Squirrels Must Pay

First off, please keep praying for Mish Weiss. She is having some problems because she tried to get off IV painkillers.

Now back to my exciting life.

I am suffering serious frustration here.

A couple of weeks back, I decided to take the plunge and get a Vz 58 rifle, to discourage people from walking on my grass. Okay, I got it for home defense. But a man’s grass is sacred. We need legislation to account for that.

The gun is still not here. The dealer had some kind of problem contacting the local FFL who is supposed to take delivery. And dealers are so busy, you can’t really get on their backs and push them to get things done. Thanks, Obama, for saving the American firearms industry. After the Obama gun panic is finished, it will be perfectly okay to outlaw the sale of guns, because everyone will already have five or six.

Meanwhile, I have learned that Obama has made it extremely difficult to get a Saiga 12 shotgun modified. By passing laws against it? No, by inducing a surge in sales that has resulted in a gigantic gunsmithing backlog. The best-known source of modified Saiga 12s is Tromix, and they (“he,” actually) are so busy, they would probably lay down suppressing fire if you tried to enter their property and place an order.

The stock Saiga 12 is very silly. They took a Kalashnikov and added parts to make it look like a deer gun. I don’t know why liberals are too dumb to realize that hunting guns are just as deadly as self-defense guns. I don’t know why it’s so easy to mollify them by talking about hunting and target shooting. But that’s how it is. They love to pretend the Second Amendment has something to do with sports, which it does not. And the gun industry has to play along.

The Second Amendment is about having the power to kill human beings, so they will refrain from oppressing you and committing crimes against you. It has nothing to do with shooting rabbits or quail. Still, we have nutty laws that result in the sale of odd-looking Frankenweapons that need to be modified in order to perform their actual purpose well.

If the Founding Fathers had cared about protecting our right to engage in sporting activities, they would have done something really useful and written an amendment forcing home builders to construct houses in such a manner that every one had room for a full-size pool table. They could have called it Frank Costanza’s Law.

There are a few other people out there who do a good job modifying shotguns. They have backlogs, but not like the Tromix backlog. Maybe the Obama panic will subside to the point where it’s possible to get a gun fixed up without losing the use of it for three months.

I think it would be great to get a tax stamp and have a shotgun with a 14″ barrel. Very nice for turning quickly in hallways and small rooms. Chris Byrne says the answer is to learn the technique for maneuvering a longer gun. I assume the technique consists mainly of pointing the barrel up. Up and not down, because you can’t hit your toes if you shoot the ceiling.

The defensive ammunition I ordered for my .38 Super arrived. It does not seem inclined to cycle well. Maybe this is the time to get serious and have the gun worked on. The .38 would be a marvelous carry piece for formal occasions, but not if the bullets won’t cycle. I guess the ramp needs to be worked on. And I never did get the defective rollmark fixed.

I think I have pretty well covered my survival needs, as regards food. I mentioned the possibility of shooting squirrels, and I said I needed a BB gun. Someone said I should use the .17 HMR. I think that in a national crisis, the local cops would have no problem with a BB gun, but they would be highly disturbed, to the point where they couldn’t digest their doughnuts and pastelitos, if they saw me wandering around with a rifle.

I’m pretty sure a simple Crosman pump would do the job. They do a number on birds, and the accuracy is more than adequate. The smartest thing, really, would be a trap. Let the squirrels come to me. A reader told me how to build a very efficient squirrel-drowning machine from a bucket and a piece of pipe.

I figure I’ll buy some dried beans and some oatmeal and be done with it. It will be easy to stay alive for a month. If things get so bad people need more supplies than that, it probably means there is no point in prolonging the misery.

The funniest suggestion I’ve heard is this: buy cartons of generic cigarettes and vacuum-seal them in bags. If the nicotine supply dries up, smokers will gladly give you their food, their jewelry, their kidneys, and their children in exchange for cigarettes. You could buy tobacco seed, for that matter. Grow your own cheroots. You could have a home staffed by groveling nicotine-addict zombies.

It won’t work with booze, because sugar plus water plus time equals alcohol. You can’t take away the supply. And real alcoholics will drink absolutely anything that gives them a buzz. Mashed raisins in toilet-tank water will do just fine.

I’m kind of stalled on the machine tool issue. I continue to believe machine tools are going to flood the market shortly, due to the effervescence of the amazing Obama/Geithner economy. I think businesses are going to disappear, and their machine tools will have to go somewhere. Also, a guy I want to buy a lathe from is in the hospital.

Man, I want a lathe. Just once in my life, I want to knurl something. Can you relate to that?

Anyhow, stay away from my oatmeal, and keep off my lawn. Let the piles of squirrel skeletons be a warning to you.

Therapy not Sustainable

Here is an update on Mish Weiss.

She had a marrow biopsy last week. The results were good. When you have leukemia, you produce immature blood cells called “blast cells,” and the percentage of your blood cells which are blast cells is indicative of the severity of the disease. Mish just went from 36% to 31%. That’s about a 16% decrease, using 36% as the initial figure. That’s good.

I wish I could say that were the whole story. She got positive results from her last round of chemotherapy, but she is so ill, a continuation of that therapy would be fatal. You have to wonder what would have happened had they started with this particular therapy back when she was stronger.

Treatment has now shifted to a different type of chemotherapy intended to prolong her life. There is a difference between curative therapy and life-prolonging therapy. As a lay person, I don’t know if there is hope that a person in this condition will gain strength until curative chemotherapy can be attempted again. I suppose that’s the obvious question.

Mish is not giving in. A total surrender would mean giving up chemotherapy and focusing on improving her quality of life. She is very, very tough.

My plan? Keep up the prayer. It costs me nothing, and miracles do happen, and it’s a gift to be given a chance to do something for someone in need. There is always a blessing in trying to do good. I can’t think of any significant reward for giving up. I hope people who found Mish through this blog, and who have been praying for her, will think about that. Even if you have doubts about what you are accomplishing for her, you’re doing yourself a lot of good.

Today Drudgebart links to a story about David Wilkerson, the famous preacher. He is predicting a horrible sin-generated American catastrophe, and it seems to center around New York City. He talks about “a thousand fires.”

I hate to say this, especially since I have been attending a church pastored by a man said to be a relation of his, but I would not get too excited about the New York prediction. David Wilkerson has a history of making predictions. I invite you to read up and draw your own conclusions about his batting average. I have doubts, to put it mildly.

Nonetheless, I continue to believe we’re in big trouble as a nation, and I do think it’s because we’ve tested God’s patience. People have always been sinful, but over the last fifteen years or so, we’ve gotten downright gross. In addition to our old sins, we now do bizarre things like cutting up our own bodies for amusement. Our sexual perversions are getting so strange, it is impossible to understand how anyone can find them erotic. And now we have a weird, vacuous, inept, idol-packing President who is the very symbol of human pride, and he’s starting to take an adversarial position toward Israel. He’s also taking our money and using it to fund convenience abortions.

Life is changing. A couple of months back, I noticed that the atmosphere in the US seemed to be altered. Things seem grubbier and dingier. The way they’ve always been in foreign countries that don’t do well. It’s really obvious here in Miami. The grass is brown, and huge trees are dying all over the place. Is it my imagination? It can’t be. I’m surrounded by vacant houses no one can sell. The stores are quieter. The restaurants are often empty. It reminds me of places like Greece and the Bahamas.

It looks like Iran is now a nuclear power. Isn’t that great? The vast bulk of the process of getting nuclear weapons is behind them. Only the easy jobs remain to be done. Obama tried to appease the Russians into negotiating with Iran for us, offering to give up our efforts to protect ourselves with a missile shield. The Russians dealt him a remarkable public humiliation, dismissing his offer as eccentric and half-baked. Good thing. I wonder what he was thinking? If we build a missile shield, it won’t just protect us from Iran. It won’t check a missile’s nationality. We have other Muslim nations to worry about, as well as North Korea. Where did Obama get the idea that Iran was the only reason we needed a shield?

It’s funny that the press didn’t get excited about the Russian slapdown. It was an extraordinary bit of public emasculation, and the MSM ignored it. Obama came across like a little boy trying to break into his dad’s poker game. We’re going to see more of that. He is not man enough for the office. We retired a pit bull who scared our enemies to death, and we replaced it with an attention-starved bichon frise. Obama has been called Carter II, but even Carter had more grit. And Carter wasn’t totally opposed to maintaining a national defense.

I almost feel like God selected our leaders in the past, making sure that even when they were not the best available, they were not utter fools. And now we have served our purpose, and God has decided to let some other nation take the lead, so he is content to let us put rabble in our high offices, as less-blessed nations do. For now it’s Obama. Maybe next time we’ll swing to the other extreme and get a nut like Ron Paul. When no one guards the door, you don’t know who will come in and crash on the couch.

Wilkerson says each of us should have a month’s supply of food. That, I agree with. He’s not the only one saying it.

I think I’ll summon my nerve and check the Dow Jones average.

Pray for Mish.

Someone Wants to GAIN a Job

A friend has asked me to put out a prayer request for her dad. He got squeezed out of a job a while back, and the company has tanked, and now they may want him back. I believe he was the CEO; I’m not sure. Anyway, they apparently think they made a big mistake, and this would be a big boon to him and his family.

Would everyone do her a favor and pray that he gets the job? Thanks.

As always in these situations, I pray that everyone concerned will draw closer to God, in addition to getting the earthly need filled.

Usually a Mitzvah

I’m going to go ahead and just steal this.

Posted by Leah’s Dad.

Mish is a wee bit better this morning, they removed the tube holding the airway open, but not the NG tube. I’m deaf but I know she said at least 3 four letter words. Her counts are still dangerously low, she’s weak and pale, but she has fight left in her.

In a few hours she will have the bone marrow biopsy to see if the blast cells have decreased from the last chemo regime, hopefully they have. She remains in critical condition, too weak to sit up. Seeing her fight and cuss the doctor was a good sign, it means she hasn’t given up.

When I suggested she open this blog it was for her to vent, and keep track of her progress. We had no idea of the love and support she would receive, thank you.
G_d bless you all.

Gut Shabbos

It’s not much, but “better” is not “worse.”

Let’s make a big prayer push and ask for a good result on the biopsy! Come on! We’ve pulled this off before!

Well. GOD has.

You know what I mean.

Cold, Grey, Ugly, Lethal

Is there any ammunition uglier than Wolf? It’s like the Russians had an ugly bullet competition, and the guy who designed this stuff won.

I don’t care. I have never had a problem with it. I’ve used it in a Glock and a PSL, and it seems accurate and reliable. I question the guys who say it won’t shoot straight. When you have a bad day, any excuse looks good.

I just received my order from Midway; a big pile of 7.62x39mm. It is shockingly ugly. I got the hollow points, because I had read that they were probably better at helping perps relax and then die. It’s intended for the range, but it’s good enough for guest control. I don’t know if I’ll even bother getting better stuff. How much better can it be? There’s a ton of difference between cheap FMJ 9mm ammunition and Cor-Bon, but AK stopping power is so much better than a pistol’s, I don’t know if ammunition quality matters much.

Yes, I know the gun I got is not an AK. But it’s AK ammunition.

I’m definitely getting a Saiga 12. That will give me two very good long guns for self-defense. That should cover my needs, regardless of the duration of the soon-to-begin Ob*ma Dark Ages. I truly fear that the next few years will be a bad time to live in a suburb, especially in a town like Miami with big, violent ghettos nearby. Those folks live in tiny apartments and microscopic houses with bone-dry dirt yards where nothing grows. They will have needs and no way to fill them, and the government teat may get downsized considerably. Obama has already fomented an atmosphere of class and race hostility. It will only get worse if a depression hits.

I should go ahead and get a food dehydrator. Why not? I’m going to be producing all sorts of bananas and papayas. I can’t eat them all fresh, and they’re very good dried. Papayas are actually better dried than fresh.

I could also get bulk apples from Costco and dry them. Nothing beats dried apples. You can make pies. You can make apple butter. They rule.

I’m thinking up ideas to save money on food. Beans would be perfect. Buy a fifty-pound sack of pinto beans, a bunch of smoked ham hocks that will keep a long time, and some salt. Rice is good. I should be able to fish for grunts and snapper in the local canals.

If life really goes in the toilet, Coral Gables will have to give up its ridiculous pansy ordinances. People will need chickens and ducks. They’ll need cheap fences and razor wire.

I don’t know what life in Miami was like during the Depression. In Kentucky, drifters wandered up and down the roads looking for odd jobs. Hoboes used to sleep on my grandparents’ porch; it was accepted. They didn’t even have to ask permission. People showed up asking for meals.

My grandmother said the local people didn’t notice the pinch much. That’s because the area was poor before the Depression, and also because the locals were still able to grow their own food and trees. And there were squirrels and rabbits.

Maybe it won’t be so bad here. Maybe it will just be boring. Spend less money, travel less, stop eating out. Keep your old things longer and make them last. That may be tough, with a 2003 Thunderbird.

I wonder what will happen to the car market. Most people don’t own their cars. When unemployment jumps, will the banks repossess, flooding the market with cheap vehicles, or will they renegotiate and take the losses?

It will be strange, seeing bums who actually deserve handouts. I’ve never seen those in America. “Will Work for Food” actually means “Will Take Money Straight to Liquor Store, Drug Dealer, or Crack Whore.” How often do you see “Will Work for Food” over a hundred yards from a place that sells beer? I can’t think of one instance.

I keep meaning to get some fast-food gift certificates to give to bums. That way, if I misjudge someone, no harm done. And if it turns out I’m feeding an addict, that’s okay, because giving them food is not immoral. And if they trade gift certificates for crack, it’s their sin, not mine. When you give them money, you’re not even trying to help. You’re giving to make yourself feel good, and you know what they’re going to do with the money, and you don’t really care if they buy drugs. If you give a food gift certificate, you’re making a credible effort to help.

The market is tanking again today. On top of that, a surprising number of finance-show talking heads are openly excoriating Obama, for whom most of them voted. I am going to be fair and point out that George Bush is getting off easy. He was blamed for many things he didn’t do, or which didn’t even happen, and he didn’t get credit for the great things he did. But in his last months he gave Obama a great head start on his wrongheaded mission of pouring socialist gasoline on our economic conflagation. And people aren’t talking as much as they should about Bush’s dumb 2008 moves. Still, if Bush is measles, Obama is leprosy.

I think I’ll do some research and see what to expect in a depression. I believe God will take care of me, but I don’t want him to have a bigger job than necessary.

Still Kicking

Here is a post from Mish Weiss’s blog, written by her friend Marc:

Mish is not in a coma, she remains in critical condition.
She responds to touch and sound.
All we can do now is wait and pray.

You can probably guess how much I know about leukemia. I know a lot of leukemia patients die from hemorrhaging. They even get hemorrhages inside their eyes, causing temporary blindness. I don’t know how much doctors can do to control it. I’m hoping they have an effective way to put a stop to it.

Here’s part of a comment from her blog:

You know, G_d told Moses to raise his hands over the children of Israel (sorry I don’t recall all the details of why, but I think it was to bless them and keep them safe). Anyway, Moses obeyed G_d and had his hands raised, but he got so tired he could no longer keep them raise, so two friends, Aaron and I don’t know the other friends name, came along side him and held his arms up for him. (I think I need to study that again.) My point is, you are like Moses, a strong, brave Jewish person, but you are so tired that it is difficult for you to continue to carry on, so your friends, a big crowd of us, have come along side you to encourage you, and to help you carry on and to pray for you. That’s our job for right now. Your job is to just let us be your friends, to love you, to care for you, to pray for you. Mish you are a Moses.

I have had exactly the same thought. I believe many Old Testament stories were planned by God, to provide symbolism and foreshadowing. This story seems to be symbolic of the need for believers to stand together. A single person can’t pray 24 hours a day, and even if it were possible, people fail. So we are supposed to share our challenges and close the chinks in the armor.

I have a more positive outlook toward marriage these days, and the main reason is that Christianity is a tough burden for a single person to bear. When you feel weak or you go astray, you have no one to turn to except God. When you’re not praying, no one is praying for you. Two believers together can help each other stay on the path. It would have been a lot harder for me to leave the church almost 20 years ago, had I been married to a believer.

I value my autonomy, and women are often selfish, annoying, spoiled, and just unprofitable. Very often, a wife is a net negative, not unlike a tapeworm. But I have to believe that the same God who can bring peace to a torn-up family can make a marriage work.

I think the Internet can be a tremendous weapon, to help Christians join in purpose. Look at all the prayer requests that go up on this blog. Having a dozen or a hundred praying for you is certainly better than praying alone.

The same reader who posted the above comment said she had awakened in the middle of the night with Mish on her heart. That keeps happening to me, too, and it seems like it’s always at around 1:20 a.m. I hope it means something.

Let me mention another Aaron. My friend Aaron has just had a crisis. His wife had chest pains, and they put a stent in one of her arteries. It looks like she’s okay, but they have both decided they really need to change their diets and exercise regularly. I hope you’ll pray that her condition improves and that they’ll succeed in their efforts. Like I told Aaron, the Orthodox diet is not known for promoting health or longevity. They’ll have to get used to some real changes.

One More for the List

Today I have an opportunity to return a favor, to some extent. Reader Ed Bonderenka and his friends gave me invaluable help, praying for me when I needed it. Now Ed needs some help:

On another note. please hold me in prayer. I’ve been seeing a doctor for some lower G.I. issues with little results. Thank God x-rays and ultrasound came back good Friday. But I’m in pain. Thanks.

“Lower G.I. issues.” Yeah, I’ve used that euphemism, too, Ed. Here’s something that has worked for me: blame it on the dog.

Seriously, though, keep Ed in your prayers.

Best Shop Safety Device: a Macho Man Who Will Take Stupid Risks For You

I got a very weird email this week. A reporter from The New Republic wanted to interview me about Pajamas Media. The temptation was fairly potent. Think about it. The PJs reviled me in a forum to which no one pays attention. The interview would give me a chance to respond before a different and more respectable audience.

But I turned it down. Some of the mean things I have said about PJM still make me cackle helplessly, but like I said in my response to the reporter, picking on the PJs is a vice. It would be fun telling him what I thought about a group of college graduates thinking they could make money selling something which a) nobody wants, and b) is already available for nothing. And I could once again compare Simon and Reynolds to the Thunderdome characters “Master-Blaster.” But what little conscience I have would plague me.

I am trying to be a nicer person these days. Really.

I told the reporter he needed to talk to Moxie and Dennis, neither of whom is currently trying to be nicer. So clearly I’m not cured yet.

I think they will give him material that is way more entertaining than anything I would be willing to say.

In other news, I have had a problem which will amuse all of you. I joke all the time about being addicted to tools, but over the last couple of weeks, I have been seriously concerned. I would get up, write a blog post, shop for machine tools, work with tools, do my regular daily stuff, write another blog post, and shop for machine tools again.

It interfered with my early morning prayer time. It distracted me from more important things. So I have been trying to get a handle on it. I’m shutting the PC down earlier now. Hopefully I won’t need an intervention.

I am part of the group of Christians who think that anything that is too important to you is equivalent to an idol. An idol doesn’t have to be an object carved in the shape of a God. It can be a job, a car, a woman…you can even be your own idol. And if you miss your daily Bible study because you’re busy Ebaying tools you will never buy, you are over the line.

I feel a whole lot better now that I’m getting back on track. I missed God.

I’m not totally free; let’s be serious. A neighbor has two juicy mahogany logs in his or her trash, and I plan to make a rescue mission later today. But I think my priorities are a little more balanced.

This trash-wood business has me interested in woodturning. That means buying a wood lathe, right? Not really. You can turn wood on a metal lathe, if you rig it up so wood won’t get into the machinery. Lots of people do it. I would be limited to about a 12″ swing, but I don’t plan to turn manhole covers, so I don’t care. I don’t know what a reasonable swing for a wood lathe is. Lots of people like the Jet 1220VS, which has a 12″ swing.

I used to think turning was sort of silly. You plop a chunk of wood on the lathe, you spin it, a bowl comes off, and you put it on Ebay, where it brings 79¢ (because your mom feels sorry for you and bids on it under a friend’s account). Ho hum. But some people do very creative work, and you can turn wood that is worthless for other purposes. I’ve seen at least one beautiful item made from poinciana wood. Which is not rare in Miami trash piles.

I have learned that there is such a thing as a bandsaw blade made especially for cutting green wood. I suppose I need one. My 3/4″ blade is pretty gummed up right now.

Today I had an idea for an invention. It’s not really useful, but I still think it would be great to make it. I’ll explain.

Lifting things is bad. It’s stupid. You can ruin your back lifting something as small as a typewriter (remember those?). But we have no answer to the lifting problem. We have those stupid belts they wear at Home Depot, but research suggests they don’t actually work. What’s the answer?

Clearly, we need mini-forklifts. We have big forklifts for huge things, and we have somewhat smaller lifting devices for things that are still pretty big, but what if you want to lift something that weighs 50 pounds? Go pack sand. Nobody in industry takes you seriously. But it’s a very legitimate need. I have a dry cut saw that weighs maybe 65 pounds. I have a planer that weighs nearly a hundred. I don’t want to lift these things from the garage floor to a shelf, over and over. They’re small, but they’re definitely big enough to be risky to lift. I’ve been lifting wet mahogany logs to the bandsaw table because I had no choice, and one of them probably weighed a hundred pounds. It’s a bad habit to get into.

If you go to sites like Northern Tool, you’ll see there are things called Genies which are small-footprint, hand-powered lifts. They lift up to 500 pounds. Swell. But they cost $500, and they take up an area about two feet by twenty inches. For a guy with a few tools and other items that need to be moved around in a garage, this would be overkill. You would have to have a fairly big garage in order to have room to use this thing, and would you really want to use it for something like a miter saw? It’s too inconvenient. You’d grab the saw and take your chances.

I think it would be neat to make a lift with a 250-pound capacity that would lift things five feet off the ground. You could have forks 12″ apart, and you could make them 18″ long. If you need more area, slap a piece of plywood on it, with bolts that go through the forks. No, forget bolts. Use pins that pop in and out. It would take up about as much room as a handtruck, and it would be so light you would actually use it. You wouldn’t even need decent steel. You could weld it up using galvanized fence posts.

A lot of men are ashamed to ask for help lifting things. They are utter morons. Those are the guys who end up moaning about how they can’t leave the couch. The last time I had to lift one of the props from my dad’s boat, I told another guy to take one end. He was a steroid-enhanced bodybuilder who was not overly burdened with genius. He was clearly contemptuous as he grabbed the 80-pound, awkwardly-balanced prop and carried it by himself. Me? I was delighted. I can carry an 80-pound prop. But I’m smart enough not to. When I’m 70 and he’s 55, I’ll be able to kick his ass. He’ll be a cripple.

There is nothing macho about ruptured disks or having to ask your wife to carry your laptop case. Life is not a weightlifting competition, and lifting stuff does not impress people. No one cares about your mighty feats of strength. Women do not find them sexy, and men do not find them intimidating. Sorry to break the news.

It would be even more fun if I could put a motor on the lift, to shoot things up and down and make a crank unnecessary. That would be the difference between a usable lift and a dust collector. You shouldn’t need a whole lot of torque, so it should be possible to make the lift work pretty fast. Maybe a motorcycle gel battery would work.

Maybe I’ll try to make something once my other projects are not so backed up.

Speak Up

I am investigating a ministry that provides assistance to needy Jews. I was wondering if anyone who reads this site was aware of it. It’s called Jewish Voice Ministries.

I’ve written a lot about the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews. This is a wonderful organization that moves Jews to Israel, helps poor Jews, and fights anti-Semitism in the media. But that organization has one weak point. They are completely opposed to evangelism. They work with Christian minister John Hagee, who has come to the controversial conclusion that Jews are under a different salvation scheme, and that there is no reason to mention Jesus to them.

Jewish Voice is somewhat different. It’s run by messianic Jews. They evangelize, and they do it from a Jewish standpoint, which is a little unusual. And they move Jews to Israel, much as the IFCJ does, so you can donate money for pretty much the same purposes.

I talk to my sister about charities and ministries. She pointed this one out to me. She likes it better than the IFCJ, for the reasons mentioned above.

I checked it out with Charity Navigator, and their rating is slightly higher than the IFCJ’s, so it’s a reputable organization. And the leader takes a reasonable salary.

If you’ve heard of Jewish Voice, let me know.

More

I may have spoken too soon. I’m looking at their site, trying to find information about moving Jews to Israel, and it doesn’t seem to be there.

ATTACK!

Mish Weiss is on the prayer list again. She has a cold. This is not something you want, when you have leukemia. Please don’t forget her.

Okay, but We Also Ordered “Hope”

Can you believe the Dow is dropping AGAIN?

We might as well start using the “D” word. “Depression.” It looks very likely, and unlike the first Depression, it will probably end with an overall level of prosperity that is permanently reduced.

Congratulations, Obama voters. Thanks to you, we have spent everyone’s grandchildren’s college tuition, and we are getting nothing in return except exacerbated economic injury. This is what happens when you elect a wet-behind-the-ears Chicago-machine bagman instead of a leader. And just to make you happy, I’ll admit that McCain would not have been appreciably better. We needed a conservative, but there were no conservatives on the menu. I hate to say this, but because the economic mess is so important, we might have been better off electing the lunatic Ron Paul. Sure, he would have caused horrible problems. But he would not have put our overgrown government on steroids, nationalized banks, and put the Big Three on methadone.

I still blame the left, because were it not for their growing numbers and the pressure they apply to the political parties, the GOP might have had enough of a spine to run a conservative.

The things that are happening in the market right now do not reflect the wrongness of trickle-down economics implemented under George Bush. They reflect the investing public’s knowledge that Obama’s socialist approach to ending the recession will make it worse. This is why people are selling stock, and selling is what makes the Dow drop. No one with any common sense believes we can fix this mess by rewarding the institutions and individuals that caused it, yet that is exactly what Obama is doing, and even Bush got into the act at the end of his term. If you want to criticize Bush, don’t yammer about his supply-side ideas, which were very sound. Complain that he gave in last fall and decided to give leftist economics a try. And complain that he wasn’t man enough to rein in and regulate the GSEs that espoused leftist policies which caused the housing bubble.

I don’t know if people understand the magnitude of this catastrophe. The Dow peaked at above 14,000. That wasn’t all that long ago. Now we’re headed for 7,000, after months of frantic, pants-wetting government first aid (consisting mainly of tourniquets applied to the neck). This didn’t happen after the 1987 crash or the tech meltdown. This is much more like the post-1929 era. At a similar point after the 1987 crash, the market was much healthier than it is today, on a percentage basis. In fact, the same is true of the 1929 crash.

We’re printing money to ward off deflation, and we have to pay interest on that money, because we issue bonds to justify the printing. Will that stop deflation, when people no longer have jobs and can’t afford to spend? Won’t sellers drop their prices in order to get money to stay in business? I don’t know. Here’s another question: will that money end up in circulation? Sooner or later, won’t foreign governments get wise and stop buying bonds? I don’t know enough about the Fed to say, but it sounds like printed money only ends up in circulation if we can find someone stupid enough to lend to us. If that’s true, maybe deflation is unpreventable.

China is hard to understand. On the one hand, they want us to do well enough to buy their products, so they need to buy our bonds. On the other, they want to keep increasing their output, which means crushing American industry and wrecking our economy. Maybe they’ll eventually realize we’re not going to recover, and they’ll decide making products and marketing them to the rest of the world is smarter than keeping us on life support. What they’re doing is a little like giving your son an allowance so he can support your family by buying products you make in the garage. It seems inherently inefficient and lossy.

Who would have thought that a community organizer with virtually no experience wouldn’t be able to solve all the world’s problems? Gee, electing him seemed like such a great idea. Socialism worked so well in North Vietnam and Cuba.

I guess I should quit poking the left. They’re the symptom, not the disease. The disease is turning away from God and slicing up the Promised Land in exchange for promises from murderers and liars. I suppose that if conservatives were in charge, the curse we have brought on ourselves would still bring us down. Leftism is inherently evil and ungodly, because it presumes that man can usher in the Messianic Age without God’s help. It’s just as idolatrous as the Tower of Babel. But godless conservatism is equally vain.

I’ll bet that nine months from now, I’m a hundred miles north of here, planting things on a big lot and driving a truck instead of a Thunderbird. In times like these, things with intrinsic value become precious, and small homes in big cities don’t fit that description.

Rebels are we…Born to be Free…

I am more pessimistic than ever about Obamanomics.

I just saw Jared Bernstein on CNBC. He’s Biden’s economic wonder boy. There were four pundits interviewing him about the stimulus package.

Just for background purposes, Paul Krugman endorses Bernstein, and Bernstein writes for The Daily Kos. Or did before he was appointed. This should tell you all you need to know about his leanings.

It was horrible to watch. The pundits kept asking him why we should take money away from responsible people and give it to people who took on debt they could not handle. And he refused to answer. He smiled, and he kept saying, “That’s a great question,” but he weaseled and sidestepped and refused to answer. This wasn’t Fox, mind you. This was CNBC, home of openly belligerent liberals like Erin Burnett and Mark Haines. But this panel was hostile.

He said the handouts would not go to “speculators.” Okay, first of all, many professional speculators are productive people. They may have screwed up in the housing boom, but many of them are excellent businessmen, and I would rather see them get the money than give it to hopeless perennial deadbeats. Second, as the hosts fairly screeched at Bernstein, an impoverished individual who signs a note with an adjustable rate IS a speculator. He’s just not a sophisticated and rational speculator who has a chance of succeeding. He’s speculating that he’ll have enough income to pay the note, and that the interest rate will remain low. And the basis for his speculation? HOPE that his basic nature will CHANGE. Suddenly he’ll become capable of handling money, in spite of a lifetime of poverty.

Bernstein kept saying, “through no fault of their own.” But as the hosts pointed out, when you sign a note you can’t pay, it’s definitely your fault.

Rick Santelli, who may well become a cult figure, asked how subprime-borrower losses differed from stock losses. Why shouldn’t stock losses be covered? Millions of responsible people put their retirement money in carefully chosen stocks, and now it’s gone. And come to think about it, it’s gone because of the irresponsibility of the people Bernstein wants to continue subsidizing. With money taken from the responsible, who are already eating major investment losses!

The injustice is mind-boggling.

Bernstein whined about foreclosures. Look, if the banks don’t want to foreclose, they don’t have to. They can write off principal and eat big losses. They can lower interest rates. They don’t have to adjust rates based on the prime rate. They can go as low as they want, voluntarily. The banks took this risk. Responsible people didn’t. Why shouldn’t the banks take the hit? After all, they made the bad loans, and they made the voluntary choice to raise interest rates above a sustainable level for their subprime borrowers.

And if we have foreclosures, so what? Sure, people who had no business buying homes will lose their houses. What will happen then? Responsible people–the class of people who sold them the homes to begin with–will snap up the homes. They’ll rent them to the subprimers, and life will go on as it was before the boom, when all of these people were renting, anyway.

Here’s a nasty little secret nobody wants to discuss. As a class, these people are going to lose their homes regardless of whether we help them. No one wants to talk about that. The reason? They’re not the kind of people who can hold onto wealth. If they were, they wouldn’t have needed subprime loans. Sure, there are exceptions, but the fact is, people who can’t qualify for loans are rejected for good reason. They fail to make the payments. Save them this year, and they’ll be in default two years from now. Why is no one talking about this? Many, many of these loans are going to fail regardless of what we do. They would have failed even if the economy hadn’t tanked. Sooner or later.

Even if we gave them the homes outright, many of them would mortgage them, blow the money, and end up on the street. You cannot make people prosperous. It is impossible. All you can do is provide opportunity. History proves that when you give poor people enough money to live well, without requiring them to be responsible, you do not get affluent people. You get more poor people.

I’ll tell you what I always say about “the rich,” and by that, I mean people who do reasonably well. Democrats call them rich; so will I. If you took everyone’s money and possessions away and started over from nothing, and you let people scratch their way into the best economic positions they could manage, in six months, the people who were rich before would be rich again, and the poor would still be poor.

Come to Miami, if you don’t believe me. This town is full of rich Cubans who were rich in Cuba, then poor in Miami, and then rich again in Miami. It’s also full of Cubans who were poor in Cuba and have gotten rich here, but that’s because the US has a better economy and is considerably less corrupt.

Fidel and his minions enjoyed cutting the Cuban rich down to size. But a lot of the people the communists stole from came to the US and had the last laugh.

Bernstein and Obama want equality of outcome, regardless of how we get there. That’s a mirage. You can’t reach it. It’s the wax carrot of socialism. The carrot is phony. The stick is all too real.

The Democrats are going to get their way. I think a lot of people who used to see themselves as liberal now realize they’re more conservative than they thought; many people are furious about what’s happening. But Obama will win. We are in deep, deep trouble. It has to be the hand of God. We are not this stupid. We didn’t walk into this obvious trap; we charged. Like we were getting free admission to Disneyland.

It’s Cuba all over again, and this is 1958.

She Crieth in the Chief Place of Concourse

I couldn’t get this to load on CNBC’s site, and it occurred to me that I may not be alone.

Here is Rick Santelli, calling for a revolt against Obama’s mindless, destructive socialism:

Bigger quotation:

10 My son, if sinners entice thee, consent thou not.

11 If they say, Come with us, let us lay wait for blood, let us lurk privily for the innocent without cause:

12 Let us swallow them up alive as the grave; and whole, as those that go down into the pit:

13 We shall find all precious substance, we shall fill our houses with spoil:

14 Cast in thy lot among us; let us all have one purse:

15 My son, walk not thou in the way with them; refrain thy foot from their path:

16 For their feet run to evil, and make haste to shed blood.

17 Surely in vain the net is spread in the sight of any bird.

18 And they lay wait for their own blood; they lurk privily for their own lives.

19 So are the ways of every one that is greedy of gain; which taketh away the life of the owners thereof.

20 Wisdom crieth without; she uttereth her voice in the streets:

21 She crieth in the chief place of concourse, in the openings of the gates: in the city she uttereth her words, saying,

22 How long, ye simple ones, will ye love simplicity? and the scorners delight in their scorning, and fools hate knowledge?

23 Turn you at my reproof: behold, I will pour out my spirit unto you, I will make known my words unto you.

24 Because I have called, and ye refused; I have stretched out my hand, and no man regarded;

25 But ye have set at nought all my counsel, and would none of my reproof:

26 I also will laugh at your calamity; I will mock when your fear cometh;

27 When your fear cometh as desolation, and your destruction cometh as a whirlwind; when distress and anguish cometh upon you.

28 Then shall they call upon me, but I will not answer; they shall seek me early, but they shall not find me:

29 For that they hated knowledge, and did not choose the fear of the LORD:

30 They would none of my counsel: they despised all my reproof.

31 Therefore shall they eat of the fruit of their own way, and be filled with their own devices.

32 For the turning away of the simple shall slay them, and the prosperity of fools shall destroy them.

33 But whoso hearkeneth unto me shall dwell safely, and shall be quiet from fear of evil.

That’s from Proverbs, chapter 1. Gives me chills.

Jump In

Reader Paula sent this in an email. It appears on a site called Caringbridge.com:

I have been diagnosed with Ewings sarcoma. The cancer started in my right hip and leg area and the tumor is quite large. Scans have shown that the cancer has already spread to my lungs. My first cycle of chemotherapy January 15 and the second cycle is to begin on January 29.

Paula says this is from a lady named Chrissy. She is 27 and married. She has kids aged 5, 6, and 7.

In other news, Mish Weiss wants to give up her fight against leukemia. Her doctor is very upset, and he put a message on her blog. He has gotten her to agree to 21 more days of treatment, using new drugs.

I hope you’ll join me in praying that she will be healed, and that she will do what it takes to please and serve God. I’m not suggesting there is something wrong with her behavior. Whenever I pray for someone to receive something, I also pray that they will turn to God and make a change. I do that because blessings are connected to obedience and faith, not because I am judgmental. Spare me the angry comments.

Surprise, Surprise

Imagine you are an evil spirit, and you want to destroy a wealthy, powerful nation that, on balance, serves God. What would be a good way to do it?

First you might come between the old and the young, introducing musical genres and dance styles and other cultural changes that act as barriers. You might even manage to create an extremely bizarre and unnatural situation in which the old and young separate to socialize. No healthy civilization has ever had a sick, twisted segregation of the generations. It’s a great way to bring nations down. It’s like girdling a tree. You disconnect the leaves from the roots, and the leaves die.

The separation would prevent the young from being around the old enough to absorb their time-tested wisdom, so when you filled the heads of the young with destructive garbage, there would be no responsible voice to balance it. You could make the young believe really stupid things. “Pride is good.” “Aggression is a virtue.” “All types of sexual behavior are healthy and natural.” “Abstinence is sick and impossible.” “Money solves life’s hard problems.” “Man created God because man is weak and cowardly.” Wisdom is strength. Take it away, and you get weakness.

To help you brainwash the young, you could destroy the educational system. You could corrupt it to the point where most teens had a hard time succeeding at simple tasks like finding major countries on a map or naming fundamental principles and rules expressed in the Constitution. They’d be so ignorant, they’d believe any ridiculous claim, including the claim that socialism–which has been utterly discredited by history–works.

You could misuse the Constitution to remove Christianity from schools, and eventually, you would be able to use the schools to attack Christianity openly. Once you manage to get courts to say that acknowledging Christianity amounts to establishing a religion, you end up with a helpful logical conclusion: saying positive things about Christianity in state-run schools is unconstitutional, but preaching the nonexistence of God is not.

When the country’s standard of living began to decline as a result of sin and rebellion, you could mask it by pretending to fight for women’s rights. You could convince women that raising children is a trivial job fit only for ignorant, unskilled immigrants, and that no woman who has no outside-the-home career should have any self-respect. Then women would go out into the workplace, and families would have more income. By objective standards like home ownership, they would be worse off than their parents, and they would work more, and each breadwinning pair might earn less real wealth than a typical male wage earner in an earlier generation, but things would look good on the surface.

You could convince people that loading up on credit, which has been considered stupid for centuries, was a good thing. Their neighbors would have fancy cars and houses, in which they actually had little or no true ownership interest, and people would get jealous and join the flock of debtors. The borrowing would enable people to have better possessions, and they would seem and feel richer than they actually were.

It would be helpful if the value of the currency could be manipulated, so you might take the country off the gold standard. Then inflation would be considered normal, and people would earn salaries that seemed high because they contained a lot of zeroes. And they’d feel pretty good about that.

Then you could convince people that Israel and the Jews caused a lot of the world’s problems by holding onto land captured in war. Never mind the fact that territory has traditionally been acquired in this manner. Forget the fact that the wars in question were defensive wars, and don’t mention the size of Israel, and the need for buffer areas around it. Israel’s enemies have proven that they don’t keep promises, and that land doesn’t satisfy them, and that their real goal is the destruction of the Jewish state. Try to keep the press from acknowledging these things.

Eventually, you’d end up with a nation that supports Muslim land grabs, in opposition to God’s promise to Abraham, which, as your state-paid teachers say, is just a fable. And once a land opposes Israel, its fortunes will fall.

When it’s all over, you have an economically depressed land full of atheism and other forms of idolatry, which opposes Israel, embraces just about every type of sin, has fractured families, and has no clue about the value of ancient wisdom. The people have debt. They have no savings. They are losing their jobs. They don’t know how to pray or repent. God has no plans to help them; in fact, he now helps their enemies. He looks elsewhere for champions, because unlike George Bush and Barack Obama, God does not promote and assist failures at the expense of the responsible.

Job well done.

This blog post expresses an idea that has been rolling around in my head for a while. And time seems to be bearing it out. Maybe it’s just something I thought up on my own, out of neurosis and pessimism. Or maybe someone merciful and generous and patient whispered it in my ear, to help me and my family survive, and to equip me to inform others. Maybe that same someone is whispering it into hundreds of millions of ears all over the planet.