Articles from November 2016

Made the magic number: 200,000 hits

My website has been around since around 2005 and my blog since 2009, but I didn’t start using Google Analytics until 2011, so I don’t know my total numbers.  But ever since February 2011, I have now received 203,000 hits.  To the best of my ability, that does not include my own hits or bots.

It may not be as big as many websites, but it is bigger than many others, and certainly bigger than I ever expected it to be.

So many thanks to all my readers: I couldn’t have done it without you.  😀  (And that includes my two pet stalkers, my most faithful readers.  You know who you are.  😉  )

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Remember Benny Hinn prophesying the downfall of Castro?

Many years ago now, I wrote the following on one of my theology pages:

Benny Hinn…once came on The 700 Club and said he’d been taken into a trance by God, who took his spirit over various parts of the earth and showed him things that would happen in the 1990s.

In naïve gullibility, I wrote these things down exactly.  I’m not sure where that paper is now, but I remember that few, if any, of those things came true.

  1. I remember him saying that two of God’s “great giants” would die in the 90s.  I thought this meant Billy Graham (or even Pat Robertson).
  2. I remember there was supposed to be a wondrous revival in which people would be in the parking lot on their way into church, and get healed.
  3. One of the prophecies I remember distinctly: “Castro’s Cuba will fall in the 90s.”  Well, that never happened.
  4. I remember a prophecy in the early 90s that there would be an economic collapse and only the givers in the church would survive.  Was that Benny Hinn?  There are accounts of him saying such things in 1999, so I wouldn’t be surprised if he said it on The 700 Club in the early 90s as well.  Or it could have been Pat Robertson, giving one of his own yearly prophecies.

So Benny Hinn is also a false prophet who, like Pat Robertson, has lots of followers and tons of money coming in.  And if they’re false prophets, then their faith healing, “words of knowledge”/prophecies, and religious teachings are also suspect.

Benny Hinn–False Prophet Extroardinaire by Jackie Alnor

Questions for Benny Hinn by Bill Alnor

This website lists many prophecies for the 90s, several of which sound like the ones on my missing paper.  (Also note that God destroying the homosexual community with fire in the mid-90s is greeted with a round of applause.)  He says that Fidel Castro will die in the 90s.  Um, no.: Benny Hinn Prophesies for the Mid-90s

(Well, Castro died in HIS 90s.  By the way, the above link is full of Hinn’s false prophecies for the 90s.  Read and be entertained by all that was supposed to have happened 20 years ago.)

A simple Google search on “Benny Hinn prophecy 90s Castro” reveals many more websites exposing Benny Hinn’s false prophecies.

Some Updates on Life etc.

It’s been nearly three months now since I switched from Bluehost to Siteground.  Remember the crap going on with the site during the summer?  You may have tried to come on and had problems: not loading, loading v e r y s l o w l y, various error messages.  It was even worse on the backend, as I spent days upon days trying to figure the stupid thing out, and very nearly switched to WordPress.com.  And yeah, I posted about that back then.

Well, it must’ve been Bluehost.  Nearly three months on Siteground, and my site is still running.  I used to get downtimes a lot; now, none at all.  Let’s just check and make sure the Jetpack Monitor is still turned on–Yep, it’s still on and working, but I never get e-mails anymore telling me the site is down.

I just checked my load speed with https://tools.pingdom.com/: My site, in the US at least, still loads at less than 3-4 seconds, MUCH better than with Bluehost.

I also now have my domain registered with a third party instead of my hosting provider, so I can take that with me anywhere I go.

So far, so good.  I can’t say much about Siteground’s customer service because I don’t know because I haven’t needed it!  😀

As for other issues:

–Yeah, there’s still stuff going on around the whole Trump thing, but I don’t want to post about that for now.  Like lots of people, I’m burned out by the election.  Even being scared has become too tiresome.  I might read what other people post, and keep up with the news somewhat, but, ugh, I don’t want to think about Trump much right now.

Though no, I still have not resigned myself to thinking of him as “President Trump.”  {shudder}  {throw up in my mouth just like Stephen Colbert}

Though I will note that unless the Wisconsin recount truly pulls up some kind of fraud (and so far it just appears to be human error), I don’t think it’s going to change anything.  I don’t think people appreciate that Wisconsin is not actually a bastion of Democrats.  It may look that way come election time, but that’s just because Madison and Milwaukee are Democrat.  Everywhere else is mostly Republican.  I feel alone, very alone….

Also, many voters were disenfranchised recently with the Voter ID law here in Wisconsin.  Many people don’t have IDs, and there was a lot of confusing back-and-forth about how to get one.  College students suddenly didn’t know where to vote because student IDs weren’t allowed.  This article explains how so many people, in a time when you need an ID for practically everything, can still have no ID.  Also here.

So if you couldn’t get an ID, you couldn’t vote.  And a lot of those who couldn’t vote, were likely Democrat voters (minorities, college students), and enough to have potentially tipped the vote toward Clinton.  A recount won’t change this.

 

–Does anybody else think Once Upon a Time has jumped the shark?  I feel like it should’ve ended a season or two ago, because now:

Interesting characters are going into the background and just acting as sounding boards (I’m looking at you, Hook).

There was so much potential for the Jekyll/Hyde storyline, but then it just suddenly ended.  Very disappointing.

The writers seem to be running out of ideas, so they keep screwing around with the characters.  And since the evil characters keep turning good, they have to either introduce a new one, or make a good one turn bad again.

Belle’s constant I-love-Rumpel-I-hate-Rumpel-I-love-Rumpel-I-hate-Rumpel is tiresome.  I wish she’d decide whether to accept him as he is or leave, and then stick with it.  She knew what he was like when she fell for him.  And this time around, I don’t really know why the heck she hates him.  She loved him, then all of a sudden hated him.

Unless there’s something I missed, because I really have trouble keeping up.  It doesn’t help that, since I watch it with Hubby, I can’t just back it up and re-run it whenever I zone out and/or get confused.

I often do this when watching TV or movies.  They move too fast, talk too fast, and next thing I know, somebody just died and I have no clue who killed them or why.  I’ve read that this is an NVLD trait.

It’s one reason why I HATE action movies, but LOVE slower talky-movies like Jane Austen.  That, and action movies suck for character development.

(No, I cannot stand Batman Begins or Guardians of the Galaxy!  I mean, seriously–no character development whatsoever in Guardians!  No depth.  Scanty backstory.  They’re just caricatures who argue and deliver lines that are–shall I say–pretentiously cool.  How to explain–I’ve noticed this as far back as Buffy, dialogue which seems to be trying too hard to be witty/modern/cool.  Like Zander must be delivering it with a smug look because he knows it sounds cool.  It grates on my nerves whenever I hear dialogue like that.  It doesn’t seem real.)

 

–We have a major home repair coming up!  Yay, more debt.  😛  But it must be done.  No more putting it off.  We don’t want the house to fall apart, after all, or hear more cluck-clucking from plumbers.  We’ve been here so long that repairs/remodeling are needed all over, but we don’t have the kind of $$$ to do that.

By the way, keep that in mind if you think it would be a good idea to own a house instead of rent: You can’t give repairs to the manager to take care of anymore.  You have to call the plumber, get the contractor, pay the $$$ all yourself.  And it’s a lot of $$$.

I’ve been watching One Day at a Time and often thinking, “I wish I had a Schneider to take care of repairs!”  I recently saw an episode of Mary Tyler Moore in which Lou had these exact same complaints, and was happy to sell the house and move into an apartment.

It’s the one and only hope I have for a Trump presidency, by the way: that the economy will pick up and make it so the middle class is no longer getting squeezed like this, unable to get anywhere.  Seriously, how is my generation even supposed to retire without pensions or a way to save AND keep up with expenses?  And now the Millennials can’t even find jobs in their field, or to pay their college debts!

 

 

 

 

 

Reblog: “Stomping on Eggshells” and “Why White People Freak Out When They’re Called Out About Race”

A couple of good articles about the defensiveness we’ve been seeing when white people discuss race:

Samantha Field, stomping on eggshells: on white fragility and speaking up

Quote:

Which brings me to the topic of today, which is part criticism, part education, and part encouragement for my fellow social justice advocates and progressives. In speaking with people over the past two weeks about ways to get involved and stand up for vulnerable people– especially Muslims and people of color– I’ve been seeing a common theme. It’s certainly not new, and it’s something I’ve struggled with until relatively recently. People with privilege– white, straight, male, Christian, etc– frequently want to do what’s right, but they feel like they’re “walking on eggshells.” They want to be an ally, but they don’t want to say or do the wrong thing. Many of us feel anxiety or nervousness about racial issues in particular.

I would like to gently and lovingly and directly say that this feeling of “walking on eggshells” is based in a lie, and one we believe because our privilege has made us incredibly arrogant. I don’t say this to be mean or harsh, but because I believe it’s the truth, and one I had to learn for myself sometimes painfully.

Some notes in the comments do make sense, however: A couple of commenters–one who grew up fundamentalist, where any wrong thing makes you hellbound, and one who is autistic and often made to feel like her mistakes are “pathetic screwups”–note that arrogance isn’t always the reason we feel we are “walking on eggshells.”

This is my own situation, both as NVLD (socially like autism) and having grown up fundamentalist.  I’ve already been accused of horrible things because of my social ineptitude.  Also, being fundamentalist taught me that even cussing over a banged toe could send me to Hell if I didn’t ask for forgiveness right then.  So if somebody tells me I’m doing something wrong, it can immediately be heard as “You’re going to Hell” or “You’re a wicked, evil person.”

So I can understand the sentiments in the next blog post, on “white fragility”:  Sam Adler-Bell’s Why White People Freak Out When They’re Called Out About Race

Quote:

For white people, their identities rest on the idea of racism as about good or bad people, about moral or immoral singular acts, and if we’re good, moral people we can’t be racist – we don’t engage in those acts. This is one of the most effective adaptations of racism over time—that we can think of racism as only something that individuals either are or are not “doing.”

In large part, white fragility—the defensiveness, the fear of conflict—is rooted in this good/bad binary. If you call someone out, they think to themselves, “What you just said was that I am a bad person, and that is intolerable to me.” It’s a deep challenge to the core of our identity as good, moral people.

I see this very thing going on in my family, and it’s very distressing.  I have been open to rebuke about racism since my teens, however, and this has allowed me to avoid much of the “white fragility.”  But it also means I can get terribly uncomfortable around a certain family member who is very fragile–but denies his/her own fragility.

I try to avoid discussing race issues with this person as much as possible.  I try to avoid watching TV shows/movies featuring black characters, around this person.  (When this person walks through the room while I watch, he/she will make indignant little remarks that make me have to back up the recording because I could not hear the TV.)

I have seen this person get so defensive about race on Facebook, that I removed him/her from my newsfeed and notifications.  I even avoid posting anything on Facebook about race anymore, lest this person get mad in the comments, and embarrass me.

After this person argued with one of my friends about race and discovered I did not want to break off relations with my friend, this person became indignant and guilted me over it.  This person also became irate at his/her favorite cousin (who is mixed-race) after arguing with her over race issues.

This is definitely white fragility, which is not at all helpful, as written by Adler-Bell, above:

When I’m doing a workshop, I’ll often ask the people of color in the room, somewhat facetiously, “How often have you given white people feedback about our inevitable and often unconscious racist patterns and had that go well for you?” And they laugh.

Because it just doesn’t go well. And so one time I asked, “What would your daily life be like if you could just simply give us feedback, have us receive it graciously, reflect on it and work to change the behavior? What would your life be like?”

And this one man of color looked at me and said, “It would be revolutionary.”

Let me use my white privilege to tell other whites: Dealing with someone else’s white fragility is intensely frustrating.  I can’t express myself anymore.  I can’t be myself.  I’m afraid of hurting this person’s feelings if I speak up, and getting chewed out, because I’ve already tried, and that’s what happened.  I am very embarrassed to see this person behave this way on Facebook, so much so that I took this person out of my newsfeed.

This person doesn’t seem to have any regard for how he/she is affecting other people with this constant defensiveness.  And yes, others can see exactly what’s going on, that white fragility leads to hostile, bullying behavior–yet the person doing it thinks they’re the one who’s being bullied!

White fragility leads to fractured and lost friendships.  It leads to constant stress.

I can tell you that my own friendships are still intact, including ones with minorities, that I have very few arguments online, and that I can hear about racial concerns without feeling attacked and abused.  It is a much better place to be in, than to be on the defensive all the time.

Seriously, you’ll be much happier if you stop defending your whiteness, stop telling other people what their experiences really were (that’s gaslighting), and instead just listen to their concerns.  If you’re willing to be open to what minorities are trying to tell us, and reflect on things you may unconsciously do that are racist, it doesn’t make you a bad person.  It means you can grow and help make life better for everyone.

Neo-Nazis and KKK crawling out of their holes….

This is not just a problem in the US, but elsewhere as well, alt-right racist and xenophobic groups crawling out of the woodwork.

In the US, they’ve taken the election as their time to come out, but keep in mind that Republican leaders have denounced these groups.  Paul Ryan said they have no place in their party.

However, such groups have been growing in numbers around Europe.  This is a reason why EU leaders are freaked out by the election, because they fear his election will embolden the alt-right in Europe, and the EU will fall, leading to warring states again.

I remember the end of The Plague by Albert Camus:

And, indeed, as he listened to the cries of joy rising from the town, Rieux remembered that such joy is always imperiled. He knew what those jubilant crowds did not know but could have learned from books: that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen-chests; that it bides its time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, and bookshelves; and that perhaps the day would come when, for the bane and enlightenment of men, it would rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city.

As I research my novel, I keep finding Neo-Nazis all over the Net.  They are just as bad as the ones from old Germany, but society keeps them under control.  Just as we keep the Plague under control with sanitation, good hygiene, and medicines, free societies such as ours keep this Neo-Nazi plague under control.  But we have to be vigilant, lest they rise up again and take over.

Just look at what the American Nazis wrote here:

I can only HOPE that deep down inside, Donald Trump IS as “vindictive and nasty” as he was charged with being during his campaign – ESPECIALLY by those REPUBLIRAT traitors who did their utmost to attack and smear their own Party’s choice of candidate, IF I was him, I would be considering a “Night of the Long Knives” on these political whores. With the Republirat Party now controlling BOTH the House AND the Senate, along with the White House, AND possibly THREE new seats on the Supreme Court, – they OUGHT to be able to push through ANY and ALL of Trumps promised agenda, from “The Wall” and Rounding Up and Shipping the illegals HOME, to repealing all the “Trade Deals”, as well as the Obama-Care fraud etc et al…

…IF he IS for “REAL” – I hope that he REPLACES each and every “security detail” that has ties to the “PAST” – with folks he KNOWS and TRUSTS. For IF Trump IS for REAL, and intends to “ROCK the BOAT” on the world of this REAL “Game of Thrones” crowd of scumbags – it will be DANGEROUS…

…NONE of this “oh, let’s kiss and make up, and all unite together for the good…” that the defeated are now prattling on the boob tube. These ANTI-WHITE bastards HATE our Folk, and seek to EXTERMINATE our RACE, and have done a pretty good job over the past decades DOING just THAT! We MUST – BEWARE – of all the “TROJAN HORSES” from the SYSTEM’S “Con-Servative” poison peddlers, who under directions of the Zog will start this “can’t we get along” for the good of the country crap. REMEMBER and NEVER FORGET – it has been the ANTI-WHITE sell-outs in the “right-wing, con-servative camp” working with the blatant ANTI-WHITE forces of the “Liberal camp” who have brought us to the point of where we are in this country, as well as around the entire world!

…Comrades, it’s only November – there is still plenty of time to DO OUTREACH – time to REACH with our NS message, EDUCATE these White men AND women who rebelled against the system’s status quo, and then to ORGANIZE them into POLITICAL SOLDIERS willing to carry on the political struggle for the 14 Words and Social Justice for the White Working Class!

Don’t let them win as they try to use this election as license to rise up, whether here in America or in other countries.  Let them know they’re not welcome here.  Instead of panicking at how they’ve been rallying up the past week, let’s make sure they don’t succeed at their objectives.  Make them crawl back into their holes!  This election just means we have to keep fighting.

Sources:

Trump’s Election gives hope to Europe’s Far-Right

Der Spiegel articles cited here

For many years, I have been writing and speaking about the danger of the rise of an honest and charismatic ideologue in the United States, someone who could exploit the fear and anger that has long been boiling in much of the society, and who could direct it away from the actual agents of malaise to vulnerable targets. That could indeed lead to what sociologist Bertram Gross called “friendly fascism” in a perceptive study 35 years ago. But that requires an honest ideologue, a Hitler type, not someone whose only detectable ideology is Me. The dangers, however, have been real for many years, perhaps even more so in the light of the forces that Trump has unleashed. —Noam Chomsky

 

Shades of conservatism aside, the alt-right are cultural rebels and nationalists whose firmament is the Internet.
If defining them is hard, their political agenda is clearer. Liberalism is the dirtiest word, and its trappings — feminism, political correctness, multiculturalism, “social justice” — are to be resisted. The establishment is corrupt and full of political cuckolds, or “cucks,” who have failed America through their cowardice.
Below this, there bubbles a more insidious layer: white racial superiority, racism, anti-Semitism, anti-Muslim tendencies and a conspiratorial anger against the Jewish cabal that it claims runs the world.
…Last week, their “God Emperor” ascended the throne to raucous applause from his digital supporters. “We actually elected a meme as president,” wrote one centipede on 4Chan, echoing a feeling that somehow their digital campaign had swung it for Trump. Thousands delighted in the schadenfreude, sharing images of miserable-looking Clinton supporters. Thousands others turned their eye to the future.
…Dedicated forums for far-right candidates Geert Wilders (the Netherlands), Marine Le Pen (France) and Norbert Hofer (Austria) are in overdrive. “The American Meme Soldiers are here to help liberate France!!! Man your battlestations, fellow meme warriors!” goes one Reddit post. “Centipedes! We’re fighting on two fronts now. Get in there! Even if you don’t care about France, you need to care about stopping the liberal disease!” goes another. —http://www.cnn.com/2016/11/14/opinions/what-next-alt-right-krasodomski-jones-opinion/index.html

 

 

 

 

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