning. I believe we’re supposed to feel that way most of the time. Love is a fruit of the Holy Spirit, like joy and peace. If we’re supposed to feel peace and joy that come from God and flow through us to others, surely we’re supposed to feel love, too.

It’s not morning now. A friend of mine came into town, so I interrupted my writing. I’ll continue.

This morning I woke up before the alarm went off. While I was lying in bed, I felt the same sensation I felt in the flying dream. It felt as if God was somehow caressing me with the mattress. I felt the sensation on and off through breakfast. I tried to focus on it and hold onto it.

My friend showed up, and we spent a few hours together. During that time, the feeling decreased somewhat.

You would think that love would increase when you’re around human beings, but it appears that that’s not always true. There is something about the presence of other people that pushes love into the background. We have other things to talk about. We aren’t known for putting our affairs on hold so we can sit and talk about how much we love each other. Also, if you’re with someone who is not used to a warm, fuzzy version of you, it can be hard to let that version appear in front of them.

People tend to pull you backward. Their presence can pressure you to behave as they’re used to seeing you behave. The longer you’ve known them, the more likely this is to be true. I suppose this is why Jesus surrounded himself with new people instead of starting a ministry with his mother and brothers.

I can see why Jesus spent so much time alone. The purpose of love is to be shared with human beings, but human beings themselves, by their very nature, tend to make it hard for your love to flow. After you’ve been around them for a while, it makes sense that you would want to go off into the desert and recover. I guess you need to sit with God and remind yourself why you love them!

Funny, but true.

I keep getting the impression that there is going to be a love revolution in the church. We have the Holy Spirit back. We use his gifts. Lots of knowledge is being restored. It seems like supernatural love is the component which is obviously missing.

In my flying dream, God showed me that his love lifts us up to do good works. Doing good works out of obligation is not what makes him happy, and it’s tiresome, too. Yesterday I saw Mark Hemans quote a passage in which the Bible said something about faith and love working together. I just found it. Galatians 5:6: ” For in Jesus Christ neither circumcision availeth any thing, nor uncircumcision; but faith which worketh by love.”

There are a lot of relatively cold and even cranky people out there displaying (or pretending to display) the gifts of the Spirit. There are certainly a lot of greedy and narcissistic people doing these things. We don’t see love pouring out of many self-styled prophets and apostles, unless the love of cameras and money counts.

I think something big is happening. I certainly hope so. The church has to be cleaned up before the rapture, and it seems obvious to me that the restoration of supernatural love is a necessary part of the process.

Don’t be too Quick to Approve of Glamorous Conversions

It looks like Kanye West is promoting Christianity now, and he is holding church services. People are trying to decide what to think about it.

West is interesting to me, because Richie Wilkerson, the son of my former pastor, married him to Kim Kardashian. Richie is all about money and fame. He is in very deep trouble. He is toxic, just like his dad. There is no possibility that he gave the Wests good advice while he was counseling them. When you see Kanye West claiming to belong to Jesus, you can’t just swallow it at face value. You have to ask God what’s happening, and you have to use common sense.

West supposedly turned to God several years ago, and Richie was his mentor. Kim Kardashian visited Trinity Church, and the armorbearers were forced to treat her like a VIP and give her a special seat. Rich Wilkerson made himself look ridiculous on Twitter, calling West, whom he barely knew, “a special friend.”

He always treated famous and wealthy people like that. They would show up briefly, and he would take them into the green room behind the stage and try to buddy up to them. It didn’t have anything to do with God. Famous people can help you raise your own profile, and if a millionaire comes to your church and tithes, you will receive a tremendous amount of money.

It was disgusting when the armorbearers had to honor Kardashian. She had a sex tape out, and she posed in Playboy. She is America’s leading proponent of sexual sin. She teaches girls to be sluts, plain and simple. She has never stopped. When Wilkerson kowtowed to her, it was as though he were bowing to the Whore of Babylon.

He also made the team honor Luther Campbell, AKA Luke Skyywalker, one of the filthiest rappers of the last century.

God is not a respecter of persons. This means he does not like it when you give special treatment to someone who is socially prominent. God wants you to honor everyone who can receive it, and he is especially concerned about the way we treat people who are on the bottom. At Wilkerson’s church, those people were pretty much kept away from the pastors, who had no interest in them at all.

Preachers who want to justify whoring out to the world and associating with prominent sinners like to point out that Jesus spent time with tax collectors and drunks. The difference is that Jesus was a leader, not a follower. He showed up to change sinners. Rich Wilkerson chases unrepentant sinners and lets them mold him.

The words says a believer is to be the head and not the tail. Shallow Christians think that means we get to be on top all the time and push other people around. It’s true that it implies dominance, but it also implies obligation. We are required to lead, even when it means giving up popularity. Wilkerson and his crew are not leaders. They look to see what sinners want them to be and do, and they obey.

As pastors, his bunch doesn’t have an inch of guts among them. They can’t bear to say anything that might drive a person to leave the church and take his money with him. They are incapable of leading.

If you can’t say no, you are a follower.

Jesus reached out to sinners, obviously, but he did it so they could repent, not so they could invade churches, take over, and turn them into nightclubs.

People used to make fun of Trinity and call it “Club Trinity” because the leaders worked so hard at putting on a great show. They spent $72,000 on four spinning lights for the band, and they used smoke machines.

These things are on my mind when I think about the Kanye West story.

I don’t know what famous preachers are saying about Kanye, but here is my guess: they’re shaming Christians who are skeptical, saying, “Don’t judge!” In fact, one of my Youtube favorites has put out a video to that effect. I have been worrying about his ministry, because it seemed to be declining, and now I see confirmation that there are problems.

He also changed the name of his channel. It used to be called Cardboard Box Church, after the little box structure he puts up in public to draw people. Now it’s named after him: Thomas Fischer. I am always leery of ministries named after the people who run them. It’s a way of honoring yourself.

Preachers love, love, love money, and they love virtue-signaling as well as accusing others falsely in order to make themselves look good. Most of them know nearly nothing about God and do not hear from him, so they say whatever benefits their bottom lines. It should not shock anyone if they try to shame Holy-Spirit-led Christians who speak wisdom. They’re led by Satan, not the Holy Spirit, and they say what he tells them to say.

The phrase “don’t judge” has caused the charismatic church more trouble than anything over the last 20 years or so. Jesus never said, “Don’t judge,” all by itself. He spoke a longer message which contained the phrase. Preachers and sin-loving Christians don’t quote the whole message because it shows they’re wrong.

We are supposed to warn other people about sin. We’re not supposed to be self-righteous about it, but we have to do it. It’s in the same passage as the bit about not judging hypocritically.

Think of all the people Jesus criticized. John the Baptist did the same thing. So did Paul. So did Jude. Come on. Think.

Judging isn’t just permissible; it’s mandatory. What matters is why you judge and whether you judge correctly.

I think Kanye West is sincere. I think he is a tormented person because he hears from spirits, and while he has listened to evil spirits for most of his life, he also hears from God, and God is waking him up. That being said, he appears to be a long way from anything resembling powerful, correct Christianity.

The shows West puts on are very much like the kid-pleasing shows Trinity relies on. Lots of flash. Lots of good music. The problem is that there seems to be no substance. I haven’t watched an entire show, but what I’ve seen so far has been very shallow.

People may hear the excellent music and see the spectacular presentation and say, “The Holy Spirit has to be in this.” Come on. Wake up. Liberace put on a better show than Billy Graham ever thought about putting on. If you think a good show proves God is behind things, you should pick up your Bible and go see Beyonce, who is corrupting people like a typhoon of sin.

Are people repenting at West’s services? Are speakers telling people they have to stop sinning? Is there prophecy? Are they casting out demons? Are their healings? Are people being baptized properly and speaking in tongues? I haven’t seen any of this yet. If these things aren’t happening, then Kanye’s services are just man-glorifying backslapping sessions.

It’s not enough to cry and sing and yell that you love Jesus, in front of a crowd, so people will be impressed. The word says that if you love Jesus, you obey him.

It’s disturbing that West is trying to make Jesus hip. Jesus is not, and never will be, hip. The world hates Jesus, as he said, and it always will. The world hates his children, as he said it would. That will never change. Whenever someone preaches a “cool” Jesus, he preaches a lie. He is telling people they can stay in the world of the flesh and still please God. The Bible makes it very clear that the flesh can’t please God.

People may say God is using West and his big services to reach a lot of people, because God “needs” famous people and their ability to reach millions. That’s a complete lie. The age of famous preachers and huge churches is ending, not beginning. That whole business was a failure. Satan ran it. The real church is going to be driven underground, and God is preparing us for that. We won’t be able to have big fancy churches. Christianity will spread from person to person, in small groups. That’s how it has always spread. The successes of the big churches were illusions.

Satan has never needed famous people or big gatherings to work effectively. Sin and iniquity spread like the flu, from one individual to another. It works just fine, and Satan got the idea from God, who thought the idea up first.

I think there is a lot of hope for Kanye West, but he is a baby right now. No one should be following him. He doesn’t know anything.

If you see his secular career flop, and famous people start shunning him, then you should be aware that God may really be working in him. If God gets anywhere with Kanye West, his associates will flee, and his wife is likely to follow.

Popularity is a mark of a failed Christian. Jesus assured us that the world would hate and persecute us. You can be popular within a limited circle, but that’s about it.

The other day I told someone I saw more hope for Kanye West than for his wife and Richie Wilkerson. West is a strange guy, but he is willing to go against the crowd, and that may save him.

In other news, God has emphasized something he told me long ago.

The other day I saw a Mark Hemans video, and he told someone demons had entered her when she got tattooed. He says demons like to enter with tattoos, and he is against tattooing. In that respect, he is aligned with God, who forbade the Jews to do body modification, other than circumcision.

In ancient times, body modifications were used to glorify false gods and to honor the dead. In fact, the dead were often worshiped as gods. For a long, long time, tattoos were rightly considered disgraceful among Christians. A tattoo was something you got when you were 18, in the navy, and very drunk. It was something you later regretted. Now many Christians are obsessed with tattoos. You go to churches and see them covered up with them.

The “judge not” obsessives have a field day with people who are against tattooing. They love to point to tattooed people who are supposedly leading wonderful lives. They used to circulate memes featuring a very prominent young man who was highly successful and covered with tattoos.

His name was Aaron Hernandez.

The murderer. Who killed himself in prison.

The memes dried up after he was arrested.

Some people actually claim God told them to get tattooed. I’m not saying it could not happen, but it probably does not. God hates tattoos. A tattoo is a mockery of the Torah, which was made by marking animal skin. It also defaces the body, which was created in God’s image.

There are Christians who say tattoos are fine because we’re not under the law. Here’s something people need to know: we are still under a law. We are not under the law of the written word, but we are under the law of the Holy Spirit. I know this is terrible news to many people. What the Holy Spirit commands, we must do, just as the Jews had to obey the dietary laws and keep the sabbath. The Holy Spirit is still against tattooing, and by the way, he doesn’t like marijuana, either. He doesn’t like a lot of things that are suddenly permissible in our declining culture.

People still use tattoos to honor false gods and the dead, in case you have not noticed. I don’t just mean Maoris and Africans. I mean your American neighbors.

I’ve been against tattooing for a long time. The fad came to us not just from idolaters but from criminals, just like chin beards, head-shaving, and sagging pants. Prison is an earthly picture of hell. It’s a foretaste of hell, and it mainly traps people who are hellbound.

Prisoners are the biggest losers in society. They are the tail, not the head. They have no rights. They receive no honor. They have no liberty. They can’t even control their persons. When you’re a prisoner, your handlers, who may be of the opposite sex, can strip you naked and look up your rear end pretty much whenever they feel like it. Then can put you in restraints. They can blast you with hoses.

At some point around 1990, Americans began changing their appearance so they would look like convicts. That was a very bad thing. You become what you imitate. By imitating convicts, we prove we love evil, and if we love evil, we hate good.

Why does Satan love body modification? Because it allows the demons that control you to turn you into a replica of themselves.

God killed the physical bodies of demons in the flood. Now they want bodies very badly. We supply those bodies by inviting them in. When a demon makes a home in you, it wants to redecorate. It’s like taking over a church and turning it into a mosque. It marks territory. It allows demons to express themselves through us.

Does this remind you of anyone else?

What does the Holy Spirit do when he comes to live in you?

He cleans you up. He will tell you to get rid of offensive clothing. He is likely to tell you to get your tattoos lasered. He changes your speech. He changes your posture and your facial expressions.

I started thinking about tattooing while I watched Mark Hemans deliver people, and God put things into words for me. God told me demons want to create man in their image.

That’s the essence of body modification.

There is always symmetry in the supernatural. To learn about God, look at Satan. To learn about Satan, look at God. God creates people in his image, and evil spirits want the same power. They want nice filthy vessels to live in. Vessels whose very appearance, without words, thoughts, or actions added to it, is an insult to God.

I know there are lots of preachers out there who have gaudy, trashy tattoo “sleeves,” and maybe these people do some very good things. I don’t care. God never changes, and I’m not here to make excuses for people who don’t want to admit fault. Accept it, or go ahead and be angry with me. Doesn’t matter to me, because I will still say the truth.

I assure you, there are a lot of tattooed preachers who hate their tattoos and would back up everything I’m saying. The fact that a person has a tattoo doesn’t mean he likes it or approves of it.

The body-modification craze has gone off the rails, which proves it has a supernatural foundation. When things don’t make sense in the natural, they make sense in the supernatural, because there is always a supernatural cause for things that do not make sense.

People are cutting their noses off. They are cutting fingers off. They are castrating themselves. That’s not self-expression. It’s self-destruction and the expression of the selves of demons that live in us.

Sex-change surgery is body modification. Giving anti-puberty hormones to demon-controlled kids is body modification. Huge, creepy, breast implants, which are extremely popular, are body modifications.

This is fascinating stuff, but anyone who gets it and talks about it will be dismissed as crazy. Satan always attacks and falsely accuses anyone who turns the light on and exposes the roaches.

On the positive side, God gave me a more pleasant revelation. He thinks we’re cute.

The other day, I found out what agape, the Greek word used to describe God’s love, means. It means warm, affectionate love. It doesn’t mean a sense of duty that makes you so determined to help people that you become a permanent doormat and punching bag. It doesn’t mean you have to give both of your kidneys away to strangers. It doesn’t mean you levitate and glow, or that you always have a silly, pretentious grin on your face.

I learned about love from my mother. She adored me. When I was a little kid and my sister was at school, she used to take me places and spend time with me. We used to make paper boats and put them in the waters of Tampa Bay. We used to go to the zoo at Lowry Park. Sometimes she would put me on a bed and just lie next to me and look at me.

I think a lot of kids don’t have experiences like that. Many mothers don’t love their kids, and many who do can’t show it.

It’s natural to love small, helpless things that need your care, especially if they’re your children. This is why abortion is so sick. We attack and murder the smallest, most defenseless, and most in need of our love.

Parents don’t love their kids out of duty. They love them because they’re cute. Something about the smallness of children and their dependence on parents touches the heart in a special way. It’s not rational, and it doesn’t take work. You don’t have to struggle to love your kids. Not unless something very odd is going on.

Today, I felt that I could see myself as my mother did. I thought about the little things she bought me and the things she did for me. I took those things for granted, but she did them out of unstoppable love, and I’m sure she wished I understood that. She wanted me to understand the love she felt as she was doing things for me. I really didn’t.

I can’t go back and be good to my late mother, and my dad is also dead, but I still have one parent I can appreciate, and I can let his love for others flow through me.

Compared to God we are very small and defenseless. When he sees a person struggling alone with problems, it’s like seeing a lonely kid no one wants to adopt and help.

When God saves you, it’s not unlike stopping to pick up a puppy you see sitting beside a busy road. That’s what motivates him.

We can’t be controlled by love all the time, because there is also justice. We can’t always be nice. God doesn’t want us all to be weepy vegetarians who run animal shelters. Not during this age. The age of total peace and love won’t arrive until after the tribulation, and trying to force it to come now is sin. In this age, sometimes we have to be very hard. The world can’t receive perfect peace yet. But when we restrain ourselves and hold back, it should be for a good reason.

Very interesting.

I am not an exemplary Christian, but he certainly tells me a lot of things. That’s because of prayer in tongues. If you want to hear things yourself, instead of just imagining that what you already believe and want to hear came from God, you can go to the same source.

You Aren’t Called to Drag People into the Kingdom

I’ve been watching more Mark Hemans videos. Hemans is a healer and teacher from Australia. He travels the world doing speaking engagements.

So far, I’m favorably impressed. I think God does heal people through him. I believe his teaching is generally sound. I do see some issues, though. He seems proud, he doesn’t seem to teach anyone else to do what he does, and I don’t sense a lot of love coming from him.

If you heal people and don’t teach them to be like Jesus, you accomplish nearly nothing. Everyone dies, so all physical healings are temporary and relatively unimportant. God created the world so he could reproduce, and our primary purpose here is to be instruments of reproduction. If you exhibit all sorts of godlike characteristics, but you don’t have disciples, you are a failure.

For all I know, he has hundreds of disciples who are just as powerful as he is, but I doubt it, because if they existed, they would be in his videos. Tom Loud, an American healer I follow, creates all sorts of disciples, and he films them. If Tom Loud heals you, he is very likely to make you heal the next person who needs help. Loud gets it. I don’t think Mark Hemans is doing what Tom does, and if that’s true, when he dies, people who depend on him instead of God will be left without help.

I am not that thrilled with Loud’s approach to sanctification. He seems very content when strangers tell him they’ve met Jesus. I’m sure very few of them are doing well in their walks. Salvation is the most important thing in life, but you can’t stop there.

I like Hemans’ teaching. I like the way he receives words of knowledge. I like watching him heal and cast out demons. I like it when he flat-out tells people tattoos are not okay and that they need to get rid of their rock music. I just wish he would get other people involved.

There is a big danger for Christians who do great things with the gifts of the Spirit. If they go it alone, without peers or disciples, they can turn into celebrities, and it’s not a big step from there to receiving worship. Most famous healing preachers fall into this trap. They convince people they’re necessary, so people end up treating them the way they should treat Jesus.

When I think about this, I always think about something I heard about the Iraqi army. When an American unit gets a new piece of equipment, they hand out manuals and teach everyone how to use whatever it is they’ve been given. In the Iraqi army, an officer in charge of such a unit would confiscate the manuals so no one else could read them. This would assure that he, alone, knew how to keep the equipment working, and it assured his continued value to the army.

Christians have always been like the Iraqi army. Clergymen like to keep people dependent. The Catholic Church once banned the Bible in order to prevent lay people from reading it, interpreting it on their own, and introducing doctrine which conflicted with the church’s Satanic notions. At Trinity Church in Miami, Rich Wilkerson Sr. had a rule that only he could receive a message in tongues. At my last church, we were forbidden to lay hands on people until the pastor, an active pedophile and rapist, cleared us to be sure we were as qualified as he was.

We are called the children of God, and children are supposed to become adults. If you’re tying your son’s shoes when he’s 7, or he’s wearing a diaper when he’s 4, something is wrong. Most preachers don’t teach us how to tie our shoes. They want us to keep coming back to hear their nonsense and pay tithes every week.

Mark Hemans seems stronger on prophecy and the word of knowledge than Tom Loud, and I think he takes a better approach regarding cleaning up your life and becoming sanctified, but Loud (and The Last Reformation) generates disciples, and that’s crucial.

Hemans speaks very honestly, without fear of offending. That’s a wonderful thing to watch.

I saw Hemans warning people to cut certain individuals out of their lives. He said the Holy Spirit was behind it. I liked that. One of the strangest things God ever showed me was that cutting the toxic people out of my life was much more important than bringing beneficial people in. You can get by with only God for a companion, but you can’t thrive if you mulch yourself with parasites.

I call this revelation strange, but it isn’t. It’s exactly what Jesus and Paul taught. It seems strange because modern Christianity is so phobic of disapproval. Our man-pleasing, money-loving leaders teach us to be doormats who waste our lives praying for stubborn friends and relatives who are most assuredly going to hell no matter what we do. Jesus and Paul said to cut them loose, except in the case of marriage, and in that case, Paul said not to stop them if they left.

I’ve been thinking about this over the last day or two. Sometimes it surprises me to find out who turns out to be a good investment of my time and who doesn’t. Often, a person who seems very humble and receptive–even desperate–at the start turns all high and mighty later on, and once the wall is up, I can’t do anything for them. Sometimes people who seem totally useless at first end up very serious and committed later.

Maybe desperate people are more inclined to end up this way, because a desperate person will clutch at any lifeline, even if it’s something he or she would not ordinarily want. They say there are no atheists in foxholes.

This is something for men to think about when they marry. The last thing you want is a woman who pretends to be excited about God because she’s actually just excited about you and desperate to be taken care of.

Women are known for molding themselves to men in order to hook them. You like truck pulls? She loves them. Can’t get enough. You like riding motorcycles? She thinks it’s really sexy, and she totally supports it. You like eating meat? She’s all about steak. She wouldn’t dream of trying to make you a vegan. You want sex almost every day? Wow, so does she. She’s so glad she found a guy who doesn’t think it’s weird.

You marry a woman like that, and the first thing you know, your bikes are on Craigslist, you’re eating soy, you only get sex when you’re obedient, and her most absorbing hobby, apart from decorating the nursery and ridiculing you to her girlfriends, is throwing out things you love.

A lot of women convince themselves they’re not like this even though they are. A manipulative and dishonest person will lie to herself as much as anyone.

Feminism is a real problem. It has convinced most women they’re supposed to run their households and “correct” the males. They’re not. The New Testament makes it very clear. The burden of leading families falls on men. The other approach is evil. This is why matriarchal cultures are represented so well in prison.

I’m not going to cite scripture. If you don’t know the scriptures, you should read more often. There is a spirit in America that tells us masculinity is a bad thing, when in reality, it is part of the nature of God, and it’s essential to our protection and development. Prisons aren’t full of the children of single dads. There’s a reason for that.

Women are much more likely to be corrupted by the occult, and to spread the infection to their families. How many male fortune-tellers have you seen? How many male witches have you seen? The term “witch” is gender-neutral, but witchcraft is so full of women, we think it refers to a woman. We even use the term “male witch” because we know anyone who hears the word “witch” will assume it refers to a woman.

I saw this dynamic at work in my family. My own mother, a Christian, brought the occult into our home. She went to palm readers, and she tried to read my palm. She had my astrological chart done. My dad, whatever his faults were, never had the slightest interest in the occult.

The first practitioner of the occult in the Bible was a woman. Eve practiced witchcraft with Satan, because she thought she knew better than Adam and God. She was going to “correct” things. She took a dangerous, forbidden drug and then convinced her husband to take it. We all know where that led.

Statistics say over 80% of yoga practitioners are women. Most early Mormons were women; this is why they resorted to polygamy. More women than men believe in astrology. The Jehovah’s Witnesses are mostly women. The vast majority of American pagans are women.

All of the prophets and apostles were men. Moses was a man. Joshua was a man. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were men. The tribes of Israel were named for men. Israel itself is named for a man. Jesus was a man. All of the priests were men. Paul would not permit a woman to teach publicly. There is a reason for these things. Men were created to stand guard.

A husband and father is supposed to be the priest of his house. If you get stuck with someone who sits back and clucks her tongue and disagrees while you share Holy Spirit revelation with her, your house will be a mess. This is why the Bible says–twice–that it’s better to live in the corner of a rooftop than in a big house with a quarrelsome woman.

A lot of women resent the notion that God is masculine, but he is. The scriptures call him “Father” and “Son.” We never see “Mother” or “Daughter.” Mary was inseminated by the Holy Spirit, according to scripture. Females can’t inseminate. God did not appear as a woman and let Joseph inseminate her. The Bible calls the church “the bride of Christ,” not the husband. Jesus is called “the sower.” Sowing is a masculine activity. Males sow their seed in females.

Who was God’s big enemy in Israel? I don’t know which false god did the most damage, but I can tell you this: the only one that had a second altar in the synagogues was “the queen of heaven.” These altars still exist today.

It could not be more obvious.

The unfortunate thing is that Satan has convinced women that their position is degrading, that they are victims, and that they are naturally superior to men. This is why so many men have wives who act like mothers. I don’t know how men like that keep from killing themselves. Often they resort to adultery to make themselves feel whole again. I know a guy who is doing that right now; he is a prolific, committed, determined serial adulterer. His wife is like Chrissy Teigen, Hillary Clinton, and Angela Davis, rolled into one. She is completely unbearable. She’s like a little sun of compressed hate. I can’t even guess how many demons she carries around with her.

I can’t tell you how I pity him. He married her because she gave him extraordinary sexual pleasure. Ironic.

Sometimes I wish I had found a wife when I was young, and then I think about this guy. If God gave me the choice between dying right now and marrying his wife, I would beg for death.

Anyway, if you hook up with a woman who can’t listen, and you think it’s cute that she’s so spicy and spirited, or you think you “need” a hard-headed, “strong” woman because she’ll make you a better man, you’re going to suffer like you can’t imagine, and it’s all your fault. You will never please her, and she will never stop crushing your spirit.

Women who listen and who don’t have chips on their shoulders are very refreshing, and it’s always a shock to find out you know one. It’s not always the ones you think will turn out that way. If you find a wife like that, she will be a source of strength all your life.

To get back on track, I know some people who seem to be at, or past, the end of their teachability. If that’s the case, we will probably grow somewhat distant until and unless they get over it. I feel God is letting me know that. I’m fine with it, because dealing with such people is like trying to push a car in the mud while the driver stands on the brake. I am only too happy to quit pushing, and I love meeting new people who cooperate and provide me with some reward for my effort. There is nothing like seeing someone run with what you tell them and then come back to bless you.

There are some people who are never going to improve, but I’m sure there are also people who are simply ready to be allowed to ferment until they decide to listen to God, and it’s not necessary for me to pester them and cajole them until they do. Someone else can help them when they come around. I’m not God, and I’m not the whole church.

Listening to Hemans, I felt a lot better about excluding my biological sister from my life permanently. He told folks they needed to let certain people go. He didn’t say they should fast or beg God to fix them. There are some people you just can’t tolerate. I rarely wonder what’s happening to my sister. I have no desire to contact her. I consider every day without contact to be a beautiful gift, and I have prayed many times for God to keep her away from me.

I see why God won’t let me join a church. I find a teacher, learn a great deal, find out what his ministry is missing, and move on to someone who has something else to show me. If I stuck with one guy, I’d be held back. Almost all pastors are seriously stunted.

Don’t put any man on a pedestal, and don’t marry your mom. That’s my advice for today.

Prophesy, or Wishful Thinking Gone Overboard?

I may not be the best Christian on earth, but I always have a fresh testimony. Surely that’s worth something.

I wouldn’t be saying this if I weren’t leading up to an example. Here goes.

I believe God tells me things, and I have also stepped out in faith, based on some teaching from Derek Prince, and started prophesying. If you’re wondering how to prophesy, and you already speak in tongues, the best way I can explain what I do is this: do the same thing you do when you speak in tongues, but speak English.

That’s probably not much help.

When you speak in tongues, you open your mouth and start moving the necessary parts, and as long as you provide the motion, the Holy Spirit gives you things to say. You can do it as fast as you can move your mouth. You will never run out of new syllables. You probably won’t have any idea what you’re saying, and it may even sound like gibberish, but it works.

I had tried prophesying before listening to Derek Prince, and I had not managed to say anything that didn’t sound crazy, so I stopped. After listening to Prince, I figured I had to try again. He was not an idiot, so if he told people they could prophesy, he had to be right.

I prayed for God’s help, and I started doing it. Now I do it as much as I can bear. It’s somewhat stressful, because my carnal mind keeps saying, “Your mouth is going to write a check God won’t cash.” It says I’m making things up.

I can think of a few things I thought God told me (not prophesies) that didn’t pan out. VERY few. Generally, they come to pass. This is one reason (along with not having a giant ego and zero ability to perceive how others see me) I don’t call myself a prophet. The Old Testament says, “when a prophet speaks in the name of the Lord, if the thing does not happen or come to pass, that is the thing which the Lord has not spoken; the prophet has spoken it presumptuously; you shall not be afraid of him.” That’s not quite the same thing as saying such a person was a false prophet, but it’s not praise, either. You wouldn’t want to jump into the Red Sea and try to outrun the Egyptians based on advice from a prophet who made mistakes.

Maybe there is such a thing as a student prophet.

I can’t think of anything I have said in prophesy that hasn’t turned out to be right. Maybe I’ve forgotten something. Generally, though, the things I say are somewhat vague. “My heart is with you, and it can never be taken from you.” Things like that.

Prophesying and having God tell me things are not the same thing. When you prophesy, you, yourself, say things by God’s inspiration. When God tells you things, it may happen in other ways. You may ask God a question and feel you know his answer, for example.

Anyway, I had a spot on my hand. This is where the testimony starts. A few weeks back, I saw a little spot, and I froze it to get rid of it. I don’t want to get into details, but I have had many little things pop up on my skin over the years, and I have very solid medical reasons not to assume they’re cancerous, so I freeze them off in order to avoid the hassle of going to a dermatologist.

A few days back, it seemed like something was still going on in the area of the spot, and there was an area of discoloration about the size of a shirt button. It wasn’t a big black melanoma, if that’s what you’re thinking. Anyway, it disturbed me, and I was not sure what to do.

I believe God told me I could not have cancer. I can’t recall when I heard this. It was not in prophesy. I don’t worry much about spots for this reason. But here this thing was, on my hand. Little voices kept telling me it was very serious and that I was doomed.

If you’re wondering why I have concerns about skin blemishes, or why I don’t freak out and demand surgery every time I have one, it’s because I grew up in Florida. If you live in Iowa or some other place where people get limited sun, you probably know nothing at all about skin cancer. Floridians know skin cancer is a)100% curable, and b) extremely unlikely to cause serious harm unless left untreated for a very long time, unless it’s melanoma, which is not hard to distinguish from the other types. In Florida, skin cancers and precancerous lesions are about as exciting as warts. It’s hard to make people from up north understand that. They hear the word “cancer,” and they think it’s extremely serious. It’s not serious. Not at all. Unless you let it go until it takes over.

It’s very hard to make people from up north accept that, but it’s true.

I was about to call a dermatologist, but I really wanted to continue relying on God for healing. He has given me all sorts of little miracles, and his healing is perfect, free, and painless, unlike the kind of healing doctors give. I also thought about what I believed he had told me. I thought he had said I could not have cancer. Should I ignore that and treat it like a lie? Was I wrong to think he told it to me? If I was wrong, what about all the other little things I think he said, which I have been relying on every day? Had I been building a life inside a house of cards?

God’s word doesn’t say he may heal some of our diseases once in a while, when he feels like it. It very clearly says “all” our diseases. It’s not ambiguous. I don’t want to make God out to be a liar. On the other hand, is it wrong to question my own ability to get healed, or my ability to hear him?

You can imagine the things I was thinking. Little demons must have been flying in circles around my head, yelling at me through megaphones.

I decided to rely on God as long as I felt I safely could. I cursed the spot and the spirits behind it. I commanded my body to be healed. I fasted. I did all the things I knew to do. I’m still doing them.

I did take one carnal step. I put hot sauce on the spot. Skin cancers and precancerous lesions don’t like it. The capsaicin in hot peppers can make them dry up and peel off. I had a couple of big spots on my face around 12 years ago, and I used capsaicin, green tea, and curcumin powder to make them go away.

I believed God had given me the okay to use the sauce.

Last night, I was determined to keep prophesying, even if I felt I might be wrong. I kept telling God I needed to know the truth, though. I have had my strongest Christian friend pray twice for God to help me not to prophesy falsely.

While I was prophesying, I said the spot was going to go away. I said it would be smaller in the morning.

I really painted myself into a corner there. If God was speaking through me, the spot had to be smaller in the morning, so if it wasn’t smaller by noon, I was prophesying falsely.

I was stuck.

This morning, I woke up and started praying. I kept thinking about what I had said. The spot didn’t look any smaller than it had the night before. I figured “smaller” meant “smaller in diameter,” because it seemed that the spot had been getting smaller in diameter for several days. I told God I believed “morning” meant “no later than noon.”

Part of me felt I was telling God how long I felt I could honestly wait, but another part felt I was giving God extra time in order to help him, because the spot didn’t seem smaller yet. I was not happy about the feeling that I was assisting God so he would not fail. We should never make an excuse for God or try to help him in any way. That’s all carnality. If you’re expecting God to do something, and he doesn’t do it, don’t make up a reason or try to come up with an explanation that lets God off the hook. If it doesn’t happen, he didn’t actually say it would. Period. Just admit it and pray you don’t make similar mistakes in the future.

If God tells you to build an altar, get some rocks and build it. If he says he’s going to build it, don’t you dare lift a hand.

I got up to use the bathroom, and I washed my hands. I noticed the spot felt funny, like it had a little projection on it. I poked it with a fingernail, and a piece fell off. I got back in bed to continue my prayers, and I poked it again. Another piece fell off.

Then it occurred to me that the spot had gotten smaller. The diameter was the same, but two flakes of abnormal skin had come off, so the mass of the spot was significantly reduced.

The thing I prophesied had come true–completely–and God, being God, had managed to throw me a curve ball by giving me what he had promised, in a way I didn’t immediately recognize.

So…if this came true, what about the other things God seemingly said, which were also very good?

You see the position I’m in now. If one prophesy was true, the others must be true, and because they’re so positive, it’s hard to believe. Fortunately, you don’t have to have faith in a prophesy. It’s not like a prayer. Once God says something will happen, it will happen whether anyone believes it or not. I don’t have to have faith. I just have to sit here and find out whether I was really prophesying.

Prophesies are so unconnected to faith, their fulfillment often brings anguish and death to people who don’t believe them. God has a history of saying bad things were going to happen to the very people who did not believe what he said. They didn’t have faith, and the prophesies still came true.

God has actually used prophesy to foretell bad things that were sent to punish people for not believing prophesy.

I’m not going to scrape and pick at myself to make the prophesy come true. If it’s a prophesy, it does not require my involvement, and my involvement would merely obscure God’s activity and cast it into doubt. It would cost him his glory. He has to have the glory so other people can benefit from what happens to me. If it’s clear he did the work, it will build other people’s faith.

I’m walking by faith here. I’m writing about this before the story ends. I’ll have to follow up honestly no matter how things go.

In other news, I found another Youtube healer. His name is Mark Hemans. He appears to be Australian. Interesting guy. Very serious. He looks like the real thing. I don’t see him teaching other people to heal, though, and that’s a major concern. Judge for yourself.

Addendum

I’m amazed that I forgot to mention this. The night before the skin on my hand started flaking off, I felt a very mild stinging sensation in the area three times in succession. Then I felt something like pressure. I wasn’t touching my hand. There was no physical object making contact with it.

“Stinging” is the best way I can describe it, although it was so mild, it could not be called pain. “Tingling” might be a better word.

I was startled when it happened. Sometimes people feel tingling when God touches them to perform miracles. I felt God touching my knees 6 or 7 years ago when he healed them permanently during a church service. It felt sort of like a jacuzzi jet. If you’ve ever put your leg maybe a foot away from a jacuzzi jet in your bathtub, you know what I mean. It was a warm, soft, pulsating sensation.

Sorry I didn’t mention this yesterday.

I Only Need ONE More Math Book…

Against my better judgment, I am stirring the moldy stew of my abandoned STEM education some more.

I’ve been watching videos made by a physics grad student. Today I watched one in which he listed the math courses he had taken. He always sounds extremely smart, and sometimes I have wondered if he was a much better student than I was, so I am curious to find out what he actually knows. I don’t want to think I was a complete idiot back when I was part of the shared agony of the physics community.

This morning I thought about something my undergrad advisor said. He told me I was “weak in math.” I don’t recall when he said that. Maybe he said it before I got it together, or maybe it was something he said to fill me with confidence right after I told him I had been accepted by the University of Texas.

I don’t know what “weak in math” meant to him, either. Maybe he thought John von Neumann was weak in math. After I recalled his remark, I remembered that four of my math professors had been pretty impressed with me. I wonder what they thought about people who were strong in math.

I remember messing with my PDE professor’s mind. He gave us a problem to solve, and I used a contour integral. I didn’t know he wanted us to use another method. He was pretty surprised. At first, he just said I was wrong. Then I talked to him about it. He took my work home, looked at it, and returned the next day and confirmed that I was right. It wasn’t obvious to him right away. He was impressed. That was one of my math glory moments.

But maybe I really was weak in math, and the math professors were so used to people so incompetent, I just looked good.

I looked at the video, and I was surprised to find out that the video guy had taken fewer math courses than I had. He didn’t take a complex analysis course. I didn’t even know it was possible to get a physics degree without complex variables.

I guess it was, though, because this guy did it, and when my advisor told me to take the course, he spoke as though it were optional.

Let’s see.

Calc I
Calc II
Multivariable Calc
ODE
PDE
Complex Analysis
Mathematical Methods for Physicists
Linear Algebra
Real Analysis

That’s all I remember. The course for physicists was taught by a physicist. Very useful. They used Arfken’s book, which wasn’t bad at all.

I don’t think I took a statistics and probability course, because I don’t know anything about probability.

Needless to say, I also took a ton of physics courses, every single one involved calculus and other types of advanced math, and sometimes I had to learn math that wasn’t covered in my math courses.

When I was a grad student, my mechanics prof taught us differential geometry in about a week. Did anyone actually learn it? I doubt it. The name is deceptive. It’s not trigonometry. It’s calculus on weird spaces. It’s a very demanding subject to which entire courses are dedicated.

I never got a grip on it. Ordinarily, when professors slammed us with new math during physics lectures, we picked it up. Differential geometry was the only exception for me.

The class started with a full room, and at the end of the semester, there were five people, including Dr. Matzner, a quiet and pleasant man who had written the thin but scary textbook. I got an A, and I didn’t really use differential geometry. Sometimes I think I got an A for not dropping the course.

I had taken…let’s see…three mechanics courses as an undergrad, so presumably, I knew a couple of things before I showed up.

The graduate program was very hard. Most people dropped that particular mechanics class because it was so hard. We were expected to teach two labs and take three courses. Teaching assistants in other departments had to take three courses, so we did, too, even though one physics course is as hard as about 50 history courses. Liberal arts majors don’t like to hear that their work is easy, but BOY, is it easy.

UT gave us an escape hatch, which is ridiculous. We could use “the colloquium” as our third course. They pretended it was a physics course. I think the course name was 398T, but I’m probably wrong. The colloquium was a weekly informal lecture given by a guest. I recall watching a guy from the Electrosource battery company, telling us about his lead-and-fiberglass composite batteries.

The colloquium was a joke, but it was necessary, because otherwise we would have been so buried in work there would have been no time for things like bathing and eating, and participating in research would have been unthinkable.

UT was like a machine that made French fries. Student/potatoes went in one end, they were forced through the array of sharpened blades, and they fell out as fries at the other end. There was no pity or flexibility. Had intelligent people run the place, the requirements for physics students would have been different from those for people who were taking drama classes, learning how to be convincing trees, but you could not bend the rules at UT. Not when it was so much easier to bend students.

Here’s how sensitive UT was to students. I went to the gym once to look it over. They had a row of toilets against a wall. Not stalls. Toilets. There must have been 20 of them. French fries don’t need privacy! Man up and poop in front of your professors, your fellow students, and anyone else who walks in! Audie Murphy didn’t have a stall when he was fighting the Nazis!

Maybe they were trying to discourage gay trysts, for which bathroom stalls have traditionally been prime venues, although having no privacy at all certainly encouraged voyeurism.

Anyway, I did not learn much about differential geometry, and it has always bothered me. I am sorely tempted to get a book and see what I can do with the subject.

If anyone else is interested in this brand of self-torture, I think I’ve found the correct book. A guy named John Lee wrote a text called Introduction to Smooth Manifolds, and it’s supposed to be “wordy,” “readable,” and “suitable for self-study.” To a physicists, those are fighting words, because physicists are crazy, but to a student, they are dog whistles of hope.

People in STEM fields often criticize books that explain things, which is bizarre. Explanation is the primary purpose of a book. The only other purpose is reference, and reference is only useful to people WHO ALREADY KNOW THE MATERIAL. I’ve seen people insult books that explain things well yet don’t cover their subjects exhaustively. Hello? You’re not supposed to cover a subject exhaustively in one book or course. It’s okay to write two separate books.

I made it through graduate electrodynamics (with a weak B) but that certainly didn’t mean I knew everything in the horrible, exhaustive textbook. My professor didn’t know it all, either. If no one could possibly learn everything in the book, how was its exhaustiveness helpful to anyone, EXCEPT people who wanted a reference book?

“Reference” and “instruction.” Two totally different concepts a person with an IQ of 170 ought to be able to comprehend. But then these are verbal concepts, so maybe it’s not fair to expect STEM people to get it.

I think maybe STEM people should swing their heads in a circle for a few minutes every day, so some of the brains slosh over into the language/emotion/common sense areas.

If I get this book, I’ll probably read it for two days, put it down, and forget about it. Still tempting, though.

It’s a bad idea. There is no reason to buy it.

Still might, though.

Smoke Signals from a Kindred Spirit

I feel like writing something that isn’t about Christianity or tools.

I have never completely given up my interest in math and physics. I quit graduate school in 1996 because the University of Texas and ADD drugs had pretty much crushed my soul, but I have kept all my texts, other than the ones ants ate in Miami, and I still do problems from time to time. I remember about 5% of what I learned. I can’t understand a lot of my old homework papers. Still, I am way ahead of a typical college graduate, and I like to use what remains of my old skills.

If you told me I had to take the midterm and final for a calculus class, I could be ready to nail them in a month. Same should go for what is known as “University Physics.” That’s about the best I can say for myself. I wouldn’t even be able to read a graduate-level quantum exam.

Sometimes I watch science videos on Youtube. There are some excellent lectures available. It’s no exaggeration to say that a smart person could use Youtube and Amazon to get the equivalent of a Ph.D. without ever applying to graduate school. A really disciplined person could copy down the curricula from a couple of good institutions, go through the courses online, and end up just as able as someone who studied at a university.

Because I occasionally watch this stuff, Youtube suggests STEM videos from time to time. The other day, it suggested videos by Andrew Dotson, a man who is currently in graduate school. His videos are about the physics grad school experience, which, I hope, is like no other. I hope medical students and math students and so on are not as miserable as physics students. Law students aren’t; I can tell you that. I did virtually nothing in law school, had a great time, and graduated cum laude.

A high percentage of physicists are incredibly bad teachers. There is no way to make you understand how bad they are unless you’ve been there. There are some wonderful instructors out there, but many professors, especially those who write textbooks, are really obstacles to your success. They hurt more than they help.

Here’s a story I like to tell people about my experience. I took Quantum Mechanics at UT. The undergrad version is very hard. The graduate version is exponentially worse. My professor gave us a set of homework problems one week. One of the problems was so hard, I refused to try to write out the endless pages of vector mathematics that gushed out of it. I knew it would be so cumbersome it would be nearly impossible to write or read. I got so desperate, I splurged on Mathematica, a math program which, I hoped, would spew out and print the math for me.

It was a nightmare.

At some point, I talked to my professor about it. He said, “I couldn’t solve that one. How did you do with it?”

This is not an exceptional physics story. It’s totally normal.

Physics is very hard even when you have good teachers. At the University of Miami, my undergrad teachers were generally good. Some were fantastic. I had one guy, Harry Robertson, who was so bad he actually caused a riot in the 1950’s. He gave an exam and failed most of an undergrad class, and they drove their cars around campus, honking their horns to protest. This was long before protesting was cool. I always thought he was sadistic. He never showed any sympathy when people complained. I took his Mechanics class (because I didn’t know about him), and nearly everyone, including grad students, pretty much died on the first exam. We talked to him as a group. He actually laughed at my entire class as if we were complaining about a pea under a mattress. Our futures were on the line, and he truly thought our distress was amusing. Strange guy.

You would think that once a professor causes a riot, his university would take some sort of action to improve his teaching methods, but I took his class around 35 years after the riot, and he hadn’t changed. He just smirked at us. Smirking was just about the only facial expression we saw from him. He was in his seventies and looked ten years older, so it was strange to see such apparent immaturity.

Here’s a fact: when most of a class fails a test, the professor is the problem. You can lose 10% of your class because they’re lazy or simply not smart enough. You can’t lose most of them. In order to get into the class, they had to prove they were qualified, and they were not failing all of their other classes.

He used a book written by a couple of guys named Fetter and Walecka. There are lots of great mechanics books out there, notably Goldstein’s Classical Mechanics, but he picked the worst one in existence. It was not much better than having no book at all. My wild guess is that either Fetter or Walecka was one of his buddies. Or maybe he hadn’t bothered to read it because he cared so little about his students. The book was total garbage, so between the instructor and the book, we were really up against it.

When my Mechanics class bombed on the first test, Robertson’s defense was that one Chinese guy got a good grade. He didn’t ask himself how much help this student got from the Chinese government, which was paying his tuition and expenses. For all he knew, this student was faxing his homework to China so government employees could help him do well. Or maybe he was a true genius. But you don’t flunk most of a class simply because Norbert Wiener strolls in and aces your test.

There is no such thing as an independent Chinese exchange student. They are government projects from a collectivist culture. They don’t just send them over here and let them flounder, or rebel, on their own.

Regarding Robertson’s demeanor and behavior, it’s not exactly rare for STEM people to have no social skills, and sadism is not unusual, either. My undergrad advisor had a touch of it. Most people don’t get a brain with two big halves. If you’re a mathematical genius, you probably won’t break the 60th percentile on the verbal SAT, and you will probably have trouble forming normal relationships. Of course, there are many exceptions. I was one of them. I’m not saying I was a math genius, but I was capable of doing physics well, and I also had a very high verbal aptitude. In physics, I got to know (or at least be acquainted with) a lot of guys who were missing some important psychological components.

You may need to click the gif to make it work.

It’s disturbing to realize that technology, which rules our lives, is in the hands of people who are generally somewhat maladjusted and often extremely hostile. Nothing can be done about it, though.

I quit physics, and it hurt a lot, because I knew I could succeed with a little time and rest. It’s a good thing I quit, because physicists are generally unhappy in their careers, not just in graduate school. But no one likes to fly close to the sun and then plummet to the sidewalk.

I had a legitimate medical problem which made studying very difficult. I was full of drugs that made sleep impossible and had all sorts of powerful emotional effects. UT was not helpful. Their main concern was getting sued. A professor named David Gavenda had had some kind of run-in with an undergrad who was being treated for ADD, and when I went to the department for help, they mentioned Gavenda more than once. They processed students the way a Perdue plant processes chickens, and they did not want any grit in the machinery. If students dedicated years of undergrad study to physics and then moved across the country to study at UT, and if the school’s unwillingness to provide any assistance when they were in need caused them great hardship, it was not important. It wasn’t that UT wanted to hurt them. It was just the inconvenience to the list, as the Nazi officer in Schindler’s List said concerning his unwillingness to help Itzhak Stern get off the train to Auschwitz.

The professor who was supposed to be helping me was Tom Griffy. He was an avuncular Oklahoman who seemed like a great guy at first, but the impression I got whenever I probed for signs of support was that his only concern was to do the least he could do for me in order to prevent an ADA lawsuit. It was extremely obvious that he was being advised by attorneys, not educators.

I was sleeping one or two hours per day at best, and I was under tremendous stress. I asked to be allowed to drop a course and concentrate on another course I felt I could do well in. His response was to force me to take a D in the course I wanted to drop. In the end, after I had to take a medical leave because a misguided doctor tried to treat my ADD with Prozac, he took away my teaching job and said I could only stay if I agreed to settle for a master’s degree.

He did do me one favor. He gave his E&M class a take-home exam, and my computer crashed while I was working on it, so I had to start over by hand. After I submitted the result, my computer functioned again, and I printed out the answer I had originally intended to give him. I put it in his faculty mail box just so he would realize I was not a moron. To my amazement, he accepted it even though it was late. That was a grand gesture by UT standards, and I did appreciate it.

Dealing with the school showed me, repeatedly, exactly how I measured up in the ecosystem. I was getting $15 per hour to tutor students privately. UT contacted the grad students and asked us if we wanted to tutor their athletes for less than half of that. Bag boys at the grocery a few blocks from my apartment made more. Kaplan was paying $12.

When I went to the student pharmacy to get my Ritalin prescription filled, a lady who worked there told me they had it, but I couldn’t have it. She said it was discrimination. That’s the word she used. She said they had a female athlete who was taking huge doses, and she got all the Ritalin. You know how that works. The athlete probably didn’t graduate, and if she did, she’s probably stocking shelves at a store somewhere. She was still important, because UT was all about sports.

It was truly bizarre. Like any university, UT had a socialist mindset, so they provided inexpensive medical insurance which was supposed to cover just about any need I had. And I could not use it. I had to go to pharmacies and pay full retail for drugs. They never tried to explain this. Good thing I didn’t have cancer. Maybe Bevo, UT’s mascot, might have come down with bovine leukemia, and he would have gotten my chemotherapy drugs.

UT had a reputation for treating students like worthless and fungible objects, so I could not say I had not been warned.

There is no way to make other people understand how miserable I was after things went sour at UT. I did not have a single friend, which is not unusual for grad students in physics. I couldn’t even get away from my stress by sleeping, because the pills would not permit it. I actually found myself lying in bed making a sort of rocking motion to distract myself, like a zoo animal that had been kept isolated for 20 years. It was the best I could do.

I had pinned all my hopes on physics, so I had no other plan for my life. Law school wasn’t a tantalizing, prestigious alternative. To me, it was like running home and flipping burgers.

I was away from God, so when I prayed, I felt as though I were in a concrete cistern and the prayers bounced off the ceiling.

When you don’t even have God to talk to, you have serious problems.

Since leaving UT, I have had no one to talk to about my experience. I can tell people about it, but they can’t understand.

Youtube surprised me with promoting Andrew Dotson’s videos, and I’ve watched several. It’s crazy to see how right I was about grad school. People have gaslighted me, trying to make me feel I wasn’t physics material, and some have said the teaching and books weren’t the problem. Now I have someone who confirms what I’ve said. I’ve never really had that before. For some reason, many people defend the physics education apparatus, and that’s completely nuts.

The other day, I saw a thumbnail for one of his videos, and I saw that it was supposedly about the most infamous graduate text. I knew instantly what he had to be talking about! Classical Electrodynamics, by J.D. Jackson. This was the book Tom Griffy used. Behind the scenes, the graduate students advised each other to read books by people like Leonard Eyges.

I don’t know where to start criticizing Jackson.

Jackson had a hard act to follow. My undergrad E&M book was written by a man named Griffiths. His book was extraordinary. It started with pages of mathematical preparation. Then he explained physics pretty well. His problems were chosen wisely, too. Someone must not have told him the proper way to write a physics book.

Jackson abandoned mks units for cgs (centimeter-gram-second). Why? I had been using mks (meter-kilogram-second) for several years. Every other class I took used mks. There is nothing wrong with mks. Griffiths used it. Someone tried to tell me it was because centimeters were more useful for the small measurements in E&M. Seriously? Can you really “see” a light wavelength in your mind’s eye? They’re measured in nanometers. Is it really helpful to measure them in nanometers times a hundred? You can’t imagine either measurement, so why not stick to the system every other course uses?

The big issue was that Jackson didn’t explain anything. Also, his problems were diabolically hard.

If you’re not going to explain anything, what is the purpose of your textbook?

There is no satisfactory answer to that question.

Here are some snippets from glowing reviews on the book’s Amazon page:

“[A]lmost no exposition is given for the concepts presented in the book.”

“Pedagogically, the book is about as bad as it gets.”

“[I]t doesn’t teach it at all, it just holds you accountable for it.”

“Sometimes he skips about 20 steps and tells you it’s obvious how he got to the next equation. Even my professor and TA could not explain how Jackson arrived at some of his equations.”

“Folks, find something else to use for education! This book is for someone who knows EM and needs a reference. It has no place in a classroom.”

“wtf some one write a new book.”

“There’s got to be a better way. But I’m told this is the best out there. Very depressing.”

“This is without a doubt the absolute worst textbook I have ever used. The material is presented is a random illogical order, as if it were written with the sole purpose to confuse readers.”

“The only reason this stinking rotting pile of crap is used in American universities is because the professors themselves were forced to use this book.”

Perhaps the best comment, from a physics professor:

“As a course text it is a bad choice and the tradition of using it is akin to hazing. Those who continue to teach lecture courses using Jackson are lazy.”

I always say math is much easier than physics. That’s not really true, of course. Math seems much easier than physics when you’re studying it. Why? Several reasons.

First, when you study an area of math, and you get homework problems, you know what kind of math you’re going to be using. If you’re studying calculus I, you know you’re not going to have to do a contour integral. Physics…not the same. You can’t even guess what kind of math you’re going to need until you see the problem.

Second, physics requires you to understand how the physical world works. If you can’t draw a picture and come up with a physical model that makes sense, you can’t even define the problem. Math doesn’t work like that. They just give you an expression or two and tell you what to do to them. It’s all handed to you.

Third, math problems generally have answers. I’ve never had a math professor give me a problem he knew had no answer. Physics professors do that all the time. Not helpful, when you’re already doing 30 hours of homework a week. You start in on a problem at 5 p.m., assuming it will take 45 minutes, and at 3 a.m., you’re still banging away at it, ignoring other problems you can actually solve, because you think that if it was assigned to you, there has to be an answer.

I had a professor assign a problem with an integral that diverged, and he didn’t tell us the answer was nonsense. What’s the point?

Fourth, math professors and their books explain things. I can’t understand why physics people are different. A math book will give you a long derivation to study. Someone like Jackson will omit it and tell you to figure it out yourself as an exercise.

Fifth, physics professors think it’s perfectly fine to give an exam on which a 30 is an A. Everyone in the class walks out thinking they’ve failed, they feel depressed until the grades come in, and then they find out the only guy who got a high score is the Chinese guy who never leaves his Chinese-government-subsidized dorm room.

Here’s something funny about physics: when a math instructor teaches a subject, he gives it a week or a month or a semester. If a physics professor knows you need to have a certain skill AND he condescends to show it to you, he will slap it on the board and devote maybe 20 minutes to it. What a math student learns over a period of days, you have to absorb in a few minutes.

Math isn’t always easier than physics. It’s as hard as you want to make it, and…you don’t have to make it hard. You can get an undergrad degree in math, taking courses that are much easier than physics courses, but if you deliberately look for hard subjects, you can torment yourself pretty badly.

I have a math minor, which means I have all the credits for a math degree, except that I was advised to take a certain course instead of another course that would have made me a math major. I don’t know how many credits I have, but if a math major was required to have 45, for example, that’s how many I have. I used to do maybe 4 hours of math homework per week, and I never had a problem. Undergrad physics took up at least three times that long.

I’m sure there were math courses that would have been more challenging. Graduate-level course, I would imagine. I didn’t take them.

I never took one hard math course, and I did complex variables, real analysis, partial differential equations…the works. Physics made everything seem easy.

To get back to the videos, here is Andrew Dotson’s video on J.D. Jackson. If you’re still reading, you may find it amusing. For me, it was vindication. There may be profanity; I can’t remember.

Here’s his video on the difference between undergrad and graduate courses in physics. It’s 100% true.

I was a little intimidated when I heard him talking about his work. I didn’t understand a lot of what he said. Then I looked him up. He got his degree from Old Dominion, which is not quite Harvard, and he’s studying at New Mexico State University. I looked the school up, and it’s ranked 124 by US News and World Report. When I studied at UT, it was ranked 22. He got rejected by lots of places. He can’t be any better than I was. I guess I just don’t remember all the things he talks about in his videos, so I feel as though I’ve never studied them.

I cannot remember anything about Bessel functions. Not for the life of me. I assume I must have encountered them.

Why am I writing this? I suppose it’s because it’s so rare for anyone to touch these particular nerves.

I’m going to try to quit watching his videos, but I did break down and buy a new copy of Mathews and Walker, to replace the one the ants ate. I don’t know if I’ll use it. I’m just mad at the ants. RE the ants, I want closure.

I hope this young man does well. He has chosen a very hard road which pays very poorly considering how long it takes to become qualified and how extreme the qualifications are.

The Impossible Requires 5 Weeks

Yesterday I wrote about a couple of healings I received. It seems obvious to me that if you have a positive testimony about God, and you share it, you are then obligated to post any corrections that come later. God doesn’t want help from fraudulent testimony.

Here is my follow-up.

I had some pain in my left hand. I commanded it to be gone and so on, and it left immediately. I then noticed I had slight pain in my right hand, and it responded to supernatural healing, too.

Later in the day, I felt some pain in my left hand again, so I repeated the healing process, and the pain left again. I did this a number of times.

My hand never got back to the original pain level, but I have had to fight whatever is trying to take the healing away.

What’s the conclusion? Here it is: I got a miracle healing. Pain doesn’t just leave randomly. My pain responded instantly to supernatural healing. If it then tried to come back, it doesn’t prove I was not healed.

If you had an amputated leg, and it grew back instantly and then went back to being amputated later in the day, could you then say you didn’t get healed? Of course not. The miracle still took place.

I don’t know if there is something in my life that gives hand pain power to resist me, or if I just need to persist until I overcome. But pain doesn’t just leave when you tell it to, unless a miracle takes place.

I’ve been honest about what happened, so now it’s not my problem.

In other news, I’m starting to wonder if painting is the hardest thing a human being can do. Yesterday I wrote about the problems I was having, getting my grinder’s mobile base painted. I learned that environmentalist meddling had made paints harder to apply successfully. I had problems with persistent brush marks.

I had the stand sitting on its top, which already had several coats of dry paint on it. I turned it over last night to finish the top, and I found that paint had mysteriously flowed over the edge of the top and onto the surface. The top was resting on a garbage bag I used to cover the floor, and I found big areas where the new paint had glued the top to the bag.

I applied the paint very sparingly, so you can imagine how surprised I was to see that it had found its way around the edge of the top and up to two inches into it.

I removed the damaged paint, applied primer, and quit. Today I painted the top again. Will it work? I don’t know. The paint will stick, but I don’t know if I can get the new paint to level with the old. I may have to strip the entire top.

I’m wondering if I can wet-sand it. It would be less aggravation. I could get some 300-grit paper, sand the paint, paint it again, and then repeat a couple of times. Maybe it would work. It works on car paint.

I also found that the tops of the bottom forks of the base didn’t look as good as the bottoms, which no one will ever see. Frustrating. If you’re going to have a really nice area on a painted project, you want it to be an area everyone sees.

I really dislike painting. Things keep going wrong. Even when the paint seems okay, tiny bits of stuff fall on it while its drying, just to mess with me. I have the base indoors where there should be very little material falling through the air, but it still happens.

It makes me wonder how anyone paints anything successfully without a special clean room no consumer can afford.

I should go get some truck bed coating, strip the top of the base, apply the coating, and tell people I planned to do it that way from the start. Yes…I wanted a green base with a black top. That was my plan. These aren’t the droids you’re looking for.

In any case, to recap, it works like this: time to cut and weld mobile base nearly perfectly: 8 hours. Time to paint mobile base very badly: two weeks, not including the time it actually takes hardware store paint to harden fully, which is another three weeks.

Something is wrong there.

I should find a powder-coating place and let them coat my next project. If it costs 50 bucks, it will be well worth it. I had crazy ideas about making my own projects cheaply. Now I doubt that’s possible, except for people who have been painting for 20 years. I can make projects inexpensively, but only if I don’t mind terrible, blobby paint.

I’m going to move my painting projects to the garage. I think the air there is better than it is in the shop, and my projects will be far from my other tools, so I will be able to use them while I wait for paint to dry. Right now, I’m afraid to do anything in the workshop. I might send crud flying onto my perpetually wet paint.

If I ever figure this out, I will blog it. There must be an answer out there somewhere.