Kindly Stop Breathing Near Me

What’s going on with coronavirus? I wish I knew.

My county is up to 6,573 known cases, or about 2.2% of the population, based on a mental calculation I just did, which I am too lazy to check.

Does it mean the virus is spreading as quickly as the number suggests, or does it mean we’re just testing a lot?

You tell me.

The number of coronavirus deaths here is currently 89. That’s about 5 times what it was a couple of months ago. The known-case number has multiplied by something roughly like 20, but the death number is not keeping pace. That seems to suggest that the real infection rate has probably only multiplied by about 5, and that suggests testing is the main driving force behind the known-case number.

Of course, there are reasons why no one can rely on any of these figures. For one thing, medical institutions have big financial incentives to attribute deaths to coronavirus. Because medical people lean left, they also have political incentives. People in my area are talking about falsified records, and I have no reason to doubt what they say. The tests aren’t very good, and people lie.

Another problem: roughly a third of our known cases come from prisons. That’s a freak thing. This county has a lot of prison–not just jail–beds. Compared to other counties, we have more prisoners per capita. Prisons are not normal environments. The residents are confined in very small spaces, and that’s the single most important factor in coronavirus transmission. Also, a disproportionate number are black, and black people are more susceptible to infection.

Prisons are getting a disproportionate death rate. I suppose people in prison are more likely to have underlying conditions. They are not responsible people. A lot of them are probably former smokers. Many are probably obese. Then there is AIDS. And hepatitis C.

Another strange thing: women make up a big portion of the known cases. Is that because we have women’s prisons? Search me.

Anyway, you can’t look at a 2.2% known-infection rate and draw solid conclusions.

For months now, I’ve been hoping the bug would turn out to be more contagious than it appeared. The experts kept telling us it was more contagious than the flu, but the infection numbers are still nowhere close to those we see in an average flu year. The flu takes around 120 days to generate the bulk of its statistics. The consensus is that Coronavirus has been in America for at least 7 months, but a smart person who knows there is air travel between here and China pretty much has to conclude that it actually got here by December 1, 2019. Whether the correct guess is 7 months or over 8 months, if this had been the flu, we would have had something like 40 million known cases by May 1, and unless we are failing to detect cases, that hasn’t happened.

If coronavirus really is more contagious than the flu, then maybe half of Americans have already had it. If that’s true, then it’s typically very, very mild. If it were not, we would have noticed the huge wave of sick people.

We have moderately large wave of people who are known to be infected, and we have a much smaller wave of people who have had symptoms.

The other day, some expert said he thought we probably had 50 million cases. I hope he’s right. That would mean the disease was not as severe as the hype suggested, and it would also mean we were pretty far into the process and therefore much closer to recovery than official figures suggest.

But you can’t trust any of the numbers, so what do I know?

The people who ALLEGEDLY died from coronavirus here were almost all afflicted with “underlying conditions.” We have 89 deaths, including 86 victims with preexisting health problems. That’s a comforting 97%. Unless you have an underlying health condition. Then it’s an extremely alarming 97%.

The news says nearly every infected person here has a known source of infection. That sounds very encouraging. It suggests you’re not likely to wake up sick with no explanation, and that suggests you have some control.

It looks like the local mask ordinance is gone. The city Karens or whatever they’re called passed an ordinance for the city, but the mayor vetoed it. Not sure why. I would have to pay money to read the story; forget that. I don’t think it matters, because businesses have signs up. No mask, no Big Mac. As is so often the case, the private sector is well able to look after itself without government coercion.

I read some interesting stuff today. They say the polio vaccine and pneumonia vaccines may confer some resistance. I’ve had a bunch of polio vaccines. I don’t know if that’s normal. Either you’re supposed to get more than one, or my mother let them give them to me because we moved around and didn’t keep my medical records. I know I’ve had more than one, because I remember how they tasted.

I wonder if I should get a pneumonia vaccine. I don’t see how it can hurt. I should definitely get a flu shot.

I have also read that they suspect that asymptomatic people don’t get sick because they’ve had other coronaviruses, or similar viruses, in the past. That would be great news. When I was a kid, I got a cold about once a month. I must have had everything by now. It would also suggest that vaccines will be incredibly effective. If a cold I had 5 years ago can protect me, surely a vaccine can.

I don’t worry. I think I already had coronavirus, I think God will look after me even if I’m wrong, I have no underlying conditions, I do well with respiratory stuff, and I do not care at all if I die. And besides, worry is sin, it’s faith in Satan, it’s unpleasant, and there is nothing good about it. Not one thing.

Do I worry about other people? Well, if worry is wrong, it’s wrong, no matter who you’re worrying about. I don’t worry about other people. I can’t do anything for them anyway, apart from prayer. I’m doing that.

I keep feeling that the rapture is coming this year. I now, officially, hope this is true. I don’t want to see anyone go through the tribulation unnecessarily, but the more I see of 2020 humanity, the more I am weary of us, and the more weary I think God must be. It must be unpleasant, watching us at each other’s throats over a mild disease, knowing almost none of us will get the message and fast and repent. He offers us all the solutions to our problems, and we are scrapping over masks and disinfecting wipes.

A sea of lies is spewing from leftists these days. It reminds me of the red dragon story from the Revelation. I’m so tired of lies. It doesn’t bother me that people are wrong, but many lies demand a response. Lying works, at least in the short term. I’m tired of contending with liars.

When I think of lies, I think about my sister. She never took responsibility for anything that happened to her. Everyone was out to get her. She was a saint, surrounded by villainous scum. She lied constantly, aggrandizing and exonerating herself and accusing other people of dishonesty. She denied she was a drug addict. She denied being arrested in Florida and Kentucky, even though the whole family knew what had happened. She accused my dad of raping her, in front of two people who had no idea whether it was true or not. She almost got him in serious trouble by accusing a mafioso’s kid of raping her; my dad went to the kid’s house to give him a beating, and fortunately, no one was home. She accused my dad of breaking her arm. She tried to get me in trouble, claiming I kicked her dog. My dad was also accused, and he wasn’t even in the room when the incident supposedly occurred.

You can imagine how tiresome it is, dealing with someone like that for decades. You can never address a problem involving a person like that in an efficient way. First, you have to have an elaborate trial, with testimony, proving that person’s version of the facts is a lie. Then you have to deal with the people that person convinced. Then when you get past one smokescreen of lies, that person puffs out another one, and you’re off to the races again.

Lying is quick and easy. That’s why Satan does it. Refuting lies is a big, big job.

Antifa is based on lies. BLM is based on lies. Leftism is based on lies. Anti-white and anti-Christian bigotry are based on lies. We swim in lies all day. In a healthy society, the truth would be settled and widely known, and people would work together for common ends. We can’t do that. We have an adversarial system. The group that lies and yells the loudest and the most persistently wins.

I’m tired of arguing and refuting. I don’t do nearly as much of it as I used to. I try not to do it at all. Imagine how tired God must be.

We all want immunity these days. Unfortunately, immunity can be fatal. Many, many of us have become immune to the truth. We treat it like a disease. We social-distance from people who spread it. This is what will bring the rapture to pass. When God decides people are so bone-headed the effort of persuading them is no longer worth tolerating the contempt, dishonesty, arrogance, and cruelty, he will pull the plug. Our presence here has to serve a purpose, and once it becomes clear we can’t serve that purpose to a satisfactory degree, we will be pulled out.

Today. Tomorrow. Ten minutes from now. I’m ready. If we can get a real revival worth the abuse we’ll put up with, I’m all for staying, but things do not look good.

I’ve often said the flood was like a flea dip for the earth. I’m sure Noah and his family grieved for the people who died, but imagine the peace they had when they came out of the ark. Imagine having all the annoying, venomous people in your life disappear. That’s what the rapture will be like. People who are removed will find themselves in a world where everyone is in agreement with them, and the rest will be like a swarm of gnats with no one left to bite and drain except each other.

I am not going to worry about other people. I will speak the truth and pray for them, but that’s it. I’m not going to stress myself. If they want to stay here after the rapture and go through hell on earth, that’s their choice. They will still be able to be saved. Maybe when the trees burn up and the fish die and people beg for death, they’ll change their minds. If not, they were not worth pursuing in the first place.

I have no doubt that there are many people in hell who still accuse God and his children and refuse to admit fault. The willful irrationality of human beings knows no limits. I think many, many people will realize God is real during the tribulation yet will continue to revile and defy him. The fact that people are going to be lost shouldn’t destroy our peace. It’s a normal part of the human experience, and it can’t be helped.

Fake Forecast

As everyone who knows me knows, I’m a stoic kind of guy. I never complain about anything. It’s not my style. I’m just too manly. So I know people will realize it’s a big deal when I announce that my property is currently being pummeled by Hurricane Isaias, which I mistakenly called “Isaac” the other day.

It’s pretty bad. I would say we are getting gusts of up to 3 mph, if you get on the roof and run as fast as you can, and the skies are full of rain-laden clouds which could, conceivably, release some precipitation, some of which might possibly reach the ground before evaporating.

It’s exactly the kind of disaster you would expect if you had just read a story I saw this morning. Business Insider, also known as Trump Derangement Insider, says Governor DeSantis has declared a state of EMERGENCY EMERGENCY EMERGENCY in Florida, and HURRICANE Isaias is BARRELING toward the coast.

In typical alt-right fashion, the hurricane DENIERS at NOAA are calling Isaias a tropical storm, and their politicized maps show it prancing onshore in South Carolina as what I would call a Category .75.

The willful blindness is staggering. Can’t people see we need sensible gun control and a federal sensitivity commission that oversees the design of microaggressive pancake syrup bottles? How many times does this have to happen before we finally elect Vladimir Lenin’s pickled corpse president for life and declare the Salvation Army a terrorist organization?

I know what you’re thinking. Lenin was a white male. Not a problem. There is no reason why gender reassignment…I mean “confirmation”…surgery can’t take place post-mortem, and afterward, we can touch him up with a coat of brown Krylon.

I’m starting to wonder why I ever look at the news. I can’t help thinking about the old joke regarding the Soviet news agencies Tass and Pravda. “Tass” means “news,” and “Pravda” means “truth.” The Russians used to say, “The news is not truth, and the truth is not news.”

Hurricane news has been nearly worthless for a very long time. It was probably okay when we had three channels and Neil Frank used to go on the news and comfort us with his flattop, but now it’s an endless contest to see who can become most unhinged.

Every time the cone of certain death appears on NOAA’s website, a friend of mine sends me texts telling me we may have to endure the spectacle of Jim Cantore and his Land’s End jacket. I have been spared this time. I think he ought to go ahead and rig himself up with wires so he can appear to have his feet lifted off the ground. Better yet, CGI. He could lounge at home comfortably in boxers while his avatar Jim Headroom held onto a post and let his L.L. Bean duck shoes flap in a virtual breeze.

Isaias is the Smart Car of hurricanes. It qualifies for the title, but only in a way that waters down its meaning.

One of Donald Trump’s greatest achievements was coining and popularizing the term “fake news.” It condensed a pervasive understanding into a solid verbal bullet that could be fired at will from innumerable locations. It was as though America were a crime scene and Trump handed every one of us a can of luminol.

I learned something very interesting yesterday. The people who make up…I mean “compile”…our coronavirus statistics are including old cases in the total. If you get a test that says you USED to be infected, they say you’re a new case. It’s not a conspiracy theory. Bigwigs are apologizing publicly. I know coronavirus exists, and I think a big percentage of the upswing data we’re seeing is real, but I completely understand people who think the epidemic is nearly over. For all I know, they could be right.

I still don’t know a single person who has been diagnosed. We still have only two real celebrities who have died from coronavirus, and they’re not what you would call headliners. Roy Horn and that other guy. Now I have to look it up. Oh, right. Herman Cain. Of course, he was 74, he was already dying from cancer, and he was on chemotherapy. Where are the dead stars? There are none. And it’s not because they have money to protect themselves. Many very famous people are broke.

I keep having the feeling that if Obama were still in office, the MSM would be calling the epidemic itself an alt-right fantasy. I guess they wouldn’t go that far, but the coverage would be very, very different.

If you want to see coronavirus go away, just vote for Biden. A week after he’s elected, if he hasn’t already been forced to withdraw due to his suddenly obvious dementia, coronavirus will go away. It will be just like our war casualties. When Bush II was in office, the press published daily tallies of our military deaths. When Obama wafted into the White House, the stories ceased. I guess our enemies stopped shooting, out of reverence for the left’s messiah.

You have to wonder what the news will look like the day of the rapture. In many liberal cities, it won’t even be noticed, because so few people will be missing. It may take days for our city-bound journalists to realize something is wrong. Maybe they’ll accuse us of hiding. Which wouldn’t be entirely wrong.

“BREAKING NEWS: doctors add new item to coronavirus symptom list as millions of annoying people vanish. Fauci rages: ‘Masks could have prevented this!’ Scientists race to find new rationales for blaming Trump.”

It will be a looter’s jubilee. They’ll take all our liquor and jewelry and throw out the Bibles.

We finally have to wear masks here. I can’t go to Home Depot without one. Finally, I understand what other people have been going through. Masks are fine when you exhale, but when you inhale, they suck up against your nostrils and prevent air from entering. I always wondered why I saw so many people with masks slung under their chins. Now I get it. I do it, too. Expose mouth and nose. Walk down empty aisle. See someone approaching. Raise shields.

My post-upswing guess, based on the New York data, was that my county would top out at about 9,000 confirmed cases. Now I’m not so sure. We have prisons here, and the high rate of prison infections inflates the figures. If the old folks homes get hit, this county will have a major problem, because there seems to be one on every block. We might end up with an astronomical figure that has nearly no relationship to a typical person’s risk of infection. Applying data obtained from atypical people to the rest of us would be sort of like saying an average resident is likely to play shuffleboard and only wear orange.

It would be neat to find news I could trust. It would be neat if Santa and the Easter Bunny landed a Harrier sleigh in my yard and threw me 10 duffel bags full of rubies. Not sure which is less likely to happen.

As for me, I’m back to fasting. I went 9 days and then skipped a day. I was not happy with the way I acted and felt yesterday, so I’m fasting again. For a long time, I’ve asked God to help me fear him, and I have to say that my prayer has been answered. I think the rapture is imminent, I think I need God’s help in the turbulent, disaster-heavy end times regardless of whether the rapture comes soon, and I do not want to be here during the tribulation.

I have been thinking maybe I should fast until 3:00 every day from now on. Maybe I should throw in some all-day fasts. I invested a lot of time in messing myself up, so I should not be surprised if getting clean is not a quick process.

I still think I had coronavirus in February. I’m probably immune. If not, I probably won’t be infected, because coronavirus isn’t very contagious. If I’m infected, I probably won’t get very sick. If I die, I’m ready to go, and I don’t care. Nonetheless, I am trying to be somewhat responsible. I don’t like being sick, and a tiny percentage of coronavirus victims survive and have problems afterward. It’s not like mild sickness and death are the only options. There is an unpleasant middle path. And there is also the possibility that I could infect others.

I should be preparing for the flu. The infection rate is something like 10%–far higher than coronavirus–and the flu is awful. Through insurance, I’ve already paid for a vaccination. I ought to get that taken care of. They say it will halve my chances of getting sick. I haven’t had a shot since 2017, unless I had one and forgot. I made sure my dad got them while he was alive.

Tomorrow is August 4, and a fringe group says it’s the real Shavuot. They say the rapture will happen on that day. I think they’re completely wrong, but wouldn’t it be nice if they were right? Nothing could make me happier. I don’t care when it happens. Tomorrow. December. Next year. Whenever it happens, take me take me take me take me. A lot of leftists brag that they were at Woodstock. The rapture is the Christian Woodstock. You don’t want to have to say you weren’t there.

Every rapture prediction sparks a flame of hope in my heart, even when the predictions are clearly crazy.

I’m glad I had a chance to let everyone know how I was doing during the hurricane. I’m sure my tale of bravery and determination will inspire millions. It’s a good thing I’m so humble, because this is the kind of thing that makes people conceited.

Digital Flea Dip Increases Peace and Love

It’s remarkable how disappointing people are!

Yesterday, I wrote a piece about the bizarre behavior of the moderators at a firearms forum I have used. I saw a crazy video featuring Massad Ayoob, a layman who gives people legal advice concerning firearms. He has no business doing this. Someone might see one of his videos and decide not to wait for a lawyer’s advice at a very critical time, and every lawyer knows this can result in prison time or even an execution. I wrote a forum post about it, and early the next morning, the moderators had sent me a personal message. A group of them had assembled for the purpose of telling me I was wrong.

I marveled. I did something insignificant, and I did nothing wrong, but they clearly thought it was momentous. They had assembled something resembling a firing squad, and they did it early in the morning. The guy who started the private message conversation lives in California, and it appeared he had started it at 7:35 Eastern time, or 4:35 a.m. where he lives. Maybe Ayoob got him out of bed.

I was not nasty about Ayoob’s video at any time. I was critical for sure, but criticism is a good thing, especially when your criticism could keep people out of prison.

Jesus was extremely critical and blunt; he said things that would spark protest marches today and send man-bunned college kids into special rooms full of therapy puppies. It’s important, in our efforts to be kind and loving, not to go too far and lose what Jesus called our saltness. When salt loses its saltness, it’s only fit to be trampled underfoot. If you can’t speak the truth when it’s not popular, and you can’t do it unapologetically, you aren’t doing one of the things Christians are supposed to do.

I’m not saying I went to the forum to evangelize, but one of my concerns these days is the danger of letting myself be childish and mean. You have to know the difference between useless, sadistic railing and blunt, well-deserved, useful criticism.

The moderators in the ad hoc forum jury said things that were obviously wrong, and I corrected them at length with no reserve or timidity, but I told them I wasn’t there to cause problems. I said something about how they should delete the thread I started if it bothered them.

Of course, I did cause a problem. The thread wasn’t that big a deal, but I caused a major problem by confronting forum moderators with their own unfairness, lack of real importance, and ignorance about the practice of law.

Shortly thereafter, the thread disappeared, and they claimed it was because I had made misrepresentations, which was completely untrue. The thing that bothered them, it appears, is that I said things that were true, about someone they held to be exempt from all criticism. I think losing a debate very badly in the private message conversation was also a major factor.

I didn’t care about the thread. Who would? It was trivial.

The things I found interesting were the dishonesty and corruption. I told them Ayoob was getting special treatment, and I said they ought to ask themselves why they were bothering to create what I called a star chamber or FISA court in the clandestine direct message conversation. Obviously, they don’t do this for every person who says another person made a bad Youtube video. They denied giving him special treatment, in a conversation, the existence of which was the direct result of special treatment.

I wondered if they knew what a star chamber was, and that’s why I used the term “FISA court.”

Ayoob is a forum member, and he knows some of the poobahs personally. A cynical person would say they singled me out for disparate treatment just because I made their pal look bad. I think that was what got them going, and I think the fact that I stood up for myself put the cherry on the sundae.

Who are Internet forum moderators to me? Should I be intimidated by them or in any way bow down to them? It would be ridiculous.

Ayoob never showed up in the conversation; at least not while I was participating. I thought it was odd that they would do his responding for him as though I had mugged a disabled person. Maybe he’s not doing well. He lives in Florida, where coronavirus is hot right now, and he’s elderly.

Anyway, I wondered why they didn’t ban me. They were clearly not above such things, and it seemed like the obvious next step. Given their childish behavior, I wondered if I would soon find that I had no access to the site. I thought it would happen eventually.

Guess what happened this morning? You’ll never guess. Not in a million years.

Yes, my username is now banned. The reason? “Violations of the rules.” Plural.

That’s all I know.

Of course, I didn’t violate any rules. I cooperated completely.

Oddly, I am still logged in. I can’t log out. There are fresh alerts for me on the site. One appears to be a private message alert. I think maybe they told me I was banned, in a conversation they should know I can’t see. If you go to the site and look at old posts I made, it still says “member” by my username. I guess the software does that. Surely they’re not pretending I’m still active, to cover their behavior.

So now I’m cut off forever from all the close friends I’ve made there, as well as the great information the forum contains.

Actually, I don’t find friends by going to Internet forums, and I can still go to the site whenever I want, using a new username they don’t recognize, and ask questions until the cows come home. And I belong to other forums. One wonders what they accomplished.

I suspect the thing that really set them off was a remark I made about the thread. While I was telling them I didn’t want to be a problem and saying they could go ahead and delete the thread, I said there was a website where the boss always agreed with me (since he’s me), and I would put my stuff there. I let them know I respected their very limited authority, but I also did something you should never do to a bully: I made it clear I would continue to defy them elsewhere.

Bullies are about two things: sadism and control. When you tell them their control is extremely limited, it makes them more determined to punish your defiance.

If you want to inflict great suffering on a bully, all you have to do is thwart his efforts to bully you and let him know he can’t do anything to you. You don’t have to do to them what they try to do to you. Just make it clear they can’t do what they want to do. The pain they feel is like red-hot whips. I can’t explain it, but I’ve seen it many times.

I don’t know how many people would have seen the thread I posted, had they not deleted it. Hundreds, maybe? I wrote about the whole business here, where it will remain as long as I pay my hosting fees. Thousands of people will see it. They can’t take it down. They can’t send me private messages. They can’t involve themselves in any way. In trying to cover up dissent, they put it before more people and destroyed their power to participate. They set me free and pulled their own teeth.

If my thread were still up, they could post all sorts of things vilifying me and praising Massad Ayoob to the heavens. Not an option now.

It’s nice to be banned. I feel light because I have been freed from a considerable number of cantankerous, unreasonable people. The atmosphere in the forum was pretty corrosive.

Gun forums are full of obnoxious, posturing men who think owning a Browning Buckmark makes them Rambo, Chris Kyle, and John Moses Browning, rolled up in a needlessly-camo-covered ball of unpleasantness. You have to walk on eggs around them. Insecurity hangs in the air like fallout after a nuclear test. Using a gun forum can be very helpful, but you have to be careful not to become contaminated with hostility and immaturity.

I got somewhat annoyed during the Ayoob digital kangaroo court, and that bothered me, because I don’t want to be infected with lingering anger over tiny trivialities. The prospect of having stuff deleted and being banned didn’t bother me at all. What could be less important? But the gaslighting and unfairness of the silly private conversation made me a little angry.

The majority of the people at the forum are reasonably pleasant, but the minority is not a small one, and it is well-represented among the moderators.

For a long time, I’ve felt that using the forum was a vice. It was something I limited deliberately. Whenever I thought about going there to post something, I asked myself, “Do I really want to do this? I want to be a man of love and please God. Do I want to risk being provoked by very small people in exchange for some unimportant information or a few minutes of diversion?”

I saw it as a throwaway activity. I had the feeling I would eventually be banned for standing up for myself or that the bullies would eventually take so much of the fun out of the forum I would quit, as I have quit other forums.

Gun forums are nasty places for people who don’t cower for bullies, and this particular forum is worse than others I use. To me, it was a place I went when I felt energetic enough to risk being insulted and belittled. I would think, “I know a lot of these people are basically land mines, but I feel like checking the forum out today, so what the heck.”

This is my second forum ban. The other forum was also a gun website. I joined the Rimfire Forum, and I got the boot within a month or so, if memory serves. I had just gotten started. I was trying to find a new trigger for a .22 rifle, and there was a guy who called himself Arrowdodger who was famed for the triggers he made. I tried to get in touch with him via various means, and he never responded.

I mentioned this on the forum, where he is revered, and when people defended him and someone blamed me for not continuing to pursue him, I dismissed their strange remarks, essentially saying a person who runs a business should not have to be chased by customers. I wasn’t nasty about it at all. I just didn’t bother applying a coat of sugar. Why would I? I wasn’t blaspheming God. Just saying a mere man like myself should communicate with potential customers.

Within a day or two, without warning, I was banned for spamming. Of course, I don’t spam. I don’t sell anything. It was a lie someone told, perhaps because the forum software required an explanation for the ban, and something had to be typed in a box. That’s a guess. They were never man enough to respond to email inquiries, so I will never hear their explanation.

One of the illusions firearms forum people tend to have is that they are manlier than everyone else, but in this case, they ran away and hid. Because I am so scary? What good are guns to people who don’t have the courage to stand their ground in emails? Gun owners like to call leftist protestors snowflakes, but at least the protestors have the guts and integrity to show up.

Bottom line: Internet forum moderators tend to be immature and corrupt, some are not rocket scientists, and the problem is worse in certain types of forums where insecurity and hostility are higher than normal.

The ban will be helpful to me, because it takes a source of irritation away. I can’t say I feel damaged, even though I was wronged, because the people who wanted to chew on my ankles ended up blessing me by removing themselves from my life.

Every day, I pray for a group of people I know, and of course, I’m on the list. As part of the process, I pray the Lord’s Prayer. What does it say? “Lead us not into temptation.” I expound on it. I say, “Please keep us away from temptation and provocation, and help us not to tempt or provoke others.” Provocation is temptation. Bullies are some of the worst tempters around. They are great at infecting you with rage it’s hard to get rid of.

The ban is a direct answer to my prayers, and I am thrilled to get it. I love seeing a prayer answered. I hope similar things are happening to the people I pray for.

It’s surprising how many doors Satan will use to get into your life. Things that seem insignificant can be chinks that turn into major perimeter breaches. Being given a desk next to a rude coworker, receiving a credit card charge for something you didn’t buy, or being lied about on an Internet forum can open the door to anger and unforgiveness that come between you and God.

In about 2015, God gave me what I call “the little rapture.” He told me to get rid of my social media accounts. I had been dishonored and sassed online repeatedly by numerous people I knew from church. Christian “friends” were the main problem. They had no respect for older people, the educated, or people with good prayer lives. Trying to help them was like trying to clean up Somalia. I was punished for it.

When I got rid of my social media accounts, I missed certain people, but I had peace. I was insulated. God still had access to me, and so did good people I knew, but unrepentant, arrogant, impudent boneheads did not. I was no longer required or permitted to wrestle with them. It was, and is, very nice.

The forum thing is also like the rapture. It separates me from an endeavor that did me little good and had the potential to be infectious.

I truly look forward to the rapture. Imagine the peace of being away from protestors, road ragers, politicians, abusive relatives, sadistic employers, and so on. It will be magnificent. Everyone around you will be bursting with love and support, and they will agree with you about absolutely everything. The love you will share with every person in heaven will be much deeper and cleaner than the strongest love you share with anyone here on earth.

Forgiving people is a beautiful, powerful experience, but it will be much better to be around people who never, ever have to be forgiven.

It was annoying to receive the strange treatment I got at the forum, but I can be purged of annoyance, and the freedom from provocation is very, very pleasant.

MORE

I mentioned the coward who banned me from The High Road on another forum where one member of the super-secret THR forum jury is also a moderator, to let people know I might not be around later. I wanted to thank the people on the other forum for their help, in case I got banned there, too. My remarks were up for an hour or two, and then they were deleted with no explanation. My guess is that a ban will be handed down later today.

Unfortunately, when it comes to this site, all they can do is watch.

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Things keep developing. A moderator at the second forum sent me a message telling me to stop talking about the first forum. I told him I was actually glad someone was talking to me instead of sniping from cover. I said I would gladly comply, or he could ban me if he wanted, and there would be no hard feelings.

This is a moderator who lost an argument with me pretty badly a while back, and he’s a hothead who doesn’t like admitting error. I was polite, but his arguments were extremely poor and easily refuted, and he didn’t prevail or come close to prevailing. I expect to be banned because of that, not because I mentioned the other moderator.

Rice for the Woke

So what’s the story with coronavirus?

I am still not willing to go out on a limb and say there really is a spike in infections, because I can’t find information I trust. I’ve been lied to so much, I can’t draw conclusions. Nonetheless, it certainly looks like there is a spike.

I wrote about the dire predictions of a second wave. I didn’t see why there would be one. If nothing changes, why would a disease suddenly stop fading out and start spreading again? It didn’t make any sense, and no one I was able to dig up provided an explanation. Oddly, we are being told we’re not having a second wave, even though we are supposedly seeing much bigger numbers. Makes me wonder what a second wave is. It would be nice if someone told us.

Today I saw something that made sense. Researchers somewhere or other think covid has become more contagious. I believe they mentioned a factor of something like 17. Anyway, it was between 10 and 20. I’m not going to look it up.

One of the saving graces of covid has been its low speed of transmission. Doctors kept telling us it was much more contagious than the flu, even as it failed to infect nearly as many people. Now maybe that has changed.

Is it a good thing or a bad thing? Wish I knew.

The same people who have been lying to us or providing utterly inadequate true information are saying viruses tend to become less deadly as they spend more time among humans. The evolutionary basis, supposedly, is that a virus strain that leaves victims alive will have more carriers and therefore multiply faster than, and replace, other strains.

I don’t believe in evolution as the origin of species, but creatures do respond to selection forces, as the first person to breed dachshunds could tell you.

If we have more contagion, we may have lower severity. If that happens, we could end up with a whole lot of infected people who don’t do badly and become immune. I suppose we already have this to some degree, but maybe it would become true of the elderly and other people who are weak and in danger.

If it works this way, nice viruses that spread quickly will protect us from mean ones that spread slowly.

If covid is spreading more efficiently now due to mutations, then we have to hope it behaves better than the old covid once it infects. Otherwise, it will be a very bad year, barring divine intervention.

This disease doesn’t seem to care all that much about behavior. That’s strange. It blasted lockdown prisoners in New York more heavily than people who were out and about. It also seems unaffected by warm weather. Or is it? A slowdown caused by warm weather could be masked by an acceleration caused by increased contagion.

Will it continue to hit regions where God is unpopular harder than areas where Christianity is strong (assuming such areas really exist)? I hope so. Not because I want to see pagans and protestors get sick, but because it’s very important that repentance and prayer work to protect people. If we can’t get help from God, then there is nothing we can do except wait for the vaccine. If turning back to God works, then people who aren’t totally close-minded will be able to help themselves and get out from under the curse. This is the best outcome we could hope for. It would combine protection from disease with beautiful new relationships with the God who loves us.

I said covid wasn’t a plague back when it was infecting very slowly. If it hits flu numbers AND remains severe, it will be a real plague.

Was it ever severe, though? The overwhelming majority of people who die are weak to begin with. We let people in nursing homes get sick because we didn’t care about them, so we had a lot of deaths. The flu could do things like that, and it doesn’t scare us. What would the rate of severe cases be if covid were infecting people more randomly, as the flu does? What would the flu death rate be if we didn’t vaccinate people in nursing homes?

Maybe it’s not very severe now and it will become much less severe as it mutates and spreads more quickly.

Unfortunately, we could still end up with a lot more deaths in absolute terms. A wimpy disease that affects nearly everyone can kill more people than a terrible disease that isn’t common.

I still don’t know a single person who has had it. I know two people who have friends (one each) who have been symptomatic. I can’t tell you how many asymptomatic people my acquaintances know, because asymptomatic people fly under the radar.

What am I doing to protect myself? Still nothing, almost. I do disinfect my hands when I’m out and around. I stand far from people most of the time. That’s a great idea whether or not there’s an epidemic. That’s all I do. As I have said before, I now own several masks, but they’re to protect other people, not me. A cloth mask–based on what the propaganda machine is saying at the moment–will not help the wearer, but it may reduce the number of people he infects.

While I was at my shooting class this weekend, I was surrounded by hard core conservatives, many of whom were ex-military. Surprising, I know. None had a mask. When we conversed, they said a lot of hostile things about the paranoia. I saw a group of black people shooting at the range. That’s always encouraging. Some of them wore masks. That was about it.

I get on my face every day and worship God. I try to do it at least twice. Humility is very important when it comes to avoiding curses. So far, covid has been weak in Christian-heavy areas, but what if God was just holding the disease back to give his people time to straighten out? What if he hit leftists first in order to warn his own people and get them to pray and repent? If they’re not doing it, they may regret assuming they were invulnerable.

Humbling yourself before God is like washing your hands. You shouldn’t need a crisis to motivate you to do it. You should be doing it already.

My county is still doing very well. The official case number is up around 600. It jumped when testing became available to everyone. I don’t know if it’s spreading faster here. The number includes people who have recovered. It doesn’t mean 600 people are known to be sick. Most are well now. Our death toll is stuck at 10.

It was very interesting listening to the military guys over the weekend. They discussed the impossibility of standing out in any environment including female combat troops. Women can’t do what ground troops do, period. It’s just not possible. It never will be. Nonetheless, PC requires that female soldiers get prizes. The unofficial policy is to promote them and pretend they passed courses they failed. If a man does better than everyone else, a useless woman who can’t really fight will get the place he earned.

They talk about it openly. The people in charge of training will tell the women things like, “It doesn’t matter what you do. You’re all going to pass.” Then when they move on to harder tasks, they all wash out and quit.

One spoke of a prominent female solder who is now strongly against women going into combat. She pushed her way through the process, and because of the physical demands, she became sterile. I did not know physical exertion and stress could do that to women, but anyway, this lady is now pushing to keep women out of combat.

At the same time, these men agreed they had no problem with female pilots. One of them talked about a lady who annihilated all sorts of enemy personnel while doing close air support. He said she was fearless. He thought she was great.

They talked about Jessica Lynch, the private who was captured by Iraqis after her vehicle was attacked. One of the reasons women, apart from lack of ability, that women have been kept out of infantry roles is that we are afraid they will be raped when captured. This is exactly what happened to Jessica Lynch. The press denied it, as did some Iraqis, but she said it was true. She was sodomized. The scuttlebutt in the military is that they raped her anally twice a day, and that she is now incontinent. I don’t know whether they used body parts or objects. Interesting people, the Arabs.

I don’t know how they make female soldiers succeed in Israel. I assume they must face the truth and give them easier jobs. Are they actually going into combat? I don’t know. I know women in IDF uniforms are all over Israel, carrying guns. I know they’re not doing the hardest jobs men do, because it’s not possible.

Wikipedia says they have it easier than males. Big surprise.

It’s amazing how poisonous PC is. Imagine the morale of a soldier who has to sit in a chair and clap for an ineffective, deluded woman who got everything he earned, even while he anticipates the inevitable day when she will quit and some man who didn’t get a prize or promotion will have to start doing her job.

I decided what to do about my long range rifle hobby. I’m getting a Ruger Precision Rifle. This is the Glock of PRS. It’s common. It works well. It’s not too expensive. It will get you started. Done. I also have a very good scope on the way. I got it at a crazy discount. It was discontinued. I’m also getting a MIL-dot scope (cheaper) for the AR-15.

There is a 900-yard range within a reasonable distance. I don’t feel comfortable going above 200 yards in my pasture. I’m going to need a range bag and a shooting mat.

I have to decide where I want to go for more training. The people who taught me spun off from a group now located in Tennessee. I was very happy with my Florida teachers, but it would be nice to get away from palm trees. I could also go out west. I love it out there. I don’t know if I would want to live there. The environmentalists are a pain, and toxic, flaky California transplants are defiling some areas. It would be nice to shoot there, though.

Maybe it’s time to think about hiring a guide and doing some hunting. Life is short. If it’s short for me, it should be short for deer.

I’m glad I can think about trivial things instead of grave issues such as whether the people who put Uncle Ben on the rice bag were white supremacists. The company has an announcement on its web page, sniveling and groveling about their dismay at Uncle Ben’s stereotypical appearance. Hmm. A man in a suit and tie, with a giant company named after him. Yeah, that’s degrading.

The Internet says Uncle Ben was based on a very successful black farmer who grew excellent rice. Wow. What a terrible role model for black kids. They need an imaginary rice grower in a spandex suit complete with whiskers, from an imaginary African country with world-leading technology, which, for some reason, allows neighboring countries to live in ignorance, squalor, and violence.

An advanced country where the inhabitants select their leaders by letting them beat each other to death in ponds.

I know what to do about Uncle Ben and Aunt Jemima, but I hate to let my genius plan go public without charging. Oh, well. Here it is. Aunt Ben and Uncle Jemima. The trans food role models.

You put Aunt Ben in a dress, and you give Uncle Jemima a military uniform. It’s perfect. You would have to take the word “converted” off the Aunt Ben’s rice package, though, because Aunt Ben didn’t convert. She was born that way.

Send me a check, people. You know it’s the right thing to do.

Trump Rallies no Longer Permitted to Exist?

The MSM is beside itself. President Donald Trump had a rally in Oklahoma, and attendance was poor.

To read the MSM sites, you would think America had abandoned Donald Trump. But is that true? The surge of racist, envy-driven rioting has awakened a lot of people. So did coronavirus, which, oddly, sent huge numbers of Americans to gun shops to buy their first firearms. Republican voter registration is up. The Trump economy is still good. These are things that ought to make it hard for Democrats to get elected.

Is the surge in Republican registrations real, though? Some say Democrats with no integrity are registering as Republicans in order to weaken the party from within.

It makes sense. Republicans will not reciprocate, because they are less enthusiastic about lying and spying. You can see this in our nonexistent response to the left’s habit of attending conservative events. BLMtifers show up at conservative events to riot and disrupt. When leftists have their own events, we generally avoid them.

According to a well-known former Republican, the reason Trump’s rally didn’t do well is that leftist liars took a large number of tickets fraudulently. Left-leaner Steve Schmidt, who worked as a strategist for people like McCain and Schwarzenegger, brags that his daughter and her friends have hundreds of tickets. Legislator and former bartendress Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez also bragged about the fraud and said she was proud of the people who had done it.

It’s a sickening moment. People who hate Trump are too stupid and immature to understand that subverting democracy is a great evil.

Some time ago, I predicted that America would one day be ruled not by Democrats or Republicans but by people with smartphones. I said technology’s ability to coordinate people was getting so strong, we would reach a point where elections and laws would lose their power. Everyone can’t be in the police or the national guard. It’s impossible to control Americans when a sufficient number of them are united in real time by gadgets. It looks like we’ve just seen a big step toward true technocracy administered by complete idiots. The Beast is discovering his hands.

We seem to be looking at a future in which mobs will be mobilized much too quickly for the government to react. It will be facilitated by a cyberspace infrastructure we all subsidize willingly through wireless and Internet fees. It’s as though the technocratic government already has a taxation system, and we’re all paying.

The law doesn’t matter, and fairness certainly doesn’t. Justice is one of the main things leftists hate. As the electronically coordinated Beast becomes more aware of its power and better able to direct it, anyone who disagrees with its infantile doctrine will be in danger of deletion. They call what they’re doing “canceling,” but that’s just bad English from people who aren’t bright. Cancellation only applies to events. It’s really deletion. They want to remove our voices, our power, our wealth, and all traces of our existence from the earth. Why do you think they pull statues down? A statue is evidence that a person lived.

If Jesus delays his coming long enough, electronic government will happen. It’s inevitable. Conservatives, Christians, whites, Jews, and Asians from China, Korea, and Japan will have to wall themselves inside enclaves in order to survive. No one who disagrees with the Beast will be safe in the general population.

They’ll be able to touch us anywhere. They’ll be able to mob-assassinate individuals they don’t like. If you blog from a cabin in Idaho, they will be able to converge on your property, pull you out of your house, and torture you to death for Facebook. The government won’t be able to help you. They won’t see it coming, and they won’t have the manpower.

We’ve already seen how our government handles riots. In some cases, they break things up, but in many cities, they have chosen to retreat instead. They don’t do that out of principle. They do it because they have no choice. The rioters are stronger than the police and the National Guard.

In the future, we’ll see riots directed at individuals, far from cities. It will be like the torches-and-pitchforks scene in Frankenstein. The police will let the rioters kill, just as they do when rioters attack groups.

According to Jewish legend, mob crime was one of the things God hated about Sodom and Gomorrah. There is evidence of this in the Bible. When the angels visited Lot, a gay mob showed up and insisted on having the angels released to them so they could rape them all night. Jewish legend says the Sodomites ruined visiting merchants by showing up in mobs. Each person would take one item, so no individual committed a crime that, in and of itself, was serious. The effects on the victims were worse than grand theft.

Maybe God burned the Sodomites alive partly to prevent mobs from understanding their power. Maybe he didn’t want their knowledge to spread.

God deleted the Sodomites, leaving only a few survivors. Now their spiritual descendants want to delete the Jews, God’s children, and anyone who succeeds in amassing wealth. It’s like I’ve been saying for a long time: the story of creation is a story of genocidal war.

Control over commerce has moved into the cyber realm. The Bible says the Beast will prevent God’s children from buying and selling. The more stores we lose, and the more we buy through cyberspace, the closer we get to the day when it will be possible to exclude people from commerce arbitrarily and without legal repercussions. Even if we move to insular communities and somehow manage to protect ourselves for a while, how will we get things like oil and electricity? How will we repair the things we have? If we rely on generators, how will we get parts for them?

If we want to defend ourselves, how will we get bullets, brass, and smokeless powder? Those things don’t just jump out of the ground on prepper farms. They have to be shipped from areas the Beast will control.

The Beast is somewhat like Thanos, the villain in the recent Avenger movies. Thanos felt that half of the universe’s population need to disappear. He thought overpopulation was an existential threat, which is an odd thing to believe in a universe which appears to be infinite in size. His answer was to create a jeweled gauntlet that allowed him to snap his fingers and make them vanish. Marvel’s writers didn’t say how he expected to prevent the population from rebounding, which is a little ridiculous, but never mind that.

The left–the Beast–sees people like me the way a body sees viruses. They want us gone, permanently. They truly believe utopia is possible but for the presence and influence of people like me. They want to snap their fingers and delete us. The Beast just snapped his fingers in Tulsa.

Even if we have a temporary recovery from our insanity, the Beast will eventually get what he wants. It’s foolish to argue with prophesy. It’s absurd to try to prevent it from coming to pass.

I have the feeling that something that kept the world going has been taken away. It’s as though humanity had been shot with a poisoned arrow, and I’m watching it die. It doesn’t know it has been killed, but death is spreading through the body the way hemlock slowly extinguished Socrates.

All over the US, tattooed brats are celebrating their own doom.

I have a feeling similar to the feeling you get when you know you’re going to dump your girlfriend. You’re both smiling, she thinks things are fine, and you still spend time together, but you know it’s over, and you look forward to live without her. A lot of people think God is still doing everything he used to do to keep the world running, but I think he stopped a while ago. I think the world has been jilted.

I feel myself mourning. Not for me. For a country that should have had a better end, and for arrogant young boneheads who are sowing agony and eternal damnation into their own endless futures. I also feel bad for weak Christians who appease and compromise, thinking nothing has changed. They think people who see the end coming are cranks. They’re going to get a lot of nasty surprises.

I think people who are truly close to God will have great favor in the coming days. I think many of us will do well regardless of the Beast’s deletion campaign, and the favor God gives us will be used to heighten leftist hatred. It will drive people to sharpen knives and dream of plunging them into us. If you have toilet paper, good food, and a nice house, you will be a greedy Jew who fattened himself on Germany’s Weimar misery and then celebrated Pesach with matzohs made with the blood of Gentile babies. You will be a privileged white who wallows in money generated by the suffering of black slaves. You will be a Romanov who moved from palace to palace, drinking the blood of serfs.

You’ll be everyone the Beast’s slandering children can blame for their own self-inflicted unhappiness and failure. You’ll be whatever figure of fantasy they can conjure up.

Maybe I should get rid of my guns. I don’t plan to use them defensively. I study the subject, and I prepare for it by buying appropriate weapons and making good ammunition, but those are just intellectual exercises. It’s a hobby. I don’t want to hole up behind sandbags and shoot flash mob assassins. It would make me more like them, and it could keep me here with them a lot longer. It would increase my entanglement with them.

I can understand why Jesus and Paul didn’t resist the people who killed them. Think how tired they were, after dealing with human beings for so long. If you fight the Beast’s kids, you may prolong your exposure to them unnecessarily and delay your escape to heaven.

If I have guns, I might defend myself reflexively instead of accepting a welcome transfer to a better place.

I’ll keep them while I can. I enjoy shooting. As far as I can tell, God wants me to have them.

I don’t want to be here when they come for the guns or when they start imprisoning and killing us. I don’t want the pain of watching the end. I don’t want to see the pierced and the stained, hooting and dancing as they perpetrate atrocities on defenseless people who are better than they are. There is nothing I can do about it, though. I can’t leave the earth. I can only wait to be taken.

I wish I could do more before I go. I tried to get involved in ministry starting in around 2007, but I was rejected and back-burnered over and over. Churches and movements are crooked. They can tell if you’re going to mess things up for them. If you’re honest about greed and lies, or if you talk about the need for inner change, you’re the enemy. Satan runs churches just as he rules Antifa and Planned Parenthood.

If you’re tired of people bothering you and trying to involve you in things, start telling the truth. You’ll be unpopular in no time. I speak from experience.

Maybe I’ll still be used to get something done. For all I know, I may have to remain on earth for 30 more years. I would like to see people get physical healing miracles through me. I would like to see people delivered from compulsions and delusions. I would like to see them grow up and become one with God. Maybe I made these things impossible through my own bad behavior.

If Trump wins and we get a brief reprieve, it will have to be because God stood up for us and defeated the Beast. We just don’t have the earthly tools to beat his benighted flock.

Somehow, Racism Must be at the Bottom of It

CORRECTION AT BOTTOM.

Yesterday a cousin I barely know sent me a text to check on me. I believe she lives in Arizona. She said she and her husband had been helping Navajos. She said the epidemic had hit Navajos harder than other people.

That got me thinking. I already knew blacks were getting hit badly, and we all know older people in homes are more likely to be infected . People in homes represent something like 25% of all covid-related deaths. Today I learned that Latins and prisoners were also at higher risk. Now I’m learning that American Indians get infected more often. It’s not just Navajos. What’s the explanation?

The CDC, predictably, says racism explains the rate among blacks. That was easy, wasn’t it?

Lower incomes? The cause must be racism. More heart disease? Racism. Sickle cell anemia? Definitely racism. When the race card is in their hand, liberals don’t even look at the other cards.

Racism isn’t making people sick. When the CDC blames racism, it’s making a self-serving wild guess that also helps it virtue-signal.

If a certain group gets inferior healthcare, it should result in more deaths, not more infections. It wouldn’t make people more likely to be infected, but it would make them less likely to get adequate care once they were ill.

I can see why prisoners and residents of homes get infected. A home is just a prison for old people. Both types of facilities confine people on whom society places a low value. We put them in small spaces, and we don’t really try to keep them safe, because we don’t care about them. It should have been expected.

Minorities are different. They’re not confined together. Why are they getting sick?

I just read a story in which an official claims to have come up with the reason: racism. That surprised me. Okay, it didn’t. She says many Navajos don’t have running water or electricity, and the government has let them down by failing to provide good healthcare. But isn’t medical care what helps people who are already sick? I have never seen any source of information that suggested healthcare providers could slow the transmission of covid. On the contrary, they put that burden entirely on the public. Don’t leave your house. Wear a mask. Wash your hands. Doctors and nurses can’t help you do those things.

It’s as though supernatural forces had chosen to focus on certain nations and groups. I wonder if that’s the case.

If the disease were somehow being directed toward enemies of God, you would expect it to hit leftists harder. That has actually happened here in America. The Northeast has an extremely high disease rate. Liberal cities across America have high rates of infection. San Francisco is a notable exception, but California itself has a high rate. Hawaii hasn’t been hit hard by the virus, but it has been slammed economically because a quarantine order cut off money from the state’s major industry: tourism.

Blacks and Latins tend to be liberal. American Indians depend heavily on government assistance and generally support Democrats.

I can’t find information on infection rates among gays. Either it doesn’t exist, or it’s being concealed. They are overwhelmingly liberal, and they have an abysmal record of containing infections. They still have epidemics of venereal diseases the rest of us rarely contract.

American Jews tend to be atheists and supporters of Israel’s enemies. They have a high infection rate. This is true even of Orthodox Jews, who are more supportive of Israel. Israel itself has a low infection rate.

Republicans are more likely than leftists to be friends of God, and a May article from Reuters said the coronavirus rate in Democrat-controlled areas was triple the rate in conservative areas. Triple!

Remember how Democrats made fun of conservative counties in Florida when hurricanes came through? They said it was God’s punishment for voting for Bush. They distributed silly memes which distorted the truth, making it look like the storms were heavily concentrated in conservative areas. In fact, liberal areas got hit, too. Could it be that God is making his response?

In 2012, leftist extremist Antonio Villaraigosa presided over a voice vote at the Democratic Convention, supposedly after Barack Obama forced the issue. The Democrats had removed “God” from the text of their platform, along with text acknowledging Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. The delegates voted on restoring this language. They voted several times, clearly in the negative. Villaraigosa looked at other leaders for help, knowing he was in a pickle. Then he lied and said the motion had passed, and he was booed loudly. Is God thinking about that now?

In the Revelation, after releasing a horseman to conquer the earth for Jesus, God releases three other horsemen to torment the earth. The first horseman is disease, and the second is lack. When the second horseman is released, a voice says, “Two pounds of wheat for a day’s wages, and six pounds of barley for a day’s wage’s, and do not harm the oil and the wine.” The third horseman is murder. Like a lot of people, I have said he represents war, but that’s not what the Revelation says. It says he takes peace from the earth and makes people kill each other. That’s not necessarily war. Look at the BLMtifa riots.

We saw coronavirus, which is a disease, and then we saw lack. Now, with the riots, we are seeing an end to domestic peace. These things took place in the same order in which the horsemen were released.

The next thing the Revelation predicts for the earth is the fall of the stars of heaven. They will fall on the earth like untimely figs.

Stars are great spirits. Is God about to release powerful spirits on the earth to punish mankind?

The Revelation says 4 spirits will be ordered to prevent the wind from blowing on the earth, and before the real destruction starts, the people of God will be sealed in their foreheads.

It’s confusing. The story about the horsemen and ensuing disasters seems to describe things that can’t happen until the rapture has taken place. It speaks of people who have come to heaven through the tribulation, which is a post-rapture event.

Maybe what we’re seeing now is a little picture of that time. A preview. Maybe we will see something that looks like the tribulation, except that it will be relatively mild.

I’m very confident the tribulation can’t come before the rapture. God removed Noah’s family before the flood, and he removed Lot from Sodom. He separated the Hebrews from Egypt and protected them from the plagues. I don’t see why he would show us that pattern over and over and then abandon it.

If we’re seeing a preview, maybe we should expect violence and the cancel culture to rage for a while and then subside somewhat so people can repent and prepare.

Then, of course, it would all come back, except it would be worse, and it would not subside. It would just lead into things that were more unpleasant.

If God is involved in what’s happening, why is San Francisco doing so well? It’s an extremely vile place. It also has strong ties to China, and many sick people must have flown from San Francisco since the epidemic began.

When the USA was making plans to drop the atom bomb, our leaders spared certain cities from conventional bombing. They spared Hiroshima because they wanted a clean target for nuclear weapons. They wanted to be able to distinguish Little Boy’s effects from those of ordinary bombs. I wonder if San Francisco is being set up.

I don’t know what’s happening. I’m just trying to perceive the pattern.

I think Revelation’s admonition not to harm the oil and the wine is about God’s plan to protect people who belong to him. Oil represents the Holy Spirit, and wine represents the blood of Jesus, which confers salvation. Maybe people who are really on God’s side are receiving protection.

Why wouldn’t God protect old people from covid? Maybe old people who don’t belong to him are dying. Or maybe he’s sparing them the ordeal of being elderly and helpless during the tribulation. The antichrist’s people venerate the young and excoriate the old. They have no respect for the wisdom of older people, and they blame them for the world’s problems. Who knows what they’ll do to older people when God’s hand isn’t here to restrain them?

We’ve already seen them mistreating the elderly in videos from the riots.

It makes sense that prisoners wouldn’t do well in a world facing God’s wrath. Prisons house the worst, least godly people in society.

The other day while I was in prayer, I felt he said, “I will surround you like a shield.” I hope so. He has done that so far. I hope other people will get as close to him as they can and avoid the pain of his anger.

CORRECTION

I made a strange error in this post. Somehow, I got the order of the horsemen of the apocalypse mixed up. It goes like this: conquest, violence, lack, and death.

I thought the last three horsemen were death (disease and so on), lack, and violence, in that order. We have had a pandemic, shortages, and riots. I thought it might mean something that the same things were taking place in the same order.

Of course, we had a bunch of BLM and Antifa riots before the current wave of opportunistic crime by filthy criminals masquerading as activists, but I don’t recall any shortages.

It’s strange that I got this wrong, because it was right in front of me.

Learn from my Bad Example

God changes lives with supernatural revelation, and he has been very generous with me lately. He gave me a compound revelation this month involving my attitude.

He showed me that I need to be much more reluctant to complain. I’ve had a lot of bad experiences in cultures where people were pressured to bury their heads in the sand, and I have come to love exposing the truth, but I haven’t done a good job of separating exposure from pointless bellyaching or from reviling or ridiculing. Revealing the truth is very important, and it’s very important to do it in situations where it will destroy your popularity, but you can’t let yourself obsess on what is wrong or let it become an excuse for giving up too early.

It’s good to say, “I hear a noise coming from my front end, so I need to have my bearings checked.” It’s bad to say, “I hate this car. It’s always letting me down. Why can’t I ever have a car that works right? Other people have good cars. I can’t believe this is happening again. I’m so sick of this thing.”

You have to appreciate what you have and what happens to you.

Here is what God has shown me: you have to have what I call an immigrant/orphan/warrior attitude.

Consider immigrants who move the USA. I know many of them are curses to us. Many come filled with hostility toward us. Some perform acts of terrorism. Some expect us to mold ourselves to their toxic, backward cultures, which they themselves fled, instead of adapting themselves to our superior culture. Many come here out of pure selfishness. All those things are true, but I’m not suggesting we be like them in those ways. I’m suggesting we be like them in our appreciation of what we have.

I read an anecdote about a visitor from Russia. This person kept telling her hosts how wonderful the USSR was and how inferior America was. She could not shut up. Then there was a trip to an American supermarket in the winter. The critic looked around at the packed shelves and the fresh fruit and vegetables and started to cry.

That individual appreciated a blessing I have enjoyed every single day I’ve spent in America. I, on the other hand, feel deprived when my local store doesn’t have the exact cut of choice beef I want to buy or the right brand and variety of tomatoes for pizza.

Consider orphans. Many are hard to place, so they get stuck in orphanages for years, or they go from one foster family to another. They dream of having their own homes, with siblings and parents. The rest of us don’t feel much gratitude for situations older orphans pray for every night.

My family did me a lot of harm, but at least I had a family. My bills were paid, and we never had to live in a shelter or even an apartment. My mother was wonderful. I knew my grandparents. I knew my aunts, uncles, and cousins. Both of my parents left me inheritances. My family damaged me more than most white American families, but it also did me a great deal of good.

Think about warriors. When a warrior in a superior force goes into battle, and enemy soldiers start shooting at his position, he doesn’t say, “I am cursed. These people should have given up as soon as they saw us, but they’re trying to kill us anyway, and now I have to go through a miserable battle.” A warrior expects conflict. It’s what he trains for. He sees it as a normal obstacle he has to pass in order to get to victory.

The other day I bought a new stove. My old primitive stove was very hard to clean, and it only had 4 burners. I was reluctant to cook because it was so difficult to get the stove back in order afterward. I found a great induction cooktop at Home Depot for something like 45% off. I measured the existing stove, and while I couldn’t get at the cutout in the stone counter to measure it, I made a reasonable assumption: because appliances are standardized, a 36″ induction cooktop would fit in a cutout made for a 36″ conventional cooktop.

I got the old cooktop out, and I found that the cutout was 3/8″ too short. I had expected the switch to take about 30 minutes. Now I was looking at hiring someone or buying unfamiliar tools, making the new cuts myself, and enduring a long, messy job. I also learned that the manufacturer had not included some brackets for supporting the new stove in a stone counter. I’m talking about two small pieces of steel plus a tube of glue. Should cost about 10 bucks. In fact, these things should be included in the package with a stove that retails for $1800. I looked online, and the price for the “kit” was about $135.

I felt defeated, and that’s ridiculous. I knew it was ridiculous. I apologized to God even while I was feeling defeated. I rejected the feeling.

I said I knew the stove was going to fit. Victory was already mine. No doubt about it. I wasn’t experiencing defeat. I was just having a setback. I was blessed with an $1800 stove for which I paid about $1000, I didn’t have to use cash to get it, I got free delivery, I didn’t need help removing the old stove, I was sufficiently handy to know I was going to be able to get the cutout enlarged, I was putting it in a beautiful kitchen in a magnificent house in an extremely pleasant county in the United States of America…what possible excuse was there for feeling cursed and defeated?

I didn’t have a warrior attitude. I had a snowflake attitude. An Antifa/BLM attitude. I knew it. I hated it. I refused to continue in it. I asked God to help me.

I knew that on the other side of the work and the mess, a fantastic new stove was waiting. The new stove has a top which is a continuous sheet of glass. Cleaning it after a messy cooking session takes less than 5 minutes. It has 5 burners, one of which is gigantic, which is a nice feature. It’s much, much faster than gas, conventional, or radiant cooking. It won’t work with certain cookware, but I can get new things, and I have additional portable burners anyway. When I’m not cooking, the surface functions as temporary counter space.

God was blessing me like crazy. Feeling defeated and wronged was not just incorrect; it was offensive.

I made a terrible mess when I installed the cooktop, but a tradesman would have made the exact same mess. Instead of getting a new stove for $1800 plus maybe $500 in installation costs, I got it for $1000, no cash left my bank account, and I learned a lot.

Along the way, I found out I didn’t need the expensive tube of glue and sheet metal brackets.

The Bible promises us victory over and over. It doesn’t say we’ll never have to fight or that things will go exactly the way we want. Victory is not the same thing as lack of conflict. When we win wars decisively, we still have to fight, and we still lose people. No one with any common sense says that makes us losers.

Sometimes God has shown me what it’s like to deal with me and my bad attitude. I have been in situations where I’ve been in charge of people who were doing various things. If you have employees, or if you have hired people temporarily, you’ve been there. I have dealt with people who whined and complained. I have dealt with people who stood around conversing instead of working, while I, the one who was paying them, worked. I’ve dealt with people who were so slow and lazy, they were literally much slower than I would have been had I done things alone. I’ve experienced resentment from people I was paying. I felt I was being punished for giving them money.

When I was slaving away as an armorbearer at Miami’s Trinity Church, I worked a couple of Richie Wilkerson’s Rendezvous meetings at the Fillmore Theater on Miami Beach. People volunteered to help the armorbearers. We were there mostly to manage crowds. I had a lot of experience, and I was in a position of authority. A young black man was part of my team.

I set things up the way they were supposed to be, in cooperation with the other armorbearers. Then this young man decided he was in charge. He started moving cordons and changing the way traffic flowed. He started telling me how things were going to be set up, as though I had volunteered to work for him!

His ideas were inept and would have caused problems. I immediately moved things back, and I told him I was running the team. I said if he wanted to help us, he had to follow orders.

He got so mad, he walked off and quit. He could not understand that he we were not equals on the team. It was impossible to explain this concept, which 98% of human beings chosen at random would have understood without being told. No one on the team could figure him out.

I never interacted with him after that. I forgot his face. I don’t know what happened to him. Another young man from the same area had also volunteered, and he could not have been more helpful. He kept making sure he was doing what the team wanted him to do. He never complained. After the conference was over, we would always wave at each other in church and converse a little.

I’ve dealt with a lot of people who could not submit, honor, or appreciate. I have often shown similar attitudes toward God.

If someone is willing to pay you and advise you when he has other options, and you make him miserable, he’s going to limit what he does for you. It’s just not worth it when you have to be treated like you’re imposing. On the other hand, when people have a good attitude, it makes you grateful. It makes you want to do more for them and to be more closely involved with them.

Surely we punish God when we aren’t grateful and respectful, and surely he responds by holding back our blessings. Surely he must increase our blessings when we have better attitudes. I believe there are things I wanted which God kept from me, and now I believe he will provide those things because I will reward him instead of making him wish he had a better son to work with.

Here is something Jesus said:

A certain man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard; and he came and sought fruit thereon, and found none.

Then said he unto the dresser of his vineyard, Behold, these three years I come seeking fruit on this fig tree, and find none: cut it down; why cumbereth it the ground?

And he answering said unto him, Lord, let it alone this year also, till I shall dig about it, and dung it:

And if it bear fruit, well: and if not, then after that thou shalt cut it down.

When you’re push-starting a car, you don’t push forever. If it doesn’t start to run eventually, you quit pushing.

Every day, I need to see my blessings as though they were new. When I get in my car, I should feel as though I were driving a new car off a dealer’s lot. When I sit in my air-conditioned house, I should feel as though I had been living in a tent in insufferable heat all my life. When I eat and drink, I should feel as though I had just been rescued from a month in a lifeboat. I live in a world where billions of people don’t have the good things I have. I could easily be replaced with someone more grateful.

That’s what happened to the Jews. I’m not talking about replacement theology. They are still God’s chosen. But if you read the Bible, you will see that they got in trouble over and over for taking God’s blessings for granted, and in the end, most didn’t appreciate the greatest blessing of all: their messiah. So most of what he offered went to Gentiles. Now, of course, most Christians take God and his blessings for granted, so we’re in the same boat.

I believe this revelation is extremely powerful and that it will bring me things I couldn’t get before. I pray, and I have faith, but faith isn’t everything. How effective can faith for a result be if God knows you’re going to make him wish he had never granted your request?

I’m astounded when I look back and think of all the blessings I’ve spat on and ruined. My education is an example. I barely did anything in high school, but one of the world’s best universities sent me a letter, asking me to apply. When I was accepted and my parents paid my tuition and expenses without hesitation, I didn’t appreciate it at all. I behaved like a character from the movie Animal House. I thought the administration was my enemy. I thought drunkenness was cool. I made trouble.

I wish I could go through high school again. I went to the best school in Florida. I could have focused on math and science. I could have gone to MIT or Caltech. Even Columbia, the school that accepted me, was a top-notch STEM school.

I know I couldn’t have done much better as things were. I didn’t know God, and I truly was cursed. My family was a constant source of discouragement and pain. Things didn’t go well even when I did things right. But if I had known God and had a better attitude, I would have excelled.

I know people who were thrilled to be able to go to community college. I know people who were thrilled to go to state universities. I know people who have student loans. I had a full ride at one of the best Ivy League schools, and I resented it!

I can’t complain about mowing the yard. Most people don’t have a yard. I can’t complain about doing bookkeeping and taxes. Most people have no money to manage. It’s amazing to me that I ever complained about cleaning up after my pets. Who chose to buy them? How many people are there who would love to have two beautiful exotic birds who love them?

I have to remember that regardless of what happens while I’m here on Earth, I have victory. Under the worst circumstances imaginable, which are nothing like my actual circumstances, I would still be saved when I died. The rejection and problems I face here are like the heckling and reviling Cubans used to experience when they chose to move to America. People would spit on them and call them worms. The speed bumps I deal with are temporary and unimportant, and they precede blessings that will make me forget them.

I think my new outlook will improve my life tremendously, so I want to tell other people who make the same mistakes I did. I hope someone else can make the change earlier and have a better life than the one I’ve had.

Are we Done?

It’s surprising how hard it is to find a simple timeline of the end times, including the rapture. I am Googling today, and I haven’t found it yet.

The rapture is a real event. It has been foreshadowed clearly more than once. Noah and his family were lifted up above those who hated God. Lot was drawn out of Sodom before it was destroyed. Moses and the Hebrews were protected from the plagues of Egypt, and they were moved to a place of safety while their enemies drowned behind them. God does similar things over and over, and he expects us to notice and understand that there is a pattern he follows.

The Lord and his prophets gave us information so we would have a general idea when to expect the rapture. Certain events have to occur first. I’m trying to find out what those events were. The world is descending rapidly into unprecedented turmoil, and it seems to me, for various reasons, that it will be unsustainable. It won’t be like past challenges that left mankind standing. Because things are going so badly, and for other reasons, I’m wondering if the rapture is closer than we thought.

The end of the current age will lead into the tribulation, which will be a time of terrible suffering on earth. It will be as though the upper boundary of hell had been raised above the surface of the earth. Christians who are really on board with the Holy Spirit won’t be here to see it. Like Noah’s family, we will be extracted in advance.

Unfortunately, we will still suffer, because Jesus made it plain that we would be here long enough to experience terrible persecution. We will be murdered and imprisoned. We will be hated. We already see these things happening. It’s nothing new in the Muslim world, and it’s spreading to the US. We’re not being murdered for our faith very often, but we are being driven out of jobs and we are facing increased ostracism and reviling. Anti-Christian sentiment is now mainstream.

Powerful Christians suffer less. I can tell you that right now. I’ve seen it. God puts bubbles around people he has chosen. Weak Christians have less help and protection. They don’t listen, and their prayer lives are not good. They leave doors open.

My understanding of the way things work is that even a powerful Christian may be martyred, but that such a person’s suffering will ordinarily come toward the end of his life, over a relatively brief period. I don’t believe strong Christians can live in defeat for decades on end. It’s not consistent with God’s promises.

Paul suffered a lot, but he seems to have been an unusual case, and my feeling about Paul is that he didn’t always do the right thing. He appears to have been an angry, argumentative person, and he may have gotten ahead of the Holy Spirit and exposed himself to danger unnecessarily from time to time. We know he had a problem with pride, because he said God allowed him to have a thorn in his flesh to prevent him from being overly exalted.

We tend to think of great Biblical figures as perfect role models, but that’s not true. They were flawed.

The Bible says “the son of perdition” must be revealed before the rapture. Does that mean we can’t go until a single identifiable person becomes famous as the Antichrist?

Maybe not.

First of all, even if there is a single man who will be called the Antichrist, he’s just part of a bigger entity. Satan has a body of people who are controlled through their flesh because they aren’t Spirit-led. Satan, who is the real Beast, speaks and acts through this body. The voice of the mobs we are seeing now is the voice of the Beast, even though we don’t know of one man who can conclusively be called the Antichrist.

Second, the Bible says the son of perdition will be “revealed.” Does that mean we have to know the name and face of one person? God has shown me that the Beast is here, in the mob movement. Doesn’t that mean the son of perdition has been revealed? I got it by revelation. Revelation is what happens when something is revealed.

It’s interesting that Paul used the term “son of perdition,” because Judas was called “the son of perdition” in John 17:12.

Judas was a disciple. He probably believed Jesus was God. A lot of Christians think the Antichrist will be a Muslim or some kind of sorcerer, but the term “antichrist” actually comes from the discussion of Christians who turned against God because they didn’t listen to the Holy Spirit. The Bible talks of antichrists who “went out from us.”

Some people believe Judas did not want Jesus to be killed. They think he tried to manipulate him into overthrowing the Romans and defeating their puppets in the temple. The idea is that if Jesus were in trouble, he would have to use his power to crush the people who were against him. This may well be true.

God showed me that his human enemies don’t promote evil while calling it evil. They call it good. I use the term “alternative righteousness” to describe it. They claim they’re doing good when they promote homosexuality or they burn cities or martyr Christians for Islam.

Christians are supposed to do what the Holy Spirit tells them, and they are supposed to rely on God’s power. Instead, most of us strive in our flesh, doing what we wrongly think is right. We exalt ourselves. We brag about how hard we work for God and how much we suffer for him. We feel that our accomplishments, which are worthless, are our own, and that we should be admired. We rely on natural tools instead of supernatural power.

Jesus had a plan, and that plan was to be crucified in order to crush Satan. The Holy Spirit gave him this plan. Judas didn’t care about the Holy Spirit. He was a natural man, like a pope or a rabbi. It may well be that by betraying Jesus, he wanted to force him to advance the Judas plan. Get rid of the Romans, get rid of the priests, put the Jews back on top, and make Judas a wealthy and powerful ruler.

It would certainly explain why a man who knew Jesus was powerful would sell him to the priests.

Most Christians rely on natural tools, and they try to advance their own plans, so they are children of perdition and antichrists. Many, many of the rioters who are abusing us now identify strongly as Christians.

If the mob is part of the body of the Beast, and at least one Christian is saying so publicly, hasn’t the man of perdition been revealed?

In the Bible, “man” doesn’t necessarily mean one person. Paul used the term to describe the entire body of Christ. Look at Ephesians.

For he is our peace, who hath made both one, and hath broken down the middle wall of partition between us;
Having abolished in his flesh the enmity, even the law of commandments contained in ordinances; for to make in himself of twain one new man, so making peace;
And that he might reconcile both unto God in one body by the cross, having slain the enmity thereby:
And came and preached peace to you which were afar off, and to them that were nigh.

“In himself” appears to mean “in the body of Christ,” or, to state the same thing another way, “in the group of people who are led by the Holy Spirit.”

If the Christ is one man and many people, how can the Antichrist not be one man and many people?

There is always symmetry in the supernatural.

Smug Christians like to sneer and say, “People have always said the end is near.” They’re not good at math or analyzing current trends. They’re asleep because they like to sleep. There are nearly 8 billion human beings now. The earth has a limited capacity, and we are filling it up. That has never happened before. Technology is destroying free will, and that has never been possible until now. Without free will, there is no reason for the current age to continue. Free will is essential in order for God’s work of separating the righteous from the wicked to continue.

I keep having the feeling that what I do in the natural doesn’t matter now. I keep feeling that I don’t have to take care of my earthly responsibilities because something is going to happen to make them unimportant. If you knew your house were going to burn down, you wouldn’t paint the kitchen or fix the roof. I keep wondering if the end, or at least my own end, is very close.

The mobs are divided. We have a violent, murderous mob on the left, and we have a carnal, civilized mob playing defense on the right. One mob behaves like a pack of animals, hurting even those who make it clear they side with them. The other mob thinks hard work, AR15’s, and voter turnout will save them. Neither mob hears from the Holy Spirit, who always brings agreement between those who listen to him. The Holy Spirit is the one who creates one new man.

People identify with colors, parties, and nations. We are supposed to identify with the body of Christ. We divide ourselves in accordance with trivial distinctions, and we don’t seek the only unity that works.

Patriotism has some usefulness, but I can’t see myself primarily as an American. I can’t think of myself as someone who has obligations to the white race, either. I can’t have conflicts. God has to be number one. Not many people feel this way. Right now in America, most black people are taught that their earthly race has to be the most important, most controlling thing in their lives, and that they have to believe what their leftist leaders tell them. Blacks are just like Jews. They have no freedom of thought or allegiance.

I’m not black or Jewish. I can belong to any political party I choose. I can believe Jesus is the Messiah without having my family and friends tell me I’m a Nazi. I can associate with most gentiles without worrying that I’ll be reviled for thinking for myself. If I were black or Jewish, I wouldn’t have any of this freedom. Blacks and Jews live in straitjackets, and so do many Hispanics.

Non-black, non-Hispanic gentiles have much more freedom than anyone else, but it isn’t helpful if we align ourselves primarily with anything other than the body of Christ.

Jesus said the end times would be marked by betrayal. How can our friends betray us if Christians aren’t vulnerable to delusion? If our enemies are against us, it’s not betrayal. It has to be people we loved and trusted. It has to mean weak Christians. I wonder how many black friends I’ll lose. I’ve already lost family members, and I have certainly been betrayed by preachers and the cult members who follow them.

All of us have to be ready to put the body of Christ before loved ones. You have to be prepared to drop people so they won’t pull you down and drown you.

I feel grief for America. I’m not unhappy, but I feel cut off from my country. Should I call it my former country? I feel separated from the people who will not make it in the rapture. There is nothing I can do for them except talk and pray. In the end, they have to save themselves by giving in. I can’t force that, and God won’t.

I am concerned that the grief I feel may actually be the grief of the Holy Spirit, warning me about the future. If so, then it’s well-founded, and things are worse than I thought.

Is there any way the rapture could be far off? Our population’s growth would have to stop. There could be a real plague, unlike coronavirus, but it seems improbable. We are very good at dealing with infectious diseases now, even when we can’t cure them. We might develop strict laws regarding who gets to reproduce. Forced abortion might make a move from China to the rest of the globe.

What about technology? Can we slow down the destruction of free will and privacy? I think this is impossible. Technology never goes backward. It’s like a fatal viral disease. Once you’ve got it, you can’t get rid of it or make it stop progressing.

Things aren’t proceeding linearly. They’re getting worse exponentially. Our decline is accelerating. It’s not a steady thing. How much faster will it be moving in a year?

Part of me hopes the rapture will come ASAP. The world is looking more and more like a dish of moldy food with a few bits that can still be cut out and eaten. Participating it is becoming very unrewarding. It would be nice to move on to something better. But the rapture will be followed by horrible suffering, and people I know will be here to feel it. The Bible says receiving salvation during the tribulation will be a terrible experience. It would be nicer for those who are not ready if they had more time under the current rules.

Let’s see where we are a month from now. If our cities still look like Mogadishu, it may be a sign that the end is very close.

Pro Tip: Wear Shoes

It’s a beautiful overcast day, and I feel like blogging, so I think I’ll tell on myself. Here goes.

I have a burglar alarm. It’s annoying sometimes. This weekend it annoyed me by beeping over and over.

I had a half-hour power outage. The burglar alarm has a UPS-type battery for backup power. When the battery is low, the system beeps. It appears that the outage drained the battery and the system was not able to charge it enough to make the beeping stop. The battery is from March of 2017, so it’s a little bit past the halfway point of its expected lifespan.

The control panel is not a good product. It’s not intuitive. For example, before you enter the security code to turn things on and off, you have to enter a “1.” This should be printed on the panel in big letters in case a friend has to turn the alarm off while you’re away. It has tiny instructions printed on it, and they don’t tell you very much. It has directions for turning off the annoying beep, which it spins as a “chime.” These directions do not work when the power goes out. When you turn off the CHIME, the battery beep does not stop. Because when your battery goes bad, or the system simply isn’t man enough to charge a good battery, you need to be reminded every 90 seconds, forever. Especially when you’re trying to sleep.

I can’t get burglar alarm batteries where I live. I have to order such things, or I suppose I could pay the alarm company $150 to install a $20 product. I ordered a battery with a larger capacity than the old one, and then I thought about killing the beeps.

I did not call the alarm company. I figured it was impossible to kill the beeps using the panel. After all, the CHIME shutoff did nothing.

I decided to try two things. First, I got out an old computer UPS I wasn’t using, and I plugged it in, hoping it would charge its own battery to the point where I could substitute it for the alarm battery. After a few hours, it charged up, but when I installed it, the beeps continued.

My next genius move was to open up the alarm panel and look for the buzzer, which really is a buzzer, not a chime. I think. It certainly looks like what electronics people call a buzzer. My plan was to take my soldering iron, remove the buzzer, and reinstall it when the battery arrived. Or not. You don’t really need a buzzer on your burglar alarm panel. It has a text display, and it also communicates through my phone. I guess the buzzer is nice if you enjoy hearing the CHIME go off over and over as doors are opened and closed. I don’t have much use for that feature.

I plugged my soldering iron in and turned it on. There is no furniture near the panel, so I left the iron on the floor. I wasn’t going to step on it. Who would step on a hot soldering iron, knowing it’s turned on?

While I was doing all this, I decided to call the alarm company. They might conceivably be of use. I talked to some lady who said she would refer me to their technical people and have them call me.

While I was talking to her, I felt a terrible pain in my right little toe. I was standing on the soldering iron.

It’s not that easy to have a calm conversation on the phone when you’ve just stood on a soldering iron, but I found that it could be done. What really bothered me was the smell of burning flesh which filled the area after I moved my foot. Apparently I left a significant amount of myself on the soldering iron.

It was very late, and I figured I would hear from these people the next day, so I heated the buzzer’s lugs and started pulling. One slid out of the PCB just fine, and then the buzzer fell apart. Now I had a permanently deleted buzzer.

Immediately, the phone rang. It was the tech guy. I told him my problem, and he said, “Press the star key.”

Mmmf.

I put the panel back together and went to bed. Before turning out the lights, I hit Ebay and ordered a package of buzzers for $3.65. The pain went away after about half an hour, thank goodness. Falling asleep was not a problem. Too bad it happened pretty close to 2 a.m.

I don’t know if pressing the star key actually works, but I suppose I should have called and tried before mutilating my alarm panel.

For all I know, the panel has been straining to beep all night with its larynx ripped out. I sort of hope so. I like the picture of an annoying adversary screaming at me silently, features contorted with desperation, while I sleep in peace.

Later this week, my buzzers and battery will arrive, and maybe this will be the end of my problems.

Why didn’t I just look up my panel’s manual? You’re so smart. You think you know everything, don’t you? Get ready for some humble pie.

My panel has no manufacturer’s markings on it, inside or out. Seriously. It has a logo sort of a thing consisting of symbols. It’s sort of like the thing Prince used as his name for a while. You can’t search for it on Google.

Today, by sheer luck, I found out what type of panel it is, and I downloaded a manual. Guess what? There are no instructions for turning off the battery beep. Totally serious. What kind of sick mind writes a manual like that?

I can see him now. Some nerd with 42 pens in his shirt pocket, sneering that if people don’t feel like buying spare batteries, they don’t deserve to sleep.

I should have had a spare battery on hand. Actually, I did, if you count the UPS. Not sure the UPS battery is up to the task, though. Can’t tell without a buzzer. BWAH HA HA HA HA.

Should I get a spare battery now? Don’t know. The new battery should last at least three years. Will I still be here?

I’m thinking I should hook the battery up to a car charger the next time this happens. I think the internal charger in the alarm box is junk. It works off a tiny wall wart. I’ll bet I would have to put up with a solid day of beeping even if I had a good battery, because it would take that long to recharge.

I also think I should put a UPS on the wall wart. If the system never knows there’s a power outage, it won’t be aware it has an excuse to bother me. I’m not sure why the internal battery doesn’t provide complete backup. Maybe it’s deliberate. Maybe the company wants me to know the power is out, even if the alarm is working. I don’t see how that helps me, though.

If I add a UPS, the system won’t know there’s an outage for a considerable length of time, and that will give the power company time to fix things before the system finds out. Most outages are short. They wouldn’t challenge a UPS. As for long outages, the UPS will run down, and then I’m no worse off than I was with a depleted internal battery. It will just take a little longer to get there.

Maybe I should get a motorcycle gel battery to replace the internal battery. It seems stupid to protect your house with an expensive system when you’re going to back it up with a $20 Chinese lead-acid battery that won’t keep a PC running for 20 minutes.

I guess a gel battery would need a different charger. Okay, maybe I should get a lead-acid motorcycle battery. Still better than what I have.

In other news, I got another useful revelation.

One of the tough things about serving God is getting humility right. Even when you credit God with the good things that happen in your life, you can do it in a way that draws admiration to you. I’ve noticed that preachers who heal people get a lot of thanks and admiration, and they don’t do a great job of deflecting it.

You can say, “God did this for you,” but that doesn’t capture the truth of what happened. You can’t help but sound a little condescending.

God showed me this: don’t just say, “God did this.” Say, “My master did this.” Call God “my master” whenever possible. Don’t say “the master.” It’s not personal enough. The feel isn’t the same.

I got ahold of this, and I started telling God he was my master. Try it. It feels wonderful. It makes our relationship seem like what it actually is. I feel tension drain out of me when I say it. It’s as if burdens are sliding off of me.

God has to receive proper credit in order for his power to flow through us. It can’t just be words and thoughts. It has to be in our hearts. Using the proper language can change your heart and open you up so he can flow.

You have to try it in order to understand how helpful it is.

God’s glory is a problem if it starts to stick to you. When you’re close to him, it’s easy to end up in a situation where you are overly exalted. It appears that this is what happened to Satan. You need to be able to reflect the glory and prevent it from harming you.

The Bible makes it clear that God does his most impressive work when others are standing aside. When you’re striving, the credit for what you do is yours. God won’t take credit for it or get heavily involved. When he gets the glory, he does the work.

I can’t say enough about it. Give it a try and see how it works out.

Beautiful, Beautiful Data

I got to try out a new product today: the Competition Electronics Prochrono DLX chronograph. It connects to phones via Bluetooth and creates files of shooting data.

My old chronograph is a Master Chrony F-1, and I probably got it in 2009. Even back then, it was not advanced for its time. Smartphones and PC’s existed, and the F-1 had no real means of connecting to them. It didn’t do much of anything.

When I use the F-1, I have to stop after every shot, put my gun down, and write down the velocity. A lot of the time, the F-1 fails to take a reading. That’s annoying when you only have 5 test rounds.

The people who make the F-1 solicit email orders on their website, but they don’t seem to respond to them. They have no electronic shopping cart, and that’s unbelievable. They sell parts, but getting them is a hassle.

The F-1 has light diffusers cobbled together from three pieces of plastic. It has diffuser supports that telescope into each other so you can separate them and put them in the Chrony’s small box. The Prochrono has one-piece diffusers and one-piece support rods.

I’m making .45 rounds out of the pile of free bullets I got from Hornady when I bought my press. It has been hard to get good information for loading the cartridges. I want a velocity of between 850 and 900 fps, and I want to use Unique or Accurate No.7 powder. I already have both, and I have more Unique than I need. Maybe. Do you ever have more powder than you need?

I found an article from the Handloader Ammunition Reloading Journal, listing a bunch of loads. The author went up to 6.8 grains of Unique with an OAL of 1.205″, which is a lot shorter than Hornady’s recommendation. At 6.8, he got 949 fps. I figured I would try 6.5 to be safe.

I set the Prochrono up in the pasture and fired away. I had the phone app running. It allowed me to set up a special list for the load I had created. I was able to enter the type of bullet, the case, primer, charge weight, OAL, and whatever else I wanted.

When I started firing, I heard a lady telling me how fast the rounds were flying. The app was announcing the velocities! That was wonderful. I didn’t have to stop to write things down or check the screen.

When I was done, I had the following info:

45 ACP XTP 230 6.5 Unique Digital Link
Test rounds for defensive purposes. Goal 875 fps.
Temperature: 93° F
Pressure: 30 in Hg
Bullet Weight: 230.0
Power Factor Average: 218
Power Factor Low: 218
Power Factor High: 219
Number of Shots: 5
Minimum: 948
Maximum: 956
Spread: 8
Average: 951
Standard Deviation: 3
Custom Attributes
OAL 1.205
Brass Starline new
Powder Unique 6.5
Primer WLP
Bullet Hornady XTP
# Velocity Ft/lbs Power Factor Date
5 952 462.82 218 5/23/20 5:07 PM
4 948 458.93 218 5/23/20 5:07 PM
3 951 461.84 218 5/23/20 5:07 PM
2 950 460.87 218 5/23/20 5:06 PM
1 956 466.71 219 5/23/20 5:06 PM

To me, that’s incredible. Writing that up myself would take forever. I was able to email it to myself as a PDF.

The velocities were way higher than I expected, and the cases bulged. I found three of them, and they had creases running across them where the chamber restrained them. Not what I wanted.

I don’t know why my rounds were so much faster than the ones in the magazine.

The rounds were pleasant to shoot, and the gun didn’t seem to mind at all. It’s too bad I can’t use this load.

The velocities were incredibly consistent. I am guessing this has something to do with the way I’ve been cleaning my powder measure. I’m using an RCBS beam scale which is very accurate. Today I set it up using test weights, so not only are my charges consistent, they should be very close to the number I want.

People say charge weight doesn’t affect accuracy much. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but I know my .45 handloads have always been more accurate than factory ammo. Is it the Unique, or is it charge consistency? Can’t say, but there is no conceivable reason to want your charges to be inconsistent, so I’m glad mine are not.

I moved to 6.2 grains and started over.

45 ACP XTP 230 6.2 Unique Digital Link
Test rounds for defensive purposes. Goal 875 fps.
Temperature: N/A
Pressure: N/A
Bullet Weight: 230.0
Power Factor Average: 207
Power Factor Low: 202
Power Factor High: 209
Number of Shots: 5
Minimum: 882
Maximum: 910
Spread: 28
Average: 902
Standard Deviation: 10
Custom Attributes
OAL 1.205
Brass Starline new
Powder Unique 6.2
Primer WLP
Bullet Hornady XTP
# Velocity Ft/lbs Power Factor Date
5 882 397.26 202 5/23/20 6:18 PM
4 905 418.25 208 5/23/20 6:17 PM
3 910 422.88 209 5/23/20 6:17 PM
2 906 419.17 208 5/23/20 6:17 PM
1 908 421.02 208 5/23/20 6:17 PM

Again, wonderful consistency. The 882 figure is the least consistent, and it’s right in line with the accuracy of factory ammunition. Maybe that charge was a little short.

I should have bought this chronograph a long time ago. Comparing it to the Chrony is like comparing a Commodore 64 to a modern PC.

I don’t know what’s going on with the Chrony people. Maybe it’s a family business, suddenly overtaken by modern companies with Asian connections. Maybe they did their best. In any case, they haven’t caught up. Someone on a forum recently said they weren’t answering the phone.

I have to decide whether to stay at 6.2 grains or drop a tenth. If I take a tenth off, I won’t be able to make ammunition until tomorrow, because I don’t want to test more rounds tonight. If not, I can get started making cartridges right now.

Very nice. I think I’m finally marginally competent at making pistol ammo.

Asphalt Looks Better Every Day

Winter was very disappointing. Where I live, the daily highs should be below 80 from November through March, and there should be a lot of days below 70. This year, we got plenty of roasting-hot days in the 90-degree neighborhood. When that happens, you feel cheated, because while summer can trespass on winter and ruin it, there is no possibility we will have cold days in the summer to make up for it.

Now that temperatures are high and we’re getting occasional rain, the grass has started growing. The lawnmower and I are resuming our romance.

Today the mower would not start. I got a click, and that was it. I put a charger on the battery and went to brush the pool.

When I finished brushing the pool, I tried the mower again. It ran. I mowed most of the yard, and then I got off the mower to move a branch. My mower has a seat switch on it that turns the engine off when I get off, but I bypassed it because it’s unbearable. Because the engine was still running when I got off to grab the branch, I disengaged the PTO so the blades would stop spinning.

When I got back on the mower, the PTO would not reengage. I could still ride the mower, but I couldn’t cut anything.

I guess this is what happens when you mow as rarely as I have been mowing.

I almost shut the mower down to look it over, but it occurred to me that it might not start, and I was at least 100 yards from the area where I park it. I drove it back to its spot and shut it down. Of course, it would not start again. I got idiot lights but no starter, no PTO, and no headlights.

I did what I always do. I checked Internet forums. I found a wide array of problems and solutions.

I found out oxidation could cause the mower to act this way. My battery cables had some kind of hard oxide inside the terminals. I had to remove it with a Dumore grinder and carbide burr. I lost my battery brush, which would have done the job in 10 seconds, so this is what I had to resort to.

I let the mower charge while I had lunch, and when I tried the key again, it worked.

I can never decide whether this mower is junk or not. It’s impossible to work on, and it seems much more complicated than it needs to be. It’s full of engineering errors. On the other hand, I believe it’s 28 years old, and it should run for another 20. The John Deere 430 is hard to kill. It’s way too easy to shut down, but it’s hard to kill.

I was unhappy about the failure to start, because I had a special task in mind for today. I wanted to go to the pasture and cut a bunch of weeds that were in an area where I wanted to shoot.

I shoot into a berm made from sand taken from a pond. On one side of the berm, there are no trees within 100 yards. On the other side, there is a nice wooded area, which is exactly where I want to be when I shoot on hot days. Between the wooded area and the berm, there are blackberry and beautyberry bushes. Today I attacked the beautyberries while trying to spare as many blackberry briars as I could. Blackberries are useful. Beautyberries are pathetic. People eat them, but I think they’re trying to prove something. They don’t taste good.

I found that the beautyberry bushes were not easy to remove with a mower. They fold over so low the blades don’t make good contact. But with persistence, I improved my view of the berm a great deal. I suppose I’ll have to attach the bush hog to the tractor and do it right. Either that or I’ll have to use the brush blade on my gas weed eater.

How much do you want to bet the weed eater starts after several months of idleness? Ethanol gas makes it very difficult to keep machinery running here. Even treated ethanol-free gas lets me down a lot.

When I get my shooting lane cleared, I’ll move my targets. I’ll be shooting from east to west instead of the other way around. Right now, I shoot toward a highway. It’s totally safe, but I would feel better shooting toward the big lot full of trees to the west of my land.

My pasture is dish-shaped, so even without the berm, from either direction, I am shooting toward the ground. That’s a nice feature.

I don’t know how people driving on the road would feel if they knew a guy was shooting a 10mm pistol in their general direction, but then they do 70 with cars coming toward them in the left lane at the same speed, and they don’t freak out about that.

Maybe I should have a policy of restricting shooting to experienced shooters. I will never fire a round over the berm, but women and kids do amazing things with firearms.

I feel as though my enthusiasm for life is returning, 9 days after my personal tragedy. I let a lot of things go while Travis was in the hospital, and my motivation was even worse after he died. I seem to be getting more done now.

As I have written before, I believe joy, as used in the Bible, means something other than ordinary happiness. I believe it’s connected with results and expectations. For example, the Bible says, “Weeping may endure for a night, but joy comes in the morning.” That describes a type of happiness which is related to relief. The word “rejoice” comes from “joy,” and it’s always connected to an event. Something hoped for happens, or something dreadful ends, and people rejoice.

The Bible says, “The joy of the Lord is our strength.” That’s literally true. If you have joy, you expect good things to happen. It gives you motivation to keep going and get things done.

Depression is the absence of joy. It’s discouragement. This is why depressed people kill themselves. They don’t expect things to change for the better.

I had been expecting to rejoice when Travis left the hospital. Instead, joy was taken from me, and I didn’t have the strength to do all the things I should have done.

It may seem strange to get this upset by the death of a friend. I may not have written enough about Travis to give people an understanding of how close we were. I would feel bad if any of my friends died, but Travis was like a family member.

This morning I asked God for joy. It appears it worked. I got the pool in order and mowed the yard, and had the lawn tractor behaved, I would have gotten more done.

I’m coming back to life, and I guess most of the world feels the same way. COVID-19 is going away. Leftists are unhappy about it, because they think the disease will put Biden in the White House, but it’s happening. People are going to work. We can’t play hooky forever.

Leftists say there will be a huge second wave. If that’s true, where is it? Right now, the epidemic is disappearing in places that reopened, and areas that are locked down continue to have problems. Reopened areas are not getting second waves, but locked-down areas seem to be prolonging the first one.

If there’s going to be a second wave, why hasn’t China had one?

Right now, the main reason the numbers look as bad as they do is the local epidemic in Brazil. I don’t know if they got the bug later than the rest of us or what, but their figures are very bad. The numbers keep rising. The other major nations are doing great.

I am determined to keep cutting back on looking at the news, but I still see things. I saw that leftists were going after Trump for using hydroxychloroquine, the quinine substitute some countries use to treat covid. They’re furious at him for taking it. They keep citing studies which suggest it doesn’t work. They don’t seem interested in the opinions of competent doctors who think it does.

Why do they care what he takes? What possible reason could they have for objecting? These are the same people who think we should all be able to get marijuana prescriptions for anxiety. Not just marijuana, but cigarette marijuana which damages lungs and gives off secondhand smoke. They think drugs should be legalized. All except one, I guess.

They excoriated Trump for not wearing a mask. They wanted him to wear something they thought would protect him, even though they certainly did not want him to be protected. Now he’s doing something to protect himself, and they’re angry about that.

One of the great things about Trump is that he knows it makes no difference at all what he says or does. When he goes against the left, they pour vitriol over him. When he does what they want, the response is the same. The result: he pays no attention. He actually needles them to make it worse. Needling people is a vice, but it shows how little their raving bothers him. I think he enjoys it.

Trump gets annoyed in the short term, but you can tell he forgets all about it 15 minutes later. I guess that’s why his blood pressure is good.

Leftists are all over the web saying Trump lied when he said the White House physician gave him the drug. The physician had to write a note, correcting them. He took responsibility and endorsed the use of hydrochloroquinine in Trump’s case. I wonder what they’re saying now. They’re probably calling him a quack.

Maybe they’re saying the note is forged.

Watching Trump reminds me of my own experiences. God knew before I was born that I belonged to him. Whatever my faults were, I was not cut out to be a child of darkness. No matter how much I tried to fit into the body of Satan, I couldn’t do it. I was always rejected, trolled, and mistreated. I have often wondered why people constantly popped up to attack me. I didn’t always know my status as a child of God was the reason.

What Trump goes through is very similar. There is absolutely no way to make the people who hate him happy. They will never make peace, admit fault, or forgive.

Sooner or later, you have to quit worrying about being liked. Jesus never worried about it. He said incredibly harsh things to people. He was extremely rude. I don’t think Christians should make rudeness a goal, but we ought to be truthful. We should lead instead of following.

I just read a book by Anthony Bourdain, the chef who died by his own hand in France two years ago. Bourdain was a lover of the pleasures of the flesh.

He was a wonderful writer. His book is very entertaining.

As I read, the thing that struck me about Bourdain was that he was the perfect child of darkness. He was a complete follower. He accepted every vice you can think of. He devoured the corrupt ethos of the people around him like a starving dog on a bowl of chicken livers. I don’t think he ever had an original thought, and maybe that’s why he was not a great chef. Running a kitchen well is only part of being a great chef. You also have to be creative. Bourdain was not. He admitted he was a very ordinary chef.

His description of culinary professionals is revolting. According to him, big-city kitchens are full of sexual deviants, criminals, drug addicts, alcoholics, men who molest other men on the job, thieves, and liars. They are astonishingly nasty to each other. They hurl filthy insults at each other all day. They brutalize each other physically. They enjoy abusing and breaking each other.

Bourdain wrote about this atmosphere with tremendous enthusiasm. He couldn’t get enough of it. He savored it and wallowed in it. When he was a newcomer, he saw how vile older cooking professionals were, and instead of choosing another job, he was filled with drive to become like them. It’s as though they were father figures and he was trying to live up to their debased standard in order to prove something to himself.

He was like a kid who went to a “scared straight” program and thought, “THESE ARE MY PEOPLE!”, and did his best to go to prison.

He was a man of the earth. No doubt about it. He was programmed to go to hell. He was made for it. Hell fits him like a bespoke suit. He was Jewish, which means he was descended from Abraham, but he preferred the other side.

When I say hell fits him, I don’t mean he’s not likable. He is. But he lived like a joyous pig rolling in week-old garbage. I don’t think anything could have changed his attitude. Depravity and misery brought him pleasure. He could never have turned to God, because righteousness appalled him.

There are two families on earth, and only two, and every person belongs to one of them.

When people die, they go exactly where they belong. There is no injustice to it. God may not have created hell for people, but plenty of people fit in beautifully there.

As the decline of the world accelerates, we’re going to see huge numbers of people ganging up on God, Christians, Jews, and Israel. They will be more and more direct and bold in their attacks on God himself. We’re going to marvel at them, and many of us will feel that we have to do something. We’ll think something must be wrong because so many people are competing to get into hell. Nothing will be wrong. We’ll be seeing people who belong in hell, establishing their credentials.

I don’t mean we shouldn’t love them or hurt for them. I’m just saying we’ll be seeing something that makes perfect sense.

We’ll be seeing the Bourdain mindset, sweeping over multitudes.

That was quite a digression, but I won’t delete it.

I feel as if COVID-19 were a sorting mechanism, like a cream separator. It’s doing a great deal to divide people into pro-God and anti-God factions. I don’t think the world will be the same afterward. Some people think masks and social distancing will be the big changes. I don’t think so. I think covid is pushing many, many people into the arms of the Beast. It’s teaching them to cling to the government nipple, trust the state without reserve, and jettison their rights as though they were dirty diapers. It seems like far fewer people are being driven in the opposite direction.

I suspect the main changes will be in people’s attitudes toward governments, rights, God, and those who believe in God.

If we’re really getting close to the end, we should expect all the signs Jesus spoke of. We already have one very strong sign. He said it would be as the days of Lot and the days of Noah. Perversion and wickedness abounded in those days. Genesis said a homosexual rape mob in Sodom tried to violate two angels.

Luke 21 contains the description Jesus gave of the end times. It looks like a lot of the things that have to come to pass haven’t transpired yet. It looks like the rapture can’t come this week or this year, but next year can’t be ruled out.

Enough of that. I’m glad I’m feeling more like getting things done.

Deposits May be Illegal Soon

Yesterday I finished making about 500 .45 cartridges. I say “about” because the actual number is 498. I believe I have finally run out of brass.

I decided to do something about the monumental pile of 9mm brass which is occupying space in my home. I ordered 500 semiwadcutter bullets. I read that semiwadcutters are pretty versatile. They make nice holes in targets, and they are better for self-defense and hunting than round nose bullets.

The semiwadcutter is based on the wadcutter bullet, which should be no surprise. A wadcutter is a cylindrical bullet. The flat face cuts nice round holes in targets, making the holes easier to see. Wadcutters don’t always feed well in semiauto guns because they’re short and flat on the ends. A semiwadcutter has a cone on the front, and the cone has a flat face on it. The longer bullet helps with feeding.

The cost for my ammunition will not be far from what I would pay for factory rounds, but my ammunition should be more accurate. Since it’s for practice, that matters to me.

I started using a Powder Cop on my press. This is a device which sits in a press station. There is a rod in the middle of it, and when a cartridge is raised to the top of the press, the rod hits the powder charge, which lifts it up. If the charge is correct, the rod rises to the right level. If not, it doesn’t. There is a white ring near the top of the rod, and you can set it so it’s level with the top of the Powder Cop when the charge is correct.

The most important thing a Powder Cop does is to alert you when you put a double charge in a shell. A double charge can make a gun blow up. A Powder Cop will also tell you when you have a low charge. That’s not as big a deal, but it’s still important. A weak charge can cause a bullet to stick inside a barrel. If you fire another round without clearing the barrel, your barrel may explode. A bright person will not shoot a weak round without stopping to examine his gun, but not everyone is careful.

Do I like the Powder Cop? No. Not for pistol rounds with short cases. My press is mounted low, so I can’t help seeing into the casings as they go by. It’s very obvious when there is a problem with a charge. I’m used to looking into the casings, so it’s hard to remember to look at the Powder Cop.

Does this mean the Powder Cop is a bad invention? No. Most people mount their presses high, which seems like a mistake. They can’t see into casings. Also, there are types of ammunition that have deep casings, and you can’t expect to see the charges clearly.

Here is what I think. A smart person would rig up a couple of electrical contacts on the Powder Cop. If the rod rose too high, the Powder Cop would close a circuit and sound an alarm or turn a light on. It would not be easy to rig it up for low charges, because the rod goes below the low-charge line every time a round is lowered, but oversized charges are the big problem, and an electrical alarm would tell you about them.

If I put an alarm on the Powder Cop, I won’t have to stare at it consistently.

I suddenly have a good deal of ammunition. I don’t say “a lot.” My notions of how much ammunition a person should have are changing.

I used to feel rich if I had two boxes of ammo for a given caliber. Now I’ve been through two ammunition panics: the Obama panic and the covid panic. I have seen how fast the supply can dry up. Once Democrats take over, it will dry up permanently. When you buy ammunition now, you shouldn’t ask yourself how much you’ll need this weekend. You should ask yourself whether you can accept doing without this or that caliber for the rest of your life. If not, start buying.

It’s not hoarding. True hoarding is something selfish people do, to the detriment of others, during a crisis. If you start stockpiling ammunition now, while the shortage is easing, you won’t hurt anyone else.

You should probably have 10,000 rounds of every caliber you consider important and expect to shoot frequently. That’s for old people. If you’re 25, maybe 40,000. You can’t just think about rounds you’ll carry or use for hunting. You’re going to need to practice, and you will want to be able to give ammunition away sometimes. People you care about are not going to prepare. And you will want to leave something to your family.

You probably can’t afford that much ammunition. You could spend $40,000 on one rifle. You should think about your future and decide what your best choices are.

You can get 10,000 rounds of AK ammunition for about $2,000. That’s not a lot of money at all, for a very important future-proofing purchase. The ammunition is very useful. It’s fantastic for self-defense, and you can even shoot deer with it. The AK-47 is like a .30-30.

A lot of people prefer the AR-15. I don’t know if it will be as useful. I’m not a deer hunter, but I’ve read that the AR-15 is marginal for anything bigger than a coyote. There must be something to it, because some states won’t let you shoot deer with one.

Here’s what I think: with 7.62x39mm, you have no doubt. With .223, not so much.

I am sitting on a nice pile of .22 LR. I think it’s something everyone should have. It’s very cheap, you can hunt anything up to a wild pig with it, it’s great for target practice, and you can even use it for self-defense if you have to. I think I should seal up my .22 LR boxes and leave them alone. I can buy new boxes for shooting and leave the stockpile on the shelf.

Maybe it’s best to think of your ammunition reserves as your ammunition IRA.

The upshot of all this contemplation: I still need to make and buy ammunition. I should also spend a couple of hundred bucks on bullet molds so I can cast bullets.

Preparation may not help once they pass laws against ammunition possession, but you do what you can.

I have no interest in holing up in my house and shooting at law enforcement agents or murderous leftist “zombies,” but I want to continue shooting and hunting, and I would like to have some capacity for defending myself and others.

Yesterday while I was reloading, I listened to the Bible. I heard the account of Jesus’ betrayal. It’s funny how you can hear the Bible over and over and still find new things in it. Here’s what I heard: when the worthless snakes from the temple showed up to arrest Jesus, they asked him who he was, he identified himself, and they all fell to the ground. How about that? He knocked them off their feet with supernatural authority. He showed them they were at his mercy.

He proved he was God, and they got up and arrested him anyway. He humiliated them and made it clear that they were on the wrong side, but they refused to take the opportunity to repent. They condemned themselves.

Peole like to say Jesus was captured, but that’s a damnable lie. He surrendered willingly, and he could have freed himself whenever he wanted.

It seems very clear to me that God wants American Christians to own guns, but I think it’s very unlikely that he endorses the idea of having last-ditch shootouts with our enemies. I suspect he wants us to show that when we are taken and imprisoned and killed, it’s by our consent.

Some conservatives and Christians actually seem to look forward to killing their enemies. That can’t be a holy mindset.

I suppose people are getting tired of reading about the death of my friend Travis. They can always start their own blogs. Today I learned he will have a funeral on May 30. There is no information about the location. It was announced on Facebook. I don’t have an account, and I am not starting a new one.

I hope they’re not doing it at Miami’s Trinity Church or The COOL Church, which is a depressing Trinity branch headed by Travis’s friend Terrance. Seeing Trinity’s leaders posturing at his funeral would be like watching vultures and maggots defile a dead soldier. Terrance cared about Travis, but don’t ask me to vouch for the rest.

I’m not planning to attend. I was very involved with Travis when he was alive. I don’t need to show up now and only pretend I cared. Let the dead bury the dead, as someone once said. Whatever I was supposed to do for Travis is done or not done. There is no changing it now.

Travis won’t look down and count the people at the funeral. He will not even know it took place. He has already moved on to something much, much better. He is not sitting beside Jesus feeling bad because I don’t want to go to his funeral.

Certain people may say nasty things about me if I’m not there, but they do that already, and anyway, they are permanently out of my life. I’ve gotten along fine without their love for 8 years.

I did without it while I was a member of the church.

Trinity’s leaders are a mess, but many of the people are even worse. The best people left. Here’s an example of the kind of thing I might have to deal with. I put up a Youtube video and talked about Travis’s life and death, and someone put this comment up: “WE DON’T EXPECT YOU TO UNDERSTAND IF YOU’RE NOT BLACK SO WHAT’S YOUR POINT!”

There is no possibility that person watched the video.

It’s not someone who was close to Travis. I know all their names.

I really lost a lot when I lost my prayer partner. I am asking God for a replacement. They don’t grow on trees. It’s as if Teller died and Penn had to find someone who could do what he did.

Now that I have the reloading process working well, I may stop posting about firearms so much. I may move to electronics for a while. I have not decided.

Flu Numbers/Black Death Emotions

I keep thinking about COVID-19, AKA coronavirus AKA covid AKA C19 AKA C-19 AKA the Chinese Communist Party Virus. What have I been right about? What have I been wrong about?

When this thing surfaced, I kept looking at the numbers, and I saw that there was no way its ability to spread could, at that time, be compared to the seasonal flu. After a while, I concluded firmly that the disease was never going to be as common as the flu, even though the flu has to battle awareness and a strong vaccination program. That conclusion was completely correct OR there are around 700 million cases we just haven’t noticed. Take your pick. There is no third possibility.

I also opined that covid would be about like a bad flu season in terms of mortality. This was correct. The US is on track to get something like 100,000 reported fatalities, many of which will surely turn out to be bogus, and that’s not radically different from the 80,000 flu deaths the CDC reported for last year. The global figure also resembles flu data. Even if we get 200,000 deaths, that’s 2.5 times the flu figure, and that is within the flu ballpark.

For some reason, covid hit us harder than many other countries, and no, it’s not because Trump. The Chinese completely ignored covid while busily exporting it, and they still have fewer than 100,000 reported cases, and no, it’s not because they’re hiding cases. At least that doesn’t appear to be the reason.

The Chinese can’t really hide things that well. Word about covid got out in January on Youtube. If covid were still spreading significantly over there, it would be impossible to hide it.

People who are ignorant about China think the Chinese can’t communicate with the world. Wrong. Not even close to right. I subscribe to the channel of a South African expat who lived there for many years, and I watched his warnings about covid back in January. Chinese people can get around Internet blocks. This man did it for a living.

Here’s something weird. If you look at flu cases over the years, it appears that the flu also hits Americans with disproportionate zeal. We have something like 1/20 of the world’s population, and we get way more than 1/20 of the deaths. Can that possibly be right? Does it mean covid is behaving normally by flu standards?

I don’t know why America would have more flu deaths, in relative terms, than other countries. Maybe we do a better job of counting.

If the Chinese botchery and deliberate lies didn’t cause flu-like levels of transmission in China, then there is no way whatever it is people think Trump did wrong could have caused our problem. Assuming, in order to conform to Democrat/Deep State talking points that Trump did everything wrong, why did we get more cases than a country where the response was very clearly much worse?

The US makes my prediction look good, but there are many places where my guess about fatalities exceeds the actual numbers.

I didn’t buy the hysteria over the disease itself, but what about the economic pessimism? That, I accepted as gospel. This may have been a mistake. Home prices are not plummeting. The stock market isn’t that bad. We are losing a lot of businesses, but many will come back. Some were dying already because of the Internet, so should we consider them covid losses? When it comes to businesses, covid acts the same way it does with regard to people. It’s very hard on those that were likely to die soon anyway.

I thought the lockdowns were a bad idea for two reasons.

First, we don’t lock down for the flu. This is accepted policy, even among people who smoke dope for breakfast and think Caitlyn Jenner is definitely a woman. There is no left/right contention. The flu kills tens of thousands of us every year, and we don’t wear masks, close businesses, or lock people in their houses. We err on the side of poverty avoidance and personal freedom. It has always been pretty obvious that covid was going to produce flu-like numbers of fatalities, so why the inconsistency in policy?

Second, I thought it would kill the economy. I don’t really need to explain that. It’s a simple idea.

Now I’ll write about things no one else seems to be considering. If I was wrong to think the economy would be destroyed, was I also wrong to object to lockdowns?

If the lockdowns haven’t hurt the economy that much, wasn’t it a good idea to stay home?

If you say we should stay home to save ourselves from what amounts to a couple of years’ worth of flu deaths, then shouldn’t we also lock down for the flu every year? Shouldn’t we force people to be vaccinated? Shouldn’t we wear masks every year between October and April?

We can’t lock down every year. Not if we want to have the standard of living Americans expect. Even if we don’t end up in a depression, we will surely end up like second-rate countries where two-car families are unusual.

Is that acceptable, or should we accept a death rate on the order of 10 to the 5th power, just as we do in the cases of tobacco and opioid users?

I don’t have to take responsibility for that choice, because we have been making it ever since America was founded. The pattern is set. Diseases and other causes of death have always been with us, and we have accepted these things as unpleasant but tolerable and unavoidable problems. Every country in the world has the same history of going on with life in the face of similar epidemics.

When Sweden’s leaders decided not to lock the country down, someone asked one of them about the wisdom of the experiment. He said Sweden was not experimenting; other countries were. That’s really true. Sweden was doing something very normal by global historical standards.

Let me stop presenting this in a rational way for a minute. Let me try the Democrat/Deep State/MSM approach.

THOUSANDS WILL DIE IF WE DON’T FORCE FLU VACCINATIONS AND LOCK THE COUNTRY DOWN EVERY YEAR! IT WON’T JUST BE OLD PEOPLE! IT WILL BE 30-YEAR-OLD MOMS WITH NO UNDERLYING HEALTH PROBLEMS!

Maybe now you see what I mean. You can take the emotional predictions and demands that have popped up with regard to covid and apply them to the flu, seamlessly.

The other day, some anonymous Internet person went on Facebook and said covid had killed fewer people than drug overdoses, and the MSM got so upset, a rebuttal was issued. In essence, the rebuttal said, “This may not be 100% true,” while admitting facts that showed it was probably mostly true.

Whether a death is important to Americans depends mostly on how many cameras are pointed at it. If 40 people die in a fire (or because they’re Christians living in a Muslim country) and it gets very little coverage, no one cares, but if one ER nurse with three kids dies from covid and the entire MSM runs with the story, it’s a national tragedy that requires draconian measures for all of us.

Up in New York, people are disturbed by a news story that says that when new infections were counted, 66% had occurred in people who were observing lockdowns. What does that mean? It seems to mean we are shooting ourselves in the financial foot while also making the epidemic worse. It’s a data point leftists don’t like to talk about.

It makes some sense. Where does covid spread most quickly? Nursing homes, where people are not allowed to leave. “That’s because the people are old.” Is it? We know that covid is much more likely to kill elderly people, but have you seen anyone say they’re more likely to catch it? I haven’t. There is a big difference between infection and death, as Tom Hanks could tell you.

Some authorities are now saying the New York problem is the result of keeping infected people at home with people they interact with a lot. That makes sense to me. We all know how common illnesses spread inside houses. My uncle came to Christmas dinner with norovirus and nearly killed all of us.

What about masks?

I bought the MSM line in that regard. They told us masks were useless because viruses don’t even see normal masks when they go through them. It’s like flying helicopters through the Grand Canyon. The authorities told us NOT to buy masks. If you bought a mask, you were selfish and irrational. At the time, I more or less believed them, but I noted that a mask might help you not to touch your face, and I probably said it would reduce the spray to a less dangerous level. On the whole, I thought a mask was a waste of time for someone in a covid cold spot.

My county has ramped up testing, and we still have about 200 known cases, which makes this place as cold as you can get. Still, I feel like I ought to put something on at the store. What if I’m infected and I don’t know it?

The likelihood that I can protect myself with the kind of mask I can lay my hands on at the moment (without burglarizing hoarders’ houses) is extremely low, but a mask might make some tiny contribution to the protection of others.

Of course, I can also stand 6 feet away from people, which is said to be much more effective (as of 10:57 a.m. Eastern time on May 15, 2020). I’ll just have to quit offering people back rubs in the produce area. I’ll have to curtain my notorious penchant for invading people’s spaces and getting touchy-feely. People who know me won’t recognize me.

I thought the meat shortage might be a big deal, and I made very lame steps toward protecting myself. The shortage has not panned out. I can still buy anything I want. Walmart is selling bacon for $3.00 per pound, which is less than half of what it normally costs in local stores. This is ordinarily a bad area for bacon lovers. My cousin near Chicago can’t get meat without shooting her neighbors’ cats, but people in the Chicago area appear to be extremely selfish and heartless, and hoarding is clearly the reason for her problems.

Two days ago, a story came out saying vitamin D might ease covid symptoms. I take vitamin D, so I did the smart thing. I hoarded.

No I didn’t. I bought one bottle of capsules. I’ll bet the supply takes a big dent shortly. Chicagoans have probably been hoarding since 10 seconds after the story was published.

Here’s something weird. No one can explain why minorities are more likely to contract covid as well as being more likely to die once they get it. They’re saying that even if you correct for racism, oppression, Dukes of Hazzard DVD’s, general nonspecific triggeration, and so on, they still get hit worse.

In my county, something like 16% of the known cases are black. The percentage of black people here is under 12%.

A friend of mine thinks it’s because minorities are poorer and have to go to work while the rest of us stay home, but lockdowns apply to minorities, too, and let’s face it: a lot of black adults weren’t going to work before the epidemic. Just being real. Drive through a black area at 11 a.m. on a Wednesday, and you will see the high black unemployment rate in action. You will see many, many people just hanging around.

I wonder if black people are in worse shape because they trust the government more. Based on what I see online, they seem to be extremely pro-lockdown. They post very angry pro-lockdown memes. Maybe they’re being so obedient they’re spreading the disease more efficiently.

If it weren’t for paying taxes, I would have no involvement with the government at all. I don’t go to government offices for help. No one comes here to help me, unless you count a nice young lady from the University of Florida who showed up to give me non-helpful advice on gardening. When you let the government take care of you, you will have problems.

Black people have a very serious problem with susceptibilty to rumors. The more black people you know, the more you will see it. They join causes very quickly with great fervor. It’s like watching a grass fire spread. They appear to be swallowing Auntie Sam’s covid advice with very little criticality. I wonder if that’s what’s hurting them.

Is the real problem supernatural? I suppose all problems are, in the final analysis. Black people seem to have more setbacks regardless of what they do, and that can’t be 100% natural or even attributable to white people in red baseball caps. If you know a lot of black people, you will know many people who are sick. You’ll see a lot of people in wheelchairs. You’ll know people who had crazy accidents. You can’t explain all those things by looking at their natural circumstances.

My friend Travis had no involvement with gangs, drugs, or violent crime, and he still got shot and died young. He died after receiving a non-life-threatening wound from which he was expected to recover fully. His brother was run over while sitting on a bus bench, in an accident that killed at least one other black person and caused another to lose a leg, and the driver, who was from Africa, didn’t do too well afterward, either. Travis’s dad has MS. Before getting run over while minding his own business on a sidewalk, his brother had cancer.

You can’t put these things down to bad decisions or racism.

Maybe Juliette Ochieng’s thoughts about the curse of Ham are correct. But how do you get rid of it?

It’s strange that covid has spared the Chinese, since they practice traditional Chinese medicine, which is witchcraft.

Back in March, Nigerian preacher T.B. Joshua said rain was falling in Wuhan and taking away the C19 epidemic. Case transmission then dropped to nearly nothing. It seems like no one noticed! The epidemic is still essentially dead in China. If you don’t believe in the supernatural, what’s the explanation?

He made a prophecy, and then he extended it to the whole world. He was wrong about the rest of the world, but how can you explain what happened in China? I think he misinterpreted his own true prophecy.

Overall, it looks like my wild guesses regarding the virus have panned out much better than the predictions the “experts” have made. My main errors seem to have resulted from relenting and believing the high muckity-mucks.

The case numbers are still doing what I said they would do, but they’re doing it two or three weeks later than I expected. A large part of that is caused by greatly increased testing, so I’m less-not-totally-right than it seems.

I expect things to keep dropping off, and if we have a resurgence, I would expect it around the start of November. I think we’ll have a vaccine very, very quickly, and then we’ll get on with life.

I think forced covid vaccination will become a reality in many states, and if the nanny-staters are smart enough to see the leverage they have, they will probably force flu vaccinations, too. Presumably, there will be topless protests by anti-vaxxers, since they’re all women and all women’s protests have to feature nudity.

I like trying to guess what’s going to happen. For one thing, I feel…I KNOW…I am being gaslighted by the pro-hysteria crowd, and for another, it makes me feel like I have some degree of understanding of what’s going on around me. It makes me feel as though I can prepare for things.

Don’t I Own This Computer?

Just a brief post to help people who might be sufficiently uninformed to let Microsoft fool them into obliterating a PC just because they can’t find the Windows password.

If you inherit a computer, or you just forget your Windows password, Microsoft will not give you advice on hacking the computer to get the password. That’s fine. I can understand why they wouldn’t want to endorse competing companies that make hacking software for this purpose. Hacking your own computer is completely legal, but Microsoft may be afraid you’ll screw something up, and then you might sue them.

What isn’t fine is responding to password-recovery questions with a list of things to do to reinstall Windows. You don’t tell people to burn down their computers when it’s not necessary. I wonder how many people have done it.

There are legal programs out there that will help you get Windows running again. One is called “Lazesoft Recover my Password.” I don’t know a whole lot about the others. This one is easy to use. You make a bootable USB drive or DVD, you boot the PC from the new software, and the program deletes your Windows password. Now you have no Windows password, and you can log on with no problems.

It took me longer to create the boot drive than it did to wipe out my password, whatever it was. The program ran in a few seconds.

The obvious issue here is that unsavory characters like burglars and your mother-in-law can erase your Windows password just as easily as you can, which means a Windows password was never really good for anything except keeping you out of your own files and programs and maybe even driving you to wipe your computer clean and struggle to rebuild it from nothing except maybe some data.

That’s some fine unintended consequences right there.

Nice.

Something weird is going on with Windows right now. They’ve decided to fix it so you can’t look at your stored browser passwords without Microsoft’s permission. I found this out today. I needed a password for a website, and Windows demanded my Windows password. Of course, Microsoft did not warn me this was coming. Because Microsoft. They really do write stupid software. It’s not everyone’s imagination.

The problem with the new policy is that I had an issue while moving the computer from my late father to myself, and somehow, the Windows password got screwed up, and when I was done, I was not able to get in using the password I had chosen. I had fixed the computer to enter the password itself, so I didn’t need to know what it was in order to get to work. I let it go “temporarily.” Then I forgot to fix the underlying problem.

If, like me, you think it’s a good idea to go months without knowing your Windows password, you can get around this problem in Firefox (which has apparently gone nearly extinct since I started using it) by going to about:config and changing some value or other from “true” to “false.”

This won’t help you get into Windows, but it will allow you to view your CanHazCheezburger.com cat-picture forum password without proving you have clearance.

I think the most amazing thing the Internet has done was to make people think cats have personalities.

If I had this problem, millions of other people must be having it, except that presumably, most of them have some idea what their Windows passwords are. For the rest, I offer a solution which is a lot better than jumping off a bridge because you can’t find your tax records or keep your business running.

Is it me, or should someone at Microsoft be fired? Wasn’t it obvious to them that their bizarre new nannying policy would drive people nuts?

Now I have a bunch of information recorded in very obvious text files, to prevent me from having problems like this in the future.

Thanks, Microsoft. I really needed to spend 90 minutes working on this instead of relaxing and taking care of my pets. Thanks for making dumb decisions on my behalf so I don’t have to.

Inertia Gives Way to Dread

I feel like covid and my friend’s medical crisis put my life on pause. I have to get up tomorrow and live again, before doing nothing becomes an unbreakable habit.

On the day Travis died, there was a lot of communication. I spent a lot of time texting and talking. Yesterday, things died down. People were digesting the news. Today there was a little chatter. I had a very long phone call from a young lady he knew. Listening to her appraisal of the people he knew was like listening to a recording of myself.

Everyone seems to be saying the same things. They can’t understand why things were handled the way they were. They are fed up with Travis’s social circle.

I find myself talking to so many wonderful young women. Where were they when I was 35? Oh, right. I was a physics T.A. at a university. You could station such people strategically around a property to repel women and prevent them from entering.

I used to have someone I could hope one of these girls married.

Some people are holding Travis accountable. For too long, he held onto people who were going nowhere, in a city that was going nowhere. He was not honest with himself about their faults and the power of their negative influence. Sometimes I had to bite my tongue when he praised people he knew. He was in denial.

Today I heard something positive. I had been told that Travis had not had a single visitor during his month in the hospital. Someone now says his mother and brother visited as often as they were allowed. Whom should I believe? I hope the second source is right.

If you knew everything I knew, you would understand why I can’t assume the new information is correct.

In case anyone from Miami reads my blog (doubtful), I sincerely apologize if I said anything that was incorrect. That was not my intention. I don’t think my judgment regarding Travis’s situation has been that great over the last few days. It is an emotional time.

It appears there will be no funeral that amounts to anything. The epidemic still has South Florida shut down. I’m glad for my sake. I told Travis to cut his crowd off. I should be able to take the same advice, and it would be unpleasant to see some of these people. There are roses among the toadstools, but I don’t know if it would be worth it to wade through the toadstools to see them.

People who took advantage of him in life are posting complimentary things about him now that he’s gone. I am told preachers are praising his loyalty. This loyalty is exactly what kept him in trouble.

I am told Richie Wilkerson, Kanye West’s former pastor and the son of my former pastor, posted something. I’m glad I’m not able to see it.

I hear Kanye is now a pastor, at least in his own mind. I just checked, and the pastor’s wife is topless on Instagram with a lei around her neck. Things are going as expected.

I truly believe Kanye West is feeling a call from God, and I think that if he lives long enough, he’ll be all right, but at the moment, he ought to be keeping quiet and confessing his faults to God.

I haven’t done much of anything today, apart from communicating. I stuck a 4-terabyte drive in my new PC. That ought to hold me for a couple of years. There was no way I was going to blow for a solid state that size, if they even make them, but I got a fast hard drive with a big cache. Should be fine.

Why are nonmechanical drives called “solid state” drives? Ordinary hard disks are also solid state. They don’t have vacuum tubes.

I keep having an ominous feeling, as if the end of the world were just around the corner. I have this feeling that we may end up forgetting about responsibilities that seem important right now, because things will happen that will make them vanish into insignificance.

It’s just a feeling. Maybe it’s the pandemic combined with the unusual set of events I’m dealing with in my personal life.

Has there ever been a time like this? The black death certainly had an apocalyptic feel to it. There were places where a third of the people died, whereas covid is still only a little more lethal than the seasonal flu, for all the hype. During plague attacks, everyone saw dead bodies. They were everywhere. I still don’t know a single person who has been diagnosed with covid.

During the black death, the disease, not the panic, was the major problem. The reverse is true now. Confinement has us feeling like there’s a plague when there is not. We have a plague mentality without a plague.

A big difference between the current day and the plague years is that today’s world was already coming to the end of the slack in the rope before covid showed up. In the 14th century, the world was sparsely populated, and we weren’t faced with a rising tide of technology that could be counted on to completely destroy privacy and free will in the near future. To me, this makes the present age seem full of foreboding.

Back when God flooded the world, the earth got a fresh start when things dried up. If we lost half of humanity today, that wouldn’t happen. We would still be besieged by malignant, unstoppable technology. We would still be close to the end of free will and free thought. Humanity would have to be decimated in order for the reset button to work.

It’s wrong to call technology malignant. Technology doesn’t destroy freedom; people do.

Human beings can’t be trusted with pointed sticks or handfuls of sand. It would be insane to hope we could resist ruining the world with computers.

I have this feeling that nothing earthly matters. I feel that if I never pay my bills again or do my taxes, it won’t make any difference, because something is going to come and sweep concerns like that off the table.

I wonder if other people feel it.

It’s very quiet here right now. It feels like the day before a hurricane. If you’ve been through one, you know what I mean. Is God’s orchestra tuning up, to accompany the fateful horn? Doesn’t line up with the timeline I’m familiar with.

Whatever. I’ll get up and start moving again in the morning, God willing. I believe there will be a morning for me.

My new beam reloading scale is at the mailbox, if Skynet 9000 is giving me the straight poop. I guess I’ll go grab it, and in addition to fixing the pool and working on business, maybe I’ll tune the scale tomorrow and see if I can make some ammunition.

My expectations for the future are dramatically changed, but my life is not over yet.