Archive for February, 2018

It’s Raining Squirrels

Thursday, February 8th, 2018

I’ll Teach You to Eat my Acorns

Success at last. I bagged a squirrel this morning.

I got the idea that late afternoon was not the best time to shoot squirrels, so I went out a few minutes after 7 a.m. Squirrel activity was considerably higher. In an hour and a half of walking, I saw maybe half a dozen squirrels, stalked about 4, shot at 2, and nailed 1.

The squirrel I shot was maybe 50 feet up in an oak tree. That’s where he was when I shot him, I mean. Prior to that, he was moving around from tree to tree, in the canopy. I tried to shoot him in the head, but from the looks of things, the bullet went in the upper rib cage on one side and out the other shoulder. The exit would was ragged. It was pretty exciting to watch him drop. It was my first shot of the day. First shot of the season, for that matter.

He gasped once or twice on the ground, but I didn’t have to shoot him again.

After that, I stalked other squirrels. I learned a few things.

I don’t think squirrels get spooked by human beings or guns. Not to the point where you can’t kill them. In fact, they don’t seem very bright. I nearly got a couple of other squirrels very close to the one I shot, within a few minutes of shooting him. They didn’t seem concerned at all.

I also learned that squirrels drink coffee. I can tell because they don’t seem to be on top of things right after sunup. They wander around up there, looking for the Keurig, and while they’re still waking up, they’re easier to kill.

My ideas about weaponry are changing. The .17 HMR is great, but it cost me some shots. I was only willing to shoot pretty much straight up, to prevent misses from sailing horizontally into other people’s houses and cars. That meant I had to get very close to the squirrels. Had I been able to shoot from farther away, I would have more than 1 squirrel brining in the fridge right now.

I like electronic hearing protectors. I bought my dad some Peltors a long time ago, and he can’t use them now, so I took them with me. You can turn them up so your hearing is better than normal. It helps you hear squirrels. Nice.

I had to say it, but the shotgun is a better tool then the .17 HMR right now. I can shoot horizontally with it, and I’m more likely to hit squirrels because of the wide pattern. An air rifle would also be nice, because I could shoot horizontally, from farther away, but I’m not sure it’s humane, because I would be more likely to wound squirrels without killing them right away.

I nearly nailed a second squirrel today. I took a shot at him, and it stunned him. I guess I “barked” him, which means shooting near a squirrel and dazing him. You can shoot a tree beside a squirrel and knock him down, unconscious. This squirrel reacted by running around the trunk in circles and then climbing down to stare at me. He perched about 10 feet from me, staring at me. I don’t think he knew what was going on. I had only brought 5 rounds with me, and I barked him with number 5, so all I could do was stare back. I was afraid he had been wounded, but he looked fine. Maybe he’ll drop dead from a concussion later.

I sighted the .17 in from too far away. I think I’m shooting a little high. I had assumed there was no real drop at 60 yards (my zeroing distance), but I’ll bet I’m wrong, because I missed 4 times today.

Cleaning the squirrel was not pleasant. I’ve torn a million fish apart, and it never bothered me, but cutting up cute, warm-blooded animals is a little gross.

I didn’t want to hack his head off with a pocket knife. I thought about it for a few minutes, and then I saw the pruning shears. Perfect.

I tried poultry shears on his legs and tail. Worked okay, but the pruning shears put them to shame.

I really did not want to gook up a pocket knife. They’re hard to clean. I found a Forschner filet knife in the kitchen. Of course, other people had abused it since I had last sharpened it, so I had to spend a long time fixing it with diamond hones. When I finally got it working, it worked just fine.

It seems like squirrels are very tough around the collar line. I had to cut some crap away in order to free the skin. I slit him down the belly, which was a bit nasty, and then I peeled his skin off him like a jumpsuit. His man bits went with the skin, so I didn’t have to yank them off with my bare fingers. I was not looking forward to that. His guts and other organs went down the disposal, and after that, I cut his anus out with the filet knife. I washed him down and stuck him in a lidded container full of brine, and now he resides in the fridge.

I would say I got something equivalent to one large chicken breast. I think it will be worth eating. I may go out in a few minutes and see what the shotgun produces. It’s foggy today, so I don’t think squirrels will be hiding from the heat. In fact, I know they aren’t. I went to McDonald’s for breakfast, and coming up the driveway to the house, I saw EIGHT EIGHT EIGHT squirrels. Makes me so mad.

My hands smell like dead squirrel, even after washing them and having two McMuffins. Guess I’m stuck with that.

This has been a great experience. Standing around failing to shoot animals is not that rewarding, but when you kill one and butcher it, it makes you feel close to nature. Many times, I’ve seen people write, or heard them say, that hunting made them feel like they were one with nature. I never experienced that until today. I figured it was hogwash, but it’s true.

I like animals, and it’s impossible to feel completely comfortable, blasting cute creatures with hot lead, but killing is part of life. It’s something a man needs to confront and deal with. A man should hunt and fish, if he has the opportunity. You have to confront the ugly parts of life in order to understand it. You can’t cower in the house and whimper like a woman in a Bambi T-shirt all the time. That’s not love or humanity. It’s shirking. You don’t want to admit you’re part of the cycle of life and death, so you sit back and criticize people who man up and accept their responsibility. Meanwhile you wear leather and eat fried chicken, as if they grew on trees.

Farm animals have it harder than hunted animals. A hunted animal does what it pleases for most of its life, and then it feels something briefly and expires quickly. Farm animals have tags shoved through their ears. Chickens have their beaks cut off with shears. Cattle get dehorned and castrated. Pigs get castrated while screaming their lungs out. Farmhands routinely beat animals with sticks while herding them. Slaughterhouses are only as humane as the law can make them. I don’t have much patience for self-righteous people who complain about hunting, and people who criticize fishing are just plain insane. Fish are so insensitive they will continue to try to feed after you cut them in half.

People should also think about the consequences of not hunting. Prey and nuisance animals overpopulate and starve. They destroy crops. They invade attics and do all sorts of damage. They kill pets. Right now, southern states are being torn up by wild hogs that reproduce at a phenomenal rate. They need to die, plain and simple, and hunting is one of the best ways to get it done.

I feel surprisingly good about hunting tiny ratlike animals. Think about it. Any idiot can shoot a deer, which is as big as a house. A squirrel is very small, and it moves around constantly. If I can learn to shoot squirrels, deer and hogs will be cake. How can you miss something that has a kill zone a foot across? Maybe I’m wrong, but to me, killing squirrels is much more impressive.

On the walk back, I found something disturbing. I planted some blackberries recently, and I found one of the plants sitting beside a neat little hole containing a huge…turd. There is no other word for it. Some filthy animal carefully moved my plant and moved its own project into the hole. I can’t figure that out.

Because of the size, I can’t believe this is a coon turd. I’ve seen those, and they’re about like poodle poo. Coyote, maybe? I think I need to get me a blind and put some meat out for bait.

Why on earth would it dig up my blackberry? Can’t figure that out.

I’m going to see if I can produce a meal instead of an hors d’ouevre. I’m going to get out my grandpa’s Sweet Sixteen. Wish me luck.

It is a Good Day for a Squirrel to Die

Wednesday, February 7th, 2018

Rodent-Killing Efforts Proceeding Nicely

Today I spent a few hours failing to kill squirrels again.

Things are getting better, however. I have learned a few things. For example, do not put your 4.5-14x scope on 14 when you’re shooting squirrels. When you try to use the scope to look at a squirrel 50 feet away, you will be lucky if you’re on the same tree, and if you see the squirrel, it will look like a grizzly.

I also learned I like using Peltor electronic hearing protectors. These are earmuffs with amplifiers. You can turn them up so your hearing is better than normal. They make it a lot easier to hear squirrel noises. Ear plugs are not helpful when you’re trying to locate game.

The other day I spotted 3 squirrels in the woods. If I had been driving up the driveway to the house, I would have spotted 10, but that’s another story. Today I saw absolutely nothing. I can’t figure out how squirrels know I’m hunting, but they do. If I leave the gun at home, I’ll be surrounded by a conga line of squirrels.

I took some time out during the hunt to sight my scope in. I had it sighted in pretty well at 100 yards, but I expect to shoot squirrels at 30 yards or less. I put a table in the pasture maybe 60 yards from the target and went to work.

My rifle, a Savage .17 HMR with a bull barrel, came with a pretty bad synthetic stock. It’s free-floating, which is good for accuracy, but it was made with no comb. You need a comb when you use a scope. A comb is a big bump on the buttstock. You rest your cheek on it, and it raises your face up so you look into the scope at the right angle.

I was going to get a new stock from Boyd’s, but I thought they were rude when I asked them a couple of questions. They pretty much blew me off. Good thing, because I didn’t need a $230 stock. I just needed a comb. I went to Amazon and bought a $40 adjustable Kydex comb from Matthews Fabrication. It’s a piece of plastic that folds over the top of the buttstock. Two screws go through the buttstock and the comb, and you tighten them down when you get the comb at the right height. Look it up to see what I mean.

Today I used it for the first time. It’s fantastic. It puts my eye right where it should be. Now I have a warp-proof, weather-proof, free-floating stock with an adjustable comb, and I didn’t have to pay Boyd’s a dime.

The comb took about an hour to install. Most of that time was spent looking for tools. If my workshop weren’t a mess, it would have taken 20 minutes. You need a transfer punch, 2 drill bits, and some tape. Very easy. You have to drill 2 holes in your stock, but my stock is cheap plastic, and it was completely useless without modification, so I didn’t care,

I don’t know why Savage sells this gun with an unusable stock. The gun has no iron sights. You have to use a scope. That means the stock should have a comb. I guess they expect you to throw the stock out. The version with the stock I got is the cheapest model available, if I recall correctly. I believe the idea is to provide you with the least expensive stock available, on the assumption that you won’t keep it long.

I fired maybe 30 rounds and got the rifle shooting into about 1/2″. God help the squirrels.

This caliber (.17 HMR) is known for ruining squirrel meat. It’s powerful. If you can make head shots, that problem disappears. Now that I have the scope zeroed nicely, I should have no problem blowing squirrel heads off.

I should have zeroed it at 30 yards, but who cares? How much is it going to change at 50 feet?

Here is the second target I used. The first one had scattered shots on it because I was moving the scope crosshairs. The flyers to the right are from an experiment with the windage knob.

I started out shooting at the center of the target, and when I thought I had it together, I shot at the intersection of two lines above the center. As you can see, all 5 shots were very close together. Maybe not 1 MOA, but not far from it, and good enough for squirrels.There was a lot of wind. Most of it was from my back, so I don’t know if it mattered.

I went back to the woods and continued not seeing squirrels. I don’t know if it’s a good idea to shoot a target and then hunt squirrels a few hundred feet away, but the birds weren’t disturbed, so what the heck.

I’m thinking I need to try hunting in the morning, but I hate to do that because it will interfere with prayer time.

I used to think the .17 HMR was the wrong gun for squirrels, but now that I have the magnification adjusted, the comb fixed, and the zero corrected, it ought to be very good. I can hit squirrels a good distance off, and I can shoot them in the head to avoid tearing them up. An air rifle would be better because it would be quiet and safer, but what I have now is a lot better than a .22, and it’s more fun than a 16 gauge.

It’s still heavy. That bull barrel was not made to be carried around.

I can tell I’m going to like hunting. I like it now, and I haven’t shot anything.

I hope to post some photos of headless squirrels this week. Wish me luck.

Satanic Verses

Tuesday, February 6th, 2018

This Land Isn’t Your Land, Especially if You’re Mexican

In prayer this morning, I felt nausea again. I started thinking about Woody Guthrie. I believe God was directing my attention back to him. When I think about the indifference I used to feel with regard to Guthrie, I feel like someone gave me poison. All my life, people tried to make be think Guthrie was a sweet guy who wrote upbeat songs. In reality, he was dark and angry, and he was an enemy of God. I can’t believe schoolteachers made me sing his ridiculous anti-God anthem. Schools were already insane when I was a kid. Worse than I have realized.

Guthrie was an atheist, and he was against Christianity. There are apologists who claim otherwise, but that’s just part of the left’s sick effort to lay claim to the church in order to destroy it.

Here’s something Guthrie wrote: “Love is the only God that I’ll ever believe in.” Sounds nice, right? The Bible says God is love. But it also says he is a God of justice. Furthermore, it says he is a humanoid being who sits on a throne in heaven, and it says he gets angry and kills people, sometimes by the millions. God is love, but not everything that feels like love is God.

When you say, “Love is the only God that I’ll ever believe in,” you are expressly denying the God of the Bible, because he is more than that.

Here are the words that follow the quote above:

The books of the holy bible never say but one time just exactly what God is [not true], and in those three little words it pours out a hundred million college educations and says, God Is Love.

And that is the only real definite answer to ten thousand wild queries and questions that I my own self tossed at my bible. That is the only really sensible, easy, honest, warm, plain, quick and clear answer I found – when I was ready to throw so-called fearful cowardly thieving poisoning religion out my trash door, it was those three words that made not only religion, but also several other sorts of superstitious fears and hatreds in me meet one very quick death.

Pretty clear.

Guthrie claimed he thought about Jesus all the time. That probably is not true, and if it were true, it would not make him a Christian.

Leftists love to try to own Christ. They say he was a homosexual, even though he supported the Jewish law, which describes homosexuality as an abomination. They say he was a socialist, in spite of the commandment against coveting. They say Christianity is only about being nice to people, in spite of the overwhelmingly negative nature of Jesus’s remarks about humanity. Meanwhile, they deny the existence of Satan and hell. They deny the existence of heaven. They seem to think Jesus was a deluded sissy who ran around teaching pacifism and mindless approval. They think he was wrong about God, but right about being nice. The left’s Jesus is a straw messiah. You can’t get redeeming blood out of straw.

If Jesus was wrong about God, why should we listen to him about being nice? A wrong Jesus would have no more authority than Stuart Smalley. He wouldn’t be an authority figure. He would be ridiculous, like Rod McKuen or Leo Buscaglia.

I learned something else about Guthrie: his twisted song about America contained verses we don’t teach our kids. Look:

As I went walking I saw a sign there
And on the sign it said “No Trespassing.”
But on the other side it didn’t say nothing,
That side was made for you and me.

In the shadow of the steeple I saw my people,
By the relief office I seen my people;
As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking
Is this land made for you and me?

Guthrie was a communist, and that explains the first stanza above. Attacks on property rights were very important to union organizers trying to force their way onto company properties in order to recruit. Laws were made, to force property owners to let them in.

The second verse is another of his attacks on Christianity. “If God is so wonderful, why is there suffering?” Never mind our utter failure to cooperate with God.

In the early 20th century, God gave man a huge gift. He poured his Holy Spirit out on a bunch of believers in a church on Azusa Street in Los Angeles. They began speaking in tongues. They got a taste of the power of the early church. What happened afterward? America rejected the gift. The Azusa Street miracle produced a wave of Holy Spirit evangelism which gave rise to the charismatic movement, but what percentage of American Christians listened? Very small. Even today, the message of the Holy Spirit is generally rejected, and the churches that accept it are mainly concerned with money. They are run by greedy idiots, and the people in the pews are greedy, too. The movement never became what it should have.

The Azusa Street Revival occurred between 1906 and 1915. It petered out. Then we had a pretty rough century. We had 2 world wars, a depression, 2 failed wars in Asia, and the spiritual cancer of the 1960’s. The 1960’s were Satan’s revival, and unlike Azusa Street, this revival succeeded. It’s 2018, and we still live in the culture of the 1960’s.

P.J. O’Rourke said something interesting. He visited a university decades after the Sixties, and he he saw kids who still dressed and acted like Sixties students. He understood how strange that was. It would have been like going to a university in the Fifties and seeing kids wearing raccoon coats and listening to Jelly Roll Morton. It shows what the Sixties did to us. They never ended.

The last century was rough, but it wasn’t because we didn’t have socialism or because we believed God would help us. It was because we hated God and rejected him. We hate him now more than ever.

Here’s another song Guthrie and his kind used to sing. The name is “Long-Haired Preachers” or “The Preacher and the Slave.” It will make you sick, if you have any kind of feeling for God:

Long-haired preachers come out every night
Try to tell you what’s wrong and what’s right
But when asked how ’bout something to eat
They will answer with voices so sweet

Chorus:

You will eat, bye and bye
In that glorious land above the sky
Work and Pray, live on hay
You’ll get pie in the sky when you die

And the starvation army they play
And they sing and they clap and they pray
Till they get all your coin on the drum
Then they tell you when you are on the bum

If you fight hard for children and wife
Try to get something good in this life
You’re a sinner and bad man, they tell
When you die you will sure go to hell

Workingmen of all countries unite
Side by side we for freedom will fight
When the world and its wealth we have gained
To the grafters we’ll sing this refrain

Last Chorus:

You will eat, bye and bye
When you’ve learned how to cook and to fry
Chop some wood, ’twill do you good
And you’ll eat in the sweet bye and bye

That’s more like it. That’s more honest. You can teach kids that “This Land is Your Land” is a good song, because the limited version they learn omits the anti-God business, but the song above lays it all right out there: “Give up God, and you will prosper.”

When this song is sung, you’re supposed to chant, “That’s a lie,” between verses, until you get to the last 2 verses, which celebrate carnal effort. At the end of those verses, you shout, “That’s no lie!”

So faith in God is a lie, to leftists. Nothing new there.

How can anyone hate the Salvation Army? It’s an organization that has helped save countless people, not just from damnation, but from things like alcoholism, drug addiction, prostitution, and poverty.

It’s the craziest thing. God has increased the numbers of his children by sending preachers around, and he has used hymns to get his point across. In Guthrie’s time, Satan used preachers, too, and they used music. They went to migrant camps and preached atheism, covetousness, violence, and the victim mentality the left is famous for. Never say Satan doesn’t have preachers.

The Azusa Street Revival failed, but Guthrie’s God-hating socialist revival worked. We never learned how to be blessed by God. We learned how to carry signs and take things from other people.

I feel like I understand the world better than ever, and it’s not pleasant. I see why God is exasperated. Nothing he does for us works. We rejected him in Adam’s time. We rejected the laws of Moses. We rejected Jesus and the Holy Spirit. When Jesus comes down personally, to reign in the Messianic Age, we will reject him again, even without curses and problems to complain about. It does not matter what God does. We will always reject him. No wonder he’s going to destroy the world. Everyone, even God, reaches a point where he says, “Enough.”

You can’t talk to victimhood junkies about God. You have to get close to God in order to see how right he is, and they hate him so much, they won’t accept the milk, let alone the meat. They won’t hear him. They won’t give him a try. They want to have all of their problems fixed, right now, without any type of repentance or accountability. Giving them blessings would be like giving a fortune to a 2-year-old. It would just make things worse.

I wonder what it will look like, when people reject Jesus during the Messianic Age. It’s hard to believe anyone could be that stupid, but we know it will happen. It’s hard to believe Adam and Eve rejected God, or that the Jews rejected him after seeing the pillar of fire and cloud. It’s hard to believe when another person misses the obvious, but we’re doing it right now, and we think we’re the smartest people who ever lived.

There are reasons for failure and suffering. It’s not random. It’s not caused by rich people who hoard an imaginary cache of golden eggs. Kill the rich, pass out their money, and what do you get? Poor people who have one great Saturday night and then return immediately to poverty. Poverty isn’t just a lack of wealth. It’s a lack of the inner qualities that draw wealth. Money doesn’t give you those qualities. Trash with cash is still trash.

America is disgusting. We are ungrateful and spoiled. We bite the hand that feeds us all day, every day. Eventually we will be presented with bills.

Lukewarmness is poisoning us. We think we please God while we keep one foot in the Sixties. That’s not possible.

I feel queasy because of what God is teaching me, but I appreciate it. Medicine doesn’t have to taste good. I am very disturbed by what I see around me and inside me, but thank God I’m able to see it.

I Hate Meeces to Pieces

Monday, February 5th, 2018

New Scourge to Brighten my Days

When I moved from Miami to the frigid tundra here in northern Florida, I did not see the learning curve coming. It keeps slapping me in the face. Today’s challenge: mice. Not a big issue in Miami.

I got up today and made my way to the room where I hang out. I have a couch and recliner set up in front of the TV/computer. When I watch TV with the birds, I put an old quilt on the couch to protect it. I tend to forget to take it off and fold it up. Good thing, because this morning it had little black items on it. Mouse poo.

How did this happen? Who do I complain to? This is not acceptable.

I’ve lived north of the Florida line in the past. I didn’t have mouse problems. This house is so nice, I assumed it was sealed up against pests. I didn’t expect indoor rodents. Now I have to kill them.

The last time I killed household rodents, it was a desperate situation. Rats were running amok in a house destroyed by a drug addict. When I walked in the front door during the day, I could hear them rattling around in the kitchen cabinets. I used Tomcat poison on them. They disappeared quickly. I wasn’t worried about the smell of decaying rats, and I wasn’t in a position to use traps, which require a lot of looking after. Now I’m reading up on mice, and it looks like traps are the way to go.

It’s hard for me to believe that a half-ounce mouse can create much of a smell when it dies, but I don’t want to take a chance.

I guess dropping food scraps into the waste can was not a great move. It must have drawn the mice to the sitting area. Perhaps throwing out excess cheese-flavored popcorn was a bad idea. I hope they didn’t use the remotes.

It appears that I now have two options: never use the waste can for anything a mouse can eat, or remove the bag every night and put it in the garage.

It’s surprising how many things I have to kill in order to have a peaceful life here.

I hate a mouse. I really do.

My Aunt Jean had the worst mice imaginable. She was obsessive about cleanliness. She grew peanuts, and because she had to have the cleanest peanuts on earth, she washed them after she dug them. They rotted and had to be thrown out. Next time around, she didn’t wash them, so they didn’t rot. But they started to disappear. One day she showed me a gallon jug full of peanuts. There was also a filing cabinet drawer that had been filled. The mice had moved the peanuts, presumably one at a time. Thousands of them. She had to throw them out, because how do you get mouse residue off a peanut?

It was like an episode of Monk.

I am tempted to get glue traps, because you don’t have to bait them. You just put them down and pick them up. But glue is not very nice to the mice. They struggle for a long time. I had a rat run across my house with a glue trap stuck to it. I guess snap traps are the answer. How nice.

Well, maybe I’m wrong. I am reading that mice get less gullible with time, and that you need to make a big assault on the first day you go after them. Maybe the best answer is several snap traps and several glue trays.

Miserable, stinking creeps. They will rue the day.

The Left Hates God

Sunday, February 4th, 2018

Wealth Disparity Just a Pretext

Today I looked at an old movie during breakfast. Last night, I came across Bound for Glory while taking the birds out for amusement, and I watched for a while. Today I watched some more of it.

Bound for Glory is about Woody Guthrie, the communist musician who wrote the song This Land is Your Land, putting the words to the melody to an existing hymn. It starred David Carradine, the guy from Kill Bill and Kung Fu. He was a childhood hero of mine. I didn’t realize Kung Fu and eastern mysticism were BS. He died naked, while abusing himself, hanging by a belt in a hotel closet. Not the way an old man should go. No dignity.

Don’t get my started on Kung Fu. When I was a kid, I broke my arm imitating Carradine’s wandering idiot. A Phys. Ed. teacher told me to jump off a high beam made from an old telephone pole, and to hit the ground rolling. I jumped headfirst because I had seen David Carradine’s stuntman do it. Thank God my neck wasn’t broken.

I thought the movie would be interesting because it would tell me things about the Depression, but it left me a little nauseated.

I don’t know how true the movie is. It was based on Guthrie’s autobiography of the same name, but the movie’s “facts” don’t look much like the facts on Wikipedia’s page. Some of it is true. Guthrie was a union agitator and a communist. He didn’t join the Communist Party formally, but he did what he could to advance its twisted agenda.

The version of Guthrie presented in the movie was supposed to be flattering, but I found him disgusting. Carradine’s Guthrie is a smirking, smug, arrogant, selfish jerk who cheats on his wife without even thinking about it. He condescends to everyone around him. Very off-putting.

The movie promotes unions and leftism, and as I should have expected, it attacks Christianity. Movie Guthrie’s agitator pal Ozark Bule goes to migrant camps and sings a revolting song about pie in the sky when you die. The idea is that preachers tell you you’re going to get good things in heaven, which is a “dirty lie,” and that you should stand up and demand good things here on earth.

There is a scene in the movie in which Guthrie ask a preacher for an odd job so he can eat. The preacher gives him a speech about having no work to give him and not wanting to make things worse by giving him charity, and he gives Guthrie nothing. The message: “God isn’t going to do anything for you, and people who believe in him are your enemies.” Don’t think about the huge body of charity work Christians have done over the centuries. That’s irrelevant.

I found out that Guthrie wrote This Land is Your Land as a rebuttal…get ready…for God Bless America, which was getting heavy radio play at the time. Can you believe that? What a peek into the hidden heart of leftism. How can anyone find God Bless America offensive? Look at the lyrics. It acknowledges that God has blessed America, and it asks him to guide her. Only a leftist could find outrage in that. It doesn’t promote capitalism. It doesn’t attack unions. It is astounding that anyone would find it provocative.

This Land is Your Land doesn’t mention God once. It merely suggests that everyone in America owns all of America. In other words, if you don’t have everything you want, it’s because some rich person is hoarding it, and you have the right to take it.

When I say the movie was nauseating, I am not exaggerating. I feel physical nausea. The “heroic” leftists in the movie are sleazy people with dirty, defiled lives. They have no interest at all in God, except to fight the notion that he exists. They think all their problems can be solved be battling in the flesh. They think people who have more than they do are morally inferior parasites.

I’ve known successful people, and I’ve known poor people. The poor are morally inferior to the rich. In most cases, this is why they’re poor. They commit most violent crime and property crime. They have worse problems with pride. Many poor people are so intoxicated with self-love, they give themselves names, like comic book superheroes. I know two guys who call themselves Cheno Lyfe and Dunamis. I don’t think Dunamis is a proud guy, but he got caught in the name trend, which came from pride. We all know of pride-crazed poor people who became rich and held onto their bizarre handles or invented new ones: Jay-Z. Eminem. J-Lo. Dr. Dre. Snoop Dogg.

Success doesn’t make you a good person, but on the whole, successful people are better than poor people. Who would you rather live among?

The sick leftist notion that poverty equals holiness and wealth equals depravity is poisonous. It put the bodies of countless nice people in ditches in Cambodia. It built Castro’s torture chambers. It built the gulags. It killed 100 million people during the last century.

There’s a gag-inducing scene in the movie which could probably be used as a litmus test to distinguish good people from bad. Guthrie chases a woman in order to have sex with her. She’s a volunteer who fed him at a soup kitchen. When he finally gets into her house, he sees that she’s rich. After he has had his way, he scolds her for her money and asks if it embarrasses her. During the same conversation, with his smirk bright as ever, he tells her he has a wife and kids, and that he has to leave her because he has started to care. No shame. Just a big grin. Then he walks out.

If you can watch that scene and admire the character Carradine is playing, you’re probably going to hell, because you are completely unfamiliar with love, and you are blind to cruelty.

I wonder: how bright is the line between God’s children and the future residents of hell? More than ever, I feel like we only have 2 classes and 2 races. Once class/race is those who choose God, and the other is those who despise him. Leftism is associated strongly with the latter group.

The movie reminds me of something they used to do in communist countries. You have a teacher ask a room full of kids to pray to God for food. Then when they get nothing, you tell them to pray to Mao/Stalin/Castro/Barack Obama/whoever for food. Then you wheel in a cart full of pastries and pass them out. Leftists want us to think violence and agitation get our needs filled, and they want us to hate God for failing to cater to our whims.

In East Germany, there used to be posters that read, “Without God and without sun, we will get our harvest done.” The average American does not understand how deeply leftism is entwined with hatred of God. Socialism was invented to turn the government into a messiah, in order to replace the Lord.

When I was at Columbia University (before Obama was admitted belatedly as a transfer student), I used to hang around with Woody Guthrie’s heirs. I was not interested in their politics. I did not realize you had to swing that way to really be part of the gang. We used to play instruments and sing in our dorm rooms. They were social justice warriors. Now, of course, 98% of them are bank presidents and lawyers and so on. Not one that I know of went on to become a bona fide, to-the-bone agitator.

One of the agitators was named Dave. He had a beat-up Gibson J45. At the time, I did not know this was the signature guitar of leftist troubadors. He was one of the people who used to come to my dorm room and play and sing. When I left Columbia for one of the last times, I caught a cab, and Dave was at the wheel. On the way to LaGuardia, he told me how he was hoping to go to Nicaragua and work for the bloodthirsty Sandinistas. I looked him up today. He’s a partner in a New York law firm. Still sings. I wonder if he thinks he’s a real Guthrie heir.

I didn’t understand that he and my other music buddies were part of the other class. I wish I had. I would not have messed with them. I wouldn’t have gone to Columbia in the first place. A person of my race has no business there. I was ignorant, though. I didn’t know the world was divided, or that there was no way to cross the gulf.

Dave was a nice enough guy, and I had fun with the others, but these were relationships without futures.

Satan tries to convince us that people are all more or less the same. Not true. There are two groups, and everyone belongs to one or the other. If you hang out with the other group, you will suffer eventually. I did. You can be nice to them. You can do business with them. You can’t become part of their family, though.

You can’t join the other race, but you can let them drag you to hell, where, in addition to being damned, you will be a misfit.

Interesting stuff. There was no one to teach me these things when I was young.

I am not a Woody Guthrie fan. I literally find him disgusting now. I don’t mind being rejected by the grey people; the people with dark lives. Life around them is depressing and anxious. There is no real love among them.

More

Today after I wrote this entry, a strange feeling came over me. I felt like I was saying goodbye to the children of darkness.

I feel like a sliding door has come down between me and people who won’t listen to God. They’re on the other side, continuing to scrap over cheap trinkets, and I have a feeling I would describe as resignment. It’s not going to work out between us, and I might as well let them go.

As the Bible says in many places, God sets his people apart from the world. We are not called to have 5,000 Facebook friends. If you can go anywhere and be accepted, you’re not close to God. A child of darkness is welcome in a much wider variety of social circles. A person like that can go nearly anywhere and adapt. Fewer things are forbidden to them. If you’re close to God, you have to be careful not to get too close to the wrong people. It’s like working at a hospice and making friends with every patient you work with. The friendships have no future.

It’s almost as though people who are against God aren’t real. No matter how solid they look now, in a few years, they will vanish forever.

I know many people I will never see again. People I know are in hell. I could give you names. Some are relatives. I know a lot of people who are virtually certain to go there. It’s funny; we laugh and joke with our non-saved friends here on earth. We don’t feel afraid for them. We don’t think much about their terrible destinies.

Christian friendships are different. Christian friendships will last forever. We will know each other and enjoy each other’s love and faithfulness a billion years from now.

If you’re a Christian, and you want to do it right, you have to stop trying to fit in. Strangely, though, we have a lot of prominent clergymen telling us to be friends with everyone. We have hip young pastors telling us to try to be cool. Love is their excuse, but the truth is that they’re greedy. The more their congregations conform to the world, the more people go to their “churches,” and the more money comes in the door.

If you look like the worldly, you talk like the worldly, you think like the worldly, and you vote like the worldly, you are a person of the world, not the church.

So much of our activity here is wasted. All sinful activity is wasted. Then there are our other pursuits, which, although not forbidden, serve to render us useless. We get caught up in chasing goals that mean absolutely nothing to God. We’re so proud when we succeed! We want to be noticed. We like reminding ourselves. We collect ridiculous trophies and medals. We put plaques on our walls, celebrating our vain accomplishments. Salesman of the Month. Who’s Who in America. WBC Lightweight Champion. Whatever. We die, and then it’s all garbage. If we’re rich, we may try to be keep our names in people’s mouths. We may have our widows put our names on the fronts of hospitals and dormitories. As if such things help or matter to dead people.

There are parks and museums named after people who went to hell before they were built. They were in hell, thinking about anything but parks and museums, while people they left behind got things rolling and gave speeches and cut ribbons. How weird is that? You can be in hell, crying and screaming, while your smiling widow cuts a ribbon in front of a library with your name on it.

“Wherever he is, he must be smiling.” We ought to stop saying that.

This life looks stranger and stranger to me all the time.

Bucktoothed Tree Terrorists Must Pay

Friday, February 2nd, 2018

Squirrel Party Time is Over

I am a hunter now.

The great thing about calling yourself a hunter is that you don’t have to accomplish anything in order to justify it. All you have to do is take a gun and sit in the woods for a while. This is pretty much what I did.

The word “hunter” doesn’t imply success of any type.

I don’t like squirrels because they plant live oak trees and because I fully expect them to eat the berries from the bushes I’ve planted. I remember how they used to cut mangoes off my trees in Miami, just to hear them hit the ground. And they annoy me when I drive; I have trained myself not to take my foot off the gas. A while back I decided to get a revenge hunting license and see if I could make a dent in the local population.

Yesterday, I went out in the woods in the afternoon and sat in a clearing with no gun. I just wanted to see what the squirrel situation was. I heard barking all over the place. It was a squirrel-bark symphony. I saw a couple of squirrels climbing in the trees. I figured it wouldn’t be too hard to nail some in the future.

Today I went back, and I learned that squirrels can tell when you’re hunting. I didn’t hear a bark for an hour and a half. Little creeps.

I sat on a downed tree for a while and waited. I heard a noise to my left. I looked, and a squirrel was on a tree trunk about 20 feet away in the x direction and 20 feet up in the y direction.

Years of math have affected the way I express myself. Be glad I didn’t use spherical polar coordinates.

Okay. R(squirrel) = 23.5. Theta = pi/4. Phi = pi/4. Satisfied?

I probably could have nailed the squirrel, but I would have been shooting upward, and I was holding a .22. A rifle slug will go a long way after missing a squirrel. I didn’t feel like spending the evening telling the Florida Highway Patrol why I shot out a window a mile away, so I let the rodent flee.

I know I should use a shotgun, but man, I love rifles. I like accurate shooting. Where is the pleasure in using birdshot? Anyone can shoot, when the projectiles cover half a steradian (sorry).

It doesn’t matter. I wasn’t ready. I didn’t know how to dispose of the body. I had a plastic trash bag with me in case I hit anything, but even if I had used it, I would have had to get on the web to get instructions. I know about cutting the leg joints and cutting the head off and all that, but how much time do you get? And what are you supposed to use to do the cutting? Not my nice pocket knife! No way! How would I get it clean enough to put it back in my pocket?

When I was a kid, I shot rabbits in Kentucky. Here’s how I dealt with the meat: I handed the dead rabbits to my grandmother. That option is no longer available.

Once your squirrel is butchered, how do you clean your hands? You can’t just grab your gun with fingers covered with blood, poop, bile, and squirrel pee.

Maybe I need to take a backpack with disposable gloves. Seems a little precious, though.

I may try again tomorrow. The squirrels are taunting me, and I find their behavior inexcusable.

Gifts and Bombs

Thursday, February 1st, 2018

The Dubious Value of Verbal Aptitude

Last night I looked at Amazon Prime to find something to watch while I had the birds out of their cages. I saw that they offered a documentary on the atomic bomb. I’m a sucker for books and videos about the bomb, going back to The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes, so I had to watch.

As I expected, I found it entertaining. I haven’t seen all of it yet. I hoped to see some mention of Richard Feynman, a great physicist who worked on the bomb in his youth, but he has not appeared yet.

A friend of mine bought me a new copy of Richard Feynman’s first book, Surely You Must be Joking, Mr. Feynman, as a Christmas present, and I have been reading it over the last few weeks.

I first bought the book years ago, when I was a physics student. I bought a lot of physics-related nonfiction. When I dropped out of grad school and moved back to Miami, I put my books in boxes, and later, I found that ants had eaten a lot of them. At some point after that, Feynman got publicity from some source or other, and his book became popular.

It’s always a bummer when other people catch onto something you like. Everyone thinks you jumped on the bandwagon, and you end up having very unsatisfying conversations with real bandwagon jumpers who lack any sort of real understanding. It reminds me of my experiences with brewing. I was a beer freak even when I was in high school, and then at some point other people got into quality beers and homebrewing, and suddenly the world was full of hipsters who were instant beer experts.

I’ll tell you something funny. No matter how popular good beer becomes, there won’t be many people who can tell Miller Lite from Dogfish Head. That’s just the way humanity is.

I loved Feynman’s books. I won’t lie; I didn’t understand the third one I bought. It was about quantum electrodynamics. I didn’t have the patience to work my way through it. But the first two were great. They were autobiographies. He wrote about his experiences as a smart kid, as well as his time working with great men of science.

I learned something interesting from the bomb documentary. The thing I learned was of great historical importance, but I had never heard about it before. My best guess: liberal journalists and academics suppressed it. It concerned the United States and atomic policy, and it cast the United States in a very favorable light, so it’s the kind of thing hippies would naturally find infuriating and worthy of concealment.

The United States, on its own, tried to get rid of nuclear weapons and prevent the arms race.

For a short time, before the expected and unpreventable betrayal by leftists put the bomb in the hands of evil communist regimes, the US had a monopoly on nuclear weapons. We proposed destroying them and working to create a global ban on new production, combined with verification. The Soviets were working on their own bombs, and they refused to cooperate until we destroyed our weapons. Of course, the demand was ridiculous. We knew they were working on the bomb, and we didn’t know how far along they were. We knew we didn’t know how far along they were. It would have been idiotic to disarm and hope they didn’t have bombs waiting to be deployed.

The Soviet empire was, as Reagan put it, evil, and there is no way to justify the canard that westerners were just as bad. Even the disenfranchised in countries like the US had it much better than ordinary Soviet citizens, who were prisoners and slaves in their own nations. The Soviets were warlike and aggressive, and their policy was to expand by means of force. Unchecked, this would have resulted in a world system in which all human beings were humiliated prisoners and slaves. Taking a chance of making the USSR a nuclear monopoly would have been criminal.

I’m old, and I’m not especially ignorant, yet until last night, I was unaware that the US had tried to prevent the arms race. Thank you, crooked disseminators of information.

Today during breakfast I decided to Google and see if there were any documentaries about Feynman, and I came across a very interesting site. It’s called Cosmolearning. I know very little about it, but the “About” page says, “Collecting the top educational videos on the web, generously offered by hundreds of universities, educators, and professionals, we share their passion for teaching by providing a platform for world-class education free of charge.”

They had several videos on Feynman. Now I have some good stuff to look forward to.

Feynman’s autobiographical books are good reading not just because he writes about science, but because he writes interesting tales about a remarkable person with an engaging personality. He writes about his feelings, not just his accomplishments. A lot of his stories are funny. Some are moving.

One deceptive thing about the books is that Feynman undersells his intelligence. He was not just brilliant. He was extraordinary among brilliant people. But he describes himself as a guy who was dazzled and intimidated by the bright people he worked with.

Feynman writes about working on the bomb as a young man, as though he hadn’t graduated from college. He mentions overseeing high school boys at Los Alamos, as though he were some kind of low-level babysitter. I looked it up, and I found out that he had received his Ph.D. in 1942, at about the age of 24, before starting to work on the bomb.

So much for the babysitter narrative.

Feynman scored 125 on an IQ test, and that’s not impressive, but he also blew the tops out of very difficult math exams. His aptitude for math and physics was freakish, regardless of his self-deprecation.

It has been suggested that Feynman’s surprisingly low IQ was due to the nature of the test he took. After all, IQ is a test score, not a definitive quantization of intelligence. A very smart person can, legitimately, have a low IQ. You just have to measure the right things.

Most physicists are not good at verbal tasks. I know that from working with them. The great physicist Murray Gell-Mann said more or less the same thing in one of his books; he remarked that he was unusual because his gifts were balanced. It may be that Feynman’s test measured verbal ability more than mathematical aptitude. My guess is that a score of 125 on such a test would be unusually high for a physicist. I wouldn’t be surprised to find that other brilliant STEM thinkers had disappointing IQ scores.

Anyway, the notion that Feynman was anything less than astounding is untenable.

This got me thinking about smart people, so I Googled John von Neumann. If you don’t know who he is, it suffices to say that he appears to be the smartest person, among people of note, of the last century. He intimidated people like Edward Teller the way Edward Teller would intimidate you or me.

The power of von Neumann’s mind was incomprehensible. He made gigantic contributions in a number of fields in which most solid workers have no hope of making any type of memorable impact.

I have to say that I was depressed a little by looking into these things. God gave me some pretty good gifts, and I didn’t do anything with them. Earthly achievements aren’t very important in the Christian scheme, since everyone in heaven is a greater genius than 10 von Neumanns, but doing nothing with your gifts is not something that makes you feel good.

I always wonder what would have happened, had I been raised in a healthy family, by people who knew how to help their kids win. These days, I goad my friends to avoid the minefields I walked into. I tell them they need to get their kids started on music, math, and languages EARLY, EARLY, EARLY. Once you hit maybe 16, everything gets harder to learn, and your future success becomes limited. Earthly gifts aren’t everything, but being strong is usually better than being weak.

This week I realized something funny: extreme verbal aptitude has very little value. If you have a ton of STEM aptitude, you can use it to get a fine career that will feed you for life, and you may be able to make an extraordinarily large amount of money and look after yourself and others. A STEM person with an IQ of, say, 180 will find a lot of open doors. But what if you have an extreme verbal aptitude? There’s nothing you can do with it. No one will pay you to do crossword puzzles. It will help you as a lawyer, but let’s be honest; a lawyer with an IQ of 145 (common) will be able to do absolutely everything the law demands, very, very well. We have probably had good Supreme Court justices who were not that smart.

God gave me a very high verbal IQ, and now I know how unmarketable it is!

I do very well in STEM pursuits, but I got a late, late start. I was 30. I went from algebra dropout to grad student in a top physics program in 4 years, but I got burned out and quit (also, I suspect my memory was fading and making it harder), and I very much doubt I was ever going to come up with anything useful. I would have ended up doing experimental physics somewhere, shooting lasers through cold gases or something, and taking endless measurements to be interpreted by people who were smarter than I.

Maybe there is something useful about extreme verbal aptitude, and I just haven’t figured it out yet. Or maybe it’s just a gift to keep me entertained. I would not wish it for a son or daughter. A nice solid 650 verbal SAT and an 800 math SAT would get a kid much farther in life.

It seems to me that smart STEM people give us things that are useful, whereas verbal freaks do nothing but misunderstand and spread misunderstanding. They write books and essays full of godless opinion and conjecture, dragging the rest of us along in their wakes. The academics who are constantly hacking away at Christians are mostly verbal people.

I think of Justice Brennan, the famous liberal sage. He was wrong all the time, and his views were poisonous, but he was so smart, he convinced people (probably including himself) he was right. What a wasted life.

Now I’m more depressed than ever!

I may not be inventing great things or advancing physics, but thank God, I haven’t ended up like Sartre or Noam Chomsky or any of the other umpteen million verbal people who spent their days filling other people’s minds with sewage.

I think STEM gifts are better than verbal gifts, but on the whole, freak aptitudes are not that wonderful. The most important thing in life is a relationship with the Holy Spirit. After that, you want a nice, solid above-average brain, and more than that, good habits. The world is full of contented, successful people who serve God and couldn’t equal Feynman’s 125 on their very best days.

Incidentally, Feynman was an atheist. I enjoy his books, and I admire his mind, but in all likelihood, he is in agony right now, defeated forever. Terrible. I will never meet him.

Von Neumann is a different story. When he learned he was seriously ill, he sought God. He was a Jew by birth. I guess he was not religious prior to his illness, because he didn’t look for a rabbi to help him. He became a Catholic, and even on his deathbed, he was very afraid. I hope he made it.

How about all these huge Jewish brains? Where do they come from? What is God’s purpose for them? Feynman, von Neumann, Einstein, Bohr (half Jewish), Oppenheimer, Norbert Wiener…some almost incredible, others merely amazing. You could sit and list them all day. It almost makes you wonder what life would be without them. Would we have nuclear technology yet?

Gentiles do okay. Tesla, Gauss, Leibniz, Newton, Dirac, Fermi, and so on. But we SHOULD do okay. The vast majority of human beings are Gentiles. Something like 99.8%.

Strange.

I often wonder why God bothers giving us gifts at all, when the real answer is to connect to the Holy Spirit and get him to take care of you. But I suppose gifts are useful to keep you alive until you find the Holy Spirit. You have to use whatever crude weapons you have.

Whatever my potential was, I missed the bus, so now I get my thrills playing with farm machinery and machine tools. C’est la vie. At least I can function as a walking cautionary tale and help other people.

I’m going to look for more stuff on the Cosmo Learning site. Maybe I can still jam a few more things into the worn-out container which is what’s left of my mind.