Today’s Haul

Here’s how low I have sunk, fooling with tools. Today I stole my neighbor’s garbage.

I was driving down the road, and I saw a pile of wood. In a neighborhood full of mahogany trees. I had been waiting for this.

I went back later and took a look. It was a bunch of thick, short, crotchy logs. The bigger ones were all hollow, but it was obvious that a bandsaw could still extract short boards two inches thick, about a foot wide, and between one and three feet in length. Well worth the effort. The only question was whether they were desirable mahogany or somewhat less desirable live oak. That’s about all we have here, when it comes to typical hardwoods.

I kept driving by the pile. I even took a photo. Then later temptation overcame me, and I grabbed a log. I took it back to my lair and tried to stuff it through the 19″ bandsaw, which I had been sure was a too-big tool buy, and DAMN if the thing wasn’t too thick to go under the bearings.

I live in a place where no one cuts firewood, so of course, I have no maul, real (non-electric) chainsaw, or wedges. I managed to trim it down using a blacksmith’s hammer, cold chisels, and a circular saw. Using a 3/4″ bandsaw blade, I popped the log into two pieces, sawed a flat side onto it so I could resaw it, and cut some boards.

I got some advice from the Sawmill Creek crowd. Evidently, when you cut fresh wood, you cut it as soon as possible, and you waterproof the ends to keep it from splitting. All I had was Kilz, so I put that on the ends.

I have to check the bandsaw tomorrow. I’m afraid I may have messed up a new blade. The wood is very wet and easy to saw, but I saw a few sparks. Maybe the hard, crunch bark is not nice to saws. This is not the kind of neighborhood where people drive nails in trees, and I didn’t see any metal anyway, so I don’t think I hit a foreign object.

If this wood turns out to be okay, it will pay for a new blade. Mahogany is expensive, even in a town where people pay yard guys to cut it up and throw it out. And this mahogany has some figuring in it, unlike the stuff at the lumber yard.

I THINK it’s mahogany. It looks and smells like the mahogany my friends and I used to help the trash guys run into a chipper when I was a kid. Can you imagine that? It would never happen today. There are always a lot of trucks in Miami, disposing of tree limbs, and when I was a kid, they let us help, because we thought the chipper was cool.

I’m hoping it’s not live oak. It’s light, even though it’s very wet, and it’s not coarse at all.

Photos:

The wood is pink, mostly. Some is kind or orange-yellow. Some of it is spalted, because it came from a rotten log. The boards in the photo are about 2 1/2″ thick, which means I can get maybe five 3/8″ sheets from each one. And I have maybe another 150 pounds of this stuff yet to cut.

The bandsaw is a wonder tool. You just put a log on the table and push, and look what you get. I love it.

Uncle Obama Will Buy Them for You With Rich People’s Money

This is truly annoying. I didn’t make it to church. The car crapped out.

My sister and I go to church together, and we take turns driving. And she has not totally mastered the concept of punctuality. We usually get there about half an hour into the service. This week, it was her turn to drive, and the service started at 12:30, and I finally gave up and left the house at 12:53. I didn’t want to drive, because the car had been acting up, but I was stuck.

On I-95, the car acted funny, and the scary motor-shaped light came on, so I exited in the ghetto and limped to a car parts store, where I got water remover, octane booster, and fuel injector cleaner. I put the water remover in the tank and headed home. I’ll clear the car’s codes later, scan it, and see what happens.

I felt very sorry for myself, and on that basis, I decided to get some ice cream. I went to CVS. If you’re not familiar with CVS, you eventually will be. Remember Judge Dredd? In the future, every restaurant is Taco Bell? In the present, every drugstore is CVS, or soon will be. I know a CVS where I can stand in the front doorway and see another CVS.

The ice cream at the CVS had melted. Unbelievable. So I looked at the cookies. They had something called “CVS Absolutely Divine” cookies. Seriously. What an appetizing name.

They had several varieties. I did what I always do when confronted with possibly faux-premium stuff (like Edy’s and Ben and Jerry’s, which are full of fake crap). I looked at the label. It said “butter”! Hmm…

Bought a package and did the mature thing, i.e., started eating them in the car. They’re really good! I was amazed. Better than Pepperidge Farm, and probably half the price.

I’m thinking of patenting a bucket-like device attached to a strap. You put the strap around your neck, and the bucket rests on your chest and catches things when you eat in the car. I think this would be very elegant. Let me know if you would consider buying one.

Maybe to make the experience seem more familiar, I could make the bucket look sort of like a kitchen sink.

Sorry to Say

RE this week’s column: gold IS heavier than lead.

Nothing Ventured…

I achieved virtually nothing today, but I had fun anyway. I was trying to make a guard for my table saw, and I also finished up my first MDF zero-clearance insert.

Everyone at Sawmill Creek says MDF is great for inserts. What they failed to tell me, or what I failed to read when they told me, was that this stuff is no fun to drill. You get a crater going in and a blowout going out. It looks like the only way to avoid this is to put your MDF between slices of scrap. Then you have a hard time figuring out exactly where the drill hole will be, which matters when you’re putting a set screw 1/4″ from the edge of an insert.

I managed to do an adequate job. The piece of scrap I glued to the back of the insert to stiffen it is holding on, the set screws work, the slots are in the right places, and nothing has exploded.

Working on the guard was a nightmare. The splitter mount on the Powermatic 66 has no room around it, so you can’t really get a wrench on the jam nut. Maybe you could if you took the blade off. EVERY TIME YOU ADJUST THE SPLITTER. You can imagine what a pain this is, when you have to adjust it ten times. I worked around it with channel-locks, which probably saved no time at all. This probably took a solid hour out of my day. Here’s a great lesson: if you have a nut under your table saw top, holding your splitter on, replace it with a wingnut. I plan to do that. It will be more than tight enough, and I won’t have to keep a 9/16″ on the bench all the time.

I learned that a table saw is a wonderful tool for shaping thin aluminum, provided you don’t care how many fingers you have at the end of the day. It’s ironic; I had to do a lot of things that made me very nervous, while trying to build a SAFETY DEVICE.

I had some aluminum angle…I can’t call it “angle iron,” but I don’t know the right name. Anyway, you get the idea. I was able to turn it into useful flat pieces of aluminum by sawing it lengthwise. Then I had to turn the aluminum into a splitter and guard support, and wouldn’t you know it, the first pieces I cut were too short. I should have measured, but this was one of those times when you don’t measure, because you’re sure the pieces you’re cutting are way too long, and you plan to measure when you cut them down to size. I couldn’t believe the splitter was too short. I had to start all over.

I know aluminum can mess up a wood blade, but I had no problems, and I have two dozen blades, so I was willing to take the chance. The blade I used was a Corian blade with about fifty thousand teeth. This is not what you use to cut thick aluminum, but for an eighth of an inch, it was jim dandy.

I had to interrupt my day to check my car’s codes, twice. It’s going “BLOOP…BLOOP.” I figured it was another COP problem, but the scanner says no codes. Maybe there’s water in my gas. Guess it’s time for a trip to Discount Auto Parts. That sucks, but it beats another warranty repair, which would entail handing my car over to thieves so they could sabotage it in order to get me to pay for more work. The COPs are on a special warranty; the rest of the car is my problem.

Reminds me how much I want a pickup. Maybe next month I’ll buy a new Ford for forty dollars and some table scraps.

I have a Wixey angle gauge. I decided to give up and get one, because some gadgets are such labor-savers, you have to be a complete fool not to buy them. Put it on my saw today, zeroed it, stuck it on the blade. Readout: 90.0 degrees. Thank God for that. That’s one tedious adjustment I won’t have to make. I also got a Wixey digital planer readout. In retrospect, that was probably stupid. I would guess a planer is accurate to 1/64″ without the digital thing. That’s probably good enough.

The chicken I fixed for lunch was fantastic. I guess baked chicken is always fantastic, unless you’re the worst cook in the galaxy. It’s not exactly challenging. I’ll tell you what I did anyway.

Winn-Dixie was selling fryers for about three cents each, so I got one. I salted it, hit it with black pepper and cheapo garlic powder, injected it with Korbel Brut mixed with salt, and draped a few leaves of fresh rosemary on it. Stuck it in a Corningware dish, covered, and baked it at 300 for about four hours. When I remembered it was in the oven, it had flattened out as though depressed. That’s because it had gotten too tender to be perky. I left all the fat in the chicken when I baked it, and it melted and formed a gorgeous fragrant pool. And the chicken was nicely browned.

So far, the saw guard design is feeble, but I know what’s wrong with it, and it’s easy to fix. I’ll crank it out soon. After it’s operative, maybe I’ll order a Shark Guard. The shopmade guard will keep me alive until it arrives. The advantage of the Shark Guard is that it has a dust port, which is a real pain to make.

I found a trash pile with what I think may be mahogany logs in it. Not sure. It’s not the best wood on earth; the logs are hollow. But you could still resaw them and get some wood which would be more than adequate to make beautiful boxes. If you take a two-foot log that’s eighteen inches thick, and it’s hollow, you should be able to get boards maybe two inches thick and a foot wide out of it. That’s definitely worthwhile. If it’s live oak, however, it’s not all that desirable. I may go swipe a log and cut it open. Aren’t bandsaws great?

I’m reading up on cutting and drying wood. Might be doable.

Sleep awaits.

One Board

I bought wood today. It’s depressing. I think about all the wood my family has owned, and all the wood I still own in another state, and then I think about what I just paid for a little piece of walnut.

Maybe I’m actually a billionaire.

I got a five-foot-long piece of walnut, 1 3/4″ thick and 7″ wide. And it was about 55 bucks. It has no options. It doesn’t play MP3s or anything. It’s just wood. Hard to believe.

I felt even worse about it until I reminded myself that I actually had 15 feet of walnut. Because I’m not going to use wood 1 3/4″ thick in anything I make. I’m going to resaw it on the bandsaw. I figure 3/8″ is a good thickness for wood you use in boxes. Half an inch is clunky, and a quarter inch is hard to work with. Try putting a spline in a box that thin.

I designed a table saw guard today, so I bought stuff to make that. I went out and stared at the saw until an idea came to me, and I had one that will work. I’m going to make it out of aluminum strips and quarter-inch plexiglass. I hope I can cut plexiglass without making a fool of myself. I have a flush router bit, if all else fails. All those Corian blades that came with the table saw…you would think one of them might work.

The guard I’m making is very simple, and I should be able to yank it off the table instantly when I have to. It will be hinged so you can flop it back over the side. I don’t know how to put a dust port on it, but I’ll figure it out. For twenty bucks, it should be a pretty good guard. It will require me to leave two of my spiffy Irwin clamps on the rear rail of the saw, but I have eight of them, so it’s not a big sacrifice. I can put something else in there when the fixture becomes permanent.

The wood choices at the lumber place don’t seem to be as great as they once were. Let’s see. Oak, poplar, maple, cherry, jatoba, purpleheart, zebrawood, ipe, mahogany, bubinga, lacewood, ash…that’s most of it. I’m not all that excited about funny looking items like bubinga; I think they can look tacky. But the lacewood is an exception. It might make a nice box. I can’t really describe it. You can probably Google a picture.

I picked up some Johnson’s paste wax for the saw top. Everyone says it rocks, so I’ll try it. I also got Allen screws for my new zero clearance insert.

Picked up a chicken on the way home, and I’m roasting it with homegrown rosemary. I didn’t realize how much rosemary resembles pine needles. The smell is really strong. I hope they didn’t sell me some kind of evergreen shrub as a joke. Hemlock, I’ll bet. They got Socrates, and now they’re after me. I’ll bet it’s the Illuminati again. They aggravate the crap out of me. If it’s not the Illuminati sending me unwanted pizzas, it’s the Masons or the Trilateral Commission, toilet-papering the yard. Jerks.

Socrates was a pedophile, so he got what he deserved. I wonder why we don’t hear more about that in college. If Socrates were alive today, his picture would be on every government pervert site in the country.

The chicken is roasting. I shot it full of Korbel Brut. I am no longer ashamed to say that I like Korbel Brut. If you haven’t tried it in twenty years, give it another chance. They did something to it.

Off to the garage.

Variety Sucks

The machine-tool quest continues to frustrate. I think I know what I’m doing now (to a minimal degree), but I still have to shop. That means waiting. And waiting. And after that, waiting.

I can buy a mill right now. I know of at least one pretty good deal. Mills aren’t that complicated. I want a Millrite or a Bridgeport, in decent shape. But the economy is dissolving, and I’m sure mills are going to get cheaper and cheaper, and I want a lathe first, so I’m not in a rush.

Lathes are a pain. There are five million models, and they come in many sizes. It took me a long time just to figure out that I wanted a 12″ swing and 36″ between the centers. After that, I found out there are lots of options, and you have to get the right ones. For example, you need a quick change gearbox. And you want a big spindle hole, and you may want to avoid a variable speed model, because they tear up.

When a full-size mill becomes available for sale, it’s usually a Bridgeport. All you have to worry about are options and condition and price. When a lathe comes on the market, you have to wade through details. It may be for wood or metal. It may be the wrong size. It will probably be made by a third-rate manufacturer. So every time a new ad pops up, you should expect disappointment.

This is why I have no lathe.

Right now, the best choices I have are two Clausing 5914s. One is local. The other is far away, but it would cost the same amount of money, and the seller is a very reputable dealer. That dealer is in the hospital, so I won’t even see photos of the lathe until he’s out.

Do I want a Clausing? I’m not sure. I’ve read that the drives on these things can have problems. I’ve never seen anyone say something like, “WOW, you snagged a CLAUSING!” They say things like, “It’s pretty good. It should be okay. You can probably find parts.”

Sooner or later, I’ll find one. Then Coral Gables will find out I have a lathe, and they will realize lathes are fun and useful, so they’ll pass an ordinance banning them.

Today I’m thinking of running to the lumber store and picking up some hardwood and maybe enough plywood to make a crosscut sled. I accidentally saw some hideous Internet photos of a table saw injury, and I’m horrified, and a sled is a good safety measure.

I don’t know what to think about table saw safety. On the one hand, I know an awful lot of people get hurt. On the other, I haven’t come across anyone yet who got hurt without doing something stupid. Apparently many users refuse to use guards. And a lot of people don’t use push sticks or even splitters. Forget safety; I can’t figure out how they manage to cut wood, period.

It looks like there are hordes of men out there who buy saws, trash the guards and splitters immediately, and go to work. I think the guy who sold me my saw is in this category. I had to make a splitter for my saw, and it has no guard.

I would like to have a nice guard. I want a Shark Guard, but the guy who makes them runs three months behind, and they are not cheap. I took a look at the photos, and it looks like I could make the same basic thing in half a day, using a plasma cutter, a file, a drill, and a table saw. I think I should do that. It will make it impossible to use my Gripper half the time, but those things are overrated anyway, because you can’t use them on any cut where the Gripper has to go past the splitter. I need to make a decent push stick for cuts like that.

One clever inventor has come up with a riving knife that bolts onto old-fashioned table saws. I saw that, and I ran out to my garage to see if I could do something similar. Sure doesn’t look like it. The device would have to ride on the deal that holds the saw blade, and in my saw, everything is so close together there is no place where you could mount the knife.

Sooner or later, a lathe will appear in my garage. The life will be bliss.

New Lesson

Airgas has let me down.

I went out to the garage, figuring I’d finish my saw-blade hangers. I fabricated the parts, and I was going to weld them up. I tried to do this a few days ago, but it turned out I had no gas. I had left the valve open.

I hate exchanging pretty new Ebay tanks for old rusty bottles, but I decided I had to get used to it, so I let the Airgas guy give me an exchange. Today when I tried to connect it, my regulator wouldn’t screw into it far enough to seat. I took out the regulator doodad, and I looked at the valve. The threads had shavings hanging off of them. I have no idea how Airgas did it, but they mangled the threads on their tank. It scraped my threads up a little when I tried to attach the tank, but thank God, I had better sense than to force it with a wrench.

And of course, I found this out fifteen minutes before Airgas closes for the weekend.

I wonder if I could just use CO2. I have it lying around in little beer tanks.

I also wonder if Airgas has a whole bunch of ruined valves. I assume they use the same fitting to put gas in that customers use to let it out. Or maybe they don’t. The valve has another side to it, and it has something on it that sort of looks like a quick-release. I suppose that would be faster for their purposes.

Anyway, no welding until Monday. Unless I resign myself to CO2.

Rebels are we…Born to be Free…

I am more pessimistic than ever about Obamanomics.

I just saw Jared Bernstein on CNBC. He’s Biden’s economic wonder boy. There were four pundits interviewing him about the stimulus package.

Just for background purposes, Paul Krugman endorses Bernstein, and Bernstein writes for The Daily Kos. Or did before he was appointed. This should tell you all you need to know about his leanings.

It was horrible to watch. The pundits kept asking him why we should take money away from responsible people and give it to people who took on debt they could not handle. And he refused to answer. He smiled, and he kept saying, “That’s a great question,” but he weaseled and sidestepped and refused to answer. This wasn’t Fox, mind you. This was CNBC, home of openly belligerent liberals like Erin Burnett and Mark Haines. But this panel was hostile.

He said the handouts would not go to “speculators.” Okay, first of all, many professional speculators are productive people. They may have screwed up in the housing boom, but many of them are excellent businessmen, and I would rather see them get the money than give it to hopeless perennial deadbeats. Second, as the hosts fairly screeched at Bernstein, an impoverished individual who signs a note with an adjustable rate IS a speculator. He’s just not a sophisticated and rational speculator who has a chance of succeeding. He’s speculating that he’ll have enough income to pay the note, and that the interest rate will remain low. And the basis for his speculation? HOPE that his basic nature will CHANGE. Suddenly he’ll become capable of handling money, in spite of a lifetime of poverty.

Bernstein kept saying, “through no fault of their own.” But as the hosts pointed out, when you sign a note you can’t pay, it’s definitely your fault.

Rick Santelli, who may well become a cult figure, asked how subprime-borrower losses differed from stock losses. Why shouldn’t stock losses be covered? Millions of responsible people put their retirement money in carefully chosen stocks, and now it’s gone. And come to think about it, it’s gone because of the irresponsibility of the people Bernstein wants to continue subsidizing. With money taken from the responsible, who are already eating major investment losses!

The injustice is mind-boggling.

Bernstein whined about foreclosures. Look, if the banks don’t want to foreclose, they don’t have to. They can write off principal and eat big losses. They can lower interest rates. They don’t have to adjust rates based on the prime rate. They can go as low as they want, voluntarily. The banks took this risk. Responsible people didn’t. Why shouldn’t the banks take the hit? After all, they made the bad loans, and they made the voluntary choice to raise interest rates above a sustainable level for their subprime borrowers.

And if we have foreclosures, so what? Sure, people who had no business buying homes will lose their houses. What will happen then? Responsible people–the class of people who sold them the homes to begin with–will snap up the homes. They’ll rent them to the subprimers, and life will go on as it was before the boom, when all of these people were renting, anyway.

Here’s a nasty little secret nobody wants to discuss. As a class, these people are going to lose their homes regardless of whether we help them. No one wants to talk about that. The reason? They’re not the kind of people who can hold onto wealth. If they were, they wouldn’t have needed subprime loans. Sure, there are exceptions, but the fact is, people who can’t qualify for loans are rejected for good reason. They fail to make the payments. Save them this year, and they’ll be in default two years from now. Why is no one talking about this? Many, many of these loans are going to fail regardless of what we do. They would have failed even if the economy hadn’t tanked. Sooner or later.

Even if we gave them the homes outright, many of them would mortgage them, blow the money, and end up on the street. You cannot make people prosperous. It is impossible. All you can do is provide opportunity. History proves that when you give poor people enough money to live well, without requiring them to be responsible, you do not get affluent people. You get more poor people.

I’ll tell you what I always say about “the rich,” and by that, I mean people who do reasonably well. Democrats call them rich; so will I. If you took everyone’s money and possessions away and started over from nothing, and you let people scratch their way into the best economic positions they could manage, in six months, the people who were rich before would be rich again, and the poor would still be poor.

Come to Miami, if you don’t believe me. This town is full of rich Cubans who were rich in Cuba, then poor in Miami, and then rich again in Miami. It’s also full of Cubans who were poor in Cuba and have gotten rich here, but that’s because the US has a better economy and is considerably less corrupt.

Fidel and his minions enjoyed cutting the Cuban rich down to size. But a lot of the people the communists stole from came to the US and had the last laugh.

Bernstein and Obama want equality of outcome, regardless of how we get there. That’s a mirage. You can’t reach it. It’s the wax carrot of socialism. The carrot is phony. The stick is all too real.

The Democrats are going to get their way. I think a lot of people who used to see themselves as liberal now realize they’re more conservative than they thought; many people are furious about what’s happening. But Obama will win. We are in deep, deep trouble. It has to be the hand of God. We are not this stupid. We didn’t walk into this obvious trap; we charged. Like we were getting free admission to Disneyland.

It’s Cuba all over again, and this is 1958.

She Crieth in the Chief Place of Concourse

I couldn’t get this to load on CNBC’s site, and it occurred to me that I may not be alone.

Here is Rick Santelli, calling for a revolt against Obama’s mindless, destructive socialism:

Bigger quotation:

10 My son, if sinners entice thee, consent thou not.

11 If they say, Come with us, let us lay wait for blood, let us lurk privily for the innocent without cause:

12 Let us swallow them up alive as the grave; and whole, as those that go down into the pit:

13 We shall find all precious substance, we shall fill our houses with spoil:

14 Cast in thy lot among us; let us all have one purse:

15 My son, walk not thou in the way with them; refrain thy foot from their path:

16 For their feet run to evil, and make haste to shed blood.

17 Surely in vain the net is spread in the sight of any bird.

18 And they lay wait for their own blood; they lurk privily for their own lives.

19 So are the ways of every one that is greedy of gain; which taketh away the life of the owners thereof.

20 Wisdom crieth without; she uttereth her voice in the streets:

21 She crieth in the chief place of concourse, in the openings of the gates: in the city she uttereth her words, saying,

22 How long, ye simple ones, will ye love simplicity? and the scorners delight in their scorning, and fools hate knowledge?

23 Turn you at my reproof: behold, I will pour out my spirit unto you, I will make known my words unto you.

24 Because I have called, and ye refused; I have stretched out my hand, and no man regarded;

25 But ye have set at nought all my counsel, and would none of my reproof:

26 I also will laugh at your calamity; I will mock when your fear cometh;

27 When your fear cometh as desolation, and your destruction cometh as a whirlwind; when distress and anguish cometh upon you.

28 Then shall they call upon me, but I will not answer; they shall seek me early, but they shall not find me:

29 For that they hated knowledge, and did not choose the fear of the LORD:

30 They would none of my counsel: they despised all my reproof.

31 Therefore shall they eat of the fruit of their own way, and be filled with their own devices.

32 For the turning away of the simple shall slay them, and the prosperity of fools shall destroy them.

33 But whoso hearkeneth unto me shall dwell safely, and shall be quiet from fear of evil.

That’s from Proverbs, chapter 1. Gives me chills.

Jump In

Reader Paula sent this in an email. It appears on a site called Caringbridge.com:

I have been diagnosed with Ewings sarcoma. The cancer started in my right hip and leg area and the tumor is quite large. Scans have shown that the cancer has already spread to my lungs. My first cycle of chemotherapy January 15 and the second cycle is to begin on January 29.

Paula says this is from a lady named Chrissy. She is 27 and married. She has kids aged 5, 6, and 7.

In other news, Mish Weiss wants to give up her fight against leukemia. Her doctor is very upset, and he put a message on her blog. He has gotten her to agree to 21 more days of treatment, using new drugs.

I hope you’ll join me in praying that she will be healed, and that she will do what it takes to please and serve God. I’m not suggesting there is something wrong with her behavior. Whenever I pray for someone to receive something, I also pray that they will turn to God and make a change. I do that because blessings are connected to obedience and faith, not because I am judgmental. Spare me the angry comments.

Surprise, Surprise

Imagine you are an evil spirit, and you want to destroy a wealthy, powerful nation that, on balance, serves God. What would be a good way to do it?

First you might come between the old and the young, introducing musical genres and dance styles and other cultural changes that act as barriers. You might even manage to create an extremely bizarre and unnatural situation in which the old and young separate to socialize. No healthy civilization has ever had a sick, twisted segregation of the generations. It’s a great way to bring nations down. It’s like girdling a tree. You disconnect the leaves from the roots, and the leaves die.

The separation would prevent the young from being around the old enough to absorb their time-tested wisdom, so when you filled the heads of the young with destructive garbage, there would be no responsible voice to balance it. You could make the young believe really stupid things. “Pride is good.” “Aggression is a virtue.” “All types of sexual behavior are healthy and natural.” “Abstinence is sick and impossible.” “Money solves life’s hard problems.” “Man created God because man is weak and cowardly.” Wisdom is strength. Take it away, and you get weakness.

To help you brainwash the young, you could destroy the educational system. You could corrupt it to the point where most teens had a hard time succeeding at simple tasks like finding major countries on a map or naming fundamental principles and rules expressed in the Constitution. They’d be so ignorant, they’d believe any ridiculous claim, including the claim that socialism–which has been utterly discredited by history–works.

You could misuse the Constitution to remove Christianity from schools, and eventually, you would be able to use the schools to attack Christianity openly. Once you manage to get courts to say that acknowledging Christianity amounts to establishing a religion, you end up with a helpful logical conclusion: saying positive things about Christianity in state-run schools is unconstitutional, but preaching the nonexistence of God is not.

When the country’s standard of living began to decline as a result of sin and rebellion, you could mask it by pretending to fight for women’s rights. You could convince women that raising children is a trivial job fit only for ignorant, unskilled immigrants, and that no woman who has no outside-the-home career should have any self-respect. Then women would go out into the workplace, and families would have more income. By objective standards like home ownership, they would be worse off than their parents, and they would work more, and each breadwinning pair might earn less real wealth than a typical male wage earner in an earlier generation, but things would look good on the surface.

You could convince people that loading up on credit, which has been considered stupid for centuries, was a good thing. Their neighbors would have fancy cars and houses, in which they actually had little or no true ownership interest, and people would get jealous and join the flock of debtors. The borrowing would enable people to have better possessions, and they would seem and feel richer than they actually were.

It would be helpful if the value of the currency could be manipulated, so you might take the country off the gold standard. Then inflation would be considered normal, and people would earn salaries that seemed high because they contained a lot of zeroes. And they’d feel pretty good about that.

Then you could convince people that Israel and the Jews caused a lot of the world’s problems by holding onto land captured in war. Never mind the fact that territory has traditionally been acquired in this manner. Forget the fact that the wars in question were defensive wars, and don’t mention the size of Israel, and the need for buffer areas around it. Israel’s enemies have proven that they don’t keep promises, and that land doesn’t satisfy them, and that their real goal is the destruction of the Jewish state. Try to keep the press from acknowledging these things.

Eventually, you’d end up with a nation that supports Muslim land grabs, in opposition to God’s promise to Abraham, which, as your state-paid teachers say, is just a fable. And once a land opposes Israel, its fortunes will fall.

When it’s all over, you have an economically depressed land full of atheism and other forms of idolatry, which opposes Israel, embraces just about every type of sin, has fractured families, and has no clue about the value of ancient wisdom. The people have debt. They have no savings. They are losing their jobs. They don’t know how to pray or repent. God has no plans to help them; in fact, he now helps their enemies. He looks elsewhere for champions, because unlike George Bush and Barack Obama, God does not promote and assist failures at the expense of the responsible.

Job well done.

This blog post expresses an idea that has been rolling around in my head for a while. And time seems to be bearing it out. Maybe it’s just something I thought up on my own, out of neurosis and pessimism. Or maybe someone merciful and generous and patient whispered it in my ear, to help me and my family survive, and to equip me to inform others. Maybe that same someone is whispering it into hundreds of millions of ears all over the planet.

We’re Going to Miss the Frying Pan

Looks like the Dow is poised to open way down. Another victory for Obamanomics.

This is shocking. You can hear the fear in the voices of the hosts on CNBC.

Sometimes being right is not pleasant at all.

Now pundits are talking about inflation. Where do you go in an economy in which stocks are dead, your wages are depressed or gone, and your savings are under attack from inflation?

Frankly, I hope the anti-deflation measures bomb. At least, I hope they fail badly enough to protect responsible people who saved money and didn’t get caught up in the sleazy, ill-fated housing orgy.

My clever and sophisticated survival plan is to trust God. I think this recession is his punishment for slicing up Israel and turning away from him, and if he can punish a nation, he can protect people within that nation.

The Bible says, “The Lord knoweth the days of the upright, and their inheritance shall be forever. They shall not be ashamed in the evil time, and in the days of famine, they shall be satisfied.”

Hold on tight.

A/C Help

Help me out again. I asked about this a long time ago, but now I’m serious. I want to put an air conditioner in a cinderblock garage wall. The garage has become an even better refuge than Frank Costanza’s “The Place to Be,” but it won’t be much of a refuge when it’s 90 degrees in there with 80% humidity.

I have determined that a 115-V unit 18″ high by 24″ wide, pumping out 15,000 BTUs, should do the trick. The space is 565 square feet. It’s not insulated, and I suppose I could go above 15,000 BTUs to be sure, but I hate to cut a bigger hole, and I’d really like to stay at 115 volts so I can avoid running a third circuit.

I need help with the hole. I believe it will have to be 26″ by 20″, which is not much. I can put a special blade in my ancient circular saw and make the hole. But what do I do to finish it? The unit has to sit on something, and I would want something across the top of the hole to support the cinderblocks above it.

I assume there must be a product made for this. I suppose I could fake it with pressure-treated wood, but that would make me nervous.

WAAAAAHHHHHH!!!

At this writing, the Dow is down about 50 points. Wow, that Obama recovery is really something. This morning the futures looked good. We were expecting a rally because of “overselling.” Now it looks more like underselling is what actually happened.

I saw a funny Youtube this morning. It showed clips of CNBC’s Jim Cramer, talking about the new exciting BULL MARKET! And if the person who put the Youtube together was honest, Cramer was saying these things in the fairly recent past. And he was not playing around. The bear market was OVER; no ifs, ands, or buts. And CNBC’s Rick Santelli was in the video, telling Cramer how wrong he had been. Cramer claimed otherwise, but the clips seem to prove Santelli right.

A Drudge-linked story says inflation is here, but it’s based largely on temporary peaks in energy prices. Look at oil prices now, and tell me January is meaningful.

It’s amazing how poorly Obama is doing. He’s not just average or mediocre. He is a full-blown train wreck, and not all of it is related to the economy. He can’t even do a competent job of appointing cabinet members. How hard is that? When it looks like you’re going to be elected, you tell your people to find good prospects. You give them a simple list of questions to ask, and one of those questions is, “Do you pay your taxes?” Everyone knows this. Remember how we ended up with the catastrophic Janet Reno DOJ regime? Bill Clinton’s top choice didn’t pay her taxes. The tax question is routine and obvious. If you don’t ask it, you risk hiring someone who causes the death of two dozen kids, because she has no idea how hostage negotiations work. We waited 444 days to get the Iran hostages out safely, and they were adults. After 51 days of trying to extract innocent children, Reno decided it was time for the tear gas and tanks.

Not all of Obama’s choices are tax evaders. Richardson paid his taxes but may also have paid off political supporters.

Suddenly Bristol Palin doesn’t look so bad. Although when I say that, I am trying not to think of her shameful Fox interview, which I’m sure you’ve all seen. And she’s a kid, not a governor or Senator or whatever.

Cartoonist Sean Delonas is in trouble for drawing a cartoon of a dead chimp, suggesting a chimp wrote the Porkulus Package. People say it compares Obama to a monkey. One problem: Obama didn’t write the bill. This is another one of his giant failures. He has no idea what’s in this bill. He broke his promise to post it on the Internet before signing it, and there is no possibility that he has had time to read it. I’m not sure the Internet is big enough to hold it. You know, I’m considering spending a low four-figure sum for a lathe, and I’m taking weeks to get it right, and it’s a relatively small sum which will have absolutely no effect on my future. Can’t we take weeks before we decided how to spend eight hundred billion dollars?

For the cartoon to reflect on Obama, he would have to have authored the bill. That bit of logic, like most others, is lost on the openly anti-Semitic Al Sharpton, who encouraged blacks to riot in Crown Heights, leading to the brutal murder of Yankel Rosenbaum. Sharpton thinks the cartoon is troubling. I guess Delonas needs to atone by drawing a cartoon encouraging chimps to kill Jews. Or portraying Jews as chimps. Or something. Cartoons like those would be just fine by Sharpton’s standards.

If you check Youtube, you can find videos of real secular prophets: people who knew the economy was doomed, and that Obama would make it worse. One example is Peter Schiff. He was a Ron Paul supporter, which means not all of his Eggos have popped out of the toaster, but he pointed out something chilling. He said the boom we experienced after 2001 was based on excessive borrowing and inflated housing prices, which gave consumers economic leverage that was not based on real income or assets. Whee. Does that mean what I think it does? It seems to mean the real economy–the one we would have, had we not mortgaged the entire country–has been tanking for almost a decade, and now we’re just getting the bills. Which are bigger, because we prolonged the “boom” by borrowing.

Nothing is worse than borrowing money in anticipation of higher income, and then getting lower income. And when the lower income is partly caused by the borrowing…it’s like M.C. Escher economics.

I wonder if Escher is available to be a cabinet member.

Schiff says to buy guns and ammunition. I guess you could call that “bearish.” My response? Way ahead of you, bucko. Let me know if you find a place that will sell me Claymores.

“Carter 2.” That’s what the smart money was betting on, but it looks like Obama is going to make Jimmy Carter look like Ronald Reagan. Or, if you’re a partisan who can’t admit Reagan’s greatness, Abraham Lincoln. I compared Obama to Gilligan the other day, and I’m still going with that metaphor. Although you could also compare him to Lucille Ball, trying to keep up with the machine at the candy factory. I won’t compare Biden to Vivian Vance, because Vivian Vance tried to help Lucy, while I’m pretty sure Biden has been chloroformed and stuffed in a closet.

What we need in the Oval Office is a guy like Fred Mertz. An old bald veteran who will pull his huge pants up way too high, spit in his palms, and get the job done.

I think Biden still can’t believe his luck. Judging from reports about the process by which he was chosen, Obama’s people were frantically making calls to anyone they could think of, and they got Biden on the line, and they said, “Vice President or Secretary of State?” And after Biden threatened to find out who their parents were and turn them in for making prank phone calls, he chose the job which would enable him to have the highest profile while doing the least. So he’ll be Ed McMahon or Hank Kingsley, which is about as hard as being a stuffed penguin, and Hillary has to bust her hump being Doc Severinsen.

BDS sufferers won’t remember this, but George Bush didn’t start out this way. He looked pretty good for a long time, and to rational people, he still doesn’t look as bad as BDS would suggest. Obama is doing so badly, he’s not going to get a hundred-day honeymoon, and this, from the press that used to suckle him to sleep and leave mints on his pillow.

I may buy a little gold. You never know.

I really wanted to get a lathe and a mill, but I seriously think that if I wait a month, someone who has lost a business will actually pay me to take them.

Be Glad When Someone Puts the Smite to You

Let me pose a question to my Christian readers.

Suppose you communicate from time to time with another Christian. And you and this person agree that donating to the church and to charities is very important. But this person has a habit of telling you exactly how much he gives.

Imagine also that this person has represented himself as financially comfortable, and has expressed a belief that the money was a reward from God. Then this person admits having financial problems.

It worries you that this person tells you the amounts of the donations, because you believe a Christian’s generosity will be rewarded in one way or another, and that disclosing the amounts of one’s giving will cut off or reduce whatever blessings may come of it. After all, Jesus said not to let one hand know what the other was doing. You worry that this is the reason the person needs money.

Finally, out of concern, you tell the other person you are concerned about learning these amounts, for the above reasons. And this person tells you that you are impossible to communicate with because you are judgmental.

Is what you’ve done okay, or is the other person right?

I think the other person is completely wrong. After all, both testaments of the Bible are full of examples of believers giving each other advice. We’re expected to do it. Most people wouldn’t even know what the word “rebuke” means, were it not for the Bible. Everyone makes mistakes, and we need other believers to warn us, for the same reason you’d warn someone who was walking toward a minefield. Psalm 141 says, “Let the righteous smite me; it shall be a kindness. And let him reprove me; it shall be an excellent oil which shall not break my head.”

I’m sure I have the punctuation wrong. The KJV has very weird punctuation.

I think it’s fine–not just acceptable, but important–to talk about the importance of giving, because you don’t talk about it in order to glorify yourself. You do it to help other Christians realize there is a blessing they may be missing out on, and you talk about it for the sake of the church, and for the sake of the needy. And it’s fine to mention organizations that deserve donations. How else are people supposed to find them? That’s why I have charity links on my site. And if you read this blog regularly, you know that I don’t just recommend charities. I also ask for recommendations.

I also think it’s fine to say you feel you’ve been rewarded for giving. That’s called “testimony.” It’s helpful to others.

At the same time, I think you harm yourself when you talk about how much you give, or what an empathetic or generous person you are.

I’ve gotten all sorts of great advice from other Christians. I take it very well unless it’s offered in a snotty way. Sometimes I manage to take it well even then, but I’m not nearly saintly enough to do that consistently.

Sometimes people are clearly self-righteous when they tell you about an error you’re making, or something you missed out on. But most of the time, they’re trying to help.

I think it’s important not to get mad when someone throws a fit over advice you’ve given them. Anger and division are just what the enemy wants, and they waste time, make you miserable, and interfere with God’s ability to grant the things you ask in prayer. Sometimes people get really mad when you give them advice, and then a week later, they’re taking the advice and either thanking you for it or pretending they thought of it themselves. Either way, it’s a positive result, and it’s less likely to happen if you start whacking each other with your giant leather-bound designer Bibles.

If I were to break character and give to charity or the church I would tell NOBODY but the IRS, and I would even be tempted to keep it off my tax returns. Not because I’m a wonderful person (although I am) but because I would like to get some sort of worthwhile reward. Let’s be honest; unless you’re a complete martyr, a lot of what you do as a matter of faith has a big element of self-interest. That’s perfectly reasonable. You won’t find Biblical figures saying things like, “O Lord, increase my leprosy, give my enemies victory, make me fight with my family, and keep me in poverty.” And God wouldn’t have given us tons of promises regarding rewards, had he not expected us to try to get the benefit. God always says, “Do this and get a reward, or do that and suffer.”

Hello? I didn’t make the rules. God isn’t a socialist. He realizes that even good people act out of self-interest.

I don’t agree with prosperity preaching. It’s wrong to tell people God has a magical machine in the sky that automatically turns every ten-dollar donation into a hundred-dollar return. But I do believe giving to God and the poor is crucial to a blessed life. We’re supposed to be like God in our character, and God is generous. I think it is literally impossible for a person or a family to have peace and prosperity and harmony without being generous. Sooner or later, you will find corruption in whatever good things you receive. You’ll make good money, but you’ll get a divorce and your kids will end up on drugs. You’ll get a nice business going, but you’ll be too sick to run it, or a lawsuit will destroy it. Something like that.

I also think God probably respects every donation made in the right spirit, but he may reward you with something other than money, because sometimes money is not what you should have. Maybe you can’t hold onto it. Maybe it will lead you to do stupid things with it and end up like one of the many wealthy celebrities who died by thirty. Not everyone can be counted on to do the mature thing and buy expensive machine tools.

Anyway, there is nothing wrong with pointing out dangers other people may be courting with their behavior. The Bible actually says that if we don’t correct people, we share responsibility for their sins. The people who can’t stop parroting “judge not, et cetera” need to learn that there is more than one verse in the Bible. And I can tell you this: if people had not pointed my own sins out to me on occasion, I would be in a real mess right now.