Squirrel Hunting Success

I had a wonderful squirrel outing today. I chased a number of squirrels, fired on two, and dropped two. Excellent. I think I can now say I’m an okay squirrel hunter, and since hunting squirrels is as hard as hunting deer, I must be an okay hunter, period.

That’s my position.

I’ve decided that hunting squirrels is not hard. It may be hard to do WELL, but doing an okay job is not tough. Here’s what you do: walk around in the woods. When you see a squirrel, shoot it.

The first squirrel was hanging onto the side of a downed tree. I have no idea why. He was just hanging there, doing nothing. He was in an area where I didn’t want to shoot. One neighbor has a house maybe 25 feet from the property line, which is ridiculous, and I want to be a big person and avoid shooting within 150 feet, but this squirrel was taunting me, so I walked up, got in a position where I was shooting onto my own property, and blew him to squirrel kingdom come.

I have spared other squirrels in that area, but if they insist on congregating there, I am not going to let them sit there and smirk at me.

I circled around the woods and came back, and wouldn’t you know it, I heard a squirrel barking near the house. It was farther away, but not too far. It was sitting on a downed tree, all curled up, so I went to my left until I had a safe angle, and I blew him off the trunk. Blammo!

There were a couple of other squirrels I could have annihilated, but I want to take safe shots that are highly unlikely to wound without killing, and I prefer not to be too close to other people, so I let them go. I also chased a few squirrels that vanished.

The second squirrel I blasted may have been responding to my squirrel caller. I took it with me today and used it a few times. For the most part, the results suggested that instead of “Squirrel Buster,” the device should have been named “Squirrel Offender” or “Squirrel Repeller,” but I heard the barks of the second squirrel while I was using the call. I tromped in the direction of the sound and saw him waiting for his ticket across the River Styx, and I obliged.

My best guess is that the caller is a sad hoax, but I will continue testing it.

I don’t wear camo or use a blind, and I am too impatient to sit for 45 minutes in one place, so I am probably not doing the best job possible. I don’t know what the general rules are, but I can tell you this: MANY squirrels don’t give a crap about your clothes or the fact that they can see your face. MANY will sit and stare at you while you walk up very noisily and point a shotgun at them. MANY are too stupid to hide properly when you get close. MANY will let you shoot them not long after you shot a friend of theirs a hundred feet away. Squirrels are not particle physicists. They are not that hard to outsmart.

I suppose the difference between an okay squirrel hunter and a good squirrel hunter is the ability to kill the 30% of squirrels who aren’t utterly stupid.

I feel good about my results. I can say I’m a hunter now, without too much concern about being exposed.

Tomorrow my BugBuster scope arrives, and hopefully, I will be able to use the air rifle on squirrels and increase my take.

I’ve been reading about the gun I’m using (Browning Sweet Sixteen semi-auto shotgun). Apparently, it’s a very nice gun. The Remington 16 gauge is built on a heavy 12 gauge frame (the 1100), so you get all the weight of a 12 gauge without the power. Sounds like a stupid gun to me. The Sweet Sixteen is light and pleasant to carry. I appreciate that after lugging it around for an hour. The air rifle is much heavier.

The 16 gauge shotgun has lost popularity in the US because of some dumb rules in competitive skeet shooting, but that won’t prevent me from hunting with it.

It works great with #6 shot. Squirrels plop right on the ground. I had to shoot one twice, but he came down instantly after the first shot and couldn’t run off.

I can’t wait to try the air rifle scope. I love scopes. With an accurate gun at the proper distance, you can literally see the exact point of impact, +/- 3/8″, while you’re in the act of shooting. With iron sights, you have to be right up against the target to do that. When I use iron sights from 100 feet, all I know is that I’ll be somewhere in a 2″ circle. That’s not good enough for shooting squirrels with an air gun.

I’ll post a shot of the squirrels. Cleaning them was horrible. I read that you’re supposed to cut them under the tail, stand on the tail, and pull on the hind feet, but these little squirrels are very attached to their coats. I had to fight like a tiger to get them skinned. The boot method didn’t work.

My squirrels are not big. I saw a Youtube squirrel-skinning video, and the squirrels the guy was skinning were like 1.5 of mine. Maybe smaller squirrels are harder to skin. Anyway, they’re in the fridge.

It’s funny, but anti-hunting journalists (there is no other kind) are saying mass murderer Nikolas Cruz demonstrated is propensity for killing by putting photos of dead squirrels online. What a ridiculous, narrow-minded thing to say. A murderer is probably more likely to hunt than other people, but hunting doesn’t make you more likely to murder. Why not go back over Jeffrey Dahmer’s history and post a photo of every trout he ever caught?

It occurred to me that I’m posting squirrel photos at a time when squirrel photos are in bad odor, but I don’t care. My people have been killing squirrels since firearms were invented. I can’t be responsible for the provincial notions of hypocritical, ignorant people who think barbecued ribs come from a rib factory.

I will report on the scope after I use it.

Can Anything Good Come Out of Youtube?

Youtube is either a poison or a medicine, depending on what you look for in it. I suppose that could be said of anything.

I found out about the many helpful Christian videos on Youtube, and I started watching. It’s a gigantic resource. The videos I like best are the testimonies. Most people who teach about religion don’t know anything, because they’re just passing on gossip they heard from rabbis or priests. People who testify know something. They talk about things they have witnessed.

The Bible was written by witnesses, not scholars.

A person who sits around reading about God all day, without encountering him, is ignorant and has very little useful information to pass on. They don’t know much which is useful, but they’re jam-packed with poisonous fairy tales and lies that can do me harm. Look at the pagan nonsense Augustine poured into the church. Devastating.

I know God. I can say that, even though I am not a good person or what Catholics would call a “saint.” It’s possible for a bad person to know God. If it were not, we would all be doomed. I know God because Jesus visited me twice, and because the Holy Spirit communicates with me every day, numerous times. However screwed up I still am, I am much better off knowing God than knowing ABOUT God. A proper relationship with God is closer than a marriage.

What kind of marriage would you have, if your husband or wife never talked to you?

Are we better than God? We insist on communicating on people we love. Doesn’t he want to communicate with us?

Many, many Christians know God personally.

I found a wonderful Youtube channel called One for Israel. The people who run it are Messianic Jews. They really have their work cut out for them, because they work in Israel. Israel is not America. You can’t build a church there and stand in front of it telling people Jesus is God and then expect things to go smoothly. Israel is full of two kinds of Jews: leftist atheists and religious Jews who absolutely hate Christianity. The resistance the One for Israel people encounter must be something to see.

One Israeli rabbi, in particular, has gone public with very negative remarks about Christianity and Messianics. He created a video in which he said Christianity would be exposed and destroyed, more or less, and that Jesus is in hell, boiling in feces. The latter pronouncement comes from the Talmud. I believe most religious Jews say the passage he refers to is not about Jesus. The angry rabbi is the first guy I’ve ever seen who openly states that Jesus is the subject.

A prominent anti-missionary group, Jews for Judaism, acknowledges that the person said to be boiling in excrement is “Yeshu,” which is an unflattering name many religious Jews insist on using for Jesus (instead of “Yeshua,” a form of “Yehoshua”), but they say it’s a different Yeshu.

The person who supposedly conjured “Yeshu” and found out about the excrement issue was the historical figure Onkelos, a Roman who converted to Judaism. He converted after summoning spirits of the dead to guide him, and “Yeshu” was one of them, along with Titus (destroyer of the temple) and Balaam. Onkelos was very respected, and it is believed he is responsible for one official translation of the Talmud.

I don’t know why a man who committed a great idolatrous sin in order to research Judaism would later be respected, but there is probably a rationale.

Onkelos lived just after the time of Jesus, so he would certainly have known who Jesus was, and he would have had a very negative opinion of him, consistent with the meaning of “Yeshu,” which means a person who led Jews into idolatry. During his time, Messianic Jews were running around the Mediterranean area, preaching in synagogues, trying to get other Jews to accept Jesus. He had to be aware of this, and he would not have been happy about it.

This is all I know. Nothing is certain.

The rabbi’s take is pretty impressive, as negativity goes. It sounds like something I would say about Satan. Hard to improve on it.

I don’t know what kind of reputation this man has in Israel. It may be that almost no one shares his views. Maybe Orthodox Jews think he’s a complete idiot. Judaism, like Christianity, is very fragmented and full of conflict among sects. In any case, it shows that Messianics have some heavy-duty detractors in Israel.

I love the One for Israel channel, for many reasons.

Christianity is largely about what Christians call “strongholds.” A stronghold is a sort of fortification, built to block and demoralize an enemy. A stronghold, from the viewpoint of someone outside it, is a structure which seems impossible to overcome.

There are all sorts of examples of strongholds. I’ll give you one. The Muslims used to believe that the Jewish Messiah, whom they hated, would enter Jerusalem through the Eastern Gate. In order to prevent it, they did two things. They filled the gate with stone, and they put a Muslim cemetery outside of it. Their rationale was that Elijah, presumably a priest, would have to preceded the Messiah when he entered. They believed a Jewish priest could not walk through the cemetery without becoming unclean.

This isn’t a very good stronghold. I’m not God, and I can think of all sorts of ways to get around it. Move the stones. Move the bodies. Enter on a hovercraft if you have to, so you don’t touch the ground. It’s not a great stronghold, but it’s an example. The presence of a mosque and a Muslim shrine on top of the Temple Mount, which rightly belongs to Jews, is a much better stronghold.

The purpose of obstructing the gate was to set up a barrier the Jews could not defeat. That’s the point.

Jericho is a great example of a Biblical stronghold. Its walls were considered invasion-proof. The Hebrews brought them down without lifting a finger. They marched around the walls over and over, and one day God leveled them and gave Jericho to them.

In our personal lives, there are a lot of strongholds. Drug addiction is a stronghold. It’s nearly impossible to beat. They say pedophilia is incurable. If so, that would be a stronghold. People who refuse to entertain the notion that Jesus is God live in strongholds. As strongholds go, the Jewish resistance to Jesus is one of the best. It is extremely discouraging.

God is a destroyer of Satan’s strongholds. Watching the One for Israel testimonies reminds me that no matter how tough a stronghold looks, God has the power to crush it.

Jews usually don’t draw attention to Jewish opinions about Jesus, but when one converts, look out! They can’t tell their stories without telling about the resistance they met from other Jews. One guy says his gentle old grandfather threw a dish at him the minute he came out, cutting his head open and leaving a scar. Another lady says her mom went into a church to get her, and she started beating her. She got home, and her dad joined in. Another person was told he was worse than Hitler. A family member asked if conversion meant the believer was going to become a Nazi.

The Nazism-Christianity connection in the mind of some Jews is extremely bizarre. Did some Christians join the Nazi party of fight for Hitler? Sure. Did many European Catholics, including priests, help Hitler kill Jews? Certainly. That doesn’t make Hitler a Christian, and it doesn’t make Nazism a Christian movement. Most American Catholics vote liberal. Does that make Christianity a leftist movement? Most Jews–something like 90%–vote liberal, and Karl Marx was Jewish. Is Marxism Jewish? Most American Jews are for the division of Israel. Is the division of Israel a Jewish cause? Of course not. You have to have some common sense in this world.

Catholicism has a rotten history. Catholics tortured Jews and American Indians and God knows who else, to persuade them to accept conversion. They raised armies and murdered unbelievers. Catholics are famous for bullying Jews, calling them “Christ-killers” and so on. An awful lot of the negative things Jews feel about Christianity come from their experiences with Catholics, and when Jews criticize Christianity, usually, they criticize things that apply mainly or solely to Catholicism. It’s as though they think all Christianity is Catholicism.

The Bible makes it pretty clear that every human being is a Christ-killer. If you don’t accept responsibility for his death, you’re not a Christian. And where would we be if he hadn’t been killed? The whole “Christ-killer” thing is beyond stupid. I am as responsible for the murder of Jesus as the soldiers who drove the nails.

One Jewish testimony I watched was almost funny. A rabbi converted, and he was rejected. He had to take a menial job, washing dishes for a Christian-hating Arab. He lived on a beach in Israel, in a tent. A bunch of rabbis, including one who is famous, came to visit him in his tent, imploring him to return to the fold. When he refused, they started cursing him and spitting all over him. With friends like that, who needs enemies? I have had people disagree with me, but they don’t make road trips to come to my house and spit on me. Yet.

It’s remarkable to see the things God does in order to reach Jews. For Americans of Christian background, receiving salvation is typically a little dull. You say the prayer, you feel peace, and you feel relieved because you’ve finally surrendered. For Jews, it is often more dramatic than that. They see visions. God works miracles in order to get their attention. They get delivered instantly from addictions. I almost feel envious. In comparision, to American gentiles, salvation seems almost boring.

Muslims and Arabs seem to get even wilder experiences. You can find their testimonies on other Youtube channels. Jesus appears to them. He comes to their bedrooms at night and lights them up. All sorts of things happen. Maybe the nature of Muslims and Arabs is such that they need a little more persuasion.

Speaking of Arabs, I saw an Arab testify on the One for Israel testimony. This guy came from a Christian family, yet he knew nearly nothing about God. He was violent. He killed a man in a fight. Even though he came from a Christian background, he had to encounter God and make a personal commitment in order to be changed. I think most American Christians are like that. They sit in church three times a year, but they don’t know God, they don’t make any effort to change, and they’re on the way to hell.

One of the funny things about Christianity is that it brings Jews and Arabs together in Israel. They worship side by side. They cut out the identity politics. I suppose their new attitude is that “us” is worshipers of Jesus, not Arabs, Muslims, or Jews. It’s an interesting thing. Human beings always talk about a solution to the conflict over Israel, and we discuss stupid ideas like the two-state solution. Christians who actually know God live in harmony with each other; people with conflicting religions do not. They are pitted against each other every day. The real answer to the Mideast problem is Christianity. Unfortunately, it’s not going to happen.

Here is Psalm 133:

Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity!

It is like the precious ointment upon the head, that ran down upon the beard, even Aaron’s beard: that went down to the skirts of his garments;

As the dew of Hermon, and as the dew that descended upon the mountains of Zion: for there the Lord commanded the blessing, even life for evermore.

This is not about the two-state solution. It’s about the one-state solution. People can only live in peace when all are ruled by the Holy Spirit. He tells everyone exactly the same thing. He never, ever makes his people disagree. After all, he’s the one who says a house divided against itself can’t stand, and he also said David’s house would last forever.

“Anointing,” the application of ointment, refers to pouring oil over a person as he is installed in an office and given authority. Oil runs DOWN. Authority runs downward from God (a single, undivided, unconflicted source) onto us. Authority can only exist when God commands us; without commands, authority means nothing. Psalm 133 says God’s commandments pour down over his children, from heaven, and that when we obey, we are in harmony, because we are all answering to the same commander.

Jesus calls himself the Prince of Peace. He really is. If we were listening to the Holy Sprit, we would be in alignment with each other, and we would have peace.

Right now we are having terrible racial discord in the US. Blacks and Latins are being pitted against white people. Minority churches have a real problem. They push Marxism and identity politics, and they reject the unity of the Holy Spirit. Most white churches reject the Holy Spirit altogether. If we listened to the Holy Spirit, we wouldn’t be hearing about BLM, La Raza, or the tiny groups of unsuccessful, resentful whites who agitate against minorities.

The answer to Israel’s problems is already available, but it’s going to stay on the shelf, because not enough people want it.

Here’s another thing that surprised me about the testimonies: many of the Jews who spoke said they originally believed ridiculous things about Jesus and the New Testament. For example, many thought Jesus was a Catholic god who had nothing to do with Yahweh. They also thought the New Testament was a Catholic book written by Catholic anti-Semites. Some thought it was a sort of instruction manual for “getting” Jews.

They were amazed to see that the entire New Testament was about Jews and Israel. They were shocked to learn that the disciples and apostles were Jews. Many were surprised to learn that Jesus was Jewish. How can anyone not know that Jesus was Jewish? His name was Yehoshua. I mean, come on. But I’m telling you what they say.

The church was originally Jewish. How can people not know that? The Jewish religious establishment sent people to find and murder early believers, hoping to stamp out the church. They couldn’t do that to gentiles. The Romans would have exterminated them. In the beginning, the conflict between the Jewish establishment and Christianity had nothing to do with gentiles. It was an intramural squabble between Jews who believed in Yahweh. Christianity didn’t become a gentile religion until after it spread among Jews, and the people who first spread it in Israel and abroad were Jewish. Any Jew who complains about Christianity is complaining about something his people started.

They also said they were shocked when they read Isaiah 53, because it seemed to them that Jesus was the only person it could apply to. It’s clearly about the Messiah, but it says he will be rejected and despised, not that he will be an honored king who leads Israel to victory. It says, “He was cut off from the land of the living.” That means the Messiah was killed.

They also talked about the emptiness of a religion that emphasizes rules and study, without the presence of God. Several of them talk about how strange it was to see Christians worship. The Christians they saw weren’t just talking about God or learning rules. They were talking to him directly and enjoying his presence.

I can relate to that, because most churches, especially the older ones like the Catholics and Episcopalians, run services in which smug, effeminate old men stand up front and lecture and perform rites, while the people in the pews grit their teeth and wait for it to be over. I hate church worse than just about anything, but for the presence of God.

We’re supposed to know God personally. The Bible calls his people “children.” What kind of father would let a child live 70 or 100 years without visiting? Come on. Think. Would you do that? You couldn’t. You would hate yourself. You would find it unbearable. You would be ostracized and reviled, even by atheists. Does that mean you’re a better parent than God? Is God a deadbeat dad? I don’t think so!

The Old Testament confirms that we are supposed to know God personally. Look at the Psalms. The writers pant and thirst for God. They beg him to show them his face. They say believers abide IN him. Intimacy, intimacy, intimacy; not rules and aloofness.

What does aloofness in a human parent mean? It means abandonment. It’s abuse, under the laws of every state. You can lose your children by refusing to spend time with them. Courts will literally remove them from your home and give them to other people. Refusing to spend time or be intimate with a spouse has always been considered grounds for divorce; it’s tantamount to adultery. Yet God is guilty of this? Come on. Wake up.

I remember Rich Wilkerson at Trinity Church in Miami, arguing with me, trying to tell me we don’t have to feel anything in our relationships with God. But then this is the same man who asked for an offering at a funeral.

I wonder if he knows what people said about him after that. I doubt it. He surrounds himself with sycophants who see him as a sort of milk cow that has to be managed and babied because it will one day give them money and success. They always smile and tell him what he wants to hear. They said plenty behind his back, however. I heard it!

It’s kind of neat when Jews accept Jesus, because they understand things we don’t. The New Testament is a Jewish book, and knowledge of Jewish culture and history are helpful in understanding it.

Remember Planet of the Apes? Taylor was walking around an archaeological site with the chimps Cornelius and Zira, and he was able to identify and explain artifacts the apes couldn’t understand. He had lived in the world of the people whose home became the site, so he recognized and understood things the apes had dug up. Messianic Jews are like that. Sometimes they understand things about Christianity which we have gotten wrong. For example, they know that baptism is really ritual immersion, which comes from Judaism. Sprinkling water on a baby’s head is not baptism.

I highly recommend the One for Israel channel. It will restore your hope. You will remember that God is still plucking people out of the flames, no matter how powerful Satan is getting.

Kill Pests Without Alerting Hillary Voters

I have decided to get me an air rifle.

My current squirrel weapons are a shotgun and two rimfires. The .22 is not suitable for a scope, and the long travel of the bullets limits the shots I can take. The .17 HMR is a joy in every way, but even those tiny rounds are of no use for any angle between zero and maybe 60 degrees from horizontal, unless a big tree trunk is behind the squirrel. I don’t think a 17-grain bullet fired in a woody area is very likely to damage anything or hurt anyone, but you never know. The shotgun is much safer than the rimfires, but I could still send pellets raining down on people. Not dangerous, but not a good way to greet the neighbors.

Air rifles are really complicated. They come in various types. At the lowest level, you can get a Crosman 760 pump BB gun, which is neither accurate nor powerful, although you should be able to hit squirrels within 50 feet. After that, you move up to expensive guns with rifled barrels. I wrote about this already.

I decided to get a Diana 54, also known as an Air King or an RWS 54. I don’t know why it has so many names. It’s a powerful gun that should kill anything I want to kill, within 50 yards.

The Air King has a weird barrel that slides to kill recoil, and unfortunately, this transmits recoil to the scope, if you have one. It will kill a scope if you aren’t careful to buy a model that can handle the shock. It looks like I’ll have to get a rifle scope, and that means $200-$300. Sounds insane, but that’s how it is.

Before I do that, I want to get a peep sight. I don’t like regular iron sights. I had a BB gun (don’t laugh) with a peep sight when I was a kid, and it was much more accurate than open sights, at the tiny distances over which BB guns work. A peep sight, also known as an aperture sight, requires you to look through a little hole, and…well, go look it up on Youtube. It’s hard to explain. Anyway, I like them, and I suspect a peep sight will be nearly as good as a scope, on a weapon that won’t shoot well past 75 yards.

If you’re wondering, there is a scope which is highly recommended for this gun. It’s the Vortex Optics Diamondback 4-12×40 AO Dead-Hold BDC Reticle, 1 Inch Tube (DBK-412B). A professional air rifle guy (seriously) named Hector Medina uses it with the Air King.

Surely I can get by with a 12-power scope. When it comes to squirrels, 4 is plenty.

The Air King is really expensive. I figured it was worth it. It should last a long time, and I will never have to upgrade. Living on a small farm, I have a legitimate need for a good air rifle. There are a lot of things here that will need killing, and I don’t want to have to buy a new gun every two years.

The pellets it fires weigh 18 grains, and they probably move at something like 800 fps. That will kill a squirrel as dead as Compuserve, and if it leaves my property, it will be much less dangerous than a rimfire round. I will still have to use common sense, but I won’t have to worry about shooting a car window out half a mile away.

The .17 HMR moves at well over 2000 fps, and a .22’s speed is something like 1300 fps. A .22 slug weighs around 40 grains, depending on which one you use.

The Air King should be much, much quieter than a rifle, so if it turns out I have self-righteous yankee neighbors who have stupid ideas about hunting, I will be able to shoot close to the property lines without them knowing about it.

I got a very good deal on the gun. I don’t know why. The price was too low to resist. I considered getting an RWS 34 in order to save money, but the price difference was not that great.

My squirrel call arrived yesterday. I can’t wait to see if it works. It makes the sound of a squirrel in trouble. Apparently, squirrels are like women, in that they love to see each other suffer. When you make a noise like a squirrel being torn up by a hawk, the other squirrels pop out to watch.

Can’t recall whether I mentioned this before, so I will say it: it looks like I have bears. I keep finding something that looks like cow manure, but it’s way too fresh to be from a cow. The last steer moved out of here in August. I looked at poop-ID sites, and it appears that the poo comes from bears.

Florida has lots of bears now, and they need to be hunted, but hippies and yankees keep protesting. They killed the 2016-2018 hunts. I don’t know why anyone listens to them. Bear attacks are surprisingly common here, and besides, bears are good to eat.

I had this idea that a bear wouldn’t cross a fence, but I am clearly wrong.

The bear and the air rifle are not related in any way. I am not likely to get a chance to shoot a bear here, and an air rifle would not be very useful for that task.

There is something disconcerting about having to use an air rifle in a rural area. In backward countries with limited firearm rights, air rifles are very popular. People think nothing of spending huge sums on them, and they’re very proud of them. I have rifles suitable for killing people 750 yards away, plus very nice semiautos with big magazines, and here I am, lowering myself to purchase a second-world weapon. I might as well start watching soccer and eating toad in the hole!

Due to my dad’s condition, I can’t go farther north than Marion County. At least I don’t think so. He needs a relatively warm place geared toward old people, and boy, is this it. But I keep thinking it would be neat to look for a place in Tennessee after he’s gone. A couple of hundred acres would be nice. The more woods, the better.

Georgia is way too liberal, and it keeps getting worse. Black people there will vote for anyone who tells them what they like to hear. South Carolina seems similar. North Carolina is too much like Eastern Kentucky, and it’s filling up with Miami Cubans. An undesirable culture is being augmented with a worse one. Maybe Tennessee is better.

The South is funny. There are many areas full of unsuccessful people who are trashy and can’t get it together, but there are also areas where people are more responsible and mature. If you look around, you can find places where the good parts of southern culture aren’t tainted by the bad.

I love the South, but we don’t have the most capable, smoothest-running culture in America. We are too emotional. I seriously believe people are more together in the center of the country. They seem to be less in touch with God, however.

This morning during prayer, I took a look at my cell phone. I took a notion to look up a Miami friend on Facebook. I looked at this person’s friends list, and I saw familiar faces from law school. I felt a little nauseated. I never want to see these people again. I’m so glad I have nothing to do with them. They didn’t treat me badly. They just live in a different world, and that world disgusts me. It’s a world with no future, full of cocky, grasping people who have no idea the iceberg underneath them is melting.

Supposedly, many people who have been in prison become obsessive about not going back, to the point where death seems preferable. That’s how I feel about Miami. Never, never, never, NEVER.

I don’t understand people who want to live in or near big cities. I usually have to drive 15-20 minutes to get to a decent restaurant, and I feel like I’m not far enough out. I don’t want to go to cocktail parties or meet “important” people; I want to stay out of the circle of butt-kissers and compromisers. I don’t want to drive a foreign car built by a company that made vehicles for the Nazis. I would rather hide in a tent than go to benefits and society events.

I will write about the Air King after I shoot it. Hope it works out. I plan to go out today and see how the squirrels like the squirrel call. Heh heh.

Victory is Sweet

My hunting adventures are proceeding well. Today I bagged a third squirrel, and later on, I fried her along with her friends.

The last time I had an opportunity to eat squirrel was probably in the late Seventies. My grandfather either shot some or received some as a gift, and my grandmother fried them. I thought they smelled funny, so I passed. Today I remedied that mistake.

I made a mixture of flour, salt, pepper, paprika, chipotle powder, and garlic powder. The squirrels were all treated in a solution of baking soda and salt, and then I soaked them in buttermilk for a short time. I dredged them in the flour mix and fried them in olive oil (which is what I happened to have) and bacon grease.

I screwed up the first batch and had to re-bread them. The second ones came out much better. I made gravy with the grease, and I also made buttermilk biscuits with half butter and half bacon grease. Then I made gravy.

The squirrels were very nice but not much of a meal. I would say a grey squirrel contains about as much meat as a chicken breast. The meat tastes like the meat you find on a chicken breast alongside the backbone. It’s dark, but the flavor isn’t very strong. It was surprisingly tender.

I think you would need to have two squirrels to make a decent meal for a man.

I’m happy about the results. Squirrel meat is tasty, and it’s rewarding to eat something you killed.

I’m looking at air rifles now. One corner of my property is loaded with squirrels, but it’s close to neighboring houses, and for all I know, some of the neighbors are liberal yankee retirees. I don’t want to get into it with ignorant people who moved here from Long Island. It’s perfectly legal for me to shoot near their property, but northern retirees are idiots about firearms. They wouldn’t know the law, and they might think they were in their rights to waste my time and the time of the local LEO’s. An air rifle will avoid the whole question. No noise. They wouldn’t know what I was doing

It’s hard to choose a rifle. I want something with some power, but I don’t want to spend $700. And if it’s too powerful, it will be an awful lot like the .22 I’m trying to supplement.

The neatest rifles are PCP guns. I forget what PCP stands for, but it means the air is pre-compressed. You don’t have to pump them up every time you fire. You fill them before you go shooting, and you get a large number of shots before you have to pump again.

I don’t want a PCP rifle because it takes forever to pump them manually, and they fill up with moisture that eventually rusts them out. You can drive to a dive shop and get them to fill a scuba tank for you, and then you can use that to fill your gun with dry air, but the pressure in the scuba tank will drop each time you fill the gun, so every refill gives you a different velocity and trajectory. What a pain.

PCP guns are powerful and convenient to use, but who wants a product which is designed to rust out? And I don’t want to spend all day pumping a rifle with air.

You can get around the water problem with desiccants, but it sounds like a hassle.

It looks like the best choice is a spring-powered air rifle that shoots .22-caliber pellets. It will be powerful enough to kill squirrels and even coons, and I won’t have to fool with the Rube Goldberg pump business.

A company named Diana makes a nice .22 that gives a lot of velocity, but it is said that this particular gun ruins scopes. The recoil is too much. Apparently you have to be careful which scope you use with it.

–PAUSE–

I stopped writing last night, and now I’m back.

Yesterday’s squirrel came with an unpleasant lesson. I had learned that I should leave squirrels on the ground after shooting them, to draw out others. This is what I did yesterday. I walked around a bit and came back to get the squirrel. When I looked at it, I was surprised to see movement. It was still breathing.

New lesson: check your game as soon as you shoot it, to make sure it’s not suffering. This won’t prevent me from leaving a squirrel where it lies. I can check it and move on.

I wish I had understood this before I let a live squirrel lie on the ground for 5 minutes. I don’t think it was conscious, because it didn’t react to me, but there is no reason to take a chance. I had to blow its head off.

I have been trying to find out whether I can carry a .22 pistol for the purpose of finishing game off. Game laws can be stupid. In some states, it’s illegal to use a pistol to euthanize a wounded deer. Shooting a wounded deer with a rifle round doesn’t sound smart. It would mess up the carcass, and I don’t know how safe it is to fire a high-powered rifle at the ground at your feet. I also have to wonder if flying bone fragments would be an issue.

Again, air may be the answer. Or at least CO2. A CO2 pistol would finish a squirrel off just fine, and it would be quiet.

I am trying to obey the law, but I can think of 3 illegal things which would have been illegal had I done them. Not saying I did these things. Always the lawyer, and there are at least two people from my past who can’t get over rejection, and who probably read my blog every day and would be happy to try to have me cited. Some people never move on and get lives. I’m not saying I did the illegal things. But I did consider them.

I thought about putting some peanuts down to see if they would attract squirrels. I had done my best to research the law on baiting squirrels, and I had found nothing. I eventually turned up an applicable law. You can’t shoot animals near food (other than crops) unless the food was there 6 months before the season opened. What? I don’t understand it, either. Anyway, I will not be putting peanuts out in the future. At least until March 5, after the season closes. Then I’m putting up a permanent feeder!

I plan to put it at a nice distance from the back of the house so I can sit in my yard and make 75-yard shots with a scope. In Florida, it’s perfectly legal to shoot from your house. You can put a sandbag on your dining room table and shoot deer through the window.

There was an incident in which I could have fired some shotgun pellets over some woods belonging to a neighbor. In Florida, you can shoot in your front yard in the suburbs if you want, but you can’t send a projectile onto someone else’s property. I’m sure no one would care about a few spent pellets up here, but I don’t want to get in the habit of ignoring the hunting laws.

The third thing, well, why talk about it?

Game laws are often counterintuitive, so you almost have to be a lawyer to know what you’re doing. I am a lawyer, and I made mistakes, even after reading up.

The other day I shot at a squirrel and stunned it, and it came down and stared at me from maybe 10 feet up. I was out of rifle rounds, so I just stared back. I had a pistol in my pocket, and it would have been easy to draw and kill the squirrel, but I didn’t do it. For one thing, it didn’t occur to me. For another, the pistol holds 11 rounds. My understanding is that you are limited to 5 in Florida. But what if it held 5? Would it have been okay to shoot? I don’t know.

I am wondering if I should get camo or a blind. Sometimes the squirrels hide, and sometimes they pay no attention to me at all. Do they really know what I am, or is their behavior random? Hard to say. I thought about getting a ghillie suit just for fun. Easier to move than a blind.

No hunting yet today. If anything happens, I will update you.

Every Plant Does Better in the Right Soil

I just got back from having BBQ with my dad. I have been to Sonny’s BBQ about 9,000 times since moving to Marion County in August. My dad loves to have lunch in restaurants, and Sonny’s is convenient, so we visit a lot. Personally, I would rather eat out less.

People knock Sonny’s, but it’s actually very good. There’s something about chain restaurants that makes people want to criticize. Go figure. There are some shortcomings, such as the tomato-free salad bar and the dry chicken and turkey, but the ribs are about as good as ribs get.

We were driving home, and as I usually do in such situations, I marveled at the fact that I don’t live in Miami any more. I hate Miami! I hate Miami! I hate Miami! I can’t believe I’m free! I hate that place!

I hate Miami.

My only regret is that I didn’t move even farther north and deeper into the sticks. I have always hated city and suburban life. Now I’m on 34 acres, and it’s wonderful, but I wish it were 300, and I wish I could be at least 400 miles farther north. I don’t like sand, I don’t want to see palm trees, and I want the winter to last a little longer.

It’s weird how my style has changed since I moved. Down south, I wore the Miami uniform: a T-shirt, shorts with pockets on the legs, and sneakers. Sometimes I wore flip flops. Up here, I had to make changes in order to cope with the environment. I’m the Carhartt king now. Carhartt work jeans every day. I have 3 Carhartt jackets and 4 Carhartt work shirts. I wear a baseball cap almost everywhere. I have 3 pairs of waterproof work boots with safety toes, and I wear them with wool socks. I complete my ensembles with work suspenders. You can’t clear downed trees while wearing a belt. Not if you want to be comfortable.

I wonder what people who knew me in Miami would say if they could see me. Tonight I walked into Sonny’s wearing my Carhartt jeans, suspenders, a Cummins T-shirt, and boots. I had a Kershaw knife in one pocket and a 10mm in another. I think they would assume I was trying to prove something, but I’m not. I’m just basking in the joy of being a born-again Southerner.

Today I told a friend it’s beautiful not to be surrounded by idiots all the time.

I hate Miami.

I am doing much better here. I feel better. I’m even getting stronger. I have time and energy to lift weights. My chest is ballooning out again, and not just from biscuits.

If anything happens to my dad, and it isn’t too late in my life, I’m going to check out southern Tennessee. That would be perfect. Conservative state. Hills. Trees and plants I am familiar with from living in Kentucky. Might be even better than Ocala.

Killing squirrels has magnified my joy. It gives me one more reason to love the country. Shooting on my own property, any time I wanted, was thrill enough, but now I get to do it with a purpose.

You know what I’d like? Enough land to allow me to kill squirrels with a .17 HMR without thinking about the neighbors.

My grandfather had lots of land in eastern Kentucky. I loved his farms. Some were hundreds of acres. You could stand on our land and be unable to see anyone else’s. It was a magnificent sensation. Shooting rifles was not a problem. I could have hunted with artillery shells, and no one would have known.

My grandfather left no plan for his estate, so the family’s strategy has been to sell everything. Sad. We had 300 beautiful acres beside the Red River. We had 120 acres above the Red River gorge, full of blackberries, with cliffs and creeks and springs. We had a lot of nice stuff. I’ll never see it again.

I would not tell the other grandchildren, but I was his favorite. I guess they know it already.

Some of the others got on his nerves. My mother was his favorite daughter, and I was her only son. I think my cousin Robert, who was younger than I was, would be number two. When I stayed with my grandparents, my grandfather never went to his farms without me. He would come home from court or whatever and say, “You want to go to the farm?” I always did. He was the closest thing I had to an involved dad. When my dad talks about him, he often slips and calls him “your father.”

He used to mow hay with me sitting on the fender of his Massey-Ferguson, and he taught me to drive it. Now that I think of it, he taught me how to drive cars. He always bought Chevy pickups. He showed me how to drive his 1968 truck with three on the tree. He was a circuit judge, so no one told him what to do. He let me drive all I wanted on the public roads near the farm.

That reminds me of something I did later, after I had my own car. I ran from a cop. I pulled out of a burger joint parking lot and squealed my tires. I was about half a mile from the house. A cop came out and chased me. I saw the lights, but he was too far back to be able to say I knew he was trying to pull me over. I drove up the hill into my grandfather’s driveway, turned the ignition off, and sat on the hood, waiting. The cop drove by the bottom of the hill with his lights on, and then he skulked back to the burger joint.

My mother and some relatives were eating there at the time. My mother got mad and came and got me. She made me go back and sit with the family. The cop was across the room. He sat and glared at me. Never said a word.

Gramps–I was too cool to keep calling him “Papaw” after a certain age–used to take me shooting. When he died, someone snatched the Colt Woodsman pistol we used to use. A number of things sort of vanished. He also had a Remington .22 someone ran off with. I shot rabbits with it. He would pull his car over when he saw one, and then he’d coach me while I shot it.

My grandmother gave my dad his Sweet Sixteen when he died. It’s downstairs right now. I used it on the squirrel I killed this morning.

My grandfather didn’t say “hunt.” He said “kill.” “Let’s go over there and kill some squirrels.” That’s more honest than “hunt” or “harvest.”

I remember one day he threw me in his brother’s pickup truck, and the three of us drove to the stockyard in Paintsville to buy ponies. We bought a black one and a palomino. I had no idea why. When my grandfather got an idea, he didn’t bother explaining it to anyone. I had no interest at all in horses. He brought the palomino to his house, and the kids took turns riding. I found out later that he told my mom, “It will be worth it if Steve rides it just once.” I didn’t know what to make of that. My sister was the one who screamed and cried whenever she saw a horse. I hadn’t been very grateful, because it hadn’t occurred to me that he was thinking of me when he bought the ponies.

He took me everywhere, the way you would take your favorite dog around. I didn’t always understand what was going on, and my presence usually served no purpose, but I know he enjoyed my company because I went so many places with him. Court. The farms. Cotton’s Restaurant in Stanton. Relatives’ houses. The drugstore. His car dealership.

Everywhere we went, people would gather around him. He was the Frank Sinatra of three counties. They would pull up chairs. If you went to a restaurant with him, and the table had four chairs, there was a good chance eight people would be sitting with him before you left. I thought he was the tentpole that held up the sky.

When it was time to buy the ponies, I was the one who got tossed into the pickup. I guess he could have taken one of the others, but it would have been weird.

Once he took me to his Tar Ridge farm, and we just walked, with no plan. He was about 70, and he walked me to death, up and down cliffs. He took me to the site of an old moonshine still, by a creek. He dug in the ground and pulled out old bottles the moonshiners had left. A moonshine operation is also a campsite, so they left medicine bottles and so on. I saved the bottles he gave me, but I don’t know where they are. My relatives may have them. They still have a few things I haven’t collected.

He and my grandmother taught me the names of all the trees and plants. It seemed like they knew every one. It was a strange thing to behold. They showed me things like sourwood, teaberries, various types of oaks, hemlocks (as contrasted with spruces), and huckleberries.

He used to slip me money all the time. I appreciated that. I didn’t understand how jealous people could be. One day I let a cousin know Gramps had given me fifty bucks for absolutely no reason. I thought he would think it was neat. He got so angry I thought fire was going to come out of his ears. He was furious at my grandfather.

My grandfather didn’t have the same feeling for my cousin, and I have to say that was understandable. He was my favorite cousin, but he drove adults up the wall. Serious brat issues. When it was time for his bath, he used to run through the house naked, cursing my aunt. He would hide under the bed while she jabbed him with a broom. He was the only grandchild my grandfather ever spanked. A bunch of us went to Canada in a station wagon, to fish at Jim’s Caviar Camp at Lake of the Woods, and my cousin made my grandfather so mad he pulled over and gave him a beating.

He was not always pleased with me, but he never said a really harsh word to me, and it’s impossible to imagine him putting his hands on me.

I have so many memories of him; they’re coming out now that I cast my mind back.

He took me squirrel hunting twice. He was an exceptional shot, and he expected the same of me. We only saw one squirrel between the two trips. It was a fat red squirrel by the river on his largest Powell County farm. We couldn’t get a shot at it. We gave up, and he pulled a buckeye from a nearby tree, cut the fruit off, and gave me the nut. He said I was supposed to carry it for luck. I still have it, plus one I found in his dresser drawer after he died.

I’ll tell you how good a shot he was. He was hunting deer with my dad, and he spotted a grouse in a tree. This is a fairly small bird. My grandfather was carrying a shotgun loaded with “punkin balls,” or rifled slugs. My grandfather shot from the hip and killed the grouse.

When people hunted with my grandfather, and they didn’t hit birds with every shot, he told them they were wasting shells.

I was a hell of a shot when I was a kid. One day he cut a postage-stamp-sized bit out of the bark of a tree and told me to shoot it with a .22 pistol. I shot and hit the edge of it. He walked up to it, looked at it distastefully, and said, “You missed.” On another occasion, he told me to shoot at a wire wrapped around a fence. I shot, and the hole I made was next to the wire, with no gap. Same response. I didn’t understand how well I had done. Here he was, telling me I had missed.

Maybe shooting well scored me some points with him. He never really said what he thought about my shooting. He was not a person who paid compliments. If I had snapped the wire in two, he probably would said I had shot it off center.

While he was alive, I didn’t realize I was his favorite or how much he loved me. I don’t think of myself as a person other people love. If I had understood, I would have reciprocated more. I knew he liked to take me places, but I didn’t see the significance of it.

He could not stand my sister, which means he reacted to her the way everyone else did, including other judges. She belittled him and called him by his first name. He threw her out of his house. He loved his grandchildren, but I think he had a little less interest in the girls. Maybe that was because he had four daughters and no sons. And what can you do with a girl? Not much good for hunting and fishing.

He turned my mother into a tomboy. She was the closest thing he had to a son until I showed up.

He used to “sell” his grandchildren cattle. He gave every one of us fifty dollars every Christmas, and sometimes he let us give it back to him for calves. One year I got calf number 32. On a visit to his farm at Tar Ridge, I realized 32 had died. “Oh, no,” he said, “Your calf is 42.” Number 42 was a fat, healthy Charolais/Angus cross. He was a funny grey color. My Gramps called it “blue.” I remember being disappointed when I found out blue calves were actually grey. I got paid when he sold.

My mother was crazy about him. The other three daughters didn’t seem to feel it. My mother was the oldest. He never did warm up to the second one. The third seemed to want to compete with him. The fourth was never able to hold his attention. I liked all of my aunts. At different times, each one was my favorite aunt.

He had spoiled my mother. She used to write checks on his account when she was in college. She bought clothes, sold them to her friends, and took the money. At the end of every month, he raised hell, but he never cut her off. When she got married, my grandparents bought my dad a suit, and my grandfather bought a new car for my parents. It was a grey DeSoto with an orange roof. Hideous. My grandfather realized it was ugly, so he had it painted. He had the roof painted red. Maybe not a great choice.

At the wedding, he got very emotional, which was not like him at all. He always carried a lot of money, and by the time the wedding was over, he had forced my dad to take all of it.

My parents met in law school. My dad was serious. He eventually graduated third. My mother was just there to get a car. While she was an undergraduate, my grandfather offered to get her a car if she would become a lawyer. She went and talked to the dean at the University of Kentucky, to get special permission to go to law school without a bachelor’s degree. The dean, who was not a complete fool, signed the paperwork and said, “Now go on over there and get married.” That’s exactly what she did. She got the car, married my dad, and dropped out. Unfortunately, she turned the car over in an accident involving a bus, and my grandfather sued the Greyhound bus company.

He got rich suing people. My dad was with him one day, riding in the car with an out of state guest, and the guest marveled at the poverty in Eastern Kentucky. He asked how people there made their living. My grandfather said, “Insurance companies.”

My mother was proud of him, and she probably loved him more than all of his other daughers, combined. I know she was happy he took to me so well.

I don’t know why I’m thinking about these things.

Rural life is great. People told me I would miss the city. They can’t understand why I would want to live here. It reminds me of the best times of my childhood. That’s one reason.

I wish I had been better to my grandfather. I didn’t understand him.

I guess it’s okay. I don’t think I ever offended him.

Rodent Genocide Continues

I nailed another squirrel today, right in my yard.

I went out at around 7:15 this morning. Yesterday, it was gloomy at that time. Today the sun was fairly bright. I think I should have been there before sunup. Anyway, I only saw one squirrel on my tour of the property, and it lost me.

I decided to try something a website suggested. I sat as still as possible for half an hour, hoping the squirrels would emerge from hiding. Absolutely nothing happened. There goes that idea.

On the way back to the house, I had a funny notion. I got out my phone and played squirrel noises on Youtube. No dice, but it was amusing.

When I got near the house, I heard a squirrel screaming at me. It was really giving me the business. There is something creepy about shooting animals 50 yards from home, but this thing was provoking me, and I had no bodies in my trash bag. I saw it about 10 feet up on a live oak. I walked around it to get an angle that would keep stray pellets away from the neighbors, and I blasted it from maybe 60 feet.

Taking a clue from a reader (and the same website that told me to sit still) I didn’t pick up the squirrel. I walked around, and sure enough, I heard another squirrel screaming from a nearby tree. That one refused to come out, so I picked up the dead one and headed for the house. I am getting blase about touching dead animals. As I was walking, I heard other squirrels yelling in the front yard. I wondered if the sight of their buddy hanging by her tail got them agitated.

I tried to locate the new noisemakers, but the only one I saw was across the fence on another property, so I went back in the house and cleaned the new squirrel.

I noticed a few things. I used #6 shot in the 16 gauge, and it didn’t mess the meat up much at all. I found a few pellets, but no major damage. Also, this squirrel really did not want to give up her fur coat. It was like it was glued on. I have to go watch some squirrel butchering videos.

I was less grossed out this time, although this squirrel smelled worse than the other one. I felt like shampooing it with dishwashing liquid, but I restrained myself. I skinned and halved it, and I put it in brine. Today I plan to fry 2 squirrels and make biscuits. We’ll see if they’re any good.

I think I should add baking soda to the brine from now on. It kills gaminess.

Sitting still does not impress the local squirrels. I think bait and getting up early will change things. I may get a bag of corn and start dumping it in the woods.

The shotgun is wonderful. I love the .17 HMR, but the results are not as good. It tears squirrels up, and it’s hard to get a good safe angle for shooting.

Should I feel bad about killing yard squirrels? In a word, no way Jose. It seems opportunistic and sort of mean, but the truth is, these are the squirrels I want to get rid of. They are not pets. I want to grow berries and things in my yard, and I don’t want squirrel vandalism in the buildings. If I leave the yard squirrels alone, I am responsible for whatever misery they cause in the future.

The squirrels out in the woods are not the ones I have to worry about. In truth, I should be killing the ones near the house first. The people who sold us the house put a bird feeder in out front, and it has a skirt on it for the purpose of keeping squirrels out. That tells you how intelligent people feel about squirrels in their yards.

Squirrels are cute and all that, but so are mice. Some rats are cute. They still have to go. Killing them takes some getting used to, but I have an obligation to do it. It’s the correct thing to do.

I plan to go out again tomorrow (every day I can, until the season ends on March 4), and I hope to dispatch more than one squirrel. I think I can do it, if I get up early.

What will I do when squirrel season ends? All is not lost. First of all, it’s legal to shoot nuisance animals all year on your own property, so if I have some berries and tomatoes growing in the yard, I will have every right to sit on the back porch and kill squirrels. I won’t be able to go out in the woods and shoot, but that just means I get to rest and keep a cooler beside me.

Second thing: squirrels aren’t the only targets.

As I mentioned, an animal dug up one of my blackberry plants and left a giant turd in its place. If my research is right, that animal was a coyote. Either that or someone collecting for Greenpeace. Guess what the restrictions on killing coyotes are? Basically, you’re not allowed to use nuclear weapons. That’s about it. You can kill them all day, every day, with no bag limit. You can use any weapon you like. Kill the puppies, too. Make interesting hats from the hides. Do as you please.

I am reading up on coyote hunting, and it should be doable. We will see.

A coyote serves no purpose here. They are not native. They cause all sorts of suffering. They tear up calves and kids, and they kill dogs.

There are also wild pigs in Florida. Again, no restrictions. Big ones. Little ones. Mommy pigs. Daddy pigs. They are all legal targets. I have not seen any pigs here, but I am told I will eventually run into them.

Coons are nuisance animals under the law, so you can kill them all year. Nothing is worse than a stinking coon. They throw garbage all over. They poop. They kill chickens. They spread rabies. I made the mistake of saving a little coon in the past, and I have even driven them to the Everglades and released them alive. No more. Like the comedian Robin Harris said in his routine about the death penalty, “Gotta go, gotta GO.”

Nuisance animals are bad news. They are extremely annoying. Anyone who kills them is doing the world a big favor. Relocating a nuisance animal just makes it someone else’s problem.

Coons are edible. Not sure I want to try that, but it could happen. My grandmother ate them. Coyotes, being related to dogs, probably taste good, but I am not hungry enough to try one.

Here’s a nice thing about killing nuisance animals: you don’t have to clean them. It’s perfectly okay to leave them for the buzzards. Coyote pelts and coon tails might be fun to take, but the carcasses can rot or go on the burn pile.

I pickled my squirrel tails in salt water. Why not? You never know when a squirrel tail will come in handy.

I have a very, very strong sense that God wants me to get good at hunting. Fine with me. Shooting targets is fun, but if you never take game or varmints, you never use guns for their proper purpose. Guns were not invented for shooting targets. Their purpose is to kill. A man should know how to kill pests and bring meat home, and it doesn’t hurt to have lethal skills that can be used against entitlement-minded looters who might want to visit rural Christians and conservatives if the economy tanks.

Times are good right now. We can’t predict the future. Your typical urban victimhood junkie knows nothing about firearms, except how to use them on weaker people at point-blank range. They would fare poorly against hunters. You should see the things people on Youtube are doing with night vision and scopes. I’ll post a video that will give you new respect for your rural friends.

Cleaning game may never become fun. I have a super-strong sense of smell, and dead animals are pretty fragrant. I washed thoroughly after cleaning today’s squirrel, and I cleaned the kitchen well. I still smell the squirrel on me. Luckily I haven’t showered yet. Soap and shampoo will kill the aroma.

I like hunting. A lot. Wish I had started sooner. I hope the squirrels fry up nice.

I have to go get this smell off me.

I’ll Teach You to Eat my Acorns

Success at last. I bagged a squirrel this morning.

I got the idea that late afternoon was not the best time to shoot squirrels, so I went out a few minutes after 7 a.m. Squirrel activity was considerably higher. In an hour and a half of walking, I saw maybe half a dozen squirrels, stalked about 4, shot at 2, and nailed 1.

The squirrel I shot was maybe 50 feet up in an oak tree. That’s where he was when I shot him, I mean. Prior to that, he was moving around from tree to tree, in the canopy. I tried to shoot him in the head, but from the looks of things, the bullet went in the upper rib cage on one side and out the other shoulder. The exit would was ragged. It was pretty exciting to watch him drop. It was my first shot of the day. First shot of the season, for that matter.

He gasped once or twice on the ground, but I didn’t have to shoot him again.

After that, I stalked other squirrels. I learned a few things.

I don’t think squirrels get spooked by human beings or guns. Not to the point where you can’t kill them. In fact, they don’t seem very bright. I nearly got a couple of other squirrels very close to the one I shot, within a few minutes of shooting him. They didn’t seem concerned at all.

I also learned that squirrels drink coffee. I can tell because they don’t seem to be on top of things right after sunup. They wander around up there, looking for the Keurig, and while they’re still waking up, they’re easier to kill.

My ideas about weaponry are changing. The .17 HMR is great, but it cost me some shots. I was only willing to shoot pretty much straight up, to prevent misses from sailing horizontally into other people’s houses and cars. That meant I had to get very close to the squirrels. Had I been able to shoot from farther away, I would have more than 1 squirrel brining in the fridge right now.

I like electronic hearing protectors. I bought my dad some Peltors a long time ago, and he can’t use them now, so I took them with me. You can turn them up so your hearing is better than normal. It helps you hear squirrels. Nice.

I had to say it, but the shotgun is a better tool then the .17 HMR right now. I can shoot horizontally with it, and I’m more likely to hit squirrels because of the wide pattern. An air rifle would also be nice, because I could shoot horizontally, from farther away, but I’m not sure it’s humane, because I would be more likely to wound squirrels without killing them right away.

I nearly nailed a second squirrel today. I took a shot at him, and it stunned him. I guess I “barked” him, which means shooting near a squirrel and dazing him. You can shoot a tree beside a squirrel and knock him down, unconscious. This squirrel reacted by running around the trunk in circles and then climbing down to stare at me. He perched about 10 feet from me, staring at me. I don’t think he knew what was going on. I had only brought 5 rounds with me, and I barked him with number 5, so all I could do was stare back. I was afraid he had been wounded, but he looked fine. Maybe he’ll drop dead from a concussion later.

I sighted the .17 in from too far away. I think I’m shooting a little high. I had assumed there was no real drop at 60 yards (my zeroing distance), but I’ll bet I’m wrong, because I missed 4 times today.

Cleaning the squirrel was not pleasant. I’ve torn a million fish apart, and it never bothered me, but cutting up cute, warm-blooded animals is a little gross.

I didn’t want to hack his head off with a pocket knife. I thought about it for a few minutes, and then I saw the pruning shears. Perfect.

I tried poultry shears on his legs and tail. Worked okay, but the pruning shears put them to shame.

I really did not want to gook up a pocket knife. They’re hard to clean. I found a Forschner filet knife in the kitchen. Of course, other people had abused it since I had last sharpened it, so I had to spend a long time fixing it with diamond hones. When I finally got it working, it worked just fine.

It seems like squirrels are very tough around the collar line. I had to cut some crap away in order to free the skin. I slit him down the belly, which was a bit nasty, and then I peeled his skin off him like a jumpsuit. His man bits went with the skin, so I didn’t have to yank them off with my bare fingers. I was not looking forward to that. His guts and other organs went down the disposal, and after that, I cut his anus out with the filet knife. I washed him down and stuck him in a lidded container full of brine, and now he resides in the fridge.

I would say I got something equivalent to one large chicken breast. I think it will be worth eating. I may go out in a few minutes and see what the shotgun produces. It’s foggy today, so I don’t think squirrels will be hiding from the heat. In fact, I know they aren’t. I went to McDonald’s for breakfast, and coming up the driveway to the house, I saw EIGHT EIGHT EIGHT squirrels. Makes me so mad.

My hands smell like dead squirrel, even after washing them and having two McMuffins. Guess I’m stuck with that.

This has been a great experience. Standing around failing to shoot animals is not that rewarding, but when you kill one and butcher it, it makes you feel close to nature. Many times, I’ve seen people write, or heard them say, that hunting made them feel like they were one with nature. I never experienced that until today. I figured it was hogwash, but it’s true.

I like animals, and it’s impossible to feel completely comfortable, blasting cute creatures with hot lead, but killing is part of life. It’s something a man needs to confront and deal with. A man should hunt and fish, if he has the opportunity. You have to confront the ugly parts of life in order to understand it. You can’t cower in the house and whimper like a woman in a Bambi T-shirt all the time. That’s not love or humanity. It’s shirking. You don’t want to admit you’re part of the cycle of life and death, so you sit back and criticize people who man up and accept their responsibility. Meanwhile you wear leather and eat fried chicken, as if they grew on trees.

Farm animals have it harder than hunted animals. A hunted animal does what it pleases for most of its life, and then it feels something briefly and expires quickly. Farm animals have tags shoved through their ears. Chickens have their beaks cut off with shears. Cattle get dehorned and castrated. Pigs get castrated while screaming their lungs out. Farmhands routinely beat animals with sticks while herding them. Slaughterhouses are only as humane as the law can make them. I don’t have much patience for self-righteous people who complain about hunting, and people who criticize fishing are just plain insane. Fish are so insensitive they will continue to try to feed after you cut them in half.

People should also think about the consequences of not hunting. Prey and nuisance animals overpopulate and starve. They destroy crops. They invade attics and do all sorts of damage. They kill pets. Right now, southern states are being torn up by wild hogs that reproduce at a phenomenal rate. They need to die, plain and simple, and hunting is one of the best ways to get it done.

I feel surprisingly good about hunting tiny ratlike animals. Think about it. Any idiot can shoot a deer, which is as big as a house. A squirrel is very small, and it moves around constantly. If I can learn to shoot squirrels, deer and hogs will be cake. How can you miss something that has a kill zone a foot across? Maybe I’m wrong, but to me, killing squirrels is much more impressive.

On the walk back, I found something disturbing. I planted some blackberries recently, and I found one of the plants sitting beside a neat little hole containing a huge…turd. There is no other word for it. Some filthy animal carefully moved my plant and moved its own project into the hole. I can’t figure that out.

Because of the size, I can’t believe this is a coon turd. I’ve seen those, and they’re about like poodle poo. Coyote, maybe? I think I need to get me a blind and put some meat out for bait.

Why on earth would it dig up my blackberry? Can’t figure that out.

I’m going to see if I can produce a meal instead of an hors d’ouevre. I’m going to get out my grandpa’s Sweet Sixteen. Wish me luck.

Rodent-Killing Efforts Proceeding Nicely

Today I spent a few hours failing to kill squirrels again.

Things are getting better, however. I have learned a few things. For example, do not put your 4.5-14x scope on 14 when you’re shooting squirrels. When you try to use the scope to look at a squirrel 50 feet away, you will be lucky if you’re on the same tree, and if you see the squirrel, it will look like a grizzly.

I also learned I like using Peltor electronic hearing protectors. These are earmuffs with amplifiers. You can turn them up so your hearing is better than normal. They make it a lot easier to hear squirrel noises. Ear plugs are not helpful when you’re trying to locate game.

The other day I spotted 3 squirrels in the woods. If I had been driving up the driveway to the house, I would have spotted 10, but that’s another story. Today I saw absolutely nothing. I can’t figure out how squirrels know I’m hunting, but they do. If I leave the gun at home, I’ll be surrounded by a conga line of squirrels.

I took some time out during the hunt to sight my scope in. I had it sighted in pretty well at 100 yards, but I expect to shoot squirrels at 30 yards or less. I put a table in the pasture maybe 60 yards from the target and went to work.

My rifle, a Savage .17 HMR with a bull barrel, came with a pretty bad synthetic stock. It’s free-floating, which is good for accuracy, but it was made with no comb. You need a comb when you use a scope. A comb is a big bump on the buttstock. You rest your cheek on it, and it raises your face up so you look into the scope at the right angle.

I was going to get a new stock from Boyd’s, but I thought they were rude when I asked them a couple of questions. They pretty much blew me off. Good thing, because I didn’t need a $230 stock. I just needed a comb. I went to Amazon and bought a $40 adjustable Kydex comb from Matthews Fabrication. It’s a piece of plastic that folds over the top of the buttstock. Two screws go through the buttstock and the comb, and you tighten them down when you get the comb at the right height. Look it up to see what I mean.

Today I used it for the first time. It’s fantastic. It puts my eye right where it should be. Now I have a warp-proof, weather-proof, free-floating stock with an adjustable comb, and I didn’t have to pay Boyd’s a dime.

The comb took about an hour to install. Most of that time was spent looking for tools. If my workshop weren’t a mess, it would have taken 20 minutes. You need a transfer punch, 2 drill bits, and some tape. Very easy. You have to drill 2 holes in your stock, but my stock is cheap plastic, and it was completely useless without modification, so I didn’t care,

I don’t know why Savage sells this gun with an unusable stock. The gun has no iron sights. You have to use a scope. That means the stock should have a comb. I guess they expect you to throw the stock out. The version with the stock I got is the cheapest model available, if I recall correctly. I believe the idea is to provide you with the least expensive stock available, on the assumption that you won’t keep it long.

I fired maybe 30 rounds and got the rifle shooting into about 1/2″. God help the squirrels.

This caliber (.17 HMR) is known for ruining squirrel meat. It’s powerful. If you can make head shots, that problem disappears. Now that I have the scope zeroed nicely, I should have no problem blowing squirrel heads off.

I should have zeroed it at 30 yards, but who cares? How much is it going to change at 50 feet?

Here is the second target I used. The first one had scattered shots on it because I was moving the scope crosshairs. The flyers to the right are from an experiment with the windage knob.

I started out shooting at the center of the target, and when I thought I had it together, I shot at the intersection of two lines above the center. As you can see, all 5 shots were very close together. Maybe not 1 MOA, but not far from it, and good enough for squirrels.There was a lot of wind. Most of it was from my back, so I don’t know if it mattered.

I went back to the woods and continued not seeing squirrels. I don’t know if it’s a good idea to shoot a target and then hunt squirrels a few hundred feet away, but the birds weren’t disturbed, so what the heck.

I’m thinking I need to try hunting in the morning, but I hate to do that because it will interfere with prayer time.

I used to think the .17 HMR was the wrong gun for squirrels, but now that I have the magnification adjusted, the comb fixed, and the zero corrected, it ought to be very good. I can hit squirrels a good distance off, and I can shoot them in the head to avoid tearing them up. An air rifle would be better because it would be quiet and safer, but what I have now is a lot better than a .22, and it’s more fun than a 16 gauge.

It’s still heavy. That bull barrel was not made to be carried around.

I can tell I’m going to like hunting. I like it now, and I haven’t shot anything.

I hope to post some photos of headless squirrels this week. Wish me luck.

This Land Isn’t Your Land, Especially if You’re Mexican

In prayer this morning, I felt nausea again. I started thinking about Woody Guthrie. I believe God was directing my attention back to him. When I think about the indifference I used to feel with regard to Guthrie, I feel like someone gave me poison. All my life, people tried to make be think Guthrie was a sweet guy who wrote upbeat songs. In reality, he was dark and angry, and he was an enemy of God. I can’t believe schoolteachers made me sing his ridiculous anti-God anthem. Schools were already insane when I was a kid. Worse than I have realized.

Guthrie was an atheist, and he was against Christianity. There are apologists who claim otherwise, but that’s just part of the left’s sick effort to lay claim to the church in order to destroy it.

Here’s something Guthrie wrote: “Love is the only God that I’ll ever believe in.” Sounds nice, right? The Bible says God is love. But it also says he is a God of justice. Furthermore, it says he is a humanoid being who sits on a throne in heaven, and it says he gets angry and kills people, sometimes by the millions. God is love, but not everything that feels like love is God.

When you say, “Love is the only God that I’ll ever believe in,” you are expressly denying the God of the Bible, because he is more than that.

Here are the words that follow the quote above:

The books of the holy bible never say but one time just exactly what God is [not true], and in those three little words it pours out a hundred million college educations and says, God Is Love.

And that is the only real definite answer to ten thousand wild queries and questions that I my own self tossed at my bible. That is the only really sensible, easy, honest, warm, plain, quick and clear answer I found – when I was ready to throw so-called fearful cowardly thieving poisoning religion out my trash door, it was those three words that made not only religion, but also several other sorts of superstitious fears and hatreds in me meet one very quick death.

Pretty clear.

Guthrie claimed he thought about Jesus all the time. That probably is not true, and if it were true, it would not make him a Christian.

Leftists love to try to own Christ. They say he was a homosexual, even though he supported the Jewish law, which describes homosexuality as an abomination. They say he was a socialist, in spite of the commandment against coveting. They say Christianity is only about being nice to people, in spite of the overwhelmingly negative nature of Jesus’s remarks about humanity. Meanwhile, they deny the existence of Satan and hell. They deny the existence of heaven. They seem to think Jesus was a deluded sissy who ran around teaching pacifism and mindless approval. They think he was wrong about God, but right about being nice. The left’s Jesus is a straw messiah. You can’t get redeeming blood out of straw.

If Jesus was wrong about God, why should we listen to him about being nice? A wrong Jesus would have no more authority than Stuart Smalley. He wouldn’t be an authority figure. He would be ridiculous, like Rod McKuen or Leo Buscaglia.

I learned something else about Guthrie: his twisted song about America contained verses we don’t teach our kids. Look:

As I went walking I saw a sign there
And on the sign it said “No Trespassing.”
But on the other side it didn’t say nothing,
That side was made for you and me.

In the shadow of the steeple I saw my people,
By the relief office I seen my people;
As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking
Is this land made for you and me?

Guthrie was a communist, and that explains the first stanza above. Attacks on property rights were very important to union organizers trying to force their way onto company properties in order to recruit. Laws were made, to force property owners to let them in.

The second verse is another of his attacks on Christianity. “If God is so wonderful, why is there suffering?” Never mind our utter failure to cooperate with God.

In the early 20th century, God gave man a huge gift. He poured his Holy Spirit out on a bunch of believers in a church on Azusa Street in Los Angeles. They began speaking in tongues. They got a taste of the power of the early church. What happened afterward? America rejected the gift. The Azusa Street miracle produced a wave of Holy Spirit evangelism which gave rise to the charismatic movement, but what percentage of American Christians listened? Very small. Even today, the message of the Holy Spirit is generally rejected, and the churches that accept it are mainly concerned with money. They are run by greedy idiots, and the people in the pews are greedy, too. The movement never became what it should have.

The Azusa Street Revival occurred between 1906 and 1915. It petered out. Then we had a pretty rough century. We had 2 world wars, a depression, 2 failed wars in Asia, and the spiritual cancer of the 1960’s. The 1960’s were Satan’s revival, and unlike Azusa Street, this revival succeeded. It’s 2018, and we still live in the culture of the 1960’s.

P.J. O’Rourke said something interesting. He visited a university decades after the Sixties, and he he saw kids who still dressed and acted like Sixties students. He understood how strange that was. It would have been like going to a university in the Fifties and seeing kids wearing raccoon coats and listening to Jelly Roll Morton. It shows what the Sixties did to us. They never ended.

The last century was rough, but it wasn’t because we didn’t have socialism or because we believed God would help us. It was because we hated God and rejected him. We hate him now more than ever.

Here’s another song Guthrie and his kind used to sing. The name is “Long-Haired Preachers” or “The Preacher and the Slave.” It will make you sick, if you have any kind of feeling for God:

Long-haired preachers come out every night
Try to tell you what’s wrong and what’s right
But when asked how ’bout something to eat
They will answer with voices so sweet

Chorus:

You will eat, bye and bye
In that glorious land above the sky
Work and Pray, live on hay
You’ll get pie in the sky when you die

And the starvation army they play
And they sing and they clap and they pray
Till they get all your coin on the drum
Then they tell you when you are on the bum

If you fight hard for children and wife
Try to get something good in this life
You’re a sinner and bad man, they tell
When you die you will sure go to hell

Workingmen of all countries unite
Side by side we for freedom will fight
When the world and its wealth we have gained
To the grafters we’ll sing this refrain

Last Chorus:

You will eat, bye and bye
When you’ve learned how to cook and to fry
Chop some wood, ’twill do you good
And you’ll eat in the sweet bye and bye

That’s more like it. That’s more honest. You can teach kids that “This Land is Your Land” is a good song, because the limited version they learn omits the anti-God business, but the song above lays it all right out there: “Give up God, and you will prosper.”

When this song is sung, you’re supposed to chant, “That’s a lie,” between verses, until you get to the last 2 verses, which celebrate carnal effort. At the end of those verses, you shout, “That’s no lie!”

So faith in God is a lie, to leftists. Nothing new there.

How can anyone hate the Salvation Army? It’s an organization that has helped save countless people, not just from damnation, but from things like alcoholism, drug addiction, prostitution, and poverty.

It’s the craziest thing. God has increased the numbers of his children by sending preachers around, and he has used hymns to get his point across. In Guthrie’s time, Satan used preachers, too, and they used music. They went to migrant camps and preached atheism, covetousness, violence, and the victim mentality the left is famous for. Never say Satan doesn’t have preachers.

The Azusa Street Revival failed, but Guthrie’s God-hating socialist revival worked. We never learned how to be blessed by God. We learned how to carry signs and take things from other people.

I feel like I understand the world better than ever, and it’s not pleasant. I see why God is exasperated. Nothing he does for us works. We rejected him in Adam’s time. We rejected the laws of Moses. We rejected Jesus and the Holy Spirit. When Jesus comes down personally, to reign in the Messianic Age, we will reject him again, even without curses and problems to complain about. It does not matter what God does. We will always reject him. No wonder he’s going to destroy the world. Everyone, even God, reaches a point where he says, “Enough.”

You can’t talk to victimhood junkies about God. You have to get close to God in order to see how right he is, and they hate him so much, they won’t accept the milk, let alone the meat. They won’t hear him. They won’t give him a try. They want to have all of their problems fixed, right now, without any type of repentance or accountability. Giving them blessings would be like giving a fortune to a 2-year-old. It would just make things worse.

I wonder what it will look like, when people reject Jesus during the Messianic Age. It’s hard to believe anyone could be that stupid, but we know it will happen. It’s hard to believe Adam and Eve rejected God, or that the Jews rejected him after seeing the pillar of fire and cloud. It’s hard to believe when another person misses the obvious, but we’re doing it right now, and we think we’re the smartest people who ever lived.

There are reasons for failure and suffering. It’s not random. It’s not caused by rich people who hoard an imaginary cache of golden eggs. Kill the rich, pass out their money, and what do you get? Poor people who have one great Saturday night and then return immediately to poverty. Poverty isn’t just a lack of wealth. It’s a lack of the inner qualities that draw wealth. Money doesn’t give you those qualities. Trash with cash is still trash.

America is disgusting. We are ungrateful and spoiled. We bite the hand that feeds us all day, every day. Eventually we will be presented with bills.

Lukewarmness is poisoning us. We think we please God while we keep one foot in the Sixties. That’s not possible.

I feel queasy because of what God is teaching me, but I appreciate it. Medicine doesn’t have to taste good. I am very disturbed by what I see around me and inside me, but thank God I’m able to see it.

New Scourge to Brighten my Days

When I moved from Miami to the frigid tundra here in northern Florida, I did not see the learning curve coming. It keeps slapping me in the face. Today’s challenge: mice. Not a big issue in Miami.

I got up today and made my way to the room where I hang out. I have a couch and recliner set up in front of the TV/computer. When I watch TV with the birds, I put an old quilt on the couch to protect it. I tend to forget to take it off and fold it up. Good thing, because this morning it had little black items on it. Mouse poo.

How did this happen? Who do I complain to? This is not acceptable.

I’ve lived north of the Florida line in the past. I didn’t have mouse problems. This house is so nice, I assumed it was sealed up against pests. I didn’t expect indoor rodents. Now I have to kill them.

The last time I killed household rodents, it was a desperate situation. Rats were running amok in a house destroyed by a drug addict. When I walked in the front door during the day, I could hear them rattling around in the kitchen cabinets. I used Tomcat poison on them. They disappeared quickly. I wasn’t worried about the smell of decaying rats, and I wasn’t in a position to use traps, which require a lot of looking after. Now I’m reading up on mice, and it looks like traps are the way to go.

It’s hard for me to believe that a half-ounce mouse can create much of a smell when it dies, but I don’t want to take a chance.

I guess dropping food scraps into the waste can was not a great move. It must have drawn the mice to the sitting area. Perhaps throwing out excess cheese-flavored popcorn was a bad idea. I hope they didn’t use the remotes.

It appears that I now have two options: never use the waste can for anything a mouse can eat, or remove the bag every night and put it in the garage.

It’s surprising how many things I have to kill in order to have a peaceful life here.

I hate a mouse. I really do.

My Aunt Jean had the worst mice imaginable. She was obsessive about cleanliness. She grew peanuts, and because she had to have the cleanest peanuts on earth, she washed them after she dug them. They rotted and had to be thrown out. Next time around, she didn’t wash them, so they didn’t rot. But they started to disappear. One day she showed me a gallon jug full of peanuts. There was also a filing cabinet drawer that had been filled. The mice had moved the peanuts, presumably one at a time. Thousands of them. She had to throw them out, because how do you get mouse residue off a peanut?

It was like an episode of Monk.

I am tempted to get glue traps, because you don’t have to bait them. You just put them down and pick them up. But glue is not very nice to the mice. They struggle for a long time. I had a rat run across my house with a glue trap stuck to it. I guess snap traps are the answer. How nice.

Well, maybe I’m wrong. I am reading that mice get less gullible with time, and that you need to make a big assault on the first day you go after them. Maybe the best answer is several snap traps and several glue trays.

Miserable, stinking creeps. They will rue the day.

Wealth Disparity Just a Pretext

Today I looked at an old movie during breakfast. Last night, I came across Bound for Glory while taking the birds out for amusement, and I watched for a while. Today I watched some more of it.

Bound for Glory is about Woody Guthrie, the communist musician who wrote the song This Land is Your Land, putting the words to the melody to an existing hymn. It starred David Carradine, the guy from Kill Bill and Kung Fu. He was a childhood hero of mine. I didn’t realize Kung Fu and eastern mysticism were BS. He died naked, while abusing himself, hanging by a belt in a hotel closet. Not the way an old man should go. No dignity.

Don’t get my started on Kung Fu. When I was a kid, I broke my arm imitating Carradine’s wandering idiot. A Phys. Ed. teacher told me to jump off a high beam made from an old telephone pole, and to hit the ground rolling. I jumped headfirst because I had seen David Carradine’s stuntman do it. Thank God my neck wasn’t broken.

I thought the movie would be interesting because it would tell me things about the Depression, but it left me a little nauseated.

I don’t know how true the movie is. It was based on Guthrie’s autobiography of the same name, but the movie’s “facts” don’t look much like the facts on Wikipedia’s page. Some of it is true. Guthrie was a union agitator and a communist. He didn’t join the Communist Party formally, but he did what he could to advance its twisted agenda.

The version of Guthrie presented in the movie was supposed to be flattering, but I found him disgusting. Carradine’s Guthrie is a smirking, smug, arrogant, selfish jerk who cheats on his wife without even thinking about it. He condescends to everyone around him. Very off-putting.

The movie promotes unions and leftism, and as I should have expected, it attacks Christianity. Movie Guthrie’s agitator pal Ozark Bule goes to migrant camps and sings a revolting song about pie in the sky when you die. The idea is that preachers tell you you’re going to get good things in heaven, which is a “dirty lie,” and that you should stand up and demand good things here on earth.

There is a scene in the movie in which Guthrie ask a preacher for an odd job so he can eat. The preacher gives him a speech about having no work to give him and not wanting to make things worse by giving him charity, and he gives Guthrie nothing. The message: “God isn’t going to do anything for you, and people who believe in him are your enemies.” Don’t think about the huge body of charity work Christians have done over the centuries. That’s irrelevant.

I found out that Guthrie wrote This Land is Your Land as a rebuttal…get ready…for God Bless America, which was getting heavy radio play at the time. Can you believe that? What a peek into the hidden heart of leftism. How can anyone find God Bless America offensive? Look at the lyrics. It acknowledges that God has blessed America, and it asks him to guide her. Only a leftist could find outrage in that. It doesn’t promote capitalism. It doesn’t attack unions. It is astounding that anyone would find it provocative.

This Land is Your Land doesn’t mention God once. It merely suggests that everyone in America owns all of America. In other words, if you don’t have everything you want, it’s because some rich person is hoarding it, and you have the right to take it.

When I say the movie was nauseating, I am not exaggerating. I feel physical nausea. The “heroic” leftists in the movie are sleazy people with dirty, defiled lives. They have no interest at all in God, except to fight the notion that he exists. They think all their problems can be solved be battling in the flesh. They think people who have more than they do are morally inferior parasites.

I’ve known successful people, and I’ve known poor people. The poor are morally inferior to the rich. In most cases, this is why they’re poor. They commit most violent crime and property crime. They have worse problems with pride. Many poor people are so intoxicated with self-love, they give themselves names, like comic book superheroes. I know two guys who call themselves Cheno Lyfe and Dunamis. I don’t think Dunamis is a proud guy, but he got caught in the name trend, which came from pride. We all know of pride-crazed poor people who became rich and held onto their bizarre handles or invented new ones: Jay-Z. Eminem. J-Lo. Dr. Dre. Snoop Dogg.

Success doesn’t make you a good person, but on the whole, successful people are better than poor people. Who would you rather live among?

The sick leftist notion that poverty equals holiness and wealth equals depravity is poisonous. It put the bodies of countless nice people in ditches in Cambodia. It built Castro’s torture chambers. It built the gulags. It killed 100 million people during the last century.

There’s a gag-inducing scene in the movie which could probably be used as a litmus test to distinguish good people from bad. Guthrie chases a woman in order to have sex with her. She’s a volunteer who fed him at a soup kitchen. When he finally gets into her house, he sees that she’s rich. After he has had his way, he scolds her for her money and asks if it embarrasses her. During the same conversation, with his smirk bright as ever, he tells her he has a wife and kids, and that he has to leave her because he has started to care. No shame. Just a big grin. Then he walks out.

If you can watch that scene and admire the character Carradine is playing, you’re probably going to hell, because you are completely unfamiliar with love, and you are blind to cruelty.

I wonder: how bright is the line between God’s children and the future residents of hell? More than ever, I feel like we only have 2 classes and 2 races. Once class/race is those who choose God, and the other is those who despise him. Leftism is associated strongly with the latter group.

The movie reminds me of something they used to do in communist countries. You have a teacher ask a room full of kids to pray to God for food. Then when they get nothing, you tell them to pray to Mao/Stalin/Castro/Barack Obama/whoever for food. Then you wheel in a cart full of pastries and pass them out. Leftists want us to think violence and agitation get our needs filled, and they want us to hate God for failing to cater to our whims.

In East Germany, there used to be posters that read, “Without God and without sun, we will get our harvest done.” The average American does not understand how deeply leftism is entwined with hatred of God. Socialism was invented to turn the government into a messiah, in order to replace the Lord.

When I was at Columbia University (before Obama was admitted belatedly as a transfer student), I used to hang around with Woody Guthrie’s heirs. I was not interested in their politics. I did not realize you had to swing that way to really be part of the gang. We used to play instruments and sing in our dorm rooms. They were social justice warriors. Now, of course, 98% of them are bank presidents and lawyers and so on. Not one that I know of went on to become a bona fide, to-the-bone agitator.

One of the agitators was named Dave. He had a beat-up Gibson J45. At the time, I did not know this was the signature guitar of leftist troubadors. He was one of the people who used to come to my dorm room and play and sing. When I left Columbia for one of the last times, I caught a cab, and Dave was at the wheel. On the way to LaGuardia, he told me how he was hoping to go to Nicaragua and work for the bloodthirsty Sandinistas. I looked him up today. He’s a partner in a New York law firm. Still sings. I wonder if he thinks he’s a real Guthrie heir.

I didn’t understand that he and my other music buddies were part of the other class. I wish I had. I would not have messed with them. I wouldn’t have gone to Columbia in the first place. A person of my race has no business there. I was ignorant, though. I didn’t know the world was divided, or that there was no way to cross the gulf.

Dave was a nice enough guy, and I had fun with the others, but these were relationships without futures.

Satan tries to convince us that people are all more or less the same. Not true. There are two groups, and everyone belongs to one or the other. If you hang out with the other group, you will suffer eventually. I did. You can be nice to them. You can do business with them. You can’t become part of their family, though.

You can’t join the other race, but you can let them drag you to hell, where, in addition to being damned, you will be a misfit.

Interesting stuff. There was no one to teach me these things when I was young.

I am not a Woody Guthrie fan. I literally find him disgusting now. I don’t mind being rejected by the grey people; the people with dark lives. Life around them is depressing and anxious. There is no real love among them.

More

Today after I wrote this entry, a strange feeling came over me. I felt like I was saying goodbye to the children of darkness.

I feel like a sliding door has come down between me and people who won’t listen to God. They’re on the other side, continuing to scrap over cheap trinkets, and I have a feeling I would describe as resignment. It’s not going to work out between us, and I might as well let them go.

As the Bible says in many places, God sets his people apart from the world. We are not called to have 5,000 Facebook friends. If you can go anywhere and be accepted, you’re not close to God. A child of darkness is welcome in a much wider variety of social circles. A person like that can go nearly anywhere and adapt. Fewer things are forbidden to them. If you’re close to God, you have to be careful not to get too close to the wrong people. It’s like working at a hospice and making friends with every patient you work with. The friendships have no future.

It’s almost as though people who are against God aren’t real. No matter how solid they look now, in a few years, they will vanish forever.

I know many people I will never see again. People I know are in hell. I could give you names. Some are relatives. I know a lot of people who are virtually certain to go there. It’s funny; we laugh and joke with our non-saved friends here on earth. We don’t feel afraid for them. We don’t think much about their terrible destinies.

Christian friendships are different. Christian friendships will last forever. We will know each other and enjoy each other’s love and faithfulness a billion years from now.

If you’re a Christian, and you want to do it right, you have to stop trying to fit in. Strangely, though, we have a lot of prominent clergymen telling us to be friends with everyone. We have hip young pastors telling us to try to be cool. Love is their excuse, but the truth is that they’re greedy. The more their congregations conform to the world, the more people go to their “churches,” and the more money comes in the door.

If you look like the worldly, you talk like the worldly, you think like the worldly, and you vote like the worldly, you are a person of the world, not the church.

So much of our activity here is wasted. All sinful activity is wasted. Then there are our other pursuits, which, although not forbidden, serve to render us useless. We get caught up in chasing goals that mean absolutely nothing to God. We’re so proud when we succeed! We want to be noticed. We like reminding ourselves. We collect ridiculous trophies and medals. We put plaques on our walls, celebrating our vain accomplishments. Salesman of the Month. Who’s Who in America. WBC Lightweight Champion. Whatever. We die, and then it’s all garbage. If we’re rich, we may try to be keep our names in people’s mouths. We may have our widows put our names on the fronts of hospitals and dormitories. As if such things help or matter to dead people.

There are parks and museums named after people who went to hell before they were built. They were in hell, thinking about anything but parks and museums, while people they left behind got things rolling and gave speeches and cut ribbons. How weird is that? You can be in hell, crying and screaming, while your smiling widow cuts a ribbon in front of a library with your name on it.

“Wherever he is, he must be smiling.” We ought to stop saying that.

This life looks stranger and stranger to me all the time.

Squirrel Party Time is Over

I am a hunter now.

The great thing about calling yourself a hunter is that you don’t have to accomplish anything in order to justify it. All you have to do is take a gun and sit in the woods for a while. This is pretty much what I did.

The word “hunter” doesn’t imply success of any type.

I don’t like squirrels because they plant live oak trees and because I fully expect them to eat the berries from the bushes I’ve planted. I remember how they used to cut mangoes off my trees in Miami, just to hear them hit the ground. And they annoy me when I drive; I have trained myself not to take my foot off the gas. A while back I decided to get a revenge hunting license and see if I could make a dent in the local population.

Yesterday, I went out in the woods in the afternoon and sat in a clearing with no gun. I just wanted to see what the squirrel situation was. I heard barking all over the place. It was a squirrel-bark symphony. I saw a couple of squirrels climbing in the trees. I figured it wouldn’t be too hard to nail some in the future.

Today I went back, and I learned that squirrels can tell when you’re hunting. I didn’t hear a bark for an hour and a half. Little creeps.

I sat on a downed tree for a while and waited. I heard a noise to my left. I looked, and a squirrel was on a tree trunk about 20 feet away in the x direction and 20 feet up in the y direction.

Years of math have affected the way I express myself. Be glad I didn’t use spherical polar coordinates.

Okay. R(squirrel) = 23.5. Theta = pi/4. Phi = pi/4. Satisfied?

I probably could have nailed the squirrel, but I would have been shooting upward, and I was holding a .22. A rifle slug will go a long way after missing a squirrel. I didn’t feel like spending the evening telling the Florida Highway Patrol why I shot out a window a mile away, so I let the rodent flee.

I know I should use a shotgun, but man, I love rifles. I like accurate shooting. Where is the pleasure in using birdshot? Anyone can shoot, when the projectiles cover half a steradian (sorry).

It doesn’t matter. I wasn’t ready. I didn’t know how to dispose of the body. I had a plastic trash bag with me in case I hit anything, but even if I had used it, I would have had to get on the web to get instructions. I know about cutting the leg joints and cutting the head off and all that, but how much time do you get? And what are you supposed to use to do the cutting? Not my nice pocket knife! No way! How would I get it clean enough to put it back in my pocket?

When I was a kid, I shot rabbits in Kentucky. Here’s how I dealt with the meat: I handed the dead rabbits to my grandmother. That option is no longer available.

Once your squirrel is butchered, how do you clean your hands? You can’t just grab your gun with fingers covered with blood, poop, bile, and squirrel pee.

Maybe I need to take a backpack with disposable gloves. Seems a little precious, though.

I may try again tomorrow. The squirrels are taunting me, and I find their behavior inexcusable.

The Dubious Value of Verbal Aptitude

Last night I looked at Amazon Prime to find something to watch while I had the birds out of their cages. I saw that they offered a documentary on the atomic bomb. I’m a sucker for books and videos about the bomb, going back to The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes, so I had to watch.

As I expected, I found it entertaining. I haven’t seen all of it yet. I hoped to see some mention of Richard Feynman, a great physicist who worked on the bomb in his youth, but he has not appeared yet.

A friend of mine bought me a new copy of Richard Feynman’s first book, Surely You Must be Joking, Mr. Feynman, as a Christmas present, and I have been reading it over the last few weeks.

I first bought the book years ago, when I was a physics student. I bought a lot of physics-related nonfiction. When I dropped out of grad school and moved back to Miami, I put my books in boxes, and later, I found that ants had eaten a lot of them. At some point after that, Feynman got publicity from some source or other, and his book became popular.

It’s always a bummer when other people catch onto something you like. Everyone thinks you jumped on the bandwagon, and you end up having very unsatisfying conversations with real bandwagon jumpers who lack any sort of real understanding. It reminds me of my experiences with brewing. I was a beer freak even when I was in high school, and then at some point other people got into quality beers and homebrewing, and suddenly the world was full of hipsters who were instant beer experts.

I’ll tell you something funny. No matter how popular good beer becomes, there won’t be many people who can tell Miller Lite from Dogfish Head. That’s just the way humanity is.

I loved Feynman’s books. I won’t lie; I didn’t understand the third one I bought. It was about quantum electrodynamics. I didn’t have the patience to work my way through it. But the first two were great. They were autobiographies. He wrote about his experiences as a smart kid, as well as his time working with great men of science.

I learned something interesting from the bomb documentary. The thing I learned was of great historical importance, but I had never heard about it before. My best guess: liberal journalists and academics suppressed it. It concerned the United States and atomic policy, and it cast the United States in a very favorable light, so it’s the kind of thing hippies would naturally find infuriating and worthy of concealment.

The United States, on its own, tried to get rid of nuclear weapons and prevent the arms race.

For a short time, before the expected and unpreventable betrayal by leftists put the bomb in the hands of evil communist regimes, the US had a monopoly on nuclear weapons. We proposed destroying them and working to create a global ban on new production, combined with verification. The Soviets were working on their own bombs, and they refused to cooperate until we destroyed our weapons. Of course, the demand was ridiculous. We knew they were working on the bomb, and we didn’t know how far along they were. We knew we didn’t know how far along they were. It would have been idiotic to disarm and hope they didn’t have bombs waiting to be deployed.

The Soviet empire was, as Reagan put it, evil, and there is no way to justify the canard that westerners were just as bad. Even the disenfranchised in countries like the US had it much better than ordinary Soviet citizens, who were prisoners and slaves in their own nations. The Soviets were warlike and aggressive, and their policy was to expand by means of force. Unchecked, this would have resulted in a world system in which all human beings were humiliated prisoners and slaves. Taking a chance of making the USSR a nuclear monopoly would have been criminal.

I’m old, and I’m not especially ignorant, yet until last night, I was unaware that the US had tried to prevent the arms race. Thank you, crooked disseminators of information.

Today during breakfast I decided to Google and see if there were any documentaries about Feynman, and I came across a very interesting site. It’s called Cosmolearning. I know very little about it, but the “About” page says, “Collecting the top educational videos on the web, generously offered by hundreds of universities, educators, and professionals, we share their passion for teaching by providing a platform for world-class education free of charge.”

They had several videos on Feynman. Now I have some good stuff to look forward to.

Feynman’s autobiographical books are good reading not just because he writes about science, but because he writes interesting tales about a remarkable person with an engaging personality. He writes about his feelings, not just his accomplishments. A lot of his stories are funny. Some are moving.

One deceptive thing about the books is that Feynman undersells his intelligence. He was not just brilliant. He was extraordinary among brilliant people. But he describes himself as a guy who was dazzled and intimidated by the bright people he worked with.

Feynman writes about working on the bomb as a young man, as though he hadn’t graduated from college. He mentions overseeing high school boys at Los Alamos, as though he were some kind of low-level babysitter. I looked it up, and I found out that he had received his Ph.D. in 1942, at about the age of 24, before starting to work on the bomb.

So much for the babysitter narrative.

Feynman scored 125 on an IQ test, and that’s not impressive, but he also blew the tops out of very difficult math exams. His aptitude for math and physics was freakish, regardless of his self-deprecation.

It has been suggested that Feynman’s surprisingly low IQ was due to the nature of the test he took. After all, IQ is a test score, not a definitive quantization of intelligence. A very smart person can, legitimately, have a low IQ. You just have to measure the right things.

Most physicists are not good at verbal tasks. I know that from working with them. The great physicist Murray Gell-Mann said more or less the same thing in one of his books; he remarked that he was unusual because his gifts were balanced. It may be that Feynman’s test measured verbal ability more than mathematical aptitude. My guess is that a score of 125 on such a test would be unusually high for a physicist. I wouldn’t be surprised to find that other brilliant STEM thinkers had disappointing IQ scores.

Anyway, the notion that Feynman was anything less than astounding is untenable.

This got me thinking about smart people, so I Googled John von Neumann. If you don’t know who he is, it suffices to say that he appears to be the smartest person, among people of note, of the last century. He intimidated people like Edward Teller the way Edward Teller would intimidate you or me.

The power of von Neumann’s mind was incomprehensible. He made gigantic contributions in a number of fields in which most solid workers have no hope of making any type of memorable impact.

I have to say that I was depressed a little by looking into these things. God gave me some pretty good gifts, and I didn’t do anything with them. Earthly achievements aren’t very important in the Christian scheme, since everyone in heaven is a greater genius than 10 von Neumanns, but doing nothing with your gifts is not something that makes you feel good.

I always wonder what would have happened, had I been raised in a healthy family, by people who knew how to help their kids win. These days, I goad my friends to avoid the minefields I walked into. I tell them they need to get their kids started on music, math, and languages EARLY, EARLY, EARLY. Once you hit maybe 16, everything gets harder to learn, and your future success becomes limited. Earthly gifts aren’t everything, but being strong is usually better than being weak.

This week I realized something funny: extreme verbal aptitude has very little value. If you have a ton of STEM aptitude, you can use it to get a fine career that will feed you for life, and you may be able to make an extraordinarily large amount of money and look after yourself and others. A STEM person with an IQ of, say, 180 will find a lot of open doors. But what if you have an extreme verbal aptitude? There’s nothing you can do with it. No one will pay you to do crossword puzzles. It will help you as a lawyer, but let’s be honest; a lawyer with an IQ of 145 (common) will be able to do absolutely everything the law demands, very, very well. We have probably had good Supreme Court justices who were not that smart.

God gave me a very high verbal IQ, and now I know how unmarketable it is!

I do very well in STEM pursuits, but I got a late, late start. I was 30. I went from algebra dropout to grad student in a top physics program in 4 years, but I got burned out and quit (also, I suspect my memory was fading and making it harder), and I very much doubt I was ever going to come up with anything useful. I would have ended up doing experimental physics somewhere, shooting lasers through cold gases or something, and taking endless measurements to be interpreted by people who were smarter than I.

Maybe there is something useful about extreme verbal aptitude, and I just haven’t figured it out yet. Or maybe it’s just a gift to keep me entertained. I would not wish it for a son or daughter. A nice solid 650 verbal SAT and an 800 math SAT would get a kid much farther in life.

It seems to me that smart STEM people give us things that are useful, whereas verbal freaks do nothing but misunderstand and spread misunderstanding. They write books and essays full of godless opinion and conjecture, dragging the rest of us along in their wakes. The academics who are constantly hacking away at Christians are mostly verbal people.

I think of Justice Brennan, the famous liberal sage. He was wrong all the time, and his views were poisonous, but he was so smart, he convinced people (probably including himself) he was right. What a wasted life.

Now I’m more depressed than ever!

I may not be inventing great things or advancing physics, but thank God, I haven’t ended up like Sartre or Noam Chomsky or any of the other umpteen million verbal people who spent their days filling other people’s minds with sewage.

I think STEM gifts are better than verbal gifts, but on the whole, freak aptitudes are not that wonderful. The most important thing in life is a relationship with the Holy Spirit. After that, you want a nice, solid above-average brain, and more than that, good habits. The world is full of contented, successful people who serve God and couldn’t equal Feynman’s 125 on their very best days.

Incidentally, Feynman was an atheist. I enjoy his books, and I admire his mind, but in all likelihood, he is in agony right now, defeated forever. Terrible. I will never meet him.

Von Neumann is a different story. When he learned he was seriously ill, he sought God. He was a Jew by birth. I guess he was not religious prior to his illness, because he didn’t look for a rabbi to help him. He became a Catholic, and even on his deathbed, he was very afraid. I hope he made it.

How about all these huge Jewish brains? Where do they come from? What is God’s purpose for them? Feynman, von Neumann, Einstein, Bohr (half Jewish), Oppenheimer, Norbert Wiener…some almost incredible, others merely amazing. You could sit and list them all day. It almost makes you wonder what life would be without them. Would we have nuclear technology yet?

Gentiles do okay. Tesla, Gauss, Leibniz, Newton, Dirac, Fermi, and so on. But we SHOULD do okay. The vast majority of human beings are Gentiles. Something like 99.8%.

Strange.

I often wonder why God bothers giving us gifts at all, when the real answer is to connect to the Holy Spirit and get him to take care of you. But I suppose gifts are useful to keep you alive until you find the Holy Spirit. You have to use whatever crude weapons you have.

Whatever my potential was, I missed the bus, so now I get my thrills playing with farm machinery and machine tools. C’est la vie. At least I can function as a walking cautionary tale and help other people.

I’m going to look for more stuff on the Cosmo Learning site. Maybe I can still jam a few more things into the worn-out container which is what’s left of my mind.

Comments are Appreciated

I want to write a quick post to thank people who have written grateful or positive comments regarding the things I’ve written about God. I tend to think of myself as a sort of invisible person. I don’t see myself as someone other people think about or miss. I don’t have the feeling that I’m important to other people or that I have any influence. That’s just my nature. No matter how many times I get a word of thanks or support, I am always a little surprised when it happens.

The encouragement is very helpful.

I thought I was writing for a few dozen people, but when I looked at correct versions of my site’s statistics, I learned I was getting between 1,000 and 2,000 unique visits per day. That was a little sobering, because it meant I was in danger of affecting a significant number of people. I realized I needed to be careful.

I don’t know why I get so few comments these days. I think the scarcity of comments helped give me a false notion of the size of my audience. I don’t care if people choose not to comment, though. If you don’t feel like it, don’t do it. It’s your business.

I don’t try to build an audience. I am not planning to try to make money here. I am not interested in running a busy forum, either.

I hope that whatever influence I have will become more and more positive. I have a lot to make up for!

Contempt for God is a Major Problem

I am having a good week. I’ve been asking God to help me spend more time in his presence, especially praying in tongues, and he has been coming through.

It may sound strange, but after all I’ve been through, I still have difficulty motivating myself to pray enough. You would think it would be automatic by now, but it seems like something always comes up to distract me when I try to start the day’s second session. For example, it may suddenly seem very important for me to look something up on the Internet. First thing you know, an hour has passed, and I no longer have time to do what I should.

I know spirits work to distract and discourage us. I would do the same thing, if I were headed for the lake of fire. I would do anything to delay it.

Youtube has turned out to be very helpful. If you like, you can turn Youtube into a source of frivolous viral entertainment. You can watch all sorts of garbage. It doesn’t have to be that way, though. There are all sorts of helpful Christian videos on the site, and once you start looking at them, Youtube seems completely different. I’ve been looking at a lot of videos by people who say they’ve seen hell.

I’m not as interested in learning about heaven. The desire to go to heaven can’t motivate you like fear of hell.

Yesterday I came across a remarkable video. A young man said he had had a number of dreams of hell. The thing that struck me about it was that he reminded me so much of myself. He said things I say. He emphasized things I emphasize.

He discouraged people from getting caught up in church. Church buffs would have fits watching that. We think church is the answer to everything. Sit in church once a week, and you go to heaven. The man in the video said he saw pastors in hell. Their problem was that they taught people to serve them, not God.

Boy, can I relate to that. I belonged to two churches that turned pastors into cult leaders.

I belonged to Trinity Church in Miami. It was just an apparatus designed to make the Wilkerson family rich and famous. They sucked up to anyone they thought might have money, power, or the ability to put them in front of cameras. They made the armorbearers treat Luther Campbell and Kim Kardashian like VIP’s. They demonized anyone who talked about the church’s problems. This is how things work in megachurches and would-be megachurches like Trinity. The stoning of prophets didn’t stop or even slow down with the crucifixion.

After that, I belonged to New Dawn Ministries, also in Miami. The pastors were treated to repeated “Pastor Appreciation Days,” and they were never held accountable for anything. We sent them to spas and hotels while the church was failing financially. The head pastor got up and lectured us once, because we had not given his family enough money on his birthday.

The church is gone. All the rosy “prophecies” about its success have been exposed as fantasy. The pastor is awaiting trial on very serious charges. What’s happening to all the people who idolized him? They have suffered a lot of damage, and much of it is his fault.

Churches are very dangerous. Each one of us is supposed to be taught directly by God, and a preacher’s real purpose is to connect us, not to get us to pay for thrones and jets.

When a pastor is a church’s only source of information, he becomes a choke point. Everything has to pass through him. All Satan has to do is take down one fool, and the rest of the crowd follows. When every person knows the Lord and hears from him every day, that’s not possible.

If Mormons and Muslims knew the Holy Spirit, Mormonism and Islam would not exist. These cults were started by individuals, not God. God doesn’t want a Pope or a Twelfth Imam. He wants all of his children to have knowledge and authority. A church that depends on one man is like a dog that balances on one sore foot.

When you try to help by pointing out the problems, they call you rebellious and self-righteous. They say, “Look what we do for the poor. Look at our charities.” Al Capone did the same thing. He used soup kitchens to excuse his crimes. Who cares what you do for the poor, if you steal and send people to hell?

I see a theme in many videos. They cover a topic most preachers ignore: the problem of Christians going to hell. The witnesses mention a problem which boils down to one issue: people don’t repent of their sins. Some don’t repent at all, so their salvation is fake to begin with. Others repent and then let it go. They go back to sinning, and instead of repenting, they mumble, “God please forgive me,” every time they do what they please. Then they end up in hell, claiming they don’t belong there.

Salvation is by faith, not acts, and you will probably sin from time to time after you’re saved, but you’re not allowed to keep sin in your life, deliberately. This is why Christians are so upset by gays who pretend to be saved. You can be gay and be saved if you repent. You can’t be saved if you continue in your lifestyle and insist God is all for it.

I find these videos disturbing. I’ve sinned casually many times since becoming a Christian. I wonder how many people I know are in hell or headed that way, in spite of their religion.

Most people go to hell, but I wonder…what’s the ratio? Is it 51%? Is it 75%? What if it’s 98%? Things may be much worse than we think.

I have to ask myself: why take a chance? Why try to find out how much I can sin and still enter heaven? It’s not good to sin, ever, even if you’re forgiven.

I’m beginning to think I need to do more to isolate myself from bad influences. I don’t watch much TV, apart from old movies and non-trashy reality TV (Forged in Fire, etc.). Maybe I need to keep cutting back, and I definitely need to reduce the amount of news I read, because it stirs up worry and anger. God is looking after me. I don’t really need to know about every problem that faces society. I don’t need to read Internet comments. It’s like watching demons bicker.

Preachers tell us that when the Bible talks about the fear of the Lord, it’s really talking about “loving reverence” or something. The words translated as “fear” mean “fear,” however. Why are we afraid to say that? Read the Bible and see how people behaved in God’s presence. Often, they fell on their faces in terror, not reverence or joy.

Good kids are afraid of their parents, even though they know they are loved. Law-abiding citizens are afraid of the justice system. There is nothing wrong with being afraid of God. We need it, and we don’t have it. If we could see the loved ones and acquaintances who are thrashing and screaming in fire right now, we would probably look at God differently.

I am still screwing up a lot, and I have to be more serious. God has shown me that the more time I spend in prayer, the fewer problems I will have. I hope he gives me the time and ability to improve my performance.

Take a look at the video I’m writing about. See if it strikes a nerve.