Andrew Clavin dismisses Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize as shallow compared to Milton, mocking his lyrics as boomer-era fluff while critiquing Trump’s "rigged election" claims—backed by Project Veritas’ voter fraud footage—as evidence of systemic corruption under Obama, from IRS targeting to Holder’s Philadelphia inaction. Rejecting free will as mere "ghost in the machine" chemistry, he pivots to pornography, advocating forgiveness over moralism before debunking biblical prophecy timelines as futile. The episode ends with queer ghost-story speculation and a boozy "stupid" debate tease, blending culture wars, philosophy, and pop culture into a chaotic critique of modern decline. [Automatically generated summary]
Some people have said that awarding Bob Dylan the Nobel Prize for Literature represents the baby boomers' final triumph over a once magnificent Western culture that so dwarfed their own artistic achievements that they had to destroy it in order to feel any respect for themselves.
Some say giving a major literature prize to a folk songwriter was the baby boomer's way of saying, yes, the geniuses of ages past created the plays of Shakespeare, the poems of Keats, and the novels of Dickens and Tolstoy, but we listen to simplistic protest songs sung by a guy with a harmonica and a voice like an alarm clock buzzer, and so we're going to celebrate ourselves because by golly, that's how much we suck.
But the Nobel Prize committee says Dylan is a great poet, and that means we should now study Dylan's words as we've studied the words of the great poets of the past.
For instance, John Milton was a great poet of the past, and here he is describing how classical cultures created distorted myths about the fall of Lucifer from heaven.
How he fell from heaven, they fabled, thrown by angry Jove, sheer o'er the crystal battlements.
From morn to noon he fell, from noon to dewy eve a summer's day, and with the setting sun dropped from the zenith like a falling star on Lemnos, the Aegean Isle.
Note the subtle blending of classical and Christian illusions, which suggest that the mythology of the ancients gracefully foretold the form into which Christ would live out his world-altering truth.
Thus, the verse expresses an entire underlying philosophy of religion's relationship to culture.
Likewise, with Bob Dylan, we find the verse, it ain't me, babe.
No, no, no, it ain't me, babe.
It ain't me you're looking for.
Babe.
Note the repeated use of the word babe, suggesting that the person the songwriter is addressing is a babe or an attractive woman, or possibly just an annoying woman whose name he can't remember.
In any case, it's clear the person the babe is looking for is not him.
Otherwise, he wouldn't keep saying over and over and over again, it ain't me.
Babe.
Likewise, when Dylan writes, lay, lady, lay, lay across my big brass bed, stay, lady, stay, stay with your man a while, many readers have come to believe that the lady is probably also a babe, because the word lady keeps repeating as did the word babe, and if she weren't a babe, why would he want her in his bed?
Which, interestingly, is made of brass, suggesting that it's a brass bed with a lady in it who's a babe.
Thus, when we look at the literature of the past, we see a towering monument to the imagination of man.
While when we look at the literature of the baby boomers, we see that towering monument lying broken in a cultural desert, and in the immortal words of the poet Shelley, round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away.
Babe.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky, life is tickety-boom.
Birds are ringing, also singing, hunky-dunkity.
Ship-shaped ipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing!
Oh, hoorah, hooray!
Oh, hooray, hoorah!
Hooray!
You missed the singing, the kind of the chorus singing.
That was brutal to Bob Dylan, who has had the good grace to go into hiding.
This is true, the Nobel Committee can't find him because, yeah, he's hiding away.
He's going like, I'm not taking that award for literature, man.
I write folk songs.
And, you know, I don't mean to attack him.
The guy is a really good folk songwriter.
I just, hmm, literature is a little tough.
All right, it's Malbag Day.
And you know what that means?
It means we'll be talking about porn.
Hey, woohoo, double woo-hoo.
Free will and porn.
Don't miss that.
If you're watching on Facebook or YouTube, we're going to cut you off after 15 minutes unless you shovel those eight bucks our way.
Actually, you don't even have to.
You get 30 days for free.
And I think you get Ben's now.
If you subscribe, you get Ben's book, which he's got a novel coming out, which I read and is really entertaining.
So you can get that.
And, you know, you'll get my show.
You can watch my show in real time.
You can watch Ben's show in real time.
And after this, I'll be signing my book, The Great Good Thing.
After the show, I'll be signing my book, The Great Good Thing A Secular Jew Comes to Faith in Christ to send to all of you.
Rigged Election Claims00:15:45
It's obviously taken a long time, which is actually the publisher's fault.
It took the publisher a long time to get us the books, but we got them now.
I will sign them this very day and we'll send them out to you.
So it's on the way.
And if you haven't gotten a copy yet, get a copy.
I keep getting these emails.
I'm getting these emails of people.
This book has changed my life.
So unless, don't buy it if your life is perfect.
If your life is absolutely, if you don't want to change your life, don't do that.
But anyway, you might really enjoy the book.
All right.
So yesterday we talked about the right is hysterical because Donald Trump is destroying.
They think Donald Trump is going to destroy the GOP by his claims that this election is rigged in various ways.
Now the left says he's going to destroy the entire democracy.
He's taking the whole republic down with him.
It's like just a long, you know, here's our president, Barack Obama, soon-to-be former president Barack Obama, saying why Trump, Trump's kid.
Well, let's play Trump first.
Here's what Trump is saying.
He's saying the election is rigged.
Here he is talking to, who is he talking to?
He's talking to Mike Gallagher, my old pal.
Here he is talking about the rigged election.
When I talk about the election being rigged, it was just reported there are almost 2 million dead people that are registered to vote.
Right, right.
And Paul Ryan gets up and issues a memo that he disagrees that the election's rigged.
Why doesn't he walk over to Philadelphia and St. Louis and Chicago?
And how could he say the election is look, nothing's perfect, but this process is unbelievable.
And it's certainly rigged with the press.
So why would he issue a memo that the election said?
Is he naïve?
Because that's naivete or maybe something worse than that.
Lack of street smarts, as you said last night in Wisconsin.
I don't know what it is, but you know, when you go to Philadelphia where Romney got zero votes, where McCain got zero votes, but so they're very disappointing.
So, first of all, that's Donald Trump taking his precious time to attack his own party.
But on top of that, let's just be clear.
On the one hand, there are millions of dead people on the rolls.
That doesn't mean they're voting.
On the other hand, the Democrats go out of their way to make sure the rolls don't get cleaned up and that people don't have to use ID.
So there's perfectly good reason to be suspicious of it on that side.
Here is Obama saying our very democracy is under threat by these charges.
One of the great things about America's democracy is we have a vigorous, sometimes bitter political contest.
And when it's done, historically, regardless of party, the person who loses the election congratulates the winner, reaffirms our democracy, and we move forward.
That's how democracy survives, because We recognize that there's something more important than any individual campaign, and that is making sure that the integrity and trust in our institutions sustains itself, because democracy, by definition, works by consent, not by force.
I have never seen in my lifetime or in modern political history any presidential candidate trying to discredit the elections and the election process before votes have even taken place.
It's unprecedented.
And then he goes on with that graciousness and loftiness that we've come to expect from this president to attack Trump personally.
This is the guy standing outside the White House, right, acting as our president, so he's not campaigning now, going into campaign mode and calling Trump a whiner.
Here he goes.
Every expert, regardless of political party, regardless of ideology, conservative or liberal, who has ever examined these issues in a serious way will tell you that instances of significant voter fraud are not to be found.
That keep in mind elections are run by state and local officials, which means that there are places like Florida, for example, where you've got a Republican governor whose Republican appointees are going to be running and monitoring a whole bunch of these election sites.
The notion that somehow if Mr. Trump loses Florida, it's because of those people that you have to watch out for.
That is both irresponsible.
And by the way, doesn't really show the kind of leadership and toughness that you'd want out of a president.
You start whining before the game's even over.
If whenever things are going badly for you and you lose, you start blaming somebody else, then you don't have what it takes to be in this job.
So let's take this apart for a minute because Obama, you know, it is funny when you go back and listen to Obama, sometimes there's always this kind of truth interwoven into the baloney.
And it's true, Trump whines.
It is also true that Democrats commit voter fraud at a much, much, much higher rate.
Rudy Giuliani was talking about this.
He said maybe it's because they control the inner cities.
But Rudy had the great line, dead people tend to vote Democrat.
That was his line.
It's a great line.
And it would it would also help.
It would also help if this particular president had not undermined our institutions to the degree that he had.
I mean, if if he hadn't taken the IRS and used it to suppress Republican organizations, if he hadn't corrupted.
Let's remember the just right after the first election, Attorney General Eric Holder refused to prosecute Black Panthers who were standing.
who had cried out how deeply they hated white people and were standing outside election stations in Philadelphia holding batons looking very threatening.
And Holder refused to prosecute.
And when somebody said, this is terrible, he said, well, you can't compare it to what happened to black people.
Here's Holder refusing, telling Congress he's not going to prosecute.
Compare what people endured in the South in the 60s to try to get the right to vote for African Americans and to compare what people were subjected to there to what happened in Philadelphia, which is inappropriate, certainly that.
But to call that you describe it in those terms, I think does a great disservice to people who put their lives on the line, who risk all for my people.
For my people.
See, that's the Attorney General of the United States.
I am his people.
I am his people.
And he's talking about people with the same color skin he's got.
He's the Attorney General.
Obama has done this straight through all our most cherished organizations, government organizations.
He has eaten out the credibility of these organizations.
They are now the rotted hulk, and the FBI is on top of them.
The reason the FBI, the FBI is releasing all this stuff all of a sudden about their investigation into Hillary Clinton.
And I believe that James Comey is doing this for the same reason that he stood up and gave that original press conference where he basically damned her, basically said she had committed crimes, but we shouldn't prosecute.
And I think that Comey is caught in a vice.
I think he was told that he basically couldn't prosecute, and so he didn't, but he wanted to get out all the information that he could get out, and so he did.
But, you know, now we have this whole thing that has been put out of Patrick Kennedy, the Undersecretary of State, negotiating with the FBI to keep them from classifying documents so that Hillary Clinton wouldn't look bad.
Again, again, Patrick Kennedy works for you.
He works for me.
He is doing this on your time, on your money.
He is negotiating to protect Hillary Clinton's election chances and her reputation.
Okay, and now Project Veritas.
Let's get back to Project Veritas.
James O'Keefe has released the second in his big investigation.
And, you know, yesterday I said that I felt that James O'Keefe gets a kind of a bad rap.
And here's what I mean by that.
James O'Keefe is a guerrilla journalist.
And by the way, he describes himself as a radical progressive.
So he's not, I don't think he's one of us.
I mean, I've sat and chatted with him, and, you know, I don't know what his politics are, but that's how he describes himself.
And so O'Keefe gets this bad rap, and they just throw it off in a couple of lines all the time.
They say, well, he's been convicted of phone tampering, and he had to pay $100,000 to somebody at Acorn and all that stuff.
But when you're looking into it a little deeper, it's really a little bit, it's much, much, much more gray.
The $100,000 he paid was to an Acorn guy.
He went in and did that scam on Acorn where he tried to get them essentially to bring in sex slaves, the sex trafficking, and a lot of them agreed to it.
One person who agreed to it, the minute he walked out, called the police.
So in other words, he was milking him for information, and then he called the authorities and said this guy was just in trying to do this stuff, and he felt he got burned.
He lost his job after the video came out, and he felt he got burned, and he sued, and O'Keefe paid him $100,000 to get him to go away.
We will continue this and have the mailbag and our discussion about porn.
But first, I've got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube, and we will see you over at The Daily Wire.
And likewise, you know, so likewise, when they say he was convicted of phone tampering, that's not true.
He got into Mary Landrell's office or tried to get in dressed up as a phone repairman, and he pled to entering a federal office under false pretense or something like that.
He was doing his job.
Listen, he's not the greatest journalist in the world, and the New York Times would be right to vet his stuff before filing it, but he's doing the job the New York Times would be doing if they were journalists at all.
If they were still practicing, if they were not a former newspaper, but still a current newspaper, they would be doing what O'Keefe is doing, and they would have all those layers of editors and fact checkers and people to make sure they were getting it right.
But O'Keefe is doing guerrilla journalism, and he's doing a good job.
This new stuff, he's got two people have now lost their jobs over this.
One is Robert Kramer, who is the husband of Jan Schakowsky, the Democrat congresswoman from Illinois, and Scott Fauval, who was part of this national field director for Americans United for Change.
These are these kind of black ops consultant firms that say they are working with the DNC with the full knowledge of Hillary Clinton.
And now, basically, he has Fauval on tape saying, Faye, for 50 years we've been bussing voters in to vote illegally.
And he explains here in great detail how he does this, because Rudy Giuliani, during his run for mayor, he was vetting the buses that came in that were bringing voters in from New Jersey.
He was vetting them and turning them away.
He says he's got about 75% of them.
So Fauval here on this tape is explaining how they get around that, how they get around bringing in buses.
Well, okay, let's just say, you know, Derry, if a major investigation came up of major vote fraud that way, how would they prove it and who would they charge?
Are they going to charge each individual?
What?
Charge each individual with voter fraud?
See, that's the fairly fair.
Are they going to go after the facilitator for conspiracy, which they can prove?
Fine, I'm hiking in, and I'm the head for you that I've used the tool.
One thing if all these people drive up in their personal cars, if there's a bus involved, that changes the dynamics.
It's the legality.
Oh, yeah.
Because you can prove each Pharisee if there's a bus.
Yeah.
If there are cars, it's much harder to prove.
And there's enough money.
If there's enough money, you don't have to drive their POV.
Absolutely.
Or you have to drive Rental.
Yeah, with Wisconsin license plates.
Absolutely.
Well, you can't have them with Wisconsin license plates because Renton's here, most of them don't have Wisconsin licenses.
But there's this thing called used car auction.
Used car auction.
The titles belong to some unknown company.
That company scabers.
And you know, these are multiple employers.
These are not all one employer.
Yeah.
Use shell companies.
Yeah.
Cars come from one company and two cars come from another.
There's no bus involved, so you can't prove that it's en masse.
There you go.
It doesn't tip people off.
I hope you could hear that because there's a lot of background noise.
But basically, he says you get a shell company to buy a used car at an auction, then you send in people individually and they can't find the facilitator.
They can't track down what are they going to do.
If they catch one guy committing fraud, that's one thing.
But if they catch him, then they've caught everybody.
Then they expose this massive fraud scheme.
Pretty hard to deny that this guy is saying what he's saying, that he obviously knows what he's talking about.
That's a very, very elaborate description, and he knows a lot more about how to get a car that has a Wisconsin plate and won't be questioned out of voters' booth than I do.
He knows a lot more about it.
And resigned, was forced out basically after this video came out.
It's very clear that the DNs, the Democrats, do this stuff.
Do they steal elections?
Well, I think the John F. Kennedy election was stolen, yeah, so they do steal elections, but I think if it's, you know, as they say, if it ain't close, they can't steal it.
So it's like if there's a 1% differential, then Trump is going to have an argument to put forward.
You can't eat out the, destroy, rot away the integrity of the government and then yell at Donald Trump for pointing it out, pointing out that it's rotten.
He may be irresponsible.
He may be doing it for selfish reasons.
I'm sure he is doing it for selfish reasons.
He may even be whining.
I kind of think he is.
But whose fault is it?
Who did it?
Who undermined our confidence?
You know, Holman Jenkins Jr. in the Wall Street Journal has this thing where he says, Trump, instead of scattershot claims that the race is being manipulated and wild conspiracy theories about ballot box stuffing, Trump might be focusing laser-like on the rigged argument that nobody can confidently refute.
That's the argument that Hillary Clinton is her party's nominee and on her way to the White House only because the Obama administration decided to waive the law on handling classified material and the FBI went along in order to assure that its designated heiress would succeed to the presidency.
Ghostly Confessions00:13:39
In other words, it is the Democrats who have taken away, rotted out the integrity of our government and the integrity of our process.
And I don't believe it's as bad as Trump says it is, but it's bad.
It has been bad these eight years.
I mean, Barack Obama is a boss Tweedian Chicago Paul who has made the entire White House the, you know, he has made the entire government boss Tweed's government.
You know, the only thing is when people look to the future, I always, I'm not in the futurist business because I think it's like when they're connecting dots, it's like making constellations.
The stars are up there randomly.
You find the shapes there, you know, and human affairs are so complex that after six months they become almost random so that you really can't say what's going to happen next.
But one positive thing I could see, if the polls are right and Clinton goes on to win, and this is the one year in which the polls might be wrong, but if they're right and Clinton goes on to win, the one good thing I can see is that there's going to be a reckoning if Republicans keep the Congress that she is going to be under fire from the minute she gets there, just like Nixon was.
And that's going to take away from the government dealing with the actual problems that we have.
On the other hand, it really is time for a reckoning that hasn't come during this administration because the press has completely absconded on its responsibility and allowed Obama to do whatever he wants.
I don't think that's going to be true under a Clinton administration.
And so maybe, maybe we'll do some house cleaning while she's there, and maybe we'll get rid of her at the same time.
Let's do the mailbag.
All right.
Is that Lindsay?
Hey, Lindsay, she's back.
She's back in spirit anyway.
That's great.
All right.
So Michael, Supreme Leader Clavin.
And yes, I always like it when people use my proper titles.
I recently got into a debate with an old friend about free will.
He argued that free will doesn't really exist in humans because nearly every thought and decision in the human body can be explained by our chemical makeup and its reaction to our external surroundings.
The more I've read on the matter since then, the more evidence I've found of us being essentially conscious machines.
I've been a practicing Catholic my entire life, but I'm really having difficulty coming up with an answer to this.
It's a rather depressing notion.
I figured you'd have some thoughts on this as I recall you tweeting out an article mentioning this idea.
This is one of the biggest issues of our time.
We have people you might call thought leaders.
Sam Harris comes to mind, Steven Pinker, a very good science writer, psychologist, and a science writer, essentially telling us that we are machines, and it has even entered our language.
We say things like, I have an adrenaline rush instead of I'm excited.
You know, I have a dopamine high instead of I'm feeling good about myself or whatever.
You know, we are being told that it is parts of our brains lighting up that causes us to feel the way we feel.
Ten seconds of thought and you will see that this is absurd.
Let us say that you can trace every single emotion you feel, which I believe you can, by the way, in every decision you make, to an electronic impulse or a chemical reaction.
I believe this is ultimately true.
I believe there is nothing that happens to us that you will not be able to see happening in the human body.
That is still not evidence at all that it is caused by the human body.
Think about it for a minute.
When you say, I have an adrenaline rush, is it the adrenaline making you excited, or is it the fact that you have just fallen off a cliff?
It is the adrenaline that is communicating the feeling to your body that is the excitement that your spirit is feeling.
The reason they are able to get away with this completely spacious argument, this completely false argument, is because the idea you have of the soul is a misguided idea.
This is the ghost in the machine.
If you're thinking of yourself as a flesh puppet being run by this little ghost, transparent you that's inside you, and then when you die, this transparent you is going to fly up to heaven, you know, or wherever it goes.
Well, then their argument makes sense.
That's not the way it works, okay?
Let's take the one thing we know of that is immaterial, an idea, okay?
Ideas are described in words.
2 plus 2 equals 4.
2 plus 2 equals 4 is not 2 plus 2 equals 4.
It is words describing an invisible, insubstantial, completely non-material idea.
This idea continues to exist whether I describe it.
It just has no existence in our world.
If I don't describe it, if my brain doesn't light up and think it, it has no existence in our world.
But whether we're all here or not, 2 plus 2 still equals 4.
It's still the truth.
Your spirit is an idea like that that your flesh expresses.
Everything about you in this world, just like that 2 plus 2 doesn't exist until I say it, until my brain lights up, but it's still there.
Everything about you in this world is expressed in your flesh.
It is all expressed in your flesh.
Your flesh is a machine.
It is a machine to express your spirit.
It is like the words that God uses to express you.
But you are still there.
And to say that the adrenaline is what causes your excitement is silly on its face, right?
And to say that the machinery that lights up when you make a decision is what is causing you to make that decision, and that decision is already decided and you have no free will is actually a spacious argument.
It makes no sense.
It is based on a misguided notion of who you are and what your soul is like.
Your soul is not a ghost, a magical little ghost.
It is actually an idea in the mind of God that is being expressed by your flesh.
And that idea will still be here because God will still be here when your flesh is gone.
Okay, and this leads us to our letter about porn because it's on the same topic.
Andrew, this is from Andrew, sorry, to Andrew, from Andrew to Andrew.
As someone who has never intentionally viewed pornography, I would say I have no experience of it, but I saw the horrible way it affected my friends in high school, it seems to me that we, the traditional conservatives, should be encouraging virtue and discipline when it comes to sex, something that clearly affects entire communities.
The answer all too often from all sides is who cares?
Why is it our business?
This is a seriously difficult issue.
Okay, let's take porn for a minute.
I make a lot of jokes about porn.
I've looked at porn.
I'll probably look at porn again.
I don't think porn is very good for you.
I think it's degrading.
I think it can be addictive.
It ruins people's relationships.
It ruins people's lives.
There's absolutely no question about it.
It's just like any other drug.
You know, men are made, our machine, these machines that we're talking about, that express the idea of ourselves, they work in a certain way.
And one of the ways they work is if men see something that is sexually exciting, they get a little zing in their head, you know, and that's the way that works.
And so that zing feels good, and so people like it, and they get addicted to it, just like a drink feels good, and you get addicted to that.
It really is dangerous stuff, on top of which it's degrading, because what your soul is looking for, what your soul is looking for is love.
Your soul is looking for love that your body sometimes expresses in sex, in Eros.
That is the communication that's going on.
What pornography does is it reduces that to a machinery.
In the same way, if you walk in to a psychiatrist and say, my wife left me and I'm depressed, and he says, well, let me prescribe you some medicine.
He is reducing your experience to a chemical reaction.
He's saying, I can fix this depression.
But if he gave you a drug that showed, that made you think that it was raining, that wouldn't make you wet.
You see, he's not really changing the reality of your depression.
He's simply breaking the machine so the machine can't express your spirit's depression to you anymore.
That's why those drugs are overused and why it's a mistake to overuse them.
Same thing about pornography.
It is not, it is taking away from you.
It is not giving you something.
It's taking away from you your soul's ability to express erotic love through your body.
It is simply saying it's just the pleasure that you get.
It's not the emotion that goes behind it.
It is degrading.
Having said that, having said that, all of comedy comes from the fact, comes from a low-high relationship, right?
A man in a tuxedo who slips on a banana peel and falls into mud is funny because he's supposed to be one thing, but he's really another.
That is what makes our sexual lives so funny because we feel, we know in our hearts that we are something noble and grand and good and immortal, and yet we act like buffoons the minute we get turned on.
And so it's funny.
And if you don't know that it's funny, then you spend a lot of time with a pinched expression on your face, wagging your finger at people, and that has no effect.
I believe that you should accept people as they are with their sins and forgive them, you know, and forgive yourself and understand that.
And then start to talk about the discipline that comes from living a higher life.
You know, I try to live that higher life.
Do I fail?
Yeah, that's why my life is hilarious.
You know, that's part of the comedy of life.
It's not a tragedy if you look at porn and then think, gee, that was a bad thing.
It is a tragedy if you get addicted to it.
So what I guess I'm talking about is an honest look at the way people are.
And if you allow people to discredit, if you allow the press, for instance, the media, to discredit people because they sometimes use porn, you're essentially depriving people of their private faults and flaws.
Since we all have private faults and flaws, the question then becomes, why is the fact that Barack Obama has sometimes looked at porn not reported, and the fact that Donald Trump has sometimes looked at porn, it is reported.
Because we all, if it's not porn, it's something.
We all have something.
We all have these weaknesses and these sins.
And so what I'm always trying to do is simply accept people as they are so we can get down to the important things, which is the ideas that we're arguing about.
Okay?
So listen, if you can resist pornography, you're doing a good thing for yourself, you're keeping yourself on a higher plane, I guarantee you there's somewhere else where you fall down on the job.
And I hope when you fall down on the job, you get up, you know, you dust yourself off and you try to have a little bit more discipline, but you don't beat yourself or other people up about it.
So it's a balance.
That's all I'm saying.
We're broken people, all of us.
It's a balance.
Let me see if I can do one more here.
Terry, Andrew, a two-parter for you today.
What is your feeling that the times we are living in are fulfilling biblical prophecy, especially in Revelation?
And two, if we are living in times that have been prophesied, should we even be trying to intercede?
You know, I always wonder about this.
The Bible says, Jesus says, no man knows the hour of the day.
And he says, not only no man, the angels in heaven don't know, and I don't know, only the Father knows.
And then people read that and they say, yeah, that means April 15, 16th, you know, 2007.
You go like, wait a minute, no one knows.
And the reason he's telling you that is he wants you to live all the time, every day, as if the minute could come every moment.
Plus, if that moment comes, what are we supposed to do about it?
If you have faith, if you are trying to live into your faith, you're already doing everything you have to do.
Don't worry about it.
This is entirely with, this is above your pay grade, okay?
It is above my pay grade.
If Jesus says it's above the pay grade of the angels in heaven, believe me, it's above your pay grade.
So don't worry about it.
The thing you should be doing is trying to make your life as spiritual a life as you can.
That's the best thing you can do for yourself as well as for everybody around you and the world.
All right, quick Halloween stuff I like.
You know, I wanted to talk about this.
I wanted to talk about this weird fact that I've suddenly stumbled on that a lot of great ghost stories are written by gay people.
And I stumbled on this by, I was reading a ghost story and I thought, how about this guy's gay?
So I looked it up and he was.
A couple of months later, I'm reading Ghost Story.
I thought, wow, how about this woman is gay?
And she was.
And, you know, it was just something in the writing that just made me think that.
Didn't bother me.
It didn't have anything to do with it.
But I thought, like, this is weird.
And I started to look back.
M.R. James, my favorite ghost story writer, no evidence that he's gay, but I don't think he ever married.
A lot of people have speculated that he might have been gay.
Anyway, just a lot of, it's an interesting thing.
I suspect that it has to do with the sense of feeling other than your body.
In other words, feeling that your desires are other than what your body was made for as a body, and that it separates you from your physical self and gives you a sense of an other within you.
Anyway, it's a contribution that gay people are making to the world, so good on them.
Here is a ghost story writer I discovered this year who only it only he only turns out to be gay.
This is not a guy.
His stories have nothing to do with being gay.
And I just looked him up because I liked his writing so much.
And sure enough, there he was again, another guy.
But he was a paperback original writer, which in the old days was kind of disdained.
A guy named Michael McDowell, really, really good writer, wrote a book called The Elementals, one of the better ghost story novels I've ever read, The Elementals, by Michael McDowell.
And I really recommend it as a ghost story.
I'm kind of sorry I started off with the gay thing because now people think like, ooh, he's gay.
I don't want to read it.
It has nothing to do with that.
It's just a really, really good ghost story.
The Elementals, excellent read for Halloween if you're looking for a good novel.
Debate is tonight.
We're all off to watch it.
You know, we're going to take a drink every time somebody says something stupid, I think.
And then, so we won't be here tomorrow.
We'll be dead.
But we'll be back to talk about it and figure it all out.