From F to C-Minus

I have become a total TIG welding expert.

Perhaps that’s an exaggeration. It would be more accurate to say I have put down a few beads that wouldn’t elicit shrieking from an instructor if he glanced at them from across a street in the dark.

If you’ve been keeping up, you know I got a Chinese TIG machine recently, and I’ve been trying to make it function. I clamped some crap steel to the tool rest of my belt grinder and tried to make fillet welds. After that, I tried to lay beads down on a piece of angle iron and some rectangular tubing that came from a treadmill.

The first effort was a horror. Since then, I’ve managed to create some beads that could almost be called welds. Things keep getting better.

I have a few tips for other beginners. Believe it or not, these tips are really good.

1. Get a real welding jacket. Cotton is fine. I got a Tillman 9230. It’s extremely ugly, but it’s heavy flame-retardant cotton, and it’s made with welding in mind. The sleeves have snaps at the cuffs that tighten them up to keep UV out and make the cuffs fit inside welding gloves. It’s better than the crummy old dress shirt I used to use.

2. Go ahead and buy some gas lenses. I’m not sure why welders ship with regular nozzles, since most people agree that gas lenses are better the vast majority of the time. For around thirty bucks, Welding City will send you good Chinese lenses and the associated collets and so on. With a lens you will be able to stick the tungsten farther out and see what you’re welding. It will also shorten up the torch.

3. Get a welding table. Don’t be so cheap. I’ve welded things on the garage floor and my wooden bench, but I don’t recommend it. Welding on wood is always exciting, because you have to think about the weld while keeping an eye on the wood to see if it’s on fire. Welding on the floor is awkward. That’s fine for MIG, but it won’t work with TIG, which takes much more coordination. Harbor Freight has a great table for $55 (after coupon). It’s small and light. It folds away fast. It doesn’t begin to compare to an inch-thick monster that will hold the rear end from a car, but for 95% of your jobs, it will work great. It has lots of slots, and you can clamp things to it. You’ll like it.

For three times as much, you can get a different version that comes with clamps, welding magnets, and wheels. I forget the brand name.

4. Find some decent metal to weld. I’ve been using angle iron and powdercoated tubing. Half of my welding time is taken up cleaning crap off the metal. Save yourself the aggravation and buy something that isn’t covered with scale, paint, or powdercoating.

5. Buy a torch holder. Riverweld makes a magnetic job which is magnificent. The magnet must be rare earth, because it holds like an alligator. If you don’t have a holder, you’re going to put your torch on the floor or try to hang it on things, and it will fall and break the ceramic cup.

6. Buy a BSX Flak Finger. This is a fiberglass sleeve you put your ring finger and pinky into. It doesn’t transmit heat. You will want to rest your right hand on the work for control, and the work will get very hot. The Flak Finger will keep you cool, and because it has a wrist strap to hold it in place, it won’t fall off a hundred times a day, like a competitor’s product, the Tig Finger.

7. You’re going to be welding 1/8″ steel. That’s pretty much inevitable, because it’s what’s most widely available for practice. For this material, use a 3/32″ tungsten (purple rare earth is fine), not 1/16″ like the books recommend. Use 3/32″ filler. Set the amps at 125 (one per thousandth of material). You should be fine.

8. Consider a belt grinder for tungsten. Grinding electrodes will mess up your bench grinder by gouging the wheel. If you use a belt grinder, you can dedicate one belt to electrodes. If you ever feel like you have to be super careful about contamination, you just grab a new belt.

9. Get a couple of Strong Arm clamps. These are just like Bessey clamps, but they’re Chinese. They’re very well made, and they come with a neat tubing attachment. You’ll like them for holding stuff on the table.

10. Get a knot wheel for your angle grinder. If you don’t have an angle grinder, get an angle grinder. These things clean metal fast.

As noted in earlier posts, I have an Eastwood “Professional Welding Cart,” which is a two-tier cart with rings for two bottles. Actually, I have two carts, because the first one I ordered had a minor defect, and instead of sending the defective part, Eastwood sent a second cart. I now have the TIG on the bottom shelf, my MIG on the top shelf, a 125-cu.ft. argon tank in one ring, and an 80-cu.ft. C25 tank in the other. It’s very nice. If you’re looking for a two-welder cart, this one is one of the best Chinese choices. A lot of the others are known to bend and fall apart.

The AlphaTIG welder just barely fits on the bottom shelf of this cart. You have to put it on the cart before you attach the top shelf, and then the clearance is about 1/4″. Good enough! You’ll have problems with the transparent panel cover staying in the up position, because the shelf will be in the way, but that’s a small price to pay.

I’ll post a photo of my latest “welds.” The ones at top left are the undersides of beads from an earlier session.

These are not great welds, but they’re better than the random blobs I put down the first time around. They’re grey, and I think that’s caused by overdoing the amperage. Not sure. I don’t know if the penetration is good. I should cut the steel and see.

I had a big problem with my left glove heating up. It turned out I was leaning the torch too far, so it was pointed at my left hand. This melts the rod before it gets to the weld, and it also roasts your fingertips. The torch should be within 10 degrees of perpendicular.

I would say I am now good enough to TIG weld two parts in an emergency. If I wanted them done well, I would use MIG. I figure I’ll be able to do a decent TIG weld in a week or two.

I can tell TIG is going to be wonderful. MIG is fast and powerful and puts fewer demands on variables such as cleanliness and work positioning, but it’s clumsy. TIG can make beautiful, precise welds you just can’t get with MIG. You get much more control. If you want to put a muffler on a Jeep in a dirty garage while lying on your back, use MIG. If you want to put a trigger guard on a Russian shotgun, use TIG.

The welder I got is an inverter welder, and that means it doesn’t suck much power. You can run it using the socket next to your nightstand if you want. Doesn’t have to be 220 unless you weld thick metal. That’s a huge convenience. I can’t MIG weld anything more than 20 feet from my 220 socket, but I can TIG anywhere an extension cord will reach.

Filler rods are disappearing at a high rate. I go through one per session. I am told you can weld the nubs together to make new rods, but I have another tip which is better. Buy big packages, and look for deals. If you buy ten pounds of steel rods on Amazon in pound tubes, it will run you $90. If you buy one ten-pound package, and you shop around, it’s $25.

Someone gave me a neat tip for really small filler: use MIG wire. It’s the same stuff.

If I ever weld two pieces of metal together in any sort of competent fashion, I will be back to post photos.

A Stupid House is a Happy House

I have a smartphone. Sometimes I wish I didn’t. If it’s not the Mark of the Beast, at the very least, it’s his friendship ring. I gave in and jumped on the smartphone wagon, but I do not want a smart house.

To some degree, I’ve already bought into the smart house paradigm. I’ve had a couple of Internet-connected burglar alarms hooked up. They’re for rental properties. I’m not that concerned about the problems a tenant might have with Big Brother. I suppose in the case of tenants, Big Brother is me. I don’t want to sink any farther into the quicksand, though. I don’t want smart appliances or a smart air conditioner. After reading about a company called Garadget, I don’t want a smart garage door opener.

Garadget sells a garage-door-opening system that hooks up to the web. A customer bought it, and then he could not get it to work. Filled with the kind of fury one can only experience during divorce or when rendered impotent by an intransigent computerized device, the customer went online and left some abusive reviews. He told other people not to buy the product.

Mr. Garadget himself, one Denis Grisak, responded by taking control of the garage door system. He cut the customer’s access to his server, and the customer was no longer able to open his own garage door using his phone.

Think about that. You come home from work, you want to pull the car into the garage, you try to open the door with a gadget you paid for, and you can’t do it, because some jerky nerd a thousand miles away has taken control of your opener. It could have been worse, because Grisak wasn’t able to disable whatever system was in place before Garadget was installed, but still. You don’t treat customers like this, and at the very least, you give them prior notice.

When the public became aware of Grisak’s disturbing behavior, a certain percentage were smart enough to take the consumer’s side, and Grisak had to yield. Although he gave in, he seems completely unrepentant. A customer insulted his product, and he seems to feel entitled to blockade the customer electronically and deny him the use of something he paid for.

Here’s something crazy: a lot of people–maladjusted tech types, I assume–think Grisak was right to do what he did. This is the scary thing about the story. People are too brainwashed and ignorant to understand how serious it is when a stranger who is legally obligated to look out for you betrays your trust and turns on you.

When Garadget took the customer’s cash, it assumed a duty to him. It accepted a position of trust and responsibility. Grisak may not get that, but it’s true. Think of it this way: when you buy a “dumb” garage door opener, the person who installs it has a clear obligation to refrain from using his skills to lock you out and force you to lift the door manually. That obligation doesn’t change just because the equipment is a little different.

I’ve written about this before: tech people have no oversight. They have almost no regulation. As a lawyer, if I represent a client, I am forced to assume a position of near-total loyalty. If I get out of line, I can lose my license and possibly go to the penitentiary. On the other hand, what if I run a hosting company? I can do just about anything I want. I remember a well-known blogger complaining that a cantankerous host company operator went through her emails during a feud. In that situation, the blogger had no one to run to except possibly a very expensive lawyer. Nerds have no bar association or department of professional regulation. Most don’t have to have licenses.

Here we are, in a world full of potentially devastating technology, depending on immature people with small hearts and no right brains.

What could possibly go wrong?

The CIA and God knows which other government agencies can wake your smartphone up right now and listen to you. Presumably, they can turn the camera on; at least one school district (presumably less savvy than the CIA) has done it with student laptops. That’s terrible, but we put up with it, because Americans don’t really care about liberty. As bad as it is when the government does things like that (and they do it around the clock), it’s worse when it’s some 23-year-old kid who makes six figures handling other people’s sensitive data.

In four or five years, you won’t be able to buy a vehicle the government can’t shut down at will. Count on it. Ten years later, you’ll probably need a permit to operate a car that isn’t self-driving. The government will be in the system, and when you tell the car where you want to go, if Uncle Sam doesn’t agree, you will have to walk.

No matter what I do, the lamprey of technology is going to consume more and more of me, but I don’t have to make it worse by inviting strangers to spy on my washing machine.

The great mass of sheep are helping Big Brother shove this stuff down our throats. They’re extremely excited about gadgets, convenience, and safety. They’re too stupid to know what liberty is or why it’s harmful to lose it. When the TSA took nude photos of us at airports, the indignant sheep bleated, “Would you rather be blown up?” When private companies give us gadgets in exchange for liberty and privacy, they say, “Would you rather have things the way they used to be? Do you want to go back to [insert minor inconvenience here]?”

About 400,000 Americans sacrificed themselves in World War Two, in exchange for things like privacy, freedom of movement, and freedom of speech. Obviously, to generations past, liberty was very, very important. No one seems to understand that now. There are worse things than dying in a terrorist bombing. Similarly, there are worse things than having to operate your home’s thermostat by hand, exhausting though it is.

Grisak isn’t an outlier; he represents a large segment of his colleagues. If you know nerds, you know I’m right. Most people who are technically inclined are deficient in other areas. Most physicists would have a hard time finishing a crossword puzzle (I know from watching them.). People who devote their lives to technology tend to lack empathy, love, and mercy. They thrive in an artificial online environment that promotes cruelty, dishonesty, and pride.

We used to think nuclear weapons were our big existential threat. It turned out it wasn’t that hard to control them. Until Clinton and Obama demonstrated extraordinary incompetence by allowing the Norks to arm themselves, the world managed to rein in nuclear aggression. The tech community isn’t like that. It’s impossible to control. It has no location. It has no government or identifiable leader. It has a million ways to escape detection and defy authority. And here we are, pulling its tentacles and claws into our houses. Technology will succeed where bombs failed.

It’s unfortunate, but the second we get the power to do a thing, we usually decide we need to do it. We “need” to be able to look at the contents of our refrigerators before we drive home from work. We “need” cars the manufacturers can unlock or shut down remotely. Grisak’s customer “needed” an Internet garage door opener, obviously. In reality, much of this junk wastes our time and money and leaves us no better off.

Technology gives us the illusion of omnipotence. Humans have always wanted the power of gods with none of the pesky moral obligations.

I remember Hurricane Andrew, which may seem irrelevant until I explain. Andrew hit before the Internet was part of most American lives, but it came between us and the technology we had at the time. The power was out for weeks. So was the water. So were the phones. We couldn’t watch cable. We couldn’t talk to anyone who wasn’t physically present. For a number of days, we couldn’t even drive. The thing is, we survived, and it wasn’t that bad. Once you found a cool place to sleep and a place to shower, you were okay. You could read books. You could talk to other people. You could eat reasonably good food out of a cooler or fresh off a grill. The point I’m making is that we clutter our lives with a lot of crap that only seems necessary. A natural disaster will help you understand that.

I’m not saying we should give up all of our toys, but a lot of them convey worthless benefits and have hidden costs that are truly obscene.

This problem is more acute if you’re conservative or Christian. Tech people, overwhelmingly, dislike Christianity and Republicans. They really hate Trump. The polarization of American society is becoming more and more venomous, and in the tech area, people who hate us hold most of the cards. They’re already abusing the power. Facebook is notorious for persecuting us. Twitter goes after us. So does Google. Ebay and Paypal banned firearms sales. So did Craigslist.

The government, putatively, is required to be impartial with regard to religion, and it’s supposed to keep its hands off political speech. Unfortunately, private entities aren’t bound by the Bill of Rights, and as we become more dependent on them, we give them power the government never had. Many people depend on tech nerds for their livelihood. Many people make a living on Youtube. People use Facebook to promote their businesses. We are deeply plugged in, and there is no legal guarantee that we can’t be unplugged without our consent.

To shut down someone’s Youtube channel or Facebook page arbitrarily is, in some cases, more damaging than any restraint the goverment could impose, yet it’s completely legal. Remember what happened to Milo Yiannopoulos? He depended on Twitter to feed himself, and he got the boot. He had no recourse whatsoever. He still had freedom of speech, but it lost most of its value because he lost his ability to be heard. I’m not saying I miss him, but if he’s vulnerable, so are you.

For many people, the liberty to use online services is just as important as the liberty to travel and speak, but there is no way to protect it, because we are not legally entitled to it. No one has a Constitutional right to a Facebook page. Right now, greed is our only protection. The tech Borg will try not to offend us too much, because they need our participation in order to make money. If they ever decide stifling us is worth the financial sacrifice, we will be in trouble.

I’m glad no one else can control my garage door, turn on my sprinklers, or stop my truck in the middle of the road. I’m going to try not to give more control to the nerd collective than I absolutely have to. They have so much control already, though, I wonder if there is any point in resisting.

At least I’m aware of what’s happening. That counts for a lot.

I hope this Grisak person has a moment of self-awareness and comes to understand how wrong he was. A person a bad temper and a control-based mindset has no business in a position of trust.

It’s Like Al Franken has Gone to Heaven, and We’re Forced to Watch

I made conservatives mad when I gave up on Ann Coulter and Ted Nugent, and if anyone had known about it, they probably would have been mad when I said I didn’t support Milo Yiannopoulos. I guess I’ll continue doing what I do best: Bill O’Reilly is not helping us.

Leftists are digging up dirt on O’Reilly, pointing out that he has been accused of sexual harassment on a number of occasions. He has been sued for it, successfully. Fox has paid out eight figures in hush money. O’Reilly doesn’t admit fault. At all.

Conservatives are saying it’s a witch hunt (like the Bork hearings or ridiculous attacks on Trump over Russia, which were and are bona fide witch hunts). They’re saying O’Reilly is the victim here. Come on. Be serious.

To anyone who says leftists don’t care about harassment, and that the O’Reilly siege is only about silencing a prominent conservative, I say, “I agree.” Leftists don’t care about the many women Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, George Stephanopoulos, and the rest of the Clinton Gang destroyed or at least soiled. They don’t care about them any more than they care about the millions of women who have been pressured into abortions they didn’t want. That’s true. Doesn’t matter. If O’Reilly is guilty of the things of which he has been accused, he should be released.

Is it really that big a deal if the office horndog makes advances toward disgusted women? Sometimes it is, and sometimes it’s not. It depends on the facts. Merely asking someone out is not harassment. But O’Reilly is accused of far worse things. He is accused of extremely gross, persistent advances, and of coupling them with threats and attacks. His accusers say he followed through on his threats. He is accused of using his power to make and break careers to push women into the sack with him.

That’s a whole lot worse than a few inappropriate come-ons.

No sane person would want his mother or sister to have her career wrecked by a creep who sees other people as disposable receptacles, and seeing them give in and allow themselves to be violated would be even worse.

As for the advances themselves, at least in the case of former producer Andrea Mackris, they were pretty bad. In her complaint, she said she had recorded him, and the transcribed portions are extremely graphic, prolonged descriptions of the sex acts he wanted to perform. The recordings must have existed, because no lawyer on earth would willingly make up transcriptions and submit them to a court, knowing he would be forced to come up with actual recordings later. Disbarment would only be the beginning of his problems.

If the recordings hadn’t existed, Fox would have forced Mackris’s lawyer to admit it, and Fox wouldn’t shell out $13 million to settle frivolous suits it expected to win. It seems likely that O’Reilly told his counsel the recordings existed, and Fox buckled and paid the plaintiff off.

I am tempted to remind everyone that O’Reilly is not indispensable. He can be replaced easily. He’s not really that good at what he does. But to talk about his value to conservatism would be to take the position that a highly successful ally should be permitted to profit from egregious, malicious wrongdoing simply because of his value to a cause. That’s wrong. If a lowly copywriter would be fired for what O’Reilly did, then O’Reilly should be whacked with the same axe.

If we’re going to talk sympathy and patience, where is the sympathy for the women? Losing your career is a whole lot worse than losing one gig.

To argue that O’Reilly’s supposed value to the right justifies letting him ruin women’s careers is to commit the sin of the O.J. jurors, who would literally have permitted Simpson to cut his ex-wife’s throat in the courtroom without repercussion. “I’m on your side, and I’m successful” is not a good excuse for destroying people in the name of base, lower-brain drives.

If I’m against O’Reilly, why am I not against Trump? Mainly because Trump has not been accused of harassment. He has been accused of adultery (consensual) and putting his hands on willing women (also consensual). Leftist propagandists have accused him of sexual assault, but they based their claims on a video in which he described consensual contact. Also, Trump has not been accused of linking women’s careers to their pliability. O’Reilly and Trump and very different.

I’m not thrilled that a serial adulterer is in the White House, but I don’t go around crusading for adulterers and fornicators to be fired. That standard wouldn’t leave many people standing. That would be a very personal standard based on my religious views. My stand on O’Reilly is pretty much the same standard the vast majority of Americans would observe.

I can be a good Christian and not insist every person who commits gross sexual sin be fired, but I can’t see myself pleasing God AND insisting a persistent destroyer of weaker people should keep his job.

If the poop on O’Reilly is true, and it looks like much of it is, then he may a very bad guy. It’s easy to excuse inappropriate flirting, but ruining people who turn you down is sick and cruel. It goes beyond lust, which is something everyone has to fight with, and into the realm of viciousness. It is also blatant corruption.

What if he decided to come clean and change his ways? What if he apologized on the air and said he intended to turn over a new leaf? Would that justify keeping him? I don’t know. There has to be some punishment for what he has done already, and merely losing a job is not a penalty commensurate with the offenses in question.

I say let him go. He has had plenty of chances to turn this around, and it hasn’t happened.

That’s the memo for today. Name and town, if you wish to opine.

Wishes Aren’t Horses

I read some interesting stuff this weekend, and it got me thinking about the leftist obsession with lying about history.

First off, the Niihau Incident.

Niihau is one of the main islands of Hawaii, and it’s privately owned. During the Pearl Harbor attack, the Japanese thought it was uninhabited, and they instructed fighters with damaged planes to set down there and wait for rescue. A pilot named Nishikaichi did just that. He crashed a Zero there.

When Nishikaichi landed, the first person to see him was a Hawaiian named Hawilo Kaleohano. Mr. Kaleohano didn’t know about the filthy attack on our naval base, or the piles of dead bodies, or the garbage cans full of amputated limbs, but he knew our relations with the Japanese were bad, so he took the pilot’s papers and pistol and refused to return them.

The Hawaiians were polite to Nishikaichi and threw him a party, but they absolutely refused to hand over his belongings.

Three interpreters worked with the Hawaiians. The first was a Japanese-born resident named Shintano. He walked off abruptly and abandoned the effort. The next two were an American-born couple, Yoshio and Irene Harada. Obviously, they were American citizens.

The Haradas turned on the Hawaiians. They bickered with them, insisting, without success, that Nishikaichi’s belongings be returned.

Shintano also turned on his neighbors, offering them $200 for the items Nishikaichi wanted. He claimed it was a matter of life and death.

The Haradas and Shintano helped Nishikaichi escape and recover his pistol. They helped him remove two machine guns from the plane and take them with him. With their assistance, he was able to take a hostage and demand his items. In the end, the Hawaiians had to attack and disarm him, and in the process, one received three non-fatal gunshot wounds. Thankfully, the wounded man and his wife were able to crush Nishikaichi’s skull with a rock and slit his throat.

Mr. Harada was so distressed, he shot himself to death on the spot.

Why is this interesting? Because not too long ago, a Japanese-American group succeeded in getting the Haradas’ treason expunged from an exhibit at a museum. The island was (still is) owned by a family named Robinson, and the Robinsons generously donated the Zero’s remains to the Pacific Aviation Museum in Pearl Harbor. The Robinsons donated the Zero with the understanding that the Haradas would be mentioned in the display, so they are not happy.

Michelle Malkin, an American of Asian extraction, wrote about this incident in her head-exploding book, In Defense of Internment. At the time, leftists were flipping out over profiling, which, in retrospect, turned out to be a great idea we needed to implement. Malkin’s thesis was that, yes, foreigners and even the children of foreigners DO sometimes turn against us in times of war, and it makes perfect sense to give Muslims added scrutiny. Instead of focusing on the only group likely to perform major acts of terrorism, our addled keepers took naked pictures of every person who tried to board a plane.

When human beings plan their actions, they generally look to the past for guidance. That only works when they have all the facts. Garbage in; garbage out. If we are going to hide history from ourselves, how are we supposed to learn from it? The Haradas were unquestionably traitors. The Niihau Incident should have been considered and publicized when we were falling all over ourselves, pretending terrorism was not primarily a Muslim issue. We should be talking about it today when we discuss Trump’s travel bans and the idiocy of making blue-eyed old Christian and Jewish ladies submit to groping at airports.

Here’s the other thing I read about: the real nature of Robert Stroud, better known as “the Birdman of Alcatraz.”

Stroud was not really the Birdman of Alcatraz. He was the Birdman of Leavenworth. He was jailed for beating a man unconscious and shooting him in the back of the head, and he also stabbed a prison guard to death and stabbed another inmate. During his time in Leavenworth, a progressive warden allowed him to raise birds, and he became something of an authority on diseases of pet birds.

He was eventually moved to Alcatraz because he was so dangerous to inmates and prison workers, and because he used his lab equipment to distill alcohol. At Alcatraz, he wasn’t allowed to keep birds.

He was the subject of a ridiculous movie starring Burt Lancaster. In the movie, Stroud seems like a fine person who has repented. All he wants to do is keep his birds and continue studying, but the mean old prison system is against him because, well, it’s just bad!

Burt Lancaster was a very handsome man. He looked great in the movie. He seemed like a reasonable person. In short, he was very different from Robert Stroud.

Stroud’s first known victim was a bartender. Stroud was pimping his own girlfriend, and the bartender engaged her and paid her two dollars instead of the standard price of ten. He also gave her a beating. This is why Stroud beat him. Shooting the unconscious man–an execution–was just an added service.

In prison, Stroud shanked another inmate for telling the guards about a minor rule infraction. He stabbed another who was working with him in a scheme to get drugs. He attacked a hospital orderly who reported him for threatening violence in order to get morphine. He helped start a riot. He also murdered a guard, in front of over a thousand prisoners, for reporting a rule violation.

I just can’t see Burt Lancaster doing those things.

Stroud was filthy. He kept a huge number of birds in his two cells, and he never cleaned up. He was also something of a nudist. He refused to wear any clothes at all in warm weather. To make the picture even worse, he used to shave his entire body, head to toe, which is why he has such short hair in some photos.

Stroud was also a sexual predator. He wrote pornographic stories about kidnapping, raping, and murdering children. He received letters from children after he became famous, and he got in trouble for making sexually suggestive remarks in his responses. One of his prison friends, mobster Alvin Karpis, said Stroud talked constantly about raping and killing kids, and Karpis said Stroud intended to do it if he ever got out.

At Leavenworth, he was confined to the hospital because he was aggressive in his homosexual advances to others. In other words, they confined him to keep him from raping other men.

In the movies, sweet old criminals mumble and shuffle and plead at parole hearings. Stroud was different. He told the board he had a long list of people to kill, and he had a short time to do it.

When the movie came out, simple people screamed for Stroud’s release. Film historian Alan Royle put it this way: “What the public really wanted, of course, was to see Burt Lancaster released, not Robert Stroud.”

You can read more of Royle’s thoughts concerning Stroud here: The real ‘Birdman of Alcatraz.’

Here’s the obvious question: what if the movie had told the truth?

Let’s see. A naked Burt Lancaster, shaved from one end to the other, gets dressed and leaves his filthy cells to go have lunch. Along the way, he threatens to rape a few guys, and they duck into doorways. While standing in line, he talks to another prisoner. He grins and his eyes light up as he describes himself raping a child and cutting his throat. He is clearly aroused. Then he notices a guard who turned him in for a rule violation, and he shoves a sharpened spoon through the man’s heart.

Yay. Let’s have a protest. Free Bob! Free poor old Bob the bird lover!

I don’t think so.

Why on earth would anyone make a movie that made this psychopath look good? What was the point? Obviously, the people behind the film were agitating to get Stroud released and prisons reformed, but if you base your notions of reform on gigantic lies, how can they be anything but disastrous when implemented?

Conservatives and Christians are ostracized in the press and entertainment, so the world sees things through a very small and distorted lens. That’s not okay. It causes real harm.

Leftists can’t seem to understand that evil people exist. They think everyone is basically good, and that we can get our enemies to treat us well simply by hugging them and finding out what the world did to them to make them bad. How, then, do you explain people like Ted Bundy? He killed girls, dumped them in the woods, and then returned to their dead bodies over and over to have sex with them. When he was interviewed, he said his parents were fine and that he had a good childhood. According to Psychology Today, Jeffrey Dahmer and Dennis “BTK” Rader had good upbringings.

Many people simply enjoy evil. They prefer it. They’re not doing it because no one understands them. They’re not looking for a reason to avoid harming others. They’re looking for opportunities and excuses to harm us. Harming us isn’t the final result of a desperate search for relief from injustice. It’s their primary, most fundamental motivation.

Serial killers keep things like body parts, videos, and weapons so they can look at them when they pleasure themselves. Seeing a rock with hair and skin on it, or a tiny pair of bloody, torn panties excites them sexually. I don’t know if there is a leftist alive who understands that kind of depravity. For some people, life without parole and execution are the only logical solutions. Even God would admit that. He created hell, and he’s the one who puts people there every day. In Noah’s time, he killed the entire human race. Sometimes you have to give up on people.

Yesterday I read about a highly prolific killer named Carl Panzram. He claimed he had raped about a thousand men and boys. He talked about beating a 12-year-old victim until brains came out of his ears. He was happy about it. He killed people because he enjoyed it, the way a normal person might play the guitar or throw a frisbee. When he was sentenced to death, he threatened to kill people who tried to reform him. On death row, he wrote this:

In my lifetime I have murdered 21 human beings, I have committed thousands of burglaries, robberies, larcenies, arsons and, last but not least, I have committed sodomy on more than 1,000 male human beings. For all these things I am not in the least bit sorry.

After that, when he was hanged, he insulted the executioner. Wouldn’t you love to see Phil Donahue or Barbara Walters sit down with him? He’d have to be pried off of them with crowbars.

Revision of history to fit the naive notions of people who knowingly reject reality is not a good thing, even when people think they’re doing it with good intentions.

I am disgusted by what I’ve read. Unfortunately, the stories of Niihau and Robert Stroud are just part of a monumental smoke screen that covers the world. There is not much that can be done about it.

In the next world, truth will be all I see. I look forward to that, and until then, I will just have to put up with the nonsense I see here.