If I Liked Being Treated Like a Child, I Wouldn’t Have Guns in the First Place

More than once, I have written positive things about Savage firearms on this blog. I have a couple of Savage rifles, and a third one is coming. I have an A22, which is a semi-auto .22 rifle. I like it for a number of reasons, but it fails miserably in one regard: customer support.

I got myself a silencer, so I need a threaded muzzle for the A22. If I want to buy, say, a Smith & Wesson barrel, I can go to a website, place an order, explain nothing to anyone, and have the product sent to my house. I can also buy a barrel nut and a whole bunch of other things. If I want to buy a Savage barrel, well, I can’t. They will not sell me one. They won’t sell me the nut, either.

If you want to put a new barrel on a Savage A22, you have to ship your gun to Savage and pay them to do it. Okay, so it costs a little more. No big deal, right? Wrong. They will only give you the same kind of barrel the gun came with. Because…because of stupid, I guess.

The A22 comes from the factory with a variety of barrels. There is nothing dangerous about putting a different barrel on the gun. There is no good reason not to send people the barrels they like.

If Savage were willing to send parts out, people would buy more of their guns. Obviously. When people find out a manufacturer is anti-right-to-repair, they start buying from other manufacturers.

Good luck finding an aftermarket A22 barrel. The A22 is pretty far down on the popularity list, so it’s not like Shilen and Bartlein are scrambling to make barrels for it. There are lots of precision 10/22 barrels, though.

I plan to try altering the existing barrel myself, and if I somehow manage to fail, I’ll put the barrel in a dumpster and keep the rest of the gun for parts. I’m not poor. I can afford to destroy a cheap gun, especially one that is likely to cause me heartburn in the future due to poor treatment from the manufacturer.

Savage won’t send me a target trigger spring, either. And no one else makes them.

A company named Jard makes a high-end trigger for the A22. You can probably find one for about $270 if you look. About the cost of an A22. This is all that appetizing to most .22 shooters. The gun is 3 MOA at best, with a trigger made by the angels in heaven, so doubling the price of the gun to improve the trigger only makes sense for real enthusiasts who have a lot of money to spend.

The A22 has an Accu-trigger, which is a proprietary Savage thing intended to provide an easy, smooth trigger pull. Unfortunately, a lot of these guns have heavy pulls even after the triggers are adjusted to the minimum.

You can put a Savage target trigger in your A22, and it will lighten the pull, but Savage will not sell you the spring because you can’t be trusted with a complicated object like that. To get one, you would have to read off a serial number proving you own a gun that came with a target spring. You can also go to Gun Shack and buy one online, when Gun Shack has them in stock, but that’s about it.

Without a good trigger, the A22 is just an average gun, like a Ruger 10/22, but unlike the 10/22, it doesn’t come with a world of aftermarket parts for customization. Might as well buy an A22 and start customizing. You can rebarrel it. You can buy a new trigger. The sky’s the limit.

Gun manufacturers, unfortunately, tend to end up in the hands of stupid people. Marlin, Remington, and Smith & Wesson collapsed when firearms sales were peaking due to the efforts of the world’s greatest gun salesman, Barack Obama. If you can lose money in a market like that, you should be working for an hourly wage for someone who can.

I guess someone must have sued Savage over a part installed by an end user. They must have a weak-kneed attorney who told them to choke off the supply along with their customer goodwill.

Whatever. I’m all done with Savage.

Whose Past is on my Wall?

Sometimes I really disappoint myself. It’s already January 13, and I have only bought two rifles this year.

Technically, I’ve only bought one. I ordered one in late December and picked it up this year.

I’m pretty sure I’ve bought fewer than 2,000 rounds of ammunition.

The first rifle is a bolt-action .22. The second is a semi-auto. “What possible reason could a person have to buy two .22 rifles in one month?”, asked no reader of this blog, ever.

Last year, I made a tentative decision to cut 5.5″ off the barrel of my Savage A22 and thread the end for a silencer. I had received a .22 silencer, and it would have been cumbersome to have it hanging off a 22″ barrel. I tried to find someone near me who would do the work, but even though this is a huge 2A area, there is nobody. I think people here generally buy off the rack, receive no training, do very little customization, and shoot low-grade ammo.

I did some research, and I think I now know how to modify the barrel myself. I bought a dial test indicator to help me do the work.

I could have bought a new gun and sold the old one, but selling a gun is like selling a child, without the relief over not having to pay for college. Also, I have done a little work on the gun, and I wasn’t eager to do it over on a new one.

I guess that sounds silly. Not wanting to do a little trigger work on a new gun, but being willing to machine an old one. I wanted to learn how to thread barrels, though, so I wasn’t all that bothered by the prospect.

Another thing: it’s pretty unusual for a gun to drop in value. They go up and up and up. It’s almost always better to have an old gun than the money you could get for it.

While I was thinking about all this, I found out that Savage now sells the same gun, with a cute camo stock, with exactly the options I want. It has the short barrel and the threading. And it’s pretty cheap. Surprisingly so. I ordered one.

I figure I’ll shoot the new one and hold the old one until my son is old enough to shoot it. So several months, at least.

I am inclined to try cutting up the barrel anyway. It would be a good experience. If I blow it, I can buy a new barrel.

I should think about my son’s inheritance when I buy guns. If the rapture doesn’t come before I die, and 2A hasn’t been undone, my son or sons will get all my firearms. I should make an effort to leave some nice stuff behind.

My grandfather had some nice guns, but while he was alive, he failed to say who got what, and when he died, I got nothing decent except for a shotgun which actually belonged to my dad. My grandmother gave it to him after my grandfather died. The stuff I inherited from my grandfather is junk.

The worst example? A counterfeit shotgun.

Possibly counterfeit.

At some point after the nice guns had mysteriously vanished, I was given a list of things I could still have, and it wasn’t pretty. One thing that surprised me: no one wanted my great-grandfather’s gun. It had been mounted over a fireplace in my grandparents’ house. The story was that my grandfather tracked down the guy who owned it and bought it from him.

I remembered it as a fairly nice gun with a figured-wood stock.

I asked for it, and I received a double-barreled flintlock shotgun that looked like someone had painted the stock with something slightly nicer than Rust-Oleum. I don’t recall the valuation that was placed on it, but I know it was between $100 and $200. Trash, but for sentimental value.

I didn’t think too much about it. I decided to stick it on my wall.

Eventually, I remembered something from my childhood. I remembered playing with the ramrod from the gun my grandfather owned. It was a rifle ramrod, small enough to fit in a .40-caliber barrel. It was raw wood.

The crummy gun I received has a big, fat varnished ramrod. A shotgun ramrod. You could never get it into a rifle.

I don’t think this gun belonged to my grandfather. It looks like my memories were right. So now I have an almost-worthless gun which apparently belonged to some stranger, and when I see it on my wall, what I think about most is not my grandfather, but the mystery of what happened to the real gun.

Assuming my memories are correct.

Did the gun seller who evaluated the estate’s guns steal it and substitute the shotgun? Did one of my cousins take it home and tell the dealer to claim the shotgun was the one from the estate? I’ll never know.

At least I know why no one wanted it.

Now what do I do? Do I leave it on my wall?

I am thinking I might buy a nice antique Kentucky rifle, prettier and more valuable than anything great-great-granddad had. I have a practice of buying nicer guns than the ones that vanished. On top of that, I have real shooting training, and I make my own ammunition and modify my guns. And I have some excellent glass. I don’t think my grandfather owned a scope.

For a few grand, I can get something really nice, and it will appreciate.

If I had some of received my grandfather’s guns, most of what I would have gotten would have been mediocre. An old Smith & Wesson .357, maybe, with a 3″ barrel. Too heavy to carry; too short for targets. A Marlin lever action in an inferior caliber. A creaky old 12 gauge that can’t measure up to today’s standards. A .32 revolver only a pimp would carry on his person. An Enforcer M1 pistol, which is another item a pimp would like. Flashy, with very poor quality. The American Draco, except a Draco is a good, reliable weapon.

On the other hand, I have some pretty good stuff. Some beautiful 1911’s. A very nice Browning Challenger. A nicer Colt Woodsman than the one my grandfather had. An RPR that shoots 0.5 MOA or better. Some extremely accurate hunting rifles. An AR-15 with a White Oak Armament varmint upper. The Tikka .22 I got recently is infinitely better than anything my grandfather had. I also have some excellent revolvers.

I have a great shooting mat. Rests. I built my own roofed long-range platform which will last forever, along with a heavy-duty bench made from thick-walled 2″ square steel tubing. I fabricated my own gong stands.

I’ll be able to pass on some neat guns and related tools, and I’ll be able to teach my son(s) how to develop loads, mount scopes the proper way, and shoot at 1,000 yards. I don’t think my offspring will be upset about not getting a rusty Remington 550-1 .22 or a lever-action Marlin that shoots 4 MOA and has poor ballistics.

I only got one knife my grandfather owned, and like the shotgun, it came through my dad. One day he told my grandmother he would like to have a knife my grandfather owned, so she gave him one.

It’s a German folder with no lock. It rusts. It was nasty and rusty when I got it, because my grandfather used to cut apples with his knifes. It was dull. I fixed it up, because I’m the only grandson who has the tools for it, but I wouldn’t carry it. He carried junk knives. Street value? Probably $10.

On my own, I got Benchmade. Cold Steel made from CTS-XHP. Lionsteel made from M390. I have a handmade Entrek. Some Spydercos. Gerber is my low-end choice for jobs that might mess knives up. And I have a fancy rig for putting better-than-factory edges on knives.

I bought my son, myself, and my wife engraved Swiss Army knives in Switzerland. Now I have to hide his and mine for 8 years.

I’m not sure what to do with the shotgun. What if it turns out Gramps owned it, and it was in a closet or something when I was a kid? I don’t see any way it could be the gun with the skinny ramrod and the figured wood that I remember. The gun that had a powder horn with it, which vanished with the Marlin, the Remington, the Colt, and the revolvers. And my closeness with my relatives.

My relatives would lie if they were guilty, and they would say the same things if they were innocent. I already know what they would say if I asked about the guns and powder horn, so there is no point in bothering with them. One of the bad things about lying habitually is that it eventually teaches people that speaking to you makes things worse and is not worth the effort.

It would be great to have some heirlooms, but you can also make heirlooms. My grandfather’s dynasty fell apart, but mine can hold up, if we stick with God.

The new Savage should be here in a couple of days. The old one will be good for my son. Although a CZ 457 Scout with a 12″ length of pull would actually be better…

I’m going to stop now.

Cheap Ammo Surprise

Today I tested three types of ammunition in the Tikka T1x, using the Athlon Helos scope I mounted the other day. It is generally believed that one key to making a .22 accurate is to find ammunition it likes, so that’s what I’m doing.

Things were not totally optimal. I need to move the scope back one or two notches. The eye relief was not right, and it was hard to check the parallax. Nonetheless, things went pretty well. My dream is to shoot into half an inch at 50 yards with a .22, and I am getting closer.

I bought Eley Benchrest Outlaw ammo. Eley is one of the brands .22 competitors love. They also make something called Benchrest Precision, but it’s a lot more expensive.

I also bought CCI Sub-Sonic 40-grain lead round nose. Most people think subsonic .22 rounds are more accurate, and they definitely shoot much quieter from a suppressor.

My third choice was recommended by a guy on a forum. He said he had turned a couple of ladies loose with a .22 and some CCI Blazers, and they had shot really well. I ordered some 40-grain rounds.

Blazer is CCI’s cheap line, so you would expect it to be inaccurate. I paid 6.4 cents per round before tax, and that’s pretty low.

Sadly, it turns out you get what you pay for. On the high end, I mean. The Eleys gave me an average of 0.468″, or 1.28 MOA, at 35 yards. This included a flyer, but the flyer was not bad. I shot 4 10-round groups, and two were under 0.4″ Without the flyer, I was at 0.382″, or 1.04 MOA. I didn’t feel like I caused the flyer, but maybe I did. If so, Eley Benchrest Outlaw is very impressive.

The groups looked stringy, which made me unhappy and gave me the impression the Eleys were shooting worse than they were.

The Sub-sonics did not make me happy. I got a serious flyer which opened a group up to 0.840″. Without the flyer, I would have been at 0.515″ for an average, or 1.41 MOA. I don’t know if this stuff is prone to flyers or not. I am inclined not to trust it.

I forgot to shoot the last group. I wonder how it would have changed things.

The Blazers were great. They shot very pretty groups. Prettier than the other brands. I felt as though I were shooting better with Blazers, although the dial caliper told a different story. I averaged 0.555″, or 1.51 MOA. I may have had a flyer I caused, but it’s hard to tell, because the groups were still small. If you take out the worst group, I would be at 0.517″ or 1.41 MOA.

It looks like Blazers would be excellent for squirrels. They will hit harder than subsonics. The question is whether I can conclude anything about their reliability from 40 shots.

No .22 ammunition is truly reliable, as far as I know, but some are better than others.

I need to keep practicing. I laid off for a long time, so I need to get consistent, not just to shoot squirrels, but to test ammunition. I shot the Eley first today, and I was learning things the whole time. Maybe it would have shot even better had I shot it last.

People say CCI’s 38-grain Blazers are terrible, so I’m not going to bother with those.

I’m going to move the scope back and do some more shooting. Things are already looking really bad for the rodents.

“My, How Fat Your Crows Are!”

As noted yesterday, my Athlon 2-12 scope arrived, and I did what was probably a lot of unnecessary work getting it mounted just right. The Tikka Tx1 is ready for action, so today I sighted it in at 35 yards. Sort of. I didn’t use a proper bench, and I didn’t lie prone. I did what I could with a plastic tripod while sitting on my back porch. This works well enough for 2-MOA work, and it was definitely good enough to get the scope close to where it needed to be.

This photo shows what happened once the scope and rifle were just about right. I started shooting at the right, and I went clockwise and then shot at the center of the target. I adjusted the scope a couple of times between 5-shot groups.

I used CCI 36-grain HP ammo, which is fantastic for shooting coons and little hogs but not ideal for squirrels. You really need something good if you want to be consistent with squirrels at 50 yards.

So how did I do? Good enough to make me happy at this stage. The smallest group is 0.50″, and the biggest two are 0.875″. That gives me a range of about 1.35 to 2.38 MOA.

If I can manage to stay within an inch at 35 yards, which will mean practicing a lot and getting good at resting the gun in dubious circumstances, I should have no trouble at all killing squirrels with the gun just the way it is, with cheap ammo. I am going to try other types of ammunition, and I should be able to do significantly better.

I loosened the trigger once during this shoot, and the POI moved considerably, which is why I moved the turrets. I feel I should reduce the pull to the absolute minimum and count on common sense instead of the trigger to keep me safe.

I am fine off a sturdy bench or a platform, but I am not happy with my steadiness in other circumstances. I don’t know how much I can do about it. I can carry a plastic tripod when I shoot. When shooting from the house, I can lie down on the floor and eject my shells under the bed. I’m going to read up and see if there is any good advice out there beyond, “Stay really still.”

The POA seemed to be wobbling around in an area bigger than the groups I shot.

I like this scope a great deal. The glass is more than clear enough for me. It focuses pretty well at 35 yards. I was able to see the bullet holes. The reticle illumination is bright.

The reticle has a dot over the zero point. That makes it a little difficult to position the shots precisely. I guess I can sight the scope with the dot just under the POA, making it easier to line things up. Not sure if that’s a good idea.

Fooling with rifles in a systematic way shows how great shotguns are for squirrels. I can hit a squirrel a hundred feet up in a tree, no problem. Hitting squirrels on the ground that far away, consistently, with killing shots, is way harder.

If I can manage it, I’ll use my bench tomorrow.

I hope I’m not wrong about the distance at which I’m shooting. I used a Leica laser rangefinder. I have to say that 35 yards in the pasture looks longer than it does in the yard. On the other hand, the yard contains buildings and objects, and we all know how furniture makes a room look smaller.

This is a great squirrel gun. It’s not too heavy. The short barrel allows for a silencer without making the gun too long. The trigger is excellent. I am hoping to hunt with subsonics, and they make the gun extremely quiet.

Now lets just hope it’s still better than my cheap guns when I try my rifles side by side.

Who Was She Writing About?

Yesterday I learned that the wife of my first cousin by marriage had died. I didn’t even know her name. I couldn’t pick her out of a lineup. I’m not even sure this is the wife I met. I saw a photo, and the face doesn’t look familiar.

My dad and I took my cousin and his wife fishing in the Bahamas. I guess this would have been 30 years ago. I remember the wife as a chunky lady with a round face, but the lady in the photo I saw has a prominent chin. I wonder if this was my cousin’s second or third wife.

I would guess I have seen the cousin fewer than 10 times in my life. On very rare occasions, our families got together when I was a kid. My cousin’s stepmother, my dad’s sister, died in 2014, and my dad insisted I accompany him to Tennessee for the funeral. I must have seen the cousin and his wife, but I have no memories to prove it.

To me, this underscores the difference between my mother’s family and my dad’s family. When I say “my family,” I mean my mother’s family, although bad behavior involving my grandparents’ estates has led most of them to distance themselves from me. When I discuss my mother’s family without mentioning my dad’s family, I generally don’t give my dad’s family a thought.

My dad picked up on this unintentionally. Often, he referred to my mother’s father as my father.

My cousin’s wife died last year. Cousin or ex-stepcousin? I don’t know how that works. The notice I saw didn’t mention a cause.

No one called me. No one emailed. I wouldn’t expect them to. I’m not offended. If I had stood in line behind this guy at Walmart this week, I would have had no idea who he was.

My dad’s older sister was a cruel sociopath, and my dad also had sociopathic tendencies. She was abusive to him when he was a kid. She stabbed him in the head with a pencil. He was sitting on the floor making noises and pretending his hand was an airplane, and she stabbed him. She must have been trying to murder him.

The pencil didn’t go through his skull, but as an adult, he liked to show people the deep hole it left.

My aunt was obese and brassy. She was not charming. Her first marriage produced one child. I don’t know if she was at my aunt’s funeral. Can’t recall. I was just counting the minutes until I could leave. It was boring, sitting among strangers, facing an ash container that looked like a styrofoam beer cooler, listening to them talk about their abusive parents as though they were wonderful people.

My uncle had 4 kids of his own, so I guess he needed help. I don’t know why else he would have married my aunt. They didn’t seem to feel anything for each other except annoyance.

My aunt’s child was a daughter. Maybe this is why my aunt hated my uncle’s daughter, who was kind, gentle, and honest. She used to beat her for no reason. She used to give her own child candy and let her eat it in front of her husband’s daughter.

I was Googling my cousin when I found out his wife had died. For some reason, I started thinking about his first name, which is a strange one. I wanted to know if anyone else had that name.

I also came across my uncle’s obituary, written by the kids. He died 11 months ago.

I’ll tell you what. I wish I had known the guy in the obituary. But truthfully, I was not worthy.

Scholar. War hero with a Purple Heart. Educator. Beloved dad. I never met that guy!

He was awful. He didn’t have the spine to protect his kids from his wife. I don’t think he cared. They made the kids work and buy their own clothes. They worked them hard. After the kids were grown, they sat their parents down and told them exactly what they thought of them.

I thought about him again today, because norovirus is spreading in America.

My uncle was a big baby who thought only of himself. He loved to travel, fish, and hunt. He loved to freeload in order to make these things happen. His son was a pilot, so when my uncle and his wife flew, they only had to pay the taxes on their tickets. Freeloading. They didn’t care much for my dad, but he had vacation properties and a yacht, so my uncle arranged to visit from time to time.

They came to visit us over Christmas one year. I wanted no part of it. Back then, I was still close to my mother’s family, so I wanted to be with them, as usual. My dad’s two sisters and their entire tribes packed themselves into his three-bedroom house. The nicer sister and her husband were also freeloaders.

We shared common dishes. Christmas. People started throwing up. Turned out my uncle had norovirus, and he didn’t tell anyone. He knew we would have told him to stay home.

Making matters worse, norovirus is only spread via feces. If you’ve had norovirus, you touched someone else’s poop. My uncle hadn’t been washing his hands after using the toilet.

He was a biologist. A professor. It wasn’t like he had no idea how germs worked.

Every single person who was present threw up and had diarrhea for several days, except for my mother, who was spared. Maybe the viruses couldn’t take the nicotine.

When I found out my uncle was making us all sick, I left and slept somewhere else. Didn’t work. I still ended up using the toilet every 20 minutes.

I’m pretty sure my other aunt’s daughter Judy thinks I’m a jerk because I left abruptly. My mother was angry with me. I loved my mother, but common sense was not her long suit. She was overly emotional.

I didn’t care about ruining our puking family Christmas. I knew my aunts and uncles a little. The others were like strangers. It wasn’t like I had any concerns about future resentment or lost connections. There was no possibility we would go on to have relationships.

I don’t owe anyone an apology for isolating myself from a disease. It seems like women put closeness above staying healthy, however.

That might make a little sense in situations where people care about each other and aren’t together simply because relatives want free Florida vacations.

Avoiding days of diarrhea and vomiting is not rude, and even if it were, I would still have done it. If I were sick, I would expect others to avoid me.

Maybe the problem was that I was smarter and more rational than everyone else there, and I had a better conception of the connection between present behavior and future regurgitation. I really hated norovirus. I was familiar with it.

My dad’s older sister never liked it when I stood up for myself. I think this was because it bothered her to see a young relative she couldn’t abuse and boss. She must have felt like a horse that couldn’t reach an apple through a fence.

All around her, in her own home, she had had kids who ran and fetched when she barked, and they were used to feeling her knuckles on their heads. Here I was, out of range. Acting like I had rights.

I suspect she resented my mother, my sister, and me because we stood in the inheritance path. She thought my dad was much richer than he was, and he let her believe it. Even though he didn’t like her, he enjoyed being seen as a financial guru and being asked for advice.

I never understood why he liked spending his time impressing people he didn’t like much.

My dad’s relatives liked inheriting money and stuff. When my grandmother started to decline, my dad sent money and helped arrange to finance her care. When she died, my aunts backed up to her place and emptied it with no notice to us. My mother was incensed on behalf of my sister and me. She was always appalled by my dad’s people’s selfishness and greed.

Of course, she didn’t live to see what her own daughter and sister did with her parents’ estates.

My dad’s bunch picked some heirlooms for my sister and me. A Baccarat angel and a Lladro horse my dad had given my grandmother. Street value about $75, combined.

They’re both gone now. I threw the angel out because it looked like an idol to me, and I accidentally broke the horse after my sister abandoned it. It wasn’t like these were things we had seen on fondly-remembered visits to my grandmother’s apartment. I don’t miss these things. I didn’t know the angel or horse existed until my dad presented me with them and told me to choose one.

Why did he do that? He paid for them.

The thing on my mind today is the contrast between my uncle and the guy in the obituary. He was lazy. He was selfish. He always seemed gutless to me, so the idea of him fighting bravely and competently in Korea befuddles me. Maybe it’s not completely true. He probably got on the other soldiers’ nerves and let them down.

They didn’t write the obituary.

We love praising combat veterans, like they’re Yeshua himself. They can do no wrong. We don’t look after their families well, and we warehouse the crippled ones in substandard facilities, but we tend to act like anyone who has seen combat is an inspiring figure. A lot of vets use their exalted status to shut other people up. “You weren’t in ‘Nam with me and my buddies, face-down, in the muck!”

It’s not true. Lots of combat veterans–even true heroes–are horrible, trashy people. I knew a Korea vet who thought it was funny to steal other soldiers’ helmets. He said that when he got tired of his heavy helmet, he would dump it. Later, when he needed a helmet, he stole someone else’s. Serving in combat doesn’t automatically make you a role model.

There are too many stories about my uncle to tell.

My grandmother hated him, but because they lived near each other, he and my aunt had to drive her around. She used to sit in the backseat and watch the gas gauge. He would refuse to stop and get gas because he didn’t like being told what to do, so more than once, he ran out of gas with her in the car and ended up walking to gas stations. He kept a gas can in the car for this reason. She used to call him a fool.

On a Bahamas trip, his wife fell on our boat and caught her ring on something. It ripped the skin on her finger wide open. We had to go to the nearest island where there was medical help, in very rough seas.

While we were en route, with the seas pounding and things falling on the deck in the saloon, while my aunt held her bleeding hand in a paper towel, he told her to get up and get him a Coors Light.

Why the glowing obituary?

I wonder if Mormonism is the reason.

I don’t know a lot of Mormons, but my impression of them is that they have an inferiority complex about their non-Christian cult. The feeling I get is that they want people to think they’re the real Christians. They want to convey a false image of success and blessings in order to convince actual Christians we’re wrong.

“Look how much money we make.” “Look at our beautiful families.” “Check out our family photos.” They seem to be aggressive about it.

They say you should never fish with fewer than two Mormons, because if you fish with one, he’ll drink all your liquor.

My uncle’s daughter is a Mormon spiritual advisor of some kind. Women listen to her. She seriously believes American Indians are really Jews. She believes every wacky thing Mormonism teaches. Maybe she wrote the obituary.

I said she was honest, but many people who are otherwise honest lie in obituaries.

My aunt and uncle were miserable, and so were their kids. My aunt and uncle were immature. They were not good people. They were sometimes embarrassing. They hurt their children.

They didn’t actually believe in Mormonism. They were both atheists. They went to hell. Their local shaman or whatever told them not to worry about losing their faith, if they had ever had it. He said they should stick around for the social life.

I wrote a nice obituary about my dad. I did not say he was an alcoholic. I did not say he beat his wife when he was younger. I left a lot of stuff out. On the other hand, I did not craft a deceptive blurb intended to make people think he was an exemplary human being everyone should envy. That would have been wrong. The unnecessary damage he did to his family was immense.

Lying about the dead in order to make people admire them is sinful. Other people need to learn from bad examples.

Why should we make each other feel bad about our lives by pumping up the resumes of dead scoundrels?

I sound like I’m calling my dad a scoundrel now, which was not my intention. Well, he was. But he changed. During the last months of his life, he was wonderful, but the past can’t be erased.

When we laud each other unrealistically, we discourage people. We make them feel as though they are particularly wicked or unsuccessful. We destroy their hope. Everybody is a failure. Everybody is despicable. Pretending otherwise is harmful, not helpful.

My uncle was a jerk. My aunt was a wicked stepmother. If they ever did anything good for anyone else, I am not aware of it. If they ever expressed concern for people with problems, I don’t remember it. They didn’t even take us to dinner when they showed up to freeload.

I should make it clear I didn’t hate my aunt and uncle. There were times in my life when I got along well with them. But they were what they were. The person who wrote the obituary erected a monument to an illusion.

Doing the Unnecessary in the Pursuit of the Unimportant is no Vice

Today I had some fun doing something which may well have been unnecessary and even detrimental.

Nothing new there, now that I think about it.

What do you do when you want to kill squirrels at 50 yards or less?

A) Buy a cheap Ruger 10/22, a $75 scope, and a box of Mini-mags and fire at will, accepting the fact that you will miss a lot.

B) Buy a shotgun and a box of 6 shot and get the job over with.

C) Buy an expensive bolt-action rifle, put a silencer on it, and top it with a 2-12x42mm first focal plane scope with an illuminated mrad reticle, and then spend a king’s ransom on an assortment of expensive ammunition to find out what works best?

If you didn’t pick C, you’re not me.

Actually, I’ve done B and C.

I got myself a Tikka T1x rifle, and today I put an Athlon Helos milrad scope on it.

If you were going to put a scope on a rifle, what would you do?

A) Install the rail without checking the torque, install the ring bases without checking the torque, install the caps without checking the torque or lapping the rings, level the scope via wild guess, and start plugging squirrels?

B) Use a torque wrench to install the mount and bases, spend two hours lapping the rings, spend another 20 minutes cleaning lapping compound off everything, install the caps with a torque wrench, and level the scope by shoving a machinist’s parallel between it and the base?

I didn’t do A, if that’s what you’re wondering.

I don’t know how much of this stuff is really necessary. Shooters are like golfers. If a golfer hits a hole-in-one while wearing one red sock, he’ll wear one red sock for the rest of his life. No one is really positive installing scopes carefully makes a difference, but some shooters think it does, so a lot of them do it. And apparently, and lot don’t, and they make fun of the others.

I consulted some people, and most of them said lapping was stupid and was only needed for terrible rings. On the other hand, there are shooters on the web who think anyone who doesn’t lap is an idiot.

I decided the preponderance of the evidence slightly favored the lappers.

“Lapping” means polishing with fine grit. In the case of scopes, it grinds irregularities out of the inner surfaces of rings.

A scope is a straight tube except when the Chinese have an off day, and it has to be held in two metal rings that should be 100% concentric and free of bumps and so on. The theory is that if the rings don’t line up, or if the inside surfaces are irregular, the high points will mar your scope, you may put bending forces on the scope which will affect the function, and the rings won’t hold on very well.

When I took my precision rifle course, I was taught to lap rings. I think. Anyway, someone somewhere told me to do it, so I have done it a few times. I have a kit.

The kit consists mainly of a hard steel bar the diameter of a scope tube. You put lapping compound (an abrasive) inside the rings, you clamp the bar inside them, and you move it back and forth until compound grinds the rings round and true.

When you lap, you remove the bar from the rings once in a while to see if you’ve ground out enough metal to get something like 80% contact with the bar. When you do this, it’s hard to keep the compound from getting into the threads on the ring bases.

The problem with this, other than the mess, is that the caps are supposed to be torqued to certain values. The grit in the threads produces friction, so it seems to me you could end up with caps that aren’t tight enough. The grit could give you a high torque reading when the screws aren’t really in far enough. I think.

I used a sonic cleaner and brake cleaner to get the compound out. Did I succeed? No way to know. The grit may have embedded itself in the threads.

Another thing: I had to take the scope bases off the rail to clean them. So who’s to say the rings register exactly the same way every time they’re put on the rail? I hope they do, but what if they don’t? Maybe I did more harm than good.

People say to buy really good rings in order to avoid lapping, but that doesn’t help if the rail isn’t perfect. If lapping is necessary because rails can’t be trusted, then expensive rings can’t fix the problem.

Whatever. Now the scope is mounted. I really like it. It has tons of eye relief, so I had a lot of leeway when I decided where to put it. The reticle is bright. The glass is pretty good. The diopter thing works with my vision issues without glasses. It should be great.

The big problem now is that my list of excuses for not hitting squirrels just got a lot shorter.

Critical Race Theory Could have Prevented This

I saw some interesting stuff today, related to the California fires that are destroying the homes of entertainment people and other wealthy individuals. It looks like I was right to think leftism is the fundamental cause of the destruction.

Prager University posted a very interesting video. They say California has forced one of its big power companies to waste a huge amount of money on “renewable” boondoggle projects while failing to improve existing infrastructure. According to the video, failing power lines cause a lot of the fires, and one of the worst fires was caused by a power line built in 1921. So around 104 years ago.

I’ll embed the video, and you can judge for yourself.

Adam Carolla, The Man Show’s Art Garfunkel, has a podcast, and he said some very interesting things. He says rich people who lose houses in the fire will not be able to rebuild them for years because of Los Angeles County’s hostility to construction. He also says some will not be able to rebuild at all. He’s talking about three-year waits between the beginning of the permit process and the arrival of the first construction materials.

I’ll embed his video here.

Can this really be true? It sounds about right. He says the late Suzanne Somers had to move because it was not possible for her to replace her burned home.

According to Carolla, the real mission of the county employees in charge of permits is to get people out of certain areas. They do not want people to rebuild. If this is true, they must be glad certain homes are burning.

Imagine that. You pay $10 million for a house, you can’t get insurance because insurance companies aren’t stupid, the house burns down, and you end up with a permanently-vacant lot worth, what, $500,000 as a neighbor buffer? Maybe less.

My neighbor owns an 85-foot-wide strip of land that runs the length of my property. It’s a county requirement in case he needs to build a driveway. He will never need a driveway because we have a private road.

He is not allowed to sell the strip. As a result, it will never be cleared, and I will always have 85 feet of woods between me and the weird guy on the other side who put Biden signs on his fences.

It’s great for me. I don’t want to see or be seen. It costs me nothing. My neighbor has to pay taxes on it. This is presumably the kind of thing people in Los Angeles will see in the years after the fires.

Carolla also predicts a red wave. He says people who got “burned” by Democrats will vote for conservatives in the future. That won’t happen. Not to any serious degree. Leftism is a religion, not a set of opinions based on reason.

My wife and I were talking about the displaced entertainment people last night. We felt bad for them. Losing a home has to be extremely unpleasant, and losing large numbers of possessions that are irreplaceable or attached to memories must be almost like losing a loved one. On the other hand, these are destructive people whose industry leads our children to hell. They help Satan’s candidates get elected. They lie and propagandize in their ridiculous shows, movies, and concerts. What is happening to them is not nearly as bad as what they do to the rest of us.

It’s ironic that photos and videos of the fires show scenes that literally look like they could be from hell. Flames. Bright orange skies. Smoke and flying embers.

I saw Gavin Newsom criticizing Trump with the hellscape behind him. He pretended to be emotional and outraged. Trump has been lambasting Newsom and his kind for causing the fires. Newsom’s oily spin: how could Trump be insensitive enough to play politics with a major disaster?

Blaming politicians for the consequences of their dishonesty and incompetence is not “playing politics,” but shaming people for exposing you is disgraceful.

L.A. is one of a number of big American cities that chose masculine black women as mayors. L.A.’s not-straight-looking single Mayor Karen Bass is under fire, pun not intended, for taking off for Ghana just as fire warnings were popping up. And she cut about $17 million from the firefighting budget. Where did it go? Something related to DEI, I would guess.

Reigning as a leftist is theater. It’s about virtue-signaling. Competence is not a factor. Competence doesn’t get you votes. Enabling voters so they can persist in their delusions does.

It’s frustrating to watch Californians burn their own properties, but it’s pointless to get upset, because they will never stop, any more than movie stars will stop forcing their little boys to wear dresses.

I suppose Satan destroys some people, but mainly, he gets people to destroy themselves. Fighting is hard. Lying is easy. It’s smart. your enemies do themselves in, and you sit back and watch. They do all the work for you.

I guess the flames will go out soon. There can’t be that much left to burn.

At least they don’t have to worry about looters. You can’t loot ashes.

Here’s something interesting. Megyn Kelly says Kristin Crowley, L.A.’s female fire chief, has been working on DEI instead of preventing fires. James Woods, who just lost a house, agrees.

ANNNNNNNND she’s a lesbian.

Perfect.

Maybe we’ll find out if the criticisms are true before long.

Thank Goodness the Weeds are Okay

Los Angeles is burning again.

What a mess. Houses are coming down. Roads are blocked. People are getting out of their cars, leaving them in the street, and taking the keys with them so bulldozers have to move them.

Some Christians are saying God is showing the world what he thinks of Hollywood, but is that true? Los Angeles is like a giant boil Satan created to pump infectious pus out over the world. Great evil is done there. On the other hand, floods wiped out a lot of homes in Appalachia not long ago, and there are a lot of Christians there.

Here’s what I find interesting: there are two schools of thought as to why California keeps burning. One theory is that there is nothing anyone can do about it. The other is that the blue-state population and the officials it elects refuse to cut the brush that burns over and over, because every weed is sacred and a child of Mother Gaia, as important as an Californian and definitely more important than anyone wearing a red hat.

Today I read a web post from a guy claiming to be a firefighter. He is on the hopelessness side. He said the fires approach at 60 mph.

Sorry, but I can’t believe these fires move that fast. If they did, the fires would have gone out in a day, because they would have burned all the way to the ocean in a few hours. By now, we would be used to seeing gee-whiz Youtube videos of fires moving at freeway speeds. They don’t exist. There is no way Youtubers would miss out on catching a wall of fire moving over a brushy area at freeway speeds.

Is he saying bits of flaming material move on 60-mph winds? That is surely true, but there is a big difference between having sparks fly by you and being IN a fire.

The real speed is probably more like a mile per day. If I’m mistaken, maybe someone will show me a video of a fire moving a mile a minute.

I set my pasture on fire once. Embarrassing. The grass was very dry. A spark landed maybe 60 yards from a burn pile, and the grass started burning. I would say the actual fire moved at about 50 yards per hour. Even slower than I do while carrying a hose. Thank God. I guess it would have been faster had the wind been stronger, but it spread slower than the wind at the time. A 60-mph wind would not have spread the fire at 60 mph.

I have seen hopelessness promoters saying it’s stupid to tell people to cut brush, because it would take a billion lifetimes or something to cut the brush covering the whole state. Well, that’s stupid. You don’t have to denude the whole state. You have to manage brush around buildings and roads. And even if you can’t fix the entire problem this way, you can do a great deal of good.

If cutting brush doesn’t help, why does the Getty Museum spend a king’s ransom cutting brush on its property? I doubt they just enjoy wasting money on projects they know are pointless.

People love to say things don’t work or can’t exist even when they do work and do exist. I’ve seen numerous Christians tell people miracles don’t happen any more, because apparently God has retired while Satan has kept his miracle business open. I’ve experienced miracles, personally. You can see other people experience them on Youtube.

People also like to argue that things happen when they really don’t.

Remember the ivermectin-overdose-tsunami lie? Rolling Stone published a completely false article saying people couldn’t get into emergency rooms because poor ignorant Trumpers were overdosing on ivermectin and tying up the staffs. Never happened. Good luck finding even one example of a death caused by ivermectin. They’re about as common as deaths caused by lima beans. The myth persists, however.

The other day, some guy trying to justify buying $500 kitchen knives told me putting knives in the dishwashwer would beat them up. This is true of fragile Japanese knives, but I have been putting my cheap commercial knives in the dishwasher for maybe 15 years, and nothing has ever happened to one. He loved his theory, and all I had were proven facts.

I think clearing brush works, because it has worked all over the globe since the dawn of history, and I think the fires we see in California would be much, much smaller, if they existed at all, if everyone there were conservative.

We now live in a world where a person who catches a fish and puts a photo on the web is treated like Heinrich Himmler, celebrating the ash output of a new crematorium. People worship nature and animals with astonishing intensity, and they turn their hatred, which is literally murderous, on human beings. They say there are too many of us, like we’re lionfish, decimating snapper and grouper on American coral reefs. Like we’re kudzu, not the highest-ranking life on the world God created for us.

To me, it is completely plausible that Californians have decided flammable scrub is somehow important even though it flames up, destroys homes, and kills people. Even though it burns on its own all the time, as part of the natural process, and never amounts to anything.

Here’s what I always tell my wife: the environment can drop dead.

By that, I mean the world was put here for human beings, we are the only thing that give it importance, and it is our right and obligation to do reasonable damage to nature when our interests are sufficient.

I don’t really mean I want all life on Earth to cease. I mean we need to use common sense. But “common sense” is an oxymoron.

We need dams. We need to cut wood. We need oil. We need to kill a lot of creatures that make trouble for us. We and the rest of the biome or whatever they call it now would be better off if certain species were rendered extinct. That is especially true of microbes. The world doesn’t actually need anthrax, covid, syphilis, fleas, lice, or ticks.

Leftists love to tell us every obnoxious species is vital and that the world will collapse if we lose even one. Hmm. In 1900, the US was covered with gigantic chestnut trees. They dominated forests and provided wood, food for animals and people, and places for animals to live. They’re gone now. If the chestnut can disappear and leave us with thriving forests, why do we need every subspecies of cockroach and slug?

We lost the passenger pigeon, which used to darken the sky with its numbers. We lost most of the bison. We killed off the mammoths and mastodons. The ecosystem has not collapsed. Shouldn’t we be okay if we cut a few weeds?

I think Californians could do better. This has to be true, because people who cut brush, even in California, get better outcomes.

Maybe they love standing on their flammable decks with the inevitable white wine in hand, admiring the natural desert weeds. I could understand that, but I destroyed something like 15 big, irreplaceable oaks that made my property look nice. I didn’t want them falling on my house and shop in storms. Houses surrounded by big oaks definitely look better, but they also get crushed. When the storms come, I sleep soundly.

I could have left them up. I could have said, “When the roof is crushed and hundreds of gallons of water pour in and ruin the walls and our expensive belongings, I’ll just put my wife and infant son in the car and move to a Hampton Inn for 6 months, and when my son is older, I’ll tell him how we did the right thing for Mother Gaia.”

People love to say it’s okay if you have losses when you have home insurance. No, it’s not! You’ll always lose more than the insurance companies will pay you, they won’t give you a dime for the many hours of hard work you’ll have to do when you set your house back up, they won’t be able to replace unique items, and you will have to start over on all the things you worked hard to get just right. Not everything comes out of a box just the way you want it. And who wants to live in a hotel room?

As for who God is punishing, he hasn’t informed me. But I have some thoughts.

My wife and I pray for the destruction of the entertainment industry, including sports, every day. We pray for the filthy people and spirits involved in it to be exposed around the clock. When bad things happen that impact the industry adversely, and when celebrities are exposed as filthy criminals who hurt the innocent, it certainly comports with our requests. I’m sure other Christians pray for the same things. Hollywood leads our children to hell.

As for heavily-Christian areas that receive disasters, I think most Christianity is very weak. We don’t teach people to repent. We don’t teach them to pray in tongues. We push the fake prosperity gospel on them, and it separates them from God. We don’t teach people they need to know God supernaturally and spend time with him in order to be protected. I don’t think it should be a big surprise if bad things happen in an area where the church itself cuts people off from God while pretending to bring them closer.

Receiving prophets brings blessings. Receiving false prophets brings curses.

Lots of bad things happened to me when I was an uninformed and disinformed Christian, but as God has corrected me, things have gotten better and better.

God promises us things like healing, protection, and prosperity. If we don’t receive them, how can we not be doing something wrong? He can’t lie.

Read the Old Testament and see how he treated the Jews when they behaved well.

God has a special love for the Jews, but the destruction of Israel and the Holocaust happened anyway. They rejected their Messiah and the Holy Spirit, so they weren’t as protected as they should have been. Surely the same things happen to Christians.

Yeshua said he wanted to protect Jerusalem, holding the people under his wings like a mother hen. The false doctrine of the Jews of that time prevented him.

It is amazing that rich areas in a rich state in the world’s richest country in 2025 could have a crisis like this; the kind of crisis you would expect to see in Africa or India. But then it’s also amazing they can’t keep their electricity on or get the poop off their sidewalks.

In Los Angeles and San Francisco, it’s a crime to fail to clean up your dog’s poop in public places. Think about that for a second.

Imagine walking your Chihuahua in San Francisco. You might have to pick up his ounce of poop while leaving a two-pound pile of human poop right next to it.

You know what they should do? They should pass a law saying that if your dog poops, you have to leave it and fill a bag with human poop.

Or used needles.

Digression: I wondered why Canada gave Trudeau the boot. I knew it had nothing to do with “common sense,” because if Canadians had that, Canada would be a lot different. My wife is more aware of international news than I am, because I’m an American. She filled me in. One reason is that Canadians are sick of Trudeau letting illegals in from India. There is now a big street-pooping problem in Canada.

If you search the web, you’ll see two kinds of websites. The ones where credible public officials and citizens complain about Indians pooping in public, and the ones that swear it has never happened even once.

There are 1.5 billion Indians in India, and every single one wants to move to North America. The ones in Canada all want to move to the United States.

Canadians are concerned because in some places, Canadian culture, which is unimportant, is being replaced by wonderful, vibrant, pagan Indian culture, which is extremely important because it’s not European or Christian.

It would be wonderful if Canadian culture were completed replaced, because then Canada would be as wonderful as India. Indians have all the answers.

It’s going to be interesting, following the California story. It will be interesting to see homes belonging to billionaires and people with hundreds of millions collapsing in flames, seemingly unnecessarily, simply because weeds are more important than human beings.

It’s a shame to see so much wasted.

Don’t Let Satan Cheat You Out of a Family

God gave me a very strong revelation, and it has changed my life.

This happened on around January 2.

For a long time, I have been asking God to help me to love him and be close to him. Greasy, lying preachers tell us to ask God for money, spouses, healing, and so on, as though he were nothing but a genie. We are also taught to follow rules so we get points and win the game of Christianity, earning places in heaven. That’s completely wrong. We don’t earn anything. It’s better to pray for God to clean you up and help you to be like him, and you should pray for him to help you to obey the two fundamental commandments: love God as intensely as possible, and love others as you love yourself.

When I prophesy, God keeps saying, “Be close to me and love me.”

In 2021, one of my pets died, and it was my fault. I hesitated to take him to the University of Florida, where they said I might sit in the waiting room for 12 hours. I took him to an incompetent vet who said he would be fine while antibiotics came from Arizona. This is how I lost Maynard the cockatoo.

He was extremely attached to me. He loved to he held and petted. The more an animal loves you, the more its death hurts you.

Several times, he has appeared to me in dreams, glowing and full of joy and love. In these dreams, I have held him and kissed him. I was so glad to see him. I was always glad to see him in life, but when he returned from the dead, it was more intense.

Over the last few days, God has helped me to feel as though he were holding me against himself, feeling his love and warmth go through me. It reminds me of the dreams I had about Maynard. I feel great relief in being close to God. I spend time in this state now, and it’s hard to break loose and come back to the world.

God showed me that we should love people as though they had just returned from the dead. Have you lost a child or spouse? How glad would you be if they returned and let you hold them? You would be beside yourself with relief.

He then reminded me of something. Yeshua did return from the dead, and so have we. We were dead before he saved us, even if we couldn’t see it. Yeshua feels as though he lifted us out of hell and took us into his embrace. This is why the angels in heaven celebrate so much when we are saved. They are celebrating our resurrections.

He showed me something else: in the story of the prodigal son, the father said, “It was meet that we should make merry, and be glad: for this thy brother was dead, and is alive again; and was lost, and is found.”

There is more. Look at Colossians 12.

Buried with him in baptism, wherein also ye are risen with him through the faith of the operation of God, who hath raised him from the dead.

And you, being dead in your sins and the uncircumcision of your flesh, hath he quickened together with him, having forgiven you all trespasses. . .

Look at Romans 6: “Therefore we are buried with him by baptism into death: that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life.”

We are resurrected with him, and if we are resurrected, we have returned from the dead.

People who reject Yeshua reject a man who returned from the dead, as described in the story of the rich man in hell. He asked God to send Lazarus the beggar to warn his brothers, and God told him that if they didn’t believe the prophets and Moses, they wouldn’t believe one who returned from the dead.

This was not a parable. In parables, people don’t have names. Lazarus and the rich man are real people, and the events in the story happened.

Ephesians 2 says God “quickens” us, and “quicken” means “bring to life.” It says he has raised us up together.

I hate to put it this way, but we should be like dogs. If you have a dog, every time you come home, the dog treats you like you were just raised from the dead. He dances and jumps. He wags his tail. He becomes delirious with joy. It’s like he thought he would never see you again.

We should feel this way about Yeshua and about each other. After all, we don’t know how long we’ll have each other. Things happen. We should be intensely grateful for each other while we live.

God showed me something else: Yeshua, who is God, is called Emmanuel, or “God with us.” If you are not with God, you aren’t a success as a Christian.

Now I lie in bed feeling as though my cheek is pressed up against God, and I have a hard time making myself let go and talk to my wife. But when I’m back, I savor being with her. I press her against me.

God showed me some other things.

If we have this attitude about him and other people, then we treasure God and human beings. They become our treasures. What did he say about treasure? “For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”

If you treasure God and people, your heart will be for them, as it’s supposed to be.

God calls us his pearl of great price. He said the pearl of great price, worth everything a man had, represented the kingdom of heaven, and he said the kingdom was in us.

A pearl is treasure.

The Bible is very consistent, but you have to have the Holy Spirit’s help to see it. Smart theologians often go to hell because they rely on their minds.

When you are with God, he blesses you, and he keeps spirits that hate you away. It’s crucial to be with God.

God has also shown me how powerful humility is. It brings God close. It should be cultivated and prayed for. You can’t be close to God without humility, and without it, demons will always surround and inhabit you.

These things God showed me are very important, and everyone is supposed to have them. I suggest you ask for them and see how things change for you.

This Cake Isn’t Done Yet

I finally got to make a nearly-credible effort to try out the Tikka T1x .22 rifle today.

My hope has been that I could find something that would shoot around half an inch at 50 yards. I have not found it yet, but it could happen soon.

I decided to try two rifles today. My Marlin 60 and the Tikka. I used two kinds of ammunition: CCI 36-grain Mini-mags (1235 fps) and CCI 40-grain Standard Velocity Target (1070 fps). The Target ammo is more accurate because CCI stamped “Target” on the little boxes. It really tightens those groups up.

I have criticized the Marlin a great deal, because there is a great deal to criticize. The inner workings are cheap. From the factory, it couldn’t shoot hyper loads safely. It has a tube magazine fastened to the barrel, so free-floating is not an option. To reload, you have to put your hand in front of the muzzle. The factory trigger was a horror. It came with no sling studs.

Whatever. It has a great barrel. There is no denying it. And because I have done a lot of work on it, it now has an acceptable trigger, sturdy guts, and studs. It’s 80% of the rifle Marlin should have made.

I have been planning a major .22 campaign against squirrels, and I wanted something substantially more accurate than the Model 60 and my Savage A22, so I bought the Tikka, my first .22 bolt gun. It cost three times as much as the Model 60. Unless you count all the parts I had to put in the Model 60 to turn it into a proper firearm. Then I guess it only costs around twice as much.

The Marlin has a UTG Bug Buster scope, so named because it will focus on things 10 feet away. I paid something like $70 for the Bug Buster. It started out on an expensive RWS/Diana air rifle, which turned out to be worthless and a waste of money.

The Tikka has a Vortex Diamondback 4-12×42 scope, which I would say is pretty good for deer. It will focus on things as little as 30 feet away, supposedly. I can’t get it to do it. I believe the current price for this scope is around $250.

Which scope is better? The Bug Buster. I don’t care who laughs at me for saying it. The glass is clearer, it has target turrets, it has an illuminated reticle, it has parallax adjustment (the Vortex is fixed at 100 yards)…it’s wonderful.

I couldn’t get a truly sharp focus with either gun at 35 yards, but the Bug Buster was nearly there. The Vortex was just plain bad. Rotating the eyepiece did not overcome my vision issues. Maybe it would have worked well with my glasses.

I set up two four-bullseye targets. The bullseyes are 4″ across, and the rings are 1/2″ apart. I shot 40 rounds per gun. I shot 20 Mini-mags and then 20 of those anointed target rounds.

If my little Leica rangefinder is right, I was shooting at 35 yards. I used my nice solid bench, and I rested the guns. The plan is to zero at 35 and shoot targets later at 50 to see what the gun will do. If I’m zeroed at 35, I’m right on the button for long squirrel shots, and I just have to hold over 1/2″ for normal shots. I can hold under at 50 yards when shooting for accuracy. I think it’s over, not under. I’ll find out.

So what happened? I’ll post the targets. Marlin first. The top two bullseyes on each target were shot with Mini-mags, and you can guess what I used on the lower bullseyes.

I would say the Tikka did a little better, but not two-times-the-price better. I pulled at least one shot while shooting the Marlin, but even if I hadn’t, I think the groups would have been slightly worse.

I would also say the target rounds were less prone to flyers, so Mini-mags are probably the wrong ammo for squirrels over 25 yards off.

At normal squirrel distances of up to 75 feet, these guns are interchangeable in their current state. Might as well shoot the Marlin and avoid getting the Tikka dirty.

Was it a fair comparison? No.

I mounted the Diamondback for seated shooting off my back porch using a hunting tripod. When I rested the gun on the bench, the scope was too far forward. I had to fight with it to get in the eye relief sweet spot. Also, I would guess that the parallax error cost me some accuracy. The Diamondback is not a precision scope. I think it was made to hit a deer in the side, accurately enough to kill it. That’s asking very little.

Right now, you can walk into any store and buy a sub-MOA hunting rifle. Not a tactical rifle or target rifle. A hunting rifle. The hunting rifles our parents and grandparents used, including very expensive ones, were doing great if they managed 4 MOA. Deer are big. You just have to hit an immense kill zone in order to take one home.

I suppose many scopes are still made with MOA+ accuracy in mind.

The furry glass in the Diamondback made it hard to see where my point of aim was. I had no trouble at all with the Bug Buster.

The darker it got, the more the Bug Buster outshone the Diamondback.

I suppose I should put the Tikka away until the new scope comes. Then we’ll find out what it can do.

I also want a new front rest. Today I used a Caldwell Rock Jr., which is a front rest that only goes up to 7.5″. You have to crawl under the gun to get the crosshairs on target. I don’t understand how people use it without fighting it. I should make a simple rest from plywood, with a wingnut to let me adjust the height.

I also used a front bag, but it was hard to get height out of it. They’re great for prone shooting, but they’re small for seated shooting.

I ordered two types of ammunition to see if they’re any better than what I have. I ordered Eley Benchrest Outlaw, which has done great in at least one T1x. I also ordered subsonic CCI hollow points. Not the really slow ones. Barely subsonic. Maybe they’ll help. Real .22 nuts buy lots of different brands to see what works in their guns.

With the silencer in place, the Tikka sounded like an air rifle, as it did the first time I tried it. Really nice.

In any case, I think it’s fair to say I am ready to commence .22LR squirrel genocide. The Marlin will do the job reliably and humanely as long as I don’t get ambitious about distance.

I need to practice and get my trigger pull in top shape. Otherwise, I’ll hold my guns back and maim squirrels.

So that’s it for now. The Marlin will work, and it’s too early to say much about the Tikka.

Taking the Gas Out of Gaslighters

My buddy Mike sent me some interesting photos on December 31. His son works in Manhattan, and while his son was at work, a man showed up on a balcony below his office and set up a sniper rifle. Here it is.

At first, I thought the photo was more interesting than it later turned out to be. I thought Mike’s son’s building was locked down due to a terrorist situation. Then I realized the rifle belonged to a cop. Mike sent me a video, and it featured a burly guy in black clothing with big white letters on the back.

If you were dancing, getting drunk, and doing drugs in Times Square when the ball came down, you were surrounded by guys with precision rifles.

I thought this was interesting, so I went to a community of shooters and asked if they could identify the gun. I have a precision rifle, so it was natural for me to be interested. You could call my gun a sniper rifle if you wanted. Professional snipers use precision rifles, just like shooting hobbyists. Military snipers didn’t always use them. They used to use deer rifles that were nicely set up to maximize accuracy.

I don’t know if it’s correct to say our military still uses deer rifles. The Marines use a modified .308 rifle based on the Remington 700–a deer rifle–and you can buy a heavy-barreled 700 in .308 for $690. The Marine designation for its rifle is M40A5.

A company called Georgia Precision sells the M40A5 for about $6500 without a scope. Do Marine rifles come from Georgia Precision, or are there a bunch of companies selling different M40A5’s? Not sure. I saw an Internet forum post which suggests the Marines build their own rifles.

The McMillan stock they use runs about $1400, and the aftermarket barrel probably costs something similar, including customization.

Do you need to spend that kind of money to get a super-accurate .308? No. But not every custom part is intended to improve accuracy, and the military can afford frills.

How much of the money is, basically, wasted? No idea. I’ll bet a lot of it is.

The Marines use a barrel made by a company named Schneider. So Schneider must make unbelievably accurate rifles on one else can match? No.

I don’t know why the Marines use .308. It’s an obsolescent (not obsolete) cartridge that loses velocity quickly. It drops below supersonic speed at around 800 yards, and when that happens, the bullet jiggles in flight, and it degrades accuracy. A 6.5 Creedmoor round is supersonic to about 1400 yards. It’s a more modern cartridge, designed with better technology.

When I took my precision rifle course, an instructor said my .308 had a trajectory like a mortar. The bullet goes up, slows down, and comes down, creating a path that looks like the Gateway Arch in St. Louis.

All rifle bullets do this, but a .308’s arch is a lot shorter and steeper than a 6.5 Creedmoor’s arch.

A bullet that slows down and drops fast is a pain to shoot accurately a long way out. When you do precision shooting, you have to know how much your bullet will drop over distance so you will know exactly how high it will be when it gets to your target. A short arch means the bullet’s path will be more nearly vertical far away. That means it will drop a lot more over a given distance out there. You have to have a good accurate range figure, because the round is less forgiving than a flat-shooting round.

The .308 delivers somewhat more energy to a person or deer at 200 yards than 6.5 Creedmoor, but farther out, the 6.5 delivers more energy because it’s moving faster. Because it wasn’t designed during the Truman administration.

I don’t know why any sniper would use a .308. Tradition, maybe? I don’t know any Marine armorers, so maybe I’ll never know. Maybe they have a great reason. It can’t be the increased energy at short ranges. A 6.5 Creedmoor will kill a moose just fine, so there is no reason to think a .308 is needed to kill a person. And there are a bunch of other cartridges that are better than 6.5 Creedmoor.

It’s not because a .308 rifle can use spare ammo from machine guns when things get bad. You can’t hit anything with machine gun ammo. I have tried.

If the .308 didn’t exist today, no one would invent it, because the technology is so backward. It would be like inventing a black and white TV with 13 channels.

The .308 was invented 73 years ago. Penicillin was about 11 years old. The transistor was just being made available to the public. The only intelligent life that had been to space was a few perverted beings that liked to abduct guys out of bass boats in Mississippi and probe their unmentionable parts. There were no satellites.

I guarantee you, you can get a Remington 700 that is just as accurate as the Marine version for way, way less than $6500. Maybe it will weigh more or not have wifi or something, but it will shoot fine, and given the short useful range of the .308, it will never need to shoot better than maybe 0.75 MOA. One MOA is 10.5″ at 1000 yards. How wide is a person?

Remington rifle: $650. Timney trigger: $250. New barrel: $500. Precision chassis (stock): $400. Bipod: $100-$250. Ballpark figures. Under $2000. Good scope (Vortex Viper): $1000. Rings: $150.

You don’t actually need the precision chassis, but it looks neat.

What are we at? $3050? Have my 3,000 university math credits paid off?

I think I have something like $2700 in my precision rifle, and I can promise you it will shoot 0.5 MOA with the right ammo and shooter, because I shoot close to that with crap off the shelf, and I am not a great shot.

You know what? Boys like their toys. It’s a blast, customizing, well, nearly anything and getting it just the way you want it. The Marines are boys, just like the rest of us.

As King Lear said when his daughter tried to tell him she couldn’t keep his drunken entourage in her palace, “O, reason not the need!”

To get back to the sniper photo, I asked some forum people if they knew what it was. It turns out the NYPD bought (or was given for publicity) Sako Trg M10 sniper rifles, which sell for about $12,000 without accessories. This is a 14.6-pound gun, and apparently, the NYPD went for .308.

Sako is Finnish, so yay for supporting US jobs.

I asked if anyone knew why the NYPD used this gun when Chris Kyle managed to get by with a TAC-338 which you can buy for $6500.

The TAC-338 uses a real sniper round which stays supersonic out to maybe 1500 yards and can be useful farther out.

The best answers I got involved politics. Basically, the NYPD does not care what it spends, and if it fails to spend whatever it gets in a given year, it gets less the next year, so it tries to spend up to its allotment.

I believe this is the correct explanation, because it comports with my understanding of human nature and blue states.

Anyway, I got a few unbelievably stupid answers. One guy called me a Fudd, which is a nasty name for a person who thinks the Second Amendment only applies to things like hunting shotguns. His answer contained zero useful information. He wanted to know how I had been on the forum for 4 years without knowing exactly why the NYPD needed a $12,000 rifle.

The answer was dumb for multiple reasons. First of all, they do not need the rifle. They could do the same job with an RPR from Bass Pro. Second, since they do not need the rifle, it is not possible for the justification for the rifle to appear anywhere on the forum. Third, who sits and memorizes every post on an Internet forum for 4 years? Fourth, his answer was rude, and he was a bully. I put him in his place and left him there.

Another guy said I had posted a dumbass thread. Another bully. I trimmed him down to size as well. A whole bunch of other users–knowledgeable people including former snipers–had responded with useful posts full of great information. A bunch of them agreed with me. I asked him if they were dumbasses.

I was called a whiner, by someone who has no idea what whining is. Whining means exaggerated, useless complaining. I didn’t complain. I pointed out problems with the arguments supporting the Sako purchase. That makes me a hater, not a whiner, right?

The Internet is a big playpen for jerks and bullies, and forums can be really trying. And certain interests draw unusually snotty people. Firearms. Bodybuilding. Christianity. Fishing. Electronics. Professional machinists are so rude they’re barely human. Hobby machinists are in the middle along with homebrewers. Welders are really nice. Foodies are Nazis. Not regular guys who like barbecue and pizza; they’re okay. I mean people who call themselves foodies and worship Food Network windbags who can’t really cook. Photography people are okay.

It’s funny, but bodybuilding draws bullies, but bodybuilders can’t actually fight. Fighting is a skill. It also requires cardio fitness, which many bodybuilders don’t have because they’re on drugs and don’t do cardio. There are bodybuilders who get tired climbing stairs. A lot of guys pump up show muscles in order to push other guys around, but actual martial artists who could pummel them easily are less obnoxious.

Bodybuilders aren’t even that strong. The kind of lifting they do produces big muscles that don’t do as much as smaller powerlifter muscles.

There is a skinny guy on Youtube who goes to gyms and humiliates drugged-up bodybuilders, tossing their weights around and saying how light they are.

Nineteenth-century-pistol guru Massad Ayoob is a forum guy, and he’s pretty obnoxious. Goes into panic/attack mode when anyone shows him up, which is not hard to do, or, more accurately, hard not to do. He has set himself up so many times. He got me banned from The High Road for disagreeing with him in a thread he was not even part of. Must have sent a note to his pals the mods: “I HAVE BEEN BLASPHEMED!”

Christian forums are awful. The Catholic forums are full of Catholics telling each other all Protestants go to hell. Protestant forums are full of people telling each other they’ll pray God helps them with their errors, when they really mean they hope they go to hell.

You literally have to treat electronics people like mental patients who could have full-blown slobbering-and-head-banging crises if you say the wrong thing. You can’t think of them as human beings. You have to act like you’re trying to extract data from bombs without setting them off. Like you’re playing Operation, with no funny bone.

Reddit is swarming with moderators who have no interest in moderating. They live to delete useful posts and lecture people. “Stand in awe of my deletion powers, mortal! Nanna, get me more Hot Pockets! And shove more Funyuns in them!”

In any case, I think I know why New York City spent a king’s ransom on rifles that work no better than Bass Pro merchandise.

People should be nice to each other. We should be patient. It makes life so much better. If you’re going to be hostile to someone, you should have a very good reason.

When people are nice to you, it gives you a lift. Sometimes I remember nice things people said to me decades ago, and the memories still give me strength. I remember nasty things people said and did, and I realize they still drag me down. It’s funny that I attached so much weight to remarks made by inferior people who were little better than chimps and who failed at life.

When you’re nice, you form attachments to people, and you go on to be helpful to each other in life. Snotty people push others away and end up fending for themselves unless they can control others.

God put us here to help each other. It would be wonderful if more people realized that instead of seeing humanity as a muy thai bag to use to vent their baseless cruelty.

Guess it’s time to take my new rifle out and see what it will do.

The Reckoning Approaches

This was written yesterday.

I was going to go out in the pasture and shoot my new .22 at 35 yards in order to zero the scope, but I have neglected my bench, so I had to lift it with the tractor, bring it in, sand and plane it a little, clean it up, seal the wood, pop the tires off, fill them with Slime, reinstall them, and move it back to the pasture.

I ended up shooting from a seated position on my back porch, using a wobbly plastic hunting tripod. It wasn’t a great rest, but it wasn’t the worst.

I used CCI standard velocity target rounds, rated at 1050 fps. This makes them subsonic, and subsonics are very quiet out of silencers. I used my freshly-cleaned silencer today.

The nice scope I ordered will not be here for a while, so I slapped a Vortex Diamondback 4-12×42 on the gun. I knew this was not an expensive scope, but until today, I didn’t realize how lacking it was. I felt like I was looking through glass someone had touched with their oily hair. On top of that, I could not get everything to look sharp at 35 yards, so I had to guess a little.

The scope has no illumination. Once you’ve had an illuminated reticle, you’ll be really spoiled. I could have used one today. It was starting to get dark when I sat down to shoot, and I only got about 35 rounds out before I quit.

I think the scope would be fine for deer or some other large game in good light, but shooting into an inch at 35 yards is not what it was made for.

The gun’s trigger is wonderful. I adjusted it for a very low pull. For some reason, I get used to triggers very fast, so even if a trigger is light, I start to feel like I’m trying to lift a bowling ball. It’s very strange how quickly I adapt, and I don’t know whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing. In any case, the trigger feels sort of like the trigger on my Colt Woodsman. Like breaking a little glass rod, as they say.

Hearing protection was not even a consideration. I did some research, and I’m confident I can shoot high velocity rounds with my silencer without protection. Using subsonics, the sound was sort of like a loud click. Like a strong air rifle.

I’ll post the targets I used. I started out on the target to the right. I was WAY off when I fired the first shots, so I had to crank the turrets over and over. When I finished, I shot the group by the left bullseye. I still need to bring the shots up slightly.

I definitely pulled the two worst shots (lower right), so I am confident this gun would have shot into around half an inch if I had done things correctly. Half an inch with a poor rest and bad light at 35 yards, with unimpressive ammo, suggests I could stay somewhere close to half an inch at 50 under better circumstances.

I am going to have to improve my steadiness if I want to kill squirrels. You can’t always shoot from a prone position using a nice bipod and bag. You have to do what you can, where you are. I think shooting unsupported would be hopeless at over 20 yards.

I hope to shoot again tomorrow, using a proper bench. I should be able to dial this scope in perfectly, and I could also try a couple of other types of ammunition. I don’t have a big variety here.

With squirrels, I suppose accuracy is the big thing. If a round with great terminal performance isn’t highly accurate, you will miss squirrels entirely, and if you can hit squirrels squarely, you don’t need fantastic terminal performance. Maybe I should hunt with the most accurate ammo I can find and forget about expansion and fragmentation.

I’m not sure about all this, but I’m gathering info.

The thing that scares me is that I might set up my bench and shoot the Tikka next to my Marlin Model 60 and Savage A22 and find out they’re just as accurate.

There are worse problems to have.

If They Could be Trained, They’d be Bringing me my Mail

Conservatives always worry about the feds making secret lists of our firearms from purchase records. Then we go on the Internet and post photos of us shooting everything we buy.

Given the competence of the feds, however, maybe we have nothing to worry about. “‘Facebook?’ There’s a book with faces in it? Why would anyone put his face in a book? Is my pension vested yet?”

Anyway, here I go, doing my part for the database. Today I picked up a Tikka T1x MTR. The last three letters stand for “Multi-Task Rimfire.” I’m not sure what those tasks are. Maybe I can find out.

It looks like the tasks are “small game hunting and training.” That’s from Sako’s website. Sako is the Finnish concern that owns Tikka.

Why would I want to train small game? I guess it would be helpful to train squirrels to quit chewing on my belongings. I don’t think it’s actually possible, however. That’s why I kill them.

Oh, wait. “Training” doesn’t refer to small game. That makes more sense. So what does it refer to? Target shooting? Why not call it “target shooting”?

Okay, on another webpage, Sako says it’s for target shooting. I guess different employees write different webpages.

They drink a lot in Finland.

This rifle is extremely cool. It’s a 16″ bolt-action .22 which is supposed to have a magnificent barrel along with a very good trigger that can be adjusted down to a 1.5-pound pull. It’s very short and handy. It could be lighter, but nothing is perfect except pizza. It’s threaded for a silencer.

The bolt has a wacky 45° throw, which is wonderful. Why can’t other guns be like that instead of making you swing the bolt up and practically hit your scope?

I have not fired the gun yet. I have to put a scope on it, because it comes without sights. It comes with a dovetail scope mount, which must give a lot of people a good laugh. I had to order a rail that attaches to the dovetail mount. It should arrive tomorrow.

Deciding which scope to use has been hard.

I went the buy-once-cry-once route with my first .22 bolt gun. I wanted something accurate and well-made in order to avoid future upgrades. So should I give it a scope of similar quality, or should I go with something cheap, given that I may never shoot at more than 50 yards?

Right now I plan to throw my idle Vortex Diamondback 4-12×42 on it. The scope already has rings on it, and I probably even lapped them. It’s not a top-quality optic, it has no reticle illumination, and it’s a second focal plane scope, so it’s not the finest product around. On the other hand, a lot of people shoot squirrels really well with scopes costing less than $100. All my existing .22 scopes came in at that price level, and they certainly work.

Once the Diamondback is on it, I can put some rounds through the gun and get used to it.

I might get fancy and put a $400+ Athlon scope on the rifle. That would be pretty ritzy for a squirrel rifle, but a lot of guys spend considerably more, and squirrel hunting is actually a serious and demanding pursuit. It may seem like a joke because grown men are shooting well-dressed rats, but I think you have to gauge hunting by the difficulty, not the weight of the prey. Squirrels are very uncooperative in addition to being hard to hit due to their size.

I feel like the worst hunter on Earth. When I tried to get into it a few years ago, I got a deer rifle, a lot of ammo for my shotgun, and some guns for varmints. Then covid ruined everything. I couldn’t buy a paid hunt if I wanted one. And it turns out my property, though rural, is blessed with a relatively low population of game animals. I’ve only seen one turkey here. The coyotes that used to be here seem to have left. I haven’t seen a coon in a you-know-what’s age. There are no hogs. I haven’t seen a bear here.

I shot quite a few squirrels, but I never got around to shooting anything large, unless you count a coon I shot in the head while it was in a trap.

I bought a crazy machine that makes noises to attract coyotes, but I got nowhere with it. I’m not completely sure it’s not a gag.

Rabbits have suddenly become abundant here, which is why I think the coyotes are gone. I hate to shoot the rabbits. They haven’t bothered me yet, and they exhibit a disturbing degree of trust. They get really close. I could shoot them with my EDC pistol.

I have foxes, but for some reason, we’re not allowed to kill them. I’ve seen red ones and black ones here. The web says we have two species: red and gray. They’re all foxes to me.

I’ve never seen a bobcat here. The state seems to want us to shoot them, because the rules are generous.

I can’t leave the property now because we’re having a son, so it looks like it’s squirrels or nothing for the near future.

Maybe once the baby is stabilized, I’ll be able to shoot something other than a squirrel.

Thank goodness Florida decided to extend the squirrel season to the entire year. In the past, I could shoot squirrels anywhere on my property during a short season, and I could shoot nuisance squirrels any time. In order to be a nuisance, a squirrel had to be near the house where it could cause problems. Now I can shoot them all over the farm at any time for no good reason at all.

Hey. How do I know a squirrel a quarter of a mile from the house isn’t planning to chew on my porch furniture? I can’t take that chance. That’s a reason.

I hope to pop some rounds off tomorrow. Maybe Saturday. I haven’t received the rail for the scope. The web thinks it will arrive tonight, but tomorrow is more likely. Once I have the scope on the rifle, I plan to blow a bunch of rounds through it to foul the barrel for precision, and then we’ll see what the gun will do with the types of ammo I have on hand.

It would be great to hand this gun off to my son when the time comes. I should learn to hunt properly for his sake, so I’ll be ready when he is.

You Know too Many People

I had an interesting dream.

My wife and I were here at the heavily armed, fenced Northern Florida compound (my homey, welcoming name for it), and I was standing by the front door when I saw a big truck in my driveway. I had not let it in.

Right away, I reached for my illegally-modified full-auto AR-15 with the Punisher Trump skull laser engravings on the grips and opened up while quoting Bible verses I misinterpreted in order to justify violence.

Oops. Sorry. For a second there, I thought I was one of the guys who thinks we can shoot our way back to the Fifties.

I don’t have any illegally-modified full-auto firearms. I don’t even have Trump Punisher skulls. Sorry, BATF. I’m not interested in spending a grand every time I shoot steel for 15 minutes. I think one of my neighbors might have something, though. Based on the sounds I hear occasionally.

You should start by investigating the lady across the fence who complained that my shooting disturbed her snowflake horses. I’m pretty sure it’s her. Go no-knock on this one, guys. The earlier in the morning, the better. Just keep your fingers off the trigger, because I could be wrong. It’s actually okay for feds to withhold fire until there is a real problem.

I don’t mean any of that. I don’t wish her problems, but she should respect borders.

I don’t have any guns like that, but it takes like 45 minutes to make one with a Dremel and an Internet printout. When things finally go totally nuts, the number of automatic weapons in the US will skyrocket by a factor of 20 in about a day. Except in the ghettos, where everyone already has a Glock switch and kids fight white supremacy and institutional black genocide by shooting at other black people.

That switch has probably done great things for Glock sales. To the people the guns are stolen from, I mean. They have to replace them, after all.

Forget “Glock perfection.” The new slogan should be, “Glock. Make the switch.”

Pardon the jocularity. I am in a jolly mood this morning. Because I’m not drunk and in pain, unlike most Americans. It’s bowl season, and today many people are hugging one.

I shouldn’t joke about the BATF. They just ransacked a black man’s home for no clear reason, threw bombs into rooms occupied by innocent people, held children at gunpoint, threatened to blow up his gun safe, and left without arresting anyone. They destroyed floors and windows. Their dogs pooped on the victim’s daughter’s bed.

Apparently the training issues in federal law enforcement have spread to the canine agents.

The victims cleaned up the poop themselves. That was unnecessary work. They could have called the FBI crime lab and told them it was important evidence. The FBI would have collected it and lost it.

Not that there is any justification for thinking the feds are high-handed or anything, but, shockingly, if you’re the kind of person who believes CNN is fair, the BATF has not responded to inquiries from the press. I get it. If Uncle Joe doesn’t have to talk to the press, neither do they. I plan to keep checking dictionary sites to see if the leftist editors have gotten around to changing the definition of “transparent.”

The man’s name is Mark Manley. He has a Go Fund Me page.

Joe Biden will surely pardon the agents later in the day, as soon as his wife wakes him up and tells him to. Or maybe someone else has already done it. The thirtyish West Wing transvestites who have actually been running the country since January 20, 2020. “Hold his hand steady. Make the loop on the ‘J’ bigger.”

Is it possible Jeff Dunham is the president?

The victims kind of asked for it. They live in Baltimore. It’s like being in jail and asking to bunk with P Diddy. “Come on, warden. I’m a huge fan. It’s okay if he works on his music. I’m a very heavy sleeper.”

Maybe they’ll join the flood of political refugees and move to my county. Like traffic isn’t bad enough already. I was used to seeing a lot of yankees and other blue state survivors here before 2020, but they were really old. Now it’s entire families. Still in their reproductive years. And Republicans let their babies live. Once an invasive species starts breeding in Florida, you can’t get rid of it.

I hope they’ll open pizzerias. That would soften the pain.

I don’t know why I’m in such a good mood. I need to stop.

So the truck turned out to be a big hurricane-debris truck. We have had two messy storms here since my arrival. The county gives us time to dump trees by the road, and they send huge trucks to pick them up. They have cranes on them to lift the debris and drop it into their beds.

Dumping in beds. BATF. Stop it, self. Let it go.

The truck was inside my gate, which made me feel somewhat territorial, but I let it go, because they started going all over the compound, gathering up the dead wood. They picked up entire burn piles that predated the last storm. I was thrilled.

I suspect the dream had supernatural significance.

In the Bible, trees represent people. A dead tree is an unproductive tree, fit only to be discarded and burned.

In dreams, government employees are usually spirits. The police and the feds are demons. Military people are angels. Government employees who are helpful and pose no threat are on God’s side, and they usually will not talk to you. They already have their orders. They seem happy, and they’re pleasant, but they ignore your efforts to communicate, and they go on with what they’re doing.

Demons are chatty. They like attention. And they rely on the power of lies and threats. They need to talk in order to lie.

I think the county guys in the dream were angels sent to remove useless, destructive people from my life and my wife’s life. The few people who still treat us badly. If so, it’s not a good sign for people I am still entangled with financially. I knew it would not be long before old age got the most difficult ones, but the dream makes me wonder if the time of our disconnection is close.

It’s extremely important to get free of useless people whose only contributions to your life are negative. Sometimes you can’t cut them loose. You can’t put a wife in a dumpster, and you can’t abandon your kids. But most people can be dismissed at will, and you should get rid of the ones who consistently reward you with good for evil.

My dad was a net negative for most of his life, and one day, God told me he had cut him off, meaning his patience was used up.

I knew he had become forgetful, but he was still able to handle his affairs. I had prayed a lot for God to restore him, but after God told me he had been cut off, I quit.

The same year, my dad had to quit practicing law because dementia set in. I was put in charge. We ended up leaving Miami, finally, after years of delay which he caused.

After a while here, his dementia got very bad. At some point around the beginning of 2019, I started feeling that God was saying my dad would be gone before April 1. That was not his medical prognosis, however. His doctors didn’t think his situation was deteriorating all that fast.

When I finally had to put him in a nearby facility, I started to feel bad because I wasn’t praying for his recovery. One day as I drove to see him, I asked God if I could pray for recovery again. I felt it was allowed, so I prayed.

When I saw him the next day, he was much sharper than he had been the day before. He was fighting with the employees. He called his roommate a filthy name in his presence. He had been opening up to God, and he had asked for salvation, but on this day, he told me it was all insincere. He said he had done it to make me happy, which wasn’t true. He disavowed Christianity. He said the Bible was a story book. He radiated his characteristic arrogance.

The dad I had known all my life was back.

I prayed for help, and I got an idea.

I asked my dad if I could pray that God would do whatever had to be done to assure him a good afterlife, and he agreed to let me do it.

The next day, he had slipped backward. The clarity was gone. He was pleasant again. The negative talk about Christianity was gone. I realized God was showing me that some people shouldn’t be healed, because they turn healing into a curse.

Wherefore if thy hand or thy foot offend thee, cut them off, and cast them from thee: it is better for thee to enter into life halt or maimed, rather than having two hands or two feet to be cast into everlasting fire.

This is true of all blessings. Some people can’t be given husbands or wives. Some people can’t be given financial abundance. There are people whose problems are necessary in order for them to remain saved. This is particularly true of the proud. It’s true of people who repent, get what they want, and then forget their repentance.

My dad died three weeks later, in peace, with me at his side and Derek Prince speaking from a laptop. He had recovered his salvation. All the hateful talk about Christianity had been replaced with reverence, gratitude, and enthusiasm.

This was late March. He didn’t make it to April 1.

If he had continued to recover from dementia, he would have died in torment and then gone to hell. He would be burning in humiliation right now, instead of waiting for me and his grandson to join him for eternal life in a place of perfect love.

My dad was a mixed bag. When his mind went and he started to love God, I was thrilled. I loved praying with him and talking to him about God. But the situation couldn’t last. I was alone, and he kept me too busy to progress in my own life. I could have continued visiting him over and over for years, but that wasn’t what God wanted for me.

I keep asking God to change me without chastisement and suffering. I want supernatural change. I want him to be able to give me good things without losing me.

As for the dead trees in my dream, I can understand why God would free me from them.

They don’t disrupt my life the way my dad did, and my situation is absolutely fantastic. I have a wonderful wife. I’m having a child. I’m healthy. We have abundance without working. We live on a dream property in a dream county. We get closer to God all the time, and things continually improve. He keeps correcting us. But while these people can’t keep us from having beautiful lives, they are treacherous and out of place in our circle of acquaintances. We should be big assets to each other, but while I am good to them, they abuse me and my wife, and they have no intention of changing.

They are tiresome, and it would be best if they were replaced by better people who are the opposite of tiresome. Even if they’re not replaced, their absence from my life would be a welcome relief. I’m ready for it. I can’t change their choices, I am in no way responsible for the way they treat me, and I will not be troubled about problems they make for themselves.

As for us, we are planning to fry chicken today. The deep fryer beckons. I’m going to try making twice-fried fries in it for the first time. We can’t find small chickens at Publix, but the local Winn-Dixie had a 4.5-pounder, so I think we’re all set. I’m also making hush puppies because they’re wonderful.

Later on, I may do some shooting out back. When you live in a place like this, every day you fail to shoot is a disgraceful waste.

Maybe God will smile on us in 2025, and his children won’t have to be here on this date in 2026. One can only hope.

Make Silent Movies With Your New $320 Microphones

Time for some practical information that will probably be interesting to about 30 people.

When I got married and we started traveling, I began investing in camera gear. Normal families take pictures and make videos and recordings, unlike my family. They like spending time together. I can’t even guess what that’s like.

Eventually, I realized the microphones that were built into cameras were not intended to be used routinely. They are for times of desperation. When your real microphones aren’t available.

Put a camera 5 feet from a speaker, in a room with normal noise, and you get bad audio. Put both outdoors in a light breeze, and all you hear is the wind. You can put a hairy mike cover (“dead cat”) on the mike to cut the wind sound, but you will still get bad audio because the mike is too far from the speaker.

You’re supposed to use external microphones. Some connect to cameras mechanically. Others send sound to cameras via radio.

You can get a “shotgun” mike, which is a little tube you mount on your camera’s hot shoe. It’s directional. You can point it at your subject, and it will emphasize sounds coming from his direction. You can also buy mikes with long cables.

What you really want is a wireless mike set with at least two remote microphones. And you want lavalier mikes. I mean mikes with wires that connect them to transmitters. Apparently some people think a mike with no wires at all can be a lavalier, but that goes against the definition of the word.

The remote microphones go with your subjects. If you’re a subject, you can attach a remote mike to your collar and capture your speech perfectly when you’re a long way from the camera.

A lavalier mike is a tiny mike with a long cable. You plug it into the remote mike or transmitter, which is larger and more conspicuous. You can put the remote mike in your pocket and clip the lavalier mike to your shirt. This way, you don’t have a big, heavy black thing pulling on your shirt, and the remote mike can’t fall off and land in a toilet or a river.

I got my first remote set in Hong Kong. I wanted DJI, but DJI was hot, and no one had them. I got a Saramonic set. It’s pretty neat. It has two remote mikes you attach to yourself using magnets. It works great.

Problem: it’s very easy to knock the mikes off the magnets. Then they roll down the street. It has happened to us more than once.

Problem: you can’t plug lavaliers into them.

Problem: if you need a part, forget it. Saramonic is an unreliable company. I lost a dead cat for a while, and I could not get a new one. They are still unavailable.

Problem: the magnet in the receiving unit, which sits on your camera, may interfere with your camera’s monitor screen. You have to install a ridiculous spacer on your hot shoe. Saramonic promised me one and never sent it. I had to go aftermarket.

I decided to eat the $250 loss and get a new set. I had to choose between Rode and DJI. Both seemed pretty good. I went with a Rode Wireless Pro set for some reason I don’t remember. Rode is a serious company that makes professional stuff. The set I got is on their low end.

We decided to make a Christmas video with the Rode set and a Sony A7IV camera. Couldn’t do it. There was a horrible buzzing noise that took over most of the audio signal. I could sort of hear words in the background, but that was it.

Rode knows this problem exists with at least one product. The set one step below the one I got. I don’t know how much they know about this issue and the Rode Wireless Pro.

Let’s cut to the chase. There was a short cable that connected the receiver to the camera’s audio jack. Rode claims it’s a shielded cable. Whatever. It passed all sorts of noise and very little audio. It was the problem. When I contacted Rode, they gave me bad advice, like suggesting I crank the gain way up. Yes, so then I’d hear the audio AND the buzz. If I had listened to them, my set would now be in the return pile at an Amazon facility.

I had a similar cable I bought in an electronics shop in Lucerne. I think it was Lucerne. Could have been Singapore, but I don’t think so. I put this cable where the Rode cable had been, and all the noise disappeared.

Either:

1. Rode’s cables are pathetic, or
2. I got a defective one.

Based on Rode’s reputation, I would guess my cable is defective. I certainly hope they’re not sending useless cables out on purpose.

I got a Rode rep to send me a new one so I could find out. In any case, the camera works now. The new cable is longer and more likely to get in the way. I am hoping the replacement cable from Rode will function.

They asked me for my phone number before shipping the replacement. I told them they didn’t need my number, but they insisted. I didn’t want junk calls, so I gave them the number for a local Burger King.

Our relationship needs work.

Other than this, the product seems great. The batteries drained faster than the ad copy suggested, but every company lies about battery life. The audio sounds beautiful

Should you buy a Rode system? No idea. I don’t know whether DJI’s competing products have this problem. I know you should avoid Saramonic. If they can’t supply parts, it almost certainly means they are going out of business slowly. If you have a Saramonic set, guard the dead cats with your life, because you will never get a new one.

A Rode set like mine runs about 40% more than a Saramonic set, but at least it’s from a real company that has real support, and you won’t drop your mikes in the toilet.

The Saramonic mikes are still nice for indoor work. When the subjects aren’t moving around or leaning over deep fryers or anything.

How do you replace the batteries in products like this? That’s a great question. I’m pretty sure the product is finished when the battery quits. They don’t make a point of putting this information in the ads. “DIES PERMANENTLY AFTER 200 SESSIONS! COULD HAPPEN DURING A WEDDING OR EXPENSIVE VACATION!” That wouldn’t help them move merchandise.

I just emailed the Rode rep to find out. Not going to bother with Saramonic. They already owe me a part, and I don’t think I’ll ever get it.

I see some people on the web replacing batteries for a different Rode set, so maybe there is hope.

If you bought a Rode Wireless Pro, and you can’t record anything, maybe this blog post will fix the problem. I recommend trying your set out before your return period expires.