This Seems Totally Normal to Me

When I asked my new wife Rhodah what her favorite food was, all she said was, “meat.” It was nice to hear that in these times of self-righteous, controlling vegetarian women.

When we got together in Egypt, I took homemade beef jerky and dried apples to keep me alive on flights. Naturally, she took a big share of the jerky. Now she wants me to bring more, as well as a good supply of dried apples and Colgate toothpaste with Scope. I had a nearly-fresh tube with me on the trip, and she confiscated it. Now she’s hooked.

Recently, a mouse invaded my house. Before I managed to trap it and stamp on it, it found my jerky stash. I had a lot of inviting foods within mouse reach, but it only broke into the jerky and a bag of emergency rice. It nibbled on some containers holding bird food, but it gave up before it got in.

Jerky was clearly the mouse’s favorite item, and that makes sense, because making each bag required about two pounds of fresh beef. Jerky is expensive, and pests always destroy the expensive stuff. Now beef prices are going insane, just when I have to replace my contaminated jerky and also make more for Rhodah.

Yesterday, I got a blessing. A local store was selling London broil, which makes very nice jerky, for $4 per pound. I bought about 5 pounds. I may go back today and buy 5 more. Maybe I should buy 10 more and load up the freezer. I don’t want to spend the whole week making jerky. If I freeze it, I can dry it later. I doubt freezing has any serious effect on the texture and flavor of jerky.

I have around 2.5 pounds of marinated beef in the dehydrator right now, and I have over a pound marinating. I decided to use the same marinade twice. What kind of bacteria can grow in cold soy sauce and Worcestershire with added hot pepper sauce? Reusing the marinade will save me a couple of bucks.

I have discovered that the dehydrator will hold about 9 pounds. I need to get about that much meat together before turning the machine on again. These small batches increase the work.

Here’s a useful tip: you can finish jerky in the fridge. Your refrigerator IS a dehydrator, as you have surely already noticed. I want my jerky heated to reduce germs and add flavor, but once it has been heated, it can go in the fridge if it comes out too wet.

Will jerky and other emergency foods save us if society gets crazier and food gets scarce? I doubt it. Even if I store enough food for 6 months, which is pretty optimistic at my character level, a real food disaster would last longer than that, and we would still starve. I’m not sure why I bother. I guess doing something feels better than doing nothing.

Maybe we could manage to grow our own food, given 6 months to try. That’s something to think about. The soil here is useless, the weeds and pests are overwhelming, and it’s impossible to grow food by conventional means, but we might be able to build raised beds and fence them in.

I have read that potatoes do well in sand, which is the kind of soil I have. That would be helpful. Potatoes are high in calories and vitamin C. Sweet potatoes might grow here, too.

Protein is the big challenge. I think I could reliably kill three squirrels a week without running out, but that would change if desperate neighbors started poaching. You can eat any mammal, so coons and other pests could make our menu, and crows, which we have in abundance, are supposedly delicious. There was a time when people who ate them called them “black partridges.” Maybe things wouldn’t be so bad.

Crows are very smart, though. I could probably kill 10 today if I tried, but would they be as cooperative tomorrow?

One big advantage to eating crows is that most people would be slow to start. I doubt anyone here would try them until they ran out of other ideas.

In any case, I look forward to having jerky again. The store stuff can’t compare to homemade.

I hope Rhodah will let me keep some.

Recurring Dream Explained

This morning I had a dream which seems to have been very helpful.

I was on my dad’s boat, fishing with a woman. I believe she was my first cousin. I was reeling in a sailfish. I couldn’t tell what it was until it got close to the boat. It was very thin, and it was black. I had the feeling that, somehow, it wasn’t a very good fish. It was as though the fish didn’t have much character, like a junkie who only goes to detox when there is absolutely no choice.

While I was reeling it in, I noticed the boat was sinking by the stern. I told the woman to go up on the flybridge, start the engines, and get the boat moving so the water would go out the scuppers.

I had had so many dreams like this, I wasn’t afraid of sinking. Telling her to start the mains seemed routine.

I looked off to the side of the boat, and I saw the head of an enormous shark. It looked like a great white. The whole shark would have been something like 50 feet long. It was waiting for the boat to sink.

The boat started to move, and the stern rose. Everything was fine.

I’ve had many dreams in which my dad’s boat started to sink. The answer was always to fire up the engines and start moving. I never thought about the deep meaning of getting underway in order to keep from sinking.

I’ll give my interpretation of the dream.

The boat is my life. The woman is people I’ve helped to get close to God. My cousin is a person who has suffered a lot of rejection. She’s exactly the kind of person God chooses.

Fishing is evangelism. Fish are people you reach for God. The black, skinny fish was a bad harvest. It represented people who pretty much have to be dragged to the altar, whining the whole way. The dregs.

Starting the engines and getting underway is praying in tongues. Sinking is falling under the power of the unsaved world and the people and spirits who make it up. The shark is Satan, waiting for me to sink so he can have me. He can’t sink the boat, but he can have me if I let it sink.

The lesson is that if I don’t keep praying in tongues, I am going to be overwhelmed by the cursed world and sink in it. If I keep praying in tongues, I will stay afloat. I think the sailfish shows that the harvest is getting very thin, but I’m not sure.

In the Bible, the Sea of Galilee symbolized Satan’s stolen world. When Peter sank, it showed what happens to us when we don’t focus on Jesus. He was not able to stay above the water using his own faith. He made it a few steps, and then Jesus had to lift him. Only God can lift us out of the world’s clutches, and he only does it when we focus on him instead of the waves.

Noah and his family floated while everyone else sank. Moses was saved because he floated on water until he was pulled out. The Hebrews walked toward their promised land on dry sand between walls of water. Jesus didn’t just walk on water; he walked on the storm above the water.

Noah’s contemporaries sank. The Egyptian army sank. Jonah sank. He was in rebellion against God. He hid his face from him.

When you pray in tongues, the water of God fills you, and it drives out the water of the world. Water is voices and words. When you focus on the world, as Lot’s wife did, the water of the world pours into you, and you start to sink.

This is why God tells people to get rid of secular entertainment and stop using social media. These things fill you up and make you sink down to where the sharks can get you.

My first rapture dream involved floating. I was sitting on the floor, and I started rising as though water were rising under me. I can understand why God used that imagery.

I feel I should be praying in tongues whenever I can. I should develop the habit of praying in tongues all the time, except when I have to focus on something else.

The rapture and the start of the tribulation are the same thing. One person’s flood is another person’s salvation.

God has said he won’t destroy the world with water again, so the rapture won’t be a flood of physical water, but the supernatural water of filthy voices and words is now a flood, and it gets higher every day. Eventually, it will lift God’s children off the earth, and Satan’s children will stay here under the water. That’s fair, since it comes from their mouths.

The Revelation says Satan sent a flood from his mouth to carry away the woman who gave birth to the Messiah. We see that flood today all around us, from leftists and the disgusting people who contribute to the rot of our culture. Jesus said the things a man says defile him, and the same goes for Satan.

If you can defile yourself by speaking, you can sanctify yourself by speaking. That’s how the symmetry works.

I plan to try to keep speaking in tongues during the day. I am sure it will pay off, because it always has.

Plus Indoor Hunting Adventures

Yesterday, I went squirrel hunting. In my living room.

Ordinarily, this type of activity takes place outdoors and during squirrel season, but this situation was a little different.

I was sitting with Marvin, watching Youtube, when I started hearing banging noises. It sounded like someone was outside vandalizing my air conditioner. I got up and looked, but I couldn’t see any problems. I considered grabbing a rifle.

The noises persisted, and eventually, I realized they were coming from the fireplace. I was not happy about this. A few days earlier, I had seen a fat mouse hop out of the fireplace and run out of the room. I had to put poison and traps out, and before long, the mouse had defiled $40 worth of magnificent beef jerky plus a big bag of rice. I think the mouse is dead now, because he definitely ate the poison, and the Internet says it’s lethal after one feeding. I hope this is true. I haven’t smelled dead mouse yet.

Hearing the noise in the fireplace, I was afraid the mouse’s family was dancing in the flue. I got a light and started poking around, and whenever I jiggled the flue, I heard something big jumping and scampering.

The flue got stuck, and when I applied a little too much force, it opened, and a stinking squirrel landed in the fireplace. I jumped back because I was not eager to be chewed up by a vicious rodent. The squirrel ran into a corner of the fireplace and hid behind my portable light.

I had a problem. There is no way a human being can catch a squirrel. If he had left the fireplace, he would have gone God knows where, and I would have had to share the house with a starving squirrel until he got too weak to hide. By then he probably would have destroyed half of my possessions, and poop would have been everywhere.

I prayed he would stay in place, and I went and got my useless, overpriced pellet rifle. I paid $500 for it, and I have shot it maybe twice. I figured a .22 would damage the fireplace after passing through the squirrel, so the pellet gun was the way to go.

Finding pellets held me up. Then I had to look for goggles in case I had a ricochet. Then the gun refused to cock. I finally got it done. I went to the fireplace, held the gun’s muzzle close to the squirrel, and blasted him. I was hoping to hit the upper body, but it’s not easy to aim a gun at something 8 inches away, especially when you have to work around a plastic light and a big grate.

Sadly, the squirrel did not die immediately. It ran out of the fireplace and into the kitchen. Then it ran to the stairs, started running upstairs, turned around, and went into my bedroom. It ran to the sliding doors, which were closed. Then it went in the bathroom through the east door.

I shut the bedroom door to keep it from going out into the house, I opened the sliding doors, and I went in the bathroom from the west door to see if I could chase the squirrel out. He was not in the bathroom, but I saw a big smear of blood on the floor.

As far as I can determine, he ran out the sliding doors, and I hope he is now dead. The plan was not to make the squirrel suffer. I just wanted him out of my life.

The big lesson I have learned here is that as a former Miamian, I need to learn about fireplace and chimney operation and maintenance. I don’t know how the mouse and squirrel got into the chimney, and I need to keep the flue shut tightly so anything that makes it into the chimney is prevented from entering the house.

I think one problem was that the flue was not closed properly. When it’s really closed, it’s hard to open. It sticks. A rodent could never pry it open. When I started fiddling with it yesterday, it was not closed well. There were little gaps through which I could see into the chimney.

Another problem: filthy creatures are able to enter the chimney from above. I have to go up on the roof and see what the problem is. Surely there is some kind of metal feature designed to keep animals out.

When the flue opened all the way yesterday, dirt and dead bugs fell out. I think maybe rodents have been catching bugs and eating them in the chimney.

I learned some things about rat poison. The one you want is called bromethalin.

Anticoagulants like warfarin (coumadin) have been popular for decades, but rodents develop resistance to them, and they have to eat a lot before the poisons kill them. Bromethalin is better. It’s a nervous system poison, and the rodents die after a single serving. A poisoned mouse may live for a couple of days and pollute your precious beef jerky before he croaks, but he will croak.

Another good thing: bromethalin will not poison predators. If you poison squirrels with it, they will poop it out before dying, so you don’t have to worry about killing hawks and owls that eat their bodies. Disadvantage: it won’t kill feral cats, coyotes, coons, or possums, either.

I have too many squirrels, and shooting them is inefficient. I have mice in my outbuilding. I can put bromethalin bait out and thin the herd, and it will benefit not only me, but all the birds of prey in the vicinity.

I’ll bet you can find a website that says bromethalin kills all sorts of desirable wildlife. That’s leftist nuts for you. They would spin fables about water if they thought it killed vermin.

Maybe I could maintain a bird feeder if I used bromethalin. I could put a poison station beneath it for the squirrels. I don’t think a bird would try to eat it. It comes in huge, hard chunks. Maybe there is a way to do it.

Tomcat is a brand of promethalin baits. You can get it at Home Depot.

In other news, the tribulation really does seem to be rumbling to life. It appears to be manifesting in the weather. Europe has been having crazy floods. I think I wrote about the European problems. Germans have been dying. Germans! When you read that it rained in India and a hundred or a thousand people died, it’s not surprising, because India is a backward country full of people who lack common sense. The Germans are different. They’re sharp, and they are very responsible. In order for a flood to kill Germans, it has to be truly exceptional.

China has had floods. Dams have burst.

It’s funny how people who dislike God seem to pick up on the approach of the end. Far-left extremist Maureen Dowd just published a column about the floods, entitled Apocalypse Right Now. Unfortunately, she sees the floods as proof conservatives cause all the world’s problems. She says the flooding was caused by global warming.

There is a huge problem with that argument, and it’s pretty obvious. Global warming is a slow process. It can’t happen in one year, between 2020 and 2021. If the globe is warming, and if it causes flooding in Europe, then we would have seen floods for a number of years. The floods wouldn’t just leap out and surprise us. There is no gradual trend of increased flooding in Europe. Had there been, Europeans would have been ready this year instead of getting caught totally unprepared.

Leftists love to point to any example of bad weather and blame capitalism. They did it after the active hurricane season of 2005. After that, we had a bunch of very quiet years. Where did global warming’s hurricane-stimulating effects go during those years? Same place the left’s hysterical claims went. They shut up when the evidence turned against them. They only listen to “the science” when it agrees with their economic and social justice theories.

When conservatives say cold weather proves global warming doesn’t exist, leftists love to say, “Weather isn’t climate.” This means “weather” describes short-term events, whereas “climate” describes conditions that change very slowly over many years. Maureen Dowd is doing exactly what leftists accuse us of doing. Europe had one rainy summer, and she says it proves her view of the climate, which just happens to go hand-in-hand with environmental extremism, the destruction of industry, redistribution of wealth from responsible countries to chaotic ones, and socialism, is correct.

The evidence for climate change is not good, and the evidence that mankind causes it is even worse, but that doesn’t prevent leftists from latching onto sporadic weather events and trying to use them to prove Karl Marx was right. Marx is their messiah. Christians do the same thing. We look at the world and try to prove events prove Jesus is God, and sometimes we go too far. One big difference, however, is that many of our efforts are supported by prophecy.

Dowd’s irrational, facile column is evidence the tribulation may be near. Prophecy says God will release a spirit of murder into the world. Dowd is intolerant and irrational. She sees “them” (us) as the source of humanity’s problems, much as the Nazis saw the Jews, Gypsies, and Communists as wellsprings of humanity’s ills. Dehumanizing and demonizing other groups is the foundation of genocide, which is the purpose of the spirit God will release. You can’t have genocide until you make one group of people think of other groups as disposable, subhuman vermin.

I can provide a parallel. It would have been pretty hard to get me to embark on a squirrel genocide program, had experience not taught me they were bona fide pests with nearly no redeeming functions. These days, I find killing a squirrel rewarding, even if I’m put off by their suffering. Killing them is necessary and righteous, like killing roaches. I would be thrilled if grey squirrels went extinct this afternoon.

We’re seeing the spirit of murder in the left’s reaction to people who resist masks and vaccines. They often say they’re the reason coronavirus hasn’t been wiped out. They say they’re killing people, equating them with murderers. They’re taking steps to prevent resistors from buying, selling, traveling, speaking, and doing business. It’s very much like what the spirit of Antichrist did to the Jews of Europe. They were excluded from many jobs. They lost the right to disseminate their opinions, even by carrier pigeons, which they were forbidden to own. Eventually, they were segregated, concentrated, and exterminated, and the Nazis did this because they thought a day would come when they could say, “Finally, our problems are over.”

Of course, people who resist masks and vaccines are proxies for conservatives and Christians.

Conservatives and Christians generally don’t use carrier pigeons, but maybe we should start buying them, along with CB’s and ham radios. We are being tossed off the Internet every day.

If you listen to enraged leftists these days, you can sense that they feel like the Nazis did. They want to make us as though we did not exist. They want us to have no power of any kind. It’s not just obscure tweeters and commenters. Keith Olbermann, who had a popular television shows on popular networks, said Trump supporters should be arrested and prosecuted, and the mainstream left was fine with it. He called us “maggots,” which is exactly what Castro’s supporters called the innocent people they beat, robbed, enslaved, jailed, tortured, deported, and murdered in Cuba.

On the right, there appears to be a rising tide of kooky voices calling for civil war and blaming minorities for most of our ills. They are far fewer in number than leftist nuts, who have been dominant in leftist culture for a long time, but they’re here. These people also serve the Antichrist. Jesus never called for us to buy rifles and shoot our way out of our problems. He told the disciples to buy swords for the defense of individuals, but he never suggested organized armed resistance.

Over the last year, we have seen lack, disease, and hatred, which are symptoms of the arrival of the three horsemen. We have seen signs in the heavens. We haven’t seen earthquakes, which Jesus predicted, yet. Some Christians say earthquake activity has suddenly increased, but it isn’t true. Maybe we should consider increased activity a crucial sign. It would be easy to spot, and it would be unique in mankind’s history. We have had wars, plagues, and shortages ever since the world was created, but we haven’t had global outbreaks of earthquakes.

I keep feeling like I’m just waiting to leave. I can’t make myself feel that life will return to normal. I keep feeling that none of the earthly things I do are important. It’s as though I were in a burning building, waiting to be rescued, and I no longer needed to think about mopping floors or fixing plumbing leaks.

A guy I like to watch just put up a Youtube video about a dream a friend of his had. I watched, and at first, I wasn’t sure what to think. Then suddenly I felt I knew what the dream meant.

The friend dreamed a group of people were in a building, and they were high up, looking toward a city which resembled London. The city was being destroyed by an earthquake. As they watched, their own building moved toward the city.

A man showed up to lead people out of the building. Some followed. He took them up on a high ridge where there was snow and ice, and they walked toward a destination. The building went over a waterfall, into an abyss.

A similar ridge appeared nearby, and a woman was seen on the ridge, trying to take a quicker route to the same destination. She fell off and went into the abyss.

A man appeared via a flight of stairs. He climbed up to the first ridge and joined the rescued people. He said he had come from hell.

They learned their destination was Zion, the city of God.

I’ll tell you what I think God told me.

The city that resembled London was the carnal world. The isolated building was the location of the church. The destruction of London was the tribulation.

People who stayed in the building were carnal Christians. They kept their eyes on the carnal world, so they were sucked down with it. They were like people who live on social media sites; like Lot’s wife. She was still part of Sodom, so she stared at it with yearning, and she shared its fate.

The Christians who left were people who listen to the Holy Spirit and reject the Antichrist’s world. The man who led them was an evangelist. The ridge was Jesus. It was Jacob’s ladder, which is Jesus. A ladder is a type of stairway, and it’s a type of path, and Amos 9:6 says God builds his steps in the sky.

Jesus is a path. He called himself “the way” or “the road,” using the same word the Greeks use on street signs. The path is narrow. It’s easy to fall off, just as it’s easy to fall off a ridge. When you fall off a ridge, there is no way to go but down. It’s the same with Jesus. There are no lateral or upward moves.

The second ridge is an alternative route preferred by human beings. Any path but Jesus leads to hell. You can’t design your own Jesus. You can’t insist on a god who loves homosexuality, selfishness, and pride. The woman represents people who try to save themselves through the false messiahs of idolatry, including worship of self, man, and government. She’s a woman because women are the first to lead us into idolatry. Think of Eve, Jezebel, and Solomon’s wives. Men are supposed to lead, and the human race is supposed to be God’s submissive wife.

The man who came up from hell is a person who received salvation during the tribulation. Missing the rapture doesn’t condemn you to hell. You can still be saved, but you will wish you had listened sooner.

Zion is the new Jerusalem. It’s where the saved will go. It’s described in the Revelation.

This is what came to me, and I think it’s right.

I would love to say I hope I’m wrong, but I would only say that to comfort other people. I hope the rapture is close. This place is just too messed up to continue.

I used to tell God I was ready to go, but I wanted him to look after my dad and my pets. Then my dad died. Then one of my pets died. Marvin is okay; I hope God will take him along with the chosen. There seems to be no good reason to leave him here.

I used to feel bad because I might leave the earth unmarried. I felt a little cheated. I wanted to have the love of an attractive woman, chosen by God, before the end, and the pool of women who seemed available at my age looked more like a punishment than a reward. I’m just being honest.

I met a wonderful lady, much younger and more attractive than I had any reason to expect. We spent time together in Egypt. We did’t cross the line, but we shared love and deep affection. Then we married after we parted. Even if God harvests his crop before we get together again in person, I am content.

I have hope we will come back after the marriage of the lamb. The Bible suggests the raptured (not the resurrected) will return after Satan is imprisoned, to enjoy long lives on a blessed earth. That would be nice, but I will be thrilled to be anywhere where I don’t have to live amid curses, evil spirits, and toxic people.

Pray for Open Eyes

“Rebecca” and I have something to celebrate today. Yesterday, she decided to stop working on her bar exam.

Rebecca used to be career-driven. Now things are different. God has been transforming her, and her priorities have changed. She was supposed to start cramming for her exam last year, but she was not able to summon the necessary enthusiasm. As a result, she felt ill-prepared this year.

Exam stress has been a huge weight on her, and studying has interfered with our time together and her relationship with God. She wasn’t able to pray as much as she wanted. She couldn’t read Christian books or watch helpful videos. Lately, we have been limiting the time we spent praying together, and it was a big problem. When you’re Spirit-led, the last thing you want is to start a prayer session by saying, “We only have five minutes.” Flexibility is essential when you serve the Spirit of Holiness. If he wants an hour or more, you need to be free to comply.

This week she felt as though exams were not going the way she wanted, and last night, she made her decision. Prior to this, the plan was to complete the first cluster of exams and then stop.

The strange thing is that after she told me, I felt as though I were the one who had dropped the weight. I felt drained. I wanted to sleep. I hadn’t thought of her problem as a burden to me, but the sense of relief was overwhelming. I slept very well, and I woke up feeling very rested. It seems there is a supernatural connection between us, and we are sharing the same feelings.

As for Rebecca, she looks very different today. Her skin looks toned and bright. Her face seems to glow. We both noticed it. She says her youth has returned.

Psalm 103 says God renews his servants’ youth like that of the eagles. In the Bible, eagles are angels. When Jesus told the disciples how to know whether he had returned to earth, he said where the body was, the eagles would gather. He was referring to spirits that serve him. Two spirits that serve him were found at the tomb when he was resurrected, and apparently, they will be with him when he comes back.

We know that spirits in heaven surround God and praise him, and we know God strengthens those who are in his presence. Perhaps renewing your strength like the eagle’s means spending time near God and having your vitality restored. The word says to rest in God.

In any case, Rebecca will now be able to spend more time in his presence.

I heard Kenneth Copeland repeat a ridiculous myth about eagles. He said an old eagle will shed its old feathers and the outer layers of its beak and be physically rejuvenated. This doesn’t happen, of course. Eagles get old and die. Angels, on the other hand, do not.

It’s amazing how preachers will repeat nonsense, without investigation, when they can’t hear the Holy Spirit. Unbelievers hear it and draw the conclusion that Christianity itself is nonsense.

In other news, the press is saying anti-Jewish attacks are increasing in the US. If so, thanks, Democrats. It’s a pity so few Jews have avoided the trap of conflating Christians and conservatives with Nazis, and it’s unfortunate that around 90% of them consistently embrace their enemies and sponsor them financially.

Many anti-Semites, and perhaps many Jews, think our government favors Israel because of a mysterious, hidden group of rich Jews who control journalists and politicians with money. In reality, Christians are behind it. Our numbers are many times those of American Jews, and politicians are afraid of us. When Joe Biden feels compelled to help Israel, it’s not because he’s scared of the Jews, who make up about 2% of the electorate and who will vote for his party regardless of what it does. He’s afraid of the many tens of millions of Christian voters.

A supernatural delusion prevents most Jews from seeing this.

Anti-Semitism is a big problem among blacks, Hispanics, and of course, people from Muslim countries. Americans are afraid to correct people belonging to minorities, so the problem keeps growing. I think a lot of Jews expect their persecutors to show up in pickup trucks with Confederate flags, but in reality, the pickup people are more likely to defend them and donate money to charities that help Jews.

The worst thing about increasing anti-Semitism is that it is likely to include more and more white leftists who have fallen under the influence of BLM and Antifa. BLM is openly against Israel, which is no surprise, given the shocking prevalence of anti-Jewish hatred among American blacks. Antifa also sides with Israel’s persecutors. Most American kids have no connection to the Holy Spirit now, and many think it’s cool to protest and riot, so we should expect anti-Semitism to become much more mainstream in the near future. Presumably, we will eventually see cheerful selfies of white suburban kids beating Jews.

Rebecca and I have been praying for Israel, and we will continue, but ultimately, the spread of belief in Yeshua and the baptism with the Holy Spirit are the only things that can bring real peace. Only God puts Palestinians and Jews in church together as brothers. Peace talks and appeasement through giving up precious territory don’t really help.

Israel’s enemies are not interested in coexistence, so giving up land is pointless. If Israel only had one acre, the Palestinians would kill to get it. If the Jews left the country entirely, Muslims would still try to exterminate them. That’s why Israel exists. The Jews need one piece of land they can defend, because things haven’t gone well when they’ve relied on protection from gentile nations.

It’s tragic that Jews have created a religion which requires them to live in cities. It concentrates them among their worst enemies. They’re like sheep in corrals, waiting to be slaughtered by their neighbors.

God’s word provides a shocking confirmation of what happens when Jews live in gentile nations:

Thou hast given us like sheep appointed for meat; and hast scattered us among the heathen.

Yea, for thy sake are we killed all the day long; we are counted as sheep for the slaughter.

Those passages are from Psalm 44.

Israel created nuclear weapons (supposedly) and a big war machine to defend itself, but Jews in America have done nothing whatsoever. They have made themselves as vulnerable as possible. It’s a strange contrast.

I wonder if Israel really has the bomb. Nuclear weaponry is very expensive, and fissionable material is hard to get. Israel has no nuclear power plants. Israel has never had a confirmed bomb test. If they’re bluffing, I hope they continue to succeed.

In short, overall, the Jewish strategy for self-defense is more like a strategy for partial extinction. Support your enemies. Fight your friends. Fight firearm ownership. Concentrate yourself in small, undefended areas so rioters can reach you using mass transit and even on foot. Then dress conspicuously.

I look forward to continued improvement in my life and Rebecca’s life, especially with our new freedom. I hope we can help as many others as possible.

Another Institution Crumbles Under the Weight of its Own Wokeness

It’s interesting how the Antichrist’s children are poking their noses into every aspect of life.

In case you didn’t know, Epicurious no longer helps people with beef. You can’t post a new beef recipe, for example. Why? Cows are just too flatulent. Their rearward outbursts are an existential threat to mankind because they supposedly cause global warming. That means no prime rib for you.

It’s bad enough that Amazon recommends horrible victimhood-mentality movies and books I would never read even at the point of a gun. It’s bad enough that Yelp encourages people to accuse restaurateurs of racism. Now I’m a bad person because I like cheeseburgers.

When did it become appropriate to inject leftism into everything we do? When did it become a great idea for businesses to insult, falsely accuse, shame, and offend half of their customers?

Here’s a crazy idea: if you have a business website, how about concentrating on making your customers happy and fulfilling their desires instead of preaching to them? Am I out of line here? Let’s say I want to buy a pair of shoes online. Is it okay if a shoe website is only about shoes, or do I have to read about my imaginary privilege and be told I’m the source of all the world’s problems?

Am I really supposed to base my principles on things millennial marketing majors scribble on retail sites? These kids can’t do anything but Facebook and text. They know nothing about the world. I might as well go outside and seek advice from squirrels.

The Antichrist offers a filthy alternative righteousness. Remember, “anti” doesn’t just mean “against”; it means “instead of.” Satan wants his son to be the new Jesus. What did Jesus’ father do? He set up a temple which was basically a barbecue facility. All day, animals went in to be cooked. Their throats were cut. Their hides and hooves were removed. Blood went everywhere. Then the priests cooked them over flames. The smell in the temple’s neighborhood must have been wonderful.

Satan saw an opportunity. He could out-righteous Yahweh. Killing is mean, right? Fantastic. The blood shed and meat consumption at the temple left the door open for Satan to introduce the worship of animals and even plants. “We’re nicer than God, so we’re better!”

Now we’re being pushed to accept the false notion that killing animals for food is evil. This, not global warming, is why Epicurious went off the rails. Spirits are pushing a sick vegan agenda, and cattle are easy targets because raising them takes a lot of resources.

Jesus himself ate meat, he helped people net fish which later suffocated, and he ordered Peter to catch a fish with a hook. He also wrote the Jewish law, prior to his incarnation. He ordered the Jews to kill and eat animals. A vegetarian Jew was an apostate, under the laws Jesus himself wrote. Eating the Passover lamb was mandatory. Sacrifices were mandatory. Writing Torah scrolls on animal hide was mandatory. Wearing tefillin was mandatory. Judaism was always an animal-killing, meat-eating religion. Abraham made his covenant with God by killing several animals and laying their dressed bodies on the ground.

Cain behaved like a vegetarian, refusing to slaughter animals for God, and he was vile. He was the first murderer. Just like the Antichrist’s children, he had a victim complex and an alternative version of righteousness.

People think they know better than God now, when it comes to meat. Western women are among the biggest offenders. In the past, we rightly dismissed self-righteous vegetarians as fringe eccentrics. As their power grows, they are becoming more and more controlling.

It’s amazing how nuts and once-powerless groups are putting sane people to flight these days. Favor is gone from groups that used to be protected by God. They’re like Samson without his hair.

People need to get as close to God as possible. He still offers favor and protection to people who are close to him, but nominal Christians are wide open to attack. On the other side, Satan is giving all sorts of favor to his servants.

Epicurious was doing poorly anyway. In the past, I found it a valuable resource, because it stood out in a sea of websites full of recipes written by hacks. I have found it unreliable in recent years, so I suppose it wasn’t going to be helpful with beef regardless of whether it posted recipes. Still, the notion of “canceling” beef is repugnant. Milk products are also in the crosshairs. Imagine the things we could lose. Steaks. Roasts. Burgers. Cheese. Ice cream. Butter. Yoghurt. Buttermilk biscuits.

I guess we’ll have to sit around eating salads. Raw plant foods are major vectors for food-borne infections, so we have that to look forward to.

It seems like America’s Test Kitchen is also deteriorating. When I saw them fry chicken with overcooked areas on both sides, I knew something was badly wrong. A friend thinks ATK jumped the shark when Christopher Kimball was forced out. I am going to look at his new project to see if he has maintained his standards.

Is Bon Appetit any good? I wonder.

In related news, I had a huge breakthrough with garlic rolls.

Not long ago, I decided to make dough using a poolish (“poo-LEESH”). The word is French, and it means “Polish.” Somehow the Poles were connected with the use of pre-ferments in dough. A pre-ferment (usually spelled without the hyphen) is a mix of flour, water, and microorganisms. You can make a preferment by mixing water and flour one-to-one and leaving them on your counter overnight to fester.

I found that poolishes made my dough better, but to use one, you have to start at least 6 hours before you want to toss your pizza crust or form your loaf.

A day or two back, I had an idea. Part of the reason a poolish works is that the water really gets into the flour, changing the texture of the bread. What if I made dough using boiling water?

When you mix starches with really hot water, they become gelatinized. You can see this in sauces made with corn starch. You can also see it in the texture of boiled oatmeal. I thought partially gelatinized flour might make better dough.

I measured out flour, water, salt, and diastatic malt extract as though making a poolish. Then I boiled the water in the microwave and stirred it into the mixture. I threw it in the food processor, let it cool enough so it wouldn’t kill the yeast, and processed it with additional ingredients to make dough.

It was excellent. The pizza and rolls had a ton of flavor. The texture was beautiful. The only issue I noticed was that the dough rose slowly, but that may have been because I left my yeast out of the fridge a couple of nights. Maybe it got tired.

Today I made 6 garlic rolls, and they seemed to come from heaven itself. Magnificent. I ate them for lunch while video-chatting with the Zambian yam. I must have annoyed her tremendously. I kept groaning with pleasure. I kept it up for at least half an hour after the last roll was gone.

I made the garlic sauce or topping or whatever by blending several big cloves of garlic in olive oil and then nuking the mixture to cook it. I added a little butter. When I ate the rolls, I untied them and dipped the strands in the sauce. I also added cheap parmesan cheese from a jar. Wonderful. Of course, fresh cheese would have been even better.

Instead of adding boiling water to about half the flour, I used it for nearly all of it.

When I tied the rolls, I rolled the dough into sticks and twisted them first so they looked like screws. This improved the shape and appearance of the rolls. I dipped the sticks in oil before tying them to make sure the strands wouldn’t stick to each other. A real garlic knot can be untied. If you can’t untie it, it’s inferior.

You can do other things. You can use three thin sticks instead of one big one.

I’m still feeling the afterglow.

It wasn’t beef, but man, it was good.

You Have Already Been Found Guilty

Yesterday, I wrote a piece analyzing the moral problems with covid vaccines. Should I take an mRNA vaccine I don’t trust to leave my genes alone? Should I take an adenovirus vaccine made using a cell line derived from the 1985 murder of a helpless baby? Should I opt out and trust God alone? I tentatively concluded that receiving the murder vaccine was no worse than my unintentional and unavoidable after-the-fact participation in many other crimes. Every time I buy anything made in China, I support murder abortion as well as the killing of delivered babies, and I also support Joe Biden and the undermining of my country by hostile foreigners.

Today, I feel like writing about the flag at the dump. When I went to drop my garbage this week, I saw a flag at half mast. I don’t say “half staff” because it sounds pretentious. I wondered what the story was. My buddy Mike said it was for the victims of the Atlanta massage shootings. Biden signed a proclamation about the flag, covering several days.

The ridiculous premises are 1) there is an epidemic of ant-Asian violence connected with the virtually nonexistent phenomenon of white supremacy, and 2) the shootings were part of the epidemic.

It’s draining, seeing the constant flood of lies, rising to my very doorstep. It’s a constant reminder that the end of the age is here and America will never recover its sanity.

Of course, there is no new wave of anti-Asian violence, so there is no new wave connected to white supremacy, and white supremacy barely exists, and the man who killed the Asians in Atlanta, who was not a white supremacist, did it for other reasons. On top of that, he is atypical of people who hurt Asians.

Violence against Asians is nothing new, and it’s mainly a black problem.

Far and away, black men are the biggest perpetrators of attacks on Asians in the US. Before this country became Wokanda, we talked about this publicly. Asians have a history of moving into black neighborhoods and setting up successful businesses, and community relations have always been bad. Remember the Family Red Apple market libels? Prominent black leaders have said racist things about Asians taking over. Their slanders and victimhood speech encourage black men to harm Asians. They make it sound like self-defense.

Remember when every American knew all these things?

In the US, black men commit most of the anti-Asian violence, and that’s remarkable, because there are about 5 times as many white men, and white men are bad, bad people.

What, exactly, is the Wokandan definition of white supremacy? Fundamentally, it’s whatever anti-white racists want it to be at a given moment.

Here’s what real white supremacy is: it’s a policy of creating a government in which non-whites are excluded from all positions of power.

Here are some things which are not white supremacy: requiring people to wear business clothes, insisting employees speak English, criticizing discrimination against white people (including affirmative action), refusing to kneel on an athletic field, refusing to adequately froth at the mouth and join in the persecution of people the Wokandans have erroneously accused of white supremacy, refusing to give a black power salute while terrorists threaten you at a restaurant, voting for a Republican, owning an AR-15, expecting a nation to have borders, reading a Dr. Seuss book, reading a Mark Twain book, and putting a Confederate flag on the rear window of your pickup. Also: being white.

Why do I bother to say these things? They will convince no one, because the Wokandans and Ewokes don’t think. They are impervious to the truth. Demons rule them because they rejected and decided to persecute the Holy Spirit before they chose to persecute white people.

About half of the country is under the delusion that Donald Trump is personally responsible for the January 6 riot, simply because he encouraged people to protest. This is the same half of the country which was fine with Kamala Harris encouraging people to go out in the streets and raise hell. It’s the same half of the country that thought it was okay when Maxine Waters and Al Sharpton literally encouraged people to riot. Never mind that the damage done on January 6 is dwarfed by what leftists have done in America over the last few years.

The victimhood pimps like to use the words “weaponizing” and “radicalizing” when it comes to conservatives who are overly angry about the death of America. Let’s turn those words around. They are clearly weaponizing and radicalizing leftists. Increasingly, non-whites in the US believe they are entitled and even obligated to rain extreme cruelty on white people, Jews, and Asians. Many white leftists agree. Anyone who is more successful must be a supremacist, so cut them, shoot them, rape them, and take what they have. The more the victimhood pimps blather, the more anti-Asian crime there will be, and white people will not be the main perpetrators.

It’s remarkable how Satan gets the children of darkness to do his work.

The Holy Spirit transcends race. When he is allowed to work, people he leads come to understand that race, color, and nationality mean nothing. They learn that their beloved brothers and sisters are all types of people. We see this in Israel, where former terrorists sing in churches and intermarry with Messianic Jews. Satan makes us focus on differences in the flesh, making peace impossible.

I am in love with a magnificent Zambian lady. What is she going to think if she marries me and comes to live in America? What will she think of most black Americans? The men will think she betrayed her race. Anyone who learns she’s not a leftist will call her things like “coon” and “house negro.” They’ll say she’s a whore. She will have no mainstream black friends. If she wants to know black people, she’ll have to get together with those who are ruled and transformed by the Holy Spirit.

Conservative, Spirit-led black Americans are persecuted and rejected by people who look like them and think they’re entitled to tell them what to think and whom to associate with. In America, black people are still treated like property, except the owners aren’t white farmers. They’re politicians, other blacks, and leftists. In America, white leftists routinely rip black people for failing to obey them and submit.

Anyone who can tell you what to think is your master. Don’t fool yourself. Denial of the right to think and speak is more invasive and nullifying than denial of liberty and property.

The Atlanta murderer was not out to get Asians. If he were, he would not have shot two non-Asians, and he would not have gone to a whorehouse and killed prostitutes. In his own confession, he said he had a sex addiction he could not break. He would have shot the prostitutes he was involved with regardless of their race. It’s sickening that leftists won’t admit this.

I don’t know why I write these things, knowing leftists are too in love with hate to listen. Maybe it’s for the purpose of judgment. There are two reasons why God interacts with people: to help them, and to provide evidence for their damnation. If he offers you help and you refuse or misuse it, you seal the case for conviction and eternity in hell. You can’t say you weren’t warned. On the other hand, Ezekiel said people like me would be blameless only if we gave warnings.

It’s very sad that a Christian man was so disconnected from the Holy Spirit that he was willing to murder people who are probably damned and, in doing so, ruin his own life. He probably comes from a church that doesn’t teach people to pray abundantly in tongues, cast out demons, and beg God for correction. But his crimes are not indications that he was a white supremacist or that proper Christians are dangerous. Christianity works, but it has to be the real thing, involving adherents very deeply with the Holy Spirit. Any church that teaches pride and hard work, the prosperity gospel, anti-Semitism, leftism, black liberation theology, prayer to saints, or cessationism is powerless and under Satan’s control. No person who isn’t transformed by the Holy Spirit is a yardstick by which Christianity can be judged. Such people are nominal Christians only, as Rebecca calls them.

I can’t vouch for nominal Christians. Such people perpetrated the Spanish Inquisition, and many cooperated with Nazis. I wish I could say none are dangerous, but anyone who is not connected well to the Holy Spirit can be manipulated by Satan. Just like a leftist rioter or a person like Al Sharpton who encourages them.

Sometimes Evolution Goes Backward

My goddaughter had a birthday yesterday, so she and her family came to visit. Five kids, or, more accurately, four and one new adult. This gave me a good excuse to keep working with the fancy new ice cream machine. I made four flavors.

I have totally mastered cherry vanilla and butter pecan, and I have great confidence that my next batches of peach and Heath bar crunch will be perfect. It’s time to ask myself what other flavors I need to make before I stop building my ice cream armament. I don’t need a lot of flavors to be happy. As it is, I will never need to buy ice cream again unless I want a novelty like a Nutty Buddy or ice cream sandwich.

I used a bag of crushed Heath bars from the grocery store. This was a mistake. They’re worthless. They’re not just broken. They’re ground. The biggest pieces are like peas. If I do it again, I’ll buy bars and break them.

Based on Internet research saying most people prefer artificial vanilla to the real thing, I tried fake vanilla in one of my flavors. It was not terrible, but it wasn’t that good, either. Expensive vanilla is much, much better.

Here’s what I concluded: most people don’t know what tastes good. I knew that already, because Budweiser is the most popular beer in the country. The guy who is trying to replace Christopher Kimball at America’s Test Kitchen tried fake vanilla in a blind test, and he preferred it. That should have told me all I needed to know. Kimball was the spine that held the organization up. The new guy strikes me as a cooking school wonder who knows everything about food while lacking the ability to create or recognize success. Many of the bad meals you’ve had at restaurants were prepared by culinary school graduates, so it should never surprise anyone when a person with scary cooking credentials can’t cut it.

People worship James Beard, but his recipes aren’t good. The Joy of Cooking should be called The Joy of Indigestion. It’s the way of the world.

One of my guests suggested I try my hand at peppermint. That should be simple. Vanilla ice cream without the vanilla. Add crushed peppermint candy and mint extract.

I can’t eat chocolate without regretting it because of the caffeine and theobromine, but it is conceivable that I might eat it anyway from time to time in the future. I have an urge to try to duplicate Ben & Jerry’s Everything but the Kitchen Sink. It’s chocolate and vanilla ice cream with peanut butter cups and bits of toffee bars mixed in. An Internet search tells me it also contains white chocolate chunks and fudge-covered almonds. I don’t recall running into those items, but then when I eat ice cream, I don’t study it and take notes.

Making a mixed ice cream would be laborious. I would have to make two batches in chocolate and vanilla and combine them. Not sure I want to go through that for a product I don’t plan to eat.

The machine needs a rolling cart, so I blew $88 on steel. I bought 1″ square tubing with 1/8″ walls. I thought thick walls would make welding less risky. Welders can blow through tubing easily. When I saw the price and lifted the steel, I felt I should have gone with thinner tubing. I’m no engineer, so I made a mistake. It’s not a problem, though. I’ll just have a really strong cart I won’t want to lift.

The plan is to put three wooden shelves in it, and I’m going to use the casters that were left over when I put my smoker on a factory-made cart (which I should have built myself).

In related news, I keep wanting to make new workbenches. My old bench of all trades is extremely sturdy, but I built it before I knew anything. It has no wheels, it’s less than ideal for woodworking, and it should probably weigh 100 pounds less.

I finally bought real blades for my Powermatic 66 the other day, and it got me thinking about a woodworking bench. I started thinking about designs. Fresh from the success of building my steel and wood shooting bench I thought I should go against convention and make a woodworking bench with a welded base.

Woodworkers tend to be true believers, and that means they make everything out of wood. They are hostile to certain new ideas, and they really like bench designs that are hundreds of years old. One was created by a famous Frenchman named Roubo. Another one was designed by an Englishman named Nicholson. Actually, these guys may have simply passed on designs that were already traditional. I don’t know.

These benches are very heavy for two reasons, neither of which has anything to do with function. First, wood has a poor strength-to-weight ratio compared to metal, so it takes a lot to do the same job, and second, the people who designed them knew nothing about designing rigid structures.

A typical woodworking bench will have a solid top at least three inches thick. This gives you a nice, stiff surface to work on, and it allows you to make deep holes that will work with bench dogs and holdfasts.

A holdfast is a steel rod with a hook on one end. The hook has a flattened end. You put the other end of the holdfast in a hole and slide it down until the flat part rests on your project. Then you whack the holdfast and drive it into the hole until it wedges in there. It’s a great invention. Really holds things in place, and it’s quick to use. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work well if your bench is thin.

A bench dog is a cylinder of wood that fits in the same holes holdfasts use. You can pull a bench dog up and rest a piece of wood against it while you work it. The dog will keep it from moving away from you. Again, you need deep holes.

At some point during the last millennium, engineers discovered the torsion box. This is a fancy term for a hollow box with supporting members inside it. You build a lattice of crossmembers and then enclose it in two sheets of material like plywood. What you get is a box which is very strong for its weight, and it’s easy to make it flat by sizing the internal members accurately. Many wooden doors are torsion boxes. Nobody wants a door that weighs 200 pounds.

A guy named Paulk designed a bench top which is a torsion box. It’s pretty neat. The top and bottom are several inches apart, and he put holes in the sides of the box so he could reach in and put tools inside it. That feature alone makes the design brilliant. When I first started thinking about building a new bench, I thought I would glue two-by-fours together side by side and make a thick top. Now I realize that was stupid. I want a torsion box.

Problem: how do you put deep holes in a torsion box? The top and bottom may be an inch thick, but there is air between them. I would want holes with wood around them all the way down.

I thought about it last night. Here’s what you do: you add internal members with holes drilled through them. You only need a couple of rows of holes, so you can add two extra members just for drilling them. The holes would weaken the members, so drilling through members that need to be solid would be bad, but adding extra members wouldn’t hurt anything. In fact, you wouldn’t need members running all the way across the bench. You could use cubes of wood.

Problem solved.

What about making holes in the sides of the bench for access to the storage space? Making holes like that in wood is a pain. Why not use steel?

Make yourself a steel frame from tubing. Put plywood on the top and bottom, screwed in for easy replacement. Instead of a few little holes for access, you could have three sides of the bench wide open. One end would have to be covered by an end vise, and part of one side would be blocked by a vise on the front, but other than that. you would have tons of access for storage and cleaning.

Put the box together. Weld up a rolling base. Attach the base to the wood of the box, not the welded base. Install vises. Done.

Any woodworker who is reading this must be screeching by now.

Would the bench top be too flexible to make a good surface for pounding? First of all, why would you be pounding? Woodworking doesn’t require that. Second, many people already use benches with relatively thin tops, and they are doing fine.

I saw a neat bench on Adam Savage’s Youtube channel. A guy named Andrew Klein gave it to him. Klein works for Magswitch, and he also has a side business.

I was awestruck by the bench. It has a base with four legs made from what looks like 5″ steel tubing with 1/2″ walls. The top is two slabs of hardwood that appear to be 4″ thick. It has two geared twin-screw vises Klein makes and sells. The dogs have steel shafts, and the holes contain magnets so the dogs stay up when you raise them.

The more I looked at the bench, though, the more I thought I saw bad engineering.

I don’t know what the bench weighs. Maybe 500 pounds? Savage was happy about that, but overbuilding is one of the best-known hallmarks of bad engineering. I know; I’ve done it. Weight means increased material, production, and shipping costs. It means increased difficulty in handling finished products. It means waste. It’s a clumsy way of handling problems you can’t address properly because you’re not a good engineer.

If you ever read a welding textbook, you’ll learn that one of the main things that drive the study of weldments is a desire to reduce weight. People who don’t know anything about engineering love to talk about how “beefy” their tools are. It’s like bragging that your car has solid tires made of steel. It’s a demonstration of ignorance. I’m no engineer, but even I know these things. You don’t have to be a Georgia Tech grad to get this far.

The bench has no wheels. That’s insane. I say that as the guilty creator of a bench with no wheels. Why would you make an extremely heavy tool you can’t move without a forklift? Smart shop owners put everything they can on wheels. The more you can move things around, the smaller and less expensive your shop can be without sacrificing comfort or much convenience.

What about the magnetic dogs? At first, I thought they were cool. Then I thought about Paul Sellers. He’s a British woodworker who is very big on Youtube. He’s a real expert. His dogs are bits of scrap wood with springs he makes from coat hangers. I have some I made myself. They work great, so why drive yourself nuts with rare earth magnets?

Now, the vises. They are beautiful, and the cost is very reasonable. They are probably a little better than competing vises from companies like Veritas. Veritas uses bicycle chains to connect and synchronize the screws on its vises, while Klein uses gears, and gears are sturdier and don’t need adjustment. Klein’s vises have transmissions so you can shift into high gear and move them fast.

I thought the vises were neat. Then I asked myself: “How are they significantly better than what I have right now?”

I made a Moxon vise for my bench. It’s a long block of maple with two holes in it. Two long Acme screws run through it, and there are handwheels to turn the screws. I can put longer and wider objects in it than will fit in most factory vises. I can put things in it that reach down to the floor; nothing gets in the way. I can fasten it on objects that are tapered because the screws aren’t synchronized. It doesn’t have a speed mode, the way the Klein vises do, but I have never felt I needed that. If I really want that feature, I can create it using half-nuts.

The Veritas vise is also very good, and unlike Klein’s boutique vise, it’s available. I don’t have to wait for a guy to make it in his basement.

The bench top…beautiful. Tombstone-thick maple with a glossy finish. But what is the purpose of all that weight? Answer: to make Adam Savage feel good. If loving your tool is your goal, buy what you like, but what if you just want to make things?

Savage has already put a big sheet of leather on the bench to protect it, and that shows how shortsighted the design is. A bench is like a pair of boots or gloves. You’re not supposed to protect it. You’re supposed to protect the work. A bench shouldn’t be sanded with 400 grit and finished with 10 coats of polyurethane. It should be bare wood. Imagine fussing with a giant sheet of cowhide every time you use a workbench. Ridiculous.

I made a shooting bench from 2″ steel tubing, a few screws, and some pressure-treated two-by-sixes. You could literally rest a car on it. If it weren’t for the two pneumatic tires on one end, you could never wiggle it at all by using tools on it. It’s way overbuilt. It probably weighs 150 pounds now that the wood is dry. I can lift one end of it and roll it 50 yards by myself. I do it all the time. I should have made it even lighter.

If I made a woodworking bench from the same tubing, it would be just as sturdy. Each leg might weigh 7 pounds. What do the legs on Savage’s bench weigh? Maybe 10 times that? For no reason.

I can use 2″ tubing for the base of my bench. I can put a caster on each corner. I can add feet that lower with screws when the bench is where I want it, so it won’t move when I push on a hand plane. It will feel like the Rock of Gibraltar, I’ll be able to move it unaided, I’ll have a ton of handy storage, and when the top gets beaten up, it will take me half an hour to put a new one on.

I can throw two Veritas vises on it, or I can buy two Moxon parts kits (because I am tired of making the parts). No need to wait for vises with transmissions. Done. Bang. Next problem, please.

I looked into leg vises. Long story short: no. Twin-screw vises are better.

Isn’t it bad to have screws in the top of a woodworking bench? No. Why would it be bad? Don’t plane the screws. Don’t chisel them. Countersink them a little to keep them out of your way. No problem.

I can make one bench for wood and another one for general use. I can put my old bench on the burn pile, using the tractor. If I move, my new benches will roll onto a truck.

I really don’t see the point in reverting to Fred Flintstone design policies. It seems to me that a half-ton woodworking bench is like a big sign saying, “I reject every intelligent thing man has learned since 500 A.D.”

I kind of wonder if I need a wood bench at all. Why not use a welding table? I have thought about buying a real fixturing table made from 1/4″ or 3/8″ plate. It’s a steel torsion box. They’re very popular. Why couldn’t I do woodworking on it? Mounting vises would be interesting, to say the least, but there is no reason why you can’t make wooden projects on a steel table.

Something to think about.

Speaking of Fred Flintstone, I saw a video about Nick Offerman. He’s the actor who played Ron Swanson on TV. Swanson is a hilarious caricature of an old-fashioned libertarian, whereas Offerman is your standard Hollywood liberal with full-blown Trump Derangement Syndrome. After watching Swanson, Offerman is a big disappointment. He’s a gun control nut.

I’ll post a video of Ron Swanson just for fun.

Anyway, Offerman is a woodworker. He has a beautiful shop. You can see it in videos. When you look at his setup, you wonder what kind of furniture he makes. It must be cleverly designed and painstakingly crafted.

Well, not so much. He makes Flintstone furniture. I’ll post a photo.

You may think it looks nice. Well, sure. God designed it. Nick Offerman voted absent.

This is a style of furniture which is very popular now. You take thick slabs that could be used to make a lot of quality furniture, and instead of coming up with a real design, you run them through a jointer, fasten them together crudely, slap some Danish oil on them, and call it art. Funny thing: it’s the opposite of art. “Art” means something which has been transformed by the mind of man.

The crude furniture people make now reminds me of the increasing use of the word “rustic” in cooking. You’ve seen it. A “rustic” pizza is a pizza that looks like a kitchen accident because it was made by an unskilled person. “Rustic” means “crudely made due to lack of skill.” Offerman’s table is definitely rustic, although it may be a superficial rusticity. He can probably do a lot better. I hope he can.

I have zero skills, yet given a big enough planer, I could make this table in an afternoon. In gluing extremely thick pieces of wood together, I would waste many pounds of wood which could have been turned into genuine pieces of craftsmanship.

If there is anything good about this style, it’s that it preserves thick slabs of valuable wood until the furniture can be demolished and the wood used in better projects.

Here’s a modern chair made by a guy named Maloof. It’s from the Smithsonian’s collection. Not really my thing, but it’s graceful, skillfully crafted, and pleasing to the eye. Compare it to Fred and Barney’s table, above.

The chair serves to remind us of the difference between art and copping out.

Offerman, like Klein and Savage, has fallen prey to the beefy bug. Instead of a graceful table with a design that required human input, he created a crude device useful mainly for rupturing disks. If God thought like these guys, birds would be unable to fly. A chicken would weigh 40 pounds. All fish would be bottom dwellers. The weight of their bones would glue them to the seabed.

Birds have air inside their bones to reduce weight, but many birds are extremely strong. The other day I saw a video of a cockatoo which probably weighed two pounds, lifting a pumpkin and throwing it off a kitchen counter. That’s not rustic. That’s engineering.

What purpose did Offerman serve here? He didn’t design anything. He found something that occurred under the random influences of nature and presented it nearly as-is. He’s not a maker. He’s a finder.

Offerman’s type of furniture is known as “live edge.” I don’t know why they call it that. The wood is dead. Maybe they didn’t want to call it “rustic edge.”

The idea is that the outermost part of the wood isn’t cut away. You would think it makes every piece of furniture unique, but in reality, it makes them all look the same. Go to Google Images and look up “live edge furniture.” It’s like a giant Offerman exhibit, but he didn’t make any of the pieces.

Live edge woodworkers are fungible. One’s work is just like another’s. There is no need for any particular live edge woodworker to exist. Any other member of the crew can step in and finish his work exactly as he would have.

I could swear I hear Ayn Rand shouting at me.

Mr. Maloof is a real woodworker. Nick Offerman is just a guy who stacks slabs.

Nick Offerman is funny, but he’s not on my list of most-admired people. His Trump issues are disturbing, and he nearly ruined Lagavulin whisky for me. It has been my favorite whisky for many years, because it’s the best whisky there is. Offerman’s Swanson character came alone and started drinking it, and now I feel like I should hide my bottle. Remember how you wanted to hide your cowboy boots after Urban Cowboy came out? Same thing. My guess is that Offerman didn’t know what Lagavulin was until he read about it in a script.

I don’t know if I’ll make a new bench or not, but at least I was saved from the beefy bug. An afternoon of Googling did that for me.

It’s time to go blast some squirrels. They smoke up pretty good. It’s fun being a lot more like Ron Swanson than Nick Offerman will ever be.

MORE

Ready for an whale-choking dose of irony? I just learned that the TV character Ron Swanson designed the Maloof chair pictured above. The exact same chair.

I was looking at clips of Ron Swanson in action, and I came across one in which a lady tried to license a chair design Swanson had created. When they showed the chair, I was stunned. I’ll post a photo.

What are the odds?

Does Maloof know a fictional person is taking credit for his talent?

I don’t watch the show, so there is now way I could have seen Ron with the chair in the past. I found the Maloof chair by Googling “chair” along with “Smithsonian,” figuring the Smithsonian probably had a collection of historic furniture.

If ever you needed evidence that Nick Offerman is inferior to his broadcast persona, look no further.

I checked Offerman’s website and found that not all of his furniture is Flintstone tribute material, so it appears that if he ever got his head straight he could conceivably improve his work and successfully ascend the Swanson Pyramid of Greatness.

Sleepy Joe Considering Putting our Rights to Sleep

My friend Mike is planning to visit, and he lives in another state. Yesterday, he called and told me Biden’s underlings are talking about making it illegal to travel to and from Florida.

The first thing I wondered was whether a president had the power to do that.

Trump limited travel between NATIONS. That’s fine. The Constitution gives presidents the power to conduct foreign relations. Telling me I can’t drive to Atlanta is another matter. That’s a restriction of the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of liberty and the First Amendment’s implied right to freedom of association. Where does the Constitution say a dementia patient who leads the executive branch can arbitrarily ignore these two fundamental rights?

The Fifth Amendment says the feds can’t deprive us of liberty without due process of law. What does “due process” mean when a man who will soon be in diapers decides to imprison 21 million people? Does it mean Biden has to go to the Supreme Court and file some sort of lawsuit? Does it mean he has to go to Congress? Search me (Fourth Amendment).

The Fourteenth Amendment provides the same guarantees as the Fifth, except it applies to states. That didn’t help people in Michigan. Their governor went all Nurse Ratched on them, and she got her way.

Can Biden pull it off by having his teleprompter help him declare a national emergency? Wouldn’t such a declaration be subject to judiciary review?

I don’t know how it works. My guess is that no one does. It sounds like one of those Constitutional gaps that breed litigation and bad decisions made by biased activist (i.e. “left-wing”) courts. Thank God we haven’t lost the Supreme Court yet.

It could be worse. The Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments could start out with, “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state.”

Our rights are extremely fragile now. I would say they’re actually gone. All that’s left is a facade. Our rights are like a painted structure eaten away from inside by termites. The surface looks fine, but don’t lean on it.

I told Mike what I always tell myself. You can’t let provocateurs and revolutionaries, who are very powerful on both sides of the aisle, engage your emotions. All this political nonsense is carnal and not really the business of people who are Spirit-led. It’s intended to ruin our faith, turn us into creatures of emotion, waste our time, and drive us to sin.

America is washed up, period. It’s done. The details and means don’t matter much, and it’s a very bad idea to get caught up in carnal resistance and agitation.

If you know any addicts, you know what I’m talking about. I mean real addicts who can’t be helped, not old ladies who took a couple of weeks to kick painkillers after knee replacement surgery. When someone close to you is an addict, you can’t spend your life chasing them around, wiping their rear end for them over and over. You have to cut them loose and let them die. Real addicts end up in three places: prison, institutions, and the grave. That information doesn’t come from me. It comes from medical doctrine. You’re not in charge of the universe, and you can’t change it. What you can do is withdraw and spend your time with people who can be helped. People who won’t drain your savings, steal your heirlooms, ruin your home, and make your life an unending taste of hell.

Maybe Biden will be able to turn Florida into a prison. Okay. He can’t come between me and God, though. He can’t defeat me. He can’t stop God’s blessings from pouring through me every minute of my life. He can’t prevent me from fulfilling my purpose, any more than he can speak unaided for a solid minute without getting lost.

It amazes me that leftists elected a man as unintelligent as Biden. I can’t recall any other stupid presidents. Biden graduated low in his class at a very bad law school, but look at his predecessors. Obama managed to get through one and a half Ivy League schools. Bush broke 1200 on the SAT. Clinton made it through law school at Yale. Bush I was Phi Beta Kappa at Yale. Reagan’s high intelligence is self-evident. Carter was inept, but he was an Annapolis graduate and nuclear engineer. Ford graduated high in his class at Yale Law. Nixon was sharp as a tack. LBJ fell apart in office, but he was very shrewd. Kennedy was smart, although not nearly as smart as he led people to believe. Biden is the only true dunce that has occupied the Oval Office in my lifetime.

People keep taking up for Biden as though he were Albert Einstein and Benjamin Cardozo, combined. Look what Wikipedia says about his brief, failed legal career: “Corporate law, however, did not appeal to him, and criminal law did not pay well.” Excuse me. Corporate law is pleasant and even somewhat intellectually stimulating, and the pay is excellent. Biden would have stuck it out had he been able to function. Criminal law is simple, and it pays very, very well if you win cases. Biden simply was not bright enough to make it, and you don’t have to be very smart to make money as a lawyer. That’s especially true in criminal law, which is very easy.

As a general rule, people in the bottoms of law school classes don’t have what it takes to do well in the profession. There are many exceptions, but Joe Biden is not one of them. He was a bad student in high school, and he also failed to distinguish himself at his state’s mediocre university, where he majored in simple fields.

Biden isn’t smart, and neither is his remaining son. It’s obvious from his son’s writings. Intelligence is mostly inherited. Biden’s success has been propelled by aggression and dishonesty, and he also has a monumental and helpful case of Dunning-Kruger Syndrome. He has self-confidence in inverse proportion to his ability.

Biden’s unlikely and ludicrous ascendancy is evidence of God’s withdrawal of favor. The Bible shows that a nation that turns away from God will be ruled by idiots and scoundrels, and that aliens will rise up and dominate the inhabitants.

A man who served as Vice President for 8 years, and who was denied the traditional role of successor due to his mental limitations, is now the left’s messiah. Look how far America has slipped.

Truth be told, he is not the first warning sign. Obama was an unaccomplished political zero put in place by affirmative action and Bush Derangement Syndrome. He had to get into Columbia via transfer, which is how poor prospects get in. The Ivy League’s heavy-handed affirmative action couldn’t save him on the first try, and that’s saying something. His SAT score (which he will not reveal) must have been extremely low in order for Columbia to reject him. Harvard Law scooped him up, and he headed the law review, but he never wrote an article. Why? Because he couldn’t. The position was a sop based on his skin color. The sole purpose of law review membership is to produce articles. Obama is relatively bright, but he has never said or done anything remotely clever. Everything is handed to him.

As much as I love Trump, I have to admit he isn’t a class act. He’s crass. He is often childish. His sexual and marital history is heavily blemished. He did a wonderful job, but he’s no genetic aristocrat. Could such a person have survived the first primary in 1980? I often wonder if God gave us Trump because he didn’t want to subject a nice person to the cruelty and abuse Trump went through.

The people who rule America are going to look worse and worse as time passes. Californians like to say everything California gets comes to the rest of the nation 5 years later. That’s part of the fatuous California ego. It will surely happen with regard to leadership. California, Washington, and Oregon show that there is no limit to the stupidity of the things a majority of an electorate can believe and support.

The waters of evil are rising, they’re never going to stop rising, and the areas of high ground are getting smaller and farther apart. There is no point in poring over the news every day to try to figure out what we should do. There is nothing we can do. We had our chance. The best thing now is to get close to God and see if you can get inside the bubble of his protection.

America is being destroyed, and the option of saving it is gone. Now there are only two options left: sinking with the ship, or getting in a lifeboat.

I read something else that interested me, while I was looking into the possibility that I might end up living in a prison state. I saw that medical people think coronavirus variants that don’t respond to our current vaccines will develop.

How about THAT?

I’ve been sitting here trying to get God’s guidance about taking the existing vaccine, but it may well be that there would be no point, even if it worked and had no adverse effects. Coronavirus may turn out to be a lot like the common cold. It may dance around our efforts to eradicate it for the remainder of the age. Funny how the experts and bigwigs aren’t talking about this.

What if we have to have masks, lockdowns, attrition, and social distancing FOREVER?

It gets worse. What if coronavirus becomes substantially more deadly? Usually, diseases become less lethal, but that’s not always true, and coronavirus is crazy.

There are certain types of beneficial plants that develop blights that never kill them off entirely, yet which keep them sickly and few in number. It also happens to animals. That could be our future until Jesus comes. We could end up like the chestnut trees.

One of the big problems with coronavirus is that you can’t look at it today and plan future strategies based on its current form. No one can say it won’t be more infectious or more deadly in the future. It keeps mutating. Look how long it took us to create vaccines for the common strains we have right now. If nastier types develop, should we expect similar one-year lags?

Biden’s Florida ruminations are based on the belief that Florida has a heavier load of more-destructive viruses. Here’s the obvious question: how will locking up Florida prevent other mutations from happening right here in America? If it can happen in Africa and Europe, it can happen in the single biggest coronavirus reservoir on Earth.

Current vaccines aren’t completely effective against the prevalent strains, new strains are already out there, more new strains will certainly develop this year and every year after that, and it takes a year to create a new vaccine.

It sure looks like we are hearing the entrance music of the pale horseman of the apocalypse.

As for the red horseman, murder, something interesting is happening. If you want .22 or 9mm ammunition, you have a problem. It’s hard to find, unless you want to pay several times what it’s worth. I can’t even find obscure calibers like .204 Ruger. Guess what is available? AR-15 and AK-47 ammo. Think about that. You can get all the .223 and 7.62 you want, and prices aren’t all that bad. What are these rounds used for? Combat. Life is tough if you want to shoot harmlessly in matches or in the forest, but if you want to amass 10,000 rounds of calibers developed for the purpose of filling high-capacity combat weapons, all you have to do is point and click. For $2000, you can have enough ammo to kill and wound other Americans for months of active fighting.

We’re being set up for a shooting civil war. Can that really be a coincidence?

Everything we hold onto is shaking, and the shaking gets worse all the time. Sooner or later, we will reach a crescendo.

I hope one of two things happens: either things quiet back down and revival and evangelism are restored, or Jesus comes for us and I can forget about the world’s problems. Sitting here doing nothing is getting old.

I refuse to worry, and I will not let myself be dragged into activism. My earthly nation is finished, but my real nation–the nation of heaven–will never be shaken. God will stay by me and lift me above this mess. I don’t have to scrap and fuss in the carnal mosh pit.

By the way, Project Veritas has been banned by Twitter. You will eventually get the same treatment.

1 for 2

I hit the woods again today. Things went pretty well. I set up my blind to see whether the squirrels liked it better than the sight of me sitting in my Home Depot folding chair.

I wasn’t all that happy about the weather. It’s miserably hot. It hit 80 degrees here. We’ve had a wonderful winter so far, so it disturbs me whenever the pattern is broken. I was concerned that the blind might be hot because it cuts off the wind.

I set it down in a general area where I have killed squirrels before. I’ve learned some things about choosing a place to lie in wait. You don’t want too much undergrowth in front of you. It hides squirrels on the ground. You don’t want to set up so trees block your view of other trees. You don’t know which tree a squirrel will climb down, and if it’s a tree you can’t see, you can spook the squirrel when you move to get a clear shot. You also want a spot in the shade, for obvious reasons.

I made a tremendous racket when I set the blind up. It’s confusing, and there are a lot of things that flop around and make noise. I was afraid all the squirrels would take off for Jacksonville.

It wasn’t all that long before I started seeing squirrels, though. They are quite stupid. Unfortunately, they didn’t cooperate very well. They stayed too high up, or they sat behind things I couldn’t see through, or they ran back up trees without presenting good shots.

Eventually, I had a somewhat decent shot at maybe 25 yards. I couldn’t see the bottom half of the squirrel, but that wasn’t the half I was shooting at. I did my best to steady the gun, and I fired. The squirrel dropped. I got out of the blind and started walking to him. He jumped up and ran up a nearby tree. I couldn’t find any blood. I think the little jerk was playing possum. He got me to blow my cover royally, which made me fear I wouldn’t see any more rodents.

I sat back down anyway, and before too long, I picked up motion in my peripheral vision to the right. A squirrel was on the ground, rummaging for acorns. It was in an area with considerable junk on the ground, plus swells in the terrain. Sometimes it moved a few feet and disappeared completely.

It kept moving to my right, so I had to keep picking my chair up and turning it. The squirrel didn’t care. The magic of the blind was working.

Finally, it showed most of its body from around 30 yards. It was at 4 o’clock relative to my original position, and I had been watching it for a very long time. I figured this was the best shot I would ever get. I pressed the trigger, and the squirrel disappeared.

I wondered if I was getting another Academy Award performance as I left the blind, but when I got to the area where the squirrel should have been, I saw a motionless furry object on the ground. No breathing. The bullet had traversed the chest cavity. Very clean kill.

I threw the squirrel on the ground in front of the blind, because I had been told squirrels like to investigate their dead buddies. I gave it a good solid trial, but I had no luck. I tossed the squirrel in a Home Depot bag and walked home. I left the blind and chair, figuring it would be helpful to avoid making a huge spectacle the next time I used it.

Cleaning the squirrel went better than before. I stopped trying to do exactly what Youtube videos said to do, and I used common sense. The hide came off reasonably easily, and the squirrel remained in one piece, except for the head, which I severed on purpose.

I now have 4 squirrels in the oven at 250, wrapped in foil, and once I think they’re tender, I plan to grease them, put a rub on them, and give them an hour in the smoker. Maybe doing it this way will keep them from drying out.

I’m getting used to gutting and skinning warm animals that smell. It doesn’t bother me now. That’s good, because you have to get used to it if you want to enjoy it.

Maybe I can manage to bag a turkey during the spring season. I certainly hope so.

It’s unfortunate that I didn’t get into hunting years ago, before the lunatics took over and started treating hunters like criminals. It’s astounding how people can believe lies and choose to wallow in ignorance.

There have been times when the gaslighting has started to get to me. I started to wonder if killing animals was okay. Surely God loves them. The other day I got a revelation, however, so I no longer have even a sliver of guilt.

In case some self-righteous ninny is giving you a hard time about hunting, I’ll tell you my revelation. Ask yourself this: how do wild animals die when hunters DON’T kill them?

Answer: horribly. They die from animal predation, for one thing. Animal predators are not humane. They often kill slowly. Many predators like to play with their wounded prey. They are also known to wound other animals just for the fun of it and then wander off, leaving them in agony. Animals also die from terrible diseases without medical care. Check out what’s happening to the key deer here in Florida to see good examples. Animals die from injuries that are never treated. They die from starvation and thirst, too. Wild animals don’t die of old age, because as soon as age weakens them, something else finishes them off.

In the wild, there is no such thing as a peaceful death in a warm bed surrounded by loved ones. There are no animal hospices. No one tries to mitigate a dying animal’s agony. It goes on and on.

Farm animals and game killed by hunters generally die fast deaths while in the prime of life. Very often, they die instantly. Hunters track wounded prey to put it out of its misery. Hunters think about ethics when they shoot. They avoid shots that are too likely to cause unnecessary suffering.

In reality, hunters don’t cause an overall increase in suffering. They reduce it. Every wild animal dies, but only a small percentage are lucky enough to be taken humanely.

Put that in your bong and smoke it a while.

Here’s a few videos of animals dying in the wild. Don’t watch if you’re sensitive. Ask yourself if you wouldn’t prefer a high-powered round through the heart and lungs.

1. A cheetah being torn apart by lions.

2. A lion being mauled to death by hyenas.

3. Komodo dragons eating a deer alive.

4. Here’s a lynx taking a very long time to kill a squirrel.

5. Here’s a polar bear in the process of dying. National Geographic claimed the bear was dying because of climate change, but they later admitted they had no idea what its problem was. In fact, this is how bears normally die.

So much for the anti-hunting nuts.

Hope I can get better at killing squirrels while the season lasts. It seems like great training for other types of hunting.

Squirrels Yield to Superior Technology and Practice

I took the Marlin 60 out today, found out where it shot at around 15 yards, and headed for squirrelville.

Shortly after I got away from the house, I saw a lady training a horse on a property nearby. I was in the woods, but she was on the side of my land which is closest to houses. I guess they were a little over a hundred yards away. She would definitely see me if I killed a squirrel where I was, and she would have ample opportunity to stick her nose in my business.

I noticed a stupid squirrel on the ground not far ahead. The stupid ones are the majority of my business. I thought about the lady. Was it the same character who called me over to the fence a few years ago and told me shooting upset her horses? I thought maybe I should avoid a confrontation. Then I thought again. I needed to assert my dominance and defend my rights. No pushy neurotic woman with zero understanding of property rights, good manners, or the law was going to make the rules on my land. Sorry, Karen of the Squirrels.

I stalked up to a tree for partial concealment, opened up a monopod, put the squirrel on the crosshairs of my Bugbuster scope, and let him have it right through the upper body. He dropped and twitched briefly. I looked at the lady with the horse. They were continuing with their business. The horse was not interested in my activities, and I guess it wasn’t the crazy lady. Either that, or she was intimidated, as she should have been. No one should feel entitled to disturb a hunt, especially in a state where it’s a second-degree misdemeanor.

I walked over and looked at the squirrel. No movement. A nice clean kill.

I stuck him in a Ziploc and went on my merry way. I saw a few more rodents, but they were either too wary to get close to or impossible to shoot safely.

Skinning went pretty well this time. I tore a squirrel in half two days ago. A real mess. It gets easier with practice. I left most of the offal in the yard. The possums and coons must love me.

I’ve learned that it’s handy to flush things like kidneys and man parts. I cut squirrels up in my mud room, which has a toilet.

Now I have three little buddies in the fridge waiting to be smoked.

I’m not all that excited about eating them, but it’s a good idea to get used to game, given the fact that a hot civil war is on the way. It would probably be smart to learn how to eat ants, worms, roaches, and grass.

I feel like I should do things right at least once. I should set my blind up in a likely place and start hunting early. I don’t want to cut into my morning prayer time, though.

Things are going well. I finally have one scoped .22 that works well, and I’m getting better at hunting itself. I hope I can start coming home with 5 squirrels instead of one or three.

It’s bizarre how hunting can bring out instincts you never used in the suburbs. When I’m walking in the woods and something moves 50 yards away, I freeze instantly, just like cats do when they see birds. If I’m in mid step, that’s where I stop. I stare at whatever moved. Nothing is in motion except my eyes. I don’t think about anything else.

People think hiking and camping make you part of nature. No, sorry. Hiking is fun, but hikers are spectators, and camping just lets you know how it feels to be homeless. If you want to feel like part of nature, start hunting. You literally become part of the game. You become a predator, just as legitimate as a hawk or a fox. Hunting is real. Buying meat at the store is make-believe.

Yesterday I was out by my target stands, and I smelled squirrel. I guess I had gotten something on the bed of my cart when I killed the last two, because there were no squirrels around. It looks like squirrel hunting is turning me into a squirrel dog. I can smell them in the kitchen a day after I put them away and clean everything carefully.

I’m glad I hunt squirrels, because they’re very challenging. Shooting a squirrel at 100 feet is like shooting a deer at 300 yards. It’s actually harder, because squirrels move around more, and rifles for deer have much better optics and triggers than .22’s. Deer, hogs, coons, and coyotes should be a breeze after this.

Marlin Model 60 Surprises

Sometimes China is right.

I have been trying to shoot squirrels with a Savage A22 rifle and a Nikon Prostaff II Rimfire scope. The scope gets great reviews all over the web, and that’s why I bought it. I figured experts and people who had actually used the scope knew better than I did.

I have gotten fed up with the scope. It’s always blurry. The diopter adjustment seems to do nearly nothing. There is no parallax adjustment. You’re stuck at 50 yards. All sorts of liars claim they shoot squirrels in the head with .22 LR at 50 yards, but it’s physically impossible to do it reliably unless you have a fantastic rifle, top-notch ammunition, and a rest that compares to a bench. And the squirrel has to help.

The Nikon has no illumination. Once you’ve used illuminated scopes, you don’t want to go back. It doesn’t have target turrets. It doesn’t come with end caps. The minimum focus distance is significantly longer than the minimum squirrel distance.

I do not like it.

A long time ago, I wasted a lot of money on an expensive air rifle, and I put a UTG Bugbuster scope on it. I thought the scope was kind of a toy. The Chinese make a lot of low-quality optics baited with features. In fact, however, it’s much better than the Nikon.

1. It’s very clear, and the diopter adjustment works.

2. It has an illuminated reticle with a choice of two colors.

3. It has target turrets.

4. It comes with end caps.

5. The parallax is adjustable.

6. It focuses all the way down to living room distances. Not that I’m suggesting anything.

Yesterday, I did something I was putting off. I took the Marlin Model 60 out and zeroed it at 50 yards with the Bugbuster and CCI Mini-mags. I remembered to bring my rear bag, but I forgot my front rest. I put a few rounds in one bullseye, but they were spaced out pretty badly because I didn’t have a good rest. I adjusted the turrets and mashed up my range bag so it performed as a makeshift rest.

I fired. Center of the bullseye. I fired again. Center of the bullseye. I fired a third time. Center of the bullseye.

After that, I quit. I wasn’t sure my shots weren’t flukes, because there were only three, but it was getting dim out, and I was excited. I wanted to kill some squirrels.

When I went to pick up the target, I saw that all three shots had gone into about a quarter-inch hole. No, I did not miss the target with two shots. It was obvious three shots had landed.

I headed over to squirrelville, and on the way, I thought about the crow I was going to have to eat.

I have criticized the Marlin 60 for good reason. The guts are cheap. The factory trigger is disgusting. The quality control is sub-Chinese. The gun doesn’t come with swivels, and it’s made so major surgery is required to install a real forward swivel that doesn’t put pressure on the barrel. I bought a Savage A22, which is a real gun made from real parts. The Savage comes with swivels, a much better set of iron sights, a fantastic adjustable trigger, a real barrel, a real receiver, and good quality control. I have been using the Savage and leaving the Marlin on my bedroom floor, which is my gun safe.

Now it’s starting to look like the Marlin works better. It’s still cheaply made, and I had to make a bunch of modifications in order to turn it into a real gun, but it’s very accurate for a .22, and it’s light and handy. Actually, it’s only half a pound lighter than the Savage, but the balance is good.

It’s more pleasant to hunt with. Arggh. There. I said it.

Doesn’t mean I nailed any squirrels yesterday, unfortunately. I got one 50-yard shot, which I took, even though I couldn’t get a good rest. A squirrel’s target area is about 1″ across, and personally, I can’t hold a rifle on an area that small at 50 yards without a decent rest. My shot sailed over the rodent and into a tree trunk.

I got another shot from about 15 feet, and I missed. It’s actually hard to hit small things up close with a scope, unless you’ve practiced. My scope’s axis is 2″ above the rifle’s axis, so I had to guess where the bullet would go. I had a full-body shot at the squirrel, but in order to make it a safe shot, I had to move until all I was able to see was his tiny, evil head. I missed.

Still, I can’t take back what I said. The Marlin appears to be a serious squirrel machine.

I plan to buy used golf balls and shoot them from various distances to find out how to hold over when shooting squirrels up close. I may also start taking a long bipod into the woods for distant shots. It’s a lot of aggravation, but so is missing squirrels.

I have a swinging metal target which has one gong the size of a squirrel’s head. I’ll be practicing with it today or tomorrow. Im also going to see if I can put lower rings on the scope to make it closer to the rifle’s bore and reduce error at short distances.

Do I owe Marlin an apology? Well, Marlin is dead, and the dead don’t have feelings. Ruger just bought Marlin from Remington, which is a bankrupt company. Also, I was right about the Marlin’s quality and design problems. Can’t take those criticisms back. It looks like it’s an inferior gun which works extremely well once the right person modifies it. Nicest thing I’m willing to say.

The Savage is made better, but it feels less handy. I think I’ll get a second Bugbuster for it. After that, maybe I’ll want to use it again.

If the Marlin continues shooting sub-MOA at 50 yards, and the Savage doesn’t catch up, I’ll forget I ever thought about the Savage. It could happen. Rimfire ammo is not great, but the shorter your distances are, the less the ammo matters, and 50 yards is (“are”?) a short distance. Ammo problems that cause serious deviations mean less at 50, and believe it or not, it’s not a simple error-to-distance ratio. A gun that shoots sub-MOA at 50 may shoot much worse at 100. You can’t just assume a gun that shoots x MOA at 50 will shoot 2x at 100.

More likely than not, my next 50 yard groups will open up to about an inch. Still good, but not squirrel-head good.

Guess I better get moving. Those gongs aren’t going to shoot themselves.

Fauxcahontas Wants your Wampum

Yesterday I made my second batch of butter pecan ice cream, and it was pretty bad. Things went well, however. By making bad ice cream, I learned how to make excellent ice cream.

My first batch of butter pecan was very, very good, but it didn’t have as much flavor as I wanted. I saw recipes calling for brown sugar, and I doubted them, so I used white sugar. I paid the price. I decided to keep looking at recipes to find out if brown sugar really was what I needed.

In the process, I found a recipe from…I almost typed “jackass”…from a pro, and it said to steep the pecans in hot milk to add pecan flavor to the ice cream. I tried this, and I also used brown sugar. I decided to use more salt than I used in my first batch. It just seemed like the thing to do.

The pecans were soggy and the ice cream was too salty. Instead of frozen bliss, I tasted rubbery defeat.

I know what to do. No steeping, brown sugar, and less salt. Today I expect to make a pan of butter pecan the angels would gladly fall in order to taste.

My fried chicken experiments continue to go poorly. It seems like it’s just not possible to make really good fried chicken from skinless chicken. I don’t like skinless chicken, and I consider it a spineless concession to the neurotic feminization of cookery, but thanks to the skin-haters, finding a chicken under three pounds is impossible. When chickens get bigger than that, they are not worth frying.

I don’t know why it’s so hard to get chicken right when I get such spectacular results with other foods. Chicken seems to hate me.

Maybe I should pressure-cook big, inappropriate pieces of chicken until they’re done and then fry them.

I continue to wonder what’s going to happen to the world. I feel as though humanity has stampeded off a cliff, and I’m the only one left behind. I have a real Omega Man complex, only without the desire to turn a machine gun on the neighbors. I feel like what goes on in the world has very little to do with me.

I know many others are in the same boat, but I don’t know them or interact with them, so it’s as if they don’t exist.

Ordinarily I don’t get lonely or bored, but things are different now. I feel like I’ve been separated from the world and I’m killing time in the landing zone while I wait for the chopper.

I make ice cream. This is what fills my days, along with shooting and squirrel hunting.

I try not to look at the news, but sometimes I do. Yesterday I saw that Elizabeth Warren is trying to get a wealth tax through congress. Who predicted that? Don’t hurt yourself trying to find the answer. It was me.

Income taxes and other taxes are bad, but wealth taxes are the supreme taxation evil. When they tax your income and your purchases, you still have some hope of retiring and dying in comfort. When they come for what you already paid tax on, the world crumbles under your feet and you have to consider unthinkable futures such as one in which you share a big, dirty room with other paupers in a government-run assisted living facility.

Warren is going after the “ultra-rich,” of course. When you pass totalitarian measures, you have to start by attacking segments of the population who have very few votes. She wants to take 2% of what they have. So if you have a billion-dollar net worth, kiss $20 million goodbye, in cash, in addition to the death tax your kids will have to pay. If you have to close your business or borrow to keep it going, so sorry. Not all billionaires have a lot of cash.

What happens if inflation makes us all “ultra-rich”? What if everyone is a billionaire in 5 years?

The Germans used to use wheelbarrows full of paper money to buy groceries because little things cost millions of marks.

It will be amusing to see how leftist tycoons react. I can’t lie. I hope I can prevent myself from reading about it. Nearly all wealthy leftists are hypocrites. They will not like the sensation when the tiger they fed bites their hands and chews off their fingers. It’s not at all like the gentle kissing of their posteriors which they have become used to.

Redistribution of land is already underway in some places. California has passed laws against single-family zoning. If things go as planned–think about this–Barbra Streisand’s neighbors should be able to build poverty apartments a few feet from the walls of her estate. It’s impossible for me not to find the prospect amusing. What will leftist elites in walled compounds do when their friends start building low-income housing right next door in order to enhance their social credit? I wonder how Cher will take it when rap music is hammering at her windows at three a.m., furniture and rotten garbage start piling up on her swales, and ladders start popping up on her walls in the middle of the night.

Bel Air and Beverly Hills could become gang territories. Stars might have to go to Ralph’s and Bulgari in armed convoys. I welcome it. I want to see if it will change their minds. But I know it won’t, because they’re ensnared in demonic insanity.

I think some leftist star will build a housing project behind his or her home. I think someone will want to perform a major wokeness display. Probably a star who lives somewhere else but maintains a California house.

Here’s something I’ve noticed about unsuccessful cultures like mine: in unsuccessful cultures, educated people who do well and obey the law are expected to pal around with illiterates and criminals. I’m from Eastern Kentucky, and people there are expected to associate with everyone, regardless of their social station. Black people are the same way. Maybe it’s a supernatural curse, and we’re starting to see it applied to mainstream white Americans.

It’s not a good thing. No one should be proud, but people who are cursed tend to be infectious. Their curses tend to spread. It’s best to associate with blessed people.

I feel as though America is already dead and the scavengers and worms have started to eat the body.

It makes perfect sense. What happened to Jerusalem when it abandoned God? The walls were torn down, men of quality were killed, their sons were taken away and castrated, women were raped, wealth was confiscated, and outsiders moved in and ran things. Biden is dissolving our borders, cursed people are gaining more access to blessed people and their wealth, and the types of people who built America are being persecuted and disempowered.

As for the rapture, what happens when a body dies? Its spirit–the thing that gave it life–goes elsewhere.

I will be surprised if Warren gets her way, because I guarantee you, enraged rich people have been berating their paid-for legislators ever since she opened her trap. Leftist hypocrites are surely squawking the loudest.

I will be surprised, but then I was surprised to see she had the gall to propose the law in the first place. I was surprised when Biden won. I was surprised when we lost the Senate. How can it be that I’m always surprised to see things happen when they’re completely consistent with what I predict?

I hope the law passes. I want to see how the rich react, and I want to see what Congress does. I may learn that I’m an alarmist, or I may find out things are going as I thought they would.

I should get started on the ice cream. I really think it will work this time.

Will 2021 be my Best Year Yet?

I always say there is symmetry in the supernatural, and it’s 100 percent true. The reason I know it must be divine revelation. God has apostles, Satan has witches. God has a body composed of human beings who will rise to be with him in paradise, and Satan has a body which will descend to be with him in agony and humiliation. God has Jesus. Satan has the Antichrist. God has the Holy Spirit. Satan has the Internet and cell phones. You could make a very long list of analogs.

Last year, Satan’s children were thrown into a state of fear, lack, illness, and misplaced,culpable homicidal rage. I, on the other hand, had a beautiful, peaceful year which seemed to indicate a permanent change.

Is it possible that people who listen to God had an anti-2020, and that it will continue?

I’m sitting here wondering what I’m supposed to do. Coronavirus seems like a glue that holds things in place. You can’t go to church, and evangelists are treated like criminals if they try to hold revivals. Social opportunities are drastically restricted. It looks like it’s a very bad time for forming new relationships or starting new projects. The government is descending into true insanity.

The feeling I get is that if you didn’t have it together before the pandemic, you’re probably not going to get it together now.

I like a TV show called Forged in Fire. They take groups of knifemakers and turn them loose with tools. The contestants get limited time periods in which to make knives designed for certain purposes.

Most of the contestants just aren’t very good at using tools. It’s a little disturbing to watch them display their lack of knowledge. Their lack of preparation makes things hard for them, and that means drama. Also, the judges of the show add very difficult challenges to their work. The pressure of doing difficult work while watching a clock adds suspense to the show.

At the end of every time period, the host tells everyone time is up, and he commands them to stop what they’re doing and put down their tools. Whatever they’ve made up to that point is what they have to present to the judges. It doesn’t matter how bad it is.

You can see the parallel. I feel like our work on earth is pretty much done, and that we won’t be able to do much more. It’s just a feeling. I’m not saying I’m sure the feeling is a reliable indicator of mankind’s status with regard to God. I’m just saying it feels as though it were.

What do I do now? I don’t get to pray with people any more. I have no one to help out financially. I can’t go to church. It’s not realistic to travel to revivals and meetings, as I used to. These days, I pray a lot, I try to be improved by God, I look after my earthly responsibilities, I blog and put other material on the web, and I play. I make things with my tools, I shoot, and so on. That’s about it.

I don’t seem to reach anyone new any more. The people who thought they knew better than I did still feel that way, and they will never change. I’m not meeting anyone new.

It’s like the school day is over and I’m waiting for my mom to pick me up. Heaven is a place of rest and pleasure. I seem to be in a place of rest and pleasure now, and it wasn’t something I could have planned or worked for. This is why I wonder if God is giving people who are close to him pleasant times to mirror the miserable times people who ignore him are experiencing.

It really does look like Revelation 22:

He that is unjust, let him be unjust still: and he which is filthy, let him be filthy still: and he that is righteous, let him be righteous still: and he that is holy, let him be holy still.

And, behold, I come quickly; and my reward is with me, to give every man according as his work shall be.

The weird thing about coronavirus is that it’s a very minor plague, yet it has still been extremely effective in keeping us away from each other. Masks and lockdowns don’t work, and if you get sick, you’re nearly certain to have nothing more than a brief, minor illness, yet the irrational, authoritarian bars to free association remain in place and are being strengthened.

It doesn’t make sense. Things that don’t make sense have supernatural origins. We’re not being kept away from each other by politicians. We’re being kept away from each other by spirits that influence politicians. Are they evil spirits? Is it God and his ministering spirits, forcing us to stand down? I don’t know. I just know it comes from the supernatural realm.

Day before yesterday, the final scene from the 1959 film On the Beach popped up in my Youtube recommendations. I took a look at it. In case you don’t know, it’s about a nuclear war. In the movie, the northern hemisphere is blanketed in radioactive air, and everyone there is dead. The movie’s characters are in Australia, waiting to see whether the radiation will kill them, too. I’ve written about this movie before.

The characters try to continue their lives. A dissipated middle-aged lady tries to start a romance so she won’t die alone. The crew of an American submarine tries to find survivors in the northern hemisphere. People go to the beach. They have parties. None of it works. The romance fails, the sub finds no indications of human life, and the radiation starts moving south through Australia, killing people as it goes.

At the end of the movie, the streets are empty. Everyone is at home, taking taxpayer-funded poison in order to avoid dying from radiation sickness. The buildings are there. The man-made objects required for normal life are there. The sun is still rising every day. It’s all for naught. Everything has been abandoned, and nature will eventually destroy it. War has turned every single one of man’s treasured accomplishments into vanity.

The movie portrays Christianity as a security blanket for the fearful. The Salvation Army maintains an outdoor station in front of a public building, and people flock to the building’s steps to be comforted. At the very end of the movie, the steps are deserted, and in a clumsy attempt at anti-military propaganda, the filmmakers show the Salvation Army’s banner, which is swaying in the breeze. It says, “There is still time…brother.”

Nuclear apocalypse movies used to be very, very popular, and leftists manipulated by foreign communists who couldn’t afford to keep up in the arms race used to agitate about disarmament all the time. Now no one seems to have any interest in the subject. The bombs are still there, but leftists have decided to move on, for no apparent reason. The weather, white people, and Confederate flags are the fashionable threats now.

The scenes reminded me of what we’ve been seeing for the last year. Projects abandoned. Businesses needlessly destroyed. In some places, we’ve seen empty streets. We’ve seen many empty malls and stores. I am told that in Miami, people now do whatever they want on the roads (even more than they used to). They drive at furious speeds and completely ignore the traffic laws. Something inside them is telling them obeying the law doesn’t matter any more.

We’re not sitting at home committing suicide, but we are not the active, hopeful people we were in 2019, and it appears that leftist hysteria will continue tightening the shackles. We elected a befuddled old egotist who was unintelligent to begin with, and he is firing off misguided executive orders as though he were being paid by the pound. He seems determined to control us, which is not surprising from a man who has a long history of bullying.

If things continue to get better for me as the centrifuging of society continues, how should I feel about it? I didn’t earn it. I earned the opposite, through sin and arrogance. Someone else bought all this for me with his flesh and blood. All I did was listen and admit I was wrong.

People who are far nicer than I am have had it much worse, and I think that will continue. Christianity was never about being nice. You can be nice while your entire life is an insult to God. Christianity is about being transformed by the Holy Spirit and submitting to him. It’s about listening and being honest. Emotional people who let their hearts rule them are always very dishonest. They hate the truth.

One of the worst things the Bible says about people is that they did what was right in their own eyes. Notice: it doesn’t say they did things they thought were wrong. They had opinions about what was right, and they obeyed their consciences. When the Bible says someone did what was right in his own eyes, it’s a judgment that precedes punishment. People who make up their own ideas about right are wrong are what the Bible calls “workers of iniquity.” They are called “lawless,” even though they obey their own rules. The only law that has any validity is the law of the Holy Spirit. It’s what he tells us to do, moment by moment. You can’t make a fixed list of his laws, because they change. Fixed laws are inferior. They were provided under the old covenant, but they generated evil results because of their lack of flexibility.

I’m not the nicest or kindest person around, but I will still make it when nicer people fail and go to hell for ignoring God. Is it fair? Of course it’s fair. If Jesus wants to be murdered and then give his inheritance to bad people, he has every right to do it. What I get isn’t stolen. It was all paid for. Just not by me.

Leftism is all about taking blessings from people God favors and giving them to people who are cursed because they don’t listen to him. Leftists hate God’s ways. They can’t understand that it’s right for God to treat me better than a politically correct individual who thinks he knows better than God.

For a long time, my impression has been that I would continue to have a better and better life, and that the only real unpleasantness I might have to face would be ostracism (“cancellation”) and death by murder. I’ve felt that the biggest drag on my happiness would be my inability to get other people to listen so they could do well. I have concluded that even the most blessed person on earth will have to suffer from watching other people fail. When someone you know abandons God, lives in misery, and goes to hell, you have to accept the fact that it doesn’t mean you’re not blessed. No matter how much it hurts, you have to realize it didn’t happen to you.

The other day, I was thinking about blessings and what a blessed life should be like. I was unhappy because I knew America was finished, and that we brought it all on ourselves. We could turn and be healed at any time, but we won’t, because we think we know everything. I asked myself: should a Christian ever be unhappy? Then I remembered the shortest verse of the Bible: “Jesus wept.”

If I have a pleasant life and then go to heaven, and every other person on earth suffers and goes to hell, and I suffer from seeing what happens to them, I am very, very blessed. There are some forms of suffering that spare no one.

Day before yesterday, I listened to my friend Mike, who is the worst influence since the GOP let liberal journalists convince it John McCain and Mitt Romney were surefure winners. I’m kidding about Mike, but whenever I have a crazy idea, he tells me to go for it. I foolishly admitted I had been considering getting a very expensive ice cream maker. An hour or two later, my order was in. Why do I talk to him?

This is the kind of thing I concern myself with these days. Toys. Pleasant pastimes. I’m also dedicating myself heavily to prayer, but that’s about it. If there were anything else left to do, wouldn’t God have shown me and helped me get going?

Mike just had a hip replaced, and he quit a job that was killing him. He started a company with a bunch of carnal people, and they gradually pushed him out, which was what I expected. I told him he could come down here to recuperate. He loves this area. He says he wants to get deeply into prayer. He said he wants to play for a while. He used the same word that had been going through my mind.

I have been fooling around with a Christian dating site, but given my view of the world, I wonder if there is any point. I don’t think there is time to build much of a life with anyone. I would be happy to have someone attractive who shares my views and doesn’t want to be alone with the end comes. I wonder if my attitude will make me so unappealing nothing will come of my efforts. I don’t seem to have anything to be concerned about, though, because nearly all of the women I talk to are really foreign scammers. They’re like a hedge of thistles that wall me in, and things like that have supernatural origins. Maybe God is telling me to be content with things as they are.

I look forward to seeing how things pan out, regardless of whether I’m right about things. I want to know what’s happening and get accustomed to it.

Seems Pointless in a Time When Facts Don’t Matter

I have learned that I was wrong about the Capitol riot.

When hyped-up Trump supporters stormed the Capitol, I looked at the news, and what I saw didn’t seem to be as bad as leftists were saying it was. Here is what I saw:

1. An angry crowd broke into the Capitol.
2. Police shot an unarmed woman who was climbing past a security barrier and killed her.
3. One person in the crowd died from a heart attack.
4. A police officer died in some way related to crowd control.
5. The crowd overcame another police officer and put him on the ground but did not kill him.
6. Some idiots went into restricted areas and posed with selfies.
7. A couple of pipes with wires were found in Washington the same day, but no one had established that they were on the scene at the Capitol or that they were bombs.

I thought the death of the unarmed woman looked more like police misconduct than a necessary and natural consequence of the riot. Rioters generally have not been shot for entering government buildings. If police did that, imagine how many dead leftists there would be.

I thought the death of the heart attack victim didn’t have anything to do with the people who entered the Capitol. The press harped on it because it helped them inflate the casualty toll, and that was dishonest.

I found out one other woman was trampled and died, and another man who was somewhere among the DC protestors, or maybe among the rioters, died from a stroke. Back when all the riot news was emerging, I didn’t know about those deaths because they weren’t mentioned in the stories I read. That being said, the woman who was trampled is no different from the people BLM and Antifa have accidentally killed, and the stroke victim shouldn’t even be in the news.

It looks like I’m still right about the woman who was shot and the heart attack victim, so no apology there. I have to add that it’s strange how leftist journalists treated all the conservative casualties as though they were targeted victims of the mob.

I will also say I don’t apologize for saying the riot was overhyped. It was not a coup or an attempt to kill legislators. It was also much gentler than most leftist riots. Amazingly, the rioters went home when they were confronted and scolded. Try that with BLM. Leftist terrorists have attacked local and federal government buildings many times, and they have tried to burn them with government employees inside, and while all that was going on, the press called them “protestors”, and businesses like Amazon signaled their solidarity with them.

Was the riot terrorism? Terrorism is the use or threat of violence in order to force political ends. This riot doesn’t qualify. The participants were generally trying to demonstrate their disapproval of the way the election was handled. There may have been a few hard core types among them who wanted to terrorize, but overall, they were just acting out, and they had no plan to occupy the building, destroy it, take hostages, or kill congressmen. They didn’t intend to frighten the government into overturning the election, and they weren’t trying to scare people into voting conservative.

So what was I wrong about?

First, the cop who was killed did not die in an accident. I have learned that someone hit him with a fire extinguisher. That looks like first-degree murder to me, and since it occurred in a federal district, I assume the death penalty applies. People who murder cops need to be prosecuted. Of course, I’m saying all this with limited knowledge of the facts, so I may be wrong.

Second, the cop who was knocked down says more than one person urged his assailants to kill him with his own gun. The rioters themselves protected him and prevented this from happening, but they should never have battered or restrained him in the first place. They should be prosecuted for whatever battery offense applies, on top of the charges related to breaking and entering, and anyone who suggested killing him should do multiple decades in prison.

I never supported mobbing the Capitol. I think all political rioters should be arrested and prosecuted. Unfortunately, leftist politicians and prosecutors have established a bad precedent by restraining the police and dropping charges for BLM and Antifa, so the picture becomes cloudy when it comes to the DC riot. Surely, right-wing rioters will be treated much worse than leftists, but I think they would be in bigger trouble had left-wing rioters been getting what they deserve.

As for the general climate, things seem to be much worse than the public understands. I like to shoot, so I have alerts set up to help me get ammunition. The alerts tell me when ammo is available. They have been going off less and less frequently. People are really stocking up. I’m also trying to get parts for firearm projects, and the situation is not good. For example, complete upper receivers for AR-15’s are hard to come by. The easiest products to buy are undesirable junk and high-end products no one can afford.

On a lark, I decided to look at 80% gun frames and receivers. These are unfinished, nonfunctional parts you finish at home. The BATF doesn’t consider them guns, so anyone can order them over the web. The supply has really dried up. A gun you complete yourself has no serial number, so if you shoot someone with it and the police find it, the BATF can’t figure out who bought it when it was new. For this reason, these weapons are called “ghost guns.” They appeal to a lot of people who are bothered by the fact that every single numbered gun you buy new can be traced to you by the BATF. Effectively, there is a “ghost registry” through serial numbers.

I thought it might be fun to buy one of these things and finish it, and that’s why I checked their availability. Things have to be getting pretty bad when guns you have to finish manufacturing are hard to get.

Where are all these products going? People aren’t buying them so they can shoot ducks.

Oddly, conservatives are helping the government disempower their fellows. They’re snapping up gigantic quantities of things they don’t personally need, so they can resell them and make money. Having a few extra dollars so you can buy a new bass boat won’t mean much to you if civil war comes and your allies can’t defend themselves effectively.

People have been selling cheap .22 ammo for 50 cents per round. It usually runs about 6 cents. My buddy Mike wanted to get rid of an unfired Marlin Model 60 he had never shot, so he put it on Gunbroker.com. The new value of the gun and scope should be around $225, but he got $375. He also doubled his money on a shotgun he wasn’t using. The gougers and hoarders have made it possible for sellers with perfectly good intentions to reap windfalls.

Tomorrow is inauguration day, and I am longing for closure. If Biden has to be inaugurated, let’s get it over with. It’s as if America went to a rodeo featuring a dozen capable riders and bet on the clown, but okay, let’s put it behind us. What if we don’t get closure, though? What if something happens tomorrow, or what if something happens next week, and it’s so momentous it’s big enough to topple Biden?

I would love to see him knocked out of office. No doubt about it. I also think we may reach the point where reasonable people choose resistance over tyranny. But there is nothing comforting about any likely scenario, except for God’s protection for a few individuals and the possibility of the rapture. No matter what happens, I think things will go badly for America.

Forget That Iceberg; Let’s Dance

It’s a beautiful Saturday, and I am stuck here waiting for a background check so I can pick up my new Anderson Manufacturing AR-15 lower receiver.

Yesterday, it arrived at the pawn shop I always use for transfers. I went in today, after donning the government-mandated China flu face diaper. Of course, I knew what was awaiting me: a group of people who would stare when I walked in. Nobody wears the diaper at that place. I saw I was among friends, and I took mine off.

Prior to the kung flu’s arrival, we had around 120 years of science leading to the conclusion that cloth masks do nearly nothing to prevent the spread of respiratory viruses. Suddenly, a few months after Anthony Fauci told us there was no point in wearing them, the establishment started telling us cloth masks were extremely important. I get a false sense of security when I wear mine, and it serves to shut people up, but the science backing it up appears to rival that supporting the rhythm method.

I feel a little strange walking into stores and banks wearing a mask and carrying a loaded gun and a big knife.

This was my first look at the lower, and I had mixed emotions. The good: I didn’t see any flaws, and it looked like it was manufactured to very high standards. The bad: it’s not as pretty as my other uppers. The actual receiver, meaning the aluminum housing everything attaches to, is very plain. The trigger is ugly. It looks similar to pot metal. It’s mil-spec, though, so it must work. I’m going to replace it as soon as my new trigger arrives, so it doesn’t matter.

The butt stock has already been replaced. The replacement is sitting beside me in a Fedex bag.

Was it a mistake to buy an assembled lower? I don’t know. The price was $10 below MSRP, the manufacturer makes quality receivers, and it was available right away. Replacing the trigger and butt stock will cost me around $130. Should I have bought a receiver without those parts? Could be. I would have had to get the buffer parts and install them, along with the grip, safety, and so on. I should be able to get 5 bucks for the old stock, and maybe I can sell the trigger parts, too.

I thought about people in tyrant-controlled states today. I thought about my cousin, who lives in the Illinois town Kyle Rittenhouse comes from. I feel so bad for them. I expect all of us to be tyrannized soon, but they’ve been putting up with it for decades. I was able to buy lots of guns with no waiting period. I never had to deal with an asinine, dangerous magazine limit. I have loaded up on mail-order ammunition. I’ve had a carry permit forever. I can drive around with a loaded AK in my truck. Florida isn’t perfect, but it could be so much worse.

I’ve been wondering what I’ll do when the civil war gets going. I’ll have to choose a side. I suppose that anyone who lives where I do will have to support the anti-Antichrist side or leave, even if he doesn’t take up arms.

Historically, Americans have chosen war and casualties over peace and tyranny. I think that’s what we’ll do this time, too.

Tyrants force wars to erupt by making people so miserable war looks better than compliance. I believe that’s where we’re headed. Gloating, sadistic statists will take pleasure in making us suffer, and they’ll overdo it. They’ll go after things that are too important for us to give up, and so many of us will be outraged, there will be sufficient support for rebellion.

It’s funny; Americans always seem to support nations that fight for independence, but half of the country opposed the Confederacy. Why is it that states can’t secede? “State” means “nation.” A state that can’t declare its independence isn’t a state. It’s a colony or an occupied territory. Why did the North feel it had the right to subdue the South? I’ve never seen that decision explained well.

It wasn’t because they wanted to rescue the slaves. The US didn’t have a history of trying to rescue slaves in other nations, and emancipation was not on the table when the war started. It had to be about wealth and domination.

The question of whether Americans are prisoners of the union doesn’t seem to come up much, but it looks like the answer is “yes.”

People are accusing Trump supporters of treason, while turning a blind eye to leftist terrorists who call openly for revolution. Personally, I think of treason as something you do to give an enemy an advantage over your nation. Seeking independence doesn’t seem like treason to me.

In America, you can get in very serious trouble for trying to overthrow the government, but should that be true if you’re really just trying to break off a few states? If I try to dethrone the president and Congress and impose a new system for all 50 states, it’s treason, but should it be considered treason if my state and I simply want to break up with the US, while leaving the existing government in charge of the remaining states?

I never thought I’d have to think about these things until recently.

If civil war starts, and I cooperate with the people who are in charge in my area of the country, recognizing their authority, will that make me a criminal?

My great-grandfather fought for the Confederacy, but he wasn’t tried or sentenced as a criminal. The North tried to kill him every day while he was in uniform, but when the war was over, they didn’t go after him.

I’m writing as though there will be a cessation of hostilities followed by reconciliation. That won’t happen this time. The tribulation will start, and things won’t ever go back to normal.

I guess I don’t have to worry about how the union will perceive me in the post-conflict future. I don’t expect that future to exist until the tribulation ends. By then, there will be no union to bother me.

There will be no post-conflict future while the union exists. While the union exists, conflict will be the future.

Anyway, today Donald Trump is my president, and I’m going to go pick up a new lower receiver today or Monday, and eventually, my new upper should arrive. That’s not so bad.

Sufficient until the day is the evil thereof.