Carl Wells Books

We are looking at seventeen disasters in U.S. history. We are trying to put in perspective the disaster of Biden/Harris becoming president and vice-president. Whether or not the election was stolen–personally, I think it was–the elevation of these two people to our highest offices is a disaster. As the next four years will prove, I think. But we’ll see. We are ready for disaster number 11.

11/The Vietnam War 1960?-1973. This cost us 58,000 dead, countless wounded, and untold treasure. For a losing war. If it had been a winning war, that would have been very little better. Perhaps even no better at all. Vietnam is not our country. If countries insist on going communistic, that is their decision. Communism won’t work–ask the Soviet Union, ask Red China–but hey, knock yourself out. How would we feel if Russia, China, or Canada said, “We think you people in the U.S. are going down a very wrongheaded path with your politics, therefore we are going to come into your country and straighten things out.” They would be correct that we are going down a wrongheaded path. But that is our problem. We would be furious at the military intervention of Russia, China, or Canada, in our country. We are not their business. Neither was Vietnam our business. It cost us many dead and crippled, to do something that should never have been done.

12/The Great Society 1965-present. It is built into the way mankind is wired that we flourish best as people when we work to provide for ourselves. You can blame God for this, or you can blame the universe, but it remains a fact. Once you start taking away the personal responsibility to earn a living, you start to ruin the people you are supposedly “helping.” You are not helping them; you are destroying their ability to function wisely in the world. This does not mean that all charitable giving is foolish and counterproductive. But charitable giving has to be done voluntarily and with careful practical wisdom, or it can backfire. A welfare state in which non-workers are financed by tax money extorted from workers at the point of a gun is not charity, and it is not wise, and it destroys the recipients. This of course does not mean the underclass are the only people being corrupted. Medicare, Social Security, public education at any level, farm subsidies, unemployment compensation–all these are aspects of the Great Society’s attack on personal responsibility. Of course some of these programs started well before 1965. But the Great Society only intensified the desire of most of us to live at the expense of other people. Almost everyone is now a thief at heart. Sounds like something called communism, doesn’t it?

13/End of gold standard, 1971-present. We don’t have any backing for our dollars. They are printed out of thin air. Why not print up a lot, and pass them out? We’ll all be rich! Well, maybe. This is not going to end well. Inflation (the increase in the money supply via dollars backed by nothing) gradually impoverishes those who work for a living. As a nation we are already bankrupt. When we discover that, it may be a hard landing for most of us. Dishonest money comes about because we have dishonest hearts. Do I detect a pattern here?

14/Roe v. Wade abortion decision, 1973-present. This is not rocket science. You can’t go around killing babies, and expect to get away with it. You kill 61,000,000 babies, and there are bad consequences. A country willing to kill its children, is a country committed to ending itself. It is a country not worth preserving. It is a country made up of self-absorbed, hard-hearted people. Children can be annoying, and difficult to take care of. Sometimes they are noisy, and sometimes they are sticky after tea, as one of E. F. Benson’s characters might say. But anyone who doesn’t like children need not make them. If you make them, it is not a practical solution to the inherent problem of their existence, to kill them. You wouldn’t go down to the local school and kill fifty children because they are sticky after tea. And you would be upset if some screwball did that, as some screwball occasionally does to great national anger. Then why would we permit the murder of 61,000,000 unborn children who probably would have proven to be sticky after tea if they had been born? We do it because we are totally nuts.

15/Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq 2001-present. Here we go again. Well, it is hardly worth complaining about. So far we’ve lost only about 6,700 killed. That is basically a rounding error from zero. Unless you happen to be one of the ones killed, or the family of one of the ones killed. Or one of the people in Afghanistan or Iraq killed. Or their family. Or someone crippled by the wars, rather than killed, whether you are from the U.S. or from Afghanistan or Iraq. Of course these wars have also cost a lot of money. But these wars have brought great benefits to the U.S., for example . . . okay, give me a little time here. There must have been benefits. Okay, I thought of one! We have been able to introduce transgender bathrooms to Afghanistan and Iraq, which otherwise would be so backward as never to consider having such a thing. We have in that fashion and no doubt in many others brought the blessings of “our democracy” to these backward people. So maybe these wars were not such a disaster after all.

16/The bailout of 2008. A thoughtful commentator who goes by the name of Bionic Mosquito has pointed out how in 2008 the calls by ordinary Americans were running highly against the potential bailout. The percentage of us opposed was through the roof. But it didn’t matter. Congress ignored us. They did what they wanted. The fix was in. So $787 billion was passed out, in typical crony capitalism style, to the in crowd. It is hard for us to process such numbers. But it is a lot of money. I did the math for one chapter of my book Getting Ready for Secession in 2016, and I figured out that if that $787 billion had been spread out among the 305,000,000 people in the U.S. (rough estimate at the time), each of us would have been bailed out to the tune of $2,580.00. I don’t know about you, but I would have felt bailed out to receive such a check. I was not advocating such a passing out of free money; it would have been very foolish to send out such checks. But at least each one of us would have received some personal benefit from such a bailout. No, instead the money went to corporate welfare recipients. The major point is: Congress is a complete disaster. We knew it before 2008, but they proved it conclusively with their bailout bill. How can any country survive when the political Powers That Be are completely corrupt?

17/The election of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. These are people at enmity with Christian morality. Such enmity has been building in our elite class for a long time, but Mr. Biden and Mrs. Harris seem to be a further step in the direction of Satan. They hate Christians, but most of all they hate God. They have no good principles. Their only principles are to do the most wrongheaded thing they can think of among the ideas recommended by the most left-wing of their supporters. As I write, we are beginning the second day of the rule of Biden/Harris. Well, at least it should be interesting.

Those are seventeen disasters the U.S. has experienced. Each one was serious–is serious, because they continue to have consequences.

I promised to give several morals at the end. I hope to do that next week in the concluding segment of this series.

Last week we began discussing disasters in U.S. history. This was prompted by the fact that Biden/Harris will take office on January 20, 2021. Many of us believe that the Nov. 3, 2019 election was stolen. But assume for the sake of argument that the election was as pure as the driven snow. In either case, their elevation to office is a disaster. These are thoughtless and irresponsible people, baby-killers. Even before they take office, we can easily see these are bad, bad people, and that their effect on our national life is almost certain to be horrific.

But disasters are commonplace in U.S. history. So far we have looked at only three. We’re ready to examine number 4.

4/The Spanish-American War (1898)/The Philippine-American War (1899-1902). We will lump these two wars together, since the first sort of led to the second, and they happened very quickly, back to back. The U.S. had always shown an unhealthy interest in what other countries were doing. (Example: the Monroe Doctrine, 1823.) But these two wars showed that we were ready to put our great goodness to the task of beginning to run the world. A generation after the so-called Civil War, we had recovered to the point that we were fat, sassy, prosperous–and full of urine and vinegar and righteousness. We would cheerfully take the beam out of our neighbor’s eye. Please, don’t thank us. Just be grateful that we exist and that we know how other countries should be organized. We had moved completely into our empire stage–a stage we have never left, and probably never will leave until we cease to exist as a nation. For which, stay tuned.

5/Federal income tax ratified, 1913. Once you give the national government the ability to tax its citizens at any level to be determined by the ones doing the taxing, in order to fund programs of undetermined nature but almost certain to be bad, you have opened us up for disaster. They confiscate what they want. You don’t approve of a high percentage of the things they do with this confiscated money? Tough toe-nails. They are going to do those things anyway, without your approval–but very much with the money you unwillingly provide.

6/The Federal Reserve created, 1913-14. The elite can be trusted to do what is best for all of us, of course. Well, maybe not. Maybe they do what is best for them, and we take the consequences. For an in-depth discussion of how the Federal Reserve came to exist, and what that means for us, please see The Creature from Jekyll Island: A Second Look at the Federal Reserve, by G. Edward Griffin. Since 1913-14, the dollar has lost approximately 95 to 97% of its value. That value will continue to drop.

7/World War I 1917-18 (U.S. involvement). Europe was involved in a suicidal war. It was our privilege to look on in horror. No, that wasn’t good enough for the second most disastrous man in U.S. history, Woodrow Wilson (edged out only by Abraham Lincoln). He yearned to straighten out Europe and the entire world. Clearly he and his fellow Americans had the wisdom to do this! So, instead of WW I coming to a natural end, with the possibility that the exhausted European participants would take time to think about what they had done and maybe, just maybe, plan never to do it again, Wilson got us into the war. He was killed in battle, dying bravely on the Western Front. Oh no, wait, it wasn’t him, it was 53,000 of his fellow citizens. They died so that World War I could turn into the bigger and better World War II only about 21 years later. Wilson’s involvement in making the Treaty of Versailles was–of course–disastrous. The world has never recovered from World War I. The recovery would have been incredibly difficult even if we had stayed out of the war, because the war was first of all a symptom of Europe having turned its back on biblical Christianity. The millions of dead were only the consequence; the root cause was that our civilization (including the U.S.) had turned its back on biblical ways of thinking. We made everything much worse by our foolish and harmful entry into the war.

8/The New Deal 1933-1938?. This was an horrific lurch leftward, away from freedom and responsibility, and toward fascist/communist bossing other people around. Franklin Roosevelt was the leader, but he had lots of help.

9/World War II 1941-45 (U.S. involvement). Wait, this wasn’t really our fault, right? Japan attacked us, and we had to defend ourselves. Well, only sort of. In fact Franklin Roosevelt (again with lots of help) was eager to get us into war on the side of the Allies. We poked Japan foolishly, with our policies. Once again we would straighten the world out. If that meant we had to go to war to teach other people how they should behave, so be it. We lost about 405,000 killed, about 671,000 wounded and crippled. We helped win the war, but somehow or other we and Europe have managed to lose the peace–even after the Soviet Union disbanded in 1991, which should have made winning the peace a piece of cake.

10/The Korean War 1950-53. About 36,000 more of our people dead, in another chapter in our attempt to run world history. How come it seems like every time the elite people running our country want to do good by running world history, tens of thousands of our ordinary people end up dead, while the elite people never end up dead? Do I detect a pattern here?

Well, we still have a few more disasters to go, but I will pick this up again next week, Lord willing.

Well, to the total surprise of just about no one, it seems that the Biden/Harris coup d’etat engineered by the Democratic Party and their familiars is going to be successful. It seems clear to the meanest intelligence that the election was stolen outright. The Democrats planned ahead this time (unlike 2016), and with the media completely unwilling to smell a rat–with pencils intentionally shoved up their noses to make sure they couldn’t smell anything at all–and unwilling even to consider trying to find out the truth, the actual winner of the election (Donald Trump) will be sent packing in a couple weeks.

This is a disaster of great consequence. If Biden/Harris actually won the election fairly, it would still be a disaster, because these are two of the least principled people the U.S. has ever put in high office–and the competition for that honor is very fierce. But of course it is much more of a disaster if elections mean nothing and from now on the Deep State simply appoints the winner ahead of time. Which, admittedly, might be simpler and easier.

So, whoever actually won, we have a disaster. We have a worse disaster if the election has been stolen, as it seems obvious that it was. Here is one summary, by Paul Craig Roberts, which shows how stolen the election was:

But the point I want to make in this space is that the U.S. and A. (to use L’il Abner’s name for us) has had lots of disasters in our history. Disaster is nothing new. Disaster is commonplace, routine, and by now should be expected–although we are usually surprised, and moreover we have a knack for calling disaster a wonderful success. Which does not keep disaster from really being disaster.

So what I would like to do in this space is list seventeen disasters in U.S. history, in the order in which they happened. These are just the major disasters. No doubt we could name dozens of other disasters which we might call minor. And I would not be shocked to discover that I have failed to note one or several major disasters, just because I have not been paying attention enough.

At the end I will give the moral of the story. Oh, what the heck! I’m feeling generous; I’ll give several morals at the end.

Some of these disasters you may have been used to considering as triumphs rather than disasters. And perhaps our unwillingness to see disaster as disaster is the biggest disaster of all, and why we keep on having more disasters. But feel free to disagree with me on what is a disaster and what is a triumph. Think for yourself.

Statistics given are rounded off and open for argument, if argument is something you enjoy. I don’t particularly enjoy arguing, myself. I am trying to give the big picture here. Exact accuracy on numbers is going to be incredibly difficult to come by. I admire exact accuracy, but I likely won’t have it. Please be patient.

So anyway, here are seventeen disasters in U.S. history, in historical order. (It’s one d— thing after another, as Bertie Wooster would say–censored slightly for a family blog.)

1/The American Revolutionary War. This cost us 8,000 combat deaths, 17,000 other deaths, for a total of 25,000 deaths, and many additional wounded. (One might also mourn for the British dead and wounded, if one had a tender heart–most of the British were just ordinary saps like the rest of us.) We won our “freedom”–which means we won increased taxation far above what we were paying under British rule.

Canada and Australia managed to become their own separate countries (still in the British Commonwealth, of course) with violent revolutions costing 36,000 and 42,000 death respectively . . . oh wait, I guess that didn’t happen. They became their own separate countries with no violent revolutions at all. It seems certain that the U.S. also could have become its own country without violent revolution, if we had simply waited for circumstances to lift us to “freedom.” No doubt we would have proven just as able to be ridiculous as Canada and Australia are proving themselves to be–but all without warfare.

25,000 dead is a pittance, of course. Except it wasn’t really, at the time. One website said that the American Revolutionary War cost us 1% of our population at the time. Picture that in 2021 terms. If we are a nation of 320,000,000 (approximately), 1% of our population lost to warfare would be 3,200,000. That is a lot of dead people. It’s actually about eight times as many dead as we lost during the entire time of World War II. Then picture perhaps another 6,400,000 wounded, sometimes crippled. (Not to mention the unlamented British dead and wounded and crippled. Oops, I guess I just mentioned them. Sorry.)

The American Revolution was a disaster–our first, but far from our last. We were just warming up.

2/The American Constitution. The Articles of Confederation were ratified by the thirteen states in March of 1781, late in the American Revolution. The Articles arranged for a very limited central government, with most authority remaining with the individual states. That was one of the smartest things we’ve ever done. So immediately, within about six years, we threw out the Articles, and replaced them with the Constitution.

The Biden/Harris coup d’etat was not the first coup in U.S. history. The first took place when the founding fathers pretended they were going to revise the Articles of Confederation, and instead threw them out and whacked out the Constitution (as Huck Finn might say). Lots and lots of people at the time knew it was a mistake, a disaster, something that was going to cause endless misery down the road. Such people were and are called anti-federalists. They said what they suspected would happen, loud and clear and voluminously. Surprise, surprise–they were right. But hey, it’s only 240 or so years. We’ll figure this out eventually. Just give us a little time.

The Constitution meant that we are much, more more of a centrally organized nation than the Articles had permitted us. Given human nature in regard to holding power, what could possibly go wrong? Only everything. With the Constitution, the days of the republic were numbered.

3/The Civil War. Otherwise known by many names, including The War to End the Republic of the United States and Replace it With an Empire. (Okay, I made that up just now, but it fits.) The South had a perfect right to secede. Hate them if you want to, because they held slaves, but don’t insult your own intelligence by claiming that they had no right to secede.

Secession runs in our blood. (And it should; it should run in everybody’s blood.) Go back to 1776. We seceded. It was foolish in that case, and it led to a war which should not have been fought, but we wanted to secede–and if we could not do it peacefully we insisted on doing it violently. No state would have signed on for the Constitution if they thought they were giving up their right to be a state all by themselves. Organizing as one country seemed to offer advantages to the individual states, but no honest person would claim that signing up to join the United States under the Constitution was the end of all history with secession never ever again permitted.

The South had a right to secede. The North had a right to secede. The North should have been glad to get rid of the crackers. But led by the most disastrous man in U.S. history, Abraham Lincoln, the U.S. refused to allow the South their right to go their own way. The South in turn was too eager to go to war.

This cost a total of about 655,000 dead. Again we ignore the wounded, the crippled, and the blinded. (Quit bringing your whining around here, wounded and crippled and blinded.) We ignore the physical destruction of property. We ignore the rapes. Just count the dead. One website said this was 2.1 percent of the population at the time. That translates to 6,720,000 dead if we lost that many dead in 2021 terms.

All for what? To end the republic once and for all, to make the U.S. an empire without humility or self-restraint.

Could slavery not have been phased out gradually, without violence? Of course it could. That happened in countless places around the globe. It is only the U.S. where the Powers That Be insisted on a violent war to end slavery. They got the end of slavery, all right–or at least the end of one form of slavery. But they got it at an exorbitant cost which they need not have paid.

If God had wanted to devastate the South because their form of slavery was unbiblical, He could have been trusted to do that in His own timing. Being smarter than God, the North took vengeance on the South–and slaughtered their own people in the process, along with ending the republic once and for all. Maybe it might have been smarter to wait for God, meanwhile seeking non-violent means of ending slavery. It’s just a thought.

We will stop there for today, and plan on picking this up again next week. So far we have discussed only three of the seventeen major disasters the U.S. has inflicted on itself. So we have a bunch to go.

We’ve come to the end of 2020. 2021 starts tomorrow. Many of us like to make New Year’s resolutions, which gives us something else to feel guilty about when we fail to keep them. Anyway, I thought of a number of potential New Year’s resolutions for my readers, to a total of 14 (resolutions to a total of 14, readers to a total probably far less than 14). These are for Christians and non-Christians. You’ll be able to figure out which potential resolution might apply to you. Some might apply to me. They are in no particular order, except that I have kept the most challenging and perhaps even the most controversial for the last three.

1/Increase your church giving by 1% of your income. The Christian organization emptytomb.org has research that shows that the American Protestant church as a whole currently gives about 2.5% of its increase to the church. (Roman Catholic giving is similar.) The figures from capital letter challenged emptytomb show 2.9% giving in 1916, 3.2% in 1933, 3.2% in 1955, and 2.5% in 2007. Here is a link:

http://www.emptytomb.org/fig1_07.html

So if you are typical, and giving 2.5%, you might consider giving 3.5% in 2021. Granted, you will probably starve to death, but Columbus took a chance and it worked out for him; it might for you also. Christians are bitterly upset that the state taxes away our wealth from us at an horrific rate, but we steal 75% of God’s tithe from Him. He might be telling us: theft is a round game, and more than one can play.

If you are a non-Christian with no desire to support any Christian church, consider upping your charitable giving by 1% to some group God would approve of if He existed, which of course He doesn’t, but if He did He would approve of it. You’re smart enough to figure out what that might be. Hint: not a pro-abortion group.

2/Resolve to read six pretty good books in a year. That is only one every two months, so it is not an impossible goal. Here are some potential options:

2a/Read at least one famous novel which you’ve heard of but never got around to reading. A suggestion? Of course. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. (Sorry, I couldn’t resist.) Or David Copperfield by Charles Dickens.

2b/Read at least one unread children’s classic. If you need a suggestion, I’ll volunteer Anne of Green Gables by L. M. Montgomery. In the last year I know of two adults over 65 who read it and loved it. You might be a third adult to love it.

2c/Read one book of straight history. History gives us a perspective on life which we need. Life is more than just what is happening in the world right now. We tend to get lost in the constant present.

3/Walk one mile a week. Our bodies are meant to be used. I remember when I was in my mid 20s one day I suddenly got an urge to walk outside a little bit. The walk probably was around one-half mile, longer or shorter, but I’ve never forgotten it. I learned a lot that day. Again, perspective is provided. The world is a wonderful place, and a walk helps us remember that.

4/Turn off Main Sleaze Media completely, for as long as you can stand it. They are lying liars telling us lies. They are clueless as to how the world is put together. Begin to free your mind from these trite scumbags.

5/Do one house or yard project in the course of the year.

6/Battle to lose five pounds. I didn’t say lose five pounds. I said battle to lose five pounds. It probably won’t be easy, but a key is never giving up.

7/Be on time for things.

8/Cut your normal TV viewing by some reasonable goal. From 20 hours a week to 15? Fine. Don’t set an impossible goal, but set a goal. Then even if you miss the goal, you have come close and you have made a start. Most television is drivel. Begin to free up more of your time. Remember, you might be plugged into #2, so you may need more time to read. Or, #3, you may need more time to walk.

9/Write a thank you note to someone. It could be a teacher you admired in grade school or high school. Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s man from underground told us that the scientific definition of man is “the ungrateful biped.” Pretty doggone close. We seldom say thank you. But usually we have a lot for which to be thankful.

10/Invite one person or one family to your home for a meal. Top off the night with a DVD or perhaps just conversation. We seldom make a real effort to get to know people well. We need people, and they need us. (They haven’t realized that yet, but then neither have we.)

11/Read the Bible all the way through in a year. The Bible is not easy reading, and is pretty long, so there is no disgrace in cutting your goal to reading half the Bible in one year, half in the next. This goal is appropriate to both Christians and non-Christians. Few Christians have read the Bible very much. Non-Christians? The Bible is central to our western civilization. At the worst, you can begin to see what all the fuss was about.

12/If you are a non-Christian, attend church at least once in the year. Wear a tie (just so you’ll be different), listen quietly, be polite, and put $10.00 in the collection plate.

13/Whether you are a Christian or non-Christian, pray intermittently through the year for one person who is either an enemy of you or an enemy of God (or an enemy of both). Or alternatively, pray intermittently for one person who may have some very good qualities but who still needs practical wisdom or needs salvation, or needs something.

14/Pray intermittently that God would send American blacks 10,000 people, young and old, male and female, who want to love Him and obey Him, and who will learn to stand bravely for His truth. This Black Lives Matter stuff is horrible. Woke white liberals hate God, and don’t respect black people. Black people are going to have to turn to God as He really exists in the Bible, and stop believing lies–or accept the (bad) consequences of believing and acting on those lies. Nothing is going to change for the better until you turn to God.

Well, there they are–14 potential New Year’s resolutions. They are all free, and no salesman will call. Or think of something that you know you really should be doing in the year ahead, and then make a start toward doing it. Even failure is better than not trying.

Also, don’t assume that 2020 was uniquely bad. We can do worse than that. Besides, we had a chance to learn a lot in 2020. An elbow to the ribs can be necessary and helpful.

Have a great year in 2021.

Countless people are fans of multiculturalism. “Diversity is our strength,” and so forth. You will be “shocked, shocked,” to find out that multiculturalism is not necessarily a wonderful thing. And I am sure you will be equally shocked to find that those people who think multiculturalism is so wonderful are people who suppress the truth about the problems of multiculturalism. And you will be shocked also at the same time to discover that the fans of multiculturalism are people who don’t give a rat’s posterior about the physical or sexual safety of hundreds of thousands of English schoolgirls ages 11 to 16 approximately. Wait, you’re not shocked at all? Wow, you are hopelessly cynical.

You may have heard a truncated version of the sordid story. Bad things were going on in Rotherham, England. Muslim adult males were seducing English schoolgirls, and then selling them as prostitutes. This went on for a long time (decades, actually) before something was done about it. Rotherham had really messed up.

But that is only the propaganda version of what happened. Yes, Rotherham officialdom was horribly at fault. But that was only the tip of the iceberg. The same thing was happening in numerous towns. The Powers That Be would like us to think that horrible things happened basically only in Rotherham, and maybe a little bit here and there also. That is a lie. What happened in Rotherham was ubiquitous in England. The way Muslim men treated the girls is not a one-off oddity: it is part of the warp and the woof of Islam. That is shown clearly in the book Easy Meat.

I have just finished reading Easy Meat: Inside Britain’s Grooming Gang Scandal, by Peter McLoughlin. This was the 2016 update on a book first published in 2014. I think this may be the most depressing book I have ever read, in my entire life. It is a very good book, and Mr. McLoughlin deserves enormous kudos for doing the research and for giving us the truth. But it is depressing because the facts that he recounts are so horrible.

Yes, it is horrible that countless thousands of young girls have been seduced, raped, prostituted. But the book gives us many other things that are horrible. Reality can be painful. I am going to list some facts that are painful and depressing. We may be tempted to think that this reality applies only to England. I think that would be a huge mistake. The problems are worldwide.

So here are some conclusions I drew after reading Easy Meat. I’ll try to keep them brief.

1/Everyone official failed these schoolgirls. That includes teachers, social services, police, politicians. Lots of people knew these things were going on, but they were much more afraid of being considered politically incorrect, than they were concerned about the welfare of the girls. So they just let things go on.

2/The media are a pack of lying liars. They covered up what happened because it exposed their politically correct multiculturalism as a lie about reality. They are still covering it up as best they can.

3/Political correctness is a moral failing–and a very large moral failing, at that.

4/The Christian church is conspicuous by its absence. It doesn’t appear that the church was involved in the cover-up. But neither was the church involved in exposing the lies of officialdom and in trying to rescue and protect the girls.

5/Parents were unable to protect their own children. Granted, when parents tried to raise a stink about what was going on, they met a stone wall of indifference from officialdom. But one might have hoped that parents could have done more.

6/Courage to tell the truth is in incredibly short supply.

7/Of all the religions in the world which have a belief in the supernatural, Islam is the worst religion of all. Muslims act with wickedness because their religion is foundationally wicked and encourages its practitioners to do bad things. Even those Muslims not involved in the seduction and rape of schoolgirls were very willing to protect the worst predators among their number. Now, it is possible that non-supernatural religions such as communism and Nazism are worse than Islam. That is a topic for discussion. But of supernatural religions, Islam is the worst in the history of the world.

8/A nation which encourages the entry of Muslims (other than as visitors for a brief period) is suicidal.

9/England is almost certainly finished as a nation. The moral rot is too great. A nation which refuses to protect its schoolgirls from seduction and rape is morally dead.

10/Multiculturalism is a lie. There is no such thing as the separation of religion and state. Muslims, curiously, understand that better than Christians or humanists. Muslims want sharia law. Christians want mushy thinking and “a place at the table.” Christians need to grow up. It is Christ or nothing. That does not mean we bully other people. It just means we need to let other people find their own level while at the same time we build our own small nations where we protect our children and tell monsters to go somewhere else.

11/The U.S. is not exempt from the problems England has encountered. We may think we are, but that is self-deception. Islam is dangerous wherever it gets strong enough to be dangerous. Courage to tell the truth is in short supply in this country just as it is in England. Our media is just as corrupt. We, like England, have shrugged at the murder of unborn children. Is it likely that we will protect our children any better than England has? Transgenderism, anyone? No, we are in as grave a danger of being finished as is England.

I will close with two quotes about Easy Meat from the back cover. The first is from the Englishman Paul Weston, chairman of Liberty GB.

“A non-Islamic society society which allows its young women and girls to be raped, beaten and treated as literal war-booty by Muslim males is a society teetering on the brink of irrelevance. A non-Islamic society which goes out of its way to suppress the truth behind the Islamic gang-rape scandal and which actively sides against the non-Muslim victims is a society on the brink of extinction.”

The second quote is from Theodore Dalrymple, another Englishman, and one of the leading essayists of our time:

“Those who think that political correctness is only a harmless absurdity perpetrated by intellectuals will soon be laughing on the other side of their face when they read this book.”

Both men have hit the nail on the head.

Easy Meat is a very important book. It is depressing, but we needed to know all this. I found myself underlining great swaths of the text. I could devote three or four more blog posts to just quoting significant passages from the book. But I have made it a goal to get done in just one segment. The topic is too painful to write about more, for me.

Easy Meat is not cheap. (It might be a good candidate for borrowing via interlibrary loan.) The best price I could find today was $18.53 (a paperback, shipping included, but sales tax extra) at AbeBooks. Read it at your own risk. You will find yourself grateful to the author . . . as you slip into depression. Are we really so suicidal as to desert our civilization to barbarians living the most despicable theistic religion in the world?

Yeah, maybe.

[I informed Mr. McLoughlin that I had reviewed his book, and asked him to tell me if I needed to correct anything. He responded on Dec. 27, 2020. The news is not encouraging–but it is what we could have expected. The cover-up continues. I appreciate his input. Part of his response is quoted below:

“I’ve not much to add to your summary of the book. Just a couple of points.  When 1st edition came out 104/119 convictions were Muslims; when 2nd edition came out 170/191 were Muslims; currently it is 344/409 (there have been almost no prosecutions since the first lockdown).  http://pmclauth.com/grooming-gang-statistics/gangs-jailed  If you see the bold lines in the left column, those are the trials which received no national media attention. I predicted in Easy Meat that this was how they would square the circle — appear to give justice to those victims who insist on their rapists being prosecuted, whilst concealing from the public the true scale of the scandal. This pattern of prosecution-with-concealment was evident already in 2015. . . . [Carl’s ellipsis]

“The elite in UK put the immigrant population above the indigenous population. There is nothing else we can conclude.  I don’t believe the truth will ever come out. And I believe that the reach of these grooming gangs will just extend. They know the authorities are complicit. Sadly most of the public has probably been deceived by the joint cover-up by courts/news media.”]

Sometimes I know ahead of time what I am going to write about in these weekly blog posts. Other times I struggle to find a topic, and find myself still searching as the time to write gets closer. That is what happened today. I had to come up with something, and ‘”out came this calf”‘ (as Aaron said in a different context, Exodus 32:24).

Today’s topic is one I have thought about for some time. I have been kind of avoiding writing about it only because I know it stands the chance of annoying the socks off of people I know. I don’t enjoy having people angry with me. On the bright side, few people read these posts, so maybe all of the people I might annoy will never read it.

But if other people get annoyed with me, it will become clear from today’s post that I in turn can be annoyed. Today I will list things that I find annoying. But these are all petty annoyances. I won’t even think about starting to name all the things that annoy me in a major way. Surely those show up enough in my other posts.

In a few minutes I came up with 15 petty things I find annoying. I will begin with things that most people never think about, and proceed to more important matters. Near the end, quite a few of things I write about have some sort of importance for society at large.

1/Scoreboards that begin the game with double zeroes in the place where points go: Visitors 00 Home 00. That looks horrible. Then when a team scores two points, do we then have 00 and 02? Confusing. Either nothing at all, or one zero for each team, are both logical and reasonable ways to start the game. This petty annoyance is one I probably never would have thought of by myself. Thankfully, a friend capable of being just as annoyed by petty things as I am, alerted me to the problem. It encourages me to know that other people also can be annoyed by petty things.

2/Having to push a button to get a receipt. At Dollar Tree, for example, if I want a receipt, I now have to push a button. A waste of my time. Of course I want a receipt. Wouldn’t it just be better to print out a receipt for every customer, saving time for customer and cashier both? That used to be automatic. It worked fine. Why introduce this inquisition about whether or not I want a receipt? Please understand: I love Dollar Tree. It is a fantastic place to shop, and I have even purchased stock in the company. But please stop making me push a button in order to get a receipt. Such a policy is unworthy of your greatness.

3/Putting an extra three minutes on the halftime clock. This happens constantly at high school football and basketball games. The football team has 15 minutes for halftime. That is quite reasonable. But when teams are slow to get back on the field, the scorekeeper quite often adds an additional three minutes on the clock. Basketball halftimes are ten minutes. Again, the scorekeeper will sometimes add an additional three minutes. This is annoying. I want to get home at a reasonable hour. I have to get up early tomorrow in order to squeeze in my exercising before I go to work. Some people may be due to work the second shift somewhere. People have children they want to get to bed as soon as possible. The weather we are sitting in (football) may not be very pleasant. Bladders are put under more pressure. There are plenty of reasons to just stick to the legitimate number of halftime minutes.

4/The cartoon “Fort Knox” by Jon Paul. I hope Mr. Paul never sees this comment. I hate to criticize him. But his cartoon is never funny. It is intended to be funny, but is not. I am a struggling artist myself, struggling to get readers, struggling to sell books, struggling, struggling, struggling. I know it is not easy to produce something people want to read. But after a while Mr. Paul should see the writing on the wall: he is not intended to be a cartoonist. It is not possible that more than two or three people in the world can find this comic strip to be funny. Mr. Paul does not have any sort of sense of humor. Mr. Paul almost certainly has gifts along another line or lines. I encourage him to search for those gifts and develop them. Still, if people are actually paying him to continue to publish his strip, I can see why he would be loath to retire from cartooning. (I do understand the Mr. Paul or other people might say the same thing to me: read the handwriting on the wall about your abilities, and find another line of work.)

5/Listing actresses as actors. This is very new, having cropped up in the last few years. Apparently it is some sort of insult to a female who does acting, to call her an actress. But it is not an insult at all, and was never intended by anyone to be an insult. A male who acts is an actor. A female who acts is an actress. To call her an actor is to introduce confusion. On the other hand, if we would continue to call actresses actresses, we avoid that confusion.

6/Two last names. Sorry, this is not playing fair. Everyone gets one last name, not two. I can be Carl Wells, but if I suddenly become Carl Wells-Abercrombie, I am cheating. If I then marry Sally Overshiner-Huddleston, will our first child Elly become Elly Wells-Abercrombie-Overshiner-Huddleston, or Elly Overshiner-Huddleston-Wells-Abercrombie? What if Elly goes on to become a gifted basketball player? Is the announcer supposed to call her by four last names or by two last names, or (heaven forfend) by one last name? If by one, which one? No, this is nonsense. Everyone gets one last name, but one only.

7/Tattoos. The Bible tells us that we are not to make any tattoo marks on ourselves (Leviticus 19:28). That is good enough for me. I do understand that at least one celebrity Christian writer thinks that to interpret this verse as really telling us we should not get tattoos, is unsophisticated. Fine, and who knows, maybe he is correct (although personally I doubt that he is), but I will continue to think it is foolish to get a tattoo. Do we have to follow every fad that comes along, in order to be cool and with it? That lets me out, since I have a natural aptitude for being uncool and un-with it.

8/Earrings. I don’t even like earrings on women. I have yet to see a woman whose looks were improved by wearing earrings. But especially on men, earrings are ridiculous. Do we have to follow every fad that comes along, in order to be cool and with it? (Is there an echo in here?)

9/Women who keep their own last name when they get married. If you don’t think enough of the guy to want to take his last name when you get married, don’t marry him. You don’t give up your individuality when you take your husband’s last name. You are still an individual. But the two of you are now one separate family, under the headship of the husband. Did Elizabeth Stevenson give up her individuality when she took her husband’s name? No, she managed to become one of the better writers in world history, under the name Mrs. Gaskell. Her husband is forgotten, but she is not. She did it without hanging on to her maiden name. She was just as much herself as Elizabeth Gaskell as she would have been as Elizabeth Stevenson.

10/Newspapers are doing an increasingly poor job at giving us line scores and box scores of both varsity and junior varsity basketball games. We used to get quarter scores, and a decent summary of the scoring, sometimes with other information as well, in a box score, for varsity games. JV games at least rated a line score, with at least the scoring for the local team. All this information is of considerable value to the fan who cares about the games. But newspapers give us less and less of what we want. And then newspapers whine that their circulation is decreasing. Really, we fans don’t expect miracles. Give us the basic information and we will be satisfied. But to tell us to get lost by ignoring our needs? Don’t be surprised if your circulation numbers continue to drop.

11/People of African heritage are Black, while white people are only white, not White. This is another question of fairness. If black people deserve a capital letter, then white people deserve a capital letter. Ask yourself this question: if the Powers That Be insisted on calling white people White while at the same time insisted on calling black people black, how do you think that would fly? Everyone would be outraged at the horrific racism involved in honoring white people and dishonoring black people. Well, the exact same principle is involved when black people are called Black and white people are called white. Where we have Black and white, we have egregious bigotry.

12/The constant use of the f-word. I am thinking not just of daily life as we all experience it, but also of books and movies. We can of course throw in all blasphemous and vulgar language, not just the f-word. All of this is annoying, and is a bad sign about our civilization.

13/Books that are censored without warning. I was reading Mark Twain’s wonderful Tom Sawyer Abroad, when suddenly I began to smell a rat. I went back to an older version of the book, and found out my instinct was correct. The publishers had taken it upon themselves to censor and change what Mark Twain had written. If they had warned their readers, fine. That would be fair play. Foolish, in my opinion, and unnecessary, but definitely fair play. But the publishers had taken it upon themselves to change the text without warning their prospective readers what was going on.

14/Scam phone calls and scam emails. Maybe I am asking too much, but it seems to me that most of this could be stopped if we had legal authorities who wanted badly enough to stop it. Is it not a matter of will? Our politicians promise us the moon, but usually deliver high taxes. A governor of a state could say, for example, “We are going to try to apprehend and punish scam artists. We may fail, but we are going to try. We will report back to you honestly about how we are doing. Please be patient and give us some time. Meanwhile, be very careful. Unfortunately, there are a lot of crooks out there.” Then do what you say you are going to do. At least try.

15/Long hair on men. 1 Corinthians 11:14 says, “Does not even nature itself teach you that if a man has long hair, it is a dishonor to him?” Again, I am sure that there are plenty of Christian authorities who say, perhaps correctly, that I am unsophisticated in my understanding of this verse. And again I say, I don’t care much. To me long hair on men looks and seems foolish. Women are the ones who are built for beauty; men are built for work. Let’s keep it that way.

Okay, that concludes my fifteen petty annoyances. I want to go on record here that if I am saved from drowning by a tattooed guy with two last names and with an earring and long hair, I will thank him with great gratitude. No doubt I will also hold on to my sense of annoyance about his personal flaws.

My Aged Parent has sometimes told me something like, “No wonder you never married,” or “It’s a good thing you never married.” No doubt she is correct.

Maybe all these annoyances are bothersome to me because I am offended that other people are more free and flexible in the way they live their lives. I’m an uptight jerk/loser. Fine. But meanwhile all I ask is that the world attend to my complaints and make the situation right by changing.

In the previous three weeks I said what a disgrace and danger it is to have people like the baby-killing socialists Joe Biden and Kamala Harris become president and vice-president. I have not given up hope that it will be conclusively proven to the meanest intelligence that they won the election only by theft, and so I have hope that Donald Trump will serve a second term. He is not likely to do a better job in his second term than he did in his first, but at least he is better than Biden/Harris.

The obvious point was made that no matter who is inaugurated, we are going to have to go on living, so it behooves us to try to find ways forward. I listed 38 things we could do. Number 35 was one I hoped to revisit. Here is what I wrote last week:

“35/We could mentor new believers. This is mostly untried ground in Christian churches. We tend to hope and expect people will automatically become strong Christians as soon as they join the church. But that is not how life works. This is such an important and big topic that it needs a lot more discussion. Hopefully I will devote a single blog post to this sometime in the future. For now, just let the idea percolate.”

Today is the time for that “single blog post.”

I will begin with two negative examples, both true stories. These things happened in churches with which I have been involved. I would stress that the two churches were not bad churches, as churches go. I would rate both of them as significantly above average. Someone looking for a decent church home could do far worse than either of these two churches.

Negative example #1/A divorced woman showed up at church out of the blue. She had several children. Her husband had enjoyed making children but had been less enthused about helping raise them. So he bailed out. On the plus side, he did provide child support.

This woman seemed to be a true believer. Was she? Or was she not really regenerated and converted? I don’t know the answer, but does it matter? If she was a true believer, we are off to a great start. If she was not yet a true believer, here was someone who showed up at our doorstep with at least some kind of interest in being or becoming a Christian.

She definitely had some excellent qualities as a human being. She worked to provide for her family–I think possibly worked full time. She put money in the collection plate, and she gave more than a pittance. She was good about naming people in her orbit who needed prayer. She went to some trouble to make it to church with her children every week. This was not an unpleasant person to be around.

But she had some problems. Working (probably full-time) with several young children to care for, she was pressed for time in getting some tasks done. Her home was disorganized. Her children needless to say lacked a strong father figure. Some of the children showed promise as human beings, others were so damaged that one had to wonder about their long-term prospects.

We let this woman down like a ton of bricks. She desperately needed someone to come alongside her and help her. No, she was on her own, basically. We didn’t come alongside. Things could have been done to help her get more organized. Some of the families–and we had strong families in that church–could have incorporated the children into some of their activities. It could all have been done naturally and gradually. But it didn’t get done at all.

Eventually, after several years, this woman was lost to another church. I hope they did better than we did.

Negative example #2/A young man sponsored by a woman in the church came to church twice. The second time the woman said he wanted to become a Christian. He was gladly received by the elders, and we all prayed over him. He was, within a day or two, baptized. He missed church the next week, I think, then came to church one more time. We didn’t see him after that, ever again. Eventually I heard someone say he was “in detention.”

When I talked about this with a man in the church, he told me, “At least he got saved.” But did he? Is it not far more likely that the young man was never regenerated? He heard the word and showed some interest, but most likely he had not truly sought salvation through Jesus Christ.

The church in essence gave validation to his self-deception. This young man needed to learn more about what was involved in Christianity. He needed to learn a lot, he needed to see examples of Christian behavior week after week. Perhaps he too is going around thinking, “Well, at least I got saved,” but without having learned how to live as a Christian. My guess is that he was not regenerated and converted.

We needed to get to know him, to involve him in our daily lives. It did not happen. We needed to love him enough to spend time with him. It did not happen.

Okay, so what can be done? I repeat: to begin with, just let the idea that we could mentor new believers (or prospective believers) percolate. It seems such an unusual idea, because we almost never see it happening. So maybe it is a bad idea. Or maybe it is a good idea, but just really difficult to implement.

The latter point is I think the answer: this is something that is going to be really hard to do.

There is one major reason it is going to be so hard to do. That major reason is really dark, but it is true.

That is, we have a really hard time caring about what happens to other people. Do we even care about our family members? We think we do, but most of the time we just want them to be successful because they are part of us. Usually we excuse or enable their sin, rather than truly love them by holding them to a biblical standard of behavior. The examples of this are so egregious as to be laughable.

So if we don’t even love our own family in a biblical manner, how the heck are we going to love other people enough to be involved in their lives in a significant manner?

Let’s be realistic. It simply is not going to happen. We just won’t be able to do it. We care only about ourselves.

However, there is a gleam of hope. It is slight, but it exists.

Nothing really good is going to come about via a mass movement. But one person doesn’t need to wait on a mass movement. One person can act, on his own. One person can come alongside a new believer or a prospective new believer, and can involve himself in the life of that person in a good manner.

In a perfect manner? Ain’t gonna happen. But we can show an interest in another person by the way we treat him. We may have to force ourselves to do it. Our interaction with that person won’t be as good as it could be. But it still might be helpful.

On the rare occasions when another person showed you respect by the way he talked to you, did you appreciate it? Of course you did. Did you expect perfection out of that other person? No. But he seemed to see you as an individual human being worth talking to. It helped.

When we care enough about other people to get involved in their lives, we will begin to see a surprising growth in the kingdom of God on earth.

I don’t expect it to happen soon. Right now we don’t even see the problem, let alone search for the solution. But I do think that eventually the church will begin to get better at this. I wish it would happen soon, but more likely it will be centuries before this begins to happen to a large extent. I think we are in the early church. Somewhere along the line we are going to remember that God is a person, each of us is a person, and other people are persons, and that all of life should be about respecting and caring for persons.

Now to double back slightly. I think the church as a whole has a basic misunderstanding about what Christianity is all about. We think Christianity is about going from being a non-Christian to being a Christian. “At least he got saved,” is a typical attitude among Christians. “We walked the aisle, so all is well.”

But I don’t think that is how God has constructed Christianity. Yes, it is true that there is a difference between being a non-Christian and being a Christian. But I would contend that learning to live as a Christian is a process.

Think of becoming a Christian not as a “Bang, I’m saved” moment; “now all is well.” Think of becoming a Christian as the first step on a journey of 3,000 miles. One step is not very far along. It is only a start. A start is great, but one step forward won’t get you to the 3,000 mile marker. You have to keep moving.

Being a Christian means learning to live as God wants us to live, in countless practical ways. Being a Christian means things like paying our bills on time, doing what we say we’re going to do, learning to discipline our children rather than enable their sin, learning to keep our dog inside so he won’t bother the neighbors with his barking, learning to tithe, being on time for church every Sunday, avoiding huge debt, controlling our tongue, refusing to declare bankruptcy, fighting our temptation to envy those who are wealthier or who have greater gifts or abilities than we have, voting to protect our neighbor’s wealth, praying for our enemies, working at a job faithfully even if it is not highly paid, driving courteously, and on and on world without end amen. Biblical Christianity is practical daily growing Christianity.

I don’t see that Christians as a whole understand this. As proof, I would offer the fact that Christians give about 2.5% of their increase to the church, while God requires a tithe (Malachi 3:8-12, etc.), which is 10%. Tithing is probably the easiest thing to do on the list of practical things above, and yet we are only one quarter of the way there. If we can’t even do that, how can we do the ten thousand more difficult practical things on the list?

We can’t and we won’t. Right now Christians have a very weak understanding of what biblical Christianity is.

Much of today’s post has been dark. But dark truths are also freeing. When we face dark truths honestly, we have a chance to see how we need to change our thinking and behavior.

“We could mentor new believers,” I said. I’ll stick to that. We could. We probably won’t in the near future, but we could. When we begin to care about other people enough to involve them in our lives, and begin to hold them and ourselves to a biblical standard, some good things are going to happen. That is worth waiting for, even if it takes a few thousand years.

It is both a disgrace and a danger to have baby-killing socialists like Joe Biden and Kamala Harris be elected to executive office. It seems likely to me that the election was stolen, but even if Donald Trump won and is eventually installed in office, we will have lots of hard work ahead of us. The country has been going in a wrong direction for a long time.

Rather than assume that all is lost forever, however, let’s hope that we can change the direction we are heading. So this is part three of a series exploring what practical things we can do if we are searching for a way forward. We are ready for #25.

25/Treat everyone with respect and kindness. Every person is made in the image of God. We should be notorious for speaking courteously to people. Grumpy people are self-indulgent. We all like to be treated with respect, so it should not be a bridge too far to theorize that maybe we in turn should treat others with respect.

26/Be on time. Oddly, it is often true that Christians cannot even be on time for Sunday school or church. Being late is a form of self-indulgence, and shows a lack of respect for other people.

27/Maybe we should all learn to handle firearms safely. Hopefully it is a skill most of us will never need. But at the worst it is something that is useful to be able to do. Churches could organize Saturday lessons in handling guns safely, and in learning how to shoot a little bit. This could be for boys, for girls, for men, and for women, all taught separately in order to keep embarrassment levels as low as possible for each group. If the elders/deacons won’t organize this as the church leadership, still it could be done by responsible adults in the church on a more informal basis. I used to shoot a rifle a little bit, but it’s been decades. I would definitely show up to learn more about gun safety and about shooting a gun, if the time scheduled did not interfere with my work hours. Other adults would show up as well. Countless young people of both sexes would be glad to be taught.

28/Finding a way forward is not a mass movement. It would be nice if thousands follow the lead of obedient Christians, but it is not necessary or expected. The Bible and world history make clear that one person is important and can make an incredible difference for good. Relax. The fact that you at your absolute best seem to have little effect on the thoughts and actions of others should not be overwhelming. Our temptation is to despair because so few people seem to care about freedom and responsibility. But when we despair, we are not thinking with faith. Jeremiah, Paul, the little slave girl (2 Kings 5:1-4), Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Ron Paul, were each only one person. They just did what they knew they needed to do. God used it. He will use us as well. Of course He is unlikely to use us as dramatically as He used the five people I just named. So what? We all have our small but important part to play. If we don’t do our own part, someone else will have to do it for us.

29/Avoid sexual immorality and cultivate purity. We are on the verge of a new age of chivalry. Nonsense? Well, remember #28. Even if a widespread new age of chivalry is delayed a few thousand years, one person can begin to live in a new age of chivalry immediately. Current Christians are notoriously careless about sexual matters. But each of us as an individual need not follow the careless pattern. C. S. Lewis said it well in That Hideous Strength: “lust . . . disenchants the whole universe” (Chapter 12). We can have back the rightly enchanted universe, starting today.

30/Don’t consider the value of small countries. The end of the United States will probably be a very good step in the right direction, say a few idiots. What do they know? Don’t read The Breakdown of Nations by Leopold Kohr. He will cause you to consider that possibly it is wise to have small nations rather than big ones. So don’t read him. Don’t consider a new idea that might be correct. Don’t consider that God dealt covenantally with lots of nations, and that He might have had a reason for keeping nations small. (Okay, that was all sarcasm. To be clear: please consider the possible value of small countries. A U.S. split up into many parts will be a less dangerous U.S., and might provide a few places where Christianity was welcome.)

31/The Republican Party is not a reliable counterweight to the Democratic Party. Consider forming new parties. Consider running as an independent. Christians seem to want microwave solutions which rescue us immediately. This is not how life works. (Again, the Rapture ain’t happening. The Rapture is a crock of horse manure.) If we want to get from a horrible place to a good place, it is going to take many years, possibly many decades. We will receive defeats along the way. We will have to study and learn. We will have to stand for things that causes lots of people to hate us. It is not going to be easy. But remember #28.

32/Churches could and should begin to excommunicate non-believers. Begin with pro-abortionists. The church is weak for many reasons, but at least one of the reasons is that we refuse to excommunicate non-believers.

33/Try to find a few like-minded people to be your friends. This will not necessarily be easy. But it can be done. If you are persistent, God will help you. He may even work a miracle. I was given one of my closest friends by what can plausibly be seen as a miracle.

34/Try to find a few commentators on the Internet who share your outlook. This is similar to #33. We are inundated with horrible ideas. But there are still a few commentators who will speak the truth, and who will lift your spirits and give you hope as you read them. Keep searching until you find a few. Many would be better, but even a few will be a great blessing to you.

35/We could mentor new believers. This is mostly untried ground in Christian churches. We tend to hope and expect people will automatically become strong Christians as soon as they join the church. But that is not how life works. This is such an important and big topic that it needs a lot more discussion. Hopefully I will devote a single blog post to this sometime in the future. For now, just let the idea percolate.

36/We could keep our weight under control. Lose five pounds. (Easy for you to say!) Exercise moderately; exercise at least enough to keep some physical tone. God made our bodies to be used. Don’t expect too much of yourself, but also don’t expect too little.

37/Be grateful and avoid envy, avoid blaming others for your problems. Those of us who love freedom/responsibility despise Black Lives Matter and Antifa, but look at them from another angle. These poor people are living in a hell of their own making, right now. They are envious and they refuse to accept responsibility for their actions. Their manner of going through life is horrific. Yes, they bring misery to others, and should not be indulged, but their first victims are themselves. My Aged Parent has often pointed out that some people show us how not to be. She is correct. BLM and Antifa show us how not to be. Learn from the horrific mess they are making of their lives.

38/Remember that we are in this for the long haul. Temporary defeat is not total defeat forever. Remember Russia. The communists took over in 1917 and millions of people suffered and died as a result. But in less than two generations the Soviet Union was gone. The Soviet Union disbanded in 1991. We too may have to undergo some horrors. I hope the horrors will not be as egregious as those suffered by the Russian people. But we can’t be sure what will happen. We can take hope in knowing that God exists and reigns and will win eventually. Let us be found faithful to Him. Then, alive or dead, all will be well for us.

That concludes our three-part series on things we can do if we are searching for a way forward after the disgraceful election of 2020. Pick one or two which seem helpful to you, or just make up your own list. Enjoy the years ahead. They may be challenging, but at least they should be interesting.

Last week I mentioned what a disgrace it is to have Joe Biden be the president-elect of the United States. That is so whether he stole the election, or won it fairly. A nation in which 70,000,000+ people (or almost that many, if several million votes are fictional) vote for the baby-killing socialists Biden/Harris is a nation deliriously corrupt.

But I also noted the obvious fact that life on the planet doesn’t just stop because things go badly sour. For proof of that, plug into world history at any place. Lots of bad things keep happening, and life seems to keep on going anyway.

We can expect the same in our future. We are going to keep living until we die, and we would be well advised to try to search for a way forward. Giving up is not a very honorable option (although admittedly tempting at times).

Last week we began with five fundamental good things we could do, and then added an additional eight things. So in part II we will begin with #14. Needless to say, none of these ideas are likely to be original, and they are in no particular order (after the fundamental five of last week).

14/Consider that having an upper middle class lifestyle is not necessarily important. For countless people, much of their energy goes into getting lots of wealth. That does not give them time to think about more important things. Consider the option of saving, and living under your means rather than buying and spending up to the extreme limit of your means. Jesus Christ tells us that ‘”not even when one has an abundance does his life consist of his possessions.”‘ (Luke 12:15) Your life is way more than your possessions, even if you are wealthy. Consider the value of living simply rather than always climbing the middle class ladder another rung or two. Probably we make such a fetish out of getting rich because we are empty of more interesting ideas. Yuck.

15/Avoid large debt. This sort of follows naturally from point #14. When we fall into large debt, suddenly our options are more limited. We have to keep bringing in (or begin for the first time to bring in!) huge income, just to pay off debt, when maybe we should be working at something that doesn’t bring in as much money but which is more important. Are we trapped in an area or trapped in a job because we have huge debt? Very low debt, or zero debt, will give us increased options in what we can do.

16/Pay your bills promptly. Why should ordinary people, Christian or non-Christian, have to hold their breath to see if we are actually going to pay them what we owe them? Similarly, we should not be resorting to the bankruptcy laws to get out from under our legitimate debts. Pay back what you owe, even if it takes many years.

17/Plan ahead for how you will leave your wealth, if any. It should not automatically go to family members. If they are enemies of God, why would we give what we have saved to them? We are trying to build the kingdom of God. Giving huge amounts to God’s enemies is a bad strategy. Would you give your wealth to the Democratic Party, to Nazis, to communists, to Planned Parenthood, or to any other evil organization? Then why give it to family members who have proven to be enemies of God? Granted, it is difficult to leave one’s wealth wisely! Think about this problem a lot–especially if you have much to leave.

18/Understand that complete sanity is impossible on this earth. We are all insane in one way or another. Rafael Sabatini’s hero Scaramouche was born with “a sense that the world was mad.” (Scaramouche, p. 1). Understanding the insanity of ourselves and of others will help us to be realistic about life. We can and I believe should strive for semi-sanity, but sanity in fullness will come only after death, if/when God completes our sanctification.

19/Laugh. Scaramouche, in the same sentence mentioned above, is also described as having been born with “a gift of laughter.” So he was doubly blessed, despite being born poor and of uncertain parentage. We need to develop our sense of humor, and learn to laugh with our friends. There could be incredibly frustrating and evil things ahead of us, but if we have the ability to laugh we have gained something very important and useful and enjoyable.

20/Try to develop an objectivity about your children and grandchildren. As an obviously rough estimate, 90% of the misery of the world comes about because Christian parents do a mediocre or poor or terrible job of raising their children. The parents never have a clue that this is so. But it is. We tend to expect little of ourselves, and then, surprise surprise, in return expect little of our children. They deliver the expected little, and countless numbers of our children end up enemies of God in the way they live. All of us have a hard time seeing that our [blank] stinks. When it comes to our children and grandchildren, we are even less honest about their character than we are about our own. Admittedly, it is very hard to develop objectivity about ourselves, about our children, and about our grandchildren. But it needs to be done, and even a modest beginning will help us and them in the long run. With pain involved for all of us on the way, of course.

21/Begin to read good books a lot. This ability can be developed. It won’t come automatically to everybody. But we are not likely to change the way the world goes on if we refuse to read books.

22/Become an expert on something. It is best to pick something for which you have a knack. I am unlikely ever to become an expert on countless things. No one will ever call on me to do their plumbing, or to install their electricity, or to build their needed box girder bridge. But there is one topic about which I am a leading expert in the world: the writer Gwendoline Keats (pen name Zack). This happened not because I am brilliant, but because God led me down a path where I was apparently the only person in the world who appreciated Gwendoline Keats enough to do some research on her. My expertise is a modest accomplishment for which apparently there currently is no competition from other people, and admittedly I stumbled into it, but it encourages me to know that a person of no particular brilliance can become an expert on something. If I can do it, so can anyone.

23/Relax part of the time. Life is challenging. The enemies of God have been winning a lot of battles lately, and we can get worn out trying to fight back. Most of us need some time just to relax and enjoy life. Watch a DVD or read a non-improving book. God went out of His way to tell us to take off one day in seven to rest and to worship. Worship is part of that, but so is rest. Kick back plenty of times. And not just on Sunday.

24/Consider the possibility that we can begin to have Christian law courts, which people resort to voluntarily rather than submit themselves to courts of the civil magistrate. Biblical justice is always going to be practical and helpful. The U.S. is moving steadily away from what is sometimes called the rule of law. We can begin to provide something better than what U.S. courts provide. This must start very small, but could become very big.

Well, it is going to take a part III to finish this. Meanwhile, enjoy Thanksgiving Day. Despite the bad things that have been happening to our country, we have much for which to be thankful.

Last week I lamented the national disgrace that Joe Biden was voted for by more than 70,000,000 people. A Biden/Harris administration is a grim prospect for people who love freedom and responsibility. But we have to accept the fact that life goes on. God is not going to rapture His people off the face of the earth. (Sorry, dispensationalists. I wish you were right, and that Christians would escape soon. But God doesn’t work like that.)

Since life goes on, we are going to have to keep living until we die. So what are we going to do in the coming years?

It may help us to remember that even if Donald Trump had won, things were not going particularly well in this country. We have been a basket case for a long time. We had a lot of work to do, even if Biden/Harris had been dramatically rejected by the voters. In fact, if someone had time-traveled from the 1950s and had seen the policies of Donald Trump, he would have assumed that a spend-spend type of leftism had captured the country. Nor did Mr. Trump do much to extricate us from foolish foreign interventions, or to defend our borders. His election would not have been much help to us. Our nation’s policies still would have been basically insane.

This is all depressing, but we have kind of earned our disaster. God gave us plenty of time to change the way we think and act, but we preferred not to use the time wisely. Now we are reaping the consequences.

I am going to list a large handful of things we can do if we want to try to find a way forward. We can’t go back. We have to go forward, like it or not.

The reader may object that the list could be summed up as “Be like Carl, and all will be well.” That is true to an extent, but not entirely. I reserve the right to refuse to follow my own advice. Certainly those who know me well will probably scratch their heads over some of these points, wondering where I get the gall to mention them. Please just examine the value or non-value of each point for yourself, and act accordingly. I’m just a guy. If what I say rings true, great. If it doesn’t ring true, reject it.

The first five points are sort of foundational. After that there is no particular order.

1/Consider the possibility that Christianity as presented in the Bible might be true. I understand that this cannot be proven. But we all live by faith of one sort or another. (See Cornelius Van Til.) And experience continues to show us that when we reject Christianity and Christian morality, things don’t go well. Disasters happen. People’s lives are ruined. So just consider the possibility that maybe Christianity is true. If you decide it is true, or might be true, don’t just say, “How interesting,” and move on. If it is true, it has consequences for how we live. On the other hand, if it isn’t true, you will find you have no solid intellectual foundation for living life.

2/Do something to end abortion. If killing unborn babies is not evil, then nothing is evil. The 70,000,000+ people who voted for Joe Biden unanimously agreed that killing babies was not evil. How can a person striving for semi-sanity accept such an idea? Abortion is perhaps the key issue of our era. If we eradicated all theft, ended corporate welfare, got taxation down to 1%, stopped intervening in the affairs of other countries, had honest money, and did many other good things, but still murdered unborn children, we would not be thinking clearly no matter how excellent the reforms we had made.

3/We have to learn to love truth more. Truth is under great attack in this country. A male is a female, and a female is a male; children can choose their gender. At least, so we are told. The best writer on the topic of truth is Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Read especially his essay “The Smatterers” in the book From Under the Rubble. The book may be hard to find. If you can’t find the book, I’ll photocopy a handful of the most important pages and send them to you. Solzhenitsyn quoted a Russian proverb in one of his speeches: “One word of truth outweighs the whole world.” Truth is always crucial, and the decades ahead are likely to challenge us to give up the truth when pressure comes. Ponder the central importance of truth; that is, really think what kind of position we put ourselves in when we reject truth and believe lies. Solzhenitsyn backed up his respect for truth by the way he lived. It was not always easy for him, but he persevered. We can imitate him.

4/Honestly face the fact that our current brand of Christianity is not worth the powder to blow it to hell. I insist that there is much potential for good in the American Christian church. But it is mostly potential rather than rubber meets the road productive thought and action.

5/Cultivate a sense of sin. Humility is a rare virtue, but a lovely one. We are all pretty rotten, even after Jesus Christ regenerates and converts us. If we can remember that, it will help us in countless ways.

6/Pastors need to preach hard truths to us. Not 52 sermons a year, but maybe six or eight times a year. We need to be challenged, because we Christians aren’t thinking very clearly and aren’t acting with practical wisdom.

7/Be willing to be hated. If we speak the truth, we run the risk of being hated. None of us likes to feel the hatred of others. But it may become necessary.

8/Tithe to a Bible-believing church. The tithe (10% of one’s increase) is very important. If we are willing to steal from the God who died on the cross to save us from eternal death, who can trust us not to steal from our neighbor? If you are not yet a Christian, consider giving your tithe to some other worthy cause.

9/Be otherwise generous with your money.

10/Pray often. That includes praying for our enemies. They need God’s grace. But then so do we. If we are willing to extend grace to our enemies, then maybe God will be more likely to extend grace to us. We are not in control of reality. We are dependent on God. We can have increased peace of mind, if we pray. That way we show Him that we realize we need Him.

11/Marry and have several children. Pick a godly spouse. Don’t concern yourself overmuch with the physical appearance of your potential spouse. Pick a spouse whose character you can respect over the long haul. The family is a building block of Christian civilization.

12/Stop wanting to live off the production of others. That means we will need to give up public education, Social Security, Medicare, unemployment compensation, farm subsidies, and countless other things. If we are unwilling to give up subsidies stolen from the production of others, how are we different from the hardcore left represented by Biden/Harris and their allies?

13/Educate your children outside of public schools. But don’t automatically trust Christian schools. Right now and for the immediate future, they seem to be mostly just baptized humanism. They will probably not teach your children how to think and act as a biblical Christian should. Your children will have to learn that at home. Which means you will have to learn first, so that you can teach them. (There’s always a catch, isn’t there?)

That is enough for today. Next week I hope to publish part II. Despite the wretched condition in which the U.S. finds itself, there can be a practical way forward. Perhaps if we follow enough of the good paths, we will merge onto a pleasant thoroughfare helpful not only to us but also to people who currently are our enemies.