Fluffy Herald of Relief Appears

I have earth-shaking news. Real American toilet paper is available from Amazon. I don’t mean weird Chinese paper which is somehow puffed up so it takes three rolls to do the job of one real roll. I mean actual American toilet paper. I saw Angel Soft in the listings, and it’s in stock. Other brands must be on the way.

Surely the clouds have parted.

I thought this would happen two weeks ago. It did happen, though, and that’s the main thing. America’s garages and spare rooms can only hold so much toilet paper. People couldn’t keep buying huge quantities forever. Eventually, we had to see a change.

Now what are the hoarders going to do with their house-choking stashes? Check Craigslist next month.

I have a cousin in the Chicago area, and she says she’s down to two rolls. Apparently, the good-natured midwestern folk of Chicago have treated each other very badly during the last month or two. She says they cleaned stores out. Things many Americans were able to buy easily were not available there.

I’ve heard people say Chicagoans are wonderful, friendly, helpful people. Nothing like New Yorkers.

Whatever. The proof is in the pudding.

The other day I heard a quote about hard times. I can’t find it. Paraphrasal: hard times don’t change a man; they reveal him. That’s what I have to say about Chicago’s hoarders, as well as all other hoarders. There is no point in virtue-signaling after you’ve been exposed. Makes you look worse.

The hoarders here are completely nuts. If you go to one store, you’ll find it completely stripped of one type of item, but if you go to another, you’ll see that item for sale, along with things you couldn’t find at the first store. Example: my local Winn-Dixie had a run on potatoes, but a Publix a few miles away had plenty. Two days ago, the only dish powder I could find at Publix cost $14 for 37 loads, so about 38 cents per load. It was that weird encapsulated kind. Anyone who buys that is begging for poverty. I drove a mile to Walmart and found I could get almost whatever I wanted. I bought two boxes of the store brand, which is very cheap and works just as well as Cascade. Paid about half what the fancy stuff cost. I would guess you use half an ounce per load, so 300 loads at 2.58 cents per load. What drives a person to buy pods? It’s madness.

Walmart had paper towels, too. I bought two rolls, just for the thrill. The beef had been raided (unlike Publix and Winn-Dixie), but they had a magnificent, highly marbled cowboy rib eye for a good price, so I jumped on that. It was excellent.

If there were any sense to the hoarding, every store would lack the same things. And no, it’s not a supply thing. It’s not like Publix has a secret potato farm surrounded by guard towers. Hoarder obsessions vary depending on location.

I do not read newspapers, but several times a week, I try to go to the local paper’s website to see if I’m under martial law or anything. I check the COVID-19 numbers. It’s really creeping here. The known total for the county is 121, or about one in 2500. We’re never going to get a major epidemic among the general population. That’s my prediction, anyway. It may find its way into senior facilities, but if we’re at 1/2500 as of April 19, I don’t see us ever ending up like New York.

Speaking of New York, there are a lot of Northerners who live here during the winter, and they’re gone, presumably reducing the travel between here and the north. We had a high percentage of travel-related cases. If you think about it, epidemics can only spread to new areas through travel-related cases.

The median age of the cases here is 50, and it’s probably close to the average, too. Is the virus hitting older people more often? Could be, but it may also be that because most cases are mild or asymptomatic, the people who are reporting their illness are generally those who don’t do as well as the average victim. That would lead to over-reporting of old people, smokers, diabetics, and fat people.

This is not a healthy county. Smoking is everywhere, and the people eat garbage. Obesity almost seems fashionable. Add these factors to the large number of seniors here, and you have a bomb waiting to go off. But it hasn’t and probably won’t.

I have to hand it to the people who run the ALF’s. I know these places are not as clean as typical homes, but someone here must be doing something right. We don’t have a single ALF death cluster, but Massachusetts is jam-packed with them, to the point where they overwhelm statistics for everyone else. Massachusetts has had a bona fide ALF catastrophe. They must be doing very little to protect the elderly.

I would have expected worse performance here.

Apart from having a low population density, I don’t know why we’re doing well. Traffic here is just about normal. It’s not like we’re imprisoned, the way people are in other places. There is still a lot of mingling. I’m considering looking into a haircut next week. The ponytail look is not for me. The Seventies are over, and we should do all we can to put a stake in their heart.

The Johns Hopkins USA graph was still on a plateau last night, which is the last time it was updated. The graph was turning downward again. A plateau is good. We can’t have a true disaster if the transmission rate is sufficiently low.

I wonder how my Ebay bench grinder poverty index is doing. Last time I looked, there were 44 items listed under “Baldor bench grinder.” Let’s see.

It’s down to 41! We’ll see what it looks like after a week or so. Still higher than it was before the epidemic.

Still not ONE major celebrity death.

I suppose I should talk about the supernatural approach to epidemics, since it’s the most important approach.

We got here by neglecting the supernatural, and we should focus on the supernatural to get out.

Disease comes from sin and poor relationships with God. Idolatry, including atheism, is a major cause. Epidemics come to countries where not enough people are repenting and praying. They’re not random things that happen to “good people.” Calling yourself good is actually a great way to invite disaster. The word says God is near to them that are of a broken heart and saves such as be of a contrite spirit, and it says he fights the proud.

The word also says God will heal a country if his people will pray. It doesn’t say, “if everyone in the country will pray.” It says “my people.” God was willing to spare Sodom for 10 righteous people, but he couldn’t find that many.

We should be attacking the epidemic with prayer and repentance. Those of us who are already trying to live God’s way should be praying for revival and repentance, not just an end to the epidemic. Of course, we will be attacked for saying sin is in any way involved in epidemics, even though everyone knows how VD works. Sin even contributes to non-infectious diseases like cirrhosis, lung cancer, COPD, and obesity-related illnesses. The connection between sin and disease should be obvious even to atheists.

Most Christians don’t bless or curse. I guess they don’t know they can. You can speak defeat to problems. You can speak help to people. Isaac did it. Balaam did it. Peter did it. Jesus did it. We should be doing these things.

We should be saying, “I speak defeat to the spirits and people contributing the panic and selfishness.” “I speak defeat to the spirits that spread the disease.” “I speak defeat to the hoarders and the spirits they serve.” “I speak defeat to Satan in his effort to use this disease to turn people into servants of the Beast.” “I speak victory to God’s servants and those who speak the truth about the epidemic.”

Even jihadis know curses and blessings matter. They gather in groups and curse the USA and Israel. Somehow, we don’t think our words have power.

I pray for the epidemic to end, and I also pray for God to defeat the spirits and people who are using it to train people for Satan. I ask God to destroy this plan, and I ask him to spread revival and repentance. I ask him to free people from crooked pastors and dependence on churches, and I ask him to spread true Christianity like a disease, outside of church, from person to person, so people will know him personally, as they are supposed to. I ask him to take Satan’s training exercise away and make it his own.

The Bible mentions several epidemics. Were any NOT caused by sin?

Let’s see.

The Egyptian plagues were caused by sin, and two were bodily afflictions. The hemorrhoid plague in Gaza was caused by sin. The Revelation plagues will be caused by sin. A plague killed 185,000 Assyrians in one night, and it was because they were against God. A plague struck Israel because of David’s sin.

It’s strange that so many Christians think an epidemic is an unjust attack on an innocent society. Where, exactly, is this innocent society? Is it America, which has killed at least 60,000,000 unborn babies since Roe v. Wade? Is it Israel, which has generally rejected Jesus? Is it China, which leads the world in abortion and infanticide?

What does the Bible say about protection from plagues? It says that if you dwell in the secret place of the most high, you shall not fear for the pestilence that walks in darkness. It says that if you make God your refuge, no plague shall come near your dwelling. It says the Hebrews were spared the plague on the firstborn because they obeyed God.

Sometimes famines are epidemics. They can be caused by crop diseases. The Bible says famine comes from curses related to disobedience.

It sure seems like plagues are connected to our attitudes toward God.

If the pandemic is an end-time thing, it will happen again. It may not come as a coronavirus epidemic, but some other global disaster will hit, and it will be followed by others, because the end will be a series of birth pangs. They will precede the emergence of the Antichrist and the return of Jesus Christ. Labor pains get more frequent and more intense, so if you don’t like COVID-19, you will really hate what comes later. It’s time to come inside.

Paul Harrell Would Slap Me

I’m going to tell on myself.

I cranked out a bunch of 10mm rounds today, and then I decided to shoot a few and see if they blew my hand off. I took the Glock 29 and the new Glock 20 to the pasture. I had 11 Hornady factory rounds. I shot those from the new gun because shooting reloads would void the warranty. I don’t care about voiding the warranty on the old gun, because I know it was okay from the factory. The major parts have no defects. Whatever goes wrong from here on out, I can probably fix. If it turned out the new gun had a giant crack in the frame or a ringed barrel or something, I would want to find out while I still had a warranty.

Glock is a real pain about warranties. They void you if you shoot reloads, which seems ridiculous. I guess most people lie, but I prefer not to.

The Hornady rounds shot fine, but three of the first 11 handloaded rounds failed to fire because of light primer strikes.

That’s a pretty high ratio of duds to viable rounds.

The second magazine only had one dud. That told me the cartridges were probably okay. I rounded up the cartridges that failed, ran them through the gun again, and they fired.

My conclusion? Somebody let lint gum up his firing pin.

I can’t even remember the last time I cleaned the gun. I never shoot it. Evidently, Glocks will suck up lint and become useless. It may be because I have an Uncle Mike’s pocket holster, which sheds little fibers until it’s broken in.

Man, it would have been unpleasant if this had happened with my carry ammo on a bad day. “RELAX, LADY, I’LL SAVE YOU!” “Click.” “SORRY! BEST OF LUCK! WORK THE JAB!”

I brought the gun inside, and for the first time since I’ve owned it, I disassembled the slide. It only takes a second. I went through it with swabs and alcohol, among other things. I went online and ordered 220 pipe cleaners to ream out the deep holes in the slide. I cleaned everything with Powder Blast, which is brutal, and I also used Hornady One Shot. I used a tiny bit of Mobil 28 grease on the slide when I reassembled it.

They say you should not lubricate anything on a Glock but the slide, and they recommend oil, but I can’t resist trying out my super-duper Mobil 28 grease in the special made-for-gunsmithing skinny syringe. Since I’m the one who has to clean it, I figure I’ll do what I want.

I was not happy with the way the gun acted when I put it back together. It has a Lasermax guide rod laser, which I never should have bought. The laser replaces the guide rod and spring, and it doesn’t feel great. Also, you have to install a Lasermax slide lock, which can actually fall out. And the batteries die fast, unlike those in a Crimson Trace.

I decided to reinstall the original rod and spring. Then I got them out and noticed they had separated from each other. This is something that happens with Glocks, but this was the first time I had seen it happen to a spring that wasn’t used. The manufacturer, unbelievably, considers the guide rod assembly a disposable part, so they don’t make them very well, and they come apart. This would be fine if you could predict when it would happen, but you can’t. It looks like my original assembly fell apart under the stress of sitting in a box in a closet.

This is at least the second Glock spring failure I’ve had.

I can’t deal with this. Personal safety is important, even to a guy who doesn’t clean his guns. I’m getting a Wolff spring and rod, and I will never buy them from Glock again. As if I planned to. I’m also getting a Crimson Trace.

The new Glock has a horrendous trigger. I don’t know why it would be different from the old ones. That will have to be fixed.

The ammo appears to be fine. It shoots very accurately, and it cycles when you actually hit the primer correctly.

I’m getting a few boxes of factory ammo for the new gun. I’ll shoot it up, and if nothing breaks, I’ll go ahead and void the warranty. I’m not going to be stuck with factory defensive rounds for $45 per box just so I can have a warranty.

The funny thing is that what happened to me today has happened in a number of dreams. I pointed my gun at someone, pulled the trigger, and got nothing. It’s as though God were trying to warn me about my gun. But I’ve always assumed those dreams were about cleaning up my act so I would have authority to cast out spirits.

Cleaning your carry gun really is important. I repent.

They Hear Their Master’s Voice

It looks like the coronavirus graph for the US is struggling with a plateau. This is my best guess. The steady upward progress we saw in earlier weeks is over, but the rate is oscillating.

Good enough. Even the government is acknowledging that things are winding down, so I’m satisfied.

Yesterday, I made an essential trip to an essential store. I hit Harbor Freight and bought a TV mount for the gun room. Now I have a TV/monitor on the wall, and I no longer have a TV on the floor.

I’m not sure what’s going on with the mounting. I used a stud finder to locate good places to put the two screws that hold the TV. I got positive results, and when I drilled, I didn’t pop through drywall and then hit air. On the other hand, I didn’t get any sawdust. It’s like I drilled into plastic. The TV isn’t coming loose, so I’m happy.

I moved my dad’s old $1400 office chair into the gun room. In my opinion, it’s really a $300 chair that got a lot of help from insurance. I went with him to buy it, years ago. We went to Relax the Back, a chain that specializes in furniture covered by medical insurance. His back had been bothering him. He had to pay for it. I think that if the manufacturer and the store hadn’t been using to suckling on the insurance teat, the chair would have been much, much cheaper. It’s not significantly more expensive to make than a chair from Office Depot.

Whenever loans and insurance get involved, prices go up, as anyone who has sent a kid to college or paid for medical care can tell you. It’s sad, because responsible people who pay cash and cover their own costs get taken to the cleaners while irresponsible people who rely on others get big breaks.

After my dad became demented, Asians started calling him, trying to sell him special belts for his back. These things don’t work. It probably costs ten bucks to make one, and they charge Medicare $1200. A famous huckster who calls himself Dr. Ho sells one on TV. If you were wondering where your tax dollars were going, now you know. I’m sure it will make you feel better about giving half your income to the government. Dr. Ho really appreciates it. He probably needs a back belt to help him lift your money.

He ought to be in prison, but this is how the world works.

Today I’m putting more shelves in the gun room. I have to clear the floor. I ordered shelves yesterday from the Home Depot site, and they didn’t clear the order until the store was closed. I suppose the curbside pickup policy is slowing them down.

One reason I need more shelves is that I broke down and bought 3,000 more rounds of .22 ammo. I was going to quit, because I thought other people needed a chance. But no one was answering the ad. I figured it was fine for me to buy more if no one else had the good sense to take it.

The ammo panic is teaching people to shoot odd calibers. The panic patrol is stocking up on common things like 9mm, .22 LR, and .40. Supplies are tight, but I can get all the .204 Ruger and .17 HMR I want. I haven’t checked .38 Super. Let’s see. Yes, it’s available. Some types are out of stock at Midway USA, but others are not.

I got a .38 Super pistol because I thought it was cool, not because I wanted to shoot burglars with it. It’s a great defensive round, though. The FBI used to use it to get through the heavy steel of old car bodies. Special Agent Earl Hamer carried one when he and his crew thoroughly ventilated Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker.

Maybe this is the time for people to start carrying .357 SIG, a caliber experts refer to as “useless.” It approximates .40 S&W performance, for only twice the price. Maybe shelves are full of .357 SIG rounds no one wants. There is also a weird .45 ACP variant out there.

Harbor Freight has a doorman now, like Studio 54. I had to stand in line outside, hovering over my social-distancing decal, hoping to be chosen. I tipped him $50 and asked for a table near the band. Then I found out he was letting everyone in eventually. And he wasn’t even selling molly.

I actually cautioned a guy who got too close to me. I like social distancing. I don’t think I’ll get COVID-19, but the disease does exist, and there is a much bigger chance that I’ll get the flu. Why not stand 6 feet apart when it’s not inconvenient? It’s a good thing to do even when there is no virus panic. It’s good manners.

If you’re a man, you should be used to social distancing in stores. Men in their thirties and forties have problems with strange women chasing them at the grocery and other stores, and it can train us to maintain space barriers. Women’s magazines, which are full of heinous advice provided by homosexual men and single women who will never be married, tell women this is a great way to land a husband.

I always hated it. I wasn’t going to ask a strange woman out because she kept turning up beside me at Barnes & Noble. It made me wonder what was wrong with them. Of course, when you get old and they stop, it’s not flattering.

Then when you hit 65, they start up again, and they’re rabid and unrelenting. And they’re not attractive young women worried about their biological clocks. Also, it shouldn’t be taken as a compliment. It doesn’t mean you’re attractive or charming. They just want something to lie next to at night, which other women can’t get. Terrifying.

I was in line for the register when a guy took the decal behind mine. He was wearing a carpenter’s dust mask. Don’t get me started. The problem was that he stood in front of his cart, about three inches away from me. I mentioned the decal, and he apologized and moved back. He had moved close to me so he could get a better look at an item I was standing next to. Of course, he would have been next to it himself a minute later, even without the strange decision to increase intimacy. He just thought he’d save time by doing something he clearly thought was dangerous.

My friend Mike lives in New Hampshire and works in Boston, which is a hotspot. He has become militant. He has taken to standing in the middle of aisles and saying, “You’re not going past me. You can try if you want.” He’s a pretty big guy, so he can do that. Probably not the best approach.

I told him about my theory that Northeasterners were getting hit hard because they’re dirty and don’t believe in germs. I thought he might disagree. He said, “I hate them.” That was a little over the top. He gave me a long speech about how rude and narcissistic they are. He is really fed up. He said people up there are ignoring the distancing rules wholesale, while voting for Democrats who are much more likely to impose draconian measures than Republicans. I guess they think having a rule, not obeying it, is what counts.

That’s actually very normal for leftists. Make a rule that’s unsustainable and irrational, and then violate it as a matter of policy while expecting the government to make other people obey.

He says Michigan’s liberal governor won’t let people go outside. Yeah, that’s totally reasonable and science-based. We have all gotten used to the stories of people who gave other people coronavirus from 50 yards away while mowing yards. He says she won’t let people buy anything that isn’t essential, even when visiting a store for a good reason. So if you go to Target to buy canned soup, you can’t get your kids a Monopoly board to keep them from tearing the walls out of your house.

Sounds like a total nutcase, but she’s in charge because people don’t vote with their brains. It makes me dread the emasculating post-Trump future, when her kind rules the nation. Look what they’re capable of. I knew they would be socialists, but I didn’t think they could incarcerate everyone on a whim.

Death, for Christians, is pleasant and rewarding. In this respect, it is different from, and generally preferable to, living under anti-Christian leftist nanny-tyrants.

Mike has 5,000 N95 masks, with more on the way. He ordered them weeks ago for his employees, but he uses them, too. I don’t know what good they will do him, but he has real reasons for taking unusual measures. He has had heart and immune system problems. He offered to send me masks, but I wasn’t interested.

In other news, I saw a neat video from Messianic Rabbi Zev Porat. He works in Israel, reaching out to Jews. He’s from an Orthodox family, and he has helped a number of heavy-duty Orthodox Jews, including rabbis, come to Yeshua.

He spoke about the coronavirus panic, using the word “panic.” He knows what’s happening. The hysteria is from Satan.

He talked about the Hebrew word for panic. He says it’s “panikos.” Pretty creative. It comes from the name of Pan, supposedly the oldest false god. His name means “all” for some reason. I recall being taught that the reason was that he was originally the greatest of the Greek false gods.

Pan looks like our typical depiction of Satan. He’s a man with goat’s horns, a post-90’s chin beard, and a goat’s lower body. Some equate him with Satan.

It’s interesting that the ancient Jews chose to associate panic with a pagan deity.

The word “pandemic” comes from roots meaning something like “all (Pan) people.”

Among pagans, there was a belief that if one woke Pan up from a nap, he might yell and cause livestock or people to stampede. So a panic is really a stampede. Isn’t that perfect? We’re acting like scared cattle. Instead of listening to the Holy Spirit, we look to see what the other cattle are doing, and we do the same. This is why you can’t find toilet paper, which is a product totally unrelated to caring for coronavirus victims.

I’ve been telling people the Beast isn’t just a man or a spirit. It’s the herd of human beings who aren’t led by the Spirit of God.

The other day, while considering the coronavirus hysteria, I thought of a flock of birds flying in random directions as one simply because the birds in front turned this way or that. We’ve all seen this. Human beings are supposed to be smart, but we do the same thing every day. I hate it. I have always hated it. Even when I was a little kid, I could not understand other kids who did and thought as others did, without thinking. I noticed that sometimes they seemed to lose their minds. It was like something else had taken over. I didn’t understand why they couldn’t see it.

When I was in the second grade, I knew a kid named Dave. We were friends. He was a great guy. One day I went up to him after school was out, and when I spoke to him, he puffed out his chest and started barging toward me. He bellowed, saying he was a Gator fan, and he said something or other about how you have to get out of the way for Gator fans or else. I had no idea what he was talking about. He acted like he didn’t know me. I actually asked myself if I had mistaken someone else for Dave. I was seeing the Beast in action. Didn’t know it.

You’re supposed to be the head, not the tail. If you hoarded toilet paper in March, you’re a follower, not a leader. You don’t think. You’re disconnected from God, and you’re displeasing him.

Porat mentions the Banias, which is something I’ve written about. It’s a hole in the side of Baal-Hermon (“lord of the curse”), which is one name for Mount Hermon in the north of Israel. “Banias” means something like “place of Pan.” It’s an Arabic term, and the Arabs don’t have a “P” sound in their language. I suppose it would be “Panias” if they did.

According to the book of Enoch, Baal-Hermon, a snow-capped peak, is the place where Satan (or Semyaza) and a bunch of other angels came down from heaven, took physical form, and agreed to defy God and have sex with women. They exchanged curses binding each other in a pact. This is where the name of the mountain comes from.

These were angels who gave rise to a race of dominant freaks who oppressed mankind, and the flood was sent to clear them off the earth.

It’s not clear to me how Satan could have been cursed after he tempted Adam and then gone on to fall at Mount Hermon, much later. Maybe Satan and Semyaza are different spirits, or maybe the serpent wasn’t the spirit we call Satan. The book of Enoch says the angels who had sex with women tried to get forgiveness by sending Enoch to talk to God, but it certainly looks like the serpent was already damned and would not have bothered trying to get forgiveness. There is an explanation, but I don’t know what it is.

Mt. Hermon is one of three sources of the Jordan.

In the past, the hole at the bottom of the mountain contained a powerful spring with a very vigorous flow of water. Pagans used to throw their sacrifices into the spring, presumably contaminating the Jordan as it made its way through Israel to the Sea of Galilee and then the Dead Sea. An earthquake eventually reduced the flow.

The Banias was the location of Caesarea Philippi. This is the place where Jesus called Peter Satan. He said the gates of hell would not prevail against his church. The Banias was a gate of hell. It was surrounded by pagan structures. Still is.

It’s remarkable how things fit together. The Beast is the false god of the flesh. He will rule humans as a herd, and he will do it largely through panics. People who pretend to be kind and rational in normal times will turn hard and even vicious in enforcing a panicked herd’s irrational dictates. We’re seeing that now among coronavirus hysterics.

People who wouldn’t hurt you during normal times will burn your house with you in it if they think they have to do it in order to stop a plague. People who don’t know God are terrified of death. They are not like solid Christians.

A few years back, God put this word in my mind: “I will not be rushed.” I didn’t see how prophetic it was until now. When Satan rules you, you are likely to be rushed. A rush and a panic are the same thing.

There have been many times when I felt like I needed to act fast because of some perceived threat, and I deliberately chose not to do anything, simply because I remembered what God had said.

Here’s something else God showed me: worry is faith in Satan.

People don’t like to hear that, because many people think worry is good. The Bible is against worry. It tells us not to do it, over and over. It says it leads to evil.

If you watch Zev Porat’s video, you will see him say a remarkable thing. Talking to a man who is worried about coronavirus, he asks him who he has faith in. He says essentially the same thing God told me.

Worry is faith in Satan. Worry spawns panic. Worry leads to counterproductive herd behavior. Satan is using coronavirus to teach us to obey him, so we can become the body and bride of the Beast. It all fits together.

It also fits in with another thing God taught me, which is that there is always symmetry in the supernatural. God’s imitation is Satan. Faith’s imitation is worry. Being led by spirits of panic is an imitation of being led by the Holy Spirit. The counterpart of Jesus is the man who becomes the incarnation of the Beast. The counterpart of the body of Christ is the body of Satan, which is the body of the Beast.

The Beast’s prophet is probably the counterpart of Elijah.

It’s wonderful to see a rabbi saying things I’ve said. God tells everyone the exact same things. When people who claim to be Christians disagree, somebody is out of the loop.

I don’t know what it’s like to be terrified of death. I’m grateful for that. My mother was the same way. When she found out she had cancer, she only underwent treatment to make the rest of the family happy. She didn’t pity herself or spend her days crying. My sister, on the other hand, became hysterical and even more selfish. She was the picture of a bad cancer patient.

My great-grandmother was a healthy 85-year-old charismatic who refused to go to doctors, and one day, she got in bed and told everyone she was going to die. No shrieking or whining.

Maybe our consciences tell us where we’re going if we die.

If so, this is a bad time for leftists, who seem to be getting hit much harder than people in Christian areas.

I guess that’s all I have. Still no major celebrity deaths. Not one. Still many fewer known infections than the flu. Still below last year’s flu death total.

I better get to Home Depot.

Fodder for the Math-Challenged and Panic-Prone

My prognostications concerning the pandemic have taken a hit!

For days, the world coronavirus new-case graph has been dipping, creating an apparent maximum followed by a decline. Over the last couple of days, it has turned upward again. It’s still down from the peak, and it’s WAY down from where it would be had there been no dips. That’s the important thing. If the epidemic weren’t faltering, we would have many, many more new cases today, and the lookout for next week would be much worse.

Here is today’s graph, which comes from last night’s figures. If the epidemic had not dipped, the graph would run up and out of the frame to the right. It would be as high as the word at the beginning of this sentence.

I’m not going to keep downloading and posting this graph. I did it today so people would know I was acknowledging the upturn, but it’s getting to be a drag.

Was I wrong? I can’t know, but I don’t think so. Maybe a new country is having problems, or maybe testing or counting is changing. I’m still betting on a continued decline through the month and, well, forever, until and unless we get a second epidemic.

Here’s something I’m thinking about: why is the death rate worse than they said it would be a week ago? This disease is far less common than the flu, regardless of what anyone says, but the death toll will probably be comparable when all is said and done.

I’m going to make another wild guess: it’s because very old people are extremely susceptible, and we don’t protect them. I’m going to guess that if we ever see real figures, we will learn that the vast majority of the dead were over 70, and many were confined in homes.

A few days back, I noted that about half of the deaths in Massachusetts took place in facilities where old people live, and they were generally elderly people, not staffers. What percentage of that state’s citizens are elderly? Not half. Believe that. People in homes have an abnormally high death rate. My friend Mike, who runs a hospice up there, says it’s wiping out old folks homes.

I was talking to him about it today. I told him to imagine that he lived with his son, and one of them had the disease. Would they be able to keep the other one healthy? His answer: of course. You stay apart. You wash your hands. You watch what you touch. All of us have shared homes with people who had diseases more contagious than coronavirus, without getting infected. It’s just not that hard to protect yourself.

When my dad was alive, I was generally able to isolate him from diseases, but I only had one patient, he wasn’t cooped up with a bunch of other people, and I actually cared about him.

I guess I seem obsessed with pink eye, which I had earlier this year, but it’s one of the most contagious diseases imaginable. You spew viruses from every possible outlet for weeks. Your doctor will tell you to take your clothing to laundromats because it needs the high heat of commercial machines in order to be rendered safe. That’s how bad it is. I had pink eye when I was a kid, I lived with three other people, my mother did not use a laundromat, and no one else in the family got the disease. It’s not that hard to protect people from contagion when you know there’s a danger.

When I was looking for a home for my dad, I saw a number of local ALF’s. I toured the cheapest and the most expensive. None of them were truly clean, by the standards of ordinary houses. Even in the cleanest one, there were always smears of things that hadn’t quite been removed. There were smells. And the places were full of things old people would touch, like books, tables, and chair arms.

I don’t think my area is exceptional. In fact, the ALF industry is competitive here because of the huge number of elderly residents. This county is probably doing a better job than other places.

In my opinion, we’re letting them die. Keeping them safe is a lot of trouble, and there isn’t much motivation, because we see them as people who are nearly dead already. They’re easily replaced, from the perspective of ALF managers. There are people waiting to move in. That’s the hard truth.

When you get past a certain age, and the inconvenience of keeping you well reaches a certain threshold, people will do less and less to keep you well. It’s human nature. I’m not endorsing it. I’m pointing it out. We all know it.

We keep hearing about young and supposedly healthy people who have died, and very often, their ages have been mentioned in the headlines, to make sure we see it even if we don’t read the articles. The obvious intent: to prove that this is a disease that is equally dangerous to people of all ages. It’s a lie. The death rate for people over 80 is over 10%. Kids almost never die. If you’re under 60, the rate goes down close to 1%.

It’s like AIDS. They kept trying to convince us we were all at risk, and it wasn’t true. It’s impossible for a heterosexual man to get AIDS from a woman. Somewhere, there is probably someone who really did get syphilis from a toilet seat, but it’s considered impossible. Female-male AIDS transmission is the same way. Women who think their infected husbands are straight are living with homosexuals or intravenous drug users. You can check WHO if you don’t believe me. The “heterosexual” men in the African AIDS epidemic have had sex with other men.

Magic Johnson is a homosexual. Accept it. Either that, or he shot up. The odds against any other type of transmission are astronomical. One famous group of people were infected deliberately by a murderous homosexual dentist named Acer, but if Johnson had gotten the disease in a similar way, there would be a cluster of fellow victims. There isn’t.

They used to terrify us with numbers from Italy, and then we found out the average age of the dead was about 80. Italians didn’t look out for the elderly.

My guess is that we are going to find out that all or nearly all countries with high death rates will have unusually high average ages for their fatalities. The rest will turn out to be places with terrible medical care.

The Swedish government is with me. Their policy is to look out for the elderly and the sick, while refraining from locking the rest of the population down. I assume this is still their policy. It was last week, and it was working very well.

I’ve seen emotional guilt merchants accusing people who mention the age disparity of being insensitive. They say we don’t care about old people. Where is the basis for that claim? What if I say death in general is more likely to hit old people? It’s true. Does it mean I think they’re disposable?

The effect of age is very important, because, while it’s bad news for the elderly, it’s very good news for nearly everyone else. There is nothing wrong with spreading good news. When did good news become a bad thing?

The special vulnerability of the aged and sick is useful information. It could have been a great help in strategizing. Instead, our politicians listened to the ignorant, emotional mob and wrecked our economy unnecessarily.

It’s a terrible thing when a young mother dies from COVID-19, but it’s also a rarity, and we have to acknowledge that. We shouldn’t put her on the news and make her the face of the disease. It’s like making a lottery winner the face of the average American net worth. The most typical COVID-19 victim is a healthy-looking person who has no symptoms or coughs a little.

Where are the heart-wrenching videos of the tens of thousands of Americans who died from the flu this season? Don’t they matter? Many of them were babies and toddlers. If their tragic deaths didn’t rate coverage, why are we zooming in on atypical COVID-19 deaths?

The press made healthy heterosexual Americans the faces of AIDS, and it turned out to be baseless propaganda. We’re letting them do the same thing all over again.

Maybe if we focused on protecting the most endangered, we could save more people.

To sum up, I’m doubling down. Again. So I’m quadrupling down. No one can predict the future except God, but I’m betting on greatly reduced new infection numbers before April ends. If I’m wrong, sue me for medical malpractice. I’m just a blogger.

Now I’m going to try to make some 10mm ammunition. I can’t wait. I may also hit Harbor Freight for a mount to put a TV on the wall in the gun room. I have to have a computer in there, and I have a 37″ TV gathering dust on the floor.

Still no big celebrity coronavirus deaths. John Prine is at the top, and he was about as famous as Larry Hovis.

Dining Room Furniture is for Losers

All you single males out there, and males with wives who have their priorities straight, listen to me. Convert your dining rooms to gun rooms. You won’t believe how great it is.

Yesterday I found a way to mount a Hornady Lock-n-Load ammo press on a Rockwell Jawhorse. Today I’ve been getting out my reloading junk and putting the press in working order. It’s fantastic.

The thing that concerned me most was the state of the powder measure. This is a complicated dispenser that drops powder into cartridges. Before I understood just how bad rust is up here, as contrasted with Miami, my powder measure developed a nice orange-brown coat. This would be a problem for most people, but not for Eccentric Man, strange visitor from planet Heaven. I had a Baldor industrial buffer waiting for me with a wire wheel and an assortment of buffing compounds and buffing wheels. I disassembled the measure, cleaned off the rust, and moved on.

I found my Lyman powder scale. It can be operated using an AC adaptor or a 9-volt battery. Being me, I stuck a battery in it years ago, for no good reason. Then I left it in there. When I opened the scale up, the battery was in bad shape, but no chemicals had touched the scale. I was in business.

It almost looks like Duracell made the battery in such a way that failure would be less likely to damage anything but the battery itself. Are they that smart?

I stuck 10mm dies in the press, and now I’m trying to remember how it works.

I just downloaded a manual. With God’s help, I may be able to make some ammo tomorrow.

I learned something useful: you shouldn’t clean your brass until you remove the primers. Heh heh. I ran a 10mm shell through the deprimer, and the pocket is filthy. I soaked the shells in citric acid and water to clean them, and it looks like I’m going to have to do it all over again.

It’s amazing to see that the Jawhorse is rigid enough for this use. You could literally hold up a pickup truck on my workbench, if you could balance it, but it flexes when you make ammunition. The Jawhorse weighs about 75% less, and it doesn’t seem to move at all. We’ll see if that holds true when I’m pushing shells into dies.

I received some night sights for the new Glock. What to do? They don’t install themselves. Eccentric Man wasn’t intimidated. He has workbenches, tools, and a Panavise with Pana-hands in his dining room. I stuck the Glock’s slide in the vise and went to work. Then I realized I really needed a sight-pushing tool to do it right. I also needed a tiny 3/16″ nut driver to remove Glock’s silly front sight screw. That’s okay! Eccentric Man has Ebay and Amazon apps on his phone. The tools will be here very soon.

I’m going to make a new lever and handle for the press. I’ve seen some things other people have done, and I like their ideas. I could pay a lot of money for a new lever, but why? Eccentric Man has a propane torch, vises, and a lathe. He can make his own lever for $10.

I guess it’s odd for a Christian who is obsessed with God’s love and who has zero interest in violence to enjoy firearms so much, but I do, just as I enjoy nice tools and good kitchen knives. It makes me wonder what will happen to me if I’m ever involved in a defensive shooting. They say cops and prosecutors really don’t like it when you defend yourself with quality equipment. They prefer you use your grandma’s rusty .25 automatic, filled with ammo your grandpa won in a poker game in 1952. It makes you look like a harmless creampuff who never thought about firearms until he was ambushed.

People say that if you use things like a laser, a 10mm, and excellent expanding hand-loaded rounds, you’re as good as indicted, even if you did nothing wrong. I would probably be very well equipped in a shooting situation, but it’s not because I’m a potential serial killer. I just like getting gun-related stuff right.

I’m not a psychopath. Really. I don’t fit the profile. I don’t start fires, except, well a few dozen times a year, because I have to get rid of downed trees. I don’t torture animals, except, yes, I do shoot squirrels because they’re annoying. You don’t know what they’re like. If Ellen DeGeneres lived here and shared the place with Richard Simmons, THEY’D shoot them. And I hardly ever wet the bed these days. Probably not even once a week. I’m not the droid you’re looking for. Pay no attention to the AK with the green laser under the rear seat of my truck.

I could carry a Kel-Tec with cheapo 9mm JHP and hope for good shot placement. That would make me look like a bona fide gun moron. Of course, it didn’t help George Zimmerman. It’s what he used, and he refused to shoot until he was on his back having his head pounded against concrete, and his prosecutors literally perjured themselves in order to railroad him. Now he’s so crazy, he may actually be what they claimed he was before they drove him around the bend.

It probably helps to live in the right county. Zimmerman lived in Seminole County, which, like Wyoming, is far to the left of my county. Where I live, the cops would probably help me hide the body.

You really need a gun room. You should even convince your doctor it’s a medical necessity, for your nerves. Then it’s deductible. If they can give you a note that forces restaurants to accommodate your filthy, smelly, stupid, untrained dog, and if they can prescribe blunts for insomnia, and if they can prescribe castration for an 8-year-old boy just because he enjoyed watching The Turning Point, surely they can prescribe gun rooms.

It might even cut some ice with your wife.

What Goes Up…

Warning: I’m pretty full of myself today. I hope people will consider that unusual. I just checked the daily Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Sky-is-Falling graph, and guess what’s happening? The curve is picking up speed…in the downward direction…in April…as a certain blogger predicted.

I’m not even looking at the numbers and my equation. What’s the point? Here’s what’s happening: the actual figures are diverging downward from my equation’s numbers, exactly as I said they would. I don’t need to get out my calculator to see that. It would be like looking at my phone to find out what the weather is like, instead of getting out of my chair and opening the front door.

I actually do that.

If this was so easy for me and maybe 4 billion other people with common sense, why couldn’t our government figure it out? No, it was better to hit the rest of us with a $17000 per capita tax bill in order to fund a bailout to respond to a self-inflicted recession.

That number is 6 trillion (6000000000000) divided by 350 million. Of course, the actual number for your household is much worse, because half of us don’t pay taxes. It also doesn’t include things like lost wages and investment crashes.

I should have just bought a new Porsche for a struggling crack addict. It would have been faster.

New prediction: get ready for a squabble which will break out between largely urban leftists who reject God and largely rural conservatives who believe in God. The question of when we should lift the ridiculous lockdowns will be put before the public, and leftists will demand they remain in place, possibly forever.

We don’t need to work. Just keep taking funds from that imaginary stockpile of money the evil rich are sitting on. Find out where they keep their golden geese and nationalize them. Why didn’t we do that a long time ago?

Leftists don’t care about freedom. They are obsessed with merely continuing to exist. Put them in kennels. Feed them Purina. Take away their right to vote. They’re fine with it, as long as they think they have security. Conservatives think more about the quality of life, both before and after death.

I’m wondering when the paper-goods hoarding will stop. By the end of May, I will have to think about buying paper towels. By July, I may need toilet paper. I can buy these things right now, but it means leaving the house before 10 a.m. Unacceptable.

I hope the ammo situation loosens up, but maybe it won’t. I heard a rumor that some crazy guy in my neighborhood bought 60 pounds of .22 cartridges.

Someone tell me if I’m guessing right: Google is in the tank for Bernie. Is that correct? I keep seeing video recommendations involving the election, and they are consistently anti-Biden. Someone at Google is steering this junk at me.

The website The Hill has a show. It features a big, loud young woman and a not overly masculine young man. Shockingly, they are leftists. Google is shoving their videos at me, one after another. I keep taking the bait. They HATE Biden. They’re making several videos every day, exposing the MSM’s dishonesty in promoting the Biden campaign.

At first, I had a hard time figuring out whether they were liberal or conservative. I’m not kidding. Here are some things they were saying:

1. Joe Biden is demented.

2. Joe Biden gropes women.

3. The Democrat establishment has chosen its candidate instead of letting democracy work.

4. The evidence against Brett Kavanaugh was much weaker than the evidence against Biden, but Kavanaugh was treated as though he were guilty because he’s conservative.

5. The MSM is completely dishonest and generally treats liberals better than conservatives.

Wait. Is this Fox?

The semblance falls apart when they start talking about how they want to give Bernie Sanders full-body massages. They’re clear-headed enough to see what’s happening with the MSM and Biden, but they still think money falls from clouds populated with generous vegan transgender fairies.

What happened to the, “There is no media bias,” party line? Did we forget about that? Did Soros fire up the bat signal and send everyone texts telling them to change the narrative?

It’s quite a spectacle. As out of the loop as I am, even I can perceive it. There is going to be a WWE-style battle royale to get Biden off the ticket and resuscitate a man who is already confused without the need for dementia.

It’s imperative that the Democrats replace their elderly privileged white male with another elderly privileged white male.

Had to get that in there.

What’s more remarkable about it? The fact that leftists are being honest about bias? The fact that they would knowingly vote for a mental deficient? To me, really, it’s the fact that college graduates would vote for a socialist. Don’t they teach history in college?

Biden must be beside himself with anger and confusion. They let Bill Clinton treat women like unfeeling airline hot towels. Why can’t he do it? They let Al Gore run for president right after his term as Vice President. Why not Biden? They didn’t try to gut Hillary when she was anointed, even when they had to buy her a special van to roll her into when she fainted. It was her turn! How come it’s not Biden’s turn?

It’s never Biden’s turn! Is that fair?

I don’t know what would be worse for America: putting Trump up against a man with dementia, or putting him up against a socialist. Which one will get more support from Democrats? Wait. Democrats don’t matter. Either one will get support. Which one will get support from swing voters? They’re the ones who choose our presidents. The least-perceptive people in America make that choice for us every 4 years. God bless our system.

Leftists are apparently going to be at each other’s throats until Biden steps down or the election is over, whichever comes first. Conservatives can relax and make popcorn. When this is over, we will have a candidate most people think is a demented rapist, or we will have an eccentric whose discredited, dangerous ethos is–one hopes–so offensive it will give Trump the edge.

I hope Biden gets the nod. It’s terrible to see him exploited and exposed, but on the other hand, he lacks the capacity for self-examination and embarrassment, so it probably won’t bother him.

My guess is that a demented candidate will be so disturbing to watch that even swing voters may dimly perceive that something is wrong.

Imagine a Trump/Biden debate. It would be like watching a bullfight. Not good. Trump isn’t the greatest debater on earth, but he knows where he is, and he can remember and respond to questions.

My guess is that God is steering things. He wants 4 more years of Trump so God’s children will have some time to prepare for our socialist, persecution-heavy future. Leftists are behaving even more irrationally than usual, destroying their own effort to retake the White House, because God is confusing them. There has to be a supernatural reason for that.

I’m going to Youtube, and I’m going to remove political videos from my history and feed. I can’t believe I watched Joe Rogan. Staring at a wall is a better use of my time. It’s embarrassing. I hate this political stuff.

Here I go. “Don’t recommend channel.” “Don’t recommend channel.” “Don’t recommend channel.” They need a batch mode.

Man, my feed looks better now. It’s like someone bleached the bathroom floor after an unfortunate accident.

Rogan is a mess. He’s a middle-aged man who still thinks drugs, alcohol, and tattoos are neat. It’s like someone grabbed him when he was 17 and injected him with Peter Pan serum. His opinions are useless. He has nothing to offer me except someone to pray for.

If you have to use weed in order to feel okay, how can you not know you’re in deep trouble? That’s not normal. It’s like alcoholism. You need to get to know the Holy Spirit. He’s what you’re really looking for.

Drugs merely simulate things the Holy Spirit does much better and with no bitter aftertaste.

I’m going to see if I can avoid even thinking about the election. Here’s something God told me: “Your circumstances DO NOT MATTER.” If you let politics into your head, you’re letting tens of millions of ignorant, deluded people decide how you feel. God kept Noah happy during a flood. I’m sure he will look after me during an election year.

MORE

I always say the Trump economy can be judged by the lousy market for used tools. When Obama was president, you could find a lot of deals. As the economy improved, they dried up. People were using their tools to make money. They didn’t need to sell them.

Here’s an Ebay search I’ve done for years: “Baldor bench grinder.” I set the condition to “used.” Before Trump won, there used to be a lot of them available. A couple of months ago, they were rare, and the prices were high.

I just searched. There are 42 items for sale. Some of the prices are good.

If we don’t go back to work, I expect the number to increase. Check it out yourself and see what happens.

COVID-19 Graph Looking Good

Because I tried to predict what was going on with coronavirus, it seems like I have to mention it once a day.

Basically, everything I predicted is still coming true, in spades. My equation’s predicted number for today is 12.7% higher than the actual number, and I predicted a drop-off in April. I was hoping for a very large drop by the end of the month, as we always get with the flu. We’ll see.

My equation was crude to start with. The premise was oversimplified, and the underlying data was dubious. It’s very odd that it ever worked. The longer the epidemic progresses, the less the premise makes sense, so the less inclined I am to talk about the equation. We have a huge number of recoveries now, and they have to be messing things up.

All that is true, but I’m still within 12.7%, which is extremely accurate. Go figure. Who would have predicted that when I started?

If you want to know what’s happening, my suggestion is to start visiting the Johns Hopkins page with the updated graphs. Just Google “Johns Hopkins curve flattening,” and you’ll find it. I’ll post today’s graphs. It seems like the most useful guide out there.

As you can see, things continue to improve. America took a harder hit than some places, and our recovery looks like it’s starting later, but it does appear to be starting.

Still no dead major celebrities. How can that be?

I still don’t know anyone who has the disease. I don’t know anyone who has a sick family member.

Sweden is the big story. They didn’t wreck their economy with panic-driven measures, and they are doing better than their neighbor Norway. When things die down, will “experts” and politicians look back at Sweden and say, “We should have done the same thing?” No. I don’t think so. A lot of people put their reputations on the line, standing up for hysteria. A lot of people made money from hysteria. A lot of people profited politically from hysteria. If they admit fault, they’ll be giving a lot up, and the truth is, they care about themselves, not the rest of us. I think they’ll double down on hysterical. Hope I’m wrong.

Even if Sweden did somewhat worse in terms of infections and deaths, they would still be winners because they won’t have a depression.

One of the bad things about getting old is developing the ability, based on experience and an understanding of human nature, to predict that people will do rotten things. Maybe it’s a blessing that we generally die after 8 decades. Would you really want hundreds of years of watching people do the same crazy things?

My friend Mike seems to be getting caught up in the emotion. He runs a hospice, so he is seeing a lot more problems than the rest of us. Also, he works in Massachusetts, which is a hotspot. I checked. Yesterday, Massachusetts had a coronavirus rate of one in 300. They had about 700 deaths.

Interesting fact: about half of the deaths in Massachusetts happened in old folks homes. That suggests that lockdowns can cause deaths.

Think about it. What percentage of Massachusetts seniors live in old folks homes? Maybe 5%? It’s probably less than that. But half of the deaths took place in these facilities. These are places where people are cooped up together. Old people who are living at home are much, much better off. It appears that when you’re locked down with very few people, it’s not bad, but when you’re locked down with dozens, you have a problem. You and your friends are set up like dominoes, waiting for the virus to tip one over.

Makes me wonder if people in apartment buildings, dormitories, and hospitals are being put at risk by lockdowns. Some believe the Italians killed a lot of people by hospitalizing individuals who should have stayed home. When you’re in a hospital, you have more people to infect.

I’m just speculating.

I checked the coronavirus rate in my county. It’s one in 4000, even though the county is packed with ALF’s and old people (and unhealthy people). The death total here is 4.

I can’t thank God enough for moving me out of Miami. Like I needed another reason. I have no mayor to take away my rights, I’m around the nicest, most thoughtful people on earth, I get to be a Southerner again, and I’m also in a coronavirus dead zone. For now. I didn’t deserve any of these blessings.

Now that America’s epidemic appears to be in decline, maybe we need to start looking at states and counties instead of nations. Urban Northeasterners are very dirty, and they’re packed together. They’re having lots of problems. People in the South are cleaner and farther apart. I would guess that rural Midwesterners and Westerners are also cleaner than people in New York and Boston, but I don’t know. Maybe one-plunger, fork-sharing, sidewalk-spitting households are common in the plains.

Let’s see. Georgia has a rate of something like one in 800. Tennessee has something like one in 1300. Minnesota has one in 3400. New York State has a rate of one in 1000, but the city’s rate is one in 80! New York is a big state with a lot of open areas. California’s rate is one in 2000, which is great. L.A. County has a rate of one in 1000, which is still good. L.A. is not densely populated.

Miami-Dade County has a rate of one in 400, more or less, so 10 times what I have in my county. Over half of the state’s total comes from Miami-Dade and Broward, which borders Miami-Dade on the north side.

This epidemic seems to be whacking cities very hard. That means it’s whacking Democrats.

I wonder if that means anything. I wonder if it will affect the presidential election.

People pretend to be leftists when things are going well, but that can change when life provides challenges. On the other hand, panicked leftists can move farther left because they want to give more power to the god-government they worship, so it can protect them.

George Bush was reelected during tough economic times. No matter what they say, many leftists want a tough conservative in office when foreign aggression is a threat. Will they want a conservative when the threat comes from a disease?

Trump is doing a fine job of swinging left, so maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe he’ll be the new Bernie in many regards. Spending 6 trillion taxpayer dollars on a stimulus to revive an economy which is unable to benefit from it is not smart. It’s a gigantic amount of money, and it will have to be paid back with higher taxes or more currency debasement. Either way, productive people will be impoverished to support people who spend their money on weed and lottery tickets.

Maybe coronavirus’s disproportionate impact on Democrats is one of the reasons they’re more hysterical right now. In their urban provincialism, they probably think the whole world is in the same situation.

New York City’s coronavirus death toll has actually surpassed the flu’s average death toll. That’s surprising. It’s strange that they fare so poorly. Maybe it’s hitting ALF’s and hospitals.

For a long time, it has seemed like America was being centrifuged, with leftists settling in increasingly debauched cities and the rest of us remaining in pleasant rural settings. The city people keep pushing for ways to rule the rest of us and turn us into slaves. They would destroy our superior cultures and ruin the nice places where we live. I guess coronavirus is likely to widen the divide.

Anyway, there are no big surprises. Globally the great plague seems to be turning out to be a biological speed bump and a psychological holocaust. It’s too bad we blew it out of proportion.

By the way, I read up on quinine-related drugs, and they really do look promising. Journalists are playing it down. They’re actually saying chloroquine is “distantly related” to quinine, but it isn’t. It’s a synthetic quinine substitute, created for the same purpose, developed during World War Two. You can actually buy quinine sulfate in bags, and you can get tablets from overseas, if you want to have it around for a last stand. Reading about it is tempting. Real gin and tonics! I barely drink, but hot weather has arrived, and an occasional G&T might not be bad.

Also, ammonium chloride is supposed to be hard on coronaviruses. Maybe I should make pizzas with it.

The DNC Reaches a New Low

Every time election season comes around, we hear fascinating rumors, most of which are false or unproven. “Trump works for the Russians.” “Obama was born in Kenya.” “Elizabeth Warren is part Indian.” “Biden is demented.” The thing is, that last one, which we’re hearing right now, is true. Biden IS demented.

Also, Hillary really was falling apart due to old age and a severe overeating problem, but that’s a digression.

I like to watch gun-related videos in the hope that I will develop some level of competence in my firearm hobby. Sadly, this means Youtube thinks I’m interested in political videos, so I’m getting bombed with them, and I give in from time to time. This is how I know Biden is not all there.

I actually watched Joe Rogan. That’s how far I’ve sunk. I remember him as a pretty good actor (News Radio) and a third-tier comedian. In recent years, he has become one of the top Youtubers. I’m not sure how his show works, because I’ve only seen it a few times. I have the impression that he’s high a lot of the time. Maybe someone who knows more about it will say something in a comment.

He’s not a genius. I can tell you that for sure. He’s not someone to look to for sharp analysis or good advice. He’s a moderately bright guy who has a knack for providing enjoyable conversation for people who are looking for a way to kill time. And he probably appeals to stoners.

Rogan supported Bernie Sanders until he went poof. Now he says he would vote for Trump over Biden because Biden is mentally disabled. Liberals are having a fit over it.

I don’t really know how Biden got the nod. People are suggesting Elizabeth Warren stayed in the race to kill Bernie’s primary performance. Some suggest Obama put her up to it. Some leftists are saying the big leftist machine chose Biden because they felt he could attract moderates. Leftists…get this…are saying we can’t trust the left-wing media because there is a conspiracy to get rid of Bernie and push Biden.

Aren’t these the same people who insist there is no left-wing media? Did I imagine that?

Anyway, yes, Biden is demented. He starts sentences and then forgets what he’s talking about. He forgets old chestnuts he has recited in the past. He says nutty things and doesn’t acknowledge or correct them, because he has no idea he has said anything nutty. In one case, he caught himself, and he apologized and said that what he had said was stupid. That was unnerving. It’s disturbing to see a demented person get a quick glimpse of what he has become.

Does anyone remember the old Biden? He was a televangelist who missed his calling. He was polished. He was practiced. His speech was fluid. He stayed in shape. He had surgeries to keep himself looking viable. He had perfect artificial teeth always that glowed like the sun. He was a total professional, even though he was wrong about everything. This was two years ago. Now he stumbles around calling people “dog-faced pony soldier,” and his sentences aren’t sentences.

Dennis Miller says there is no way he’ll debate Trump. I agree. No one is going to let him get on a stage with a person who still has his faculties. It would be like watching a tiger kill an old Labrador retriever.

One of the weird things about Democrats is that they have no souls when it comes to using handicapped people as figureheads. They did it with James Brady, pretending he was an articulate spokesman for the denial of our civil rights when he was actually a childlike invalid with a big percentage of his brain missing. They did the same thing with Gabby Giffords, who barely knows where she is. A bullet went through one side of her brain, from one end to the other. There is a reason why she quit. They did it with that autistic kid from Europe, who probably has no idea that her neurotic fears spring from her condition. They pretend Ruth Ginsburg is still healthy and competent; as long as her heart is beating, they will glue her to her chair. Now they’ve made Biden their victim.

One of the amazing things about this is the ignorance. There are smart Democrats. Many doctors who treat dementia are leftists. Why isn’t anyone concerned about the speed with which dementia progresses?

In early 2015, my dad was practicing law and billing people, but he had to stop before the year was out. In mid-2016, I had to take over all of his affairs. In 2017, I made him stop driving. At the end of 2018, I had to get him a walker and put him on hospice, and before the year ended, he needed a wheelchair. He died in March of 2019, after becoming so demented he asked me what my mother’s name was and whether I had a sister.

This is Biden’s future, and it’s not the distant future. It’s happening right now. If he managed to stumble through the election, he might very well be in diapers before his first year in office was over. That is no exaggeration. There is zero possibility that he will not be completely mentally disabled within two years. He is declining fast. He doesn’t have a type of dementia that progresses slowly.

This is what the Democrats have decided is the right path for the presidency, and they really think it’s the best way to win the election. What on earth are they thinking?

How do they know he’ll be in good enough shape to give a victory speech or get through the inauguration? What are their plans in case he isn’t?

They’re trying to attract swing voters, who are just barely intelligent enough to breathe, but they’re not so inept they would vote for someone who is clearly demented. Even a person who isn’t clear on the difference between Elizabeth Warren and Dick Cheney can tell when a candidate is senile.

Right now, many conservative pundits are hammering on the Biden dementia problem. That’s not a great strategy. They should be wringing their hands and telling the world how scared they are of a Biden candidacy. “Don’t throw us in the briar patch!” Instead, they’re showing the Democrats how to fix their problem. If there is a solution, which may not be the case. Look at the off-putting people they’ve offered us this time around. Are any of them electable?

Buttigieg is really something. How many Americans like the idea of their president being sodomized regularly? I’ll bet it would put a lot of folks off.

I think the choice has been made behind closed doors, and unless Biden starts running around with his pants down, claiming he’s a chicken, he will be the candidate. There is a lot of weight behind him. Bad, firm decisions have been made. People who are in on it are counting on profiting. Deals have been cemented. “You’ll get this.” “I’ll get that.” They won’t let go easily. I think Biden will have to do some spectacular things in order to get himself replaced as the chosen one.

My best guess is that we’re going to see the Democratic Party drive its train into the side of a mountain with a full head of steam and an abundance of advice to the contrary.

The decent thing would be to sit him down, have an intervention, and get him to quit. He needs to get his affairs together. He needs to make decisions about treatment and his will and so on. He has no business flying around the country, squandering what little relatively lucid time he has left.

Here’s an interesting question. If they did the right thing, would Biden listen? First, he’s a monumental egotist. Second, he’s demented. Taking advice is probably not something he does well these days. He has been trying to get this job since the Eighties. He even got to sit very close to the flame for 8 years, as Vice President. Now it’s so close, he can almost taste it. I think he’s an extremely vain and venal person, and he would probably have to be tranquilized in order to get him onto a jet for Delaware.

I guess God is looking out for us. I always say that when things don’t seem to make sense, you should look for a supernatural explanation. Four more years of Trump would be great for America, God’s children, and Israel.

It’s a shame, what they’re doing to Biden. History will not be kind to the people behind it, even though most historians are leftists. If he goes on to run, he will surely lose, and then in a year or two, we’ll read about his “sudden” dementia diagnosis, and then he’ll die, while Trump is still charging ahead. He will prove people who said he was demented were right.

Inheritance Beats Striving Any Day

I’m not even bothering to check my coronavirus equation this morning. The point appears to have been made: this was never a plague, and it never had the potential to be. You don’t need an equation. Just look at Sweden. They have a relaxed approach, and their infection rate is lower than Norway’s. Norway has a heavy-duty lockdown.

You may ask how I can say this didn’t have the potential to be a plague. How can I be so sure things won’t change? The answer is a question: why would they? The epidemic can’t just speed up because you want it to. It has to have a reason. Something new has to happen. It would have to be a completely different disease. You can say it can mutate. Why would coronavirus do that? Isn’t the common cold just as likely to turn into a plague through mutation? It’s more likely, because the common cold is caused by many viruses.

Tuberculosis hasn’t turned into a plague. Chickenpox hasn’t turned into a plague. Lots of old diseases haven’t turned into plagues, even though they’ve been with us for centuries. You can’t bank on bizarre occurrences that are so unlikely they should be considered impossible.

The known number of infections is under 1.8 million. The US alone had about 40 million flu cases this year. In all likelihood, the real coronavirus number is in the hundreds of millions, and we don’t know about it because the disease simply isn’t very severe, except for rare individuals. I think we will find out that these things are true. Just a hunch.

We still have zero major celebrity deaths. That’s astounding. Wynton Marsalis’s father died. Not a major celebrity. Most people don’t know his first name. Then we have Joe Diffie, John Prine, and Tom Dempsey. Where are the Biebers, Anistons, Pelosis, and Clooneys? I’ve been predicting a failed plague, and even I thought we would see a few dozen celebrities die.

Celebrities are behaving pretty badly. They’re posting things to get attention, as always. “Here I am, bravely weathering coronavirus in my mansion, surrounded by guards in N95 masks.” “Yoga is keeping me sane during this terrifying time.” “Why did Trump do this to us? He has to go.” “My vegan diet will protect me.” “Here is a really bad, maudlin, hysterical song I wrote in order to call attention to myself and make me look like I care.”

Here at the ranch/compound, I continue my idle pursuits. Maybe I’ll stand on my head in yoga pants, surrounded by disinfected tarot cards, and put it on Instagram.

I am not happy with my new Instagram account. While I was using it to try to get in touch with people after my friend Travis got shot, I saw that a married friend who appears to be on the outs with her husband was posting provocative swimsuit shots. This is someone who used to sing at my last church. I remember why I gave up social media.

This morning, I decided to try using citric acid to clean .45 brass. It seems to work well. I don’t know if the insides of the cases are as pretty as they would be after using a tumbler, but they look ready for reloading. I put about two teaspoons of acid in a mixing bowl, filled it partially with warm water, and added a squirt of Dawn, which I have, in spite of the hoarders. I dumped the cases in and mixed everything up. I let them go for 15 minutes, and then I rinsed.

This is much easier than using a tumbler, and it reduces my carbon footprint (practically all I think about, when I’m not crying about whaling) because it’s not electric. I mean, yes, electricity heated the water, and I guess they use electricity to make citric acid and pack it and ship it. Other than that, it’s so green, it hurts.

It makes me feel good about opening the French doors to cool the patio.

In all seriousness, tumbler media tend to make a mess, and the tumbler makes noise.

Now I just need to mount my press to a bench and go through my reloading components. Having reloading components is great, unless it means you’ve been too lazy to turn them into ammunition. It’s better to have cartridges than bullets.

I’m getting very tired of self-righteous Youtube ads. They keep popping up. “STAY AT HOME IF YOU DON’T WANT THE TORCHES AND PITCHFORKS MAKE THIS A TIME OF UNITY AND LOVE.” Today I got an ad about a ridiculous coronavirus concert. I knew this was coming. “We are the world; we have a mild cough and a slight fever.” Celebrities never, ever miss a chance to turn events into self-glorification festivals. It’s disgusting. They should sing about the giant future tax burden we just took on over nothing.

I promise you that if I die, I will not come here and act like a martyr. I’ll try to be a man about it.

The “stimulus” program is insane. They’re sending people money to stimulate the economy, but they’re also killing the economy by forcing us not to work. Can anyone see the problem with this? It’s like doing CPR on someone while holding a pillow over his face. You can’t stimulate anything while you’re doing your best to kill it.

It’s not the only remarkable piece of cognitive dissonance we’re seeing. There is a meme out there about our jails. My paraphrasal: “You’re arresting people for leaving their houses because they’ll spread coronavirus, but you’re letting criminals out of jail to keep them from spreading coronavirus. Hmm.”

I have Roku, and my home screens changed to an ominous, pseudo-friendly “STAY HOME OR ELSE” theme. Totally inappropriate. It’s not your place to tell me what to do, from a cubicle in Silicon Valley. Butt out, put on some real pants, and cut off your man bun.

The leftist power-grabbing and maternalism (definitely not paternalism) are very disturbing. It’s coming from every side. We are being mommied ruthlessly, with no regard for the disgusting consequences that prevail in a feminized society. Matriarchy is poisonous. There is a reason why Satan portrays Jesus as a helpless baby in the arms of a grown woman.

There is no “baby Jesus.” He was a baby for two years, like everyone else. Then he became a man. Would you put a baby picture on your driver’s license?

Satan is very effeminate. There is no doubt about it. Consider his vanity, his beauty, and his methods. Consider his rejection-obsessed, vindictive personality. Consider his love of attention. Look at all the feminine men he has used.

He’s like a rejected girlfriend who didn’t get palimony.

Conservatives always spout about civil rights and how great they are, but look how easily Auntie Sam took them away this year. You don’t even need a leftist president. You just need a godless mayor and governor who worship the state. One day you’re free, and the next day, BANG! It’s 1984, only without toilet paper.

The Russians were always short of toilet paper under Soviet rule. Maybe the current American shortage is Satan’s little leftist joke. “We’re coming for you and your Charmin.”

I have some uplifting news, as if the continued failure of the coronavirus plague weren’t uplifing. I’ve gotten a huge revelation about God’s status as father.

Fatherlessness is a huge curse. People whose fathers are inadequate grow up to be punks. Many males get caught up in pride and haughtiness. Many females get caught up in ugly, attention-craving female rebellion. People who don’t have fathers don’t know how to live, because no one has taught them. If you don’t have a father to tell you things, you have to learn over a very long period through trial and error.

Fatherlessness Personified

My parents were not very competent. My dad didn’t watch over me and give me tips. My mother didn’t teach me discipline. As a result, I haven’t had a good feel for the presence of a loving father who takes an interest in me and is always available and eager to advise me and solve my problems. I know such people exist, but I haven’t been able to feel what it would be like to have one in my life.

Suddenly, God has helped me understand that feeling.

One of the worst curses you can have is a heartfelt conviction that God is reluctant or unable to help you. I’ve fought that curse for a long time. In my mind, I know God forgives me and wants to work on me. I know he loves me and wants to help me get through life, all the time. But knowing and feeling are not the same, and feeling is important. Supernatural gifts don’t come through knowledge alone.

God has helped me to understand, in my heart, that I can go to him and say, “Dad, I have this problem. Will you please show me how to defeat it?”

I knew this in my mind, but it wasn’t in my heart until yesterday.

Faith doesn’t just work in the mind. It has to work in the heart. The word says to love God with all your heart and mind.

This is a wonderful breakthrough. I have a much more direct type of communication with God now. I have much more faith that he will help. The big problem is that once I get started, it’s hard to make myself get up and deal with my daily obligations. I don’t want to stop talking to him.

That, however, is a problem, and a loving father solves problems for his children.

Here is what Paul said about this:

For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God. For you did not receive the spirit of bondage again to fear, but you received the Spirit of adoption by whom we cry out, “Abba, Father.” The Spirit Himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs—heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ, if indeed we suffer with Him, that we may also be glorified together.

My whole life has changed, so I am anxious to see what happens from here on out. I’m looking forward to internal change. I’m looking forward to being rid of juvenile priorities and being filled with divine ones.

I feel like I’ve died. It’s very strange. I hope it continues and increases.

All this being said, I suppose I will continue to amuse myself with trivial pursuits until something important comes along.

I have at least 3,600 rounds of .22 LR on the way, so I feel I have the green light to hit the pasture and improve my shooting. I’m also thinking of giving away my bedroom furniture, which is heavy and depressing. I’d like to get something newer and lighter. Easier to deal with in a move.

I need to clean up the workshop, which has suddenly become very productive. There is a layer of steel filings and flap-wheel grit on the floor. I should consider getting a better welding table. Mine is great, and it was very cheap, but I would like something a little bigger.

I have to move my non-firearm-related junk out of the gun room and into the storage room. Or maybe I should just throw it on the burn pile. Maybe I should get some kind of man-friendly couch and chair for that room. Something like you would see in a Firestone waiting area. I have to put a computer in there and put a monitor on the wall.

There is no limit to what a single man can do to a dining room.

I need to look into holsters for full-size Glocks. Maybe a shoulder holster is best. I already have one for my Glock 29. I guess I could try it out on the farm, and if I like it, I can get one for the big Glock. Which I haven’t shot yet.

I expect things to go better for me now. If so, I can be of more help to other people.

Brass Sorted

Today I crossed a major hurdle. I sorted my brass.

When I moved from Miami, I dumped brass in whatever boxes were available. I actually threw out some military brass because I had read it was a pain to reload. I barely looked at my brass until a week or two back, when I decided to turn my dining room into a gun room/indoor workshop.

Today I got out all the dirty bags and boxes and went to work.

It looks like I have maybe a thousand .40 S&W casings. Problem: I sold my Glock 22 to my buddy Mike. I don’t have a gun that can shoot .40 S&W. In all likelihood, this works out well for Mike. Today I did some math and found out I can make him range ammo for around $7 per box. That’s even cheaper than Russian ammo, and it would probably be more accurate.

I have found that homemade pistol ammo is more accurate than store ammo. I don’t know why. I assume the powder charges are more accurate, which would be odd, because a big factory should have really accurate powder-dispensing equipment.

I haven’t set my ammo press up yet. I moved my workbenches into the dining room. I’m reluctant to drill holes in a bench. My benches are very nice, and besides, once you drill a hole in a bench, things fall into it. If you plug the holes when you’re not using your press, you have screw heads sticking up, banging into things.

I’m wondering if I can fasten the press to a long board and clamp it to a bench. I’m also considering welding a stand-alone stand together.

I’m looking into ways to clean casings. My first case-cleaning tool was a tumbler full of corn cob media. I still have it, but since the last time I used it, I got a sonic cleaner. I was looking up information on using sonic cleaners to clean brass, and I found I could do it with citric acid instead. This process has been used for years, so why didn’t I know about it when I bought my tumbler?

If I understand things correctly, you can clean brass perfectly well with citric acid with no sonic cleaner or tumbler. You just let the brass sit in the acid for a few minutes. If this is true, I regret buying the tumbler.

I don’t regret it that much, though, because it’s useful for other things.

If citric acid works, why do people use tumblers, which make a mess, cost a lot, and work slowly? Maybe it’s because they want super-shiny brass, which is pretty silly. Tumblers shine things well.

The obvious question is this: how does the citric acid trick help me, when no one keeps citric acid in their house? Well, this is me we’re talking about. I think I have 9 pounds of citric acid, down from 15.

I have a pretty decent amount of 9mm brass. Not sure why I bothered to save it. When life is normal, 9mm is very cheap. I’ll bet I can make it for $6 per box. The other day, I paid a little over $7 for new ammo with brass casings. How hard should I work to save a dollar per box?

Ammo prices don’t seem to make sense. There are fairly big cartridges which aren’t terribly expensive, and there are smaller ones that cost more. It seems to even out when you reload.

I was working on my gun room with great enthusiasm when I found out my friend Travis had been shot. Was it a message from God? Was I being punished for owning guns? Was he being punished because he wanted one? No. Is it wrong to continue working on them and shooting them now that I see what they can do? No. Owning guns is fine with God, and I already knew what they could do.

I don’t recommend using any form of tobacco, but I smoked a number of cigars after my mother and aunt died from lung cancer. There was no connection. I wan’t killing them retroactively with my cigars. I’ve had two pets run over, but I still drive cars, and I do not slow down for squirrels. My dad used to drink and get abusive. I have beer in my fridge.

God has no problem with guns. Take my word for it. Misuse and accidents don’t change that. If a refrigerator fell on your dad, you wouldn’t sell your refrigerator.

I’m going to make a firm decision and choose a way to mount my ammo press. I picked up a new 10mm Glock yesterday, and it’s no good without ammunition.

Men, if you can’t throw out your dining room furniture and turn the room into something useful, I feel your pain.

By the way, I checked my coronavirus prediction equation today, and I’m about 7.5% high. It looks like the real numbers are diverging downward from the curve the infection had been following, and that’s good. I’m going to have to quit fooling with the equation, because as the number of recoveries increases, the total number of people who have been infected means less and less, and my equation isn’t set up to take it into account anyway.

It seems like the USA is the only reason we are still seeing a lot of new infections. Other countries have infection rates with decelerating accelerations, if you know what I mean. We’re still infecting each other pretty well. Is it because our epidemic started later? I don’t know. The numbers have always been crazy, so how can you draw conclusions? We know not many people have been gravely or killed, by pandemic standards, because those things are relatively easy to check, but we don’t really know how many mild or asymptomatic cases there have been.

A reader mentioned a study that suggests a whole lot of us have been infected and don’t know it. The study was conducted in Germany. A snippet:

Over the last two weeks, German virologists tested nearly 80 percent of the population of Gangelt for antibodies that indicate whether they’d been infected by the coronavirus. Around 15 percent had been infected, allowing them to calculate a COVID-19 infection fatality rate of about 0.37 percent. The researchers also concluded that people who recover from the infection are immune to reinfection, at least for a while.

It may well be true that this disease is more contagious and less dangerous than we thought. I’ve suspected this was true, but how do you prove test results are bad when you already know testing is faulty? Can you use bad tests to prove tests are bad?

News of a high infection rate would be wonderful, because a high infection rate means a high number of recovered patients who are now immune. This will force the infection rate to drop. What if 15% of Americans are now immune? That’s great. Even better: finding out how already had the big, scary disease and didn’t notice it. Next time it hits us, will you be scared? No. You’ll march right out to Safeway and buy your toilet paper with confidence.

Trump is talking about ending the social distancing guidelines. I like the guidelines. We should hold onto them in situations where it’s practical, especially in the winter. It’s always a good idea to think about the spread of disease. People should also continue to be clean. That would be a nice, and very great, change. But we need to get rid of the lockdowns, unless riots and a depression are our goals. Sometimes you have to take a punch in order to avoid something worse.

I’m going to try the citric acid. If it works, I’ll be happy that it’s so easy and sad that I spent money on a tumbler, simultaneously.

Stuff You Think About When Someone Gets Shot

I am beat. I have to say it.

As mentioned earlier, my friend Travis got shot last night. I got word at 8 p.m., from the young man who shot him. He called from Travis’s phone. He hung up while I was talking to him, and I spent a lot of time after that scrambling to get information from other sources.

Needless to say, I got to bed very late. I probably slept about 4 hours. I don’t just have bags under my eyes. My whole face looks like a bag. It looks like a souffle that fell. My features look like slits in Jabba the Hutt’s belly.

It’s quite an experience, going 12 hours wondering whether one of your best friends is alive or dead.

I couldn’t help trying to make deductions. For a while, I thought I wasn’t able to call the friend back on Travis’s phone because the friend was in custody and the phone was being held for evidence. I also considered the possibility that the friend hung up because he thought Travis was about to die. I kept trying to come up with explanations for the limited facts that were available to work with.

For a time, I kept thinking how much better it would have been had I been the one who got shot. I’m older, and I’m single and childless. I enjoy life, but I’m ready to go. Travis is young, and he wants to have a family.

I also felt as though part of me would die if Travis died. He’s a big part of my life. I’ve put effort into him. Losing him at his age would be like growing an arm over a period of years and then having it sliced off in an accident. I knew my life wouldn’t lose all purpose, but emotionally, I felt as though I would. It was just an irrational feeling.

Of course, I prayed a lot. The oddest thing that happened to me took place after I prayed. For long periods, I felt complete supernatural peace. It made me feel as though something were wrong with me. How can you have a conscience and feel peace when someone you care about could be lying on a stainless steel drawer in a refrigerator?

I didn’t want to fight it. My belief is that when you feel good, you should let it happen. Don’t worry about not feeling bad. You’ll have plenty of chances to do it later if you really want to. And if the Holy Spirit is the one making you feel good, why would you reject it?

I tried prophesying, which is something I do every day. I have been taught that prophesy is a gift that can be operated at will. You can’t guess upcoming lottery numbers. It doesn’t make you a Magic 8 Ball. You can only say what the Lord wants to say. But you can do it at will. I heard myself saying Travis would be fine.

That seemed like a potential problem. He was shot in the chest with a large-bore pistol. There was no natural reason to think he would be fine. What if I got up the next day and received a text saying he was dead? Not only would he be dead, but I would have to rethink a very important teaching, and that could impact my relationship with God in a very damaging way. It would be a great setback.

I have a lot invested in certain people, and I also have a lot invested in the Holy Spirit. It would be hard to go back and learn a new, powerless kind of Christianity.

Paul told Christians to prophesy. He told them to covet the gift. Clearly, we’re supposed to be doing it. He also seemed to say prophecy was superior to speaking in tongues. Here is what he said:

I wish you all spoke with tongues, but even more that you prophesied; for he who prophesies is greater than he who speaks with tongues, unless indeed he interprets, that the church may receive edification.

He also said:

Therefore let him who speaks in a tongue pray that he may interpret. For if I pray in a tongue, my spirit prays, but my understanding is unfruitful.

It appears he believed prophecy was better than tongues even for personal use. That’s saying something. Regular prolonged prayer in tongues will change your life and put you on a new level. Anything that beats that is worth seeking.

When I heard that Travis was fundamentally all right, one of the first things I thought of was prophecy. If there were problems with it, they hadn’t been demonstrated. I was not in immediate danger of losing a friend and a big part of my relationship with God, simultaneously.

It’s funny how our spiritual infrastructure can seem to depend on how things turn out in the natural world. If Satan can “prove” faith is a lie, he can take away everything you stand on.

Speaking of prophecy, I’m very disappointed in T.B. Joshua, the African preacher who said the coronavirus epidemic was over in Wuhan. Some things have disappeared from his Youtube record. I’ve mentioned this before. If you issue a prophecy, and it seems to turn out to be wrong, you need to leave it in front of the public. They need to know what they’re buying when they believe you.

He said rain was washing away the epidemic in Wuhan, and he went on to say the epidemic was over everywhere. The China numbers froze in time (at least according to whoever provides them), which seemed to back up what he actually predicted, but as we all know, the rest of the world didn’t do as well. He should have confronted the issue. Was the whole prophecy false? Did he simply misunderstand it, which is completely possible? I can’t answer, but regardless, covering up was wrong. The cover-up is a huge problem. Prophesying and missing are much less significant.

He should have left all the videos up.

You can say overzealous underlings are probably to blame. I’ll bet that’s true, but he’s in charge, so it’s still on him.

You have to get to know God for yourself. You can’t breastfeed from churches and preachers for the rest of your life. Other people will lie or make mistakes. If you’re connected to the source, you’ll always be okay. You will never thirst.

I am not watching any Christian videos these days. I can’t find anything that makes me feel like I’m being improved. I feel like I’ve exhausted the available material, like a Trivial Pursuit player who has memorized all the cards.

I don’t see this as a bad thing, but I do miss watching good videos.

My big job today was driving to Rural King to pick up a Glock I ordered a couple of weeks back. Rural King is like Tractor Supply multiplied by 10. They had a new system. When you go in, they give you a freshly bleached cart, and you have to take it, because they count carts in order to count people. When the available carts are used up, people have to wait.

I would guess my background check took an hour. The FBI is still that backed up.

It was a pain, but I had nothing better to do, and I’ve been wanting a full-size Glock for open carry at home. I don’t know if it was a good idea or not. It may also be a good gun to keep in the car. I used to rely on rifles, but now I know I can hit people a long way off, and 10mm is nothing to sneeze at. A pistol is handier than a rifle, especially in a vehicle.

Rural King had paper towels. The world has not ended. I resisted buying them. I probably have 12 rolls in my house. Other people matter. Somewhat.

I’m going to try to be in bed at nine. I don’t care if I sleep till Monday.

Joy Comes in the Morning

Last night I was informed that my friend Travis had been shot in the chest. I got the news at 8 p.m. Travis told a friend who was with him to call me for prayer. After a lot of networking and help from friends, I got this information: Travis is in stable condition. As far as his brother knows, he is not going to have major physical problems because of the injury.

I found this out at around 8 a.m. It was an unpleasant night.

I thank everyone who prayed, and of course, I thank God, who did all the work.

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In case anyone is wondering, I don’t know all the facts, but I have a pretty good theory.

Travis had been telling me a friend of his wanted to buy a pistol. He asked me for advice I could relay. I said I would go for a Glock in .45 ACP or 9mm.

When the call came last night, there were only two people in the room: Travis and a friend. That indicates that the friend probably shot him. I think he was a new gun owner without training, and he made a mistake.

If you’re a new gun owner thanks to coronavirus, do everything right. Learn the safety rules. Learn how to shoot well by getting expert advice. Practice. Run at least a hundred rounds through your gun if you can. I would suggest at least a hundred per week until you feel comfortable.

My young friend Travis has been shot. It was an accident. I just got a call from his phone. It was one of his friends. Travis told him to call me for prayer. He is crying out in pain. The friend says it’s a chest wound. They are waiting for the EMT’s.

This is the young man who looked after my dad’s house after I left Miami.

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While trying to get information, I found out an old Instagram account of mine was stolen. I canceled the account, but it looks like some nut in Russia stole it. If you are following me on Instagram, you’re following a hacker.

I tried to call Travis’s phone several times, but there was no answer. My guess is that the young man who called me shot him and was arrested, preventing him from answering.

I could not talk to Travis, but I heard him saying, “Please, God, not this way.”

I contacted a mutual friend, and she managed to connect with Travis’s cousin in another state, so the wheels are rolling.

That’s all I know. Thank you for your prayers. It may be a long time before I know what’s happening.

Pessimism Requires Faith and Determination

Before I get into the meat of this post, I have a word of encouragement for neurotics. You shouldn’t be disturbed by good news about coronavirus. If the facts show that the epidemic is going away, you can continue to enjoy panicking and bringing other people down with your rotten attitude. Just ignore the facts. After all, that’s what you’ve been doing for weeks.

I have heard some really wacky things from people who seriously believe this is an Omega Man situation. There is no excuse for that.

So. Without troubling you with numbers, my prediction equation is off by a little over 6% today, on the HIGH side. This may actually mean something. Ordinarily, I would dismiss it, but the Johns Hopkins graphs show the epidemic peaking and declining all over the world, so I feel good about it.

To make it clear, my equation, which predicted things with crazy precision for a while, is now OVERESTIMATING the rate of infection, and this is what I expected and hoped for.

Maybe we’ll get out of this thing without a major hysteria recession. But we still have to pay back 6 trillion dollars in panic spending.

I’m not saying infections aren’t increasing. I’m saying the rate at which they are increasing appears to be decreasing. That’s good enough. And all I’m discussing is the total number of infections. I don’t know what the number of active infections is doing. Obviously, it’s lower. I could check, but why?

I’m very glad to see people getting away from preachers. The lockdown has been helpful with that. I’m texting a friend, and she is as annoyed with preachers as I am. She says Joel Osteen and Kanye West are doing some kind of project. Totally predictable. It’s wonderful that Kanye West realized God exists, but who told him he should be in charge of anything? And Joel Osteen is worse than smallpox.

It’s wonderful to know a couple of people who are on the same page. It’s especially great to see younger people and minorities rejecting the Kool-Aid. Traditionally, they have been much more vulnerable than the rest of us. You don’t have to be limited by your social circle when God communicates with you directly.

I hope tomorrow my equation is off by 10% or more. Maybe next week, it will be so far off, there will be no doubt.

But don’t let me discourage you if you enjoy moaning and predicting catastrophe. Just believe whatever you want and enjoy your misery. It won’t be hard. You’ve had plenty of practice. And if anyone tries to bring you out of it, scold them and try to make them feel bad. Because that totally makes sense.

Are we Peaking Yet?

Here are my coronavirus figures for today.

My prediction (total global cases): 1,466,645

Johns Hopkins number: 1,446,557

Percentage error: +1.39

I’m not sure why I’m even doing this any more. My number is correct, within a tiny margin of error, every day. I do want to see the deceleration start, though.

My number has been higher than the official number two days in a row. Let’s hope that continues and increases.

I have been wishing I had historical data, so I could look at other trends. For example, I’m wondering if the figure for total cases minus recoveries can be predicted. That gives you the known active cases. The lower that goes, the better life is, regardless of the overall total.

Of course, playing around with disease figures is not my biggest thrill in life, so I have not been working hard at it. Not at all. I spend a few minutes on it once in a while. I haven’t been digging to see what’s available out there, because I really don’t care much. It seems very obvious that this epidemic is never going to approach fulfilling the hype, so I’m not lying awake wondering how I can get better data.

Today I finally checked the Johns Hopkins site, and they have an archive. It’s a bunch of CSV files, not to be confused with CVS files, which would involve very long cash register receipts. I don’t know how to work with CSV files, but I guess I can figure it out. I’ll see what I can do. If I can get numbers for March 5 and a more recent date, I’ll be able to fiddle with an equation. It would be trivial. “Trivial” is a term math and physics people use to describe calculations that are incredibly easy or even unnecessary. All the stuff I’ve done with regard to coronavirus has been trivial. If it weren’t trivial, I couldn’t do it.

Guess what? I got myself a Github account and learned how to download Johns Hopkins’ data and turn it into spreadsheet files. I learned this: since March 5, which is when I started doing equations, the ratio of sick victims to total victims has increased a lot. It went from 2.2202 to 3.6933.

Now I’m trying to figure out what it means. Maybe the ratio of sick people to recoveries is a bad indicator, because it takes longer to recover than to get sick.

Let’s see. The average incubation period is 5 days. It’s hard to get an answer regarding the duration of the disease, but it appears that a typical case takes two weeks to clear, and bad cases take three to 6 weeks. So, assuming 15% bad cases, maybe close to 2.5 weeks on average? That’s a lot longer than 5 days.

Given how recently the epidemic started, I guess recoveries will always lag the total number until some time after the infection curve plummets.

Speaking of the curve, I found pleasant information on the Johns Hopkins site. I’ll post it here. They allow downloads.

How about that? You can go to their page and see curves for individual “hotspot” countries. They’re all on the down slope. Not one exception.

Why am I playing with calculus? Johns Hopkins itself thinks the infection rate’s acceleration is over, unless they don’t believe their own graphs.

That little bump on the left is China. Isn’t that great?

Didn’t I say I thought the curve would turn around this month? Am I a genius, or was it just something any smart person could predict, without calculus, if he was only willing to pull up his pants and look at the numbers?

Reluctantly, I must say I can’t go with “genius.”

Maybe it’s time to buy stock.

Things look good. They couldn’t look better, barring a miracle. Let’s hope the good news holds out.

I hate being manipulated. The lies and manipulation are what disgust me most about the epidemic. Christians know that manipulation is the essence of witchcraft. I have always hated it. I can’t stand people who pull it on me. I can’t stand people who drop guilt trips on me. It makes me angry. I strive not to do it to other people. It’s a filthy, vile thing to do.

If guilt trips are your thing, and you can’t make yourself stop, I will drop you permanently no matter who you are or what we’ve been through. I’ve dropped a whole lot of people, and I have not regretted it even once. The world is full of people who will treat me with respect. Everybody can be replaced.

When I was a kid, I was cursed with a father and older sister who were manipulative. It was unbearable and unsustainable. I’m all done with that.

My friend Mike, who is probably still my friend because he doesn’t manipulate, once told me I was the least codependent person he knew. That was a powerful compliment. It was a nice surprise. I hope he was right.

I’ve had a very good time during the pandemic. Life is better now than it was last year or even in January. God truly does look after people. You just have to stay close to him and do things his way. You don’t have to be all that good at it, either.

Yesterday, I had some fun. I had to move branches out of my yard. We’re not allowed to burn them right now because the fire department has somehow decided coronavirus requires limited coverage. I’m dumping them in the woods.

I started the tractor up, drove 50 feet, and watched my left front tire come off the rim.

Until yesterday, I figured a tractor tire that looked inflated was inflated. I guess I won’t judge tractor tires by the way they look in the future.

Right away, I realized I didn’t have a tire wrench for the Kubota. Never fear! I have three sets of SK sockets plus a Makita impact driver.

I didn’t want to haul a heavy floor jack across the yard and try to jack up the tractor on soft soil. Now what? Well, I had jackstands in the workshop, and I had scrap lumber. The tractor had a front end loader. I used the loader to lift the wheels off the ground. I put wood down. I put a jackstand on the wood. I lowered the tractor onto the jackstand.

Nice.

The impact driver wouldn’t budge the nuts. Problem! But I had 1″ conduit. I put a 4-foot-long piece over the wrench handle and used the conduit as a breaker bar. Problem gone!

Jocko Willink, the professional ex-SEAL, likes to say “no factor” when a problem turns out not to be a problem. No Kubota wrench? No factor.

I got the tire and rim over to the shop. I fired up the big compressor. I had to get the tire back onto the rim. I put it on its side and stood on it. It popped into place. I used a wet paper towel to clean the mating surfaces of the tire and rim.

Knowing the tire probably wouldn’t seal, I gave the compressor a shot, and the tire didn’t fill. Now what?

NO FACTOR!

As a Youtube University honors student, I knew that it was possible to mount a tire using an explosion. You shoot starting fluid into your tire and light it. The explosion expands the tire and fills it with gas.

I didn’t have starting fluid, and I didn’t feel like driving to Tractor Supply, which is nearly 6 minutes away. But I had gasoline!

I put a teaspoon or so in the tire and lit it with a barbecue lighter. POOMP! Mounted tire!

I used the compressor to pump it up, and I was all done.

Guess what? If the tire keeps leaking, and I can’t fix it, I can put a new tire on the rim, myself. I’ll save, probably, 10 dollars. That’s over two Whoppers! And I won’t have to drop it off, wait for it to be fixed, or go back to pick it up.

I can mount my own tires! How about that? Balancing is another story, but don’t count me out until I’ve tried. I haven’t checked Youtube yet.

They have fancy machines for mounting tires in tire shops, but they’re not always necessary. They’re just easier and faster to use.

My biggest problem during the pandemic has been weight gain. The epidemic makes me think about food. I’ve probably bought 1.25 times as much food as I usually do. I refuse to hoard, because it’s tacky, but, to give an example, I bought 4 pounds of spaghetti. Also, Ben & Jerry’s has been on sale, and Tractor Supply put Gimbal’s jelly beans right next to the register.

I told the cashier at Tractor Supply it wasn’t fair to put the jelly beans there, and she said they did it on purpose. I said she needed to move them to the back of the store, and she said, “Not gonna happen.” Never missed a beat.

You have to love Southern humor.

Even though I ate the jelly beans.

Gimbal’s jelly beans are as good as, or better, than Jelly Bellies, but they’re a lot cheaper. You have been warned.

My new Glock is taking forever to arrive. I think I made a great choice. The caliber is probably even better than .357 SIG (which is also tempting).

I saw an interesting story the other day. I got wind of it from a video featuring Massad Ayoob. He mentioned a guy named Gary Fadden, who was a salesman for Heckler & Koch.

Fadden was driving with his fiance, and he had at least one submachine gun in his vehicle. He used submachine guns in his work. He got in a road rage confrontation with two armed bikers and their…lady friend. He fled and look for cops, but he had no success. Eventually, he was cornered, so he got out with a Ruger submachine gun which was already set to full auto. He called the cops on his cell phone. He fired a warning burst, but his new friends rushed him anyway, so he filled one of them with lead.

This happened in Virginia, which is NOT NOT NOT a good 2A state. I know people who think they’ll leave liberal areas for “paradises” like Virginia. They think all Southern states are alike. No, no, no. They are not. Virginia is jammed up with leftists. Avoid.

Florida is not bad, although that won’t last. Tennessee is great. Kentucky is messed up because Kentuckians hate work and love the government teat. You have to be careful.

A Virginia prosecutor charged Fadden with murder, and then he did him the favor of offering him a manslaughter plea, which Fadden rejected. Fadden was acquitted, but the experience didn’t do him a lot of good.

The prosecutor was bursting with enthusiasm to put Fadden away. It wasn’t like his hands were tied and he did his work reluctantly. He even told the jurors they had released a murderer.

Ridiculous.

Reading between the lines, it appears that Fadden gave the finger to the bikers, or did something similar, but guess what? Insulting people doesn’t affect your right to self-defense. I can call your mother everything you can think of, and if you put your hands on me, I can defend myself using whatever degree of force is needed. If I attack you illegally, then I lose the right to defend myself, but I can say anything I want and still be protected. I can give you the finger with both hands and still be innocent.

Ayoob is a self-defense expert. He says using a scary-looking weapon is a bad idea. He says Fadden wishes he had been carrying a shotgun. Ayoob believes people who use scary-looking guns are much more likely to be charged falsely.

Ayoob is an interesting guy. Gun people nearly worship him. He’s a cop. I assumed he was a New York City cop, or maybe Chicago. It turns out he’s a part-time cop somewhere in New Hampshire, where most of the crimes involve moose poaching. He lost a lot of credibility with me when I read that, but he’s still a smart guy.

I used to keep an AK in my truck, because why not? Pistols are for people who don’t have rifles. We carry pistols because carrying rifles is inconvenient or illegal. A person in a vehicle can keep a rifle handy without any aggravation.

After reading about Fadden, I wonder if I should stick to Glocks while on the road.

I used to be concerned that I would miss with a pistol, but now that I’m shooting gongs, I realize I’m a much better long distance pistol shot than I thought. It would be very hard for a dangerous criminal to get within 100 feet of me without getting shot. Maybe the greatly reduced effectiveness of a pistol is okay when balanced against the increased likelihood of being arrested.

On the other hand, I live in the most conservative county in Florida, and if I hosed an assailant down with 7.62mmx39 and then set fire to his blacked-out Camaro, the cops here would probably have a barbecue in my honor. So maybe the AK is still a good idea.

Whatever the story is, I think a full-size Glock will be an asset.

I think I’ll stick with pistols when traveling.

Hope everyone is having a pleasant lockdown.