Fluffy Herald of Relief Appears

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

Surely the clouds have parted.

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

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

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

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

Whatever. The proof is in the pudding.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I would have expected worse performance here.

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

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

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

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

Still not ONE major celebrity death.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let’s see.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fodder for the Math-Challenged and Panic-Prone

My prognostications concerning the pandemic have taken a hit!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Navy Beans and Poached Squirrel

I still have not set up my reloading press. I made a platform for it yesterday, but I haven’t followed through. I plan to get on it shortly.

I thought I would say something about the epidemic, since I have been writing about it for so long. Today, again, the infection rate is dropping. At least that’s what’s happening according to the Johns Hopkins graph page, which I have linked to in the past.

The rate at which the rate is dropping seems to be slowing at the moment, but bumps are to be expected.

Toilet paper is still unavailable online, unless you order questionable Chinese coronavirus scam paper, or you get really lucky, or you pay some low-life 5 times what the paper is worth.

At some point, the expense and trouble make using the curtains an intelligent choice.

I can’t figure the toilet paper problem out. I was wrong to think the problem would only last a couple of weeks. I read that factories would keep churning it out, and I figured people could only continue buying three dozen rolls per day for a short time. I figured online sources would rebound quickly because they could limit per-person orders and no one could go in and clean them out.

Still, the paper is hard to find during reasonable shopping hours, and online sources are useless. I check because I get bored.

I saw someone trying to explain it online. The theory was that people were using home-quality paper instead of commercial-quality. They make you stay home, you can’t use the toilet at work, and you end up using ridiculous fluffy paper with baby ducks stamped on it instead of the military-looking stuff. Somehow or other, increasing the demand for fluffy paper threw things out of whack.

I don’t believe it. I never used that stuff, and I still can’t find the kind I buy. Not online. I can’t find anything that isn’t Chinese or overpriced. Several months from now, this could become a problem. I’ll have to get up early and get to the store before the hoarders, and I may have to have a late breakfast. This is how you get toilet paper. Be at the store when it opens. While you’re there, make sure you use the can. Free is free.

I think the explanation is a crock. If the only problem were the difficulty of making fluffy paper, we would be able to buy non-fluffy paper, and we’re not. The problem is that people are still buying every roll they see. The system, which isn’t designed for a 2000% increase in demand, is just not built to cope with it.

If people don’t get over it, some morning in July, I will have to be at Winn-Dixie as soon as the special old-people-only shopping hour is over.

Manufacturers are ramping production up, and distribution, contrary to what some people claim, is not out of commission due to the the millions of dead truck drivers who can’t show up for work. They don’t exist. More people have died from the flu this year.

It’s amazing how people think there are overflowing hospitals and bodies on sidewalks. Does anyone actually read the news?

I still don’t know a single person who has coronavirus or who has mentioned a relative or loved one who has it.

There are STILL STILL STILL no major celebrities who have died! Inexplicable! But there are celebrities who are trying to capitalize, and I don’t just mean the ones who are virtue-signaling and trying to tell us what to do on social media. Bill Cosby, Michael Avenatti, Bernie Madoff, R. Kelly, and Julian Assange are all trying to get released so they can avoid the virus.

Here’s how out of the loop I am: I had no idea Avenatti, Kelly, and Assange were incarcerated. I’m thrilled to see how little I know about such things.

I have to read up on Avenatti. That guy is not to be believed. Is he still posting cocky Tweets? When it comes to denial and lack of remorse, he rivals the pre-conviction Harvey Weinstein. I feel sorry for him. I’m astounded by what he did to his life.

In other news, I’ve escalated my own fight against COVID-19. Having heard that quinine will keep me well, I have committed to having a gin and tonic every day, no matter how difficult it is to choke it down. It’s definitely working. I started two days ago, and I’m as healthy as a horse.

I found a very nice brand of tonic water: Q. I’ll bet Patrick Stewart drinks it. Is there really any quinine in it? Observe my symptom-free status and judge for yourself. That’s science, right there.

I didn’t realize how nice a G&T could be. A good mixer really helps. It makes me want to buy cinchona powder–the source of quinine–and make my own tonic. Summer is coming.

There’s a good chance my resolve will fail when my 4-pack of tonic is gone, but I might want one or two G&T’s later this year.

I believe you would have to buy something like a pound of cinchona bark in order to get a therapeutic quinine dose every day for a couple of weeks. I was curious, and I checked. For malaria, you take 200 mg per day. That adds up to 4 grams of cinchona, so one ounce per week.

Okay, you have to have two or three ounces. Still a lot.

Now that the known rate of COVID-19 here is above one in 3,000, I have to admit I think more (i.e. a little bit) about protecting myself. I think about that with the flu, too. I really hate getting sick. I’ve been pretty bold about running errands. Will I still be this brave if we get up to one in 100? That would probably mean the real rate was more like 10%. The world would be a sea of cooties.

Here’s something I wonder about: what do single people do for food when they get sick? When I had pink eye, I still went to buy groceries, taking what precautions I could. Would I do the same thing if I thought I had coronavirus? Would I have a choice? I guess I could order food. I don’t know if I could eat Domino’s for three weeks. It’s hard enough to eat it once.

I bought two bags of navy beans. I wasn’t afraid stores would run out of food and leave me starving. I was afraid hoarders would buy all the navy beans in existence and that I would not be able to get them again until after the harvest. I don’t know how the bean supply chain works. I really like to have beans with cornbread occasionally.

I guess that with those beans and a canister of oatmeal, I could get through a week of quarantine without crippling constipation. Beans by themselves would be worse than coronavirus. Those things can lodge in your system for days, doing what beans do the whole time.

When the week was up, I would have to poach squirrels, in both senses of the word.

No, I guess I could still use drive-throughs.

I have some .38 Super brass soaking in water and citric acid. I should take them out and work on the press.

If I die, the first one here gets the toilet paper. It’s in the master bath in a cabinet. Sorry it doesn’t have baby ducks printed on it. This is what happens when men do the shopping.

Goodbye, Pandemic; Hello, Needless Recession

The coronavirus news gets better and better, at least as far as the disease itself is concerned. The oppression and totally unnecessary economic destruction are different matters.

The Johns Hopkins site that graphs new cases as they appear shows that the American infection rate is down near the point where it was two weeks ago. That means transmission is decelerating. The epidemic is going away, and it’s happening fast. Some time in May, we should be walking around outdoors again, and toilet paper will be on sale everywhere. We will be using it for landfill.

I can’t imagine what it’s like to be without toilet paper for weeks. I’m so grateful. My own supply seems to grow. I had plenty before the lunacy started, and I keep discovering new rolls. Found one in a closet yesterday.

Amazon has had a run on bidet attachments for toilets. Maybe coronavirus will drive Americans to catch up with France and start cleaning their rear ends properly.

When I’m in stores, I force myself to walk by paper towels. It’s actually exciting to see them. I feel drawn to them. But I have all I need, and as long as I’m willing to shop before noon, I can always get more. If I pass them by, people with big families may get a shot.

I don’t want to pick on people, but I’ve seen some desperate, uninformed behavior here. I’ve seen a lot of masks. The only kind of mask that is known to protect people from coronavirus is an N95 or N100 mask. I don’t know much about it, but they’re for people in unusual situations. I read about these masks yesterday. A doctor said they were very uncomfortable and that it’s hard to wear one for more than half an hour or so. You have to push the air in and out, and that wears you out. You also have to fit them properly, which most people would not do even if they had them. And you can’t keep the same one forever. They get contaminated. They’re disposable. Health care workers just came up with an approved way to clean them, and that was out of desperation.

Even good masks don’t catch all the bugs, even if you fit them correctly. That’s interesting. They may catch a significant percentage.

I hate to cite experts, who have been wrong about all the big things, but they say you shouldn’t wear a mask. They don’t think it helps. I guess it will help you not to put virus-laden fingers in your nose and mouth, but were you planning to do that?

When I go out, I see people in bandanas and Home Depot dust respirators, often loosely fitted. They’re not being used like protective gear. They’re being used like charms. “If I wear this, the disease will stay away. And I will win the Florida lottery.”

I’m still waiting to see someone who has poked a hole in a mask for cigarettes. I guarantee you, that person is out there.

People are wearing gloves. How is that supposed to help? You can’t get the virus through your hands. If it gets on a glove, it’s just as easy to transfer to your face as it would be if it were on your bare hand.

Here’s my hat tip to neurosis: I keep a bottle of alcohol in the car. I pour it in my hand when I leave a store, and I rub it over both hands. Then I let it dry. Does it actually do anything? How would I know? If the official numbers are right, I’ve probably never seen a person with coronavirus, let alone been near one. Even if they’re off by a factor of 100, I haven’t been exposed much. But it feels nice to make the effort, and the flu and colds, which are bigger threats, are out there.

I should have been using sanitizer a long time ago, and I was, but I found that it pours out of the bottle when you leave it in a hot car. I never fixed that problem. I gave up.

I wonder what people think when they see me with the car door open, pouring precious alcohol on my hand. Maybe I should draw my gun before I do it. Couple of warning shots might be smart.

I’ve actually considered buying real quinine, which is available on Ebay. How could it hurt? But I suppose if I had the extreme misfortune to develop a serious case of COVID-19, doctors would come up with better treatments than I would. It’s just possible.

What’s going to happen when the total number of active cases drops down near zero? Will our keepers determine that hot weather really does kill coronavirus infections, giving themselves heartburn, because Donald Trump guessed it first? Maybe they’ll tell us to stay indoors because our crazy lockdowns are really what did the trick. It’s important for the powers that be to keep confirming that their bad choices were correct.

China isn’t the only place where saving face leads to doubling down on terrible decisions. Hello…Biden nomination.

No, he’s great. Democrats should rally behind him. Wonderful choice. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

I guess it’s fitting that the Democrats are nominating a man with an underlying condition.

Here’s a prediction: when all is said and done, IF we get a reliable test and IF it’s applied retroactively to samples from people who have died (as it should be), we will find out that many died from something other than COVID-19. I may be wrong. It may be easier to diagnose a fatality than someone who gets well, so maybe coronavirus fatalities have been identified with more certainty. If we test people who got well, I think the overwhelming likelihood is that a lot of coronavirus cases will become flu cases. After all, the Chinese say current tests have a 40-80% false-positive rate.

It will be great when the vaccine becomes available. They used to tell us it would be 18 months. Now one company is shooting for a 2020 release. That would pretty much kill next year’s epidemic, if one begins.

I think I’ll be good this time around. I’ll get the flu shot this year, and when the coronavirus shot becomes available, I’ll get it, too, unless all the doses have been reserved for celebrities.

STILL NO MAJOR CELEBRITY DEATHS. Incredible. Are the Illuminati giving them enchanted gluten-free suppositories?

In lighter news, I used my new, bigger propane cooker last night. I splurged on a choice rib eye instead of the selects they sell at Winn-Dixie for hamburger prices. Splurging was a mistake. It wasn’t any better. The center was just as tough. On the up side, the cap was tender, and the flavor was magnificent. There is nothing like high-temperature butter-frying for steak.

I had to use long tongs because you can’t really get that close to the cooker when it’s working. It will take the hairs right off your hands. I think that means I should use a bigger skillet which will cover more of the flames. Now that I have a proper cooker, I can use a griddle if I want. I can cook for two, in the unlikely event I have a guest.

The butter in the skillet caught fire while I was cooking. That warmed my heart. It told me things were working out.

The rib eye is THE steak. All others are inferior. Unfortunately, Winn-Dixie has been pushing T-bones lately. It’s not a good steak. Sorry, but it’s true.

Filets are good. New York strips are acceptable. A T-bone or porterhouse, which is a filet and strip attached to a bone, is a bad steak for frying. The meat shrinks, the bone doesn’t, and the bone ends up interfering with the pan-to-steak contact. This means no crust. Even if you cook a T-bone by some other means, you still have a very good cut on one side and a lesser cut on the other.

New York strips are wildly overrated. They’re dry and relatively tough. A good one is okay, but it can never compare to a better cut, and bad ones are common.

I’d rather have a good skirt steak than a T-bone or strip.

If the recession goes as expected, good beef will be cheap. I think I paid $7 per pound for prime boneless rib eye during the real estate recession. That was at Costco. I had to buy entire roasts.

Let’s check my Ebay bench grinder poverty index. Yesterday, the search “Baldor bench grinder” came up with 42 used items. Today the total is 44. If my theory is right, the number will increase. Men will be exchanging their tools for signs to hold up beside highways.

But it was worth it. To fight an epidemic which is roughly as deadly as the flu.

It will be interesting to see how the index pans out. Sad, but still interesting.

What Goes Up…

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

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

I actually do that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. Joe Biden is demented.

2. Joe Biden gropes women.

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

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

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

Wait. Is this Fox?

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

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

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

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

Had to get that in there.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MORE

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

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

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

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

COVID-19 Graph Looking Good

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

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

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

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

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

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

Still no dead major celebrities. How can that be?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’m just speculating.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Inheritance Beats Striving Any Day

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fatherlessness Personified

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

Suddenly, God has helped me understand that feeling.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here is what Paul said about this:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brass Sorted

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pessimism Requires Faith and Determination

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Are we Peaking Yet?

Here are my coronavirus figures for today.

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

Johns Hopkins number: 1,446,557

Percentage error: +1.39

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maybe it’s time to buy stock.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nice.

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

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

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

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

NO FACTOR!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You have to love Southern humor.

Even though I ate the jelly beans.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ridiculous.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I think I’ll stick with pistols when traveling.

Hope everyone is having a pleasant lockdown.

Things are Getting Creepy

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

Johns Hopkins global toll: 1,359,398

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

Error: 0.074%

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He’s not Kim Kardashian.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One wonders how we will treat the hoarders and gougers.

Coronavirus: Sweden Gets Something Right

First of all, my coronavirus prediction equation.

Today’s prediction: 1,263,839.

Actual figure: 1,286,409.

Error as a percentage: 1.75.

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

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

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

Ouch.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No wonder I hate cities so much.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sorry for the Delay

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I kid.

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

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

Who says college math isn’t useful?

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

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

Still Trying to Figure Coronavirus Out

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Even the black death failed to bring that about.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Interesting times.

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

That’s it for today.

Coronavirus Prediction Still Doing Well

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

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

Actual: 1,026,974.

Error: ~1.9%.

These figures are global.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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