My Coronavirus Ordeal Intensifies

The coronavirus epidemic just got real to me. McDonald’s has stopped making all-day breakfast.

Prior to this, I was telling everyone the epidemic was a great misfortune but not a catastrophe. Now I must agree with the toilet paper hoarders. Suffering has begun in earnest.

Today I did my best to adapt. I was determined to be strong. I made myself a big slice of country ham and several bacon-grease biscuits with red eye gravy. I’m no longer sobbing now. I think I can handle this.

Yesterday I learned that two counties not far away have put lockdowns into effect. That was disturbing. It made me wonder if my county was next. I live in the most conservative county (i.e. “sane”) county in the state, so I have good reason to hope for relatively intelligent leadership.

I checked the local paper’s site, and it says they’re not locking us down. They closed Internet cafes, though. Not sure what that’s all about.

Honestly, if I’m locked down, I plan to go out anyway. They don’t have enough cops to prevent it, and there will be enough “essential” businesses open to let me blend it with law-abiders. In truth, I will probably end up obeying the law, because the businesses I frequent are generally on the essential list. Grocery stores. Hardware stores. Places that sell firearms.

I assume this county wouldn’t be crazy enough to close gun stores. Many liberal-dominated cities are shutting them down. It’s obvious that gun stores are essential. The right to self-defense is extremely important. Liberals don’t see it that way, however, and they are always looking for underhanded, back-door methods of taking away our civil rights.

If the disease becomes widespread here, I’ll probably be more careful, but right now, getting this disease is like winning the lottery. It’s not common at all when compared to colds and the flu.

I’m disappointed to see that the government plans to hand out over a trillion dollars in totally unnecessary vote-buying tax money. Our economic problems are being caused by panic, not a relatively minor epidemic. We will have higher taxes because of the handout. We should just get out of the way of progress and let capitalism do its thing.

Here’s something funny: leftist Sweden isn’t imprisoning its citizens. They’re taking a relaxed approach, because, hello…it’s the correct thing to do. Evidently someone over there is capable of understanding simple math. You have to wonder how America’s leftists will take this.

Sweden won’t have a catastrophe. Even Italy didn’t have a catastrophe. No country will.

Here’s something that will raise your spirits or give you heartburn, depending on how you look at it: the lady in charge of the White House response says the initial coronavirus predictions may have been WILDLY (my word, not hers) exaggerated. Welcome to Club Reason!

I’ll embed a video of her appearance. If you don’t want to watch it, I’ll mention a key point. Initial death toll prediction for the UK: 500,000. Current prediction: 20,000.

So they were only off by 96%. No biggie.

Extrapolate to the US, and you get around 80,000. Terrible? Well…it’s the same number of people the CDC says we lost to the seasonal flu last year. Did you mourn all last year? Were there mass cremations? Did we shut down stores and tell grown people they were grounded? Don’t think so.

Here’s a screaming uninentional admission from the video: there is no antibody test. Hello? Remember me writing about the Chinese researchers who said the false-positive rate was 40-80%? Am I a genius because I read a news story and told other people about it?

If you don’t have an antibody test, you’re guessing. They’re judging people by symptoms, and coronavirus isn’t the only bug that causes respiratory failure.

It looks like we’re going to find out we misdiagnosed a huge number of flu patients. The epidemic’s numbers may collapse inward. For this, we deprived each other of toilet paper.

Should we have locked the country down just to be safe? Of course not. We already knew, from looking at the numbers available to us, that this disease was not going to spread that widely. It would have been inexplicable had it come to the US and hit a large percentage of the population. That would have been totally inconsistent with the way it worked in other countries.

We should have sheltered fat people and old people from the disease. I’ll bet we could do a lot of that with a trillion dollars of tax money. Think about this: even if you spend a trillion dollars, if you let people work while you spend it, you have earnings to mitigate the loss.

Not that I think we need to spend a trillion dollars to help “bubble people.” I’m just using the figure we’re actually spending. We could do it for nearly nothing.

It’s scary being part of an unthinking herd. Even if you know they’re wrong, you can still get swept over the cliff with the lemmings. Thank God I’m in the country and among conservatives.

In other news, I watched a Hickok45 video this morning. He’s the old guy in Tennessee who shoots steel in his backyard. He reviewed a Glock 20, which is a full-size 10mm pistol. I was glad to see this, because I ordered a Glock 20. I already have a Glock 29, which is the compact version, but I thought it would be nice to have a bigger one with a bigger magazine, to wear in my yard. I don’t want a heavy pistol bogging me down in the grocery store, and I want to keep my out-and-about gun in a pocket, but it’s okay to have a big carry pistol displayed openly at home.

Should I be content with a compact in the car. I don’t know, but I can legally put an AK47 in the backseat, so it doesn’t matter. I used to keep a similar rifle under the seat of my truck. I’ll tell you what. In a traffic dispute with a carload of bullies, nothing gets you respect like a rifle with a 30-round magazine.

When I saw that ammo hoarding was starting up, I ordered myself some 10mm bullets, primers, brass, and powder. I did not hoard. To hoard is to buy more than is reasonable. Anything up to 1,000 rounds, in a particular caliber and load, is reasonable. Back during the Obama panic, people were buying pallets of ammunition, and a lot of them were flipping them on Gunbroker. That’s hoarding.

Anyone who says a thousand rounds is a hoard is not a good shooter, because that person doesn’t practice. If you practice, you know you can shoot a thousand rounds in a week.

I have another Youtube favorite: Paul Harrell. He’s a true expert. He has won prizes in tons of shooting competitions, and he has been through a bunch of military schools. He was a military instructor. He even killed a guy with a deer rifle. The man was attacking Harrell and his wife, who were on foot, in a pickup truck. Harrell put two rounds through him and got charged with manslaughter, but he was acquitted.

Harrell is a remarkable person. He’s generally a class act, although he has given people the finger in a couple of videos. He’s very smart and very patient. He would have made an exceptional attorney. He thinks his videos through very carefully, and he’s extremely thorough.

About 20% of gun lovers are absolute jerks who ought to be muzzled. Harrell knows this. He knows that no matter how carefully he words his videos, some couch commando will pop up in a comment and “correct” him. Watching him speak is like watching George W. Bush deliver the carefully constructed messages his team crafted in anticipation of leftist distortions.

Recently, Harrell was attacked by a much less popular creator: Caleb Giddings. Giddings was on a “reality” show featuring people who shot well. It was actually a multi-episode game show. He got weeded out and lost, but he still has an ego that won’t quit.

Harrell posted a video about shooting revolvers, and this set Giddings, a competition revolver shooter and former insurance agent, off. Giddings posted a response in which he accused Harrell of ignorance.

I’ll embed the video, but I don’t recommend watching it.

Giddings used the AH word to describe Harrell, and in comments, he made very arrogant remarks about his own shooting ability, compared to Harrell’s. He said something about Harrell’s championships lacking certification from recognized bodies.

Giddings drank Scotch all through is own video, which kind of looks bad given that it was a gun video. Guns and liquor aren’t supposed to be seen together. In Florida, alcoholics and potheads are legally barred from concealed carry, and this is probably true elsewhere. The federal NICS form lists drug and alcohol abuse as things that will prevent a transfer.

I have to admit, I’ve had more than a couple of beers while carrying. This was a long time ago. I wasn’t thinking. It’s a big deal, however. I rarely have more than one drink now, so it won’t be an issue ever again.

Harrell got fed up and responded to Giddings with a one-hour spanking that has to rank as one of Youtube’s all-time harshest rebuttals. He proved that Giddings said a lot of things that weren’t even close to true, and then he crushed what was left of his reputation by displaying a table full of awards. He took a plastic bin full of medals and dumped it on the table.

I don’t know who is the better shooter, but it would take at least two people to carry Harrell’s awards, and he even wins tomahawk-throwing matches, which is a little ridiculous, to be honest. Giddings has his credits listed on various gun-related sites on the web, but they don’t provide long lists of marksmanship championships, and knowing this guy, if there was such a list, it would be on every site he’s involved with.

My guess is that he would fare badly against Harrell.

A bunch of Harrell’s half-million fans went to Giddings’ video and left uncomplimentary comments. The dislike/like ratio was very high.

What did Giddings do? Did he admit fault? Actually, he turned the comments off and hid the likes and dislikes. This is not helping him. It makes him look cowardly and even more dishonest, and on top of that, he can’t get rid of the comments on Harrell’s video, which has a much bigger audience. Giddings only has about 50,000 subscribers, and he will probably have considerably fewer tomorrow.

His personality is very unpleasant. He drips venom. He seems very insecure. He doesn’t honor other people at all. He contemns them, and he does it from a pretty unimpressive position. He’s like a movie character who makes you long for the moment when he finally gets punched in the face. He is not someone you would want to know, unless you’re also a jerk.

Giddings is currently in the Air Force, so I guess he didn’t make it as a professional shooter or insurance salesman. If he had the kind of talent he thinks he does, he would be making a living shooting, like Jerry Miculek. If Miculek acted the way Giddings does, people might understand, but it looks awful coming from a semi-pro with a day job.

It’s very interesting. It reminds me of the days when blogs were actually blogs and not corporate pseudopods. Giddings trolled Harrell, who had done nothing to provoke him, and he got bitten very deeply in the rear end. The Youtube crowd wasn’t having his nonsense.

The whole kerfuffle makes me think of things I’ve done and said in the past. God is love, and his children should also be love. Men should be men, not boys. Not arrogant punks who have no appreciation for anything. I’m glad I’m finally improving.

It’s too bad there are so many insecure macho men in the gun crowd. They ruin things for everyone. I quit using The High Road because there were so many jewels filling the board with poison. I joined another board, and I make liberal use of their “ignore” feature. When someone says something nasty, I try not to respond at all. If I do respond, I try to say something mature but clear. The ignore list is wonderful.

Similarly, I quit watching Gordon Ramsay again. Earlier in the week, Youtube started suggesting his videos again. I don’t know why. I watched several, and then I quit and deleted them from my history. If you keep something bad in your history, Youtube will recommend similar things. Ramsay is a mess. He spreads hate everywhere he goes. I don’t care if it’s an act (it’s not). I don’t need that circulating in my blood.

Every day, when I look at Youtube, I tell it to stop recommending certain channels. The Mormons. News stations. Political vloggers. Movie-related channels. Keep that mess. It makes my stomach hurt.

I guess I’ll try to finish my steel target array today. Then I’ll do a lie-packed video about Jerry Miculek and see if I can get some attention!

Ballpark Prediction Equation Survives Another Day

I am still alive, and I salute all those who are in the same condition in spite of the underachieving coronavirus plague.

I have good news to report. After several days with no changes, my coronavirus forecast equation, which will be a primary source when I create my upcoming Coronavirus Hysteria Index, is doing extremely well. The equation predicted 375,977 infections for this morning, and the actual figure was 387,382. I am trying to predict the Johns Hopkins running total, so please don’t make the mistake of correcting the actual total in a comment. It’s irrelevant. I don’t have data for it.

You would expect the actual, known-to-God-alone graph and the Johns Hopkins graph to run more or less parallel anyway, even if the former graph has higher numbers.

The difference between the actual and predicted values is so small, it’s insignificant. It would be amazing if an armchair epidemiologist were within 200% of the correct number, and I’m within something like 3%.

I don’t know if I’ll make any more changes to the equation. I would be excited to be within 20%, and there is no hope, short of a miracle, that I can improve on 3%.

Will the equation hold up? That’s the question.

Of course, it will not hold up. As noted earlier, it goes infinite with time, and there are only 7.7 billion people to infect. All epidemics plateau and go away to nothing or a very low level of infection. This one, will, too. There is a future moment for which my equation predicts an infection total of 4 trillion, and by that time, my equation will be pretty useless. I have high hopes that it will do well while the infection is still ramping up. That’s about it.

My best wild guess is that we will see a plateau within the next month. Before a plateau, of course, the infection rate will slow down. If the beginning of the plateau, which is something you have to define arbitrarily, is on April 20, then there will have to be a number of days prior to April 20 during which the rate drops off pretty quickly.

What happens when coronavirus goes away?

I was concerned about that yesterday, because you can have this bug more than once, and they don’t expect it to vanish entirely (although it could). What if we always have COVID-19 with us, from now on? The question disturbed me.

I don’t think it’s a big deal now. Officials seem to think vaccinations will work, and it won’t take that long to develop them, so within a year or two, you’ll be able to protect yourself.

This won’t help gullible, dangerous people who keep diseases alive by refusing to get their kids vaccinated, but then coronavirus doesn’t like kids, so maybe that won’t be a big factor. I’m not sure whether kids are relatively immune or they just get light symptoms. If they get infected just like the rest of us, they will spread the virus, so that will be bad.

I saw a piece of bad information on a website. They said no one is immune to this virus. That’s wrong. No virus can infect every person on the planet. There are many human beings who have never been ill in their lives. Look it up. There are definitely people who can’t get this virus, and there are people who can be infected yet can’t develop symptoms. The symptoms are what kill you.

What they should have said is that the majority of us are not immune, and they should have added that a whole lot of people get no symptoms or very, very mild symptoms.

When this is over, I will think a little bit, but not too much, about future preparations. I will put a few things in a closet, and I don’t mean a big closet. I’ll try to have enough food to keep me alive for a month, I guess. Beyond a month, there isn’t anything I can do. I can’t grow enough food to feed myself indefinitely.

I may pack away some more ammunition. That’s always a good idea, because the price keeps going up.

What did Jesus say about the future? He predicted wars, famines, and plagues. Does a mild problem like coronavirus count? I don’t know, but more stuff is in the pipeline, and it may be worse. We’re already having a sort of famine because selfish people who aren’t all that bright are filling their houses with food the rest of us want. Not much of a famine, but it’s no fun having to go to two different stores to find a baking potato.

The disasters aren’t the main problem. The main problem is the pig-like way people respond to them. Coronavirus hasn’t caused a single shortage. People have.

It’s strange that we can suffer lack while we are surrounded by an abundance of food. It’s there, even if you can’t see it. It’s in warehouses and in the houses of a few people who should be banned from grocery stores. It flows into stores every day, and the worst people in the world scoop it up before you get there.

I don’t believe in creating a huge personal cache of stuff. Jesus told us to take no thought for such things. If he won’t take care of us, there is no point in worshiping him. He gave us all sorts of great promises, and we should be connected with him and receiving his help. If you reject God, well, maybe hoarding is your best bet. But it’s no substitute for favor. God’s help can’t be defeated by people with bulging grocery carts. You can’t keep food away from me. Only God can do that.

I try not to scrap for things like a starving dog. When my sister conned my dad into buying her a house, and he asked for my approval because it affected my inheritance, I told him to do whatever he wanted. When my grandparents died, and some relatives competed over their belongings, I didn’t get involved. When you lower yourself to the level of a looter, what good does it do you? You get a bunch of things you like, but you become a filthy creature no one can respect, and you find yourself in a world of stress, striving, and defensiveness. It’s a bad trade.

The Bible compares God’s children to eagles, not maggots.

In the end, I did very well in spite of failing to engage, so it looks like I took the correct course.

It’s sad to think of all the people I care about whom I can count on to try to stick it to me at the slightest sign of pressure. You’re in the same boat. Something you should think about.

Before I go, more interesting information. I found a site saying it is estimated that the swine flu pandemic of 2009 caused 123,000-200,000 deaths, and that since then, the same virus has killed many more people. The article was written last summer, so it’s not someone trying to stifle COVID-19 fears. In 2009, we didn’t hide in our houses or shut down the country. We had ample access to toilet paper.

There are pandemics we barely notice.

It’s starting to look like the biggest change we’ve seen isn’t an attack from a new virus. It’s our new, snowflaky inclination to react to mildly bad news with hysteria.

People just can’t understand how many of us there are, and how little 100,000 deaths mean in a population this size. Not that we’ve seen anything like 100,000 deaths from coronavirus. In order to have a real global plague, we would have to see something like 400,000,000 deaths in less than a year. A slow plague isn’t a plague.

In a real plague, we would see hospital corridors filling up all over the world. We would see government trucks going around to get bodies. Instead, we’re seeing news stories about isolated individuals. An obese person here; a celebrity there. The fact that the press is stretching so hard to find stories should tell you everything you need to know.

If people were better at math, you would be able to buy hand sanitizer right now. I feel sure of it.

Innocent by Reason of Other People’s Insanity

It looks like I’m hoarding. But I didn’t mean to.

One reason I’m hoarding is that I was a hoarder before hoarding was cool. I started shopping for things like targets, pistols, and ammunition before I had any idea the American public would go nuts and start buying up toilet paper.

I went to Gander Outdoors to look at a Glock, which is probably pointless, since they are all nearly exactly the same, and I saw Aguila 9mm selling very cheap. I didn’t even want it, but I bought hundreds of rounds. I knew I would use it some day. Pay a little now, or pay a lot later.

I bought a neat Colt Woodsman pistol, and I felt I needed to quit relying on Remington’s not-quite-ideal Golden Bullets, so I ordered a fairly heavy box of CCI Mini-mags. I also bought a huge number of small pistol primers, because I was thinking about reloading. This was all before I realized people were going to snap up gun stuff. I also bought a large package of .50 AE, because I happened to be shooting that gun at the time.

I already had enough ammunition of other types to require many trips to move it from one room to another. This is just how bargain ammo shoppers roll. I accumulated this ammunition over a period of years.

The last time I bought toilet paper, I figured I might as well quit playing around and buy a lot so I would save money. When the panic set in, I still had something like 17 rolls.

I use disinfectant wipes when I go to the dump and when I leave the grocery store. I’ve been working on the same can for quite a while. After the supply dried up, I figured I was going to have to make that can last. Then I went upstairs and checked my bathroom. I had two cans that were nearly full. For me, that’s probably a 6-month supply.

I always have a lot of alcohol. I have parrots, and I used to have a parent with dementia, so I use alcohol to wipe things down all day. On top of the isopropyl alcohol I had on hand when coronavirus popped up, I had a big jug of denatured alcohol in my workshop. I haven’t checked, but my guess is that microbes don’t like it any more than isopropyl.

I checked. The Internet says it works great.

Factoid: coronaviruses have oily outer coatings, so solvent disinfectants work well on them, and soap kills them. Lysol wipes aren’t that great for coronavirus. But they will still help me when I visit the dump.

Since the Purge began, I’ve made another gun buy. It took slightly more effort than usual, but I got it done, and I got what I wanted. I needed reloading supplies, because the only good store 10mm ammunition is expensive. I was afraid I was out of 10mm powder. I couldn’t remember what I used last time. When I looked into it, I realized I had probably used Alliant No. 7, of which I have a large quantity. I also had large pistol primers because I had made a big buy while the Obama panic was subsiding. I thought I was out of bullets, though. I found 300 of the ones I like, so I ordered them. Then I looked at what I already had. Turned out I had around 200, sitting around. Oops.

I had to get some 10mm brass. I bought direct from the people who make it. I’m really hoping I don’t turn out to have hundreds of cases I forgot about, moldering in a storage box.

But it’s pretty likely.

I was planning to do some .308 shooting before crazy got ahold of us, and after it did, I was determined to go through with my plan. I found 300 rounds of match ammunition, which no one actually needs during an epidemic. If it were crisis ammunition, I would have bought something made for killing game.

Do I feel bad about any of these buys? Actually, I am having misgivings about the 10mm pistol. I don’t really need it. I just thought it would be handy, and I was concerned that the hysterical mob might make it impossible to get another one for several months. In retrospect, I think maybe I should have left it for someone else. To the person who needs this gun, I would like to provide a tip: Democrats say attackers will leave you alone if you soil your pants. They really say that, and I assume they wouldn’t say it unless they had done the research.

That was humor. Calm down.

The 10mm reloading stuff does not tickle my conscience. I did end up with more than I wanted, but no desperate person is running to gun stores demanding 10mm components for reloading. If you’re into reloading, you have ammunition already. The desperate are trying to find factory ammunition because they can’t make their own. Besides, 500 rounds don’t constitute a hoard. It’s three days of casual shooting, plus a couple of magazines for home defense.

Last week, I went to the store. I wanted to buy little red potatoes to go with a pork roast. I could not find loose potatoes, so I bought a big bag. This week, I went back, and I bought two New York strips for $5.49 per pound. Guess what? People are hoarding potatoes now. Unbelievable. The store did not have a single potato. But I did. I still had half a bag of red potatoes at home.

You can’t keep potatoes forever. They sprout or they rot. Hoarding them is a bad idea. What happened to make people hoard them? Did Oprah tell all her girls to buy potatoes?

It’s gross, the way women worship her. Millions of women think she’s a genius. She’s so influential, Weight Watchers pays her to do ads, and she’s obese! Unless she converts to Christianity and gets help from God, she will probably be obese until she dies. Obviously, she doesn’t know how to be thin, but they pay her, and many women listen.

If they want me to listen, they’ll have to hire Kate Moss.

Why would you hire an obese person to give people dieting advice? It’s like hiring Amy Winehouse to counsel drug addicts.

I was running out of paper towels when the insanity started. I found some online, through Office Depot. I only wanted 6 rolls, but when I bought a small package, the deal fell through. I had to buy 15. So now I have more than twice the number of paper towel rolls I would usually have, and because I bought an off brand, I got a deal.

I just found more alcohol in an upstairs bathroom. Sorry, but I did.

When are people going to start hoarding fuel? They’re hoarding water, which has a zero percent chance of a supply problem. Why not fuel? Maybe I need to fill my cans in case people get even crazier. I don’t think they’ll hoard fuel, but I didn’t think they would hoard water and potatoes, either.

I guess fuel won’t be a problem, because the supply is great and people have nowhere to hoard it. If you’re an average person, you can fill your car and maybe a few cans, but that’s it. We only have fuel shortages when the supply is bad.

Oh, buy. I checked. No gas cans at Home Depot! People never cease to disappoint me. I have more cans than I know what to do with, so it doesn’t matter.

Why are things going so well here? Here is what God has to say, in Psalm 37:

The LORD knoweth the days of the upright: and their inheritance shall be for ever. They shall not be ashamed in the evil time: and in the days of famine they shall be satisfied. But the wicked shall perish, and the enemies of the LORD shall be as the fat of lambs: they shall consume; into smoke shall they consume away.

Am I saying God rewards me because I’m a wonderful person? Of course not. That’s obviously untrue. My faults are not hard to see. But you don’t have to be perfect to get God’s protection. Give your life to him, be baptized with the Holy Spirit, move in the gifts and fruit of the Spirit, develop a powerful prayer habit, claim God’s promises, focus on being changed internally, and you will meet the criteria.

I am trying to keep listening to God so I don’t mess up my protection. I’m not saying this will work. I’m just saying it has worked for me for the last 12 years or so. That’s a pretty good run, for someone who is wrong.

If it works for 30 more years, I’ll be dead before my streak ends. WINNING!

When the real estate recession hit, God said, “This recession is not for you,” and it turned out to be true. I didn’t have any problems. Why should 2020 be any different? Same God.

The best retirement account is the one you build up through years of prayer. It’s an account in heaven, where nothing can touch it. I haven’t knocked myself out trying to make money, but I’ve been extremely consistent with daily prayer, for a very long time. I’m doing fine, and I live far from areas where the coronavirus psychosis is making people suffer. I don’t even have a mayor, so I am less likely to have my civil rights taken away during this ordeal.

It’s not good enough just to pray to “God.” You have to know JESUS, and you have to be full of the Holy Spirit. “God” doesn’t mean much unless the word is connected with Jesus, because to reject Jesus is to reject God. If you don’t know the Holy Spirit, you won’t have good communication with God, so you’ll lack guidance, and you’ll get out of his will, even when you think you’re doing things that make him happy. To be out of his will is to lack is full support. You can be a missionary and fail to please God.

As for the virus, it looks like my forecast equation is still doing quite well, although the actual numbers are still diverging upward from my prediction. It’s not a big deal, because a true plague would infect more people by orders of magnitude.

I check figures in the morning, and I saw something like 276,000 today. It’s higher now. My prediction for this morning was about 252,000. If this were a plague, we would be looking at hundreds of millions by now. Even if we are missing many cases, I am still being vindicated by the data. Even if the actual case number is 10 million, we’re not seeing anything like flu rates, and we have had plenty of time for the infection to spread.

Why is Italy doing so badly? Maybe it’s because Southern Europeans aren’t as clean as Northern Europeans. Sorry, but it’s true. The Germans and Scandinavians are much cleaner than people to their south. That would explain the high Italian transmission rate, but why are so many dying? The German death total is 73, and the Italians have lost 4,000. It can’t be because Italian cases have had longer to worsen, because China has a lower death rate than Italy, after 4 months.

If you take the figures for cases by nation and deaths by nation side by side, you will see that the order is different. Countries that are high on one list are low on the other.

Are more Italians obese? We know they’re older than other Europeans, but it’s hard to believe it makes that much difference. I just checked, and the median age, which ought to be close to an average, is higher in Germany than in Italy.

The average age of victims in Italy is supposedly around 80. This would explain the high death rate, but why are so many being infected? I suppose the general dirtiness of Southern Europeans is the explanation. They must not be protecting older people, and older people are probably dirtier anyway.

It makes people angry when you say one ethnic group is cleaner than another. So what? Read about personal habits in places like China and Iran. Gross. There are places in Africa where people use their fingers to shove food in other people’s mouths, as a sign of affection. Is it okay to admit this happens? Koreans eat out of the same dishes when they have meals. My family never did.

I would say my mother’s family was in the 90th percentile in terms of cleanliness, and my dad’s was much lower. His family was closer to what people in Kentucky call “white trash.” Southerners from good families are phobic about cleanliness, but poor Southerners will sit at a dinner table and scoop mashed potatoes from the common bowl with their forks. I picked up some of my dad’s filthiness and some of my mother’s cleanliness, and I have been trying to improve all my life.

When I was a kid, I had a friend whose mother was a Lebanese Arab. She wouldn’t let him go to Lebanon. I asked her why, and she said, “Because of the damn dirty Arabs.” She was afraid he would die from food poisoning. Different cultures have different standards. I’ve cleaned out apartments after Hispanic tenants left, and I saw things you would not believe. There are entire apartment buildings in Miami that smell like cockroach manure. My time in such buildings is the only reason I know what cockroach manure smells like. Ordinarily, there isn’t enough of it in a building to create a smell you can detect.

Speaking of Miami, I just got a really annoying text from Miami-Dade County, in SPANISH. It looks like it says, “Since we’re all staying at home, why not fill out the census?” Says it’s from Alcalde Gimenez. I absolutely hate being dragged into anything involving Miami. Their site says they will leave you alone if you text “STOP” back to them, but how did they get this number to begin with? That place is like a stink that won’t wash off.

Maybe old Italians are dying because they’re Italians. Imagine all the great food and drink an 80-year-old Italian has had. Maybe Italy had a high smoking rate when these people were young, and their lungs aren’t strong enough to stand up to the disease. Anyway, it sure looks like Italy is letting the aged down.

Journalists here in the US are trying to tell us young, healthy people are in great danger. They put out a story about a family in New Jersey. Several of them died after a gathering. I saw a photo of the family. Everyone visible in the photo was obese. The skinniest one was a lady who had to be 40 pounds overweight. None looked to be under 45. Most were older. They looked awful. Saggy and weak, with terrible posture and crepey skin. They were exactly the kind of people this disease kills. Reading the twisted coverage from journalists is very trying.

Coincidentally, or not, the sick family in New Jersey is Italian.

If Bernie Sanders were president, we would be hearing about his brilliant response, and journalists would be looking for ways to reach back and blame George Bush for his failures. They hate Trump and are conditioned to lie about him, and this is an election year, making things worse. They also love exaggerating crises because it makes them money and builds careers. It’s a perfect storm for propaganda. Until it becomes hard to find a new case anywhere, it will be impossible to get them to admit the epidemic isn’t that bad.

If you’re looking for a Glock 10mm pistol, I apologize, because it’s on its way to me. I felt like God said I should buy it. I pray before I buy just about anything. Maybe I was wrong. I don’t think it would matter, because there are still used guns all over the place. Nothing interesting is happening with the used guns on my Gunbroker watch list. There’s even a new Tanfoglio Witness that hasn’t sold.

Just try to be nice to the home invaders. It could work.

The other stuff was hoarded in advance, making it unintentional, and intent is an element of hoarding. Before you know there’s a shortage, hoarding is just smart shopping.

Gun-Buying Panic Finally Gains Some Logical Support

What is there to write about, except coronavirus?

I guess I could write about my mother’s giant credenza. I think it’s called a credenza, anyway. You would have to ask a guy who likes musicals. It’s an eight-foot-long china cabinet. I got rid of it today. It’s on the way to a consignment shop.

My dad didn’t buy my mother nice furniture or cars. We always got Buicks at cost from my grandfather’s dealership. We got used furniture or things from outlets. Then when my parents divorced, my dad got a girlfriend and let her fill his house with Miami Vice-style furniture that cost a fortune. It included a thousand-dollar credenza. Made from particle board.

My mother earned her own money after the divorce, and when my parents reunited, she bought furniture from an old lady who bought estate goods. That’s where the credenza came from. In addition to being a gigantic, heavy piece of furniture no heterosexual man needs, it’s a reminder of family dysfunction.

Now that it’s gone, I can move my indoor workbenches downstairs into the dining room, which I have been using as a storage area. It will be nice not walking upstairs every time I need a wrench.

If I leave this place, it will be a blessing to be rid of heavy furniture I never liked to begin with. Moving costs money. On the way out of Miami, a mover tried to charge my dad a grand for packing and moving one mirror.

I still have my mother’s bedroom furniture, which is not particularly good. It’s real wood and all that, but the fit and finish are not great. I think it was from an outlet. It’s about like Thomasville, but it seems like the quality control is lacking. No way am I paying anyone to move it. I have the first dresser my parents bought when they married. I already gave away the matching bed. When I was in high school, the dresser and bed were in my bedroom. High school itself was fine, but my life at home was not, so I look forward to not having that dresser.

I also want to unload her first set of sterling flatware. Both sets, in fact. The first set is just plain ugly, and the second set is ostentatious. It’s too fancy. I love my mother, but her taste was limited by her Eastern Kentucky roots.

Actually, now that I think about it, my grandmother had much better taste. That’s odd.

My mother collected Waterford crystal, which I do not like. It’s heavy and lacking in grace. Waterford makes fine vases and such, but no one wants a wine goblet that weighs a pound and looks like…a vase.

It would be nice to have heirlooms around, but what do you do when they’re ugly or they remind you of miserable times? The nice shotgun and terrible, cheap revolver I inherited from my grandfather remind me of good times. The furniture is different.

Actually, I inherited the shotgun from my dad. My grandmother gave it to him.

My dad’s mother, who did not give anyone a shotgun, knitted two afghans for our family. I threw one out a long time ago, and I’m still planning to take the other one to Goodwill. She was a very cold lady. She wasn’t nasty to us, but she had no interest in my sister or me. Didn’t send us Christmas gifts or cards. Didn’t call. On top of that, she liked olive green, which is a depressing color. Every time I look at anything she owned, I think about the fact that she was a stranger to me.

If the afghan were wool, I might be more reluctant to part with it. It’s synthetic.

I have the feeling that I’m cutting myself loose from things. Part of this involves my dad. Yesterday, I found out he had a Linkedin account, so I canceled it. I unsubscribed him from emails from the Kentucky Bar. I took him off a Morgan Stanley list.

I have canceled many accounts for him in the past. When an account has contacts, I look at them to see what kind of people he associated with. It’s interesting to see how many were the sort of people who take advantage of older men they think have money.

A woman who was an associate at his law firm emailed him a while back, out of the blue. At first, I didn’t think anything of it, but then I decided to Google and see if she had divorced recently. I didn’t come up with anything. I emailed her from his account and let her know he had died. No response! Not a good sign. Seems pretty cold. But I can’t draw conclusions. Maybe my email went to her spam folder.

She and her husband have separate Facebook pages. His photo shows him with another man. Hers is a picture of a sunset. No human beings. There are also a couple of photos of her alone on a beach with her dog. Her husband tended to rub folks the wrong way. Maybe things didn’t work out.

It’s funny how smart you get when you get old. It’s too bad I didn’t have any older people to give me good advice when I was young.

It’s not exactly unheard-of for middle-aged women with financial problems to see older men as lifeboats. It’s a nasty business. When you start to fail, you don’t want to be at the mercy of someone who has been wishing for your death from the second the ring slipped on.

There were a couple of single women who emailed my dad regularly during his last years. I find it extremely hard to believe they were interested in him for reasons that were not financial. He was very overweight, and he was past 80. My grandfather had very young admirers when he was around 70, but he was tall and thin, and women had always liked him. Not everyone ages that way.

Anyway. Coronavirus. The epidemic is progressing very slowly, but the madness is still going viral, to use an appropriate metaphor. California’s governor just told his citizens they have to stay home. It’s an order. Oddly, he does not plan to enforce it. Because he can’t. Let’s be real. But he still had the nerve to issue it.

He says people can only go out for essential errands. He says you can’t go to work unless you’re in an essential business. I can already picture the confusion and inintended bad results. What if your essential errand involves a business that isn’t officially essential? Uh oh.

You can’t just imprison a whole state and expect it to work.

Here’s something weird: there are major cities where the mayors have banned the arrest of people who rob houses and commit other types of theft. I think the point is to reduce the load on skeletonized city employee rosters.

I’ll try to be helpful here. When you issue an order like that, you may think you’re saying, “We will not arrest people who steal.” What you’re really saying is, “Go out and steal, right now. You can even break in people’s houses.” That’s how people will take it. You’re also saying, “Buy guns and ammunition so you can protect your home or protect yourself while you steal.” You’re telling people the purge has commenced.

Supposedly, all sorts of hypocritical leftists (redundant) are dashing to gun stores to buy weapons they don’t know how to use. I’m sure this will end well. I wonder how many noobs got their hands pinched by semiauto slides at gun ranges today.

People who pretended to be against the Second Amendment are showing they’re all for it when they think they need it. Why didn’t they just admit it in the first place?

One big difference between leftism and conservatism is that leftism is often a pose. Leftists get to say all sorts of nice things they don’t mean. They get to virtue-signal. Leftist men do it to get gullible women in bed. Conservatism is different, because conservatives have to say things people don’t like to hear. Leftists are like divorced dads who fill their kids with candy and burgers on the weekend. Conservatives are like the moms who make them do their homework and brush their teeth. Naturally, leftism attracts more hypocrites.

With regard to the gun situation, people like me are sitting at home, relaxing. I have enough ammunition to start a South American insurgency or support a typical Tuesday in Baltimore. I didn’t buy it to shoot people, for the most part. I just like to buy in bulk and get good prices. I like shooting recreationally. In the past, I used to think a lot about defending my property, but the closer I get to God, the less that mindset appeals to me.

I’ve been thinking about getting a full-sized Glock. I used to have one. I bought it because my sister, whom I had helped push into rehab, was threatening to send her addict friends after me. They are very lucky she didn’t follow through. I sold it because I didn’t like the caliber or the memories.

The other day, I saw Jerry Miculek carrying at home. He’s a freak pistol shooter. I subscribed to his Youtube channel. He does things you would not believe. He said he carried openly while working on his property. I generally carry a compact Glock with 11 rounds in it. I had to ask myself why I was cheating myself. On my own property, I can carry anything I want. It doesn’t have to fit in a pocket.

I thought about getting a Glock 40. This is a full-size 10mm. I’m already set up for 10mm, so the caliber is not a problem.

I have to think about it. Carrying in a pocket is very nice. Holstered guns are a pain in the butt. They bump into things. They’re hard to draw. I can draw from a pocket in one second.

Added capacity would be nice, but I could just as easily put an extra magazine in another pocket.

A longer sight radius would make for better accuracy, but I shoot just as well with my compact as I do with a full-size 1911. If you’re an assailant within a hundred feet of me, you are in serious danger.

The only way to make a real step upward in long-range accuracy is to carry a long gun or use a red dot sight. I think. Not sure about the red dot. I know nearly nothing about them.

A Glock 40 would give me 16 shots without a magazine change. I now have 11. I should also admit I’m carrying a 9mm at the moment. The 10mm was heavier, and the gun I’m carrying is one I bought for my dad. It has sentimental value.

On the one hand, I have no interest in shooting people; I want to return good for evil. On the other, I still carry, because I might be wrong, or I might have to defend someone else, so shouldn’t I do it right?

Someone said I should get a long-slide Glock. They have longer barrels. The only real advantage is higher velocity. I’m getting 1250 fps from the 10mm right now, with 180-grain hollowpoints. That’s awfully good already. It’s about like a .357, with a bigger wound channel. How much overkill do you need?

I could try carrying a 1911 in a holster to see how I like it. I don’t think I have any defensive .45 ammo, though, unless I’ve forgotten where it is. I’ll bet it’s fun trying to buy it right now. I may have some defensive .38 Super ammo, but I don’t want to carry my pretty barbecue gun and scratch it up.

Actually, I do have a lot of .45 hollowpoints. I had forgotten. I made them myself. I don’t know how good the bullets are. I got them for nothing when I bought my press.

I’m trying to be improved by the pandemic instead of rotting. This morning, I felt that God was telling me to get a grip on myself. I was starting to be overly critical of the people who are panicking, as though I were somehow superior. I made comments on Yahoo News stories, and some were snippy. Ordinarily, I avoid reading the news, and I do not make comments. This afternoon, I went back and deleted them all, except for one, which I thought was acceptable.

I can actually understand why people with dependents are panicking. I give them a little slack. When you have mouths to feed, it’s probably harder to resist buying 10 cartons of eggs. It’s still not smart, and it’s morally wrong, but the pressure is greater.

I do not understand the people who are purely selfish with no discernible excuse. Ellen DeGeneres has been hiding at home for days, and she has had the tone-deafness to post about it on social media. “I’m cowering in the living room of one of my mansions, and I’m sending the maids out for tofu.” This is the opposite of inspiring. I’m surprised she doesn’t understand how bad she looks. Well, no I’m not. She lives in a bubble, surrounded by toadies.

In 1941, celebrities ran down to recruiting stations and joined the armed services. Wow. That’s a little different, isn’t it? Jimmy Stewart, who had to stuff himself to make the induction weight requirement, flew a bunch of dangerous missions. He actually enlisted long before the war started. When he died, he was a general. Lots of celebrities were war heroes (John Wayne, who was having an affair with Marlene Dietrich, notably excepted). Now celebrities post snowflaky messages about their terror of getting the sniffles.

Tom Hanks showed a lot of class. He and his wife submitted to quarantine, and as I recall, he said it was about like having a cold.

I’m hoping the epidemic poops out here, as it did in China, in a month or so. T.B. Joshua predicted the Chinese coronavirus collapse. He seems to think his prophecy is for the entire world. I’m not so sure, but he knows more than I do. If this thing goes away quickly, it will be a nice, relatively painless warning we can all profit from.

Even if it doesn’t go away quickly, we will probably get used to it before long, and then we’ll start to get pretty angry about the ludicrous forecasts and insane restrictions. Life should become more normal by June regardless of whether the epidemic goes away.

I guess I should go to the store and see if they have any cheap rib eyes available. I have been trying to think of different things to fix for dinner that aren’t a lot of work. Seems like I keep coming back to beef. Maybe I should buy a pound of shrimp and have a giant shrimp cocktail.

I’ll check the toilet paper situation out. There is no way I’ll buy any, though. I can’t stand between needy people and their miracle cure.

New Chinese Coronavirus Cases: ZERO

When I write this blog, I keep going. I don’t stop when I write something I know might need correction. I write until the end, and I try to make mental notes to go back over everything. Of course, being me, I sometimes forget to check what I wrote, and then I publish things that aren’t finished.

Yesterday, for some reason, I left this passage in an entry:

I redid the math using a new constant: 0.0621. We’ll see how it works. I’ll show you some new predictions.

3/19: 214,585
3/20: 228,325
4/4: 579,249

If it’s way off for the next two days, I’ll have to go back over it.

I can’t even guess why I left that in there. I was working on my coronavirus prediction model, and I was fiddling with constants. The actual constant I came up with is 0.0643, which is also mentioned in the entry.

I eat a lot of fruit and vegetables for breakfast, and I chase them with hot ginger tea, so it may well be that I had to answer the call of nature while I was writing. Or maybe I got a phone call. Anyway, something went wrong.

The figures are still lower than the actual numbers, but not by much. I plan to let at least another day go by before I revisit the constant.

I can’t say this enough: the important thing is not whether the equation is right. It would be amazing if I were within 50% of the actual number in a month, even if I were a genius with perfect data. The important thing is that coronavirus is producing a TINY number of infections compared to the flu, and there is no evidence at all that this will change. The flu got something like 35 million of us this year (Americans), and it got something like 650 million people globally. Coronavirus spreads exponentially, like all diseases, I guess, so it would not make sense to try to compare 650 million to the 220,000 or so coronavirus victims we know of at the moment. The former figure is a yearly total, and the latter is an interim figure. But it doesn’t look like we’re going to have anything remotely resembling 650 million coronavirus cases when the epidemic poops out, as it will.

Here’s something interesting: our treasonous press skewered Trump for saying something which now appears to have been true. Don’t be shocked. Do you think they’ll admit fault and apologize? HAHAHAHAHAHA. Sorry. I love a little joke.

Trump said he hoped the disease would go away with warm weather, as just about all similar illnesses do. He didn’t say he knew it would. As a big-hearted person who wanted to make us feel better, he expressed a hope. People jumped all over him, because…Trump. Now Chinese scientists are telling us heat and humidity reduce the infection rate. Science says Trump was right, but the press will ignore their error.

The press is toxic and sick. By and large, journalists have low morals and a disgusting mindset. Their mission isn’t to inform; it’s to control. They want to bring the Sixties back and make them permanent. I’m so glad I gave up newspapers and quit watching TV news. I don’t need vile people in my life.

Try and imagine the press doing this to FDR in 1942. They were too busy lining up to lick his socialist toes.

A week or so ago, something interesting happened in Africa. T.B. Joshua appeared on Youtube, and he said rain was falling in Wuhan, washing away the epidemic. This was a follow-up to an earlier prediction that the epidemic would be gone by March 27.

I am always reluctant to trust sensational preachers with big churches and TV shows, but I cannot find dirt on T.B. Joshua, and I can’t find any indication that the constant flow of miracles and testimonies from his church is bogus.

Since the second prophecy, I’ve been watching the China numbers. They’re flat. I didn’t talk too much about it, because I thought maybe Johns Hopkins, which runs the site I check, was having a problem adding Chinese data. Now I’m seeing other secular sources confirm it: the transmission rate in China is so low, it’s negligible. The figure I heard was dozens per day.

This is in China, a dirty country where people are very selfish. We’re not talking about Denmark or Norway.

While the disease continues to spread outside China at a very slow rate, China is doing great. Joshua still thinks the worldwide epidemic’s back has been broken. He believes we are seeing the epidemic’s death throes. I’m not so sure he understands his own prophecy, which appears to have been true. It may be that it only applied to China.

You can go look at the China figures for yourself. Don’t trust me. There is no need to.

Today, Yahoo News has a banner: “China reports zero new domestic cases.”

Yahoo. A source which is usually as ungodly as you can get.

The real disease isn’t coronavirus. The disease is a mass delusion. We are terrified of a mild disease that kills very few people in relative terms. It borders on psychosis. Christians should take note.

In the future, we and the Jews will be slaughtered wholesale. Americans are used to feeling bulletproof. We think nothing bad can happen here. We are very arrogant when it comes to our morals. We think we are nothing like the Germans, for example. We believe large-scale slaughter could never happen here, in spite of the Civil War and the things that have happened to the Indians.

If Satan can make intelligent people fill their vehicles with toilet paper and wear surgical masks in grocery stores, he can make them hate and kill Christians. All he has to do is make them angry and afraid. He just has to get us to believe some lies. He’s very good at that, and people who are not baptized with the Holy Spirit have almost no resistance. They will believe anything he tells them to believe.

People think the Germans didn’t know what was happening to the Jews. They think they were carted off in the middle of the night to remote installations to be killed. This is not true. Most Jews were killed by roaming teams. They weren’t in camps. The Germans knew, and most of them were all for it.

You can’t exterminate millions of people in secret. The suggestion is ludicrous. Do you think German soldiers didn’t talk to their friends and relatives? Do you think no one saw Jews getting into trucks?

We are not better than the Germans. They were orderly, rational, responsible people. They were known for it. They still did what they did, and most of your neighbors can be motivated to do the same kinds of things. If the Germans had won the war, they would have continued exterminating Jews until this very day. They had to be forced to stop. They didn’t have a change of heart. They were bombed into submission.

This feeble physical epidemic and overwhelming psychological epidemic is a warning to Christians. We need to separate ourselves. Clinging to cities will cause many of us to die.

Right now, in the face of a minor epidemic, mayors all over America and claiming unconstitutional power to deny people their civil rights, and nothing is being done about it. Doesn’t that concern you? I had no idea mayors could pull this off. I always thought of them as insignificant people with giant egos and a need for attention. Now I see how dangerous they are.

I don’t have a mayor. Until yesterday, I didn’t know how blessed I was. If someone wants to lock me in my house and take my firearms, they’ll have to get the governor or the president to go along with it. A few miles away, there are people whose situation is completely different. They are at the mercy of the kind of individuals who run for class president in the sixth grade.

Now I know something: I can never allow myself to have a mayor again. That’s powerful wisdom.

Jews love cities and fear the countryside. It’s terrible. Thinking about it is like watching them dance on the edge of a cliff. They think cities are their protection. The opposite is true. They should have learned that from Poland. They are making it more convenient for their future murderers. They’re like cattle gathering in pens.

They have quite literally been herded into slaughterhouses before, in countries where they thought of themselves as valued citizens. The Nazis killed native-born Jews who were citizens and war heroes. They killed physicians and engineers. Their obvious value to society meant nothing, as it will in future America.

I hope T.B. Joshua’s prophecy applies to the whole world, as he thinks. I hope we are getting a warning that will pass and give us time to react accordingly.

I consider the coronavirus collapse in China to be a miracle. There is no other reasonable explanation. You can’t cut new cases to zero by telling people to stay home and wash their hands. If that worked, America would have no new cases.

I don’t know what greater sign we could want. God is really up there, and he does help. If you have a real relationship with him, he will do wonders for you. If not, you are going to end in misery and humiliation. It may take time, but it will happen.

When God does something obvious, we generally ask for more proof. We are afraid to believe him. Look at China. What more could you ask? Do you want a cherry on top of it? This is as good as it gets. If you hesitate after this, how will you explain it when you are held accountable? What excuse will you give?

Of course, the China phenomenon will screw my equation up. I’m happy to see it happen.

I hope people will listen to God’s warning. The greatest treasures in the universe are ours for the taking, and the things we have to give up are worthless, perishable filth.

Update on my Amateur Coronavirus Predictions

My second coronavirus death toll prediction model is not doing very well. My total infection prediction model seems to be doing quite well indeed. While it should amaze anyone if either model works, I figured the death model would work better, based on the higher reliability of death numbers, but that hasn’t panned out.

Several days ago, I came up with a differential equation to predict the total number of infections that would occur. It says the total for today (morning, more or less) should be about 178,000. The actual total is 185,000. I call that a home run! Much better than I expected. Of course, the total may diverge wildly from my prediction in the future. It would be remarkable if I even came close.

Later on, I created an equation based on the death numbers, which I thought would be more accurate. The death total for today…well, I don’t know what it was, but it doesn’t matter, because it looks like we will pass the number for March 22 tonight or tomorrow.

So what does this mean?

1. Given my total lack of training in the area of epidemiology, combined with the lack of reliability of the data, maybe there was no way either prediction could work, and the good results we’re seeing from the A equation (total infections) are illusory. Maybe it will turn out to be a bad predictor, just like the D equation (total deaths).

2. Maybe the death figures are actually less reliable for prediction purposes than the total figures, because the death rate varies wildly depending on where the virus is.

These guesses top my list.

I suppose that with a very minor epidemic like this one, where the total numbers are very small (sorry, but it’s true), you end up with a situation in which death rates vary because the tiny infected populations in various countries have characteristics that make them much more or less likely to die.

Example which I just made up: what if the virus hits a big community of retirees in Thailand, and because they’re old, 10% die? In a tiny infection pool of 185,000, that would mess up the death data.

The Italians have a crazy death rate. Maybe they’re not detecting mild cases. That seems to be the only thing that could explain it, since the people in countries around them are doing better.

Scandinavians and Germans have low death rates. Given their rigidity and willingness to follow orders, maybe they’re getting tested more thoroughly.

I wonder if I could go back and apply my model to the flu. I don’t think I could get figures. I would have to apply it early in the season, because it doesn’t take saturation into account.

Do I still think the hysteria is utterly unrealistic? Of course. Don’t forget: we get something like 8 million flu cases per day during a global season, and right now we have 185,000 global cases for coronavirus after several months. There is just no way an honest, rational person can look at those numbers and think COVID-19 is worth the trouble we’re putting ourselves to.

I’m very blessed to live where I do. My poor cousin lives in the Chicago area, where the population density is high and the politicians are corrupt leftist authoritarians. She said the authorities are threatening to tell people they can’t leave their houses except to buy food and so on. Consider this: yesterday, the Chicago Tribune said there were 105 detected cases in Illinois.

I looked at the website for the local paper, and nothing like that is happening here. Events are closing, and schools are shut down, but if they are threatening to imprison people in their houses, the mighty Star-Banner is not saying so online. I would assume the would put that information on their site if it were in the paper.

Unless the people in the press room are just too weak to work their keyboards.

The terrible thing is that we are going to have the economic destruction of a plague, without a plague. Businesses are going to close permanently, all over the place. Stocks are in the toilet. All sorts of jobs will be lost. Jobs are important. Businesses are important. It’s not okay to throw them away over a disease that will probably kill fewer than 20,000 Americans.

We should be focusing on insulating old people and sick people. That’s it. Kids are nearly immune, and the rest of us are very, very unlikely to die even if we get infected. In other words, it’s a lot like the flu, except it affects way fewer people.

If you think 20,000 people is a big hit, you’re bad at math. You don’t understand how many people die here every year. Go look up the number of traffic deaths we suffer in one year. Look at the number of suicides. Look at tobacco deaths. There are over 300,000,000 people here, and you have to take that into account.

Doesn’t every life have infinite value? No. Never did. If a life had infinite value, we wouldn’t build skyscrapers or bridges. Every huge construction project costs lives. We would quarantine people who get colds and norovirus, because these diseases kill a small number of people. We don’t do that. The world has to keep turning. The value of keeping our economic system going, sorry to tell you, is very, very high, and before coronavirus, we accepted the fact that keeping America bustling would cost many thousands of lives every year. We just didn’t talk about it.

If lives had infinite value, we would drive $500,000 cars that provided 100% protection in crashes. We would force kids to be vaccinated. We would ban tobacco and scuba diving. We would build every house from reinforced concrete. We don’t do those things. An acceptable risk of death is something healthy societies accept. The alternative is economic paralysis. And we can’t really control death, anyway.

It’s okay to say money is important. It’s not something to be ashamed of. Money is housing. Money is clothing. Money is medical care for kids with cancer. For the leftists, let me say that money is tarot cards, dope, Molotov cocktail ingredients, and black ski masks. It’s Greenpeace donations.

Guess how many people die in New York City every year. The figure is over 154,000. That’s one city. One year. How many New Yorks can you fit in 7 billion? The global annual death figure is around 60 million, and many, many of those deaths are not from old age.

I just looked up the world’s population. I thought it was 7 billion, but I’m seeing 7.7. Is that really true? Man, there are a lot of us.

We are killing our economy over nothing. When the panic goes away, we will have a real problem: increased poverty.

Here is the total number of cases of coronavirus, expressed as a percentage of the world’s population: 0.0024%. Here is the total number of cases of Spanish flu, expressed as a percentage of the world’s population in 1981: 27%. Here is the number of seasonal flu cases in the US, expressed as a percentage of the nation’s population: 10%.

Sure, the coronavirus total will go up, but if it were going to get anywhere near flu numbers, which don’t upset us, why is it so far behind after several months? The flu gets the job done in 100 days.

There is really no point in my writing these things, except to vent and to commiserate with other people who understand the situation. People are not going to listen to common sense in large numbers. They’re under a mass delusion with a supernatural cause. This is what happens when people don’t get baptized with the Holy Spirit.

I have to go to the grocery store. I can’t believe it. I have to go look for purified water. I’m not buying it because of the virus. I buy it because I’ve had kidney stones. Will I find any water on the shelves? I wonder.

I would like to get sanitizing wipes, because I use them when I go to the dump, and I’m running out. Not sure I’ll be able to buy them.

Last night I wondered if I should buy a sack of rice and some dried beans. Then I snapped out of it. Food isn’t going away. Farmers aren’t going to let their crops rot. People are filling their houses with Pop-Tarts, potato chips, and other boxed food, and when the panic tapers off, they’ll be stuck at home, eating junk. Maybe I’ll have the store to myself for a while.

Time to leave the house. I plan to cover the entire car with toilet paper rolls, with a tiny hole I can look through to drive. This should give me protection from the juju.

God help people who live in cities. I am praying he will wake them up and help them move.

Addendum: in case anyone cares, Tom Hanks and his wife are out of quarantine after a lengthy one-week illness. Here’s the list of terrible symptoms they had: mild fever, chills, and some aches. I have to confess; when I was a kid, I would have chosen that over going to school. Hanks is over 60, and so is his wife. Was he lucky? Did Australian medicine, which was developed mostly on sheep, work a miracle? NO. Their cases are typical, even for old people.

I’m off to brave the panic. If I don’t make it back, my toilet paper stash is up for grabs.

You Know What Mark Twain Said About Statistics

I’ve been using calculus to try and guess how the coronavirus epidemic is going to go. I started out with figures for the total number of cases, taken from the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus/Missile Command simulation site.

You’ll see why I call it that when I show you a screen shot. Does anyone remember Atari? Someone at Johns Hopkins does.

I guess some people will say I’m cold for making jokes during an epidemic, but we joke about the flu all the time, don’t we? Hmm.

While I was working on the math, I expressed disappointment because while I had taken note of infection totals in the past, I had not written down death totals. Death totals should be much more reliable, because a dead person will not be able to stay home and avoid being counted. If you die from coronavirus, someone is going to put your name in a database. Live people are different. They can stay home and avoid being counted, as I would.

Yesterday I found an old death toll figure, so I used it to come up with a new differential equation. It gave me new estimates for the future. Here they are.

March 22: 7,809
March 29: 10,456
April 4: 13,999
March 14 + 30 days: 18,743
March 14 + 60 days: 71,155
March 14 + 90 days: 248,521

My earlier estimate for the last date (mid-June) was about 150,000, so the toll now looks worse.

I will repeat the question I ask over and over. Does this mean I was wrong to say coronavirus wasn’t a big deal? NO. At least not yet.

This epidemic is not going to run all year, unless it’s very different from the other SARS we already know about. It’s going to peak and fall off. My equation doesn’t take that into consideration. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a death toll of 250,000 by June 15, but I don’t think we’re going to see a million later in the year. Look what happened in China. They had a whole bunch of cases, and then the rate of new infections dropped to the point where in intelligent person would say the Chinese epidemic is just about over. If this happened in China, where people have really dirty habits, I assume it will happen in other places.

In any case, 250,000 global deaths over 7 months do not constitute a plague. It’s bad, but it’s not THAT bad. Don’t forget: the common cold kills 5,000 people every year in the US, and we’re looking at a figure that might be twice that high. It’s very sad that these people die, but we don’t put on rubber suits because of it.

It would be nice to have better figures. The Chinese threw everything off. I’m thinking I’ll start over in a week, on the assumption that the available data will be better.

Here I am, talking like my uninformed amateur equation is reliable. I don’t know if it is or not. I am a layman. But I do know that a person who knows very little about math can look at the totals and tell this doesn’t look like the Spanish flu. That’s what I really rely on. The equation is just an interesting exercise.

The variation in death rates is very confusing. The Italians got hit hard, but the French are doing much better. Why? Are the statistics messed up because of bad testing regimes, or are Italians simply weaker?

In the US, the death rate based on the available facts is 2%, but at the same time, we know we’re not testing many people. The death rate is a quotient. The numerator is the number of people who have died, and the denominator is the number of people who have been infected. The denominator is probably a lot bigger than we realize. As testing becomes more widespread, the death rate should drop a lot, even though the death toll will not.

Maybe the Italians aren’t doing well at testing. That seems to be the only reasonable explanation for their death rate.

It just occurred to me that people will probably flip out even more when testing really gets going. They’ll find out the infection rate is higher than they thought, and they won’t consider the fact that the death rate hasn’t changed. People who think buying toilet paper will protect them are not going to get drawn into mathematical subtleties.

The death rate and toll are all that matters. No one cares about a cough and a mild fever. Obsessing on the number of infections is pointless. As long as the death toll stays low, it won’t matter if half of the world gets infected.

Look at it this way. Gonorrhea is a pandemic, right now. So is HPV, the genital wart disease, which supposedly infects something like 20% of Americans. The common cold is always a pandemic. No one cares. Until people start dying in very large numbers (percentage, not just absolute), a pandemic is not a plague. A high death toll is an essential requirement for a plague.

I’ve been assuming the coronavirus test has a low false-positive rate. I wonder if that’s true. If not, we may be piling flu casualties in the coronavirus bin.

Oh, man. I decided to check. This is unbelievable. According to the Chinese, over HALF of asymptomatic people who test positive may not have COVID-19. And they’ve been testing during flu season! That means they have tons of potential false-positives coming at them!

Now I don’t know what to think. If doctors all over the world are telling enough cold and flu patients they have coronavirus, the pandemic may turn out to be a joke.

At times like these, I’m really glad I rubbed my entire 700-pound stash of toilet paper with a lucky rabbit’s foot.

If there are a lot of false positives for living people, what about the dead? Maybe those figures are also inflated.

From the spiritual standpoint, I see some things about coronavirus that truly are scary.

People think the Beast is just one person, but that isn’t true. There will be a figurehead, but the body of the Beast will be billions of unsaved people, acting in concert, guided by demons and fallen angels. As I have often said, everyone is spirit-led; it’s not just Christians who have been baptized properly with the Holy Spirit. If you’re not led by the Holy Spirit, you’re led by spirits that work for Satan. You may not be completely controlled by them, but they have a big influence on you.

Before the Antichrist can do his thing, he will have to have a body prepared. I think that’s what’s happening now. Satan is using training exercises to get people used to obeying him. He’s getting them used to believing crazy things and behaving irrationally.

Look at the toilet paper shortage, which is absolutely real. No one with a grain of common sense would ordinarily hoard toilet paper, yet millions upon millions of people are doing it. Satan is conditioning them to obey him as a unit.

He’s also conditioning them to give control to the state. Satan is a statist. He loves government, because he is weak and can’t be everywhere at once. God can lead an infinite number of people with no earthly infrastructure, but Satan needs our help. He needs telephones, televisions, and the Internet. He needs the government.

People are now much more open to government power grabs. Coronavirus did that.

There is a wacky mayor in Illinois who just gave herself the power to stop the sale of guns, ammunition, and alcohol. She also gave herself the power to confiscate and use private property as she sees fit. And no one has stopped her! I’m sure what she’s doing is unconstitutional. Why aren’t people up in arms? We’re supposed to be connected with God, and we’re supposed to have his protection, but we’re not, so we run into the arms of Karl Marx and his father, Satan.

When I voted in mayoral elections in the Miami area, I didn’t think much about what the mayors could do to me. I just tried to pick the least-obviously-corrupt Cuban and left it at that. It never occurred to me that one of them might go nuts and try to break down my door and take my guns. Now I see that such things can happen in America, because of a manufactured panic. If you live in a place like Chicago or St. Louis, how do you know the Gestapo won’t barge into your house, just like they did in Germany and Austria? It used to seem impossible. Is it?

I’m not going to get coronavirus, but oppression is a certainty. It will take longer to get to some areas, but it will come. The only question is whether God will move me to a place where freedom will last as long as possible.

I can see why I keep feeling he wants me to move to Tennessee.

Here is how the world works: it’s like The Matrix. Remember how that worked? The rebels who went into the matrix were surrounded by ordinary people who didn’t know what was going on. They were generally harmless, but at a moment’s notice, agents could enter them and transform them into vicious enemies. That’s how the Beast will function. People around you will be transformed by demons, and they will do terrible things to you, claiming it’s their civic duty. This is what happened in Germany, Austria, Cambodia, Cuba, and so on. It can happen here, too.

Ordinary people who are generally nice can do astounding things. It has happened throughout history. Chinese crowds were known for cutting large pieces out of people, keeping them alive as long as possible. A crowd of religious Jews ridiculed Jesus while he was hanging from nails. Nice Germans bought the property of Jews at absurdly low prices and kept it. Consider lynchings. They weren’t performed by escaped convicts. They were performed by people who attended church and made their kids say their prayers before going to bed.

Christians won’t just be abused by people who are obviously evil. It will be ordinary individuals, just like the nice Dutch citizens who sold Jews to the Nazis during the occupation. It will be teachers, Walmart greeters, doctors, preachers, and so on. And many of them will do it in the name of Jesus.

The country looks better and better. I’m already in the country, but apparently not deep enough.

I plan to keep updating my equation, but I’m not buying a rubber suit. This thing will blow over.

Prominent Doctor Does his Part to Spread Panic

Yesterday, I used a differential equation to predict how the coronavirus epidemic would pan out, and it made the future look very good. Total predicted deaths by June 5: 150,000, give or take. That sounds bad until you consider how many people will die during that time from the flu, the common cold, pneumonia, car wrecks, tobacco-related diseases, and so on. You have to remember that the world is a very big place, and a disease that kills 150,000 people isn’t a big deal.

Today I found an article quoting a Johns Hopkins professor. He’s trying to panic people. He says the number of actual cases is much higher than what we’re seeing, because testing isn’t going well.

For a minute, I wondered if I was on the wrong track. After all, I can only rely on data that’s available to me, so if the data is no good, neither are my predictions.

I’m not on the wrong track. I realized that after a short period of thought. It’s unfortunate the the Johns Hopkins doctor didn’t say what I’m about to say.

What is it that matters during this epidemic? The number of actual cases? Not at all. That figure means nothing. No one cares how many people get sick, because the symptoms generally aren’t very bad. The only thing that matters is the death toll.

The death figures are very solid. Why? Because dead people can’t escape diagnosis. If you have mild symptoms and you decide not to bother with the major annoyance of dealing with the post-Obama healthcare system, no one will ever put your case in a database. If you die, it’s a different story. They will know you died, and they will know what killed you. We know how many people are dying, regardless of how bad the testing program is.

Here’s something that will make people mad: the more actual cases there are, the better the news is. It increases the ratio of infections to deaths, and the inescapable conclusion is that coronavirus isn’t as bad as we thought it was. The death toll is a solid figure, so changes in testing won’t change it. The case total can only go up as testing improves, because it’s a mathematical certainty that we are missing cases. If the case total goes up, the death rate will drop. Say the current death rate is 3%, to make up a figure. If the total case number doubles, the death rate goes to 1.5%.

They think the real death toll is around 1%. The doctor thinks the actual case number in the US is at least 50,000 and could be 500,000. The official figure is 1600, so if the doctor is right, there are 30 to 300 times as many cases as we thought. If that’s true, the death rate is 30 to 300 times lower, making coronavirus less lethal than the flu. The rate would be three thousandths to three hundredths of a percent. The latter figure would put the coronavirus well below the flu death rate.

Any way you slice it, unless the death figures are unbelievably wrong, this disease is much less of a problem than people think.

Interesting thing: preacher T.B. Joshua prophesied that rain would come to China and wash the epidemic away. Since he said that, the China numbers have been just about flat. Hmm.

My Hypothetical Branch Office

Now that I’m shooting more, it’s time to confront a project I have been putting off: the shooting shack.

I shoot in a cow pasture. The shells go all over the place, and then I have to go find them. You can guess what they are likely to land in. I don’t want my brass disappearing, and I’m not crazy about handling it after it lands in poo. Another problem: there isn’t much shade out there. On bright days, the sun can be very uncomfortable, and it also makes it hard to see what I’m doing.

I came up with a plan a long time ago: build a three-sided shack with a metal roof and plywood floor. I could fix it so the floor was slightly raised, allowing me to move the shack around quickly using the forks on my tractor. My shells would always land right next to me, or on the person I was shooting with, and I could sit in the shade. I could make the shack 6 feet deep and 7 feet wide, to allow plenty of room for two people.

The project is intimidating for various reasons. I know a fair amount about building things with tools, but this knowledge doesn’t really extend to carpentry. I could weld a shack together pretty quickly, but making one from wood would be more challenging. The materials would be bulky and heavy, too, and I’m not anxious to handle them alone.

If I were to weld a steel frame together, I could save a lot of time. It would be hard attaching wood to it, however. I don’t think I could keep it from rusting. Even if I painted the steel, water would find a way to rest on it and create rust. This is my guess.

I had an epiphany that made the job less off-putting. I realized I did not need to have wooden sides on the shack. Screen or hardware cloth would be better because they would let the breeze through and they would weigh less. They would also be easy to install. I have to have plywood on the back to block the sun, however. On my property, I always shoot along an east-west axis, so the sun can’t really hit me from the side. I just have to protect my back.

Adding up all the materials, it looks like it’s around $240 before paint and fasteners. Not too bad. I have some materials lying around, so I should be able to cut the cost a little bit by scavenging.

I still have some engineering problems. For example, what would I use for a table? If I use a folding Home Depot table, it will pretty much fill the length of the 6′ by 7′ interior of the shack, making it hard to get to the chair. They make 5′ tables, but that would still be a little tight. Maybe I could make a permanent bench with one section that swings up to let people pass, or I could build two podiums.

Why not put wheels on it so I can keep it forever? Wheels would put the floor maybe 15″ off the ground. This is too high. I don’t want to shoot down at everything. With a wooden-framed base, I figure I can get down a lot lower.

Why not build it on four-by-fours in cement slugs in the ground? Because I don’t want to be forced to shoot at the same distance all the time. I can’t move my berm, so I have to be able to move the shack.

It’s doable. I have to make my mind up to do it.

In other news, the pandemic seems to be stuck in the mud. The total number of detected cases has not been able to break 130,000 yet, meaning transmission is slowing down or testing is not working. I saw an article today from a major newspaper, asking why people were so worried when the virus wasn’t all that scary. I’m not the only one who sees that the plague has no clothes.

Two American celebrities have COVID-19 now: Tom Hanks and his wife. They’re in Australia, quarantined. They’re both over 60, and Hanks says they’re not very sick. No shock there. It’s typically a mild disease. No one seems to understand that.

I should not be surprised to see people ignoring logic and falling apart under the influence of rumors that aren’t very credible. This is how humanity works. Logic is way down on the list of things that motivate us. On top of that, it’s a safe bet that spirits are behind the panic. Most people are not connected to the Holy Spirit, and he is the Spirit of truth. If you’re not full of the Holy Spirit (and maybe even if you are), you’re full of other spirits, and they run your life. You may think you’re steering your own ship. It’s a delusion.

It’s distressing to see how we’re allowing a mild disease to push us into very bad economic decisions. People are calling off events. Trump has banned travel from most of Europe. The Chinese have closed factories. It’s overkill, and the financial cost will be tremendous in view of the disease’s inability to cause a true plague.

Why are politicians and others doing these things? I’ve already mentioned the supernatural cause, but there are more-obvious reasons. Anyone who fails to panic and overreact will be held accountable by a public ruled by ignorance. People are covering their rear ends, at great expense.

Democracy is a bad thing. I have to say it. The public has extremely poor judgment. As Plato said, a wise king is much better. Here in America, we don’t see ourselves as leftists, but we are. The American Revolution was a leftist uprising, believe it or not. The term “leftist” comes from the French Revolution. Democracy is a leftist concept. No wonder it’s so dangerous.

A strong king could respond to the COVID-19 epidemic with common sense, but our politicians are at the mercy of people whose ignorance is astounding, so they have to do unwise things in order to stay in power.

Airlines aren’t bringing enough sick people to America to make a big difference in the numbers, and closing businesses is not going to be all that helpful, because people will still spread disease while they’re off work. The best way to fight the disease, apart from supernatural means, is to wash your hands a lot and refrain from dirty practices like kissing everyone you greet. Dirty people will always be dirty, however, so most people will not change their behavior.

One of the nice things about leaving Miami is that I don’t have people I barely know kissing me all the time. Latin women feel like they have to kiss every person they meet, and it’s disturbing to a person who is used to cleaner, safer customs. I submitted to it while I lived there, because objecting offended people, but I’m glad it’s behind me.

Kissing may be a sign of affection, but that doesn’t take the microbes out of the spit. You really shouldn’t kiss people indiscriminately, and people shouldn’t hold onto backward customs.

If I were king, I’d say, “Stop being filthy. Quit kissing strangers. Avoid getting close to old people. Go to work and stop hoarding.”

I’m going to keep thinking about my shack design. I’ve waited way too long to get started.

GunBroker Exceeds Admittedly Low Expectations

I’m out of control. Third blog post today.

I picked up my new old Colt Woodsman pistol, which I found on Gunbroker. If you know anything about buying guns, you know Gunbroker’s reputation is not that great. There are a lot of overpriced things there, listed by opportunists. Nonetheless, if you watch and wait, you can do very well. I bought a brand-new AR10 for something like $200 below typical retail, and I got a very nice price on the Woodsman.

People are listing fairly nice Woodsmans for between 900 and 1000 dollars. If you go check Cabela’s Gun Library, you won’t find anything really nice for less. I paid $750.

When I saw my gun at the pawn shop, I almost wondered if they had sent the wrong pistol. It was so nice, I had to look at the breech to see if it had been fired.

It’s not perfect. The handles aren’t in mint condition, and there are one or two tiny (I mean tiny) areas where the bluing has been nicked. There is a trace of holster wear on the end of the barrel. That’s about it. For the most part, it looks new.

I was looking forward to picking it up, but I didn’t expect it to be this exciting. It always bothered me that someone stole my grandfather’s Woodsman (and his High Standard .22 semiauto pistol) without giving me a fair chance at it. Now I have a much nicer gun, and I didn’t get cheated on price.

As Jesus said, life doesn’t consist on the amount of possessions you have. Physical items aren’t that important. Nonetheless, I feel as though God made a kind gesture in helping me find this pistol.

I’ll post a photo, but it won’t do the gun justice. It can’t capture the near-mint look of the thing, and it can’t make you understand how elegant the design is. I love my S&W Victory .22, but it seems to weigh twice what this one does. John Moses Browning, who also designed the 1911 pistol and a bunch of other renowned firearms, knew how to make a gun light and pleasant to hold.

The pistol is so nice, I am reluctant to shoot it. I don’t want to get powder residue on it! But that’s silly. Firearms were made to be used.

I had thoughts about getting a holster. Not so sure now. A holster will rub against the bluing on the muzzle!

Biggest Effect here: Empty Shelves at Harbor Freight

I decided to check the coronavirus situation before going out to cut trees. As you know if you read this blog regularly, I have expressed what could be called extreme skepticism regarding the impending extinction-level pandemic, as well as my amazement at the seeming ineptitude of the officials and medical people predicting a plague. Today, I see nothing that could change my mind.

To have an epidemic that compares numerically to a typical American flu season, China needs 1.5 million new COVID-19 cases PER DAY. When I checked yesterday, the global total–not just China–was increasing at a rate of about 5,000 per day. Today, there are about 5,000 more cases than yesterday. Nothing has changed.

I am still wondering how the medical establishment can be so wrong. Is it really possible for a guy who blogs from his couch, using fourth-grade math, to be right when doctors all over the world are wrong to the point of absurdity?

Sure looks like it. Maybe I will have to eat my words later, topped with Robitussin, but so far, my prediction looks solid, and theirs look insane.

Maybe I should not doubt myself. I’ve been right when I said the TV heads who predicted severe hurricane destruction at my locations were totally wrong. I was right when I told people home prices could not increase by 20% every year, forever. On the other hand, I was wrong when I said Obama’s economy would tank. I still can’t figure that out.

I was also wrong about Ebola, which looked pretty bad when it was starting to break out of Africa. Apparently, the African response, not the disease, was responsible for most of the transmission and lethality. I should have known. In Africa, people go blind needlessly because they don’t wash their hands and faces, so it’s not surprising that ebola patients would die in large numbers.

Every time I post things like this, I think about the bizarre mindset many people have toward misfortune. I can understand people who disagree when I say dire predictions are wrong. What I don’t understand is why so many people get angry with me. There is something seriously, deeply wrong with you if optimism makes you angry and worry makes you feel righteous.

Women are much more prone to this syndrome than men. My mother had three sisters, and they and their mother all savored talk of misfortune and suffering. They were not unusual at all. I think this is one reason why men are so much happier and less given to mental illness than women. It makes me wonder if the feminization of men is going to make men less happy. I dread the thought of large numbers of old queens sitting around, speaking almost longingly about things like cancer and infidelity.

It’s not fashionable to say women are more likely to be mentally ill than men, but it’s a fact borne out by statistics. I suppose it has something to do with the modern male’s failure to get God’s protection for his wife and daughters.

Worry and unbelief are sin. People forget that, and somehow, like pride, worry has been turned into a virtue.

Worry is a type of faith. It’s faith in Satan. Faith brings results. Something to think about.

FYI, T.B. Joshua, the African preacher I’ve been watching lately, says God has washed the epidemic away. He says God showed him this. If it ramps back up and billions die, we will know we shouldn’t pay any attention to Joshua!

I’m tripling down on my rosy forecast. I’ll keep following up on it, unless I turn out to be wrong, in which case I’ll delete all these posts and claim I expected a pandemic all along.

In other news, my new welding helmet and some gun stuff should be arriving today, so I should be able to repair my Desert Eagle and finish off my dry saw stand. I decided to turn my dining room into a mini-workshop/gun room, so I’m selling my mother’s gigantic china credenza to make room. A heterosexual male with no wife has no earthly use for a china cabinet.

Do I feel bad about selling an heirloom? A little, but this thing is 7 feet long and probably weighs 200 pounds, and I keep my mom’s china, which I will never use, in boxes in a storage room. Also, if I move to Tennessee, I will have to go through the misery of dealing with a giant piece of furniture I don’t like.

The other day I was talking with my friend Mike about all the things I’m putting on wheels in my workshop. He confirmed something I suspected. He said God was making it easier for me to move things to Tennessee.

The credenza is not a great heirloom. My mother knew an old lady in Miami who sold estate goods, and she bought the credenza from her. To me, the credenza shouts, “MIAMI! MIAMI! MIAMI!,” which is as comforting as, “FECES! VOMIT! INFECTED PAPER CUTS!”, and it also shouts, “YOUR DAD NEVER BOUGHT NICE FURNITURE FOR YOUR MOM! SHE NEVER GOT WHAT SHE WANTED IN LIFE!” She paid for the used credenza herself, but my dad bought expensive Scandinavian furniture for the girlfriend he lived with while he and my mother were divorced.

I have never used the dining room for anything but storage. My kitchen is so big I can have two dining tables in it, so the formal dining room is superfluous.

A consignment shop will pick the credenza up in a couple of weeks, unless I can sell it myself before they show up. Can’t wait to see it go.

I’ve learned something about selling junk. If you want a good price, you will probably have to hold onto it for a year. If you want it gone in a reasonable amount of time, you can expect to get about half of what it’s worth. I am okay with that. I have accepted it.

I think I’ll shove the credenza out of the way and move my indoor tool benches downstairs. I already raised the dining room chandelier so it won’t hit people in the head.

A single man is like a superhero. We can do stuff other men simply can’t do.

Time to saw some trees. I hope ethanol doesn’t thwart me.

New Colt Headed for the Barn

The news here is pretty bright.

First, I found myself a good deal on a beautiful Colt Woodsman.

Leftists like to say people who like guns like them because they’re racist or because they have problems with their genitals. These are amazing claims, given that guns have no race and that a gun makes a pretty poor substitute for sexual organs. Gun control, on the other hand, has racist roots. In America, gun control got much of its impetus in the post-Civil-War south, where authorities tried to prevent blacks from owning guns. We also saw race-based gun laws in the 20th century; the famous “Saturday Night Special” laws were aimed at blacks, who were less likely to be able to afford good firearms. In Nazi Germany, Hitler used gun control to subdue the citizenry and prevent them from defending themselves against tyranny. One of his gun laws has been used as a pattern for American gun control laws.

Anyway, I like guns mainly because they remind me of the best parts of my miserable childhood. My family was dysfunctional. My dad drank. He was verbally and physically abusive. He used to hit my mother. My sister and I were always unhappy. My mother’s parents lived in Kentucky, and I spent a lot of time with them. They had a beautiful house with 4 bedrooms. My grandfather had lots of guns, and we used to shoot together. I had access to his guns, and I could use them when I wanted.

I was his favorite grandchild. Some of my relatives would explode if they read that, but it’s true. I was the third oldest. My older sister was popular when she was very young, but after that, her star waned due to her unpleasant personality and her cruelty. I had a male cousin who was born on the same day as my sister, and he was a perfectly nice kid, but somehow, he and Gramps didn’t connect. I had a male cousin who was a year younger, and he was a terror. He was the only grandchild my grandfather ever spanked.

There were four younger grandchildren, and my grandfather loved them, but I was different. I was the one he threw in the truck when he wanted to go putter around on his farms. He bought two ponies for his grandkids, and he told my mother it was worth it as long as he got to see me ride once. I wish I had known how he felt, because I didn’t particularly like horses.

For the most part, I shot two guns with him. One was a cheesy 9-shot .22 revolver with an aluminum frame, and the other was a 3rd generation Colt Woodsman. I shot very well, which is strange, considering my age at the time. Maybe this is one of the reasons he favored me.

When you shoot a lot, you want someone to shoot with. Helping kids (or adults) shoot can be fun, but it can also be a pain in the butt. If their attitudes are bad, if they’re frivolous, if they’re whiny, if they refuse to listen, if they seem to be incurably helpless, it’s a real drag. I was not helpless. You could put a gun in my hand and watch me hit stuff with it.

When he died, I made a list of his guns and handed it over to the family. He had a Marlin lever action, a Remington 12 gauge, a Sweet Sixteen, two Smith & Wesson .357 Magnums, a commemorative Colt 1911, a .22 rifle, two small Smith & Wesson pocket revolvers, an M1 carbine pistol, and some other things, including the Woodsman. The guns stayed in his house until my grandmother died years later. When it came time to ask the lawyers for the guns we wanted, the Woodsman was gone, along with a lot of other things. No one ever offered an explanation. Someone stole the guns.

Was it a relative? Was it the lawyers? Was it the lady who cleaned my grandparents’ house? No idea. In the end, I got the aluminum .22, my grandfather’s father’s flintlock shotgun, and I Sweet Sixteen, which already belonged to my dad. My grandmother gave it to him before she died, so it was never part of either estate. Nobody else wanted the aluminum revolver or the shotgun.

In practical terms, I got just about nothing. The revolver and the flintlock were junk, and my dad owned the Sweet Sixteen. I didn’t get it until he died, 16 years after my grandmother.

Whoever took the Woodsman forgot the owner’s manual, which I now have. It would be a nice thing for that person to have, but they will never get it, because in order to get it, they have to confess.

It’s kind of sad that I didn’t get some guns. I’m the best shot in the family, and while I have one cousin who hunts, I know a lot more about firearms. My grandfather would have wanted me to have at least one decent pistol or rifle.

Some person got a whole bunch of guns. Two big revolvers, two small ones, the carbine, the 12 gauge, the .22 rifle…lots of things. I know what happened to the 1911. It went to my cousin, because his dad bought it for my grandfather. That was the right outcome, although I didn’t get the big Frederick Remington sculpture my mother went out and got for my grandfather.

Two people have told me that my grandmother’s father had a gold watch, and that my grandmother said it was to go to me. They say my aunt gave it to my cousin. I don’t know if that’s true. Some day I’ll ask. I don’t expect to get the watch, but it would be informative to see what she says.

For a long time, I wanted another Woodsman. It would not be the same as having the one I used to shoot in Kentucky, but it would still be a nice reminder. Yesterday, I found a very good deal online. I found a gun in better shape than my grandfather’s, and I jumped on it. It should be here in a few days.

Online gun sites get a lot of criticism, because a lot of the sellers are profiteers. Nonetheless, if you search and wait, sometimes you’ll get surprising deals. It has happened to me. People were trying to get a thousand dollars or more for a good Woodsman, and I paid a lot less.

They say living well is the best revenge, and that is particularly true for God’s children. People rob us all the time, and we’re not able to scrap with them the way other people are, so we lose things. God compensates us, and when he does, he gives us more than we lost. I may never see my grandfather’s pistol again, but God has been very generous and merciful with me, so if I feel like it, I can buy a bunch of pistols and rifles. Maybe I’ll start collecting Woodsmans. I could buy some that are much nicer than the one that was stolen.

You know what they say: God bless the child who’s got his own. I don’t have my grandfather’s gun, but when I look at the one I got, I will still think of him, and I’ll know I didn’t have to extend myself to get it. No one else will ever have a claim on it or any of the other guns I got myself.

In celebration, I decided to get some steel gongs. These are handy for people who like to shoot quickly and are not interested in precision. I’m going to hang them in the pasture by the berm. I got two round gongs, a hog-shaped gong, and another gong shaped like a squirrel.

I don’t know how my grandfather would feel about gongs. He was an exceptional shot. My father saw him shoot a grouse out of a tree with a rifled slug at 50 yards, without shouldering the gun. He also said my grandfather was the best wing shot he ever saw.

I don’t know what you’re supposed to do with a grouse that has been rearranged by a 12 gauge slug.

I like gongs, though. Sometimes you just want to relax. Besides, they’re good for rapid-fire practice, which is important for self-defense.

Second thing…new welding helmet.

I started welding with a helmet from Harbor Freight, which a reader recommended. I have no major problems with these helmets. I paid $40, and I didn’t even have to buy a battery. The helmet was powered by the light from the welding arc. It worked fine.

As time passed, I found I wanted a helmet with a bigger viewing area, so I bought a Hobart Hood when they were on sale at Northern Tool. This helmet has batteries. It’s not a cheap helmet, and it works pretty well.

As I got older, I found I wanted to weld better, and I got frustrated with the difficulty of seeing the weld puddle using the Hobart helmet. I Googled around, and I learned that I was using second-tier equipment. Expensive helmets give a better view. In particular, I learned that Lincoln Electric’s 3350 series helmets with 4C technology were much, much better than what I was using. My Hobart turns everything green, and it’s hard to see what I’m doing. Lincoln helmets don’t distort color as much, they’re much clearer, and you can turn the shade down as low as 5.

Last week, I ordered a Lincoln. I look forward to it. I have some welding jobs I’m keeping on hold until it arrives.

It should be a big blessing. I’ve improved my ability to see my work using bright lights and vitamin A, but based on what I’ve seen on the web, the Lincoln should take me to another level. It also has an external button to shut off the shade so I can wear the helmet while grinding metal. With the Hobart, I have to remove the helmet and use a face shield.

Now I’ll have three helmets. I can lend the Hobart to guests. Maybe I can do the same thing with the Harbor Freight helmet, if I can get it to work. The batteries eventually give out, and you can’t replace them without cutting the helmet up.

I have to hit Lowe’s and get some stuff to hang gongs. I’m planning to use garden crooks. I have a scheme for hanging the gongs so they tilt forward and direct bullet fragments toward the ground. It should work. I may use 1″ by 1/8″ steel bar to make straps for hanging the gongs. It won’t move around like chain or rope.

Flat bar is phenomenally useful.

I’m considering getting a couple of small semiauto pistols, just for fun. I found a pretty good deal on a Colt Model 1903 in .32 ACP with a nickel finish. I’m thinking I should put pimptastic pearl grips on it. Neat little gun. The one I’m looking at was made in 1911. I’m also thinking about buying a stainless Colt Mustang Plus II in .380 and using my buffer to give it a mirror finish.

I’m not in love with the calibers, but they would be fun projects and shooters.

A long time ago, I wrote about my desire to fix up a stainless gun I had, and someone who knew absolutely nothing informed me that polishing guns was highly skilled labor performed by people with years of training. It didn’t occur to me to check out this patently ridiculous claim. Since then, I’ve learned that putting a mirror finish on a brushed or satin stainless gun is so easy, you can do it with paper towels while sitting on your couch. I have a magnificent Baldor buffer, so for me, it will be even easier.

I don’t know why people say crazy, seemingly authoritative things about subjects they know nothing about.

One of the big problems with seeking advice on the Internet is that you will generally hear from ignoramuses who will assure you that you can’t do what you plan to do. It has happened to me over and over. The fact that someone else lacks ability doesn’t mean you or I do. The fact that someone else fails at simple tasks doesn’t mean you will.

I had a professional restaurant manager tell me I couldn’t make French fries in beef fat. What if I had listened? He could not have been more wrong. McDonald’s used to use pure beef fat, back when their fries were actually good. I was told I couldn’t use a TV as a computer monitor. I did it anyway, starting in about 2007, and it has been fantastic. People said putting a pistol in a pocket holster was stupid. Wrong. It’s way better than a belt holster or one of those ridiculous things people jam in their pants. Someone told me it was impossible to shoot a 12 gauge shotgun well from the hip. Wrong. Never let someone discourage you without looking into the facts.

I remember deciding I wanted to put a green laser on an assault rifle with a folding stock. My plan was to shoot from the hip. This provides huge advantages at indoor distances. People said I was nuts. I did it anyway. It works great, and I didn’t have to get an SBR stamp.

Point-shooting gives you an enormous advantage over people who use sights. Former SEAL Team 6 leader Richard Marcinko agrees with me. He obtained tremendous amounts of ammunition for his men, and he had them train without sights. When you shoot with sights, you’re lucky if you can get three shots off in two seconds. Without sights, you can shoot 10 rounds during that time. Believe me; unless you’re hopeless, you’re going to hit something.

I remember going on a church shooting outing. I showed a young man how to shoot a Glock. I talked to him about the sight picture. He didn’t listen. He held the gun out in front of him like a TV cop and blasted away from 7 yards. His shots went into an area about 6″ in diameter. Break into that kid’s house, and you are going to DIE. No two ways about it. He was right, and I was wrong.

We tend to train by squeezing shots off slowly, while trying our best to maintain 1″ groups. Try that with a burglar in your house. Seriously. Good luck.

An untrained burglar will empty 18 rounds from his stolen sideways gun while you’re playing around with your sight picture. Even an idiot can hit you 1/18 of the time without aiming.

Maybe we need to give up ideas we came up with when pistols only held 5 rounds.

Why do people say “revolvers and pistols”? A revolver IS a pistol. Dictionaries don’t lie. Much.

I’m on a tangent.

I have to go buy a gunsmith’s bench block so I can fix my Desert Eagle. Maybe while I’m at the store, I’ll check out a Glock 20.

I will definitely put up photos when I shoot the Woodsman.

The Floor is not for Storage

Today is a big day. I’ve been organizing my gun stuff.

When you have one gun, organization is pretty simple. You put the gun in your pocket or your nightstand, and you put the ammunition in a drawer along with a simple cleaning kit. When you have a fair number of guns, it’s different. I suppose I have 6 different types of .22 ammunition. I have at least two types of .17 HMR ammunition. I have multiple versions of ammunition for a bunch of calibers. I have brass, bullets, primers, and powder for a bunch of calibers. My cleaning kit is pretty big, and I have a separate box of chemicals and Boresnakes. Then there are my targets, gadgets, parts, and papers.

It’s a mess.

Speaking of targets, I made a practice of buying Caldwell Orange Peel second-quality targets whenever they turned up for sale, so I have a pretty decent supply on hand. In retrospect, this wasn’t the best move I could have made.

I bought 8″ circular targets with white circular grids on them. I don’t need an 8″ target most of the time. For me, a 4″ target will usually do the job. For a pistol at 60 feet, a 6″ target would be fine. By buying 8″ targets, I risked wasting a lot of paper.

I learned I could economize by shooting at several different places on each target. By doing this, you can turn each target into at least 5 targets.

My system works, but I have started buying targets with 4 4-inch bullseyes on them. It’s somewhat more elegant, and it still saves money.

Today I located all the boxes I could find which had gun-related things in them. I still have a bunch of boxes I haven’t unpacked since leaving Miami. There are things I just don’t need to have unpacked, so for the most part, leaving the boxes as they are makes sense. Today I dug into the boxes that actually needed to be emptied and organized. I found Russian sniper ammo, loose pistol shells, owner’s manuals, bits of a chronograph, a green laser, and plenty of other things.

I rooted around online, trying to come up with a way to store these things. I can use little cardboard boxes, but cardboard falls apart eventually, and certain bugs like to live in it. I finalled decided to try transparent plastic boxes from Home Depot. They cost a little over a dollar each, and each box will hold a good deal of ammunition.

This left me with papers to deal with. My solution is a see-through file box from Office Depot. It will give me a place to put all my manuals. The ones I still have, I mean.

Gun cleaning items…I still have no solution. I have a wheeled toolbox I used to use for range trips when I was a land-deprived surburbanite who could not shoot in his own yard. Maybe I can throw everything in that.

A lot of people use steel ammo boxes for ammo storage. They cost a lot, they’re heavy, and they’re too big for most of my calibers. I would rather spend $20 than $200.

I got my Desert Eagle out and shot it this weekend. It was a Chinese fire drill. About half of the shells refused to extract, and the rest hit me in the face, leaving cuts and bruises.

I think this demonstrates a fundamental difference between men and women. With the possible exception of ballet, there is no hobby women will take up which causes them to be injured repeatedly. Only a man will continue firing a gun that flings hot shells into his forehead. Women can’t enjoy that kind of thing.

I did what I usually do when I have a problem. My first response should be prayer, but I tend to go to Google first. I learned some things about the Desert Eagle.

First, it has a terrible extractor spring. It’s not even a real spring. It’s a tiny red piece of “polymer” (plastic to you and me) that sits under the extractor. It looks like a miniature Jujube. Magnum Research sold thousands of these guns and didn’t tell buyers the Jujubes fell apart upon being exposed to oil and solvents.

Good thing no one ever puts oils or solvents on firearms!

My extractor Jujube is apparently dead. I have not opened the bolt up completely, but there is no tension at all on the extractor, which is the reason I still have some skin on my forehead. I ordered two new extractor springs, and I also ordered an AR15 spring. I read that AR15 springs, which are steel, fit the Desert Eagle just fine.

Second thing I learned: the Desert Eagle has an adjustable trigger.

Did this thing come with a manual? If so, I should punch myself for not reading it.

Or I could just hold the Desert Eagle in front of me and fire a shot.

I have always criticized the Desert Eagle’s trigger. It felt like I was trying to close rusty scissors on a piece of sandpaper. When I found out there was a simple screw for trigger adjustment, I adjusted the trigger, and now it seems almost pleasant. Wish I had known about this sooner.

I can’t shoot the gun until my springs get here. I hope it functions.

Magnum Research always blamed the end user for being battered with shells. They said it was caused by “limp-wristing,” which means holding the gun like Barack Obama. Not so. I held it very firmly yesterday and still got pummeled. I’m wondering if the extractor problem could have had anything to do with it.

I plan to keep researching the problem. There may be some way to fix the gun so I don’t have to wear a face shield.

I’m not impressed with the gun’s engineering. I have some pretty old guns, and they work just fine. I don’t have to open them up and insert new plastic Jujubes every hundred rounds. Running properly for many years without repairs is normal. You can make excuses for Magnum Research, but the truth is, they blew it.

Why haven’t I been shooting the gun over the years? Simple. The rounds cost me a dollar each. The other day, I started to feel bad about owning a beautiful firearm I did not use, so I looked around online for ammo. While the mainstream stuff has increased to maybe $1.35 per round, a reputable company called Precision One makes it considerably cheaper, so that’s what I ordered. It’s probably great ammunition when you shoot it in a firearm that works.

I have dies for .50 AE, so I am looking into reloading. It appears that there are two types of bullets: the 80¢ kind and the 32¢ kind. There is no point in reloading using 80¢ bullets. It would cost as much as factory ammo. A company called Berry’s makes the cheaper bullets. I may pick some up when the box I ordered runs dry.

If I can get my shooting stuff organized, maybe there is hope for the rest of my possessions. I am still working on the workshop. I’m about to put my dry saw on wheels. That will help. Things are already much better than they were a month ago.

Right now, there are a bunch of piles of ammunition, parts, and so on littering my floor. I’m happy about it, though, because it’s the beginning of the end of a tiresome problem.

I’m going to try to shoot more. I’m thinking of buying a couple of steel gongs.

When I finish fabricating the saw stand, I’ll post photos. I think it will be amazing, especially to people familiar with the dubious quality of most of my metal work.

The Best Tools Come From God

I watch a lot of Youtube stuff, as readers of this blog know. The two most important types of videos for me are religious and educational. Sometimes I wonder if it’s a good idea to watch a lot of the educational material, simply because the people who post it generally have a worldly mindset. God hasn’t told me to stop, however. You have to have a certain amount of exposure to the worldly if you’re going to live on this planet.

This week I started watching videos from a guy named Jocko Willink. I don’t know if Jocko is his real first name. He’s a former Navy SEAL. He’s a very impressive guy. Anyone who makes it through SEAL training and then does 20 years is impressive, even though the British SAS is supposedly the world’s best special operations organization. He is very muscular. He speaks with great confidence. He knows a lot about working with people. He has done a lot with his life. SEAL’s don’t make much money in exchange for giving us so much, but he has turned having been a SEAL into what looks like a good business. He sells Jocko shirts and even Jocko tea.

That being said, sometimes his videos get on my nerves.

Today I heard him talk about cursing. He said the SEAL’s use language so filthy it goes way beyond even normal Navy standards. He’s pushing 50, but he said that when he finds himself in that kind of crowd, he reverts to cursing. As far as I can tell, he doesn’t see much wrong with it, and he believes that sometimes it’s a valid means of enhancing communication.

That’s a bothersome thing to hear from a man that age. I used to be proud of my ability to use defiling speech, and over time, I’ve come to understand that there is no good excuse for it. Also, it meant I was proud of injuring and hindering myself.

We curse for a lot of bad reasons.

Many of us take up cursing because we want to sound grown up. The irony is obvious. It’s like smoking in order to look grown up. Refinement and sophistication are essential parts of maturity. When old people curse, it shows they haven’t developed properly. Somewhere in the process, they failed to receive an important message which is right up there with, “Don’t use your pants for a toilet.” Bad language is the province of the trashy, the unintelligent, the ignorant, the cruel, the insecure, and the undisciplined. When you give in to it, it’s as though you’re asking God to help you not to grow up.

We often curse to curry favor with others. We want to show we’re part of the club. We want them to know that no matter how old we are or how serious we are about God, we haven’t forgotten our ape-like roots. It’s a way of keeping one foot in the world and the other in heaven. It’s counterproductive. It holds you back.

Cursing defiles us and encourages spirits to come in and rule us. It reveals that our hearts haven’t been cleaned thoroughly and that we are still vulnerable to supernatural corruption. Jesus said that which comes out of a man defiles him. The filthy things you say can bring curses to you, including psychological problems, diseases, and failure in the things you do.

SEAL’s are interesting people. We tend to ascribe godlike status to them. We think every SEAL is, basically, a Steven Seagal character or a Jason Bourne clone. Movie characters are not real. There has never been a human being who compared, even remotely, to Steven Seagal’s imaginary alter egos or Jason Bourne. There has never been a real James Bond. With all their resources, governments can’t produce people like that. There has never been a Jack Reacher, and there never will be.

Every SEAL isn’t a sniper. Every SEAL can’t compete successfully in the UFC. SEAL’s don’t speak every language. They can’t fly. They can’t bend spoons with their minds. They’re just very good soldiers. They probably don’t like being called soldiers, but it sounds funny saying they’re very good sailors.

SEAL’s can be beaten up. They can be murdered. They can lose in combat. They can become drug addicts and alcoholics. They’re just people, like the rest of us. Chris Kyle, a celebrated SEAL, told ridiculous, shameful lies about Jesse Ventura and was successfully sued over it. We owe these people a great deal, and they should be honored, but they are not superheroes. The fact that a SEAL says something in a podcast doesn’t mean we should believe it.

I saw Willink talking about verbal abuse today. He was speaking to a conservative psychologist named Jordan Peterson. Willink said SEAL’s live in an atmosphere of constant abuse. He seemed to have no problem with that.

Peterson told the story of a person he worked with. This person’s coworkers called him “Lunch Bucket” because he had a funny-looking lunchbox. Lunch Bucket was subjected to unceasing abuse, and eventually, he quit. Peterson and Willink faulted him for this. They said he should have taken other tacks, such as joining in the insults that were directed at him.

It was disappointing to see two older men talking like this.

I am not a good person, nor am I accomplished, but I have managed to absorb a few lessons in life, and here is one of them: everyone sets a price for his company, and it’s all people will pay. If you set the price too low, you will always be a doormat and punching bag, and it will be largely your own choice. You’re not supposed to do this.

Here is a word for people who do it: “lickspittle.”

A long time ago, God told me this: it’s more important to exclude the wrong people from your life than to include the right people.

Scripture backs me up. Christians tend to think we should swallow filth from abusive people forever, in the hope that they will change. The Bible doesn’t say that. It says we should shun Christians who behave badly. We’re not even supposed to sit down to meals with them. The word says it’s better to live in the corner of a rooftop than with a contentious woman. Boy, is that true.

Look it up.

When I was in college, I had 5 friends I was very close to. All but one are gone. Two were abusive and racist, and they took advantage of me. One was insecure, dishonest, pompous, conceited, and treacherous. Two had a lot of good qualities, but we are on different paths now, and I can’t be the same person I used to be in their company. The last one I really keep in touch with is an Orthodox Jew. I hear from him from time to time. His outlook on life has a lot of similarities to mine, and perhaps this is why we still communicate.

One of my friends called me maybe 10 years ago and said he wanted to come to Miami and fish with my father and me. I sent him a polite email that said I had changed. I made it clear that while we had been good friends in the past (by admittedly poor standards), things were different now. This is someone who used to call me a brother. I just could not subject myself to that relationship any more, for more than one reason.

This guy had terrible problems with the truth. He would tell stories and embellish them beyond credulity. If a friend of his was insulted in a bar, and the friend said something nasty in return, a few years later, you might hear that the friend broke a bottle over the other person’s head, and then he beat up four cops. He also had a bad temper. Often, a few beers made him want to fight, and he would use racist language. He called black people “boofers,” which must be something he picked up in his hometown. On one occasion, he put his hand through a 1/4″-thick window.

I remember having to grab him, immobilize him, and drag him down the street because he was determined to break someone’s car window with a beer bottle.

He was with me and some other friends when we stole some expensive banners from Barnard College. These things were huge. Two of us took the banners down from inside the building and dropped them outside, and two took them and ran to our dormitories. We were supposed to share them, but my friend took one and nailed it to his wall and then defended what he had done. No honor among thieves, I guess. Anyway, it shows that he was a hard person to trust.

He also had a way of belittling the people around him, as though they were supporting cast members.

Of course, he had good qualities. He was smart. He was willing to take risks to get ahead in life. He was very generous. He could be extremely loyal. He loved kids.

The feeling of being belittled got to me eventually, and I also started thinking about the anger, racism, lying, and so on, and I just couldn’t face the prospect of putting up with it in the future. That’s how it works when I reduce my social circle. I don’t think about it for a long time, make plans, and then cut the cord. It happens very suddenly, over the course of one day. I realize the relationship is over, and I act accordingly, without hesitation.

Another friend loved cruel humor. He was worse about it than I was. He truly contemned his friends, and he said things he knew would cut. He didn’t seem to be equipped with compassion. To be around him was to feel that you were in the shade. He left school after some debilitating problems with drugs and alcohol, and after that, I never heard from him again.

Yet another friend tended to fawn over me at first, but later, after he fell into a job that made him a lot of money, he promoted himself to a position of moral arbiter. A member of our circle had come out as a homosexual, and I had sent that person a very polite letter saying I still loved him even if I could never agree with what he was doing. The friend who was making a good living called me one day to see what I was up to, and during the conversation, he told me the letter, which was not for him, was “evil and unnecessary.”

You can probably guess how many times I said similar things about his religious convictions. I also didn’t correct him when he bragged that a car he was selling actually had 142,000 miles on it, not the 42,000 the odometer indicated.

He changed a lot during the time when I knew him. A Jew, he was initially very hostile to Arabs. He didn’t like Jewish Israelis, whom he called “Dumb Israeli Bastards,” but he supported them against their enemies. Fast-forward a few years. He became an extreme leftist. He and his wife became ardent supporters of “Palestinian” rights. It was as if a spirit had taken him over, and it may well be that this is what happened.

He had some wonderful virtues. He was courageous, and sometimes he took the heat for bad things he had done, when I would have run. Nonetheless, I’m not his son, and I’m not going to be lectured by him. I’m glad he has done well financially, but he didn’t earn it. He was unemployed after college, having graduated with a liberal arts degree after proving unable to handle engineering courses, and he found a job as a bookkeeper for an oil firm. They let him start trading, which is a simple job anyone can do, and he earned tremendous commissions. That’s not the kind of thing that should make you proud. On the contrary; you should be thrilled things worked out so well for you in view of your very fungible capabilities. A high school kid could do what he was doing.

He got our homosexual friend a job doing the same thing, and he became rich, too, but he never got full of himself.

A high school friend of mine had to go. One day many years ago, he invited me to have pizza with him, and he started telling me black people were a cancer. This was a big surprise. He said they should be taken out into the ocean and drowned. He said his wife was an idiot savant and that he had only married her because he had gotten her pregnant in a one-night stand. He talked about his plans for leaving his family. I feel bad for him, because he is in very bad shape, but I let him go. What do I have in common with someone like that?

Of course, as longtime readers know, I let my own sister go. Being around her is like being sprayed with excrement or worse. I’m all done with it. It’s not just unpleasant; it’s intolerable.

I had a friend in Miami who came to me from the blogging world. We were close for a long time. I eventually got tired of the way he treated everyone. He told everyone in his circle what to do. He put us down, which didn’t make much sense, in view of his own very ordinary talents and accomplishments. He was extremely disrespectful. He was very selfish. He was drunk or stoned all the time. He wasn’t good to his friends. For example, he borrowed a new saw from his neighbor (who mowed his yard for him), left it in the rain, and then got mad when the neighbor complained. He would ask me to take him fishing, arrive late, drink all of my dad’s beer, sleep in the saloon because he had a hangover, and refuse to help with the cleaning up. It got to the point where I never heard from him unless he wanted something.

He wrote about American politics, as though he had great authority, and then one day he admitted to me that he wasn’t a citizen.

What?

Gone.

Do I miss the corrosive people I dismissed? In all honesty, not at all. I’m glad I don’t have to deal with them any more. The thought of taking up with them again is disturbing. It would be like being pardoned and then volunteering to go back to prison.

Christians are supposed to love and forgive. That being said, we’re not supposed to be other people’s diapers. A blessed person is the head and not the tail in his relationships. You can’t be the head when you live in an atmosphere of abuse. Everyone is mistreated from time to time, but if it’s your daily fare, something is wrong with your walk.

Why do we hold onto corrosive people? Love? Not really. It’s fear. We fear change. A woman will say, “My husband beats me, but if I leave him, I’ll be alone, and I won’t have any income.” You may say, “My friends humiliate me all the time, but if I drop them, I won’t have friends at all.”

We tell ourselves a lot of crazy things that aren’t true. There are seven billion people on the planet. You will make new friends. God can bring you a new spouse. I’ll tell you something awful I used to say about controlling women. Here is the cleaned-up version: some women act like they invented female genitals. That’s a bad way to put it, but it proves a point. There is always another woman out there, and there will always be new friends.

In short, no, I do not agree with Jocko Willink and Jordan Peterson. It’s not okay to torment others, and cutting off abusive people is not a sign of weakness. It’s a sign that you know a curse when you see one.

Willink is a motivational speaker. He is doing something worldly people need, because they don’t have God’s help. If God isn’t beside you giving you favor and making you succeed, then yes, you need to be motivated by people like Willink and Anthony Robbins. It won’t help you in the long term, because God isn’t in it and it leads to pride, which makes God fight you. In the short term, however, it can get you through a tough year.

Christians should avoid motivational speakers. God doesn’t want you to tough it out or lift yourself by your own bootstraps. He does not want you to have self-confidence. He wants you to have confidence in him. The Bible says he helps the humble and fights the proud.

It’s always disturbing when a preacher is also a motivational speaker. It means he couldn’t find God’s help, so he stole from worldly sources. If the world knows more than we do, then God is worthless, and we should renounce him. If God is supreme, and he is willing to help us, then we shouldn’t insult him by pumping up our belief in ourselves.

If you can’t find God’s help, by all means, motivate yourself as well as you can until you succeed in obtaining favor. When you don’t have a rifle, fight with dirt clods or sticks or whatever you have. You need the rifle, though. Dirt and sticks won’t get you through the long haul.

Willink carries a pistol, and he is a black belt in jiu jitsu. That’s great. What good will these things do him when he’s 75, or he has a disability, and the Democrats have disarmed him? What good will they do him if he is simply attacked by an adversary who is better and stronger? No good at all. God, on the other hand, will always be as strong and invincible as he is right now. You need to get real protection instead of relying on imitations.

It’s interesting to hear Willink’s great insights into carnal success, and I wish I had some of his virtues, but I’m too old and experienced to think I should do things his way. I’m glad I’m not falling for the self-help lie, the way I did when I was young and spiritually fatherless.

New Ideas About Sleep?

I woke up today long before it was light. I felt some anxiety. Rather than roll over and try to forget about it, I decided to go ahead and have a prayer session. I prayed in tongues. I spoke God’s word for a while, affirming it. I played a few Youtube videos in which preachers prayed for viewers. I played some Christian music and sang along. The anxiety left.

I feel that I’ve learned a few things other Christians will find useful.

1. It’s a good idea to have at least two sessions of Christian music every day, and you should sing or play an instrument. The day should begin and end with it. Music has supernatural power, and we’re supposed to have it in our lives. It’s helpful with entering into God’s presence.

2. Men–in fact, the leaders of all households (some households lack men)–should get used to getting up and praying in the middle of the night. I’m not positive this is a revelation, but it seems to be.

What happens when you have a baby? You don’t get to sleep any more. You have to get up in the middle of the night and do things for the baby’s sake. Why? Because you’re in a position of authority, looking after someone who is less able. If you’re the man of your house, you’re in a similar position relative to your wife and kids. Feminists will not like to read that, but then their hobby is being angry and rebellious, so it’s unproductive to accommodate their irrational and corrosive attitudes.

A man is a home’s watchman, king, and priest. He is the first line of defense and offense. He keeps the walls up. Men are more suited to this role than women, because men are more stable. It would outrage some women to read that, but it’s true. A woman is a different person every week. A man is exactly the same person, every single day. Our ups and downs are much more subdued. Men aren’t tossed around as much, so a man has a more stable vantage point from which to view and evaluate things. It makes for better decisions. A person whose personality is constantly changing will make decisions that vary based on her moods, and that’s not good. If your emotions rule you, you will have lots of self-inflicted setbacks.

There is a certain amount of honor in being the head of a house, but that’s not a good thing to focus on. You’re not getting an award for being male, along with a license to be a tyrant, with no strings attached. You also carry a lot of obligations other people in the house don’t have to carry. People know this in their hearts, even if they refuse to admit it. If your family doesn’t do well, people–feminists included–will generally blame you above everyone else. You won’t get the credit if your family does well, but unless your wife is a real prize, you will be the first one to be blamed if there are problems.

A man has more authority than a woman, so a man has to do things a woman does not have to do. It makes sense that a man would have to get up earlier and get things on a good supernatural footing while everyone else sleeps.

The Bible says he who finds a wife finds a good thing and obtains favor from the Lord. Presumably, then, the prayers of a man who is over a house have special power because of this favor.

We think of a day as a 24-hour period, but I would suggest that every 24-hour period actually consists of two days: a dark one and a bright one. Satan tends to get a lot done during the dark time. It’s when we have nightmares. It’s when we perceive evil spirits in our bedrooms. Diseases generally get worse at night, and the sick usually feel better as the day progresses. People often die early in the morning. Our fears seem closer at night. Far and away, most murders take place at night. By 4 or 5 in the morning, Satan has gotten a lot done, so it makes sense that someone would need to get up and re-sanctify the home. It should make things much better for everyone who is still asleep. They’ll wake up to a home that doesn’t have to be warmed up or hosed out supernaturally, because someone else has already done the job.

It’s very common for people to start the day with supernatural warfare, but we are not as likely to end the day with it or to interrupt sleep to deliver another assault. You may think that kneeling beside the bed for 30 seconds before you go to sleep is warfare, but it’s pretty weak compared to the real thing.

While I was awake early this morning, I watched Mark Hemans and T.B. Joshua. They prayed for people and cast out spirits. It may seem silly to think a man in a Youtube video could have any effect on you, but God does work through video. I’ve had it happen to me, and so have other people. I’d rather receive help face to face, but I won’t throw free help away just because it’s on video.

Listening to the preachers talk about deliverance and freedom, I could not help thinking about my sister and my father. In spite of my age, I still have walls inside me I can’t break on my own, because of mistreatment I received from my family when I was young! My sister was completely demonized. She was hateful to everyone, and she had a special hatred for me which has never abated. The mere fact that I existed and received some of the attention and generosity she used to consume by herself was a provocation to her. She tormented me and ridiculed me all the time, and she got other people to join in. She wasn’t as smart as I was. She was not as talented or as well-liked. She was unaccomplished. She didn’t have my parents’ permission to rule over me. Nonetheless, she strove to dominate me all the time, as though she were entitled. My mother even caught her torturing me physically when I was a baby.

My sister has an emasculating spirit. She hates males. She hates male authority. She loves ridiculing males and destroying the respect other people have for them. She really loves tormenting gay men; they are easy targets because they’re already emasculated. When I was born, I was dropped into her sphere of influence, and to the spirits she served, I was fresh meat.

Satan is effeminate. He loves attention. He loves looking beautiful and decorating himself; he is the Liberace of the supernatural realm. He feels as though he were God’s jilted girlfriend. He thinks he was the bride of Christ before human beings showed up, and he wants his position back.

What do jilted, unforgiving women do to the men who dropped them? They do their best to emasculate them.

Some people say God is largely feminine, but that’s not true. Women who can’t accept every part of their female status say it. God is the most masculine being there is. He is a seed sower, not a childbearer. Satan hates God’s masculinity and his authority. Satan loves feminizing men because men look like God, and a feminized man is like a cartoon of a feminized God. Satan can’t feminize God, but he can feminize men, get them to allow themselves to be used like women, and say, “This is how you would look if I could feminize you. This is what I want you to be.”

Sometimes I think about the way my relationship with my sister ended, and I have doubts. I believe God told me to stay away from her and that I was not even to pray for her. I don’t do anything for her financially, in spite of her poverty. Sometimes I ask God if this is really how I should behave. After all, the Bible is hard on people who won’t help their own blood.

Here’s something we all need to remember: the Bible speaks generally, but the Holy Spirit is specific. Sometimes the general advice the Bible gives is wrong for you.

That will make people mad.

The Bible actually shows that it’s not always a clear source of guidance in a given situation. Look at this:

Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest thou also be like unto him.

Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own conceit.

What is God saying here? He’s saying there is no adequate set of rules for every situation. Even the Bible falls short.

God told the Hebrews only the priests could eat the showbread in the temple, but David went in, took it, and gave it to his men, and it was not a sin. How can that be? It was not a sin, because the Holy Spirit–the author of the Bible–gave David permission. The Holy Spirit may give you permission, or an order, to do things a set of rules based on the Bible will not permit you to do.

The Bible says you shouldn’t abandon your own blood, but that’s a general principle. The Holy Spirit told me to avoid all involvement with my sister, regardless of her problems. That’s a specific commandment.

God really hates emasculation, which is why homosexuality is called an abomination. He permitted Jesus to be beaten, spat on, flogged, stripped, pierced with nails, and crucified, but he never allowed him to be feminized or emasculated. There are some things we are not required to endure on earth. Some things are just too ugly and humiliating. They are too close to Satan’s heart.

It’s probably true that Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego were castrated, as the prophet predicted, but they lived under the old covenant, and in all likelihood, their misfortunes occurred before they were old enough to be close to God.

God doesn’t expect me to continue to endure the presence of a demonized woman whose very presence is emasculating and demoralizing. The influence of my sister is so ugly, it literally renders it impossible for me to lead the powerful, blessed life I was created to lead. God will not tolerate it any longer, so he told me to let her go.

God wants me to be delivered from demons, but how can I do that if I persist in involvement with the one person who is controlled by the very demons who have done the most to harm me?

Paul told us to put wicked Christians away from us, but we ignore him because we think it’s more holy to remain under their feet. We think abandoning incorrigible people is selfish and judgmental. That’s just not true. It’s a way of choosing God over demons.

While I was watching the videos last night, I gained a much better understanding of why God separated me from my sister, or, as I call her, “my former sister” or “my biological sister.” He was so right. I should never have doubted it.

Sometimes we try to be holier than God, and we imprison ourselves needlessly.

It’s wonderful to be free of her. Sorry to say it. I will never have another person like her in my life if I can avoid it.

As for her unfortunate situation, she chose it and chose it and chose it. She also chose to be so corrupted I can’t even risk sending her checks because the slightest attachment can easily become a red-hot chain.

That’s an interesting way to put it. Yesterday, I was thinking about people who say they’ve seen hell. They say there are rivers of fire there, and in the rivers, there are large numbers of male and female homosexuals chained to each other like convicts. It made me think of generational curses. We always say these are chains that have to be broken. We think of them as chains that bind us to habits and so on, but if these curses come from iniquities that pass down from our ancestors, aren’t they also chains that bind us to other people?

If I involve myself with hateful people, I put myself in a position where their drama becomes my drama. That subjects me to provocation and other types of temptation. I have to be separate from that. No wonder God says he sets the godly apart for himself.

Some people are like the creatures in the Alien movies. You just have to rid yourself of them. There is no coexisting with them.

And that explains hell.