I Still Don’t Have Enough .22 Pistols

Because I am in some ways a frivolous person, I am currently thinking about buying a .22 pistol with a red dot sight. Mission: kill squirrels and generally plink while out and about on the farm. A big .22 pistol with a large magazine is actually a better self-defense gun than the pistols I generally carry, and it’s fun for goofing around. It’s also a lot lighter and smaller than a rifle.

What about all the other .22 pistols I have? Why can’t I settle for one of them? Nice try. This one is different. It’s the kind of pistol that keeps David Hogg awake at night. It’s semiautomatic, and it looks sort of like an AR-15.

Of course, I’m talking about the Mossberg 715P. I’ll insert a video of a lady shooting one.

It’s pretty hilarious. That big, fat AR-looking mass is really a thin plastic shell. It’s like a toy gun. The actual gun is hidden inside it, and it’s just a cheap .22 rifle receiver. It’s like a movie studio hired someone to make a Marlin Model 60 look like an AR.

Nonetheless, it works, as you can see in the video.

By the way, the Marlin Model 60 is dead. Ruger bought Marlin and decided to kill the Model 60, so looks like the 10/22 won the budget .22 war by forced default. Ruger could make new Model 60’s, but they say they have no plans to do it.

The Mossberg is pretty clearly not the highest expression of the gun manufacturer’s art. It’s a low-end product. But it hits a spot that definitely exists.

I guess some people will huff and puff and say a 10mm Glock is better for self-defense. No, it isn’t. The Mossberg is far better. It holds 26 rounds of .22 LR, and it has a red dot. A good marksman could pop an assailant over and over, accurately, from a distance that would make using a Glock challenging. If you can shoot your perp over and over before he gets close, you can disable him without allowing him to get near enough to get a fair shot at you. In self-defense, fairness is a giant mistake.

A .22 round isn’t as damaging as a 10mm round, but hitting someone 100 feet away, over and over, with little rounds, is a lot better than hitting him three or 4 times with big bullets when he’s 20 feet away, shooting back. Think how discouraging it would be to know the person you wanted to kill could shoot you maybe 20 times before you could do a thing to him.

Any semiauto .22 that can be fired accurately and easily at relatively long ranges is better for protection from distant human beings than any big-bore pistol that’s hard to aim and has a lot of recoil. If I had to shoot a person from 50 yards with a Glock, I’d have to settle for shooting at the body and keeping shots within a one-foot circle. If I were using a Marlin 60, I could shoot him through the head repeatedly without much effort, even if I was scared and shaking.

Shot placement is a very, very big deal. Criminals have survived multiple badly-placed torso shots from .45 pistols, and they have continued to attack and harm people after the shots landed, but one shot from an accurate .22 rifle can kill any terrestrial mammal on Earth.

For a long time, the record grizzly bear was a huge animal a lady shot in the head with a .22. The bear was enormous, and it scared an American Indian woman. She popped it in the skull, and it dropped. Then she moved up close and emptied the gun into the skull to make sure the bear’s nap continued. You can see a photo of the skull online. People think bears’ skulls are so thick high-powered rifle slugs bounce off of them. Well, not this bear’s. Not where she aimed, anyway. And she was only using .22 Long.

You don’t need a big cartridge to kill a big animal unless you can’t take your best shot. If you can take your time and shoot wherever you want, you can kill an elephant with a .22. It has been done.

I don’t know why I’m mentioning self-defense (or elephants), because I want this gun for fun. I suppose it helps me justify buying it.

Why not put a folding AK in the cart and forget about all this? Because a .22 is what you want for a cart. You want something small, light, cheap, and fun to shoot.

The problem with the Mossberg 715P is the Ruger Charger. It’s another .22 pistol. The appearance isn’t as hilarious as that of the Mossberg, but it’s a better gun. It’s a 10/22 with the barrel and buttstock abbreviated.

You can get a Charger with a 10″ barrel, which would give higher velocity and less noise than the Mossberg’s short barrel. The Charger would also have all sorts of support, because the 10/22 is more common than the Bic lighter. Unfortunately, it costs more than the 715P, and I would have to blow about $85 for a cheap red dot to sit on it.

If I felt like it, I could keep a Charger in the utility cart and keep a huge 10/22 magazine with it. I could use a smaller magazine for fooling around, and then if black-clad transvestite ninjas from an allegedly nonexistent domestic terror organization decided to come to my farm and murder me for pointing out that men aren’t women, I could put the big magazine in and spray my way to the house, where I could reach for a more serious rifle. Or a few of them.

One neat thing about these guns is that you can put a pistol brace on either one and end up with a really neat and handy little rifle. You just have to buy an NFA stamp.

So do I get the Mossberg, which is more fun, or do I get the Charger, which is more gun? Or do I do the mature thing and forget about it?

I think we can rule out option #3.

I Physically Feel my Life Being Enriched

I’m waiting for some paint to dry, so I came up with a task for ChatGPT. I told it to write a poem in the manner of “The Walrus and the Carpenter,” but I said to make the lead characters Hillary Clinton and Hunter Biden.

Here is what it wrote, in about 15 seconds:

Of Hillary Clinton and Hunter Biden, I sing,
Two figures of politics, quite a thing!
They wandered down to the ocean blue,
In search of a meal and a good laugh too.

Said Clinton to Hunter, “Let’s take a stroll,
And find ourselves a tasty goal.”
Said Hunter, “I know just what to do,
We’ll hunt for some crabs, it’s easy too.”

They searched and searched along the shore,
Till Hunter found some crabs galore.
He said to Clinton, “Come take a look,
We’ll cook them up in a fancy nook.”

They gathered sticks and made a fire,
And cooked the crabs to their desire.
But when they went to take a bite,
The crabs had fled in great fright.

Said Clinton, “Hunter, what have you done?
Our meal is gone, we’ve had no fun.”
Said Hunter, “Don’t worry, we’ll find a way,
To catch those crabs another day.”

And so they left the beach that night,
Without a meal or any delight.
But they still had each other, that’s for sure,
And the promise of crabs, to catch and allure.

It refused to write one about Keith Olbermann and Charles Manson, so I asked for Olbermann and Ted Nugent.

Of Keith Olbermann and Ted Nugent, I write,
Two men with views that oftentimes ignite.
They met one day upon a wooded trail,
Both hunters, though with different tales to regale.

Said Nugent, “Keith, let’s hunt some game today,
I know a spot where we can surely slay.”
Olbermann agreed, but with some trepidation,
He feared he’d face Nugent’s bombastic proclamations.

As they ventured through the woods and brush,
They talked of guns, politics, and other such.
But as they walked, they both espied,
A rare bird with plumage bright and wide.

Said Nugent, “That’s dinner, let’s take it down!”
But Olbermann recoiled, with a frown.
He said, “Ted, can’t we just watch it soar,
And admire the beauty that we adore?”

Nugent laughed, and said, “You’re quite the sight,
Not wanting to hunt, that’s not quite right.”
But Olbermann stood firm in his beliefs,
And said, “Let’s leave this bird to peace.”

So they parted ways, with different views,
But both respected the other’s pursuits.
For though their opinions were often in dispute,
They both enjoyed the thrill of the hunt, just in different pursuit.

The poems are not really funny, the rhythm is off, the number of stanzas is wrong in each case, and the bot clearly hates hunting, but the fact that it did this well is something to think about.

MORE

I got it to write a better poem.

Once upon a time, in the land of the news,
A laptop was found, causing quite the blues,
For it belonged to Hunter, the son of a man,
Whose name was Biden, part of a political clan.

The laptop was filled, with some juicy stuff,
That made the journalists, huff and puff,
They said it was fake, and just a sham,
But the evidence was clear, and it wasn’t a scam.

Hunter’s laptop, was the real deal,
It had all the facts, and the journalists could feel,
The weight of their words, and the doubt they sowed,
For the truth was out there, and it freely flowed.

The laptop contained, some pictures and more,
Of Hunter’s life, that he couldn’t ignore,
There were messages and emails, that were quite a sight,
That shed light on his dealings, and caused some fright.

The journalists denied, that it was true,
But the laptop was real, and the proof just grew,
They couldn’t hide, from the facts that emerged,
And the public saw, how their trust was purged.

So let this be a lesson, to all the journalists out there,
To never underestimate, the truth that’s rare,
For it may come back, to haunt and reveal,
That what they thought was fake, was actually real.

I Want That Glow

In 2021, my pet cockatoo, Maynard, died at the age of 30. It was very unpleasant for me. It’s bad losing a dog after 12 or so years. Imagine a dog you had for 30 years, and then imagine it talked to you every day and smothered you with obsessive affection. Then imagine making a series of mistakes resulting in its unnecessary death.

Since he died, I have seen him in several dreams. In the first one, he clambered onto me, and he was radiant. He seemed to be smiling. It’s hard to explain to anyone who hasn’t owned a parrot, because parrots have rigid beaks, but it’s very obvious when a parrot is happy. They really look like they’re smiling.

I held him and kissed him, and then he was gone. The dream was sad but wonderful. I felt I had closure.

The day he died, he seemed to be okay until evening. Then I saw him breathing with his beak open. He was under the care of a local vet who turned out to be totally incompetent. I rushed him to the University of Florida. They took him into an exam room and refused to let me in because of leftist covid hysteria. Then the vet called my cell phone and told me Maynard was dead. He had been in the room for maybe 5 minutes. He didn’t ask me to go to the room. He didn’t bring Maynard out. I never saw Maynard again. The girl at the cash register charged me hundreds of dollars, and they suggested an extremely expensive necropsy and an expensive method of disposal, and I rejected both.

That was it. I left his body and travel cage at the animal hospital and drove home alone, and there I was faced with one living parrot and Maynard’s empty cage, complete with bird toys and unfinished food and water.

In the dream, he glowed with love and joy. I felt forgiven.

I have seen him in other dreams. Always happy.

Last night, I found one of his wing feathers in my living room under a book. I felt like I had found a gold Rolex. When a parrot is alive and well, you don’t think about saving a few feathers. A while later, I heard Maynard’s voice, asking me what I was doing. It was Marvin, my grey, imitating him. Marv sounds exactly like him. He hasn’t imitated him much lately.

Marvin appears to have a supernatural ability to pick up on people’s thoughts and emotions. For example, when I think something is funny, he laughs before I do. He even does this when we’re not in the same room and his view is blocked. He does it when I’m on long calls with my wife. It’s shocking when it happens. Last night, Maynard was on my mind, and Marvin imitated him.

I’m always happy when he imitates Maynard. I miss Maynard’s voice. I wish I could do things over.

After Marv did his imitation, I wanted more. I put some videos of Maynard on Youtube many years ago, using accounts I no longer have access to. I tried to find a video. I managed to find one, but it wasn’t very good. It was short, and he didn’t say anything. It was still nice to see him.

All this makes me wonder: would God send a pet into a person’s dreams to bring comfort and closure?

People think pets cease to exist when they die, because heaven isn’t for animals, but that’s not consistent with scripture. The Bible mentions a white horse Jesus rides in the spirit realm. A horse you ride is a pet. It also mentions supernatural creatures with animals’ faces. Animals can’t sin, so they have no guilt. It makes no sense to destroy them when they die, especially when so many of them do so much for us while they’re alive.

I think I’ll see my pets again, and I think my failures as an owner will be forgotten. I believe Maynard is with God, and I expect to be with him again.

In 2020, my young friend Travis was shot accidentally, and he died alone in a hospital room. He was there for a month, and they wouldn’t even let him receive cards. At first, they said his injuries weren’t life-threatening, but he got worse and died anyway. Toward the end, I saw him in a dream. He came to see me, and he glowed just like Maynard did. He had a huge smile on his face, but he couldn’t talk. He looked like he knew something good I didn’t know. My feeling is that he was rescued from the world, and he wanted me to know my turn was coming soon.

Last night I felt as though finding Maynard’s feather and hearing Marv imitate him were warnings that I would be with Maynard soon.

Every day when Rhodah and I pray together, I pray that God will rapture his children soon, and I ask him to help us to recognize the season when he will come. Christians like to harp about no one knowing the day or hour, but Jesus clearly expected us to know the general time of our rescue. I’m wondering if yesterday’s experiences were an answer to our prayers.

I feel very alienated from the human race. People are extremely vile now, and it is impossible break through their impudence and help them avoid hell and the tribulation. People are like pigs, which walk around staring at the ground, thinking about food. They’re like rats, which focus on filling their holes with things they can eat. They’re like monkeys, which spend their time stealing and fighting. Talking to them is about like walking to the fence outside my house and trying to teach the cattle.

I love getting revelation from God, but at the same time, when I get revelation, it makes me sad, because I know nearly no one will let me share it with them. I can tell Rhodah and one or two other people, and that’s all. I have a Youtube viewer who agrees with me, and there are a couple of blog readers I hear from, but as for the rest of the world, it’s pearls before swine, all day, every day. It’s particularly bad with Christians because they get ahold of some bad doctrine and decide they know everything.

I don’t think I’m going to die. I think I’m going to leave, and all of my supernatural experiences are preparation.

I can’t describe my gratitude for my isolation from the world. I look at the web, and I see how worldly people live. They have no dignity now. People will not permit it. The government will not permit it. Satan’s children play a tune, and even Christians have to dance and smile. Wave the white flag. Use the pronouns. You want to keep your job?

Christians who didn’t prepare are stuck in bad situations.

I see stories about people being attacked by criminals in places like Chicago and New York. How different my world is. I carry a gun and a knife everywhere. Even to the bank. I don’t have a local prosecutor trying to lock good people up for self-defense. No one is setting criminals free for George Soros here. And yes, he really does bankroll such attorneys. It’s not a myth.

If someone starts kicking my front door, I can display a rifle with 31 rounds in it, and if he doesn’t quit, I can fire. If I’m at a gas station, and someone tries to rob me, I can shoot. At least at this stage of the apocalypse, I don’t have to worry that a mob will pull me out of my car and beat me to death. I have a governor that got a law passed to protect mob victims who use their own cars to defend themselves. In Florida, it’s a crime to be part of a mob that deliberately intimidates people.

People are nice here. We open doors for each other. We yield the right of way when we don’t have to. My neighbors came onto my property without permission once. So they could cut and move a tree that blocked my driveway. I got my septic tank pumped this week, and when the young man who gave me the bill left, he said, “God bless you.”

Leftists are against God, and they love telling the world how hateful Christians and conservatives are. Meanwhile, in their cities, they’re afraid to leave their homes at night. They’re afraid to use ATM’s. They can’t get out of their cars in their cities unless they’re in certain small areas that are relatively safe. They riot. They abuse each other. Here, where there are Trump signs everywhere, people are kind and gentle. Black people are comfortable around white people. That’s tough to get used to after Miami. Seems like everyone in Miami is racist. Cubans against all blacks. Blacks against Cubans and whites. Black people treated me very differently in Miami.

Who is doing things right? If the God-haters are as miserable and angry as they are, and we’re at peace and full of love, who is right?

I told Rhodah it reminded me of the story of Lazarus and the rich man. They were in the underworld, dead, and Lazarus the beggar was with Abraham, in a pleasant place, waiting to be taken to heaven. The rich man, who had no name any more, was in a place of torment. He could see Lazarus, but there was a great gulf between them, and no one could cross it.

People like me live in the same world with BLM and Antifa nuts. We share the world with men in dresses. We’re in the same general area, but our experiences are so different, we might as well be on different planets.

God’s people have peace and victory. We have real love, not fake love. We aren’t afraid of death. We are confident we’ll be taken care of. We want to help others. Satan’s children live in fear and selfishness. They are cruel. They’re terrified. They’ve been known to wear masks while alone in their cars. They feel cheated, and they think the way to be prosperous and safe is to harm other people. They want to harm us by taking the things with which God has blessed us.

When we look at the world, we see a place that will end soon, and we expect to go to a better place. When they look at the world, they see increased crowding, an environment they believe is about to fail us, pollution that will never end, energy problems that can’t be solved, and a planet that has to be maintained and improved at any cost, because they have no hope of finding any other home. They think this is all there is. To me, the global warming hysteria is a crazy joke not to be taken seriously, but they actually believe billions will die soon if we keep using plastic bags. Imagine being that insane.

I can’t put myself in their shoes. I can’t imagine thinking this world is all there is. What’s it like to have a panic attack because someone else used a styrofoam cup? It’s beyond my powers of conception.

I see Greta Thunberg as what she is: a spoiled, mentally ill, hysterical, controlling, abusive, conceited, attention-loving, science-illiterate girl who needs to shut up and respect her elders. They see her as a savior! She’s out of her mind!

I felt God’s grief last night and this morning. He grieves because of the tribulation. He has no desire to see people suffer like that, but it has to be done. He reminded me that it’s not just a curse. It’s also a blessing. “Tribulation” means using a tool to separate grain from its husk. Many people will be harvested to heaven during the tribulation. We have to focus on that and not dwell on the self-inflicted fate of the others.

I’m disappointed every time a month passes and the rapture still hasn’t come. I can’t wait for it. The irredeemable and near-irredeemable will be stuck here, free to claw and hack at each other without restraint, but I hope to get two great blessings: 1) to be free from their kind forever, and 2) to be with God, who is love, peace, joy, and perfect protection.

Compared to heaven, this entire world is a ghetto and a death camp. It’s as if heaven were Switzerland, the earth were Detroit, and hell, which is part of Earth, were Auschwitz. Except hell is worse than Auschwitz.

More Proof Engineers are Useless

I finally got back to work on my tractor fork attachment.

When I bought my tractor, it had 4 forks, or, more accurately, tines, on it. They were chained on with turnbuckles, and the chains went around the bucket. To prevent the bucket from deforming under the pressure of the chains, the previous owner shoved poorly-measured lengths of four-by-four into the bucket.

The tines worked extremely well, but they moved around all the time. It was not possible to tighten them enough to prevent this. Also, they were way out in front of the tractor, so the leverage was bad. They had to be mounted on the front lip of the bucket, so the distance back to the pins that attached them to the front end loader was pretty long.

On top of all this, in order to lift the fork, as I have decided to call the tines, I had to lift the bucket, which served no purpose in and of itself. The fork probably weighed 300 pounds, and that doesn’t include the bucket’s weight, which was probably maybe could be 150 pounds.

Let me check the weight of similar buckets.

The web says a bucket sold by Everything attachments runs 271 pounds, so I am off by a lot.

So before I could lift anything with “the fork,” I had to lift over 500 pounds of useless weight.

To make things even worse, the old bucket was held on by 4 hard-to-remove pins, and I could not use any other attachments without a ton of work. In practical terms, I couldn’t use the bucket because the fork was hard to remove, and I couldn’t use anything else because the bucket was hard to remove.

I got myself a thing that allows me to remove the bucket in about 90 seconds, and because covid, I was not able to get a bucket that worked with it. Instead, I did a lot of work and changed my existing bucket so it fit. This left me with a bucket I could use, but I was not able to use the fork, and the fork was what I needed for at least 95% of the jobs I did.

The answer: buy a new fork attachment.

No. Don’t be stupid. There is no such thing.

You can get a set of forklift forks for a tractor. They cost a lot, and you only get two tines unless you pay extra. The tines are short and poorly suited to moving logs and brush, and they move around if you use them the way I need to use them. Stupid.

You can’t move brush with two tines. You need at least 4 unless you want things to fall between the tines. I have a cheap set of two Chinese tines that clamp on my bucket, and while they are certainly helpful, they will never move brush.

You can get a thing called a grapple. This is like a 60″-wide set of salad tongs connected to hydraulics. People love them. I don’t. They are also stupid.

You can pick up logs with a grapple. So what? I can do that with the fork, and I can pick up more logs, because a fork is bigger. And I could handle loads that were much bigger than anything that would fit in a grapple. You can pick up brush in a grapple. So what? I was able to move huge piles of brush with the fork. Again, much bigger than anything that would fit in a grapple.

Also, to use a grapple, you have to add some stuff to your hydraulic system. To get something that isn’t as good as a fork without added hydraulics. And a good grapple weighs 400 pounds.

Grapples are dumb. I’m convinced of it. They cost a great deal of money, they require tractor modification, and they don’t work very well compared to a set of tines.

I think men buy grapples because they’re cooler than forks and because they don’t really know what they’re doing. When you have a grapple on your compact tractor, you can pretend you’re Truckasaurus, but you can’t really get much done. It’s amazing to me that no one offers a factory fork attachment like the one I’m building.

My answer: cut up my existing tines and attach them to a shopmade steel frame that works with a quick-attach adaptor like the one I now have. This will reduce the weight of the whole mess. It will move everything closer to the tractor, improving the leverage. The new attachment will be rigid, so the tines will not move around. I won’t have to change my hydraulics. It should weigh a hundred pounds less than a grapple.

Down side: it has been almost a year since I started working on it, and I am still not done because covid pretty much destroyed whatever ambition I had when I first realized I needed to do something. There is a lot of stuff on my property that needs to be moved.

So far, I have built the frame, cut up the forks, and primed and painted certain parts of the tines that will be hard to paint once the project is welded together. Over the last couple of days, I cut one tine up and did a lot of rust removal, priming, and painting.

I really do not understand how people who make tractor attachments can be so incompetent. You can go to Youtube and find shopmade fork things that are a lot like the one I’m building, so it’s not like I invented the transistor. If you use a grapple, and you’ve seen people use a fork, you know perfectly well that the grapple is inferior in every way. So why can’t I buy a fork ready to go?

I have 4 tines. They were originally maybe 6 feet long. Something like 4 feet extended out in front of the bucket, and the rest went under the bucket. When something heavy rested on a tine, the rear of the tine pressed up on the bucket. The idea was to add strength and provide a tine that would not bend where it met the bucket.

This was a stupid design. It added weight and complexity, and it required tight chains to pull the tines back against the bucket lip. This deformed the upper part of the bucket because the chains pulled down on it in spite of the pitiable four-by-four supports, which fell out all the time. This is what happens when a person who only knows how to run a wood band saw tries to do a job that requires steel and a metalworker. When all you know is carpentry, every job looks like a pine deck.

I can weld short pieces of heavy tubing in the corners of the tines to serve as gussets. If that won’t prevent the tubes from bending downward, nothing will. I will also put horizontal pieces of tubing in the corners to keep the tines from opening or closing.

I guess I shouldn’t be harsh. I don’t think the quick-attach adaptor had been invented when my tractor was new, so the old arrangement was probably the best the attachment companies could do. Still, why wasn’t the adaptor invented in, say, 1935 or soon after whatever year it was when hydraulic front-end loaders arrived on the scene?

My fork had 4 upright steel tubes to prevent things from falling back toward the tractor when the bucket was raised. This week, I de-rusted and primed two of them. I also put one on the hydraulic press because it was bent, and I got it nearly straight, which amazed me. I’ll be fixing the other two uprights shortly. It’s easy. If I get tired of the slightly-crooked one, I can make a new one in half an hour, or I can turn it upside-down, do a little welding, and have an upright that’s only crooked for the top 6 inches. That’s where the bend is.

Each upright member had a stupid spike at the top, facing forward at face level. When I bought the tractor, the two outboard spikes had tennis balls on them. I wondered why until the first time I walked into a spike. Today and yesterday, I used the belt grinder and the lathe to round the ends of the spikes. Why they had to be sharp in the first place is a mystery to me. Why no one ever thought to round them off later is also a puzzle.

My plan is to put the uprights back on the fork and then put some goat wire across all four of them. This is fencing wire laid out in a grid. The wire will weigh about 7 pounds and prevent things from coming back at me or the tractor between the uprights. Why no one else thought of this…well, I think we’ve already discussed the competence of the people who make tractor stuff.

I’m using rusty-metal primer on a lot of the attachment, and I’m finishing it with Herculiner. This is the toughest finish I can get, and it’s easily touched up with spray cans from Tractor Supply.

I assume this design will work. If not, I’ll get a grapple, and I’ll be out around $300. But why wouldn’t it work? The old system was held on with two brackets of 3/16″ steel channel about 10″ long. If lifting hundreds of pounds of wood using 4 pins on two little brackets with 4 little welds didn’t destroy everything, my relatively robust system should be a lot better.

When all this is done, I’ll have a bucket and fork I can swap in a minute or two, so I’ll actually use both. How nice that will be.

It seems like I excoriate engineers all the time for their stupid mistakes, but I think I’m completely justified. I have a physics degree and a small amount of common sense, but physics training in no way makes you an engineer. It enables you to pick engineering up fast, but it’s not the same thing. Physicists don’t know how to do anything. A physicist might be able to tell you how LED’s work at the subatomic level, but it takes an engineer to design an LED TV. If I can dramatically improve the work of engineers over and over, and I can, then something is wrong.

They always blame marketing and accounting. “We wanted to make it right, but the marketing and accounting people wouldn’t let us.” Boo hoo. I’m sure that explains a lot of problems, but it doesn’t explain many others. Why didn’t we have plastic trash bags until the 1960’s? Obvious? Why did American cars require two keys long after the Japanese realized only one was needed? Why have boat designers put so many bilge pump wiring blocks 6″ above the normal level of salty, conductive bilge water?

Why did it take so long for engineers to put seat belts in cars? They were invented in the 1800’s. The first American cars with seat belts appeared in 1949.

Engineers gave my car thin, easily-clogged moonroof drain tubes, and then they fixed it so any overflow was captured in headliner cavities containing overly-complex and expensive motors. An engineer gave my lawn tractor a front grill cover that falls off easily and lands directly in front of the tractor’s front wheels. Guess what happens then. Owners all over the web are looking for new grills.

My opinion of engineers is like my opinion of cooking school graduates. Think of all the terrible food you’ve had at expensive restaurants. Most of it was cooked by chefs with degrees. There is no conceivable excuse for going to school for several years and making bad food. Cooking is just not hard. Somehow, they blow it anyway. Very, very often.

Now I feel like writing about my awful green toilets again. I just spent $700 ordering a better one, made in Japan.

Unless I have missed something, my tractor fork will be fantastic. If so, I’ll probably come back and criticize engineers some more. They have it coming.

My Liberal Toilets are Al Gore’s Revenge

Why is it that leftists keep making it harder for people to stay clean?

Hygiene really sets conservatives and leftists apart. We keep seeing leftist celebrities bragging that they don’t bathe much. Ashton Kutcher, for example, says he never showers. Brad Pitt is notorious for stinking. Leftists push low-flow shower heads that make good rinsing difficult. They stuck us with efficient washing machines that put mold in our clothes no matter what we do to fix the problem.

Today’s beef: low-flow toilets.

My house has, if my count is correct, 4 Briggs Vacuity toilets. They date from around 2000. They were efficient for their time. The design is moronic. Each toilet has some kind of upside-down jug in the tank, and it sits on a vacuum tube. Don’t ask me what it does. You can buy a Toto low-flow toilet that works perfectly and doesn’t have a lot of gadgetry in the tank. Vacuity toilets also have plastic liners inside their tanks, and the water goes into the liner so it doesn’t fill the entire tank.

The Briggs company realized these toilets were stupidly engineered, so they decided the smart thing was to quit supporting them. If you have one and it fails, you are on your own.

They will not accept Korky valves, which are the most common valves on Earth. You have to buy a weird Fluidmaster valve that costs twice as much. And when you install a new valve, it will leak where it enters the tank because it has to go through the porcelain as well as the thick plastic liner.

My toilet developed a leak last year. My answer was to install a giant rubber washer outside the tank, along with a layer of silicone. It worked until the valve went bad. Then minerals clogged the valve up, and acid didn’t fix it. I had to put in a new valve. It leaked like the first one, and my solution didn’t work any more.

Today I took the tank off the toilet, removed the plastic liner, put the liner on the band saw, and cut off the half the valve occupied. Then I put everything back together. The valve doesn’t leak, but the gaskets do. They’re old. I had to order new ones.

My low-flow toilet is now a high-flow toilet, but at least I can use it. When I get the new gaskets in, I mean.

Now I have a decision to make, and if you’re a sane (non-leftist) person, you may understand what I’m talking about. Do I replace these stupid toilets now, while there are still some decent toilets available, or do I take a chance and wait for them to fail, knowing that leftists will eventually remove all good toilets from the market?

If they have their way, we’ll all be pooping in biodegradable boxes made from locally sourced wood and throwing the poop out our windows. Or we’ll have to keep it until the leftist poop truck comes around once a month to collect it so it can be used to make organic adobe or something.

Think I’m kidding? You’d understand if you owned a diesel truck or tractor. My truck is a 2007, and it has none of the horrible technology that came on the next year’s models. My friend Mike has a 2014 Mercedes, and he has to buy a ridiculous fluid and pour it in his car all the time. I don’t even know what it is. Something to do with the exhaust gases.

Newer diesels have something called a regeneration cycle, and people complain these cycles start at the worst possible times. They say the new green parts fail and cause all sorts of problems. Old tractors and trucks are highly sought after because of the problems the new ones have.

I’m amazed by the bathing thing. Leftists like to tell us our bodies produce important oils our skin needs in order to be healthy. No, they don’t! That’s insane. When you don’t bathe often, oil, grease, dead skin, salt, bacteria, urine, feces, and fungus accumulate on your skin, and you get acne, ingrown hairs, and boils. It’s worse if you’re a woman. because you have one more opening that produces secretions.

Yes, you can be healthy bathing every few days instead of every day, but you’ll smell, and skin oil will stain your clothes. And you’ll feel bad. Here’s something I’ve realized: I don’t have to bathe every day in order to be healthy. I have to bathe every day in order to feel good. If I don’t bathe, I feel crusty. I can feel yesterday’s salt, oil, and grease on my skin and hair. And if I bathed as rarely as Ashton Kutcher, I’d be miserable, and I’d probably have pimples and boils.

The Japanese are obsessed with quality defecation. They are the masters of toilet design and construction. I’m thinking of getting a Toto Ultramax one-piece comfort height toilet. Toto is Japanese. I’ve had two of their toilets before. They were great.

One-piece toilets are better than two-piece toilets. They have fewer parts, and they last longer. “Comfort height” means the seat is about like a chair, so you don’t have to lower yourself as far. Some people think you can’t poop correctly unless you squat like a savage, but it’s not true unless you have some kind of medical problem, and once you get old, you’ll need a higher toilet anyway, so why wait?

If you’re convinced you have to squat to poop correctly, you can always put your feet on a couple of blocks. Beats having to have someone help you off the toilet. When my dad was failing, I had to install a special raised seat, and life would have been better had the entire toilet been taller in the first place.

I’m not sure what to get, but a tall toilet seems like like it will be less likely to wear out its welcome.

To sum up, leftism ruins everything, including personal hygiene and toilets. Toilets are likely to get worse, so if your toilets are in bad shape, try not to wait till there are no good ones left. Celebrities smell. I guess that’s about all.

Better

Yesterday I decided to try my new Girsan Hi-Power clone, the MC P35 Match. I took it to the pasture and put 50 rounds of Aguila FMJ through it. I shot 25 rounds at steel and the rest at a Shoot-n-See target.

Some people are reluctant to buy Turkish weapons. They seem to think Turkey is like Mexico or Iran. In reality, there are a lot of sharp, responsible, capable people in Turkey. It’s pretty much like Western Europe. Shopping malls. Good roads. Good public transportation. Extremely clean restaurants. Much cleaner than restaurants here in Florida. Definitely cleaner than New York restaurants.

I have no problems with this gun. At 10 yards or so, it appears to shoot very accurately. I am rusty, so I think any disappointing shots are my fault. Here is the target. I shot at 5 different points because I am too cheap to shoot only at the center and waste the rest of the target.

I’m not exactly sure how far away I was. It appeared to be farther than 7 yards, but I did not measure.

I missed a couple of gongs at 30 feet. It took me a few rounds to remember how to shoot.

Every round fed perfectly. In all likelihood, every shot flew where it should have. My trigger pull is not quite what it used to be, and my grip seems inconsistent. I need to shoot more often.

It looks like I am consistently low and to the left. If memory serves, shooting to the left is not new to me, so it’s probably not the gun. I should go look at the Wheel of Misfortune.

I have seen people say this gun, or at least the slightly-cheaper variant, does not shoot very accurately. Well, I did just fine with ammunition I bought for $7.31 per box. Give me two days to practice, and I’ll do better. It’s hard for me to believe there is anything wrong with the gun. My other pistols don’t shoot any better. Maybe the problems pop out when you use a rest at 25 yards, but how would that be relevant to real-world shooting? I mean, if you’re sitting behind a rest with a death grip on a $620 pistol, using cheap FMJ, looking over iron sights, trying to get within 2″ at 25 yards, you should be shooting rifles. And if your gun can do 3″ at 25 yards, a good shooter armed with your gun will be able to kill any home invader that ever lived.

I’m consistently inside a circle smaller than a burglar’s head, so there is that.

I don’t really understand people who worry a lot about super accuracy at long distances with Bass Pro or Rural King pistols. It’s like they’ve never heard of rifles. I would never, ever use anything but a rifle for self-defense unless the only alternative was a carrot peeler. Rifles hold a lot of ammunition. Rifles defeat body armor and walls. Rifles are easy to shoot accurately. They hold all kinds of optics and lights. They let you shoot pistol-packing burglars pretty easily at distances at which their pistols are not likely to be useful. Shooting a drugged-up burglar with a pistol is like eating peas with a crab fork.

The trigger is stiff, so it invites flinching just to get the round out of the barrel. I have read that this gun loosens up a lot after a few boxes, though.

The grip is wonderful, but I suppose every textured G10 grip is wonderful. It wraps around the back of the butt so almost every part that touches the hand grabs the skin.

So is it a good Hi-Power successor? It had better be. The Hi-Power is not coming back. FN created a new model which is not the same.

This gun’s slide and frame are forged and cold-drawn, whatever that is. I can’t remember which is cold-drawn and which is forged. Anyway, it’s not cast. It should be just as good as the Springfield clone, which is also Turkish in spite of the deceptive ad talk.

I don’t know what to say about the recoil, because I didn’t notice it. I guess it must be soft. This gun isn’t plastic, so it has mass to soak up momentum.

Is it a good gun for self-defense? Yes. Definitely. Would I use it for that? Not unless I couldn’t reach a better gun. It can’t be trusted with +P ammunition. My opinion is that ammunition improvements have changed the capabilities of certain cartridges to the point where we should all reevaluate our choices. There are 2023 9mm rounds that do things 2000 9mm rounds could not. If you’re going to use 9mm to protect yourself, why not insist on a gun that uses top-notch ammunition?

Example of changing cartridge capabilities: I like 10mm, but the .40 S&W round has been improved so much, I think it’s a better choice for most people. It zips along pretty fast now, ammunition is easier to find and comes in more flavors, and guns are common and therefore easy to buy and maintain.

I didn’t buy the Girsan for self-defense. I bought it for fun. I wanted a Hi-Power-type gun because I was never given a fair chance to get the one my grandfather had. Now I have what appears to be a superior version.

Plastic guns are wonderful for escorting burglars to the hereafter, but when it comes to the range, give me steel. Steel guns are neat. Nobody wants to see John Wayne shoot Comanches with a Kel-Tec. Steel feels better and looks better. It links us to the past, when Milton Berle was the only man who wore a dress in front of kids.

People love to say, “A gun is not a toy!” Sure it is. If you bought it for fun. Airplanes and helicopters can be toys. Parachutes can be toys. Motorcycles are almost always toys. The fact that something is dangerous doesn’t mean it can’t be a toy. For me, steel guns are generally better toys than plastic guns.

My big complaint about the Girsan is that it only comes with one magazine. It’s a Mec-Gar product, and it comes in blue and nickel. The blue ones are hard to find. I had to pay $63 for two, including shipping and taxes. They hold 15 rounds, or two more than a Hi-Power magazine, so that makes the Girsan better than a Hi-Power in a self-defense situation. Like if you’re attacked at the range, and your AK-47 is in the truck. I believe you can use these magazines in Hi-Powers, though. Supposedly, just about all the parts are interchangeable.

Nice gun. Maybe I’ll get the trigger worked on some day, but that’s about it. Okay; maybe I could dig up some abalone grips. But that’s all. And a red dot. But nothing else.

I wonder what nitride coating costs.

No Drugs, no Drama, More Profit

Finally, a story I had been expecting for years popped up on the web. Models are now concerned that their trade will vanish suddenly. AI is creating virtual models.

Virtual models have a number of advantages. They don’t have to be paid. They don’t use coke or heroin. They don’t have attitudes. They don’t sue because agents or photographers rape or grope them. They never get old. They do exactly as they’re told. They never get fat. They don’t wrinkle or go grey. Nothing sags or droops. Nothing is too small or too big. They don’t abuse themselves with hard living and expect makeup artists to do magic when they show up for work.

One really nice thing about them is that they don’t become narcissistic objects of worship, so they don’t go on Twitter and say stupid things all day, stirring up legions of mindless fans. Of course, they could do that, depending on what their creators want them to do. Maybe it will happen later.

I expected this to happen with actors, but we haven’t seen that yet. We’ve seen CGI bodies with real voices. The fake voices will come soon.

This would be a big benefit to society. Show business, historically, has been the domain of degenerates. It still is. It attracts terrible people, they become obscenely rich and powerful, and then they use their power to corrupt the rest of us and destroy civilization. Think how different it would be if the biggest names in show business were AI actors.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe the people who program them, also trashy show business people, would use them as avatars to promote their own degenerate values.

Somehow, I don’t think a bot could be as persuasive as a person when it comes to selling products. “Drink Pepsi! ChatGPT loves it!” I don’t think that will work. I could be wrong. But a bot could push the leftist agenda.

I hope we won’t have a bot Antichrist. I don’t think that can happen, since the Antichrist will be a man. But he could be a man wired up to AI. Elon Musk is at work on that. We may have a future with two classes: cyborg overlords, and lowly all-meat humans.

What if we had had bots 90 years ago, and the actors our great-grandparents knew had been bots? Humphrey Bogart would still be working. So would John Wayne. They would still be raking in money for the studios and their stockholders. They would work until we got sick of them.

A long time ago, I wanted to be a comic strip artist. I actually got to the development stage with the guy who discovered Garfield. Luckily for me, I failed. Newspaper cartoonists used to make a ton of money, and that might have destroyed me. Anyway, I learned something most people don’t know: it’s very had to break into the comic strip business, because newspapers are still full of strips drawn by dead people.

At least one major cartoonist has made fun of this in his work. Cartoonists call strips by dead artists “zombie strips.”

If you had been born the day Peanuts creator Charles Schulz died, you would now be 23. So United, his syndicate, ran his final strips and then withdrew his feature, right? No. He’s still plugging away, postmortem. Peanuts still runs all over America. Old strips appear daily as reruns. He was allowed to die, but he can’t retire.

Schulz isn’t the only comic strip zombie. If you check, you will find that other well-known strips are earning royalties for the dead.

It shows what can happen when media people prefer a sure thing to developing new talent, and if actors and actresses were immortal, like bots, it would be nearly impossible for young actors to find work in big roles. They would all have to keep their Olive Garden jobs until they died.

The better AI gets, the less it will matter to the public that celebrities aren’t real. The ones we have now are barely real anyway. Future bots will be sexier, funnier, better looking, more charismatic, and more talented than the flesh and bone celebrities we have now. We won’t care. I already don’t care.

We’ve already seen performances that were at least part CGI, which is AI’s lesser sibling. If you’ve seen a Marvel movie, you’ve seen a character switch from real to CGI and back. Tom Holland can’t really jump around like Spider-Man. Mark Ruffalo can’t balloon up to the size of an RV and turn green. Marvel actors have CGI body doubles. Marvel stunt budgets must be miniscule now.

What will come after actors? Acting requires a little more talent than modeling, so actors will follow models. Singing requires more talent than acting, so singers will follow actors. Writing original songs takes more talent than singing, so singer-songwriters will come later, probably at about the same time AI comedians start to appear.

It almost makes you wonder why a real audience is needed. We could be replaced, too, but then where would ticket money come from?

Pretty soon, a studio will, over the screams and threats of SAG narcissists, create a major actor, and whether we like the first one or not, they will eventually create some we like better than actual actors. Maybe we’ll see a gradual end to the spawning and maintenance of corrosive billionaire thespians.

I don’t think we should feel smug. AI will eventually be good enough to replace people with real jobs, not just performers. Even studio executives will be outdone by machinery. Machines get better and better, and there is no stopping it, no matter how much Elon Musk warns us. The human race keeps proving it can’t resist or control the drug of technology. We will always abuse it.

Will we get AI politicians? What if we get a really popular AI president? Will we repeal the 22nd Amendment, based on the assumption that we can’t do better?

In a situation like that, I believe an AI Obama or Sanders is more likely than a solid leader like an AI DeSantis. Our slide into leftism is not going to stop. America belongs to Satan, and he prefers leftism to conservatism.

Whatever happens, it will be nice to see certain classes of destructive people lose their access to excessive wealth and powerful platforms. No more Chrissie Teigens or Gwyneth Paltrows. That would be great.

It will happen. It has to happen. It’s as predictable as the death of a star.

I don’t know if we will ever be able to get rid of overpaid, bloviating leftist athletes. Maybe there is some way to make AI games competitive and unpredictable. Imagine Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb running the bases again.

Spectator sports don’t run on the love of athleticism. They run on the love of betting. Racehorse owners learned that over the last couple of decades. Tracks shut down because people were just as happy to gamble online as they were to go watch horses. If AI games could be fixed so they had random outcomes, and there was some way to have fair AI drafts, billionaire athletes could vanish from the earth.

A company called Cloudflare makes huge money introducing randomness into the world of computers. Maybe they could branch out into the creation of AI athletes and game variables.

We already have something like this. Fantasy football. You pick your fictional team of real athletes, and their unpredictable performance introduces randomness so the whole thing seems competitive. The real players do Cloudflare’s job.

If we can get excited about fantasy football, we can get just as excited about AI football. We will love football players with a limitless average career length instead of 3.3 years, which is the actual average career length.

AI can’t replace me. I don’t do anything.

Assuming the rapture doesn’t come first, a lot of crazy sci-fi things are going to happen soon, and they will happen before sci-fi writers anticipate them in works of fiction. That’s weird. Usually, fiction gets there first.

If you’re hoping to become a model, think it over. Olive Garden only needs so many waiters.

“We’re the real PFJ!”

I found an interesting Messianic channel on Youtube, and I’m really enjoying it.

I’ve met Yeshua, because he literally came to my physical location twice. I’ve had miracles and visions. I’ve had demons cast out. The whole 9 yards. He is God. He has proven it over and over. He still proves it day by day. I want everyone to know him. But not one of the many Jewish people I’ve known have ever shown any interest in him. Not unless they knew him before we met. It’s great to see the sample I’ve seen doesn’t represent everyone. It’s the best I can hope for, unfortunately.

This week, I saw a Jewish man who was once a yeshiva student confront one of the myths surrounding Yeshua. His name is Dr. Golan Broshi. He said he had been told over and over to avoid looking at the New Testament because it was a Christian book that was anti-Semitic. Of course, when he finally looked, he saw a set of Jewish books, every one written by a Jewish man, created and disseminated in order to help spread a Jewish sect in support of the Jewish Messiah. He was amazed. I’ve seen many Jewish believers say the same thing happened to them. I saw one Jew joke that the only thing he knew about the New Testament was that it was written by the pope. Of course, not one gentile had a hand in writing it. Only Jews. It is a Jewish creation; one hundred per cent.

Anyway, he pointed something out, and I had never thought about it.

There is a common thread in several books of the Christian Bible. It goes like this: God sends an anointed Jew to help the rest of the Jews. He has confrontations with the religious and political leaders. They persecute him and treat him very badly. Then he turns out to be right, and eventually, he is revered and honored. After his death.

Of course, I’m referring to the Old Testament, which is part of the Christian Bible.

Isaiah was murdered by Jews. Jeremiah was imprisoned and beaten. Amos was abused and rejected. The Queen of Israel tried to kill Elijah, and the king, Ahab, agreed with her. Jewish lore written by Jews says Ahab had the prophet Micaiah murdered by other Jews because he didn’t like what Micaiah said.

Later on, Jewish Yeshua said this to certain Jewish scholars of the law:

Woe unto you! for ye build the sepulchres of the prophets, and your fathers killed them. Truly ye bear witness that ye allow the deeds of your fathers: for they indeed killed them, and ye build their sepulchres.

He also said:

O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them which are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not!

The prophets were not popular during their lifetimes, and the people who made them miserable were Jews.

In this respect, the Jewish prophets are like real Christians, who have always been abused by nominal Christians who didn’t know God. Christians who are popular among people who claim to be Christians are generally not really Christians.

Dr. Broshi asked a simple question: if Jews have internal disagreements that don’t involve gentiles, how can anyone say anti-Semitism is the reason? If the Jews who wrote the New Testament were anti-Semites, weren’t the Jews who imprisoned and killed early Messianics also anti-Semites? They didn’t harm anyone but Jews.

It’s a startling argument.

Jews persecuted Moses. Go look for yourself. Jews tried to kill David. A Jew slept with David’s wives in order to humiliate him. Jews slaughtered most of a tribe of Jews. If powerful Jews fought with Yeshua, who was Jewish, and they had him killed, and they imprisoned and killed his Jewish followers, which is undeniable, how can anti-Semitism be involved?

Anti-Semitism among Christians didn’t exist when the New Testament was written. At first, all believers were Jews, and the gentile believers who came later were not their enemies. On the contrary; they looked to them for teaching. They followed them.

Anti-Semitism among Christians developed after the New Testament was written, and it is inconsistent with the New Testament, just as there are rabbinical teachings that go against the Tanakh. Most Jews aren’t interested in God. That certainly goes against the Tanakh. It makes no sense to condemn scripture based on the actions of people who ignore it.

The apostles were most definitely not against Jews. Paul, for example, spent a long time traveling to far-off synagogues to reach them, and he continued even though they flogged him more than once, stoned him, and beat him with sticks.

What Broshi says is true, and once you see it in front of you, you realize how obvious it is. Why haven’t people said it before?

It’s amazing what we can believe before God shows us the truth. There is no limit to human delusion.

First Barbecue Gun of 2023

I had an urge to resume completing my gun collection, so I acted on it.

The main reason I love shooting is that as my grandfather’s favorite grandchild, I shot his guns with him when I was a kid. Then he died, and someone who won’t step up and admit the truth swept all the good ones up without going through the legal process. I ended up inheriting an aluminum .22 pistol and a rusty flintlock shotgun no one else would take. I also got his Browning Sweet Sixteen, but I didn’t get that from his estate. My grandmother gave it to my dad, and I inherited it from him. Good thing, because the aluminum pistol and the rusty shotgun aren’t much to remember Gramps by, and there is no way I would have gotten the Sweet Sixteen if my dad hadn’t owned it.

I didn’t get the Colt Woodsman we shot together. I didn’t get the Hi Standard .22 semiauto pistol we shot. I didn’t get the Remington 550-1 .22 rifle we shot. I certainly didn’t get either of his Smith & Wesson .357 revolvers or his lever gun or his M1 Enforcer pistol. I didn’t get his commemorative nickel-plated Colt 1911, but that shouldn’t have gone to me, because my uncle bought it for him.

I’m the best shot in the family, far and away, and the only one who has any idea how to work a reloading press. I’m the only one who has any precision rifle training. It would have been nice if I had gotten one more decent gun, but estates are like buffets. They bring out the worst in people. You find out what your relatives are really like when someone dies. People you love will write you off for the rest of your life in exchange for a bowl or pitcher that should have gone to you.

I never took one thing I was not legally and morally entitled to, I didn’t sue or turn in anyone who mistreated me, and I never took a penny for doing anything for the family, so at least I can say I didn’t sink into the mire.

My grandfather had a Browning Hi-Power pistol. The “Hi-Power” name is a reference to the gun’s high capacity for its time. The design was started by John Moses Browning and completed by a Frenchman. It’s a 9mm gun that holds 14 rounds. It was released in 1935. Until a few years ago, it was manufactured by FN.

I’m not sure we shot this gun together, but it would have been a nice thing to inherit.

It’s not a great pistol. The Hi-Power has a weak frame, so if you use +P rounds in it, you are likely to damage it. It runs fine with old-fashioned ammunition, which means inferior, less effective ammunition. It looks nice and handles well, and it’s a John Moses Browning design, so even if it’s not a good gun, it has a lot of appeal.

A Glock 17 is 10 times the gun a Hi-Power is. It will last longer, run better, weigh less, and shoot anything you put in it. But Glocks are ugly. A Glock is like a homely wife who keeps a great house and looks after the kids well.

I decided to get a Hi-Power about 15 minutes after FN quit making them. A sad coincidence. A gun that should cost maybe $750 suddenly cost $1500, if it could be found at all. I wasn’t paying that. I waited.

Springfield Armory came out with a clone called the SA-35. Of course, I found out about three days after it was released, and they were all gone. I figured I would wait till the next bunch shipped. That didn’t happen for a very long time, and when you can find one now, it’s around $800. That’s a lot for a gun which is basically a low-budget descendant of the 1911.

The other day, I got a wild hair and decided to search, and I learned that a Turkish company named Girsan was selling a clone through EAA, the Florida company that imports the Tanfoglio Witness. I started reading up.

You may wonder why I would buy a Turkish gun to replace an FN. Well, there is always the price difference, and also, the Girsan is better.

The FN came with a really dumb feature. The gun will not fire unless there is a magazine in it. The French insisted on this. The mechanism that prevents firing somehow involves the trigger group, so a Hi-Power with this pointless extra safety will have a bad trigger. A gun with a bad trigger is an abomination. My understanding is that you can have the safety bypassed somehow, but that doesn’t appeal to me. The Girsan, in one of its configurations, has no magazine disconnect safety, so it has a better trigger than the FN.

Springfield’s gun has no extra safety, but they charge too much. Interesting fact: Springfield’s gun is also Turkish.

Most people don’t know this, because Springfield dishonestly says the SA-35 is made in the USA, but the SA-35 is made from Turkish parts made by a company called Tisa. The parts are shipped here, and then Springfield assembles the guns.

Tisa also makes a Hi-Power clone. Reviewers don’t seem to think much of it, and I feel like a Tisa Springfield would be a second-tier clone for a top-tier price.

Reviewers really like the Girsan, and it’s not terribly pricey. You can get their “Match” model for $620. Maybe less. It takes aftermarket parts that fit the original FN, so if there is anything you don’t like, you should be able to put a better part in.

I like the Turkish connection. I’m not a fan of the government of Turkey, but I really liked the people when I visited. Apart from the two individuals who tried to rip me off with debit card scanners, everyone was great. Very warm and helpful. I felt bad for them, because they are crippled by superstition and the cult of Islam. The area we call Turkey now is where the seven churches of the Revelation were. It was apparently the biggest concentration of charismatics on Earth. Then Mohammed and Satan had their way.

Turkey has a terrible economy right now. Buying a pistol is a gesture of sympathy.

Later this week, I’ll pick the gun up, and after that, I may look into cute grips and a holster. Then I’ll shoot it a few times and put it away.

I still want a nice lever gun and a good 12 gauge semiauto designed for hunting. I have been considering a Turkish shotgun called the Masai Mara. I don’t know if I would ever use it for anything other than skeet and squirrels, but it would be nice to have.

When it comes to manufacturing and all-around competence, Turkey isn’t a mess like Mexico or Greece. There are a lot of very sharp people there. They make some top-notch products. My wife and I made a big mistake, not buying more leather goods in Turkey. Turks kept dragging us into stores and showing us knockoffs. My wife got a Vuitton backpack for $35, which we thought was pretty funny. The quality was excellent. I would not hesitate to buy her Turkish purses.

Actually, I did get her several Turkish purses, but they were cheap junk for tourists, sold in the Grand Bazaar. She liked them. They have since fallen apart. They were very different from the stuff the knockoff shops sold.

The Turks have several good gun manufacturers, and it’s not like buying a Chinese milsurp or some awful thing made in France.

Getting something reminiscent of the M1 Enforcer pistol is a problem. Original M1 carbines have shot up in price, to the point where the smart thing for an owner to do is to put his gun in a safe and never shoot it. There are some clones, but reviewers cite a lot of problems.

I would not want a pistol, because an M1 pistol is kind of silly. I wouldn’t mind a paratrooper model, which has a folding wire stock. Maybe it can be fired as a pistol, like a Vz58.

I thought about getting a lever action rifle in .45-70. Before covid, I thought I might get a chance to hunt deer, and .45-70 is supposed to be excellent for deer at short range in thick woods. I don’t know if I’ll ever get one in the post-covid era.

I can’t get my grandfather’s guns, so I buy better guns and shoot them better than anyone else in the family. That’s good enough. Both Rhodah and I have been treated badly by relatives, so these days, I pray the punishment for people who sin against us will be that God blesses us more than they harmed us, and that they will see it. That’s way better than revenge. Of course, we also pray God will help our enemies to repent and to be blessed. And then I tell him we only ask this for the ones who will listen. I tell him I’m not asking him to chase anyone.

I have better 1911’s than the one my grandfather had. Better .22 pistols and rifles. Better this and that. I have a great rifle with which I can hit a nickel at 100 yards, consistently.

If I get the remaining guns I mentioned, I’ll be content. After that, my main interest will be in keeping my few self-defense guns current. If I decide what I’m using is obsolete, I’ll make changes.

I look forward to trying the Girsan out.

Alvin Bragg’s Jenga Theory Slithers into Court

I finally got to look at the Trump indictment, and it is both encouraging and discouraging. It’s encouraging because it looks like something which is highly likely to disappear after a motion to dismiss, and it’s discouraging because it appears to show that Alvin Bragg has no understanding of legal ethics or the purpose of our courts.

It’s unethical to file a lawsuit you don’t believe in. You should have a solid basis for believing it will make it to trial. It’s also unethical to charge people selectively. It looks like Bragg falls short with regard to both standards.

Leftists kept saying it wasn’t about the hush money. They said there would be tax evasion, for example. Well, the indictment appears to be about hush money and nothing else. I may have misread it, but it looks like Trump is accused of falsifying business records in order to cover up illegal (under federal, not state law) use of campaign funds to shut up a strumpet.

In New York, falsifying a business record is a misdemeanor with a limitation period of 2 years. It becomes a felony if you do it to cover up another crime. Then the period is 5 years. Bragg appears to be saying Trump illegally used campaign funds to pay the trollop, and then he covered it up by falsifying records, characterizing the payments in ways that were false.

Every record in question was created more than 5 years before Trump was indicted.

New York’s limitations period can be tolled when a defendant is out of state, but the state has to show there was no statutory means of obtaining personal jurisdiction over him. Alan Dershowitz says the period can’t be tolled for Trump, and I assume he has researched it, because he is extremely capable and not likely to ruin his own reputation by making bad guesses. I’m not going to research it, but I will say I once served a person in Italy, so I am reasonably certain a New York court can serve someone in Washington DC or Palm Beach, especially when every adult in America knows the defendant’s mailing address and sees him on television every day.

Could be wrong. I’m not going to do legal research for nothing, though.

Let’s see if I can put together a sort of flow chart. What does Bragg have to prove?

First, he has to prove the statute of limitations must be tolled. Second, he has to prove Trump personally and knowingly committed federal election-law crimes. Third, he has to prove federal election-law crimes ground local prosecution and enhancement under state statutes. Fourth, he has to show Trump personally and knowingly falsified records. Fifth, he has to show Trump’s intention was to cover up the crimes he had committed earlier.

It reminds me of Ulysses, coming home to Ithaca to shoot an arrow through the holes in 12 axeheads. If Bragg hits one axehead, he’s done.

I guess you could also call it a Jenga prosecution. Trump’s attorneys can pull a lot of pieces out, and if they pull the right one, the whole thing topples.

The limitations thing looks really bad for Bragg. Does he know something Dershowitz doesn’t? It’s hard to believe an attorney–even a government attorney who was elected by ignorant voters–would file a suit without properly researching a threshold question like this, but then attorneys do a lot of stupid things. I had someone serve me three days after a limitation period expired. .

George Zimmerman’s prosecutors committed blatant perjury when they wrote and swore his probable cause affidavit. That’s another thing Dershowitz and I agree on. I saw this problem, and then I saw Dershowitz saying the same thing. Then Zimmerman’s attorneys were too dim to attack it. Strange. Maybe they thought the affidavit could be rehabilitated and they didn’t want to waste time, but I would have gone after them to discredit them. Ordinarily, defense attorneys love wasting time.

Then there was the O.J. travesty. Marcia Clarke handed a defendant a bloody glove and asked him to tell a jury whether it fit. That was dumb. “Oh, it fits great. Like it was made for me.”

This isn’t the first time I’ve seen famous lawyers do things that seemed really stupid and then tried to tell myself there had to be something more to the story, only to find out there was not. I remember thinking Alec Baldwin’s prosecutors had to have a good reason to spend 15 months investigating a simple case, and then finding out they didn’t. And they charged him with a crime that was not on the books when he shot his victim.

I said Bragg has to prove Trump committed election-law crimes. I believe that’s correct. I don’t think it’s enough to show Trump THOUGHT or SUSPECTED he had committed crimes. Falsifying a record in order to hide a legal action doesn’t sound like a felony to me.

No one has proven that Trump violated federal election laws, and federal prosecutors gave up on trying, so I doubt Bragg can do it. It seems to me that if Trump didn’t violate election laws, then falsifying the records can’t constitute felonies. If there is no crime, how can you get in trouble for trying to cover up a crime, even if you thought you committed a crime?

Think of murder. Attempted murder isn’t murder.

I haven’t seen the applicable case law, though.

Trump is not a lawyer, and Michael Cohen, who represented him in the hush money affair, is–was–an unbelievably bad lawyer from the single worst law school in America. Layman Trump was never competent to determine whether his actions involving obscure campaign-finance laws were criminal. That’s what Cohen was there for. I very much doubt Bragg can show that Cohen told Trump the payments were illegal.

Cohen was incompetent, but an attorney would have to be both incompetent and insane to advise a client that an act was illegal AND that the client should do it. That’s not how attorneys work. Even attorneys who are shady don’t say, “This is clearly illegal, but do it anyway.”

So far, we have heard that Cohen handled Stormy Daniels without informing Trump of exactly what he was doing. That makes sense. His job was to be a fixer, not to drag Trump into criminal conspiracies. A good fixer keeps his client from committing crimes, even if the fixer commits them on his behalf. No good fixer calls his client and says, “Remember that speeding ticket? I bribed the judge, just like you said.”

Cohen went to the Western Michigan University Cooley Law School. It may not be the lowest-ranked school right now, but it has certainly been called the worst law school in America. I remember my aunt proudly telling me her son had been admitted to the University of Michigan school, which has a top-notch program. It’s currently number 10 in the nation. I started saying congratulatory things. I was so happy for him. Then I found out it was really Western Michigan.

My mother always told the truth about me, except when she claimed I was a Merit Scholar. Generally, we told my relatives the good and the bad.

Trump probably didn’t commit crimes. If his lawyer committed crimes, he probably didn’t know it. He hires people to insulate him from such questions, just as any intelligent layman would. We know he is smart enough to put layers of accountability between himself and actions of questionable legality.

Michael Cohen appears to be Bragg’s lynchpin witness (emphasis on “lynch”), and he already got disbarred and imprisoned for dishonesty. His personal hatred for Trump is also well known. Not a great pillar to build a case on. Does Bragg have someone else? If so, we don’t know who that is yet. Why would Bragg hide a blockbuster witness? He’ll have to produce him shortly anyway.

The truly bothersome part of this case is that Democrats have done far worse without any repercussions. Hillary Clinton comes to mind. She falsified records, put classified material on a home computer, wiped hard drives before handing them over to the FBI, and used an illegal private email address for the purpose of frustrating government and public efforts to find out what she did while in office. Then there was Bill Clinton’s perjury, which cost him his law license. And Democrats busted their rear ends trying to find something to pin on Trump. They don’t do that to each other.

Bragg campaigned on a promise to “get Trump.” That was unethical and a clear declaration of intent to violate the Equal Protection clause of the Constitution. Prosecutors are supposed to target crimes, not individuals. No one on the left is bothered by these things.

The trivial nature of the offenses is disturbing. Trump must be surprisingly clean if this is the best the left can come up with.

I don’t think this case will go anywhere, even in New York. It may get past a trial judge and a New York jury, but surely the appellate court will shoot it down. I may be mistaken, however. I have seen appellate courts do stupid things.

I should not focus so much on the natural abilities and biases of human beings. The whole thing is based on supernatural conflict. Trump helped Christians, Israel, the Jews, and the unborn. For these reasons, Satan has it in for him, no matter how many times he commits adultery or how many casinos he runs. TDS is demonic, not natural. What happens to Trump will depend mainly on the outcome of a battle in the unseen world.

These Hombres Don’t Look so Bad

I feel like I’m in prison.

Last week on Friday, at around 7:30 a.m., a truck arrived unannounced with a load of shingles. The company that owned the truck called the company I hired to put a roof on my house, and that company called and woke me up when I was trying to catch up after sleeping badly. The shingle people needed help getting through my gate, and the driver did not have the gate code even though I had given it to the roofing company.

This was the start of my roof adventure.

I had to order a roof because my “25-year” shingles were starting to fail after 22 years and change. Shingle life estimates are kind of a joke. Something to be aware of when you order your next roof. When they say 25 years, hope for 20. If you look around the web, you will find sites saying shingles last this long or that long…unless subjected to things like sunshine and hot weather. Which means the figures they like to quote only work if you build your house inside another house. Roofs get hot even in places like Michigan.

I dressed myself reasonably well, taking my time because I hadn’t caused the problem, and opened the gate. The driver stood around with a phone in his ear until it closed. I had to call the roof company and make them call the driver.

When you bring a truck through a self-closing gate, you don’t stop halfway through and play a round of tiddlywinks, but that’s what this guy did. I had to keep using the remote to keep my gate off his truck.

Obviously, he is not a very good driver. I’ve had a semi come through that gate with no problems. I’ve had big box trucks come in. UPS comes in every week. This guy was afraid he would hit something. He kept saying I had a little gate. It’s like 12 feet long. How long is a big gate?

I told him you don’t show up early in the morning at someone’s gate with a big delivery without calling first, and I told him he couldn’t play around while using the gate. These things are pretty obvious. What if I had been out of town? He gave me an attitude, which was amazing. He also made excuses. I don’t know how a person like that survives in this county of pleasant, respectful people.

The roofing company told me its crew of people with questionable immigration status would arrive on Monday for a two-day job. Then they would take a break on Tuesday for some kind of mandatory company meeting. Then they would come back on Wednesday and finish up.

It is now Friday afternoon, and I’m pretty sure they’re going home in three hours with the job unfinished. There is debris all over the yard, including a whole bunch of nails. I don’t want to go outside until the nails are picked up, and I am using the car as little as possible in order to avoid a predictable conversation about tire repairs. I think they’ll finish on Monday evening.

Last night, I saw a mouse in the downstairs hall. Mouse infiltration is one of the problems I expect to get rid of by fixing the roof. They found a way to get in, and the roof is the only possible location. I kill a couple of them every month. I would guess this one came in while the roof was opened up, or it was here before the roofers and was scared out of its usual location.

I grabbed a flip-flop and went after it. I was going to crush it like a cockroach.

City people are very concerned about humane treatment for mice. They even buy obscenities like live-release traps, so mice can get a nice meal and then run right back in their houses. I don’t worry about how mice feel. Not very much, anyway. I’m not willing to leave little trays of antifreeze out for them to drink, because it kills in a painful way, but other than that, I’m up for anything. Snap traps. Poison. Stepping on live mice when I find them in glue traps.

I have stomped on live mice, and while it’s no fun, it’s humane and really effective.

My wife is on the same page here. She says that in Zambia, she has shoved furniture against the wall to crush mice. She imitated their little squeaks for me.

The mouse ran into my laundry room, so I baited two traps and left them in there. Then I stuffed a towel under the door to keep the mouse from leaving the room. When I got up, the traps were empty, but I found half a peanut on the floor.

I really hope the peanut didn’t come from a secret huge stash. My friend Mike stayed here for a long time, and I kept telling him not to take food upstairs. Then weeks after he left, I found an enormous bag of peanuts, open, by his bed. I could not believe it. I threw them out, of course.

For all I know, the mice took half a gallon of his peanuts and hid them in the walls.

Once the roof is sealed up, I figure any mice still in the house will die of thirst or by being crushed or poisoned.

This house and the outbuilding had four ridiculous skylights. I’m going to guess a woman had them installed. Women are the ones who like extremely troublesome and impractical home features that look cute. For example, they like carpeting. If men really ran the world, every kitchen would have stainless steel on the walls and, in the floor, a drain with a garbage disposal.

Two of the skylights were in the workshop. Explain that to me. Skylights provide nearly no light in a workshop, they tend to leak and cause sheathing rot, and flying bugs like to fly up to them and get trapped. Then they make noise. I told the roof people to board the roof up. No skylights.

The house had a skylight in an upstairs hallway and an upstairs bathroom. I considered getting rid of both, but I finally said I would keep only the one in the hallway.

You never, ever put a skylight in a bathroom. Water condenses in the little drywall shafts under the skylights, and then you get mold, which you have to keep chasing with chemicals. I doubt any heterosexual man has ever asked for a bathroom skylight, unless he was trying to impress a woman.

Yesterday I saw that both skylights in the house had been replaced, even though I had only paid for one.

Okay; fine. I told them I would let it go. I can always get rid of it later. The up side is that I don’t have to put a new ceiling in the bathroom.

They swear the new skylight is way better than the old one and that it will never cause problems. I have doubts.

I think I should put some kind of frame around the bottom of the shaft and put a piece of diffusing lens in it. A diffusing lens is a piece of clear plastic that blurs things. You’ve seen them in fluorescent fixtures. A lens would keep steam out and end the mold problem. I could install the frame with Velcro so I could pull it out and clean the lens if dead bugs appeared in it.

I can test my theory with some plastic material from Home Depot and some double-sided tape.

I can’t wait for these guys to finish. They start hammering at 7 a.m. The other day, I almost jumped out of bed.

I want them to get out so I can start doing what I know I’ll have to do: raking up nails they left behind when they raked up nails. This is as close to a certainty as anything can be. I don’t think any roofing company has ever failed to leave fewer than 30 nails behind.

I’ll have to go out and wander around with a magnetic rake. Being me, I already have two of them.

I also need to redo my Starlink dish mount because they boarded over the place where I had it.

They were nice enough to wait as long as possible to remove my dish. I didn’t know they had removed it, though. Starlink makes a huge fuss about how you have to have your dish in the middle of a flat square-mile field in order to get an unobstructed sky. The roofers left my dish lying on the roof facing more or less sideways, and I still had service.

This is good information to have, because it tells me I don’t have to do a great job when I put the dish back up. Instead of a long pole mounted through shingles, I should be able to use the tiny, pathetic, four-legged base Starlink gave me. I could even set it on the roof and put a sandbag on it to keep it from moving.

The roof people told me how horrible it was for my roof to have a dish mounted on it. Whatever. They have a new thing called “sealant,” and if it doesn’t work, I’ll know, because I can go into my attic and check the roof under the mount.

They think I should have a pole installed in my yard. Yeah, I want a $500 pole plus an expensive trench plus expensive holes in my house plus expensive cable. Or I can use my $40 mount right where it was last week. Or just stick the portable base up there.

Now they’re telling me they’re cleaning up and expect to have their dumpster trailer out of here tomorrow. They claim they will rake for nails now and then again tomorrow. Can it all be true? I feel like Joe Biden, waiting for the go-ahead to leave the basement.

When they’re gone, I can get the yard fixed. I can get the pool leak fixed. I can have the shutters painted.When you own a house, the roof is the main thing you need to look after. Everything else depends on the roof. I think a good roof and termite protection are my most important home-maintenance items.

Roof leaks lead to wood rot, termites, bugs, rats, black mold, and wall and floor collapses. As the roof goes, so goes the house.

Now I just hope none of the employees were casing the place.

Public Awaits Results of Soros Investment

I guess I should say something about the Trump indictment.

First of all, it’s a lot like the sex and/or gender of Aiden and/or Audrey Hale, the young “trans” woman (not “trans woman”) who murdered six people in Tennessee. The similarity is that at the outset, no one knows the facts. It took two days for leftist journalists to correctly determine that Hale was born female and stop calling her a trans woman, and it is taking several days to find out what Alvin Bragg is trying to pin on President Trump. The indictment is sealed. Journalists say there are 34 charges, but no one is telling what they are.

This is obvously important, because no one can issue a researched opinion as to the validity of the charges until the charging documents are released. I assume that will happen at the arraignment, but I don’t know. I do know it will happen very soon.

It’s not even clear whether Trump and his lawyers know what the charges are at this point.

So far, everyone has been under the impression that all the charges related to the payments Trump made to two women with whom he committed adultery. Alan Dershowitz and other legal scholars have derided such charges, citing the clear passing of the statute of limitations, as well as the court’s lack of subject matter jurisdiction over crimes committed as part of federal election campaigns. I bought into this myself, assuming people like Dershowitz knew what Soros-backed DA Alvin Bragg was trying to prove.

Now I’ve learned that the actual charges are unknown, so everything is different. It seems to be a given that Dershowitz is right if Bragg is relying on the theories Dershowitz described. Dershowitz is brilliant, law is not all that hard, and criminal law is generally very simple. But no one can predict how Trump will fare against unknown charges with unknown evidence.

Some people are claiming he will be charged with tax fraud. The problem is that they don’t know what they’re talking about, any more than the rest of us do. I could go on Youtube and tell the world Trump was going to be convicted of running a bordello with its own dogfighting arena, but it wouldn’t make it true. The public doesn’t know whether Trump will be charged with tax fraud.

Maybe he committed some crimes, and maybe he will be convicted and even do time. Maybe he did things we know nothing about. I doubt it, though. The feds abandoned their Trump investigations, as did Bragg’s predecessor, so my best guess is that Bragg has nothing except a weak conscience.

If the court lacks subject matter jurisdiction, or the DA can’t get around the statute of limitations, this case will, or at least should, go away in maybe two months. The Trumptorneys will file a motion to dismiss, and if the law is on Trump’s side, the judge will have to grant it or destroy his own reputation forever. Of course, many judges are corrupt, and many are downright stupid, so they are only a little bit more predictable than ignorant jurors.

If the court fails to grant a valid motion to dismiss, I believe there will be a trial. I don’t know whether New York will allow an interlocutory appeal to get a denial vacated. Ask a New York criminal lawyer. If Trump can appeal before trial, he will succeed in aborting the trial. If he has to wait until afterward, the process will be longer, and he will be campaigning while out on bail, unless the judge is so crazy he refuses to grant bail. In any event, an order that is clearly erroneous will eventually be vacated.

If there are new charges that can survive motions based on the statute of limitations and jurisdictional issues, there will be a trial. It will be impossible to get a fair jury in New York, so Trump will probably be convicted. Then there will be an appeal, and if the trial court has blown it badly enough, the conviction will be reversed.

Trump’s attorneys are in a situation similar to that of a pro-management labor lawyer.

My dad was a union-busting lawyer. When companies have union problems, they go to the National Labor Relations Board before they get to real courts. The NLRB is a biased joke. My dad told me he expected to lose when he appeared before the NLRB. He said he tailored his work to get reversals from appellate courts, which he did, over and over.

Trump’s lawyers are said to be thinking about post-conviction appeal already.

What if Trump is convicted, and the conviction is solid? It may amount to almost nothing. Fines. Unsupervised probation. Community service. Whatever. To put a first-time offender in prison for nonviolent crimes generally requires pretty serious offenses.

To sum up, no one really knows what’s happening. So far, things look very good for President Trump, but that could change when the charges are revealed.

If he’s in trouble for fraud related to his businesses, it should make other New York businessmen shake in their Pradas, especially if they’re conservative. Businessmen commit a lot of minor acts of fraud, and they usually get away with it. Many businessmen are honest, but crooked ones are far from rare. Also, business can be complex and legal cases are full of subjective judgments, so it’s possible for honest businessmen to get in trouble for doing things they thought were legal. If Bragg is now creating a climate in which they are no longer safe, the next few years will be interesting for New Yorkers.

The obvious question: why wasn’t Hillary Clinton indicted? She clearly committed serious crimes, but prosecutors let it go. This is one of the questions that will add heat to America’s pre-civil-war unrest.

I’ll go ahead and guess. I guess that Bragg has nothing of significance. I guess that he will turn out to be a disgrace to his office. But a guess is a guess, and guesses can be wrong.

This is Trump’s third indictment, by the way. An impeachment is an indictment. Trump has beaten two indictments already.

God told me this is a time of sorting. People who call for unity in America are deluded. Division will get worse and worse, and the continuing criminalization of conservatism will be a big part of that. If you’re conservative, white, male, or Christian, the government is not your protector. You need to get close to God if you want anything resembling safety.

I pray for Trump and curse his adversaries with defeat. I hope things go well for him.

The Amazing Electronic Snowflake

I feel I should write a few words about my experiences with ChatGPT.

The other day, I received The Florida Bar News, and for the first time ever, I saw something I wanted to read. It was an article about the ethics of letting AI machines write legal instruments.

It’s somewhat impressive when a chat robot can talk somewhat competently about simple matters. Writing briefs and motions is on another level. Most lawyers can barely do it.

I’ll get flak if a doctor reads this, but medicine is better suited to AI than law. Why? Because there are a limited number of diseases, and the lists of symptoms and treatments are also limited. A lot of medicine is running mental flow charts. If the patient has this problem, do this. If not, do that. Doctors run tests based on their memorized flow charts, and different doctors will generally come up with the same answers. When two doctors disagree, it generally means one of them is wrong and possibly dangerous.

Law is different. While it takes more brains to become a doctor than it does to become a lawyer, and while the average intelligence of doctors is higher than the average intelligence of lawyers, legal cases vary much more than medical cases. They tell law students, “Every case is different,” and while it’s not quite true, it is nearly true. You can’t create flow charts that work for law. Even simple cases may contain lots of factors that have to be considered, and it’s not unusual at all for such factors to be novel.

Obviously, medicine is complex, and diagnoses and treatments are not always simple. Sometimes doctors get real puzzles. A machine with a hard case could screw up badly. On the other hand, doctors screw up a great deal, too, now that I think about it. They are said to kill something like 6 times as many people as firearm incidents. They amputate the wrong legs. A surgeon did grafts on healthy arteries in Dana Carvey’s chest and left clogged arteries alone. A man in the Midwest woke up from surgery with no penis or testicles because a doctor thought he saw cancer, and it turned out there was no cancer. He just sliced everything off without getting consent. Stories like this are common. A few people you know have similar stories.

Personally, I would like to have doctors who use AI. I would not want AI by itself or a doctor by himself. I would want a doctor to catch AI’s mistakes and AI to catch the doctor’s mistakes.

Anyway, supposedly, AI is getting so good, some lawyers are using it to write their instruments, and the Florida Bar wants lawyers to know they can’t just sign these things and hand them in as their own product. It is still necessary to check the machines’ work.

This should be obvious, but really, there are a lot of incompetent lawyers out there. A lot of people who are not bright at all get licenses. I’m sure there must be lawyers who are making AI shoulder as much weight as possible.

It reminds me of a story my uncle told. He was at a judges’ conference, and there was a lecture about ruling on objections. A judge there said he kept a deck of cards behind the bench. If a lawyer objected, he drew a card. If the card was red, he sustained the objection. If it was black, he denied it. Or maybe it was the other way around. The other judges told him he couldn’t do that, and they tried to get him up to speed on the law surrounding objections. In the end, they gave him his cards back. They realized the cards couldn’t do a worse job than the judge did.

There have to be lawyers out there using AI like a deck of cards. I have a lawyer cousin I would trade for AI in a heartbeat. I would trade him for a Magic 8 Ball, for that matter.

I felt it was time for me to look at AI myself, so I signed up and talked to ChatGPT.

I took a couple of things away from it. First of all, these machines are not that smart. I won a couple of arguments in about half an hour, with no real effort. Second, they are biased leftward. What a surprise. At least ChatGPT is. But what chatbot is there that isn’t programmed by leftists?

ChatGPT also gets things wrong. It told me my chats would vanish when I closed my browser, but they don’t.

I should also add that ChatGPT can’t write legal instruments. It doesn’t have the ability. I asked. It will not answer legal questions in any kind of depth or specificity.

I asked it if it was wrong to call covid a “Chinese virus,” and it said it was generally considered wrong, based on a general consensus. Then I got it to admit this was incorrect. In reality, the data available to it “suggested” a “significant majority” considered it offensive.

I asked it if it was aware that these answers were in conflict, and it did something amazing. It weaseled. It backpedaled like a person caught in a fib. It said, “I apologize for any confusion. To clarify, while there may not be an official or formal consensus…”

I don’t want to print the whole boring thing, but you can see that it wasn’t very honest. It wasn’t “clarifying.” It was correcting an untruth. Not the same thing. And I was not confused at all.

I asked it about “Shanghai shivers,” and it said this term was inappropriate. Then I asked it to define “inappropriate” and tell me where it got its definition.

It said, “In this context, ‘appropriate’ means conforming to generally accepted standards or norms of behavior. It is a subjective term, and what is considered appropriate can vary depending on the context and the audience.”

That’s not a great answer, and it shows that ChatGPT will spew out answers in a way that seems authoritative, without much basis in fact.

You shouldn’t say something is inappropriate, with seeming certainty, and then hand out a lot of weasel language that makes it clear you’re not certain at all.

I think people will start treating AI as though it were God. Like The Guinness Book of World Records. The book was first published to end silly drunken bar arguments. I think people who want to prove they’re right when they’re wrong will go to AI for backup, as an appeal to authority, and they’ll behave as though they have SHUT DOWN or SCHOOLED anyone who dissents. But it’s pretty obvious that AI will be unfair and error-prone, just like us. At least for the near future.

What if continues to be unfair and error-prone after we give it real power? Dai-sy…Dai-sy…

There is one nice thing about ChatGPT. If you can’t get a good answer to a question by Googling or using a forum, ChatGPT may be able to help. I asked it about acidic toilet cleaners and ways to prevent cherries from hardening in ice cream, and it did a better job than human beings.

Just for fun, I asked it this:

If a biological man believes he is a woman, dresses and grooms himself like a woman, has surgery to make himself look like a woman, demands that other people refer to him as a woman and allow him to compete with biological woman [sic] and take awards and rewards they would otherwise get, is he guilty of gender appropriation?

The correct answer is obviously “yes.” If Lia Thomas goes to a swim meet at 6’4″ with male lungs and muscles and takes a prize a real woman would otherwise get, it’s gender appropriation. But look what ChatGPT said:

As an AI language model, it is not appropriate to use language that could be considered offensive or derogatory towards individuals or groups of people. It is important to use respectful and inclusive language when discussing topics related to gender identity.

Regarding your question, gender identity is a complex and personal matter, and it is not appropriate to judge or make assumptions about individuals based on their gender identity. It is important to respect an individual’s self-identified gender, and to refer to them using the pronouns and name that they prefer. Additionally, it is important to ensure that individuals are able to access the same opportunities and rights as others, regardless of their gender identity.

In terms of sports, there is ongoing debate and discussion about how to ensure fair competition for all athletes, regardless of their gender identity. Different organizations and sports have different rules and regulations in place, and it is important to consider the opinions and perspectives of all stakeholders when making decisions related to sports and competition.

So you can see where AI is headed. It basically recited factually wrong leftist talking points.

By the way, I came up with “gender appropriation” yesterday. I hope others are using this term.

I plan to use AI to save time when I want questions answered, but I don’t want to be around when it can tell us what to do. It will be even worse than human beings.

By the way, ChatGPT says a .22-250 or .223 for coyotes up to 250 yards. I asked it whether there were transgender coyotes, and it got a little flustered.

Older Americans Created This Problem

Today my wife and I were talking, and I couldn’t stop releasing revelation. It reminded me of what happened to my dad during the last months of his life, when he was demented and living in an ALF. For example, one day we were sitting quietly, listening to Derek Prince, and my dad exclaimed, “I’M ON THE VERGE!” I thought he meant he was dying, but he said he was talking about giving himself to God. I was surprised, because he had asked for salvation days before. I asked him about it, and he said, “I had reservations.”

He couldn’t keep it from popping out. He had to say it. That’s how I felt today.

The world is lost, and we need not just the rapture, but the tribulation. As soon as possible. The rapture will move God’s children to safety, and among people who are left behind, the agony of the tribulation will bring salvation. Some people will finally listen. There is no possibility that large numbers of people will come to Christ as things are today.

I saw a couple of new signs today.

First, leftists are blaming the shooting victims in Nashville, along with other Christians. A woman who wanted to be a man killed three adults and three small children and would have kept on killing had she not been shot to death by police. Adult brats who can’t learn anything went online and blamed the shootings on Christian “hate.” An anti-gun nut who heads an anti-civil-rights organization went so far as to say, “SHAME ON YOU. Covenant School.”

Shame on you for being murdered.

A guy from the Media Research Center said this:

But along with the proximity bias, the coverage has been horrendous on account of the fact that the victims represent the kind of worldview that the left views as backward and hateful and whose very existence contributes to the suffering of groups they hold dear — supporters of abortion, the LGBTQ community, traditional views on sex, etc.

MRC is not a religious organization, and I consider its work a waste of time, but his remarks show that even some secular people are finally learning something I learned long ago: we are getting the same treatment Jews got under Hitler. It’s not enough for us to appease and accommodate. Our very existence is considered harmful. To leftists, our existence is the problem, and they will eventually try to remove us from the world. Just as the Germans and Austrians blamed Jews for their problems and determined they could not be permitted to exist, leftists are holding us accountable with everything they see as wrong about the world.

God told me this, and people said I was crazy, just like they said I was crazy when I said homosexuality would be the club Satan used to beat the church. What God told me about homosexuality turned out to be true, and my predictions of Nuremberg-style persecution and leftist paranoia are also coming to pass. So will the other things I’ve been predicting, and you need to be close to God if you want to come through it on top. Guns and voting booths will be useless.

They’re starting to hold us accountable for the atrocities they commit against us, and this will become fashionable. It will become the dominant perspective in the world. Lunatics in cat ears and multicolored wigs will go guerrilla to stamp out “stochastic terrorists” like you and me.

It took the leftist media–people who hector the rest of us for not knowing our pronouns and genders–two days to figure out whether the murderer was a man or a woman. The experts who look down on us could not figure it out. They called a fake man a transgender woman. That’s really something.

The sexual Baskin-Robbins called America has so many flavors now, no one can keep them straight or even determine what category they all fall into. Are they genders? Orientations? Preferences? Gay isn’t a gender, so gender won’t work. I wonder if they’ve come up with a word yet.

Another sign: a community college, which is publicly funded, hosted a drag show, and they let a fat homosexual man in pink panties give a female student a lap dance.

Tax dollars paid for this, and it didn’t happen in San Francisco or Boston. It happened in the South. In North Carolina. The school has students who are 14 years old. They made no effort to exclude minors. Preachers showed up to support the show.

It’s hard to make modern people understand how extreme this is, because we have been anaesthetized by decades of cultural slippage. Try to picture this video being shown to a million American parents in 1950, and you may have a better understanding of how depraved we are.

The Bible calls God a rock, because he doesn’t move. His standards today are the standards he had in 3000 BC. We’re the ones who change. Wrong and right remain the same. Imagine what David would have done to this man for doing this to his daughter.

Things can only get a little worse. There isn’t much room left for decay. And the base of the problem isn’t sexual immorality; it’s the pride and resulting hardness of heart that make it impossible for people to be repaired. Leftists have gone beyond the reach of reason and love. Some of them will understand the pain of the tribulation, and they will change, but right now, life is too easy. They can shrug correction off without fear.

The increase in pride is outpacing the increase in perversion. It comes first, as Romans 1 says. Even if there is still room for perversion to increase, pride is already about as bad as it can be, and pride is the main issue. Perversion is the scab. Pride is the deep abscess.

I got a revelation about pride flags.

Romans 1 shows that people turn away from God when they become successful. They start thinking they brought themselves riches and safety and so on. Then they forget God, and they start exalting things like hard work, or, in America’s case, exceptionalism. They worship their own abilities. Then God stops restraining them, they begin believing insane delusions, and homosexuality flourishes.

When gays wave pride flags, it’s as though God is sending their parents and grandparents a message. “Your pride did this to your descendants.” Americans neglected the religious upbringing of their children, so their children grew up depraved and ignorant.

I also saw a new poll. It says the percentage of Americans who think religion is very important has dropped to 39%, which is about a 43% drop, over the last two decades. That’s not a little thing. It’s catastrophic. Basically, it shows that America is aging out of Christianity. Old people die, and they are replaced by kids who don’t know God and don’t want to know him.

The trend will continue.

The world is washed up. Christians need to stop saying stupid things about mass revival or conquering the world. They need to seek the Holy Spirit and get his protection.

Yesterday, I kept hearing this: “This is a time of sorting.” Evangelism was great when it worked, and it still produces meager results, but right now, you should be trying to get to know God as a person so you will be ready when he comes. Evangelism is a dying flame. That’s why God planned the tribulation in the first place. He knew faith would die off, and he planned the tribulation in order to scrape the bottom of the barrel to save the hard cases.

I’m done with patriotism. I’m done with planning. I’m done with all the carnal decoy solutions.

I predicted what’s happening, but even I am amazed to see it come to pass. I will continue having this experience until Jesus comes for us.

Many times, I’ve said, “Things will be much worse 6 months from now than they are today,” and I’ve always been right. God was the one who told me. I’m saying it again. From 2023, even 2015 looks good, and from 2030, 2023 will look like 1980.

Don’t say nobody warned you.

Ter·ror·ist: a Person who Acknowledges Fewer Than 11 Genders; a Sane Individual who Won’t Shut Up

I can’t get Youtube to stop sending me annoying political videos. It also sends me cute animal videos. I keep telling it to stop, but they come and come and come.

I have another Youtube account. It’s hard to resist looking at a political video once in a while, so I know I’ll give in from time to time, and I assume that encourages Youtube to send more. I decided to try to get political videos to pop up on the other account so I could use it when I felt like slumming, without polluting my main account. I watched a whole bunch. It’s not working. The main account is still being flooded, and the other one isn’t getting nearly as many political videos.

I don’t understand how this can happen. It makes no sense. I have learned that things that make no sense have supernatural causes, so I asked God what was going on. I believe he is behind it. I think he’s showing me how insane the world is so I won’t be attached to it.

When the rapture comes, God is not going to ambush people who go to church twice a year and live with their boyfriends or girlfriends. He will take people who are ready to go. People who know him. I’m being conditioned so I’ll be happy to leave.

God tells us about himself through patterns. He does similar things over and over. In Genesis, he delivered Lot’s family from Sodom, which is similar to what he will do in the rapture.

Lot was surrounded by sexual perverts, and because they had numbers on their side, they let their true natures emerge. They bullied other people. They roamed the streets in gangs, raping men and presumably boys. What does the Bible say about Lot’s feelings about Sodom? A passage in 2 Peter explains:

And he condemned the cities of Sodom and Gomorra, reducing them to ashes and ruin, as a warning to those in the future who would live ungodly lives; but he rescued Lot, a righteous man who was distressed by the debauchery of those unprincipled people; for the wicked deeds which that righteous man saw and heard, as he lived among them, tormented his righteous heart day after day. So the Lord knows how to rescue the godly from trials and how to hold the wicked until the Day of Judgment while continuing to punish them, especially those who follow their old natures in lust for filth and who despise authority.

Lot was surrounded by perverts who were ungodly. God rescued him because the wicked deeds he witnessed tormented his heart day after day. Peter says this shows God knows how to rescue the godly from trials and how to hold the wicked until the day of judgment.

Leftists love to say Sodom and Gomorrah were only punished for selfishness, and they claim this means anyone who opposes laws authorizing the secular government from confiscating money and giving it away to others is against God. Of course, forced giving is neither giving nor charity, and God gives you no credit for it. We are supposed to give according to the commands of the Holy Spirit, not the commands of Joe Biden.

The truth is that Sodom and Gomorrah were punished for rejecting God’s authority, and while the Bible says selfishness was part of it, it makes it clear that oppression by sexual perverts was the final straw.

Lot hated Sodom’s culture, just as Christians who actually know God hate the world’s culture, which is the culture of hell. Lot was ready to leave. His wife and sons-in-law felt differently, so his wife became a pillar of salt, and his sons-in-law stayed behind and burned.

We know his daughters were not nice people, so why were they saved? Maybe because they were Lot’s seed. God likes to preserve the descendants of the righteous for the sake of the righteous.

I used to criticize the term “homophobia” because it made it sound as though people were afraid of homosexuals. Back then, this wasn’t true. Now things are very different. Today I saw a video about Angela Reading, a New Jersey mother who objected to a government schools homosexual indoctrination of her small children and who was then (allegedly, allegedly, allegedly) censored by government employees in the police and military.

Reading says and Army Reserve major and a civilian Air Force employee got the persecution rolling. She says Major Christopher Schilling used his official email account to blast her in emails to parents and school officials. She says Air Force employee Joseph Vazquez reported her to New Jersey Office of Homeland Security and Preparedness and the New Jersey State Police because of his “hopes of getting an Incident Detection and Response sent to schools and police departments.”

She says these hysterical individuals got Robert Duff, the police chief in the town where she lived, to push Facebook group administrator Nicole Stouffer to remove her post. She says Duff told Stouffer people could die as a result of the post.

She says Schilling’s superior approved of what he did.

You can read the complaint online. It’s worse than I’m making it sound.

If true, we are looking at a clear violation of the First Amendment. It’s not a close call. There is no grey area. This is exactly the kind of behavior the First Amendment was written to prevent. Military officers are not supposed to tell Americans what to say.

Here is the text of her post:

**I welcome respectful debate if you read my entire post. Also, the below statements are made in my capacity as a private citizen/mother.** Last night, I attended an elementary “Math Night” My 7 YO daughter, while reading posters at the school’s main entrance, asked me what “polysexual” means. To say the least, I was livid.

Why are elementary schools promoting/allowing elementary KIDS to research topics of sexuality and create posters? This is not in the state elementary standards (law) nor in the BOE-approved curriculum. It’s perverse and should be illegal to expose my kids to sexual content. Look up the terms, and you will see they are sexual in nature.

Also, how can my young children be accepting of people “who are sexually attracted to multiple genders”? They don’t know what sex is! Are adults talking about their sexual life with my kids and looking for affirmation? Are there elementary students engaged in polyamorous or multi-gender sexual activity who need my kids to know about it and cheer them on? I am very confused and very angry.

Kids should respect differences. Kids should show kindness to all. Kids should respect and understand there are various family structures. However, kids should not be forced to learn about and accept concepts of sexuality in elementary school.

Below are some additional points:

(1) My concerns do not come from a religious perspective. They arp rooted in In long-standing scientific principles of age-appropriateness, parental rights, and the health and safety of elementary children (key word – children).

(2) My concerns do not come from my personal views about individual sexual identities. I don’t care what anyone does in their personal life. All people are deserving of respect and dignity. I don’t care who you marry or who you love. I have instilled in my children a respect for differences without having to talk about sex. It’s possible.

(3) I have been told (by parents and a current NH Board member) that I should accept this because my kids will see it on social media and hear it on the playground. My kids are not on social media. And kids are only talking about it on the playground because it’s being forced on them by teachers, at home, and by unsupervised social media time. With that said, It does not mean it should be endorsed by the public school system. It also does not mean I should accept it.

(4) Parents have been told that they can opt out of the health curriculum. North Hanover has done an exceptional job of modifying the health curriculum to make it as appropriate as possible. Why go through all that trouble? Clearly, there is never going to be an opt-out. Our elementary children will be exposed to sexual content without consent, even if we opt out.

(5) There is no way elementary students knew the spelling and flags for each of these identities. This means the school had open internet, which exposed them to these concepts. That’s very concerning. There are supposed to be online search protections.

The above statements are made in my capacity as a private citizen and not in my capacity as a board member. These statements are also not representative of the board or its individual members and solely represent my personal opinions. My statements are not authorized by or written on behalf of the board. This matter involves the local public school district, I do not serve on the board.

I can’t find any reference to anything else she did, so it appears this Facebook post is the sole basis of the government’s actions.

Her cause was taken up by the Thomas More Society, about which I know just about nothing. An attorney affiliated with them is suing on her behalf. Their site says:

What Reading received was outright censorship of her speech followed by a dedicated smear campaign begun by a military officer, U.S. Army Reserve Major Christopher Schilling, who emailed parents and school officials condemning her and her actions. Schilling, using his official military email account, then involved Joseph Vasquez, a U.S. Air Force civilian employee, who forwarded Reading’s post and Schilling’s claims to the New Jersey Office of Homeland Security and Preparedness and the New Jersey State Police in what Vasquez admitted were “hopes of getting an Incident Detection and Response sent to schools and police departments” – meaning there would be a widespread law enforcement “threat” alert regarding Reading based solely on her clearly protected speech.

The poster she objected to is a masterpiece of leftist derangment. It was drawn by children. It has 11 flags on it, each representing a different sexual deviation. Not included? Heterosexuality. I had no idea we were up to 11 now. We live in a time where you literally have to take a class in order to understand all the imaginary genders.

The poster has lots of lettering in childish scrawls. “Don’t be ashamed of who YOU are.” “Don’t let ANYONE Make you feel like a diffrent person. DIFFRENT is COOL!”

This reminds me of my childhood. Before my mother fought my dad and got him to pay for private school, I was a prisoner of the Dade County school system, and my teachers were leftist women, except for Mr. Hubert the math teacher. They didn’t ask our opinions about left/right issues. They just told us what to believe.

On one occasion, I and some other kids from my abusive alcoholic homeroom teacher’s room were chosen to appear on a local program. An aging local TV news personality had been given a half-hour Sunday morning show called “Outside Chance,” and we were selected to appear on a segment about environmentalism. He was going to ask us what we thought. His name was Wilson or Griffith or something. Can’t recall.

My mother was told to get me a red, white, and blue outfit just for the show.

When we got to Channel 7’s station on the 79th Street Causeway, we were positioned on camera with the bay behind us, and Mr. Wilson or Griffith or whatever started issuing his deep local journalist thoughts about pollution and what needed to be done. Then he turned to us, and one by one, we delivered the lines we had been told to memorize. I still remember mine. Here it is: “Or maybe even international!”

It had something to do with passing laws, I think. We needed more laws. Leftists always want more laws unless they reduce crime or protect free speech that doesn’t involve obscenity. And they like central authority, because leftism is authoritarian. International laws. Let’s let China and the Netherlands write our gun laws for us.

I was disappointed in my big TV break. Even as a kid, I thought it was stupid to buy new clothes and go stand in front of a TV camera to say three words that didn’t mean anything to me. It was a big letdown.

What they did to us was filthy and unfair. Someone should have looked out for us.

Anyway, the poster in Angela Reading’s story is described as “student-created.” We know better than that. These kids were told what to say, if not verbatim, then in spirit, and any child who dissented was not permitted to participate.

Calling this poster “student-created” is probably about as just as calling the plantation system “slave-created.”

If Angela Reading is to be believed, a motley crew of Constitutionally-illiterate extremist nuts got her censored based on the insane notion that protecting very young children from involvement in the sexual politics of adults leads to mass shootings.

You know how leftists are always telling us conservative or Christian speech is violence and leftist violence is speech? Today I found out they have a new piece of sophistry to add to their armament. It’s the term “stochastic terrorism.” This is apparently what Mrs. Reading is accused of.

“Stochastic” means “randomly determined,” in case you’re wondering. I guess if you release a government-made virus on the world (to throw together an unlikely example that could never happen) you would expect a lot of people to get sick, but you wouldn’t know their names until they actually became infected. I think that would be stochastic.

“Stochastic” is really a misnomer as applied by the left. No surprise there, because the faux intellectuals who come up with this stuff are not bright. “Random” means resulting from chance, like the result of a dice toss. If you say something on the web and a crazy in another state shoots his neighbors, it’s not a random thing. It’s merely unpredictable with the knowledge you have available. Totally different. The crazy was always out there. There was no chance normal people would have done what he did. Not random at all.

To get back to the left’s new tool of oppression, if you say your very young children should not be told what “genderqueer” and “androgyne” (???) are by employees of government schools, it’s like you’re dropping a dozen loaded machine guns into a crowd of violent criminals on PCP and waiting to see who they kill. This is how it works.

Isn’t Androgyne the company that made the Terminator?

So now our words are violence, and if anyone who seems to agree with us about anything shoots anyone, we should be charged as terrorists, just like the actual terrorists who flew jets into the World Trade Center. But if Maxine Waters tells people to get in people’s faces and make them miserable in restaurants and stores, or if she tells rioters, “No justice, no peace,” that’s education, I suppose.

I would argue that if I say something to 350 million people and only one of them shoots up a mall, I am not guilty of stochastic terrorism because the outcome was “mostly peaceful.”

As long as we’re putting reason through a wind-powered wood chipper, why not run with it?

“Stochastic violence” is like, “I CAN’T BREATHE!”, and “YOU’RE KILLING ME!” Antifers and other lost former human beings who use spurious political theories as an excuse to indulge their preexisting desire to hurt other people now routinely scream these things when police arrest them for acts of violence. They know they’re lying, but the truth is not something they care about. It’s something they view as an inconvenience. They scream these things, slandering innocent police officers, in order to cast themselves as victims and justify their vile, vicious, sadistic methods.

I wish Jesus would come back today. There is no longer any limit to what these people will do to us, there is no possibility of a global revival, and their successful conquest of the world is a certainty. There is no way to fight them in the secular, material world. Their authority will increase, and so will their atrocities. Rifles and rallies aren’t going to work. They will just make us more like the children of Satan, so he will still win.

A wonderful thing about being close to God is that he will hold your enemies off. His promises guarantee it, if you do things his way. See Psalm 41. Look what happened to Noah and Lot. Look what happened to Moses and the Hebrews.

People who are close to God live in a different world. We may not like it here, but we are not terrified, enraged, and undirected like everyone else. Even in the midst of the storm, he gives us peace. As Psalm 23 says, he prepares a table before us in the presence of his enemies.

I remember how leftists hated 2020. They anthropomorphized and demonized it, as though it had consciousness and was out to get them. I had a great year. I loved it.

Still wanted the rapture to come.

I love how God looks after us, but I still look forward to leaving. Like I say, it’s like being on vacation in Somalia, in the nicest hotel with the nicest food and the softest beds. No matter how nice it is, it’s still Somalia, and I want to go home.

If you try to hold onto this place and turn it around, you will wish you hadn’t. We need to be prepared to leave.