Fauci Fell, and No One Noticed

I should have switched to the shotgun three years ago. I went out for an hour today and plugged two squirrels. Both kicked a little, but neither one was breathing when I got to it, so it looks like they died quick.

I blasted one, walked around the property, missed a good opportunity at a second, and blasted another. Both of the dead ones were near my house, which is great, because those are the ones that need to be killed. By the time I made my circuit of the property, the first one was gone. Hope it went to a hawk and not a coon, possum, or coyote.

I think from now on I’ll throw the dead ones on the workshop roof. That way, I’ll be sure they go to the birds.

It’s really nice not having to find a squirrel in a reticle or worry about how high he is off the ground. With a shotgun, you can get a shot off in a couple of seconds, and you get way more opportunities. It’s also hard to miss. I nailed one of today’s squirrels from about 30 yards, and I would say the other one might have been 40 yards off. It was so far off, I wasn’t sure it was a squirrel. I figured it was best to shoot it to be on the safe side. Worst-case scenario: I kill a stick.

I looked at the news when I got home. I checked to see if anyone was excited to find out that Fauci lied about gain of function research. It’s a surprisingly low-key story. Even Rand Paul, whom Grouchy Fauci slandered while lying to Congress, was not very vocal about it.

I’m not sure why gain of function research exists. My understanding is that they take nice, harmless viruses that could never bother human beings and “fix” them so they can make us sick. I assume there must be some purpose to it, but it sounds really stupid on the surface, especially after two years of a pandemic.

I wonder if Wikipedia can tell me.

Okay, it says gain of function research CAN be “research which could enable a pandemic-potential pathogen to replicate more quickly or cause more harm in humans or other closely-related mammals.”

You know, science can be amazing, in very bad ways unrelated to science itself. Science can be so obscure or so hard for the public and the government to understand that eggheads can be allowed to make incredibly dangerous decisions without legislators or executives finding out about it. I am guessing, but I’ll bet no one ever went to Donald Trump and said, “We’re making a SARS virus much more dangerous to humans, but we have a good reason, and we’re letting the Chinese handle security, so is that okay?”

We all know military people can’t be trusted with policy. The president can’t say, “Go fight a war the way you think best, and tell us when you’re done.” Wars are fought to achieve objectives that may be thwarted when the military does as it pleases. Similarly, it may be that we need to make certain scientists and engineers get permission from Congress or the White House before doing stupid things. Aren’t we doing that already? Apparently not, since it took two years just to get proof we were doing what Fauci said we were not doing. If there was any kind of transparent mechanism for sanctioning insane research, Trump could have called some underling and gotten the facts in 10 minutes.

The Wikipedia article is short, and it’s Wikipedia, and I am not a virologist, but the sense I get is that super-viruses can be useful in developing vaccines. That sounds great, but how are they helpful if you release them on the entire world, before creating the vaccines, through stupidity?

You take a virus which may or may not be a problem if it gets loose, and just to be safe, so you can make a vaccine, you turn it into a virus which will definitely cause a pandemic, and THEN, before you’re anywhere close to creating a vaccine or treatment, you let some butterfingers drop a vial in the lunchroom. And you put the CCP in charge of letting us know China dropped the ball.

Who made this possible? Somewhere, there are some men and women who signed the papers. Who are they? Why haven’t we dyed them green or something so everyone knows not to hire them again?

Isn’t China our enemy? Did I dream that? Isn’t there a country called Taiwan, which we are sworn to defend, which China is currently threatening to take by force? Didn’t China just launch a shocking hyper-sonic missile that made everyone in the Pentagon and at Raytheon soil their pants? Isn’t it bad form to pay your enemies to learn how to develop weaponizable viruses?

Or is this just me, being a deplorable, ivermectin-buzzed hick who doesn’t understand nuance?

It reminds me of the War Room scene where Dr. Strangelove commented unfavorably on the secret Soviet Doomsday Machine, which was intended to deter nuclear strikes by assuring that if one bomb went off, the planet would be cleared of all life. He said, “Yes, but the whole point of the doomsday machine is lost…if you keep it a secret!” Similarly, the whole point of creating a killer virus to save lives is lost if you put the Chinese in charge of containing it AND reporting any embarrassing accidental exposures.

I don’t know if the Chinese created the virus and let it escape, but it looks more likely every day. I mean, sure, the epidemic could have started right beside the research lab by chance. That could have happened. After centuries of Chinese wet markets with no pandemics, in which people bought and sold exactly the same revolting things they bought and sold in 2019. It’s totally possible.

Fauci is a real peach. If he doesn’t turn out to be the biggest public health villain since Josef Mengele, it will be a great testimony to the power of the lying liberal press. It’s bad enough that he lied, but he lied angrily, as though Rand Paul, who was telling the truth, was accusing him falsely of groping toddlers. Paul stood up for us, against the smug, lying press and against many of his peers. He blew the whistle for us, repeatedly. He didn’t quit when the world tried to slap him down. And Fauci shot the messenger in order to save face. Very CCP of him.

Lying to Congress is a crime, at least under certain circumstances. Is it only true when you’re sworn? I’m not familiar with the law. There must be some reason why Fauci hasn’t been indicted. I guess it would be necessary for Democrats to go along, so never mind.

So what else is he lying about? I guess we’ll never know, because he’s the one we question, and he lies. Isn’t there somebody else over there we could talk to?

The Washington Post says Fauci lied, so there is no point in commenting here, claiming he didn’t. When the Post gives up a leftist the right hates, you know it’s a lost cause.

Now they’re saying the definition of “fully vaccinated” is going to change. That’s fascinating from an apocalyptic perspective. They’re saying you may have to have three or more shots. It’s open-ended.

They told an older generation not to worry about Social Security numbers because they would never be used for anything but delivering government benefits. Remember how that worked out?

Nobody has my Social Security number. Nobody except every university I’ve attended, every bank and securities firm where I’ve had an account, every company that has given me insurance or a quote, every company that provided me with a credit card…I’m pretty sure my cell carrier has it. I should have it tattooed on my forehead.

The vaccines do not work well. I’m not saying they “don’t work.” I’m saying they “don’t work well.” We can no longer deny this. Public health officials are saying they may not be very helpful at all to a big, big percentage of the only large groups of individuals who are generally at risk of real problems. In other words, the only groups that were ever really endangered, as a whole, are the fat, the sick, and the old, and now they’re saying they’re also the only groups for which the vaccines work very poorly.

If you have any brains at all, you can see what that means.

A vaccine that has a 95% no-catch rate (to make up a flattering, unrealistic figure) for people who are extremely unlikely to become seriously ill anyway is not necessarily a good vaccine. The purpose of the vaccines is not to prevent the sniffles. No one cares about that. They were developed to prevent serious illness and death. When they came out, we were told THE SCIENCE had hit a home run. A very small percentage of the vaxxed could get something like a cold, but virtually no one would get very sick or die; that was the official line. Dying would be like winning Powerball. Now they’re saying the shots have a pretty high breakthrough rate AND the people who were already vulnerable have a VERY high breakthrough rate combined with high rates of serious disease and death.

So, if I understand things correctly, the vaccines have done a FAIR job of preventing the sniffles and a POOR job of preventing death and serious disease.

Or maybe they did better at the start, and now the disease is changing and defeating the shots. After all, we did see big drops in the stats after the shots came out. Something had to cause that, and we know it wasn’t masks or social distancing. We have a big collection of old graphs showing spikes coinciding with lockdowns, masks, and distancing.

They tell us different things every week. They’ve been wrong over and over. They don’t know what’s going on. Very often, they actually say so. My uninformed guesses may well be just as good as the best conclusions trained scientists can offer. I could be like the famous chimp who beat professional stock-pickers.

Now the Morlocks have decided I’m eligible for a booster. I was thinking I’d get it, because for all I know, it could be of some help, but now I don’t know. I used to think coronavirus was probably a one-time thing, but now I think I’ve had it twice, and I was vaccinated between episodes. I don’t know that another shot will help, I have every reason to believe future episodes will be mild, I have had dramatic improvements after using ivermectin from Tractor Supply, and I don’t feel good about going in for another round of a bizarre vaccination which has attracted warnings from intelligent, informed medical professionals.

To get back to the apocalypse, the redefinition of “fully vaccinated” opens the door to a future of increasing and unending oppression. As long as they can tell us we have to jump through new hoops to end the crisis, we will have to keep jumping, and they will have the authority to create nastier hoops. We will have to get used to life on the salmon ladder.

The first shot wasn’t the mark of the beast. The first booster isn’t the mark of the beast. Isolated mandates aren’t the mark. It has to be something big and global, and it can’t be temporary. What if the mark is something that shows you’re complying with a long-term program of repeated injections, not to mention fascist masking, isolation, AND censorship laws? Wow. That’s the Antichrist’s dream scenario.

Again, “fascist” is the correct term. It’s a value-neutral term. There are people who are proud of being fascists, and they wear hats and shirts that say “fascist” on them. Forcing people to take shots, making them stay in their houses, and deleting their publicly stated remarks about a disease are fascist measures.

I’ll bet it happens. I’ll bet the virus never cooperates. I’ll bet we get variants that really are more contagious than the flu, instead of much less contagious, like the ones we have now. Maybe we’ll get some variants that threaten healthy people. If that happens, kiss the outdoors goodbye, because Uncle Sam will nail your front door shut.

Maybe variants will get so bad, you’ll stand a substantial chance of dying if you’re not vaccinated regularly. Then you would have to obey the government pretty fastidiously, and it wouldn’t be surprising if the government denied unvaccinated people access to food and goods, claiming they were seditious and toxic and unlikely to live anyway.

Leftists love the word “seditious” now. It’s so strange. Maybe young people don’t know it, but they used to hate that word the way they hated Joe McCarthy. Liberal teachers sneered when they said it. How things change.

We could be looking at year after year of new shots and fascist curtailments of our liberty, with the mark of the beast provided as a reward for obedience. You obey, you eat. Just a guess, but it fits the way the disease and our governments have behaved so far.

I have about a dozen unopened tubes of ivermectin, just sitting around. Maybe I’ll buy a few dozen more. Who knows how many times I’ll get sick? Ivermectin may actually be helpful, and it could gain popularity and become hard to find. It may also be useful if I catch something else, and someone else might need it. Can’t hurt to stock up.

If I get really sick, I’ll try to get monoclonal antibodies. I have been told Biden won’t let anyone who has been hospitalized have them. Not sure what that’s all about. They say that if you get sick, you should absolutely refuse to be hospitalized until you’ve received antibodies. Is it a rumor? Is it true? Hope I don’t have to find out.

Every day the mark of the beast seems closer than I thought it would seem the night before. The world’s insanity isn’t just accelerating; it’s jerking.

Acceleration is a physics term. Jerk is sort of a physics term, but it’s used by engineers, not physicists. I never saw it until after I had become a physicist and then quit.

Acceleration is velocity’s rate of change. If a car is doing 10 mph now and 20 mph in 10 seconds, it’s accelerating at 10 mph per second. Jerk is acceleration’s rate of change. If a car is doing 10 now, 20 in 10 seconds, and 300 in 20 seconds, it’s jerking. I guess. Not sure what the present participle is, in engineering. I’m not an engineer. Anyway, the acceleration isn’t constant. It increases with time. Jerk can be constant. I’m sure it’s not, in my example. I would have to do a calculation to come up with a constant jerk. Wait…no, I wouldn’t. Jerk can increase, and its increase can increase, and so on. I’m digressing. Help me stop.

Think of a magnet, moving toward another magnet. It will accelerate slowly, then faster, and then it will bang into the other magnet so fast you can’t see it happen. That’s jerk. Gravity does the same thing, but we can’t see it because we’re all at the same distance from the center of the earth. Where we are, gravity seems constant. If you were to fly toward a black hole, the change would be obvious. Don’t do that, though.

Anyway, the world’s insanity isn’t just increasing, and the rate of increase isn’t just increasing; the rate of the increase of the increase is increasing. I expect things to be a certain way in a few days, based on the way things have been getting worse over the last month, but they will probably be worse than I expect.

Apocalyptic jerk is why I think the rapture is coming very soon. People will try to predict the end based on a relatively smooth timeline, but things aren’t changing smoothly. It shouldn’t surprise Christians. Jesus said he would come at a time when we thought not.

Accidental Shooting Puts Liberal Actor in Undesired Spotlight

It looks like Alec Baldwin has killed someone. He was performing. He fired a gun in the direction of a cinematographer and a director. The former is dead, and the latter is injured.

It’s an interesting story, because the two articles I read say movie prop masters are traditionally given the responsibility for making sure movie guns are not loaded. The writers made sure they included this information, which sounds exculpatory. Did someone working for Baldwin tell them to do it? It won’t help.

When people think they’re in legal trouble, they tend to spout every argument and excuse they can think of. This is very useful to the authorities, because most people don’t know the difference between exculpatory evidence and damning evidence. They will rattle off excuses they think are helpful when they’re really telling the police they’re guilty.

“I knocked him down and fractured his skull because he called me the N-word.” “I told the kids to stay away from the gun cabinet.” “The meter reader let the tigers out.”

If you kill someone negligently, you can be liable both criminally and civilly. I have no idea how the jurisdiction where Baldwin shot these people handles negligent homicides. That varies. I do know how civil negligence works, and the standards are ancient and pretty much universal.

In order to be guilty of negligence, you have to owe another person a duty of care, breach that duty negligently, and cause that person harm. Assuming Baldwin’s gun was functioning normally, he is guilty of negligence.

There are rules to gun handling, and they are well known. They don’t vary from place to place, either. One of the rules is that you always check a gun when you take possession of it. You see if it’s loaded. I don’t care if your dad, your priest, or Santa Claus himself hands it to you. You check. Another rule is that you never point a gun at anything you don’t want to shoot.

Baldwin should have examined the gun to see if it was loaded. If he didn’t, the cinematographer’s loved ones, if any, may be able to sue. They can sue Baldwin, the prop master, and maybe the company or companies that were making the movie.

What if he checked, but there was some defect in the gun or ammunition that caused a projectile to do harm? He’s still negligent. Why? Because he pointed a gun at people he didn’t want to shoot and pulled the trigger. He violated a well-known rule of gun safety.

You may argue that it’s impossible to make a movie without pointing guns at people and pulling their triggers, and that is true, but it’s only true if you’re aiming at an actor or stuntman. There is no valid reason for aiming a real gun or any other dangerous instrumentality at a cinematographer.

Everyone in Hollywood should know that freak accidents can cause guns to kill even when they’re not loaded with normal ammunition. The most famous on-camera shooting involved a gun that had something called a “dummy bullet” stuck in the barrel. A blank drove it out, and it killed Brandon Lee. Every studio’s attorneys and insurers know this, and actors and directors should know it. Studios should have comprehensive documents covering firearms safety measures, and one of the rules should be that you tell the actors never to point a firearm at anyone who isn’t playing a character who should be shot or threatened. Everyone who will be on the set of a movie where guns are used should have to read these documents. They probably exist.

Maybe the victims were shot because they needed to film Baldwin shooting toward the camera. They could have been moved. In 2021, we have sufficient technology to allow a director and cinematographer to film something without standing close to a camera.

What about the guilt of the victims? They’re probably negligent, too. If they sat next to a camera while Baldwin fired toward it, and they didn’t have to, they breached the duty of care they owed themselves. No idea how a court or jury would apportion the liability.

Are there waivers in place? I don’t know. Will they help? I don’t know. Courts don’t like waivers, believe it or not. That’s especially true when one party has more bargaining power than the other. Matt Lauer probably can’t stand on a waiver that says an intern won’t sue if he molests her.

I think that if the cinematographer has loved ones, some money will change hands, either after a trial or, if the studio’s insurance company’s lawyers aren’t idiots, before one can start. I doubt the director will sue anyone. He was in a management position, and the killing happened on his watch. He would look stupid trying to blame anyone else.

In the case of Brandon Lee, various lay sources say the authorities determined that the cause of the killing was negligence. I don’t know whether that’s true, but I do know that an investigator’s finding is not a verdict, so it wouldn’t mean anything in court. Lee’s mother sued and got some money, and the filmmakers were fined for workplace safety violations. There was no criminal prosecution.

I’m rusty because I don’t practice, so maybe I’m wrong about Baldwin’s case, but it looks somewhat complicated to me. I don’t think it’s a simple case.

I hope they don’t prosecute him. He must be miserable. I think our legal system is way too hard on people who make mistakes. I have performed more than one negligent act that could have killed someone else, and you probably have, too.

Oh, you haven’t? Ever text in the car? Better get off that high horse, Jesus Junior.

As readers of this blog know, there was a young man who was like a son to me, and he died two years ago after an accidental shooting. I felt some frustration because I knew the killing was unnecessary and caused by negligence, but I never, ever wanted to see the shooter arrested. I never felt any hostility toward him. People make mistakes, and a prosecution would have made him unemployable for years. Baldwin is a jerky individual, but I don’t think prosecution would serve any purpose. It certainly would not be corrective. I don’t think he’s likely to be careless with guns in the future. He will probably be the most careful actor in Hollywood.

There is some justice in what happened. Baldwin is on the far left, and he mocked Donald Trump after a high school shooting. He loves gun control, but, let’s face it, he does a great deal to promote the sale of firearms. Google “Alec Baldwin” images, and you will see him holding a wide variety of guns, and I don’t mean for trap shooting.

I like to say Barack Obama is the greatest gun salesman ever, because when he was elected, people went nuts, and they went on a gun-shopping binge that still hasn’t stopped. Truthfully, though, Hollywood has probably sold more guns than Barack Obama. Hollywood has done more than any other entity to make guns and knives seem cool and desirable.

Remember Dirty Harry? When Clint Eastwood played him, he used a Smith & Wesson Model 29 revolver in .44 Remington Magnum. A bogus story has circulated, saying it was a Model 57 in .41 Magnum, but according to director John Milius, that isn’t true. I think I’ve repeated the myth myself.

Before the movies came out, you could get yourself a gun like Harry’s. They were in short supply because they had gone out of production due to low popularity, but they could be found. Afterward, they vanished. Everyone wanted one, so they were snapped up. They’re still in demand. I bought a 27-2 in .357 Magnum partly because I liked Harry’s gun. The Model 29 went back into production because of Clint Eastwood. He probably drove the popularity of revolvers from Colt and Ruger, too.

Movies and TV shows sell guns like nothing else. The best thing that can happen to a gun manufacturer is to have a model featured in a movie. It will drive people to stores. Actors make it all happen. They even pose with guns on movie posters. Baldwin appeared on a poster for The Getaway, pointing what looks like a 1911 at the camera!

If actors are going to try to take away our civil rights, they should stop exercising them and making them so alluring in movies. Obvious?

Or they could just admit we need guns. Still, though, they could make a little effort to make shootouts look less enjoyable. They could show what really happens when the hero gets shot in the shoulder. He doesn’t wrap a rag around it and keep fighting. He gets an amputation, maybe. He loses use of the arm due to nerve damage. He loses an entire bicep muscle, like the guy who tried to murder Kyle Rittenhouse. Stuff like that happens.

I’m against Ouija boards and tarot cards. If I were an actor, I wouldn’t accept roles where I made them look appealing to the public. Why can’t actors have similar standards? Believe it or not, it’s possible to make a good movie without firearms or with firearms but without making people want to buy and use them.

My guess is that Baldwin will have a bad year due to stress and legal issues, but I’ll bet there is no prosecution. I feel sympathy for him. This has to be a terrible thing to go through.

I wonder what other conservatives are saying. Probably nothing nice.

Humility Solves Pest Problem

Just blasted a squirrel from the front porch. KERBLOOIE! Lights out, just like that. No .22 kicking and scratching. No guilt.

For the longest time, I’ve had problems killing squirrels quickly with .22 rifles, but I hated using a shotgun because it’s like using a mop to put ketchup on a French fry. No sport. Tonight, I gave in.

People kept telling me I couldn’t shoot! My last 100-yard 6.5mm Creedmoor target had 5 groups. Four were 5 shots each, and one was two shots. The two shot group was the biggest at under 5/8″. PLEASE do not tell me my shooting is the problem. I once shot a squirrel three times in the head, and I had to put one more in him to finish him off. Squirrels are not rabbits or birds. They do not roll over and die easily.

Maybe red squirrels are weak. Maybe the gray squirrels in your area are wimps. Here, you just can’t kill grays hard enough. They are tougher than Terminators on PCP.

I once shot a squirrel that had three legs. Someone else had shot it first, or an animal had torn a front leg off, and the squirrel had escaped, continued to feed and climb trees, heal, and mate. I had to shoot it more than once, myself. I have no patience with the people who say every squirrel they pop with a .22 dies instantly.

The other day, I thought maybe I should start using a shotgun, so I looked for #6 shot for my 16 gauge. I was shocked to see how little there was out there. The industry started starving the 16 gauge a long time ago, and the shortages made things worse. There was very little #6, most of it was overpriced badly, and some vendors were limiting buyers to two boxes. TWO BOXES, with UPS shipping added.

I decided to look at 20 gauge guns. Maybe it was time to get a squirrel gun in a more popular gauge.

I know almost nothing about hunting shotguns because my dad quit hunting before I was born and decided it was better to spend every waking hour in front of the TV. I started making Google searches like “best 20 gauge shotgun.” I had to start somewhere.

It had to be semiauto. This is 2021, and paying semiauto prices for primitive one- or two-shot firearms is idiotic.

I figured I would be looking at $700 for something nice. That isn’t what popped up. I saw Benelli and some other brands. Upwards of $2000. What? Don’t people shoot Remingtons any more?

I saw a Turkish brand: Retay. It was getting great reviews, and it was a lot cheaper than Benelli. The Turks make very good guns, not just for the money, but good, period. I’m sure it’s good enough for me, and I’m also sure I don’t want to spend $2500.

I found out the 20 gauge was around a grand, and the 12 gauge was not that much more. I thought, “Why buy a 20 gauge that will only kill birds and squirrels when I can go big and kill everything?”

I’m pretty sure my grandfather killed birds with a Remington 1100 and the Browning Sweet Sixteen I now have. I don’t know if the 1100 is any good or not, and it looks like Remington’s inept management has made it impossible for me to get one, so that model is out.

While I was thinking about the Retay, I found an acceptable deal on 16 gauge shells, so the new purchase was put on hold. Although I should still do it, because gun.

It is because I was able to secure a few shells that I lost my fear of shooting the Sweet Sixteen, so when I saw a squirrel tonight while I was talking on the phone, I was ready. Using Bluetooth to keep the conversation going, I stuffed 4 shells into the Browning, and when I was free, outside I went.

I filled the bird feeder yesterday. Not because I love birds. I knew what it would attract. While I was on the phone, I saw a big, fat, white belly facing me from beneath the feeder. An insolent rodent was chomping away, looking me right in the face.

He vanished during my conversation, but he returned, and when I went outside later, he was in the same spot. I aimed, pulled the trigger, released the safety, and pulled the trigger again. I have to work on that. BAM! Squirrel down! He had a buddy behind him, and the buddy took off and ran to the base of a tree. I couldn’t see him clearly, so I gave him a temporary reprieve, but next time, I’m going to shoot everything out there, even if it’s on the run.

I left him to rot. He’ll be gone tomorrow. He’s probably gone now.

I should have put the rifles away long ago. They just don’t work. You can’t shoot at anything above the horizon. You can shoot half a squirrel’s head off without killing him. You will find yourself watching wounded squirrels run off, time after time. Rifles are way more fun than shotguns, and using a shotgun makes me feel like a woman, but something has to be done about these rodents.

Rifles are great from a rest, when you have time to aim well and you don’t care whether kill anything or not. The rest of the time, a rifle is the wrong choice.

I’m thinking I should get a good hunting 12 gauge. I have never had one. I can get the gun, a big supply of bird shells, and a big supply of squirrel shells. Then I can relax, knowing all my hunting bases are covered. Maybe they’re covered now, with the 16 gauge, but I’m not sure.

I’m all set for 12 gauge buck. No worries there.

For the rest of the season, I’m going to kill squirrels like Democrats think ivermectin kills Trump supporters. The insanity of tolerating these creatures has to stop.

Next: a Table Saw

It’s important to marry a woman who has things in common with you. Rhodah and I agree on Christian doctrine and conservative politics, so the big-ticket items are covered. As a bonus, she also likes things like meat, knives, and guns. She even likes my waterproof Keen hiking shoes. Suffering with woman shoes while I walked all over Egypt and Turkey in comfort made an impression on her.

Guns are legal in Zambia, where people are still somewhat sane and remain able to tell the difference between 1) a woman and 2) a male head case in a dress. We have discussed the possibility of getting her a firearm, but we haven’t done anything about it.

I did get her a knife, however. She won’t be able to handle it until we’re together again, because shipping things to Zambia is like shipping things to Neptune. I suggested a Spyderco Manix 2 with CMP SPY17 steel, which is supposedly about like S35VN, only cooler because it was made especially for Spyderco.

There are steels that hold an edge better, but they are harder to sharpen. I don’t see Rhodah becoming a sharpening expert any time soon, so I thought I should make things relatively easy. As much as it pains me, I’m giving her a pull-through sharpener with carbide and ceramic guides. It will not win any contests, but her knife will stay sharper than 98% of the knives within a 10-mile radius of her house.

When I picked the knife out, I was happy to see that it had a pretty blue handle. I knew that would help with the sale. She confirmed that it was “cute,” and we were in business.

I made the mistake of saying I could make a belt sheath for it, so now I have to do that.

When the knife arrived, I liked it so much I was extremely jealous, so I ordered a sister knife in M390 steel, which is harder. It’s not here yet.

The Smith Pocket Pal sharpener I ordered has been tested on a stubborn Forschner kitchen knife, and it put a very good edge on it. It looks rough, but it will cut just fine.

I decided to get a real sharpener for myself. I have hones and diamond stones, and they work, but a modern sharpener will give you nearly exactly the edge you want, all the way down a curved blade, without the need for a lot of skill or youth-grade eyesight.

You can blow well over a thousand dollars on a knife sharpener if you have no life whatsoever and give your knives the names of female anime characters, but it looks like you can do very, very well for two hundred bucks. A company called KME makes a gadget which will put a beautiful edge on knives up to 10″ long. I ordered one. True nerds like them a great deal, and that’s good enough for me.

I hope it works out.

I told my buddy Mike about it, and he said he only sharpens his knives on one side. I had to sit down. I shook for a while. He said it saved time.

Maybe he’s onto something. Sushi chefs use knives sharpened on one side, and they do a fine job. Sharpening one side of a knife takes no skill, and as Mike says, it’s fast.

The big knock on Mike’s system is that it can make it hard to make a straight cut.

MAC, a Japanese manufacturer, recommends a big bevel on one side of the knife and a tiny one on the other. They claim it makes it easier to make thin slices, and it doesn’t make the blade drift. That’s interesting. I might have to try that. I could get another chef knife.

Mike didn’t come up with his system after years of study under Hattori Hanzo. He was just too lazy to learn how to sharpen a knife. What if it turns out laziness has worked out better than work?

I usually use a Mundial santoku with a plastic NSF grip. I think I paid $18. This is what real chefs use when they’re not on TV, by the way. A restaurant will hire a company, and the company will come around every so often with a bunch of sharpened Forschner or Mundial knives with thin stainless blades, and they’ll take the restaurant’s dull knives away to be restored. I know some chefs have knife rolls full of overpriced, impractical Wusthofs and Globals, but you’re probably not going to see 35 greasy Wusthofs if you barge into the kitchen at Morton’s on a busy Saturday night. I have never worked in a commercial kitchen, but I’ll bet expensive knives are only seen in the hands of prima donnas.

The Mundial sharpens to a razor edge in about 5 seconds, it loves the dishwasher, it’s springy, and it can’t rust. If you gave me a big, heavy Sabatier that cost $200, I would thank you, put it in a drawer, and keep using the Mundial.

I’m going to spend $15 on another Mundial and sharpen it the MAC way. It will be an interesting experiment. If it doesn’t work, I’ll have one more chef’s knife. If it does, it could revolutionize my sharpening practices.

I would have to come up with a good lie to tell Mike, though.

Knives are so much better than they were when I was a kid, it’s a wonder anyone still has a knife more than 40 years old. Edges last way longer, handles don’t disintegrate, corrosion is no longer an issue, and most pocket knives now have locks to keep them from closing and severing finger tendons. Old knives look really, really bad compared to new ones.

Today I saw a video from a guy who knew T.B. Joshua. His name is Mfon Tommy. He says Joshua’s last message to the disciples was, “Watch and pray, that ye enter not into temptation: the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.” Jesus said this on the night he prayed in the garden, and after he said it, he went away and returned to find the disciples were sleeping and ignoring his warning.

I thought this was all very interesting. Jesus left, and he will come back. He will come back to rapture certain Christians, he will depart for 7 years, and he will return a second time to rule the earth.

While he is gone, the world will undergo a period of suffering called the tribulation. In the Revelation, Jesus called it “the hour of temptation, which shall come upon all the world, to try them that dwell upon the earth.”

It may be that Joshua was warning the world about what was about to come. You don’t want to be here during the tribulation. The government will inflict all sorts of suffering on you to make you take the mark of the beast. The beast mindset is already setting in. Governments are destroying liberty and crushing protestors all over the world.

Rhodah had a rapture dream last night. She had written a book, and she had to pay a man 500 units of some currency in order to have it published. When she gave him the money, he grabbed her and took her to heaven using an escalator. When she arrived, she met people who had died. Some were people she expected to be saved, but some were pleasant surprises.

Her sister and her sister’s new baby, who was still a baby in the dream, were also raptured.

Rhodah said there was a division between the dead and the raptured. They could talk, but they couldn’t merge.

Rhodah hates escalators. It’s something we disagree about. I took a smug satisfaction in the presence of the escalators.

My understanding of the rapture is that the dead will rise first and stay in heaven. The living who are worthy will go to heaven for 7 years, for the marriage supper of the lamb. Then they’ll have to return. One would expect the dead and the raptured to be separated in heaven.

Jesus is a raptured person. He went to heaven in his flesh body. It makes sense that we would be like him. The Bible says the rapture is a harvest, accomplished with a sickle, and elsewhere, it calls Jesus the firstfruit of the harvest. He is the first of many. He will return to live on earth, so the raptured should return as well.

Was the dream prophetic? Rhodah’s nephew is a few weeks old, and he will only be a baby for another year and a few months.

The book seems to be her testimony. She needs to get it out there. Maybe she needs a blog.

Pest Control Season Opens

The first squirrel of the season has been ushered across the river Styx.

In reality, I didn’t usher him anywhere. He is lying dead in my front yard, where I shot him.

I’m glad I know how to skin and cook squirrels, because we may be headed for unbelievably hard times, but I don’t plan to eat any more squirrels unless I have to or they start growing a lot bigger. It’s too much work for three ounces of meat. My new policy is to leave them to rot.

Killing animals should serve a purpose. In the case of a squirrel, the animal’s death is its own justification. They ate the fuel gauge on my garden tractor, they ate a lot of my peaches, they chew on my lawn furniture, and they are currently eating my expensive aluminum gate. Also, one got into my living room. The life of every squirrel on my property, present and future, has been forfeited, exactly like the lives of mice, roaches, mosquitoes, rattlesnakes, coons, spiders, armadillos, and any traveling salesman who has the guts to scale my fence.

Hunting season started a few days back. I don’t really hunt. It has been too hot, and I haven’t felt like it. I walk around carelessly, carrying a rifle, hoping something that needs killing makes a mistake.

I stalked two other squirrels during my walk today, but I hesitated to shoot, and they took off. I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to kill them cleanly. I don’t know why I care. I don’t care about killing mice cleanly.

The squirrel that met its end was in my front yard, as I looped back to the house. It climbed up a palm and shook its tail at me, which I took to be an insult. Sadly for the squirrel, the palm has a very thick trunk, so there was no possibility of firing a shot off the property if I missed him.

I didn’t drop him quickly. I was using a scope and shooting from maybe 30 feet, and the shot went through his upper front leg, which means I missed his heart by maybe three fourths of an inch. It’s hard to use a scope up close unless you practice, which I don’t. I had to chase him around and blast him a few more times when he stopped moving.

I would like to start using a shotgun. It’s not good to shoot an animal 4 or 5 times, even if it is a squirrel. I like using a scope, but they just don’t work for me at short distances. You have to put a .22 through the center of a squirrel’s head or chest in order to kill him quickly, and that is not easy when you’re thinking about the distance between the scope and the barrel and how close you are to the squirrel.

Unfortunately, it is no longer possible to get acceptable deals on 16 gauge ammunition, and I only have a few boxes. I can get the wrong stuff for about 68 cents per shot. The 12 gauge picture is somewhat better, but my only 12-gauge is not exactly a squirrel gun. Maybe in our dystopian present, with the possibility of starvation looming, it would be smart to get a 12-gauge hunting shotgun and some shells for birds and squirrels.

It’s liberating to give up on cleaning squirrels. I don’t have to deal with the stink and the mess now. I just kick the dead squirrel out where other animals will see it, and I’m done.

A shotgun would improve things a lot. In addition to killing more squirrels, I wouldn’t have to spend time stalking slowly or standing still. When I stand still, the bugs catch up with me. With a shotgun, I’d be able to blast away at any squirrel I see, as long as it was not directly between me and a neighbor’s property, so I wouldn’t have to wait for special opportunities.

By walking faster, I’d get bitten less and exercise more, and maybe I’d also see and terminate more squirrels.

Maybe I’ll grab a new shotgun. Better to have and not need…

Tomorrow I’ll try a different .22 anyway. Maybe the Marlin and I just don’t get along.

Hoorah for Australian Manhood

G’day.

I’m just reading about Australia. It’s really something. Australia has brutal lockdown, masking, social distancing, and vaccination policies that remind one of Australia’s BFF China, and while most Australians are docile, tamed subjects who go along with whatever the government says, thousands are protesting and being abused by the police.

An old lady in Melbourne is now famous because two male cops shoved her to the ground and fired a copious stream of pepper fluid into her face while she was on her back, helpless. Here in America, we have plenty of dangerous “protestors” who actually deserve treatment like this, but this is an old lady who was unarmed.

A cop also attacked a male protestor from behind while he was standing around talking to other officers. The victim was wearing headphones, so maybe he didn’t hear his brave attacker coming. He was slammed to the floor so his face struck hard enough to knock him out, and when he lost consciousness, he urinated all over the floor and bled abundantly.

The cops he was talking with were not very helpful when his assailant was approaching. Wonder why not.

Fortunately the brave police assailant had the presence of mind to handcuff the unconscious criminal before he received medical treatment.

Australian news outlets are putting out stories in which they seem to be gloating about the success the police have had in preventing protests. I could understand gloating about preventing Antifa-style nonsense, but government-worshiping Australians seem happy to see expression itself blocked. They seem to be a lot like Canadians, who have no problem with the RCMP arresting preachers and political pundits. The big difference is that Canadians proudly admit they’re whipped, while Australians pretend to be rugged individualists.

I am not in Australia, and I have not witnessed a protest in person, but based on videos and stories I’ve seen, it seems fair to say the protests in Australia really are protests, whereas most of the events we call protests in the US have actually been leftist riots motivated by wealth envy and anti-white animus. There has been a little protestor violence in Australia, along with some property damage, but they’re not burning neighborhoods or throwing Molotov cocktails at the police. They’re not carrying guns, because they don’t have them. They opened wide and let the government pull out their teeth.

The police working the protests are pretty violent. You can find a lot of footage of them tackling unarmed people whose only offense is running away. Groups of cops slam them onto pavement and grind them into it while they cuff them. It looks more like punishment than reasonable force.

The impression one gets is that many of the Australian police are motivated by sadism, not a desire to bring order. This is not an unusual thing with the police.

This morning, I had a revelation while I was thinking about something other than riots and protests. I was thinking about controlling people and sadism, and I realized you can never have such people without sadism. There aren’t many good words to describe control freaks. The best one I know is “bully.” That’s really what they are. A bully doesn’t just want to cause pain. He wants submission. He wants you to obey physically, and he will also insist you pretend you agree with him.

Forcing people to pretend to agree is one of the practices which is making the gender-confusion wars so unbearable. LGBetc. bullies can’t be content with peaceful coexistence. They have to bully you into lying, calling them what they falsely claim to be.

My dad was a bully, and one of the things that kept his violent sessions with my mother going until morning was his insistence that she say she agreed with him when she did not. He was not very violent with me, but he liked to try to force me to say things I didn’t think were true. Dealing with sexual-confusion abusers is like being abused by a spouse or husband, except the government and many employers take the abusers’ side and may fire or fine you for standing up for yourself.

The social giants are manned by bullies masquerading as tormented ethicists.

This morning I realized there are no controlling people who aren’t sadists. Bullies have the ungrounded feeling that other people have a duty to obey them, and when people resist, the primary thing that infuriates bullies is the disobedience, not the actions employed in resistance. If you resist a crooked cop by punching him in the belly, it’s not the punch that makes him shatter your orbital with a baton. It’s the temerity; the thought that you have the right to say no to him. It’s insulting.

This is why cops so often react violently to harmless words. You can get yourself arrested or beaten for calling a cop a dirty name, which is legal, or for saying something like, “I have a right to film you.” To an abuser, the manner of disobedience isn’t that important. The disobedience itself is infuriating.

My sister is a terrible bully. She always has to have someone defenseless to torment and humiliate in front of other people. We used to squabble, and eventually, I learned I didn’t have to hurt her or say anything cruel to torture her. I just had to say things she didn’t want to hear. I could fill her with rage by repeating, “You are not a victim,” or, “You cause all your own problems.” I shouldn’t have done that, even though I was just speaking the truth in calm tones. I didn’t say it primarily to inform her. I did it to make her suffer, and that was wrong. I let her provoke me.

To make a well-adjusted person angry, try to tell them what to do. To infuriate a bully, tell them they can’t tell you what to do.

Sadism is a big problem with cops, just as it is with abusive spouses, teachers, and bosses. Many people express sadism when they’re given authority. This is why so many cops beat their wives and kids as well as suspects and bystanders. Many people are drawn to the job by a desire to push other people around, so they are already sadists when they sign up, and the badge allows them to blossom.

Given my new understanding of the connection between controlling and sadism, I think it must be true that public officials all over the world are becoming more sadistic. Their overweening efforts to control coronavirus aren’t just driven by reason. They’re driven by a desire to hurt and humiliate–to break–people who resist. Their newly enhanced authority is going to their heads. This must be why HHS Secretary Becerra, an attorney with no scientific competence, called people who are against vaccination “flat-earthers,” which is a term of cruelty and contempt, not science.

We’ve all heard of the famous Stanford Prison Experiment in which volunteers were required to assume the roles of prisoners and guards. Even though it wasn’t real, some of the guards started abusing the prisoners. The experiment revealed something about human nature. Makes sense. That was its purpose. Some people have an inclination toward sadism, and power exposes it and encourages them to act on it.

Psychologists like to say the experiment is discredited, but no one has been allowed to replicate it and see if the conclusions are sound.

Politicians are controlling by nature. It’s unusual to want to be a politician if you don’t crave control over other people. It’s likely, then, that politicians are more prone to exhibit sadism than the rest of us, when conditions are right.

This is something to think about as the apocalypse and the coronavirus problem progress.

Australia has the population of Florida plus Oregon. Around 25 million. It’s a big, empty place. The current 7-day coronavirus new-case average in Australia is about 2300 per day. It’s going up, fast. Prior to this wave, the biggest peak was around 500 daily cases, and that peak was short-lived.

Zambia has 20 million people, a 2.2% vax rate, no remaining lockdowns, and very poor standards of masking and social distancing. Coronavirus is GONE in Zambia. The 7-day average is 23, and the wave that just ended peaked at about 2500, which is not bad for a maximum. Florida’s rate has been several times that high. I’ll bet Australia gets into Florida territory soon, if only because God hates hubris.

Two big differences between Zambia and Australia are that Zambia has not become a police state and Zambia doesn’t have a coronavirus epidemic. The only people you will see face-down in the street in Zambia are drunk. It makes me nervous to say it, because I don’t want to live in Africa, but I can see why it’s not unusual for white people to move to Zambia and become citizens. It must be wonderful to live in a Christian country instead of the USA, which is ground zero for the world’s anal-misadventure pandemic.

Zambian politicians have very limited motivation to become sadistic, because they have no epidemic to put them under pressure. That’s a tremendous blessing, but since Zambia’s government has called for prayer and repentance to end coronavirus, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that the disease has gone away there. Australians are like the British and most blue-state and urban Americans. They generally hate real Christianity, so they’re not getting Zambian results. Zambia is full of people of faith who experience things like miracles and prophecy.

I saw a sad and ludicrous article by a pro-government Australian. She said the protests were no big deal. As evidence, she said no protest had attracted more than a few thousand people. A few THOUSAND! Excuse me, but how many American riots have drawn that kind of crowd? When a thousand people show up to protest the government, it’s a major event.

I see pro-fascism apologists saying Australians are amused to see Americans talking about Australia’s troubles. They say we’re making things up in order to use them to prop up our Trumpian assertions about our own inner turmoil. They say Australians have been living blissfully, enjoying life while trapped in their homes or unable to travel more than 2 miles away or unable to visit neighboring states without government permits. Yes, I’m sure it’s been fun. Everywhere else in the world, people are miserable, and there is a huge global conversation about the suffering people have endured, but in a country with some of the most extreme and cowardly restrictions, everyone is enjoying confinement and wishing it had come sooner.

I saw something really crazy yesterday, and I wrote about it. Protests in Switzerland. New videos are still going up, so I watched. I have to say that coronavirus has managed to expose the one thing the Swiss are not good at: rioting.

They dress normally. By Swiss standards. They don’t wear hoods. Nothing is on fire. No one throws anything. I guess you don’t throw projectiles when there’s a good chance you’ll hit a large commercial building you own, debt-free.

Maybe my perception of the Swiss is off. I can imagine them rioting for MORE government control, but not less. After all, they have the most unbearable speed limits in Europe, even though their roads are potentially among the most fun to drive on. Switzerland is like hell for sports car owners. Only a people that loves being told what to do could live in a place like that.

“We demand earlier curfews! I was out past 8 p.m. last night! This is not right!” “My lawn is 12 centimeters high! The government must force me to end the scandal, or I shall go to bed without brushing my teeth!”

When people protest in Japan and Singapore, we’ll know the end is upon us.

I just took another hit of ivermectin, and I feel very good today. I think I’ll eat a big bowl of nuclear chili and then try to kill squirrels in my yard. I won’t wear a mask, and the police won’t come and grind my face into the lawn for being outdoors without permission. Maybe I’ll come back later and criticize homosexuality some more, while pouring out more material that surely qualifies as coronavirus misinformation. The last hours of America’s time of prosperity and liberty seem to be ticking away, but freedom feels good this afternoon.

Get my Pod Ready

I talk to my parrot Marvin a lot, which only means I’m reciprocating. The other day, I found myself walking around the kitchen saying, “It’s really happening. The world is really ending.” He didn’t have much to say about it. He talks mostly about peanuts. But it was comforting to have a listener.

Marv’s new favorite thing to say is, “peanuts and bird.” I think the meaning is obvious. It’s like saying, “Pawn to queen five,” sort of. It’s a delivery request.

Can a pawn move to queen five? I don’t know. I don’t play chess.

I was talking to my wife this morning, and she was enjoying her new home in Zambia. Seems like she never gets out of the tub. I thought about the mild stress I had felt about setting her up over there. I want to be generous, but I don’t want to endanger our futures by overspending. The stress has melted away. I thought about that.

These days, I feel as though the funds I have were Monopoly money. I feel like it doesn’t matter what I spend, because we won’t be here long.

Remember The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy? Arthur Dent’s village was about to demolish his house, and he was very upset. His friend Ford Prefect took him to a pub while the bulldozer was sitting in his yard, waiting to start, and he ordered pints and peanuts for Arthur and himself. He told the bartender to serve them quickly because the world was going to end. At first, the bartender didn’t pay much attention, but he realized something was wrong when Ford left him two extravagant tips. Pounds were about to lose all their value, so why not spend them?

Douglas Adams is the best humorist I know of. A modern Voltaire. It’s a shame he was a proselytizing, belligerent atheist. I will never meet him. He dropped dead while still holding onto his pathological beliefs. When we are judged and the question of salvation is resolved, we won’t get any credit for good intentions or good works. Nice people who wrote funny books and rejected Jesus will go to hell.

Voltaire was an atheist, too. It’s one of the things that make people view him as progressive. He was an atheist before atheism was cool.

In Paris, there is a collection of tombs for famous people. It’s a sort of secular pantheon, and aptly, it’s in a building called the Pantheon. Victor Hugo is there. So is Marie Curie. They moved dead celebrities in, and Voltaire is one of them.

The Pantheon was originally a church, but it was commandeered for secular use. Fitting.

The Pantheon’s mausoleum is for people who are revered for their allegedly positive contributions to Western civilization. Voltaire’s encased body is there, still receiving the adulation of intellectuals. Where is Voltaire himself, though? Probably not receiving adulation. Very much the opposite. He is probably crying in hell, where his pride likely failed to follow him when he died two and a half centuries ago. Everyone is humiliated in hell, no matter how cocky they were up here. There are probably some people who keep spitting at God even from the pit, but my guess is that the majority spend their time crying, screaming, and begging with no dignity at all.

In November, they’re putting a plaque for Josephine Baker in the Pantheon. What are the odds she made it to heaven? She did a lot of things to help France during World War Two, and she was a civil rights activist. She also adopted poor children. It all sounds nice, but she was a famous stripper who was promiscuous with both sexes, and she didn’t do her good deeds in the name of God.

I guess she was the black Marlene Dietrich.

Atheists and even many Christians think God takes you to heaven for being good, but it’s completely untrue. You can do no end of nice things, but if you reject Jesus, you go to hell anyway. People who live altruistic lives while rejecting Jesus are like ectopic pregnancies. They are headed for problems. The entrance to heaven is like the birth canal, and there are no spiritual caesarians.

Guess I’m digressing. Or am I? The underlying theme hasn’t changed. The things we think are important here generally are not, and that becomes increasingly obvious as we get closer to our departures.

Yesterday, motivated by the shortages most people haven’t noticed yet, I went to Wal-Mart and Publix. I spent about $175 on things like beans, flour, protein bars, and canned meat. I replenished the disaster rations I’ve been carelessly eating.

Costo says paper towels are going to disappear again, but there are plenty here. I picked up 24 rolls. I noticed that Wal-mart’s selection of dried beans was pretty bad, and the big bags of rice I wanted to buy were not there. The rice in the main area was wiped out. They still had some big bags in the Hispanic region, but I passed them by. Products aimed at Hispanics tend to be low-quality.

I got some New York strips at acceptable prices. These days, $10 per pound is a good deal. It used to be the everyday price. I paid $9 and $10, at different stores.

I don’t like strips all that much, but they’re way better than nothing, and deals on choice rib eyes are rare.

I have a ton of oatmeal. When the rapture comes, it will not find me constipated. The oatmeal will counteract the rice, pasta, white bread, and Velveeta.

If they don’t take away our electricity, I will be fine for a few months of famine. Without electricity, I won’t have water or any way to cook food. I wish I lived in beautiful Tennessee, on a farm with springs, a gas well, and soil that grows things other than water oaks and weeds.

Are my acorns edible? I should check. They don’t sound appetizing. I think there is something you can do with them to render them useful, but I don’t know what it is. I have mountains of them.

WebMD says you can eat acorns if you pulverize them, soak them, and keep discarding the water until it’s colorless. Yay. Whee. Rapture me, please.

If famine outlasts my supplies, I would just as soon die as subsist on squirrels and crows. I think those would be my only fall-back staples once Sonny’s BBQ closes. Even Euell Gibbons would have a hard time finding wild food on my property.

Rhodah is nervous about Tennessee. She is afraid of racism. You can’t let other people tell you where to live, though, and my guess is that there are plenty of places in rural Tennessee where they are more concerned about people’s religious and political beliefs than they are about race. I would think there would be room for two charismatic Christian conservatives who showed up with thousands and thousands of rounds of ammunition.

Is it okay for a Christian to use lethal force in self-defense? It’s a question I revisit from time to time.

I had this thought the other day: Jesus told us to turn the other cheek if we were struck, but he didn’t say to stand still and let people stab us with swords. A slap on the cheek is not that big a deal, but other types of battery are. Even dangerous people who know a lot about fighting routinely counsel us to avoid fights and run away, but they don’t usually tell us to lie down and die.

There is a former Navy SEAL named Jocko Willink, and he looks exactly like his name sounds. His head, all by itself, looks like it could defeat a battalion. He is a scary-looking dude. The other day, I saw a little bit of a video in which he provided people with advice. He said that if someone punched him, his first choice would be to run away.

I kind of wonder if he was telling the truth, given the ease with which he could subdue most people, but I am relaying his advice accurately. He said fighting leads to a lot of problems, which is true. He and Jesus are in agreement when it comes to minor batteries. Would he let someone shoot him or his wife, though? Bet not.

I would appreciate it if someone who reads my blog would find Jocko Willink and punch him in the face, just to see how honest he is. I would do it myself, but my sinuses are bothering me, and you know how that is.

Jesus told the disciples to buy and carry swords. What for? He discouraged Peter from using a sword to save him from the murderous priests who had him tortured to death, but he let him whack one of their servants first. This happened on a special occasion. The priests had come, and it was important for Jesus to die. Would he have stopped Peter a week earlier, when a premature murder would have prevented the crucifixion?

The death of Jesus was necessary. My death by murder isn’t, as far as I can see. My blood has no value. It can’t save anyone. No one who eats my body can claim to have taken communion. Would Jesus have told Peter not to defend me?

Was it necessary for Paul to take beatings and stonings? Maybe Jesus would have preferred to see him use a sword to save himself. I wonder.

The apostles made a lot of mistakes. No one likes to talk about that. They had public arguments, so obviously, they weren’t right all the time.

Wow. Superman is a sodomite. I just found out after writing the last paragraph. DC Comics has a new Superman–the primary messiah substitute in American comics–who does it with dudes. Sorry about the abrupt transition.

Wow. Wow. What’s next? Deepfake John Wayne gay porn? James Bond has been fairly gay since Casino Royale, so there is no point in wondering about him. Maybe they’ll create a deepfake Eastwood character called Dainty Harry.

Yesterday, I started thinking about the long history of seemingly gay Bond villains. It startled me.

1. Dr. No. No. Although he was a single man who lived on an island with other men, so I could be wrong.

2. From Russia with Love. Robert Shaw’s Donald Grant was a bemuscled gym rat with bleached blond hair and a full-body winter tan, he appeared to be oiled in at least one scene, and he certainly liked tussling with other men. Not sure, though.

3. Goldfinger. Single man who favored shorts back when they raised eyebrows. Could be.

4. Thunderball. Emilio Largo lived on an island with men who spent a lot of time swimming together, he wore a shorty wetsuit, and he always had an incredible tan and perfectly coiffed salt and pepper hair. A possible.

5. You Only Live Twice. Blofeld…gay, gay, gay, gay GAY. A prim old man who sat around stroking a cat. Come on. He could have been Elton John’s dad.

6. On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. I don’t know. No one saw this movie.

7. Diamonds are Forever. Jimmy Dean was definitely straight, but Blofeld was still the uncle who always shows up for Thanksgiving dinner unaccompanied, drinks too much, and cries because everyone else gets pecan pie before he does.

8. Live and Let Die. Kananga seemed butch, but Geoffrey Holder made up for it in spades. He was the first Rupaul.

9. The Man With the Golden Gun. Christopher Lee was effeminate and dressed way too well to be straight. And he cried because an elephant died.

10. The Spy Who Loved Me. Don’t remember. I couldn’t stand Roger Moore, who was, himself, a bit buoyant in his Ballys.

11. Moonraker. Michael Lonsdale’s Drax did not exactly ooze testosterone. I would not want him to be my son’s scoutmaster.

12. For Your Eyes Only. Honestly, I don’t remember this one, except that Bond had to fend off an amorous minor who was determined to get him to commit a felony with her.

13. Octopussy. The villain was Louis Jourdan. Draw your own conclusions.

14. A View to a Kill. Christopher Walken’s Zorin will remind you that Walken got his start as a dancer.

15. The Living Daylights. Timothy Dalton made us all miss George Lazenby. No idea what happened in this movie.

16. Goldeneye. Didn’t see it.

17. Tomorrow Never Dies. Didn’t see it, but Jonathan Pryce generally comes off as masculine in his other roles, in spite of being nearly English.

18. The World is not Enough. Robert Carlyle’s Renard had that “They always picked me last in gym class” feel, but he also had a crush on Sophie Marceau.

19. Die Another Day. Toby Stephens’ Gustav Graves and Pierce Brosnan seemed positively infatuated with each other. Their sweaty fencing match was like two storks doing a courtship dance.

The Craig films, or at least some of them, were fit to sit on the same DVD shelf as Gore Vidal’s sometimes-troubling Ben Hur. The gross Mads Mikkelsen rope scene, gay Q, Bond failing to close the deal with the tantalizing Moneypenny, Bond and Javier Bardem flirting, the return of tiny, Italian-slippered Blofeld, an aging Craig fighting Freddie Mercury…I’d have to say there were undercurrents.

Maybe they’ll rewrite our history books and put George Washington in bed with Thomas Jefferson. In the future, we’ll go past saying everyone is gay and every really admirable historical figure was gay. We’ll say everyone has always been gay. Children will wonder how we kept the race going.

We’ll have to transpose “surrogate” into hieroglyphics and cuneiform in carve it on obelisks and tablets. We can make some fake Dead Sea Scrolls, but to keep up with the times, we can see to it they’re discovered in Provincetown.

Superman is a homosexual. It was inevitable, but still. It’s terrible, but it’s impossible not to laugh a little. Who’s next? Winnie the Pooh? Tom Sawyer? Mickey Mouse? The Grinch? Well, Jim Carrey already went there.

If there is one thing that would make Lex Luthor go straight, this has to be it.

Everything around me is exploding in slow motion. It’s like the verse from the Revelation in which the stars fall from the sky.

I should buy a few more groceries and some batteries, and then maybe I’ll burn, “Come get me, Jesus,” into my lawn and sit outside hopefully in an Adirondack chair.

What fresh insanity will tomorrow bring? The question is chilling. I lack the imagination to guess.

As Bad as Your Life may be, at Least You’re not Joe Biden

Before I say anything else, here: they are saying food shortages have arrived, so if you haven’t prepared, you might want to visit Wal-Mart. I am considering loading up on pasta, Velveeta, and protein powder. I already have a lot of beans and rice, as well as canned fish. My jerky supply is poor, as is my dried apple supply. I’ll have to see what I can do.

I talked to Rhodah in Zambia. She was in a grocery store at the time. Lots of food. No price increases. So now America is the third world, and Zambia is the promised land. They had rows of Black Forest cakes in a display case, ready to go. I can’t find that here without driving to, maybe, Orlando.

I am still not quite well. My symptoms come and go in waves. They are always very faint, but they are still annoying. The worst thing is having days when I lack energy. That is not like me. I want to get out and walk the farm every day. Ordinarily, I can’t wait to get out there, but on low-energy days, I’m a different person.

On normal days, I tromp around for about 45 minutes with a .22 on my shoulder and a pistol in my pocket. Just so I can enjoy not being Australian. Or European. Or Chinese. Or a yankee.

Boy, those Australians turned out to be sissies, didn’t they? Remember Paul Hogan? What a tired fraud. “That’s not a knife. THIS is a knife!” Yeah, uh, except you’re not allowed to carry a knife in Australia.

If I were, admittedly amazingly, attacked by crocodiles on one of my walks, even at the bank, where the rifle wouldn’t be allowed, I could realistically hope to kill 11 before changing magazines, and I would be prepared to skin them on the spot for anybody who had a family to feed. And I’m a huge creampuff by rural American standards. Even in his prime, in Australia, Paul Hogan would have had to lock himself in the toilet.

My advice to Australian men is this: if you’re going to be docile, dependent sheep, be docile, dependent sheep. Don’t pretend you’re the kind of man they produce in places like Tennessee and Wyoming. Macho talk and too much Foster’s don’t make you Marcus Luttrell, girls.

I wonder what the Australian men of a century ago would think of their descendants.

I read that they now think bad dental hygiene makes coronavirus hang on longer. I won’t make the obvious jokes about England. I think there was a link from The Drudge Report, also known as the Trump Hate Report. What happened to Matt Drudge? Bet he got a vegan girlfriend.

The theory is that viruses live in the crud in your mouth, so it acts like pus in an abscess, reinfecting you over and over. This proposition disturbed me at first, because I have had several nights when I simply flopped into bed without brushing my teeth. After I got over it, I felt encouraged, because it seemed like this new knowledge might be helpful not just for covid sufferers but for anyone with an infection involving areas connected to the mouth.

The person pushing this theory says you can improve your lot by using mouthwash, which kills viruses.

It sounds a little weird, because we are always told there is no way to kill a virus. Antibiotics supposedly have no effect, and doctors never tell us to gargle to kill them. Antiseptics do kill viruses, however, as we now know after America’s great cleanliness revival. Alcohol, bleach, benzalkonium chloride, and other chemicals destroy coronaviruses on surfaces. It stands to reason that they would also kill them in our mouths and throats. Whether it does us any good, I can’t say.

If it works for covid, wouldn’t it also work for other viruses and strep? One would think so.

My grandmother’s best friend used to tell me to gargle with ST-37 every time I got sick. I don’t know if they make this product any more. It seems like they quit making it. It’s probably full of dioxin and thalidomide. Anyway, I took her advice, and it seemed to help. Maybe she was ahead of her time. Sometimes ignorance can put you a step ahead of doctors.

I plan to start flossing twice a day instead of once, and I will use mouthwash. I had read that mouthwash might have adverse health effects, but I don’t know it to be true, and killing microbes seems like a good idea.

I feel good today, and my energy is flowing, but I woke up with swollen nasal passages, and I can feel something going on in my head. I know I’m not completely over this.

My big project today, now that I’ve fixed my Cold Steel Swift knife in CTS-XHP so it actually opens as designed, is to get more food. I’ll be going to Wal-Mart shortly.

I have looked over my existing supplies, and I should be able to go a couple of months without suffering much. One thing that concerned me: Velveeta. I checked, and it looks like my cheese expired 9 months ago.

Am I worried? No. A Youtube prepper has a video in which she made Velveeta shells and cheese using a package that got its burn notice two years earlier. Her advice? If it looks okay and doesn’t stink, eat it. I’m going to buy more Velveeta anyway. If times get hard, I’ll try the old stuff first, and if it doesn’t work, I’ll still have the new stuff.

Is this the end? Will human beings be at each other’s throats, fighting over Chiclets and old cans of Libby’s pumpkin puree in three months? I wish I knew.

I had a wonderful, comforting thought today. I have had concerns about becoming poor, starving, and having to shoot urban visitors, and I am not all that happy about watching other people starve and murder each other even if I’m safe and fat. Here’s something that occurred to me, however: the tribulation is supposed to last 7 years, during which time, the elect will be in heaven at the wedding supper of Jesus. That means 7 easy years. If we return, as the Bible seems to say we will, we will have a thousand more easy years on Earth, because Satan and every other evil spirit will be bound, Jesus will rule in person, and the world will be blessed. If not, we’ll still be in heaven.

Either way, things brighten up for good once the rapture comes. If it’s imminent, as it seems to be, then so is the end of my problems. Forever. That makes the whole process look much less intimidating.

When we say the end is near, maybe we should be thinking of the end of our suffering, not the end of God’s patience and protection. What the apocalypse brings you depends entirely on which side you’re on.

Things aren’t looking good from a secular point of view. Biden’s poll numbers are sub-Trump, and it looks like he’s not even pretending he wants to get along with us. He just hosted a press conference about his dismal job numbers, and when it was over, he turned his back on his fawning press wet nurses and shuffled away without responding to questions.

Have you heard about, “Let’s go, Brandon!”? A NASCAR driver named Brandon something or other won a race, and an MSM meat puppet interviewed him at the track. While they were talking, the crowd was screaming, “F__ JOE BIDEN!”, very clearly. The meat puppet told a lie rivaling the famous Villaraigosa convention voice-vote lie. She said they were yelling, “Let’s go, Brandon!” Now, thanks to her dishonesty, “Let’s go, Brandon!” is one of the right’s new slogans. You can’t chant the other thing wherever you go, but you can send your nine-year-old to school in a shirt that says, “Let’s go, Brandon!”, and no one there will be able to do a thing about it, even though the teachers will know exactly what it means.

Public discourse hits a new low every week.

God is punishing us for electing Biden. No doubt about it. His precious presidency is dissolving. Biden has been paying people to stay home, and because they’re staying home and eating taxes, taxes will go up, and products and services are in short supply. Wages have gone up a great deal because no one wants to get off the couch. Gas prices are crazy because Biden killed American oil production, the Chinese stupidly banned Australian coal, and God personally strangled the wind farms in England. Inflation is killing our savings, and the stock market and real estate markets are in dangerous bubbles. It’s bad, bad, bad. Unless God is with you.

All we need now is an epsilon variant that laughs at vaccines and kills the healthy, and the picture will be rounded out.

Here’s hoping Jesus comes soon and takes as many people with him as possible. Once I’m gone, you can help yourself to my Velveeta and ammunition. If I’m sufficiently blessed to be taken, I won’t want it any more.

I’m Practically a Tarantino Character

To my perhaps everlasting disgrace, I took until today to finish assembling my new AR-15.

I started ordering parts in January. White Oak Armament said they could have an upper in my hands in something like two months. I no longer recall the exact figure. Over the ensuing weeks, the date kept falling backward, suggesting the White Oak people were putting people in front of me. Either that, or they were having problems getting parts and materials. The upper finally arrived in late June!

I can’t recall whether I’ve blogged about the upper, so here I go. I went with .204 Ruger. I know, I can hear readers shaking their heads. “Too small for burglars! Too small for deer! Too big for squirrels!”

I got it for things like coyotes and coons, okay? I admit, I’ve only shot one coon here, and I shot it in the head with a .22 pistol while it was trapped in a cage. But I figured I would shoot more stuff. Also, I thought .204 Ruger would be nice for target practice at ranges up to maybe 400 yards. It’s a nice, accurate round, and ammunition is…was…relatively cheap.

Maybe it was a stupid idea. I just like .204 Ruger.

I got a 22″ stainless fluted barrel with a threaded muzzle and a very nice M-Lok handguard. They put a flash hider on it, too. I don’t think I paid for that. The fluting cost me $110, and it probably saved me half an ounce of weight, but it looks cool.

Of course, I bought a pricey Gucci lower, right? No. Lowers were hard to come by, and a good price on a fairly ordinary one popped up, so I pounced. I got a plain old Anderson Industries lower. I am no expert, but I think the people who spring for expensive lowers are probably the same people who get American Express black cards just so other people will see them when they use them to pay for overpriced pants at Duluth Trading Company. The lower I bought appears to be very, very well made, and Anderson makes the same lowers for status brands. I don’t know how an expensive lower can make a gun run better. If you want your gun to run better, buy something other than an AR-15. Isn’t that the cheapest, most effective step?

I wanted a lower with no forward assist, or as I would call it, no “shell jammer.” When a shell doesn’t want to go into your chamber, in what conceivable world is forcing it a good move?

The trigger was pretty pooptastic, but that’s milspec for you. It’s to be expected.

I decided to put a LaRue MBT-2S straight bow trigger in it. This is a sister to the triggers I put in my other AR’s. The pull is a bit heavy, but it’s a top-quality trigger. It seemed to me that putting a 1-pound trigger in a gun I wanted to use for hunting was not smart, even if a hair trigger produced better accuracy.

I also got an “Adaptive Tactical EX Performance Adjustable MILSPEC Stock w/ Buttpad,” as the confirmation email reads. This is an inexpensive buttstock with a very nice pad on it. I have one on my .223 AR. I have one I plan to put on my LR-308. Milspec AR-15 buttstocks dig a hole in your shoulder when fired prone, and the Fuddly buttstock that came with the LR-308 is heavy, ugly, hard, and non-adjustable. You can get expensive buttstocks for AR guns, but I don’t know if there is any point. I shoot about 0.5 MOA with the factory stock on my RPR, and everyone hates that stock. I don’t think the stock makes much difference unless you’re a super-precision shooter. I mean, 0.5 MOA is pretty good by most people’s standards. I think that if you can shoot a gun that well, you can do just about anything it was ever designed to do.

I still need a sling and a doodad to attach a swivel to the handguard, so I have ordered these things.

I had a 4-14x Primary Arms scope on my other AR-15, but back when BLM and Antifa were really raging, I put a mid-range red dot on that gun so I would have one more gun I could use in a zombie situation. Now the Primary Arms is on the .204. It’s very, very nice for ranges under 500 yards. It’s no Nightforce, but then the .204 Ruger doesn’t shoot very far, so expensive glass seems wasteful to me.

I had to find .204 magazines. You can use .223/5.56 magazines for .204 Ruger, but you may have feed problems. I got some 10-round aluminum mags made for this round.

I’m hoping to get accuracy that beats my regular old AR-15. I like accuracy. If I can get below 1 MOA consistently at 100 yards, I will be as happy as a clam. If I can get close to that at longer distances, so much the better.

Ammunition is now the problem. I have a pretty decent amount of Fiocchi varmint ammo, which is pretty good, but I don’t know when I’ll be able to replace it at any price. Maybe I should be brave and shoot a box every couple of months.

With this gun, in my area, I should be able to kill anything that walks. We don’t seem to get deer or bears here. Everything else is smaller.

I would love to use this gun on squirrels, and I may do it. The season is nearly here. Dissolving a squirrel at 150 yards would be satisfying.

Today, in addition to installing the trigger, I used Mobil aircraft grease to lube everything that should be lubed. I also used Hornady One Shot and a Boresnake on the barrel. There isn’t much left to be done.

I hope I get around to shooting. Marriage and trips damaged my enthusiasm this year.

I wish I could go back to Altus Shooting and take another rifle course. To do that, I would need a lot of good 6.5mm ammo. I have cheap 1-MOA FMJ, and I have the makings for a lot of precision hunting cartridges, but I have very little match target ammo. I would like to redeem myself after showing up for the first course with a badly chosen gun and malfucntioning scope. I did fine, which was miraculous, but an RPR and a Vortex Viper would have made me look much better.

Maybe I should consider a better .223 barrel for my other AR-15. The one I have is good, but it’s not White Oak Armament, and I wonder if a high-end barrel would make it shoot better. The ammo I have is highly regarded, so I don’t think I can blame it. The last time I shot the gun, the old buttstock started gouging me, so I quit. I got the scope zeroed and then shot 4 groups. The first three were not much worse than 1 MOA, and the 4th, which I shot after the pain started, opened up. I don’t know whether the pain, the barrel, or the difficulty of shooting a gas gun well did me in. I should have shot more after changing the buttstock.

Maybe I shouldn’t complain about shooting well enough to hope to kill a coon at 200 yards, but where is the fun in shooting if you don’t keep trying to improve?

I also broke down and bought a new Gerber knife. I know. Gerber. But hear me out.

I realize Gerber is not what it once was, but they still make a few neat things. One is the Gerber Gator II lockblade knife in 154CM. This is what I bought.

I have two Gerber Gators in 420HC steel, which is a cheap steel that both sharpens and dulls quickly. But for the softness of the steel, these are great knives, which is why I have two. Sharpening a knife is not a long job for me, and these knives are very tough and comfortable to use, and they cost very little. I don’t carry them any more, but I used to. They were okay.

The Gator II I bought is similar to the Gators I have, but the steel is better. My first good knife was a Gerber in 440C stainless. About 35 years ago, I used it to whittle on an oak stick for about an hour, and when I was done, I was amazed to see it would still shave hairs. These days, 440C is considered somewhat outmoded. You can spend a lot on fancy new steels and get way better performance. You can also spend a little, but not much, more on 154CM and get considerably better performance. This steel is made by a company called Crucible, and while it may not be the latest and greatest, it should outperform 440C, which is similar to it, and bury 420HC.

The new knife has a big rubbery handle, and it seems pretty solidly made. I thought it would be nice to have something I wasn’t afraid to use for things that would threaten the beauty of my higher-end knives. I guess that’s silly, but there it is.

I paid $50 for the knife. For comparison purposes, you pretty much have to spend twice that much to get a really neat steel, unless you come across a bargain, like the $87 Cold Steel Swift in CTS-XHP I found on Ebay. I think it will turn out to be a great buy, and if I lose it or break it, I’ll get over it fast.

I thought I might get out and shoot today. Looks like that won’t happen, so I’ll walk instead, armed with a knife, pistol, and rifle. God bless America and the freedoms he gave us. They may be gone soon, but today I will indulge.

Horse Paste and Pills for Tropical Fish

I’m all excited today because my amoxicillin is almost here.

I got sick in Turkey, and while the symptoms don’t quite fit strep throat, they are not the most typical symptoms of covid, either, so I feel like I should cover all the treatment options. In the case of covid, that means ivermectin, supplements which probably don’t help, and waiting. In the case of strep, it means amoxicillin.

Today I read that it takes people at least three days to feel better after taking amoxicillin for bacterial infections, so in all likelihood, even if I have strep, taking an antibiotic won’t necessarily make a big difference. I am getting better every day, so even if I do nothing, if I have strep, I should be better in three days regardless of what I do.

Maybe amoxicillin won’t help at all, but I like feeling like I’m doing something.

I ordered 300 500-milligram pills, for $34. This is a huge amount of amoxicillin. My wife and I should be covered for several years.

Why haven’t I gone to a doctor? Because I don’t see any point in spending real money on a minor problem which is clearly going to go away soon whether I treat it or not.

Another reason I haven’t gone to a doctor: I have no faith in them. I will explain.

I am old, and when you’re old, you are full of knowledge you picked up from unpleasant experiences. I have learned that doctors are very good at treating highly treatable problems with which they are very familiar. Outside of that set of ailments, they are bumblers, and they often make things worse.

If you have a wart on your foot, or a broken arm, or you need a coronary bypass or a boob job, a doctor can help you out. If you have a collection of symptoms that don’t quite fit any disease you can find on the Internet, your doctor is likely to be stumped, and he will probably fall back on trial and error, giving you one treatment after another until one works, you leave him and go to another doctor, or you die.

Given human nature, this makes sense, and the principle doesn’t just apply to doctors. Today I realized all professionals are the same way. They are used to seeing the same problems over and over, so they are good at doing a limited number of things, but they get confused when you give them new challenges. Take them a few inches outside the box, and they flounder.

Most professionals are mediocre. Your doctor is probably mediocre. You aren’t qualified to say whether he is or not. You like him because he’s nice to you. That’s what we mean when we use the phrase “good doctor.” Unless you’re exceptionally blessed, your doctor will generally screw up when presented with novel tasks, and you won’t figure it out until he has led you around the mulberry bush for quite some time.

I can back my position up with countless tales of botched diagnoses and treatment, and I know you can, too, even if you’re a doctor and what I say makes you mad. Doctors give each other bad treatments, just like they do the rest of us.

I used to get tonsillitis over and over when I was a kid. People, especially doctors, don’t believe me when I say that. They say my tonsils would have been taken out. Sorry, but what I say is true. The doctors I saw didn’t believe in tonsillectomies.

They gave me antibiotics, which probably were not appropriate. One told my mother I had a herpes virus in my throat, and that the way to keep it from flaring up was to force me drink milk laced with bacteria every day. They all had diplomas up on their walls, but none of them ever solved or understood my seemingly simple problem.

Another doctor told my mother I had a cleft palate. I don’t know if he had murdered a real doctor and stolen his diploma or what, but that’s not a mistake a real doctor should make. Of course, he was wrong.

Another doctor used to tell my mother to keep me out of school whenever my temperature was above 99. He didn’t bother telling her many people have normal temperatures that high, so I got very, very familiar with the Mike Douglas Show while we applied his advice. I could turn a minor cold into a two-week vacation.

I feel like I should only go to doctors for problems only doctors have any chance of treating. These ailments fall into two categories: simple minor ones and complicated serious ones. Right now I have a simple minor problem I can handle as well as a doctor, so I’m staying home.

Remember how we respected doctors 60 years ago? We thought they were wonderful. Meanwhile, they were withholding water from fever patients, smoking in exam rooms, prescribing thalidomide, killing pneumonia patients by telling them to lie flat on their backs, and doing countless other things that made us worse off than if we had never seen them. Human beings probably thought just as highly of doctors back when they were doing bloodlettings with dirty instruments and going from surgery to surgery with pus on their hands. The farther back you look, the more physicians look like witch doctors. Fifty years from now, if the world survives, today’s doctors will also look bad. They are today’s witch doctors. I keep that perspective in mind when I think about medical treatment. Often, I tell God, “Please keep me away from the witch doctors.”

If doctors were really all that great, they would have come up with a credible consensus about coronavirus and masks, and they still have not done that. All they have is a party line determined by politics, not science. They wouldn’t have made fools of themselves by saying it was impossible for the vaccinated to have serious symptoms; vaccinated patients are dying all over the world. They still argue about whether it’s okay to eat eggs. They can’t cure cigarette or opioid addiction. They can’t even fix fat people. It’s important to know what doctors are good at and which challenges reveal how far they still have to go.

Enough of that. Back to me.

Today’s new symptom: food tastes funny. Does it mean I have coronavirus? No idea. Coronavirus is commonly associated with the disappearance of the sense of taste and smell, but this usually happens early, not a week into the disease, and I can still taste and smell things. My food tastes funny, and the flavors are weak, but I can taste it. I had hot chocolate this morning, and I would say it tasted like a mouthful of pennies.

Don’t pretend you don’t know what pennies taste like. You were a kid once.

The worst symptom I have is the constant accumulation of thick, chunky mucus in my nose, like rice pudding with raisins. I have to get up once a night and blow it out. I don’t sleep well. But for that, I would not mind being sick. I have all sorts of energy, and when I’m sick, I’m able to tolerate stimulants, so I’m enjoying coffee and chocolate. On the whole, but for the mucus, it may be preferable to being well. I’m looking forward to having a Lindt bar later. Don’t know if I’ll be able to taste it, but I am determined to try.

I say I have all sorts of energy, but that’s not totally true. At around 8 p.m., I start to flicker out and fall asleep wherever I am. I don’t think that’s because of the disease, though. I think it’s because of the lack of sleep. Also, I was going to bed 7 hours earlier last week, so I may not be in sync with Eastern time yet.

I’m not using ivermectin today, because my course of paste is done, but nonetheless, I have three new tubes on the way. I have no intention of running out while THE SCIENCE is still chasing its tail, trying to figure out whether ivermectin works while uninformed and dishonest physicians lie about it to the press. If they decide it works, the supply will disappear instantly. I plan to be ready.

It’s safe to give billions of doses to Africans for worms, but it’s lethal for Americans with coronavirus. Yeah, okay. Makes complete sense to me.

The vaccines have killed a few people, but ivermectin hasn’t, even when self-administered by bona fide imbeciles. Interesting fact.

Two deaths have been “linked to” ivermectin. After a year and a half of covid disinformation, we all know what “linked to” means. If you get a mild case of covid and fall off a ladder, your death is covid-linked. The ivermectin victims probably died in a car wreck.

About 8,000 people are reported to have been killed by covid vaccines. Not that I’m an anti-vaxxer. I’m vaccinated. I’m just pro-truth.

I hate the way the truth has disappeared. I may not say what you want to hear, because I may not have accepted all of your side’s covid dogma, but I strive to strain out the BS and present the truth. Most people are not doing that. They are telling us there are invisible microchips in liquid vaccines that pass through tiny needles, during a chip shortage. They are telling us masks are highly effective when they barely work at all. They are saying vaccines are the mark of the beast when the Bible makes it clear they are not. The Chinese are claiming the Chinese virus started in a lab in America, which is clearly a giant lie. American journalists are still repeating the moronic claim that an Oklahoma hospital turned away gunshot victims because there were so many people showing up with terminal cases of ivermectin poisoning.

I think the best lie is the magnetism story. People are posting videos of themselves with metal objects stuck to their arms. They claim the vaccines made them magnetic, causing things like copper coins to stick to them. Hello? Copper isn’t magnetic. If copper is sticking to you, you need to start using a washcloth, because your body’s own undisturbed grease is making things cling. If you’re dirty enough, I suppose nearly anything will stick to you.

People who can’t hear the truth can’t be helped, and they are very easy to control. The world’s new truth-deafness is being used to make human beings blame and hate each other, and it will form the basis of the murder pandemic predicted in Revelation 6. It’s already happening.

The only people who can’t be deceived are those who hear from the Holy Spirit, and if you’re not praying in tongues, you’re not one of those people. Christians who call tongues “gibberish” are already out there teaching anti-Semitism and preparing misguided militias to take on mirror-image dupes who think white people cause all the world’s problems.

A lot of the people who believe the chip stories are Christians. It’s embarrassing. Can you imagine how hard and expensive it would be to make a radio chip small enough to go through a hypodermic? The only implantable chips that small have to use ultrasound, not radio, and they only started making them this spring, in a university lab, not in factories. Have you been scanned with an ultrasound probe since getting your vaccine? I haven’t. What would be the point? If they can make you sit still for a probe, they already know where you are, right? What would the chip tell them that they don’t already know? Furthermore, I have to ask: are you walking around with a GPS-enabled phone which constantly tells Google your location to within a couple of yards, while whining about an imaginary locating chip?

You’re not magnetic. You don’t have a chip. The vaccines are not the mark of anything, yet. On the other side of the coin, ivermectin is not poisonous and may be helpful, masks don’t work in practical use, vaccinated people die every day, and closing borders no longer serves any purpose whatsoever, except when we do it to keep illegals out.

When you reject the truth and tell the lies one camp loves, you can be sure at least one faction will love you. When you accept truth and reject lies from all sources, people on every side will hate you.

I cannot wait for this snot to go away. My pills are still not here.

I think I’ll go out and kill squirrels out of season. I have nothing better to do, and I have some legitimate scores to settle. I hope everyone who reads this is preparing for the apocalypse, because the mass delusion which is leading us to an orgy of murders is, like coronavirus, untreatable except by divine means.

The Key is to be Enthusiastic About It

I decided to load up on pharmaceuticals today.

While I was in Turkey, I developed a sore throat. This happened shortly before I was due to take a PCR test to determine whether I would be allowed to fly home to the US. Something similar happened on my recent Egypt trip. I got a cold. Both times, I was concerned that I might get stuck in a hotel in a foreign country while coronavirus ran its course. I was also concerned that I might take a long time to get over the bug. Extending a foreign trip can be fun, but after a month or so, it would be less fun.

Obviously, I passed both times. I am here in my gun room, typing away.

Does this mean I didn’t get coronavirus? Maybe not. In spite of inexplicable, delusional MSM articles calling the PCR test “highly accurate,” in fact, reputable sources (not Mike Lindell or Alex Jones) claim the reverse is true. Some analysts have found false-negative rates as high as 67%.

I’m pretty sure I did not get covid in Egypt, because all I had was a runny nose. In Turkey, things were different. Things started much as they had in early 2020, when I got a mystery ailment with symptoms consistent with covid. I started out with foul-smelling diarrhea that didn’t last long. Then I felt nausea. Then I got a sore throat and a low fever. Then I got thick nasal discharge, which is still with me. In 2020, I had conjunctivitis, similar diarrhea, brief nausea and vomiting, a runny nose that persisted for a long time, and a dry cough coupled with sharp but mild chest pains.

In Turkey, I wondered if I had strep. I don’t think I did, because nausea and diarrhea are not common with strep, and they’re common with coronavirus.

In 2020 and on my Turkey trip, I got very strange diseases which could have been covid but didn’t seem to be anything else, based on my layman’s scrutiny of Internet symptom lists.

I took ivermectin before leaving for Istanbul. I expected to take more in Turkey. I had my wife pick up tablets in Africa, and I told her to bring some for me so I could avoid depleting my American stash of horse paste. She misunderstood me and left them behind, so by the time I got sick, I had been off ivermectin for maybe 10 days. People who push ivermectin for coronavirus prevention claim you only need one dose per month. Whether that’s true or not, I don’t know, and for that matter, I don’t know if ivermectin helps even when administered as directed by my fellow fringe nuts.

Following guidelines provided by actual doctors who treat coronavirus patients, I’ve been taking ivermectin every day for several days. They recommend a 5-day course for active cases. Today is my last day. Hope I don’t drop dead tomorrow.

Yesterday, based on my travel problems and the general craziness of today’s world, I decided I should pick up a few disaster medications. Shortages are everywhere, the Revelation promises more plagues, and it’s not always easy to get to a doctor, especially when you’re traveling.

I ordered more ivermectin, amoxicillin, metronizadole, azithromycin, and doxycycline.

How did I get the antibiotics without prescriptions? I did it the same way I got the ivermectin. I took the veterinary route for most. You can get all sorts of prescription medications that way, and the prices are nice and low because malpractice lawyers haven’t managed to wreak havoc on the cost of veterinary medicines.

I already have enrofloxacin (a ciprofloxacin relative) and something called ronidazole. I picked these up for Marvin. Enrofloxacin is not approved for humans, and it belongs to a family of drugs which can cause tendon damage and severe nightmares, so I am not planning on using it, but Marv or some other pet might need it in our dystopian future, so I’m keeping it. Ronizadole is considered dangerous for people, so it will also stay in my pet-medicine stash.

I plan to pick up a few more things. I’m considering antifungals.

Ciprofloxacin is a preferred drug for treating anthrax, which is a popular biological weapon. Because cipro is so scary, doxycycline, the other preferred drug, looks better to me.

Despite the dishonest MSM hubbub, there is no ivermectin supply crisis. It may be hard to find locally for some people, but you can still get it online for under $8 per tube. Nobody’s horse is going to die because you or I buy a few tubes, and if horses do die, I don’t care, because people are more important.

Reader Ed Bonderenka alerted me to a different ivermectin preparation. Apparently, ivermectin penetrates skin, so you can apply it externally. Drug companies sell very inexpensive topical drenches.

I don’t know how safe these products are for people. A cow has very thick skin, so it may be that drenches are made very strong in order to get through it. Don’t ask me. Interesting alternative, though.

Taking a drench internally looks like a bad idea. You would have to drink 2 ml of isopropyl alcohol with every dose. Alcohol is part of the product.

I’m strongly tempted to drive to Tractor Supply and grab a vial of injectable penicillin for $18. They don’t sell oral preparations, but there is no reason why you can’t measure out the injectable stuff and swallow it. What if I have strep? Penicillin would probably help.

Or I could just drive to an urgent care doc-in-the-box like a normal person.

There is something appealing about off-the-grid medical care, though, as long as I’m not wading into the deep end. I’m not transplanting lungs or doing heart bypasses.

Playing amateur doctor when I don’t really need to is not the point here, even though I do it sometimes. The purpose of snapping up a few medications is to prepare me and the people I know for times in which we have to be our own pharmacies.

Maybe I should also stock up on loperamide (Imodium), famotidine (acid blocker), ibuprofen, antibiotic ointment, bandages, topical antiseptics, swabs, tape, gauze, vitamins, and whatever else intelligent people keep on hand during apocalypses.

I guess it would be smart to stock up on toiletries, too. That 3-in-1 shower goo is a big convenience. Shampoo, wash, and shave, without getting out of the shower or leaving hairs and dried shaving cream on the sink, and it doesn’t leave soap scum behind.

Should I grab a few ladies’ products? I’m in the dark there. I can ask Rhodah and order a bale of them on Ebay.

Costco says toilet paper may disappear again soon, so I may add to my monumental collection, along with more paper towels. Walmart’s high-end towels seem like a real bargain.

Batteries. Obvious.

Okay; I paused and ordered a few more things. For a couple of hundred dollars, I got enough antibiotics to provide a measure of protection for two or maybe three people. I could never have persuaded a doctor to give me this stuff. One online vendor even threw in two Cialis tablets, which, let me stress, I did not ask for. That stuff scares me.

I’m leaning toward buying dry disaster food, although I think the only real answer is to grow things. It would cost a lot of money to buy food for 6 months, and it would take up a lot of room. When it ran out, my wife and I would be right back where we started. Until now, my plan has been to have enough food for one month, eat it, and then die without complaining.

In case anyone cares, the Florida coronavirus spike is over. The press is not talking much about it, because the end of a spike doesn’t make Ron DeSantis look bad. They’re also not talking about Florida-style spikes that have, and are, taking place in blue states. When a spike hits a red state with a governor who may run for president, it’s proof Republicans are idiots. When a spike hits a blue state, it’s a mystery. Which probably proves Republicans are idiots.

I’m wondering what will happen. Will the end of the wave of spikes also be the end of coronavirus as a major epidemic, or will the virus find a way to come back and keep biting us in the butt?

One thing is for sure: whatever happens will prove we need more government control, more socialism, and confiscation of wealth. You can bank on that. Democrats believed those things were called for before coronavirus ever became a problem.

Will we ever get real vaccines? The ones we have now are terrible; that is indisputable, as the many, many dead “breakthrough” victims could tell you. Will covid turn out to be like AIDS, which is impossible to eradicate? Both diseases are curses which came as rewards for rebellion against God, so maybe both will be with us until God destroys the human race again. Humanity is not going to repent. We’re not going to admit fault or confess that only God can save us. God has no reason to take covid away.

Maybe old people, fat people, sick people, smokers, and people who vote for Democrats will have to live like bubble boys forever.

Now that I think about it, our flu vaccines are also really bad. Smallpox is gone. Polio is gone. The measles are gone. The flu infects millions of us every year.

I can’t tell you how happy I am to be back in Florida. As soon as I found my car at the airport, I put my gun and huge, sharp knife back in my pockets, and I’ve only worn a mask once since I got home. While I was in Turkey, I kept reaching for my right front pocket because I thought I had left my gun in a restaurant or something. At least they let me carry a small Spyderco.

Rhodah and I are trying to get our US visa application submitted today, and after that, we need to start working on visas for another third-country trip. We will probably be apart for quite a while, so another trip will be needed.

Israel is still, predictably, overreacting to covid. Other desirable countries will be cold by the time we are approved to visit. Greece is a good target, and they claim they accept Zambians. Italy is still closed. France could work, if we can convince them Rhodah doesn’t want to squat and collect welfare. That should be easier now that she has visited two countries without trying to stay.

Paris in winter is not that alluring, but it’s warmer than New York. There are warmer destinations in France, so we should have good options.

Biden, or whoever is doing his job, finally faced reality and decided to open America’s borders somewhat wider. I don’t know if it will help Rhodah or not. America does not care about Zambians, so even when a president helps visitors from other countries, Zambians may remain stuck in the pipeline.

I guess all we can do is pray, try to be ready for the rapture, and make earthly plans as well as we can.

Fresh Reminders That This is Really Happening

What a week.

Remember me writing about flooding as a likely sign that God is preparing the world for the tribulation? I mused about Hurricane Ida, which was about to hit New Orleans, wondering whether it would signal a continuation of the global flooding crisis. After I wrote that, Ida did terrible damage in Louisiana, and yesterday, it flooded places like Manhattan, New Jersey, and Philadelphia!

I read that New York City had just issued its second flash flood warning in history. There were also floods there in August, when Henri passed over.

During the last week, there have been floods in New Zealand, Nepal, and Mexico.

Seems like the run-up to the rapture is really happening. The flooding problem is not going away. It will be interesting to see if it carries on into the fall.

When I chose this house, I made sure it wasn’t in a flood area. The government has a site where you can check every property in the country.

Of course, leftists look at the floods and blame global warming, which is a backhanded jab at capitalism, which is a backhanded jab at Christianity, America, and white people.

A gradual increase in global temperatures shouldn’t cause an abrupt increase in flooding, which appears to be what we are seeing. Doesn’t matter. Global warming causes every problem, regardless of what it is. It’s not a scientific conclusion. It’s a fundamental premise of a political religion.

My wife knows a lady who prophesies and prays for people. Sometimes she visits the lady. The lady is young, but she has said she expects to die before long, because God will take her before things get bad. This week, my wife dreamed about her. She saw her in church, saying she would be taken away like T.B. Joshua. In the dream, she told the lady they needed to pray to prevent it, but the lady refused. As they were talking, my wife saw a beautiful, green place full of mountains.

The heavenly place turned into an earthly place where a man swam in a river like the Nile. The river looked like blood. A voice asked if Satan was going to come and bring 6 plagues to the earth.

Rhodah is not an end times buff. She is young, and she wants to live out a normal life here. I would be thrilled if the rapture came tomorrow, but Rhodah is less enthusiastic. She has not studied the end times much.

Was T.B. Joshua taken because the tribulation was coming?

The book of Enoch says that when God decided to flood the world, he chose to wait until Methuselah, the grandfather of Noah and the son of Enoch, died. Methuselah was a righteous man, and God did not want to flood the earth while he was alive. When God told Abraham he was going to destroy Sodom, he agreed to forbear if 10 righteous men could be found, but when God sent angels to look at Sodom, the homosexuals there tried to gang-rape them, and 10 righteous men could not be found. God has demonstrated a pattern of sparing the wicked while the righteous are among them. In a parable, he said it was best to let weeds and wheat grow together instead of ripping the weeds out and burning them before the harvest. He said the best thing was to harvest the wheat and then burn the weeds.

Joshua is not well-known in the US, but he was one of the world’s most famous preachers. He did many miracles, and he never had a scandal. He didn’t beg for money or sell his help. He was a youthful and vigorous 57 when he died, and he went quickly, without suffering. Maybe it’s true that God took him because he wanted to spare him.

As signs become clearer, Rhodah is getting more interested in the end times.

On the subject of end times concerns, I decided to get myself some ivermectin, figuring there was no down side to it. When I visited Tractor Supply, I saw that ivermectin was not available, and there was a little notice cautioning people against taking it. I guess they sold out. I bought three tubes on Amazon, though, and Rhodah is bringing some ivermectin for humans to Turkey.

For what it’s worth, I learned that ivermectin has a sister drug which is also active against coronavirus microbes. The name also ends with “mectin,” and people are not rushing to buy it yet. Useful info if you can’t find ivermectin.

Another interesting end time fact: the silicon chip shortage is getting worse, and it wasn’t caused by coronavirus. Trump battled with China because we were being abused in our trade relationship, and that caused some problems with the chip supply. Then a major supplier had a big fire. On top of that, a drought hit Taiwan, making it hard for chip factories to get water for cleaning, which is essential to manufacturing. Right now, a huge number of vehicles is sitting in lots because automakers can’t get chips to finish manufacturing them. Automakers are shutting down production. Electronics manufacturers have products backordered, so you may not see your favorite video console (or motherboard, if we have to talk about things that are actually important to mature adults) until 2023.

Remember, the tribulation will be ushered in by murder and hate, death and disease, and shortages. See Revelation 6. We have all three problems, and we can’t blame coronavirus for all of it, so it’s not like our predicament can be traced to one natural cause or even a few.

By the way, beef is going to be in short supply for at least a year, and rubber supplies are expected to dry up shortly.

There is good news regarding our belated honeymoon, which has been delayed by coronavirus-related visa issues. We had our time wasted by Sweden, Iceland, and Spain, which rejected our applications, and we started looking for other options. We did not want to go to a New World destination, and we didn’t want to go to Egypt again.

We learned that Mexico, which is one of the top easy dates when it comes to visas, would not let Rhodah in unless she applied in South Africa. We looked at third-tier European nations. We learned that Georgia is a good safety nation for a Zambian. They let them in without visas.

We checked Turkey out. I thought it was just another depressing Muslim nation, but I learned that wasn’t true. The Turks are backsliders, so they’re easygoing. They have bars. They let women wear bikinis to beaches. They have a strong reputation for friendliness and great food, and the country is set up well for tourists.

We had some confusion about Turkish visas. Turkey has a website that dispenses electronic visas, but the embassy people in Zambia gave Rhodah the impression she would have to apply in person, which would take weeks.

The e-visa site said visitors from Zambia were required to have tickets from one of three airlines before applying, and I didn’t want to buy tickets in advance because if her application had been rejected, we would have lost a lot of the ticket money. Also, the only airline that offered round-trip flights for the needed route was very expensive.

I decided to apply on Rhodah’s behalf, and I clicked the box saying she already had a ticket. I figured I would find out whether they were checking before awarding visas. If they were not, we could always buy the ticket afterward. If they rejected her, we wouldn’t get a visa, but I would learn something useful.

It took me about 10 minutes to get her a valid visa. The visa itself merely said she had to prove she had a ticket on an approved airline WHEN SHE TRAVELED. That’s a piece of cake.

We are still hearing information from a friend of Rhodah’s, claiming she needs to apply in person in spite of the e-visa, but nothing the Turkish government says in emails or publishes on the web agrees with him. I am making inquiries. We should get final confirmation by Monday.

Now that we have a visa, I’m looking at videos and reading up on Turkey. The exchange rate is insane, so we can expect to pay about $7 for meals for two. The food picture is amazing. Istanbul has restaurants of every type, and the standards are said to be very high. Istanbul is on the water, so there should be things like dinner cruises. We can also visit Ephesus and see the city Paul wrote about.

The temperatures should be below 80, so it won’t be like Egypt, where we had days 35 degrees warmer.

I’m looking forward to visiting another country where Muslims are friendly. In the past, most of my impressions of Turkey came from the movies Midnight Express and Lawrence of Arabia, so it wasn’t a place I wanted to visit. Of course, I was crazy to think movies bore any relationship to reality. I mean, I’ve seen Deliverance, a preposterous movie in which the danger of being sodomized is low in cities and high in rural Appalachia, instead of precisely the other way around, the way it is in real life.

I feel bad about having the wrong idea about people. Turkey’s government may be anti-Semitic, and for all I know, terrorists are getting significant support from individual Turks, but I clearly misjudged the character of the nation.

I’m not crazy about visiting a place controlled by a man who has it in for Israel, but I can’t have everything the way I want it.

The Turks have had floods in 2021. Figures. But they happened on the Black Sea coast, and I don’t plan to go there.

People are supposed to be very nice in Georgia, and the scenery is beautiful, but the food is somewhat scary, and the country isn’t set up all that well for tourism.

My understanding is that Georgians have a love affair with bread stuffed with meat and cheese. They serve many variations on this theme. Sounds good to me, but I don’t know if I could handle it for a more than a couple of days.

Here at the house, things are going great, but I haven’t managed to trap the squirrel that has been chewing on my gate. I put out a live trap, and the bait disappeared twice. Then I tried triggering the trap and saw that it didn’t work. That would have made it more of a feeder than a trap, except that the second bait was a big chunk of rat poison. Whatever critter stole it is probably dead.

I fixed the trap, but the bait disappeared again. I have a theory that a bigger animal is reaching in and taking the bait without setting it off, so I got a larger trap and set it next to the little one. Yesterday, I found a coon in it.

Getting rid of a coon is always a blessing, but the job is not pleasant. I had to shoot it in the head with a .22 pistol. Because it was raining and I didn’t want to carry the coon to the burn pile in bad weather, I chucked it over a fence into some bushes.

Today I went back in dry weather, thinking maybe I should move the coon. It was gone. Evidently, coyotes and/or bobcats remove dead coons without even being asked. That’s nice.

I don’t know how many times I will have to empty the traps. Quite a few, I would think. It’s part of rural life, so I need to get used to it instead of becoming a sissy city transplant who names the squirrels that eat his patio furniture and tries to pet rabid coons.

A disturbing thing about dispatching game and pest animals with firearms is that it makes you understand that you could do the same thing to a person if you had to. Reluctance to shoot is grounded in moral questions and fear of negative consequences, not the repugnance of the act itself, which can be overcome by willing one finger to move. People who live in the country are used to overcoming it because they hunt. A typical hunter has ended many more lives than all but the rarest soldiers, and many are capable of much better stalking and marksmanship than ordinary combat veterans.

Our cities are experiencing a very sudden murder epidemic, and it will surely bleed over into suburbs and the country eventually. When that happens, spoiled urban terrorists who are used to dealing with police who are hampered by rules of engagement and career concerns will find themselves up against millions of civilian men and women who face far fewer constraints and don’t think twice about shooting a warm-blooded creature and pulling its organs out with their bare hands. Video-game-trained urbanites in search of easy prey will probably face an extremely steep learning curve, with lessons written in their own blood. Hope I will not be on earth to see it.

I hope I’m right about the Bible predicting a thousand-year age of love, led by Jesus himself and staffed by rapturees, following the tribulation. It would be wonderful to see the world function the way it ought to.

People in Kabul Aren’t Feeling Gay

Tell me whether you think this is a revelation.

In Genesis, God said, “My spirit will not strive with man forever. Because he is flesh, his days shall be 120 years.” Many people think this means modern humans have limited lifespans because God was saying he was shortening them.

Problem: Noah lived 950 years, and 350 of those years passed AFTER the flood and AFTER God said man’s days would be 120 years. Noah is not alone. Abraham lived long after Noah, and he lived to be 175. Isaac died at 180. Israel died at 147.

Uh oh.

Other people believe God was saying, “I am not going to continue wasting effort trying to save a human race which clearly will not listen, so in 120 years, I will destroy them.” That seems to make more sense.

Googling around, I see that we are not certain how much time passed between the day Noah received his assignment and the day the flood began, but we know it was around 100 years. We don’t know the date of God’s announcement that he would shorten man’s days to 120 years, but it is mentioned before the command he gave Noah. There appears to be no reason why the 120-year announcement could not have taken place 120 years before the execution of the human race, and there is also no other good explanation for the announcement.

We know the tribulation will be the second destruction of the human race. It won’t be as thorough as the flood, because God will end it in order to prevent total extinction, but effectively, it will be a repeat performance, except people will be drowned spiritually, not physically. God will use fire, not water, to cleanse the earth.

God gave us the rainbow to document his promise that he would not destroy the earth with water a second time. He also said he would return, which will happen at the end of the tribulation, when things are as they were in the days of Noah, when human beings were given over to evil. It’s notable that homosexuals, whose activities are extremely offensive to God, use the rainbow on their flag, and that they call it the “pride” flag.

Pride is almost synonymous with homosexuality. Google “pride” and see what pops up. It won’t be Charlie. Other search engines give somewhat mixed results, but the Google Kidz have their site rigged up so the results are gay, gay, gay.

Here is what occurred to me last night: what if God intends to bring the tribulation 120 years after giving the world a final dispensation of grace? He left Noah to preach here for 120 years, and he got nowhere, and God works in repetitive patterns. What if God started counting the years at the beginning of the revival of baptism with the Holy Spirit?

Many people think the charismatic movement started in 1906, in Los Angeles, in a church on Azusa Street. That isn’t true. In America, it started no later than 1901. The first known manifestation which fed into the charismatic movement took place in Topeka, Kansas, with a woman named Agnes Ozman. Another manifestation, which failed to get traction, took place near Murphy, North Carolina, in 1896. Ozman’s experience appears to be the match that lit the fire.

Ozman’s pastor and 34 other people began manifesting the gift, it spread to California, and the rest is history.

What is 1901 plus 120? It’s 2021.

People may shout, “Jesus said he didn’t know the day or the hour,” but he said that a long time ago, and surely he didn’t mean neither he nor anyone else would ever know. He can’t return unless he knows the day and hour. Also, 2021 is not a day or an hour. It’s a year. If God tells us the year the tribulation will begin, we will still be in the dark regarding the day and hour.

If we reckon from 1906, when the real explosion occurred, 120 years will be up in 2027. Still not far off.

It seems pretty clear to me that the 4th seal of Revelation 6 has been opened, and the 5th seal may also have been opened. If the 5th seal is open, then once the events it heralds are finished, the 6th seal will open, and that’s a very bad seal. It will indicate that the nicer part of the tribulation has begun. During the 6th-seal period, people will be saved and martyred. The 7th seal period is where the heavy-duty tribulation sets in.

Here’s what happens when the 6th seal is opened:

And I beheld when he had opened the sixth seal, and, lo, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as blood;

And the stars of heaven fell unto the earth, even as a fig tree casteth her untimely figs, when she is shaken of a mighty wind.

And the heaven departed as a scroll when it is rolled together; and every mountain and island were moved out of their places.

And the kings of the earth, and the great men, and the rich men, and the chief captains, and the mighty men, and every bondman, and every free man, hid themselves in the dens and in the rocks of the mountains;

And said to the mountains and rocks, Fall on us, and hide us from the face of him that sitteth on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb:

For the great day of his wrath is come; and who shall be able to stand?

More 6th-seal events:

After this I beheld, and, lo, a great multitude, which no man could number, of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues, stood before the throne, and before the Lamb, clothed with white robes, and palms in their hands;

And cried with a loud voice, saying, Salvation to our God which sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb.

And all the angels stood round about the throne, and about the elders and the four beasts, and fell before the throne on their faces, and worshipped God,

Saying, Amen: Blessing, and glory, and wisdom, and thanksgiving, and honour, and power, and might, be unto our God for ever and ever. Amen.

And one of the elders answered, saying unto me, What are these which are arrayed in white robes? and whence came they?

And I said unto him, Sir, thou knowest. And he said to me, These are they which came out of great tribulation, and have washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.

Things look pretty bad during that time, but 7th-seal events are much worse. It appears that every person who prays and serves God will be gone from the earth by the time the 7th seal opens, so everyone here will be like those who are already in hell. They will feel God’s wrath without a buffer, because God doesn’t have to hold back his fury to protect his children, and because no one on earth is repenting or praying for mercy.

During the 7th-seal period, Many people of the earth will be destroyed with plagues, including things like being roasted with fire.

Is this how it works? Are we nearly at the end of a 120-year probation period? Is this why the weather is so strange and an air of foreboding has pervaded my county for the last year and a half? Is this why people are frozen in place, waiting for the end of a bobbing-and-weaving pestilence that will never go away?

Is this why we elected an arrogant, lying, demented dotard who is currently presiding over our downfall? Biden is sitting in the Oval Office feeling great about achieving his narcissistic dream, with no idea how to cope with the events that are swirling around him. It’s as though he were elected captain of the darts team on a burning ship. He’s clutching his treasured prize, but it might as well be a sack of manure.

To add to my questions, the other day my wife heard an audible voice. It said, “October 26th.” What does it mean? Is it the day of the rapture? Is it the day she will get a tourist visa to come to America? We don’t know.

It’s remarkable that some Christians don’t believe in the rapture. The Bible describes it with considerable specificity, and there have already been at least three raptures. Enoch, Elijah, and Jesus have already been raptured. The flood was a picture of the rapture, even though no one was lifted to heaven.

Noah represents Jesus. The 8 people on the ark represent a new beginning, because a week has 7 days, and day 8 starts a new week. Noah’s children were lifted above the earth while people below were killed miserably, and when they returned, they owned the entire earth, and they gave rise to every race on the planet.

In the rapture, Jesus takes us away, we spend 7 years in heaven, and then he returns us here, to lead the survivors of the tribulation and start a new human race.

In Genesis, God said he had shortened man’s time because men were flesh. Enoch said God brought the flood because the sons of the angels were giants in the flesh but not in the spirit. It looks like God was saying the same thing Enoch said. Right now, a gigantic percentage of human beings are ruled by the flesh. The parallel is obvious.

We’re putting homosexuality flags up at our embassies abroad, along with the US flag. Not everyone agrees. Jamaicans have protested this celebration of abomination. I am on their side. The embassy may be our soil, but godly Jamaicans have to look at that flag. I wonder if we have homosexuality flags up in places like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. I’ll bet we don’t. Leftists are loud but not brave.

We did put flags up in the UAE, the Vatican, and Afghanistan. In Kabul, the flag was intended to celebrate June, which is Pride Month. How is it that blacks got stuck with February, the worst month of the year, and homosexuals got June? It’s interesting that Kabul fell after we insulted the God that gives us victory.

Biden is amazing. I just read that ISIS set off two suicide bombs in Kabul, including one at the airport. Raise your hand if you didn’t see that coming. Remember all those ISIS victories on US-occupied ground during Trump’s term? Neither do I. Biden is bringing back the good old days of Obama and Bush.

People are so deluded and dishonest, they’re actually debating whether it was a good idea to forgo creating a withdrawal plan and allow the country to collapse at the whims of our terrorist enemies. The news says we left the Taliban arms and other military items worth $28 billion, and that includes Blackhawk helicopters, which they are now operating. Armed versions of the Blackhawk are very nasty weapons, and you can destroy one with a single bomb, so why didn’t we do it? Why didn’t we have our soldiers drive tanks and MRAP’s over rifles instead of handing them over?

I can destroy an M16 in three seconds, and so can you. A person with a jug of gasoline and a lighter can burn out a vehicle or an aircraft in a couple of minutes. I can put uniforms, boots, and ballistic helmets in piles and set fire to them. I’m not even in the military. Somehow, these ideas never occurred to Biden. It looks like our military leaders never thought of them, either, but they did have time to form and implement plans to promote male-on-male anal sex.

The Germans and Japanese destroyed arms and other resources as they retreated. So did the Soviets. Are Americans just too dumb to do the same thing?

How can we be this stupid? Supernatural delusion is the only explanation. No one is this dumb without help.

The Taliban said they agreed the airport should stay open, and Biden believed them. He believed the enemy, because that’s who smart leaders go to for wartime advice. Did ISIS make the same promise, or did Biden just forget to invite them to the talks?

I can’t believe leftists are still arguing about what will happen in Afghanistan. Here’s what will happen: we will leave, Biden will keep calling it a victory, the Taliban’s enemies will be arrested, tortured, robbed, raped, and murdered, and the Taliban and ISIS will crank up terrorism both inside and outside Afghanistan. Other terrorists will smell dotard blood in the water and follow suit. You don’t have to be Nostradamus to figure these things out. They’re already happening.

China and Russia will be emboldened because they look at America and see grandpa asleep at the wheel of the Family Truckster. Thank God the Chinese Navy is so feeble. If it weren’t, we could probably expect to hand the Taiwanese their own Bay of Pigs this year. I wonder how Biden or Harris would try to spin that.

Biden drove gas prices up by destroying the Keystone Pipeline and sending the gas to China. He’s also going after fracking and drilling. He’s begging OPEC to pump oil to help us fix the problem he and his supporters caused. Remember how oil importers had to pay buyers to take oil under Trump? Wasn’t that great? Now Biden is pumping air into the furnace of international terrorism, which always raises oil prices. Is there anything else he could do to put us at the mercy of our enemies? Maybe it would help if we had gays dance around our domestic rigs and chant for more crude in the name of pride.

It’s only August, and Biden’s America already has two wheels in the ditch.

I can’t swear God’s 120-year punishment has been repeated for the modern world, but it seems very plausible, so I plan to pray about it. I hope it’s true, because as much as I enjoy life, I know my wife and I are living behind enemy lines, and it won’t be long before persecution in America starts to look like persecution in Iran, except with more men in dresses.

Soon Civil Rights Will Only be for the Rich

What a rewarding day this must be for “conservatives” who voted for Biden because they wanted to punish Trump. Biden just banned the importation of Russian-made ammunition. Never-Trumpers must be rejoicing as they contemplate what may turn out to be a permanent ammunition shortage, accompanied by prices that make 9mm look like .50 BMG.

Prices were already insanely high before Biden acted. The other day I saw an ad bragging about 9mm selling for about $27 per box. The last time I bought 9mm, I paid $7.35.

Anyway, wonderful work, Trump-haters. At least you have a president who doesn’t hurt your feelings.

Pro-civil-rights news outlets are claiming Russia made about 40% of the ammunition currently offered for sale in the United States. That’s a pretty high percentage to lose. The market can’t absorb that kind of hit during an ammo glut. It certainly won’t be able to do it during a severe shortage.

There are people who like to brag that they don’t buy Russian ammunition. They claim the quality is low and the steel cases hurt their guns, and they say the ban will not affect them. That’s a ridiculous position for a number of reasons.

1. The quality isn’t low. Commercial Russian ammunition is reliable and safe, and the primers are not corrosive. Low-priced Russian ammunition may not be as accurate as top-shelf products from other countries, but generally, this is true of cheap ammo regardless of where it’s made.

2. Contrary to keyboard-warrior scuttlebutt which is peer-reviewed at barbecues by individuals under the influence of Shiner Bock, the steel-cased stuff does not damage firearms.

3. Now that Russian ammo is disappearing, people who used to buy it will start competing with snobs for ammunition made elsewhere. That ammunition, which is already overpriced and in very short supply, should become much more expensive and harder to find. The only people who won’t be affected are the few individuals who are hoarding enough ammunition for a lifetime and who don’t lose their stashes to theft or fire.

4. It doesn’t matter that Russian manufacturers aren’t big factors when it comes to many calibers. A panic caused by a ban applying to any category of ammunition will drive people to stock up on every other type.

Russian ammo kills countless deer and other game animals every year, it’s perfect for people who use a lot of ammo practicing for armed confrontations, and the Russians make deadly, reasonably priced rounds for taking out home invaders. Anyone who thinks Russian ammo is garbage and serves no useful purpose in the hands of a discriminating consumer is living in a fantasy world.

The price of 7.62x39mm has already gone way up, and the ink on the ban is barely dry.

I decided to pick up another box in this caliber, as well as what should be enough .22 LR to get me through a year. I paid about 10 cents per round for the .22 shells. That’s not great, but it beats paying twice as much, the way people were a few weeks back.

Biden’s excuse for the ban is that the Russians are making neurotoxins and infringing human rights. It is believed they poisoned a dissident named Navalny.

When I heard about the ban last night, I got very angry at Biden. I could not help myself. Obviously, this ban has nothing to do with intelligent or principled political tactics. If we cared about human rights, we and the rest of the world would have blockaded China a long time ago. The Chinese have a huge system of political prisons, they have legions of slaves, they harvest organs from dissidents, they occupy Tibet, they persecute Christians, and they’re destroying the Uighurs. Biden isn’t banning Chinese goods.

Biden isn’t concerned about human rights or the manufacture of a little bit of poison. He’s probably trying to show his conspiracy-addled supporters he’s standing up to Trump’s alleged puppetmaster, and he’s pumping up his base by striking an extremely damaging blow to our exercise of our civil right to keep and bear arms.

Our big imports from Russia are oil, precious stones and platinum, iron and steel, fertilizers, and inorganic chemicals. How can ammunition be a priority?

Biden will be happy to let his order expire as early as 12 months from now, provided the Russians do things like promising not to make nerve gas, letting us inspect, and paying restitution to Mr. Navalny. There is no way they will do any of those things. Maybe they would be more malleable had we stopped buying steel and oil, but Biden doesn’t have the guts or integrity to go after those things, and I don’t think he wants to. I think this whole thing is an anti-freedom scam. I believe Biden and his leftists pals wanted a way to make the ammunition shortage worse while appearing to stand up to Putin. I think Biden would be extremely disappointed if Russia caved in.

The news for shooters isn’t all bad. Biden also released a gigantic, multi-billion dollar store of excellent American weapons and ammunition, and he gave it away to anyone who wanted it. Unfortunately, it’s in Afghanistan, and the people who took it are Taliban soldiers. Here they are, wearing our uniforms and carrying our rifles while they make fun of us.

If that photo doesn’t break your heart, you should be deported.

Those things on their heads appear to be night vision systems, which cost US taxpayers as much as a nice used car. Presumably, if the Taliban can figure out how to use them, they will employ them to shoot collaborators and whichever Americans are unfortunate enough to remain in the country too long.

Destroying a rifle or a night vision system is not hard or time-consuming. It can be done in a few seconds. Bend the rifle’s barrel in a vise and throw the monocular at a concrete floor. Done. Our troops and Afghan friendlies could have been ordered to do it before Afghanistan collapsed. Somehow, this was not a priority to Biden, but he had time to plan a cowardly attack on our civil rights.

I was angry about the ban, and I even said some nasty things about Biden, but after I corrected myself, all I felt was a sense that the world was in the process of collapsing.

Back in 2015, I dreamed the rapture had come. I heard a long, low, loud blast from an enormous horn, and I started floating up through the ceiling. I knew everyone on earth could hear the horn. I was not scared, but I felt a heavy sense of how serious the moment was. It was extremely sobering. I felt vicarious dread on behalf of the unprepared world. Last night after reading about Biden’s pandering ban, I felt the same thing.

Of course, there are other signs of the end and the abandonment of reason. This morning I got up and checked to see if any of my Youtube subscriptions had posted anything interesting, and I saw stories of Australia’s coronavirus ban. I had not been paying attention to Australia and its 25 million people, so I was surprised to see how bad things were.

Evidently, many parts of Australia have been under lockdowns since last year. People are losing their minds. Now that more cases are popping up, the house-arrest rules are getting worse.

I learned that Australia is fining people $3000 to $5000 (70-cent Australian dollars) for doing things like leaving their homes and going for drives…alone! That’s astonishing.

Australians are protesting. Guess what the police do? They arrest the people who coordinate the protests. Not for protesting or bothering the police. For encouraging others to protest! Of course, they arrest protestors, too.

I saw a smug leftist celebrity on Youtube the other day, claiming America was not the greatest country on earth. He issued various criticisms, and he said we were not distinguished by freedom. He claimed 187 countries were free.

To leftists, “free” doesn’t mean what it means to the rest of us. It doesn’t mean you have freedom of speech, except when it comes to the vilest types of sexual obscenity. There are “free” countries where you can now be prosecuted for criticizing homosexuality or pagan religions. Canada is one of them. Australia certainly is not free if you can’t leave your house, can’t protest, and can’t even tell others they should protest.

I can’t imagine being locked in my house for months. Last year, there were times when I couldn’t enter certain local businesses, and I have had to wear masks for brief visits to other businesses, but apart from one excursion outside the state, during which I had to pretend to wear masks for long plane trips, I have never had to give up much freedom. I don’t know how I would stand what Australians are going through.

Freedom is not a luxury. It’s very important. I won’t call it a basic human right, because after what I’ve seen, I’m not sure it is, but it’s not something to be given up merely because you might get a respiratory disease. Australians handed their freedom over, and many Americans have done the same thing and want to force others to follow suit.

For centuries, Americans have had a policy of sacrificing lives–ours and those of our enemies–for freedom. We killed about 200,000 Japanese with atomic bombs in defense of freedom. We firebombed German cities in defense of freedom. We sacrificed 400,000 of our own citizens in World War Two in defense of freedom. When did we become more afraid of sickness than tyranny?

For a long time, I’ve been saying Americans didn’t actually care about freedom. I grew up surrounded by people who enjoyed claiming Americans loved freedom so much they could not bear life without it. Maybe that was generally true at one time; I don’t know. It’s not true now. Some of us love freedom, but many are excited about the prospect of increased control by government and unelected technocrats. A huge percentage of Americans seriously think our keepers should be trusted with everything we have, to the point where “liberty” only means freedom to comply.

If westerners who love to spout off about freedom are imprisoning their citizens and treating them like kids who get caught wandering around without hall passes, simply because they might get a disease that kills a tiny percentage of its victims, you have to wonder what other excesses are on the way.

The ammunition ban, which also applies to firearms, is disturbing for more than one reason. It’s terrible to know that our president is willing to nullify the Second Amendment on a lark, using a constitutional loophole. It’s also disturbing to think about all the freedom-lovers out there who may react badly to this decision. I don’t believe in using guns to fix our political problems, but many people do, and this is the wrong time in history to provoke them.

Store shelves may go dry, but Obama and Biden spurred a prolonged frenzy of buying, and there are more firearms, cartridges, and associated products in private hands than ever before. Conservatives are armed to the teeth, many are at least as highly trained as the police and the military, and they have things like night vision and plate carriers. Even leftists have been arming themselves; hypocrisy is a fundamental part of leftism. If Biden manages to toss the right match into this mess, he’s going to set off a firestorm. In his senility and arrogance, he is willing to toss matches, probably because he lacks the ability to understand what he’s doing. Who knows what he’ll do next? Who knows what Harris will do when he steps down? She has even less common sense than he does.

I think leftists are pulling the tiger’s tail. They are simply not able to fight conservatives. They don’t have as much training, ammunition, or armament. They may think they’ll have the government on their side, but the problem with that hope is that the police and the military are full of conservatives who will revolt and side against them. They’ll have to fight us by freezing bank accounts and keeping us off the web and cell networks. Will weapons like that be useful when people are shooting each other in the streets?

I can’t wait for the rapture. I wish it would come today. I have no intention of joining up with right-wing guerrillas when things go sideways, and I could never help the left. I don’t want to get caught in a carnal battle between two factions which are both controlled by demons. The truth is despised, and only a small number of Americans are led by the Holy Spirit, who is the only author of harmony. Regardless of who seems to win an armed conflict, it will be a catastrophe followed by an era of unending hatred and vengefulness.

I’m not sure why I bought AK-47 ammo yesterday. I’m not going to join in an armed resistance. I suppose it was reflexive. I want to be sure I’ll have enough for target shooting, plus a little for home defense, so the ban made me nervous, but I haven’t fired a round of 7.62x39mm for several years. I will probably have almost all of my AK ammo when I leave the earth.

People really need to get to know the Holy Spirit. They need to be ready for the end, because it looks like it’s almost here. I am highly confident that nominal Christians will be left behind when the rapture arrives. We need to fight anger and unforgiveness. We need to be aligned with God in our hearts and minds.

What Biden has done is a clear, deliberate act of oppression and provocation. If a president is crazy enough to do something like this, at the worst possible time, there is no telling what kinds of surprises the future holds for us.

When Neurosis Becomes Policy

Rhodah and I, obviously, have not had our honeymoon yet. She applied for visas a while back, and we have not heard any news. Meanwhile, the nations of Europe appear to be playing a game of visa roulette. One border opens, and another one closes. European nations have to make double-sure coronavirus doesn’t arrive within their borders! Thank goodness that has never happened.

For a while (if I understand things correctly), Greece was open to us. We found out while we were in Egypt. Before we could do anything about it, the door snapped shut. Then Sweden and Spain opened up. We applied. Now the web says they’re closed.

The people in Zambia who process Swedish and Spanish visas say they haven’t heard anything, but you can’t put a lot of faith in what you hear from Africa. The rest of the world isn’t knocking itself out to fill Africa with current information.

I have read that a valid visa is not a guarantee that a person will be allowed into a country. I don’t know what to make of that. If Rhodah applies for a visa before a border closes and receives the visa afterward, does it mean the visa is no good? Would her visa be “grandfathered” in? You can’t really spend 5 figures on tickets and hotels and show up at a border, just hoping they’ll see things your way.

Imagine being turned away in a situation like ours. You’ve spent somewhere in the neighborhood of a full day traveling, and they tell you to get lost. You would have to sit in an airport, using your phone to buy new tickets at whatever prices were offered. You would have to wait for the planes to take off. Then you would have a day or so of travel in front of you, with no sleep and no bathing.

Clearly, we would need some kind of assurance before taking off, but if the information on the web is right, we won’t get it. In fact, it indicates she won’t get Swedish or Spanish visas at all.

Out of our three choices, the only reasonably desirable country we are confident we can enter as a couple is Iceland, which is not a place either of us is excited about. It’s either that, Mexico, or one of a long list of dreary Muslim countries.

There is very good news, however. France just opened to Zambians. That’s a good honeymoon country.

As I’ve said before, we have been hoping to parlay a Swedish, Spanish, or Icelandic visa into a Swiss visa. The Swiss want Rhodah to go to South Africa, at great expense and at some personal risk, to get a visa, but they may relent if she has a pre-existing visa from another country in the Schengen area. Sweden, Spain, and Iceland fit that description.

The Swedish embassy in Zambia is handling our existing applications, and they say they are also doing France.

To sum up, Iceland looks like a lock, France can be done if we are willing to wait, and Switzerland, our number one choice after hermetically-sealed Israel, is also a possibility.

I do not particularly want to go to France. Places like Israel, Switzerland, Greece, Austria, and Italy are better. France is okay, though. France has alps, like Switzerland, so it would make losing Switzerland less painful. We don’t actually have to go to Paris like everyone else. We can go to an alpy area, squint, and pretend we’re in Lucerne. The food will be better than Swiss food, and my creaky French will be plus utile than it would have been in Switzerland.

It’s funny, but I have little interest in the UK and Ireland, even though I speak the language and most of my ancestors came from these places. In my mind, English-speaking countries offer bad food, second-rate scenery, resentful service, disappointing art, street crime, and negative attitudes toward Americans. Maybe I’m mistaken, but this is the impression I have gathered from the news, the Internet, and personal conversations. The British are gross these days. Americans used to see them as witty and civil, but now they can’t seem to get a sentence out without saying something filthy, and they appear to be angry all the time.

The UK’s tallest mountain is something like 3000 feet high. It doesn’t have a Mediterranean or a Rhine. The architecture is tacky. There isn’t much Renaissance stuff. The food is a bummer. The people seem unhappy. We could get mugged, in a country with no Second Amendment. It’s just not inviting.

The problem with UK anger and violence is not new. Many years ago, when I lived on a kibbutz, there was tension between the gentile volunteers and the kibbutzniks. Why? Because some British morons had a disagreement with the volunteer liaison, and one of them beat him with a soccer shoe. While I was there, a Scottish volunteer told me he was afraid to be outdoors in Edinburgh at night. For some years, the gun-deprived British have been using kitchen knives on each other, and knife attacks are so common, they’re trying to ban pointed blades.

When your citizens are so childish they can’t be trusted with sharp tools that are used safely in places like Pakistan and Somalia, it may well be time to put razor wire around your country and tell everyone else to stay away. In the rest of the world, blunt scissors are only for very small children. It’s strange to see similar items being forced on a nation’s adults. Can it be that after centuries of brewing and drinking, the British still can’t handle beer?

The UK has outdoor cameras everywhere now, which is another implicit comment on the maturity of the populace.

I have no interest in pubs or drinking. I don’t care for the theater. I don’t know what I’d do in London, after seeing the few tourist attractions every American sees by his third day.

Britain has a rich (past) culture, but I can take that in here, through books.

As for my UK ancestors, they were poor and oppressed, they didn’t leave the British Isles on good terms, some were slaves of the British in America, and when they and their revolutionary compatriots got free, the British came after them and burned their capital. The British weren’t really allies of America until the 20th century, and even then, America always picked up the checks. We owe the French a lot more. They helped us throw the British out. The British would never have given us a statue representing liberty. Our Statue of Liberty is really a monument to British military weakness and the humbling of a cruel empire that did things like shooting crowds of Indian protestors, starving the Irish, and forcing China to import drugs.

I don’t want to say the British Empire was all bad. In 1790, they changed their laws so it was no longer legal to burn female traitors alive, and during the next couple of decades, they stopped executing people for minor thefts.

America hasn’t always been great to England, either. We let them help us design atomic bombs, and once we had the know-how, we classified it and refused to give it to them. We did something similar with supersonic flight.

Then we stole The Office. I would have let them keep that.

I like the British in spite of the deterioration of their culture, but the things I hear about the tourist experience do not make me eager to visit. Not when there are so many places I would put higher on my list.

In unrelated news, I saw something very odd today. CNN is being harder on Joe Biden than Fox.

Afghanistan is lost, which was to be expected. No one with any brains thought we could help these people. Their culture is too corrupt. They won’t do what they should do, so all other countries can do is occupy them temporarily and restrain them. Our failure as nation-builders was inevitable, as was our exit. What may not have been inevitable were the ignominious collapse of the nation under Biden, as well as our failure to rescue Afghans who put their families in danger by cooperating with us.

I could have told you we would give up in 2005, as could most intelligent people, yet Biden behaves as though the Taliban’s victory was a sudden surprise. He had 9 months to plan, if you count the days beginning with his inauguration. If you include his stint as vice president and Trump’s term, which should be included, given Biden’s standing under Obama and his hopes of becoming president, he has had close to 13 years to write himself a little note: “Plan for the end in Afghanistan.” He didn’t do it.

It’s not that hard to move people out of an occupied country. We ran Afghanistan. Americans weren’t scurrying around behind rocks. We could have driven people to Kabul and put them on planes instead of abandoning them to torture, prison, and murder.

Today, Drudge has linked to a site showing a photo of two tiny specks beneath an airborne C-17. They are Afghans, plummeting to the ground after grabbing the airplane in a desperate effort to escape Kabul. You have to wonder what they did to help us, and what other Muslims have threatened to do do them, to make them so afraid of reprisals.

In June of this year, Biden said, “There’s going to be no circumstance where you’ll see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy of the United States from Afghanistan.”

I’ll post the famous Saigon photo, followed by a now-famous Kabul photo. This is fair use of cropped, low-resolution photos for purposes of comment.

You can decide for yourself whether Biden was wrong, and whether he should have done something to prevent this.

The weirdest thing about this is seeing a number of articles on CNN’s site, criticizing Biden. How can that be? Ordinarily, they lick his feet and ignore his long history as a perennial also-ran laughingstock. Generally, it’s as though Inspector Clouseau became the president of France and people determined to justify their votes started building him pyramids. Why the sudden honesty?

Surely they’re not preparing the ground for a Harris coup. We are told that leftists are panicked by the prospect of a Harris presidency because the public can’t stand her. Is that untrue? Or is it that CNN is so addled by Marxist fervor, its pundits seriously believe Harris will be an improvement?

I know one thing for certain: CNN’s coverage is not motivated by journalistic integrity. That’s why I am searching for other explanations.

We should get used to spectacles like this. Biden is running on fumes, so he will continue to lack to plan for predictable crises. He lacks the capacity to plan. Planning requires concentration and a working memory. These are the two main things dementia destroys.

Without a leader, his team will bicker and trip over each other while working on personal CYA strategies and cultivating private-sector contacts so they’ll get cushy jobs when Biden leaves no later than January of 2025. A team needs one man to define a coherent plan and force everyone to stick to it.

Another weird thing about Afghanistan: I actually agree with Biden’s assessment. He says we should pull out if Afghans can’t or won’t fight for themselves. That’s absolutely true. But if that was how he felt, why didn’t he provide a way to save Afghans who fought alongside of us?

This morning, I realized Saigon and Kabul remind me of the rapture. The rapture will come when God realizes the people of Earth are no longer worth trying to help. Like Vietnam, Somalia, and Afghanistan, we are proving the cost of leaving God’s precious pearls down here is not worth the return.

Fortunately, unlike Biden’s Kabul blowout, the rapture will be peaceful and orderly, because the leader who planned it isn’t demented. He has been preparing his embedded collaborators for years. When the rapture comes, we will be ready to get out.

Over the last couple of days, I’ve been watching tours of graveyards full of famous people. The saddest thing about it was seeing how people who are almost certainly in hell are literally worshiped by their fans. Michael Jackson still gets more flowers in a week than most people get at their funerals.

I saw graves belonging to Oscar Wilde, Jim Morrison, and various rock and roll degenerates who died young. I saw Hugh Hefner’s resting place, which, like more than one showbiz grave, was adorned with lip prints. People kissed it.

I saw the grave of Isadora Duncan, the dancer. It was adorned with adoring notes. I thought, “She must have been a lesbian and a Marxist.” I looked at Wikipedia. Yep. She had sex with women, and she was a communist. Why else would the godless world love her so much?

The grave tours made me realize how sad it is that people who belong to God try to become rich and admired in this world. Satan runs most things, and he decides who gets the huge monuments adorned with flowers, photos, and stuffed animals. When we’re young, we are not told this, so many of us waste years being blackballed and torpedoed while children of darkness with less ability take our prizes.

I can name a few people whose decorated graves I saw.

Jimi Hendrix. Drug addict who washed out of the army and died at age 27 from injecting too much heroin and inhaling his own vomit.

Janis Joplin. Drug addict who died from a heroin overdose at age 27.

Amy Winehouse. Alcoholic who died from alcohol poisoning at age 27.

Jim Morrison. Drug addict who died from a heroin overdose at age 27.

Hugh Hefner. A pimp who made pornography mainstream in the US.

John Belushi. An actor who specialized in lowbrow comedy and poisoned a whole generation of young people with his role in Animal House. Died at 33 from a combination of heroin and cocaine, administered by a famous rock groupie who was not his wife.

Michael Jackson. A famous singer and pedophile who died young, alone, single, and without fathering children, from an overdose of a drug intended to make him sleepy.

Voltaire. Entombed in the Pantheon in Paris, Voltaire was a gifted humorist who distinguished himself during his era by calling Christianity “the most absurd and the most bloody religion which has ever infected this world.” He promulgated a number of debunked myths about Christianity in an effort to destroy it.

One of Satan’s best jokes is having his children decorate and idolize the grave of a person who is below it, in hell, crying, screaming, and shaking.

The world is so perverse; we love evil and hate good. No wonder God is giving up on this place.

I guess I have rambled enough for one day. Hope Rhodah and I make it to Europe while Christians are still allowed to have passports.