Sorry for the Delay

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I kid.

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

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

Who says college math isn’t useful?

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

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

Still Trying to Figure Coronavirus Out

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Even the black death failed to bring that about.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Interesting times.

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

That’s it for today.

Coronavirus Prediction Still Doing Well

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

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

Actual: 1,026,974.

Error: ~1.9%.

These figures are global.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If Snowflakes were Horses, my Neighbor Would Ride

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’m thrilled with this thing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fears Wiped Away

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How Embarrassing

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

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

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

I guess I should give up!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

After that, I draw a blank.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The whole country has been grounded. Like children.

Well. Most of the country.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Coronavirus Equation Error Leveling Off as Percentage

I have some truly weird news concerning my coronavirus prediction equation.

I checked today, and my prediction is off by 20.9%. The last two times I checked, it was off by 17.5% and about 20%. I don’t know where I scribbled the latter figure down.

This is big news. The error in my equation is nearly constant. You may not understand what it means. If the error stays nearly constant, it becomes possible to make predictions with great precision. Maybe under 5%.

Imagine this. You have a tape measure. There is an extra inch at the end. Every time you measure something, you get an inch less than the correct figure. It’s still an accurate tape measure. You just add an inch every time, and you get the correct figure. Not a perfect analogy, but you see what I mean.

If my equation stays about 20% low, you can get a very accurate result from it by adding a percentage every time you use it. That’s astounding. It’s like hitting a hole in one every day.

It doesn’t mean I’m a genius or even good at differential equations or predicting epidemics. It just means the equation I came up with is extremely useful for creating good predictions this week.

Maybe I should post a few predictions and see what happens. Even if I don’t, my equation is already known, so if I posted the predictions after they came true, no one could say I was cheating.

I’ll use 20.88% as my future error. Of course, that’s relative to the actual figure. Relative to the prediction, it’s about 26.4%, so that’s what I’ll add.

April 1: 867,545
April 2: 934,081
April 3: 1,007,033

These are figures for early in the day, like between 10 a.m. and noon.

Wonder what will happen. If it works, how long will it work? Even 4 or 5 days would be neat.

The percentage error is increasing very slowly. Maybe I should take that into account, but I’m already going way beyond what I can reasonably expect to predict, so I think I’ll let it slide.

Goebbels’ Children

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

Here’s a link: LINK.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Interesting stuff.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The cows must think I’m nuts.

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

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

I’ll post a photo of the new gongs.

Will Coronavirus Improve us or Keep Making us Worse?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The men in authority probably represented preachers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Interesting.

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

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

Steel Targets Bring New Life to Backyard Range

Today I went out and shot my steel targets. It’s surprising how different it is from shooting paper.

First of all, you don’t have to take a lot of junk. When I shoot paper, I take a bunch of targets and tape. Then I have to tape targets up. Sometimes I have to replace them during a session. For steel, you just drive to the pasture and start shooting.

Another difference: you really blow through ammunition. When I shoot paper with a pistol, I aim very carefully and slowly squeeze off rounds because I want to hit an area the size of a dime. With steel, you have no small aiming points to shoot at. I’m aiming at targets that are at least 6″ wide, so I can fire a round every second.

Because I’m not aiming at tiny points, I can back up from the targets. Today I shot a .22 pistol from over 60 feet away, standing, and I hit a gong most of the time. When I missed, it was because I was playing around.

It’s really strange to shoot at something from 60 feet with a pistol and hit it most of the time. I would be hitting the gongs 95% of the time if I tried. I haven’t even sighted my gun in properly. I need to finish adjusting the sights and move back to 25 yards to make it a challenge. Didn’t see that coming.

Speaking of the gun, it’s a real surprise. I had a Smith & Wesson Victory pistol, and I thought it was great. Then I bought a Colt Woodsman, and suddenly, the Victory’s trigger seemed so bad I didn’t want to shoot it. I put it away and ordered a new trigger from Tandemkross, which is a company that specializes in gun upgrades. I believe they coordinated with Smith & Wesson before the Victory came out, because it seemed like they had a bunch of upgrades available right away.

The new trigger is flat in the front. I don’t know too much about flat triggers, but I believe they are supposed to be better for accuracy because you can choose a consistent place to rest your finger. On a curved trigger, you pretty much have to press wherever the curve puts your finger. Seems that way, anyhow.

The Tandemkross trigger is a little lighter than the original trigger, but the main difference is that is extremely smooth and consistent. You know exactly when the gun is going to go off. I can’t say for sure without shooting some paper, but I think this gun, and the Woodsman, may bring me to a completely new level of pistol accuracy. Or not. I have to put them to the test on paper.

The Tandemkross trigger seems to be truly excellent. The Woodsman’s trigger break is like snapping the stem of a wine glass sized for a Barbie doll, and that’s impressive. The Tandemkross trigger doesn’t have the same elegance, but it’s so smooth and predictable, it may be just as good.

I’ve been using CCI’s Troy Landry Choot ‘Em Mini-magnums. They’re very nice. They come lubricated from the factory, they cycle beautifully, they shoot well, and they don’t leave black filth all over your guns like Remington Golden Bullets.

I believe I shot 76 rounds in 20 minutes. My magazines hold 11 rounds, and one round failed to cycle. In fairness to CCI, I only clean my guns when they stop shooting.

Anyway, if I had been shooting paper, I would probably have shot about 50 rounds. On top of that, I will shoot more often now that I have steel.

It’s good to be hitting small targets easily at over 20 yards. That tells me I’m in good shape should I ever have to shoot in order to defend life. After shooting steel for a week or two, I’m going to be Dirty Fricking Harry. Stay away from me, or at least mind your manners.

Speaking of defense, I’ve gone back to carrying a 10mm. I decided to get a full-size 10mm Glock for carry on my property, and that got me thinking about putting the 9mm away. I was carrying a 9mm I bought for my dad. It has Tru-Glo sights and a Crimson Trace laser. It’s very nice. Still, there is a lot to be said for big bullets that go fast.

I need to put a rack on the utility cart, which I keep calling a golf cart. If I have a rack, I can put an AK-47 on it and forget about pistols.

I’ve learned a lot about steel targets. I learned that tilting targets downward to send metal into the ground isn’t as effective as it sounds. The stuff that bounces off a target isn’t bullets that bounce in one direction. Bullets splatter like water balloons when they hit steel, and the metal sprays back in a cone-shaped splash that covers something like 20°. You would have to tilt your target a lot to eliminate, say, 95% of the spall.

Based on my knowledge of physics, I think it makes more sense to use the lightest targets you can and make sure they swing freely. A target that moves a lot when a bullet hits it will take momentum (and velocity) away from the bullet, so fragments traveling toward a shooter won’t move as fast. That’s my theory.

If a target is infinitely hard and heavy, none of a bullet’s momentum will go into it, so all of the bullet’s energy will go into the formation of the spall, the spall’s velocity, and things like sound and heat. If a target is light, a lot of the bullet’s momentum, and therefore energy, will be transferred to it when the target swings. That leaves less energy to propel the spall back at your face or crotch or whatever. If you’re going to be hit with spall, slow is better than fast.

I learned that you don’t need anything thicker than 3/8″ for anything up to a .308. I have 3 1/2″-thick targets. Next time, I’ll go thinner.

I think I want 4 more small targets and one big one. Big targets just aren’t challenging for most guns, but I would like to have a big gong for shooting rifles with iron sights. You need to be a hundred yards back to shoot steel safely with a centerfire rifle, and I am not all that confident in my iron sight rifle skills. Also, I may want to shoot relatively inaccurate guns like the AK-47.

I’m not sure I’ll be able to shoot the .204 Ruger at steel. When velocity gets too high, steel can be damaged, and damage makes it reflect bullets. The .204 goes nearly 4000 fps.

I highly recommend you try steel. Paper is great, but it’s limited in what it can do for you, and steel is much more fun.

Soylent Green is Made out of Toilet Paper

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MORE

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

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

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

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

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

Those who Can’t Learn the Lessons of Basic Math are Doomed to Repeat Them

The coronavirus news continues to alarm and disappoint…liberals and journalists (but I repeat myself).

As people who read my blog know, I put together a very simply differential equation intended to predict how the disease would spread. I touched the equation up a couple of times, but after I started getting excellent agreement, I decided to leave it alone and accept the error. I thought this would give me more credibility. You can’t change a forecast every day. That’s not forecasting. That’s present-casting.

A couple of days ago, I came very, very close to nailing the actual total number of cases. Today, things are much worse. I’m only within about 9%!

Yes, that was sarcasm. An accuracy of 9% is beyond my wildest dreams. It’s the stuff of Joe Biden’s nightmares. He really needs a plague to get him in office.

Actual figure today, worldwide: 480,446.

Predicted figure: 437,040.

Flu cases: 650,000,000.

Biden is a MeToo nightmare. He is famous for his creepy behavior with the ladies. Trump has already been inoculated againt MeToo. They have exhausted their pop-gun ammunition already, and he survived. They will look stupid shooting the same rounds at him again. Not that some won’t try.

Biden needs a distraction and a stick to hit Trump, and the failed plague is turning out to be a pretty soggy stick.

To get back to the math, for the moment, the epidemic is acting a great deal like my equation, and that should continue for some time. I think the numbers will outpace my equation to some degree, and then as the epidemic dies out, my equation will outpace the epidemic and become invalid.

I’m hoping this will happen by the end of April.

Someone told me his wife got really mad when she saw my equation. She attacked it because I didn’t use exact numbers. People who are bad at math and determined to be upset are impossible to talk to at times like this.

You don’t need exact numbers in a situation like this, and even if you did, only God knows them. Also, the equation doesn’t have to be all that accurate. It’s not really intended to tell us how many people will get sick. It’s intended to give us a ballpark idea which serves perfectly well to tell us whether this is a real plague.

Many women enjoy being upset. This is less common among men, and it’s common among kids. It’s a form of manipulation. “If I’m upset, the burden is on you to do my will.” It’s important to know when you’re guilty of this. It’s a character flaw you need to address. Being worried and refusing to listen to reason are very bad things that bring negative consequences. Worrying doesn’t make you a good person. It makes you a liability and a burden to other people.

If you’re a man over the age of 15, you already know that one of the best ways to upset women is to try to calm them down when they’re flipping out. Very often, when a woman comes to you in a panic, she’s not looking to be calmed down. She’s looking to have her panic confirmed. Don’t ask me why.

Being calm and rational is a good thing. It doesn’t make you insensitive or heartless. Truthfully, I don’t want hysterical people in my life. I don’t like being around them. Coming to me with hysteria isn’t a way to make me embrace you and bond with you. It’s a very good way to drive me off. I have plenty of problems without including neurotic people who do not want to feel better.

It’s pretty obvious now that coronavirus isn’t going to be a big deal compared to other illnesses we already have. It has hit the entire world, it doesn’t have any fresh new continents to attack, and things just aren’t going that badly. I don’t know what the final tally will be. I would guess 20 or 30 million at the outside. We can say with confidence that the numbers won’t be all that bad. We have had ample time to see what the disease can do, and it’s not going to develop new infectiousness to increase the toll.

The disease is not a catastrophe, any more than Obama’s swine flu was. The economy-killing panic is the real problem.

If an ignorant layman who blogs can figure out what coronavirus is doing, why can’t the experts? I suppose they can, because they are much more able than I am. They don’t even need equations. They must surely have excellent software, and they have to know coronavirus isn’t a major threat. I guess they’re giving us worst-case predictions in order to justify their financial support. Also, people in that kind of work tend to be Trump-haters.

Yesterday, I saw an article written by an ER physician from the New York area. It was a hysterical, critical letter to Trump, claiming Cuomo had all the answers and Trump’s policies were going to lead to an Omega Man scenario. She said she had treated “countless” severe cases, and she wrote of watching people gasp for breath.

I checked the figures. New York City was at 15,000 known cases. We know that out of that many people, less than 10% will be in bad shape, so let’s say 1500. How many will gasp for breath? Maybe 750? How many emergency rooms are there in a city of 8 million people? There are over 200 in New York, so that should give you a clue. What percentage of the time is this woman at work? Well under 50; that’s guaranteed. What percentage of her ER’s coronavirus patients go to her instead of another doctor?

“But wait,” you say, “people with detected cases are likely to be much sicker.” Good try, but that’s not what we’ve been told. We’ve been told that severe cases amount to something like 10% of the total, and that has to refer to detected cases, because otherwise, it’s an imagined figure.

She hasn’t seen “countless” anything. She has probably handled 10 or fewer gasping patients. She just wants to get rid of Trump.

When BS fights with math, BS loses every time.

It’s very unfortunate that American kids aren’t taught to think this way. Am I a genius because I can do division and multiplication? Am I exceptional because I passed fourth-grade math? Has it come to that?

Lies are a bigger threat than disease. The truth matters. Most Americans don’t know this.

I can’t help thinking of the many times professionals with big computers gave us bad, alarming information about hurricanes when ordinary citizens could look at maps and models and see that we were being deceived. Reporters re-spewed the hysteria to us with no semblance of criticality. No one was ever held accountable. It looks like coronavirus coverage is working the same way.

If there is one thing I’ve been wrong about, it’s the toilet paper crisis. I greatly overestimated the character and intelligence of the American people. I thought people would quit hoarding in a week. This country is full of toilet paper. There is no shortage at all. It’s still being shipped to stores, and they’re still stocking it. The problem is that selfish, heartless people–worriers–are continuing to show up early and buy it all. And stores are letting them. That’s really something. A great lesson for the future.

Take heart. They can’t keep buying it up forever. The supply is just too great. Sorry if you’ve already used your curtains. Things will get better soon.

You can get toilet paper from Amazon right now, if you look around, and it will be delivered in a few days. Hope this helps. I would hate to see people ruin all their socks and neckties.

Ballpark Prediction Equation Survives Another Day

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What happens when coronavirus goes away?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There are pandemics we barely notice.

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

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

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

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

The Love Grows Cold

On Friday, I went to see my metal dealer (who was sick), and I spent about $33 on steel so I could build a stand for my steel gong targets. Yesterday, I finished the main part of the fabrication. Here’s the result.

I plan to paint it, since it will stand in a cow pasture permanently. Until the cows knock it over and walk around on it, which will probably happen 15 minutes after I set it up. I didn’t know cows were mischievous, but it turns out they are.

The long square bits are 1″ tubing. The round bits are galvanized conduit, which I had lying around. I also used some scrap, including two short pieces of a spear for a Hawaiian sling. Look it up.

Wait…you can’t weld galvanized steel! It gives off poisonous gas! Not to worry. If you dip it in muriatic acid for a few seconds, the zinc goes away. Cheap galvanized stuff is a great resource for hobby welders.

I have a piece of round tubing that will slip over the horizontal bar. I’m going to cut the round tubing in several pieces. I’ll weld long pieces of 1″ by 1/8″ bar to the round tubing, and I’ll fasten my gongs to the other ends. This will give me targets that can swing vertically but not from side to side.

I have considered welding the targets to the steel bar, but welding will surely anneal the gongs in small areas. Soft metal can cause ricochets. I don’t know if a tiny bit of soft steel will be dangerous enough to worry about. After all, people all over the world shoot hardened gongs held up on mild steel frames that are soft, and obviously, the frames get hit. Welding would be quick and easy compared to using bolts.

I think it would be smarter to insert bolts in the gong holes and weld the ends of the bolts to the flat bar. I wouldn’t have to drill holes in the bar, and I wouldn’t soften the gongs. I don’t want the gongs to be right up against the bar. I want to put some distance in there. This will make the gongs hang so they tilt forward a little, which may make spent lead more likely to be deflected toward the ground. I guess the bolt idea is good.

When this is finished, I will have a strong stand that comes apart with two screws.

If I were making the stand today, I would change the design a little, but it will be fantastic, so I don’t care.

People knock steel, saying it’s heavy, but they forget that it hasn’t been that long since steel was considered a wonder material. The abundance of iron and the versatility of steel have changed the world. If you think steel is heavy, try building a wooden or masonry skyscraper. We haven’t always had lighter metals, and they’re more expensive and harder to work with. Steel is an incredible material. You just don’t realize it because you’re spoiled.

In other news, when I got up this morning and checked the coronavirus numbers, my latest coeffient’s results had me within a few hundred cases of the actual toll. Shocking. Maybe the equation I constructed will work fairly well for the next couple of weeks. Sooner or later, factors like recovery and saturation should mess it up, however.

I read some very comforting news today. I don’t know if it’s true. I read that MOST Americans get the flu once a year. I had read that about 36,000,000 of us caught it this year. If “most” is correct, we’re looking at a figure over 170,000,000.

That would be comforting, because it would make coronavirus look even less significant compared to the flu.

I have my doubts about it, to say the least.

A reader has suggested that Italians screwed up their data by calling all respiratory-disease deaths that in anyway involved the new bug coronavirus deaths. I wonder if that’s true, and I wonder how many other countries are doing similar things.

Don’t forget: Chinese researchers put the percentage of false positives at 40% to 80%. How would you feel, taking a cancer test that unreliable? What if you got charged with murder, and you found out juries had a 40% false-guilty rate?

Actually, that wouldn’t shock me. I’m amazed they ever get it right.

I have finally been impacted by coronavirus. Almost. A week or two ago, I noticed that my local Winn-Dixie sold store-brand shredded whole-milk mozzarella. This is not an easy thing to get even in sane times. If the cheese is good, it would be perfect for pizza. Low-fat mozzarella turns brown in the oven. You can reduce this by covering it with provolone or some other whole-milk cheese, or you can butter your mozzarella, but it’s better to start with good cheese.

Yesterday, I thought I might get some bagged cheese and Ragu for emergency pizza, just in case. Too late. The hoarders got both. They should be forced to go out in orange vests and pick up dog poop. They should have all their toilet paper confiscated and replaced with corn cobs. Or bastard files.

Another store had plenty of sliced provolone, so I grabbed some. I bought crushed tomatoes and paste. Can’t hurt. Still low on flour, but the kind of person who hoards food isn’t likely to cook from scratch, so maybe I can find some.

Hoarders don’t eat most fruits and vegetables, either. They cleaned out my local store’s potatoes the other day, while apples and all types of green vegetables sat in a big lonely display, untouched. When you see hoarder carts, they’re full of sugar cereal, Pop Tarts, Hot Pockets, and so on. Hoarding doesn’t appeal much to people who have it together.

I wonder what’s happening with cigarettes! I’ll bet they’re gone. People with poor values hoard, and they also smoke.

If you think about it, maybe the hoarders are onto something. They eat garbage and they smoke. They tend to be obese. These are coronavirus’s favorite things. Maybe hoarders are more likely to die if they get infected, so we should let them hoard!

Hoarders seem to miss some obvious things. Stores are having temporary problems, but you can go to McDonald’s or any other takeout restaurant and get all the food you want. You would think this would be a clue that there is not going to be a food shortage.

The only thing that could cause a real food shortage would be a lack of workers at the fundamental level. If there is no one to work on farms because insane politicians have made them stay home, yes, we will have shortages. The disease itself won’t hurt enough people to cause a problem. The US food supply chain is very, very flexible, and it has a lot of backup storage built into it. People need to read about it instead of filling their homes with food other folks should have.

I have a policy. I always try new pizza restaurants that open near me. In Miami, this was usually not a fruitful effort, because Miami is a pizza desert. Cubans make very bad pizza. Ocala is different. The pizza here is as good or better than New York pizza. Don’t ask me why. And yes, there is bad pizza in New York. There is plenty of it.

There is a chain here called Five Star. They opened a location near a grocery I use. Twice, I went in and tried to get slices. This was weeks ago. They were having professionalism issues, so I could not get served in a reasonable time. Yesterday, I finally got lucky. I got a couple of slices. Wonderful. I’m thinking of heading over there today.

Coincidentally, Five Star left a flyer in my mailbox yesterday. It says they use 100% actual cheese, which is something Papa John’s and Domino’s can’t say. They use fake cheese. Look it up. They mix cheese with things like starch.

Five Star also uses tomatoes which are packed ripe. This is hugely important. It’s very hard to find this kind of tomato sauce in grocery stores. Hunt’s Contadina, Cento, and the others generally do not use ripe tomatoes, and they mistreat the green tomatoes they do use. Five Star probably uses Bonta or Stanislaus sauce, from California.

I may try to hit the store tomorrow early, because I am very curious about the bagged cheese. Oldsters get exclusive shopping rights before 9 a.m. After that, I can pounce. But maybe there are lines and fistfights in the morning. Wouldn’t surprise me.

I had another plague problem. I tried to order a GoPro from Best Buy. Ordinarily, I have very good experiences with this chain, but not this week. They’re cowering behind their counters with their doors locked, but you can still pick things up in the parking lot. My understanding is that you drive by with your hatch up, and an employee in a nomex burqa fires your purchase into the back of your car with some kind of cannon. Then he goes back in, and they give him a squirt with a flamethrower.

Anyway, I tried to place the order three times, and Best Buy canceled it every time, saying they couldn’t verify my info. Their site said to call them. I called. They routed me to someone who was in the wrong department. That person routed me to another department. That department’s system told me I could expect to wait over 60 minutes to hear a human voice.

Tomorrow, Amazon will be delivering my GoPro. They promised a Thursday delivery, but it’s going to be Tuesday.

I have a Yi-brand camera I bought in ’17, but it’s junk. It turns itself on and off. When you’re shooting video, it switches to still photos and fills your SD card with them. It takes many tries to connect it to a computer or wifi. I decided to give up and buy the real thing. Do NOT buy a Yi camera.

You can imagine my stress, missing out on unnecessary cheese and having to buy toys online instead of in person. It’s hard, but I’m a natural hero and saint, so don’t make a big thing out of it. It would embarrass me, because I’m humble. And charismatic.

This morning, I realized something really bad about the stay-home orders and business closures. When people are stuck at home and they can only shop for essentials, what are they going to do? They’ll shop out of boredom. So the bans are increasing hoarding. How about that?

I’m going to see if I can get paint for my target stand. If the hardware store has paint, I’ll just buy ALL OF IT! I HAVE TO HAVE IT! SOMEONE ELSE MIGHT GET IT FIRST! I WANT IT ALL!

Whew. I’m back now.

I guess I’ll put up a photo of the stand when I set it up. May be a couple of days.

Coronavirus Math Looking Better than Yesterday

I really have to apologize. I made a little booboo while updating my coronavirus forecast yesterday. I came up with future figures which were somewhat disturbing, but today I corrected myself, and the estimate for late May was reduced by over 60%.

I’m still not saying you can rely on the equation, but at least it looks better.

Yesterday, the Italians dumped 27,000 unrecorded cases on us, all at once. I looked at their total in the morning. It was about 27,000. Three hours later, it was about 54,000. Obviously, the difference was due to error. It’s not like 27,000 people got sick instantly.

I put the new figures into my equation, but I also made the mistake of bumping the baseline date up. I figured the more recent the starting date was, the better the data would be.

This was wrong. The total on the recent starting date was artificially low because of the Italian fumble. A low starting figure gives you an equation the blows up faster.

I went back and did the math again using my original starting date, which is March 5. The farther back you go, the less impact Italy has on the figures. If they were artificially low all along, the error would be smaller farther back in the past, when Italy’s total numbers, though wrong, were too small to screw things up as much.

New figures:

3/22: 323,000 (actual figure this morning: ~311,000)
3/23: 348,723
3/24: 375,977
3/31: 636,679
4/4: 860,281
3/22 + 60: 29,552,653

No one wants to see 30 million people get this disease, but yesterday the number was about 80 million. And again, this is global, and the flu total this year was around 650,000,000, over a much shorter time. The flu did that in spite of our usual preparations and precautions. We didn’t see coronavirus coming, thanks to the Chinese. The flu had to overcome a big vaccination program which worked, and it still nailed 650,000,000 people and killed 80,000 Americans. No one has been vaccinated against coronavirus.

More news: they’re saying the death rate for healthy people is probably about 0.3%.

What about Italy’s crazy death rate? On Friday, the average age of an Italian killed by coronavirus was 78.5. AVERAGE.

A reader pointed me to a story which may also shed light. People are saying the Italians blew it by hospitalizing people instead of treating them at home. They did the opposite of social distancing. They put sick people in buildings full of other sick people. If this is the case, no wonder so many Italians died.

China is still flat, and people are going back to work.

If relatively tiny Italy is rivaling China in total infections, Italy is doing something very, very wrong. They don’t have a stronger strain of the virus. If they did, young people would be dying, and they aren’t. The weak link in the chain has to be human.

What about the Fusco family in New Jersey? They had a get-together, 7 got sick, and two died. Proof that we’re all going to die? No. The Fuscos are old and obese. Go look them up. There is a group photo of them. Some are very obese, and the thinnest one is merely somewhat obese. They look very bad, even in their pre-coronavirus photo. The youngest one is middle-aged. The two that died had “underlying health problems.” These are exactly the type of people you would expect to have wildly disproportionate bad fortune.

The data still stinks, probably, but look out your window. Do you see bodies lying in the yard? Is the real estate market glutted with the homes of victims? Is the government sending out makeshift morgues to refrigerate millions of corpses? Nope. That’s not happening even in Italy. Even if there is never a good prediction equation, there is still common sense, and we can see that coronavirus is not an extinction-level event.

Scientists are now talking about 0.3% as a reliable death rate, and they are still expecting people under 60 and healthy people to do much, much better.

I hope this makes people feel better.