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.

Things are Getting Creepy

I’m glad I posted my coronavirus equation and predictions online, because I don’t think anyone would believe me had I waited until after the results came in. Today’s result is another stunner. It’s so accurate, I’m starting to feel like somebody is pulling my leg.

Johns Hopkins global toll: 1,359,398

My predicted toll: 1,360,398 (rounded to nearest integer)

Error: 0.074%

Yes, my figure is almost exactly 1,000 higher than the actual number. And you can check it yourself, because all the required information is available to you.

I don’t know what the error in the Johns Hopkins number is, but I guarantee you, it’s a lot bigger than 1,000. For all practical purposes, my figures are identical to the actual figures.

Don’t ask me what’s going on. I don’t know.

The prediction is higher than the actual number. Does that mean anything? I don’t see how it could. It’s just one number, based on approximations, compared to another number which is not all that reliable, and the spread between them is too small to mean anything. But what if my prediction starts diverging upward from the Johns Hopkins number, and it never stops? That would mean something. Eventually. At first, the uncertainty in all of the figures involved here would make small movements meaningless.

Are they changing testing methods? Are people volunteering to be tested more or less often? Are doctors becoming less biased toward diagnosing coronavirus when the flu is the actual problem? Does an increase of 10,000 this week mean the same thing as an increase of 10,000 next week? No way to know.

Because of the huge false-positive rate (estimated at 40-80%) and other factors, it’s impossible to be sure of anything on a small scale. What is reasonably certain is that the flu’s numbers continue to dwarf those of the disease that motivated us to ruin our economy.

Here’s a prediction for you. The flu is going away. That’s certain. As it goes away, I predict a dampening effect on coronavirus diagnoses, because there will be many times fewer people to misdiagnose. Colds and other respiratory bugs also go away in hot weather, so they should contribute. I would think the death rate from coronavirus would also drop, since there would be fewer bugs out there to cause secondary infections.

I don’t think there is any way to prove or disprove this prediction. Sadly.

I’m still hoping for a drop-off in the acceleration of contagion this month. The weather is warming up, the dirtiest, most careless, and most susceptible uninfected people are getting rarer, many people are trying to be clean for the first time in their lives, and, of course, a lot of people are imprisoned in their houses.

One nice thing to remember is that my equation doesn’t take recoveries into account. There are a lot of people in the total figure who are no longer sick or contagious. That’s very important. They can’t spread the disease, they can’t burden the rest of us, and in all likelihood, they can’t be reinfected.

If there were enough of them, I would expect them to serve as buffers for the rest of us, but so far, only about one American in 1,000 is believed to have the disease, so I doubt the recovered are making a big dent in the effective mean distance between contagious people and potential victims.

Today I was nearly impacted personally. It would have been the second time. The first time was when McDonald’s, in an act of extreme callousness, stopped serving all-day breakfast. Today I decided to look for mouthwash. Believe it or not, some places don’t have it. What are people doing with it? Are they bathing in it? It’s not the answer.

The Internet says my local Walgreen’s has it, so I guess I’ll be visiting them today in my plywood-and-polycarbonate coronaburqa.

There are several victims in my zip code now. I am ambivalent about the risk. I truly do not want to get sick. I hate respiratory ailments. I hate mucus and sore throats. On the other hand, if I get coronavirus, when I’m over it, I’ll be able to go anywhere I want without even thinking about the possibility of getting sick.

Shouldn’t I have faith that God will keep me well, regardless of whether I have antibodies? Yes. No doubt about that.

I haven’t had the flu in years. I started taking the yearly shot. I haven’t one in a good while, and I still haven’t gotten sick. I feel like I should go get one, but Florida has very little flu, and it’s April.

I don’t get respiratory bugs very often. I would guess less often than once a year. I think I had them all when I was a kid, so it built me up! I like to think so, anyway. Seemed like I was sick every month.

If I recall correctly, I had pneumonia once, but it didn’t bother me. I was up and around, functioning normally.

It would be embarrassing to die from coronavirus after trying to make people understand that the epidemic was overblown.

We still have no major celebrity victims. I check every day. Some have gotten sick, but none have died. I thought Tom Dempsey was fairly well-known, but I talked to a friend who is involved with professional football, and he didn’t know who Dempsey was. I had to remind him.

He’s not Kim Kardashian.

Some weird things have happened here. Two nights ago, I woke up, and before I was completely awake, I saw a spirit leaning over my bed. It was transparent, like the Predator character in the movies. It was shaped like a fat man in a bowler hat. I got very angry, and I cursed it with defeat and banned it from my property. Last night, I woke up again, and briefly, I saw a transparent cloud in a corner by the ceiling. I cursed that, too.

Spirits seem to love upper corners and beds. I don’t know why.

I’m not afraid of them. They’re weaklings. They play for the losing team.

Last week, and again last night, I had the strange feeling that something big had ended. Maybe the age of the gentiles, also known as the church age? I don’t see the rapture happening right away, and I’m sure the world isn’t ending. I’m a bad student of prophecy, but I’m fairly certain a number of prophecies need to be fulfilled before the tribulation.

The rapture, tribulation, and second coming are three different things, and they are supposed to occur in the order in which I just wrote them. The rapture is supposed to follow persecution of the church. Worldwide, the church is persecuted very badly. Christians suffer more persecution, including murder, than anyone. Still, I have always expected pre-rapture persecution to be much worse than what we see right now.

The age of the church is definitely ending. God has been telling me that for years, and he has told other people. Maybe this epidemic is a threshold.

Churches cause a lot of problems. They teach garbage and keep people from getting to know God. Moving to smaller groups will be a big victory.

I can’t get inside the heads of people who are afraid of death. I know fear of death must be very common right now, but I can’t relate to it. I’m afraid of suffering, but not death. If you’re afraid of death, I’m sorry to say, it’s your fault, and you need to do something about it. If you don’t know God, and you’re reading this, what is your excuse? You have the Internet. It’s full of resources.

I discussed this with a buddy of mine. He told me a story about an aborted airline flight. His plane aborted takeoff three times. The pilot said a light kept coming on. The pilot looked at a manual, and he told the passengers the light meant the jet would need oil filters soon. He took off again, and the plane went over on its side. My friend looked out the window and saw the ground.

He said he started taking account of things. He knew his kids would be okay. He expected to go to heaven. He wasn’t afraid. This is how I feel about death.

In dreams where I have died, in the seconds before death, I felt very sober. I felt that something extremely important was happening. I also felt relieved that I was putting down my earthly burdens. I felt a sense of concern, hoping I was prepared. I wasn’t terrified. I didn’t beg God to rescue me so I wouldn’t die. Truthfully, I was looking forward to heaven. I suppose that’s selfish, but life on earth is tiresome. It’s a grind, even when it goes as well as possible.

There are people out there who feel differently. There are many people who will eat their own children if food becomes scarce, and that is not an exaggeration. It has happened.

Right now, those people are all hoarding toilet paper and Clorox wipes. If a real famine comes, a lot of people will be killed by the actions of hoarders, not by famine itself. Those who survive through selfishness and hysteria will be relatively worthless people.

In a society in which a woman will tear her own baby’s arms and legs off in order to avoid taking a semester off or just to look better in a bikini, should it surprise us when someone suggests that many of us would eat our children? We’re already doing it, not to avoid starvation, but to avoid inconvenience. We are known to have eaten about 60 million of our children since Roe v. Wade.

It would be great if, later in the week, my forecast was 10% too high, and then next week 50% too high, and so on. Sooner or later, this disease will stop spreading quickly, and then it will drop off to nearly nothing. Then we’ll get a vaccine, and our main problem will be coping with the likely needless recession or depression we caused.

One wonders how we will treat the hoarders and gougers.

Coronavirus: Sweden Gets Something Right

First of all, my coronavirus prediction equation.

Today’s prediction: 1,263,839.

Actual figure: 1,286,409.

Error as a percentage: 1.75.

Discuss among yourselves. I can’t explain a result this good.

Sweden has not immersed itself in the lockdown Kool-Aid. A while back, their leaders announced that there would be only modest precautions. They haven’t closed elementary schools, but they have closed high schools. People are still free to move about.

When asked if it was a good idea for Sweden to “experiment” during a PANDEMIC PANDEMIC PANDEMIC, an official said Sweden was not experimenting. He said the rest of the world was.

Ouch.

Today I checked up on the situation, and guess what? Our press is lying about it.

I found an article which says Sweden is wrong because it has a higher death toll (per million residents) than neighboring countries. All of the tolls were very low. Dozens.

Why is it wrong, in cases where very few people have died, to look at the death toll as a primary indicator of an epidemic’s severity? It should be obvious.

Because there are very few deaths in the entire region, the statistics are guaranteed to be lumpy and deceptive. If COVID-19 hits one old folks home in a country in Scandinavia, it can kill 100 people pretty quickly while the overall population does better than it does in other countries.

I looked at the overall infection numbers. Sweden has around 10 million residents. Norway has around 5 million. Nice, easy numbers to work with. Norway infections: 5,760. Sweden infections: 7,206. Even if both countries had taken the same approach, you would expect over 11,000 cases in Sweden. Sweden has taken a more relaxed, sane approach, and it has 37.5% FEWER cases per capita.

The article cited Finland, which has a very low death rate. Finland shares a relatively short border with Sweden, and that border is in an area which contains very few people. Norway runs the entire length of Sweden. Which country is more analagous? Which country is part of the same basic pool of potential victims? Which country has more travel to and from Sweden?

Finland is more like Russia, which has a low COVID-19 rate, than Norway. Finland shares a long border with Russia.

I saw a disturbing figure online. Some “expert” is predicting 32% unemployment in the US. It’s not a good trade. Poverty will probably cause more deaths than coronavirus ever had the potential to. Poverty doesn’t just kill by starvation. It kills by poor nutrition, poor medical care, greater risk-taking in exchange for money, overwork, stress, and so on. Poverty is bad. It’s not just inconvenient.

The Swedish say, rightly, that you can’t confine entire nations for months. No matter how scared people are, they will eventually realize that a little risk is acceptable compared to living in FEMA tents. People will start going out no matter what, even if they have to riot.

The Swedish say they’re focusing on protecting those who are most likely to be harmed seriously. Gee. Didn’t someone recommend that on a blog somewhere?

If a foreign enemy appeared on our coast and said it would attack and destroy our economy through war, we would go to war and accept the possibility that 100,000 or 200,000 people might die. We lose more people than that to cigarettes. Right now, we are destroying our own economy because we fear that something like 100,000 people will die, even though maybe half of those deaths are unpreventable. Does this make sense?

I am not a fortune-teller, and I can’t tell you the Swedish approach will continue to work, but it sure looks good, and we have had ample time to test it.

This epidemic is exposing neurosis in many, many people. Neurosis isn’t fear. It’s unrealistic, unfounded fear. If, in normal times, I wash my hands before I eat, I’m not necessarily neurotic. If I shower every time I come home and spray my entire naked body with alcohol, I’m neurotic. Being concerned about an illness which has a small likelihood of doing you severe harm is normal and prudent. Buying 300 rolls of toilet paper and 100 bottles of hand sanitizer, and then wearing a mask when you mow your yard…that’s nuts.

If you can’t sleep at night because of fear of the disease itself, and you and your loved ones are not in high-risk groups, you need to man up. No other way to put it. To families like yours, the odds are like body armor. If you’re afraid of being put out in the street because you aren’t allowed to work, that’s different.

There are people who seriously believe this is a plague that could kill a big percentage of Americans. There is absolutely no reason to think that. Even the “experts” don’t believe it or say it.

Part of me hopes I get coronavirus. I do well with respiratory problems, and God heals me all the time. If I got infected and had 10 days of coughing and sneezing, I could then go on with life and think about other things. Like the flu, which is just as threatening.

Some people are saying we’ll be infected over and over again because we don’t develop lasting antibodies. Where do these ideas come from? “Experts” aren’t saying this. We have very little research to stand on. What we do have suggests that we develop immunity. Monkeys do. We’re also expected to have a vaccine in a year or so. On top of all that, Trump turned out to be right about the off-label drugs that are used to treat the disease. Treatment is getting better, fast.

I almost wish the Magical Nobel Peace Unicorn were still president. When he had a huge pandemic, and did nearly nothing, no one in the press crucified him, and the world kept turning. Trump keeps saying things that are correct, and the press treats him as though he were advocating something atrocious and diabolical, like, say, tearing the arms and legs off unborn babies.

For diehard hysterics, I have what will, oddly, feel like good news. An celebrity who isn’t completely obscure in America has died. It wasn’t George Clooney or Jennifer Lopez. Don’t get your hopes up. It was Tom Dempsey. He was an NFL kicker a long time ago. He was missing part of a foot. He was very old, and he was in bad health. He was suffering from dementia. Sad story.

He’s not what panic-mongering journalists had hoped for. Not a major celebrity by any means. He may be more famous than Joe Diffie, who was the most famous person they could scrape up prior to today. Maybe I’m wrong.

Still no matinee idols. Still no NBA stars. Still no pop luminaries. Trump, with no mask, is still vertical. Four months in.

I had a fascinating talk with a young Spirit-led friend last night. He lives in Miami. He is much more in tune with the ungodly than I am. He is still on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, and he spends most of his time with people who don’t know God. He says many people he knows are flipping out. His friends are generally under 30, and in all likelihood, not a single one will have a severe coronavirus episode, but they think civilization is coming to an end. It’s a shower of neurosis, and the press is doing nothing but feed it.

He thinks we’re going to become a very aloof nation. As people are forced to abandon jobs where they deal with the public, substitutes will take their places, and we will never go back to the old model. We already saw this coming with Amazon, Ebay, and electronic cashiers, but he thinks it may get much worse.

It makes perfect sense. Carnal people don’t understand the importance of human beings and social interaction. The universe was created for human beings; it has no other reason for existing. The purpose of creation isn’t to have perfect order in the natural world. If it were, the best course would be to exterminate all humans. Pollution would disappear. Nature would rebound. War couldn’t exist. But the world would have no purpose. As the word says, “Where there are no oxen, the manger is clean, but there is much profit in the strength of an ox.” Reproduction is messy, but it’s the purpose of the earth, and God considers it worth the trouble.

I think the world is going to turn into a big vending machine. Electronics can’t replace all forms of commerce, but they can replace most of them, just as they have replaced millions of factory workers. We’ll go out much less. We won’t carry cash. We’ll sit at home and do pointless things, and we’ll wait for the UPS truck.

That actually sounds a lot like my life, but give me credit. I pray for God to use me to help people every day.

Fifteen years ago, we did not stare at our phones all day. We were not commanded and indoctrinated electronically throughout the day. Things are very different now, especially for the young. In about three years, we will have adults who don’t know what life without a smartphone is like.

The Internet and its sister, the phone universe, are becoming strings for puppeteers to pull. We’re becoming a colonial organism, like the Borg. We’re binding ourselves to each other in an extremely restrictive and unhealthy way.

It’s the Beast’s perfect storm. His mission is to create a worldwide army of people controlled through electronics.

I am not a joiner. I hate feeling that I’m part of a big organism, except for the body of Christ. It offends me when people try to tell me I owe unity and obedience to the secular world. It’s as though I’m a healthy arm, and someone is trying to attach me to a person with AIDS. I don’t want any part of the Beast. I want to be able to think and breathe.

I do not want to be part of your fake family just because we’re connected to the same Internet. The United States and the population of the earth are not my families. Step off!

No wonder I hate cities so much.

My friend says he’s not afraid for himself. He’s concerned about people he knows. They’re hysteria zealots. They have made coronavirus panic their religion. They have no protection. I reminded him of something. God has said, “A thousand shall fall at my side, and ten thousand at my right hand, but it shall not come near me; only with my eyes shall I behold and see the reward of the wicked.” Even if bad things don’t touch you, you will have to watch other people suffer.

You can’t help many people. They generally won’t let you.

Things continue to go very well for me. I enjoy life more and more. I’m starting to wonder if I should admit it publicly. My stress level drops every month. I do things I enjoy. I know there are maladjusted people out there who will be angry at me because I’m doing well and telling people what God is doing for me.

When someone else has a good life, it’s not an attack on you. Mature people celebrate other people’s happiness. The other kind, well, they put people on crosses.

If you’re hoping for me to apologize because I’m doing well, forget it. Grow up. I don’t pray for God to help me so I can turn around and pretend to feel bad about it when he comes through.

I pray for God to keep pampering me. “Pamper” is the word I use in my prayers. I’m not ashamed of it. Problems are bad. This is why we call them problems. Not wanting to have them is correct. I pray for God to do the same things for other people. I have a list of people I go through every day.

Glorying in suffering is for the proud. I want a nice, easy life. A lot of people take pleasure in being perceived as martyrs. Not interested. Jesus said his yoke was easy and his burden was light, and I ask for this when I pray. If you like suffering, you are very misguided, and you will probably get what you want.

Jesus didn’t wander around Israel making people poor and giving them diseases. He didn’t afflict people so he could say, “Aww, poor baby! You’re even better than I am!”

People who have a perpetual victim complex are always looking for someone who is better off whom they can hate. I volunteer. It’s better to be blessed and hated than not to be blessed.

The fear we are seeing is disappointing. The anger is far more disgraceful.

I’m waiting for coronavirus to be blamed on Christians and Jews. We’re already getting heat for going to church. Some numbskull put out a theory that coronavirus was created in a lab in Israel. I wonder if Satan will find other rumors to use as nails. He did it when Nero burned Rome.

Yesterday, I saw a few seconds of a Fauci clip, and he said the curve was starting to flatten. Hope he’s right, but at the moment, the Johns Hopkins tally is adhering very tightly–as tightly as one could hope in one’s wildest dreams–to an exponential function with a slope that increases. And increasing slope means an increasing infection rate. I will assume that a person in his position knows a little more than I do.

He may be taking recoveries into account. I’m not doing that. I don’t know if the numbers are available to me. Johns Hopkins lists them for China. Maybe they’re available for the whole world. It hasn’t been a concern. I just want to know how many people have been diagnosed.

I still think we’ll see a big change in April. Not because of hysterical overreaction but because of the weather and because people who are easy to infect are disappearing. Of course, people will credit hysteria with the win, so next time we get a relatively minor pandemic, we will be expected to run for our burrows again.

After socialism, willing inundation by hostile immigrants, and Abba, I didn’t think Sweden could be right about anything. Looks like I was wrong.

Sorry for the Delay

This morning I realized I had not shared my coronavirus prediction equation via this website, so I am posting a photo of it. I’m not industrious enough to type it out with an equation editor, so I used a chalkboard. Just wrote it down. It’s not neat.

Here you go. I said the equation was simple, and now you can see I meant it.

Now anyone who thinks I cheat can go back and check the figures personally, as long as they have some idea how to use a calculator. They can also go forward in time and see what the equation predicts on any date they choose.

Don’t choose next year. You’ll scare yourself. It’s not going to be accurate that far in the future. It goes up forever. It doesn’t include a term for the eventual deceleration of transmission.

The expression “exp” means “e to the power of.” It’s a handy notation that makes things easier to write. The expression “e” is Euler’s number. A with a subscript of 1 is the total number of cases on some day I forgot. I could look it up. Anyway, I needed this figure (which I rounded off to 300,000) to come up with k, the coefficient.

Today my prediction (posted yesterday) is off by about 3.6%, which means I got a better result today than yesterday. Does this mean anything? Probably not. If the error increases or decreases significantly over several days, I’ll think it’s important, but the difference between 4.2% and 3.6% is probably just noise.

I don’t know if the entire equation means anything, let alone its tiny movements. It has been working well for a number of days, however.

I was calling this the Coronavirus SWAG Equation, for “Scientific Wild-___ Guess,” but I thought about what the “A” stood for, and I thought about how I should give God the credit for doing so well, and now I call it the Coronavirus Grace Equation.

When it goes off the rails and starts predicting really bad results, I’ll call it The Devil’s Equation.

I kid.

The little bottle is Germ-X, a brand of hand sanitizer. It’s mostly full. You can have it for $7,000. That’s today’s price, mind you. It will surely go up.

This equation was posted elsewhere on the web some time ago. No one can say I made it up this morning. In fact, I haven’t made anything this morning, including breakfast. I overslept. Woke up at 9:26.

Who says college math isn’t useful?

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Still no major celebrity deaths in America. Watching celebrity deaths may turn out to be a very good gauge of the severity of the disease. The press lies to us every day about the epidemic, but they can’t hide the lack of dead celebrities. If Bruce Springsteen or Will Smith dies, to pull two names out of a hat, we will know, and we will also know if they don’t die.

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Can’t believe I forgot to mention this. Today’s actual figure was 1,216,422. My prediction was 1,172,227. And now you have the power to check my math.

Still Trying to Figure Coronavirus Out

Just a note to update the universe on my coronavirus prediction equation.

Here are the predictions for today and the next two days. Remember, this is based on the same math I’ve been using. I’m not cheating.

April 4: 1,087,256
April 5: 1,172,227
April 6: 1,263,839

Today’s prediction is off by about 4.2%. Make what you will of it.

I still can’t figure this epidemic out. They say it’s more contagious than the flu, and you would think there must be some reason why officials are telling us this. Nonetheless, we have about a million global cases after over four months, and the flu generated about 650,000,000 cases in the same amount of time. You can’t credit lockdowns and social distancing, because for most of the epidemic, those have not been in effect.

Why are they telling us it’s more contagious? Do I not understand what “contagious” means? If a highly contagious disease can spread much more slowly than a less contagious disease, “contagious” doesn’t mean what people think it means, and we need a new word.

There’s a big difference between one million and 650 million. You can’t just pretend it doesn’t exist.

My understanding is that “infectious” means one thing and “contagious” means another. An infectious microbe doesn’t require large numbers to make you sick, but it may not be terribly effective at spreading disease from person to person. A contagious microbe needs larger numbers to overcome your defenses, but it may spread quickly. Does this have anything to do with the slowness of the coronavirus spread? I don’t see it. They’re saying every victim infects more than one person, and that’s a measure of contagion, not infectiousness, if I understand the terms correctly.

A coronavirus case develops more slowly than a flu case, so you would expect people to take longer to become contagious. I don’t know if that’s true. If it is, you would expect them to take longer to start infecting others. Can a disease that spreads slowly be considered highly contagious? I guess it could, but it would be much easier to fight and react to than quicker diseases.

This disease has been in many countries since early December, if not sooner. Chinese people use airlines, and they fly all over now that they have discovered capitalism. While the Chinese government was hiding the virus, many people flew to America and other countries. The disease has had lots of time to infect the world, but if the official numbers are to be trusted, a flu-sized toll hasn’t happened and will not happen.

Here’s a possible explanation: the flu is with us all the time, so we had a bigger base to start with. Doesn’t make sense to me. This year’s flu is not the same disease as last year’s. We get a new set of microbes every year, and it always starts in one place in Asia. This is why we have new flu vaccines every year. You’re not still getting the flu you had in 1995.

If the flu were a single disease, there would be a single vaccine, as we have for other illnesses.

The flu has to fight very effective, widely available vaccines, as well as preexisting public awareness, and it still puts coronavirus in the shade. How can that be?

I’m also wondering if warm weather will get rid of the epidemic, as some researchers expect. Here is the counterargument: the epidemic is in Florida, where it’s warm. The problem with that argument is that the flu, which goes away in the summer, affects Florida. In Florida, the flu is fed by people who travel between Florida and colder areas. The same travel-related transmission should be happening with coronavirus. If warm, humid weather stops coronavirus, we won’t know until the north warms up significantly.

April is the month that kills the flu. If hot weather kills coronavirus, we will know very soon.

I don’t know what to believe. We’re being lied to many times a day (fact), and “experts” are also correcting themselves continuously. We’re not sure how many people have the disease. We’re not sure of the real death rate. It seems like no expert is giving us good figures on the future infection total.

One of the big problems with the press is that they’re treating every case like a major event. The flu killed 80,000 of us last year, and we didn’t see sad stories in the news every day. We didn’t see, “Grandma says goodbye to grandchildren as flu shuts down her lungs,” even though things like that happened many times every day.

Ordinarily, we don’t lose our minds when a disease kills thousands of people, and when we discuss epidemics, we speak in terms of large numbers and statistics, which is the only sane, rational way to do it. With coronavirus, you can’t say, “It will probably only kill 75,000 people [which is a perfectly acceptable thing to say about the flu] so we’re going to be okay.” If you say that, people call you a monster. They’re not smart enough to understand how big the world is and how many people die every day. They actually think it’s a significant event, on a national scale, when a stranger in Nebraska dies from coronavirus.

Here’s something I thought about yesterday: there is a cap on our losses. Given the death rate, and assuming every single person in the United States gets infected, which will not happen, our losses would max out at around 3.5 million. That would be terrible. It would qualify as a true plague. But life would go on. It wouldn’t be like the black death, which used to wipe out half of the people in some areas. I wonder if anyone is thinking about this. I wonder if there are people out there who think civilization could end.

Even the black death failed to bring that about.

Interesting fact: we still have no dead major public figures in America. That surprises me. I thought we would have a few by now. The only big celebrity death I’ve found happened in Japan. A famous comedian who was up in years died. You don’t know him. Sooner or later, some high-profile American will die, but it hasn’t happened yet. No pro athletes. No actors. No singers. It’s still Joe Diffie, Mark Blum, and Terrence McNally.

Here’s something weird: dying from coronavirus enhances your reputation. A minor celebrity who dies becomes a colossal figure the next day. It reminds me of the way paintings go up in value when the artist dies.

I’m wondering how coronavirus will affect gays. They still have a very high AIDS rate. They don’t do what they should to to block the spread, even though it’s easy. They also have a lot of other venereal diseases, such as hepatitis, syphilis, herpes, and gonorrhea. They’re not the healthiest people on earth, and they have proven incapable of social distancing. Even if the rest of us do pretty well, you would think gays would fare very badly.

Today I read that smokers have a problem, and it’s not just their overall bad health. Smokers put their hands to their lips all day without washing. Smokers are drug addicts, and they don’t wait around for hand sanitizer every time they get the jitters. So if you smoke, you’re more likely to get sick, and then you’re much more likely to die. That’s not good.

What about the marijuana explosion? It’s strange, but we now live in a country where doctors tell people to smoke. Marijuana smoke isn’t a nutrient. It’s not like tobacco smoke is the only kind of smoke that hurts your lungs. Marijuana smoke is also harmful. Why aren’t doctors limited to prescribing capsules? Imagine what would happen if they told people in pain to smoke oxycodone. No one would stand for it. Somehow marijuana is different. Anyway, there are “patients” all over America, lighting up multiple times a day, damaging their lungs permanently. Why is no one discussing this?

The world seems crazier and crazier as I get older and more red-pilled. I refuse to say “woke,” because it’s trashy English, and because it generally describes people who are sleeping under the influence of victim-mentality ether. “Woke” is a synonym for “deluded and dangerous.”

Whatever the truth about coronavirus is, one thing is certain: it’s a great opportunity to get to know God in your own home. It’s a great opportunity to get away from preachers who serve as Satan’s goalies.

Hostility toward Christians is ramping up. Shades of Nero’s Rome. Some Christians insist on going to church, and non-Christians are excoriating them for it. I wonder how bad the scapegoating will get. It’s completely implausible, but then so were the things Hitler said about Jews.

Sooner or later (I thought it would be later), the church will be driven underground in America. This is obvious to any Spirit-filled Christian and has been for years. When it happens, we will have a smaller but much stronger church. There are a lot of ungodly people who go to church for the social life. Those people will disappear. It would be interesting to find out what percentage of churchgoers are really Christians. Maybe we’ll know in a few years.

Satan is using the epidemic to form the Beast. People think the Beast is just one man, but that’s not true. It’s the body of Satan. It’s a great mass of people who are his servants. He rules them through earthly means such as rumors, governments, and the Internet. He is using coronavirus to train them to believe and do crazy things.

Coronavirus panic has become a near-religion. You can endorse the murder of the unborn in America and be considered a saint, but if you discuss coronavirus rationally, people don’t just disagree with you; they become emotional. They get very angry and treat you like a traitor. It’s like Invasion of the Body Snatchers. They don’t want to hear what you have to say. You’re a problem. You’re one of “them.”

We are becoming much more dependent on the government. We are becoming mindlessly obedient. It’s quite a spectacle. It’s conditioning. Today, it drives people to buy toilet paper they don’t need. In the future, it will work the same way it did in Cambodia. Your nice neighbors will be your persecutors. Satan will give them excuses to harm you, just as he gave Europeans excuses to turn Jews in to the Nazis.

Interesting times.

I’m not afraid of death at all. I’m afraid of suffering, but not death. We are too afraid of death. The Bible says fretting leads to evil, and boy, is it true. Look around you and imagine how people will act when we have a real catastrophe.

That’s it for today.

Coronavirus Prediction Still Doing Well

Here’s what’s happening with my coronavirus forecast equation.

Predicted cases (including error correction discussed earlier): 1,007,033.

Actual: 1,026,974.

Error: ~1.9%.

These figures are global.

Ignore the correction factor, and I’m still within around 20%, which is still a bullseye.

It appears undeniable that this disease will never begin to spread as quickly or infect as many people as the flu. Every continent is infected, and the easiest targets, by and large, will have the disease by the end of the month, if they don’t already. It’s not like there is a huge bank of unexposed populations of potential victims which will cause the rate to spike.

I would expect the transmission rate to drop off soon because of the shortage of suitable targets.

I am not knowledgeable about epidemics, but like I always say, I can tell the difference between one million and 650 million.

I coined a phrase this week, and I decided to have a shirt made. Here it is:

If you want one for yourself, you can find it on Cafepress. You don’t have to have white. You can choose the color. I don’t use my blog for financial gain, so I won’t link to it.

That’s it for now. Time to look for productive activities.

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We still have no major-celebrity deaths. The press’s latest unsuccessful candidate: Adam Schlesinger, the “famed pop rock singer” (???) who ghost-wrote “That Thing you Do” for Tom Hanks.

Schlesinger supposedly had no preexisting risk factors. He was a bit overweight and over the age of 50, but that’s all we know.

There are thousands of real celebrities, like Madonna and Michael Jordan. What’s protecting them? If it’s not magic, it must be math.

I don’t know a single person who has this disease, and even though I’m a hermit, I do know a lot of people. I’m a connected hermit.

I suppose people who put Schlesinger’s fame in proper perspective will be accused of insensitivity. Be honest. Do you weep every time you learn that someone you never heard of died? No. That would be a sign of mental illness. It’s very sad, but my oldest memories of this man go back about 25 minutes. There is a limit to what you can expect.

If Snowflakes were Horses, my Neighbor Would Ride

The first day of lockdown is in progress. As your reporter on the scene, I ventured out to survey the misery. And to get sushi, which is clearly vital to my survival.

Here is my report: I can’t tell the difference.

Stores are bustling. There is plenty of traffic, by this area’s standards. Chick fil-A is open. I’m still not sure who or what, exactly, is locked down.

I’ll bet my barber didn’t close. But I don’t need a haircut, so I won’t know for a while.

I guess “lockdown” means different things to people in different areas, and it’s probably a lot worse if you have a 9-to-5 job or kids. Or if you live in a leftist-dominated police state.

I coped with the anguish and fear by completing a second stand for steel targets. I am beside myself with satisfaction. Here’s a photo:

It’s simpler than the other stand, so putting it together was faster. It will hold my weight in the middle. It should be excellent.

It’s on the low side. I do that on purpose, to make it harder to shoot over the berm and kill my neighbors. If it turns out to be too low, making adjustable extensions for the side supports will take about 90 minutes.

I blasted it with truck bed coating. I’ll need another can tomorrow. Luckily, car parts stores are essential.

Tomorrow, the gongs should get here. Federal Express is essential! Then I’ll be able to shoot at TWO target arrays at once.

I’m thrilled with this thing.

I’m also going to slap my bottle stands together. That should take half an hour.

Things are getting better at stores, although judging from some bulging carts I saw today, the relatively toothless lockdown order is scaring people who don’t think very carefully.

Flour is coming back. I bought eggs. Hadn’t seen those in a while. The cashier told me the store had toilet paper until noon every day. That’s how long it takes for the selfish to show up and remove it.

I ask cashiers about toilet paper purely for entertainment, and it upsets them. Not my intention. They are not happy with the hoarders. They have to watch them waddle past their registers all day.

I have to wonder how Miami is doing. Cubans have an incredibly selfish me-first culture. I’ll bet there has been violence in grocery stores. There are probably hoarder-stocked new businesses all over Hialeah now, under the table. During the Andrew mess, gouging was everywhere. We are the world! We are the children! Hold hands, everyone!

Don’t give me a hard time for my assessment of Miami culture. I lived there. I’ve seen how people behave. I’ve seen how they fish. In Miami, anyone who obeys the fishing laws is considered a fool, and Miami boats clean out the reefs in the Bahamas. I’ve seen how people cut in lines. I’ve seen how they treat other drivers. I’ve seen their attitude toward fair taxes and reasonable environmental laws. I’m not making anything up.

I was going to get chicken today and make doro wat, which is a spicy Ethiopian stew, but apparently someone hoarded the chicken at the store I visited today. It only takes a few immature customers with freezers to ruin things for everyone for an entire day. The Winn-Dixie near me hasn’t been having chicken problems. Maybe I’ll run over there. It’s essential.

I had a minor problem. I wanted liquid chlorine for my pool. It needs a shock to get the swimming season started. Of course, hoarders have been taking the chlorine. I can’t figure out what they’re doing with 10% pool chlorine. It’s brutal. Bleach is not that hard to find. Hoarding pool chlorine is not necessary. Besides, bleach is not the best thing for coronavirus. You need alcohol, which can be found in hardware stores and possibly liquor stores. Everclear ought to work.

I had to buy powdered shock treatment, but it worked out fine. I wanted to avoid the kind that has calcium in it, because it leaves a residue in the pool. The brand I bought contains sodium.

My cousin in the Chicago area says people there are whispering that the government is going to shut stores down for two weeks. I marveled when she told me. How can anyone be that gullible? Imagine the riots. “Sorry, everyone. Just fast until the 28th. If you feel you’re going to die, make sure you unlock your front door for the collection people.” That’s not going to happen.

They can’t starve us, but they’re doing an awful lot to us. It turns out the Constitution tears much more easily than I thought. It’s a very thin document, especially after years of being abraded by statists.

Today I was thinking it would be funny if I got coronavirus, after telling people the truth about the overblowing of the epidemic. If I got sick, people would say it proved I was wrong. Of course, it would not. One robin doesn’t make a spring. But people aren’t logical. They would not understand. They would be sure it proved I was mistaken about everything.

Being right is frustrating when you swim in a sea of people who are wrong. I feel like God gave me a simple cure for cancer and then cursed me with a language no one else can understand.

About 1/2000 of America is believed to have the disease, so there is no medical reason why I couldn’t get it. I would just have to beat great odds. Like when I got pink eye in spite of being a hermit.

If you get a mild case, you will probably feel relieved, because it will put an end to the anticipation. You’ll know you’re not going to die.

I would not be beside myself if I got a typical case. I would be pretty bummed out if I got the other kind, however. The relatively rare kind. But then I would also be bummed out if I got a severe case of the flu, which is many times more likely.

This disease obviously spreads much more slowly than the flu. This is proven. It did so even when no one was locked down or socially distancing. Also, there is evidence that warm weather will get rid of it. Still, I do wonder what will happen. I’m not sure how a disease that spreads slowly to begin with can infect a large percentage of people when everyone is struggling to avoid it. Maybe it can, but unless the Chinese are doing a phenomenal job of keeping a secret, it’s not happening in the birthplace of coronavirus, so it would appear that it won’t happen anywhere.

I feel some reluctance to go out and shoot the gongs. The gunfire that is usually so common in my neighborhood has been silent lately. My guess is that people are afraid to expend precious ammo. When they hear me out there banging away, it may seem to be in poor taste. It may seem like showing off or irresponsibility.

Ammo is not in short supply, however, except locally. It still rolls out of factories and into stores. If you shop online, as you should be doing anyway, you can find it. There is no reason to be shy about using it. That may change if whichever Bolshevik the Democrats nominate starts to do well in polls.

I’m going to shoot. People who don’t like it will just have to man up and bear it. I don’t think there’s anyone like that here, though, except maybe for the strange lady who thinks no one should be allowed to shoot within a mile of her inbred, untrained horses. I shoot all I want, and I count on her and her horses to find coping strategies. Things will work out fine if we all do our jobs. My job is to blast steel gongs with various types of bullets.

You can’t start making concessions when spoiled neighbors with boundary issues make crazy demands. If I let her prevent me from shooting, next she’d be texting me to tell me to turn the TV down or to watch a different channel. “I thought we agreed you were going to watch Oprah.”

I like to think it does her good when I go out and pop off a hundred or so rounds. It will toughen her up, and maybe it will make men out of her horses.

I’m enjoying using my tools. Sometimes I find myself putting off working on a project, and as I have probably said before, I tell myself, “If you don’t want to use your tools, sell them.” Then I get started, and I have a great time.

Life is better when you end the day with bits of torn steel in your hair. It’s like cruising home from fishing with fish blood all over you. It shows you did something with your day.

Of course I will post photos of the stand when the gongs are attached.

Fears Wiped Away

Let’s get this out of the way first. I wrote an equation to predict how many cases would appear on the Johns Hopkins coronavirus site. I got it working so well the predictions were leveling out at around 20% below the actual figures. Then it occurred to me that I could do better by simply adding the error (~26.4%) to the predicted numbers. Yesterday, I was within one percentage point.

Today, my math says there should be 937,081 cases on the website. Actual figure this morning: 941,949.

So this equation has worked incredibly well for what? Five days in a row? It has worked since the last time I changed the constant, whenever that was.

Yesterday, I was about 0.83% off. Today I’m 0.52% off.

That’s so precise, there is no possible way to attribute it to skill. Even if the disease obeyed an equation precisely, there would be errors in collecting the data and putting it on the website, and they would be big.

I’m tempted to say the infection rate is slowing down, because 0.83 is bigger than 0.52, but of course, that would be ridiculous. There are probably a lot of people it would fool, though.

I wonder if anyone other than my 4 readers will ever know how well I did with this. I guess not.

I seriously wonder if God is helping me for some reason.

Yesterday, longtime reader LauraW (Internet names are so weird) thanked me for blogging during this insanity. That was nice. I didn’t think I was helping anyone. Hope I am.

Tomorrow’s figure is 1,007,033, as reported here yesterday. No one can say I predict retroactively.

With that behind me, it’s time for a testimony.

God keeps providing for me during this time of hysteria, authoritarian virtue-signaling, and selfishness. I had a lot of toilet paper before the fuss started. I got what may well have been the last package of paper towels in Ocala. I’m retired, so I won’t lose a job. I got a great deal on a bulk .22 LR buy right before the ammo panic hit, and I got good deals on other things even after it was underway.

I found two canisters of disinfecting wipes I didn’t know I had. I keep rubbing alcohol in the house in big quantities all the time, so I had plenty when things went nuts, and I found a gallon of denatured alcohol at Lowe’s yesterday, in a store with no wipes and no hand sanitizer. I need it for my workshop, but it can also be used for disinfecting if the hoard horde keeps emptying store shelves.

I’ve been using spray bottles of alcohol in my house for years. It’s not new. I cared for my dad when he had dementia, and I have two parrots with dirty feet.

Life here is better than it was a month ago. Stress is down. I keep feeling the sensation of God’s benevolence. It hits me every time I see something he has provided for me.

Yesterday, after visiting Lowe’s, I went to my metal supplier to get steel for a target stand. I always wipe rust off my hands with a disinfecting wipe when I leave that place. The can I keep in my car has been with me for over a year. I don’t use many wipes. Mainly, they’re for cleaning my hands when I visit the dump.

There were only a few wipes in the can yesterday. During the steel errand, I bought gas at a very low price, and it occurred to me that I could put DNA from the new jug on the wipe I had used to wipe off rust and use it to clean the pump handle at the gas station.

I’m not paranoid, but those things are filthy all the time, and this one could have had flu viruses on it. Or one of the 20 alleged coronavirus victims in my county could have touched it. Might as well use what God gave me. I wiped down the handle, the keypad, and the buttons that select the grade of gas. Why not? I think I’ll keep doing it after the craziness subsides. It’s a good idea.

Last night, I did what I always do. I put detergent and trisodium phosphate in the dishwasher. I keep these products under the sink. I look under the sink every day, because I use the products every day.

Last night, I saw something I had never noticed before: a nearly full can of Lysol disinfectant wipes.

I started laughing out loud. I couldn’t stop. Funniest thing I had seen all day. I knew it was a message.

I have three known containers of these things. For all I know, there are others somewhere. I’ve had them since before my dad died. I probably won’t need new ones for a year.

They don’t do much to kill coronaviruses, but it’s still comforting to have them. They work against diseases which, unlike coronavirus, I might actually be exposed to in the near future.

Here’s something else. My friend Amanda has three sons. They used to visit a lot. I noticed that when they visited, the soft soap in my guest bathroom seemed to disappear. I wash my hands over and over, all day, and it takes me over a month to get to where I need to refill anything. You only need a few drops of soft soap to get the job done, unless you’ve just changed your oil or something. Using a handful of soap is completely unnecessary.

I asked Amanda if she could counsel the boys to go easy on the soap. She said she was going to bring me a new container to refill my dispensers. I said I already had a big jug of soap. I said I didn’t care about the cost of the soap, which was nearly nothing. I was just tired of filling the dispenser, which is a pain.

She brought me a jug of soap anyway. I could not dissuade her.

Then coronavirus arrived, and I had well over a gallon of soap on hand (poor choice of words).

Hand soap will actually kill and wash away this virus, and people have been stripping the shelves for a couple of weeks now.

They’re also hoarding dishwashing liquid. I buy it in large quantities because I use it for pressure washing. No worries there.

In the future, never ask me how coronavirus affected me. You may not like the answer. God has been wonderful to me.

Yesterday, our governor finally gave in to the hysteria and issued a statewide lockdown. Because I have no mayor, I was free until he spoke. I got on the web to see how I would be affected. “Essential businesses” were still open.

Where do I go when there is no epidemic? Grocery stores. Hardware stores. Gas stations. Takeout places. To sum it up, I never go to non-essential businesses. Nothing is going to change for me.

I’m not sure which businesses are considered non-essential. Strip clubs? Florists? There must be some businesses that are off-limits.

I’m reminded of something my grandmother said. She told me that when the Depression hit her area, people’s lifestyles didn’t change noticeably.

I have to hand it to governor DeSantis. He stood up to the authoritarians and neurotics for a good long time, risking his political future. I am impressed. That’s leadership.

I assume my metal dealer has an essential business. I picked up my steel the day the lockdown was announced, however, so it doesn’t matter.

Don’t be angry with me. If I have favor, it’s not coming from me. Get your own. It’s available.

Join me in prayer that the epidemic ends. More importantly, pray that the epidemic of fear and selfishness ends, because unlike the viral epidemic, it’s a big problem. Pray that people get to know God in their homes and get filled with the Holy Spirit.

Hope I can finish my target stand today. The targets are scheduled to arrive tomorrow.

How Embarrassing

It’s premature to provide an update on my coronavirus prediction equation, but I will do it anyway because it provides me with entertainment.

I have to apologize for being overconfident. Yesterday, I predicted the Johns Hopkins website would list 867,545 cases today. In actuality, the figure this morning was 874,801.

As you can see, I am way off. My figure is 0.83% lower than the actual total.

I guess I should give up!

I was extremely happy back when I was within around 20%. To be within 1%, even for a day, is too much to absorb.

How come the CDC can’t do this? Surely they can. Why aren’t they? Why isn’t some pundit somewhere doing this? Why isn’t some prominent person saying, “The epidemic is just not that bad?”, and using numbers to prove it?

For this, we shut down the world’s economy. Except for Sweden, where, for once, common sense is prevailing.

The whole thing has to be Satanic. There is no way billions of people could be this deluded without supernatural help.

We still have no major-celebrity deaths. Joe Diffie is the best the hysterics can come up with, and he was an elderly, obese chain-smoker who had had two heart attacks and a bypass. Shouldn’t this tell us something?

Ask 100 random Americans who Joe Diffie was. My bet: 85% will have no idea, even after his publicized death. He just was not that famous. Journalists had to reach deep into the bucket of second-rate news to dig him up.

Things are going very well for me. In fact, life is better than it was before the plague. A number of responsibilities have been postponed. Even though I was an idle hermit before this thing started, I seem to have more spare time now.

What do I lack? For a day or two, I was not able to find russet potatoes at a price I liked. Without driving 10 miles. I also had to wait a day or two to get a particular kind of cheese, which I didn’t need.

After that, I draw a blank.

I thought there might be an ammo shortage, and briefly, there was, but even then, I managed to get exactly what I wanted, without overpaying. In fact, I got a great deal on .22 LR right before people started sacking gun stores. I hate to admit this, but yesterday I found an incredible deal on the same ammo, and I bought 5,000 rounds. I don’t see it as hoarding. I’m tired of paying for shipping over and over, and I know the price will go nowhere but up in the future, so I decided to try to set myself up for at least a couple of years. I feel like I should buy more soon. This caliber is extremely useful, I go through it very fast, and I will probably live two more decades, so why not save money?

I paid 5 cents per round. That’s a crazy price in the best of times. I’m not going to let a deal like that go by.

I should also load up on .17 HMR and shotgun shells. Stuff I can hunt with in hard times. I don’t think I really need 10,000 rounds of 10mm, however.

Ammo has been coming back this week, so you have nothing to worry about in the near term. The election is a concern, however, so stocking up between now and November would be smart. If you really want a military-style semiauto rifle, you might want to start shopping this month. Next year, we may become a nation of Fudds. It happened under the Clintons, and it can happen again.

Gas is very cheap. I’m not locked down. Stores are generally open here. I have toilet paper and a bidet, and Walmart is allowing people to buy toilet paper for pick-up anyway. The weather has been hot, but it has also been dry. I feel wonderful. My stress levels are much lower than they were last year. I’m afraid people will think I’m gloating, but I’m not. I’m just expressing amazement.

I lost a potential tenant. She has COPD, and she’s panicking. Also, the condo association, in its courage, closed its offices, so they aren’t approving tenants (which they could do at home). Another tenant says his business has been hurt. Things will be different in a month or so, when Americans realize they have been hoodwinked and demand to be allowed out of their houses.

The whole country has been grounded. Like children.

Well. Most of the country.

The press continues to lie. Not “exaggerate.” Lie. Yesterday, Yahoo News said New York City hospitals were “overflowing” with bodies. New York always loses over 400 people per day, and many of those people die in hospitals. A few hundred bodies over the course of several weeks can’t make hospitals overflow. Remember, the flu is killing many more New Yorkers than coronavirus, and that didn’t make hospitals overflow.

I clicked on the Yahoo banner that referred to the bodies, and there was no story behind it. There was just a list of updates which did not include a story about overflowing hospitals.

Longtime reader Ed Bonderenka has a blog, and he posted the most devastating debunking of press credibility I have seen since Dan Rather’s disgraceful career was destroyed. Here is a link. I think the item I like best is the photo of a “journalist” (hired liar) in head-to-toe protective gear, being filmed by a cameraman in ordinary clothing.

They lie about hurricanes. They lie about wars. They lie about Trump every day. And most Americans believe them. Most Americans can’t understand that the press has to be fact-checked. If Brian Williams says it, it’s good enough for them.

Emergency rooms are not full of victims, unless they’re flu victims. Coronavirus just hasn’t infected enough people or made enough people sufficiently ill to send them to hospitals. The numbers are readily available.

If 40,000,000 American flu victims, many of whom have died, haven’t clogged up our health system, how are 180,000 coronavirus victims, most of whom have mild symptoms at worst, going to do it?

I hate having to debunk this nonsense. It shouldn’t be necessary. There are people who are paid to tell us the truth. It’s their job, not mine, but they’re lying to us.

I’m not sure what to do with myself. I guess I’ll go get steel and create a new target stand. I have an idea for a design that will be quick to build.

Here’s what I recommend: pray for the epidemic to die out, and more importantly, pray for the hysteria/fear/selfishness epidemic, which is the real problem, to be destroyed. Pray that Satan’s plan to train people to be afraid and do crazy things is destroyed, and that instead, God uses this time to introduce people the world over to the Holy Spirit. These are things I’m praying for.

I noticed something the other day. The word says that if God’s people will pray, he will heal their land. I used to think this was not all that useful in modern America, because most of us are against God. I was wrong, however. The scripture doesn’t say, “If everyone in a country prays.” It refers to God’s people. Praying for God to get rid of this problem is not a waste of time.

I’m not sure what to make of T.B. Joshua. He prophesied that rain would fall in Wuhan and that the epidemic would wash away. This actually happened. The China epidemic is dead, unless the Chinese have somehow managed to conceal a gigantic problem in a nation full of Internet users and foreign journalists. The figures are flat and have been for a long time. But Joshua seemed to think his prophecy applied to the whole world.

It’s possible to be mistaken about the meaning of your own prophecy. Prophecy itself comes from God, but it’s not always followed by divine understanding.

The video about the rain has been removed from Youtube. When I clicked on it, I got a message saying it had been removed for violating Youtube’s disgusting standards, but is that true? His church removed another problematic prophecy video a long time ago, so there is a history.

What happened in Wuhan is undeniable. It’s also undeniable that the rest of the world did not exit the epidemic by March 27, as he said it would. He ought to leave his predictions up. I doubt Ezekiel burned scrolls of prophecies he didn’t understand.

He once said he saw a woman winning our 2016 election. Then Hillary lost, and the video disappeared. Later, he said he had seen her winning the popular vote. Maybe this is true, but his organization should have left the video up.

You can’t depend on a man to tell you what God is saying. It’s nice to hear from prophets, but you should be able to communicate with God on your own.

It will be interesting to see how well my predictions hold up over the next 7 days. They should do very well. They can’t be denied, either, because I’ve already posted the method and all the information. I’m not predicting retroactively, and the proof is unassailable.

I don’t think anyone will ever notice, though. Maybe it will be our little secret forever.

Goebbels’ Children

Today longtime reader Rick C provided a link to a highly disturbing coronavirus video from conservative media personality Todd Starnes. It’s a video of a Brooklyn hospital that tests people for coronavirus. You can imagine the droves of infected people, lying on the sidewalks because they can’t stand, hoping against hope that someone will test them before they die and get rolled into the gutter.

Here’s a link: LINK.

For those who don’t care to click, the area outside the hospital is deserted. Maybe the truck and front end loader already came, and the bodies are being dumped in a mass grave in the South Bronx, where no one will notice.

It’s really something, the way journalists and even doctors are flat-out lying about the scary pandemic, which still has an official global infection toll far lower than the US flu toll for a single week.

Is this how Jews felt when inane Nazi lies were swallowed by the majority of Germans and Austrians? I wonder.

I think they’re just trying to get rid of Trump. The Chinese essentially put this disease in a box and Fedexed it all over the world in secret, and everyone knows it, but leftists are willing to say anything to get a backward socialist elected in America.

Human dishonesty is so deep and broad, it’s hard for me to conceive of it. I hate to use this expression, but I can’t wrap my head around it. The natural inclination is to think people can’t really be that bad, but they can, and they are. Every day.

I haven’t checked my epidemic prediction equation today, because it’s becoming less and less interesting with time. It is now beyond obvious that my ballpark prognostication is correct. The divergence between the prediction and the official number is probably still growing, but it’s way, WAY close enough to prove I’m right. My thesis isn’t that the official number will be x on a certain day in the future. It’s that if we continue testing pretty much the same way we do now, coronavirus will never be anything like as big a threat as the flu. Remember: coronavirus 850,000; flu 650,000,000.

I was thinking I might create an equation for the divergence itself and see if I could tighten up my basic equation by adding the divergence equation. That would be funny. Maybe the divergence is changing exponentially and predictably.

It would be nice if I could make the results extremely close to the official numbers, but life isn’t a video game, and even if the epidemic numbers obey an equation precisely (doubtful at best), the official numbers, which are different, probably will not. Doctors diagnosing the disease are biased. Testing prevalence can go up and down. Society’s response to the virus can affect the transmission rate. No one can predict anything with true precision.

Scientists don’t have to be told this. Only lay people expect precision.

I guess you could ask why I would trust Todd Starnes, about whom I know nothing, over the press. That would not be a smart question. Here: Dan Rather. Not enough? Brian Williams (who still has a job).

It’s interesting that Bill O’Reilly, whose crime was very bad manners, can’t find work, while a man who betrayed the public as a matter of policy and failed at the primary purpose of his trade is still being paid millions. If Matt Lauer had merely been caught lying repeatedly, he would still be working.

From the perspective of the general public, a major journalist who lies is a much bigger problem than one who acts like Bill Clinton at the office. Ask anyone who has escaped from North Korea.

Interesting stuff.

Now I’ll get back to my own life, since I seem to be unable to offer my hardheaded species much help. Before I move on, I’ll repeat the obvious: Jesus is real. Receive salvation. Be baptized with the Holy Spirit. Pray in tongues as much as you can. Learn to hear from God. Learn to obey. Focus on being transformed supernaturally. That’s all I can offer.

I have four new steel gongs on the way. This time, I ordered two round gongs, a zombie figure, and a bear. Everything is 3/8″ thick. I’m hoping thinner targets will absorb more momentum from bullets, and aside from that, they’re cheaper and easier to move.

I’m trying to come up with a good stand design. My last design is great, but I think I can do just as well with less steel. Right now, I have four vertical members. I can reduce that to two. Actually, one would work, but I want the stand to be more rigid than necessary.

I’m very happy with the CCI Troy Landry ammo I bought, but since I got it, the supply has dried up. Question: do I keep shooting it, secure in the knowledge that the epidemic will go away soon, or should I count on hysteria to continue the problem through the election? It’s generally a good idea to bank on the selfishness and irrationality of the human race.

Whenever you start thinking human beings are rational, remember that when they were faced with a minor RESPIRATORY epidemic, they hoarded TOILET PAPER. That’s all you need to know.

I believe I can still get Remington Golden Bullets in buckets. Maybe I should spring for a bucket, just in case. The ammo is perfectly good. The mess it leaves on guns is the problem.

I just checked Ammoseek, and it looks like I can get Troy Landry ammo without Troy Landry’s picture on it for 6 cents per round, but I have to buy a case. I might as well go ahead. I know I’ll use it, and ammo never gets less expensive. I have never regretted buying too much, but I have often regretted buying too little *cough* GP11 *cough* 7N1.

The site selling the ammo says shipping times are back to normal. That’s a good sign.

I’ve been saving up purified water bottles. Last night I filled a bunch with dyed water. I filled them to the tops so they would explode better. The more air you leave in a bottle, the more the air will contract when you shoot, and that cushions the reaction. I want red water everywhere.

There are Youtube shooters who use colored soda. Seems like a needless expense, although the carbonation adds a lot of action. Maybe in the future I’ll buy the cheapest soda I can find.

It’s ironic that I was getting back into shooting just as the hysteria started. If I had done this 4 months ago, I would be sitting on 10,000 rounds of the .22 LR of my choice.

I wanted to use my .204 Ruger on steel, but I have read that it tears it up. The .204 shoots tiny rounds at close to 4000 fps. Speed is what damages gongs. When your gong is damaged, it may send fragments back at you. The recommended shooting distance for .204 Ruger is 300+ yards. Distance allows the bullets to slow down. I don’t think I want to shoot 300 yards here.

I suppose I should buy steel today. So far, my county has been an idyllic oasis from lockdowns and real shortages. A friend tells me her kids can’t go to school, and you can’t sit in a restaurant, but I can go to Target or Lowe’s whenever I feel like it. I predict that my own freedom will last throughout the panic.

When she told me her kids had to be home-schooled through April, I asked her who would teach them about homosexuality, drugs, and socialism.

If I do a simpler stand design, I should be able to put a nice stand together in a couple of hours. My last design included a bunch of non-90° angles, and that made it harder to create.

I could make stands for bottles. I could get rebar or steel rod and weld flat steel platforms to the tops. Drive the rods into the ground…instant bottle stands.

The cows must think I’m nuts.

Once I get my indoor tools moved to the dining room (yay, being a single man), I can set up my ammo press, and after that, I’ll feel better about shooting big pistols at steel.

I’m going to be a seriously good shot pretty soon, God willing.

I’ll post a photo of the new gongs.

Will Coronavirus Improve us or Keep Making us Worse?

Here’s some crazy news: my coronavirus prediction equation is holding up beautifully after 25 days.

Do I mean I wrote the equation 25 days ago? No. If you read this blog, you know better. I fiddled with it until some time early last week. But the equation’s starting point is 25 days back, and the results are still within 20% of the actual total.

That amazes me. I keep expecting the prediction and actual total to diverge quite a bit as testing becomes more widespread, which makes the actual total rise, but after a week or so with the same coefficient, I’m within 20%.

“Actual total” is a misnomer, since no one knows the actual total. To me, “actual total” means the figure posted on the Johns Hopkins website.

The divergence doesn’t have much time left to manifest. That’s my guess, because I think the epidemic is going to plateau in April. If I’m right, the graph’s slope will decrease soon. When it does, the actual total will get closer to my results instead of diverging.

Here’s something fascinating: credible scientists, or maybe doctors (not always the same thing) are suggesting that the actual total is very, very high and that the pandemic has been with us since last year. This would be fantastic news.

The conventional wisdom is that coronavirus popped up in China in November and that it made it overseas very early this year. People are pointing out the huge flaw in this belief. China is a whale of a country, and China has airplanes (hello). There is huge air traffic in and out of China, so there is no possibility that the virus wasn’t exported very shortly after the Chinese epidemic started.

I’m thinking about that right now. It has to be true. Even with a very low infection rate (which is what China had and has), a whole lot of jets go in and out of the country every day, and infected people had to be on a significant number of them.

If the virus was abroad by December 1, then it may be true, as one medical person says, that a huge number of people have already been sick and recovered. I don’t recall who it was, but he said most UK residents might already have had the disease.

I read an article about this, and then I looked at comments. They were full of claims from people who had been sick. A typical comment might look like, “In December, I had a fever, chills, and a dry cough, and doctors assured me I didn’t have the flu. They never figured out what it was.”

In late January, I had pink eye symptoms. This is a minor disease which ordinarily runs its course in a maximum of two weeks. I had it for three. Coronavirus produces pink eye symptoms in some people.

Coronavirus typically lasts 10 to 14 days unless it affects your lungs, so it sounds like the duration is similar to pink eye’s.

I had a bunch of symptoms which were somewhat unusual. I had some vomiting on the first day. At one point I had diarrhea. I had a runny nose, fatigue, and some aches. Toward the end, I had a dry cough and some sharp but relatively faint pains in my chest.

I didn’t go to the doctor. Why would I? Doctor visits are a pain, they cost money, they jack up your insurance rates, and they generally do you no good. You shouldn’t go to the doctor every time you have a pimple. I had a mild viral disease which doctors can’t treat. I stayed home and avoided people, thinking it was pink eye, which is very contagious. I never found out what it was.

I did buy toilet paper during this time. Maybe cornavirus makes you do that.

Did I have coronavirus? I sure hope so. It wasn’t that bad.

If the epidemic is older and much more widespread than previously believed, it’s wonderful news, because it means the disease is extremely mild except for very unusual cases. Right now we think 5% of victims need ventilators, but if the actual infection number is a hundred times higher than we know, the ventilator figure would drop down below a tenth of a percent.

An old epidemic would also mean many fewer future cases, because there would be fewer people left to infect.

It’s too bad people are getting their information from celebrities and the ignorant and biased press. Someone just told me he had never seen the flu kill as many people as coronavirus. The worldwide COVID-19 death total is still far below the US flu death total for last year. Where do people hear all this nonsense?

People are talking about packed emergency rooms and doctors who are running out of masks and gloves.

If the US infection rate is far, far below that of the flu, how can ER’s be packed? There are about 5,000 known COVID-19 cases in Florida, which has 17 million people and a huge number of hospitals and ER’s. Most victims are staying home. How, then, can we have an ER crisis? Seems much more likely to me that we have a press honesty crisis. If ER’s were full, the government would be telling us to do triage at home before showing up. They would be telling us this with great urgency.

As for masks and gloves, we ran out because selfish hoarders bought them. Look it up. We still have plenty of them. Unfortunately, they’re in people’s garages. And masks are not very helpful for preventing wearers from being infected, which makes hoarders look worse.

If the epidemic is old, how can numbers be increasing? It could happen. I don’t know if the epidemic is old, but I know that the numbers are unreliable. The more people think they have coronavirus, the more people will be confirmed as victims. The tests we have now are not very good, and it’s fashionable for doctors to diagnose coronavirus. Yes, doctors are like that. Remember how they put half the country on Ritalin 25 years ago? Suddenly, there was an ADD epidemic. Journalists asked why. Was it from pollution? Was it power lines? Was it lack of sensible gun laws? In reality, there was a diagnosis epidemic.

People are likely to think they have coronavirus when they think there’s a plague. Doctors are likely to diagnose them falsely. More people will go for testing. It’s a recipe for higher numbers regardless of the actual prevalence of the disease.

Here’s a great question: why haven’t any major celebrities died from coronavirus? There are thousands of major celebrities. Where are the deaths?

Until yesterday, I was not able to find a single person Americans would call a real celebrity who had died from coronavirus. Finally, one popped up, and he was a minor celebrity. His name is Joe Diffie, and you probably don’t know who he is. He was a country musician.

Uh oh. He was about 70. He was obese. He had had two heart attacks plus a bypass. He was a chain smoker.

A cold could kill someone like that. That, or walking upstairs too fast. Not trying to be funny. He was in bad shape.

The press is frantically looking for celebrity victims, and they are dredging up “famous” casualties almost no one has heard of. A character actor from the Eighties. An obscure Spanish royal. A playwright most people couldn’t name.

If this were a plague, big names would be in the news several times a week. My own guess, which is way below what the hysteria suggests, was that several dozen would die, but we haven’t seen a single one yet. Sooner or later, some will die, but if this disease were a plague, we would have seen quite a few by now.

If you had a bit part on Family Ties and then ended up working at a gas station, and you die from coronavirus, take heart. The press will remember you as a star.

To this day, we can still name genuine celebrities who died in real pestilences. In fact, some people attribute the invention of calculus to the plague. Isaac Newton discovered it while hiding from the plague in the country. He wasn’t a victim, but he was a famous person who was affected.

Lacking actual celebrities, the press is hyping “influencers.” People who have a lot of Instagram and Twitter followers. Some influencers are saying they’ve suffered the tortures of the damned. Okay, let me ask something. Why would you trust a woman who craves attention and relies on it for her income? What do you expect such people to say during an epidemic? “I’m fine; go look at something else”?

I’ll tell you a mildly amusing story. When I was in the 9th grade, a substitute teacher made hydrogen sulfide in my biology class. He let us know that it made some people feel sick. Yes, if you put a plastic bag on your head and pump it in. Otherwise, no. Anyway, as soon as he said that, people started raising their hands. In a few minutes, the whole class was in the hallway having fun, waiting for the dangerous gas, which I could barely smell, to dissipate. Everyone knew they were pulling the teacher’s leg. Twitter and Instagram are just like that class.

It will be interesting to see what the facts are once science catches up. That’s assuming they tell us the truth *cough* *cough* *global warming*. Pandemics are wonderful opportunities for leftists and other authoritarians. Leftists have just found that they can ban gun sales, keep cars off the streets, and shut down businesses during a pandemic. They aren’t going to miss a chance to do similar things in the future, so they won’t want anyone to think coronavirus was a mild problem.

From a spiritual standpoint, I see coronavirus as a great positive.

For many years, God has been telling me the age of the church was ending. Big churches kept people away from God. They put old gay men in gowns, and greasy televangelists, between God and his children. They sent untold millions to hell by preventing them from receiving true salvation.

Now we find ourselves in a situation where people have great motivation to pray and they can’t go to church. This should lead to real revival in many areas. Once you get rid of the thieves, pedophiles, serial fornicators, atheist grifters, and old-church bureaucrats, people will have a clearer view of God.

I’m not the only one who has been saying the church age was ending. Many others have started saying the same basic thing over the last year or so.

I’ve been thinking about this, and now evangelist Mark Hemans is on Youtube, confirming it. He was going to come to the US and have a tour. I booked a spot at one of his meetings. Then the insanity started, and the tour was canceled. Now he’s teaching about the great opportunity people have to have church at home. He’s happy about the change.

Satan is using a relatively mild epidemic and a lot of lethal lies to train people to be selfish and to rely on the state. God is using Satan’s campaign to bring people closer to himself. I suppose it’s part of the ongoing polarization we’ve been seeing. Children of darkness are flocking to cities and putting their faith in Karl Marx, and the children of light are moving to rural areas and drawing closer to God.

It’s a recipe for increased power and holiness, and also for increased, state-sanctioned, brutal persecution.

Last night, I had a weird dream. I was in Miami. I think Miami symbolized our corrupt secular society.

I was with Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez, about whom I know nothing. In the dream, he was a short, fat, mild-mannered guy with dark hair. I looked him up this morning, and he doesn’t look like that.

He was about to make a decision that, if it went a certain way, would please leftists and hurt the economy. For some reason, I was at his side. It was as though someone had called me in to be with him because there was something special they thought I could do.

I remember walking down a hallway with him, on a way to an appearance. People were throwing silver coins behind us. Some were very big. I started picking them up. Free silver. I’m not a fool. Gimenez said “wingers” were throwing them. He said “wingers” were people on the right wing. It’s a term of contempt, and it doesn’t make much sense, because there are leftist wingers, too. I told him I was one of the right-wingers.

He didn’t get angry. He didn’t seem to be an angry person.

We went into a room where officials were getting ready for him to speak. There was no dais or podium. There were two chairs at the side of the room, with a table between them. He sat in one chair, and I took the other. No one questioned my place there.

The room was full of handsome men in suits, wearing firearms. They were like Miami’s attempt to copy the Secret Service. One young black man was waving what appeared to be an M16. He was really pleased with it.

I realized I had my 10mm Glock in my pocket. I wondered why they hadn’t frisked me. I wondered if I should tell them I had it or keep quiet and avoid starting a fuss. I didn’t wave my pistol around like a person who had never been allowed to carry a gun before.

They gave us coffee, which wasn’t the Cuban kind. My own cup was full of instant coffee powder. I walked off to find hot water. I found a machine dribbling water, but it was lukewarm. As I walked away from it, one of the suited men told me I could drink the water. He didn’t know I needed it for coffee. I rejected it and sat back down.

By now, my instant coffee had turned into cake, so I turned it out onto a plate and ate half of it.

Gimenez said leftists expected him to do things that would hinder the economy, and we talked about it. He was not a sincere leftist. In the dream, he ran as a Democrat simply because it was the easiest way to get elected. He said maybe the best thing to do was nothing at all. He clearly believed it. In his heart, he was somewhat conservative, but he was about to betray his principles.

Across the room from us, there was a half-door. Mark Hemans was behind it. He was not allowed in the room. He was only visible from the waist up. He was wearing a veil that covered his face, like Moses. He spoke in a deep, slow voice, as though in a trance. He was talking to me. He said, “Get him on his knees.” He was telling me I needed to get Gimenez saved and baptized with the Holy Spirit.

I pointed Hemans out to Gimenez and started telling him who he was and how many amazing things he had done on Youtube through God’s power. I was working up to getting him to receive salvation and the baptism with the Holy Spirit. Gimenez got up and walked off to talk to someone. I got the feeling he wanted to avoid discussing God.

There was a building next to the building containing the room in which we sat. The buildings were only a few feet apart, and it was possible to walk from one to the other without going downstairs. In the other building, there was a bar, and men in the bar were watching us through windows. They had a great view.

Maybe the room represented the natural world, and the bar represented the supernatural realm.

I realized there would be some kind of attack. I decided I, too, could use the bar as a vantage point. I walked in and watched through the windows.

Soon, I found myself outside with John Wayne and a stereotypical cocky young male supporting actor. The ground was brown dirt, as it always is in Westerns. John Wayne was supposed to be in charge of protecting Gimenez. He expected an attack the next morning, and he was getting drunk. So was his friend. There was a big barrel of red wine, and Wayne sat in it and submerged himself up to the forehead. He was very intent on getting as drunk as he could. No one was going to tell John Wayne how to get ready for service. He was confident he could beat anyone, even with a hangover. It seemed to me that I would have to be the one who actually shot the bad guys, and John Wayne would get the credit anyway.

They ended up putting me and Gimenez in a big black limousine that loaded through a wide door on the left rear side. We sat down on the car’s rear seat, and that’s all I remember.

I don’t think God has any plans to send me to Miami. I sure hope not. I don’t think Carlos Gimenez figures in my future at all. I think Miami and Gimenez are symbols.

I have the impression that certain people who have earthly power will ask me for advice. My job will be to introduce them to the Holy Spirit, but they won’t be interested. They’ll want to involve God just enough to get what they want. They will have career hangers-on around them, with secular authority. These are the armed men. They will have great confidence in their ability to defend and support, but in reality, they will be inconsequential, weak, overconfident blowhards whose main gift is an ability to get attention.

The men in authority probably represented preachers.

John Wayne represents arrogant, titled hangers-on who think they have everything under control. They won’t prepare.

John Wayne is an interesting person. He’s a symbol of masculinity, patriotism, and toughness, but he never saw or came close to combat. Some say he avoided combat because he was having an affair with Marlene Dietrich and did not want to be distracted. There are some indications that he complained about not being near the fight, but let’s be serious. John Wayne had ample pull to get himself to the front. He wasn’t too old. He was physically able. His family didn’t need him to earn money. He could have gone.

Clark Gable was older and more famous. He flew combat missions. You can claim the brass held Wayne back because he was a big star, but they didn’t have the power to do that, and bigger stars served.

Some people theorize that he developed his tough guy image in order to compensate for his behavior during the war. This is what his third wife said. I have also read that GI’s had a very low opinion of him and booed him during appearances.

Meanwhile, actors like Glenn Ford and Jimmy Stewart were fighting.

I’ve always enjoyed John Wayne movies, but he was nothing like the men he portrayed. He was from California. He was a surfer, not a cowboy. He never faced a bad guy down, and he wasn’t equipped for it. He ran around on his wife. Supposedly, his he-man image didn’t really exist during the war. He built it later.

I should have less confidence in other people. A nice suit, a shiny rifle bristling with gadgets, a special degree, a culinary diploma, a set of tactical duds, official credentials…Jesus himself didn’t have things like these. Neither did John the Baptist or the apostles. They had anointings, and that was what mattered.

Over and over in my life, I have deferred to people who couldn’t get it done as well as I could. There are plenty of John Waynes out there sitting in wine barrels, and I give them too much slack. I have paid people a lot of money to do things I could do better, with God’s help, for nothing.

We are always surrounded by people who are better at claiming credit than walking it like they talk it. It’s hard to believe they keep fooling me at my age.

I think the silver in the dream represents accusations of betrayal. Judas took silver coins when he betrayed Jesus.

I don’t really need a dream to tell you that people in power sell us out every day. They inflate their credentials and talk a big game, but in the end, most are looking out for number one, and they are good at excusing themselves.

Interesting.

We should get close to God, get a grip on our anointings, and stop being impressed by empty shirts.

I don’t know when my equation will go off the rails, but if I get tired of writing about it, you can always check it yourself with a calculator. You probably won’t be doing it from the hospital.

Soylent Green is Made out of Toilet Paper

I feel like I have to keep updating people on my coronavirus forecast equation, even though the facts (apart from the equation) have proven that this pandemic is not going to be that big a deal. There is no longer any possibility, short of a miraculous mutation, of a pandemic that will approach the severity of a bad flu season, let alone a true pestilence.

Every seasonal flu is a pandemic. I wonder if people are aware of that.

The official estimate for the COVID-19 death rate is between 0.5% and 1%, we still know of only a few hundred thousand cases, we don’t have an accurate test that looks for antibodies, and Chinese researchers tell us the false-positive rate is 40-80%. The flu hit about 650,000,000 people this year, and its death rate, according to the source I checked, is 0.1%, which is not that far from the coronavirus rate, which may continue to drop. And the flu and COVID-19 kill exactly the same kind of people, except that COVID-19 almost never kills the very young. Generally, it kills the old, the fat, and the unhealthy. This is a painful paragraph for determined worriers to read.

Today I read a sensational story about a young male nurse who died. The person who commented for the press was his sister, not a wife or girlfriend. Hmm. Gays make up a big percentage of male nurses, and they have crazy rates of venereal disease, including things like syphilis which barely touch the rest of us. They have high rates of viral hepatitis, AIDS, herpes, gonorrhea, and so on. They are also much more likely to abuse their bodies with things like alcohol, drugs, and tobacco. The story seemed to be an effort to portray COVID-19 as a big threat to young, healthy people. It’s just not. The proof is already on the table.

I don’t know if this young man was gay or had preexisting health problems, but whatever the truth is, he’s an outlier. Maybe gays should be treated as a high-risk group, just like old people.

Back to the math. If I don’t provide updates, people (especially those who don’t know much about science and math) will think I’m weaseling out. I refuse to weasel. This time.

Here is today’s figure: 615,519. Here is what my equation predicts: 508,020.

That’s not just okay. That’s still a home run. Two days ago, I was off by 9%, which was astounding (and a fluke, really). Today I am off by 17.5%. Less sensational, but still shocking. They keep telling us the world is ending, but we still have less than 2% of the infection rate of this year’s rather ordinary flu, and not only is my prediction within an order of magnitude; it’s within 18%.

Non-math people will think today’s result proves I’m wrong. They don’t understand that there was never any hope that I would get the exact number or something within a percentage point. All the computers and experts in the world couldn’t do that. It’s probably impossible with a simple bacteria culture in a dish. The authorities don’t even know the current number right now. They only have estimates.

What I’ve been saying lately is that I expect the official numbers to diverge upward from my prediction and then collapse through it. This is exactly what’s going on. It’s not rocket science. It’s not even medical science (oxymoron?).

I can talk about the reasons I think the error would increase and then drop.

I haven’t adjusted my constant upward in a while, even though I probably should have, because I wanted to avoid changing it so often I looked like I was cheating. I thought it was better to have less accuracy than to change the constant too often. I’m in a trap here. You have to change the constant over and over at first in order to make your equation more accurate, but because this epidemic will be short, and because the shape of the actual infection curve will change very soon and make my equation invalid, I can’t continue changing it forever. I chose a time to stop, arbitrarily. It might have been better to stop the following day. That can be checked retroactively, but I’m too lazy.

The graph of actual present and future infections, which is not really known, is in the shape of a hump. It increases exponentially, and then it flattens, turns downward, and dies. The part of the graph I’m trying to predict is the middle of the slope on the way up. That part applies to a very short time. It may end in a week or two. If I’m still fiddling with my constant when the rate’s acceleration drops, I will be wasting my time.

The increase in testing should make the graph turn upward from my initial predictions, but then when the graph starts to level out, it will pass down through the graph of my equation, and from that time on, my equation will predict many more infections than actually occur.

It’s also important to realize that there may be no simple equation that predicts the infection’s spread really accurately.

I don’t know if I’ve explained it well.

Anyway, the equation was never important. At least not after it was obvious that the infection rate was many times lower than that of the flu. As I keep saying, anyone with common sense can look at the numbers and see that coronavirus has never begun to live up to the hype.

The equation is just a fun experiment to see whether my college education is actually useful for anything, and maybe it has some value for reassuring people. Those who are willing to be reassured, I mean. If you like being hysterical, and this would not make you rare at all, no equation can help.

Can I predict how inaccurate the equation will be with time? Search me. To do that would be a back-door way of coming up with a new equation, if you think about it. If you know the error, then you know what the real graph looks like. You just subtract the error from your old graph.

It would be neat if the error stayed under 100% for the next three weeks. I would feel very good about that. It would be amazing.

I’m trying to be nicer to people who are behaving selfishly and irrationally. People can’t be expected to see the truth unless they’re full of the Spirit of Holiness. Everyone is under the influence of spirits, and every spirit is either with God or against him. If you’re not baptized with the Spirit of Holiness, you will believe what other spirits tell you. They will close your eyes and ears. I’m not going to say it’s not your fault if you can’t see the truth. It generally is. If you choose to reject the Spirit of Holiness, whatever happens afterward is your fault. But I have been deluded as much as anyone, and when I’m not deluded, I can’t take the credit. I should be more patient.

Someone brought up an interesting point yesterday. I wish I could remember who it was. They said that draconian measures make less sense in rural areas. If you live in my county, you are automatically socially distanced most of the time. If you live in New York City, you swim in a sea of filth and people even in normal conditions. New Yorkers are very dirty, and there are a whole lot of them in a small space.

If you live in New York, you know what I mean. People in northeastern cities have dirty habits. They share food and beverages. They spit in the street. They don’t take things like hand-washing seriously. The surfaces in the subway are always covered with a film of oil and other substances that come from human skin. This film has a distinctive smell that hits you as soon as you board a car. Unless things have changed, the restaurant and grocery inspectors are on the take. Anyone who has eaten in New York restaurants knows they are dirtier than those in other cities. It’s not like you can’t tell. People in New York joke about it, even when they’re sitting down to eat. It’s a commonplace.

I wish we weren’t so determined to virtue-signal that we’re willing to cut our economy’s throat. When I pray about the epidemic, I pray it will end, but I pray with more urgency that the panic will end. It’s the real problem.

It’s good to live in the country. Think about that, going forward. Human beings are jamming themselves into cities more and more, and in doing so, they are making themselves much more vulnerable to future panics and bad authoritarian leadership. When Soylent Green becomes a reality, the country will be the last place to see it.

MORE

I have a great new example of pro-hysteria press bias.

The press is telling us the STAR of Desperately Seeking Susan just died from coronavirus. Of course, if you remember this awful movie at all, you know the star was Rosanna Arquette. Also appearing: Madonna and Aidan Quinn. So who died?

The deceased is Mark Blum, an obscure character actor. He was 69. Did he smoke? Was he diabetic? Did he have HIV? We don’t know. The press isn’t saying. They’re just saying a “star” died.

No star has died yet. It’s certain to happen. A lot of celebrities have health problems. Many are old. But reaching for near-unknowns like Mark Blum is a testimony to the weakness of the epidemic.

My wild guess is that there are maybe 10,000 people who are legitimate celebrities in the minds of Americans. Mark Blum was not one of them. I’m talking about people like George Clooney and, say, Michelle Rodriguez, to pick someone a little lower on the food chain. Based on current figures, I would expect us to lose a few dozen. But it hasn’t started yet.