Plastic is Manly

Am I a bad husband? When I make major decisions, do I thoughtlessly forget the fact that I am no longer single?

Every once in a while, I start to say, “I’m single, so…” I’m well aware that I am not single, but after so many years on the shelf, and with a wife who is still stuck in a foreign country, I sometimes forget the proper mindset.

Last week, I did it again. I ordered new steak knives without showing them to the wife.

Back when I lived in Austin, and I was a physics TA, I got some steak knives for my apartment. They were Henckels knives from some store or other. Probably Bed, Bath & Beyond. They were serrated stainless knives with extremely tough handles that looked like wood yet didn’t go all snowflaky in the dishwasher. They worked fine for about 25 years, but some of them disappeared during that time.

Why do steak knives disappear? They do it to everyone. Where do they go? I think it sometimes happens because idiot relatives grab them and use them as screwdrivers and paint scrapers. Other than that, I can’t figure it out.

Between my dad and me, we had three or four knives when we moved to the Ocala area. It wasn’t a big problem, because we didn’t have gatherings that required a lot of knives. I got sick of it, though, so I decided to go to Ebay and see if I could find loose knives to match my old ones. I figured there would be new knives all over the place at reasonable prices. Even if the knives had been discontinued, surely there would be new old stock.

Boy, was I wrong. New ones did not exist, and old ones were selling for Sabatier prices. Okay, not Sabatier prices. But they were so dear, it looked like I would be better off getting a new set.

No problem, right? I went to Cook’s Illustrated, figuring I would buy whatever they recommended. They’re pretty reliable.

Guess what? They recommend a set of Victorinox knives that sell for $167. And they have wooden handles, so forget the dishwasher.

If they had wooden handles, I wouldn’t pay $167 for a set of lightsabers. I have a $200 knife that has been wrapped in newspaper since I left Miami. Wooden handle. I’m not washing that by hand. I will probably never use it again.

I should frame it to remind me of my own bad judgment.

Here is what Victorinox says on Amazon:

Victorinox Swiss Army recommends washing all knives by hand. For best results, hand wash your knives with a soapy cloth and dry immediately.

While Fibrox Pro knives are dishwasher safe, we recommend hand washing as dishwashers are designed to spray water at a relatively high pressure, which can jostle the silverware and cause the knives to collide, dulling the edge.

That’s what they recommend. I recommend they find another sucker to buy their knives. What am I? Niles Crane? I may be a snob, but I’m not insane, and I don’t have an illegal to wash my knives for me.

I finally found a cheaper set I liked, and it happens to be made by Victorinox, the company that also made some of my cheap Fibrox-handled chef knives. I paid $68 for 6 knives. I know I should have bought 8, but I was too cheap. I figured that if I…WE…ever needed 8, we could give the old, dull Henckels knives to the guests who were most likely to cut themselves.

I went with straight edges. Why? Because serrated edges are for women and other people who can’t sharpen a knife. Serrations make really dull knives cut well enough to satisfy most people. I don’t want them. Have you ever cut a steak with a sharp knife? It’s bliss. It just falls off onto your fork, and you don’t have to saw and rock the table back and forth.

Here is the part the wife may not like: the knives have black Fibrox handles. Plastic, in other words. They look like they came from Big Lots.

I don’t think she’ll care. When I asked her what her favorite food was, she said “meat.” She didn’t narrow it down any more than that. Meat. All meat. Any meat. She even eats hippopotamuses. As a person who will soon be eating meat in my house, not to mention washing dishes, I think she will love these knives. If not, I can always get the wooden ones and use the plastic ones when I’m alone.

So, what to do with the old knives? Nothing, right? They’re for the kids’ table.

I couldn’t leave them alone. While I was admiring the newly-arrived set, I had to do something about the old ones.

The old knives were only sharpened on one side. To a knife person who isn’t a sushi chef, this is on a par with vandalism. I guess it made the knives easier to manufacture. I don’t think Henckels expected anyone to sharpen them. I believe the idea was that undiscerning customers would buy them and use them until they lost a certain number. Then they would be replaced.

At first, I tried to sharpen them on one side, just like Henckels. I used two diamond hones; coarse and fine. It was very slow work. I reshaped the bevel on one knife with many strokes, and then I touched up the back side to get rid of the burr. I wasn’t satisfied at all. The knife was pretty sharp, but it didn’t make me completely happy, and I still had two to go. After working on the second knife for too long a time, I changed tactics.

I have a Smith’s PP1 sharpener. This is a desperation gadget for hopeless unskilled people, but it works pretty well for kitchen knives. It has coarse carbide cutters in one notch, and the other notch holds fine ceramic stones.

I ran the knife through it a few times, and I got an edge, but it wasn’t great. Even after following up with a leather strop saturated with 1-micron diamond spray, it was disappointing.

I found that the final answer was to make a crude edge using the Smith’s tool and then follow up with the hones. This worked quickly, and it gave me reasonably refined edges that shaved hairs. The serrated areas wouldn’t shave, but they were sharp again.

This is now my official steak knife sharpening method. The hones are fast and easy to use. You just have to be willing to learn to do it right. You can push your knives away from you on the top of the hones and then on the bottom, in order to get both bevels, or you can push on the top, turn the knives over, and pull toward you. You have to learn how to hold the knives at a fixed angle on both strokes.

You may not get a really symmetrical set of bevels, but that doesn’t matter. They’ll be close enough. The only hard part will be establishing your characteristic bevels in the first place. Factory bevels may be very symmetrical, and they may also have angles that differ from the ones you want to apply by hand. It may take a long time to grind the bevels down they match your angles. After that, resharpening a knife will take about 20 seconds. It’s so fast, you can do it every time you take a knife out.

I’m going with this method. It works.

The other day, I bought a KME sharpening system for my carry knives. It’s wonderful. It provides a beautiful edge that rips through anything. It’s not right for everything, though.

Carry knives are made from super steels which take forever to dull and aren’t easy to sharpen, and it’s natural to want a perfect edge on a carry knife, so it’s okay if it takes a while to sharpen one. Kitchen knives are different. A kitchen knife that will pop little hairs off the backs of your fingers is plenty sharp for any kitchen job. Also, kitchen knives get dull faster than carry knives, so using a KMA sharpener, which takes a while to set up, is completely impractical.

Now I have 6 new steak knives with razor-like factory edges, plus three old knives that, while not as keen, are sharper than they have ever been before

The problem will be to convince my guests to be careful.

Almost no one expects knives to be sharp. Only a small percentage of knife owners have any idea how to sharpen a knife, and when it comes to women, that percentage is close to zero. They’re used to bad knives in their own houses, so when you hand them sharp knives, they tend to be careless. They also lean into them, because they’re used to forcing dull blades through food.

Women will actually get angry at you for sharpening knives. Many women think it’s irresponsible and unsafe to sharpen a knife correctly. It’s sad.

It’s really mens’ fault. A man sharpens his wife’s knives.

A long time ago, my Aunt Jean asked for a big knife while working on a holiday meal. I let her use a huge Forschner butcher knife with a great edge. I told her several times to be extremely careful. I warned her that it was sharper than knives she was used to. Only a few minutes passed before I saw her with a paper towel wrapped around her hand.

I don’t want people to come to my house and maim themselves over shared meals. It ruins the atmosphere.

I think my sharpening technology is as good as it will never need to be. I have a CBN-wheel bench grinder for things like hoes and woodworking tools. I have two belt grinders for axes and similar tools. I have chainsaw files. I have the KME for carry knives. I have diamond hones for kitchen knives. I have the strop and diamond spray for all my knives. I have big DMT diamond stones for filling in the gaps. I am set. You can do better, but you don’t really need to.

I am building the kitchen up again. Not all that long ago, I stepped back from cooking because it was related to gluttony, but now I have a wife to think about, and she should have a well-equipped food workshop, even if I do a lot of the cooking.

Yesterday, I unboxed a new toaster oven. It’s a Breville Smart Oven Air Fryer Pro. It’s a smart oven with a fan in it. It does air frying, which is good for routine weekday vegetable sides. It has all sorts of programs. It reheats, proofs dough, keeps food warm at realistic temperatures (unlike a big oven), and can even handle a turkey or rib roast.

My big oven is pretty bad. It probably came with the house. The thermal fuse blows every time I use the self-cleaning cycle, the display has gone so dim I can barely see it, and the convection setting doesn’t air-fry. I found a new one for $1100, but I have been too cheap to spring for it. It also takes 15 minutes to preheat, whereas the new hotness takes three. I spent $400 on it, which is a ton, but I think it will be worth it, because it appears I will only be using the big oven for maybe 10% of my oven jobs.

People complain about the difficulty of cleaning this oven, but I have an ace in the hole. I have a steam cleaner. Not many people know it, but a steam cleaner will dissolve baked-on crud in a hurry, with no chemicals or abrasives. Also, I’m not the kind of person who cleans ovens a lot. I’m not going to feel bad if my new oven looks like someone uses it.

I can’t fix a new entree until I get rid of the chicken I made two days ago, so all I can do for now is reheat. The new oven is performing beautifully. It seems to be a revolutionary change for my kitchen. The reheating feature, all by itself, is huge. My big oven is impractical for reheating, the conventional microwave I got to accommodate my dad’s dementia makes food rubbery and limp, and the little microwave with convection features is a much better at microwaving than convection.

When you’re single…married but temporarily living alone…you have to reheat a lot or throw out a great deal of food. You can’t eat everything you make in a single day, so you eat a lot of leftovers.

I almost wish I hadn’t thrown out my dad’s old Popeil rotisserie. Crude product that it was, it worked like crazy. When you move, you have to prioritize, and the rotisserie seemed like a good candidate for the garbage pile. My friend Mike has one, and he can’t believe I threw ours out. When I told him, he sounded close to tears.

Oh, my God. I thought Ronco had stopped selling the oven. I see a new one on Amazon. Should I? Should I? I can always get another kitchen cart. Oh, man. This is good news.

You may be inclined to assume the late Ron Popeil would never sell a decent product, purely as a matter of principal, but that isn’t true. His dad was very shifty, but Ron made some good stuff. The rotisserie lasts forever and makes excellent food. Ron himself worked on it, determining that 6 turns per minute were ideal.

The oven is sort of primitive, but the food is undeniably great. It’s strange that my dad, who could not cook, bought one, but I have to say that the things he made with it were shockingly tasty.

It’s not that easy to clean, but as I said, I have a steam cleaner. Nothing is hard to clean when you have a steam cleaner.

I am researching, and it looks like the new Ronco company is not the same as the old one. People are complaining that the new ovens turn at 4 RPM instead of 6, and that is not good. I found a new-looking original-Ronco oven on Craigslist and made an offer.

Being a handy person, I could conceivably take the gearmotor out of a new oven and put a faster one in, but I am not anxious to bet on it.

Guess I better warm up some chicken.

Heavenly White Bread for Bad Cooks

Yesterday I wrote a piece about British actor John Cleese, saying how disappointed I was in him. I used to think he was something more than a good comic actor, but gradually I realized he wasn’t a great screenwriter or a particularly witty or smart person. He tweeted something pretty asinine about the Rittenhouse case, and I felt like responding.

I took the piece down. I felt it was just too crabby.

Today I feel like making amends. I’ll post a recipe for the most delicious white bread imaginable. It’s very easy to make. I like it better than croissants, baguettes, and, well, anything. The recipe will produce a loaf of rich, moist bread you’ll have a hard time staying away from.

It’s similar to white bread I’ve made in the past, but it’s better.

INGREDIENTS

520 g bread flour
1.5 tsp. salt
1 tbsp. instant yeast
2 tbsp. sugar
4 tbsp. butter
310 g warm water
1/2 tsp. diastatic malt extract (Amazon)

Blend the dry things first in the food processor. Then blend in the water until the dough is well mixed. Maybe 20 seconds. Wait 10 minutes. Blend in butter (softening in advance will speed this up). Butter a bread pan after salting the butter.

Form a loaf and put it in the pan. Butter it with more salted butter. Bake about 30 minutes at 440°.

You will have to watch the top of the loaf. If it browns too fast, you can put something between the bread and the upper heating element.

I use steel nonstick pans. Nothing fancy.

The bread will come out with a delicious, salty, buttery crust. If you cut it while it’s too hot, you may crush the inside of it. It gets firmer as it cools. It’s best to use a very sharp serrated knife and move it back and forth very fast while you cut, making sure you’re cutting instead of pushing the knife down through the bread. Light pressure is key.

If you have no shame at all, make this bread and prepare a lot of preserves and soft butter. Eat it while it’s hot. It’s decadent. You can have it with hot chocolate or tea with lots of milk and sugar.

When it cools, it makes an excellent sandwich bread. It’s also a good foundation for Texas toast. You just salt a slice, dip both sides in garlic butter, and brown it in a skillet.

This bread is a godsend for bad bakers. It’s hard to mess up. If you can breathe, you can make this bread.

You will need a big, powerful food processor to mix this much dough. If that’s a problem, you can always use a mixer or your hands, but don’t knead it too much, because you’ll get tiny, uniform bubbles like the ones in Wonder Bread.

I ordered myself some miniature bread pans. I like homemade bread, but I can’t deal with big loaves. They sit on the counter and taunt me until I eat them. Small loaves are much less dangerous. I haven’t tried one yet, but I’m hoping they will be better than big loaves because of the high crust-to-insides ratio. I think this recipe would make better dinner rolls than anything I’ve tried, but I’m just guessing.

Thanksgiving for One

The unthinkable has happened. I will not have guests for Thanksgiving.

Ordinarily, friends show up for Thanksgiving and Christmas, but somehow it didn’t happen this year. One bunch moved to Georgia, and another is saddled with a difficult octogenarian who requires pampering and obedience. My friend Mike was going to come, but he decided to visit his son in New Jersey. Mike is distressed, because he usually cooks a feast, and he can’t do it this year. His son works in Manhattan and has a tiny, useless apartment kitchen.

Mike made reservations at a restaurant in Times Square. Today it occurred to him there would be a parade running through it. He is not happy.

Last week I was thinking I’d just make a turkey sandwich and be done with it. I was in the store yesterday, however, and the fiends who run the place had set out rib roasts for $10 per pound. These days, that’s actually a very good price.

Feeling myself a victim of entrapment, I bought the smallest rib roast in my long history of cooking beef. Two ribs. A little over 5 pounds.

I thought I would cut a steak off of it, freeze the steak, and roast the rest, but I was afraid a 3-pound rib roast wouldn’t cook correctly, so I’m fixing the whole thing.

The butchers did an excellent job of cutting the ribs off and reattaching them with twine. Usually, I do this myself. Today I took the roast out to apply salt, butter, and garlic, and I found myself asking if the ribs really needed to be tied back on.

Time for Google.

I read that a lot of people cook rib roasts without the ribs. They claim they’re just as good, and the big advantage is that you can use twine to force your roast into a rounder shape. The bonus here is that it will cook more evenly. I decided to give it a try. Cooking experiments are best left for solo meals. Never try anything new when you’re cooking for company. You will face-plant and ruin a memory.

While I was looking at the web, I came across an idea I had heard about earlier this year. People claim the things you put on the outside of meat before you cook it do no good.

If you go to Youtube, you can find at least one video of a person “proving” marinades don’t work. They marinate one piece of meat, leave the other one alone, cook both, cut the outside off the marinated piece, and have people compare the taste. People say they can’t tell the difference. The claim is that nothing soaks in farther than 2 mm.

I asked myself if I was wasting my time, applying salt, butter, and garlic days before cooking.

I decided to grease the roast as planned.

Why did I go against THE SCIENCE? First of all, as a Youtube dissident has pointed out, you don’t throw away the outside of meat when you cook it. Multiply 2 mm by two, and you get about 3/16″ of intensely flavored meat, accounting for both sides. That’s worth the effort of marinating or seasoning.

Second thing…salt penetrates. Anyone who has ever eaten ham knows this. I’ve eaten pieces taken from huge country hams, and they were salty all the way through. If salt didn’t penetrate, it would be impossible to cure a ham.

I don’t know if the garlic will improve the inside of the meat at all, but two days of absorbing salt should make a difference. The butter and garlic will add flavor to the outside of the meat, and they will run off and collect in the broiling pan, providing stuff I can use to make gravy.

I don’t know if it was a good idea to force the meat into a round shape. It’s supposed to cook more evenly, but do I want that? Chances are good I’m getting advice from people who don’t know good food when they eat it. It’s nice when a rib roast’s cap is a little more done. I don’t know if I’ll like it as much if there is pink meat right under the surface.

They say a roast with the ribs removed will give you a tasty salt crust all over the outside, whereas leaving the ribs on prevents one side from getting crusty. I fell for this, but now I wonder if it’s true. My roast will have one side facing down while it cooks. That doesn’t sound like a good way to put a crust on it. I’ll bet it’s not much better than it would have been with the ribs on.

I’ll miss stuffing. I’m thinking maybe I should make stuffing even though I have no turkey. There is no law that says stuffing is only for poultry.

I feel obligated to make a dessert, but I don’t think I will. My best dessert is cheesecake. It’s a lot of work, it’s a calorie supernova, and after the meal, I would have enough left over for a week, making for a very fat November.

I will miss my friends, but it should be nice to have an easy Thanksgiving. Ordinarily, I have to start cooking on Monday.

You, too, Can be a Spud Stud

I feel like writing about something less serious than the apocalypse. I’m trying not to read the news or focus so much on the impending destruction of mankind. I can’t help picking a few things up. I have been informed that Joe Biden is now less popular than shingles, and the Chinese suddenly have the ability to nuke all our cities at will. I’m not trying hard enough.

Every man knows the most painful experience you can have is to tell a friend he was right about something. I am now faced with that chore. My friend Mike showed me the best way to fix baked potatoes.

Everyone knows you can nuke a potato and get an okay result which is fine for dining alone in front of the TV. Not that I do that. Every day. You can also do what I used to do. I rubbed russet potatoes with olive oil and salt and baked them on the rack at 425°. You can also omit the salt if you like a dry jacket. This method works great.

Mike tried to tell me he used the microwave and a toaster oven in his recipe. Horrors. But I tried it anyway, because it was quick, and it looked like a step up from the microwave alone.

It’s very simple. You poke a few holes in your potato’s skin to prevent explosions. Then nuke it until it’s done. For a relatively large potato, I go around 7 minutes in my somewhat-strong oven. You can use a thermometer to find out how long your oven needs. The common wisdom is that the internal temperature should be about 210°.

Once your potato is cooked, throw it in the oven at the highest temperature for 3-5 minutes. This will fix the skin. Best I can do here is 500°.

I figured I was in for a compromise potato, but the first one I fixed was excellent. The jacket wasn’t limp or soggy. It tasted like it had been baked. The inside of the potato had a wonderful flavor and fluffy texture.

I was very surprised, but you can’t argue with empirical results, so now this is my default method for baking potatoes. It’s not just fast. It’s the best method I know.

I called Mike and faced the humiliation of telling him he was right, but then he is a food genius. Without his pizza knowledge, I would not be the man I am today.

As long as I’m writing about food, I just found out about a neat, inexpensive rolling pin. You won’t believe it. It’s a piece of PVC pipe. I’ll post the video where I learned about it.

My wooden rolling pin cracked because I put it in the dishwasher. I have a low tolerance for things that can’t take machine washing, so I didn’t care. I currently use a bizarre pin with a Teflon surface, and I have to wash it by hand because it’s all I have left and I don’t want to ruin it.

Today I went to Tigerchef.com to order something I needed, and in order to make the UPS charge more productive, I added a few other things. I started looking for a rolling pin, and then I decided to research. I saw the video, and I decided to try the pipe before buying anything.

I’m going to get some pipe and make two pins: a long one and a short one. I’ll use the lathe to smooth off the ends. We’ll see if they work. I don’t think PVC can take dishwasher temperatures, but I can find out by putting a scrap piece in the top rack. I may prefer hand-washing for the big pin anyway, because I don’t think the dishwasher can get the inside of a long pipe clean.

Maybe the potato method will be useful to you. I would suggest not criticizing until you try it.

Looks Like it Will be Beans and Rice Till Friday

I realized I had to start eating my old survival supplies in order to keep them from going to waste, so yesterday, I made myself a huge pot of red beans and rice. Let it suffice to say I am extremely pleased.

I took a chance on what is purportedly an Emeril recipe. I have nearly no faith in Emeril, for a number of reasons, but he ran the Commander’s Palace, so Cajun food shouldn’t be a challenge for him. After I got into the process, I realized the recipe was actually secondhand. Some lady who probably eats margarine posted it on the Internet, and she said she had made changes. When a woman makes a change in a recipe containing pork, it’s generally an indication that regurgitation is imminent. They’ll substitute turkey for pork or canola for butter. I decided to take a free hand, and things worked out great.

I had two pounds of dried beans to get rid of, so I had to make a big batch. When it was over, 24 ounces of andouille and two ham hocks were in the pot along with the beans. The main thing I did to make it work was adding dry white wine. It’s hard to think of a good excuse for preparing poultry or pork without wine.

My beans are maybe two years old. I forgot to put the buy date on the bag. As a result, it took hours for them to get soft. I had to have a PBJ for dinner, but I made up for it this morning with a big serving of Cajun joy.

You don’t have to spend a lot of money to make good food. Well, actually, you do, during the Biden catastrophe. But you don’t have to spend a lot compared to what you would spend on things like steak and seafood, which used to be expensive but are now downright precious. If you can fix beans a few different ways, you can get good nutrition without being hammered too badly by Uncle Joe’s empty shelves.

I would say it’s best to use one whole cup of dry white wine per pound of dried beans. That sounds like a lot, but it seems like beans blunt the wine’s effect on the pork.

I should have a relatively pleasant couple of months after true famine sets in, getting creative with my prepper cache. After that, unless I’m raptured, it will be time to learn how to eat acorns.

In other news, the Alec Baldwin story continues to get more interesting.

I now think what happened to Baldwin was supernatural. I think God did him a favor by allowing him to be humbled so he can examine himself and receive salvation. It would be hard for random chance to explain all the bad things that happened to Baldwin simultaneously. Let’s see if I can list them all without checking the web.

1. He was producing the movie, so he has more responsibility than an actor would ordinarily have.

2. Hypocritically, for a self-righteous, vitriolic leftist, he hired non-union workers to fill spots vacated by disgruntled union members. This guarantees that many people who worked on the movie will try to make him look as bad as possible.

3. Prior to the shooting, there had been several gun mishaps, and there had been protests.

4. Instead of having the movie’s trained armorer declare the gun safe and hand it to him, he let an assistant director do it.

5. The assistant director has been subject to a lot of complaints. He is said to have expressed resentment over having to hold meetings about gun safety, and he is also said to have done a very poor job at those meetings. On top of all this, men and women who have worked with him have complained about inappropriate touching, which makes Baldwin look irresponsible for hiring him.

6. Forget the universal gun safety rules he disobeyed; he ignored a rule specific to moviemaking. You never point a live gun at a human being on a movie set. There are protocols. Baldwin knows about them. He violated one.

7. The person he killed has a husband and parents, so Baldwin has set himself up for wrongful death litigation from multiple plaintiffs, and prosecutors are sensitive to plaintiffs’ goading.

8. Baldwin has a history of condemning people who have shot others. Regarding a California police officer who shot a man who attacked him and grabbed at his gun belt, Baldwin said, “I wonder how it feels to wrongfully kill someone.”

Let me add that the movie Baldwin was making was to be about a boy sentenced to death for an accidental killing. That can’t be a coincidence.

At least one New Mexico criminal attorney has confirmed that Baldwin may be on the hook for a homicide charge. Under New Mexico law, it’s possible. That pretty much ends the debate over whether he can be charged. Now, the question is what the police and prosecutors will choose to do. A leftist prosecutor committed perjury to indict George Zimmerman, and a leftist prosecutor refused to charge the people who tried to murder Kyle Rittenhouse. A prosecutor has been indicted for failing to properly pursue charges in the Ahmed Arberry case. Prosecutors aren’t vending machines. They are as biased as anyone.

It would be bad enough for Baldwin if he had taken the gun directly from the armorer, on a peaceful set with no prior accidents, and killed a woman. It would be more typical of workplace accidents. His case is exceptional, though. Accidental shootings don’t usually have mountains of additional circumstances that make things worse for those at fault.

The only thing that could be worse for him would be if the prosecutor had voted for Trump.

Baldwin has not behaved well since the accident. He went to Twitter and posted a link to a story that said he had been told the gun was safe before he handled it. It was a desperation move. I’m sure his attorney didn’t advise it. He’s not taking responsibility. He’s throwing other people under the bus. Here’s what he should be saying: nothing. Maybe, “I am devastated by the accidental shooting which occurred on my set today.” Anything beyond that looks like denial of guilt and lack of remorse.

I’m not saying he should admit he’s responsible. Not until after jeopardy has passed. But he shouldn’t feed the public BS.

It doesn’t matter whether he was told the gun was safe. He was supposed to check it personally, regardless of who looked at it before he did. Even if you swallow his invalid argument at first, you have to admit that it was negligent to listen to an assistant director when there was an armorer on the set, especially after several other mishaps.

I’m not trying to condemn him. I just know how lay people think, and I know that if I don’t present things forcefully, people may come back in my comments and play amateur attorney, defending Baldwin with very poor arguments lawyers have already rejected.

I’m not writing about this story to pick on Baldwin, but to connect it to my own experiences. Last night I woke up and started confessing to God and asking for help to be a better Christian. I thought about all the bad things I had done, said, and felt. I thought about two things God had told me.

1. The concealment of a sin is worse than the sin itself.

2. An excuse is a lie.

I’ve done what Baldwin is doing, and worse. I could never begin to recall all the excuses I’ve made for myself.

I started thinking about Adam and Eve. Satan tempted Eve, Eve sinned, Eve tempted Adam, Adam sinned, God accused Adam and Eve, Adam blamed God and Eve, and Eve blamed Satan.

Then all the descendants of Adam and Eve were cursed, and we fight those curses to this very day.

God has also told me this: everything you bury, you also plant.

The sins and lies of Adam and Eve became the seeds that would eventually result in things like damnation and the tribulation, not to mention every evil man has ever experienced. Eve’s sin was a very small seed, but it turned into a tree that covered the world. No wonder God cursed women for what she did. No wonder he cursed Adam PRIMARILY for listening to the voice of his wife.

Until last night, I had never thought about this: Satan didn’t tempt Adam. Eve did. Adam wasn’t the first person to sin. Eve was. Adam didn’t blow it until he abandoned his role as leader and chose to be a feminist. Feminists like to say the world would be a better place if women ran everything, but the only time a woman ran the world, she led mankind into destruction.

Now we live in a time in which masculinity is considered toxic and we are told to let women and even children lead. No wonder the world is disintegrating. We’re living the curse of Isaiah 3. We’ll really feel the pain when Kamala Harris takes over for Biden. Female leadership leads to curses, period. It’s not what God commanded, and there are consequences.

Overwhelmingly, women are the ones who lead us into idolatry. Witchcraft, fortune-telling, astrology, crystals, yoga…you will probably never hear a woman say, “I was a Christian, but my husband convinced me to try Buddhism.” It’s almost always the other way around. There is a reason God requires men to lead.

Eve and Adam should not have sinned, but once they had, they should have confessed. God already knew everything. Baldwin shouldn’t be on Twitter showing he is not willing to be honest.

I don’t want him to be prosecuted. I would rather see him get away with it, just as you and I have gotten away with things. Putting him in prison for a mistake doesn’t seem to serve a valid purpose. But he should not blame others for what he did.

I’m not that concerned about his civil liability, since whatever he ends up paying will not be a significant percentage of his wealth. He’s probably worth several dozen million dollars, so whatever he pays probably won’t affect his lifestyle or those of his children.

I expect the assistant director to get obliterated. He’s a #MeToo magnet, he appears to have done the armorer’s job for her without justification, and he’s lower on the food chain than Baldwin, who will have moneyed interests pushing for his exoneration. The armorer might be okay if she can say she did everything right and the assistant director prevented her from doing her job. She will still have to explain the other accidents, though.

The assistant director, David Halls, has deleted his Twitter account, so we can’t see if he ever said unfortunate things about the use of firearms.

Personally, if I were working on a movie that had had three on-set gun accidents, I would quit. One is inexcusable, and two prove the moviemakers can’t be trusted. After a third, the insurers should cancel the production.

As for Biden and Harris, I see socialist Saturday Night Live has taken the gloves off. Last night, they did a sketch in which 2021 Biden talked to his 2013 self. They made fun of his unpopularity, his false teeth, and even his dementia. When Saturday Night Live turns on a leftist president, there isn’t much hope of redemption or spin. Maybe next time, they’ll do the right thing and hit him for the terrible problems he’s causing. They didn’t mention the Biden energy crisis, the Biden shipping crunch, or his enormous mandate lie. Things will probably be a lot worse in 2022, and Biden isn’t doing anything to prevent it. He’s doubling down on pathological policy.

Biden is turning out to be a replay of Carter, except that Carter still had his faculties. It’s very bad when dementia compounds incompetence and corruption.

Carter is said to have had a nervous breakdown in office. Older readers will remember. He knew the ship was sinking, and he couldn’t fix it. He was temporarily disabled by hemorrhoids, and that didn’t help his image. He knew the public despised him. There was no light at the end of the tunnel because he just wasn’t good at what he did. He has a gargantuan ego, but it wasn’t a thick enough rampart to protect him from crumbling. Biden is a monumental egotist, too. Will his baseless pride allow him to continue confronting the world with mock confidence, or will he fold up one morning and refuse to leave the bed?

I know how dementia and arrogance work together. Arrogant people who know they’re demented don’t admit it. A proud dementia patient can stand in his own excrement and insist you’re the one with the problem. Maybe Biden will go out clawing and accusing.

At his most recent town hall, Biden clenched his fists and held them in front of him for around 20 seconds while receiving a question. It was very odd. Internet commenters have pointed out that dementia patients are known to make this gesture. It indicates anxiety or confusion. I wonder if that’s what’s happening with the president. He also appears to be developing what is known as a “magnetic gait,” which is a dementia symptom in which the feet slide along the floor instead of being lifted.

I don’t know how the left’s lie machine will cope with Biden’s final implosion. My best guess is that they’ll pretend it’s something other than dementia until he has been out of office a long time. “Our overworked, beleaguered president has succumbed to exhaustion.” Maybe they’ll hypothesize that his aneurysm problems have led to delayed issues. They’ll never admit the obvious. They’ll never say they voted for a man they knew was senile because they hated Trump more than they cared about a strong America.

My friend Mike has a golf buddy who used to play with a Trump hater. The Trump hater told the buddy he didn’t care if America was destroyed as long as Trump wasn’t president. I think that attitude is common.

Wake me Up When They Start Injecting Faces

Today I saw people on Youtube talking about the Satanic nature of the coronavirus vaccines. They are convinced vaccination is the mark of the beast. It’s pretty obviously not. Where does the delusion come from?

The Bible says the beast–the man called the Antichrist–will appear. Then the world gets the mark. You can’t have the mark of the beast with no beast. The Bible says people will receive the mark in their foreheads or right arms. I got vaccinated in my left arm. The shots don’t leave marks, so how can they be marks? Science has no way of telling whether you’ve had the shot, so how can your grocery store or Home Depot tell if you’ve had it when they’re deciding whom to allow to shop? You could display your vaccine card, but it’s not a mark.

People are worried that vaccines somehow let the government track their movements electronically. Oddly, some of them use smartphones to air this concern. If you have a smartphone, Joe Biden already knows where you are. What about the sensors and cameras that line our streets? What about the doorbell and security cameras that are connected to the web? What about the facial recognition software that knows when you go to the mall or a concert?

Wait…are there still concerts?

The vaccinations are not the mark of the beast. Accept it. The present is bad enough without making problems up.

I saw a lady saying she had a dream about people who got the shot. She saw a Spirit-led friend who had gotten it. The friend said she thought God had shown her it was okay. Then she attacked her friend who was dreaming the dream. This dream is supposed to be evidence that the shots are transforming people into enemies of God.

Not every dream is from God. I once dreamed I had a big harem of teenaged girls. God didn’t send that. Sounds more Muslim than Christian.

I think human beings will end up with global passes, and the pass will be the mark. It makes more sense. People are already using vaccination status to prevent others from traveling, buying, and working. If the pandemic gets bad enough, there will suddenly be a “need” for a standardized pass used the world over. For the children, as always. People who push it will wrap themselves in clouds of virtue, and they will shame everyone who disagrees, just as virus fascists do right now.

“Virus fascist” is an accurate term. Fascism is authoritarianism, and regardless of whether draconian measures are right or not, they are authoritarian.

Maybe the aversion to the shots comes from God. The shots aren’t the beast’s marks, but they are being used to train us so we will welcome the mark. Maybe God is using fear of vaccination to prepare people to resist the mark when it comes.

This morning, I was thinking about the causes of the crisis the world is enduring. I found myself trying to list them. Then I scolded myself. When God judges nations, the causes are always the same. Idolatry, sexual perversion, lying, cruelty, and selfishness.

There is very strong evidence that the pandemic’s local severity is tied closely to governmental promotion of sexual perversion. I keep watching Australia and New Zealand, because they seem like test cases. They have moved heaven and earth, imposing unbearable, unsustainable measures to keep covid out. They’re also perversion havens. If things go well in these countries, it will seem to indicate that perversion is not really a big factor in the global crisis.

Today I checked both countries, and numbers are going up. In Australia, the genie really seems to be out of the bottle. The graph looks like the Burj Khalifa. New Zealand also has a very sharp spike, but in absolute terms, it’s tiny. I’m going to keep watching.

The UK, which is arguably the place where effeminacy first went mainstream among influential post-Christian Western men, is doing badly in spite of harsh government responses. They are planning on cracking down again, even after vaccinating a whole bunch of people. Russia is also going back into panic mode.

Why aren’t the vaccines working better? The UK looks like it’s doing worse than it did last year, when it did very badly indeed. The peaks aren’t as high, but they are very high, and they are broad. How can that happen, in a nation which is a leading oppressor and vaccinator? The vaccination rate is 68%. Even if the vaccines aren’t great, shouldn’t they cut the infection numbers by maybe 50%? Where is the decrease? Is the current crisis what covid looks like WITH a big decrease?

Is the delta variant the problem? Last year they told us covid was incredibly contagious, which appears to have been a huge exaggeration, because (if you believe official figures) it spread much more slowly than a typical flu. Maybe things would have been much, much worse had we had the delta variant from the start. I can only guess.

As for official figures, the CDC says the flu hits one billion people in a typical year, and we are told the two-year-old covid pandemic still hasn’t hit 250 million. Believe what you will. Everyone else does.

Over 10% of UK residents have been diagnosed with covid, so the actual figure must be a lot higher, but it’s not slowing down. Shots and recoveries aren’t getting the job done. How can that happen?

From a Biblical perspective, things don’t look good at all. The Bible predicts pestilence before the end, and it says the tribulation will affect the whole world. I didn’t realize until a few days ago that there had only been one other pandemic in history. I mean real pandemics, not typical flu epidemics, the plague, syphilis, the common cold, or AIDS. A real pandemic has to hit every nation, it has to cause big problems, it has to happen within a short time, and it can’t be something you have to work hard to catch.

The Spanish flu and coronavirus are the only real pandemics history has recorded, but only coronavirus is accompanied by other problems predicted in the Revelation.

I still expect things to get worse. Right now, my feeling is that coronavirus will continue to defy vaccines and countermeasures, and that we will see numbers a lot worse than the ones we have seen so far. I think it will never go away until Jesus returns to rule.

My guess, which is just a guess, is that the world will get used to seeing pundits on TV, saying they have no idea why coronavirus keeps beating science.

If this happens, hostility between pro-vaxxers and anti-vaxxers will get worse, contributing to another of the three main plagues of the apocalypse: hatred.

I saw something amazing on Youtube. About a month ago, there was a vaccine-mandate protest in France. People were walking around holding signs and making noise. Suddenly, a large gang of men armed with long poles dashed out into the frame and started beating the protestors. They were not cops. They were not soldiers. Some ordinary French citizens were so afraid of death and so furious at people who didn’t want a shot, they beat them with deadly weapons, knowing they would be filmed.

I can understand governments beating people, because that’s what they do. Secular government is a curse, and it manifests in government brutality. But why would private citizens get so enraged about a vaccination that they would organize, buy big sticks, and try to inflict serious, permanent injuries on strangers who were simply standing around complaining?

You can blind someone with a blow from a stick. You can emasculate and cripple people. You can destroy hearing. You can destroy mental faculties and motor functions. Hitting people with sticks is not a small aggression. It’s not like throwing pies.

It’s remarkable that NBC posted the stick video. Usually, you have to look for a fringe channel to learn about the mandate crisis.

The MSM appears to be working to hide mandate protests. It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen. Very large crowds have assembled all over the planet, and to watch the news, you would have no idea it was happening. You would think Fox would be breaking the picket line, but it’s not. Fox is headquartered in New York, where people fear death and think Christianity is funny. Fox’s people aren’t conceited liberal elites, but they’re still conceited elites.

It’s as though the godless media elites in New York, Los Angeles, and London had a conference call and decided mandates were too important to cover fairly. I don’t think that happened, but things wouldn’t look any different if it had.

Youtube started pushing a channel on my feed. It was full of protests. A day or two ago, it vanished. I had to search for it. When you search for “coronavirus protest,” Youtube’s search suggests topics it should know you’re not looking for. When it finally delivers, it seems to do so grudgingly, and it provides videos that are weeks or months old, ignoring the protests that are happening right now. Can that possibly be coincidence? It sure looks like some Pokemon-playing millennial who knows better than we do nudged the algorithm.

It’s very unfortunate that the most misguided, arrogant, unempathetic people on earth think they know better than Christians and have power to rule society and control the flow of information.

I am concerned about myself. I don’t think I will ever experience lack again, and I don’t believe I will die from a disease or be murdered in a riot or for my cans of milk and corned beef. I am concerned that I’m not sufficiently sanctified. There are things about myself that I still need to correct, and I have not taken them seriously enough. Time will run out on me if I don’t watch it.

I keep working to stop ridiculing people. I am trying to stamp out what remains of the habit of heartless humor. I’m trying to stop getting angry about things. I have to let go of role models who are either in hell or on the way there. Even men my age have role models, whether they admit it or not.

I believe holding doors open for ungodly influences allows spirits to come in and drive me to sin, and sin can prevent people from being saved or raptured. I don’t want to be here the day after the rapture, waiting for strangers to kill me for my rice and flour, or just for being white or having a nice house.

When your ship gets torpedoed and you’re trying to stay afloat until you’re rescued, you throw the things that make you sink overboard. It’s that simple. When the horn blows, I want out of this place.

Next: a Table Saw

It’s important to marry a woman who has things in common with you. Rhodah and I agree on Christian doctrine and conservative politics, so the big-ticket items are covered. As a bonus, she also likes things like meat, knives, and guns. She even likes my waterproof Keen hiking shoes. Suffering with woman shoes while I walked all over Egypt and Turkey in comfort made an impression on her.

Guns are legal in Zambia, where people are still somewhat sane and remain able to tell the difference between 1) a woman and 2) a male head case in a dress. We have discussed the possibility of getting her a firearm, but we haven’t done anything about it.

I did get her a knife, however. She won’t be able to handle it until we’re together again, because shipping things to Zambia is like shipping things to Neptune. I suggested a Spyderco Manix 2 with CMP SPY17 steel, which is supposedly about like S35VN, only cooler because it was made especially for Spyderco.

There are steels that hold an edge better, but they are harder to sharpen. I don’t see Rhodah becoming a sharpening expert any time soon, so I thought I should make things relatively easy. As much as it pains me, I’m giving her a pull-through sharpener with carbide and ceramic guides. It will not win any contests, but her knife will stay sharper than 98% of the knives within a 10-mile radius of her house.

When I picked the knife out, I was happy to see that it had a pretty blue handle. I knew that would help with the sale. She confirmed that it was “cute,” and we were in business.

I made the mistake of saying I could make a belt sheath for it, so now I have to do that.

When the knife arrived, I liked it so much I was extremely jealous, so I ordered a sister knife in M390 steel, which is harder. It’s not here yet.

The Smith Pocket Pal sharpener I ordered has been tested on a stubborn Forschner kitchen knife, and it put a very good edge on it. It looks rough, but it will cut just fine.

I decided to get a real sharpener for myself. I have hones and diamond stones, and they work, but a modern sharpener will give you nearly exactly the edge you want, all the way down a curved blade, without the need for a lot of skill or youth-grade eyesight.

You can blow well over a thousand dollars on a knife sharpener if you have no life whatsoever and give your knives the names of female anime characters, but it looks like you can do very, very well for two hundred bucks. A company called KME makes a gadget which will put a beautiful edge on knives up to 10″ long. I ordered one. True nerds like them a great deal, and that’s good enough for me.

I hope it works out.

I told my buddy Mike about it, and he said he only sharpens his knives on one side. I had to sit down. I shook for a while. He said it saved time.

Maybe he’s onto something. Sushi chefs use knives sharpened on one side, and they do a fine job. Sharpening one side of a knife takes no skill, and as Mike says, it’s fast.

The big knock on Mike’s system is that it can make it hard to make a straight cut.

MAC, a Japanese manufacturer, recommends a big bevel on one side of the knife and a tiny one on the other. They claim it makes it easier to make thin slices, and it doesn’t make the blade drift. That’s interesting. I might have to try that. I could get another chef knife.

Mike didn’t come up with his system after years of study under Hattori Hanzo. He was just too lazy to learn how to sharpen a knife. What if it turns out laziness has worked out better than work?

I usually use a Mundial santoku with a plastic NSF grip. I think I paid $18. This is what real chefs use when they’re not on TV, by the way. A restaurant will hire a company, and the company will come around every so often with a bunch of sharpened Forschner or Mundial knives with thin stainless blades, and they’ll take the restaurant’s dull knives away to be restored. I know some chefs have knife rolls full of overpriced, impractical Wusthofs and Globals, but you’re probably not going to see 35 greasy Wusthofs if you barge into the kitchen at Morton’s on a busy Saturday night. I have never worked in a commercial kitchen, but I’ll bet expensive knives are only seen in the hands of prima donnas.

The Mundial sharpens to a razor edge in about 5 seconds, it loves the dishwasher, it’s springy, and it can’t rust. If you gave me a big, heavy Sabatier that cost $200, I would thank you, put it in a drawer, and keep using the Mundial.

I’m going to spend $15 on another Mundial and sharpen it the MAC way. It will be an interesting experiment. If it doesn’t work, I’ll have one more chef’s knife. If it does, it could revolutionize my sharpening practices.

I would have to come up with a good lie to tell Mike, though.

Knives are so much better than they were when I was a kid, it’s a wonder anyone still has a knife more than 40 years old. Edges last way longer, handles don’t disintegrate, corrosion is no longer an issue, and most pocket knives now have locks to keep them from closing and severing finger tendons. Old knives look really, really bad compared to new ones.

Today I saw a video from a guy who knew T.B. Joshua. His name is Mfon Tommy. He says Joshua’s last message to the disciples was, “Watch and pray, that ye enter not into temptation: the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.” Jesus said this on the night he prayed in the garden, and after he said it, he went away and returned to find the disciples were sleeping and ignoring his warning.

I thought this was all very interesting. Jesus left, and he will come back. He will come back to rapture certain Christians, he will depart for 7 years, and he will return a second time to rule the earth.

While he is gone, the world will undergo a period of suffering called the tribulation. In the Revelation, Jesus called it “the hour of temptation, which shall come upon all the world, to try them that dwell upon the earth.”

It may be that Joshua was warning the world about what was about to come. You don’t want to be here during the tribulation. The government will inflict all sorts of suffering on you to make you take the mark of the beast. The beast mindset is already setting in. Governments are destroying liberty and crushing protestors all over the world.

Rhodah had a rapture dream last night. She had written a book, and she had to pay a man 500 units of some currency in order to have it published. When she gave him the money, he grabbed her and took her to heaven using an escalator. When she arrived, she met people who had died. Some were people she expected to be saved, but some were pleasant surprises.

Her sister and her sister’s new baby, who was still a baby in the dream, were also raptured.

Rhodah said there was a division between the dead and the raptured. They could talk, but they couldn’t merge.

Rhodah hates escalators. It’s something we disagree about. I took a smug satisfaction in the presence of the escalators.

My understanding of the rapture is that the dead will rise first and stay in heaven. The living who are worthy will go to heaven for 7 years, for the marriage supper of the lamb. Then they’ll have to return. One would expect the dead and the raptured to be separated in heaven.

Jesus is a raptured person. He went to heaven in his flesh body. It makes sense that we would be like him. The Bible says the rapture is a harvest, accomplished with a sickle, and elsewhere, it calls Jesus the firstfruit of the harvest. He is the first of many. He will return to live on earth, so the raptured should return as well.

Was the dream prophetic? Rhodah’s nephew is a few weeks old, and he will only be a baby for another year and a few months.

The book seems to be her testimony. She needs to get it out there. Maybe she needs a blog.

Pest Control Season Opens

The first squirrel of the season has been ushered across the river Styx.

In reality, I didn’t usher him anywhere. He is lying dead in my front yard, where I shot him.

I’m glad I know how to skin and cook squirrels, because we may be headed for unbelievably hard times, but I don’t plan to eat any more squirrels unless I have to or they start growing a lot bigger. It’s too much work for three ounces of meat. My new policy is to leave them to rot.

Killing animals should serve a purpose. In the case of a squirrel, the animal’s death is its own justification. They ate the fuel gauge on my garden tractor, they ate a lot of my peaches, they chew on my lawn furniture, and they are currently eating my expensive aluminum gate. Also, one got into my living room. The life of every squirrel on my property, present and future, has been forfeited, exactly like the lives of mice, roaches, mosquitoes, rattlesnakes, coons, spiders, armadillos, and any traveling salesman who has the guts to scale my fence.

Hunting season started a few days back. I don’t really hunt. It has been too hot, and I haven’t felt like it. I walk around carelessly, carrying a rifle, hoping something that needs killing makes a mistake.

I stalked two other squirrels during my walk today, but I hesitated to shoot, and they took off. I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to kill them cleanly. I don’t know why I care. I don’t care about killing mice cleanly.

The squirrel that met its end was in my front yard, as I looped back to the house. It climbed up a palm and shook its tail at me, which I took to be an insult. Sadly for the squirrel, the palm has a very thick trunk, so there was no possibility of firing a shot off the property if I missed him.

I didn’t drop him quickly. I was using a scope and shooting from maybe 30 feet, and the shot went through his upper front leg, which means I missed his heart by maybe three fourths of an inch. It’s hard to use a scope up close unless you practice, which I don’t. I had to chase him around and blast him a few more times when he stopped moving.

I would like to start using a shotgun. It’s not good to shoot an animal 4 or 5 times, even if it is a squirrel. I like using a scope, but they just don’t work for me at short distances. You have to put a .22 through the center of a squirrel’s head or chest in order to kill him quickly, and that is not easy when you’re thinking about the distance between the scope and the barrel and how close you are to the squirrel.

Unfortunately, it is no longer possible to get acceptable deals on 16 gauge ammunition, and I only have a few boxes. I can get the wrong stuff for about 68 cents per shot. The 12 gauge picture is somewhat better, but my only 12-gauge is not exactly a squirrel gun. Maybe in our dystopian present, with the possibility of starvation looming, it would be smart to get a 12-gauge hunting shotgun and some shells for birds and squirrels.

It’s liberating to give up on cleaning squirrels. I don’t have to deal with the stink and the mess now. I just kick the dead squirrel out where other animals will see it, and I’m done.

A shotgun would improve things a lot. In addition to killing more squirrels, I wouldn’t have to spend time stalking slowly or standing still. When I stand still, the bugs catch up with me. With a shotgun, I’d be able to blast away at any squirrel I see, as long as it was not directly between me and a neighbor’s property, so I wouldn’t have to wait for special opportunities.

By walking faster, I’d get bitten less and exercise more, and maybe I’d also see and terminate more squirrels.

Maybe I’ll grab a new shotgun. Better to have and not need…

Tomorrow I’ll try a different .22 anyway. Maybe the Marlin and I just don’t get along.

Your Christmas is in a Container in Long Beach

I don’t want to depend on preachers, but I like seeing good ones at work, and they are few these days. T.B. Joshua is dead, hateful, intolerant lovers of sexual abomination got him removed from Youtube, and his church has been torn apart by selfish disciples. I still watch Mark Hemans, but he doesn’t seem to have any useful information about the times we live in. I watch an obscure Christian in Scotland, too.

Today I’m watching a man who calls himself Wiseman Daniel. He worked under T.B. Joshua, doing the same things Joshua did. He left and started his own church. Unlike some other people who started out at the Synagogue Church of all Nations, Daniel left on good terms, and I haven’t been able to find any stories about scandal or corruption.

I think Joshua is the one who put the title “Wiseman” on Daniel. He had more than one person at SCOAN who held that office.

I enjoy watching him. He goes up to people and tells them the secrets of their lives, and he helps them get out from under curses. This is what Jesus did. What percentage of preachers are doing it? I have never seen a preacher or other Christian at any of my churches do it.

I haven’t seen him ask for money or pimp the money gospel.

If you work miracles that help people, and if you free them from demons and curses, they are going to give you money or at least try. You don’t have to beg.

Today I learned a bit more about the shortages in America. China is now officially the biggest exporter of goods on Earth. One country, controlled by savages who are planning to go to war with us soon. That’s who has the most control over the flow of needed goods into our country. How about that?

About 40% of the cargo ships that enter the US go through Long Beach and Los Angeles. There are no viable substitute ports. California is a God-hating state controlled by delusional lovers of socialism and sodomy, and its officials can choke the rest of us off at will. Even if the Chinese behave, we still have to hope our enemies in California are merciful.

California has insane rules on the unloading of ships. They favor unions, and they won’t let independent truckers in. Biden is paying truckers to stay home and eat potato chips, and this makes things even worse. America’s waters are full of goods we need, but we can’t touch them. They’re like presents mommy put on top of the refrigerator until Christmas.

One of the worst ways to be cursed is to have what you need and be unable to use it. You can see this in the Bible. It refers to men who have wives only other men sleep with, for example. It’s God’s punishment for depriving him of our faithfulness. Here we are, able to choose God and live in fidelity with him, but we deprive him while we fornicate with evil spirits and the government.

America has oil, food, and all sorts of natural resources. We have a huge labor pool. We even have merchandise, a few miles offshore. We just can’t get decent access to any of these blessings. We cursed God and deprived him, so he returned the favor.

Here’s something God told me: the way God treats us is a reflection on us, not him.

You can read the Bible yourself and see that the above sentence is correct. It’s a principle expressed over and over in the Bible, in different ways.

We are not victims. We caused all our own problems. We are still causing them. We are provoking worse punishments, so the future will be more unpleasant than the present.

Biden says the shortages are good. He says they prove we’re prosperous. He says we are buying things up because we have money. Not true, and of course, he knows it. Affluence isn’t pushing gas to $4 per gallon. It’s not causing Chinese factories and coal mines to close. It’s not trapping cargo ships at anchorage or drying up supplies of things like beans and rice. It didn’t kill the wind that provided England with electricity.

Biden is a prodigious, unhesitant, and unrepentant liar, and he is probably lying because he doesn’t want to offend union bosses or the California politicians they own. Also, conventional wisdom says Americans will vote against an incumbent if they think our economy is bad, and Biden is aware of this.

In Zambia, they say, “America has no president.” That’s close to true.

The shortages haven’t hit very hard yet. What will Biden say when we’re back in July of 2020? “It’s great that people can’t buy eggs. Eggs are bad for you. Meat causes global warming. It’s high time we started eating less.”

It will be hard for leftists to put a positive spin on running out of fruits and vegetables. They practically worship them. They are, after all, the children of Cain.

I think America is a sinking ship, and it’s no fun being on a sinking ship, even if you know you’ll be rescued. You know you’ll have to watch most of your companions drown. I’ll take it, though. Jesus said we would always have the poor with us. We will also have the damned with us. Their numbers can be reduced, but they will always be in the majority. I’m glad I have an assurance I can be saved.

I believe Jesus is the white horseman of the apocalypse, and that horseman carries a bow, which is a weapon that can only be used against one person at a time. The white horseman can’t shoot a nation. He can only choose individuals.

In the Old Testament, God talked about nations a lot. This nation will prosper. That nation will starve. He even allowed a few Jewish priests to atone for the sins of all of Israel and Judea. The New Testament is different. It’s about individuals. Jesus said he would pit fathers against sons, for example. He will take one or two people out of a family and leave the rest to die in their rebellion and pride. He still works that way. One person in a house will be raptured. The rest, who fought with that person and thought him a fool, will wake up in the tribulation and start begging to die.

The red horseman is murder and war. One person can’t have a war, but two nations can. The black horseman is famine. One person can’t have a famine, but a nation can. The green horseman is pestilence. One person can’t have a plague, but a nation can.

The white horseman is a man of conquest, according to the Bible. Conquest is the capture of people or land that belongs to another leader. Satan is the god of this world, according to Jesus. People are born belonging to Satan. Every person who is saved is an object of conquest.

War isn’t always conquest. There have been wars in which neither side wanted to rule the other.

I expect rapturees to be like the folks who were recently airlifted out of Afghanistan. A few will leave this mess behind, and the rest, who rightfully belong here under Satan’s power, will remain on Earth.

The people who were taken from South Vietnam and Afghanistan were traitors, like Christians. They turned on the dominant factions in their countries and helped outsiders. Satan is the ruler of Earth, and real Christians are all guilty of treason. When Jesus takes us away, it will be to give us political asylum.

The vax and passport protests are hitting very unexpected places now. The Netherlands and Austria are involved. They’re protesting in Israel and Long Island; not exactly Trump territory. A city in Germany has banned unvaccinated people from grocery stores. Sound familiar?

And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads:

And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.

What is it that is telling people who don’t know God to resist mandates and passports? It’s not reason. It has to be supernatural.

I seriously believe the vax passports are going to evolve into the mark of the beast. Watching eager, broken-spirited people scan their passports into brand-new machines outside of ordinary office buildings is chilling. Soylent Green is here. Today. Suddenly. And this is just the sharp end of the nail. This is the trailer. The movie will be like Hollywood’s most sensational dreams of upheaval and despair.

I wonder when the shortages will become real to an America that doesn’t want to listen. People dismiss the news because they can still buy things. They treat the news as though it were coming from Alex Jones. It’s not, though. It’s the MSM. Even Biden has acknowledged that the problem exists.

Will God turn things around before Christmas and hold the black horseman back? If he did, it would just convince skeptics normal life was about to resume.

Worldly people are convinced global warming is real, in spite of overwhelming evidence that it’s either trivial or nonexistent, yet they expect shortages, hate, and disease to go away all by themselves in the near future, for no good reason.

I wish God would get it over with. It’s like squeezing a big, painful pimple that won’t burst. I would like to see an end to the tension and delusion. I don’t want to wish the tribulation on anyone, but most people are already doomed to experience it, and millions will presumably be saved once they feel its sting. I’m not wishing damnation on people.

I want out of this place. I want my wife out. I don’t want to have kids during this age. I don’t want to ever see a child of ours wearing a mask.

Hoorah for Australian Manhood

G’day.

I’m just reading about Australia. It’s really something. Australia has brutal lockdown, masking, social distancing, and vaccination policies that remind one of Australia’s BFF China, and while most Australians are docile, tamed subjects who go along with whatever the government says, thousands are protesting and being abused by the police.

An old lady in Melbourne is now famous because two male cops shoved her to the ground and fired a copious stream of pepper fluid into her face while she was on her back, helpless. Here in America, we have plenty of dangerous “protestors” who actually deserve treatment like this, but this is an old lady who was unarmed.

A cop also attacked a male protestor from behind while he was standing around talking to other officers. The victim was wearing headphones, so maybe he didn’t hear his brave attacker coming. He was slammed to the floor so his face struck hard enough to knock him out, and when he lost consciousness, he urinated all over the floor and bled abundantly.

The cops he was talking with were not very helpful when his assailant was approaching. Wonder why not.

Fortunately the brave police assailant had the presence of mind to handcuff the unconscious criminal before he received medical treatment.

Australian news outlets are putting out stories in which they seem to be gloating about the success the police have had in preventing protests. I could understand gloating about preventing Antifa-style nonsense, but government-worshiping Australians seem happy to see expression itself blocked. They seem to be a lot like Canadians, who have no problem with the RCMP arresting preachers and political pundits. The big difference is that Canadians proudly admit they’re whipped, while Australians pretend to be rugged individualists.

I am not in Australia, and I have not witnessed a protest in person, but based on videos and stories I’ve seen, it seems fair to say the protests in Australia really are protests, whereas most of the events we call protests in the US have actually been leftist riots motivated by wealth envy and anti-white animus. There has been a little protestor violence in Australia, along with some property damage, but they’re not burning neighborhoods or throwing Molotov cocktails at the police. They’re not carrying guns, because they don’t have them. They opened wide and let the government pull out their teeth.

The police working the protests are pretty violent. You can find a lot of footage of them tackling unarmed people whose only offense is running away. Groups of cops slam them onto pavement and grind them into it while they cuff them. It looks more like punishment than reasonable force.

The impression one gets is that many of the Australian police are motivated by sadism, not a desire to bring order. This is not an unusual thing with the police.

This morning, I had a revelation while I was thinking about something other than riots and protests. I was thinking about controlling people and sadism, and I realized you can never have such people without sadism. There aren’t many good words to describe control freaks. The best one I know is “bully.” That’s really what they are. A bully doesn’t just want to cause pain. He wants submission. He wants you to obey physically, and he will also insist you pretend you agree with him.

Forcing people to pretend to agree is one of the practices which is making the gender-confusion wars so unbearable. LGBetc. bullies can’t be content with peaceful coexistence. They have to bully you into lying, calling them what they falsely claim to be.

My dad was a bully, and one of the things that kept his violent sessions with my mother going until morning was his insistence that she say she agreed with him when she did not. He was not very violent with me, but he liked to try to force me to say things I didn’t think were true. Dealing with sexual-confusion abusers is like being abused by a spouse or husband, except the government and many employers take the abusers’ side and may fire or fine you for standing up for yourself.

The social giants are manned by bullies masquerading as tormented ethicists.

This morning I realized there are no controlling people who aren’t sadists. Bullies have the ungrounded feeling that other people have a duty to obey them, and when people resist, the primary thing that infuriates bullies is the disobedience, not the actions employed in resistance. If you resist a crooked cop by punching him in the belly, it’s not the punch that makes him shatter your orbital with a baton. It’s the temerity; the thought that you have the right to say no to him. It’s insulting.

This is why cops so often react violently to harmless words. You can get yourself arrested or beaten for calling a cop a dirty name, which is legal, or for saying something like, “I have a right to film you.” To an abuser, the manner of disobedience isn’t that important. The disobedience itself is infuriating.

My sister is a terrible bully. She always has to have someone defenseless to torment and humiliate in front of other people. We used to squabble, and eventually, I learned I didn’t have to hurt her or say anything cruel to torture her. I just had to say things she didn’t want to hear. I could fill her with rage by repeating, “You are not a victim,” or, “You cause all your own problems.” I shouldn’t have done that, even though I was just speaking the truth in calm tones. I didn’t say it primarily to inform her. I did it to make her suffer, and that was wrong. I let her provoke me.

To make a well-adjusted person angry, try to tell them what to do. To infuriate a bully, tell them they can’t tell you what to do.

Sadism is a big problem with cops, just as it is with abusive spouses, teachers, and bosses. Many people express sadism when they’re given authority. This is why so many cops beat their wives and kids as well as suspects and bystanders. Many people are drawn to the job by a desire to push other people around, so they are already sadists when they sign up, and the badge allows them to blossom.

Given my new understanding of the connection between controlling and sadism, I think it must be true that public officials all over the world are becoming more sadistic. Their overweening efforts to control coronavirus aren’t just driven by reason. They’re driven by a desire to hurt and humiliate–to break–people who resist. Their newly enhanced authority is going to their heads. This must be why HHS Secretary Becerra, an attorney with no scientific competence, called people who are against vaccination “flat-earthers,” which is a term of cruelty and contempt, not science.

We’ve all heard of the famous Stanford Prison Experiment in which volunteers were required to assume the roles of prisoners and guards. Even though it wasn’t real, some of the guards started abusing the prisoners. The experiment revealed something about human nature. Makes sense. That was its purpose. Some people have an inclination toward sadism, and power exposes it and encourages them to act on it.

Psychologists like to say the experiment is discredited, but no one has been allowed to replicate it and see if the conclusions are sound.

Politicians are controlling by nature. It’s unusual to want to be a politician if you don’t crave control over other people. It’s likely, then, that politicians are more prone to exhibit sadism than the rest of us, when conditions are right.

This is something to think about as the apocalypse and the coronavirus problem progress.

Australia has the population of Florida plus Oregon. Around 25 million. It’s a big, empty place. The current 7-day coronavirus new-case average in Australia is about 2300 per day. It’s going up, fast. Prior to this wave, the biggest peak was around 500 daily cases, and that peak was short-lived.

Zambia has 20 million people, a 2.2% vax rate, no remaining lockdowns, and very poor standards of masking and social distancing. Coronavirus is GONE in Zambia. The 7-day average is 23, and the wave that just ended peaked at about 2500, which is not bad for a maximum. Florida’s rate has been several times that high. I’ll bet Australia gets into Florida territory soon, if only because God hates hubris.

Two big differences between Zambia and Australia are that Zambia has not become a police state and Zambia doesn’t have a coronavirus epidemic. The only people you will see face-down in the street in Zambia are drunk. It makes me nervous to say it, because I don’t want to live in Africa, but I can see why it’s not unusual for white people to move to Zambia and become citizens. It must be wonderful to live in a Christian country instead of the USA, which is ground zero for the world’s anal-misadventure pandemic.

Zambian politicians have very limited motivation to become sadistic, because they have no epidemic to put them under pressure. That’s a tremendous blessing, but since Zambia’s government has called for prayer and repentance to end coronavirus, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that the disease has gone away there. Australians are like the British and most blue-state and urban Americans. They generally hate real Christianity, so they’re not getting Zambian results. Zambia is full of people of faith who experience things like miracles and prophecy.

I saw a sad and ludicrous article by a pro-government Australian. She said the protests were no big deal. As evidence, she said no protest had attracted more than a few thousand people. A few THOUSAND! Excuse me, but how many American riots have drawn that kind of crowd? When a thousand people show up to protest the government, it’s a major event.

I see pro-fascism apologists saying Australians are amused to see Americans talking about Australia’s troubles. They say we’re making things up in order to use them to prop up our Trumpian assertions about our own inner turmoil. They say Australians have been living blissfully, enjoying life while trapped in their homes or unable to travel more than 2 miles away or unable to visit neighboring states without government permits. Yes, I’m sure it’s been fun. Everywhere else in the world, people are miserable, and there is a huge global conversation about the suffering people have endured, but in a country with some of the most extreme and cowardly restrictions, everyone is enjoying confinement and wishing it had come sooner.

I saw something really crazy yesterday, and I wrote about it. Protests in Switzerland. New videos are still going up, so I watched. I have to say that coronavirus has managed to expose the one thing the Swiss are not good at: rioting.

They dress normally. By Swiss standards. They don’t wear hoods. Nothing is on fire. No one throws anything. I guess you don’t throw projectiles when there’s a good chance you’ll hit a large commercial building you own, debt-free.

Maybe my perception of the Swiss is off. I can imagine them rioting for MORE government control, but not less. After all, they have the most unbearable speed limits in Europe, even though their roads are potentially among the most fun to drive on. Switzerland is like hell for sports car owners. Only a people that loves being told what to do could live in a place like that.

“We demand earlier curfews! I was out past 8 p.m. last night! This is not right!” “My lawn is 12 centimeters high! The government must force me to end the scandal, or I shall go to bed without brushing my teeth!”

When people protest in Japan and Singapore, we’ll know the end is upon us.

I just took another hit of ivermectin, and I feel very good today. I think I’ll eat a big bowl of nuclear chili and then try to kill squirrels in my yard. I won’t wear a mask, and the police won’t come and grind my face into the lawn for being outdoors without permission. Maybe I’ll come back later and criticize homosexuality some more, while pouring out more material that surely qualifies as coronavirus misinformation. The last hours of America’s time of prosperity and liberty seem to be ticking away, but freedom feels good this afternoon.

Get my Pod Ready

I talk to my parrot Marvin a lot, which only means I’m reciprocating. The other day, I found myself walking around the kitchen saying, “It’s really happening. The world is really ending.” He didn’t have much to say about it. He talks mostly about peanuts. But it was comforting to have a listener.

Marv’s new favorite thing to say is, “peanuts and bird.” I think the meaning is obvious. It’s like saying, “Pawn to queen five,” sort of. It’s a delivery request.

Can a pawn move to queen five? I don’t know. I don’t play chess.

I was talking to my wife this morning, and she was enjoying her new home in Zambia. Seems like she never gets out of the tub. I thought about the mild stress I had felt about setting her up over there. I want to be generous, but I don’t want to endanger our futures by overspending. The stress has melted away. I thought about that.

These days, I feel as though the funds I have were Monopoly money. I feel like it doesn’t matter what I spend, because we won’t be here long.

Remember The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy? Arthur Dent’s village was about to demolish his house, and he was very upset. His friend Ford Prefect took him to a pub while the bulldozer was sitting in his yard, waiting to start, and he ordered pints and peanuts for Arthur and himself. He told the bartender to serve them quickly because the world was going to end. At first, the bartender didn’t pay much attention, but he realized something was wrong when Ford left him two extravagant tips. Pounds were about to lose all their value, so why not spend them?

Douglas Adams is the best humorist I know of. A modern Voltaire. It’s a shame he was a proselytizing, belligerent atheist. I will never meet him. He dropped dead while still holding onto his pathological beliefs. When we are judged and the question of salvation is resolved, we won’t get any credit for good intentions or good works. Nice people who wrote funny books and rejected Jesus will go to hell.

Voltaire was an atheist, too. It’s one of the things that make people view him as progressive. He was an atheist before atheism was cool.

In Paris, there is a collection of tombs for famous people. It’s a sort of secular pantheon, and aptly, it’s in a building called the Pantheon. Victor Hugo is there. So is Marie Curie. They moved dead celebrities in, and Voltaire is one of them.

The Pantheon was originally a church, but it was commandeered for secular use. Fitting.

The Pantheon’s mausoleum is for people who are revered for their allegedly positive contributions to Western civilization. Voltaire’s encased body is there, still receiving the adulation of intellectuals. Where is Voltaire himself, though? Probably not receiving adulation. Very much the opposite. He is probably crying in hell, where his pride likely failed to follow him when he died two and a half centuries ago. Everyone is humiliated in hell, no matter how cocky they were up here. There are probably some people who keep spitting at God even from the pit, but my guess is that the majority spend their time crying, screaming, and begging with no dignity at all.

In November, they’re putting a plaque for Josephine Baker in the Pantheon. What are the odds she made it to heaven? She did a lot of things to help France during World War Two, and she was a civil rights activist. She also adopted poor children. It all sounds nice, but she was a famous stripper who was promiscuous with both sexes, and she didn’t do her good deeds in the name of God.

I guess she was the black Marlene Dietrich.

Atheists and even many Christians think God takes you to heaven for being good, but it’s completely untrue. You can do no end of nice things, but if you reject Jesus, you go to hell anyway. People who live altruistic lives while rejecting Jesus are like ectopic pregnancies. They are headed for problems. The entrance to heaven is like the birth canal, and there are no spiritual caesarians.

Guess I’m digressing. Or am I? The underlying theme hasn’t changed. The things we think are important here generally are not, and that becomes increasingly obvious as we get closer to our departures.

Yesterday, motivated by the shortages most people haven’t noticed yet, I went to Wal-Mart and Publix. I spent about $175 on things like beans, flour, protein bars, and canned meat. I replenished the disaster rations I’ve been carelessly eating.

Costo says paper towels are going to disappear again, but there are plenty here. I picked up 24 rolls. I noticed that Wal-mart’s selection of dried beans was pretty bad, and the big bags of rice I wanted to buy were not there. The rice in the main area was wiped out. They still had some big bags in the Hispanic region, but I passed them by. Products aimed at Hispanics tend to be low-quality.

I got some New York strips at acceptable prices. These days, $10 per pound is a good deal. It used to be the everyday price. I paid $9 and $10, at different stores.

I don’t like strips all that much, but they’re way better than nothing, and deals on choice rib eyes are rare.

I have a ton of oatmeal. When the rapture comes, it will not find me constipated. The oatmeal will counteract the rice, pasta, white bread, and Velveeta.

If they don’t take away our electricity, I will be fine for a few months of famine. Without electricity, I won’t have water or any way to cook food. I wish I lived in beautiful Tennessee, on a farm with springs, a gas well, and soil that grows things other than water oaks and weeds.

Are my acorns edible? I should check. They don’t sound appetizing. I think there is something you can do with them to render them useful, but I don’t know what it is. I have mountains of them.

WebMD says you can eat acorns if you pulverize them, soak them, and keep discarding the water until it’s colorless. Yay. Whee. Rapture me, please.

If famine outlasts my supplies, I would just as soon die as subsist on squirrels and crows. I think those would be my only fall-back staples once Sonny’s BBQ closes. Even Euell Gibbons would have a hard time finding wild food on my property.

Rhodah is nervous about Tennessee. She is afraid of racism. You can’t let other people tell you where to live, though, and my guess is that there are plenty of places in rural Tennessee where they are more concerned about people’s religious and political beliefs than they are about race. I would think there would be room for two charismatic Christian conservatives who showed up with thousands and thousands of rounds of ammunition.

Is it okay for a Christian to use lethal force in self-defense? It’s a question I revisit from time to time.

I had this thought the other day: Jesus told us to turn the other cheek if we were struck, but he didn’t say to stand still and let people stab us with swords. A slap on the cheek is not that big a deal, but other types of battery are. Even dangerous people who know a lot about fighting routinely counsel us to avoid fights and run away, but they don’t usually tell us to lie down and die.

There is a former Navy SEAL named Jocko Willink, and he looks exactly like his name sounds. His head, all by itself, looks like it could defeat a battalion. He is a scary-looking dude. The other day, I saw a little bit of a video in which he provided people with advice. He said that if someone punched him, his first choice would be to run away.

I kind of wonder if he was telling the truth, given the ease with which he could subdue most people, but I am relaying his advice accurately. He said fighting leads to a lot of problems, which is true. He and Jesus are in agreement when it comes to minor batteries. Would he let someone shoot him or his wife, though? Bet not.

I would appreciate it if someone who reads my blog would find Jocko Willink and punch him in the face, just to see how honest he is. I would do it myself, but my sinuses are bothering me, and you know how that is.

Jesus told the disciples to buy and carry swords. What for? He discouraged Peter from using a sword to save him from the murderous priests who had him tortured to death, but he let him whack one of their servants first. This happened on a special occasion. The priests had come, and it was important for Jesus to die. Would he have stopped Peter a week earlier, when a premature murder would have prevented the crucifixion?

The death of Jesus was necessary. My death by murder isn’t, as far as I can see. My blood has no value. It can’t save anyone. No one who eats my body can claim to have taken communion. Would Jesus have told Peter not to defend me?

Was it necessary for Paul to take beatings and stonings? Maybe Jesus would have preferred to see him use a sword to save himself. I wonder.

The apostles made a lot of mistakes. No one likes to talk about that. They had public arguments, so obviously, they weren’t right all the time.

Wow. Superman is a sodomite. I just found out after writing the last paragraph. DC Comics has a new Superman–the primary messiah substitute in American comics–who does it with dudes. Sorry about the abrupt transition.

Wow. Wow. What’s next? Deepfake John Wayne gay porn? James Bond has been fairly gay since Casino Royale, so there is no point in wondering about him. Maybe they’ll create a deepfake Eastwood character called Dainty Harry.

Yesterday, I started thinking about the long history of seemingly gay Bond villains. It startled me.

1. Dr. No. No. Although he was a single man who lived on an island with other men, so I could be wrong.

2. From Russia with Love. Robert Shaw’s Donald Grant was a bemuscled gym rat with bleached blond hair and a full-body winter tan, he appeared to be oiled in at least one scene, and he certainly liked tussling with other men. Not sure, though.

3. Goldfinger. Single man who favored shorts back when they raised eyebrows. Could be.

4. Thunderball. Emilio Largo lived on an island with men who spent a lot of time swimming together, he wore a shorty wetsuit, and he always had an incredible tan and perfectly coiffed salt and pepper hair. A possible.

5. You Only Live Twice. Blofeld…gay, gay, gay, gay GAY. A prim old man who sat around stroking a cat. Come on. He could have been Elton John’s dad.

6. On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. I don’t know. No one saw this movie.

7. Diamonds are Forever. Jimmy Dean was definitely straight, but Blofeld was still the uncle who always shows up for Thanksgiving dinner unaccompanied, drinks too much, and cries because everyone else gets pecan pie before he does.

8. Live and Let Die. Kananga seemed butch, but Geoffrey Holder made up for it in spades. He was the first Rupaul.

9. The Man With the Golden Gun. Christopher Lee was effeminate and dressed way too well to be straight. And he cried because an elephant died.

10. The Spy Who Loved Me. Don’t remember. I couldn’t stand Roger Moore, who was, himself, a bit buoyant in his Ballys.

11. Moonraker. Michael Lonsdale’s Drax did not exactly ooze testosterone. I would not want him to be my son’s scoutmaster.

12. For Your Eyes Only. Honestly, I don’t remember this one, except that Bond had to fend off an amorous minor who was determined to get him to commit a felony with her.

13. Octopussy. The villain was Louis Jourdan. Draw your own conclusions.

14. A View to a Kill. Christopher Walken’s Zorin will remind you that Walken got his start as a dancer.

15. The Living Daylights. Timothy Dalton made us all miss George Lazenby. No idea what happened in this movie.

16. Goldeneye. Didn’t see it.

17. Tomorrow Never Dies. Didn’t see it, but Jonathan Pryce generally comes off as masculine in his other roles, in spite of being nearly English.

18. The World is not Enough. Robert Carlyle’s Renard had that “They always picked me last in gym class” feel, but he also had a crush on Sophie Marceau.

19. Die Another Day. Toby Stephens’ Gustav Graves and Pierce Brosnan seemed positively infatuated with each other. Their sweaty fencing match was like two storks doing a courtship dance.

The Craig films, or at least some of them, were fit to sit on the same DVD shelf as Gore Vidal’s sometimes-troubling Ben Hur. The gross Mads Mikkelsen rope scene, gay Q, Bond failing to close the deal with the tantalizing Moneypenny, Bond and Javier Bardem flirting, the return of tiny, Italian-slippered Blofeld, an aging Craig fighting Freddie Mercury…I’d have to say there were undercurrents.

Maybe they’ll rewrite our history books and put George Washington in bed with Thomas Jefferson. In the future, we’ll go past saying everyone is gay and every really admirable historical figure was gay. We’ll say everyone has always been gay. Children will wonder how we kept the race going.

We’ll have to transpose “surrogate” into hieroglyphics and cuneiform in carve it on obelisks and tablets. We can make some fake Dead Sea Scrolls, but to keep up with the times, we can see to it they’re discovered in Provincetown.

Superman is a homosexual. It was inevitable, but still. It’s terrible, but it’s impossible not to laugh a little. Who’s next? Winnie the Pooh? Tom Sawyer? Mickey Mouse? The Grinch? Well, Jim Carrey already went there.

If there is one thing that would make Lex Luthor go straight, this has to be it.

Everything around me is exploding in slow motion. It’s like the verse from the Revelation in which the stars fall from the sky.

I should buy a few more groceries and some batteries, and then maybe I’ll burn, “Come get me, Jesus,” into my lawn and sit outside hopefully in an Adirondack chair.

What fresh insanity will tomorrow bring? The question is chilling. I lack the imagination to guess.

As Bad as Your Life may be, at Least You’re not Joe Biden

Before I say anything else, here: they are saying food shortages have arrived, so if you haven’t prepared, you might want to visit Wal-Mart. I am considering loading up on pasta, Velveeta, and protein powder. I already have a lot of beans and rice, as well as canned fish. My jerky supply is poor, as is my dried apple supply. I’ll have to see what I can do.

I talked to Rhodah in Zambia. She was in a grocery store at the time. Lots of food. No price increases. So now America is the third world, and Zambia is the promised land. They had rows of Black Forest cakes in a display case, ready to go. I can’t find that here without driving to, maybe, Orlando.

I am still not quite well. My symptoms come and go in waves. They are always very faint, but they are still annoying. The worst thing is having days when I lack energy. That is not like me. I want to get out and walk the farm every day. Ordinarily, I can’t wait to get out there, but on low-energy days, I’m a different person.

On normal days, I tromp around for about 45 minutes with a .22 on my shoulder and a pistol in my pocket. Just so I can enjoy not being Australian. Or European. Or Chinese. Or a yankee.

Boy, those Australians turned out to be sissies, didn’t they? Remember Paul Hogan? What a tired fraud. “That’s not a knife. THIS is a knife!” Yeah, uh, except you’re not allowed to carry a knife in Australia.

If I were, admittedly amazingly, attacked by crocodiles on one of my walks, even at the bank, where the rifle wouldn’t be allowed, I could realistically hope to kill 11 before changing magazines, and I would be prepared to skin them on the spot for anybody who had a family to feed. And I’m a huge creampuff by rural American standards. Even in his prime, in Australia, Paul Hogan would have had to lock himself in the toilet.

My advice to Australian men is this: if you’re going to be docile, dependent sheep, be docile, dependent sheep. Don’t pretend you’re the kind of man they produce in places like Tennessee and Wyoming. Macho talk and too much Foster’s don’t make you Marcus Luttrell, girls.

I wonder what the Australian men of a century ago would think of their descendants.

I read that they now think bad dental hygiene makes coronavirus hang on longer. I won’t make the obvious jokes about England. I think there was a link from The Drudge Report, also known as the Trump Hate Report. What happened to Matt Drudge? Bet he got a vegan girlfriend.

The theory is that viruses live in the crud in your mouth, so it acts like pus in an abscess, reinfecting you over and over. This proposition disturbed me at first, because I have had several nights when I simply flopped into bed without brushing my teeth. After I got over it, I felt encouraged, because it seemed like this new knowledge might be helpful not just for covid sufferers but for anyone with an infection involving areas connected to the mouth.

The person pushing this theory says you can improve your lot by using mouthwash, which kills viruses.

It sounds a little weird, because we are always told there is no way to kill a virus. Antibiotics supposedly have no effect, and doctors never tell us to gargle to kill them. Antiseptics do kill viruses, however, as we now know after America’s great cleanliness revival. Alcohol, bleach, benzalkonium chloride, and other chemicals destroy coronaviruses on surfaces. It stands to reason that they would also kill them in our mouths and throats. Whether it does us any good, I can’t say.

If it works for covid, wouldn’t it also work for other viruses and strep? One would think so.

My grandmother’s best friend used to tell me to gargle with ST-37 every time I got sick. I don’t know if they make this product any more. It seems like they quit making it. It’s probably full of dioxin and thalidomide. Anyway, I took her advice, and it seemed to help. Maybe she was ahead of her time. Sometimes ignorance can put you a step ahead of doctors.

I plan to start flossing twice a day instead of once, and I will use mouthwash. I had read that mouthwash might have adverse health effects, but I don’t know it to be true, and killing microbes seems like a good idea.

I feel good today, and my energy is flowing, but I woke up with swollen nasal passages, and I can feel something going on in my head. I know I’m not completely over this.

My big project today, now that I’ve fixed my Cold Steel Swift knife in CTS-XHP so it actually opens as designed, is to get more food. I’ll be going to Wal-Mart shortly.

I have looked over my existing supplies, and I should be able to go a couple of months without suffering much. One thing that concerned me: Velveeta. I checked, and it looks like my cheese expired 9 months ago.

Am I worried? No. A Youtube prepper has a video in which she made Velveeta shells and cheese using a package that got its burn notice two years earlier. Her advice? If it looks okay and doesn’t stink, eat it. I’m going to buy more Velveeta anyway. If times get hard, I’ll try the old stuff first, and if it doesn’t work, I’ll still have the new stuff.

Is this the end? Will human beings be at each other’s throats, fighting over Chiclets and old cans of Libby’s pumpkin puree in three months? I wish I knew.

I had a wonderful, comforting thought today. I have had concerns about becoming poor, starving, and having to shoot urban visitors, and I am not all that happy about watching other people starve and murder each other even if I’m safe and fat. Here’s something that occurred to me, however: the tribulation is supposed to last 7 years, during which time, the elect will be in heaven at the wedding supper of Jesus. That means 7 easy years. If we return, as the Bible seems to say we will, we will have a thousand more easy years on Earth, because Satan and every other evil spirit will be bound, Jesus will rule in person, and the world will be blessed. If not, we’ll still be in heaven.

Either way, things brighten up for good once the rapture comes. If it’s imminent, as it seems to be, then so is the end of my problems. Forever. That makes the whole process look much less intimidating.

When we say the end is near, maybe we should be thinking of the end of our suffering, not the end of God’s patience and protection. What the apocalypse brings you depends entirely on which side you’re on.

Things aren’t looking good from a secular point of view. Biden’s poll numbers are sub-Trump, and it looks like he’s not even pretending he wants to get along with us. He just hosted a press conference about his dismal job numbers, and when it was over, he turned his back on his fawning press wet nurses and shuffled away without responding to questions.

Have you heard about, “Let’s go, Brandon!”? A NASCAR driver named Brandon something or other won a race, and an MSM meat puppet interviewed him at the track. While they were talking, the crowd was screaming, “F__ JOE BIDEN!”, very clearly. The meat puppet told a lie rivaling the famous Villaraigosa convention voice-vote lie. She said they were yelling, “Let’s go, Brandon!” Now, thanks to her dishonesty, “Let’s go, Brandon!” is one of the right’s new slogans. You can’t chant the other thing wherever you go, but you can send your nine-year-old to school in a shirt that says, “Let’s go, Brandon!”, and no one there will be able to do a thing about it, even though the teachers will know exactly what it means.

Public discourse hits a new low every week.

God is punishing us for electing Biden. No doubt about it. His precious presidency is dissolving. Biden has been paying people to stay home, and because they’re staying home and eating taxes, taxes will go up, and products and services are in short supply. Wages have gone up a great deal because no one wants to get off the couch. Gas prices are crazy because Biden killed American oil production, the Chinese stupidly banned Australian coal, and God personally strangled the wind farms in England. Inflation is killing our savings, and the stock market and real estate markets are in dangerous bubbles. It’s bad, bad, bad. Unless God is with you.

All we need now is an epsilon variant that laughs at vaccines and kills the healthy, and the picture will be rounded out.

Here’s hoping Jesus comes soon and takes as many people with him as possible. Once I’m gone, you can help yourself to my Velveeta and ammunition. If I’m sufficiently blessed to be taken, I won’t want it any more.

Plus Disease Updates

I thought I married a woman. In reality, I married a bathtub.

Rhodah’s stay at her previous lodgings came to an end this week, and now we are renting a sort of townhouse in Lusaka. The major bonuses in my eyes: more room, a nicer home, a good location, and security. The only thing that matters to Rhodah: a bathtub with hot water on demand. It seems like it’s very hard to catch her out of the tub.

Until recently, she was sharing student housing with some other law students, and their home had no hot water. They had a water heater, which they call a geyser (pronounced “geezer”), and they had a tub, but the water heater probably hasn’t worked since Cecil Rhodes installed it. She had to heat water herself, put it in buckets, and use it to wash. I used to tell her to get a new one. I was happy to pay, even though the apartment was rented. Couldn’t get her to do it.

I just tried to call her, and of course, a bath was in the works. She says she will call me when she is finished. I don’t know if that means one hour or three hours.

I imagine this behavior will continue for at least two weeks. Women love their tubs, and she has been deprived for a long time. She says her skin falls off when she uses a tub. Apparently showers don’t exfoliate everyone.

As for me, I really think I have coronavirus. My symptoms are down to almost nothing, but I am not 100%.

Let’s recap. I started out with a brief spell of unusually foul diarrhea, with mild nausea, combined with a sore throat. Then I got mild joint pain and a good case of sinusitis, and things accumulated in my nose and sinuses all day. Then that pretty much went away, and I had several days during which I felt faint. Yesterday was the last one. During much of the nose-harvesting stage of the illness, I got very sleepy relatively early in the day, but I didn’t feel faint or weak.

A couple of days back, I noticed that food didn’t taste right. I haven’t lost my sense of taste or smell, but some things just taste wrong, and when I’m not eating, I have a metallic taste in my mouth. It’s hard to taste certain flavors.

The sore throat was strange. At times I felt as though my throat had been burned. Drinking acidic beverages wasn’t fun. I also had periods during which my throat was very dry for no apparent reason.

I passed two PCR tests, and my thermometer has never gotten up to 98 degrees, so not everything points to coronavirus. On the other hand, taken as a whole, the symptoms don’t point to anything else.

Today my strength and energy are good, so I assume I am moving into a new phase.

I can’t help feeling that ivermectin helped. Three times, I felt a lot better several hours after taking it. I felt worse when I stopped. It’s not like I did a study, but you don’t necessarily have to test 10,000 patients in order to learn something. At the beginning of the 20th century, we had all sorts of highly effective medicines and treatments we still use, and they didn’t come from studies. The discovery of penicillin came from a guy looking at dirty culture dishes. Without a study, I learned I can’t tolerate even tiny amounts of caffeine. I learned that 1/8 of the normal dose of Prozac drove me around the bend and caused bizarre symptoms for weeks after I quit taking it. I didn’t have to compile statistics. It was obvious.

Whatever I have, it’s not going to be a problem. It’s pretty unusual to get a disease, have mild symptoms, recover almost completely, and then die. And I don’t consider dying to be a bad thing.

I confess I’m not wearing a mask in stores. If PCR tests can’t detect the virus in me, what are the odds I’m spreading it? Maybe I’m being irresponsible, though.

I will say this for myself: I rarely go out, and I don’t stand close to people because I’m a normal American in a rural area.

Something great happened today. One of my favorite Youtube guys posted a video. He calls himself Brother Grahame. No one watches him. Every so often, he puts up a video in which he relays what he thinks is a word from God.

He had a long dry spell, as have most of my other favorites. Today he posted a video delivering helpful advice for people who think the rapture is coming yet don’t know what to do.

It boils down to this: repent. Consecrate yourself. He put it this way: if you knew the rapture were coming in 10 days, what would you do? You already know, so do it. Quit watching garbage. Give up the recurrent sins you think don’t matter. Spend time with God.

I thought it was great. Much better than what Joel Osteen is probably saying right now. Let me guess. “Live your best life. Believe in yourself. Keep sending me and my wife money.” Tony Robbins should sue him.

I saw another neat video a couple of days back. My favorite Messianic rabbi, Zev Porat, shot down a revered rabbinic tradition. He also exposed the dangerous holes in the education of a respected rabbi who was unfamiliar with the Bible, preferring secondary sources like the Zohar and the Talmud, which are full of gossip.

He went to the Western Wall, intending to talk to Jews. A rabbi confronted him and threatened him with violence, including death. It was shocking, really, Ordinarily, I associate that kind of behavior with Islam, but it does happen in Judaism. Christians have pretty much given it up. He told Porat he would start a riot if he didn’t leave, and it would have been a pretty one-sided riot, with only one person on Porat’s side. He also told him he could have him killed.

This is pretty extreme. Rich Wilkerson had secret meetings about me and tried to discredit me to other Christians, his son preached ignorant messages which were clearly intended to refute things I said, and Albert Santiago the child rapist told people to shun me and threw a screaming fit in his church’s parking lot while attempting to interrogate one of my best friends. That’s about all the persecution I’ve experienced. No one has threatened to kill me yet, except for my sister, and that had nothing to do with doctrine.

In America, Christians still are not threatening to kill each other. Even BLM isn’t there yet. It’s just Antifa and a few Muslim nuts at this point.

By the way, leftist violence has not stopped. The press has simply decided to ignore it. An Antifer recently pulled a pistol and shot someone he disagreed with in Portland. Like most Antifa cowards, he was covered in black from head to toe to escape responsibility for his filthy behavior, but he was caught on video, and he has been identified and arrested.

He’s an unlikely outlaw and gun owner. He’s a wimpy, effeminate leftist. He’s simultaneously skinny and fat. He has a gut, combined with long, spindly limbs and no muscle tissue. He didn’t shoot to protect himself. People were running around sort of randomly, and he took out a pistol and fired, with poor technique, at some people who were out of the frame. He didn’t warn anyone. It looks like he did it just for the fun of hurting someone.

That’s how riots work. They are driven by sadism. You’re there because you want to cause other people pain and make them feel powerless, so you dance in and out like Floyd Mayweather, inflicting injuries, running away, inflicting injuries, running away…it has nothing to do with winning battles or advancing causes. It’s all about the pleasure of hurting and humiliating others.

Back to Porat. He challened the rabbi. He started discussing the traditional prohibition on combining milk and meat. He said it was not in the Bible. The rabbi agreed to let him stay where he was if he could prove it.

Porat turned to the passage that says Jews are forbidden to boil a kid in its mother’s milk. The rabbi got all excited, thinking he had won. Then Porat pointed out the context. He said it was in part of the word that concerned pagan practices. He said boiling a kid in its mother’s milk was something pagans did as part of their religion. It wasn’t like eating a pig, which is expressly forbidden in the dietary laws.

You can check for yourself. Here is Exodus 23:19, which appears in a list of required Jewish religious practices as well as prohibitions concerning heathen religious practices: “The first of the firstfruits of thy land thou shalt bring into the house of the Lord thy God. Thou shalt not seethe a kid in his mother’s milk.”

It’s also in Exodus 34:26, which occurs in the same basic context: “The first of the firstfruits of thy land thou shalt bring unto the house of the Lord thy God. Thou shalt not seethe a kid in his mother’s milk.

If you Google around, you will find that the Canaanites liked to boil a kid in its mother’s milk in order to assure a good harvest. Like ancient Christians and even modern Christians, ancient Jews had a habit of taking up idolatry in order to conform to the nature of the people around them.

Porat asked the rabbi if Abraham was righteous, and the rabbi said he was. Porat then turned to a passage which showed Abraham serving milk and meat…to God himself!

I’m not a Jew, so I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about kashrut when I read the Bible. It had never occurred to me to go over the details of Abraham’s meal and compare it to Jewish tradition, so I never noticed what he served. Now that I’ve seen it, it’s very obvious, and it’s shocking that the issue isn’t better known.

You have to see it for yourself. It’s part of Genesis 18.

And the Lord appeared unto him in the plains of Mamre: and he sat in the tent door in the heat of the day;

And he lift up his eyes and looked, and, lo, three men stood by him: and when he saw them, he ran to meet them from the tent door, and bowed himself toward the ground,

And said, My Lord, if now I have found favour in thy sight, pass not away, I pray thee, from thy servant:

Let a little water, I pray you, be fetched, and wash your feet, and rest yourselves under the tree:

And I will fetch a morsel of bread, and comfort ye your hearts; after that ye shall pass on: for therefore are ye come to your servant. And they said, So do, as thou hast said.

And Abraham hastened into the tent unto Sarah, and said, Make ready quickly three measures of fine meal, knead it, and make cakes upon the hearth.

And Abraham ran unto the herd, and fetcht a calf tender and good, and gave it unto a young man; and he hasted to dress it.

And he took butter, and milk, and the calf which he had dressed, and set it before them; and he stood by them under the tree, and they did eat.

Notice: he served beef, butter, and milk, together. To God himself. The Jewish God.

How about that?

It sounds pretty good. I like beef fried in butter, with a potato buried in sour cream. Of course, potatoes come from the New World, so Abraham didn’t have that option.

Needless to say, the rabbi was dumbfounded, and Porat was not beaten or driven off.

Apparently, some rabbis have noticed the contradiction. One argument they make is that milk was served first, which would be permissible. Unfortunately, there is no indication of that in the text, and it says, “he set it before them,” meaning both beef and dairy items. There is no indication that he served milk and butter first, and besides, who would drink milk and eat butter while letting beef get cold? It’s not credible.

Another explanation is even stranger: Abraham created a special calf which could be eaten with milk. Really? He was trying to get the most important guests imaginable to sit and wait for food, and he wandered off and used magic to create a calf instead of getting the food ready quickly? Why?

Maimonides, who has been shown to be wrong about other things, claims the visitors were angels, and that it was permissible for angels to eat meat with milk. Well, Abraham didn’t address them as angels. He said, “My Lord.” The Bible says, “The Lord said to Abraham.” The word translated “Lord” is Yahweh. Is Yahweh an angel?

You really have to twist the text to get away from the obvious meaning.

Why does Porat do things like this? I can’t speak for him, but I know he shocks religious Jews with their ignorance of the Bible. Secondary sources are everything to them, just as they are to Catholics and Mormons. He also likes to show them how the word conflicts with the traditions of men.

It’s encouraging to watch these videos. Through Porat, God is showing Abraham’s children how they have been disinformed and kept in the dark. It helps them see the truth. He says many, many people in Israel secretly believe in Yeshua now. They just keep it quiet for obvious reasons. People, including black-clad religious Jews, email him and other Messianic ministers all the time, asking for materials and instruction.

Until recently, I thought it was no good for a Jew or anyone else to believe secretly, because the word says that if anyone denies Jesus before men, he will deny him before the Father, consigning them to hell. Now I think I was wrong. Keeping quiet is not the same thing as denying. A denial is proactive. Silence is passive. It’s not an act. I think Jews and former Muslims who take a “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach should be fine, as long as they never cross the line into denying Jesus.

Heathens love pressuring people to deny Jesus. It’s a very big deal to them, because they serve Satan, and they know that to deny Jesus is to be damned. The Vikings used to torture people to make them deny Jesus. Socialists have done it, too. Lots of pagans have done it. Paul had believing Jews imprisoned and killed by the Jewish authorities, and the Jews of his time beat and threatened Jews who evangelized, just as Porat has been threatened and assaulted. Muslims crucify Christians today, hoping to get them to recant. The Mark of the Beast will be a public renunciation of Jesus, and the Bible says people who take it will be lost. That means the Democrats and worldly Republicans will be coercing people to give up salvation, which is “Yeshua” in the Hebrew language.

Pretending to believe something because you’re afraid is not really believing. If you threatened to burn me at the stake, I would tell you I was certain Joe Biden was an avocado if you wanted. It wouldn’t mean I believed it. You can’t go to God and say, “I believed what the rabbis told me because I was afraid of them.” You can only say you pretended to believe.

I keep hoping the rapture comes soon, because I don’t like this world at all, but because I don’t have certainty, I have to continue living and attending to various responsibilities. Rhodah and I have to keep working on a green card. We have to think about a possible future together here.

This week, a stranger came up to her and started prophesying. He said she was newly married. He said God had given her a good man who loved her a great deal. That all sounded great. Then he said God was going to give her twins.

Twins! Oh, boy. If God wants to give us twins, may it be so, and I will be grateful. May his will be done, always. But wow. Twins?

Needless to say, we are praying for God to let us know if the prophecy is correct. Rhodah thinks it’s great. I am unnerved by the prospect of going from no babies to two babies, instantly.

We are working on her green card. We haven’t even finished the forms. It’s a lot of work, and her information just changed because of her move.

England now says she can visit. We’ll see if it’s true or just another European lie. Other countries pretended to welcome Zambians and then proved they actually wanted to keep them out. They made excuses, pretending they thought a married woman with an expensive ring and an American husband with assets was likely to stay in their countries illegally. Some countries, including America, claimed Zambians could visit, but then they made it impossible to apply for visas.

I doubt their sincerity.

A few weeks back, she heard an audible voice say, “October 26th.” We are wondering what that’s about. Was it a demon, spreading confusion? Was it God, telling us when we would be together again? I don’t put a lot of credence in it. It’s October 7th. We would have a hard time even getting back to Turkey in 19 days. America and desirable European destinations seem as unlikely as Mars.

I haven’t been able to attach any significance to the date. It’s not a Christian or Jewish holiday.

Now that my strength is returning, I feel the familiar urge to get out and walk a long distance. I guess I’ll get on it after lunch.

The Key is to be Enthusiastic About It

I decided to load up on pharmaceuticals today.

While I was in Turkey, I developed a sore throat. This happened shortly before I was due to take a PCR test to determine whether I would be allowed to fly home to the US. Something similar happened on my recent Egypt trip. I got a cold. Both times, I was concerned that I might get stuck in a hotel in a foreign country while coronavirus ran its course. I was also concerned that I might take a long time to get over the bug. Extending a foreign trip can be fun, but after a month or so, it would be less fun.

Obviously, I passed both times. I am here in my gun room, typing away.

Does this mean I didn’t get coronavirus? Maybe not. In spite of inexplicable, delusional MSM articles calling the PCR test “highly accurate,” in fact, reputable sources (not Mike Lindell or Alex Jones) claim the reverse is true. Some analysts have found false-negative rates as high as 67%.

I’m pretty sure I did not get covid in Egypt, because all I had was a runny nose. In Turkey, things were different. Things started much as they had in early 2020, when I got a mystery ailment with symptoms consistent with covid. I started out with foul-smelling diarrhea that didn’t last long. Then I felt nausea. Then I got a sore throat and a low fever. Then I got thick nasal discharge, which is still with me. In 2020, I had conjunctivitis, similar diarrhea, brief nausea and vomiting, a runny nose that persisted for a long time, and a dry cough coupled with sharp but mild chest pains.

In Turkey, I wondered if I had strep. I don’t think I did, because nausea and diarrhea are not common with strep, and they’re common with coronavirus.

In 2020 and on my Turkey trip, I got very strange diseases which could have been covid but didn’t seem to be anything else, based on my layman’s scrutiny of Internet symptom lists.

I took ivermectin before leaving for Istanbul. I expected to take more in Turkey. I had my wife pick up tablets in Africa, and I told her to bring some for me so I could avoid depleting my American stash of horse paste. She misunderstood me and left them behind, so by the time I got sick, I had been off ivermectin for maybe 10 days. People who push ivermectin for coronavirus prevention claim you only need one dose per month. Whether that’s true or not, I don’t know, and for that matter, I don’t know if ivermectin helps even when administered as directed by my fellow fringe nuts.

Following guidelines provided by actual doctors who treat coronavirus patients, I’ve been taking ivermectin every day for several days. They recommend a 5-day course for active cases. Today is my last day. Hope I don’t drop dead tomorrow.

Yesterday, based on my travel problems and the general craziness of today’s world, I decided I should pick up a few disaster medications. Shortages are everywhere, the Revelation promises more plagues, and it’s not always easy to get to a doctor, especially when you’re traveling.

I ordered more ivermectin, amoxicillin, metronizadole, azithromycin, and doxycycline.

How did I get the antibiotics without prescriptions? I did it the same way I got the ivermectin. I took the veterinary route for most. You can get all sorts of prescription medications that way, and the prices are nice and low because malpractice lawyers haven’t managed to wreak havoc on the cost of veterinary medicines.

I already have enrofloxacin (a ciprofloxacin relative) and something called ronidazole. I picked these up for Marvin. Enrofloxacin is not approved for humans, and it belongs to a family of drugs which can cause tendon damage and severe nightmares, so I am not planning on using it, but Marv or some other pet might need it in our dystopian future, so I’m keeping it. Ronizadole is considered dangerous for people, so it will also stay in my pet-medicine stash.

I plan to pick up a few more things. I’m considering antifungals.

Ciprofloxacin is a preferred drug for treating anthrax, which is a popular biological weapon. Because cipro is so scary, doxycycline, the other preferred drug, looks better to me.

Despite the dishonest MSM hubbub, there is no ivermectin supply crisis. It may be hard to find locally for some people, but you can still get it online for under $8 per tube. Nobody’s horse is going to die because you or I buy a few tubes, and if horses do die, I don’t care, because people are more important.

Reader Ed Bonderenka alerted me to a different ivermectin preparation. Apparently, ivermectin penetrates skin, so you can apply it externally. Drug companies sell very inexpensive topical drenches.

I don’t know how safe these products are for people. A cow has very thick skin, so it may be that drenches are made very strong in order to get through it. Don’t ask me. Interesting alternative, though.

Taking a drench internally looks like a bad idea. You would have to drink 2 ml of isopropyl alcohol with every dose. Alcohol is part of the product.

I’m strongly tempted to drive to Tractor Supply and grab a vial of injectable penicillin for $18. They don’t sell oral preparations, but there is no reason why you can’t measure out the injectable stuff and swallow it. What if I have strep? Penicillin would probably help.

Or I could just drive to an urgent care doc-in-the-box like a normal person.

There is something appealing about off-the-grid medical care, though, as long as I’m not wading into the deep end. I’m not transplanting lungs or doing heart bypasses.

Playing amateur doctor when I don’t really need to is not the point here, even though I do it sometimes. The purpose of snapping up a few medications is to prepare me and the people I know for times in which we have to be our own pharmacies.

Maybe I should also stock up on loperamide (Imodium), famotidine (acid blocker), ibuprofen, antibiotic ointment, bandages, topical antiseptics, swabs, tape, gauze, vitamins, and whatever else intelligent people keep on hand during apocalypses.

I guess it would be smart to stock up on toiletries, too. That 3-in-1 shower goo is a big convenience. Shampoo, wash, and shave, without getting out of the shower or leaving hairs and dried shaving cream on the sink, and it doesn’t leave soap scum behind.

Should I grab a few ladies’ products? I’m in the dark there. I can ask Rhodah and order a bale of them on Ebay.

Costco says toilet paper may disappear again soon, so I may add to my monumental collection, along with more paper towels. Walmart’s high-end towels seem like a real bargain.

Batteries. Obvious.

Okay; I paused and ordered a few more things. For a couple of hundred dollars, I got enough antibiotics to provide a measure of protection for two or maybe three people. I could never have persuaded a doctor to give me this stuff. One online vendor even threw in two Cialis tablets, which, let me stress, I did not ask for. That stuff scares me.

I’m leaning toward buying dry disaster food, although I think the only real answer is to grow things. It would cost a lot of money to buy food for 6 months, and it would take up a lot of room. When it ran out, my wife and I would be right back where we started. Until now, my plan has been to have enough food for one month, eat it, and then die without complaining.

In case anyone cares, the Florida coronavirus spike is over. The press is not talking much about it, because the end of a spike doesn’t make Ron DeSantis look bad. They’re also not talking about Florida-style spikes that have, and are, taking place in blue states. When a spike hits a red state with a governor who may run for president, it’s proof Republicans are idiots. When a spike hits a blue state, it’s a mystery. Which probably proves Republicans are idiots.

I’m wondering what will happen. Will the end of the wave of spikes also be the end of coronavirus as a major epidemic, or will the virus find a way to come back and keep biting us in the butt?

One thing is for sure: whatever happens will prove we need more government control, more socialism, and confiscation of wealth. You can bank on that. Democrats believed those things were called for before coronavirus ever became a problem.

Will we ever get real vaccines? The ones we have now are terrible; that is indisputable, as the many, many dead “breakthrough” victims could tell you. Will covid turn out to be like AIDS, which is impossible to eradicate? Both diseases are curses which came as rewards for rebellion against God, so maybe both will be with us until God destroys the human race again. Humanity is not going to repent. We’re not going to admit fault or confess that only God can save us. God has no reason to take covid away.

Maybe old people, fat people, sick people, smokers, and people who vote for Democrats will have to live like bubble boys forever.

Now that I think about it, our flu vaccines are also really bad. Smallpox is gone. Polio is gone. The measles are gone. The flu infects millions of us every year.

I can’t tell you how happy I am to be back in Florida. As soon as I found my car at the airport, I put my gun and huge, sharp knife back in my pockets, and I’ve only worn a mask once since I got home. While I was in Turkey, I kept reaching for my right front pocket because I thought I had left my gun in a restaurant or something. At least they let me carry a small Spyderco.

Rhodah and I are trying to get our US visa application submitted today, and after that, we need to start working on visas for another third-country trip. We will probably be apart for quite a while, so another trip will be needed.

Israel is still, predictably, overreacting to covid. Other desirable countries will be cold by the time we are approved to visit. Greece is a good target, and they claim they accept Zambians. Italy is still closed. France could work, if we can convince them Rhodah doesn’t want to squat and collect welfare. That should be easier now that she has visited two countries without trying to stay.

Paris in winter is not that alluring, but it’s warmer than New York. There are warmer destinations in France, so we should have good options.

Biden, or whoever is doing his job, finally faced reality and decided to open America’s borders somewhat wider. I don’t know if it will help Rhodah or not. America does not care about Zambians, so even when a president helps visitors from other countries, Zambians may remain stuck in the pipeline.

I guess all we can do is pray, try to be ready for the rapture, and make earthly plans as well as we can.

Call me Marvin, Because I’m a Haggler

This is my third day back from Turkey, and I am still not on an even keel. The bug I picked up is doing amazing things in my nose, so I am not sleeping enough. I can’t wait for this to end.

My latest PCR was negative. I don’t know if it’s correct, but I’m not going to keep testing. Whatever I have is mild, and it keeps getting less severe.

I thought I should share my thoughts on Turkey, in case anyone who reads the blog is considering a visit.

Spoiler: we had a wonderful time, and I recommend Turkey as a tourist destination.

As I have said before, I used to think the things I had seen in movies were true, and for that reason, I thought Turkey was a good place to avoid. Now that I have been there, I see how unfair the movies were. I’m sure Oliver Stone, Billy Hayes, and the studio that owns Lawrence of Arabia will issue full apologies any day now, because we all know that’s what showbiz types do when they’re wrong.

Something must be holding them up.

We stayed in Istanbul, with a short trip to Kusadasi in the middle of our honeymoon.

I flew to Turkey on Lufthansa. I would not fly Lufthansa again, unless I had a very good reason. I tend to tell myself the German reputation for rigidity and being a pain in the butt is a bigoted canard, but in reality, it is not. They really are that way. Lufthansa would not allow me to wear my special, fraudulent, low-resistance mask. If the stewardesses don’t like your mask, they give you one they do like, and believe me, you will not like it as much as they do. Mine was like having a piece of thick canvas glued over my mouth and nose.

The only thing I like about Lufthansa is that they order you to stay seated until they call on your row to debark. Order. People who jump up and run to the front of the plane while it’s headed for the gate should be shot, and if Lufthansa could, they would make this a reality.

Fortunately for me, I had an empty seat between me and the nearest passenger on the way from Frankfurt to Istanbul. That was a mercy.

The food was ghastly. They gave me vegetarian pasta with a molten, funky white cheese on it, plus peas and carrots. Who thought that was a good idea? Do I look like a vegan? I ate about half of it.

They served canned beer. I heard a stewardess ask a man if he like the German beer, like she was pouring him a glass of investment-grade diamonds. I wondered if she knew that American beer is now infinitely better. We used to be the worst, but now we are, far and away, the absolute best. Even the Belgians have to bend the knee to us. German beer is like a BMW. It has few flaws, but then it’s also boring and relatively bland.

Before I would consider drinking German beer again, I would choose my own, then Belgian, then Irish, then Mexican, and then maybe British.

Istanbul Airport is not bad. It’s better than American airports I’ve seen. I arrived about 45 minutes after the wife. Our big challenges were getting cash, finding each other, and finding our driver.

I learned that Turks call doors “gates.” The driver kept texting that he was at gate 13. I kept telling him I could not go to the gate because I was through customs and could not return to the gate area. Finally, I realized he was talking about the 13th exit door that led to ground transportation. It took us quite a while to figure this out, and I got very familiar with the layout of the airport while walking around looking for answers.

In America, I had researched the problem of getting cash. I was ready. All the gurus told me the same thing: use ATM’s. My bank said to use machines belonging to TEB, a partner bank. I tried this, and the cost of withdrawals nearly gave me a coronary. Also, the machines refused to call withdrawals “withdrawals.” They called them “cash advances,” probably to justify taking more money. My debit card is not a credit card, so cash advances should not be possible.

I got myself over $300 worth of Turkish Lira anyway, realizing I had no choice.

Here’s what you SHOULD do when you visit Turkey: bring several thousand dollars in cash. Street crime is not an issue in Istanbul, so don’t worry. At the airport, change enough money to get to your hotel. After that, change money at the Grand Bazaar. You can put your excess dollars in your room’s safe.

I wish I had done this, but instead, I listened to confident individuals who knew nearly nothing.

I’ll bet I spent several hundred dollars in unnecessary fees. There is nothing I can do about it. I had no choice, so I don’t care. The trip was important, and the money was not.

We always used private cars to move between airports and hotels. You can do this for as little as $33 right now. They gave us big minivans, and the transfer companies did the planning so we didn’t have to tell them when to arrive. It was fantastic. We sometimes spent as much as $50 for one trip, and I suppose we could have done it for $40 using cabs. The correct choice was obvious.

In Turkey, you need 50-Lira bills. The machines like to give you 100-Lira bills, so break them whenever you can. Most of the things you buy will cost less than 20 Lira.

The hotel was very nice. We had about 300 square feet, plus a huge terrace, near the Sultanahmet area in the Old City. This is where tourists hang out. It’s close to a lot of the tourist stuff, and there are tons of restaurants.

We had a fantastic king size bed, a jacuzzi tub, and a sitting room. The hotel was clean, and things were generally in good condition. The wifi was free. The TV started losing English channels when we arrived, but we didn’t go to Turkey to watch TV.

Istanbul is a walker’s city. On the first night, we walked to the general area of the Hagia Sofia and found ourself a nice touristy restaurant. On the way, we discovered the big problem with Turkey: human mosquitoes.

Mosquito: Excuse me! Where you from?

Me: America.

Mosquito: Where in America?

Me: Florida.

Mosquito: I have an uncle in Florida! Welcome to Turkey!

Me: Thank you.

Mosquito: How long you here?

Me: Just got here.

Mosquito: Let me show you carpet!

Me: I don’t want a carpet.

Mosquito: I give you great price!

Me: A great price on something I don’t want.

Mosquito: Take a look. No obligation!

Me: There is no conceivable way I would even consider buying a carpet.

Mosquito: Why not?

Me: I don’t want one.

Mosquito: Why not?

Me: The smell makes my nose swell shut.

Mosquito: Only wool! I have silk!

Me: I don’t want silk.

Mosquito: Why not?

Me: I don’t want a carpet.

Mosquito: Why not?

Me: I’m not going to go to a foreign country and spend thousands of dollars on something I know nothing about.

Mosquito: Come to my shop! No obligation! I teach you!

Me: Would you let someone who is trying to sell you something teach you about it?

Mosquito: Of course!

Me: No, you wouldn’t.

Mosquito: Just come have some tea.

Me: I’m not buying a carpet.

Mosquito: Maybe tomorrow!

Then the next day, he would say, “You promised to come to my shop today!”

During our stay, we went through this with carpets, fake watches, knockoff leather goods, scarves, boat tours, food, spices, and also Viagra (or what they said was Viagra). We went through it maybe three times in a typical block. A few times, we actually let them take us to shops just because it was so weird.

They were always amazed when I left without buying anything. Weren’t they listening?

They were always polite, and believe it or not, we had some really interesting conversations with a few. I freaked one out by telling him my dad had owned an Isfahan Mechad (spelling?) and an orange Bokhara. I actually know a tiny bit about rugs. He was floored. I told him my dad’s girlfriend had made him get them. He said I needed a rug because they were in my blood, from my dad. I told him they were actually in my dad’s girlfriend’s blood.

If you actually want to buy a rug in Turkey, you’re supposed to go to a place called ABC, by the Grand Bazaar. It has a reputation for quality and honesty, so you shouldn’t have to worry about spending $8000 on a beautiful rug and then having them ship you a roll of burlap. You’re welcome.

The touristy restaurant was near the Blue Mosque, and it was called Mozaik. I would say the prices were about 60% higher than they should have been, because it catered to tourists. It turned out to be very good, however, so we went more than once. In Istanbul, a badly overpriced meal for two runs around $45, so it’s not a catastrophe.

Turkish restaurants tend to serve dishes from other countries, not just Turkey, so in addition to things like kebab and falafel, they had excellent pasta. Rhodah fell in love with the puffy, freshly baked bread and the appetizer platter.

If I go again, I will bring condiments. Turks don’t use enough seasoning in Turkish dishes. A bottle of hot sauce would be a big blessing over there. It’s strange that they don’t use a lot of seasoning, because they are constantly trying to sell people spices. Like I can’t buy spices here. I don’t think they know we have spices in America.

Because I was with a woman, we did buy some junk in Istanbul. That was inevitable and normal, so I was all for it. Rhodah got about 5 purses with weird Turkish embroidery on them, along with some really expensive espadrilles made from carpet. I also got her a scarf which may or may not be made from silk, plus a Vuitton backpack made in Turkey, where all genuine Vuitton bags are made.

We found the backpack in the Grand Bazaar, where only tourists shop, so the guy wanted a sultan’s ransom: 1000 Lira, or around $85. Rhodah is not the best haggler on earth, so I went to work. I told him it was Chinese, pulling back the corners of my eyes to make him understand. It was Turkey, not Berkeley, so I could do that. He insisted it was actually made in Turkey. Maybe it was.

We got him down to around 400, which seemed like too much, so I told him my standard haggling line. I said, “You’re starving our children. You’re taking food out of their mouths.” He and his buddy broke up when I said that. He said he had never heard that one before. He said he would go to 350 just because I said it. We made a deal. He asked how many kids we had. Rhodah said two. I said 6.

They never got mad when I haggled. I think they enjoy it. They didn’t get mad when they said things like “150” and I responded with “25.” It never worked, but I never got punched or anything.

We didn’t plan any tours in Istanbul. We made decisions on the fly.

Our first big excursion was a boat ride around the Bosphorus. It wasn’t a tourist boat. It was a big steel job the locals ride around on. I think we paid about $3 each for a couple of hours. There was no guide, but we sat in comfort on the stern and enjoyed the sights.

We found Gulhane Park, which is a very nice park in the shadow of the Topkapi Palace, where Sultans use to make huge, important decisions with other world leaders. It’s a great place to take a blanket and some food, which we failed to do.

Before we did any more touristing, we found out how to get to one of Istanbul’s malls. They have normal malls, just as we do. The one we picked was called Cevahir. It had a GAP. It had Zara, a bunch of stores more or less along the lines of maybe Anne Taylor Loft, Adidas, Levi’s (company store), Mango, Victoria’s Secret, Sephora, KFC, Popeye’s, and Krispy Kreme.

We tried to pump up Rhodah’s wardrobe there, and then we had a meal of American fast food. The KFC was cooked more skillfully than it is here, but it didn’t taste all that much like KFC. The Popeye’s chicken sandwich was good, and I got it at the only Popeye’s I had ever seen that didn’t resemble a lunatic asylum, but they didn’t have the spicy version. The Krispy Kreme donuts were okay, except for the glazed one. They have to be hot, or they’re useless.

We got her some REAL Nike running shoes, which are greatly outnumbered by fakes outside the US. Unfortunately, she wore them the next day without socks and blistered herself. While this was going on, her new socks were back at the hotel.

I don’t feel like getting deeper into the trip right now, but I will say we got so used to walking by the same determined proprietors, we actually got to know a few. They started to seem like friends. One restaurateur got us to agree to sit at a table and drink free tea, just to make him look busy. We could pretty much count on that offer every night. I told Rhodah we had become models.

Here’s my advice about Turkish restaurants: never, EVER buy the expensive dishes. They’re not very good, and they cost a lot. Get the cheap stuff everyone else eats. Doner kebab. Falafel. Hummus. Baklava. Kofte. Pide. And stay away from “lemonade.” It’s always some chemical mix, even when they tell you it’s homemade. If you like beer, have Efes (Turkish name for Ephesus). It’s truly excellent.

We saw and did all sorts of stuff, and I will probably get back to it later. Right now I think I need a steak.