Lockdown Blues sort of

 When the foundations be destroyed, what can the righteous do?    The righteous these days are silenced.  Oh you can hear them if you want to but you have to know who they are and that's already an obstacle, and you have to go out of your way to hear them.  What hits you in the face every minute is the lies.  And unfortunatley a lot of people believe them.  

 I feel helpless, I AM helpless or at least I don't know what to do if I had the means to do it..   I watch the conservative films at Amazon but the people who need to watch them don't.  D'Souza's Trump Card, Curtis Bowers' Agenda, both films, The Plot  Against the President that just came out.   They play in the echo chamber.   

And every day I hear the latest COVID statistics and the vaccine promises that don't tell you about the side effects, and the impression is created that the hundreds of thousands that are dying are inevitable, not a word to the contrary when I know, and I know others know, that HCQ could have saved every last one of them if they'd received it in time.  Zelenko Protocol, you can find it at Eleftherios Gkioulekas Zelenko but it may go poof on you as it did on me though I found it again.  And Simone Gold   I've posted some interviews with her.  Del Bigree also did one I haven't linked.  Harvey Risch.  Knoweldgeable honest people who are being silenced.  But there must be many others.  Why aren't we hearing from them?   This is murder.  I'm happy to know that the suppressors are going to face God for it some day, and so are those who are silenced by their own cowardice.

Totalitarian control by the Left has been brewing for quite a long time but I guess we didn't expect it to appear so suddenly, so effectively shutting us all up so completely.   All the right things are said by some, you can find them, but that's all, they are said and nothing happens, and of course they are said only into the echo chamber, outside of which the lies prevail.

I don't think I've ever looked forward to death as I do now.  I'm useless here, there's no reason to stick around, the alternative is a better life in a better world in the presence of Jesus.  I'm grateful I have that faith because so many others don't, and they won't let me give it to them either.  I'd prefer to go in the Rapture.  My own personal death, even if I die happy, probably won't persuade anyone, but the Rapture might.  Of course that will be twisted by lies too.  

Evolution Proven To Be Impossible.

We are now in essence a banana republic as they are called, complete with bogus "President Elect" who is not legally President Elect but is called that by our corrupt media and the whole corrupt leftist gang, who continue to force their views on the rest of us, yes, even to the point of election fraud which very probably replaced enough Trump votes with enough Biden votes to steal the election.  We might have a chance to save ourselves from this destruction of our great American system except for the fact that there are among other things all too many nonleftists who think Donald Trump is a fascist or something other than the effective defender of true American values his supporters know him to be.  Thus are we likely lost.  Doomed.  No more America.  Well I knew it was coming years ago, why make a fuss about it when it's finally come?  We tried.   They were smarter.  

So I'm trying to ignore it all, there being nothing I can do about it, and have been entertaining myself with such pastimes as rereading the UC Berkeley web pages they call Evolution 101.  

There is one subject that is particularly relevant for my purposes, the "mechanisms of evolution," also called there "mechanisms of change" and "mechanisms of microevolution."  The same four "mechanisms" are listed for each designation.

They are Mutation, Migration, Genetic Drift and Natural Selection.  As I recall, when I read this site some fifteen or so years ago now-- it's changed some since then but this concept is pretty much the same -- it was this part of it that contributed most to launching me toward the thoughts I've been elaborating ever since.  I think the first post I wrote on the subject at EvC was titled something like "Natural Limitations to the Processes of Evolution"  I've been blocked from EvC so I can't go find out for sure.  I'd read up on some population genetics and spent some time thinking through the genetics involved in breeding programs, mainly dogs.  

So, Mutation, Migration, Genetic Drift and Natural Selection are given as the "Mechanisms" of the biological changes that are mistaken for evidence of the ToE.

 These four "mechanisms" are not very similar to each other.  Mutation hapopens at the genetic level, producing a new sequence for better or worse, Migration is the movement of individual animals from one place to another, Genetic Drift is the consequence of random selection of traits/genetic material that creates a subpopulation within a larger population, and Natural Selection is one of the ways a trait and its genetic substrate is favored in reproduction which results in the creation of a new gene pool, or supposedly ultimately a new species.   

What I noticed back then was that that Mutation and Migration add to the genetic pool while Natural Selection subtracts from it and Genetic Drift is one of many possible effects of a subtractive process.  I already thought of natural selection as a subtractive process because I'd been thinking about domestic breeding and how it's all about preeserving chosen traits from contamination by alien genes.   In other words nothing is ever added, all alien or unwanted traits are eliminated -- that's the subtraction -- and the whole idea is to pare down the genetic stuff to as many fixed alleles as possible, which is what creates the breed you want.

After having thought about this for so many years it's hard for me to understand why it isn't obvious that getting new phenotypes in nature has to follow the same path as getting them in domestic breeding:  in selecting a trait or set of traits you are eliminating all competing traits, and this means you are reducing the genetic variability in the new population.  And reducing genetic variability means you are reducing its opportunities for further phenotypic change.  If the genetic variation is quite high to begin with, continued development of new phenotypes can go on occurring for some time, even the formation of daughter populations with their own different phenotypic presentation, but the trend is always toward the reduction of genetic variability.  This fact absolutely defeats the ToE but it's utterly ignored.  Even when reduced genetic variability is recognized its implications for the ToE never enter the discussion.

So I discovered that such things have been discussed in population genetics circles but always with the idea of which phenomenon being considered has most to do with furthering evolution.  

I've always struggled with why Genetic Drift is taken so seriously.  I don't get it.  It's just one version of the processes that bring about a new population phenotype or its gene pool.  In other words it's just a version of the subtraction of traits and their alleles or genetic material of whatever  kind, in order that others come to expression, the old having disappeared.  It's always emphasized that genetic drift is random, as if this distinguishes it from other ways populations change.  The only method that could be considered not to be random is Natural Selection but the effect is the same.  A trait is eliminated, others favored and the allele for the rejected trait disappears from the population.  Subtraction.  The alleles for the selected trait or traits increase in number but nothing new has been added.  All that has happened is that one or some have been lost.  Subtraction.  Loss of genetic diversity.

Migration is just the REconnection of one population with another that had split at some time in the past.  During their separation new genetic combinations would have emerged, bringing out new phenotypes so that it looks like they are something new and different.  What keeps getting overlooked is that you can get dramatic differences in appearance just from inbreeding a new set of gene/allele frequencies in reproductive isolation.  Quite dramatic.  But the point here is that you get them because of the elimination, subtraction, of other forms of the traits involved.  

The ToE seems to be talked about as if there were endless genetic possibilities for change.  But if the phenotypic changes that suggest evolution in the first place turn out to be the product of eliminating genetic material the opposite from the usual expectation is the reality.

Mutation is like migration or gene flow except that it actually does bring something new into the genetic picture.  Usual a bad something or a neutral something.  But for it to be part of the population phenotype it has to be selected and all its competitors eliminated.  There's always going to be subtraction meaning always a loss of genetic diversity when you get new phenotypes.  

This is true even at the individual level.  Sexual reproducion is the process by which traits for the offspring are selected, quite randomly, all other possible traits possessed by the parents eliminated from the chosen genetic collection.  That's the formula.  It's elimination or loss that brings out the new traits.  

In one of the Attenborough films I watched recently there was footage of him as a younger man meeting an isolated tribe somewhere like Borneo or Irian Jaya, I don't remember.  Every time you see such a tribe of people who have been isolated for a very long time you can't fail to notice how strikingly distinct they are as a population, very similar to each other, clearly all of the same family, but identifiable as a group.  That's what a race is, just a population that has developed its own identifying traits in isolation over time.

That's how the ten lizards loosed on Pod Mrcaru developed their characteristic huge head and jaws over the thirty years they were left alone there.  they started out with normal sized heads and jaws like their parent population and all it took was their reproductive isolation over somenumber of genertations to bring out the traits they now all shared.  Breeding only among themsleves their own peculiar set of gene frequencies got recombined and passed on over and over again down the generations without the input of genes from the original population they'd come from.

There is no exception to this.  Evolution is impossible because of how genetics works.  Certainly there are lots more examples to be explored and lots more angles on the question that are also fun to pursue, but I dare claim that this is the rock bottom definitive falsification of the ToE.   Tty all the chess moves you can think of, if you're smart enough and honest enough you have to come to this same conclusion.

Thanks to God in Anticipation of the Day Dedicated to that Purpose

There are lots of things for me to be grateul for.  I'm taken care of, I'm free of major worries about my family and my own wellbeing, as well as having writing projects I enjoy enormously, and much more.  

But I have to say that the way things have been going politically I'm seeing the destruction of America looming, and while I know that God's judgments are for the good in the end as is everything else He does, it's nevertheless sad that it's come to this.    How it affects me personally is not my concern, I'll probably do fine as far as that goes, but the loss of America is enormously sad.   And the corruption that has been growing adds to my melancholy.

All of which this year makes it my most fervent gratitude that this world is not my true home and that eventually I'll live in a perfect world where truth and honesty and true love of God and neighbor reign.  I'm SO grateful I have that to look forward to, and above all that I've had the highest privilege a human being can have, of believing in God and the truth of His Word and salvation through Christ Jesus. 

Back to Evolution: It's SO wrong and I've proved it but so far to deaf ears

  Been watching more films than usual these days.   Could write opinions on a few of them but for the moment I'm most interested in David Attenborough's A Life on Our Planet.

His films do a nice job of nature photography, especially capturing animal behavior, always fun to watch.   But of course he's big on evolutionary theory, explains everything in those terms, and is concerned about the human impact on the planet.  He's convincing about the consequences of some thoughtless human actions such as the wanton destruction of rain forest and the poaching of animals in Africa, and the need to take measures to correct these things.  I'm all for whatever can be done rationally in that direction that takes care of both man and environment, and that is also Attenborough's aim.  

But what exercises me the most is the question of global warming and human contribution to it.   It is demonstrable that the planet is warming, just from the melting of the Arctic ice, the disappearance of glaciers for instance.  The controversy is over how much is contributed by human activity.  

If you are convinced of evolutionary theory you will be thinking in terms of vast aeons of time.  If the last ice age started about 2.6 million years ago, the timing accoding to current scientific theory,  you think of an enormously slow process of freezing and warming, you also think of there having been many ice ages so that when this one is over another one will begin, on that very slow schedule.   

The last ice age, according to science, ended 11,700 years ago, warming ever since apparently, although they also say the planet is considered to be still in that ice age.   Which I suppose must mean the warming trend isn't over yet?:  I don't know -- reading is hard on my eyes so I tried to get the gist and not spend more time on it --  but with the Arctic ice melting it must be close to ending.

 https://www.livescience.com/40311-pleistocene-epoch.html#:~:text=The%20Pleistocene%20Epoch%20is%20typically,parts%20of%20the%20planet%20Earth. 

However, it's interesting that the 11,700 years of warming is at least in the time frame ballpark of the biblical framework I think is the real timing.  It's not the usual millions of years   On biblical time the Flood was roughly 4500 years ago, a little less I think, and that would have to be the event that brought on the ice age.  I think in terms of the way an airconditioner works, by evacuating heat, and there are many events associated with the Flood that would generate heat s well as evacuate it, including of course the splitting apart of the continents which must have happened around that time, which I've argued quite a bit at EvC Forum.  

Only one ice age, somehow precipitated by the Flood, or by the climatic catastrophe of which the Flood was a part.  There is evidence of glaciation that came pretty far soueeth, covering much of North America for instance, though something I read put the southernmost extent of the ice as far south as northern South America a few degrees above the Equator.  Since it would have occurred after the Flood there would have been no human beings in the western hemisphere.  I'm not sure how long it took the descendants of Noah to spread out over the world, but even to spread from their landing place in the Middle East into Europe and Eastern Asia and Africa would likely have taken hundreds of years at least.  (No, humanity did not originate in Africa.  The African races or tribes are descended from Noah just like all the rest of humanity).

There is no reason to dispute the physical observations of global warming, only the timing.   What science thinks took billions or years, on biblical time only took thousands.  Sure it's laughable, but only because we're so used to thinking in terms of such vast stretches of time.  It certainly made me laugh when I first encountered the biblical timing.   Now I just automatically think in those terms.  

SO.  The ice age has been retreating for a few thousand years, the planet has been warming up for that length of time.  We know the glaciers have been retreating, there's evidence of how far they went and they aren't there now, so why is there such a big panic about its all finally retreating to the point that even the Arctic is melting?  AND of course, what is the necessity of imputing that event to human activity?  It was going to come to that point anyway, and while eleven thousand isn't four thousand it's not the huge time frame of millions in this case, it's computable on a human scale.  

If there is some contribution of human activity to the process, some argue that it's very minor, a matter of two or three percent of the total effect.   Stopping human activity is not the solution although we certainly need solutions, and if we had a biblical perspective we would have been thinking in those terms for a long time already how to mitigate the destructive effects of the warming trend.  If we were rational we would be thinking this way I mean.  Stopping SOME human activity of course, such as cutting down rainforests and doing whatever we can to replenish them and even grow a few more in other places, planning agricultural development around them, making use of new technologies that reduce the space required for agriculture, as Attenborough points out is now possible.  That sort of thing,  (Getting the Africans to stop poaching is another rhing.)

A biblical perspective would of course also tell us that this world is destined to end, and probably fairly soon too.   Doing what we can to improve its habitability for people as well as other living things is the right thing to do in any case for as long as we have left   -- that is certainly within the responsibility God gave us back in Eden before the Fall -- but it will come to an end anyway.  Because the whole thing is about human sin, meaing disobedience to God's commandments.  Think "Karma" if you can't wrap your head (or your prejudices anyway) around the idea of God's Law.  Karma is a very flawed intuition of God's Law by fallen human beings, but it's the same basic idea:  misbehavior brings negative consequences, only the Bible puts those consequences on a global as well as personal scale.  That's what brought death and disease and suffering of every kind into the originally perfect Creation, that's what brought on the Flood that destroyed most of life and the physical Creation as well, and it's human sin that brings on all forms of God's judgment, which must certainly have increased in the west since the sixties.  Very few of us think in such terms unfortunately, even Christians although it's the reason the Son of God became a man to live and die for us so we can be saved from our debt to God's Law    On the national scale, the blood of aborted babies cries out for God's vengeance, just as the blood of Abel did, but on we go committing murder anyway, and every other kind of sin.  Because as fallen creatures we are blind to God and the spiritual underpinnings of reality.

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While I'm at it I feel like sketching out my usual arguments against the Theory of Evolution.   The Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection was Darwin's title for his theory and although it's changed in some ways the basic theory remains mostly intact.  They still don't seem to have discovered that Natural Selection CAN'T be the means of evolution from one Species to another, because selection subtracts genetic material in order to bring out the new traits/phenotypes that are considered to be the evolution that results. 

Darwin didn't have the benefit of the science of genetics in his day but he did have a lot of experience with breeding, pigeons mostly, or Artificial Selection, which is what led him to his formulation of Natural Selection:  by selecting traits he could create some dramatic new species of pigeons, so it made sense that Nature must do the same thing to bring about all the variety we see there.  

Even his experience of breeding pigeons could have shown him that to get his elaborate new breeds required the loss of other traits than those he selected.  There is a cognitive trick involved here that is easy to fall for.  You are getting something new, a pigeon with enormous tail feathers perhaps, or with an enormously puffed-out chest,  but you get it not by adding anything but by removing everything that doesn't contribute to that chosen trait.   Since you are selecting FOR the trait you may not be aware that it requires losing all competing forms of that feature to bring it about.  

Genetically this is what happens too.  A pure breed is sometimes defined as having reached the condition of fixed genes for all its main characteristics, or "fixed loci"  or homozygosity for those traits.    This is because competing alleles for each gene have been eliminated from the breeding pool by selection and the selected alleles then reproduced over many generations.  Or not as many generations in the case of a very small founding population.   

A small number of cattle originally taken from a wild herd would first produce scattered observable individual differences that had been present in the original population but barely noticeable there.  It would take the inbreeding of the particular genes in the daughter population to bring such traits to the point where they can be clearly seen.   (Another way of saying this is that the daughter population has a new set of gene frequencies from that of the parent population and over time they bring out new phenotypes that disitnguishes it from the original wild herd)  These new phenotypes now come to the fore in a few generations because there are fewer mating choices in this smaller population,  

As the herd continues in domestication it grows in population and continues to elaborate and develop an emerging phenotype.  It contains only the genes selected in the original isolation from the wild herd, and as long as the domesticated herd continues in reproductive isolation it will be those and only thoe genes that will contribute to the herd phenotype that will develop over time.  It will go through many changes in individual animals through many generations until eventually a characteristic herd phenotype should emerge.  This requires reproductive isolation so that only those original selected genes contribute to the herd phenotype.    The population could grow very large and continue to display its own characteristics that distinguish it from the original wild herd.  Of course animals will be sold and the population diminshed and the genetic component will lose some genetic material that way but if the growing herd is large enough such losses may not make much difference.  The owner of the herd may also decide to breed chosen individuals for reasons of his own.  In any case we know there are hundreds of different cattle breeds that have become purebreds over some number of generations, all most likely from the same original wild stock, all differeing from that original wild herd -- AND from other herds that were also taken from it  

This is because the domestic herd does NOT have the OTHER genes, it has only those of its own set of gene frequencies shared within its own population, that produce its own particular phenotype.    It has LESS ability to evolve than the original herd did, not more, and ultimately this means evolution  is limited and at the extremes will become impossible.  So, far from being the means of evolution from species to species, Natural Selection actually makes evolution impossible beyond the built-in genetic material of the species genome.   Evolution defeats evolution.  Meaning the phenotypic variations that selection and isolation bring about reduce genetic diversity within the selected population and such reduction is contrary to what would be required if the ToE were true.

Everybody always wants to add in mutations at this point as if that would defeat my argument.  But all mutations do is what any genetic addition does -- it interferes with the reproductive isolation that brings about new phenotypes.  Any kind of addition such as resumed gene flow between populationjs will have the same effect.  Supposedly a mutation would bring about something truly new but this is unlikely.  All it can do is change the trait coded by a particular allele, and it will only vary whatever that gene already does.  If it's eye color it will change the eye color, it can't do anything else.  If it's fur texture it will change the fur texture, it can't do anything else.  And if you do get a viable mutation that also gets selected, for it to become characteristic of the population requires that it continue to be selected and reproduced and the same genetic situation of loss of genetic diversity is the result in any case.  So you get a new eye color.  That's about it.  And my guess would be it's not new anyway, it's probably only the reemergence of an eye color that was lost to the species a long time ago.  Genes are just strings of chemicals.  

I always forget how long it takes to make any part of this argument.   I could go on to the Pod Mrcaru lizards and the Jutland cattler, which demonstrate that evolution, which is really microevolution or built-in variation, can occur in a very short period of time, thirty years in the case of the lizards, something less I think in the case of the cattle.  All it takes is reproducrtive isolation of a daughter poulation breeding among themselves for enough generations to bring out all the possibiities of the new set of gene frequencies and blend them together.   No millions of years are required.  Darwin's Galapagos turtles were the result of separation from the mainland turtle population, whose new gene frequencies produced a new general phenotype over generations of breeding in isolation.  Probably only took a couple of decades, depending on how many founding turtles there were.  The Pod Mrcaru lizards started from ten individuals.

Another argument I like is the fossil trilobite argument but I didn't intend this to become my definitive statement.  

And then there are the Geological arguments, since the ToE is considered to be shown in the fossil record which is contained in layers of sedimentary rock.  There is a seeming progression up through the Linnaean taxonomy that seems convincing, and I certainly can't explain that apparent sequence.  But the strata are explain in terms of tens of millions of years to define a specific time period -- Cambrian, Devonian, Mississippian, Permian, Triassic, Jurassic etc etc etc -- that all together from primordial to recent time add up to billions of years.  On this time scale a  particular creature, say reptiles, show up within one period of tens of millions of years, and the next period up, meaning the next layer of sedimentary rock above it, contains mammals which are then taken to have evolved from the reptiles.  this is impossible for many reasons but I'm too tired to try to argue it out again here.

And besides, the mere equation of a slab of sedimentary rock with a time period is just plain ludicrous.  And don't tell me that equation isn't made.  There is a model of the strata at the Grand Canyon that makes it very clear that is how it is understood.    No, such strata of different kinds of sediments could not possibly have occurred so regularly over tens of millions of years per layer, neatly changing from one sediment to another so abruptly and completely.  Obviously the best explanation for the strata is the Flood of Noah.  Worldwide.  Chock full of fossils of all the dead things the Flood was intended to bring about.   Water in many forms causes layering of sediments.  It even occurs with the rising of sea water.  Walther's Law I think.  I forget so much of this because I haven't argued it in so long.  It should all be at EvC Forum though unless Percy decided to censor it all.  Some of it is on my other blog here but not as much as is at EvC.  

Wish some evolutionary biologist might come along who has the honesty and integrity as well as the IQ to get my point.  Not that I have such a great IQ I hasten to add.  Mine is only middling, but perseverance and prayer can accomplish a lot.  Nevertheless it takes a lot of thought and a lot of time and it's counterintuitive in many ways, as well as fraught with all the baggage of the ToE that is being challenged.  If I die soon I'd like to think somebody appreciated it all though.

A Trump win is likely provable but maybe not very soon?

 Wondering what's going to happen with this election.  Georgia has certified Biden as winner despite the fact that all the recounting was only recounting a bunch of fraudulent ballots along with the true ones.  My impression is that Trump's legal team will be able to prove massive fraud if they get it to court, and i can't imagine that they would stop short of that.  They still need time to probe into all the allegations and document the actual detailed evidence.  Mark Levin is going to talk on his podcast Sunday night about the stages involved in such a legal proceeding as this one.  People keep expecting the evidence to be already available but he is going to explain why that expectation is ignorant of how the law works.  They have plenty of evidence of some fraud and of the great possibility of much more and that is what they need at this point.  If the Dominion program was set to turn something like 3% of Trump votes to Biden that's a pretty huge number.   

Probably the biggest suspicion comes in with the fact that the Republicans did well in the "down ticket" votes for other offices, and only lost Trump, which is extremely unusual.  Besides of course the suspicious fact that while Trump was winning handily on election night all counting suddenly stopped, w and then when it resumed the next morning Biden had pulled ahead.  Sydney Powell explains that as Trump's winning at such an expectedly high level the fraud softward couldn't deal with it so they had to adjourn to readjust hings to put Biden in the lead.  

I just hope we eventually find out.  I wonder what happens if they prove that Trump really did win some time after Biden is in office?  Throw the bums out I hope.

Reconsidering Some of the Timing of the Book of Revelation

Although I've accepted the Pretribulation Rapture eschatology because it all hangs together so nicely, I do run into doubts about it.  The main doubt is about the amount of time in which the judgments of the seals play out:  That is, seven years is an awfully short time for the six seals of Revelation 6 to unfold, and the seventh doesn't even start until the 8th chapter..  

The first thing that started to bother me was why we have different groups of martyrs.  Those revealed under the altar at the opening of the 5th seal seem to have been waiting quite a long time for God to avenge them, but within the Tribulation time frame it's all within the seven years, and probably fewer than that since they are waiting for a new group of martyrs to join them.    

Presumably those martyred over the two millennia up to the Rapture would have gone in the Rapture and be in heaven with the Lord Jesus as the seals are being opened, not treated with any special distinction from the Church as a whole.  But those shown in the fifth seal are treated as a special group.  Why is there a separate special group of them presumably coming after those martyred over the last two millennia?    What makes this group different from some fifty million who were tortured and killed by the Roman Church over 600 years during the Middle Ages  for instance, who would now be in heaven with the raptured Church?   I can't see any reason to divide them.  Those under the altar are "souls," evidently not yet in their resurrected glorified bodies, which means they aren't part of the raptured Church.  

I'm thinking that at least the first five seals  were already opened throughout previous history.   When we get to the sixth seal, we are now getting what sounds like prophecy for the first time, NOW comes the Day of the LORD, so the opening of that seal could be yet future.  In fact that might be the starting point of the Seventieth Week of Daniel or the Great Tribulation, instead of the opening of the first seal.  However, this plays havoc with the Pretribulation time frame.   

It would put the martyrs in the Raptured Church and since they are not yet glorified that can't be the case.  These  things are not fitting together with the Pretrib scenario.  And it is during the Tribulation that the multitude pictured standing before the throne of God in Revelation 7 were martyred, and they must be those the martyrs under the altar are told to wait for.   But although the first four seals judgments are dreadful in their own way they don't point to the killing of believers, yet this is what is assumed in the Pretrib scenario.  It seems to me more likely that they represent all those martyred in the previous two millennia, now waiting for the final martyrs of the Great Tribulation that is about to occur to join them.  If that is the case, of course, the Rapture has not yet happened.  

And that is hard to reckon with after accepting the Pretrib eschatology.  When DOES it happen then?  I am still persuaded that it doesn't make sense for it to occur at Jesus' Second Coming, but I don't see any place for it before that if I remove it from the Pretrib frame of reference.  The Pretrib timing is still the most logically satisfying, but then the time possibilities for the first six seals, and especially the fifth, seem to me to undo it.  

In his vision of Revelation John saw Jesus open the seals.  The Pretrib timing has this beginning after the Rapture of the Church, but the timing is only because of that interpretation and otherwise there are no other clues to the timing.  It could have started in John's time.  Jesus had ascended to Heaven and had earned the right to open the scroll, and there is no clue given as to why there would be any delay.  Unless we equate the opening of the seals with the Great Tribulation or Day of the LORD itself, but then that is what I'm now finding problematic given the seven-year period it all has to fit into.

It certainly seems necessary that the Great Tribulation be the seven-year period of Daniel that has yet to be fulfilled.  There are many reasons for that besides the fact that the seventieth week is still unfulfilled, a major one being the Old Testament imagery and context of the middle part of the Book of Revelation, very specifically the beasts which reflect those of Daniel and certainly his fourth beast which is now revealed to be the Roman Empire, though described as including the characteristics of the first three empires.  We see the Roman Empire and we see the Roman Church as the historical context of the Antichrist.   

Revelation reflects history as well as representing events yet to come.  In John's time he would of course recognize the Roman Empire in the beast that incorporates the beasts of Daniel's prophecy, and therefore identify the final Antichrist and the Harlot Church as related to that beast  but the Roman Catholic apostasy did not yet exist so he wouldn't know about that.  However, she's "Mystery Babylon" and all the symbolism points back through the empires to Babylon and the original religion of Nimrod and Semiramis, which was well tracked in the book "The Two Babylons."   All the False Christs track through that line, which is characterized by the image of mother - Queen of Heaven, and child -Savior which became emblematic of the Roman Church, placing it squarely within that Babylonian lineage and outside Christianity.   The Antichrist would surely represent that system rather than some unknown modern nation, and since he is also a civil power the Pope is a great candidate, the Vatican being a secular state in its own right thanks to Mussolini.  

Anyway, all these symbols point to ancient facts as well as currently existing entities as well as entities prophesied to play a future role in the End Times drama as spelled out in Revelation.  It all ends conclusively in the Day of the LORD.   Nimrod was Satan's first Antichrist stand-in (the word "vicar" will do) for the Messiah , though there are many antichrists in small and every false religion has its own version.   The Pope is put in the place of Christ too, that's what makes him the best candidate for the Tribulation Antichrist.  The vision represents that which was, which is and which is to come.  Although some teachers present this as a chronological sequence through the seven-year Tribulation, much of it appears to overlap.  It could nevertheless be a simple chronology anyway, except now I'm wondering about some elements that don't seem to fit, and that wondering MAY throw off where I end up placing the Rapture..

I also have a problem with the spiriting away of the Woman of Revelation 12 into the wilderness for 1260 days which is the equivalent of the "time, times and half a time"  allotted to different events in the Tribulation period, both in the Book of Daniel and the Book of Revelation.    (Later:  Decided to go back to John MacArthur's study of Revelation to find out what he says about the woman's flight into the wilderness and of course he solved my problem:  this occurs at the midpoint of the Tribulation as the last three and a half of the seven years, considered to be the GREAT Tribulation, begins.  The Abomination of Desolatioin is just now set up in the temple and as Jesus warned in Matthew 24, those in Israel who know the scripture flee into the wildneress for the duration.   Works nicely.  By the way, this particular sermon in his Revelation series is especially fascinating for a lot of reasons:

.https://www.gty.org/library/sermons-library/66-42/the-war-of-the-ages-part-2  )

Well, I'm probably mostly trying to distract myself from other things that could drive me even crazier if I let them.  I'm far from having arrived at any conclusions about all this but I think the questions are valid and need more thought, maybe in a less crazy time, if that's even possible now..  (If I continue listening to the parts of MacArthur's Revelation series I've missed, and especially if I go back to earlier parts I may have failed to grasp, I may very well find he answers it all anyway.)

Multiple Sources of Election Fraud

 Already for weeks we'd been hearing of ballots found in dumpsters and wastebaskets, one bunch all marked for Trump.  We were getting uncontrolled mail-in voting, ballots submitted in the name of dead people and multiple ballots sent in by one person, new election laws enacted at the last minute by officials with no authority to make such decisions, all to loosen existing laws in a way that makes fraud easier.  No enforced deadline, ballots accepted long after the end of election night, no requirement that signatures be matched, postmarks fraudulently changed acording to one whistleblower,  legally pernitted observers kept from getting close enough to observe what's actually going on, under the excuse of social distancing although arrangbement s could have been made to put up plexiglass barriers and weren't.  Large numbers of  boxes of ballots to be counted delivered well  after election day to a number of polling places at 4 in the morning.  ALL in Democratic states run by Democratic governors.  Republican states were somehow able to get their ballots counted on election night, but not the Democrats.  In many precincts where Trump had a clear lead on election night, vote counting suddenly stopped and some time later all these extra ballots started being "found," every last one of them without exception marked for Biden, and in numbers that couldn't have been better calculated to overthrow Trump's earlier lead.  And that's not even to mention the fraudulent suppression of conservative opinion by Big Tech social media.

All circumstantial evidence of course, and when the Trump team started with the lawsuits we got loud objections to such supposedly unjustified conspiracy thinking for which there was "no evidence."  Al Gore got 37 days to have recounts done in Florida in 2000 without Bush interfering, declaring victory on the basis of the first count, got four different recounts and only then was Bush declared the winner.  But not this time.  Biden has declared victory, complaining about Trump's insistence on recounts and fraud checks, Biden supporters have even done victory dancing in the streets,  and Biden is acting like he's the President while these efforts to check the validity of the election are barely underway.  And this time it's not just one state but many states that are being checked.  

All circumstantial so far, yes it is, but there's an awful lot of circumstantial smoke here for there to be no fire.   And now I'm hearing about the possibility of some truly meaty evidence of large-scale fraud that may make a big difference very soon.  This is the testimony of Lieutenant General Thomas McInerney about a computer program used in many precincts that changes votes from one candidate to another.  This is the Hammer program which McInerney says was altered by a program called Scorecard invented by a Dennis Montgomery from a defense surveillance program to a vote switching program that is designed to flip something like 3% of the vote from Trump to Biden.   Montgomery's story is told here (and you may have to pick your jaw up off the floor after hearing about the level of corruption reported on here):  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kEkKNNXa9to     I heard McInerney interviewed by Larry Elder on his program at 5 PDT  this Tuesday, and here's Steve Bannon interview of McInerney done before the election:    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYpCzWKkSy8

Here's another pre-election  interview of McInerney about the Hammer/Scorecard program:   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYpVvjh_TMA

Until all this started coming out, despite the huge turnout for Trump, and despite knowledge of fraud committed in other elections by Democrats, and despite plenty of suspicion about this one,  I was willing to think well maybe angry Leftists did manage to get out the vote in enough numbers to pull off a legitimate win.  

Now I'm well beyond such a naive thought.  It may still be possible that the numbers will add up for Biden despite all the fraud, but while I say it's possible I really doubt it.   I just hope it's possible to get a fair and accurate reassessment of what really went on.