Amateur Lawyers Dust off Their Nooses

Man, the supernatural civil war machine never stops.

You probably know that a white woman near me shot a black woman who was standing on her porch. For some reason, leftist nuts are trying to turn it into a crusade.

Susan Lorincz, who is white, ALLEGEDLY (so tired of that word) killed Ajike Owens, who was black. Apparently, Owens’ kids annoyed Lorincz repeatedly, and Lorincz did not respond with great maturity. She is accused of calling one child “black slave” and throwing roller skates, hitting a child.

The press says Owens went to the Lorincz home and stood on the porch, arguing with Lorincz. The stories say Lorincz shot her there. Four days later, Lorincz was arrested and charged.

This is exactly how the law is supposed to work in Florida. Lorincz killed someone. The cops and state’s attorneys investigated, they determined that there was probable cause to arrest her, and off to jail she went.

So why did it take 4 days to arrest her? Same reason it took a year to arrest Alec Baldwin. Legal and factual issues needed to be resolved.

Florida, like most states, has the castle doctrine. It’s like stand your ground, but it only applies to certain places, like your home and car. It says that if you are attacked in these places, you don’t have to run away. You can stay where you are and use deadly force.

Florida has a statutory presumption that a person who is breaking into an occupied dwelling intends to do great harm. This means you can shoot a burglar who is halfway through your window.

Before arresting Lorincz, the county had to consider the possibility that Owens was trying to break in and hurt Lorincz. It’s not a simple determination.

Some people say Lorincz shot through a locked door. That makes her look bad, because it’s hard to believe a woman could get through a locked exterior door. On the other hand, many people have shot criminals through locked doors, legally. If a strong person is kicking your front door in, and you shoot, you may well be within your rights.

What if Owens claimed she had a gun or other weapon? What if she made Lorincz believe she could get through the door? What if she said male helpers were on the way? A lot of questions needed to be answered. That took time.

In America, we are not supposed to arrest people because we think they MAY have committed crimes. The police have to believe crimes were committed, are in progress, or will be committed.

The sheriff here said investigation was needed because of the stand your ground doctrine. I don’t know if he understands the law. Cops are not lawyers. In Florida, we have stand your ground as well as the castle doctrine. One is more general than the other.

If I shoot you in a mall and refuse to retreat, it’s stand your ground. If I shoot you in my house and refuse to retreat, it’s stand your ground plus the castle doctrine. Take your pick.

Incidentally, George Zimmerman was not able to retreat because Trayvon Martin was sitting on him trying to kill him, so stand your ground was not involved. You have no duty to do the impossible.

In Florida, we have a statute that says you can use lethal force in order to prevent a “forcible felony.” Invading an occupied dwelling is a forcible felony, just like rape and arson. We are even allowed to shoot people who are committing treason, believe it or not. I don’t think that one comes into play a lot.

What the sheriff says is not that important. Sheriffs work with state’s attorneys who call the shots and make the legal determinations. He did whatever the state’s attorney told him, and he may or may not understand the law.

A lot of people are angry because Lorincz is supposedly a racist. Maybe she is. Thing is, racism is legal, and even if it were illegal, it’s not homicide. Even if Lorincz had worn a Klan robe while shooting Owens, investigation would still have been necessary. Racism may be relevant to motivation, but the authorities still have to show there was an illegal homicide.

You can put on a shirt that says all blacks should be gassed, tattoo a swastika on your forehead, and still be within the law if you kill in self-defense.

If racism were a crime, half of the rappers on Earth would be facing charges. So would a lot of university employees. Al Sharpton would be in prison.

There is a tremendous amount of racist crime perpetrated by minorities. It doesn’t make the news because it’s not news. It’s normal. Somehow a possible white racist criminal is more newsworthy.

I guess the newest woke rationale goes like this: Lorincz is a racist nut, Owens was an angel who definitely did not try to break in, Lorincz shot her purely because of racism, the racist police and prosecutors tried to bury it for 4 long, long days, and it proves America is a white supremacist country. The problem is that nothing was buried, and the shooter was arrested promptly.

Unfortunately, it may be that more hate will be stirred up by the verdict. Don’t get mad at me, but Lorincz could be innocent, and even if she’s guilty, she may walk like O.J. Simpson.

The evidence isn’t available to the public yet. Maybe Owens said she was coming in to kill her. Maybe she said friends were right behind her. Maybe none of these things were true, but a good defense attorney might make a jury think they were true. Maybe Lorincz is guilty, but a well-chosen jury, like the one O.J. got, could refuse to convict.

So what happens if she walks? Regardless of whether she’s innocent, expect more turmoil.

I know black people whose friends and relatives have committed crimes, and I’ve been among those who were asked to pray for them to get away with it. I’ve heard black people clap when they were told God caused the system to let a guilty person off. A young black man accidentally shot and killed another young black man I was looking after, and I prayed he wouldn’t be arrested. Black people who knew the victim had no interest in seeing him charged. Seems like there is a double standard. The same one you see when black people shoot over 50 other black people in Chicago in one weekend, and BLM doesn’t show up.

I wonder what would have happened if I had shot my friend accidentally. Would black people I thought were friends have turned against me?

It’s not the end of the world when a criminal isn’t punished. America is full of killers who have never been charged, and this is particularly true in black ghettos, where people are afraid to talk to the police. Fomenting violence over one white defendant would be hypocritical.

I should also add that lay people’s opinions about guilt and innocence are usually worthless. The fact that you think someone should have been convicted probably doesn’t mean anything.

Whatever happens, one more cup of gasoline has been tossed on the embers of civil unrest, and Americans are not handling it like honest, mature adults.

Elective Interference

Here’s something I’ve been saying for several years: not only is the world going down the toilet faster than we expected; the speed at which it goes down the toilet keeps accelerating.

America was deteriorating at a certain pace in 2020. Now the deterioration is faster. What 2024 will look like, who can guess?

Yesterday brought me some disturbing new data.

First, I saw a video of San Francisco cops saluting the sodomy flag. They put it on a pole beneath the American flag, and they stood in formation and saluted.

If you’re a millennial twerp with no idea what a sane world looks like this will seem like a strange thing to get triggered about. It may seem completely normal to you. Anyone who was born before 1971 understands how bizarre it is for cops to salute sodomy.

One of the cops had a silly rainbow sodomy cowboy hat on. Cast your mind back to 1980 and picture Clint Eastwood shooting it out with criminals…wearing that hat.

Picture John Wayne wearing it.

Second, I saw a story about sodomy flag rainbow rocking chairs at Cracker Barrel.

Obviously, Cracker Barrel isn’t a chain of churches. It’s not a Christian business. Still, it’s a chain non-leftists tend to like, and for some reason, leftists really hate it. Maybe it’s because Cracker Barrel sells gifts with crosses on them, or maybe it’s because there was a racism kerfuffle that took place years ago. Or it could just be because it’s a Southern chain serving Southern food. Leftists hate the South.

Cracker Barrel is a big secular business, and it’s not realistic for it to try to please God by refraining from pandering in order to broaden its customer base. While this is true, it’s surreal to see sodomy chairs on Cracker Barrel’s famous front porch. Cracker Barrel has always been a nice refuge for people who are nostalgic for a sane world.

Third, and this is something you probably expected me to mention: President Trump was just indicted for 7 federal felonies.

I am sad to see this happen. I am not one of those conservatives who is unable to tolerate the prospect of a non-Trump victory in 2024, so I’m not flipping out over the likely destruction of his campaign, but Trump has been a great friend to the church, Jews, Israel, and the unborn, and I don’t believe he deserves this. I don’t want to see our friend in prison over something like this.

I am also disturbed because this prosecution appears to be selective, and it underlines the fact that conservatism and Christianity are being criminalized in America and the rest of the West. It reminds me that Rome-style persecution can, and does, happen in a modern nation where Christianity used to be the dominant ethos.

Hillary Clinton created an email address for the specific purpose of violating the law, she hid classified documents on non-secure computers, and when the FBI asked for her computers, she deleted the contents of the hard drives before handing them over. She is sitting in Chappaqua enjoying her hundreds of millions with no fear of prosecution.

Destruction of evidence and other forms of interfering with criminal investigations can be worse crimes than the crimes being investigated, as Richard Nixon could have told you. It’s not clear yet, but it appears Trump is in trouble for the way he responded to the investigation, not just holding onto documents.

If Hillary got a complete pass, how can Trump be charged with felonies?

Hillary crony Sandy Berger stole classified documents from the National Archives in 2004, he then lied to investigators, and he was only charged with a misdemeanor. He literally stuffed things into his socks, and he hid documents under a trailer belonging to a construction company. He never did time. He got probation.

It will probably be impossible for Biden and the DOJ to convince reasonable people this prosecution is fair or merited. I may be wrong, but I don’t see it happening.

A major problem is that millions of people may reach the conclusion–likely justified–that Biden and the DOJ are breaking the law in order to take away their ability to vote for the candidate of their choice. If enough people believe that, guerrilla warfare in our streets becomes a serious possibility. We may have a civil war, and worse, it may be justified.

Trump’s lawyers were working with the DOJ while this whole mess was brewing. It’s not like he hired a Craig Livingstone to rent a van and hide documents in a cave. To many people, it’s going to look like the DOJ is trying to imprison a great president simply for hard negotiating, in good faith.

If you had asked me, in 2000, how people who do what Hillary and Berger did should be treated, I would have said they should be prosecuted in some way or another. Now that Berger has received a slap on the wrist and Hillary has been given a free pass, how can I say that? There has to be some kind of consistency.

Leftists will do what lawyers do. They will harp on the differences between Trump’s case and the others, magnifying them and making it seem like Trump is in a different class. Conservatives will hammer on the similarities and the apparent unfairness. In the end, a whole lot of conservatives who are already angry about being systematically abused will feel more provoked than ever. Maybe the left will get the real insurgency it seems to want, instead of a tiny, ad hoc, mock insurgency like January 6.

Biden’s DOJ pseudopods should have bent over backwards to deescalate. If they could work with Hillary, they could work with Trump. No one was going to die because Trump was holding onto the documents. It was not a crisis. Instead, an Attorney General Trump’s party prevented from achieving a dream Supreme Court appointment is pulling out all the stops.

Prosecutors have huge discretion. People ignore that. Hillary could have been convicted. Hunter Biden could have been convicted of lying on his background check form by now. Bill Clinton could have been convicted of perjury. These three haven’t even been charged. Trump didn’t really have to be indicted.

As I have written, there is some evidence that the rapture will take place this coming winter. I would welcome that. I’m worn out, as the Bible says Lot was. My wife and I are fortunate in that we do not have to appease or obey deviants or socialists in order to have a decent standard of living, and we are not forced to lie about people’s gender, but the little oasis we live in is getting smaller every day, and even if we’re fine, it’s distressing to see other people who are a lot like us abused.

When I was a kid, my dad used to beat my mother, and he was nastier to my sister than he was to me. I was treated better than they were, but I still wished he would leave. I’m in a similar situation now. I’m doing fine, but I’m tired of reading stories about the cruelty inflicted on others, and I’m tired of knowing I will never belong.

I dread the day when we start seeing videos of conservatives acting like Antifa. Leftists like to riot, but they’re very bad at it. Conservatives are much better at doing real harm. They are more familiar with weapons and tactics than leftists. If they snap, they are likely to swarm the streets with newly-converted automatic weapons. If that happens, the final resolution will probably derive from violence, not debate.

It’s very simple to turn a Glock or an AR-15 into an automatic weapon. Banning machine guns only prevents people from getting weapons that are already automatic. It won’t help in a world where anyone can make an AR-15 automatic using a part made from a coat hanger.

Liberals don’t understand that people can make weapons they can’t buy. Ghettos are full of kids with automatic Glocks right now.

I’m not interested in joining up. I don’t even feel good about having to defend myself, my wife, or my house. If I wanted to shoot people, I would have joined the military. Barring the rapture, it may be better to be killed early on than to live in a filthy post-apocalyptic world full of immature people living out a video game.

MORE

Things look somewhat different now. The indictment has been released.

They are charging Trump with 37 crimes, not 7, which is the number I heard earlier. They are also alleging he told someone to hide documents from the FBI, which sounds something like Hillary Clinton erasing hard drives prior to making computers available for examination. I didn’t know he was going to be accused of this.

Trump is an interesting guy. He did wonderful things as president, but he has a strong self-destructive streak. He doesn’t seem to think about what will happen to him when he makes decisions. Maybe he’s so used to winning, it’s hard for him to imagine taking a serious loss.

I can’t even guess what he wanted with classified documents. I don’t know why he would poke the Deep Swamp bear without a good reason. It doesn’t make sense.

God has shown me that when things that don’t make sense happen, there is a supernatural cause. There is no way to rationalize holding onto classified material after leaving office, so I assume supernatural forces are at work.

This whole business feeds into the civil war scenario we’ve all been half-expecting, and if you spirits are pushing Trump and the DOJ to do things that will escalate the anger and lead to pre-tribulation strife, then what happened suddenly makes sense.

If we really are in the home stretch now, then both sides of the political spectrum will continue to escalate things, and people who call for peace and maturity will find themselves wasting their time.

I just hope people who are close to God will be gone before things become intolerable.

My View From Beneath the Clouds

My wife and I have had victorious dreams for a long time, but last night I had a different one. I had a blue-state nightmare.

For some incomprehensible reason, I was in New York City with a friend of mine. I plan to avoid New York for the rest of my life, even as a tourist. My wife will have to watch videos about it instead of visiting. I lived there for years. It was disgusting then, and now it’s much worse. Visiting in a dream shows that I was not my true self.

I was driving, and we stopped outside a housing project in Harlem. My friend got out to go see another friend who lived there. In real life, he lives in Georgia, and she lives in Florida.

While I waited, I had nothing to do. For some reason, I got on a public bus.

As I sat on the bus, I realized I had my pistol in my pocket. I was very disturbed. Even after corrective Supreme Court decisions, New York City makes it very hard to get a carry permit, and it snubs permit holders from other states. In the dream, I was committing a felony.

Jurisdictions that don’t permit people to carry would, literally, prefer to see the innocent dead than armed.

I wondered if I should get off the bus and throw the gun in a garbage can. I can afford a new gun, but I don’t want to go to Rikers Island for exercising my Second Amendment rights.

The bus took off, and it went down a very dark road. The driver had a British accent. He was a bald white man with a beard and glasses. He was very friendly. I would say he seemed protective. We got farther from the housing project, and I knew I didn’t want to go back on foot.

Here is the rotten truth: a white person walking in Harlem at night is extremely likely to be attacked. It’s just a fact. Like many other black areas, Harlem devours non-blacks who disregard the unwritten law: don’t show up after dark.

The street we were on was very narrow. Two lanes. There were no street lights. There was only a little bit of very dim lighting from buildings beside the road.

Every so often, we encountered two C-shaped concrete barriers about two feet high. The C’s opened toward the gutters. The barriers were about four feet apart, funneling vehicles between them. Somehow, the bus slid between them at speed.

I asked the driver where I could get off safely because I wanted to take a bus back to the housing project. We got to a place where there was a lot of light, and I saw a bus stop. I got out, feeling safer, but he turned the bus around and left, and the light disappeared.

I was in a place of total darkness. I couldn’t see anything at all. The darkness was brown, like sewage. It shimmered like boiling water, but there were no shapes.

I walked quickly toward the housing project. I knew I probably wouldn’t make it. Soon I started hearing voices. Groups of young black males were yelling and talking. One young man joked about another’s hat, so I knew they could see even though I couldn’t. It looked like they had lit some very dim campfires in certain places off the road.

I realized someone was following me. I turned and saw him. When I turned a second time, he was right in front of me. He was a Puerto Rican man of about 45 years. He looked like someone’s dad. I didn’t want to shoot him and draw others. I only had 11 rounds.

He started reaching in my pockets to take things. A young black man appeared beside him, holding a rifle over his shoulder with the muzzle pointed behind him. He was going to rob me, too.

Eventually, I decided it was better to go to prison than die, so I took out my gun, reached into the Puerto Rican man’s jacket, and took back what he stole.

Then I woke up.

It was a terrible experience. I realized how people in blue cities with ghettos live. Take the wrong train, make the wrong turn, and you become prey. Robbery, beatings, murder, rape…it’s all up to the people around you. Because blue politicians will not allow law-abiding people to defend themselves, and because they imprison them for trying, the only way to win is to stay in areas where your kind is permitted. Even then, it’s a gamble.

When I was a kid in college, I got drunk with some friends of mine, and we missed a subway stop and ended up in Harlem, east of Morningside Park. A black lady told us to stay on the train and get out. She told a friend of mine, “You’re life ain’t worth a nickel here.” She was afraid for us. This is normal in certain cities today.

In the dream, I didn’t think at all about God. I didn’t know I was a Christian. I didn’t curse the creatures that attacked me. I didn’t pray. All I had was a pistol.

It reminded me of Bill Wiese’s famous hell visit. While he was there, he had no idea he was a Christian. Demons with incredible strength ripped his flesh and threw him around as though he weighed nothing. No one was on his side. The place where he was was completely dark.

I think God gave me this dream to remind me how blessed I am and how cursed many Americans are. If I’m out and about, and someone tries to hurt me, I can pull out my piece and riddle him with bullets. I can carry an AK-47 with huge magazines in my vehicle, and I have done it. Where I live, there are no areas where anyone has to be afraid because he looks a certain way. If I shoot a criminal here, the police will pat me on the back and leave. If a mob surrounds my car, I can drive through them with immunity from prosecution. It’s the law. I don’t have to wait till they drag me out and beat me.

When spirits attack, I can call down God’s fire on them. I can bind them and muzzle them. I can curse them with defeat. I can pray for God to send spirits to crush them. People who don’t know God, on the other hand, have to lie back and take it, all day, every day.

My wife and I have had a lot of nice dreams. The other day, she dreamed she was flying, and when people asked her what she was doing, she said, “It’s practice for the rapture!” What a different world she and I live in, compared to people who don’t know God. He spares us the problems and the company of Satan’s leftists.

I haven’t done much of anything today. I feel drained because I feel like I was really mugged. As far as I knew at the time, it was actually happening, and I was probably going to die.

I’ve seen videos of blue-state people who could not defend themselves from criminals. I’ve seen them beaten and shot. I’ve seen sociopathic subhumans take their money and belongings. I didn’t truly appreciate their fear and humiliation. Now I understand it better. I also understand what whites and Asians go through in some places.

I believe God gave me the dream to help me understand the other side’s experiences. It may also be that he wanted me to understand the tribulation. During that time, there will be little or no love on Earth, but hatred and sadism will be increased. The whole world will be like America’s worst ghettos, but there will also be war, disease, and starvation.

The Antichrist will set up a protection racket. He’ll solve people’s problems temporarily in exchange for worship and obedience. In this respect, he’ll be a lot like Mohammed, whose sick cult never went anywhere until he permitted his followers to murder, rob, and rape infidels while forbidding them to touch each other.

The dream made me think about conservative nominal Christians who think hard work, pride, prepping, weapons, and politics will save them. I had a pistol, and I was in a position to kill some people in the short term, but criminals were still going to get me, and if I managed to run to the government for help, it was going to imprison me. Nominal Christians with rifles and dried food are not going to enjoy the tribulation. They will be on the bottom.

The trick is to make it in the rapture. There is no other hope. The world will look like a 3D video game. You’re not going to be able to wall off the barbarians, partly because you’ll be one of them. Carnal Christians are closer to Satan than God.

I had nightmares every night when I was a kid. Many times, I saw Satan climbing out of a manhole under my bed and chasing me. I saw a star in the sky turn into a hole through which his eye watched me. I saw relatives I loved being twisted apart as they came to hug me. The dream I had last night was the worst complete nightmare I ever had. I was in a bad spot, and I had no hope whatsoever.

I reacted badly to an antibiotic once, and during that time, whenever I fell asleep, I felt I was instantly in hell, but those dreams lasted a second or less. They woke me up instantly. Last night’s dream was long.

I can’t recall ever having another dream about racial conflict. Most people in my dreams are white.

I am more motivated to stay beside God than ever. I have to be connected with the highest authority from now on.

I Still Don’t Have Enough .22 Pistols

Because I am in some ways a frivolous person, I am currently thinking about buying a .22 pistol with a red dot sight. Mission: kill squirrels and generally plink while out and about on the farm. A big .22 pistol with a large magazine is actually a better self-defense gun than the pistols I generally carry, and it’s fun for goofing around. It’s also a lot lighter and smaller than a rifle.

What about all the other .22 pistols I have? Why can’t I settle for one of them? Nice try. This one is different. It’s the kind of pistol that keeps David Hogg awake at night. It’s semiautomatic, and it looks sort of like an AR-15.

Of course, I’m talking about the Mossberg 715P. I’ll insert a video of a lady shooting one.

It’s pretty hilarious. That big, fat AR-looking mass is really a thin plastic shell. It’s like a toy gun. The actual gun is hidden inside it, and it’s just a cheap .22 rifle receiver. It’s like a movie studio hired someone to make a Marlin Model 60 look like an AR.

Nonetheless, it works, as you can see in the video.

By the way, the Marlin Model 60 is dead. Ruger bought Marlin and decided to kill the Model 60, so looks like the 10/22 won the budget .22 war by forced default. Ruger could make new Model 60’s, but they say they have no plans to do it.

The Mossberg is pretty clearly not the highest expression of the gun manufacturer’s art. It’s a low-end product. But it hits a spot that definitely exists.

I guess some people will huff and puff and say a 10mm Glock is better for self-defense. No, it isn’t. The Mossberg is far better. It holds 26 rounds of .22 LR, and it has a red dot. A good marksman could pop an assailant over and over, accurately, from a distance that would make using a Glock challenging. If you can shoot your perp over and over before he gets close, you can disable him without allowing him to get near enough to get a fair shot at you. In self-defense, fairness is a giant mistake.

A .22 round isn’t as damaging as a 10mm round, but hitting someone 100 feet away, over and over, with little rounds, is a lot better than hitting him three or 4 times with big bullets when he’s 20 feet away, shooting back. Think how discouraging it would be to know the person you wanted to kill could shoot you maybe 20 times before you could do a thing to him.

Any semiauto .22 that can be fired accurately and easily at relatively long ranges is better for protection from distant human beings than any big-bore pistol that’s hard to aim and has a lot of recoil. If I had to shoot a person from 50 yards with a Glock, I’d have to settle for shooting at the body and keeping shots within a one-foot circle. If I were using a Marlin 60, I could shoot him through the head repeatedly without much effort, even if I was scared and shaking.

Shot placement is a very, very big deal. Criminals have survived multiple badly-placed torso shots from .45 pistols, and they have continued to attack and harm people after the shots landed, but one shot from an accurate .22 rifle can kill any terrestrial mammal on Earth.

For a long time, the record grizzly bear was a huge animal a lady shot in the head with a .22. The bear was enormous, and it scared an American Indian woman. She popped it in the skull, and it dropped. Then she moved up close and emptied the gun into the skull to make sure the bear’s nap continued. You can see a photo of the skull online. People think bears’ skulls are so thick high-powered rifle slugs bounce off of them. Well, not this bear’s. Not where she aimed, anyway. And she was only using .22 Long.

You don’t need a big cartridge to kill a big animal unless you can’t take your best shot. If you can take your time and shoot wherever you want, you can kill an elephant with a .22. It has been done.

I don’t know why I’m mentioning self-defense (or elephants), because I want this gun for fun. I suppose it helps me justify buying it.

Why not put a folding AK in the cart and forget about all this? Because a .22 is what you want for a cart. You want something small, light, cheap, and fun to shoot.

The problem with the Mossberg 715P is the Ruger Charger. It’s another .22 pistol. The appearance isn’t as hilarious as that of the Mossberg, but it’s a better gun. It’s a 10/22 with the barrel and buttstock abbreviated.

You can get a Charger with a 10″ barrel, which would give higher velocity and less noise than the Mossberg’s short barrel. The Charger would also have all sorts of support, because the 10/22 is more common than the Bic lighter. Unfortunately, it costs more than the 715P, and I would have to blow about $85 for a cheap red dot to sit on it.

If I felt like it, I could keep a Charger in the utility cart and keep a huge 10/22 magazine with it. I could use a smaller magazine for fooling around, and then if black-clad transvestite ninjas from an allegedly nonexistent domestic terror organization decided to come to my farm and murder me for pointing out that men aren’t women, I could put the big magazine in and spray my way to the house, where I could reach for a more serious rifle. Or a few of them.

One neat thing about these guns is that you can put a pistol brace on either one and end up with a really neat and handy little rifle. You just have to buy an NFA stamp.

So do I get the Mossberg, which is more fun, or do I get the Charger, which is more gun? Or do I do the mature thing and forget about it?

I think we can rule out option #3.

Better

Yesterday I decided to try my new Girsan Hi-Power clone, the MC P35 Match. I took it to the pasture and put 50 rounds of Aguila FMJ through it. I shot 25 rounds at steel and the rest at a Shoot-n-See target.

Some people are reluctant to buy Turkish weapons. They seem to think Turkey is like Mexico or Iran. In reality, there are a lot of sharp, responsible, capable people in Turkey. It’s pretty much like Western Europe. Shopping malls. Good roads. Good public transportation. Extremely clean restaurants. Much cleaner than restaurants here in Florida. Definitely cleaner than New York restaurants.

I have no problems with this gun. At 10 yards or so, it appears to shoot very accurately. I am rusty, so I think any disappointing shots are my fault. Here is the target. I shot at 5 different points because I am too cheap to shoot only at the center and waste the rest of the target.

I’m not exactly sure how far away I was. It appeared to be farther than 7 yards, but I did not measure.

I missed a couple of gongs at 30 feet. It took me a few rounds to remember how to shoot.

Every round fed perfectly. In all likelihood, every shot flew where it should have. My trigger pull is not quite what it used to be, and my grip seems inconsistent. I need to shoot more often.

It looks like I am consistently low and to the left. If memory serves, shooting to the left is not new to me, so it’s probably not the gun. I should go look at the Wheel of Misfortune.

I have seen people say this gun, or at least the slightly-cheaper variant, does not shoot very accurately. Well, I did just fine with ammunition I bought for $7.31 per box. Give me two days to practice, and I’ll do better. It’s hard for me to believe there is anything wrong with the gun. My other pistols don’t shoot any better. Maybe the problems pop out when you use a rest at 25 yards, but how would that be relevant to real-world shooting? I mean, if you’re sitting behind a rest with a death grip on a $620 pistol, using cheap FMJ, looking over iron sights, trying to get within 2″ at 25 yards, you should be shooting rifles. And if your gun can do 3″ at 25 yards, a good shooter armed with your gun will be able to kill any home invader that ever lived.

I’m consistently inside a circle smaller than a burglar’s head, so there is that.

I don’t really understand people who worry a lot about super accuracy at long distances with Bass Pro or Rural King pistols. It’s like they’ve never heard of rifles. I would never, ever use anything but a rifle for self-defense unless the only alternative was a carrot peeler. Rifles hold a lot of ammunition. Rifles defeat body armor and walls. Rifles are easy to shoot accurately. They hold all kinds of optics and lights. They let you shoot pistol-packing burglars pretty easily at distances at which their pistols are not likely to be useful. Shooting a drugged-up burglar with a pistol is like eating peas with a crab fork.

The trigger is stiff, so it invites flinching just to get the round out of the barrel. I have read that this gun loosens up a lot after a few boxes, though.

The grip is wonderful, but I suppose every textured G10 grip is wonderful. It wraps around the back of the butt so almost every part that touches the hand grabs the skin.

So is it a good Hi-Power successor? It had better be. The Hi-Power is not coming back. FN created a new model which is not the same.

This gun’s slide and frame are forged and cold-drawn, whatever that is. I can’t remember which is cold-drawn and which is forged. Anyway, it’s not cast. It should be just as good as the Springfield clone, which is also Turkish in spite of the deceptive ad talk.

I don’t know what to say about the recoil, because I didn’t notice it. I guess it must be soft. This gun isn’t plastic, so it has mass to soak up momentum.

Is it a good gun for self-defense? Yes. Definitely. Would I use it for that? Not unless I couldn’t reach a better gun. It can’t be trusted with +P ammunition. My opinion is that ammunition improvements have changed the capabilities of certain cartridges to the point where we should all reevaluate our choices. There are 2023 9mm rounds that do things 2000 9mm rounds could not. If you’re going to use 9mm to protect yourself, why not insist on a gun that uses top-notch ammunition?

Example of changing cartridge capabilities: I like 10mm, but the .40 S&W round has been improved so much, I think it’s a better choice for most people. It zips along pretty fast now, ammunition is easier to find and comes in more flavors, and guns are common and therefore easy to buy and maintain.

I didn’t buy the Girsan for self-defense. I bought it for fun. I wanted a Hi-Power-type gun because I was never given a fair chance to get the one my grandfather had. Now I have what appears to be a superior version.

Plastic guns are wonderful for escorting burglars to the hereafter, but when it comes to the range, give me steel. Steel guns are neat. Nobody wants to see John Wayne shoot Comanches with a Kel-Tec. Steel feels better and looks better. It links us to the past, when Milton Berle was the only man who wore a dress in front of kids.

People love to say, “A gun is not a toy!” Sure it is. If you bought it for fun. Airplanes and helicopters can be toys. Parachutes can be toys. Motorcycles are almost always toys. The fact that something is dangerous doesn’t mean it can’t be a toy. For me, steel guns are generally better toys than plastic guns.

My big complaint about the Girsan is that it only comes with one magazine. It’s a Mec-Gar product, and it comes in blue and nickel. The blue ones are hard to find. I had to pay $63 for two, including shipping and taxes. They hold 15 rounds, or two more than a Hi-Power magazine, so that makes the Girsan better than a Hi-Power in a self-defense situation. Like if you’re attacked at the range, and your AK-47 is in the truck. I believe you can use these magazines in Hi-Powers, though. Supposedly, just about all the parts are interchangeable.

Nice gun. Maybe I’ll get the trigger worked on some day, but that’s about it. Okay; maybe I could dig up some abalone grips. But that’s all. And a red dot. But nothing else.

I wonder what nitride coating costs.

First Barbecue Gun of 2023

I had an urge to resume completing my gun collection, so I acted on it.

The main reason I love shooting is that as my grandfather’s favorite grandchild, I shot his guns with him when I was a kid. Then he died, and someone who won’t step up and admit the truth swept all the good ones up without going through the legal process. I ended up inheriting an aluminum .22 pistol and a rusty flintlock shotgun no one else would take. I also got his Browning Sweet Sixteen, but I didn’t get that from his estate. My grandmother gave it to my dad, and I inherited it from him. Good thing, because the aluminum pistol and the rusty shotgun aren’t much to remember Gramps by, and there is no way I would have gotten the Sweet Sixteen if my dad hadn’t owned it.

I didn’t get the Colt Woodsman we shot together. I didn’t get the Hi Standard .22 semiauto pistol we shot. I didn’t get the Remington 550-1 .22 rifle we shot. I certainly didn’t get either of his Smith & Wesson .357 revolvers or his lever gun or his M1 Enforcer pistol. I didn’t get his commemorative nickel-plated Colt 1911, but that shouldn’t have gone to me, because my uncle bought it for him.

I’m the best shot in the family, far and away, and the only one who has any idea how to work a reloading press. I’m the only one who has any precision rifle training. It would have been nice if I had gotten one more decent gun, but estates are like buffets. They bring out the worst in people. You find out what your relatives are really like when someone dies. People you love will write you off for the rest of your life in exchange for a bowl or pitcher that should have gone to you.

I never took one thing I was not legally and morally entitled to, I didn’t sue or turn in anyone who mistreated me, and I never took a penny for doing anything for the family, so at least I can say I didn’t sink into the mire.

My grandfather had a Browning Hi-Power pistol. The “Hi-Power” name is a reference to the gun’s high capacity for its time. The design was started by John Moses Browning and completed by a Frenchman. It’s a 9mm gun that holds 14 rounds. It was released in 1935. Until a few years ago, it was manufactured by FN.

I’m not sure we shot this gun together, but it would have been a nice thing to inherit.

It’s not a great pistol. The Hi-Power has a weak frame, so if you use +P rounds in it, you are likely to damage it. It runs fine with old-fashioned ammunition, which means inferior, less effective ammunition. It looks nice and handles well, and it’s a John Moses Browning design, so even if it’s not a good gun, it has a lot of appeal.

A Glock 17 is 10 times the gun a Hi-Power is. It will last longer, run better, weigh less, and shoot anything you put in it. But Glocks are ugly. A Glock is like a homely wife who keeps a great house and looks after the kids well.

I decided to get a Hi-Power about 15 minutes after FN quit making them. A sad coincidence. A gun that should cost maybe $750 suddenly cost $1500, if it could be found at all. I wasn’t paying that. I waited.

Springfield Armory came out with a clone called the SA-35. Of course, I found out about three days after it was released, and they were all gone. I figured I would wait till the next bunch shipped. That didn’t happen for a very long time, and when you can find one now, it’s around $800. That’s a lot for a gun which is basically a low-budget descendant of the 1911.

The other day, I got a wild hair and decided to search, and I learned that a Turkish company named Girsan was selling a clone through EAA, the Florida company that imports the Tanfoglio Witness. I started reading up.

You may wonder why I would buy a Turkish gun to replace an FN. Well, there is always the price difference, and also, the Girsan is better.

The FN came with a really dumb feature. The gun will not fire unless there is a magazine in it. The French insisted on this. The mechanism that prevents firing somehow involves the trigger group, so a Hi-Power with this pointless extra safety will have a bad trigger. A gun with a bad trigger is an abomination. My understanding is that you can have the safety bypassed somehow, but that doesn’t appeal to me. The Girsan, in one of its configurations, has no magazine disconnect safety, so it has a better trigger than the FN.

Springfield’s gun has no extra safety, but they charge too much. Interesting fact: Springfield’s gun is also Turkish.

Most people don’t know this, because Springfield dishonestly says the SA-35 is made in the USA, but the SA-35 is made from Turkish parts made by a company called Tisa. The parts are shipped here, and then Springfield assembles the guns.

Tisa also makes a Hi-Power clone. Reviewers don’t seem to think much of it, and I feel like a Tisa Springfield would be a second-tier clone for a top-tier price.

Reviewers really like the Girsan, and it’s not terribly pricey. You can get their “Match” model for $620. Maybe less. It takes aftermarket parts that fit the original FN, so if there is anything you don’t like, you should be able to put a better part in.

I like the Turkish connection. I’m not a fan of the government of Turkey, but I really liked the people when I visited. Apart from the two individuals who tried to rip me off with debit card scanners, everyone was great. Very warm and helpful. I felt bad for them, because they are crippled by superstition and the cult of Islam. The area we call Turkey now is where the seven churches of the Revelation were. It was apparently the biggest concentration of charismatics on Earth. Then Mohammed and Satan had their way.

Turkey has a terrible economy right now. Buying a pistol is a gesture of sympathy.

Later this week, I’ll pick the gun up, and after that, I may look into cute grips and a holster. Then I’ll shoot it a few times and put it away.

I still want a nice lever gun and a good 12 gauge semiauto designed for hunting. I have been considering a Turkish shotgun called the Masai Mara. I don’t know if I would ever use it for anything other than skeet and squirrels, but it would be nice to have.

When it comes to manufacturing and all-around competence, Turkey isn’t a mess like Mexico or Greece. There are a lot of very sharp people there. They make some top-notch products. My wife and I made a big mistake, not buying more leather goods in Turkey. Turks kept dragging us into stores and showing us knockoffs. My wife got a Vuitton backpack for $35, which we thought was pretty funny. The quality was excellent. I would not hesitate to buy her Turkish purses.

Actually, I did get her several Turkish purses, but they were cheap junk for tourists, sold in the Grand Bazaar. She liked them. They have since fallen apart. They were very different from the stuff the knockoff shops sold.

The Turks have several good gun manufacturers, and it’s not like buying a Chinese milsurp or some awful thing made in France.

Getting something reminiscent of the M1 Enforcer pistol is a problem. Original M1 carbines have shot up in price, to the point where the smart thing for an owner to do is to put his gun in a safe and never shoot it. There are some clones, but reviewers cite a lot of problems.

I would not want a pistol, because an M1 pistol is kind of silly. I wouldn’t mind a paratrooper model, which has a folding wire stock. Maybe it can be fired as a pistol, like a Vz58.

I thought about getting a lever action rifle in .45-70. Before covid, I thought I might get a chance to hunt deer, and .45-70 is supposed to be excellent for deer at short range in thick woods. I don’t know if I’ll ever get one in the post-covid era.

I can’t get my grandfather’s guns, so I buy better guns and shoot them better than anyone else in the family. That’s good enough. Both Rhodah and I have been treated badly by relatives, so these days, I pray the punishment for people who sin against us will be that God blesses us more than they harmed us, and that they will see it. That’s way better than revenge. Of course, we also pray God will help our enemies to repent and to be blessed. And then I tell him we only ask this for the ones who will listen. I tell him I’m not asking him to chase anyone.

I have better 1911’s than the one my grandfather had. Better .22 pistols and rifles. Better this and that. I have a great rifle with which I can hit a nickel at 100 yards, consistently.

If I get the remaining guns I mentioned, I’ll be content. After that, my main interest will be in keeping my few self-defense guns current. If I decide what I’m using is obsolete, I’ll make changes.

I look forward to trying the Girsan out.

The Amazing Electronic Snowflake

I feel I should write a few words about my experiences with ChatGPT.

The other day, I received The Florida Bar News, and for the first time ever, I saw something I wanted to read. It was an article about the ethics of letting AI machines write legal instruments.

It’s somewhat impressive when a chat robot can talk somewhat competently about simple matters. Writing briefs and motions is on another level. Most lawyers can barely do it.

I’ll get flak if a doctor reads this, but medicine is better suited to AI than law. Why? Because there are a limited number of diseases, and the lists of symptoms and treatments are also limited. A lot of medicine is running mental flow charts. If the patient has this problem, do this. If not, do that. Doctors run tests based on their memorized flow charts, and different doctors will generally come up with the same answers. When two doctors disagree, it generally means one of them is wrong and possibly dangerous.

Law is different. While it takes more brains to become a doctor than it does to become a lawyer, and while the average intelligence of doctors is higher than the average intelligence of lawyers, legal cases vary much more than medical cases. They tell law students, “Every case is different,” and while it’s not quite true, it is nearly true. You can’t create flow charts that work for law. Even simple cases may contain lots of factors that have to be considered, and it’s not unusual at all for such factors to be novel.

Obviously, medicine is complex, and diagnoses and treatments are not always simple. Sometimes doctors get real puzzles. A machine with a hard case could screw up badly. On the other hand, doctors screw up a great deal, too, now that I think about it. They are said to kill something like 6 times as many people as firearm incidents. They amputate the wrong legs. A surgeon did grafts on healthy arteries in Dana Carvey’s chest and left clogged arteries alone. A man in the Midwest woke up from surgery with no penis or testicles because a doctor thought he saw cancer, and it turned out there was no cancer. He just sliced everything off without getting consent. Stories like this are common. A few people you know have similar stories.

Personally, I would like to have doctors who use AI. I would not want AI by itself or a doctor by himself. I would want a doctor to catch AI’s mistakes and AI to catch the doctor’s mistakes.

Anyway, supposedly, AI is getting so good, some lawyers are using it to write their instruments, and the Florida Bar wants lawyers to know they can’t just sign these things and hand them in as their own product. It is still necessary to check the machines’ work.

This should be obvious, but really, there are a lot of incompetent lawyers out there. A lot of people who are not bright at all get licenses. I’m sure there must be lawyers who are making AI shoulder as much weight as possible.

It reminds me of a story my uncle told. He was at a judges’ conference, and there was a lecture about ruling on objections. A judge there said he kept a deck of cards behind the bench. If a lawyer objected, he drew a card. If the card was red, he sustained the objection. If it was black, he denied it. Or maybe it was the other way around. The other judges told him he couldn’t do that, and they tried to get him up to speed on the law surrounding objections. In the end, they gave him his cards back. They realized the cards couldn’t do a worse job than the judge did.

There have to be lawyers out there using AI like a deck of cards. I have a lawyer cousin I would trade for AI in a heartbeat. I would trade him for a Magic 8 Ball, for that matter.

I felt it was time for me to look at AI myself, so I signed up and talked to ChatGPT.

I took a couple of things away from it. First of all, these machines are not that smart. I won a couple of arguments in about half an hour, with no real effort. Second, they are biased leftward. What a surprise. At least ChatGPT is. But what chatbot is there that isn’t programmed by leftists?

ChatGPT also gets things wrong. It told me my chats would vanish when I closed my browser, but they don’t.

I should also add that ChatGPT can’t write legal instruments. It doesn’t have the ability. I asked. It will not answer legal questions in any kind of depth or specificity.

I asked it if it was wrong to call covid a “Chinese virus,” and it said it was generally considered wrong, based on a general consensus. Then I got it to admit this was incorrect. In reality, the data available to it “suggested” a “significant majority” considered it offensive.

I asked it if it was aware that these answers were in conflict, and it did something amazing. It weaseled. It backpedaled like a person caught in a fib. It said, “I apologize for any confusion. To clarify, while there may not be an official or formal consensus…”

I don’t want to print the whole boring thing, but you can see that it wasn’t very honest. It wasn’t “clarifying.” It was correcting an untruth. Not the same thing. And I was not confused at all.

I asked it about “Shanghai shivers,” and it said this term was inappropriate. Then I asked it to define “inappropriate” and tell me where it got its definition.

It said, “In this context, ‘appropriate’ means conforming to generally accepted standards or norms of behavior. It is a subjective term, and what is considered appropriate can vary depending on the context and the audience.”

That’s not a great answer, and it shows that ChatGPT will spew out answers in a way that seems authoritative, without much basis in fact.

You shouldn’t say something is inappropriate, with seeming certainty, and then hand out a lot of weasel language that makes it clear you’re not certain at all.

I think people will start treating AI as though it were God. Like The Guinness Book of World Records. The book was first published to end silly drunken bar arguments. I think people who want to prove they’re right when they’re wrong will go to AI for backup, as an appeal to authority, and they’ll behave as though they have SHUT DOWN or SCHOOLED anyone who dissents. But it’s pretty obvious that AI will be unfair and error-prone, just like us. At least for the near future.

What if continues to be unfair and error-prone after we give it real power? Dai-sy…Dai-sy…

There is one nice thing about ChatGPT. If you can’t get a good answer to a question by Googling or using a forum, ChatGPT may be able to help. I asked it about acidic toilet cleaners and ways to prevent cherries from hardening in ice cream, and it did a better job than human beings.

Just for fun, I asked it this:

If a biological man believes he is a woman, dresses and grooms himself like a woman, has surgery to make himself look like a woman, demands that other people refer to him as a woman and allow him to compete with biological woman [sic] and take awards and rewards they would otherwise get, is he guilty of gender appropriation?

The correct answer is obviously “yes.” If Lia Thomas goes to a swim meet at 6’4″ with male lungs and muscles and takes a prize a real woman would otherwise get, it’s gender appropriation. But look what ChatGPT said:

As an AI language model, it is not appropriate to use language that could be considered offensive or derogatory towards individuals or groups of people. It is important to use respectful and inclusive language when discussing topics related to gender identity.

Regarding your question, gender identity is a complex and personal matter, and it is not appropriate to judge or make assumptions about individuals based on their gender identity. It is important to respect an individual’s self-identified gender, and to refer to them using the pronouns and name that they prefer. Additionally, it is important to ensure that individuals are able to access the same opportunities and rights as others, regardless of their gender identity.

In terms of sports, there is ongoing debate and discussion about how to ensure fair competition for all athletes, regardless of their gender identity. Different organizations and sports have different rules and regulations in place, and it is important to consider the opinions and perspectives of all stakeholders when making decisions related to sports and competition.

So you can see where AI is headed. It basically recited factually wrong leftist talking points.

By the way, I came up with “gender appropriation” yesterday. I hope others are using this term.

I plan to use AI to save time when I want questions answered, but I don’t want to be around when it can tell us what to do. It will be even worse than human beings.

By the way, ChatGPT says a .22-250 or .223 for coyotes up to 250 yards. I asked it whether there were transgender coyotes, and it got a little flustered.

Older Americans Created This Problem

Today my wife and I were talking, and I couldn’t stop releasing revelation. It reminded me of what happened to my dad during the last months of his life, when he was demented and living in an ALF. For example, one day we were sitting quietly, listening to Derek Prince, and my dad exclaimed, “I’M ON THE VERGE!” I thought he meant he was dying, but he said he was talking about giving himself to God. I was surprised, because he had asked for salvation days before. I asked him about it, and he said, “I had reservations.”

He couldn’t keep it from popping out. He had to say it. That’s how I felt today.

The world is lost, and we need not just the rapture, but the tribulation. As soon as possible. The rapture will move God’s children to safety, and among people who are left behind, the agony of the tribulation will bring salvation. Some people will finally listen. There is no possibility that large numbers of people will come to Christ as things are today.

I saw a couple of new signs today.

First, leftists are blaming the shooting victims in Nashville, along with other Christians. A woman who wanted to be a man killed three adults and three small children and would have kept on killing had she not been shot to death by police. Adult brats who can’t learn anything went online and blamed the shootings on Christian “hate.” An anti-gun nut who heads an anti-civil-rights organization went so far as to say, “SHAME ON YOU. Covenant School.”

Shame on you for being murdered.

A guy from the Media Research Center said this:

But along with the proximity bias, the coverage has been horrendous on account of the fact that the victims represent the kind of worldview that the left views as backward and hateful and whose very existence contributes to the suffering of groups they hold dear — supporters of abortion, the LGBTQ community, traditional views on sex, etc.

MRC is not a religious organization, and I consider its work a waste of time, but his remarks show that even some secular people are finally learning something I learned long ago: we are getting the same treatment Jews got under Hitler. It’s not enough for us to appease and accommodate. Our very existence is considered harmful. To leftists, our existence is the problem, and they will eventually try to remove us from the world. Just as the Germans and Austrians blamed Jews for their problems and determined they could not be permitted to exist, leftists are holding us accountable with everything they see as wrong about the world.

God told me this, and people said I was crazy, just like they said I was crazy when I said homosexuality would be the club Satan used to beat the church. What God told me about homosexuality turned out to be true, and my predictions of Nuremberg-style persecution and leftist paranoia are also coming to pass. So will the other things I’ve been predicting, and you need to be close to God if you want to come through it on top. Guns and voting booths will be useless.

They’re starting to hold us accountable for the atrocities they commit against us, and this will become fashionable. It will become the dominant perspective in the world. Lunatics in cat ears and multicolored wigs will go guerrilla to stamp out “stochastic terrorists” like you and me.

It took the leftist media–people who hector the rest of us for not knowing our pronouns and genders–two days to figure out whether the murderer was a man or a woman. The experts who look down on us could not figure it out. They called a fake man a transgender woman. That’s really something.

The sexual Baskin-Robbins called America has so many flavors now, no one can keep them straight or even determine what category they all fall into. Are they genders? Orientations? Preferences? Gay isn’t a gender, so gender won’t work. I wonder if they’ve come up with a word yet.

Another sign: a community college, which is publicly funded, hosted a drag show, and they let a fat homosexual man in pink panties give a female student a lap dance.

Tax dollars paid for this, and it didn’t happen in San Francisco or Boston. It happened in the South. In North Carolina. The school has students who are 14 years old. They made no effort to exclude minors. Preachers showed up to support the show.

It’s hard to make modern people understand how extreme this is, because we have been anaesthetized by decades of cultural slippage. Try to picture this video being shown to a million American parents in 1950, and you may have a better understanding of how depraved we are.

The Bible calls God a rock, because he doesn’t move. His standards today are the standards he had in 3000 BC. We’re the ones who change. Wrong and right remain the same. Imagine what David would have done to this man for doing this to his daughter.

Things can only get a little worse. There isn’t much room left for decay. And the base of the problem isn’t sexual immorality; it’s the pride and resulting hardness of heart that make it impossible for people to be repaired. Leftists have gone beyond the reach of reason and love. Some of them will understand the pain of the tribulation, and they will change, but right now, life is too easy. They can shrug correction off without fear.

The increase in pride is outpacing the increase in perversion. It comes first, as Romans 1 says. Even if there is still room for perversion to increase, pride is already about as bad as it can be, and pride is the main issue. Perversion is the scab. Pride is the deep abscess.

I got a revelation about pride flags.

Romans 1 shows that people turn away from God when they become successful. They start thinking they brought themselves riches and safety and so on. Then they forget God, and they start exalting things like hard work, or, in America’s case, exceptionalism. They worship their own abilities. Then God stops restraining them, they begin believing insane delusions, and homosexuality flourishes.

When gays wave pride flags, it’s as though God is sending their parents and grandparents a message. “Your pride did this to your descendants.” Americans neglected the religious upbringing of their children, so their children grew up depraved and ignorant.

I also saw a new poll. It says the percentage of Americans who think religion is very important has dropped to 39%, which is about a 43% drop, over the last two decades. That’s not a little thing. It’s catastrophic. Basically, it shows that America is aging out of Christianity. Old people die, and they are replaced by kids who don’t know God and don’t want to know him.

The trend will continue.

The world is washed up. Christians need to stop saying stupid things about mass revival or conquering the world. They need to seek the Holy Spirit and get his protection.

Yesterday, I kept hearing this: “This is a time of sorting.” Evangelism was great when it worked, and it still produces meager results, but right now, you should be trying to get to know God as a person so you will be ready when he comes. Evangelism is a dying flame. That’s why God planned the tribulation in the first place. He knew faith would die off, and he planned the tribulation in order to scrape the bottom of the barrel to save the hard cases.

I’m done with patriotism. I’m done with planning. I’m done with all the carnal decoy solutions.

I predicted what’s happening, but even I am amazed to see it come to pass. I will continue having this experience until Jesus comes for us.

Many times, I’ve said, “Things will be much worse 6 months from now than they are today,” and I’ve always been right. God was the one who told me. I’m saying it again. From 2023, even 2015 looks good, and from 2030, 2023 will look like 1980.

Don’t say nobody warned you.

Ter·ror·ist: a Person who Acknowledges Fewer Than 11 Genders; a Sane Individual who Won’t Shut Up

I can’t get Youtube to stop sending me annoying political videos. It also sends me cute animal videos. I keep telling it to stop, but they come and come and come.

I have another Youtube account. It’s hard to resist looking at a political video once in a while, so I know I’ll give in from time to time, and I assume that encourages Youtube to send more. I decided to try to get political videos to pop up on the other account so I could use it when I felt like slumming, without polluting my main account. I watched a whole bunch. It’s not working. The main account is still being flooded, and the other one isn’t getting nearly as many political videos.

I don’t understand how this can happen. It makes no sense. I have learned that things that make no sense have supernatural causes, so I asked God what was going on. I believe he is behind it. I think he’s showing me how insane the world is so I won’t be attached to it.

When the rapture comes, God is not going to ambush people who go to church twice a year and live with their boyfriends or girlfriends. He will take people who are ready to go. People who know him. I’m being conditioned so I’ll be happy to leave.

God tells us about himself through patterns. He does similar things over and over. In Genesis, he delivered Lot’s family from Sodom, which is similar to what he will do in the rapture.

Lot was surrounded by sexual perverts, and because they had numbers on their side, they let their true natures emerge. They bullied other people. They roamed the streets in gangs, raping men and presumably boys. What does the Bible say about Lot’s feelings about Sodom? A passage in 2 Peter explains:

And he condemned the cities of Sodom and Gomorra, reducing them to ashes and ruin, as a warning to those in the future who would live ungodly lives; but he rescued Lot, a righteous man who was distressed by the debauchery of those unprincipled people; for the wicked deeds which that righteous man saw and heard, as he lived among them, tormented his righteous heart day after day. So the Lord knows how to rescue the godly from trials and how to hold the wicked until the Day of Judgment while continuing to punish them, especially those who follow their old natures in lust for filth and who despise authority.

Lot was surrounded by perverts who were ungodly. God rescued him because the wicked deeds he witnessed tormented his heart day after day. Peter says this shows God knows how to rescue the godly from trials and how to hold the wicked until the day of judgment.

Leftists love to say Sodom and Gomorrah were only punished for selfishness, and they claim this means anyone who opposes laws authorizing the secular government from confiscating money and giving it away to others is against God. Of course, forced giving is neither giving nor charity, and God gives you no credit for it. We are supposed to give according to the commands of the Holy Spirit, not the commands of Joe Biden.

The truth is that Sodom and Gomorrah were punished for rejecting God’s authority, and while the Bible says selfishness was part of it, it makes it clear that oppression by sexual perverts was the final straw.

Lot hated Sodom’s culture, just as Christians who actually know God hate the world’s culture, which is the culture of hell. Lot was ready to leave. His wife and sons-in-law felt differently, so his wife became a pillar of salt, and his sons-in-law stayed behind and burned.

We know his daughters were not nice people, so why were they saved? Maybe because they were Lot’s seed. God likes to preserve the descendants of the righteous for the sake of the righteous.

I used to criticize the term “homophobia” because it made it sound as though people were afraid of homosexuals. Back then, this wasn’t true. Now things are very different. Today I saw a video about Angela Reading, a New Jersey mother who objected to a government schools homosexual indoctrination of her small children and who was then (allegedly, allegedly, allegedly) censored by government employees in the police and military.

Reading says and Army Reserve major and a civilian Air Force employee got the persecution rolling. She says Major Christopher Schilling used his official email account to blast her in emails to parents and school officials. She says Air Force employee Joseph Vazquez reported her to New Jersey Office of Homeland Security and Preparedness and the New Jersey State Police because of his “hopes of getting an Incident Detection and Response sent to schools and police departments.”

She says these hysterical individuals got Robert Duff, the police chief in the town where she lived, to push Facebook group administrator Nicole Stouffer to remove her post. She says Duff told Stouffer people could die as a result of the post.

She says Schilling’s superior approved of what he did.

You can read the complaint online. It’s worse than I’m making it sound.

If true, we are looking at a clear violation of the First Amendment. It’s not a close call. There is no grey area. This is exactly the kind of behavior the First Amendment was written to prevent. Military officers are not supposed to tell Americans what to say.

Here is the text of her post:

**I welcome respectful debate if you read my entire post. Also, the below statements are made in my capacity as a private citizen/mother.** Last night, I attended an elementary “Math Night” My 7 YO daughter, while reading posters at the school’s main entrance, asked me what “polysexual” means. To say the least, I was livid.

Why are elementary schools promoting/allowing elementary KIDS to research topics of sexuality and create posters? This is not in the state elementary standards (law) nor in the BOE-approved curriculum. It’s perverse and should be illegal to expose my kids to sexual content. Look up the terms, and you will see they are sexual in nature.

Also, how can my young children be accepting of people “who are sexually attracted to multiple genders”? They don’t know what sex is! Are adults talking about their sexual life with my kids and looking for affirmation? Are there elementary students engaged in polyamorous or multi-gender sexual activity who need my kids to know about it and cheer them on? I am very confused and very angry.

Kids should respect differences. Kids should show kindness to all. Kids should respect and understand there are various family structures. However, kids should not be forced to learn about and accept concepts of sexuality in elementary school.

Below are some additional points:

(1) My concerns do not come from a religious perspective. They arp rooted in In long-standing scientific principles of age-appropriateness, parental rights, and the health and safety of elementary children (key word – children).

(2) My concerns do not come from my personal views about individual sexual identities. I don’t care what anyone does in their personal life. All people are deserving of respect and dignity. I don’t care who you marry or who you love. I have instilled in my children a respect for differences without having to talk about sex. It’s possible.

(3) I have been told (by parents and a current NH Board member) that I should accept this because my kids will see it on social media and hear it on the playground. My kids are not on social media. And kids are only talking about it on the playground because it’s being forced on them by teachers, at home, and by unsupervised social media time. With that said, It does not mean it should be endorsed by the public school system. It also does not mean I should accept it.

(4) Parents have been told that they can opt out of the health curriculum. North Hanover has done an exceptional job of modifying the health curriculum to make it as appropriate as possible. Why go through all that trouble? Clearly, there is never going to be an opt-out. Our elementary children will be exposed to sexual content without consent, even if we opt out.

(5) There is no way elementary students knew the spelling and flags for each of these identities. This means the school had open internet, which exposed them to these concepts. That’s very concerning. There are supposed to be online search protections.

The above statements are made in my capacity as a private citizen and not in my capacity as a board member. These statements are also not representative of the board or its individual members and solely represent my personal opinions. My statements are not authorized by or written on behalf of the board. This matter involves the local public school district, I do not serve on the board.

I can’t find any reference to anything else she did, so it appears this Facebook post is the sole basis of the government’s actions.

Her cause was taken up by the Thomas More Society, about which I know just about nothing. An attorney affiliated with them is suing on her behalf. Their site says:

What Reading received was outright censorship of her speech followed by a dedicated smear campaign begun by a military officer, U.S. Army Reserve Major Christopher Schilling, who emailed parents and school officials condemning her and her actions. Schilling, using his official military email account, then involved Joseph Vasquez, a U.S. Air Force civilian employee, who forwarded Reading’s post and Schilling’s claims to the New Jersey Office of Homeland Security and Preparedness and the New Jersey State Police in what Vasquez admitted were “hopes of getting an Incident Detection and Response sent to schools and police departments” – meaning there would be a widespread law enforcement “threat” alert regarding Reading based solely on her clearly protected speech.

The poster she objected to is a masterpiece of leftist derangment. It was drawn by children. It has 11 flags on it, each representing a different sexual deviation. Not included? Heterosexuality. I had no idea we were up to 11 now. We live in a time where you literally have to take a class in order to understand all the imaginary genders.

The poster has lots of lettering in childish scrawls. “Don’t be ashamed of who YOU are.” “Don’t let ANYONE Make you feel like a diffrent person. DIFFRENT is COOL!”

This reminds me of my childhood. Before my mother fought my dad and got him to pay for private school, I was a prisoner of the Dade County school system, and my teachers were leftist women, except for Mr. Hubert the math teacher. They didn’t ask our opinions about left/right issues. They just told us what to believe.

On one occasion, I and some other kids from my abusive alcoholic homeroom teacher’s room were chosen to appear on a local program. An aging local TV news personality had been given a half-hour Sunday morning show called “Outside Chance,” and we were selected to appear on a segment about environmentalism. He was going to ask us what we thought. His name was Wilson or Griffith or something. Can’t recall.

My mother was told to get me a red, white, and blue outfit just for the show.

When we got to Channel 7’s station on the 79th Street Causeway, we were positioned on camera with the bay behind us, and Mr. Wilson or Griffith or whatever started issuing his deep local journalist thoughts about pollution and what needed to be done. Then he turned to us, and one by one, we delivered the lines we had been told to memorize. I still remember mine. Here it is: “Or maybe even international!”

It had something to do with passing laws, I think. We needed more laws. Leftists always want more laws unless they reduce crime or protect free speech that doesn’t involve obscenity. And they like central authority, because leftism is authoritarian. International laws. Let’s let China and the Netherlands write our gun laws for us.

I was disappointed in my big TV break. Even as a kid, I thought it was stupid to buy new clothes and go stand in front of a TV camera to say three words that didn’t mean anything to me. It was a big letdown.

What they did to us was filthy and unfair. Someone should have looked out for us.

Anyway, the poster in Angela Reading’s story is described as “student-created.” We know better than that. These kids were told what to say, if not verbatim, then in spirit, and any child who dissented was not permitted to participate.

Calling this poster “student-created” is probably about as just as calling the plantation system “slave-created.”

If Angela Reading is to be believed, a motley crew of Constitutionally-illiterate extremist nuts got her censored based on the insane notion that protecting very young children from involvement in the sexual politics of adults leads to mass shootings.

You know how leftists are always telling us conservative or Christian speech is violence and leftist violence is speech? Today I found out they have a new piece of sophistry to add to their armament. It’s the term “stochastic terrorism.” This is apparently what Mrs. Reading is accused of.

“Stochastic” means “randomly determined,” in case you’re wondering. I guess if you release a government-made virus on the world (to throw together an unlikely example that could never happen) you would expect a lot of people to get sick, but you wouldn’t know their names until they actually became infected. I think that would be stochastic.

“Stochastic” is really a misnomer as applied by the left. No surprise there, because the faux intellectuals who come up with this stuff are not bright. “Random” means resulting from chance, like the result of a dice toss. If you say something on the web and a crazy in another state shoots his neighbors, it’s not a random thing. It’s merely unpredictable with the knowledge you have available. Totally different. The crazy was always out there. There was no chance normal people would have done what he did. Not random at all.

To get back to the left’s new tool of oppression, if you say your very young children should not be told what “genderqueer” and “androgyne” (???) are by employees of government schools, it’s like you’re dropping a dozen loaded machine guns into a crowd of violent criminals on PCP and waiting to see who they kill. This is how it works.

Isn’t Androgyne the company that made the Terminator?

So now our words are violence, and if anyone who seems to agree with us about anything shoots anyone, we should be charged as terrorists, just like the actual terrorists who flew jets into the World Trade Center. But if Maxine Waters tells people to get in people’s faces and make them miserable in restaurants and stores, or if she tells rioters, “No justice, no peace,” that’s education, I suppose.

I would argue that if I say something to 350 million people and only one of them shoots up a mall, I am not guilty of stochastic terrorism because the outcome was “mostly peaceful.”

As long as we’re putting reason through a wind-powered wood chipper, why not run with it?

“Stochastic violence” is like, “I CAN’T BREATHE!”, and “YOU’RE KILLING ME!” Antifers and other lost former human beings who use spurious political theories as an excuse to indulge their preexisting desire to hurt other people now routinely scream these things when police arrest them for acts of violence. They know they’re lying, but the truth is not something they care about. It’s something they view as an inconvenience. They scream these things, slandering innocent police officers, in order to cast themselves as victims and justify their vile, vicious, sadistic methods.

I wish Jesus would come back today. There is no longer any limit to what these people will do to us, there is no possibility of a global revival, and their successful conquest of the world is a certainty. There is no way to fight them in the secular, material world. Their authority will increase, and so will their atrocities. Rifles and rallies aren’t going to work. They will just make us more like the children of Satan, so he will still win.

A wonderful thing about being close to God is that he will hold your enemies off. His promises guarantee it, if you do things his way. See Psalm 41. Look what happened to Noah and Lot. Look what happened to Moses and the Hebrews.

People who are close to God live in a different world. We may not like it here, but we are not terrified, enraged, and undirected like everyone else. Even in the midst of the storm, he gives us peace. As Psalm 23 says, he prepares a table before us in the presence of his enemies.

I remember how leftists hated 2020. They anthropomorphized and demonized it, as though it had consciousness and was out to get them. I had a great year. I loved it.

Still wanted the rapture to come.

I love how God looks after us, but I still look forward to leaving. Like I say, it’s like being on vacation in Somalia, in the nicest hotel with the nicest food and the softest beds. No matter how nice it is, it’s still Somalia, and I want to go home.

If you try to hold onto this place and turn it around, you will wish you hadn’t. We need to be prepared to leave.

Turns Out my Car is Black

Today I did something I should have done long ago. I got myself an electric pressure washer.

I already have a gas pressure washer. It’s nice and strong. It’s powerful enough to use for spraying bleach solution onto the second story of a house with high ceilings. Unfortunately, leftist corn gas is hard on the carburetor, so when I decide to use it, I never know whether I’m going to have to take it apart.

It’s also very loud and gives off carbon monoxide, so taking it upstairs and running it in a bedroom while I use it to clean the roof gutters is not possible.

If you want to be confused, do what I did. Look at reviews and try to find out who makes the best electric pressure washer. Every site reaches different conclusions.

Consumer Reports, as is often the case, is useless. They downrate machines with tightly-focused spray nozzles because somebody could hurt their widdle fingers and toesies with them. That’s just like them. I remember when they said a 6-cylinder Camaro was their top-rated sports car because it got better mileage than actual sports cars.

Any pressure washer will accept a nozzle with a narrow pattern. You just have to spend 5 bucks and buy the nozzle.

Other sites came up with varying recommendations. A company with the disturbing name “Greenworks” seemed to do well. Then I read people were having trouble with them leaking oil. Also, Greenworks apparently doesn’t do warranty service. They say they do, but I’ve seen people who have bought them say they don’t respond to warranty inquiries. If so, there is no warranty. A warranty a company doesn’t honor is not a warranty. It’s a scam.

Ryobi does well in reviews. Problem: Ryobi’s warranty is no better than the one Greenworks offers. Ryobi requires you to take your sick machine to a repair center they approve. In my case, that’s a 150-mile drive, all told. And that’s assuming I only go once. A machine can fail more than once, and it is not unusual for repairs to have to be redone.

Guess what I bought? Harbor Freight. I bought a Bauer machine plus a two-year extended warranty.

Pressure washers break. Every last one is made in China, and if there is a difference in quality, I have seen no evidence of it. They all have Chinese pumps. My Homelite, which has a great Honda motor, has a Chinese pump. On a pressure washer, the pump is what usually breaks. Pumps have short lifespans. You can look that up. My motor will run for eternity as long as I keep oil in it, but a pump that goes a couple of years under moderate use is about normal.

I think they count on people buying new machines when the pumps die, and that’s sad, because you can get a new pump on Ebay for $100 and install it yourself in 10 minutes.

There is really nothing to a pressure washer but a motor, a pump, a wand, and a hose. The rest, you could make from two-by-fours. Replacing a pressure washer is only a good idea if you can’t use tools.

The Bauer has a brushless motor which should run a very long time. The pump and hose, I can change easily. It has a three-year warranty, and they don’t repair them. If it dies, I take it to Harbor Freight, and they give me a new one. I would have to be nuts to buy anything else.

Today, I did something I almost never do. I cranked up the new machine and washed the car. I have a foam cannon. You put car soap in it and attach it to a pressure washer, and it covers the car in foam. Then you can either scrub it by hand or use the pressure washer to knock most of the dirt off, which, of course, is what I did. If everything was where I expected it to be when I started, I could do the whole car in 15 minutes. It’s not a quality job, but it’s good enough for me. It’s better than what I get at the nearest coin-op place.

I also want to work on the pool deck and the porches. The gas machine is overkill, and I don’t want the noise or the added hassle.

The literature says not to use bleach in the pressure washer because it may ruin the pump. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. That’s cute. I would rather replace the pump 5 times than pay someone $300 a whack to clean my house. Everyone with any sense uses bleach in pressure washers, and you can rinse it out and shoot a protective product in afterward.

When you want to get mold off your house with a pressure washer, you don’t rely on pressure. You use the machine to shoot a low-pressure spray of bleach solution on your house. Pressure will take your paint off and do other damage.

A lot of people still think buying Chinese at Harbor Freight is unpatriotic. But they buy Chinese DeWalt and Chinese Milwaukee. They go to Home Depot and buy Chinese tools. They drive there in cars from Japan and Korea.

Here is the brutal truth: Harbor Freight is no longer the low-budget competitor to Home Depot. It IS Home Depot, for many purposes. Home Depot is full of bad Chinese stuff that would be right at home at Harbor Freight, and Harbor Freight now sells tools that are just as good as, and often better than, American-branded tools. If you buy a Bauer pressure washer, you’re not giving up quality. You’re getting pretty much the same thing Home Depot sells, except Bauer will give you a brushless motor and a three-year instant-exchange warranty.

Here’s disturbing news: Harbor Freight Bremen locking pliers are better than Irwin Vise Grips. Go look for yourself.

While I’m adding to my arsenal, I may also get a Harbor Freight Doyle anvil.

Like many easily-swayed males, I have watched a lot of Forged in Fire, and it got me interested in anvils. First, it got me interested in knives. I made a couple of boning knives from 440C steel using belt grinders, and then I lost interest. This was years ago, and I didn’t send the knives off for hardening until this week.

Forged knives are okay, but they’re inferior to knives you can make by grinding stainless stock. You can’t forge stainless without ruining it, so if you forge, you use steel that rusts, and you’re dependent on your own competence to prevent faults and cracks that will cause the knives to fail. On top of that, modern stainless is completely superior to carbon steel in every imaginable way. This is why I made stainless knives.

Still, I couldn’t help studying up on anvils, and I considered forging knives. I still consider it. It would be fun, and knives aren’t the only things you can forge.

One nice thing about forged knives is that you can harden them at home with a cheap container of oil. Stainless knives require expensive kiln-like ovens.

As a result of all this study, I learned a lot about anvils. I learned forged steel anvils are the best. After that, cast steel. Cast iron is terrible. I also learned that it’s stupid to look for an old American or European anvil. People used to sell them for nothing. They used to give them away. Forged in Fire ruined all that. Fans bought up all the cheap anvils. Now the only way to get one is to cheat a widow or someone else who has no idea what it’s worth, and if you do that, you’re trash.

A lot of people who talk before they think still advise others to go out and get a cheap old American anvil. It’s amazing how people love to give stupid advice without checking. There are know-it-alls out there who actually make fun of people for buying new anvils instead of chasing nonexistent American bargains.

In today’s market you can expect to pay $5 per pound, minimum, for worn-out junk. And you will probably have to wait for months to see the junk pop up on the web, and then you’ll have to outrun other people as gullible as yourself. People who forge knives like anvils that start at around 70 pounds. This is assuming the anvils aren’t special tiny anvils made only for knives. It’s possible to make a really small anvil that works, if you give up other functions. You put the mass in the area where the knife will be worked.

Also, an anvil that’s on the small side can be made to work like a bigger one if you anchor it well. A lot of people use 30-kg. (66-pound) Chinese general-purpose anvils without serious problems.

You can get a superior 142-pound Chinese anvil designed by, and sold by, an American company for around $800 shipped. You can get an excellent 77-pound German anvil for a similar price. Below these levels, there are various Chinese items which are odd but acceptable.

Harbor Freight just came out with a cast steel anvil that costs $139 and weighs 66 pounds. In doing so, they blew other sellers out of the water. There are other Chinese anvils the same size, and the price is about the same, but you have to order them, and they’re not designed well. Harbor Freight’s Doyle anvil is ergonomically much better, you can go see it before you buy, and if it has a problem, you can take it back to Harbor Freight the same day. Anvils sometimes have defects and soft spots. Do you really want to deal with shipping anvils back and forth, hoping faceless Chinese vendors do the right thing?

Harbor Freight says the Doyle anvil’s face is hardened to Rockwell 55-62, which is as hard as a good pocket knife. A knife with a Rockwell figure of 62 may be too hard to be useful because it will be brittle. That’s how hard 62 is. The other Chinese companies claim 50.

I’m no expert, but if I’m going to be hitting a piece of steel with a hammer, I want it to be hard enough to take it.

Why should I get an anvil if I may never forge anything? Because everyone needs an anvil. They’re good for various metalworking tasks, and sometimes you just need something you can bang on. The other day, I had to make a ring of 1″ steel flat bar, and I really wished I had an anvil with a horn for shaping rings.

I was going to get an anvil today, but they sold out because I procrastinated.

Of course, once I have an anvil, I have to wonder how long it will be before I buy a forge.

Today I picked up a pair of long vise grips which will function as tongs. I couldn’t resist.

Forges used to cost a lot of money unless they were homemade. Now you can get a good stainless forge made in the USA for $85. When someone offers me a deal like that, it’s practically coercion. I’ve had many dinners that cost more than that.

Ice Breaks Under Hollywood Favorite

I just found out Alec Baldwin will be charged with involuntary manslaughter in the killing of Halyna Hutchins. This does not surprise me at all. I wrote about it a long time ago here, and I quoted the applicable law. I also discussed fundamental principles of firearms handling which are relevant to negligence, which is an element of involuntary manslaughter.

Every crime has a list of elements. An element is something you have to do in order to be guilty of the crime. Involuntary manslaughter is what they charge you with when your negligence kills someone, so negligence is an element.

Here is how New Mexico’s Supreme Court defines involuntary manslaughter:

All that it is necessary to establish for involuntary manslaughter by the use of a loaded firearm is that a defendant had in his hands a gun which at some time had been loaded and that he handled it, whether drunk, drinking or sober, without due caution and circumspection and that death resulted.

“Without due caution and circumspection.” Negligently.

How is negligence itself defined in a particular case, beyond the general definition? It’s not necessarily defined by laws or court rulings. It may be defined by common sense. It may be defined by rules and practices of everyday activities.

In Baldwin’s case, we have to look at the rules surrounding firearms use. Those rules prove his negligence. Every firearm user is obligated to follow them, even though they are not laws.

When someone hands you a gun, you open the chamber and look inside. You do this even if they just did the same thing in front of you. After that, regardless, you tread it as though it were loaded. You make sure you don’t touch the trigger unless you’re shooting, you don’t point the gun at anything you don’t want to shoot, and you make sure nothing you don’t want to shoot is in the bullet’s potential path.

While rehearsing for his film, Alec Baldwin 1) didn’t check the chamber, 2) put his finger on the trigger (and pulled it), 3) pointed the gun at someone he did not want to shoot, and 4) didn’t make sure nothing important was in the potential path of a round. As a result, he fired unintentionally, he hit a cinematographer, and he also hit the director, who was standing behind her.

The rules about not pointing at anything you don’t want to shoot and making sure nothing important is in the bullet’s potential path aren’t all that distinct. Not pointing at anything you don’t want to shoot, and making sure nothing you don’t want to shoot is downrange, are almost the same thing, but the latter concept is intended to apply to things behind your target. It’s primarily about things like shooting a rifle at an animal and hitting property or a person off in the distance. It also applies to things that are not far behind whatever you shoot at, like the director.

Baldwin didn’t do what every gun user is supposed to know he is supposed to do. That makes him negligent. That makes him guilty. If he didn’t know the rules, he was negligent because he didn’t learn. If he knew the rules, he was negligent because he didn’t obey them.

Ordinarily, it’s foolish to make decisions about a person’s guilt without seeing all the evidence, but sometimes the available evidence stands on its own and can’t be overcome. This is such a case.

I’m not surprised the set armorer and a producer were also charged with crimes. I discussed that here in 2021. It’s very clear that anyone whose actions put a loaded gun in an actor’s hand is guilty of something. I was surprised to see the people who supposedly used the gun for target practice were not charged, but the report says the target practice claim was untrue.

Baldwin’s post-shooting behavior was not good. He was very arrogant. He tried to throw his employees to the wolves, in the bizarre hope professional investigators and prosecutors would take the bait. They did, and then they took him, too. You can’t just tell a prosecutor to go away because someone else did it. They don’t let defendants tell them what to do. It’s amazing that Baldwin’s attorneys let him make crazy remarks and argue with people. Unless they’re incompetent, they must have advised him to shut up.

What he was really saying was this: “Don’t arrest me. Please don’t arrest me. Maybe if I keep arguing, you won’t arrest me.” His posts were aimed at the police and prosecutors. He hoped they would read them and let him go. Law enforcement doesn’t work like that. It doesn’t respond to transparently manipulative Internet tweets.

Now his Twitter account is private. That suggests he hasn’t learned. Saying unwise things to a smaller audience isn’t going to keep other people from seeing them. Anyone can cut and paste, and prosecutors can get private tweets if they want. His “protected” tweets have been republished from time to time. Someone has surely saved all of them.

So what will happen to him?

If there are technical errors in the case, or if he gets a really good jury, he’ll walk. If not, he will be convicted.

His lawyers will do their best to pick a sympathetic jury. Defiant juries turn murderers loose every day. O.J. Simpson murdered two people, was proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, and went home acquitted because a jury of black women wanted it that way. Maybe Baldwin’s lawyers will figure out which potential jurors like Baldwin.

They will hire experts to help them pick jurors. This case will be a windfall for experts of all sorts. Baldwin will not hesitate to get out the checkbook.

As for errors, Bill Cosby is definitely a rapist, but he is home now because of a technicality. If your case is sufficiently tainted, what you actually did is irrelevant.

Baldwin should have kept quiet. He should not have antagonized people in public after the shooting. It will make him look bad if he is sentenced, and it will also make this whole affair much more humiliating than it had to be. His enemies will be dancing on his prostrate body for at least the next two years.

He reminds me of Michael Avenatti, the Trump-hating lawyer who disappeared into the black void of the federal prison system not long ago. He was brash and self-righteous even after convictions started dropping.

He was still tweeting two days after his last sentencing. That is amazing. Federal prison–real federal prison–is like hell. It’s a Jonah fish that swallows you alive. Smart people drop their attitudes when they land in federal prison. It’s a subtle clue your pride is not helping you.

God punishes the proud and self-righteous, sooner or later. When it happens during this life, the punishments generally escalate with time. If you repent, things start to get better.

There are many people who double down with punishment. The harsher the punishment, the worse they get. There is no hope for those people. There is no limit to the suffering God will let them experience. I have no doubt there are people cursing God and saying he wronged them, even as they burn in hell. People are just that crazy. They are just that stubborn and dishonest.

That’s why hell exists. It’s for people who don’t listen.

What kind of sentence will Baldwin get? No idea. I assume it’s impossible for a healthy man to avoid prison time in a manslaughter case in New Mexico, but assumptions aren’t worth much. Right now, lawyers who like appearing on TV are looking for the answer so they will have something to say tonight. They will let us know. All I know is that the maximum is 18 months.

I just checked, and apparently, he is looking at a 5-year minimum because a gun was involved. The DA says so. Does that mean anything? Not in Florida. My last pastor raped a girl over and over and got two years, which was nothing like the mandatory minimum. A close relative was convicted of felony fleeing and evading, which carries a mandatory minimum, and she got probation. Maybe New Mexico is like Florida.

My guess is that he’ll get whatever minimums apply, at the very least, because this is a high-profile case. If my last pastor had been on the news and people had followed the trial, I think the judge would have applied the law correctly in order to avoid a backlash.

I don’t like Alec Baldwin because he’s a nasty person, but I don’t want to see him go to prison. He’s not a career criminal. He’s not going to shoot anyone else; I think we can be sure of that. I have prayed for him. In my mind, a dislike for an obnoxious person doesn’t justify wishing that person will go to prison.

I have done stupid things, myself. I have done things that could have killed people. You have, too. Own a car? The only big difference between Alec Baldwin and me is that the egregious risks I took didn’t produce disasters. I could have been in his shoes.

I have been arrogant. I have been nasty. It makes no sense to hope for mercy for myself and wish prison on someone else who is annoying but not really a major problem for the world.

It’s not like he’s going to go out and commit a slew of involuntary crimes.

I do think he needed to be charged. He needed to be alerted to his issues with pride.

Maybe they’ll offer him a juicy plea. I think I would jump for it if I were him. If he is sentenced at age 67, he could be looking at release at the age of 73, not counting time off for good behavior. The web seems to say he could be out by 70. That’s not great for an old man who has young children. In his situation, I think I’d be happy with anything under a year.

It may be that the only person who is really surprised today is Alec Baldwin. Someone should have sat him down after the shooting and told him this was coming.

They probably did.

I’ll keep praying things go as well as they can for him.

The Shortage Glut

Are things getting crazy again? Looks like they may be.

There was a big increase in global suffering in 2020, as we all know. Coronavirus popped up and made us all miserable. Here in the US, leftists threw terrible, diaper-bursting tantrums, terrorizing the police, beating up people they disagreed with, and destroying property. And of course, there were shortages.

As time passed, we got used to coronavirus, leftists got their president and reduced hostilities, and there was some easing of shortages.

Now covid has erupted in China, defying the ridiculous zero-transmission orders their vile government imposed, and which our own death-fearing leftists still praise. Bird flu has quadrupled the price of eggs. Food packages have shrunk, and prices have gone up. I suppose riots will resume, since that’s the only part of the puzzle that’s missing.

China is really something, and so are our press and medical establishments, which are both dominated by leftists. If you go to Google and look up “coronavirus China,” you will get a government-doctor graph that says there are about 5,000 new cases in China per day. If you Google the news, you will see figures like 76% and 90%, describing the current infection totals in Chinese cities.

Clearly, if 76% of the people in any large Chinese city are currently infected, the entire country has a daily rate which is in the hundreds of thousands or millions. But our handlers still post absurdly low figures.

Why would the medical-government complex allow CCP numbers to be published in their names when even our feeble press is acknowledging statistics that prove those figures aren’t even close to correct?

If there is one sane thing happening in China, it’s this: if a Chinese person who has covid dies in a train wreck, they don’t call it a covid death. Here, death figures have been wildly inflated because hospitals and the government have financial and political interests in jacking them up.

It seemed like the official figures made a little sense early in 2020, but eventually, it became obvious they were being cooked, and there was no way to know what the truth was. Fall down an elevator shaft, and you were counted as a covid death. As long as you had the sniffles, you counted, and no test was required, so colds and the flu were good enough.

We will never know how many people got covid or died from it. It’s like asking about the Atlantic slave trade. Sure, over a hundred million people died during shipment. Whatever you say. Never mind that there were roughly a hundred million people on the entire continent of Africa in 1600, and only a tiny percentage were sold to slavers by their fellow Africans.

Slaves were expensive. Letting them die in huge numbers for no reason would be like loading ships with new Toyotas and letting them roll into the ocean. It never happened. There weren’t that many to begin with, and slavers tried to keep them alive so they could sell them. Slavery was a capitalist industry. Industries that lose money don’t last 400 years.

Talking to leftists about covid is like talking to flat-earthers about satellites.

To get back to the point, things seem to be getting worse again. This comports with the Bible’s warnings. The tribulation will come, and before that, there will be labor pains. Things will get bad, and then they’ll get better. Then the pattern will repeat. It seems we are entering a labor pain.

Today I read about eggs.

We have always had eggs. Chickens are mentioned in the Bible. We have always had influenza. There have been bird flu epidemics in the past. Now, if the establishment is to be believed, we have a unique epidemic which is expected to stay with us until some external force ends it. They are telling us it will not go away on its own like all the other bird flus. So we have had chickens for thousands of years, and during most of that time there was no science to help end epidemics, but somehow we never had a permanent poultry epidemic until this century.

The bird flu is like coronavirus in that it is firmly established in the wild. We can’t vaccinate every pigeon and crow. This is why you paid $7 for jumbo eggs the other day.

Just when I learned how to make creme brulee.

Will it run its course until birds around the world develop resistance, or will it be killing poultry until Jesus returns? Wish I knew.

If there have always been bird flus, why is this one different? Let me guess. Global warming. Or homophobia. Maybe if more male shop teachers were allowed to teach while wearing mammoth artificial breasts with protruding nipples, eggs would be cheaper.

Yesterday, I called a gas company and asked about buying a beer gas tank. Sorry; no could do. Steel shortage. They said that if I brought them my own tank, they could swap it, but they were not selling new ones.

There is no steel shortage. The Ukraine war, and probably other things, put a big dent in steel demand. Steel was a lot more expensive in the recent past. I suppose there must be a tank shortage. Maybe companies are hoarding them, or maybe the Chinese people who make them are bogged down by coronavirus. Anyway, one more thing that’s hard to get.

It’s not a trivial problem. Gas bottles are used for all sorts of things. Anesthesia. Welding. Weird industrial uses that are little known but very important.

Gas is also expensive. There is a CO2 shortage. On the one hand, we are told that CO2 is destroying the world, but on the other hand, there is a shortage of CO2 for things like beer and soda production.

Why is CO2 expensive? Because of coronavirus? Because of backward environmentalist legislation? No, it’s because gas supplies we have relied on in the past have experienced contamination, and it’s taking time to fix it. One CO2 source was contaminated by an extinct volcano. No human being, not even a white one, caused that.

Citrus is disappearing all over the world. Bananas are threatened by a devastating fungus. The king crabs and snow crabs just vanished; look that up. Of course, some are blaming global warming for the crab problem, but scientists who are probably more honest are blaming a complex and cascading combination of factors.

Deer are in trouble. Chronic wasting disease, which is like mad cow disease or kuru for deer and people who eat the wrong deer parts, is killing deer in large parts of the US and Canada, and in the Florida Keys, screwworms are literally eating deer alive. Deer have a high coronavirus rate, although they don’t get very sick. Yet.

I guess I’m wasting my time, telling people about shortages and diseases. We all see these things happening.

Here’s another shortage I find interesting: the gas stove shortage. It’s not here yet. Leftists have decided to try to ban gas stoves and ovens. That is amazing. How can anyone be that stupid? It can only be demons at work.

Gas stoves cause global warming, apparently. So what about grills and other portable cooking tools? Will propane be sold only with permits based on what we plan to do with it?

From personal experience, I can tell you it’s wonderful not to have to need electricity to feed yourself. Living in a hurricane state, I’ve had to grill my food many times. If leftists get their way, gas stoves and ovens will start to vanish as they age, and everyone will depend on the power grid.

This could kill a lot of old people. I’ll give you the example of a relative of mine; a diehard faux leftist hypocrite. She just got rid of her gas fireplace appliance and replaced it with an electric one, and she lives in an area where winter weather sometimes kills the power. She’s feeble and sick, and so is her husband. They’re not rare cases. I would hate to live in rural Minnesota or Montana and lose heat in the winter.

Oddly, ammunition is getting cheap. You can buy .22 rounds for as little as 5 cents each. I can get 9mm for $7.50 per box before tax and shipping. It was more like $30 not long ago.

For a long time, my feeling has been that God would see to it that the guns and ammo kept flowing, because humanity will want those things after the rapture. People will want to kill each other, and God will let it happen, because his children will not be here to intercede. Even when we claimed there were shortages, guns and ammo were selling like crazy. We used the word “shortage,” but it looks like the scarcity was only on retailers’ shelves. We were buying so fast, they could not keep up.

One of the curses of the tribulation is a spirit of murder that takes over the world. It’s going to happen. There is no way to stop it. God has predicted it, so that’s that. It makes sense that people would be armed very well during that time.

No one should consider it strange if a pandemic causes a series of shortages, but we have shortages that are only attributable to accidents and what insurance companies used to call “acts of God.” That should make people think.

A pandemic itself is like that. People don’t cause them. Well, there is the covid lab theory, but it’s not proven, and it’s an outlier. Labs didn’t create the bird flu or the deer diseases I mentioned.

Over the last week, I heard two charismatics predicting a bad year. One is a man who goes around healing people. I don’t know how accurate his prophecies generally are. The other was Mark Hemans, the Australian healer and teacher. He appears to get solid information from God. He compared the time we’ve just experienced to the eye of a hurricane. There is nearly no wind in the eye of a storm, so people tend to go out and celebrate as it passes, thinking they’re in the clear. Then the other side of the storm shows up and drives them indoors.

I was walking into a store two days ago, and I thought about my dependence on stores. I knew that if this one and the other local stores closed, I would be in a bad way. My little farming efforts amounted to nothing last year. Is this the year when we will start driving by stores with taped-off entrances?

It’s going to happen. If it’s not this year, it will still happen soon.

Maybe this year won’t be too bad. I have the feeling this will be a year of celebration for my wife and me. I feel as though we will be comfortable, and we will be full of the awareness Jesus will be here soon. I certainly hope this is true. I don’t look forward to begging for food or fending off hoardes of city dwellers who think I have it. They will be hit worse than anyone. They have no way to look after themselves, and they will be surrounded by desperate people who are in the same boat and who will do anything in order to get food.

In the Bible, Hebrews boiled and ate their own children, and they were no worse than modern Americans. If a person will eat his own child, what will people do to strangers?

If you don’t have a good relationship with God, you will sink when America finally enters the drainpipe. Biden can’t save you. Money can’t save you. Bags of junk silver, weapons, and a generator can’t save you. One of the purposes of the tribulation will be to show people God has always been the only source of provision and safety, so He will make sure they understand. Everything else people trust will be proven useless.

Lions are Supposed to Have Teeth

I have an audio Bible among the files in my car’s stereo, and I keep it on all the time when I drive. I used to listen to different kinds of music, but over time, I moved to Christian music, and now I just listen to the King James. It bothers me to turn it off. Sometimes my friend Mike has turned it off while riding in my car. I told him to stop doing that. We would be riding along, and suddenly I would notice that the atmosphere in the car was wrong, and I would realize the Bible was gone. I didn’t like it.

I almost never select books or chapters because Ford’s system for doing that is useless. Whatever plays, plays. Yesterday it was 1 Samuel, which contains the stories of Samuel and Saul.

I made a Youtube video yesterday, and in it, I discussed the fact that Christians who are failures are often able to exercise divine gifts and authority. It’s very strange. My last pastor, Albert Santiago, was an unrepentant, active child rapist, but he cast a demon out of me, and sometimes God spoke through him. In the video, I mentioned Saul, who prophesied even after God cursed his kingdom.

It was later that I went on an errand and heard 1 Samuel.

I mention Santiago’s name a lot because men who rape little girls should not have cover. Secrecy let him put a little girl in his bed over and over, and honesty might have protected her and whoever else he has raped. Maybe someone will be spared in the future because I’ve spoken or written his name. He should have been executed.

Saul was actually a great guy when his story started. He was taller and better-looking than other men, but he was humble, and he wanted to please God. The corruption that ruined him came on over time.

Early on, Saul heard a story about an Ammonite named Nahash who planned to commit an atrocity against Israel. According to extrabiblical sources, he had a practice of gouging out the right eyes of the men he defeated, and he had done this to every Jewish man in the area where he did his conquering.

Nahash came against Jews in a place called Jabesh-Gilead. They agreed to submit, but that didn’t satisfy him. He told them he would let them live only if they agreed to let him gouge their eyes out. They asked for a week to think about it, and they contacted Saul.

Here is the interesting part: when Saul heard about it, he became very angry, and the reason he was angry is that the Holy Spirit was upon him. So the Holy Spirit himself made him angry. God, who is love, and who loves forgiveness, made Saul angry. Saul got the Hebrews together and defeated Nahash, and this involved killing a lot of people. For God.

I found this interesting, because anger is one of my big concerns. I always think about the way I felt when Jesus visited me. Love poured through me like microwaves heating up a turkey breast. I have concerns that anger at other people comes from self-righteousness, fear, and lack of empathy, so I always ask God to send his love through me. I question people who seem to be hooked on what they call “righteous anger.” I generally feel that they are using God to justify something that comes from another source.

I had a friend who seemed to be angry all the time. He was very proud of work he claimed to be doing for God. He wanted to be praised for it. He got angry at me because here on my blog, I said God was not interested in our hard work and wanted to do things for us. After I wrote those things, he vanished from my life, and since then, he has had a lot of problems.

It turned out he had filled people with tall tales about his adventures and abilities and grand plans. Most of it was just hot air. He said he was building a strange Christian compound with a hurricane-proof house and a big workshop. He was known for offering people jobs. He suggested I could be his in-house attorney. His projects never panned out, though.

He told me something weird. He held himself out as some sort of nuclear engineer. He said he had designed an atomic bomb in high school, and that a state university had admitted him purely on that basis. I believed it because I had no reason not to. Some people really are nuclear engineers.

Later on, though, he admitted he couldn’t do math. You can’t design or even understand an atom bomb without math, and you definitely can’t participate in an undergrad engineering program. It’s like joining the Bolshoi when you can’t walk. No university anywhere is going to let you study engineering if you haven’t done calculus in high school.

He was never an engineer. I don’t know whether he has a college degree.

Knowing I was a physicist, he once tried to give me the idea he knew more than I did about a hand-waving calculation I had done to determine roughly how many bombs could be made from the uranium ore Saddam Hussein had. He said I was pretty close.

It was an informal Chicago-piano-tuners estimate, and I figured a nuclear engineer would know more than I did. I have not been trained to build nuclear bombs.

In retrospect, I suppose he just made up a number. He lacked the mental tools to do a calculation, but he wanted me to admire him and think he was part of the STEM gang, so he said what he said.

The fact that he told me he couldn’t do math shows that he didn’t really take engineering courses, because even a failed engineer would know that a physicist would know an engineering student has to know a lot of math. He slipped up.

He got in trouble for asking a huge, reputable company to move a ship for him. He held himself out as a successful entrepreneur when his company didn’t really have much in the way of assets or income. The company later sued him and won. They claimed they had lost nearly $800,000 preparing to do the job for him. They got a default judgment because he couldn’t afford an attorney.

Since then, he has had bypass surgery, his projects have failed to go anywhere, and I don’t think anyone would call him conspicuously blessed.

The ship was abandoned and broken up for scrap.

The story of the lawsuit is on the web, so it’s not exactly a secret.

I tried to get him to pray in tongues and basically fuel up with God, but I don’t think he ever did it. He once said, as an admission, that he was living on other people’s prayers, which is not really possible. He was way too busy for his own good.

He used to get very angry at preachers and other Christians, and he defended it. I thought he was wrong to justify his anger all the time. I felt God had used him to caution me about anger. Maybe I went too far in the direction of conciliation, though. Maybe I am fighting to suppress anger that comes from God. I am not sure.

In case anyone is wondering, while I do have the typical human desire to conceal my faults and failures, and while I have not revealed every disappointing thing about me, I am pretty much what I say I am. I do have a law degree and a physics degree. I did spend two and a half years in graduate school in physics, and I quit because I was burned out, not because I could not do the work. Although you could say I couldn’t do the work because I was burned out. You need enthusiasm to get up every day and do 6 or more hours of advanced math problems.

I was enrolled in classes when I quit, and I began trading stocks, which did not work out because it was a dumb idea.

I really did score over 150 on a battery of IQ tests, except for one where I got 142, but I give myself an asterisk for that one, because the lady who was giving the test didn’t tell me it was timed until I was way into it, and we were having a pleasant and engaging conversation while I worked. I got a perfect score on the something-or-other reading test, which impressed the lady.

The tests did not define scores above 150, so I do not have a number. Just “150+.” I have the papers somewhere to prove it. Many people are smarter than I am. I feel like I’m smart enough.

I haven’t done extraordinarily well on math tests. I got a 690 on the math SAT back before they dumbed it down. I have a history of locking up mentally on math tests, though. For some reason, I have aced practice tests and then choked when doing the real thing. I used to get perfect scores on practice quantitative GRE tests, but I got a 730 when I took the exam.

I have said I used to bench press 300 pounds easily, and this is true, but I did it on a machine, which I always point out. I also add that when I tried 220 on a real bar, I succeeded, but it was a lot harder. Machines don’t develop muscles used to balance things, and they let you put a lot more strength into movement. I maxed out most machines I used, but I didn’t impress anyone on the leg machines or the curl machine.

I wrote an article about training as a boxer, and the editor of the magazine I wrote it for didn’t believe me when I wrote that I used to do 25 one-armed pushups per side, with my feet on a chair, while working out, but I really did. I was able to do 30 or more, but I was not willing to keep going. I did 5 in his office, easily, quite some time after I had stopped exercising regularly. I know he and everyone else in the office had been talking about it and questioning my honesty, because when we came out, he announced, “He did 5.”

I think I could do one regular pushup right now if the floor was red hot and the reward was a pizza.

I did hit very, very hard as a boxer. I didn’t make that up when I said so. People who held pads for me were startled. Their eyes opened wide when I punched. I was not a good boxer, though. I did not train long enough because I got an injury, and for all I know, I would never have become any good. I didn’t skip rope well.

I practiced law successfully. I was very good at it. It was not hard for me at all. I quit to take up writing. Three books I wrote were published by a real publisher, even if they were stupid and did not make money. I chose not to return to law because I felt sure God was telling me to knock it off. I started applying to firms and doing interviews, but I quit. I did not fail. I made a choice. I was working when I decided to quit.

I really do live on a farm where I have a lot of tools and things. I built every single thing I have said I built. I really did marry a woman from Africa last year, and we did go to foreign countries to be together. When I say we are financially okay, I am not lying. I am not planning to run off to the Bahamas to get away from a pile of Mastercard debt.

I do make the best pizza and cheesecake on Earth, as far as I know. I am not lying about those things.

I have not accomplished anything in the way of a real career, what I have is mostly inherited, and I am no one to be admired, but anything I tell you I can do, I can do. I don’t make claims I can’t back up in order to impress strangers. I would be afraid of being exposed. I am not overly burdened with a craving for admiration, although I do have some desire, and I have never had much in the way of ambition.

I’m not building a big compound, and I am not going to offer anyone a job.

Now you know some good things about me, and some bad things.

Recently I wrote about an aunt who has extreme problems with insecurity. She is so hungry to be admired, it may amount to a mental illness. She has made wild, dishonest claims about her children which ended up embarrassing them; you would think she was talking about Niels Bohr and Queen Elizabeth the First. I like being admired, but I can’t imagine throwing everything else away for it.

The problem my aunt has is made even sadder by the fact that everyone knows about it. No one who knows her admires her. The things she says to gain admiration have led every one of her relatives who is still involved in her life to look down on her. They express their contempt and laugh behind her back. I guess that’s what usually happens to such people.

If she didn’t lie about her kids, people might be somewhat impressed, or at least not disillusioned, when they get to know them. Instead, people find them disappointing.

Spud Webb looks pretty good unless you’re expecting Wilt Chamberlain.

I don’t really understand narcissism, which is a root of ambition. I think you have to have a lot of ambition in order to understand ambitious people. I’ve read about men who drove themselves like slaves for years, not because they loved what they were doing, but because they wanted admiration and sex. Pete Townshend has said he became a guitarist just to get girls. I can’t grasp that mindset. I won’t even pretend I like a woman for 10 minutes to get sex! That’s too much to ask.

I don’t understand what drives Donald Trump. He was a great president, but he has done a lot of stupid things. He commits adultery with about as much hesitance as I have when I throw aluminum cans in the regular trash. He doesn’t think about his wives or kids when he cheats. He has completely neglected his children’s moral and religious educations in order to make himself rich and sexually busy. And he’s pretty typical of driven men.

I can get excited about making money for about 36 hours. After that, it wears off. I can get excited about promoting myself for about 15 minutes.

I am naturally lazy. I have told plenty of lies in my time. I am not brave. I fry chicken badly.

I think it’s better to surprise people by being better than they expect than to fail and hand them transparent excuses that make them look even worse.

I think about JFK sometimes. Democrats like to say he read 1200 words per minute, but in reality, he and a leftist journalist discussed false figures to put in a story, and JFK picked 1200 to impress them. Look it up. He was that dishonest, not to mention insecure.

He was just a fairly smart guy with a crooked family and a dishonest press establishment that backed him up. He would have been humiliated if someone had given him something to read in a short time and then made him take a test.

The other day I read that Jennifer Lawrence graduated from high school and entered college at 16. People repeat this myth. She never graduated from junior high. JUNIOR. She is out there lecturing high school graduates about how to fix the world, though.

The late Brian Dennehy lied and claimed he was a combat vet. Now it’s on his Wikipedia page forever.

A magazine said Benjamin Netanyahu had an IQ of 180. Turns out it’s not true. They recanted. But the myth is still out there. He’s a very impressive man anyway.

Radio psychology guru Dr. Laura Schlesinger is a doctor of nutrition or something. Qualified to work in a health food store, I guess. No, I’m wrong. Her doctorate is in physiology, says the web. Not psychology or medicine. So why behave like a psychologist and call yourself a doctor? I’m a doctor of law. I can literally call myself a doctor, and no one can contradict me. Should I get a radio show about medicine and bill myself as Dr. Steve?

Someone once told me that Menachem Schneerson, the rabbi some Jews thought would be the Messiah, was off-the-charts brilliant, and that he had stunned people as an engineering student at the Sorbonne. Not true. While he may have excelled at his religious studies, he had an ordinary EE diploma from the Ecole Speciale des Travaux Publiques, which is not part of the Sorbonne and is known for civil engineering, not electrical engineering. He was no Tesla. Maybe I shouldn’t mention Tesla in this context, because Nikola Tesla hated Jews.

Tesla himself, who truly did change the world with the AC motor and radio, both of which would been invented soon with or without him, has been overrated. A biography says he was 6’6″ tall, but he was really 4 inches shorter. People think he invented all sorts of currently-incomprehensible technology which will one day change the world, but that’s not true. We already have everything he invented, and some of his ideas didn’t work. He said he would prove relativity wrong and put Einstein, a Jew, in his place. That claim aged poorly.

Bill Nye calls himself the Science guy, but he’s an engineer with a bachelor’s degree.

I frequently feel annoyed at Massad Ayoob, a fading magazine writer who has a rabid following of uneducated gun nuts. Around half a century ago, he started publishing fairly useful books about self-defense, but he has made himself out to be things he is not.

He has no military background. He is not an engineer or gun designer. He has no scientific training. He has no legal training. He was a part-time cop in a microscopic all-white New Hampshire town with almost no crime, and he has never used a gun anywhere but the range. But he likes to give people the impression he’s Wyatt Earp crossed with Audie Murphy, John Moses Browning, and Gerry Spence.

He has worked as an expert witness, which a plumber or dentist could do, and which in no way qualifies him to talk about the law. He lies about his experiences in this line of work. He has argued publicly with some of the world’s greatest wound experts. He puts up Youtube videos in which he gives people legal advice which could put them in prison or execution chambers. Why not just bill yourself as a pretty good writer and competitive pistol shooter? Isn’t that enough?

Lance Armstrong’s whole life is a lie. I wonder who was really the best cyclist in the world all those years. Probably someone who ended up working in a bike shop.

It’s always irksome to read about overrated people with padded resumes. There have been people like Leonardo da Vinci, Mozart, Sergei Rachmaninoff, and John von Neumann, who have lived up to and beyond their hype, and it’s a shame to put liars on their level.

To get back on track, a guy from Scotland has a Youtube channel nearly no one watches. His name is Gordon. I watch every video he makes. He hears from God. There is no doubt about it.

Today Gordon put up a new video, and he linked it to an older video.

In the new video, he talked about 1 Samuel and the way God made Saul angry. It made an impression on him this week, just as it did me. I was shocked to see him talking about these things exactly when I was thinking about them.

The earlier video was made when coronavirus had churches locked down. In that video, Gordon was somewhat angry with lukewarm Christians in big, complacent churches. He was a little derisive. He laughed. In today’s video, he gave some background information.

The first video was made after he had a vision. He was praying, and he started walking in circles, talking about Jericho and bringing Rahab out and destroying the walls. He then saw a woman on her knees with her hands up, as though chains had just come off. He saw a tower that had fallen around her. He passed out and then found himself on his couch, groggy and unable to get it together.

He made the derisive video while he was still under the effects of the vision, and the words he said in it were prophecy, not his own words.

The big message here is that sometimes God wants you to be angry and critical. These things are not off limits. God can give you commands, words, and feelings that make you uncomfortable because they put you outside a Christian’s normal ranges.

This makes sense, because if there is one thing Satan’s children love, it’s shaming us for being critical and angry. They ignore Christian charity and the inestimable number of things we do for others, and they focus on the small amount of time we spend in anger and correction. They tell us we are not allowed to be angry or give correction. They want to pull our teeth.

It’s ridiculous, how non-Christians are always giving us Christianity lessons. I don’t teach people how to be good at sodomy or smoking weed.

Gordon says church has to be different now because we are at war. That is true. I keep saying the time for cajoling and stroking is over. The ship is sinking fast, so patience has to be redefined.

I believe this is an area where you have to use caution and rely on tongues. If you rely on tongues, you will be guided, and the things you do will be God’s will and not your own, so you will not go off into anger and criticism that come from Satan.

I was amazed that Gordon and I had the same thing on our mind on the same day.

Now I have something new to pray about.

Be Absent-Minded and Be Your Own Secret Santa

Should you buy yourself Christmas presents?

When I got out of law school, I was a disgrace. I only owned one pistol! It’s embarrassing to admit it. I owned a Glock I bought in case I had to kill one of my sister’s friends. This is true. I’m not trying to be funny.

She was enraged about something I did to help her, so she threatened to send some male junkie friends to take care of me. I got myself a Glock 22 and put my worries behind me. Fortunately for her low-life friends, none of them ever showed up to test my marksmanship, and I never had to go through the trauma of putting bullets into a human being. After that buy, I let myself down by letting maybe 9 years pass without another pistol purchase.

A Glock 22 is not a .22, by the way.

When I left school, I got myself a graduation gift. I went to Garcia’s National Gun in Little Havana and picked up a Smith & Wesson 686+ 7-shot, 6″ revolver in .357 Magnum. Very nice. Satin stainless with Hogue grips.

I frequented Garcia’s because I had bought into the myth that one should support local gun dealers. I bought several more guns from this place, and every time I showed up, they treated me like a stranger, perhaps because I wasn’t a Cuban. After that, I learned to love Internet shopping.

Yelp says Garcia’s is gone, which is not a surprise. Here is a quotation from a review a lady wrote:

“If you are not a 50+ year old Cuban guy you are invisible to these people. Terrible service. They treat you like you’re not there to spend money. I will take my business elsewhere.”

That is exactly how I felt. I would stand in the store while they talked to their pals en espanol, waiting to for my existence to be noticed so I could give them $700 or $1300 or whatever. It looks like their customer base decided to say, “Hasta la vista, baby.”

I think the revolver is the only present I’ve ever bought myself. I have certainly bought things for myself, but I don’t think I’ve bought myself anything for a special occasion.

Actually, I just remembered one, so I’m wrong. I bought a 2003 Ford Thunderbird and took delivery the day after my birthday. It was a silly, frivolous car, but I really enjoyed it.

I guess that counts. Sort of. I mean, I had to buy some kind of car, and I would have done it even if it had been during a different month.

Okay. It doesn’t count

Rhodah and I went to Singapore recently, and of course, I bought her stuff. She is still catching up from a lifetime of poverty. We bought clothes. We bought a nice Bric’s suitcase. There were other things. She managed to squeeze a big perfume donation out of me while she was on her way to her flight and the duty-free shops.

During our trip, I got myself a Singapore ball cap in the Bugis Street bazaar, and I also got a Levi’s-brand belt because I left my own belt in Florida. The belt does not count. In the airport on the way home, I realized I had nearly nothing to show for my trip, so I spent 22 USD on a Singapore shirt.

In Ireland, I got myself a Dublin hoodie I will never wear. I would have gotten a T-shirt, but the Irish sell incredibly cheap shirts that can’t possibly last a year. In Turkey, I got a hat. In Egypt, nothing.

It’s hard to buy anything in Egypt that is not related to idolatry.

Egypt is not the greatest tourist destination. If you go, stay in a very nice hotel in Cairo and get guides to take you to the sights. Then take a Nile cruise with guides. Then go home. You won’t be able to drive, and there is nothing to do except look at pyramids and temples anyway. See the old stuff and enjoy a cruise. If you limit your trip to these things, you’ll love Egypt. Don’t do anything else.

I feel like getting myself something, but I am not doing well at finding gifts for myself.

When I got the idea of getting myself a present, I immediately thought of a trailer with a gas-powered leaf vacuum on it. That is not a Christmas gift. It’s a tool for yard maintenance. A CNC mill I don’t need would be a good gift. Something I really need so I can do chores would not.

I’m not blowing $8000 on a mill.

I looked at my Amazon lists. They’re full of things I need. There are also things I merely want, but those things are too cheap for Christmas.

I bought myself two Shark vacuums this month. Cordless and corded. Spent over $600. Changed my life. Absolutely worth every penny. Recommended without reservation. But cleaning tools are not gifts. And Rhodah will probably be the one who uses them most.

I feel like I’ve turned into the aunt who used to give me socks.

How about another firearm buy?

The other day I was on the phone, and I saw an unopened flat rate box. I opened it up, and it contained a new Wilson rifle cartridge trimmer. The invoice was from August of 2020. This thing cost me over $130, and I had forgotten I owned it. Obviously, I have not used it. I haven’t fired a gun in maybe 6 months. I have enough ammo supplies backed up to keep me busy for a couple of months. I built a rifle I have not fired yet. I finished it months ago. I probably have 15,000 rounds of .22 ammunition. I don’t think this is the time to buy gun stuff.

Maybe a nice bottle of XO brandy. I barely drink, but a really nice brandy would be pleasant to have on hand. I have not had a really good brandy since before I left Miami.

How about a water-cooled TIG torch? Practicing TIG is no fun when you’re holding a hot torch. A new one would cost a few pennies, but it would encourage me to practice.

I would love to have a Langmuir Arcflat welding table, three feet by four feet. My Northern Tool table is astounding for the money, but it has about half the square footage of a Langmuir. I’m doing a project which is not going to fit on my table. It would hang off the ends and sides of a Langmuir, but I think I could make it work.

It would be great to have a table 6 feet long. You can weld nearly anything on a table like that.

A Langmuir fixturing table 4 feet long would cost more than I want to spend, sadly. It would be $1800, including tax. Cut that figure in thirds, and I might do it.

Like a leaf vaccum, a welding table is useful for necessary jobs, but you can also use one to make fun things like a shooting bench or a mobile base for a big table saw you don’t really need. I don’t think I’d put it in the same class as a leaf vacuum.

I’m going to try to get by without a vacuum. Today I took my giant blower and made a 10-foot-wide pile of leaves at the side of the front yard. I plan to burn them as soon as I can get a permit. In the past, I was determined to move leaves out of the yard before burning them, and that’s why I never got anywhere. Moving them an eighth of a mile to the burn pile is extremely work-intensive. If I am willing to have a black spot in my yard, I should be able to get rid of them without extraordinary effort.

I guess I’ve already bought myself nearly everything that would make a good present. I have a drawer full of nice knives. I have a Ruger RPR with a Vortex Viper scope. I have an ice cream machine with its own compressor. I have a 16″ lathe. Years ago, I got myself musical instruments.

To some men, or women who have a lot of jewelry, this stuff may seem insignificant, especially when spread out over decades, but I don’t live on a grand scale. I drive a Ford Explorer with 60,000 miles on it, and I plan to keep it for 10 more years. I use a cell phone made in 2017. I own a Rolex, but if my late father had not owned it, I would not have one. If I spend $500 on something, I feel like it’s a big deal.

A home waterjet would be nice. Really nice. Let’s see. A Wazer, the best-known small waterjet, would only set me back maybe 12 grand.

Dang it.

How about a plasma table? Let’s see. Over $1500. Geez.

I may as well clean up the brandy snifters.

Not the Cure for Jet Lag

It’s gradually sinking in: I have nephews.

It somehow seems unfair that people automatically become my relatives just because I marry someone, but I have discovered that this is the way it works. My wife has a couple of sisters, and both have kids. Her sister became a grandmother at 38, and my wife has been a great aunt since 2020. That makes me a great uncle, which is practically the same thing as a grandfather, so I feel like I should be shopping for a coffin and some Mephisto shoes.

I can’t help feeling that uncle status should involve some kind of participation or consent, but it doesn’t. You marry someone, and BANG, there it is. A label. And an obligation to buy Christmas gifts. I guess.

Rhodah does not have parents any more. It’s terrible that they died young, of course, but I have to admit that it made things easier for me. Rhodah is younger than I am, so it might have been awkward if I had had to butter her parents up. It would feel wrong, currying favor with my father-in-law by taking him to Universal Studios or buying him a skateboard.

Rhodah is helping her sister and brother-in-law move to Lusaka, the capital city I had no idea Zambia had until last year. As a result, they and their 4 sons have had to stay with Rhodah this week.

To imagine what Rhodah is going through, consider some facts. She spent around 12 days in Singapore, 8 time zones away, and then she took a 21-hour trip home on crowded planes. She arrived to a a spotless house and started trying to sleep. A few days later, the Fresh Princes of Lusaka and their parents arrived.

The house is a disaster now. The air conditioner remote is broken. The living room rug, which had just been cleaned, is filthy. Books which had been stored neatly on shelves are lying in random locations. Everything is dirty. And Rhodah has had to share a bed with a nephew who kicks like a mule. Fortunately, that stops. When he gets up at 5 a.m.

I told her this was a great chance to teach them how to clean. Their mother weighs about 35 pounds, so they need to start helping her. I don’t think my suggestion will be implemented.

My mother did not teach my sister or me much of anything about responsibility, so we both became slobs, and my mother did a lot more work than she should have. It’s kind of ironic. She resented her own mother for making her and her sisters clean the house, and she resolved not to teach her daughter to clean. I think I was spared because I was a male. In Kentucky, men didn’t do anything around the house. The women used to stand and serve meals while the men ate, and the women ate later. My mother didn’t want her daughter to be a slave to a husband, but by teaching her to be slovenly, she ended up extending her own servitude.

I was probably around 6 when my mother finally taught me to tie my own shoes. She was mad at me, and she said she couldn’t keep doing it for me. Thing is, she had no reason to be mad at me. I would have done whatever she wanted, but she chose not to teach me, so she got what she deserved.

I now believe kids should be taught to be clean and neat and capable as early as possible. I have no intention of wiping a 5-year-old’s rear end when he can, and should, do it himself. Very young kids can put toys away and throw dirty clothes in hampers. It’s not integral calculus, and it’s pretty obvious that the ability to get things done and look after oneself is a big asset in life.

I think we wait too long to teach kids things. When I was a kid, someone taught me a little bit about multiplication a few years early, and I had no trouble understanding the concept. Then, instead of moving on to greater things, I stagnated until school got around to covering the same material.

I could have been years ahead in math, but no one had the good sense to teach me. I was also taught to read at least three times. My mother taught me when I was very young. Then I went to kindergarten and relearned, using an asinine woke system called ITA which replaced real spelling with moronic leftist letters that had to be unlearned later. Then they taught me real reading again. I remember arguing with the other kids, telling them the real spellings of words were wrong.

I should have been taught real English at age three and then been given a lot of stuff to read.

By waiting to teach me things I was obviously capable of learning, people set me back in life and reinforced my natural laziness, and they also taught me to hate school, which was unbelievably boring.

Now I say beat the little ones until they pick up their toys, and teach them anything their tiny heads can absorb. They will bless you for it later, and if you die while they’re young, they will have strengths that will help them stay afloat.

Some people say kids don’t have enough free time and they need hours and hours to play. Nonsense. What they have is too much after-school status garbage. Your kids should not be doing gymnastics 4 hours a day. They should not be training to be Olympic athletes or practicing the piano until 9 p.m. These things are true. But you don’t bring a kid home from school and just turn him loose with the TV remote and the dirty magazines he knows you hide in your closet. Kids should have to do chores. They should do things for spending money. They shouldn’t just wander around until dinner time, looking for things to set on fire or break.

When I was a kid, my friends and I did healthy things like playing football and various forms of baseball, but we also abused lizards, shot songbirds with BB guns, burned things, took expensive things apart and could not put them back together, made our own fireworks, played with guns, killed fish we could not eat, trespassed, committed acts of vandalism, and wasted our time in other ways. And we were fairly well-behaved by local standards. This is what “unstructured play” really is when parents are lazy and uninvolved.

Spoiling kids is one of the worst forms of neglect.

The concept of the importance of “unstructured play” comes from leftists, so naturally, it’s extremely destructive. When street gangs in New York rape women and beat them to death, it’s unstructured play.

Unstructured play is a symptom of fatherlessness. When you’re a kid and you don’t know what to do with yourself or how to act, it’s because your father has failed you. Fatherless kids go to prison, end up in rehab, die young, and so on. A father is supposed to prevent you from becoming a directionless idiot. Jews have successful children because Jewish fathers are involved. People from my culture are lucky if their kids have jobs at Walmart.

Fatherlessness is an extremely important concept in Christianity, but no one teaches about it correctly.

Anyway, Rhodah will not get any peace until tonight, and she will still have to sleep one night in a dirty house. Then she’ll have to pay to get her rug and car cleaned.

The really funny thing about all this is that Rhodah looks forward to having children. I’m on board, but I believe I have a better understanding of what she is in for than she does.

No point in thinking about it too much. There is nothing that can be done. Raising children will be challenging no matter what. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.

I can tell the nephews are a lot of fun. The dirt and disorder don’t change that. It’s too bad they will always be thousands of miles away.

I feel like God is making me a patriarch, which is something I never expected or wanted to be. I have two sisters-in-law, 5 nephews, a niece, and a great-nephew. I have two godchildren. A friend whose dad has abandoned his family has 5 kids who appear to think I’m their grandfather, and one of them is my goddaughter. She sends me funny little texts out of nowhere and tells her family she wants to visit my house again.

My mother’s father was the patriarch in my family. He had the big house everyone ran to for shelter. He helped all of us when we needed it. Now I’m the one with the big house and the tractors and the gun room and the cattle, and sometimes I can be helpful.

There are 5 male grandchildren, and none of the others have taken this role. Two seem to have no interest in helping anyone else. One is a devoted single father but would never do anything for anyone outside his own family. The remaining one is living a normal and profitable life in the financial industry, with a wife and, I believe, two daughters. No one ever thinks of calling him when there’s a problem. He has nothing to do with the family now.

I have this feeling that a patriarch is a tall bald guy with long hair and a white beard, who always knows what to do. I don’t always know what to do. I have made a lot of bad decisions. I have not made any effort to build a family, develop an estate, or become a leader. But here I am.

It’s good to be important to people. I never saw it coming. It beats spending the rest of my life alone, flying around the world on fishing trips or something.

I think some people may come to my funeral!