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I used to wonder how my wife could read essentially the same book over and over again. I mean, the books did have different titles and different authors, but if you summarized the plot in one or two sentences it could probably apply to all of them.

Then I started reading Joel C. Rosenberg books. They were interesting, I liked them, I kept reading, and then I realized how my wife could keep reading variations of the same book. And I don’t mean that in a bad way.

Here’s my summary of the books. Note that each series is meant to be read in order. And the title of this blog post is winter 2021, but I’ve been reading these since July 2020. It’s just in winter 2021 I finished all of them.

I started with the original series – The Last Jihad, alternatively known as the Bennett and McCoy series. This seems to be his earliest work, as the writing is slightly clunkier than his later series. But it was engaging, and educational in some spots. You will certainly come away with a better understanding of some of Ezekiel’s prophecies after the 3rd book.

What I also liked about this series was that it showed how the end times and the anti-Christ could happen from a geopolitical perspective. My exposure to end times stuff has been from the spiritual and theological angle. Not that these books discount or ignore that – indeed there is much scripture referenced in the later books – but the focus is different.

My comparison is that this series starts out like Tom Clancy and ends up more Tim Lahaye and Jerry Jenkins.

Also, the series ends pretty conclusively, but not completely so. There could be another book after the 5th one, but it understandable why he ended it there.

I then read the next series available at our library: The Third Target, alternatively known as the J.B. Collins series. This series was different because it was Rosenberg’s foray into first-person perspective. It didn’t take much getting used to, but he didn’t go back to it for his other books so I think he didn’t care for it.

This series came to a definite conclusion – no chance for another book. Well, I suppose there always could be, but it would be a stretch for this one. This was a little darker than the other series, probably the same amount of violence but a little more depravity to contrast the bad people from the good people.

Next up: The Kremlin Conspiracy, alternatively known as the Marcus Ryker series. This one was back to third person perspective like the original series, but centered around Russia rather than Israel and not much in the way of end-times prophecies. Mostly just military action. The third book ended well enough, but there were a couple of question left unresolved. Then a couple weeks after I finished the series (and was halfway through the next), I saw that Mr. Rosenberg had a fourth book coming out for this series.

Finally: The Twelfth Imam, alternatively known as the David Shirazi series. This was more in the spirit of the original series, but focused on Iran and surrounding countries. And not the standard end times settings, but a possibility of what could happen. This series ended fairly well; I’m not expecting any surprise fourth book for this one.

Basically, if you like any of JCR’s fiction books you’ll like them all. But you can’t just pick a book at random and read it, you need to read them as a series. You can pick a series at random and read it – there’s no overlap or crosstalk at all between series.

And you may be wondering why I’m reviewing only this one guy’s books in this blog post. No ulterior motives – his books are the only books I’ve been reading for the last few months. But now that I’ve read all the fiction series he has, I’m adrift in looking for what to read next. Browsing through the library, I happened upon a Jules Verne book I hadn’t read yet, so I’m in the middle of that. I’ll try to include that in my next reading update.

I was very tempted to call it Fall Fotos, but I didn’t. And now that’s in your head anyway.

Here are some pictures I liked, to represent what things can be like around here in the fall. The first two are around my property and the last 4 are at a park.

After years of not having a dedicated internet connection, I finally found something that works.

T-Mobile Home Internet

We are too far back from the main road to get cable, unless we wanted to pay the cable company to install a repeater and a quarter mile of line.

Satellite wasn’t really an option, because that’s download only and you need a landline for uploads, and we don’t have a landline. We have a home phone, but it’s through cell service.

We checked about DSL, but that wasn’t available, nor is fiber optic.

We used to have a dedicated hotspot from AT&T, back when it was a family share plan. It worked fine, but it had a data cap with overage charges if we went past the cap. That wasn’t much of a problem until about two years ago.

So we switched from the family share plan to the unlimited plan, which gave us more data on our phones and was a cheaper plan (even without factoring in the overage charges) but we were not allowed to keep the dedicated hotspot.

We survived by using the hotspot capabilities of our phones. That was fine, but it hastened the demise of my iPhone 5’s battery. But that was easily replaced (the battery, not the phone), and then our local library helped out by doubling their number of free mobile hotspots. We could check out a hotspot for two weeks at a time, and that was especially helpful this last spring when the schools switched to remote learning, and this fall when they resumed classes remotely. And for my job being work-from-home too. The last couple months we’ve had up to 5 people in online meetings at the same time. The library hotspot is okay but it wasn’t that good to keep up with that many devices, and its range wasn’t that good. It’s that little hotspot thingy about the size of a deck of cards.

Then, after a visit back to the family farm a couple weeks ago, my brother encouraged me to try AT&T fixed wireless. It’s what they use in their rural area, but it requires the service provider to setup special equipment, both at the cell tower and at the home. So they only put the equipment at the cell tower if there are enough people in the area to warrant it.

I checked online and AT&T fixed wireless is not an option.

I then checked Verizon because I had seen their commercials. They have a wireless home internet option for people like me, but it’s not available in my area. But I clicked on the option that said I was interested, so they’d be encouraged to add the service here.

I had looked into mobile hotspots from Sprint last year, but they were not helpful because I didn’t have a cell phone plan with them.

Going down the list of cell services, I tried T-Mobile. They had a home internet service, which was invitation-only, but some things online said it was opened up to everyone. With nothing to lose, I went to the T-Mobile site and clicked the link to sign up. They said service was available in my area! But then they said I had a call them to setup the service.

That had me confused. A cell phone company with a website to be able to check for service in my area but not able to let me buy the thing didn’t quite make sense.

That was late that day though, so I left it until the next day. In the morning though, they called me and left me a voicemail. Yes, I was approved and they’d like to get me going with the home internet service. So I called them back and went through a lot of questions, mostly related to my credit worthiness. This lady also said I was lucky to have gotten an invitation, but she never asked for any invitation info – she just saw that I was approved and that was that.

A couple days later, the home internet box arrived on my front porch. I plugged it in, the lights turned green, and it worked.

At that point, there had been no charges on my credit card and no email from T-Mobile welcoming me or even acknowledging my existence.

Even now, a few days into the service, I got no communication from T-Mobile about my account.

The home internet box uses their cell signal but it’s a more powerful box, about half the size of a toaster. It has both 2.4GHz and 5GHz signals, and they’re both more powerful than the free library hotspot. The kids were pleasantly surprised by the extra speed of the 5GHz band. And if it ends up not being good enough everywhere, there are ethernet jacks on the box to which I could connect an extra router.

The only problem I’ve had so far with the home internet box is that it doesn’t like FTP. My FTP client just gives errors. As soon as I fire up my phone tether hotspot or the library hotspot and connect the laptop to that, the FTP client is happy. I have not checked Archie or Gopher yet.

Overall though, it’s much better than having to go to the library every two weeks for a new hotspot. They won’t let those be renewed, so we’d have to take it in and hope they had another one ready to go. Sometimes we’d have to wait a few days for someone else to turn one in. Apparently we aren’t the only people in the area with this problem.

For $50 a month, it’s worth it. At least I hope it’s $50, I’ll find out once I get a bill or something from T-Mobile.

I have an update to an old post about the trichotomy of features. This one pertains to ambitions of a person.

This one could have been called hobbies, but I already have one for hobbies. So I chose “ambition” instead, but it pertains in general to things people want to do. This is not for the ambitions themselves but rather for what the person needs in order to accomplish them.

I was inspired to write this after reading a column in World magazine. That column had referenced the quote “It takes a village to raise a child.” and what stuck with me from the column is what it takes to make a village.

What does it take to make a village? It takes families.

For a healthy village – one that would do a good job in helping to raise a child – you need healthy families. “Healthy” as in emotional and social health, not physical health. What happens if your village is full of dysfunctional families? You wouldn’t want your child raised by that village.

I connect this to the concept of herd immunity. “Herd immunity” in the realm of diseases and vaccinations has to do with if a large enough percentage of a population is immune to a disease then the disease won’t spread throughout the population.

If you replace “disease” with “dysfunction” and “physical health” with “societal health” then that’s the picture I was getting in my mind of what I wanted to convey. If most of the families in the village are traditional families then the children will be “immune” to a lot of problems that befall society (plenty of citations out there, here’s one).

People want to live in a good neighborhood, but if they’re not trying to be a good family and also good neighbors, then it’s not going to stay a good neighborhood. It’s like the saying about traffic: you’re not stuck in traffic, you are the traffic.

You could keep going with this concept: what does it take to make a good family? and then what does it take to make a good whatever that answer was? Etc.

Why does God allow evil? Why does evil exist in the world?

Those are some questions that are a good combination of philosophy and theology.

I like to answer them with a different branch of study – physics.

The question of why evil exists is framed wrong, because evil does not exist – just like cold and dark do not exist.

“But!” you may protest, “I can see and feel darkness and coldness, so how can you say they don’t exist?”

Cold and dark are just the terms we have for lack of heat and lack of light. They do not actually exist as things in and of themselves. If they existed, you could produce them. No one can produce cold, and no one can produce dark.

If you could produce dark, you could make a flashdark that would “shine” a shadow wherever you pointed it.
If you could produce cold, you could make a refrigerator that would not have a heat byproduct.

Remember, refrigerators and air conditioners don’t make cold, they just transfer heat. That’s why the other side of it blows hot air – that’s the heat removed from the inside.

Also, if you could produce cold, there would be no absolute zero – you could always add more cold to make the temperature go down further.
There is also an absolute dark, with no light. But you can always add more light to make something brighter, and you can always add more heat to make something hotter.

That’s because light and heat are the things that do exist.

Evil doesn’t exist, it’s just the term we have for a lack of good. As a Christian, I would adjust that sentence to say “lack of God” because He is the source of goodness. If you disagree, then you’ll have to clarify where goodness comes from. If you don’t believe in God, then you should not be asking the question about evil because there is no fundamental right and wrong. “Evil” in that case can just be rephrased as “deviation from the cultural norms”.

Trying to find out what is causing the evil is like trying to find out what’s causing a room to be dark. There is no source of darkness; the solution is to bring in some light. If there’s too much evil somewhere, the solution is to bring in God.

Of course, the analogy breaks down at some point, so don’t take it too far. And this does not cover the discussion of “Why does God let bad things happen?”

We have finally joined the civilized world and switched to an unlimited cell phone plan.

I kept my old family share plan because it was grandfathered in and once I switched away from it I could never get it back. Plus, 15 gigabytes a month should be plenty for any reasonable family.

But we had been going over the 15 GB allotment the last couple months, and the overage fees were adding up. We are in a somewhat rural area and there’s no good wired internet option, so our cell phone plan is also our home internet, using a USB hotspot that’s also on the family share plan.

Anyway, I had been resisting the call of the unlimited plans because the last time I had checked they were more expensive than our metered plan. One option was to get an unlimited plan for just a USB hotspot for the laptop, but no one does that. You can’t even get just a USB hotspot on a limited plan by itself. Everyone forbids a USB hotspot as the only device in a plan and requires at least one phone line.

Except for Boost mobile, but we tried their USB hotspot and it was terrible. The device was fine, it was their signal was so poor. Then we tried a T-Mobile line and it was great. They offered a free USB hotspot for a month. Their signal was great, speeds were good. But then the trial period was over and they didn’t make it easy to keep using that device. I was ready to pay $30-$40 a month for a limited USB hotpsot plan, but they didn’t want my money.

In the end, it worked out better I suppose, since I had no other option but to switch my existing AT&T plan to unlimited. I did have the option not to switch, but after pricing it out, their new unlimited plan was cheaper than my old family share plan. Even if I didn’t want unlimited data (so as to prevent the family from becoming mindless zombies), it was going to at least save me money.

For a little while before the switch though, I did feel like such an old-timer. I reminded myself of the people who saved every little thing because they lived through the Great Depression, but I was trying to save every little bit of bandwidth. Just like it doesn’t make much sense for me today to wash and reuse tinfoil, that’s how I probably appeared to my kids. “Dad, why are you worrying about how much data we are using?” They never actually said that, but I imagined they were thinking something along those lines, since to them just about every place has Wifi and bandwidth is just not something that needs to be thought about.

Oh well.

Maybe someday I’ll tell them stories of the first couple of modems I ever used – the 300 baud, then 800 then 2400 baud modems on the family’s Commodore 64. No prefix of kilo- or mega- or anything. Just plain ol’ baud. And yet the messages went through a lot faster than some of these texts that I send these days. When I see a text taking forever to send, I’m thinking to myself “It’s only 50 bytes. At the speeds this phone can transmit at, the transaction shouldn’t even be noticeable.”

I suppose that’s the price of convenience.