Braised Rubber Equals Good Eats

Interesting stuff is going on today.

First off, I received–and tried–my rice cooker today.

Cooking rice correctly is not hard if you do it several times a month, but if you lay off, you forget exactly which measurements, stove settings, and cooking times work. I gave up and ordered a computerized cooker.

I was going to go with something that only makes rice, but I saw that I could get an Instant Pot automatic pressure cooker for a reasonable price. I had to try that. Pressure cookers are wonderful, and a pressure cooker that already knows how to do a lot of basic things, and which also lets you choose how long it stays on, sounded like a godsend.

So I made rice, right? No. I made boliche, which is a Cuban dish. This may be the first time I’ve wanted any type of Cuban food since leaving Miami. Generally, it makes my stomach hurt when I see a sign for a Cuban restaurant, and the thought of eating food that reminds me of one of the most unpleasant cities in America turns me off. But today I needed something suitable for pressure-cooking, and boliche came to mind.

Boliche is eye round roast. It’s like a big piece of fat-free rubber shaped like a tongue. If you throw it in the oven and try to prepare it like a real roast, it will be inedible. If you cook it forever in the presence of the right ingredients, it’s very good.

I made a tunnel in the roast and shoved cheap chorizos into it. I covered the roast with salt, pepper, cumin, and fresh garlic. I added red wine and a little water, plus a couple of sacrificial onions for flavor. I cooked the meat for 45 minutes. Then I tossed in seasoned potatoes, carrots, and more onions and cooked everything for another 15 minutes.

You can’t cook vegetables and meat in a pressure cooker for the same amount of time, because the vegetables disintegrate. I saved most of my onions for the second cooking session. I only added onions to the first run to get their flavor into the meat.

The boliche was quite good. It would have been better had I remembered to add red bell peppers, but it was very nice. It could have been more tender, though, so after dinner, I put the meat back in the machine by itself and set it to run 15 more minutes. Really good boliche is on the verge of falling apart, and the sauce permeates it.

Is it worth it to use a computerized cooker to make boliche? It’s an improvement. It’s easier to clean than my regular pressure cookers, and it’s somewhat easier to use. It should give reproducible results easily because it has repeatable settings. On occasions when I have to cook a lot of things, it will free up a stove burner and turn itself off for me, and it will keep things warm when they’re done. It’s hard to see buyer’s remorse in this picture.

I’ll make rice sooner or later. I look forward to rice that doesn’t have little crunchy bits in the middle or a layer of leathery rice on the bottom.

Second major event: I received more .22 LR ammo. I now own too much of it to carry without risking a back injury. I have 5,000 more rounds on order, but the company I bought it from seems shady, so I wouldn’t be surprised if I ended up disputing the charge and getting a refund from my credit card company. My lack of confidence in them is the reason I ordered the shipment that arrived today.

Now I feel good about the .22 LR supply. I can sit back and see if it loosens up. I honestly think 15,000 rounds by mid-summer would be a good sensible goal. As I have said before, it only gets more expensive with time, and I know perfectly well that I’ll shoot thousands of rounds during my life. Best to get the buying over with.

This caliber is indispensible. If you want to be a good shot, practice makes a big difference, and .22 LR makes it affordable. It’s also more pleasant to shoot than bigger calibers. It’s good for hunting. It’s good for slaughtering farm animals. You can even use it for self defense if you’re a good shot with a big magazine. For under $700, you can get a very good pistol plus enough ammo and targets to turn you into an excellent marksman.

I really like Mini-mags. I am content to settle on them for my go-to .22 cartridges for the foreseeable future. I don’t think something else will pop up next month and blow them out of the water. CCI/Speer has always given me great results. I’ve shot aluminum Blazers, brass Blazers, .22 LR, and 10mm Gold Dots. No problems at all. Can’t say that about every brand *cough cough PMC*.

I found an okay deal on 7.62x39mm, but it’s probably gone now. The company I wanted to buy from listed the price as about $250. Problem: one part of their site said it was 100 rounds, and another said 1000. I asked for clarification days ago. They had a box of ordinary pistol ammo priced at something like $35, and that suggested they were not above gouging. I didn’t want to receive a very small box of ammo with a $300 invoice.

They finally responded this afternoon. It’s 1000 rounds. Now…how likely is it that they still have it? I’ll check.

Dang. They still have it.

I have over 1000 rounds already. Why do I want more?

When I first got into AK ammo, I bought Wolf hollowpoints. I figured they were a good balance of low price and reasonable usefulness in a defensive situation. Then I found out Tulammo hollowpoints did a lot better in tests, so I ordered those. Recently, I learned that Tulammo soft points do better than hollowpoints, and the price is either identical or close.

I have no desire to harm anyone, but I did buy my Eastern-bloc guns for self-defense, and it seems to me that I might as well have ammo that works.

People say they do well with deer, using Tulammo soft points. Sounds good enough for me. Anything that works well on deer works well on unexpected guests.

There is a lot of pricey non-Russian AK ammo out there, and maybe it will work somewhat better than Tulammo. I don’t know. Tulammo seems very good, and when you’re shooting 30-round magazines, it’s hard not to think about cost.

Maybe I’m not being logical. I have a desire to make a credible effort to maintain good self-defense ammo, but on the other hand, I am not excited about shooting human beings, and I like saving money. Tulammo is where this maelstrom of motivations took me.

People love to say, “How much is your life worth?”, when discussing ammo prices. I’m not sure my life is worth $1.50 per round. Also, I don’t think a murderer will take 20 hits of Tulammo and then run over, stick a knife in me, and say, “Should have bought Hornady, vato.”

Buying the first lot of Tulammo turned my Wolf into range fodder, and buying a second lot would turn the first lot into range fodder. Guess I’ll start shooting the AK and Vz58. My steel targets are probably too small to hit from a safe distance (100 yards), so I should get a bigger gong or shoot paper.

Widener’s. That’s who has the ammo. If you’re looking for Tulammo soft points, jump on it. I’ve written about the situation before, but I didn’t want to mention the name because I was afraid someone who reads the blog would snap it all up. Before tax and shipping, it’s 25 cents per round. That’s acceptable. The shipping isn’t too bad.

Cheaper Than Dirt has been gouging like crazy. I don’t know why anyone buys from them. Maybe it’s old guys who can’t Google well enough to find good deals. Does the proprietor understand just how cheap dirt is? The name of the company is a bad joke.

I’m all set now. Nearly. I just need some more .22 rifles and pistols, rifle brass, primers, powder, and bullets, an infra-red scope or two, a rangefinder, a couple of cool shooting jackets like Paul Harrell wears, a McCormick AR trigger, several suppressors, and a tactical haircut with lots of gel.

It has been a pleasant day. Hope things are looking up in your area.

Inheritance Beats Striving Any Day

I’m not even bothering to check my coronavirus equation this morning. The point appears to have been made: this was never a plague, and it never had the potential to be. You don’t need an equation. Just look at Sweden. They have a relaxed approach, and their infection rate is lower than Norway’s. Norway has a heavy-duty lockdown.

You may ask how I can say this didn’t have the potential to be a plague. How can I be so sure things won’t change? The answer is a question: why would they? The epidemic can’t just speed up because you want it to. It has to have a reason. Something new has to happen. It would have to be a completely different disease. You can say it can mutate. Why would coronavirus do that? Isn’t the common cold just as likely to turn into a plague through mutation? It’s more likely, because the common cold is caused by many viruses.

Tuberculosis hasn’t turned into a plague. Chickenpox hasn’t turned into a plague. Lots of old diseases haven’t turned into plagues, even though they’ve been with us for centuries. You can’t bank on bizarre occurrences that are so unlikely they should be considered impossible.

The known number of infections is under 1.8 million. The US alone had about 40 million flu cases this year. In all likelihood, the real coronavirus number is in the hundreds of millions, and we don’t know about it because the disease simply isn’t very severe, except for rare individuals. I think we will find out that these things are true. Just a hunch.

We still have zero major celebrity deaths. That’s astounding. Wynton Marsalis’s father died. Not a major celebrity. Most people don’t know his first name. Then we have Joe Diffie, John Prine, and Tom Dempsey. Where are the Biebers, Anistons, Pelosis, and Clooneys? I’ve been predicting a failed plague, and even I thought we would see a few dozen celebrities die.

Celebrities are behaving pretty badly. They’re posting things to get attention, as always. “Here I am, bravely weathering coronavirus in my mansion, surrounded by guards in N95 masks.” “Yoga is keeping me sane during this terrifying time.” “Why did Trump do this to us? He has to go.” “My vegan diet will protect me.” “Here is a really bad, maudlin, hysterical song I wrote in order to call attention to myself and make me look like I care.”

Here at the ranch/compound, I continue my idle pursuits. Maybe I’ll stand on my head in yoga pants, surrounded by disinfected tarot cards, and put it on Instagram.

I am not happy with my new Instagram account. While I was using it to try to get in touch with people after my friend Travis got shot, I saw that a married friend who appears to be on the outs with her husband was posting provocative swimsuit shots. This is someone who used to sing at my last church. I remember why I gave up social media.

This morning, I decided to try using citric acid to clean .45 brass. It seems to work well. I don’t know if the insides of the cases are as pretty as they would be after using a tumbler, but they look ready for reloading. I put about two teaspoons of acid in a mixing bowl, filled it partially with warm water, and added a squirt of Dawn, which I have, in spite of the hoarders. I dumped the cases in and mixed everything up. I let them go for 15 minutes, and then I rinsed.

This is much easier than using a tumbler, and it reduces my carbon footprint (practically all I think about, when I’m not crying about whaling) because it’s not electric. I mean, yes, electricity heated the water, and I guess they use electricity to make citric acid and pack it and ship it. Other than that, it’s so green, it hurts.

It makes me feel good about opening the French doors to cool the patio.

In all seriousness, tumbler media tend to make a mess, and the tumbler makes noise.

Now I just need to mount my press to a bench and go through my reloading components. Having reloading components is great, unless it means you’ve been too lazy to turn them into ammunition. It’s better to have cartridges than bullets.

I’m getting very tired of self-righteous Youtube ads. They keep popping up. “STAY AT HOME IF YOU DON’T WANT THE TORCHES AND PITCHFORKS MAKE THIS A TIME OF UNITY AND LOVE.” Today I got an ad about a ridiculous coronavirus concert. I knew this was coming. “We are the world; we have a mild cough and a slight fever.” Celebrities never, ever miss a chance to turn events into self-glorification festivals. It’s disgusting. They should sing about the giant future tax burden we just took on over nothing.

I promise you that if I die, I will not come here and act like a martyr. I’ll try to be a man about it.

The “stimulus” program is insane. They’re sending people money to stimulate the economy, but they’re also killing the economy by forcing us not to work. Can anyone see the problem with this? It’s like doing CPR on someone while holding a pillow over his face. You can’t stimulate anything while you’re doing your best to kill it.

It’s not the only remarkable piece of cognitive dissonance we’re seeing. There is a meme out there about our jails. My paraphrasal: “You’re arresting people for leaving their houses because they’ll spread coronavirus, but you’re letting criminals out of jail to keep them from spreading coronavirus. Hmm.”

I have Roku, and my home screens changed to an ominous, pseudo-friendly “STAY HOME OR ELSE” theme. Totally inappropriate. It’s not your place to tell me what to do, from a cubicle in Silicon Valley. Butt out, put on some real pants, and cut off your man bun.

The leftist power-grabbing and maternalism (definitely not paternalism) are very disturbing. It’s coming from every side. We are being mommied ruthlessly, with no regard for the disgusting consequences that prevail in a feminized society. Matriarchy is poisonous. There is a reason why Satan portrays Jesus as a helpless baby in the arms of a grown woman.

There is no “baby Jesus.” He was a baby for two years, like everyone else. Then he became a man. Would you put a baby picture on your driver’s license?

Satan is very effeminate. There is no doubt about it. Consider his vanity, his beauty, and his methods. Consider his rejection-obsessed, vindictive personality. Consider his love of attention. Look at all the feminine men he has used.

He’s like a rejected girlfriend who didn’t get palimony.

Conservatives always spout about civil rights and how great they are, but look how easily Auntie Sam took them away this year. You don’t even need a leftist president. You just need a godless mayor and governor who worship the state. One day you’re free, and the next day, BANG! It’s 1984, only without toilet paper.

The Russians were always short of toilet paper under Soviet rule. Maybe the current American shortage is Satan’s little leftist joke. “We’re coming for you and your Charmin.”

I have some uplifting news, as if the continued failure of the coronavirus plague weren’t uplifing. I’ve gotten a huge revelation about God’s status as father.

Fatherlessness is a huge curse. People whose fathers are inadequate grow up to be punks. Many males get caught up in pride and haughtiness. Many females get caught up in ugly, attention-craving female rebellion. People who don’t have fathers don’t know how to live, because no one has taught them. If you don’t have a father to tell you things, you have to learn over a very long period through trial and error.

Fatherlessness Personified

My parents were not very competent. My dad didn’t watch over me and give me tips. My mother didn’t teach me discipline. As a result, I haven’t had a good feel for the presence of a loving father who takes an interest in me and is always available and eager to advise me and solve my problems. I know such people exist, but I haven’t been able to feel what it would be like to have one in my life.

Suddenly, God has helped me understand that feeling.

One of the worst curses you can have is a heartfelt conviction that God is reluctant or unable to help you. I’ve fought that curse for a long time. In my mind, I know God forgives me and wants to work on me. I know he loves me and wants to help me get through life, all the time. But knowing and feeling are not the same, and feeling is important. Supernatural gifts don’t come through knowledge alone.

God has helped me to understand, in my heart, that I can go to him and say, “Dad, I have this problem. Will you please show me how to defeat it?”

I knew this in my mind, but it wasn’t in my heart until yesterday.

Faith doesn’t just work in the mind. It has to work in the heart. The word says to love God with all your heart and mind.

This is a wonderful breakthrough. I have a much more direct type of communication with God now. I have much more faith that he will help. The big problem is that once I get started, it’s hard to make myself get up and deal with my daily obligations. I don’t want to stop talking to him.

That, however, is a problem, and a loving father solves problems for his children.

Here is what Paul said about this:

For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God. For you did not receive the spirit of bondage again to fear, but you received the Spirit of adoption by whom we cry out, “Abba, Father.” The Spirit Himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs—heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ, if indeed we suffer with Him, that we may also be glorified together.

My whole life has changed, so I am anxious to see what happens from here on out. I’m looking forward to internal change. I’m looking forward to being rid of juvenile priorities and being filled with divine ones.

I feel like I’ve died. It’s very strange. I hope it continues and increases.

All this being said, I suppose I will continue to amuse myself with trivial pursuits until something important comes along.

I have at least 3,600 rounds of .22 LR on the way, so I feel I have the green light to hit the pasture and improve my shooting. I’m also thinking of giving away my bedroom furniture, which is heavy and depressing. I’d like to get something newer and lighter. Easier to deal with in a move.

I need to clean up the workshop, which has suddenly become very productive. There is a layer of steel filings and flap-wheel grit on the floor. I should consider getting a better welding table. Mine is great, and it was very cheap, but I would like something a little bigger.

I have to move my non-firearm-related junk out of the gun room and into the storage room. Or maybe I should just throw it on the burn pile. Maybe I should get some kind of man-friendly couch and chair for that room. Something like you would see in a Firestone waiting area. I have to put a computer in there and put a monitor on the wall.

There is no limit to what a single man can do to a dining room.

I need to look into holsters for full-size Glocks. Maybe a shoulder holster is best. I already have one for my Glock 29. I guess I could try it out on the farm, and if I like it, I can get one for the big Glock. Which I haven’t shot yet.

I expect things to go better for me now. If so, I can be of more help to other people.

Brass Sorted

Today I crossed a major hurdle. I sorted my brass.

When I moved from Miami, I dumped brass in whatever boxes were available. I actually threw out some military brass because I had read it was a pain to reload. I barely looked at my brass until a week or two back, when I decided to turn my dining room into a gun room/indoor workshop.

Today I got out all the dirty bags and boxes and went to work.

It looks like I have maybe a thousand .40 S&W casings. Problem: I sold my Glock 22 to my buddy Mike. I don’t have a gun that can shoot .40 S&W. In all likelihood, this works out well for Mike. Today I did some math and found out I can make him range ammo for around $7 per box. That’s even cheaper than Russian ammo, and it would probably be more accurate.

I have found that homemade pistol ammo is more accurate than store ammo. I don’t know why. I assume the powder charges are more accurate, which would be odd, because a big factory should have really accurate powder-dispensing equipment.

I haven’t set my ammo press up yet. I moved my workbenches into the dining room. I’m reluctant to drill holes in a bench. My benches are very nice, and besides, once you drill a hole in a bench, things fall into it. If you plug the holes when you’re not using your press, you have screw heads sticking up, banging into things.

I’m wondering if I can fasten the press to a long board and clamp it to a bench. I’m also considering welding a stand-alone stand together.

I’m looking into ways to clean casings. My first case-cleaning tool was a tumbler full of corn cob media. I still have it, but since the last time I used it, I got a sonic cleaner. I was looking up information on using sonic cleaners to clean brass, and I found I could do it with citric acid instead. This process has been used for years, so why didn’t I know about it when I bought my tumbler?

If I understand things correctly, you can clean brass perfectly well with citric acid with no sonic cleaner or tumbler. You just let the brass sit in the acid for a few minutes. If this is true, I regret buying the tumbler.

I don’t regret it that much, though, because it’s useful for other things.

If citric acid works, why do people use tumblers, which make a mess, cost a lot, and work slowly? Maybe it’s because they want super-shiny brass, which is pretty silly. Tumblers shine things well.

The obvious question is this: how does the citric acid trick help me, when no one keeps citric acid in their house? Well, this is me we’re talking about. I think I have 9 pounds of citric acid, down from 15.

I have a pretty decent amount of 9mm brass. Not sure why I bothered to save it. When life is normal, 9mm is very cheap. I’ll bet I can make it for $6 per box. The other day, I paid a little over $7 for new ammo with brass casings. How hard should I work to save a dollar per box?

Ammo prices don’t seem to make sense. There are fairly big cartridges which aren’t terribly expensive, and there are smaller ones that cost more. It seems to even out when you reload.

I was working on my gun room with great enthusiasm when I found out my friend Travis had been shot. Was it a message from God? Was I being punished for owning guns? Was he being punished because he wanted one? No. Is it wrong to continue working on them and shooting them now that I see what they can do? No. Owning guns is fine with God, and I already knew what they could do.

I don’t recommend using any form of tobacco, but I smoked a number of cigars after my mother and aunt died from lung cancer. There was no connection. I wan’t killing them retroactively with my cigars. I’ve had two pets run over, but I still drive cars, and I do not slow down for squirrels. My dad used to drink and get abusive. I have beer in my fridge.

God has no problem with guns. Take my word for it. Misuse and accidents don’t change that. If a refrigerator fell on your dad, you wouldn’t sell your refrigerator.

I’m going to make a firm decision and choose a way to mount my ammo press. I picked up a new 10mm Glock yesterday, and it’s no good without ammunition.

Men, if you can’t throw out your dining room furniture and turn the room into something useful, I feel your pain.

By the way, I checked my coronavirus prediction equation today, and I’m about 7.5% high. It looks like the real numbers are diverging downward from the curve the infection had been following, and that’s good. I’m going to have to quit fooling with the equation, because as the number of recoveries increases, the total number of people who have been infected means less and less, and my equation isn’t set up to take it into account anyway.

It seems like the USA is the only reason we are still seeing a lot of new infections. Other countries have infection rates with decelerating accelerations, if you know what I mean. We’re still infecting each other pretty well. Is it because our epidemic started later? I don’t know. The numbers have always been crazy, so how can you draw conclusions? We know not many people have been gravely or killed, by pandemic standards, because those things are relatively easy to check, but we don’t really know how many mild or asymptomatic cases there have been.

A reader mentioned a study that suggests a whole lot of us have been infected and don’t know it. The study was conducted in Germany. A snippet:

Over the last two weeks, German virologists tested nearly 80 percent of the population of Gangelt for antibodies that indicate whether they’d been infected by the coronavirus. Around 15 percent had been infected, allowing them to calculate a COVID-19 infection fatality rate of about 0.37 percent. The researchers also concluded that people who recover from the infection are immune to reinfection, at least for a while.

It may well be true that this disease is more contagious and less dangerous than we thought. I’ve suspected this was true, but how do you prove test results are bad when you already know testing is faulty? Can you use bad tests to prove tests are bad?

News of a high infection rate would be wonderful, because a high infection rate means a high number of recovered patients who are now immune. This will force the infection rate to drop. What if 15% of Americans are now immune? That’s great. Even better: finding out how already had the big, scary disease and didn’t notice it. Next time it hits us, will you be scared? No. You’ll march right out to Safeway and buy your toilet paper with confidence.

Trump is talking about ending the social distancing guidelines. I like the guidelines. We should hold onto them in situations where it’s practical, especially in the winter. It’s always a good idea to think about the spread of disease. People should also continue to be clean. That would be a nice, and very great, change. But we need to get rid of the lockdowns, unless riots and a depression are our goals. Sometimes you have to take a punch in order to avoid something worse.

I’m going to try the citric acid. If it works, I’ll be happy that it’s so easy and sad that I spent money on a tumbler, simultaneously.

Stuff You Think About When Someone Gets Shot

I am beat. I have to say it.

As mentioned earlier, my friend Travis got shot last night. I got word at 8 p.m., from the young man who shot him. He called from Travis’s phone. He hung up while I was talking to him, and I spent a lot of time after that scrambling to get information from other sources.

Needless to say, I got to bed very late. I probably slept about 4 hours. I don’t just have bags under my eyes. My whole face looks like a bag. It looks like a souffle that fell. My features look like slits in Jabba the Hutt’s belly.

It’s quite an experience, going 12 hours wondering whether one of your best friends is alive or dead.

I couldn’t help trying to make deductions. For a while, I thought I wasn’t able to call the friend back on Travis’s phone because the friend was in custody and the phone was being held for evidence. I also considered the possibility that the friend hung up because he thought Travis was about to die. I kept trying to come up with explanations for the limited facts that were available to work with.

For a time, I kept thinking how much better it would have been had I been the one who got shot. I’m older, and I’m single and childless. I enjoy life, but I’m ready to go. Travis is young, and he wants to have a family.

I also felt as though part of me would die if Travis died. He’s a big part of my life. I’ve put effort into him. Losing him at his age would be like growing an arm over a period of years and then having it sliced off in an accident. I knew my life wouldn’t lose all purpose, but emotionally, I felt as though I would. It was just an irrational feeling.

Of course, I prayed a lot. The oddest thing that happened to me took place after I prayed. For long periods, I felt complete supernatural peace. It made me feel as though something were wrong with me. How can you have a conscience and feel peace when someone you care about could be lying on a stainless steel drawer in a refrigerator?

I didn’t want to fight it. My belief is that when you feel good, you should let it happen. Don’t worry about not feeling bad. You’ll have plenty of chances to do it later if you really want to. And if the Holy Spirit is the one making you feel good, why would you reject it?

I tried prophesying, which is something I do every day. I have been taught that prophesy is a gift that can be operated at will. You can’t guess upcoming lottery numbers. It doesn’t make you a Magic 8 Ball. You can only say what the Lord wants to say. But you can do it at will. I heard myself saying Travis would be fine.

That seemed like a potential problem. He was shot in the chest with a large-bore pistol. There was no natural reason to think he would be fine. What if I got up the next day and received a text saying he was dead? Not only would he be dead, but I would have to rethink a very important teaching, and that could impact my relationship with God in a very damaging way. It would be a great setback.

I have a lot invested in certain people, and I also have a lot invested in the Holy Spirit. It would be hard to go back and learn a new, powerless kind of Christianity.

Paul told Christians to prophesy. He told them to covet the gift. Clearly, we’re supposed to be doing it. He also seemed to say prophecy was superior to speaking in tongues. Here is what he said:

I wish you all spoke with tongues, but even more that you prophesied; for he who prophesies is greater than he who speaks with tongues, unless indeed he interprets, that the church may receive edification.

He also said:

Therefore let him who speaks in a tongue pray that he may interpret. For if I pray in a tongue, my spirit prays, but my understanding is unfruitful.

It appears he believed prophecy was better than tongues even for personal use. That’s saying something. Regular prolonged prayer in tongues will change your life and put you on a new level. Anything that beats that is worth seeking.

When I heard that Travis was fundamentally all right, one of the first things I thought of was prophecy. If there were problems with it, they hadn’t been demonstrated. I was not in immediate danger of losing a friend and a big part of my relationship with God, simultaneously.

It’s funny how our spiritual infrastructure can seem to depend on how things turn out in the natural world. If Satan can “prove” faith is a lie, he can take away everything you stand on.

Speaking of prophecy, I’m very disappointed in T.B. Joshua, the African preacher who said the coronavirus epidemic was over in Wuhan. Some things have disappeared from his Youtube record. I’ve mentioned this before. If you issue a prophecy, and it seems to turn out to be wrong, you need to leave it in front of the public. They need to know what they’re buying when they believe you.

He said rain was washing away the epidemic in Wuhan, and he went on to say the epidemic was over everywhere. The China numbers froze in time (at least according to whoever provides them), which seemed to back up what he actually predicted, but as we all know, the rest of the world didn’t do as well. He should have confronted the issue. Was the whole prophecy false? Did he simply misunderstand it, which is completely possible? I can’t answer, but regardless, covering up was wrong. The cover-up is a huge problem. Prophesying and missing are much less significant.

He should have left all the videos up.

You can say overzealous underlings are probably to blame. I’ll bet that’s true, but he’s in charge, so it’s still on him.

You have to get to know God for yourself. You can’t breastfeed from churches and preachers for the rest of your life. Other people will lie or make mistakes. If you’re connected to the source, you’ll always be okay. You will never thirst.

I am not watching any Christian videos these days. I can’t find anything that makes me feel like I’m being improved. I feel like I’ve exhausted the available material, like a Trivial Pursuit player who has memorized all the cards.

I don’t see this as a bad thing, but I do miss watching good videos.

My big job today was driving to Rural King to pick up a Glock I ordered a couple of weeks back. Rural King is like Tractor Supply multiplied by 10. They had a new system. When you go in, they give you a freshly bleached cart, and you have to take it, because they count carts in order to count people. When the available carts are used up, people have to wait.

I would guess my background check took an hour. The FBI is still that backed up.

It was a pain, but I had nothing better to do, and I’ve been wanting a full-size Glock for open carry at home. I don’t know if it was a good idea or not. It may also be a good gun to keep in the car. I used to rely on rifles, but now I know I can hit people a long way off, and 10mm is nothing to sneeze at. A pistol is handier than a rifle, especially in a vehicle.

Rural King had paper towels. The world has not ended. I resisted buying them. I probably have 12 rolls in my house. Other people matter. Somewhat.

I’m going to try to be in bed at nine. I don’t care if I sleep till Monday.

Joy Comes in the Morning

Last night I was informed that my friend Travis had been shot in the chest. I got the news at 8 p.m. Travis told a friend who was with him to call me for prayer. After a lot of networking and help from friends, I got this information: Travis is in stable condition. As far as his brother knows, he is not going to have major physical problems because of the injury.

I found this out at around 8 a.m. It was an unpleasant night.

I thank everyone who prayed, and of course, I thank God, who did all the work.

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In case anyone is wondering, I don’t know all the facts, but I have a pretty good theory.

Travis had been telling me a friend of his wanted to buy a pistol. He asked me for advice I could relay. I said I would go for a Glock in .45 ACP or 9mm.

When the call came last night, there were only two people in the room: Travis and a friend. That indicates that the friend probably shot him. I think he was a new gun owner without training, and he made a mistake.

If you’re a new gun owner thanks to coronavirus, do everything right. Learn the safety rules. Learn how to shoot well by getting expert advice. Practice. Run at least a hundred rounds through your gun if you can. I would suggest at least a hundred per week until you feel comfortable.

Some Things, You Just Have to Have

Have I crossed the line into real hoarding?

Before the insanity started, I was stocking up on ammo and reloading supplies, because I was also creating steel target arrays for my pasture. MidwayUSA sent me one of its pester emails, saying they were selling CCI Mini-mags for a little over 5 cents each. I had to jump on that. I bought 3,000.

That sounds like a lot, but it takes about 100 to fuel a good range session. If you only have 500 .22 cartridges, you’re running low. It has been hard for me to absorb that.

Ammo supplies tightened up, and then they seemed to start loosening. While this was going on, I was idly looking at prices. I saw a site advertising Mini-mags for 5 cents, flat. Free shipping. I had to buy. I ordered a 5,000-round case. Now ammo seems to be getting scarce again. Maybe people who are imprisoned by their own governments are killing time by shopping online.

After buying the 5,000-round case, I started to suspect that the site where I found it was not on the level. I started seeing sites saying things like, “New stock expected on June 8.” That bothered me.

I called the site that sold me the big order, and I got voicemail. That made me even more antsy. Even if there is no real shortage, I don’t want to wait until summer for more ammunition. It wouldn’t be hard at all to eat up 2,000 rounds before it arrived. My new targets make practice a breeze and a joy.

I found someone on Gunbroker, of all places, selling the same ammo for a little over 7 cents per round, including shipping and so on. That was more than acceptable. That’s a fair price in the best of times. I pondered and pondered. What if I ordered the ammo and then got a box from the place I didn’t trust? I would have enough .22 LR for what? Two years? More than I originally planned to get.

Then I thought about it some more. I realized no one was going to be unable to get ammo because of me. There are other brands available, and Mini-mags are still being shipped, even if some dealers will take two months to get them. Also, a smart person would go ahead and get maybe 25,000 rounds, because .22 LR is only going to get more expensive in the future (barring a post-pandemic deflationary period), and I know I’ll use it.

It’s like “FOREVER” stamps. I know I should buy a couple of thousand of them, because I’ll use them, and they are only going to get more expensive. But I haven’t been able to make myself do it.

So. If everyone comes through, I will have over 10,000 rounds. If the two less-dodgy vendors are the only ones who come through, I’ll have 6,600, which isn’t excessive. If they come through, and then the dodgy outfit catches up two months from now, back to over 10,000. No matter how you slice it, I won’t really be overstocked.

I should order more!

Of course, I wonder if the Gunbroker ad is legit. What if someone went into a bunker and left their ad up even though the ammo was gone? Am I going to get a “Dear John” email, just when I thought I was all set? What if they and the dubious vendor both let me down?

I might actually have to buy Remington Golden Bullets again. Arrgh. They make such a mess. They seem to work fine, however. Maybe a couple of duds out of a hundred, which is not disastrous.

When this idiocy is officially over, I’m going to make a serious effort to put an ammo bank together for rainy days. I’ll focus mainly on important things like 7.62x39mm, 10mm, 9mm, .45 ACP, shotgun shells, .17 HMR, and .22 LR.

Why would I include .17 HMR? It’s really nice for shooting small edible things.

The pistol calibers are useful for obvious reasons, as is 7.62x39mm. The .22 is a great meat and pest caliber. Shotguns are also good for emergency food.

Life won’t end if I run out of .50 AE, and I don’t think .308 will be a major necessity. As much as I love shooting .38 Super, it’s a luxury.

Ammunition is really important. The natural tendency is to buy a gun and pick up two boxes of ammo and think you’re done, but a gun without a decent supply of ammo is a paperweight. It’s like a car without gas.

I think we should be glad about the sudden surge in gun buying, along with the ammo spike. It means leftists had a leg cut out from under them. When everyone is happy and fat, leftism seems like fun to people who are naturally hypocritical. When things get scary, it’s harder to maintain the pose, and many hypocrites de-closet themselves as conservatives and centrists.

They say a conservative is a liberal who got mugged.

The weird thing is that people are scared about something that has no rational relationship to firearms. People with coronavirus aren’t going to shoot at us.

It’s good that people are arming up. It will make some of them cross the fence. It’s also good that the press is lying so clumsily and persistently. Even liberals have noticed that Trump is being bashed when he does very helpful things. It may be that swing-voters, who are the dumbest people in the universe, will get so disgusted they’ll give Trump a second term.

Democrats gave us a real gift this time around. Of course, I am referring to Uncle Joe. Bernie Sanders was also a gift, because he was so nutty and extreme, but Biden is a shooting gallery for detractors. He has groped women and exposed himself. He routinely says things that are clearly insane and too extreme to be attributed to fatigue. He may drive spiteful Bernouts to stay home on election day. He’s such a poor candidate, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton sat him down in 2012 and flat-out told him he wasn’t going to be the nominee.

Maybe the gun panic will convince people who aren’t ordinarily serious that we need a real, i.e. conservative, leader for now. Magical Peace Unicorns are for less-challenging times.

I’m not going to beat myself up about .22 ammo. I’m not a real hoarder. I don’t have a ton of food. I have empty gas cans. I only have about 17 small bottles of water. My entire canned good supply could be placed in a shoebox. But I do want to be able to shoot my .22. Give me that.

It’s starting to look like some of our problems may have been caused by a few incredible jerks. Yesterday, I learned about a Chinese citizen who bought hundreds of thousands of masks in Florida right before things got bad. She made a video in which she smirked and said she felt like a thief. She talked about depriving “the Americans.” I also read about a character in the northeast who got busted with, I believe, over a million masks.

You don’t need a whole lot of people to buy a million masks each to put a dent in the supply. Both of these people, and their accomplices, should do prison time. They deprived Americans of a product they believed would keep them alive. In their minds, they were deciding other people shouldn’t live.

It should be easy to find the hoarders and gougers. They buy using credit cards, so there are trails.

Or you could just look around and see who wears a fresh mask every day for the next three years.

I look forward to seeing the coronavirus graph plummet. Based on John Hopkins’ information, it appears to be starting. Once everyone relaxes a little, I can build my ammunition bank. And just in case, I’ll lay in 36 rolls of toilet paper.

Are we Peaking Yet?

Here are my coronavirus figures for today.

My prediction (total global cases): 1,466,645

Johns Hopkins number: 1,446,557

Percentage error: +1.39

I’m not sure why I’m even doing this any more. My number is correct, within a tiny margin of error, every day. I do want to see the deceleration start, though.

My number has been higher than the official number two days in a row. Let’s hope that continues and increases.

I have been wishing I had historical data, so I could look at other trends. For example, I’m wondering if the figure for total cases minus recoveries can be predicted. That gives you the known active cases. The lower that goes, the better life is, regardless of the overall total.

Of course, playing around with disease figures is not my biggest thrill in life, so I have not been working hard at it. Not at all. I spend a few minutes on it once in a while. I haven’t been digging to see what’s available out there, because I really don’t care much. It seems very obvious that this epidemic is never going to approach fulfilling the hype, so I’m not lying awake wondering how I can get better data.

Today I finally checked the Johns Hopkins site, and they have an archive. It’s a bunch of CSV files, not to be confused with CVS files, which would involve very long cash register receipts. I don’t know how to work with CSV files, but I guess I can figure it out. I’ll see what I can do. If I can get numbers for March 5 and a more recent date, I’ll be able to fiddle with an equation. It would be trivial. “Trivial” is a term math and physics people use to describe calculations that are incredibly easy or even unnecessary. All the stuff I’ve done with regard to coronavirus has been trivial. If it weren’t trivial, I couldn’t do it.

Guess what? I got myself a Github account and learned how to download Johns Hopkins’ data and turn it into spreadsheet files. I learned this: since March 5, which is when I started doing equations, the ratio of sick victims to total victims has increased a lot. It went from 2.2202 to 3.6933.

Now I’m trying to figure out what it means. Maybe the ratio of sick people to recoveries is a bad indicator, because it takes longer to recover than to get sick.

Let’s see. The average incubation period is 5 days. It’s hard to get an answer regarding the duration of the disease, but it appears that a typical case takes two weeks to clear, and bad cases take three to 6 weeks. So, assuming 15% bad cases, maybe close to 2.5 weeks on average? That’s a lot longer than 5 days.

Given how recently the epidemic started, I guess recoveries will always lag the total number until some time after the infection curve plummets.

Speaking of the curve, I found pleasant information on the Johns Hopkins site. I’ll post it here. They allow downloads.

How about that? You can go to their page and see curves for individual “hotspot” countries. They’re all on the down slope. Not one exception.

Why am I playing with calculus? Johns Hopkins itself thinks the infection rate’s acceleration is over, unless they don’t believe their own graphs.

That little bump on the left is China. Isn’t that great?

Didn’t I say I thought the curve would turn around this month? Am I a genius, or was it just something any smart person could predict, without calculus, if he was only willing to pull up his pants and look at the numbers?

Reluctantly, I must say I can’t go with “genius.”

Maybe it’s time to buy stock.

Things look good. They couldn’t look better, barring a miracle. Let’s hope the good news holds out.

I hate being manipulated. The lies and manipulation are what disgust me most about the epidemic. Christians know that manipulation is the essence of witchcraft. I have always hated it. I can’t stand people who pull it on me. I can’t stand people who drop guilt trips on me. It makes me angry. I strive not to do it to other people. It’s a filthy, vile thing to do.

If guilt trips are your thing, and you can’t make yourself stop, I will drop you permanently no matter who you are or what we’ve been through. I’ve dropped a whole lot of people, and I have not regretted it even once. The world is full of people who will treat me with respect. Everybody can be replaced.

When I was a kid, I was cursed with a father and older sister who were manipulative. It was unbearable and unsustainable. I’m all done with that.

My friend Mike, who is probably still my friend because he doesn’t manipulate, once told me I was the least codependent person he knew. That was a powerful compliment. It was a nice surprise. I hope he was right.

I’ve had a very good time during the pandemic. Life is better now than it was last year or even in January. God truly does look after people. You just have to stay close to him and do things his way. You don’t have to be all that good at it, either.

Yesterday, I had some fun. I had to move branches out of my yard. We’re not allowed to burn them right now because the fire department has somehow decided coronavirus requires limited coverage. I’m dumping them in the woods.

I started the tractor up, drove 50 feet, and watched my left front tire come off the rim.

Until yesterday, I figured a tractor tire that looked inflated was inflated. I guess I won’t judge tractor tires by the way they look in the future.

Right away, I realized I didn’t have a tire wrench for the Kubota. Never fear! I have three sets of SK sockets plus a Makita impact driver.

I didn’t want to haul a heavy floor jack across the yard and try to jack up the tractor on soft soil. Now what? Well, I had jackstands in the workshop, and I had scrap lumber. The tractor had a front end loader. I used the loader to lift the wheels off the ground. I put wood down. I put a jackstand on the wood. I lowered the tractor onto the jackstand.

Nice.

The impact driver wouldn’t budge the nuts. Problem! But I had 1″ conduit. I put a 4-foot-long piece over the wrench handle and used the conduit as a breaker bar. Problem gone!

Jocko Willink, the professional ex-SEAL, likes to say “no factor” when a problem turns out not to be a problem. No Kubota wrench? No factor.

I got the tire and rim over to the shop. I fired up the big compressor. I had to get the tire back onto the rim. I put it on its side and stood on it. It popped into place. I used a wet paper towel to clean the mating surfaces of the tire and rim.

Knowing the tire probably wouldn’t seal, I gave the compressor a shot, and the tire didn’t fill. Now what?

NO FACTOR!

As a Youtube University honors student, I knew that it was possible to mount a tire using an explosion. You shoot starting fluid into your tire and light it. The explosion expands the tire and fills it with gas.

I didn’t have starting fluid, and I didn’t feel like driving to Tractor Supply, which is nearly 6 minutes away. But I had gasoline!

I put a teaspoon or so in the tire and lit it with a barbecue lighter. POOMP! Mounted tire!

I used the compressor to pump it up, and I was all done.

Guess what? If the tire keeps leaking, and I can’t fix it, I can put a new tire on the rim, myself. I’ll save, probably, 10 dollars. That’s over two Whoppers! And I won’t have to drop it off, wait for it to be fixed, or go back to pick it up.

I can mount my own tires! How about that? Balancing is another story, but don’t count me out until I’ve tried. I haven’t checked Youtube yet.

They have fancy machines for mounting tires in tire shops, but they’re not always necessary. They’re just easier and faster to use.

My biggest problem during the pandemic has been weight gain. The epidemic makes me think about food. I’ve probably bought 1.25 times as much food as I usually do. I refuse to hoard, because it’s tacky, but, to give an example, I bought 4 pounds of spaghetti. Also, Ben & Jerry’s has been on sale, and Tractor Supply put Gimbal’s jelly beans right next to the register.

I told the cashier at Tractor Supply it wasn’t fair to put the jelly beans there, and she said they did it on purpose. I said she needed to move them to the back of the store, and she said, “Not gonna happen.” Never missed a beat.

You have to love Southern humor.

Even though I ate the jelly beans.

Gimbal’s jelly beans are as good as, or better, than Jelly Bellies, but they’re a lot cheaper. You have been warned.

My new Glock is taking forever to arrive. I think I made a great choice. The caliber is probably even better than .357 SIG (which is also tempting).

I saw an interesting story the other day. I got wind of it from a video featuring Massad Ayoob. He mentioned a guy named Gary Fadden, who was a salesman for Heckler & Koch.

Fadden was driving with his fiance, and he had at least one submachine gun in his vehicle. He used submachine guns in his work. He got in a road rage confrontation with two armed bikers and their…lady friend. He fled and look for cops, but he had no success. Eventually, he was cornered, so he got out with a Ruger submachine gun which was already set to full auto. He called the cops on his cell phone. He fired a warning burst, but his new friends rushed him anyway, so he filled one of them with lead.

This happened in Virginia, which is NOT NOT NOT a good 2A state. I know people who think they’ll leave liberal areas for “paradises” like Virginia. They think all Southern states are alike. No, no, no. They are not. Virginia is jammed up with leftists. Avoid.

Florida is not bad, although that won’t last. Tennessee is great. Kentucky is messed up because Kentuckians hate work and love the government teat. You have to be careful.

A Virginia prosecutor charged Fadden with murder, and then he did him the favor of offering him a manslaughter plea, which Fadden rejected. Fadden was acquitted, but the experience didn’t do him a lot of good.

The prosecutor was bursting with enthusiasm to put Fadden away. It wasn’t like his hands were tied and he did his work reluctantly. He even told the jurors they had released a murderer.

Ridiculous.

Reading between the lines, it appears that Fadden gave the finger to the bikers, or did something similar, but guess what? Insulting people doesn’t affect your right to self-defense. I can call your mother everything you can think of, and if you put your hands on me, I can defend myself using whatever degree of force is needed. If I attack you illegally, then I lose the right to defend myself, but I can say anything I want and still be protected. I can give you the finger with both hands and still be innocent.

Ayoob is a self-defense expert. He says using a scary-looking weapon is a bad idea. He says Fadden wishes he had been carrying a shotgun. Ayoob believes people who use scary-looking guns are much more likely to be charged falsely.

Ayoob is an interesting guy. Gun people nearly worship him. He’s a cop. I assumed he was a New York City cop, or maybe Chicago. It turns out he’s a part-time cop somewhere in New Hampshire, where most of the crimes involve moose poaching. He lost a lot of credibility with me when I read that, but he’s still a smart guy.

I used to keep an AK in my truck, because why not? Pistols are for people who don’t have rifles. We carry pistols because carrying rifles is inconvenient or illegal. A person in a vehicle can keep a rifle handy without any aggravation.

After reading about Fadden, I wonder if I should stick to Glocks while on the road.

I used to be concerned that I would miss with a pistol, but now that I’m shooting gongs, I realize I’m a much better long distance pistol shot than I thought. It would be very hard for a dangerous criminal to get within 100 feet of me without getting shot. Maybe the greatly reduced effectiveness of a pistol is okay when balanced against the increased likelihood of being arrested.

On the other hand, I live in the most conservative county in Florida, and if I hosed an assailant down with 7.62mmx39 and then set fire to his blacked-out Camaro, the cops here would probably have a barbecue in my honor. So maybe the AK is still a good idea.

Whatever the story is, I think a full-size Glock will be an asset.

I think I’ll stick with pistols when traveling.

Hope everyone is having a pleasant lockdown.

Home Shooting Gallery Becomes a Reality

I accomplished a couple of neat things today.

First, I made doro wat, which is a spicy Ethiopian chicken stew. It came out great. I also made fake injera. Injera is a type of savory pancake. You spread these pancakes on a platter and pour doro wat over them. Then you eat the doro wat by rolling it up in bits of pancake.

Real injera is made with teff, a brown grain that smells a little bit like cow manure. I have tried it, and I don’t think much of it. I have eaten in Ethiopian restaurants, and I haven’t seen real teff in one. I used flour.

Injera is supposed to be a little sour, I think. I tried to get buttermilk to sour mine up, but the stores were out. People hoard the funniest things. Today I added citric acid to my batter to make it sour, and it worked perfectly. Really nice.

Second thing I did: I finished my target array. Nearly. I made 6 stands for bottles or bowling pins or whatever else you might want to shoot off a stand.

It took me around half an hour to make 6 stands. Very easy. I bought 3″ squares of 1/8″ steel. I also bought 4′ lengths of 3/8″ rebar. I cleaned the squares up on the belt grinder. Then I welded the rebar to them. Simple. Some of the squares weren’t as level as I wanted them to be, so I clamped them in a vise and bent the rebar. When I was done, I sprayed the tops of 5 of the stands with truck bed coating. After that, I ran out. I will finish up tomorrow after a run to an essential store.

Here are a couple of photos.

Using these is simple. You drive them into the ground with a big hammer.

They’re a little small for big bottles. I just realized that. But then I don’t see myself shooting giant bottles. Shooting isn’t fun if you’re not challenged.

Guests may see things differently.

Maybe I’m making things too hard for visitors. I didn’t think about that. You have to stay a certain distance away from steel to shoot safely, but my targets are small, so people who don’t shoot well may be unable to use them because they’ll be too far away to hit.

I don’t know if I want guests shooting my steel as a general rule. They will tear up the stands when they miss. Also, they could get hit by fragments of bullets.

I’m all set for steel targets, paper target stands, and bottle stands. I may want to add something in the future, but I am doing great as it is. Didn’t take long at all. About four weeks from start to finish, including ordering stuff and procrastinating.

The last thing I really need is a portable shelter for shooting semiauto weapons. I need a shelter to catch the casings. Sooner or later, the pasture will fill up with casings if I don’t recover them, and besides, I want to keep my brass.

I was thinking of building a shelter from wood, but I’m considering weld one together now. Simple frame with metal roof panels screwed to it and a plywood floor. I may not be living here next year, so building a fancy shelter that can’t be broken down and taken with me seems like a bad idea.

Getting this done has taken a load off my mind. Now I look forward to improving my shooting.

No Telling How Much Money $40,000 Worth of Tools will Save You

No one can say my day is being wasted. I finished assembling my new steel gong target stand. Photo to follow.

I feel like I’m in heaven.

The gongs arrived today. I decided to hose them all with black truck bed coating. It seems to resist bullets very well. I thought it would be good to put it under the orange paint on the small gongs because if the paint flaked off, the black would give a nice contrast.

I’m extremely happy with the stand. The whole job probably took less than 6 hours, including the paint. From a distance, it looks like a professional did it. In just the right light. If you squint.

I went to the grocery today, a little earlier than usual. It appears that the governor’s lockdown order scared people, because there were some hoarders there. You can tell who they are because their carts are piled high. The store had lots of eggs, there was bleach in the detergent area, and I even saw rubbing alcohol in carts.

Forget toilet paper. You have to get there pretty early for that.

They had big stickers on the floor near the checkout stands. When you stand in line, you’re supposed to stand on a sticker to maintain your distance from other people. I like that idea. They should keep those stickers. I don’t want people’s kids bumping into me. I don’t want their dogs licking me. And the added distance should hinder all sorts of diseases, not just coronavirus.

I wonder if it would offend people if I had some stickers of my own printed up and put them down wherever I am when I socialize.

Yesterday I wasn’t able to find a package of chicken suitable for Ethiopian chicken stew. Today, at a different store, the chicken-hoarding wasn’t as bad, and I got what I wanted. That was nice. They also had Ben & Jerry’s on sale.

I hit an auto parts store to buy truck bed coating for my target stand. Hey, car parts and firearms are essential. By extension, target practice is essential. I know my rights. The store was running normally, except they had a couple of things taped up for people to read. Curbside service and whatnot.

I plan to “test” the targets with the Marlin Model 60 and the Smith & Wesson SW22. I hate to say it, but the ticky-tacky Model 60 is growing on me now that I have spent two years correcting its faults. I shot my Savage A22 the other day, and while it’s ten times the gun, it’s somewhat lower in charm.

I found I had a harder time hitting the targets at 20 yards with the A22 than with a pistol. The reason? Wind. It was a blustery day, and a rifle really catches the breeze. The crosshairs roamed all over the place. Never thought I would wish for a pistol while shooting a rifle.

Time to go try out the new targets. This should be great.

If Snowflakes were Horses, my Neighbor Would Ride

The first day of lockdown is in progress. As your reporter on the scene, I ventured out to survey the misery. And to get sushi, which is clearly vital to my survival.

Here is my report: I can’t tell the difference.

Stores are bustling. There is plenty of traffic, by this area’s standards. Chick fil-A is open. I’m still not sure who or what, exactly, is locked down.

I’ll bet my barber didn’t close. But I don’t need a haircut, so I won’t know for a while.

I guess “lockdown” means different things to people in different areas, and it’s probably a lot worse if you have a 9-to-5 job or kids. Or if you live in a leftist-dominated police state.

I coped with the anguish and fear by completing a second stand for steel targets. I am beside myself with satisfaction. Here’s a photo:

It’s simpler than the other stand, so putting it together was faster. It will hold my weight in the middle. It should be excellent.

It’s on the low side. I do that on purpose, to make it harder to shoot over the berm and kill my neighbors. If it turns out to be too low, making adjustable extensions for the side supports will take about 90 minutes.

I blasted it with truck bed coating. I’ll need another can tomorrow. Luckily, car parts stores are essential.

Tomorrow, the gongs should get here. Federal Express is essential! Then I’ll be able to shoot at TWO target arrays at once.

I’m thrilled with this thing.

I’m also going to slap my bottle stands together. That should take half an hour.

Things are getting better at stores, although judging from some bulging carts I saw today, the relatively toothless lockdown order is scaring people who don’t think very carefully.

Flour is coming back. I bought eggs. Hadn’t seen those in a while. The cashier told me the store had toilet paper until noon every day. That’s how long it takes for the selfish to show up and remove it.

I ask cashiers about toilet paper purely for entertainment, and it upsets them. Not my intention. They are not happy with the hoarders. They have to watch them waddle past their registers all day.

I have to wonder how Miami is doing. Cubans have an incredibly selfish me-first culture. I’ll bet there has been violence in grocery stores. There are probably hoarder-stocked new businesses all over Hialeah now, under the table. During the Andrew mess, gouging was everywhere. We are the world! We are the children! Hold hands, everyone!

Don’t give me a hard time for my assessment of Miami culture. I lived there. I’ve seen how people behave. I’ve seen how they fish. In Miami, anyone who obeys the fishing laws is considered a fool, and Miami boats clean out the reefs in the Bahamas. I’ve seen how people cut in lines. I’ve seen how they treat other drivers. I’ve seen their attitude toward fair taxes and reasonable environmental laws. I’m not making anything up.

I was going to get chicken today and make doro wat, which is a spicy Ethiopian stew, but apparently someone hoarded the chicken at the store I visited today. It only takes a few immature customers with freezers to ruin things for everyone for an entire day. The Winn-Dixie near me hasn’t been having chicken problems. Maybe I’ll run over there. It’s essential.

I had a minor problem. I wanted liquid chlorine for my pool. It needs a shock to get the swimming season started. Of course, hoarders have been taking the chlorine. I can’t figure out what they’re doing with 10% pool chlorine. It’s brutal. Bleach is not that hard to find. Hoarding pool chlorine is not necessary. Besides, bleach is not the best thing for coronavirus. You need alcohol, which can be found in hardware stores and possibly liquor stores. Everclear ought to work.

I had to buy powdered shock treatment, but it worked out fine. I wanted to avoid the kind that has calcium in it, because it leaves a residue in the pool. The brand I bought contains sodium.

My cousin in the Chicago area says people there are whispering that the government is going to shut stores down for two weeks. I marveled when she told me. How can anyone be that gullible? Imagine the riots. “Sorry, everyone. Just fast until the 28th. If you feel you’re going to die, make sure you unlock your front door for the collection people.” That’s not going to happen.

They can’t starve us, but they’re doing an awful lot to us. It turns out the Constitution tears much more easily than I thought. It’s a very thin document, especially after years of being abraded by statists.

Today I was thinking it would be funny if I got coronavirus, after telling people the truth about the overblowing of the epidemic. If I got sick, people would say it proved I was wrong. Of course, it would not. One robin doesn’t make a spring. But people aren’t logical. They would not understand. They would be sure it proved I was mistaken about everything.

Being right is frustrating when you swim in a sea of people who are wrong. I feel like God gave me a simple cure for cancer and then cursed me with a language no one else can understand.

About 1/2000 of America is believed to have the disease, so there is no medical reason why I couldn’t get it. I would just have to beat great odds. Like when I got pink eye in spite of being a hermit.

If you get a mild case, you will probably feel relieved, because it will put an end to the anticipation. You’ll know you’re not going to die.

I would not be beside myself if I got a typical case. I would be pretty bummed out if I got the other kind, however. The relatively rare kind. But then I would also be bummed out if I got a severe case of the flu, which is many times more likely.

This disease obviously spreads much more slowly than the flu. This is proven. It did so even when no one was locked down or socially distancing. Also, there is evidence that warm weather will get rid of it. Still, I do wonder what will happen. I’m not sure how a disease that spreads slowly to begin with can infect a large percentage of people when everyone is struggling to avoid it. Maybe it can, but unless the Chinese are doing a phenomenal job of keeping a secret, it’s not happening in the birthplace of coronavirus, so it would appear that it won’t happen anywhere.

I feel some reluctance to go out and shoot the gongs. The gunfire that is usually so common in my neighborhood has been silent lately. My guess is that people are afraid to expend precious ammo. When they hear me out there banging away, it may seem to be in poor taste. It may seem like showing off or irresponsibility.

Ammo is not in short supply, however, except locally. It still rolls out of factories and into stores. If you shop online, as you should be doing anyway, you can find it. There is no reason to be shy about using it. That may change if whichever Bolshevik the Democrats nominate starts to do well in polls.

I’m going to shoot. People who don’t like it will just have to man up and bear it. I don’t think there’s anyone like that here, though, except maybe for the strange lady who thinks no one should be allowed to shoot within a mile of her inbred, untrained horses. I shoot all I want, and I count on her and her horses to find coping strategies. Things will work out fine if we all do our jobs. My job is to blast steel gongs with various types of bullets.

You can’t start making concessions when spoiled neighbors with boundary issues make crazy demands. If I let her prevent me from shooting, next she’d be texting me to tell me to turn the TV down or to watch a different channel. “I thought we agreed you were going to watch Oprah.”

I like to think it does her good when I go out and pop off a hundred or so rounds. It will toughen her up, and maybe it will make men out of her horses.

I’m enjoying using my tools. Sometimes I find myself putting off working on a project, and as I have probably said before, I tell myself, “If you don’t want to use your tools, sell them.” Then I get started, and I have a great time.

Life is better when you end the day with bits of torn steel in your hair. It’s like cruising home from fishing with fish blood all over you. It shows you did something with your day.

Of course I will post photos of the stand when the gongs are attached.

Fears Wiped Away

Let’s get this out of the way first. I wrote an equation to predict how many cases would appear on the Johns Hopkins coronavirus site. I got it working so well the predictions were leveling out at around 20% below the actual figures. Then it occurred to me that I could do better by simply adding the error (~26.4%) to the predicted numbers. Yesterday, I was within one percentage point.

Today, my math says there should be 937,081 cases on the website. Actual figure this morning: 941,949.

So this equation has worked incredibly well for what? Five days in a row? It has worked since the last time I changed the constant, whenever that was.

Yesterday, I was about 0.83% off. Today I’m 0.52% off.

That’s so precise, there is no possible way to attribute it to skill. Even if the disease obeyed an equation precisely, there would be errors in collecting the data and putting it on the website, and they would be big.

I’m tempted to say the infection rate is slowing down, because 0.83 is bigger than 0.52, but of course, that would be ridiculous. There are probably a lot of people it would fool, though.

I wonder if anyone other than my 4 readers will ever know how well I did with this. I guess not.

I seriously wonder if God is helping me for some reason.

Yesterday, longtime reader LauraW (Internet names are so weird) thanked me for blogging during this insanity. That was nice. I didn’t think I was helping anyone. Hope I am.

Tomorrow’s figure is 1,007,033, as reported here yesterday. No one can say I predict retroactively.

With that behind me, it’s time for a testimony.

God keeps providing for me during this time of hysteria, authoritarian virtue-signaling, and selfishness. I had a lot of toilet paper before the fuss started. I got what may well have been the last package of paper towels in Ocala. I’m retired, so I won’t lose a job. I got a great deal on a bulk .22 LR buy right before the ammo panic hit, and I got good deals on other things even after it was underway.

I found two canisters of disinfecting wipes I didn’t know I had. I keep rubbing alcohol in the house in big quantities all the time, so I had plenty when things went nuts, and I found a gallon of denatured alcohol at Lowe’s yesterday, in a store with no wipes and no hand sanitizer. I need it for my workshop, but it can also be used for disinfecting if the hoard horde keeps emptying store shelves.

I’ve been using spray bottles of alcohol in my house for years. It’s not new. I cared for my dad when he had dementia, and I have two parrots with dirty feet.

Life here is better than it was a month ago. Stress is down. I keep feeling the sensation of God’s benevolence. It hits me every time I see something he has provided for me.

Yesterday, after visiting Lowe’s, I went to my metal supplier to get steel for a target stand. I always wipe rust off my hands with a disinfecting wipe when I leave that place. The can I keep in my car has been with me for over a year. I don’t use many wipes. Mainly, they’re for cleaning my hands when I visit the dump.

There were only a few wipes in the can yesterday. During the steel errand, I bought gas at a very low price, and it occurred to me that I could put DNA from the new jug on the wipe I had used to wipe off rust and use it to clean the pump handle at the gas station.

I’m not paranoid, but those things are filthy all the time, and this one could have had flu viruses on it. Or one of the 20 alleged coronavirus victims in my county could have touched it. Might as well use what God gave me. I wiped down the handle, the keypad, and the buttons that select the grade of gas. Why not? I think I’ll keep doing it after the craziness subsides. It’s a good idea.

Last night, I did what I always do. I put detergent and trisodium phosphate in the dishwasher. I keep these products under the sink. I look under the sink every day, because I use the products every day.

Last night, I saw something I had never noticed before: a nearly full can of Lysol disinfectant wipes.

I started laughing out loud. I couldn’t stop. Funniest thing I had seen all day. I knew it was a message.

I have three known containers of these things. For all I know, there are others somewhere. I’ve had them since before my dad died. I probably won’t need new ones for a year.

They don’t do much to kill coronaviruses, but it’s still comforting to have them. They work against diseases which, unlike coronavirus, I might actually be exposed to in the near future.

Here’s something else. My friend Amanda has three sons. They used to visit a lot. I noticed that when they visited, the soft soap in my guest bathroom seemed to disappear. I wash my hands over and over, all day, and it takes me over a month to get to where I need to refill anything. You only need a few drops of soft soap to get the job done, unless you’ve just changed your oil or something. Using a handful of soap is completely unnecessary.

I asked Amanda if she could counsel the boys to go easy on the soap. She said she was going to bring me a new container to refill my dispensers. I said I already had a big jug of soap. I said I didn’t care about the cost of the soap, which was nearly nothing. I was just tired of filling the dispenser, which is a pain.

She brought me a jug of soap anyway. I could not dissuade her.

Then coronavirus arrived, and I had well over a gallon of soap on hand (poor choice of words).

Hand soap will actually kill and wash away this virus, and people have been stripping the shelves for a couple of weeks now.

They’re also hoarding dishwashing liquid. I buy it in large quantities because I use it for pressure washing. No worries there.

In the future, never ask me how coronavirus affected me. You may not like the answer. God has been wonderful to me.

Yesterday, our governor finally gave in to the hysteria and issued a statewide lockdown. Because I have no mayor, I was free until he spoke. I got on the web to see how I would be affected. “Essential businesses” were still open.

Where do I go when there is no epidemic? Grocery stores. Hardware stores. Gas stations. Takeout places. To sum it up, I never go to non-essential businesses. Nothing is going to change for me.

I’m not sure which businesses are considered non-essential. Strip clubs? Florists? There must be some businesses that are off-limits.

I’m reminded of something my grandmother said. She told me that when the Depression hit her area, people’s lifestyles didn’t change noticeably.

I have to hand it to governor DeSantis. He stood up to the authoritarians and neurotics for a good long time, risking his political future. I am impressed. That’s leadership.

I assume my metal dealer has an essential business. I picked up my steel the day the lockdown was announced, however, so it doesn’t matter.

Don’t be angry with me. If I have favor, it’s not coming from me. Get your own. It’s available.

Join me in prayer that the epidemic ends. More importantly, pray that the epidemic of fear and selfishness ends, because unlike the viral epidemic, it’s a big problem. Pray that people get to know God in their homes and get filled with the Holy Spirit.

Hope I can finish my target stand today. The targets are scheduled to arrive tomorrow.

New Target Stand Takes Shape

I have had a fantastic day in the workshop.

Last week, I finished creating a stand for steel targets. After I tried the targets, I got so excited, I ordered more of them. Today I bought steel and started making a second stand, using a different design.

My first stand was all square tubing. I made two steel A-frames with short pieces of square tubing across the tops, and I ran a long piece of tubing from one A-frame to the other. It works great, but it took too long to fabricate. My second stand is simpler. It’s easier to show you than explain. The main crossmember will be round, not square, and the end supports are just inverted-Y shapes made from square tubing.

Fabricating these supports is easier than fabricating the other kind. Also, they’re lighter, and they use less steel.

One part of the job was time-consuming. I was too tight to buy drawn-over-mandrel round tubing, which has no weld seam inside it. I bought the cheap kind. Because the main horizontal tube has to go into the short pieces on top of the supports, I need the short pieces to be unobstructed. I could have just jammed the crossmember in over the welds, but I wanted to do a good job, so I put the short pieces on the lathe, bored them, and sanded the insides. Must have killed 90 minutes.

The targets will hang from pieces of the same tubing, slipped over the horizontal crossmember. I bored and sanded those, too. My first stand has square tubing which is a loose fit inside the round tubing attached to the targets, so the weld seams aren’t a problem. When you put one round tube inside another, everything is closer together, so one tube can gouge the other.

I used the lathe, the mill, the buffer, two angle grinders, one welder, the welding table, my phenomenal new welding helmet, and a 1/2-13 tap today. Lots of fun.

Tomorrow I have to make the rest of the stand. It will be easy. I got the tedious lathe work behind me today, and I learned how to put this particular type of stand support together for welding. Doing a second support will be easier.

The targets should arrive Friday. After that, Katie bar the door.

I also bought 6 lengths of 3/8″ rebar and 6 3″ squares of 1/8″ steel. I’m going to weld the squares on top of the rebar, pound it into the ground, and put things like soda cans on them. I could also put bowling pins on them.

I know what you’re thinking. It would be easier to build a single long platform. If I did that, every time I shot one object, the motion would travel down the platform and knock others over. Also, I would be limited in how I could place the objects.

It’s great to have the workshop up and running. I missed having tools more than I can say.

Hope everyone is enjoying life in spite of the big scary pandemic. Just because the world has gone crazy doesn’t mean you have to.

How Embarrassing

It’s premature to provide an update on my coronavirus prediction equation, but I will do it anyway because it provides me with entertainment.

I have to apologize for being overconfident. Yesterday, I predicted the Johns Hopkins website would list 867,545 cases today. In actuality, the figure this morning was 874,801.

As you can see, I am way off. My figure is 0.83% lower than the actual total.

I guess I should give up!

I was extremely happy back when I was within around 20%. To be within 1%, even for a day, is too much to absorb.

How come the CDC can’t do this? Surely they can. Why aren’t they? Why isn’t some pundit somewhere doing this? Why isn’t some prominent person saying, “The epidemic is just not that bad?”, and using numbers to prove it?

For this, we shut down the world’s economy. Except for Sweden, where, for once, common sense is prevailing.

The whole thing has to be Satanic. There is no way billions of people could be this deluded without supernatural help.

We still have no major-celebrity deaths. Joe Diffie is the best the hysterics can come up with, and he was an elderly, obese chain-smoker who had had two heart attacks and a bypass. Shouldn’t this tell us something?

Ask 100 random Americans who Joe Diffie was. My bet: 85% will have no idea, even after his publicized death. He just was not that famous. Journalists had to reach deep into the bucket of second-rate news to dig him up.

Things are going very well for me. In fact, life is better than it was before the plague. A number of responsibilities have been postponed. Even though I was an idle hermit before this thing started, I seem to have more spare time now.

What do I lack? For a day or two, I was not able to find russet potatoes at a price I liked. Without driving 10 miles. I also had to wait a day or two to get a particular kind of cheese, which I didn’t need.

After that, I draw a blank.

I thought there might be an ammo shortage, and briefly, there was, but even then, I managed to get exactly what I wanted, without overpaying. In fact, I got a great deal on .22 LR right before people started sacking gun stores. I hate to admit this, but yesterday I found an incredible deal on the same ammo, and I bought 5,000 rounds. I don’t see it as hoarding. I’m tired of paying for shipping over and over, and I know the price will go nowhere but up in the future, so I decided to try to set myself up for at least a couple of years. I feel like I should buy more soon. This caliber is extremely useful, I go through it very fast, and I will probably live two more decades, so why not save money?

I paid 5 cents per round. That’s a crazy price in the best of times. I’m not going to let a deal like that go by.

I should also load up on .17 HMR and shotgun shells. Stuff I can hunt with in hard times. I don’t think I really need 10,000 rounds of 10mm, however.

Ammo has been coming back this week, so you have nothing to worry about in the near term. The election is a concern, however, so stocking up between now and November would be smart. If you really want a military-style semiauto rifle, you might want to start shopping this month. Next year, we may become a nation of Fudds. It happened under the Clintons, and it can happen again.

Gas is very cheap. I’m not locked down. Stores are generally open here. I have toilet paper and a bidet, and Walmart is allowing people to buy toilet paper for pick-up anyway. The weather has been hot, but it has also been dry. I feel wonderful. My stress levels are much lower than they were last year. I’m afraid people will think I’m gloating, but I’m not. I’m just expressing amazement.

I lost a potential tenant. She has COPD, and she’s panicking. Also, the condo association, in its courage, closed its offices, so they aren’t approving tenants (which they could do at home). Another tenant says his business has been hurt. Things will be different in a month or so, when Americans realize they have been hoodwinked and demand to be allowed out of their houses.

The whole country has been grounded. Like children.

Well. Most of the country.

The press continues to lie. Not “exaggerate.” Lie. Yesterday, Yahoo News said New York City hospitals were “overflowing” with bodies. New York always loses over 400 people per day, and many of those people die in hospitals. A few hundred bodies over the course of several weeks can’t make hospitals overflow. Remember, the flu is killing many more New Yorkers than coronavirus, and that didn’t make hospitals overflow.

I clicked on the Yahoo banner that referred to the bodies, and there was no story behind it. There was just a list of updates which did not include a story about overflowing hospitals.

Longtime reader Ed Bonderenka has a blog, and he posted the most devastating debunking of press credibility I have seen since Dan Rather’s disgraceful career was destroyed. Here is a link. I think the item I like best is the photo of a “journalist” (hired liar) in head-to-toe protective gear, being filmed by a cameraman in ordinary clothing.

They lie about hurricanes. They lie about wars. They lie about Trump every day. And most Americans believe them. Most Americans can’t understand that the press has to be fact-checked. If Brian Williams says it, it’s good enough for them.

Emergency rooms are not full of victims, unless they’re flu victims. Coronavirus just hasn’t infected enough people or made enough people sufficiently ill to send them to hospitals. The numbers are readily available.

If 40,000,000 American flu victims, many of whom have died, haven’t clogged up our health system, how are 180,000 coronavirus victims, most of whom have mild symptoms at worst, going to do it?

I hate having to debunk this nonsense. It shouldn’t be necessary. There are people who are paid to tell us the truth. It’s their job, not mine, but they’re lying to us.

I’m not sure what to do with myself. I guess I’ll go get steel and create a new target stand. I have an idea for a design that will be quick to build.

Here’s what I recommend: pray for the epidemic to die out, and more importantly, pray for the hysteria/fear/selfishness epidemic, which is the real problem, to be destroyed. Pray that Satan’s plan to train people to be afraid and do crazy things is destroyed, and that instead, God uses this time to introduce people the world over to the Holy Spirit. These are things I’m praying for.

I noticed something the other day. The word says that if God’s people will pray, he will heal their land. I used to think this was not all that useful in modern America, because most of us are against God. I was wrong, however. The scripture doesn’t say, “If everyone in a country prays.” It refers to God’s people. Praying for God to get rid of this problem is not a waste of time.

I’m not sure what to make of T.B. Joshua. He prophesied that rain would fall in Wuhan and that the epidemic would wash away. This actually happened. The China epidemic is dead, unless the Chinese have somehow managed to conceal a gigantic problem in a nation full of Internet users and foreign journalists. The figures are flat and have been for a long time. But Joshua seemed to think his prophecy applied to the whole world.

It’s possible to be mistaken about the meaning of your own prophecy. Prophecy itself comes from God, but it’s not always followed by divine understanding.

The video about the rain has been removed from Youtube. When I clicked on it, I got a message saying it had been removed for violating Youtube’s disgusting standards, but is that true? His church removed another problematic prophecy video a long time ago, so there is a history.

What happened in Wuhan is undeniable. It’s also undeniable that the rest of the world did not exit the epidemic by March 27, as he said it would. He ought to leave his predictions up. I doubt Ezekiel burned scrolls of prophecies he didn’t understand.

He once said he saw a woman winning our 2016 election. Then Hillary lost, and the video disappeared. Later, he said he had seen her winning the popular vote. Maybe this is true, but his organization should have left the video up.

You can’t depend on a man to tell you what God is saying. It’s nice to hear from prophets, but you should be able to communicate with God on your own.

It will be interesting to see how well my predictions hold up over the next 7 days. They should do very well. They can’t be denied, either, because I’ve already posted the method and all the information. I’m not predicting retroactively, and the proof is unassailable.

I don’t think anyone will ever notice, though. Maybe it will be our little secret forever.

Goebbels’ Children

Today longtime reader Rick C provided a link to a highly disturbing coronavirus video from conservative media personality Todd Starnes. It’s a video of a Brooklyn hospital that tests people for coronavirus. You can imagine the droves of infected people, lying on the sidewalks because they can’t stand, hoping against hope that someone will test them before they die and get rolled into the gutter.

Here’s a link: LINK.

For those who don’t care to click, the area outside the hospital is deserted. Maybe the truck and front end loader already came, and the bodies are being dumped in a mass grave in the South Bronx, where no one will notice.

It’s really something, the way journalists and even doctors are flat-out lying about the scary pandemic, which still has an official global infection toll far lower than the US flu toll for a single week.

Is this how Jews felt when inane Nazi lies were swallowed by the majority of Germans and Austrians? I wonder.

I think they’re just trying to get rid of Trump. The Chinese essentially put this disease in a box and Fedexed it all over the world in secret, and everyone knows it, but leftists are willing to say anything to get a backward socialist elected in America.

Human dishonesty is so deep and broad, it’s hard for me to conceive of it. I hate to use this expression, but I can’t wrap my head around it. The natural inclination is to think people can’t really be that bad, but they can, and they are. Every day.

I haven’t checked my epidemic prediction equation today, because it’s becoming less and less interesting with time. It is now beyond obvious that my ballpark prognostication is correct. The divergence between the prediction and the official number is probably still growing, but it’s way, WAY close enough to prove I’m right. My thesis isn’t that the official number will be x on a certain day in the future. It’s that if we continue testing pretty much the same way we do now, coronavirus will never be anything like as big a threat as the flu. Remember: coronavirus 850,000; flu 650,000,000.

I was thinking I might create an equation for the divergence itself and see if I could tighten up my basic equation by adding the divergence equation. That would be funny. Maybe the divergence is changing exponentially and predictably.

It would be nice if I could make the results extremely close to the official numbers, but life isn’t a video game, and even if the epidemic numbers obey an equation precisely (doubtful at best), the official numbers, which are different, probably will not. Doctors diagnosing the disease are biased. Testing prevalence can go up and down. Society’s response to the virus can affect the transmission rate. No one can predict anything with true precision.

Scientists don’t have to be told this. Only lay people expect precision.

I guess you could ask why I would trust Todd Starnes, about whom I know nothing, over the press. That would not be a smart question. Here: Dan Rather. Not enough? Brian Williams (who still has a job).

It’s interesting that Bill O’Reilly, whose crime was very bad manners, can’t find work, while a man who betrayed the public as a matter of policy and failed at the primary purpose of his trade is still being paid millions. If Matt Lauer had merely been caught lying repeatedly, he would still be working.

From the perspective of the general public, a major journalist who lies is a much bigger problem than one who acts like Bill Clinton at the office. Ask anyone who has escaped from North Korea.

Interesting stuff.

Now I’ll get back to my own life, since I seem to be unable to offer my hardheaded species much help. Before I move on, I’ll repeat the obvious: Jesus is real. Receive salvation. Be baptized with the Holy Spirit. Pray in tongues as much as you can. Learn to hear from God. Learn to obey. Focus on being transformed supernaturally. That’s all I can offer.

I have four new steel gongs on the way. This time, I ordered two round gongs, a zombie figure, and a bear. Everything is 3/8″ thick. I’m hoping thinner targets will absorb more momentum from bullets, and aside from that, they’re cheaper and easier to move.

I’m trying to come up with a good stand design. My last design is great, but I think I can do just as well with less steel. Right now, I have four vertical members. I can reduce that to two. Actually, one would work, but I want the stand to be more rigid than necessary.

I’m very happy with the CCI Troy Landry ammo I bought, but since I got it, the supply has dried up. Question: do I keep shooting it, secure in the knowledge that the epidemic will go away soon, or should I count on hysteria to continue the problem through the election? It’s generally a good idea to bank on the selfishness and irrationality of the human race.

Whenever you start thinking human beings are rational, remember that when they were faced with a minor RESPIRATORY epidemic, they hoarded TOILET PAPER. That’s all you need to know.

I believe I can still get Remington Golden Bullets in buckets. Maybe I should spring for a bucket, just in case. The ammo is perfectly good. The mess it leaves on guns is the problem.

I just checked Ammoseek, and it looks like I can get Troy Landry ammo without Troy Landry’s picture on it for 6 cents per round, but I have to buy a case. I might as well go ahead. I know I’ll use it, and ammo never gets less expensive. I have never regretted buying too much, but I have often regretted buying too little *cough* GP11 *cough* 7N1.

The site selling the ammo says shipping times are back to normal. That’s a good sign.

I’ve been saving up purified water bottles. Last night I filled a bunch with dyed water. I filled them to the tops so they would explode better. The more air you leave in a bottle, the more the air will contract when you shoot, and that cushions the reaction. I want red water everywhere.

There are Youtube shooters who use colored soda. Seems like a needless expense, although the carbonation adds a lot of action. Maybe in the future I’ll buy the cheapest soda I can find.

It’s ironic that I was getting back into shooting just as the hysteria started. If I had done this 4 months ago, I would be sitting on 10,000 rounds of the .22 LR of my choice.

I wanted to use my .204 Ruger on steel, but I have read that it tears it up. The .204 shoots tiny rounds at close to 4000 fps. Speed is what damages gongs. When your gong is damaged, it may send fragments back at you. The recommended shooting distance for .204 Ruger is 300+ yards. Distance allows the bullets to slow down. I don’t think I want to shoot 300 yards here.

I suppose I should buy steel today. So far, my county has been an idyllic oasis from lockdowns and real shortages. A friend tells me her kids can’t go to school, and you can’t sit in a restaurant, but I can go to Target or Lowe’s whenever I feel like it. I predict that my own freedom will last throughout the panic.

When she told me her kids had to be home-schooled through April, I asked her who would teach them about homosexuality, drugs, and socialism.

If I do a simpler stand design, I should be able to put a nice stand together in a couple of hours. My last design included a bunch of non-90° angles, and that made it harder to create.

I could make stands for bottles. I could get rebar or steel rod and weld flat steel platforms to the tops. Drive the rods into the ground…instant bottle stands.

The cows must think I’m nuts.

Once I get my indoor tools moved to the dining room (yay, being a single man), I can set up my ammo press, and after that, I’ll feel better about shooting big pistols at steel.

I’m going to be a seriously good shot pretty soon, God willing.

I’ll post a photo of the new gongs.

Will Coronavirus Improve us or Keep Making us Worse?

Here’s some crazy news: my coronavirus prediction equation is holding up beautifully after 25 days.

Do I mean I wrote the equation 25 days ago? No. If you read this blog, you know better. I fiddled with it until some time early last week. But the equation’s starting point is 25 days back, and the results are still within 20% of the actual total.

That amazes me. I keep expecting the prediction and actual total to diverge quite a bit as testing becomes more widespread, which makes the actual total rise, but after a week or so with the same coefficient, I’m within 20%.

“Actual total” is a misnomer, since no one knows the actual total. To me, “actual total” means the figure posted on the Johns Hopkins website.

The divergence doesn’t have much time left to manifest. That’s my guess, because I think the epidemic is going to plateau in April. If I’m right, the graph’s slope will decrease soon. When it does, the actual total will get closer to my results instead of diverging.

Here’s something fascinating: credible scientists, or maybe doctors (not always the same thing) are suggesting that the actual total is very, very high and that the pandemic has been with us since last year. This would be fantastic news.

The conventional wisdom is that coronavirus popped up in China in November and that it made it overseas very early this year. People are pointing out the huge flaw in this belief. China is a whale of a country, and China has airplanes (hello). There is huge air traffic in and out of China, so there is no possibility that the virus wasn’t exported very shortly after the Chinese epidemic started.

I’m thinking about that right now. It has to be true. Even with a very low infection rate (which is what China had and has), a whole lot of jets go in and out of the country every day, and infected people had to be on a significant number of them.

If the virus was abroad by December 1, then it may be true, as one medical person says, that a huge number of people have already been sick and recovered. I don’t recall who it was, but he said most UK residents might already have had the disease.

I read an article about this, and then I looked at comments. They were full of claims from people who had been sick. A typical comment might look like, “In December, I had a fever, chills, and a dry cough, and doctors assured me I didn’t have the flu. They never figured out what it was.”

In late January, I had pink eye symptoms. This is a minor disease which ordinarily runs its course in a maximum of two weeks. I had it for three. Coronavirus produces pink eye symptoms in some people.

Coronavirus typically lasts 10 to 14 days unless it affects your lungs, so it sounds like the duration is similar to pink eye’s.

I had a bunch of symptoms which were somewhat unusual. I had some vomiting on the first day. At one point I had diarrhea. I had a runny nose, fatigue, and some aches. Toward the end, I had a dry cough and some sharp but relatively faint pains in my chest.

I didn’t go to the doctor. Why would I? Doctor visits are a pain, they cost money, they jack up your insurance rates, and they generally do you no good. You shouldn’t go to the doctor every time you have a pimple. I had a mild viral disease which doctors can’t treat. I stayed home and avoided people, thinking it was pink eye, which is very contagious. I never found out what it was.

I did buy toilet paper during this time. Maybe cornavirus makes you do that.

Did I have coronavirus? I sure hope so. It wasn’t that bad.

If the epidemic is older and much more widespread than previously believed, it’s wonderful news, because it means the disease is extremely mild except for very unusual cases. Right now we think 5% of victims need ventilators, but if the actual infection number is a hundred times higher than we know, the ventilator figure would drop down below a tenth of a percent.

An old epidemic would also mean many fewer future cases, because there would be fewer people left to infect.

It’s too bad people are getting their information from celebrities and the ignorant and biased press. Someone just told me he had never seen the flu kill as many people as coronavirus. The worldwide COVID-19 death total is still far below the US flu death total for last year. Where do people hear all this nonsense?

People are talking about packed emergency rooms and doctors who are running out of masks and gloves.

If the US infection rate is far, far below that of the flu, how can ER’s be packed? There are about 5,000 known COVID-19 cases in Florida, which has 17 million people and a huge number of hospitals and ER’s. Most victims are staying home. How, then, can we have an ER crisis? Seems much more likely to me that we have a press honesty crisis. If ER’s were full, the government would be telling us to do triage at home before showing up. They would be telling us this with great urgency.

As for masks and gloves, we ran out because selfish hoarders bought them. Look it up. We still have plenty of them. Unfortunately, they’re in people’s garages. And masks are not very helpful for preventing wearers from being infected, which makes hoarders look worse.

If the epidemic is old, how can numbers be increasing? It could happen. I don’t know if the epidemic is old, but I know that the numbers are unreliable. The more people think they have coronavirus, the more people will be confirmed as victims. The tests we have now are not very good, and it’s fashionable for doctors to diagnose coronavirus. Yes, doctors are like that. Remember how they put half the country on Ritalin 25 years ago? Suddenly, there was an ADD epidemic. Journalists asked why. Was it from pollution? Was it power lines? Was it lack of sensible gun laws? In reality, there was a diagnosis epidemic.

People are likely to think they have coronavirus when they think there’s a plague. Doctors are likely to diagnose them falsely. More people will go for testing. It’s a recipe for higher numbers regardless of the actual prevalence of the disease.

Here’s a great question: why haven’t any major celebrities died from coronavirus? There are thousands of major celebrities. Where are the deaths?

Until yesterday, I was not able to find a single person Americans would call a real celebrity who had died from coronavirus. Finally, one popped up, and he was a minor celebrity. His name is Joe Diffie, and you probably don’t know who he is. He was a country musician.

Uh oh. He was about 70. He was obese. He had had two heart attacks plus a bypass. He was a chain smoker.

A cold could kill someone like that. That, or walking upstairs too fast. Not trying to be funny. He was in bad shape.

The press is frantically looking for celebrity victims, and they are dredging up “famous” casualties almost no one has heard of. A character actor from the Eighties. An obscure Spanish royal. A playwright most people couldn’t name.

If this were a plague, big names would be in the news several times a week. My own guess, which is way below what the hysteria suggests, was that several dozen would die, but we haven’t seen a single one yet. Sooner or later, some will die, but if this disease were a plague, we would have seen quite a few by now.

If you had a bit part on Family Ties and then ended up working at a gas station, and you die from coronavirus, take heart. The press will remember you as a star.

To this day, we can still name genuine celebrities who died in real pestilences. In fact, some people attribute the invention of calculus to the plague. Isaac Newton discovered it while hiding from the plague in the country. He wasn’t a victim, but he was a famous person who was affected.

Lacking actual celebrities, the press is hyping “influencers.” People who have a lot of Instagram and Twitter followers. Some influencers are saying they’ve suffered the tortures of the damned. Okay, let me ask something. Why would you trust a woman who craves attention and relies on it for her income? What do you expect such people to say during an epidemic? “I’m fine; go look at something else”?

I’ll tell you a mildly amusing story. When I was in the 9th grade, a substitute teacher made hydrogen sulfide in my biology class. He let us know that it made some people feel sick. Yes, if you put a plastic bag on your head and pump it in. Otherwise, no. Anyway, as soon as he said that, people started raising their hands. In a few minutes, the whole class was in the hallway having fun, waiting for the dangerous gas, which I could barely smell, to dissipate. Everyone knew they were pulling the teacher’s leg. Twitter and Instagram are just like that class.

It will be interesting to see what the facts are once science catches up. That’s assuming they tell us the truth *cough* *cough* *global warming*. Pandemics are wonderful opportunities for leftists and other authoritarians. Leftists have just found that they can ban gun sales, keep cars off the streets, and shut down businesses during a pandemic. They aren’t going to miss a chance to do similar things in the future, so they won’t want anyone to think coronavirus was a mild problem.

From a spiritual standpoint, I see coronavirus as a great positive.

For many years, God has been telling me the age of the church was ending. Big churches kept people away from God. They put old gay men in gowns, and greasy televangelists, between God and his children. They sent untold millions to hell by preventing them from receiving true salvation.

Now we find ourselves in a situation where people have great motivation to pray and they can’t go to church. This should lead to real revival in many areas. Once you get rid of the thieves, pedophiles, serial fornicators, atheist grifters, and old-church bureaucrats, people will have a clearer view of God.

I’m not the only one who has been saying the church age was ending. Many others have started saying the same basic thing over the last year or so.

I’ve been thinking about this, and now evangelist Mark Hemans is on Youtube, confirming it. He was going to come to the US and have a tour. I booked a spot at one of his meetings. Then the insanity started, and the tour was canceled. Now he’s teaching about the great opportunity people have to have church at home. He’s happy about the change.

Satan is using a relatively mild epidemic and a lot of lethal lies to train people to be selfish and to rely on the state. God is using Satan’s campaign to bring people closer to himself. I suppose it’s part of the ongoing polarization we’ve been seeing. Children of darkness are flocking to cities and putting their faith in Karl Marx, and the children of light are moving to rural areas and drawing closer to God.

It’s a recipe for increased power and holiness, and also for increased, state-sanctioned, brutal persecution.

Last night, I had a weird dream. I was in Miami. I think Miami symbolized our corrupt secular society.

I was with Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez, about whom I know nothing. In the dream, he was a short, fat, mild-mannered guy with dark hair. I looked him up this morning, and he doesn’t look like that.

He was about to make a decision that, if it went a certain way, would please leftists and hurt the economy. For some reason, I was at his side. It was as though someone had called me in to be with him because there was something special they thought I could do.

I remember walking down a hallway with him, on a way to an appearance. People were throwing silver coins behind us. Some were very big. I started picking them up. Free silver. I’m not a fool. Gimenez said “wingers” were throwing them. He said “wingers” were people on the right wing. It’s a term of contempt, and it doesn’t make much sense, because there are leftist wingers, too. I told him I was one of the right-wingers.

He didn’t get angry. He didn’t seem to be an angry person.

We went into a room where officials were getting ready for him to speak. There was no dais or podium. There were two chairs at the side of the room, with a table between them. He sat in one chair, and I took the other. No one questioned my place there.

The room was full of handsome men in suits, wearing firearms. They were like Miami’s attempt to copy the Secret Service. One young black man was waving what appeared to be an M16. He was really pleased with it.

I realized I had my 10mm Glock in my pocket. I wondered why they hadn’t frisked me. I wondered if I should tell them I had it or keep quiet and avoid starting a fuss. I didn’t wave my pistol around like a person who had never been allowed to carry a gun before.

They gave us coffee, which wasn’t the Cuban kind. My own cup was full of instant coffee powder. I walked off to find hot water. I found a machine dribbling water, but it was lukewarm. As I walked away from it, one of the suited men told me I could drink the water. He didn’t know I needed it for coffee. I rejected it and sat back down.

By now, my instant coffee had turned into cake, so I turned it out onto a plate and ate half of it.

Gimenez said leftists expected him to do things that would hinder the economy, and we talked about it. He was not a sincere leftist. In the dream, he ran as a Democrat simply because it was the easiest way to get elected. He said maybe the best thing to do was nothing at all. He clearly believed it. In his heart, he was somewhat conservative, but he was about to betray his principles.

Across the room from us, there was a half-door. Mark Hemans was behind it. He was not allowed in the room. He was only visible from the waist up. He was wearing a veil that covered his face, like Moses. He spoke in a deep, slow voice, as though in a trance. He was talking to me. He said, “Get him on his knees.” He was telling me I needed to get Gimenez saved and baptized with the Holy Spirit.

I pointed Hemans out to Gimenez and started telling him who he was and how many amazing things he had done on Youtube through God’s power. I was working up to getting him to receive salvation and the baptism with the Holy Spirit. Gimenez got up and walked off to talk to someone. I got the feeling he wanted to avoid discussing God.

There was a building next to the building containing the room in which we sat. The buildings were only a few feet apart, and it was possible to walk from one to the other without going downstairs. In the other building, there was a bar, and men in the bar were watching us through windows. They had a great view.

Maybe the room represented the natural world, and the bar represented the supernatural realm.

I realized there would be some kind of attack. I decided I, too, could use the bar as a vantage point. I walked in and watched through the windows.

Soon, I found myself outside with John Wayne and a stereotypical cocky young male supporting actor. The ground was brown dirt, as it always is in Westerns. John Wayne was supposed to be in charge of protecting Gimenez. He expected an attack the next morning, and he was getting drunk. So was his friend. There was a big barrel of red wine, and Wayne sat in it and submerged himself up to the forehead. He was very intent on getting as drunk as he could. No one was going to tell John Wayne how to get ready for service. He was confident he could beat anyone, even with a hangover. It seemed to me that I would have to be the one who actually shot the bad guys, and John Wayne would get the credit anyway.

They ended up putting me and Gimenez in a big black limousine that loaded through a wide door on the left rear side. We sat down on the car’s rear seat, and that’s all I remember.

I don’t think God has any plans to send me to Miami. I sure hope not. I don’t think Carlos Gimenez figures in my future at all. I think Miami and Gimenez are symbols.

I have the impression that certain people who have earthly power will ask me for advice. My job will be to introduce them to the Holy Spirit, but they won’t be interested. They’ll want to involve God just enough to get what they want. They will have career hangers-on around them, with secular authority. These are the armed men. They will have great confidence in their ability to defend and support, but in reality, they will be inconsequential, weak, overconfident blowhards whose main gift is an ability to get attention.

The men in authority probably represented preachers.

John Wayne represents arrogant, titled hangers-on who think they have everything under control. They won’t prepare.

John Wayne is an interesting person. He’s a symbol of masculinity, patriotism, and toughness, but he never saw or came close to combat. Some say he avoided combat because he was having an affair with Marlene Dietrich and did not want to be distracted. There are some indications that he complained about not being near the fight, but let’s be serious. John Wayne had ample pull to get himself to the front. He wasn’t too old. He was physically able. His family didn’t need him to earn money. He could have gone.

Clark Gable was older and more famous. He flew combat missions. You can claim the brass held Wayne back because he was a big star, but they didn’t have the power to do that, and bigger stars served.

Some people theorize that he developed his tough guy image in order to compensate for his behavior during the war. This is what his third wife said. I have also read that GI’s had a very low opinion of him and booed him during appearances.

Meanwhile, actors like Glenn Ford and Jimmy Stewart were fighting.

I’ve always enjoyed John Wayne movies, but he was nothing like the men he portrayed. He was from California. He was a surfer, not a cowboy. He never faced a bad guy down, and he wasn’t equipped for it. He ran around on his wife. Supposedly, his he-man image didn’t really exist during the war. He built it later.

I should have less confidence in other people. A nice suit, a shiny rifle bristling with gadgets, a special degree, a culinary diploma, a set of tactical duds, official credentials…Jesus himself didn’t have things like these. Neither did John the Baptist or the apostles. They had anointings, and that was what mattered.

Over and over in my life, I have deferred to people who couldn’t get it done as well as I could. There are plenty of John Waynes out there sitting in wine barrels, and I give them too much slack. I have paid people a lot of money to do things I could do better, with God’s help, for nothing.

We are always surrounded by people who are better at claiming credit than walking it like they talk it. It’s hard to believe they keep fooling me at my age.

I think the silver in the dream represents accusations of betrayal. Judas took silver coins when he betrayed Jesus.

I don’t really need a dream to tell you that people in power sell us out every day. They inflate their credentials and talk a big game, but in the end, most are looking out for number one, and they are good at excusing themselves.

Interesting.

We should get close to God, get a grip on our anointings, and stop being impressed by empty shirts.

I don’t know when my equation will go off the rails, but if I get tired of writing about it, you can always check it yourself with a calculator. You probably won’t be doing it from the hospital.