Misplaced Passion

Last night brought an interesting dream.

I was at a social event in someone’s house. A young woman came up to me and started asking why a certain young man’s family had allowed him to have firearms after he had been found holding a shotgun to his head. I started saying such decisions should depend on his attitude toward guns, because most gun enthusiasts aren’t thinking about violence when they interact with their collections. But I stopped short, because I realized what I was saying was not applicable in a case in which someone had already shown a desire to kill himself.

In any case, his family wasn’t the problem.

The young woman who was talking to me turned into the young man’s wife, and she pushed me back against a wall and kissed me on the mouth very suddenly, with intensity. I realized she was on fire with love for me. I was shocked. Her features seemed swollen as though her love had inflamed her flesh.

Her husband was dead. She was not being unfaithful. Just bold. Like Ruth.

In real life, the man from the dream is alive and has not threatened to kill himself, and I assume his wife and son are just fine. I have never had any designs on the wife, before or after they married. I barely know her. There could never be any type of romance between us. The very thought is beyond absurd. In the dream, she did not represent herself. She didn’t really look like herself.

Her husband is a music leader and former youth pastor. He’s now part of a church which doesn’t promote the Holy Spirit, so whatever his many virtues are, he is probably not in a position to provide her with the knowledge she needs to move ahead with God. Like Travis, he loves performing in front of crowds, and he loves teaching kids. He’s white, but he was very caught up in black culture when I knew him. Maybe he still is. When you get caught up in black culture, you can end up with the same spiritual problems black people have. By seeking approval from black people, you can end up following instead of leading.

I feel like I’m writing about Travis.

After I woke up, I thought about the dream, and I asked God if it meant anything.

The heat and depth of her love had startled me. I thought of the phrase from the Song of Solomon: “I am sick with love.”

Here is the relevant passage, taken from the Complete Jewish Bible:

Like an apple tree among the other trees in the forest
is my darling among the other men.
I love to sit in his shadow;
his fruit is sweet to my taste.
He brings me to the banquet hall;
his banner over me is love.
Sustain me with raisins, refresh me with apples,
for I am sick with love.
[I wish] his left arm [were] under my head,
and his right arm around me.

It made me think about the way husbands and wives are supposed to feel about each other, as well as the way every person should feel about God.

A couple should be completely unified. The Bible says a man and woman are one flesh. They should have deep intimacy and trust. They shouldn’t wonder about each other’s behavior and intentions when they’re apart. Each should put the other above every other person on earth. Their love for each other should be hot and compelling, not lukewarm.

Our relationships with God should also be intense. God should be number one, even above a person’s spouse. We and God should love each other with burning intensity.

As I thought about this, I got a revelation about my unfaithfulness. I’m serious about God, but I wander off and say and do things I should not do. I see now that this is very much like adultery. I have a partner who is always faithful and trustworthy, and he loves me with limitless heat, without reservation. I don’t live up to my end of the bargain.

It’s disturbing to see things this way. I hate adultery and unfaithfulness. I see adultery as something small-minded, trashy people do, like putting used gum on the undersides of restaurant tables or urinating in swimming pools. Adulterers don’t really love their spouses, and they think their sins against them only matter if they’re revealed.

I already knew oneness with God was like marriage, and I knew God compared unfaithfulness to him with adultery and whoring, but it hit home with more strength this morning.

The fact that a firearm suicide was part of the dream made me think about my friend Travis, who died following an accidental shooting.

Travis was not suicidal, but there were self-destructive elements in his life. He never gave up secular music. He never gave up his long list of maladjusted, ungodly, fake friends. He also stayed in Miami even though he knew it was poisoning him.

Travis was a wonderful person, but as someone who loved him pointed out to me, one reason he held onto things that hurt him was that he wanted the admiration of people he knew. Had he left Miami, he would have had to start over somewhere else as a nobody. Many people in South Florida admired him, and he did not want to give that up.

He was not completely honest with himself, and I know he was somewhat different around me than he was with other people. One mistake he made was trying to remain part of the black social justice culture, which is founded on a false victimhood complex. In private, he said this mindset was wrong, but he still used a photo of Colin Kaepernick for a Facebook avatar. I’m not saying the police don’t brutalize people from time to time. It’s the victimhood mindset I’m against.

People who wallow in victimhood are manipulators, and they don’t examine their own contribution to their problems. They don’t grow. They rot.

We all know what happened to Lot’s wife. Our commitment to God has to have depth. We can’t hold onto things from which he wants to free us.

I’m not condemning Travis. I’m just stating facts that matter.

So what does the dream mean? Maybe I’m supposed to take over for Travis. Maybe there is someone he ministered to, and I am going to have to fill his shoes. If so, based on what happened in the dream, that person is extremely thirsty for help.

Maybe it’s more than one person.

I have to hold onto this revelation. I can’t continue mistreating God. It’s vile and unthinkable, but I have done it over and over. If I wouldn’t cheat in an earthly relationship, why would I cheat on God, who allowed himself to be tortured to death for me?

I’m already doing things Travis used to do. There were a couple of young ladies he thought of as marriage prospects, and I ended up texting them a lot. One of them called me unexpectedly the other day, and we had a long conversation. She is disgusted by the people he knew. She lives near Miami, but she has no intention of going to the funeral. Both of us feel that it will be a disgraceful display of false love, from people who did little or nothing for him while he was alive.

She needs someone who isn’t totally useless to tell her things that will help her stay close to God after a major disruption. Travis is actually the third person she’s lost this year, so she really needs something to balance things out.

I thought I wouldn’t hear much from her after Travis died, but I was wrong about that.

While I was typing this, another mutual friend called. He was weighing the pros and cons of going to the funeral. He used to live in Miami, and he hates it. He is disgusted with Trinity Church and Travis’s phony friends. When his son was a baby, he got a big burn on his face in Trinity’s nursery, and the leadership shut him and his wife out when they went to the pastors. Seemed to me they were lawyering up instead of doing the right thing.

My friend isn’t going to the funeral. He made up his mind. He and his family will be here soon for a visit, though.

Rules and doctrine have taken the love out of Christianity. We put these things up like a lattice, and Jesus has to look through it to see us. Now that I think about it, the Song of Solomon agrees: “My darling is like a gazelle or young stag. There he is, standing outside our wall, looking in through the windows, peering in through the lattice.”

We’re supposed to know God personally and have extremely intense feelings for him.

It would be nice if we could go to churches and hear these things. Instead we have to wait for dreams.

Democrats Killed the Small Gas Engine

Today’s amazing news: sonic cleaners work.

I have three chainsaws, two gas blowers, and a gas weed eater. Thirty years ago, these were great things to have. Now owning them is torture because Democrats force us to use inferior gas tainted with ethanol. It turns out ethanol is a great fuel for political campaigns, but it ruins small engines, and it’s not great for large ones, either.

Here is what Husqvarna says about using ethanol gas: “It is recommended that you replace gas in your fuel tank every 2-3 weeks to avoid alcohol and water related engine issues.”

I have 6 small engines. I never know when I’m going to need to use one. Nonetheless, if I use gas station fuel, I’m expected to maintain a strict schedule of replacing fuel in every tank, and “replacing” doesn’t just mean you can pour it out. You have to run every engine dry, and then you have to run them dry with ethanol-free fuel.

Obviously, I am not going to turn my life upside-down so I can nanny a bunch of yard tools. I buy ethanol-free gas, I add the best ethanol-fighting additive I can buy, and I buy new carburetors when I have problems.

A stock carburetor for a typical chainsaw runs somewhere in the neighborhood of $100. They’re made in China. They’re not very good. Even if ethanol doesn’t plug them up, the diaphragms rot. It’s not like you’re doing yourself a big favor by buying OEM.

The same carburetor, made in the same country and sold by a different company, will generally cost you under $15, along with a new fuel filter, a spark plug, and some other useful junk, such as gaskets. My belief is that any time you buy a small engine, you should buy a Chinese carb off Ebay just so you’ll be ready for the inevitable. Some carbs are a pain to replace, but many pop in and out in 10 minutes, with no tools except for a screwdriver.

I am a huge fan of Chinese Ebay carbs, but I know have an even better weapon: the sonic cleaner. I saw a Youtube video about using them on carbs, and I saw my destiny unfold before me. I needed a sonic cleaner anyway. A sonic cleaner, like a welder or a mill, is a superpower tool. It lifts you to new levels most men will never reach.

My pole saw pooped out a few weeks back, due to ethanol. I can’t recall whether the carb is Chinese. I have a dead-carb collection. Maybe one of them came from the pole saw. Anyhow, by the time it died, I had a 15-liter sonic cleaner. I filled it with hot water, partially disassembled the carb, sealed it in a jelly jar full of gas, and gave it the business. Today I reinstalled it. No problems.

Of course, in order to check it, I had to put fuel in it, so once I confirmed that it ran, I had to empty the fuel, run it dry, and so on. Even non-ethanol fuel should be removed from a carb before you put a tool away.

I didn’t have total confidence in the effect of running the saw dry, because, believe it or not, you can run one dry and still have problems later. My solution was to run some Sea Foam through it. Sea Foam is an engine treatment made from mineral oil and secret ingredients. It’s supposed to be great for engines. I am hoping it can’t congeal like gas.

I wanted to use my weed eater today. It refused to start even though it has never seen ethanol. Today’s gas supposedly contains things that can plug an engine even without ethanol’s help.

I popped the carb off, stuck it in the sonic cleaner, and gave it 25 minutes at 53° Celsius. I picked 53 arbitrarily. Then I gave it another 25 minutes. I’m about to reinstall it.

I’m planning to get some of the Gucci premixed gas they sell at Home Depot. It’s supposed to be better than ethanol-free. My plan is to run engines dry, add a little Gucci gas, and run them dry again. It’s a giant pain, but it’s not as bad as taking saws apart and working on the carbs. I don’t know if it will work.

It seems like there is something special about the climate here. Small engine carbs just don’t like it. People from other areas tell me they use gas station gas and never have problems. I can’t explain what’s happening, but I’m not imagining my problems.

I may get some Gucci gas tonight. You can’t use it all the time, because it costs $20 per gallon. That’s over six times the cost of ethanol-free.

Replacing carburetors is actually cheaper than using this stuff.

You can use sonic cleaners for jewelry and a whole bunch of other things. A big one will run you around $150, but having a superpower is worth it.

Maybe the weed eater will run tonight, and if so, maybe I’ll be able to use it to clear the beautyberry bushes out of the shooting lane in my pasture. I sure hope so, because otherwise I’ll have to attach the bush hog to the tractor, and attaching the driveshaft will probably be a one-hour job all by itself. Having a quick hitch on your tractor is great, but if your driveshafts are torture devices, it doesn’t help much.

Get yourself a sonic cleaner. Feel the power.

Asphalt Looks Better Every Day

Winter was very disappointing. Where I live, the daily highs should be below 80 from November through March, and there should be a lot of days below 70. This year, we got plenty of roasting-hot days in the 90-degree neighborhood. When that happens, you feel cheated, because while summer can trespass on winter and ruin it, there is no possibility we will have cold days in the summer to make up for it.

Now that temperatures are high and we’re getting occasional rain, the grass has started growing. The lawnmower and I are resuming our romance.

Today the mower would not start. I got a click, and that was it. I put a charger on the battery and went to brush the pool.

When I finished brushing the pool, I tried the mower again. It ran. I mowed most of the yard, and then I got off the mower to move a branch. My mower has a seat switch on it that turns the engine off when I get off, but I bypassed it because it’s unbearable. Because the engine was still running when I got off to grab the branch, I disengaged the PTO so the blades would stop spinning.

When I got back on the mower, the PTO would not reengage. I could still ride the mower, but I couldn’t cut anything.

I guess this is what happens when you mow as rarely as I have been mowing.

I almost shut the mower down to look it over, but it occurred to me that it might not start, and I was at least 100 yards from the area where I park it. I drove it back to its spot and shut it down. Of course, it would not start again. I got idiot lights but no starter, no PTO, and no headlights.

I did what I always do. I checked Internet forums. I found a wide array of problems and solutions.

I found out oxidation could cause the mower to act this way. My battery cables had some kind of hard oxide inside the terminals. I had to remove it with a Dumore grinder and carbide burr. I lost my battery brush, which would have done the job in 10 seconds, so this is what I had to resort to.

I let the mower charge while I had lunch, and when I tried the key again, it worked.

I can never decide whether this mower is junk or not. It’s impossible to work on, and it seems much more complicated than it needs to be. It’s full of engineering errors. On the other hand, I believe it’s 28 years old, and it should run for another 20. The John Deere 430 is hard to kill. It’s way too easy to shut down, but it’s hard to kill.

I was unhappy about the failure to start, because I had a special task in mind for today. I wanted to go to the pasture and cut a bunch of weeds that were in an area where I wanted to shoot.

I shoot into a berm made from sand taken from a pond. On one side of the berm, there are no trees within 100 yards. On the other side, there is a nice wooded area, which is exactly where I want to be when I shoot on hot days. Between the wooded area and the berm, there are blackberry and beautyberry bushes. Today I attacked the beautyberries while trying to spare as many blackberry briars as I could. Blackberries are useful. Beautyberries are pathetic. People eat them, but I think they’re trying to prove something. They don’t taste good.

I found that the beautyberry bushes were not easy to remove with a mower. They fold over so low the blades don’t make good contact. But with persistence, I improved my view of the berm a great deal. I suppose I’ll have to attach the bush hog to the tractor and do it right. Either that or I’ll have to use the brush blade on my gas weed eater.

How much do you want to bet the weed eater starts after several months of idleness? Ethanol gas makes it very difficult to keep machinery running here. Even treated ethanol-free gas lets me down a lot.

When I get my shooting lane cleared, I’ll move my targets. I’ll be shooting from east to west instead of the other way around. Right now, I shoot toward a highway. It’s totally safe, but I would feel better shooting toward the big lot full of trees to the west of my land.

My pasture is dish-shaped, so even without the berm, from either direction, I am shooting toward the ground. That’s a nice feature.

I don’t know how people driving on the road would feel if they knew a guy was shooting a 10mm pistol in their general direction, but then they do 70 with cars coming toward them in the left lane at the same speed, and they don’t freak out about that.

Maybe I should have a policy of restricting shooting to experienced shooters. I will never fire a round over the berm, but women and kids do amazing things with firearms.

I feel as though my enthusiasm for life is returning, 9 days after my personal tragedy. I let a lot of things go while Travis was in the hospital, and my motivation was even worse after he died. I seem to be getting more done now.

As I have written before, I believe joy, as used in the Bible, means something other than ordinary happiness. I believe it’s connected with results and expectations. For example, the Bible says, “Weeping may endure for a night, but joy comes in the morning.” That describes a type of happiness which is related to relief. The word “rejoice” comes from “joy,” and it’s always connected to an event. Something hoped for happens, or something dreadful ends, and people rejoice.

The Bible says, “The joy of the Lord is our strength.” That’s literally true. If you have joy, you expect good things to happen. It gives you motivation to keep going and get things done.

Depression is the absence of joy. It’s discouragement. This is why depressed people kill themselves. They don’t expect things to change for the better.

I had been expecting to rejoice when Travis left the hospital. Instead, joy was taken from me, and I didn’t have the strength to do all the things I should have done.

It may seem strange to get this upset by the death of a friend. I may not have written enough about Travis to give people an understanding of how close we were. I would feel bad if any of my friends died, but Travis was like a family member.

This morning I asked God for joy. It appears it worked. I got the pool in order and mowed the yard, and had the lawn tractor behaved, I would have gotten more done.

I’m coming back to life, and I guess most of the world feels the same way. COVID-19 is going away. Leftists are unhappy about it, because they think the disease will put Biden in the White House, but it’s happening. People are going to work. We can’t play hooky forever.

Leftists say there will be a huge second wave. If that’s true, where is it? Right now, the epidemic is disappearing in places that reopened, and areas that are locked down continue to have problems. Reopened areas are not getting second waves, but locked-down areas seem to be prolonging the first one.

If there’s going to be a second wave, why hasn’t China had one?

Right now, the main reason the numbers look as bad as they do is the local epidemic in Brazil. I don’t know if they got the bug later than the rest of us or what, but their figures are very bad. The numbers keep rising. The other major nations are doing great.

I am determined to keep cutting back on looking at the news, but I still see things. I saw that leftists were going after Trump for using hydroxychloroquine, the quinine substitute some countries use to treat covid. They’re furious at him for taking it. They keep citing studies which suggest it doesn’t work. They don’t seem interested in the opinions of competent doctors who think it does.

Why do they care what he takes? What possible reason could they have for objecting? These are the same people who think we should all be able to get marijuana prescriptions for anxiety. Not just marijuana, but cigarette marijuana which damages lungs and gives off secondhand smoke. They think drugs should be legalized. All except one, I guess.

They excoriated Trump for not wearing a mask. They wanted him to wear something they thought would protect him, even though they certainly did not want him to be protected. Now he’s doing something to protect himself, and they’re angry about that.

One of the great things about Trump is that he knows it makes no difference at all what he says or does. When he goes against the left, they pour vitriol over him. When he does what they want, the response is the same. The result: he pays no attention. He actually needles them to make it worse. Needling people is a vice, but it shows how little their raving bothers him. I think he enjoys it.

Trump gets annoyed in the short term, but you can tell he forgets all about it 15 minutes later. I guess that’s why his blood pressure is good.

Leftists are all over the web saying Trump lied when he said the White House physician gave him the drug. The physician had to write a note, correcting them. He took responsibility and endorsed the use of hydrochloroquinine in Trump’s case. I wonder what they’re saying now. They’re probably calling him a quack.

Maybe they’re saying the note is forged.

Watching Trump reminds me of my own experiences. God knew before I was born that I belonged to him. Whatever my faults were, I was not cut out to be a child of darkness. No matter how much I tried to fit into the body of Satan, I couldn’t do it. I was always rejected, trolled, and mistreated. I have often wondered why people constantly popped up to attack me. I didn’t always know my status as a child of God was the reason.

What Trump goes through is very similar. There is absolutely no way to make the people who hate him happy. They will never make peace, admit fault, or forgive.

Sooner or later, you have to quit worrying about being liked. Jesus never worried about it. He said incredibly harsh things to people. He was extremely rude. I don’t think Christians should make rudeness a goal, but we ought to be truthful. We should lead instead of following.

I just read a book by Anthony Bourdain, the chef who died by his own hand in France two years ago. Bourdain was a lover of the pleasures of the flesh.

He was a wonderful writer. His book is very entertaining.

As I read, the thing that struck me about Bourdain was that he was the perfect child of darkness. He was a complete follower. He accepted every vice you can think of. He devoured the corrupt ethos of the people around him like a starving dog on a bowl of chicken livers. I don’t think he ever had an original thought, and maybe that’s why he was not a great chef. Running a kitchen well is only part of being a great chef. You also have to be creative. Bourdain was not. He admitted he was a very ordinary chef.

His description of culinary professionals is revolting. According to him, big-city kitchens are full of sexual deviants, criminals, drug addicts, alcoholics, men who molest other men on the job, thieves, and liars. They are astonishingly nasty to each other. They hurl filthy insults at each other all day. They brutalize each other physically. They enjoy abusing and breaking each other.

Bourdain wrote about this atmosphere with tremendous enthusiasm. He couldn’t get enough of it. He savored it and wallowed in it. When he was a newcomer, he saw how vile older cooking professionals were, and instead of choosing another job, he was filled with drive to become like them. It’s as though they were father figures and he was trying to live up to their debased standard in order to prove something to himself.

He was like a kid who went to a “scared straight” program and thought, “THESE ARE MY PEOPLE!”, and did his best to go to prison.

He was a man of the earth. No doubt about it. He was programmed to go to hell. He was made for it. Hell fits him like a bespoke suit. He was Jewish, which means he was descended from Abraham, but he preferred the other side.

When I say hell fits him, I don’t mean he’s not likable. He is. But he lived like a joyous pig rolling in week-old garbage. I don’t think anything could have changed his attitude. Depravity and misery brought him pleasure. He could never have turned to God, because righteousness appalled him.

There are two families on earth, and only two, and every person belongs to one of them.

When people die, they go exactly where they belong. There is no injustice to it. God may not have created hell for people, but plenty of people fit in beautifully there.

As the decline of the world accelerates, we’re going to see huge numbers of people ganging up on God, Christians, Jews, and Israel. They will be more and more direct and bold in their attacks on God himself. We’re going to marvel at them, and many of us will feel that we have to do something. We’ll think something must be wrong because so many people are competing to get into hell. Nothing will be wrong. We’ll be seeing people who belong in hell, establishing their credentials.

I don’t mean we shouldn’t love them or hurt for them. I’m just saying we’ll be seeing something that makes perfect sense.

We’ll be seeing the Bourdain mindset, sweeping over multitudes.

That was quite a digression, but I won’t delete it.

I feel as if COVID-19 were a sorting mechanism, like a cream separator. It’s doing a great deal to divide people into pro-God and anti-God factions. I don’t think the world will be the same afterward. Some people think masks and social distancing will be the big changes. I don’t think so. I think covid is pushing many, many people into the arms of the Beast. It’s teaching them to cling to the government nipple, trust the state without reserve, and jettison their rights as though they were dirty diapers. It seems like far fewer people are being driven in the opposite direction.

I suspect the main changes will be in people’s attitudes toward governments, rights, God, and those who believe in God.

If we’re really getting close to the end, we should expect all the signs Jesus spoke of. We already have one very strong sign. He said it would be as the days of Lot and the days of Noah. Perversion and wickedness abounded in those days. Genesis said a homosexual rape mob in Sodom tried to violate two angels.

Luke 21 contains the description Jesus gave of the end times. It looks like a lot of the things that have to come to pass haven’t transpired yet. It looks like the rapture can’t come this week or this year, but next year can’t be ruled out.

Enough of that. I’m glad I’m feeling more like getting things done.

Deposits May be Illegal Soon

Yesterday I finished making about 500 .45 cartridges. I say “about” because the actual number is 498. I believe I have finally run out of brass.

I decided to do something about the monumental pile of 9mm brass which is occupying space in my home. I ordered 500 semiwadcutter bullets. I read that semiwadcutters are pretty versatile. They make nice holes in targets, and they are better for self-defense and hunting than round nose bullets.

The semiwadcutter is based on the wadcutter bullet, which should be no surprise. A wadcutter is a cylindrical bullet. The flat face cuts nice round holes in targets, making the holes easier to see. Wadcutters don’t always feed well in semiauto guns because they’re short and flat on the ends. A semiwadcutter has a cone on the front, and the cone has a flat face on it. The longer bullet helps with feeding.

The cost for my ammunition will not be far from what I would pay for factory rounds, but my ammunition should be more accurate. Since it’s for practice, that matters to me.

I started using a Powder Cop on my press. This is a device which sits in a press station. There is a rod in the middle of it, and when a cartridge is raised to the top of the press, the rod hits the powder charge, which lifts it up. If the charge is correct, the rod rises to the right level. If not, it doesn’t. There is a white ring near the top of the rod, and you can set it so it’s level with the top of the Powder Cop when the charge is correct.

The most important thing a Powder Cop does is to alert you when you put a double charge in a shell. A double charge can make a gun blow up. A Powder Cop will also tell you when you have a low charge. That’s not as big a deal, but it’s still important. A weak charge can cause a bullet to stick inside a barrel. If you fire another round without clearing the barrel, your barrel may explode. A bright person will not shoot a weak round without stopping to examine his gun, but not everyone is careful.

Do I like the Powder Cop? No. Not for pistol rounds with short cases. My press is mounted low, so I can’t help seeing into the casings as they go by. It’s very obvious when there is a problem with a charge. I’m used to looking into the casings, so it’s hard to remember to look at the Powder Cop.

Does this mean the Powder Cop is a bad invention? No. Most people mount their presses high, which seems like a mistake. They can’t see into casings. Also, there are types of ammunition that have deep casings, and you can’t expect to see the charges clearly.

Here is what I think. A smart person would rig up a couple of electrical contacts on the Powder Cop. If the rod rose too high, the Powder Cop would close a circuit and sound an alarm or turn a light on. It would not be easy to rig it up for low charges, because the rod goes below the low-charge line every time a round is lowered, but oversized charges are the big problem, and an electrical alarm would tell you about them.

If I put an alarm on the Powder Cop, I won’t have to stare at it consistently.

I suddenly have a good deal of ammunition. I don’t say “a lot.” My notions of how much ammunition a person should have are changing.

I used to feel rich if I had two boxes of ammo for a given caliber. Now I’ve been through two ammunition panics: the Obama panic and the covid panic. I have seen how fast the supply can dry up. Once Democrats take over, it will dry up permanently. When you buy ammunition now, you shouldn’t ask yourself how much you’ll need this weekend. You should ask yourself whether you can accept doing without this or that caliber for the rest of your life. If not, start buying.

It’s not hoarding. True hoarding is something selfish people do, to the detriment of others, during a crisis. If you start stockpiling ammunition now, while the shortage is easing, you won’t hurt anyone else.

You should probably have 10,000 rounds of every caliber you consider important and expect to shoot frequently. That’s for old people. If you’re 25, maybe 40,000. You can’t just think about rounds you’ll carry or use for hunting. You’re going to need to practice, and you will want to be able to give ammunition away sometimes. People you care about are not going to prepare. And you will want to leave something to your family.

You probably can’t afford that much ammunition. You could spend $40,000 on one rifle. You should think about your future and decide what your best choices are.

You can get 10,000 rounds of AK ammunition for about $2,000. That’s not a lot of money at all, for a very important future-proofing purchase. The ammunition is very useful. It’s fantastic for self-defense, and you can even shoot deer with it. The AK-47 is like a .30-30.

A lot of people prefer the AR-15. I don’t know if it will be as useful. I’m not a deer hunter, but I’ve read that the AR-15 is marginal for anything bigger than a coyote. There must be something to it, because some states won’t let you shoot deer with one.

Here’s what I think: with 7.62x39mm, you have no doubt. With .223, not so much.

I am sitting on a nice pile of .22 LR. I think it’s something everyone should have. It’s very cheap, you can hunt anything up to a wild pig with it, it’s great for target practice, and you can even use it for self-defense if you have to. I think I should seal up my .22 LR boxes and leave them alone. I can buy new boxes for shooting and leave the stockpile on the shelf.

Maybe it’s best to think of your ammunition reserves as your ammunition IRA.

The upshot of all this contemplation: I still need to make and buy ammunition. I should also spend a couple of hundred bucks on bullet molds so I can cast bullets.

Preparation may not help once they pass laws against ammunition possession, but you do what you can.

I have no interest in holing up in my house and shooting at law enforcement agents or murderous leftist “zombies,” but I want to continue shooting and hunting, and I would like to have some capacity for defending myself and others.

Yesterday while I was reloading, I listened to the Bible. I heard the account of Jesus’ betrayal. It’s funny how you can hear the Bible over and over and still find new things in it. Here’s what I heard: when the worthless snakes from the temple showed up to arrest Jesus, they asked him who he was, he identified himself, and they all fell to the ground. How about that? He knocked them off their feet with supernatural authority. He showed them they were at his mercy.

He proved he was God, and they got up and arrested him anyway. He humiliated them and made it clear that they were on the wrong side, but they refused to take the opportunity to repent. They condemned themselves.

Peole like to say Jesus was captured, but that’s a damnable lie. He surrendered willingly, and he could have freed himself whenever he wanted.

It seems very clear to me that God wants American Christians to own guns, but I think it’s very unlikely that he endorses the idea of having last-ditch shootouts with our enemies. I suspect he wants us to show that when we are taken and imprisoned and killed, it’s by our consent.

Some conservatives and Christians actually seem to look forward to killing their enemies. That can’t be a holy mindset.

I suppose people are getting tired of reading about the death of my friend Travis. They can always start their own blogs. Today I learned he will have a funeral on May 30. There is no information about the location. It was announced on Facebook. I don’t have an account, and I am not starting a new one.

I hope they’re not doing it at Miami’s Trinity Church or The COOL Church, which is a depressing Trinity branch headed by Travis’s friend Terrance. Seeing Trinity’s leaders posturing at his funeral would be like watching vultures and maggots defile a dead soldier. Terrance cared about Travis, but don’t ask me to vouch for the rest.

I’m not planning to attend. I was very involved with Travis when he was alive. I don’t need to show up now and only pretend I cared. Let the dead bury the dead, as someone once said. Whatever I was supposed to do for Travis is done or not done. There is no changing it now.

Travis won’t look down and count the people at the funeral. He will not even know it took place. He has already moved on to something much, much better. He is not sitting beside Jesus feeling bad because I don’t want to go to his funeral.

Certain people may say nasty things about me if I’m not there, but they do that already, and anyway, they are permanently out of my life. I’ve gotten along fine without their love for 8 years.

I did without it while I was a member of the church.

Trinity’s leaders are a mess, but many of the people are even worse. The best people left. Here’s an example of the kind of thing I might have to deal with. I put up a Youtube video and talked about Travis’s life and death, and someone put this comment up: “WE DON’T EXPECT YOU TO UNDERSTAND IF YOU’RE NOT BLACK SO WHAT’S YOUR POINT!”

There is no possibility that person watched the video.

It’s not someone who was close to Travis. I know all their names.

I really lost a lot when I lost my prayer partner. I am asking God for a replacement. They don’t grow on trees. It’s as if Teller died and Penn had to find someone who could do what he did.

Now that I have the reloading process working well, I may stop posting about firearms so much. I may move to electronics for a while. I have not decided.

They Knew Things were Bad when he Knitted Little Colt Sweaters for his Parrots

Today’s exciting challenge: forming a plan for 9mm target ammunition. I’m still not done with .45 ACP, but I will be soon.

I have a couple of 9mm Glocks, and they’re pleasant to shoot. They’re very accurate, and they don’t beat me up. I also have a lot of 9mm brass and maybe 200 Laser Cast bullets. I feel like I need to get rid of the bullets.

I can’t recall making 9mm ammunition, but I have a nearly-empty box of bullets, so it must have happened. I don’t have a recipe. Today I started looking around for one. I don’t want super-hot +P loads for target use. Seems like there is no point. I do want a little recoil, because it makes no sense to practice with ammunition which is way easier to shoot than the real thing. Sure, I shoot .22 pistols, so maybe I’m a hypocrite, but it seems to me that when you shoot a big bore gun, you ought to teach yourself to handle recoil.

I keep wanting to look at new powders. Unfortunately, whenever I look for new recipes, I keep coming back to what I already have: Unique and Accurate No.7. It seems like they do everything. No.7 is really hard to get away from. It’s great for .38 Super, 10mm, and 9mm.

I would like to stop using Unique in calibers other than .45 ACP because it’s dirty. I need to shoot up the vast supply I have on hand, but I don’t want to get crud on every pistol I own, so I figure it’s best to sacrifice .45 ACP.

But wait! I just read something online. An article says Unique isn’t actually dirty. What?

The article says Unique used to be nasty, to the point where unburned grains interfered with the way guns worked. At around the turn of the century, Alliant (the manufacturer) introduced a new, cleaner formula.

If this is true, why does my 1911 always have black residue on it?

Is it possible the residue actually comes from somewhere else?

The lead bullets I shoot come covered with greasy wax. Is it possible this stuff turns into a mist, gets contaminated with soot and then sticks to the gun?

I suppose that is not the explanation. I shoot the same brand of bullets from my stainless .38 Super, and it’s very clean. Unique must be dirty.

Makes me wonder what it was like before they cleaned it up.

Is it really a good idea to make 9mm target ammunition? I should try to find out. Let’s see. I have free brass, so that saves me about 15 cents per round. That means I save $7.50 per box. But I can buy target ammo with brass cases for $9.00, or 18 cents per round. I have 4 boxes I bought for $7.85 plus tax, so it was even cheaper.

Bullets are nearly 7 cents each, or $3.50 per box. Primers run, call it 4 cents, so $2.00 per box. Powder is around 1.5 cents, or 75 cents per box. So $6.25 per box for homegrown 9mm, or $13.75 if I use new brass.

Depending on the breaks, I save between two and four dollars per box compared to factory ammunition. Not a huge savings.

On the other hand, I get very accurate ammunition, I know exactly what’s in it and what it will do, and I get the fun, knowledge, and skill. The knowledge and skill could be important some day. They could make it very hard for us to get ammunition in the future.

I don’t know why homegrown shoots better than factory, but it’s true. Maybe not all the time. Some factory stuff is super-accurate. It’s true for pistol ammunition, at least for me.

I can do better on price if I get a few bullet molds. Lead will always be cheap or free. A good mold runs something like $40, which is far from free, but by the time you’ve made 1000 rounds, you’ve saved around twice the price of the mold, which makes me wonder why I’m not doing it already.

Lead ammo is not useless, even if it’s inferior to jacketed. You can hunt with it. Squirrels and rabbits can’t tell it’s lead. It may not be optimal for self-defense, but it’s still very good. It worked just fine during the Civil War. It still incapacitates a lot of bad people today.

If I were a prepper, I guess I’d stock up on jacketed ammo in a few calibers, but I think it would also be smart to stock up on reloading stuff. Powder and primers are not things you can reasonably expect to make at home.

If things ever got really bad, hunting would become very important, and the hunting laws would be ignored. People would shoot game, and they would also look for ways to eat things like coons, coyotes, and crows. You can eat just about anything made of meat. There are bobcat recipes out there. I guess a feral cat would work just as well, as would a feral dog. They’re pretty abundant.

Mmm. Thoughts of a tasty dystopian future. Cat a l’orange. One more thing that would draw us closer to China.

Crows are supposedly delicious. Soylent Crow.

I don’t think I’ll have problems in the future with ammunition data. In the past, I didn’t do much in the way of taking notes, so I floundered when I started making ammo again. Now I’m acting like the scientist I allegedly am. I write something every time I make ammo, and I include anything that could be relevant. That’s how science works. If you’re really serious, you don’t just record the reagent and the amount and the temperature and so on. You record the type of wood the lab bench is made from.

Don’t laugh. An important discovery in nuclear physics involved something that happened when an experiment was performed on a wooden bench.

I haven’t written down what I was wearing or what kind of bulbs were in the overhead lights, but I record very minor things, such as an incident where debris clogged up my primer-seating punch.

I guess my reloading notes could be used by our future hipster/millennial rulers when they round us up to try us for whatever offenses they can make up. “He made 3000 bullety things, and it also says he ate red meat. EeEeeWWwwWWWwwwWWW!”

What else is happening? I think a lot about love these days. A week or so ago, I was putting Marv back in his cage, and he got very emotional and started nuzzling me with his head. He did not want to go. It made me think about what this world was supposed to be. It was created to be a place where love was like a persistent fog no one could escape.

How often do preachers talk about that? We have completely lost sight of it, but love is the single most important thing in the universe. The physical world and the human race were created so God could have a huge family tied together by love. That’s the only reason. You can cite other purposes, but they all stem from his intention to create a family. Remove love, and they all disintegrate.

We’re very busy attending to responsibilities. We have to work. We have to get the necessities of life. We educate ourselves. We deal with our problems and our human enemies. We also spend a lot of time doing frivolous things to make ourselves happy and reward ourselves for the other things we do. We don’t have a lot of time to lie back on our recliners and think about loving other people. We don’t share affection all that much, with other people or with God.

It’s perverse, if you consider the reason why we’re here. It’s as though God put us here to be farmers, but instead of growing things, we spent all our time polishing our tractors and decorating our barns.

I wonder if the church can change. We focus on rules. We expend a lot of effort trying to do things to impress God. We spend a lot of time criticizing unbelievers without presenting them with solutions. When they look at us, they often see anger and stress, not love.

Some of us are leftist Social Justice Warriors, which is incredible. How could anyone be that wrong?

Satan is great at misdirection. He gets us to prioritize the wrong things.

My friend Travis died a week ago today, and it has been rough, but something good came of it. I got together with a group of people so we could pray and try to help him, and we have been communicating a lot. Now we’re closer than we were. Love has been served. I think the effect will persist.

No Mas!

Today and yesterday I worked on reloading .45 ACP target rounds. At them moment, I have about 250 ready to shoot. It’s a nice feeling.

I had a very weird issue with my seating die yesterday. I was having problems seating Wolf primers in old brass with primer pockets that had not been cleaned. Wolf large pistol primers are supposedly a little bigger than other brands. If this is true, it explains why I’m having seating issues.

I’m using Wolf primers because I have a lot of them. Several thousand. I bought them during the Obama panic. I was lucky to get them. My understanding is that Wolf primers are as good as anyone’s, but they have a reputation for being hard to seat and hard to fire. Some primers require a stronger firing pin whack than others. I had some problems with them the other day while shooting 10mm rounds from a Glock, so I decided to quit using them in defensive ammunition. I don’t want to wonder whether a round will go off when a burglar or a particularly surly squirrel is the target.

I’m using Wolf primers for target rounds because I don’t really care whether every single one goes off. I’m shooting them from a 1911, and it seems to like them just fine. No problems. Is this because the 1911 strikes harder? Were my earlier problems caused not by the primer but by pocket lint slowing the movement of my Glock’s firing pin? I can’t say.

Someone has suggested that tight primers sit high in their pockets and that this can cause them to be hard to fire. If that’s the case, maybe the Glock problems were caused by the tight new brass I was using. Maybe the primers were a couple of thousandths away from being completely seated. I can only guess.

I have shot a lot of Wolf ammunition, and it has always been perfectly reliable, even in Glocks. I don’t have much experience with Wolf primers in 10mm Glocks, though.

I’m thinking about my next project. I want to make defensive ammo for the .45. When I got my press, Hornady gave me 1000 free .45 ACP 230-grain XTP hollowpoints. These are not the greatest hollowpoints on earth. It sort of looks like Winchester Rangers hold that title. But they were free, and I fully intend to use them. I will probably use them up on targets, but still, I want to give them respectable defensive velocities.

I looked loads up, and I found that “fast” for this caliber is 900 fps. Whew. That’s even faster than a BB gun. Impressive.

I spent a long time researching loads. I found some info on using a powder called Power Pistol. You can get over 900 fps with it. I looked up other powders and recipes. Toward the end, I really thought I needed Power Pistol. Then I saw a load for…wait for it…Accurate No.7. I can’t seem to get away from this powder. It seems to do everything. I already use it for .38 Super and 10mm.

I have a lot of No.7, so I’ll give it a try. I still need new brass, however, and I think I’ll still get some Power Pistol. You can’t learn much if you don’t try new things.

I read some new information about using handloads for self-defense. As I have noted earlier, there is a big prejudice against using homegrown ammunition. I have taken a dim view of some of the claims, and I don’t feel bad about that, because experience has shown me that gun experts are often fakes or partial fakes, and they often promote nonsense. Yesterday, however, I saw something that seemed to make sense at first. Massad Ayoob, who is not a total idiot, cited a case in which ammunition caused a defendant some trouble. I hadn’t realized such cases existed.

Up front I’ll say that Ayoob is a non-lawyer and therefore limited in the scope of what he can say with any authority. He gives lawyers advice, and he acts as an expert witness, but he sometimes says things that reveal that he doesn’t fully understand how the legal system works. A lot of people are so awed by him that they think everything he says comes from the throne of heaven, but laymen are not lawyers. Ayoob can’t read, or read about, a case and fully understand it. That’s not a dig. It’s reality.

He doesn’t hesitate to write as though he were an attorney, and that is unfortunate, because other laymen can’t perceive his errors and are likely to believe him.

He wrote a long post on a forum, and one of the lawyers who helped him was a civil, not criminal, attorney. This guy was rude to me a number of years back, and I looked him up. It appeared that he was an insurance attorney. Here’s what my dad always said about insurance lawyers: insurers don’t hire the best or the worst. They hire the mediocre. It’s the best balance between cost and results. Look at it this way: if insurance companies had paid the rates my dad and I charged, it wouldn’t have been all that much better than settling. They need okay attorneys with low rates.

I was unfavorably impressed by the things this man wrote, and apart from that, if it’s true that he’s a civil attorney, Ayoob should have consulted with someone else.

My grandfather got rich taking on insurance attorneys, and he is far from alone. What can I say?

The other attorney doesn’t use his real name, and I have not been able to find any reference to his qualifications. For all I know, he could be handling uncontested divorces out of a trailer for $75 each. If he had impressive credentials, I think he would let everyone know. He may not even be a lawyer.

It’s funny, but for all the popularity of gun forums, you rarely see real, serious, qualified criminal attorneys speak up. In fact, I can’t recall seeing it happen even once.

What we have are a part-time New Hampshire cop from a sleepy town, a guy who appears to be the sort of person who shows up when you sue Safeway because you slipped on a banana peel, and a mystery man who does not hold himself out to be a prosecutor, defense attorney, or judge. Ayoob, in spite of his lack of experience with serious crime, is a huge figure in the 2A community. Why isn’t he choosing better collaborators?

I like his work, and it would be neat to take one of his courses (assuming he hasn’t read this), but like Harry Callahan said, a man’s got to know his limitations.

People also worshiped Jeff Cooper, but he seriously believed FMJ was the way to go, and that’s about like putting bias ply tires on a Ferrari.

I’ll describe a case Ayoob mentions. A man named Bias was married to a woman who was mentally ill. One day she was shot in the back of the head in their home. Descriptions of the case vary materially, which is a nice way of saying some are totally wrong. Bias claimed she threatened to kill herself with the gun and that she fired while he tried to disarm her. The prosecution claimed the gunshot residue evidence showed that Bias shot her from a distance. Apparently, there was no GSR on her, and if she had been holding the gun, and if she had been using typical ammunition, there should have been some.

Gunshot residue is the dirty stuff that comes out of a gun barrel along with the bullet. It flies a few feet and no more. If you shoot someone, the cops will test your skin and clothing for GSR.

Bias did not know what kind of charge was in the cartridge that killed his wife. He claimed only light loads were in the gun, but he didn’t know which of several he had made had killed her. The prosecutors supposedly used a similar, but heavier, factory load to show that a lot of GSR would have hit Mrs. Bias had she shot herself. The defense team determined that the types of loads Bias made had to be fired from a much shorter distance in order to leave GSR on the body.

Here, I must digress. To find out about the GSR, the defense must have hired “experts.” My evidence teacher, the irrepressible Mickey Graham, who awed students because he had supposedly represented the Beatles (actually just John Lennon, I think), used the following acronym to describe legal experts: W.H.O.R.E. “Witness Having Other Reasonable Explanation.”

The fact that a defense expert said something means nearly nothing. I would hope a prosecution expert would be marginally more reliable due to ethical and other reasons, but I wouldn’t put money on it.

Ayoob claims it would have been easier to get convincing information regarding GSR had Bias used factory loads. The defense could have bought ammunition and had it tested.

There are some big problems with using this case as proof that handloads cause people problems in court.

First, it’s a very, very rare case. That, all by itself, is the biggest issue. It’s huge. Ayoob has only managed to produce a few cases in which, in his mind, handloads caused problems, and there are thousands of defensive shootings in the United States every year. If cases where handloads cause issues are that rare, it must be true that handloaded ammunition causes very few legal problems for shooters.

Have you ever, in your entire life, seen a news story about someone who was in trouble for using handloads? If these cases existed, the press would bury us in them, the same way they scream that 1,000 rounds of .223 are an ARSENAL.

Second, it really does look like Mr. Bias murdered his wife. How do you shoot yourself behind the ear without getting a lot of residue on your hand, your arm, and your body? The defense said the residue wouldn’t be heavy if the shot were fired from over 24″, but her hand and arm were certainly closer than that, and how can a woman who is struggling hold a gun’s MUZZLE (not butt) over 24″ away from her head shoot herself behind the ear?

Under the defense’s own theory, the gun’s muzzle had to be at least 24″ away. How?

Side note: who commits suicide by holding a gun two feet away? Has that ever happened in the history of the world?

I just checked, and it is conceivable that if I really tried, I could aim a gun at the back of my head while holding the gun so its muzzle was a little over 20″ away, and that’s the best I can do. Maybe Mrs. Bias was a basketball player. Ayoob says the autopsy determined that she had a reach of 30″. Clearly, that was not the maximum distance from the muzzle to her head. Try and hold a gun with the muzzle 30″ from your ear. Good luck.

When people work on a case together, they tend to buy into their arguments. They start to believe in the parties they work with. It’s normal. Many just say they believe, but that’s a discussion for another time.

When gun enthusiasts talk about people who got “railroaded” by the system, they rarely give serious consideration to the possibility that the prosecutors are right. I don’t know much about the case (largely the fault of people who do a poor job of presenting it on the web), but the little I do know doesn’t make Mr. Bias sound innocent.

I saw an article in which an lawyer claimed it would be hard to get personal reloading records admitted because they were hearsay. That’s not at all certain, but actual ammunition is not hearsay, so excluding it would not be easy, and a judge who excluded it would surely fear reversal on appeal. Excluding admissible exculpatory evidence is something judges know will lead to professional embarrassment.

Third, Bias was acquitted of murder. He eventually got convicted of manslaughter. I will propose that if you have a bad marriage, and your wife gets shot in the head, and if your story is that she held the gun two feet from her head and then shot herself behind the ear, you are likely to be arrested no matter where you got the ammunition. If your defense theory is that a woman of normal height held a gun’s muzzle over two feet from her head and shot herself behind the ear, and if there is no GSR on her at all, you can expect skepticism, to put it mildly.

It looks like there was good, solid evidence against Bias, and he used handloads, and he still got acquitted once and got a hung jury the second time. I don’t know whether better GSR evidence would have helped him in the final trial or not, but he had a lot of baggage without it.

Fourth: factory ammunition probably would have made Bias look worse, because the GSR evidence against Bias would have looked much more solid. “Here are the test results, and we are certain he used this ammunition.” It appears that it could not have helped him, because the defense’s own theory said there would have been GSR at under 24″, and it is implausible that a woman could shoot herself from a distance of more than 20″.

Fifth, Ayoob has a dog in this fight. He promotes the theory that handloads will get you thrown in to prison, and when he writes about it, his language (“lightweight net ninjas”) shows he is emotionally invested in proving himself right. We all know how that works on the Internet. In a post in which he presents his cases, he makes it clear that he researched them AFTER people disagreed with him, and that suggests he didn’t really have the ability to back his arguments up before he was challenged. People called him out, and he did research to prove them wrong, and he came up with very little. What does that tell you?

Should you really call people “lightweights” when you never did police work in a city or served in combat and you have no law degree? He’s clearly a gun expert and a serious student of self-defense, but he’s not Jim Cirillo, Chris Kyle, Audie Murphy, or Vincent Bugliosi.

One of his cases is about someone who was criticized by a prosecutor for using handloads. Ayoob admits he was acquitted, and he presents no evidence that handloads were relevant to his being charged or tried.

Of another case, he writes, “The evidence was messed up in a number of ways in this case, and I do not believe the reloaded ammo (which the prosecution did not recognize to be such until during the trial) was the key problem, but it definitely was part of a problem in reconstructing the case. We were able to do that without GSR evidence, and Mr. Barnes won an acquittal.”

So in a very unusual case, factory ammunition would have been helpful, but it turned out to be unnecessary.

Of a third case, he says a cop shot an assailant at close range and used GSR evidence to show that he was telling the truth when he said the assailant was about 18″ away. I have to ask: what type of handload would have left so little GSR at 18″ that the distance would have seemed so great it made self-defense seem implausible? I’m not a forensic scientist but it sounds like there had to be a lot of GSR no matter what.

Three cases, of which only one has any impact at all. That’s it. To listen to the people who swallow the handload=conviction theory, you would think prisons were full of innocent people done in by Hornady and Dillon.

I don’t know why I’m writing this in the context of this post. I’m not planning to make hundreds of .45 ACP rounds for self-defense. I just don’t like the way people swallow legends and rumors.

Looking this stuff over, here is what I could conclude: there is a tiny, tiny chance that using handloaded ammunition will cause you to be arrested when you would otherwise be left alone, and there is an even tinier chance that it will result in you being tried, and the chance that you will go on to be convicted is tinier still. There is a pretty substantial chance that using lame ammunition will get you killed. It has happened to many, many people. Not just three.

I have zero interest in armed confrontations or being a white knight. The older I get, the more I understand how important it is to AVOID defending yourself with deadly force. I really don’t see myself using a gun to shoot anyone, but if I did, I would want every round to count. I would want the first shot to incapacitate, and I would feel horror every time a round landed without stopping my attacker. In real life self-defense situations, every failure to incapacitate raises your chance of being hurt, and the increase is great, not small.

Imagine a guy is charging you with an axe, which is something that actually happens. You manage to get your gun out and shoot him in the chest…and he keeps coming. Imagine how that feels. What if he has a gun? Imagine knowing your failure is likely to bring bullets your way in the next quarter of a second. This is why good ammunition is important, along with shot placement.

It sounds like there is a microscopic chance that you could avoid a legal problem by using factory ammunition, so why not get the most effective type you can? Because the legend choir will tell you a prosecutor will get you convicted for not using bad, run-of-the-mill cartridges. With the legend choir, you can’t win by using handloads, and you can’t win by using the best factory ammunition you can buy. You have to use whatever junk the cops use. That’s their standard line. Of course, the poor performance of LEO-endorsed ammunition is the whole reason the 10mm was originally adopted by the FBI. They chose it after the Miami shootout, in which FBI calibers failed to incapacitate quickly enough. The fact that a law enforcement agent uses something doesn’t mean it works.

Anyway, I am going to order some brass and get this stuff put together. After that, I may never have to buy .45 ACP again, unless I want something that works better than Hornady XTP’s, which are mediocre.

Inertia Gives Way to Dread

I feel like covid and my friend’s medical crisis put my life on pause. I have to get up tomorrow and live again, before doing nothing becomes an unbreakable habit.

On the day Travis died, there was a lot of communication. I spent a lot of time texting and talking. Yesterday, things died down. People were digesting the news. Today there was a little chatter. I had a very long phone call from a young lady he knew. Listening to her appraisal of the people he knew was like listening to a recording of myself.

Everyone seems to be saying the same things. They can’t understand why things were handled the way they were. They are fed up with Travis’s social circle.

I find myself talking to so many wonderful young women. Where were they when I was 35? Oh, right. I was a physics T.A. at a university. You could station such people strategically around a property to repel women and prevent them from entering.

I used to have someone I could hope one of these girls married.

Some people are holding Travis accountable. For too long, he held onto people who were going nowhere, in a city that was going nowhere. He was not honest with himself about their faults and the power of their negative influence. Sometimes I had to bite my tongue when he praised people he knew. He was in denial.

Today I heard something positive. I had been told that Travis had not had a single visitor during his month in the hospital. Someone now says his mother and brother visited as often as they were allowed. Whom should I believe? I hope the second source is right.

If you knew everything I knew, you would understand why I can’t assume the new information is correct.

In case anyone from Miami reads my blog (doubtful), I sincerely apologize if I said anything that was incorrect. That was not my intention. I don’t think my judgment regarding Travis’s situation has been that great over the last few days. It is an emotional time.

It appears there will be no funeral that amounts to anything. The epidemic still has South Florida shut down. I’m glad for my sake. I told Travis to cut his crowd off. I should be able to take the same advice, and it would be unpleasant to see some of these people. There are roses among the toadstools, but I don’t know if it would be worth it to wade through the toadstools to see them.

People who took advantage of him in life are posting complimentary things about him now that he’s gone. I am told preachers are praising his loyalty. This loyalty is exactly what kept him in trouble.

I am told Richie Wilkerson, Kanye West’s former pastor and the son of my former pastor, posted something. I’m glad I’m not able to see it.

I hear Kanye is now a pastor, at least in his own mind. I just checked, and the pastor’s wife is topless on Instagram with a lei around her neck. Things are going as expected.

I truly believe Kanye West is feeling a call from God, and I think that if he lives long enough, he’ll be all right, but at the moment, he ought to be keeping quiet and confessing his faults to God.

I haven’t done much of anything today, apart from communicating. I stuck a 4-terabyte drive in my new PC. That ought to hold me for a couple of years. There was no way I was going to blow for a solid state that size, if they even make them, but I got a fast hard drive with a big cache. Should be fine.

Why are nonmechanical drives called “solid state” drives? Ordinary hard disks are also solid state. They don’t have vacuum tubes.

I keep having an ominous feeling, as if the end of the world were just around the corner. I have this feeling that we may end up forgetting about responsibilities that seem important right now, because things will happen that will make them vanish into insignificance.

It’s just a feeling. Maybe it’s the pandemic combined with the unusual set of events I’m dealing with in my personal life.

Has there ever been a time like this? The black death certainly had an apocalyptic feel to it. There were places where a third of the people died, whereas covid is still only a little more lethal than the seasonal flu, for all the hype. During plague attacks, everyone saw dead bodies. They were everywhere. I still don’t know a single person who has been diagnosed with covid.

During the black death, the disease, not the panic, was the major problem. The reverse is true now. Confinement has us feeling like there’s a plague when there is not. We have a plague mentality without a plague.

A big difference between the current day and the plague years is that today’s world was already coming to the end of the slack in the rope before covid showed up. In the 14th century, the world was sparsely populated, and we weren’t faced with a rising tide of technology that could be counted on to completely destroy privacy and free will in the near future. To me, this makes the present age seem full of foreboding.

Back when God flooded the world, the earth got a fresh start when things dried up. If we lost half of humanity today, that wouldn’t happen. We would still be besieged by malignant, unstoppable technology. We would still be close to the end of free will and free thought. Humanity would have to be decimated in order for the reset button to work.

It’s wrong to call technology malignant. Technology doesn’t destroy freedom; people do.

Human beings can’t be trusted with pointed sticks or handfuls of sand. It would be insane to hope we could resist ruining the world with computers.

I have this feeling that nothing earthly matters. I feel that if I never pay my bills again or do my taxes, it won’t make any difference, because something is going to come and sweep concerns like that off the table.

I wonder if other people feel it.

It’s very quiet here right now. It feels like the day before a hurricane. If you’ve been through one, you know what I mean. Is God’s orchestra tuning up, to accompany the fateful horn? Doesn’t line up with the timeline I’m familiar with.

Whatever. I’ll get up and start moving again in the morning, God willing. I believe there will be a morning for me.

My new beam reloading scale is at the mailbox, if Skynet 9000 is giving me the straight poop. I guess I’ll go grab it, and in addition to fixing the pool and working on business, maybe I’ll tune the scale tomorrow and see if I can make some ammunition.

My expectations for the future are dramatically changed, but my life is not over yet.

Gun Nerds and Their Dubious Doctrines

I think grief is different for different people. For some, it seems to cling like tar. For me, it comes and goes. I’ll feel very bad for a time, and then later in the day, the pain will lift, and I’ll be more or less okay until the next wave. I feel good at the moment, so I want to write about trivial things instead of death.

I am still working on getting my firearms hobby back on its feet. It may seem strange that I would be interested in this right now, given that my friend just passed away after being shot, and especially considering that he had probably relayed gun recommendations from me to the young man who apparently did the shooting. In my heart, there is not much of a connection. If I gave someone driving lessons, and then they had a bad accident, I wouldn’t condemn myself for helping them learn to drive.

Owning firearms isn’t a dirty vice. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. Firearms are one reason you’re free right now. I didn’t recommend a prostitute or a drug to anyone. I tried to help someone to be responsible and capable, for his sake and the sake of his future family. I’m not going to let an accident poison something I really enjoy.

I had no idea what was happening in Miami. I don’t even know the name of the young man who owned the gun. I didn’t know he had bought it. I don’t know the make or caliber. I just knew some unknown person wanted some tips regarding something he might or might not do.

I bought myself a new old stock RCBS 505 reloading scale made by the Ohaus company. I’m hoping it’s American and not Chinese. The scale is expected to arrive tomorrow. I feel like I’m stuck in place until then, because my only other scales are an old Lyman 1500 XP which drifts and a new Chinese scale which only resolves to the nearest 0.2 grains. I have worked around the new scale’s resolution by weighing two charges at once, but that’s not a terribly reliable solution.

I can make 10mm defensive ammunition right now, because my powder measure is set up perfectly for it. I used the Chinese scale to make some rounds, and the velocities were right on the money. I don’t really need to know what the charge weight is, because the only purpose of the charge weight is to get the right velocity. If the measure is giving me the right velocity, I don’t care what the charge weight is.

I can make 10mm today, but I can’t do anything else. There is no good reason to fool with different ammunition and different charge weights when a scale that actually works will be here tomorrow.

One thing I don’t have: a real set of check weights. These are precision weights used to calibrate scales.

I have a couple of weights. Each scale came with one. The Lyman came with a 20-gram weight, and the Chinese scale came with a 50-gram weight. I would guess that the Lyman weight is pretty accurate. Don’t ask me about the Chinese one. On the Chinese scale, it weighs exactly what it should, in grains, but that’s after making allowances for the scale’s large resolution. It could be a tenth off.

I suppose I should get some better weights. I would really like to be within half a tenth of a grain when I use the RCBS beam scale. I don’t want to think my powder measure is averaging 10.0 grains when it’s really averaging 10.2.

Metrology, or the science of measurement, is a very humbling field. When you start trying to measure things well, you find out just how inaccurate a lot of measures really are. Most of the time, it means nothing at all, but sometimes it matters. A grain is less than 1/15th of a gram, and a gram is less than 1/28 of an ounce, so you can see why measuring twentieths of grains takes some care.

Why did I pick a twentieth of a grain as my tolerance? Charges are measured to the nearest tenth of a grain, and to measure charges that size without completely blowing it, you really need to be within a twentieth.

When I was teaching physics to premed students, I taught a little bit of metrology. My course materials said one should always try to estimate to one-half of the smallest measuring division an instrument provides. This is often good advice. If you have a yardstick that measures down to sixteenths, you can pretty well tell whether 1-1/32″ or 1-2/32″ is closest to your actual measurement just by looking. This should be possible on a beam scale, because it has rulers on it. The beams are just rulers. When you weigh things, you’re really measuring lengths. You slide the weights up and down, and you see which graduations they settle on.

There are a lot of check weights out there, but when you calibrate reloading scales, you need weights labeled in grains. They are a lot less common. I’m going to give up looking for a deal and get a new set of weights made for reloading.

One problem with old weights is that they may not weigh what they used to. Metrology is a real pain.

I have never made .45 ACP defensive ammo, and I have never bought .45 brass. I probably have 1000 cases I picked up at gun ranges. One range officer was very impressed with my shooting, and he said he would save brass for me. Then I didn’t get around to shooting for a long time. I hope he didn’t sit around waiting beside a big bag of brass.

When I bought my press, Hornady gave me a huge number of .45 ACP XTP 230-grain hollowpoints. I have barely loaded any of them. They’re very good for defensive ammunition. Maybe I’ll buy some new casings.

I have no intention of ever using my .45 ACP 1911 for defensive purposes, but it seems wrong to own it and not have the ammunition for the purpose for which the gun was made.

I went online and asked for advice on making defensive ammunition. I was soon immersed in “proven” nonsense and mythology.

Here’s a really annoying myth: “If you use homemade ammunition to defend yourself, the cops and prosecution will say you’re a nut who is obsessed with making super killer ammunition, and you will be charged and convicted.”

Here are some threshold questions. How will the cops know you made the ammunition, and why would they care? They’ll be very interested in other matters. Was it legal for you to be where you were? Were you reasonably afraid of great harm? If you’re in a mandatory-chicken-out jurisdiction, did you try to run away? If they walk in your house and see you sitting in a recliner next to the body of a stranger and a shotgun, they are not going to confiscate your ammunition and send it to MIT for analysis. Unless they think you shouldn’t have shot the person, they won’t care if you used a howitzer. You could defend yourself legally with a flamethrower if it was all you had.

Manufacturers use a lot of the same brass and bullets as reloaders. I don’t see how a cop could tell the difference between your Starline-and-Speer cartridge and one from Underwood. You’re not going to tell them, and you don’t have to. They won’t assume it. They won’t get a warrant so they can have David Caruso’s team examine your reloading press with the Hubble telescope.

Have you ever heard of a citizen being tried because he used legal ammunition he made himself or, for that matter, ANY legal ammunition? No, and neither has anyone else. Try and find a case.

In my entire life, I have heard of one case in which ammunition made a defendant look worse to gunphobes. That person was Colin Ferguson, a deranged black racist who shot up a subway car full of non-black people. He used Black Talon ammunition, and the press had a field day with it. “Killer bullets!” “What other kind is there?”, one would ask.

When you buy defensive rounds, you’re supposed to get the most lethal type for your caliber, to make that caliber work as well as it can. If you’re going to buy weak ammunition on purpose, why not just drop down to a .22 and save your ears and your wrist? It makes no sense to buy a large bore pistol and use ammunition that does small bore damage.

Two things about Ferguson: his cartridges came from a factory, and…he shot a bunch of unarmed strangers on a train! Let’s assume he used plain old UMC FMJ. Would he have been acquitted?

Winchester quit selling Black Talon bullets to the general public. Because the bullet-haters had a point? No, because Winchester was afraid of lawyers and bad publicity.

It was pretty silly. You can buy things that work better than Black Talons. They weren’t particularly damaging, as the medical examiner in the Ferguson admitted. Winchester quit making them, and they started selling what was essentially the same thing with improvements to enhance lethality.

I read some other nonsense from a gun writer. He said you should use factory ammunition because defensive ammunition goes through all sorts of special testing, including being measured with lasers, presumably worn by sharks. He said it made the ammunition more reliable, and that it justified the exorbitant cost of defensive ammunition. He said it was treated very differently from plain old FMJ, which, hello, IS defensive ammunition. There are places where you’re not allowed to use anything else, and the military is forced to use it.

I’m not sure what planet actually has special standards like that, but I don’t think it’s Earth. On this planet, manufacturers perform quality control checks on all their ammunition. You can go to Youtube and see workers for Sellier & Bellot doing checks on FMJ. I don’t think manufacturers are okay with their target ammo blowing people’s guns up. Except maybe for PMC, but then they’re special. I would never buy their stuff again.

As to reliability, do you seriously think computerized machines that pump out ammunition at high speed can beat a human being who examines every cartridge? If that’s true, why do precision shooters, whose livelihoods depend on good ammunition, make their own?

They didn’t read the article.

It seems to me that if your ammo choice has any bearing on your case’s disposition, which was not true in Colin Ferguson’s case, it would have to mean you were already going under.

There is a case which is often cited to show that “scary looking” guns (meaning military-style semiautos) are more likely to get people prosecuted. I wonder about that. The case involved a submachine gun, which is definitely not a Bass Pro semiautomatic, and the shooter was an H&K rep named Gary Fadden. He didn’t shoot someone in his living room or off the top of his wife. He shot someone during a road rage incident.

He was in his truck with his girlfriend. The story, as traditionally related, says a biker darted in front of the truck and forced him to brake, and that soon after, a couple of bikers in a truck chased him while waving a pistol.

And I have a bridge to sell you.

A motorcycle cuts in front of you, you hit the brakes and go on with life, and then the rider’s pals try to kill you for no apparent reason. Sure. I’m positive there were no gestures and no expletives. There was no use of the horn, and there was no tailgating or brake-checking. Because bikers always show up with pistols to avenge their friends after their friends have done something moderately rude without provoking a response. This has probably happened over a hundred times this month in my neighborhood alone.

Fadden says he ran from the bikers and found himself in a position where he had to face them, so he got out and confronted them with a submachine gun, and he was not able to find the selector switch in time to use it. Okay.

He had to analyze and shoot this gun for a living, mind you.

His assailants advanced, and Fadden fired 9 warning shots in one burst. One kept advancing. Fadden, who was still unable to find the selector switch (!) fired 6 rounds in a single burst before he could stop himself. Again…okay. You can go on Youtube and see people firing one-round bursts from submachine guns with no problem, but maybe that was not possible with this model.

The assailant died.

Fadden was charged with first-degree murder, which is, admittedly, ridiculous even taking the facts in the worst possible light. You’re allowed to defend yourself even after you’ve given someone the finger in traffic. He was eventually acquitted.

The common line is that he was only charged because he used a submachine gun, and while I doubt that’s true, I’m sure the gun didn’t help him.

Here’s the thing. Cops and prosecutors don’t like road ragers, even when they can prove the other guy started it. And shooting one person six times, which was reasonable under the circumstances, doesn’t play well in Washington, DC, suburbs, where the shooting occurred. Finally, the “victim” was shot in the back, and that gave the prosecutor something to work with.

An article you can find online says Fadden, who is now afraid to carry scary guns, now keeps an M1 carbine and a 10mm pistol in his vehicle. The first is a semiautomatic military rifle, and it looks like one. The second is the ultimate overkill semiautomatic, not including freak calibers and Desert Eagles.

Scary weapons.

The story is a very poor tool for scaring gun owners, because the shooter used a type of gun almost none of them have, he shot a person 6 times, he fired 15 rounds and claimed he could not find the selector switch on a gun he was paid to analyze, he shot the biker in the back, it happened during a road rage event, and it happened, basically, in Washington, DC. Fadden had a lot of problems that had nothing to do with the choice of firearm.

Paul Harrell, known gun guru, seems to buy into the scary gun and unusual ammunition theories, although he seems concerned about weird cutting-edge ammo, not handloads. He has suggested that it may not be wise to use ammunition with a brand name like “R.I.P.”, and that seems reasonable.

Harrell was charged with murder once. He feels he was railroaded. He used a deer rifle, not a scary gun.

He says he has no faith in prosecutors or medical examiners. He says the medical examiner’s material said the deceased was shot in the head, and that the prosecutor mentioned it in court, and he says they didn’t mention the other huge wound in the chest. That speaks poorly of the medical examiner and prosecutor, but it’s not clear to me how it hurt Paul Harrell, since shooting someone in the chest looks just as bad as shooting him in the head. I would think he benefited from the omission, since shooting someone twice with a deer rifle looks worse than shooting him once.

I can certainly understand not trusting the medical examiner or the prosecutors, but anyway, he got in a lot of trouble using a non-scary gun with factory ammunition. I think his big problem was that he was on foot and the assailant was in a truck. Also, he shot a man a second time after inflicting a horrendous wound. It shouldn’t be that hard to convince a jury a person on foot can dodge a truck or that a person who has been shot once with a deer rifle by one of the nation’s top marksmen, with excellent shot placement, doesn’t need to be shot again. I think that was probably the center of the case. Just guessing.

Not saying he did anything wrong.

If scary guns were really a major problem, the hundreds or thousands of people who have successfully defended themselves with AR-15’s would generally have been arrested, and that is not what has happened. If the problem really existed, people would be afraid to buy what is supposedly America’s favorite rifle. You can’t hide thousands of AR-15 arrests. Where are they?

I am not giving you legal advice, and if legal advice is what you want, you should pay a lawyer before making decisions about guns and ammunition. I plan to use my own ammunition in whatever legal firearms I choose. Homemade ammunition is very good. No one seems to be able to dig up a scary-ammunition case, and the only scary-weapon case I know of might well have gone to court had the shooter used a Marlin 60.

When I make ammunition, I know the charges are right, and I chamber every round before putting it away, so I know it will work. I don’t have to ask myself how much I trust strangers who do semiskilled labor in factories. I also get to choose the velocity I like instead of picking the least-unsuitable factory choice.

If it’s bad to take a microscopic chance on getting in trouble for using a scary gun, what about the relatively large chance of dying because you used an inferior firearm in order to look less scary? Does that make any sense whatsoever? When you could have 31 rounds of 7.62x39mm plus a spare magazine, and you’re stuck with maybe a duck gun and a few rounds of buckshot, you have made a very poor decision.

I’m writing about stuff that will never matter, because I will never shoot anyone.

To get back to .45 ACP, I suppose I should get some new brass. My old brass will work fine, especially in a round that barely exceeds BB gun velocity and pressure, but who uses old brass in defensive ammo? It’s like putting used tires on the car your kids go to school in. Even if it makes no difference at all, it just sounds weird.

I may also get a belt holster for my .38 Super. It’s a barbecue gun, and you can’t have a barbecue gun without a leather holster.

Some day I may get wildly ambitious and make .357 ammo or even .204 Ruger, if it’s possible to reload that tiny round.

I’m glad I feel good this afternoon. I’ll ride it as long as I can.

We are confident, I say, and willing rather to be absent from the body, and to be present with the Lord

I have bad news. This afternoon, someone sent me an Instagram photo indicating that my friend Travis has died.

To a person who looks with the natural eye only, this is not shocking. Travis had been in intensive care for weeks following an accidental shooting which led to complications. To people who have felt great faith that Travis was going to be healed, it’s a major blow.

A year or two back, I listened to Derek Prince as he taught people to prophesy. I decided to try it. Paul tells us to covet prophecy, and he says it’s a better gift than tongues in some ways. God clearly wants us to do it. I started doing it once in a while, and then I made a point of doing it a lot every day.

I heard positive things. “I will build you up.” “None of the things you worry about will happen to you.” “My love will pour through you.” I rarely heard anything negative. That concerned me, because I knew from prayer in tongues that it was possible to get in the way of the Holy Spirit and add your own material. I prayed repeatedly for guidance. I had other people pray. I did not want to be a false prophet.

The other day, I heard myself saying Travis would be healed. Yesterday, someone who is very, very honest said God told her the same thing.

Look, it can still happen. He can still recover. As I said before, Lazarus stank when he was healed. He was dead and rotting. But generally, the dead stay dead.

I knew before this happened that if Travis died, I would have a major problem apart from the grief. I knew I would have to question what I thought I heard from God. That’s a big deal. I have been relying very strongly on what I thought was God’s voice for years. How much am I wrong about? What do I have left to hold onto?

You can’t sweep problems like this under the rug. Pretending things didn’t happen is not acceptable. You have to hold yourself accountable.

It’s as though I built several rooms onto my house, and one or more have to be torn down. I can’t entertain guests in a house that isn’t habitable. How can I talk to other people about God right now?

What can I tell the world about Travis?

He had a bad start. He got in trouble a lot when he was a kid.

He excelled in music when he was in elementary school. By the time I met him, he played 11 instruments well.

His Dad tried to raise him and his siblings well. His mother and father split, and his father deteriorated. He was isolated from the family.

I met Travis at Trinity Church in Miami. I believe he was 17. We were on the security team. We became unlikely friends. In prayer sessions behind closed doors, we talked about things the pastors didn’t want to hear about: prayer in tongues, casting out demons, confession, and transformation through the Holy Spirit. Travis got hooked, and he started to change.

He kept growing, and our friendship grew. I started making pizza for the church’s cafe, and Travis became my sous chef.

We knew the church was a mess. We both left. He came to the new church I joined. We left that one, too. We started spending a lot of time praying at my house. During one session, Travis had a vision of a woman he believed would be his wife. He never saw her face.

Travis was a teacher. He worked at a government-funded center, teaching ghetto kids music. He wanted black children to be successful and appreciated. That desire burned in him. He could not accept the way black people in America were living.

He was hurt over and over by the things that happened to young people he knew. He was frustrated with their parents, who wouldn’t drive them to lessons. Kids had unwanted babies. They got shot. One friend from church got caught driving a stolen Mercedes, and after the police handcuffed him, he jumped into a canal and drowned.

Travis wanted to see black people rise up and do well, and over and over, he was slapped in the face by deaths, illegitimate births, and incarcerations. It caused him tremendous pain. He could not let go.

He wanted to be the first member of his family to get a degree. He had started college at FAMU in Tallahassee, but he got caught up in a marching band scandal and left. I encouraged him to go to the University of Miami and audition, and one day, he went without telling me and got a full ride, less room and board.

He worked harder than any student I ever knew. He lived in rented rooms. He slept on people’s couches. He sometimes rode a bicycle 15 miles at night to get home from jobs. He was promised a car, but by the time he got it, it was in such bad shape it had to be scrapped. His cheap, wobbly secondhand bicycle was stolen by someone who must have been desperate as well as heartless. He had to scrounge up a new one. He never quit.

When I left Miami, I made him my house sitter until I sold the house. I told him he was the Fresh Prince of Coral Gables. He loved the peace and safety.

During his time there, I got baptized at a Last Reformation event. I told Travis about it, and he got so excited, he borrowed a car and drove to my house near Ocala to be baptized in my pool. He couldn’t submerge completely in my tub. It was 51 degrees out when he went into the pool. He drove up in a borrowed car, stayed one night, and drove back.

When the place finally sold, I was concerned about him, but he landed on his feet. He found a place near school. He struggled, but he didn’t live in the street.

When COVID-19 hit, he had a problem. He played gigs to make money, and the gigs were gone. We prayed over the phone. He said God would handle it.

He got a respiratory bug in March. He had a high fever and aches. I told him to get checked, but he stayed home. Some friends and I prayed, and his symptoms dropped off to nearly nothing overnight.

Travis got in contact with me a few times about a friend who wanted to get a firearm. He asked me for advice. I saw nothing odd about it. I suggested a Glock. A simple, reliable gun. I said I would consider .45 ACP if it were me. I probably mentioned .40 S&W.

On April 9, my phone rang. The caller ID named Travis, but the voice was someone else’s. The man on the other end said he was Travis’s friend. He said Travis had been shot accidentally. He stressed “accidentally.” I asked if they had called 911. Hoping for a break, I asked where Travis had been shot. The friend said, “in the chest region.” No break.

I could hear Travis in the background pleading with God. He wasn’t afraid to die. He just didn’t want to die that way, so soon. He said, “Not this way, God!” That was the last time I heard his voice. His friend hung up.

After that, the information dried up. No one answered his phone. I started accounts on Instagram and Facebook, hoping to alert his family. I found his brother and let him know. I thought the family would handle things.

I didn’t want to go online and say, “TRAVIS HAS BEEN SHOT.” I thought it would make his family panic. Now I wish I had done it. Maybe more people would have tried to help. I worked with some friends who tried to look after Travis’s affairs, and the family was not responsive. We didn’t hear from them for days. I assumed things were going well because the early report was that the injury was not life-threatening.

Travis lived out his final days in a remarkable state of isolation. There was no phone in his room. He was intubated at least part of the time. They didn’t give him a laptop so he could Skype. The hospital was so strict, they would not allow cards into the room. Recently, a nurse told Martha Travis had never had a visitor.

We knew very little about what was happening.

As far as I know, he didn’t die from a gunshot wound. He died from complications. He wasn’t getting oxygen. He had an infection. He was tested regularly for covid, but the tests were negative. Of course, the tests are not reliable. He may have had covid in March, and he may have relapsed after the shooting.

Would things have been different with better communication? I don’t know, but things were handled very badly.

I thought I could point to Travis as a success story. Someone whose life had successfully repaired, partly with my participation. I thought I would see his wife and children. I thought I would be at the wedding.

He’s in heaven. That’s for sure. If he had any issues with God, you can be sure he cleaned them up while he was alone in the hospital. You can say that makes him a success, but it’s not the kind of success I had in mind.

I thought God had given him to me as a sort of son, to make up for my failure to marry.

Now the crop is gone, and it’s late in the season.

Is it right to feel sorry for him? He has seen Jesus. He is perfect. He is happy. He is fulfilled. He is safe, forever. He’s with my dad. Surely they have talked today.

I suppose if I grieve, I’m really feeling sorry for myself, not Travis. He’s practically a god now.

Over the last few days, I’ve been telling God I would be happy to take Travis’s place. It didn’t matter to me. I enjoy life, but it’s not like I have a lot of meaningful irons in the fire (one less now), and I am not far from elderly.

Now I’m still here, he’s gone, his wife will have to marry someone else, and his kids will not be born. There will be no one to help his dad, who has MS and lives in a facility, unless God sends him a friend. His dad had been very bitter, but he had come around. He had started praying with Travis. He had started calling him often instead of shutting him out. Where does a 59-year-old man in a wheelchair go to replace a son like that?

Will anyone try to save Travis’s family now? Who else will care?

I spoke to my friend Freddly about the news. She’s a nurse in a management position, and she deals with dying people, including covid patients. She is very experienced. She says something is wrong. She says young men don’t just die suddenly, even when they’re intubated and connected to ECMO machines. She says that happens to the elderly. The nurses knew Martha had a special relationship with Travis. According to Freddly, they would have made sure Martha was informed had he taken a sudden turn for the worse. Even though she was not his wife, they would have seen to it that she had a chance to come to his bedside had they thought he was about to die. They didn’t do that. Two days running, they said there was no change, and there is no chance they were wrong. They told her he was in the same condition at 9:30 this morning. So what happened?

She said she wished she could look at his chart.

It’s good to have an expert to talk to, not that it does much good now.

I talked to a mutual friend today. He was on the Trinity Church security team with Travis and me. He wants to go to the funeral if there is one. My concern is that Trinity will be in charge. I don’t want to see people who used Travis using him as a tool to boost their profiles. I am also not excited about being among people he knew who let him down consistently. But on the other hand, it might be good to show up, welcome or not, and hold my head up and look them in the eye.

I don’t want to go to Miami. Not even for this. I don’t know how it will play out.

It was a great, great privilege to know Travis and to be of some assistance to him. I’m glad he’s out of harm’s reach now. He could not catch a break in this life. It seemed like it rained on him every day. He fought the curses of black life, and he still died like a black man who was still immersed in them. That’s all finished now. I will take the good with the bad.

I won’t get to see him stand at the altar, and I won’t get to hold his kids. I won’t have a third godchild or a boy named after me. That’s okay. We have a father who makes all things right, even if it has to wait until after the resurrection.

I look forward to seeing him again. Until then, I will remember how blessed I was to know him in this life.

A friend who led the armorbearer team at Trinity Church just did a final roll call for Travis via text message. His call sign was Bass Clef.

So that’s it. Travis didn’t sound off here, but he was present at a better roll call today. It won’t be that long before I sound off as well, and then all our troubles here on earth will be forgotten.

Only Took 5 Months

Not long after the covid hype started, I began searching the news to see if any major American celebrities had died. I don’t mean people like the guy who played Otis the Drunk on The Andy Griffith Show. I mean people whose names a typical American would recognize. We finally have an example. Covid has been here since last fall, and Roy Horn died on May 8. I would call him a minor major celebrity. He’s not Tom Brady or Jennifer Lopez, but people have heard his name.

It’s remarkable how long it took. I thought we would have a couple of dozen by now. It’s even more remarkable when you consider the fact that many foreigners are famous in America.

Of course, he was in very bad shape. He was 75, and he had been crippled by a tiger bite. He was also a homosexual, so he may have had other health problems from substance abuse or infectious disease.

How are things in northern Florida? Great. That’s just how it is. Sorry if you live in New York or New Orleans. I’m not trying to make you feel bad.

We’re still waiting for the meat shortage to hit. It doesn’t look like it’s coming. I went to the grocery yesterday, and the place was swimming in chicken, beef, and even pork, which has been hit hardest. Ground chuck patties were selling for $3 per pound.

I always look at the hoarder stuff when I’m there. They had a lot of Bounty paper towels (cheap brands don’t count), and they were putting toilet paper on the shelves late in the afternoon. They even had a bottle of Dawn, which I bought. I thought I needed it for the laundry room sink, but I didn’t. Sorry about that. There was still no rubbing alcohol. People are probably pouring it on their food.

The meat problem was supposed to be here by now, wasn’t it? It has been 11 days since I noticed the story, and people were talking about a two-week delayed impact. That means everything should be gone in three days. We’ll see.

After shopping, I texted my poor cousin near Chicago. She still can’t get meat. People are still insane there. Going to Costco is like trying to beat the crowds in the movie Soylent Green. Her son says it takes hours to get in the door.

This mess is not the same for liberals and conservatives. Liberals are more hysterical, their areas are suffering the most, and the vast majority of the suffering is caused by bad behavior, not covid. It appears they really do treat others much worse than conservatives. The way they clean out stores is a wonder to behold.

Shouldn’t be a surprise. Leftists are the only people who riot and lynch. Conservatives don’t know how. When you see conservatives fighting in the streets, it’s because leftists came to their events and attacked.

It’s not like goods aren’t being shipped to liberal cities. They are. Cities are very powerful, and those in power will see to it that goods come in. Obviously, the problems arise once they get there.

Cities will get goods even if rural people have to starve. There is no electoral college for food distribution. Food will go to the power centers.

People who are against God are much more afraid of death. They think this life is all there is. What a pity. This life is pretty dreary. Childhood is hard and very degrading, then you can expect to get a job you don’t like, then your body falls apart slowly, and then you die. If this is all there is, your prospects are horrible, and the threshold for choosing suicide should be very low.

If you’re afraid of death, you are capable of just about anything. Hungry human beings have been known to eat their children.

I suppose they have a better excuse than well-fed women who have abortions.

The Christian attitude is much different. Think of all the Christians who have allowed themselves to be murdered for the good of humanity.

It’s strange that San Francisco is doing so well. It makes me wonder if something much worse is in store because of their rebellion.

I should mention my friend Travis, who is still in intensive care. The nurses open up to us occasionally, so bits of information get out. The latest news is excellent as far as I’m concerned. He is no worse. That indicates they’re not talking about unplugging things. His situation is far from good, but it’s not the kind of crisis it appeared to be two days back.

If no one you know has died in a hospital after a long illness, I’ll tell you how it works in most cases. The staff will know when your loved one is very likely to die within a day. They know the signs from experience. They will tell you to get your butt to the hospital if you’re not already there. A couple of days ago, it looked like we were in that situation, but now it’s clear that we’re not. It was misinterpreted by relatives who had been ignoring Travis and were shocked to learn he was on an ECMO machine. I’m not saying a person can’t seem stable and then die suddenly, but we had one set of expectations, and now it’s clear that we are looking at a different paradigm.

I only have two medical professionals among my close friends. Both work with gravely ill and dying people. One started out as a hospice CNA, and now she manages other nurses. She has seen hundreds of people die. She is on Travis’s prayer team. She is very positive today. She said, “We’ve got a fight!” That’s correct. We weren’t told to come drive him home, but we have a fight. She also said, “He can bounce back.”

The other professional runs a hospice. His basic sentiment was that if a person isn’t declining, he can turn around.

Of course, this is just speculation in the natural. Lazarus stank from decomposition when he was healed, and Jonah, who died, was pulled back from sheol.

I have been seeing demons in my bedroom, and my belief was that they were the demons that were trying to kill Travis. Last night, I bound and muzzled them in the name of Jesus. I spoke defeat to them. I forbade them to come near me or Travis. I slept the whole night through. I was surprised when I woke up. I have been waking up before dawn, consistently.

It will be nice when we get a better report. I’m tired of feeling distressed when a text notification goes off. I’m okay, but that doesn’t mean this isn’t unpleasant.

I’m planning to make .38 Super defensive ammunition. I don’t need it, but I feel stupid owning a gun and having so little real ammunition for it. Also, it will be fun.

I did not take notes when I reloaded a decade ago. I think all of my .38 Super reloads are from that time. To get information, I had to go back through blog posts. I’m learning my lesson. I’m creating text documents with lots of facts. I even use the outline feature. It’s almost as if I used to be a scientist!

You would think a former scientist would have done it this way from the start, but I didn’t.

It looks like I had a lot of problems in the past with the Hornady Lock-n-Load AP press. I was getting a lot of unprimed cases. Because of that, powder spilled everywhere. I was using Accurate No.7, and the grains are tiny. They went right into the workings of the press and gummed it up.

I was not happy with Hornady. The press is a good product, but you can’t pop one on your bench and expect things to go perfectly. There are a lot of adjustments to be made, and there are things that are not deburred well or massaged at the factory. Hornady support has a great reputation, and that’s good, because press buyers need it. You can root around the web and read about all the problems they have.

People told me to buy a Dillon press, but if you check the web, you’ll see that Dillon owners complain just as much. Many knowledgeable people say Hornady’s products are the best. It appears that brand loyalty is the main reason people say either brand is better than the other.

Progressive presses are complicated, and they have to be set up just right. A manual isn’t enough. You have to have experience and good advice, and you have to be good with tools. That’s just how it is.

A well-adjusted Lock-n-Load will work great. Until it doesn’t. Then you will lose one or more rounds because the press has gone crazy, and you’ll have to make an adjustment. Then it will work great again.

When you get a press running, you may forget all the breakdowns and struggles you had getting it to where it actually worked. I did. New users who are frustrated aren’t whiners. They’re not imagining things.

A guy who calls himself 76Highboy has great videos on running the Hornady press. It’s great to see how well he knows the machine. There is no problem he can’t help you fix or avoid. But the fact that his videos have to exist tells you how hard it can be to make a Lock-n-Load work.

He’s a bona fide Lock-n-Load guru, and his dad was a proficient reloader, but he obviously had a lot of problems, because he had to learn to fix them.

Here’s something weird. The powder measure requires a fatter O-ring than all the other stations. Hornady will never tell you that. Also, you may have problems with metering the powder because of static electricity, so you should rub the affected parts with a dryer sheet.

My press had at least one defective primer seating punch. It has two, and I have only checked one. It was obstructing the slide that loads the primers. The manual doesn’t tell you about that. I had to grind material off the slide with a Dremel so it wouldn’t hit the punch. A punch that sits too high will prevent primers from loading, and then you fill unprimed cases with powder. The powder leaks through the primer holes, and then your press locks up or fails to register correctly.

When I switch to my other punch and slide, I’m going to grind the other slide before I even check to see if it works. The alteration won’t hurt it, and if the slide needs it, it will save me a ton of misery. I’m also going to stone the slide to get rid of burrs, as Highboy76 recommends.

Every Lock-n-Load should come with a friend who finally got his to work.

People will tell you you’re the problem when you’re really not. You can say a press operator is the problem if he wasn’t born knowing how to deal with the product’s many issues. That’s not really fair. It’s like saying you’re the problem if you don’t know exactly the right way to jiggle your defective toilet’s flush handle.

If a product you paid good money for doesn’t do exactly what it’s supposed to do when you follow the manual, the product or the manual is the problem. Don’t blame yourself.

I need to get out and shoot the .38 Super more. It’s wonderful. I’m concerned about losing casings, though. I’m thinking of using a red marker to color them and make them stand out after they land in the pasture.

Some day the Beast’s cruel, infantile children will take our guns away, and I won’t be able to shoot steel in my own yard. I need to take advantage of what I have while I still can.

One Less Frustration

One of the things I have to learn about owning this farm is that I absolutely have to go outside every day. The psychological benefits of the natural beauty and space are powerful. The weather today is like my impression of the weather in heaven. Cool and moderately sunny, with a gentle breeze.

My friend Travis is in a hospital connected to machines, and I heard disturbing things about him this morning. It has not been a pleasant day, so I decided to make some more 10mm ammunition and go out and test it.

I started reloading around a decade ago. I bought a Lyman 1500 XP digital scale because I assumed digital scales worked. The ad copy didn’t say anything like, “This scale is convenient but gives crazy readings.” I have since learned that digital scales were not reliable back then, and incredibly, nothing has changed. If you want a good digital scale now, the very lowest price you can pay is over $300, and your $300 scale won’t really be all that great. If you REALLY want accuracy, you have to spend $465 on an A&D FX-120i. But if you REALLY REALLY want accuracy, you don’t even want that; you want a Prometheus scale. I believe you can buy several FX-120i’s for the price of a Prometheus.

I will never have a Prometheus. Not unless my reality changes completely and I find myself shooting competitively at 1000 yards.

I got perfectly okay results with the Lyman 10 years ago, but it looks like storing it in a garage hasn’t done it any good. I made up several test batches of 10mm, and I kept getting average speeds of something like 1070 fps. That was no good. If I wanted underpowered 10mm bullets, I’d buy a .40 S&W. I wanted at least 1225 fps.

I looked for reasons for the power shortage. I cleaned my equipment to make sure it dispensed correctly. I tried new primers. I tried a different powder. Nothing worked. Eventually, I found out my old scale was exaggerating the weights of charges, even when I calibrated it.

My power problems led me to research digital scales, and I also learned about mechanical scales, like the ones you used to use in chemistry class. Mechanical scales are slow and not fun to use, but they are a lot cheaper for a given degree of precision.

It’s even more complicated than that, I’m sorry to say.

Mechanical reloading scales used to be made very well, but…China. A company named Ohaus made scales for companies like RCBS and Lyman, and of course, they quit making the good ones about 40 seconds before I realized I needed one. Ohaus still sells reloading scales, but they get complaints.

There is a guy who is known for taking old scales and polishing them up to make them more precise. The problem with this approach is that you still have to find an old scale for a decent price. I believe you’re looking at around $125 on Ebay before even discussing his $85 fee.

Sadly, there is more.

Cheap digital scales can be made to work well enough for pistol shooting if you stay after them constantly, but you may have problems. One problem is that they drift. Another problem is that they are programmed to resist drifting. Reloaders like to dribble tiny bits of powder onto scales, very slowly, in order to get very precise loads. A cheap digital scale may think it’s drifting when you do this, so it may ignore some of your powder in order to be more accurate.

I was not planning to do any dribbling right away. The proper term is “trickling,” if it matters. I needed a scale to check my powder measure’s accuracy. A powder measure is a machine that drops premeasured weights of powder. In order to make pistol rounds, you use a scale to adjust your powder measure. You drop a charge, weigh it, adjust the measure, and so on until you get the same correct charge over and over. For that, I didn’t need a drift-proof scale. I just needed one that would weigh a premeasured charge and give me a single accurate reading.

I decided to try a new cheap digital while I worked on my problem. Covid has made it hard to get scales quickly, and I was having trouble finding anything good anyway, so I figured I would get something reviewers like and see what happened. I bought a Chinese Brifit pocket scale. It’s an amazing machine. It’s very easy to use, it will give something like 6 different units, and it seems more accurate than the manufacturer’s claim. Problem: it can’t read odd tenths. If you measure something weighing 12.3 grains, it will give you 12.2 or 12.4.

I was very discouraged, but then I realized I could weigh two charges at once and divide by two. I had faith that my powder measure was pretty consistent, and the new scale gave perfect results when I weighed my old Lyman test weight, so I thought I could probably come up with pretty good weights this way. I got the powder measure to give me 24.0 grains on the new scale, and I made 6 cartridges. I used Winchester primers because I have learned that you don’t put Wolf primers in Glock ammunition you might depend on to save your life. The failure rate is high.

Here are the speeds I got today:

1246
1222
1247
1232
1238
1237

Average: 1237.0 fps.

This will work. I guess I could go higher, but this is more than acceptable. I would probably be doing something like 1260 in the big Glock with the longer barrel.

My plan is to mark down the micrometer reading on the powder measure. I should be able to reproduce the exact setting in the future when I have a better scale. Then I can find out what my charges actually weigh, and I can put it in my log.

I have a log now. Having to guess at my old recipes has taught me a thing or two. You need a log.

I bought Blue Dot powder because I had read that it was very good for 10mm. Then I had problems because of my scale, and I went back to Accurate No.7. The old powder worked perfectly. So what do I do with two pounds of Blue Dot? It’s a powder with limited pistol applications. I guess it will be fine for target ammo.

I took the old Nylon 66 with me today. It had been too long since its last workout. That gun brings back a ton of memories. I remember shooting it into a bullet trap with my cousin, in my grandfather’s driveway. The trap was maybe 50 yards away, and we were missing part of the time, which was inexcusable. My grandfather walked by, took my cousin’s Winchester pump .22, and rapid-fired a series of shots into the trap. He handed it back and said, “There’s nothing wrong with that gun.” We were impressed.

Today I shot my gongs from maybe 30 yards, just playing. I put 13 rounds in the Nylon 66, lifted it to my shoulder, and rapid-fired at a squirrel gong until it was empty. Didn’t check the sights on a paper target. Never missed. Suddenly I realized I was shooting better than my grandfather. Wow. He was no slouch. I didn’t see this coming.

I don’t know if I would still measure up if we were shooting at the same gong from a longer distance. The bullet trap wasn’t much of a test for him.

I hope Travis gets to shoot the gongs some day.

I’m going to crank out some 10mm defensive ammo because I need it now, and then I’ll order me a scale. Then maybe I’ll move on to .45 ACP. I have a ton of 9mm brass I need to get rid of, so I might actually make 9mm target ammo I don’t need. I find it easier to store cartridges than components.

Things are going well on the firearms front. I can’t control the world and make everything perfect, but there are a lot of things to feel good about.

Shooting Story Defies Belief

I have a little more information about my friend Travis, who was shot on April 9.

He is on a machine that helps oxygenate his blood. I forget the name. He is sedated. He has had an infection. We are now being told he has had no visitors. I hope that isn’t true. It is not possible to send him anything because the covid rules are far beyond reasonable.

I completely understand that the hospital doesn’t want covid sweeping through the trauma center, but no one is getting covid from cards or flowers. Emotional support is extremely important at a time like this, so depriving patients of contact is very harmful. There has to be a reasonable effort to balance risks. They could at least show patients cards and flowers briefly.

I am planning to send a card even if he can’t receive it. The nurses will see it, and they will know people care whether Travis lives or dies. Hospitals let unwanted people die. This is something many medical people would deny publicly with red, flustered faces, but it’s a fact, and medical professionals are much more open about it in private. Travis is costing the hospital a lot of money, no one is visiting him, and he’s black. Also, he has a gunshot wound, and that surely has to affect the way he is perceived by people who are tired of treating minority members who have been shot because of their own unwise behavior.

I wonder if they know the shooting was accidental.

I’m going to look for a big post card. If I send a card, the nurses will be able to read it and learn that Travis is not disposable and that he has a future.

It may well be that everyone at the hospital is pulling for him very sincerely, but when it comes to human nature, it’s generally not smart to assume the best.

I hope the information about visitors is wrong. He has a mother, a sister, and a brother who are perfectly capable of showing up. I would have expected his siblings to make it.

His dad, who is not yet 60, is in a nursing home due to MS. Travis was starting to have great success helping him forgive and turn to God. Now his dad is cut off from that, and he is isolated from an important source of help.

Nothing about the situation makes sense, and no one can do anything to change it by natural means. That means it’s a supernatural situation. The battle is taking place on a higher plane.

Satan hates Travis and wants to prevent him from fulfilling his destiny. Somehow he was able to get him shot and infected, and he has been able to keep him isolated. I can’t tell you exactly what God has been doing. Unlike Satan, he is not predictable. He may be showing Travis just how wretched and toxic his social circle and environment are. For a long time, God has been telling Travis to cut ties. Travis is reluctant to unload people he cares about. He has taught music to a lot of ghetto kids, and he has seen a number of them die or go to prison. He wants to make a difference, and it has been hard for him to admit he can’t. Free will is an obstacle that stops God himself. It’s no wonder the free will of people who don’t listen has stopped Travis so many times.

God is definitely showing Travis who his real friends are. A number of people are praying for him and looking for opportunities to help him. A young lady who graduated before him is doing wonderful things for him. She got his landlord to cooperate. She calls the hospital and updates me so I can report to other people. It’s too bad they’re not married. I don’t think he could do any better. She is very impressive.

When Travis gets out and has a lot of things to get squared away, his family will not participate to any significant degree. He will be helped by friends.

Travis might have to move up here for a while. That’s how badly his life has been shaken up. It would also be God in action. Getting out of Miami is important for Spirit-led people. There are plenty of people who pretend to be Spirit-led there, but the real children of God have been leaving for years.

If God has left you in Miami, it’s probably so you can suffer with the wicked, not so you can change your neighborhood.

I feel very good about the situation during my time with God. I’ll go out on a limb and say it: believe Travis will make it. Appearances don’t matter, because God is able to do anything. I hope the profit Travis derives from this ordeal is tremendous.

More

After posting, I got an unexpected text from Travis’s brother saying Travis was on life support and that they were rushing to the hospital. I texted everyone who is praying for him and gave them the news. I told his brother not to let the medical people give up on Travis.

Afterward, I learned some things from the young woman who is helping Travis.

His brother and mother have not responded to communications for two weeks. At some point, his mother said she was going to take over and didn’t need help. She didn’t put the young lady on the communication list.

The young lady says Travis is still on the same ECMO machine he was on yesterday. For all we know, his brother thinks an ECMO machine is the same thing as life support. That would be a distortion. While they are used to keep people alive, many people are treated with ECMO machines temporarily and then recover. Its main purpose is to assist recovery by taking the burden off the heart and lungs.

It is starting to look like his family got a nasty surprise today because they hadn’t been paying attention. His brother is reacting as though a sudden and likely final crisis had occurred, but it may just be that he is excited because he went a long time without news and then got an update that surprised him.

When my dad died, the ALF called me and said I needed to go to his side. Several hours later he was dead. It wasn’t a big shock to me because I visited him daily. It’s not clear that Travis is in a similar situation. Nothing is clear.

In the midst of the texting that is happening today, a friend of mine who is a nurse said she would be willing to be named as my health care surrogate. That was very touching. I am not afraid of death at all, but I don’t want to be tortured for months by care providers. I may take her up on her offer. She has more firsthand knowledge about looking after dying people than anyone I know.

I certainly wouldn’t want my sister to be named by default. If I become incapacitated, she needs to be as far away as existing technology can put her.

You Qualify

I’ve run into an interesting problem when telling people about God. They say they’re reluctant to ask him for things because they don’t deserve them.

This is an extremely destructive problem. It’s rooted in the poisonous teachings of traditional churches. For 2,000 years, preachers who knew nothing whatsoever about God told us we were supposed to look out for ourselves and work really hard. Someone even made up a Satanic saying which many people mistakenly believe is in the Bible: “God helps those who help themselves.” Obama’s press secretary quoted this nonsense and attributed it to the Bible.

God does not help those who help themselves. If you think you can help yourself, you’re completely deluded. You can’t take your next breath unless God helps you. He has been helping you every second of your life. If you think you built your career, your fortune, or your family by yourself, you are disconnected from God. Everything you have is in danger.

The belief that you can help yourself is based in pride. It’s more toxic than hate, lust, greed, or any other fault. If you read the Bible, you will see that the worst evils humanity has suffered were caused by people trying to help themselves. Adam and Eve tried to help themselves by taking a forbidden drug to give themselves the knowledge of good and evil. Read Genesis for yourself. They were trying to improve themselves.

Somehow, Satan has convinced us that pride is a virtue. There are still people who are against other character flaws, but in America, we exalt pride. Some of us even say, “Christian pride,” which is sort of like saying, “Christian rape,” or “Christian abortion.”

I supposed it’s not a coincidence that people who are snared in sexual sin use the word “pride” to label their movement. They’re right. They think they know better than God.

We really need to get this through our heads: God wants us to ask him for things all the time. He wants us to ask for little things, not just big things. You should ask him to help you what you should have for lunch. You should ask him which brand of aluminum foil to buy.

Get over the idea that God is busy. God has never, ever been busy. You can’t be busy unless your a limited being who lives in time. There is no time where God lives. Get over the idea that God does not want to be bothered. He loves us with extreme intensity, and he craves interaction with us. He is full of desire to do things for us.

Stop thinking you’re imposing on God. Everything is easy for him. He has said so. If you ask him for financial help, he doesn’t have to work extra shifts at Target. He doesn’t have to do without. It’s impossible for God to lack. If you ask him for healing, he doesn’t have to strain and pant and work up a sweat. He is not inconvenienced. He sits on the throne of heaven and wields infinite power. He has infinite resources. After he helps you, he still has as much as he had beforehand.

You have to ask for things and give God the glory when things work out. James said you can’t even do normal business without God’s help. Look:

Go to now, ye that say, To day or to morrow we will go into such a city, and continue there a year, and buy and sell, and get gain: Whereas ye know not what shall be on the morrow. For what is your life? It is even a vapour, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away. For that ye ought to say, If the Lord will, we shall live, and do this, or that. But now ye rejoice in your boastings: all such rejoicing is evil.

In the same chapter, he says God resists the proud but gives grace to the humble. When you say you do things so God doesn’t have to, you’re saying you are your own god.

What is grace? Anything God does for you is grace. Some people think grace is a supernatural ability to suffer and live in misery. That’s insane. Here are some examples of grace: miracle healings, the ability to prophesy, supernatural faith, supernatural love, financial success, marital success, and the next beat of your heart. Anything at all that you receive from God is grace.

You have to understand that God is a testator. He is a person who gives his heirs what they have inherited. He is not interested in your hard work. He is not adding up your hours so he can pay you what he owes. He is giving you things you could never earn. You deserve hell and defeat, all the time. God doesn’t owe you one good thing. The reason you’re not in hell right now is that he is patient and full of love.

God never owed you anything except failure and pain on earth and then damnation followed by perpetual agony, and because he didn’t want to pay that debt to you, he paid it to himself.

God gives gifts, not salaries.

It doesn’t matter what your need is. God wants to help you. Turning down his help will not make him happy. Would it make you happy if your son were crippled and he insisted on hobbling his way through life instead of letting you heal him?

I ask God for little things all the time, just for the purpose of nullifying pride. Hamburger or peanut butter and jelly? The grey shirt or the blue one? A lot of the time, I don’t really care what happens. I just want to acknowledge my total inability to do anything without his help. I want his help to keep coming. I want to be used to receiving it.

I want to be pampered by God. Anything he is willing to give me, I will take. I will gladly say I’m his charity case. It’s true whether I admit it or not, and it’s true of you, too.

I wish someone had shown me this when I was a kid. There were a lot of blessings that never arrived, but I was pretty good at receiving curses.

This was on my mind this morning, as was pistol ammunition. I’m trying to get 1250 fps from 180-grain Speer Gold Dots in a 10mm Glock 29. I’m getting numbers about 150 fps lower than expected, with known loads. Frustrating.

Yesterday I started to wonder if my primers were the problem. Back during the Obama ammo panic, I bought several thousand Wolf large pistol primers. I think they were all I could find. I’ve been using them. I’ve learned a few things.

People say Wolf primers are hard and that they are difficult to seat. Put these things together, and you end up with rounds that don’t go off. This is not a terrible tragedy when you’re shooting targets, but it could kill you in a defense situation. I’ve had a bunch of rounds fail to fire, and I’ve also experienced low velocities.

I believe I used CCI and Winchester primers when I made my original defensive ammo, which ran something like 1225 fps in a Glock 29. I have information dating back to my efforts with Wolf, and back then, I noted that they didn’t always go off.

Primers can affect bullet speeds. How much? I don’t know. But when you add the FTF’s in with the low speeds I’m getting, it’s obvious that I need to try a different brand. I have some Winchester large pistol primers, so today I loaded up 6 rounds for test purposes. I’m going to chronograph them.

I hope they perk up. If I can get 1225 or so, good enough.

I don’t see how a primer can knock 150 fps off a round. Maybe I got a bad box.

I have a new powder scale arriving today, so that will make me feel better about things. I may also get a powder trickler so I can load individual rounds accurately. I don’t need it for targets, but I want to be sure my defensive rounds are okay. It would be a real problem to have one get stuck in the barrel during a home invasion.

I’m avoiding looking at the news. That feels nice. I did take the time to check the local coronavirus figure. We are at 181 known cases for the county, even though testing is going on. Restaurants are open now. I am considering getting a haircut.

I don’t think the global or national coronavirus numbers mean anything now. As Trump said, apparent increases we see now are reflections of increased testing. It may not be possible to infer anything about the disease’s actual progress.

I’ve had an uncomfortable thought. What if the lockdowns don’t really hurt our economy that much?

This is an uncomfortable thought, because it could suggest that the lockdowns weren’t as misguided as I thought.

We have heard two very clear messages from the hysteria crowd: 1. we absolutely have to have lockdowns, and 2. we are definitely going to have a depression. I disagreed with the first claim and agreed that the damage due to lockdowns would be very severe.

If the economy isn’t really that bad, the lockdowns may have been worth the trouble, or at least they may not have been a disastrous idea.

T.B. Joshua prophesies that the world’s economy will do very badly and that there will be deflation. Bad if you don’t have cash. He says people need to grow food. Here I am on sand, with squirrels eating my peaches.

I don’t know if he’s right or not. If he is, then the lockdowns will continue to cause much more pain than the virus.

The last time we had a big recession, God told me it wasn’t for me, and I was fine. Hope I get the same grace every time.

I pray for God to create a huge grassroots Spirit-led church and for him to destroy the many big ministries that made people slaves and weaklings. How many Christians are confident about being blessed and protected? Bad ministries helped make them what they are. When times are easy, even people who don’t know God do well, but it’s different in hard times.

This is why the misery at the end of the age is called the tribulation period. A tribulum is a device for separating edible grain from husks. Hard times expose hypocrites.

I’ve noticed that the big charismatic preachers aren’t talking about the end of the church age. Why would they? First of all, they benefit from it by making people their slaves, and second, they have no idea what God is saying, so they don’t know what’s happening.

They must know Spirit-led people have been predicting the end of the church age for a number of years. They probably hate it. No more $7000 basketball shoes.

We need the Holy Spirit pandemic to start. We need to infect each other wherever we are, one on one, instead of counting on buffoons and human traffickers.

KNOCK IT OFF

I have decided to publish an edict. All inhabitants of earth must comply as of yesterday.

Stop hoarding bread flour.

I still can’t get bread flour in my county. I can get all-purpose, which, of course, isn’t good for all purposes. I can get self-rising. I can get White Lily. I can get all types of corn meal. I haven’t seen bread flour in weeks, and yeast is also unavailable.

Why on earth are people hoarding bread flour and yeast? Who are they fooling? They’re not baking.

Here are some facts no one seems to think about.

1. White flour goes bad in a relatively short time, so unless you can freeze it in an airtight container, hoarding it is likely to lead to substandard bread.

2. Bread is readily available. Stores are packed with it.

3. Bread freezes beautifully.

I don’t have a real problem, because when I saw how things were going, I bought a bag of gluten. I add it to all-purpose flour, and that pretty much turns it into bread flour. Still, I am issuing my edict. I am tired of the nonsense.

I don’t know why corn meal is still available. You can get all the Martha White cornbread mix with Hot Rize your trunk can hold. I had this in mind yesterday when I bought bacon. It’s technically possible to make cornbread without bacon grease, but I hope it never comes to that. It would be disgusting and demoralizing.

People should be thinking about biscuits more than bread. Biscuits are better than bread. Wait! Hold your venom! I will make my case.

It only takes 20 minutes to make biscuits. Furthermore, biscuit recipes tend to be smaller than bread recipes, so you are less likely to make way too much and eat all of it at one sitting.

Not that I know anything about that.

Okay, yes, homemade bread is one of the greatest things ever, but the truth is that it’s too good to keep in your house on a daily basis. If you bake your own bread regularly, you’ll eat 1500 bread calories every day.

Of course, I had yeast before the hype…I mean “pandemic”…started. In fact, I had one more jar than I needed.

I keep laughing when I see how God provides for me. Today I had to make up a batch of my no-scrub shower spray. One of the ingredients is 6 ounces of Dawn dishwashing liquid. In the current hysteria, Dawn is seen as a miracle cure, for reasons I have not been able to determine. Maybe Oprah and Dr. Oz drink it. Most of the time, even here, a trip to the store to get Dawn will be fruitless.

I had about 4 ounces left in the kitchen bottle. Was I concerned? No, because I had a couple of bottles for the upstairs bathrooms, plus one huge jug in the workshop for the pressure washer. But I wondered…had God done it again? Was there ANOTHER bottle under the kitchen sink? I had to look.

There it was. Full. Waiting.

Speaking of Oprah, I kind of wonder when we’re going to start hearing celebrity hoarding stories. They have to exist. Celebrities are generally venal and self-absorbed. They think they’re gods with special importance to humanity, because we can’t get by without their naked Instagram photos and self-righteous Tweets. How did we survive before Chrissy Teigen started telling us what to do? She’s a trained model! Remember Leo DiCaprio flying around on private jets to fight global warming? The stories will come. I’m sure of it.

I had a dream about celebrities last night. I dreamed I was in some venue where Whitney Houston was singing. She was made up beautifully, and she was wearing some sort of partially transparent catsuit. She wasn’t on a stage. She was on a table, on all fours, with her head down near the table top. She was completely engrossed in herself and her singing. Her behind was considerably higher than her face. Her knees were pretty far apart.

Fans weren’t separated from her the way they were during her life. They were walking around the table. Some were touching her. Some were putting their hands between her buttocks, practically committing rape. She was oblivious. She was caught up in her fame and in getting what she had always hoped for: attention and admiration. She felt like a success.

She didn’t look happy. Her expression was like that of an extremely thirsty person who was drinking water. She looked desperate.

I think the dream came from God. It wasn’t a sex dream. It wasn’t exciting for me. I think it was about people who debase themselves in order to become famous. They think they’re in control, but in reality, they are like whores for countless uncaring strangers. They think they’re leaders, but they’re really the worst type of followers. They have no freedom.

Many famous people serve the Beast. The Beast speaks through the mob, and in order to stay on top, celebrities have to obey the mob. We’re in a time when the Beast is training the mob to be more responsive. Celebrities are a big part of it.

Haven’t they always been?

Whitney Houston is one of Satan’s masterpieces. She had everything, and she died naked in a bathtub, in a filthy hotel bathroom, full of drugs, surrounded by takers. She was rich, but she was married to a man who beat her. The Bible says God lifts people up above “the waters.” Whitney Houston drowned in 10 inches of water, on dry land.

Is it me, or are degrading celebrity deaths becoming more common? Michael Jackson, David Carradine, Whitney Houston, Amy Winehouse, Prince…seems like there is an increase, and on top of that, we are suddenly seeing male celebrities die naked from hanging, which suggests erotic asphyxiation. Not a flattering way to be remembered. Solo erotic asphyxiation is one of the most narcissistic, selfish, fleshly things a person can do in this life. When physical pleasure becomes that important to you, you have a problem.

The other day I learned that many gays are now injecting their genitals with meth and a Viagra-like drug called Trimix. Former Tallahassee mayor and failed gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum was found naked and unconscious at what appears to have been an injection party. Pleasure is nice, and a certain amount is harmless, but you shouldn’t trade your soul for it, especially in a subculture in which a man of 50 is considered too old to socialize with. Sooner or later, you will find yourself deprived of access to the things you built your life around.

I keep praying in tongues and trying to prophesy every day. I don’t want to be without guidance and correction. Look how crazy the world is getting. Without God, I will be as lost as anyone else.

I’ve been trying to figure T.B. Joshua out. He’s a Nigerian preacher I’ve written about. He prophesies a lot. It seems very clear that he is the real thing, but sometimes he and his ministry are disappointing. He said he saw “a woman winning” before the 2016 election, and when Clinton lost, he or his people took the video down. Then later he said he had actually seen the popular vote. Maybe his explanation was correct, but taking the video down was not.

Earlier this year, he said rain was falling in Wuhan, washing the epidemic away. Sure enough, afterward, the numbers in China dried up abruptly. But later he claimed the epidemic would end by March 27, and he didn’t limit it to China. Obviously, the epidemic got worse. Then the video containing the prophesy disappeared. Now they have a video saying he predicted that “the noise” of the epidemic would end, and they’re supporting it with a Forbes article claiming March 28 is the day the acceleration of the contagion rate changed instantly.

I think he’s a real prophet who does not always understand his own prophesies, and I think he is covering up when he gets things wrong. That’s unacceptable.

If it’s true, it confirms what I believe, which is that we aren’t supposed to depend on prophets. We are supposed to BE prophets, as Moses indicated and Joel confirmed.

I am trying to prophesy every day, but I’m not transcribing it and putting it here. I want to see how things come out. If I start to feel secure enough to share things with other people, I will. If I’m not sure, I shouldn’t be saying things that could mislead. My purpose isn’t to tell other people the future, anyway. It’s to connect them with God so he can tell them the future and whatever else they need to hear.

My feeling is that even if you’re prophesying for real, if you’re not experienced, you can end up taking over from God and saying things that aren’t correct. I don’t think the gift is enough. I think a little experience is necessary. We’ll see if I’m right.

Living by prophecy is like climbing a mountain one foothold at a time. Every time you speak about what you should do, you have to establish a new foothold and then jump onto it, abandoning the security of the old one. You need to know the footholds are solid.

That’s all I have. I need to go out and test a few rounds of defensive 10mm. I’m hoping to put an end to my search for a good, solid recipe.

Pandemic Logic at Work

I have to ask: are we having a meat shortage or not?

Last week, they told us meat was going to become a problem, fast. Whether or not it was true, I felt I had to get out there and try to blunt the effects of hoarding by picking up a few pounds of meat. I have learned that when people think something is in short supply, they will generally hog it and make it hard to find, whether or not it’s scarce.

Today I went to the grocery. My local Winn-Dixie had lots of beef on sale. They also had bacon on sale. I picked up two pounds. I’ve been making biscuits, and I will need bacon grease in the future.

I went to Publix, which is another chain. I was hoping to find real bread flour and yeast. I had no luck in the baking aisle. I checked on bacon. They were somewhat low, and there were little signs telling people not to hog it.

At Winn-Dixie, they were selling bacon two for one. At Publix, the signs said you should only take one package.

One store was trying to get rid of pork, and a store two or three miles away was trying to prevent a run. This is the way the panic has been. What’s unobtainable on one block is abundant on the next.

Smithfield is a big pork producer, and they have been named among the likely plant-closers. Smithfield bacon was on sale here today. Okay. That certainly makes sense.

Complicating things, the situation varies from state to state. My cousin lives near Chicago. She says they can’t get meat. She says you have to park across the street to get into Walmart for anything, and her son told her it would take hours to get inside the building. Those nice, generous Chicagoans. You have to admire them.

What’s the story? Is there no shortage? Is there a slight shortage? Is the shortage still a week or so away? Did Trump abort the shortage when he pressured the meat packers and gave them special status?

Why is it you can’t get into a Chicago-area Walmart while the one closest to me is packed with nearly everything and not crowded? They even sell toilet paper. There is a lot of empty space in the paper aisle, but you can get toilet paper. In Chicago, you pretty much have to use leaves.

I’m wondering if this epidemic is completely different for Christians and unbelievers. Are they suffering more than we are? I live in an area where chain stores play Christian music, and things are not bad at all.

I guess reality is always different for the blessed and the cursed. It was certainly different when the flood started and when God burned Sodom and Gomorrah. It was different when he struck Egypt with plagues and killed Pharaoh and his army.

I don’t think the meat shortage will amount to much, because Trump is on the case. Still, if you live in a godless area where people don’t care about each other, a perceived shortage can be worse than an actual shortage.

Maybe when the election comes, they will marvel at us because we haven’t turned on Trump. Maybe because their experience has been worse, they will assume we went through the same thing.

I did something fun today. I bought paper towels. I bought 6 big rolls of Bounty. Real paper towels. Not an off brand. Did I need them? Not really, but I’ll need them in a few weeks, and I figured it was okay to buy them because they were sitting on the shelf in mid-afternoon. I wouldn’t have done it at nine. I just felt that if I bought them, I would stop thinking about paper towels.

Maybe I shouldn’t have bought them. Hard to say.

I am considering getting masks. I have no idea how I’ll do it, so maybe it won’t happen. I think they will do nearly nothing to protect me, but they might help other people if I get C19 and don’t know it. I wonder if they’re available anywhere.

Amazon has some dubious listings that look fraudulent. And they want over four bucks each for disposable masks. Surely that’s not the normal price. Forget that. I’m not paying $4 every time I get out of the car.

I checked, and the regular price is around $1.20 per mask, if you buy 10. It’s a wonder no one is shooting price gougers.

Should I get cheap surgical masks instead?

At first, they told us masks were pointless. Then they told us N95 masks could protect us if fitted very carefully and disposed of after use. Now they’re telling us to wear nearly anything.

Forget it. If cheap is all I can get, I have a camo thing I bought for hunting. It will be just as good as a surgical mask, and I can wash it.

I want to get tested to see if I really did have C19 in January. It would be great to find that out. It would mean I am immune and in all likelihood, not contagious. Testing is still reserved for sick people, however, and going into a place where they are testing seems like the only really good way to catch C19 in this county.

I’m going to chronograph some ammunition and forget the whole business. I think June will be a very nice month.