Hope Your Morning was This Good

Some good things are happening today. First, “Martha” texted and said my friend Travis is still with us, and his condition has not changed. As always, I call that a win. Finding out that he’s alive is great. Learning that he hasn’t gotten worse is icing on the cake. Now we’re just waiting to hear that he’s improving. If you’ve been praying, thanks.

I sent the news out today via text, and my friend Tina responded. I wrote about her the other day. She called me after reading about Travis on Instagram, and since then she has been part of the prayer team.

Today Tina received the news, and I also said I had been saying, “Travis is healed, and Jesus Christ is glorified.” She said this was confirmation of what the Lord had told her the day before. Naturally, I had to ask for more information, so she called.

I can’t recall everything she said, but I can hit the high points.

Yesterday, she spent time praying for Travis in the Spirit and with her understanding. She said the Lord told her her prayers were answered. She said he said Travis was going to be healed, and that he would be healed in such a way that the doctors and providers would know the healing didn’t come from their efforts.

She said God told her she didn’t have to ask for healing. She said he told her to command it and declare it done, so that’s what she has been doing.

I hadn’t told her what I was doing. Our choices were made independently.

She said God told her he was going to work on Travis’s family. That will be nice to see.

Tina is praying for God to help the providers do things they could never do without his help. I am agreeing.

Bonus: I put Tina in touch with Martha, and they hit it off. They are very similar. Two young black women of excellent character who are responsible and successful. Tina can help Martha get to know God. Martha and I texted for a very long time yesterday. I suppose God is drawing her to people who can give her a little guidance.

I had a real text storm today. My friends are really getting behind Travis.

In the midst of all this, I made myself biscuits and gravy. I forgot to halve the recipe, so I ate a little more than I should. The biscuits were wonderful. I keep tinkering with my recipe.

Here is what I did today:

INGREDIENTS

1-3/4 cups AP flour (not self-rising)
1/4 cup starch
2/3 cup milk
1-2 tsp. salt
4 tsp. baking powder (not soda)
2 tbsp. cold bacon grease
2 tbsp. hard butter
2 tsp. sugar
1/2 tsp. citric acid

I should increase the acid slightly, but these were wonderful.

Maybe I can wind down a little now. Who wants to clean my kitchen?

KNOCK IT OFF

I have decided to publish an edict. All inhabitants of earth must comply as of yesterday.

Stop hoarding bread flour.

I still can’t get bread flour in my county. I can get all-purpose, which, of course, isn’t good for all purposes. I can get self-rising. I can get White Lily. I can get all types of corn meal. I haven’t seen bread flour in weeks, and yeast is also unavailable.

Why on earth are people hoarding bread flour and yeast? Who are they fooling? They’re not baking.

Here are some facts no one seems to think about.

1. White flour goes bad in a relatively short time, so unless you can freeze it in an airtight container, hoarding it is likely to lead to substandard bread.

2. Bread is readily available. Stores are packed with it.

3. Bread freezes beautifully.

I don’t have a real problem, because when I saw how things were going, I bought a bag of gluten. I add it to all-purpose flour, and that pretty much turns it into bread flour. Still, I am issuing my edict. I am tired of the nonsense.

I don’t know why corn meal is still available. You can get all the Martha White cornbread mix with Hot Rize your trunk can hold. I had this in mind yesterday when I bought bacon. It’s technically possible to make cornbread without bacon grease, but I hope it never comes to that. It would be disgusting and demoralizing.

People should be thinking about biscuits more than bread. Biscuits are better than bread. Wait! Hold your venom! I will make my case.

It only takes 20 minutes to make biscuits. Furthermore, biscuit recipes tend to be smaller than bread recipes, so you are less likely to make way too much and eat all of it at one sitting.

Not that I know anything about that.

Okay, yes, homemade bread is one of the greatest things ever, but the truth is that it’s too good to keep in your house on a daily basis. If you bake your own bread regularly, you’ll eat 1500 bread calories every day.

Of course, I had yeast before the hype…I mean “pandemic”…started. In fact, I had one more jar than I needed.

I keep laughing when I see how God provides for me. Today I had to make up a batch of my no-scrub shower spray. One of the ingredients is 6 ounces of Dawn dishwashing liquid. In the current hysteria, Dawn is seen as a miracle cure, for reasons I have not been able to determine. Maybe Oprah and Dr. Oz drink it. Most of the time, even here, a trip to the store to get Dawn will be fruitless.

I had about 4 ounces left in the kitchen bottle. Was I concerned? No, because I had a couple of bottles for the upstairs bathrooms, plus one huge jug in the workshop for the pressure washer. But I wondered…had God done it again? Was there ANOTHER bottle under the kitchen sink? I had to look.

There it was. Full. Waiting.

Speaking of Oprah, I kind of wonder when we’re going to start hearing celebrity hoarding stories. They have to exist. Celebrities are generally venal and self-absorbed. They think they’re gods with special importance to humanity, because we can’t get by without their naked Instagram photos and self-righteous Tweets. How did we survive before Chrissy Teigen started telling us what to do? She’s a trained model! Remember Leo DiCaprio flying around on private jets to fight global warming? The stories will come. I’m sure of it.

I had a dream about celebrities last night. I dreamed I was in some venue where Whitney Houston was singing. She was made up beautifully, and she was wearing some sort of partially transparent catsuit. She wasn’t on a stage. She was on a table, on all fours, with her head down near the table top. She was completely engrossed in herself and her singing. Her behind was considerably higher than her face. Her knees were pretty far apart.

Fans weren’t separated from her the way they were during her life. They were walking around the table. Some were touching her. Some were putting their hands between her buttocks, practically committing rape. She was oblivious. She was caught up in her fame and in getting what she had always hoped for: attention and admiration. She felt like a success.

She didn’t look happy. Her expression was like that of an extremely thirsty person who was drinking water. She looked desperate.

I think the dream came from God. It wasn’t a sex dream. It wasn’t exciting for me. I think it was about people who debase themselves in order to become famous. They think they’re in control, but in reality, they are like whores for countless uncaring strangers. They think they’re leaders, but they’re really the worst type of followers. They have no freedom.

Many famous people serve the Beast. The Beast speaks through the mob, and in order to stay on top, celebrities have to obey the mob. We’re in a time when the Beast is training the mob to be more responsive. Celebrities are a big part of it.

Haven’t they always been?

Whitney Houston is one of Satan’s masterpieces. She had everything, and she died naked in a bathtub, in a filthy hotel bathroom, full of drugs, surrounded by takers. She was rich, but she was married to a man who beat her. The Bible says God lifts people up above “the waters.” Whitney Houston drowned in 10 inches of water, on dry land.

Is it me, or are degrading celebrity deaths becoming more common? Michael Jackson, David Carradine, Whitney Houston, Amy Winehouse, Prince…seems like there is an increase, and on top of that, we are suddenly seeing male celebrities die naked from hanging, which suggests erotic asphyxiation. Not a flattering way to be remembered. Solo erotic asphyxiation is one of the most narcissistic, selfish, fleshly things a person can do in this life. When physical pleasure becomes that important to you, you have a problem.

The other day I learned that many gays are now injecting their genitals with meth and a Viagra-like drug called Trimix. Former Tallahassee mayor and failed gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum was found naked and unconscious at what appears to have been an injection party. Pleasure is nice, and a certain amount is harmless, but you shouldn’t trade your soul for it, especially in a subculture in which a man of 50 is considered too old to socialize with. Sooner or later, you will find yourself deprived of access to the things you built your life around.

I keep praying in tongues and trying to prophesy every day. I don’t want to be without guidance and correction. Look how crazy the world is getting. Without God, I will be as lost as anyone else.

I’ve been trying to figure T.B. Joshua out. He’s a Nigerian preacher I’ve written about. He prophesies a lot. It seems very clear that he is the real thing, but sometimes he and his ministry are disappointing. He said he saw “a woman winning” before the 2016 election, and when Clinton lost, he or his people took the video down. Then later he said he had actually seen the popular vote. Maybe his explanation was correct, but taking the video down was not.

Earlier this year, he said rain was falling in Wuhan, washing the epidemic away. Sure enough, afterward, the numbers in China dried up abruptly. But later he claimed the epidemic would end by March 27, and he didn’t limit it to China. Obviously, the epidemic got worse. Then the video containing the prophesy disappeared. Now they have a video saying he predicted that “the noise” of the epidemic would end, and they’re supporting it with a Forbes article claiming March 28 is the day the acceleration of the contagion rate changed instantly.

I think he’s a real prophet who does not always understand his own prophesies, and I think he is covering up when he gets things wrong. That’s unacceptable.

If it’s true, it confirms what I believe, which is that we aren’t supposed to depend on prophets. We are supposed to BE prophets, as Moses indicated and Joel confirmed.

I am trying to prophesy every day, but I’m not transcribing it and putting it here. I want to see how things come out. If I start to feel secure enough to share things with other people, I will. If I’m not sure, I shouldn’t be saying things that could mislead. My purpose isn’t to tell other people the future, anyway. It’s to connect them with God so he can tell them the future and whatever else they need to hear.

My feeling is that even if you’re prophesying for real, if you’re not experienced, you can end up taking over from God and saying things that aren’t correct. I don’t think the gift is enough. I think a little experience is necessary. We’ll see if I’m right.

Living by prophecy is like climbing a mountain one foothold at a time. Every time you speak about what you should do, you have to establish a new foothold and then jump onto it, abandoning the security of the old one. You need to know the footholds are solid.

That’s all I have. I need to go out and test a few rounds of defensive 10mm. I’m hoping to put an end to my search for a good, solid recipe.

Pandemic Logic at Work

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Should I get cheap surgical masks instead?

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

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

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

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

The Evolution of Pistol Ammunition

It’s Sunday. Is that the proper day for confessing? I’m not Catholic. Anyway, I made biscuits again. They called out to me.

After getting my new PC set up, I moved on to a new project: 9mm reloading.

Why would anyone carry a 9mm when he has a 10mm? I started carrying it after my dad died. I had bought him a Glock 26 and a Crimson Trace sight. After he died, it was mine, and I liked carrying it because it had been his. I knew I was giving up stopping power, however. Another reason for carrying it was that I lacked faith in the Lasermax sight on the 10mm.

The other day it occurred to me that I had done nearly nothing to provide for top 9mm ammunition. I had a few magazines full of Cor-Bon hollowpoints, but that was it. I certainly did not have enough to allow practice with defensive rounds. Also, I knew that ammunition had improved a lot since I bought the pistol. If you go 5 years without reevaluating your ammunition, you may miss something important.

When I got my 10mm, 9mm and .40 S&W were not that great. Since then, things have improved to the point where .40 is so good, I almost wish I had my old Glock 22 back. Both calibers have gotten better. Maybe .40 is a better carry choice than 10mm now. Did I really type that? I’m cringing. But it might be true. Maybe the lower recoil and lighter ammunition make up for the lack of power.

A few years back, a site called Lucky Gunner opened. They sell ammunition. The owner actually sent me some ammunition for nothing. I shot it and wrote about it. I applaud this publicity tactic. I think Dan Wesson should send me some free 1911’s to review. Anyway, Lucky Gunner now has some very nice information for people evaluating ammunition. They have interactive charts featuring excellent graphic representations of gel tests. You can sort different rounds by things like expanded diameter and penetration.

I checked that out, and it sure looked like Remington 124-grain Golden Saber hollowpoints were the best choice. They opened up like crazy and penetrated a long way. Problem: it may be weeks or months before anyone can buy these things. I also considered Speer Gold Dots, which performed nearly as well.

Of course, I looked at other sources. The more I got into it, the more types of ammunition I came across. Coincidentally, during this time, I downloaded a book by the late Jim Cirillo, an NYPD officer who killed 11 men in gunfights. He is one of Massad Ayoob’s prominent sources. Ayoob, believe it or not, is not a gunfighter. He was a part-time cop in a sleepy town in New Hampshire. His work is wonderful, but he doesn’t write about shootings from experience. He could probably tell you a lot about writing parking tickets.

I’m not putting him down. He seems like a huge resource, and his house is probably a very bad place for a home invader to visit. I’m just saying he’s not an experienced gunfighter.

Cirillo was part of a stakeout squad that existed for a brief period, after which it was dismantled by liberal bureaucrats who thought too many criminals were being shot. The group was producing more than one outlaw casualty per month, and the liberals in power, being liberals, thought this was a bad thing. By extension, this means they thought it was preferable to continue to allow innocent people to be raped, shot, and killed.

The squad was critized by foggy-headed members of the public who called it an assassination team.

An assassination is a murder, and it is typically committed against an unarmed person. Cirillo’s team hid in businesses that were experiencing repeated robberies. Armed men entered and threatened employees, the police drew on them and told them to surrender, and the armed men did bright things like charging them, shooting at them, shooting employees, and grabbing employees to use as hostages.

Cirillo’s book may change the way you think about self-defense. It emphasized a number of factors most of us don’t think about enough.

One thing the book emphasized was the utter stupidity and depravity of criminals. In story after story, criminals who were confronted by armed cops in superior numbers with better positions and cover decided to shoot instead of surrendering. If you’re not a complete moron, you’re probably not going around robbing drugstores, so perhaps their behavior should not surprise anyone.

One of the dumbest things gun enthusiasts say is that if you rack a pump shotgun (a dubious defense weapon), any criminal who hears it will fill his pants and run away. It doesn’t work that way. Many criminals are very stupid, and many do their work on drugs that make them impervious to fear. Cirillo’s experiences show that criminals often ignore danger, and they also show that some are not discouraged at all by being shot multiple times.

Cirillo and his team were attacked on one occasion, and they fired multiple rounds into the face of their assailant. While they were getting it together after the event, the “body” on the floor asked them to help him up. Every single round had traveled around his head under the skin without penetrating the skull. On another occasion, he shot a man in the head, and the man wasn’t seriously injured. The round literally bounced off.

That brings me to another thing Cirillo thought was important: good ammunition in a powerful caliber.

Cirillo knew of a number of criminals who were still dangerous after taking fire, and understandably, it bothered him. He set out to create a new round that would penetrate well and do maximum damage. He wanted it to go through things like skulls and windshields.

He created a number of different rounds. He patented at least one. He tested his ammunition on car bodies in order to simulate skulls. He was always looking for something that would go through a hard object even when fired from an angle. He didn’t want his bullets bouncing off of criminal’s skulls.

You can understand why he did these things. He knew that if a well-placed shot didn’t do the job, the next shot might be from the criminal’s gun, and it might work very well.

His ammunition didn’t go anywhere, but there are companies that make similar things now, and their products are very interesting.

The round that has caught my attention is the 65-grain copper Lehigh Xtreme Defender. It’s very easy to describe. Imagine a Philips screwdriver bit made from copper. That’s not quite right, but it’s not far off.

The idea is that the flutes of the spinning round will stir up the wet stuff inside the body and create a huge permanent wound channel. Generally, handgun rounds can’t create such a channel because they’re slow. The Xtreme Defender can be pumped up to 1800 fps, which is rifle territory.

The maker says it will go through things like windshields and still do its job. Also, because it’s not a hollowpoint, it may be legal in insane jurisdictions where hollowpoints are banned. Another likely advantage: it’s less likely to fail. Hollowpoints can clog with fabric and fail to expand. That shouldn’t happen with a fluted round.

Does it work? If so, is it worth taking a chance on these instead of tried-and-true conventional ammunition?

It’s amazing that hollowpoints are banned anywhere. “We want you to be able to defend yourself. Just don’t hurt anyone.” Even in liberal states, the authorities know that in a defense situation, you always shoot to kill. They just want you to fail.

The simple truth is that you want the most effective bullet there is. That’s the only thing that makes sense. If they sold bullets that made people explode, they would be perfectly suited to self-defense. The purpose of a bullet is to hurt someone so badly they are instantly rendered unable to harm you. Any bullet that gets you closer to that goal should be legal.

I am not qualified to tell you whether the ammunition works, but Paul Harrell is. He’s a gun nut and former military instructor who does very informative Youtube videos. His strategy is to use what he calls “the meat target.” It’s an old leather jacket, some cloth, a layer of ribs, a watermelon, another layer of ribs, more cloth, more leather, and a bunch of fleece blankets to act as a backstop. He believes the watermelon simulates lung tissue, and you can figure out what the other parts do.

Harrell hates what he calls “hyper” ammunition, which means anything beyond a hollowpoint. He has various objections which you can hear about in his videos.

The Lehigh Xtreme Defense is unquestionably hyper ammunition. Nonetheless, he was very impressed by what it did to his meat target. It pretty much wiped out the watermelon.

His objection is that the ammunition is slightly less accurate than plain old hollowpoints. He fired it from 10 yards, and he got a 5-round group that appeared to be a little over an inch in diameter.

That’s not terrible accuracy. I would guess the group was around 50% bigger than his control group, fired with Remington ammunition. At 20 yards, you would expect around 2.5 inches. Can you shoot that well with match ammunition and a rest? It would be very good shooting. If, like most people, you can’t keep your rounds in a 10-inch circle at 7 yards, you will never notice any accuracy problems with Xtreme Defense.

I think you have to consider recoil if you’re going to consider accuracy. If the recoil from the light bullets is a lot lower than it would be with standard ammo, the advantage in ease of fast target reacquisition might override a small difference in inherent accuracy.

I feel like this is a battle between two philosophies: the Cirillo philosophy and the Harrell philosophy.

Harrell has never been in a gunfight. He shot a man in the head because he appeared to be trying to kill Harrell and his wife, but that’s not a gunfight. You don’t bring a truck to a gunfight.

When you talk to people about defense ammunition, the same people who talk about shotgun racking will invariably say, “If you don’t use standard ammunition, you will be charged with murder, and the fact that you used special ammunition will be used against you.”

Here is my response to that: you can’t be charged with murder…if you’re dead. Dead is what Cirillo and his partners almost were the time they shot an armed criminal in the face without killing him. If their ammunition had actually worked, after the first head shot, they and the civilians around them would have been safe.

If you’re mortally wounded because your prosecutor-pleasing ammunition failed to incapacitate your assailant, will you feel better because you know you minimized the risk of a murder trial?

You can object and say hollowpoints work fine. They really don’t. Not often enough. They do a fabulous job on ballistic gel, but ballistic gel doesn’t wear jeans, a jacket, a shirt, or a belt. When real criminals get shot with hollowpoints moving at handgun speeds, the bullets fail frequently.

There is no EDC-suitable conventional handgun round that “works fine.” Every pistol round is a weak substitute for a rifle or a 12-gauge. They’re all compromises.

Whether an idiot tries to charge you with murder after a justified shooting depends a lot on the circumstances and where you live. It’s not all about the gun or the bullet. Where I live, they would probably give me a medal for shooting a burglar. In order to get in trouble for a shooting which is clearly justified, you pretty much have to live in a liberal-dominated area, you have to shoot a black attacker who doesn’t have a gun, or you have to live in Florida and be the source of so much bigoted and uninformed public outcry that a dishonest governor persuades a disgraceful prosecutor like Angela Corey to perjure herself in order to get your case into court.

Paul Harrell was prosecuted, but appearances were not what caused his problem. He lived in a liberal state. He shot an unarmed man who was driving a truck around his campsite, which provided room for a prosecutor to ask if the shooting was necessary.

He killed his assailant with a deer rifle, so it’s not like he had a Desert Eagle with a red dot scope and leering skulls engraved all over it.

He shot a man who wasn’t using a gun, in a type of situation that probably didn’t sound too solid to jurors. I don’t think he would have been any worse off if he had used a highly modified AR-15 with “Trump Commemorative Edition” stamped on the side.

I’m sure scary-looking ammunition has caused problems for some survivors, but I think the odds of this happening are low. Life isn’t Matlock. Generally, the way things panned out is pretty obvious. The odds that a criminal who is not incapacitated will continue to attack are unacceptably high, as are the odds that a well-placed hollowpoint will fail to incapacitate.

Another thing I keep hearing: you shouldn’t use handloads for self-defense.

I’m not sure I agree. I’m thinking about it.

Factory ammunition is generally less consistent than handloads. That’s just a fact. It’s less accurate, and it sometimes fails to go off. On the other hand, if you get sloppy, it’s easy to make handloads that have the wrong amount of powder in them, that won’t chamber, or that will not extract without being pounded out.

Let’s see.

You can weigh the powder you put in every round. That solves the charge problem, and it’s something manufacturers can’t do. As for chambering issues, you can chamber every round and eject it before carrying it for defense. If it chambers once, it will chamber again.

It wouldn’t be a bad idea to test factory ammo this way. I’ve never seen anyone recommend it, but it’s obvious.

Do you want to trust yourself or a big machine in the Hornady factory, where there is zero possibility that every round will be inspected? I don’t think trusting yourself is a bad idea. Now that I think about it, Cirillo’s squad loaded ammo.

It seems obvious to me that all that matters is whether you handload carefully. If not, buy your ammo at Cabela’s. If you’re careful, why would you trust yourself less than strangers?

Companies that make ammunition charge a great deal more for defensive ammunition, and as far as I can tell, the prices are not in line with the increased price of the bullets, which are the only components that are different from those in target ammo.

Let me check.

Federal 124-grain HST in 9mm. Perfect. I found it for…seriously…$40.50 a box. If you add up the price of components for reloading with new brass, you get something like 50 cents per round. That’s $25. I’m talking about retail, so what is the wholesale cost? Maybe $15? You would think they could put the bullets together and sell them at a price that would put them on shelves for less than $40.50.

The lowest cost for Federal FMJ is around 24 cents, or $12 per box, retail.

Whether or not the markup is reasonable, you can make practice HST with used casings (free) for around $15 per box, and you can make carry rounds with new brass, if fired brass scares you, for $25.

Lower prices = more practice ammunition = better preparation.

Lehigh bullets are very expensive. There is no lead in them, so it’s all copper, and they are machined, not swaged or whatever. On the up side, unlike many brands of bullet, they are available.

I may try some. For that matter, I might try the 10mm version. Hollow points of all calibers fail.

You have to wonder if we’re headed for a future in which powerful, large-bore rounds are actually worse choices than 9mm or even .380. The Lehigh Defender in .380 appears to be pretty nasty.

I don’t know if what I wrote is correct or helpful, but it’s what I’m thinking about today. I’m sure commenters will have thoughts of their own.

Lock Down Flavor with These Biscuits

I feel like blessing the world with a recipe.

Today I got up and saw how great the weather was, and I thought about all the things God does for me, and I decided to make biscuits.

I think no explanation is needed.

I didn’t have buttermilk. I decided to play around with what I had. I made 7 biscuits around 2″ in diameter. You can scale the recipe up. It’s big enough for two reasonable people.

INGREDIENTS

1 cup biscuit flour
2/3 cup milk
2 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. sugar
1 tsp. salt
1 tbsp. cold butter
1 tbsp. cold bacon grease
1/4 tsp. citric acid – I am guessing here. You might start with 1/8 tsp.

Naturally, I had citric acid in my kitchen. This is me we’re talking about. I didn’t have buttermilk, but citric acid is sour, so I used it.

You mix the dry stuff and then cut in the fat. Make sure it doesn’t melt. Mix in the milk, holding some back so you can sneak up on the right amount without making the dough too wet. Roll and fold the dough 4 times, using flour to keep it from sticking to things. I roll the dough out to about 5/8″ high before cutting the biscuits.

Put the biscuits next to each other on the pan, grease the tops, and bake at 450.

I don’t trust Alton Brown, for very good reasons, but he can’t always be wrong, and says to put biscuits close to each other to make them rise higher. I don’t know if it worked, but it didn’t hurt.

I was concerned that the citric acid might make the biscuits heavy or tough, because citric acid is an emulsifier, but they were fine. Very nice. The hint of acidity made the biscuits much better than usual. I think I shouldn’t bother buying buttermilk any more. Citric acid gives me better results. Maybe I could use buttermilk and a smaller dose of acid.

I ate the biscuits with gravy made with country ham fat and bacon grease.

These were tremendous. I’m glad I only made 7.

UPDATE

I made the biscuits again. I believe you need a good solid 1/4 teaspoon of citric acid per cup of flour.

A Nation Turns its Lonely Eyes to You

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good luck.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What does that mean?

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

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

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

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

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

Sweden knew a Ferris Bueller scenario was unsustainable.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Plant Closures Threaten Americans with Crippling Flatulence, B12 Deficiencies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I don’t have worms. That’s for sure.

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

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

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

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

I’ll take that.

Just What we Need; More Panic

It’s official. I am a meat hoarder.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s for science.

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

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

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

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

The coronavirus news never stops changing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Navy Beans and Poached Squirrel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Goodbye, Pandemic; Hello, Needless Recession

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Common Cocktail in the Crosshairs

If you’re in the state of Florida, I have news you can use. It turns out liquor stores and Dunkin’ Donuts are essential businesses. You may not be able to go to work and feed your family, but you can knock back all the gin you want. There is no shortage. And you can dunk crullers in it.

Speaking of gin, I bought some. I picked Boodle’s. I am just barely a drinker, but coronavirus drove me to the bottle. I kept reading stories about quinine-related medicines which are being used successfully to treat the disease. That got me thinking about quinine, and one thing led to another.

Quinine is an essential ingredient in tonic water, which is used to make gin and tonics.

For those who don’t know, here is the history of the gin and tonic, as I recall it from listening to unreliable gossip. The British conquered most of the world so they could do helpful things like growing opium in India and forcing China to let them sell it to addicts. A lot of the places the British conquered had mosquitoes and malaria. Quinine kills the malaria parasite, so British occupiers had to take it regularly. It tasted disgusting by itself, but some clever person–this is not a surprise, considering the fact that we’re talking about the British–decided to combine it with strong drink. Eventually, the concoction morphed into the concoction known as the gin and tonic, which Americans perfected by adding ice.

Some claim the gin was added to kill bacteria in third-world drinking water, but come on. We weren’t born yesterday.

Will tonic water give you a good dose of quinine that might help you avoid coronavirus? Yes. If you drink two liters a day. That’s what I read, anyway. Modern tonic water generally contains very little quinine. Two liters of gin and tonic per day may be business as usual for a British soldier, but it would be hard on most people.

I read that there are snobby brands of tonic water that contain a lot more quinine than, say, Canada Dry. Maybe you could get by with a pint a day. You’re not driving to work anyway, so why not?

I didn’t mean that.

Funny thing: tonic water seems to be disappearing from shelves. I went to the store yesterday and today. Yesterday, I could get anything I wanted. Today I couldn’t find the snobby stuff. I wanted to see what it was like. I’ve tried it before, but I forgot how it tasted.

There is a theory that quinine softens berserk immune responses like the one that kills coronavirus fatalities. Is it true? How would I know? Interesting, though.

In related news, locals are now hoarding inexpensive sugar. There must be a story out there that says it cures coronavirus. My local groceries are running out of store-brand sugar, but the expensive stuff, which is exactly the same, is still there.

Maybe the bag itself is the cure.

I got myself a new propane cooker. I had to order it because people hoarded them. Someone explain that. I bought a wimpy one a while back, and it had to be coaxed to do an acceptable job of frying steaks in butter. When I realized it was always going to be a challenge to use it, I decided to get a bigger one, but by then, half of the county had decided that propane cookers were the answer to respiratory disease.

The first one put out something like 50,000 BTU’s, if memory serves. The new one is over 200,000, I think. Anyway, it really pumps out the heat. Perfect steak, here I come.

I ordered it from Home Depot, and they shipped it to the store. Today I got a text telling me to get curbside service. I drove to Home Depot, and a guy in the wrong kind of mask came out and lobbed it into my hatch. On the sidewalk in front of the store, people were standing in line on marks six feet apart. They had to wait for the doorman to let them in. That was new. It used to be easier to get into Studio 54.

The epidemic appears to be dying out, so I hope the weirdness subsides soon. In the meantime, coronavirus has made shopping at Home Depot much easier. You sit in your car and make them do the work. It’s hard not to like that.

Guess I’ll have a steak and a G&T. Life could be worse.

Braised Rubber Equals Good Eats

Interesting stuff is going on today.

First off, I received–and tried–my rice cooker today.

Cooking rice correctly is not hard if you do it several times a month, but if you lay off, you forget exactly which measurements, stove settings, and cooking times work. I gave up and ordered a computerized cooker.

I was going to go with something that only makes rice, but I saw that I could get an Instant Pot automatic pressure cooker for a reasonable price. I had to try that. Pressure cookers are wonderful, and a pressure cooker that already knows how to do a lot of basic things, and which also lets you choose how long it stays on, sounded like a godsend.

So I made rice, right? No. I made boliche, which is a Cuban dish. This may be the first time I’ve wanted any type of Cuban food since leaving Miami. Generally, it makes my stomach hurt when I see a sign for a Cuban restaurant, and the thought of eating food that reminds me of one of the most unpleasant cities in America turns me off. But today I needed something suitable for pressure-cooking, and boliche came to mind.

Boliche is eye round roast. It’s like a big piece of fat-free rubber shaped like a tongue. If you throw it in the oven and try to prepare it like a real roast, it will be inedible. If you cook it forever in the presence of the right ingredients, it’s very good.

I made a tunnel in the roast and shoved cheap chorizos into it. I covered the roast with salt, pepper, cumin, and fresh garlic. I added red wine and a little water, plus a couple of sacrificial onions for flavor. I cooked the meat for 45 minutes. Then I tossed in seasoned potatoes, carrots, and more onions and cooked everything for another 15 minutes.

You can’t cook vegetables and meat in a pressure cooker for the same amount of time, because the vegetables disintegrate. I saved most of my onions for the second cooking session. I only added onions to the first run to get their flavor into the meat.

The boliche was quite good. It would have been better had I remembered to add red bell peppers, but it was very nice. It could have been more tender, though, so after dinner, I put the meat back in the machine by itself and set it to run 15 more minutes. Really good boliche is on the verge of falling apart, and the sauce permeates it.

Is it worth it to use a computerized cooker to make boliche? It’s an improvement. It’s easier to clean than my regular pressure cookers, and it’s somewhat easier to use. It should give reproducible results easily because it has repeatable settings. On occasions when I have to cook a lot of things, it will free up a stove burner and turn itself off for me, and it will keep things warm when they’re done. It’s hard to see buyer’s remorse in this picture.

I’ll make rice sooner or later. I look forward to rice that doesn’t have little crunchy bits in the middle or a layer of leathery rice on the bottom.

Second major event: I received more .22 LR ammo. I now own too much of it to carry without risking a back injury. I have 5,000 more rounds on order, but the company I bought it from seems shady, so I wouldn’t be surprised if I ended up disputing the charge and getting a refund from my credit card company. My lack of confidence in them is the reason I ordered the shipment that arrived today.

Now I feel good about the .22 LR supply. I can sit back and see if it loosens up. I honestly think 15,000 rounds by mid-summer would be a good sensible goal. As I have said before, it only gets more expensive with time, and I know perfectly well that I’ll shoot thousands of rounds during my life. Best to get the buying over with.

This caliber is indispensible. If you want to be a good shot, practice makes a big difference, and .22 LR makes it affordable. It’s also more pleasant to shoot than bigger calibers. It’s good for hunting. It’s good for slaughtering farm animals. You can even use it for self defense if you’re a good shot with a big magazine. For under $700, you can get a very good pistol plus enough ammo and targets to turn you into an excellent marksman.

I really like Mini-mags. I am content to settle on them for my go-to .22 cartridges for the foreseeable future. I don’t think something else will pop up next month and blow them out of the water. CCI/Speer has always given me great results. I’ve shot aluminum Blazers, brass Blazers, .22 LR, and 10mm Gold Dots. No problems at all. Can’t say that about every brand *cough cough PMC*.

I found an okay deal on 7.62x39mm, but it’s probably gone now. The company I wanted to buy from listed the price as about $250. Problem: one part of their site said it was 100 rounds, and another said 1000. I asked for clarification days ago. They had a box of ordinary pistol ammo priced at something like $35, and that suggested they were not above gouging. I didn’t want to receive a very small box of ammo with a $300 invoice.

They finally responded this afternoon. It’s 1000 rounds. Now…how likely is it that they still have it? I’ll check.

Dang. They still have it.

I have over 1000 rounds already. Why do I want more?

When I first got into AK ammo, I bought Wolf hollowpoints. I figured they were a good balance of low price and reasonable usefulness in a defensive situation. Then I found out Tulammo hollowpoints did a lot better in tests, so I ordered those. Recently, I learned that Tulammo soft points do better than hollowpoints, and the price is either identical or close.

I have no desire to harm anyone, but I did buy my Eastern-bloc guns for self-defense, and it seems to me that I might as well have ammo that works.

People say they do well with deer, using Tulammo soft points. Sounds good enough for me. Anything that works well on deer works well on unexpected guests.

There is a lot of pricey non-Russian AK ammo out there, and maybe it will work somewhat better than Tulammo. I don’t know. Tulammo seems very good, and when you’re shooting 30-round magazines, it’s hard not to think about cost.

Maybe I’m not being logical. I have a desire to make a credible effort to maintain good self-defense ammo, but on the other hand, I am not excited about shooting human beings, and I like saving money. Tulammo is where this maelstrom of motivations took me.

People love to say, “How much is your life worth?”, when discussing ammo prices. I’m not sure my life is worth $1.50 per round. Also, I don’t think a murderer will take 20 hits of Tulammo and then run over, stick a knife in me, and say, “Should have bought Hornady, vato.”

Buying the first lot of Tulammo turned my Wolf into range fodder, and buying a second lot would turn the first lot into range fodder. Guess I’ll start shooting the AK and Vz58. My steel targets are probably too small to hit from a safe distance (100 yards), so I should get a bigger gong or shoot paper.

Widener’s. That’s who has the ammo. If you’re looking for Tulammo soft points, jump on it. I’ve written about the situation before, but I didn’t want to mention the name because I was afraid someone who reads the blog would snap it all up. Before tax and shipping, it’s 25 cents per round. That’s acceptable. The shipping isn’t too bad.

Cheaper Than Dirt has been gouging like crazy. I don’t know why anyone buys from them. Maybe it’s old guys who can’t Google well enough to find good deals. Does the proprietor understand just how cheap dirt is? The name of the company is a bad joke.

I’m all set now. Nearly. I just need some more .22 rifles and pistols, rifle brass, primers, powder, and bullets, an infra-red scope or two, a rangefinder, a couple of cool shooting jackets like Paul Harrell wears, a McCormick AR trigger, several suppressors, and a tactical haircut with lots of gel.

It has been a pleasant day. Hope things are looking up in your area.

Chicken Meat and a Pint of Spices

Today I made doro wat (Ethiopian chicken stew) again, and I think it’s time to change the model.

Doro wat starts with a big pile of spices. The main spice is paprika, but it also contains pepper, cumin, cardamom, and some other things. You throw the dry spices in a skillet and heat them until they smoke. The spices alone, for my two pounds of meat, must have amounted to 6 dry ounces.

My recommendation: replace half of the cardamom with black cardamom, which is stronger. Black cardamom is also smoked, so that adds something.

Another thing: take the amount of sauce in whatever recipe you use, and double it. The sauce is really important.

This dish is traditionally served with boiled eggs. You simmer it with chicken for 40 minutes, and then you add boiled eggs and continue for another 20 minutes. As I was eating it today, I saw the error. Doro wat needs FRIED eggs. They should be fried at a fairly high temperature so you get some browning and little semi-crunchy areas.

Instead of simmering the eggs with the chicken, you could fry them over easy and add them at the end. Then you would get tasty soft yolks.

Here’s another idea for changing the spices: replace a third of the paprika with hot chipotle powder, which is really just a type of paprika. It helps a lot.

I put minced habaneros in my doro wat. It’s just not hot enough without them.

I serve it with cold sour cream on the side. This is mandatory. I don’t care what Ethiopians say. Sour cream and spicy food are a marriage made in heaven. The fat lets you crank up the heat without pain.

If you’ve never had doro wat, you have no idea what I’m talking about. It’s very nice. I would describe it as chicken-based Ethiopian beanless chili.

Today I ate my doro wat with rice. The traditional thing is a huge pancake, but that really adds to the labor.

I have given up on myself as a rice preparer. I don’t know about you, but if I don’t cook rice a couple of times a month, I lose my touch. Every stove is different, and you forget the perfect heat setting. I gave in and ordered a machine that cooks rice. This is one area where I’m totally confident in Chinese appliances. If there’s one thing they’re going to do right…

I’m getting a computerized pressure cooker that does a bunch of things in addition to cooking rice. People rave about it. Sounded like a good idea to me. Alton Brown may ruin steaks with his odd preparation method, and my wild guess is that he’s probably not a great cook, but I think he’s right about kitchen tools that only do one job. It’s generally best to buy things that have versatility.

I’m not getting back into cooking. I’m just trying to do things right and expand my capabilities. I have gotten into a dinner rut, so anything that opens up new possibilities is probably a good move. Steak and spaghetti are wearing me down.

Here’s my opinion on the popularity of Ethiopian food: it would be much higher if Ethiopians had some understanding of sanitation. When you order food at an Ethiopian restaurant, they bring your table a huge platter of pancakes, and they dump everyone’s entrees on it. Then everyone tears the pancakes, puts food on the torn bits, rolls them up, and eats them. It’s the opposite of social distancing. It’s social proximation, and it’s gross and dangerous.

When I go out to eat, I just want food and conversation. I don’t want to get herpes.

This dish is delightful. It makes the house smell wonderful, the spices open up your head, and if you make it spicy, you get that nice capsaicin buzz.

I just updated my recipe. I’ll post most of it below. Maybe you’ll like it.

This is what passes for excitement during these challenging times.

By the way, I saw a bunch of packages of paper towels at my local Winn-Dixie today, and I also had no problem buying mouthwash, which is still a good idea even when you’re staying 6 feet away from people.

No major celebrities have died. Amazing. John Prine is gone, but you probably have no idea who he is. He wrote two fairly well-known songs. He was 73 and looked to be in pretty bad shape. He had severe heart problems, and he was a lung cancer “survivor,” which generally means remission, not a cure. He was a former cigarette smoker, so his lungs were badly damaged even if he was cured.

The Chinese found that smokers in a study were 14 times as likely to develop pneumonia as other coronavirus patients.

INGREDIENTS

2 pounds chicken legs and thighs or boneless chicken
6 eggs
2 softball-sized white onions, chopped finely (or coarsely)
1-2 very large habanero or Scotch bonnet peppers, minced
1 cups chicken or beef broth
½ cup red wine
8 tbsp. tomato paste
1 stick butter
2-4 heaping tbsp. minced fresh ginger
4 tbsp. shallots, chopped finely
2 heaping tablespoons pressed garlic
2 teaspoon salt
Juice of 2 lemons
4 tbsp. paprika
2 tbsp. chipotle powder
½ tsp. allspice
½ tsp. turmeric
1- ½ tsp. nutmeg
1 tsp. cardamom
1 tsp. ground black cardamom
1 tbsp. ground fenugreek
1 tsp. pepper
1 tsp. cumin
1 tsp. coriander
¼ tsp. ground cloves
¼ tsp. cinnamon

I’ve made this with chicken breast, but it tends to be dry. Traditionally, chicken pieces with bones (legs and thighs) are used. I leave the skin on. I think the bones improve the texture of the sauce, but they make the dish a pain to eat. I suppose you could boil chicken bones in the chicken broth if you wanted the thick sauce but not bones in your food.

If you’re using breast meat, cut the chicken in chunks twice as big as a sugar cube. If not, you can toss the pieces in whole or cut them up Asian-style with a cleaver. Salt the chicken well and add the juice of two lemons. Stir it up and let it sit for at least half an hour. You can cheat by using ¼ teaspoon of citric acid if you don’t have lemons.

Fry the eggs. Fry them on the hot side so you get some little crunchy areas.

Heat a large skillet (medium heat). Throw the dry spices in the hot skillet. Stir them around with a spatula while you toast them for about three minutes. A little smoke is okay, but don’t burn them. The scent will change, and you’ll know they’re done. Dump them in a bowl, and wipe the skillet out with a wet paper towel.

Get the skillet hot again and throw the onions in, dry. Stir them as you cook them, so they don’t scorch. When they start to turn clear, or if they begin to brown, add the butter and the shallots and continue to cook until the shallots turn clear.

Throw the rest of the ingredients in the pan, except for the chicken and eggs. Stir and simmer until everything is mixed well. Add the chicken. If you really want to go crazy, brown the chicken in oil or clarified butter before you add it.

Simmer the chicken and other ingredients for 40 minutes. Add the eggs. Cook for 20 more minutes.

Traditional doro wat uses boiled eggs. If you use them, pierce them with a skewer before adding to the stew.

No Telling How Much Money $40,000 Worth of Tools will Save You

No one can say my day is being wasted. I finished assembling my new steel gong target stand. Photo to follow.

I feel like I’m in heaven.

The gongs arrived today. I decided to hose them all with black truck bed coating. It seems to resist bullets very well. I thought it would be good to put it under the orange paint on the small gongs because if the paint flaked off, the black would give a nice contrast.

I’m extremely happy with the stand. The whole job probably took less than 6 hours, including the paint. From a distance, it looks like a professional did it. In just the right light. If you squint.

I went to the grocery today, a little earlier than usual. It appears that the governor’s lockdown order scared people, because there were some hoarders there. You can tell who they are because their carts are piled high. The store had lots of eggs, there was bleach in the detergent area, and I even saw rubbing alcohol in carts.

Forget toilet paper. You have to get there pretty early for that.

They had big stickers on the floor near the checkout stands. When you stand in line, you’re supposed to stand on a sticker to maintain your distance from other people. I like that idea. They should keep those stickers. I don’t want people’s kids bumping into me. I don’t want their dogs licking me. And the added distance should hinder all sorts of diseases, not just coronavirus.

I wonder if it would offend people if I had some stickers of my own printed up and put them down wherever I am when I socialize.

Yesterday I wasn’t able to find a package of chicken suitable for Ethiopian chicken stew. Today, at a different store, the chicken-hoarding wasn’t as bad, and I got what I wanted. That was nice. They also had Ben & Jerry’s on sale.

I hit an auto parts store to buy truck bed coating for my target stand. Hey, car parts and firearms are essential. By extension, target practice is essential. I know my rights. The store was running normally, except they had a couple of things taped up for people to read. Curbside service and whatnot.

I plan to “test” the targets with the Marlin Model 60 and the Smith & Wesson SW22. I hate to say it, but the ticky-tacky Model 60 is growing on me now that I have spent two years correcting its faults. I shot my Savage A22 the other day, and while it’s ten times the gun, it’s somewhat lower in charm.

I found I had a harder time hitting the targets at 20 yards with the A22 than with a pistol. The reason? Wind. It was a blustery day, and a rifle really catches the breeze. The crosshairs roamed all over the place. Never thought I would wish for a pistol while shooting a rifle.

Time to go try out the new targets. This should be great.