Rasmussen Proves It

My Chinese (of course) carbide indexed cutting tools arrived yesterday. The price was great. But the lid on the little plastic case was smashed. The seller took the whole mess and shoved it in a Priority Mail envelope instead of a box, and naturally, something got crushed. He didn’t even sandwich it in bubble wrap.

I complained. Carbide tools are brittle, and you’re supposed to store them in a way that keeps them from touching other tools. One way to do that might be…a plastic case! It’s important. Granted, I can throw out the case lid and rig something up. But I shouldn’t have to.

What do you think? Am I being too picky? This guy could just as easily have used a box. Priority Mail boxes exist.

No response to my complaint yet. I can’t see giving someone a negative over this, but a neutral might be in order. If you’re going to ship people things, you should make some effort to pack them correctly.

Yesterday, unfortunately, I found something interesting on Craigslist. Another lathe. Wait! It’s not as bad as you think. It’s a little bitty lathe. Like Otisburg. The company that makes it goes as small as 4″ by 8″, and I think their biggest model has a 10″ swing. I’m not sure which model it is, but the description makes it sound really small. It’s a good lathe, too; not Chinese. And it has tooling. And the price is too good to pass up. Dang it.

It would be pretty cool to have a tiny lathe I could store in the closet, for very small parts. I could teach Marv to run it.

He’d make a lot of bells, I suppose. Bells are his bag.

Two disturbing items in the news today. First, only 53% of Americans told the Rasmussen pollsters that capitalism is better than socialism. And 30% of Democrats think socialism is better. Big surprise there.

It looks like the liberals have won the education battle. Socialism has caused the deaths of tens of millions of people, and it has never produced a good standard of living anywhere, and it is the greatest evil mankind has ever encountered. But a fair number of Americans, especially those who were “educated” after our school system was destroyed by liberals, think socialism is…pretty rad. No work! Free beers! Che T-shirts! If you want to be a lazy, flabby slouch all your life, socialism is the bomb. A lot of people are content to live that way. Clip your own wings and belly up to the trough.

This is how the killing fields in Cambodia happened. People didn’t know, or ignored, the clear and obvious lessons of history. They thought they could take something that had never worked anywhere and somehow make it succeed. And they ended up rounding up educated people, lining them up beside big holes, and machine-gunning them to death.

Here is the lesson conservatives should have learned from the last three elections, especially after seeing the impact of swing voters. The stupid are incredibly dangerous. The stupid make totalitarianism possible. Our kids are stupid, and they’re getting more stupid every decade. Look out.

The poisonous harvest of our most toxic decade, the Sixties, is a bizarre notion that the young are smart. In truth, the young are generally fools. I certainly was. But back in the Sixties, the left managed to seize on one or two things the old had been wrong about–things like racism and reckless pollution–and convince the young that the old were wrong about EVERYTHING. Since then we have been producing insolent, unprincipled, overconfident, weak children who think their tiny brains hold the keys to a bright and happy future where everyone eats tofu and and smokes free dope and has sex with no consequences.

It’s amazing; a human being will generally get smarter with age. But our nation, composed entirely of human beings, has gotten dumber. And we’re going to pay. Stupidity is an extremely expensive luxury.

I wasn’t raised very well. To some extent, I am part of the problem. I don’t mean to be disrespectful to my parents, and I don’t blame them for my failings, but they made mistakes. When you have kids, you should give them the same kind of effort you put into your job, at the very least. There should be a plan. There should be discipline and oversight. I didn’t get everything I needed. Thank God, I am able to perceive the existence of the problem, so I can work to improve myself. But many people are not as lucky as I am. They think the neglect they experienced as kids was freedom. They’re grateful for it. They think it allowed them to grow up without the “backward” ideas that made their grandparents so silly. They don’t understand that restrictions can be great blessings. Rules aren’t like shackles, intended purely to deprive you of liberty. They’re like frames that guide tomato plants and help them produce more fruit.

Presumably, every book of the Bible has a purpose. I believe that one purpose of the book of Proverbs is to help people like me. There are lessons my parents failed to teach me. And I’ve absorbed a lot of counterproductive ideas throughout my life. Where do people like me go for guidance? Pastors don’t have the time to provide it. You can’t expect your friends to fill the need. You can’t just think it up on your own. The book of Proverbs can be very helpful. It’s like a frozen bone marrow transplant, waiting to be infused into lost generations, to heal them of the cancer of savagery. Wisdom is supposed to reside in human beings, but sometimes it misses generations, and it has to be stored somewhere so people raised without exposure to it can be reinoculated.

I went through this book systematically. I found that I already believed and applied a lot of it, so I deleted those portions. I put the rest in a Word file. Now I have it to use as a reference. The deletions left me with a targeted version that focuses on my specific gaps. I don’t look at it often enough, but I keep a printout handy. You might give this a try. Wisdom really is power, and it will take care of you.

Sometimes I look at that printout and alight on passages I wish I had read twenty years ago. I think of specific mistakes I have made, and the pain they have caused me, and I wince. That’s the kind of experience parents are trying to spare you when they tell you to pull up your pants, get a real haircut, stop watching MTV, and get your butt to church.

In case any kids are reading this, let me say this. Socialism is a horror, and it will bring only misery and death. And there is no such thing as safe sex. And piercings are generally disgusting.

The other thing that disturbed me today was a ridiculous essay by Juan Williams. Someone sent me a link to it. He comes out and admits he thinks gun ownership should be banned. Like it was in Washington D.C., that peaceful haven where crime is unknown. Unbelievable.

Here’s an incredible quotation:

In fact, in Nebraska there is a big argument in the legislature about guns. It is not about banning them. The debate is whether to allow security guards to bring guns into churches. To my mind the debate should be about how to keep all guns out of churches.

If Mr. Williams had had his way, Jean Assam would not have been able to shoot the man who murdered two people in the parking lot of New Life Church. If, on the other hand, Ted Nugent had had his way, that murderer would probably have been killed much earlier in the day, when he opened fire at another church. A churchgoer packing heat would have laid him out on the pavement. Whose way do you prefer? I prefer Ted’s. When I go to church, I keep a switchblade in my pocket and a pistol in my glove compartment. I’d carry inside, if I had the clothes for it.

Why is there any doubt about a church’s right to have armed guards? We don’t prevent stores and banks from using guns to assure security. Explain why churches should be different. Provide the basis for the state’s right to discriminate against any institution in this matter, based purely on that institution’s status as a religious entity. The disciples would not have been allowed inside a church run by Mr. Williams. They carried swords, on orders from Jesus himself. If Juan Williams ran the Vatican, the Swiss Guard would be ejected from the premises. They carry MACHINE GUNS. Not semi-automatic. Automatic. Most people in the Williams faction don’t know the difference. Their writings prove it every day.

Quite frankly, I find it odd that the Pope isn’t armed. If you require other people to bear arms for you, you are fully responsible for what they do, and you should be willing to do the same thing. If you’re not willing to do that, how are you different from Rosie O’Donnell, who preaches against guns yet pays armed bodyguards? If John Paul II had been armed when Mehmet Ali Agca attacked, he might have spared himself some surgery and prolonged his life.

Says Mr. Williams:

The roll call of death and suffering from guns continued earlier this month with the tragic mass shooting in Binghamton, N.Y. That followed one man killing ten people in Alabama before taking his own life. And that preceded the murders of eight people in a North Carolina nursing home, as well as one parolee shooting four policemen to death in Oakland, Calif.

Excuse me, but how is that “suffering from guns”? Isn’t it actually “suffering from criminals”? And which of these murderers would have obeyed a law banning gun ownership? The laws against murder, which have steeper penalties, didn’t bother them at all. And what do you think would have happened had the first three killers encountered armed civilians? Same thing that happened in New Life Church.

Reading this column, I learn two things. First, Juan Williams is never going to make it as a professional logician. Second, he’s a great target for violent crime. He chooses to be defenseless, and he makes good money. I think that if I were opposed to allowing civilians the means to defend themselves, I’d be smart enough to avoid bragging about it on national television, while working in a city known for street crime. It’s like begging to be mugged.

Williams says no change is in sight. I sure hope that’s true. Barack Obama and his awful Attorney General have done more to arm Americans in the last six months than the NRA could have done in ten years. I’d hate to see that wonderful progress reversed.

Proven Idiot Supposedly Deserves Chance Bush Never Got

I am sad to report a setback in the quest for the ultimate pillow. Night before last I tried a memory foam pillow and slept extremely well, and all day yesterday I felt almost as though I were on speed. It made a big difference. Yesterday I got a second pillow–a fake down product called Indulgence–and I thought my joy would be complete. But I had a little congestion anyway, and on top of that, I couldn’t get to sleep on time. It’s as if the extra energy from sleeping well made me more sensitive to caffeine. So today, no coffee, and I’m drinking my daily ration of revolting green tea as early as possible, to give the caffeine time to wear off.

I still feel much better than I used to.

I just skimmed Camille Paglia’s latest. I never read anything she has written in its entirety. She has not mastered the humane tool known as the paragraph, and she seems to write defensively, the way a lot of self-proclaimed intellectuals do. They’re used to hanging around with people who correct each other and whose big thrill in life is pretending to be much smarter than they really are. They always end up using bigger words than they need and giving unhelpful references to show you how much they’ve read. They do this to discourage other pretentious effetes from finding opportunities to show them up. Yes, Camille, we know you own four tons of books and actually made it through Ulysses. Just write like a human being, okay? Be like Billy Joel, who said he never wanted to work that hard. There’s a reference for you. I’m sorry it couldn’t be Krishnamurti or Ezra Pound.

Sooner or later, she’s going to snap and admit she’s conservative. She’s like Dennis Miller and Ron Silver. She keeps saying the same things about liberals that conservatives say. This is why a lot of liberals hate her. Eventually she’s going to break down and say, “Okay, I’m a lesbian, but I can’t take these hippies any more, and I am just not stupid enough to think socialism works.”

She’s secure enough to get herself in trouble by criticizing the left, but she’s not secure enough to abandon it. Which is all right, I guess, since we already seem to have enough conservatives who want nothing to do with God or morality. I refer to the actual God, not the one Joseph Smith made up.

Today she admits that Barack Obama is an embarassment. Hello? Where was she when he was using a childish gesture to give Hillary Clinton the finger on camera? Where was she when we learned that he belonged to an anti-Semitic church, and that the pastor was one of his closest associates? Where was she when we found out one of his buddies was a terrorist who belongs on death row?

Wake up, lady. Barack Obama has been an embarassment for a long time. And his wife is downright disgusting. You don’t grab the Queen of England with your big Amazon paws and wool her around like a puppy. You don’t go on TV and tell America you’ve been ashamed of it for virtually all of the four decades of your pampered life, which was made possible by America’s misguided generosity and bizarre notions of collective guilt.

Michelle Obama is like the relative you pray won’t show up at your wedding. And now she is the face our womanhood presents to the world.

Paglia says the “major” media has been remiss in not howling over Obama’s horrific bow the to the despotic ruler of Saudi Arabia. No duh. Thanks for pointing out the obvious and expecting people to applaud your remarkable insight. And where have you been, woman? How could you not expect this kind of thing, from a guy who spent most of his life as a glorified bagman for the chicago machine? He’s been kissing the rings of corrupt tyrants for decades; he probably bowed out of habit.

It’s revealing that Paglia admits that the mainstream press is unfair in Obama’s favor, but notice she won’t go the whole distance. She won’t call them “the liberal media.” She’s thinking it, people. This woman has only made it out of one closet. The other one is yet to burst open.

Too funny. Free thinking is good when it gets you attention and lands you book deals, but when it threatens your social life, suddenly it’s SCARY. Ann Coulter appears to be mentally ill, but give her credit. She isn’t afraid to say what she feels like saying, and as a result, she has probably lost more friends and eaten more gay-waiter boogers than anyone in history.

I will never be able to make the kind of clever references Camille Paglia makes, because I pretty much abandoned literature over twenty years ago. I realized that literature was unrealistic; it was written from the point of view of people who had great faith in despair and none in God. The world of literature is distorted, because God doesn’t exist there. Henry Miller said the first thing you scratch down when you start to write is “the cry of the wounded angel: pain.” How right he was. But here’s an equally accurate way to put it. To a large degree, literature is an elaborate form of whining. I don’t think that would have pleased Miller’s readers as much as the angel thing.

Ahab ends up tied to the whale, sort of like a big dead suction-cup Garfield on a white minivan. The savage hangs himself because he can’t find his place in man’s squeaky clean, genetically engineered world. The smelly old Italian guy who hangs out at the whorehouse says, “It’s better to live on your feet than die on your knees,” because there is no divine mathematician up there, balancing the moral equations. My world isn’t like that. Is yours? Why should I read books in which my views will be shaped by unfortunate fictional people who DON’T GET IT? If I want to be pelted with wrongness, I don’t need a book. I can turn on Air America. Assuming it still exists.

Did I get the references wrong? If so, good for me. It shows I haven’t been wasting my time.

Speaking of ways to spend time, I’ve been thinking about the amazing tools I saw over at Practical Machinist. I linked to a thread started by a guy who says he’s a starting machinist. He made his own quick-change tool post set, plus other helpful machining items you would ordinarily have to buy. It makes me wonder if I should try to make a few tools for myself. Example: a Criterion boring head costs hundreds of dollars. The metal used it in can probably be had for two figures. Some people make their own boring heads with little mills and lathes. Maybe I could do that.

I wish I could make a milling attachment for the lathe, but that appears to be a milling job, so like I said in an earlier post, I think you need a milling attachment in order to make a milling attachment.

Someone posted a question here about small lathes, like Sherlines and Taigs. I’d recommend looking at W.R. Smith’s video about tooling up for clockmaking. He says Sherline now provides so much milling paraphernalia for lathes, you can do a ton of stuff without springing for a second machine.

I bought some lathe DVDs. Smartflix is useful, but they’re very slow. I can’t wait two months. Besides, I like to support the people who create educational materials when I can. Some video sets, like the ones from ATI, are obscenely expensive. Others cost a little over twice as much as Smartflix charges to rent them. I can swing that.

I hope more junk arrives today. I can sit in the garage and fondle it until the lathe gets here.

“Medical” = Markup

Man, did I get burned yesterday. I went to Vitamin Shoppe to get curcumin and green tea pills. I don’t take tea in pill form, but I like to mix it with soap and water and moosh it onto suspicious areas on my skin; it does a real number on actinic keratoses, and it sure beats paying a dermatologist to freeze them or slice them out, leaving big divots in my face.

I got to the register, and the girl told me my total was a little over forty bucks. FORTY. For a hundred tea bags’ worth of tea plus a third of a pound of turmeric. Does that sound right to you? The only reason I take curcumin capsules is that turmeric is too disgusting to swallow in powder form. But at thirty-two bucks a bottle, it may motivate me to start using a spoon.

I usually use Vitacost.com, but I figured I could stand to pay brick-and-mortar prices for two measly items. Forget THAT. Today I’m going to Costco, and I’m going to make very sure I get a big jug of fish oil. That’s the only thing I’m missing right now.

I’ve also decided to get a memory-foam pillow. I can’t put up with congestion any more; I’m wondering if being around Marvin and Maynard has sensitized me to feathers. For thirty bucks, I can find out.

The other day I wrote about someone I know from Nowlive. He started having strokes. I don’t have all the details. I was told he was going in for an operation involving his heart and brain, and I was asked to put up a prayer request, so I did. I’m happy to report that he seems okay. Thanks, everyone who helped.

It seems like my blog is becoming a prayer clearinghouse these days. That’s fine with me. I can always use something positive on my record, to offset the bad things I do. I think it’s important to look for opportunities to do good deeds, because they won’t always come knocking on your door.

I got another request last week, but I didn’t post it, because a blog entry that goes up on a Friday is worthless. No one will read it. Here’s the draft I typed to keep me from forgetting:

Someone who frequents this blog sent me a prayer request. Had it arrived yesterday, I would have figured it for an April Fool’s joke, but since it arrived today, it must be serious. It sounds bad. I won’t say who sent it; if he wants, he can ID himself in the comments.

This individual has been suffering from Dupuytren’s contractures in his hands. This is a disease that causes the hands to contract and the palms to become tough. That has been treated surgically, and he is not happy with the results. Now he says he has been diagnosed with Peyronie’s disease. Look it up if you want. It’s a urological issue which can cause considerable suffering.

His wife has had cardiac problems and migraines. She has been treated successfully for a brain aneurysm. Now she’s having dizzy spells and falling for no reason.

On top of all this, they’ve both had cataract surgery.

These folks are having a bad time. I hope you’ll take a minute and put a word in for them.

I have to get on the road to Costco. I hope they have kosher Coke!

Decent Milling Machine in Miami?

I had assumed that my only machine tool buy for the first half of this year would be a lathe. Now I think I may have been wrong. Sometimes you see a deal that is so good you have no choice but to take it.

Last night I noticed a Bridgeport mill for sale locally. Nine hundred bucks. It doesn’t look great; it’s painted in one of the shades known to Internet forum users as “Ebay blue.” But it has a DRO, what may be a Kurt vise, a power feed, and a bunch of collets.

A used DRO is worth maybe 500 bucks. The vise is worth 250. The collets would run maybe a hundred. I could take the good stuff off of this, sell the rest for scrap, and break even. Or I could use it until something better showed up, take the good stuff off, put the good stuff on the better machine, and then sell this one for scrap.

Whoops! The same machine is on Ebay for $4500! What’s up with that? The bigger Ebay photos don’t look so hot. And it’s not local! It’s in Tampa!

Never mind. When you add $700 to get it here, it’s not so exciting.

Church was good today. They’ve been putting on an Easter show. It’s impressive. The acting is not Oscar-quality, and it would not be the end of the world if someone polished up the script, but most of the music was incredible. I don’t know where they find these people.

The best part came at the end. People who were at the scene of the crucifixion took the mike, and they gave their testimonies. One credited God with finding her a job. Another said God restored his business and his family after his wife died from cancer. And another said her daughter was healed of terminal cancer and has since gone on to have a recording career in Christian music.

I suspect that we focus too much on what God does for us, and not enough on what we’re supposed to do for him. But it’s extremely important for people to talk about the miracles in their lives. People who don’t believe point to “miracles” that have turned out to be false, and they make the bizarre claim that no one has ever been proven to have experienced a miracle. But answered prayers are all around us. People really do get healed of cancer from time to time. Folks have visions. Families are put back together. And you can find the witnesses. They’re real people, with names. Lots and lots of people pray for things they don’t receive, but they’re not the whole story.

I had a strange experience on Friday. Twice in my life I have literally felt the presence of God in the room with me, so powerfully that I could tell you its exact location. On other occasions, I’ve felt it in a more diffuse and general way, but that almost always happens in church, not when I’m alone. On Friday, I was sitting here in this chair, and I felt it descend on me. For no clear reason. Not in one location, but throughout the atmosphere of the room. If you know the sensation I’m talking about, you know it’s very, very pleasant. It’s something that doesn’t happen every day or on command, so when it happens, you stop what you’re doing and try to enjoy it and make it last. I sat here and concentrated on it and made the most of it.

I can’t figure out why it happened or what the point of it was. I wish it would happen more often.

Sometimes I’m suspicious of people who claim to have supernatural experiences and who say they know exactly what they meant or why they happened. In my experience, God is not obvious. He does things that seem to have no purpose, and he does them when you least expect them, and you are left grateful but also somewhat confused.

The thing that impressed me about it was that it appeared to have no connection whatsoever to anything I had done. I wasn’t fasting or writing a big check to help orphans or doing anything else that could be considered particularly righteous. In fact, I was feeling guilty about some bad things I had done. I always think slipping up will wreck my relationship with God and set me back, but it doesn’t always work that way. Maybe it never works that way and I just don’t realize it. In any case, I felt like I had received something of tremendous value. I’ll bet this doesn’t happen very often to people we all think of as lucky, like Bill Gates or Barack Obama. I think it’s better than the things they’ve received, and that I’m luckier than people like that. When those people die, the good things they’ve received disappear. Things that advance you spiritually can’t be taken away. I think this is why the Bible uses words like “vanity” and “leasing” to describe earthly blessings. They’re not permanent, and you don’t own them. I own the good things that have been given to me. Forever.

Here’s something I’ve thought about a lot. If civilization somehow disappeared, and a group of people survived on an island somewhere, and some of those people had been rich and powerful beforehand, those people would no longer be anything special. They’d have no advantage over anyone else. Donald Trump would be no better off than a guy who collected garbage for a living. They’d be equals. But people who knew God would still know him, and they would still have all the advantages they had before the disaster.

I think about that, and it makes me wonder what’s real and what isn’t.

I guess I’m rambling. Marv is squawking for attention, so I’ll stop here.

Nosebleeds

Mish Weiss is having nosebleeds. This can kill a leukemia patient. Please pray.

Relic From the Archives

Can I tell you how great it is to dream of something for decades and then do it?

I am going to get up off my lazy rear end and take a photo of something for you.

That is my copy of The Metalworker’s Benchtop Reference Manual. I got it about 20 years ago. I’ll tell you why I bought it.

My mother had some stone crab claws. Stone crabs have very thick shells. They are not easy to bust. These days, most sellers crack them before they sell them. That was not the case in the 80s. At least, not at the place where my mother got these claws. She needed help with them.

The standard thing to do is to get a hammer and put the claws on a cutting board, one at a time, and go at it. But that makes shells and bits of crab fly around, and it’s easy to overdo it. My solution? Vise Grips.

It turns out that if you tighten Vise Grips on a crab claw using the screw in the handle, you can break a very tough crab claw by squeezing the handles without much force at all. It’s beautiful.

That inspired me. I thought I needed to make my own crab claw breakers. The Vise Grips worked okay, but it was time-consuming to adjust the screw before every squeeze. I had a couple of ideas for a set of pliers that used leverage.

I went to a local machine shop and paid a guy $35 to make some pliers I designed. They would have worked, but he used 1/8″ mild steel, so they weren’t strong enough.

I knew absolutely nothing about machining. I got a drill press, and then I went to a metal supply place and ordered a small amount of tool steel. You can probably imagine how well that went. The instant a spinning tool hits tool steel (at the wrong speed, with no lube or coolant), the tool steel hardens up until it’s about like a diamond. I managed to get part of the way through the project, and then I quit. It was at some point during this time that I got the manual. It was pretty much the only book I had seen anywhere that I thought might contain a clue about how to make the crab pliers. I saw it in a bookstore one day, and I bought it on a whim.

I never got any benefit from the book, nor did I succeed in creating the pliers. But it shows how long I have been interested in machining.

I am in the process of getting a metal lathe. Readers and people I’ve contacted via forums are giving me all sorts of advice. Everyone said the tooling was what would kill me, and I tried not to think about it until the lathe order was in the works. Now reality is in my face, and I am buying things like fishtail gauges, dial calipers (better than the Chicom jobs I already have), indexed carbide tools, and a tool post. Thank God for China and the used-tool market. Without these resources, there is no way the cost of this effort would be something I could make myself swallow.

Machining experts seem to agree that you should learn turning before you learn milling, so the lathe is probably a good move. But I would still like to make those crab pliers! I could do it on a lathe, if I could get a milling attachment. I’m pretty sure Clausing made about 3 of those attachments, and they have since been sold for scrap and turned into doorknobs. I suppose there’s a work-around. There always is.

I can’t wait to do this. I can’t wait to see the first chip squirting off the surface of a workpiece. FINALLY. This will be even better than the table saw, which, without a doubt, is a life-changing tool.

Maybe I’ll even get to use that book.

I’m convinced that good things like this come from turning back to God.

Make it Fast

I wish I had known about this before I went to bed.

Someone I got to know through Nowlive has had a series of strokes. Right now he is in surgery. This is one of the nicest people you could ever hope to know. I have been asked to post a prayer request.

I ask you to pray that the surgery is successful, and that he is healed completely, and of course, that he draw closer to God.

I Plead Guilty

I have depressing news about Mish Weiss. Don’t worry; the news about her health is great. What’s depressing is the way she has been treated.

Many people have been praying for Mish. Many of those people are Christians. And Christians want other people to become Christians. I certainly do; I don’t pretend otherwise. But it looks like some people got overexcited and used poor judgment, going overboard in their efforts to expose her to the gospel.

Mish wrote a polite response on her blog, stating that she did not wish to become a Christian. It’s her decision to make. God gives each of us that choice.

Since then, she has been receiving hate mail from people claiming to be Christians. I don’t say “claiming to be Christians” because I don’t think Christians could do this. They certainly could, and I’m sure some of the responsible people are Christians. I say it because it’s possible that some of the vicious morons who sent these emails were just posing as Christians to make trouble. Like the Democrats who call radio shows and use the phrase “lifelong Republican” to describe themselves.

One particularly fine person sent an email accusing Mish of hating Christians. Wasn’t that helpful and loving? She was also called “Christ-killer.” And worse.

I can’t believe there are Christians so stupid, bigoted, and vicious that they would use the term “Christ-killer.” The fact is, every Christian is a Christ-killer. We believe Jesus had to die, and chose to do so, in order to pay for our sins. That means he is our sacrifice. Our sins caused it. So we are the ones who caused the death of Christ. It amazes me that there are people who don’t understand that. Have you sinned? Have you accepted Jesus and asked for forgiveness? If so, you’re a Christ-killer. Get used to it.

A long while back, I got a ridiculous, self-righteous email criticizing me for not pushing Mish to accept Christ. I posted the text here, and I explained why this person was wrong.

Many Christians are unfamiliar with Jews and the Jewish mind. I’m more aware than most. I’ve been living among Jews since I was three. Half of the students at my high school were Jewish. I spent three years at Columbia University, which has a big Jewish population. I lived in Israel for four months. Aaron even got me in to some yeshiva classes.

I know that Jews feel threatened by Christianity. Christians were responsible for the Inquisition, pogroms, and much of what happened in the Holocaust. Hitler was hostile to Christianity, and he persecuted Christians, but many of the people who did the grunt work were Christians, and it was not unusual for them to tell Jews that persecution was justified because Jews killed Christ (I thought it was the Romans!). Some Catholic clerics helped the Nazis. On top of that, Jews believe they cease to be Jews if they accept Jesus, and they are extremely concerned about their dwindling numbers. They are afraid of disappearing as a people.

I am familiar with the sophisticated objections Jews have raised to the divinity of Jesus. I am aware that most Jews do not take proselytizing efforts gracefully; you can’t just give a Jew the same canned speech you would give any Gentile on the street and expect to get anywhere. In all likelihood, you’ll just alienate them and increase their antipathy toward your religion. I know these things. Many ignorant Christians do not. And I will not be judged by the ignorant.

When I got involved in the prayer campaign for Mish, I also knew that the Bible instructs us to look out for the Jews, without any requirement that they become proselytes. No strings attached. That’s the assignment. So I was perfectly content to pray and offer encouragement; I felt no need to badger this poor sick woman.

There is no Biblical precedent for badgering people. Find me an example in the New Testament. There is none. The early evangelists went from place to place, making their case. Those who chose, accepted Jesus. And that was the end of it.

The Bible tells us God calls people to become Christians. He knows who will listen and who will not. If that is the case, then telemarketer-style sales techniques are unscriptural and ultimately serve to harm the church by giving it a bad name.

I believe you pray for people to give in. You try to live a life that makes them jealous of what you have, so they feel moved to try to get it for themselves. You tell them about the benefits you’ve received. And if that doesn’t work, you need to give it a rest, because when you torment people in the name of Jesus, you only drive them farther away.

How stupid do you have to be to think Jesus wants you to call Mish Weiss a Christ-killer? How can a brain as small as yours even manage to coordinate things like breathing? Explain why you think this is likely to make her want to convert. I’m sure whoever wrote that idiotic email or comment reads this blog. Enlighten us all, oh holy one.

Self-righteous imbeciles have probably succeeded in undoing whatever positive work the rest of us managed to do over the last few months. Here’s what I have to say to them: Chabad should hire you to make sure no one ever converts to Christianity again. You are doing things they could never hope to do. I am ashamed to belong to the same religion as you. You are a disgrace. And you are taking God’s name in vain, pretending to serve him by expressing your hatred.

Okay, enough of that. Here is the good news. Mish’s blast cell count has dropped below 30%. That is fantastic. And her blood counts are up. The stronger she gets–I think I have this right–the better she’ll be able to tolerate treatment that could cure her. So the prayers are working. I mean Christian AND Jewish prayers. Nowhere does the Bible say God only hears the prayers of Christians, or that he only hears when you pray in the name of Jesus.

Let’s keep it up. We can’t ask for better results than this.

I Only Like Religions Endorsed by Major Celebrities

I’ll tell you what. I am fed up with congestion.

I don’t know if it’s pollen or what, but I am having all sorts of sleep problems due to nasal congestion. I was getting up at 5:30 every morning, and I really enjoyed it. Now even if I go to bed early, I tend to feel crummy when I get up, so I add two hours to the alarm setting, and I go back to sleep. Today when I woke up I was so out of it I got up and made coffee in order to help me make it to the shower. Have you ever awakened in such a state that you had a hard time keeping your balance during your first steps? That’s me today.

I probably need to sterilize my bedroom. Wash the mattress cover and dust ruffle, mop under the bed, dust everything in sight, and get more of that Clorox allergy spray. I may also get a memory foam pillow. When I was a kid, a doctor told my mother I couldn’t have feather pillows, and at the time, he was wrong. Maybe he’s right now.

I still haven’t recovered from the time change. That’s weird. Usually it doesn’t bother me at all. I tried melatonin, but the results were not great. I tended to wake up in the middle of the night. I don’t know if that’s the melatonin or something else.

I strongly suspect that when you have a good prayer life, and there are people that need your help, God will literally wake you up so you can pray. Maybe that’s what’s happening now. I am determined to be thankful for the opportunity, but I think you know how that works. “Thanks for giving me this chance to pray, and boy would I thank you even more if you gave someone else the chance tomorrow. That would be just great, because I hate to hog the righteousness.”

Here’s a good question for everyone. Have you ever been shaken up by an answer to prayer? I’ll explain. Usually when I pray for things, I find myself praying for things that are likely to happen regardless of whether I pray. “Keep me safe.” “Help me find the car keys.” But sometimes I pray for things that are extremely unlikely to happen without divine intervention. One example: I pray that people I know will become Christians. That’s a tough one, because it involves manipulating beings who have free will, and it also involves a decision that is subject to tremendous cultural bias.

People who are not Christians are often very contemptuous of Christianity; praying for them to change is a little like praying that I will give up Christianity and become a Scientologist or a Mormon. Many people see Christianity as beneath their level of sophistication, and they may see Christians as rubes and suckers. The thought of having their cool friends look down on them is too much to bear. Often, the barrier is pride. It feels great, thinking you’re more clever than people who picked the wrong religion. That’s something I need to watch, as a matter of fact.

Why is it that American Buddhists are so stuck up? Can someone explain that to me? Buddhists can’t wait to tell you they’re Buddhists; it’s as if they think they won the Nobel Prize. The real message, much of the time isn’t “I’m a Buddhist.” It’s “I am smarter and more moral than you.” Isn’t bragging about your morality and humility sort of oxymoronic?

Was Buddha stuck up? Isn’t that bad karma? And why do so many Westerners assume Asians have deep wisdom? One look at Asia is all you need to realize how kooky that idea is. Life in Asia is pretty awful, and it always has been. How come the deep wisdom isn’t kicking in and fixing things? Also, if human beings are recycled, how come there are six billion of us now? Where did all the new souls come from? Maybe a lot of us are recently promoted ants and cockroaches.

If you were a cockroach not too long ago, what do you have to be arrogant about? You must have been a mighty impressive cockroach. And if you insist on being arrogant, why be arrogant toward other human beings? The appropriate thing would be to lord it over all the folks who are still cockroaches.

I often think one big draw of Buddhism is that it enables you to work on yourself without having to oppose or even acknowledge sin. That’s pleasant, because it means you never have to take a stand, and you never have to give anything up because it’s sinful. This is probably why gays love Buddhism. You can be gay and be a full-blown, hardcore Buddhist. In order to be a gay Christian or Jew, you have to mangle the Bible pretty badly.

Some non-Christians feel brave and strong because they don’t need the “crutch” of an “imaginary” God. Unlike those weak Christians who chose to be torn apart in the Coliseum rather than deny God. Wow, what crutch-dependent weaklings. That isn’t courage. Real courage is standing up in a room full of your fellow unbelievers, saying you believe exactly what they do. I guess.

It takes real bravery to do things that make your life easier. That must be how it works.

I have never understood how anyone could feel smug about thinking for himself, while espousing beliefs that tend to bring him approval and acceptance. I think the funniest examples are on college campuses. Kids who rebel by doing and saying exactly what their teachers tell them to. Tenured professors who pretend it’s brave to spout rhetoric their bosses agree with. How is it brave to speak out, when you can’t be fired for it? You can’t “Question Authority” by agreeing with everyone who has power over you. The proper term for that is “toadying.”

I’m off on a tangent. All I’m saying is, it’s a big deal when a prayer involving changing another person’s mind is answered. I was using prayers regarding religious choices as examples.

Not long ago, I had a prayer granted, and it had seemed so unlikely, I literally looked up and thanked God in a state of confusion and amazement. I always try to believe God will grant my requests, but the human mind is a funny place where a belief and its opposite can exist at the same time; when you say you believe something, you usually mean you have less doubt than belief. So when God comes along and crushes the remaining doubt, it wakes you right up. Are all believers like me? Maybe Moses was startled when God parted the Red Sea.

It’s funny; faith is not constant in a given person. It varies in degree. I suppose it would be impossible, on my worst day, to convince me that God doesn’t exist. On the other hand, it can be a big shock when he does something really bold that forces me to realize he’s really there.

Let me know if it has ever happened to you. Meanwhile I better suck it up and clean that bedroom.

My Whole World View is Crumbling

Most of the time, being absent-minded is a minor inconvenience, but sometimes it’s embarrassing. Example: I received a prayer request and forgot to post it. It comes from JeffW.

In addition to your prayers for Mish, could you also lift up a boy by the name of Russell? He is a 13-year old student at my daughter’s homeschool co-op that has a cancerous brain tumor. The family was informed last night that the tumor had grown 3-4 times it’s previous size in the last six weeks and the prognosis is not good. The family are all committed Christians, so they value prayer.

I had no business going about my business and forgetting to put this up. Prayer is powerful, and sometimes it is needed desperately. I should have mentioned this earlier. And don’t forget Mish. Her fever is going up and down. I assume that’s a good sign, since it suggests the bacteria are not getting their way.

Overall, my own walk is going well. Lately I have let things disrupt my routine, so prayer and study have suffered somewhat. I am working to fix it, and I’m going to succeed.

For many Christians, faith is all about not going to hell. As I keep saying, I don’t focus on that. I can’t recall ever having concerns about going to hell; I have no idea when I became a Christian, but it was a long time ago, and since then, I haven’t thought a lot about my own salvation. What I do think about is leading a blessed and productive life. I can’t tell you what heaven is like. I’ve never been there. But I know the difference between life close to God and life far from God. It’s huge. So to me, Christianity is mainly about holding onto that difference.

My life was consistently miserable until I was about 30. Everything I touched turned to garbage. I was depressed. I worried. I never stopped fighting the problems; I kept trying to improve my life. I learned all sorts of wonderful self-help tricks. But I could not make things better on a long-term basis. It seemed that the things I wanted were dangled in front of me and then jerked away, over and over. I was healthy and free, but other than that, I was incredibly unlucky and there was nothing good about my life.

I became increasingly religious in my twenties, and for a while, it seemed to help, but I got in with a self-oriented prosperity-theology Assemblies of God church, and things stalled. That stuff does not work. You can’t just go to church twice a week and beg God to heal you and make you rich and so on. You have to focus on serving God and helping other people, too. The word-of-faith people didn’t teach that. Many still don’t. Listen to their sermons, and you hear the word “money” over and over. God wants you to be rich. God wants you to be perfectly healthy at all times. Give money to the church and do everything just right, and it will work out. If it doesn’t work, come back next week, give the church more money, and find out what you’re doing wrong. It’s like chasing a carrot on a string.

It’s a sink. You dump your time and money and effort into it, and you don’t get much out, and the farther in you get, the more you think you’re not doing enough. Sooner or later, you realize it’s not working, and you get discouraged. You may get the wrong idea. You may think your preacher is a dud and your church is no good, and you’ll be right, but the danger is that you’ll decide God is imaginary or that he doesn’t care about you.

I realized my church was a dry hole, and I quit. Stupidly, I didn’t find another church. I figured I could do it on my own. And of course, I fell away. Still believing, but lazy and not very obedient. I would go days without prayer. I rarely looked at a Bible. When I needed help, I prayed. And in the mid-Nineties, I had the disturbing experience of feeling as though I were praying in some sort of tank or cistern, and that my prayers simply bounced off the ceiling. Maybe that was because I was asking for help, but I wasn’t offering anything in return. I didn’t think I had to change.

I had problems in my thirties, but on the whole, the trend was positive. Things have been pretty good since about 1997. I would say that was when I became a happy person. Since then, things have gotten better and better. I don’t think I’ve had more than two or three consecutive days of sadness in all that time.

After 911, I started praying every morning. I developed a prayer list, which is something everyone should have. Since then, the improvement in my life has accelerated. And lately, the acceleration has accelerated. Incidentally, I believe engineers call an increase in acceleration “jerk.” Appropriate in so many ways. I feel like I’m being jerked out of the state of being a jerk.

Every morning and every night, I literally get on the floor and thank God for the way things are going. And I mean it. I don’t have all the pieces of my conception of a whole life, but the quality of life is not determined primarily by whether you’ve achieved your goals. What matters is the trend. If you know you’re on the right track, and things are consistently improving, chances are, you’ll be happy. And for that to be true, it is necessary that you be among the things that improve. Your behavior, your feelings toward others, and so on.

Goals are important, but here’s a funny truth: once you achieve them, you are likely to feel a tremendous and painful emptiness. Sometimes I wonder if this contributes to post-partum depression. Before you get something you want, you’re excited, because you’re anticipating and working toward something good. It gives your life meaning. It fills your time. Once it arrives, all you have is the thing itself. And it may be less rewarding than the process of getting it, even if it’s a child. Your hopes may be so unrealistic that nothing you receive can fulfill them.

I’ll bet brides have to cope with that a lot. They have the most unrealistic hopes of anyone in society. It’s a little disgusting. You spend thirty thousand dollars on one day of self-worship and concentrated attention, and then three hours after the wedding, everyone has stopped focusing on you, and all you have is the same old boyfriend and a bunch of junk from Williams Sonoma. And maybe a lot of debt. It’s never fun paying for something you have ceased enjoying.

Watching a big, self-indulgent wedding is not significantly different from watching a morbidly obese man get in bed and eat five pies with his fingers.

I think women have an unfortunate tendency to turn new husbands into messiah figures, expecting them to solve all their problems and provide things only God can give. It doesn’t work like that. You don’t enter your own personal messianic age when the ring goes on.

New things that bring me satisfaction keep coming to me. I don’t mean objects, although I have found objects essential to some parts of the process. I mean new outlets for creativity. New growth as a Christian. New knowledge. New interests. I think this all comes from God. I believe that making a sincere effort to believe and serve has brought me a certain measure of protection and reward.

I am not stupid enough to think I’ll never have a problem again, or that every good thing I have will be with me until I die. But I suspect that regardless of what happens, the sensation of being blessed and looked after will be with me the rest of my life. After all, what does Psalm 23 say? “Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life.” What does Psalm 1 say about God’s servants? “And he shall be like a tree, planted by the rivers of water, that bringeth forth his fruit in his season. His leaf also shall not wither, and whatsoever he doeth shall prosper.” What about Psalm 34? “Delight thyself also in the Lord, and he shall give thee the desires of thine heart.” This stuff isn’t lip service from a fat rich Jewish king trying to impress people with his piety. It’s truth. These are promises from God. Either you believe in God, or you don’t. If you believe, you should believe these words are not empty.

God does not necessarily make your life problem-free, although it is very likely that he will shift it strongly in that direction, ending many of your troubles. He makes the problems unimportant and brings good things out of them. That’s actually better. It increases your faith and makes you stronger, because it teaches you that troubles are not to be greatly feared.

Christians who only worry about where they go when they die are blowing it. Life in the kingdom of God starts while you’re here. Literally.

So anyway, I am determined to get back on track. The course deviations I experience these days aren’t all that bad, but they are not acceptable, either.

Enterococcus

I just checked Mish Weiss’s blog. Her fever is fluctuating. Here is the bad news:

Enterococcus is the bacteria, and with counts as low as Mish’s sepsis can occur. Because this bacteria is sometimes antibiotic and multi drug resistant, it is especially difficult to treat.

This girl can’t seem to catch a break. Her parents are gone. She had problems with addiction. She got leukemia. She turned out to have a genetic makeup that made it harder to treat. Curative chemotherapy didn’t work. Now this. Yet she still fights. How many people would do that? I don’t know that I would. I know that the afterlife is better than this life; I don’t think I could hold on as hard as Mish has.

Please keep her in her prayers. Hopefully the variety of bacteria she has will respond to drugs. This is not the time for the people who care about her to give up. This is when faith matters most.

Help

Mish Weiss is unconscious. It’s not the leukemia. She has a bacterial infection in one lung, and her fever has hit 105.4, which is about as high as an adult fever gets.

Please pray for her. Her blood cell counts are up, which means she is getting some benefit from chemotherapy. It would be a terrible thing if she were to succumb to a bacterial infection while she was improving.

Obama Subterfuge Works Better Than Papal Candor

Shmuel Rabinovitch, rabbi of the Western Wall, says the Pope can’t wear a cross when he visits.

That’s up to him. He’s the boss; he writes the dress code. The wall is Jewish property.

But where was he when Obama showed up at the wall carrying his famous Hindu monkey idol in his pocket? Also, a cynical person might say Obama himself, being the self-anointed false messiah, is a religious symbol.

I suppose you can argue that the monkey idol was not visible, whereas the Pope’s cross is. Does that mean the Pope can please the rabbi by putting the cross in his pocket right before he approaches the wall?

My guess is that the rabbi has no idea Obama carries a Hindu idol around, or that he accepted a huge gold-plated version sent from India. It’s probably in our White House right now, since it’s Obama’s property. This is the kind of “diversity” Solomon favored. Sadly, God felt differently.

Interesting quote from the rabbi:

“I feel the same way about a Jew putting on a tallit and phylacteries and going into a church.”

He may feel that way, but I very much doubt the Pope does. I can’t imagine any Christian, even in a weak mainstream church, telling a Jew to keep his Jewish paraphernalia out of the sanctuary. These days, even Orthodox rabbis sometimes speak in churches, and they don’t have to scrap their yarmulkes.

I don’t think the rabbi feels it would be disrespectful to Christians to wear these things in a church. I know of no basis for such a feeling. The overwhelming likelihood is that he feels it would be disrespectful to Judaism, but he’s trying to convey a different impression, which is pretty disingenuous. On the other hand, maybe he just misunderstands us. Very badly. To a degree which is not really credible.

The Pope should cancel his visit to the wall. Asking a Pope to take off his cross is like asking the rabbi to take off his yarmulke or work on Saturday. It would be a tacit yet undeniable and unambiguous denial of faith. Part of the Pope’s job is to profess and symbolize belief in Jesus. If he took off the cross, he would be letting down every Christian in the world. He would be telling us it’s okay to hide your faith in order to avoid trivial social awkwardness.

He can have a nice visit and mend fences without going to the wall. He showed respect by asking to go; that’s good enough.

The world is not ready for Papal visits to the wall. That’s the bottom line.

Still Waffling

Mish Weiss’s blood cell counts are showing some improvement, but she has another cold and a very high fever. Here’s what a faithful prayer warrior has to say in her comments:

Of course, we will pray. Thanks for the specific info so we know exactly how to pray. I believe G_d answers our specific prayers. So we will pray that Mish’s counts continue to go up and the fever goes down the the cold goes away.

I’m joining in these prayers, and I hope you will do the same. Posting for Mish, Marc says “I know that I don’t even have to ask for prayer, thank you in advance.” What a day we live in, when Christians and Jews cooperate like this and see each other as allies. Many denominations, especially mainstream churches, display disturbing hostility to Jews and Israel, but there are at least 800 million Christians who have been taught that the Jews are the apple of God’s eye, and that we are to help them whenever we can.

In other news, I’m dithering on the lathe issue. A certain sum will buy me one of these three items: a Grizzly G4003G with a stand and a warranty, a used Clausing 5914 that came from a prison, and a South Bend 13 x 36. Og says the Chinese stuff is as good as ours now. If that’s true, the Grizzly is a good move. It will have a warranty and great customer support, and presumably, it will work right out of the crate. Still, I’ve read about little quality issues where the old US stuff is much better, and it’s possible that I might be better off with an old lathe.

I should point out that the G4003G is a gunsmith’s lathe. It’s a G4003 with better bearings and a few gewgaws. It should be considerably better than most non-Taiwan Grizzly offerings.

I’ve decided I’m not comfortable buying a used local machine unless I can be completely sure it will perform as well as a new Chinese job. The risk is too big, unless the machine is so cheap I can’t justify not trying it. A person of limited skills can’t really restore an old lathe, unless it has damage limited to certain areas. The Clausing and South Bend come from a dealer with a great reputation; I’d rather pay him a fair price than buy an iffy lathe really cheap.

Complicating the issue, I keep thinking the smart move might be to drop a few hundred on a Harbor Freight job and learn about machining. If I did that, presumably in a few months I’d be knowledgeable enough about lathes to evaluate used tools.

I hope my next round of Smartflix DVDs arrives today.

Friction Gone

More info for Hornady Lock-N-Load AP owners.

A while back I wrote about the problems I had with my Lock-N-Load. I want to emphasize something: this machine may have been completely perfect when I got it. It is possible that I screwed it up while learning how to use it. But I don’t think so, because it appears that the fundamental problem is excess friction, and that’s a design and/or manufacturing tolerance issue.

I had problems with indexing from the time I got the press. The ball detent things under the shell plate are of limited value; they don’t give enough resistance to prevent the plate from indexing incorrectly. You have to have the pawls set perfectly. These are little spring doodads that push the index wheel that turns the plate. They must be aligned with extreme precision; one quarter of a turn of an adjusting screw can mess things up.

The pawls move the plate by pushing the index wheel with their upper edges, which are very thin and somewhat fragile. The index wheel is hardened steel, and it will eat the pawls quickly if they have to work too hard. If it takes a lot of torque to turn the wheel, the pawls aren’t going to last. I think Hornady dropped the ball here. It seems to me that if you’re going to use a thin, delicate metal edge to push something, you should reduce the required force as much as possible. It would have been just as easy to make machines that turned with less resistance. Change two specs: the diameter of the drive hub, and the diameter of the drive shaft.

I figured I was having a problem with friction, so I took the driveshaft out, mounted it in a drill, and spun it inside a sheet of emery paper until it was shiny. When I stuck the shaft back in the machine, the decrease in friction was obvious. But I couldn’t test the press because while I was fooling with it I snapped a little key off the drive hub, and I put a lot of wear on the pawls. I ordered new pawls and a new hub, and they arrived a couple of days ago.

I put the hub on the shaft, mounted it in the drill, and gave it the emery-paper treatment. I cleaned out the inside of the sub plate (the hub rotates inside it), and I greased everything and put the machine together. When all was said and done, it turned considerably more freely than in the past, and it indexed perfectly.

One interesting side note: I had a hell of a time getting it to index when I first put it back together. Finally, I looked at the index wheel. It appeared to me that it was impossible for the pawls to push it as far as it needed to go, because of the shape of the wheel’s arms. They seemed to be curved in the opposite direction from the way they needed to go. And of course, they were. I had put the wheel on upside-down. This is probably why I couldn’t get the machine to index the last time I worked on it, after I ground the worn parts off the pawls. In all likelihood, I bought new pawls I didn’t need. Oh well. I’ll need them eventually.

I also have a habit of reassembling coaxial parts in the wrong order, so whatever I’m working on has to be taken apart several times before I’m done. I only did that about three times tonight.

The machine works great now. Slick as snot on a doorknob. And I understand it, finally. I suspect that every LNL owner needs to do what I did. Unless some units have less friction than others.

Hornady redesigned the shell ejection system. You have to buy a $30 replacement sub plate and pay $10 each to get your shell plates converted to work with it. I don’t know if I’ll bother. The old system relies on a stiff wire that pushes shells out of the plate. It’s very clearly at an angle which is suboptimal for the job. That’s not the whole problem; when the wire pushes on the side of the case to eject it, the rim rotates up against the bottom of the shell plate and creates resistance to ejection. But I think that if I bent the wire a bit, it would be reliable enough to keep using. I have two or three spares, so I don’t really care if I ruin one.

It feels great to get something fixed. So often now, when I have a problem, I’m able to go out in the garage and fix it. I can’t explain how wonderful that feels. I am finally getting something I’ve wanted all my life. It’s like coming up for air after a long swim under water.

My tool journey has been much more than a frivolous waste of money or a passing interest. I has been a genuine voyage of self-actualization. Christians don’t use that term much, but we should, because self-actualization is something the Psalms promise us. “Delight thyself also in the Lord, and he shall give thee the desires of thine heart.” “The steps of a good man are ordered by the Lord, and he delighteth in his way.” God knows us before we are born, and he designs each of us for a purpose. So it’s only natural that faith and obedience lead to a life in which you find yourself doing the very things that fill your innermost needs.

It’s funny. Non-Christians talk about the importance of “finding yourself.” That’s exactly what’s happening to me. So often, we spend our lives trying to find the things we know we need, when we should be living by faith and letting God bring us those things. You don’t need to find yourself. God already knows where you are, and he can show you.

I am starting to wrap up my lathe search. I have a couple of candidates. The prices are merely fair, but I can live with that, if it means not having the headache of coping with disappointing tools from shady dealers. Sometimes you have to pay for things. That’s just how it is.

I’m thinking I’ll get a 12″ by 36″ lathe and possibly a Millrite. I would prefer a Bridgeport, because there is a good chance I’ll eventually want to upgrade from a Millrite, but space is an issue, and a Bridgeport is about half again as big as a Millrite, in linear terms. The Millrite I found locally appears to be very nice, and I can get it at an okay price, with a shipping charge much lower than what I’d pay to drag one in from out of state. Once I have a mill and a lathe, I’ll be pretty well set for major tools.

Just don’t talk to me about Bobcats.