Scratch That off the List

Three projects are behind me now: my welding cart, smoked ribs, and mac and cheese. Well, four projects if you include my new kitchen blackboard. I put a list of things to do on it. “Paint cart” is at the top.

The ribs are fine, except I think I should decrease the salt and avoid using too much rub. The mac and cheese was gritty in spite of using starch instead of flour. I’m melting the cheese too fast. The cart is just about perfect. Here it is.

I was going to wait for the paint to cure completely before assembling it, but it looked like it would hold up, so I moved ahead.

I already put two welders on it. I need to get a bigger C25 bottle. Perhaps tomorrow.

Once I get things settled, I’ll decide where to put cord hangers.

I hate to sell my Harbor Freight Vulcan cart. It’s a great tool. I just don’t need it any more. My Eastwood carts are okay, but they’re cumbersome, and they always seem to be in the way.

I plan to build a second cart as soon as possible. The workshop has to be tamed, and welding carts are central to the plan. Today after I finished this one, I experienced a taste of my future. Some Vise Grips and other tools were lying around in the way, and I grabbed them and put them in the cart’s drawers. It felt wonderful. I couldn’t see them any more.

I should probably be building a bulletproof cart with rifle ports so I can welcome uninvited Biden supporters (undocumented guests) in November and December, but maybe they’ll be too busy killing Republicans and running over cops in their own cities to visit me out here.

I wore my MAGA hat while running errands today and yesterday, and it seemed like I couldn’t go to a single store without being accosted and congratulated on my good taste. A guy who was rounding up grocery carts told me we had to keep praying.

I have 48 cans of tuna, my own well, and enough ammunition to kill a small city. I hope the rapture comes in December. If not, I think I will still make it through January.

Jim Beam and Corn Starch Trial #1

Our nation is hurtling downward toward chaos, BLM is trying to kill cops in Philadelphia, Christians are predicting a 2020 rapture, and what am I doing? I’m smoking ribs.

I’ve been eating cheeseburgers for lunch. There is nothing wrong with that, but I don’t want to eat a big cheeseburger every day from now on. When I got my new smoker, one of my hopes was that I would be able to increase my protein and fat consumption in style, while–I told myself–reducing refined carbs. Ribs and many other smoked meats aren’t served with buns.

I’m going to try to smoke once a week. That will cover me for three dinners.

Yesterday, I went to Walmart to buy motor oil. You should know about Walmart’s oil prices. Advance Auto Parts had a sale on oil, and it would have cost me about $40 to do one change, with a dubious filter included. I bought 6 quarts of synthetic oil at Walmart yesterday for about $16, and I bought a Fram Titanium filter at Advance. My total cost will be around $28. Not bad.

Anyway, Walmart’s price for St. Louis ribs was pretty good, so I picked some up. They’re smoking right now.

I wanted to marinate them, but I don’t like wasting marinade. I like to use liquor, so a pint costs a lot. Today I tried a new strategy.

Ribs come in shrink wrap. I have giant cattle hypodermics. I made a mixture of Jim Beam, sugar, and salt, and I shot it into the rib package through a tiny hole. I tried to cover the hole with tape, but it wouldn’t stick. I should have tried a waterproof bandage. Anyhow, it was not a problem. The plastic confined the marinade close to the ribs, and none spilled. I was able to rotate the package and distribute the marinade, and I put the package on the counter, meat side down, for half an hour.

It worked really well.

I used around half a cup of liquor. I can’t think of a better use for it. I wish it wasn’t a brand promoted by Mila Kunis, a well-known proponent of the murder of unborn babies, but it will do the job.

Last year, Jim Beam (part of a Japanese company) suffered a huge warehouse fire and lost 45,000 barrels of liquor. They told the press the lost whiskey was “young.” Eerie.

Smoking meat with a rub is not hard at all. I make my rub, put the meat on a towel, apply the rub, put the meat in the smoker, shake the towel out in the yard, and put the towel in the laundry. No mess to speak of.

As for my carb intentions, things are not going as well. The other day, I was starving after a long fabricating session, and I decided to throw some old stuff together and make macaroni and cheese. I got to thinking about it, and I wondered if putting flour in the sauce was a good idea. Flour doesn’t convert completely into a gel. Even in gravy or a roux, it’s slightly gritty. It occurred to me that starch might work better.

I Googled around, and sure enough, people do use starch. I’m going to try it today. I’m also going to use a block of cheese instead of shredded, because shredded cheese has tiny cellulose fibers in it.

The trick to making ribs part of a healthy diet is to stop thinking of them as special-occasion food. Ordinarily, when I eat ribs, it’s a big deal, so I want Texas toast, beans, mac and cheese, and dessert. The key is to think of ribs as just another protein.

Clearly, I have not met that goal yet.

The Smokin-It smoker is a joy to use. Highly recommended.

Workshop-Destroying Decluttering Project Nears Completion

The welding cart project is 95% done.

Today I welded some upright tubes on the tank platform. I thought they would be useful for holding little bars for hanging cables and cords. I haven’t welded any bars to them because I want to put the machines on the cart first. I thought that would give me a better idea where the bars should go.

When I was done welding, I separated the project from the chest and shot truck bed paint on it. It’s drying now.

Tomorrow, I plan to bolt the project onto the cart, put the machines on it, stuff it with welding tools, and clean up the shop. Then I’ll make decisions about welding hangers on it. I’ll have to grind some of the paint off in order to weld them on, but I thought it was better to do some of the paint over than to have to cut bars off and move them. That would require removing paint anyway.

I managed to flash myself while doing a tack weld. I had reading glasses on. Presumably, they absorbed some of the UV rays, but how much? I’ve been praying and using my supernatural tools to prevent pain and discomfort from developing.

It’s not a big deal. Every welder flashes himself sooner or later. Flash injuries are fleeting. Still, it’s frustrating to forget something so important.

There have been times in the past when I thought I had flashed myself, but I never had any pain later, so I was wrong, I was healed by God, or I didn’t get enough radiation to cause problems.

Once this thing is up and running, I’ll use it to make a second one for two other machines. Two new tool chests will really free up storage space.

I Have a Panic HOUSE

Today I am having my roof fixed. I’m paying $1000 for something I could probably do myself, but I am not interested in rolling off the roof and becoming a permanent yard ornament. I’m also not excited about having my ceiling fall because I didn’t know how to do roofing correctly.

I wanted to put blinds in my former dining room before the roofers showed up. Why? Because it’s a workshop/gun room now. I have a lot of ammunition in that room, and anyone looking into a window would know what it was. These days, ammunition is like gold. You can buy it, but if it’s a popular caliber, you’re likely to shell out three times what it cost last year.

Roofing companies are a top resource for released prison inmates. If you can’t get a job anywhere else, a roofer will probably take a chance on you. Good information to have, if you’re a homeowner or, perhaps more importantly, a homeowner’s wife or daughter. The thought of an electrician or plumber seeing my stuff doesn’t concern me all that much. Roofers are different.

Sadly, I signed a contract before buying blinds, and I didn’t think I had time to get them installed before the roofers showed up, so I didn’t do anything.

Today the roofers showed up without warning, so moving my ammunition out of sight, one container at a time, was not an option. Someone was looking out for me, however, because I had my ammunition loaded on a wheeled shelf unit. I rolled it into a hallway, and I was all set.

I should have bought these shelves a lot sooner. I cheaped out at first. I bought plastic shelves from Home Depot. I wrote about this a couple of days ago. They run $40 each, and when you overload them, they bend. Mine bent. The shelves I have now are fancy chromed Seville Classics jobs from Amazon. I have two units. One is mostly dedicated to ammunition. The other is for reloading components and other items. I have hundreds of pounds on the first one, and it’s not sagging at all. Wish I could say the same of myself.

I moved one of my plastic shelves to the laundry room, where it has become my paranoia storage area.

I went to Walmart yesterday for dishwashing powder and salt, and I bought a big, heavy bag of jasmine rice. I also picked up 4 pounds of great northern beans, canned salmon, two large jars of Skippy, and 6 pounds of pasta. This is a lot of food. One person could probably go a month on it. I also have 6 gallon cans of Stanislaus pizza sauce.

You would think a long-term food supply would take up a lot of room and cost a lot of money, but you would be wrong. My shelf unit is maybe 25% full. My total bill at Walmart was around $80, and I bought a lot of things unrelated to preparation.

I plan to add more rice and maybe some different beans. I have 48 cans of tuna on the way. I want to dry apples. When you’re from Appalachia, not having dried apples is uncivilized. Ordinarily, drying apples is a pain because of bugs, but I have a screened-in pool, so no flies.

I checked into generators. Not a great option, unfortunately. I would have to spend close to $20,000 to get a whole-house rig that would cost me $5 per hour to run. That’s about $3600 per month for electricity, assuming diesel would even be available, and the price would go way up in a crisis. Unless you have your own natural gas well or hydroelectric plant, I think you can pretty well expect to do without power in a hard core prepper scenario. Maybe you can run your laptop off solar panels.

I wonder if people are buying manual pumps for their wells.

There is zero fresh water near me, unless you count swampy ponds.

I suppose I’ll have to hope we still have power during the civil war.

The Internet says my power company uses a mix of coal, uranium, “biomass,” and natural gas. What is “biomass”? Chicken manure, maybe? Is there anything chicken manure can’t do?

Let’s see. Coal comes from the South, so that may still be available after the North turns on us. Natural gas comes from the South. I would guess that biomass comes from the South. Would we still have nuclear power? The plants are in-state, but would we be able to get uranium? Maybe the Chinese would sell it to us on Alibaba or Banggood.

There is a lot of oil in Jesus-friendly areas, and there are also many refineries. That’s good.

If you would like to dry your own apples, I have the ultimate tip. Spend $25 on an apple peeler. They really work. You can core, peel, and slice an apple in 5 seconds. I should go get apples today. You can dry them by setting them on a window screen.

I don’t like factory dried apples, because they put a chemical on them to keep them white. It kills the flavor. To get the real flavor of dried apples, you need to avoid that stuff. Real dried apples taste like apple butter. Factory apples taste like air.

The future is uncertain. Are we looking at a few weeks of pro-Biden terrorist riots followed by a crackdown and resumed calm, will we have a full-blown civil war complete with drawn borders, or will we simply move into an Israel-type situation in which terrorism is a normal part of daily life? Actually, we’re already in that situation, except that the acts of terrorism committed here haven’t been as serious as the ones Israelis face.

A full-blown civil war with new borders would be a catastrophe, because leftists would freeze or simply steal the bank and security accounts of conservatives and centrists, and they would also cut off our access to phones, the Internet, and credit. Leftists would probably be massacred routinely due to their inferior capacity for violence. They’re pretty good at throwing bottles of pee, but they would do poorly while trying to familiarize themselves with firearms, camouflage, tactics, and so on. Jesus people have been shooting, hunting, and serving in the military for centuries.

My hat is off to people who think they can do well after a total breakdown of society. It would be very hard to prepare sufficiently well to guarantee that. I figure it’s realistic to prepare for a bad month or two, tops, and I see no hope of providing my own electricity over long periods. I will have to bank on a future in which companies in my area adapt and continue producing power.

Should I cut some firewood? Arrgh. Anything but that.

In my area, I would probably need wood for maybe 45 days. That’s a lot of wood. To prepare it, I would need to create huge snake-infested piles which would eventually attract termites and rot.

I have a lot of downed wood already. Maybe I should just wait and see what happens. I can cut it into firewood if I have to. I was going to burn it, but maybe it has value.

In any case, there is no possibility my ammunition will get the roofers excited today.

Trump Milkshake: Existential Threat to Mankind

Two huge stories are in the news today. It’s hard to decide which one to write about.

For a long time, I felt God was telling me to avoid looking at the news. That was pleasant. Now I feel he is telling me I have to look at it. What’s the difference? I believe the difference is in me. It used to be harder for me to look at the news without being provoked or discouraged. Now, with better supernatural tools, I am more stable, so the news is not as dangerous to me.

“Dangerous”? I must be a Bible-thumping climate-change-denying mask hater! How can information be dangerous? Actually, it can. The informative value can be exceeded by the damage it does to your heart. This is one reason why God tells us to be separated from the world. Merely witnessing what happens around us can tempt us in ways that can be destructive. You have to limit your exposure to the cursed, God-rejecting world in order to avoid being overwhelmed.

Here are the big stories: President Trump has proven his unfitness for his job by ordering a milkshake, and Pat Robertson has “prophesied” regarding the near future of America.

I know it’s hard to believe that a grown man with responsibilities would order a milkshake, but Trump did it. He was in a security briefing, and he called a waiter into the room and offered everyone a malt. We can’t say for sure, but there is no proof he didn’t tell the waiter to hold the nuclear button while he tweeted. There is no proof it didn’t happen, so we can assume it did. When will this man be stopped?

“Journalists” are enraged. They are offended, so they must be right. The theory is that our elected and appointed officials would continue spewing dangerous information while a waiter was in the room, because, well, THERE IS NO PROOF THEY DIDN’T. There is also no proof they or the waiter renounced white supremacy.

I guess I’m a feckless optimist, but I can’t help thinking top officials would stop blurting out sensitive intelligence while ordering milkshakes from a person with a low security clearance.

If hackers take out our missile silos as a result of Trump’s milkshake gaffe, it will just be more proof Trump isn’t groovy. Bush II wasn’t groovy, and now we have another non-groovy chief executive, and I just can’t stand it one more second.

I should rejoin Tiktok just so I can get in the car and do a meltdown video.

As for Pat Robertson, he says he “thinks” Trump will be reelected. Prophets don’t “think” things will happen. God tells them things will happen. God will never tell you he “thinks” this or that, because God knows. There are no opinions in heaven. There are only facts no one there questions.

Anyway, Robertson says there will be post-election bloodshed followed by a 5-year period of peace in which people will serve God and pray together and so on. He says God will resolve people’s disputes. Then there will be a big war, and I believe he said the second coming would come after that.

Can’t buy it. It doesn’t seem to line up with the Bible or the dreams and impressions charismatics have been having this year. I have not seen a reference to a 5-year Messianic age in which the world gets straightened out. The Bible says there will be a millennium of peace, not 5 years. I don’t know where Robertson got his timeline.

I keep saying I have a very strong impression that the rapture will be this year. I don’t call it a prophecy. I haven’t found any ways in which the impression conflicts with the Bible, and it makes sense in too many ways to list. But I make mistakes, and God didn’t hand me a scroll with a detailed prediction on it.

I “think” I’m right. I’m just about sure Robertson is wrong.

He claims to receive information from God about people’s problems, and viewers have called in and said they’ve been healed while watching him. They idea is that God told Robertson these things but did not attach names to them, and when Robertson says “someone” has this or that problem, people who are watching realize he’s talking about them. There is considerable evidence that this actually happens, and I don’t get supernatural information about strangers’ medical issues, so who is more likely to be right about the future?

Just putting it out there.

I’ve decided to buy a little food. You never know. I ordered 48 cans of tuna at a great price, and I’m going to load up on dried beans and rice. I plan to lay in some canned salmon. Canned fish lasts forever, and beans and rice are good for at least a couple of years. Maybe I should get a big jar of compensational multivitamins, too. For maybe $150, I can set myself up with food for several months. I’m not very excited about it. I don’t want to be here to eat it! I heard someone is throwing a big party in heaven, and the food there should be a lot better.

I should dehydrate apples. Imagine life on beans and rice without anything to help push them through the colon. Apples could save my life.

My ammunition situation is good. Example: a couple of days ago I found 1000 rounds of 9mm bullets I had forgotten I had. I need to put them in cartridges.

I bought lead semiwadcutters and started loading them, but I found the overall lengths were not consistent. People said it might be that compressed air in the cases was pushing the bullets back up. The recommended answer: coated bullets. I bought more semiwadcutters coated with plastic. I don’t recall how plastic solves the problem, but I’ll try it. I believe the coated bullets have less grease on them. The uncoated ones left lube all over my dies, to the point where I was afraid it interfered with reloading.

I have no desire to be part of the upcoming civil war, but I like to shoot, and I don’t want to be deprived. And maybe someone who is part of the war will need my ammo.

I want to be ready for whatever happens. These days, I battle demons, literally. I evict them from my presence several times a week. I tell them I will not host them. It’s a very strange thing. After going after a few spirits–let’s say murder, the spirit of antichrist, and laziness–I’ll start to fall asleep. It happens over and over. I think this is because hostile spirits speak into your mind all the time. When you drive them out, you get some quiet.

It’s a very real thing. Everyone has demons. Jesus had Satan himself and had to drive him off more than once. It’s strange that Christians think they can’t have demons, but Jesus could have Satan. Are we better than Jesus?

I now pray for God to bring the rapture ASAP. The more I think about it, the more I realize humanity has had ample chances. The Bible says stripes are for the fool’s back. Some people can’t take gentle hints. Maybe the tribulation will bring a bigger harvest than the rapture. Maybe billions of scoffers will yield once they’ve suffered enough. God has been kind, and things have gotten worse, so maybe it’s time to put away the carrot and bring out the stick.

The thought of being in the lifeboat and encouraging the captain to paddle away from people floating in the water is a little scary, but look at what the world has become.

I don’t want to be here when I can be fined or jailed for refusing to call a man a woman. I don’t want to live to see wealth taxes and “reparations”-based land confiscations. I don’t want to see Christian and Jewish families massacred and raped. I’m very content with the evil I’ve already seen. It will suffice.

When the Tiktok car-meltdown people are in charge, it’s time to be somewhere else. Ask a Cuban or a white South African.

Today I plan to work on my new welding cart. I have to do something while the world burns, and I can’t play the fiddle.

Masked Fascist Strikes Again

The election is over for me. I just voted.

Here’s a shocker that will have people chattering for weeks: I voted for Donald Trump. I guess this means Keith Olbermann’s fans will be marching up the driveway soon to kill me. Hopefully, they will use the gate. It would make a nice choke point.

I voted at a public library. A northerner was standing out front with a Biden sign, yelling, “Thank you for voting.” I don’t know if he lives here or what. His accent and his sign made him stand out like a bar of soap at an Antifa rally.

I took a couple of face diapers with me. I have cloth masks made from cotton, and I have a stretch camo gaiter for confusing squirrels. Until recently, they were telling us gaiters actually made the spread of disease worse. Then about three days later they said it was not true. Let’s be honest: none of these things work to any significant degree. I just wear them to shut people up.

There was a sign out front saying face coverings were “encouraged.” I love this county. The election worker minding the line was not wearing a mask. The line was outdoors, so even if masks worked, they would have been unnecessary, but most people wore them anyway.

Before I walked to the voting place, I removed my gun and knife from my pockets, and I switched my MAGA hat for one from Rural King. I figured I might get in trouble for “electioneering” if I wore the hat. Then I saw an old guy walk out of the building wearing a Trump hat. Again, I love this county.

I did my job. I voted for Trump, against a minimum wage hike, for a law making it harder for referendums to change the constitution, and for a bunch of Republican-appointed judges. Now that my part of the work is done, the only question is whether my vote will make it to Tallahassee.

Two people behind me said they had had their Trump signs stolen. Anyone who steals an election sign should do 5 years in a federal prison. It’s not a trivial thing, attacking another person’s right to express his political opinions during an election season.

The intimidation and censorship are rising to startling levels. Antifers attacked a few pro-free-speech activists in San Francisco a few days back, and one of them punched the leader from behind and knocked two of his teeth out. He wasn’t rioting. He was just walking. The activists were not promoting Trump. They were just protesting censorship from the tech giants. Predictably, Twitter banned the victim.

Oddly, the persecution gives me hope. People are reluctant to express their support for Trump publicly, so there are many hidden Trump supporters who won’t wear a hat, put up a sign, or respond to a poll. I live in an extremely conservative county, and there is no way I’d put a Trump sticker on my car. Getting the car repainted would cost a fortune. Most Trump supporters live in areas where they have to be careful not to even say his name. Obviously, they will be considerably more cautious than I am…until they vote.

Berserk leftists have put themselves in a funny position. By censoring, stealing, firing, banning, and committing acts of violence, they have turned a lot of people into Trump supporters, and they have also driven many people to conceal their support. Inevitably, the Trump vote will be bigger than leftists expect, and that is largely because of their Krystallnacht tactics. They are going to get a surprise that will make them even more berserk, and it’s 100% their fault.

Does that mean Trump will win? If I had to guess, I would say he will. I pray about it a lot, and I curse the Biden campaign all the time. I keep feeling God is telling me Biden will lose. But I could be wrong.

We really are going to have a civil war of sorts, and something is needed to set it off. A Trump loss would not be a very good blasting cap. A Biden loss would be definitely work. It appears the red horseman of the apocalypse is about to burst out of the gate, and there have to be severe temptations to make his mission work, so it seems to me a Biden loss is likely. It would fit in perfectly with Trump’s original victory and the nomination and confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett.

Conservatives believe in laws, and we just do not riot. Rioting conservatives are as rare as Antifers who will make it in the rapture. I don’t think a Biden victory could throw the nation into a state of war, because Republicans would just stay home. A Trump victory would likely send armed terrorist mobs into residential areas.

My best guess for the future is that Trump will win, and leftists will start a war. It just makes sense.

Who will win? Well, we have all the land, food, and oil, and we own most of the coasts. We are much better fighters, and we have lots of weapons. Military people will generally side with us. On the other hand, we may not have the Internet, cell phones, credit cards, or bank accounts. Leftists can probably take those things away. What’s worse? Being effeminate and whiny and not having weapons or crops, or being poor and deprived of the ability to communicate?

What can a conservative do if his leftist New-York-based bank confiscates his accounts? What can we do if our cell phones and Internet connections stop working? I wonder.

I hope I’m not here to see it.

The Revelation says the church of Philadelphia will be spared the season of temptation. It’s not a literal reference to an ancient church. It’s a figurative reference to those Christians who will be close to God when the rapture comes. The season of temptation is the tribulation. The whole thing points to a pre-tribulation rapture.

The unfairness, dishonesty, verbal abuse, physical violence, workplace sabotage, and various crimes of the left are infuriating. They are provocations no one should have to endure in America, and they will get worse. Provocation is temptation. There is no good reason for God to keep subjecting faithful sons and daughters to severe temptation, after they’ve already shown they are firmly on his side. Hypocrites, on the other hand, still need purification by fire.

I have good news for people who think Christians will be here during the tribulation. They’re right. Many Christians will not make it when God calls us home. Their hypocrisy will tie them to the earth, like a millstone pulling a man down to the bottom of the ocean.

I want to be gone when things get worse. How can I secure a place for myself? Jesus says he wants to find people serving meat in his house. “Meat” means the deep truths of God; the things you will never hear from cowards like Joel Osteen, who don’t have the guts to upset people. Jesus’ house is the people who belong to him. He must want us to give strong teaching to Christians. I hope blogging qualifies as serving meat. I certainly do not have any stadium crowds to address.

Time to sit back and watch things unfold.

Pork, Guns, and God

I barely survived the weekend.

Two friends of mine drove up on Saturday morning, and they left yesterday. I’ll call them Diamond and Silk. They’re sisters. Diamond is a nurse, and Silk is a newly-minted prosecutor for a Florida county. They’re Haitian. I met them when I was going to Trinity Church in Miami.

We made a deal. I would fix ribs, and they would do all the cleaning up.

I bought two racks of spare ribs, which were twice what we needed. I found a Youtube video on turning spare ribs into St. Louis ribs, and I followed the directions.

Spare ribs have little ribby bits on one side, and the other side is a large piece of boneless meat. When you cut that piece off, you get a piece of meat you can smoke, along with a rack of ribs that are somewhat like baby backs, only fattier and more delicious.

I didn’t really know what was inside spare ribs. I never bothered to figure out where the bones stopped. I was afraid I would need a saw to make St. Louis ribs. Not so. You just cut where the ribs join the cartilage which connects to the sternum. I’ll post a very helpful video.

I think this is a great move. It gives you small ribs that are easy to handle, plus a large piece of meat which is good in its own right.

I smoked the ribs with 2.5 ounces of hickory and my own rub, after hosing them down with Jim Beam. They were spectacular. It should have been illegal to put sauce on them. But we did.

I also made Texas toast. I made a loaf of sweet white bread with butter and sugar in the dough, and then I dipped slices in strained garlic butter (no garlic pieces) and browned them in a skillet. Unbelievable.

I also prepared a blueberry cheesecake. I’m glad I don’t have any of it left, because this stuff is just too good to not eat.

We also had corn on the cob and barbecue beans with smoked sausage bits.

I think I can safely say that no one in Florida ate better than we did this weekend.

We talked a lot about the rapture and the tribulation. Diamond is taking it seriously. She has bags of rice and beans. She had a dream about moving to Tennessee, even though it’s not what you would call her natural habitat. Silk is not all that aware, so she is still a Democrat. She’s baptized with the Holy Spirit, though, and I have confidence she’ll come around if she speaks in tongues as much as she should. Nothing turns people conservative like prayer in tongues.

We got to shoot a little. I have two arrays of steel targets, welded together by yours truly. Diamond has a Ruger EC9, which is a plastic compact 9mm, and Silk has a Smith & Wesson Bodyguard in .380. Unfortunately, they are not integrated tightly into the 2A cult, so they were not ready for the ammo shortage. Diamond had one 50-round bag of ammo, and Silk had nothing.

Luckily for them, they know a guy who was watching the wind. I have .22 ammo to burn, so I used some of it to teach them to shoot. We used an SW22 and a Colt Woodsman. At first, they were shooting all over the place, but by the end of the day, they were hitting the steel most of the time at 7 yards. I also let them shoot my bright stainless Colt 1911 in .38 Super.

Now maybe there is a chance they’ll be able to defend themselves instead of pulling a Pulp Fiction scene and filling walls with wasted lead.

Watching over Diamond and Silk is like looking after 6 hyperactive kids in a mall, so I was pretty worn out when they left.

Today, I got back to my routine.

I had ordered 5 pounds of smokeless powder, and Fedex failed to show up when they promised. To take delivery, I had to sign in person, so I had to either sit at the house and wait or go to the Fedex hub and pick up the package. I was afraid they would send the powder back, and in these times, you can’t afford to lose any powder. Today I went to the hub and picked up the box.

I also went to get my new .22 pistol. It’s a Browning Challenger I, made in Belgium. I think I already wrote about it. I found it on Gunbroker. It looked very good, an excellent specimen is worth $700, and no one was making reasonable bids. All told, including a transfer fee and shipping, I paid about $477.

This is a marvelous pistol. The trigger is magnificent, the bluing is in very good shape, and it shoots beautifully. A real addition to my collection.

I thought it was in near-mint condition from the pictures, but that isn’t true. I can see it has been fired a lot, and the bluing on the forward side of the grip has thin places where two fingers rested on it, but still…$477.

I hope nothing goes wrong with it, because Browning is not good about supporting the model. They aren’t working very hard to make parts for middle-aged pistols.

Yesterday, once I was alone, I assembled some new shelves for the gun room. When I moved my stuff in there, I bought two $40 plastic shelf units from Home Depot and loaded them up. Sadly, they were not up to the weight of ammunition and reloading components. They bowed. I ended up with boxes all over the floor, because I had nowhere to put them. I broke down and ordered two Seville Classics (really Shanghai Classics) rolling steel units. I got them for $150 each. For some reason, the price fluctuates during the day, and I caught them on a dip. They were $168 when I first put them in my cart.

These shelves can hold 4000 pounds if you put feet on them. If you use wheels, the capacity drops to 500 pounds. I guess the spindles on the wheels bend. Anyway, it’s pretty obvious the shelves are not the weak points, so it’s okay to put a great deal of weight on a couple of shelves per unit, as long as you don’t overload the remaining shelves. I filled the lower shelves with ammo and brass. Then I put other junk on the other shelves. No problems. They roll around just find, and nothing is bent.

I was able to keep one Home Depot unit for light objects, so now I have a lot of storage, and I can see the floor. I can actually find things now.

I’m going to get back to work on my tool chest welding cart conversion. I should go ahead and buy a second tool chest.

The year 2020 keeps getting better. I hope it’s a trend that continues through the rapture.

The Biggest Scandal Your Neighbors Will Never Know About?

If you’re not conservative, you may be amazed to learn that Rudy Giuliani has a copy of a laptop hard drive belonging to Hunter Biden, the son of Joe Biden. People who watch Fox and get their news from the Internet instead of TV and newspapers are well aware of the story, but the leftist press, including Facebook and Twitter, is actively censoring it.

Hunter Biden is an influence salesman. Whose influence does he sell? One likely name comes to mind. Hunter Biden is a drug addict who was discharged from the Navy because of his problems, he fathered a son with a stripper, and he’s a Yale-educated lawyer who doesn’t seem to be able to make it as an attorney. It’s hard to imagine bigwigs other than Joe Biden lining up to work with him.

I am not on a first-name basis with this man, obviously, but in order to distinguish him from his father, and to avoid typing “Hunter Biden” over and over, I will refer to him as Hunter.

The hard drive contains disturbing photos of Hunter, along with an 11-minute video of a man who appears to be Hunter, engaging in a sex act with a woman. One photo shows Hunter with a crack pipe in his mouth. Text in the hard drive suggests Hunter sells access to his father to the Chinese.

Democrats are calling the data “Russian disinformation,” and they’re saying Giuliani–the star prosecutor who took down the mafia–is an unreliable dupe who is easily taken in by fake evidence. The problem with this theory, as Giuliani has noted, is that a person claiming to be Hunter’s attorney demanded that his client’s property–the hard drive–be returned. If the hard drive is fake, it’s not Hunter’s property, and it would be unethical for an attorney to lie in order to get it.

Unless Giuliani is making the story up, Hunter’s legal representative has conceded the genuineness of the hard drive.

Emails in the hard drive say an interest in a foreign deal was set aside for H, and a source confirms that H is Joe Biden. Another message in the drive informs Hunter’s daughter he won’t take half her salary like Joe Biden would. The implication is that Joe Biden is receiving half of Hunter’s profits.

That would be a little sick. Biden became rich through his political position, and everyone who knows anything about taxes knows you do NOT let your children give you wealth. You should always look for ways to transfer wealth to them in order to avoid inheritance taxes. A rich parent who skims money from a less-wealthy child is like an animal that eats its young.

Twitter is banning mention of the story, which appears in The New York Post (a reputable mainstream outlet), and so is Facebook. Twitter’s rationale is that they don’t publish “hacked” material. Unfortunately for Twitter, Hunter abandoned the laptop at a repair shop, and he signed a waiver saying it would become the shop’s property if he did not pick it up. You can’t hack yourself. The people at Twitter know this. Technology is their thing, and they have lawyers. Twitter is censoring the story because they know it hurts Biden’s chances of being elected.

We have reached a predictable (and predicted) point in history in which a big percentage of Americans get their news from social media. Because social media firms are not bound by the First Amendment, they are allowed to restrict speech arbitrarily. We saw this coming, and our legislators did nothing to protect us. As a result, a few kooky, spoiled, far-left tech kids now have the ability to keep legitimate news from tens of millions of irresponsible Americans who make no effort to find reliable news.

It certainly looks like Biden (the elder) made a lot of money from selling influence or at least access through his son, after saying he never discussed his son’s business with him because of the conflict of interest. That, unlike the fake Russian Trump dossier financed by Hillary Clinton or the debunked collusion scandal, would be a very big deal. But if you ask your Democrat or swing-voter neighbor about it, he may have no idea what you’re talking about, even if he watches the news twice a day.

For a few years, I’ve been disturbed to see conservatives gloating about their political successes. We barely got Bush elected, we lost the presidency to a previously obscure mediocrity twice in a row, and then we barely got Trump elected. Somehow, many conservatives thought this history showed that we owned the world. I’ve seen people on the web talking about the death of leftism, as though it were a done deal. I wondered how anyone could be that dumb.

They’re even smug about the Supreme Court. Well, guess what? Clarence Thomas is fat, old, black, and fond of tobacco, Roberts is unreliable, and there is no legal barrier to packing the court. If the Democrats want to put 150 liberal judges on the court, leaving 6 conservatives to oppose them, they can do it.

America becomes less conservative every year, we don’t have the House, we are close to losing the Senate, Biden is ahead in the polls, and if Trump loses, the Supreme Court is Biden’s for the asking, as soon as next year. We are on the edge of a precipice, and many of us are too stupid to see it.

Now leftists in the information industry are doing what smart people predicted years ago. They’re choking conservatives out of public forums. Because we rely on their platforms so much, they can destroy our ability to speak and amplify the voices that oppose us without committing a technical violation of the law. The First Amendment still exists, and it’s still the law, but it no longer matters much. It protects us from the government, but the government isn’t the aggressor.

Having the right to speak means nothing if you’re speaking to three friends in your backyard and your opponent is reaching a billion people on Facebook, with help from Facebook’s promotional algorithms.

It will be very strange if Biden is elected, the laptop story finally gets to the public, and Biden is impeached and removed. I suppose impeachment will be impossible, however, because Democrats in the House will not hold one of their own accountable. They have no integrity.

Hunter is the most interesting part of the story. His father is aggressive, mean, dishonest, highly ambitious, and ruthless. Hunter does not seem to be cut from the same cloth. He appears to be unambitious, nonaggressive, sensitive, and easily dominated. The impression one gets from reading his communications and seeing his photos is that he was raised by a domineering, selfish dad who pushed him around and wrecked his self-image. It’s just an impression, but it makes me wonder.

He seems like a more honest person than Joe. He has admitted he probably wouldn’t have gotten where he is but for his dad. Joe would never admit a thing like that. Joe is not bright. He graduated near the bottom of his law school class, at a low-ranked school. He plagiarizes because he can’t have original or clever thoughts. Joe compensates by lying and bullying. If you questioned Joe’s merits, he would challenge you to a pushup contest, make a patently false claim of high intelligence, call you a name, and accuse you of being some kind of plant.

Here is a sad excerpt from a text Hunter sent:

my brother and I were
required to go to mass
every sunday growing up.
Just the three of us-Bean
my Dad and me. It was an
event-as long as we had
on a clean shirt and pants and
combed our hair we were ready to go. But
it was mandatory. And the
truth is U hated moss for
the post part. It always
seemed hollow to me. more
a an exercise in commitment than an act of
spirituality.
We were almost always late. We always sat in
the back or stood against the back wall if
there wasn’t room for the three of us to sit
together. And for some reason I always remember
it being hot regardless of the weather the hemi
lp at st. Joseph’s on the Brandywine rarely
spoke to me in anyway, and I spent most of the
time between standing, sitting, kneeling repeat
over and over lost in thought about what way
ahead or what was behind
There were only two parts of
the mass that I enjoyed.
The first was the “sharing of
peace.” IIn that monent
while the rest of churchgoers
would be shaking hands
with their peep neighbors, Bea
Dad and I would turn to one-
another and we each would
hug and kiss. No matter what.
It orbit mattes if Beau and
I were arguing up until the
moment we entered the
church, or if Dod way
pissed at one of us for
whatever reason. We would
give each other a hug and

I can’t read minds, but that seems like it came from a man who is much more honest than Joe Biden, at least in his personal life.

The feeling I get is that Hunter disappoints his father. Maybe his average mind and talents bother Joe because they don’t fit in with his fairy tales about himself and his brains. Biden has made crazy claims about his academic achievements and his IQ, and we all know smart, talented people produce smart, talented kids. Joe is a blue-collar impostor in a white-collar realm. He pretends to be something his genes could never have produced. A man like that wants a son who gets into Yale because of his grades and test scores, not because is dad is a Senator.

Hunter’s eyes look distant and haunted in his photos. He looks like he’s just there because he has to be. Maybe for his dad.

Quite honestly, he seems like the Holden Caulfield of the Democratic Party. That sums it up better than anything else I could say.

As happy as I would be to see the laptop keep Joe Biden in his basement and assisted living for the next 4 years, I feel very bad for Hunter. How can you read the story, read the texts and emails, look at the pictures, hear about the drugs, the sex video, and the pornography, and not wish this hadn’t happened to him? Situations like his drive people to kill themselves.

I don’t know the truth. Maybe I’m completely wrong about Hunter Biden. I have impressions; nothing more.

This is what happens to families when church is a lifeless place where effeminate men putter around in robes instead of introducting people to the Spirit of the living God. As a politician, Joe Biden knew he had to go to church regularly even if they were sacrificing virgins on the altar, just as he had to marry and have kids. It looks like he dragged his sons along just for optics.

Boredom and alienation are normal in Catholic churches and other churches where the Holy Spirit is stifled.

Arriving late in church is something proud people who don’t know God do. People who know God, and who know other people’s time is valuable, show up on time. It’s disrespectful. It’s also a way to make sure people see you when you arrive.

We should pray for Hunter Biden, while we’re praying his dad loses and Kamala Harris never becomes president.

The rapture can’t some soon enough for me. I keep praying for God to call us as soon as possible. Freedom of speech is dying. So is freedom of assembly. Restraints on disinformation are being removed. Hatred and cruelty are now fashionable. If it’s this bad now, I don’t want to be here to see what it’s like in 2030.

Link Machine Blows with Unseen Wind

Am I the only one who is extremely disappointed in Matt Drudge?

Drudge and President Trump are enemies now, and no one seems to know why. Drudge has a reputation for leaning pretty far to the right, and it is said he was highly disturbed by the prospect of a Hillary Clinton presidency in 2016, but for some reason, his site has turned into a news hub for people with Trump Derangement Syndrome. I’ve visited a few times lately, but I felt like I was looking at Yahoo News or The Daily Kos, so I quit. The page was full of links to innuendo-filled stories, gossip, and polls that looked bad for Trump. Leftists continue to provide abundant material for right-leaning aggregators, but Drudge doesn’t seem interested in relaying it now.

I used to visit Drudge every day, because he was one of the few promulgaters of legitimate, important news stories that were damaging to the left. They say he broke the Lewinsky scandal. I quit visiting for a few years, so I was pretty startled when I returned a few months back. What happened to him?

What I have been told is that Andrew Breitbart ran the site back when I began reading it. I know a lot of people adore Breitbart, but I thought he was an unprincipled toad, based on things I heard from a source that had inside information. My opinion of him did not change when he died. This is the guy who became Drudge’s lickspittle in order to launch his own site, yet who had no qualms about helping start Huffto for a known hack and turncoat.

Was he a real conservative? I doubt it. I think he was just pro-Breitbart, bought and sold like a bag of fertilizer.

Anyway, Breitbart ran Drudge’s site back when it provided useful information. I don’t know who’s running it now. Maybe Drudge is doing the arduous 15 hours of websurfing and linking per week himself. In any case, the site is pretty clearly dedicated to putting Kamala Harris in the Oval Office. If it’s out of principle, well and good, but it sort of looks like Drudge is throwing America under the bus out of pettiness.

Is he being blackmailed? Homosexuality rumors have been in the wind for years. Is there a video in a hard drive somewhere? I would think more highly of him if I knew coercion were behind his new policies.

It reminds me of what Jesus said about hirelings. They can’t be trusted. If your allies aren’t allies at heart, they’re not really allies.

I hope to see Drudge severely disappointed after the election, along with the pagans, perverts, racists, domestic terrorists, fake journalists, and treacherous RINO’s who curse Trump, lie about him and his supporters, and gloat in advance. They don’t just go after the president and his supporters. Many of them mock God himself. They conflate Trump voters with Christians, not without reason. They think Christians are superstitious, illiterate, racist incest enthusiasts, and they look forward to seeing our hearts broken by a nonexistent God who doesn’t come through.

It won’t ruin my life if we elect a senile president credibly accused of rape, and I will survive if his obnoxious, terrorist-coddling vice president takes over and manages to nullify our First, Second, Fourth, and Fifth Amendment protections. God, not Donald Trump, is the real source of my safety and dominance. But I don’t want to see God lie back and wait, giving brats and losers who hate him the appearance of victory over him.

We know what Drudge is now, so that’s a blessing.

I wonder what will happen to him after the election. Surely, he has driven conservatives away. Will he be able to hold onto anti-Trumpers in the absence of the cause that drew them to him?

If his new friends turned out to be fickle and abandoned him, it would be poetic justice.

Yelp Lets Imbeciles Call Terrorists Down on Businesses

You know what hurts? Being right.

As I’ve observed the decline of America, I have made a bunch of predictions. Many involved technology, which I know little about. Even though I don’t have deep knowledge of technology, I have been proven right over and over. My misses are few in comparison. Surely God must have been telling me things.

One of the things I predicted was that the Internet would replace the government. Eventually, people will be wired together so effectively, they will resemble a single consciousness that reacts to things very quickly. Too quickly and decisively for the government to react. It’s happening.

Today I learned that Yelp, the Internet review giant, has a new policy. If enough idiots and liars flag your business as racist, Yelp will put a notification on your page.

It’s extortion. It’s a protection racket. “Play ball, or go out of business while violent, unprosecutable mobs menace your store.”

Why do I say “unprosecutable”? Because we have major cities in which it’s nearly impossible to get yourself prosecuted for terrorism related to Antifa and BLM. People are being arrested, released, and arrested again.

I had 95 Yelp reviews up as of this morning. Now I have none. I deleted them all. I tried to replace them with messages protesting the extortion, but you can’t do that. You can add to a review, but you can’t remove it. Yelp offers you a little box in which you can explain why you deleted your review, so I used it to call them extortionists.

Remember what happened around 50 years ago? The government stepped in and forced business owners to accommodate minorities. Whether it was a good idea is debatable, since the public was turning against segregation anyway, and passing intrusive new laws extended the federal government’s control of individual citizens, but it was something the government was entitled to do. No private entity could do it. Now government has been supplanted. We don’t have to draft laws or have Congressional debates or votes. A bunch of imbeciles with cell phones can shut you down pretty much instantly, and there is no legal recourse, nor is there any due process. Then when terrorists show up to break your windows, the police ignore them, or they get arrested one night and show up to terrorize you again the next day.

Jewish legend says the people of Sodom and Gomorrah tormented visitors because they loved their cities and didn’t want anyone else to share in the blessings. It says that when merchants visited, locals would swarm them. Every person would steal one small item. Each crime was too small to ground prosecution, but the merchants were ruined. It was like being attacked by piranha. Or flies. Satan is the Lord of the Flies, after all. That name wasn’t given to him without good reason.

Now we have swarms of unnaccountable terrorists, performing the same basic function as the Sodomites, with just as little accountability. In fact, they receive approval and financial and social rewards.

Cell phones and the Internet are facilitating our decline into lawlessness. Fifty years ago, it was much harder to coordinate large numbers of cruel morons. Now it’s a breeze, and I promise you, it will get easier.

I keep telling people: this is the Beast. Yes, the Bible says one man will bear that title, but he will not be alone. He would be powerless alone. He’ll have a body of servants, just as Jesus does. The body of the Beast is part of the Beast, just as we are parts of Jesus.

Jesus influences, but does not control, people through the Spirit of Holiness. Satan is a weak loser and the father of all losers, so he doesn’t have a comparable, ubiquitous spirit. He has Skynet, however, and it has given him power greater than any power he has ever had.

The net human beings are weaving for themselves will choke them to death. No one can withstand constant scrutiny and exposure or a system of quick rewards and punishments that come without recourse or due process. We are sewing a straitjacket around ourselves, and we’re just too stupid to see it. We can’t handle this much power. It will destroy us. Only the perfectly righteous can handle omnipotence. This is why God cast Satan into hell. Satan wanted the power of God with the character of a cockroach.

It will keep getting worse. We will not magically develop the character needed to wield this kind of power correctly. There is no hope that will happen. Conservatives understand this, because conservatism is based on the knowledge that people are selfish. Liberals pretend people are good and that they can solve their own problems, so they will keep feeding the flames.

I’ve used Yelp a lot. I’m not sure why, because the recommendations haven’t worked out well. Business owners queer the reviews. There are tons of glowing reviews which clearly were not written by actual customers, and I’m sure business owners write bad reviews for competitors. I’ve eaten plenty of slop at places with good reviews.

Yelp gives you the illusion that you’re getting something you can trust, but in reality, it’s not that good. My experience suggests consistently bad reviews can be trusted, but a huge string of good ones means nothing. A lot of business owners have big families and no integrity.

In the upcoming civil war, the left’s ace will be control of information. Censorship and ecommerce restrictions will be used to counter the right’s control of most of the land and most of the weapons. Yelp, Google, Youtube, and so on will be on the wrong side of history. Tech kids are overwhelmingly leftist, and tech people tend to be cruel and arrogant, with undeveloped hearts and no interest in fairness. It will be interesting to see what happens.

I wonder what the next sign will be. Yelp isn’t the biggest influence on the web. The bigger players may be able to cause real suffering on a very wide scale.

Satan’s Leftists Starting to Look Ripe

The red horseman of the apocalypse is either riding among us or playing his entrance music.

The newest focus of the Antichrist’s mindless mob violence: Wauwatosa, Wisconsin. The next name terrorists may try to force you to say in order to avoid a beating: Alvin Cole.

Alvin Cole, who was black, went to a mall. He took a Smith & Wesson M&P pistol with a 30-round magazine. He got in a moronic argument with a man, and he showed him his gun. The police were called. Cole ran, and he was pursued. While he ran, he shot at his pursuers, a cop and a security guard. In response to his unspoken request, the police provided him with a generous serving of hot lead, and he expired.

Alvin Cole made himself garbage. He treated himself as though he were disposable and forced others to do the same. He put himself in a position where the only option was to send him to hell. Somehow, in the minds of our domestic BLM terrorists, this is the fault of the police and the security guard. Terrorists ran amok in Wautosa, entering yards and breaking the windows of random homes.

The disturbing thing is that terrorists went into the suburbs this time. We’re used to seeing them attack police stations and businesses. Now they run down streets and break house windows while the occupants are within.

It’s a bad development. I can’t tell you what the law says in every state, district, and territory, but here in Florida, a person who enters an occupied home without permission is presumed to be likely to kill or do other great harm, and it’s okay to shoot them dead without running away or making much of an effort to investigate their intentions. Going into someone’s yard doesn’t necessarily raise the same presumption, but it probably can, and once a pattern of trespassing in yards is established, home invasions will follow. When BLM and Antifa home invasions become common, bodies will start piling up, and the vast majority will be those of terrorists.

We already know what terrorists and potential terrorists will do when a violent criminal is killed by police in a jusitified shooting. What will they do when we start hearing reports that this or that victim has shot 7 or 8 “teens” dead in his or her yard?

How many potential terrorists do we have? How deep is the bench? Do we have enough privately owned guns to discourage them? I wonder.

Maybe it varies by location. Where I live, terrorists would have a very difficult time. But there are many residential neighborhoods filled with liberals who are self-righteously determined to live unarmed. Jews come to mind; it’s like they never heard of the Warsaw Ghetto. And gun and ammunition supplies get tighter all the time, so strapping up now is not a viable option for most unarmed people. On top of that, leftist officials are very likely to respond to terrorist aggression by trying to shut down further sales to people in their areas. They will also try to confiscate arms that are already present, regardless of what the law says.

I suppose the chickens will come home to roost. Liberals made their beds, and they will have to lie in them and harvest the rewards of their efforts. They raised the chickens.

I saw a video of a man in Wauwatosa trying to tell terrorists they were vandalizing homes belonging to Democrats. It’s so sad; he doesn’t understand. They don’t care. Why do people think they care? How can people be that stupid?

Police shootings don’t matter. They’re pretexts. Black racists and self-hating whites (who are taking BLM over with an astounding demonstration of the power of whitesplaining) aren’t really motivated by police violence. They’re motivated by bigotry and cruelty. They don’t care if you voted for Obama. They don’t even care if you belong to BLM. They’re just looking to hurt people. They love the joy of humiliating helpless human beings, injuring and killing them, and taking or destroying what they have.

The man who tried to talk to terrorists should have stayed in his house with a gun. He was deluded. He didn’t understand that he was waving bait in front of sharks. He was old, white, and fat. He must have looked the way a chicken with a broken wing looks to a fox.

One of the reasons for the tribulation is hatred of truth. Leftists, as children of the Antichrist, have abandoned truth. It means nothing to them; they find it offensive. When you abandon the truth and love lies, you become immune to growth and correction. Truth is what people use to help you. When it can’t find a way in, you become worthless, and efforts to save you become a waste of time and resources.

Antichristians say things like, “Only whites can be racist.” It’s a hate-excusing mantra, coined from thin air, spewed by racist academics and ghetto philosophers. They say all whites are racist. They say speech is violence. They even say silence is violence. When you try to talk to them, they vomit their Satanic canards at you, condemning themselves to abandonment and destruction.

Why do they say speech and silence are violence? Because violence justifies violence in response. They love violence, and they’re looking for ways to get permission to do it. What they really mean is, “We hate whites, Jews, successful Asians, conservatives, and real Christians, and we want to hurt you and keep hurting you forever.” Their father is Satan, they are just as crazy as he is, and they feel pretty much what he feels.

God told me that people who reject him are afterbirth. When a baby is born, a lot of live flesh comes out with it, but it dies in the process, and then it becomes garbage. This is the fate of people who hate Jesus. Like afterbirth, they have to exist, and they serve a purpose, but once the purpose is served, they go to be incinerated and kept away from the living.

Plants have afterbirth. A seed comes with a husk and other non-fertile parts. When a seed grows, the afterbirth rots. This is very relevant to the tribulation, because the word “tribulation” literally means removing the afterbirth from grain so it can be burned. A tribulum is a device used to separate grain from husks.

The Antichristians are afterbirth. They have no hope of remaining free after death or of leaving a legacy. Their names will die with them, and they will stay dead. Their memory will die. The tribulation will be the final winnowing in the age of the gentiles.

Until today, I felt very concerned about people who will miss the rapture. In my heart, I somehow conflated missing the rapture with eternal damnation. This morning I realized that was wrong. The words says people who are alive during the tribulation will be able to accept salvation. The problem is that they will live in complete misery until they die. The prayers of God’s children won’t be rising from the earth any more, and God’s fury won’t be restrained as it is now. It will be very bad, but not so bad that we should beg God to put it off unnecessarily.

It’s better for Antichristians to suffer the tribulation now than for Christians to remain here until their suffering becomes excessive and unprofitable. Antichristians have made their choice. If anyone has to suffer, it should be them, not us. And maybe that suffering will help them more than a few extra years of grace would. The word says stripes are for a fool’s back. Persuasion and kindess are inappropriate, and counterproductive, for many people.

A big, big percentage of America is deeply in love with lies. Even if they’re not committing terrorism, they’re supporting it and voting for it. It seems to me that we have sunk very deeply into the love of evil. Trump may win, and we can pray and have revivals, but dishonesty and pride are like strong armor. I don’t think we can make real change, because you can only sell people things they want. If they want evil, they won’t swallow the truth even if they understand it well.

Another reason for an imminent rapture: the more violent and cruel the left becomes, the more likely they will be able to tempt Christians to become like them and be damned. God already raptured Enoch and Elijah, and some believe Enoch was removed because if he hadn’t been, he might have turned to sin.

I used to think the world would have to be completely chaotic in order for the rapture to come. I no longer think that’s true. I think 2020 would make perfect sense. The only major refuge of godliness in the world is gone. We have to bow to idiots, whores, and murderers as a matter of course. If God wants to put an end to this act of the drama, I say may he do it.

May it come before large numbers of us find ourselves presented with the choice of shooting terrorists or being beaten, murdered, and raped.

I have regretted not doing more for God in this life, but it occurs to me that this life will not end with the rapture. If I make it, I’ll be eligible to return here after 7 years. That’s what the Bible says. I would still have time to accomplish things for God. The post-tribulation world won’t be cursed, but it won’t be perfect, either. There will still be rebellion and sin, and Christians will still have missions to accomplish. Maybe I should look forward to that instead of feeling bad because I was rejected over and over in this stage of my existence.

I think Trump will win, for a few reasons. For one thing, witches curse conservatives all the time, and antichristians make fun of God and say he won’t help us. I think God has a wonderful opportunity to show them their “gods” are garbage. Also, I believe a Trump victory would lead to an instantaneous increase in leftist violence. That would fit in with the release of the red horseman of the apocalypse. Some kind of trigger would be useful. Leftists have already been triggered by coronavirus, several years of Donald Trump, the rejection of Merrick Garland, and the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett. I think a Trump victory would be a great way to push them off the cliff and into full-scale, mindless, cannibalistic civil war worthy of scared rats.

I have wondered if I was accumulating guns and ammunition so they would be here for lapsed Christians who didn’t make it in the rapture. Now I’m wondering if they’re for antichristians, so they can find them and kill each other.

I suppose cutting gun safes and vaults open will be major occupations for leftists in the days following the rapture.

Today I ordered 800 rifle casings, target bullets, and a pretty decent amount of H3450. Target bullets aren’t optimal for killing and maiming, but at 2700 fps, they will certainly do a fair job.

I think I’ll just pray for God to go ahead and wrap things up. The insanity has gone on long enough to suit me.

Meanwhile, Leftists Protest his Recovery

If you learn nothing else before you die, learn this: God created the universe for love.

Thought I’d just toss that out there.

Donald Trump has coronavirus. You may have noticed. It’s a bad thing. Occasionally, healthy people–like President Trump–have serious problems with coronavirus, or they die. Hopeful leftists are saying there is a 5% chance he’ll die, simply because of his age. I call BS. At least 5% of people his age are in terrible health–unlike President Trump–and people in terrible health will obviously make up most of the 5% who die. Hello? Common sense? Sometimes healthy people die, and it’s not good to be sick at all, so his illness is a bad thing. But it looks like there is a huge silver lining.

The President went into the hospital on Friday. By Saturday, people all over the US were gathering to pray for him and wish him support. That’s wonderful. If he has to have the sniffles for a day or two in order to motivate people who show him their love their faith in God, I say it’s a good trade.

There is a movement called Drag the Interstate. I don’t really understand the name, because it sounds like something Eddie Izzard would do, but people hold rolling Trump rallies in moving vehicles. They were all over the place this weekend. Massachusetts, Florida, New York…lots of places. They had three public prayer meetings in The Villages, a huge retirement community near me. There was a big boat parade in Virginia. Lefty journalists are taking care to point out that many of these events were planned before Trump got sick, but some were not, attendance was surely increased dramatically by news that the president was ill. His illness also changed the tone of the events. It may be improving the tone of the whole campaign.

Mike DeWine, the governor of Ohio, declared a statewide day of prayer for Trump and the first lady! How about that?

I’m not a Paula White fan, but give her credit: she appeared on the Trump Youtube channel and hosted a long prayer service. That’s important, whatever her faults may be. Surely it means something to God when a president acknowledges him during a pandemic caused by humanity’s rejection of Jesus Christ.

Night before last, after hearing about the outpouring of love, faith, and solidarity, I had the powerful sensation of being loved. I know that doesn’t seem to make sense, because the love was directed at the president. But I felt it.

It got me thinking about the rapture. In heaven, people swim in love all the time. There are no shadows in heaven, because there is nothing to hide or which wants to hide, and there is no sun. The word says God is the light of heaven, so there is no need for any other source. Because Jesus visited me twice, I know how God’s love feels. It makes you feel like a hamburger under a heat lamp, except the warmth is the warmth of God’s heart, and it goes right through you. We are transparent to God.

In heaven, people live in an atmosphere of love, and we could be living in love here, too. The Trump rallies and caravans brought this to mind.

Leftists are full of hate and murder. They love being snotty and impudent. They love cruelty. They love humiliating older people and their betters. They’re perpetually enraged and depressed. They live in a dark alternate reality constructed of infantile, demonic delusions. Conservatives are closer to God, and we are happier and warmer. It’s a fact you can observe simply by watching leftist and conservative political gatherings. One side is throwing feces, literally, and tormenting people whose feet they aren’t fit to lick, and the other side is praying, singing, waving flags, and talking about how great their president is.

Have you noticed that leftists don’t praise Biden much? They don’t particularly like him. They have no loyalty to him. Conservatives feel genuine warmth for Trump. We praise him and thank God for him all the time. Totally different.

The rapture will be wonderful, because people who make it will be separated permanently from the Antichrist’s murderous, tamper-throwing, lie-loving, truth-hating children. They’ll bathe in love all the time. Everyone will be in agreement. No one will ever be stressed about an election. God has always been king, and he always will. Satan dethroned Adam. That won’t fly in heaven.

President Trump has done very well so far, as his doctors tell us, but leftists are making up fantasies about his condition. They say his prescription for dexamethasone proves he’s seriously ill. They claim, falsely, that his team is sending out photos with false time stamps. Meanwhile, he is appearing on camera occasionally, and he even got in an SUV and drove by the supporters outside the hospital. He also made his chief of staff go outside and give his supporters Trump-labeled chocolate kisses. That’s the kind of president I want!

Of course, lefty journalists are excoriating Trump for risking the lives of the Secret Service agents who rode with him. Yes, seriously. Secret Service agents risking their lives by accompanying a president!

Secret Service agents risking their lives to protect a president? Wow. I hope this new practice doesn’t catch on.

Meanwhile, leftists actually showed up–at a hospital–to counter-demonstrate. One character held a sign saying “Science Matters,” and a couple of hefty Latinas in stretch pants showed up to dance and sing while giving everyone the finger. One of them chanted, “Your president is gonna die!,” with a happy expression. She said what you would expect her to say. Sometimes it almost seems like Trump’s first name starts with “F.”

Only leftists would protest a sick person’s medical treatment.

People who have severe cases do not stand up, walk, speak clearly, or go for car rides. Obvious? They lie flat on their backs inhaling oxygen. I don’t know how the president feels today, but as of yesterday, he clearly did not have severe symptoms.

Journalists are generally not intelligent–this is true, not a baseless insult–and they are also extremely lazy. They don’t do much footwork. They don’t research. They wait for other people to call them with stories. They also find out what other journalists are covering, and they join in. When they report on Christians and conservatives, they almost never dig for the truth. For example, they keep saying the Proud Boys is a white supremacist organization even though it’s full of minority members and the founder married a full-blooded American Indian (not a fake 1/32 Indian who scams the government for affirmative action and poverty bucks).

When journalists talked to Trump’s doctors, they were suddenly different people. They asked questions that were pretty esoteric. Suddenly, they knew a great deal about treatments and symptoms. It was very clear they had been Googling for hours before the press conference. They kept prying for sound bites they could use to make Trump look seriously ill. They were aggressive and rude. They were extremely determined.

It occurred to me that America would be a much different country if journalists worked this hard all the time.

Leftist outlets are full of the “Trump is dying” theme. It’s like they’re living on another planet where what they say is true. When I say they live in an alternative reality, I’m completely correct.

Trump is right. The press is a public enemy. It’s necessary, but it’s diseased. It’s also dangerous, as the victims of Joseph Goebbels could tell you. Fake news is a very real thing. It’s a weapon for people to whom the truth looks like a problem that must be contained.

Here’s something interesting: Yahoo News got rid of the commenting function on its stories. Why? Here’s some information which may be relevant: commenters were overwhelmingly negative with regard to many, many far-left-narrative stories. This was especially true for stories promoting “transgendering” (an impossibility) and the attendant castration, mutilation, and hormonal sabotage. It sure looks like the leftists at Yahoo couldn’t take the heat, so they bricked up the kitchen.

Public comment is news, and stifling it is a form of fake news. Fake news doesn’t have to be affirmative. You don’t have to say something that isn’t true. Withholding the truth is also fake news.

I can’t recall ever hearing anyone else say that. Why isn’t everyone saying it?

I want to live in love and joy, even here on earth. I worked hard to make myself a caustic person, and I regret it. Love and joy are better, and the Holy Spirit will actually pour these things through you so you don’t have to manufacture them on your own.

I keep praying for Trump. I keep cursing the spirits that want to take him down. I also curse the Biden campaign. I hope to see good news, but the truth is that Donald Trump isn’t the source of my safety, joy, success, or love. I’ll be okay no matter what, and when I die or the rapture comes, I’ll do even better, by orders of magnitude.

Leftists: it’s okay to be happy and upbeat. It’s okay to stop being snotty. Cruelty is toxic. Warmth and kindness are good things. They’re not signs that you’re stupid or ignorant. Join God’s team and see. He’s ready to take you in.

Backlog of Chores Dwindling as Spiritual Warfare Takes Effect

I got loads of stuff done today.

My utility cart has been giving me problems. I did a trigger job on my Thompson Center Venture, and because of the weather, I had to wait weeks to shoot it. A few days back, the weather got nice, and I threw my mat and rifle in the cart. It would not start.

I took the carb out, which was not fun at all, and I threw it in the sonic cleaner in gasoline. I did this twice. Didn’t help. I decided to take the main jet and the float needle out and look at them.

The float is held on a pin that goes through two posts made from what I suppose is cast aluminum. Generally, float pins are not fitted tightly. They are held captive by the bowls, so there is no reason to have a tight pin. The people who made my carb didn’t know this. It was jammed in there.

I tapped it out with a punch. I really had to whack it. Unfortunately, one of the posts snapped at the base.

I was not happy. I can do a lot of things with tools, but I had little confidence in my ability to refasten a tiny broken aluminum post to its base, inside a carb bowl. I tried some Hail Mary solutions. First, I tried to get solder to stick to it. I figured I might be able to glom enough solder onto it to hold it in place. Didn’t work at all. Aluminum does not seem to like solder.

I then decided to bury it in 5-minute epoxy. Maybe that would stick. Epoxy is impervious to gasoline, and carb floats put nearly no stress on their pins, so if I could get the post to stick, it would probably stay there for years.

Unbelievably, it worked. I’ll post a photo.

How did I fix the tight pin? Two ways. First, I have a number of junk carbs. I happened to have one with the same size bowl and float. There was no possibility I would ever use it, so I took the pin out and put it in the cart carb. One hole was still too tight, so I opened it with a small drill bit.

The bowl gasket in the old carb was destroyed. I guess someone overtightened the bowl nut. Because I had a carb with the same size bowl, I had a usable gasket.

The sonic cleaner didn’t fix the jet because corrosion was the problem. Ethanol gas has water in it, and water makes things corrode. The jet was narrowed because of corrosion. It looks like sonic cleaners don’t do well with thick oxidation. I also saw something protruding into the bore of the jet. A varnish flake? I didn’t know.

My answer was to put the jet in a citric acid solution. It ate the crud, and the jet opened up. I also soaked the needle.

The plugs were black, and I replaced them, too. The old ones had the wrong number on them, so I assume they were the wrong size.

I put the carb back in the cart, and it ran better than ever.

While I was working on this, I ordered a Chinese carb from Ebay, with gaskets. Cost: $13.56. I inquired about carb gaskets on a cart forum, and some guy told me I should stick with OEM products. He said OEM carbs only cost $126 each.

You know, I would love to support American businesses, but a 9.5-to-one price differential is not acceptable. I have a bunch of cheap Chinese carbs, and they are just like OEM carbs, which are probably also Chinese. When you pay 10 times as much for “American,” you don’t get a better product. You get the same Chinese carb, at a Chinese price, from a different American vendor. Good enough.

In all likelihood, my epoxy repair will hold for the life of the cart, but I will have a Chinese carb on hand anyway, because you never know. I may install it preemptively. In any case, I will never again have to go several days with no cart to drive to the mailbox. Getting your mail on foot is just not the Southern way. It’s wrong.

I also ordered a new PCV hose and choke cable. Someone had Bubba’d the old cable with a piece of wire.

My cart is unbelievably useful. I’ve done lots of gardening and tree cutting with it, and I always use it when I shoot. I can’t risk more cart down time. Ain’t nobody got time for that.

After I fixed the cart, I put a new transmission in my Makita cordless drill. A while back, I snapped the screw that holds the chuck in. These screws are hard to get out, and while I was trying, I did something to the transmission that made it fail to work. I think I lost a ball bearing. I pictured myself trying to find the right ball bearing and paying a fortune for it, and I gave up and ordered a transmission. I didn’t know it would take weeks to arrive.

Whatever. It got here, and I installed it. Check that off the list. I also bought a backup drill. Cordless tools aren’t expensive when you buy them without batteries. Life without a cordless drill was not pleasant, so I won’t let it happen twice.

After the drill triumph, I installed a $240 Timney trigger in my Ruger Precision Rifle.

The Ruger comes with a nice trigger, but it’s not TOO nice. I think rifle makers have lawyers who tell them not to sell really soft triggers. You can adjust your RPR trigger, but you can’t really get it down to the target level.

You can make it better by simply removing the trigger spring. So I’m told. They say the trigger spring’s only purpose is to make the pull heavier. It works perfectly without it. So I’m told.

I thought about it, and I thought about all the triggers I’ve modified on my own. I decided to go first class for once.

Installing a Timney trigger is easy. You remove a few screws, pop the old trigger out, and put the new one in. It has two stages. The first stage is 8 ounces, and the second is one pound. THAT’S a trigger.

Now I’m ready to find out what the gun can really do.

But wait! There’s more!

When I was done with the RPR, I took the .204 out and shot a few rounds to see if the new trigger spring was light enough.

Here’s a funny thing about rifle triggers. They all seem light and crisp in your living room or at the counter at the gun shop. When you’re looking through a scope, aiming at a bullet-diameter spot on a target 100 yards away, they suddenly become very heavy and gritty. When I put the new spring in, I thought it was very, very light.

Today, it seemed much heavier. I was not happy at all.

I didn’t shoot all that well. I’ll put up photos. The barrel may need cleaning. I’m not sure I’ve ever cleaned it. When I took my shooting class, the instructors appeared to be in favor of leaving barrels dirty until they started losing accuracy. That’s what I’ve been doing. Whatever the problem is, I decided to do more work on the trigger.

I put the gun on my bench, yanked the new spring out, and cut about two coils out. Now it seems light and greasy-slick. I’m not fooled, though. They always seem that way in the house. I’m going to clean the barrel and try the gun again in a little bit.

I feel like this has been a productive day. Tomorrow, I hope to lube the turnbuckles on my tractor forks and put them back on the bucket. Then I can move some logs I cut.

The weather is gorgeous. Cool, not very sunny, and a little breezy. I was outside for over an hour, and my shirt isn’t even dripping on the floor. Fall is here, and fall should be more productive than summer.

I believe I’m getting a lot done because I’m remembering to do supernatural warfare against demons that try to restrain me. I do it every morning, and sometimes I do it at night. It’s funny how Christians are ashamed to fight demons. They believe God is a spirit. They believe Jesus and the Holy Ghost are spirits. Somehow, they can’t make themselves believe in other spirits! Why is that?

If demons don’t exist, neither does God, so why do you think you’re a Christian?

Christianity says we are also spirits. Do you believe you exist?

Guess that’s all I have. Hope everyone is praying for President Trump. His doctor says things are going very, very well.

This was no Debate

I resisted temptation for a while last night, but I ended up watching maybe half an hour of the Trump/Biden debate. What a mistake!

I hate debates. Even when done properly, debates don’t establish the truth. They establish the identities of the best debaters. A fantastic president can be a terrible debater, and a great debater can be a pathetic president.

I was a member of the debating society in my high school. I went to the best prep school in Florida, so you would think we would have had a great debate team, but our faculty sponsor was Mr. Frishman, a man who posed for his yearbook photo standing in a garbage can. He was a lot of fun, and everyone liked him, but he was not a great instructor or leader. We only participated in one event, and I did some kind of improvisational speaking. Never debated. It would have been better for me if I had, because I had a real gift for argument, and I would have excelled. Back then, I liked debating. I was young, and young people have a lot of stupid interests.

I like the approach Jesus took to argument. He did very little of it. When he did argue, he said whatever he wanted, regardless of whether it had any relationship to the questions, and people could take it or leave it. He wasn’t pushing a point of view. He had the truth, and he was simply delivering it. There are no opinions in heaven. There is no debate there. Everyone knows the truth, and everyone agrees.

If people on earth were in touch with the Holy Spirit, they would argue much less, because he tells everyone the same things.

I really hate presidential debates. One thing that bugs me is that they are not real debates. In a real debate, you take turns. You can’t just pipe up when your opponent is talking. Speaking out of turn prevents participants from doing their jobs. It’s cheating.

Usually, Democrats cheat like crazy in presidential debates, and Republicans behave better. Conservatives think rules and logic are important. Leftists have no self-discipline, and they think their emotions put them above rules everyone else has to observe. Last night, however, both participants violated the rules wholesale, and they also insulted each other personally. It was like a food fight.

Of course, Chris Wallace did some of Biden’s debating for him. This is another thing I don’t like about presidential debates. The moderators almost always help the leftists and fight with the conservatives. They also fail to maintain order. Perhaps because they’re generally not conservative, and they lack respect for rules, moderators tend to abandon control and let the participants do as they please. Wallace didn’t surprise me. He made some effort, but overall, he was very weak. He failed at his job. His dad was much tougher.

They should put debaters in different locations and turn off their mikes when it isn’t their turn. And peppermint sticks and hundred-dollar bills should fall from the sky without warning. It will never happen. The American people just aren’t smart enough to demand real debates. They want to see food fights. And journalists, with very few exceptions, aren’t smart enough to moderate debates.

I saw some pluses for Trump. For one thing, Biden looked like a corpse. That matters. His flesh looked white, even for a man of Irish extraction, as though he had been pickled. He seemed weak and almost transparent. His transplanted hair looked like bleached cobwebs, and his surgically altered eyes were tiny and puffy. Biden has always been a physical bully who bragged about his strength and liked to assert he could beat other men up or defeat them in physical contests. Now he looks like he’s stuffed with paper napkins. He’s frail. It appears he lacks the genes for longevity. My dad looked stronger when he was 87 and dying from heart failure and dementia.

Trump was aggressive and angry, and Biden, a man known for his short temper, love of confrontation, and arrogance, didn’t seem to know what to do. I think he can’t think fast enough to return fire. Look at old videos of Biden insulting and challenging people. Not the same man. It’s not a big deal if a candidate who has no job is dominated during a debate. It’s different when a president can’t stand up to foreigners, Congress, and the press. Biden would give us a basement presidency.

I didn’t see the whole debate, so I can’t be sure, but it may be that Biden seemed nicer. Women vote based on their emotions, not the facts, so if Trump comes across as a bully, it may firm up Biden’s female support. Women are already in the tank for the left, though, so I don’t know if it matters. Female suffrage sounds like a wonderful thing, but it really hurts America.

What about the issues? My response: who cares? Biden makes facts up as he goes, so there isn’t much point in listening to him. Trump tends to exaggerate, so you have to check what he says, too. It seemed like Trump’s presentation of facts was better, for what it’s worth. Biden seemed to avoid discussing facts, probably because he’s not sure what they are, and also because they generally work against the left. Biden seemed determined to convince America he was the warm, non-creepy uncle who would protect us from the billions of pickup-driving white supremacists leftists think are coming to get us. He was pushing a fantasy scenario. Facts would have gotten in the way.

I read that Hispanics overwhelmingly thought Trump won. The ratio I saw was about two to one. Hope that’s true. Maybe aggressive macho leaders get them stirred up. I’ve known tons of Cubans and Puerto Ricans, and I will just say it: they’re emotional and, perversely, proud of it. Calm, rational Hispanics complain about it all the time. It embarrasses them.

I don’t care if people think I’m prejudiced. Look at government in Central and South America. Look at crime. The proof is in the pudding. In Honduras, you can barely walk outside without getting shot.

Cuba, Mexico, El Salvador, Brazil, Colombia, Argentina, Nicaragua, Venezuela…no point in pretending things aren’t different down there.

Biden’s dementia wasn’t as big a hindrance as I expected. It may be that they gave him a handful of Ritalin or some other drug to keep him alert and awake. He refused to be tested. He was nothing like them greasy-confident Biden we saw in his debate with Sarah Palin, but he knew where he was, and he didn’t sundown. Maybe he could survive a couple of years in office. It all depends on the disease’s trajectory.

I don’t think Trump prepared much. I believe he is a very busy president. He is extremely effective, and he has gotten a great deal done. I think he counted on using his job experience as preparation. He referred to his own doings a lot, the way you would if you worked hard at your job and some know-nothing started criticizing you.

I believe God chose Trump partly because of his pugnacious character and his fearlessness. Trump is thin-skinned in that he’s easy to provoke for brief moments, but he’s very thick-skinned in that he never worries. Example: a person close to him said it means absolutely nothing to him when people sue him. If you’ve ever been sued, you know that says a lot about him. God needed a tough conservative who would survive continuous attacks and sleep like a baby every night. That’s our Trump. His blood pressure is low, his appetite is good, he never shows uncertainty, and he sleeps as much as he wants to. Nothing gets to him on a deep level.

I’m sure Trump didn’t worry about the debates. That probably made him hard to coach.

I keep feeling that Trump will win. I certainly hope so. On the other hand, I also keep feeling, very strongly, that I won’t be here on earth during the next inauguration, so maybe it shouldn’t matter to me, personally.

I would hate to see Biden win. He’s a creep, a liar, a career plagiarist, and a man of questionable intelligence, having graduated in about the bottom 15% of his class at a lackluster law school. He has no soul and no integrity. He will say or do absolutely anything that gets him through the next 5 minutes. His administration would be a flabby, rotten slide back into regressive leftist policies from which we were starting to recover. He would surrender to every foreign country on earth except Israel. He would persecute white people and people who work hard. He would let domestic terrorists do anything they wanted, and he would almost certainly mainstream them and include them in his initiatives.

Biden would bring back Critical Race Theory instruction, a racist practice which greatly resembles Hitler’s anti-Jewish propaganda. It must be wonderful, going to work and realizing you’re going to spend the day being attacked for your race. I don’t know how people stand it.

This year has been wonderful for me, apart from the tragedy of seeing a close friend die. All over the US, leftists are literally throwing screaming tantrums and posting them online. They curse 2020 as though it were a person who kept them in a cage and gave them electric shocks. I’ve had financial abundance, free time, a wonderful home, good friends, and great health. My relationship with God has improved every month. I feel closer to him than ever. Leftists and other people who don’t know God are floundering and weeping, but I’ve had a great year. A day or two ago, I was thinking about the election, and it occurred to me that if I can have a wonderful life during a pandemic, I can certainly have a wonderful life under a Biden administration.

My peace and happiness don’t come from the government. They come only from God, and his administration will never be voted out. It will always be on top.

I curse Biden’s campaign daily, and I pray for Trump to win, but more importantly, I’m trying to continue in the pleasant path God has created for me. If I’m wrong about the rapture, and I’m stuck here in a nation which suddenly resembles Venezuela, God can still insulate me. This is what people should be striving for.

America is in a supernatural centrifuge. God’s children and the children of darkness are being separated and defined. To me, this looks like something God would do in preparation for a harvest. It makes sense to me that the rapture would be preceded by a choosing of sides. I hope that’s what’s happening. I do not want to live in Venezuela, and I am not at all afraid of death or leaving the earth.

I can’t believe we’re seriously considering electing Biden president. People like to use the name “Fredo” to describe individuals who are close to power yet considered too stupid, venal, and immature to be given real authority. Biden is a classic Fredo. In 2012, he was vice president, and after serving 8 years, he was told he had to take a seat and let a very unpopular female secretary of state run. Biden was dusty furniture in Obama’s administration; a necessary accoutrement everyone hoped would never be used. Now he’s the best the Democrats can come up with.

I am reminded of the Chinese proverb people quoted when unaccomplished, unremarkable, Democrat toady junior Senator Barack Obama was elected: “when little men cast long shadows, you know the end of the day is near.”

They don’t come much littler than Joe Biden. Maybe AOC is next.

Getting too Southern for my Own Good

My oldest friend is a guy named Mike. Just to show you what a rotten friend he is, I will post a photo he sent me recently.

This represents part of his output for one week. He bought a Masterbuilt smoker, and he has smoked his weight in pork and chicken.

These days, I stifle my interest in cooking. It’s not good to be a lover of pleasure, and gluttony is an invitation to inhabitation by demons. I rarely cook anything impressive. But here is Mike, telling me one more rack of ribs won’t hurt.

I live in an area where even the worst barbecue is pretty good. It’s not like Miami, where Cubans and yankees think only of money when they prepare food. Still, the obvious truth is that I make barbecue better than any restaurant I’ve been to. Also, it’s much cheaper, and if I barbecue at home, I won’t have to go to restaurants, which are considered prime coronavirus transmission hubs.

These are the thoughts I had as I pitted Mike against mere reason.

Of course, Mike won. I ordered a smoker.

Years ago, I built my own smoker: the Hoginator. I took a big Char-Broil grill and cut holes in it so I could mount to electric heating elements. I cut another hole so I could feed smoke into it. I fabricated a steel smoke box that sat behind the smoker, and it had a hinged door in it so I could shove wood into it. I smoked with flaming wood, the way you’re supposed to, but the smoke box was over a foot away from the smoker, so not much of the heat got into the smoker. I was able to maintain a nice low temperature.

This time, I thought about building another smoker. For about three minutes. Yes, I think men who buy things they can fabricate are really women, but you have to choose your battles. In order to make a really good smoker, I would have to bend and weld a lot of stainless sheet, and I would have to make it double-walled so I could put insulation in it. Forget that. I already paid my dues with the Hoginator. This time, I’m going to let someone else do the metalworking.

Digression: yesterday I finished straightening the mounting tabs on my middle buster and welding gussets in to keep them from bending again. Metal still bends the knee to me.

I ordered a Smokin-It smoker. They’re made in Michigan, hopefully by Southern immigrants. They have double-walled stainless cabinets. People swear by them. I ordered the second-smallest model. I wanted to be able to jam a turkey into it, and the little one did not look promising. Also, when you buy the cheapest model of anything, you’re usually asking for a bunch of after-purchase Band-Aid modifications and add-ons that take the fun out of it. This smoker will come with everything it needs, including wheels.

I believe it’s a little smaller than a waist-high fridge. We shall see.

While I was trying to figure out what to buy, I learned some things.

First, people say Masterbuilts fall apart in a few years. I didn’t want to take a chance. There are competitors such as Pit Boss and Cuisinart, but they look to be of similar quality. I don’t want to drop $250 on a new smoker every three years until I die. The box I bought should last for eternity.

Here’s another thing: propane smokers are hard to use. The temperature fluctuates. Forget it; not interested.

I learned that electric smokers don’t produce smoke rings in meat. A smoke ring is a layer of reddish meat just under the surface. I was upset to read that I wouldn’t be getting one, until I learned that barbecue judges all agree that a smoke ring doesn’t improve the flavor of the food.

Smokin-It has a close competitor called Smokin’ Tex. Smokin-It gives you a lot more for the money, so that’s why I chose their product.

The smoker will be here Thursday, God willing. That means barbecue on Friday. I need to get some ribs.

I don’t do baby backs. I don’t get them at all. I think they’re for suckers. Spare ribs are much cheaper. They’re bigger. They have more fat and flavor. They’re not dry like baby backs. I plan to pick up a rack of spare ribs.

I’m about to dig up my rub recipe. I’m considering adding a little black cardamom.

I would post my rub recipe, but in all honesty, they’re all about the same. Sugar, salt, mustard, pepper, cumin, garlic…it’s not rocket science.

Actually, I shouldn’t say that. A barbecue celebrity named Myron Mixon opened a joint in Miami, and his rub was disgusting. Very litte salt. No flavor. This was after he talked a lot of smack, belittling the competition. His place went bankrupt, even after a lot of Miami people who knew nothing about barbecue posted ridiculous positive Internet reviews.

I prayed before ordering the smoker, and my impression was that God likes it when I entertain friends and that he was in favor of me buying it so I could barbecue for them and still have time to talk about Christianity. I hope my friends don’t read that.

The Hoginator was a lot of work to use. The new smoker should be much less bother.

I should be able to barbecue for 30 people with this thing, so the small gatherings I am likely to draw should be no problem.

Here’s a neat hint for applying a rub: use a bath towel. Drop your ribs on the towel, add the rub, and use the towel to contain the mess while you press the rub onto the meat. When you’re done, roll the towel up with the excess spices in it and put it in the laundry. It won’t stain. This is my original idea, so make sure you send me royalties when you use it.

What about sauce? Here is my conclusion. Store barbecue sauce is so good now, there is not much point in making your own. Yeah, I said it. Stubbs, Sweet Baby Ray’s, Cattleman’s…you name it. There are lots of good ones. Buy four brands every time you barbecue, and make notes on the ones you like.

I will post pork photos eventually.