Synonym for Anti-Hero: Idiot

I am turning into a House junkie, which is fitting, considering the nature of the show’s protagonist.

Last night I was exhausted from cleaning up the garage and installing wiring, and I plopped on the couch and watched two episodes. They were connected, although not consecutive. DVRs can’t work miracles; the episodes linking them were not in the box.

It works like this. House has to put in time at the free clinic, and he hates it. A big guy (David Morse) comes in and demands a VD test, commenting on House’s unpleasant, bullying nature in the process. House gets even by inserting a rectal thermometer unnecessarily. Morse figures it out, and he demands an apology. House refuses. Morse turns out to be a cop. He pulls House over for speeding, and he finds a bottle of painkillers in House’s jacket. House is arrested, and prosecution begins. He faces ten years in jail for drug crimes. Morse gives him chances to apologize and make it right, but House refuses until Morse runs out of patience. Too late, House goes into rehab, just to impress Morse and the judge. Morse doesn’t buy it, because he knows what addicts are like, and the prosecution proceeds.

That’s the bare bones of the plot.

I’ve decided House is a rotten human being. I used to think that sooner or later, something good would be found beneath the layers of slime and rot, but that’s not in the cards. He’s just bad. Last night, he whined and whined about how awful Morse and the judge and his friends were. But he never admitted responsibility or remorse, and he made no effort to change. He drove a friend to perjure herself–a felony–to get him off the hook. This, after stealing prescriptions, abusing his misguided friends, and raping a man. Sticking something in a person’s rear end after obtaining consent by fraud is rape; that’s how the law sees it. House never even brought the issue up. He didn’t just deserve to be jailed for his drug escapades. He deserved a fat lip and a prosecution for sexual battery. I was rooting for him to lose his medical license and go to the penitentiary.

House is a very good representation of a drug addict or alcoholic. They are unbearable whiners who blame the world for their problems. I don’t know why whining is connected to drug dependency. Maybe it’s because addicts can’t stand discomfort of any kind, and they are used to getting it fixed by crying and mewling. By using their misery to manipulate others. Other people accept pain and wait for it to pass. An addict deflects it onto other people, making it their problem and motivating them to get rid of it. Now that I think about it, I suppose an addict is helpless without other people around. They are so used to making other people do their bidding and support their habits, they don’t know how to do things for themselves. Is this where the concept of co-dependency comes from? I guess it is. When Walter Hudson got up over a thousand pounds, it was clear he wasn’t the only one with a problem. Somebody was bringing him the buckets of doughnuts, and that person was also sick.

Have you ever known an alcoholic who didn’t revel in self-pity? I haven’t. They don’t always do it openly, but if you spend time with a problem drinker, it will come out eventually. For me, one of the most disgusting, ugliest parts of dealing with addicts is listening to their infantile whimpering. It’s worse than driving one to rehab or changing locks or searching inside couch cushions and bric a brac for hidden pills. Those things are relatively pleasant compared to being subjected to moaning and excuses. I’m sorry to say it, but this was the dark side of reading Acidman’s blog. He wasn’t always the ruthless self-examiner he held himself out to be.

Virtually every addict is one hundred percent responsible for his addiction, but almost all of them blame other people or circumstances they can’t control. What a load. No addict who sees himself as a victim can hope to recover. If you’re hooked on something, you’re not a victim. You’re just foolish, and you need to grow up. There are only two persons who have the power to end an addiction. The addict, and God. Everyone else should be left out of it. At least, they should not be held to account for it.

I have never made another person an addict. Nothing I have ever done, no matter how bad it may have been, has caused another person to take a pill or a drink. I am completely blameless. Addicts are self-made, and they have no right to drag the rest of us into their self-inflicted misery.

Sometimes when we watch TV and movies we see heroes who are abrasive and demanding, yet who turn out to be justified, because they mean well, and they’re harder on themselves than on other people. John Wayne played this type better than any other actor. I kept telling myself House would turn out to fit the model. But he doesn’t. He’s a complete coward. He doesn’t have the guts to ask a woman out; he rents hookers instead. He never criticizes himself. When he apologizes, the show stops dead, because it’s such a rare event. He abuses people verbally, for no constructive purpose. He steals, purely to satisfy his base urges. He browbeats patients for no reason. He sabotages relationships that he finds threatening. He even refused to go to his father’s funeral, knowing it would punish his innocent mother and not the dead father who was beyond his pathetic vengeance.

He’s funny and smart and creative. But those are gifts, not virtues. In the big scheme of things, they have no lasting or deep value.

Thinking about his inability to criticize himself, I started to consider the modern cult of self-esteem. It’s a very sad religion, to which I was once a deluded adherent. Today I realized that when we tell people their salvation lies in self-esteem, we are telling them to take on the fundamental and fatal flaw of the addict. We are telling them to stop acknowledging their flaws. You can’t grow unless you can admit fault and apologize and work sincerely to change.

A personality is like a garden. And what do you do in a garden when you want the good plants to grow? You go in every day with a hoe, and you kill the bad plants. Imagine what raising tomatoes would be like, if we applied the principles of the self-esteem religion. We wouldn’t see weeds. We would see “botanical diversity.” We would see “nature manifesting its power and determination.” It would seem a thing of beauty. We would withhold the hoe. And we would get very damn few tomatoes.

Self-esteem feels good, and it gives you energy and helps you do the things you want to do. But when it goes beyond a healthy level, it causes you to ignore your own faults and overestimate your abilities. You start to think every good thing that happens to you is deserved, and that you caused it through your own strength. People who have that belief tend to wander away from God. They forget they need him. They may start to think morality is silly. They may commit crimes and mistreat other people. They sever the connection to God’s power. Then when the illusion of self-sufficiency is shattered, they don’t have the habits of faith and prayer and contrition and obedience, so they have a tough time recovering.

Self-esteem is not the answer to your problems. Psychologists tell us that self-esteem is highest in segments of society where achievement is lowest and immorality is rampant. Prison inmates, for example, tend to think very highly of themselves. You need to be confident that you can achieve. But if that confidence is to be healthy and productive, it can’t be purely self-directed. You have to have confidence that you can do what you need to do, with God’s help. That’s how man was designed to work. The self-esteem cult is idolatry, and it leads to stunted development and a dead end. A spiritual stillbirth.

Moses was extremely humble. He was too shy to talk to Pharaoh without Aaron beside him. But he parted the Red Sea and led hundreds of thousands of people across, dry-shod. He esteemed God, not himself. Moses exalted God, and God exalted Moses. That’s the healthy way to live.

I don’t know if I’ll keep watching House. It’s hard to enjoy a show when you keep hoping the “hero” gets punched in the mouth and convicted of a pile of felonies. And I’m also tired of hearing about MS and sarcoidosis. I don’t know if the medical consultants who help write the show are out of ideas or what, but it seems like every patient, sooner or later, is suspected of having MS, sarcoidosis, or both. I don’t even know what sarcoidosis is, but I know how to treat it, thanks to House.

I have enjoyed movies and shows in which moral ambiguity played a part, but we have gotten to the point where we are expected to support characters who are not merely confused, but vile. All year I’ve been watching Breaking Bad, a show in which a chemistry teacher with cancer starts making meth in order to be able to leave his family money. In the beginning, you could feel sorry for him, because of his desperation, and because he wasn’t doing the very worst things drug dealers do. Lately he’s been a real idiot, though. It was bad when he was selling poison. Now he’s urging his sidekick to commit murder, and he’s threatening rival dealers. I used to wish him well. Now I want to see him in an orange jumpsuit. Or I’d like to see him take a good, bloody pounding from a parent whose kid used his product.

Guess it’s a good thing that I watch so little TV these days.

Plus Convulsions

News from Israel, RE Mish Weiss:

Doc R said when I spoke with him last, “Mish is still with us through sheer willpower and the power of prayer” thank you, you all have a lot to do with it.

Shabbat Shalom

Marc

If you remember Mish in prayer today, do me a favor and remember my cousin Debbie, too.

More

Leah says the fever is fluctuating, and the lows are getting lower. What a testimony this makes for.

I Got More Power

I’m all excited. Today I get to turn the new air conditioner on. And I need it! I worked in the garage for four or five hours yesterday, and by the end of it, I was really dehydrated. I kept drinking, figuring I would catch up. Before I went to bed, I drank even more, and I assumed I would overdo it and then have to get up in the middle of the night. Yet, to put it delicately, the results defied expectations. I slept all night.

The people at Home Depot probably know my face by now. I have to go over there soon and get a plug so I can fake up a receptacle until the proper stuff can be obtained.

I’m going to get a milling machine next. I don’t care how much aggravation it causes me. I am not going to go to my grave wondering what it would have been like to fulfill my decades-old desire to learn machining. Law school cost me $22,000 per year, and that’s just tuition. I have less than that invested in my tools, and they bring me a thousand times the satisfaction.

I went out to the garage last night and looked over my work. I felt a sense of gratitude I can’t even describe. I know it’s silly. What I have out there isn’t much. A few nice tools, a TV, and an air conditioner. But I feel like I got my own private resort.

Lately I’ve been watching House reruns. For some reason, I DVR’d a bunch of shows for my sister, and they were piling up on the machine, and I started watching them. Wonderful show. Hugh Laurie was already one of my favorite actors because of his work in the Bertie Wooster and Jeeves series and The Blackadder. If you haven’t seen his Prince George, your television has not justified its existence.

Once in a while, Laurie plays music on the show. He’s a pianist and a guitarist. He’s really good, too. He played a version of Georgia on my Mind which made me wish I could buy it on CD.

On House, he plays a rude doctor who solves patient’s problems through pure creativity. He fumbles around for half an hour or more, and then in the last few minutes of the show, he experiences a revelation, and the patient gets well.

I am not a jealous person by nature. I don’t really care what other people have, unless they’re obnoxious about it, or they got something important which really should have gone to someone else. But I started to feel jealous, watching House. I’ve had a lot of problems with my own musical efforts, because my memory and concentration let me down. And here was Hugh Laurie, a man who excelled in his chosen field, playing music beautifully as a hobby. And I know it’s irrational, but because he played a character who solved problems through creativity, he reminded me of myself. A better version of me. Back when I was studying to be a physicist, I used to solve problems by lying down and thinking about other things until the answers came to me.

Last night I read about him on the Internet. Seems like he’s not a particularly happy person. I may be wrong, but that’s the impression I get from the information I found.

I thought about that while I looked at my silly garage. I enjoy it so much, and my life is so pleasant. I could not believe I deserved the garage! You would be amazed at the intensity of the emotions I felt as I looked at it.

On the one hand, I was right, because as a Christian, I know people don’t really deserve the blessings they get. On the other hand, from a human perspective, it’s just a garage. Donald Trump had a 300-foot yacht with gold-plated faucets, and it didn’t make him happy.

I don’t feel jealous now. I got my perspective back. Also, House is a fictional character. And even if he were not, he’s so miserable, no one in his right mind would envy him.

You can’t look at what other people have and assume it would please you. You don’t know how they got it or what it cost them, and you don’t know what problems may prevent them from enjoying it. I see Bentleys and Ferraris and Porsches almost every day. Even though I don’t care much about cars, I used to think the people who drove them were very lucky. Then one day I realized that only a small percentage of them were paid for. And I saw a neighbor’s Porsche on a repo truck a few months back; that made me think. The grass is always greener. It’s good to realize that it’s an illusion. If more people knew that, the world would be a more peaceful place.

The little things I have bring me tremendous pleasure, and even though that is true, I am fortunate enough not to be bound up in them. If they burned in a fire tomorrow, I wouldn’t like it, but I would sleep well tomorrow night. That attitude is a gigantic blessing, and it must come from God, because it’s contrary to human nature.

I don’t think we’re supposed to get everything we want, or that our lives are supposed to be free from problems. But I do believe we’re supposed to be happy, and that overall, we are supposed to succeed. I don’t buy into the idea that all Christians should have piles of wealth, or that we should never get sick, or that everything we try should work right from the start. The TBN nuts used to preach that stuff because it got people to fill their coffers, and it’s wrong. But I think life is supposed to be good, and that we should feel blessed and content. And very often, we do get very good things.

Home Depot is calling. Who am I to resist?

My Money is in Copper

I have returned from Home Depot. Guess what 6-3 Romex costs? A whopping $2.56 per foot. And I bought 30 feet. Plus some 3/4″ conduit and a 50-amp breaker. All this, just to beef up my compressor circuit by ten amps, so I can add the air conditioner.

At least I didn’t have to buy a 15-amp breaker for the unit itself. When I went out to look at the plug, to find out what kind of receptacle I needed, I saw that it had a breaker built into it. That saved me half an hour and maybe twenty bucks.

My plan is to yank the old 8-3 Romex, put the 6-3 in, upgrade the breaker to 50 amps, run conduit to the disconnect, run conduit from the disconnect to a location near the air conditioner, and install a socket. The 8-3 runs through a foot-long hole in solid concrete. I hope it’s big enough for 6-3. Otherwise…wait, this is no problem…otherwise, I’ll have to get out my mighty rotary hammer and spend TEN SECONDS reaming out the hole. Man, having the right tools is wonderful.

My new 4-jaw chuck arrived. It’s really nice. The grease in it is probably forty years old; it hasn’t been used. Or it has been used so little, you can’t tell. I wonder if I’ll ever be able to make myself use the 3-jaw chuck. Precision is addictive. The 3-jaw chuck says it was made in England, but I haven’t spotted a manufacturer’s name on it. I’m wondering if it’s a Cushman.

Before I got the new chuck, I was concerned about the hollowed-out backside. I had read complaints about this being a light-duty chuck. But now I can see that if it hadn’t been hollowed out, it would weigh seventy pounds. It probably weighs fifty as it is. It’s huge. Much bigger than the 3-jaw chuck. Eight inches, as contrasted with six.

The stuff from Enco arrived. Guess where my new aluminum oxide wheel was made. Israel. I love it.

The remote for the AC will be here soon. Once that arrives, I will be totally worthless. One remote for the AC, one for the stereo and TV and DVD player, and a VFD for the lathe. I’ll barely have to move. That is my life’s goal.

Eventually, I want to be like the baron, in Dune. I want to be carried around by an electronic hovercraft rig, with little anti-gravity things holding up my fat so it doesn’t drag on the floor and collect swarf. That’s for indoor locomotion. Outdoors, I’ll rely on my souped-up fat cart.

Tomorrow the new motor arrives and I can officially close and suture up the lathe. I can get rid of the rat’s nest of wires and put the missing panels back on. Then it will be very hard to come up with excuses for not making anything.

But I’ll bet I manage.

Am I spoiling myself like a hopeless degenerate, or is this what the Bible means when it says, “Delight thyself also in the Lord, and he shall give thee the desires of thine heart?”

I know what I prefer to believe!

It gets even worse. I finally decided to spring for health insurance, so I may start riding my motorcycles again. A big part of the reason I let them rot was that I kept putting off getting insurance, and I was afraid I would mangle myself and have to pay all the expenses. Now I can subject myself to all sorts of hideous physical risks with less trepidation.

I saved all sorts of money by being too cheap to insure myself, but at a certain age, you have to hand the dice off and get a policy before you crap out. Some diseases pretty much disqualify you from insurance, so you have to get hooked up before one of them hits you. Insurance companies hate people like me, because they need healthy young worrywarts to pay the cost of treating old insureds on their last legs. They need insureds who never take money out of the system. But if you can afford most medical problems, you don’t really have a lot of motivation to get insurance when you’re young.

I hope I stay ambulatory until the policy issues. That is the key to making my strategy pay off.

Fever

Mish Weiss has been doing okay since her second bone marrow transplant, but right now she has a fever of 105, and her friends are putting out an emergency prayer request.

Our Creditors Will Now Sell us Cars

Being a conservative is usually a great blessing, because we’re right about nearly everything. But it’s frustrating when we’re right about things the rest of the country did not see coming. Case in point: the Chinese are about to invade our automobile market. Who has been warning about this for ages? Me. Backward little Bible-clinging, meat-eating, non-recycling pistol-carrier that I am. I’m sure other conservatives have said the same thing. You can’t walk down the aisles in Home Depot every week and see row after row of inexpensive, quality Chinese-made tools and not realize Chinese cars are inevitable. You’d have to be remarkably stupid.

Drudgebart links to a story about it today. I figured the Chinese would attack directly and independently. But it’s even worse than that. GM is going to give the market to them! I thought future competition was what we had to worry about, but GM is capitulating before that has a chance to happen. They’re going to import Chinese cars!

The union is angry. Who cares? They were dying anyway. They had no chance whatsoever of remaining viable. Unions are parasitic, and one of the essential properties of a successful parasite is that it can’t kill the host while the host still serves a need. The UAW has never understood this. You can maintain a union like the one at UPS, because they don’t get five times what they’re worth. They permit UPS to make a profit, so UPS stays in business. You can’t maintain a union that causes a company to run at a deficit.

If a tick sucked a quart of blood a day, ticks would be extinct. Isn’t that obvious?

Autoworkers and workers in related industries are going to earn less money from now on, because of a troublesome little thing called supply and demand. They’ve managed to fight it successfully for over 50 years, but it always wins in the end. Ten years from now, you won’t see typical American autoworkers in nice houses with five vehicles. That was an unsustainable aberration.

Here’s a quotation:

“GM should not be taking taxpayers’ money simply to finance the outsourcing of jobs to other countries,” Alan Reuther, the union’s Washington lobbyist, wrote in a letter to U.S. lawmakers.

That’s true, I guess. On the other hand, the government shouldn’t be forcing taxpayers to invest in a company that union labor will eventually kill (or any company, for that matter). Okay, union labor isn’t the only problem. Let’s be fair and admit that GM also has problems because of bad management. That’s especially true now that Barack Obama is the CEO. It’s interesting, if you think about it. This is his first real job. GM is Barack Obama’s lemonade stand!

The story implies GM is SHOCKED that anyone would think they would move manufacturing to China, and they love the unions, and the percentage of cars sold here that will be made in China will be limited…blah, blah, blah. I’ve heard this kind of BS before. “Social Security numbers will only be used in the management of government benefits.” “The income tax will only be in place long enough to pay our war debts.” “None of the money from the state lottery will go to anything but education.”

“You’re the third man I’ve ever slept with.” “Don’t worry, I had a vasectomy.” “My breasts are real.” “I’ll limit myself to public campaign funds.” “My administration will be totally transparent.”

Some lies are so pathetic, on their faces, that no one should ever believe them unless somebody posts a bond.

It’s possible that cars will be made here. IF the wage drops to maybe fifteen bucks an hour. Otherwise, forget it.

Proponents of the pitiable, obnoxious, ludicrous, conceited America-as-master-race theory think the Chinese are hopelessly incompetent. I guess these folks have no idea which nationalities do best in engineering and science. Here’s a clue. When I applied for graduate study in physics, I was told I had an advantage because I was not Chinese. Universities were tired of cluttering their departments with Chinese students. Americans are not better, smarter, more talented, or more industrious. There is nothing special about us, and it is remarkable that Asians have done so poorly up to this point. Like the union thing, it’s an aberration. It’s unnatural. It is a situation that will eventually right itself.

American produced Henry Ford. It also produced the Ayn-Rand-vindicating degenerates who succeeded him. Now China has its own Henry Ford; a battery manufacturer who crushed Sony and who has now set his sights on the Big Three and Toyota. People like that are raised up by God. They don’t occur naturally, and they don’t lift themselves up by their own bootstraps, no matter what their egos tell them. We have had our share of giants, but now they’re popping up abroad, and our supply seems to be running dry. I’d trade twenty sets of Google kids for one Wang Chuan-Fu. In fact, I’d trade the actual Google kids for a good cigar.

We used to have Presidents who built and nurtured and encouraged. Now we have a spoiled, tyrannical boy who cannibalizes and reallocates and salvages and jettisons. A downsizer masquerading as a builder. Like an engineer on a battleship that has been torpedoed, he moves assets around in a vain effort to keep us (and himself) afloat.

Perry Stone thinks the US may have come to the end of its God-given run as the dominant nation in the world. The more time passes, the more I think he’s right. I think from now on, the country will wane, but individual Americans who align themselves with God’s will are going to be blessed.

Nobody wants to hear that. They want to hear “USA! USA!” while they chant along and crush Budweiser cans against their foreheads. But everything we have came from God, not from ourselves. We worked and planned and planted, but human effort is pointless unless it is also blessed.

I think the only way for an American to rise above the developing chaos is to turn back to God. I think God pounded that into my thick skull over the last few years, and I hope I can help other people reach the same conclusion.

Ignore Him and He’ll Go Away

Apparent coincidence is one of the hallmarks of effective Christian living. The deeper you get into your faith, and the more trust you put in God, the more weird things happen.

Here are a couple new ones, from my life.

Last week, I got an email from a guy who sells machine tools. I ignored it, because I figured I was being spammed. Also, he had a Millrite listed for over two thousand dollars, which suggested his prices were not too good. I didn’t realize a regular reader of this blog knew this guy, and he had told him about me.

Later on, I got on Ebay, looking for a 4-jaw lathe chuck. I needed an L00 mount, and I needed an 8″ chuck. This is the usual size for a 12″ lathe, which is what I have. A seller had an unused (new old stock) Skinner chuck from a 13″ South Bend, and he also had a back plate. We negotiated, and I bought the parts. I got a good deal, and I didn’t have to buy Asian or used. Guess who the seller is? The guy who emailed me. Out of the hundreds or thousands of people on Ebay selling machine tool parts and tooling, I found him.

What does it mean? I don’t know. It must mean something. It’s not a small coincidence. Many, many people sell lathe chucks on Ebay.

Second story. Last week, I received two self-defense DVDs from Gunvideo.com. Looks like good stuff. But I didn’t order it! Some guy named Ray did. His name was on the invoice. I figured someone who meant well had taken the kind but somewhat creepy step of finding out my real name and where I lived, and that he had sent me the DVDs as a present. Either that, or it was a gay stalker.

I decided to email the people at Gunvideo. They said there was a screwup. I had ordered something from them a year ago, and this Ray person owned the company that produced it. They had it drop-shipped to me from his company. Then recently he ordered something from them, and somehow my address ended up in the ship-to box. They said they’re still trying to figure it out. But they told me to keep the DVDs.

I keep feeling like I’m supposed to have guns and tools. I can’t figure it out. I wonder what’s on those DVDs.

When you’re a Christian and you live by faith, your life becomes like the Bible. Almost everything in it has meaning. It makes it harder to be disappointed or rattled or angry. When something goes wrong, instead of getting mad, you think, “There must be a reason for this. I wonder what it is.” And you look forward to finding out, which usually happens.

This is often extremely irritating to non-Christians, even though there is nothing aggressive or inherently provocative about it. It should elicit no negative response whatsoever. Why should it anger you that another person takes misfortune well? Marcus Aurelius found the complacency of Christian martyrs annoying, and he increased their suffering because of it. Why is it so aggravating to non-believers? I would say, but that would aggravate them even more. Most Christians know; I don’t have to tell them.

Christianity is funny. It looks better from inside than outside. Even backslidden Christians who should remember how rewarding it is tend to forget, and they dread returning. I was there; I know.

Motor Headed Back to Kansas

Mish Weiss is in a bad state, as should be expected after a bone marrow transplant. I’m hoping this one works better than the last one. You would think marrow from a daughter would be more likely to take hold than marrow from a stranger. It’s comforting to believe, whether or not it’s true. She appreciates all prayers and comments.

I hope some of you will do me a favor and remember my cousin Debbie today. Her cancer involves her brain as well as her lungs. It amazes me, how many people in my family smoke. I can understand the older ones getting caught up in it, because the link between smoking and cancer wasn’t recognized by the US government until 1964. But why did the younger ones start?

Human beings are not driven primarily by reason. If we were, Barack Obama wouldn’t be President, and it would be impossible to get anyone to buy heroin. You would think that intelligence would make us happier and healthier than other creatures, but it hasn’t worked out that way. Intelligence is overrated; I’ve always said so. An ounce of character is worth a ton of intelligence. I’m smart, and I’ve done so many stupid things, I could never hope to remember a tenth of them.

Maybe I shouldn’t write about my lathe problems after saying a thing like that, but I will.

UPS, in its wisdom, sent my damaged motor back to Kansas. They provided no explanation. I have no idea whether they’re paying the seller anything toward the damage. It will be at least a week before I get a replacement.

Yesterday the new VFD arrived. I wired it up and held my breath, wondering if I might accidentally come up with a new way to destroy VFDs. I connected it to the ancient motor the lathe seller sent me, and it ran. Thank God. Literally.

When this motor arrived, it made a bonking sound when the shaft rotated, but now it’s quieter. I don’t know why. The shaft is still a mess, so it’s not possible to align the pulleys well. But the motor works. I’m thinking I should shove it into the lathe cabinet and use it until the Baldor arrives. I could rig it up without conduit for now, in order to make the Baldor installation easier.

If I could get the shaft out, I could use the lathe to take off the shaft burrs that make the pulleys sit at an angle. But I’d need a working motor to do that. I have a single-phase motor I could use, but to do that, I’d need to connect the drum switch. That would be a giant pain. I’ve stripped and degreased the drum switch, in preparation for wiring it to the VFD logic inputs. Besides, I’m sure the motor’s shaft is permanently attached to the rotor or stator or whatever the big thing covered with windings is. You could never mount that in a lathe chuck, unless the lathe was the size of a house.

I suppose a real genius would mount the motor on something solid and use it as a lathe. The shaft would turn, so it would be possible to apply a tool to it. But you’d have to have something solid to mount the tool on, and I think you can see what a Rube Goldberg mess it would be. If I were stranded somewhere and I had to fix the shaft in order to save my life, I’d give it a try, but as it is, it looks like a very bad idea.

I think I have enough crap now–here and in shipment–to use the lathe. I went crazy and sprung for Moly-Dee instead of cheap cutting fluid. The machinery snobs at PM seem to think Tap Magic is only fit for amateurs; they like Accu-lube (nearly impossible to find) and Moly-Dee (expensive). How often am I going to buy fluid? Once a year? I think buying the good stuff is a reasonable expense. I’m also going to get a gallon can of WD-40 for cutting aluminum. They have it at Home Depot.

I Ebayed a used 1/2″ 4-flute center-cutting carbide end mill. I might be able to rig the lathe up so I can use this to trim down the base for my quick change tool post. If not, it’s still a good cutter to have, and I think the total cost is ten bucks. I figured out how to put Enco’s 80-grit aluminum oxide wheels on my half-inch grinder arbors, so I have one of those on the way. I also got a silicon carbide dressing stick. I was not able to get a star-type dresser from Enco, and I didn’t feel like looking elsewhere and paying a big shipping fee for a four-dollar item.

I need some metal to train on. I’ve been watching Craigslist for scrap, but the one promising ad I saw did not produce a return phone call or email. I may have to drive to a metal dealer and pay up. I think I’ll get a couple of feet of bronze, some T6 aluminum, and some leaded steel. With WD-40 on hand, I can work aluminum right now.

What will I do? Don’t know. I guess I’ll start by chucking some aluminum and trying each type of tool, to see how everything works. I have a Clausing manual, but like most manuals for professional tools, it doesn’t tell you how to use the tool. It just tells you where the controls are. I plan to do what I used to do in my old science labs. I’ll make sequential lists of the things I need to do, in order to perform various operations. Then I’ll laminate them and put them near the lathe. This approach is a godsend for absent-minded people. If I had done this when I wired up the first VFD, it would still be working. I ruined that thing simply because I did not accommodate my known failings. The lesson was worth the expense. If you make a dumb mistake while running a lathe, it can mess you up good. A big lathe can roll your arm up like a bedroll, snapping the bones as required. I don’t know if this one can do that, but it can fire a chuck at me at great speed. This lathe should be pretty powerful. I’m using the biggest motor Clausing recommends, and I don’t have the vari-speed drive to sink horsepower. It’s just two belts and a gear or two.

I should make a list of operations I’ll do in order to train myself. That will simplify things and give me direction.

Lists are powerful things, if you have the character to make them and use them. Guess I’m looping now, so I’ll close.

Don’t Feel Left Out

What do you do on Mother’s Day if your mother has passed on?

Here’s a suggestion. Make a donation to Care-Net. They provide counseling, prenatal tests, material assistance, and other types of help to pregnant women in crisis.

Planned Parenthood puts the vast majority of its resources in minority neighborhoods, in a highly successful continuation of the genocidal policies of its twisted founder, Margaret Sanger. Planned Parenthood is the answer to unwanted children, provided you understand that the term “unwanted” refers mainly to the way Planned Parenthood’s overwhelmingly white supporters feel about minority babies. Thanks to them, 60% of black babies are killed before birth. It has proven much cheaper and more effective than lynching adults.

Care-Net is the Christian response. Aborting a baby is fast, cheap, and easy, and it takes no courage. Carrying it and raising it require guts and perseverance. Care-Net helps women stick it out.

I can’t go back in time and improve on the way I treated my mother, but thanks to charities like Care-Net, I can make some effort to acknowledge my debt, by helping other people’s mothers. If your mother, like mine, is no longer here for you to bless, maybe Care-Net can help you, too.

Tools Provided

I guess I’ve solved the 4-jaw chuck problem. I bought the Ebay Skinner chuck I mentioned yesterday. It’s expensive, but the cost is about the same as a Chinese chuck plus a Bison plate, and if I bought that combination, I’d have to do some machining to make it fit. I think. And in the end, it wouldn’t be as good. A new Bison with an L00 mount is about $660, and it’s not an American-made chuck like the one I got. Hopefully I did okay. I also got an 11″ faceplate with lots of slots. I guess I’ll need a drive dog. I think this will cover the basic tooling. Some day I guess I’ll need to be able to use collets and end mills, and I may need a taper attachment. But I think I have enough junk to make the lathe work.

I mean it will work once the motor is installed! Man, that’s frustrating. This week, UPS will be looking at the one that was shipped to me, to try to find a way to weasel out of paying for the broken conduit box. I was a fool to report the damage. For $35, I could have had a new box. I shouldn’t have to pay it, but sometimes the smart thing is to give up. I got a $750 motor for about 85% off. Another thirty-three bucks would not kill me.

I’m sure this is exactly what UPS is hoping customers will say after making their first damage claim. The point of the process, in all likelihood, is not to improve customer relations. It’s to punish customers for reporting damage, so they never do it again.

That’s probably the intended consequence, but here is what the actual result will be. I always use Fedex or the post office when I ship things. UPS’s damage policy has reinforced my preference.

I’ve had one problem with Fedex in all the times I’ve used them, and it was a minor one. I also had a damaged package. I don’t count that as a problem, because Fedex came to the door and took it back, and they brought a new package, and that was the end of it.

UPS has been unionized for a long time, and Fedex has a long, proud history of resisting unions. Maybe there’s a connection.

Church was pretty good last night. My sister wants a church where they talk more about ideas she considers advanced, but I find that I need plenty of help just mastering the fundamentals, so it doesn’t bother me at all when a sermon deals with basic things. I want a sturdy foundation before I worry about parapets and balconies. Maybe different people have different needs. I should also add that the old familiar sensation of God’s presence was there. At one point we were all standing, and I was trying to pray and so on, and the sensation became so strong, words stopped forming in my mind. I had to stop and feel it.

I had been feeling somewhat discouraged. I didn’t do much to promote the cookbook, because I changed so much during the time when it was rolling out, and while sales are not embarrassing, they are not what I hoped they would be. There were things in there that I wish I hadn’t written, so my drive to promote the book was not what it could have been. I have been looking for guidance about what I should do. I would like to use my writing in a positive way, but nothing has come to me so far. I don’t want to practice law; it’s a minefield of temptation. Lawyers spend half their time rationalizing their questionable actions, and when you’re surrounded by people who do that every day, you tend to absorb their mindset. I suppose I could do arbitration and mediation without sinking too deeply into the slime. I don’t want to wake up one day and realize I’ve turned into a parasitic fomenter of litigation.

Yesterday, the pastor and his wife talked about standing in faith. Holding on until you get what you’re supposed to. And although it was a simple message, it hit home. I needed to hear it. God promises us all sorts of stuff, but he also says you can’t expect to receive any of it unless you ask in faith and remain steadfast. I knew that already; I’ve had so many prayers answered after sticking to my guns, you would think it would be a habit by now.

I don’t have financial problems, and I don’t see much danger of problems any time soon. But I would like to be doing something productive. After the book came out and the promotion tapered off, I found myself without a project. Because of the things I heard last night in church, I won’t be worried about that any more. Something is going to happen.

In that vein (I guess it’s appropriate to use an anatomical term), Mish Weiss just had something happen. Her long-lost daughter insisted on donating bone marrow for a transplant. The procedure took place today. Mish is in very bad shape, which is normal under the circumstances. Over the next few weeks, the marrow will have to take root, so to speak, and grow in her body. I hope you’ll pray for Mish’s recovery, and that she will succeed in forming a strong and satisfying bond with God.

I think this may be her reward for carrying her daughter to term. It’s so much like the stories you see in the Bible. People planted seeds, and they came back to bless the world. Think of the births of Samuel, Jesus, John the Baptist, Moses, and Samson. My mother always told me that this was what the Bible meant when it said, “Cast your bread upon the water, for after many days ye shall find it again.”

Mike just called. He and his son are going to a church recommended to him by the pastor at my church. They’re walking in right now. That’s exciting. I’ve never gotten anyone else to go to church. I hope they find something they can hold onto and build on.

Right?

First things first.

Mish Weiss is feeling very weak because they are giving her increased radiation and chemotherapy, in preparation for her second bone marrow transplant. I wrote about this a few days ago. When Mish was in her teens, she gave a daughter up for adoption, and now that daughter insists on donating marrow. Please pray that Mish will be strengthened, and that the transplant will cure her leukemia.

I posted a prayer request about my cousin, who has been diagnosed with 4th-stage lung cancer. People wanted a name. I didn’t put it up at first, because I had concerns about revealing details of her life. But what I have written is pretty spare, so I guess it’s okay. Her name is Debbie. Thanks for helping. I need recommendations for soothing and uplifting Christian music to put in the MP3 player my sister and I bought for her.

I could use a little prayer myself. I have been having real trouble getting back to my routine of retiring and rising early, so I can give the first hour or so of the day to God. Things keep coming up, disrupting my schedule. Any help would be appreciated.

Some people say it doesn’t matter when you pray, but I think that’s wrong. The Bible is full of references to rising early, and the fifth psalm says, “My voice shalt thou hear in the morning, O Lord; in the morning will I direct my prayer unto thee and will look up.” The sixty-third psalm says, “O God, thou are my god. Early will I seek thee.” I think beginning the day with God is like prenatal care; it puts a good foundation under things. And it gives you a jump on your enemies. It’s a little like rolling up your car windows and locking your doors before you drive through a rough neighborhood.

This is an exciting day, by my peculiar standards. The new lathe motor should arrive soon, and I am just about ready to hook it up. The VFD is mounted on the lathe headstock. All I have to do is put the lathe in, attach the belt, and run some wires. It should run like a dream, with that shiny new Baldor.

On Monday I made a plate to hold the VFD, but I was not happy with it, because the paint I bought for it turned out to be so shiny you could actually mistake a painted surface for bare aluminum. I decided to get out my old standby: black truck bed paint. I used my bench grinder to fine-tune the plate so it would fit around the drum switch bracket on the back of the headstock, I scraped the paint away from the bolt holes to assure a good ground connection between the VFD and the lathe, and I sprayed it down. It looks okay, but I am wondering if I now have to worry about heat. The old paint was thin and conducted heat well. This new stuff is a layer of plastic, and the VFD heat sink is pressed right into it. Hopefully the fan and sink included with the VFD are sufficient. Otherwise I’m going to go get a piece of aluminum and make a new plate from that. It will conduct both heat and electricity, and it’s easy to work. I still have to attach conduit and so on, and that means drilling holes. Not fun, in a hard piece of sheet steel.

The old wiring was protected by some strange kind of smooth-surfaced flex conduit. I don’t know what it is. Maybe all plastic flex conduit looks like this. I never use it. How would I know? I don’t have anything like that, and I don’t want to buy a whole box just for this. I guess I’ll use the same metallic flex conduit I used for the compressor.

The lathe has a big push-button switch way down on one pillar (or whatever you call the two parts that make up the cabinet). I assume it’s supposed to be some sort of safety shutoff. It looks awful, and it doesn’t seem to do anything, and it’s in a bad spot. I think I’ll yank it and put it in the trash. I have an emergency disconnect on the wall already. I think the disconnect is probably useless. By the time you get to it, whatever will happen has happened. The VFD’s braking is probably a better answer. It’s too bad this machine has no mechanical brake.

I have been watching my Lathe Learnin’ DVDs. A day or two ago, I learned something interesting. You don’t always have to use a big 4-jaw chuck to get optimal accuracy. You can put a small 4-jaw chuck in your existing 3-jaw chuck. Pretty wild. I’m considering getting a relatively cheap 4-jaw chuck for this purpose. Even if I get a bigger one later, this would be very quick and easy, and it would probably hold 95% of the things I’ll want to work on.

I learned something good last night. You can use a milling machine to do layout. You ink your part, put it in your vise, and use edgefinders or whatever to get you situated. Then you use your DRO or handwheels to put marks where you need them. To make the marks, you put a drill chuck in the mill, and you insert a spring-loaded scribe. You lower the point to the work and move the table to make the scratches.

Clearly, this would justify me spending fifteen thousand dollars on a new Bridgeport.

Maybe not.

But it’s still neat.

The guy from Swarfrat says you can do layout on a PC, print it out, and glue the paper to your work using 3M somthing or other 77 spray adhesive. He says it will be accurate to within a thousandth. His videos are excellent. I feel guilty about renting them, even though it’s legal. I’m planning to buy some of his materials, to support what he does.

I have been trying to choose drill bits. Believe it or not, this is complicated. Apparently, there are about 115 bits in a complete 1/16″-1/2″ set. Some sets have 114 or 118, but 115 is the number I keep seeing. And you have to make a lot of choices.

First off, you have to choose the length. I think I’m going to get short screw machine (or “stub”) bits. They take up less room on your machines, and they’re rigid, and they are more than long enough for most jobs. But you can also get mechanic’s length (longer) or jobber length (longer still). What is a “jobber”? No idea.

Second, you have to choose the material. Cobalt is expensive, but it lasts longer than high speed steel, and you can cut harder stuff with it. You can sharpen it on a plain old grinder. But the gaps between the flutes are smaller, so it may not clear chips as well. High speed steel is cheap and good, but it will get dull quickly if you drill anything hard.

On top of that, there are different finishes. I bought some Hitachi bits coated with titanium nitride (TiN), and as far as I can tell, the finish is completely worthless. The drills dull almost instantly when used on hard metal. But others assure me that quality TiN-coated bits are more slippery than HSS, and that you can run them faster, and that TiN resists wear. I don’t see how it can resist wear once you’ve used the drill, because the finish comes off the tip in a hurry, and the tip is where the action is. But people pay for it, so there must be a reason for it. I wouldn’t buy it again. It may well be that my Hitachi bits are actually Chinese, so I would not judge TiN by their performance.

Third, there are different tip styles. You can get them in 118-degree or 135-degree styles, and you can get split points. I’ve seen photos of these, and I didn’t see anything that looked like a split, but okay, whatever. They’re supposed to walk less when you start holes.

Once you get past all that, you have to make a decision on how to sharpen them. The old-fashioned way is to use a grinder and a little gauge and eyeball them. I am trying to get out of the habit of doing things the hard way, so I considered getting a sharpening machine instead. The only one available at a price I am willing to pay is the Drill Doctor. Is it a good machine? It’s fantastic. Or it’s complete garbage. Everyone you ask tells a different story. Aargh. I guess the smart thing is to get a gauge and see what happens. I’ve sharpened drills in the past, but that was out of laziness and desperation, and I had no idea what I was doing. I don’t know if I want to keep doing it without a special tool.

Can you believe how hard it is to buy drill bits? I never imagined. And what if I need different lengths later on? I’ll have to repeat the entire expense.

I got a cobalt bit the other day, and I am really impressed. It seemed completely unintimidated by the steel plate I drilled. Maybe that just shows how sad my other bits are. I’m considering splurging on a set of US-made cobalt bits. Hard to decide. It’s about $100 for HSS and $300 for cobalt. Lots of money, either way.

The grinder is also a headache. It’s a wonderful machine; a 6″ Baldor that runs at 1800 RPM. But the wheels it came with are apparently intended to be a practical joke. They’re 36 and 60 grit, in silicon carbide. Not much good for anything other than shaping metal and sharpening coarse tools like hoes. I have to get aluminum oxide in 80 grit, and of course, most wheels fitting that description don’t fit my arbors. Enco’s wheel page says to use their “universal arbor adapter,” which is NOT IN THE CATALOG. However I’m pretty sure the items they sell under the heading “bushings” are actually adapters, so I’m buying one, as well as a wheel. A real man would turn an adapter in his lathe! Where are the real men when you need them?

I’ll need the grinder when I want to make HSS lathe tools. How do you do that? Well, you buy a $5000 milling machine and a face shield, remove the eye shields from your grinder, remove the highly risible tool supports, make a fancy-shmancy adjustable tool table that goes in front of the wheels (including an adjustable protractor), and you check the material you’re working, and you refer to a giant chart of appropriate angles, and you grind your tool. OR you stand in front of a bare grinder wheel and ram the blank into it, and you make every single angle either 10 or 15 degrees. The first method is the Rudy Kouhoupt method (from his DVD), and the second one is the Lathe Learnin’ method. The guy in the Lathe Learnin’ video says his tools work just fine for him. If he can get away with it, I guess I should try it, too. I really don’t want to turn this into precision machining if I don’t have to. I don’t want to turn the tool into the workpiece.

I think the more you study this stuff, the harder your life gets. If you just plug your machine in and get to work, you probably learn all the things you need to know reasonably fast, and I’m sure a lot of the things I’m learning have more to do with anal retention than practicality.

This is the story of my day so far.

Match Made in Heaven

If you’ve been following Mish Weiss’s story, you know she had a daughter when she was a teenager. She made the right choice, letting her daughter live and giving her up for adoption. Recently, Mish found her.

Mish is in bad shape. Her leukemia is getting worse. But there is a glimmer of hope. There is a possibility that a bone marrow transplant will save her, and it turns out her daughter, Abby, is a match. Mish told her not to bother; she thought it would be a lot of pain for nothing. But this girl insisted. So on Sunday, Mish gets the transplant! There are no guarantees that it will work, but it’s a chance Mish would never have gotten, but for the existence of Abby.

How about that? Mish sacrificed to bring Abby into this world; now Abby is sacrificing to help Mish stay here. There is now way Mish could have known, all those years ago, that she was carrying someone who would return to save her. The only reward she expected was freedom from the sin of taking the life of her child.

Makes you wonder what miracles our abortion industry has prevented.

The Gloves are Off

I just read this unbelievable quotation in the Jerusalem Post, via Drudge:

Thwarting Iran’s nuclear program is conditional on progress in peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians, according to White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel.

SINCE WHEN DID OPPOSING EVIL REQUIRE AN ADDITIONAL INCENTIVE?

Obama is so stupid and conceited he seriously believes the Iranians will bow to the synthetic Messiah. That’s the only explanation. That, and anti-Semitism. How can he not realize Iran is a threat to all humanity? Is he so determined to spite Israel that he’ll give Iran the tools to start a worldwide conflagration? Thank you, Jeremiah Wright. Job well done.

I have to ask it again: when will American Jews learn who their real friends are? When was the last time you heard a leftist pundit express concern about Israel’s security? It never happens. But conservatives voice their outrage every day!

Show Rahm what you think of him. Donate money to the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, in his name. They’ll use it to do things that would make him retch up his tofu.

It’s a pity they only accept dollars. I’d like to send thirty pieces of silver.

Don’t even try to tell me this disgraceful President is not the manifestation of a curse.

Help us Out

My third cousin has been diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer. I would appreciate it if people who read this site would pray for her physical health and also for her mental health. I don’t want to go into details, but this is a truly delightful person whose life had been utterly blighted even before this diagnosis. I just wish God would give her a blessing what would somehow make her whole and constitute a redemption.

Three Cheers for the Invincible Master Race

I have been thinking about the Chrysler mess for a couple of days, and two obvious questions come up.

1. Shouldn’t people be angry that Bush and Obama gave these incompetents billions of dollars, knowing it was a complete waste? I knew it, and I’m not even President. And so did tens of millions of other Americans. But the press’s reaction is barely audible.

2. Doesn’t this prove that conservatives were right when we said the failure of a Big Three company would not kill the economy, and if that is true, isn’t bailing the automakers out a stupid idea? Shouldn’t we cease all efforts to keep these parasitic, terminally ill companies going?

We were told (by Bush as well as Obama) that we had to keep the Big Three alive, because a failure would have ripple effects that would destroy our economy. Chrysler has failed, and the stock market is up, and nobody is rioting in the streets. Hmm…looks like the socialists were WRONG, doesn’t it? A lot of businessmen are actually happy that Chrysler is going bankrupt. It’s the normal, healthy thing for a failed company to do.

Why did Bush do this? McCain was already dead; it couldn’t help him. The bailout was approved after the election. What possible reason could Bush have had to become an eleventh-hour socialist? The man is not stupid. Surely he didn’t think this would work. Doesn’t he have any faith in the free market?

I guess there are no capitalists in foxholes. When times get rough, politicians pray to their true messiah. Karl Marx.

This is all foolishness. The incompetence and obsolescence of the Big Three are only one part of the problem, and they are far and away the lesser part. The Chinese are going to eat our car industry. Accept it. Let’s let the Big Three die in the cheapest possible way, because it’s foreordained. There are two possibilities. America will not make cars, or we will pay our auto workers so little we can compete with China. There is no third choice, and the second choice is pretty unlikely. Actually, the third choice is a never-ending subsidy that bleeds us dry, but I believe that even Obama is smart enough to see that that won’t fly. Besides, he has the heart of a tyrant, and he didn’t like the way the UAW refused to toe the line.

What we are doing right now is not investment. It’s welfare. We are not going to get our money back from the carmakers, because they’re not going to make a profit. We’re just enabling them. Keeping them alive a little longer. Delaying a constructive move toward redeployment of their work force in industries that have some hope of prospering.

I have a prediction about Obama’s choice to replace Ruth Ginsberg. It’s going to be someone so offensive to conservatives that we will utterly stunned, and whoever it is, she will be confirmed. We are going to have to drink our own bathwater one more time. But for the fact that a woman has to get the job, I’d predict Laurence Tribe or Alan Dershowitz. If Hillary Clinton were not busy already, I’d expect her to be on the list. Maybe it will be someone from the Ninth Circuit. They have three female judges. They’re all white, however, so maybe they aren’t strong candidates. I’m glad Rosie O’Donnell doesn’t have a law degree.

I feel certain it will be a God-hating idiot of such colossal stature that conservatives will vomit for at least a month. We are going to miss Ruth Ginsberg. America is rotting from within, like a cancer patient, and the new associate justice will be part of the rot. Just like the illegal aliens who are becoming more and more powerful, even obtaining the right to vote. Our enemies are crawling inside us to gestate and metastasize, because our walls are down.

Why do I say Obama is going to appoint someone awful? Because America has lost its blessing. Discarded it, in fact. Obama is a divine punishment, and so are his appointees.

I have this strange feeling that our judiciary is going to go to hell, but we will somehow retain our gun rights. So many Christians are getting into shooting; I think there has to be a reason for it, and it wouldn’t make sense, if we were going to lose our guns in the near future.

I also think the Chinese are going to gain such a military advantage over us that we will be helpless before them when we finally have a showdown. They’ve infiltrated our military technology, and they are already able to destroy our vital military satellites in a single day, and Obama has announced that he plans to kill weapons R&D as well as the missile shield. Even Carter was smarter than that.

I see it this way: America is in trouble; Christians within America are not. And Israel will survive without us, because her blessing, unlike ours, is eternal. We’re probably going to shrivel into insignificance and chaos, but Israel is going to survive and grow closer to God. I suspect that Iran is going to get nuclear weapons soon, and that Obama will prevent the Israelis from doing anything about it. And maybe Iran will use them. But in the end, whatever her trials may be, Israel will prevail.

People keep saying we’re going to pull out or our tailspin, because we’ve always recovered in the past. But the past was different. We were not as proud and decadent, and we didn’t have powerful, wealthy enemies whose strength was on the rise. The Nazis were creampuffs compared to China, India, and Russia. The Third Reich had no legs. Neither did the USSR or the 20th-century Chicoms. Our new enemies have capitalist engines driving them, and they have inexhaustible manpower and natural resources. All we have is an idiotic, offensive presumption that Americans are the master race. I guess the Jews felt the same way, right before the Babylonians crushed them. We didn’t make America great; human beings don’t have the power to do things like that. But we do have the power to destroy her.

I know I sound like a pessimist, but that only applies to my country. I’m extremely optimistic for myself and my family. Besides, the prophets were generally pessimists, so I’m in good company. It’s funny, but God never raises up a voice to tell a nation that everything they’re doing is just swell. If God were a parent in an SUV, and he had a rotten kid who was too lazy to get good grades and an honor roll bumper sticker, he wouldn’t have one of those ridiculous consolation-prize “Terrific Kid” stickers on his bumper, to pump up the little brat’s self-esteem. He tells it like it is, and I don’t think he really cares if we have low self-esteem. If anything, he is displeased when we have too much.