Decorated by the Department of Defense

I just found out my blog has been blocked by the Department of Defense. Amazing! The grounds: “hate” and “racism.” I wonder what that’s all about.

These days, “hate” is like “bullying.” For the most part, it’s a code word for any type of negativity toward homosexuality. I’ll bet that’s what got me flagged. I’m a Christian. I believe the Bible when it speaks against homosexuality and other forms of sexual sin. These days, that’s hate!

I don’t think racism is the issue. I can’t think of anything I’ve written that would cause a problem. I’ve certainly criticized BLM, not to mention affirmative action and corrosive identity poltics, but as of 2018, I don’t think these things would merit a DoD ban. Maybe two years from now they will.

Here’s what I think happened. Someone who looks like Chaz Bono has a job, sitting at a DoD computer, looking for Christian websites to ban. He or she or ze saw my website and pushed the magic button, and there was no oversight, so now I’m gone. There is no committee. There is no hearing. Just a person with a lot of tattoos and a crabby attitude. This is my guess.

The fascinating thing to me is that the DoD babysits employees. You can go to Afghanistan and get your head blown off, but you can’t visit my blog because it’s not safe. If you read my blog, something real bad could happen to you. Worse than breaking your neck on the confidence course or being killed by a grenade in boot camp.

I can understand why they would ban porn sites, gambling sites, and maybe Ebay and Youtube, because they don’t want employees goofing off all day on their computers, but are they really trying to protect their little snowflakes from blogs? Is that a proper function of the Department of Defense? I always think of military personnel as tough individuals who face dangers the rest of us run from, but maybe not all of them are like that.

What an amazing age we live in. Our universities–supposedly bastions of freedom of thought–force conservatives and Christians off campus and pamper the people we offend with puppies and coloring books, and now our military is on the same track!

Here’s what I’m going to do to fight the ban: absolutely nothing. I don’t make money here. I’m not running for office. I don’t care if anyone reads this site or not; not enough to plead my case before the deluded and self-righteous. The government would be doing me a big favor if they shut it down completely. This site can get me in trouble, clearly, but it can’t do much to for me.

I didn’t fight Facebook when they killed my account, either. I started a new one, and eventually, I quit altogether. I am not a joiner, so whenever I get the chance to drop out, I’m likely to take it.

It’s fascinating, watching my predictions come true. It’s really happening. Anti-Christian fascism is here! Now! Today! It’s not “coming.” We have it right now! And I’m already being victimized! I’m not reading about someone else’s problems. It’s me!

It’s shocking to see that our government is this brazen about censoring people for religious and political reasons. And look how they did it! No warning. No notice once it was done. No appeal. No explanation. They MeToo’d me, without even a hint of due process. I have been disappeared, like a Salvadoran whose village picked the wrong team. But this is America! Or at least it used to be.

If this is happening, then the other things I’ve foreseen will happen. They will come after my money and property. Eventually, they will imprison and kill me. I feel like I’ve been projected back into 1930’s Germany, with full knowledge of what lies ahead.

I’ve often wondered what I would have done, had I been a Jew under Chancellor Hitler. It was just idle speculation. It’s not idle any more. They really will come and get me if I live long enough. What will I do?

Again, I will do nothing. I will not join a militia. I will not build a bomb shelter. I will not buy Glenn Beck’s vacuum-packed survival wafers. If they want me, they can have me. When the time comes, put me in a cell and then shoot me. Better yet, just shoot me. When you want this planet, you can have it. I’m not that attached to it. Not if it means being confined here with people who would do this to me.

I’m not afraid of death at all. It’s dying that scares me. I just hope the freak patrol in charge of cleansing sees fit to make it quick.

I feel sorry for conservatives and Christians who are holing up in places like Idaho, rattling their sabers and talking about last stands. It’s not going to work, and even if it did work, the cake wouldn’t be worth the candle. If you have to become a brute in order to take your country back from brutes, you haven’t gained anything. They’ve still won.

The Bible says we’re supposed to be more than conquerors. That means we don’t just defeat our enemies; we turn them into brothers and sisters. Satan always copies God. He thinks the same way. He is more than a conqueror. He doesn’t just want to murder good people. He wants to turn them into bad people. It’s better to die than to cooperate.

I’ve written a lot about how it may be necessary to fend off urban hordes in the future, when the cities dry up and the depraved inhabitants come to places like this to loot whatever remains. My feelings are changing. I don’t think I could take part in that. If I were to use a gun to defend my own property, it would have to be out of fear of violence. I could not do it out of hate or anger.

The Nazis killed many people by relatively humane means. They shot more people than they gassed. The deranged leftists who murdered the last Czar’s children used firearms. Maybe when the chanters and mask-wearers get me, they’ll be as kind as the Nazis. Hopefully they’ll be nicer than the Romans, who crucified Jesus and deep-fried John.

It’s really going to happen. I can’t wrap my head around it. When I was a kid, I thought I’d get a job and marry a woman and have two kids. I thought I’d have a normal life and be part of society. I didn’t expect the entire earth to have a civil war, and I didn’t think I would have to exist as a loner, outside the human family’s general population.

This is just the start. I’m going to lose my Internet access. I’m going to be denied the ability to buy and sell. I’m going to lose my wealth and property. I’m going to be confined. Then I’ll be killed. A lot of people will be taken along with me. It may be a few years, but wait and see.

Come get me. I threaten you with…nothing. You think I’m kidding? You think I won’t do nothing? Don’t push me. I’m not playing.

Humanity is so childish. The thought of stopping the bus and getting off is nothing short of enticing.

I don’t know if military people are (were) reading my blog. If so, sorry to see you go. Sorry to see me go, I should say. Can’t do anything about it.

To whoever flagged me, you need help. God is real. Whatever my faults are, I am telling needy people the truth about him. You are not helping humanity. You are cutting people off from something they need desperately. You’re leaving them in the hands of people like televangelists. You’re not on the right side of history, believe me. Talk to God yourself. Get to know him. Ask him what he thinks. You’ll find out you made a big mistake.

I don’t care about what you did to me. I’m required to forgive people, and like I said, this site isn’t that important to me. If you ever regret what you did, and you wish you could apologize to me, don’t worry about it. Just do your best with the time you have remaining, after you change your mind.

It’s a huge honor to be persecuted. I completely understand why Peter felt he was unworthy to be crucified like Jesus. I’m not worthy, either. It’s very flattering to be attacked for whatever resemblance I may bear to someone who is utterly superior to me. I am not a good person, but I must be doing something right, finally.

Now I Need a Puffy Shirt and Some Goth Tattoos

Temptation got me. I am buying a 3D printer.

This was not an easy decision. I was waiting for printers to become a) affordable and b) useful. I would say I’m 75% of the way there. You can get a fairly decent printer for a little over $200 now, so a) is covered, and the printed parts are useful for certain purposes as long as you don’t push it. That covers b) to the tune of what I reckon to be about 50%.

When 3-D printers came out, they were very pricey. They still are, if you get one that even approaches fulfilling the 3D printer mission. If you want multiple colors, limited glitches, strong parts, large parts, and so on, you pay through the nose. If you’re content to make reasonably good stuff in single colors, with a tolerable level of aggravation, you can get a lot done for a a low three-figure sum.

Why do I want a 3D printer? To print illegal guns, of course. I want to print up a warehouse full of flimsy, dangerous, non-rifled pistols and stick it to the Deep State.

That was my little shout-out to you, DHS people.

I actually want it to improve my CAD skills, prototype stuff I am considering making with machine tools, and make whatever useful printed items are within the limits of the technology. Printed guns are not for me. They are the gas station sushi of guns.

If you truly want to print good stuff, you can now buy 3D printers that do metal. Last time I looked, they started at about $800,000. That’s a little steep; I plan to wait just a little bit longer.

I’m not sure how such a machine can make sense, when you could have astounding casting and CNC capabilities for maybe $100K. You can get a HAAS CNC mill up and running for under $30K.

I never got anywhere with CNC. I did a few things with CAD, but when you’re machining things by hand, CAD is not that tempting. It’s usually easier to just go to the garage and throw metal on the machine, relying on a sketch on a legal pad.

I learned that Fusion 360, the free CAD from AutoCAD, will create designs a printer can use. Now I’ll have a little motivation to use Fusion 360. I won’t be able to make anything unless I have a computer file on hand, so CAD will be mandatory.

At first, I considered getting a $300 Monoprice printer, but I read some bad things about them. I ended up choosing something called an Anet A6. It’s an open source gadget. You buy a kit and put it together. I’m sure manufacturer support is terrible, but the web is full of nerds who use this machine and similar machines, so you can always go to a forum and get advice, if you don’t mind fielding a few snotty remarks from 4chan-dwelling pimple-poppers.

Wow. I just described about 30% of the world’s tech hobby forums.

My understanding is that the vast majority of printer users make useless things like plastic skulls and dolls action figures. I suppose they get excited about the novelty of printing, and they crank out a few items using other people’s designs. Then they get bored and let the printers gather dust. I’m hoping I’ll find uses for my printer. If not, there is always Goodwill.

I don’t want a skull. I don’t understand why printer owners like them so much.

I looked online for useful designs, and I really didn’t find any. One guy made a bottle opener. American homes contain a lot of stuff that has plastic parts that break, though, so I should be able to come up with projects from time to time, even if I can’t invent anything.

I think it’s going to be a long time before 3D printing really works. It seems like the problems printers had three years ago are the same problems they have today. Weak parts. Inaccurate parts. Parts that are too small.

I’ve read that it’s possible to print with nylon. This is a very strong material. I’m wondering if I’ll be able to do it. The obvious question is this: “If it works, why isn’t everyone doing it?” There have to be some issues with the process, or no one would be using relatively crappy products like ABS plastic.

I ordered something called PETG, I think. It’s supposed to be better than ABS. I picked blue. I figured it was a good choice for most parts. Red would be annoying after you made 40 or 50 things with it. Blue has more dignity.

If I create anything useful or even recognizable, I will be back to tell the world. Don’t expect any skulls, though.

Sew a Yellow Cross on Your Shirt

Today is a great day. I was supposed to be in Miami today, but I’m not. I need no additional cause for celebration.

I was supposed to drive down to Miami and retrieve more things the movers left behind. I made a reservation with a rental company. I wanted a large enclosed van. My pickup wasn’t right for the job. The website agreed to a noon appointment. Then when I arrived at the location, it was closed. They close at noon on Sundays, so in order to pick up the van, I would have had to be there earlier.

My schedule has been messed up, and now I’m trying to work things out so I can go later this week. Bad. But I’m not in Miami, so I’m happy. I hate that place so much. Driving down there is like driving to prison to start a sentence.

I’ve had breakfast, and I’ve been reading the news. I see the forces of tolerance just mustered their might to persecute Sarah Sanders. She went to a restaurant in Virginia that had a big homosexual element on the crew, and they voted to throw her off the premises.

We should have known we were sowing for a dim and contentious future back in the Sixties, when we decided civil disobedience was a good thing. We were too stupid to see it. People started holding sit-ins and so on, and eventually young Americans decided rioting was also civil disobedience. Now we call riots “protests.” Okay.

At some point, leftists decided that it was always good to break the law–any law–or to commit any wrong, in order to make a point. This is where we now stand.

Maxine Waters, who has encouraged people to riot in the past, is now encouraging leftist criminals to target conservatives wherever they may be. Leftists have actually showed up at people’s homes–private property–to hound them. Imagine how wives and kids feel when they see angry crowds at their houses. Must be nice.

The restaurant that ejected Sanders is called The Red Hen. Their actions were repugnant, but believe it or not, I support their ability to choose their clientele. They’re wrong to pick on Christians and conservatives, but they should have the right to do it. I’ve started to think the whole business of having the government force us to do business with each other is counterproductive. I suppose there must be exceptions, in important areas like transportation, medical care, and lodging, but generally, I think we ought to be able to say no without having to explain ourselves.

The reason we don’t get along isn’t a lack of laws. We have more laws than we know what to do with. We don’t get along because we don’t hear the Holy Spirit. Two thousand years ago, Jesus died to give us the power to become Holy-Spirit-led. We have not taken him up on it. As a result, we are led by evil spirits, exceedingly stupid people, and our own tiny minds. Our beliefs and motivations come from different sources, so they conflict.

God does not tell different people different things. If we heard from the Holy Spirit and submitted, we would be in agreement, and we wouldn’t be throwing each other out of restaurants.

Division is a frustrating thing. It’s particularly frustrating to see it in the church. We were never supposed to have denominations. If we were united by the Holy Spirit, we would agree on doctrine. There would only be one denomination. Unfortunately, denominations are started or corrupted by people who listen to the devil, and he does his best to pit us against each other with lies and nonsense.

Most Christians are not baptized with the Holy Spirit. Most don’t pray in tongues. Most who pray in tongues don’t do it enough to matter. We don’t confess every day. We don’t cast out the spirits that rule us.

We don’t hear from God. We don’t think God is smart enough or sufficiently engaged to tell us what to do, so we make things up. No meat on Friday. Pray to the “saints.” Homosexual preachers are fine and dandy. God has stopped working miracles. Give preachers money, and God will make you rich. “God helps those who help themselves.” “Christian pride”; I love that one. It’s like “Christian child pornography.” Pride is evil.

The other day I read about a guy who seriously believed Jesus had told him he was proud of him. Jesus is not proud of anyone; not even himself. Jesus can’t have pride.

The Bible clearly states that God fights the proud. God doesn’t fight himself.

One of the biggest lies is this: “Christians have to be more politically involved.” That doesn’t work. That puts us on Satan’s turf, in a game where he chooses the rules and equipment. We need to be more spiritually involved. The government can’t save you from what’s coming, but God can, and he will.

Christians fight each other all day, and we also have to contend with unbelievers who want to remove us from the planet. Instead of using the powerful tools God gave us, we use things like memes and tweets. It’s a bad situation.

We (Americans) don’t have supernatural unity, so we pass laws to keep us from clawing each other all day. It’s the best we can do. When you don’t have a power screwdriver, you use a butter knife or even a fingernail. It’s understandable. Jesus died to take hard work off our shoulders, and we don’t know how to receive the gift, so we work and strive. Laws seem better than nothing.

One of the big problems with human laws is that they are many-edged swords. A law you use to stick it to your enemies may be used to stick it to you later on. If we tell the fragile, bitter employees of The Red Hen they can’t have a safe place where Sarah Sanders can’t terrify them by eating highly pretentious food, can we then tell bakers they don’t have to choke back tears as they make cakes for homosexual marriages?

I prefer the word “homosexual” to “gay.” There is nothing gay about homosexuals. They’re extremely angry. Also, the word “gay” hasn’t always been applied to lesbians. That’s a new thing. It’s why we see “LGBT” instead of “GBT.” Lesbians tend to be a little grim, perhaps because it’s how they perceive masculine men, so it makes sense that people would be reluctant to call them “gay.”

It’s funny, but the First Amendment, which was intended to make America safe for different Christian denominations and perhaps Jews, is a law which has been turned against Christianity. It says the US won’t make any laws respecting the establishment of religions or the freedom to practice religion. That’s all it says. Courts took that and brought us to, “You can’t pray in school unless you’re a Muslim, in which case we will build a special room for you, but you can teach atheism and sexual immorality.”

Maybe the founders should have kept quiet about religion. Was there really any danger of ending up with a state religion? I don’t think so. I think they were paranoid. They passed a law anyway, intending to foster the free exercise of mainstream religions, and now your kids can be disciplined for opening a Bible during their private reading time at school.

It’s amazing how the First Amendment has been perverted. Without it, we would not have Satanic monuments and displays in courthouses and so on.

It’s too bad courts haven’t made the obvious logical jump and used the First Amendment to ban all state-backed coercion that relates to religion. If you push atheism and humanism, obviously, you are teaching about religion, yet the courts don’t see it that way.

Atheism is a religious belief, even if it’s not a religion. It’s a belief about religion.

We should do an experiment. We should get rid of anti-discrimination laws, except for industries that absolutely have to be accessible to everyone. We should go hands-free for a year and see what happens. It would be fascinating have a “purge” and see what business owners really want to do. The sudden jump in anti-Christian and anti-Semitic activity might drive a bunch of us back to God’s throne.

We don’t hear the Holy Spirit, so we are at each other’s throats. This is not going to go away. Things are going to get worse. America celebrates sin more and more. We are astoundingly filthy, even compared to the Americans of 2000. We watch filthy entertainment. We worship truly filthy celebrities. We are cruel and proud. We are cutting off whatever harmonizing influence the Holy Spirit still has, and we are increasing the influence of the spirits that want us to murder each other.

It’s crazy, seeing the bizarre things I’ve predicted come true. When God tells me something and I repeat it, I believe it…pretty much. When it comes to pass, it’s still shocking. For a long time, I’ve been saying we were headed toward a Nuremberg paradigm. Christians and Jews will be driven out of business, academics, and so on, and eventually, the imprisonments and killings will begin. Look what we’re seeing. They’re not murdering us in our yards yet, but many people have lost their livelihoods or important career opportunities because of their support of Christianity. That could not have happened 10 years ago, but now it’s commonplace.

It won’t be long before I’m marveling at the manifestation of worse things I’ve predicted.

I shouldn’t say I predicted anything. I was told things. I can’t predict what will happen 10 minutes from now without help. If I could predict the future, I wouldn’t have rented Black Panther, because I would have known what a clumsy, trite, amateurish movie it was.

You can say Sarah Sanders was thrown out because of politics, not religion. Thing is, politics IS religion. Leftists hate Trump largely because they see him (correctly) as the candidate of Christians. Homosexuals have a real hatred for Christianity. You can Google around and see for yourself. They would love to abolish Christianity.

When Satan’s children want to get rid of you, they start labeling you as the cause of a bunch of society’s problems. That’s what they’ve done to the Jews and Israel. Remember when Mel Gibson got drunk and became psychotic? Demons were controlling him. What did he say? He said, “Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world!” Mel Gibson doesn’t believe that when he’s sober. It’s idiotic. It came from demons allowed in by alcohol. When Hitler wanted power, he blamed the Jews for Germany’s poverty. Personally, I would have blamed the Kaiser or maybe England and France.

“Terrorism is caused by Jews. If we got rid of Israel, Muslims would stop.” “Christians cause gay and trans kids to kill themselves.” “Christians ruin education.” “Jew bankers caused the recession.” “Jew doctors created AIDS to kill blacks.” “Jews control America’s government.”

The enemy is convincing people who don’t hear the Holy Spirit that the answer to the world’s problems is to get rid of Christians and Jews.

Right now, in America, they can’t take us out and curb-stomp us for Youtube, but they are able to scratch their inexplicable itch a little bit, by getting us fired and excluding us from participation in the economy.

Laws aren’t going to save us. If you want protection, to go the only source, and submit. The world is a mess, and the only way to find safety is to step aside and let it proceed without you.

The world is rapidly becoming a place where we will not be able to (or want to) live. We need to be able to let go of it.

A funny thing happened to me yesterday. I was eating a snow cone at a flea market. I was really going at it. A couple of times, I felt a pain inside my chest. I knew it was the sensation of lots of ice melting in my esophagus, but part of me wondered: what if it was something else? Can eating ice bring on a heart attack?

For a few seconds, I was disturbed, but then I thought, “If it has to happen, let it be fatal.” I was ready to go. I didn’t mind at all. Emotional attachment to this world is a bad thing, and God is cutting me loose.

Life is like a birthday cake with a little bit of poop in it. Maybe you can enjoy it when the poop is tiny and it’s way down at one end, but these days, it seems like there is poop in every bite.

I can’t read the news without seeing pictures of half-naked women. I see rainbow flags in the Christian-heavy county where I live. A guy down the road has a concrete lawn jockey with black hands and a black face placed conspicuously in his yard, plus some other stuff that seems likely to be related to racism.

The poop is everywhere. I don’t like it. I don’t even like swimming in public pools.

Don’t fall in love with this place. It definitely doesn’t love you.

Don’t PC my Childhood Joys

I made a huge mistake. I bought a movie so I could listen to the commentary track.

When I was a kid, Jeremiah Johnson was one of my favorite films. It was a sensational movie, full of violence and grossly exaggerated “mountain man” antics, such as a scene where a very old man deliberately leads a running bear into his own cabin as a joke. Jeremiah Johnson was full of Indians, and it made them sensational, too. They were scary people who committed atrocities.

I still like the movie. The other day, it popped up on Turner Classic Movies, and I watched it. It’s a bad film. No question about that. There is no story to speak of. There is very little dialogue. The characters are as thin as the fog on a bathroom mirror. But it’s entertaining to watch Robert Redford fight with Indians and wild animals, and there are a lot of funny lines. Also, who doesn’t love mountains?

I bought a Blu-Ray disk and started listening. Biggest problem: the commentary is supposed to feature remarks by Redford, but there is very little of that. I’m halfway through, and it seems like he disappeared 10 minutes in. The other commentators are director Sidney Pollack and writer John Milius. Who wants to hear from them? Not me. They’re boring. “I could only afford to show dailies twice a week.” “We had to use a split lens in this shot.” Wow. Edge-of-your-seat-stuff.

Here’s another issue: the things I’m learning are somewhat disappointing. This movie was made by far-left L.A. people fresh out of the Sixties, a swollen, malignant decade that mars our history like snot on a silk tie. They messed with the story in order to make Indians look better.

The film is based on the legend of Liver-Eating Johnston (with a “T”), a real human being who was born toward the end of the eighteenth century. I say “legend” because no one really knows how much of his story is true. He had some kind of beef with the Crow Indians, and he killed a bunch of them. They say he ate their livers because it was supposed to cause them problems in the afterlife. Something about their religion. A little silly, unless you think their religion is correct.

Film character Johnson SPOILER loses his pregnant Indian girlfriend (“wife,” if you respect 30-second coerced ceremonies) and his foster son to a Crow attack. His crime? He led an army expedition through a Crow burial ground so they could rescue some starving settlers.

What’s wrong here? Nothing, unless you know why the burial ground scenes were put in the film.

In the commentary, Pollack says it was very difficult to find a way to justify the Crow attack. Yes, “justify.” He was a coastal Sixties guy, so he was all about long hair, protesting, and picking on white people and Christians. He didn’t want to make Indians look bad.

Originally, there was no expedition to save starving settlers. It wasn’t in the script. The makers of the film came up with the expedition so they could say Johnson caused his family’s slaughter.

They didn’t want to show Crows swooping in and murdering the family for no reason.

As motivation, it’s pretty thin. If you went to my mother’s grave tomorrow and emptied a dumptruck full of horse manure on it, I wouldn’t even send you a nasty email. I would think you had a screw loose, and I would hope the sheriff would go after you and shut down your grave-vandalism operation, but that’s about it. Walking past a bunch of dead Indians suspended in trees doesn’t seem like grounds for murdering women and children.

It made Pollack happy, apparently, so he went with it. Isn’t this the soft racism of lowered expectations?

I’m not sure he realized he still made the Crows look bad. Oh, well.

Why do leftists love making excuses for Indians? They practiced slavery. They were incredibly violent. They invented scalping, regardless of what apologists say. They had tortures which lasted for days, making drawing and quartering seem tame. They used to cut people’s eyelids off and bury them up to the neck in the burning sun. They were big on human sacrifice.

To listen to leftists, you would think pre-Columbian America was like a liberal’s impression of Denmark. Everyone rode around in Smart cars wearing hemp clothing and carrying reusable shopping bags. They sat in their sustainable teepees on IKEA furniture, talking about yoga and the works of Robert Mapplethorpe. It was nothing like that. It was a place of conquest, sadism, and theft.

People like to say whites came here as illegal immigrants. Nonsense. First of all, there was no real government when whites arrived, so there was no such thing as a legal (or illegal) immigration process. There were scattered tribes here and there. Some claimed to own land. Some didn’t. Many welcomed whites. Many sold whites their land.

I was born in Kentucky. Kentucky was sold to whites a long time ago. Yes, sold. The British bought Kentucky. Look up the Treaty of Sycamore Shoals and the Treaty of Fort Stanwix. Manhattan was sold to whites, too. A deal is a deal, folks. You can’t sell me your land and then call me a squatter. No Indian or tribe has any claim on my dad’s former house or the houses and farms of my relatives. Sorry, folks. We have clear title.

The British have a better claim to Kentucky than the Indians. America didn’t pay the British.

I live in Florida now. The US bought Florida from Spain, but Spain got it through conquest. That sounds bad, but a lot of Indians from other areas forced their way in, too. If my title and resident status are suspect, so is theirs.

Another point: there were something like 10 million people in North America when whites arrived. Think about that. North America is bigger than the former USSR. There are more than 10 million people in New York City. You can’t seriously claim 10 million people with no central government owned the whole subcontinent.

Sure, whites took Indian land, but they also bought land and took land no one had claimed, and Indians took land from each other.

Let me point something else out: if you’ve been on a hospitable, fertile subcontinent for thousands of years and the population is still only 10 million, something is wrong. A society’s failure to increase in number is an indictment of its general competence. It means most babies die.

North American Indians weren’t sitting around in safe places filling in coloring books when whites showed up. They were killing, raping, stealing, enslaving, and torturing, just like every other race on the planet. The idea that Indians wouldn’t murder a woman and child without provocation is absurd.

In the end, the movie gives a very poor impression of Indians, regardless of what Pollack and the others hoped. When white characters encounter Indians, they act like urban yuppies who accidentally got off the Broadway Local in Harlem and ran into the Crips. They are terrified. They mumble about torture and mutilation. They patronize the Indians and lie to them to avoid become victims of atrocities. They’re thrilled when they get away. This is not a good look for Indians, regardless of what the filmmakers thought. If anything, it appears to justify their subjugation.

It’s funny; it reminds me of the way women and kids react to wife-beaters. “Let it go. Just say whatever he wants.”

The Indians in the movie are exactly the kind of people I thought of when I got my concealed carry permit. Sick bullies who enjoy sadism.

The reason Johnson agrees to marry is that he is told the alternative is to have himself, his friend, his foster son, and even his horses cut open from crotch to throat with a dull deer antler. That’s not very nice.

There are only two Indians in the movie who aren’t utter idiots: Johnson’s girlfriend and a condescending Crow named Paints his Shirt Red. The rest are gullible and/or violent.

Oddly, the movie reinforces the classic movie-western notion that white people are good and Indians are bad. All of the violent acts committed by whites are committed in retaliation or self defense. The Indians threaten, injure, and kill people, and steal their goods, just for kicks. As we all know, white people did all sorts of rotten things to Indians, with no justification whatsoever.

Maybe the movie is really about the way urban-kid moviemakers feel when they leave Bel Air and the Upper West Side. But aren’t a lot of movies like that, to some degree? Look at our other westerns. We see a lot of Jewish and gentile yankee cowboys, reading lines written by Jews, fighting Jewish and Puerto Rican Indians. A lot of TV and movie characters are really urban Jews in gentile-face.

Why not be realistic? Have bad white characters and bad Indian characters. Projecting L.A. and New York sensibilities onto nineteenth century wilderness dwellers can turn a western into a movie about Hollywood itself.

I’m halfway through the disk. I may quit watching. “When I finished typing the script, I used an orange binder and drove it to the studio in a Ford Maverick.” Ho hum. Not what I signed up for.

Supreme Court Goes After Internet Cheats

What a relief. The Supreme Court has cleared the way for forced taxation of Internet sales.

I must be the only person who is relieved. I can explain.

I live in a state where we are legally required to pay tax on all purchases. If I buy something on Ebay, and the seller doesn’t collect tax, I have to report it and pay it myself.

I’m not going to say I always did this in the past. I do it now. I feel that curses fall on thieves and liars.

The Internet has a way of bringing new curses into people’s lives. It brought us pornography and Internet rage, for two examples. The sales tax thing is another example. The Internet made tax evaders out of most of us. I decided to start tallying up my purchases and sending money to Tallahassee.

I hate dealing with sales tax. I hate making lists of purchases and dealing with the Department of Revenue. Their website is an abomination. You have to enter every purchase on its own line, and if you click the wrong thing, everything disappears. They only let you pay quarterly, so you have three months’ worth of items every time you log in. It’s awful.

Florida doesn’t deserve the taxes. It makes paying them a miserable experience.

Now that Florida has been cleared to force sellers to collect taxes, I may be spared all that work. I sure hope so.

I actually look for items that come with a sales tax charge. I will pay ten dollars plus tax instead of $9.50 for something, simply to avoid the bookkeeping.

The new tax system should be good for America. It will help states collect lost revenue, making them (I naively state) less likely to raise taxes. Florida has no income tax. I don’t want to see Amazon force an income tax on us.

Will the taxes help bricks-and-mortar retailers? No. It’s stupid to suggest they will. Online vendors have lower overhead. Even if they charge for shipping (many don’t), they will still have competitive prices, and on top of that, they have better selection. And customers don’t have to drive. That’s a huge advantage.

Am I going to drive all over town just to get a box of .22 shells, when the Internet cost is $7.00 and the local price is $6.50? Are you nuts?

People keep telling us to support local retailers. I would love to, if I thought it would work. It won’t, so I don’t. In fact, they punish me when I try. They fail to maintain inventory. Their employees disappear when I need help. They don’t put enough cashiers at the registers, so I have to wait. They put me on hold when I call to see if they have what I want.

Real stores will continue to disappear. That’s just how it is. Horses disappeared. Newspapers are disappearing. Deal with it. It’s a bad thing, because it centralizes control of the distribution of goods, but there is nothing we can do.

If you’re a Christian, my advice is to pay your taxes even if you don’t have to. States have been lenient so far, but you never know what the future will bring, and besides, why give the enemy something to bring before God?

Revelation 12:4

The sad tale of the family who ran my last church continues.

As you know if you’ve kept up, my former pastor is going to trial to determine whether he is guilty of molesting a little girl over a period of years. After he was arrested, his wife developed a brain tumor, and she is dying. The church is long gone.

Here is something their only son put on Instagram the other day, with my redactions:

I want to be honest about his kid without being self-righteous or angry. It’s a hard line to tread, because he is a real button-pusher. He’s very obnoxious, especially to older people. He has never accomplished anything in his life, yet he looks down on individuals who are more intelligent and who have done much better. I’ll be blunt. He’s not bright. He ought to have a little humility.

When I knew him, he couldn’t hold a job. He was not in college. He had problems with the police. He seemed determined to convince people he was a thug, although he was really a soft, chubby mama’s boy who lived with his parents. A friend of mine told me he spent too much time in Liberty City, around true thugs. He was afraid one day this kid would turn up on a sidewalk naked after a thorough beating.

I think the reason he hasn’t been beaten half to death is that no one takes him seriously. Or maybe God is watching over him.

Certain other kids like him in spite of his off-putting personality and unproductive lifestyle. Maybe he is willing to say the things they secretly feel and believe.

I think that if he is determined to air his toxic views, he should wait until his mother dies. She doesn’t need to have his problems on her mind right now.

The two people who “liked” his picture and his ranting, and whose usernames appear under it, are church kids. One is a beautiful girl who was part of the dance team. The other is the stepdaughter of the church’s late head deacon. This man had breast cancer, and he died in spite of all our praying and fasting. He was very proud, and he refused to discuss repentance and confession.

The girl from the dance team is now a professional tattoo artist. God does not like tattoos, which is why Satan inspired the Nazis to tattoo Jewish prisoners.

I can’t tell what’s in people’s hearts. A lot of folks say they can “read people.” They can’t. We can only guess. Anyone can be fooled. I admit, one of these girls didn’t seem very committed, but I did’t expect her to fall away completely. The other–the deacon’s daughter–went to a Christian high school and seemed perfectly solid. Now she’s out there in public, backing up an endorsement of atheism.

When I think about the pastor, the first thing that comes to mind is distress over what has happened to him. I should be more moved by the damage his niece has sustained, but what happened to him is scary, so I suppose it affects me more. I would want to die if I were in his shoes. Barring a technicality, he will be in prison for decades. Bearing that prospect must be extremely difficult, and he has to do it while he watches his wife wither and die.

I think too much about a proud man who doesn’t believe in confession. That’s because I also have guilt. I can relate to the guilty and the threat of God’s punishment. I don’t think enough about the people he hurt.

The church did a lot of good. God manifested himself in the services. He spoke through the pastors. God will speak through an active pedophile! That’s something I never expected. The church attracted a lot of young people, and had the pastor not been destroyed, they might have gone on to have excellent, powerful relationships with God.

Who knows what would have happened, had the pastor repented? Maybe he and his family would have handled things privately. Maybe God would have healed him, his niece, his children, his wife, and his sister. I’m not saying a pedophile is good choice to pastor a church, but God does miraculous things in people who humble themselves.

The pastor waited until God’s patience ran out, and he was exposed by other people. The church crumbled. People who relied on the pastor scattered.

There’s the problem. Reliance. We worship men and women. We put too much trust in them. Pastors heap glory on themselves. They have a VIP mindset. They speak of themselves and other preachers as though they were celebrities. An informed Christian never exalts a man. They don’t talk about their buddies, name-dropping in order to convince people there is a special group of anointed individuals on a higher level. There are only two levels in God’s kingdom: his, and ours. God is only one rank above me. No human being is above me. No one.

At New Dawn Ministries (might as well name the church), we treated the pastors and their silly son like royalty. I didn’t like it, but it’s how things were. We kept having pastor appreciation days. We paid for them to go to spas and resorts. The pastor wanted us to give money to his son, who would have been better served by a foot in the butt and a month on a chain gang. We were supposed to honor the son simply because his dad was the pastor.

I think I gave some money to one of the birthday collections for the pastor, but I stayed away from the other offerings. These people worked three hours a week, and they took whatever they wanted from the church’s donations. They couldn’t be bothered to show up before services or for prayer meetings. I didn’t see any reason to shower them with massages and free dinners.

The church had ranks and positions. One position was “minister.” We had a minister named Sal. He was a lot older than the pastors. One day, he stood in front of church members and put the pastor’s arm over his shoulders. He stooped and told us the pastor was over him. He said something about the pastor being his “dad.”

He was showing us we should be completely submitted to the pastor. Crazy. That’s not in the Bible. Nobody groveled before Paul or called him “father.” Paul was in the business of connecting people with the Holy Spirit. He didn’t build little armies with multiple tiers of authority, putting barriers between men and God.

When a hundred people worship a man, and Satan wants to get those people, he doesn’t have to corrupt all of them one at a time. He corrupts the man they worship, and that man leads the rest of them to destruction. If you are directly connected to God, who can come between you? No one is going to corrupt God.

I don’t like Christian celebrities. I don’t care how many orphans they feed or how many CD’s they sell. They almost always end up glorifying themselves and making others feel as though they were gods. A celebrity is just a person a lot of other people know about. They’re not special. Jeffrey Dahmer was a celebrity.

You can be as good a Christian as Paul and Peter, and if no one knows who you are, it’s irrelevant. Don’t let anyone tell you different. Don’t exalt your pastor. He may teach you error. He may go to hell. If he’s still alive, he has time to fall away.

Sometimes I tell God, “I will stick with you even if everyone else on earth goes to hell.” I don’t mean I don’t care about other people. I mean I am not going to let their nonsense affect my relationship with God.

If you go to a church where the same 5 or 10 people keep showing up on the stage to teach or heal or whatever, your church is a failure. Everyone in a church should have power, and they should have testimonies. If the power and righteousness aren’t spreading, the church has gangrene.

I no longer pay any attention to people who don’t have testimonies. If God is working in your life, you, like every Biblical figure who knew God, will have something to show for it.

I don’t care how many books you’ve read. I don’t care how many mission trips you go on. I don’t care how many orphans you’ve posed with on Instagram. I don’t care if you’re fluent in Christianese. I don’t care if your pastor gave you a black belt in intercession. I don’t care about your nonsensical validations that might as well have come out of cereal boxes. I don’t care. I don’t care. I don’t care. Paul reached people by demonstrating God’s power, not by opening a yeshiva and holding classes. If you can’t demonstrate God’s power, you have nothing whatsoever to teach me, because you don’t really know anything.

It’s hard to think of anything more worthless than a theology degree.

I got an “Abishai award” from the pastors at Trinity Church in Miami. I burned it and used the frame for something else. I was an idiot to go onstage and accept it.

The pastor’s son’s Instagram post underscores something for me: I am surrounded by people who are full of it, and I can’t tell who they are.

I remember my days at Trinity Church. I used to wonder what the parking lot would look like if all the liars left. We wouldn’t have had hundreds of cars any more. How many would we have had? Ten? Five? Three?

People puff themselves up to look bigger than they are. Think about debt. Imagine driving through a neighborhood and seeing all the cars and houses that aren’t paid for disappear. What would remain? How many people are really homeowners? How many people own their cars? That’s what Christianity is like. If God put us through a sieve, most of us would fall right through.

About 80% of America’s homes are occupied by people who rent or have mortgages.

The pastor’s son and his friends were just theater props. There was nothing inside them to give them permanence. Maybe if the pastors hadn’t failed, these kids could have been changed.

It has to be hard to grow up in a pastor’s house, knowing he’s a fraud. It has to affect your view of God himself. We always end up blaming God for what human beings do.

I think about these young people, but I also think about the sincere ones (the ones I think were sincere, anyway). We had kids who got up early on Sunday and waited for the church van. They rode to church without their parents. I suspect that at least some of them were serious. What are they doing now? What do they think about church? What do they think about God?

Maybe they were liars, too. Maybe they only went to church so they could socialize. In any case, they were abandoned. Their parents abandoned them, and then the church followed suit.

Is the son really an atheist? He used to fall on his knees in front of the church and sob as hard as he could. He shook and wailed. He cried for about 45 minutes once. He was completely out of control. That wasn’t an act. Something was going on. But people are irrational. There are people who have seen God manifest himself, yet who act like it never happened. I’ve known people who spoke under the influence of the Holy Spirit in church yet had a different mindset at home.

Many atheists aren’t really people who don’t believe in God. They are people who are trying to punish God by insulting him and pretending he doesn’t exist.

What’s the upshot of all this? I suppose it’s this: confession and repentance are important. The pastor is going to prison. His wife will be dead soon. His son is a punk. Many people who relied on the pastors are in trouble. Confession and repentance could have prevented this from happening, but they are the two things the pastors hated most.

Penny Wise and Pound Stupid

I’ve decided to punish humanity with a tool rant.

Back when I still had a real Internet connection, I put a video up on Youtube. In the video, I fixed up a $15 Harbor Freight wood plane, just to see if I could make it work. I got it to function, but I wouldn’t suggest anyone else try it.

A commenter said I should buy planes at garage sales. That set me off. The bag of pet peeves ruptured, and now I must rant.

Garage sales are only good for three types of people: mentally ill hoarders who buy crap, young people who live in poverty, and professional shoppers who snap up the best merchandise and put it on Ebay and Etsy.

That’s it. I will explain.

Say you’re 45 years old, and you decide you want a hand plane collection. To do woodworking well, you really need 4 or 5 planes, and you’re better off with a dozen. Different planes do different things well. Block planes are good for tight spaces and breaking corners. Jointing planes are good for jointing, obviously. Smoothing planes are good for, well, smoothing. Rabbet planes make rabbets. You can’t buy one plane and make it do everything. You’re going to need a bunch of planes.

You’ve already blown it by reaching 45 without collecting any planes. Now you have to catch up. Say you start going to garage sales.

Look at the paper or the web. There are no promising sales this week. Probably. Most of the time, the sales you read about look really bad. Action figures with missing arms and spit all over them, plus things like lamps with torn shades. IKEA furniture that ought to be burned. Maybe you’ll see a good sale in a couple of weeks. You may find 10 sales a year that are worth leaving the house for.

When you go to these sales, 9 of them will turn out to be losers. The other one will have one or two decent items.

To get those items, you will have to get up before the sun rises and do some driving. If you show up an hour after the sales start, the things you want will be gone. Tools go fast. Every city now has a fleet of professional shoppers who raid garage sales as early as possible and take all the good stuff. If you’re not there at the start, you’re dead. And what if you have two promising sales on the same day? You can get to one early enough to score, but you’ll be late for the other one

If you get the items you want, they probably won’t really be the items you want. By that I mean you won’t be able to choose brands and models. Want to collect a set of Stanley type 13 planes? Forget it. You’ll have to take a type 11, a 1990 plane from Home Depot, a Craftsman…whatever happens to be available. You will eventually get items that do what you want, but you’ll have to settle.

If you insist on good tools, you’ll have your woodworking shop equipped in about 20 years. During those years, you will have had to struggle without important tools. You will have had to forgo a lot of projects. You will become farsighted. You may get cataracts. You may get arthritis in your hands. You may need new hips. You’ll feel less like getting things done. The TV and the shuffleboard court will beckon.

You’ll miss out on the fun you would have had if you had bought your tools as early as possible.

You may drop dead, and then other people will buy your tools at your wife’s garage sale.

Now, IF you’re 20 years old and you have no money, by all means, go to garage sales. You can’t even afford Ebay. Do whatever you can. Your shop will be up and running when you’re 35. Your income will increase, so in a few years, you’ll be able to shop like a normal person and fill in the gaps in your collection. You’ll miss out on a few years of having a fully functional shop, but when you get it together, you’ll still have your eyesight, and your prostate won’t force you to leave the shop every 10 minutes.

If you’re a professional shopper, again, go to garage sales. These sales are for sellers who are too lazy to use Ebay and get good money. Buy items for five bucks each and resell them for fifty. It works. But expect to have every weekend ruined for the rest of your life. You will be up with the chickens every Saturday and Sunday, driving like a maniac, trying to beat the other Ebay bottom feeders.

Garage sales are also good for people who are just bored. If you enjoy getting up in the dark and driving around looking for bargains, garage sales are for you. If you do it long enough, you will eventually run into a few great deals on things you actually want. Just don’t get the idea that garage sales can replace Ebay.

Everything I said, nearly, applies to flea markets as well as garage sales. Have you ever been to a flea market at one p.m.? Most of the good stuff is gone, and everyone is leaving. Flea markets aren’t quite as bad as garage sales, because there are serious vendors who have so much merchandise they don’t empty out early, but on the whole, you should really be there when the gates open.

I like online shopping. Ebay. Etsy. Craigslist. Facebook Marketplace. A new service called Offerup. You can see what’s for sale. You don’t have to drive ten miles to find out.

Ebay and Etsy are somewhat expensive, but the other services aren’t bad. They’re for people who are too lazy to use Ebay. They fully expect to get less money.

I recently sold my dad’s NordicTrack ski machine for $80. I probably could have gotten twice that much on Ebay. I don’t care. I wanted it gone. I was ready to give it to Goodwill.

When you shop on Ebay, you’re really paying other people to shop at garage sales, estate sales, and auctions. They get up early and buy stuff cheap and offer it online. You lie in bed and bid on it later. They perform a useful service, so they deserve some profit.

I’ll go out on a limb and say no one has ever put together a good wood shop–with quality tools–exclusively from garage sales and flea markets in less than 15 years. I don’t see how it can be done. There must be plenty of people who have bought 25% or 30% of their tools at garage sales in less than 15 years, but I doubt you can do 90%.

A lot of people say, “Go to garage sales,” like it’s a brilliant tip. How many of them practice what they preach? It’s particularly rantworthy when someone who works for a big tool-related website recommends garage sales. Dude; you get tools for nothing. Manufacturers give you tools in order to corrupt your reviews. You’re not running around every weekend, pawing through boxes of other people’s 8 tracks and Cabbage Patch dolls.

Here is what I say: keep an eye on online sources like Ebay, Facebook Marketplace, Craigslist, Offerup, and Etsy. Sign up for discounts on sites like MSC Direct, Travers Tool, and Wholesale Tools. After that, if you feel like puttering around with garage sales and flea markets, go ahead. You will find a few things you like, and you can add them to the tools you bought from sources that require less work and operate much faster.

In other news, I mastered my universe again today. I fixed my gate opener.

For years I fantasized about having a walled central Florida compound. Now I have a fenced northern Florida compound. Similar idea.

In fact, now that I think about it, I insist that everyone refer to it as “The Compound.” I’m also thinking of making everyone call me “The Colonel.”

I have an automatic gate. It’s a nice feature. It probably discourages thieves a little. It certainly prevents pedestrians from casing the joint. It’s not fun when it doesn’t work, however. After Hurricane Irma, I had to figure out how to disconnect the gate from the opener so I could leave it open.

A short time ago, a friend had a problem leaving The Compound. The gate would not open. I used the remote to help her. I figured it was a one-time thing. I was mistaken. It was stuck. It worked when I used the remote and keypad, but the sensor in the driveway was useless.

Driveway openers work using inductive loops. You put a big loop of wire in the ground under the asphalt, and when a vehicle goes over it, a current goes through the wire and alerts the opener.

Whenever you change the magnetic flux (magnetic field times the area, sort of) through a conductive loop, you get a current. This is how all of our electricity is generated. I’m not sure why a car moving above a loop generates a current. Maybe a car has a net charge or a magnetic field. Anyway, induction makes your gate opener work.

Now the question is bugging me. I’m Googling. It looks like gate opener loops are just metal detectors. You know how metal detectors have loops on them.

Okay, I found the answer. Inductive sensors aren’t passive. They have currents running through them all the time, producing magnetic fields. When a sensor gets close to a conductor, the field from the sensor induces currents in the conductor. This creates magnetic fields that come from the conductors, and the sensor detects these fields.

Lenz’s Law at work. I think. Ampere’s Law? Whatever. N’importe quoi. As Ampere would have said.

I wondered what could cause a wire loop to quit working, and the only thing I could think of was a broken wire. That would be bad. The wires are cheap, but someone has to come and remove the old wire from the pavement and insert the new one. They are embedded in slits made with diamond saws, and they are covered with tough sealant. I’m sure they’re not cheap to replace.

I called a few people, trying to get help. It was frustrating. The company that made the keypad kept me on hold for about four months. Repairmen said they could come by next week.

I’m not having random individuals walk into The Compound for a week.

I found a professional outfit that was willing to come by today, but by then I was on the warpath. I was Googling. I found out something interesting. Sometimes gate opener sensors have to be reset.

I took the golf cart (God bless the South) down the driveway, opened the gate opener box, and found a reset button staring me in the face. It works. I now have a functioning gate.

If you have a gate opener that doesn’t work, try to find the reset button before you do anything else. Try turning the power on and off at the circuit breaker. Try unplugging the sensor from the PCB and plugging it back in. If these things don’t work, and you can’t get tech support or a manual, call a repairman. Hope this is helpful.

Anything beats paying some doofus a grand for a wire you don’t need.

Patching a Major Hole in my Gun Collection

I may be doing it again. I have an offer in on a firearm.

When I was a kid, my grandfather used to load me in the truck and take me around to his farms. Sometimes, we would shoot. He had three .22 pistols. One was a High Standard Double Nine revolver. Another was some kind of High Standard automatic. He spoke highly of that one. The third pistol was a third-generation Colt Woodsman.

When both of my grandparents were gone, the estate lawyers gave the heirs a list of the guns. My grandfather had a fair amount of stuff. He had two Smith & Wesson .357 revolvers. He had two S&W pocket revolvers. He had an unfired WWI Colt commemorative 1911 in a glass-topped box. He had a Marlin lever action. He also had a .30 caliber “Enforcer,” which is a strange pistol made from an M1 carbine

A number of things I expected to see on the list were not there. I never expected a shot at the Colt, because my uncle bought it for my grandfather, and it made sense that his son would get that. But the other things…hmm…where did they go?

I only wanted a few things, and they weren’t particularly valuable. I wanted the Colt, because I used to shoot it with my grandfather. I wanted the High Standard revolver for the same reason. I wanted my great-great-grandfather’s flintlock shotgun, which no one else wanted. I was also interested in an old Remington 550-1 .22 rifle, because I had used it a lot.

Other than the Colt, I wanted junk. The value of the flintlock, the revolver, and the .22 rifle is probably less than $300. The flintlock is useless. The Remington is (was) not much of a gun. It has a cap on the butt end of the barrel which unscrews itself from time to time. The revolver is about as cheaply made as a firearm can be without inviting lawsuits.

I got two items: the High Standard revolver (featuring a painted aluminum frame) and the flintlock. Luckily for me, my dad already had my grandfather’s Browning Sweet Sixteen. That was not part of the estate. My grandmother gave it to my dad while she was alive, so no one else had a claim to it. It’s probably worth $600. They bring a lot more when they’re in good shape, but my grandfather threw his guns around and beat them up.

I have been told that I’ve been cheated on a couple of items that belonged to my grandparents: a watch and a Frederic Remington sculpture. Is it true? I don’t know. I hope not. I refuse to mud-wrestle over trinkets. The way people tussle over inherited wealth is disgusting and heartbreaking, so I don’t do it, even if I suspect I’m being defrauded to some extent.

I govern myself as though my relatives, apart from my sister, had done everything as ethically as they could. For all I know, that’s true. My sister is special. I have no doubts about her ethical issues.

My relatives–some of them, anyway–know more about my grandparents’ personalty than I do. They took a greater interest in looking after their cut.

I have the manual for the Colt, because whoever took it didn’t understand how important it was. It was going to be thrown out. When you sell an old gun, the more original paraphernalia you have, the more the gun is worth. That manual, with the box (now gone) may be worth $200. No one will ever see that money, however, because the gun is somewhere far away, and the manual is here.

I hope a stranger didn’t steal that gun.

I don’t think my grandparents gave any other guns to my relatives, because the recipients would have made a point of letting the rest of us know. I have mentioned the Colt, and no one has raised a hand to say they have it. I told everyone about the Sweet Sixteen, to avoid problems.

Ever since I learned my grandfather’s Colt was gone, I have wanted to get a Woodsman. It won’t be the gun I used to shoot in Kentucky, but like all of my guns, it will make me think of my grandfather when I shoot it. I didn’t appreciate him when he was alive. I miss him more now than I did during the years following his death.

I don’t want a Woodsman exactly like his. I don’t like the heel-mounted magazine release on the third-generation guns. I want a second-generation gun with a button release on the grip, like a 1911.

I found a nice one online, and I decided to see if I could buy it. The store wants more than I think it’s worth, so I sent them an email and offered them a hundred dollars less. I am waiting for their reply.

I’m doing it again. I’m buying another gun. Trying, anyway.

If I get this one, it should hold me for quite some time. I may get a bolt rifle in 6.5 Creedmoor or Swedish, for deer, but that wouldn’t happen right away. I can’t think of anything else I “need.”

As I have said before, the Woodsman will have a purpose other than making me smile because I have another gun. When you hunt, sometimes you wound animals without killing them, and you need a sidearm to finish them off. It can be hard to hit a small animal at close range when you use a scope. The bullet will be 1.5″ below the point of aim when it leaves the barrel, and five feet away, things won’t have changed much. A pistol can make things easier.

The gun looks pretty good in photos. The seller claims he can’t see any evidence that it has been shot. It has light holster wear. Seems like every Woodsman I look at has holster wear, and that means people liked these guns. They didn’t leave them at home in drawers.

I don’t really recall the condition of my grandfather’s gun. It was good, but I don’t recall how good.

If the seller will deal a little, I’ll make this happen, and then I’ll be one step closer to forgetting the many senseless problems I’ve had with my inheritance.

If you have kids and/or a spouse, you need a will, and you need to be very, very detailed about who gets what. Otherwise, your heirs may sacrifice each other in exchange for junk they could easily buy at yard sales.

If you’re an heir, you need to choose your battles wisely. Flawed relatives usually have more value than household goods.

Usually.

Grace is the Key

When you’re a tool person (or a “tool queer,” as Youtube machinist Keith Fenner puts it), life is never simple. Every time you try to add to your collection, you learn there is more to it than walking into Home Depot and reaching for a box. A huge percentage of the tools sold in the US are so bad, anyone who buys them will have regrets. You really have to look around.

Case in point: hooks and picks. Everyone needs a few hooks and picks. When you work with small objects, you need to be able to get into them with tools smaller than your fingers, and hooks and picks are what you use.

Simple, right? A hook is like a skinny screwdriver with a hooky bit at the end. A pick is a skinny screwdriver with a bent pointed bit at the end. A monkey could make them. You would think.

I found out that most sets either come out of the handles when you put pressure on them, or they bend. Who wants to deal with that? That’s pathetic. Even the crappiest screwdrivers will generally work fine for a decade, so it’s not that terrible if you buy them, but who wants a tool that bites the dust and puts your project on hold the first time you use it?

I’m really mad now. I will think of my happy place.

Oh, wait. I’m sitting in my happy place. I’ll just look around.

I’m about to get mad again, because I’m going to tell you who makes the pick set everyone loves the most. Snap-On. Of course. Everyone says their set is magnificent. A typical set–even American–is under $15. Guess what Snap-On charges.

Wrong. They charge over $50.

You’re mad, right?

I’m not paying $50 for four pieces of bent wire.

A company called Ullman supposedly makes good picks, but–and you won’t believe this–they thread them into their handles. If you apply pressure in the wrong direction, the picks come loose. Come on. What were they thinking?

An American company called Pratt & Reed makes picks that look okay.

I decided to give Grace a shot. This is the outfit that makes the gunsmithing screwdrivers everyone likes. They use good steel in their screwdrivers. They use square wooden handles that don’t roll and are easy to turn. Their picks and hooks appear to be exactly like their screwdrivers. They cost about $20, which is a lot for picks and hooks, but you get 7 tools. Most sets only have 4 tools.

We’ll see what happens. If they stink, I’ll throw them out in the pasture.

Now I’ll look even more cool when I work on guns, because I’ll have Grace screwdrivers plus a set of Grace picks and hooks that match.

If you decide you need your own set, and you don’t trust my judgment (unthinkable), read reviews, because a lot of otherwise-okay companies get serious complaints. I like Gearwrench wrenches, but their picks draw a lot of whining.

Picks are the sort of thing that set tool people apart from doofuses. Everyone knows about hammers and pliers, but there are certain important tools most people don’t seem to be aware of. Fish tapes. Punches. Timberjacks. There are a lot of tools you need, just to make other tools work the way they’re supposed to. I come from a long line of doofuses, so I’m doing the best I can to recover.

I think I’m doing okay. I have two oscilloscopes and four routers.

In other news, I’m getting a six-foot-long table to match my workbench. I already know it will fit in the room, because I’m using a cheap table which occupies the space it will take. It will be nice to have, because it will fill the corner my bench won’t fit into, and the height is an exact match. I’ll have an L-shaped work area that takes up the whole corner instead of leaving me with an awkward empty space I can’t really get to.

I may also get a gooseneck LED lamp and attach it to my pegboard. I can get a 24″ IKEA gooseneck job with a flat base, and I can take it off the base and attach it to a clamp. Then when I need it, I can put it anywhere I want on the shelf at the top of the pegboard.

Right now, lighting is a problem. I have an LED strip over the bench, but obviously, it’s on the other side of the work, relative to me, so it’s illuminating the wrong side of everything. I need a light that comes from my side.

It’s not easy being a mad scientist. You never have enough stuff, and it’s impossible to find a good hunchback.

Large Backlog

God has told me a lot of things since the last time I wrote about the little phrases he gives me, so I am here to catch up.

“You are the only authority.”

God has been stressing the importance of getting rid of the spirits I drew into myself in decades of ignorance and rebellion. My so-called teachers didn’t help me with this. My last pastor, to his credit, talked about demons and cast some out, but he didn’t understand how important they were, and he never talked about the importance of confession and repentance. If you don’t confess and repent, the demons you cast out generally come back with friends.

When I was a kid, churches were totally dead and without power. You sat in a pew and listened to useless criticism from a preacher who encouraged you to improve yourself instantaneously, without help, and you sang some boring hymns and, depending on the denomination, maybe you watched the adults eat a cracker. That’s what church was. Later on, I went to churches where they taught that demons were real, but the pastors were mainly concerned with satisfying their greed, so they didn’t do enough to get people delivered.

They didn’t want to tell people they needed to confess or that they had demons. They wanted money, money, money. They wanted butts in seats. They coddled their audiences and tickled their ears with comforting lies. “God is happy with you just as you are.” Imagine going to a doctor with a huge melanoma on your face and having him tell you you’re in perfect health. That’s what they were like.

Only one authority can give me a life of peace and victory. That’s God. There are rich and powerful people who seem to be doing well, but with few exceptions, they’re full of rot and failure. We judge them by the way they look, which is exactly what Satan wants. He holds them up and says, “Look. You don’t need God. Look at Kim Kardashian. Look at Beyonce.” He used to hold up Whitney Houston and Michael Jackson. He held up Anthony Bourdain. He held up losers who looked like winners. Anthony Bourdain is burning in agony right now, and he always will be.

He also points to godly, supernaturally people who live in obscurity and tells us they’re failures.

My life can’t work unless I give God complete authority, casting every competing spirit out, and allow his authority to flow through me. I can’t dip my toe in the pool and expect success. I have to jump in.

“Thank you for beauty.”

Some things work. Not everything is so corrupt I can’t take pleasure in it. I was getting into the shower, and I was looking at this wonderful home God gave me. I was thinking about the way peace and success were increasing in my life. I thought about the beauty of God’s shalom; his peace and prosperity. Then I heard, “Thank you for beauty.” This world is a cesspool and a death camp, but there are little footholds that help us bear it until we leave.

“I have to be a wisdom collector.”

I was thinking about the helpful things I learn. Consider the book of Proverbs. If you read it without thinking, it’s not that impressive, but if you try to apply every proverb, your life changes dramatically. Applying one proverb can be the difference between success and disaster.

Consider the warnings about slutty women in Proverbs 5. Many men have gone insane from syphilis because of brief indiscretions. The flesh has rotted off of their skulls. Go look up pictures. That can happen to you in 30 seconds of fornication. That’s just one way a trollop can destroy you. Millions of men have had good health all over their lives simply because they listened to Proverbs 5 once, and many men and families have been destroyed by quick acts of disobedience.

Wisdom is a big deal. Successful cultures impart wisdom to kids. Consider Jews and east Asians. They give their kids inheritances of wisdom and knowledge. People from these cultures tend to do well and stay out of prison and off government assistance. Now think about cultures that don’t pass knowledge and wisdom on. Think of American blacks, many of whom don’t have fathers. The majority of murders in America are committed by one eighth of the population: black people. They stay on the bottom because they have no guidance. Every generation starts with nothing.

My parents didn’t teach me much of anything. It’s a terrible thing to reflect on. My dad is 86, and he is still a source of destructive advice. I wasn’t cultivated. I grew like a watermelon seed spat out of a car window into a ditch. It’s amazing that I’m not dead. All I had to rely on was my own very poor judgment.

I have to collect wisdom, rely on it, and spread it to other people. There isn’t much hope for me, at my advanced age, but I can help others, and whatever time I have left will be improved considerably.

“You can’t be a worldly person.”

God gave me this for someone else, but it applies to every Christian. It’s not enough to refrain from things like murder, stealing, fornication, and drug and alcohol abuse. We have to insulate ourselves from worldly ideas. We have to quit watching TV all day. We have to stop listening to stupid, sinful entertainers who corrupt our minds. If you make your mind up to live in a godless city, work in a godless office, hang around with godless friends, and absorb godless entertainment, you will stay weak, and God won’t pay any attention to you when you come crying to him with your problems.

Remember the scene in The Godfather, where Amerigo Bonasera came to Don Corleone and asked him to kill the young men who raped his daughter? Corleone said he had always avoided him, thinking he was above him, and then when he needed him, he showed up begging for help. He turned him down. Bonasera hadn’t wanted anything to do with Corleone, but he called on his authority when he had a problem. God isn’t a mafioso, but the Bible makes it clear that people who don’t belong to him get limited help.

I feel like I need to keep moving away from unnecessary exposure to the world of the godless. I shouldn’t get too close to people who are in the process of being destroyed.

“You know already.”

When I confess to God, I have a hard time refraining from covering up. I feel like I have to shape my words so they don’t make him angry. I deny things that I feel. I want to make excuses. The thing is, God knows already. I can’t tell him anything he doesn’t know. The purpose of confession isn’t to inform him. It’s to get clean.

Were Adam and Eve cursed for eating the forbidden fruit? I’m not sure, but I know that even if God had forgiven that, they would still have been on the hook for refusing to take the blame. Eve blamed Satan. Adam blamed Eve. God told me this: “The concealment of a sin is worse than the sin itself.” Sin is bad, but denial is what makes you sick and causes you to rot.

I have to remember that God sees through me, so I can be honest and get cleansed and healed.

“You’ve given me supremacy.”

God has given us authority over everything. Our flesh. Evil spirits. Fallen people. Matter. We are supposed to exercise it, in humility and honesty, giving him the glory. It really works. When it doesn’t work, it’s us, not the system.

“Things get better, or things get worse.”

God was reminding me that it’s impossible to rest and feel like I don’t need to keep confessing and praying. You’re not okay just because you go to church and pray. When you turn back to God, you don’t instantly find yourself in a position of perfect protection and success. You have to keep growing. Every day, you have to dig inside yourself and work with God. If you’re not doing this, you’re rotting. You’re becoming more corrupt. You can’t stand still.

Unfortunately, this world is like an ocean, and we’re all treading water. If you become complacent, you sink.

Christians can be full of demons (most of us are). We can become possessed. We can go to hell; it’s full of Christians. Rest is for the dead, not us. Don’t stop doing maintenance.

“I am watching Satan fail.”

God was encouraging me. Good things keep happening in my life. It’s because God keeps correcting me. He keeps helping me to reach new levels of confession. I let go of things I haven’t wanted to acknowledge. Satan kept me captive by preventing me from confessing. Now that God is succeeding in improving my honesty, Satan is failing, and he will never stop failing unless I stop.

“Thank you for correction.”

God was reminding me what was at the root of the positive changes in my life.

“I am growing in hostile ground.”

This planet is not my home. It doesn’t work. It tries to kill me every day, literally. My body is unrefrigerated meat. Without God’s protection, I would be like a pile of green hamburger in three days. People are constantly trying to take what I have. They are looking for ways to hurt me. Bugs want to sting me. Germs want to make me ill and kill me. Demons swarm on me like flies on manure. This is a terrible place. I can’t let myself get attached to it, and I can’t let myself get the idea that things here will ever be ideal.

Many Christians think they have to change the world. That’s insane. Jesus himself could not change the world. He left. We’re going to be driven out, too. We’re supposed to be working with God to change individuals, starting with ourselves. The world has terminal cancer.

“Thank you for freedom.”

God keeps increasing my power over the spirits that assail me. When I was a little kid, spirits tormented me all day and every night. Loathsome people abused me. I couldn’t get victory over anyone. I had no relief. The more God aligns me with his program, the more power I have to drive my enemies off. He is giving me real freedom that lasts.

“Please save me from myself.”

I am the worst enemy I have. Think about it. No one else can sin for me. No one else can reject salvation. No one else can lie to God for me. I have all sorts of enemies, but the only reason they succeed is that I help them.

If God can save me from myself, no one else can touch me.

“I’ve been abused a lot, and I’m weary of people.”

I feel the air go out of my lungs when I say this. It’s so true. What a revelation.

Why do I love living in the country? Because I’m sick of people. Satan is able to use most people against me. No matter what I do, I can count on them mistreating me and arguing with me. I can count on them doing their best to tempt and provoke me. To make things worse, they never come up with anything new. Nothing is more vexing or discouraging than being attacked with the same nonsense over and over.

I’m not the only one who feels this way. God has the same problem. His love never runs out, but his patience does. Before the flood, he gave mankind 120 years to straighten up. Then he drowned everyone. He’s going to do it again, with fire.

God is exalted. He is to be obeyed and honored. He can’t really be God if he allows himself to be abused forever. It has to be a temporary thing. Order has to be restored.

The closer you get to God, the more alienated you feel. Other people seem more and more foreign. It becomes rarer and rarer to meet anyone who understands you or feels as you do. I find myself wanting to limit the time I spend with people. It’s nice to visit with people I care about, but it’s also very nice when they go home.

Thank God life is short. This place is a madhouse, and it’s dangerous.

I am Triggered

I have sort of sad news RE the Savage Accutrigger project. I bought two light trigger springs for two rifles. One of the springs installed pretty easily and worked perfectly. The other one didn’t work.

The gun that works with the new spring is a Savage A22 in .22 Long Rifle. The new spring dropped right in without alteration. It was very soft, so I had to set the trigger pull somewhere above the lightest level. The trigger is great now.

The gun that doesn’t like the new springs is a Savage 93R17 in .17HMR.

This is a different sort of gun. The A22 is a semiauto, and the 93R17 is a bolt action. The Accutrigger assemblies are somewhat different.

When I got the 93R17 open, I saw that the spring was harder to get out. The spring in the A22 had a pin at one end that lodged in the trigger assembly housing. I lifted that pin out and screwed the spring out of the threaded hole at the other end. The 93R17 didn’t have a hole for a pin. The entire bottom end of the spring went over a pin in the trigger assembly. I guess that pin is about 3/16″ in diameter. There isn’t enough room to lift the spring off the pin and pull it out, so you have to remove the trigger and lower the trigger away from the pin to free the spring.

Another problem: the spring I ordered wouldn’t accept the pin on the trigger assembly. In order to create the pin at the end of the spring, the manufacturer bent the spring wire across the bottom of the spring and then bent a small bit outward at 90 degrees. The part that went across the bottom blocked the large pin on the assembly. I had to Dremel it off.

I got the new spring installed and put the trigger assembly together. It wouldn’t fire. The new spring was so soft, it was almost completely compressed by the pressure of the rear of the trigger.

Another customer claims the spring worked with a Savage .17 HMR. Maybe he has the semiauto version. Anyway, I got nowhere.

I decided to modify the original 93R17 spring. I was nervous about doing it, because I had read that Savage didn’t like mailing new springs to people. I pictured myself having to pay a gunsmith a hundred bucks to put a $5 spring in. I found out people had been able to get new springs from a company on the web (Sharp Shooters’ Supplies), so I decided to take a chance.

I wasn’t sure about what I was doing. Some guy on Youtube claims you shouldn’t shorten the spring because it causes other problems. There’s a video of a man taking a different route. He ground down the part of the trigger the spring sits on. He reduced it by about 0.070″. This allows the spring to relax a little.

I considered trying his solution, but I hate hacking up a gun like that.

I found a thread at Rimfire Central, the site that banned me for no discernible reason. A whole bunch of people said they had cut their old 93R17 springs with no ill effects. Supposedly, you can take an entire coil (360 degrees) off the spring. If you take off much more, you can end up with a gun that won’t fire.

The thread was very long, and a ton of people said the modification worked, so I decided to ignore the Youtube advice.

I took my old spring and mounted it in my new Panavise. That was exciting. By my standards. I took down the old Dremel I opened up and got working the other day (another triumph). I used a cutoff wheel to remove one coil from the spring, and I put it back in the gun.

It works fine. It feels just like it used to, except the pull is lighter.

Using the new workbench is a blast. I have air conditioning. I have a big screen TV. I am within easy reach of a couch and a recliner. It’s heaven.

The people on the thread suggested adding Loctite to increase friction in the threaded cavity the spring sits in, to keep the spring from turning and changing the trigger pull all by itself. I did that. I hope it will still turn when I want it to.

I contacted the outfit that sold me the spring that didn’t work, to find out if I had done something wrong. I guess they’ll email me.

Now I have two super-duper scoped rimfires. All I need is some decent weather to try them out.

I keep getting failures to fire with the A22 and Remington Golden Bullets. Not sure what that’s all about. I have a new batch, but I’m still shooting old ones. I haven’t sat down and had a real session with it since I modified the spring, but I did go out and shoot 5 rounds in the yard to make sure it worked. One of the rounds didn’t go off.

I’m not worried. If there’s a firing pin issue or something, it can be fixed. If I have to take the gun to an authorized Savage smith, I can always put the old spring back in so they don’t give me any noise about the warranty. The spring has nothing to do with the firing pin.

Maybe the A22 will work fine with my newest shipment of Golden Bullets. If so, everything is fine.

I like accurate rifles. You can’t learn to shoot with a rifle that shoots worse than you do. You end up chasing the rifle’s errors. As far as I know, I have three very accurate guns now. Not sure; I think the .204 Ruger is accurate, but I haven’t shot it enough to be certain.

I hope to get outside tomorrow and try the modified Savages out.

New Trigger Spring for the Savage

I think I now have the world’s most dangerous .22 rifle. From the perspective of squirrels. I have also had an extremely satisfying session with the new workbench. Putting this thing together was a stroke of genius. Which I failed to have until I was really old, unfortunately.

I started out with a Remington Nylon 66. I could not put a scope on it, so I looked for something new. People recommended the Ruger 10/22 and the Marlin 60. They said the Ruger 10/22 was a very accurate gun…once you gave your life savings to a gunsmith to make it work. Uh…no. If I want to spend way too much on a .22, I’ll get a CZ 512 or Browning, not an entry-level rifle which is a small step up from a BB gun. I bought a Marlin 60.

The first 60 I got literally would not hit a soda can at 100 feet, so I sent it back to the factory, and they sent me a new one which shot pretty well. Then I found out how hard it was to attach sling studs to it. I also found out how hard it was to get a trigger that worked. The guy who sells the best trigger, which he calls the “KAT,” did not answer email inquiries or social media messages, so I bought the second-best trigger, an M*Carbo, and installed it myself. I also added an M*Carbo recoil spring, because the Marlin 60 is too fragile to shoot hypervelocity rounds with the factory spring.

Finally, I had an okay rifle, but it still didn’t make me all that happy. Because of Marlin’s firing pin design, it could not be dry-fired without damage. With the new recoil spring, it was SUPPOSEDLY able to stand up to powerful .22 rounds like CCI Stingers, but I didn’t trust it.

I bought a Savage A22. It can be dry fired all day without damage. It comes with sling studs. It can be disassembled in about 10 seconds with one hex key. It has a real milled receiver. The Marlin has no receiver. It has two sheets of pot metal bridged by removable pins. The A22 has a Savage barrel, obviously, and Savage makes barrels that are accurate when you buy them, not just after you pay a gunsmith to finish the job the manufacturer should have done. It was also pre-drilled for scope mounts, and it had real iron sights, not the cheap sheet metal flap that comes with a Marlin.

The Savage, which was only slightly more expensive than the Marlin, had an adjustable Savage Accutrigger. This is a wonderful adjustable trigger that sets Savage apart. You can adjust it in the field with a tiny wrench, lowering or raising the trigger pull weight to suit you.

I shot the Savage, and I found that it was accurate. I had failures to fire, but I was using highly questionable Obama-era Remington Golden Bullets, so I wasn’t disturbed by that.

Problem: I had been under the impression that the Savage’s trigger could be taken down to 2 pounds, which sounded very nice to me. In practice, I found that it was fairly stiff even when I adjusted it as far as it would go.

Solution: a company called Gun Shack sells a special spring for the Accutrigger. Apparently, Savage makes at least two springs. One is a somewhat stiff spring that comes with certain models, and the other is a lighter “varmint” spring, for varmint rifles. The springs are interchangeable.

You know I had to have that.

I got myself two springs, because I have two Accu-trigger rifles.

Today I put the new spring in the A22. It was very easy. Well…it should have been easy. I had no instructions, so I wasted some time taking out and replacing the wrong spring.

In case you’re Googling “A22 Accutrigger spring replacement,” let me tell you what to do. I am too lazy to take pictures, but this is really easy.

Take your gun out of the stock. You will need to engage the safety, because it gets in the way when you try to pull the gun out.

Remove the trigger assembly (a plastic box) from the gun. You have to drive out one pin at the rear in order to do this. Your manual has a picture. Make sure the gun isn’t cocked, because the pin won’t move if it’s cocked.

See the fat spring at the very rear of the trigger assembly? That’s your trigger spring.

Insert your trigger adjustment tool and tighten the spring all the way. Your spring is like a screw. It sits in a threaded hole. You have to screw it up out of the hole so it comes loose. That’s why you tighten it. Once that’s done, you can pull it out with tweezers.

There is a little wire pin sticking up from the top of the spring. It rests in a hole in the trigger assembly housing. It acts as an axle. When you turn the spring with the adjustment tool, it turns on this pin. Once you have the spring unscrewed and released from its threaded hole, you can pull the pin out of the hole in the trigger housing and take the spring out of the gun.

To install your new spring, which is lighter and easier to work with, just do everything in reverse. Get the lower end of the spring into the threaded hole and screw it in as far as you can with the adjustment tool. Then you can take tweezers and fit the spring’s pin into the trigger assembly housing hole.

You’re done. Adjust the spring and give yourself the trigger pull weight you want.

I finished working on my gun a few minutes ago, and man, is that trigger easy to pull. I could not get the original trigger spring to give me a weight I liked, but the new spring is so light, I had to back it off from the lowest setting. You can give yourself a bona fide hair trigger with the varmint spring, and if you do that, you might have problems with the gun going off before you want it to.

This is sweet. I look forward to taking it out in the pasture to see what it will do.

I’m also going to fix my 93R in .17 HMR. It’s already extremely accurate, but a lighter trigger pull will surely improve it.

It is said that gun companies make trigger pulls heavier than they have to be in order to avoid getting sued when unskilled people shoot themselves and others accidentally. This is probably true. A heavy trigger pull is helpful for idiot-proofing. Sadly, it also makes it hard to hit anything. The other day I read that NYC cops are forced to use pistols that have extremely heavy triggers. That may help explain why they miss the people they shoot at.

I don’t like heavy triggers. When you go the the range and shoot 50 rounds, you will lose accuracy if your finger gets tired. When you shoot slowly and carefully, your finger spends a lot of time working, and after a few dozen rounds, it can start to tremble. This is a problem you don’t need when you’re wrestling with breath control and God knows what else.

If you’re happy hitting a man-sized target at 7 yards with a pistol, or hitting a deer’s huge kill zone at 100 yards with a rifle, a heavy trigger is fine. If you want to shoot WELL, it will be a problem.

My short-range pistol goal is to keep nearly every round inside a 1″ circle at 7 yards. I want to shoot 1 MOA (or as close to it as my guns will permit) with a rifle. I don’t want to fool around with heavy trigger springs made for old ladies and bro dudes.

I criticize the Marlin 60 because in the end, it cost me 15% more for a modified Model 60 than it did for a Savage A22 that worked perfectly out of the box. Even with the modifications, the Marlin was still completely inferior. Here I am, though, adding an aftermarket part to the Savage! Hey, it cost something like 9 bucks. Go price an aftermarket Model 60 trigger. No comparison.

Now I just have to learn how to use a scope correctly. I need to know where a bullet will land, regardless of the distance between me and the vile rodent in my crosshairs. Scopes are great for putting bullets exactly where you want to at the distance at which you zero them, but change that distance, and everything goes nuts.

I think accurate hunting must be much harder than shooting paper. A target shooter always knows his distance, he always shoots from the same position, and he should know exactly what the wind will do to his shots. Also, targets cooperate. They don’t run around or go behind trees. A hunter has to deal with unreliable targets at unknown distances, and he has to shoot from various positions, most of which will not work as well as shooting from a bench.

When I decided to shoot squirrels, I thought I was entering the minor leagues, but I was wrong. Minor leaguers hunt large animals. I can hit a deer over and over without understanding my scope. A total idiot can hit a deer. To hit a squirrel with a rifle, I have to know exactly what I’m doing. I have to know my ammunition and the way my bullet will behave at various distances.

If I shoot a .308 at a deer anywhere within 100 yards, even if I can’t figure out how much error there will be, I will still hit the kill zone. The error from shooting at a distance different from that at which I zeroed the rifle will never be more than a couple of inches. Big deal. But if you have a one-inch error when you shoot at a squirrel, you’ll probably miss him.

I feel like I finally have the right tool, and the right adversary, for learning how to use a scope. If I can learn how to nail squirrels, I’ll be able to hit anything. And I’ll be doing the world a favor, because squirrels are obnoxious.

If tomorrow brings me a couple of hours without rain, I’ll go out and see what the new gun will do. Wish me luck.

The Best Tools are Scary-Looking

How much more joy can I stand? My Pana Hands third hand device for my Panavise arrived yesterday.

This is a pretty neat item. Constructed of a very nice cast base, alligator clips, and flexible pipe, it attaches directly to a Panavise and allows you to hold up to 4 things in place at a time.

The people who make it pack it in a nice box and include candy with it. Call it smart promotion. Call it entrapment. It worked on me. I was quite pleased to receive a packet of Starbursts with my tool.

Ufortunately, I’m not the only one here who likes Starbursts. As you can see, the Pana Hands caught a thief trying to purloin them, and it was in the process of administering punishment when I took this photo.

Do not ask me why a male over the age of 4 owns a stuffed animal. I have friends. They like to have their fun. That’s all I’m willing to say.

I think the menacing appearance of the Pana Hands is the best part. Even when it’s idle and the work area is dark, it’s there to scare burglars and children with its Dr. Octopus impression.

You can put a similar third hand device together for less money if you’re willing to order parts from Banggood and so on. I didn’t want to wait weeks and deal with whatever problems might arise from trying to match parts from different vendors. They sell assembled kits. I don’t know if any of them fit the Panavise. Do I really want to deal with Chinese shipping and mysterious return policies to save twenty bucks? No.

Today I plan to open my old Dremel up and see if I can use the Panavise to position it so I can solder a broken wire on the armature. I don’t know whether I can pull it off, but sometimes the process is more important than the result.

You can buy new Dremel armatures for $35.00, and that would be cheaper than a new Dremel. They’re very expensive now.

I looked at other hand-held rotary tools, and it appears they’re all junk, except for overpriced high-end tools and the offerings from Proxxon. I don’t want to blow $90 or whatever on a second Proxxon.

Rotary tools should be on everyone’s short list. Duct tape, impact driver, rotary tool. If you have these things, maybe 85% of life’s annoying challenges will succumb to your efforts.

I used a Dremel to cut a bed frame once. That’s how great these small tools are. I had a bed frame with sharp pieces of angle iron (actually steel) sticking out where I managed to drive my feet into them from time to time. I’m thinking the thickness was about 3/16″. I had like 4 tools at the time. I got out the Dremel and some cutting disks and cut the corners off the frame. It would have been hard with a tool like a saw.

Dremels drill, grind, cut, and polish. They probably do other things I haven’t thought about.

If I can get the Dremel working properly, maybe I’ll let the Pana Hands use it on the squirrel. I don’t like to be harsh, but someone has to make an example of household tortfeasors.

God’s Patience is not Infinite

I just had some disturbing news.

If you’ve been reading the blog for a while, you may know that the pastor of my last church was arrested for molesting his niece over a period of years. He was supposed to be tried today, but he got a continuance until August 20. That will be one year to the day from the first morning I woke up in my new home, far from Miami.

The charges indicated that she was less than 12 years old when he started. As I understand it, she told a friend of hers last year, and somehow things escalated. A friend of mine says the pastor confessed in front of the church last summer, and he was arrested in September.

Prison is bad at its best, but it is said to be worse for child molesters. If you’re a child molester, everyone feels morally superior to you, and they feel entitled to mistreat you.

The pastor and his wife were not good to me. They didn’t just reject me. They were nasty about it. The pastor accosted a friend of mine in the church parking lot long after I left and started screaming at him. He got way too close, and my friend threatened to give him a beating.

That’s what things were like.

The church was a cult. When members fell out with the pastors and left, everyone else was discouraged from talking to them. When I left, I found out which church friends were real. The others cut me off and even unfriended me on Facebook, as if merely seeing my Facebook posts would poison their minds.

I told people the church was going to dry up and disappear. At best, I said, they would end up meeting in someone’s living room. The pastors had terrible pride issues. They did things to drive people away, and they got angry when members made suggestions.

The “house prophet” kept “prophesying” that the church would grow, we would get a new building, we would see miracles, this one would have twins, that one would be healed of cancer, and so on. A real prophet would have told them they were blowing it.

Obviously, the church did not survive the arrest. It ran on fumes for a bit and then expired.

Today I found out things have gotten even worse. The pastor’s wife has brain cancer. She is said to have only weeks to live, and I am also told her mind is going. I also heard that the molestation started when the victim was six.

A friend of mine called and told me. I said, “It’s like that family is being destroyed.” He said the person who told him had said the same thing.

It’s like they’re being erased from the planet. What is happening to them is astounding.

Their son is a mess. He’s a petty criminal, and he has all sorts of emotional problems. He ridicules Christianity. He seems to be included in the destruction.

Their daughter seems okay. She married a very nice guy. He’s a preacher. They live over a thousand miles away.

I know what their problem is. They don’t confess. They and others in the church got mad at me when I talked about the connection between misfortune and a lack of repentance. They were 21st-century charismatics. They only wanted to hear about money and miracles. People accused me of blaming others for their problems. Actually, that was correct. We do cause our problems, including cancer and other diseases. But people don’t want to hear it. They want to hear that nothing is their fault.

My mother’s sins made her sick and killed her. She smoked for 50 years, and she died of lung cancer. Using addictive drugs is a sin. AIDS is almost always caused by sin. The sin of gluttonizing puts people in motorized wheelchairs, blinds them, and costs them their feet. It ought to be obvious that sin causes problems. It also prevents God from fixing our problems and healing our diseases.

Many times, I’ve asked God if I should pray for the pastor and his wife, and the answer has always been “no.” The reason? They won’t listen. Their problems are caused by their own decisions. They’ve decided to close their ears, so praying won’t help them. They don’t need miracles. They need to have their minds changed so God’s power can flow through them. God doesn’t change people’s minds. He applies persuasion, but he doesn’t interfere with our free will. His name is Jehovah, not Geppetto.

A person only has so much prayer time, and if you waste it on the proud and stubborn, you will neglect people who can actually be helped. Satan sends us time-wasters who don’t really want to change.

You would expect Christians to do better than this. I’m not surprised that the church failed, because that was obviously inevitable. I’m surprised that this couple’s lives are being completely destroyed. Even a Christian who is off course will usually get a fair amount of help from God. I’m shocked at how little help they’re getting.

Sure, he’s a pedophile. But God helps pedophiles that open up to him and repent. His wife may be brassy and difficult, but she’s not an axe murderer. Whatever their failings are, they acknowledge God. Apparently, it’s not enough to protect them from catastrophe.

We should be afraid of God. Look how badly things can go when we toy with him.

I’m so glad God has helped me to receive correction. He saved me incredible suffering by teaching me about confession and repentance. I didn’t figure it out. I was an idiot who loved sin. He had to show me. I was doing my own thing, screwing my life up as much as possible. I would have continued had he not given me knowledge I didn’t deserve.

I can’t say it enough. Hell isn’t full of sinners; it’s full of people who don’t listen. Heaven is packed to the rafters with sinners. It’s full of murderers, thieves, whores, sodomites, and every other type of transgressor. It’s full of guilty people who confessed and repented. Hell is full of people who thought they knew best. And many of them are very, very nice people who treated others well.

Pride and denial may not take you to hell, but they can bring hell up to meet you while you’re here on earth. They caused Job’s problems.

Scary stuff.

I don’t think I’ll ever pray for my former pastors again, but I will be praying for the people they bamboozled and abused. The Bible says that when the dragon was cast out of heaven, it drew a third of the stars along with it, with its tail. I know a lot of people who have been misled by preachers, and there is more hope for many of them than for their former pastors.

Profligate Mendacity

Today is Jim Comey’s day on the hot seat, and I have to get something out of my system. It’s something I’ve probably said before.

When Hillary Clinton was “investigated” regarding her intentional mishandling of classified information and her illegal, deliberate use of a private email server, Comey’s report said she was “grossly negligent,” which was kind, since the legal definition of negligence doesn’t include intentional behavior. Demoted FBI agent Peter Strzok changed it. The new phrase: “extremely careless.”

“Gross negligence” is a phrase lawyers use. They could use other terms to mean the same thing, but lawyers like to stick to specific, traditional phrases others have used before them.

Strzok isn’t a lawyer, but he works with the law every day, and he surely knows the legal importance of many phrases, including “gross negligence.” Also, he has been exposed as a fervent supporter of Hillary Clinton. He is very, very hostile to Donald Trump.

Strzok was worried about the Espionage Act of 1917, codified as 18 U.S.C. § 793. Under that law, what Hillary did would ground criminal prosecution if her acts were the result of “gross negligence.” Strzok wanted to avoid publishing a report about his idol which essentially said, “Clinton committed criminal violations of 18 U.S.C. § 793.”

What does “negligent” mean? It means “careless.” If you have a duty to exercise care, and you choose not to, you’re negligent.

What does “gross” mean, in legal terms? It means extreme. There is no real difference between “gross” and “extreme.” If I lend my car to someone I know has had 4 beers, I’m negligent. If I lend it to someone who has been smoking PCP all night and has a bag of hand grenades slung over his shoulder, I am grossly negligent.

Add it up, and you get this: “extremely careless” equals “grossly negligent,” but “gross negligence” is a phrase used in a statute Hillary Clinton violated, and “extreme carelessness” isn’t. Strzok chose to say something legally damaging–he had no choice about that–in a way that would smell less like fresh meat.

When Peter Strzok says Clinton was “extremely careless,” he’s like a criminal attorney who says his client is “fully culpable” for a murder while rejecting the word “guilty.” It’s a choice of words that sounds different but means the same thing.

Jim Comey determined that Hillary Clinton was grossly negligent, and an FBI agent who supported her bid for the presidency disguised his conclusion. This happened in July of 2016, at a time when Hillary Clinton’s campaign for president was in full swing.

Extreme carelessness is gross negligence.

That’s what I wanted to say.