Are You Sure You’re Sure?

It’s remarkable how many things I “believe” but don’t really believe.

Of course, I am contradicting myself on a superficial level, but receptive people already understand, without my having to explain. Which I will.

Consider the times I prayed to be healed and then received miraculous healing. While I was praying and commanding my body to be healed, I believed God would heal me. Had I not, I wouldn’t have prayed, right? But I didn’t believe completely, in every corner of my heart. When the healings came, there was still some surprise.

People are fuzzy thinkers and fuzzy believers. When we reason, we aren’t afraid to discard things that appear to be facts, when they conflict with other evidence, our desires, our emotions, and our intuition. Surprisingly, fuzzy logic often leads to the better conclusions than non-fuzzy logic. When it comes to faith, we can hold a mixture of belief and unbelief.

It can be frustrating to deal with folks who think the human mind takes a binary approach to thought and feeling. The world is full of individuals who can’t tolerate the notion that a person can think or feel two ways about something at the same time. It should be very obvious that human beings have internal conflicts, but many of us look at the mind and heart the way engineers look at toasters, and they draw simplistic, half-baked conclusions about the way we work, the way children do.

I guess I started this blog entry with a digression, but I don’t care.

Today I looked at Youtube over breakfast. I wanted to watch some Christian material. I chose Tom Fischer; I’ve been watching a lot of other people, and today I felt like it was his turn.

I saw a video labeled “Street teaching with Tom Fischer-evil spirits” [sic], and I was drawn to it. I have been the site of an internal battle lately, between evil spirits on one side and the Holy Spirit and me on the other. From watching Fischer’s other videos, I knew he was likely to have something important and USEFUL to say.

About 97% of the time, preachers tell us things that are useLESS or counterproductive. Actually, useless and counterproductive are synonyms when it comes to religion. Neutrality doesn’t exist.

I am only interested in teaching I can put to work. Keep the fables, traditions, and feel-good stories to yourself. If powerful material is meat and less powerful material is milk, the slop most preachers serve is colored water and valium.

A few years back, God showed me interesting things about evil spirits. He showed me that demons are actually dead human beings. You can see it in the book of Enoch, and there is also evidence in Genesis. Rebellious angels married women and reproduced with them, and they gave rise to a race of vile beings that were stronger than ordinary humans. At least some were giants. They abused and dominated people, and they also ate them.

Am I making a stretch when I call them human? I doubt it. Jesus was the result of a spirit/human coupling, and he was human. In any case, demons are our dead brothers and sisters, and they really hate us. They were going to run the world and either destroy us entirely or keep us around as slaves and food. We got it all, with eternal life in heaven to follow, and they got nothing but the promise of eternity in flames.

Supernaturally, we are the 1%.

I’m not saying we make up 1% of the beings that have lived on earth. I’m saying we’re privileged, like the mythical 1% liberals love to hate. Heard of white privilege? We have human privilege. Among humans, God’s children are even more privileged.

The Bible is all about genocide. Churches don’t get that. The earth contains two races: God’s children and the children of darkness. God and Satan battle to exterminate each other’s seed and put their own seed in charge. Read Joshua.

God said Noah was “perfect in his generations.” I take that to mean he had no demon blood. Why? For one thing, the phrase makes no sense otherwise. It doesn’t mean he was righteous, because had that been the case, God would have said, “Noah was righteous.” The bit about “in his generations” makes no sense in that context, but if you take it to mean the generations that gave rise to him were untainted, it all comes together.

Genesis lists Noah’s ancestors carefully. Why do that if you’re not proving a point? His great-grandfather was Enoch, who was so righteous God removed him from the earth. His grandfather was Methuselah, who was so righteous God waited for his death before sending the flood. You won’t see Og the giant in the list.

God flooded the earth to kill off the seed of the angels, and he chose a pure male to repopulate the earth.

The dead children of the angels are stuck here. At least some of them are. Jewish legend says the earth was cleansed of them, and that Satan persuaded God to release 10% to tempt mankind. Mary Baxter, who claims she visited hell, says there are beings partially embedded in the walls there. They can’t come here.

Like whorish girls throwing themselves at rock stars, women had sex with angels, so now we have disembodied demons that cause disease, murder, perversion, mental illness, and all sorts of iniquities.

No man taught me these things. I read Enoch, I read the Bible, I prayed in tongues every day, and things fell together in my mind.

This is what I “believe.” I think God showed it to me. But my faith in what I believe is not perfect. I like having it confirmed by other sources. It proves I’m not making things up.

Fischer’s video was made in 2012. I don’t recall when my understanding of the origin of demons came to me, but it was at around that time. I was going to Trinity Church, which I attended from 2008 until early 2012. I had no idea who Tom Fisher was, and he still has no idea I exist. We didn’t conspire or listen to the same preachers.

If you watch the video, you will see that he says pretty much the same things I say. He says demons are the spirits of giants. He mentions Enoch. That’s confirmation. If there were people teaching these things on TV, and we both watched those people, or if we had seen similar teaching on the web, you could say we drank someone else’s Kool-Aid. That’s not what happened.

He says things I don’t say. He says people have found bones from the giants all over the world. I have never heard anything about that, and to say that I doubt it would be an understatement. I don’t think we’ve found grossly outsize bones that appeared to be humanoid. Sometimes stories and pictures go around the web, using fossils to prove the Bible is true, but they are generally fraudulent.

It’s not unusual for Christians to be fooled by fake news or bogus science.

The Internet is so weird. I started thinking about giants, and I remembered a famous discovery: the Holly Creek giant. The story of the giant says that in 1965, man named Kenneth White found a huge skeleton buried under a cliff in the area of Kentucky known as Holly Creek. When the bones were put together, they measured almost 9 feet in length. The skull had slits instead of round eye sockets, and it was about 30 inches in circumference. White later reburied the bones, and of course, there are no photos, and no one has dug it up to prove the story’s veracity.

My mother was born on Holly Creek. It’s a tiny place. Not even a town. If Kenneth White exists, she probably knew him. I knew an Artie White and a Stan White, from the next county to the west.

I looked around to find evidence supporting or refuting the story, and I came across the obituary of my grandfather’s buddy Earl Napier. I wasn’t looking for it. The name showed up in Google results.

I had wondered what happened to Earl. He died in a hospital in Lexington in 2010. Now I know.

I remember the night Earl punched out a guy named Gary at the Dixieland Lounge in Winchester, where I worked the door. Gary called him a dirty name, and Earl Punched him immediately, right in the mouth. I would say Earl, a former boxer, was 5’7″ tall, and Gary was about 6’6″. Gary was upset afterward because Earl punched him without any warning. I think he felt a man was obligated to respond to a bar challenge orally before attacking. It was a matter of etiquette.

Earl did okay against his giant.

Sometimes I wonder if the dinosaurs were demons. With their outrageous physical adornments, dimensions, and accessories, they remind me of the demon-controlled people who pierce themselves, split their tongues, cover themselves with tattoos, put fake horns under their skin, and so on. God made people look fairly uniform and boring, and he banned body modification under Moses, but Satan is driven by pride and a craving for attention, so his children look for ways to sensationalize their flesh.

Imagine what would happen if a doctor in San Francisco got complete control over people’s genes, and he could turn you into anything you wanted. Imagine the crazy competition that would ensue. Giants. Huge birds. Creatures from Avatar, with upgrades. It would be something to see. It would be like gays competing to get the most attention with their costumes, in parades like the one they have every year in Key West on Halloween.

If God allows us to live long enough, one day we’ll have that kind of control over our flesh, and the excesses will be astounding. Antlers. Fins. Whatever you want.

Enoch said God killed the giants because they were giants in the flesh but not the spirit. That makes complete sense. Satan is all about peaking early, and so are his children. It makes sense that they would be spectacular on earth but pathetic in the afterlife. Look at his famous human children. Beyonce. Madonna. Elvis. Jeff Bezos. Bill Gates. The living ones are very impressive right now, but one second after they die, they will be pitiable, unless they repent.

Satan is like “Peaked in High School Rob Lowe.”

There are dinosaurs whose bodies don’t seem to make sense. What possible evolutionary advantage can there be, on land, to weighing 70 tons? Think of the crazy structures dinosaurs had. Spinosaurus had a huge fin on its back, which would have hindered its movement. Tyrannosaurus had front legs that were too small to reach its mouth or the ground, and scientists can’t figure out how they could have evolved. There were dinosaurs with huge, inexplicable, inconvenient structures on their heads. If you look for physical justifications for these things, they are hard to explain, but if you consider what body modifiers would do if they could change their DNA, they look logical.

I know it doesn’t make sense. We date things using radioactivity, and the dates say dinosaurs disappeared about 60 million years ago. It’s just a funny thought.

I do wonder if our dating techniques are reliable. God and spirits can change the physical world’s properties. For example, there was no rain until Noah’s time. God could change a constant here and a law there and leave us very confused. He held the earth still in the sky for Joshua. He can do whatever he wants.

Why God would allow us to have a misleading fossil record is beyond me, but it’s something I think about. I know God is real; he has proved it over and over. That gives me a firm premise, so the things I see in the physical world, by comparison, are not reliable.

Genesis tells us many things happened, but there are many possibilities it does not mention and doesn’t exclude. We don’t know if the six days of creation were consecutive. It’s not clear whether the days were 24-hour earth days, longer days in an earth that turned more slowly, or longer days measured by heaven’s standards. We don’t know if creatures existed before those named in the creation story.

When I was a kid and I awoke and saw demons crawling on the walls, floor, ceiling, and bed, they appeared to be reptiles and bugs. The reptiles weren’t so large they would be considered unusual on this planet, but the bugs were up to a couple of feet long.

There are fossils of three-foot-long centipedes and an eight-foot millipede as wide as a bathroom scale. Paleontologists have also discovered a dragonfly 17 inches long. There was a two-foot scorpion.

I don’t know how to explain the fossil record, but I have proof that God is real, so it doesn’t matter. Somehow or other, the facts will reconcile when they are known.

Tom Fischer says it’s harder to get demons out of Christians than unbelievers, because Christians know better than to let them in. We allow them in through deliberate sin, and then we hold onto them through denial. We don’t confess or repent, so God allows them to stay. When they are allowed to stay, they corrupt our hearts and give us physical ailments. If we can get rid of them, the iniquities and ailments will leave.

I’ve been confessing and repenting like crazy since I saw Fischer talk about these things in other videos.

I can tell God is destroying the influence spirits have on me. Sometimes I feel things leave. My mind is much quieter than it was a month ago. I think fewer invisible things are speaking to me. My desires are changing suddenly, too.

Fischer and I agree on something else: the eradication of the giants in the promised land was shown to us to symbolize our own obligation to drive demons out of ourselves. No one taught me that. Moses sent spies into the promised land, and when they returned, they said the people who lived there were too strong, and some were giants. Ten spies wanted to quit, and God destroyed them and a bunch of other people with a plague. Two–Joshua and Caleb–had faith and wanted to keep fighting. They were preserved and rewarded with land.

Fischer is the only person other than myself whom I have heard saying these things.

A while back, God told me I was one of many, and he was not kidding. I don’t have to feel proud or special. God is saying the same things to many people. I’m just disconnected from them, as Elijah was disconnected from the 7000 people who had not bent the knee to Baal. God has an army tied together by the Holy Spirit. It’s not something I imagined.

Unfortunately, that army has almost zero influence in organized churches.

Compare modern humans to the 10 weak spies. We are defeated by all sorts of spirits. We give up in the face of cancer, addiction, mental illnesses of all types, blindness, allergies, arthritis, infertility, homosexuality, obesity, and a host of other ills. The vast majority of addicts will die addicts, even with the best help available. Medicine has never cured a cold or the flu.

Lately we’ve adapted by declaring that our demon-driven problems are actually virtues. Fat women are “curvy.” The retarded are “differently abled” or whatever the euphemism of the week calls them. Homosexuality, in which men use highly specialized reproductive organs to deposit reproductive fluid in orifices in which reproduction cannot occur, is considered normal. We glorify cripples instead of healing them. We have a “new normal” attitude toward these things, and worse, we treat people who offer hope like child molesters and rapists. A Christian who tries to help a homosexual will get about the same treatment as a Nazi.

Healing and other types of deliverance have been available, free of charge, for 2000 years, and we have turned away, and we have persecuted those who could help us, because we’re afraid to believe.

I’m going to keep going forward. If I drop dead while trusting God, so be it. I will eventually drop dead anyway, and I don’t have that many years left. What difference does it make? The people who are against me only have a few years to peck at me. After that, I will be beyond their reach and out of the way of all harm.

If you think it would be helpful to you, take a look at the video. It certainly helped me.

Squiddly Diddim Bop Em Diddim Plop

I have been resting today. Earlier I had a supernatural experience, and I have already written about it. Since it happened, I’ve felt much better, but I’ve also felt drained.

I finally got up and did something relatively useful. I walked to my game camera and took it down. Yesterday I put it up near a place where animals cut under my fence.

There were several videos in the camera, not including the one of me taking it down or videos that don’t show any animal life. The first two were the usual coons, but I also got a coyote and a fox.

The interesting thing to me is that these predators showed up during the day. I thought coyotes were nocturnal, but one crossed my fence between 1 and 2 p.m. I’ll post a capture.

The fox showed up at around 8:30 this morning. I had put some stuff down to attract animals, and it appears that it was gone before he arrived. He nosed around looking for it.

I’ll post a shot of the fox I filmed earlier this month. As you can see, it’s a different fox. It’s younger, and its coloring is more brilliant. It’s much smaller than today’s fox. So it looks like I have at least two foxes here, and our backward government will not let me shoot either one of them!

What do they want? Do they want foxes overrunning the place? Do they want them crowding me off the recliner and fighting over the remote?

Don’t tell me tyranny doesn’t exist.

Today’s fox seems nearly as big as today’s coyote. The coyote seems small, although I’m not equipped to judge. Maybe it’s young.

Their behaviors are different. The fox seems carefree. It’s intent on finding food. The coyote seems worried. He raises his head over and over and sniffs the air, like he knows there is a guy on a recliner, thinking of coyote pelts.

It’s as if they know the hunting laws. Coyotes are legal 24/7/365. Foxes are sacred. You can’t hunt them at all. No wonder the fox is relaxed.

The coyote video is encouraging because it shows I don’t have to be up at 4 a.m. to shoot one of these guys. It’s discouraging because the coyote is already nervous even before my arrival. I think he’ll be as wary as Donald Trump speaking at a Sierra Club dinner. Of weeds and mold and whatever it is they eat.

I’m disappointed that I haven’t filmed a bear. That would be neat. People keep expressing doubt that we have a bear, but you know what they say. Poop don’t lie.

I found some exciting new poop today. Poop is my new hobby. You could call me a poop watcher. I don’t know what it is. It’s not a coon. I don’t think it’s a bear. It’s not a bobcat or a coyote. It doesn’t look like fox poop. It’s sort of like very small, more or less rectangular cow manure.

Scanning the numerous helpful poop sites on the web, I have to conclude that it must be a bear after all. Maybe it’s a very small bear. Maybe it’s a big one that eats too much cheese.

You’re supposed to call poop “scat.” Seems pretentious. Looks like plain old poop to me. Scat is poop with a college degree.

I don’t want to think of poop when I listen to Ella Fitzgerald.

I have never seen deer poop here, and I’ve only seen a couple of things that looked like they could be turkey poop. When we bought the property, I made a big mistake. I had it surveyed. I had it inspected. I had a title search done. I did not do a poop inventory.

Live and learn.

I heard a bird of prey call while I was walking in and I saw what must have been a big hawk. It was sitting in the top of a hickory tree. It was huge. We have little hawky-looking birds here the size of crows, but this one would have fed three people.

When I got to the house, two sparrow sort of things were flapping around in the garage. They could not find the giant open door, so I opened the other one, increasing their odds of escape by 100%. They made it.

I have started putting seed in our feeder, partly to attract birds to amuse my dad (who turned out not to be interested in them), and partly to attract squirrels and get them fat and stupid for squirrel season. I’ve seen some strange birds going after the seed. I saw some that were tiny and bright yellow. I think that’s what I saw in the garage today.

It has occurred to me that I could go out and look at birds. But the only good optics I have are attached to rifles. I don’t know if I want to have a game warden spot me aiming a .308 at an eagle. There is probably a law against it, even if you take the bolt out of the gun. Wardens have heard a lot of clever excuses. “I’m just carrying my friend’s rifle.” “I’m just sitting in a covered deer blind with a Ma Deuce because it’s hot out.” As a result, the laws prevent you from doing just about anything that resembles hunting, unless you do it to animals in season. You can probably get fined for saying “BOO” to the wrong animal.

I think I’m forbidden to even walk within a certain distance of a tortoise hole. Like I know where they are.

I like the game camera. I should have bought a better one, but this one is fun. Maybe I’ll eventually see something other than a crow, coon, coyote, or fox. If I do, I will certainly let you know.

One Day Closer to Coyote Bath Mats

I’m trying to figure out whether I qualify to be called an outdoorsman yet.

I’ve done a ton of fishing. You could put me on a 60′ fishing yacht in Boston Harbor and tell me to take it to Eleuthera and catch marlin or yellowfin, and I would need no advice whatsoever, except for a pilot’s help getting across the Devil’s Backbone off Harbour Island. I would just need a credit card and some grunts to do the peon work. I’m not the greatest fisherman on earth, nor am I an expert captain, but I can do it. I can also bleed and clean the fish.

Maybe that counts for something.

I have shot a few rabbits. This is not exactly big game hunting. You walk around, look for rabbits, and plug them. But it is a form of hunting.

I nailed a few squirrels this year.

Today I set my portable blind up in order to see how it worked. I was quite pleased. It sets up fast, and it appears to function. I learned a few things, and I think the bugs are mostly out of my blind-hunting system. I realized I needed a monopod to support my rifle, so I’ll be buying one shortly.

You can spend $200 on a special chair for blinds, and I probably should, but the plastic Adirondack chair from Home Depot is really comfortable.

I set it up near a known choke point: a hole under one of my fences. Coyotes, coons, and foxes use it, so I know that if I sit there long enough, I’ll see something I can kill.

I read up on coons. They love marshmallows. This is supposed to be one of the best baits. I think I may dump a tin of sardines and some marshmallows by the fence, sit in the blind, and see what happens.

I am very sorely tempted to get a night vision scope. I have to think about it. They work great when you know where the game is, but it occurs to me that scopes have small fields of view, so how do you know where to look? Do you have to get a second night vision device with a wider field of view to tell you when the coons show up?

Man, it’s tempting. Shooting animals with a light seems sloppy and crude. Sitting in the dark and blasting them when they have no idea you exist…that’s hunting. If you can do that AND cover your infrared signature so the government can’t see you in the dark, you’re basically Rambo. You are a Carlos Hathcock starter kit.

I’m not much of a hunter, but I feel like I can say I’m a hunter without feeling like I’m totally full of it.

I left the blind set up. It seems to me that animals will be less freaked out by something they’ve seen sitting around for a while. I want to see how it holds up, too.

It’s marshmallow and monopod time. I’m going to run out and see what’s available.

More

I went to Gander Outdoors and got me a monopod and a cool spinning rimfire target that will save me a ton on paper targets and reduce aggravation.

While I was there I saw this dummy, which reminds me why I don’t do tactical. If the Village People knew about 5.11 gear, they would have another member.

The Vogons Were Amateurs

Leftists get very upset when you criticize the government, because when you do, you criticize their god. They know how important it is to their agenda that everyone think the government does a great job. But what happens when you actually deal with the government? They screw up and screw up and screw up, and just as conservatives say, they don’t care, because it’s almost impossible to get government workers in trouble.

Seems like the cops and our precious military personnel are the only government agents they hate.

I am here to criticize the god of the left. I had a horrible experience (again) with the Post Office. No, I am not referring to Shakir the Angry Muslim Mailman, who had the nerve to put tip-soliciting cards in my box on a Christian holiday and who got furious because I used to stamp “DELIVERED TO WRONG ADDRESS!” on the multiple pieces of other people’s mail he gave me each week. No, I am not referring to his successor, the crazy lady with the wrist cast who got the Post Office to force me to move my mailbox 20 feet closer to the driveway (until 10 minutes after she was replaced, at which time it was moved back). I am referring to the problem I had with a knife I ordered.

I picked out a knife on Ebay, and because the price was so low, I splurged on express delivery. I was supposed to receive it yesterday. I signed up for email delivery updates.

By the way, do you have an ex-wife or maybe and ex-boyfriend you want to stalk and murder? The Post Office has a handy service that will help. You can sign up to have photographs of all of their mail emailed to you. You don’t have to provide an ID. The government photographs all of our mail (not in order to gather information on us; oh, no), and they decided to make the pictures available to us so they can pretend it’s a feature, not a grotesque threat to our privacy and liberty. If you’re planning to slit someone’s throat, and you want to know if someone else has been sending them love letters, now you know what to do.

Anyhow, I gave the Postal Service my phone number and received updates on my phone. I wrote about this already.

Yesterday, I received a very nice update. It said the driver had taken the package back to the Post Office.

It did not say, “We are at your gate; please let us in.” It did not say, “We are on the way with your package.” I did not hear a horn honk. They had my number. They were too inept to use it to call me.

Today I gave up and drove to the Post Office.

There aren’t many unpleasant drives in Marion County, but today I found one. I had to drive about 9 miles to get the package, and it took about 25 minutes. That’s urban Miami speed. The roads were torn up. I got stuck behind a country trailer loaded with someone’s personal furniture (I’m sure that was kosher), and he turned at every turn I had to take. I thought I would never get there. I went in and picked up the knife. I talked to an employee just long enough to confirm that they didn’t give a crap about my problem. I went home. Very slowly.

God bless Federal Express. Think how much worse the Postal Service would be if they didn’t have Fred Smith showing them up every day.

I contacted the Ebay seller and told them negative feedback was on the way. We’ll see if they care. You don’t send a small package and demand a signature without informing the recipient.

I can’t believe I finally got my knife. I wasted 10 days trying to get one from an incompetend Amazon seller, and then I thought the Ebay knife was the answer to my prayers. Then they tortured me as much as possible until I got it home.

It looks very serviceable. The blade is very heavy. The edge is great, if the job it did on my junk mail is any indication. The sheath is not elegant, but it ought to function very well. It’s Kydex with a few rivets.

I don’t wear a belt, and the sheath is made for a belt, so I guess I’ll have to come up with a different solution. I’m not defiling my ensemble with a belt. I think people look insane when they combine belts with suspenders. It’s the Lumbergh look from Office Space. Maybe I can get some Kydex and some Internet know-how and make a sheath that hooks over my waistband.

I love micarta handles. Whenever I watch Forged in Fire, I always scream, “USE THE MICARTA, YOU IDIOT!”, because smiths are always choosing nutty handle materials that shatter. As far as I know, micarta is the adamantium of knife handle materials. It’s basically fiberglass made with ordinary fabric.

I learned some surprising stuff about knife steels. I think I have been too hard on 420HC, the metal used in my disappointing Gerber Gator II’s.

The alloy 420HC is cheap compared to 440C and a lot of other metals, and generally, knives made from it are not great. It appears that one company is an exception to this rule: Buck. They take 420HC and harden the edge to something like Rockwell 58. That’s acceptable. I had read that Buck had special heat treating skills, but I assumed it was marketing BS intended to cover yet another great company’s descent into the toilet. It looks like that was wrong.

If what I’m reading about Buck is right, they may be providing very good 420HC knives at very good prices. I am still suspicious, because Buck itself uses the phrase “medium edge-holding” to describe the knives, but maybe they’re okay. This metal has some advantages. It’s very tough, so it can take a beating, and when you get it sharp, you can get it very, very sharp. Some metals are hard to put a serious edge on.

Some day I may try a Buck folder just to see what it’s like. I would not be shocked if I were disappointed, but maybe I wouldn’t be.

I hate a knife that gets dull fast. Sharpening twice a month is okay. Sharpening three times a day is not. There is some very impressive steel out there, and it’s not unreasonable at all to expect stellar performance, so I prefer not to fool around with junk. In the kitchen, cheap steel can be useful, because you can always keep a diamond hone handy, but elsewhere, you want a knife that doesn’t have to be suckled and coddled.

I wish the Post Office had a face so I could punch it. I will pray about that.

Time to go check the game camera. I hope it actually did something last night.

Advance and be Ostracized

Now that I’m a game camera guy, I’m trying to improve my game camera game.

I started calling game cameras “trail cameras” because I saw other people using that term on the web, and then I found out “game camera” was right after all. Maybe smelly hippies are promoting “trail camera” because it has less of the scent of hunting, masculinity, whiteness, capitalism, and normal sexual orientation. I am not sure.

I went to Amazon and bought a cheap camera, and I got results with it. Then I found out I could have gotten considerably better video with a name brand. I feel like I need to upgrade already.

Here are some things you need to think about when you buy a game camera. They eat batteries, and batteries are not free, so look for one with good battery life. This varies so much, it may literally be worth it to pay three times as much for an efficient camera. Also, the illuminated area in infrared night shots may be small, so get a camera that gives you a whole frame to look at. Finally, ignore the 1080P claims and the megapixel claims. My camera has 1080P and a billion pixels, and it’s still grainy.

I’ll post some photos captured from video. I assume still photos would be much better.

This is a coon by my fence. This is not the whole frame. Only about half of the frame is illuminated.

This is a coyote by my fence. Pretty neat.

This is a fox that jumped on the fence. I didn’t know foxes were this coordinated. He jumped to the top of the fence with no problems, and then he stood there with no wobbling at all.

It looks like the big winners in the reasonably priced camera war are the Brownings. They make a couple of cameras called the Black Ops Pro and the Strike Force Pro, at around $150. They have great battery life. I put 8 new AA batteries in my camera, used it a couple of times, and then lost a night of video because the batteries were dead. The Brownings will go months on a set of batteries. I think you can see why I would be willing to pay more.

I don’t understand why game cameras don’t use wifi the way action cameras do. It would make checking them much easier. You can get full-blown cellular game cameras, but they cost a lot, and you have to have a good cell signal.

All of last night’s creature visits are lost because the camera’s batteries died. I found some old frozen pork in the fridge, so I put new batteries in the camera, put the pork by my fence, and turned the camera on. We’ll see what I get tonight. Whatever it is, it probably won’t be a herd of nocturnal Chassidic Jews.

I bought a portable blind. It’s an Ameristep Caretaker. What this really is, is a small tent made for hunting. It has openings you can shoot out of. It has room for two Adirondack chairs (you can see where I’m heading) and a cooler.

Cooler, scoped rifle, chairs, Christian music on the old Worktunes hearing protectors…I’ll have it made in the shade.

I told the cashier at the store it was too bad the blind didn’t work on people. She started telling me how great it was and how much she enjoyed hers. You have to love this town. Where else would a female cashier have her own blind?

Even if it doesn’t help me kill animals, I can set it up in my upstairs hideaway and have a cool fort, like the ones I made from couch cushions when I was a kid. There will be a secret password, and of course, no icky girls will be allowed, even if they threaten to tell on me. My sweet blind is a cooty-free zone.

You’re not cool enough to join my club, so don’t ask.

I still don’t have my hunting knife, and this strikes me as a good time to excoriate the Post Office. I ordered a knife and paid $15 for 2-day shipping. The Post Office had my phone number, and they were sending automatic texts, telling me about the status of the knife. This afternoon, they sent me a text saying they tried to deliver it and gave up because no one was here to sign for it. They didn’t say, “Help us get in.” They said, “We already left.”

Okay. You have my phone number. You’re at my gate. You have the intelligence to send me a text saying there’s a problem, but you’re too stupid to call me and ask me to come out and sign?

I think you see why I was upset.

They want me to drive 30 miles to pick it up. Nice. I called to see if they could relax the idiotic signature requirement. I couldn’t get through, so I told the computer to call me back. An extremely ghetto lady called and made it clear that she could do nothing at all for me and didn’t care at all whether I ever got the knife.

This is why the guy who founded FedEx is a billionaire. It also explains why postal employees have to wear bulletproof vests.

I don’t know if I’ll ever receive the knife, and I feel sure the $15 will never be refunded.

I had to deal with my dad’s medical chores today, so I didn’t get to shoot or do anything fun. Maybe tomorrow.

Goodbye. I will be in my fort, having a secret meeting. God help any animals that walk through the room.

Wolf in Hog’s Clothing

I feel like there are forces out there that only want me to have crap knives.

I decided I needed a sheath knife for hunting. I looked around and settled on a semi-custom job made from 440C stainless: the Entrek Javalina. It’s a 4.25″ knife that comes with a Kydex sheath.

I ordered it on February 23, and I splurged on expedited shipping. I think I paid $7 extra. I kept waiting to be told that had shipped, but the seller, Knife Country, didn’t make a peep.

I finally contacted them to ask what was going on, and all I got in return was a crummy cut and paste of the tracking number and order date. I wouldn’t buy another knife from them if it cost $5 and was forged by Vulcan himself.

The knife finally arrived today, 10 days after I ordered it. Yes, 10. That’s expedited. It arrived the day after squirrel season ended. I took it out of the box…and it was the wrong knife. It was an Entrek Wolf, which is a slightly larger knife with a finger groove and a tanto-style blade.

Talk about annoyed.

I don’t want a tanto blade. I’m not even a Lone Ranger fan. I want a blade with a curve to it, so I can sharpen it easily and cut skin without a lot of effort. I’m sending it back, and in my little Amazon form, I gave Knife Country a piece of my mind. I have to start over. It looks like I’ll end up taking 15 days just to get a danged knife.

The up side of all this is that a look at the Wolf forced me to overcome my prejudices and admit that a finger groove, which makes a knife look kitcheny, is a good thing. It will help prevent my hand from sliding up to the blade.

“Groove” is a knife-nerd misnomer. It’s really a semicircular concave area, not a groove.

The Javalina is a neat, old-school-looking knife, but I now want a finger groove, so I’m ordering a Beaver. Yes, that’s the name of the knife. I went from a filthy hog that roots around in the forest to a fat, waddling rodent with a name that makes immature people titter.

Who comes up with these names? Mr. Entrek’s wife?

The Wolf looks very nice. The blade is around 3/8″ thick, so I don’t think I would have to worry about snapping it on a really tough squirrel pelvis. The edge grind is not perfect, but it’s hand-finished, so you have to deal with little variations.

The knife looked very short when I took it out of the box, so I Googled around, and I saw that 4″ is pretty much standard for hunting knives. I think this is the smallest hunting knife I’ve ever seen. I guess they were bigger in the past, and then people got real and went for practicality, not flash.

I found out Amazon is not the place to get knives. Ebay sells the Beaver for $123, which is a whole lot less than Amazon.

I could build this knife for $60, including heat treating. That hurts. But my belt grinder is in Miami. I don’t have the best tools to shape the blade. Also, there are supposedly tricks to heat treating, so maybe the folks at Entrek know more than whoever I would end up sending it to for treatment.

The blade on the Beaver is bead-blasted, which is not something I like. You can always polish a damaged smooth surface. Once bead-blasting is messed up, you’re done. And I will mess it up. Count on that.

I also have a new folder on the way. I used to carry a Gerber Gator II, which is a really fine knife for people who enjoy sharpening. It’s made from 420HC steel. You can only harden 420HC to about Rockwell 52. I think plastic forks are Rockwell 53. A good knife will be Rockwell 58+. The Gator had a great shape and a wonderful handle, but it got dull every time I used it. I want a knife of roughly the same size, except not junk.

Gerber used to make very, very nice knives. Now Gerber is the new Camillus. If you don’t know how insulting that is, try a Camillus knife. They used to sell them at drug stores. Gerber uses bad steel because it’s cheap.

I tried to find a nice folder in 440C, but it’s not that popular, because knife makers love trendy new steels. I learned that Cold Steel now has a steel called CTS-XHP. I don’t know what it is. I’ve had two little Cold Steel folders, and they were fantastic. I carried the first one for years, and then I lost it and replaced it. It always looked brand new. Weird.

Cold Steel used to use something called AUS8, which is supposed to be slightly less good than 440C, but similar to it. In 2015, they moved to CTS-XHP, which is an American-made wonder steel. AUS8 is Japanese, except for the Chinese version.

Cold Steel put out a crazy video to show why they switched. They took a folder made from AUS8 and used it to chop manila rope. They got it to cut over 1400 times before it got dull. Then they tried CTS-XHP, and they had to quit when they got past 6000 cuts. The guys who were testing the knives were getting sore.

I decided to order a Cold Steel CTS-XHP folder. Then I learned they’re moving to a different steel because CTS-XHP is hard to obtain. Great. I’ll fall in love with this knife, and then when I lose it and replace it, I won’t be able to get the same steel.

If you think you want to try this steel, this is the time to buy a Cold Steel knife, because old stock won’t last forever. The steel they’re using now isn’t as good. How do I know that? Because Cold Steel would still be using CTS-XHP if they could get it.

I hate, hate, hate bad steel. It’s okay for a cheap kitchen knife you can sharpen in 15 seconds, but not for a carry knife that cuts things tougher than tomatoes and celery. There is no excuse for bad steel, and there is no excuse for trying to make people think crap steel is good.

Knife makers are really sleazy about steel. Buck pimps 420HC like it’s a miracle metal, but they use it because they’re stingy, not because it’s good. I’ve seen companies brag about their 440A knives, hoping to make people think it’s like 440C. It’s not; 440A is soft garbage.

You are bored now. I understand that. I don’t care, though.

Entrek knives are probably very good. The one I’m sending back looks indestructible. I guess we’ll find out. I’ll also report on the Cold Steel I ordered.

Wonder what they’ll send me this time.

Soon the HAL 9000 Will be Picking Out Your Ties

Lots to think about today. It’s generally God-related, so you can’t say you weren’t warned.

First off, I keep feeling a pressing need to confess and criticize myself. I keep having prayer sessions in which I struggle very hard to dig up the worst dirt on myself I can remember. It’s a little nauseating. It makes me wonder if other people are as bad as I am. Part of me hopes they are, which is perverse.

Every person has areas of sin in his life. It’s not hard to put names on them. Lust. Greed. Dishonesty. They’re all bad, but for me, some are harder to think about than others. I don’t know how other people see sin, but for me, sins of cowardice and cruelty are the most embarrassing. They are hard to discuss with God, even though I know he knows all about them before I speak, and they are hard for me to think about.

Between cowardice and cruelty, cruelty is harder to confront. I’m not a serial killer, but I have done some really evil things during my life. They stand out like beacons in the landscape of my past. Like arrest warrants with sirens and flashing lights.

I’ve always known that people, including me, were evil, but I tried not to dive into my personal muck too deeply, and I felt that I was okay, at least by human standards. When I have these sessions with God, though, I wonder how he can want to save me. If I saw someone else doing certain things I’ve done, I would be appalled.

I suppose I would not consider them unworthy of the effort it would take to change them. I know that’s true, because I know people who have done terrible things. I don’t marvel that God would want to save them. I would tell them it doesn’t matter what they’ve done. Murder, child molestation, animal cruelty…I would tell them God is ready to accept anyone who applies. That must be true for me, too.

I know Christians–even those baptized with the Holy Spirit–have demons. Living in a flesh body is a little like driving a school bus full of brats. You have to exercise authority while continuously being challenged and told what to do. When you accept the baptism with the Holy Spirit, he boards the bus, but he doesn’t necessarily ride alone.

I believe that when you refuse to confront your iniquities–your evil inclinations–and tell God about them, you give demons passes. They can say, “We’re allowed to be here. The driver says it’s okay.” I believe it’s important to go through the deworming process. Otherwise, the Holy Spirit sits in the back and lets you and your demons do what you want. I believe it limits his participation in your life.

I have less peace than I want. I think it’s because God showed me how to succeed, and I turned away. Thirty years ago, he told me I needed to pray in tongues a lot every day, and I let it go. I didn’t have the full understanding of it, but that doesn’t excuse me. You’re not supposed to base your obedience on consequences. You obey, whether you understand the consequences or not. If you know you’re supposed to do something, and you don’t do it, you’re guilty. God isn’t obligated to give you an explanatory brochure every time he gives you counsel.

I should have spent these years getting cleaned up, but I spent about 17 of them doing as I pleased. I rarely prayed in tongues. I went entire days without praying at all. I think I tried to be “good” by the world’s standards. I tried not to do things that made other people suffer. I didn’t do a great job. Living by the world’s rules doesn’t make you a moral, disciplined person.

My best guess is that during my time away, I was collecting spirits and feeding them. I was holding the shackles steady while they welded them shut. Now I’m going through a long regurgitation process which would have been much shorter and easier had I listened in the first place.

Some people say that God will eventually show every second of our lives to everyone who has ever existed. Could you stand that? I wonder if anyone would still want to speak with me if everyone knew everything I’ve done, thought, and felt.

Here is what Psalm 32 says:

Blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered.

Blessed is the man unto whom the Lord imputeth not iniquity, and in whose spirit there is no guile.

When I kept silence, my bones waxed old through my roaring all the day long.

For day and night thy hand was heavy upon me: my moisture is turned into the drought of summer. Selah.

America is full of feel-good churches that teach people to ignore their iniquities. How can you be healed if you don’t let the doctor look at the pus? Why are we so afraid of accepting responsibility? We already know God will forgive us, so why not get it over with?

The answer is that preachers are terrified of losing their audience. They love money. Some want to impress their superiors and keep their jobs. Some measure themselves by attendance figures. They look for ways to rationalize flattery and denial. It’s not a mystery.

There is a martial art called aikido. One of the principles is that it’s good to use your opponent’s momentum against him. It can be difficult to stop a hostile person’s movements, but if you can find a way to direct those movements so they cause your opponent to fall or whatever, you can save a lot of energy and effort. The devil uses the same approach. If he can’t lure you to do something new, he can always find the bad things you’re already doing and remove the obstacles.

Flattery is poison. Look what happens to celebrities. Look at Elvis and Michael Jackson. They probably never heard the word “no” after they turned 20. They ended up dressing in costumes, like superheroes. They became completely disconnected from reality. They behaved like spoiled gods. Like Will Smith’s son.

Flattery destroyed them, and it can destroy you, too. The devil saw what these men wanted to do, and he gave them the power to do it. He took away wise counsel and surrounded them with yes-men. After that, he didn’t have to do much at all.

I wonder what my life will be like after I endure most of the major cleaning that has to be done. I assume there will be more peace. It’s hard to imagine that while you’re in the middle of the process.

Let’s change the topic. Here’s something else: I read a strange testimony from a guy named Ken Peters. I am not endorsing him. I don’t know enough about him to do that. In 1980, he had a couple of long, detailed dreams about the end of the world. You can read a transcript of his remarks about them. It’s sobering.

Before I get to the details of his dreams, I want to write about his background. He said he didn’t know the Bible very well, that he knew nothing about prophecy, and that he had not accepted Jesus personally…because he was a “practicing Catholic.” Is that really how it works? I know Catholicism is a mess, but he makes it sound worse than I thought.

Here’s an excerpt:

At the time I received this dream I was not even a believer in Jesus Christ. I was raised in the Catholic Church but had never personally invited the Lord Jesus to come into my heart to be my Lord. As a practicing Catholic, I had no knowledge of what the Bible said about the tribulation period or any of the events of the last days.

Chilling. The Catholic Church is very, very big.

He said his exposure to the Bible was mainly composed of little passages that were read aloud in church services. Apparently, no one shoved a Bible into his hands and told him to read it. Can that be true? Even the worst charismatic preacher will tell you to read the Bible. This is fundamental. The notion of a Christian who doesn’t read the Bible is unthinkable in charismatic churches. I would guess that most Protestants outside of the Episcopal church have the same attitude.

If you aren’t familiar with the Bible, you are a zero as a Christian. You don’t know what you believe. You don’t know whom you believe in. You don’t know where you came from. You have no idea what’s going to happen in the future. You’re probably going to hell, because a valid decision to accept salvation is an informed decision. You can’t tell God you accepted Jesus because Mom said you had to.

Talking to Christians who don’t read the Bible is like talking to foreign spies pretending to be Americans. Imagine a spy who speaks English perfectly but doesn’t know our laws or our customs. When you mention Biblical ideas to such Christians, you get one blank look after another.

I hope Peters was exaggerating.

As for not knowing Jesus on any personal level, I don’t think it’s possible to be saved and not know him. How can you give your heart to him sincerely if you don’t feel he’s there?

Christianity is a relationship with a living God who communicates with you. If you don’t have that, you need to ask God for it, because you’re in trouble. He didn’t just dump us here, like unwanted toddlers in day care, and say he would send a Salvadoran nanny to pick us up. He is right here with us. He said he would never leave or forsake us. His presence is always available.

You can be baptized and go to hell. You can think you’re a Christian and go to hell. Look at the Mormons. You better be careful not to trust your church’s authorities too much. God won’t listen when you try to blame them for your lack of salvation.

A lot of people who say they’ve had visions of hell say it’s full of Christians. That is true. I know it’s true, because there are entire churches full of unrepentant homosexuals. There are gay churches. You can’t get salvation while deliberately building your life around a sin.

Ken Peters, who did not know what the rapture was or what the book of Revelation said, told a disturbing story.

First, he said a horn blew, certain graves flew open, and people ascended into the air and disappeared. That would be unnerving, especially for the people who witness it and realize they’ve made the wrong choices.

He also said there was a two-week period during which everything was disrupted. Broadcasting was disrupted, for example. He didn’t see living people rise into the air, but if all the strong Christians involved in broadcasting, transportation, and so on vanished, a hiatus of chaos is exactly what you would expect to see.

He said he saw an old man who was evangelizing. This man had screwed up as a Christian, but he had repented after the horn blew, and he was helping others. Peters accepted real salvation, not a fake version endorsed by a blind church, and started following him. Side note: Peters is a real Christian today, and he pastors a church.

A new global government formed under a mesmerizing leader. Eventually, the government captured Peters, his wife, the evangelist, and various Christians. At first, they used gentle persuasion to push them to renounce Jesus. When Peters and his wife refused, they were fastened to a table and beheaded with a sword. They preached until the end. The man with the sword put it down and said he was done killing Christians. That happened at the end of the dream.

If you know the Bible at all, you know the Revelation mentions Christians who have been beheaded for their testimony. It’s not something Ken Peters invented. He said the sword looked like the swords on Shriners fezzes. In other words, a sword like those used by Muslims. He dreamed this in 1980, when Islam was not the huge threat that it is today.

As I understand it, in the Bible, the end of the current age works like this:

1. The rapture occurs. Serious Christians are taken, and the rest are left here.
2. Suffering and catastrophe increase in the world.
3. Salvation will still be available, but if you receive it, you will be killed unless you renounce it.

Of course, there are a lot of other details. But as far as avoiding hell goes, that’s the important stuff. My understanding is that it’s much better to get on board now than to be left behind and face increased persecution.

My own dream of the rapture was shorter, and it was symbolic, not literal. I was sitting in my grandparents’ living room, on the floor with my legs crossed. In front of me on the floor was a small dish of poisoned rat bait pellets. My mother was sitting in a recliner in the corner. She was wearing jeans. Work clothing. As far as I know, she never owned clothes like that as an adult. No one else was there.

Our family no longer owns the house, and my grandparents and my mother are dead. This is why I say the dream was not literal. I believe what happened to us in the dream is what will happen to people during the rapture, but obviously, my mother and I won’t be in that room on that day.

I heard a horn. The pitch was low but well within the range of human hearing. It made the entire earth vibrate. I knew with certainty that it could be heard everywhere in the world. I knew the horn itself was thousands of miles away. I felt it was behind me. Given my position, that would have been to the northwest.

I wasn’t afraid, but I felt completely sobered. I knew what was happening was as serious as anything could be.

Three things started to rise: me, the dish of rat bait, and my mother. We were buoyed up toward the ceiling, and we were on our way through it when I woke up.

I was glad the world, in its current state, was over. I felt a great sense of adventure. I felt relief. I also felt that it was an event of global moment, and that there would be astounding consequences for mankind.

Peters mentioned some strange things in his dream.

He said televisions would watch people for the government. In 1980, that was impossible, but it’s happening today. Some TV’s are connected directly to the web. Some have cameras, which is ridiculous.

My TV has an LED screen. Your TV probably uses LED’s too. An LED is a light-emitting diode. Run current through one, and it lights up. Interesting thing: an LED also senses light. You can use them to detect it. I’m not great with electronics, but even I know that it should be easy to make a camera using a grid of LED’s and a lens. For all I know, that’s what’s inside a smartphone camera.

One wonders what kind of visual information an LED TV could gather if it were programmed the right way.

Peters said the government kept track of the locations of all vehicles in his dream. Light posts had cameras mounted on them. We already have that. The government puts some of them out there where we can see them, making no effort to hide them. Other sensors have been put in place quietly, with no explanation.

I think the government knows where most vehicles are, all the time. There are too many sensors and cameras, and there aren’t that many roads. You can’t make your own road. Wherever you go, you have to drive by equipment installed by the government. I think that when a crime occurs and the cops really need to find someone, government nerds know where that person is, and they look for ways to get the info to the cops without letting the public know the capability exists.

He said the government would be able to find us whenever it wanted. That day is almost here, and the technology is focusing on us even when we’re just walking around. You can put a few cameras in a mall or stadium, connect them to computers with facial-recognition software, and make lists of the people who show up.

The government is too stupid and cruel to have this much information.

I don’t know if Peters is a flake or a prophet, but I thought people might want to know about him and read what he said.

I believe the end is right around the corner. Technology is destroying free will. When you can’t do anything without being discovered, you have no free will. Without free will, there is no sin, and there is no righteousness. We will live under coercion.

That’s not God’s style. He needs free will in order for his system to work. Free will is so important, he prefers putting people in hell and roasting them to taking free will away. He could fix is so we never sin, but he doesn’t. The concept of sin makes no sense without free will. Measuring the righteousness of people who can’t sin is like putting an altimeter in a car.

When free will is gone, there will be no reason for the world to go on existing, so the end will come quickly.

I don’t see how it could take even 10 years. I see that as an outside limit. That’s not prophecy. That’s just me, not being totally obtuse.

It would be nice if it were true (from my standpoint), because I don’t like aging. I am not in a hurry to get cataracts, wear diapers, and be unable to carry my own groceries. I like having teeth, too.

Leftists want to do away with free will. They want to be free to take drugs, indulge in obscenity, and have whatever kind of sex they like, but other than that, they are happy to plug into the Matrix and be told what to do. Strange people.

How can anyone trust the government that much? I don’t know a single human being I would trust as much as leftists trust the government. They trust the government far more than Christians trust God.

Do you ever think about how awful the future could be, when you watch sci-fi shows? Think about TNG.

In TNG, there is no money. Okay; how do you get things you want? Obviously, you must have to ask for it. So everyone in the future is a beggar. Mommy, can we buy this cereal? Mommy, can I have these LED shoes? Yeah, that would feel great, for an adult.

Whom do you ask? What if they say no? What if some crooked person persuades them to give stuff to them instead of you?

What if you want to buy a house? What if you want to travel to another galaxy?

Are you allowed to buy and sell? How can you do that without money? What if you want to Craigslist a couch? What if you want to teach piano and charge for it? Do you have to barter? Would you require students to bring you groceries instead of money?

In TNG, it’s very hard for people to hide. They have scanners to find you. If you work for Star Fleet, you have to wear a doodad that broadcasts your location and acts as a phone. What if you’re fed up and you need a few hours by yourself? Do you have to ask permission? What if they say no?

In TNG, they used to beam people up and down without permission. Know what the law calls that? “Kidnapping.” It’s a major felony. In Florida, if you try to kidnap me, I’m allowed to blow your brains out. It’s bad. Imagine living in a world where the government can reach out and suck you out of your beach chair and into jury duty, while simultaneously extracting a fine from “your” bank account.

Gene Roddenberry was a feckless atheist leftist, so naturally, he never thought about the unintended consequences of creating his utopian society. He should have read Orwell.

When I was in grad school trying to become a physicist, I knew a guy whose students called him “Fridge.” He was a very serious guy, but likeable. A little weird. He had no furniture. He said he did his copious homework standing up with his back against a wall, holding a clipboard.

Fridge left the Navy to study physics. He had to struggle to get out. Evidently, the Navy doesn’t have to let you go just because you ask. If you do a good job, like Fridge, they will reward you by holding onto you with a death grip. I asked him how he did it. He said, “I enforced the rules.”

He was in a position sort of like a quartermaster. When things had to be obtained or shipped, papers landed on his desk. Before he decided to leave the Navy, he would work to get things through. The rules were idiotic and restrictive, so he had to bend them all the time in order to make the system work. When the Navy refused to let him go, he stopped bending the rules. He observed them to the point of madness. “This has to be in blue ballpoint. Send it back.” “This has to be in triplicate, not duplicate. Send it back. It’s 5:01. My shift ended one minute ago. Talk to me on Monday.” You can imagine.

The system crashed. Things didn’t go where they were needed. Everyone hated him. They wanted his guts on a stick. He got his discharge. It’s a hilarious story.

It shows what will happen when free will disappears entirely. If we couldn’t break the rules, the world would jam up like a lawnmower with 5-minute epoxy in the engine.

I know another guy, an electrical engineer, who got out of the Navy by pretending to be an alcoholic. Now he’s a lawyer. He told the Bar what he did, and they let him in anyway.

Not relevant, but interesting.

I think things are drawing to a close. It makes me wonder what I should do. Should I still think about moving farther north? Is there any point in ever talking to a woman again, given that we could be raptured the day after I propose? Should I invest?

I’ll put those things in God’s hands, because I have no idea what to do.

I love it here, but I would like to have a year in Appalachia before the curtain falls.

Final thing: God told me something interesting today. When people give you things voluntarily, there are only two explanations. They’re being generous, or they want something from you. Disturbing.

I had a lot to think about when I got up, and now that I’ve written about all of it, it’s your problem. Enjoy the rest of the day.

Arboreal Rats go Offline; Next up: Mano a Mano With the Wily Possum

Tomorrow, supposedly, my new hunting knife arrives. Anticipation is high. Because getting a new knife will bring me boundless joy? No, it’s just that waiting for things way too long makes them seem more important than they are.

It will be nice to have a good sheath knife, so I’m not going to knock it too much, but I wish it had arrived sooner. I will have one to two days of squirrel hunting, post-knife, before the door slams shut. If I were to kill 4 squirrels, I would be doing great, and I am more likely to get two or less.

I have to find something new to kill. I can kill turkeys as of March 17, but I don’t have a good feeling about it. I don’t think there are many around here. I have spent a lot of time in the woods, and I have never seen turkey poop. I’ve seen a metric ton of bear poop, but no turkey poop.

Today I saw a van-sized pile of something resembling coon poop. I’m familiar with coon poop because they pooped in my pool back in Dade County. This looked like coon poop, but the scale was wrong. Coons poop like beagles, but this was closer to the size of German shepherd poop. I don’t think it was dog poop, because I have never seen a loose dog here, and it had little coon crumbly bits in it. Like granola. Like hippie food. It doesn’t look like Internet photos of coyote or bobcat turds.

If it came from a coon, something is seriously wrong. Either the coon is morbidly obese, or it’s 5 feet tall.

I need to kill coons whenever possible, because there is nothing good about them at all. They do nothing but cause misery. They’re cute and all that. Don’t care. They have to go.

I can put coons on my kill list for the rest of the year, because they have no season. Even the state of Florida hates them.

I can kill possums, too, but that’s about as challenging as shooting a speed bump. It’s like playing Jeopardy against Wolf Blitzer and Vivica Fox.

I haven’t tried it, but they say you can actually chase a possum down and grab it. I feel sorry for them, because they’re ugly and have no self-esteem. They take dumps on my porch, and there are probably other bad things they do. The horse people around me might be glad to see them go, because they give an obscure disease to horses. It’s hard to get motivated to shoot possums, but I suppose I could find it in me.

Skunks. I did not know skunks were bad, but I learned that they carry rabies. That begs the question: if I shoot one, can I skin it? I don’t want to get rabies.

Is rabies a good enough reason to shoot skunks? Maybe it’s a reach. I haven’t heard a lot of stories about people getting skunk rabies and biting their kids.

Maybe we should use T-shirt cannons to fire angry skunks with rabies into extremist mosques on Fridays. Not sure those guys would notice rabies, though.

Armadillos! They dig holes and annoy people. They carry leprosy, believe it or not. Some people eat them anyway. I can’t eat leprosy, even if it’s dead. That’s a dealbreaker. Do I have a legitimate need to kill armadillos? I’ll have to check.

Yes, I do have to kill armadillos. They threaten pipes and foundations.

I’ve found a bunch of burrows on this property. I don’t know what lives in them. They are not large enough, nor do they smell badly enough, to contain hippies. I want to find out what lives in them.

My trail camera arrived today, so I have a great opportunity to film the burrows and check out the residents. Right now, the camera is in the back yard. I want to find out if the bears are visiting. I have this neurotic idea that they waddle in after I go to bed and dance in a big circle under the moon.

How can there be so much bear poop on my property when I haven’t seen a single bear? But it has to be bear poop. Something like that couldn’t come from anything else. It’s huge. Again, hippies can be ruled out.

Maybe big fat ones, like Wavy Gravy or Rob Reiner…

It must be a coon. What else could it be? Maybe it has diverticulosis or some other illness that expands the colon.

Wild pigs are worse than the Viet Cong, but I have never seen one, so I don’t know if there is any point in trying to kill them.

I am not sure there is an important reason to kill bobcats, but it’s an option.

I can kill all the otters I want, but where would I find them?

Okay, let’s see. What should I definitely put on the kill list?

1. Turkeys
2. Coyotes
3. Coons
4. Pigs
5. Armadillos
6. Rabbits

Possibles:

1. Bobcats
2. Skunks
3. Crows
4. Poodles
5. Possums

I know “poodles” shouldn’t be in there. My hands just typed that automatically because it made so much sense.

I’m reading that possums may actually be helpful, apart from the constant porch-crapping.

It’s very hard to get good advice on what to kill. The Internet is full of extremist hippie loons who will happily tell you every revolting animal known to man is beneficial. “Don’t be so quick to shoot that rattlesnake in your daughter’s nursery! Rattlesnakes eat insects and other pests so you won’t have to buy evil pesticides made by Trump-hat-wearing stormtroopers who read the Bible and think men can’t have babies.”

America is being taken over by complete idiots who think we should never kill anything. “The animals were here first.” So what? We’re more important than they are. Conservatives are, anyway. Not sure about hippies.

I don’t know how many bears I’m more important than, but I’m thinking at least 7. This doesn’t include bears that can ride a bicycle in a Chinese circus while holding an umbrella. They would obviously be worth more.

When I go out in the ocean to fish, I find fish who were there first. I kill them anyway. Being in a place first doesn’t necessarily entitle you to anything. How come “They were here first” doesn’t apply when Americans are trying to eject illegal aliens?

The squirrels I’ve been killing were here first, and I will be here last, in my plastic Adirondack chair in the backyard, sipping a tasty beverage and texting my friends. That’s how things are supposed to be.

I have to find stuff to kill, not because I’m bloodthirsty and sadistic, but because you can’t learn to hunt without practice. You can’t take 9 months off every year and expect to be any good.

I’m thinking of getting a tree stand. This is an insane platform you put in a tree. Tree stands have built-in chairs. No recliners, unfortunately. Maybe that will happen eventually. The kind of tree stand I like comes with a ladder. You sit with your rifle 16 feet off the ground, and animals, being not smart, don’t think to look up and spot you. As a result, you can sit in the sky with a cooler next to you and rain destruction on them.

They say squirrels poop on tree stands, which is yet more reason why they deserve no quarter. But I digress.

I wonder if electrifying a tree stand is legal. That’s one way to find out how far a squirrel can jump.

Tree stands are commonly used for killing deer, but there is no reason why you can’t use one to kill other stuff. I think it would be a great move in my location, because it would allow me to shoot downward. That would make shooting safer, and it would mean forgoing fewer opportunities. If I had shot at every available squirrel I’ve seen in the last two weeks, I would be eating squirrel for dinner every day.

I have two weeks to get ready for turkeys. I hope I get at least one. After turkey season ends, I’ll be forced to persecute the wretched inhabitants of the lowest level of animal society. I will feel like a vampire that eats rats. I will feel the way UFC fighters and Olympic wrestlers feel the first time they have to wrestle Triple H. “Glad mom’s not watching tonight.”

I’ll let you know if I pick up anything on the trail cam tonight. I really hope Rob Reiner isn’t in town.

Stick With the Borg or Pull Out the Wires?

Wonder if anyone out there can give me email advice.

My dad insisted on using AOL long after the rest of the galaxy moved on. Now he has a million AOL contacts, plus a massive archive of emails, some of which are not worthless.

AOL is dying. Today I was not able to access my dad’s business emails because AOL was down. Sooner or later, there may come a day when AOL simply evaporates, and that will be inconvenient.

The answer is a new email account. I know that already. But what’s the best answer?

I don’t like the big free email providers. I have a Yahoo account, and Yahoo looks shakier every day. I have a feeling I’m going to lose everything within a couple of years. I don’t like Gmail. I suppose Gmail is considerably more secure than AOL or Yahoo, but titans have a way of crumbling unexpectedly, and anything is possible.

Today I was extraordinarily blessed to find a very compact domain name which is perfect for my dad. It’s 5 letters with a com suffix. That’s just about unbeatable, especially in 2018, when you can literally run a finger over your keys at random, type “.com” after, it, do a search, and find out it’s taken. I bought the domain name, and because I have my own hosting, I added it to my hosting account and created an email address.

Great.

Here’s the question: is this the way to go?

Outsourcing has some benefits. I can go anywhere, take out my phone, enter a username and password, and get my dad’s emails for the last umpteen years (however long he has subscribed). I can do that with a private domain, too, but it’s not as easy. I’ll have to install the account on my phone and every other device I use. I’ll have to put access-related info in files.

I don’t expect to receive tons of email, so I don’t think storage will be an issue. Not to be morbid, but even if we get spam, my dad is not very likely to be around in 5 years, so we won’t have time to run into a glut problem. Even if we do, storage keeps getting cheaper and more abundant.

What would you do? I trust myself more than I trust Google, which is like saying I trust myself more than I would trust Hitler or Stalin, but I don’t want to do a bunch of work for nothing.

I also want to find a way to download and archive every AOL email he has. I have a feeling AOL does not like that and makes it difficult.

Knife Lost in Fog of Cybercommerce

I am quite frustrated. My hunting knife has not arrived yet.

I know everyone wants to read about this. No need to thank me.

I went to Amazon and ordered an Entrek Javalina from Knife Center. I like Knife Center. I have bought stuff from them before. The knife didn’t ship, so I contacted them. They said they didn’t know when they would receive it. What? This would have been good information to have when I placed the order. I thought the website said it was in stock, but they didn’t have it. I canceled and ordered from a different outfit. I elected to pay $7 extra for faster shipping. Squirrel season is nearly over. I can’t let the squirrels down.

I placed my order on the 23rd. I kept getting tracking updates saying the knife was in “pre-shipping,” meaning a label had been printed but the Post Office didn’t have the package yet.

This is 2018. An Amazon “seller” can be a fat guy who never gets out of bed except to go to the Post Office. “Pre-shipping” could mean he put the knife in a box and dumped it in a pile in his bedroom next to a mountain of dirty Star Wars underwear. I contacted the seller to get the facts. All I got back was the shipping date, order date, and tracking number, which is information I already had. I didn’t even get a note. “Sorry; we mailed it yesterday.” Whew! It would be exhausting to type something like that. I guess.

Long boring story short and still boring: I have no sheath knife. The squirrels are mocking me.

On the up side, I have a game camera on the way. I have to find out what’s roaming around in my yard. I thought a coyote dug up my blackberry plant and deposited a coyote stool in its place, but as I spend more time examining poop on the web (not on German websites; don’t worry), I am beginning to think it may be bobcat poo. My friend Mike says cats bury their poo==>bobcats are cats==>do the math.

Should I shoot the bobcat, if it exists? Interesting question.

I never really thought about shooting a bobcat. They don’t sound appetizing. I am not Chinese, after all. Also, I assumed they were protected and sacred on account of being semi-big cats. Turns out they’re not. You can shoot the bejeezus out of them. There is a season, but there is no bag limit.

This is a cut and paste of the bobcat rules:

Dec. 1 – March 31

By all legal rifles, shotguns, muzzleloaders, crossbows, bows, pistols and air guns.

Those with a hunting license may possess no more than 1 bobcat pelt between April 1 and Nov. 30, unless pelt has CITES tag. Also, bobcat pelts may not be taken out of Florida unless tagged. Bobcats may be chased with dogs year round.

Bag Limit: No Limits

Explain that if you can. If I can shoot 3,000 bobcats during the season, Florida will have no problem with it, but I can only keep one skin.

I don’t want a bobcat skin. Cats smell, and bobcat pelts probably smell, too. And what would I do with it? But it makes me angry that I can’t keep them. What am I supposed to do with them if I can’t keep them? Make a big cat-smelling pile of pelts in the pasture? Is it better for bobcat hides to rot than to adorn my tractor seat or whatever? I guess it is.

Why is there no bag limit? What does Florida have against bobcats? Why is there no explanation? Why are we tagging animals we want to get rid of? Once you have it tranquilized in the back of the van, why not put a pillow over its face and get it over with?

I will never understand hunting laws.

I don’t really plan to shoot a bobcat, although maybe I should, because I suppose it’s possible that a time will come when the ability to kill troublesome predators will be important. When Oprah wins the presidency, the economy tanks, and BLM starts sending reparations squads into the suburbs to confiscate groceries.

It would certainly improve my hunting skills.

If only I had a knife to skin bobcats with.

I found a bobcat recipe online. Come on. Seriously?

I remember cutting up a dead cat in college. Let me stress: this was for a course. I didn’t find it on the sidewalk. Anyway, the meat looked pretty good, and through the formaldehyde, there was a smell that could conceivably have been inviting, but there was also a catty sort of musky stankness in there. I would expect bobcat meat to be fragrant, and not in a good way. I can’t help wondering, though.

I did a couple of bad things with that cat. For one, I used its tail to decorate an elevator. One of the elevators in my dorm was missing a button. I uninstalled the cat’s tail and inserted it in the hole. It looked like a cat had somehow shoved itself through a 1″ aperture and gotten stuck inside the panel. It was hilarious. To me, anyway. Also, there was an occasion when I wanted to do some dissection at home, so I checked my cat out and walked across campus with it. I had the option of covering it up, but, well…

They gave us those cats in clear plastic bags. They were stiff, spreadeagled, with startled expressions on their faces. “I thought I was going to be adopted!”

I wonder what people thought.

Final thing: I had a buddy who went to that class with me. He could be squeamish about certain things, including cat whiskers. Every so often, I would yell, “HEY!”, and then when he looked, I would pull out one of the cat’s whiskers with a hemostat.

Good times.

It was not alive. I want to make that very clear.

My knife may not get here for a coon’s squirrel’s age, but the game camera will help keep me amused while I wait. I should call it a trail camera. That’s what Amazon calls it. It will turn on automatically when it sees movement, even at night. I’ll probably get a bunch of videos of squirrels mooning me and giving me the finger.

I’m thinking of getting surveillance cameras for the house. If we ever have to travel and leave the house empty, I would like to have video of any “dreamers” who show up to celebrate the American dream (or Cinco de Mayo) by stealing it. Is that not a PC thing to say? Sorry, but 92% of foreign-born federal prisoners are illegal aliens, so the facts are on my side. For a few hundred bucks you can get wifi cameras and a special router. The cameras will send video wherever you want. You can upload it to the cloud (i.e. Uncle Sam’s secret 4th-Amendment-destruction server farm).

I don’t know if I want video of my property in the cloud. I am completely aware that the government has ways of looking at stuff it has no right to look at, and I shouldn’t help them. I’m not doing anything illegal, but what if that changes? What if the government and I have a falling out and I decide to do something which is moral and correct but illegal? I guarantee you, they’ll be able to subpoena my security footage. Let me check.

Yes, I am correct. My two minutes of research indicate that there are two ways for prosecutors to get your home surveillance footage. They can get a warrant, which takes a little effort, or they can use a subpoena, which is about as hard as placing an order at Denny’s. And if they use a subpoena, they may not have to tell you. Nice.

What if I decide I want TWO bobcat pelts for some compelling reason, such as my truck needs seat covers? I better not tan them in front of my surveillance system.

I think a good alternative would be to store the data on a laptop hidden in the house. Burglars would be too stupid to look for it, the fuzz wouldn’t know about it, and if they found out, they would have to get a full-blown warrant to come get it. And I might not have what they wanted when they asked for it. You don’t have to preserve your home surveillance videos for all eternity. Mainly you want them for the immediate past, so you can nail thieves.

I’m sitting here trying to foil a government grab for bobcat-related data I will never possess, and the actual people who will end up using my plan will most likely be drug dealers and terrorists. Oh well. I’ll be in the cloud, being lazy, hoping for the best and trying to get by with one bobcat pelt. Uncle Sam will get whatever he wants, and eventually I’ll start eating Soylent Green and hating Goldstein every morning.

Did you know there might be cameras on your property right now? Uncle Sam doesn’t really need warrants for yard cameras that are sufficiently far from your house. The law on cameras is extremely oppressive. The government can put cameras in your trees and bushes without consulting you, for no good reason at all. Putting them in your house takes some legal maneuvering, but if you have a pasture or some woods, forget it. They can watch you swimming in your creek naked all day, and there is nothing you can do about it. You don’t have a “reasonable expectation of privacy” a few hundred feet from your front door, on a remote property in the middle of the woods, where you are not suspected of doing anything illegal. How about that?

How about this: a bobcat jacket and matching pants?

Just spitballing.

Liberty is drying up and dying, so maybe there is no point in brainstorming about ways to preserve it. At least if I’m on a big spread in the woods, I’ll have the comforting false impression that I’m free.

I hate to quit when I’m making such a great contribution to western thought, but I have to go to the dump now. I hope my knife gets here while squirrels are still legal.

Completing my Ensemble

I finally decided on a new hunting (sheath) knife.

When I was a kid, my mom would not let me cross the street without a police escort (perhaps I exaggerate), but I was allowed to have all the knives I wanted, and when I stayed with my grandparents, I was allowed to shoot anything in my grandfather’s gun cabinet. I’ve had a few hunting knives.

My first hunting knife wasn’t really mine. My dad had a Case sheath knife with a stacked leather handle. I started carrying it around, and it disappeared. My best friend Clayton stole things from me all the time, and I’m pretty sure he has it. He was a terrible friend. He was the kind of friend you end up with when God isn’t part of your life.

My second cousin Byrd was a circuit judge in Kentucky, so he got dibs on a lot of confiscated weapons. A man got drunk and shot his best friend to death while playing with guns, and Byrd got his Browning hunting knife. He gave it to me. He was always very good to me. Unfortunately, it eventually disappeared. It was also a bad knife.

My mom got me some kind of weird bone-handled knife for my birthday when I was in high school. It’s gone, too.

I never had a use for a sheath knife, so losing these items wasn’t exactly crippling. Now I need one. I have to clean and skin game, and I don’t want to gum up a folding knife and then stick the filthy thing in my pocket. I want something I can wear on my belt and clean thoroughly with dishwashing liquid.

Today I Googled around, looking for something good, and the results were depressing. Seems like everyone uses 420HC steel. This stuff is garbage. It’s the steel in my Gerber Gator II folder, for which I paid something like $15. It sharpens fast, and it’s tough and corrosion-resistant. It also gets dull in a hurry. Forget that. There is no such thing as a quality knife that doesn’t hold an edge.

I saw other knives that used other steels which are comparable to AUS-6. Not for me. I have an AUS-8 knife, and I like it a lot, but it’s my understanding that the little number after AUS means a lot. There is AUS-10, and then there are AUS-8 and AUS-6. I am told AUS-8 is comparable to 440C, which I love, but AUS-6 is not as good. I’m not risking it.

I found a company called Entrek, and they specialize in fairly ugly knives made with 440C. They use micarta for their scales. I love micarta. It’s ugly and boring, but it’s indestructible. It’s plastic reinforced with cloth. Perfect for a hunting knife. I love stag handles and other fancy types of scales, but I don’t need something that has to be petted and coddled. Micarta is IT.

I liked what Entrek’s copy said about steel: “With 36 years experience we just aren’t that impressed with the glamour steels.” If that’s how they feel about steel, they probably have a low tolerance for BS.

I decided to try an Entrek Javalina. This is a very plain sheath knife with a thick blade and a Kydex sheath. It’s on the way. Tremble, squirrels, tremble.

I also need something to carry game in. Yesterday I was jogging through briars with my customary squirrel-filled tall kitchen garbage bag, and the plastic kept snagging on thorns. I’ve had it. I’m also not thrilled about all the shotgun shells bouncing around in my left pocket. The other day I ran about 6 .17 HMR shells through the washing machine. I posted a forum comment asking what I should do. Looking forward to the answers.

Skinning the last pair of squirrels was difficult. I think small squirrels are harder to skin. I found a video by a kid who uses catfish pliers. I plan to get some. They grip the skin very well while you’re yanking it off. It was great to see a kid whose voice hadn’t changed, giving adults great tips on skinning game. Take that, feminizing forces of leftist idiocy.

My new scope arrived today. I know that because I heard the UPS truck roll up. I plan to mount and try it ASAP. If things go well, I should be perforating squirrels relatively quietly with .22 pellets later in the day. I can’t wait.

I’ve decided to get a trail camera. This is a sort of action camera for filming wild animals automatically. They’re very cheap. They have sensors that turn them on when critters walk by. They shoot video and/or photos, and they use IR LED’s to generate light for night shooting. I want to find out what (or who) has been pooping in my yard, and maybe I can find out whether there are any turkeys wandering on my property. I heard some a couple of days ago. I hope it wasn’t some neighbor, practicing his turkey calls.

I looked into turkey blinds. The season is approaching. Worst blind of all time: a giant turkey costume. What were they thinking? As the website says, with this blind, safety continues to be a primary issue. I think if you dress up like a turkey and walk outdoors in hunting season, people should be allowed to shoot you without repercussions.

Imagine how exciting it is when people see that thing. It looks like a turkey the size of a Saint Bernard. They think they’re going to be in the record books. Then they fill the guys wearing them with shotgun pellets. What a disappointment that must be.

I don’t know what I’d do with a wild turkey. People say they taste good.

The other day I read that crows taste good. Like ducks. No lie. People disagree, but evidently, the only people who put crow meat down are those who have not eaten it. I have no plans to shoot crows. Yet. The more game resembles parrots, the less I want to shoot it. But it’s interesting to know that they’re tasty.

If I ever get over the psychological barrier and shoot crows, I’ll have meat on the table all the time. They are not scarce here.

People say crows can’t taste good because they eat carrion. Hello, what do chickens eat? Insects and worms. Is that better? It’s not like the food an animal eats goes straight from its mouth into its body. It’s broken down by acid and enzymes, and it passes through the intestine wall in liquid form. Then the cells of the body turn it into new things. If a crow eats a dead cat, by the time the cat gets processed, it’s something totally different.

Anyway, crows don’t just eat carrion. They hunt. They eat little critters, just as bears do. People say bears taste great. What’s the difference?

I don’t think I can talk myself into this, but I’m trying.

I will review the knife when I get it. I’m really looking forward to it. I hate bad knives, and I love good ones. I’ll make my next one myself.

I hope Clayton doesn’t find out I have it.

Squirrel Party Time is Over

I am a hunter now.

The great thing about calling yourself a hunter is that you don’t have to accomplish anything in order to justify it. All you have to do is take a gun and sit in the woods for a while. This is pretty much what I did.

The word “hunter” doesn’t imply success of any type.

I don’t like squirrels because they plant live oak trees and because I fully expect them to eat the berries from the bushes I’ve planted. I remember how they used to cut mangoes off my trees in Miami, just to hear them hit the ground. And they annoy me when I drive; I have trained myself not to take my foot off the gas. A while back I decided to get a revenge hunting license and see if I could make a dent in the local population.

Yesterday, I went out in the woods in the afternoon and sat in a clearing with no gun. I just wanted to see what the squirrel situation was. I heard barking all over the place. It was a squirrel-bark symphony. I saw a couple of squirrels climbing in the trees. I figured it wouldn’t be too hard to nail some in the future.

Today I went back, and I learned that squirrels can tell when you’re hunting. I didn’t hear a bark for an hour and a half. Little creeps.

I sat on a downed tree for a while and waited. I heard a noise to my left. I looked, and a squirrel was on a tree trunk about 20 feet away in the x direction and 20 feet up in the y direction.

Years of math have affected the way I express myself. Be glad I didn’t use spherical polar coordinates.

Okay. R(squirrel) = 23.5. Theta = pi/4. Phi = pi/4. Satisfied?

I probably could have nailed the squirrel, but I would have been shooting upward, and I was holding a .22. A rifle slug will go a long way after missing a squirrel. I didn’t feel like spending the evening telling the Florida Highway Patrol why I shot out a window a mile away, so I let the rodent flee.

I know I should use a shotgun, but man, I love rifles. I like accurate shooting. Where is the pleasure in using birdshot? Anyone can shoot, when the projectiles cover half a steradian (sorry).

It doesn’t matter. I wasn’t ready. I didn’t know how to dispose of the body. I had a plastic trash bag with me in case I hit anything, but even if I had used it, I would have had to get on the web to get instructions. I know about cutting the leg joints and cutting the head off and all that, but how much time do you get? And what are you supposed to use to do the cutting? Not my nice pocket knife! No way! How would I get it clean enough to put it back in my pocket?

When I was a kid, I shot rabbits in Kentucky. Here’s how I dealt with the meat: I handed the dead rabbits to my grandmother. That option is no longer available.

Once your squirrel is butchered, how do you clean your hands? You can’t just grab your gun with fingers covered with blood, poop, bile, and squirrel pee.

Maybe I need to take a backpack with disposable gloves. Seems a little precious, though.

I may try again tomorrow. The squirrels are taunting me, and I find their behavior inexcusable.

The Dubious Value of Verbal Aptitude

Last night I looked at Amazon Prime to find something to watch while I had the birds out of their cages. I saw that they offered a documentary on the atomic bomb. I’m a sucker for books and videos about the bomb, going back to The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes, so I had to watch.

As I expected, I found it entertaining. I haven’t seen all of it yet. I hoped to see some mention of Richard Feynman, a great physicist who worked on the bomb in his youth, but he has not appeared yet.

A friend of mine bought me a new copy of Richard Feynman’s first book, Surely You Must be Joking, Mr. Feynman, as a Christmas present, and I have been reading it over the last few weeks.

I first bought the book years ago, when I was a physics student. I bought a lot of physics-related nonfiction. When I dropped out of grad school and moved back to Miami, I put my books in boxes, and later, I found that ants had eaten a lot of them. At some point after that, Feynman got publicity from some source or other, and his book became popular.

It’s always a bummer when other people catch onto something you like. Everyone thinks you jumped on the bandwagon, and you end up having very unsatisfying conversations with real bandwagon jumpers who lack any sort of real understanding. It reminds me of my experiences with brewing. I was a beer freak even when I was in high school, and then at some point other people got into quality beers and homebrewing, and suddenly the world was full of hipsters who were instant beer experts.

I’ll tell you something funny. No matter how popular good beer becomes, there won’t be many people who can tell Miller Lite from Dogfish Head. That’s just the way humanity is.

I loved Feynman’s books. I won’t lie; I didn’t understand the third one I bought. It was about quantum electrodynamics. I didn’t have the patience to work my way through it. But the first two were great. They were autobiographies. He wrote about his experiences as a smart kid, as well as his time working with great men of science.

I learned something interesting from the bomb documentary. The thing I learned was of great historical importance, but I had never heard about it before. My best guess: liberal journalists and academics suppressed it. It concerned the United States and atomic policy, and it cast the United States in a very favorable light, so it’s the kind of thing hippies would naturally find infuriating and worthy of concealment.

The United States, on its own, tried to get rid of nuclear weapons and prevent the arms race.

For a short time, before the expected and unpreventable betrayal by leftists put the bomb in the hands of evil communist regimes, the US had a monopoly on nuclear weapons. We proposed destroying them and working to create a global ban on new production, combined with verification. The Soviets were working on their own bombs, and they refused to cooperate until we destroyed our weapons. Of course, the demand was ridiculous. We knew they were working on the bomb, and we didn’t know how far along they were. We knew we didn’t know how far along they were. It would have been idiotic to disarm and hope they didn’t have bombs waiting to be deployed.

The Soviet empire was, as Reagan put it, evil, and there is no way to justify the canard that westerners were just as bad. Even the disenfranchised in countries like the US had it much better than ordinary Soviet citizens, who were prisoners and slaves in their own nations. The Soviets were warlike and aggressive, and their policy was to expand by means of force. Unchecked, this would have resulted in a world system in which all human beings were humiliated prisoners and slaves. Taking a chance of making the USSR a nuclear monopoly would have been criminal.

I’m old, and I’m not especially ignorant, yet until last night, I was unaware that the US had tried to prevent the arms race. Thank you, crooked disseminators of information.

Today during breakfast I decided to Google and see if there were any documentaries about Feynman, and I came across a very interesting site. It’s called Cosmolearning. I know very little about it, but the “About” page says, “Collecting the top educational videos on the web, generously offered by hundreds of universities, educators, and professionals, we share their passion for teaching by providing a platform for world-class education free of charge.”

They had several videos on Feynman. Now I have some good stuff to look forward to.

Feynman’s autobiographical books are good reading not just because he writes about science, but because he writes interesting tales about a remarkable person with an engaging personality. He writes about his feelings, not just his accomplishments. A lot of his stories are funny. Some are moving.

One deceptive thing about the books is that Feynman undersells his intelligence. He was not just brilliant. He was extraordinary among brilliant people. But he describes himself as a guy who was dazzled and intimidated by the bright people he worked with.

Feynman writes about working on the bomb as a young man, as though he hadn’t graduated from college. He mentions overseeing high school boys at Los Alamos, as though he were some kind of low-level babysitter. I looked it up, and I found out that he had received his Ph.D. in 1942, at about the age of 24, before starting to work on the bomb.

So much for the babysitter narrative.

Feynman scored 125 on an IQ test, and that’s not impressive, but he also blew the tops out of very difficult math exams. His aptitude for math and physics was freakish, regardless of his self-deprecation.

It has been suggested that Feynman’s surprisingly low IQ was due to the nature of the test he took. After all, IQ is a test score, not a definitive quantization of intelligence. A very smart person can, legitimately, have a low IQ. You just have to measure the right things.

Most physicists are not good at verbal tasks. I know that from working with them. The great physicist Murray Gell-Mann said more or less the same thing in one of his books; he remarked that he was unusual because his gifts were balanced. It may be that Feynman’s test measured verbal ability more than mathematical aptitude. My guess is that a score of 125 on such a test would be unusually high for a physicist. I wouldn’t be surprised to find that other brilliant STEM thinkers had disappointing IQ scores.

Anyway, the notion that Feynman was anything less than astounding is untenable.

This got me thinking about smart people, so I Googled John von Neumann. If you don’t know who he is, it suffices to say that he appears to be the smartest person, among people of note, of the last century. He intimidated people like Edward Teller the way Edward Teller would intimidate you or me.

The power of von Neumann’s mind was incomprehensible. He made gigantic contributions in a number of fields in which most solid workers have no hope of making any type of memorable impact.

I have to say that I was depressed a little by looking into these things. God gave me some pretty good gifts, and I didn’t do anything with them. Earthly achievements aren’t very important in the Christian scheme, since everyone in heaven is a greater genius than 10 von Neumanns, but doing nothing with your gifts is not something that makes you feel good.

I always wonder what would have happened, had I been raised in a healthy family, by people who knew how to help their kids win. These days, I goad my friends to avoid the minefields I walked into. I tell them they need to get their kids started on music, math, and languages EARLY, EARLY, EARLY. Once you hit maybe 16, everything gets harder to learn, and your future success becomes limited. Earthly gifts aren’t everything, but being strong is usually better than being weak.

This week I realized something funny: extreme verbal aptitude has very little value. If you have a ton of STEM aptitude, you can use it to get a fine career that will feed you for life, and you may be able to make an extraordinarily large amount of money and look after yourself and others. A STEM person with an IQ of, say, 180 will find a lot of open doors. But what if you have an extreme verbal aptitude? There’s nothing you can do with it. No one will pay you to do crossword puzzles. It will help you as a lawyer, but let’s be honest; a lawyer with an IQ of 145 (common) will be able to do absolutely everything the law demands, very, very well. We have probably had good Supreme Court justices who were not that smart.

God gave me a very high verbal IQ, and now I know how unmarketable it is!

I do very well in STEM pursuits, but I got a late, late start. I was 30. I went from algebra dropout to grad student in a top physics program in 4 years, but I got burned out and quit (also, I suspect my memory was fading and making it harder), and I very much doubt I was ever going to come up with anything useful. I would have ended up doing experimental physics somewhere, shooting lasers through cold gases or something, and taking endless measurements to be interpreted by people who were smarter than I.

Maybe there is something useful about extreme verbal aptitude, and I just haven’t figured it out yet. Or maybe it’s just a gift to keep me entertained. I would not wish it for a son or daughter. A nice solid 650 verbal SAT and an 800 math SAT would get a kid much farther in life.

It seems to me that smart STEM people give us things that are useful, whereas verbal freaks do nothing but misunderstand and spread misunderstanding. They write books and essays full of godless opinion and conjecture, dragging the rest of us along in their wakes. The academics who are constantly hacking away at Christians are mostly verbal people.

I think of Justice Brennan, the famous liberal sage. He was wrong all the time, and his views were poisonous, but he was so smart, he convinced people (probably including himself) he was right. What a wasted life.

Now I’m more depressed than ever!

I may not be inventing great things or advancing physics, but thank God, I haven’t ended up like Sartre or Noam Chomsky or any of the other umpteen million verbal people who spent their days filling other people’s minds with sewage.

I think STEM gifts are better than verbal gifts, but on the whole, freak aptitudes are not that wonderful. The most important thing in life is a relationship with the Holy Spirit. After that, you want a nice, solid above-average brain, and more than that, good habits. The world is full of contented, successful people who serve God and couldn’t equal Feynman’s 125 on their very best days.

Incidentally, Feynman was an atheist. I enjoy his books, and I admire his mind, but in all likelihood, he is in agony right now, defeated forever. Terrible. I will never meet him.

Von Neumann is a different story. When he learned he was seriously ill, he sought God. He was a Jew by birth. I guess he was not religious prior to his illness, because he didn’t look for a rabbi to help him. He became a Catholic, and even on his deathbed, he was very afraid. I hope he made it.

How about all these huge Jewish brains? Where do they come from? What is God’s purpose for them? Feynman, von Neumann, Einstein, Bohr (half Jewish), Oppenheimer, Norbert Wiener…some almost incredible, others merely amazing. You could sit and list them all day. It almost makes you wonder what life would be without them. Would we have nuclear technology yet?

Gentiles do okay. Tesla, Gauss, Leibniz, Newton, Dirac, Fermi, and so on. But we SHOULD do okay. The vast majority of human beings are Gentiles. Something like 99.8%.

Strange.

I often wonder why God bothers giving us gifts at all, when the real answer is to connect to the Holy Spirit and get him to take care of you. But I suppose gifts are useful to keep you alive until you find the Holy Spirit. You have to use whatever crude weapons you have.

Whatever my potential was, I missed the bus, so now I get my thrills playing with farm machinery and machine tools. C’est la vie. At least I can function as a walking cautionary tale and help other people.

I’m going to look for more stuff on the Cosmo Learning site. Maybe I can still jam a few more things into the worn-out container which is what’s left of my mind.

Plus Guns

Today, for the second time since 2002, I had the annoying experience of having a website hacked. Someone left a stupid tag at the top of my home page. I had to drop everything and change every conceivable password, and I exported the entire content of my WordPress blog so I could republish it if the blog vanished.

I suspect there is a hole in WordPress, because my password was a huge jumble of nonsense characters which would have taken a very, very long time to guess. I’m not a computer expert, but I doubt a nerd in Turkey with a 5-year-old laptop has the ability to crack a password as long as a finger, composed of random ASCII. Maybe I’m wrong.

I contacted my hosting company, and their online chat took forever. I tried calling. The phone number took me to an outsourced security company. The guy who picked up the phone told me (this is my interpretation) that my host company’s security is worthless. He said his company would scan my site for $15 per month, which doesn’t sound bad, but then I asked the obvious question. Yes, it’s a yearly deal. So $180.

I tried the support number again, and I got a phone maze that went nowhere at all. That was surprising. Then I got the chat guy (Kumar, no lie), and after much poor communication, he finally assured me that as long as my passwords were fresh, no one but me should be able to get into my email accounts or Cpanel (if you don’t know what that is, forget it).

This killed maybe an hour.

I don’t use lame passwords for my hosted stuff. If you want to get into my business, you will have to find some other way. I assume WordPress provided it, and if that is true, the site may be hacked again, because WordPress has not updated in a while. If this happens, I will probably reinstall the site. It depends on the then-current state of security the host can provide. If I’m going to be reinstalling once per week, I will let it go. There is always Blogger.

I was concerned about my emails, but then I realized there isn’t much for hackers to steal. When you have your own server, the emails are removed as soon as you check them, so there is no giant backlog of sensitive material waiting to be stolen. Unless the host company is stupidly putting deleted emails somewhere where hackers can find them.

This scare made me think about something I expect to happen before long. Eventually, Christians and conservatives will be banned from the web. When we are not banned entirely, we will be hobbled by Nuremberg-style laws that will limit us to very basic participation, free of political and religious content. The big Internet players are not bound by the Constitution, so they will have a good legal opening when they decide to muffle us once and for all.

I assume whoever hacked me is just bored, but it could be someone who has an agenda. It’s not a Christian or a conservative. Actually, some conservatives hate me, but I’m not in the political blogging game now, so I doubt these stunted souls feel motivated to bother me.

While I was fixing my security to the best of my ability, I learned something surprising. I am getting nearly 2 thousand unique visits per day. I figured I was getting more like 80. I had a stat counter that gave me depressing results, but I knew it wasn’t working very well. I guess it was working worse than I thought. My host company’s internal stat stuff told me the truth.

What can I say about this? I thought I was yelling into a bucket, but it appears that I have some readers. They don’t comment much. Maybe most are bots. Years ago, “unique visit” meant a human being had probably come to your blog. Now? Search me.

I don’t think ~2000 people are showing up every day, but maybe it’s ~1000.

Maybe I am reaching some people with my testimony. I will have to think more about what I write, now that I know someone may actually read it.

In other news, I solved my long-range (longish) shooting problem. I was shooting a 17 HMR rifle at 100 yards, and I was getting a lot of dispersion. I was frustrated. Then I learned that a slight wind will blow a 17 HMR all over the place. Also, a gun forum guy told me to get my left hand off the gun. Today I went out with my friend Mike, and we shot a while. There was no wind. I switched to shooting with my left hand down, and here is what I got:

That’s 5 rounds on the left, plus an extraneous round Mike fired just to make my target look bad. What a punk move. Can you believe that? Anyway, that’s a wee bit over 1 MOA, probably. It may be 1 MOA. It’s very close, measuring from the outsides of the farthest-separated holes.

I figure if I practice a little, I will be 3/4 MOA with that gun, and I will be consistent. I won’t have to shoot 50 rounds to get a single 3/4 MOA group I can put on the Internet. This makes me extremely happy.

That gun is a laser. It’s crappy rimfire ammunition, which you can get for 10 bucks per box, and look how accurate it is. IF the wind isn’t blowing. I am reading some surprising distance figures. I thought the gun was useless past 150 yards, but apparently that’s not true unless you want to kill things. People are claiming they shoot targets at nearly 300 yards. If that’s true, this is the practice gun for me. I just need to choose days when there isn’t much wind.

That’s exciting. I can find 300 yards of safe shooting space here, no problem. I could conceivably learn to shoot real distances.

We also shot some grapefruit and ponderosa lemons. I hit one and blew half of it about 15 feet away from the rest. Fun.

It’s really nice to be shooting a rifle well. It was a long time coming. And since I’m not using the best stuff or practicing a lot, I should expect considerable improvement in the future. Too bad they don’t sell a license for shooting hackers.

If the blog disappears, don’t blame me. I’ll make a reasonable effort to keep it alive.

Free 2-Day Shipping Takes a Week

Am I the only one who has noticed that Amazon Prime is a sham?

When I first signed up, I wanted free shipping. That was the thing. I knew I would save more than the cost of Prime. But I also liked the 2-day time frame. Amazon promised they would ship stuff to me for nothing, in 2 days. Obviously, there are exceptions. They’re not going to ship you a bulldozer in 2 days, and if you order at 9 p.m. on a Monday, you’re going to wait till Thursday. But generally, 2 days.

Now that I think about it, Bezos has a lot of nerve, putting things he can’t ship quickly on the Prime list. It’s dishonest. If you can’t ship a heavy item in 2 days, it’s not Prime, now, is it?

Anyway, at first things were great. I could order an Arduino board on a Friday and receive it on Sunday. I received things on Saturdays, too. The 2-day promise was no joke.

Over the last few months, I’ve seen a big change. Order on a Monday, receive on…Friday. Extra charges for weekend delivery, too.

Yesterday I ordered 2 Prime items. That was Wednesday. Now Amazon says they will arrive in a week. Is Amazon on Mars time? Maybe on Mars, 2 days equal 1 earth week.

I got no explanation. I didn’t get an email containing an apology. Just a notification on Amazon’s site, telling me I had to wait a week.

It’s interesting. It’s not surprising. To me, it’s consistent with the way evil works.

I think the Internet is basically evil. I use it, but I think the devil is using it to do us great harm. It has spread pornography to every corner of the world. It has helped hostility increase to levels no one could have predicted 30 years ago. It’s going to destroy cash, so the government will be able to control us by freezing and confiscating our money and by using our purchases to surveil us. It’s going to destroy free will by making us unable to do anything without being observed.

The Internet is a bad thing, and one of its evils is the destruction of retail businesses. Malls are closing because no one wants to get in the car any more. We are headed toward a state in which a few big companies hold all the inventory, and you won’t be able to get the things you need unless you deal with them electronically, leaving a trail of bread crumbs for Uncle Sam, who is stupid, cruel, and unfair.

About half of Americans have Amazon Prime now. That’s an astounding statistic. It’s very powerful. And 2-day shipping was a big part of the appeal. Now that we’re hooked, the shipping guarantee is dissolving. That’s completely typical of the way evil works. No drug dealer charges you for your first line of coke. He lets you develop a taste for it, and then you pay whatever he asks.

As we become more dependent on Amazon and other online companies, they will lose their motivation to provide good service. That’s what’s happening with Prime. They have half of America. They know you won’t quit now. Maybe technological advances will make Prime a real 2-day service, and maybe Amazon will tell us to shut up and accept delays. Either way, Amazon comes out on top.

Am I saying we should boycott Internet vendors? No. They already won. There is nothing we can do. Depriving yourself won’t fix the situation.

It doesn’t matter that much to me. I went without house shoes and a housecoat for most of my life. I can wait 6 more days. But I find it interesting, and I wonder why no one seems to be talking about it.

Amazon says it will refund your membership for a month if they deliver something late. At least that’s the Internet scuttlebutt. Something to look into, if your Christmas socks haven’t arrived yet.