“Smitty,” They call Me

Reader LauraW posted some interesting comments about my recent dealings with my elderly aunt.

My grandparents left some property to their descendants, and my 78-year-old aunt is in charge of getting rid of it and distributing the proceeds. She should have been finished with nearly everything in about 2012. She doesn’t provide bank statements or reports, and she says she doesn’t have to, which is something most prosecutors would disagree with.

She has Parkinson’s, and her health is very, very bad. She has trouble speaking and walking. She has been hospitalized at least once. Her husband is 89 and appears to be senile. He is also in bad health, and he is not expected to stay out of assisted living long. He takes care of my aunt, so a crisis is expected soon.

My aunt has two grown children. I can’t imagine her son offering to care for her. It would be very unlike him. I think her daughter and her son-in-law would want to do the right thing, but they have kids to deal with, and their house is not that big. In all likelihood, my aunt will have to choose between 24-hour live-in help or the local nursing home.

While I was in Singapore, my aunt texted me and said I needed to contact her right away about a property she wanted to sell, and I responded, saying I was in the process of flying home and I would try to contact her the next day. When I arrived, I called her. She was very angry with me from the second she answered the phone. She was angry with me for taking a trip, and she demanded to know why I had done it.

She asked me who goes on vacation during November, as though I had done it to offend her, personally. Well, can anyone think of a day in November when people like to travel? And who calls his aunt for permission to leave town? No one thinks, “I want to go to Fiji, so I better call all my elderly relatives who almost never talk to me.”

While we were talking, I spoke very bluntly about her poor performance, but I was not rude. She apparently felt she was being attacked personally. She said a lot of very insulting things about me which were shocking and untrue, and she speculated that I was poor and desperate and had no one in my life except a “sorry dog.” Paradoxically, she also criticized me for bragging that I was “filthy rich,” which I did not do. I didn’t tell her anything about my financial situation.

You can read more details in an earlier post.

LauraW says she was an RN, and she worked with psych patients and old people. She said urinary tract infections sometimes cause old people to go nuts, and she said antibiotics bring them back.

I don’t know anything about my aunt’s urinary health. We are not close these days, and even if we were, I would not be connected with her care in any way. She has her husband and children, and aside from that, she is not inclined to take advice.

I decided to look up Parkinson’s. I knew it caused dementia and other mental problems, but that was about the sum of my knowledge.

Parkinson’s is incurable and fatal. The web says it isn’t fatal, but that’s not really true, because it causes problems that shorten life. When it sets in in late middle age, you can expect to live about 20 more years, depending on the breaks. My aunt is at the upper range of that period now.

When I was a kid, and people got fatal diseases, doctors either told them they were going to die, or they told their families and let the families keep them in the dark. Now, the fashionable thing is to refuse to say conditions are fatal. It doesn’t mean they’re not. It just means the medical establishment has developed a bias against saying so. The official dogma appears to be that Parkinson’s isn’t fatal, but on the other hand, you can find all sorts of sites discussing deaths caused by Parkinson’s, so, yes, it’s fatal, unless something else gets you first. The same could be said of any fatal disease. You can get rabies and die from an unrelated heart attack.

We think of Parkinson’s as something that causes tremors, but it also causes hallucinations, delusions, and dementia.

I found out it can make people paranoid and likely to argue. They may become physically violent.

It is common for people with Parkinson’s to see things that aren’t there, like brightly-colored animals.

My aunt said some weird things to me, causing me to wonder if she was experiencing psychosis. She seemed panicked because I was questioning her actions as my fiduciary. Panicked people often lash out. Proud people with dementia do this when you question their faculties.

She seemed to feel it would help if she criticized my life to make me feel like a loser. Thing is, she doesn’t know much about my life because her side of the family started excluding me a long time ago. She had to guess. She attacked in various areas, including the area of romance and family. She said I had flown to Egypt to try and find a woman who would agree to come home with me and marry me. That was weird.

Did someone tell my aunt I went to Egypt last year? I don’t know. I don’t believe she knows. I know she has no idea I’m married, because she said she had grandchildren and all I had was the dog she imagined. One of her longstanding traits is that she wants people to admire her life and feel bad about their own.

My grandparents had eight grandchildren, and by God’s blessing and no virtue of my own, I turned out to be the smartest. I think this gnaws at my aunt. She used to tell me how brilliant her kids were, even though it wasn’t true. Then it was her son in law, who went on to die in a plane crash, removing him from the arsenal. Now it’s the grandchildren. Evidently, they are all prodigies, although no one else in the family seems to have noticed. She also tells me how incredibly intelligent various local eccentrics are, even though there is no truth at all in that. Smart people get out of Eastern Kentucky.

I think she was guessing about the trip I just completed, which had nothing to do with Egypt. If she had heard anything substantial about last year’s Egypt trip, she would know I was married. I took that trip with my then-fiancee.

I didn’t mention my marriage because I felt it could be helpful to me to hold onto that information, and I didn’t feel any motivation to get into the process of arguing with her about whether I was a loser and she and her family were to be greatly admired. That kind of bickering is not important to me. I didn’t insult her kids or her life, and I certainly had room to do so.

It would be pretty strange to go to Egypt to find a wife. The prime countries for foreign brides are the Philippines and Thailand, as far as I know. I believe Ukraine is also high on the list. Egypt is a Muslim country, so it’s not a great hunting ground. Nothing spoils a wedding night like a honor killing.

Finding a wife in the US is not exactly hard, so it makes no sense to suggest I would fly overseas if I were desperate. If you’re a desperate American male, stay where you are. You just have to make yourself available, have a net worth, and stop saying no. Finding a wife you actually want is another story. Only God can arrange that.

In any case, if I had been desperate for a wife, I would have looked here first. In fact, I did, when I decided to check out online dating. The Americans who popped up…there was just no way. Unthinkable.

My aunt must have come up with Egypt through a coincidental delusion or a guess. My wife and I have been to 4 countries, so the odds of her randomly picking one we had visited were not all that low.

I don’t think American brides will ever be hard for American men to find, and I doubt they will ever be in big demand overseas, because they tend to be spoiled, selfish, conceited, and misandrist. And they’re not especially attractive compared to the competition. Far Eastern brides get the best marks in that area, and Eastern European girls are also very impressive compared to Americans. American women also have a very high obesity rate. Over 40% of American women are obese, and 12% are severely obese.

I can say these incendiary things now, because I’m married and have nothing to be afraid of. Although, to be honest, I would have said them anyway.

I am checking Wikipedia, and it looks like I’m right. It says:

The majority of the women making use of these services in the late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century are from Southeast Asia and from Russia and other countries in the former Soviet Union.

It also backs up what my friend Mike, who does business with Ukrainians, has told me:

52 percent of Russia’s workforce is made up of women, yet according to some sources they often hold low positions of prominence in their home country and work jobs with less respect and lower wages (such as teaching or physician positions); and women earn 43 percent of what men do. Marriage is a substantial part of Russian culture, with 30 years being the age at which a woman is considered an “old maid”. With 4,138,273 more females than males from the ages of 15 to 64, marriage opportunities are slim at home and worsened by the life expectancy difference between men (64.3 years) and women (73.17 years), as well as the fact that a large portion of successful males are emigrating out of Russia.

I realize Ukraine is not Russia, but the foreign-marriage business is big not only in Russia itself, but also in countries like Ukraine which have similar cultures and are part of the same general area.

Foreign men who pursue American girls are generally looking for money or temporary non-Muslim demi-wives to serve as unpaid servants and sex providers.

For all their problems, I don’t think American men are as undesirable as American women. If you think they are, I have three questions.

1. Why is “bridezilla” a word, while “groomzilla” is not?

2. Why do American women crave marriage while most American men fear it?

3. Why are American men lining up to find foreign brides while almost no American women are looking for foreign men?

In at least three places, Proverbs cautions against the horror of an combative wife. I go further. I always say marrying the wrong woman is, literally, worse than cancer. America is a great place to find the wrong wife.

My aunt seems way more argumentative than she used to be, which could be a Parkinson’s symptom. I’m not sure, though, because I used to be one of her favorites, so I may not have seen what others have been seeing all her life. I have been told my sister and my other living aunt were chewed out royally by her. I have heard stories that made her sound pretty awful. Maybe she has always been nasty to other people.

In conversations with me, she always sought approval. I think she wants validation from people who didn’t grow up in Eastern Kentucky. I think she perceives them as more sophisticated, which is true.

My wife and I pray for my relatives. That’s all we can do. When thinking about what’s happening makes me angry, and it does, I use my supernatural tools to end it and get God’s help to love them. I don’t want pettiness to damage my relationship with Him.

Unsaved people who are too close to you will be used to drag you down to hell. This is why we are not to be unequally yoked. Provocation is one way they do it.

I’m very glad my relatives are only connected to a small part of what I have. Such independence is a gift from God, and it is an extraordinarily great gift I did nothing to deserve. I deserve poverty, but God lifted me up. Many, many people are in horrible marriages or are caught up in family turmoil or have cruel employers and jobs they can’t quit. I have been spared in spite of inviting these problems.

My aunt criticized my parents and me, saying we were ashamed of our people and our culture. Don’t ask me to explain it, but she felt this disqualified me from telling her she should advertise real estate on the web like everyone else, including people in Appalachia. She thinks I should be ashamed because I don’t admire my people, or former people. I thought about her remarks a lot yesterday.

If you’re a Christian, it’s very important to reject your earthly culture and to be ashamed of it, especially if you come from a backward place like the one where my aunt lives.

It goes beyond rejecting certain earthly cultures. You have to reject the culture and ways of the earth as a whole. Things that work to make you successful as an unbeliever don’t work for Christians. To make it without God, you are expected to be proud, aggressive, relentlessly self-promoting, greedy, and way too devoted to hard work. To succeed as a Christian, you have to be humble, peaceful, self-abasing, generous, and unwilling to sacrifice your relationship with God in order to make money.

Backward cultures are worse than relatively healthy ones, emphasizing stupid things like fighting, drinking, emotionalism, ethnic pride, racism, fornication, adultery, and contempt for education. All these things are celebrated in Eastern Kentucky.

My wife rejects Zambian culture. People ask me why I don’t go visit her, and I tell them she doesn’t want me to. We have no incentive to get together there. There is nothing in Zambia except wild animals and Victoria Falls. Her parents are dead. The relatives who looked after her when she was young treated her badly, and a number of them are witches who put curses on her.

Rhodah used to want to enter politics so she could fix Zambia. Now she wants to get out and move to America. She’s not stupid. She can look around and see that her country isn’t going anywhere. There are a lot of good Christians there, but they are outnumbered by pagans and Catholics. America is doomed, but it offers a better standard of living and a husband who will be unified with her in her relationship with God. Most importantly, I think, it will get destructive relatives out of her life.

You have to hold onto the family God gives you, but you should also cut the old one loose.

Yesterday we talked about our names. She said she wants to dump both of her names, both first and last. She was a neglected child, and her first name was issued as an afterthought. She was so neglected, her birth date is uncertain because no one cared enough about her to keep good records. She says I should pray for God to tell me what to name her.

I plan to get rid of my dad’s last name. I like the idea of taking my mother’s father’s name, which is a very common one. I want to get rid of my middle name because a middle name is one more thing to write down on forms, and it makes you easier to trace. We can have nice, common names that are very hard for people to use to look us up on the web. Perfect for making a new start. I don’t want people from my past, especially hopeful divorced women, bothering me. My life and my real brothers and sisters are in the future.

I don’t know how my aunt feels about people of other races today, but I know what she said in the past. I have to wonder what will go through her mind if Rhodah and I show up with a mixed-race son who has my grandfather’s first and last names. I think my grandfather’s family name is a bit like an Hermes “H” to her.

Time for yet another digression. A year or two ago, my dad’s email address got a message from a woman who used to work for him. She was an associate in his firm. She wanted to know how he was doing. Mind you, this was a person who probably had not contacted him in 10 years, and she had no idea he was dead.

I emailed her back, letting her know my dad had passed away. So of course, she responded with condolences, asked what happened, and said she hoped I was okay.

No, she didn’t! She didn’t respond at all. And I know her and her husband. We are not strangers.

Googling, I see that she and the man I knew as her husband now live in different states.

Here’s what I think: she took her shot. Best guess. Maybe she emails other elderly single men.

I don’t think she had a heartfelt interest. My dad was rude to his subordinates and said all sorts of offensive things to them. I recall two colorful terms he used to refer to this lady.

I don’t think she’s a malevolent person, but it’s common for older women to need money, and marrying is one of the most common ways to fill the need.

The older a man gets, the more women will see him as a potential musical chair. Something to be aware of.

To get back on track, I am expected to be excited about my people and be loyal to them, but who are my people? Not my grandfather’s descendants. They don’t care about me at all. My people are those who are Spirit-led. Jesus said the same thing. He said, “whoever does the will of My Father in heaven is My brother and sister and mother,” and the word says it is impossible to please God in the flesh, so he was talking about Spirit-led people.

Maybe we should call ourselves Mr. and Mrs. Jim and Mary Smith. Does it matter whether our earthly names have any connection to our ancestors? People who claim to have died and visited heaven sometimes tell us we have new names there, which is probably true. I can’t imagine heaven having three million people named John Jones.

I used to think Eastern Kentucky was my refuge and a sort of paradise on Earth, but now I have no desire to go there again. It’s like Miami to me. I hope I never have to visit again. Drugs, laziness, violence, racism, self-inflicted poverty, childishness…these are the things it offers me. It offers to pull me backward and take away whatever improvements God has made.

Eastern Kentucky is rich, or it used to be before leftists killed the coal industry. It should be like Texas. Instead, Kentuckians sold their mineral rights to less-backward people from places like New York City, and they became laborers for the people who owned the coal. It wasn’t theft, regardless of what apologists say. They did what Esau did. They gave their birthrights away for fleeting short-end benefits.

Fools are supposed to lose their money to responsible people. It’s not an aberration, and it certainly isn’t unjust. Appalachia has poverty because it earned it.

The funny thing about what my aunt said is that it applies to her, too. She is also ashamed of her culture and her people. She’s always trying to make them look better, and she likes to claim accomplished people who came from the area. The problem is that she claims people whose parents got out before they were born. She likes to talk about J.D. Vance and Cameron Crowe.

Until my aunt told me, I had no idea who J.D. Vance was or that he was connected to Breathitt County, Kentucky, where my grandfather sat as judge. I didn’t know who Cameron Crowe was or that he had a parent from Powell County, another county on my grandfather’s circuit. Vance is a senator-elect who wrote a bestseller about toxic mountain culture, and Crowe wrote Jerry Maguire.

The problem with using them to prop up Kentucky is that both these men are from other places. Like many Kentuckians who wanted better lives, Vance’s parents moved to Ohio, and he was born there. Crowe has only one parent from Kentucky, and he was born in Palm Springs.

Obviously, the Vances and the Crowes were unhappy with our culture, and their sons probably would not have succeeded had they stayed in Kentucky. Furthermore, Vance clearly has a low opinion of his parents’ culture, because his book, Hillbilly Elegy, has a slur in the title and depicts a family destroyed by mountain ways.

If you thought Mexico had a great culture, would you write a book about car thieves and gangs in Los Angeles and call it Wetback Memories? The name of Vance’s book killed my interest in reading it. I don’t think anyone should call another person a hillbilly.

J.D. Vance has no accent. How about that? Neither does Crowe. Losing your accent is considered one of the most important steps in masking your Kentucky roots. It’s a tradition among social climbers who leave.

Loyalty to earthly connections is a tool of the antichrist. The spirit of antichrist pulls people backward and makes them feel a groundless loyalty to the cultures of the earth. Satan wants us to put our families and ethnic groups above God. Clinging to degenerate ways out of mindless loyalty is a great way to make sure you are never transformed by the Holy Spirit, and it can also help you on your way to hell.

It’s also a great tool for starting wars. We identify with nations instead of the family of God, so instead of having the unified interests of God, we have the conflicting interests of squabbling countries.

I don’t know what will happen with my biological relatives, except maybe the one I baptized, but I have a great Christian wife and a number of friends who are my true brothers and sisters. My biologicals distanced themselves from me a long time ago, so I don’t feel much of an attachment now.

Kentucky is getting worse and worse. I was there in 2019 for my dad’s burial, and my second cousin told me she had told her kids to leave the area. Appalachia had its big revival about 80 years ago. Since then, in Eastern Kentucky, there has been more deterioration than progress.

I still like the idea of moving to a Christian area in Tennessee. Kentucky and West Virginia are a mess, but it seems like there are places in Tennessee where a Christian could enjoy life.

There is a guy in Scotland who pops up occasionally and makes Youtube videos about things God has shown him. He has nearly no subcribers. He just put up a video in which he discusses the fact that Spirit-led Christians lose their interest in carnal pursuits and the things of the world. To me, it’s obvious that maintaining your unity with stubborn unsaved people is an example of a worldly pursuit.

Gaslighted by the Medical Profession Again

My wife and I were discussing the new monkeypox outbreak. In case you don’t know, monkeypox is related to smallpox, and it is endemic in Africa, where people butcher monkeys. It’s not a big deal there. Suddenly it’s popping up in other places around the world. It causes things like fever, bone pain, and huge pus-filled blisters that leave scars. It kills weak people.

Why is the outbreak interesting? Because it’s a homosexual plague. The vast majority of people who are falling ill are homosexual men. The press loves to say “men who have sex with men,” as though it’s possible for a man who has sex with men to be anything but homosexual. Voluntary sex with other men is the act that defines homosexuality. Getting ambushed on a Navy ship doesn’t make you homosexual, but lying down willingly does.

The press is trying to convince us we’re all at risk, but that’s untrue. Monkeypox has been in Africa forever, they don’t have lockdowns or quarantines, and the disease isn’t all that common. People with normal sexual inclinations don’t get it all that easily, even though it can be spread through casual contact. The authorities are reluctantly admitting you can’t catch it just from being in a room with someone. It requires prolonged face-to-face contact, at the least.

Why are homosexual men getting it? Because they are unbelievably promiscuous and do all sorts of things other people are less likely to do. It’s not rare for a homosexual to have hundreds of sex partners per year, and they congregate in dark rooms (actually referred to as “dark rooms”), anonymously, often having sex with multiple partners they never even get a good look at.

Right now, you can go online and find an article by a major news outlet, saying it’s hard to track monkeypox exposures because of anonymous sex. Not “casual.” ANONYMOUS. That’s a veiled reference to homosexuals. Anonymous sex is not part of heterosexual life. It’s rare. To homosexuals, it’s normal. It’s one of the main things that drives homosexual tourism. They literally ride from airports to clubs with dark rooms, where they get down to business right away. Google and see.

Homosexual men penetrate each other’s anuses. The anus is not engineered to be a sex organ. It’s too fragile, and anal sex damages it. Unlike a vagina, it rips easily, allowing whatever microbes and fungi the penetrating individual has to go right into the bloodstream of the one playing the female role. Feces enters the urethra of the man playing the male role, and from there fecal pathogens have access to his mucous membranes and his urinary tract. Homosexual men lick each other’s anuses. They perform oral sex on each other. They urinate on each other. Many of them enjoy playing with feces; that particular diversion is called “scat.”

Homosexuals are also heavy drug users compared to the rest of us, and that includes intravenous drugs, so needle-sharing is a problem. And drug abuse weakens people’s immune systems even when they don’t share needles.
In short, if you wanted to be as diseased as possible, taking up homosexual-style sexual activity would be the best way to do it. There is no better way to catch infections of all types.

Obviously, I am a person who disapproves of homosexual activity, because I know it wrecks a person’s relationship with God and is likely to end with damnation. Nonetheless, objectively, any person with common sense should be able to see that the homosexual lifestyle, as engaged in by real homosexuals (not imaginary ones who are very careful) is an extreme invitation to infectious disease.

Recklessness is, and always has been, a huge problem among homosexuals. It’s the reason the AIDS epidemic never went away among them. People like to tell us education will stop VD, but most people who get VD know exactly how to prevent it and choose to do otherwise, and people who don’t know much about VD and who behave themselves are so safe they might as well be immune.

Back during the first AIDS panic, Miami had a gay gym that had an interesting story. To normal people, a gym is a place to exercise. To gays, it’s very different. It’s a place to pick up sexual partners and, often. to have sex with them on the premises. I suppose a homosexual at a homosexual gym must be like a normal man at a women’s gym where he gets to shower with the girls and have sex with them in the locker rooms. Most of us would show up early, leave very late, and never miss a workout.

The gym in Miami was called Body Positive. They created a program of AIDS education. Men met in the gym and took classes. They got an award for this.
After the program had been going on a while, it was noticed that people who took the class were dropping dead from AIDS. Why? Because after class, they had orgies without protection.

These were people who knew men who had died from AIDS. They had seen the skin lesions, the vomiting and diarrhea, the dementia, the pneumonia, and the slow deaths of living skeletons. They still pounced on each other after their classes.

This is a good illustration of the mindset that has made AIDS so devastating to homosexuals. Their aberration doesn’t just cause them to prefer men; it causes many of them to be unable to control themselves and exercise ordinary responsibility. They don’t just have DIFFERENT sex. They have much MORE sex, with much less care.

I risk being be called hateful for repeating the indisputable, well-known facts about AIDS. Back when it first appeared, the same facts were disseminated by journalists who thought homosexuality was just fine, and it was considered okay for them to bring up the behavioral problems that were killing so many men. They were obviously trying to help by bringing attention to the root of the problem. I’m trying to help as well, but this is 2022, and the cancel kids rule the world.

Syphilis and gonorrhea are not common among normal people these days, but due to irresponsibility, they have never stopped raging among homosexuals. Right now, journalists are trying to avoid confronting this truth. There are stories saying monkeypox is more common among people with syphilis and gonorrhea, but they’re not admitting these are predominantly homosexual diseases, which is true. They also say monkeypox is typically presenting on the genitals and anus, without pointing out that this used to be atypical. Historically, monkeypox lesions have appeared first on people’s faces. Initial anal and genital lesions are new aberrations, and the cause is obvious.

A few days ago, the politicized CDC came after us again, telling us to mask up on airplanes in order to avoid monkeypox. Airplanes. The places where, according to the best science, masks do about as much good as seat belts on cruise ships. They knew masks weren’t helpful, so why recommend them?

I think they did it to bulk up the illusion that normal people were at risk. Fortunately, the CDC contradicted its own recommendation almost immediately.

Here’s a question no one is asking: how many frauds will be exposed by monkeypox? The blisters it causes can’t be prevented, and they leave big scars in obvious places like the face and arms. How many liars will start developing scars? How many actors? Will they be able to cover them up? Will we see certain actors start to wear unusually thick makeup, with no explanation? Will actors disappear from public view for weeks, so they can let their sores heal in private?

How about priests and other clergymen? How about scoutmasters and gym teachers? Certain occupations and activities attract men who are on the down low.

Monkeypox may well serve as a blacklight, lighting up people who would prefer to stay in the shadows. It will be interesting to see if that happens. It all depends on how responsible homosexuals decide to be. The scale of the epidemic, if it becomes one, will depend on their actions.

I believe the apocalypse has started, and the Revelation says death will be part of it. Death by pestilence, not just starvation or war. Since coronavirus popped up, I have been posing the question, “Which disease will be next?” We have our answer.

Monkeypox isn’t that bad, so that’s fortunate. Another disease will follow, and then another. Things will keep getting worse.

When a disease crops up and homes in on a group of people who do certain things which God calls sinful or, worse, abomination, we ought to ask ourselves why. We should ask if it’s really coincidence. Pride shouldn’t blind us to information that could help us.

There used to be no VD. No VD is mentioned in the Bible. Syphilis was unknown in the Old World until Columbus returned home. Gonorrhea appears to have popped up over a millennium after Christ. Over the centuries, the situation has deteriorated.

When I was a kid, there were syphilis and gonorrhea, and they were all we heard about. They were always mentioned together, because lay people didn’t know of any other diseases. They summed up “VD” for most of us. Both could be cured with one shot. Now we have HPV and the cancers it causes, chlamydia, AIDS, herpes, bacterial vaginosis, hepatitis, and probably some others I can’t recall at the moment. We have things that can’t be cured at all. Because God’s punishment is progressive, we should expect new forms of VD to show up in the future.

People should ask themselves why there are no sexual infections associated with monogamy and abstinence. If abstaining from sexual sin prevents infection, and sexual sin causes it, and the correlation is many times worse among male homosexuals, shouldn’t you wonder if God is involved?

Pretending monkeypox is a heterosexual problem doesn’t help homosexuals. They need to know they are getting messages from the supernatural realm. They need to know spirits that are truly hateful, not merely in disagreement with them, are trying to destroy them here on Earth and then in hell. God wants them with him for eternity, in a state of perfect health and safety, surrounded by love, not toxic, selfish lust. To be with him, they have to do things his way, just like everyone else. As God once told me, denying a sin is worse than the sin itself.

MORE

Amazon is now putting this warning on order status reports: “Please give drivers at least 6 feet of space to safely complete your delivery.”

Funny how we didn’t see that during the pandemic, but it popped up quickly after monkeypox arose. Think there’s a connection?

Hell Keeps Freezing Over

Yesterday, my friend Mike told me Roe v. Wade had been overturned, and he said the news came from a site with a name like “topnewznowlulz.biz.” Based on the facts that I thought it would be a very long time before Roe would come under attack, and that the site was obscure, I scoffed. But I Googled anyway, and we all know what happened.

What APPEARS to have happened. What MAY happen. I should be careful.

I say, “What APPEARS to have happened,” because I read the opinion, and the tone is a little like that of a Yahoo News article from a leftist agitation site. “Sam Alito SHUTS down far-left Roe Jurists.” Okay, that’s an exaggeration, but you will see what I mean if you read the opinion. As of this writing, I haven’t seen any confirmation that the opinion is real, so I am hedging my bets.

Ordinarily, court opinions are very restrained, but Alito says Roe was “egregiously wrong,” and he really drops the hammer on the justices and other leftists who formed Roe’s murderous, imperialist conclusions.

I say, “What MAY happen,” because the opinion is not published, unless publication by news sites counts. It’s not law until other courts get notice via official notification.

When I saw that the news was probably real, I rejoiced, but I’m sorry to say it wasn’t because I thought the unborn were finally being rescued. It was because I thought the ruling was going to spur conflict and disorder, and I thought this was probably one more indication that the end of the age was very close.

That’s how tired I am of this crazy planet.

A friend of mine had a baby, and when I visited her, she said that during labor, she would have done anything to get him out of her. She wasn’t embarrassed about being seen naked by other people. She didn’t care what she had to do. She wanted him OUT, OUT, OUT. The new ruling (I am too lazy to write “alleged” or whatever over and over) made me think of my friend. When a crisis gets bad enough, your values change, and you just want it over with.

The left loves the word “unsustainable,” and they use it to manipulate us, so naturally, I don’t like it. But I will use it. The world’s current course is unsustainable. We can’t continue in a world in which people and even animals are constantly dodging an infuriating, mutating, capricious disease. We can’t continue in a world where hatred and lawlessness are considered normal. We can’t have lives that are bearable in an atmosphere of forced participation in sexual perversion or where we are expected to submit to technology and completely abandon privacy and free will. Fundamentally, to use a word that is appropriate in more than one way, we can’t continue in a world where God is hated and Satan is openly crowned in his place.

Things have to come to a head, because the strain we live under is unendurable.

Actually, that’s not quite true for people who are close to God and have his blessings and protection. But even such people long to get out of a world where they are completely out of place.

The leak of the opinion is a great example of what’s wrong with the world right now. God tells us Satan’s children are lawless. We see lawlessness everywhere these days. People have turned civil disobedience into an obsession. Many people go so far as to endorse rioting openly. States refuse to obey federal law. Local governments refuse to obey federal law and state law. It’s not just individuals running amok. It’s rulers.

What does the Bible call the Antichrist? “The Man of Lawlessness.”

The person who leaked the opinion is lawless. She (the pronoun I choose) doesn’t care about preserving the order our government is designed to maintain. We have three branches of government. The judicial branch is supposed to make unbiased decisions regarding the actions of all three branches. The judicial branch is supposed to be the final arbiter of existing laws. It is extremely important for the judicial process to be untainted by outside influences. When judges are manipulated, the judiciary becomes a powerless farce, justice is perverted, and people who depend on the judiciary and who rightly feel cheated are likely to be motivated to stop obeying the law.

The leaker is almost certainly a left-wing justice or clerk. There is no conceivable reason why a conservative would do something like this. No conservative would be outraged by the opinion. No conservative would be so highly motivated by dissatisfaction with parts of the opinion that he would abandon his ethics and risk his career by leaking it.

Leftists also have a history of stealing and leaking private and confidential information regarding conservatives. Conservatives are not as prone to these slimy tactics.

What is the purpose of leaking the opinion? Good question.

Is the traitor trying to influence the outcome of the case? Maybe, if she is sufficiently hysterical. Leftists now have greatly increased faith in the public’s ability to coerce judges through protesting and other forms of pressure, and they have lose all scruples about doing so. They don’t care at all about impartiality or justice, and they have a history of pressuring courts. But if the leaker is a justice or clerk, she is also a lawyer, and she has to be pretty smart to be where she is, so she should know the leak has a very slim chance of saving Roe.

What about the midterm elections and the presidential election? Now we have a scenario that makes a little sense. The leaker may be trying to motivate female voters to stop the anti-Biden stampede that is projected to inundate the polls in November. We won’t be voting on a new president, but if Roe is undone, the states will have the power to ban various types of abortions, and leftist women will feel motivated to storm the voting precincts in order to put more leftists in power on the state level.

Of course, by and large, women vote more destructively than men. They are much more leftist than we are. If men didn’t vote, only a small percentage of our elected officials would not be extreme leftists. Many women want the government to be their husband, so they are willing to give up more of their liberty than men.

If the leaker can get more women to the polls, their influence will increase, and effectively, conservatives will be disempowered.

Will the leaker be caught? I think she made a good effort to avoid it. The opinion draft that was published appears to have been scanned, not uploaded directly. I assure you, internal communications at the Supreme Court are purely electronic except for documents obtained externally, and even those documents would be transmitted electronically after being scanned once.

The leaker appears to have given the press a printed copy in order to avoid having the federal marshals trace her through electronic accounts.

Is this a great day for the unborn? I guess. I suppose many children who would otherwise be murdered will be protected by sensible new abortion laws. But many states will persist in supporting infanticide, so the effect will be limited.

Jesus told us the problems of the end time were labor pains. Someone is being born. Who is it? Can it be Jesus? He was already born, so why would he be born a second time?

I suppose you could say that everyone who is raptured is born a second time, because the rapture changes people, but it’s pretty well agreed that “born again” refers to internal transformation by the Holy Spirit.

Is the Antichrist the one who is being born? I tend to think so, but it’s obviously a guess.

The world can’t stay in labor forever. I don’t want to root for the coming of the tribulation, but I am ready for change. If we’re about to descend into global conflict and misery, I say better sooner than later. The sooner we see the rapture and the tribulation, the sooner we will see a world free of Satan, demons, and crazed leftists and pagans who make the world the cursed place it is.

Having Ruined Christmas, the Left Moves on to New Year’s Day

The habitual victims among us now have something new to feel bad about! Surely this is cause for rejoicing, because feeling bad is their bag.

It’s kind of surprising I didn’t see this coming. It turns out New Year’s Day is racist!

Some delightful person who works for The Daily Beast just wrote an article saying that in the state of Rhode Island, New Year’s Day was known for a statewide orgy of slave transfers. A sort of Black Friday, but not the kind where you come home with a video game console. Evidently, the event wasn’t limited to Rhode Island. It was a nationwide thing. New Year’s Day was called Hiring Day, and it is said that on Hiring Day, slaves were commonly sold for year-long terms, after which they went back to their owners.

If there is anything to be praised about this article, it’s the astounding admission that Northerners had slaves. They always pretend 1) there were never any slaves in the North, 2) Northerners never profited from slavery after it was banned in their states, and 3) Southerners invented the institution of slavery.

Hello? All of the colonies permitted slavery at first, and Northerners have always had lots of investments below the Mason-Dixon line. Southerners have a long history of selling their natural resources to Northerners for pennies. Maybe a few people have heard the name “Andrew Carnegie.”

Here’s the money part: :

When the American Revolution began in 1775, “Rhode Island was the largest slave trading colony in British America,” according to Leonardo Marques, author of The United States and the Transatlantic Slave Trade to the Americas.

Mike drop. Bazinga.

Is it true? Could be. The fact that a liberal quoted it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a lie.

Slaves were afraid they would be rented out on New Year’s Day, if the story is true, and they feared their families would be broken up.

Okay, that was extremely bad. Over a century and a half ago. It’s 2021.

About a third of the Jewish people were exterminated around 80 years ago, and the Jews were pretty much back on their feet 20 years later. Just saying. I have never had a Jewish person accost me and tell me I should be ashamed of myself because America rejected Jewish refugees fleeing Hitler. America did that, but no one has ever tried to make me feel like it was my fault.

For God’s sake; the Germans, Japanese, and Vietnamese have forgiven America.

It doesn’t matter, because it’s official now: we are no longer allowed to celebrate the new year. Just stop. You’re probably too hung over to celebrate, but if you were starting to feel better, knock it off. Racist scum.

I’m glad this happened, because I had this feeling there were still too many things left for people to enjoy.

I don’t celebrate New Year’s Eve because it’s one of the dumbest holidays of the year, and also because I like knowing where I am when I wake up, but I’m glad to see someone is working to make sure no one else has fun.

Several black people have texted to wish me a happy new year today. Those racist jerks! Clearly, they are white supremacists. At best, they are Uncle Toms. I need to put some white liberals in touch with them to happiness-shame them and teach them the correct way to be black.

Groundhog Day comes in one month. I’ll be ready. I’ll have my offense face on. I shouldn’t have to explain why Groundhog Day is racist. That’s obvious. At least it’s not as bad as Valentine’s Day, when men give women packages wrapped in red, to symbolize the blood of the slaves, and the women chew up chocolates which just happen to be BROWN. Some women receive diamonds. You know where those come from. AFRICA!

My computer is racist! I’m typing little black letters, forcing them to serve me, on a big white page symbolizing white privilege! Why didn’t I see this before? Those poor little letters probably only get 5% of the page.

I’m typing on stolen screen space!

I hope everyone is suitably miserable today. I am, and it feels great.

Illness or Nature’s Vaccine?

Bad news. My modified squirrel trap has not attracted any visitors.

Fed up with the continued destruction of my property by worthless rodents, I took a badly-designed trap and made some improvements. It has been in action for about 18 hours, and nothing has happened. I placed an order for a Squirrelinator, which is a factory-made trap dedicated to, well, you can guess. It should be here in the middle of next week.

I took a chunk of neurotoxic rat bait, smeared it with peanut butter, and put it in my chicken house, which the squirrels have turned into a resort. Later today, I’ll see if they’ve eaten it. I’m going to do whatever has to be done until I have a decent body count.

I have excellent rat baits made with an anticoagulant, but I was afraid to put them in the chicken house because I didn’t want hawks and owls to eat poisoned rodents and die. I’m reading up on it today. It looks like the Audubon Society recommends the anticoagulant as safe for predators, so maybe I should start using it.

In other news, I see another prediction of mine has come true. It’s not a big surprise, because I try not to predict anything that isn’t obvious. The Omicron variant has been found all over the place. Hawaii, New York, California, Colorado, Minnesota…it’s doing the blue state tour.

When we first heard about Omicron, which my wife inadvertently dubbed “the Unicorn Variant,” journalists and even scientists voiced “concern” that it “might” pop up in new places. I’m no epidemiologist, but I said that if you find one case, there are dozens of others you don’t know about. I said Omicron was already everywhere except places like Australia and New Zealand, which have sick, authoritarian rules. I was wrong about Australia, however. Omicron has been found there.

Australia is actually an Omicron hotspot, with more identified cases than America. Maybe arresting people and putting them in concentration camps isn’t working as well as they expected.

Of all the people on Earth, you would think Australians would be reluctant to put people in prison. You would think they had had their fill already.

The usual suspects also said they were worried the vaccines wouldn’t work well against Omicron. I wasn’t worried about that, because I already knew they wouldn’t. They don’t work well against any variant! Why would Omicron be different? The Dutch found 14 infected airline passengers, and today they’re telling us all 14 were vaccinated. If this surprises you, you should go in for cognitive tests and be very careful climbing airplane stairs.

A failure rate of 100% in 14 patients seems pretty bad to me, but then I am no doctor. I am no statistician, but it sure seems like the results could not have been worse. I can’t help feeling there just might be some predictive weight to this data.

I keep hoping Omicron will turn out to be a blessing. So far, there are no news reports suggesting the symptoms are anything but mild, but scientists say Omicron is extremely contagious compared to Delta. Put those things together, and Omicron might be the inoculation man couldn’t create. It might displace the nastier variants and give us resistance to them which would provide either immunity or safety from severe symptoms. It could turn coronavirus into the new common cold. Ineradicable, but not dangerous.

It may turn out to be the Omicron VACCINE.

Or it may kill a whole bunch of us.

We’ll know by the end of the month. That’s my new prediction, and like the others, it’s obvious. Omicron will hit thousands of people this month, if it hasn’t already, and it will have enough time to start producing deaths. If Omicron goes viral metaphorically as well as literally, and waves of deaths don’t materialize, sell your stock in mask manufacturers.

Now if we could just pay the Chinese to create a killer bug that only hits building contractors and tort lawyers.

And CCP members.

One thing is certain: if Omicron saves the world, the CCP will start pressuring smaller countries to call it the Xi Variant.

My understanding is that new diseases tend to become less severe as they mutate. Hope that’s correct. Didn’t pan out with smallpox, though.

If I get sick, my first move will be to blow my nose on my squirrel baits.

It’s amazing how dumb our statist overlords are. Why would anyone think it was smart to enact travel bans AFTER a new virus hit several countries? How badly did you have to do in elementary school math to think that was intelligent? We never find covid variants before they go around the world. By the time they’re detected, they’ve been carried all over the globe. Travel bans just add economic distress and feelings of powerlessness to our problems.

Speaking of feelings of powerlessness, I have realized they may be the worst consequences of covid. It has taught us man is weak and can’t fix his own disasters. It has taught us our governments have way more ability to control us than we had allowed ourselves to think. It has turned many of us into shuffling shut-ins who lack confidence in their ability to change their lives for the better.

It’s very important for people to think they can affect their circumstances. Take that away, and they develop what psychologists call “learned helplessness.” This is one of the reasons welfare states get worse, not better. People start sucking up government money, and they become convinced they need it. They believe going to school and applying for jobs won’t change their lives much.

When you pay someone so much for doing nothing he can’t significantly improve his lifestyle by going to work, he is likely to choose to stay home and make excuses. That’s exactly what’s happening right now. It’s turning America into a much more socialist state, and socialism is authoritarianism. Authoritarianism brings dystopia.

I believe feelings of powerlessness also breed hatred and resentment. If you’re helpless and someone else is responsible for your happiness, you will feel entitled to make that person miserable when things don’t go your way. This is one explanation for the intense anti-white racism in America. Blacks and Hispanics are taught that whites, Asians, and Jews cause them to live in squalor and crime through racism, but paradoxically, many think the people who caused their problem are the saviors who can fix it. They believe the rest of us have special powers we’re not using.

It’s crazy, believing a certain class of people is evil and responsible for your problems, yet running to them over and over again, expecting them to make things right at their own expense.

Why would you expect a malicious enemy to save you?

The rest of us didn’t cause the problems, we’re not malicious, we are not good enough to devote our lives to making things better for you, and even if we were, we couldn’t do it. You have to do some things for yourself.

Anyway, I’m convinced the pandemic has made things worse.

Maybe Omicron will save us from the pandemic. The apocalypse is a delivery process with labor pains, and labor pains come and go. Maybe we’ll get a few years of rest. I wonder. I tend to doubt it, because I have reason to think the rapture is imminent.

One nice thing about proof the variant has spread is that it should convince the nations of the world to drop recently-imposed travel bans. Rhodah and I were planning to visit the Netherlands, and they have an Omicron ban. Maybe they’ll show some common sense and relent.

As for the rapture, I had a disturbing dream last night.

For years, I’ve had dreams about airports. There are things about airports I don’t like. When you’re in an airport, you’re not where you want to be. You want to be somewhere else, which is why you went to the airport. Airports, then, are inherently representative of not having arrived.

Also, airports are dirty, the food is bad and overpriced, and while you’re in airports, you are subjected to degrading control through unreasonable rules.

At least the Hare Krishnas moved out.

Last night, I dreamed I was in the imaginary airport again. My second-oldest friend had been there, but he had left. His family was still there. He had gotten on an elevator to turn himself in.

In the dream, Nazis were in power. My friend and his family are Orthodox Jews. The Nazis were allowing people to turn themselves in. In the dream, you could get on an elevator, and as soon as you got to the bottom, you would be in Auschwitz. You would go through the death camp process and be killed and incinerated. By the time you turned yourself in, you were doomed. There was no way to change your mind and go home, and no one could rescue you.

I couldn’t believe what my friend had done. Why did he trust the Nazis? Even though it wasn’t possible, I tried to help. I saw another Jew, and I ran up to him and tried to tell him what had happened. I wanted to know if he had any idea what to do. He thought I was Jewish and that I was asking him to help me.

Nothing was done. It was already over when I asked for help. I knew my friend was somewhere down below, beyond help, regretting his choice.

I now think the airport I dream about represents the earth. You spend time here on your way to heaven or hell. You get routed one way or the other depending on what kind of ticket you chose. This place isn’t your permanent home.

I don’t know if my friend represented himself, someone else, or a class of people.

The Nazis were the state-worshipers and man-worshipers of the Earth. The beast’s troops. The vaccine-lovers and distancing freaks. People who are willing to give up all their rights because they’re terrified of death. They say, “Trust us, and everything will be fine.”

If the airport represents the earth, then there must be departing flights. You can either go up or down. That seems to be a very Jewish idea. Moving to Israel is considered a move upward, and people who leave are called “yardim,” meaning they descend. The name of the Jordan River comes from the same root.

That’s it for today. Two containers of maple syrup have arrived, and I need to test them. I might skip dinner food and make waffles.

High Crime or Legitimate Investigation?

Written on 11/15/21.

The Ashley Biden diary case is getting more interesting.

To recap: Ashley Biden is Joe’s daughter, and she went to drug rehab in 2020. Before the election, Biden’s people called the AG and claimed she had been burglarized (sure) and that her rehab diary and some other things (sure) had been taken. The DOJ launched an investigation. Two people tried to sell the diary to Project Veritas, claiming they found it after it was abandoned, and they were turned down. Project Veritas tried to turn the diary over to Ashley Biden’s lawyer, who refused it because he didn’t want to say it was genuine. They also tried to give it to law enforcement. The FBI just raided three homes searching for evidence. All the homes belonged to journalists. James O’Keefe was one. Another was a Project Veritas employee. The third was a former employee.

That’s most of it.

I blogged about the story, saying I was amazed that the DOJ was chasing a worthless diary. It looked like corruption to me. Liberal news outlets buried or ignored the story. Eventually legal experts started voicing the same concerns I had. My assertion is that this proves I’m not crazy, even though I believe the story about Noah’s ark and I keep writing about the rapture.

Additional facts: the FBI, possibly taking a cue from Dick Morris and Bill Clinton, invaded O’Keefe’s home on a Saturday, assuring that the lazy, pro-left press would have an excuse to ignore it. Dick Morris, Clinton’s former fixer, used to arrange it so the White House released problematic news on Friday afternoons, knowing journalists were too lazy to go back to work and cover it. O’Keefe’s home was invaded before dawn, and the FBI threw him against a wall outside his apartment and handcuffed him, and he remained there, in his underwear, displayed before his neighbors. Legally, if not ethically or morally, Biden has the authority to micromanage DOJ and FBI activities, so he could force them to persecute his political enemies if he wanted.

Like actual legal experts (I just blog as a hobby), I wondered how a worthless diary which the Bidens denied was genuine could ground a federal investigation. Now we have answers.

The search warrant mentions three crimes: conspiracy to move stolen property across state lines, conspiracy to possess stolen property, and movement of stolen propert across state lines. These are federal crimes that fall under federal statutes, not common law. Problem: in order for these crimes to occur, the property has to be worth at least $5000.

I read about the warrant, and my insides sank. I thought, “Biden really is that corrupt. He is forcing the DOJ to undertake a personal vendetta when he knows there is no possibility a federal crime was committed.”

I knew Biden was corrupt and dishonest, not to mention narcissistic and combative, but it was disheartening to think he would do something this brazen. It was like watching a cold war go hot. Sometimes a conflict will fester for a long time without much direct action, and then the gloves will come off and all hell will break loose. I thought this was one of this times. I’m not so sure now, but this was my mindset after reading about the warrant.

It seems like no nationally recognized expert is doing what I did yet: they don’t seem to be trying to answer the $5000 question, so I’ll do it. I think the DOJ has decided the diary is worth over $5000 because journalists offered to pay more than $5000 for it.

If you’re a TV talking head who steals ideas from blogs, you’re welcome.

The accused thieves, known as R.K. and A.H. (no giggling), claim they found the diary abandoned in a room where Ashley Biden had stayed. If that’s true, no federal case, because no theft. No theft means no conspiracy to move stolen goods, no conspiracy to receive stolen goods, and no movement of stolen goods. You can’t be a murderer if the victim was already dead when you showed up.

The DOJ must be trying to prove the diary was real, stolen, and the subject of at least one sincere offer of more than $5000. They also have to prove there was a conspiracy and that whoever received the diary knew or should have known it was stolen, and if they’re going after O’Keefe, they have to show his efforts to return the diary don’t suffice to absolve him of guilt.

Criminal cases are usually simple, and the same can be said of many criminal attorneys, but this case seems to pose some questions that are somewhat difficult to resolve. Maybe the case law has already answered them. I am too lazy to investigate, because no one is paying me and I don’t do criminal law anyway.

Here is a question: can a worthless diary be considered valuable under the statutes if a buyer doesn’t make a sincere offer until it crosses state lines?

Let’s say I steal your favorite Beanie Baby, which has a street value of nothing. Then I move to another state. Someone there, a lunatic, offers me a hundred grand for it. Did I violate the statute? What if the buyer calls me before I move, and he says, “Bring me the special edition Birthday Bear, and I’ll pay you handsomely,” but no figure is discussed until I arrive? What if he says he wants to look it over to see if it’s worth buying?

What if the buyer makes a sincere offer of $6000, I make the trip, and he then reduces it to $4000? What if that happens, and then a different buyer offers me $10,000? Am I guilty? Was I guilty when I stole the Beanie Baby, when we talked on the phone, when I took it across state lines, after the first offer was made, or after the second offer was made?

When and how is the value established?

What about proving theft?

I do not believe the diary disappeared in a burglary, because it’s not plausible. The Bidenistas told law enforcement several items, including the diary, were taken. That suggests the criminal was not a political operative. If James O’Keefe hires you to steal Ashley Biden’s diary, you’re not going to wait around in her house, picking through knickknacks and taking junk while precious time ticks away. It makes no sense.

A burglar who was not a political operative would not take the diary. Burglars aren’t clever people who try to destabilize elections. They are generally idiots who grab whatever they can in order to fund drug habits or degenerate parasitic lifestyles. I had no idea who Ashley Biden was in 2020, and I’m a fairly bright person. The notion that a crackhead or career burglar would understand the significance of her diary is not tenable.

I think Joe Biden’s people faked a burglary so the DOJ could get involved. They were probably alerted to the disappearance of the diary, perhaps by the people who possessed it. A federal investigation would have seemed like a good way to stifle the eruption by intimidating the finders and journalists. You may think a top-level politician wouldn’t commit a crime like that. Well, think about Nixon and the long list of Congressmen who have committed felonies.

Filing a false police report is easy, and it’s very hard for the police, who really aren’t very good at solving cases, to prove you did it. And how highly motivated would Deep State FBI and DOJ employees be?

No one has gone after St. Fauci, who clearly lied to Congress. That’s a crime. It shows how the system really works. Informed people are aware of many similar abuses.

My guess is that the diary was abandoned. I think Ashley Biden was done with it because she had left rehab, so she did’t keep it.

If that’s true, then why would the FBI keep hammering away? One possible answer: they may have coerced the innocent finders of the diary they were going to prison if they didn’t confess.

Surely the FBI wouldn’t try to coerce a fake confession or convict an innocent person.

Oh, wait. Michael Flynn.

News flash for lay people: cops are allowed to lie to you, and that includes federal cops. It’s perfectly legal. They can put you in one room and your best friend in another, and they can tell each of you the other one says you’re guilty. Look it up. It should be illegal, because, like torture, it leads to bogus confessions, but it’s done every day.

If the FBI could get one or both of the finders to confess and take a plea, purely out of terror, then one of the elements necessary for the issuance of the subpoena and warrants would be satisfied.

The FBI could be on a fishing expedition. That means they may be using immoral or unethical means to get evidence for an investigation which shouldn’t have started unless the evidence were already in hand.

The government can’t come to your house on a whim and look around to see if you’ve committed a crime. They have to have some reason that will make a judge happy. In the absence of evidence, they may be motivated to create false evidence, and a coerced, invalid confession will do just fine.

Maybe the FBI doesn’t know whether the journalists did anything wrong but decided to use bad confessions to bypass the Fourth Amendment and root around in the journalists’ data to see what they can come up with. The Deep State, which is very real, does not like Project Veritas, and O’Keefe and his employee surely have a lot of data the Deep State could use to derail other O’Keefe projects and, conceivably, convict Project Veritas personnel of crimes.

If the cops get permission to search my house for a stolen toaster, and while they’re ripping the place up, they see a dozen hand grenades on the kitchen counter, I’ll have to answer for the hand grenades, even if the toaster never turns up and the person who filed the police report chimes in later to say he found it in his garage.

The FBI may well be looking for metaphorical hand grenades.

O’Keefe and his lawyers know this, and it’s why they got the judge to consider appointing an “impartial” (Why do we even use that word?) special master to go over the evidence and determine what the FBI/DOJ should be allowed to see. Supposedly, the authorities have been forced to stop going through O’Keefe’s phone. Right, because it takes weeks, not minutes, to clone a phone’s data. Who knows how many copies are on FBI/DOJ flash drives already?

“The FBI would never do that!” Really? Must we go there? The vast majority of the time, any law enforcement organization will do the right thing, if not out of principle, then out of fear and because, in most situations, they don’t need to do anything sleazy. Breaking the law can require a lot of planning and effort, so that also has to be considered. Law enforcement people usually uphold the law, but exceptions are commonplace.

Look at what prosecutor Binger did in the Rittenhouse case, on national TV.

If the feds got shaky confessions, they really need to be sure the evidence won’t blow up in their faces. If the finders got scared and said things to make the feds happy, and the confiscated data proves those things are not true, it would lead to acquittals and possibly scandals which could include a presidential impeachment. The feds may be scouring the data primarily to see if coerced confessions will blow up on them later.

I think the diary was found innocently, that the journalists involved committed no crime, that the Biden gang lied about the burglary, and that the feds are trying to bootstrap. But I’m just guessing. What if serious crimes were committed?

O’Keefe has stepped in it before. He used to go into situations with inadequate legal advice, and he was charged with crimes. Maybe he, or one of the other journalists, has done it again.

How smart is O’Keefe? Has he learned from past scrapes with the law, or is he still winging it? I would expect Project Veritas to have top-notch lawyers on hand to provide prophylactic advice before the commencement of any caper. It’s hard to believe O’Keefe would risk his liberty foolishly, given his history. But he may have done it.

Remember Scott Ritter, the wacky, arrogant arms inspector who used to say inflammatory, unhelpful things about the Bush II administration and the second Iraq war? He was arrested for sexual escapades involving a sting operation he apparently thought was a girl in her mid-teens. It killed his career. He got probation and avoided conviction the first time he was charged, but years later, he got charged a second time and went to prison. Not only did he do the same basic thing again; he was so cocky, he rejected a plea and spent over two years in the federal can. People don’t always learn their lessons quickly.

Maybe, hard as it would be to believe, the diary really was stolen in the burglary the Biden crew reported, and maybe the feds have good, solid evidence that this is true. Maybe they’re just looking for data that shows one or more journalists made communications incriminating themselves. Maybe at least one of the thieves has some of those communications on his phone, and the feds want to confirm them from the other end.

What does this all add up to?

If the searches are shown to be improper, and/or the burglary turns out to be a hoax, Biden could be impeached and/or convicted, depending on the breaks. If it can be shown that he or people close to him pushed a weak, daughter-privilege investigation even though they knew it was wrong, Biden could find himself sniffing hair back in Delaware in the private sector.

Then our president would be 28% Harris. Oh, well. That will probably happen soon anyway.

The finders could turn on the feds. Whistleblowers could emerge. Anything is possible.

This would all be very bad for the cozy, smoochy relationship among Democrats, the Deep State, and the press.

If, on the other hand, it turns out one or more of the journalists are at fault, some of them might do time or at least lose their livelihoods.

I think it will not be possible to prove the diary was stolen, and I think the charges will evaporate. Then the press will generally ignore the story, until a few brave souls start pushing it, and then it may turn into a big stink, with many organizations jumping on the bandwagon and siding with O’Keefe while trying not to touch him any more than they have to.

If these things don’t happen, I think the finders will be shown to be guilty, and then there will be one or more journalist trials, and the public, which can’t even understand simple cases, will go nuts arguing about the merits.

I don’t know. I’m not an expert. I haven’t done significant research. I haven’t seen what the feds have seen. I just like to guess.

Biden’s family is remarkable. So many bad things have happened to them, they resemble the Kennedys. Three premature deaths out of seven people, plus miserable, defeated lives for the surviving adult children who are Biden’s legacy. Biden himself has had surgery for two intracranial aneurysms, and now, just when he has gotten what he has always wanted, he has dementia, an imploding country, plummeting polls for himself, disastrous polling for his vice president, and stadiums resounding with a popular chant suggesting someone perform an unwelcome sex act on him. People also ridicule him for his enhanced teeth, hair transplants, facelift scars, and motionless forehead, which suggests the use of botox.

It’s interesting to speculate on all this stuff. Maybe I should be more distressed by it, because it’s happening in my country, where I have to live. The thing is, the problems of the apocalypse, including the rapid decline of America, haven’t harmed me or my wife significantly yet, apart from making it hard for us to get together.

By the way, I just saw a scientist on Youtube, saying a Swedish team has found evidence that the spike protein from the mRNA vaccine can enter cell nuclei and affect two important genes. One gene is important in the repair of severed DNA strands. My lay understanding: the shots may result in damage to our DNA.

This is why I didn’t want to take the mRNA shot in the first place. My reasons were spiritual, not scientific.

Curses and blessings are recorded in our DNA. You may scoff, but things like good health, talent, intelligence, height, good looks, physical strength, resistance to addiction and infection, resistance to cancer, and resistance to many diseases can be largely attributed to DNA sequences. Blessings. On the other hand, Huntington’s Chorea, type I diabetes, many types of cancer, low intelligence, ugliness, dwarfism, and even sexual perversion can be carried in our DNA. Curses.

When I say blessings and curses are encoded in our DNA, I’m not expressing an opinion. It’s a medical fact.

DNA seems to have importance to God, because he flooded the earth to get rid of the genetic contribution of fallen angels. They had had sex with women, and their cursed offspring were destroying mankind. For a long time, I’ve suspected that some curses and blessings can affect our DNA. I suspect that changes can bring us closer to the children of darkness or even make us part of that group.

When the mRNA vaccines came out, we were told they could not possibly affect our DNA. They were supposed to make us make the spike protein and then dissipate. I read that, and I thought about all the other rosy medical predictions, made during the last century, that had turned out to be false. I thought, “One day, these people may turn around and tell us the shots change our DNA.” Now that day has arrived. In fact, it arrived in October.

I am no biologist. I am no geneticist. I am no doctor. I’m just a religious extremist. Nonetheless, it looks like THE SCIENCE (PBUI, PBUI*) may have been wrong, and I may have been right even though scientists had a tremendous amount of evidence suggesting they were right, and I had pretty much none to the contrary. All I had going for me was disdain for the arrogance of human beings. Remember the “unsinkable” Titanic?

So what does the Swedish study mean?

The guy who explained it in the video I saw is some sort of scientist, and he says it’s important to see if the study’s conclusions can be reproduced and proven correct, so maybe the whole thing is a fuss over nothing. But when a scary warning has a good basis in research, should you wait to see it proven right before acting on it? The general rule in life is that you err on the side of safety.

Smart people avoided cigarettes long before the first cancer report came out. They saw how unhealthy smokers were. They knew it didn’t make sense to smoke one’s lung tissue like a commercial fishery smoking salmon. They knew refraining from smoking did no harm.

The vaccine situation is different, because vaccines seem to do good, not harm, and eschewing vaccines appears to raise the risk of severe permanent damage and death. But you don’t have to take an mRNA vaccine. Yet. They haven’t banned the adenovirus vaccine. You can always take that one and avoid the mRNA shot.

I’ve had the adenovirus shot. It also makes us make the spike protein, but as far as I can determine from Googling, it hasn’t been shown to pose a risk of sticking it in our nuclei. Maybe it does. Biology is not simple, and I know little about it. I chose the J&J shot for the specific reason that it might decrease risk to my DNA, which must be really wonderful, given what a great person I am.

I prayed before I got the shot. I needed it in order to be able to visit my then-fiance and, later, my wife. I needed it to get her immigration process going. I prayed about it, and my feeling was that God was fine with it, even though it was prepared using an abortion product. I’m sitting on a chair made in China, where forced abortions are normal, and I may also own products made through slave labor. I have an Ipod. I can’t really avoid products made by evil means.

My wife got mRNA shots. That concerns me, but I left the decision to her, and she hears from the Holy Spirit, so I saw no reason to forbid it. I don’t think the J&J adenovirus shot was available in her country.

Now we are faced with the necessity of waiting to see what the ill effects, if any, are. Nothing we can do. We can shun additional mRNA shots until we get better information, but that’s about it.

I don’t want another shot. I think I’ve had covid at least once, and it was no big deal. I want to take the blood test that will tell a vaccinated person whether he has been infected. I would feel better, knowing I had already stomped covid at least once.

What does it mean if vaccinated people have inferior DNA-repair capabilities? More cancer, I guess. Isn’t that the big hazard when your DNA is cut? Radiation causes cancer by severing DNA strands. Will the spike protein do the same thing?

Will vaccinated people start having mutant babies? Most mutations aren’t good. It’s not like the X-Men. You don’t get the ability to move metal with your mind or transport yourself through solid objects. You’re more likely to be born without legs or something like that.

My wife is young (yay, sorry), so if bad things can happen to her, they would have plenty of time to manifest, unless the rapture comes first. Maybe that’s God’s plan. Maybe the shots are very bad, but they can’t affect people who are close to God, because they’ll be gone before the problems show up.

*Peace Be Upon It

Negotiating the Pre-Travel Obstacle Course

I am wiped out. I haven’t done anything but work on travel plans today.

It’s a shame countries and airlines don’t do a better job of laying things out for travelers. It would be simple to post comprehensive lists of entry requirements, but instead, you see one rule here and another rule there. Surprises keep popping up just when you think you’ve got things covered.

Today I found out Rhodah and I have to fill out health certificates before we enter Turkey. That was news. I found a Turkish site and filled out the forms, but they require you to do it right before you travel, so today’s forms will not be acceptable. I filled them out just so I would have the required information handy when I have to do the job over.

What do the forms say? Nothing, really. They tell who we are and which hotel we’re using. Not sure why this is helpful. I’m also not sure why these forms can’t be filled out at the Istanbul airport. I’ll bet they can.

I had a scare over Rhodah’s tickets. She is required to use an approved Turkish air carrier when she arrives, and I had her coming into Istanbul on Turkish Airlines. Today I realized she would actually enter Turkey on another airline and then switch to Turkish Airlines for a final leg to Istanbul. I thought I was going to have to cancel her flight and mine and go through the horror of trying to find new bookings that worked. That would have sent well over a thousand dollars down the chute.

I called Turkish Airlines, and they told me there was no problem. What matters is where she goes through immigration, not where she physically enters.

I have had excellent experiences with Turkish phone and email help. The Turkish government responds in minutes, and they are extremely polite. Turkish Airlines will put you on the horn with a very capable non-Indian human being in a few seconds, and their reps actually know the answers to the questions you ask. I don’t know why Americans make support such a bad experience.

Sometimes I want to find the lady who recorded all the American phone system messages that lead me in circles and give her a piece of my mind. You know her. “For English, press ONE.” She must have hung up on me ten thousand times.

You can actually see her on Youtube. It’s almost scary hearing that hateful voice coming out of a real human being. Her name is Elita Bradley.

I really hate talking to machines. I didn’t realize that until today, when I considered the issue. Being forced to talk to a machine is degrading. It tells you you’re not important enough to talk to a human being. It tells you no one cares about your problems, even when you’re paying their bills. Often, machines tell you there is literally no way to make yourself heard or stand up for yourself. It is disempowering.

When I got the arrival question answered, I moved on to another crisis. My airline has suddenly decided to impose draconian mask rules. More degrading than mask rules were to begin with. I have to wear a real mask or something that looks like one. They require N95, KN95, FFP2, or surgical masks. Last time I flew, I bought special flimsy masks that don’t work, so I could fly with as little breathing resistance as possible. I must have spent an hour and a half today, trying to find something new that would pass muster with the COVID Luftwaffe. I came up with a couple of things, but I think I’m in for an unpleasant flight to Istanbul.

I had to look at every layover location and make sure neither of us needed transit visas. I confirmed it. I wrote a long document containing that information, along with flight details and other important facts. I listed the contact numbers for all of the airlines. I listed the hotel’s address. I found out how we could get COVID tests before leaving, and I included the URL of a company that will test us at our hotel.

Neither of us has to be tested on the way to Turkey, but both of us have to be tested on the way home. Rhodah has to take a real test. The USA will let me get by with a quick antigen test. Should I do it? Antigen tests are fast, and they have the benefit of generating more false negatives. A false negative could prevent me from being trapped in Turkey. I don’t want to spread coronavirus, though.

I’m so used to resisting hysterical anti-COVID measures, resistance is my natural response. I have to remember not to resist measures that have some basis in reality.

I had to find out how to get us our tickets and boarding passes. This is a confusing area now. Near as I can tell, some airlines don’t provide tickets. They send receipts, and you can check in and get boarding passes a few days before your flight takes off, but they don’t send you anything that says “e-ticket” at the top.

Remember when you could call an airline and make a reservation without paying for it? Remember when they would mail you real tickets long before your trip? Yeah, I do, too. I remember having stewardesses tell me it was fine for kids like me to bring their pocket knives onboard.

I did all this stuff, and then I found out Turkey had just put out a new list of coronavirus restrictions. I mean within the last two weeks. The restrictions are very bad. People have to have PCR tests to travel between cities, go to crowded events, and so on.

I was pretty upset. We would have had to take at least three tests each, and what if either of us had failed one?

Then I saw this, on our State Department’s Turkey page: “The COVID-19 related restrictions apply to all citizens and residents of Turkey. Tourists are exempt from COVID-19 restrictions.”

Thank God for that.

I think I can relax now. My hope is that no new landmines will go off before the trip. I’m extremely glad we can go to Turkey without being tested. I would rather be stuck in Turkey in a nice hotel with Rhodah than stuck here without her.

Tough Love for Popular Destination

Originally written on 6/19.

It’s my second day back from Egypt, and I feel great. I can’t tell if I feel great in absolute terms or I just feel great compared to the way I felt in Egypt. I’ll take it, however.

Egypt is 6 hours ahead of me, so before I left home, I decided I would try to start going to bed early. It didn’t pan out all that well. I didn’t sleep well the night before I left.

Sleeping on the flights was not possible.

My first flight took me from Orlando to JFK on Jetblue. I have heard people say nice things about Jetblue. I’m glad they had good experiences. Both of my Jetblue flights were so packed, people were forced to check their carry-on bags, and Jetblue did not let me choose my seats. It wouldn’t have helped had Jetblue been a better airline, however, because I can’t sleep on short flights.

My second flight took me to Cairo on Egyptair. Apart from the fact that Egyptair is one of the few airlines whose most effective terrorists are their pilots, I have no complaints. My economy seat was reasonably spacious, and it reclined a long way. The food was okay. The airline supplied a good entertainment console, and we also got things like sleep masks and socks. The flight staff was polite. On top of all this, I had three seats to myself.

Problem: bad parenting. A lady a few rows ahead of me had a little girl who screamed all the way to Cairo. I know what people will think: “Poor thing. Her ears hurt.” No. This kid was a brat suffering from improper instruction. She was not screaming in pain. She just enjoyed screaming. The lady holding her encouraged her. Even with silicone ear plugs, there was no possibility of sleep.

In Cairo, the tour operator liked to get started early. For some reason, Cairo is in a time zone where the sun is pretty high at 5:30 a.m., and the Egyptians like to get moving before the air heats up. I wanted to sleep until at least 7:30 to start getting over the time change, but it wasn’t happening. We had a day tour scheduled, and the pyramids could not wait.

Later in the week, in order to get to Aswan for the cruise, we had to get up at 4:00. This didn’t improve things at all. We also had to get up early for the unbelievably long drive to Abu Simbel, a destination I recommend skipping.

Egyptians like to get up early, but they also like to eat dinner late. The cruise ship provided dinner no earlier than 8:00, which is ridiculous. You eat, you run back to your room, you prepare, and if you’re lucky, you’re in bed by 10:00. It should be obvious that ship operators don’t want their tourists limited to 6 hours of sleep, but I guess no one in Egypt has thought about this. Dinner should start no later than 7:00.

When I returned to Florida, I had to get up at 4:30 in order to make a 9:35 flight. This was what the guides recommended. In reality, 6:00 would have been just fine, but there you go. It was 4:30 in Cairo, making it 10:30 p.m. the previous day in Florida, and my flight was scheduled to land in Orlando at 8:00 p.m. Thankfully, the screaming kid was not aboard my second international flight, so I did sleep a little. By the time I got home and found my car, I had been awake for about a day, after getting too little sleep in Egypt. It was not a recipe for highway safety.

I thought I would have a hard time adjusting to Florida time, but last night I fell asleep at around 10:00 without drugs, and I woke up at 5:00, which is not all that far from my target.

Rhodah’s situation was worse. We tried to work things out so we would be together as much as possible on the way home. I didn’t want her to be alone in airport waiting areas. It wasn’t possible to make the flight times work well. My flight from Cairo left in the morning, and hers left at about 7:00 p.m. We tried to get her a nice paid lounge to sit in, but Cairo International is not set up well for that. She had to sit in the main terminal. Then she had a similar wait in Dubai. Fortunately, I was able to put her in a lounge there, with a buffet and so on, but she still ended up landing in Zambia a long time after I arrived in Florida.

Anyway, we survived. I just wish I didn’t have this cold. It’s mild, but even a mild cold is a pain when you’re traveling. Rhodah’s symptoms were somewhat milder than mine, thank God.

I have some more observations about Egypt.

We were taken to a bazaar during one of our day trips. I recommend against going to bazaars that are popular with tourists. First of all, there is not much you really want in an Egyptian bazaar. Second, you will pay more in markets that draw tourists. At least this is what I deduced; one of the guides let something slip. While we were in the car, he pointed to another bazaar where locals go, and he said the prices were very good. If you’re determined to buy Egyptian scarves which may or may not be genuine, find out where the real bazaar is and go there on your own.

The bazaar we went to was called something like El Khalili. I am too lazy to look it up. The main drawing point was a small coffee shop where Naguib Mahfouz and Morgan Freeman have been known to drink. There are pictures of both of them on the walls.

I have never read a Mahfouz book, and I never will. I don’t have any interest in his books. I can’t name one title. It’s amazing that I even knew who he was. As for the sensation of being in a shop where Morgan Freeman once sat, it’s everything it sounds like it would be. But the guide and the shop employees were very nice, so I was, too. They have to make a living. I was happy to look at the photos.

There were jewelry stores in the bazaar. They made a real impression on me, like the jewelry stores in airports. I wondered who in his right mind would buy jewelry in such places. If a bazaar shopkeeper in Egypt sells you a ring, how do you know if the price is good, and what do you do when the plating comes off and you find out your ring is mostly steel? And airport jewelers…has any airport merchant anywhere ever offered a reasonable price on anything? If a Whopper costs $10.00 in an airport, why would you expect a good deal on a watch?

I suppose some people shop at these stores. They’re not for me, though.

Googling around, I don’t see much of a connection between Freeman and Egypt. It looks like he visited a few years ago while doing a documentary, so I suppose his stop at the cafe was incidental. I guess the proprietors were happy when they saw him, and they decided to make the most of his visit.

Rhodah and I stayed near the pyramids every night we spent in Cairo. I wouldn’t do it again. She was captivated by the view, which was pretty neat, but until Giza is put back together, it won’t be very comfortable for tourists. Walking around is dangerous and difficult because of the street repairs, and shopping and dining out are nearly impossible. We considered moving downtown, to the area of Tahrir Square. That would have put us near the Egypt Museum, not to mention streets with usable sidewalks and functioning shops and restaurants. If I were to go back, I think I would do Giza for one night and then move downtown.

I had no problem getting money from ATM’s, but they dispense 200-pound notes, and that made life harder for me. In Egypt, a 200-pound note is a big deal. It’s around $12. When a driver runs you around all day while touring, a good solid tip is 100 pounds. When someone carries your luggage, 50 pounds is very generous. If you’re stuck with big bills, you have to get change all the time, and it can be awkward. Not that this stopped me.

My hotel, the Steigenberger Pyramids, had some failings, and one was that they didn’t keep petty cash on hand. I could not get bills changed reliably. That’s a shame, because they should have learned to provide such routine services.

When you use a public toilet in Egypt, you can pretty much count on running into someone who wants a tip. Five pounds will do it, although I think it annoys them when Americans know how little to tip. Some bathrooms have attendants, and others are jammed up with janitorial people who pretend to be attendants, and they may tell you stories about their starving children in order to get more money out of you. They will not hesitate to try to get several dollars.

Two bad things happened to me because of the constant haggling. First, I started saying no to people even when they were trying to sell me things I wanted. I would say no and keep walking, and then I’d realize I should have bought the water or whatever they were selling. Second, I haggled when I shouldn’t have, out of habit. I’d walk away after negotiating a proper Egyptian sum, and then later, I’d realize I should have given them more, just because they needed it. By then there was nothing I could do.

Haggling is a stupid system. Egyptian merchants would make more money from tourists if they just posted reasonable prices and stuck to them. Just because you got a sucker to pay you $25 for one $3 scarf doesn’t mean you’re doing a good job. You have to think of the many people you drove away with your haggling. You might have sold dozens of scarves and made money on volume.

Haggling conditions tourists not to talk to Egyptians. How can that be helpful? It also conditions them not to visit the country again.

We got a guy in trouble at the Valley of the Kings. We went into a tomb, and he took up with us, uninvited, and started taking pictures for us. He climbed into a sarcophagus, which is highly illegal, and took photos. Then he badgered us, trying to get us to go in, too. Of course, we refused. Then he demanded a lot of money on the way out.

We had a good relationship with our guide, and I commented on what we had been through. I said the unofficial escorts in the tombs should say what they wanted up front. I wasn’t complaining, and I had no intention of trying to get money back. I was just commenting on a funny business model I found interesting. Our guide didn’t think it was funny at all. He went to the man who managed the site, and that man was irate. He dragged men out of the tombs and had us identify them so he could chew them out. He even insisted on going into the next tomb with us, to protect us. We kept telling them we didn’t want to get people in trouble, but he was adamant.

I felt like we should have told him one man was climbing into a sarcophagus and trying to get tourists to go in. He was damaging the site. I decided to keep quiet. I didn’t want to cause more trouble, and in the end, as a Christian, I don’t really care if someone damages a pagan site. The world would be better off if they were all destroyed. Rhodah agreed.

Speaking of damaged sites, we saw an interesting phenomenon in many locations. There were wall carvings of pharaohs and false gods with the faces chiseled off. Our guides told us this was done by Christians who had used the temples as churches. When Rhodah and I were alone, I told her I had no problem with it, and she felt the same way. It’s safe to say that when Jesus returns, he won’t be interested in preserving structures and artwork created to honor beings who dragged people he loved down to eternal agony.

The Egyptians don’t take good care of their treasures. You can rub your hands all over ancient carvings in every site. Many relics look dirty and worn in places because people have handled them so much. Tut’s tomb is defaced by big spots where bacteria introduced and fed by human breath have formed colonies. Between the ancient Christians, the tomb robbers, the gypsy “guides,” and tourists, many ancient artifacts are slowly being destroyed.

In the Valley of the Kings, a licensed guide can’t go with you into a tomb, but untrained attendants who crave tips practically live in them. It will not work out well in the end.

I almost feel bad about snapping a finger off a statue of Nefertari to turn into a keyring. I was going to tag the Sphinx with my Instagram handle, but they weren’t letting visitors get close to it.

Our guide told us a British man bribed tomb attendants to help him cut a placemat-sized panel out of one of the tombs. He tried to take it home to England. Somehow, I can’t help picturing a gay man who wanted a really nice board for serving cheese at parties.

When I got home, I had to go get my birds from the boarding place. The lady who helped me asked where I had been, and I told her I had visited Egypt. She practically swooned. She had been there herself, years ago. She adored Egypt. I was amazed. I found it extremely hot, very dirty, hard to get around, and, apart from the tourist sites, pretty dull. Oddly, I liked the Egyptians themselves a lot more than their country.

I can understand loving a place like Paris or Athens. If you go to Paris, you’ll have no end of things to see. You’ll also be able to walk out of your hotel and get great food in countless locations. The weather in Paris is magnificent. The shopping is great. Public transportation is great. You can even rent a car.

Egypt isn’t like that. You pretty much sit in your hotel or on your ship, waiting to be picked up and driven through security checkpoints, to see temples that all look alike, in the burning sun, with no clouds, knowing you’ll have to walk past endless merchants who will descend on you like horseflies and who will never take “no” for an answer.

Rhodah wasn’t thrilled, either. She doesn’t want to go back except possibly to celebrate the anniversary of our engagement. We met some very nice people, and we accomplished our purpose, which was to be with each other, but the country itself is a very demanding, even exhausting, destination with limited rewards to compensate visitors.

With a few changes, Egypt would be as inviting as Greece. It’s too bad the Egyptians, who can be such exceptional hosts, aren’t aware of the things they need to do.

If we had gone to Greece, we would have been filled with great food. We would have had wonderful walks in parks and on streets that didn’t smell like poop and weren’t full of constrution debris and garbage. We would have seen important historical sites. We could have been alone together without hiding in hotel rooms. Egyptians should take note. They can do anything Greeks can do. I would love to see them do better.

All up in my Business

This is amazing. Someone has been surreptitiously filming me and my long-distance Zambian girlfriend.

FYI, we have decided my new pet name is The Problem of Whiteness.

I Pulled Out my Beam; Pull Yours

I’m sure everyone who reads this site has been unable to sleep, wondering what became of the Kenyan lady I talked to on the dating site.

Fear not. I will escort you back into the arms of Morpheus.

To recap, I decided to take a look at interracial dating sites, for reasons already explained. I have had many amusing encounters with African Internet scammers, and I was not optimistic when I started hearing from women in Africa. I started talking to one anyway, and we had an incredible conversation. After that, I vetted her on the web. She checks out. She is the same person who has been posting on Youtube and Twitter for years. She’s a very seriously lady who hates BS, and she has put up a number of Twitter posts chewing out crooked Kenyan politicians and essentially saying God would soon smite them with boils and mighty emerods.

She didn’t literally say that, but you get the picture.

Our first conversation seemed extremely encouraging, but yesterday, I barely got a response from her.

It occurred to me that I had already failed one test as a potential leader. I had had a marvelous encounter with an extraordinary woman, and then I had failed to lead by asking her to agree with me in prayer for guidance as to whether we should continue. I emailed her and apologized, and she sent a nice email back. In it, she suggested I look into Kenneth Copeland, Jerry Savelle, and Kenneth Hagin.

AHA.

She believes in the American prosperity gospel. I said bad things about it in our initial encounter, so she withdrew to think things over. This was obvious to me.

Obviously, the thing to do was to send another email explaining that it was okay with me if she followed Copeland, and I needed to tell her I was okay with a wife who practiced the money gospel and gave money to rich preachers.

Yeah, right.

I doubled down.

This morning I sent a long email. To summarize, I said a man has to be a leader, and part of leadership is learning things first and passing them on to his wife. This necessarily means he and she will disagree on things until she agrees to submit and listen. I told her about the bad experiences I had had with greedy prosperity buffoons like Kenneth Copeland and Rich Wilkerson, Sr. I told her how I had criticized them publicly. I told her people had said I shouldn’t touch God’s “anointed.” I told her I had become wealthy while they were saying that, and they had not prospered. I told her I received the home and inheritance of a person who defended the money preachers. I said I cursed their ministries from time to time, and that I planned to keep criticizing them.

I am wondering what she’ll say if she responds.

The incel community has a useful but profane phrase. I will paraphrase it and say “poop test.” A poop test is a cruel, dishonest test a woman puts a man through in order to establish dominance and weed out men with spines. Women will say these tests are intended to screen out losers, but that isn’t true. Only losers pass these tests. They’re all about enslavement and hatred of men.

Women will do things like “running hot and cold.” This means she’ll love you one day and shun you the next. The idea is to use sporadic reinforcement to draw you closer. It’s the same thing that makes slot machines work. If a slot machine pays off every time, you’ll only pull the arm until you get what you want. If it never pays off, you’ll only pull the arm until you realize it. If it pays off unpredictably at random intervals, you may pull the arm until you get blisters and tendinitis.

Wife-beaters work the same way. A wife-beater can’t be predicted. One day he’ll be Prince Charming. The next, he’ll give you a fractured orbital. Women and kids learn to try to mold themselves in order to shape a wife-beater’s behavior. It doesn’t work, but it’s literally addictive.

Poop tests are abuse. Anyone who sticks around for them ought to donate his testicles to medical science, because he is not using them.

Poop tests are wrong, but clinging to your principles and seeing if your partner is right for you is right. It’s what I’m doing. It’s what Jesus did. He said incredibly rude things to people, and he accepted the fact that people who were offended shouldn’t have been there in the first place.

By the way, a reader recommended a video in which a dating coach gave three tests to give women. I thought it was kind of funny. Here they are:

1. Ask your true love to get you a cup of coffee.
2. Say you’re not going to do something she wants to do.
3. Ask her if she’ll sign a pre-nup.

It’s wrong to come up with contrived, dishonest tests, but I’ll say this: these are legitimate tests, not weapons of manipulation.

The second test reminds me of something that happened to me. I was dating a nutjob who will never be anything but miserable. Unfortunately, I was the love of her life. She had our future all planned out. She was smitten.

She asked me to go to a cat show. I had zero desire to do this, but I agreed, because you do things for people you love. No big deal.

On the day of the show, she arrived at my house very late, and she did not call or give me any warning. When she arrived, I said she needed to let me know when she couldn’t be on time. Again, no big deal. Off to the cat show.

On the way to the show, she had a nutjob moment in the car. The mask fell off. She started telling me I was angry. She said I had a “pissy” look on my face. She was furious. I had no idea what she was talking about. I had been wondering if there was anything interesting to see at a cat show.

I don’t recall whether we made it to the cat show. I recall that I dumped her. The cat show berserker conniption cut the cord, but it was a few days until I made it official.

She thought I ruined her life when I cut her loose, but I saved my own. She took forever to let go. I had to chase her down and force her to take the belongings she had left in my bedroom. Women leave things in men’s homes in order to mark territory and ease their way toward marriage. “If my stuff is in your house, you’re still my man, and this will blow over.”

Sometimes people give themselves poop tests. It wasn’t the first time for her. I remember sitting in the car while she berated some minimum-wage ghetto girl over a parking fee dispute that amounted to less than a Starbucks bill. The girl in the booth was not in a position to make the rules, and she was obviously very hurt. I told her to forget about it and drove off. I caught hell for that, and I learned something.

The way a woman treats other people she’s angry about is the way she will treat you when she’s angry at you. The same thing applies to men. If you like big, strong men who push other men around physically, get ready for dental caps and bruises you can’t hide with makeup. Your day is coming.

Anyway, again, poop tests are wrong, but standing up for God and the truth can perform their function for you.

Today I did exactly the right thing, so I feel good. I’m not sitting around wondering what clever move will make her love me. I wrote my email and got up and made some delicious buckwheat pancakes. She can accept me or move on. She says she believes a man should lead and a woman should submit. We’ll find out if she means it.

She is a bold person who has been rejected for telling the truth. Does she have the stomach to accept someone who speaks the truth to her?

Now you know what’s happening. Sleep well.

Backlog of Chores Dwindling as Spiritual Warfare Takes Effect

I got loads of stuff done today.

My utility cart has been giving me problems. I did a trigger job on my Thompson Center Venture, and because of the weather, I had to wait weeks to shoot it. A few days back, the weather got nice, and I threw my mat and rifle in the cart. It would not start.

I took the carb out, which was not fun at all, and I threw it in the sonic cleaner in gasoline. I did this twice. Didn’t help. I decided to take the main jet and the float needle out and look at them.

The float is held on a pin that goes through two posts made from what I suppose is cast aluminum. Generally, float pins are not fitted tightly. They are held captive by the bowls, so there is no reason to have a tight pin. The people who made my carb didn’t know this. It was jammed in there.

I tapped it out with a punch. I really had to whack it. Unfortunately, one of the posts snapped at the base.

I was not happy. I can do a lot of things with tools, but I had little confidence in my ability to refasten a tiny broken aluminum post to its base, inside a carb bowl. I tried some Hail Mary solutions. First, I tried to get solder to stick to it. I figured I might be able to glom enough solder onto it to hold it in place. Didn’t work at all. Aluminum does not seem to like solder.

I then decided to bury it in 5-minute epoxy. Maybe that would stick. Epoxy is impervious to gasoline, and carb floats put nearly no stress on their pins, so if I could get the post to stick, it would probably stay there for years.

Unbelievably, it worked. I’ll post a photo.

How did I fix the tight pin? Two ways. First, I have a number of junk carbs. I happened to have one with the same size bowl and float. There was no possibility I would ever use it, so I took the pin out and put it in the cart carb. One hole was still too tight, so I opened it with a small drill bit.

The bowl gasket in the old carb was destroyed. I guess someone overtightened the bowl nut. Because I had a carb with the same size bowl, I had a usable gasket.

The sonic cleaner didn’t fix the jet because corrosion was the problem. Ethanol gas has water in it, and water makes things corrode. The jet was narrowed because of corrosion. It looks like sonic cleaners don’t do well with thick oxidation. I also saw something protruding into the bore of the jet. A varnish flake? I didn’t know.

My answer was to put the jet in a citric acid solution. It ate the crud, and the jet opened up. I also soaked the needle.

The plugs were black, and I replaced them, too. The old ones had the wrong number on them, so I assume they were the wrong size.

I put the carb back in the cart, and it ran better than ever.

While I was working on this, I ordered a Chinese carb from Ebay, with gaskets. Cost: $13.56. I inquired about carb gaskets on a cart forum, and some guy told me I should stick with OEM products. He said OEM carbs only cost $126 each.

You know, I would love to support American businesses, but a 9.5-to-one price differential is not acceptable. I have a bunch of cheap Chinese carbs, and they are just like OEM carbs, which are probably also Chinese. When you pay 10 times as much for “American,” you don’t get a better product. You get the same Chinese carb, at a Chinese price, from a different American vendor. Good enough.

In all likelihood, my epoxy repair will hold for the life of the cart, but I will have a Chinese carb on hand anyway, because you never know. I may install it preemptively. In any case, I will never again have to go several days with no cart to drive to the mailbox. Getting your mail on foot is just not the Southern way. It’s wrong.

I also ordered a new PCV hose and choke cable. Someone had Bubba’d the old cable with a piece of wire.

My cart is unbelievably useful. I’ve done lots of gardening and tree cutting with it, and I always use it when I shoot. I can’t risk more cart down time. Ain’t nobody got time for that.

After I fixed the cart, I put a new transmission in my Makita cordless drill. A while back, I snapped the screw that holds the chuck in. These screws are hard to get out, and while I was trying, I did something to the transmission that made it fail to work. I think I lost a ball bearing. I pictured myself trying to find the right ball bearing and paying a fortune for it, and I gave up and ordered a transmission. I didn’t know it would take weeks to arrive.

Whatever. It got here, and I installed it. Check that off the list. I also bought a backup drill. Cordless tools aren’t expensive when you buy them without batteries. Life without a cordless drill was not pleasant, so I won’t let it happen twice.

After the drill triumph, I installed a $240 Timney trigger in my Ruger Precision Rifle.

The Ruger comes with a nice trigger, but it’s not TOO nice. I think rifle makers have lawyers who tell them not to sell really soft triggers. You can adjust your RPR trigger, but you can’t really get it down to the target level.

You can make it better by simply removing the trigger spring. So I’m told. They say the trigger spring’s only purpose is to make the pull heavier. It works perfectly without it. So I’m told.

I thought about it, and I thought about all the triggers I’ve modified on my own. I decided to go first class for once.

Installing a Timney trigger is easy. You remove a few screws, pop the old trigger out, and put the new one in. It has two stages. The first stage is 8 ounces, and the second is one pound. THAT’S a trigger.

Now I’m ready to find out what the gun can really do.

But wait! There’s more!

When I was done with the RPR, I took the .204 out and shot a few rounds to see if the new trigger spring was light enough.

Here’s a funny thing about rifle triggers. They all seem light and crisp in your living room or at the counter at the gun shop. When you’re looking through a scope, aiming at a bullet-diameter spot on a target 100 yards away, they suddenly become very heavy and gritty. When I put the new spring in, I thought it was very, very light.

Today, it seemed much heavier. I was not happy at all.

I didn’t shoot all that well. I’ll put up photos. The barrel may need cleaning. I’m not sure I’ve ever cleaned it. When I took my shooting class, the instructors appeared to be in favor of leaving barrels dirty until they started losing accuracy. That’s what I’ve been doing. Whatever the problem is, I decided to do more work on the trigger.

I put the gun on my bench, yanked the new spring out, and cut about two coils out. Now it seems light and greasy-slick. I’m not fooled, though. They always seem that way in the house. I’m going to clean the barrel and try the gun again in a little bit.

I feel like this has been a productive day. Tomorrow, I hope to lube the turnbuckles on my tractor forks and put them back on the bucket. Then I can move some logs I cut.

The weather is gorgeous. Cool, not very sunny, and a little breezy. I was outside for over an hour, and my shirt isn’t even dripping on the floor. Fall is here, and fall should be more productive than summer.

I believe I’m getting a lot done because I’m remembering to do supernatural warfare against demons that try to restrain me. I do it every morning, and sometimes I do it at night. It’s funny how Christians are ashamed to fight demons. They believe God is a spirit. They believe Jesus and the Holy Ghost are spirits. Somehow, they can’t make themselves believe in other spirits! Why is that?

If demons don’t exist, neither does God, so why do you think you’re a Christian?

Christianity says we are also spirits. Do you believe you exist?

Guess that’s all I have. Hope everyone is praying for President Trump. His doctor says things are going very, very well.

59 Buffalo Cops Failed to Understand the Memo

The reasons America is devouring itself right now are not natural, and it’s counterproductive to focus too much on natural reasons. We are having problems because we turned away from God and rejected the Holy Spirit. Nonetheless, it’s interesting to look at the symptoms as long as you don’t misdiagnose the disease.

Today something very unpleasant happened. I found my self agreeing with a Cuomo and even Chris Hayes, who could arguably be said to represent 75% of what is disappointing in current American males.

I saw the video of the Buffalo incident. An old man approached riot police and waved a cell phone while he was talking to them, and one of them shoved him hard. He fell backward, and immediately, so much blood poured out of his right ear it formed a puddle beside his head. He’s alert and in stable condition, and he is urging people to react peacefully.

Here’s a Youtube of the incident.

I guess it’s a good thing the victim doesn’t appear to be black. BLM doesn’t take much notice of police brutality toward white people, so maybe the incident won’t stir the violence up very much.

Am I upset about the attack itself? Sure, but it’s not what I sat down to write about. According to the news, the two cops involved in the attack were suspended. Then 57 cops resigned from the unit…in support of the attackers.

That’s the part of the story that should bother people the most. The cops will always hurt a certain number of people without justification, no matter what we do. I accept that. But I don’t accept the culture of cops who stand up for other cops who are clearly criminals.

The cops who quit supported two criminals, and they also decided it was okay to diminish their city’s ability to control rioters. What priorities. At least they’ll be welcome in the sack race at the department’s next picnic.

As a lawyer, I don’t ordinarily like to draw conclusions from news videos or early stories, because I generally don’t have enough evidence to make up my mind. For example, George Zimmerman shot a larger attacker in what was textbook self-defense, but if I had listened to the biased initial reports, I would have thought he was a murderer. There are exceptions, though. When a Cleveland cop leapt out of a car and shot 12-year-old Tamir Rice without trying to communicate with him or give him a chance to drop his toy gun, I said it was second-degree murder. It was too obvious to allow doubt. I’m also confident that what happened in Buffalo was a crime, and there is no excuse for backing up the men who committed it.

When I learn about cases like the one in Buffalo, I always think of the time I spent working with a DV prosecutor in Miami. She said she dealt with a lot of domestic violence cases involving male cops, and she said it was very hard to get anywhere with them because other cops obstructed her work and refused to cooperate. Yes, Miami cops–the people abused women were expected to call for help–stood up for men they knew to be wife-beaters. They didn’t do it because of the evidence. They did it simply because the wife-beaters were their co-workers.

Many people will get angry with you unless you side 100% with protesters, black people who are hurt by the police, or the police themselves. The truth is that it’s a complicated picture. Life isn’t a cartoon.

Rioting can never be excused, but on the other hand, police brutality is very real. Bad attitudes among cops are very common. How many times have you had an obnoxious cop treat you rudely? I rarely interact with the police, but it has happened to me on a number of occasions. How many times have you seen a cop give orders that go beyond what he knows he is authorized to command? This stuff is normal and widespread.

The police need to operate in the sunlight. Body cameras should be used every time they interact with us, and we should always be allowed to film and record them at work, except in unusual cases where information really needs to be restricted. There are still places where shooting video of the police can get you in legal trouble. That’s astounding, and if it doesn’t violate the letter of the First Amendment, it certainly conflicts with the spirit. The primary reason the First Amendment exists is to allow us to criticize the government.

I support the police. I know they are almost always right when people accuse them. I know their jobs are very hard and that our support is necessary if we expect them to get anything done. But the complaints we are hearing about them now weren’t fabricated from thin air. They arose from a long, consistent history of abuse.

The police are probably in the right in 95% of the incidents that draw accusations. In relative terms, they’re much less culpable than their accusers. But in absolute terms, they’re wrong too much of the time. Let’s go crazy and increase the figure to 98% for the sake of argument. How long would you expect your restaurant to stay open if you gave 2% of your customers food poisoning or you got angry and called 2% of your female customers sluts?

It’s not that hard to run an organization with a very low rate of employee misbehavior. Not in the world of business, anyway. It shouldn’t be any harder for the police. It should be easier, because we expect the police to be people of good character.

All this being said, I don’t think what I’m saying is very important. If we don’t address the supernatural roots of conflict, putting cameras on cops and passing new laws won’t improve things enough to matter.

The cops who committed the battery have been charged, so things could be worse.

Elegance Isn’t Everything

The makeshift Rockwell Jawhorse reloading bench is up and running, and it’s excellent. I have more confidence in it than I would in something manufactured for the purpose.

A while back, I blogged about creating this thing. I had a Jawhorse. I needed an indoor bench. I didn’t want to cut up my nice oak benches. I grabbed some scrap wood and threw together a platform I could clamp in the Jawhorse.

Today I got the press running, and I’ve been making 10mm cartridges. The Jawhorse is a hit. It’s steadier than my homemade multi-hundred-pound wooden workbench.

I highly recommend this for anyone who has a Jawhorse and doesn’t want to have a permanent bench.

Harbor Freight has a coupon for their Jawhorse copy, the Franklin clamping station, taking it from $130 to $100: LINK.

I can remove the press and pop the platform out of the Jawhorse in a couple of minutes, so storage is not a problem. The Jawhorse doesn’t mar the floor. The long wooden top of the platform is a great place to put bullets and casings, and you can also screw a piece of plywood, an aluminum baking sheet, or some kind of tray to the wood, giving you a nice big work area. I used the wood for banging a bullet puller. Worked fine.

I managed to crank out 77 rounds of target ammo using old brass. Now I have to break into my stash of new Starline. Not sure I bought enough. I thought 500 cases would be plenty, but I have more bullets than that.

I was going to make defensive rounds first, but it turned out the press was more nearly ready for a target load, so I went with it.

Now I have to decide: do I shoot this stuff in my new Glock right away, terminating the warranty, or do I test it with some wimpy factory ammo? I guess I should see if I have any.

Will Coronavirus Improve us or Keep Making us Worse?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The men in authority probably represented preachers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Interesting.

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

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

The Love Grows Cold

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Whew. I’m back now.

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