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.

Only Took 5 Months

Not long after the covid hype started, I began searching the news to see if any major American celebrities had died. I don’t mean people like the guy who played Otis the Drunk on The Andy Griffith Show. I mean people whose names a typical American would recognize. We finally have an example. Covid has been here since last fall, and Roy Horn died on May 8. I would call him a minor major celebrity. He’s not Tom Brady or Jennifer Lopez, but people have heard his name.

It’s remarkable how long it took. I thought we would have a couple of dozen by now. It’s even more remarkable when you consider the fact that many foreigners are famous in America.

Of course, he was in very bad shape. He was 75, and he had been crippled by a tiger bite. He was also a homosexual, so he may have had other health problems from substance abuse or infectious disease.

How are things in northern Florida? Great. That’s just how it is. Sorry if you live in New York or New Orleans. I’m not trying to make you feel bad.

We’re still waiting for the meat shortage to hit. It doesn’t look like it’s coming. I went to the grocery yesterday, and the place was swimming in chicken, beef, and even pork, which has been hit hardest. Ground chuck patties were selling for $3 per pound.

I always look at the hoarder stuff when I’m there. They had a lot of Bounty paper towels (cheap brands don’t count), and they were putting toilet paper on the shelves late in the afternoon. They even had a bottle of Dawn, which I bought. I thought I needed it for the laundry room sink, but I didn’t. Sorry about that. There was still no rubbing alcohol. People are probably pouring it on their food.

The meat problem was supposed to be here by now, wasn’t it? It has been 11 days since I noticed the story, and people were talking about a two-week delayed impact. That means everything should be gone in three days. We’ll see.

After shopping, I texted my poor cousin near Chicago. She still can’t get meat. People are still insane there. Going to Costco is like trying to beat the crowds in the movie Soylent Green. Her son says it takes hours to get in the door.

This mess is not the same for liberals and conservatives. Liberals are more hysterical, their areas are suffering the most, and the vast majority of the suffering is caused by bad behavior, not covid. It appears they really do treat others much worse than conservatives. The way they clean out stores is a wonder to behold.

Shouldn’t be a surprise. Leftists are the only people who riot and lynch. Conservatives don’t know how. When you see conservatives fighting in the streets, it’s because leftists came to their events and attacked.

It’s not like goods aren’t being shipped to liberal cities. They are. Cities are very powerful, and those in power will see to it that goods come in. Obviously, the problems arise once they get there.

Cities will get goods even if rural people have to starve. There is no electoral college for food distribution. Food will go to the power centers.

People who are against God are much more afraid of death. They think this life is all there is. What a pity. This life is pretty dreary. Childhood is hard and very degrading, then you can expect to get a job you don’t like, then your body falls apart slowly, and then you die. If this is all there is, your prospects are horrible, and the threshold for choosing suicide should be very low.

If you’re afraid of death, you are capable of just about anything. Hungry human beings have been known to eat their children.

I suppose they have a better excuse than well-fed women who have abortions.

The Christian attitude is much different. Think of all the Christians who have allowed themselves to be murdered for the good of humanity.

It’s strange that San Francisco is doing so well. It makes me wonder if something much worse is in store because of their rebellion.

I should mention my friend Travis, who is still in intensive care. The nurses open up to us occasionally, so bits of information get out. The latest news is excellent as far as I’m concerned. He is no worse. That indicates they’re not talking about unplugging things. His situation is far from good, but it’s not the kind of crisis it appeared to be two days back.

If no one you know has died in a hospital after a long illness, I’ll tell you how it works in most cases. The staff will know when your loved one is very likely to die within a day. They know the signs from experience. They will tell you to get your butt to the hospital if you’re not already there. A couple of days ago, it looked like we were in that situation, but now it’s clear that we’re not. It was misinterpreted by relatives who had been ignoring Travis and were shocked to learn he was on an ECMO machine. I’m not saying a person can’t seem stable and then die suddenly, but we had one set of expectations, and now it’s clear that we are looking at a different paradigm.

I only have two medical professionals among my close friends. Both work with gravely ill and dying people. One started out as a hospice CNA, and now she manages other nurses. She has seen hundreds of people die. She is on Travis’s prayer team. She is very positive today. She said, “We’ve got a fight!” That’s correct. We weren’t told to come drive him home, but we have a fight. She also said, “He can bounce back.”

The other professional runs a hospice. His basic sentiment was that if a person isn’t declining, he can turn around.

Of course, this is just speculation in the natural. Lazarus stank from decomposition when he was healed, and Jonah, who died, was pulled back from sheol.

I have been seeing demons in my bedroom, and my belief was that they were the demons that were trying to kill Travis. Last night, I bound and muzzled them in the name of Jesus. I spoke defeat to them. I forbade them to come near me or Travis. I slept the whole night through. I was surprised when I woke up. I have been waking up before dawn, consistently.

It will be nice when we get a better report. I’m tired of feeling distressed when a text notification goes off. I’m okay, but that doesn’t mean this isn’t unpleasant.

I’m planning to make .38 Super defensive ammunition. I don’t need it, but I feel stupid owning a gun and having so little real ammunition for it. Also, it will be fun.

I did not take notes when I reloaded a decade ago. I think all of my .38 Super reloads are from that time. To get information, I had to go back through blog posts. I’m learning my lesson. I’m creating text documents with lots of facts. I even use the outline feature. It’s almost as if I used to be a scientist!

You would think a former scientist would have done it this way from the start, but I didn’t.

It looks like I had a lot of problems in the past with the Hornady Lock-n-Load AP press. I was getting a lot of unprimed cases. Because of that, powder spilled everywhere. I was using Accurate No.7, and the grains are tiny. They went right into the workings of the press and gummed it up.

I was not happy with Hornady. The press is a good product, but you can’t pop one on your bench and expect things to go perfectly. There are a lot of adjustments to be made, and there are things that are not deburred well or massaged at the factory. Hornady support has a great reputation, and that’s good, because press buyers need it. You can root around the web and read about all the problems they have.

People told me to buy a Dillon press, but if you check the web, you’ll see that Dillon owners complain just as much. Many knowledgeable people say Hornady’s products are the best. It appears that brand loyalty is the main reason people say either brand is better than the other.

Progressive presses are complicated, and they have to be set up just right. A manual isn’t enough. You have to have experience and good advice, and you have to be good with tools. That’s just how it is.

A well-adjusted Lock-n-Load will work great. Until it doesn’t. Then you will lose one or more rounds because the press has gone crazy, and you’ll have to make an adjustment. Then it will work great again.

When you get a press running, you may forget all the breakdowns and struggles you had getting it to where it actually worked. I did. New users who are frustrated aren’t whiners. They’re not imagining things.

A guy who calls himself 76Highboy has great videos on running the Hornady press. It’s great to see how well he knows the machine. There is no problem he can’t help you fix or avoid. But the fact that his videos have to exist tells you how hard it can be to make a Lock-n-Load work.

He’s a bona fide Lock-n-Load guru, and his dad was a proficient reloader, but he obviously had a lot of problems, because he had to learn to fix them.

Here’s something weird. The powder measure requires a fatter O-ring than all the other stations. Hornady will never tell you that. Also, you may have problems with metering the powder because of static electricity, so you should rub the affected parts with a dryer sheet.

My press had at least one defective primer seating punch. It has two, and I have only checked one. It was obstructing the slide that loads the primers. The manual doesn’t tell you about that. I had to grind material off the slide with a Dremel so it wouldn’t hit the punch. A punch that sits too high will prevent primers from loading, and then you fill unprimed cases with powder. The powder leaks through the primer holes, and then your press locks up or fails to register correctly.

When I switch to my other punch and slide, I’m going to grind the other slide before I even check to see if it works. The alteration won’t hurt it, and if the slide needs it, it will save me a ton of misery. I’m also going to stone the slide to get rid of burrs, as Highboy76 recommends.

Every Lock-n-Load should come with a friend who finally got his to work.

People will tell you you’re the problem when you’re really not. You can say a press operator is the problem if he wasn’t born knowing how to deal with the product’s many issues. That’s not really fair. It’s like saying you’re the problem if you don’t know exactly the right way to jiggle your defective toilet’s flush handle.

If a product you paid good money for doesn’t do exactly what it’s supposed to do when you follow the manual, the product or the manual is the problem. Don’t blame yourself.

I need to get out and shoot the .38 Super more. It’s wonderful. I’m concerned about losing casings, though. I’m thinking of using a red marker to color them and make them stand out after they land in the pasture.

Some day the Beast’s cruel, infantile children will take our guns away, and I won’t be able to shoot steel in my own yard. I need to take advantage of what I have while I still can.

Hooray for Hollywood

This is pretty funny. Or maybe it’s not. I’ve been proven right again, along with everyone else who thinks a big portion of the covid mess is due to fraud. Project Veritas has caught an Auschwitz…I mean “Michigan”…clinic faking testing crowds.

The basic story: a couple of people showed up at a clinic to be tested. There was a long line of cars. The rest of the cars were full of clinic volunteers who were not actually tested.

CBS News decided to do a typical honest unbiased segment about an organization called Cherry Health in Michigan. It’s a nonprofit clinic. They do covid testing. When they saw that almost no patients were waiting for testing, they and the clinic brass conspired to make things look busier and more panicky. They recruited employees to get back in their cars and sit in the testing line. To make things worse, real patients had to sit and wait while CBS arranged the scene.

Project Veritas has had its ups and downs, and for a time, it had professionalism issues revolving mainly about failing to get good legal advice before doing stories, but overall, it seems to be a great organization and an important source of news even Fox won’t touch. It’s wonderful to see them confirming something many people already knew: health care providers are faking things in order to look like they need help (AKA money). They also caught CBS demonstrating another known fact: leftists lie about covid in order to make it look worse.

It’s amazing that CBS would be so brazen. Didn’t it occur to them that employees might not like being forced to participate in fraud? Do they think every person in health care is a leftist and also extremely dishonest?

It’s disappointing that most of the employees didn’t care, but that’s human nature for you. It’s a wonder God doesn’t flood the world every Tuesday.

If you’re looking for a neck to hang this around, it belongs to Oprah confidant Gayle King. She’s responsible for the segment.

Maybe You Didn’t Have the Flu in December

In spite of the update on my friend’s continuing difficulties in recovering from a gunshot wound, I am continuing with life as I pray. I feel like going over the coronavirus news.

Here’s a nice development: a lot of people are settling on the term “covid” to describe the disease. I like it. “Coronavirus” isn’t a disease. It’s a general term describing a type of virus. There are coronaviruses that cause other illnesses. “COVID-19” is a pain to type. It has five capitals followed by a hyphen and a number. Tiresome. I’ve been calling it “C19,” which is about like “C-19,” a term that has appeared elsewhere on the web. I think “covid” will do very well, and it’s probably what people will call the disease next year.

It appears that the authorities are finally allowing themselves to believe covid was here earlier than originally thought. It’s surprising that they resist. The disease started in Hubei Province (which I have mistakenly called “Wuhan Province” many times), and while it was spreading there, among millions of people, many individuals from the area flew to the US. It would have taken a series of miracles to prevent covid from infecting people here last fall.

A lady named Patricia Dowd died on February 6. The official conclusion is that she was infected in early January, but the nature of her physical problems suggests that it was earlier than that. Her family says she was ill in early January, meaning she was probably infected in December.

An article about Dowd, who worked in an area with ties to Wuhan, suggests covid could well have been here in November.

It seems undeniable that covid was here much earlier than we have been told. Why, then, didn’t we see a major epidemic during the winter?

It certainly looks like covid spreads much more slowly than the flu. People say the opposite, but the numbers are what they are: 650,000,000 cases of flu, most of which occurred during a short period in the case of a widespread vaccination campaign, compared to 1/200 as many covid cases since last year. How can you reconcile those figures without admitting that covid is less contagious? The best explanation would be that it hit a great number of people, but it’s generally too mild to be noticed.

The Chinese did everything wrong, and they didn’t have a flu-sized epidemic.

Or maybe they did, and it wasn’t noticed because the illness isn’t that bad. Maybe we have had a big epidemic, too.

It’s confusing. If we had a big epidemic, where are the pre-March deaths? Why did deaths ramp up in March? Were these people who got sick much earlier? Were many of them really flu victims?

I am told that reporting deaths as covid-related brings big money into hospitals. Are care providers above fudging their data? Of course not. People are people, and hospitals are always hungry for money. Also, and perhaps this is most important, biased people do dishonest things without realizing it.

Doctors screw up very, very often, and they lie a great deal. Don’t bother contradicting me. I have a sister who is an opioid addict. People like her don’t have to go to illegal pushers. They walk into doctors’ offices and say something hurts, and they get what they want. They just have to know the right doctors, and drug addicts tell each other which doctors are easiest. They network. I’ve seen it personally.

Right now, doctors in America are prescribing marijuana, in a smokable form that damages lungs and gives off secondhand smoke, for people who show up and say they’re nervous or have headaches. They know they’re enabling addicts and abusers. They know what they do is dishonest.

If you want proof that drug users network and keep track of crooked doctors, just watch Drugstore Cowboy, a movie about a group of users who travel around in search of drugs. It was based on the actual experiences of a drug user. The phenomenon is nothing new. Many decades ago, celebrated addict William Burroughs wrote of compliant doctors, whom he referred to as “croakers.” Burroughs, an exceedingly evil and depraved individual, actually appeared in the film.

In addition to dishonesty motivated by financial concerns, doctors are also susceptible to political bias, and they overwhelmingly lean left. There is a longstanding leftist campaign to hype the epidemic in order to hurt Donald Trump. It’s a bad idea, because it appears to be driving people to him, but the campaign unquestionably exists. No honest person could deny it.

It seems like the conclusion best supported by the facts is that covid deaths are grossly overreported, and it may also be that they were underreported early in the year. If you put these things together, and you add increased testing in March, you end up with a graph that humps up suddenly during that month, and that’s what we got.

All I can do is guess. You have to take the known facts and make the theory fit them. You can’t make up your own reality to fit your theory. Unless you’re WHO or the CDC.

In my county, there were 193 known cases as of last night. Oddly, a bunch of local artists took the time to create sidewalk art nearly deifying medical workers. That’s delusional, given the extremely low risk these people face, not to mention the special benefits they and their families enjoy. They still have high-paying jobs, they got things like masks, alcohol, and hand sanitizer when the rest of us were barred, and very few of them have even seen a known covid case. This isn’t New York.

Weird. It seems consistent with the delusion that has overtaken the country as a whole.

Medical workers here have it great. They are extremely privileged. Still “heroes,” however.

I am now eligible for testing, and I’m thinking of doing it. They’re testing anyone who shows up. I would love to know whether the mystery disease I had in late January was covid. I don’t have a lot of faith in the tests, though, and as I have said before, if there is one good way to get covid in this county, it’s by going to a hospital unnecessarily.

Imagine getting tested, feeling great about a positive result and the attendant immunity, and then getting covid for real.

It is simply amazing how wrong and useless our medical and political establishments have been. Is this just my impression? On the one hand, Satan is definitely using this disease to train us to obey the Beast and worship our keepers, but on the other, look how incompetent they are.

Reuters says covid is helping Trump. It says people don’t think Biden will handle covid and the economy as well. I think Biden is hindered by two other facts: he is holed up in his mansion like the Omega Man, and he’s sinking into dementia.

No matter how you slice it, hiding in a bunker is not the way to make people believe in you. Trump’s approach is completely different. He still won’t wear a mask. He projects confidence and power. He’s on television all the time, taking punches and giving back better than he gets. Biden is only seen as a lonely, distant face, in basement-based TV interviews and depressing Youtubes no one watches, denying he’s a rapist.

Why are people saying “assault” instead of “rape”? What he’s accused of is rape. The fact that he is accused of using his hand doesn’t matter.

His Youtube channel is so unpopular, it comes up 8th in a Youtube search for “Biden.”

His latest video, uploaded yesterday, has 10,000 views. At the top of the Youtube “Biden” search list, there is a video from The Today Show. The title: “Michigan Governor Talks Reopening, Joe Biden Sexual Assault Allegations.” You have to see that headline before you can scroll down to Biden’s video. The video about Whitmer and rape has 44,000 views. You also have to pass this headline from The Hill: “Krystal and Saagar: Obama team SOUNDS ALARM on Biden’s failing basement campaign.”

“Basement campaign.”

That one has 419,000 views, and it was released within 24 hours of Biden’s video. The people in the video are liberals who think Biden can’t win.

I subscribe to a lot of Youtube channels. One of them put up a video today. It’s not as old as Biden’s video. The title? It’s “1000cc Trophy Kart Build Pt. 3 | Mounting the Rear Axle.” It has 1.5 times as many views as Biden’s video.

Go-karts. No kidding.

I don’t even remember why I subscribed to that channel.

A channel called SeekingWisdom Ministries [sic] has a video newer than Biden’s. “Final Countdown! True Disciples Rising!” This…I am not making this up…is a kid who makes Christian videos in his bedroom. It’s literally like Wayne’s World for Christians. I’m not knocking him. I subscribed. But what I say is true. He has 11,000 views. Biden is eating his dust.

Take a look.

Here’s something interesting I learned from a professional Youtuber. Subscribers mean absolutely nothing. You can have 10 million subscribers and still have an unsuccessful channel. Views are everything. Even if subscribers mattered, this kid still beats Biden handily. He has over 62,000 subscribers. Biden has 49,000.

Am I crazy, or is this news? It seems like a big deal to me.

Biden’s comments are turned off.

If you don’t know what that means, I’ll tell you. Turning off comments is something Youtubers do when they’re in big trouble. If comments are good for your channel, you leave them on.

Case in point: a few weeks back, a very angry young man with a gun channel attacked Paul Harrell, who is one of Youtube’s top gun gurus. This young man was on a firearms reality show, and he has won some prizes shooting revolvers. Harrell has won more prizes than he can carry, and he has great credentials unrelated to competition. The young man disagreed with Harrell’s ideas about defensive revolver shooting, which is something professional speed shooters don’t necessarily know anything about. In his attack, he said a lot of things that were very clearly wrong, and he did it in a very nasty way, calling Harrell at least one profane name.

Harrell put up a calm rebuttal video which was the equivalent of nuking the other guy from orbit. Harrell has 10 times as many subscribers, and a whole bunch of them went to the other channel to post vicious, yet often accurate, comments. Suddenly, the comments disappeared, as did the little graphics showing how many people liked and disliked the video.

It was, and still is, a sorry spectacle. Anyway, it helps to show why a channel would disable comments. It’s not a sign of confidence.

In that respect, it’s like hiding in your basement when you should be making campaign speeches.

Can’t he leave? Isn’t campaigning an essential business?

The White House has a channel which, effectively, belongs to Donald Trump. Comments are enabled. Donald Trump has a personal channel. Comments are enabled.

It looks like these two channels get relatively little traffic for famous channels, but they feature pretty boring content. Footage of rallies and so on. Trump’s channel gets considerably more traffic than Biden’s, however.

Biden should bail out and get treatment. Maybe doctors can do something for him. In a world that made sense, I would expect him to be removed from consideration, but this is not that world. Maybe he’ll make it to election day. What a mess that would be.

The election is 6 months off. Biden will probably be considerably and obviously worse than he is now. His dementia is not one of the slow kinds.

Maybe the DNC can’t get rid of him. After all, he is protected by the Constitution and the election laws. I suppose they don’t have the power to force someone to step down. If they did, they would have done it to Bernie instead of killing his campaign through sabotage.

So we have a demented, arrogant, extremely driven candidate who is the only person who can end his own campaign. That’s really something.

He backed down in 2016 because of pressure from Democrat bigwigs. Maybe he won’t do it twice. I think he lives in a Biden-centric universe, and he will probably insist on having his turn.

Obama came out and backed him. That would be hard to retract.

Interesting.

If he were elected, he would be the Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the presidency, except he would have a lot more power, and he would be much harder to control. How would we address the problem? Many dementia patients become combative and paranoid, and Biden is already showing signs of both problems. They also exhibit profound denial. He might have to be forced from office.

It’s an engrossing puzzle, but the bottom line is that whatever America’s problems are, we need to repent and pray. Our disease and leadership problems are the result of sin, period. If we want things to get better, we have to go out the same way we came in: via the supernatural route.

You Qualify

I’ve run into an interesting problem when telling people about God. They say they’re reluctant to ask him for things because they don’t deserve them.

This is an extremely destructive problem. It’s rooted in the poisonous teachings of traditional churches. For 2,000 years, preachers who knew nothing whatsoever about God told us we were supposed to look out for ourselves and work really hard. Someone even made up a Satanic saying which many people mistakenly believe is in the Bible: “God helps those who help themselves.” Obama’s press secretary quoted this nonsense and attributed it to the Bible.

God does not help those who help themselves. If you think you can help yourself, you’re completely deluded. You can’t take your next breath unless God helps you. He has been helping you every second of your life. If you think you built your career, your fortune, or your family by yourself, you are disconnected from God. Everything you have is in danger.

The belief that you can help yourself is based in pride. It’s more toxic than hate, lust, greed, or any other fault. If you read the Bible, you will see that the worst evils humanity has suffered were caused by people trying to help themselves. Adam and Eve tried to help themselves by taking a forbidden drug to give themselves the knowledge of good and evil. Read Genesis for yourself. They were trying to improve themselves.

Somehow, Satan has convinced us that pride is a virtue. There are still people who are against other character flaws, but in America, we exalt pride. Some of us even say, “Christian pride,” which is sort of like saying, “Christian rape,” or “Christian abortion.”

I supposed it’s not a coincidence that people who are snared in sexual sin use the word “pride” to label their movement. They’re right. They think they know better than God.

We really need to get this through our heads: God wants us to ask him for things all the time. He wants us to ask for little things, not just big things. You should ask him to help you what you should have for lunch. You should ask him which brand of aluminum foil to buy.

Get over the idea that God is busy. God has never, ever been busy. You can’t be busy unless your a limited being who lives in time. There is no time where God lives. Get over the idea that God does not want to be bothered. He loves us with extreme intensity, and he craves interaction with us. He is full of desire to do things for us.

Stop thinking you’re imposing on God. Everything is easy for him. He has said so. If you ask him for financial help, he doesn’t have to work extra shifts at Target. He doesn’t have to do without. It’s impossible for God to lack. If you ask him for healing, he doesn’t have to strain and pant and work up a sweat. He is not inconvenienced. He sits on the throne of heaven and wields infinite power. He has infinite resources. After he helps you, he still has as much as he had beforehand.

You have to ask for things and give God the glory when things work out. James said you can’t even do normal business without God’s help. Look:

Go to now, ye that say, To day or to morrow we will go into such a city, and continue there a year, and buy and sell, and get gain: Whereas ye know not what shall be on the morrow. For what is your life? It is even a vapour, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away. For that ye ought to say, If the Lord will, we shall live, and do this, or that. But now ye rejoice in your boastings: all such rejoicing is evil.

In the same chapter, he says God resists the proud but gives grace to the humble. When you say you do things so God doesn’t have to, you’re saying you are your own god.

What is grace? Anything God does for you is grace. Some people think grace is a supernatural ability to suffer and live in misery. That’s insane. Here are some examples of grace: miracle healings, the ability to prophesy, supernatural faith, supernatural love, financial success, marital success, and the next beat of your heart. Anything at all that you receive from God is grace.

You have to understand that God is a testator. He is a person who gives his heirs what they have inherited. He is not interested in your hard work. He is not adding up your hours so he can pay you what he owes. He is giving you things you could never earn. You deserve hell and defeat, all the time. God doesn’t owe you one good thing. The reason you’re not in hell right now is that he is patient and full of love.

God never owed you anything except failure and pain on earth and then damnation followed by perpetual agony, and because he didn’t want to pay that debt to you, he paid it to himself.

God gives gifts, not salaries.

It doesn’t matter what your need is. God wants to help you. Turning down his help will not make him happy. Would it make you happy if your son were crippled and he insisted on hobbling his way through life instead of letting you heal him?

I ask God for little things all the time, just for the purpose of nullifying pride. Hamburger or peanut butter and jelly? The grey shirt or the blue one? A lot of the time, I don’t really care what happens. I just want to acknowledge my total inability to do anything without his help. I want his help to keep coming. I want to be used to receiving it.

I want to be pampered by God. Anything he is willing to give me, I will take. I will gladly say I’m his charity case. It’s true whether I admit it or not, and it’s true of you, too.

I wish someone had shown me this when I was a kid. There were a lot of blessings that never arrived, but I was pretty good at receiving curses.

This was on my mind this morning, as was pistol ammunition. I’m trying to get 1250 fps from 180-grain Speer Gold Dots in a 10mm Glock 29. I’m getting numbers about 150 fps lower than expected, with known loads. Frustrating.

Yesterday I started to wonder if my primers were the problem. Back during the Obama ammo panic, I bought several thousand Wolf large pistol primers. I think they were all I could find. I’ve been using them. I’ve learned a few things.

People say Wolf primers are hard and that they are difficult to seat. Put these things together, and you end up with rounds that don’t go off. This is not a terrible tragedy when you’re shooting targets, but it could kill you in a defense situation. I’ve had a bunch of rounds fail to fire, and I’ve also experienced low velocities.

I believe I used CCI and Winchester primers when I made my original defensive ammo, which ran something like 1225 fps in a Glock 29. I have information dating back to my efforts with Wolf, and back then, I noted that they didn’t always go off.

Primers can affect bullet speeds. How much? I don’t know. But when you add the FTF’s in with the low speeds I’m getting, it’s obvious that I need to try a different brand. I have some Winchester large pistol primers, so today I loaded up 6 rounds for test purposes. I’m going to chronograph them.

I hope they perk up. If I can get 1225 or so, good enough.

I don’t see how a primer can knock 150 fps off a round. Maybe I got a bad box.

I have a new powder scale arriving today, so that will make me feel better about things. I may also get a powder trickler so I can load individual rounds accurately. I don’t need it for targets, but I want to be sure my defensive rounds are okay. It would be a real problem to have one get stuck in the barrel during a home invasion.

I’m avoiding looking at the news. That feels nice. I did take the time to check the local coronavirus figure. We are at 181 known cases for the county, even though testing is going on. Restaurants are open now. I am considering getting a haircut.

I don’t think the global or national coronavirus numbers mean anything now. As Trump said, apparent increases we see now are reflections of increased testing. It may not be possible to infer anything about the disease’s actual progress.

I’ve had an uncomfortable thought. What if the lockdowns don’t really hurt our economy that much?

This is an uncomfortable thought, because it could suggest that the lockdowns weren’t as misguided as I thought.

We have heard two very clear messages from the hysteria crowd: 1. we absolutely have to have lockdowns, and 2. we are definitely going to have a depression. I disagreed with the first claim and agreed that the damage due to lockdowns would be very severe.

If the economy isn’t really that bad, the lockdowns may have been worth the trouble, or at least they may not have been a disastrous idea.

T.B. Joshua prophesies that the world’s economy will do very badly and that there will be deflation. Bad if you don’t have cash. He says people need to grow food. Here I am on sand, with squirrels eating my peaches.

I don’t know if he’s right or not. If he is, then the lockdowns will continue to cause much more pain than the virus.

The last time we had a big recession, God told me it wasn’t for me, and I was fine. Hope I get the same grace every time.

I pray for God to create a huge grassroots Spirit-led church and for him to destroy the many big ministries that made people slaves and weaklings. How many Christians are confident about being blessed and protected? Bad ministries helped make them what they are. When times are easy, even people who don’t know God do well, but it’s different in hard times.

This is why the misery at the end of the age is called the tribulation period. A tribulum is a device for separating edible grain from husks. Hard times expose hypocrites.

I’ve noticed that the big charismatic preachers aren’t talking about the end of the church age. Why would they? First of all, they benefit from it by making people their slaves, and second, they have no idea what God is saying, so they don’t know what’s happening.

They must know Spirit-led people have been predicting the end of the church age for a number of years. They probably hate it. No more $7000 basketball shoes.

We need the Holy Spirit pandemic to start. We need to infect each other wherever we are, one on one, instead of counting on buffoons and human traffickers.

Pandemic Logic at Work

I have to ask: are we having a meat shortage or not?

Last week, they told us meat was going to become a problem, fast. Whether or not it was true, I felt I had to get out there and try to blunt the effects of hoarding by picking up a few pounds of meat. I have learned that when people think something is in short supply, they will generally hog it and make it hard to find, whether or not it’s scarce.

Today I went to the grocery. My local Winn-Dixie had lots of beef on sale. They also had bacon on sale. I picked up two pounds. I’ve been making biscuits, and I will need bacon grease in the future.

I went to Publix, which is another chain. I was hoping to find real bread flour and yeast. I had no luck in the baking aisle. I checked on bacon. They were somewhat low, and there were little signs telling people not to hog it.

At Winn-Dixie, they were selling bacon two for one. At Publix, the signs said you should only take one package.

One store was trying to get rid of pork, and a store two or three miles away was trying to prevent a run. This is the way the panic has been. What’s unobtainable on one block is abundant on the next.

Smithfield is a big pork producer, and they have been named among the likely plant-closers. Smithfield bacon was on sale here today. Okay. That certainly makes sense.

Complicating things, the situation varies from state to state. My cousin lives near Chicago. She says they can’t get meat. She says you have to park across the street to get into Walmart for anything, and her son told her it would take hours to get inside the building. Those nice, generous Chicagoans. You have to admire them.

What’s the story? Is there no shortage? Is there a slight shortage? Is the shortage still a week or so away? Did Trump abort the shortage when he pressured the meat packers and gave them special status?

Why is it you can’t get into a Chicago-area Walmart while the one closest to me is packed with nearly everything and not crowded? They even sell toilet paper. There is a lot of empty space in the paper aisle, but you can get toilet paper. In Chicago, you pretty much have to use leaves.

I’m wondering if this epidemic is completely different for Christians and unbelievers. Are they suffering more than we are? I live in an area where chain stores play Christian music, and things are not bad at all.

I guess reality is always different for the blessed and the cursed. It was certainly different when the flood started and when God burned Sodom and Gomorrah. It was different when he struck Egypt with plagues and killed Pharaoh and his army.

I don’t think the meat shortage will amount to much, because Trump is on the case. Still, if you live in a godless area where people don’t care about each other, a perceived shortage can be worse than an actual shortage.

Maybe when the election comes, they will marvel at us because we haven’t turned on Trump. Maybe because their experience has been worse, they will assume we went through the same thing.

I did something fun today. I bought paper towels. I bought 6 big rolls of Bounty. Real paper towels. Not an off brand. Did I need them? Not really, but I’ll need them in a few weeks, and I figured it was okay to buy them because they were sitting on the shelf in mid-afternoon. I wouldn’t have done it at nine. I just felt that if I bought them, I would stop thinking about paper towels.

Maybe I shouldn’t have bought them. Hard to say.

I am considering getting masks. I have no idea how I’ll do it, so maybe it won’t happen. I think they will do nearly nothing to protect me, but they might help other people if I get C19 and don’t know it. I wonder if they’re available anywhere.

Amazon has some dubious listings that look fraudulent. And they want over four bucks each for disposable masks. Surely that’s not the normal price. Forget that. I’m not paying $4 every time I get out of the car.

I checked, and the regular price is around $1.20 per mask, if you buy 10. It’s a wonder no one is shooting price gougers.

Should I get cheap surgical masks instead?

At first, they told us masks were pointless. Then they told us N95 masks could protect us if fitted very carefully and disposed of after use. Now they’re telling us to wear nearly anything.

Forget it. If cheap is all I can get, I have a camo thing I bought for hunting. It will be just as good as a surgical mask, and I can wash it.

I want to get tested to see if I really did have C19 in January. It would be great to find that out. It would mean I am immune and in all likelihood, not contagious. Testing is still reserved for sick people, however, and going into a place where they are testing seems like the only really good way to catch C19 in this county.

I’m going to chronograph some ammunition and forget the whole business. I think June will be a very nice month.

Donate Your Masks and Go Back to Work

If you’re waiting for some great news, apart from the fact that it’s a beautiful Saturday morning, here you go: South Korean scientists have concluded that you can’t be infected with COVID-19 more than once.

In your FACES, doom-mongers.

This is the best news the world has received since we got up on a Wednesday morning and found out Hillary Clinton had lost.

I still remember that day. I felt like crying with joy.

Here is a link to the story about South Korea: LINK.

Some Koreans got test results suggesting they had been reinfected, but now we know that they were actually having relapses. It’s not good that people can relapse, but a relapse is nothing like as bad as a new infection. Once you’re really done with your first infection, it’s behind you for good. If we could be reinfected, coronavirus would continue pummeling individuals over and over until they died or got vaccinated.

We already knew about COVID-19 relapses. Relapse is one of the disease’s known features.

For months, with no apparent justification, people have been telling us the disease was likely to infect us over and over. None of it made any sense. They don’t say that about most other viruses.

The reinfection story was one of the things that made C19 seem so scary. The model was one in which you were very likely to be infected (false), you were very likely to die (false), and even if you got over it, you would probably be infected repeatedly. It was a scenario of hopelessness. No wonder people bought freezers. They actually swallowed the pitch.

Does this mean we can’t get new strains after the virus mutates? I wonder. But even if we can, there will be vaccines, and we will have a lot of experience, so there should be less panic and senseless economic destruction.

It’s very sad that people are afraid to accept good news and that it makes them angry. Neurosis is not a good thing. Neurotics can’t enjoy life. Your irrational worries make it impossible to enjoy the good things you have, and they make it impossible for you to anticipate enjoying the good things in your future. And they make you a giant pain to be around. I do not like having determined pessimists around me.

Worry is faith in Satan, and faith brings results.

All though this thing, the prophets of doom have been wrong, and those who predicted an easier time have been right. That has to be acknowledged.

If Obama were president, Time and MSNBC and all the others would be giving people hell for panicking. What a different world we would live in. A lot of businesses that have failed because of draconian measures would still be alive.

It’s the only scenario I can think of in which an inept socialist president could be better for the economy than Donald Trump.

Think how this will affect people who have recovered. They will be like superheroes now. They can go back to work. They can go anywhere without masks. I wonder if a positive test will be an asset to a person looking for work this summer.

Things are still going well in my county, although I think we will see cases increase for a while. Unfortunately, C19 has found its way into at least three ALF’s. The news says there are two ALF’s that each have an employee who tested positive, and another ALF has multiple infected staffers and residents. We are now up to 175 known cases.

I hate to say I was right again, but there is another story: over 25% of purported C19-related deaths in the USA occur in what a story calls “nursing homes.” This would include ALF’s. I wrote about this phenomenon after seeing that about half of the deaths in Massachusetts were in homes.

This is bad news for people who are confined in homes, but it should encourage the majority of Americans. Not many of us are cooped up in places where careless workers are our only protection from infection, and most of us will have mild or no symptoms if infected.

The high ALF infection rate appears to be proof that sequestering in buildings with multiple residents makes you much more likely to be infected, and it also suggests that ALF workers in many places do a very poor job of protecting people.

Now that I think about it, I was right about yet something else. People are developing an interest in rural properties. You can read about it online. I predicted this a while ago. C19 is, by and large, a city disease. Also, it’s hard to grow food in an apartment. People are realizing these things.

My guess: leftists will cling to cities, and conservatives will be more likely to move. Nothing new there.

I think a redistribution of the population will be good for the church. Cities are ruled by Satan’s stooges. They are not spiritually healthy places to live.

Christians will be more likely to leave cities, and that means they will get away from megachurch pimps and fabulists. Churches are killing us. It would be great to see toxic people like Joel Osteen and Joyce Meyer go out of business completely, but that probably won’t happen, so a significant exodus from cities may be the best thing we can hope for.

I wonder how a conservative exodus would affect elections. I don’t think it would matter in cities, because they are already electing leftists. Maybe it would strengthen certain states and rural counties, though.

Still no major-celebrity deaths. The Baldor bench grinder Ebay poverty index is holding steady in the low 40’s.

Time to move on with my day. I just bought a hunting license online. My new peach tree was loaded with peaches, and now the squirrels here are loaded with peach flesh. Something must be done. The law says I can kill nuisance squirrels out of season, but it’s not all that clear on whether I need a hunting license, so I am not taking a chance. Considering the peaches, the fuel gauge they ate, and all the other issues they cause, I feel that my long truce with the rodents must now end.

Don’t Ruin This for me, Gates

Today I’m doing something I said I would never do again. I’m building a new PC.

I started playing with video, and I downloaded Davinci Resolve, a very nice free editing program. Problem: my main PC was my dad’s old business computer. I would guess it’s a 2015 model, although it might be 2013. He spent something like $500 on tower with no monitor or keyboard or mouse. It was not the kind of machine NASA uses.

When you edit a video in Resolve, you make all your changes, save the project, and then tell the program to compile the video. This was like telling a senior citizen with a bad leg to move my books to the top of a 5-story building, one at a time. It took a very long time. Also, I couldn’t edit very well because I couldn’t replay videos while I was working on them. They stopped and started, and I couldn’t really see what I was going to get.

There is a guy on the web who puts out videos to help people put together video-editing computers without going broke, and I took a look at his latest offering. I decided to go for it. Of course, because of the C19 epidemic, I could not get the motherboard he recommended. Apparently, people hoarded motherboards for a while. For roughly the same price, I found a model which was better in every way. After all, 4 months had passed since he made the video, so it only made sense that better stuff had come out.

By the way, I learned that Australians are typing “C-19” instead of “coronavirus” and “COVID-19,” so I’m very happy today. Not long ago, I arbitrarily and unilaterally decided to call coronavirus “C19” because it was easier to type. Now I feel vindicated.

They need to get rid of that hyphen.

I quit building computers because it was a pain in the butt. Years ago, it was fairly easy, and then, for various reasons, it got difficult. Components didn’t seem to want to work together. I also had problems getting Windows to run. It seemed to me that the whole business had changed to the point where building your own computer was a bad idea.

I’m surprised at how easy today’s build was. I guess it took two hours, and it wouldn’t have taken that long if I had had real instructions instead of tiny cartoons and Youtube QR codes.

Right now, I’m downloading stuff from Microsoft to make a Windows 10 installation disk. I guess I’ve been downloading for over 90 minutes. Rural Internet speeds are really something. I’m at 97%. I’m excited. I may actually be able to get back to work in 15 minutes.

I would guess that the PC I’m building will be quick by 2018 standards. That will be good enough. I bought a gaming motherboard. My impression was that gaming and video are nearly the same thing. Gamers need good stuff.

The processor came with a giant heat sink and fan. The whole mess must weigh a pound and a half. When I held my breath and turned the PC on, I noticed that there was a bizarre light show included in the CPU fan assembly.

Gamers. Do you really think you’re going to impress girls with your CPU’s LED’s?

Maybe there’s a way to shut the lights off. I’ll find out.

Microsoft is “validating” my download. I’m on pins and needles.

The cabinet I bought has a glass side, because gamers. That means the flashy lights will light up the gun room, where I plan to put the computer. Who thought this would be a good idea? What if you stream movies on your PC? Do you really want huge LED’s lighting up your wall while you watch Fast and Furious XVIII?

I think the last time I had a relatively fast PC was in 2007, when I built a couple for my dad and myself. I would guess that the PC I just built is the fastest one I’ve ever built, for its time. The possible exception is a two-CPU PC I built in about 1995 for physics and calculus. There is an asterisk, though. I never got around to installing the second CPU, so while the potential was there, the execution was not.

I was startled when I opened the package containing the SSD I ordered. Last time I bought one, they were about the size of a pack of cards. The one I installed today is the size of a stick of gum, and it screws directly to the motherboard. No cable. It’s magnificent. It’s blistering-fast compared to a disk, and if I ever need to travel and I want to protect my data, I can pull it in two minutes and hide it where no one could ever hope to find it.

I got a 500-gig drive. I plan to get 4 or more terabytes for storage, but my plan is to use an external USB drive instead of solid state memory. Storage doesn’t have to be as fast as programs. I may change my mind, though. Maybe there are older SSD’s which are cost-effective and still much faster than disks. I think replaying videos from external disk drives may be slower than replaying them from SSD’s.

Maybe I should forget external drives. Maybe SATA is faster than USB, and that would be good enough. I will check.

I’m looking around. It appears that there are still no huge cheap SSD’s. Oh, well. I paid $89 for a 4TB external last year, and one just like it should be fine for hobby use.

I also plan to use the PC for CAD, which was not much fun on the old PC. I could almost hear it wincing.

I may go totally nuts and spring for a small 4K TV to use as a monitor. My existing monitor is an “old” 1080p TV. Who ever thought we would think 1080p TV’s weren’t sharp enough to use as monitors?

My download is validating. Thank you for helping me kill time.

The Truth is Inconvenient, so Don’t be Inconvenienced

Yesterday I wrote about the extremely dangerous build-up of hatred on the left, which will eventually lead to mass violence far beyond what we’ve already seen from Antifa and BLM. A reader commented, saying something about leftists hoping conservatives would die from COVID-19. I Googled around, and I found a reference to an article by a “conservative” MSNBC contributor. Can such a person exist? She says COVID-19 will kill more Republicans than Democrats because Donald Trump has fed us lies downplaying the epidemic.

I am not quite sure this lady is conservative. I looked her up, and all I’ve found so far is that she’s strongly pro-Israel and anti-jihad. She has a history of criticizing Trump and his followers, and she has used the words “dog whistle” and “far right” in the same sentence, which is not a great sign. She is pro-abortion, too. She was very upset about Kavanaugh’s nomination because she knew he might turn the Supreme Court against the violent murder of helpless babies God gave us to protect.

It’s revealing that the left tags a person as conservative because she supports Israel. I would call that an admission against interest. The traditional, and facially absurd, leftist line is that Republicans hate Jews. We’re the only people keeping Israel alive, and leftists want to give Israel to the Arabs!

Ask some Israelis how much they like Obama. Then ask about Trump.

Regarding her prediction, all I can say is, “Can she read a map?”

Where is C19 hitting hardest? The Northeast. If you remove the Northeast from consideration, generally, America’s C19 numbers don’t look too bad. The other day I noticed that about 1/3 of the known infections were in New York State. That’s a lot. It’s also hitting Chicago, New Orleans, Miami, Detroit, Boston, DC, and a slew of other leftist strongholds.

Where is the tide of conservative deaths?

Who lives in the Northeast? Is it really a conservative stronghold? When did that happen? Is Chicago packed with red hats? Is Detroit?

She says conservatives are going to gatherings and ignoring the guidelines. What gatherings? Even Tennessee has tightened the leash.

Her prediction is interesting because it’s so insane. It reminds me of the time a liberal friend told me she voted for Democrats because Republicans took prayer out of schools.

Yes, she really said that.

Conservatives like to say leftists are afflicted with cognitive dissonance, which means they are comfortable believing mutually contradictory things. It’s worse than that. They’re comfortable believing things that can’t possibly be true, by any stretch of the imagination.

A long time ago, God showed me that when people don’t make sense, there is a supernatural cause. This is what we’re seeing on the left. They don’t just disagree about things that are legitimately controversial. They believe things no rational person could think were true.

If you can look at the C19 case distribution in the US and conclude that Republicans are getting the worst of it, you are not just wrong. You are supernaturally deluded. There is no limit to what you can believe. You are immune to logic.

I remember Robert Bork’s book, Slouching Towards Gomorrah. It was written many years ago. He wrote about the delusions of the left. He told of leftists who justified their untenable beliefs by saying logic itself was Eurocentric and paternalistic. Look it up. I’m not making it up. They seriously advocated abandoning reason.

When you decide reason is evil, what hope is there for you? You’ve become exactly the kind of person hell is full of. You can’t be persuaded of the truth.

Christianity is extremely logical. It’s sad that people don’t realize this. Many uninformed individuals think Christianity is irrational because it places a very high value on love and compassion, and because it requires people to walk by faith in spite of what their logical minds might conclude given natural evidence. Many people think Christianity is highly emotional, and that it’s about letting your unbridled heart tell you what to do. None of this is correct. Christianity is strongly against emotionalism, and God requires us to rule ourselves with logic.

The Bible calls faith “evidence,” and it calls the things we tell others about our experiences “testimony.”

An unbeliever might say a Christian can’t be logical because it’s illogical to expect God to do something for you when natural circumstances point to a different outcome. For example, Moses led his people to the edge of the Red Sea instead of taking a convenient land route, and he pinned his people between the Egyptians and the water.

Think about it. How was Moses irrational? He knew God was all-powerful and that he told the truth. He had seen the 10 plagues of Egypt. Only an idiot would have disbelieved God. Moses was extremely logical, and the people who told him to give up were unreasoning hysterics who were proven wrong by history.

Faith isn’t illogical. Unbelief is.

Christians are supposed to be completely logical. There are times when we have to accept God’s guidance and do things for which we can’t see the justification, but that just means we have a logical belief that God knows better than we do.

Human beings are supposed to act on the truth. The only way to know the difference between the truth and fantasy is to listen to the Holy Spirit. Leftists and conservative Christians who reject the baptism with the Holy Spirit, tongues, prophesy, the word of knowledge, the word of wisdom, discernment of spirits, and the interpretation of tongues are not connected to the only reliable guide there is.

It’s no wonder this lady can’t see that C19 is hitting liberals very disproportionately. She can be made to believe anything.

The facts are obvious. A bold person might even say C19 is primarily a disease of leftists.

Of course, all of the numbers are based on terrible science, so we can’t even be sure the official figures mean anything, but they’re what most people rely on, and they favor conservatives heavily.

It’s very important to realize that the delusion, hatred, and cruelty of the enemies of Christ is without limit. People who stay in left-leaning areas, relying on the restraint of their neighbors, are going to be like Jews who seriously expected the German government to come around and look after them.

The fact that leftists can approve of tearing a baby’s arms and legs off or cutting his spine with scissors ought to tell you that they don’t have all their oars in the water. No reasonable person could support these things.

Let’s not even discuss thinking castrated men are women.

The writing is on the wall, but there are tons of Christians who have no plans of moving. They think God sent them to save places like Baltimore and Dearborn. It’s not going to happen. How many decades of proof do you need?

I’m still waiting for leftists to decide Christians caused the epidemic. They’re already blaming Trump, who has become our proxy in their eyes.

I wonder how he caused the epidemic in Italy.

I just Googled. A liberal extremist blamed Christians in the New York Times on March 27. She said Trump caused the epidemic, and she said “evangelical” (a toxic nonsense term) Christians were to blame, because they voted for him. Never mind the swing voters who actually put him in office.

Nero falsely blamed Christians for burning Rome, and he paved the way for wholesale torture and murder. The left is trying to do the same thing. I wonder if they’ve blamed Jews yet.

I hate the term “evangelicals,” because it includes millions of lukewarm Christians who reject the Holy Spirit. I’m not even thrilled with the term “charismatic,” which refers to Spirit-baptized Christians, because most charismatics don’t speak in tongues daily or listen to the Holy Spirit. There are plenty of charismatics who love abortion, astrology, socialism, yoga, fornication, and drugs. It’s not enough to be baptized with the Holy Spirit. You have to spend time with him every day, and you have to obey him.

There are “evangelicals” who hate Jews and blame them for the decline of America. Nutjobs. They’re a small minority, but the fact that they exist shows that “evangelical” is a term that means nearly nothing.

Evangelicals are doing Satan a world of good. By behaving badly and by living lives that are clearly cursed, they give God-haters ammunition. “Bob is an evangelical, but he’s dying of cancer, he’s a porn addict, and he’s obnoxious and poor.” God-haters use them to “prove” Christianity is a powerless superstition that ruins lives.

Evangelicals have convinced many that you can be a good Christian and murder your own babies one after the other.

The only Christians that have any authority are “Spirit-led.” The Bible confirms this It says the Spirit-led are the sons of God. It says Jesus will drive off many people who merely call him “Lord.”

Before I wrap up, I’ll point out that the major-celebrity coronavirus death toll is still zero in the USA. My personal poverty index, which looks at the number of used Baldor bench grinders selling on Ebay, is stuck at 41. Still waiting for the mass graves and bulldozers. I don’t think they’re coming.

By the way, if you’ve been reading about “mass graves” in New York City, I have disappointing news for you. They have been there for centuries. The city buries the poor in mass graves. Nothing new.

Get in touch with the Holy Spirit, and you will have help when the waters rise. That’s the bottom line.

A Nation Turns its Lonely Eyes to You

I feel like I got sucked in by the mainstream media. It wouldn’t be the first time.

This week, I read that we were going to have meat shortages. Tyson Foods, a huge meat company, put out an irresponsible self-congratulatory ad about plant closings and future supply problems. If you read the ad, you’ll see that it’s a lot like the disturbing “We’re here for you” emails we’ve been receiving since March. You know what I mean. “During this difficult time, we want to know that In-N-Out Burger is committed to customer and employee safety, and we promise that we will be here to help you for the duration.”

I’m not seriously suggesting In-N-Out Burger sent an email like that, but it wouldn’t surprise me. I got annoying messages from McDonald’s and other businesses that couldn’t have done anything to help me in this or any other conceivable universe or fanciful paradigm.

It would have been more honest to sent messages like, “Here at Cinnabon, we understand that a national crisis and the accompanying hysteria provide us with a special opportunity to grandstand and raise our profile without actually doing anything else anyone can discern.”

I used to save my COVID-19-virtue-signal emails so I could marvel at them in the future, but I started deleting them. There are just too many. They never stop coming. Some companies refuse to stop sending new ones.

By the way, are you tired of the “health workers are heroes” nonsense that’s going around? Health workers have pleasant, high-paying, recession-proof, epidemic-proof jobs in an industry that will only get stronger as America ages. They get protective gear and chemicals the rest of us can’t get. They get free medical care. Most of them don’t go anywhere near C19 patients.

Yesterday, the official case count in my county was 151, which is astonishingly low, and there are still signs here and there that say, “HEROES WORK HERE.” I’m not feeling it. Even if it were true, why would anyone praise himself like that? Who works in the places who put the signs up? Healthcare workers. It sure looks like they’re the ones installing the signs.

You’re a hero for going to work and getting a paycheck and free medical care while your neighbors max out their credit cards and straight-arm their landlords? Really?

I’m sure there are places in the Northeast where the risk of exposure for health workers is high, but they’re not dropping like flies, regardless of what anyone says without checking.

This afternoon, I’m going to go out by the highway and put up a sign that says, “A HERO LIVES HERE.” I braved Home Depot in order to buy graphite for my reloading press.

Don’t make a big deal out of it. I deserve praise, but I’m too humble to put up with it. I’m wonderful on many, many levels, but if you try to wrap your head around it, you will only realize how limited you are compared to me.

Today I did a very brief news check–something I am determined to stop doing–and I learned that our pork supply has been dented to the tune of 25%, and the figure for beef is 10%.

Do I misunderstand how the system works? Will a 25% reduction in pork really drive us to forced veganism?

I also learned that the Donald has given meat processors special status and instructed them to try to stay open. CNN and other outlets are taking the ball and running with it, trying to convince Americans that trying to keep food on our tables is somehow proof that Trump is incompetent.

Here’s a fun exercise. Sit back, close your eyes, and try to imagine something Donald Trump could do which would not be criticized by our far-left media.

Good luck.

I inadvertently came across a video the other day, showing Trump boarding Air Force One with a scrap of paper stuck to his shoe. I’m not kidding. A major news outlet took the time to film this, edit the story, and put it in front of the public.

Imagine if they had treated John Kennedy this way. His dad was a Hitler-supporting anti-Semite with strong ties to organized crime. Kennedy himself cheated on his wife pretty much continuously. He escalated the war in Vietnam with no clear plan. He accepted a Pulitzer Prize for a book someone else wrote. His alcoholic brother drove an attractive young female employee into a pond and ran away while she suffocated. His time in office would have been a continuous party for the press, had anything like Trump Derangement Syndrome afflicted him.

So now I have enough meat for a month, and if I freeze it, I may never actually need it. We’ll see how it plays out.

One nice thing about steak is that you can keep it for several weeks without freezing it, and it just gets better.

Tyson, along with some other companies, said it was considering closing 80% of its operations. Interesting fact no one is talking about: Tyson helped create Bill and Hillary Clinton. The story in Arkansas is that Clinton got into the governor’s mansion with Tyson’s help, and then he didn’t play ball. Tyson chose not to support him in his reelection bid, and he was voted out. Then he decided to kiss the ring, there was a reconciliation, and back to Little Rock he went.

I got this information from my dad, who represented Holly Farms before and during the Tyson takeover. He got it from his business contacts.

The Tyson connection was so strong, Ross Perot used to call Clinton “chicken man.”

Tyson is the company that gave Hillary Clinton the famous $100,000 bribey windfall back in the 1990’s. Remember? Someone at Tyson made commodity trades for her, the margin requirements were relaxed for her, and somehow she made a $99,000 profit on a $1000 investment.

Donald Trump made billions by virtue of his own skill. Like many politicians, the Clintons had to have a little help. That help is why you can go into the House of Representatives, to pick an example, with student loans and a negative net worth and come out 10 years later with several million dollars.

Do the Clintons have sufficient juice to get Tyson and other meat companies to try to destabilize Trump? You have to wonder.

Meat plants hire large numbers of illegals, and getting rid of Trump is probably a priority for many meat companies.

CNN is saying Donald Trump is inept, because meat workers won’t go back to factories. They don’t actually have proof of this, but that didn’t get in the way of the story. It’s not clear how doing nothing would have been a better idea.

Hmm. A whole lot of illegals sneaked across the border and endured considerable hardship to get their precious American meat-packing jobs. Now they’re going to refuse to work, encouraging other illegals to flood in and replace them? Not so sure about that.

Meat-plant jobs are not skilled labor. The only reason they exist is that we still can’t program robots to do everything. I guess some day we’ll pull that off. If we ever reach the point where machines can look after themselves, the machines may wonder why they still keep feeding us.

I feel like I fell for a carnival scam, buying all that meat. At least I didn’t hoard toilet paper. That’s like crowning yourself with a dunce cap.

Fauci is saying a COVID-19 “second wave” is “inevitable.”

What does that mean?

What does “second wave” mean? Does it mean a major epidemic or a much smaller epidemic? And how does he know it’s inevitable?

Here’s my guess. A second wave is inevitable because coronavirus likes cold weather (hat tip: Trump), and saying so is not very brave, because a second wave could be very mild. If we get a new hump in the curve this fall, and it’s 5% as bad as the current hump, it will be a legitimate second wave, but the harm will be negligible.

Fauci, a fungible bureaucrat who has to think about his future every day, will be able to say, “See? I told you so.” But the impact of the disease will be even lighter than it was this time around.

I’m going to make a common sense prediction and see if it holds up. We will see another hump when the weather cools down, but it will be nothing compared to the present hump, and it won’t be a big deal. We will have a toilet paper shortage anyway, because it only takes a few ignorant, selfish people to clean out stores.

Barring mutations, COVID-19 will not be a major factor in our futures. That’s another guess. Journalists like to shriek that there is no proof we will have immunity, but that’s what comes of studying tooth bleaching, hair extensions, and ruthless self-promotion instead of math and biology. Scientists, who know even more than journalists, generally expect us to develop immunity. This is why Sweden didn’t lock people down. They wanted the infection to spread so immunity would develop.

Sweden knew a Ferris Bueller scenario was unsustainable.

When COVID-19 returns, there will probably be a huge number of people who can’t be infected, along with people who can be infected but can’t have severe symptoms.

Maybe it sounds like my confidence in my judgment is inflated, considering my near-total lack of qualifications, but how many things have I been wrong about? How many things have the experts been wrong about?

Still no major celebrity deaths today. Will we ever see one? My personal Ebay bench grinder poverty index is holding steady at 41 items. The Johns Hopkins new-case curve is trending downward strongly, in spite of increased testing. Trump says the USA’s ostensibly high infection numbers are due to a superior testing regime, as I said I suspected, and the BBC, which is on the far left, admits it’s true. It appears I was right when I said the decline in the acceleration of the rate of infection was probably greater than the graph showed.

I often refer to changes in the acceleration of transmission, because an epidemic can break down and turn around while there is still a steady increase in the daily number of infections. Acceleration of transmission is not the same thing as infection rate. It looks like we’ve reached the point where we have an infection rate which is decreasing.

You can be in the process of decelerating while your speed is a hundred miles per hour. You can have an acceleration of 300,000 miles per second squared while traveling at a speed of 5 mph. Speed and acceleration are different.

It’s good when acceleration slows down, and it’s better when we have deceleration, which appears to be what’s happening now.

I need to resign myself to eating a lot of steak. Yesterday I ruined my appetite with Reese’s Pieces and M&M’s. Today I will be strong. I need the refrigerator space.

Plant Closures Threaten Americans with Crippling Flatulence, B12 Deficiencies

The meat frenzy is about to kick into high gear! Get ready for a couple of months of tofu and tabouli. Buy yourself some Beano or get used to driving with the car windows open.

What’s going on? Well, workers at certain meat plants are testing positive for COVID-19 at high rates, and our genius overlords are shutting the plants down.

Here’s the question an intelligent person must ask: what percentage of the C19-positive workers have symptoms? Also, how many have symptoms that aren’t extremely mild? Here’s a really good question: if a big percentage test positive and very few are significantly ill, what does it mean for the rest of us?

I’ll tell you what it would mean: the lockdowns were a bad idea.

C19 has been in the US since December, at the latest. There is no way to deny it. You can’t have an undetected yet vigorous epidemic in China, plus abundant air traffic between China and other countries, without spreading the infection abroad. It’s just not possible.

It’s starting to look like the infection rate in the US is very high, and that the only reason the official numbers are low is that we are very, very bad at diagnosing the disease. If this is true, then lots of good conclusions follow.

One conclusion is that the disease just isn’t that bad. If it were, we would have sick and dying people everywhere, and we don’t.

Another conclusion is that the epidemic is wrapping up due to herd immunity. If, say, 20% of Americans have already been infected, the body of vulnerable people has decreased greatly, and they are also separated from infectious people by a growing buffer of immune individuals. If this is true, the recent collapse of the acceleration of the infection rate is largely due to saturation and herd immunity.

“BUT THE LOCKDOWNS FLATTENED THE CURVE!” Did they?

The shortest likely incubation period for C19 is 3 days, and the average is 5 days. If lockdowns were saving us, the curve would have started flattening 3 days after they went into effect. Did it? Doesn’t look like it. The downturn didn’t even begin until the second week of April. Go look. The influence of lockdowns isn’t even visible on the graph at the time when it should have appeared.

As always, I’m relying on a graph which is based on squishy numbers, but then so are the authorities.

There is no doubt that lockdowns save some people, but then they would also save us from the flu, which kills people in numbers comparable to C19. We don’t have flu lockdowns. We don’t even force people to get vaccinated. We say, “Disease and death are inevitable, and freedom and prosperity are essential, so we accept allow free adults to make their own choices, and we accept some casualties.” That’s what we’re thinking, even if we don’t articulate it.

A cousin of mine is in the food industry, and he says the meat thing will hit hard in two weeks. This morning, after texting him, I felt like I should buy protein. I prayed about it. I was thinking maybe I would get three dozen eggs and pickle them. I thought I might buy 5 more rib eyes and maybe 8 pounds of chicken. I considered getting canned salmon. I like it, and it’s cheap. And almost no one else likes it, so it’s not a big hoarder priority.

I felt like God told me I could get a few cans of salmon and 4 pounds of chicken breast, but that was all. I saw some gorgeous bone-in rib eyes on sale for $5.49 per pound, and the temptation was serious, but I let them go.

I have enough protein to maintain a pretty decent level of consumption for something like 6 weeks. That will have to do. I’m not turning on the spare fridges.

The press is telling us millions of chickens will be slaughtered because farmers can’t sell them to plants. That sounds like a big deal, but we slaughter at least 10 billion chickens per year in the US. Also, chickens grow fast. Guess how old chickens are when we kill them? A year? Six months? Try 7 weeks. If we killed half the chickens in the US, we could be back on track in July.

What about cattle? I can’t speak for everyone, but the cattle on my land aren’t expensive to keep in hot weather. The grass grows, and they don’t require hay or silage. I would be surprised to learn that farmers were slaughtering herds this far into spring. Maybe a reader who knows more can tell me.

I have read that steers are generally slaughtered when they’re between one and two years old, so a panic massacre could presumably cause problems for a year or two.

I don’t think eggs are going anywhere. You don’t have to butcher eggs. Also, if meat production falters, chicken feed will be cheaper. Farmers will need to sell grain.

I was thinking about it today, and I realized the meat problem is not a big deal. I don’t think it will last long, and even if it did, life with a little less meat will not be difficult. Who cares? It’s better to do without than to be a hoarder.

One silver lining behind the meat cloud: squirrels. I have an endless supply, and shooting squirrels is one of the most virtuous things a person can do. They’re destructive and also quite tasty.

Squirrels are out of season here, but I contacted the authorities, and they told me homeowners are free to kill nuisance squirrels all the time. My squirrels are ALL nuisance squirrels. The other day I wrote about losing the fuel gauge on my lawn tractor to a stinking squirrel. I can shoot them whenever I want, legally. Squirrel works just fine in chicken recipes. Kung pao squirrel may be in my future.

Maybe the meat panic will wake people up and make them realize it’s time to go back to work. That would be nice.

In case anyone is interested, this county’s current C19 tally is 151. Barely moving. That may be a bad thing. It may mean we don’t have as much herd immunity as other places. It’s nice for now, however.

This morning at the store, I saw several packages of toilet paper, right out there where just anyone could grab them. I was awestruck. Things are getting better.

I can’t stop writing about coronavirus without mentioning the American major celebrity death toll: still zero. I’m also checking my used bench grinder poverty index. The number of used items that come up on an Ebay search for “Baldor bench grinder” is 39. This is down from 41 but a lot higher than last year. Maybe the economy isn’t as bad as I thought.

In other news, today I watched a video by Messianic rabbi Zev Porat. He interviewed a student of late rabbi Yitzhak Kaduri, a revered mystic who died not long ago. Kaduri said he had met the Messiah. He left a note indicating that the Messiah’s name was Yehoshuah, which is the long form of Yeshua (“Jesus”).

Kaduri’s son claimed the note was a forgery, but Kaduri students have come forward and admitted that Kaduri did, in fact, believe Jesus was the Messiah. So much for the forgery claims.

In the interview, the student suggests mainstream Orthodox Jews believe Menachem Schneerson, the Lubavitcher Rebbe who died many years ago, is the Messiah. Schneerson was the leader of a big sect called Chabad. Many thought he was a Messiah candidate, but the official hard-line rule was that no one who died without fulfilling his mission could be the Messiah, so Jews with integrity abandoned his candidacy when he passed away.

I already knew that certain Jews thought he was the Messiah, and you can find them online saying they pray to him. They believe he is immortal; a god. Some think he will rise again. It’s a big kerfuffle. Allowing Jews to worship a Messiah could open doors they work hard to keep closed against a certain well-known individual from Bethlehem. Defining Jesus out of monotheism is extremely important in a culture beset by Christian missionaries.

You can see the dilemma. Anti-missionaries have objections to Jesus. One is their belief that the Messiah can’t be a god. Another is that he can’t die before fulfilling his mission. If a strict Orthodox Jew says Schneerson is a god and admits he died, what happens to two very strong objections to Jesus? POOF.

Anti-missionaries dismiss the miracles of Jesus as magic, and they say you miracles don’t prove someone is righteous or approved by God. But Schneerson’s worshipers say he worked miracles and cite them as proof of his Messiah status. Problem.

The official Jewish posture is that if you believe Jesus is the Messiah, even if you were born Jewish and continue practicing Judaism, you are no longer a Jew. Just like that. But what if you accept Schneerson? How does one rid the faith of followers of one putatively false Messiah while embracing others?

Schneerson denied that he was the Messiah. I don’t think he can be blamed for what happened after he died.

There are followers who claim he did’t die. That’s really something. He had heart attacks. There were witnesses. A doctor signed a death certificate. The body was seen. It’s in a hole right now.

Christians admit Jesus died, so our situation is different. There is no body. There are no bones. There never was any physical evidence that he remained in the tomb. The Gospels say the Romans put soldiers around the tomb to prevent his followers from stealing the body, but it vanished anyway. The penalty for the soldiers was death. You can look that up. I did. It’s not like they would have taken their job lightly.

I didn’t realize how big Schneerson Messianism was. I thought it was a few fringe characters. Now that I’ve seen the video with the Kaduri student, I realize it may be a much bigger movement than I thought. I looked around online, and it appears to be a major phenomenon.

What will the repercussions be? Will the Schneerson movement make more Jews open to embracing Yeshua? Will it make them more determined to exclude Messiah impostors? Will it lead to the termination of the Jewish status of Schneerson worshipers?

My guess is that they will refuse to confront the issue. I think it’s a can of worms they will run away from. That appears to be what’s happening now. I don’t think they’re ready to expel thousands of Jews. I think they want to hang onto all the religious Jews they can get. They worry about numbers. It’s a very big issue with them.

Is this a double standard? I don’t know enough to judge. It doesn’t look too good.

It’s very interesting how the policy of expelling Messianics has made Jesus seem like a huge problem. If Jews don’t expel them, then Messianics can be seen as annoying Jews who are still brothers. If Jews expel them, their conversions become reductions in the total number of Jews, and conversion, which would otherwise be a mere nuisance, becomes an existential threat. Suddenly, Jesus isn’t just a Messiah pretender. He’s a potential end to the existence of the Jewish people.

It looks like the rabbis have chosen the threat of annihilation over the possibility of tolerance.

If they don’t expel Schneerson worshipers, in the minds of reasonable people, the Messiah contest may come down to a competition to see who has the best candidate. That will be weird.

I guess it’s a good thing they don’t stone people any more. Walking in Mea Shearim would be like crossing an asteroid field.

It will be interesting to see if the Schneerson faction gains ground. I think it’s certain the Kaduri faction will be unpopular for the foreseeable future.

While I’m writing about God, I should mention a testimony I just got from my friend Mike. I had the honor of baptizing him last year.

I didn’t know he had serious arthritis in his neck. He couldn’t turn it normally without pain. Last week, he was in bed, and he started praying in tongues. He raised his hands, and he felt a sudden sensation in his neck. As soon as it passed, he was able to move his neck without pain. He said he has 90% of the motion he had before arthritis set in. He is completely freaked out. Overjoyed. Really nice.

I have my own testimony, as always. I believe it was last year that I wrote about a growth on my hand. It had a funny color to it, so immediately I thought of melanoma. I decided to take the Christian route. I did not go to a doctor. I prayed, and I cast things out and so forth. I spoke healing to myself.

I will not lie. I did a few other things after praying for permission. I put hot sauce on it, because hot sauce and other things like curcumin and green tea have made growths dry up in the past. For a brief time, I also applied a prescription drug that belonged to my dad. These things didn’t seem to help. I threw the drug out. On a lark, I also tried fenbendazole, which is an interesting deworming drug that people are using to fight cancer. I gave it up, too. Didn’t seem to do anything.

I don’t have worms. That’s for sure.

I forgot about the growth for several weeks. The one day I remembered it and checked. There wasn’t much going on.

Right now, it’s not easy to see where the growth used to be. There was a pronounced raised place, and it was getting bigger. Looks like it’s history.

One less thing to worry about, as Forrest Gump would probably say.

God always tells me, “None of the things you worry about will come to pass.”

I’ll take that.

Just What we Need; More Panic

It’s official. I am a meat hoarder.

Today I saw a story that said Tyson Foods, a major chicken supplier, ran a Sunday ad in the New York Times that said all meat would disappear from the earth by Friday.

I may have the details slightly wrong. Let me see.

Okay, they say they’re being forced to close some plants because of C19 outbreaks. They also say “millions” of chickens, cattle, and pigs will have to be killed because farmers have no place to sell them. Does Tyson even sell beef and pork? Isn’t it a chicken company?

My dad used to be the labor attorney for Holly Farms, a poultry company Tyson bought. If I recall correctly, Tyson went with their own in-house counsel, so my family was cut off from its supply of delicious pre-breaded chicken burgers.

Frankly, this looks like an opportunistic self-back-patting ad which contains hysterical predictions that are very unlikely to pan out. An awful lot of the ad basically says, “Tyson wonderful Tyson wonderful.” “Tyson love employees. Tyson very very good.” There aren’t a lot of numbers.

This epidemic has been an incredible PR opportunity for many companies and people.

I doubt the supply will falter severely. Nonetheless, remembering how the toilet paper thing worked, and considering how much I’m enjoying my new propane cooker, I decided this aggression would not stand. I ran out and got like 10 pounds of ground chuck and 7 rib eye steaks.

I know I don’t hoard very well. I could have filled both freezers today. I’m destined to remain an amateur. I felt like other people should get a shot at the precious.

My plan is to freeze 5 of the steaks and turn all of the ground chuck into half-pound patties for freezing. My best guess is that Tyson’s berserker mouth-foaming moment will pass and that we will continue to have a decent supply of meat, perhaps after a couple of weeks of insanity. I bought enough meat to get me through a month of relatively heavy usage, and I left it at that. If the meat supply dries up, I’ll fall back on my pizza skills.

Freezer space limitations should limit meat hoarding. Let’s see. Are freezers selling out? Time to check Best Buy’s site.

Well, I should have seen this coming. The hoarders have bought all the freezers. They’ll be eating frozen stuff through Christmas while the rest of us eat fresh food. They even hoard frozen vegetables. Why? One of the most notable things about the C19 epidemic is the total lack of impact on produce. Vegetarians are sneering at normal people.

People have the dumbest ideas. They really thought the world was ending. Nice job, American journalists.

I belong to a cattle forum, and I just checked. They have some concerns, but no one is panicking. Except Tyson and the people who bought freezers, I guess.

Here’s something to think about: people who run big companies don’t know everything. They make a lot of stupid mistakes. Remember a company called Sears? Remember New Coke? Remember the Edsel? Remember the Pontiac Aztek? Don’t run down the street naked because a chicken executive tried to play prophet. I mean, okay, I ran out and bought steaks, but I don’t expect long-term issues. I was concerned about the effects of his remarks, not the effects of the virus.

The rib eyes I make now with the big propane cooker are mind-blowing. Steakhouse chefs should make pilgrimages to apologize and kiss my unwashed feet. I have never had a high-end steakhouse steak that compared to my own steaks, and they cost three or four times as much. My choice steaks are better than their prime steaks because the preparation is better.

Ground chuck is the best pre-ground burger material available at grocery stores. That’s my opinion, anyway. Sirloin is like dry sawdust, and regular hamburger is made from tonsils and private parts. Okay, it’s probably not, but it has so much fat it sort of disappears when you cook it.

I should try grinding up a rib eye. All other cuts bow to the rib eye.

Anyone who tells you to make burgers from sirloin alone is a bad cook, so there is no point in finishing a recipe that starts with sirloin. It’s astonishing how many chefs who publish online are inept enough to promote sirloin-burger recipes. There are also people who put other types of meat in burgers, and that’s a red flag, too. If you put pork, poultry, or seafood in a burger, you have to cook it well done, and that destroys it.

Rachel Ray makes burgers with pure sirloin. Now I know not to listen to her.

Some chefs recommend grinding short ribs and brisket into burgers. Hmm…a short rib should have the same flavor as a rib eye, shouldn’t it? I’m too lazy to grind meat for burgers. Ground chuck is outstanding, so even if custom grinds are better, I’m not motivated to try.

America’s Test Kitchen recommends grinding sirloin tips with butter. I would never argue with these people. They’re just too good. Butter must make up for the dry texture of the inferior meat.

I don’t know what a sirloin tip is or how to get them.

I like mixing fresh garlic and salt into hamburger and then gas-grilling with super-high temperatures, but in lazy moments, I fry burgers in butter and Worcestershire sauce, and they’re wonderful. I cook them medium, with hot fat running out. I use brioche-style buns, toasted on the inside over the grill.

My gas grill was weak when I got it, so I bought a much bigger regulator, and now it’s not bad at all. If you buy a gas grill for burgers, you may have the same problem. I think they make them weak because of lawyers. It’s literally impossible to prepare a decent burger or steak on the model I bought without hot-rodding it mercilessly.

Gordon Ramsay cooks burgers that appear to be almost an inch and a half thick. Bad idea. A super-thick burger will tend to be raw inside, and you don’t want an overly high ratio of inner meat to outer crust. The flavor is in the crust. It’s also hard to eat a burger that’s too thick. I like burgers 7/8″ to 1″ thick.

I’ll snap a photo from Youtube so you can see a Ramsay burger.

You can’t really eat that like a burger. Your mouth won’t open wide enough. It’s all show and no go. Made for TV, not the table. He cuts his burgers with a knife and fork, which is about what you would expect an untutored foreigner to do.

Lately I’ve been toasting the buns on one half of the grill and then putting them on the other (unlit) side to wait for the burgers. I turn off the flames on the side where the buns are toasted. I flip the buns’ tops and apply cheese. The lingering heat in the grill softens the cheese. This makes it easy to go heavy on the cheese without having melting issues. You may have to put condiments between the cheese and the bun, though. It may resist being pried off so you can put it directly on the meat.

Maybe I should just throw the cheese on the meat and use a propane torch.

I don’t want to get back into cooking, but the constant talk of shortages makes me think of food.

Enough about meat. I also bought famotidine today. I could not resist.

A day or two ago, news organizations started saying famotidine, the drug in Pepcid, showed promise as a coronavirus treatment. What the heck. Can’t hurt me to pick up a couple of bottles. It’s a good thing to have around regardless of whether there’s a pandemic. Heartburn is annoying. When I got to the store today, naturally, most of the famotidine was gone. There must be a hoarder hotline out there. They are fast.

I think I’ve already had coronavirus, and I don’t expect to have it in the future, but it’s fun to feel like you’re doing something that might help.

I got the famotidine at Walgreen’s. They had a hand sanitizer bottle at the register for customers. After I paid, I pumped some out and rubbed my hands with it. It felt luxurious. Like putting caviar on my hands. The smell was invigorating, but that’s normal, because hand sanitizer smells like martinis.

I went to two Walmarts and a Winn-Dixie today. The first Walmart was not in good shape. It was pretty post-hoardery. The second was jammed with goodies. It’s always striking to see how hoarding, which is not guided by reason, varies from location to location.

I saw a lot of paper towels today. Real brands, not just the typical pandemic store brands. “Ekono-Pryce towels, made from real Chinese sawdust!” It’s comforting to know Bounty is back in a big way.

I have cinchona bark on the way. It’s the source of quinine, which is the drug from which chloroquine is descended. As mentioned in an earlier post, I read up on this stuff online, and it got me thinking about gin and tonics. I got some Boodle’s gin and Q tonic water. I couldn’t resist. Q tonic water has almost no quinine in it, so it’s probably not much help when you’re sick, but you can’t read about gin and tonics for two days and not want one. I decided to try the real thing, because people say it’s phenomenal. When the bark arrives, I’ll make some syrup with it. I would guess that the amount of quinine I bought would get me through something like a day and a half of actual treatment, but in practice, it will give me maybe a month of delightful beverages.

I’ve been drinking a gin and tonic almost every other day for quite a while now, and I’m not sick, so that proves it works. No, seriously.

Okay, maybe I’m wrong, but I’m going to continue my arduous regimen. I’m no quitter.

G&T’s with quality tonic are peak-experience-level beverages. I need to have one with my next rib eye.

I have to wonder if quinine is useful for things like colds and the flu. It’s worth a try. Several tries.

It’s for science.

I also wonder why meat plants are especially vulnerable to C19 outbreaks. They’re some of the cleanest places on earth. They hose their equipment with harsh disinfectants all the time. Maybe it’s because they’re cold. C19 does not like heat, humidity, or sunlight. A meat plant is probably a great place to keep the viruses alive on surfaces. They’re also staffed largely by illegals who are not always the cleanest beings in the universe. Maybe their personal habits are spreading C19 at home and overcoming the hygiene measures at the plants.

It shouldn’t take long for plants to recover, especially if they’re hit hard so a lot of employees return at roughly the same time. C19 runs its course in a couple of weeks, and then it leaves you immune and noncontagious. It’s not like meat workers are dying or being hospitalized in large numbers. They’re just having flulike symptoms that pass quickly.

If you wrap and freeze a steak correctly, it will be very good when you thaw it. The quality difference isn’t a huge deal. I don’t know if burgers hold up as well, but I know they’re okay. If it turns out there is no beef shortage, I can always put the burgers in meatloaf and go back to fresh. If not, a B burger, while not an A burger, is well worth cooking.

Is it Already Over? The “Experts” Really Don’t Know

The coronavirus news never stops changing.

For some time, people have been saying they thought COVID-19, which I have just decided to call “C19” because it’s easier to type, had shown up in America much earlier than the authorities were telling us. Now even the New York Times is getting in on the act. It says we now know that an American death in early February was caused by C19.

Want better evidence that the disease has been here a long time? A test of random people in New York City supermarkets came up 21% positive. An expert is trying to dismiss it as the result of false positives, but like many experts, he doesn’t understand math. The false-positive rate, if the Chinese are to be believed, is 40-80%. Even if the real positive rate in New York City was 4%, allowing for the worst possible rate of false results, it would still be much higher than the official rate.

The people who were tested were out shopping. They weren’t sick people hooked up to ventilators. What does that tell you?

I think about my own mystery illness. I got sick in January. I had conjunctivitis, a runny nose, a cough with chest pain, and body aches. I also had nausea and diarrhea. These are all C19 symptoms. The illness lasted longer than a typical pink eye case, and there was no pink eye epidemic in my area. Pink eye is extremely contagious; much worse than the flu or C19. You don’t get it all by yourself.

My disease was mild, like C19. It took a long time to come and go, like C19. I had a dry cough with chest pain, like a C19 patient. I had a virus, not bacteria. Bacterial conjunctivitis comes with pus and different symptoms. I was sick in the winter. Viral conjunctivitis peaks in the summer.

How could I get C19? I live in the woods by myself. I have an answer.

Early in January, I traveled to North Carolina for a Last Reformation event. Most people there had traveled a long way. There were many Europeans there. One prayed for me, and I spent a lot of time with him. People were laying hands on each other. We got close to each other. I would have returned here on about January 6. I noticed I was feeling funny during the days preceding January 20.

The incubation period for C19 is now known to run to 24 days in some cases, and I was exposed to a lot of people from distant locations around 10 days before I got sick.

When I realized I was ill, I stayed away from people, including my barber. My hair was out of control. I went to buy groceries and so on, but I didn’t have guests or visit anyone. In other words, I did exactly what every contagious person should do but generally doesn’t.

So. Did I save my county from coronavirus? Wouldn’t surprise me at all, if I were the only person who had it, but in all likelihood, a lot of people had it and weren’t diagnosed.

In order to believe C19 wasn’t a problem in the US until late January, you have to believe some unlikely things. You have to think there was a serious outbreak in Wuhan in late fall, that thousands of people traveled between Wuhan and the US before the disease was identified, and that somehow, the infection didn’t spread in the US until January. The first three things are undeniable facts. The fourth is so unlikely it should be considered impossible.

If C19 got here earlier than we think, why is there a big medical crisis now?

Is there really a medical crisis? The stories of hospitals filling up with the dead and dying still aren’t true. Only a tiny percentage of Americans have been diagnosed, meaning not many are significantly ill. The death toll is comparable to that of the flu, and many so-called coronavirus deaths will turn out to be flu deaths because of false positives and provider bias. We’re hearing about shortages of certain medical items. Were those shortages caused by sick patients or by providers scrambling to get more equipment than they needed? People talk of a ventilator shortage, but in reality, it’s still not here. There is only an ANTICIPATED shortage.

We’re having a lot of problems due to C19, but are they generally medical problems? No. They’re hysteria-related problems. We can’t work. We’re struggling financially. We can’t get haircuts. We can’t travel. When you’re caught up in panic and deprivation, it’s easy to confuse your problems with medical problems.

If everyone in your city is hoarding toilet paper and going around in masks, it doesn’t mean there is a major illness problem. Healthy people can do those things.

C19 hits very old people very hard, and it’s a real scourge when it hits old folks homes, which is what happened in Massachusetts, but the rest of us are generally fine. Even the sick.

I am no expert, which means I am not part of a group of people who indisputably got nearly everything wrong, but if I had to make a guess my life depended on, I’d say C19 has swept most of the nation already. I think I already had it. Maybe you’ve had it, too.

It’s amazing how unreliable experts and authorities are. This is one of those things you have to be old to understand. The natural thing is to trust people in power and people who have credentials, but the older you get, the more you will find that you are often better off figuring things out on your own. There are a lot of mothers out there who have had to tell incompetent doctors what was wrong with their kids. There are laymen who have been executed who would have been better off representing themselves.

The more experts and authorities let you down, the more firmly you will believe you have to do your own thinking. You have to do your best to decide which things you can figure out and which things you have to put in other people’s hands. When you rely on other people, you have to watch them. They will let you down in ways that will astound you.

Right now, the new-case graph is still oscillating. I thought it would peak more sharply, but a lot depends on physician bias and the availability of tests. A sudden increase in testing will drive the graph upward even if the actual numbers are plummeting.

Guess how many major celebrity deaths America has, as of today? Not one. Still.

How many major celebrities are there? Let’s look at football. There are 1700 players right now. The average career is 3.3 years. That means there are tens of thousands of retired players. Many are famous. None have died. Now throw in baseball, basketball, and hockey. Throw in college athletes, past and present. Where are the deaths? We have Tom Dempsey, but most people have no idea who he is.

Trump-hating journalists are still falling back on Mark Blum and Joe Diffie. When you have to reach for poor examples to prove your argument, something is wrong.

In other news, my new propane cooker is working out great. I did okay with the smaller one, but even when it did a fairly good job on steak, it wasn’t on the level of a 200,000-BTU unit. The crust and charring on steaks weren’t as good.

Yesterday I threw a Walmart cowboy rib eye in the skillet with butter. It was magical. I was stunned by how good it was. Two hours later, I was still pausing to think about it. You really have to be nuts to cook a steak any other way.

I need a big griddle. This cooker has a huge burner, so heat rises all around it. I have to use long tongs to avoid being burned. I’m pretty sure I removed all the hair on the fingers of my right hand yesterday. Walmart has a nice big griddle for around twenty bucks.

One of the best things about the cooker is not having to clean the kitchen or open windows to let smoke out. The cooker is on the patio, where it belongs. It can’t stain my ceiling with condensed grease. And it’s not just good for steak. I could put a wok on it. I can’t do that on my stove. I could use it for big pots for gatherings.

One of my favorite meals now is a rib eye plus a microwaved russet potato. The oven is better for potatoes, but when you’re alone and you just want to get dinner on the plate, a microwave will give you 85% of what you want in 8 minutes. I would never use it if I had guests, but for me, it’s excellent.

I found a bag of small russets. Big ones are just TOO big, and small ones are better anyway because they have a higher ratio of skin to starch. I wanted to buy a single potato, but Walmart’s single russets are disgusting. They had some overpriced nuke-ready potatoes for a dollar each. Forget that. For $5, I got maybe 10 pounds of beautiful little potatoes that weren’t covered in hoe marks.

I have to go to Walmart for chlorine, so I should grab a griddle. Home Depot is out of chlorine. Apparently, people are washing their food in it. I am not kidding. It’s a legitimate news story you can look up. I wondered where the bleach had gone. People are poisoning themselves and ending up in hospitals.

Life is good. Don’t fall for the panic. Unless you enjoy it and get angry at people who are relaxed. If that’s you, you bring it on yourself, so swim in it. Eat it. Drink it. Just don’t bother me with your manipulation and guilt trips. I plan to savor the good times with which I have been blessed.